The Man in the Web

The meeting room at Pionen. All photos by Emil Nordin

Thirty-five metres deep under ground, inside a mountain on the Southside in central Stockholm, lies a venue that's been dubbed one of the world's coolest offices. Behind huge doors that look like a gateway to the future, you'll find technology that looks so advanced that it makes you wonder if entering this space will carry you to another time.

The first you'll see when you enter this place, are two massive engines that automatically start in case of a power shutdown-these are authentic German submarine engines. The mountain walls inside are covered with green plants that (at least) give the impression to provide the place with additional oxygen. There's also a huge sound-isolated glass cube that floats above the floor, serving as a meeting room that brings your thoughts to some sci-fi laboratory. The round carpet inside looks like the moon. The cube is located upstairs, in the middle of a massive room, looking down on endless racks of computer servers.

This is Pionen. It's one of Swedish internet provider Bahnhof's many data centres. It's a venue inherited from the Swedish civil defence, which was built during the Cold War. During a short period in the 90s it used to be a popular hub for Stockholm ravers. But eventually, it became the home to Wikileaks' servers.

"They operated their main servers from here. Later, it became common to set up servers that mirror their machinery. That wasn't ideal for us since we're hosting a business solution, and they were saving money setting up things in a different way." Jon Karlung tells me this as I'm asking if he's using Wikileaks to market his business. Karlung is the CEO of Bahnhof.

"In December 2010 when Wikileaks was at its peak, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and tons of other media were here. [Wikileaks' founders] were at some hotel room somewhere launching this thing. Media wanted something visually appealing, and if there is a James Bond-looking data centre around the corner, well…"

Karlung is 50 years old. And very tall. He's a successful businessman. He's also someone who's repeatedly subject of controversy.

"I like Wikileaks. We can't market something we don't like. I consider Wikileaks to be awesome in all possible ways. I could switch plates and say that this data centre gave them extreme media coverage. I mean, they told me that this was good. They looked into ways to be visible."

Karlung describes himself as something of a rebel. And after spending pretty much an entire day with him, I think I agree. I get the impression that this is a man who is very intelligent, who likes to play fun and games, and who fearlessly walks his own way at all times-for good and for worse. "I guess [our competitors] can get a bit uncomfortable sometimes," he tells me as we're drinking coffee in one of the more standard office-looking corners of Pionen.

Jon Karlung standing in the doorway to the room at Pionen where he keeps machinery for channelising heat from servers

After the coffee, he shows me around. I get to see servers IRL for the first time in my life – technological components that together form parts of the internet as we know it. The servers are smaller than what I had expected, but form endless corridors of virtual information.

We're discussing big data, which are huge gatherings of everybody's behaviour and information online.

"It is possible to gather big data and analyse it, and receive amazing things and knowledge from it. However, these days it's possible to use this to shackle people. I guess you can say that there are so many things that happen in our lives online. And if you're in this-let's call it a closed 'universe'-there are a few, big, dominating players who plan out the rules in that universe. I think that this ultimately is a philosophical matter. Like, what is it to be a human being?"

Sweden has recently become an attractive player on the international data centre market. Particularly since Facebook opened its first European data centre in the northern city of Luleå last year. It's due to the Nordics' cold climate that the interest in building data centres is growing. In September 2013, Microsoft announced the construction of a 250-million-dollar data centre in northern Finland.

In March 2014, it was announced that Facebook would build a second data centre close to its first.

Naturally, this growing interest in the Nordics is received with open arms by the governments. The data centres offer a growth in job opportunities at locations that have suffered from depopulation in the last couple of decades. The companies save energy costs thanks to the cold climate at these places. Rooms filled with servers get hot, and servers need to be cold to function.

Being inside Pionen's server hall, together with Sweden's king of controversial data centres, I realise that none of Bahnhof's data centres are located at a place with a particularly cold climate. Karlung tells me about a deal he has with Fortum, which is a Swedish energy provider. The deal makes it sound as if Bahnhof houses something like the world's most environmentally friendly data centres.

Instead of channelising the heat from the servers through vents, Fortum takes care of the heat and use it to heat up whole apartment blocks in Stockholm. Karlung tells me that data centres where the heat isn't taken care of and recycled cause some pretty serious pollution. "The servers create energy, and it'd be crazy to waste it."

Jon Karlung with one of his servers

Karlung is a remarkable figure. He fearlessly shares his personal contact details on each and every press release posted on Bahnhof's website. He personally deals with the company's press matters (he's Bahnhof's official press contact). When I ask him if he ever gets unpleasant phone calls from people who think he's annoying, he doesn't look bothered at all. "I let them say what they have to say and that's it." He tells me that it doesn't matter if his phone number is listed or not-if someone would want to hurt him, they will find a way to do that either way.

But why would anyone want to hurt a CEO of an internet provider? Well, Karlung is a guy who likes to pull practical jokes and perform media stunts. Which he's been doing ever since he began working at Bahnhof in 1996.

"I've been in this game ever since the Wild West – when internet was like this immense power, something positive and fucking cool. If I look back at how it was in the beginning, it was a positivity that broke free. You could access things on a global scale that hadn't been possible before-things that we take for granted today. Back then, it was freedom online, freedom of speech-not an internet used as some kind of control mechanism, it wasn't used in a repressive way."

The internet was made available for the Swedish public in 1994. Up until then, it had only been a service for government bodies, businesses, and universities. Internet provider Algonet – which no longer exists – is often referred to as Sweden's first commercial provider. But during that same year, in a basement in Uppsala, Oscar Swartz set up another web operator, which would prove to be more successful: Bahnhof.

At that time, Karlung worked as the editor-in-chief for the men's magazine-now-turned-porn magazine Aktuell Rapport. He joined Bahnhof two years later when he figured that it could work to bring the magazine online. "I had been working at Aktuell Rapport for quite a few years and was pretty tired with all that. I mean it wasn't like the ultimate dream to keep on working with that kind of thing for all eternity. Naturally, I wanted to do something else with my life, so the question, what can I do now? arose. So I was looking at things from a technical point of view and thought that, maybe I can do this online? But well, it kind of fell through."

Instead, his technology hobby took over, and Karlung left the magazine. "[Internet in the mid-90s] was so much fun! It was incredible. It was the one thing that made it possible to log on and discover the world in ways that were completely new. I mean it was a revolution that was very positive."

The 'Alien' server hall in Kista outside of Stockholm

One common conception of Karlung is that he's a provocateur. In 1997, his then-companion, Swartz, and him staged a news piece regarding Cambodian dictator Pol Pots coming to Sweden – a complete lie – which was picked up by newswire Reuters. "It was pretty mad in itself. But it took a while before they figured it out. And it did cause a mess. But that was like a market-based practical joke, which showed some of the possibilities the internet has. Practical jokes are always fun if they have a serious message embedded into them. Practical jokes without any substance aren't fun. In this case it was about the fact that you can't trust information online. That's given today, but back then, people considered information online to be the truth."

Whatever people think of Karlung, the fact is that behind the humorous take on media and sci-fi designed data centres, is a person in a very rare and powerful position. Being the CEO for an internet provider gives him the means to effect, and possibly change, the centralised direction he's fearing that the internet is currently taking.

"Then there was this thing with North Korea [in 2001]. They wanted us to build an internet that wasn't the internet. They wanted a fake Yahoo, a fake Altavista [a search engine prior to Google], and a range of different websites, so that the people of North Korea could surf in a kind of small world-almost like in the Truman Show. They were supposed to surf on a mini-internet, thinking that it was the real internet. And then there would be people monitoring and controlling everybody online. People might laugh about that today and think of it as silly, but as a matter of fact, we're in a situation where a few big players control the internet. And we are made to believe that it's free and open. So that image of things might not be that bad."

The deal with North Korea didn't happen. "Plenty of things are possible-I mean you can rob a bank if you want-but this didn't feel right even though it was an exiting thought."

Karlung is actually the kind of guy who likes to take action when it comes to things he believes in. Sometimes in pretty weird ways.

In 2013, American magazine Wired reported on what was, according to them, "the single most enjoyable comment on the year's NSA spying scandal."

One evening, Karlung and his friend Love Ekenberg made a video starring three gingerbread men, titled Gingerbread Data Center: NSA & Sweden Eat Cake. The film takes place at Pionen and the gingerbread men represent NSA, the Swedish Security Police, and FRA, which is the National Defence Radio Establishment in Sweden. These three institutions are government bodies that Karlung associates with internet surveillance. And he's not particularly fond of them. The video ends with a thank you to Edward Snowden.

Video making goes hand in hand with Karlung's first experiences of the internet. "I did experimental films-and this was before video! I did 16-millimetre films and animations and arty stuff or whatever you like to call it. [The gingerbread video] was something we did pretty quickly, but in pretty much the same kind of spirit as those I did in the beginning."

The gingerbread video is nothing compared to some of the hands-on measures Karlung has been doing over the years. For instance in December last year, Karlung had several meetings with the Swedish Security Police-which might explain their representation in the gingerbread video. "They wanted to access our systems in a standardised way, so that they in a standardised way could get access to a kind of information they considered having the right to access. And we considered that wrong."

In a response to what he believed was wrong, he decided to secretly record one of the meetings with the police. Furthermore, he handed over the recordings to the news desk at Swedish public service radio. They broadcasted the entire thing. "That might be a little bit outside of the box of what you normally do as a technical provider, but who else would do that? There isn't anybody else! That's the thing. There isn't anyone else who has that kind of access, or who is like a spider in a web at a technical provider, and who's actually interested in these issues."

Karlung walking on the imported lava stones in Kista

It might be thanks to the fact that Sweden is pretty progressive in terms of freedom of speech that Karlung is able to do these stunts without getting into trouble. Or maybe due to the fact that he always seems to have the law on his side.

Over the past decade, Bahnhof has only had major legal issues once. In 2005, the Swedish Anti-Piracy Agency alongside music giants Universal, Sony and EMI, reported Bahnhof to the police for unlawfully spreading copyrighted files. The police searched Pionen and allegedly found the files. This was during a time when piracy was a hot topic in Sweden. The goal with the search was to find file-sharers who were customers at Bahnhof.

Bahnhof responded with a lawsuit against the Anti-Piracy Agency on the grounds that material had been placed on the servers by an infiltrator from the Anti-Piracy Agency. Eventually, a deal was settled, and didn't result in any legal consequences for anyone involved.

It might sound a little odd, but Karlung's ability to combine his hobbies and concerns with his business has given results. Despite being one of Sweden's smaller operators, serving about 100,000 households, Bahnhof has become a trusted internet provider with a unique trademark. And it seems to be going well. The company has an annual turnover of about half a billion Swedish kroners (€55 million).

It's not only Pionen that is designed in a spectacular way. One of Bahnhof's newest data centres is located a bit outside of the Swedish capital in the suburb Kista.

From the outside, this building looks like an actual space- or moon-base. There are giant, square-shaped container-like rooms made out of armour steel. The various armour blocks are connected with an air-filled tent-just like you'd expect a house in space to look like. And the entire construction stands on top of red lava stones, which are imported from Iceland. All in an attempt to give the place a feel of how it would be like to be on mars. And if that wasn't enough: upon entering this planet, Karlung shows me (with the excitement of a child) how the doors that open the armoured rooms-in which the servers are stored-make pschhh sounds. They open in a just about identical way as the doors on the spaceship in the movie Alien.

Design aside-it is the company's caring attitude towards the privacy of their customers that makes it unique. Probably also the fact that some of Bahnhof's clients happened to have been big actors within the freedom of internet movement-such as WikiLeaks back in 2010.

"I was pretty naïve, and was going to auction out everything [from Wikileaks] on eBay and donate the money to Reporters Without Borders. That was the plan. But it all fell through due to eBay not being deigned to deal with that kind of thing. The server was sold for like a couple of hundred thousands [kroners] to a guy who had used his dad's credit card. So obviously we had to withdraw the entire thing and were like, fuck this. We actually still have both the [Wikileaks] web server and database."

Jon Karlung at Pionen

Bahnhof continues with their political fights for what they believe is right. Only in 2014 (which at the time of writing is in its ninth month), Karlung and his company have been involved in two pretty chaotic media hunts, both which are related to gathering and use of personal information online.

"It all comes down to freedom online without it being someone else's business. I mean, if I get a phone call from someone, what gives a third part the right to record that conversation and store that information for all eternity and use it for their own purposes?"

In January, Sweden saw a new type of online service called Lexbase. It's a business built around taking advantage of the country's Freedom of Information Act. It's essentially a search engine that allows its users to browse freely through criminal records of Sweden's citizens. By typing in someone's name, you'll get access to some of that person's dirtiest secrets.

Although criminal records have always been available to the public due to the Freedom of Information Act, Lexbase changed the process of getting hold of that information-from complicated bureaucratic procedures, to anonymous and easy online browsing.

Naturally, a shitstorm took place when the site was launched. But Lexbase's founders failed to predict that it's pretty upsetting for people when others take the right to share their private information with the world. Plus, the technology behind the website wasn't advanced enough to handle the pressure. Within a few hours of the launch, Lexbase was hacked and crashed. Bahnhof hosted its servers, and became the centre of attention once again. "The [founders of Lexbase] disappeared off the radar. We were left to act like some kind of press people for their stuff."

Following the Lexbase crash, Karlung ended their contract and edited Bahnhof's user terms. "Now, there's one paragraph saying that you're not allowed to engage in 'irresponsible circulation of gatherings of personal information.' One thing that's always been written in the terms is that you're not allowed to run things that don't work from a technical point of view, or something that can cause us major technical problems. And the formalities around [Lexbase] were the fact that their net had big technological issues."

The updated Bahnhof terms illustrate Karlung's engagement in civil right matters once again-as well as the success of his company. His unique position in the middle of the World Wide Web is in the centre of another controversy, which by the time this goes to print is an on-going case.

On April 8, the European Court of Justice declared the controversial Directive 2006/24/EC-a.k.a. EU's Data Retention Directive (DRD)-invalid. The DRD has, ever since it was introduced in 2006, been subject for debates on serious privacy issues and human rights matters. During the time when it was valid, the DRD made it compulsory for internet providers in all EU-countries to track, collect, and store people's online data, i.e. anything from your browsing history to chat logs and emails. Government bodies could then access this information if considered important or useful, such as during a police investigation.

Once the DRD was gone, Bahnhof erased all of its customers' stored data and immediately stopped the gathering of new data. But despite the court's ruling on EU-level, Sweden's government-which voted in favour of the DRD on a national level in 2012-did not remove the directive in the country's laws.

Following Bahnhof's decision to stop the gathering of data, a conflict arose between the company and the Swedish state. Sweden's Post and Telephone Board ruled that the DRD would continue in Sweden regardless of what the European Court of Justice had determined. Karlung refused to follow the directive, and on July 8, he turned himself in-confident that the case would eventually be brought up in the European court. "If you're managing a telecom operator, you obviously see things that you don't necessarily see from the outside. I mean I see what's possible and in what ways you can use current technology to control [things]."

But despite that Karlung has repeatedly confessed to breaking the law-on both Bahnhof's website and via letters to the Post and Telephone Board-action against him has still not been issued by the Swedish state.

Due to Sweden's apparent passivity in the matter (which is weird considering that they require all of the country's internet providers to gather data), Karlung together with Swartz (who now sits as the chairman for the 5th of July foundation that works for freedom online) have taken further action. On the 12th of September this year, the pair reported Sweden to the European Court of Justice. Karlung wrote on his website that, "we will take this all the way to the EU court. But the best thing would be if the court interfered and showed Sweden what way to go."

This article was originally published in The Beginning of the Limitlessness Issue, which is VICE Sweden's 10-year Anniversary issue - hence the reference to print.