[aha] Pirati di internet uniti? Qualche dubbio...

[T_Bazz]

Ciao,

sto "investigando" un poco sul successo del Partito Pirata in Svezia e 
vorrei farvi leggere questo post apparso in Nettime il 21 giugno, 
scritto da Johan Söderberg (Fwd: <nettime> Pirates of the Internets - 
unite!). La questione e' molto piu' complessa di quanto sembri.

Andando oltre il fatto della positivita' di avere all'ordine del giorno 
una certa agenda che riguarda i vari hacktivisti direttamente, ci sono 
molte critiche sulla composizione del Partito Pirata svedese, da chi si 
sente vicino a una certa filosofia del fare hacking. La cosa mi intriga 
parecchio e mi spinge ad andare a fondo e a condividere con voi il tutto.

Sembrerebbe che il Partito Pirata - pur se dichiarandosi al di fuori 
delle divisioni destra / sinistra, sia in realta' molto vicino ai 
liberali di centro destra (Folkpartiet).
Ho avuto modo di parlare con Magnus del Piratbyrån all'hackmeeting e 
anche loro si considerano critici rispetto all'idea di hacking come 
azione politica (con mio personale sbattimento nel cercare di spiegare 
perche' in Italia parlare di azione politica e' cosi importante, anche 
se si sta fuori dai circuiti tradizionali). Da come si legge sotto, per 
quanto riguarda il Piratbyrån, le anime sono molte ed e' difficile 
considerarlo di destra o sinistra, quindi in questo senso l'appartenenza 
appare piu' sfumata rispetto al Partito pirata.

Interessante anche leggere dei fondi che sono arrivati a The Pirate Bay 
e di cui ha parlato il quotidiano Svenska Dagbladet, e di cui ancora non 
si sa molto e della reazione di Peter Sunde quando e' stato usato senza 
permesso il logo di The Pirate Bay. Insomma anche loro sembrano molto 
vicini a una visione liberale della politica e della societa'.

A questo punto ho fatto una ricerca anche su Johan Söderberg, l'autore 
del post su Nettime che riporto qui sotto e ho felicemente scoperto di 
chi si tratta! Non mi ricordavo il nome, ma ci siamo incontrati piu' 
volte, all'hackmeeting a Oslo e alla conferenza Oekonux a Manchester. Ho 
sentito i suoi talk e direi che e' una persona molto valida...
Questa e' la sua pagina:
http://www.sts.gu.se/english/staff/soderberg_johan/
Per cui direi che se scrive certe cose e' perche' ha fatto una ricerca e 
non parla a vanvera.

Insomma, c'e' del materiale su cui riflettere.

Saluti,
T_Bazz


---------

<nettime> Pirates of the Internets - unite!
by Johan Söderberg

With 215,000 votes in the European election from the Swedish precinct, 
the Internet pirates have winds in their sailes. Miltos asked in a 
previos posting on this list if similar parties will now spawn in other 
EU electorates. In the ligth of his question, it can be interesting to 
note that the two major events which angered people in Sweden to point 
that they casted their votes for the Pirate Party (PP), had only scantly 
to do with EU intellectual property directives.

The first major cause of anger was a law proposing to extend military 
surveillance from radio communication to include Internet trafic. The 
operation is located at "Försvarets Radioanstalt" (FRA) i.e. a branch of 
Swedish military intelligence. Supposedly, the FRA is only going to 
eavesdrop on electrons crossing the Swedish border, but, a message sent 
from one computer in Sweden to anohter and passing through a server in a 
foreign country will be subject to FRA snoopers. The law originates in 
the department of defence and had nothing to do with the EU political 
machinery, though in the future, for sure, it might converge with IP 
enforcement. The two commonly accepted explanations as to why it was 
proposed are, firstly, that the staff at FRA are looking for new job 
assignments when their old task of listening in on Russian radio 
communication has lost its rationale, secondly, to gather information 
about suspects which can be traded with foreign (US) security agencies.

The second cause behind the success of the Pirate Party is, of course, 
the recent verdict against the founders of the Pirate Bay. The ruling 
was very harsh, the four accused were sentenced to one year in prison 
and roughly 3,000,000 euro in damage. Soon after the ruling the 
legitimacy of the court case was questioned when it was found out that 
the judge had ties with several of the people on the prosecution side 
through their joint membership in three different intellectual property 
organisations (Svenska föreningen för upphovsrätt, .SE-stiftelsen, 
Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd) The purpose of the first 
group is to inform professionals working with intellectual property 
rights about developments in their field, and the second group 
administrates the Swedish Internet domain. While the judge's membership 
in these two groups might have been entirely legitimate, something 
different has to be said about the last organisation, since it actively 
lobbies for stricter IP laws. After that debacle, the public image was 
firmly establisehd that the court ruling against the Pirate Bay was not 
something emanating from the general will of the people and embodied in 
national legal institutions, but rahter was executed by corporate 
America with the Swedish state as its proxy. Hence, just as when the 
euro-sceptical political party "Junilistan" won a seat in the last EU 
election (now it will be replaced with PP), one might suspect that an 
element of nostalgia over lost national sovereignity contributed to this 
outcome.

The other question raised by Miltos' posting is what the political 
significance could be of the recent success of the Swedish pirate 
movement? The title of his posting, "all pirates of the internets - 
unite!" suggests how this movement has often been received abroad. After 
the EU-election, I got cheerful emails from friends and activists in the 
anti/alter-globalisation movement on the continent who perceived the 
success of the Swedish pirates as a victory for their broader, political 
agenda. From inside the borders, however, the link between the 
traditional left and the pirates is not so straightforward. Before I say 
anymore on this point, I should underline that it nevertheless is a good 
thing that the Pirate Pary now enters the EU parliament. European and 
national legal authorities and the industry lobbyists will have a harder 
time to portray their political opponents as mere thieves subject to law 
enforcement. With this victory, the intellectual property question has 
decisevly moved in to the charmed circle of liberal, parliamentary 
deliberation. While that is important in many respects, in my opinion, 
it is insufficient to win the appraisal of a critical, leftist public. 
The ideology of the representatives of piratedome needs be weighten in 
in an account of the political significance of Internet piracy.

Since there is no single body representing the Swedish pirate movement, 
my account of the political ideas of its different branches are 
necessarily an approximation. That is particularly true of the 
grassroots members, milions and milions of filsharers who rally, like so 
many other cohorts in consumer society, behind the demand for lower 
prices. It is a safe guess that the majority of them are at best dimly 
aware of the political ideas attached to piracy. Still, without the mass 
violation of copyright law enacted by these people for opportunistic 
reasons, the political relevance of the spokespeople of piratedome would 
have been null. The active members championing piracy can be divided 
into three main forks, the parliamentary fraction, i.e. The Pirate Party 
(PP), the organic intellectuals of the blogosphere with Piratbyrån (PB) 
as a main hub, and the entreprenueral fraction, The Pirate Bay (TPB). 
Here it becomes meaningful to talk about shared, ideological 
convictions, even though it requires of us to read the pirate movement 
against the grain of its own self-epresentations.

The millennial-political dreams attached to the Internet as a whole in 
the 90's came to an abrupt end with the IT-bubble. During the first half 
of 00's, an echoe of those dreams lingered on but in the more restricted 
domain of the blogosphere. Piratedome has given new lease to these two 
receding waves of hype, and, subsequently, shares many of the same 
defaults. Perhaps the pirate movement can be said to differ on one 
crucial point, namely in having re-discovered antagonism in 
cyberpolitics. To adress Geert Lovink and Ned Rositer recent posting on 
this matter: The court case against TPB demonstrates how antagonism 
springs forth from the plesure principle once the social network goes 
bit-torrent on private property. However, the heritage of the Swedish 
pirate movement in the dot-com universe shines through in that the 
spokespeople of piratedome deny that the conflicts in which they are 
involved has anything to do with ownership, accumulation of capital, and 
the like. This is the bottom line of the often repeated statement of 
faith: That the politics of piracy cuts along an entirely different axis 
than the (now out-dated) division between left-right.

That this hypothesis has purchase in the first branch of the Swedish 
pirate movement, i.e. the Pirate Party, can easily be tested. Before and 
after the EU-election, the forefigures of the  party have stated in 
interview after interview in Swedish newspapers that they do not side 
with any established, political coalision. Trying to claim the middle 
ground of the electorate is a common, parliamentary tactic in the 
post-"third way" era and the same move has previously been attempted by 
other newly established political parties in Sweden (the green party, 
the feminist party) In those earlier cases, the claim rang hollow 
because of a clear leftist demography in the member base. The PP seems 
to differ, however, in that the claim about having advanced beyond the 
left-right divide is, as far as I can tell, widely believed in by both 
the leaders and the members. Putting it less generously, the agnostic 
attitude in regards to left-right issues is not just required of the PP 
in order to win key votes on the margin, it has also become a necessity 
for holding together its loose aliance of supporters with convictions 
ranging from neo-liberal to socialist. If PP can serve as a template of 
political movements to come, then it seems that the possibility of 
adressing contested class interests in the future hinges on that those 
issues are reformulated in a technocratic language purged from leftist 
alarm words. In spite of this, however, one cannot fail to notice that 
the first and the second man in command of the PP, Rick Falkvinge and 
Christian Engström, both have a former engagement in the libertarian and 
liberal right. The party leader, Rick Falkvinge, was formerly a member 
of the youth organisation of the Swedish conservative right (Moderata 
Ungdomsförbundet) but left the organisation because the party was in his 
opinion too much "social liberal", and he is still calling himself an 
ultra-capitalist. Christian Engström, who is the person most likely to 
be sent to Brussels, is a drop-out from another centre-right liberal 
party (Folkpartiet).

As for the second arm of the Swedish pirate movement, i.e. the 
blogosphere, it is harder to give a precise reading of its political 
colour from the cacophony of opinions. Anyway, having now followed the 
discussions over a period of five years, my impression is that among the 
blogs which carry heavy trafic and have high visibility, they either 
claim to have surpassed the right-left divide altogether (often 
expressed in the Deleuzian sound-bytes that were in vouge on the 
contintent in the 90's and chastised by Richard Barbrook in his essay 
'The Holy Fools'), or they openly announce an, often idiosyncratic, 
neo-liberal interpretation of the world. Pro-pirate blogers with leftist 
sympathies have become more vocal in the last few years. But it is fair 
to say that the political left has been marginal (and marginalised) in 
formulating the agenda of the pirate scene in Sweden, quiet unlike some 
other countries on the European continent where the copy-fight discourse 
has been influenced by autonomist terminology (general intellect, 
post-fordism, etc).

Finally, as concerns the core team behind the Pirate Bay, if judged by 
their own statements, one of them, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, has declared 
himself a supporter of  the Ayn Rand-ish the Classic liberal party, 
another, Peter Sunde, is a recent member of the green party, while the 
third is awovedly apolitical. Then there is of course the financial 
backer, Carl Lundström, whose coulours are quite clear from his generous 
donations to far right, anti-immigration parties in Sweden. I grant that 
this latter point has been stretched beyond the breaking point by the 
mass media, quite possibly as a guilt-by-association strategy to tar the 
more fundamental questions at stake. The lasting impression is rather 
that the entrepreneurs behind TPB service have not much looking like a 
political conviction at all, not even in matters of intellectual 
property. When two authors, Anders Rydell och Sam Sundberg, recently 
published a book about the Swedish pirate movement, they used the TBP 
logotyp on the front cover, a pirate ship. It provoked an idignant 
response from Peter Sunde who felt that their trademark had been 
violated. History repeats itself. Once upon a time, Shawn Fanning tried 
to prevent a fan from selling T-shirts with the Napster logotype (a cat 
with headphones). This political adventure sailes on a gigantic wave of 
opportunism, from the apolitical consumers downloading music only to get 
things for free, to the equally apolitical administrators of the 
service. The safest bet about such an endevour is that while many are 
working hard to campaign the issues at stake, someone else is going to 
be laughing all the way to the bank.

Hence, the statements of political fidelity only tells us so much, and, 
at the final instance, the analysis has to home in on the position of 
piracy, and, more specifically, The Pirate Bay, in advanced, liberal 
capitalism. The revenues made from advertising on the TPB website 
remains clouded in mystery. An estimate by the major Swedish newspaper 
Svenska Dagbladet in 2006 was about 10,000 euros each month, a sum 
likely to have increased considerably with growing media exposure. The 
prosecution estimated in 2008 that the venture made 3,000,000 dollar in 
profit annually, based on internal e-mail communication between the 
three entrepreneurs and their agency in Israel. What is interesting here 
is that for a long time, the folk behind TPB pretended that they were 
not making any profits at all from their service. They portrayed the 
venture as an grassroots movement motivated on ideological grounds. 
Indeed, until the disclosure in news media of the fact that large 
profits were made from advertisments, TPB was asking their supporters 
for donations, and, according to their own estimates, they earned about 
600 euros a month in this way.

My pessimistic reading of the situation is, then, that TPB, just as with 
earlier instances of profit-making filesharing services harking all the 
way back to Napster, must be seen as experiments of a new form of 
exploitation in libertarian capitalism. While established companies are 
trying to reinvent themselves into sects (corporate cultures etc), TPB 
eats away from the other end of the rope, it is a grassroots movement 
in-becoming a profit-making venture. Under the jolly roger, it can milk 
the subjectivity of its followers/labourers like no 
corporate-culture-enhanced firm possibly could hope for. The filesharing 
network has brought the "attention economy"-business model of "free 
content, free labour" to its apex. The distribution of revenues in TPB 
between capital (the entreprenuers + the agencies administrating the 
advertising service + the ISP companies) and labour (the labour power of 
the artists plus the audience power of the filesharers, with a nod to 
Dallas Smyhthe) is truly prophetic and probably outdoes even the current 
IP system in producing inequality.

The "organical intellectuals" of the pirate movement have been reluctant 
to enter into this kind of discussion (the exception are those few who 
declare themselves as belonging to the political left). Ironically, 
given the common claim in the blogosphere that it is providing a 
democratic, decentralised mode of journalism more resistant towards 
censorship than the old, centric forms of news meda, information about 
the profits made by the TPB entrepreneurs did not travel very fast in 
the blogosphere. News about it resided for about two weeks in the 
outskirts of the commentary fields until one major newspapers (Svenska 
Dagbladet) got scant of the information. This reflects back on the claim 
that the pirate movement stands beyond the right/left divide. What it 
says is basically that questions about intellectual property, the 
Internet etc. are detached from the main point of contestation between 
the right and the left, i.e. how economical resources in society should 
be distributed. But this statement is nothing but a variation of the 
notion of "the death of ideologies", a rhetorcial concept which has been 
touted by the right since the 1950s and 1960s. It is here remerged once 
more, precisely in order to avoid the problematic at the heart of the 
intellectual property question, namely: how the economic gains made in 
the industry from the introduction of information technology should be 
distributed in society between capital and labour.

Johan Söderberg





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