Apple of California or Taipei iPod Contractors? "Birth of iPhone" is "Game of Thrones" Saga

In the Game of Thrones (which am watching for the first time, binging Seasons 1, 2, and 3 during an Xfinity free-access trial).  It's about the rightful sons and daughters, or "bastard" sons of Kings, and their rights and claims to Kingdoms and Thrones.

In our world, the Patent or Copyright or Claim of invention is the coveted throne of the modern "Rightful Heir".  And the stakes - for Titans like Apple, Samsung, Sony, or Foxconn - represent a far more wealth than the "Iron Throne" at King's Landing.

Game of Thrones keeps our interest, in part, by slowly revealing more dimension in characters introduced in a previous season (before killing them off and replacing them, perhaps with a new actor less willing to negotiate better salary.. another contract manufacturing angle).  For those of us who study planned obsolescence and contract manufacturing, the history of Android (especially Samsung) vs. Apple smartphones is just as fascinating.  (There's even a 'bit player' I know personally, a kind of Hong Kong Tyrion, that I know pesonally.  Proview's Rowell Yang of the four fingers received a check from Apple for $60M five years ago. He had trademarked the name "iPhone" while I was a consulting with Proview).

In last weekend's WSJ.com, there's a fascinating chapter to the claims that Steve Jobs is the rightful King. father of the smartphone.

Circular Economy and African Shanzhai: Under the Bridge

Shanzhai, or Shan Zhai, or sanzai...

I dropped the word "shanzai" recently.  In my mind, it's something I blogged about not that long ago (2011) - a term I learned from meeting Dr. Josh Goldstein at USC via Adam Minter.  But I do admit to that habit of dropping a word or a phrase in places where no one knows what I'm talking about (unless they do).

Like a reference to "the Keystone Cops", the word "shanzhai" went "whoosh" over the heads of my listeners.  But in a reuse and recycling context, it's a profound concept.  It is like a master guitarist finding that a fan has learned to play his riffs even better than he can.  It's the concept of taking an iPhone 6 and repairing it with bells and whistles that make it, virtually, like an iPhone 9 (yet to be invented).

Today's blog has three goals - 1) remind readers of the importance of shanzhai, 2) show some really awesome examples of Africans turning broken LCD TVs into things of higher value, and 3) explore the "poor communicator" dynamic which so often dumbs down own discussions. When is it necessary to go back and remind a new reader what a word means?  Often today, journalists and bloggers "hotline" the word by html to a definition somewhere else online, similar to a footnote.

So here's the thing - Shanzai is being re-defined in relationship to "counterfeit" stuff. In the same way the charitable industrial complex defined African electronic recycling with "bad" images of Agbogbloshie, and defined Chinese technology reuse with cesspools and rice paddies, someone is out to bury the concept of refurbishment itself, and to make it seem shameful.

And they are going to use European and American implicit racism and assumptions about Africans and Chinese people to keep the competition away.  Like second string white baseball players, the American and European "big shred" recyclers are frightened of competition from Jackie Robinson.

To be fair, shanzai does also mean borrowed or knock-off, but in Chinese it has a much more respected context.  As I explained in the blog, Shanzhai is respected in China, in the way that John Frusciante, 47, (Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist) respects Josh Klinghoffer, 37.  Klinghoffer copied Frusciante's guitar riffs and added a spice to them that put the Red Hot Chili Peppers on another level.

Here's what you will see in the blog below the "more" line:

1) Chili Peppers "under the bridge" video
2) An explanation of how I feel lonely explaining African exports (tied to lyrics)
3) A photo slide show demonstrating what Africans are doing with broken LCD TVs (like the ones Total Reclaim allowed to be exported to China)

And as usual, the conclusion

4) African geeks know more than we do, and the "circular economy" doesn't revolve around white people.

followed by

5) a blog-end of why it may be worth it to sometimes write a blog that's over most reader's level of expertise.

See if you can check the boxes

Game Theory 5: Yankee Ingenuity changes to Soukous Ingenuity

Time to tweek the English Vocabulary.


This post is about "aid" or "nurture" versus strategy for growth and self-sustaining economies.  It's not the proverb "teach a man to fish".  It's "Dudes!  Don't even you see this guy is fishing successfully?  Give him back his dang fishing pole.  Like, primum non nocere already!"

for some reason this depicts strategy by wiki

"Yankee Ingenuity" was a term recognized virtually worldwide after World War II, though it harkened back the a period much earlier, when New England's industrialization began making "good enough" product  in competition with English and European manufacturing.   Paper mills, weavers, cotton gins, and printing presses (like the used one purchased by teenaged Ben Franklin from London prior to the Revolutionary War) were often erected with "tinkered" parts.   Reuse, repair, and upgrade were recognized as a talent associated with poverty and a "can do" attitude.

My generation of schoolchildren in the 1960s saw "yankee ingenuity" in our history textbooks, it was so promoted that Wikipedia's editor is within h/h rights to label it a "stereotype".  

But what we really need is a term that African and Asian and South American Tinkerers can be proud of.  The "tinkerer's blessing", as I've dubbed it refers to can-do/make-do in contrast to the "Resource Curse".   But 'blessing' is a description of an effect, whereas "Yankee Ingenuity" gave respect to the people performing the repairs and upgrades.   Tinkerer's Blessing refers to the effects the Geeks of Color have on their own emerging city or country.   What do we label the drive within the African, the Joe Benson, the Hamdy Moussa?  How do we regionalize Acer's Simon Lin or Terry Gou's adaptation of "semi-knockdown" and "elective upgrade" in a way that signifies a "tip of the hat?"

Sincerest Form of Blog Hijack? Damageethical Zelig (Poonam Verma)

Sincerest Form of Blog Hijack?  Damageethical Zelig (Not_by Poonam Verma)

Mirror Effect Photo Screenshot

Well... my search box widget in Blogspot keeps breaking down (known issue at google forums) and I have been using Google Search to find references to old blogs.

How's this for a doppleganger?   Damageethical Blog, "by Poonam Verma".  He may be from India, or from Sri Lanka, I see 22 pages accessed from Sri Lanka this morning.

It's registered as retroworksa.blogspot.com (notice the letter "a" affixed to retroworks).  And it's a complete reposting of my work in this blog.

Except every post has a crap link advertisement in front.  I haven't found any malware.

Not that Indian

So... since I'm a mission oriented dude, do I see this as "getting the word out?"   Or should I be outraged at the paid ads for water removal, sewage, etc. he's selling?  It's like running into a cyber-Leonard Zelig from India.

"The question of whether Zelig was a psychotic or merely extremely neurotic was a question that was endlessly discussed among his doctors. ... his feelings were really not all that different from the normal, what one would call the well-adjusted, normal person, only carried to an extreme degree, to an extreme extent. I myself felt that one could really think of him as the ultimate conformist." - character Bruno Bettelheim, Zelig (1983, Woody Allen film)

The ultimate conformist copies a blogger who has been labelled, by many in the "E-Waste" industry, as a non-conformist. It's copycatting of a defender of tinkerers, knock-offs, shanzai, good-enough markets...  He's probably making a lot more money on the blog than I am.

Top of the Tops: Li, Lee, Romney, Kate Middleton

THE TOP ASIAN LEADERS GOT THEIR START IN GOOD ENOUGH MARKETS -

Meetings of the Kings of repair and refurbish and semi-knockdown and shipping in Asia could tell us much about the "mystery" of Chinese imports of used electronics.   If they talk about old times... if walls could talk! Shipping line magnates offered cheap sea containers to electronics shangzai mock-upiers in Korea, who had  new plastic cases minted by Taiwanese molding companies, who had the wares re-assembled by contract labor commanders.  The history of development of the Asian Tigers, told through the eyes of "e-waste".

Kate Middleton found it missing

Here an article by By Jung-Ah Lee and Jeffrey Ng, via the Korea blog of Evan Ramsted of the WSJ.  It shows a rare meeting between two rich, wealthy, billionaire LEEs.. Li Ka-shing of Hong Kong's Cheung Kong Holdings, and Lee Kun-hee of South Korea's Samsung electronics.  Both are from the generation where Asian entrepreneurs learned to cloak used and repaired electronics (radio, stereo, tape player, computer) in new plastic garb, putting used CRTs into new "television" boxes, etc.  As young men, each lived in a country as poor as Africa is today.

Li Ka-shing is now one of the world's 20 richest men. He can get containers into Hong Kong.  Lee Kun-hee started out buying used Sony and Phillips gear, and found he could sell it for more if he got brand-new plastic cases, perhaps from (Taiwan) Simon Lin's Wistron, who began in the business of molding plastic for computer monitors and TVs.  Terry Gou, also of Taiwan, was able to assemble assembly lines to put it all together in Shenzhen's Foxconn, and Rowell Yang's Proview turned them into monitors for Dell, Panasonic, IBM, etc. at Proview...

Missing woman found on beach, after safe search, not to be Princess Kate Middleton

These tycoons wrote an end to Monopoly and patent troll boundaries when Japan, USA and Europe were extending trademarks and patents at the urging of established tech manufacturers.  They took a lesson from Japan, "A Network of Tinkerers", and built companies from "good enough" into global brands [Economist].

Wistron's Simon Lin, Proview's Rowell Yang, and Han Hoi Foxconn's Terry Gou represented the Taiwanese ownership Beijing Chinese generals wanted to fail.  But the money brought into southern China by those men, and the billions made by Li Ka-shing, and the rise of South Korea, proved irresistible.  Communist China couldn't beat 'em, and today has joined them.  But these guys are all of the age to remember the wars, the battles between Mao and Cheang Kai-Shek, the Korean War, all living in lands at the edge of starvation, dominated by Japanese and USA industrial giants, trying to just copy their way out to make a living.

Shanzai Vs. Patents: Future Stock

Tip of the hat to Adam Minter of Bloomberg/Shanghaiscrap.com, who gave an even-toned but illuminating presentation on Chinese "E-waste" recycling at the EScrap Conference here in Orlando.   I hope he will put it online, though it would be missing his verbal critique.

Adam listened to my theory of patents...  That the USA and Europe have been so important a market to sell INTO that it was relatively safe, ten years ago, to let Taiwanese and Chinese subcontractors and contract manufacturers, such as Foxconn and Wistron, make everything you sell.   An American gadget company, like Dell or HP or Apple, is in many more ways a retailer - selling "shelf space" inside a box with their logo - than a traditional "manufacturer".     Even Japanese companies, like Sony, are letting China's contract manufacturing giants make the TVs.

My theory goes, that as the "Dell" box contains a Frankenstein of Corsair, Seagate, Intel, etc. parts, sewn together by Foxconn assemblers, that they increasingly rely on the patent to remain part of the equation.  The patent enforcement was access to American and European buyers.  If you violate our patent, we can stop letting you make our products, and without Dollar and Euro holding customers to sell to, mutually assured destruction would ensue.    My theory then says that an important milestone has been reached - China is buying more new products than America is.   While the USA market remains important, the leverage of a major OEM brand is declining.   Selling copyright-infringed or knockoff products solely in Shanghai, Beijing, Mumbai, etc. is not the "desert niche" it was a decade ago.

My question to Adam was whether the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) would step in, and wield their own power of patent enforcement.  How would that power be used?  Would CCP become a member of AGMA, or a power broker?   Recalling how HP gave $6M to the Chinese EPA in 2002, and how it resulted in seizures of printer cartridges, ink cartridges, printer repair shops, and repairmen, could a CCP-AGMA bond become a future sci-fi villain?  Or would the CCP "forget how to speak English" and ignore western patents, letting their own private companies wield the free market power once enjoyed by USA brands?

PPV - Shanzai Mona Lisa

Adam taught me an important word - Shanzai.

This isn't an exact translation, but my understanding is that in the same way Westerners have a "soft spot" for underdogs, that Chinese culture has an applauding respect for "one-upmanship" in "improving" a great product made by another.    If I could improve on da Vinci's Mona Lisa, I might share a space at the Chinese Louvre.   If the "knock off" is an improvement - like the "Iphone V" discovered in Shanghai (an unauthorized copy which actually improves on any Apple Iphone sold before it), that the reaction among the Chinese public is like a rock audience to a guitar riff.

Future of Stock:   If the public in China do not hold corporate stock in the OEMs, they are unlikely to care whether a contract manufacturers "forgets english" and marches off to its own drum.   Even the CCP would find it hard to enforce against Shanzai.  That ultimately means that America needs to stay rich in order to leverage China's manufacturer sector.   And the more America outsources its manufacturing, the more difficult that will be.

I for one welcome the new Shanzai overlords.  If taking "cores" and used product to refurbish to like-new and better-than-original, it means using fewer natural resources, and producing less carbon, to make life better for more people.  The more we shred product to prevent "gray markets" the more America shreds its wealth.   A less wealthy America is less important a market to lose over a patent pissing match.

Cheap, reused goods, open new markets.  Ford Motor Company had the best reply to Vance Packard - people learn to drive on used cars, and the more people learn to drive, the bigger the car market.   Internet access in places that earn $3k per year is important to the future of American producers.    Let Africa, India, China, Indonesia and South America have cheap used goods - we should sell ours to them.  That is how the neighbors improve their houses, and the property values of my own house will go up with the neighborhood.