It's a timely question. Silicon Valley's pirate techies increasingly collide with public life. Reflecting on what actually might be going on today, I keep going back to Colin Woodard's The Republic of Pirates and Linda Colley's The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen. Read together, they reframe the early 1700s as a workshop of political technology, where discarded sailors and anxious empires were both running experiments on the basic operating system of collective life. Woodard's pirates were not the...