Over The Counter Culture

There’s very simple but well-delivered blog post by Rob Weir doing the rounds at the moment that counterattacks a recent position adopted by the BSA (Business Software Alliance – a lobby for traditional software providers).

The UK Cabinet Office (a core unit of the government here) declared that it was in everyone’s interests if royalty-free, open technology standards were adopted (encouraging, as they do, interoperability and ease of migration between competing providers, without having to pay royalties just to use certain file formats).

The BSA lobby insists: by preferring technologies “publicly available at zero or low cost” and that have “intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis” (the UK Cabinet Office’s words), the BSA claims that the government “will inadvertently reduce choice, hinder innovation and increase the costs of e-government”. Such courage and brazen ballsiness is rare today, so the BSA’s lack of sanity can only be saluted. They clearly are bold explorers of alternate realities, pioneering a potent melange of absurdity and conviction.

So, back to the blogpost. Luddismm and monopoly are actually pretty old-school. The post revives a clever, ironic piece by Bastiat that reaches through the ages to elegantly skewer the BSA. It dates back from 1845, 5 years before his death. It is an open letter to the French Parliament entitled A PETITION From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting.

Plus ca change…

To the Honourable Members of the Chamber of Deputies.

Gentlemen:

You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories and have little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic industry.

We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity for your — what shall we call it? Your theory? No, nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you have a horror of systems, as for principles, you deny that there are any in political economy; therefore we shall call it your practice — your practice without theory and without principle.

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.

Be good enough, honourable deputies, to take our request seriously, and do not reject it without at least hearing the reasons that we have to advance in its support.

First, if you shut off as much as possible all access to natural light, and thereby create a need for artificial light, what industry in France will not ultimately be encouraged?

If France consumes more tallow, there will have to be more cattle and sheep, and, consequently, we shall see an increase in cleared fields, meat, wool, leather, and especially manure, the basis of all agricultural wealth.

If France consumes more oil, we shall see an expansion in the cultivation of the poppy, the olive, and rapeseed. These rich yet soil-exhausting plants will come at just the right time to enable us to put to profitable use the increased fertility that the breeding of cattle will impart to the land.

Our moors will be covered with resinous trees. Numerous swarms of bees will gather from our mountains the perfumed treasures that today waste their fragrance, like the flowers from which they emanate. Thus, there is not one branch of agriculture that would not undergo a great expansion.

The same holds true of shipping. Thousands of vessels will engage in whaling, and in a short time we shall have a fleet capable of upholding the honour of France and of gratifying the patriotic aspirations of the undersigned petitioners, chandlers, etc.

But what shall we say of the specialities of Parisian manufacture? Henceforth you will behold gilding, bronze, and crystal in candlesticks, in lamps, in chandeliers, in candelabra sparkling in spacious emporia compared with which those of today are but stalls.

There is no needy resin-collector on the heights of his sand dunes, no poor miner in the depths of his black pit, who will not receive higher wages and enjoy increased prosperity.

It needs but a little reflection, gentlemen, to be convinced that there is perhaps not one Frenchman, from the wealthy stockholder of the Anzin Company to the humblest vendor of matches, whose condition would not be improved by the success of our petition.

We anticipate your objections, gentlemen; but there is not a single one of them that you have not picked up from the musty old books of the advocates of free trade. We defy you to utter a word against us that will not instantly rebound against yourselves and the principle behind all your policy.

Will you tell us that, though we may gain by this protection, France will not gain at all, because the consumer will bear the expense?

We have our answer ready:

You no longer have the right to invoke the interests of the consumer. You have sacrificed him whenever you have found his interests opposed to those of the producer. You have done so in order to encourage industry and to increase employment. For the same reason you ought to do so this time too.

Indeed, you yourselves have anticipated this objection. When told that the consumer has a stake in the free entry of iron, coal, sesame, wheat, and textiles, “Yes,” you reply, “but the producer has a stake in their exclusion.” Very well, surely if consumers have a stake in the admission of natural light, producers have a stake in its interdiction.

“But,” you may still say, “the producer and the consumer are one and the same person. If the manufacturer profits by protection, he will make the farmer prosperous. Contrariwise, if agriculture is prosperous, it will open markets for manufactured goods.” Very well, If you grant us a monopoly over the production of lighting during the day, first of all we shall buy large amounts of tallow, charcoal, oil, resin, wax, alcohol, silver, iron, bronze, and crystal, to supply our industry; and, moreover, we and our numerous suppliers, having become rich, will consume a great deal and spread prosperity into all areas of domestic industry.

Will you say that the light of the sun is a gratuitous gift of Nature, and that to reject such gifts would be to reject wealth itself under the pretext of encouraging the means of acquiring it?

But if you take this position, you strike a mortal blow at your own policy; remember that up to now you have always excluded foreign goods because and in proportion as they approximate gratuitous gifts. You have only half as good a reason for complying with the demands of other monopolists as you have for granting our petition, which is in complete accord with your established policy; and to reject our demands precisely because they are better founded than anyone else’s would be tantamount to accepting the equation: + x + = -; in other words, it would be to heapabsurdity upon absurdity.

Labour and Nature collaborate in varying proportions, depending upon the country and the climate, in the production of a commodity. The part that Nature contributes is always free of charge; it is the part contributed by human labour that constitutes value and is paid for.

If an orange from Lisbon sells for half the price of an orange from Paris, it is because the natural heat of the sun, which is, of course, free of charge, does for the former what the latter owes to artificial heating, which necessarily has to be paid for in the market.

Thus, when an orange reaches us from Portugal, one can say that it is given to us half free of charge, or, in other words, at half price as compared with those from Paris.

Now, it is precisely on the basis of its being semigratuitous (pardon the word) that you maintain it should be barred. You ask: “How can French labour withstand the competition of foreign labour when the former has to do all the work, whereas the latter has to do only half, the sun taking care of the rest?” But if the fact that a product is half free of charge leads you to exclude it from competition, how can its being totally free of charge induce you to admit it into competition? Either you are not consistent, or you should, after excluding what is half free of charge as harmful to our domestic industry, exclude what is totally gratuitous with all the more reason and with twice the zeal.

To take another example: When a product — coal, iron, wheat, or textiles — comes to us from abroad, and when we can acquire it for less labour than if we produced it ourselves, the difference is agratuitous gift that is conferred up on us. The size of this gift is proportionate to the extent of this difference. It is a quarter, a half, or three-quarters of the value of the product if the foreigner asks of us only three-quarters, one-half, or one-quarter as high a price. It is as complete as it can be when the donor, like the sun in providing us with light, asks nothing from us. The question, and we pose it formally, is whether what you desire for France is the benefit of consumption free of charge or the alleged advantages of onerous production. Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you ban, as you do, foreign coal, iron, wheat, and textiles, in proportion as their price approaches zero, how inconsistent it would be to admit the light of the sun, whose price is zero all day long!

The man who, because of a lack of external enemies and opposition, was forced into an oppressive narrowness and regularity of custom impatiently tore himself apart, persecuted himself, gnawed away at himself, grew upset, and did himself damage—this animal which scraped itself raw against the bars of its cage, which people want to “tame,” this impoverished creature, consumed with longing for the wild, which had to create out of its own self an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness—this fool, this yearning and puzzled prisoner, became the inventor of “bad conscience.”

-Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting

Is the recent UK violence engaged in as resistance to an oppressive state (oppressing by cutting welfare, charging more for access to university education, etc) – or are they in fact resistance to a vacuum within society itself? I ask whether they fight to ward off the predictions of Orwell, or Huxley.

The riots don’t make sense to me if it’s the former. I say this because it seems to be to be clear that the modern state absorbs mass protest pretty effortlessly. At least, no possible purpose beyond sussing out tactics of police states, and how to get messages into the media. In other words training in preparation for future war against an Orwellian state). And I don’t think these protests have reached that level of sophistication.

But if it’s about discovering and asserting an identity, discovering energy and violence and comradeship, turning cobblestones into missiles and in so doing, seeing the soil below – i.e. touching wilderness in a world which society and distraction have banished it – well then it makes more sense to me. In that light, rioting then has immediate dividends, in that it draws the mind out of numbness, and long term dividends, in that it is forging a liberal or socialist head of steam within society that will be a force in future politics.

If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

Johnny Cash cover

Lastly: I suppose the same question can be asked of the cyber-activist movement, Anonymous – possibly reaching a different answer.

See also: Bad Conscience: Reflections on a Riot

I came across the ‘Unix philosophy’ recently and read the following summary of principles when writing code and designing software, and I wondered: would these help a lawfirm change the way it thinks about drafting contracts? After all, it’s possible to perceive a contract as software: a program that ‘runs’ and defines a relationship. The parties to the contract are the hardware; the program tells them what to do, and when it’s done running, the output is, well, the set of contractual objectives – or alternatively, like any good program, in the event that the hardware malfunctions, the program handles the error; a contract handles the dispute resolution process. A bad program throws a Blue Screen of Death; a bad contract results in a very costly lawsuit.

It would be interesting to know what more the world of software development could teach the law profession. Without further ado, I re-post the following summary of the principles of Unix Programming:

• Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.

• Rule of Clarity: Clarity is better than cleverness.

• Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected to other programs.

• Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines.

• Rule of Simplicity: Design for simplicity; add complexity only where you must.

• Rule of Parsimony: Write a big program only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do.

• Rule of Transparency: Design for visibility to make inspection and debugging easier.

• Rule of Robustness: Robustness is the child of transparency and simplicity.

• Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data so program logic can be stupid and robust.

• Rule of Least Surprise: In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.

• Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing.

• Rule of Repair: When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.

• Rule of Economy: Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time.

• Rule of Generation: Avoid hand-hacking; write programs to write programs when you can.

• Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it.

• Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for “one true way”.

• Rule of Extensibility: Design for the future, because it will be here sooner than you think.