The Pirate Organization: Lessons From the Fringes of Capitalism (5 page)

It should come as no surprise that the US government has attempted to increase its control over cyberspace, most notably by turning cyberpirates into cybercorsairs. The InfraGard program, launched in 2001, is part of a broader initiative aimed at recruiting online corsairs to monitor the net. A recent study reported that 25 percent of cyberpirates are informants for the state. In fact, Bradley Manning, the alleged WikiLeaks source, may have been identified based on his exchanges with an undercover cybercorsair. In 2012, the press revealed that President Obama had been significantly gearing up US cyberwarfare capabilities since his election. Put simply, he assembled an army of cybercorsairs whose ultimate mission is to assert US sovereignty in cyberspace. To that end, they design cyberweapons such the Stuxnet and Flame viruses—incredibly sophisticated pieces of software that can send large plants and facilities spinning out of control, after having collected a wealth of data on enemy cyberinfrastructure.
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Pirate, Corsair, Pirate, Corsair, and So Forth

All corsairs are pirates, except in the eyes of the state that is sending them on a mission. As we have seen, though, the state will often abandon its corsairs if the wind turns. That being said, not all pirates are corsairs. Some pirates form stateless hordes and attack everything in sight, with no regard for national allegiance. Between 1719 and 1722, the pirate fleet of Captain Bartholomew Roberts boarded dozens of ships on Caribbean seas, as well as along the coasts of Africa, North America, and Brazil. No historical document can prove that Roberts worked on behalf of a particular sovereign, although it was rare for a pirate to remain self-employed throughout his life.

In reality, a pirate was usually an old merchant or an old corsair or both. Francis Drake, for example, took part in many pirate expeditions before he became an English corsair. Later, he returned to the pirate life, but in 1581 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, which made him a corsair in the eyes of God.
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A century later, Captain William Dampier, among many others, took a similar path, switching between the roles of corsair and pirate in the early days of a long career in which he fought in the navy against the Dutch, before retiring to a pirate community in Jamaica.
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Biographies of cyberpirates are not much different: the red visitor was a former black visitor, who, after being abandoned by China, went back to his original color. The same was true of pirate radio DJs who were recruited by governments during both World Wars to broadcast information on their behalf.

Sometimes a pirate, sometimes a corsair. Individual roles changed. But the organizations remained the same. Individual pirates and corsairs should neither be confused nor seen as extreme opposites. But in fact, the relevant distinction should be made at the organizational level: the pirate organization differs from the corsair organization with respect to its position vis-à-vis the sovereign state. In a constantly expanding capitalistic space, the pirate organization and the corsair organization bend sovereign norms in opposite directions, and it is important to adopt the Flemish perspective and equip ourselves with a magnifying glass to not lose track of such an essential difference.

The definition of piracy is the result of a power differential between sovereign states. As a state seeks to expand its reach, the number of individuals it considers to be pirates tends to increase. A reinforced monopoly, a more favorable trade agreement, and a more powerful navy are just some of the factors that produce pirates through exclusion, the pirate being the one living outside the boundaries defined by the sovereign. A bolder tracing of these boundaries consequently increases the intensity of the pirate threat.

Piracy is the product of geopolitics, since it appears precisely at the point where territorial space and the normative network emanating from a sovereign authority meet.

Rather than contrasting pirates and corsairs in absolute terms, we must acknowledge that the two roles are often endorsed by the same individuals at different points in time. And we should shift our attention to the much more important divide between the pirate organization and the corsair organization, which, independent of the particular individuals they employ, represent two stable patterns of social action. How positive or negative their influence is on social norms, capitalist expansion, or the development of new industries is only a matter of (Flemish) perspective.

Chapter Five

WHAT IS THE PIRATE ORGANIZATION?

One sometimes has the impression that the flows of capital would willingly dispatch themselves to the moon if the capitalist State were not there to bring them back to earth
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—Deleuze and Guattari,
Anti-Oedipus

Expansion is everything … the world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered, and colonized. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds, which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could
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—Cecil Rhodes, founder of the chartered British South Africa Company (1889–1965), in charge of administrating Rhodesia
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The advances made in the sixteenth century in cartography, topography, and geodesics allowed emerging European states to mark their geographic borders and draw boundaries. This allowed states to apply norms across an entire territory. When “new” territories are explored, they are partially uncharted. Laws are in the process of being established, and the social norms applicable to them are still in dispute. Typically, societies ask the following questions about a partially uncharted territory: Can the territory be owned? If so, by whom? By the discoverer? By the investors who funded the discovery? By the sovereign whom the discoverer is dependent upon. By those who seek to exploit the territory? Or by everyone? How can we exploit the new territory to gain legitimate profit, and how can we share it? In a nutshell, it all comes down to the creation of acceptable social norms regarding control, value creation, and value distribution.

These same questions were asked about the sea routes between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and about the airwaves during the twentieth century. We are asking them now in order to define the status of cyberspace and DNA, both of which are today’s versions of partially uncharted territories. In the near future, we will ask the same questions regarding the status of space. Underground resources on the Moon or Mars are likely to provide enough of an incentive to trigger a discussion. Until we have come to a consensus, the new territories of capitalism will remain partially uncharted. They will stay legal, political, social, and economic gray areas where pirate organizations thrive.

From the birth of capitalism, the state has always been the most legitimate source of normalization. Penal standards, for example, define who a criminal is; fiscal standards define who a defrauder is; and business standards define who a smuggler is. This power allowed the sovereign state to normalize and direct the flows—goods, money, soldiers, people—running through the social system. From that point on, capitalism became a matter of conquest as states sought to expand and bring new territories under their control. And with expansion came the idea of an “outside” and a “beyond,” of new idealized places where new societies could be invented from scratch. This was the era of utopia, when everything was within reach, as long as you were willing to fight against the sovereignty of the state and its desires to normalize every corner of the planet.
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The great discoveries created a rift between a territory and what lay outside it, and this rift is one of the factors that led to the emergence of the pirate organization.

Concrete Geography: Normalizing Natural Spaces

By the end of the nineteenth century, colonization brought most of the world’s land mass, including the Americas and the Indies, under European control.
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But, occasionally, organized bands would refuse to obey the sovereign. Antonio Conselheiro, a preacher, was the prototype of a renegade. At the end of the nineteenth century, he, along with his followers, rejected the rules of the Old Brazilian Republic and founded the city of Canudos in northeastern Brazil, which grew to a population of thirty thousand strong. The city took in people from all over the province of Bahia, including landless farmers, runaway slaves, prostitutes, criminals, indigenous peoples, and Métis—the majority of which were banished from the republic. Conselheiro’s band created new standards in Canudos, and the organized movement gave birth to a multitude of economic opportunities that did not come under the grip of the sovereign. A few years later, the Brazilian army attacked Canudos and massacred its people, who were in the process of becoming citizens of the Conselheiro autarkic community.

As a result of the great discoveries, states sought to normalize the new maritime routes, which opened an important chapter in the history of capitalism. During the seventeenth century, European powers issued charters to grant exclusive rights to international trade companies. These companies were created, financed, and armed by the state and were charged with organizing merchant trade from the East Indies (Southeast Asia and Oceania) and West Indies (Americas and Caribbean). In other words, these European states sought to create an economic advantage by taking control of commercial routes and normalizing them. Sovereigns used chartered companies to impose their norms upon the partially uncharted seas. Merchant organizations that refused to do business with any of these companies had to operate outside the monopolistic trade system controlled by the state. These merchants were pirates. Pursued by the navy, they set up refuge in maritime zones (Strait of Malacca, Caribbean Sea) or on land (Madagascar, Santo Domingo) abandoned by the Europeans. At this moment the first Golden Age of piracy began.

Aerial Geography: Normalizing the Analog Space

The rapid development of radio marks a similar story. Governments, especially in Great Britain, sensed that the airwaves represented a gray area that called for normalization. Shortly after the first experimental radio broadcast in 1906, states expanded their influence and imposed various levies on radio broadcasts. They granted authorization, required payments for licenses, and created rules for censorship, all of which provided the state with de facto control—economic, informational, cultural, and political—over radio. This normalization excluded many groups and individuals, and as a consequence, pirate radio was born. To escape regulations, pirate DJs would broadcast from a ship or an abandoned oil platform in international waters. This is how Radio Nordzee, a pirate radio station located on a maritime platform in the North Sea, reached the Dutch airwaves in 1963. A year later, the Dutch government claimed that the seabed below the platform was under state control, subject to its laws and regulations. A few days later, the marines and air force attacked the platform, putting an end to Radio Nordzee.

Virtual Geography: Normalizing the Digital Space

The rapid growth of the Internet is probably one of the most fascinating events in the history of capitalism. Since 1998, an American not-for-profit organization, ICANN, has been assigning Internet domain names and regulating the network of root servers that store and distribute the information on the web. ICANN, though, has been criticized at times for its links to the US government, which are not always apparent or transparent. Every country has the right to create its own standards for regulating content on servers located on its territory. Each country can also prevent the transfer of certain content from abroad to a local terminal within its borders. China, for instance, has mastered the art of filtering digital content that is accessible from its borders. This “overcoding” of content applies to both Chinese citizens and foreign tourists. Australia was the first Western democracy to set up this type of system, which, in addition to child pornography, filters from the web thousands of pages devoted to poker, euthanasia, anorexia, Satanism, and so forth. In Denmark, a spokesperson for an intellectual property lobby recently explained how child pornography is used by states and corporations alike to achieve a much broader objective: “Child pornography is great! It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file-sharing sites.”
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But some people reject the idea that private content should be subjected to government regulations—when public documents, such as government agency reports, are kept secret on protected servers.

Cyberpirates are organized groups that work to eliminate this marking of territory on the network by fragmenting the segmentation established by the state. The Legions of the Underground, founded in 1994, attacked Chinese filtering systems and temporarily deactivated the function that filtered out controversial content, including Amnesty International reports on China. After a number of Western countries accused the group of cyberterrorism, they stopped their attacks on the Chinese government to avoid criminal action. More recently, pirate organizations such as Anonymous and LulzSec have begun to wage war against several government organizations and multinational corporations in the name of net neutrality.