Cracked & burned: CD-ROMs, pirates and the materiality of digital sharing

This presentation is part of the CD-HIST project, which explores the various histories of CD-ROMs and how these continue to shape later digital practices. For this seminar, the focus is on digital sharing, understood not as a natural property of the digital, but rather something that has been developed through practice and material support. Cultures of sharing did not simply precede digital platforms, but took shape through hands-on engagement with physical media – such as discs, drives, and copy protection, as well as through early online sharing techniques – such as warez and usenet groups.

We will trace a series of material practices – burning, cracking, ripping, mounting, and releasing on CD-ROMs – to show how early digital sharing relied on very tangible infrastructures, including drives, burners, disc images extraction, CD-R cases, media compression codecs and online Peer-to-Peer protocols. We suggest that these practices shaped norms, boundaries, and imaginaries of sharing itself. By following CD-ROMs as they moved across users, machines, and informal networks, the talk reflects on how the boundaries of sharing were negotiated through media that were at once digital and physical, and how these early negotiations continue to resonate in later digital cultures.