A Pirate’s Life for Thee: Piracy in State Capitalism

Benjamin Studebaker

November 2, 2025

I have a weird little argument for you. There’s a new kind of piracy around, specific to state capitalism. These pirates aren’t sailing the seas – they’re traversing the series of tubes that lies underneath them. Instead of exploiting merchant shipping, they’re filling out online forms, exploiting the complex web of bureaucratic rules they’ve been trained to navigate. You might even be one of them.

But before we get into this new kind of piracy, let’s get clear about what the old kind of piracy was.

Where there is commercial society, there is piracy. The word “pirate” comes from the Greek, πειρατής, referring to those who “attempt” or “try.” These tryers were always mucking up Mediterranean shipping. There are two reasons to be a pirate:

1. There’s enough commercial activity that you can make a living by piracy.

2. There’s enough military activity that it’s possible to acquire pirate skills and a taste for the pirate’s life.

   
   

Invariably, states made the mistake of hiring mercenary sailors in times of war. When the wars end, the sailors are laid off. During a peace, there’s a lot of commercial activity and not much demand for the skills of mercenary seamen. But these young men signed up to be sailors. Some of them even paid a lot of money for expensive ships. On Greek ships, you need a lot of rowers, and the best rowers aren’t slaves – they’re skilled, they’re in great physical condition, and they’re committed to the cause. It’s the Greek cities that relied most heavily on the navy that developed democracy, to keep the rowers motivated and on-side. A pirate’s life therefore involves political possibilities – on a trireme, you can be somebody. Why return home, where you’ve got no land and little say?

No, these men aren’t going to go home and take up some other trade. They are going to keep rowing, and if that means they have to break the laws of the cities, so what? The penteconter is its own little polis. If the men on board vote to wage war at sea, how different is that from voting in an assembly on land?

The same kind of thing happened in early modernity. Early modern states hired seamen as privateers, giving them licenses to raid other states’ ships. When the wars ended, the licenses expired, but the young men on board the ships had no other skills, no other property, no familiarity with any other way of life. So, they started trying stuff.

Eventually, this gets out of hand. As Cassius Dio put it:

To such an extent did the power of the pirates grow that their hostility became a grave and constant menace, admitting of no precaution and knowing of no truce. The Romans, of course, heard of these deeds from time to time, and even saw a little of what was going on, inasmuch as imports in general ceased coming in and the corn supply was shut off entirely; but they paid no serious attention to it at the proper time. Instead, they would send out fleets and generals only as they were stirred by individual reports, but accomplished nothing; on the contrary, they caused their allies all the greater distress by these very means, until they were finally reduced to the last extremity. Then at length they came together and deliberated for many days as to what really should be done. Wearied by the continued dangers and perceiving that the war against the pirates would be a great and expensive one, and believing, too, that it was impossible to assail them all at once or yet individually, inasmuch as they helped one another and there was no way of driving them back everywhere at once, the people fell into great perplexity and despair of making any successful move. In the end, however, one Aulus Gabinius, a tribune, set forth his plan. He had either been prompted by Pompey or wished in any case to do him a favour; certainly he was not prompted by any love of the common welfare, for he was a most base fellow. His plan, then, was that they should choose from among the ex-consuls one general with full power against all the pirates, who should command for three years and have the use of a huge force, with many lieutenants. He did not directly utter Pompey's name, but it was easy to see that if once the populace should hear of any such proposition, they would choose him. And so it came about. 

Pompey divided the Mediterranean Sea into districts, distributing ships throughout the basin. Hoping to evade the Roman ships, the pirates holed up in the port cities they had subjugated. Pompey then attacked those port cities. Twenty thousand pirates were captured, and another ten thousand were killed.

What do you do with twenty thousand pirate captives? Plutarch tells us that Pompey set about resocializing them by giving them land:

The men themselves, who were more than twenty thousand in number, he did not once think of putting to death; and yet to let them go and suffer them to disperse or band together again, poor, warlike, and numerous as they were, he thought was not well. Reflecting, therefore, that by nature man neither is nor becomes a wild or an unsocial creature, but is transformed by the unnatural practice of vice, whereas he may be softened by new customs and a change of place and life; also that even wild beasts put off their fierce and savage ways when they partake of a gentler mode of life, he determined to transfer the men from the sea to land, and let them have a taste of gentle life by being accustomed to dwell in cities and to till the ground. Some of them, therefore, were received and incorporated into the small and half-deserted cities of Cilicia, which acquired additional territory; and after restoring the city of Soli, which had lately been devastated by Tigranes, the king of Armenia, Pompey settled many there. To most of them, however, he gave as residence Dyme in Achaea, which was then bereft of men and had much good land.

In early modernity, there was much less clemency, and certainly no land redistribution. The Piracy Act 1717 mandated that captured pirates serve as indentured servants for seven to fourteen years, depending on the severity of the piracy. Between thirty and fifty thousand convicts were forced to labor in the American colonies on this basis. The policy continued until the American Revolution. After that, the British switched locations, sending the convicts to Australia. Those that would not labor would hang, after trial in courts in which the pirates received no legal representation. The British also mandated that merchant ships attempt to resist the pirates by force, with a six-month imprisonment for those found to have surrendered without a fight.

European navies then professionalized. They stopped hiring private ships entirely. Without a steady supply of unemployed sailors with military experience, piracy declined. By the time commercial society developed into what came to be recognized as capitalism, piracy seemed to be relegated to underdeveloped parts of the world.

But I want to suggest something weird. In state capitalism, piracy comes back. In state capitalism, every kind of organization is legally defined and subjected to regulation. As the state creates all these rules, it needs to train a small army of people to write them, interpret them, enforce them, and to train other people to do these things. So, the university system is dramatically expanded and transformed. Instead of equipping you with the ability to choose your own ends, you are equipped with the job skills necessary to navigate bureaucratized spaces.

This becomes the fast track to the middle-class life. If you want all those things on the bourgeois checklist – a spouse, a house, an appropriate number of kidlets, the promise of a comfortable retirement, and an opportunity to move up the GM ladder (from Chevy, to Buick, to (formerly) Oldsmobile, and finally, to Cadillac), you have to receive the administrative training and take up a post in one of the many corporatized environments.

But, eventually, you get to a stage where nearly 40% of the population goes to university. The bureaucracies are saturated. If anything, there is an excess of applicants. Year after year, the universities churn out large numbers of people who are skilled, who are in great mental condition, and who are committed to the cause of becoming middle class. But increasingly, states and corporations don’t have a way to appropriately use them.

Still, these people have considerable skills. They are familiar with the state’s rules. Their knowledge of them allows them to avoid tax, to protect themselves from lawsuits, and get away with forms of behavior that would otherwise be prohibited. So, they start grifting on the internet, coming up with cunning ways of scamming people out of their time and money. Sometimes they get involved in charities, churches, or labor unions. Often, they sell various forms of snake-oil – cryptocurrencies, meme stocks, carbon offsets, diversity consultation, large language models, evangelical Christianity, or radical politics. They claim to be motivated by some moral or political cause, but they are motivated principally by a desire to lead a middle-class life in a context in which the usual routes are not readily available.

They are railed against, morally, as grifters, but they are really just a new kind of pirate. Pirates are not principally a moral problem. They are what happens when the state trains people to do a thing and then declines to hire them to do that thing. They are what happens when bad administration meets a vibrant commercial economy. When the state gives people skills that don’t fit the situation it creates, they do not go get retrained. They find ways to use the skills they’ve been given to get their slice of the pie, even if they have to resort to unsociable means.

Now, people sometimes make the opposite kind of mistake. Instead of condemning the pirates, they romanticize them. They point out that the pirates are more democratic and less bound by social norms. They are queer, they do things differently, and therefore they are alleged to be radical. Pirates are not radical. Many of them die young. They don’t pose any serious threat to the state. Usually, the state tolerates them because it’s annoying and expensive to get rid of them. But if pirates become a big enough problem, the state deals with them.

This fate is shared by the pirates of state capitalism, too. If pirates start to get somewhere online with their little schemes, the algorithms are changed to put a stop to it. After all, all the algorithms that govern what you can find on the internet belong to corporations. It’s not very difficult to change them in a way that destroys economic models. In state capitalism, nobody has to go and capture pirates. The pirates simply discover that they can’t get the clicks anymore. They’re left to wonder if they’ve become old, if they’ve lost touch with their audiences. They can never be entirely sure that they were shadow banned, that their reach was restricted, that the notifications they sent out stopped coming through, or what have you. There’s no Pompey Magnus to hide from, just a nebulous fear of something that cannot be pinned down. And then there’s the shame, the terrible uncoolness, of no longer being able to speak to the kids. Cringe.

So, nobody gives the pirates anything else to do – they don’t become indentured servants or get administrative posts in the small and half-deserted cities of the Midwest. They are left to see if they are adaptable enough to sort out the new rules. Can they figure out how the search engines work now? Can they pivot from Wordpress to Substack, from Facebook to Instagram to TikTok, from YouTube to Twitch and then YouTube again? Can they keep trying stuff? Do they have it in them to hustle and grind?

In the meantime, the items on the middle-class checklist drift ever further from the realm of possibility. There will be no spouse or house, no kidlets or Cadillac. It’s sink or sail, unless, out of the very worst kind of despair, they choose to be hung by the neck until they are dead.