Raising Pirates

I’ve always been a troublemaker. It’s in my blood.

You see, through my father’s line, I am a descendant of Cornish pirates.

You may have heard of the Pirates of Penzance. The Gilbert & Sullivan opera was written about real pirates who harboured in a town named Penzance, at the southern tip of the United Kingdom. If you drive 15 minutes north from there, along the A30, you’ll come to a place called Carbis Bay.

That’s my namesake. I’m a Carbis.

Carbis Bay, nestled in the larger St. Ives Bay, faces the Celtic Sea. From here you can easily sail to Cork or Cardiff, Plymouth or Porto. It’s an excellent place for a seafarer to setup shop. And many did. Cornwall became known as a place of refuge for pirates.

An elaborate system of piracy was carried on intermittently during the whole of the [Elizabethan] reign… A few of their havens-one in Dorset, one in Cornwall, three or four in Ireland, and one or two in Wales-were immune from sudden attack. They were nearly always privately owned, some of them were never used for legitimate traffic, and they were all more or less secret.

No search was ever successful. In Cornwall and Wales it was impossible to muster such forces as the Crown controlled without arousing suspicion. No pirate captain was ever taken while unlading a cargo in secrecy, and it was above all the secure possession of these harbours that made the traffic successful.

The world needs troublemakers. Or, as Seth Godin puts it, people who “make things better by making better things”. The status quo is like an old freezer. It can get jammed, and sometimes needs a good shove to break the ice, so that it can open smoothly again.

Steve Jobs penned it beautifully, in the famous 1997 “Think Different” ad.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

This really resonated with me as a teenager. It was foundational. Another foundational text was the Hacker’s Manifesto (which in hind-sight is a little more angsty).

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

My pirate heritage has had plenty of opportunities to play out in my tech career. Standard software and media piracy, of course (information wants to be free, man!). The very spirit of open-source software is pirate-like. Taking fancy Spanish wine from Galleons and distributing it cheaply to the masses – is that really so different from what the internet did to IBM and Oracle?

Beyond that, breaking rules has defined my career. I’m known by friends and colleagues for ignoring expectations and experimenting with new ideas. I have little respect for ladder-based leadership (I don’t tend to do well at large companies) and embrace meritocracy – those who do the work get to decide. That’s been my history, but also the history of the tech sector. Tech has been taken over now by men in ties, but it was started by rebels and rogues with dirty jeans and dirtier hair.

In education, mischief is more important than ever. Our school systems reinforce conformity. It rewards students for the right answer, and punishes a better question. The world walks on tip-toes, hoping not to offend anyone. This stifles new ideas, hard questions, and growth.

It’s time we taught our children to make a ruckus. Our kids need to learn how to pursue their own goals, not some curriculum designed to make everyone think the same way. Let’s fly our skull-and-crossbones flag high, and raise wild, fearless, dangerous pirates.