IP theft; Fake Carbon Footprints; Renunciative Buddhism
"O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
machines + society
Mako Shen | May 1, 2021
Source: Bruegel, Pieter. The Misanthrope.
I don’t have an overarching concept or essay I’d like to explore this month. Instead, I’ll present a couple different threads of thought that I’d had bottled up but which were not well suited to longform thought.
On intellectual property theft
November last year, U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo authored a report that claimed, among other things, that China's IP theft was "the greatest illegitimate transfer of wealth in human history". Chinese espionage is huge in the U.S., but Pompeo’s statement is funny, given history.
Putting aside various invasions/colonizations (see the horror of the Invasion of the Spice Islands in Indonesia, and more generally the British colonization of India), U.S. industry was itself founded on corporate espionage. If this sounds like a hot take— it really isn’t.
As far as I can tell, there is pretty strong consensus among historians that the Industrial Revolution was kicked off in the U.S. thanks to the (illegal) importation of British textile machinery designs. Samuel Slater is the man at the center of the story.
Slater, dubbed “Father of the American Industrial Revolution” by President Andrew Jackson, was born in Derbyshire, England. After hearing about a job opportunity in Providence, he bought a ticket aboard a ship to the United States. Because of the very harsh penalties for intellectual property theft at the time, Slater purportedly memorized the blueprints for cotton spinning machines and brought no paper for the British port authorities to find. Slater’s machines then laid the foundation of the textile industry in the U.S., which was essential for it to become the economic hegemony that it is now. He was hailed as an American hero. Meanwhile, back in Derbyshire, he apparently became known as “Slater the Traitor”. Though according to the BBC, his home town now enjoys a close economic relationship with New England.
In 19th century Europe, when intellectual property law was being pioneered, there was this concept — the patent of importation. It was a rule that legally protected people like Samuel Slater who would bring in ideas from foreign countries, regardless of if they were the inventors.
Nations will act to insure first their survival, and next their economic development. The political scientist John Mearsheimer formulates this as ‘a drive to achieve regional hegemony’. This simple principle explains patents of importation and the apparent hypocrisy of the U.S. in decrying Chinese IP theft. In the game of nations, discussion of ethics is typically just another tool in the arsenal.
Software Does Not Have Zero Marginal Cost
I routinely see commentators on the internet (even those that I really admire, like Stratechery’s Ben Thompson) say something like “the marginal cost of software is $0”.
What they mean is that since software is digitally encoded in bits, and it costs essentially nothing to move bits around on a computer, that each additional copy of a program like Safari is free. Thompson uses this to explain why the natural price of undifferentiated software falls to $0.
Yet I think this reasoning ignores two types of critical marginal costs involved in the production and use of software.
The first is the temporal cost— also known as bit rot. As everyone who’s ever built a piece of software knows, a big challenge is keeping your software up to date. Only a small fraction of the early internet sites are still functional. Software dependencies change, and it becomes increasingly difficult to support the functionality of old code. A reliable heuristic is that the more your software relies on others’, the faster the bit rot.
Just to keep your software functional as it is, you have to refactor your code, change import statements, and ensure that new browsers or devices don’t have have usability issues. These are non-negligible temporal maintenance costs in software production.
The second is marginal user cost. Putting aside the distribution costs (AWS hosting fees, for instance), each additional piece of software means an additional user. And so more customer support is required. Does your new Android device have problem playing Candy Crush? That could easily become a couple hours of developer time. Each additional customer may add a relatively small overhead, but try telling me with a straight face that the maintenance cost for your million-user app is the same as my crappy three-user research code.
Software’s marginal cost is orders of magnitude lower than physical goods— and is subject to very different scaling laws. The idea that it is precisely zero, though, can prevent people from understanding certain dynamics in technology production. Let’s think about the temporal and marginal user costs in these conversations.
Three major ways that the public has been exploited by effective advertising:
“The concept of the ‘personal carbon footprint’ was popularized by BP in a 2005 media campaign… [that] deflected responsibility for climate change away from the corporation and onto the individual consumer.” [Paper, tweet]
North Americans have such a strong gun culture in large part because of the propaganda by gun companies. Companies such as Winchester Repeating Arms were declining due to the end of the highly profitable civil war, and so mounted a hugely successful effort to turn the gun into a political and social symbol.
The ‘feminization’ of cigarettes in the 1920s led to a massive increase in sales of cigarettes as well as huge cultural persistence. That shot of Uma Thurman on the cover of Pulp Fiction smoking a cigarette — cigarettes being a significant component of the 90’s female sex symbol — can arguably be traced back to the Lucky Strike campaign.
📰 Assorted Links 📰
Renunciation is the Vehicle for Most of Buddhism. Chapman talks about just how radical traditional Buddhist scripture is. From Chogye Rinpoche: “Consider a person who has a sickness that causes vomiting. As soon as he sees something revolting, he will immediately retch uncontrollably. This is how you should feel toward conditioned existence, a sense of revulsion rather than attraction.” This is a big part of why I am turning away from Mahayana/Therevada practices and inclining towards Vajrayana.
Tyler Cowen interviews Dana Gioia about poetry, business, the most underrated museums in the world.
COWEN: Do you, like Auden, crave a social function for poetry?
GIOIA: I think poetry has a social function but it’s a relatively complicated and subtle one, which is to say, the reason that we have art is, in a sense, to increase human happiness. It does that, essentially, on an individual level. A work of art awakens you. It awakens you to the possibilities of your own potential. It takes that potential, it enlarges it, it refines it, and each art does it in different ways. Music appeals to the auditory sense, an organizational, formal structure in the mind. Painting is visual. Sculpture is visual and tactile. In the old days, people always would feel sculptures. Poetry is to our language and our emotional functions. They awaken emotions and awaken our ability to articulate them.
Ezra Klein interviews Noam Chomsky. Mainly about society. Very provocative; recommended.
EZRA KLEIN: You’re an anarchist. How do you define anarchism?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Anarchism, the way I understand it, is pretty close to a truism. That’s it. And I think everybody, if they think about it, will accept at least this much. We begin with assuming that any structure of authority and domination has to justify itself. It’s not self-justifying. It has a burden of proof. It has to show that it’s legitimate. So if you’re taking a walk with your kid, and the kid run in the street, and you grab his arm and pull him back, that’s an exercise of authority. But it’s legitimate. You can have a justification.
And there are such cases where there is justification. But if you look closely, most of them do not. Most of them are what David Hume, Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann, Adam Smith, and others have been talking about over the centuries. Namely, illegitimate authority. Well, illegitimate authorities should be exposed, challenged, overcome. That’s true in all of life. We’ve talked about a few cases. Like, say, the workplace, where it’s illegitimate, should not be tolerated, wasn’t tolerated, until it was driven out of people’s heads by force and violence. Well, OK, what’s anarchism? Just pushing these questions to their limit.
On Shame and Internal Family Systems
Martha Sweezy talks about the difference between shame and guilt in the context of different models of the self. Recommended for deeper digging into IFS. Link.
So, how does shame feel in our bodies? How do we experience it? It comes as humiliation, unworthiness, diminishing, negatively compared?
Martha: Well, diminishing is the key word there, right? People often talk about feeling small when they're shamed… that's a key feature of shame in the body is to feel diminished small and smaller than the person who is shaming you.”
Exploring Sexuality as a Spiritual Practice. [In case it isn’t obvious— NSFW]
Stoicism came about in a period of the Roman Empire’s Decline. Isaiah Berlin characterizes stoicism as “[what] happens … when the natural road towards human fulfilment[sic] is blocked, [and] human human beings retreat into themselves, become involved in themselves, and try to create inwardly the world which some evil fate has denied them externally.” Read the thread here.
Poem of the Month
The Country Wife
She makes her way through the dark trees
Down to the lake to be alone.
Following their voices on the breeze,
She makes her way. Through the dark trees
The distant stars are all she sees.
They cannot light the way she’s gone.
She makes her way through the dark trees
Down to the lake to be alone.
The night reflected on the lake,
The fire of stars changed into water.
She cannot see the winds that break
The night reflected on the lake
But knows they motion for her sake.
These are the choices they have brought her:
The night reflected on the lake,
The fire of stars changed into water.
— Dana Gioia
The poem changes upon each reading. The form that Gioia is employing here is a triolet.
🎧 Music 🎧
Twilight Prince — City Girl Poem. “It’s true that the world is larger than the last meal you ate”
Tenzin Choegyal & Philip Glass — Snow Lion.
Ralph Stanley — Clinch Mountain Backstep. Bluegrass banjo technical brilliant.
Maja Lena — Avalanche. Appalachian folk singing w/ beautiful voice
Howdy,
first let me say how much I enjoy what you're doing here! The breadth of topics that you touch on, the lightness of it but also the depth is impressive. You've inspired me to take a stab at something similar. Thank you for that.
I'm curious about your assertion concerning the link between American gun culture and propaganda from arms manufacturers. It sounds like Bernays 100 years before his time (which I was pleased to see you cite next). It sounds plausible but I'd love to hear more.
I dont expect a you're asserting crude monocausality, so how strong is the linkage in your opinion? Is it a case of the tail wagging the dog or is it more nuanced than that?
All the best,
Sam