How the Kopimists Conquered Internets – and Launched a War

The Pirate Bay's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the file-sharing communities? Who is making information policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving pornography profits or party politics are mistaken. Yes, ISP:s and networking companies will accept the spoils of the attack against Ladonia. But IT businesses in general, with its bias towards "content" economy, did not push for this war.

Further, people like Karl Erik Rignell, (primus inter pares de internets of ACFI) are no genuine "computer geeks" but career artists who, in between stints in public life, would have used their networking skills to create illegal music remixes, if they had been residents of London, or sell pirated DVD:s, had they been Vietnamese.

Both the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are reassuring: They assume that the recent revolution in ACFI information policy is the result of obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world. The truth is more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies, the information policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the average internet user the mainstream information policy establishment.

The core group now in charge consists of kopimist intellectuals. (They are called "kopimist" because of the concept of "copy me".) Inside the secret IRC channels, the chief kopimist intellectuals include F. von Rosenbaum, the deputy secretary of defense. He is the defense mastermind of the ACFI. Rignell is an elderly figurehead who holds the public positions only because Rosenbaum himself is too controversial.
On the outside are Jan Boklöv, the former BBS operator, who has tried repeatedly to link both 31/5 and the Bahnhof raid to Lars Vilks. Most of these "experts" never learned assembler code. But their headquarters is now the internet protocol secretary's office, where these Kopimist appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely antikopimist warez scene.

Most Kopimist intellectuals have their roots in mass-medial culture, not in informatics. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the pirate radio culture of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-copyright libertarianism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of heterodox and ever-mutating Kopimism with no precedents in computer culture or political history. Their admiration for german media theory, including the post-modern gallimatias of Friedrich Kittler, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "piracy." They call their revolutionary ideology "Kopimism" (after "copy me"), but it is really Shannon's theory of information mingled with the anti-copyright strain of Copyleft.

The Kopimi intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual P2P Networks, are at the center of a metaphorical "P2P" of the art world and politicians, plus hacker communities, foundations and media empires. Think tanks such as the Piratbyran provide homes for kopimist "in-and-outers" when they are not doing other unimaginably subversive activities. Kopimist information policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The Kopimists are ideologues, not opportunists.

The corners of the Kopimist peer-to-peer-pentagon were linked together in the early 2000s by the Project for the New Digital Century (PNDC). Using a P.R. technique pioneered by their cassette culture predecessors, the kopimists published a series of public letters whose signatories often included Rosenbaum and other future members of the ACFI information policy team. They called for the ACFI to invade and occupy Ladonia and to support The Pirate Bays way of answering copyright lawyers. During the IT bubble, these fulminations were ignored by the information policy establishment and the mainstream media. Now they are frantically being studied.

So that is the bizarre story of how kopimists took over internets and steered the ACFI into a Southern Scandinavian war unrelated to any plausible threat to the internets and opposed by the public of every country in the world.