Rick Falkvinge's Blog, page 10

The First Ten Years of the Pirate Party: Lessons Learned and Road Ahead

Infopolicy: Exactly ten years ago, on January 1 2006 at 20:30 CET, the Swedish and first Pirate Party was launched by me setting up an ugly website. Since then, we delivered on the proof of concept on June 7, 2009, and the movement grew from there. We weren’t always successful, though, and it’s important to be humble and do a little retrospection.

The choice of January 1 wasn’t so much chosen as a symbolic date as it was done then out of necessity. I had worked on the ugly site over the Yule holidays, and had an ordinary day of work the next day, so I simply had to take online whatever was ready at the time. But once the word was out, it just snowballed. No, scratch that. Avalanched.

From there, I led the Swedish Pirate Party for its first five years, delivering on the primary mission of showing that activists can run for office and succeed when the party got elected to the European Parliament on June 7, 2009 under my leadership. It was a huge victory showing that the net generation didn’t have to take policymaking bullshit sitting down, but that we could run for office and kick offline-borns out of their nonperforming jobs. Many other successes from other Pirate Parties followed. I stepped down from the position of party leader exactly five years ago, five years after founding the party, choosing to go full-time international liberty evangelist, something I still enjoy doing. At the time, I also revamped this blog completely (and will revamp it yet again in the coming days to a new format again).

The Mission

We’re at a crossroads with regard to information technology: who controls it? If the answer is “the government”, we’re in for a Big Brother society so horrible that books trying to describe it in the 1950s would have been discarded as too unrealistically dark. On the other hand, if the answer is “the citizens”, we’re in for a more innovative, creative, and transparent society than has ever existed. There’s enormous values at stake here.

Pretty much all of the incumbent powers are fighting to take control of the Net. While this is a problem that may solve itself once the net generation gets into power on a large scale, we risk having a Big Brother society by then that runs unquestioned by such future powerholders. Our mission was – and is – therefore to build a bridge of liberty between today and the time when the net generation gets into power on a large scale. It’s going to be some 30-40 years. Basically, the mission is and was to prevent a dystopia that would take centuries to undo.

What We Have Learned

We’ve grown and gotten elected in Sweden and Germany, and also became victims of our own success there (more on that later). We almost made it to the European Parliament from the Czech Republic in 2014. We’re currently polling at thirty-plus percent in Iceland, making it possible to hold the prime ministry there after the spring 2017 elections (though that’s pure speculation on my part; I don’t know the tactical game the Icelandic team has in mind and I only talk about the prime ministry based on the raw numbers – the PPIS is the largest party by far). We can observe that teams in different countries have consistently taken turns to pull the movement as a whole forward, making it overall viable.

We’ve learned how to get elected. Actually, scratch that. We’ve learned how to deserve getting elected. There’s a strong difference. But we haven’t learned deserving a re-election yet. We need to be humble on this point.

But the most important thing we’ve learned is that you don’t have to take repressive laws sitting down, but that it’s completely possible to run for office and kick digital illiterates out.

What We Have Accomplished

There’s a lot to say about what we have accomplished in this decade. For starters, the party is ten years old today, and we’re on our second term in the European Parliament. That kind of success borders on ridiculously impossible.

We brought a radical copyright monopoly reform proposal into the mainstream – the Pirate Party platform is now an integral part of the platform of the Green party group in the European Parliament.

We stopped Three Strikes and made it illegal across Europe, thwarting the copyright industry’s plans of shutting people off the net in the hundreds of thousands.

We were instrumental in stopping ACTA, working from inside Parliament while Anonymous and others were staging rallies across European cities.

Finally, there’s the Reda report, where Julia Reda – Pirate Member of the European Parliament, elected from Germany – was tasked with formally evaluating what works and what doesn’t work in the European Union copyright monopoly legislation, and who wrote a report on the matter and managed to get the Parliament as a whole to approve it. If somebody had told me a Pirate would be formally in charge of evaluating the copyright monopoly at the European level less than a decade after the Pirate Party’s founding, I’m not sure I would have believed them. But that’s what we’ve done.

What Has Changed in Ten Years

Depressingly little has changed in these ten years, actually.

Smartphones have arrived, so the tools have moved from desk to palm. Streaming has arrived (Pandora, Spotify, Netflix) and somewhat displaced torrenting as the media delivery mechanism of choice. People don’t torrent music any longer, but certainly torrent movies and TV shows.

Otherwise, the arguments from the copyright industry remain the same dumb arguments heard in 2003. What we’ve managed to do in that time is stave of the worst stupidities (notably ACTA and Three Strikes). It’s still illegal to use your own property, it’s still illegal to share interesting stuff with friends, it’s still illegal to do the most obvious good things just because old obsolete industries don’t like it. That’s Dumb.

I was joking the other day that I could probably re-run 90% of the articles on this blog, and they would still be as applicable as they were the day I wrote them.

This doesn’t mean we failed. It means that the power struggle is at least at a standstill, whereas before we came on stage, things were going the wrong way quickly.

Hard Lessons: Overapplying Democracy

One of the most expensive lessons has been in understanding democracy, what it’s good for, and when not to overdo it. The Swedish and German parties both fell on this point. I describe what happened in the Swedish party in detail in chapter seven in Swarmwise, but long story short, we created a youth section to get governmental grants, and had to structure it completely counter to net thinking. That was the death knell, right then and there. Once it was there, the values of the counter-net-thinking gradually took over the decentralized swarmthink of the main party, and the organization gradually bureaucratized, drove off activists and people who lead tech-style by building, making, and leading by example, and lost its delivery capacity. It went from being an organization that rewarded the best activism, to being an organization that rewarded the best procedural trickery. Hard to recover from that point.

Germany had a similar story. It had to organize in a certain (old-fashioned) way in order to be eligible for grants. Growing at a record pace, it was impossible to keep the original values when the member vote tenfolded and everybody got their pet projects into the party line. Simply put, it was not possible to keep a guiding star of a true free-information liberty ideology. Two factions – a liberal and a left-wing – crystallized, and the German party fell from there, having enjoyed as much as 13% in national polls (which is no small feat in a large country like Germany).

The lesson here is that democracy isn’t a solution that fits everywhere and on all levels. It’s constructed as a safety valve at the nation-state level and its primary benefit is that it replaces a regime before a violent revolution breaks out. But at the organization level, you have much easier means to escape the rules of a leader you don’t agree with – you just walk somewhere else. Taking this reasoning to its extreme, democracy is not how you run an organization where participation is voluntary in the first place, for it creates losers by definition of its very process, and losers are unhappy people who disengage. There are much better ways to run such organizations.

It’s hard to not look at the two most successful open projects here: Linux (the kernel) and Wikipedia. Neither of them vote, ever. Linux discusses until a technical advantage is evident for either option, and if agreement cannot be reached, Torvalds decides. Wikipedia discusses until it is determined what makes the better encyclopedia. There’s something very important to learn here, mixed in with our own experience: while democracy is preferable at the nation-state level, where the Law of Two Feet cannot be applied, it was grossly overapplied in the early Pirate Parties in a way that disengaged people at a huge cost.

So why did we overapply democracy in this way in the early Pirate Parties? Because we knew of no other way to organize, basically. “All the others did it like this.” It was a very expensive lesson, but we gradually learned to apply net organization to new political organizations. I wrote a book on that later.

Staying True to the Ideology, Even When Inconvenient

We’re champions of free speech. This means allowing nudity in the United States and hate speech in Germany, for example, despite being politically inconvenient and almost taboo. Actually, it goes beyond just “allowing” such expressions, but ferociously defending them, calling out people who want to restrict free speech as not having a single moral leg to stand on. Tearing such warriors of morality down from the high horses they pretend to be riding on, and doing so in full view of the public. We’ve failed to do this in some fear of public disapproval, and it’s come back to bite us pretty much every time. There are many other examples. If you don’t have free speech, you have none of the other liberties, either. It’s just because the thought is taboo that it must be challenged.

We’ve only just started. The average time for a new party to get one person elected is on the order of 25 years. We’ve got a lot ahead of us. But damn, what a ride it’s been these first ten years.

Bitcoin; Technology Beyond Ideology And A Call For Evolution

Activism – Nozomi Hayase: Six years since the invention of the blockchain, more people are beginning to see the powerful political implications that this technology brings. People from diverse backgrounds have been weighing in on its disruptive potential. While libertarians embrace the potential of cryptocurrencies to break up monopolies of the ‘too big to fail’ banking and payment companies, the rise of this technology was met with skepticism by many socialists. Activists who call for economic equality and oppose governments harsh austerity go further to say Bitcoin will become another tool for neoliberalism. So what is the disruptive force inherent in this technology? Is it tied to a specific political ideology?

Critics from the left primarily come from observations of particular events surrounding decentralized digital currency. On the surface, the trend of speculators trading Bitcoin and manipulation of exchange rates can resemble gambling, and some see Bitcoin as recapitulating the existing Wall Street casino-style derivative economy. This investment friendly image is strengthened when economists chime in to depict Bitcoin’s fixed monetary supply (a total of 21M bitcoin is created) as a currency mimicking assets like gold and criticize it as having a deflationary monetary design that would incentivize hoarding and increase wealth inequality.

Contrary to these perceptions, Bitcoin was never meant as a get-rich-quick scheme. While it possesses gold-like characteristics, it is also radically different, as it is highly portable and divisible (Bitcoin can be divided into 8 decimal points and more if consensus is reached). This is a new monetary design that has never existed before.

Competition vs. Cooperation

Bitcoin creates a currency with unprecedented flow. It melts borders and artificial barriers of ideological differences. It resists any stagnation of thought that tries to mold it to carry certain special interests. Careful examination reveals how it is an architecture that embodies innate human nature and is designed to uphold our internal governing structures.

From Socrates’ dictum of know thyself to the modern age of reason, throughout history people have tried to understand the internal laws that constitute man. Naturalist Charles Darwin, upon observation of biological phenomena, identified and defined this internal law as an evolutionary force that guides all species.

In his first work, The Origin of Species, he brought the theory of natural selection and random variation. The notion of survival of the fittest, first coined by English philosopher Herbert Spencer to describe his economic theory and later taken up by Darwin, promoted a view of man as not much more than claws and teeth. This became a prevailing ideology behind the rise of social Darwinism and was used to justify European colonialism and modern predatory capitalism that was spawned in the late 19th century.

Yet, this narrative of fierce competition for life was only half the story. Russian philosopher Peter Kropotkin wrote a response to the predominant Darwinian interpretation of natural hierarchy. In his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, he argued for the feeling of solidarity, empathy and cooperation as the ground for human evolution.

This alternative view was held also by Darwin himself. Psychologist and system scientist David Loey in Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love debunked the narrow reductionist interpretation of Neo-Darwinians that emphasized the notion of the selfish genes. He argued how most had buried a major contribution Darwin made when he moved beyond pre-human evolution to examine man’s moral sensibilities. Loey pointed to how Darwin, in his second work The Descent of Man, had recognized that nurturing, expressed as sympathy for the weak was a primary evolutionary force that drives humans to develop higher agency with the principle of mutuality.

The seemingly unbridgeable ideological divide between socialism and capitalism can be looked at as an expression of a contradiction that existed between Darwin’s earlier and later works. It is experienced as two forces constantly battling within us. On one hand, we have a drive for individual pursuits and independence and on the other aspirations for altruism and a deeper connection with others.

In current civilization, the tendency toward personal gain and competitive drive has been overriding the principles of cooperation. What has now become apparent is that the greed of a small minority in a ‘race to the top’ has subverted a broader evolutionary force, holding people hostage in a brutal animal-like kingdom of kleptocracy. The survival of the species in modern times has turned into a game of survival of the crudest and most rapacious corporations and bankers. This has now escalated into an arms race to the bottom, creating resource wars, economic apartheid and environmental catastrophe, likely leading to planetary crisis.

Digital Scarcity

The imagination that infused the blockchain technology intervenes in the course of human evolution that has been heading down this destructive path. Decentralized consensus at the core of this innovation gives us a platform to reconcile seemingly opposing forces manifested as this ideological divide and brings a creative solution to global problems outside of electoral politics.

Bitcoin is like one big organism that regulates itself through algorithm. With no company, CEO or individuals in control, it maintains a ledger transparent to all. Its ecosystem evolves to manifest a vision encoded in its DNA, through stimulus and active interaction with its environment.

The core of this technology is algorithmic consensus that enables digital scarcity; a way to make an object in the digital world scarce without central control. This solves the problem of the double-spend. Cryptographer Adam Back, whose invention of Hashcash contributed to the creation of Bitcoin’s digital scarcity, noted how Bitcoin “constructs a computational irrevocability from proof-of-work and consensus”. This makes permissionless transaction and innovation possible, as well as removing monopolistic control of the production and transfer of money. But more fundamentally, this scarcity offers a key to open society to move beyond the current oligarchical rule of the neo-Darwinian dog-eat-dog world that has now turned into the lions eating the lambs.

The market logic that governs the existing extractive system is that of central control. As a hallmark of the industrial era, capitalism bases its foundation on the idea of land ownership. This places production and distribution into private hands. Scarcity was created through monopolistic control of resources and energy (such as the oil spigot), which has mostly been done in secrecy.

What became the ‘owner class’ began setting rules for the rest of the population through their undue influence on governments. This controlled market slowly destroyed healthy price discovery processes by manipulating currency and creating monopolies. Government giveaways in the form of corporate welfare stifles true entrepreneurship and innovation. Forces of privatization have been swallowing the commons. With scarce access to resources and jobs, people are pitted against one another, engaging in a rigged game that just keeps enriching the richest.

Unlike the managed scarcity of centrally controlled markets, Bitcoin’s digital scarcity is created through voluntary agreement of its participants. Its open source protocol grants users power to choose what kind of network they wish to create or be a part of, as codes can be modified by anyone. Combined with game theory that enforces fairness, this scarcity creates a new form of capital, one that is open source and distributed. This brings a radical departure from the current vulture capitalism that promotes cheating and wealth without work by means of usury, rent-seeking and QE (taxation through inflation).

While central banks use fiat currency as a force of coercion, Bitcoin currency is a token of value that provides an incentive to generate productivity and efficiency of the workers (miners). This pays for the labor required to build a whole new global financial system. In a sense, each Bitcoin mining pool is like a worker-owned cooperative that requires members to both work together and also compete within the network to perform the issuing of monetary units and clearing of transactions. Solidarity generated through collective hashing power maintains the ethos of decentralized consensus.

Perceived deflationary characteristics touted as Bitcoin’s flaw is actually a vital incentive structure that bootstraps the whole venture to build a new infrastructure in this time of transition from a massive teetering debt economy. This networked scarcity encourages the funding of start-ups and fueling of innovation on the edges. All around, new projects are emerging, ones that could fulfill the aspirations and needs of various communities, fostering a new network effect of altruism. Crowd-funding platforms like StartJoin and Bitcoin Capital are good examples of this.

Distributed Accountability

Bitcoin’s self-organizing is not easily understood from outside looking in. It is like a caterpillar in the cocoon before turning into a butterfly. Market manipulation and outright theft within exchanges like Mt. Gox appear to confirm the view of man as selfishly driven. Yet, this is occurring in centralized offshoots and simply a reflection of the greed rampant in the existing system.

If we dig a little deeper into this ecosystem, what is happening within the mining process also appears to affirm the theory of natural selection, where those with powerful computer chips and hashing power can increase the chance of winning the game. Indeed, mining equipment is now highly specialized and is becoming more like a kind of survival of the fittest (where ordinary computers can no longer participate in mining). This brings concern about the potential centralization of mining. Yet, just as Darwin’s first work does not complete his full picture of evolution, the mining was also designed to be subservient to the imagination that infused this innovation.

The fierce mining competition fosters efficiency, helping make the relative capacity of the Bitcoin ecosystem significantly less energy intensive than the existing financial system and the most ecological one when fully utilized at a global scale. This also helps create a solid foundation upon which a social contract of a truly democratic society can be built.

The creator of this technology, Satoshi Nakamoto found a way to secure the system from the risks of concentrated greed and destructive seeds within our ‘selfish genes’. This was done through implementing a particular consensus algorithm that enforces people to show the proof of their work. Rewards here function as a mechanism to keep everyone honest and the equilibrium of supply and demand distributes accountability as a form of self-regulation taken up by those who participate in the mining.

All this has become an engine to build a system that is impervious to internal or external attacks. The mining rings that have now achieved global level security perform a kind of safeguard of real democracy, through which spontaneous forces of We the People can be unleashed. With its feature of infinite divisibility, value created through a peer-to-peer exchange of autonomy and reciprocity can become an abundant flow that nurtures all people, especially those who are made weak and vulnerable by current Western exploitation.

This even makes it possible for the other six billion, the unbanked and under-banked, especially in the Global South to participate in the world economy on their own terms. This is already starting to happen as investment and interest in transforming the massive remittance market is increasing, while charity and tipping is the fastest growing usage of Bitcoin in the West.

Paving the Way for Altruism

Many of us wish to evolve; to act more freely and extend kindness and compassion to others, but our actions are restricted and controlled by oppressive governments, religious fundamentalism and de-facto corporate dictatorship. As commercial-led globalization expands, the entire globe is shackled to the tyrannical logic of extreme capitalism and cowboy banksters’ autocratic control over the flow of money. People with good hearts are forced to adapt to the harsh environment of austerity and rule by the rich. They have to make hard decisions; either to be kind to others or suppress that innate nature of altruism just to survive.

The blockchain removes these obstacles, allowing us to align ourselves with internal forces of evolution. The built-in incentive structure of this game-changing innovation offers humanity a path to divest from the military-industrial complex, war economies, sweat shops and debt slavery as well as Stasi-like surveillance. Instead of supporting oligarchs that print money at will to buy missiles and tanks, people can independently invest in mining gear and channel the selfish and aggressive parts of humanity to serve the larger whole.

Artificial scarcity in centrally planned economies fuels destructive competition among people, dividing all through fear into separated nations, religions and ideologies, and justifies wars and hatred. Now the competitive drive that has been cut off and stagnated can be brought back to its origin of creative power and transformed into one that encourages each to strive for their best in service to all.

With decentralized cryptocurrencies, we can move away from the deterministic future imposed by central banks and divisive political ideologues and build a society that represents who we really are. Those who are ready and want it will find a way to chart a new path. Those in power can choose not to evolve, but they can no longer take the rest of us down with them.

Humans it seems are being degraded into killer apes. As the ideals of distributed consensus enshrined in mathematics are fully developed, they become the killer apps that can help humanity redeem itself. In this new world entered through the blockchain, we can now move beyond struggles for existence and ascend as a species capable of love.

Photo credit – Silhouette of a fibreglass spinosaurus at Blackpool zoo in Lancashire, UK and a ‘con’ trail by Simon Harrod.

Launching New Reporting Service – 682 Writers, Editors, Managers Wanted For Part-Time. Yes, You'll Get Paid, And Paid Well. Launch Now, Operational In Q3.

Headlines: Today, I’m launching a news service in an entirely new format, designed to outcompete oldmedia. The new service publishes all news as shareable images, thereby bypassing a large number of restrictions and limitations, not needing clickbait, and being immune to adblock – but also paying people well, using bitcoin. Meanwhile, oldmedia continues to call people greedy and selfish for not buying their printouts of yesterday’s internet.

It was on April 8, 2014, that the European Court of Justice declared mass surveillance in the form of data retention unconstitutional, impermissible, null, and void. Oldmedia didn’t mention the ruling at all. Instead, they wrote about surveillance activist pets. It was on that very day I decided that oldmedia no longer reports anything relevant, and decided to outcompete them.

Oldmedia is complaining that the net generation isn’t buying their printouts of yesterday’s internet, and say that the net generation is disinterested in civic society. They couldn’t be more wrong. There has never been a generation more interested in the society we live in. However, oldmedia is mistaking a disinterest in the last generation’s problems – and that generation’s solutions to their own problems – as a disinterest in general. This is a complete misconception. The net generation has a new set of problems, and they’re being discussed with more fervor and intensity than any set of civic issues before.

Oldmedia is not addressing this at all. Nor do they seem to have the capability to even see it, despite being right in front of them. That effectively makes them obsolete. Not only that, but they have willingly reduced themselves in a multi-decade process to mouthpieces for regimes plagued by corruption and nepotism – not just in the poor parts of the world, but in all parts of the world. They happily accept a poisoned newswell and declare it to be Truth – from campaigns against Iraq to recent campaigns against Snowden. That’s not just dishonest, that’s sickening and destructive.

Fortunately, the numbers (see below) say that we can outcompete them on pure business grounds. It’s high time to do so – to outcompete oldmedia’s entire concept, basically, and write about civic issues relevant to the net generation instead of blindly complaining about spoiled kids. As a bonus, we get to be paid well in the process – much better than oldmedia pays.

More details about our reason for being on the front page of the wiki.

Retweet the image below to see how easy and straightforward this concept is:

Falkvinge starts net-generation news service, hiring 682 people pic.twitter.com/MGA9iffAV6

— Falconwing News (@FalconwingNews) June 15, 2015

To learn this game, we’re starting out in Europe before going global. For each of the 28 countries in the EU, plus Switzerland, Iceland, and Norway, we need 21 writers and one country manager.

The job of a writer is to write a three-sentence story once a week. An estimated one-hour job per week, for which writers will be paid approximately €125 per month*. Should be a nice addition on the margin to anybody who’s doing writing anyway.

The job of a country manager is to edit those stories for further edge and to work with the writers to actually get the stories out (read: remind writers to submit stories when they’re due), as well as recruit new writers, for which country managers will be paid approximately €1,250 per month*. The workload is expected to be about 10 hours per week. This means a country manager edits and clears three stories per day for their country.

*see Q&A below. It’s a revenue sharing model – it may be some time before the revenue hits those levels, and it obviously starts at zero. But given the low workload, this should be bearable. We need an estimated 30,000 impressions per newspiece on average to reach those levels. (An “impression” is when the newspiece and its ad was shown once to one person, in their Twitter, Facebook, etc. timelines.)

We need 30,000 impressions per newspiece, on average, to reach breakeven.

To get a sense for how much 30,000 impressions are, look at these tweets – these are from my personal account:

Relevant fact with a hint of sarcasm – 23,500 impressions:

Some are outraged about Saudi's nine executions so far this year, no trial. Meanwhile, US Police have killed 44 so far this year, no trial.

— Rick Falkvinge (@Falkvinge) January 16, 2015

Relevant fact with a stronger hint of sarcasm – 45,600 impressions:

Fact: more than twice as many people die from contact with hot tap water in Europe per year (90) than from terrorism (40).

— Rick Falkvinge (@Falkvinge) January 17, 2015

Outright sarcasm at stupidity – 125,086 impressions:

Bigot: "If this hispanicization continues, the city of Los Angeles may well soon have a Spanish name" – um what, say that again?

— Rick Falkvinge (@Falkvinge) January 11, 2015

Random fact coupled with biting sarcasm at abusive industry – 460,966 impressions:

165 years ago, UK Parliament legalized public libraries where people could read for free. Just as publishers warned, no book written since.

— Rick Falkvinge (@Falkvinge) January 17, 2015

So is 30,000 impressions – on average, per piece – doable? Yes. Yes it is, damn right it is. However, a success also requires the advertising revenue to match. The 30,000 figure is measured on an average CPM of €2.50, which was last year’s average. Since this is a new concept, we may reach less or more. We honestly don’t know that yet.

For prospective advertisers, we’re offering €250 in sign-up credit toward advertising in a closed beta for merely supplying a Twitter handle to use for login and an ad to run. No credit card or anything like that required. This beta is limited to 100 clients. Contact sales if you’re interested in advertising – we’ll be delighted to get you going.

For writers and editors/country managers, sign up here, or read more on the wiki!

Q&A

Will the €125-per-twelve-sentences or €1,250-per-ten-hours be effective immediately?

No, I estimate it will take some months until the necessary revenue is there. It’s a revenue sharing model where writers get up to 40% of the gross revenue, straight off the top, to get to that number. Do compare that model with your favorite oldmedia house, or any oldmedia house. (Hint: they rarely pay at all.) But given the low workload, hanging in there for that time while the revenue scales up from the initial zero shouldn’t be too much of a discouragement.

See this wiki page for more information about how compensation is calculated, see how it scales up quickly in the beginning (but does start at zero), reaches the target plateau, and then starts increasing again later (at about 150,000 impressions per piece – compare above examples).

Why are you aiming for such exorbitant wages? That’s far more than anything in oldmedia offers.

You just answered your own question.

I’m not located in an EU28 country or Norway or Switzerland or Iceland. Can I still be part of this?

Not initially, sorry. We’re learning to walk before we learn to run. You’re still welcome to apply, though, and we’ll contact you when we expand to where you live.

Everybody’s running adblock today. You can’t possibly get advertising revenues?

This concept is immune to adblock.

What’s the target audience?

Intelligent people, of the net generation, who are independent, and share. That rules out any “news” about Kim Kardashian, for example.

Wait, what do you mean you’re immune to adblock? You can’t be immune to adblock.

This concept is immune not just to Adblock Plus and the like, but to all known forms of adblocking. Look at the story above and you’ll see that the ad is an integral part of the image shared.

I’m an advertiser. Can I be part of the closed beta?

Absolutely! We will need a Twitter handle for login, your company name, and one more way to reach you (like a mail address), and an ad to run which is based on this template. Provide us with that and we’ll respond with €250 in advertising credit, nothing else required. Mail here.

Do you require a degree for applications?

Are you joking? Of course not. However, excellent language and communications skills in English, as well as excellent analytical skills and a great sense of humor are requirements. A Mensa membership would be a plus, for example. Not that we’d ever look it up, but just to illustrate.

For country managers, people skills and understanding of swarm management are also requirements. The idea is that a country manager should be able to fund their living while getting a university degree, and fund it well, on those 10-or-so hours of work per week – and thus, it doesn’t make sense to require people to already have a degree.

Do you provide a union?

You’re kidding, right? …No.

Will this be a clickbait trap?

Absolutely not. We’re not even going to provide links. There won’t be anything to click on. We’re going to be providing quality reporting and have no incentive whatsoever to post clickbait, because we’re not posting links in the first place.

I’m not located in the EU or NO or CH, but would love to be part of this anyway. Can I?

Not at launch, sorry. However, the service is only starting out in Europe, with the intention of gradually going global. Do submit your application anyway, and we’ll get back when we’re expanding to your area?

Do I get paid in euros/zloty/skräppisar?

No. Payments are in bitcoin, only. No exceptions. This is for the low transaction costs and programmability involved. This entire enterprise will be unbanked by design and choice. Amount denomination may vary, but the actual payments are in bitcoin.

Blah blah taxes blah blah?

You’re responsible for paying your own taxes, and doing all paperwork required to allow you to pay your own taxes, if any. Everything’s on contractor basis to simplify operations. As payments are in bitcoin, do remember to include them in your tax reporting as appropriate – it’s probably not automatic.

The post Launching New Reporting Service – 682 Writers, Editors, Managers Wanted For Part-Time. Yes, You'll Get Paid, And Paid Well. Launch Now, Operational In Q3. appeared first on Falkvinge on Liberty.

Launching New Reporting Service – 682 Writers, Editors, Managers Wanted For Part-Time. Yes, You’ll Get Paid, And Paid Well. Launch Now, Operational In Q3.

Infopolicy: Today, I’m launching a news service in an entirely new format, designed to outcompete oldmedia. The new service publishes all news as shareable images, thereby bypassing a large number of restrictions and limitations, not needing clickbait, and being immune to adblock – but also paying people well, using bitcoin. Meanwhile, oldmedia continues to call people greedy and selfish for not buying their printouts of yesterday’s internet.

It was on April 8, 2014, that the European Court of Justice declared mass surveillance in the form of data retention unconstitutional, impermissible, null, and void. Oldmedia didn’t mention the ruling at all. Instead, they wrote about surveillance activist pets. It was on that very day I decided that oldmedia no longer reports anything relevant, and decided to outcompete them.

Oldmedia is complaining that the net generation isn’t buying their printouts of yesterday’s internet, and say that the net generation is disinterested in civic society. They couldn’t be more wrong. There has never been a generation more interested in the society we live in. However, oldmedia is mistaking a disinterest in the last generation’s problems – and that generation’s solutions to their own problems – as a disinterest in general. This is a complete misconception. The net generation has a new set of problems, and they’re being discussed with more fervor and intensity than any set of civic issues before.

Oldmedia is not addressing this at all. Nor do they seem to have the capability to even see it, despite being right in front of them. That effectively makes them obsolete. Not only that, but they have willingly reduced themselves in a multi-decade process to mouthpieces for regimes plagued by corruption and nepotism – not just in the poor parts of the world, but in all parts of the world. They happily accept a poisoned newswell and declare it to be Truth – from campaigns against Iraq to recent campaigns against Snowden. That’s not just dishonest, that’s sickening and destructive.

Fortunately, the numbers (see below) say that we can outcompete them on pure business grounds. It’s high time to do so – to outcompete oldmedia’s entire concept, basically, and write about civic issues relevant to the net generation instead of blindly complaining about spoiled kids. As a bonus, we get to be paid well in the process – much better than oldmedia pays.

More details about our reason for being on the front page of the wiki.

Retweet the image below to see how easy and straightforward this concept is:

Falkvinge starts net-generation news service, hiring 682 people pic.twitter.com/MGA9iffAV6

— Falconwing News (@FalconwingNews) June 15, 2015

To learn this game, we’re starting out in Europe before going global. For each of the 28 countries in the EU, plus Switzerland, Iceland, and Norway, we need 21 writers and one country manager.

The job of a writer is to write a three-sentence story once a week. An estimated one-hour job per week, for which writers will be paid approximately €125 per month*. Should be a nice addition on the margin to anybody who’s doing writing anyway.

The job of a country manager is to edit those stories for further edge and to work with the writers to actually get the stories out (read: remind writers to submit stories when they’re due), as well as recruit new writers, for which country managers will be paid approximately €1,250 per month*. The workload is expected to be about 10 hours per week. This means a country manager edits and clears three stories per day for their country.

*see Q&A below. It’s a revenue sharing model – it may be some time before the revenue hits those levels, and it obviously starts at zero. But given the low workload, this should be bearable. We need an estimated 30,000 impressions per newspiece on average to reach those levels. (An “impression” is when the newspiece and its ad was shown once to one person, in their Twitter, Facebook, etc. timelines.)

We need 30,000 impressions per newspiece, on average, to reach breakeven.

To get a sense for how much 30,000 impressions are, look at these tweets – these are from my personal account:

Relevant fact with a hint of sarcasm – 23,500 impressions:

Some are outraged about Saudi's nine executions so far this year, no trial. Meanwhile, US Police have killed 44 so far this year, no trial.

— Rick Falkvinge (@Falkvinge) January 16, 2015

Relevant fact with a stronger hint of sarcasm – 45,600 impressions:

Fact: more than twice as many people die from contact with hot tap water in Europe per year (90) than from terrorism (40).

— Rick Falkvinge (@Falkvinge) January 17, 2015

Outright sarcasm at stupidity – 125,086 impressions:

Bigot: "If this hispanicization continues, the city of Los Angeles may well soon have a Spanish name" – um what, say that again?

— Rick Falkvinge (@Falkvinge) January 11, 2015

Random fact coupled with biting sarcasm at abusive industry – 460,966 impressions:

165 years ago, UK Parliament legalized public libraries where people could read for free. Just as publishers warned, no book written since.

— Rick Falkvinge (@Falkvinge) January 17, 2015

So is 30,000 impressions – on average, per piece – doable? Yes. Yes it is, damn right it is. However, a success also requires the advertising revenue to match. The 30,000 figure is measured on an average CPM of €2.50, which was last year’s average. Since this is a new concept, we may reach less or more. We honestly don’t know that yet.

For prospective advertisers, we’re offering €250 in sign-up credit toward advertising in a closed beta for merely supplying a Twitter handle to use for login and an ad to run. No credit card or anything like that required. This beta is limited to 100 clients. Contact us if you’re interested.

Sign up here, or read more on the wiki!

Q&A

Will the €125-per-twelve-sentences or €1,250-per-ten-hours be effective immediately?

No, I estimate it will take some months until the necessary revenue is there. It’s a revenue sharing model where writers get up to 40% of the gross revenue, straight off the top, to get to that number. Do compare that model with your favorite oldmedia house, or any oldmedia house. (Hint: they rarely pay at all.) But given the low workload, hanging in there for that time while the revenue scales up from the initial zero shouldn’t be too much of a discouragement.

See this wiki page for more information about how compensation is calculated, see how it scales up quickly in the beginning (but does start at zero), reaches the target plateau, and then starts increasing again later (at about 150,000 impressions per piece – compare above examples).

Why are you aiming for such exorbitant wages? That’s far more than anything in oldmedia offers.

You just answered your own question.

I’m not located in an EU28 country or Norway or Switzerland or Iceland. Can I still be part of this?

Not initially, sorry. We’re learning to walk before we learn to run. You’re still welcome to apply, though, and we’ll contact you when we expand to where you live.

Everybody’s running adblock today. You can’t possibly get advertising revenues?

This concept is immune to adblock.

What’s the target audience?

Intelligent people, of the net generation, who are independent, and share. That rules out any “news” about Kim Kardashian, for example.

Wait, what do you mean you’re immune to adblock? You can’t be immune to adblock.

This concept is immune not just to Adblock Plus and the like, but to all known forms of adblocking. Look at the story above and you’ll see that the ad is an integral part of the image shared.

I’m an advertiser. Can I be part of the closed beta?

Absolutely! We will need a Twitter handle for login, your company name, and one more way to reach you (like a mail address), and an ad to run which is based on this template. Provide us with that and we’ll respond with €250 in advertising credit, nothing else required. Mail here.

Do you require a degree for applications?

Are you joking? Of course not. However, excellent language and communications skills in English, as well as excellent analytical skills and a great sense of humor are requirements. A Mensa membership would be a plus, for example. Not that we’d ever look it up, but just to illustrate.

For country managers, people skills and understanding of swarm management are also requirements. The idea is that a country manager should be able to fund their living while getting a university degree, and fund it well, on those 10-or-so hours of work per week – and thus, it doesn’t make sense to require people to already have a degree.

Do you provide a union?

You’re kidding, right? …No.

Will this be a clickbait trap?

Absolutely not. We’re not even going to provide links. There won’t be anything to click on. We’re going to be providing quality reporting and have no incentive whatsoever to post clickbait, because we’re not posting links in the first place.

I’m not located in the EU or NO or CH, but would love to be part of this anyway. Can I?

Not at launch, sorry. However, the service is only starting out in Europe, with the intention of gradually going global. Do submit your application anyway, and we’ll get back when we’re expanding to your area?

Do I get paid in euros/zloty/skräppisar?

No. Payments are in bitcoin, only. No exceptions. This is for the low transaction costs and programmability involved. This entire enterprise will be unbanked by design and choice. Amount denomination may vary, but the actual payments are in bitcoin.

Blah blah taxes blah blah?

You’re responsible for paying your own taxes, and doing all paperwork required to allow you to pay your own taxes, if any. Everything’s on contractor basis to simplify operations. As payments are in bitcoin, do remember to include them in your tax reporting as appropriate – it’s probably not automatic.

A Year Ago, The European Supreme Court Appears To Have Ruled The Whole Web To Be In The Public Domain, And Nobody Noticed

Copyright Monopoly: On February 13, 2014, the European Court of Justice – the Supreme Court of the European Union – appears to have ruled that anything published on the web may be re-published freely by anybody else. The case concerned linking, but the court went beyond linking in its ruling. This case has not really been noticed, nor have its effects been absorbed by the community at large.

It was a little-known ruling about hyperlinking. But beneath the surface lay a bombshell that will have repercussions for how the entire world exercises the copyright monopoly: a Supreme Court ruling that every single item posted on every single webpage without access control is permanently and irrevocably in the public domain, free for anybody else to copy and rebroadcast without restrictions – without restrictability.

The case was Svensson et al v Retriever Sverige AB. It concerned whether a news aggregator is allowed to link to news articles. The court found that linking was allowed, but elaborated quite a bit on why in the process, and that ruling has the net effect that the entire web is now in the public domain, republishable by anybody on web pages of their own.

The background is that the copyright monopoly in the European Union is governed by the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD), which is the European equivalent of federal law. The EUCD goes well beyond ambiguous and vague concepts like “copying”, and lists exactly which exclusive rights are contained in the fuzzy umbrella concept of the copyright monopoly.

Basically, that umbrella contains two different rights. The copyright monopoly holder has the exclusive right to produce physical copies of their works (article 2), and the same holder has the exclusive right to communicate the work to the public, or authorize or prohibit others do to so (article 3).

Publishing on web pages falls in the latter category, “communicating to the public”. We can read in the EUCD, article 3:

Member States shall provide authors with the exclusive right to authorise or prohibit any communication to the public of their works, by wire or wireless means, including the making available to the public of their works in such a way that members of the public may access them from a place and at a time individually chosen by them.

This paragraph lists exactly what is contained in the exclusive right, and it is key for the ECJ ruling.

The people who wanted to ban linking had argued that hyperlinking was such an act of communication to the public, and the ECJ explains in quite a bit of detail why it is not. Quoting from the full ruling, with my highlights:

24. None the less, according to settled case-law, in order to be covered by the concept of ‘communication to the public’, within the meaning of Article 3(1) of Directive 2001/29, a communication, such as that at issue in the main proceedings, concerning the same works as those covered by the initial communication and made, as in the case of the initial communication, on the Internet, and therefore by the same technical means, must also be directed at a new public, that is to say, at a public that was not taken into account by the copyright holders when they authorised the initial communication to the public (see, by analogy, SGAE, paragraphs 40 and 42; order of 18 March 2010 in Case C‑136/09 Organismos Sillogikis Diacheirisis Dimiourgon Theatrikon kai Optikoakoustikon Ergon, paragraph 38; and ITV Broadcasting and Others, paragraph 39).

25. In the circumstances of this case, it must be observed that making available the works concerned by means of a clickable link, such as that in the main proceedings, does not lead to the works in question being communicated to a new public.

26. The public targeted by the initial communication consisted of all potential visitors to the site concerned, since, given that access to the works on that site was not subject to any restrictive measures, all Internet users could therefore have free access to them.

27. In those circumstances, it must be held that, where all the users of another site to whom the works at issue have been communicated by means of a clickable link could access those works directly on the site on which they were initially communicated, without the involvement of the manager of that other site, the users of the site managed by the latter must be deemed to be potential recipients of the initial communication and, therefore, as being part of the public taken into account by the copyright holders when they authorised the initial communication.

28. Therefore, since there is no new public, the authorisation of the copyright holders is not required for a communication to the public such as that in the main proceedings.

Do you understand how this changes the copyright monopoly game completely?

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) goes well beyond linking here, and rules in a broader sense on what constitutes an “act of communication to the public”, which is the exclusive right enjoyed by the copyright monopoly holder according to the EUCD. It rules quite specifically what falls inside and outside the scope of that monopoly, in order to apply that ruling to hyperlinking specifically. (Actually, it doesn’t so much rule as it refers to previously settled case law – and this is a crucial nuance, as it would not be legally binding otherwise: see the comments below. Technically, that case law is the binding ruling, not this one.)

The ECJ makes it clear that the copyright monopoly holder, once having granted an audience permission to access the work, that holder has no further right to authorize or prohibit other transmissions of the same work to the same public or audience.

Specifically, the ECJ says that for an exclusive right to exist, the “communication to the public” must concern “communication to a new public”, that is, one not previously granted access.

It therefore follows, as the ECJ writes in its ruling, that once something is published openly on the web, the entire world has been granted access to it, deliberately, by the copyright monopoly holder. Therefore, the ECJ continues in driving down the hammer on this crucial point, there are no further exclusive rights to authorize or withhold. This effectively puts the work in the public domain.

(The text “effectively put in the public domain” is not in the ruling, as that is not a legal concept. However, that is still the net effect – at least as far as the Internet is concerned; you still wouldn’t be allowed to produce physical copies of the work as per article 2 of the EUCD.)

Does this mean that photos, that are published on one website without a paywall (such as a news site), may be freely published on any other website? Yes, that’s exactly what it means. Among many other things. And this is the Supreme Court of the European Union – unappealable and the final say.

Actually, the ruling goes even further and says that you may also embed content from another web page into your own, without that being a “communication to the public” (and therefore subject to copyright monopoly controls), as long as that content was freely available to the world – i.e. the same audience as you’re presenting to – from the original webpage.

I find it strange that this ruling didn’t get more attention at the time. Fortunately, the ruling is also quite in line with common sense.

So what happens when national state laws go above and beyond this? The European Court of Justice has that case covered too:

Lastly, the Court states that the Member States do not have the right to give wider protection to copyright holders by broadening the concept of ‘communication to the public’. That would have the effect of creating legislative differences and, accordingly, legal uncertainty, when the directive at issue is specifically intended to remedy those problems.

Most interesting. This case had been assumed to be about linking and linking only. It goes way beyond linking.

So let’s hear it from all other paralegals in the community – shoot this down? If this holds, we’re dealing with a new legal landscape, one that was common sense all the time.

Swarmwise Released In Czech!

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Swarm Management: The first translation of Swarmwise is officially here – and it’s in Czech! As of 20:00 on March 30, the electronic format of the book is downloadable in a multitude of formats. This is the first translation of Swarmwise to hit the release bar; there are several more in the pipeline.

Swarmwise is a leadership handbook about how to accomplish real change in the world on a shoestring budget (or more commonly, no budget at all). It gives the reader guidance and feet-on-ground leadership lessons from the point of launching a movement or community-based startup right up until the point where it goes international.

Today, as of right now, the Czech translation is available as PDF, EPUB, and XHTML. Creative Commons, just like the original.

There’s an enormous work that has gone into this translation. I’m particularly impressed by how the Czech translators — Martin Doucha, Adam Zábranský, and Pavel Císař — have gone to great lengths to replicate the look and feel of the original book in English, while still adapting it to Czech publishing standards.

The printed version of the Czech Swarmwise is scheduled for release at a conference mid-May.

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Coding Freedom; Can Blockchain Technology Help Build A Foundation For Real Democracy?

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Civil Liberties – Nozomi Hayase: The 2008 financial meltdown and disclosures of secret documents in recent years exposed widespread government overreach and corporate fraud and abuse. As trust in traditional institutions began to sag, global uprisings were spawned to find solutions outside of electoral politics. In the midst of these deep systemic breakdowns of governance, a decentralized solution emerged with a breakthrough in computer science. As the revolutions on the streets began to wind down, perhaps nobody expected the rise of the blockchain. Bitcoin’s enormous potential for disruption is beginning to be felt in the realm of finance. Yet, currency is just its first application. The core of this invention is distributed trust that enables a platform for decentralized consensus at a large scale. Can this technology help lift us out of the crumbling old world and build a foundation for real democracy?

The ongoing global crisis of legitimacy signals a significant decay of Western liberal democracy. The seeds of this corruption go way back to the very founding of the United States. Political philosopher Sheldon S. Wolin (2008) identified “the framers of the Constitution” as “the first founders of modern managed democracy” and described how the Founding Fathers created a system that favored elite rule, giving exclusive rights to white male property owners. He pointed out how in drafting a new constitution, “they treated as axiomatic that a modern political system had to make concessions to democratic sentiments without conceding governance to ‘the people’ ” (p. 155).

Despite the founders’ success in helping throw off the yoke of royalty, this was a closed system that operated with its own inherent bias to protect privilege and power. The economic imbalance prevalent then was not addressed and was directly translated into recreating age-old lever points of control. This translated into unequal political power, creating a wide gap between the Constitutional mandate as governing structure and the aspirations for rule by the people that was indicated in the preamble; “We the People”.

The highest law of the land in the U.S. was said to free the source of legitimacy from the authority of the church and the British Crown, placing it instead in the common man, with the principle of equality under the law. Yet, this attempt to embody the spirit of equality enshrined in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence faltered right from the beginning. In the often unacknowledged hypocrisy manifested in the founders’ denial of rights to Africans, indigenous people and women, this unredeemed colonial domination carried on. Contrary to the idea of consent of the governed, the reality was subjugation of blacks through slavery and natives through violence. With any sovereignty achieved through conquest, governments don’t require the consent of the conquered.

This unchallenged economic power as the engine behind the experiment of American democracy was exercised to manufacture consent of those afforded rights to participate in the political process. Although the First Amendment asserted the separation of church and state, this declaration of rights didn’t acknowledge the necessity to check and balance state control over money and thus failed to explicitly indicate the people’s right to freely express themselves financially with the currency of their choice. People didn’t have power to restrict Congress in money creation. Whether one was a descendent of slaves or of the owner class, individual liberty remained tied to this newly constituted governance.

Tyranny of Central Banks

What really lurks behind central command in this supposed land of the free? In tracing the history of money creation in the United States, attorney and author Ellen Brown (2007) revealed that the real trigger for the Revolutionary War was King George’s ban on the printing of local money in the American colonies. She described how after independence was won, the King’s economic subservience was not achieved by force but instead by the British bankers persuading the American people to take their paper money. Brown noted how the founder’s subsequent disillusionment with paper money led them to leave it out of the Constitution and that as a result “Congress was given the power only to ‘coin money, regulate the value thereof,’ and ‘to borrow money on the credit of the United States” (p. 48).

The founding father’s failure to define exactly what money was along with the lack of healthy parameters around its creation and control left a loophole within this system of representation for the shadowy forces to penetrate and later subvert the Constitution and further betray the ideals in the Declaration. The amorphous centralized creation of money has become a single point of failure that makes the entire system vulnerable to counter-party risk. This was seen especially in the Wall Street hijack of the monetary system with the passing of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.

Former Goldman Sachs banker and author of the book All the President’s Bankers Nomi Prins described how the creation of the Federal Reserve was initiated at the turn of the 20th century to preserve American corporate supremacy, while creating stability and hegemony of major banks with deep ties to Washington. Ironically, in the home of the brave, the tyranny of the old world continued with central banks as the new Kings. Since then, every time new money was created, the people were now being charged with leverageable debt and interest. Fiat as legal tender by government decree created a kind of hidden rent-seeking royalty to maintain this throne of power.

Financialization of Everyday Life

As the authority of the church weakened over time, the merger of the state with private banks created a new state sponsored religion of market fundamentalism. This market theology, based on worshiping the gods of capital and wealth accumulation became the dominant logic dictating human interaction and expression. The financialization of everyday life has stifled the First Amendment; the flow of information as the currency of democracy. Corporate consolidation of the media created a monopoly of content production and distribution. With commercial interests hijacking electoral politics, the idea of unlimited growth bypassed democratic consensus and a doctrine of profit at any cost came to shape incentive structures for mainstream society.

In Democracy, Inc. Professor of journalism, David S. Allen (2005) astutely pointed to this conflation of corporate and civic values that undermines the public sphere. Professionals have become a new class that guards access to patronage networks of single-minded corporate power. Corporatist incentive structures have become an invisible force of governance to regulate people’s actions through enforcing self-censorship, making acts of dissent more difficult. One’s rights under the First Amendment in the U.S. have increasingly come to require implicit permission from what has now become a corporate state, exercised only on their terms.

The unruly cowboy economy has then morphed into rabid corporatism in its crusade for the ‘New American Century’. First it was railroads and oil companies. Then came drug cartels, arms manufacturers and investment banks like Goldman Sachs. Now in the digital age, companies like IBM, Apple and Google have gained significant political power. This insidious growth of corporate mergers with nation-state apparatus has reached a tipping point, expanding out into the world in the form of corporate led globalization.

The Creation of a Perfect Market

What can check this seemingly unaccountable power? Bitcoin as the countenance of the blockchain has entered the belly of the beast of predatory capital and is beginning to break the bond of the interlocking power of corporations and state. With its essence of digital scarcity and distributed computing, this innovative technology performs the production of money and clearing of transactions that traditionally have been handled by central banks.

With unprecedented currency crises and BRICS countries moving away from dollar hegemony, the illusory world of the fiat house of cards now teeters on the verge of collapse. The world’s most powerful computing system corrects the erroneous math of inflated Proof-of-Government Decree and can increasingly become a safe haven for those in places like Argentina whose currency is subject to rampant hyperinflation. The frictionless flow of this stateless currency offers a way out of the oligarchic incentive structures paved by the parasitic rent-seeking petrodollar.

What is this disruptive force that challenges the monopolized markets? Bitcoin’s unprecedented autonomous flow is enabled through its algorithmic consensus. This was put into practice through a spontaneously emerging computer network around the world, harnessing massive hashing power.

What instigated this swarm of miners? Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and author Andreas Antonopoulos acknowledged how the creator of this technology Satoshi Nakamoto not only invented new currency, but gave us the world’s first perfect market. Antonopoulos described how Bitcoin mining is built around a valuable currency and the basic economic principle of risk and reward. He also explained how it is designed with an incentive to work honestly. Based on the principle of game theory to create fairness, miners engage in a broadcast math competition known as ‘proof of work’. Each 10 minutes, problems are solved by chance and whoever solves the problem wins a fixed number of bitcoins. Difficulty is adjusted according to demand with a tight feedback loop every 2 weeks, keeping the mining always profitable.

No one entity controls this Satoshi market and what governs it is the underlying operating system of mining software that generates unpredictable, unrepeatable random numbers. It is through the chaos created in the hashing that each new bitcoin is conceived and the life of the ecosystem is sustained. The protocol of algorithmic consensus is enabled through the miners’ willingness to let go of the urge to control and place the outcome at the mercy of the Satoshi dice. Through each player’s commitment to subordinate their will to this spontaneous force of the market, the underlying core of the technology becomes operational and the blockchain’s distributed trust provides a new foundation for equality that is fundamentally different than existing models of representation.

The Descent and Ascent of Man

The founders of American democracy conceived the idea of governance based on a particular vision of man. Philosopher Jacob Needleman (2003) described how in the underlying creation of law and the American Constitution, “the meaning of democracy was rooted in a vision of human nature as both fallen and inwardly perfectible” (p. 9). This was true to the conception of man’s nature put forward by naturalist Charles Darwin. Most are familiar with Darwin’s theory of genetic mutation, natural selection and the survival of the fittest from his work, The Origin of Species. But his second work, The Descent of Man was largely ignored, in which he argued for the higher nature of man based on innate altruism and love.

With this understanding, they installed their own security code of checks and balance of power. Through distributing power among the three branches of government, the creators of constitutional government aimed to safeguard the system from potential tyranny of man’s fallen nature; unbridled greed, personal bias and interests of select groups. Yet history has shown that from the beginning, this system of governance was launched on a fragile foundation.

The major bug within this form of representative government that caused a fatal system error was basing systemic accountability on trust in select individuals. To a large extent, this made the promise of the Declaration of “All men are created equal” hollow words not able to match up with reality. With government secrecy in the form of over-classification and corporate propaganda, those in power can conceal not only motives but also their actions, making the system of checks and balances virtually ineffective. Here Bitcoin’s distributed trust offers a new form of accountability and a better way to secure the system.

Accountability through Distributed Trust

The core invention of the blockchain addresses the inherent weakness of this trust model by making corruptible human nature accountable through cryptographic proof. All men are inherently corruptible and instead of trusting a handful of elected officials and particular institutions, Bitcoin’s trust by computation places accountability within the rule of consensus and guarantees the integrity of the system by removing the necessity of trusting any one group or individual.

The algorithmic rules that bind the bitcoin miners are built and maintained through incentive structures based on a realistic assessment of man’s potential to act non-altruistically. Pursuit for self-interest is not itself a bad thing. It only becomes destructive when it loses relationship to the whole and individual actions are carried out without consideration of others and society at large.

In the mining competition, all players can act out of self-interest. Yet, the reward for playing by the rules is higher than potential gains one may achieve by attacking the network, so each one learns to self-regulate their personal desires and work so to not unduly benefit from the altruism of everyone else. Whenever the system begins to centralize and people act with a narrow sighted pursuit without consideration of the whole ecosystem, they quickly come to realize they might kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. So far, each time miners get close to a concentration of a mining pool known as 51% attack, they voluntarily move away to keep the system healthy and decentralized.

This distributed trust provides a better system of accountability where there is no need for any one person or group to hold another accountable. All who choose to join simply commit to the rule of consensus and through each playing honestly, undue self-interests are naturally regulated.

Taming the Beast

In the kleptocracy of the current global empire, naked greed seems to have dragged much of the world into a rogue state of despotism. Man’s unaccounted fallen nature that creates and grabs for levers of power has crystallized into a dragon of the world. With never-ending military intervention in the Middle East, cheap sweatshop labor exploitation in Southeastern Asia, and corporate government hijack bills like TPP and TISA trade agreements, unredeemed Anglo-American imperial power continues its legacy of colonization. The genius of the blockchain’s distributed accountability offers a creative solution to the growing problem of this voracious beast.

In a decentralized organism, one’s self-interests cannot easily remain isolated. With the distributed ledger, they are placed in an interdependent context where individual’s actions tend to bring benefits to the whole network. What appears at first glance as self-serving acts of investors and speculators actually contribute to the development of the system at its early stages. Contrary to criticism, the perceived expensive mining is providing crucial checks and balances for transactions and the global level security of the system.

Honest account and acknowledgment of individual pursuit for personal gain within this system mitigates potentially destructive forces such as greed and desire that tend to careen out of control and compromise entire systems. Instead of trying to deny or eradicate man’s lower attributes, by maintaining a conscious relationship to the potentially dark side of human nature, those wild unruly beasts that are socially destructive can be tamed. Characteristics that are often considered negative in society such as risk taking, calculated selfish acts and profit motives are guided to serve a shared vision of larger society.

Through individuals freely choosing to work honestly in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the beast within each one of us can be placed inside the cage of the mining ring and accounted for in each transaction. The global mind of the world’s largest supercomputer network takes charge of the drive for competition with complex abstract calculation, digesting many ruthless and callous aspects of human nature. This in return can free humanity from forces of aggression and the logic of conquest and creates a space for people to work altruistically. Out of the torrents created through globally spread computers, the torus of the new heart grows and with every beat helps expand the collective good will of the people throughout the entire network.

Rule of Democracy

The pure flow unleashed through Bitcoin’s perfect market begins to free the will of individuals from the rule of a small minority who claim authority over entire populations. As a result, it could release the First Amendment right that was locked by corporate proprietary. This technology beyond borders can empower individuals by placing the source of legitimacy with the common people. With Bitcoin as the new First Amendment app, people can freely exchange, transact and financially associate with one another without asking permission from anyone. This helps revitalize values and ideas that have been devoured by corporatism.

A spontaneous swarm is created through aligning self-interests with the principle of consensus. Out of the creative chaos of this autonomous movement of individuals, new social forms are organically emerging, based on voluntary consent of all participants in the system. This creates the rule of true democracy, where the lines between those who govern and the governed flatten, and to represent comes to mean to serve. In the blockchain’s decentralized world, miners and developers who take their place in traditionally understood positions of representation are directly tied to the interests of users, as their satisfaction is manifested in wider adoption that creates more value. By taking an oath to algorithmic consensus, they hold themselves accountable to the demands of a more humanized market.

The Declaration of Independence was a promise and the Constitution was meant to be its fulfillment. Now, as the shredding of the Bill of Rights continues, there is an urgent need to create a better system. Necessity is the mother of invention and builders of the new world are rising to the occasion, striving to meet the challenge by coding freedom. The Founding Mothers of this breakthrough innovation were the accumulated efforts of the many embodied in the anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi represents the wisdom of the common people. Upon an open source code that can be checked and modified, transparency of governance is ensured, while lack of ownership allows the system to stay open with equal access to apps for all end users.

With objective laws of mathematics that can be applied and amended through peer-to-peer review and decentralized consensus, this system can be perfected to realize the ideal of the Declaration; that all nodes are created equal. Upon this robust decentralized platform, new apps are built and seemingly insurmountable problems can be solved through people around the world working together.

The blockchain revolution has already begun changing the world as we know it. A tsunami of innovations from Silicon Valley are creating new jobs and resuscitating the dying economy of a fiat world. Creative non-violent acts of a growing global network can redeem true enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, and fraternity, which are at the same time universal democratic virtues.

The founders of the Constitution conceived it as a system that allows individuals to struggle with two opposing impulses working within. In the eyes of Thomas Jefferson, government was to be “a shell, an armor, a protective structure that would allow and perhaps, in subtle ways, even support the growth of moral power within the individual members of the society” (Needleman, 2003, p. 166).

A piece of mathematics enshrined in computer code can become the foundation stone for real democracy. This creates a sanctuary for individual liberty against the tyranny of states, of corporations or any other third party that tries to break the circle of distributed trust. This liberty is not understood simply as free markets, but as the freedom of each person to choose their own path of self-determination and let their inner conscience guide their lives.

Bitcoin flows, splitting into ever more divisible bits across borders wherever there is a thirst for freedom, becoming the electric cord that links all liberty-loving men and women around the world. Wider adoption furthers decentralization and can lead to creation of a free society where each strives toward higher ideals of altruism and self-fulfillment.

Earth view taken by US Astronaut Terry Virts, Flight Engineer for Expedition 42 on the International Space Station Jan. 30, 2015 by NASA/Terry Virts.

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Why I've Chosen To Go With Private Internet Access

Civil Liberties: Some people have noticed I’m writing for a VPN service, and having my regular commentary on liberties presented by that VPN service: by Private Internet Access VPN. Seeing my previous stance on advertising, I think it merits some explanation why I’m choosing to associate with a service brand.

When I was posting once a day, this blog had one million visits a month. If you monetize that on advertising, it becomes quite a decent income – on the order of $3,000 a month, or frankly, enough to pay food and board for anywhere outside of San Francisco, Tokyo, or Hong Kong. And yet I didn’t. Why?

Because I posted from insight into high-level politics in Brussels, and my reasons were always political; I could not afford to have those motives questioned. Having even a little small advertising would make it possible to interpret my motives for outrage and frustration as simple clickbait – especially so when I was speculating on something or reporting on more subtle developments that might never materialize. Putting it in real terms, keeping my motives straight came with a price tag of several thousand US dollars a month, money that I chose to leave on the table.

Therefore, I would not agree to sponsoring lightly – not given the name I’ve worked hard to build. Especially given my very early investment in bitcoin (2011); I’m not starving, even if Gox ate a lot of my coin. However, it’s also the case that there are few people who both do things right on the net, and do things right for the right reasons, and I think these people deserve to be called out as good examples to be followed.

Bahnhof is one such actor, the Swedish ISP. They have consistently and tenaciously defended liberty online against governmental overreach and tabloid-fueled moral panic alike. When the Security Police came to visit their offices, to convince and pressure them to rat out their users in realtime bulk wiretaps, they famously recorded and published that conversation instead, causing huge headlines in Swedish media and rightfully shaming the Security Police into submission. That wasn’t a one-off, either – they keep doing things like that. However, their scope and offering is limited to Scandinavia, which is why I don’t write about them much on an English blog.

(Yes, my 100-megabit fiber, the one you’re reading this from and the one I’m writing this at, is indeed served by Bahnhof.)

So when the idea of sponsorship appeared, I was reluctant and cautious at first until I had looked at Private Internet Access VPN more in depth. A VPN company does provide a valuable service for liberty today, but do they also do things the right way and for the right reasons?

One such divider is whether a VPN provider accepts bitcoin. Another whether they save logs for “lawful use”, which can mean getting people killed in jurisdictions where it’s illegal to protest against the regime. Accepting bitcoin would mean that they honestly had no way of identifying a user, even if they wanted; there would be nothing to link to. Saving logs “for lawful use”, in contrast, would be an indicator that a VPN company didn’t have their head screwed on straight: the whole point is to defend liberty at a much more fundamental level than the laws on the books just right now. The perspective is centuries, not years or months.

It turns out that Private Internet Access not only satisfies criteria like these, but have walked an extra mile to run operations in jurisdictions that maximize liberty. From where I stand, they seem to operate under the principle that a successful business always follows passion for a good cause, and not the other way around.

Now, a VPN service – all of them, even – isn’t enough to save the net and liberty from kleptocratic politicians. But a liberty attitude combined with a service attitude is. Courage is contagious. And a VPN service is a good part of your overall security portfolio, even if it should never be the only one.

You’ll notice that TorrentFreak ran an article on which VPN services to trust in a “2015 edition” review yesterday. Private Internet Access is the first service listed. While I’d recommend reading all of it, I’m choosing a few highlights:

We do not log, period. This includes, but is not limited to, any traffic data, DNS data or meta (session) data. Privacy IS our policy. … We do not log and therefore are unable to provide information about any users of our service. We have not, to date, been served with a valid court order that has required us to provide something we do not have. … We do not attempt to filter, monitor, censor or interfere in our users’ activity in any way, shape or form. BitTorrent is, by definition, allowed.

Feel free to compare this stance to your current ISP. Do read it again if you like.

So to answer the initial question, why do I associate with a service brand? Because I think good people deserve recognition, and they deserve to be the measuring stick for the industry as a whole. This is the kind of attitude – both Bahnhof’s and Private Internet Access’s – that the rest of the Internet industry should aspire to, and needs to aspire to. (If other players need a nudge in that direction, it’s also enormously good business sense to put the interests of your customers before the invasive whims of your governments and authorities.)

As a final note for the sake of transparency, just to overcommunicate that point, I do get sponsorship funds from Private Internet Access for writing and talking about liberty in general – though not for writing this specific article; I’m doing that because I want to explain my motives. But as a sponsoree, I do have affiliate links for signing up, and if you want to use such a link, mine is here. They’re also reachable from TorrentFreak, presumably with TF’s affiliate program if you’re thinking of signing up and would rather send a little affiliate portion to TorrentFreak’s good reporting.

The post Why I've Chosen To Go With Private Internet Access appeared first on Falkvinge on Liberty.

Why I’ve Chosen To Go With Private Internet Access

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Civil Liberties: Some people have noticed I’m writing for a VPN service, and having my regular commentary on liberties presented by that VPN service: by Private Internet Access VPN. Seeing my previous stance on advertising, I think it merits some explanation why I’m choosing to associate with a service brand.

When I was posting once a day, this blog had one million visits a month. If you monetize that on advertising, it becomes quite a decent income – on the order of $3,000 a month, or frankly, enough to pay food and board for anywhere outside of San Francisco, Tokyo, or Hong Kong. And yet I didn’t. Why?

Because I posted from insight into high-level politics in Brussels, and my reasons were always political; I could not afford to have those motives questioned. Having even a little small advertising would make it possible to interpret my motives for outrage and frustration as simple clickbait – especially so when I was speculating on something or reporting on more subtle developments that might never materialize. Putting it in real terms, keeping my motives straight came with a price tag of several thousand US dollars a month, money that I chose to leave on the table.

Therefore, I would not agree to sponsoring lightly – not given the name I’ve worked hard to build. Especially given my very early investment in bitcoin (2011); I’m not starving, even if Gox ate a lot of my coin. However, it’s also the case that there are few people who both do things right on the net, and do things right for the right reasons, and I think these people deserve to be called out as good examples to be followed.

Bahnhof is one such actor, the Swedish ISP. They have consistently and tenaciously defended liberty online against governmental overreach and tabloid-fueled moral panic alike. When the Security Police came to visit their offices, to convince and pressure them to rat out their users in realtime bulk wiretaps, they famously recorded and published that conversation instead, causing huge headlines in Swedish media and rightfully shaming the Security Police into submission. That wasn’t a one-off, either – they keep doing things like that. However, their scope and offering is limited to Scandinavia, which is why I don’t write about them much on an English blog.

(Yes, my 100-megabit fiber, the one you’re reading this from and the one I’m writing this at, is indeed served by Bahnhof.)

So when the idea of sponsorship appeared, I was reluctant and cautious at first until I had looked at Private Internet Access VPN more in depth. A VPN company does provide a valuable service for liberty today, but do they also do things the right way and for the right reasons?

One such divider is whether a VPN provider accepts bitcoin. Another whether they save logs for “lawful use”, which can mean getting people killed in jurisdictions where it’s illegal to protest against the regime. Accepting bitcoin would mean that they honestly had no way of identifying a user, even if they wanted; there would be nothing to link to. Saving logs “for lawful use”, in contrast, would be an indicator that a VPN company didn’t have their head screwed on straight: the whole point is to defend liberty at a much more fundamental level than the laws on the books just right now. The perspective is centuries, not years or months.

It turns out that Private Internet Access not only satisfies criteria like these, but have walked an extra mile to run operations in jurisdictions that maximize liberty. From where I stand, they seem to operate under the principle that a successful business always follows passion for a good cause, and not the other way around.

Now, a VPN service – all of them, even – isn’t enough to save the net and liberty from kleptocratic politicians. But a liberty attitude combined with a service attitude is. Courage is contagious. And a VPN service is a good part of your overall security portfolio, even if it should never be the only one.

You’ll notice that TorrentFreak ran an article on which VPN services to trust in a “2015 edition” review yesterday. Private Internet Access is the first service listed. While I’d recommend reading all of it, I’m choosing a few highlights:

We do not log, period. This includes, but is not limited to, any traffic data, DNS data or meta (session) data. Privacy IS our policy. … We do not log and therefore are unable to provide information about any users of our service. We have not, to date, been served with a valid court order that has required us to provide something we do not have. … We do not attempt to filter, monitor, censor or interfere in our users’ activity in any way, shape or form. BitTorrent is, by definition, allowed.

Feel free to compare this stance to your current ISP. Do read it again if you like.

So to answer the initial question, why do I associate with a service brand? Because I think good people deserve recognition, and they deserve to be the measuring stick for the industry as a whole. This is the kind of attitude – both Bahnhof’s and Private Internet Access’s – that the rest of the Internet industry should aspire to, and needs to aspire to. (If other players need a nudge in that direction, it’s also enormously good business sense to put the interests of your customers before the invasive whims of your governments and authorities.)

As a final note for the sake of transparency, just to overcommunicate that point, I do get sponsorship funds from Private Internet Access for writing and talking about liberty in general – though not for writing this specific article; I’m doing that because I want to explain my motives. But as a sponsoree, I do have affiliate links for signing up, and if you want to use such a link, mine is here. They’re also reachable from TorrentFreak, presumably with TF’s affiliate program if you’re thinking of signing up and would rather send a little affiliate portion to TorrentFreak’s good reporting.

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Copyright Monopolist Claims Legal, Non-Infringing “Fair Use” Is Like AGGRAVATED RAPE

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Copyright Monopoly: In a fuming blog article, David Newhoff claims that non-infringing, legal uses of copyrighted works – that is, of people’s own property – are like “aggravated rape” when made without unneeded consent of the monopoly holder. Newhoff tries to scold the crucial concept of “fair use” in copyright monopoly doctrine, the concept which explicitly says that some usages are not covered by the monopoly and therefore not up to the monopoly holder, and ends saying that if you don’t grant permission and can’t set limits, it’s “aggravated rape”. Just when you think copyright monopoly zealots can’t sink any lower, they surprise you with one of the few creativities they’ve ever shown.

The copyright monopoly, which is not property but a form of Industrial Protectionism (IP) and therefore a limitation on property rights, is subject to a constant barrage of attempted re-branding to “property” by monopolists who want to strengthen their monopoly. In many regards, copyright monopoly punditry are like religious fanatics in this regard – the idea that their monopoly is just harmful is so hard to digest, that facts and empirical observations just be damned.

But in this article, which is about “fair use”, meaning exceptions to the copyright monopoly where it just doesn’t apply – and therefore about when the copyright monopoly holder can’t set limits and doesn’t get to grant or deny permission over non-infringing uses of a creative work, Newhoff really sets a new limbo bar:

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David Newhoff: If the copyright monopoly holder doesn’t get to grant or deny permission, and doesn’t get to set limits, like with a fully-legal fair-use case, it’s like aggravated rape against the copyright monopoly holder

Do note here that Newhoff is not saying that copyright monopoly infringement is like aggravated rape. That would be bad enough. Newhoff is saying that taking actions that fall outside of the scope of the monopoly, without treating them as though they were monopolized and restricted anyway, i.e. doing something fully legal with your own property, is like aggravated rape.

This goes far, far beyond the usual silliness of claiming that copyright monopoly infringement “is stealing” (which, as a reminder, the U.S. Supreme Court has handed down a firm judgment saying it isn’t in any way, shape, or form).

Civil liberties activists have sometimes been poking fun at the excessive rhetoric from copyright monopolists, saying it’s not stealing but rather arson, or maybe kidnapping. In a brilliant application of Poe’s Law, which says good satire can’t be reliably distinguished from zealot fundamentalism, it seems liberties activists just can’t possibly keep up with the increasingly ridiculous – and audacious, not to mention outright revolting – things asserted by copyright monopolists.

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