3 Technoculture versus Big Brother
The transformation of Swedish copyright and privacy rights into part of the economic-administrative complex of the EU-EC system sparked protests that led to mobilization over data retention and IPRED. The conflicts indicate that while juridification of the online lifeworld is occurring rapidly, it is still incomplete. The Internet has not yet become entirely toll taking, like a car park, a movie theater, or the iTunes store. Everyday anonymity is attainable online, although active surveillance makes deep anonymity improbable. Darknets flourish as never before, even as users’ online lives are tied increasingly to shopping carts and virtual checkouts, software as a service, expiring e-books, noninteroperable software, innumerable log-ins, and bulging cookie caches. As industry builds new silicon and software cages, some users become bolder in avoiding them and in asking about the need for new rights, such as the right to be forgotten (Rosen 2012).1
Pirate politics is intended to “ensure that Europe chooses a better road into the information society” (Engström, qtd. in Woldt 2009). The colonization of cyberspace discursively thematizes and politicizes “once unquestioned and apolitical assumptions and practices by drawing them into the administrative domain,” in turn creating “questions where once there were apolitical assumptions” (Crossley 2003, 296). The salient assumptions concern the adoption and spread of IP authoritarianism in the EU information society, a development that gave rise to pirate politics. Europeanization here is a “stirring up of cultural affairs that are taken for granted” and “furthers the politicization of areas of life previously assigned to the private sphere” (Habermas 1988, 72). The Pirates test how well the political and legal systems are able to address new political grievances. Since the Pirates participate in two national political systems and the EP, they break down some barriers that previously relegated most NSMs to permanent outsider status and redraw the system boundaries.
Pirate politics arose amid pervasive anxieties about the EU’s path to the information society (Spender 2009). The anxieties are clearly expressed in the legal and social studies literature about loss of privacy online, the lock-down of digital culture in copy protection, the criminalization of sharing practices, and anonymous and often unknowable negotiations over global information policy (Gillespie 2009; Johns 2010; Peñalver and Katyal 2010; Zittrain 2008). The anxieties cluster around blocked access to information, knowledge, and power, as well as around violations of expectancies about using the Internet autonomously. As Klaus Eder claims, such fears of relative deprivation do not concern subsistence and survival, or the loss of elite privilege. They are middle-class fears. “The cultural basis upon which new social movements were built” is a specifically middle-class culture in pursuit of the good life and lifestyles that support “personal aggrandizement, autonomy, and competition” (Eder 1995, 38).
Charting the Waters of Cultural Politics
Pirate politics claims—or perhaps invents a claim—that because of the colonization of the Internet, users have been excluded from the social means of realizing their identities.2 Party leaders express the claim as a moral crusade to restore a lost online agora, integritet (privacy in Swedish), and enhanced personal freedoms. Its universalist goals, conflicted as they are, have internationalized the appeal of pirate parties, and they offer a template and an umbrella movement for cyberliberties activism.
With some exceptions, (see, for example, Calhoun 1993), sociologists tend to identify NSMs with postindustrialism and to consider their emergence historically as having coincided with a globalized and high-tech economy characterized by networking and connectivity (Beck 1992; Kelly 2001, 30; Offe 1985). So it is appropriate that an NSM that is “about” media and communications and is reflexively oriented toward reforming cultural and social codes bears a family resemblance to reflexive NSMs of earlier generations, especially ecology and feminism. According to Alberto Melucci:
In the current period, society’s capacity to intervene in the production of meaning extends to those areas which previously escaped control and regulation: areas of self-definition, emotional relationships, sexuality and “biological” needs. At the same time, there is a parallel demand from below for control over the conditions of personal existence [that are] . . . part of society’s self-reflexiveness in information and communication production and sociability. (1989, 45–46)
The popular demand for control over the conditions of personal existence is even stronger in an age of “networked publics” (Varnelis 2008). The heightened visibility of pirate politics since the takedown of TPB, its registering in the popular imagination of the technoculture, and its transformation from a protest movement into a formal political party require fuller sociological explanations. The sociology of countercultural movements, NSMs, and “anti-political politics” (Havel 1991) takes varied forms, but typically highlights civil society as a constitutive field built from the articulation of universal rather than particular interests. Movements articulate these interests in communication directed to society at large, rather than to the state, in expressive campaigns that make use of alternative and radical media.
Here we encounter another discrepancy between pirate politics and inherited NSM theory. The institutionalization of pirate politics could suggest that NSM theory has had only limited purchase on the movement since it became a minority party in Sweden. The NSM theorists Claus Offe (1985), Jean Cohen (1982, 1985), and Nancy Fraser (1985) explicitly exclude from consideration groups that organize into political parties. The transformation of pirate politics may have demonstrated a type of social learning that reduces path dependence on the IPR ratchet by fighting it and producing a social actor that is, as Christine Kelly puts it, “uniquely capable of reflecting critically on [its] context” (2001, 110). It is still the case, however, that civil society sustains pirate politics, even as it operates in the margins of the political system. The Pirate Parties of Sweden and Germany, and many of their siblings, together with varieties of collective action by WikiLeaks, Telecomix, and Anonymous, exhibit classically “defensive” postures in symbolic politics directed to society at large. Melucci (1989) calls social movements “nomads of the present” for the way that they move and adapt to colonization, highlighting disjunctures and disruptions along the way.
Pirate politics is marked by a collective identity and transnational cultural formations engaged in conflictual symbolic politics performed for networked publics. This approach to activism and networking considers cultural movements and political movements together as social agents that present multiple “spheres of publics” (Calhoun 1995) in global civil society with alternative visions of modernity. Pirate politics emphasizes personal autonomy, lifestyle concerns, solidarity and collective identity, and shared political grievances; like other cultural movements that NSM theory considers, pirate politics mobilizes in fluid, submerged, and informal networks (Buechler 1995, 442). Offe describes movement politics as the period in which “multitudes of individuals become collective actors [in] highly informal, ad hoc, discontinuous, context-sensitive, and egalitarian modes” (1985, 829).3 In its networking, identity politics, and periodicity, pirate politics shares affinities with contemporary antiglobalization movements and advocacy networks (Crossley 2003; Della Porta and Tarrow 2005; Keck and Sikkink 1998), environmentalisms old and new (Boyle 2008), and even earlier forms of Western cultural politics from the nineteenth century (Calhoun 1993).
Although Habermas’s contribution to NSM theory has been “problematically tied to a structural strain approach to movement mobilization” (G. Edwards 2008, 300), the theory of communicative action still provides an excellent framework with which to support the basic proposition that lifeworld defense in cyberspace is oppositional and based in an NSM. It can show that the structural changes required by what has been called digital capitalism (Schiller 2003), informational capitalism (Braman 2006), technocapitalism (Kellner 1989), or cybernetic capitalism (Mosco 2009) tend to impoverish communicative rationality, unless countervailing social movements target colonization. I agree with Crossley (2003) that colonization is occurring through the market and neoliberal economics as much as (or even more than) through welfare statism, and that Habermas’s colonization thesis is an artifact of historical reflection upon the 1960s and 1970s made in the 1980s, before the rise of the New Right, the imposition of its new economic model of neoliberalism, and the dismantling of the welfare state. For critical media studies, it is the creation and growth of the Celestial Jukebox, together with its technical and juridical infrastructures, that deserves critique.
NSMs and Communicative Rationality
With their radically participatory forms of collective action and lifeworld defense, NSMs are communicatively rational, which is to say that they are “oriented to achieving, sustaining and reviewing consensus—and indeed a consensus that rests on the intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims” (Habermas 1984, 17). Communicative rationality is both the result of social learning processes (Crossley 2003, 292) and a contribution to learning.
The approach pursued here takes late modernity to represent the working conditions and social environment within which pirate politics operates. The late, or “new,” modernity (Kelly 2001) approach to NSM theory tries to explain the continuity of new political forms and processes with those of the past, and disputes the claims of postmodern theorists that information-age capitalism is qualitatively different from industrial capitalism. Late modernity affords NSMs opportunities to achieve consensus on social problems arising from colonization.
Habermas, Offe, Beck, Eder, and Cohen and Arato, on the one hand, for example, analyze contemporary forms of politics as coping mechanisms for the strains of a hyperrationalized and superdifferentiated culture and society. Touraine, Melucci, and Laclau and Mouffe, on the other hand, assume that NSMs demonstrate a definitive break with the politics of capitalist modernization. In late modernity, basic rules of sociality and power are reformatted completely, and information in the aggregate replaces social subjectivity as a source of agentic change.
The discontinuity thesis is less well suited to explain the persistence of capital accumulation, authoritarianism, and technocratic power in the transition to the information society, and—apart from new social movements—does not discern a basis in social action for social change. There is a lack of evidence to support the contention that cultural logics have mutated to the point that late modernity breaks with the past, and considerable evidence to the contrary (Habermas 1987b). As mentioned previously, adherents of the new modernity approach to NSM theory, with its empirical focus on civil society, argue that NSMs by definition cannot formalize into political parties or formally engage the state, but must dwell “elsewhere” (Kelly 2001, 38). Otherwise, NSMs are part of the political subsystem. That position rejects the possibility that social movements can be both formal and informal, developing in both the system and civil society. It also loses sight of the fact that, as Melucci (1989) points out, movements group and select elites. While “not easily adaptable to the existing channels of participation and to traditional forms of political organization, such as political parties,” new forms of conflict produce political actors ready to take advantage of political opportunity structures, such as those described in chapter 2 (41; emphasis added). Here Melucci seems to be opening the door for an argument based on continuity. Moreover, the networked public sphere developed after NSM theorists began to demarcate system-lifeworld boundaries defined by organizational communication, complicating the picture greatly. Therefore, pirate politics may be considered a maturing, even already matured, NSM, with its grappling hooks planted firmly in the system.
Some skeptical objections to the NSM approach deserve to be addressed early. Havel’s famous antipolitical politics offered as a description of NSMs has been interpreted to mean that they evade a political calculus altogether. For example, Russell J. Dalton and his coauthors (Dalton, Kuechler, and Bürkli 1990) argue that NSM theory violates rational choice models in political science, which emphasize instrumental, means-ends reason and games. This objection misses the mark, however, since NSM theory looks instead for evidence of communicative rationality.
Kevin Hetherington (1998), in making a strong argument that emphasizes the “neotribal” dimension of protest movements, offers nearly the opposite proposition. He considers NSM theories to be overly dependent upon subject-centered reason and the imputation of means-ends rationality and instrumental thinking to postmodern agents. Key to his argument is the claim, following Raymond Williams, that movements express a “romantic structure of feeling” and not rational discourse and debate (83). Hetherington’s analysis of neotribes and their affective messages comes very close to expressing what NSM theorists themselves see as one of cultural movements’ main characteristics, which is the use of affective rhetoric and moral reasoning in their appeals. Yet the criticism of NSM theory for mistaking feeling for reason focuses not on the effects of communicative action, but only on its symbolic contents. NSM theory considers the content of communicative rationality to be agnostic and to admit all kinds of claims, even “romantic” (Hetherington 1998) or “mimetic” ones (Kelly 2001, 21). What is more important is the communicative context—how and where those claims are posed, and the effects of the communicative action. It is indeed the case, as Kevin McDonald argues, that “the sensuous is at the center of the movement experience” (2006, 95), because movements navigate among the structures of the cultural lifeworld. It is the analyst’s role to ascertain a movement’s communicative effects.
Communicative Rationality and Social Learning
The lifeworld’s defining characteristic is its communicative rationality (G. Edwards 2004, 116). Freedom underpins the notion of communicative rationality as well as the notion of free culture, which is the rallying cry and source of meaning for pirate politics. The persistence of communicative rationality in cyberspace makes it possible for cyberspace to become a field of contention where people demand new rights and freedoms. In an anthropological study, Ulrika Sjöberg (1999) describes Swedish teenagers’ attraction to online sociality as a “free zone” for developing their own relationships and identities largely independently of parents and other authority figures. Other ethnographic work shows that hacker culture, which is oriented both to the freedom to tinker and to cyberliberties generally, is embedded in the lifeworld online, where it flourishes (Coleman 2010).
The communicative rationality expressed in NSMs is implicit in their critique of growth of the system (Habermas 1981, 34). Gemma Edwards argues that 1980s-era movements could “reassert communicatively rational action against the distortions of an increasingly intrusive system” (G. Edwards 2004, 117), and asks why this should not also be true for movements of the twenty-first century, especially the anticorporate movement. The present work, which is informed by the work of Nick Crossley (2003), contends that pirate politics, like the anticorporate and antiglobalization movements, has inherited the reflex of 1980s-era movements against “the tendency in advanced capitalist societies for the lifeworld to be engulfed by the growing ‘economic-administrative complex’” (G. Edwards 2004, 115) of state and economy. The communicative ties to family, work, leisure, education, and health, for example, are beset by “state bureaucracy, legal regulation, political socialization and economic privatization” (115) as consequences of system growth. The basic logics of system growth, which are juridification and commodification (115; Habermas 1987a), result in a loss of “both freedom and meaning” (Crossley 2003, 294) and in “privatized hopes for self-actualization and self-determination” (Sitton 1998, 78). Like the antiglobalization movement, the pirate movement can be viewed as “a response to or manifestation of the growing crisis of neo-liberalism” (Crossley 2003, 299).
Besides being a domain of freedom and a basis for critique of system growth and crisis, communicative rationality offers a model for social learning through social movements. Identifying social goals and guiding a general conversation about those goals can lead to broader, more negotiable validity claims. Communicative rationality is counterposed to instrumental rationality and system contexts, and is considered incommensurable with them, although communicative and instrumental rationality frequently coexist and commingle in the same social contexts. Dietz explains the distinction for Habermas’s theory:
Central to Habermas’ philosophy is the distinction between strategic and communicative action. When involved in strategic action, the participants strive after their own private goals. In doing so they may either compete or cooperate, depending on whether their goals oppose each other or rather coincide. When they cooperate, they only are motivated empirically to do so: they try to maximize their own profit or minimize their own losses. When involved in communicative action, the participants are oriented towards mutual agreement. The motivation for cooperation therefore is not empirical but rational: people respond e.g. to requests because they presuppose that these requests can be justified. The basic condition for communicative action is that the participants achieve a common definition of the situation in which they find themselves. This consensus is reached by negotiations about the validity claims raised. (Dietz 1991, 239; emphasis in original)
In everyday speech acts, validity claims are presumed—and can be challenged—as claims to truth, justice, and sincerity. Speech acts regularly succeed, with all three validity claims accepted. When a claim is challenged for any of these reasons, negotiations and an accounting process can begin to save the speech act from failing. “Only those speech acts to which the speaker assigns criticizable validity claims do motivate the hearer on their own to accept the speech act offer, and only because of this foundation do they become the mechanism for effective coordination of action” (Dietz 1991, 240).
The notion of communicative rationality, which inherited these key features from George Herbert Mead’s (1962) pragmatic tradition, relies also on the notion of speech acts from John Searle in order to show that language coordinates social action through activities such as requests and promises. Request fulfillment is a foundational form of social coordination (Dietz 1991, 236).
The universal pragmatics Habermas develops from Mead and Searle is further elaborated with the aid of Émile Durkheim, who is read as providing an evolutionary development from mechanical to organic solidarity (Habermas, in Dews 1986, 104). The key point of this sociology of communicative action is that communicative rationality evolves through processes of social learning. Mead and Durkheim offer a developmental basis for explaining “the increasing reflexive fluidity of world-views, . . . a continuing process of individuation, and . . . the emergence of a universalistic moral and legal system” (111–112). These are processes that can be accelerated by NSMs in lifeworlds that are reproduced in communicative action and carry emancipatory potentials.
Habermas himself does not pursue communicative rationality to cyberspace and, indeed, seems to associate networks and networking with functional integration common to the system (2001, 82). Extending the lifeworld concept to cyberspace, “where people interact face-to-device with each other in conditions of telecopresence,” yields a basis for finding intersubjective communication, or “we relationships,” online (Zhao 2004, 92). The Internet’s open and transparent communication protocols, near ubiquity in developed markets, and normative acceptance into personal life has led researchers to discover many ways in which cyberspace has become interwoven with the communicative lifeworld that Habermas describes. For example, Christopher Kelty (2008) describes the development of “recursive publics” in the lifeworld online, and Gabriella Coleman (2004) describes the egalitarian sociality of hackers who participate in the FOSS movement. In an influential study, Kevin McDonald considers NSM communication in general, and antiglobalization protests in particular, to exhibit “fluidarity” and networking dynamics in which “forms of action flow from one network to another, in a process amplified by the Internet and communications networks such as Indymedia in the US or the Tactical Media Crew in Italy” (2002, 44). NSMs use fluid communication networks in cyberspace as a means of building solidarity around a critique of system growth.
These characteristics suggest that twenty-first-century NSMs can, in fact, support communicative rationality, help decolonize the lifeworld, and replace juridified routines with social learning. They cannot rely on ideology to manipulate supporters, but instead use deliberation to promote noninstrumentalist and nonmarket social relations in existing social institutions. Ecology does so with respect to the environment as a socially constructed legal and physical domain; feminism does so with respect to families, the workplace, and education, among many other social institutions; and cyberliberties do so with respect to information policy, education, and the state.
Hacking the Software of State
The entry of pirate politicians into the EP served as a reminder to voters and MEPs that that the original vision of the information society was technocratic and oriented to system growth at the expense of the lifeworld. Establishing the basic rights of Internet users, especially when challenged by prosecutors of IPR, ISPs, and the state, was indefinitely postponed in favor of prioritizing trade-related IP claims of owners and purported owners.4 Pirate politics offered a corrective.
NSMs are good decolonizers because communication underlies the informational mode of production that spawned them: “Information resources are at the center of collective conflicts emerging in highly differentiated societies” (Melucci 1995, 113; emphasis in original). Sandra Braman (2004) too makes this argument, noting that conflicts over information characterize the inner dynamics of the information society. Seen from the perspective of communicative rationality, pirate politics participates at multiple levels in protecting the lifeworld online from colonization. It intervenes in colonization processes and transforms them into renegotiated politics. It disrupts and reprograms expectations about communicative rationality in the Internet generations. It expresses conflicts over codification, specifically, the cultural and legal codes that order law and policy regimes for communication and information. The conflicts are spread over overlapping social codes, cultural codes, software code, and legal code (Lessig 1999; Melucci 1989) and are visible as hacktivism, culture jamming, radical media, and pirate politics. For Melucci (1989), the purpose of movement politics is to give notice that there is a fundamental clash between cultural codes and technocratic routines and to discover and enjoy social interaction with affinity groups. Pirate politics supports Melucci’s basic proposition, but amends it to include greater participation in information-society decision making.
The recursive characteristics of pirate politics are strengthened by virtue of its constitution in geek culture and cyberspace. Kelty’s work illuminates geek culture as an affinity-based solidarity network built on collaborative work and production: “Geeks imagine their social existence and relations as much through technical practices (hacking, networking, and code writing) as through discursive argument (rights, identities, and relations). In addition, they consider a ‘right to tinker’ a form of free speech that takes the form of creating, implementing, modifying, or using specific kinds of software (especially Free Software) rather than verbal discourse” (2005, 214). Geeks’ creative work often includes speech acts manifested as code and technical writing, but they present to one another at numerous conferences, or “cons,” hackerspaces, and at other convivial places as well. And although geek culture is collaborative, it favors meritocracy, tournaments, contests, debates, and deliberations as ways to drive the creative process and generate innovations.
More broadly still, the ascendancy and internal organization of pirate politics are owed in part to the connectivity of its origins in the technoculture. The network provides the underlying structure for association, identity formation, and political mobilization. In their mobilization, pirates help us see how civil society and its public sphere have become much more like “a network for communicating information and points of view” (Lim and Kann 2008, 78), with the Internet providing “a convivial milieu in which various political uses are thriving and new tools for political criticism and commentary are emerging” (80). Moreover, since NSMs operate in the margins of system and lifeworld, at the edges of the public sphere, they communicate the edges of the network, together with the shifting frontier between system and lifeworld, to the political system itself.
Online deliberations can coordinate social action with considerable egalitarianism and legitimacy. Asynchronous communication tools help manage many-to-many, large-scale discussions and deliberations. Tools such as deliberative polling, online Citizens’ Juries (which appeared in the UK in the 1990s), Unchat, and e-liberate (facilitating something like an online version of Robert’s Rules of Order) facilitate A2K, deliberation, and debate (Lim and Kann 2008, 83–85). U.S. examples of online deliberations include AmericaSpeaks 21st Century Town Meetings and Wisdom Councils facilitated with groupware (85). During and after such deliberations, the “Internet’s inherent conviviality enables rapid, widespread mobilization” (90) among marginal actors.
The Swedish and German Pirate Parties are famous for using commercial services, including Twitter, Facebook, and PasteBin, to communicate among their members and followers. But, being geeks, they have developed their own solutions to the practical problems of social coordination. The board members of the Pirate Party of the state of Berlin worked with the Public Software Group in Berlin to develop LiquidFeedback, FOSS for supporting democratic deliberation and agenda-setting among members of a political party or any other organization: “With the platform, issues that would previously only gradually find their way to the national leadership through local, district and state organizations can quickly gain momentum and importance, so that they can then be voted on at party conferences” (Becker 2012).
The software platform uses a flexible set of rules to promote direct democracy.
The basic idea: a voter can delegate his vote to a trustee (technically a transitive proxy). The vote can be further delegated to the proxy’s proxy thus building a network of trust. All delegations can be done, altered and revoked by topic. I myself vote in environmental questions, Anne represents me in foreign affairs, Mike represents me in all other areas but I can change my mind at any time.
Anyone can select his own way ranging from pure democracy on the one hand to representative democracy on the other. Basically one participates in what one is interested in but for all other areas gives their vote to somebody acting in their interest. Obviously one may make a bad choice once in a while but they can change their mind at any time. (Nitsche n.d.)
The linguistics professor Martin Haase holds no elected office, but has the largest number of delegated votes on the German Pirates’ LiquidFeedback system, making him at one time “the most powerful member of Germany’s burgeoning Pirate Party” (Becker 2012).
LiquidFeedback enables the Berlin (state) Pirate Party to address a broad range of concerns quickly and to expand its platform beyond IPR issues. At the time of this writing, other areas included matters of “personal freedom,” including a basic income guarantee for artists, FOSS developers, other creators, students, and the unemployed; personalized learning goals for students (a goal that requires rejection of the EU’s Bologna Process); and the “right to get stoned” (Urbach, personal communication). The use of networking and voting software to develop those priorities in real time is of great practical and symbolic significance for the German Pirate Party. It permits rapid adaptation of the party’s agenda to political changes. The cultural director for the Berlin state Pirate Party has expressed hope for replacing the entire German parliament with LiquidFeedback and promoting a “platform neutral state” with respect to technology policy (Urbach, personal communication).
Besides software development, other examples of pirate mashups include the politicization of information embargoes in the War on Terror by WikiLeaks’ data dumps of classified U.S. materials (such as the “Collateral Murder” footage); the cooperation of the SPP in providing WikiLeaks with Internet connectivity after it was disconnected forcibly; and the ongoing SPP campaigns against further Europeanizing reforms to copyright, information, and communication policies. Repertoires of contention built up from “technologies of dissent” (Curran and Gibson 2012) include hacktivism, working on FOSS, mobilizing transnational protests, assisting rebel communications during the Arab Spring revolts, and blowing the cover off hegemonic power cloaked in bureaucratic secrecy.
Supporting activities aside, the ultimate objective of pirate politics is pragmatic: the reform of legal code governing information in the EU, where a “growing constitutional legitimacy gap” requires bringing ever more parties to the bargaining table when law and policy are being decided (Marsden 2011). In addition, the pirates’ primary goal provides a fresh opportunity for social learning, since the rejection of the European Constitution in 2005 set the stage for political parties and pressure groups to reframe rights as specific policy initiatives for national and European parliamentary campaigns. The codification of new digital rights might mark the growth of communicative rationality and help legitimate the European system of law (see chapter 4). Habermas characterizes law as “a medium through which . . . structures of mutual recognition . . . can be transmitted . . . to the complex and increasingly anonymous spheres of a functionally differentiated society” (Habermas 1996, 318). In its deliberative mode, pirate politics emphasizes widespread participation and open processes in the shaping of information policy, which could lead to legitimacy, since “the ultimate grounding of operative law [is] in critically self-conscious, discursive processes directed to universal reasonable agreement” (Michaelman 1996, 311).
The EC, rather than the EP, seems to be a domain where pirate politics can have the greatest impact on the legitimacy of information policy. The EC forecloses many of the communicative spaces for “debate, analysis, and criticism of the political order” (Fossum and Schlesinger 2007, 1), as was seen in the IPRED and ACTA negotiations. The institutional insulation of commissioners from national demands is at the root of criticisms of its technocratic, distanced, and unaccountable operations. Andy Smith proposes three reasons for this: they are likely to be upstaged in the media by MEPs and national ministers; the multiplicity of conflicting roles the commissioners play detracts from their ability to “speak with one voice”; and they have weak connections to journalists in national media (2007, 228). The division of the commissioners’ labors is not defined nationally, partly for fear of claims regarding unjust proportionality of distribution, and so calls for commissioners to be accountable to their member states frequently go unanswered. The legitimacy of the European commissioners’ representativeness “is constantly undermined by the specific set of rules and expectations that lie at the heart of the institutionalized role of a European Commissioner” (228). That the commissioners themselves are generally not information technology experts or even literate in new media contributes to their vulnerability.
MEPs have greater direct responsibility for their national constituents, but that responsibility is shared with coalition partners. Elected to their positions from national parties running in national referenda in member states, MEPs are also members of European party groups. Pressure from European party groups exerted on individual members—through committee assignments, resource allocation, and other methods—helps set agendas, shape MEPs into reliable and disciplined party members, and (sometimes) assist them in withstanding countervailing pressure from home (Hix, Noury, and Roland 2006, 496). MEPs’ committee work, such as Pirate MEP Amelia Andersdotter’s work with the Committee on Industry, Research, and Energy and the Committee on International Trade, is an appropriate place to look for ongoing influences on decision making.
Eder envisions the EU-EC as a learning game for the entire region. The EU creates a never-ending iteration of transnational mechanisms linking communicative spaces where legitimate claims to authority can be made, contested, and accepted in a performative fashion (Eder 2007). The EU has structured an “open organizational field” (59) that generates “interorganizational games” (56) and builds “a polity on a set of normative rules that reproduces itself through the continuous addition of further procedural rules” (58). From a shared normative basis, deliberation can proceed through the EC and other “elite publics” that engage in “collective learning” among multiple groups and constituencies, including national groups (58–59). So in theory, pirate politics could propagate social learning throughout the EU-EC and help forestall impending legitimacy crises.
The NSM Sociology of Pirate Politics
Social movements are like an autoimmune response to lifeworld colonization. They rely on cultural, pretheoretical knowledge, and intuitive know-how to make their defense. I argue that pirate politics, as a variety of cultural politics, is a symptomatic response to technocratic incursions by the law, public policy, and private corporations into formerly undisturbed areas of the lifeworld. It is partly institutionalized, in a conventional, parliamentary sense, and partly fluid. Both NSM and resource mobilization (RM) approaches to NSMs conceive of movements as alternative forms of sociality that superannuate participation in traditional party politics and emanate exclusively from civil society. RM approaches address organizational strategies, and NSM approaches address identity-maintaining strategies; there are also hybrid methods. Jean Cohen (1985) finds the two approaches mutually informing, while Gemma Edwards (G. Edwards 2008) finds the RM approach to be implied in Habermas’s critical systems theory. As I have argued elsewhere (Burkart 2010), accepting both perspectives provides for the adoption of complementary system-and-lifeworld viewpoints that cover empirical domains accessible through systems functionalism and Verstehen sociology. What is important here is that pirate politics operates in civil society with formal connections to the political system.
RM looks for what Charles Tilly calls “repertoires of contention,” or “clumps of performances that describe the forms of claim-making available to any particular set of political actors, including the government, and the likely consequences of making such claims” (2006, 22). RM reveals that the pirates are, by and large, “rooted cosmopolitans” (Della Porta and Tarrow 2005) who participate in global flows and exchanges of ideas, media, and software. Their local stances on issues of concern are informed by transnational networks of activists. Their disputes over the legal disposition of communication resources such as sharing platforms and software, and their critiques of anticompetitive business practices in media and software, appeal especially to students, technical professionals, software engineers, and entrepreneurs, whose freedom of movement in the European common market often expands their horizons beyond the scope of their localities.
RM is possible in the transnational collective action of pirate politics in part because of the “complex internationalism” exhibited by European states, their international institutions, and nonstate actors (Tarrow and Della Porta 2005, 231). Cyberspace has become a critical resource for mobilizing an observable, international repertoire of contention since the Zapatista uprising in Mexico (Castells 2001; Terranova 2001). NSM theory can offer insights into the symbolic identities of the rooted cosmopolitans. Culturally, pirate ideology partakes of the New Communalism, a postmaterialist sensibility that has been present in countercultural movements since the 1960s (Turner 2006). New Communalists look for their own technical solutions and for local alternatives to dependency on big business and big government. The spirit of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link of the 1980s still animates this “maker” aesthetic, which serves as an ethic as well.
As noted previously, pirate politics is a middle-class phenomenon. While pirate politics may avoid explicit class appeals in its rhetoric, appears to have denatured class characteristics, and has an ecological understanding of culture, its orientation to the pursuit of economic growth through formal politics exhibits the material interests of the middle and aspiring middle classes. Playing politics in a complex international setting, especially, commits the players to a conservative aim of “preserving a familiar world in which politics intervenes as the executive arm of supposed economic progress,” as Habermas says in a critique of the Stuttgart 21 protests (Habermas 2010). (Stuttgart 21 is a proposed railway and urban development project.)
Like other social movements, pirate politics shows the tension between a form of communalism aspiring to achieve a creative commons such as the public domain, and the kind of strong individualism consistent with anarchistic ideals. The communitarian perspective valorizes the public-good characteristics of digital cultures and the natural (that is, untrammeled) Internet as providing an online agora. The libertarian-anarchistic perspective prizes autonomy, hacker competencies, and personal privacy. Both perspectives fit comfortably within the culture of the new middle class. The SPP’s leaders make individualistic appeals to a shared ethic of personal responsibility and, in place of policing and regulation, call on users to self-regulate and demonstrate personal “integrity” (Troberg, in O’Dwyer 2009; to follow). As noted previously, the party leadership has aligned the SPP with the leftist Greens, although Falkvinge was a member of the conservative Moderate Party’s youth wing (Phillips 2009) and even describes himself as “ultra-capitalist” (Tuccille 2009).
The pirates have a liberal precedent in engineering history. Engineers have made calls to action in defense of ethical values and visions of a better social life, based on their knowledge, understanding, and work with technology. Engineering societies in the early twentieth-century United States provided a precedent for an ethic of engineering professionalism and class solidarity (Layton 1986). Around the time of World War I, members of the engineering professions “seemed to be searching for a redefinition of their place in society, to be seeking a more active role in resolving the problems (both technical and social) of the day. Many of them seem to have concluded that engineers, by reason of their training, experience, and social position, could develop a different, and superior kind of leadership than that exercised by business” (Meiksins 1988, 219).
The “revolt of the engineers” (Layton 1986) against the corporate businesses that hired them presented a wide variety of grievances and calls to action, but none with unanimity or even a plurality of support. Activists issued calls for greater social responsibility of business, greater unity among those working in engineering professions, more humane treatment at work, and a meritocracy for professionals (Meiksins 1988, 222). But the profession was split between probusiness elites, also known as the “patrician reformers,” and activist bench workers, whose unions and professional organizations ultimately failed to unify around the incipient ethic of engineering professionalism. Pirate politics is marked not by professional societies and unions issuing calls to action, but by far looser affiliations of professional and preprofessional students, independent contractors, entrepreneurs, staff technicians and engineers, and geeky prosumers.
More implicitly, but perhaps just as importantly, pirates reveal the blocked ascendancy of technically skilled people into the middle and upper-middle classes.5 Eder contends that the new middle class of knowledge workers is a technological and cultural elite, because of its members’ greater conceptual ability, knowledge, and opportunity to become involved in politics than some of the working classes in manual industry (Eder 1995, 44n17). The long economic crisis of 2008 broke many of the popular assumptions about social mobility and deprived many knowledge workers of job positions that weren’t “peripheral” or “decommodified” (Offe 1985). In this context, the pirate movement seems even more modestly middle class and limited. Blocked ascendancy underlies grievances voiced by people engaged in collective action with Occupy Wall Street, the “movement of the squares” across the Middle East, the Wisconsin protests, and the Spanish Indignados (Kennedy 2011). Ray Corrigan uses work and education examples to comment on the emotional appeal of SPP campaigns against ACTA: “If you start knocking people off the Internet for allegedly infringing copyright, those numbers [of Pirate Party voters] start to grow into the thousands, or tens of thousands, very quickly. It has a direct impact on their children’s education and some people may need the Internet for their job. When IP has a real impact on lives that is when you start to see a backlash” (qtd. in C. Edwards 2009). Marina Weisband, the political director for the Pirate Party of Germany, considers pirate politics, the Occupy movement, and the Arab Spring uprisings to share a common antiauthoritarian orientation and a cosmopolitan understanding of networking as a political activity, in addition to their middle-class appeal (personal communication). Blocked ascendancy has meant, then, that the material concerns of the financial downturn starting in 2008 are increasingly being paired with the quality-of-life concerns of 2006 that launched the institutionalization of pirate politics.
The information policy objectives of the Pirate Parties of Germany and Sweden pose risks to some entrenched interests—including the entertainment industry, pharmaceutical and software companies, and private and public surveillance agencies. Pirates do not advocate for the abolition, socialization, or nationalization of those businesses. The industries fear that broad implementation of the Pirates’ platform would threaten the growth of their IP monopolies. That fear is, as yet, unfounded, since the SPP’s veto powers on committees and its narrow focus area promote moderation of only the most radical of the system’s proposals, such as the three-strikes rule. Pirate politics may be counterhegemonic and countercultural, but it is not antisystemic.6
The communicative position of the pirates discloses the congruence of class interests among students, independent software engineers, web developers, start-up entrepreneurs, and others whose livelihood and aspirations depend upon access to knowledge, sharing software and tools, and communicative rationality online and in creative workplaces. Control over the norms that regulate the workplace, and resistance to colonization there, necessarily involves struggle (G. Edwards 2004, 127). But the struggle exhibits “a self-understanding that abandons revolutionary dreams in favor of radical reform that is not necessarily and primarily oriented to the state. We shall label as ‘self-limiting radicalism’ projects for the defense and democratization of civil society that accept structural differentiation and acknowledge the integrity of political and economic systems” (Cohen and Arato 1992, 493).
The pirates’ self-limiting characteristics accommodate certain forms of domination while resisting others. As previously mentioned, the pirates recognize that a transnational corporate elite opposes their interests systematically. An antitransnational corporate attitude therefore pervades pirate politics, which, like antiglobalization politics, emphasizes local and independent capital and entrepreneurship and opposes complex internationalism. The massive antiglobalization demonstrations in Seattle, Prague, and Geneva targeted international governmental agencies (principally the WTO and IMF) for their unaccountability to the people they affect and for their service to transnational corporations. The main message of the protests was that globalization creates “an unjustifiable legitimation deficit” (Crossley 2003, 298). The protests are joined by business projects such as Fair Trade and by culture-jamming operations such as Adbusters, which reject and problematize the role of the consumer and refocus attention on the producers of mass consumer culture. These filial movements decolonize the lifeworld by addressing the “moral grammar” of society and reclaim a moral organization for society from the economy (298).
Damage and Repair across the Generations
Habermas emphasizes the “disenchanted, internally differentiated and pluralized lifeworlds” (Habermas 1996, 26) that are inhabited by participants in social movements, whereas many second-generation critical theorists who have engaged with Habermas on NSM theory emphasize the reparative work of the movements’ communicative rationality. Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato interpret NSM politics as having transformative potential, for three reasons. First, the emergence of cultural modernity, and of differentiated spheres of science, art and morality, organized around their internal validity claims, “carries with it a potential for increased self-reflection (and decentered subjectivity) regarding all dimensions of action and world relations” (Cohen and Arato 1992, 524–525). Second, modernity selectively favors processes of system integration as it institutionalizes its rational potentials, leading to the colonization of the lifeworld. Third, there is a “two-sided character of the institutions of the contemporary lifeworld, that is, the idea that societal rationalization has entailed institutional developments in civil society involving not only domination but also the basis for emancipation” (524–525). Cohen and Arato identify NSM politics with the rejuvenation of civil society and the public sphere, focusing on the “institutional potentials” of the “shared cultural field” (511).
For Axel Honneth (1979) too, communicative rationality can be found in the margins of the detached system and lifeworld. He argues that communicative action there “should generate both a meaningful self-definition and a critique of domination through a process of collective social criticism which would reach the social space where theoretical enlightenment can be politically organized” (59). Working outside the second-generation critical theory tradition, but in some ways that are consistent with it, Alberto Melucci (1989) and Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison (Eyerman and Jamison 1998) argue that NSMs are regenerative and liberating forms of social transformation, and that the alternative forms of sociality and individualization that they offer are ends in themselves.
These perspectives share an interest in explaining that social movements can decolonize the lifeworld, but the process of decolonization remains unclear. In their platforms, Pirates seek to block some of the commodifying processes underlying the basic structures of technocapitalism and reinforced by the legal, financial, and political systems spanning the EU. Most important, pirate politics seeks to short-circuit the commodification logic of the Celestial Jukebox by blocking global DRM and restricting the kind of unlimited data retention that can make a universal panopticon out of customer relationship management or social networking.
Pirates target other colonization mechanisms as well. Linguistic colonizers include legal codes such as indefinite copyright renewals, European-wide patents for software and business methods, and the single-market initiatives covered in chapter 2. Those codes become integrated with nonlinguistic steering media, including the “network power” (Sassen 1999) of members of the IIAA and their industrial allies. Network power propagates colonization mechanisms across networks and code bases, including the DRM and automated surveillance and data-retention systems required to enforce three-strikes laws and DNS blocking, as well as the royalty rents such measures are designed to protect. In addition, Pirates target the secrecy and silence surrounding opaque treaty negotiations, which typically exclude public deliberations. The formal banning of DRM, or decriminalization of work-arounds to circumvent it, is a decolonizing Pirate objective that would ameliorate the conditions of unfreedom that obtain in the online “digital enclosures” (Andrejevic 2002) that are maintained by contract law, content management systems, and technical copy protections.
The Green-Pirate Continuum
Eder (1985) analyzes ecological counterculture movements as varieties of collective learning that can expressed as high levels of communicative rationality, particularly as they began to make distinctions between ecological and environmentalist ideologies, and between appropriate and inappropriate technology practices. There are important complementarities between the Greens and pirate movement, beyond the fact that Christian Engström joined the Greens/European Free Alliance in the EP.7 Like an ecological counterculture movement, pirate politics is both a pressure group and a moral crusade (Eder 1988, 159). Both ecological crisis and the tragedy of the cultural commons share exploitation as a common referent. NSM theory permits us to consider pirate politics as a variety of environmentalism and, in turn, to consider environmentalism as a mechanism for social learning in European society (Kousis and Eder 2001, 26).
James Boyle claims that “precisely because we are in the information age, we need a movement—akin to the environmental movement—to preserve the public domain” (2008, xv). For Boyle, who writes within the juridical discourses of positive law, no social movement or social actor has yet arrived to “save” the public domain from politics as usual and crisis. Cultural environmentalism remains, for the most part, an acute awareness of the creative, technical, and legal resources needed to protect online culture. Its political sensibility treats life in the information age as a shared, communicative canvas, waiting to be painted upon with a mélange of tools and colors taken and remixed from the media environment: “The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently, to see that there was such a thing as ‘the environment’ rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment” (xv). Tim Jordan and Paul Taylor (Jordan and Taylor 2004) argue that, in fact, global piracy and hacktivism have communicated this same sort of understanding of the information environment for at least two decades.
As a moral crusade, environmentalism makes appeals to noneconomic social values that are programmed out of the public sphere by economic forces. Cultural environmentalism mimics environmentalism in its drive to transform the morals of society: “Environmental politics is action taken less on the environment than on society. . . . Environmental politics (including environmental policy) shapes not simply the environment: above all, it shapes society” (Kousis and Eder 2001, 7). In civil society, pirate politics takes society and free culture as its objects, whereas in parliament its object is the administrative-legal complex.
At the system level, the Greens’ formation of policy for environmental regulations and the Pirates’ participation in information-policy negotiations defend and preserve territories that are critical for survival. Both seek to develop better protections for commons perceived to be at risk of destruction. Because of the proximity of environmentalism to health and public safety concerns, it can unify public support around nearby areas of culture, even in political systems without as strong a political opportunity structure as Europe’s. For example, Stephen Hilgartner compares the Pirates’ information-policy agenda to the movement for consumer rights and workplace safety in the United States of the 1970s, and especially the call for “a voice in decision making in areas of environment hazard management and consumer safety” (2009, 197). Reformist social movements in the United States lobbied for and won the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Products Safety Commission, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (197). In Europe, the Greens/European Free Alliance embraced a consumer rights agenda. The natural foods movement provides another point of comparison, since it communicates fears of the risks of “the impurity that is intensified by the technification of the industrial food culture” (Eder 1988, 159).
As Green parties spread across Western European countries in the 1980s, becoming formal players in coalitional governments, social scientists observed the development of an ideological continuum “from red to green” in radical politics (Fehér and Heller 1983). The exhaustion of labor-based political appeals for solidarity and lost political mandates of labor parties, together with the abdication of the revolutionary project by the New Left, coincided with the ascendancy of postmaterialist political ideologies. “Counterculture movements have reframed the modern relationship of man with nature as one of exploitation” (Eder 1996, 139), while labor exploitation was partly abandoned.
The appearance of nationally based pirate parties running for local, state, and national offices, while affiliating internationally, resembles the early organizing of the European Green parties and the Swedish Green Party (Miljopartiet de Grona). But no single crisis of the cultural environment, such as Chernobyl, has yet pushed the SPP into office. Following the Chernobyl disaster in the USSR and other environmental crises at home, the Swedish Green Environmental Party won its first seats at the Riksdag, running on a platform to shut down nuclear power plants, strongly enhance environmental regulations, and eliminate fossil fuel use in Sweden (Affigne 1990). The German Greens (Die Grunen) “emerged from sixties radicalism with an eclectic ideology and an aversion to ‘bourgeois’ politics,” eventually developing a policy platform of ecology, grassroots democracy, social responsibility, and nonviolence (O’Neill 2000, 166). “The Green manifesto . . . developed the case for ecocapitalism, reconciling ecology with progressive social measures and radical economic policy. In effect, the Greens temper an ethical antipathy to capitalism by advocating a ‘fair’ employment regime, social justice, and better eco-management: namely, reduced work-time, job-sharing, eco-friendly job creation and retraining schemes” (171).
Part of the Greens’ success as a political party in Germany is owed to its ideological transformation from fundamentalist and purist to pragmatic and accommodating. Environmentalism watered down ecology and even offered a development program that promoted economic growth in times of deindustrialization. Through a combination of faith in technological progress, financial and technical participation by technocrats and elite knowledge workers, and political accommodation, the Greens provided a politically palatable program of energy savings, smart growth, and emission controls. The migration from social movement to political party demonstrated that whatever antisystemic dynamic the Greens once contained was rendered a merely reformist and moderate force for social change. Deep ecology and ecofeminism continue to resist colonization pressures in submerged networks.
New pirate parties are still being institutionalized from submerged networks. The Czech Pirate Party led the effort to “port” the Creative Commons framework for the Czech Republic and has participated in municipal elections (Carr 2011). The Pirate Party-UK jump-started the national conversation about the Digital Economy Act after the law received little attention during its passage. The Liberal Democrats placed repeal of the act’s piracy provisions at the top of their list of 2011 convention items (B. Jones 2011). The Pirate Party of Canada, launched in 2009 as a blog, released a torrent tracker that tracks Creative Commons content; in addition, the party ran ten candidates for office in the 2011 elections (PPCA 2011). The Pirate Party of New Zealand held its first annual conference and policy-making meeting, operated a membership campaign, and registered with the New Zealand Electoral Commission in 2011 (PPNZ 2011). As ACTA faltered in the EP in mid-2012, the PPI continued to increase its membership, with the Russian Pirate Party officially registering in 2012.
Like European NSMs of prior generations, pirate politics cultivates materialist concerns related to survival and social mobility, and postmaterialist values focused on identity, expressive individualism, and “an authentic lifestyle where people interact as equals and as free persons” (Eder 1995, 33–39). Its agenda and communications contain decolonizing potentials that can serve as a heuristic for a European political system on the wrong path to the information society, and that in the process can contribute to a more robust European public sphere.
The cultural sensibilities of cyberliberties may endure, but if the Green parties of Europe serve as a guide, rapid institutionalization is likely to blunt the radicalism of pirate politics and underscore “the transitory nature of movement politics” (Offe 1990, 235). After all, the Pirates’ success “has made politicians realize they have been complacent and need to catch up” on cyberliberties issues (Schultz, qtd. in Inskeep 2009). Identity politics in the movement, “a normal and perhaps even intrinsic part of a successful, democratic public sphere” (Calhoun 1995, 248), and ongoing, engaged participation will continue forming and revising the Pirates’ political identities (273). Since the German Greens now claim to endorse the same technology program as the Pirates, it may well be the case that the Greens can become the “new pirates.” And many Pirates would accept that outcome if it meant that the pirate agenda would advance (Weisband, personal communication). However, pirate activism is still performing a winnowing function for the political system by self-regulating for purity of ideological commitment. The rejection of ascendant figures such as Julia Schramm (contentious author of Click Me and formerly of the German Pirates) for bypassing pirate publication channels and selling out helps in the selection of new elites, and enables the movement to develop and practice its distinctive moral grammar.8
As the previous chapters have argued, pirate politics imposes political limits to commodification and juridification in ways similar to those used by other NSMs. In the negotiation of those limits for ecology, a basic tension emerged between the ecological antigrowth imperative that makes the movement antisystemic, and smart growth or planned growth, a tension that normalized the Greens as they moderated their positions over the years. Pirates face the same normalization process, especially regarding contradictions between individualism-communalism, in-group—out-group distinctions between party and civil society activists, materialism and postmaterialism, and so on. Such is the fate of the rooted cosmopolitans of the technoculture.
Meanwhile, cultural colonization, which is one effect of Europeanization, materially diminishes the bases of support for the social reproduction of the technoculture, taking its toll; for example, the rendering of new martyrs from old heroes (Julian Assange, Aaron Swartz, Gottfried Svartholm) extinguishes their spark and serves notice for others. However, there is nothing a political pirate likes any more than a fresh challenge from the system, and new challenges provide political opportunities for new campaigns. In calls for arousal or quiescence, pirate politics is constantly performing its identity politics for the approval and support of networked publics.