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Given the the frequently inflammatory and oversimplified debates about copyright — indeed, discussions (sic) which are frequently referred to as the “Copyright Wars,” I fear that there are too many people who may treat Professor Vats’ observation as an indictment of copyright, rather than as an indictment of the present limitations of its scope, and of legacy industry practices based on exploitative practices which in too many cases are also aligned with race. I’m not sure what Professor Vats will argue in her book, but I highlight that she has, in her tweet, properly observed that the negative consequences flow from failure to extend rights to non-western forms of expression rather than as an undue limitation on access. I hope this complexity will inform and be reflected in this important discussion.

The potential of copyright to expand the interests of the Black creative community was perfectly captured by Professor Mtima in a piece he penned about the CASE Act — a provision of law recently adopted to create a small-claims court for copyright violations. Mtima wrote: “For a large segment of the creative community, copyright protection is a lot like McDonald’s was for Harlem kids in the 1960s — close enough to get our attention, but too far beyond our reach to mean anything.”

For Malik Yakini of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network and the Detroit Food Policy Network, D-Farm is not just a project for growing healthy local food; it also helps grow collective consciousness and reframe the kind of agriculture that works for the community. Yakini considers urban farming an act of self-determination as opposed to globalised industrialised agriculture, which exploits black labour for the accumulation of land and capital for wealthy white men. Yakini insists on repeating the three terms “wealthy,” “white” and “men,” as he believes this is what capitalism has produced: a racist and patriarchal society where the majority is neglected in favour of the accumulation9 of capital, as suggested by Walter Rodney and Samir Amin. CREATING NEW MODES OF PRODUCTION Marx’s influence has persisted in the form of one particular imperative, namely the need for the workers to take back control of the means of production. What black radical emancipatory practices are teaching us is that communities can reinvent new means of production, ones that are more connected to their needs and more connected to nature. One of the unique innovations of its kind comes from the Incite Focus digital fabrication laboratory (commonly referred to as the “Fab Lab”) in Detroit, where all the business processes were inspired by observing the regenerative features of nature. The makers’ lab includes high-tech 3D printers, a sophisticated machine to make prototypes out of cardboard, various machinery for creating electronic circuits, and a myriad of tools. Director Blair Evans – whose early activities as an organiser started with his uncle founding the Shrine of the Black Madonna Church – explained how they used permaculture as a model and a framework for organising their activities, thereby revolutionising how they operated. Evans explains that traditionally the business community prioritises profit, and therefore the starting point for all entrepreneurial endeavours is one individual’s idea. This capitalist culture encourages us to use marketing strategies, cheap labour, and so on to extract maximum profit. There is no consideration for the social or ecological consequences, let alone whether there is any real need for the product/service. This neoliberal culture is constantly driven home by the education system and also by global media propaganda surrounding patriarchal business entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, who is considered to be a genius of his time, when in fact, his initial wealth was inherited from his father who stole an emerald mine from the people of Zambia. Wealth accumulated from colonial theft and slavery is hidden by the myth of the American Dream.

The counterculture advocated by Incite Focus proposes a new relationship between the community and nature and radically distancing ourselves from the growth paradigm. It suggests that the natural world must stop being perceived as an infinite source of raw materials to be exploited. Instead, nature must become a source of knowledge and guidance that includes an intelligent consciousness that is available for us at all times, providing us with inspiration. Evans attributes the success of this community production centre to the fact that the starting point has always been the community and its needs.

If one reads James’s account of the Haitian revolution alongside Davis’s account of the abolitionist movement in the Americas, one begins to notice something else that sits as a central conundrum of abolition: the question of property. The Black enslaved were denied the legal status of family; this meant that they “passed on to their children an inherited status as being private property.”6 It was not just that one was enslaved; it was also that one could not “own” one’s self and one’s offspring, and therefore could not lay claim to family. In both theory and practice, this meant that the Black enslaved person literally had no autonomy or control over either their body or biological kin: the child followed the condition of the mother and thereby became at birth the white master’s property. This fact has informed Black people’s relationship to property ever since. Calls for and demands for abolition are built on a memory of slavery not too far removed from the present-day reality for many of us.

The problem of property and bodies, then, is at the foundation of contemporary abolitionist claims, much as it was at the abolition movement’s historic founding. In the context of the Haitian revolution, the enslaved had to conceive of owning themselves both physically and psychically, and it is this kind of ownership that underwrites contemporary calls for abolition. Thus, abolition as a radical politics means to create a different world, a different set of governing relations. It is a transformation of our society as we know it.

In many ways, A Tribe Called Quest follows the signifyin’ ways of Douglass in its 1990 song “Can I Kick It?” which parodies and deconstructs Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” The song samples from and criticizes Reed’s ode to sexual adventurism. In his song, Reed has “bitten,” or stolen, African American R&B rhythms from the 1970s and exoticized black urban spaces through his sexualized lyrics. A Tribe Called Quest’s parody, however, operates primarily through its samples, rather than the lyrics themselves. The samples rework Reed’s song, deconstructing its references to drug use, interracial sexuality, and societal rebellion. When he asks, “Can I Kick It?” Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest calls out Lou Reed for both identifying the location of his “walk on the wild side” as New York City and including African American girls within that walk.38 Q-Tip questions Reed’s ability to walk his streets or “hang” with A Tribe Called Quest. Although the lyrics do parody Lou Reed’s, the group signifies on Reed primarily through the rhythm tracks and the melody. By reclaiming a stolen or bitten rhythm line, A Tribe Called Quest is engaged in a turf war with rock and roll. This battle is not about a physical space, but appropriated elements of intellectual property. Later in the song, Q-Tip asks David Dinkins, “Would you please be my mayor?” This references the election of the first black mayor of New York City and extends the parody and the claim of cultural ownership over New York City. A Tribe Called Quest calls out not only Lou Reed and rock and roll but the white political establishment that has attempted to dominate black urban spaces. “Can I Kick It?” simultaneously constitutes a parody of white popular culture and a demand for political and cultural freedom. The form of the music, although it shares some characteristics with Douglass’s parody, also suggests a new use of signifyin’ in the post–Civil Rights era.

Signifyin’ functions like a trademark or copyright symbol. A successful instance of signifyin’ constitutes an act of rhetorical ownership over an object, a text, or even an individual. For example, Douglass’s parody demonstrated his moral superiority over Christian apologists through his verbal acuity, and A Tribe Called Quest asserts claims of cultural ownership over rock and roll and New York City. In both cases, African American cultural workers write over well-known texts. Signifyin’, especially in the case of hip-hop, adds an “ironic spin” on the original, frequently “contradicting the original meaning.”39 The practice of signifyin’ also refuses to acknowledge the seemingly settled distribution of property rights, which legal discourse purports to confer, and writes over them.40 Although Gates does not call attention to this explicitly, he describes how signifyin’ offers a method and a form to claim cultural and personal ownership over an object, sound, image, text, or trademarked logo. As a clandestine or alternative property-ownership system, signifyin’ allows participants within African American culture to write over an unjust distribution of intellectual and cultural resources. This competing legal structure “allocates” rights over intangible objects within African American culture without following the requirements identified in copyright or trademark law. For popular and vernacular culture, law, as written in the statute books, is simply irrelevant. Keith Aoki asserts that, especially during the formative years of blues and jazz, the lack of of‹cial copyright protection fostered creativity and innovation among African American musicians.41

Sampling alone, however, cannot effectively assert the kinds of ownership claims that Morrison wishes to make. Sampling is not another word for rememory. Rather, samples must be given new levels of meaning by their deployment in new patterns. Rememory is the pattern, not the recollections themselves, because certain moments stand out against the background and repeat themselves in the unfolding of chronological time. Like a strip quilt, a nonlinear or asymmetrical pattern must be pieced together from the remnants of American literary history. By reshaping the debris of Margaret Garner’s story and reorganizing it, Morrison creates a text that describes the historical trauma of slavery and property law while attempting to find a method to heal that pain. Layering is the art of creating productive tension.23 For any historically marginalized community to claim ownership over American literary history, productive tensions must be revealed. In a moment when the comic meets the deadly serious, Morrison uses the voice of Sixo to signify on the limits of the property law and to emphasize its discursive authority to shape cultural relations. In an oft-quoted section, Sixo receives a beating from Schoolteacher for stealing and “to show him that definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined.”24 While scholars have tended to view this moment as a critique of Western epistemology or the Enlightenment, they have neglected or downplayed its ironic critique of property and the law of evidence, as Schoolteacher’s methods of cross-examination force Sixo to testify against himself. When Schoolteacher claims that Sixo has stolen food, Sixo does not classify his actions as theft. Rather, he states that he has been “improving your [Schoolteacher’s] property.”25 Sixo’s response exemplifies signifyin’, illustrates hip-hop’s attitude toward intellectual property law, and highlights how property law itself has always struggled to distinguish among the layers of ownership. Reading this fictional conversation within the cultural context of when Morrison wrote Beloved, in the 1980s, Sixo can be understood as asking who owns the sample from a text that gets transformed through layering or a later act of consumption/production.

Morrison’s textual response to this dilemma can be found a few sections later. As the story comes to a close, the novel’s layers of samples begin to fall in on themselves, not merging into a unified voice but producing what Tricia Rose calls the “Black Noise” of hip-hop aesthetics. After rewriting the biblical “Song of Songs” and its heart-wrenching tale of lost love in a paragraph, Morrison weaves together the interior monologues of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved to show both the similarities and the differences between their personal and social desires. Rather than presenting distinct voices, the text makes clear how their respective identities are produced socially: “Beloved / You are my sister / You are my daughter / You are my face; You are me / I have found you again; you have come back to me.”26 In these lines, it is clear that Sethe, Denver, and Beloved are engaged in an unconscious dialogue about how to order their relationships to one another. Textually, Morrison represents this struggle for order by layering their voices. However, she does not portray their voices in fully drawn narratives. Rather, she samples their voices and then shapes the meaning of these samples by layering them in asymmetrical patterns. Sethe, Denver, and Beloved form a triangle in which desires and responsibilities do not fall evenly or symmetrically upon one another. Instead, their demands may be incommensurate, meaning that realizing one desire may necessarily frustrate a second desire.

Talk of a “broken system” makes theoretically possible the chance to fix the system. But in the spirit of Audre Lorde, attempting to fix allegedly “broken” systems using the “master’s tools” only stabilizes the foundation of the master’s house, rather than dismantling it. Too often attempts to undo systems of structural violence are liable to a redoing, especially when treating a disease with symptoms of that disease. My commitments are to organizing from the ground up and transformation consonant with the etymology of “radical” (a derivation of radix,” meaning “root”). As George Jackson reminds us, there is a thin line between “reform” and “fascism.” We cannot allow some slight tinkering to be wielded as a hegemonic tool to till the soil of oppression without uprooting contaminated terrain. This means we cannot let “mutual aid” work be de-historicized, mutated and made palatable for consumption and co-optation by the state and/or the nonprofit industrial complex. We may think we are preaching to the choir, but far too often the choir is singing the same song as the oppressor. We need to start singing a new tune. We need to start hitting notes out of range from those who can only lip sync the songs of freedom and liberation. It’s at this point when abolition steps to the mic and says, “check out my melody.”

Within any absence, there is a presence and abolitionists are steady building as they destroy. Many know how to live in a more just and sustainable world. It is for this reason that abolitionists embrace the idea that the world will not and cannot be the same. Abolition is a vital and necessary tool to ensuring that we no longer treat diseases with symptoms of that disease. The abolition of police, prisons, ICE, the state, capitalism, toxic animal enterprises, and solecism eliminates the possibility of being beholden to life-destroying systems. Some suggest that identifying what we are against is far easier saying what we are for. So let me put it this way: I am for a world without police and prisons. I am for a world without legislation that rewards Wall Street, big banks, and airlines acting as if they have nothing to lose. I am for a world without agencies like the IMF and World Bank that create the debt poor countries allegedly owe. I am for a world without a parasitic health insurance system that sucks the life out patients through the exorbitant cost of “care.”

I used to say this metaphorically to call attention to the limitations of policy change, reform, and other vacuous terms that hold little weight in relation to the gritty, grimy, rough and tough work necessary to creating a more just and sustainable world.

I knew, for example, calls for greater “police reform” is an attempt to treat a disease (police) with a symptom of that disease (policy). I knew campaigns for “community control” of the police were insufficient because of the pathological nature of what the community is attempting to control. Community control of an invasive pathogen, like police, increases risk of serious infection and the potential for community spread, while shifting responsibility and liability away from the state and towards those disproportionately harmed by the disease itself.

True abolition involves at least three necessary components: defunding of the police, the disarming of the police, and the abolition of policing as an institution. Of course, at the same time, and indeed well before the police are entirely abolished, we must work together to come up with new ways to respond to conflict, harms, and other behaviours that society collectively deems detrimental to living well together. It is for this reason that the abolition of policing and the entire criminal punishment system is often perceived as utopian, a fantasy. How can we deal with harm, whether it be to persons or property, whether it be through physical violence or other forms of injustice, without the police? I understand that this is difficult for many people to conceive. We have been told so often and for so long that there is a certain way of doing things, a certain way to get things done, to protect ourselves and our loved ones (and our property), that it is difficult even to imagine a different way. Which is why imagination is so central to the abolitionist project: the first foundational step to embracing a newfound freedom is embracing the freedom to imagine it.

For abolitionists, the increasing clamour and frequency of demands to defund the police across North America over the last few years mark a pivotal moment. The moment is one where abolition moved from utopian dreams and into actual policy and political discourse. At this moment in history, when the fascist impulses of Trumpism are one of the primary ways through which Black people experience the world, and not just Black people in the United States, highlighting how policing works as endowed state power is essential if we are to make sense of how the entire criminal punishment system works to oppress certain populations within a society, by keeping them in a proscribed place. Policing is many people’s first encounter with the state and the myriad ways it seeks to control all elements of our lives. Abolition is not just about ending current systems; it is also an engaged and creative approach to social organization meant to fully transform how we live together. It is important to understand that abolition is about much more than just policing: its focus is, rather, on the criminal punishment system as a whole.

It is also important to note that tear gas is a specific mechanism of violence meant to protect property and capitalist interests. In the 1964 riots and in the U.S.-Vietnam war, tear gas was used to disperse and “command territory.” Schrader suggests that new formulations of CS came after the Vietnam war in order to control access to terrain. He mentions that in order to keep people away from a given location “CS would be used to create a barrier.”63In a sense, CS serves as an agent that defines the space in terms of property. Meaning, the State employs tear gas in moments such as the Vietnam war and the 1964 to assert ownership and both military and police control over the territory. Given that tear gas only activates when it comes into contact with the human body…the physical space itself is not damaged or threatened. Unlike other war weapons, such as bombs and Napalm, tear gas does not have any effect on surrounding physical structures. Thus, as the bodies it comes into contact with tear gas experiencing pain and agony, the buildings, land, and territory are all preserved. As such, the U.S. deploys teargas on bodies of color in an effort to define that space and practice control and ownership over it. In the context of the ongoing project of conquest, the use of tear gas continues to define Indigenous land as U.S. property, which allows for a continued assertion of ownership and control over that land. Additionally, in asserting control and ownership via the use of tear gas, the atmosphere itself is characterized through a violence and genocide, especially for bodies of color.

In effect, tear gas is a metaphor for the toxic particles that make up capitalism and colonialism, as well as the literal manifestation of the toxicity of these structures. These regimes create an atmosphere and landscape of violence and un-breathability that is felt across the land and airspace, exacerbating the already present atmosphere of violence and genocide. Indeed, the very atmosphere where Black, Indigenous and migrant breathing takes place, is an atmosphere of violence, pain and often, death. On this, Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: on Blackness and Being, suggests that “there is too a connection between the lungs and the weather; the supposedly transformative properties of breathing free air—that which throws off the mantle of slavery—and the transformative properties of being ‘free’ to breathe fresh air.” Fresh air, as a part of an unattainable atmosphere, represents a vision for the future. A vision that is not marked by the toxic particles that currently occupy the environment. In speaking specifically about Black bodies, Sharpe expresses that the weather “registers and produces the conventions of antiblackness in the present and into the future.”64 Sharpe’s theorization of the weather and the atmosphere stages how tear gas is not a meaningless act. It is an act of producing environments that are unbreathable and unlivable.

Instead, we begin our analysis by looking at the broader global system in which knowledge and information operate: a settler-colonial system that extracts wealth, knowledge, and culture from economically marginalised communities and inequitably redistributes their economic fruits to the wealthiest and most powerful. This approach is in line with critiques that activists and critical scholars have long made of open-access movements: that the central focus on liberty values ignores concerns about equality; that a romantic notion of the ‘public domain’ as a neutral landscape where every person can reap its riches ignores its real role in exploiting the labour and bodies of people of colour, women, people from the Global South, and the impoverished. We now know that the ‘public domaining’ of Indigenous knowledge about local flora and fauna, traditional medicines, folklore, or traditional cultural expressions has enabled Big Pharma to take Indigenous knowledge, transform it into IP, and become the exclusive owner of that knowledge: a phenomenon known as biopiracy.

Abolitionist creativity also disagrees with an ideological belief that runs through some prominent segments of the open-access movements, namely that the system once worked well, but that ‘unfortunately, our IP regimes have strayed far from their original purposes’. For the colonised, for Indigenous Peoples whose collective knowledge has been ransacked, for communities forced into oppressive trade agreements (e.g. TRIPS), for the rising number of modern slaves working in global supply chains powered by intangibles, it is hard to see how the IP system ever worked for them – or what decades of reformist attempts inside IP law in the US have accomplished. For abolitionists, the system is not broken and in need of reform, tweaking, and tinkering. It is working as it was designed to work, as a settler-colonial legal and economic structure. And we are running out of time and of magical thinking waiting for public policy to somehow turn favourable in a corporate-dominated oligarchy.

As every first-year law student quickly learns, property rights are a bundle of sticks. An absolute landowner has a full bundle—to use, sell, and possess as she sees fit. That buddle can be split out, with a renter getting some of the rights—to reside on and utilize the land—while the owner retains the remaining rights.

We might not intuitively think of citizenship as property, but nationality is defined by its bundle of rights. There are of course the fundamental rights we most associate with citizenship. The right to full political participation, free movement within the country, equal legal status, freedom to pursue employment, and freedom from the threat of expulsion leap to mind. However, the distinctions between citizens and non-citizens run deeper. In the American context, the state can more easily surveil non-citizens or deny them access to Medicaid or government employment.

Solyom 12 (Solyom, Jessica A. (2012), Associate Research Professor, School of Social Transformation at ASU "Tearing at the Seams of (In)visibility: Anti-counterfeiting, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Project of Neocolonization," Kaleidoscope: A Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication Research: Vol. 11 , Article 5. Available at: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/kaleidoscope/vol11/iss1/5 //ATW)

Designers respond to these queries by insisting the rising popularity of counterfeiting affects their right to material and financial profit (Hilton, Choi, & Chen, 2004; Weller, 2004). They believe counterfeiting lowers the credibility and reputation of both the designer and product (Hilton, Choi, & Chen, 2004; Weller, 2004). From this perspective, counterfeiting practices have far-reaching implications for society as they could potentially curtail future artistic expression (Raustiala & Sprigman, 2006). In this perspective, rights are framed as entitlement to profit from one’s artistic work. For designers, justice includes the right to profit from the efforts of laborers who work to create tangible results from their designs, as well as the right to profit from the sale and distribution of ideas or goods associated with their designs.

In an economy where average U.S. consumers find themselves stretching their dollars, the idea of buying luxury fashion items for a fraction of the price is seductive. The lure of obtaining catwalk looks for sidewalk prices can be overwhelming for some. After all, who has not admired the glamour associated with coveted high-end fashion? Those looking for a good bargain may find themselves having increasing luck: as globalized distribution and production operations continue to expand, the ability of counterfeiters to market inauthentic goods has become faster and easier than before (Hilton, Choi, & Chen, 2004; Weller, 2004). This means consumers now have greater access to inexpensive imitation luxury items. Yet these lower priced knockoffs have industry leaders worried. This is because, according to them, counterfeiting creates unfair competition, endangers the future creative contributions of designers, and victimizes both the consumers and the countries that support it (Adamson, 2012; Counterfeiting Intelligence Bureau, 2008; Cox & Jenkins, 2005; Hilton, Choi, & Chen, 2004; International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition, 2005; Jackson, 2011; Pezzi & Faggioni, 2011; Salembier, 2007; Tasker, 2011). While fashion leaders struggle against the injustices presented by counterfeiting, garment workers have pointed to an additional challenge facing the industry: human rights violations. Concerned with the larger social, economic, and legal conditions making it possible for fashion goods production firms to exploit them, garment workers believe wage disparities, subjection to unsafe working conditions, and the denial of basic labor rights are among the key injustices facing the industry (Bonacich, Appelbaum, & Chin, 2000; Bullman, 2003; Dumas, 2012; Ehrenreich, 2008; Hilton, Choi, & Chen, 2004; Louie, 1992; Ross, 2004; Salembier, 2007; Scheer, 1995; Su, 1998; Thomas, 2009).

These diverging viewpoints present complexity in how the struggle for justice plays itself out in the industry and who ultimately gets framed as victim. The positionality, rank, and role of an individual within the industry influences whether s/he will support the efforts of industry leaders or whether s/he will advocate for garment workers. In these struggles there seems to be little, if any, room for overlap. Elite fashion leaders believe they are victims and call for legal reform that protects their individual and material interests. They advocate further criminalizing domestic counterfeiting practices and strongly enforcing existing anti-counterfeiting laws. Garment workers, on the other hand, believe laborers are the primary victims of unscrupulous fashion industry practices. They call for reform that provides redress for workplace abuses and they advocate for stronger protections against labor exploitation. Each group advocates for their respective solution in a political and legal system that disproportionately distributes power, rights, and benefits to its members. And although the current legal system offers some protections for designers, fewer protections exist for garment workers.

Despite its chosen and bestowed whiteness, Russia has retained its long-standing identity as a political foil and imperial actor that requires containment. This is evident in multiple areas of friction with the United States, including discussions over NATO expansion. Conflict over intellectual property and economic espionage extends at least as far back to the Soviet Era when, as Debora Halbert observes, national intellectual, political, and economic investments functioned as tools for proving cultural and artistic superiority.86 Yet the contemporary American refusal to hold Russia accountable for its misdeeds suggests that the ideological dispute is embedded within a larger context. I propose that, while Russians continue to operate as “bad whites”87 against whom Americans can demonstrate their global moral authority via soft power, it is also beneficial for the United States to engage in performative admonishments instead of meaningful consequences. Three racial outcomes flow from the toothless US response to Russia: (1) it normalizes the US position as the heroic “good white”88 who appears to seek justice in the global arena; (2) it allows the United States to chastise Russia while also simultaneously colluding with Putin; and (3) it positions China below Russia in a divide-andconquer style intellectual property and economic espionage racial order. US intellectual property rights talk with Russia thus supports larger architectures of white supremacy by letting the former off the hook while simultaneously deriding China for its illegal and illicit acts. It also exemplifies how realpolitik itself is constituted relationally, through categories of race and gender.

Returning to EEA data with this context around Russia illustrates how the United States uses intellectual property rights talk to reinforce Sinophobic racial hierarchies through relational racialization. The Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions notes that “Chinese-named defendants were 13.2% more likely to have their [EEA] cases dismissed or acquitted compared to other defendants, and 13.5% less likely to be found guilty of EEA-related charges than defendants with nonChinese names.”89 In terms of sentencing, “Chinese-named defendants on average received 12.5 months longer jail terms compared to all other defendants and 12.4 months longer jail terms compared to defendants with Western names.90 The targeting of Chinese defendants relative to other defendants is even more stark when considered over time. The number of Western defendants has declined from 59 percent of the total of all defendants in 1996–2008 to 28 percent of the total defendants in 2016–2020.91 In comparison, approximately 50 percent of the total defendants prosecuted since 2009 have been Chinese.92 These numbers are particularly notable given that Russian actors are growing increasingly bold. “US intelligence officials do not . . . rate China as the biggest threat to the US in cyberspace. The Russians are definitely better, almost as good as we are,’ said one,” Richard Clarke and Robert Knake reported in 2010.93

Talk of a colorblind coronavirus that doesn’t see race means little when racialized medicine diminishes or utterly neglects the needs of nonwhite, racialized patients. “Invisible virus” is similarly specious language. Last time I checked, the pathologization of racialized people makes this supposedly invisible virus, hypervisible. We can’t treat a disease through “universal” guidelines that render invisible the experiences of those disproportionately harmed by the comorbidity of COVID-19 and structural violence. You cannot “shelter in place” without shelter. What to some is a refuge, may also be the site of emotional and sexual violence.

Practicing good hand hygiene means little without access to soap, water and/or sanitizer. Physical distancing guidelines don’t protect you from being harassed, detained, arrested, and/or incarcerated. When you are, as Frantz Fanon writes, “overdetermined from the outside,” face coverings offer little protection or immunity from police terror. In an attempt to “flatten the curve” we cannot flatten difference and differential impact. We know that there is no single curve. Some will experience relief much sooner than others. Sadly, some will experience no relief at all. Without accuracy in language, we can’t claim to be measuring what we intend to measure or diagnosing the right problem. Using the wrong name is worse than using no name at all.

COVID-19 not only lays bare the consequences of preexisting social conditions, such as unwavering commitments to incarceration, a parasitic health care system that privileges the health of the wealthy at the expense of the poor and uninsured, the illegibility of unhoused people who cannot “shelter in place,” and the systemic neglect of indispensable workers. The current pandemic also exposes the state’s dependency on treating diseases with symptoms. What follows is an invitation to meditate on the consequences of treating diseases with symptoms of those diseases. Consider this a provocation to destroy that which is destructive. Some may call it “destruction of property.” But if the property is itself destructive, wouldn’t “destruction of destructive property” be the more sensible charge?

1) We can’t treat this disease if jails and prisons still exist.

3) We can’t treat a disease by esteeming human beings over more-than-human beings.

We can’t incarcerate or spend our way out of the current pandemic. And still, the state continues to treat the coronavirus with another symptom and key stakeholder in carceral logics and capital accumulation – animal agriculture. We can’t treat a disease without remaining in communion with the ecosystems and nonhuman animals that global capitalism is responsible for disrupting and destroying. We can’t treat the coronavirus by invoking Defense Production Acts to sustain life-taking (i.e. human and nonhuman animal life) industries. We can’t treat COVID-19 by passing an executive order barring local governments from closing slaughter houses.

Wikipedia attempts to present information from a neutral point of view and requires its content to be verifiable with citations from reliable, published sources. It also maintains a transparent editing process, in which the edit history of each article is publicly visible. Each article also has an associated, public “talk page” where editors can debate what to put in the article. Talk pages also maintain permanent histories of all such conversations over time. Interactions among editors on Wikipedia exist across a spectrum from collaborative to hostile, with trolling, vandalism (damage to an article through content deletion or addition of inappropriate text, including hate speech), and edit wars (antagonistic edits to text that change the text back and forth between two opposing opinions, often without discussion or explanation, rather than seeking consensus through gradual, explained text edits) occurring with some regularity (Jemielniak 2014; Clark et al. 2019). Wikipedia’s organizational policy is to revert edits and ban editors who are blatantly in bad faith and/or libelous and to restore article text to how it was before they made their edits.

These practices, and a host of other internal rules and enforcement norms, help Wikipedia to prevent, or catch and fix, “fake news,” disinformation campaigns, hoaxes, and vandalism (Borak 2022). Jemielniak writes that “In general, any purposeful, long-term universal bias on Wikipedia, detouring from the dominant beliefs of the general academic and para-academic community, does not prevail,” though this is more likely to be true for articles that attract the attention of large numbers of editors as compared to less popular articles (2018, 5). However, our experience suggests that overall, Wikipedia content should be described not as free from long-term bias but rather as broadly supportive of (1) the interests and perspectives of the largely male, white, Global North editors who volunteer on the site, as well as (2) the long-term biases of academia, government, and the press that create most of Wikipedia’s source materials. These knowledge distortions are pervasive and deeply entrenched, as they occur along multiple axes of power: language, geography, colonial history, race, Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and more (Bear and Collier 2016; Berson, Sengul-Jones, and Tamani 2021; Jemielniak 2014; Ramjohn 2022a; Reagle and Koerner 2020; Salam 2019; Tripodi 2021; van der Velden 2013). Of these, information inequality related to sexism is the best documented. The fact that only 19.70 percent of biographies on Wikipedia are of women is one frequently cited example (Anon., n.d.-q; Konieczny and Klein 2018). Wikipedia’s “featured articles,” the ones deemed to be of highest quality by Wikipedians and thus preferentially featured on the site, also align with subjects that tend to be disproportionately of interest to men, with warfare, sports, and video games forming three of the top four categories (Mathewson and Ramirez 2018).

Lessig (2001) frequently refers to the Internet as an innovation commons (p. 40) where innovators can develop and deploy new applications or content without the permission of others. He speaks of both commercial innovation as well as cultural innovation—though his emphasis is squarely on the notion of commercial innovation (the idea of cultural innovation is never fully developed). Lessig‘s emphasis on innovation is significant. By focusing on innovation he limits his analysis almost exclusively to the socalled productive uses of the commons. In other words, his commons is construed primarily as a resource from which capital is free to draw. Lessig (2001) states that ―free resources, or resources held in common, sometimes create more wealth and opportunity for society than those same resources held privately‖ (p. 86). Here Lessig is seeking a middle ground—to balance public and private control. When a resource has more value because of its openness and being held in common, then it makes the most sense to him to treat it as a commons. Like the law and economics scholars of the neoliberal economic tradition, Lessig‘s approach to the balance of interests is premised on economic efficiency. In other words, the terms of the debate are the same for both sides, whether they support increased authority for the private sphere or the public sphere. What is implicit in Lessig‘s conceptualization of a state-supported commons is that value is being constructed within a capitalist framework. This is why Lessig like many in the reformist camp is explicit in his denouncements of peer-to-peer file-sharing. Non-market systems of value do not enter into Lessig‘s analysis in any meaningful way despite his cryptic allusion to cultural innovation. A rhetorical focus on innovation allows Lessig to keep the terms of the debate safely within the capitalist framing.

The indeterminacy of Lessig‘s approach to resolving the contradiction of immaterial production is underscored by his constant vacillation between his adherences to private property on the one hand and property held in common on the other. At some points Lessig (2001) seems preoccupied with vocalizing his support for free-market values, proclaiming, ―I am fanatically pro-market, in the market‘s proper sphere‖ (p. 6), while at other points he obliquely seems to acknowledge his own complicity in subverting the market. For example, in the introduction to The Future of Ideas Lessig (2001) says that he is ―disgusted‖ by his friends who possess pirated DVD collections (p. xvii). Yet in the same book he admits to having pirated music off of Napster without paying for it—though he sheepishly claims that it constitutes only about five percent of his music (p. 194). Lessig‘s befuddled approach to property stems in large part from his refusal to confront the politics of property head-on. He incorrectly conflates personal property (his house and car) with corporate ownership of the means of production (Microsoft‘s source code), reasoning that society has equal interest in allowing both parties to keep it to themselves.

As Adrian Johns demonstrates in his history of "piracy," the concept is a historically complicated one, in which infringers such as the United States became protectors of intellectual properties once they had the authority and the incentive to do so. Accordingly, attempts to label those in the developing world as "pirates" have been met with considerable conceptual and legal resistance. In particular, those in the developing world have pushed back against the overarching development narrative of intellectual property law, asserting the existence and import of local approaches to the protection of knowledge. 219 Moreover, they have articulated alternative economic narratives, which reframe and even justify "Third World" infringement as necessary, beneficial, and unavoidable.220 For instance, Ravi Sundaram's concept of the "pirate modernity," which emerged through his study of the urban modernities in India, calls for recognition that the purportedly universal standards advanced by international intellectual property law do not even begin to describe the material conditions of existence in rapidly developing nations such as India.221 In Sundaram's retelling of the story of the piracy, the urbanization of the city, as well as its technological development, are integral to understanding the role of infringement, and indeed its unavoidability, within contemporary Indian contexts. 222 Liang tells a tale of Indian counterfeiters turned protectors of their intellectual properties, explaining that the progress of capitalism makes infringement necessary for many to survive. 223 He identifies capitalism as a core reason for piracy and counterfeiting, discussing the ways its detritus results in left behind individuals who copy protected works of authorship and invention to survive. 224 Liang's work demonstrates the nuance of the developing world's orientation toward knowledge production as well as how economic systems determine knowledge production structures.

Sundaram and Liang offer examples of attempts to reframe those narratives of so-called piracy that originate in the Global North. They and others continue to complicate the critique Shiva initiated, refusing reductive stories of infringement as exclusively about economic loss to Western nations. Studies of shanzhai in China, 225 hip-hop in South Africa, 226 and pharmaceuticals in Mexico and South and Central America227 ask us to reconsider accepted notions that piracy always flows from North to South. Discussions of cultural appropriation, particularly of traditional designs such as Navajo prints and adrinka and kente cloth, raise further questions about the nature of piracy. 228 Along these lines, Kavita Philip's work makes important claims about the social construction of the pirate figure, particularly by investigating how it is mobilized in the service of violence in contemporary politics. 229