Twenty years ago the movement began with assumptions that were unusual then and have not become less unusual since. Organisation as a distributed network rather than a hierarchy. Subsidiarity, meaning a decision belongs to the smallest body able to take it. Delegation that could be handed over and taken back the same afternoon. And a political identity that did not run along a national border, because the thing being defended did not either.
Those assumptions were the reason Pirate Parties International existed at all. An umbrella made sense because there was one paradigm to be an umbrella over.
What followed was, by most measures, success. Parties got on ballots, then into councils, then into national parliaments and the European Parliament. And each of those steps came with a building, a budget line, a staff, a constituency with a map around it, and a mandate lasting a fixed number of years. None of that was a betrayal of anything. It was what winning looks like inside a state system.
But state systems reward the people who work well inside them, and over time influence accrues to offices rather than to networks — without anyone deciding it should.
The retrospective point is narrow and worth stating before the argument starts: the values did not change. They are still written down, in the European Pirates’ own texts and in PPI’s, and nobody is proposing to renegotiate them. What changed is the structure carrying them — and one umbrella built for one paradigm now covers several.
So the question below is not “have Pirates lost their principles”. It is: which body should carry which part of them, and what would that actually look like?
What I want for this topic to be is a discussion where we set out to prioritize our ‘revolution’: Is it an accountability-tracing liquid democracy system? Is it making sure there is a UBI? Or legal protection of re-use of others’ works? There is also the distributed infrastructure we would like to throw into the mix.
So who does what, and to what degree? Maybe we can do all of it, but maybe not all at once. Which brings us to the European Pirates, -and their partners in parliament- not looking like the Pirates people joined, but still doing the work they set out to. We should not look like a choice, where either you’re an activist pirate or a political one, it is still one pirate movement, with different departments.