Post Modern Piracy

 

Image Copilot generated

I got an email message yesterday informing me that my “investment” had already increased to $861.53 and was about to double, then directed me to some email or phone action to take advantage of this doubling. I may be an octogenarian, but that doesn’t make me a babbling moron. I immediately identified it as a pirate ship coming alongside my rusting and slow schooner to rob me of some of my meager cargo.

It used to be that economies would cough up surplus manpower through land shortage for farming, seasonal unemployment, or whatever factory owners’ whims dictated. No job meant no food. The temptation to remedy that led many men to join privateer ships, which were licenced to support navies in a mercenary capacity. Almost inevitably, these crews’ skills equipped them to enrich themselves, a temptation too powerful to pass up. Moral scruples abandoned, they attacked and plundered cargo ships in the knowledge that valuable goods, not peanut shells, merit transporting across perilous oceans. The best of the pirate crews amassed astounding wealth in the form of gold, jewels, and cash.

The Blackbeard of our day may well have been Bernie Madoff, who skillfully plundered thousands of ships with a weapon called a Ponzi Scheme. You can do piracy without a tricorn hat, a peg leg and an untrimmed beard, apparently; this pirate wore a suit and tie and looked like any businessman.

Piracy is a category of theft, obviously, and theft is the seizure by force or stealth of the earned wealth of other people. Piracy at sea is rare, but what we’re seeing today is piracy using public media (especially the internet) to plunder others’ wealth. The computer doubles nicely as a stealthy pirate ship, one glaring difference being that children are allowed to captain the ship, choose the targets and often are far more skilled in navigation arts than the general population. (They also make easy targets for more skilled internet pirates.)

Mostly, we’re smart enough not to give our four-year-olds matches as playthings. But we will give them our phones to play on before they start school, virtually connecting them to anyone and everyone. The biggest, stupidest excuse for our failure to regulate children’s involvement in social media and the internet, I think, is the false premise that real freedom includes anonymity. “Wow, I can call the president an idiot, and no one knows it’s me!”

I suggest six changes we could make to help curtail piracy in the virtual world:

ü  That access to the public internet be licensed, like driving a car, and that rigorous training for its responsible use be taught in schools at ca. age 16. Persons too young to be eligible for www licensing could carry a simple phone with approximate land line capability only.

ü  That every social media comment, every announcement, ad, news report include the license number of the person or entity posting it, automatically, and that identities be searchable through license numbers.

ü  That private social media be established that are self-managed and only open to invited persons or by application. (Like refined Facebook groups but without any corporate involvement other than a chosen hosting/technical maintenance centre.)

ü  That advertising be prohibited from intruding on any information content, all advertising runs on  topical websites to which customers click access.

ü  That subscription to and licensing to use the world wide web, email, search capability, texting, etc. be on a user-pay basis to replace the mountain of advertising revenue foregone. 

ü  That the deliberate dissemination of false information be classified as fraud and be subject to the same penalties.

The response to such suggestions is likely to follow the pattern we’ve become used to. Knowing that nuclear fission could destroy us all, we have yet to stop perfecting more and more threatening devices of that kind as deterrents, while plowing ahead with a politic that fosters conflict instead of patiently negotiating differences.

As long as living like yesterday remains easier than changing course, the libertine internet will probably continue to move in the current trajectory until we are all either pirates or victims. AI—on top of whatever we’ve already experienced via the technology explosion and its abuse—has the potential to complete the conquest of human will and freedom of choice. (The image up top was created by copilot following my specific instructions; I could have sent in a picture of you and told it to make your face the pirate face.)

But we’ll do it anyway. Just because we can. And because there are mountains of money to be pirated with impunity.

Some AI content

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