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This is a guest post written by Peter Sunde, original co-founder of The Pirate Bay and more recently Flattr.

There's a few big moments in life where you feel that something moves you deeply. Graduating school. Getting your first kiss.


Writing that first book, publishing that first scientific document.

A loved one dies. Getting your first customer in your café. Some of them might seem small and trivial to others but to you they are huge and life altering.

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Today I got a similar feeling. A feeling that we reached a certain critical mass. A critical mass that are upset with the current state of the internet, nay, the current state of policing the internet and what it promises the world. A critical mass that finally understands that we're on the way to a broadcast democracy with little peer involvement. The Pirate Bay was shut down. It tilted people's brains into knowing that tomorrow, their favorite TV show must be downloaded somewhere else. They thought about it a bit more and decided this is the beginning of a slippery slope. They understand that maybe this means that alternative content might be hard to ever reach, if at all. That the langoleers are catching up faster than we assumed. That this thing, that we're centralising the internet, having just a handful of centralised services, mostly owned by companies in one single country, a country that doesn't care about borders when it comes to their own gauntlets, is not a great idea. A movement is forming. A movement away from this. And tomorrow, when you wake up, it will climax into a whole bunch, maybe even a whole million of people, that will see the group "Stop destroying the internet" or "Give us our pirate bay back" on Facebook. And they will click Like and feel proud. They finally did it. They stopped the internet from being destroyed.

Honestly, my feeling of climax is really there. It's a feeling that close to 100 percent of the internet community is thinking "it's not my problem, someone else will fix it". But it wasn't just the current event with The Pirate Bay that got me to this insight.


It's been a long time coming. Only a few activists left are actually doing things.

We're way underfunded, we're getting older and we're getting lazy.

We're trying to work smart while still having a family life, managing our lives with boy- and/or girlfriends, thinking about careers. Many of the best activists end up working full time on the projects in organisations such as the EFF, that can offer funding.

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The community funds the organisations and hence the community gets a feeling that if they do, these great people will fix the issues.


We stopped ACTA. We stopped SOPA, PIPA. We're working on stopping TTIP. We have people in parlament. Because that's the way we work now. The internet has become mainstream. We can't just run around as wild activists doing whatever we want. We need to do it in an orderly fashion. We need to listen to other people. There's no wild west anymore. So we stand in line. We discuss. Meanwhile, the opponents are growing bigger and stronger. They already paid their old politicians so the runway was short to get up and fly.

We're playing at their home turf. And we really want food on our table, and we've done much more than anyone else.

At the same time, there's been multiple ACTA/SOPA/PIPA/TTIP agreements that we never got to know about. When we stop one, three pass unnoticed. We're still fighting data retention even though we won in the European supreme court. It's a never ending story.

We have our own celebrities. We had Wikileaks. We had Snowden.

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We had Manning. We had Aaron Swartz. Some are dead, some are in jail forever. Some are in hiding -- scared for their actual lives. What people reveal, what people fight for, are major causes.

Freedom of information. Liberty. Democracy. Governmental transparency and due process. Things we take for granted, that are the basis for a modern safe society. We talk about it a lot. We are upset. We cry, we scream. We sometimes protest. We have our T-shirts. We have our symbols. We have our masks, our conferences.

Our debates. We get some attention. People in general like us. Our opponents are old fat bastard whore sell-outs. They're mostly rich men from the United States of America. They're corrupt. They're easy to hate. It's all like a good old Hollywood movie. The type of movies these men make to make money to fight us.

But the movies taught us that the good guys win in the end. And we know who the good guys are. We know we have our rights. We know we're protected by law. We also understand that the law can't really protect us if the bad guys come after us. But we didn't do anything wrong, so we're not worried.

Journalists contact me daily. Most of them are intelligent, well educated and highly skilled professionals. They're protected because they're from the press. They can protect their sources by law, in most countries. They've all read the documents from Manning. They've read what Snowden leaked. They know about the NSA

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surveillance. But in the back of their minds, they're also the good guys. And this PGP thing is just such a hassle. And Gmail is just so easy to use, and works everywhere.

And they never had an issue with anything before. And they don't want to end up as Glenn Greenwald, all paranoid.

I never get invited to parties anymore. It's not that I'm boring -- au contraire -- I'm usually an entertaining party guest with crazy stories, I'm the weird monkey clown that tells you insane real life events I've been through. I've met the president of Brazil, I've been to jail with killers and dope smugglers. But it's just such a hassle that I'm not on Facebook, so when someone arranges a party, they assume someone will invite me. And everyone assumes that someone else did. They think I'm so paranoid for not being on Facebook.

I'm always upset with some of my co-workers. They're so hard to reach. Most of them don't have cellphones. We have to decide a time and place to meet over encrypted chat, because they don't want to be tracked. If they're delayed I won't know. A few times I've waited 6-7 hours because trains/boats/cars had issues. Who do they think they are, trying to be that anonymous? I don't want to end up like them, they're so fucking paranoid. I assume that my phone is not wire-tapped, I'm not interesting. Just because I know a lot of people that might be interesting to some governments doesn't mean they get a warrant to tap me.

The past day I've read lots of comments on the oh-so-many threads regarding the fact that I've stated I wish The Pirate Bay is closed for good, so that something new can emerge. Something new and fresh. So many of the comments are insanely insightful. About how lazy I am for not doing anything instead of just ranting on how crappy TPB became. That I should open a new site instead of allowing TPB to go down. That they want their package they sent me, when I was in jail for my activism, returned. Since I suck for not getting TPB back up. I'm assuming these well-spleling guys (yes, they're all guys) are other activists that are doing their part for the open and libre community. If so, I must be wrong that we're just a few -- there are apparently tens of thousands of people actually doing important work that I should appreciate.


My feeling of some life-altering insight might be nothing but rants on the spoiled, lazy and naive parts of our internet community. And maybe I'm using those terms just to piss people off a little bit more. But hey. I went to jail for my cause and your TV shows. What did you do? You want that copy of Orwell's

1984 returned? I'll take one of the 25 copies I got sent to me in jail and send it back to you. Maybe you'll read it instead of just sending it to someone else to take care of.

This is a guest post written by Peter Sunde, original co-founder of The Pirate Bay and more recently Flattr.