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 usually are 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 displaying our solar-powered future, and references to the web boards the place celebration members can vote on new insurance policies or demand new management.
He disagrees that the broadening of the Pirates’ focus has diluted its identification. “We can’t be a single concern celebration,” he insists. As an alternative, he compares the Pirates’ evolution to Europe’s Greens, which began as a grassroots motion constructed round a single concern: the setting. Now the Greens are making use of their unique values to every thing from housing to vitality, 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 celebration’s issues. Like different Pirates earlier than it, the Czechs undergo from inside bickering, factionalism, and claims of sexual harassment. Former marketing campaign supervisor Šárka Václavíková has spoken publicly about her choice to depart the celebration and her police grievance in opposition to a fellow celebration member for what she describes as stalking and psychological abuse. Over Zoom from her new dwelling in Italy, she says sexual harassment of girls was systemic earlier than she left final 12 months—a declare the celebration strongly denies. “Remoted incidents can, after all, occur, simply as in society or another celebration. Nevertheless, if we had any details about such incidents, we’d take quick motion,” celebration spokesperson Lucie Švehlíková informed WIRED.
However Václavíková says she’s additionally upset with the route of the celebration as an entire. “There are two factions within the Pirate Social gathering,” she declares. There are the centrists, the individuals who need to enchantment to everybody and are disowning the celebration’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 necessary than simply gaining extra energy for our personal revenue.”
To this point, Bartoš has prevented these points from tearing the celebration aside. A part of why he has lasted so lengthy, surviving a collection of management challenges (together with from Gregorová), is as a result of he can clearly describe what makes the Pirates’ outlook totally different. Throughout Europe, different Pirates are nonetheless struggling to outline what a greater future—with extra expertise, not much less—would really appear like. Once 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.” Once 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.
Underneath Bartoš, nevertheless, the Czech Pirates have discovered a strategy to articulate a utopian imaginative and prescient of a technology-infused future which means extra than simply decreasing 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 individuals doing peace indicators and smiling by heart-shaped glasses. In Bartoš, the unique Pirate imaginative and prescient for another technology-enabled future nonetheless lingers. “I imagine that we will save the planet and society by expertise,” 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.
