On the 29th of april the third and final day of The Next Web Conference 2011  was held in Amsterdam. The first order of the day was immediately one that stuck by me. It was a Wikileaks panel with Alexander Bard  and Rick Falkvinge  led by Andrew Keen. Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party. Alexander Bard is, well, a writer, sociologist, philosopher and TV talk show host. Also; successful record producer, artist  and songwriter. This makes him a very interesting person to talk to about file sharing and illegal downloads because he has a foot in both worlds. During the panel, Bard and Falkvinge discussed the importance of sharing, pirates, power, and integrity with a fair dosage of humor.

Falkvinge was of the opinion that sharing equals power. A nine year old African schoolgirl with a laptop from the ‘One Laptop per Child’  foundation could be as powerful as a middle aged, Western man, simply because she is connected to the web and has the power to share knowledge. In Falvinge’s words: “Copying is sharing, sharing is knowledge, and knowledge is power.”
Bard agreed up to a point. According to him, poor teenage boys who are surfing the web from their basements, who share everything and have learned seven languages through playing MMO’s (Massively Multiplayer Online games) are the new upper class. The new lower class, for that matter, are white wealthy middle aged men who do nothing online besides watch porn. The balance of power is shifting.
However, there was one item that Bard and Falkvinge did not agree on. In the eyes of Falkvinge, pirates such as himself are changing the status quo. They are giving the power back to the consumer by allowing them to share. In his eyes pirates aren’t anarchists, they are revolutionizers. He himself compared it to the hippies in the 60’s. They were, in their day, considered to be anarchists as well, shouting about peace and the environment. These days their sentiments have evolved and are accepted in general society. “It just takes a while for a perspective to reach the masses.”
According to Bard, though, pirates are simply taking over the world, killing the current world leaders but replacing them with themselves. “Pirates are the new elite.”

The only way for the biggest opposers to pirates, like record labels, to survive is to find new paradigms. They need to think of a way to become relevant again. In a world where information and cultural content such as music is not a scarcity anymore, you need to think of new ways to generate income, by providing something else. Technology has always changed the world, think of the implications that the printing press had on society, for instance. Falkvinge would like to see record labels actually being paid by artists instead of the other way around. Through the internet and services like Spotify , artists will soon have the ability to share their music and generate income themselves. If record labels are really of added value, let them prove it. That way artists will be happy to pay them for their services.

I guess time will tell how this will all evolve, but there is something the gentlemen could once again agree on: what we are seeing now is only the beginning. The internet is still very much in its infancy, and we will probably only be able to see what impact it has on society in a few decades, when our grandchildren are adults.

tagged with: rick falkvinge, pirats, spotify, record labels, artists, alexander bard

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