purple motes

A bian-wen text copied in Dunhuang (China) in 921 describes highly industrialized punishments in hell:

Iron discs continuously plunged into her body from out of the air,
Fierce fires, at all times, were burning beneath her feet;
...
Bronze-colored crows pecked at her heart ten thousand times over,
Molten iron poured on top of her head a thousand repetitions;
One might ask whether the tree of knives up ahead were the most painful,
But can it compare with the cleaving mill which chops men's waists in two?[1]

The iron discs and the cleaving mill are images of industrial machinery.  Aspects of the natural landscape, mountains, trees, thorns, crows, dogs, and snakes, become fabricated torments: knife mountains, sword trees, metal thorns, bronze-colored crows preternaturally pecking, copper dogs breathing smoke, and iron snakes belching fire.[2]

Punishments for illicit sexual passion distort sexual imagery into technological torments:

Women lay on the iron beds with nails driven through their bodies,
Men embraced the hot copper pillars, causing their chests to rot away;
The iron drills and long scissors were sharp as lance-tips and sword-edges,
The teeth of the ploughs with their sharp metal points were like awls.
When their intestines are empty, they are at once filled with hot iron pellets,
If they cry out that they are thirsty, molten iron is used to irrigate them;[3]

This imagery of punishment suggests imaginative effects of traumatic industrial development.[4]  Much technological development occurred in China during the Tang Dynasty period (618-907).  Metal industries, along with an industrial workforce, became prominent in Western Europe in the nineteenth century.  At least in hell, these industries apparently were prominent in China a millennium earlier.

Punishment in Dante's Inferno is less technological and more organic and interpersonal.  In the Inferno, the punished are confined in tombs of fire, brawl in mire, are blown about in storms, and are frozen in a lake.  The punished are consistently identified as specific persons with particular histories.  They regularly engage in personal conversations with Dante.  Dante's hell doesn't emphasize masses of persons subject to impersonal, external machinery.  Dante authored the Inferno in Italy between 1308 and 1321. Unlike the Chinese bian-wen text, copied in Dunhuang in 921, the Inferno reflects the socio-economic structure of a commercial city-state.

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Image credit: Baodingshan, Dazu, rock carving, c. 1200 GC.  From K.E. Brashier's superb website of Chinese hell scrolls.  Here's a wider image of the iron wheel punishment.

Notes:

[1] Transformation Text on Mahāmaudgalyāyana Rescuing His Mother from the Underworld (Dunhuang manuscript, S2614), trans. Mair, Victor H. (1983) Tun-huang popular narratives. Cambridge studies in Chinese history, literature, and institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) p. 99.

[2] Id. pp. 99, 100, 105-6 provide the additional details cited above.

[3] Id. p. 102.

[4] China has long had a highly developed state bureaucracy.  The administrative machinery of this hell includes highly developed bureaucracy.  For example, when Maudgalyāyana, searching for his mother in hell, asks King Yama for information, King Yama summons his "karma-watcher, fate-investigator, and book-keeper."  The karma-watcher reports:

Three years have already passed since Lady Nīladhi [Maudgalyāyana's mother] died.  The legal records of the criminal proceeding against her are all in the case-book of the Commandant of Mount T'ai, who is Recorder for the Bureau of the Underworld.

Id. p. 95.

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In her interesting new book, From Iron Fist to Invisible Hand: the Uneven Path of Telecommunications Reform in China, Irene S. Wu describes competition among bureaucracies, consumer demand, and technological innovations as drivers of telecommunications reform in China.   An interesting case study is Little Smart, a low-cost, limited-mobility wireless service that rapidly gained popularity, but which will be shut down by 2011 in favor of 3G services.

Little Smart provided a vehicle for China Telecom to offer wireless service.  Little Smart was initially approved to extend China Telecom's wireline telephone service to rural areas.   However, Little Smart was first offered commercially in December, 1998, in Zhaoqing, a small city in Guangdong Province.  In 1999, Little Smart service was extended to two provincial capitals and other small cities.   By September, 2001, Little Smart was being offered in 300 cities and had about 5 million subscribers.   By early 2003, Little Smart was available in Beijing and other large Chinese cities.  The number of Little Smart subscribers reached 91 million in 2006.[1]

Efforts of mobile-service competitors and the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) to constrain Little Smart subscriber growth failed.   Mobile-service competitors China Mobile and Unicom complained vociferiously to state bodies that Little Smart was not authorized to provide the service it was providing.  MII repeatedly forbade Little Smart to expand service, but it did anyway.  MII subsequently ratified Little Smart expansions.   Little Smart succeeded in gaining state approval by first succeeding in gaining a large number of customers.

Little Smart grew rapidly as a relatively low-quality, low-cost service.  Its early nicknames indicated its low quality:

Weiwei ko (Hello-Hello Call, because users are always saying hello-hello), Shikengtong (Toilet Connection, to indicate the very low standard of service), and, in the city of Zhaoqing,
Duanzhousai (Duanzhou Disconnection) [its brand name there was Duanzhoutong (Duanzhou Connection)].[2]

Little Smart, however, was much cheaper than China Mobile and Unicom.  Its monthly fee and per minute rate were about half of these competitors' rates.  In some places Little Smart offered flat-rate, unlimited calling.  In all locations Little Smart users did not have to pay for incoming calls, as did subscribers to the other mobile services.

The challenge of shutting down Little Smart has now shifted to China Telecom and China Netcom.  China Netcom was formed in 2002 from the northern 30% of China Telecom's wireline network, plus the assets of the competing companies Netcom and Jitong.   Thus China Netcom inherited Little Smart subscribers through its descent from China Telecom.  Both China Telecom and China Netcom received 3G mobile licenses in 2008.   They have stopped investing in Little Smart and instead are focusing on building out 3G services.  But at the end of 2008, they still had a total of about 70 million Little Smart subscribers (that's equivalent to about 7% of the Chinese population ages 15-64).

The U.S. DTV transition is an example of a centralized, state-led shutdown of an old technology, over-the-air analog television broadcasting.  As of 2005, about 15 million U.S. household received only over-the-air television (about 14% of households).[3]   The U.S. government established February 17, 2009, as the date at which full-power TV stations would cease analog broadcasts. The U.S. Congress provided $1.5 billion for the transition, mostly to subsidize purchases of set-top converter boxes. The transition date was subsequently shifted to June 12, 2009, and an additional $650 million was provided for converter box coupons and related transition activities. Managing the shutdown of over-the-air analog television service has been a top priority for the main U.S. government telecommunications agencies, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Whether Little Smart service in China will be shut down with less government involvement remains to be seen. Opportunities for increasing costs for users and degrading quality of service are much better for Little Smart than for free, over-the-air television broadcasts. Even if China Telecom and China Netcom cannot raise monthly fees and per minute rates for Little Smart, they can add a variety of additional fees that effectively raise the cost of using Little Smart service.  In addition, a variety of opportunities exist for gradually degrading the quality of the service. Such actions, along with aggressive special discounts and promotions for Little Smart subscribers to shift to China Telecom/Netcom 3G service, may be sufficient to mitigate popular outrage at shutting down Little Smart.

Shutting down operations and services in a politically feasible way is as important for a well-functioning economy as is fostering the entry of new services.   Smart economic policy considers both the problems of entry and exit.

Notes:

[1] The facts in this and the subquent paragraphs, unless otherwise noted, are from  Wu, From Iron Fist to Invisible Hand, pp. 125-132, and Jack Linchuan Qiu (2005), The Accidental Accomplishment of Little Smart: Understanding the Emergence of a Working-Class ICT, paper prepared for the ARNIC High-Level Workshop on Wireless Communication and Development, October 7-8, 2005.

[2] Qiu (2005) p. 4.

[3] For a review of the data, see Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Media Bureau Staff Report Concerning Over-the-Air Broadcast Television Viewers, MB Docket No. 04-210, Feb. 28. 2005, and FCC, Annual Assessment of the Status of Competition in the Market for the Delivery of Video Programming, Thirteenth Annual Report (released January 16, 2009) pp. 53-4.

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In addition to big-screen public movie theaters, popular personal video display devices now range from mobile phones to personal computers to huge home television sets. Video first shown on a big screen to a silent crowd gathered in a darkened theater might come to be viewed on a small, mobile-phone screen by a single person on a noisy bus traveling in the afternoon.

Phone companies, software companies, and advertising agencies are developing "three screen" strategies for integrating information and serving advertisements across personal video display devices. But content convergence cannot be taken for granted. What sort of video content works well across display sizes and viewing circumstances remains largely an open question.

[video embedded above]

Liao Wen Ho Puppet Theater is an example of highly artistic entertainment that works well across a wide range of display sizes and viewing circumstances. The Liao Wen Ho Puppet Theater draws upon a rich tradition of Taiwanese puppetry. Taiwanese puppetry began with mid-eighteenth century theater performances displaying classical Chinese culture. In the 1920s, Taiwanese puppetry began to incorporate heroic martial arts fighting (wuxia). This produces the sort of performance that could draw a crowd on a street corner like that for a Punch and Judy show in late eighteenth-century England. Recently at the Sackler Gallery, Liao Wen Ho Puppet Theater performed an episode from Journey to the West, a great classical romance of Chinese literature. The performance combined classical Chinese culture with an attention-grabbing displays of heroic fighting.

The performance worked across a large scale. The individual puppets moved in subtle and expressive ways that could be fully appreciated only up-close or with a tight camera focus. At the same time, the performance occurred across a stage that I would guess was several meters long. The performance included large scale effects such as darting flames and clouds of smoke, and the dynamic spatial arrangements of the multiple puppets was an important part of the show. These aspects of the performance were best appreciated at a distance or with a wide focus. The puppets themselves ranged in size from traditional glove puppets (about 20 cm tall) to much larger hand puppets (about 120 cm tall).

In Taiwan, puppet shows have been hugely popular on television. Hand puppets, like shadow puppets, are framed in two dimensions, like video displayed on a flat panel. Television cameras offer the opportunity to give many viewers both close-up and long views of the puppets. Not surprisingly, Liao Wen Ho Puppet Theater has been successful both in theater performance and on television.

Liao Wen Ho Puppet Theater also provided a great example of interactivity. After the show, Liao Wen Ho and his company came out from behind the stage to demonstrate puppetry to the audience. They then shook hands with members of the audience, spoke with them, and patiently posed for photographs and videos with them. They thus combined new media possibilities with ancient human hospitality. That's both smart and generous.

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Good government must respond effectively to administrative problems. In China, claims of wrongful government action are addressed through petitions to complaint offices (the Xinfang system) and through court cases (administrative litigation). From 1996 to 2004, Xinfang petitions were perhaps forty times as numerous as court cases.[1] How these two processes shape communication with persons not formally parties to the dispute may help to explain this outcome.

In an interesting recent paper, Taisu Zhang argues that the relatively large number of petitions doesn't indicate Chinese reluctance to pursue court cases. About the year 2000, the Xinfang system handled about five million petitions concerning civil matters. The number of civil cases in the court systems was about four million.[2] Thus the ratio of petitions to court cases is much lower for civil disputes than for administrative disputes. Persons are not relatively reluctant to bring court cases; they are relatively reluctant to bring administrative disputes to courts.

Zhang also argues that the relatively large number of petitions occurs even though petitioning is a much less propitious action. In administrative cases in China, plaintiffs' claims prevail in about 30% of cases. In contrast, only 0.2% of Xinfang petitions lead to "successful resolution of the dispute."[3] For a person seeking to prevail in a dispute, the Chinese court system offers better opportunities than the Xinfang system.

Zhang proposes that the adversarial nature of administrative litigation explains the relatively low number of administrative disputes brought to courts. Chinese administrative litigation law prohibits mediation in administrative cases. According to Zhang, the Chinese public prefers "more paternalistic and less confrontational methods": "the judge should appear as a benevolent 'Fu Mu Guan' ('father figure') who is seeking to solve problems through the least intrusive way possible."[4] Officials in the Xinfang system appear to be much closer to such a role.

Forms of communication about the dispute to non-disputants may also favor the Xinfang system. Chinese administrative litigation law requires that all cases receive a public trial. Zhang's paper says little about this requirement. A public trial does not necessarily make for a more adversarial proceeding. It can, however, expose the interests of the plaintiff to competitors outside of the dispute. Public, authoritative accounts of disputes and decisions fosters the rule of law. In circumstances of intense socio-economic competition not well-structured by an effective legal system, serving as a public example through administrative litigation can have considerable private costs along with the public benefits. The Xinfang system, in contrast, requires no particular written statements and no public account.[5]

The Xinfang system also gives disputants better opportunities to frame the dispute in a way that appeals to others. Litigation involves highly structured forms and patterns of communication. Petitioning, in contrast, allows the petitioner much more freedom in communicating the dispute to others. While class-action litigation requires considerable conceptual and organizational support, mass petitions naturally occur and in fact tend to be associated with mass incidents. Transforming specific administrative problems into more general problems of social unrest makes those problems less informative.[6]

Requiring Xinfang petitions to be submitted according to a specific written form and requiring responses to Xinfang petitions to be described publicly might encourage the development of law-oriented procedures for resolving administrative disputes. More generally, how to get better formed communication about administrative problems is a key challenge for good government.

Notes:

[1] Zhang (2008) p. 4.
[2] Id. p. 24.
[3] Id. p. 13.
[4] Id. p. 5.
[5] Minzer (2006) pp. 161-2 notes that petitions made as in-person visits rose from 59% of petitions in 1990 to 78% of petitions in 2001. In an in-person visit, the petitioner need not commit any information to writing.
[6] Minzer (2006) argues that Xinfang regulations encourage the politicization of grievances.

References:

Minzner, Carl F. (2006), "Xinfang: An Alternative to Formal Chinese Legal Institutions," 42 Stanford Journal of International Law, v. 42, pp. 103-79.

Zhang, Taisu, "The Xinfang Phenomenon: Why the Chinese Prefer Administrative Petitioning Over Litigation" (February 27, 2008). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1098417

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"Once upon a time, the editorial page of the New York Times set the political agenda for the U.S.," began the old man. That sounds like a highly undemocratic fairy tale in this Age of Digg (AD). Today, Google is offering Australian Federal Election tools, Youtube is running You Choose '08, Yahoo is mashing up its own efforts, and the political clout of dailyKos appears to be rapidly approaching that of AARP. A significant share of persons appear to be highly interested in discussing politics with other like-minded persons. They now have much greater capability to do that.

The rise of civilizations in ancient China illustrates the importance of communication. The development of enduring social stratification among lineages living in the same location, the organization of lineages into geographical units and large warrior groups, and the development of writing all emerged in ancient China by the Longshan period 5000 to 4000 years ago. Rather than being a result of developments in productive technology and trade, these developments seem to have been products of the emergence of socially recognized, highly valued communications capabilities.[1]

Kings in ancient China emerged as those persons with special capabilities for communicating with ancestors and spirits. Kings had the right family connections and reputations for merit. More importantly, however, they performed rituals offerings, read oracle bones, and possessed elaborately designed bronze tripods (dings, also transcribed as tings). Dings were expensive and scarce. They embodied animals that, used skillfully, were apparently powerful means for communicating with ancestors and spirits.[2] Persons who sought effective communication with ancestors and spirits had to serve the king.

New findings hint that exclusive communication capabilities may also have been important in the rise of cities in northern Mesopotamia. Tell Brak in northeastern Syria, which eventually became the ancient city of Nagar, developed as a city from about 6200 years ago. A high-density central region developed, but so did "clusters of occupied space interspersed with vacant zones." The total settlement area was nearly twenty times larger than other settlement areas of the time.[3]

Subsequent development expanded outer settlements inward. The researchers who documented these developments observed:

The spatial separation between settlement clusters suggests social distance between discrete subcommunities. ... At Brak, clustering may have resulted from maintenance of social distance by immigrant groups. Existing social mechanisms may not have been able to sustain increased density in a nucleated form.

The researchers suggest that urbanism at Brak was "at least in part the unintended result of the actions of autonomous and nonhierarchically ranked groups."[4]

Tell Brak clearly was a center of trade and industry. The central mound included large industrial structures. One building in the central mound contained "grinding stones, big ovens, basalt pounders, carefully crafted stone and bone tools, flint and obsidian blades, mother-of-pearl inlay, and clay spindle whorls." A structure from about a century later contained piles of obisidian imported from Anatolia, as well as imported jasper, marble, serpentine, and diorite stones.[5]

But Tell Brak was more than just a center of trade and industry. Archaeologists found a "unique stone chalice": "a chalice with a white marble base and black obsidian bowel held together at its seam with bitumen."[6] An excavation in 1937-38 uncovered what's called the "Eye Temple":

The temple, built ca 3500–3300 BCE, was named for the hundreds of small alabaster "eye idol" figurines, which were incorporated into the mortar with which the mudbrick temple was constructed. The building's surfaces were richly decorated with clay cones, copper panels and gold work, in a style comparable to contemporary temples of Sumer. [Wikipedia]

Tell Brak became a highly stratified ritual center in addition to being a center of trade and industry. While the Eye Temple is dated much later than the growth of the city, it may have had significant but yet undiscovered antecedents.

Like the development of civilization in ancient China, the development of Tell Brak may have depended on widespread interest in gaining access to scarce communication capabilities (persons and technologies). Small groups might hear accounts that a person or persons at Tell Brak could communicate with spirits whom members of the small group themselves could not contact. They might go to Tell Brak to investigate, settling close enough for observation and investigation, but not so close as to create friction in ordinary communication with the strangers living there.

The combination of shared interests and new communications capabilities seems to have reshaped cities and civilizations. Discussing politics using web-based communications technologies can have a large effect on political authority.

Notes:

[1], Chang, Kwang-Chih (1989) "Ancient China and its anthropological significance," pp. 155-66 in C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, ed., Archaeological thought in America Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[2] Chang, Kwang-Chih (1983) Art, myth, and ritual: the path to political authority in ancient China. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

[3] Ur, Jason A., Philip Karsgaard, and Joan Oates (2007) "Early Urban Development in the Near East," Science v. 317 (31 Aug) p. 1188.

[4] Id.

[5] Lawler, Andrew (2007) "Murder in Mesopotamia?" Science v. 317 (31 Aug) p. 1165.

[6] Id.

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The development of writing gave humans technology for storing knowledge and conveying it across time. But, at least in China, storing and transmitting knowledge doesn't seem to be a good explanation for the earliest writing.

The earliest corpus of Chinese writing is oracle-bone inscriptions from the Late Shang Dynasty. The Shang Dynasty arose about 3500 years ago in the Yellow River valley in the northeastern region of present-day China. To converse with ancestors, spirits, and powers, the dynastic kings and his diviners orally addressed propositions ("charges") to a specially prepared cattle scapula or turtle plastron ("bone"). The bone was then heated, and the king read a response -- "auspicious" or "inauspicious" -- from the heat cracks that appeared in the bone.

In the late Shang Dynasty (about 3050 to 3200 years ago), the divination conversation was systematically recorded. After the divination had occurred, engravers carved unto the bone the date of the divination, sometimes the place if it was unusual, and the charge. Sometimes they also recorded the king's reading, and, less frequently, a record of the actual outcome relevant to the charge. About 150,000 inscribed oracle bones from the Late Shang have been found. Hence late Shang kings had an extensive inscribed-bone record of their conversations with ancestors, spirits, and powers.

The oracle bone inscriptions cover a wide range of concerns. Roughly 7% of inscribed bones concern primarily the weather. Other charges addressed harvests, favor of ancestors, disasters, childbirth, administrative orders, hunting expeditions, and many other topics. In other words, charges are like text on Twitter, but forward-looking:

• "Today it will not rain."
• "(We) will hunt at Wu; going and coming back there will be no disasters."
• "It should be tonight that (we) perform the you-cutting sacrifice and perform an exorcism."
• "There is a sick tooth; it is not Father Yi who is harming (it/him)."
• "The Eastern Lands will receive harvest."
• "Today, yichou, we offer one penned sheep to Ancestory Xin, promise five cattle."
• "It should be Qin whom we order to inspect Lin."
• "It should be Bing whom we order to inspect Lin."
• "If we build a settlement, Di (the High God) will not obstruct (but) approve."
• "Lady Hao's (a consort of the king's) childbearing will be good."
• "(We) pray for Lady Hao to Father Yi (the king's deceased father)."

[all of the above charges are translated and presented in Keightley (2000)]

The charges address immediate, pragmatic concerns. That's not usual for divination. Preserving a record of such divination, however, is unusual.

The purpose of this record seems not to have been to record and transmit knowledge. The reading of the cracks and the actual outcome would have been highly relevant information, but these aspects of the divination often weren't recorded. Moreover, logically complementary propositions were often proposed serially. For example, an oracle bone was addressed with the charge, "It is Shang Jia who is harming the rain," and then, on the same bone, another charge, "It is not Shang Jia who is harming the rain." To avoid inconsistency, these two conversations must have been interpreted in light of each other. In addition, there's no evidence that anyone other than the king determined the readings that the oracle-bone cracks implied. Hence no one other than the king would have an incentive to study the information recorded on the bones. Of course, modern science also implies that studying these records would have no predictive value.

Why then this costly, extensive use of writing? Communication with ancestors, spirits, and powers was highly valued in ancient Chinese culture. Accumulation of inscribed bones documented the extent of the king's communication with ancestors, spirits, and powers. What specifically the bones recorded didn't matter.

Perhaps not having a life for reading lifelogging doesn't matter either. Life is good. For those that find it hard to believe, lifelogging is evidence that they're alive. On the other hand, the social value of that record is likely to be much less than the social value in ancient China of a record of communication with ancestors, spirits, and powers.

Reference:

Keightley, David N. (1999), "The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of the Late Shang Dynasty," in Wm. Theodore De Bary and Richard Lufrano, compilers, Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2'nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press) Ch. 1.

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