As I wrote in Twitter (caravia158) we need social and political revolutions
and not only free downloads. I know the Pirate Bay phenomenon pretty well
since I lived in Sweden as they started it and many ppl who joined them were
very political naive and believed the information should be free and by it
we should all be very enlightened and live happy with our free downloaded
Art music films and texts.
No one discussing the base of the dilemma who is going to pay to all those
producing intellectual or artistic wares for all to download free and
consume?
All production of Art and writings and films and music are prized today and
they are commodities some a new Mobil phone or a new car or a new bike.
Den 12 dec 2015 18:11 skrev "Rob Myers" <[email protected]>:
Society may produce exceptional spaces though?
On 12 December 2015 03:31:08 GMT-08:00, ruth catlow
<[email protected]> wrote:
I like his final statement- that the Internet is the
same as society- not an exceptional place.
On 12/12/15 11:24, marc garrett wrote:
I've just copied this from the Nettime list,
and thought others here may be interested in the
subject...
wishing you well.
marc
<http://motherboard.vice.com/read/pirate-bay-founder-peter-sunde-i-have-give
n-up >
Pirate Bay Founder: 'I Have Given Up'
Written by JOOST MOLLEN
December 11, 2015 // 02:26 PM EST
"The internet is shit today. It's broken. It was
probably always
broken, but it's worse than ever."
My conversation with, Peter Sunde, one of the
founders and
spokespersons of The Pirate Bay, did not start out
optimistically.
There's good reason for that: In the last couple of
months, the
contemporary download culture shows heavy signs of
defeat in the
battle for the internet.
Last month we saw Demonii disappear. It was the
biggest torrent
tracker on the internet, responsible for over 50
million trackers a
year. Additionally, the MPAA took down YIFY and
Popcorn Time. Then
news got out that the Dutch Release Team, an
uploading collective,
made a legal settlement with anti-piracy group
BREIN.
While it might look like torrenters are are still
fighting this
battle, Sunde claims that the reality is more
definitive: "We have
already lost."
Back in 2003 Peter Sunde, together with Fredrik Neij
and Gottfrid
Svartholm, started The Pirate Bay, a website that
would become the
biggest and most famous file-sharing website in the
world. In 2009,
the three founders were convicted of "assisting
[others] in copyright
infringement" in a highly controversial trial.
Sunde was incarcerated in 2014 and released a year
later. After his
time in jail he started blogging about the
centralization of power by
the European Union; ran as a candidate for the
Finnish Pirate Party
during the elections to the European Parliament; and
founded Flattr, a
micro donation system for software developers.
I wanted to speak with Sunde about the current state
of the free and
open internet, but this conversation quickly changed
into an
ideological exchange about society and capitalism --
which is,
according to Sunde, the real problem.
The following interview has been edited for clarity
and length.
**MOTHERBOARD: Hey Peter, I was planning on asking
you if things are
going well, but you made it pretty clear that that
isn't the case.**
Peter Sunde: No, I don't see any good happening.
People are too easy
to content with things.
Take the net neutrality law in Europe. It's
terrible, but people are
happy and go like "it could be worse." That is
absolutely not the
right attitude. Facebook brings the internet to
Africa and poor
countries, but they're only giving limited access to
their own
services and make money off of poor people. And
getting government
grants to do that, because they do PR well.
Finland actually made internet access a human right
a while back. That
was a clever thing of Finland. But that's like the
only positive thing
I have seen in any country anywhere in the world
regarding the
internet
**So, how bad is the state of the open internet?**
Well, we don't have an open internet. We haven't had
an open internet
for a long time. So, we can't really talk about the
open internet
because it does not exist anymore. The problem is,
nobody stops
anything. We are losing privileges and rights all of
the time. We are
not gaining anything anywhere. The trend is just
going in one
direction: a more closed and more controlled
internet. That has a big
impact on our society. Because they are the same
thing today. If you
have a more oppressed internet, you have a more
oppressed society. So
that's something we should focus on.
But still we think of the internet like this new
kind Wild West place,
and things are not in chains yet, so we don't care
because everything
will be OK anyhow. But that is not really the case.
We have never seen
this amount of centralization, extreme inequality,
extreme capitalism
in any system before. But according to the marketing
done by people
like Mark Zuckerberg and companies like Google, it's
all to help with
the open network and to spread democracy, and so on.
At the same time,
they are capitalistic monopolies. So it's like
trusting the enemy to
do the good deeds. It is really bizarre.
**Do you think because a lot of people don't
consider the internet to
be real or a real place, they care less about its
well-being?**
Well, one thing is, we have been growing up with an
understanding of
the importance of things like a telephone line or
television. So if we
would start to treat our telephone lines or TV
channels like we treat
the internet, people would get really upset. If
someone would tell
you, you can't call a friend, you would understand
then that this is a
very bad thing that is happening. You understand
your rights. But
people don't have that with the internet. If someone
would tell you,
you can't use Skype for that and that, you don't get
the feeling it's
about you personally. Just by being a virtual thing,
it's suddenly not
directed at you. You don't see someone spying on
you, you don't see
something censored, you don't see it when someone
deletes stuff out of
the search results out of Google. I think that's the
biggest problem
to get people's attention. You don't see the
problems, so people don't
feel connected to it.
I would rather not care about it myself. Because
it's very hard to do
something about it, and not become a paranoid
conspiracy person. And
you don't want to be that. So rather just give up.
That's kind of what
people have been thinking, I think.
**What is it exactly that you have given up?**
Well, I have given up the idea that we can win this
fight for the
internet.
The situation is not going to be any different,
because apparently
that is something people are not interested in
fixing. Or we can't get
people to care enough. Maybe it's a mixture, but
this is kind of the
situation we are in, so its useless to do anything
about it.
We have become somehow the Black Knight from Monty
Python's Holy
Grail. We have maybe half of our head left and we
are still fighting,
we still think we have a chance of winning this
battle.
**So what can people do to change this?**
Nothing.
**Nothing?**
No, I think we are at that point. I think it's
really important people
understand this. We lost this fight. Just admit
defeat and make sure
next time you understand why you lost this fight and
make sure it
doesn't happen again when we try and win the war.
**Right, so what is this war about and what should
we do to win it?**
Well, I think, to win the war, we first of need to
understand what the
fight is and for me it's clear that we are dealing
with ideological
thing: extreme capitalism that's ruling, extreme
lobbying that's
ruling and the centralization of power. The internet
is just a part of
a bigger puzzle.
And the other thing with activism is that you have
to get momentum and
attention and such. We have been really bad at that.
So we stopped
ACTA, but then it just came back with a different
name. By that time,
we had used all our resources and public attention
on that.
The reason that the real world is the big target for
me, is because
the internet is emulating the real world. We are
trying to recreate
this capitalistic society we have on top of the
internet. So the
internet has been mostly fuel on the capitalistic
fire, by kind of
pretending to be something which will connect the
whole world, but
actually having a capitalistic agenda.
Look at all the biggest companies in the world, they
are all based on
the internet. Look at what they are selling:
nothing. Facebook has no
product. Airbnb, the biggest hotel chain in the
world, has no hotels.
Uber, the biggest taxi company in the world, has no
taxis whatsoever.
The amount of employees in these companies are
smaller then ever
before and the profits are, in turn, larger. Apple
and Google are
passing oil companies by far. Minecraft got sold for
$2.6 billion and
WhatsApp for like $19 billion. These are insane
amounts of money for
nothing. That is why the internet and capitalism are
so in love with
each other.
**You told me the internet is broken, that it was
always broken. What
do you mean by that and do we have extreme
capitalism to blame for
it?**
Well, the thing is the internet is really stupid. It
works really
simply in a simple manner and it doesn't take any
adjustments for
censorship. Like, if one cable is gone, you take the
traffic through
some other place. But thanks to the centralization
of the internet,
(possible) censorship or surveillance tech is a
whole lot harder to
get around. Also, because the internet was an
American invention, they
also still have control of it and ICANN can actually
force any country
top level domain to be censored or disconnected. For
me that's, a
really broken design.
But it has always been broken, we just never really
cared about it,
because there always have been a few good people
that made sure that
nothing bad happened before. But I think that's the
wrong idea. Rather
let bad thing happen as quick as possible so we can
fix them and make
sure it does not happen in the future. We are
prolonging this
inevitable total failure, which is not helping us at
all.
**So, we should just let it crash and burn down,
pick up the pieces
and start over?**
Yes, with the focus on the big war on this extreme
capitalism. I
couldn't vote, but I was hoping Sarah Palin won last
time in the US
elections. I'm hoping Donald Trump wins this year's
election. For the
reason that it will fuck up that country so much
faster then if a less
bad President wins. Our whole world is just so
focused on money,
money, money. That's the biggest problem. That's why
everything fucks
up. That's the target we have to fix. We need to
make sure that we are
going to get a different focus in life.
Hopefully technology will give us robots that will
take away all the
jobs, which will cause like a massive worldwide
unemployment; somewhat
like 60 percent. People will be so unhappy. That
would be great,
because then you can finally see capitalism crashing
so hard. There is
going to be a lot of fear, lost blood, and lost
lives to get to that
point, but I think that's the only positive thing I
see, that we are
going to have a total system collapse in the future.
Hopefully as
quick as possible. I would rather be 50 then be like
85 when the
system is crashing.
**This all sounds quite like some sort of Marxist
revolution: a total
crash of the capitalist system.**
Well, yeah, I totally agree with that. I'm a
socialist. I know Marx
and communism did not work before, but I think in
the future you have
the possibility of having total communism and equal
access to
everything for everybody. Most people I meet, no
matter if they are a
communist or a capitalist, agree with me on this,
because they
understand the potential.
**So, is there like a concrete thing we should focus
on? Or do we need
to aim for a new way of thinking? A new ideology?**
Well, I think the focus needs to be that the
internet is exactly the
same as society. People might realize that it's not
a really good idea
to have all of our data and files on Google,
Facebook and company
servers. All of these things need to be communicated
al the way to the
political top, of course. But stop treating internet
like it's a
different thing and start focusing on what you
actually want your
society to look like. We have to fix society, before
we can fix the
internet. That's the only thing.
--
Marc Garrett
Co-Founder, Co-Director and main editor
ofFurtherfield.
Furtherfield - A living, breathing, thriving network
http://www.furtherfield.org - for art, technology
and social change since 1997
Furtherfield Gallery & Commons,
Finsbury Park, London N4 2NQ
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