The Other Hand of Empire is Piracy
My friend came up with an excellent aphorism that clarifies a lot of how the world works.
I’ve been quiet for a month due to life reasons, for which I won’t apologise because it would be weird to apologise, why would I even say that?
I don’t have time for a full-length missive to unpack the idea, but I saw that someone has written a book called Drug Cartels Do Not Exist and it reminded me of this aphorism that my friend came up with that runs through my head on at least a weekly basis.
Caveat: this is my interpretation of someone else’s thinking, so they may read what I’ve written and not agree at all, or wish that I had explained it differently.
We tend to view piracy and organised crime in general as standalone enterprises run by ruthless individuals or groups. The state, and its extended empire, may be partially corrupted by association but they are fundamentally two separate systems. Economically speaking, this is nonsense. The pirates are owned and financed by regular capitalists through much of the same systems of ownership and finance, sell their wares through black markets that the state chooses to overlook, and return profits to, and serve, the existing power structure.
Similar but different ideas
This could be a seen as a different perspective on the investigative guidance to “follow the money”, but the difference here is that this analysis says “this is how the system is intended to function, that terms like ‘corruption’ imply a kind of exceptionalism to what is a highly structured ecosystem”.
If one asks “Cui Bono” (asking who profits from an event) enough of organised crime, one approaches this insight.
Assorted Examples
Perhaps the majority of “advanced persistent threats” hacking groups are nominally “independent” from the states that provide them safe harbour and benefit from their destabilising activities in order to provide a kayfabe fig leaf to prevent their activities as being treated as open warfare.
The greatest pirate-town in the world, historically, has been the City of London, and its distribution of stolen plunder financed the British Empire.
The sudden loss-leading supply of free Bullshit Generation Machines to small-time reputation farmers and other hustlers is intended to flood the internet with bullshit in order to destroy the information commons, such that we can be collectively sold “solutions” like “AI detection” to a problem that the tech companies have created for us.
Anti-money laundering policy has been successfully designed not to work because if it did actually work it would hurt the capitalist owners that own the world. The continued existence of interzones and free ports is proof enough that our modern empires benefit from the pirate trade.
Summary
I wanted to get the aphorism out to the wider world so that people can start to see what a useful tool it is for analysing things. One could easily write a book on the subject, but this quick post will have to do.