Piracy and the Politics of Social Media

Martin Almqvist

doi:10.3390/socsci5030041

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the understanding of how and where politics are made has changed radically. Scholars such as Ulrich Beck and Maria Bakardjieva have discussed how political agency is enacted outside of conventional party organizations, and political struggles increasingly focus on single issues. Over the past two decades, this transformation of politics has become common knowledge, not only in academic research but also in the general political discourse. Recently, the proliferation of digital activism and the political use of social media are often understood to enforce these tendencies. This article analyzes the Pirate Party in relation to these theories, relying on almost 30 interviews with active Pirate Party members from different parts of the world. The Pirate Party was initially formed in 2006, focusing on copyright, piracy, and digital privacy. Over the years, it has developed into a more general democracy movement, with an interest in a wider range of issues. This article analyzes how the party’s initial focus on information politics and social media connects to a wider range of political issues and to other social movements, such as Arab Spring protests and Occupy Wall Street. Finally, it discusses how this challenges the understanding of information politics as a single issue agenda.

Highlights

Throughout the 1990s, the conceptions of politics in the Western world changed in certain ways.In the early part of the decade, the impact of the environmental movement, the growth of identity politics, and the decline of the traditional political parties forced theorists to reconsider how and where politics are made
Ulrich Beck used the term subpolitics (or sub(system)politics) to describe how political struggles increasingly took place outside of the institutionalized political system, focusing on issues previously excluded from the established political agendas: “The old industrial consensus built into the social system is encountering new and different fundamental convictions: ecological, feminist, and many others” ([1], p. 52)
This new kind of politics was formed in alternative social movements, but it took place most notably in people’s everyday lives and in the choices and acts they made as individuals, citizens, and consumers [1,2]

Summary

Introduction

Throughout the 1990s, the conceptions of politics in the Western world changed in certain ways. The interviews give a number of different perspectives on the Pirate Party movement that I have explored in previous articles, focusing on the Pirate Party’s relation to information technology [6], cultural enlightenment [12], democracy [7,11], the crisis of capitalism [13] and on the conflicts between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary modes of political organization [3] Many of these issues and dilemmas connect to the Pirate Party’s development towards a wider democracy movement. The purpose of this concluding article is to discuss that shift from being a single-issue to a multiple-issue party and analyze how the Pirate Party’s initial preoccupation with filesharing technologies and open-source philosophy has promoted a wider political agenda It focuses on the pirate parties in the USA, Sweden and Germany but will eventually consider recent developments in Iceland. The article will take the Pirate Party as an example to challenge the assumption that digital activism and social media-based movements tend to have a single-issue focus

Expanding the Pirate Agenda

Netpresence and the Meaning of Social Media

Findings

The Wider Implications of Information Politics