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Privacy: Our parents were taking liberties for granted in their analog world, liberties that are not passed down to our children in the transition to digital — such as the simple right to send an anonymous letter.

Sometimes when speaking, I ask the audience how many would be okay with sites like The Pirate Bay, even if it means that artists are losing money from their operation. (Do note that this assertion is disputed: I’m asking the question on the basis of what-if the assertion is true.) Some people raise their hands, the proportion varying with audience and venue.

The copyright industry asserts that the offline laws don’t apply on the Internet when they want to sue and prosecute people sharing knowledge and culture. They’re right, but not in the way they think. They’re right that copyright law does apply online as well. But privacy laws don’t, and they should.

In the offline world, an analog letter was given a certain level of protection. This was not intended to cover just the physical letter as such, but correspondence in general; it was just that the letter was the only form of such correspondence when these liberties were drafted.

First, the letter was anonymous. It was your prerogative entirely whether you identified yourself as sender of the letter on the outside of the envelope, on the inside of the letter (so not even the postal service knew who sent it, only the recipient), or not at all.

Further, the letter was untracked in transit. The only governments tracking people’s correspondence were those we looked down on with enormous contempt.

Third, the letter was secret. The envelope would never we broken in transit.

Fourth, the carrier was never responsible for the contents, of nothing else for the simple reason they were not allowed to examine the content in the first place. But even if they could, like with a envelopeless postcard, they were never liable for executing their courier duties — this principle, the courier immunity or messenger immunity, is a principle that dates as far back as the Roman Empire.

These principles, the liberties of correspondence, should apply to offline correspondence (the letter) just as it should to online correspondence. But it doesn’t. You don’t have the right to send anything you like to anybody you like online, because it might be a copyright infringement — even though our parents had exactly this right in their offline world.

So the copyright industry is right – sending a copied drawing in a letter is a copyright infringement, and sending a copied piece of music over the net is the same kind of copyright infringement. But offline, there are checks and balances to these laws – even though it’s a copyright infringement, nobody is allowed to open the letter in transit just to see if it violates the law, because the secrecy of private correspondence is considered more important than discovering copyright infringements. This is key. This set of checks and balances has not been carried over into the digital environment.

The only time a letter is opened and prevented is when somebody is under individual and prior suspicion of a serious crime. The words “individual” and “prior” are important here — opening letters just to see if they contain a non-serious crime in progress, like copyright infringement, is simply not permitted in the slightest.

There is no reason for the offline liberties of our parents to not be carried over into the same online liberties for our children, regardless of whether that means somebody doesn’t know how to run a business anymore.

After highlighting these points, I repeat the question whether the audience would be okay with sites like The Pirate Bay, even if it means an artist is losing income. And after making these points, basically everybody raises their hand to say they would be fine with it; they would be fine with our children having the same liberty as our parents, and the checks and balances of the offline world to also apply online.

Next in the series, we’re going to look at a related topic – public anonymous announcements and the important role the city square soapbox filled in shaping liberty.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: The liberties of our parents are not being inherited by our children – they are being lost wholesale in the transition to digital. Today, we’ll look at the importance of posting anonymous public messages.

When I was in my teens, before the Internet (yes, really), there was something called BBSes – Bulletin Board Systems. They were digital equivalents of an analog Bulletin Board, which in turn was a glorified sheet of wood intended for posting messages to the public. In a sense, they were an anonymous equivalent of today’s webforum software, but you connected from your home computer directly to the BBS over a phone line, without connecting to the Internet first.

The analog Bulletin Boards are still in existence, of course, but mostly used for concert promotions and the occasional fringe political or religious announcement.

In the early 1990s, weird laws were coming into effect worldwide as a result of lobbying from the copyright industry: the owners of bulletin board systems could be held liable for what other people posted on them. The only way to avoid liability was to take down the post within seven days. Such liability had no analog equivalent at all; it was an outright ridiculous idea that the owner of a piece of land should be held responsible for a poster put up on a tree on that land, or even that the owner of a public piece of cardboard could be sued for the posters other people had glued up on that board.

Let’s take that again: it is extremely weird from a legal standpoint that an electronic hosting provider is in any way, shape, or form liable for the contents hosted on their platform. It has no analog equivalent whatsoever.

Sure, people could put up illegal analog posters on an analog bulletin board. That would be an illegal act. When that happened, it was the problem of law enforcement, and never of the bulletin board owner. The thought is ridiculous and has no place in the digital landscape either.

The proper digital equivalent isn’t to require logging to hand over upload IPs to law enforcement, either. An analog bulletin board owner is under no obligation whatsoever to somehow identify the people using the bulletin board, or even monitor whether it’s being used at all.

The Analog Equivalent Privacy Right for an electronic post hosting provider is for an uploader to be responsible for everything they upload for the public to see, with no liability at all for the hosting provider under any circumstance, including no requirement to log upload data to help law enforcement find an uploader. Such monitoring is not a requirement in the analog world of our parents, nor is there an analog liability for anything posted, and there is no reason to have it otherwise in the digital world of our children just because somebody doesn’t know how to run a business otherwise.

As a side note, the United States would not exist had today’s hosting liability laws in place when it formed. A lot of writing was being circulated at the time arguing for breaking with the British Crown and forming an Independent Republic; from a criminal standpoint, this was inciting and abetting high treason. This writing was commonly nailed to trees and public posts, for the public to read and make up their own minds. Imagine for a moment if the landowners where such trees happened to stand had been charged with high treason for “hosting content” — the thought is as ridiculous in the analog would, as it really is in the digital too. We just need to pull the illusion aside, that the current laws on digital hosting make any kind of sense. These laws really are as ridiculous in the digital world of our children, as they would have been in the analog world of our parents.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: “Everything you say or do can and will be used against you, at any point in the far future when the context and agreeableness of what you said or did has changed dramatically.” With the analog surveillance of our parents, everything was caught in the context of its time. The digital surveillance of our children saves everything for later use against them.

It’s a reality for our digital children so horrible, that not even Nineteen Eighty-Four managed to think of it. In the analog surveillance world, where people are put under surveillance only after they’ve been identified as suspects of a crime, everything we said and did was transient. If Winston’s telescreen missed him doing something bad, then it had missed the moment and Winston was safe.

The analog surveillance was transient for two reasons: one, it was assumed that all surveillance was people watching other people, and two, that nobody would have the capacity of instantly finding keywords in the past twenty years of somebody’s conversations. In the analog world of our parents, that would mean somebody would need to actually listen to twenty years’ worth of tape recordings, which would in turn take sixty years (as we only work 8 out of 24 hours). In the digital world of our children, surveillance agencies type a few words to get automatic transcripts of the saved-forever surveillance-of-everybody up on screen in realtime as they type the keywords – not just from one person’s conversation, but from everybody’s. (This isn’t even exaggerating; this was reality in or about 2010 with the GCHQ-NSA XKEYSCORE program.)

In the world of our analog parents, surveillance was only a thing at the specific time it was active, which was when you were under individual and concrete suspicion of a specific, already-committed, and serious crime.

In the world of our digital children, surveillance can be retroactively activated for any reason or no reason, with the net effect that everybody is under surveillance for everything they have ever done or said.

We should tell people as it has become instead; “anything you say or do can be used against you, for any reason or no reason, at any point in the future”.

The current generation has utterly failed to preserve the presumption of innocence, as it applies to surveillance, in the shift from our analog parents to our digital children.

This subtle addition – that everything is recorded for later use against you – amplifies the horrors of the previous aspects of surveillance by orders of magnitude.

Consider somebody asking you where you were on the evening of March 13, 1992. You would, at best, have a vague idea of what you did that year. (“Let’s see… I remember my military service started on March 3 of that year… and the first week was a tough boot camp in freezing winter forest… so I was probably… back at barracks after the first week, having the first military theory class of something? Or maybe that date was a Saturday or Sunday, in which case I’d be on weekend leave?” That’s about the maximum precision your memory can produce for twenty-five years past.)

However, when confronted with hard data on what you did, the people confronting you will have an utter and complete upper hand, because you simply can’t refute it. “You were in this room and said these words, according to our data transcript. These other people were also in the same room. We have to assume what you said was communicated with the intention for them to hear. What do you have to say for yourself?”

It doesn’t have to be 25 years ago. A few months back would be sufficient for most memories to be not very detailed anymore.

To illustrate further: consider that the NSA is known to store copies even of all encrypted correspondence today, on the assumption that even if it’s not breakable today, it will probably be so in the future. Consider what you’re communicating encrypted today — in text, voice, or video — can be used against you in twenty years. You probably don’t even know half of it, because the window of acceptable behavior will have shifted in ways we cannot predict, as it always does. In the 1950s, it was completely socially acceptable to drop disparaging remarks about some minorities in society, which would socially ostracize you today. Other minorities are still okay to disparage, but might not be in the future.

When you’re listening to somebody talking from fifty years ago, they were talking in the context of their time, maybe even with the best of intentions by today’s standards. Yet, we could judge them harshly for their words interpreted by today’s context — today’s completely different context.

Our digital children will face exactly this scenario, because everything they do and say can and will be used against them, at any point in the future. It should not be this way. They should have every right to enjoy Analog Equivalent Privacy Rights.

Privacy: Ross Ulbricht handed in his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court last week, highlighting an important Analog Equivalent Privacy Right in the process: Just because you’re using equipment that makes a third party aware of your circumstances, does that really nullify any expectation of privacy?

In most constitutions, there’s a protection of privacy of some kind. In the European Charter of Human Rights, this is specified as having the right to private and family life, home, and correspondence. In the U.S. Constitution, it’s framed slightly differently, but with the same outcome: it’s a ban for the government to invade privacy without good cause (“unreasonable search and seizure”).

U.S. Courts have long held, that if you have voluntarily given up some part of your digitally-stored privacy to a third party, then you can no longer expect to have privacy in that area. When looking at analog equivalence for privacy rights, this doctrine is atrocious, and in order to understand just how atrocious, we need to go back to the dawn of the manual telephone switchboards.

At the beginning of the telephone age, switchboards were fully manual. When you requested a telephone call, a manual switchboard operator would manually connect the wire from your telephone to the wire of the receiver’s telephone, and crank a mechanism that would make that telephone ring. The operators could hear every call if they wanted and knew who had been talking to whom and when.

Did you give up your privacy to a third party when using this manual telephone service? Yes, arguably, you did. Under the digital doctrine applied now, phonecalls would have no privacy at all, under any circumstance. But as we know, phonecalls are private. In fact, the phonecall operators were oathsworn to never utter the smallest part of what they learned on the job about people’s private dealings — so seriously was privacy considered, even by the companies running the switchboards.

Interestingly enough, this “third-party surrender of privacy” doctrine seems to have appeared the moment the last switchboard operator left their job for today’s automated phone-circuit switches. This was as late as 1983, just at the dawn of digital consumer-level technology such as the Commodore 64.

This false equivalence alone should be sufficient to scuttle the doctrine of “voluntarily” surrendering privacy to a third party in the digital world, and therefore giving up expectation of privacy: the equivalence in the analog world was the direct opposite.

But there’s more to the analog equivalent of third-party-service privacy. Somewhere in this concept is the notion that you’re voluntarily choosing to give up your privacy, as an active informed act — in particular, an act that stands out of the ordinary, since the Constitutions of the world are very clear that the ordinary default case is that you have an expectation of privacy.

In other words, since people’s everyday lives are covered by expectations of privacy, there must be something outside of the ordinary that a government can claim gives it the right to take away somebody’s privacy. And this “outside the ordinary” has been that the people in question were carrying a cellphone, and so “voluntarily” gave up their right to privacy, as the cellphone gives away their location to the network operator by contacting cellphone towers.

But carrying a cellphone is expected behavior today. It is completely within the boundaries of “ordinary”. In terms of expectations, this doesn’t differ much from wearing jeans or a jacket. This leads us to the question; in the thought experiment that yesterday’s jeans manufacturers had been able to pinpoint your location, had it been reasonable for the government to argue that you give up any expectation of privacy when you’re wearing jeans?

No. No, of course it hadn’t.

It’s not like you’re carrying a wilderness tracking device for the express purpose of rescue services to find you during a dangerous hike. In such a circumstance, it could be argued that you’re voluntarily carrying a locator device. But not when carrying something that everybody is expected to carry — indeed, something that everybody must carry in order to even function in today’s society.

When the only alternative to having your Constitutionally-guaranteed privacy is exile from modern society, a government should have a really thin case. Especially when the analog equivalent — analog phone switchboards — was never fair game in any case.

People deserve Analog Equivalent Privacy Rights.

Until a government recognizes this and voluntarily surrenders a power it has taken itself, which isn’t something people should hold their breath over, privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: The anonymous cash of our analog parents is fast disappearing, and in its wake comes trackable and permissioned debit cards to our children. While convenient, it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

In the last article, we looked at how our analog parents could anonymously buy a newspaper on the street corner with some coins, and read their news of choice without anybody knowing about it. This observation extends to far more than just newspapers, of course.

This ability of our parents – the ability to conduct decentralized, secure transactions anonymously – has been all but lost in a landscape that keeps pushing card payments for convenience. The convenience of not paying upfront, with credit cards; the convenience of always paying an exact amount, with debit cards; the convenience of not needing to carry and find exact amounts with every purchase. Some could even argue that having every transaction listed on a bank statement is a convenience of accounting.

But with accounting comes tracking. With tracking comes predictability and unwanted accountability.

It’s been said that a VISA executive can predict a divorce one year ahead of the parties involved, based on changes in purchase patterns. Infamously, a Target store was targeting a high school-aged woman with maternity advertising, which at first made her father furious: but as things turned out, the young woman was indeed pregnant. Target knew, and her own father didn’t.

This is because when we’re no longer using anonymous cash, every single purchase is tracked and recorded with the express intent on using it against us — whether for influencing us to make a choice to deplete our resources (“buy more”) or for punishing us for buying something we shouldn’t have, in a wide variety of conceivable ways.

China is taking the concept one step further, as has been written here before, and in what must have been the inspiration for a Black Mirror episode, is weighting its citizens’ Obedience Scores based on whether they buy useful or lavish items — useful in the views of the regime, of course.

It’s not just the fact that transactions of our digital children are logged for later use against them, in ways our analog parents could never conceive of.

It’s also that the transactions of our digital children are permissioned. When our digital children buy a bottle of water with a debit card, a transaction clears somewhere in the background. But that also means that somebody can decide to have the transaction not clear; somebody has the right to arbitrarily decide what people get to buy and not buy, if this trend continues for our digital children. That is a horrifying thought.

Our parents were using decentralized, censorship resistant, anonymous transactions in using plain cash. There is no reason our digital children should have anything less. It’s a matter of liberty and self-determination.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: We’ve seen how our digital children’s privacy is violated in everything they buy with cash or credit, in a way our analog parents would have balked at. But even worse: our digital children’s privacy is also violated by tracking what they don’t buy — either actively decline or just plain walk away from.

Amazon just opened its first “Amazon Go” store, where you just pick things into a bag and leave, without ever going through a checkout process. As part of the introduction of this concept, Amazon points out that you can pick something off the shelves, at which point it’ll register in your purchase — and change your mind and put it back, at which point you’ll be registered and logged as having not purchased the item.

Sure, you’re not paying for something you changed your mind about, which is the point of the video presentation. But it’s not just about the deduction from your total amount to pay: Amazon also knows you considered buying it and eventually didn’t, and will be using that data.

Our digital children are tracked this way on a daily basis, if not an hourly basis. Our analog parents never were.

When we’re shopping for anything online, there are even simple plugins for the most common merchant solutions with the business terms “funnel analysis” — where in the so-called “purchase funnel” our digital children choose to leave the process of purchasing something — or “cart abandonment analysis”.

We can’t even simply walk away from something anymore without it being recorded, logged, and cataloged for later use against us.

But so-called “cart abandonment” is only one part of the bigger issue of tracking what we’re interested in in the age of our digital children, but didn’t buy. There is no shortage of people today who would swear they were just discussing a very specific type of product with their phone present (say, “black leather skirts”) and all of a sudden, advertising for that very specific type of product would pop up all over Facebook and/or Amazon ads. Is this really due to some company listening for keywords through the phone? Maybe, maybe not. All we know since Snowden is that if it’s technically possible to invade privacy, it is already happening.

(We have to assume here these people still need to learn how to install a simple adblocker. But still.)

At the worst ad-dense places, like (but not limited to) airports, there are eyeball trackers to find out which ads you look at. They don’t yet change to match your interests, as per Minority Report, but that’s already present on your phone and on your desktop, and so wouldn’t be foreign to see in public soon, either.

In the world of our analog parents, we weren’t registered and tracked when we bought something.

In the world of our digital children, we’re registered and tracked even when we don’t buy something.

Privacy: For our analog parents, a diary or a personal letter could rarely be touched by authorities, not even by law enforcement searching for evidence of a crime. Objects such as these had protection over and above the constitutional privacy safeguards. For our digital children, however, the equivalent diaries and letters aren’t even considered worthy of basic constitutional privacy.

In most jurisdictions, there is a constitutional right to privacy. Law enforcement in such countries can’t just walk in and read somebody’s mail, wiretap their phonecalls, or track their IP addresses. They need a prior court order to do so, which in turn is based on a concrete suspicion of a serious crime: the general case is that you have a right to privacy, and violations of this rule are the exception, not the norm.

However, there’s usually a layer of protection over and above this: even if and when law enforcement gets permission from a judge to violate somebody’s privacy in the form of a search warrant of their home, there are certain things that may not be touched unless specific and additional permissions are granted by the same type of judge. This class of items includes the most private of the personal: private letters, diaries, and so on.

Of course, this is only true in the analog world of our parents. Even though the letter of the law is the same, this protection doesn’t apply at all to the digital world of our children, to their diaries and letters.

Because the modern diary is kept on a computer. If not on a desktop computer, then certainly on a mobile handheld one — what we’d call a “phone” for historical reasons, but what’s really a handheld computer.

And a computer is a work tool in the analog world of our parents. There are loads of precedent cases that establish any form of electronic device as a work tool, dating back well into the analog world, and law enforcement is falling back on all of them with vigor, even now that our digital devices are holding our diaries, personal letters, and other items far more private than an analog diary was ever capable of.

That’s right: whereas your parents’ diaries were extremely protected under the law of the land, your children’s diaries — no less private to them, than those of your parents were to your parents — are as protected from search and seizure as an ordinary steel wrench in a random workshop.

So the question is how we got from point A to point B here? Why are the Police, who know that they can’t touch an analog diary during a house search, instantly grabbing mobile phones which serve the same purpose for our children?

“Because they can”, is the short answer. “Also because nobody put their foot down” for advanced points on the civics course. It’s because some people saw short term political points in being “tough on crime” and completely erasing hard-won rights in the process.

Encrypt everything.

Privacy: In a series of posts on this blog, we have shown how practically everything our parents took for granted with regards to privacy has been completely eliminated for our children, just because they use digital tools instead of analog, and the people interpreting the laws are saying that privacy only applies to the old, analog environment of our parents.

Once you agree with the observation that privacy seems to simply not apply for our children, merely for living in a digitally-powered environment instead of our parents’ analog-powered one, surprise turns to shock turns to anger, and it’s easy to want to assign blame to someone for essentially erasing five generations’ fight for civil liberties while people were looking the other way.

So whose fault is it, then?

It’s more than one actor at work here, but part of the blame must be assigned to the illusion that that nothing has changed, just because our digital children can use old-fashioned and obsolete technology to obtain the rights they should always have by law and constitution, regardless of which method they use to talk to friends and exercise their privacy rights.

We’ve all heard these excuses.

“You still have privacy of correspondence, just use the old analog letter”. As if the Internet generation would. You might as well tell our analog parents that they would need to send a wired telegram to enjoy some basic rights.

“You can still use a library freely.” Well, only an analog one, not a digital one like The Pirate Bay, which differs from an analog library only in efficiency, and not in anything else.

“You can still discuss anything you like.” Yes, but only in the analog streets and squares, not in the digital streets and squares.

“You can still date someone without the government knowing your dating preferences.” Only if I prefer to date like our parents did, in the unsafe analog world, as opposed to the safe digital environment where predators vanish at the click of a “block” button, an option our analog parents didn’t have in shady bars.

The laws aren’t different for the analog and the digital. The law doesn’t make a difference between analog and digital. But no law is above the people who interpret it in the courts, and the way people interpret those laws means the privacy rights always apply to the analog world, but never to the digital world.

It’s not rocket science to demand the same laws to apply offline and online. This includes copyright law, as well as the fact that privacy of correspondence takes precedence over copyright law (in other words, you’re not allowed to open and examine private correspondence for infringements in the analog world, not without prior and individual warrants — our law books are full of these checks and balances; they should apply in the digital too, but don’t today).

Going back to blame, that’s one actor right there: the copyright industry. They have successfully argued that their monopoly laws should apply online just as it does offline, and in doing so, has completely ignored all the checks and balances that apply to the copyright monopoly laws in the analog world. And since copying movies and music has now moved into the same communications channels as we use for private correspondence, the copyright monopoly as such has become fundamentally incompatible with private correspondence at the conceptual level.

The copyright industry has been aware of this conflict and has been continuously pushing for eroded and eliminated privacy to prop up their crumbling and obsolete monopolies, such as pushing for the hated (and now court-axed) Data Retention Directive in Europe. They would use this federal law (or European equivalent thereof) to literally get more powers than the Police themselves in pursuing individual people who were simply sharing music and movies, sharing in the way everybody does.

There are two other major factors at work. The second factor is marketing. The reason we’re tracked at the sub-footstep level in airports and other busy commercial centers is simply to sell us more crap we don’t need. This comes at the expense of privacy that our analog parents took for granted. Don’t even get started on Facebook and Google.

Last but not least are the surveillance hawks — the politicians who want to look “Tough on Crime”, or “Tough on Terrorism”, or whatever the word of choice is this week. These were the ones who pushed the Data Retention Directive into law. The copyright industry were the ones who basically wrote it for them.

These three factors have working together, and they’ve been very busy.

It’s going to be a long uphill battle to win back the liberties that were slowly won by our ancestors over about six generations, and which have been all but abolished in a decade.

Our children are right to demand Analog Equivalent Privacy Rights — the civil liberties our parents not just enjoyed, but took for granted.

I fear the failure to pass on the civil liberties from our parents to our children is going to be seen as the greatest failure of this particular current generation, regardless of all the good we also accomplish. Surveillance societies can be erected in just ten years, but can take centuries to roll back.

Privacy remains your own responsibility today. We all need to take it back merely by exercising our privacy rights, with whatever tools are at our disposal.

Image from the movie “Nineteen-Eighty Four”; used under fair use for political commentary.

Activism: In the ever-evolving landscape of politics, we often find ourselves confined to the traditional left-right spectrum. This binary view, with its emphasis on economic and social policies, sometimes obscures deeper motivations driving voter behavior and political trends. As a result, we might miss crucial insights that could enhance our understanding of why people vote the way they do, why political movements gain momentum, and why some ideas resonate while others falter. I have found an alternative framework to be far more helpful: the Maslow Pyramid.

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, typically illustrated as a pyramid, categorizes human needs into five levels: physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Maslow famously hypothesized, that a lower-level need must be satisfied before we start attempting to fulfill the needs of the next level — as an example, while we’re starving and live in fear of being robbed (level one), we’re not so much concerned with having the respect of the community (level four). By examining political trends through this lens, we can gain a richer, more nuanced perspective on what drives societal shifts and voter preferences.

Physiological Needs and the Politics of Survival

At the base of Maslow’s pyramid are physiological needs: food, water, warmth, and rest — as well as immediate physical safety. In times of economic crisis, political discourse often gravitates towards these fundamental concerns. Populist movements frequently gain traction by promising to address the immediate needs of the people. For instance, during the Great Recession, there was a surge in support for policies focused on job creation, healthcare access, and basic economic security. Politicians who can convincingly address these basic needs often see significant support from constituencies facing hardship just getting from one day to the next without getting beaten, robbed, or starved. Fear of getting to this state (fear of getting robbed on your way to/from work, school, etc.) will also suffice to place oneself at this level.

However, if established parties fail to address these concerns, voters will inevitably turn to whomever offers a solution, even if it’s an atrocious one. It’s like choosing Comcast for your Internet connection when no other provider is available—you know the service is subpar, but having some connection is better than none. Similarly, in politics, when mainstream parties neglect the foundational needs of the populace, fringe or extremist parties can gain support by simply acknowledging and addressing these unmet needs — and that is regardless of how flawed their solutions to said problems may be.

Safety Needs and the Demand for Stability

Moving up the pyramid, once the physical needs are met, then safety needs encompass longer-term personal security, employment, and health. Political rhetoric around law and order, immigration control, and national security taps into these safety concerns. When people feel their safety is threatened, whether by crime, terrorism, or economic instability, they are more likely to support policies and leaders who promise to restore stability and protect them from perceived threats. The post-9/11 era (just after 2001), with its heightened focus on national security, is a prime example of how safety needs can dominate the political agenda.

Yet again, if traditional parties fail to provide a sense of security, voters may gravitate towards any party that promises to deliver it, even if their methods are draconian and/or frankly ridiculous.

Love and Belonging: The Politics of Identity

The middle tier of the pyramid addresses social needs: relationships, friendships, and a sense of belonging. Identity politics, which includes movements advocating for the rights of specific social groups based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and more, finds its roots here. Political movements that foster a sense of community and belonging can galvanize supporters by addressing these intrinsic needs. The LGBPQRST+ rights movement, for instance, not only fights for legal rights but also seeks to create a supportive community for its members.

When mainstream parties overlook these social needs, people will seek out any group or party that offers them a sense of belonging, even if that party’s overall agenda is problematic. It’s a matter of seeking connection where it’s available.

Esteem: The Quest for Recognition

Esteem needs encompass respect, self-esteem, status, and recognition. Political leaders who can validate the contributions and worth of their supporters often build strong, loyal followings. This is evident in political campaigns that emphasize the dignity of work, the importance of patriotism, and the recognition of personal achievements. Policies aimed at rewarding hard work and providing opportunities for personal advancement resonate deeply with voters seeking validation and respect.

Self-Actualization: The Pursuit of Fulfillment

At the peak of the pyramid is self-actualization — the realization of one’s potential and the pursuit of personal growth and fulfillment. Politics at this level involves visionary thinking and appeals to higher ideals. Environmental movements with or without solutions based in reality, space exploration initiatives, and educational reforms often engage this need. Leaders who inspire through their vision of a better future, who challenge citizens to think beyond their immediate concerns and contribute to something greater than themselves, tap into this highest level of human motivation.

It’s rather telling that the biggest telltale sign for voters (and media), who are personally at this level of human needs, is that they often and happily paint the political parties and movements answering to level-one and level-two human needs as brutish, uneducated, simpleton and backwards — when in reality, what such name-calling voters who pretend to hold themselves to some sort of higher standard are really doing, is disacknowledging that other people’s most basic needs are simply not being met. Talk about being overprivileged in ivory towers! “Let them eat cake”, anyone?

If mainstream political parties neglect to engage voters at this level, people will align with any party that inspires them, even if the broader agenda is not entirely sound. It can be somewhat like signing up for a self-help seminar led by a guy who lives in his mom’s basement because he speaks so passionately about “unlocking your potential.”

A Holistic Approach to Political Analysis

By applying the Maslow Pyramid to our understanding of political trends, we gain a multi-dimensional view that goes beyond the simplicity of left versus right. This approach allows us to see how different policies and political messages resonate with various segments of the population based on their current needs and aspirations.

For instance, a comprehensive healthcare reform policy can address physiological needs by ensuring access to medical care, safety needs by providing financial security, love and belonging by reducing social disparities, esteem by recognizing healthcare as a right, and self-actualization by promoting a healthier society capable of achieving its full potential.

It’s further important to realize that an individual voter would vote for completely different parties, even at opposite ends of the traditional spectrum, depending on where they feel the most urgency in their personal needs at the moment, and that this is not a contradiction or uncertainty on policies.

In conclusion, the Maslow Pyramid provides a valuable framework for understanding the complex and dynamic nature of political trends. It reminds us that politics is fundamentally about people and their needs. By considering these needs in our political analysis, we can develop more empathetic, effective, and inclusive strategies that resonate deeply with the human condition. And crucially, we must remember that when these needs are ignored, voters will turn to any party that promises to meet them, even if it means accepting a deeply flawed solution. After all, in the absence of better options, you might just end up with Comcast.

Justin Rudd is one of the funiest dudes, you'll ever meet. Justins riding skills are really technical and also very stylish, which is definitely a reason to check his instagram and Youtube Account.

BMX Since: 2012
BMX Disziplin: BMX Street
Hometown: WI, USA/Mannheim
Residence: Mannheim
Sponsors: kunstform BMX Shop, neighborhood skatepark, sesh bois
Homespots: onalaska skatepark
Favorite Spots: Skatepark Schönau in Mannheim
Favorite thing beside BMX: Music, clothes
Instagram: justinridesbikes
Youtube: justin rudd

Markus Schwital Is by far the best example that size doesn't matter at the BMX! Markus has been riding BMX Flatland for 11 years and his favorite spot is at the "Haus der Geschichte" in Stuttgart or when the sea is calling also in Barcelona

BMX Since: 2006
BMX Disziplin: BMX Flatland
Hometown: Mühlhofen
Residence: Stuttgart
Sponsors: kunstform BMX Shop / Maruel Clothing
Homespots: Haus der Geschichte in Stuttgart
Favorite Spots: Haus der Geschichte, BCN parc del forum
Favorite thing beside BMX: Party, Netflix, beer n fun!
Instagram: markusschwital
Youtube: markus schwital

BMX Flatland Stuttgart - Markus Schwital & John Krämer

Our team riders Markus Schwital and John Krämer filmed a new video on their favorite spot which is called "Kleiner Schlossplatz". How their session looked like, you can check in the video bellow. enjoy the video! Best regards, your kunstform BMX Shop

Video: Ulle

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Justin Rudd One day in Mannheim BMX 2017

Bro Justin Rudd has produced a "One day" video with Robin Kachfi at their local skatepark in Mannheim-Schönau, which you shouldn't miss! Enjoy the video, Your kunstform BMX Shop

Video: Robin Kachfi

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Are We There Yet? – wethepeople in Australien

Our bro Felix Prangenberg was visiting Australia with his Wethepeople team mates Jordan Godwin and Ed Zunda. Unfortunately, the weather was not quite on their side, despite all the guys had a good time in Down Under! Enjoy the video, your kunstform BMX Shop.

Video: Callum Earnshaw

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Robin Kachfi vs. Florian Faust - Game of Bike 2017

Bro Robin Kachfi has played with his homie Florian Faust a Game of Bike at the Skatepark in Mannheim, Ger. Check the whole video now! Enjoy the video, your kunstform BMX shop team!

Video: Robin Kachfi

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Our bro Justin Rudd has pimped his bike with fresh goods, which we had to check out!

Yo Justin, where do you come from and how long have you been riding?

I'm from Mannheim, GER and I've been riding BMX for 5 years

What is your favorite BMX video?

Dan Foley and Josh Harrington Premium Video

What bike setup do you have and what can you tell about it?

high and solid haha

Frame: Cult SOS 21"
Fork: Sunday octave
Bars: WTP Sterling 9.5"
Stem: WTP Hydra
Headset: Cult
Grips: Eclat pulsar
Barends: Odyssey plastic
Tires: Demolition rig
Rims: Merritt battle rim / Primo
FW Hub: Primo N4fl
BW Hub: Demolition Rotator Coaster
Spokes: N/A
Hubguards: BSD
Pegs: Cult butter/ fiend Belmont
Seatpost: Sunday
Seat: Demolition fernengel
Crank: Shadow killer crank 165mm
Bearings: Cult
Pedals: Eclat Contra
Sprocket: WTP pathfinder
Chain: Shadow Interlock Supreme
Brake: -

Anything else to talk about? Take your chance!

always try Ciao

Yo Justin, thank you for your answers! We are glad to have you on board and look forward to the coming time with you!

Kevin Nikulski X Dustyn Alt - BMX Flatland in Berlin 2017 Video

Kevin Nikulski has filmed a new video with his homie Dustyn Alt in Berlin, GER, in which both show their flatland skills. Enjoy the Video, Your kunstform BMX Shop.

Video: Dustyn Alt



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Markus Schwital Is by far the best example that size doesn't matter at the BMX!

Yo Markus, where do you come from and how long have you been riding?

I'm from Lake Constance (Uhldingen-Mühlhofen) but I live for two years in Stuttgart now and got my first BMX Bike 12 years ago!

What is your favorite BMX video?

Circel of Balance 2004

What bike setup do you have and what can you tell about it?

What I can say about my current setup is, that I prefer strong high-end BMX parts, which are mostly street parts

Frame: Sunday Soundwave 21"
Fork: Autum Fork with zero offset
Bars: Sunday Bikes Excelsior
Stem: Subrosa Topload stem
Headset: Odyssey Pro Internal
Grips: Odyssey Broc Raiford
Barends: Odyssey ParEnds
Tires: Ares Bikes 1.9"
Rims: eclat Trippin XL
FW Hub: eclat Dynamic
BW Hub: KHE Crisman Coaster
Spokes: Salt
Hubguards: eclat plastics
Pegs: eclat Venom in 4,5“
Seatpost: Salt Pivotal
Seat: Demolition Paradise Pivotal
Crank: Odyssey Thunderbolt 165mm
Bearings: Shadow Stacked Mid BB
Pedals: Odyssey Twisted PC
Sprocket: Subrosa Speed 25T
Chain: Shadow Interlock Supreme
Brake: -

Anything else to talk about? Take your chance!

I'm really in love with my current bike setup and I would like to thank kunstform for the amazing support! Also thanks to my parents and everyone else for the motivation and the support in my BMX career!

Yo Markus, thank you for your answers! We are glad to have you on board!

Robin Kachfi & Justin Rudd - BMX Christmas Session

Our team riders Robin Kachfi and Justin Rudd have met on Christmas Eve for a quick BMX session in Mannheim Feudenheim. Viel Spaß beim Video, Dein kunstform BMX Shop Team!

Video: Robin Kachfi

Music: Lil Yello x Cartierrudd - Diamonds Lit
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-861137051

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Justin Rudd BMX rider and rapper

Our team rider Justin Rudd AKA Cartierrudd produced his first music video with Robin Kachfi for the new track "Louis Scarf", in which Justin has a feature with Lil Yello & Lil Phase. Check their song now on Soundcloud.

Enjoy the video,

your kunstform BMX Shop Team!


Video: Robin Kachfi

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