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Pirate Bay Founder: 'I Have Given Up' (vice.com)
The future of illegal torrent websites doesn't look good. As torrent websites continue to disappear, the founder of The Pirate Bay believes the trend is the just the beginning. From an article: While it might look like torrenters are are still fighting this battle, Sunde claims that the reality is more definitive: "We have already lost." [...] Take the net neutrality law in Europe. It's terrible, but people are happy and go like "it could be worse." That is absolutely not the right attitude. Facebook brings the internet to Africa and poor countries, but they're only giving limited access to their own services and make money off of poor people. [...] Well, I have given up the idea that we can win this fight for the internet. The situation is not going to be any different, because apparently that is something people are not interested in fixing. Or we can't get people to care enough. Maybe it's a mixture, but this is kind of the situation we are in, so its useless to do anything about it. We have become somehow the Black Knight from Monty Python's Holy Grail. We have maybe half of our head left and we are still fighting, we still think we have a chance of winning this battle.
I think it's more than that.
If you take a step back and look away from just piracy, content-sharing illegal or not, what he's talking about is the acceptance of Corporate provided, and dominated, structured privacy-controlled platforms. Or the reverse, personal documenting platforms. Pick your narrative... Yes, you could say this started with Facebook, others, but it doesn't restrict it to just social media. Consider browser tracking, purchase tracking, etc.. and extending into the commoditization of every aspect of online life, that has come to fruition.
I think people conveniently forgot, that they have, or had the ability to shape what systems of communication were the winners and losers. And what we see is that convenience won, over personal privacy and their online future 'portfolio', from that.
I have to wonder. Every time I sign up on a new website, be it for work, product purchases, whatever.... just how many databases, across how many sectors of society, are being updated. And I'm not even talking about whether this extends to Government surveillance. That's a whole OTHER discussion.
The Corporate 'profiling' of everyone's online life is VERY disturbing once you go down that rabbit hole. The potential of where it might lead, is what the real concern is. There's a reason students of history are cautious and concerned with this. The question is, how do we get the majority of everyone else, to realize that. And more importantly, act on it.