Month: January 2024

  • Loneliness

    This post on loneliness came about from an insight journey I took for a prospective project aimed at generation Z. Don’t get me started on defining an audience by generation, or I will go off-topic and not be back for a while while I rant about how life stages are a superior lens. But we digress. So the approach I took was looking at the problems and challenges faced by the target cohort. From reading academic papers, I came across things like anxiety, climate anxiety and loneliness. Loneliness stuck out as interesting, as it was something that small community moments could be fostered around and a brand would help in an authentic low key way without being parasitic.

    What is loneliness?

    First of all it makes sense to define what loneliness actually is?

    loneliness, distressing experience that occurs when a person’s social relationships are perceived by that person to be less in quantity, and especially in quality, than desired. The experience of loneliness is highly subjective; an individual can be alone without feeling lonely and can feel lonely even when with other people. Psychologists generally consider loneliness to be a stable trait, meaning that individuals have different set-points for feeling loneliness, and they fluctuate around these set-points depending on the circumstances in their lives.

    Encyclopedia Britannica Online
    We are all connected, but do we feel lonely

    The UK government commissioned a report in 2019 by Simetrica Jacobs that quantified the economic cost of loneliness for businesses in terms of ill health and lost work productivity as £9,900 per year, per person. Commentary in The Lancet associated loneliness with a 26 percent increase in premature mortality.

    Loneliness hits youth harder

    In my initial research I found that we had high levels of loneliness and young adults experienced this in a more acute way.

    83% of generation-z survey respondents said that they experience loneliness, compared to 68% of the UK population as a whole. I found this fascinating as if you look at the TGI data around the UK overall group cohesion score, you tend to get much smaller variances from the mean.

    Nor is loneliness just a UK phenomenon. Studies have indicated that it is prevalent from multiple countries with different levels of cultural commonalities: from the US, Israel, Japan and the Philippines.

    This seems to go hand-in-hand with other conditions such as anxiety and depression. There are plenty of other causes for anxiety and depression: but loneliness certainly feeds into their severity. This can be seen by the increasing incidence of mental health on US student campuses over the years according to research by The Health Minds Network.

    Some experts hypothesise that the normalisation and embedding of therapy in modern culture and the popular lexicon may well be exasperating the loneliness problem, rather than helping.

    The idea of being alone, but not feeling lonely has become a rich vein of content inspiration for influencers.

    Loneliness is a longitudinal trend

    COVID-19 isolation brought ideas of loneliness to the forefront, but it has been a rising issue for a long time.

    loneliness
    Going back over a century of data from 1919 – 2019, we can see that mentions of loneliness had a peak during the great depression. It then dropped through the second world war and started to pick up again. There was a rapid increase from the late 1960s through to the mid-1980s and then an notable increase from the mid-2000s through to 2019 – which is the latest year that we currently have data for.

    There seems to be a correlation between mentions of loneliness and times of economic hardship. One also has to remember that during the second world war, publications were widely censored. Printing paper was in limited supply due to the war effort.

    The BBC conducted conducted research with the Wellcome Foundation in 2018 with 55,000 respondents. At the time it was the largest survey that had been conducted on the subject. The research found that a higher number of younger survey respondents felt lonely and that having online-only friends correlated with higher degrees of lonely feelings.

    At the time, the BBC came up with a few hypotheses about the possible high incidence of loneliness among 16 – 24 year olds:

    They have less experience of regulating their emotions, so everything is felt more intensely

    This might be only the first or second time they’ve felt lonely in their lives and they haven’t had the chance to learn that loneliness often passes

    16-24 is an age when identity is changing. Young people are working out how they relate to others and where they stand in society. That process is naturally isolating to some extent, so feeling lonely during this time may be quite normal

    BBC Anatomy of Loneliness

    The view that this might be a phase was supported by qualitative responses of older respondents who said that young adulthood was the time when they had felt loneliest. Loneliness might be something that we can’t blame completely on social media.

    Social capital

    Public policy academic Robert D Puttnam warned about the decline in social capital across American society back in 2000 with his book Bowling Alone. Social capital is the reward from communal activity and sharing. Shrinking social capital impacts both civic and personal health according Puttnam.

    Based on survey data outlining American social activities over the decades, Puttnam outlined how the population had become more disconnected from family, friends, neighbours, and social structures. This makes sense given the pivot that western society went through during the 1960s and 1970s towards existentialism, or even go further back as far as the post war period where Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care realigned parenting around the child as an individual. For various factors including long work days, both men and women working, increasing personal distractions meant that there was less participation with local organisations like:

    • The PTA (parent teacher association involved with a school).
    • Church (going to services, community bonding and related social work activities).
    • Clubs.
    • Political party related grassroots activities.
    • Organised sports such as bowling leagues.

    In the revised edition of Bowling Alone, Puttnam explored the omnipresent fabric of social media and the internet which represented an opportunity for new types of social connections, as well as the threat of even higher levels of alienation and isolation.

    Loneliness solutions

    The World Health Organisation (WHO) considers social isolation / loneliness as one of the key social determinators of health. Over this decade, they have been focusing on loneliness in aging populations. Society has already been evolving various point solutions to help combat loneliness with varying degrees of success. There have been some attempts to use healthcare’s tool de jour -behavioural economics.

    Mukbang

    Mukbang (or meokbang) is a type of online streaming programming that started in Korea. It crossed the cultural barrier to western audiences where it lost its meaning as it became a platform for eating feats or stunts. In its original form, it addressed the loneliness felt by many Korean single-person households.

    Korean lunch

    Korean cooking is designed to be shared. You have lots of side dishes, the best known of which is kimchi.

    Mukbang streamers ate and interacted with people watching their stream, giving the impression of a virtual dinner table. The watchers may be only eating an instant ramen, a convenience store meal, take-out pizza or a Cafe de Paris baguette. But they had a parasocial experience more akin to when they lived with family members.

    Elder care

    WHO is most focused on the impact that loneliness has on the elderly in society. Governments and the health sector have looked to address this in a systematic way. In Hong Kong, there is a disco to bring elderly together and visits from therapy dogs are two of the ways local government have looked to stave off the worst effects of isolation.

    IMG_0781
    PARO by Shoko Muraguchi

    Japan pioneered the use of robotics with the PARO therapeutic robot. It looks like a baby seal and provides a similar experience to a therapy lap dog. Sony’s Aibo has been adapted for a similar role.

    Inclusivity

    In Ireland, the Roman Catholic church has been weakened as the organisation at the centre of social fabric due modern Ireland gradually becoming more secular.

    Clips from the Late Late Show hosted by Gay Byrne from the 1962 to 1999 showing how Irish society changed. Byrne was both a chronicle of change and a catalyst for it because of the discussions his show facilitated.

    This was then exasperated by a series of scandals coming to light.

    8I8A7144.jpg

    The GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) is Ireland’s largest sporting organisation and is made up of local amateur clubs playing indigenous Irish sports including camogie, hurling, Gaelic football, handball and rounders. The local GAA (Gaelic Athletics Association) clubs have gone some way to pick up the slack with the GAA Social Initative.

    The GAA Social Initiative continues to grow in its capacity to enrich the lives of all older members of our communities while specifically reaching out to isolated older men across the 32 counties.

    From its genesis in the observations of then President Mary McAleese of a dearth of older men at events she attended across the island of Ireland, it has grown from a small pilot project involving GAA clubs across four counties to one of the Association’s flagship community outreach projects.

    GAA Online

    More information

    More than two thirds of adults in the UK experience loneliness | Eden Project Communities

    The West’s Struggle for Mental Health | WSJ Online

    Generation Z in Japan: Raised in Anxiety | Emerald Insight

    The Healthy Minds Network School Mental Health Research Symposium

    Loneliness at epidemic levels in America – PMC

    Esther Perel Thinks All This Amateur Therapy-Speak Is Just Making Us Lonelier | Vanity Fair

    Americans Are A Lonely Lot, And Young People Bear The Heaviest Burden | Rhitu Chatterjee

    New York State Buys Robots for Lonely Elders | Futurism

    The AI Girlfriend Seducing China’s Lonely Men

    As Hong Kong’s elderly face loneliness epidemic, carers hope dogs and disco will keep post-Covid isolation at bay – Hong Kong Free Press HKFP

    No More Loneliness: The rise of livestreaming in East Asia – YouTube

    An investigation into the relationship between climate change anxiety and mental health among Gen Z Filipinos | SpringerLink

    How Amazon, Apple, and Facebook Made America Lonelier Than Ever

    Why loneliness fuels populism | Financial Times

    PARO therapeutic robot

    Assistive social robots in elderly care: a review. Joost Broekens, Marcel Heerink, and Henk Rosendal (PDF)

    Man who married a fictional character, he’d like you to hear him out | The New York Times

    Man Who Married Hatsune Miku Hologram Says the Relationship Has Gone Cold | CBR

    The Anatomy of Loneliness research | BBC

    Firewater | No mercy, no malice – exploration of changing consumption habits, risk profiles and declining mental health in a safer environment

  • Breakin + more things

    Breakin

    Breakin was a 1984 film which brought hip hop culture around the world. You can criticise the plot and awkward dialogue, but the break dancing and body popping was amazing. The film was a sufficiently successful commercial success that a sequel was made to the original film.

    The broom sweeping scene

    The broom sweeping scene in Breakin was inspirational drawing from mime, body popping and breaking sparked the imagination of people around the world. It made the dancer Michael “Turbo” Boogaloo Shrimp Chambers a global celebrity. Chambers himself credited stop motion animation of films like Ray Harryhausen’s works as being a key influence. He went on to teach Michael Jackson the ‘moonwalk’.

    The broom sweeping scene from Breakin was shot at 4323 Melrose Avenue, which in turn has turned into a pilgrimage for fans. So a camera crew and Chambers went back to the site and reshot the scene over one night. The production team had wrapped the building to resemble the original in 1984.

    Despite Chambers recovering from knee surgery, he still has the skills some 34 years later.

    Caterham Project V

    Caterham are famous in the car world for their evolution of Colin Chapman’s Lotus 7 design, which was the purest manifestation of Chapman’s design philosophy to make light, great handling cars. Caterham has been looking at making the jump from internal combustion engine powered vehicles to electric power. Like previous Caterham cars, much of the design process is about curating parts from other manufacturers parts bins with their own chassis and suspension design to come up with a perfect handling chimera.

    ‘Military Magic’

    The role of innovation and military development has on each other is a subject that is often discussed. Our modern online world is down to cold war thinking about resilient data and telecommunications network. But Kuo’s research has found that innovation can also hurt combat effectiveness and highlights the kind of factors where this might occur. Innovation isn’t bad, but can be done badly. More on related content here.

    Green Mountain Coffee Roasters

    In the US, Keurig k-cup capsules are the default home brewed coffee standard, rather like Nespresso in Europe and much of Asia. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters worked with Kevin Costner to create signature roast varieties for him. The subsequent ad lampoons how brand partnerships often move from the authentic to the ridiculous.

    7-Select

    7-Eleven Hong Kong is a standby for workers wanting a grab-and-go breakfast, lunch or dinner at their desk. They have a range of foods called 7-Select. They promoted it online and via TV advertising this year using local celebrity Dee Gor and generative AI-based artwork.

    The 7-Select range features many Hong Kong stables that merge western dishes like sandwiches in a local way that is emblematic of Hong Kong cuisine. Below is a video on the making of the advertisements including green screens and wire work – usually a staple of Hong Kong’s fantastical martial arts film industry.

  • Pebble

    It took me a little while to write this post on Pebble. Pebble was a start-up that looked to build a more civil microblogging platform than Twitter. Unfortunately it closed on November 1, 2023.

    tombstone

    It supported 280 character posts, replies and messages. The staff validated prominent users such as journalist accounts. The service had its own mascot rather like the famous Twitter fail whale; it was a snail called Herbert.

    Pebble.is

    It was the little touches in the user interface that most impressed me when I first started using it, like the ‘radio button’ functionality that showed you what mode you were using the service in. In the screen shot above you can see how the profile icon on the left is filled out to show I was looking at my profile.

    The Pebble community

    The founders set out to build a community that more resembled early Twitter than the reactionary discussion dominated platform of today. Along the way they also looked in improve the Twitter user experience design. The product was launched as T2 and slowly built up a community. There are good reasons for slowly building a community.

    As co-founder, Gabor Cselle put it

    “Twitter, but back to the roots”

    From T2 to Pebble: The Rise, Challenges, and Lessons of Building a Twitter Alternative by Gabor Cell on Medium.com

    Years ago, I got to see George Oates talk about how the community around photography social network Flickr built up. The key was a slow build up of the right people to ensure a community was built with a set of norms that would morph into community rules and culture as the platform scaled larger.

    Which begs the question is Pebble a platform at all, or a common state of mind that bonds the community together?

    The Pebble community was surprisingly diverse from designers, fantasy authors and Silicon Valley insiders to Japanese cat enthusiasts and a few random netizens like myself. It was odd and eclectic like Twitter circa 2006 / 2007. In this respect it certainly met the brief of “Twitter, but back to the roots”.

    This diversity was even more surprising that the platform had about 20,000 registered accounts in total. Media coverage of T2 had garnered an original waiting list of 33,000 interested people.

    T2 is dead; long live Pebble

    Originally the platform was called T2, a not so subtle allusion to the ambition of building a better Twitter microblogging service. One that isn’t full of reactionary content, or the erratic policies of owner Elon Musk.

    T2 rebranded to Pebble. This was to provide a name that was more human-friendly than T2. The move to Pebble pleased investors, but didn’t help attract new consumers.

    Criticisms

    Pebble didn’t work for everyone, my friend Stuart claimed that he found it unusable with Microsoft Edge. Pebble didn’t have an app, which would have taken time to develop and so would APIs.

    If Pebble had started licensing APIs to social listening platforms, this may have driven more brand interest in the platform over time and would have been a clear differentiator vis-a-vis Threads, Bluesky, TikTok and Instagram.

    Scale

    In the technology sector, scale is considered to be everything. But that’s the approach that left us with TikTok, Facebook and Twitter with all of their attendant problems. Yet despite the attendant problems of large technology platforms, trust and safety were not clear compelling differentiators for Pebble.

    Pebble.is

    A second problem that the founders identified was that there wasn’t enough content coming in to make it a daily destination. Like Twitter and Threads before it, I found I had to ‘wind up’ to putting content on the platform on a daily basis.

    My timing wasn’t great.

    The End

    The last post was by Serge Keller, who posted a video of Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again.

    serge

    “This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”

    Winston Churchill

    Pebble didn’t completely die. As soon as news broke of the platform’s demise a few things happened. Participants started rallying around, sharing their details on other platforms and sharing invites for Bluesky and Mastodon.

    Gabor set up a sub-Reddit for Pebble participants, which didn’t get too much take-up. But a Mastodon instance that he skinned in the Pebble UI and put up as a social experiment did manage to take off.

    It provides an improvement on the user experiences I have seen on other Mastodon instances so far. A surprisingly large amount of the Pebble community kind of held together across Bluesky and Mastodon. This indicates to me that to those that know safety and trust might be more compelling than we currently believe. I find myself using the Pebble Mastodon instance more than Bluesky at the moment.

    More related content here.

    More information

    From T2 to Pebble: The Rise, Challenges, and Lessons of Building a Twitter Alternative | by Gabor Cselle | Gabor Cselle | Nov, 2023 | Medium

    Pebble, a startup that tried and failed to take on Twitter, finds new life on Mastodon | Yahoo! Finance

    @canongatebooks • It’s been a year (and 3 days) since Elon Musk bought Twitter. Strange to say, part of my profe… • Threads

    Twitter clone Pebble is shutting down just five weeks after a rebrand | Engadget

  • Watch registry

    Over the past few years we’ve seen a plethora of watch registry platforms spring up. There have been a number of reasons for this happening:

    • European Union regulations
    • Business processes
    • Crime

    European Union regulations

    The European Commission Health and Digital Executive agency have been championing the idea of digital product passports across a range of sectors including textiles and various manufactured goods. This includes:

    • Electrical and electronic equipment
    • Batteries
    • Food waste
    • Textiles
    • Packaging and packaging waste

    Even if a watch is mechanical in operation and doesn’t come with a sewn strap, it still comes with packaging. Digital product passports mean that watchmakers end up with a watch registry service almost by default for newly manufactured watches.

    The EU digital product passport sits at the intersection of a number of EU related policies including the Ecosystem for Sustainable Products regulation and the Cyber Resilience act. The focus on sustainability is designed to facilitate a circular economy of manufactured, serviced and recycled materials. Having a product’s documentation follow it through its life helps prevent fraud and regulatory non-compliance in a similar way to animal passports as part of the common agricultural policy. It isn’t perfect but it makes criminal activities harder to do and easier to uncover. For such a system to work, it would need to resist the efforts of bad actors like Russia.

    There are secondary benefits to the digital product passport including inserting friction in the global trade of products made outside of the EU for importation into the trading bloc, such as fast fashion items.

    Luxury items, by their nature have less to worry about, but given their high value, at a future date analysing watch registry data may help understand and intercept money laundering schemes.

    patek

    There have been existing watch registry players for instance The Watch Register which is a spin-off of the Art Loss Register.

    Business processes

    As well as using the digital product passport for regulatory purposes and a watch registry. Digital product passports allow product traceability to facilitate:

    • Manufacturing including quality control and quality assurance
    • Service and repair
    • Customer relationship management
    • Product recycling or remanufacture
    • Proof of authenticity throughout the life of the product, provided as a watch registry function

    Crime

    Non manufacturer related platforms have been very upfront about their concern to help combat watch thefts that seems to have surged. Between 2021 and 2022 luxury watch thefts in London surged over 40 percent. London as a global city has rapidly built a reputation for itself as a centre for watch thefts. It has been suffienctly out of control that a luxury auction house and secondary market dealers have been warning prospective and existing customers of the crime risk. The idea is that by having traceable ownership of timepieces in a watch registry, the stolen watches would be harder to fence and would likely be seized when submitted for service, repair or resale.

    For secondary dealer watch related fraud has also been an issue with a high profile allegations against Anthony Farrer aka The Timepiece Gentleman (TPG).

    The Watch Register

    The Watch Register was founded in 2016. For a 20 percent fee, they will store the details of a stolen watch. Watch dealers then check inventory that they are about to receive against the their database. This is problematic for a number of reasons:

    • You can’t register your watch unless it’s been stolen.
    • Police are now reluctant to provide a crime number to watch thefts, which you need to register your watch.
    • There’s a 20 percent fee for registration
    • The watch, its box and papers may have all been stolen. Which might make having the watch number to hand all the more difficult.

    Reviews on watch forums of the service have been mixed. Given the forthcoming regulations coming through The Watch Register is likely to be relegated only to older watches and its 20 percent commission fee looks expensive versus both manufacturer offerings and Digital Watch Vault.

    Blockchain and Watch registry

    Some of these services have adopted blockchain as their technology stack of choice. I am sceptical of blockchain as a technology in general due to its relatively slow transaction rate compared to relational databases and high speed payment networks operated by the likes of Visa, Mastercard and American Express.

    Arianee digital passport

    Arianee is a SaaS business and a governing body for a protocol. It offers digital passport and membership services that are used by luxury fashion brands, luxury retailers and beauty brands. Several watch brands have adopted Arianee’s digital passport offering. The product is white labelled and different brands might use different functions, but it is based on top of a block chain technology stack.

    • Audemars Piguet
    • Breitling
    • MB&F
    • Panerai
    • Roger Dubuis
    • Vacheron Constantin

    Breitling was the first of the brands to launch its digital passport service in 2020, Panerai rolled their version out in October 2023. There isn’t cross-brand interoperability to make a registry of registries. They all seem to operate as ‘shards’ or instances.

    Aura digital product passport

    Aura is an LVMH led consortium for the deployment of blockchain based solutions focused not he luxury sector. Other luxury groups including Richemont and Prada Group are members. Much of the use has focused on luxury fashion brands like Loro Piana and Prada. Cartier is also involved and the service is pitched at luxury watch makers. Watchmakers involved include

    • Bulgari
    • Cartier
    • Chopard
    • H Moser
    • Hublot

    Like Arianee there isn’t cross-brand interoperability for the watch registry function.

    Digital Watch Vault

    Digital Watch Vault is a platform that has been put together by individuals involved in the secondary market for watch. There is no charge to submit the details of your watch.

    Digital Watch Vault is a new service. It has a number of high profile advocates as well as some detractors.

    More luxury related topics here.

    More information

    Digital Watch Vault

    Introducing My IWC Passport | IWC Journal

    A digital passport for our watches | Panerai

    The Watch Register

    KPMG Switzerland | Blockchain technology in the luxury watch industry

    Six Steps to Digital Product Passport Readiness | Kessler

    Digital Product Passport | European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA)

    Wearing your Rolex or Patek Philippe in Europe? Why you should be worried about London and Paris’ spikes in luxury watch theft | South China Morning Post

  • Road to Le Mans

    Porsche committed to major long form content as it followed Michael Fassbender on the road to Le Mans.

    Season one

    Road to Le Mans started off over four years ago with six short form films, each no longer than 10 minutes in length. So far, pretty much what you would expect in a prestige luxury car brand film. I was reminded of BMW’s ‘The Hire’ film series over the years with Clive Owen as the driver.

    Season two

    Porsche must have had positive feedback to continue with a second series in a similar vein to series one of Road to Le Mans. But some of the episodes were double the length of series one and three more episodes in this series. Looking at the Porsche YouTube channel the two seasons were likely considered to be a complete arc. They build a playlist that holds only season one and season two.

    The manage to switch around the voices in the narrative which I think adds more in season two and season three.

    Season three

    By season three, the series seems to have hit its stride. The episodes are as long as they need to be.

    Season four

    Season four seems to have more of Fassbender’s voice in it.

    Feature film

    The theme of resilience in the face of failure was an interesting, honest angle in the film. Road to Le Mans emphasises stoicism and resilience as much as it emphasises the performance of the car. The feature film is an edit together of season four.

    Although it’s Fassbender’s journey and I respect what he’s done, it feels a bit self indulgent at times. I think that this is because the actor’s journey as a profession isn’t a team sport in the same way that most other roles are.

    What Road to Le Man also brought through to me was the depth of achievement in Porsche’s 18 Le Mans overall victories. This film feels like a final chapter to this Road to Le Mans at least.

    Porsche seem to have shouldered the cost of the film themselves, I was a bit surprised that the content wasn’t licensed to a streaming service like Netflix and then eventually put on YouTube. More related content here.