The Pirate Organization: Lessons From the Fringes of Capitalism (6 page)

Invisible Geography: Normalizing Infinite Spaces

The territories upon which capitalism expands do not have to be as tangible as land or the oceans. At both extremes of the visibility spectrum, the infinitely small and the infinitely large represent the future of capitalism. From genetic engineering and nanotech to space exploration, there remain several areas where the sovereign code has yet to apply. Who may modify living organisms and in the name of what? At which conditions? Who may make a profit out of it? Can organizations claim ownership of synthetic genetic sequences? Or should genetic material be considered a common good of mankind? Should all research results be made public? The question was posed recently when a modified H5N1 flu virus with high lethality for humans was engineered by a team of Dutch scientists. And, unsurprisingly, no consensual answer emerged.

The first animal—a tadpole—was cloned in 1952. At the same time, Francis Crick and James Watson uncovered the double-helical structure of the DNA molecule, thus creating the first map of a new biogenetic territory. In 1997, Dolly the sheep became the first mammal successfully cloned. As a result, scientists began to explore the possibility of cloning humans. For several years now, organizations made up of biopirates have been trying to gain a foothold in DNA research.

Although there is no serious scientific proof that a human being has ever been cloned, several well-known biopirates are working on it. DNA, in fact, is a gray area, as nearly fifty countries have yet to legislate about the cloning of humans. DNA, therefore, remains open to exploitation. Take the Clonaid project, which was launched by the Raelian sect, shortly after the birth of Dolly. For many years, Clonaid has developed a number of services related to human cloning. Due to the scientific and legal uncertainties of the project, the name of the company behind the project has been kept secret to protect its clients’ anonymity. The Raelian Cloning Clinic was originally set up in the Bahamas, but due to political pressure from the French government, Clonaid moved its facility to an unspecified country in which human cloning is not explicitly outlawed. With its temporary subsidiaries in several countries, including South Korea, Israel, the United States, and Brazil, the organization is said to have many clients who are ready to pay $200,000 to clone a loved one who died too young or to clone themselves in order to achieve immortality (metaphorically, to say the least). In late 2002, Clonaid announced the birth of the first human clone. Since then, others have made similar announcements without providing scientific proof. But isn’t it only a matter of time before human cloning makes it to newspaper headlines as a fact rather than as a sci-fi cliché?

At the other end of the spectrum, the space race, started in the aftermath of the Second World War, is an ongoing normalization process. The states have yet to make stars and planets into normalized sovereign territories (in this context, planting a flag on the Moon seems trivial in retrospect). If we look at recent developments in the Brazilian, Indian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean space programs, it seems that space will be to the twenty-first century what the high seas were to the modern age.

Space, however, is not an unregulated territory. The Outer Space Treaty (1967) outlaws a sovereign state from claiming ownership over the Moon or other planets, but the treaty did not address private entities, like large companies subsidized by a state. Even so, the state does not need to “own” a territory in order to normalize it (i.e., the modern state does not “own” the airwaves). If an organization like the West India Company were landing on the Moon in a few years, we would not know what norms should govern its activities. The Outer Space Treaty sought to clarify this issue by declaring all space-related resources as the “common property of humanity.” Uncertainties remain. Is it first come, first served? If so, will we live long enough to interview the first space pirates? No surprise, a handful of privately owned companies appear to have taken a small step forward, offering their clients the opportunity to buy an ownership certificate for the star of their choice. This brings to mind the golden age of conquest on the maritime routes, except that, today, none of these private companies control an intergalactic military fleet—and fortunately so. Still, it is only a matter of time before states and private organizations compete for the exploitation of space resources. In 2012, Google founder Larry Page, Microsoft’s chief software engineer Charles Simonyi, and a few other investors announced their funding of Planetary Resources, a space exploration start-up whose purpose is mining natural resources from asteroids. A few weeks later, SpaceX became the first private company to send cargo into space. For SpaceX founder Elon Musk, this is just a first step, the ultimate objective being the settlement of human colonies on Mars in the coming decades.

Territorial Normalization and the Pirate Organization

Every territorial expansion starts with a power struggle between the sovereign state and its contenders. The expansion into new territories usually begins with a period of warfare. States acquire control of a territory through the use of their armies. European states armed their Indies companies to normalize the oceans. The birth of cyberspace owes much to military research, which in the late 1960s financed the Arpanet project, the precursor of the Internet. The space race was fed by the Cold War, but it recently regained momentum after China made clear that manned missions to the Moon and Mars were high on its geopolitical agenda. On every territory, the state seeks to delimit, prepare the ground, draw boundaries, and define trade practices. A norm draws a line in our social space. Essentially, norms allow us to categorize behaviors into two groups: acceptable behaviors that follow the norm and unacceptable behaviors that do not. The process of normalization codes behavior based on an inclusion/exclusion. So, whenever an effort is made to normalize people’s behavior, it pushes some people to the fringe. These people live within a territory, but they reject its standards. They live on the outside. They cross the line of inclusion. These renegades are “abnormal”; they are traitors in a sense, public enemies. They are confronted with a dilemma: to face stiff penalties and finally accept the norm, or to flee from the normalized territory and colonize another space with an alternative set of norms.

Conselheiro’s band, the community of sailors that settled in Madagascar, Radio Nordzee, the Legions of the Underground, and the clandestine organizations working on human cloning have something of a family likeness. Working behind the scenes, these renegades run counter to the normalization process that the modern state seeks to impose every time a new territory is created. In fact, these bands share much more than a family likeness: they are all pirate organizations.

What Is the Pirate Organization?

We want to emphasize the significance of organizations in the making and workings of society, beyond the heroic and tutelary clichés about extraordinary individuals. The entrepreneur, the passionate militant, or the pirate of the Caribbean are only figures, inert masks driven by active social forces, groups, and communities. Instead of speculating about individual motives, we prefer analyzing organizational purposes, roles, actions, and outcomes. Instead of praising entrepreneurial geniuses, we prefer the concrete evaluation of networks of influence, of the organizational culture and routines, strategies, and resources—in a nutshell, the organizations that they helped create or managed.

What would Bill Gates have become without his contacts at Harvard University, his contract with IBM, and the code he adapted from Apple’s early research (itself an adaptation from Xerox’s research)? And would WikiLeaks really be an empty shell without Julian Assange? The organization has developed sophisticated cryptographic technologies that, combined with an impressive network of partners across the world and a deep understanding of today’s digital world, have made it attractive to both whistle-blowers and media outlets. Therefore, WikiLeaks as a pirate organization and Microsoft as a doomed quasi-monopolistic corporation cannot be reduced to their individual leaders. What pushes thousands of individuals that cross the limits of normalization to form crews, fleets, communities, and societies to fight the organized (and illegitimate in their eyes) appropriation of new spaces by territorialized states?

What is striking is the constant stubbornness to dismiss this large fringe from the social or economic reality in order to simplify and reduce the analysis sometimes on mass phenomena (globalization), sometimes on supposedly all-powerful individuals (Steve Jobs). We talk about the trends in society—the emancipation of women, urbanization, and political radicalization—but rarely about the organizations that allow these phenomena to spread into the social system. We evoke certain people as being on the forefront of social change: Johannes Gutenberg, Thomas Edison, and Coco Chanel invented book printing, the lightbulb, and haute couture, respectively. But what is really important is the implementation of specific organizations that result in the ideas of some becoming replicable and replicated social realities. Of the thousands of new ideas that emerge every day on the surface of the Earth, only a few will ever gain enough traction to become actual innovations or social facts. And eventually, those will modify the code. But their diffusion could not happen without the support of powerful organizations—whether they are for-profit corporations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), industry associations, government bodies, or pirate organizations. Think about this: Would we have Blu-ray without the efforts of the Blu-ray Disc Association, led by Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Philips, and a few others? And how popular would the MP3 standard be today without Napster’s pirates, who managed to attract 25 million active users to their peer-to-peer online platform between 1999 and 2001? Norms do not travel on their own.

By
organization
, we mean social groups that control resources, work toward objectives, establish transactions or links with other social entities, and develop strategies to reach these goals.
⁵
An organization can focus on profit and shareholders (corporation); it can be not-for-profit (association); it can be local or international (club or union), completely exclusive or inclusive (social network). Every organization has a set of inherent values that materialize in concrete forms and structures. They can be more or less in line with the state of a given society at a given time. For example, the creation of the bureaucratic organization, as defined by Max Weber, is based on skill, the depersonalization of roles, the specialization of administrative work, and the end of promotions based solely on bloodlines. The aims of an organization may benefit a small minority or a great majority. Financial, human, and technical resources can provide an organization with certain advantages, or, on the contrary, they can hinder its growth. Organizations embed themselves in society via the networks to which their members belong, which can provide them with, or deprive them of, the necessary legitimacy to carry out their actions. The principles of authority and management largely affect an organization’s ability to internally set and reach its specific objectives.

The pirate organization promotes values that run counter to the norms of the state. It acts on the fringes of capitalism, in the gray areas in which norms are not fully established and where the sovereign is unsure of actions it should encourage or discourage. The pirate organization, generally, intervenes when a sovereign first maps a territory for expansion (i.e., when the first globes were created in the sixteenth century or the human genome was mapped in the twenty-first century). The pirate organization worms its way into the sovereign state and navigates between its borders. It challenges the sovereign’s control. But the pirate organization does not seek to overthrow and replace the system in place; rather, it seeks to challenge widespread norms. The pirate organization is not a revolutionary movement per se, but rather a movement that appears whenever new territories are created, and does so out of view.

The pirate organization is a social group that controls people, resources, channels of communication, and modes of transportation (for people, goods, capital, or just information). It maintains trade relations with other communities, other groups, sometimes other states, and often legitimate companies. To reach its goals, it develops new strategies that favor speed and surprise. Its goal is to adapt and improvise, to develop the appropriate means to deal with its enemy. In order to protect itself, it operates from hidden locales outside a sovereign territory. To grow, it appeals to a desire for discovery; it seeks to control parts of a territory and claims certain rights to it. To attract recruits, it plays up its outsider status, and it makes change seem possible. As long as the state strengthens its hold on norms, the pirate organization is ensured a flood of new members who feel marginalized by society.

The pirate organization proliferates in the presence of a state. This is what differentiates it from a criminal gang, which prospers when the local norms are relaxed or contain loopholes, or when the state ceases to exist in its sovereign form. What is the difference between Somali bandits who use fishing boats to attack commercial ships and their fellow countrymen who extort money from peasants? We would never think to call an extortionist a pirate—with good reason—but the members of the first group are not pirates either. Traveling in a boat does not make a pirate out of a bandit. The pirate organization, therefore, does not necessarily fit into the everyday use of the word
pirate
. Similarly, Internet users who illegally download copyrighted content are not pirates (again, this is seen from our perspective). But certainly, some of the organizations that make sure copyrighted content is freely available online would qualify as pirate organizations.