"The internet is shit today. It’s broken. It was probably always broken, but it’s worse than ever.”

My conversation with, Peter Sunde, one of the founders and spokespersons of The Pirate Bay, did not start out optimistically. There’s good reason for that: In the last couple of months, the contemporary download culture shows heavy signs of defeat in the battle for the internet.

Last month we saw Demonii disappear. It was the biggest torrent tracker on the internet, responsible for over 50 million trackers a year. Additionally, the MPAA took down YIFY and Popcorn Time. Then news got out that the Dutch Release Team, an uploading collective, made a legal settlement with anti-piracy group BREIN.

While it might look like torrenters are are still fighting this battle, Sunde claims that the reality is more definitive: “We have already lost.”

Back in 2003 Peter Sunde, together with Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm, started The Pirate Bay, a website that would become the biggest and most famous file-sharing website in the world. In 2009, the three founders were convicted of “assisting [others] in copyright infringement” in a highly controversial trial.

"Stop treating internet like it's a different thing and start focusing on what you actually want your society to look like."
Sunde was incarcerated in 2014 and released a year later. After his time in jail he started blogging about the centralization of power by the European Union; ran as a candidate for the Finnish Pirate Party during the elections to the European Parliament; and founded Flattr, a micro donation system for software developers.

I wanted to speak with Sunde about the current state of the free and open internet, but this conversation quickly changed into an ideological exchange about society and capitalism—which is, according to Sunde, the real problem.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

MOTHERBOARD: Hey Peter, I was planning on asking you if things are going well, but you made it pretty clear that that isn’t the case.
Peter Sunde: No, I don’t see any good happening. People are too easy to content with things.

Take the net neutrality law in Europe. It's terrible, but people are happy and go like "it could be worse.” That is absolutely not the right attitude. Facebook brings the internet to Africa and poor countries, but they’re only giving limited access to their own services and make money off of poor people. And getting government grants to do that, because they do PR well.

Finland actually made internet access a human right a while back. That was a clever thing of Finland. But that’s like the only positive thing I have seen in any country anywhere in the world regarding the internet

So, how bad is the state of the open internet?

Well, we don’t have an open internet. We haven’t had an open internet for a long time. So, we can’t really talk about the open internet because it does not exist anymore. The problem is, nobody stops anything. We are losing privileges and rights all of the time. We are not gaining anything anywhere. The trend is just going in one direction: a more closed and more controlled internet. That has a big impact on our society. Because they are the same thing today. If you have a more oppressed internet, you have a more oppressed society. So that's something we should focus on.

But still we think of the internet like this new kind Wild West place, and things are not in chains yet, so we don’t care because everything will be OK anyhow. But that is not really the case. We have never seen this amount of centralization, extreme inequality, extreme capitalism in any system before. But according to the marketing done by people like Mark Zuckerberg and companies like Google, it's all to help with the open network and to spread democracy, and so on. At the same time, they are capitalistic monopolies. So it’s like trusting the enemy to do the good deeds. It is really bizarre.

Do you think because a lot of people don’t consider the internet to be real or a real place, they care less about its well-being?

Well, one thing is, we have been growing up with an understanding of the importance of things like a telephone line or television. So if we would start to treat our telephone lines or TV channels like we treat the internet, people would get really upset. If someone would tell you, you can’t call a friend, you would understand then that this is a very bad thing that is happening. You understand your rights. But people don't have that with the internet. If someone would tell you, you can’t use Skype for that and that, you don’t get the feeling it’s about you personally. Just by being a virtual thing, it's suddenly not directed at you. You don't see someone spying on you, you don't see something censored, you don't see it when someone deletes stuff out of the search results out of Google. I think that’s the biggest problem to get people's attention. You don't see the problems, so people don’t feel connected to it.

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Was a really good read. Thank you for that, m8.

 

Thanks for posting this, it was interesting to read.

 

The internet was finished before the new millennium started.

 

Last edited: Dec 14, 2015

we have to look only for the origins of the internet, and we will understand... it coud'nt be different...

 

Yeah, YIFY and Popcorn Time disappeared.. and reappeared fast. Stuff like this has been going on for 2/3 the life of the internet. And the circus grows larger regardless if one of the main acts quit. We live in a time where there's too much to choose from anyway, so much that it's stressful. Deciding which toothpaste we should buy, or what movie we feel like watching is a heavier thought than it should be.

 

I agree. Talking only about file sharing , I think the worst thing that can happen is that anti-piracy forced to use a new and more complex file sharing system.

Very good reading, indeed.

 

Peter Sunde is one of the few saying things as they are!
Most systems on this world are based on exploitation, injustice and slavery.
Coming from a *capitalist* wealthy country you can almost go every where you like...
...but trying to go for instance from Africa to a rich country is made impossible...
...also due to the lack of good infrastructures in such countries.

 

It looks like we need another internet - some kind of "Parallel world" so we can migrate from this to that new one.
This one should stay as it is and new should be made 'free from scratch' so we can be free from commercial advertisement and philosophy of corporate world and their "life style".
Anyone knows how to build an internet?
Internet for the free people!

I truly believe that anything is possible!

 

Couldn't agree more with this statement. Whenever I'm in public transport I always seem to be the only one not browsing Facebook or whatever. I never even log on to that shit really and only have an account because people used to share old exams there for the study I followed. So I had to have a profile if I wanted old exams to practice for my own exams when I had them coming up.

Still love having my smartphone around whenever I am on public transport though. Usually just pop on some headphones and start listening to some music. And then I start reading places all over for new stuff about music, it's like free time to study. Reading some advanced music theory, or maybe some reviews about the latest plug-ins or Kontakt libraries and how they compare to other stuff that has already been released.

About the cinema stuff, I think the vast majority people just have an extremely short attention span. That can also be a good thing though, I don't even download movies because I simply don't watch them anymore. Most of what gets released nowadays is utter shit because if stuff doesn't explode every 5 minutes all the other souls I'm sharing the theater with are bored to bits. Shame but that's the truth we live in.

 

never liked Pirate bay the much anyway..

 

Lol one day, we all gonna use the deepweb

 

This is a very pessimistic perspective... I'm gonna break it down very simple so everyone can grasp this..... TECHNOLOGY IS MOVING AT SUCH AN EXPONENTIAL RATE THAT NO LEGISLATION WILL EVER BE ABLE TO KEEP UP...... people are speaking on African censorship..... ok well last I checked they just surpassed telephone lines entirely and went directly to cellular.... Do you understand how big that really is.... SHIT IS GETTING WAY BETTER WAY FASTER .... stop living in fear of the unknown and embrace the time we live in today

 

or we could all go back to paying for our entertainment...........pfffft

 

- True, many people have indeed a brief attention span.
- Also true, especially for movies made in USA *for mass consume*.
I find them boring & repetitive. The best ever movies made (for me) are some Russian b/w movies
with no *devastating action scenes* at all, almost no dialogues but rich in content.
Movies with no content try to compensate with excessive "Action".

 

BTW, Skype and other voice messengers are already blocked in Uzbekistan. Blocked as in it stops all audio after 5 seconds. It has been like this for months. They say it's "maintenance" on Skype's end. But in reality, it's just blocked and it will stay that way.

 

Good joke, but for me possibly true. That's the spirit of my first comment: deep or surface web, torrent v2 or mega-mule v20.b7, the worst that can happen to file sharing is that we need to adopt another technology.

It'd make sense. If they can force us to use a more complex soft to download without getting fined there will be far less people downloading.

They're other important topics, of course.

 

Internet = social breakdown. De-evolution. I saw the beginnings of this in the old dial-up BBS days when nameless people could boldly argue with anyone about anything without retribution. According to my attorney, Facebook is a legal way to harass others, which is the main reason I do not use it. Internet has brought us the best, and the worst. I am afraid the worst seems to have taken over things. Even the ferals out on the streets co-ordinate their thug actions with their cell phones. Man......do I ever miss the days when a girlfriend couldn't trace your movements or call you every 10 minutes, lol!