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.