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Piracy and the Politics of Social Media

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Piracy and the Politics of Social Media social sciences $€ £ ¥ Article Piracy and the Politics of Social Media Martin Fredriksson Almqvist Department for Culture Studies, Linköping University, 601 74 Norrköping, Sweden; [email protected]; Tel.: +46-11-363-492 Academic Editor: Terri Towner Received: 13 June 2016; Accepted: 20 July 2016; Published: 5 August 2016 Abstract: Since the 1990s, the understanding of how and where politics are made has changed radically. Scholars such as Ulrich Beck and Maria Bakardjieva have discussed how political agency is enacted outside of conventional party organizations, and political struggles increasingly focus on single issues. Over the past two decades, this transformation of politics has become common knowledge, not only in academic research but also in the general political discourse. Recently, the proliferation of digital activism and the political use of social media are often understood to enforce these tendencies. This article analyzes the Pirate Party in relation to these theories, relying on almost 30 interviews with active Pirate Party members from different parts of the world. The Pirate Party was initially formed in 2006, focusing on copyright, piracy, and digital privacy. Over the years, it has developed into a more general democracy movement, with an interest in a wider range of issues. This article analyzes how the party’s initial focus on information politics and social media connects to a wider range of political issues and to other social movements, such as Arab Spring protests and Occupy Wall Street. Finally, it discusses how this challenges the understanding of information politics as a single issue agenda. Keywords: piracy; Pirate Party; political mobilization; political parties; information politics; social media; activism 1. Introduction Throughout the 1990s, the conceptions of politics in the Western world changed in certain ways. In the early part of the decade, the impact of the environmental movement, the growth of identity politics, and the decline of the traditional political parties forced theorists to reconsider how and where politics are made. Ulrich Beck used the term subpolitics (or sub(system)politics) to describe how political struggles increasingly took place outside of the institutionalized political system, focusing on issues previously excluded from the established political agendas: “The old industrial consensus built into the social system is encountering new and different fundamental convictions: ecological, feminist, and many others” ([1], p. 52). Beck described how the hegemony of left-right politics and the parliamentary party system was challenged by new social movements propagating political issues outside of the confines of party politics. This new kind of politics was formed in alternative social movements, but it took place most notably in people’s everyday lives and in the choices and acts they made as individuals, citizens, and consumers [1,2]. This pointed towards a political landscape where parliamentary structures and established institutions were no longer the primary site for political agency. A landscape emerged where the old ideologies and their grand narratives gave way to subpolitical struggles undertaken in everyday life and in heterogeneous social movements consisting of free individuals engaging temporarily through different communicative networks [3]. More recently, the rise of digital activism and social media as a tool for political campaigning has added new dimensions to the changing political landscape. The proliferation of digital technologies and their impact on ordinary people’s everyday lives can be seen to confirm the individualization of politics Soc. Sci. 2016, 5, 41; doi:10.3390/socsci5030041 www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci Soc. Sci. 2016, 5, 41 2 of 12 that began in the 1990s. Stefania Milan has conceptualized this as “cloud protesting”: a term she uses to describe “a type of social organizing for collective action with individuals and their needs, preferences, bodies, and individualities at its core” ([4], p. 198). The term refers to digital communication technologies that let individuals “tailor” their participation according to their own private motifs and values, and to take part in fluid local and global constellations without compromising their personal agendas. The cloud is described as being “composed of blogs, social networking and microblogging platforms, and other tools such as digital storytelling websites. Such imagined space is to be intended in the guise of a symbolic space between technology devices and platforms” ([4], p. 200). These kinds of digitized protest movements are increasingly becoming internationalized, or “transnationally framed” as Milan puts it ([5], p. 138). The political potential of social media was particularly emphasized after the Arab Spring and the rapid spread of different protest movements, from Syria, through Syntagma Square, to the occupation of Wall Street. These were often understood and analyzed as parallel, and sometimes interconnected, movements partly mobilized through social media campaigns [6,7]. Since the Arab Spring, the idea of the demise of the political party has, however, been challenged by a wave of new political parties. As early as 2007 Andrew Chadwick noted that instead of replacing the political parties, digital activism could actually revive them as new social movements hybridized with political parties. Chadwick and Strommer-Galley have shown that digital technologies may not only contribute to the formation of new parties but also challenge the power concentration within established parties by empowering grass roots movement within those organizations [8,9]. The more recent expansion of new political parties such as the Five Star Movement in Italy, Podemos in Spain and the international Pirate Party seems to confirm this conclusion. Digital technology and new social media are sometimes seen as promoting single-issue politics by making it easier to mobilize large numbers of protesters, nationally and internationally, over particular issues. One such example, on which this article will focus more closely, is the protest against the expansion of copyright and digital surveillance laws, which has given rise to a range of different activist groups and, for the most part, temporary campaigns that together constitute something that can be called a pirate movement [3,6,7,10–12]. This article will focus on the most explicitly politicized part of that movement, the Pirate Party: a political actor that began in Sweden in 2006 as a single-issue party focusing on filesharing and digital rights but quickly developed into something much wider. This article draws on a larger study involving a series of semi-structured interviews with Pirate Party members in Sweden, the UK, Germany, the USA, and Australia, conducted between 2011 and 2013. The interviews in the USA were conducted between December 2011 and May 2012, with follow-up interviews in May 2013. The European interviews were conducted between 2012 and 2013, and the Australian interviews were conducted in 2013. Among the 31 people interviewed for the entire project, five were women. Most informants were between 20 and 40 years old. All participants play important roles in their local Pirate Party community, but these roles differ significantly due to the heterogeneity of the pirate parties. Although two of the interviewees were members of the European parliament at the time of the interviews, the vast majority were amateurs dedicating their spare time to party work. All the interviews were carried out in person, in most cases individually, with the exception of three interviews with groups of two to three participants. They were recorded, and all participants agreed to be quoted by name. The interviews were semi-structured in that they broadly followed an interview guide based around four thematic clusters: the participant’s individual motivations, the organization of the party, the ideology of the party, and the national and international context of the party. The interviews also allowed for individual variations within those themes. The material was analyzed following a qualitative, inductive methodology. The interviews give a number of different perspectives on the Pirate Party movement that I have explored in previous articles, focusing on the Pirate Party’s relation to information technology [6], cultural enlightenment [12], democracy [7,11], the crisis of capitalism [13] and on the conflicts between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary modes of political organization [3]. Many of these issues and dilemmas connect to the Pirate Party’s development towards a wider democracy movement. Soc. Sci. 2016, 5, 41 3 of 12 The purpose of this concluding article is to discuss that shift from being a single-issue to a multiple-issue party and analyze how the Pirate Party’s initial preoccupation with filesharing technologies and open-source philosophy has promoted a wider political agenda. It focuses particularly on the pirate parties in the USA, Sweden and Germany but will eventually also consider recent developments in Iceland. Although the Icelandic Pirate Party was not part of the empirical study, it adds an important contrast to the other cases as it expanded swiftly in 2015 and 2016, while most other pirate parties were shrinking. This persistence, along with the party’s capability to act on different political and (inter)national arenas and address a wide range of dilemmas, highlights the Pirate Party’s continuous relevance as an object of study and
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