Neckbeard's Testament

Transcript of the final testimony by the defendant Neckbeard, facing charges of piracy in the Imperial Court at St. Garfield & Marmaduke, British West Indies, 1697:

Piracy! And by what right does the Honorable Court level such a charge? We’re all sinners here: what man is pure of heart enough to label another “pirate” merely because he doesn’t approve of the life the other lives, of the parrot on the other’s shoulder, of the thousands of unaccounted-for Spanish doubloons in the other’s cargo hold?

Pirates? We’re just entrepreneurs. Call us geeks, call us fanatics, call us ocean fanbois. But we’re not going to keep being pushed around by the jocks in His Majesty’s Navy.

That’s what this is really about: crushing startups before they can disrupt the market. The Hudson Bay Company doesn’t want us out here innovating leaner maritime commerce models. The Dutch East India Company is terrified by our agile, resilient port-to-port network. We work harder, we work smarter, we have more fun. We’ve found a better way and they know it.

For old economy drones like them, the ocean is just a job. They clock in, they ride around in their boats, they clock out. Maybe they play a little Battleship on the weekends. For us, the ocean is our home. It’s our community. We live it, eat it, sleep it, breathe it. Well, not literally breathe it, except for my good friend Blackgills Webb, Terror of Atlantis. Salt water isn’t just where we work. It runs in our veins (again, not literally, aside from Blackgills).

If I’m so evil, then why do they keep trying to buy me out? Why has His Majesty’s Navy made so many privateer offers? The big guys just want to suck up our tech, headhunt the key people from our team, and cast the rest of us into comfortable irrelevance. Sorry, I’m not settling for my own private island while you use my tech to conquer the Antilles. And that’s why I must be destroyed.

This Honorable Court will do as it pleases. A little band of scrappy upstarts can’t deny the will of the Crown. But I’ll tell you this: if you hang me just for being a disruptive geek, you won’t just be strangling me. You’ll be strangling innovation. And other innovative voices like mine, the voices of the 18th century economy, will be chilled into silence. Do you really want that on your hands?

Neckbeard was hanged eight minutes later.