anti-Star Trek

To Boringly Go

February 20th, 2018  |  Published in anti-Star Trek



















Bougies to Proles: Drop Dead







Robot Redux











Egyptian Lingerie and the Robot Future









  • Cheaper than the human worker
  • More convenient and easier to control than the human worker











Time Bubbles and Tech Bubbles


The Time Bubble







The Tragedy of the Commons in the Rentier Mind

February 12th, 2015  |  Published in anti-Star Trek

Complementing my last post, here's a story about the twisted ideology that now surrounds intellectual property, where IP is considered not just as utilitarian necessity, but as some kind of inherent natural right. In the most absurd form, it is seen as a moral responsibility for creators to zealously defend any IP they can get their hands on, and maximize whatever amount of money they can squeeze out of it.

This article is about our trendy hot sauce of the moment, Sriracha. Specifically, it is about the fact that while the hot sauce in question is strongly associated with a particular product made by Huy Fong foods, the Sriracha name itself is not trademarked. As a result, everyone from your local twee sauce artisan to Heinz and Tabasco is now jumping in with their own Sriracha.

None of this seems to much bother Huy Fong's founder, David Tran. But boy does it bother all the people that look at this scenario and see a bunch of juicy lawsuits!

The author of the LA Times article calls it a "glaring omission" not to trademark the word.

"In my mind, it's a major misstep," says the president of a food marketing consultancy.

Even his competitors are baffled. "We spend enormous time protecting the word 'Tabasco' so that we don't have exactly this problem," says the CEO of a rival hot sauce company that's now going into the Sriracha market. "Why Mr. Tran did not do that, I don't know."

An IP lawyer laments: "The ship has probably sailed on this, which is unfortunate because they've clearly added something to American cuisine that wasn't there before."

That David Tran has added something to American cuisine is hard to dispute. But Tran also has a successful, growing business that has most likely made him very rich. One which he has said, on numerous occasions, he deliberately does not scale up as much as he could, in order to maintain the quality of his product and control the sources of his peppers.

So for whom is it so "unfortunate" that he doesn't spend his life in constant litigation against anyone who dares make a Thai-style hot sauce and name it after a city in Thailand? Tran himself gives the answer. "We have lawyers come and say 'I can represent you and sue' and I say 'No. Let them do it.'"

Intellectual Property and Pseudo-Innovation

February 10th, 2015  |  Published in anti-Star Trek, Political Economy

The most common justification for intellectual property protection is that it provides an incentive for future creation or innovation. There are many cases where this rationale is highly implausible, as with copyrights that extend long after the death of the original author. But even where IP does spur innovation, the question arises: innovation of what kind?

I've written before about things like patent and copyright trolling, where the IP regime incentivizes innovations that have no value at all, because they amount to figuring out ways to leverage the law in order to make money without doing any work or producing anything. But there's another category of what might be called "pseudo-innovation." This involves genuine creativity and cleverness, and the end result is something with real social utility. But the creativity and cleverness involved pertains only to circumventing intellectual property restrictions, without which it would be possible to produce a better output in a simpler way. A couple of examples of this have recently come to mind.

The first is the movie Selma, Ava DuVernay's dramatization of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Like most dramatizations of historical events, the movie takes liberties with the historical record in order to compress events into a coherent and compelling narrative. But one of these liberties is particularly unusual: in scenes recreating actual King speeches, none of the words we hear from actor David Oyelowo's mouth are King's; rather they are broad paraphrases of the original words.

As it turns out, this was not a decision made for any artistic reason, but for a legal one: King's speeches are still the property of his descendants, who make large amounts of money by zealously guarding their copyrights. DuVernay was apparently barred from using the speeches because the film rights to King had already been licensed to Stephen Spielberg; meanwhile, the King family has had no problem lending his memory out to commercials for luxury cars and phone companies. DuVernay does an elegant job of giving the content and the feel of King's oratory without using his actual words, and one could perhaps even argue that some unique value arises from this technique. But for the most part it's pseudo-innovation, a second best solution mandated by copyright.

Another example comes from a very different field, computer hardware manufacturing. Here we turn to the early 1980's and the development of the "PC clone." Today, the personal computer is a generic technology---the machines that run Windows or Linux or other operating systems can be bought from many manufacturers or even, like the machine I'm using to write this post, assembled by the end user from individually sourced components. But in 1981, the PC was the IBM PC, and if you wanted to run PC software you needed to buy a machine from IBM..

Soon after the PC was introduced, rival companies began trying to produce cheaper knockoffs of the IBM product--the efforts of one leader, Compaq, are dramatized in the AMC series "Halt and Catch Fire". Building the machines themselves was trivial, because the necessary hardware was all publicly available and didn't require any propriety IBM technology. But problems arose in the attempt to make them truly "IBM-compatible"---that is, able to run all the same software that you could run on an IBM. This required copying the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), a bit of software built into the PC that programs use to interface with the hardware.

That BIOS was proprietary to IBM. So in order to copy it, Compaq was forced into a bizarre development system described by Compaq founder Rod Canlon as follows:


Through this convoluted process, Compaq managed to make a knockoff BIOS within 9 months. Just as Ava DuVernay came up with paraphrases of King, they had essentially paraphrased the IBM BIOS. And the result was something genuinely useful: a cheaper version of the IBM PC, which expanded access to computing. But the truly inventive and interesting things Compaq came up with---the things that make the story worth fictionalizing on TV---are pure pseudo-innovation.

Looked at this way, the world of IP pseudo-innovation looks kind of like high finance. In both cases, you have people making money and even having fun figuring out the best ways to game and counter-game the system, but in none of the complicated trading algorithms or software development strategies add anything to social wealth.

The Comforts of Dystopia










The Problem of “Capital in the Twenty First Century”

March 10th, 2014  |  Published in anti-Star Trek, Political Economy

Today marks the English-language publication of Thomas Piketty's eagerly awaited Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I haven't read the book yet, so I can't comment on the adequacy of its approach to the problem of capital in the twenty-first century. But I can comment on a specific problem of "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" that turns out to be illuminating.

In his review of the book, Dean Baker complains that Piketty's account is overly deterministic, largely due to an inattention to the details of institutional structures which shape the distribution of wealth and income, and which are potentially subject to change by political means. In particular, he draws attention to one of his, and my, recurring themes: intellectual property. Using drug companies as a case in point, Baker notes that this industry makes up 2 percent of GDP and 15 percent of corporate profits, based entirely on "government granted patent monopolies".

Drug patents may be the most egregious example, but there's plenty more where that came from. After reading Baker's review, I headed over to Amazon, with the thought of picking up an ebook edition of Piketty's book. There I found that the Kindle edition retails for a whopping $27.48, for a grand total of $1.45 in savings over the physical, hardcover edition.

Only copyright law and digital copy protections make this possible, of course---copying an ebook is trivial and nearly costless. And who benefits from that? Presumably some royalties accrue to Piketty and his translator, Arthur Goldhammer. Which I can't really begrudge, although Piketty already enjoys a comfortable faculty position at the Paris School of Economics.

But the other beneficiary is the publisher, Harvard University Press, and it's a bit harder to see how they need the money. HUP is a division of Harvard University, which, some incidental educational operations aside, is primarily an enormous investment fund presiding over $32 billion dollars in assets. Which brings us around to another of Dean Baker's objections, which is that the unusual success of Harvard's investments may not simply be due to the expertise of its financial managers. He proposes insider trading as another plausible (albeit unsubstantiated) explanation: "graduates of these institutions undoubtedly could [provide] their alma maters with plenty of useful investment tips."

All of which is to say that while I laud Piketty's support for increased taxation of income and wealth, the peculiar case of his own book illustrates Baker's important counterpoint. It's a point that could equally be directed at certain Marxists and other leftists, for whom all efforts at reformist politics are doomed to fail a priori: "capitalism is far more dynamic and flexible than the way Piketty presents it", and thus we should pay close attention to "the specifics of the institutional structure that is crucial for constructing a more egalitarian path going forward."

Guards, Workers, Machines








