A Libertarian Pirate - About My Short Political "Career"

I owe you the second half of my "introduceyourself". In my first post I wrote about my activities in the Bitcoin universe and as a film producer, but I am also a political animal. Over the years I have developed from a social democrat (most Germans are social democrats, don't ask me why) to a die-hard libertarian. 

In 2009 I was a member of the federal board of the Pirate Party Germany and got heavily involved in the federal elections of that year. It was a fun time, with lots of great rallyes and media activities. Here is a music video we made for our election campaign - a punk rock version of an old German sailor's song:

I have always liked the articles of the Pirate Party's founder Rick Falkvinge. His ideas and the early programmatic agenda of the party are clearly libertarian, so I joined his party and got elected to the federal board just a few weeks later. The Pirates had a real boom then, growing from 1000 to more than 10,000 members in just a few months. When we presented our campaign in August 2009, about 100 journalists were present and this short documentary was produced and aired by German public TV:

During the summer of 2009 I gave numerous interviews for TV, radio and print media and I learned a lot about political campaigning. We reached about 3% of the votes in that election, not bad for a young party, but not enough to pass the 5% threshold to enter the German parliament. 

The provisional agenda of the early days, which focussed on protecting citizen's rights in the digital age, had to be broadened. For me it would have been only logical to develop a party that fights against the surveillance state into a voluntarist, free-market party that fights the interventionist state in all areas. But it showed that despite its libertarian roots most of the new pirate members were socialists, so my positions were not very popular.

When I wrote some blog posts against political Islam and for Israel's right to protect itself against the nuclear threat by the Islamic State of Iran, the left wing of the Pirate Party got completely crazy. Someone even made strange caricatures of me. It's hard to understand how a portrait of me in a Hitler uniform fits to my pro-Israel stance, but left-wingers are not necessarily the most logical people. 

When I left the Pirate party in May 2010, I had become notorious and fiercely hated, which surprised me, as I am not used to hate in the business realm, but it also amused me a bit.

I then tried to found a Libertarian party called "Die Freiheit" (= liberty), but I made the mistake to partner up with the wrong people. They shared my critical view of political Islam, but came from a conservative, not a libertarian background, so we did not come to a consensus on many things. Consequently, this project was a flop, it scored less than 1% at the local Berlin elections and got quickly dissolved.

Through these experiences I got a bit disenchanted about party politics. So I was happy when Bitcoin came along. It gave me the possibility to work for a highly political project without having to deal with party politics - and what could be more political than to undermine the power of banks and goverments?

I am also interested in all plans to found micro-states based on libertarian principles, such as Liberland, Seasteading or Free Private Cities. I think it makes more sense to build up new projects that prove to be better than the status quo, rather than trying to change a doomed system from the inside.

So my political activities in the future will definitely not be inside the old system of parties and elections, but in disrupting the old system and helping to build up something new and superior: things like Bitcoin or Steemit.