Re: pirate parties, there actually was such controversy surrounding the more prominent instances just as they acquired public attention in their respective coun

Re: pirate parties, there actually was such controversy surrounding the more prominent instances just as they acquired public attention in their respective countries. For example, AFAIU, the current gender-politics situation arrived in Germany slightly earlier than it did the US. And so in 2009-2010, there was much media scrutiny of the low female membership of the German pirate party. Proposals for changing this resulted in lots of internal drama, culminating with a notorious debate over how a women-only mailing list was in opposition to the party's principles. Similar things happened with the Swedish party. There's hardly anything in English of this; you'll have to use your Google(-translate)-fu for more info: https://www.google.de/search?q=+piratinnen+piratenpartei+feminismus https://www.google.de/search?q=+piratinnen+piratenpartei+fem... However, I don't think this was the (sole) cause of the parties' decline. The German party had increasing vote shares until 2013, around when internal conflict over members' stances on issues other than copyright, made evident by the parties' commitment to transparency, started being widely publicized, proving (to the public, at least) that its approach to direct democracy could not scale. HN has surprisingly little discussion of the pirate parties' decline - really only one, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9231584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9231584 Aside: I have discovered the German version of ESR, who fulminates over his theory that the attacks on pirate politics and open source from gender studies perspectives are in collusion with American economic interests: https://www.danisch.de/blog/2015/11/04/feminismus-als-waffe-gegen-open-source-software/ https://www.danisch.de/blog/2015/11/04/feminismus-als-waffe-...