Ars Book Review: “The Pirate’s Dilemma”: Page 1

The strength of street knowledge

The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism (buy)
Matt Mason (blog)
240 pages
Free Press

When a former UK pirate DJ writes a book on piracy and uses an
epigraph from Dr. Dre (“You are now about to witness the strength of
street knowledge”), you’d be forgiven for expecting an anarchist’s
screed. But Matt Mason’s recent book, The Pirate’s Dilemma, isn’t some
mimeographed broadsheet written by a bomb-thrower; published by Simon
& Schuster in the US and by Penguin in the UK, the book
has a more complicated vision than “Copyright bad! Piracy good!” As the subtitle
makes clear, this is a book about “How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism,” not
about how it is replacing the market with an anarcho-socialist commune.