Recycling modernity: Pirate electronic cultures in India

Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy

“…Ravi Sundaram (1999) argues that informal processes in Indian media ecology should be seen as a pirate modernity -a mode of incorporation into the economy that is disorganized, nonideological, and marked by mobility and innovation. This formulation nicely captures the ambivalence of piracy, refusing the simple equation that piracy is an alternative or oppositional modernity (though there are elements of this in people's justification that pirate media goods redress economic inequalities between developed and underdeveloped countries).…”

“…A cycle of breakdown, repair, and breakdown again is the condition of existence for many technologies in Nigeria. As a consequence, Nigeria employs a vast army of people who specialize in repairing and reconditioning broken technological goods, since the need for repair is frequent and the cost of it cheap (Sundaram 1999;Verrips and Myers 2001).…”

Art, Technology and Policy in the Twenty‐First Century

“…Critically, the vast majority of the devices on offer through donor corporations like Microsoft, Dell and Cisco Systems are closed black boxes: machines, systems and software which do not allow users to alter them. Contrast the indigenised technologies described by Ravi Sundaram in this journal: 14 here the potential locked in black-box technologies is released by the inventiveness of pirate recyclers and hackers. Something similar is apparent in the informal economy of mobile phones throughout the developing world, and its formalisation in such innovative institutional forms as Grameenphone (http://www.grameenphone.com/).…”

Hacking and Difference

“…3 For a compelling account of this phenomenon, see Sundaram (2001Sundaram ( , 2009) and Prasad and Kumar (2009). 4 Stephen Levy puts it with characteristic aplomb: 'To a hacker, a closed door is an insult, and a locked door is an outrage.…”