Jan 18, 2024, 21:49 pm
Hey,
15 november 2023 interview of Brokep by sifted.eu
https://sifted.eu/articles/peter-sunde-pirate-bay-tech
I meet Peter Sunde at his office in Malmö, Sweden, where he greets me shoeless in odd socks patterned with hot dogs and makes me a cup of tea. It's not a look you'd expect from one of the godfathers of global internet piracy.
Sunde founded The Pirate Bay — the world’s most notorious file-sharing site — in 2003, and it quickly became one of the internet’s most visited destinations, flying in the face of legal complaints from the media industry for its central role in facilitating illegal online downloads.
In 2009, Sunde and the site’s other founders were found guilty of assisting copyright infringement and, after two years wanted by Interpol, Sunde spent eight months in Sweden's Västervik prison.
Advertisement
Ten years on, Sunde keeps a comparatively low profile, though remnants of his notoriety remain. He asks me not to mention the location of his office, as people are known to try to turn up to talk to him. He also keeps pretty famous company.
“When you’re burnt once, you tend to hang out with other burnt people,” he says, when I ask about his friendship with Edward Snowden.
The new focus: anonymous web hosting
Today, Sunde’s focus is on a platform for anonymous web hosting: a service for websites that struggle to get hosted elsewhere, or need very secure online infrastructure. That includes organisations like UbuWeb — an avant-garde library of art and music — as well as women’s rights groups and investigative journalism outlets. Most controversially, it also hosts websites for Antifa groups and Sci-Hub, a resource that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright.
“We work with people that are very aligned ideologically with what we're doing,” says Sunde, who categorises himself as previously somewhere between communism and socialism, but increasingly “more and more of an anarchist".
“We have terms of agreements, which is basically that if you do something which is hurtful to other people, we will not host you.”
Every Wednesday
~/ Startup Life
Insights, tips and tricks from Europe’s leading startup operators.
By Miriam Partington and Anisah Osman Britton
They wouldn’t host Parler, for example, the rightwing American social network site, which was suspended from hosting on AWS by Amazon.
“I'm super happy that they had issues getting hosting because what they're doing goes against basic human rights, decency and democracy, all of those things,” Sunde says.
Does Sunde like technology?
I’m curious to get the bottom of whether Sunde likes technology. He’s spent his life working with it but doesn’t strike me as, in any way, a techno-optimist.
“I like technology on an intellectual level, I like playing with it,” he says, “but I also have this thing that I want it to have meaning.”
It’s rare, he says, that new technology comes along that we actively need. “It's good to have, but we don't need to have faster 5G — it's not the most important question for humanity to improve those things.”
Advertisement
I ask him what the priorities should be. Ensuring more universal access to the internet is one (rather than ramping up the speed for parts of society that already have it), he says, as is having more discussion about the ownership of social media platforms. “Maybe when we're merging all of our media, all of our culture, everything onto one platform, maybe that platform should be jointly owned, or at least controlled by someone.”
Sunde has, in the past, held a more rosey view on the potential of tech. “I thought the internet would bring multiculturalism, a place where you would find peers from other sides of the globe,” he says. “But generally, what has happened is that there's only one culture that dictates everything [online].” An overwhelmingly American culture, he adds.
Publicly documented AI
Our conversation quickly turns to the topic of the moment — AI — with which Sunde has a number of qualms.
With closed algorithms, a gap is widening, Sunde says, between “the people that understand and have access to things and the people that don't have it and don't understand it.”
His belief in open-sourced knowledge is a thread that runs from his Pirate Bay days to his thinking now “For me, it's really interesting why the models are not more transparent… maybe that should be publicly documented.”
His other qualm with the AI discussion is that little thought is dedicated to what we plan to do with time the tech could free up. “What if we could have universal basic income?” he questions. “Then we wouldn't have to work? Maybe that could be a societal goal?”
Can fintech do good?
The day before my interview with Sunde, I read an opinion piece by him in the Swedish press about Klarna — one of Sweden’s highest valued companies at $6.7bn — where he compares the company to a loan shark.
When I bring it up, Sunde is sceptical of the entire fintech industry.
“It's funded by people being totally fucked over for buying things they didn't need and being in debt. It's always about getting some piece of someone else's cake,” Sunde says. “No one does tech for good, that doesn’t happen — especially not in fintech." (Sifted put that to Klarna, which declined to comment.)
“People don't care about unions anymore, especially in tech”
Klarna has faced a number of strikes in recent weeks, after unions were unable to reach an agreement that the company would negotiate large changes like layoffs with the unions. Worker organisation is another topic Sunde feels strongly about.
“People don't care about unions anymore because they are so privileged, especially in tech,” he says. “As a programmer, you don't have a problem getting a job, you will always find a new job and you’re highly paid.
“The problem is that the tech community doesn't realise the big picture,” he says, emphasising that the union movement is stronger when it has wide support across different industries.
“If [a tech worker doesn't] work with the union, that means that the people working at the postal office or in the supermarket or cutting your hair will have a hard time having the union on their side, because it's a joint effort.”
“I'm not pessimistic, I'm seriously realistic”
I move our conversation onto climate tech, the topic I spend most of my time at Sifted writing about. Sunde is a vegan and talks passionately about the climate crisis.
“Earth will survive, it's just humanity that will suffer. I'm not worried about the climate of the planet, I'm worried about the next generations that will suffer,” he says.
One rare moment of optimism came in the form of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, Sunde says.
“It made me super happy when Greta Thunberg came around and actually told people to fuck off, with a simple message that everyone knows is true,” he tells me. “She's the only happiness I've seen politically, even though she's not going to get anything changed.”
So does tech have a place in the fight, in his view? Put simply, no. “You're trying to fix a problem which is not technical. The solution to climate change is to stop pouring out CO2.”
Support for tech like direct-air-capture (machines which remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere) distracts us from the reality of the problem, Sunde says. “They put some sort of religious faith in technology. It’s this culty thing, the idea that technology will fix a problem." If we didn't have the option to think that the climate crisis could be fixed with tech, we would actually have to solve the crisis, Sunde says.
“I'm not pessimistic, I'm seriously realistic,” Sunde says (after I question, based on our chat, if he’d call himself a pessimist). “On a human level, on a personal, individual level, you can still love and you can still laugh and you can have all the things in life that are okay, but someone else will have to clean up the mess, which I feel is totally unfair.”
Towards the end of our chat, Sunde leaves me one of the most depressing statements I’ve been given in an interview. “I think that we are in a position where we are now seeing all of these ships sink and we're staying on, playing music as the Titanic goes down,” he says. “Let's just hope that it's not bad music.”
I leave our meeting, perhaps slightly less upbeat and slightly angrier about the state of the world than when I arrived, and head home listening to — what I hope would be classed as — good music.
15 november 2023 interview of Brokep by sifted.eu
https://sifted.eu/articles/peter-sunde-pirate-bay-tech
I meet Peter Sunde at his office in Malmö, Sweden, where he greets me shoeless in odd socks patterned with hot dogs and makes me a cup of tea. It's not a look you'd expect from one of the godfathers of global internet piracy.
Sunde founded The Pirate Bay — the world’s most notorious file-sharing site — in 2003, and it quickly became one of the internet’s most visited destinations, flying in the face of legal complaints from the media industry for its central role in facilitating illegal online downloads.
In 2009, Sunde and the site’s other founders were found guilty of assisting copyright infringement and, after two years wanted by Interpol, Sunde spent eight months in Sweden's Västervik prison.
Advertisement
Ten years on, Sunde keeps a comparatively low profile, though remnants of his notoriety remain. He asks me not to mention the location of his office, as people are known to try to turn up to talk to him. He also keeps pretty famous company.
“When you’re burnt once, you tend to hang out with other burnt people,” he says, when I ask about his friendship with Edward Snowden.
The new focus: anonymous web hosting
Today, Sunde’s focus is on a platform for anonymous web hosting: a service for websites that struggle to get hosted elsewhere, or need very secure online infrastructure. That includes organisations like UbuWeb — an avant-garde library of art and music — as well as women’s rights groups and investigative journalism outlets. Most controversially, it also hosts websites for Antifa groups and Sci-Hub, a resource that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright.
“We work with people that are very aligned ideologically with what we're doing,” says Sunde, who categorises himself as previously somewhere between communism and socialism, but increasingly “more and more of an anarchist".
“We have terms of agreements, which is basically that if you do something which is hurtful to other people, we will not host you.”
Every Wednesday
~/ Startup Life
Insights, tips and tricks from Europe’s leading startup operators.
By Miriam Partington and Anisah Osman Britton
They wouldn’t host Parler, for example, the rightwing American social network site, which was suspended from hosting on AWS by Amazon.
“I'm super happy that they had issues getting hosting because what they're doing goes against basic human rights, decency and democracy, all of those things,” Sunde says.
Does Sunde like technology?
I’m curious to get the bottom of whether Sunde likes technology. He’s spent his life working with it but doesn’t strike me as, in any way, a techno-optimist.
“I like technology on an intellectual level, I like playing with it,” he says, “but I also have this thing that I want it to have meaning.”
It’s rare, he says, that new technology comes along that we actively need. “It's good to have, but we don't need to have faster 5G — it's not the most important question for humanity to improve those things.”
Advertisement
I ask him what the priorities should be. Ensuring more universal access to the internet is one (rather than ramping up the speed for parts of society that already have it), he says, as is having more discussion about the ownership of social media platforms. “Maybe when we're merging all of our media, all of our culture, everything onto one platform, maybe that platform should be jointly owned, or at least controlled by someone.”
Sunde has, in the past, held a more rosey view on the potential of tech. “I thought the internet would bring multiculturalism, a place where you would find peers from other sides of the globe,” he says. “But generally, what has happened is that there's only one culture that dictates everything [online].” An overwhelmingly American culture, he adds.
Publicly documented AI
Our conversation quickly turns to the topic of the moment — AI — with which Sunde has a number of qualms.
With closed algorithms, a gap is widening, Sunde says, between “the people that understand and have access to things and the people that don't have it and don't understand it.”
His belief in open-sourced knowledge is a thread that runs from his Pirate Bay days to his thinking now “For me, it's really interesting why the models are not more transparent… maybe that should be publicly documented.”
His other qualm with the AI discussion is that little thought is dedicated to what we plan to do with time the tech could free up. “What if we could have universal basic income?” he questions. “Then we wouldn't have to work? Maybe that could be a societal goal?”
Can fintech do good?
The day before my interview with Sunde, I read an opinion piece by him in the Swedish press about Klarna — one of Sweden’s highest valued companies at $6.7bn — where he compares the company to a loan shark.
When I bring it up, Sunde is sceptical of the entire fintech industry.
“It's funded by people being totally fucked over for buying things they didn't need and being in debt. It's always about getting some piece of someone else's cake,” Sunde says. “No one does tech for good, that doesn’t happen — especially not in fintech." (Sifted put that to Klarna, which declined to comment.)
“People don't care about unions anymore, especially in tech”
Klarna has faced a number of strikes in recent weeks, after unions were unable to reach an agreement that the company would negotiate large changes like layoffs with the unions. Worker organisation is another topic Sunde feels strongly about.
“People don't care about unions anymore because they are so privileged, especially in tech,” he says. “As a programmer, you don't have a problem getting a job, you will always find a new job and you’re highly paid.
“The problem is that the tech community doesn't realise the big picture,” he says, emphasising that the union movement is stronger when it has wide support across different industries.
“If [a tech worker doesn't] work with the union, that means that the people working at the postal office or in the supermarket or cutting your hair will have a hard time having the union on their side, because it's a joint effort.”
“I'm not pessimistic, I'm seriously realistic”
I move our conversation onto climate tech, the topic I spend most of my time at Sifted writing about. Sunde is a vegan and talks passionately about the climate crisis.
“Earth will survive, it's just humanity that will suffer. I'm not worried about the climate of the planet, I'm worried about the next generations that will suffer,” he says.
One rare moment of optimism came in the form of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, Sunde says.
“It made me super happy when Greta Thunberg came around and actually told people to fuck off, with a simple message that everyone knows is true,” he tells me. “She's the only happiness I've seen politically, even though she's not going to get anything changed.”
So does tech have a place in the fight, in his view? Put simply, no. “You're trying to fix a problem which is not technical. The solution to climate change is to stop pouring out CO2.”
Support for tech like direct-air-capture (machines which remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere) distracts us from the reality of the problem, Sunde says. “They put some sort of religious faith in technology. It’s this culty thing, the idea that technology will fix a problem." If we didn't have the option to think that the climate crisis could be fixed with tech, we would actually have to solve the crisis, Sunde says.
“I'm not pessimistic, I'm seriously realistic,” Sunde says (after I question, based on our chat, if he’d call himself a pessimist). “On a human level, on a personal, individual level, you can still love and you can still laugh and you can have all the things in life that are okay, but someone else will have to clean up the mess, which I feel is totally unfair.”
Towards the end of our chat, Sunde leaves me one of the most depressing statements I’ve been given in an interview. “I think that we are in a position where we are now seeing all of these ships sink and we're staying on, playing music as the Titanic goes down,” he says. “Let's just hope that it's not bad music.”
I leave our meeting, perhaps slightly less upbeat and slightly angrier about the state of the world than when I arrived, and head home listening to — what I hope would be classed as — good music.
