Virtual Jolly Roger

The evolution of our society in the hi-tech era has created an interesting situation
with regard to software piracy.
Analytically, we can see that the resolution of what's up must be made in dynamic terms.
The software companies are making money, but only with new introductions.
It's a wave crest business, with the fancy new bells and whistles in this quarter's release
keeping enough people buying so the old versions can be ignored
as they sink quietly into the foam.
On the other side of the fence, the crackerz are keeping up.
Crackz are being posted by the best crews within days of a new beta's release.
Every useful or exciting computer program that's a year old,
is de facto in the public domain, because it's available to anybody
who wants to take the trouble to look for it.
 

The current state of affairs is highly encouraging to anarchists.
Were the money economy to fall apart tomorrow,
and the software corporations vanish into the pit of oblivion,
the species would not lose much of the current stock of PC software,
because just about all of it is stored somewhere, registered or cracked.
The fact is, most of the pir8z are quite consciously anarchists.
They'll say so right up front.
The old school of political type anarchists isn't too comfortable
with any company who isn't spouting theoretical analysis
that names six nineteenth-century Russians per paragraph,
but oh well.
Anarchy is as anarchy does.
 

Quietly, we can conclude that the threshold synergy of free information
has made everybody's theory of everything obsolete, if it's two years old.
Our species as a whole is a lot smarter this year than last year,
because we have a lot more information available to us collectively.
People who don't believe that, put themselves into the category of slow learners.
It doesn't matter that their rejection of computers may be ideological,
if they aren't keeping up then their opinions just don't carry full weight.
We're getting some things figured out now on our planet, and that's work.
Those who aren't helping us with the work don't get to share in the new insights.
Shared data is an evolutionary step and a big one.
Our mentation will never be the same as before.
This development was foreshadowed by the psychedelic revolution of hippie days.
Probably, the psychedelic experience is necessary to understand
the significance of the World Wide Web to our collective consciousness.
Slow learners think obsolete thoughts; those without LSD trips are deprived
of the tools of awareness required to understand our times.
 

The warez culture is absolutely viable.
It cannot be stopped by repression nor by force of law.
It may be more essential to society than the corporate software industry.
Symantec and Adobe and Netscape and Microsoft are disposable.
They are ephemeral economic entities which organize the production
of computer programs, but they are interchangeable.
Any of them could replace any other, despite specialization,
were they called on to do so and given the data they needed.
The warez pirates are the real heroes of our time.
They represent the cooperative principle flying in the face of economic forces.
They are not in it for the money.
They do what they do because they fervently believe
that computer programs should be free to everybody.
That is precisely anarchism and nothing but.
That is precisely the ethical high ground.
Nothing else so clearly delineates the shabby selfishness of property claims.
The fact that they're active as a philanthropic freemasonry of freebooters
shows people will work hard for incentives other than personal gain.
This is a clear manifestation of the altruistic principle.
 

Computer programming is work.
Yet now we have facilities to communicate our thoughts and share our work
directly with nonlocal persons.
That means we have the capability to write computer programs cooperatively.
We can produce greater works for free than the commercial developers
can put out for money.
We have more incentive to do the work than they do.
We're doing it for free, and they're just working for money.
Let's do it.
We will be able to work in direct competition with the money economy.
We can put them out of business.
We can put the world of business out of business
by hitting them in just this one industry
because this is the crucial industry.
We can make it impossible to sell software to the consumer,
by making superior products available for free,
and that will hit them where it hurts.
We can break the money economy at a blow, like cutting a diamond.
Let's do it.