Since stepping down from the leadership of the Swedish Pirate Party, I have tried to grasp the big picture. Trying to summarize the new lines of conflict in one marketable word isn’t easy, but having talked to brilliant people all over the world certainly helps.
There’s so much changing right now it’s hard, really hard, to back up to 10,000 feet and see what’s new and what isn’t. Everything related to communication and information is intensifying so much, it is easy to mistake something exciting for genuinely new, when it’s really just a difference of scale or ease.
The privacy debate is not really new, for instance. The landmark Entick vs Carrington court case was in 1765, and the United States’ Fourth Amendment guaranteeing privacy dates back to 1791. There’s a bit of question on how to apply these centuries-old principles in new circumstances. All well so far. That recycles the question, what are the new circumstances?
The reason for my asking is that I’ve been trying to identify one word, just one word, that lies at the core of the pirate ideology. One word that can be used as a positive insert-word-here to indicate adherence to pirate ideology.
The Greens, for instance, have used the core word sustainable. This is such a word that describes the Green ideology — not perfectly, but close enough to cover 95% of it. “We want a sustainable society.” Also, this needs to be a word that can be used by businesses that tout adherence as a marketing advantage: “Our hotels are built on sustainable principles.” That is what’s needed: something to fall back on.
I’ve received a couple of suggestions. It’s not going to be a made-up word; part of the point of using words is that they convey meaning in themselves, and don’t need to be explained in a second round of communication.
This spring, I was into humanism as the pirate core. But it’s not really new. The conflict between secularism and religion dates back to the Enlightenment. While those are principles we certainly subscribe to, so do we subscribe to the liberal ideas of privacy and individuals’ rights, as do we subscribe to the socialists’ ideas of the right to education for everybody, although in a new light. So what is this light?
…so I come back to the original question all the time: what has changed, and where are the new lines of conflict?
What I come back to all the time is that monopolies have been broken. Both legal and formal monopolies (think the copyright monopoly, patent monopolies, design patent monopolies) and informal monopolies (notably the monopoly on truth, news reporting, and what culture we are exposed to). Monopolies that have previously been reserved for the elite of society have been totally shattered — the citizens have become empowered.
The key phrase here is that nobody needs to ask permission anymore to make their opinion heard, to partake in society, or to create culture. This, I feel, is at the root of the conflict, and what causes the old elite — the ancien regime — to come down so hard on the new technologies. It used to be, that if you were part of the unwashed masses, you needed to filter everything through society’s elite in order to reach the rest of the masses.
That way, this elite held an effective griplock on what the masses knew — what they were allowed to know — and therefore on what they could say, play, perform, build, and do.
No longer.
That’s the key thing that has changed. Communication is no longer one-to-many, with the “one” being part of society’s elite, but many-to-many. Or, if you like to phrase it that way, all-to-all. This is something we cherish in the pirate community, that nobody asks permission any longer, and that people stand up for one another’s right to not have to ask permission to broadcast.
So I’m moving towards rephrasing the core principle to empowerment. We want an empowered society. In the balance between individual and government, we stand firmly on the side of the individual, with government’s role being one of allowing individual fulfillment and always assuming good faith. Governing, not ruling.
Nobody should need permission to observe, report, partake, communicate, create, share, or build.
This extends further and fits well in with the tangential thoughts that many pirate parties have been moving towards on education, on jobs, on economy — it fits extraordinary well with the thought of empowerment, of empowering everybody to take charge of their own lives without having to ask anybody’s permission.
So can all the other key tenets — privacy, culture, knowledge, diversity, swarm economy, and transparency — be described as deriving from empowerment? I think they can. What do you think?
It’s a nice word but perhaps a bit too general. I mean, the green party can point at other parties and say that what they are promoting is not sustainable. Would the same work with empowerment? I’m a bit doubtful.
The left: we empower people by given them economical freedom to do things.
The right: we empower people by not hindering them economically from doing things.
The pirates: we empower people by, in issues related to communication and culture, keeping/restoring a reasonable dynamic between individual and state, and promoting technologies that help everyone to express themselves and take part in a democratic society (artistically, politically, technically and publicly/privately).
It’s a nice word but perhaps a bit too general. I mean, the green party can point at other parties and say that what they are promoting is not sustainable. Would the same work with empowerment? I’m a bit doubtful.
The left: we empower people by given them economical freedom to do things.
The right: we empower people by not hindering them economically from doing things.
The pirates: we empower people by, in issues related to communication and culture, keeping/restoring a reasonable dynamic between individual and state, and promoting technologies that help everyone to express themselves and take part in a democratic society (artistically, politically, technically and publicly/privately).
I’d say that selfempowerment is a better word than empowerment, the latter can be “given” from above (i.e old type parties who want to take credit for selective parts of what comes from good progress can use the word that way as to imply it’s a “gift” from them) whereas the prefix self in selfpowerment clearly states that it’s a movement from bottom and up, from the people and up, not the other way around. Furthermore it’s not uncommon among ideologies on the other side of the spectrum, i.e communism and the like, to talk about things like “collective empowerment” in exactly the top-down manor that I think we’d better avoid or at least clearly mark a liberal difference against with a terminology they could never embrace and hence never misuse.
Empowerment refers to increasing the spiritual, political, social, or economic strength of individuals and communities.
What your one word, made up or not.. Share on #onewordpirate
Mine is:
NIMBUTELLULIBERTAS = CloudPirateLiberty Libertas Latin for Liberty was the Roman goddess and embodiment of liberty. For short “Nimbutelian”
I have two problems with the word, even though in principle it is quite good for the purpose:
1. “Empowerment” has been lingering around in the company of fake feminism. I mean the kind of “empowerment” that has been and still is being promoted for women to “love thier femininty” and show thier skin to the world and his grandmother. In many eyes the word has become a travesty of what it should really mean. This is quite sad.
2. One of the largest active and successful pirate parties is the German Piratenpartei. If you translate “empowerment” into the German “Ermächtigung” you get a word that is straight away connected with the Nazis because of the “Ermächtigungsgesetz” that secured Hitler’s power in the beginning of his regime. Also the alternative “Bevollmächtigung” might not be so ful lof godwin (could not resist that pun) but very stiff and bureaucratic. Saying “empowerment” as an english word in a German scentence makes you sound like a cliched business consultant. Most German pirates would start laughing at least then and start massive flamewars on thier extensive mailing lists.
I guess the idea is in the right direction but practical use can be a wee bit difficult.
I agree that we need a word for ourselves, or at least, a word that we are strong enough to claim.
1. “Empowerment” has been lingering around in the company of fake feminism.
Actually, I believe the word the feminists have been using is “emancipation”, which is the specific reason I didn’t want to use that word. (It has also been used throughout history by other groups, so it’s kind of associated already.)
2. Translation problems.
I think we’ll run into translation problems in all countries, no matter what word we choose. Politics is always local. I also understand that Latin languages have a bit of problem with finding a direct translation. The Swedish equivalent would be bemyndigande, which sounds like something out of a 1950s-era bureaucratic instruction form.
Once we settle on the word in principle, finding appropriate translations will certainly be necessary, and finding translations that work in practice will be more important than staying exactly, precisely true to the original meaning.
Bemyndigande är ett alldeles för tråkigt ord, i så fall ligger “egenmakt” mycket bättre i munnen i dagligt tal. Det ordet är dessutom så att säga ledigt, eftersom inget av de två svenska blocken numera vill ta i det med tång.
Sossarna försökte på nittiotalet, efter att deras egna utredningar visat att egenmakt var ett ord som unga människor gillade och något som folket i allmänhet var positiva till, men de lyckades inte göra det till ett core value inom partiet eftersom egenmakt/empowerment helt enkelt inte är kompatibelt med den top-down mentalitet som den ännu så länge dominerade generationen till vänster har i ryggmärgen.
Högerblocket å sin sida har alltid pratat om personlig frihet, en variant av egenmakt, men det ser vi ju nu överallt i Europa att när det kommer till kritan så är det övervakningsvarianten av top-down som gäller, vilket förstås också är inkompatibelt med empowerment/egenmakt.
Höger och vänster har allt fler saker gemensamt, inte bara i det de numera omfamnar i praktiken utan även i de saker de övergett. Högern har lämnat den personliga integriteten och Sossarna alla tankar (till och med retoriken) på egenmakt för att kunna samarbeta med de övriga vänsterpartierna. Lustig nog är det väl bara de grönas flytta-ut-på-landet-trend som kan sägas vara något slags egenmaktrörelse/empowermentdito i Sverige i dag, men inte heller de gröna gillar just den terminologin eftersom de ännu trots allt har top-down lösningar som ett core value.
Kort sagt: Egenmakt är både ett bra svensk ord och ett ledigt sådant! 🙂
Ett möjligt problem med just ordet “egenmakt” i svenska är den nära lingvistiska kopplingen till brottsrubriceringen “egenmäktigt förfarande”.
När jag läser brottsdefinitionen (http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egenm%C3%A4ktigt_f%C3%B6rfarande) slås jag av att punkt två, “då annans besittning olovligen rubbas på så vis att den rättmätige ägaren hindras att använda föremålet som det är tänkt.”, påminner väldigt mycket om vad som är fel med DRM-skydd, för övrigt.
I like the word. We had similar discussions in the german Pirate Party, though there is of course a lot of mean day-to-day-stuff that keeps people from philosophizing, therfore we haven’t gone far in this debate, My idea then was “maximizing individual potential” as opposed to collectivist ideas such as “growth of the economy” or conservative ideas such as “keep the things the way they are”. Not that these ideas are bad in themselves, but they shouldn’t be the “pirate idea”.
Unfortunately there is no good translation for “empowerment” in german. The literal translation “Ermächtigung” is connected to the Nazis. What may come close to the desired meaning is “Emanzipation”, but that’s already “taken”, too.
A word, that is often used in german pirate party ist “open”. Open society, open markets, open government, open internet., etc.. I think it covers a lot of issues very well, however not the privacy part. Other “meme words” are “free self-determination” & “partizipation.”
My first thought was “participation”.
It’s what the internet really encourages, if you think about it. From working together to share culture online, to breaking monopolies (a barrier to participation), to actively participating in politics (especially the estranged youth)…
Participation is certainly a good word, but I tend to think that it comes from empowerment and not the other way around?
I like them both equally. I like them in conjunction as well. “Empowerment and Participation” sounds far stronger than either word in isolation. If a politician has two key-words to throw around instead of one, he can use them at two times the frequency 😉
The word “Renaissance” also has similar connotations, given it was the one time in history when “Empowerment and Participation” really made a difference, but it’s a much less pedestrian term whose historical and linguistic (“rebirth”) meanings may not make much of an emotional impact on people.
“freie Entfaltung des Individuums” may be a good german translation of the word empowerment. It was actually already used in a youtube-spot. It is great to see that pirates in different countries come to similar conclusions 😉
Yeah Stefan is right here.
“Open” is getting closer. But how about the privacy issue that is in itself also quite much discussed in Germany. Just mention the certain Spackeria with some German Pirates inside this group.
Three is the magic number: How about “Open, Empowerment and Participation” (with the comma optional)?
Ought to be “openness” when you leave out the comma. Stacking adjectives and nouns on an equal level is bad syntax.
Disregard this one – I thought too fast.
Ought to be “openness” when you keep the comma. Stacking adjectives and nouns on an equal level is bad syntax.
Empowerment is an inappropriate word in my opinion. Judging from the principles alone, espoused in a few of the organisations’ wikis, power is seldom if not ever mentioned. I’ve only seen it in reference to limiting corporations from holding political power.
It sees as if empowerment alone also is insufficient as it fails to establish the source and the destiny of power. I assume that you mean the process by which the state, as monopoly of power, democratises or redistributes its power to the citizenry.
Well, inasmuch as this would be the effect of many of the Party’s principles, this is not the point, is it? Power is a word that belongs to the state. In using the same word to describe the institution’s goal, we miss the point entirely which is not to distribute power but to defend freedom: freedom of speach, freedom of choice, freedom of information.
It seems as if freedom is a more appropriate word. Liberty, also, perhaps.
Nevertheless, my question is really, why should we even have a word that would represent the least common denominator of the movement? You don’t only risk alienating people who would then read the organisation in an entirely different way but you would in the mean time start an unnecessary discussion that would never end.
But if you really have to come up with a word, I would suggest one that synthesises what’s already been discussed rather than one that intends to analize the aformentioned principles.
How about transparency? This word successfully captures the intention of the principles without trying to explain them, it is not limiting at all since the meaning of the word itself does not allow this and it is already mentioned in the principles. Transparency is the property of an open copyright system where information is exchanged freely, the property of a truly democratic government that allows informed participation and it is the property of a society where all citizens feel at liberty to express themselves.
Transparency is the characteristic of a society where there are no walls that blind or divide and isn’t this what the Pirate Party strives for?
LIBERTY!
Empowerment is what copyright holders enjoy.
Copyright is a derogation of the right to copy from our right to liberty.
The right to copy is inherently in all the inhabitants, but the Statute of Anne, by annulling the right to copy in the majority, leaves it, by exclusion, in the hands of a few – copyright holders.
Copyright is a privilege that grants unnatural power to those so privileged. So the last thing pirates are is empowered. They are the ones reclaiming their liberty, unempowering the empowered privileged.
The last thing pirates should be about is a pursuit of power.
Our CULTURAL LIBERTY is that which resumes when our right to copy is no longer annulled, when the 18th century privilege of copyright is abolished.
“Liberty” is taken, though. By many, many, many other movements. It’s become cliché.
And besides, the connotation of “liberty” is, among the masses, the idea that nobody’s stopping you or oppressing you. It’s not necessarily the ability to do things (even though it is, but that’s not the popular perception of it).
“Empowerment”, on the other hand, makes people feel like they’re superheroes. The average person has the liberty to do as they please, but if they’re frickin’ Superman then they have a whole new world of possibilities.
For those of us who are politically well-read, “liberty” and “power” have complex and nuanced connotations. We’re not the type of people that party branding is intended for.
Zacqary,
Power is seductive. This is why copyright remains so appealing to artists. Many of them really like the idea that they could have the power to control what people are able to do with their published work. That is ’empowerment’ and it is corrupt.
Don’t make the same mistake with piracy and suggest this too is a pursuit of power or you’re just as bad as the copyright supporters.
Piracy is civil disobedience against the powerful copyright holder. It is not a pursuit of power over the artist or their publisher, but a pursuit of liberty – freedom to share and build upon our own culture.
Try Integrity, short and sweet.
That is a word with many meanings and it is a word that you both can and will use in all kinds of situations when you are talking about what your party will accomplish.
It can mean integrity of the government, just as well as integrity of the citizen that many times is the opposite of the state/power/government. Integrity is both about keeping certain things private but also about standing tall about what you believe and do, taking responsibility. Integrity is the opposite of apparatniks who weasel out of responsibility by just obey orders, but it is just as well about citizens not being fucked all over by the state, that the state with all its power let citizens keep their integrity.
You talk about empowerment. You also wrote to someone above suggesting participation, that it comes from empowerment. Now what do you think precedes empowerment? I am quite sure that some kind of integrity needs to be there.
Many many times in the swedish debate i have written (roughly translated): What the Internet has meant is the same as the printing press once did, a dramatic reduction of the barrier to spread information. But unfortunately, the “power and the church” of today react just as they did in the time of Gutenberg.
This is the change, a technological one, both now and then. Every big change in history has its roots in disruptive technology, just as today. Once the cradle of civilization stood in Babylon, that was the informational crossroad of that time, the crossroad of camel carvans between Asia, Africa and Europe. Then man learnt how to sail.. Oops, goods and information started to take other routes, thus the informational center moved, and with that the power of the time, power needs control and thus information. Now it moved to Biblos, but not for long, since Biblos was strategically venurable. It moved up closer to the mountains, Jerusalem with connections both to the sea and the caravans via the dead sea. That is the mystery of Babylon. Then man learnt how to navigate.. shit happens and time passes, it became Rhodes, Rome, Malta, Lisbon.. At this time we had developed enough to really sail blue waters reliable, now it jumped via the Azores over the atlantic to Nantucket (with a detour to briton due to precision gunnery thanks to a man named Newton) and later divided to NewYork and Norfolk Virginia.
Now what has happened to the the routes of information, the crossroads where power accumulates? Internet, globalism, knowledge society. Now think of “information with integrity” as a concept.. how does that fit with your ideology?
We all know that a knowledge society wont be built by making information and knowledge scarse (thus have a high price), that kind of society was the time before the printing press – sort of “been there done that”.. it did not work. To lock in information and make it scarse is medevial thinking born out of protectionism. Information itself did not have its own integrity. But with the printing press important information got its integrity by the new possibility of peer review – the scientific method. And now? How has the internet affected the method of peer review an thus the integrity of information?
Intergity Rick.
[…] Falkvinge recently wrote about the word empowerment, and whether it was a suitable candidate for ”core word” of […]
Hmm, a significant part of the party seems to be against classical, economical liberty. I think the suggsted “Self empowerment” would work. Direct translations are hard.
A german term could be “Bewegungsfreiheit”.
For swedish i like the short word “Egenmakt”.
Oopss,, “egenmäktigt förfarande” is a crime
I like the word Integrity best of all the suggested words.
Empowerment (or Self-empowerment) suggests that people actively does something with their power. Not everybody is a doer, creator etc. Also, some would associate it with Anarchism, which would alienate quite a few people.
Transparency (and Open-xxx) is also a good word but could be abused by the establishment against people who want to keep their privacy and anonymity.
Integrity OTOH protects the individual’s personal freedom _and_ empowers them against authorities. Personal freedom and respect for individuals’ (versus the State/corporations/groups etc.) rights conjoins in the word Integrity.
Lawrence Lessig appears to be going for ‘entitlement’, which is just as bad as empowerment,
The privileged have been empowered by Queen Anne, and we have seen that this empowerment can’t come from nowhere. Whoever is unnaturally empowered is empowered at the expense of others, i.e. the majority who are unnaturally disempowered. The most ethical state is to leave people with the power they have by nature, i.e. the power to prevent burglars copying their works, but not the power to prevent their audience retelling the stories they tell them.
Piracy is an assertion of the liberty (right/power to share & improve) that people have by nature, it is not a pursuit of unnatural power, a grant of power beyond liberty, empowerment.
‘Empowerment’ would be a terminological error.
Whereas slavery suspends all liberties from a few, copyright suspends a few liberties from all.
Liberty is the dimensionally correct term for the behaviour that earns the copyright cartel’s pejorative of piracy.
See A Pirate’s Code – 21st Century Edition .
[…] of adopting it as a core principle in the Pirate movement. While I personally find his refutation of Rick Falkvinge‘s idea a quite convincing argument I also noticed two interesting […]
[…] recently blogged about the Empowerment perspective, apropeaux Rick’s attempt at finding a ”core word” to define the Pirate Pary’s ideology with. This got me […]
How about “decentralization”?
Thanks to the Internet you don’t need to go through a central publishing agency any more to make your opinion heard. There’s no longer a single broadcasting center supplying a whole nation with radio and TV. Publishing of all kinds has been decentralized.
While we still have a fairly centralized education system, it no longer has a monopoly on knowledge. You can now easily complement your education with knowledge from many different sources. Education has become more decentralized.
A big surveillance center watching everybody is a bad thing. Fighting crime is necessary but it needs to be done in a decentralized manner.
Many of the strengths of the Internet stem from its decentralized architecture. When you transform the Internet into a centralized network, bad things start to happen. Facebook has the power to be mean to its users because it’s a centralized system. Apple is often criticized for censorship, which is made possible by their central control of their devices. Decentralized systems avoid these problems.
We want a decentralized society.
!!
I think you might just have fucking nailed it. Let’s see how others react to that.
There’s also ‘disintermediation’, which at least doesn’t have a UK/US spelling variation as decentralisation does.
Decentralisation undermines the control necessary to enforce copyright, and thus facilitated piracy, but it is not its own ethical principle – as liberty is.
Modern piracy is an epiphenomenon of decentralisation (decentralised communications technologies aka p2p/distributed systems).
But only liberty explains why piracy is ethical, as opposed to merely facilitated by decentralisation.
Being a proponent of decentralisation doesn’t preclude support for, or an expectation that copyright will still be respected/enforceable. “Share Shakespeare, but not JK Rowling!”
Being an adherent of liberty does.preclude support for the privilege of copyright that derogates from it.
Vi pratar om dig 😉
http://opassande.se/index.php/2011/08/15/de-moraliska-rotterna-som-paverkar-vara-politiska-stallningstaganden/#comment-28816
The problem with “empowerment” is that it reeks of workers’ movements (socialism) and womens’ rights movements (feminism). The latter have also used emancipation, but empowerment still come with those associations. Empowerment is otherwise a reasonably good word to describe what we want to achieve, but I don’t see a way out of those associations, and it would be hard to claim it as our own. Also it suffers from the problem that people have radically different ideas about what it actually means in practice. True, and slogan-type word has that problem (“sustainability” being a good example), but it seems to me that the problem is especially bad with empowerment. With “sustainability”, at least we can agree on the dictionary definition of “sustainable” even if we disagree on how to put it into practice. I’m not sure two randomly selected people are likely to agree on what it means to be empowered.
Decentralisation is an interesting suggestion, but doesn’t quite capture it, in my opinion. Certainly, decentralisation is often a key component, but it carries little meaning on an individual level. To be empowered, to be free, to live sustainably are things that are tangible on the level of each individual’s life. But decentralisation? How do you live decentralisedly? How are you decentralised? What does decentralisation mean in your life? As a principle for societal organisation, it is something many could probably agree on, but it does not speak to you as a person, it does not describe your personal experience and your life.
Emancipation and enfranchisement are analogues of liberty, so they’re ok too.
[…] Falkvinge is an Internet activist and the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party. This quote is from a recent post in his infopolicy blog: “The reason for my asking is that I’ve been trying to identify one […]
How about “equality”?
“They may take our lives, but they will never take OUR FREEDOM”
I think that maximizing individual freedom is what the pirate movement is all about. Unfortunately it is all to easy for any movement to claim that their goal is to promote freedom or even “individual freedom”.
I don’t know if “empowerment” is better in this regard, but it may be and I like it too. It emphasizes freedom for people who want to act and create, which I think is a good meaning to convey. If you never communicate or create anything and just consume, then you don’t really need what the pirate movement is offering. But I think that most people communicate and create more than they normally think.
Collaboration (Sw: samarbete). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration
We see the world in groups, were we can be part of many groups, and changing groups during our lifetime. Collaboration is what we do when we share knowledge and culture.
The smallest group is an individual, which consists of parts of many groups. The biggest group is humanity, which consist of every group of individuals. Humanity is therefore more than all the individuals in the world (the sum is bigger than its parts).
The bigger the group the more power it has. Therefore it must be scrutinized more. (religions, states, corporations, political parties, etc)
Collaboration is the flow between groups. Collaboration is where new ideas form. The lone inventor is a myth, everything is built on previous ideas, which is collaboration over time.
I think it fits quite well with pirate ideals and also how society really works. We don’t see the world as one giant collective, nor do we see people as all alone. We don’t see that everything has a pricetag, nor that everything is free (as in beer). Information which is not shared is worth next to nothing, while free information is invaluable.
I suggest EMPEER2PEERMENT, wich is aimed to mean the empowerment through the practical adoption of the peer 2 peer philosophy. And this word would work (or not) just as well as in portuguese or spanish, like “EMPARAPAREAMENTO”.
[…] o fundador do primeiro Partido Pirata do mundo, Rick Falkvigne, propôs em um artigo que o termo “empoderamento” (empowerment, em inglês) seja considerado como elemento […]