Wilde’n Out

“Everything popular is wrong.” – Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde is popular. Think that one over.  Yyyyoink!  Of course maxims aren’t truths and vice versa but they often stab at the heart of truth with their steely words and if O-dogg was alive and kickin right now he would be agog over the fickle and supercilious nature of what gets published as supposedly cogent reporting of ‘facts.’  Case in point, the most recent ‘death’ of The Pirate Bay.

What sets this particular round of wrongheaded reporting apart is the clear and vicious bias it exposed among the technorati, who all too quickly trumpeted the demise of the `net’s most recognizable galleon.  It’s as if, every time TPB re-balances their load, those licking their chops for another corpse on the pile sprint up to the base of the mountain with their pitchforks and rope, keen for a techno-lynching.  Frankly, it’s disgusting.

We all have our own views on the currently morphing state of copyright across the globe.  But we’re not talking about personal opinions here, we’re talking about people who get paid to write accurate, pertinent content for some of the most well read sites in the world.  How then can they get a story SO wrong?

One theory we have is that torrenting and any entity involved has been so successfully demonized by big business and the corporate elite that any mention of it draws an immediate and negative reaction, before the facts have even been considered.  The Pirate Bay is a sign of contradiction.  If you align yourself with it publicly, get ready to be ridiculed, talked down to, treated like a child and/or generally disdained by your fellow man.  It is a symbol of what many feel is everything that’s ‘wrong with the world.’  It is seen as the shiniest example of the Old Boss losing control and the New Bosses taking back their rightful reins.  Anytime, anywhere that any kind of control is usurped from a centralized conduit and scattered to the masses, you will there see every kind of lie, distortion and obfuscation from those who stand to lose control.  It’s their last resort and often it works.  Thankfully, the team behind TPB foresaw this a long time ago and acted to prevent control from ever being wrested away from the TRUE people in charge…. that is to say – you and me.  Even those who rush to judgment and trumpet the death of TPB while the next head of the pirate hydra springs up to take the last one’s place.. even they will benefit from the way The Pirate Bay has now insinuated itself into the very fabric of reality.  They are single handedly fulfilling the promise of THE INTERNET and they are, unsurprisingly, getting a face full of shit for it.  True innovators are usually rejected out of hand.   Or if you are more of a Swift/Reilly person… “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

Who are the dunces in this equation?  We’re tempted to just list every dummy who thought that this was ‘the end’ for TPB but we’ll be nice.  Things DO change quickly but please take note… change is irrelevant to a distributed p2p system that is set up properly and with a forward looking attitude.  The technology to make a tracker impervious has existed for a while.  It just took this particular group of people to implement it correctly and to have the Swedish Meatballs fat enough to not let an email from a lawyer put their skivvies in a bunch.

Additionally, if the TPB team decided right now to flick off the servers, walk away and fade into the sunset.. The Pirate Bay would STILL live forever in two ways.

#1 – Mirrors.  The most well known right now would probably be BTArena.net.  But the TPB database is backed up in countless places across the globe, by dedicated and loyal users who recognize the immense and irreplaceable value it provides.  It’s here, don’t fear, get used to it.

#2 – Legacy.  The path that TPB blazed for others is all too apparent by just looking around these days.  Micro-blogging will be dead, as a concept, within two years.  p2p and torrenting will live forever in one form or another, largely because of what TPB has accomplished. Places like 1337x, H33t, Demonoid, et. al have not only grabbed the baton and sprinted off in their own directions, the technology behind torrents has evolved to the point that we expect it to gain sentience within a decade.  Torrage, Miro and OpenBitTorrent are three great examples.  There are dozens more.

Granted some of these concepts can be heady for the little ol’ tech journo-bot out there trying his/her best to crank out a few paragraphs between runs to Coffee Bean and their chiropractor, but we have a crib sheet  for you to print out and keep handy for those times when deadline is staring you in the face and you just want to fill out that Fbook quiz while you IM back and forth with your best friend about which theme is best for her birthday party…  if it was us, we would stay away from the Pimps and Hoes thing.  It’s been done to death and unintentional irony can be SUCH a sad thing to witness.  Besides someone will take a pic w/their cam-phone and put it on their Orkut page just to job-block you.  Bitches.

Here’s your crib sheet.

1. TPB will never die.
2. Truth is stranger than fiction.
3. Everything popular is wrong.
4. See #1