Exterior the skatepark in Prague, on a scrubby patch of grass, Bartoš leans again into his deck chair as he tries to impress on me that Pirates should not your common stiff politicians. From the marketing campaign launch unfolding behind us, that’s fairly apparent. Sure, there are lengthy speeches and well mannered rounds of applause. However there are additionally gangs of shirtless skate boarders, a blue-haired rapper, rainbow banners exhibiting our solar-powered future, and references to the net boards the place social gathering members can vote on new insurance policies or demand new management.
He disagrees that the broadening of the Pirates’ focus has diluted its id. “We can’t be a single problem social gathering,” he insists. As a substitute, he compares the Pirates’ evolution to Europe’s Greens, which began as a grassroots motion constructed round a single problem: the atmosphere. Now the Greens are making use of their authentic values to the whole lot from housing to power, as they sit in coalition governments in Germany, Luxembourg, Eire, and Austria. Though the Pirates “don’t preach” just like the Greens, he says, “we’re doing the identical journey they did some time in the past.”
The Czech department demonstrates the Pirates’ potential—how an internet-first ideology might be woven into nationwide politics—however additionally it is a microcosm of the social gathering’s issues. Like different Pirates earlier than it, the Czechs endure from inner bickering, factionalism, and claims of sexual harassment. Former marketing campaign supervisor Šárka Václavíková has spoken publicly about her determination to depart the social gathering and her police grievance in opposition to a fellow social gathering member for what she describes as stalking and psychological abuse. Over Zoom from her new residence in Italy, she says sexual harassment of girls was systemic earlier than she left final yr—a declare the social gathering strongly denies. “Remoted incidents can, in fact, occur, simply as in society or every other social gathering. Nonetheless, if we had any details about such incidents, we might take fast motion,” social gathering spokesperson Lucie Švehlíková advised WIRED.
However Václavíková says she’s additionally upset with the course of the social gathering as a complete. “There are two factions within the Pirate Occasion,” she declares. There are the centrists, the individuals who need to attraction to everybody and are disowning the social gathering’s Pirate Bay roots within the course of. Václavíková says she recognized with the opposite faction, whom she calls “the true pirates.” “For us,” she says, “the ideology of clear coverage and privateness, and likewise human rights, are extra vital than simply gaining extra energy for our personal revenue.”
To date, Bartoš has prevented these points from tearing the social gathering aside. A part of why he has lasted so lengthy, surviving a sequence of management challenges (together with from Gregorová), is as a result of he can clearly describe what makes the Pirates’ outlook completely different. Throughout Europe, different Pirates are nonetheless struggling to outline what a greater future—with extra know-how, not much less—would truly appear to be. After I signal right into a Zoom name with Tommy Klein, political adviser to the Pirates in Luxembourg, he’s sitting in entrance of a poster emblazoned with the phrase “Save Our Web.” After I ask how precisely the web wants saving, he replies with out enthusiasm that the poster is outdated. “It’s from the 2018 election,” he says.
Below Bartoš, nonetheless, the Czech Pirates have discovered a method to articulate a utopian imaginative and prescient of a technology-infused future which means extra than simply lowering Massive Tech’s affect on the European web. Just like the Pirate Bureau 20 years in the past, the Czech Pirates even have a bus—actually extra of a camper van—that carries illustrations of their message. There’s a solar, with rays resembling web nodes. Wind generators and photo voltaic farms develop out of rolling pink hills. Slogans like “Woman Energy” and “Tolerance” hover over folks doing peace indicators and smiling by means of heart-shaped glasses. In Bartoš, the unique Pirate imaginative and prescient for another technology-enabled future nonetheless lingers. “I imagine that we are able to save the planet and society by means of know-how,” he declares from his deck chair. Whether or not that optimism continues to be relevant, 20 years later, is as much as the voters to determine.
