“Why My Vote Goes to the Pirate Party”
According to an ancient source, the Emperor of Persia gave orders that sea waves be punished with beatings, for a storm had hindered him from transporting his troops by ship. That was quite stupid of him. Today, maybe he would have tried the same logic with a Stockholm district court, or asked for a consultation with its judge?
It is odd, how strongly the civil rights situation in the spring of 2009 reminds me the struggles over freedom of press in France in the decades preceding the French revolution. A new world of ideas is emerging and would not have been able to, were it not for an accelerating technology. Raids against secret printing houses, confiscation of pamphlets and, even more, confiscation of printing equipment were the norm. Orders were give to stop the adventurous nightly transports between the Prussian enclave Neuchatel — where not only large parts of the Encyclopedia was produced, but also lots of daring pornography and atheist pamphlets — and Paris.
Between the 173os and 1780s, the number of state censors in France was quadrupled. The raids against illegal printing houses rose at about the same pace. In retrospect, we know it did not help. Rather, the increase of censorship and raids on printing houses had a stimulating effect on the new ideas and made them spread even faster.
Now the conflict is raging over the Net’s continued existence as a forum of ideas and as an institution for civil rights, protected from
privacy-threatening interventions and against powerful corporate interests. That a mad French-German proposal was voted down in the European parliament does not certainly mean that the freedom of the Net and individual privacy are now safeguarded.
How real are then these threats? Let us think about the Dallven river during spring floods. In a really critical year, the water level may rise by 100 meters, maybe 200 meters, flooding housing lots and tree meadows. Does it help to call the local police?
So far, and this is shown by historical experience, legislation has not been able to stop technological development. Walter Benjamin wrote an influential essay, whose title usually is translated as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, where he draws a series of interesting conclusions about what radical changes had spring from his times’ relatively modest degree of reproducibility. The digital revolution has brought about a reproducibility which Walter Benjamin could have hardly dreamt about. One could talk about maximum reproducibility. Google is about to build a library that, if is is allowed to go ahead, will make most material libraries look obsolete or at least outmoded.
Cinema and paper newspapers have been drawn into this new immateriality already for a while. Films, novels, magazines let themselves be reproduced. Further on, also three-dimensional objects, like products of programmable lathes are going to be reproduced. Wirelessly and rapidly. This immaterialization naturally threatens copyright. And we are not only talking about run-of-the-mill writers like Mr Jan Guillou, whose social problems of acquiring new country estates I am honestly ignoring. Material copyright has much more serious aspects: What has the big pharma patents on AIDS medicines meant for the Third World? Or what about Monsanto’s claims of holding rights on crops and pigs? Every society must strike its balance between competing interests and every hypocritical attempt to ignore that is nonsense. A functioning military defence is more important than ice hockey rinks and bicycle lanes. The Net is likely to pose a threat against copyright. And so what?
Intellectual and personal integrity for all citizens, in short being able to access an Internet that has not been transformed into a government channel by lobby-marinated courts and EU politicians in leashes, is arguably more important than the needs of a primarily industrial scene for literature and music, which is rapidly crumbling already within the lifetime of authors. The need of being read, of formulating and influencing one’s times, may, but does not need to, get in conflict with the desire to sell many copies. When the two needs are conflicting, the industrial interest must be put aside and the great intellectual sphere of the arts must be defended at all costs against c0rporate and government threats.
The essential interest of artists and authors, if they are intellectually and morally serious about what they are doing, must certainly be to get read, to let their voice become heard in their generation. How that goal is attained, that is, how readers get reached, is in this perspective of secondary importance.
The growing defense of the Internet’s expanded freedom of speech, of immaterial civil rights, that we are now witnessing in country after country, is the start — just as it was in 18th century — of a liberalism that is carried forward by technology and is therefore emancipatory.
Therefore, my vote goes to the Pirate Party.