In the disintermediation between industrial and digital, faults and gates inevitably open-up. Walking through them is dangerous, but also inevitable. If someone decide not to, someone else will. It is the space of pirates, subjects who operate beyond the rules or who self-produce their own rules and succeed in imposing them globally. Global means beyond the subsistent nation or state form.
At the stage where we are, these pirates can even have names. Their names are Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and others. Each in their own way can be considerate pirates, as it happens within piracy. Pirates has not necessarily a negative sense. It simply means that they are actors who operate beyond the established system. As entrepreneurs, they are little connected to the production system, cynically using what the State can offer (on various issues from financial to legal sector). They always cynically drain what the university produces in terms of research. However, they do not bind at all to universities (some of them – I suspect – have not even graduated or, at the very least, their possible degrees are completely insignificant compared to their entrepreneurial activity). Moreover, if they need a phase of financial accumulation, they will set up banks by themselves.
Reforming this system would mean, on the one hand, winning over pirates (which is now impossible). On the other hand, it would mean recomposing the different aggregations of interests and systemic functionality by reviewing the entire production and decision-making apparatus, functions, roles and powers. It is complicated, to say the least. In particular, we should follow the flow that, starting from the generative cell, which I consider in any case the capacity for innovation /development from whatever entity arrives, has led to successive phases of bargaining with the working class, which has opened up the spaces of welfare, up to the progressive strengthening of the tertiary sector inside and outside companies. Moreover, this flow further opens up to the advanced tertiary sector, that acts on the complex and widespread networks of services which are increasingly crucial in the formation and production of values not only economic, but also social.
If only, it is clear that since much time we are no longer in the product society, but in the service society.
Pirates know how to navigate the great sea of digital. And us?
