CONCEPT
The Great Pirates
Fuller's name for the historical actors who
accumulated power through control of global infrastructure — from shipping routes to AI foundation models. The pattern that persists through every round of ephemeralization.
The Great Pirates, in Fuller's historical analysis, are the figures who accumulated power across centuries by controlling the infrastructure through which productive capability flowed. The first Great Pirates controlled the oceans, extracting rent from every agent who needed to move goods across water. Railroad barons controlled the rails. Oil magnates controlled the energy supply. Telecommunications monopolists controlled the wires. Each generation controlled the infrastructure of its era and used that control to extract disproportionate value from the productive population — not through force but through dependency, through the structural condition that productive agents could not function without the infrastructure the pirates controlled. AI infrastructure follows this pattern with accelerated precision: a small number of model providers, cloud platforms, and chip manufacturers occupy the positions the shipping magnates and railroad barons once held. Fuller argued the Great Pirates preferred that passengers of
Spaceship Earth remain ignorant of the ship's actual parameters; ignorant passengers compete for resources they believe scarce rather than organizing to demand comprehensive