News
Decentralize the Internet: Peter Sunde Interview
SHARE Beirut is a weekend-long conference celebrating “open, decentralized and accessible forms of communication.” This event brings many digital pioneers to the Lebanese capital. Al-Akhbar posed some questions to one of SHARE’s guest speakers, The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde.
A rough guide to SHARE Beirut
Kifak everyone,
First of all, we hope you've already received your bar-code voucher and have it printed on a piece of paper or on your phone, ready to be scanned. If you'd like to contribute in minimizing cue line in the peak times, exchange it as early as today according to the schedule listed on the voucher. So, here's a quick guide for all SHARE Beirut attendees, just to make sure you feel like home as soon as you pick up your wristband.
Hacking Power
A few years ago, in a souk in old Damascus, you could find some of the strangest lingerie on earth: thong panties made out of psychedelic flowers that blinked with multi-colored lights, bras that said “I love you” when you pushed a well-concealed button, and flimsy underwear made out of fake hands, complete with fingernails painted in bright red nail polish. Ayah Bdeir, a media artist and TED fellow, used this discovery to challenge and subvert the static representations of Muslim women found in Western media.
MOAR SPEAKERS
There are at least dozen of new speakers confirmed in the last two weeks, and if you didn't browse the program section of our website recently, we’ll just give you an idea by mentioning a few of them.
SHARE NIGHTS
Watch this exciting short video on SHARE nights that happened this April in Belgrade. It's a sleek and dynamic mix of Tim Exile's performance (he's also going to throw a party in Beirut) with footage of atmosphere and people (and hot ladies) at different venues around the city.
Share Beirut by Night: First Confirmed Music Acts
Finally, the first part of this October’s SHARE Beirut music program has been confirmed. It will be dominated by cutting-edge contemporary electronic music performed by both international and regional artists whose influence is reshaping the international scene and its trends.
SHARE STICKERS / Let's create them together
Okay folks, now that you know a bit about event itself, let's start doing some nice things together. These are the stickers from last conference, and this week we will print moar 4 everyone.
SHARE Conference Beirut
Dear friends from the Internets,
It’s been a while since we made a new post, but for a really delightful reason – this October, SHARE will take place in probably the most vibrant city of Middle East – Beirut.
Music Labels Won’t Share Pirate Bay Loot With Artists
Earlier this year the sentences against the Pirate Bay defendants were made final. Aside from prison sentences, they will have to pay damages to the entertainment industries, including €550,000 to several major music labels. The court awarded the damages to compensate artists and rightsholders for their losses. However, it now turns out that artists won’t see a penny of the money, as the labels have allocated it to IFPI to fund new anti-piracy campaigns.
Changer la façon de changer le monde: un festival pour activistes sociaux
Francis Pisani's Winch5 blog on french La Monde is all about social innovation around the world. We are very proud and happy that Belgrade and SHARE Conference are one of the hotspots on this great tour. Read the article and interview with Vladan and Filip, and use Google translate if your french is poor like ours.
Here Comes OpenLeaks: How It Won't Be WikiLeaks
Almost exactly a year ago I spoke via email with ex-WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg. He and the four or five others who'd defected from WikiLeaks in September of 2010 were already at work on OpenLeaks, a successor organization with the same basic goal: to maintain a secure platform where sensitive documents of interest to the public can be uploaded by whistleblowers and anonymously distributed to the press.
Share Conference Seeks to Inspire
With only one year behind it, the Share Conference is already one of the most talked about and anticipated events that Belgrade has to offer. In its second year, Share promises a programme that will be “even more subversive and without compromise.”
SHARE angels
We are presenting a few very important individuals and organizations, without whom SHARE would never have become what it is, and whom we will host in Belgrade on April 26-28.
Are you for real? Inside Second Life: interview with Khannea Suntzu
Lily Lynch jumps into the virtual world to find out who the hell is this transhumanist, blogger, activist, conceptual artist and Second Life genderqueer prostitute. If you’d like to see for yourself, you can catch up with Khannea in person at SHARE Conference in Belgrade, Apr 26-28
Internet is the most powerful tool of today
How does OpenLeaks work in a brief and how is it funded?
OpenLeaks is a project aimed at supporting sustainable whistleblowing on the Internet while maximizing the sources interests. It has been developed as a consequence of shortcomings observed during our work with WikiLeaks.
Slava Mogutin's interview for SHARE
SHARE: You’re coming to Serbia for the first time and Marina Abramovic told you not to do anything for free and to collect jokes. But you also told me you have some friends in Belgrade. What you actually know about Serbia and Balkans?
The future of reading
New reading devices might not change the face of literature, but they will create readers’ communities. According to Readmill, books have a future and the future is digital
SHARE Conference 2012: Uniting Digital Rights Activists, New Media Artists, and Tech Innovators
12 years ago, hundreds of thousands of Serbians filled the streets of Belgrade, blocking the entire city in protest of Slobodan Milošević’s regime. At the time such a widespread protest had seemed unimaginable. Before the uprising, the mood in the country was melancholic, cynical, and hopeless amid disillusionment with a government that became plagued with corruption, repression, and war. An unprecedented campaign of civil resistance against the Milošević regime paved the way for eventual democratic reform and the Serbian independence in 2006.
Smári McCarthy interviewed by Lily Lynch
I was interviewed by Lily Lynch for the BTURN magazine. The article is here. Since the interview was conducted via e-mail, I became a bit verbose… I have that tendency. Most of my answers didn’t make it into the article, which focuses heavily on the Cyber Yugoslavia project, and is really great. But still, I felt that the good bits didn’t get used, so I asked Lily permission to republish the interview in full. Here it is:
Crowdsourced constitution: better than the real thing?
From Cyber Yugoslavia to Iceland, online democracy is no longer just a fantasy. Plato must be turning in his grave.
During the late-1990s Internet era, the forgotten micronation of Cyber Yugoslavia (“CY”) was born. CY was launched in 1999, when “real” Yugoslavia had already ceased to exist. In response to the economic crisis and ethnic wars that had dismantled the country, a secretive playwright named Zoran Bacic created a virtual, multinational, and hyper-democratic version of the real thing.
Let there be copy!
Founded by a 19-year-old Swedish philosophy student Isak Gerson, the Missionary Church of Kopimism is a unique form of congregation, gathering file sharers who claim copying information is a sacred virtue, “the best and most beautiful that is”.

