Politics, Transhumanism, and The Pirate Bay

Athens.
The next speaker in this politics session at WebSci '09, A. Priftis, switches back to Greek. He begins by noting his own online presence in a variety of online environments, but says that what he does is nothing special. The Obama campaign, by contrast, very actively placed itself directly in the paths of people as they moved about online, and prepared its supporters with material that could be used to argue the Obama case in any such environments. This was very successful on a number of levels - for example in engendering the support of American youths (some of whom even changed their middle name to 'Obama').

Such online activities also condense time and space, as we've already heard from a number of speakers - this is important in our context as time and space are also a basis for the framework of representative democracy. If things change rapidly, however, that's hypertext - text which can change dynamically and can be connected to other pieces of information. In the Obama campaign, citizens created 10 times more content than the campaign, and created 100 times more visits than the campaign.

Is this a step towards transhumanism? Are we approaching different ways in which we can learn, communicate, and organise ourselves? Are we intervening in our evolution as a species? What we may need to do at this point is to imagine new political schemes and systems - not as a solution for current problems, but as a way of moving beyond such solutions. Interestingly, our speaker points to the Bittorrent site The Pirate Bay as one example for such developments - it is a new model for the distribution of content, and represents such a step beyond the current paradigms in its field.

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