Ars Electronica, X: “Thank you for the 5000 euro, we will have to waste them fast” (Piratbyrån’s talk in Linz)

Piratbyrån received an award of distinction at Prix Ars Electronica 2009, in the category “digital communities”. Here follows the talk given by Rasmus Fleischer at the festival in Linz, September 7.

I would like to take this opportunity to say a few things about how digital communities keep together, and how that relates to the issue of money.

Without any intention to sound unthankful, I still must point out that receiving 5000 euro to a project like Piratbyrån is not only helping to boost the activity, but also potentially a problem for us. Because with money in a community, it has to formalize itself. In order to make democratic decisions about what to do with a budget, a clear line must be drawn separating insiders from outsiders. Not that we are against formalization, it’s just that Piratbyrån never had these clear borders. Sometimes we define our work as just an ongoing conversation, which sometimes unexpectedly spills over into specific interventions.

Our kind of community is maybe best defined by a concept that was once established by the Russian curator Victor Misiano: “the institutionalization of friendship“. Friends are not family, not lovers, not colleagues, but something else, he points out. Maintaining friendship as the driving force for a group – especially if the group receives 5000 euro – means walking a thin line between formality and informality.

It all started precisely six years ago, in september 2003, as more of a semantic joke. There was already an anti-piracy bureau, so we put up a website of the “piracy bureau”, offering a message of pro-copying. The website became a place for critical discussions about copyright enforcement and for mutual education in the use of the various P2P file-sharing networks which were around at that time.
The establishment of Piratbyrån as a public actor kick-started a new public discussion in Sweden, which has going on ever since. By participating in that we learned a lot. Our curiosity was what made us maintain the project, instead of just letting it dissolve after a few months, as usually happens with web projects. Most of all, we learned from each other’s very different skills: hacking and slacking, art and theory.

The core of Piratbyrån has never been the website, but rather the IRC chatrooms, filled by a spirit of friendship and experimentation. One early experiment was with a new file-sharing protocol known as bittorrent. A simple server was set up in a shoebox in someone’s wardrobe and called The Pirate Bay. Some years later, The Pirate Bay was the world’s largest bittorrent tracker, co-directing a shockingly large amount of the world’s total internet traffic. How did that happen?

The answer, I think, says a lot about digital communities in general. Indeed the unique efforts made by the three system administrators have been crucial. But they “are” not The Pirate Bay, one could not even say that they “own” The Pirate Bay. They are only one part of a larger assemblage, consisting of hardware, software, domain names, and of a broader community of people (like myself) who from time to time contribute with their skills in everything from coding to design and public relations. Last but not least, there are the swarms of millions of file-sharers all over the world. Take away one of these elements, and the whole assemblage will no longer be the same. So the questions is how to keep everything together. Economy then appears as the most tricky part.

On one hand, there must be flows of money to pay for hardware and bandwidth. On the other hand, non of this money can just run into the pockets of a few involved individuals. That would mean a professionalisation which would cause the larger community of informal contributors to drop off.
The Pirate Bay solved this dilemma by letting an external company sell silly ads on the webpage, and to even let this company keep the profit after taking care of the bills for hardware and bandwidth. By keeping economic administration outside of the assemblage, a more fuzzy line between inside and outside could be maintained. Working with The Pirate Bay has basically remained a hobby project for everyone involved.
It is not even idealism that stops the system administrators from directing money flows down in their own pockets. It simply follows from a dependency on community.

The symbolic value of The Pirate Bay has enabled us to make a difference in many ways. But there are also problems with it becoming ever more clear. After all, P2P was never meant to have one single ship as its allmighty symbol. And now when the Swedish court is targetting the three system administrations, claiming that they are assisting any copyright infringement in the swarm, it might be harder to maintain the feeling of a hobby project. It’s time to sink the ship and move on!

You have probably heard that The Pirate Bay will be sold. Actually, what will be sold is the domain name. The rest is already about the be copied. You can now download The Pirate Bay from The Pirate Bay. And there are already an independent bittorrent tracker called OpenBittorrent, as well as an independent torrent hosting site called Torrage. None of these can really be claimed to assist copyright infringement, as they by their own don’t even have the ability to overview what torrents they are tracking. What will come after The Pirate Bay will not be one big ship, but something less centralized, harder to pin down by any legal system.

Piratbyrån is not dissolving, but seems to be changing its character very much, letting the borders become even more fluid. For us as a community of friends it’s not any longer so much about actually being a specific community in relation to an outside, but about initiating new communities and linking them together (much like a bittorrent tracker): some more open and some more closed, some large and some small, some formalized and some chaotic. Usually the label of “Piratbyrån” is not needed in this, but we occasionally use it, especially in international relations. In the forefront of these overlapping communities there are now, for the first time, at least as many women as there are men.
Sweden just experienced a very hot spring and a hot summer of internet activism, going far beyond the question of P2P networks, including practical solidarity with Iranian protesters as well as successful campaigning to change the EU Telecoms Package.

Still these communities are driven by joy and centered on IRC, when not centered in an old city bus. Piratbyrån bought the bus last year and drove it from Sweden to Südtirol, on invitation from the Manifesta biennale. Transferring a digital community from IRC chatrooms to the limited physical space of a bus has been a very productive experiment.
We used the bus as a base camp outside the courthouse during the first trial against The Pirate Bay earlier this year. We decided to treat the trial as a piece of theatre, named The Spectrial. The island Kungsholmen in central Stockholm became a meeting place which connected communities together: in the courthouse, in the coffeehouses around and in the bus, as well as on IRC, blogs and Twitter.
We hade a great time together and after The Spectrial was over, what remained seems to be a larger, looser and more energized digital community, ready to take on new tasks. This is not, however, a community able to make democratic decisions about the long-term use of 5000 euro. Actually, there is a risk that money can destroy such a community, if the money is not burnt-off fast enough. Good for us, then, we have a bus which is old and needs repairing and repainting.

A bus is a great way to burn money. We will probably also spend some of the money at some kind of gala party, because place-specific festivities are crucial to insert more joy into the everyday digital community based on IRC.
It is not that we romanticize short-sightedness. Rather we have learned that Piratbyrån’s specific kind of community is best at long-term thinking when not burdened by money and by the formalization that follows from having money. So thank you for the 5000 euro, Ars Electronica – we promise that they will not last long!