Today’s Der Spiegel contains a fascinating story on the rise of Sweden’s Pirate Party, a fast-growing political party founded foursquare on Internet freedom:
http://www.spiegel.de/...
And it got me thinking: isn’t it about time we Americans had our own Pirate Party? After all, doesn’t the Internet offer us an opportunity to fundamentally reshape politics? Didn’t the Internet bring us Daily Kos and even Barack Obama himself? We know the establishment is going to gradually get control over the Internet unless we—the digerati—rise to our rightful place of power now.
What do we want? What is the image of our times? Look at Iran today, and I do mean today. The Internet is at the very heart of the hopes for Iranian democracy that is boiling under the surface of the Ayatollah’s stern decrees. The hope is Youtube, peer to peer, Twitter, Facebook, breaking down the barriers to free communications between people. When you think about it the biggest threat to authoritarianism everywhere in the world is the Internet itself in all its irrepressible glory and thousand-armed reach.
What has the Internet done to our traditional world, and why does it offer us electrifying possibilities in this, our moment? The Internet has famously destroyed the so-called "middleman" in field after field in a frenzy of what Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction." The Internet has disintermediated travel agencies, ticket counters, bookstores, music and video CDs and the establishments which sell them. With the emergence of Youtube we see in a sense the disintermediation of entertainment. No longer do you need a production company, a budget, funds, cameras, and connections to get your videos shot and seen. Now any fool in their bedroom can accomplish this, and it’s amazing just how entertaining this stuff gets when millions of people are striving to express themselves and filters like number of views allows you to see the winners.
But the most electrifying possibilities of the Internet are not in the field of commerce or entertainment but rather in human cooperation and even human freedom. When we look at Wikipedia and the free software movement we see something remarkable not just on a cultural level but in world historical terms as well. We see an unprecedented effusion of human cooperation to create unprecedented structures and orders. We see such cooperation creating in a few years the worlds largest and most useful encyclopedia, and again in a few years, developing an operating system and associated software for free that corporations pay billions of dollars to develop.
What does all this phenomenal exuberance and controlled creativity tell us? To me it says that the greatest possibility of the Internet is yet to be realized, for it is in the political sphere, pioneered in the Barack Obama campaign and in Daily Kos itself. We may sigh as President Obama seems on issue after issue to be compromising with traditional politics. But the greatest promise of the Internet is still a bit in the future, for it lies in the fundamental disintermediation of traditional politics--wholesale disintermediation of hack politicians, engorged bureaucracies and tiresome factions.
Now on that point you may say, whoa, how is the Internet going to disintermediate faction? How is the Internet going to avoid divisiveness over issues like abortion, taxes, homosexuality, and the like? Here is where we can read the tea leaves of the future in Wikipedia For it is precisely on these topics—abortion, homosexuality, gun control—and on many other highly controversial topics that the Wikipedia is in its glory. Read the articles on these subjects. If you expect a one-sided assault by the most persistent and annoying factions you will be surprised to find perhaps the most well-rounded articles ever written on these subjects, far more balanced than anything to be found in a traditional encyclopedia. Why? How is this achieved? It is achieved by an intense prolonged debate of which there is a written record on the talk pages available to anyone to consult. These talk pages reveal democracy in action, everyday citizens debating in great detail every point from every point of view and through sometimes excruciating effort finding ways of being respectful, inclusive, and yet above all truthful and honest with respect to anyone and everyone. This is the future, not the petty debates between factions who endlessly repeat slogans and constantly whip up anger and hate.
One can only write so much in a daily diary, but a final thought here would be that the Internet also invites us to take for the first time in history a global political perspective. It is after all the globe itself and worldwide humanity which is threatened by global warming. And it is the squabbling of the principalities and powers in all their selfish and rhetorical excesses who seem utterly unable to deal with these threats to our common life. Look at what happened in Somali itself, where real pirates have recently swung into action. Advanced nations were taking advantage of Somali’s "failed state" status and were dumping toxic wastes within its territorial waters causing serious environmental consequences. Many modern Somali pirates consider their actions as fighting back against this wanton exploitation. And although it would be rather naughty to take the pirates’ perspective, the depredations of the great nations which they invariably cloak in platitudes of self righteousness may yet destroy us all unless we rise up and take our birthright which is self control and self government via the Internet, disintermediating all the failed states which constitute today’s world system of proliferating weapons of mass destruction and warring religions.