A Subtle Fuck You

Yesterday, I sent the third edition of Piracy is Liberation 001: Information Wants to be Free to the printer.

Pirate is an information addict. When he recieves a cry for help: ‘Information wants to be free’, he has to find out what it means. Only problem is that the infopolice are hot on his trail, so he has to run and avoid falling in the same trap that Information did.

Unaltered story content but with a new cover made by me and Susanne Johansson. I also wrote this new introduction:

Three years have passed since the second edition of this book came out, and nothing much has changed. We’ve had a right-wing government in Sweden since then and immigrants and poor people are treated badly just as they were under the Social democrats before them. On an international scale, it’s also more or less the same old stuff. War, poverty and environmental disasters as a result of capitalism still going strong.

So this is the third edition, complete with a new cover by me and my Wormgod partner, Susanne Johansson, and the world is working its way towards making my dystopian vision come true. A postapocalypse where capitalism is religion and the inhabitants of the last enormous city are kept ignorant of the world outside and even the concept of history. Which is also a reflection of our current affairs, where we are being presented with an illusion telling us that we are at the height of human civilization (ie the globalised Western civilization). That we are going in a certain direction and no real deviation is possible.

This is not true, of course. We just need to think outside the City. Outside the boundaries on our thinking that have been laid on us through television, through the school system, through a society that needs us to be wage laborers first and human beings second.

We have the technology for new ways of distributing information now. And even though those in power try to limit the possibilities of this free exchange of thoughts and ideas, information wants to be free and information will be free. And when we’ve managed to see beyond the indoctrination, to think for ourselves, to find and create and spread our own information, we need to turn those thoughts into actions. Because information is dangerous only when it breeds new thoughts, thoughts when they breed action.

So after you read this book, if you like it, tell your friends to buy it. Or, if they can’t afford it, direct them to a free version of it on the internet. Or, if you can’t find one, scan the pages and spread it yourself. Piracy is, after all, liberation.

Mattias Elftorp
Malmö, Sweden, 2010

 Published by Wormgod.

Yesterday, another illustration in Helsingborgs Dagblad (Världens Lyckligaste Folk by Lena Sundström):

Today: Chapter 2 och Piracy is Liberation 001: Information Wants to be Free begins:

http://www.elftorp.com/piracy/

And next week, I’m representing Wormgod at the Crack! festival in Rome:

I feel right now that I should say something about Ship to Gaza, but I’ll just express my sympathy and solidarity with the people of Palestine and post this video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGlnsIW3zJk&feature=player_embedded]