In this conversational excerpt, Speaker A explains how emerging communication and transport technologies—such as radio broadcasting, high‑seas navigation, and the early internet—are initially governed by government‑created monopolies that set standards, licensing rules, and profit structures. These monopolies centralize control and enforce the rules that favor the state or designated entities. Speaker B asks how this dynamic unfolds, prompting Speaker A to describe a recurring historical pattern: a technological breakthrough opens a new territory, governments grant exclusive rights to the first movers, and anyone operating outside those rights is labeled a pirate. The discussion cites 17th‑century maritime trade routes, early pirate radio, and pre‑web internet telecommunications as examples where “pirates” (later hackers or cypherpunks) organized resistance against imposed monopolies. The dialogue frames piracy not as criminality but as organized opposition to centralization, highlighting the tension between state‑driven standardization and decentralized, disruptive innovators.
Chapters
When radio broadcasting started, we needed rules like what are the standards that are going to guide who is allowed to broadcast programming? Under what conditions can they create value, capture value, make a profit with it? Who has the right to do that? Who needs a license? Right? And you have this struggle over what rules should apply. And then typically a government will say, well, We're going to create an organization that will have a government monopoly. And this way we can very easily set the rules that we like and make sure that they are enforced because we are creating standardization by using a monopoly, which essentially centralizes an entire industry in its birth phase. And what I call with my co-author on the book, The Pirate Organization, piracy is organized resistance to this movement that basically centralizes new industries.
And so how is the— how does that happen? Like there is usually a technology, how I imagine it, there is a technological advance. For instance, now we can sail the seas and then it's like, oh, who controls them? So I think, is it usually like a technological advance and who gets there first usually? Is it the pirates or is it usually governments and states or institutions?
It happens at the same time, and that's the interesting pattern. Yes, there is usually a technological advance, and there is also the opening up of a new territory, right? So in the 17th century, it was the high seas that for the first time could be used through new navigation techniques to trade over very, very long distances and exchange goods. So there was a massive potential for value creation and no rules. So the rules that prevailed initially was Okay, if if like a crew was the first one to reach a particular place, we would give them ownership on that sea route and kind of assume that they discovered it and that they own it. So if you were the first real sailors to ship to sail from Amsterdam to Indonesia, well, the government would give you a monopoly on that route, and everyone else who tried to trade. goods around that route would be considered a pirate because they were in violation of a monopoly. So you had the same struggle at work on the airwaves in the early days of pirate radio, but you also had the same struggle on the early days of the internet, even before the age of the web, whereby there were monopolies on telecommunications that were basically helping governments gain control over this new territory, which was the internet, cyberspace. Mm-hmm. And that really helped them standardize the rules. But of course, a lot of people disagreed with those rules and they were called pirates or hackers.
