Pirates!

The German Pirate Party is celebrating its recent successes in the elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state. They took 7.8% of the vote, giving them a representation in the state for the first time under Germany's system of proportional representation. The Pirate Party are an oddity: a new(ish) party that is growing fast, but whose platform appears at first glance to be based on the single issue of internet freedom. The party emerged following the legal case against Pirate Bay in Sweden, a free download site that was prosecuted for copyright infringements - giving away other people's films and music, in a nutshell.

Pirates are not new as a symbol of freedom and even of primitive democracy; there is said to have been an unwritten code for pirate crews in which treasure was shared equally and in some cases captains were even elected; certainly they were only able to command while they had the full support of their crew. In this case, the piracy being more directly referenced is internet piracy, the free sharing of copyrighted materials on sites like Pirate Bay. By calling themselves the Pirate Party, activists are making a point, hinting at the fact that the term 'software piracy' is a creation of big business and government, created to drive home the narrative that file-sharing is theft; the Pirate Party want to reclaim the word, identifying file-sharing piracy with the swashbuckling folk heroes of an earlier age and connecting it with ideas of freedom from exploitation. The point is of course moot, because individual, non-corporate musicians and artists also lose profits when their work is 'shared'.

The Pirate Party has expanded across Europe, on manifestos that are based around reform of copyright and patent law; freedom of speech and abolition of all state censorship; internet network neutrality; freedom of information and government transparency. At the heart of their philosophy is the idea that the internet is enabling a new world and that vested interests in business and politics are conspiring to strangle this new world at birth.

They have been criticised for not having enough specific policies, but there's more to it than that. They feel that the problems of the world are symptoms of a single cause: the failure of politics and the lack of real democratic power, which leaves politicians free to pursue corrupt or stupid policies, unhampered by democratic control and involvement. They see absolute freedom of information as being crucial to a renewal of civic involvement; the solutions to our financial, ecological and social problems will emerge naturally in the new world that a totally free internet will usher in.

It's an interesting idea, but I do have to wonder if the internet is really opening the door to a new world. If the internet was switched off, what would happen? Our food would still grow and once suppliers had dug out their fax machines, it would still get delivered to the shops. Water would still come from the pipes and sewage would still get flushed away. We could get the news from TV and radio. The internet is the crucial service provider for our brains, not our bodies. Imagine looking down on your life from above - what does your body do all day? It sits in chairs, eats, watches screens, walks about. Look at your friends and neighbours' bodies - what do they do all day? Much the same, no doubt. We're like monkeys riding camels: the monkeys - our brains - jump about all day long, chattering to one another, getting cross, falling in love, while the camels, our bodies, plod through the same routine day after day, tolerant of their manic riders, up to a point...

I went to a meeting the other day of a group called Funding Enlightened Agriculture. It has come out of the work of a writer and biologist called Colin Tudge, who has been campaigning for a total change in the way our food has grown. He believes that if humanity is to survive, agriculture must abandon intensive practices and become smaller-scale, more complex, more organic - more like gardening, with a huge increase in the number of people working on the land. This vision will be very sympathetic for many people. Groups like the Lammas community are already spearheading this neo-smallholder movement, combining permaculture, low impact dwellings and zero-carbon living with production of food to sell as well as for self-sufficiency.

At this meeting we discussed a surprising problem. It turns out that there are lots of people out there would would love to invest in that kind of thing, but not enough projects are coming forward with ideas about how to make it happen. The money is waiting patiently, but no-one is asking for it. The question is, can we do anything about that? We all want really workable schemes for small-scale organic food production to come forward, but is there any way to encourage that to happen apart from actually doing it yourself?

I see a connection to the Pirate Party there. The Pirates don't have direct solutions for the problems that the world is facing, but they feel that if we allow the new infrastructure of free information to fulfill its potential, the solutions will somehow emerge. In the mean time, like contemporary cargo cultists, they sweep the runways and light the lights, hoping for the plane to come. The investors in agriculture are doing the same thing: attending meetings, carefully setting out the specifications that new schemes would have to meet to be worthy of investment, and waiting for someone to pop up with an answer. Do we just keep scanning the skies and hoping?