Archive

Pirate in the Empire

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.

Micah Lee at Aaron Swartz Day 2015

When I was think­ing about what I would talk about last night, I was read­ing more about Aaron. Unfortunately, I nev­er got to meet him before he died, but I real­ized that he passed away on January 11, 2013, and that was actu­al­ly the same day that I first heard from Edward Snowden.