Bruce Sterling [Closing Keynote] - Reboot11

Ever since his keynote at SXSW in 2006, Bruce Sterling is one of the few individuals whose conference talks I make sure to watch in full - they’re always very insightful. This is no exception. (Ignore the awkward announcer at the beginning.)

I’ve been struggling for weeks now over framing a post on the acquisition of The Pirate Bay - these three guys built a BitTorrent empire, promoted free file-sharing as an ideology and unequivocally defended it to the bitter end. Regardless of your opinion on their actions, it’s hard to deny that they were icons to many, bold leaders/obnoxious criminals of a war against copyright. Thus the news of the acquisition felt like a stunning defeat for their side - even though they were three individuals among hundreds of millions of file-sharers, their acquiescence to GGF even seemed to change the fundamental framework of the copyright debate. After all, what is nuanced issue-oriented dialogue but an analysis of the shades of grey between two extremes? The nature of the dialogue changes alongside the nature of the extremes.

Sterling indirectly tackles this idea by positing an emergent phenomenon we’ll be seeing in the next decade, known as “gothic high tech”: to oversimplify it, he describes these iconic leaders (mentioning Steve Jobs, Sarkozy and Obama as examples) who oversee periods of essentially meaningless transition rather than real progress or even real conservatism. As he puts it:

They’re positioning themselves in the narrative rather than building any permanent infrastructure.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that Obama completely embodies this quote (and I know little to nothing about Sarkozy), but Jobs - and certainly the founders of The Pirate Bay - position themselves in the media narrative as champions of an ideology while neglecting to build an infrastructure to maintain that ideology after they are gone. Can you imagine an Apple after Steve Jobs retires? The Pirate Bay, even after police raided its servers and its founders were sentenced to jail, proclaimed that it would never die. And now, if the sale goes through, it will be shut down by its new owners. What have its founders personally set up to replace it?