Kim Dotcom, self-styled mega-millionaire of the internet who now faces charges of massive online piracy, poses like a barking sealion showing off his yacht and his woman. Model Janina Youssefian lies in the foam at his feet. Over the pearly green water, a highly expensive nautical commodity floats under the soft blue sky.

The king of this paradise has rolled up his black trousers so he can pose shin-deep in the frothing sea. He slopes one open palm towards Youssefian, while his other hand gestures towards the boat. The dark mass of his body makes no attempt to fit into the sunny scene. On the contrary, Kim Dotcom revels in the clumsy pose he strikes and the absurdity of his fully dressed bulk in the water.

King of the computer geeks was the image that Dotcom, aka Kimble, aka Kim Jim Tim Vestor, aka plain old Kim Schimtz, flamboyantly cultivated. His current name is an allusion to his participation as a teenager and in his early twenties in the original dotcom boom. Pictures like this were essential to his self-presentation. In fact, the lurid, hilarious image he presents here is a deliberate attempt to dramatise his wealth in order to attract investors – did he even own the yacht?

This picture is about money. It is a crudely enthusiastic but basically very typical male way of imaging what it is like to be very rich. There's the model. There's the yacht. And there's the fat bloke who can have them because he is rich. Kim Dotcom's idea of money is not that different from every tycoon who ever posed with a phallic cigar. He's just gone straight to the key points and made them with bullish clarity. The model, the beach, the yacht, what more is there to say?

Kim Dotcom is now in custody in New Zealand, waiting for an extradition hearing on US online piracy charges, because of his business Megaupload.com . This file-sharing site is accused of copyright theft on a huge scale. Dotcom is the face that the anti-piracy lobby in the US needs. So soon after protests by sites including Wikipedia stalled attempts to legislate to protect the copyrights of Hollywood and the music industry, his arrest provides the entertainment corporations with a great negative image of the archetypal, alleged internet pirate: brash and vulgar and ludicrous. Dotcom himself has assiduously cultivated, in images like this, a robustly amoral appearance.

So is the man in this picture a hero? Is he a piratical martyr of internet freedom, latest scapegoat in the content providers' war against the information sharers?

I can't get behind that idea at all. Rather he looks in this picture like the man who believed the internet was money. The myth of wealth and gratification he flaunts in this portrait was largely fantasy when he started out. In the crazy mood of the dotcom bubble days, he tried various criminal and semi-criminal ways to make a fortune (he was convicted of computer fraud and insider trading) while simultaneously projecting the image of crass wealth seen here. It is as if he believed, more than anyone else believed, in computer skills as a source of wealth and pursued this dream relentlessly until, with Megaupload and what the FBI alleges is its involvement in piracy, he found a way to achieve his fantasy, and get rich on the internet.

Nearly a quarter of all online activity around the world involves the consumption of pirated material. Draconian attempts to legislate against this may have been defeated for now, but defenders of internet freedom need to explain what they would do to filter out this criminal side of electronic life. From one point of view this is about freedom versus corporate power: but the line that all film and music companies are so evil they deserve to be pirated is as adolescent as Kim Dotcom's swagger. Even the term "content provider" is insidiously damaging, as if when someone writes a song or makes a film all they are doing is generating "content" like programmed components rather than human creators. So from one point of view it is about freedom versus control, but from another point of view it is about consumers teaming up with criminals to make fools of people who create things.

And since I am pretty determined here to prove that like proponents of Sopa I "don't understand the internet", can I also wonder about something more intangible? The rise of online culture is historically contemporary with what we now know to be a gargantuan crisis in the modern economy. An unprecedented credit boom was followed by a collapse of faith and a belief there is no longer any money anywhere.

Take a look at this picture. Has Kim Dotcom got it all?

Not literally, of course. But could it be that economists exhausted by their efforts to explain what on earth is happening to us ought to take the internet into account? This vast culture of free stuff, this virtual life, this new dimension of existence in which one of the surest ways to actually make money appears to be copyright theft – has it perhaps in some hard-to-define way contributed to the paralysis of western economic growth?

Just wondering. Like I say, I don't understand the internet. But Kim Dotcom did. And in this picture he's got it all.

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