Published in the October–November 2020 issue of Art Monthly magazine, this mid-length profile piece gives an introductory overview of the Pirate Care Syllabus project co-developed by Italian theorist Valeria Graziano with Croatian media activists Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak. PCS is a free digital tool that enables community groups to share their knowledge in stable and self-controlled ways. In the context of the project, ‘piracy’ describes a militant mode of caring, one that works illegally or in the grey areas outside the law to organise cultures of care against social injustices.
An excerpt from the article:
"By refusing database-driven systems and by using plaintext content and a simple, common mark-up language (Markdown), different syllabi can be collaboratively written and easily forked. The initial syllabus (the reflexive Pirate Care iteration) and those that follow are each a structured set of pointers to plaintext content and other media resources – mostly publications, which are stored in shadow libraries so cloned digital copies can be freely downloaded by anyone anytime. This keeps both the syllabus and its associated media in a stable relationship and outside property laws. It also means user groups can transnationally connect different community knowledges by creating their own structured sets of pointers to material within the network. Groups can create, share and secure their own overlaying syllabi, making a self-determined cause-oriented basis for inter-community solidarity."
