Conclusion: The Legacy of Pirate Politics for Moral-Practical Reasoning
Pirate governance did not come from out of the blue. The assertion by many students and young pirates that the politicians are “declaring war against a whole generation” (Soares 2009) rests on an observable paradox: copyright criminality grows with the spread of the information society. The problem for critical media studies is to illustrate how the paradox is, in fact, not an unintentional artifact of information and media policy but, indeed, a carefully planned and coordinated outcome.
To address this research problem, Pirate Politics has provided a glimpse into one form of activism in global civil society that perceives the paradox to be a social problem with political solutions. In this context, pirate politics offers potentially transformative campaigns. I have described the pirate identity and lifestyle as countercultural, even though they are considerably less than radically alternative. Pirate politics shows clearly that communication media underlie transnational collective action around information policy and digital rights. I have described the double reflex of pirate politics, in which culturally embedded technological practices cultivate qualities of communicative rationality intended to codify digital rights.
The present case study provides updated tests of concepts designed to accommodate the appearance of horizontal and participatory processes of media activism that contribute to what Puppis (2010) describes broadly as media “governance.” Pirate politics seems to support the claim that media governance is practiced by a range of interested constituencies besides official decision makers in the political system. In addition, the appearance of pirate politics supports the claims by NSM theorists that civil society remains a domain of growing importance for the study of politics and governance. Thus, my analysis included updated models for civil society and global civil society, including spheres of publics (Calhoun 1993), networked publics (Varnelis 2008), and complex transnationalism (Tarrow and della Porta 2005). These notions both update public-sphere democratic theory and illuminate pirate politics as a cultural phenomenon.
But since pirate politics often organizes and performs collective action in the porous and anonymous spaces of darknets, it becomes necessary to explore the role of such hybrid domains. Hackerspaces, Internet Relay Chat, and ephemeral message boards such as 4chan /b/ are semipublic fora with clubby in-group and out-group distinctions. So pirate politics operates in submerged networks while also making public claims for recognition and authoritativeness in global civil society. The organizational diversity of the players extends beyond the few cases focused on here (the SPP, the German Pirate Party, the IPP, and their precursor groups) to include, among many others, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative; Julian Assange and Birgitta Jónsdóttir; Christopher “moot” Poole and Anonymous hacktivists; and coders, artists, and musicians. These agents collectively function as a countercultural movement under conditions of complex transnationalism.
Since complex transnationalism privileges juridical communication and tends toward lifeworld colonization, pirate politics is forced to operate counterhegemonically. It follows the money and the sources of system power, and attaches its grappling hooks to the system in the form of agents playing formal roles in political decision making while reporting on the policy-making process and encouraging mass resistance. By campaigning for and winning political office, developing alternative forms of sociality in formal systems, and blackmailing and hacking the organs of state, Pirates engage the political system directly, even as they continue to operate in unconventional pressure groups and loose, ad hoc networks. As counterhegemonic actors, the Pirates focus on power emanating from the EC and, especially, the United States. As Jonas Andersson notes, pirate politics “underscore[s] . . . the relational nature that many smaller European countries have towards the U.S.; being ‘at the periphery of the center’ entails an altogether rather specific experience in terms of a mix of awe, advantage, and resentment towards U.S. imperialist interests” (personal communication). For the SPP, this experience informs the critique of Swedish “lapdoggery” (Falkvinge) regarding the United States, the need to expose policy-making masquerades, and the assertion of new and alternative bases of law for greater political legitimacy.
Generally speaking, the Pirates’ efforts are progressive in their orientation, and can be seen alongside those of other NSMs as “represent[ing] a non-reactionary, universalist critique of modernity and modernization by challenging institutionalized patterns of technical, economic, political, and cultural rationality without falling back upon idealized traditional institutions and arrangements such as the family, religious values, property, state authority, or the nation” (Offe 1990, 233). I emphasized the nonreactionary nature of pirate politics and argued that a vote for the Pirates symbolized a vote withheld from reactionary and right-wing competitors. But as previously mentioned, the institutionalization of the TPB was owed in large part to financial and technical assistance from Carl Lundström, a wealthy Swedish patron who has been reported to be a white supremacist and member of the anti-immigration group Keep Sweden Swedish (Expo Idag 2005). Lundström’s 40 percent share of TPB earned him a fine and prison sentence after the infamous trial. After TPB came under fire for Lundström’s role as its patron, a TPB spokesman, Tobias Andersson, said of Lundström’s support that it was better that he gave the money to TPB than to Sverigedemokraterna (Lischka 2007), a xenophobic, nationalist, and ultra-right-wing political party. It is noteworthy that Lundström did not participate in the SPP’s formation or ascendancy, and self-described Pirates reject his racist or formerly racist ideas. But his early role in TPB raises important questions about the implicit links between pirate politics, populism, anti-Europeanization, and a romantic longing for lost origins.
Romanticism animates most utopian ideologies. Pirate politics exhibits some familiar aspects of cyberutopianism that also impel cyberliberties NGOs like the EFF, La Quadrature du Net, and KEI. An inherited feature of the 1960s-era New Communalism, cyberutopianism is a structure of feeling about the Internet that is romantic in its longing for an original design. It nurtures a heartfelt belief in the salvific powers of convivial networks, in spite of the growing facticity of copyright maximalism and policymaking for post-privacy. It is essentially optimistic and hopeful that the social agency of online communities can deliver the Internet from an impending crisis, and it is likewise sensitive to new threats. The theory of communicative action supports the underlying and positive dialectic of cyberutopianism and the teleology implicit in its model of communicative rationality.
There are two main reasons for qualifying this utopianism, and they address the Lundström concerns as well. First, as I argue, the model of social inclusion implicit in this utopianism is in fundamental tension with its middle-class identity and its political program for economic growth and development. Utopias cannot countenance second-class citizens. Second, pirate politics anticipates and addresses the “cyber-realist” critique of cyberutopianism and “Internet-centrism” (Morozov 2011). Because Internet centrists treat the Internet as a constant, they fail to take responsibility for defending their existing freedoms and for curbing the power of companies like Google and Facebook (335–339). But by working in the margins of civil society and the state, and within states, Pirates posit the Internet as a variable whose values are determined by politics, and then work the political system to reframe those values. The critique of cyberutopianism promotes the social shaping of technology over technological determinism, arguing for the case that reality is a “complex interplay between social and technological factors” and privileging neither set of factors (339). In fact, the Pirates’ international mobilizations around IT and information-policy reforms are engaged and coherent, even oppositional and tactical. They demonstrate an intense awareness of—and participation in—the political, economic, and cultural shaping of technology. Moreover, the pirates distrust Europeanization as a cumulative consolidation and collection of executive powers, and they promote a restoration of power to the legislative branches of the EU and member states. They prefer promoting social learning to technocratic decision making. Above all, the pirates mean to break from the demonstrated path dependency of information policy by selecting horizontal strategies of governance in addition to traditional mechanisms of government, despite being a weaker player in governmental institutions.
New political realities could transform the basic Pirate platform. Because of their political realism and sustained engagement with state actors over the main tensions of the information age, the Pirates stand to accelerate a decomposition of the tripartite cyberliberties platform of free speech, privacy, and access that is often treated as a unitary set of “digital rights,” such as I have described. This would be an ironic outcome were it to come to pass. But the powerful state actors against which the Pirates are aligned do indeed tend to undermine the purported unity of digital rights. The Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning sagas problematized those linkages poignantly by showing the willingness of states (at the time of this writing, the United States and the UK) to collude in removing free-speech protections from “new journalism” whistleblowers and to place explosive state secrets further out of reach of the public. The WikiLeaks case shows, among other things, that pirate politics drives an evolution of “reason of state.”
Legal developments in the area of EU privacy protections—namely, the proposed “right to be forgotten” by social media sites—could additionally pit privacy against free speech and access. The right to access the unrevised historical record stands as a contemporary challenge to personal privacy rights and, especially, to a person’s right to be forgotten. When a person’s self-fashioning online requires deleting or editing out one’s online history, must historians and journalists accept the intentional data loss? What about the state? Do corporations also enjoy the right to be forgotten? Pirates face the prospect of conceding some rights in order to defend others.
Then there are the theoretical arguments about a “post-privacy” condition by Christian Heller (2011) and the Pirate Julia Schramm. Post-privacy is the ontological condition created by the combination of data retention, surveillance, and the popularity of persistent identity services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Post-privacy is a political-realist argument challenging the Pirates’ rationales for enhancing privacy laws and opposing new surveillance measures. The argument raises legitimate questions. Is it delusional to fight for the right to personal privacy and to take active technical and legal measures to protect one’s privacy? Would it be better to promote personal integrity and mutual respect for privacy online than to cling to technical and legal means of preserving personal privacy? Could it be more communicatively rational to act as if one’s life is an open book? Does the post-privacy condition deprive pirate politics of a central purpose, or shatter the unity of digital rights? Assuming that pirate parties persist as formal organizations for the foreseeable future, the Pirate agenda may very well remain single-issue: a fight to preserve the unity of digital rights.
More broadly still, cultural environmentalism is under growing pressure to address the question whether to codify new rights at all. Ironically, codification of certain cyberliberties can become a self-limiting exercise of governance. Chapter 1 touched on the potential pitfalls of codifying old rights, such as the right to ramble in the countryside. The risks include any arbitrary diminution or dilution of traditional practices still legitimated by cultural norms. Seen as part of the system-lifeworld dialectic and Europeanization, the risks include replacing negotiated and substantive coordinating action in interpersonal relationships and democratic procedures with formalized routines, narrowly juridical thinking, and recourse to harms and damages as measured by existing tort law. With every impending click of the upward IP ratchet, Pirates face the choice of asserting a narrow positive right where none has been needed.
While codifying digital rights procedurally and formally seems like a communicatively rational course of action, it is possible to imagine how the broader pirate program could become hemmed in by settling for multiple, modest assertions of cyberliberties in the face of much more aggressive, ongoing colonization by the royalties-bearing industries and the state. For example, the codification of fair use under the DMCA could have restricted DRM much more broadly and clearly, but instead requires users to re-petition for specific exemptions from penalties for circumventing DRM. In another example, personal privacy protections from the ubiquitous closed-circuit television cameras in London could have been ensured by banning the cameras altogether, but instead have been restricted to blocking images appearing in the windows of buildings falling under the gaze of the cameras. On the other hand, the digital rights agenda could have come under even greater pressure if the pirate parties had been rebuffed entirely by law-and-order-seeking political parties. So it is now difficult to imagine a Pirate parliamentarian who would pass on the chance to make positive commitments to new rights and protections, however limited and self-restricting they might be. The Pirate MEPs have exercised real influence over the creation of new International Telecommunications Regulations of the International Telecommunications Union, the rejection of the ACTA, and the official condemnation of Hungary for authoritarian new media laws, for example.
Pirate Self-Fashioning
Since identity is symbolic, and since language underlies our symbols, language, gender, and sexuality shape the emergent identity of political pirates. In what I think is a happy feature of the Swedish language, there is a single word for both “integrity” and “privacy”—integritet—which may help inform the pirate identity in ways that unify the movement around a common conception of ethical action. Leif Dahlberg explains:
In Swedish legal language, integritet is short for personlig integritet, which translates as “privacy of the individual,” typically denoting that only you yourself should have access to “personal” information about you, such as medical information, banking information, telephone records, and (of course) information about what websites you visit and what you do online. In other contexts, integritet in Swedish has a similar meaning to “moral or personal integrity” in English. That is, to have personal integrity is to have well thought through and consistent opinions that you don’t change lightly (or to gain favor or money). It’s another way of saying that somebody is a good person.
However, as is natural in (natural) languages, there may be contexts in which these two different uses (meanings) of the Swedish word integritet come into contact and start to communicate with each other. From a linguistic point of view, this is of course only bad language use, but from a literary/rhetorical point of view it may be quite effective. (Dahlberg, personal communication)
Whether or not it is bad legal Swedish to mix different contexts of the same word, integritet carries a heavier semantic load than “privacy” does in English. In the context of cyberliberties activism, the sense of personal integrity in integritet refers to personal autonomy and self-determination. It is easy to identify this use of the word in the publications of self-described Pirates (such as Anna Troberg, SPP leader). From another perspective, there appears to be a symbolic deficit in the English word “privacy” (in comparison with integritet) that is marked by a failure to recognize privacy as a moral or ethical value.
Integrity is a concept that Pirates understand, since it relates both to personal reputation in the community and freedom from suffocating legal norms. In addition, integrity informs gender relations among political geeks, making up part of the pirate vocabulary for moral-practical reasoning about acceptable conduct. “Geek feminism” adapts the concept for pirate politics. It wrestles with the glaring problems of sexism, heteronormativity, and underrepresentation of women in the intellectual and working lives of politically active pirates. Integrity thereby communicates a shared concern with autonomy while also appealing to a respect for the individuality and particularity of one’s own private life.
Not surprisingly, women who are Pirate Party members or who engage in political discussion boards with Pirates have had to address a first-order problem among many of their male peers—namely, the stubborn insistence that sexism does not exist among politically unified Pirates. Among the more prominent Swedish feminists contributing ideas to pirate politics are Gameloft’s Johanna Nylander (who wrote a blog called File Sharing, Freedom, and Feminism), Anna Troberg, and the journalist Isobel Hadley-Kamptz. Geek feminism injects desperately needed critiques of Pirate culture and broader political and social life into discourses about privacy and free speech. Geek sexism thrives in communities dominated by unseasoned and socially stunted young men, some of whom are unaware of their prejudices or are even proud to be sexist. Geek feminism generates ongoing, concrete examples of how women need stronger cyberliberties protections, especially regarding privacy. The German Pirates, owing to their elected offices, have addressed women’s issues somewhat more broadly than the Swedes. In 2012, the German Pirate Party endorsed an open letter criticizing Kristina Schroeder, the German minister for family and women, for ignoring structural factors contributing to sexism, such as Germany’s high gender pay gap and inadequate day-care provisions (Dowling 2012).
Queer participation in pirate politics is well established, particularly in Germany, where LGBT rights were made explicit in the party platform in 2009 (Urbach, personal communication). Hacker equality generates ongoing discussions and debates about “the situation of queer people within the hacker and nerd community” (Socialhack 2012) at hacker conferences and conventions. Young queer nerds share concerns about bullying and finding community at panels at the annual Chaos Communication Conferences and Chaos Communication Camps and sponsor weekly “queer roundups” in Sweden and Germany. New music culture figures prominently in the formation of group ties among queer-trans pirates and hackers and attracts queer pirates internationally through Signal Internet radio shows at hackerspaces.org (Urbach, personal communication). Prominent hacker activists, including Meredeth L. Patterson and Rubin Starset, pursue projects promoting LGBT equality through hackerspace collectives like Noisebridge in San Francisco. As might be expected, queer and feminist hacker allegiances seem to elevate the technophilic aspect of personal identity above other aspects.
The visibly feminist and queer identity currents within pirate politics reinforce the hacker ethic of personal integrity and autonomy while also promoting antiauthoritarianism and freedom as social values. These hackers ultimately place universalism over particularistic ideologies and, especially, over Lundström-esque engagements with reactionary conservatism, racism, and nationalism.
The null hypothesis for pirate politics, as described previously, presses us to imagine that the emergence of cultural environmentalism is a temporary blip without lasting social or political consequence. Its conclusion is that pirate politics is nothing but a flash in the pan. But even if the Swedish and German Pirate Parties were to disintegrate or disappear tomorrow (which is unlikely but not inconceivable), pirate politics would persist as a transnational cultural movement that urges the development of the Internet as a platform supporting democracy, shared knowledge, and governmental transparency. It would continue to contribute new Internet tools, vocabularies, and communities for pursuing those ends, independently of political parties and the identity politics of social movements. And it would continue to provide a social basis for challenging hermetic and illegitimate information policies with legal principles and procedures supportable by moral argumentation understandable by everybody. Quite possibly, these objectives can still become incorporated into the programs of more dominant political parties. In the meantime, the geeks and hackers happily rage on, semi-independently, emboldened by their newfound solidarity.