Preface

The idea for this book was planted in 2009 as I was completing the manuscript for Music and Cyberliberties and entertaining the notion of an international umbrella movement for cyberliberties. As that book was going to press, news of the upstart Swedish Pirate Party began hitting the media, first on tech blogs and later in the mainstream press. As news of the group propagated and its influence spread to the European Parliament, Sweden and other eurozone countries faced new and recurring threats to cyberliberties, further stoking the Pirates’ grievances and increasing their salience. Had the umbrella movement arrived so quickly? Pirate Politics had to be written to find out.

So I spent the 2012 school year researching pirate politics and teaching and living in Sweden while writing this book. To some of my students, the Pirate Party is a joke or a prank—of casual interest, but not to be taken seriously. The party’s single issue of digital rights flouts their expectation that politics should be more broadly engaged with society’s other problems, especially the economic crisis gripping the eurozone. However, those students who are members of the Pirate Party take their memberships very seriously. In class, our lively, well-informed debates and discussions about cyberliberties were consequential for the students, most of whom lived in Sweden, Germany, or another country with a budding pirate party. We debated pirate politics in real time in response to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (a new, plurilateral trade agreement serving as a Trojan horse for copyright reforms), new data-retention and surveillance laws, and other contemporary cyberliberties challenges.

In the closing months of 2012, the Swedish Pirate Party was struggling to rekindle its initial spark, while the German Pirates risked their newfound popularity by sharing their internal squabbles and disagreements publicly on online discussion boards. The mature pirate parties appear to be at risk of breaking down, while new ones in the Czech Republic and elsewhere are in ascendancy. Popular commentators will, undoubtedly, continue to marvel that anarchistic or apolitical geeks found a political footing to begin with, and will look no further than the flash in the pan.

Determining whether the Pirates are like an evanescent wave that has already decayed, or will persist in one form or another, is not the point of this book. It is also not my intention to rally supporters, defend detractors, or make predictions. Instead, I wish to explore the international contexts and contents of resistant forms of political and cultural agency aligned against structures and processes of media and communication perceived to be toxic and unjust. Looking for, finding, and describing the persistent features of agency in the flux—the recurring assertions of autonomy and solidarity—are the real objectives here.

Another objective is to rehabilitate prior discourses of political and social theory concerning the nature of “new politics,” especially sociological theories of social movements, and to try them on for size once more. This goal will grate against most empirical approaches to political systems, and against game-theoretical and neorealist perspectives on international relations. I make no special claims to expertise in those fields. But I ask for no forbearance either, and invite all appropriate critiques if they can help us better understand what we agree that we are observing.