PayPal

Just came across a summary of a talk by Peter Thiel on how PayPal got started, . Thiel was a libertarian, trying to work out how to claw back power from government:

One solution: move control of money from the government to individuals. But you cant do this via plebiscite. If there was a form of money that government couldn’t measure or track, you'd have a powerful alternative. This insight was genesis of Paypal in late 1990s.

In mid 90s, several companies were creating alternative currencies: Cybercash, Digicash, etc. All of the initial attempts were going out of business. Money has a network-like aspect. How do you create a new currency when no one else is using it?

All these efforts had run aground against this rock. So Paypal started by leveraging against existing systems: credit cards, checks. Send money to anyone with an email address. Started with 24 employees at Paypal. Preloaded accounts with $10. Started to spread. We grew at 5-7% compounded daily.

More here

Ausgeschlossen

Locked out for 2 days. Camped out at Ingrid's. Went to the Schlüsseldienst in Katzbachstraße at 10; he told me to come back in an hour. Retreated to Yorckschlößchen. Back to SD who drove me to the house in his car (he does this now after the time I confused 1700 hours with 7pm and was not waiting on the doorstep). He cracked the lock. I gave him a 50-Euro note and thanked and thanked and thanked.

SD: Es ist meine Arbeit.

It's my job.

The Schlüsseldienst lives in a tiny pocket of reality where someone who DESPERATELY needs a very simple thing done NOW can actually pay a paltry 50 Euros to get it done by the type of person who sees doing it NOW as his job. Once he has done that simple thing I have a place to stay, my books, my clothes, my papers, a kitchen, a bath. (Still no phone, though, and no Internet access, because there's no one at T-Com or anywhere else who can be paid to fix it NOW.)

I know it's his job; I love the fact that it's his job; I must do something to make sure that he makes much more money out of the job. I must advertise the SD on the sidebar so all English-speakers on the Kreuzberg-Schöneberg border know where to go. Yes.

I go back to Yorckschlößchen, gestresst. It's 11.34 am. I tell Jerry I must have a beer and Walker's crisps, and he says Que? and I point. I walk round the bar to have a better look at the ranks of Walker's crisps hanging from laundry clips. Olav (who owns Y'n) and Katrin are standing by.

I say: (This is all in a series of sentences bearing a family resemblance to German, but never mind that now) Don't you have anything other than Salt & Vinegar and Prawn Cocktail? Don't you have Ready Salted?

(I have just had an e-mail from an Israeli sniper who is now being retrained in a one-week crash course in computers, because she has almost finished her National Service and sniping is not seen as a sufficiently transferable skill. She can't think of anything but Gaza. She says she wishes she had been killed on a mountain by another sniper, someone who saw her brown skin against the green. She has a scholarship to Harvard which she has had to postpone for 2 years. While camped out at Ingrid's I have been TRYING to get her to put her ticket to Boston on one of my credit cards so I know the ticket is actually booked and she will go, but she now says she has bought the ticket through her factory and does not have to pay till July 1 and she will probably -- well, she has various ideas for jobs that do not sound like very good ideas. I think she has in fact booked a ticket from Tel Aviv to Newark. We had a correspondence a while back about Your Name Here, which tries to engage the reader with Arabic; she said: Do you really thinking learning Arabic will make people stop killing each other? I assure you you are mistaken. (She does speak Arabic; she has an Iraqi grandmother, who does not want her to waste 4 years on Harvard.) The many readers who acted as guinea pigs for the Arabic puzzles thought they were great. The few publishers who have seen the book are not wildly keen -- though not, as far as I can make out, because sceptical that learning Arabic will make people stop killing each other.)

I say to Olav and Katrin: Salt & Vinegar and Prawn Cocktail are the worst flavours of crisp. That's why they are always the last to sell -- nobody likes them.

Olav says: No, actually they're the most popular. When we didn't sell crisps Salt & Vinegar was the flavour everyone asked for. Salt & Vinegar and Prawn Cocktail.

I say: Oh.

I say: Well, that's echt Britisch. Salt & Vinegar, Prawn Cocktail. And Marmite. Echt Britisch.

He says: Yes. Very British. What flavour do you like?

I say: Smoky Bacon. Smoky Bacon is the best.

Meanwhile Jerry has been down to the cellar and come back with a packet of Ready Salted crisps.

Salt & Vinegar. Prawn Cocktail. These are the Da Vinci Codes of the world of crisps, crowding out Smoky Bacon, Cheddar Cheese, Cheese & Onion and Ready Salted -- flavours that are not sold out because popular, merely kept in the cellar to leave the laundry clips free for the crowdpleasers.

Many many thanks to the readers who have generously made contributions to my PayPal account. For those who are sitting on the fence, remember that a packet of Walker's Smoky Bacon crisps costs 1 Euro. According to OzForex,

PayPal charges 30 cents plus 3% commission, which means that a remote-purchased packet of Smoky Bacon Crisps costs $1.66.

Sending Arabic puzzles out into the world is clearly not my job. Writing a novel with Arabic in it was clearly not my job. Writing September 11 novels without Arabic is clearly the job of quite a lot of writers, since quite a lot of writers (Updike, McInerney, Foer, McEwan, DeLillo) have managed to get paid for it. It's not my job, but I think it's meine Arbeit. My poor head.

If Updike or McInerney or Foer or McEwan or DeLillo had learnt Arabic they would have known how exciting it is to make the first breakthrough into the language. If they had known that they would have wanted to know everyone to know it. So if some earlier writer -- a Borges or a Calvino or a Bowles -- had written fiction that enabled the reader to make that breakthrough, Updike et al. would have made that breakthrough and they would have been different writers from the ones they were. But because no earlier writer had brought out the Smoky Bacon, they themselves were in no position to bring out Smoky Bacon, and so there never has been and never will be a market for Smoky Bacon. Except that when I ask readers to act as guinea pigs on Arabic puzzles they generally get very enthusiastic.

That remote-purchased packet of Smoky Bacon crisps could keep the author sending Arabic puzzles (that Smoky Bacon of the world of books) out into the world when publishers and Israeli snipers were not wildly keen. That remote-purchased PDF of Your Name Here (a bargain at $10) sidesteps the sort of publisher who will only publish Salt & Vinegar and Prawn Cocktail. You know it makes sense.

Greening of Books

Geographical distribution of copies of The Last Samurai available through Abebooks on 11 June, 2007 can be seen here.

PayPal Account of Helen DeWitt on 14 June, 2007:


These exhibits are the result of the following e-mail correspondence:

E-mail from Helen DeWitt to George Monbiot on 10 April 2007

 Mr Monbiot

I'm a writer, with a book that sold 100,000 in English and was published
in 19 countries. Is it sad that the book did not sell 1 million, like
Captain Corelli's Mandolin or White Teeth?

118 copies are available on Amazon.com for 50 cents and upwards. I only
get paid if a new object is manufactured and sold. On the sale of a new
object for $11.99 I get 90 cents.

I've argued to the Society of Authors that it would be better all round
if we changed the system -- if an author's cut were taken for every
secondhand online sale. If we changed the social system, so authors got
"tipped" -- you buy a book secondhand in a shop, it includes the
author's Paypal account, you recycle the object and send the author a
tip if you liked the book.

Libraries are A Good Thing from the point of view of the ozone layer,
and A Bad Thing for an author who gets something like 1p per loan.  I'm
not wildly keen on writing for free, but I'm also not wildly keen on
having  getting a $200K advance to have 100K physical objects pushed
into circulation.  My understanding is that paper manufacture is
horribly expensive in ecological terms.

I would infinitely rather get paid for 10 sales of 1 book than for 10
sales of 1 book; I think ways could be found to recycle packaging and
cut down transport. The Society of Authors remains tamely unkeen.

I thought: Wait. I once met George Monbiot, the Ecowarrior, at the Pater
Society at BNC. I have a Connection. And as E M Forster famously said,
Only connect.

Any thoughts?

Helen DeWitt

Astoundingly swift reply from Monbiot on 17 April 2007:



Dear Helen,

I think this is a great idea.  Hasn't something similar been done for artists?: every time you a painting by a living artist is resold, he gets a cut.  The circulation of books is certainly more environmentally friendly than constant printing.

We do already have a system a little like this in the UK, called public lending rights: www.plr.uk.com. But it would surely make sense to extend this to secondhand sales.  The means you propose sounds plausible.

With my best wishes, George


***

The Society of Authors remains unkeen; the Authors' Guild is unkeen; but two readers have bought copies of The Last Samurai directly from the author, and one has bought a copy of Your Name Here directly from the author, and the fruits of these transactions are to be seen in my Paypal account (I do have more than $36.65 to my name, you'll be happy to hear).

I don't know how to talk round the official bodies -- but I do think the system we have now is very bad for the planet, and it's indirectly also very bad for literature.

Publishers base their decision to publish new books on the sales of the last book -- that is, on sales of new books, not on readers. But hang on just a minute. Sven Birkerts recently nominated The Last Samurai for an article in the New York Review of Books on unjustly neglected fiction, excellent news -- but if you thought you liked the sound of the book, and it wasn't in bookstores (and an "unjustly neglected" work of fiction almost certainly isn't in a bookstore near you), surely you'd either go to your local library (where you can get it free) or to Amazon (where you can get it for $1.70 plus $3.99 postage). If a reader loves the book and keeps a spare copy to lend out to friends, this is VERY VERY GOOD for the planet (not only is the same physical object being used several times, it is being passed around locally, with negligible use of nonrenewable fossil fuels). But none of these ecologically virtuous readers is visible to publishers as a potential buyer of the next book. So all these green readers indirectly sabotage the writer's chance of getting the next book published. Sad but true.

I have no idea how to twist the arm of Jeff Bezos. I have no idea how to get on Abebooks' case. But surely we can do better than this system? Surely what we're up against, really, is not selfishness or greed but a sociological problem -- and the planet is paying the price.

We-ell. One way of looking at it is: the only way to get authors paid on secondhand or borrowed books is to have the system policed. We need the Public Lending Right to collect. We need Jeff Bezos to collect. We need enforcement. Question is, is this actually right? Who polices tipping? In America it's standard to tip 15%, and my mother says she now leaves 20% because the minimum wage has been outstripped by inflation, and NOBODY HAS TO DO IT. It is not standard for readers to send money directly to authors. However much you love a book, it would be very very odd to send a monetary token of your esteem to the person who wrote it. But the fact that this would be odd is in itself odd.

Giving a waitress a $2 tip for a $12 meal does not improve your chances of getting a good meal next time. Giving a waitress a $3 tip for a $12 meal does not improve your chances of getting a better meal next time. No amount of discretionary generosity to a waitress will have any effect on the quality of the next meal. And the institution of discretionary generosity to waitresses, of course, however laudable in itself, offers no obvious ecological benefit.

By way of contrast--

Contemplating the length of this post, I am reminded of J S Mill's comment early in On the Subjection of Women, that when one is arguing against what "everyone knows" one is obliged to go on at great length, because the number of unexamined assumptions is so large. The institutions which govern the sale of books and payment of authors rest on a very large number of unexamined assumptions -- assumptions with unintended consequences. I think it may be better to pursue the subject in a later post.

I comment, however, that I have linked to the satellite version of the Google Map for a reason. Suppose it were possible to locate on the planet all 100,000 copies of the English-language edition of The Last Samurai rather than the 231 on sale at Abebooks, or the 73 available on Amazon. Suppose we knew the cities in which the book was to be found, suppose some of those owners were willing to be contacted by e-mail by would-be readers of the book who lived locally. Suppose would-be sellers of the book registered with the author rather than with Mr Bezos or Mr Abebooks. If such a system could be made to work, I think we could BOTH slash the quantities of books manufactured and hauled across the planet AND reduce authors' vulnerability to profit-hungry agents and editors. I think it would be A Very Good Thing.

Any thoughts?

[PS I see that the link to Google Maps does not, in fact, bring up the satellite view, so I did not have the total artistic control I had hoped for -- if you want the satellite view you will have to manually click Satellite. If you want to see the location of the copy in Permina ND more manual clicking will be required.]