The Pirate Bay – the end of a rebellion
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009The Pirate Bay has just announced the sell out. TPB is to be bought by Global Gaming Factory. A lot of users are spitting brimstone on the comments because the sell out of TPB is really a sell out of the user base. All those pirate bay t-shirts that used to represent a radical political position on intellectural property rights are now advertising a Global Gaming Factory brand.
I can see an incoming swarm of accountants and lawyers that will turn this cultural institution into a dessicated husk. It would be naive to assume that TPB has been a trivial accomplishment and that hundreds of replacements will quickly fill the impending void. This is the end of a rebellion. Illegal action will continue but it won’t be flying a skull and crossbones for everyone on the horizon to see.
The cultural significance of TPB goes far beyond it being a place to find movies without a credit card online. TPB was robin hood. A scoff law for the digital age poaching data from the poorly encrypted streams of the hollywood estate. TPB was rage against the culture machine. A public enemy cheering burn hollywood burn.
No one cared if the popcorn movie industry collapsed – we did not mistake the cultural dominance of hollywood for cultural value and contrary to popular belief we always paid for the movies we downloaded. We paid with the time spent watching them and by exposing ourselves to the ideology that those movies typically represented – the american dream of violence, rascism, objectification of women and homo/trans/phobia. You always pay for culture with the price of inhabiting it.
I don’t blame the original crew of TPB if the alternative is rotting in a Swedish state prison. They have sold out the user base of TPB but they took the rap for the user base at the trial. I don’t blame them but I do regret the end of a rebellion. The law is always imposed and this is another example of global just is at work. the second “legal” coup this week.
I chose to host this blog here on baywords because TPB felt like an autonomous space but that space is being appropriated by big business right now. It feels like when google started co-operating with China in censoring the internet and all their corporate philosophy about “Do no evil” officially amounted to so much bullshit. The sense of freedom has been evicted but we’re still here and waiting for the new landlord to come back for us, or send us a legal notice about the new rent for the air we breathe.
Am I being censored yet?
