Rick Falkvinge's Blog, page 21

Norwegian Pirates Slam Dunk School Elections; Talk Of Town Ahead Of Real Elections

Pirate Parties: The Norwegian Pirate Party has reached parliamentary levels in the mockup school elections, to the surprise of everybody but the pirates themselves. In Norway, mockup school elections are held one week before the real elections, and the school results are discussed in the run-up week to the elections. With the Pirate result being discussed in most major news outlets, this provides a strong Pirate boost to the coming election.

The Norwegian Pirate Party got 4.3 per cent in the school elections, despite an apparent lack of voting ballots for the party. Norwegian media reacts: “The Pirate Party had a strong success in the school elections – the youth have already embraced the party”. The Norwegian Pirates were particularly strong at technical schools and media schools.

A sample of media reactions:

“Conservatives and the Pirate Party are this year’s school election winners.” Norwegian Public Broadcasting.

“Pirate Party had a smash success in the school elections. The youth have already embraced the party.” Hardware.no.

“Pirate Party are optimistic after good school elections.” The Norway Evening Post (Aftenposten).

To be called out as an election winner just a few days before the actual election – that’s publicity you can’t buy with money. Will it carry the Pirates all the way to the Norwegian parliament, the storting? That’s far too early to call, but this is nevertheless a very good boost.

Similar school elections are held in many European countries slightly parallel to the real elections. However, Norway holds the school elections prior to the real ones – and importantly, makes the school election results available during the final few days ahead of the real elections. This way, surprises in those result affect the outcome of the real elections.

We could observe a similar effect in Berlin, when a poll gave the Piratenpartei 4.5% of the vote one month ahead of the elections. While that was technically below the parliamentary threshold, the newcomer surprise was so strong that spotlights were centered on the new darling – and so, the real election result came to almost nine per cent.

So the Norwegian Piratpartiet outscored several established parties, becoming the sixth largest party in the school elections, enough to have had secured eight seats in Norway’s proportional parliament if this were the real elections. Will the surprise effect and the added visibility be enough for seats in the real Parliament in this election, too? Time will tell – the Norwegian election is next week.

In comparison, the Swedish Pirate Party got 4.0% in the 2006 school elections, which were held on the same day as the real elections in Sweden. In the following 2009 elections, though, the Swedish Pirates got their first two seats in the European Parliament, having become the biggest party in the 18-30 age group.

Open Letter to US Border Patrol (CBP)

Activism – Travis McCrea: Yesterday, I was held for two hours (not detained, we will get into that later) by CBP, under suspicion that my political party (Pirate Party) in Canada might be a violent extremist organization. When they gave me the keys to my car I was in such a hurry to get back home, that I forgot to get anyones names so I could send a card directly so instead I will have to just write an open letter, and hope it gets to the right people.

Dear Buffalo Border Patrol (@CBPBuffalo),

Hey guys, you may or may not remember me but as frequently as you hold me, I would be surprised if you didn’t. I am the guy who drives the car that one of your officers described as “gay”, which I assume he meant “fabulous” so I appreciate the compliment.

I am also the guy yesterday who you accused of being a terrorist.

I am getting ahead of myself though, now that you remember me I wanted to make a few apologies:

Sorry For Telling Stupid Jokes At The Initial Crossing

I come through the border a lot, and I always arrive with a smile ask how the officer is doing, and promptly hand over my keys when asked. This time, I thought I would try breaking the ice with a joke, so when handing over my keys I suggested “you guys keep searching my car and finding nothing, but have you considered that I might just be smuggling Fiats?”, to which you just stared at me.

I am not good at reading body language, so I figure you were just laughing on the inside but I was unable to see it in your eyes. Incase my joke offended you or made you think I was really smuggling Fiats – I am sorry. In hindsight the joke wasn’t all that funny, and perhaps next time I will come up with something better.

Sorry That I Was Unable To Answer Questions

I didn’t want to be rude, I know that if you came to my house I would expect that you would answer basic questions that I would ask of you — nothing too personal or anything, just “tell me more about your political beliefs” and “is your political party a violent extremist organization”, just friendly conversation because “I am interested in the party personally, and just want to know more”. You expected me to be more forthcoming, and when I rudely didn’t answer your questions I could see you were getting upset at me.

I also should have been paying better attention to both officers who were asking me questions. When one told me he was done with me and that I should go sit back down, I should have known that by going to sit back down I would be acting suspicious to the second one who didn’t tell me to go anywhere.

I should point out that when I did answer questions, they always just lead to more questions and more questions. When I didn’t answer any questions I was able to go sit down, so I thought you were trying to subtly tell me you wanted less information. Again, I am not good at reading people so I am sorry for that.

Sorry I Thought I Could Leave When You Said “You Are Not Being Detained”

When I asked you “am I being detained?” and you said “no”, I figured that I was free to leave. After all, my interpretation of the law is that I am either being detained or arrested, or that I am free to leave. This must be my own ignorance, because as I walked towards the door you told me if I took another step that I would be in handcuffs. Yikes.

I wasn’t trying to cause a scene, though I am sure it looked that way. I just temporarily forgot that it is your belief that within border crossing, you have supreme law which supersedes all other civil liberties. My mistake.

Sorry About Offending You

When I was being questioned you asked if I was recording anything from my car and I told you that I was (because there was no sign outside anywhere which said I couldn’t).

When I suggested that if you were doing nothing wrong, what did you have to hide… you got angry at me. You seemed to think that it was interfering with your search of my vehicle which is illegal. The last thing I want to do is interfere. The only reason I responded with that line, is that you have used it so frequently on me and I have heard it so often in the news… I thought it was an appropriate question to ask.

Sorry That I Started Coughing Uncontrollably

Remember that time when I was in my seat, coughing uncontrollably and you guys were just looking at me over the counter? Classic. Happens when I don’t have my inhaler. Luckily for me, I don’t have asthma just a really bad case of bronchitis, and after 5 minutes of hacking my lungs up in your detention secondary screening that I cannot leave from room, you asked if I was having a medical emergency…

You then took me out to my car to grab my inhaler, so obviously your officers deserve a big thank you for being concerned that I might die under their watch. To further this, later you asked me what narcotics I was on, and not if I was on any, so I am guessing you figured I was just smoking pot in the detention secondary screening area.

Sorry My Car Was A Mess

I have been searched crossing into the US every time I come through over the past 3 months, this totals over 8 inspections. I decided to leave the floorboard detaached from my trunk, since I figured you removed it last time — you might want to have easy access in the future.

Yesterday, however, my car was a mess — normally I like to keep my car super clean and sexy. Today I felt like you might be judging me. If you did judge me, I deserved it… it probably looked like a 12 year old’s room 3 days after Christmas.

Though you must have interpreted my messy car as some sort of weapon of mass destruction, because after searching it you accused me of being a terrorist. Next time, I will try to clean my car a little more.

Sorry You Mistook Me For A Terrorist

I will be honest, I have respect for what you think you are doing: protecting freedom. We might disagree on your effectiveness from time to time, but it’s the thought that counts, right? I was, however, surprised when you suggested I was a terrorist.

For starters, the fact that I and my girlfriend were the only two white people in holding for the two hours we were there makes me proud of your department for showing progressive values and applying affirmative action to your secondary searches. Even though ~75% of the population of America is white, we were equally represented (maybe even under represented) in comparison to hispanic and middle eastern / east asian people. While basically all of your officers were white males (some white females), the fact that you balance that out by detaining more minorities makes up for it.

I know that my car is messy, and that my political affiliation, being a prime concern of all border agents, does say “Pirate Party” and just like Al-Quida means “Terrorist Party” in arabic, you would be concerned that a criminal organization would just put their dastardly deeds right in the title of their organization. Perhaps we should be something less suspicious like “The Base Party”.

One of your agents came up to me, and said that he didn’t want to violate my civil liberties and that if he could get a little cooperation it would be great because otherwise he has all this paperwork he has to fill out, and he has other parts of his job he enjoys way more than paperwork. Please make sure that he gets my apologies, I didn’t think to ask him what he prefers doing… I was being selfish and thinking only about myself.

Immediately after that the officer asked what my dads name is, what my moms name is, what her citizenship status was in America — and because I know he hated paperwork, I tried to be nice and cooperate. However, he then asked me again if my political party had any radical elements to it. I refused to answer the question and he got angry. I do hate making people angry and perhaps in different circumstances we could be friends, please ensure he knows he has an open invitation to have a beer with me.

I just had this strange urge to shut down every time it was suggested that I was a terrorist. It’s not you, it’s me. Clearly that is an abnormal reaction to the suggestion.

When you suggested if I don’t answer your questions that you would call the FBI, I actually got really excited. I have always thought the FBI looked really cool. As a guy who watches White Collar all the time, I was ready to have our conversation and didn’t mean to offend you when I encouraged you to call them. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to you anymore, just to live out my fantasy of an FBI interrogation.

Sorry That I Am Not A Terrorist

I was let down when after all the threats that you made about what you could do to me: lock me up, call the FBI, etc — after two hours you just gave me my keys and said I could go. I had even tucked in my shirt and gave my girlfriend her credit card that I was holding onto, just in case I was taken into custody and she wasn’t.

I will be sure to release my audio recordings, as I always do. That way everyone can see what an amazing job you are doing. Last time, I tried to show how manly your officers are by releasing an audio clip where a male officer said to a female officer that he might have to squeeze next to her, but he would “love every second of it”. If that doesn’t show just how masculine and awesome your agents are, I don’t know what will… but I will keep trying.

You keep bringing me in for secondary screening, and since you have no probable cause or legal justification for it — other than the mandate that pretty much says you can do whatever you want — I am going to guess that you just enjoy my company. So for that, I thank you. I am sorry that sometimes we have our disagreements, but clearly that doesn’t bother you too much, so I will keep being me.

Travis McCrea

Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter Eight.

Swarm Management: The key to a successful swarm is to be better at understanding and using massive-scale social dynamics than your competitors. We’ve looked at some of the specific techniques in chapters 4 and 6. This chapter will round off with the more advanced, yet most crucial techniques.

When you communicate the swarm’s goals to tens of thousands of people or even to hundreds of thousands, it poses unique challenges, as they’re all in different positions of understanding the swarm’s goals and have different motivations for choosing to receive your communications. You need to be aware of all of these and cater to the well initiated as well as the just-recruited activists, all at the same time.

SOCIAL LINKS

A lot of communities make the mistake of only using online connections. As we observed in chapter 4 when taking to the streets, the real strength of an activist swarm lies in being able to cross-use online and offline social friendships.

Offline friendships are much, much stronger than online friendships and connections. It is the offline discussions we want to cover the swarm’s topics; they are much stronger in terms of emotional attachment and intensity between people. Thus, we need to use the reach of online tools and communication to make people want to talk about the swarm’s goals in their respective offline environments, where the possibility of recruiting new activists is much, much better than on a random web page.

Once we’ve established that we want to utilize the offline friendships that activists have with their friends to explain the swarm’s message to more people, we need to look at how our activists are in different situations with different abilities to do that.

GROWING ON THE EDGES

A swarm only grows on its fuzzy outer edge: at the swarm’s center, where you are, everybody is already involved at the highest activity level. This leads to an important insight: the people who are most active can’t recruit any new activists to the swarm themselves by talking to their friends.

The people leading a swarm must be acutely aware that they cannot directly influence a single individual directly to join the swarm. The swarm can only grow at its edges, where people who have joined the swarm know people who have not yet joined. There, and only there, are there social links that can be used to communicate the values, mission, and enthusiasm of the swarm to gain new recruits.

But it is still the responsibility of the most motivated people to grow the swarm, despite the fact that they can’t do so personally. Rather, it is their responsibility to enable the people who can recruit new people to do so, despite the fact that the people in a leading position have no idea who these people actually are.

To do this, a couple of key components must be communicated to the entire swarm at regular intervals in heartbeat messages. This must be done by the people with the most experience in talking about the swarm, typically once a week. The heartbeat messages should contain at least the following:

Newsflow. Let people know what’s going on, both in the swarm and in the world as it relates to the swarm. Both are equally important. The most active will already know most of it, but your wording of it will help them, too. Overcommunicate the context of the news, the external news in particular — make sure even the newest activists understand why you chose to highlight the events that you pick in the newsflow. Don’t assume everybody read your letter from last week, because the newest activists didn’t.

Sample rhetoric. The newly joined people, who know the most not-yet-joined people, are also the ones who are the most insecure in their rhetoric about why the swarm is important, fun, and skilled in its work for a better world. Their confidence can be increased in many ways — one of the most straightforward and successful is to supply direct quotes that can initiate a conversation, or sample responses to typical questions.

Confidence. This brings me to the next point — the people who are in a position to recruit must also be supplied with the confidence to do so. One of the easiest ways is to enable them to use stickers or pins with the swarm’s symbols that in turn lead to conversations like above. If they’re not confident enough to initiate conversations, just identifying with the swarm gets part of the way there.

Sense of urgency. When these people are in a rhetorical and confident position to recruit new people to the swarm, they also need to want to do so. Telling them in a mass mailing is obviously not enough: they must actively want to recruit themselves. If they believe in the swarm and its mission, part of that mission must be to grow the swarm itself and to understand how such growth contributes to the swarm’s end success.

A swarm grows by people talking to one another, one conversation at a time. The Swedish Pirate Party grew to fifty thousand members just like that: one person at a time, one conversation at a time. These conversations are the key to the long-term success of the swarm.

UNDERSTANDING THE ACTIVATION LADDER

In any swarm, it is essential to know where the paths to individual success coincide with the success of the swarm’s mission, and to bring new recruits into alignment with one of these paths as soon as possible.

When somebody joins a swarm with a particular mission, he or she obviously doesn’t go immediately from first hearing of the swarm to being its leader. There are many, many steps in between: hearing of the swarm for the first time, hearing again of the swarm, looking it up online, seeing somebody in the streets, talking to him or her, etc. This is obvious when spelled out, but for being so obvious, surprisingly few organizations respond to it. We call this the activation ladder, and the swarm must understand each step on the ladder and make it as easy as possible for everybody to climb to the next step of activation.

In the previous section, we discussed how the swarm can grow only on its edges. The activation ladder is equally important to understanding recruitment: the edges of the swarm are not sharp, but quite fuzzy, and it’s hard to define the moment when people decide to activate themselves in the swarm for the first time. Is it when they hear about the swarm? When they visit its web pages? When they first contact a human being in the swarm? I would argue that all three of these are different steps on the activation ladder.

The key insight here is that from the center, where the people leading the swarm are located, the swarm looks like a flat mesa (with just one steep step to climb), but from the outside, it looks like a rounded hill (with many small steps). This is key to making it easy for people to move to the highly active center of the swarm: as we want to activate people in the swarm, it’s important to understand that activation is a gradual process with many steps on the activation ladder.

The crucial action that is needed from the people leading the swarm is to identify as many steps as possible on the activation ladder, and make each of these steps as easy and accessible as possible. Again, it sounds obvious, but many organizations fail miserably at this. Some swarms or formal organizations make it easy to become a member but explain nothing about what they do, while others go out of their way to explain how important the members are but make it impossible to come in contact with an officer of the swarm.

The problem with these organizations is usually that they have chosen one key metric that measures their success, and so, the organization reshapes to focus on that metric alone rather than the full activation ladder. (We discussed metrics a bit in chapter 5, as you will recall.)

There are several key things that need to be done. Some of the least obvious are to always make sure that all people in the swarm can respond meaningfully to questions about the swarm’s purpose from people who are just hearing about the swarm — normal social growth should never be underestimated — and that there are always plenty of empty boxes in the organizational chart for people who want to take formal and real responsibility for the swarm’s daily operations. Yes, we keep coming back to this detail, because it is important.

Apart from this, asking a dozen activists to describe each step that led them to join and activate should be a good start to discover the activation ladder for a particular swarm.

MOBILIZING ACTIVISTS

The key success factor for any swarm is its ability to mobilize activists; its ability to activate its followers. As we saw in chapter 5, metrics are tremendously important to follow and track, and can be used successfully as a motivator for internal competitions and trendspotting alike.

When push comes to shove, it’s not the number of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, or newsletter subscribers that counts (even though these metrics are easily measured). It’s how many people you can activate. This is a different number, one that isn’t as easily seen, even though it has some form of correlation to the easily measured numbers: it can be assumed to rise and fall when the other numbers rise and fall, but over and above that, it’s hard to predict.

Also, it depends a lot on your leadership. As we saw in chapter 5, direct leadership will have a tremendously better effect at activating people en masse than vague wishes when it comes to doing something very specific.

But there’s more to it than that. Your leadership is not enough. You must also provide the means for your officers and local leaders to activate people. You may want a flash mob to form outside a courtroom as a verdict is handed out, for example, when all the TV cameras are there. You have twenty-five minutes, and you’re in a different city. What do you do?

The first thing to realize is that you shouldn’t do anything except contact the local leaders of the swarm and ask them to make something happen. The next thing to realize is that these local leaders must have the tools to make that something happen.

The Swedish Pirate Party has tools to send a text message to all activists in a geographical area. (We don’t track the activists’ actual location — that would be bad and rude behavior. Instead, people can subscribe to messages related to certain areas where they typically move about.) The local leader would go into our swarm activation tools, choose an area to blanket with a phone message to our activists’ phones, and send something like “Flash mob for the verdict today. Meet up outside the District Court on 123 Such Street at 12:30, 22 minutes from now. Get there if you can.”

When such a message is sent to thousands of phones, hundreds of people show up. That is more than sufficient to look like a significant group of people, especially if you make sure that placards are available from a nearby stash so that the group looks like, well, a group — your group — rather than just a random assorted audience.

Remember, a swarm can’t compete on resources — but it is absolutely unbeatable on speed, reaction time, and cost efficiency.

CALLS TO ARMS: PERCEPTION IS REALITY

You can and should use mass text messaging over your favorite platform to mobilize the swarm not just to physical locations, but to any place where your issues are discussed. This particularly includes comment fields and discussion threads.

A lot of people in general want to be on the winning team in most contexts and will adapt their behavior to match it. Therefore, if you can make your swarm look like the winning team, regardless of your actual strength, 90 percent of your work is done. In marketing, this principle is based on the mantra that “perception is reality” — in other words, what’s real is what we perceive to be real. But the mechanisms go beyond that idea; perception also shapes reality.

In order to make the most of this, you need some kind of alert mechanism within your swarm to call for activists’ attention whenever a certain idea, perspective, or product — the one your swarm is focused on — needs to dominate a discussion, a comment field, a forum thread, etc. The addition of a mere twenty-five people to the discussion who all are pulling in one specific direction can often make it look like public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of your swarm’s goals for somebody casually visiting the discussion — and for everybody writing in a particular thread, there are ninety-nine people just reading.

In the beginning of the Swedish Pirate Party, we used this mechanism a lot. Whenever there was an article in oldmedia on our issues, we would send an alert phone text to people interested in swarming to the article and making sure our perspective dominated the comment field. In this way, we were able to give a very clear impression of public opinion on anything that touched our areas — an impression that we turned into reality by creating a persistent perception.

Again, most people will match their actions and opinions to be at least compatible with their perception of the public opinion. Control the public perception of who’s the winning team, and you become the winning team. Therefore, you need some kind of call-to-arms mechanism to quickly relocate your swarm’s activity to where people are looking at that exact moment.

In the postelection evaluation of the European elections in 2009, the Social Democratic party — Sweden’s largest party — wrote that their election workers had seen the Pirate Party “on practically every square in the entire country,” showing colors, handing out flyers, and talking to passersby. As the party leader, with a hawkeye on our activities and resources, I knew that this statement was very, very far from the objective truth. But it was our competitor’s perception of reality — a perception that we had created. If the election workers of the country’s largest party perceived reality like this, a large part of the general population also did.

It’s not just that perception is reality. If you can shape perception, you can also shape reality. A swarm excels at this.

MORE WAYS TO TRICK PERCEPTION

In Sweden, there is a political conference every year known as Almedalen, going by that name from the general area it takes place in. It doesn’t have an obvious equivalent anywhere I’ve seen — it’s just an informal agreement for everybody working in politics (reporters, analysts, PR people, and politicians) to gather for one specific week on a remote island in Sweden. There are some ten thousand people who go there every year, essentially taking over that part of town for a week.

By wearing distinctive clothing — purple, crisp-looking short-sleeve shirts with our logo and the person’s last name printed on the back — we were able to get noticed. We had sent seven people to Almedalen one year wearing such shirts, and by the end of the week, people were asking me, “Just how many people did the Pirate Party send here, anyway? I see you everywhere!” The other parties send delegations of hundreds, and yet it was our seven delegates who got noticed because we made it easy for people to notice us in a crowd. The particular shade of purple stood out everywhere, whereas all the other delegates would wear random private clothes, turning them into an indistinct grey mass. (The choice of color was not random: purple is the party color, but it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well if the party color had been grey or beige.)

This is also the reason I encouraged activists to buy and wear shirts with the party’s color and logo in the streets. We didn’t make any money on the shirts. I didn’t care about that income stream. What I wanted was to get the colors out there, into the streets of every city and town in the country.

Again, perception is reality.

RESPECTING ANONYMITY

The more information you require about your activists, the fewer activists you’ll have. You’re certain to have clowns in the organization complaining about your collecting too little data on the people in the swarm, asking you to collect as much data as possible about every volunteer in order to data-mine and find patterns that can be used in various forms of marketing. Kicking people who do this hard in the groin solves the immediate clown problem: everybody in the organization needs to have responsibility for the primary swarm goal, which can’t be attained without a large number of activists. Maximizing the number of activists is therefore always the primary subgoal, and scaring away potential activists counteracts this.

It’s not just the workload burden of a potential activist typing in his or her name, phone number, mother’s maiden name, shoe size at age twelve, and whatever more data over a half-dozen consecutive pages that will make them a nonrecruit — more often than not, it can be the act of identifying themselves in the first place that is the primary deterrent.

Think about it. Your swarm likely strives to achieve some change in the world. Since you’re choosing to use a swarm, you’re likely up against resource-rich organizations (where the use of a swarm is the most effective way to dropkick them). You will find that there are many people that want to change the status quo that these rich organizations uphold, but you’ll also find that a lot of people don’t want to sign their name publicly to that aspiration — several of them may even work for the organizations in question, or be suppliers to them, or otherwise dependent on their goodwill. After all, if they are rich in resources, they control a large enough part of society to be able to cause trouble in society for their opponents — their named opponents.

And thinking about it another minute, you don’t need to know who your activists are. You just need them to talk about the swarm’s issues with their friends, show up at rallies, etc. Many will prefer to be anonymous, and honoring that will make the swarm immensely stronger.

In the Swedish Pirate Party, you can sign up as an anonymous activist. We ask for an e-mail address and/or a phone number where you can be texted. Leave at least one of them; both can be anonymous. It works great.

(You will need to know who your officers are, on the other hand, as they become points of contact at some level. But the many-cogs-in-the-machine activists can be completely anonymous if they prefer — and many do.)

REWARDING THE LONG TAIL

Many organizations, when discussing marketing, ask themselves how they can sell their values to their target group; how they can get people to like them enough to monetize or profit in other intended ways. That is the entirely wrong question to ask, the entirely wrong framing of the problem, and solving that misframed problem will yield counterproductive results in a swarm environment.

The correct question to ask is, “How can we reward people for discussing our topic (values, politics, services, products)?”

Note that I say discuss, not promote. There is a world of difference. People are hyperallergic to positive messages that have been vetted or promoted by a suited-and-tied PR department with shiny bling-toothed smiles. It’s the worst thing there is, second only to trying to ski through a revolving door. You want to reward people for mentioning your name, no matter whether they like you or not. Again, this is counter to traditional unidirectional marketing of the shove-down-the-throat kind, but goes very well with what we learned in chapter 4 about message diversity and how crucial that diversity is to success and respect.

Many PR departments, as we also learned in chapter 4, are industrial-grade neurotic about having absolute and precise control over the brand. But when you release that control, you can achieve wonders. The same goes for rewarding the long tail — as in, the people who aren’t normally seen — for speaking about your swarm or your topics.

In the Swedish Pirate Party, a significant portion of our homepage was devoted to “People blogging about the Pirate Party.” Anybody who mentioned the Pirate Party’s name in a blog post — no matter in what context — got their blog post highlighted and linked from our front page. This could be accomplished fairly easily with automated processes.

Let’s examine what social dynamics this created.

Most bloggers get ten to twenty visitors a day to their blog. This is “the long tail” that, frankly, doesn’t get a lot of readers at all, compared to the thousand- and million-reader blogs that tend to set the agenda. Nevertheless, these small-scale bloggers are just as sensitive to — and curious about — traffic spikes as the larger blogs.

Imagine you had one of these blogs, your traffic was in the low twenties of visitors a day, and all of a sudden you had a traffic spike of some five hundred visitors when you mentioned the Pirate Party in a blog post. (This was the actual effect of promoting everybody who mentioned us on our well-visited front page.)

What would you think and feel about those sudden numbers if you were a small but aspiring blogger? How would that affect your blogging? More importantly, when you sat down to write your next blog post, what subjects would you have in mind for that article?

This is one of the mechanisms behind our becoming the most-discussed party in the entire Swedish blogosphere. When you give up the illusory control of your brand — which you never had anyway — and reward people for discussing you, unconditional of the context, they will keep discussing you and your topics, services, or products. That is exactly what you want to happen.

So reward the long tail with attention — that can tip an entire blogosphere toward discussing you, with the exception of the star bloggers, but they’re the few and the long tail are the many.

USING ATTENTION TO BUILD A COMMUNITY

On August 29, 2012, Barack Obama — the president of the United States — did a thirty-minute so-called AMA on a site called Reddit. AMA is short for “Ask Me Anything.” Anybody in the whole world had an opportunity to ask questions directly and personally to the president of the United States, and he responded to as many as he could during the allocated time.

Some twenty-three thousand people took the opportunity to ask questions directly of the president of the United States. He had time to respond to only ten of them, but did so in a very personal, frank, and candid manner — not just sticking to political questions, but also naming his favorite sports player, talking about how he managed his work/life balance, and discussing beer recipes.

A number of generations into the future, it may be perfectly normal to be able to speak to anybody in the whole world and get responses, including from heads of state — but today, it is most definitely not. This extends to leaders of swarms. People do not expect to get comments and cheers from leaders of political parties or other significant organizations. You can use this nonexpectation to your strong advantage to build a following.

In artistry, this is known as connecting with fans. It is the exact same thing, although you need to actively seek out the fans in question rather than just allowing them to speak to you.

When I led the Swedish Pirate Party, as soon as somebody mentioned the party by name on a blog, I would see if I could contribute anything to the discussion (did they ask a question out in the air or wonder aloud about anything?). When somebody mentioned on Twitter or their blog that they had joined the party, I would write a short “Welcome aboard!” signed by me personally. This was easily accomplished with a folder of bookmarks containing search pages across blogs, Twitter, etc.: it was a one-click operation to see if anything had appeared that mentioned the party’s name.

Still, this blew people’s minds. They did absolutely not expect to be personally welcomed by the party leader in their own space, that this person would come to them. Doing so builds a very strong following and activist base. However, it also requires continuous work. The president of the United States may get away with answering questions for thirty minutes total, but you are not a head of state. You need to search for new activists or potential activists every day, at least once a day, and just acknowledge that you see them — in your own preferred way. While it requires continuous work, it is not really that burdensome — just make sure to have a couple of bookmarks with search across blog networks and Twitter for the swarm’s name and your own name, and go to those bookmarks once or twice a day.

Attention is reward. Unexpected attention is great reward. Reward people for their interest in your swarm, and show them attention. It works wonders.

In the same manner, engage with people who read what you write. If people ask questions in the comment fields of your columns, articles, or blog posts, engage with them. This is generally not expected, but very appreciated, and builds a strong following. (I’ve seen people be downright surprised over the fact that I respond to questions they ask me in the comment field of my own columns: “Just ask Rick a question in the comment field; odds are he’ll even respond.”) This is quite surprising and shows what the current net generation is conditioned to — that people who write publicly lock themselves in an ivory tower and don’t want to be talked back to. Come down from the tower and connect with fans, and you’ll get a much stronger following, activist base, and swarm.

Also, the monkey see, monkey do principle that we discussed in chapters 4 and 7 applies even more when discussing in public and in other people’s spaces. People will be rude to you from time to time (after all, your swarm is trying to change the world, which is guaranteed to make some people angry). This will be challenging to your mood and psyche, but you need to respond, and you need to be nice and polite. You may never turn the person who is rude to you and angry at your values, but you will take every other reader on the site by complete surprise, and they will become potential activists in your swarm. Odds are you will even get positive responses from people other than the initial aggressor, written out in cleartext to your nice and polite reply.

Just the other day, I got a comment about this in a discussion forum: “Hey! You can’t just go out and be polite on the Internet! Who do you think you are!?”

“Monkey see, monkey do” also applies to everybody else in your swarm here, of course. People will behave as you behave on public discussion boards about the swarm’s ideas. Teach them to be polite and friendly, no matter how harshly and viciously attacked, and you’ll win wonders.

Politics is a spectator sport, and so is arguing your case anywhere on the Internet. As they say in other spectator sports, “win the crowd.”

More Thoughts On The Coming Swarm Economy

Swarm Economy: The industrial model with lifetime single-employer careers is dying, and it is not coming back. The first sign was a change from lifetime-marriage employments into its serial-monogamy equivalent, where people change jobs every three years at the most. The next change, one which is already happening, is that most people have more than one employment — or employment-equivalent — at one time: this is an enormous change to society, where people are going to be juggling five to ten projects at a time, some for fun, some for breadwinning, some for both. I have called this the coming swarm economy.

The swarm economy is not about small details in what is happening right now. It is not about bitcoin. It is not about the fraud of the banking system, it is not about peer-to-peer file sharing, it is not about universal basic income. Not on their own, anyway. The swarm economy is all of these combined, and much much more.

We are already seeing how people have pet projects on the side of their (one) employment, and projects weave in and out of somebody’s life from time to time while they also change jobs and life situations. With increasing connectivity, this trend can be expected to accelerate toward a point where most people have some five to ten ongoing projects, some of which are paid and some are not, rather than having one “day job”.

This change – from one employment per person to some five to ten ongoing projects per person – fundamentally changes much society more than somebody “working extra” or “having two jobs”. It is a definite end to the industrial economy. Here are just a few of the changes that this means, all of which can already be observed here and there in the IT sector:

The end of fixed workplaces. People will work wherever they want, typically from cafés or other semisocial places. “Going to work” will not exist as a concept, with the exception of some service person-to-person jobs.

The end of fixed worktimes. People will not just work wherever, but also whenever they want – or however it fits together with the overall project team. Timezones will make sure that there will be no nine-to-five regime as people cooperate between Europe, North and South America, China, India, Australia, and so on, all at the same time.

There are many more, similar effects as “the one day job” disappears. It means a massive decentralization of the decisions taken to support the economy – hence my calling it the swarm economy. It is interesting to compare this to previous concepts.

Capitalism, when it works, is supposed to distribute resources optimally through decentralization of decisions. Various forms of corruption have hijacked legislations and markets that call themselves capitalist to instead concentrate resources where they are already gathered – “making the rich richer”, and making capitalism something of a dirty word – but in my mind, at least the decision decentralization idea rings very strong with pirate ideals.

However, the capitalism model has failed to predict what has already happened. Under the capitalist model, Linux and Wikipedia – 10,000s of volunteers who get together to create a product without pay, and where the product is so overwhelmingly good that it outcompetes the best commercial alternatives – simply do not happen. But they have already happened. This is consistent with swarm economy thinking.

At the same time, entrepreneurship is very strong with pirate ideals. We learn by doing and we don’t ask permission when we decide to fix something. We expect people to take initiatives on their own if they are displeased with something, and we want to promote risk-taking.

We know that the community which not just tolerates, but actively promotes risk-taking, is the community that comes out on top. In contrast, a society or community where people cannot afford to lose their current situation is a community without entrepreneurs and without innovation.

This leads to the most logical justification for Universal Basic Income yet: society as a whole benefits from a risk-positive environment, and if you can provide a mechanism where anybody can try any stupid commercial idea without risking becoming homeless and indebted, more people will innovate and take risks – and the society using this mechanism will get a competitive edge.

I imagine a Universal Basic Income (UBI) that replaces all current social safety nets, an unconditional income that is sufficient for a rental one-bedroom apartment in the medium-far suburbs of a relevant city plus enough to eat well and a to have modicum of tools to restart the next enterprise. Imagine a big red “economic reset” button where somebody resets their assets to zero after having failed with a startup, is assigned a one-bedroom apartment within commuter distance from a major city, and is allowed to keep some basic equipment to begin his or her the next project, hitting the ground running. Nothing would prevent two or more people pooling their UBI to live larger, et cetera.

As a pure bonus, this strife for long-term competitiveness also solves a lot of social problems such as homelessness. (Those who read Reddit know that people who can be homeless for a year or two and then get back on their feet, sometimes starting successful companies.)

Also, these mechanisms (personal bankruptcy and social security) already exist in essence. This would be a streamlining, quickening and simplification of the processes intended to speed up iteration times to the next startup.

It can be asked whether the Pirate Party and these observations and trends would be a left-wing or right-wing policy. But the point is moot: the left-to-right scale is based in the industrial economy, and these ideas are based in the observation that the industrial economy is disappearing. It makes no sense to ask how observations of a replacement system fits into a model that it replaces and obsoletes.

However, it can be observed that these ideas are at least compatible with free-market capitalism and with socialism, having a preference for strong and unregulated free market in combination with a very strong social safety net. However, the basis for our convictions are not the industrial-era “free market” nor the socialism-era “safety net”: it is the free-software ideal “decentralization of decisions” combined with the open-source ideal “promote risk-taking and optimize for competitiveness”. They just happen to land in similar policies, but from entirely different convictions that are based in the swarm economy rather than in the old industrial economy.

Obviously, a lot of vested interests will resist this change. In particular, labor unions will absolutely hate it, despite the fact that it finally “frees the worker from the shackles of capital”, as they would have put it in their ideology. The reason labor unions will fight it tooth and nail is because the change simultaneously makes them obsolete, and their own power has become more important over the decades than winning their end goal.

Let’s see if today’s Canutes can order the tide held back.

The First Global Civil War

Civil Liberties – Lionel Dricot: Manning, Snowden, Assange, Miranda, The Guardian. With each passing day, we receive confirmation of a truth that many would prefer to ignore: we are at war. An undeclared, relatively quiet war, but nonetheless a war.

Unlike a conventional war, a civil war has no well defined front, nor belligerents clearly identifiable by the color of their uniform. Each camp is everywhere, in the same city, the same area, or ​​the same family.

On one hand, there is the class in power. Rich, powerful, they are used to control, they are alien to questions. They simply make decisions and are firmly convinced to do so in the public interest. They have many supporters that are neither rich nor powerful. But they fear any change. Or have strong habits. Or personal interests. Or have the fear of losing some of their properties. Or they simply don’t have the intellectual ability to understand the ongoing revolution.

On the other hand, there is the digital generation. From all sexes, all ages, all cultures, all geographic locations. They talk to each other, exchange experiences. Discovering their differences, they seek common ground while calling into question the deep faith and values ​​of their parents. I call them a “generation” but they are from all ages.

This population has developed values ​​of its own and an uncommon analytical intelligence. They use all the tools available to quickly pinpoint contradictions, ask relevant questions, lift the veil of false appearances. Across thousands of miles, its members can feel empathy towards all humans.

A Growing Gap

For a long time, I was convinced that it was only a matter of time. The digital culture would permeate through individuals and the divide would eventually disappear over the generations and the natural renewal.

Despite the popularization of tools such as Twitter or smartphones, this divide was not resolved. Instead, it only gets worse. The “power” generation has not adopted digital culture. It merely blindly manipulates the tools without understanding them, in a desperate parody of the cargo cult. Results: musicians who insult their own fans; newspapers, whose websites are flooded with advertisements, seem to be copies of the paper versions; young politicians who use Facebook or Twitter as a press release publishing machine without attempt to communicate with their electorate.

40 years ago, two journalists showed the world that the president of the most powerful nation used the Secret Services to wiretap his political opponents. This investigative work granted them the Pulitzer Prize and led to the resignation of the president.

Today, actors empowered by the digital culture show to the world that the president of the same nation wiretaps the whole world! He sends soldiers to cynically kill civilians. Another Pulitzer Prize? No, 35 years in prison for one and a hunt across the world for the other. The president in question, on the contrary, holds a Nobel Peace Prize.

The Death of Journalism

Unlike in the Watergate era, it is no longer possible to rely on the press. A large part of the journalists have abandoned any investigative work, even superficial such. Newspapers have become organs of entertainment and propaganda. With a little criticism, you would be able to refute the majority of news articles after a few minutes of googling.

And when the few journalists left start digging, they see their family arrested and detained without reason, they receive political threats and are forced to destroy their equipment. The online newspaper Groklaw, which was a key actor in multiple industrial trials, recently closed because its creator was scared.

The ruling class has decided that journalism had to settle for two things: fear of terrorism, to justify total control; and fear of losing your job, to give a false impression of inevitability.

Of course, all this has probably not been implemented consciously. Most actors are intimately persuaded to work for the public good, to know what is good for humanity.

You may believe that spying on mail or the Wikileaks case are details, that the important issues are the economy, jobs, and sports. But these issues are directly dependent on the outcome of the currently ongoing battle. Major financial crises and wars were created from scratch by the current ruling class. The digital generation which tries to bring new proposals to the table is gagged, choked, mocked, or persecuted.

The Panic

In 1974, it was easier for the ruling class to sacrifice Nixon and to cut a few heads with him. Parallels to the current situation are troubling. Today’s ruling class is afraid, in a state of panic, and does not act rationally any more. It seeks to make examples at all costs, to repair each leak hoping it is only a few isolated cases.

They do not hesitate to use anti-terror laws unfairly against the journalists themselves. Those who predicted such things a year ago were called paranoids. But even the worst paranoid had probably not imagined to be right so quickly, so directly. We are now more terrorized by the counter-terrorist state than by the terrorist threat itself.

The destruction of hard drives at The Guardian is certainly the most emblematic event. Its uselessness, its utter absurdity can not hide the political violence of a government that imposes its will by threatening a recognized and renowned media. It also illustrates the complete misunderstanding of the modern world by the ruling class. Draping itself in the ridiculous authority of ignorance and arrogance, the rulers openly declares a war on every citizen of the world.

A war which can not be won, which is already lost. But they will try to make it last, dragging down many victims which will be unjustly imprisoned for years, tortured, arrested, harassed, destroyed morally driven to suicide, stalked around the world.

This is already the case today. And because you had the misfortune of being on the wrong plane or sending an email to the wrong person, you could be next on the list. There is no neutrality possible. We are at war.

This post was originally published in French on Ploum.net.

Talking Back Lessons: Retorts to “Taking Without Paying”

Activism: In a series of articles here at Falkvinge on Infopolicy, I’ll be giving examples of talking back to the most disturbingly false bullshit repeated by pro-copyright-monopoly pundits. The reason for this is that I see tons of this kind of bullshit in discussion threads, and it stands unchallenged, which is dangerous. As I describe in Swarmwise, it is of immense importance for our long-term liberties that false assertions are countered immediately and in numbers whenever they appear.

Today, we’re going to discuss the assertion that somebody is “taking without paying” when sharing knowledge and culture. Here are three examples how to counter it. Adapt to your own language and use.

Don’t be content with one person already having countered a false assertion, and count on people thinking logically. A false statement must be hammered with opposition for liberties to win; it’s not a logic game but a numbers game. It’s about looking like the winning team, as I describe in Swarmwise – that’s what shapes the reality and the future.

Today, we’ll deal with this “taking without paying” nonsense. There are many variations – “benefiting without paying”, etc. Don’t let it stand unchallenged at any time.

Here are three sample responses you can use. Copy, remix and adapt to your own language.

False statement: “You are taking something without paying.”

False statement: “What gives you the moral right to see a movie for free when I pay for it?”.

False statement: “You are obviously having a benefit without compensating, so what you are doing is wrong.”

There are many variations on the theme. (The sample responses below have a weak mapping to the three variations of the statement given above, so response 2 fits statement 2 the best, etc.)

Sample response 1: Nobody is taking anything. Somebody is manufacturing their own copy of whatever-it-is, possibly in violation of the first action of six in the copyright monopoly, but at no point has any property changed hands – the manufacturing is done entirely using their own property, from blueprints shared online. Since nobody is taking anything, they’re not taking anything without paying, either.

Sample response 2: The statement/question doesn’t make sense. If you are buying a chair, you are paying for it. If I see your chair and don’t want to buy one, but instead decide to borrow blueprints for such a chair from a friend, and manufacture the chair myself instead with my own property, who are you to blame me for not paying anybody for manufacturing my own chair? This is exactly what happens in the sharing of culture and knowledge online.

Sample response 3: It’s excellent that somebody is having a benefit without cost, or with less cost. That’s how capitalism works, when it works. It always strives to improve the benefit-to-cost ratio for humanity as a whole, it strives to get more output out of less input and effort. If somebody is achieving the same benefit at no cost at all, that’s a great leap ahead and anything that stands in the way of such a leap is anti-market and anti-progress.

Take these responses. Use them. More to come next Saturday for the foreseeable future.

Economics 101 For Newcomers To Discussion On Sharing

Infopolicy: This is a primer on some fundamental concepts of economics: property, sale, goods, services. In the discussions around sharing of culture and knowledge, many words are thrown around that make no sense in the context of the discussion. Therefore, this is a reference article to use and link to in such discussions.

Our economy is a market economy. That means each and every person, over and above governmental welfare programs, is responsible for finding their own paycheck. This happens in one way, and one way only: a person makes a sale.

This concept, the sale, is the only thing that entitles a person to any money at all in our economy. You can sell two things: goods and services.

When you are selling goods, property is exchanged for value.
When you are selling services, something other than property is exchanged for value.

In the very common special case of an employee in our economy, a person sells 40 hours of service a week in exchange for value. Entrepreneurs, the focus of this article, can make sales of both goods and services – so for the rest of this article, we disregard the special case of employees.

(Another special case of contracts have an exchange of value is not discussed here, as they don’t concern brief and efficient interactions on a free marketplace, but significantly more complex, long-term relationships.)

This leads us to the first important observation:

Sunk costs and spent work are irrelevant to the economy. If you have spent two years creating something, that entitles you to exactly nothing. If you have spent thirty fantasillion euros perfecting your pet project, nobody cares. The only – only – thing that entitles you to money is a sale.

Nobody gets to be entitled to money because they have spent the past two years learning a skill, buying equipment, or doing something they enjoy (or don’t enjoy, for that matter). They get entitled to money when a sale happens.

This leads us to the important definition of property, in order to learn the difference between sale of goods and sale of services. In economics, property is either a tangible object or a piece of land. You could say that for something to be property, you must be able to either touch it or stand on it.

The money-in-the-bank fallacy: At this point, defenders of monopolies and protectionism tend to mock this axiom and pick the example of how “their money in the bank” is “obviously their property”, and yet, that money in the bank account is not touchable and wholly abstract. But it would be they who argue such who are in the wrong. Money deposited in the bank is the bank’s property. You deposit coins and notes (touchable) in the bank against a contractual obligation that the bank will give coins and notes back to you on request – quite likely other coins and notes than those which were your deposited property. If you are unsure of this observation, check the economic definition again. The bank holds all four property rights.

To wit: if the bank refuses to let you withdraw money, it is legally not theft, but an unfulfilled obligation. Hence, money you deposit in the bank is the bank’s property.

With this, let’s examine a couple of common but confusing phrases, as they don’t clearly separate the fundamental concepts of economy.

I have sometimes seen “sale of digital goods”, referring to downloads. This is one example of self-contradictory wording. If no property changes hands, there is not a sale of goods at all. When you are charging to let somebody download a data stream, you are selling a service. This distinction is important. There is no such thing as “digital goods”. When charging for access to the data stream, you are charging to let somebody else manufacture their own copy of a data stream using their own property (computer, storage, network equipment). Again, no property is transferred in such a sale.

When you are selling a DVD, however, you are selling goods. Property is transferred in exchange for value. And you are selling the entire DVD, the full DVD, and nothing but the DVD. There is no such thing as “selling the DVD but not the film on it”. That concept does not exist. You are selling the physical object, every atom of it and their internal arrangements, along with every piece of information that they carry. However, other people can hold a monopoly on duplicating that information, limiting your normal property rights to your own property. We’ll return to that shortly.

The worst weaselphrase by far in deliberately confusing basic economic concepts is “Intellectual Property”, as in the concept of non-material property: this is something that goes beyond merely not existing. The phrase itself is as meaningless as “solid vacuum” or “the square root of turquoise”. The phrase is conceptually self-contradictory. Not only is there no such thing, it’s conceptually impossible for such a thing to exist. Property, by definition, is tangible. You cannot say “non-propertizable property” and expect the term to carry meaning.

That phrase is only PR semantics intended to politically legitimize what the copyright monopolies, patent monopolies, etc. are: governmentally-sanctioned private monopolies, or as lawyers say, exclusive rights, and attempting to legitimize them by deceptively masquerading them as something else entirely. These monopolies, these exclusive rights override property rights to an object.

Let’s take that again, because it is important: the copyright monopolies and patent monopolies override property rights to an object. They are limitations of property rights. This can be easily observed in the actual copyright monopoly law text of the United States, which lists six specific actions for an object that are reserved for the copyright monopoly holder, regardless of who owns the object – regardless of whose property it is. Normally, these six actions would be part of very typical property rights, but when you buy a DVD or similar goods, your rights to your own property are limited by this monopoly.

A monopoly is a privilege granted by a legal framework that gives somebody the right to prevent others from exercising normal property rights, and is a very strong market intervention. The copyright monoply and patent monopolies are two examples of such monopolies. (If I hold a monopoly on putting two planks at an angle to one another, I can call on the monopoly-issuing government to prevent you from placing your two planks – which are your property – at such an angle.)

So with the basics settled, let’s examine the sharing of culture and knowledge in proper economic terms. Let’s take a film, just to illustrate.

When somebody buys a Blu-Ray disc with a film on it, that disc becomes their property in full. However, instead of watching it, they can read the encoded information off that piece of their property onto another piece of their property, a storage unit like a hard drive. We call this process “ripping”. Then, using a third piece of their own property, they re-encode the bitpattern that makes up the movie — still all stored on the buyer’s property, and therefore intrinsically part of the buyer’s property — into a more convenient format, typically MPEG-4 encapsulated in a Matroska container. We call this process “encoding” and it all happens within the buyer’s property, exercising normal property rights.

Finally, the encoded new bitstream – the Matroska encoding of the movie, which resides on the buyer’s storage and is the buyer’s property – is shared in blueprint format, again using only the original buyer’s property (networking equipment). This time, the action is combined with other pieces of property that belong to other people, people who volunteer their property (networking equipment, storage, etc.) for the sharing to take place.

In this way, other people are able to use the shared blueprint in order to manufacture the same bitstream using their own property (storage, networking, computers), and thus, the original movie gets duplicated into more physical copies as people manufacture them.

Now, let’s compare this to the economic basics we just learned. The most obvious thing is that no sale happened anywhere in the process, so nobody is entitled to any money in a free market. It can be argued that a monopoly was violated, and it quite likely was. But that’s also what happened. A manufacturing monopoly was violated, the first action of the six monopolized actions. Somebody manufactured an object without paying governmentally-forced license fees.

We can also observe that no property has changed hands as part of the process. Everybody is using their own property to share blueprints and to manufacture from those blueprints. Therefore, by definition, nothing has been stolen and nothing has been taken.

In particular, nobody is “taking somebody’s work”. That is conceptually impossible. The only thing that entitles somebody to money is a sale. Sunk costs and sunk work are irrelevant and entitle to nothing. Further, there has been no transfer of property in this sequence of events. You cannot steal a service, you can only steal property, by definition. (As you are not taking somebody’s work, you are not taking it “without paying” or “without permission”, either.)

Note that this article doesn’t discuss whether the copyright monopoly is good, bad, righteous, or anything else. It merely establishes what it is: a monopoly, a governmentally-sanctioned private monopoly, intended to create effects that “promote progress of science and the useful arts“. Note how that link correctly speaks of “exclusive rights”, monopolies, by the way.

USE FOR REFERENCE

The next time somebody asserts a defense of the copyright monopoly where they clearly don’t understand economic fundamentals, quote this article and link them to it. Example:

> But you are taking their work without permission!

Nobody is “taking somebody’s work”. That is conceptually impossible. The only thing that entitles somebody to money is a sale. Sunk costs and sunk work are irrelevant and entitle to nothing. Further, there has been no transfer of property. You cannot steal a service, you can only steal property, by definition. (As you are not taking somebody’s work, you are not taking it “without paying” or “without permission”, either.)

See this article with Economic Concepts 101: http://falkvinge.net/2013/08/23/economics-101-for-newcomers-to-discussion-on-sharing/

Hat tip to Fredrika for her relentless and correct focus on the sale.

France, Are You Dumb?

Stupid Politicians: The French government is dumber than a squirrel with broccoli in its socks when it comes to “anti-terror laws”. I am currently in Paris, and I have seen really stupid things around the world, but this kind of takes the cake.

I’m sitting in a Starbucks and logging on to their wi-fi, and I’m greeted with this login screen, where I must fill in my name and address before going online. This is to make sure that terrorists can be tracked. About this point, the French parliament must have run out of oxygen.

“Bonjour! My name is Charles de Gaulle (Mrs.), and I live in Paris, North Korea. Also, I don’t really like filling in my forms in French, I have always much preferred American English.”

“Welcome, Mrs. Charles de Gaulle!”

This is something of the dumbest yet I’ve seen in terms of the war on privacy in the name of so called “anti-terror” laws. This is not just an irritation, but so ineffective it needs a new word for just its sheer level of ineffectiveness. And stupor.

Just how dumb is the French legislature, anyway?

We Said Vague Laws Against “Terror” Would Be Used To Silence Journalism On The Path To Totalitarianism. This Was The Last Warning Bell.

Repression: With Glenn Greenwald’s partner being harassed by security forces at Heathrow, the last warning bell for totalitarianism has chimed. For upwards of a decade, activists of the Pirate Party have been warning that laws that are marketed to the public as being “against terror” or “against child pornography” are so vague and so full of exceptions to due process that they don’t make sense if they’re not actually targeted at creating a totalitarian society. With family members of reporters taken away for detention and harassment, the last warning bell has gone off – there will not be another bell before they come for me and you.

David Miranda, the partner of the journalist who has been publishing and revealing the extent of the NSA’s and GCHQ’s pervasive surveillance, was detained yesterday at Heathrow for pure harassment reasons. This is the last warning bell of encroaching totalitarianism. Meanwhile, the same security forces demanded that the newspaper in question ceased reporting on the surveillance, even to the point of destroying their laptops.

The Prime Chancellor of Britain, David Sutler Cameron, was informed of this detention and harassment before it happened. That simple fact says way too much of what’s going on, right here, right now.

When societies turn fascist and totalitarian, things happen in a certain order. The first is that pervasive, sweeping, and vague powers are given to police and security forces using some bullshit excuse. Here in the West, those excuses have been child abuse imagery and terrorism. Reporters have been doing a terrible job at showing how those laws actually promote child abuse and are ridiculously badly prioritized (more than 100 times as many people die from falling down staircases than from terrorism).

But those laws did something else, and if history is a guide, did so on purpose. They eliminated the right, indeed the theoretical possibility, of reporters to protect their sources. With the advent of the Data Retention Directive in the EU, freedom of the press was essentially abolished – all leaks would be traceable after that point. And yet, practically no reporters spoke up about it. So effective was the government fear campaign using the bogeymen du jour. (In the 1950s, it would not have been child porn and terror, but communism.)

The laws allowed for sources to be harassed, and for reporters to be harassed. Looking at the many examples of history, that is the next thing that happens as a society goes totalitarian.

The last visible thing that happens as a society goes fascist totalitarian is that the reporters with an ability to report on the developments are harassed and detained. After that, reports go silent. This was the canary in the coal mine, this was the last warning bell. There will be no more warnings after this, only silence, before the same forces one day come for you. And then, it is too late.

Meanwhile, it seems people do not understand the ramifications of all their internet traffic being wiretapped. It’s as close to hostile mind reading as you can get. Consider the fact that the first one to know if you’re diagnosed with a strange disease, it used to be that the first in the world to know (before your friends and family) was Google. Now it’s not Google, but the security agents. That is not theory, that is the state of current affairs. These security forces don’t just wiretap your phone calls – they know what newspapers you read, what articles you read in them, for how long, in what order. They know every piece of information you are looking for. Why don’t people see that this is a recipe for totalitarianism?

As Consumer Watchdog sounded a false alarm about GMail the other week and its users’ expectation of privacy, it turned out that Consumer Watchdog didn’t understand that a mail server must necessarily process e-mail in order to display it to the users. This is a disastrously low understanding of the most basic information security: who can see your private information? Do they understand that when you enter your ATM PIN, you are giving your PIN to the creator of the ATM’s program code? I’ll have to conclude, “probably not”.

And the people who don’t understand that every machine that sees their private information has an owner that also sees their private information, they are going to be robbed naked of their most intimate details without even knowing it. This would not be a problem if they weren’t the overwhelming majority, and as a result, alarm bells from people who do understand basic information security have not been taken seriously.

This is not new, just depressing.

Meanwhile, in the Berlin winter of 1932, families were still going skating in the park on weekends. Their lovely country, having the most progressive capital in the West with its charming cabarets, could not conceivably go down the dark path some eccentrics were doomglooming about.

I cannot begin to describe my frustration as I was reading a proposed law aloud to people in the streets of Stockholm. The proposed law would abolish any right to secrecy of correspondence and allow – no, mandate – the government to wiretap everybody, always, in bulk and without warrant. They looked at me like I was an idiot. Some said what the others were apparently thinking: “Such a law can’t pass here. You’re making that up.” And so, the FRA law enabling bulk warrantless wiretapping passed in Sweden.

The developments that are happening – right here, right now – are too shocking for most people to comprehend. Many don’t want to absorb what is happening, because the consequences are horrifying. And I understand them completely.

There is exactly one thing that can reverse this trend. There is one thing, and only one. If politicians aren’t losing their jobs en masse over this, and fast, then we will pass a point of no return. Democracy still works, but its fundaments are becoming increasingly eroded, and one day it will fall. All of the current parties have sold out to surveillance and wiretapping. They must be kicked out, or we will have Orwell on steroids within a decade.

After all, with all that has been revealed as reality now, if the politicians responsible for this are re-elected in denial or in a shrug of the shoulders, totalitarianism beyond your nightmares is just around the corner. Re-election will send a signal that further consolidation of absolute power is a boost to their careers, and act accordingly.

Yes, that means I am advocating voting for somebody that has privacy as their number one priority. I started one such party that has spread to 70 countries. There may be others, take your pick. That is the only thing left you can do within the current crumbling framework of a democratic society, and doing so is much more important than jobs, than money, than healthcare, than schooling, than any of the usual political billboard issues.

The one remaining option after that is not a place any of us want to go.

I wish I could ask how many more warning bells people need to see what’s happening, but the question is pointless, because there won’t be another one. This was the final bell.

(Article photo of marching soldiers by José A. Warletta.)

Talking Back Lessons: Retorts To “Copying Is Stealing”

Activism: In a series of articles here at Falkvinge on Infopolicy, I’ll be giving examples of talking back to the most disturbingly false bullshit repeated by pro-copyright-monopoly pundits. The reason for this is that I see tons of this kind of bullshit in discussion threads, and it stands unchallenged, which is dangerous. As I describe in Swarmwise, it is of immense importance for our long-term liberties that false assertions are countered immediately and in numbers whenever they appear.

Today, we’re going to discuss the assertion that “copying is stealing”, that amazingly still lives on. It should be dead and buried at least fifteen years ago, but isn’t. Here are three examples how to counter it. Adapt to your own language and use when discussions threads like this one on Reddit pop up.

Don’t be content with one person already having countered a false assertion, and count on people thinking logically. A false statement must be hammered with opposition for liberties to win; it’s not a logic game but a numbers game. It’s about looking like the winning team, as I describe in Swarmwise – that’s what shapes the reality and the future.

Today, we’ll deal with the “copying is stealing” nonsense. Don’t let it stand unchallenged at any time.

Here are three sample responses you can use. Copy, remix and adapt to your own language.

False statement: “Copying is stealing.”

Sample response 1: No. Absolutely not. If copying were stealing, we would have no need for copyright monopoly laws in the first place, as ordinary property laws would suffice. Those define stealing. But we have separate laws for the copyright monopoly, and stealing isn’t defined there. Therefore, obviously, it is not stealing. Not legally, nor morally, economically, Infringement of the copyright monopoly, however, is – but that’s something completely different. You are trying to redefine words in a very dishonest way to frame the debate in a factually incorrect light.

Sample response 2: No. Absolutely not. Nobody is stealing anything. They are manufacturing their own copies using their own property. The difference is very important and if we’re supposed to have a constructive debate, you should call things for what they are. This is manufacturing without a license from legal monopolies, so-called “exclusive rights” (the copyright monopoly). Nobody is losing any object, which is what defines stealing. An object is copied. You are trying to redefine words in a very dishonest way to frame the debate in a factually incorrect light.

Sample response 3: No. Absolutely not. Manufacturing your own copy of something using your own property – your computer, storage, and network equipment – is not stealing logically, legally, morally, economically, or philosophically. The debate moved past this silly argument 15 years ago, and trying to bring it up again just makes you look like you’re talking of horseless carriages. If you really want confirmation of this simple fact, you should look in the nearest lawbook: in no book of laws on this entire planet are property laws (where stealing is defined) and copyright monopoly laws defined in the same section. Hint: only violations of property laws, the former, are defined as stealing.

Follow-up false statement: “But they are causing X to lose money, therefore it is stealing.”

Sample response: Whether they are losing money is debatable, but it doesn’t matter in the slightest. People are causing other people to lose money all the time and everywhere with every action. Stealing is narrowly defined as when you break property laws in order to deny somebody their property, and the copyright monopoly is not a property law, it is defined elsewhere in the books. There is no other legal, moral, or popular definition of stealing. Instead, you are using the loaded word “stealing” to say “what they are doing is wrong”. In doing so, you are not only lying and slandering as they are not stealing, you are also factually wrong with what you intended to say, as sharing culture and knowledge is a good deed to society and to your fellow human being.

Take these responses. Use them. More to come next Saturday for the foreseeable future.