Category: economics

The Humanities and the Price of Gold

Published June 30, 2013 by cgerrish

It’s by looking back that you can see the seriousness of the fever. At the time, it seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime. Take that gold jewelry stashed away in the back of a drawer and turn it into money — big money. Inherited gold jewelry impossibly out of fashion could be sold for the value of its gold. No need to haggle about the artistic value, all that mattered was gold content. The trade value of the jewelry is simply the value of its gold.

On August 23, 2011 the price for an ounce of gold hit $1,913.50. That was an all-time high, and while the price has begun to decline, it remains at historically high levels. If you look at antique gold jewelry on eBay, you’ll see the prices have moved with the base price of gold. The collectibility of a work, its rareness, or even the acknowledged skill of the artist who created it — all these factors were overwhelmed by the spot value of gold as a commodity. During this period a lot of antique gold jewelry was melted down to create commodity gold bars or coins. Someone told me that in Hong Kong, the jewelry stores price their gold jewelry by adding up two figures, the first is the weight of the gold multiplied by the spot price, and the second represented the aesthetic value of the piece.

The relationship between form and matter becomes strangely clear when the value of the material destroys the unity of an object and creates a new commodity object — ostensibly one without any formal features. Gold, the commodity, doesn’t need to look like anything in particular. Although its usually given the shape of a brick for easy stacking and marked with its weight for easy price calculations. The material seems to shed its visible aesthetic appearance in favor its pure commodity value.

Gold shows us something important here, something that has some truth beyond the buying and selling of gold. I thought about the price of gold when reading some recent essays on the decline and fall of the Humanities in universities around the country. Certain kinds of math and science have taken on the qualities of gold in the University. A university education has always required the declaration of a major area of interest. And now we can easily assign a value to a diploma based on the degree to which it can be traded for employment that at minimum has the potential of paying back the student loans incurred in the process of attaining it. What was a university education has been disrupted by the spot value of one of its component parts.

As with objects made from gold, the university education is no longer a university education. They keep up appearances, but in many cases they’ve been reduced to their commodity value. The decline in the humanities is the process of melting down the aesthetic externalities to get at the pure gold bricks of the spot value of an education.

The humanities have a value, but not in this new object that has been created in the place of the university. Gold jewelry has a value, but not in the context of historically high spot prices for gold. The price of gold is falling, so it’s entirely possible that the old object could re-emerge out of the new object. But, of course, once you’ve melted down your great grandmother’s gold jewelry the damage is done.

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A Dunbar Number for Objects

Published May 12, 2013 by cgerrish

The objects that accumulate around us remain silent and so eventually sink into the background. Once part of the background they are present but completely disappeared. Like fish in water, we swim in this sea of objects. We maintain some kind of interactive relationship with a set of these consumer objects, but due to our physical finitude we can only keep a small number of balls in the air.

The Internet of things is coming upon us faster than anyone could have imagined. From the large scale “Brilliant Machines” industrial project of General Electric to the personal clouds of SquareTags imagined by Phil Windley and others. It was in Bruce Sterling’s book called “Shaping Things” that I was first introduced to the concept. The little book seemed to call out to me from the shelves of the bookstore at the Cooper-Hewitt.

Things call to us in different ways. The Triangle Shirtwaste Factory fire called out to a generation about the role of labor conditions in the very clothing on their backs. The stitching told a story about conditions under which the stitching itself occurred. Instead of fading into the background, the threads become Brechtian actors employing the verfremdungseffekt.

The term Verfremdungseffekt is rooted in the Russian Formalist notion of the device of making strange (Russian: прием остранения priyom ostraneniya), which literary critic Viktor Shklovsky claims is the essence of all art. Lemon and Reis’s 1965 English translation of Shklovsky’s 1917 coinage as “defamiliarization”, combined with John Willett’s 1964 translation of Brecht’s 1935 coinage as “alienation effect”—and the canonization of both translations in Anglophone literary theory in the decades since—has served to obscure the close connections between the two terms. Not only is the root of both terms “strange” (stran- in Russian, fremd in German), but both terms are unusual in their respective languages: ostranenie is a neologism in Russian, while Verfremdung is a resuscitation of a long-obsolete term in German. In addition, according to some accounts Shklovsky’s Russian friend playwright Sergei Tretyakov taught Brecht Shklovsky’s term during Brecht’s visit to Moscow in the spring of 1935. For this reason, many scholars have recently taken to using estrangement to translate both terms: “the estrangement device” in Shklovsky, “the estrangement effect” in Brecht.

For this generation, the tragic factory collapse in Bangladesh has radically changed the clothing hanging in our closets and folded in our chest of drawers. The stitching and the labels in these clothes now call out, they make themselves strange and unfamiliar. A piece of the background pricks our attention and wants to have a conversation. “Let me tell you about myself. I was born in Bangladesh in a factory like the one you read about the other day on your iPad.”

In the Internet of things, the number of things that could be transmitting data to a central store is limited only by practicality. In other words, it’s practically unlimited. Although, as Lisa Gitelman reminds us “Raw Data is an Oxymoron.” Data is a form of rhetoric based on exclusion. Deciding what counts as data is always already a form of cooking. Drawing conclusions from big data is not making an assessment of big pile of raw, natural artifacts. Data is always pre-cooked and can benefit from an analysis of our counter-transference toward it. And while the Internet of things seems to be mostly on the side of objects helping to manufacture themselves more efficiently, there’s another side to the conversation aspect of the objects surrounding us.

Not too long ago it was our food that was calling out to us. “Ask me where I’m from. Let me tell you about how I was grown.” We’ve been through the whole cycle by now. At first we could hear the words “natural” and “organic” and know something about origins. Today highly-processed foods sport the labels natural and organic. A longer dialogue than can be printed on a container is called for. Now our clothes need to explain themselves. We need to be able to ask them about where they were stitched up, and they need to be able to tell us.

In Bruce Sterling’s “The Last Viridian Note” he makes the case for deaccessioning one’s collection. If we are all curators, defining ourselves by exhibiting our taste as consumers — what are we saying about ourselves? And in this era of the Internet of things, what will the things themselves be saying about us behind our backs?

In earlier, less technically advanced eras, this approach would have been far-fetched. Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbors. If you failed to surround yourself with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.

That era is dying. It’s not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.

Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

In the sphere of social networks, we talk about the Dunbar number. While electronic computerized networks theoretically allow people to connect with tens of thousands of other people, stable social relationships, according to Robin Dunbar, are limited to a much smaller number.

Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.[2][3] Dunbar’s number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.

The globalization of the manufacture of household objects has put us in a situation similar to that of online social networks. Theoretically we can own as many things as we can afford. And if we can’t afford them, we can wait until they make their way to the deep discount stores and outlets and then buy them for below the cost of production. These things, by making themselves strange strangers — they raise their hands and step out from the background a stranger in our midst. But once our food and clothing becomes inscribed into our social space and wants to have a conversation about origins and process, can we really keep consuming at our current pace? Will the slots available in the cognitive limit of our Dunbar number now have to include all the objects that are waking up around us in this Internet of things?

We are waking up inside a world that is waking up to find us waking up inside of it.

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A Place For Our Infinities

Published March 3, 2012 by cgerrish

A short piece of writing on our infinities: Gazing toward the stars, we discovered an infinite external universe. Looking inward, we recognized the capacity to hold multiple infinities in the grasp of our understanding. In our everyday life we attribute high value to things that exude a feeling of immortality. While some things we manufacture are meant to be ephemeral, in things of quality, we want something about them to last forever.

In thinking about infinities, and by this, I’m really referring to Tim Morton’s idea of very large finitudes, I was drawn in by the great plastic vortex in the Pacific ocean. This is location, created by ocean currents, where large deposits of granulated plastic swirl in an endless gyre. “Plastic” means something that can be molded, “plastic” is plastic. Not only can plastic take any shape, it can have a high level of durability while in use. The “mold-ability” of metals on the one hand and plaster on the other, find a mid-point in plastic. Plastic is a neutral material that functions like a simile. The plastic is like leather, it functions like ceramic, it gives the appearance of wood grain. Plastic never appears to us as plastic, it’s always “like” something else.

Plastic becomes itself again when it’s discarded. It’s no longer “like” anything; it “is” plastic. Different kinds of plastic have different lifespans. Some plastic, plastic bags for instance, have a lifespan of 30 to 60 years. A plastic bottle, on the other hand, has a lifespan of 300 to 500 years. The “use” of a plastic bottle may occur over 30 minutes, the time it takes to drink a soda or some filtered water. If that plastic bottle is part of the eight million tons of garbage that reaches the ocean every day, it may go on to have a long life as a piece of bottle-shaped plastic.

In the world of literature, we talk about immortal works. Art is long, but life is short. “Words” also have a plastic quality, they can be selected and sequenced in such a way to conjure up almost anything. The word “elephant” isn’t an elephant, but it can cause the reader to register neurological activity that is “like” that of seeing an actual elephant. We can even use words to describe things like an infinite series of numbers. Here we register neurological activity of something that we can’t actually see.

But much like the plastic bottle, texts have a lifespan. They aren’t immortal. On leap day of this year, philosopher Graham Harman shared some thoughts about the lifespan of books:

Books have a much, much higher childhood death rate than people. If a book makes it to age 21 and is still being discussed and still changing career paths, then it’s obviously a huge success.

I’m a great believer in classic books, but not at all a believer in “immortal” books. Plato will not be read one million years from now, though under certain scenarios he might still be read in another 2000 or 5000 years.

You can’t do “immortal” work because that’s quite impossible. The human species will probably be turning into something rather different that won’t much care about most of our supposedly immortal books and empires.

That said, there’s still a big difference between writing a book that’s readable for 3 years versus one that’s readable for 20, 50, or 500 years. That’s the scale on which very high-quality work announces itself as opposed to more transient period pieces– not the non-existent immortal scale.

In the age of the digital network, the ephemeral seems to gain a kind of immortality. Publishing written words is almost as simple as speaking. Once published to the Network, whatever it is, is there forever. And theoretically, it is findable via some method of search. In this sense, this immortal ephemera is like the plastic bottle–useful for a short amount of time, but possibly destined to a very long after life. Perhaps it is also swirling about in the gyre of some immense database. However, there’s a qualitative difference between the kind of life of a work that Graham Harman discusses and the life of a tweet saved forever in a networked database server.

When we discuss economies of abundance in the digital age, we’re assuming the low-cost production of very large finitudes. Plastic is this kind of thing, it’s the least expensive physical simile for a large range of objects. It also has the strange quality of sometimes having a lifespan that is five or six times that of an ordinary human. In this ecological age where we are newly surrounded by economies of abundance, what shall we do with our infinities? We can no longer send them away when we’ve annihilated distance through technology. The plastic as “plastic” waves to us from the gyres in the ocean. It will swirl there for our children and our children’s children. What ever shall we do with our infinities?

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Tales of the Network: A Moment of Privacy; A Moment of Sharing

Published February 12, 2012 by cgerrish

As early adopters of technology, we like to quote William Gibson and say the “future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed yet.” We position ourselves to preview the next good thing. And from the height of our vantage point, we look out over the crowd and smile knowingly. This next new thing will eventually be much more evenly distributed. The crowd, minding its own business, seems unaware of what’s about to happen to it. In the movement of that wider distribution, some small number of people will be made very wealthy. Soon just about everyone will be using this new thing, and we’ll be on to the next thing.

Reading through the front page of the Saturday New York Times, a couple of stories struck me as auguries of coming ways of life. Neither of these stories had the sweet taste of a fruit yet unknown to the wider populace. Instead they’re bitter moments that speak to an accommodation to our environment.

In the first article, titled “Traveling Light in a Time of Digital Thievery“, Nicole Perlroth writes about the travel routine of Kenneth G. Liberthal of the Brookings Institute. When he travels to China he makes very strong assumptions about the agency of the Network in that locality. Here’s Perlroth’s description of his protocol:

He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery, for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, “the Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.”

When we think about the texture of the Network, we tend to think of it as a passive medium–something we can turn on or off. We access it, it doesn’t access us. It’s only in paranoid fantasy that invisible forces invade our minds and steal our thoughts. However, as we augment our minds with hard drives, memory sticks and cloud-based storage, we create an external readable repository of our internal mental space. Our use of common wire protocols allows for broadcast over heterogeneous networks of networks. Entities large and small have the same potential to reach a mass audience.

The two-way web is described as a democratizing feature of the Network. No longer are we the passive recipients of centralized broadcasts. Each node on the Network has both receiving and broadcast capability. But once that two-way channel has been established, the Network also has access to you. A common response to this kind of environment is to say, “well, I don’t have any secrets. I don’t have anything of real value; what’s there only has meaning to me.” If we take this attitude and overlay it onto the whole of society, we conclude that it’s okay if the Network accesses our personal data because no one keeps anything of value in these repositories. And this says something very interesting about where we think value is located.

Today, we look at Liberthal’s seemingly paranoid behavior with his connected devices as an oddity. But as we look at this story, what if we apply Gibson’s maxim? The future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed yet.

The second article is by Michael Wilson and is called “In a Mailbox: A Shared Gun, Just for the Asking.” Police forensics labs are finding more and more ballistics matches for “community guns.” A single gun is used by many different criminals in many different crimes. Here’s Wilson’s description of a shared gun used in a recent murder.

Waka Flocka is the name of a rapper. But to these men, the phrase described something else.

The community gun.

Hidden and shared by a small group of people who use them when needed, and are always sure to return them, such guns appear to be rising in number in New York, according to the police. It is unclear why. The economy? Times are tough — not everyone can afford a gun. “The gangs are younger, and their resources are less,” said Ed Talty, an assistant district attorney in the Bronx.

The example of the “community gun” brings to mind John Thackara’s discussion of real-time dynamic resource allocation in his book: “In The Bubble: Designing in a Complex World.” The average power tool (a drill, circular saw, etc.) is used for ten minutes in its entire life. But to manufacture that tool takes a tremendous amount of resources. Yet, we all need our own power drill because we never know when we’ll need it.

We can imagine a world where people don’t buy individual power drills, but instead make use of a community drill. The obstacle that stands between that world and this one is generally described as a failure of moral will. We know the right thing to do, but somehow, we aren’t ready. We find ourselves in the position of St. Augustine when he prays, “God, make me good. But not yet.”

Sharing and community seem to be attributes of a positive morality. When we see the commercialization of these qualities, we believe their moral quality suffers. We react to the commercialization of Christmas by attempting to retrieve what we imagine is an historical original experience. We react to the automation of sharing and community by Facebook by turning off our connected devices and attempting a direct connection without digital mediation.

Bad people are greedy, they aren’t willing to share. They don’t form cooperative communities where resources are shared to the benefit of the whole group. To some extent, this is how we determine who is bad and who is good. What would it mean if “sharing and community” were detached from our ideas about positive morality. Both movies and murder are better with community and sharing. Perhaps we should stop for a moment and ask: what’s the meaning of the word “better” in the previous sentence?

Both of these stories made the front page of the Saturday New York Times. The story about paranoid connected device behavior was just above the fold. The community gun story was below the fold. Neither story will receive broad coverage from other media outlets. It’s unlikely that either story will achieve viral distribution over the real-time Network. Both provide a vision of a future that’s not broadly distributed yet. They’re morality tales of the Network. They tell us something about the world we’re creating for ourselves. Or instead, maybe we should say, this is the new world that is manufacturing new varieties of humans.

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