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Piracy: Cutthroat capitalism or response to an enviro-exploitation disaster?

Dragging my net on WorldChanging and Wired for a recent research project, I stumbled across Wired’s flash game “Cutthroat Capitalism”. The game lets you “simulate” a Somali pirate interacting with the world as if through a Tamagotchi, as “economic man” usually is, balancing hostage health and trust with threat to their safety to negotiators. The game claims that pirates “are not just buccaneers — they’re businessmen,” as if Somali pirates metaphorically presage what dangers await us all when capitalism goes awry.

Well, the might be right but not how they think. Rather than capitalism gone awry, some argue that the Somali pirates are a response to globalized capitalism and the absence of governance in the face of European toxic waste dumping off the Somali coast (see
The Huffington Post’s article by a Somalian writing about these issues).

In short, the pirates may be a capitalistic response to “legitimate” forms of capitalism, rather than Other to them.

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