POST Piss Redux

Many years ago, I read David Edgerton’s “The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History Since 1900″, which really got me thinking about think technological change. I’ve just finished Richard Baldwin’s “The Globotics Upheaval—Globalisation, Robotics and The Future of Work” and now I’m just getting started with the Carl Benedit Frey’s “The Technology Trap—Capital, Labor and Power in the Age of Automation”. All of these books make me think about the impact of new technology and the gap between new technologies appearing, and greatly benefiting their “owners” and the living standards of the majority improving because of the productivity improvements that these new technologies bring.

Basically, people in England used to get paid for piss. Then, because of technological change, they didn’t. And it was just tough. It’s a good job this happened a couple of hundred years ago, because if it happened today then armies of lawyers would be getting injunctions against organic chemists for spreading the process for replacing urine and people who made a lot of money from the production and transport of excrement would undoubtedly be leading high profile campaigns to force people who wear clothes and shoes (even children) to give them money despite their technological redundancy.

Wool is produced by sheep. It is made of keratin – the same substance as hair, horn, hooves and our fingernails. Unlike hair, which is smooth at the microscopic level, wool has scales. These scales are the reason why wool fibres cling together and make it a good material for cloth. You can’t just take wool from a sheep and make it into clothes, though, it needs some processing. In particular, the natural oil in the wool (lanolin) has to be removed. This used to be done with urine, because urine contains ammonia that breaks down the lanolin. Once the grease is gone, the wool can be washed and dyed.

The UK once had a substantial wool trade. In fact, England’s medieval prosperity was founded on wool. In the 13th century there were three sheep to every man, woman and child and wool was the biggest export. At this time, the job of the “fuller” was vital. The fuller was responsible for treating the wool with urine. Officially recognised as one of the worst jobs in history, the fuller spent all day trampling wool knee-deep in barrels of stale urine. It would take a good couple of hours of urine-soaked trampling to produce decent wool. Fulling went back to ancient times, but in medieval times England needed lots of fullers and lots of urine.

Making another common clothing material, leather, was just as disgusting. Leather treatment needed something called “alum”. Alum is a fixing agent that was used in a number of different industrial processes, including leather and wool manufacturing.

Alum was made partly of urine, but another essential ingredient was dog faeces, which in those days was known as “pure”. The pure gatherers, who had a bad job but not as bad as the fulllers, were paid to collect it from the streets and even kennels. The main sources of alum in medieval times were the Middle East and, after 1461, the Papal States north of Rome but these sources were susceptible to disruption. This is why England needed its own supply and why, in 1604 at, Slapewath, near Guisborough, the first successful alum works were a cause for celebration. In a generation, England was self-sufficient. The alum works needed lots of urine, so it fetched a good price. Local households sold theirs for a small payment but as demand began to outstrip supply, the urine was brought by boat from London and elsewhere.

London, as the largest conurbation, was a major source of urine. It was collected and transported around the country. But there were other cities in this vital network. In the 17th century, Newcastle exported large quantities of urine to Ravenscar in North Yorkshire, for example. The urine was collected from both public and private sources and transported via a distrbutionn network to where it was needed. Taking the piss was an element of critical national infrastructure.

So how come this network no longer exists? Why do I have to pay to have my urine taken away, rather have competing distributors hammering on my door, waving chequebooks and demand more? Why do people throw their dogs turds away instead of hoarding them for sales? Well, these vital industrial processes needed not urine but a particular chemical, urea, that it contains. The network collapsed because chemists discovered a way to synthesis urea artificially. In fact, this discovery was a critical step in the history of science: urea was the first organic compound to be artificially synthesized from inorganic starting materials. In 1828, Friedrich Woehler prepared it by the reaction of potassium cyanate with ammonium sulfate. Although Woehler was attempting to prepare ammonium cyanate, he inadvertently disproved the theory that the chemicals of living organisms are fundamentally different from inanimate matter by forming urea, thus starting the discipline of organic chemistry.

Now, one might imagine that the amazing scientific discovery of the foundation of organic chemistry was not seen by all as unalloyed benefit. If your job was trampling wool in barrels of urine, you were now unemployed. If you owned or navigated the barges full of excrement traversing the waterways of our great nation, you were on the scraphead, and with no Bono to plead your case to those in power. Technology had moved on, creating fantastic new opportunities and boosting the economy to the great benefit of all (the standard of living of the average person in England started going up in 1828 and has continued to grow, essentially, ever since). But something that used to worth a lot of money — urine — now wasn’t. Surely a Royal Institute of Associated Alum-makers (RIAA) should have sprung into existence to help society maintain a fair approach to the competing interests of the great majority of urine producers and the small minority of urine consumers (by looting from the former to maintain the latter).

It’s not as if there wasn’t adequate precedent lunatic legislation in the world of wool. In England, after 1572 by law all men except nobles had to wear a woollen cap on Sundays. This law was passed to give the wool cap makers plenty of work. I was debating whether to mention this or not, because I didn’t want to plant a suggestion with the music business that they lobby for a law requiring everyone to buy a CD on a Sunday or face imprisonment (at public expense, of course). Even earlier, following the Black Death, the English had “sumptuary laws” to regulate who was allowed to wear what clothes. The peasantry were allowed only cheap wool (even if the could afford better) whereas the Posh n’ Becks of Edward III’s court could wear what they liked. The sumptuary laws, as an aside, also regulated what dogs people were allowed to own and thus indirectly who would have the best “pure” for sale.

Something has gone wrong in the world “intellectual property” of which the music business is the best example despite the fact that almost none of it could be labelled intellectual and it certainly isn’t property in any sense of the word recognised by the man using the Clapham ISP. Copyright isn’t a right at all, but a balance set by society. The goal of it is to balance the interests of artists and society as a whole, not to reward artists without limit at the expense of the rest of society and irrespective of technological change.

As everyone recognises, copyright is actually a pretty recent invention. It was not until the 1709 Statute of Anne (which passed into law on 10th April 1710) that copyright in books and other writings gained protection of an Act of Parliament. This is the year zero of the modern era. I can’t imagine that it’s at all surprising to people that a law regulating business at the dawn of the industrial age might not be absolutely the best way to regulate business at the dawn of the post-industrial age. Over time, copyright has developed a long way from the Statute of Anne to the point where someone who writes a song or makes a movie expects to have income from it forever and a day. The Gowers Review recommends 50 years for sound recordings but doesn’t say anything about books, pictures and so on, although it does note that the duration of protection already “far exceeds” the incentives required to ensure new works are created. In other words, pop stars and record companies extort far too much rent from the market.

If society proceeded according to the principles espoused by EMI, Disney and Coldplay, we would either be getting royalty cheques from the government depending on the amount of piss we produce (even though this piss no longer has any commercial value) or the production of synthetic urea would be banned and subject to the full penalty of the law. But this doesn’t happen. The 17th century equivalent of record companies, the people who collected barrels of piss from the streets of major conurbations and then distributed it, went out of business. And the world doesn’t seem to have run out of wool (or piss) since.

The Gower Review should have said “Copyright made sense in 1709 but not in 2009. If someone writes a book or makes up a song, good luck to them: they will have a short period of exclusivity (the same as for drug patents or movies, let’s say 10 years). If they can get some first mover advantage, great. If they can tour and sell concert tickets, advertising or interviews, fantastic. It should illegal to take something that someone else has produced and pretend it’s yours (that’s fraud) but other than that after 10 years you can mash it up how you like. There’s no reason why either EMI or the Beatles should continue to earn royalties on songs written 40 years ago. Frankly, they are taking the piss”.