From Pirate to Hacktivist w/ Peter Sunde
EPISODE #39
Co-founder of The Pirate Bay Peter Sunde shares his insights into the cultural importance of copying, why pranking and trolling is an effective form of online activism, and why civil disobedience might be our best tool to bring about a free and open internet.
Peter Sunde, alias brokep, is a politician, computer expert, and spokesperson with Norwegian and Finnish ancestry. He is best known for being a co-founder and ex-spokesperson of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent search engine. He is an equality advocate and has a popular blog where he expresses, among other issues, concerns over the centralization of power to the European Union. Sunde also participates in the Pirate Party of Finland.
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Luke Robert Mason: You're listening to the FUTURES Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.
On this episode I speak to the co-founder of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde.
"Human emotion and memories, and then connectivity, and then culture has a much higher value and meaning than just finance and business." - Peter Sunde, excerpt from interview.
Luke Robert Mason: Peter shared his insights into the cultural importance of copying, why pranking and trolling is an effective form of online activism, and why civil disobedience might be our best tool to bring about a free and open internet.
Now, one of the world's most infamous peer to peer file sharing platforms is 'The Pirate Bay'. Allegedly launched in 2003, it fast became the largest source for downloading feature films, TV shows and software. For over a decade, it sparked numerous controversies pertaining to the legality of file-sharing, the limits of copyright, and the issues surrounding civil liberties.
But behind all of this outrage is a much more nuanced story. One of activism and political engagement, driven by a desire to troll authority and to question the assumptions about what the web is, how it is operated and how it is governed. At the heart of this is The Pirate Bay's outspoken co-founder, Peter Sunde, who has continuously found new and often hilarious ways to question reality through engaging in hacktivism at a global scale.
So, Peter. Hacker or pirate? Activist or prankster? Politician or provocateur? Artist or ex-convict? How would you best describe yourself?
Peter Sunde: Like, everything you just said. I think it's a mix of everything. In general, we're not binary people. We have different time slots in life for different things. So I think we need to be all of those things, and the more the merrier.
Mason: The more the merrier, indeed. At the heart of everything that you do seems to be an interest in this idea of copying. Copying is so integral, it feels, in so many ways. In biology, society, and mechanics. Why is copying so integral to how we progress as a society?
Sunde: Well, it's the basis for everything we do. We learn by doing. We learn by copying. We learn by mimicking. We go to school to copy other people's understanding and knowledge. So we can't have a society without having copying. In today's society, all information is digital. We have the possibility of having every copy available for everyone.
So for me, it's a way of looking at how we want to develop society. If we want to do it more rapidly and a more fair way, of course, copying is at the core of everything.
Mason: I mean, I want to start at the beginning. The Pirate Bay is really the story here. How did three individuals end up creating one of the most popular destinations on the internet?
Sunde: By accident, like everything else. We were interested in technology. We were quite a big group. We're like 40 or 50 people that had different interests, but we all kind of formed together as a small, weird think tank operation called 'The Bureau for Piracy' as a reaction to the anti-pirates that were founding organisations - anti-piracy bureaus - all over Europe.
We were somewhere between a student desk prank organisation - that very loose thing - with new technologies. One of the things we happened to do was that we found a new technology called torrents - BitTorrent. We made a website that was mostly for Scandanavian file sharers. The big difference with BitTorrent and how previous file sharing worked was that you could participate in sharing in a more fair way, where you would also upload parts that you downloaded.
Previously, you would have to share a hard drive of 20 gigabytes of music in order to get the new music. It was a very elitist system, and BitTorrent kind of changed all of that. You wouldn't just be someone who took from someone. You could also help other people in sharing.
It was very interesting on a philosophical level, but also on a technical level, and on a legal level. That's kind of what we focused on. What happened to be The Pirate Bay, that came out of this group, started growing slowly, and became a little bit bigger. We were three people that were more or less the people that took care of it day-to-day. We split from the other group. I still stayed as a member of the first group, but we focused most of our time on The Pirate Bay.
We didn't have any big vision that it was going to be extremely big or anything like that. It was just important to us on a personal level, and that's why we did it. Everyone else started shutting down because of legal pressure, and we took a stance against that bullying that these companies were doing - and are still doing even to this day, against the same people. I think it was just kind of timing, luck - or maybe the opposite of luck - and just being a little bit stupid, actually. Not looking at the consequences of what we were doing.
Mason: What were those early days like? How did you find your co-founders? We always have these kind of imaginaries of what groups of young individuals coming together to create a tech project look like, but what was the culture like at The Pirate Bay, back then?
Sunde: It was nothing like what you would imagine. We were three individuals that had different political interests and philosophies. We did not like each other that much. We could talk about the internet. We were very much idealists when it came to freedom of speech and access to information. There were very few things that we had in common, from me being on the - as they would call it - extreme left, and the other guys on the moderate right - or as I would call it, neo-Nazis, almost. We were very different, but we did agree on the basis of what became The Pirate Bay, so we could work on that.
I think in many ways, every time we tried to speak on other things, we started fighting. So we decided not to do that, and it was very productive in a way to just ignore those things.
Mason: For you, what was The Pirate Bay? Was it a tech project or was there something else going on there? Were you using it as a platform for both arts and perhaps even activism?
Sunde: For me, it was definitely activism. It was early on hacktivism, I would say. It's using technology to leverage an ideology that I wanted to promote and have discussed. Of course there was the practical angle of people actually being able to reach information and sharing. For me, that was the good thing about the system that would make people think about why they were doing this and what we wanted the world to look like.
For the other guys, they had different interests. For Fredrik it was mostly an amazing tech project to work on as a technician, because we were running half of the internet traffic at one time. We had no budget and no money whatsoever. We didn't have enough money for the chassis of the first server, so it was actually an issue box run in Mexico and probably funded by some Mexican cartel. It wasn't much different than what you would imagine in a normal startup or anything like that. It was very exciting in that way.
It also made us focus very much on having the system up and running and getting people's support to do this. I think that was the most integral part of it for me. If the public didn't like it and didn't use it or want it, it would be a useless product.
Mason: That was the amazing thing about The Pirate Bay. Reading about your story, it's how you messed with people's expectations. The expectation was that because it was running about 52% of the internet traffic at the time, it was this huge nefarious organisation. You were able to use that perception to almost troll the press and mess with some of their expectations, weren't you?
Sunde: Yeah, we were really good at that. I can probably take some of the blame for that as well. Every week there would be some journalists contacting us, asking to meet us at our headquarters or maybe our local offices somewhere. Of course, we had normal day jobs - all of us - and we didn't have any money. Most of the time when The Pirate Bay was shut down, it was not because of the police - which everyone thought it was, because we had unpaid bills somewhere. We were finding the next sucker to make sure that he would not get money from us because we couldn't afford the internet bills. Bandwidth was very expensive at that time.
So the perception was very different. As you said, we were using that quite a lot to our advantage. We sent out press releases like big corporations would do, but using words that big corporations would not use. Very often, words like "fuck" or "fuck off". "Fuck" was the most used word, I would say. We used the form of big corporations when it fit our agenda. When people started giving us underserved respect and attention, we didn't feel like it was something we could waste, so we started using that as well.
As for one of the funniest projects that we did, there's this nation - an island, or platform really - outside of England, that's called Sealand. They claim to be their own nation. We had a discussion about how that is kind of cool, and how we should have our own nation. Who doesn't want to have their own nation? Sealand ended up being on eBay. They actually wanted to sell Sealand. Then we started the first crowdfunding campaign on the internet ever, just called buy sealand dot com. We just claimed that we were going to buy this country and we needed your money. That's it. If we can't afford it, we're going to do something else with the money that is fun.
People started donating. It took 24 hours and we had $50,000 or something like that. All of a sudden, I remember the Prince of Sealand got invited to the Larry King talk show and talked to one of the bosses at Warner Bros. or Disney - or something like that - about the problematic situation of us having our nation and then dictating corporate laws and so on. I think I was still hungover from the party we had when we came up with the idea of Sealand when I saw him on Larry King. It was a very bizarre situation that people took way too seriously. I think that was the best thing that we ever did, getting that attention.
Mason: How far did that project go? Did you end up starting your own country or did that get nipped in the bud after Larry King?
Sunde: Well Hollywood, being afraid of us, gave the guy a movie contract. There was this really crappy movie about Sealand a few years later. He happened to get it exactly at that time, which is probably totally unrelated. In general, we would not be good people to run our own country. At least not as a group of those three people, because it would be a really awful country to live in with those types of politics.
There was also a really interesting debate that happened when we started talking about having our nation. People on the internet started realising that there is something wrong on the internet. We need to have our own nation in order to actually have a counterbalance to the United States having so much influence, and other countries being kind of afraid of the United States and their influence when it comes to technology. It was very interesting to talk about that.
There were also some very scary situations that arose from that, because people started applying for passports. We made our government website and people started playing for passports because they were refugees and so on. There were all of these deeper meanings that came to this, which is troublesome, but of course interesting on different levels.
Mason: There were so many projects like this, weren't there? You claimed to be starting a drone internet. You basically virtually invaded North Korea. What are some of your favourite ways in which you trolled the press at The Pirate Bay?
Sunde: Long story. I'll try to keep it short, but I think the North Korea relationship is really different. Not a lot of people know this, but North Korea and Sweden have a really long history. After the Korean War, North Korea shut down, and one of the first countries they started trading with outside of Russia and China was of course Sweden. Sweden was a socialist country in their eyes and also had something which they wanted, which was Volvo trucks, Saab, and Scania tractors, and all of these things. They wanted to buy a lot of Swedish technology. Sweden was the first country invited into North Korea, which was considered or thought of as one of the richest countries in the world. This is an absurd thought today, but North Korea was very rich before the Korean War.
Sweden got pranked. They got kind of screwed over by the North Korean government. North Korea started buying things and slowly paying for them, to the Swedish government. Then, the Swedish government started funding local companies in Sweden so that they could produce faster and give more to North Korea. In the end, North Korea just stopped paying the bills and owed Sweden 200 million euros or something like that, still to this day. They haven't paid anything since the nineties, or early nineties. So of course. Sweden ended up having a North Korean Embassy in Stockholm, which was actually used for smuggling cigarettes to Sweden in the nineties as well, which is an interesting story. It's one of the few countries in the Western world that has an Embassy of North Korea.
I've been kind of obsessed with the North Korea and Swedish relationship and studied them quite a lot, just out of pure interest. I know that every time you say something about North Korea or you want to talk to North Korea, they would always say, "no comment." But very often when journalists started asking us for comments that we didn't want to reply to, we said something stupid. One time, I was really annoyed at the guy working for a Swedish newspaper because I'd told him so many times that I didn't want to respond to him. I said, "I don't want to respond because right now I have to go to my meeting at the North Korean Embassy." Two minutes later, I said, "Oh, please ignore that." Of course, he didn't ignore it. I said, "I can't comment on what I just said." I was just playing along with him.
Then, I leaked through some other sources that we were going to make a deal with being hosted in North Korea at the Embassy in Stockholm, because they also have a fibre connection there. We would be on North Korean soil, but in Sweden. One of the things we did with [The] Pirate [Bay] was that we always made up things that were plausible - very unlikely, but technically possible. Having the reputation we do, it could actually happen. Working with the North Koreans was very plausible for us - especially at that time where people were kind of confused about who we were and what our goals were.
Of course, that was the first prank we did with North Korea. We claimed to be hosted at the Embassy. When the journalists contacted them, they said, of course, "no comment." - instead of saying that this was not true, which is what the press would have expected them to say; to deny it. For a long time, there were rumours in the press. The press actually wrote a lot of stories about The Pirate Bay being hosted in North Korea.
Of course, a few years later, people realised it was a joke. But a few years later we kind of revisited that project. We actually took all of North Korea's IP addresses. We found a way to make our routers look like they were actually the routers of the North Korean country. It was kind of a brag to show how we could hack the internet and then take control over parts of the internet that were not really well protected; to show off our technical skill. Also, we actually had IP addresses that were registered to North Korea and we ran The Pirate Bay on one of those IPs.
We even delayed the traffic. Even though it came to Sweden, we had machines in front of it that delayed all of the traffic so that it would look like it was on a satellite link. We faked everything. It took like almost a week before the technologists realised how we'd done this. The press was all over it. In North Korea, they always said, "no comment." Then afterwards, of course, people started doing all of these memes with pictures of the three of us being in North Korea, teaching Kim Jong-un how to use the internet, and so on. It was very funny. The only sucky thing about this story that I always say is that for a week, we actually had all of the traffic in North Korea, so the North Koreans could not use the internet, which is sad of course.
Mason: It feels like, Peter, you should be thanked by the international community, not vilified for some of your interventions. What drives you to find these exploits and play in these spaces?
Sunde: I think it's just that I never stopped being a kid. On the other hand, I think that I like pranks because they give you the attention for something else. For instance, you have this absurdity of being in North Korea, which means that people will talk about the actual thing. The best thing that The Pirate Bay ever made was the fact that people started talking about intellectual property at all, because it's such a boring topic.
We used these pranks in order to make it...I wouldn't say sexy, but funny. When you can't make it sexy, you have to make it funny, right? We were the funny people that made it interesting to talk about serious topics in a way that was more or less a core discussion about what we want our next community or the current society to look like. If we're going to build it on top of a platform like the internet, we need, of course, to have democracy in place. We need to realise that we don't own the cables. We don't own the infrastructure and all of these things. We need to start discussing how to integrate that into actual politics; in normal, everyday politics. We need to discuss how to make sure that we have human rights on the internet, and all of these things as well. We did it in a very playful way.
For me, I like humour, of course. I like pranks. I love all of these people who make pranks that are clever and funny. It's a very effective way to actually get your ideology across, and then open up the discussion. In basically every project I go into, our opponents happen to be humourless people. You get this unfair advantage where they look like dicks and they almost are dicks as well, but they look like they're what they actually are. So you get kind of a lot of sympathy for your cause, because you pull down their trousers and see that they're just assholes.
Mason: Well, it does feel like just being annoying is a legitimate response. I know that when it came to some of the legal threats that you were getting and some of the responses to the lawyers of the companies who were sending you take down notices, you were just trying to be annoying to sort of expose how stupid some of these requests were. Could you share some of your favourite responses to some of those lawyers in the early days?
Sunde: I think back in those days, when people started sending these take down notices - the cease and desist letters - these companies were very used to people just listening to them and then taking their word for it. I would say 99 percent of the cease and desist letters that we got were from the United States and they were talking about the Millennium Copyright Act, which is a law in the United States dealing with how to take down websites, or content on websites. That, of course, does not apply outside of the United States. It felt really weird that they would try and apply that in a different country despite the fact that Europe we have other laws that they could use, and we would be happy to talk to them if they didn't have this kind of - sorry to say - but Central North American attitude of, "We are the world and we are the world police." We wanted to take them down a notch and be annoying, but also legally right. We just very often told them, "Fuck you" or, "Here's the thing you can stick up your ass." - or we'd recommend models of batons, and confuse them quite a bit.
I remember one of my favourite personal responses was when I got a letter from one of those big Hollywood studios about taking down this and this movie, or something like that. I just sent a picture of a polar bear. A popular myth is that polar bears roam around in the streets in Scandinavia, even though it's only on Svalbard, a Norweigan island far north. I just sent the picture - no text, no nothing. Just a picture of a polar bear. I got a reply saying, "Why did you send a picture of a polar bear?" I said, "Well, this guy is outside my window. He's trying to kill me. Why would I care about some American law called the MCA? It's not relevant for me, but staying alive is, so what are you going to do to help me?" Of course they didn't reply to that, because it's stupid, right?
They very often sent documents in doc format as BMP files or really big image files instead of just text in a document, because they scanned some documents. It's this coalition of internet culture and the tech savvy culture, with the old world very much in document form and the format of it. We would draw a cartoon or a doodle and send it back with a penis squirting or something like that, because they didn't know how to respond to that. When they don't respond, you actually win because they don't follow up on their legal threats anymore. We were totally in the clear because they were confused. It's a very modern approach to attack back with; stupidity.
Mason: Well, it feels like it's not just stupidity that you were utilising. It was really political theatre. What you were doing was a form of politics. I know you've been heavily involved in European politics. In fact, you ran for the European Parliament in 2014 with The Pirate Party of Finland. Why have you always had this interest in nasciently getting involved in European politics? What is it you're trying to reveal by getting involved in these sorts of things?
Sunde: As you say, theatre is a really good word for what we were doing. Still, what I'm doing is mostly theatre. I have a role in this theatre where I am some sort of prankster and jester. It's a story, right? It's storytelling. Very often when you have a story, it's simple to write for the press. For instance, when I ran for office in the European Union, it's not because I liked certain political parties in general. I don't like political parties. It's too constrained for me in many ways. I don't want to be a politician with responsibility to voters, or anything like that. It doesn't work for me. Other people do that much better, and should do it instead of me.
But, I realised that if I run for office, I will get attention and I will use that attention to make sure that the other politicians running the same election have to talk about the things that I want to be talked about in the media. I could bring the discussion about the internet's openness, and copyright, and transparency, and access to that information. All of the core values of ownership of the internet, and then what we want to do with it. Internet as a human right and all of these things.
I sent out really awful advertising campaigns. I made small videos. I was just looking into a camera romantically with romantic, smooth music which was really awful. It just started like 'Peter Romantic'. I didn't say that this is my politics. I didn't say that this other party is crap. I just took a different path because I knew that it would be much more interesting to me, because there's some sort of artistic approach to this as well.
Of course, it gave me a lot of attention - both because I had this weird background and when the media asked me about what my main point was of running, I would say, "Well, I want diplomatic immunity. If you vote for me, I get diplomatic immunity. That would be really cool, for me." People, of course, get shocked by that. It's interesting and it's funny. Then they would ask, "Why do you want diplomatic immunity?" And then I could tell them the story about how I was wanted by Interpol at the time. I could tell the story of why, which is The Pirate Bay. Then you have this David and Goliath story. All of a sudden, by saying one thing that sounds ridiculous you kind of invite someone over to your house and on your side of the playing field to have a discussion, which is much nicer than trying to force someone to have this discussion.
Mason: It was absurd at the time, but we've just come through the Trump era where it felt like the only reason he was running was for diplomatic immunity. Do you think some of these absurd things have bled back into real life politics? The border between art and reality is slowly dissipating.
Sunde: You know, it's impossible to do satire today. For the comedians working on satire, it's impossible. I'm friends with Chris, who started 4chan. He's one of the sweetest guys ever in the world. He's just an amazing guy. I would never expect what he created to create Trump and QAnon. It went from being this nice hobby project of 4chan where everything that was great with the internet was on 4chan. There was an anonymous board where people could post things, discover themselves, and rediscover themselves without having any pressure. If you post something on social media today, you will have to stand for that in five years, even though you're totally a different person. 4chan was the opposite. That was the beauty of the internet. Right now, it's just like the cesspool of the whole world.
I think something happened very quickly. It might be that our side, who were using the internet as a platform for trolling and all of these things, had tactics which were taken over by the alt-right who are the opponents to what we want to achieve. They did that in a much better way than we could ever do.
Mason: The memes were certainly stronger. I mean, it wasn't just politics you were involved in. You were involved in religion, which was one of the oddest things that I read about you. In fact, you founded your own religion, 'The Missionary Church of Kopimism'. What was the story behind the Church of Kopimism?
Sunde: Going back to my idea of taking things differently, we had an opponent in the anti-piracy world - a lawyer who realised that calling us pirates didn't really work because we kind of reclaimed that word from being something bad into something that had a positive spin. People were very proud, and a lot of people are still proud of being a pirate, depending on what meaning you attribute to it.
When the Hollywood music studios said someone was a pirate, it had no effect. This woman specifically started every single interview by saying that we were a cult. We're a cult. We're a cult. We had this fun word which was 'kopimi' which in Swedish means 'to copy me', of course. We put that as a logo on everything. Instead of 'copyright', it was 'kopimi'. We made a pyramid with a 'K' inside instead of a round symbol with a 'C' inside, as some sort of alternative to copyrights. We wanted to be copied.
When she started calling us a cult, I started, you know, looking into whether we could reclaim that word. Can we be a cult and make it something funny? I'm Norwegian Finnish. I grew up in most of Scandinavia. One of the big differences between other Scandinavian countries and Sweden is that Sweden split the state church in like 2000, I think. Sweden is one of the few countries in Scandinavia that does not have a state church. By doing that, they made the most liberal and then modern law about religions in the Western world where you can believe in whatever, and it can be recognised as a religion. If you have a certain format, it is fixed. You need to have some sort of Bible, you need to have some sort of way to do prayers and so on.
With Sweden being somewhat of a social democracy, you would pay 50 euros to register a religion that would be recognised by the state. It would be recognised if they liked the format of it. Of course they could not comment on the content, because then it would not be very open.
I had some friends that thought it was a funny idea. I was playing around, reading all of these things and I just liked the idea of having my own church. Then I realised that in most of the laws about surveillance such as Data Retention Directive - or in Sweden there's the FRA, which is the Swedish NSA that had a new law coming that was listening in to traffic between borders - all of these surveillance laws are really afraid of religious lobbying. There's always an exception to religious communication in all of the surveillance laws, which is ironic because most of what they're after is of course jihadists or someone who is a religious terrorist. You're really not allowed to listen into that traffic.
If you talk to your priests, that is a religious communication. There's this church called the Church of Mormons, or the Mormon Church. They consider everyone to be a priest. You can go and talk to anyone else in order to enlighten your heart and talk to God. I just decided we can do the same. Everyone can be a priest until proven otherwise. Then instead of having peer to peer traffic, we would have priest to priest traffic. Still P2P, but if someone filed a lawsuit against you for file-sharing, you could say, "It's my religious belief." Copying is the actual service that you do. It's your way of talking to God. Then it would be four years in prison for the person who actually looked over your traffic and discovered that you were doing your prayers.
Of course, it would be absurd in a court case to say that this is religious, but it would be plausible. It would probably be hard to not take that seriously as a lawyer or as a judge, because it would affect so many other things. We had this priest to priest communication, and then it was just a matter of getting the church registered. It was just super funny. It also took away this whole discussion from the other side that we were a cult.
The interesting thing, of course, is that this woman who started talking about this cult works for Hollywood and the Church of Scientology. She would have this understanding of why being a cult is bad. It was also one of my favourite things that happened with the church afterwards, because we opened it up for registrations and you could become a member, just as a fun thing. Tens of thousands of people signed up.
My favourite moment - or least favourite moment - was when I went to a really amazing festival in Belgrade, in Serbia. We stayed with one of the other guys there who was the co-Pope of the church, or whatever you want to call it. There was this guy that came up to us and asked if we would wed him and his girlfriend, because they wanted to be the first couple ever married in the Church of Kopimism. I had to explain that I don't believe in marriage. My friend explained that he's actually Christian and of another faith, so he didn't want to do it. They asked us what they should do. I had just seen 'Austin Powers' the day before, and so I was still in this mindset of thinking about lasers. I just told him, "You need lasers." - which Austin Powers says in the movie, very funnily.
The day after, at the festival, there was a wedding. The guy got married and they had a Guy Fawkes mask. The priest had a Guy Fawkes mask on and they had some computer speech with all of the wires. Then they had 40 people with laser pens in the audience, shooting lasers. It was funny and also a little bit scary. I talked to the guy afterwards. I said congratulations and all that, and I wanted to make sure that he realised that this was a political prank. I said, "You do realise this, right?" He looked really seriously, straight into my face, and said, "Peter, you're just testing my faith." Maybe it was a cult, which is kind of funny. I just started laughing because it was kind of scary and funny at the same time. It's on my bucket list, you know. I have a long bucket list that's getting shorter by the minute because I do some of these things, but starting my own cult is kind of a cool thing to have done.
Mason: Well, what's crazy is it seems like the only way to get true privacy in this day and age in a post-theist world is to be part of a religion. That reveals something very problematic about the world in which we're living in.
Sunde: Yeah, but everything is a religion. In the current regime we're living in, we call it political but it is sort of a religion. Capitalism is religion. Socialism is sort of a religion. We're living in one of them, and I don't have that faith. I'm not even agnostic. I very much don't have faith in capitalism. This is the problematic thing. We have a conviction rather than an understanding of society. It leads to quite problematic situations when we can't see what's good for us in the long run. This is typically the problem with religions. They're not based on facts or science. They're based on a belief, or hope - which could be good if they were also based on actual facts.
Mason: The interesting thing about the religion is that you developed the entire aesthetic of the thing. Apparently, your religious symbols were Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V. What other aspects of the religion did you enjoy creating?
Sunde: Well, I very much like the discourse around religions as a sort of political experiment. A lot of people were really obsessed about us starting a religion because they are true followers of some God and they said we were kind of abusing the power invested into people like. I can kind of understand this. A lot of people have had troubles - quite a lot of troubles - because of religious convictions. Then we show up as some sort of political prank, abusing the thing they built up some sort of recognition and respect for.
Then again, I think a lot of religions are sort of political to begin with. Many of them have been used as political tools. There's a reason why the UK Head of State is also the Head of the Church. All of these things are intertwined. It's maybe more of a culture than a religion or politics. For me, it's important that we question these things and that we have respect for them, of course. But, I think it's okay to use whatever tool you have if the reason for doing it is the right reason. Right? So if you have a conviction that you're doing it for the right reason, I'm fine with it.
Really, it was more interesting when in the church, internally, people started breaking it up into pieces. These are the things I can stand behind. There were fractions of the church which is what happens in every religion. We just call them "forks" because we're tech people and we fork things. So there was the Anti-Orthodox Kopimism Church and all of these funny different layers that happened with these fractions. It's sort of like you set something on fire a little bit, and then it starts burning; this thing that you didn't think would actually burn. I felt like a pyromaniac that was looking at something burning and it was kind of funny. It's an unexpected outcome. With the religion having people getting married, I would never have expected that, but it was funny.
I always like to play, again, with these plausible things. There is another funny - or sad - thing I've been doing, which is not so much related to the internet or copying. Like every other country in Europe, both Sweden and Finland - where I'm most active - have had a lot of trouble with the far right extremist parties joining the political discourse as some sort of equal, which is scary and problematic. With some friends, I actually decided to start a true nationalist party in Sweden and Finland, because we have indigenous people here called The Sámi, which a lot of people don't know about. They are the true Swedish, Norweigan, and Finnish inhabitants, and came to this country twenty thousand years before the current Swedes or Finns did.
We just decided that if we're going to have nationalist parties, then let's go extreme. Let's take the real nationalists. They're super nice people who would never do it themselves. Let's just pretend to be these guys. Instead of the Swedish Democrats, we have the Sámi Democrats. Instead of the True Finns, we have the True Sámis. We copied their wording. We copied their debate articles and their political programmes. We added some Hitler and all of the other things. We started talking about this Middle Eastern culture that were coming here, but we meant Christianity rather than Islam. We talked about these Swedes and these Finns moving into our countries, taking our women, taking our jobs, taking all of our minds and all of these things. This is kind of exactly the same story as is going on right now, but it just happened before.
It was very interesting to see how the fascists and neo-Nazis, in particular, were reacting to this. A lot of them agreed that these guys were here before us. We took their jobs, we took their minds; this is all true. We took their land and they just said, "Fuck them. We don't care." Some of them said, "Okay, we need to move back to Belgium, France, or wherever our parents came from ten generations ago." They were true to their ideology. For them, it was a wake-up call. They had a much more extreme party that came there and made an equal amount of sense.
The press were really upset because they also didn't figure out until like two months afterwards that this was a prank. So yeah, it made everyone feel stupid, but most of all it made the Swedish Democrats and the True Finns feel quite stupid, because they fell for it. It was kind of funny. Then again, there was this other thing. As with the church, we opened up memberships. A lot of people signed up. For me, it was like, "Okay, here's a stupid guy that signed up. There's another stupid guy that signed up" Of course, it was only men signing up. I wonder why?
Then, my co-founder - who is a little bit more extreme than me when it comes to trolling and pranking - got invited to a lot of political debates, of course. As a newly started party, we got a lot of attention. He sent one of the people that joined to go as an Official Representative of the Sámi Democrats to an actual debate. For me, it was weird seeing this extreme right-wing guy sitting there talking about politics that we were laughing about, and that started this party. After that, we kind of quit. But it's always fun to see this turn that happens, that is really unexpected.
Mason: Well, it's because you're playing in those borders between what is true and what is fake or what is false. I feel like there's one more question that I need to ask you about the Church of Kopimism, which is regarding its founder, Ibrahim Botami. He's never been seen apparently, and he died in 2010. How much can you tell me about that individual, Peter?
Sunde: Well, Ibi was not the founder of the Church, really. But Ibi was a good friend and a member of the Bureau for Piracy. He has been one of the key people who was kind of figuring out what the internet actually meant for society, and Sweden. When he died we actually closed down the Bureau for Piracy, mostly because it was felt that it was time to move on. But he was kind of the founder of the idea of Kopimi. It was the playful thing of Kopimi instead of 'copyright'. I'm not even sure that he was super happy about the Church, but of course he would have loved that something was being copied and made into something else, which was the idea of it.
That's also the funny thing. A lot of things happen in our group which we don't agree on. We are not in favour of these things, but they go hand in hand with the ethos of testing things and finding out what happens. People take credit for something that other people did, and it's kind of fine - as long as it has a higher meaning and bigger perspective. Ibi has been, for me, an inspiration to all of these things as well. I miss him, even though he could be really hard to work with. He was just an amazing guy.
Mason: The only reason I asked, Peter, is because on researching the church, there was almost a suggestion in the press that because so much was fiction, Ibi may have been a fictional individual in the first place. There was certainly a question due to there being no photos of him - or they couldn't find photos of him - about whether he was a fake identity. Again, I'm not sure how much you are able to share there.
Sunde: I will say, "no comment" on that.
Mason: Okay, well, we'll leave it. We'll leave it there. Let's move onto some of the more serious implications of what you were doing at The Pirate Bay. The reality was that there was a serious side to all of this. You were eventually wanted by Interpol, even though you still managed to evade Interpol's international arrest warrant for almost two to three years. The first question I have is, how did you manage that for so long?
Sunde: It was really hard. I went to conferences to speak, and I traveled all over the world at the same time. The thing is, Interpol really suck. I have a big problem with that because I travel everywhere. I decided not to change my life because I was wanted by Interpol. When I booked a ticket somewhere, I used my middle name instead of my last name. It would still match my passport, but it wouldn't match the Interpol warrant because they didn't put my middle name. That's how easy it is to bypass that.
Also, to be totally honest, you have random traffic pullovers where they just check people's identity card and driver's license. My face is the best get out of jail free card. I usually live in neighbourhoods that are more multicultural, and whenever there's a police control, they see a white man and they're just like "Oh, yeah. You're a guy that we're just going to let pass." So, racism has worked great for me, which makes me really upset, of course. It has been really annoying, but also good at the same time to kind of mix it up with the Church of Kopimism and Interpol.
I did go to jail afterwards, after I ran for office and didn't get in. In prison, they refused to give me vegan food. I immediately found something to complain about. I didn't want to change my ideologies because of going to prison, or being arrested, or anything like that. On the first day, I started a fight with them about how they needed to give me vegan food. I showed them the Swedish law about the right to vegetarian food, and a dictionary of what vegetarian food means. It means from vegetables. They would give me lacto-vegetarian food - so eggs and milk - and I don't eat that. Basically, what I did is talk to my friends to see if they could update the Bible of the Church of Kopimism so that everyone has to be vegan - in that wording. Vegan, and not vegetarian. Then they would fax the new Bible to the prison. For religious reasons, I ended up having vegan food.
It was a really great way for them to kind of circumvent the law or the prison mentality. I was probably the only person in Swedish prison that had the right to have vegan food. Afterwards, people joined the Church of Kopimism just to have vegan food as well.
Mason: Well, it seems like it was worthwhile starting an entire religion, for dietary preferences at least. You ended up in prison for six months. There are problems surrounding that court case. In a lot of cases, it's been looked at as a joke - the way in which you ended up in prison in the first place. Could you explain some of the circumstances that actually led to your imprisonment and how there was some trickiness with how that court case occurred?
Sunde: It's a long story, but in general, what happened is that the Hollywood movie studios, the music industry and all of these big Fortune 500 companies were really upset about us and about not having control over The Pirate Bay. They could not get us to listen. They could not dictate what we were doing. Of course, they went to the White House, to ask them to put pressure on Sweden to close down this website. The White House invited the Minister of Justice over for a discussion about this case. He understood that if Sweden didn't take down The Pirate Bay, the US would stop trading with Sweden and put Sweden on a trade sanction list. Then, they'd go to the World Trade Organisation and ask for a ban on Swedish goods being traded. This is like the nuclear bomb for making a country comply, especially an ally like Sweden has been to the US. It's kind of outrageous and funny thinking about how much they must have hated us.
The Minister of Justice came back to Sweden and he told the State Prosecutor what the US had said. It's basically illegal for a minister in Sweden to tell a prosecutor or someone working independently from the government what to focus on, who to charge, or anything like that. He said he just informed him of the problems of not charging us, instead of telling him to charge us.
He, in turn, talked to the prosecutor who had already looked into the case just a few weeks before. He came to the conclusion that we didn't break any laws. Just a few weeks after, there was another big raid against The Pirate Bay where they seized over 200 servers that didn't belong to The Pirate Bay. They had no idea what they were doing. They were just doing this because they had to do something drastic, really quickly. They arrested our lawyer. They took our mice and speakers. They had no clue, really.
During a really long investigation, what happened is that the NPAA sent out a press release before the raid even happened which made it possible for people to download a backup of the site before it was actually raided, interestingly enough. Stupid of them, because otherwise there was no backup. What happened later was that it took three days for The Pirate Bay to get back up online. It wasn't hosted in Sweden anymore, so I think Sweden felt like it was fine, and that they didn't have to do anything.
We all had the feeling that they were going to let the investigation just die out, because Sweden did what they needed to do for the US. But instead what happened is that after one and a half years of really slow investigation, the investigation started to turn. It got sped up and everything had to be done immediately. The policeman in charge of the whole care went from being a kind of nice person, to a stressed person that was really upset and really annoyed, and who wanted everything over with straight away. It turned out that he also got a job from Warner Bros and Universal that said, "When you're done with this investigation, come and start working for us with a really high salary." The day after, he handed over the investigation and he got a job with the same organisations that were behind the lawsuit against us, working on the same case again. He was working as a police officer on Friday, and on Monday he was working as the Head of Anti-Piracy in Europe against The Pirate Bay, with all of this information that he had on a personal level about our whereabouts, our phone numbers, and all of these things that he got as a police officer.
It was a big scandal in Sweden, of course. People were really upset about this - everyone except the new Minister of Justice. She said it was great that Sweden had such great police officers that even big companies wanted to employ them. It didn't change the court case, because the judge decided this was not relevant. We also found out that the judge was the Chairman of the Pro Copyright Society of Sweden, funded by the music industry that sued us.
Of course, we filed complaints about him being biased. His friend - who was the co-chair of the same organisation - was the judge that actually took the case on to decide whether he was biased or nuts. They came to the conclusion that they weren't biased. They were just the best people because they have so much knowledge about the copyrights, so that's why they should test the case. It's scandal after scandal, after scandal. Sweden was not prepared for the pressure that the US put on and the corruption that comes from these big corporations. Sweden has basically no laws against corruption on this level, because it's never happened before.
So we did get convicted - mostly without any evidence. There were screenshots of these companies downloading from The Pirate Bay, and on all of these screenshots they say that The Pirate Bay was actually not responsive. When it came to The Pirate Bay, it said that it was offline because The Pirate Bay didn't always work well. When they did the screenshots it was actually down for two days. It proved, according to the evidence, that they downloaded from other places besides The Pirate Bay. But still, we got convicted of that because it was probable that they would have also been able to download from The Pirate Bay, which is different from what was going on.
Mason: Ultimately, all of that led to you serving this six month jail sentence. How did that change your outlook on the world? I mean, Peter, you certainly haven't lost your sense of humour. I'm glad I'm glad of that, but did it certainly change how you thought about doing political activism in the world?
Sunde: No, I think one of the things that happens when you go to prison for doing the right thing is that you don't necessarily get more radicalised, but you get more in tune with the understanding of what's wrong in society. The people I met in prison were the people that would have benefitted from a better society. They fitted the classic type of having a bad upbringing because they didn't have parents involved and because society didn't protect them enough. I believe this is how we should treat people better. We would have less crime. Instead of putting people into prison for longer or harder sentences, we should have better care and better safety nets for people in society.
I think most of my political convictions and ideologies were just proven in prison. I didn't have anything to feel ashamed of when I went to prison and I didn't do anything wrong. I wouldn't have changed anything. I was kind of the sacrifice from the Swedish government to the United States government to keep on trading ABBA CDs and Volvo cars, you know?
In general, I've gained a lot from doing what I do. I have a lot of people who are interesting that I get to talk to, like you. There are a lot of other people that want to have me around. I meet people that I respect quite a lot, all the time. I get a lot of things out of this as well. I don't feel like I've lost anything, really. Of course, being in prison is not funny. But I met people that I would never have met before. I've got a better understanding of a lot of these people. I realised that the way I look at society and how to improve society is probably the best way forward as well. So it's a humbling experience in that way.
Mason: One of the most revealing things that you said about your prison experience is that it was more freeing than the internet. So, Peter, what do you mean by that?
Sunde: Well, I don't remember to be honest. It was seven years ago, I think. In many ways, you get to think things and your rights are very clear in prison. They're being violated all the time, but at least you know what your rights are. With the internet, we are kind of confused about that. We don't know what our rights are. We think we are allowed to do certain things, but we're not. Prison is more straightforward. Maybe it's because it's a much longer term institution, but the internet is broken in many more ways than prison is, because the current internet doesn't have any responsibility towards you. In prison, at least there is some sort of responsibility from the State and then so on, on how you're being treated. The internet is totally the opposite, so that is kind of scary.
Also, it's kind of a detox from technology, which I think a lot of people would need today. In San Francisco, a lot of people should maybe just go to prison for half a year instead of paying for detox for half a year, or something.
Mason: Well if Congress has its way, then we're going to see a lot of people from Silicon Valley in prison very, very soon. Are you happy with how you managed to progress the public debate on copyright and freedom? If we fast forward to today, the entertainment industry has reacted to what you were doing with The Pirate Bay in a really odd way. They ushered in - and it feels like you ushered in - the age of streaming. We have Netflix, we have Spotify and others. They've really filled that void, once inhabited by illegal file sharing services such as The Pirate Bay. I mean, even Warner Bros. is now releasing all of its content online due to COVID-19, through its own streaming service HBO Max.
It feels like their response was, "Well, let's just make it really easy to stream things. That way, folks won't go and try and find it 'illegally' on the internet." Do you think that you've ushered in streaming? Do you think that's the right response that these companies should have had? Or do you think something else should have happened?
Sunde: I think the main problem with the streaming services...Like of course, know that because of The Pirate Bay, they happened. Spotify often says that without The Pirate Bay, there would be no Spotify because of the void and gap in between the parties. If you want to look at The Pirate Bay versus someone - even though I think it's basically capitalism versus some alternative form of society - they often claim that they fill the void that we brought on.
The problem for me is that they want to thank me, thank The Pirate Bay, and thank the pirates for doing that so that Spotify Connect has a better solution now. For me, it's the opposite. I think that Spotify and Netflix and all of these have created the new cable TV which is against ideals that I wanted to have with the internet. I wanted to have free sharing. I didn't want to have this and this package, with these and these channels that we have to pay for and have different access depending on how much money we have.
Another thing I really object to is if you look at Spotify as an example, previously the record companies had to pay for distribution and that had to prepay for studio time, and all of this. As technology has progressed, there's no need for distribution anymore. It has zero costs. Studio time can basically be created by taking an office, and putting in some computers and soundproofing. You can make one of the best tracks of the year for a really low cost. You don't have these costs anymore that the record companies used to be like the venture capitalists for, but they still take the same amount of money as they did before.
With Spotify and iTunes, and some of the streaming services, they also own part of them. They have a deal with them that basically says if they don't do exactly as much and pay as much as they want to, they will just cut the deal from Spotify and anyone else, and make their business defunct.
We were on the verge of getting rid of them as middlemen. Instead of having a gatekeeper that decided what music you can listen to or what kind of movies would be promoted and all of these things, it would be something that we did as an audience, together with artists. We would get rid of the middle man. Honestly, they're so rich and they're taking so much money. That money should instead be the audience's or the artist's money. We don't have a need for these entities anymore.
Spotify has cemented that thing. They have more power than ever before. They do less and they get more money than ever before from these services. We're applauding them saying, "You solved the situation." All of a sudden you're on Spotify and some of your tracks are not in your playlist anymore because Spotify lost some sort of deal with a record company. You've lost your musical heritage, because music and these types of cultures aren't about money, licenses, fees, or anything like that. It's human emotion, memories, connectivity and culture. It has a much higher meaning than just finance and business.
We could have gone on other routes. We could have seen governments or countries coming up with better ideas of how to fund the arts. A Universal Basic Income would be one way. We didn't even have this discussion whatsoever. We just said, "Here's a problem within the age of technology. The people that used to sell physical items are not going to be able to do that anymore so we need to give them some sort of holy license to print money without doing anything in the future for historical reasons." For me, that's just like how people used to sell ice in the streets. What if we decided that now we're going to have a fridge, they're going to have 20% of the income from fridges for the rest of their lives, without doing anything. We would be outraged by that. But when it comes to these lobbying efforts that they've done and that they've been really good at, it's not something which is great for society.
If you look at the problems this creates, if you go to a country that is not a Western-world country or not a country with a population that is typically middle-class or richer, these companies are not going to spend time and such on getting the market licenses for these countries. I travelled quite frequently to Kosovo and Brazil - before COVID, obviously - and they still use file sharing because they're not first class citizens, according to these corporate entities. They're not rich enough for them to actually come there and give them the streaming services, even though there's no technical reason to not do it.
Again, we have created a class system where the poor get less access to information and culture. The rich get everything, and we don't think about the poor countries anymore because we're done. When you listen to music on Spotify and you don't share it on file sharing systems with people from countries that are not rich, all of a sudden you've created this class society that you're actually a part of.
Even though we don't talk about file-sharing or piracy that much in the Western world, it's the biggest thing outside of the Western world, because it's the only thing. That's extremely problematic.
Mason: This all comes back down to the thing that is fundamentally problematic about the internet and the 21st century, which is centralisation. Centralisation of these services around certain stacks and large, big tech services poses a massive danger, doesn't it? Peter, how are you looking towards some of the ways in which we can start to decentralise the internet? Is it even possible in the 21st century? Are all these big tech companies just too powerful? Perhaps we've lost the internet and there's no way to repair it.
Sunde: Definitely, we've lost it. We have no way of repairing it. We have ways of patching things a little bit, but it's going to be a band-aid on an open cancer wound. That's kind of the situation we're in. That's something we're going to live with for the rest of our lives.
Facebook, Google, and these companies are so powerful that they don't really have to listen to politicians anymore. If only the US would, even though they won't - change their minds like the new President, Biden. He is one of the best friends of the MPA. He loves these streaming services. Maybe he doesn't like the big-tech like Facebook and so on, but they're kind of the same crowd. If they would start being hard on them and saying, "You can't have the [inaudible: 1:02:09] you have. You need to give out the information and ownership of the identities and so on to individuals." Facebook, Google and so-on would just leave and buy their own Carribean nation. That's an option for them today. They have much more money than these islands have. They have a turnover that's bigger than most countries' GDP.
We've kind of gone to super capitalism. It's not a question about technology or decentralisation. It's about ownership of identities, ownership of data, and ownership of our cultural heritage, rather than a technological question.
A lot of people in my sphere are technologists. They have amazing solutions to all of these problems, but the problem is not that we're lacking technology to do decentralised services. The internet is a decentralised service that we've decided to remake into a centralised service. Facebook is using the decentralised technologies that we could use ourselves. We just decided that we're not going to run these nodes or software on our own machines. We're going to let some corporate entities do it, and they're really good at it. What they're giving us is the ease of reaching each other.
We're not going to see any move over to decentralised services. Every time there's an issue with Facebook censorship or some other censorship, people talk about decentralisation, and they have the technology to do that. Then they're super stoked about it. I'm super happy that these people exist, but the problem is not one of technology. It's one of power. That's why Mark Zuckerberg is invited to talk in these court cases and then in front of the governments and so on - because he has more power than they do in most of these questions.
We're way beyond a repairable situation. We can maybe start repairing some of that by stating human rights in a digital form. The ownership of identity should definitely be something we have. We need to force these corporations to be interoperable, but even if we did that, they have another advantage and that is money. If you look at Google, they don't really have competitors because they buy potential competitors. They spend a lot of money on doing that because they want the people that are potentially good employees. Quality programmers and so on with good ideas; they would just want to employ them.
The troublesome thing is when I talk to young people today, technologists that are doing startups and so on about their exit strategy - they have one. I've never had an exit strategy in my life when it comes to building an organisation. I've had some sort of idea of why I wanted to do it, but many of them think that they need to have an exit strategy or a five-year plan. The business world is forcing them to have this. For most of them, they'll say, "In two to five years, Google will buy us." That's a typical exit plan for a startup today, which is extremely worrying because it's probably their best bet. Either that, or Google does the same and makes sure that they go bankrupt because they have the eyeballs, the audience, and all of the stuff that every new organisation would need.
I don't really see a way forward. The main problem here is, again, capitalism and the way the market is set up. Even though we see GameStop and all of these things happening, it's a small annoyance on the big picture, which is not going to change. It's rather the opposite. It's being worse and it's being more cemented into our foundation in every country in the world, all the time.
Mason: The crazy thing is, Peter, you're mentioning that Facebook or Google could just buy an island. That seems very similar to the story you were telling me at the beginning of this podcast, where you were going to buy your own virtual countries. The crazy thing is you were doing this a decade ago and it was considered illegal, but now these large, big tech companies are doing it today. It seems perfectly legal. When we talk about decentralisation and redesigning the insulin, a lot of techno optimists are quick to point to blockchain. They go, "Look, NFTs - non fungible tokens - they're going to help artists. They're going to help media creators." Do you believe that blockchain technology is the solution or in actual fact, do you think, you know what, that's just another part of the problem here?
Sunde: When you look at the financial side of blockchain, it is kind of a gamble. It's another capitalist system bringing another kind of asset into a marketplace. It's not what it was originally conceived as. We thought of it as some sort of decentralised anonymous payment system - even though Bitcoin is not about being anonymous - but it was a different way to circumvent certain regulation that made it hard for activists, specifically, to deal with sharing money in a way that the governments couldn't intervene.
Of course, this turned into becoming some sort of marketplace, which is extremely volatile and dangerous. It doesn't fill a need for the everyday citizen. We don't have a money issue, really. We have decentralised money. Right now, it's called cash. The problem is that that's being taken away. Of course, especially here in Scandinavia. There's no interest in having decentralised money. We can see that people don't want to have cash. They want to have a credit card. When you do all of these systems, they don't want to run their own bank in their pocket either.
I think when it comes to NFT, it's not going to be something which is for every artist. It's going to be something which is going to work for artists that already have an audience and that are interested in technology, but it's not something which is good for the general audience or something which makes you read to a mass audience. If it's about abundance, then the internet is great. If it's about scarcity, then that's not what the internet has made for us. Then you have to put scarcity onto something. It's a virtual scarcity, which is kind of an obscene idea when it comes to information, I think.
I think that the techno optimists looking at blockchain and these technologies aren't really into it for societal reasons. Maybe some of them might be in that they have this almost religious, fanatic view of it fixing things. But when you look at blockchain and what it really is, you can compare it to an Excel spreadsheet. If there's an update, you get the new version of the Excel spreadsheet, but it's extremely, extremely slow to update the spreadsheet with information.
It's not a good technology for doing a database that is distributed. Yes, it can be good for certain things, but it's not this idea that we can solve everything with blockchain. It's kind of the opposite. It's a very specialised technology that could be helpful in certain cases. Again, I don't think technology is the solution to what technology fucked up. It's like saying, "Oh yeah, this building is on fire. Let's burn down a little bit more and then it will stop being on fire." In the end, of course, everything will be burned down. That's what we're looking at when it comes to the internet. Everything will be fucked up in the end because we're trying to fuck it up even more, because it's fucked up.
So I'm not very optimistic when it comes to these new technologies. I'm not a techno optimist, either. I see that there are some major problems. Technologists don't get education in ethics, philosophy, or anything like that in school. They're basically lobbied by the big technology companies that say, "Come work for us." - and they don't see anything bad with that. It probably isn't bad on an individual level, either. Google is probably really good for their employees, but it's not good that everyone starts working for Google, either. That's something that we, as a society, need to deal with. It shouldn't just be up to Google to have that power.
Mason: I think the other problem is that as the stakes increase, a lot of the folks in these tech companies seem to lose their sense of humour. That's why I love what you do, Peter. You've kept that sense of humour, and that's the core of all the ways in which you're thinking about restructuring these things.
We're beginning to see attempts by folks like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales to rebuild a web that we want, and a web that we deserve. But do you think they're really going to be good solutions for building a solid long-term responsible sort of internet? Or as you've just suggested there, should we burn the whole thing down and try and start again somehow?
Sunde: I think that we shouldn't burn it down because a lot of people depend on it. That's the problematic thing. We can't really build something new because you won't get people to move and you will not solve it with new technology. One of the things that I loved about being part of the Bureau for Piracy was that very often, when we talked about things it was like, "Here's a problem. We do not have a solution. We're not politicians. We don't have a solution to present. Here's a problem. Deal with it." Not everything can be solved. Not everything has to be solved. Not everything will be right in the future or even right now. We cannot solve every problem that we see.
The problem of the internet is one of those things that we will not be able to solve. We will maybe be able to mitigate some of it. I very often compare this to sexually transmitted diseases. We do now have AIDS. We will not be able to get rid of AIDS. We will have condoms or VPNs or something in technical terms that will mitigate some of the problems that we have because of AIDS, or NSA, or all of these different acronyms - but we will never get rid of them. So we need to learn how to deal with them. We need to learn how to have as little impact as possible, of the bad sides of this, but we will. We still have people smoking to this day, even though we know it's an awful thing. The way of getting rid of smoking is not by shaming people that they're smokers. It's by, in the end, maybe making sure that tobacco has an incident. Maybe the leaves die or something, so there is no more tobacco. I don't know, but it's not going to stop because we want it to stop. Maybe harm reduction is the right word I'm looking for.
That's also the beauty of being human. It's not that we are perfect individuals. We're not a perfect society. We kind of need that friction in order to maybe find alternative ways and alternative things to think about. We need to focus more on philosophy in general, in society. I think a lot of people have been starting to understand that a little bit more when it comes to technology. There are things to kind of build upon that are interesting, that are looking at this.
One of my favourite things that I discovered just a decade ago is that discussion between Michel Foucault and then Noam Chomsky in the seventies about the future and what it could look like and how it would be. They were describing a decentralised, distributed, federated network of humans - very much like the internet. They had an idea of how it would be regulated. If we had listened to the philosophy back then and taken that into context when building this new thing called the internet, that would have been better, of course.
I think there will be something after the internet as well. Just as there has always been something after that. Maybe we can learn from that, but it would not be in our lifetime.
Mason: It does feel like if some of these tech CEOs just stayed in school, that we wouldn't have the problems that we have today. They should have gone to some philosophy classes instead of dropping out of Harvard and Stanford.
Peter, you're still working in trying to make some of these changes through some new tech projects. I mean, it's a miracle to some degree that the press still takes you seriously. They're never sure now whether you're trying to troll them or not, but you've looked at micropayments with Flattr and with your encrypted messaging platform Heml.is, you're trying to train to get into the space that Signal are in at the moment. Most recently, you're looking at how to do privacy oriented domain name registrar. What are the challenges of some of these new projects and why are they so important to you and to the future of the internet?
Sunde: Every product that I start has been with a different approach that has values attached to it, not just some sort of business. Flattr, for instance, is a micropayment system, as you said, that is looking at value in a different way than how much an item costs. I don't think that you can actually put a price upon an individual song for a certain user, or a blog post, or what it would be worth in terms of money for a news article or something like that.
I think that with the internet, everything like that changed. We need some sort of new technology that also acknowledges that change. Even though I worked on Flattr for over 10 years, it later got sold to a company in Germany that runs AdBlock, which would be a good fit if they ever make the necessary changes.
I think for me, it's been somewhere between trying new technology for ideological reasons, but also finding new technology because I'm a technologist at the core of it, so I like technology and working with new technology. The problem is that I always end up in that situation where you just say that people should stop taking me seriously or so on, but I do also have a serious side with everything I do. I do use pranking and trolling as a way of getting attention for my causes. And because it's fucking funny to have fun. In general, I think I do have a certain different mindset than most of these organisations, that is more than, "How much money can I make from this?"
I think that in general, the audience likes what I'm doing and they want to be supportive of me. My problem always comes when you're in an organisation, you have a great product and you talk to someone. I have my audience with me. I get enough attention to get it rolling. Then it goes to someone who I need to partner with, because they have a big audience. Let's say I wanted to have Flattr on YouTube, but they'd say, "Great idea. We want to do it ourselves because our platform is so big." Then I'm cut out because I'm too small.
I've been trying for a few years to become an ICAN registrar - an accredited registrar with ICAN - which basically would allow me to sell the domain names like dot com or dot net, and so on directly from those, instead of having a middleman. For the first time ever, ICAN has banned one person for life, from what it seems, because of my political views. They just don't feel comfortable doing business with me.
The funny thing here is that I want to get into that space because it's an important space. Domain names are basically our identities on the internet and they control everything. Everything you do first starts with a domain name. ICAN has assessed that I'm dangerous in that way and that I should not be able to work with them. A lot of ex-criminals are working in that industry. There are a lot of corrupt people in that industry. There are old killers and elephant shooters. There are a lot of people that have committed crimes. I'm the only one ever that's been banned in this way, because I have an agenda which is not good for them. I want decentralisation. I want them to have less influence.
Maybe the problem is that I'm too open with what I'm doing. I think that's what I'm supposed to do in the long run. Maybe my given task in this world is around you having a discussion between here and here, and I want the discussion to move a little bit to the left, so I will stand 200 meters away, that way. Then someone else will come and swoop in and say, "I'm this moderate person" and they're at the place where I wanted to move to. Maybe that's just my given role. I don't know.
But I do have fun with what I'm doing, people like what I'm doing, and I'm very open and honest with my ideals when I do things like this. I think I can wake up every morning and look at myself in the mirror. I don't think a lot of people in my industry can say the same. That is extremely valuable to me.
Mason: So if anyone's listened to this podcast and they want to get away from the keyboard - as you so wonderfully put it - and engage in more real life activism, where do you suggest they even start?
Sunde: From a personal conviction, stop eating meat. That's the first step because you get a lighter head, a better body, and you're less ashamed of your killing animal sides. No, but in general, I think that what happened to me is that very often, I've looked at myself and said, "Do I really think this? Why did I decide on thinking about the things I do?" Meat, for instance, being one of those things. I did know in the back of my mind that I never really ate the meat on the plate. I was brought up thinking dinner is a piece of meat with all of these things around. I would always leave some of the meat because I didn't like it. It was like something in my body had said, "No."
I think a lot of things that we have learned, we need to unlearn. You have to find out who you are and why you have the beliefs you do. When you start looking at those beliefs and where they come from, they might mostly come from your parents or from your surroundings, and not so much from your own convictions. I think that is the first step. Finding out who you are rather than what you want to be.
Mason: Peter, you have such a wonderful story about how to engage in civil disobedience. I hope that it has inspired some of our listeners today. I just want to thank you for being on the FUTURES Podcast.
Sunde: Thank you for having me.
Mason: Thank you to Peter for showing us the importance of activism in a digital age.
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Credits
Produced by FUTURES Podcast
Recorded, Edited & Mixed by Luke Robert Mason
Audio Editing by Elliott Roche
Transcript by Beth Colquhoun
