Writer Cory Doctorow says world leaders should follow The Pirate Party and use the Internet to put trust back into politics
Pirate Party activists use a system they call ‘liquid democracy’ to decide policy. Doctorow believes this works better than traditional forms of representation. The system involves choosing an expert in a particular policy to represent millions of supporters’ votes – which can then be sub-delegated to a particular specialist. For example, Cory Doctorow cites the question of environmental issues. The populace would ‘vote’ for one person to speak and act on all green policies, and in more detailed policy discussions they might authorise that expert to switch the votes to an expert on, say, forestry or oceans. The writer claims that this method was used by the Paris Commune ( The short-lived French workers’ revolution of 1871 ) but failed at the time because the enabling power of new technology was not available. Hear the full interview here:
Pirate Bay
Using online tools, the Pirates make policies without the usual committee-based structure typical of old-style parties. Founded in Sweden as a reaction to the arrest for copyright theft of the illegal bit-torrent streaming website Pirate Bay owner Peter Sunde, the party gets most support in Germany where Julia Reda, the Young Pirates of Europe President is an elected MEP.
Reda recently visited Sunde in prison and shared reports of her visit with bloggers and activists. Her party has also won seats in the regional governments (Laender) of Berlin, NorthRhine -Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein, Saarland and Lower Saxony.
Gender issues
However, according to Doctorow the Berlin branch of the Pirate Party has run into acrimonious arguments because some female members believed that the gay men who were elected could not adequately represent their issues on gender equality. Doctorow, an Internet libertarian whose novels include Pirate Cinema, releases the electronic versions of all his books for free download under a Creative Commons licence. Ans he collaborates with hacktivists to keep his work up-to-date, with insights from the internet’s underground. They included the late Aaron Swartz who killed himself after being arrested and charged by police in New York City for stealing copyright academic journal articles. So he clearly supports the aims of the Pirate Party and its ‘liquid democracy’ system yet has doubts about how it works in practice.
FI asked Doctorow:If that’s the case – why not remove the humans altogether?
“That would be to imagine a sort of Plato’s cave where all the answers were written on the wall and you only had to have the right algorithm” he replies.
Peter Sunde is serving eight months in prison but he has stated that he intends to continue activism in support of internet freedom on his release. He has supporters in Greece, Sweden and the United Kingdom where candidates are getting ready for the 2015 General Election. In the European Parliament, their lone representative Julia Reda sits with the Green Party MEPs and has a seat on the Legal Affairs committee. Liquid democracy may soon coalesce into a solid bloc…
