Monolith Analytics

稷下Why the names

Every Monolith app is named for a strategist, statesman or scholar of classical China whose work matches the job. This page says why, for the suite and for each app.

Back to Jixia, the suite

Monolith, 碑

An immovable stone

A stele is a stone carved with a record meant to outlast its makers. We treat data the same way: one authoritative record, built to last, not a file that changes hands.

Old strategists, new instruments

Twenty-five centuries ago they wrote down what campaigns still have to relearn: that intelligence comes from people, that the ground decides, and that alliances are built one conversation at a time. The names are a promise about what each tool is for.

稷下 Jixia, the suite

The Jixia Academy stood at the Jixia gate of Linzi, the capital of the state of Qi. The state kept thinkers of every school there on stipend, to argue with each other and advise the court: strategists, Legalists, Confucians, Mohists, Daoists and logicians under one roof.

Our suite is the same arrangement. Each app is named for a figure from a different school, each does one job, and all of them run on one login and one shared data platform. The suite’s name stands above all of them: many schools, one purpose.

孫子Sun Tzu

Military strategists 兵家 · The data platform under every app: voters, geography, elections, campaign finance

Sun Tzu is the strategist everyone knows, and The Art of War opens with what a platform has to supply: know the ground, know the other side's dispositions, and spend scarce force where it counts. His chapter “The Use of Spies” says that foreknowledge “can only be obtained from other men”, which is why the platform is built from the voter file, the maps, the results and the filings rather than from guesses.

Every other app stands on it, so it carries the name that starts the tradition.

孫臏Sun Bin

Military strategists 兵家 · Money in and out: budget, fundraising, call time, the ledger

Sun Bin served the state of Qi, the same state that kept the Jixia Academy, and is remembered for a lesson about scarce resources. His general Tian Ji kept losing horse races against the king, because each of his horses was slower than the king's. Sun Bin had him pair his worst horse against the king's best, and his best and middle horses against the king's middle and worst, so he lost one race and won two.

A campaign is that horse race: never enough money, so the question is which dollar goes to which race. That is the job of the money app, and Sun Bin is the strategist of allocation. He is also the tradition's second Sun, which is why this app sits beside Sun Tzu.

蘇秦Su Qin

Strategists of alliances 縱橫家 · Coalition: who is committed, who is waiting on whom, where the doors are closed

Su Qin is the strategist of the Vertical Alliance (合縱), who joined six states against the one that was swallowing them. He did it by going to each ruler in turn and finding what held that ruler back and who he was waiting on, then moving the pieces in the right order.

That is the app: a conversation logged in thirty seconds, then a picture of where the coalition is stuck. When three people are each waiting on the same person, that is one closed door, which is exactly the thing Su Qin would have gone to open.

張儀Zhang Yi

Strategists of alliances 縱橫家 · Message: content, audiences, scripts and what testing showed

Zhang Yi was Su Qin's counterpart, and by tradition his fellow student. His “Horizontal Alliance” (連橫) won states over to Qin one at a time, and his skill was saying the right thing to each: what this ruler feared, what that one wanted.

That is audience-segmented message, which is the job of the app: one idea in several versions, each made for the people who will hear it, with a record of what worked. Su Qin and Zhang Yi together make the pair of coalition and persuasion.

鬼谷Guiguzi

Strategists of alliances 縱橫家 · The candidate's own voice: drawing out her material and drilling her delivery

Guiguzi, the Master of Ghost Valley, is by tradition the teacher of both Su Qin and Zhang Yi, and the name of a short book on persuasion. Its opening chapter is about when to open and when to close: “To open is to speak, the yang; to close is to keep silent, the yin.”

The app is the teacher’s part. It does not write for the candidate or speak to audiences; it draws out what is really hers and trains when she speaks, how, and when she holds back. The strategists on the other side of the table are its students.

韓非Han Fei

Legalists 法家 · Intelligence: the public record, compared with what the campaign is being told

Han Fei’s starting point was that what people say about their loyalties and what they do are two different things, and a ruler who wants the truth reads the conduct. “When the times change, the way things are done changes with them” (世異則事異) is his line.

The app reads the public record about the people around a race and sets it beside what the campaign has been told, then shows where they disagree. It suggests; it never overrules what the team has entered.

申不害Shen Buhai

Legalists 法家 · Access: every login and what each person may reach

Shen Buhai was chancellor of the state of Han and the thinker behind shu (術), the method of administration: who holds which office, what that office covers, and that each official does what the office calls for and no more.

That is the access console. It decides who exists, and what each person may reach in each app, campaign by campaign, from one place and by one person.

墨子Mozi

Mohists 墨家 · People and ground: volunteers, shifts, turf and door contact

Mozi built a school that was also a working community: craftsmen, engineers and defenders who held to a shared discipline. His teaching of impartial care (“Care for all alike, and all gain in return”, 兼相愛，交相利) was practical, and he is remembered for walking to the court of Chu to talk it out of attacking the weaker city of Song.

The app is for the people who turn up, and the ground they cover. The number it cares about is whether a volunteer comes back for a second shift.

經界Jingjie

Confucian lineage 儒家 · Walk turfs: cuts a targeted universe into contiguous, size-balanced turfs

This one is a term rather than a person. Mencius said that benevolent government must begin with jingjie, marking out the boundaries of the land, because “if the boundaries are not correct, the division of the land is not equitable” (夫仁政，必自經界始。經界不正，井地不均).

The tool draws boundaries between canvassers so that each turf is walkable, contiguous and about the same size as the others. It has no screen of its own; Mozi places what it cuts.

子貢Zigong

Confucian lineage 儒家 · Your own network: who you know, how, and when you last dealt with them

Zigong was a disciple of Confucius who made his living as a merchant and served as a diplomat, and he was known for reading people and for the breadth of the people he knew. He is remembered for eloquence and for being at home with rulers and merchants alike.

The app is one person’s candid record of their own relationships. It is private to that person, and nothing in it is visible to any campaign.

惠施Hui Shi

School of Names 名家 · Matching one donor across filings

Hui Shi was a logician, the friend and favourite debating partner of Zhuangzi, and his best-known puzzles are about sameness and difference: when two things count as one, and when one thing is really many.

That is the question of matching donors. The same person appears in many filings with different spellings and addresses, and the work is deciding when two records are one person. It runs inside the data platform and has no screen of its own.

莊子Zhuangzi

Daoists 道家 · Perspectives: the same idea seen from several displaced positions

Zhuangzi’s book is full of one thing seen from different places: the small cicada that laughs at the great Peng bird; the tree too useless to be cut down; the man who dreamed he was a butterfly and could not tell afterwards which he was.

The app takes an idea or a draft and returns several views of it, each produced by a named displacement of the viewer’s position, with what each view cannot see. It does not rank them or merge them into a conclusion, because that would be the one thing Zhuangzi refuses.

孔子Confucius

Confucian lineage 儒家 · The assistant that keeps a person’s meetings, capture and debrief

Confucius was the teacher whose pupils collected his sayings in the Analects. He held that a person is made by practice: the rites done on time, the day examined, the lesson repeated until it is habit. “Learning without thought is labour lost” (學而不思則罔, Analects 2.15).

The app is one person’s assistant for that rhythm. It keeps their meetings and reminders on schedule, takes notes down as they come, and helps with a debrief afterwards. It belongs to the person who uses it.

曾子Zengzi Planned

Confucian lineage 儒家 · The team’s cadence: meetings, capture and debrief

Zengzi, a disciple of Confucius, is the one who said: “Each day I examine myself on three counts” (吾日三省吾身, Analects 1.4). Whether he had been faithful in what he did for others, trustworthy with friends, and had practised what he was taught.

That is a debrief: a regular, private examination after the event. The app will keep a team’s meeting cadence and give each author a private debrief, with the useful parts passed on after the author reviews them.

司馬遷Sima Qian Planned

Historians · The archive: campaign history, race by race

Sima Qian is the Grand Historian, who wrote the Records of the Grand Historian to “search out where heaven and humankind meet, trace the changes of past and present, and form a voice of one’s own” (究天人之際，通古今之變，成一家之言).

The app is the same job at campaign scale: a dated account of what happened, race by race, that people write and read, and that is kept after the race is over.