If It Ain’t Bootlegged, Steal It

Mother’s in the kitchen
Washing out the jugs;
Sister’s in the pantry
Bottling the suds;
Father’s in the cellar
Mixing up the hops;
Johnny’s on the front porch
Watching for the cops.

Poem by a New York state Rotary Club member during the Prohibition

Bootlegging: a term that first gained popular currency during the Prohibition era in the United States, when individuals concealed unregulated alcohol within their boots to evade distribution laws. Canadian Ben Kerr – the self-professed “King of the Rum Runners” – was among the more successful rum smugglers, making routine trips from Belleville Harbour in Ontario, Canada, to the coastal hamlet of Pultneyville in New York. With Kerr essentially refusing to land on American soil, customers had to row out to his boat, particularly on dark hazy nights; he wouldn’t travel under a full moon. 

Fast forward to the 21st century, the term ‘bootlegging’ has now evolved into a broader conceptual framework for understanding informal economies and alternative systems of circulation and distribution. It is no longer confined to the illicit trade of liquor; bootlegging today encompasses a wide range of decentralised practices: the sharing of pirated media, the replication of pharmaceuticals, the reproduction of artworks, and the unauthorised dissemination of knowledge. 

Across much of the global majority, these practices are not merely acts of defiance but strategies of survival, enabling access to information, medicine, and cultural production otherwise withheld behind paywalls, patents, and institutional gatekeeping. My introduction to reading and accessing many books during my teenage years was partly enabled by the Sunday secondhand book markets that were full of old books discarded by the west. I also remember going to my local internet cafe to get pirated copies of video games, albums, and movies that I knew would never be accessible in Asia otherwise. 

So much of my cultural capital was cultivated through such informal channels. Bootleggers were, and still are, more valuable to me than most professors I have encountered throughout my formal education. They were friends and comrades who fuelled my desire for knowledge and showed me how access is not granted, but taken. 

In issue 01, Prinita Thevarajah presented a folio of cultural moments of bootlegging across the world in her feature, “Fake it like you mean it”. From Filipino Jeepneys and Ghanaian film posters to Sri Lankan replicas of mid-century furniture, the writer argued that bootlegs inevitably shape culture in their own right, further exploring whether they are modes of empowerment or erasure. After exchanging a few messages with her, our conversation revolved around what identity does a ‘fake’ commodity signify? Is it merely a photocopier that uses hegemonic cultural ink to reproduce or does it act as an agent of removal, stripping colonial power of aesthetics from objects? 

In this sense, bootlegging is not simply an act of imitation or theft but a form of vernacular resistance, a challenge to hegemonic control over production and distribution. It embodies the politics of necessity, which derives from the economic and cultural exclusion that the vast majority of the human population is subjected to. Why is it that most of the cultural and material advancements from the Global North are tactfully kept away from the rest of the world? That reconfigures questions of ownership, authorship, and legitimacy within global capitalism.

Bootlegging is also a form of bypassing the unfair nature of currency conversion, another prison many people are locked up in. If a commodity or media is produced in the west, it is usually traded in dollars or euros, making it inaccessible to people who do not earn in those currencies—this is where Z-Library and torrenting mediums come to the rescue. In many cases, it also gives rise to local adaptations of classics aimed at local populations, like Haider, the 2014 Bollywood adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Set in 1990s Kashmir, the movie transplants the tragic story to the backdrop of political conflict and is part of director Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespearean trilogy, which also includes Maqbool (Macbeth) and Omkara (Othello).

To someone sitting in the fortress that is Europe, this may sound ‘illegitimate’. To many of us in regions where exposure to western media is rare, however, such ‘bootlegs’ become our organs to explore the world. And don’t even get me started on the cultural capital that is traded as art in the west; the commodification of creativity, the delusion that is the art market, the fetishisation of labour and calling it “artisanal”. Here, bootlegging becomes a response to dreary corporatism, acting as both an aesthetic and a political strategy. 

Artist Tasneem Sarkez’s reappropriation of commercial imagery within gallery contexts, for example, interrogates institutional hierarchies of originality and authenticity, reframing the bootleg as a site of artistic and conceptual subversion. In her work, imagery and symbols that use branding to signal power are reappropriated. “Bootlegging itself becomes spatialised in response to the import and export of a culture in a new place, and ways of claiming access to something that might be harder to reach,” she says. “And though the act itself may be considered ethically wrong, it remains morally just.” 

 She further shares her own inquiry into counterfeits within her practice, “Counterfeit culture and bootlegging are often analysed from a place of legality and copyright. However, when recontextualised from its position in the art world, one will find that counterfeits morph into subjects,” she explains. “This subjectivity is then perceived from a place of aesthetic and cultural criticism and not just as mere objects which have been counterfeited.”

In Logomania, a folio of photos shot by photographer and artist Hassan Kurbanbaev, a consumeristic sensibility takes on Uzbekistan’s contradictory desire for lavishness. His image making captures young people in modest domestic settings, draped in the luxury logos of western brands. The project is a very interesting study of the enmeshed nature of tradition and desire for western assimilation. Logomania elucidates a kind of capitalistic ritual that is both sincere and ironic, where a performance of excess takes centre stage. 

This melange of highly juxtaposed motifs holds up a mirror to not just Uzbek society, but the global majority at large, where western notions of consumption of art, culture, and media are still considered more desirable. I wrote about a similar cultural intervention in an essay titled “Waste Files” (also in issue 01) for which I spoke to Johannesburg-based designers Khanyi Masina and Khumo Morojele along with photographer Jack Markovitz about their upcycling project. 

The fashion-led photojournal was set against the backdrop of local markets in Johannesburg, where the models were adorned in beautiful textiles made out of recycled toiles that Europe dumps annually in the region. Fashion was quite literally used as a medium of political expression to resist imposed colonial ideas of personhood and identity, which are still tied to garments designed from western fashion ideals and the fast paced nature of this industry. The South African woman here drapes herself in rebellion first, fabric second. 

In some instances, the hunger of western imperialism consumes bootleggers, too. For example, the unregulated circulation of music in Sub-Saharan Africa has already been appropriated as an album now readily available to stream on various western platforms. So, in a way, even the unauthorised archives sustained by bootleggers are not safe. The cultural work they do for their communities is always at a risk of either being appropriated or being outrightly shut down because it poses a threat to the global flow of capital.

The threat is not even a threat, but a fear of losing consumer markets. Record labels, media distribution companies, publishing houses, art galleries—all these neoliberal institutions will be moot if a bootlegging economy becomes the norm. “Moonshine Economy” is what I call it. Understood here as a rhizomatic undercommons where bootleggers are cultural practitioners (not just intermediaries who enable systems of alternative distribution), participants of the Moonshine Economy can be self-professed professors, off-grid manufacturers, and people with a desire for agency and a willingness to ensure access is not a hurdle for anyone. 

Moving briefly on to one of the most pressing consumer movements of our times: the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement thay started as a tool to dismantle crony corporations and their complicity in the genocide of Palestinians. The BDS movement has now scattered its understanding of consumer culture to use it against very real forms of oppression across Sudan and Kashmir. In an era defined by the commodification of conscience, when streaming choices and brand affiliations are imbued with moral weight, bootlegging raises provocative questions: Can pirated access constitute a form of ethical refusal? Gaza Cola, torrenting the upcoming Scream 7, buying iPhones from secondhand markets—these choices of consumption have material roots in bootlegging. It situates the bootleg as a postcolonial and digital gesture, one that reclaims incentive from the endless enclosures of capital. 

In the end, what comes through all these stories of copying, remixing, resisting, and reimagining is a glimpse of another way that culture can move and stay alive. This Moonshine Economy shows us that value does not come from patents or corporate approval; it comes from people who keep ideas and creativity circulating because our communities need them. It’s an economy shaped by DJs, bootleggers, artists, pirates, market vendors, teenage readers in internet cafes, and anyone who has ever reached for knowledge that was kept out of reach.

Instead of top-down control and rigid distribution systems, the Moonshine Economy offers something more direct and human. It is peer-to-peer, improvised, communal, and rooted in care rather than profit. It reminds us that some of the most important things we learn or love do not arrive through official channels. They come from the hands of people who refuse to wait for permission, carrying creativity across borders and quietly keeping access alive.

Even though there has been a recent clampdown of many decentralised resource-sharing platforms such as Z-Library and LibGen, other more collectively minded and openly socialist forms of sharing will undoubtedly take form in the future. Platforms like Silknode, Are.na, and School for Poetic Computation tend to inspire new digital and physical pathways, born from the same impulse towards mutual aid and communal knowledge. 

That’s the beauty of moonshine economies; they thrive on improvisation, resilience, and the understanding that the will to share supersedes the desire to gatekeep. In these spaces, resources begin to resemble cherished homemade recipes, crafted with care, meant to circulate freely, and enriched each time they pass through another pair of hands. They seep across borders, bypassing walls erected by profit or authority, finding their way into new homes where they continue to nourish, transform, and create unexpected connections.