Sense for Singularities
Are there unique things in the world? Objects with just one of its kind existing? Phenomenologically one could of course argue that everything might be unique in some sense. Thinking of mothers articulating the uniqueness of their highly ununique children over and over supports this idea. However, in a world where the idea of an original still exists (yet of course this idea is fading), owning an object that is one of its kind seems possible.
Especially Lucien Karpik sharpens our understanding for the worth of „the unique“. Noting that between standardized and differentiated products “singularities” were kept out of economic focus, he opens up an important field of “special things” for analysis. Especially (not singularly, but for the purposes here enough), singularities are incommensurable. You cannot compare singularities with each other, at least not in a way that could commensurate to our regular idea of weighing or measuring. In the project I work, we are concerned with intellectual property in music and pharma. For both some kind of “singularity” is demanded in order to get protection. While in pharma an invention must be (among others) new, making it at least somehow different to everything else that one could say it is “unique”, in music an artefact needs to be in some sense original (or individual), pointing to a similar understanding of singularity. Now, there are thousands of thousands of patents and millions of songs. So, one can say, there is really nothing special to a singularity at all. However, recently I came across the interesting story of Martin Shkreli that informs us about very unique singularities:
Martin Shkreli is a rather young broker with a rather bad reputation, some called him the most hated American. In March 2018 he was sentenced to a seven year long detention for fraud, but this is not really interesting. Interesting are the things Martin Shkreli was interested in. In my opinion he could be called a special expert on questions regarding singularities, maybe even as an individual with a special “sense for singularities”. I am sure there are many people around looking for the unique, art collectors might have a sense for that too, the persona of Kivas Fajo for instance, a character in a Start Trek: Next Generation episode who wants to own unique things, even if he has to commit crimes. In the episode he steals Data, another character of the series, who is an android with only one of his kind — he has something called a “positronic brain” that makes him unique.
Martin Shkreli’s story now shows us, or at least I read his story in this way, how the unique can become a central piece for as well work as leisure practices. Two things he owns caught my eye especially: the drug Daraprim and the Wu Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Pharmacy and music, the connection is obvious. Daraprim is a very old drug for patients of toxoplasmosis (yes, the cat-illness, however also immune deficiencies often lead to it). Actually, its protection by patent law expired several decades ago. This is usually not the best sign for uniqueness in the heavily innovative pharma-field, for competitors can just and allegedly easily duplicate the substance and enter the market with a very low investment offering the product at a substantially lower price. We call these products generic drug. However, today nobody is able to produce Daraprim at an economically reasonable price that made the drug “uniquer” than one might expect. And Shkreli used his position as the owner of the unique drug, as the monopolist on Daraprim, to raise the price from 13,50$ to 750$. One can imagine that a lot of critique followed.
The second unique artefact is the Wu Tang Clan album. It is the most expensive album ever sold. Martin Shkreli paid two million dollars for it in 2015. The price of the album is due to the album’s special uniqueness: only one copy of it exists and nobody besides those involved in its production has ever heard one of its tracks. There is no digital bootleg available and until today the sounds on the album remain a mystery. Shkreli is not allowed to monetize on the tracks, contractually it would only be possible to give the album away for free. To me, owning music as well as really unique music seemed somehow impossible. The techniques of reproduction and the flexibility of the sonic wave were obstacles too big to overcome. Now I know how uniqueness in music really works. However, at the moment and after Shkreli’s conviction to jail, the album became property of the United States. It is unclear what will happen to this album nearly nobody ever listened to. Somehow, one could argue, now every American owns the album, yet still nobody knows it. If trump ever listened to it since America is in its possession?
To come to an end, Martin Shkreli has a unique sense for singularities, an “eye” for those things that become valuable solely because they just exist one time. Yet, while uniqueness is often regarded as something valuable to achieve or obtain, Shkreli’s story sheds quite a different light on what it means to have something unique, which might even lead to a critical perspective on the value of singularities in general, at least from a morally.
