Pirate Bay cofounder Peter Sunde spoke to Wired.co.uk about the problems with the file-sharing website in its current form, the "imminent death" of peer-to-peer and the centralised services that leave us open to NSA surveillance. He also urges people to dispel their political apathy to prevent the emergence of a new Stasi-style era of oppression.
People who are disenchanted with politics and the financial system should try and engage with the democratic process rather than turn to technology for alternative methods of doing things, says Peter Sunde, cofounder of The Pirate Bay.
Sometimes you have to actually make sure that politics are in line with what people want. A lot of people are giving up on politics and thinking they can solve issues with technology. These kind of arrogant behaviours towards the rest of the society are a bit disgusting," Sunde told Wired.co.uk in a Skype interview.
His response was provoked by a question about Bitcoin, a technology that he thinks is "interesting" and has a fascinating story behind it, but one that he feels is symbolic of a depressing widespread lack of trust in politics. "We are a community of people, we have politicians that we elect, we can demand that they do things," he says, "but we are way too lazy to do that today".
His concern is that "we are just giving up". "We have this hatred of politicians who we just see as being corrupt and we don't trust them any more so we try to do things outside of where they can bother us." This includes setting up cryptocurrencies that are difficult to monitor and tax (Sunde is a firm believer in taxation, since it allows communities to build shared infrastructure). "The distrust of the political system is unhealthy," he says.
Instead of building tools such as Bitcoin, which he believes give "a carte blanche" to politicians and bankers, we should be forcing them to change -- in Sunde's view we should be aiming towards community-owned banks. "We need a revolution instead of a technology evolution."
The lack of engagement with the democratic process and reliance on technology is a particular problem now because we consider "the clever people" to be those who know about technology. He describes "nerds" as the "new elite" -- the very people who should be helping to fix the political system. But they "are kind of lazy bastards who are too arrogant to go onto the streets. They are too arrogant to see it's important to not think that we can solve problems with better technology".
He says that you are not going to stop the police from chasing you just because you have the best encryption in the world. "You actually need to go somewhere and vote and make sure you don't have corrupt police," he explains. "But there's a faith in technology as the saviour, as the new Messiah, and that's definitely not the case. I really don't see any revolution happening."
Political ambitions
Sunde hopes to try and instigate that revolution in his quest to become a member of the European Parliament as a candidate for the Pirate Party. His campaign will launch in January 2014 and he is planning his policies until then. He wanted to run independently, but the EU doesn't allow for this, "which is kind of weird". He's actually more of a socialist and would be more likely to vote for the left-wing parties in the Nordics ("where they are sane"), but they consider him to be too controversial a character.
Although he doubts he'll win a seat in the European Parliament, he hopes he can inspire people to take an interest in European politics. "If I get in there are so many things I could draw attention to even if I was just going there to make fun of things."
He finds it "really strange" how detached people in European countries feel from the European Parliament when it has so much influence over national legislation. We tend to joke about extraordinary Brussels-originated policies relating to the dimensions of fruit and vegetables or the fact that politicians are sent there and no one knows what they are doing. "It's just this grotesque monster and you don't see anything happening except when you want to stop some of the crazy legislation they come up with some times. We have this union and we have voting rights and we don't care enough. It's just insane that we agreed to have this parliament if that's the way we look at it."
Digital rights
The EU isn't the only grotesque monster. A major looming threat is TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), another secretly-negotiated trade agreement in the ilk of Acta and Sopa.
Instead of taking a whack-a-mole approach to fighting these treaties, we should be more aggressive in enshrining our digital rights in "some sort of internet human rights bill" to prevent TPP from simply reemerging under another guise.
He suggests that people might be apathetic towards politics because "we've already given up". People complained about the NSA surveillance revelations, but "nothing is really happening" -- there's no one storming American embassies. "I worry that we don't really care about our digital rights any more and we are not fighting for them."
Part of the problem is that most people don't currently feel that their digital rights are being repressed in any major way. "We don't really know what it's going to be like if we lose all these rights or what happens when the data about you starts to be abused.
That's not going to happen until it's too late," he says.
Sunde suggests learning from history. He was inspired by a recent visit to the Stasi Museum in Berlin with Anka Domscheit-Berg, wife of former Wikileaks' spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who grew up in East Germany under constant Stasi surveillance. "When bad people have all of the information about you -- even though that information might not seem incriminating -- it can be abused," Sunde explains. In the case of Eastern Germany, the Stasi went too far and there was a revolution. "It's better to stop right now than having to break down another wall."
Hemlis
When he's not taking on political apathy, Sunde is continuing to work on Flattr, VPN IPredator, a comedy show (!) and a new secure messenger app called Hemlis, which means "secret" in Swedish. So far the app is being beta tested by ten people using it every day and Sunde says the encryption is working well and it has a "really nice" user interface. He won't be drawn into offering a release date. "It's finished when it's finished -- we don't want to stress anything when we are dealing with something as serious as people's secrets."
Much of his time has been spent dealing with "haters" from the
encryption community. He admits that "there's always going to be a better solution" but that many of Hemlis's critics are "not that helpful". One of the main criticisms levied at Hemlis is that it wants to control the network (it doesn't allow individuals to connect their own trusted servers) "even though controlling the network is currently the only thing you can do to keep from being spied on," says Sunde.
Sunde sees these critics as elitist. "We want to give decent encryption to everyone -- not just tech people. But the tech people are the ones who are really upset that they can't connect their own server. We decided quite early on to stop listening to them."
The Pirate Bay
It's not just the encryption community that has riled Sunde, but the people who are currently running The Pirate Bay (which Sunde cofounded back in 2003). "I don't know the people left and I don't like what I see," he says, adding that he wishes it had closed down on its tenth birthday in August this year. He said that the lack of new development in the BitTorrent file sharing scene symbolises the "imminent death" of peer-to-peer. "Sometimes it's good to burn things so something else comes out of the ashes. Otherwise you get to this stale position. It's like money. If you don't spend money it's worth less because of inflation. The same applies to technology: if you don't actually make it better, it becomes worse," Sunde declares. "A lot of people say that BitTorrent is good enough, but it doesn't really matter because the scene itself is dying," he adds, explaining that there are "no alternatives" to Spotify or Netflix.
He admits that they are both good services, but is worried about the fact that a single player dominates in every silo of the internet. "We are centralising everything on the internet," Sunde says, pointing out that Facebook is the dominant social network, Twitter is the dominant microblogging site, Skype is the videophone chat service of choice. "All of them are based on central servers owned by an American company, which is giving me a really bad vibe when you consider the revelations about the NSA," he adds. "It would be impossible to have as much surveillance if we didn't all use these centralised services."
Sunde thinks Netflix and Spotify are good services, but he stopped using the latter after it deleted some of the music he listened to. He had already deleted some music he couldn't get hold of any more from a hard drive because he "trusted Spotify to have it". He was scared away from the service permanently "because I realised that someone else is controlling the music that I listen to". "Even though they [Netflix and Spotify] might have their heart in the right place, they are totally dependent on the same shitty companies -- the same shitty Universal and Warner Bros and all these companies that have given them the rights to license their music."
This goes against the tenets of decentralised file-sharing, where people cared more about culture and the music that was spread than who had the copyright. "It goes against the idea I have about how we should handle culture and cultural heritage."