What are the main points behind The Pirate Organization: Lessons from the Fringes of Capitalism book? How did you and Rodolphe Durand and you come up with the idea?
Back in 2005, at a time when I was
reading a lot about cyber-piracy, I visited the Scheepvaart Museum in Amsterdam
(Maritime Museum), which featured an exhibition about sea piracy in the 17th
century. And I
began to realize there were many connections between these two historically
distant forms of piracy. So I asked myself: why do we use the same term,
“piracy”, to describe sea robbers in the modern age and some hackers nowadays
in cyberspace? What do they have in common? A few years later, Rodolphe and I
were talking about the history of capitalism from the perspective of Gilles
Deleuze’s philosophy. We had similar views in many respects – in particular, we
both believed that Deleuze (and Guattari) did a great job at theorizing
capitalism, except that we felt that their story would benefit a lot from
looking at an additional level of analysis – the organizational level. We were
unsatisfied with the idea that capitalism was just about individual desires and
the State. In between the two, there are many different types of organizations
that channel human agency. In a way, the bureaucratic organization (in the
Weberian sense) can be seen as the mother of all capitalist technologies. Pirates,
in particular, are not lone wolves but belong to organizations that are
sometimes powerful enough to change the course of history by making visible the
inherent contradictions of the capitalist State. In fact, we realized that
piracy was key in explaining many aspects of capitalism’s evolution that
economists hadn’t addressed at all. We decided to join forces and write a book
together in 2010. It first came out in French under the title L’Organisation Pirate.
There’s
always been a tight relationship between piracy and capitalism? How do
they interact with each other?
The main thesis of the book is that
the State and the pirate organization co-define the rules of the game in a
capitalist economy as both claim control over uncharted territory (e.g., the
high seas in the 17th century, cyberspace nowadays). The recent
Prism scandal which revealed the extent of the NSA’s control over cyberspace is
yet another example of how this process unfolds across history. If we agree
that capitalism appears in the modern age after the collapse of the feudal
system, then yes, piracy has always been around to shape capitalist expansion
onto new, uncharted territories (the high seas, the airwaves, cyberspace, DNA,
and soon, outer space)
What’s
the difference between corsairs and pirates? Could you give us an example
of both of them in our current times?
Pirates contest the State’s attempt
to gain exclusive control over uncharted territory. For example, cyber pirates
fight the governments that consider cyberspace to be a sovereign territory that
should be surrounded by electronic filters and firewalls. For cyber pirates,
there shouldn’t be such a thing as a Chinese cyberspace and a US cyberspace,
subject to different sets of rules. Instead, the entire cyberspace should be
akin to “international waters”, where the freedom of the seas prevails and no
one enjoys particular privileges. In other words, pirates believe in the
existence of supra-national rules that should apply equally to everyone (think
of organizations such as Wikileaks or Anonymous). Corsairs, on the other hand,
are hired by a particular state to further its strategic objectives. The Honker
Union in China, which conducts cyberwar on behalf of the central government,
the Russian nationalists from Nashi, who attacked the cyber-infrastructures of
Estonia in 2007, or the Syrian Electronic Army, which defend Bashar Al-Assad’s
regime in cyberspace, are recent examples of cyber-corsair organizations.
However, while pirate and corsair
organizations are relatively stable, individual memberships within them are
not. Many people previously affiliated with a pirate organization end up hired
as corsairs, and vice versa. Think of Jeff Moss, the founder of the two largest
hacker conferences (Def Con and Black Hat). After an early career as a pirate,
he became Obama’s advisor for cybersecurity issues, and in 2012, he
invited NSA director Keith Alexander to give a keynote speech at the Def
Con conference. Alexander essentially showed up at Def Con to offer cyber-pirates
a job as cyber-corsairs on the payroll of the US government. In a way, people
like Jeff Moss remind us of modern-age heroes such as Francis Drake, the most
famous pirate of the 16th century, who ended up working as a
privateer (=corsair) for the British Queen.
You
have stated that piracy operates on the fringes, and from there comes
innovation. Can you tell us a couple of specific cases where
non-conformism has helped with Capitalism’s evolution?
Free radio broadcasting as we’ve
known it over the last 30-40 years used to be called pirate radio broadcasting. In 1967, in the UK, pirate radio won the
battle and took down the BBC’s monopoly, paving the way for a free radio
broadcasting industry not censored anymore by the State. Adrian Johns
wonderfully explained that story in the book Death of a Pirate. Sea pirates in the modern age opened up new
trade routes and changed the rules of the game in the shipping industry, for
instance by working collaboratively and by allowing women on board their ships.
In cyberspace, the diffusion of certain standards, from mp3 to free software,
has a lot to do with pirates’ actions.
How
does a pirate organization behave, contrary to a “legit” one?
Pirate organizations share three
important features. First, they contest monopolies that the State allows to
thrive (e.g, the East India Companies in the 17th century). Second,
they seek to establish alternative rules of the game (e.g., free software today
in cyberspace). Third, they typically defend, at a supranational level, the
principles of openness and transparency, and they emphasize the existence of
common goods (think of the freedom of the high seas, uncensored radio
broadcasting, or Net neutrality). Pirate organizations, while often considered
illegal, typically receive a lot of support from the broader civil society. In
other words, pirate organizations are legitimate yet illegal organizations
(unlike traditional criminal organizations, which are both illegal and
illegitimate).
Is
there any way to beat the Pirate Organizations or is it a battle already
lost and the best solution for their enemies is to learn from them?
The pirate organization is bound to
disappear. It cannot win unless it becomes monopolistic, in which case it
ceases to be piratical. But the pirate organization only disappears when the
principles that it defends have diffused throughout the social fabric. It is an
organization with a mission. When the mission is accomplished, the organization
disbands as it becomes pointless. Learning
from pirates is essential for businesses operating at the vanguard of the
capitalist economy. In the home entertainment industry, clearly, some
organizations have learned faster than others (compare YouTube and Netflix to
the major studios represented by the Motion Picture Association of America).
Where
does piracy end and free content start? Can a line be drawn?
Piracy is not as much about free
content as it is about un-monopolized distribution channels. Piracy is all
about territory, so the means of distribution – the transportation modes if you
wish – matter a lot more than what is being transported. In that sense, the
pirate organization is a-moral. This is precisely why government policies that
aim at censoring certain types of online content (e.g., from gambling to
Satanism) completely miss the point.
To
accompany the Pirate Organization book, music and a short animation were
also released. Can you tell us about this supporting content?
Rodolphe and I followed our
instincts! We see The Pirate Organization
as an interdisciplinary project without fixed boundaries. It started as a
narrow academic discussion, turned into a broad essay in the social sciences,
then it became a book, then a song composed by
rock band Chevreuil and published in creative commons to facilitate remixing.
Then we made an animated documentary
about the project, directed by Daniel Wyatt, in which we re-use the Chevreuil
song and some of its remixes together with excerpts from the book (note: this
documentary is subtitled in 12 languages, including Spanish). That book, in the
meanwhile, was entirely rewritten based on our French readers’ feedback, and
published in English at Harvard Business Review Press (2013). Over the last few
months, we have turned the book into a course to be taught at HEC Paris and
Ivey Business School. These days, we are developing a few research papers out
the book, building an online community around the Twitter account @PirateOrg, submitting the short movie
to film festivals around the world, and we are working on a feature length
documentary project that we are in the
middle of proposing to a couple of TV channels. We are not in the business of
selling books, we are in the business of diffusing ideas. That makes a huge
difference in terms of what we can do to reach out to our audience.
What
role do you think the State must take in order to fix this current global
economic crisis?
At least in the European Union, the
failure to address the crisis within a reasonable amount of time comes from a
blatant lack of cooperation and integration across countries. Thus, the crisis
is also political, and the solution to it will probably not be found by
examining the situation through the lens of the traditional Left/Right
political paradigm. But there are few viable alternatives… Some hope that the
Pirate Parties will come up with something new. So far, I personally have been
quite disappointed by their political platform. For instance, on the key issue
of state regulation, Pirate Parties are confronted with a huge internal
contradiction. On the one hand, they have many of their members coming from the
Left that ask for a stricter state regulation, say, of the finance and banking
sectors (all the more so in the aftermath of the financial crisis). But on the
other hand, they keep repeating that cyberspace and its related industries
should be free of state influence and regulation. At a conceptual level, it is
hard to understand how you can tell the state “we need more regulation” and at
the same time “we don’t want any regulation”. A political party that doesn’t
have a robust theory of state regulation will find it difficult to gather
support from a significant portion of the population. In the book, we are
trying to outline such a theory by distinguishing charted from uncharted
territory, and explaining why the two should be treated differently by the
State. But we still have a lot of work ahead of us if we want to come up with
something solid!
How do
you see the status quo of Capitalism in the future (from 5 to 10 years from now) if the
governments still behave and act like they do nowadays?
I am not Nate Silver, so you
shouldn’t trust my predictions! OK, I can try a few random ones, but just for
fun… China and the US are likely to engage in a long struggle to define the
rules of cyberspace exploitation and outer space exploration. Some of the major
tech firms (e.g., Google) will start to compete against defense contractors
(e.g., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SAIC) for major government programs. In
the meanwhile, pressing issues such as global warming are likely to be pushed
to the background (unfortunately) as the major powers keep playing geopolitics
as a zero-sum game. The democratization of 3D-printing (both for industrial
artefacts and biological organisms) will pose new challenges to governments and
to corporations – some of them will actually lose their control over the
manufacturing process in the next 10 years. Because of that, the “pirate
threat” will diffuse to new sectors of the economy beyond the so-called
“creative industries” (e.g., music, film, software). The patent wars will keep
raging amidst a massive restructuring of industry value chains. Soon, speaking
computer code as a second language will become more valuable than English
proficiency on the international job market. Alright, that’s it for now!
Check out their music here:
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