Rick Falkvinge is an Internet activist and the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party. This quote is from a recent post in his infopolicy blog:
“The reason for my asking is that I’ve been trying to identify one word, just one word, that lies at the core of the pirate ideology. One word that can be used as a positive insert-word-here to indicate adherence to pirate ideology.
[…]
What I come back to all the time is that monopolies have been broken. Both legal and formal monopolies (think the copyright monopoly, patent monopolies, design patent monopolies) and informal monopolies (notably the monopoly on truth, news reporting, and what culture we are exposed to). Monopolies that have previously been reserved for the elite of society have been totally shattered — the citizens have become empowered.
The key phrase here is that nobody needs to ask permission anymore to make their opinion heard, to partake in society, or to create culture. This, I feel, is at the root of the conflict, and what causes the old elite — the ancien regime – to come down so hard on the new technologies. It used to be, that if you were part of the unwashed masses, you needed to filter everything through society’s elite in order to reach the rest of the masses.
That way, this elite held an effective griplock on what the masses knew — what they were allowed to know — and therefore on what they could say, play, perform, build, and do.
No longer.
That’s the key thing that has changed. Communication is no longer one-to-many, with the “one” being part of society’s elite, but many-to-many. Or, if you like to phrase it that way, all-to-all. This is something we cherish in the pirate community, that nobody asks permission any longer, and that people stand up for one another’s right to not have to ask permission to broadcast.
So I’m moving towards rephrasing the core principle to empowerment. We want an empowered society. In the balance between individual and government, we stand firmly on the side of the individual, with government’s role being one of allowing individual fulfillment and always assuming good faith. Governing, not ruling.
Nobody should need permission to observe, report, partake, communicate, create, share, or build.
This extends further and fits well in with the tangential thoughts that many pirate parties have been moving towards on education, on jobs, on economy – it fits extraordinary well with the thought of empowerment, of empowering everybody to take charge of their own lives without having to ask anybody’s permission.”
Leave a comment