How we've evolved from a wild, semi-governed society with trade under constant threat of robbery & heists to a world where highwaymen and pirates are actually quite rare.
This made me think about cybercrime, mostly. We don't have a lot of highway robberies, partly because we rarely ship expensive material goods through uncontrolled territories. We move money through the internet! And if I was going to ship a boatload of diamonds, I would probably fly it between two very secure airports.
On the other hand, cyberattacks, including phishing, are comparatively rampant. Also, kind of like naval piracy, there is a lot of complicated discussions about rival governments and whether or not those rings get support from the (for example) Russian government, even if it is just tacit lack of care.
Beyond that, Avery's story reminded me of a lot of modern criminal stories: he was very competent at a select set of weird things, but he also just ... didn't think through how to liquidate his diamonds? But, also, how many large crime documentaries follow the pattern of someone being really smart until they aren't? And, in a particular set of irony, this made me think of Ross Ubricht and The Silk Road, wherein his downfall was in trying to unsucessfully hire a hitman because of money & criminals, which just seems like the sort of trouble that Avery would have gotten into.
Excellent point! I should have thought of cyber crime and totally didn't. Especially in the era of Bitcoin and the weirdness around cryptocurrencies, their quasi-legal regulatory situation, the gray markets they enable, and the Eastern European organized crime syndicates and the difficulty we have in dealing with it. Even sci-hub and the extradition treaty stuff has interesting parallels with ancient piracy, which duh obvious when you think about it, we even call it modern day piracy! But I wasn't really thinking through the fullness of the metaphor.
I'm so glad we're reading this together, I'm getting way more out of this book than I would have otherwise.
Yeah, going back to privateering, government sponsored cyberattacks can be gnarly. And I feel like the regular people get caught in the middle, much like the merchants that weren't active participants in the wars.
The concept of trust as the factor for pirate society is interesting, however I’m always struck by how much infrastructure and society pirates are portrayed as needing. There’s always a safe port where booty is traded for supplies (necessary and not). Those operating these ports seem to not fear for themselves or their livelihood. This could be a Robin Hood like portrayal where the “poor” don’t fear those who steal from the “rich,” buy I’m not sure.
Modern day crime seems to almost disproportionately affect the poor rather than the rich. They have less to lose and often can only be robbed of their person (labor, life, etc.) and not just their booty. While it is possible this is just ignored by our narrator given his lens, it feels unlikely.
It is highly likely that those of us participating in this reading are more likely pirate targets than pirates or pirate “friends.”
On the subject of safe ports, I know a little bit about this because I've lived in Maryland my whole life. On an elementary school field trip we went to Saint Mary's City, which is where I later went to college and, more importantly for this anecdote, the original state capital. The capital was moved to Annapolis when the government got fed up with how much tax evasion and smuggling the St Mary's City folks were indulging in. St. Mary's City thought that they were too important a port for this to be an issue, but it turns out that most shipping prefers to be legitimate, and St. Mary's City ended up fading into a historic site with nothing more than a church, a college, and an archaeological dig site.
I came across this news article today. [1] In short, $1.4 million of Switch 2 consoles were stolen from the back of a semi truck either at a rest stop or the one before. It's on land, but it happened on a known shipping route. That's a decent haul for any crew that pulled it off. Does that count as piracy?
What is the difference between piracy and robbery? Is piracy only at sea? Does it have to involve a ship? What about a crew in any form of transportation? A crew at all? Do they have to be rebelling against the government and living on the fringe of society?
I agree that our economy is a lot better now and piracy, or even crime in general, isn't a natural choice to turn to. Which it kind of was for some of those pirates.
I think the difference between piracy and robbery is one of those things where there's a "legal" term and a "common meaning" that's a little separate. Sort of like privateering, I suspect reasonable people can disagree. I get the sense (from the dictionary) that piracy is a subset of robbery -- "robbery on the high seas." Separately, it can also refer to "the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception, especially in infringement of a copyright" in the modern-day "pirating music" sense. I'm not really sure how related the terms are.
But as for your specific example about the switches getting stolen from the back of a semi-truck, the lack of violence makes it more of a "heist" to me. I think robbery definitionally includes force or the thread of force, which is what makes it separate from "regular" theft.
This made me think about cybercrime, mostly. We don't have a lot of highway robberies, partly because we rarely ship expensive material goods through uncontrolled territories. We move money through the internet! And if I was going to ship a boatload of diamonds, I would probably fly it between two very secure airports.
On the other hand, cyberattacks, including phishing, are comparatively rampant. Also, kind of like naval piracy, there is a lot of complicated discussions about rival governments and whether or not those rings get support from the (for example) Russian government, even if it is just tacit lack of care.
Beyond that, Avery's story reminded me of a lot of modern criminal stories: he was very competent at a select set of weird things, but he also just ... didn't think through how to liquidate his diamonds? But, also, how many large crime documentaries follow the pattern of someone being really smart until they aren't? And, in a particular set of irony, this made me think of Ross Ubricht and The Silk Road, wherein his downfall was in trying to unsucessfully hire a hitman because of money & criminals, which just seems like the sort of trouble that Avery would have gotten into.
Excellent point! I should have thought of cyber crime and totally didn't. Especially in the era of Bitcoin and the weirdness around cryptocurrencies, their quasi-legal regulatory situation, the gray markets they enable, and the Eastern European organized crime syndicates and the difficulty we have in dealing with it. Even sci-hub and the extradition treaty stuff has interesting parallels with ancient piracy, which duh obvious when you think about it, we even call it modern day piracy! But I wasn't really thinking through the fullness of the metaphor.
I'm so glad we're reading this together, I'm getting way more out of this book than I would have otherwise.
Yeah, going back to privateering, government sponsored cyberattacks can be gnarly. And I feel like the regular people get caught in the middle, much like the merchants that weren't active participants in the wars.
The concept of trust as the factor for pirate society is interesting, however I’m always struck by how much infrastructure and society pirates are portrayed as needing. There’s always a safe port where booty is traded for supplies (necessary and not). Those operating these ports seem to not fear for themselves or their livelihood. This could be a Robin Hood like portrayal where the “poor” don’t fear those who steal from the “rich,” buy I’m not sure.
Modern day crime seems to almost disproportionately affect the poor rather than the rich. They have less to lose and often can only be robbed of their person (labor, life, etc.) and not just their booty. While it is possible this is just ignored by our narrator given his lens, it feels unlikely.
It is highly likely that those of us participating in this reading are more likely pirate targets than pirates or pirate “friends.”
Unrelatedly, I love quotation marks today.
On the subject of safe ports, I know a little bit about this because I've lived in Maryland my whole life. On an elementary school field trip we went to Saint Mary's City, which is where I later went to college and, more importantly for this anecdote, the original state capital. The capital was moved to Annapolis when the government got fed up with how much tax evasion and smuggling the St Mary's City folks were indulging in. St. Mary's City thought that they were too important a port for this to be an issue, but it turns out that most shipping prefers to be legitimate, and St. Mary's City ended up fading into a historic site with nothing more than a church, a college, and an archaeological dig site.
I came across this news article today. [1] In short, $1.4 million of Switch 2 consoles were stolen from the back of a semi truck either at a rest stop or the one before. It's on land, but it happened on a known shipping route. That's a decent haul for any crew that pulled it off. Does that count as piracy?
What is the difference between piracy and robbery? Is piracy only at sea? Does it have to involve a ship? What about a crew in any form of transportation? A crew at all? Do they have to be rebelling against the government and living on the fringe of society?
I agree that our economy is a lot better now and piracy, or even crime in general, isn't a natural choice to turn to. Which it kind of was for some of those pirates.
[1] https://www.9news.com/article/news/crime/nintendo-switch-theft-truck-colorado/73-27ca5808-6901-4229-b1b4-4862c73b300b
I think the difference between piracy and robbery is one of those things where there's a "legal" term and a "common meaning" that's a little separate. Sort of like privateering, I suspect reasonable people can disagree. I get the sense (from the dictionary) that piracy is a subset of robbery -- "robbery on the high seas." Separately, it can also refer to "the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception, especially in infringement of a copyright" in the modern-day "pirating music" sense. I'm not really sure how related the terms are.
But as for your specific example about the switches getting stolen from the back of a semi-truck, the lack of violence makes it more of a "heist" to me. I think robbery definitionally includes force or the thread of force, which is what makes it separate from "regular" theft.