You might be more comfortable thinking about deploying math and code as your tactic, but I want to talk to you about the full suite of tactics that we use to effect change in the world. And this is a framework that we owe to this guy Lawrence Lessig.
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I think in order to understand why the Pirate Party came about as a political party, you have to look at the way that these file sharers—often minors—were being addressed by the political establishment and by the cultural lobbyists in particular. And what kinds of measures were being lobbied for by the cultural industries, especially the surveillance of people’s online behavior, which we’ve only learned probably years later was going to become a much broader problem for a fundamental rights.
In addition to freedom to connect, there also needs to be the ability to connect, and that we need to model best practice at home and around the world, and the policies that relate to that.
So the kind of technologies that get made are not necessarily very exciting. It’s something that [Alexis] Madrigal of The Atlantic said, these technologies that are coming out of these startups, they’re nice, they’re cheap, they’re fun. And they’re about as world-changing as another variation of beer pong. This is not big, radical change.