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—The Streets, “Original Pirate Material”

This is the first scholarly

research book about the “Warez

Before I turn to this network, I

want to talk about another criminal

The only problem was that the

trading software did not work as

My story of high finance points to

an obsession with speed and

This is not a book about the stock

market. But this tale of high

What could link this Warez Scene

with high-frequency trading on the

However, this caricature of two

pugnacious spheres of activity

Most important for the central

argument that I will advance in

How can we understand the culture

of this Warez Scene as economic,

We can perceive such fungibility of

capital in the two spheres of

Why should we think of this high-

level piracy Scene in these terms

That is, in the digital space, we

usually presume that once we have

My argument is different. I argue

that the Warez Scene is an

In this book, I argue that to

understand the mentality of those

While the ethos that Thomas

suggests of personal accumulation

If one is to comprehend this ethos

of software piracy as a skilled

The challenge for this parallel

with the punk scene is that the

Reputations in the Scene are made

or broken by the artistic successes

At the same time, the Scene

nonetheless has its own cultures of

It is also the case that the Scene

is composed of many discrete sub-

This framing of a prestige-

accumulation operation, which spans

An essential component of the last

of these fronts — that ARGs are, in

At the same time, though, there is

a temptation to see transgressive

The gamified nature of the Scene

may not always be evident to its

It is in the denial of game-like-

ness that ARGs begin to become

It is also hard to find one’s way

into the Scene. This hiddenness is

The type of game rubric under which

we can categorize the Warez Scene

Yet, we should also not neglect the

“alternative reality” portion of

However, the world I describe will

seem alien and foreign to most

Scene will scorn “newbies.” Authority will accrue to those who have been longest in the Scene. That is, authority will stick to those who have spent the most extended period defying the authority of the law. Consistency is not the motto of the Scene. Yet, these hypocritical norms have been internalized and are just a way of life for those on the inside. They are unassailable bounds of daily operations, the Scene’s business as usual.

There are other characteristics of

the Scene that look like an ARG.

Paul Virilio’s formulation of a

split, stereoscopic or stereophonic

The Scene is of this nature, existing in two spaces at once, producing the requirement to “read two different worlds at the same time.”[^49] A world within a world, separate from ours, with different rules and codes of conduct, the Scene is like a game but nonetheless a reality, albeit an alternative one.

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The high-level Warez Scene has

existed for several decades now and

The knowledge of the Warez Scene

that I describe in this book arises

It is also worth noting upfront

that there are challenges of

How do we know, then, what we know about the Warez Scene? If this space is so secret and closely guarded, how can I write a book about it? What kind of documentary evidence could serve to back up readings and understandings of practice?

Although the Scene is highly

private, participants leak

An excellent example of this

documentation is how sites have

Every release also has an NFO that specifies details of the release group, information about the release itself, and other assorted snippets of information. These documents can help us garner a picture of the interlocking relationship between groups. They also demonstrate their practices (e.g., the types of affiliation that release groups request reflects an evolution of software and hardware setups in the topsite network).

Furthermore, “Scene magazines”

report on activities in this

Various documentation projects have

sought to build centralized

I should broach one final question

at this point: how reliable are the

Tying in with my earlier

observations on the alternative

The nearest analogy to this

situation is the work chronicling

Most notably, while Minecraft is supposed to be a game about cooperative building, in the 2b2t landscape, so-called “griefers” travel the landscape destroying the work of others. Rival factions gather to build and protect their landscape against enemies. The server is the computer-Lego equivalent of Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian, post-apocalyptic environment in The Road (2006).

Yet what is perhaps most useful

about the world of 2b2t for the

What does this mean for the

comprehensiveness of this book? It

Studies such as this fall under the rubric of “netnographies,” or works that attempt to examine the principles and characteristics of various online cultures ethnographically. A fundamental challenge of working in this space is ethics. Most of the documents and conversations in the DeFacto2 archive, in Scene magazines, and in site wktop charts (weekly rankings of user upload volumes) were thought, by the conversation participants and authors, to have been held or published privately.

Indeed, the study of underground

pirate cultures presents a set of

Because their doings are illegal, a

separate but related question

A further question surrounds the

ethics of harm. When the harm that

The secondary literature’s advice

on handling pseudonyms is

Finally, this citation situation is

complicated even further by the

As this book argues, the Warez

Scene is, at its core, about

I have had, then, to take a stance

on whether to reveal or not

These principles allow me to take a relatively neutral stance. They are unlikely to give any additional assistance to law enforcement officers, who already possess these documents. At the same time, they facilitate the validation of the truth claims in this subcultural ethnography. For, as Anthony Grafton has put it, “the culturally contingent and eminently fallible footnote offers the only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources. And that is the only ground we have to trust them.”[^74]

In an earlier draft of this book, I

had intended to provide a pack of

However, I have opted not to distribute this archive with the work in light of the above discussion of ethics and redaction. The work is slightly impoverished because the archive on which it draws will inevitably decay and fall out of sight. The verification of my claims will become much more demanding over time as this archive fades. However, this is the ethical choice for this study, that is, to maintain the only-ever partial anonymity of attributional pseudonymity in the Scene.structure

By way of orientation, I will close this introduction with some notes on the structure of this book. This introductory first chapter has opened by setting the stage and the arguments of this book. It has given high-level background and has described the archives that document the Warez Scene and the ethics of using them for academic research.

The rest of this book features five

other chapters. The second chapter

The fourth chapter of this book

looks at structures of organization

At the same time, however, Chapter

Four also examines quality control

Chapter Five turns to the

aesthetics of the Warez Scene. A

The sixth and final chapter

examines the Scene’s interactions

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This book asks the fundamental

question: what is the Warez Scene?

Why should we ask this question?

Aside from the intrinsic interest

A penultimate note on typography

and sourcing is worth propounding

What, then, of the financial

“scene” with which I opened? I

* 1. This definition is derived from Virginia Crisp, Film Distribution in the Digital Age: Pirates and Professionals (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 186. Alf Rehn, “Electronic Potlatch: A Study on New Technologies and Primitive Economic Behaviors” (PhD diss., Royal Institute of Technology, 2001), 57–58, refuses to use the term “pirate” to refer to Scene groups. I dispute this decision, though, and use the formulation here throughout.

* 2. Patryk Wasiak, “‘Illegal Guys’: A History of Digital Subcultures in Europe during the 1980s,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 9 (2012): 267.

* 3. For more on speed, see also Rehn, “Electronic Potlatch,” 141.

* 4. Tim Harford, “High-Frequency Trading and the $440m Computer Glitch,” BBC News, August 11, 2012, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19214294.

* 5. Alexander Osipovich, “High-Frequency Traders Push Closer to Light Speed with Cutting-Edge Cables,” Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-frequency-traders-push-closer-tolight-speed-with-cutting-edge-cables-11608028200.

* 6. David Pogue, “Some Warez over the Rainbow,” MacWorld, October 1997, https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/computing/macintosh/Macintosh.txt.

* 7. Clyde W. Holsapple et al., “Parameters for Software Piracy Research,” The Information Society 24, no. 4 (2008): 199–218; Andrew Sockanathan, “Digital Desire and Recorded Music: OiNK, Mnemotechnics and the Private BitTorrent Architecture” (PhD diss., Goldsmiths, University of London, 2011), 187.

* 8. For instance, see Nico van Eijk, Joost Poort, and Paul Rutten, “Legal, Economic and Cultural Aspects of File Sharing,” Communications & Strategies 77, no. 1 (2010): 35–54.

* 9. Although, see William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2014) for a history of this supervisory terminology with respect to markets. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015) also provides a worthwhile critique of such cultures.

* 10. WTC, “World Trade Center Topsite (WTC-world.trade.center.1998.07.07.nfo),” July 7, 1998, DeFacto2, warez.scene.nfo.collection.v1.0.24351.shroo.ms.zip.

* 11. The economic character of the Warez Scene, on which this book expands, has already been addressed by Alf Rehn, “The Politics of Contraband: The Honor Economies of the Warez Scene,” The Journal of Socio-Economics 33, no. 3 (July 2004): 359–74. I do not radically depart from the analysis in this paper but instead broaden and deepen our understanding by more explicitly setting out the activities undertaken in this subculture.

* 12. Rehn, “Electronic Potlatch,” 24.

* 13. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 180.

* 14. I have written previously about the Matthew Effect in Samuel Moore et al., “‘Excellence R Us’: University Research and the Fetishisation of Excellence,” Palgrave Communications 3 (2017): 6, https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms2016105.

* 15. Douglas Thomas, “Innovation, Piracy and the Ethos of New Media,” in The New Media Book, ed. Dan Harries (London: British Film Institute, 2004), 84.

* 16. Martin Paul Eve, “The Great Automatic Grammatizator: Writing, Labour, Computers,” Critical Quarterly 59, no. 3 (October 2017): 39–54.

* 17. I use the term “alternative reality game” rather than “alternate reality game,” the preferred formulation in some of the secondary literature, purely out of a British English preference.

* 18. See Bryan Clough and Paul Mungo, Approaching Zero: Data Crime and the Computer Underworld (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), 61–84.

* 19. For just a couple of sources on the role of Napster and the growth of P2P sharing, see Raymond Shih Ray Ku, “The Creative Destruction of Copyright: Napster and the New Economics of Digital Technology,” The University of Chicago Law Review 69, no. 1 (2002): 263–324, and Peter J. Alexander, “Peer-to-Peer File Sharing: The Case of the Music Recording Industry,” Review of Industrial Organization 20, no. 2 (2002): 151–61.

* 20. Rehn, “Electronic Potlatch,” 152.

* 21. This is akin to the pirate function that Kavita Philip outlines in her “What Is a Technological Author? The Pirate Function and Intellectual Property,” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 2 (2005): 199–218.

* 22. Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage, Punk: An Aesthetic (New York: Rizzoli, 2012).

* 23. Hillel Schwartz, Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 2014), 268. A parallel is also made by Maria Eriksson, “A Different Kind of Story: Tracing the Histories and Cultural Marks of Pirate Copied Film,” Tecnoscienza: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies 7, no. 1 (2016): 100.

* 24. Alexander Sebastian Dent, “Introduction: Understanding the War on Piracy, Or Why We Need More Anthropology of Pirates,” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 3 (2012): 667.

* 25. Eric Goldman, “A Road to No Warez: The No Electronic Theft Act and Criminal Copyright Infringement,” Oregon Law Review 82 (2003): 371.

* 26. Antero Garcia and Greg Niemeyer, “Introduction,” in Alternate Reality Games and the Cusp of Digital Gameplay, eds. Antero Garcia and Greg Niemeyer (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 1.

* 27. Ibid., 10.

* 28. Ibid., 4.

* 29. Ibid.

* 30. Ibid.

* 31. Ibid.

* 32. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 19–20.

* 33. Michael Strangelove, The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the AntiCapitalist Movement (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).

* 34. Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros, “Case B: The Beast,” in Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Wærn, Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (Boston: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2009), 27.

* 35. On Reality Ends Here, see

Jeff Watson, “Games Beyond the

* 36. Rehn, “Electronic Potlatch,” 235.

* 37. Jane McGonigal, “‘This Is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play,” in Melbourne DAC 2003 Streamingworlds Conference Proceedings (Melbourne: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, 2003), 5.

* 38. Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig De Peuter, “Workers and Warez: Labour and Piracy in the Global Game Market,” in Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing, eds. Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig De Peuter (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 198.

* 39. Dave Szulborski, This Is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (Macungie: New-Fiction Publishing, 2005), 49.

* 40. Garcia and Niemeyer, “Introduction,” 15.

* 41. The quotes in this paragraph are attributed to Bogost, “Persuasive Games.”

* 42. Garcia and Niemeyer, “Introduction,” 5.

* 43. Rehn, “Electronic Potlatch,” 32.

* 44. Montola, Stenros, and Wærn, Pervasive Games, 120–21.

* 45. Garcia and Niemeyer, “Introduction,” 6.

* 46. This is gestured to by McGonigal, “‘This Is Not a Game’.”

* 47. Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2005), 15.

* 48. Ibid.

* 49. Garcia and Niemeyer, “Introduction,” 9.

* 50. David Décary-Hétu, Carlo Morselli, and Stéphane Leman-Langlois, “Welcome to the Scene: A Study of Social Organization and Recognition among Warez Hackers,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 49, no. 3 (2012): 361.

* 51. Sigi Goode, “Exploring the Supply of Pirate Soft ware for Mobile Devices: An Analysis of Soft ware Types and Piracy Groups,” Information Management & Computer Security 18, no. 4 (2010): 220.

* 52. David Tetzlaff, “Yo-Ho-Ho and a Server of Warez,” in The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory: Magic, Metaphor, Power, eds. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss (New York: Routledge, 2000), 99–126.

* 53. Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

* 54. DI, “Distorted Illusions Topsite (DI-distorted.illusions.XXXX.XX.01.nfo),” n.d., DeFacto2, warez.scene.nfo.collection.v1.0.24351.shroo.ms.zip.

* 55. VDR, “Virtual Dimension Research Lake Topsite (VDR-vdr.lake.1998.02.09.nfo),” February 9, 1998, DeFacto2, warez.scene.nfo.collection.v1.0.24351.shroo.ms.zip.

* 56. See, for instance: lester, “Which Ftpd Is Right for You?” Netmonkey Weekly Report (Nwr36.Txt), February 22, 1999.

* 57. DeFacto2, “Wanted Uploads,” GitHub, March 25, 2019, https://github.com/Defacto2/defacto2.net.

* 58. Ibid.

* 59. Ibid.

* 60. Roisin Kiberd, “The Minecraft Server That Will Kill You 1,000 Times,” Newsweek, September 15, 2016, https://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/23/minecraft-anarchy-server-2b2t-will-kill-you-498946.html.

* 61. “2b2t Photodiary: Inside Minecraft’s Most Offensive Server,” PCGamesN, October 17, 2016, https://www.pcgamesn.com/minecraft/2b2t-photodiary-inside-minecrafts-most-offensive-server.

* 62. “Timeline,” 2b2t Wiki, 2020, https://2b2t.miraheze.org/wiki/Timeline.

* 63. “Imperator’s Base,” 2b2t Wiki, 2020, https://2b2t.miraheze.org/wiki/Imperator%27s_Base.

* 64. “THEJudgeHolden,” 2b2t Wiki, 2020, https://2b2t.miraheze.org/wiki/THEJudgeHolden.

* 65. See also a similar disclaimer in Rehn, “Electronic Potlatch,” 91.

* 66. Robert V. Kozinets, Netnography: Ethnographic Research in the Age of the Internet (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2010), 151.

* 67. Ibid., 153.

* 68. Amy Bruckman, “Teaching Students to Study Online Communities Ethically,” Journal of Information Ethics 15, no. 2 (2006): 89.

* 69. Kozinets, Netnography, 145.

* 70. Ibid., 144.

* 71. Ibid., 145.

* 72. Ibid.

* 73. Ibid.

* 74. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 233.

* 75. For more on Scene ethics, see Alf Rehn, Ordered Misbehavior: The Structuring of an Illegal Endeavor (Stockholm: Royal Institute of Technology, 2003).

* 76. Adrian Johns, “Pop Music Pirate Hunters,” Daedalus 131, no. 2 (2002): 77.

* 77. Dent, “Introduction.”

* 78. Ibid, 669.

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