La Gobernación de Tokio como actor subnacional

Setting:

After an industry meeting and small workshop, suited business people huddle in quiet conversation before an elaborate array o f drapes and dining table, a decor rather reminiscent o f a National Trust estate. The conference room is part o f a select g olf club somewhere in the ‘M 3/M4 Triangle’ minutes from the motorway.

Journalist: "Call me Marty," said the self-effacing Dr. Martin Cooper, a trim, white-haired dapper septuagenarian who holds eight patents, most of them in wireless

communications technology... The twinkle in his blue eyes suggests that he'd be a fun dad... Cooper, however, can also accurately be called the father of the cell phone.41

40 Photograph o f location for closed industry association meeting 2/6/2004.

41 Ferranti, M arc (1999) Father o f cell phone eyes revolution, CNN.com, October 14, 1999.

Author: Our-father-of-the-cellphone has become a technoscience Christian patriarchal origin myth, as Donna Haraway recounts them.42 Origin stories in technoscience too-often evoke a gendered genealogy, as Judy Wajcman has summarised, “the history o f technology represents the prototype inventor as male” ; so the origins o f technology are told in terms o f hunting rather than gathering, the weapon rather than the string-bag or digging stick.43 But origins in technoscience also concern tim e’s arrow, an ordered linear flow o f progress from then to when, a singular epistemological point in the past from which it all began. Origin stories evoke “the myth o f original unity, fullness, bliss and terror” as Donna Haraway says in her figure o f disruption o f these stories o f purity, innocence and once-upon-a-time imaginaries - the cyborg.44 So what o f the father o f mobile telecoms, how does his tale go?

Journalist: It's not a moniker he particularly likes, but 74-year old Martin Cooper is the father of the mobile phone. And it's all down to an event that took place on a pavement in midtown Manhattan on 3 April, 30 years ago... Marty stuck a kilo weight of plastic... to his ear and started talking into it, becoming the first person to ever place a public call on a handheld cellular telephone.45

42 See (Haraway 1997: 175-187).. 43 See (Wajcman 1991: 15-17). 44 See (Haraway 1991a).

45 Shiels, Maggie (2003) A chat with the man behind mobiles. BBC News, 21st April 2003. h t t p : //n e w s .b b c .c o .U k /l/h i/u k /2 9 6 3 619.stm Accessed 08/06/2005.

Author:

Journalist:

Martin Cooper, the white-haired dapper septuagenarian creator o f the Motorola DynaTAC cellular mobile phone network, and the first cellular mobile phone handset nicknamed the brick. The picture o f middle-class white Euro-American venerability, grey hair, white beard. His paternity is legend in the industry, I remember it particularly well at the start o f the industry journalist account o f “the birth o f a wireless world” .46 Although he might resist the title, he has been interpellated into the trope o f self-birthing technology, well-worn in stories o f

technoscience. He is just “like the traditional masculine figures in the reproductive imagery o f technoscience, who have brain children all the tim e ...”.47 Bruno Latour tells it as the Athena-invention springing fully- formed from the head o f the Zeus-inventor, as I have already said. In this birth, by Martin Cooper, o f the first cellular mobile phone, the rest o f the industry derives its issue. Yet, the history o f technological systems are never that flat. Origins explored in science and technology studies are always rather more diffuse, rather more complex.48

This is how Martin, himself, tells it: "The time was the late 1960s. There was one telephone company in the US, one in Britain and one in Japan and so forth. In our case it was AT&T and they were the largest company in the world and they had invented this thing called

cellular. Their invention was car telephones. Can you

46 See (Galambos and Abrahamson 2002: 3). 47 See (Haraway 1997: 186).

imagine? We believed... people wanted to talk to other people and the only way we at Motorola... could prove this to the world was to actually show we could build a cellular telephone".49

Author: W hat a great national story: America as the origin o f cellular telephony. A couple o f small points, though. Firstly, there are eight names on the Motorola patent for a Radio Telephone System submitted in 1973.50 You were the project manager, as I understand, what about the seven other people on the team? At the manufacturer where I was project managed inside a mobile handset design team, every team m em ber’s name was placed on any patent or design registration, regardless o f who had done the work, who had laboured long with the patents office to make the submission, who had been inspired, who had fought, who had raged or been silent. The patent upon which my name is inscribed was fought for by the industrial designer who made it happen. The project manager did little but gamer political points for increasing the patent output o f the design group. How is it that seven people (at least) become one person? Secondly, there is the 1972 paper by Fumio Ikegami at NTT in Japan, a year earlier than your U.S. patent, concerning an experimental Japanese

49 Ibid.

50 “On October 17, 1973, Motorola filed a patent entitled 'Radio telephone system.' It outlined Motorola's cellular radio system and was given US Patent Number 3,906,166 when it was granted on September 16, 1975. Inventors on the patent were Martin Cooper, Richard Dronsuth, Albert J. Mikulski, Charles N. Lynk, Jr., James J. Mikulski, John F. Mitchell, Roy A. Richardson, and John H. Sangster”. Source: Farley, Tom (1998-2006) Privateline.com: Mobile Telephone History.

Historian:

Author:

Futurist:

cellular system.51 Why have the Japanese developments been silenced in your account?

That’s just the tip o f the iceberg... Since [David] Hughes [in London] moved his experimenting [in electromagnetic induction] from the lab to the field he had truly gone mobile. Although these clicks were not voice

transmissions, I think it fair to credit Hughes with taking the first mobile telephone call in 1879. ...And car telephony is not an AT&T invention, as the Journalist and Cooper claim . From 1910 on it appears that Lars Magnus

Ericsson and his wife Hilda regularly worked the first car telephone [in Sweden]. Yes, this was the man who founded Ericsson in 1876.52

The story o f America as the origin o f mobile telecoms, seems to have unravelled. I don’t think that you are being dishonest, Journalist, I just think your politics o f storytelling, largely a desire for straightforward completeness, necessarily absences much o f the tangled mess o f technological development. Anyone else?

My version o f the origins o f mobile telephony begins in the UK... the first land mobile services were introduced in the 1940s [in the UK] and [later] commercial mobile telephony began in the USA in 1947 when AT&T began

51 See (Ikegami 1972).

52 Farley, Tom (1998-2006) Privateline.com: Mobile Telephone History. httn://wwwr.privatel ine.com/PCS/history.htm Accessed 05/07/2005

Author:

operating a [car-based service] between New York and Boston.53

Y ou’re suggesting that it’s a British invention. Hmm, I think that will do for origin myths, I am not in the business o f mapping all the historical intricacies and international intrigues o f the development o f mobile telephony. Suffice, its origin may be flattened into several nationalistic stories: American, British, Swedish or Japanese (and no doubt others, too). Marty Cooper o f Motorola Inc. performs America as the site o f innovation in mobile telecommunications, which easily rehearses the lineage o f Alexander Graham Bell, alleged inventor o f the telephone, progenitor o f Bell Labs and AT&T. Other storytellers allude to other lineages, the Historian to the electromagnetism work o f Michael Faraday, for example. In each origin story those actors that do not fit are silenced, made absent. In each story time is extruded into a simple line, from the origin to the present-day. This has the effect o f making mobile telephony a story o f linear progress, a one dimensional plot-line, a story with a beginning, a middle, and (as I have discussed earlier) a more or less predictable end. This production and maintenance o f a story o f a single origin and an uncomplicated history o f technological progress is crucial. An origin point and linear history makes a linear future possible.

Moreover, these origin stories are knee-deep in the politics not just o f the national but o f the multinational. Journalist, I would say you are

implicitly writing a M otorola Inc. branded history o f mobile telephony, participating in a corporate mythologizing o f the past and perhaps more crucially, in the potential ownership o f not just the past but technologies

o f the past; writ large and jealously in patents and intellectual property rights. As Marilyn Strathem has noted, patents attach inventions to inventors and produce origin stories o f creativity.54 And, I would argue, vice versa. Be careful whose ownership your story makes present, for ownership o f the past affects ownership o f the future.

Historian: I agree. Multinationals appropriate to themselves credit for significant technological accomplishments,

deliberately divorcing them from the individuals, companies, and countries that, in fact, brought them into being. Cryptohistory is creating a new past to go along with the new future that multinationals are ushering in. Such Cryptohistory is disseminated... insidiously by unwitting... third parties, particularly journalists .55

Author: I am on your side, Historian, in terms o f the political effects o f telling history. But there are only ever multiple accounts o f the past. Countering corporate history on the basis o f singular historical truth is problematic. Your position is just as political, has its own epistemological location as an academic; history is being re-written, rehearsed, all the time. I think I would say that it is the silencing o f actors through the Motorola Inc.

54 See (Strathem 2001).

55 See (Schiffer 1991: 225). Michael Brian Schiffer’s extensive monograph on the long history of the portable radio is an explicit counter to the ongoing promotion of Sony as the inventor of the pocket transistor radio. This corporate mythology, which removes several decades of commercial pocket radios manufactured in America and Europe, has gained such momentum that it is even perpetuated in an undergraduate cultural studies textbook (Du Gay, Hall et al. 1997).

Journalist:

origin story, which is what is at stake: the removal o f undesirable politics, such as the entanglement o f technological development with other

companies and other countries, and the extrusion o f temporal incoherence into a neat line. This is what matters to me, rather than it being a true history versus a cryptic history. I would agree with Michel Serres who says that “every historical era is... multitemporal, simultaneously

drawing from the obsolete, the contemporary, and the futuristic.. .” .56 The mobile phone draws on both electromagnetism and optoelectronics, on both coppersmith and glass blower, on both dreams o f telepathy and the voices o f angels in the sky.57 A mobile telephone is both ancient and futuristic or as Serres explains “the ensemble is only contemporary by assemblage, by its design, its finish, sometimes only by the slickness o f the advertising surrounding it”/ 8 The mobile phone has no origin, rather each particular mobile device has its own gathered (and branded)

temporality, a heterogeneous assemblage o f times. So, rather than simply origins, tell me more o f all the times in your story o f the mobile phone...

Well, the history o f cellular mobile telephony really centres around AT&T and its collaborator, Motorola: As a result of... regulatory resistance to change, AT&T did not begin testing [its] cellular concept until 1962... [Together with] Motorola

[they] put up the first full-scale demonstration cellular systems in the United States in 1979. AT&T

56 See (Serres 1995b: 60). 57 See (Serres 1995a) 58 See (ibid: 45).

launched its system known as Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS) in Chicago.

Historian: I disagree. Y ou’re focusing too much on America, in 197 9 the first commercial mobile phone network was opened for

business in Tokyo.60 In 1982 Groupe Speciale Mobile (GSM) is formed... to design a pan-European mobile technology.61 [It wasn't until] 1983 the first

commercial operation of AMPS [began in] Chicago.62 You need to focus on GSM, that’s the worldwide standard for digital mobile telephony.

Author: There appears to be at least two distinct temporalities for mobile telephony here, a North American one and a European one. There is a technological schism between North American cellular and European

mobile. In the US you own a cellphone; in the UK you own a mobile

phone. In the US you are likely to be using the Personal Cellular System at 1900MHz; in Europe you are likely to be using the Global System for Mobile communications (originally Groupe Speciale Mobile) at 900MHz. In Europe you can roam to other countries and networks and the calling- party pays the roaming charge; but in the US, until recently, the

59 See (Galambos and Abrahamson 2002). Pp31-32.

60 Source: Possi, Petri (2005) UMTS / 3G History and Future Milestones. UMTS World.

http ://www. units world .com/umts/h istorv.htm Accessed 09/07/2005 61 Source: GSM Association (2006) Brief History of GSM & the GSMA.

http://www. gsm world .com/about/historv.shtm 1 Accessed 28/05/2006

62 Source: Possi, Petri (2005) UMTS / 3G History and Future Milestones. UMTS World.

receiving-party pays, so paging has developed to receive incoming messages. How do you justify your insistence on the pre-eminence o f the temporalities, and technologies, o f European GSM?

Historian: The GSM standard was established at an international level, as a Memorandum o f Understanding between over a dozen European operators. This group eventually became the GSM Association whose first conference, the GSM World Congress, was held in 1990 - where the world comes to do business.63

Author: I know it well. I attended the conference twice, presenting future handset concepts on the company exhibition stand. The scale o f the GSM World Congress - 50,000 industry visitors in 200664 - is without doubt the manifestation o f the influence o f the GSM standard.

Innovation Advisor: I ’ll say! You know, the closest I ever got to those guys, the executive board o f the GSM Association, was infiltrating a cocktail party being held in a bar, downstairs, in the hotel where they were meeting.65

Author: I need to pay close attention to the GSM World Congress, and to the GSM Association, later in my work, then.

Manufacturer: Y ou’re forgetting that European GSM is not the basis for the 3G standard, instead it’s American company Qualcomm’s CDMA technology. CDMA

63 Source: 3GSM World Congress 2004, Conference Guide.

64 Source: 3GSM World Congress 2006. http://www.3gsmworldcongress.coin/ Accessed 30/07/2006 65 Source: Memory of telephone conversation conducted with Innovation Advisor in 2004.

is being backed not because it's a better product, but because the Americans hate the fact that GSM is

m 66

European.

Author: So there are many versions o f the mobile phone and the mobile telecoms industry. Each with different politics, different temporalities, and different geographies. Your comments, Manufacturer, seem to polarise the debate and the versions rather too far: into either a shared GSM Association standard or a proprietary standard from Qualcomm. GSM versus CDMA is a geo-political conflict between different origin stories o f the mobile phone, conducted in the form o f technical standards. These standards are not only a multiplicity o f origin stories and technologies, but standards also foreclose possibilities and versions o f the future.67

The GSM standard was created by a technical committee derived from a number o f member companies. I remember the huge tome o f paper rather too well, since my role was once to turn those disparate specifications o f features and technical requirements into a coherent interface for a mobile device. An oft-cited effect o f this supposedly purely engineering-led specification (whose politics have long since been flattened into obscurity) was the Short Message Service, SMS, colloquially known as text messaging. The origins o f this feature are now mythical.

66 Source: Interview with senior design manager inside a European manufacturer, March 2004. 67 Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star have conducted a detailed study of standards and

classifications and their effects in medical technoscientific systems. They argue that the specification of a standard necessarily blocks off both future developments of the standard itself, and possibilities for future knowledge-making (Bowker and Star 2000).

Innovation Advisor: SMS [just] works... SMS is a teleservice that was defined by ETSI [the European standards body for telecoms]... Now, nobody interfered because nobody thought it was good for anything. It was just one guy, probably, was the champion of it. He drove it forward. It was easy to write into the whole thing. And he woke up one day and everyone was using it.68

Futurist: Text messaging was an accidental success that took the mobile industry by surprise... costed per character it is currently one of the most expensive ways for a user to communicate text across>digital networks.69

Author: But now everyone wants to repeat that success, right? Following the predictable, myopic development trajectory o f mobile telecoms, discussed earlier, there has been a move from low bandwidth to high bandwidth messaging, from text messaging to picture messaging. Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), as it is termed, is not part o f the original GSM standard and its politics have not yet been flattened out. They manifest in multiple, conflicting, proprietary versions o f the MMS standard.

Innovation Advisor: MMS doesn't fucking work... Because big companies will be big companies and [one manufacturer] will try and make their MMS slightly different from someone else's...

68 Source: Interview with Innovation Advisor, 2004. 69 See (Lacohee, Wakeford et al. 2003).

There's about three levels of incompatibility... Mysteriously when you send an MMS to somebody else most of the time you don't get the results you expect...

and the operators are a little bit disappointed at the take up. Well, they should be... [MMS] was defined by people who now had seen the dollar signs [from SMS],