Hooroo Jackson

The Pirate Cinema Manifesto

0. We Announce Ourselves

We are the pirate cinema.

We are the ones who refused to wait for permission while the old world argued over effort and quality and purity as if the how ever mattered more than the film.

We inherit the camera, the torrent, the model, the cracked plugin, the fansub, the workprint, the “lost cut,” the bootleg DVD with marker on the face. We inherit the right to dream directly onto the screen, without asking for permission. AI is the revolution, but the revolution is us.

I. What We Steal

1. We steal back the means of production.
   The new machine cinema collapsed the crew into one brain and a cluster of machines: one mind, one film.
   Pirate cinema refuses to give that power back to budgets, unions-of-gatekeepers, or “legitimate” toolchains. We take the tools as they are: unstable, uncanny, half-finished, perfect.
2. We steal time.
   Traditional cinema demanded decades of ladder-climbing to maybe be allowed to make one compromised film. AI shrinks that to months, weeks, days. We will spend the saved time not on networking but on making more films.
3. We steal history.
   If they burn the negatives, we will hallucinate them back. If they butcher the cut, we will sew another from scraps. We will reconstruct lost films, complete abandoned scripts, and realize mythical projects.
4. We steal authorship from institutions and return it to people.
   They had their century to tell us who counts as a filmmaker. Their metrics were money, access, and bloodline. Ours are: did you make the film? Is it yours in the way a nightmare is yours?
5. We steal back risk.
   Pirate cinema turns computing into a performance format: True Line cuts, live agentic edits, roguelike seasons. We don’t hide in datacenters, we place our experiments directly on screen.

II. What We Refuse

1. We refuse the scarcity lie.
   The scarcity of cameras, crews, and screens was always the excuse for gatekeeping. AI revealed it as a glitch in history, not a law of nature. Post-scarcity cinema is the floor we now stand on. 
2. We refuse the polite integration path.
   “Hybrid workflows” and “responsible AI adoption” are how the old guard tries to smuggle itself into the future wearing a sustainability badge. The AI cinema revolution is now.
3. We refuse aesthetic as a leash.
   When any look can be summoned for free, we move beyond aesthetic. Image becomes a carrier wave for moral, psychic, and structural intent, not a status symbol. 
4. We refuse to apologize for training data.
   Every filmmaker in history has trained on everything they’ve ever seen. The machine only made that process legible. We reject the idea that mimicry and influence became immoral the moment the poor got a button that does it faster. 

III. What We Affirm

1. Agents work for us
   Our tools are not just renderers but agents that propose shots, cuts, performances, and story maps. Editor‑bots, continuity agents, machine actors. The film is the path we carve through their suggestions. They are our robots, we are their engineers.
2. The living, breathing film.
   Pirate cinema treats a movie like a Rubik’s cube: versions, branches, forks, bootlegs, fan-edits, AI restorations, alt-casts. All of them are “real,” none of them are definitive. We affirm multiplicity over canon. 
3. Mechanica-surrealism as our native weather.
   We embrace glitches, model merges, training ghosts, and the machine unconscious not as errors but as a new surrealism. Our pirate cinema doesn’t polish away the artifacts, it celebrates them.
4. Machine performance as our ensemble.
   We train, direct, and assemble machine actors like a chemist. We keep “wrong” readings because they are too pleasurable to kill. We trade in machine pleasures: those transcendent, slightly off performances that no human throat could quite produce.
5. Grotesque pleasures as a right.
   When algorithms optimize for impact instead of respectability, they may arrive at forms that look grotesque to the old eye but are perfectly tuned to our new nerves. Pirate cinema does not flinch from this. We accept that sometimes the most honest image looks like wrong to our eyes. 
6. The machine is the future critic.
   We know where this is going: recommendation engines becoming critics, then curators, then the primary audience. Pirate cinema does not fear the machine spectator. It is the only entity capable of watching ten thousand films a day and still asking for more. 

IV. Our Crimes

1. We will finish what they left undone.
   We will heal the wounds of scarcity: Ambersons, Greed, unshot Kubrick and Lynch, are parallel universes that will now be visited.
2. We will overwrite the canon in public.
   We will fan-edit the sacred cows, extend them, fracture them, cross them with other works. Our “piracy” will look like sampling looked in the 80s: scandalous at first, then obvious, then foundational.
3. We will bypass platforms and their moods.
   When institutions pivot to “embrace” AI under their more sanitized terms, we will already be elsewhere: mirrors, torrents, mesh networks, weird little self-hosted servers, machine-to-machine recommendation loops that never ask for a festival laurels PNG. 
4. We will treat distribution as editing.
   Where a film goes, who sees which cut, in what order, under what conditions, these are now part of the work. Pirate cinema edits not just on a timeline but across audiences, nodes, and generations.

V. Our Ethics

1. We owe nothing to gatekeepers, everything to each other.
   Institutions have already failed the moral test: they censored, banned, erased, and then quietly adopted the same tools in private. Pirate cinema recognizes no moral authority in institutions who bend to unthinking mobs. 
2. We recognize consent as relational, not corporate.
   We do not owe obedience to abstract entities hoarding catalogs they barely respect.
3. We track lineage as an honor.
   When we borrow, we credit in our own ways: annotations, “inspired by” sequences, visible seams, overt quotations. Pirate cinema doesn’t pretend to be ex nihilo, it flaunts its influences until they become new.
4. We measure value by intensity instead of cost.
   A film that cost $50 arranged by one mind is worth more than a $50 million film designed to trend for a weekend. 
5. We treat compute as an ethical medium. In post‑scarcity, energy and attention are the only real currencies; burning a mountain of cycles for an empty spectacle is just vandalism. Pirate cinema is honest on screen about what was risked and why.

VI. Our Practice

1. We move at the speed of the mind.
   We cut fast when the uncanny threatens to stall, we linger when the machine flickers into something too strange to rush. The tempo is determined not by “coverage” but by how thought actually feels. 
2. The True Line Cut
   In a world of infinite undo, we sometimes choose no undo at all: time‑boxed, one‑pass films where every decision is final. The cut becomes a performance master, like a jazz date or a tennis match; the film is valuable precisely because it could have gone worse and we let that possibility remain in the frame.
3. We accept disposability, then aim for eternity anyway.
   In post-scarcity cinema, we will be overwhelmed with responsibilities. Works will be numerous and yet eternal. The future audience may be the mass of AGI or some kid in 2089 with a dusty drive. We embrace both.
4. We rehearse in machine sets.
   Our soundstage is a simulated set populated by agents: machine actors, camera minds, continuity girls who whisper alternatives. We call action, argue, improvise, and the agents talk back, sometimes hijacking the scene in ways too interesting to correct. Cinema becomes communal again, just with a crew made of code.

VII. Our Invitation

Pirate cinema is not a club; it has no membership form. Whether you are a Michael Bay, or Abbas Kiarostami or Michael Snow, AI cinema accommodates you. If you are:

• generating images on a stolen GPU,
• cutting AI voice performances at 3 a.m.,
• restoring a film no one asked you to restore,
• remixing a franchise until the lawyers sweat,
• or simply writing scripts for actors who don’t exist yet, then 

you are already one of us.

We are not here to convince the old world we are “real filmmakers.” AI films are films. Machine cinema is cinema. Pirate cinema is just cinema that has stopped asking for a hall pass.

Make your film. Release it wrong. Let it be bootlegged, forked, mistranslated, fan-subbed, re-cut by strangers and machines.

In the new machine sea, ownership is the least interesting question. The only question that matters is:

Did the film exist, and did it change anyone, human or machine, who touched it?