Infopolicy

In its seven years of existence, Bitcoin has gained wide mainstream attention with its disruptive potential in finance. Yet, currency is just its first application. The technology’s other potential lies in affecting governance and law. Democracy has weakened in the existing systems of governance. With concentration of power created through hierarchy, ordinary people are kept out of influencing policies or participating in vital decision-making. In this lock down system, many politicians do not represent true interests of the people and those who do are often blocked out.

Exactly ten years ago, on January 1 2006 at 20:30 CET, the Swedish and first Pirate Party was launched by me setting up an ugly website. Since then, we delivered on the proof of concept on June 7, 2009, and the movement grew from there. We weren’t always successful, though, and it’s important to be humble and do a little retrospection.

Six years since the invention of the blockchain, more people are beginning to see the powerful political implications that this technology brings. People from diverse backgrounds have been weighing in on its disruptive potential. While libertarians embrace the potential of cryptocurrencies to break up monopolies of the ‘too big to fail’ banking and payment companies, the rise of this technology was met with skepticism by many socialists.

Today, I’m launching a news service in an entirely new format, designed to outcompete oldmedia. The new service publishes all news as shareable images, thereby bypassing a large number of restrictions and limitations, not needing clickbait, and being immune to adblock – but also paying people well, using bitcoin. Meanwhile, oldmedia continues to call people greedy and selfish for not buying their printouts of yesterday’s internet.