The champions of new technology

THE PIRATE ORGANIZATION: LESSONS FROM THE FRINGES OF CAPITALISM

WHAT is it about pirates that fascinates us so much? In the decades after the Second World War, the label was attached to rebellious DJs broadcasting rock ’n’ roll off the UK coast in defiance of the BBC. At the dawn of the present century, it has been attributed to teenage nerds creating websites to make free music downloads and software available to the masses.

Rodolphe Durand and JeanPhilippe Vergne find a common link between all these characters in The Pirate Organization. These two academics see pirates as an essential part of any dynamic capitalist system.

Far from the lone discontents of popular myths, Durand and Vergne argue that pirates form into complex and sophisticated organisations that challenge and change the course of the markets in which they operate.

The authors are fascinated by pirates not so much for their actions of derring-do but the way they have driven capitalism’s adoption of new technologies. A crucial point they make is that the free market is never as free as those who create it may have us believe. “Capitalism is not liberalism,” the authors assert.

The reason pirates have cropped up repeatedly in modern history is that people are often unhappy at the way powerful nations and monopolistic corporations frame the rules for new markets, be they ownership of the seas, airwaves, DNA or the World Wide Web. The authors define pirates as those that enter into conflict with states, especially when the state claims to be the sole source of sovereignty. They operate in an organised manner in uncharted territory from support bases outside that realm.

They also develop a series of discordant norms they believe should be used to regulate the uncharted territory. As such, these pirates threaten the state by upsetting the very ideas of sovereignty and contesting the activities of the corporations and monopolies the state has legitimised. All this economic theory is paired with engaging analysis of the history and golden ages of piracy. The book also records the pirate tendencies of Apple cofounders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who in the 1970s built a reputation as rebels on California campuses by selling a device that enabled students to make telephone calls without having to pay the monopoly incumbent.

One group the authors do not believe should be considered pirates are the bandits terrorising container shipping lanes off Africa. “Blackbeard has far more in common with a cyberpirate than with a Somali peasant who uses a Kalashnikov to attack a fishing boat from,” the authors note. True pirates, it seems, are above such petty pilfering. 2012 The Financial Times Limited

Jonathan Moules