While traditional media have a commitment to “let both sides be heard,” network mobilisation can focus on emergency-campaigning in defence of those values that it prizes the most.

The Liquid Culture blog has an interesting analysis of the current p2p mobilisations, which contains a section summarizing the values that inspire the movements:

“So, what are these values?

If one pays attention to Swedish commentators like Karl Palmås, Isobel Hadley-Kamptz, Christopher Kullenberg and those voices within the Pirate Party who have embraced the ‘99 line of thinking, some central pillars emerge:

* We are (re)building.

There is something inherently wrong with the design of current copyright laws, patent laws, and repressive governmentality. There is something inherently wrong with the design of the EU. There is something inherently wrong with the actual representation and transparency of both government and MPs. Bring on the spirit level, the hammer and the saw! A hacker-influenced activism is engaged with reconstruction or altogether new construction. It seeks to build actual, functioning, alternative solutions instead of being stuck in a reactive grumbling over injustice. The Pirate Bay is a business model. See that potential!

* The Internet is an extension of the brain.

There is no real border between my brain and the network. On the Web we hardly know where our own brains end and others’ begin. New cultural products rarely have pre-given beginnings and ends. On the Web, authors become involved in conversations with the readers. The comments are sometimes as important as the body text. The citizen becomes a journalist. The researcher becomes an activist. Newspapers start living in symbiosis with Google. It is customary to speak of computer viruses as a bad thing, but exciting ideas act as infections spreading between humans, mutating into something completely new.

* Kopimi.

All creation is based on imitation. Not in a superficial way – this is a fundamental rationale for a novel way to think of economic values and entrepreneurship. Locking knowledge behind closed doors is no longer seen as an isolated practice, which is okay as long as this lock doesn’t have a bad impact on society. This can’t continue to be the case, if we really face up to the consequences of actually living in a “knowledge economy”. If knowledge is so important to society at large as it supposedly is, then such monopolies become obsolete. They become synonymous with protectionism: Favourable for some individual actors, but bad for all the rest of us.

* Money can’t measure network effects.

The economic war that has been declared on The Pirate Bay and the fundamental ambiguity about what a shared file is actually worth are both indications of this. There are values that capitalism in its current mode cannot see, and becomes deprived of, since it lacks the instruments to absorb them. Reputation, distribution, assessment, credibility, excitement – all of these values are still difficult to measure in terms of money. If the reader finds this a bit woolly, then recall how our valuation of brands and trademarks has changed only since the 1950s or how the notion of what ultimately drives individual consumption has changed since 1920s. The way we make economic valuations has changed fundamentally since then.

* Many a little makes a mickle.

“Aggregation” is more than a buzz word for joining together data streams. Almost all of the productive output of networks can be said to follow this idiom in that when numerous small, individual operators are working synchronously, something larger than the sum of its parts is created. Often one does not even know in advance exactly what this “something” will be. An ongoing adventure! We thus see how new institutional actors come to circulate in human consciousness and as actual powers in the world. Collective forces beyond simple individual control. This may seem daunting, and the regulatory legislation that we have seen recently is probably a response to this, based on the fundamental mistrust of these unruly collectives and unexpected synergies that the polity seems to hold. And we must remember that this isn’t new. The unruly crowds mobilised through grassroots processes constituted the basis for the nascent labour movement, but were quickly curbed and struck down by means of hierarchy, corporatism and pacification.”