The Illusion of More’s David Newhoff takes Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde to task
If you haven’t had the opportunity to read David Newhoff’s thoughts regarding Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde’s recent interview published on Motherboard please take the time to do so. It’s truly a must read. Sunde spent a brief time in prison in 2014 for his role in operating the notorious torrent site whose popularity spawned clones around the globe and gave rise to the well-entrenched meme that piracy was somehow morally and politically justifiable.
Sunde laments that “The internet is shit today. It’s broken. It was probably always broken, but it’s worse than ever.” But, as David so eloquently points out in his blog post, “…the thing you clearly don’t get, Peter, is that this is the Internet you helped create.”
As founder/operator of The Pirate Bay, you became a rapacious capitalist, exploiting human labor and rejecting certain legal boundaries designed to protect the rights of that labor. Marx warned against this kind of exploitation, and he was right. But in your persistent belief that technology alone—like Marx’s abolition of private property—will naturally create “equal access to everything for everybody,” you are as naive as Marx in that you forget to do the rest of the math. You fail to ask the question, “Who is going to produce the everything to which everyone is entitled equal access?” – The Illusion of More
You can read David’s thoughtful piece here.