Authors

Discussion

Eastern Europe is often considered a Mecca for illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing. However, is such activity only driven by desire to enjoy popular culture for free? What makes torrent-trackers so special that in the age of streaming platforms (legal and pirate) they still remain popular? While P2P file-sharing is covered in a few studies, the issues of identity-oriented incentives or potential activism are not addressed at all. This paper aims to fill this gap and explore how torrent tracker’s affordances may transform it into an ideological aesthetic identity-oriented project in the context of Ukraine – a country that still struggles with its identity and experiences high levels of online piracy according to both European Commission’s (2021) and US government’s (USTR, 2021) anti-pirate watch lists. The study is based on in-depth interviews with Ukrainian torrent users and explores how torrent trackers act as points of connections from different perspectives: technological, collective, cultural and ideological. It shows how torrent users give away the content, share information and thus form the collective and contribute to its aesthetical and ideological projects. While applying Benjamin’s concept of the passage, I suggest interpreting the torrent-tracker as a “communist” passage that distributes “from each according to their ability, to each according to their ability, to their needs".