June 2010 – Page 3 – purple motes

bike inner tubes better than duct tape

fix bag velco on saddle bag

If you have a problem, an old bicycle inner tube probably can fix it. For example, the velcro on my saddle bag was failing. I secured it with an old bicycle inner tube. Another problem: the pannier on my commuting bike would fall off when I hit a big bump. I secured it with an old bicycle inner tube. Everybody has problems. Old bicycle inner tubes can fix them.

Old bicycle inner tubes are like big rubber bands. They’re strong and elastic. You can tie them around anything to provide protection or tension. Moreover, all bicycle inner tubes come in a stylish black for no extra charge.

If you’re a cyclist, don’t even think of using tubeless tires. You need inner tubes.

If you don’t ride bikes, get friendly with a neighboring cyclist. He or she is likely to have a continually expanding supply of inner tubes that have flatted.

secure pannier with bicycle inner tube

varieties of knowledge-access regimes

Groups with greater social investment tend to favor more restrictive access to knowledge. Greater social investment means more connections with socially credible and authoritative persons and groups, and greater material interests in maintaining those connections. Social investment supports credibility and authority. So too does knowledge (“knowledge is power”). However, persons who are neither credible nor authoritative can develop important knowledge. The extent to which the socially invested succeed in suppressing knowledge among those without credibility and authority significantly affects the development of knowledge.

In the Neo-Assyrian Empire spanning Mesopotamia about 2800 years ago, scholar-scribes were highly invested socially. The Neo-Assyrian Empire was a powerful, highly developed empire that emerged from more than a millennium of Assyrian civilization. Neo-Assyrian scholar-scribes were an elite associated with royal courts and royal libraries. They wrote on clay tablets using a cuneiform script. Their craft thus was closely connected technologically to accountability in transactions and the development of writing. The cuneiform script that they used increased in complexity over time and diverged from an increasingly simplified script used for commercial and bureaucratic purposes.[1] Neo-Assyrian scholar-scribes had a recognized social identity, common interests in a key technology of social memory, and a close connection to political power.

Neo-Assyrian scholar-scribes limited access to broad disciplines of knowledge. They limited to experts (meaning themselves) technical knowledge concerning extispicy (divination by means of animal entrails), exorcism, lamentation, medicine, and astrology. The scholar-scribes claimed that such knowledge originated in divine revelation to ancient sages. The scholar-scribes sought to limit transmission of texts to their class, warned their students not to share class-work with others outside the scholarly institution, and wrote texts using textual instruments designed to restrict textual circulation. Such instruments included a secrecy label and a colophon explicitly restricting circulation (Geheimwissen colophon).[2] These appeared both separately and occasionally in combination, such as:

Secret of the great gods. An expert may show an(other) expert. A non-expert may not see (it). A restriction of the great gods. Written according to its original and checked.[3]

Babylonians and Medians demolished the Neo-Assyrian empire about 2600 years ago. Neo-Assyrian knowledge is slowly and laborously being recovered and reconstructed from the fragments currently accessible.

Buddhist sutras have been disseminated under a much different knowledge-access regime. The historical Buddha was a king’s son in a small kingdom in present-day Nepal. Buddhism probably arose at a time when the northern Indian sub-continent was divided into sixteen kingdoms, each much larger than the kingdom in which the Buddha was born. Within the Indian subcontinent as a whole, Buddhism began with little social investment. It rapidly developed major, enduring, and competing sects and sacred texts.

Disseminating Buddhist teachings and gaining adherents to them generated the growth of Buddhism. Buddhist scriptures included textual instruments designed to encourage textual circulation. Most Mahāyāna Buddhist sutras instruct the reader, irrespective of who the reader is, to re-copy the sutra.[4] For example, copies of The Scripture on the Ten Kings written in tenth-century Dunhuang (China) include these admonishments:

Uphold the scripture and you will avoid the underground prisons;
Copy it and you will be spared calamity and illness.
…
If you wish to seek riches and nobility and a family with a long life span,
You should copy the text of this scripture, obey it, and uphold it.

The text commands its own circulation via instruction from the Buddha himself:

the Buddha with great care and diligence entrusted him [King Yama] with this scripture [and said]: “Its name is The Teaching of the Sevens of Life that Are Cultivated in Preparation [The Scripture on the Ten Kings]. You, together with the four orders, must circulate it widely.”[5]

The Scripture on the Ten Kings was not a canonical Buddhist text. Nonetheless, it appears to have been widely circulated. Tenth-century copies recovered from Dunhuang show that The Scripture on the Ten Kings was produced in a variety of physical formats and used ritually in a wide range of ways. Persons across the spectrum of social positions commissioned copies of the scripture.[6]

Social investment seems also to have been correlated with secrecy across Jewish sects at the time of Jesus. In Luke 12:1-3, Jesus declares:

Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees, that is, their hypocrisy. Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be proclaimed from the housetops.

The declaration to those speaking in the dark and whispering behind closed doors seems to be addressed to the Pharisees. Matthew 10:25-27 provides a slightly different account:

So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.

Here, Jesus seems implicitly to contrasts himself with a Pharisaical teacher. These two text together suggests that the Pharisees, who were much more socially invested in Jewish society than was Jesus, sought to hold important knowledge secret. Jesus, like early Buddhists, sought to circulate important knowledge widely.[7]

* * * * *

Notes:

[1] Lenzi (2008) pp. 136-140. I use the term scholar-scribe for the Akkadian term ummânū in the source Neo-Assyrian texts. Not all scribes were scholars. Id. p. 146.

[2] Id. Ch. 3 insightfully reveals that the Geheimwissen colophon was just one means to mark broad disciplines of knowledge that were generally kept secret. On the specification and secrecy of these disciplines, see id. pp. 70-1, 77-103.

[3] From Mystical Miscellanea: KAR 307, rev. 26-27, owned by the exorcist Kişir-Aššur, trans. id. p. 173. Id. 170-204 provides a complete catalog of secrecy labels and Geheimwissen colophon, with translations.

[4] Teiser (1994) p. 87.

[5] This and the previous quote from the translation in id. pp. 207, 217.

[6] Id., Part Two.

[7] Interpretation of these two Gospel texts has tended to focus on ungodly personal actions and personal hypocrisy. But it seems to me that they are better understood in relation to social investment and knowledge-access regimes. Lenzi (2008) argues that in biblical Israel divine knowledge was not kept secret. Perhaps the Pharisees had begun to keep divine secrets by Jesus’ time.

References:

Lenzi, Alan. 2008. Secrecy and the gods: secret knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia and biblical Israel. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian text Corpus Project.

Teiser, Stephen F. 1994. The scripture on the ten kings and the making of purgatory in medieval Chinese Buddhism. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.

U.S. local telephone industry, 1988-2007

From 1988 to 2007, U.S. local wireline telephone companies went from strong growth to rapid decline in the number of telephone subscriber loops. Loop counts peaked about 2000. On both sides of this peak, small telephone companies had greater loop growth than large telephone companies.

A constant across these twenty years was telephone company mergers and name-changes. The thirteen largest telephone holding companies in 1988 had all become parts of differently named holding companies by 2007.

The key challenge for telephone companies has been to develop wireless and broadband businesses. Company mergers and acquisitions can be beneficial. Names are important and interesting. But in current circumstances of revolutionary technological and economic change, telephone company change has to go much deeper than mergers and corporate name changes.

Data: U.S. local wireline telephone holding companies, 1988-2007 (Excel version)

Wednesday's flowers

purple grass

understanding the real business of content

Leading twentieth-century artist Yves Klein helped to generate enormous growth in art. His influence is readily apparent in major recent works of contemporary fine art such as Maximillian Miles’ sensuous and provocative Masterwork in Bluish.

Klein’s work, however, has much broader importance. Klein pioneered marketing “zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility” — what media businesspersons today call content. Klein focused this artistic business not on content creation, but on transactions associated with the immaterial content. Traditional media should follow Klein and seek profitable transactions for freely available digital pictorial and textual sensibility.

Klein defined engaging, segmented transactions. Klein offered potential buyers prices from 20 grams to 1280 grams of gold in exchange for an elegant, personal, physical receipt for a zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility.[1] The receipts for each immaterial price product were differently denoted, but had the same form. They were printed on heavy paper and shaped and typescripted like a bank draft. The background of the receipt featured in large letters IKB. These letters stand for International Klein Blue, Klein’s signature monochrome. Klein also personally signed and dated receipts for immaterial zones that he sold.

Klein retained some vertical control in the market for immaterial pictorial sensibility, but at the same time provided a platform for participation. Those who exchanged gold for Klein’s immaterial content had to agree not to resell the receipt / immaterial content for more than twice the value of the initial purchase. This condition was written directly on the receipt. In addition, Klein declared that for a purchaser to acquire the fundamental and authentic immaterial value, the purchaser must “solemnly burn his receipt.” Klein, in turn, would ritually dispose of half the gold he had acquired from the sale:

In case the buyer wishes this act of integration of the work of art with himself to take place, Yves Klein must, in the presence of an Art Museum Director, or an Art Gallery Expert, or an Art Critic, plus two witnesses, throw half of the gold received in the ocean, into a river, or in some place in nature where this gold cannot be retrieved by anyone.[2]

Klein omitted specifying the buyer’s attendance at the event. Such buyer participation, however, was an important part of actual practice.[3]

Klein’s immaterial content business had strong fundamentals. It was gold-flow positive at its very start.[4] Disposing of half the gold apparently lessened Klein’s net income. But under more creative accounting, this gold expenditure could be recorded as an investment in good will or in business development. Alternately, one could recognize that most gold, like most immaterial content, is a natural part of the world’s commonwealth. Klein’s 50% retained share of the gold he received gave him a more favorable revenue split than Google gets through its 32% share of AdSense revenue.

Content businesses today are rapidly dematerializing. Addressing these acute business problems requires less technology, and more art.

Yves Klein takes on the content business

With the Void: Full Powers, a major retrospective of Yves Klein’s work, is at the Hirshhorn Gallery through September 12, 2010. Leaders of newspapers and broadcasting companies could do far worse than requiring all their employees to spend a day enjoying this exhibition.

* * * * *

Notes:

[1] Explicitly denominated immaterial receipts were available for 20, 40, 80, 160, 320, 640, and 1280 grams of gold exchanged. See Stich (1994) p. 268, n. 92.

[2] From Yves Klein, “Ritual for the Relinquishment of Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity [Sensibility] Zones” (1957-59), in Stiles and Seltz (1996) p. 81.

[3] Photos of the three immaterial integration rituals that took place in early 1962 show the buyer present. Small reproductions of these photos are on a placard in With the Void: Full Powers.

[4] With no formal business organization, Klein sold 8 zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility from September, 1959 to February, 1962. All these transactions but one were for 20 grams of gold. The other transaction, with Hollywood writer Michael Blankfort, was for 160 grams of gold. See Stich (1994) p. 268, n. 93, which details each transaction. Blankfort was delighted with his acquisition of a zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility. He declared that he had:

no other experience in art equal to the depth of feeling [of the ritual integration of the immaterial zone]. It evoked in me a shock of self-recognition and an explosion of awareness of time and space.

Quoted in id. p. 156. Id. describes the depth of feeling as “[the sale ceremony]”, but this is likely a mistake. A photo reproduced in With the Void: Full Powers shows Blankfort and his wife participating in the ritual integration. With the Void: Full Powers also reproduces an unattributed comment from the exhibition catalog for When Attitude Becomes Form (Berne, 1969): “artist and owner each had nothing but the art experience.” That’s incorrect. The artist had half the gold.

References:

Stich, Sidra, and Yves Klein. 1994. Yves Klein [… published on the occasion of the exhibition Yves Klein, Museum Ludwig, Cologne and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, November 8, 1994 – January 8, 1995; Hayward Gallery, London, Februar 9, 1995 – April 23, 1995; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, May 29, 1995 – August 29, 1995]. Ostfildern: Cantz.

Stiles, Kristine, and Peter Howard Selz. 1996. Theories and documents of contemporary art: a sourcebook of artists’ writings. California studies in the history of art, 35. Berkeley: University of California Press.