The Internet has begun to live a life of its own. Bloggers have developed into a new people’s movement, and it is global. The change has been rapid. Bloggers are not an old phenomenon – the blog juggernaut first surfaced in the media in 1999. The next year, the number of bloggers increased significantly and in 2002 they began to play a role in political life in the US. Barak Obama is responsible for the real breakthrough for this method of communication in politics. During his 2008 presidential campaign, he gathered his supporters by mobile phone and on-line, established personal contact with them and won the election.

Across the world, there are bloggers who write about their everyday lives. This covers everything from trivial daily events to extreme fanaticism. Some call the Internet an untameable monster, where people take an interest in the most absurd things. There are certainly problems. The idea of the Internet was never that people should be free to download child pornography or kill themselves in front of a web camera for hundreds of thousands of Internet users.

Clearly, bloggers are a force to reckon with. Freedom on-line creates involvement and provides opportunities. Bloggers came from out of nowhere and created a position of power for themselves, and today many of the world’s most influential people now blog. There are also courageous bloggers in many countries who write at the risk of losing their lives. In China, they defy the government and demand democracy; many bloggers are imprisoned for this. In Iran, democratic movements are increasingly connected via the web. Iran is one of the countries with the highest concentration of bloggers in the world. One of the great sources of inspiration in the Iranian blogosphere is Hossein Derakhshan, who was the first to write his web log in Persian. He was called “the blog father” and lived abroad for a number of years.

In 2008, he returned to Tehran and was quickly arrested and charged with spying for Israel. He is still in prison. Bloggers are a danger to totalitarian regimes, which will do anything to stop freedom on-line, but there is a wealth of innovation when it comes to finding new solutions to spreading one’s message. Stories about everyday oppression are communicated via Twitter, YouTube or some IP address that cannot be traced. In Cuba, bloggers have dared to take it a step further. They do not simply write about the oppression they experience; they start holding lectures as well.

But bloggers can be a nuisance in democracies as well. It is no longer the established power elite that set the agenda. This is bothersome for many people who have always had power in their hands. They continually try to play down the importance of bloggers, for instance by criticising them for being both unprofessional and uninteresting. The power elite are also trying to take over blogs as a tool themselves. Political parties are creating their own blog forums, where they try to keep control of the debate and where there are always opinion police who bully unwelcome visitors.

The blog world is brutal because people can write anonymously, and many have no constraints; there is a rabble of bloggers that is exceedingly nasty. The Internet opens many doors and calls old structures into question. Micael Dalén, who is a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics, has written a book about society today and the factors that govern how we think. He calls the book Nextopia and the society we live in “the expectations society”.

Young people today are entirely focused on the future, he argues. There is no history and no one is better than anyone else. Everything is possible; we can get whatever we want, whenever we want and however we want. The Internet has paved the way for a gigantic consumption society, where there are 228,000 hits for buying popcorn and five million hits for dating on-line. He calls young people today “Generation Boss”. They expect to have control; they believe they can create a better world and make the best choices.

For today’s youth, the Internet is freedom. It is largely the younger generation that is driving this development and demanding its rights on-line. Many are willing to take part in the fight for power over the new information technology, a fight between a goal-oriented Internet generation and power structures like the state, the judicial system and corporations.

Homo internetus is fighting for the integrity of the individual, against the supremacy of the state, in order to avoid having its on-line actions registered. Many people who have posted their lives on the web consider legal proposals like the International Property Rights Enforcement Directive and the Swedish FRA wiretapping law dangerous. They want to be left in peace. Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, compared control of the Internet to the former East Germany. “They demand the right to listen to everything people do on-line: date, book trips, surf porn and talk privately. In Sweden, the recording industry has already demanded their own access to the surveillance data produced when our mobile phones become government tracking devices, so they can identify how we move and who we talk to. And yes, that is in fact exactly the way it was in East Germany.”

The head of Sweden’s Pirate Party predicts a dismal future if corporations and politicians gain control of information technology. Then we will have a surveillance society that is worse than anything that can be found in a novel, Falkvinge writes in an article in the Swedish daily Aftonbladet. The Pirate Party is the most exciting thing to happen in Swedish politics in decades. They challenge the old party establishment with fundamental questions about freedom and democracy.

The Pirate Party is also interesting because they use the Internet as their base. They did not need the media to win their supporters but instead engineered their success on-line. Anger with the old power establishment reached a peak when the verdict against the Swedish file-sharing site The Pirate Bay was announced. In two days, the Pirate Party added 40,000 new members; they then won a seat in the European Parliament. The party call themselves the new civil rights movement. Their strength is in undermining old structures and demanding new solutions that are tailored to modern technology.

When three young men started the Pirate Bay, Martin Fredricsson, one of the founders, declared that piracy is a positive force and we don’t give a damn about how things are going in the recording industry. His statement fell like a bombshell, not just among the power establishment defending its economic interests, but also among an entire generation of computer nerds. The Pirate Bay inspired people all over the world. It was soon quite clear that young people saw the illegal downloading of films and music as a right.

The corporations guarding their copyrights started counting their money when record sales fell and billions disappeared into the blue. The hunt for illegal file sharers was on. The state apparatus intervened, naturally, with more police, tougher laws and denunciatory politicians – all in the aim to put an end to the bother. For the corporations, there was no self-criticism and no discussing the fact that the Internet is a tool that people use to make their everyday lives easier.

Once upon a time, the Internet was launched as free and democratic, and for the younger generation, it is obviously there for everyone to use. We have a generation whose lives are on-line – everything from the most intimate sexual initiation to contacts and jobs. File sharing is just part of it. One guy noted how he bought and collected films. He had a library in his basement with over 300 films. But when he wanted to see a move, he downloaded it from the web. After all, it’s a lot easier than running down to the basement and looking, was his obvious conclusion.

Something else not highlighted in the debate is that fact that almost every illegal file sharer is willing to pay for downloads. But the corporations, politicians and judicial system never thought of solutions; they were simply set on hunting the “bad guys”. When Rick Falkvinge talks, he sounds like a young Hjalmar Branting. Just as the Swedish labour movement last century demanded influence and fairness, the Pirate Party is demanding the same. It is not about money, Falkvinge says. It is about control of culture and knowledge. If citizens rather than corporations and politicians take control of the information society, it will be revolution, he notes.

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The younger generation is latching on. The struggle over the Internet is about leaving people’s private life alone, about influence and justice. Filippa, who is 18, says that politicians are like crocodiles. They have big mouths and no ears. It is easy to understand their being upset. It is ridiculous to try to stop technological development and change a pattern of living. The fight has only begun. There are many people who want to get involved in the action. When the Pirate Bay verdict was announced, it made headlines around the world. It also topped the stories on the websites for CNN, the BBC and Sky News. The verdict was also one of the biggest topics of conversation in the blog world. The BBC asked on its website whether readers thought the ruling was fair. Just an hour and a half later, they had 100 comments. The majority thought the verdict was wrong.

The Pirate Bay verdict is only one of many battles over the Internet. There are a number of cautionary tales – like the search engine Google, which long made a point of freedom on-line. But then the clear language of capital began to take voice; Google wanted into the Chinese market but on condition that they accept censuring. China was given the right to filter out criticism of the regime.

Google’s concession to China and the court ruling against the Pirate Bay were an appalling setback. Google chose the market over democracy but is now reversing itself. The search engine has been subject to cyber attacks aimed at hacking the email accounts of Chinese human rights organisations provided via Google. That is where the company draws the line.

The Swedish judicial system, backed by international corporations, has sided with the companies and is trying to stop technological development by punishing four guys who used the technology available. A not guilty verdict would have very quickly prompted modern copyright laws, with artists and authors being paid for their work.

Technology cannot be stopped. There is a new development sweeping the Internet world which involves everything from anonymous services to encrypted websites. Even today, there is technology that makes it impossible to track IP addresses. The Internet affects our everyday lives. Some people first thought that it was a passing phase. Then economists and others argued that the new technology would not entail any major changes in growth and economic development. But now the IT economy is impacting growth figures. This trend will affect our lives, just like as networking and the many small social entrepreneurs will influence democracy.