Whilst looking for the new BBC ‘Reith’ font – which they’ve done in-house to update Gills Sans and not pay licence fees, I came across this interesting specification on global web page design by the BBC.
Mark Ovenden talks about the new font as part of a wider appreciation of Gill Sans and Johnston (the London Underground font) in a BBC 4 documentary. It was interesting to hear how Neville Brody used it in City Limits magazine and the challenges these fonts faced in the move to digital – first of all for graphic design and then for online consumption.
Finally, from a font perspective, I found this video from Apple WWDC 2015 that Apple used to introduce its San Francisco family of typefaces as its system font (they also use it as their corporate font now). This was the first font designed in-house at Apple in 20 years. Apple keeps it tightly controlled and restricts access to it.
I looked back on Apple’s website from 10 years ago following the launch of the iPhone I realised how fad driven web design could be.
In particular notice the reflection was very now at the time. Javascript had taken off with web 2.0 and someone came up with a block of code that did reflections on images a la the image effect you can get in PowerPoint. This then drove a wider trend to do this in code or in InDesign. You can blame the font gradient on a similar ‘cool Javascript hack’ to design trend meme as well.
Toyota announced its new Toyota FJ Land Cruiser model. The Toyota FJ Land Cruiser is a smaller five-seater vehicle. It is a direct replacement for the FJ Cruiser which was sold in many markets outside the UK and European Union. Like its predecessor the Toyota FJ Land Cruiser shares underpinnings with its larger 7-seater cousin the 250 series. It features a shorter wheelbase. Toyota has put a lot of effort into thinking about how it can make the Toyota FJ Land Cruiser more extensible in capabilities and more modular.
Modularity comes in compatibility with MOLLE military storage connectivity that has made its way into the civilian world. While Alpine packs are about sleek design with few snags, MOLLE allows fastenings, pouches and equipment to be suspended inside and outside bags. Toyota has now extended this to the inside of the Toyota FJ Land Cruiser’s rear door.
The focus on extensible features within the vehicle shows how some markets (notably America) have a large after market industry providing additional features for vehicles with aspirations to do overloading. Toyota is an active participant in the SEMA show in the US. This is where fans and the vehicle modifying industry get together to be inspired, do deals and gain intelligence on vehicles so that they can design new after market parts. Toyota brings concept builds, as well as allowing after market manufacturers to measure and 3D scan new vehicles.
The move to extensible design, shows that Toyota is interested in providing more of that capability through its own business. Third-party parts, in particular lift kits can affect handling and wheel bearings. Designing its own aftermarket parts and applying extensible thinking in the vehicle design philosophy allows Toyota to:
Meet consumer needs.
Ensure the vehicles meet the factory’s quality and reliability standards.
Offer incremental additional revenue.
While a Toyota FJ Land Cruiser as ‘mum truck’ won’t need a water fording kit. An overlanding enthusiast like Chloe Kuo would put it to good use and influence more potential buyers in the process.
Like the FJ Cruiser before it we are unlikely to see the Toyota FJ Land Cruiser in UK Toyota dealerships due to the UK government’s focus on forcing UK consumers away from internal combustion vehicles. Instead they are likely to come in small numbers as JDM (Japanese domestic market) pre-owned vehicles.
Toyota recognises that net zero is more complex than importing Chinese electric vehicles. Considerations also need to be given to vehicle use case, the whole life carbon footprint of the car and sustainability. But that doesn’t make simple solutions for policy makers.
Toyota will have four Land Cruiser models that it will be selling around the world:
J70 series – sold to the UN, various militaries, Japan, Australia and in the global south. Doesn’t pass current European vehicle laws as it’s designed for resilience, robustness, repairability and sustainment in the most hostile environments.
J300 series – the flagship of the line-up. Sold in the US as the Lexus LX, this combines the comfort of a top of the range Range Rover with the capability of the 70 series in an off-road environment. As a Land Cruiser it is available in Australia, Japan, the Gulf States, South Africa and various countries in South East Asia from Sri Lanka to the Philippines.
J250 series – the most widespread of the Land Cruiser range in terms of sales footprint. It is sold in Japan, Europe, North and South America, Australia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Brunei and the Gulf States. In Europe it’s known as the Land Cruiser. It’s sold in other markets as the Toyota Prado, the Toyota Land Cruiser 250 in Japan, the Toyota Land Cruiser Prado in Australia and in North America as the Lexus GX and Toyota Land Cruiser. It is smaller and utilitarian than the J300, but not quite as robust or spartan as the J70 series.
FJ Land Cruiser – the Toyota FJ Land Cruiser is likely to be sold in North America and Japan, mirroring the markets where the FJ Cruiser was originally sold.
How the UK Lost Its Shipbuilding Industry – by Brian Potter – The UK ultimately proved unable to respond to competitors who entered the market with new, large shipyards which employed novel methods of shipbuilding developed by the US during WWII. British industry in general failed to invest adequately to keep ahead of competitors. The UK fell from producing 57% of world tonnage in 1947 to just 17% a decade later. By the 1970s their output was below 5% of world total, and by the 1990s it was less than 1%. In 2023, the UK produced no commercial ships at all. – Part of this was also down to policy decisions. The Thatcher administration deliberately designated yards as military-only to drive them to the wall and smash the trade unions.
Memory Exiled | History Workshop – a bit tiresome, don’t get me wrong I am happy to throw brickbats at the UK Government as a citizen of a decolonised country but this is distorted. – The UK government releases papers after 20 years, but some are kept under wraps for longer for national security or other reasons. Sensitive materials (in Hong Kong’s case, perhaps to do with the handover) don’t account for more than a tiny percentage of the content and are redacted. One possible reason the Hong Kong files are still not released is simply that there are huge amounts of them, and they are mostly on microfiche, which is a pain to digitise – not because of a desire to ‘control history’.
Forgive the rant, but this quote from an article about WPP’s decline–and the attitude behind it–drives me absolutely crazy. Let’s do the math.
If you’re a 40-year-old creative, you were 19 when Facebook launched.You turned 21 when Twitter debuted.You were 22 when Apple introduced the iPhone, and 25 when Instagram came out. So you’ve literally spent your entire career in advertising creating work for the digital/social/smartphone media ecosystem. And that means you’ve produced way more digital-first and social campaigns than TV spots, let alone posters. (Also: I would love to meet the creative who “built a career” making posters.)
And creatives older than 40? They’ve successfully navigated the decline of broadcast and mass media, the introduction of smartphones, the broad shift to targeting, the endless parade of social channels and new technologies that Will Change Everything–arguably the greatest two decades of disruption the advertising industry has ever faced.
And the creatives who are over 60? They’re the generation that *invented* digital advertising. – I thought that this comment from LinkedIn was the most insightful assessment of the article
October 2025 introduction – (27) gateway to heaven edition
I am now at issue 27, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘gateway to heaven’.
27 inspired an urban legend of the ’27 club effect’ where a ‘statistical spike’ in fatalities affected musicians, actors and other artists. However in reality there is no statistical spike though Amy Winehouse, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin all died aged 27.
In the I Ching, the 27th hexagram is associated with sufficient physical and spiritual nourishment – good advice for anyone since we’re going into winter.
This edition’s soundtrack is Coco – I Need A Miracle over Dreadzone – Little Britain put together by MH1. I used to love mashups and bastard pop in the early 2000s to 2010s, especially A plus D and their Bootie nights, which I got to see at the DNA Lounge back when I had to travel to San Francisco while working at Yahoo!. They built a whole genre of out of what would normally be trick recordings you might have played once in a DJ set like Evil Eddie Richards You Used to Salsa.
MH1 carries this on the same grand tradition as A plus D and sent me down a memory hole in my iTunes collection.
Now we have a sound track, let’s get into it.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Golden Mile – a collection of documentaries and films that caught my eye, from the last days of the Golden Mile complex that was a centre of the Thai diaspora in Singapore to the oral history of the Google Docs development team.
Nvidia ban in China and more things – a selection of stuff that I found of interest online including articles on Nvidia’s fraught relationship with China as a market.
Tahoe and more things – from the inside steer on Nexperia and the importance of strategic writing for using LLMs to Apple’s imperfect macOS Tahoe.
Books that I have read.
Clown Town by Mick Herron is the latest instalment in the Slow Horses series of books, on which the Apple+ TV series are based. Without plot spoilers, I can tell you that it’s up to the high standards of the earlier books. Herron is as critical of the current Labour government as he was of their conservative party predecessors.
I am just starting in on Andrew Ross Sorkin’s history of the great depression 1929. I hope to update you next month on whether it’s a book that I would recommend.
Things I have been inspired by.
I managed to spend some time with fellow former Yahoo Nick Fowden and we discussed AI futures and the altar of marketing efficiency and performance media over effectiveness and brand building.
Mercedes goes back to luxury
Mercedes-Benz put on a special event in Shanghai that looked like an attempt to reboot the brand. Star of the show was the Mercedes Vision Iconic concept car, this looked like the vehicle the relaunched Jaguar brand would want to build. The grill looked as if it came off a vintage Mercedes 600 ‘Grosser’ and was a world away from the current nadir of the car brand.
Understanding influencer payback is also about understanding the caveats, risks and current limitations in optimisation
The IPA published effectiveness data on (paid) influencers, it is is great to have this data set and shows the continued role in improving the advertising industry. You can expect to see these headlines trumpeted by influencer and PR agencies. BUT, it is worthwhile going beyond the headlines and into the deck presented. My takeouts from the data presentation:
It’s a promising, but limited sample. However overall there seemed to some commonality in results amongst the European markets compared.
On sample selection, the presentation itself says: “Based on sample definition, no campaigns are included where influencer spend was present but did not produce a result at some level therefore 0-25 ROI index likely to be significantly under-reported.” This is key because reading the data at face value gives an overly-optimistic picture of likely influencer campaign success.
The data presented represents bad news for paid social campaigns in particular, and it highlights their relatively poor RoI from the Profit Ability 2 study. What it means: Expect some of the influencer spend to come from the experimental pot within the social platform advertising budget.
Long-term multipliers for Influencers are the highest of any channel in the data, but the tiny difference between television and influencers are not significantly large to be definitive. So further research could see this relationship flip.
The numbers are averages, but Influencer ROIs are much less likely to be ‘average’ with (high and low) extremes alongside outliers much more present (and this is with campaigns giving 0-25% RoI filtered out). There is a much higher risk in terms of spend versus reward, which a responsible agency partner should be disclosed to clients upfront. This huge variance also mirrored in the kind of results seen in Chinese social commerce campaigns as well. What it means: You can’t duplicate success and optimise in the same way as you can by using testing for TV advertising and the like. So for businesses like Unilever that are putting half their spend into influencer marketing – its a high risk endeavour with limited risk mitigation strategies.
There isn’t intra-influencer category analysis based on follower size. Getting paid reach will still be critical, so social platforms will still win.
The research doesn’t cover B2B sectors but subscription revenue model technology clients (Adobe, Canva, Monday.com, Grammarly etc.) may take some hope from the RoI achieved by consumer-focused telecommunications brands.
TL;DR: At the moment influencer represents the worst attributes of both earned and paid media. The uncertainty of earned media, the higher upfront cost of paid media. What it means: be wary of over-promising influencer campaign success, set realistic expectations about the likely wide variance in results. Keep an eye out as further data expands and clarifies the picture.
Chart of the month.
European attitudes to video games
This month’s chart comes from data provided by the European Commission’s Director General CONNECT (Communications Networks, Content and Technology). The breadth and quality of research that they do is really useful to people in my line of work.
The sentiment around video games is similar to what you would have seen around television in previous decades. So video games aren’t in aggregate seen as great for society, but not the complete pox on people that you would see if you ran the same survey for social media platforms.
Things I have watched.
Jean Giraud aka Moebius was a graphic novel artist drawing in the bande dessinée tradition. Moebius Redux is an hour long documentary of Giraud’s career through to the mid-2000s. In it is a who’s who of comic book legends including Stan Lee and Mike Mignola – the creator of Hellboy. It even has an amazing original soundtrack by former Kraftwerk member Karl Bartos.
I remember seeing The Satan Bug as a child and enjoying it immensely. I also read the book that it was based on as my Dad had built up a collection of Alistair McLean and I devoured them from age 11 onwards. I went back and revisited decades later to see if I would still enjoy it. I did, but for different reasons. The premise is based on the paranoia of annihilation that was a main part of the cold war zeitgeist. The wrinkle in the story is that it’s about germ warfare rather than nuclear bombs. Adult me saw the plot as ridiculous, but the cinematography, location, set design and wardrobe floored me. The high security compound of ‘Station 3’ and the various interiors were triumphs of mid-century modern design. The scenery and locations were in the California desert making it an ideal canvas for John Sturges who had previously shot Bad Day at Black Rock and The Magnificent Seven. The Satan Bug was also the start of helicopter based cinematography thanks a newly developed steady cam mechanism.
Following on in the same vein I watched The Andromeda Strain. Just six years separated from The Satan Bug, but stylistically so different. The Michael Crichton novel has a much more coherent story. Much of it is told through jargon and multi-media formats such as a computer driven plotter and a ticker tape running across the screen in the second scene of the film. Where The Andromeda Stream loses out is in its cinematography and style. The set design feels lazy compared to The Satan Bug, the cinematography is competent but workman-like.
I watched the original Russian film adaptation of Solaris. It has been years since I have seen it. Its one of them films that you can watch three times and still pick up new details. Andrei Tarkovsky focused on storytelling rather than special effects which are used very sparingly. I still love that the Soviet city of the future was footage of early 1970s Tokyo. Watching it now the film feels more deconstructed.
The last film this month is an indulgent one of mine. Searchers 2.0 is a modern-day neo western film that thumbs its nose at the Hollywood system. The story follows the revenge quest of two former child actors against their former abuser, a screen writer on the film set. Alex Cox made the film on $100,000 budget with Roger Corman as producer. UK film fans probably remember Alex Cox as the presenter of Moviedrome. he is an accomplished director, screenwriter and the author of 10,000 Ways To Die – the best guide ever written to spaghetti westerns.
Slow Horses season five has been a must-watch TV moment for me. The show runners manage to keep the essence of the books with some creative flair.
Useful tools.
Optimising for macOS Tahoe
Moving from macOS Sonoma to Tahoe meant changing up the versions of utilities I like to use. Titanium Software make OnyX, Maintenance and Deeper.
OnyX y use of OnyX goes all the way back to 2002 and 10.2 Jaguar, various versions of it throughout that time to now. It was very good for doing startup disk related maintenance tasks.
Maintenance provides a general performance tune-up including rebuilding databases and clearing obscure caches.
Deeper is for fine tuning hidden settings across different applications on your Mac.
All three are donationware so be sure to give Joel what you can.
The sales pitch.
I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my October 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Hallowe’en. As an additional treat here is a link to my Mam’s recipe for barm brack – an Irish Hallowe’en specialism. Let me know how you got on baking it.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.
Clutch Cargo was an animated series first broadcast on American television in 1959. Clutch Cargo was created by Cambria Productions – who were a start-up animation studio. Cambria used a number of techniques to radically reduce the cost of producing the animated series.
A key consideration was reducing the amount of movement that needed to be animated. There were some obvious visual motifs used to do this:
Characters were animated from waist height up for the majority of the films, this reduced the need to animate legs, walking or running.
Much of the movement was moving the camera around, towards or away from a static picture.
To show an explosion, they shook the camera, rather than animate the concussive effect of the blast.
Fire wasn’t animated, instead smoke would be put in front of the camera. Fake snow was sprinkled so that bad weather didn’t need to be drawn.
Cameraman Ted Gillette came up with the idea of Syncro-Vox. The voice actors head would be held steady, they would have a vivid lipstick applied and then say their lines. Gillette then put their mouths on top of the animated figures. Cambria made use of it in all their animations with the exception of The New Three Stooges – an animated series that allowed Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Joe DeRita to be voice actors after their movie contracts finished and they were affected by ill health.
These choices meant that Clutch Cargo cost about 10 per cent of what it would have cost Disney to animate. The visual hacks to cut costs were also helped in the way the scripts were developed. Clutch Cargo avoided doing comedy, instead focusing on Tin-Tin-like adventures. ‘Physical’ comedy gags create a lot of movement to animate. By focusing on the storytelling of Clutch Cargo. The young audience weren’t bothered by the limited animation, as they were captivated into suspending their beliefs.
Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back. – The New York Times – Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, the chief executive of Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, told Bloomberg that food-industry executives had been calling him. “They are scared about it,” he said. Around the same time, Walmart’s chief executive in the United States, John Furner, said that customers on GLP-1s were putting less food into their carts. Sales are down in sweet baked goods and snacks, and the industry is weathering a downturn. By one market-research firm’s estimate, food-and-drink innovation in 2024 reached an all-time nadir, with fewer new products coming to market than ever before.
Ozempic users like Taylor aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite but to rewrite people’s desires. They attack what Amy Bentley, a food historian and professor at New York University, calls the industrial palate: the set of preferences created by our acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives. Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant.
Apple resumes advertising on Elon Musk’s X after 15-month pause – 9to5Mac – the negative reaction to this that I have seen from Mac and iPhone users that I know is interesting. It’s the scales have dropped from their eyes about Apple’s performative progressive values. Yet the signs have been out there for years – in particular with regards anything that is even tangentially connected to China.
Zuckerberg’s rightward policy shift hits Meta staffers, targets Apple | CNBC – employees who might otherwise leave because of their disillusionment with policy changes are concerned about quitting now because of how they will be perceived by future employers given that Meta has said publicly that it’s weeding out “low performers.” Meta, like many of its tech peers, began downsizing in 2022 and has continued to trim around the edges. The company cut 21,000 jobs, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023. Among those who lost their jobs were members of the civic integrity group, which was known to be outspoken in its criticism of Zuckerberg’s leadership. Some big changes are now taking place that appear to directly follow the lead of Trump at the expense of company employees and users of the platforms, the people familiar with the matter said.
Welcome to my February 2025 newsletter, I hope that your year of the snake has gotten off to a great start. This newsletter marks my 19th issue – which feels a really short time and strangely long as well, thank you for those of you who have been on the journey so far as subscribers to this humble publication. Prior to writing this newsletter, I found that the number 19 has some interesting connections.
In mandarin Chinese, 19 sounds similar to ‘forever’ and is considered to be lucky by some people, but the belief isn’t as common as 8, 88 or 888.
Anyone who listened to pop radio in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s would be familiar with Paul Hardcastle’s documentary sampling ’19’. The song mixed narration by Clark Kent and sampled news archive footage of the Vietnam war including news reports by read by Walter Cronkite. 19 came from what was cited as the average age of the soldier serving in Vietnam, however this is disputed by Vietnam veteran organisation who claim that the correct number was 22. The veteran’s group did a lot of research to provide accurate information about the conflict, overturning common mistakes repeated as truth in the media. It’s a handy reminder that fallacies and trust in media began way before the commercial internet.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Zing + more things – HSBC’s Zing payments system was shut down and was emblematic of a wider challenge in legacy financial institutions trying to compete against ‘fintech startups. I covered several other things as well including new sensor technology
The 1000 Yen ramen wall is closing down family restaurants across Japan. A confluence of no consumer tolerance for price elasticity due to inflation driven ingredients costs is driving them to the wall. Innovation and product differentiation have not made a difference.
Luxury wellness – why luxury is looking at wellness, what are the thematic opportunities and what would be the competitors for the main luxury marketing conglomerates be successful.
Technical capability notice – having read thoroughly about the allegations that Apple had been served with an order by the British government to provide access to its customer iCloud drive data globally – I still don’t know what to think, but didn’t manage to assuage any of my concerns.
Books that I have read.
World Without End: The million-copy selling graphic novel about climate change by Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain. In Japan, graphic novels regularly non-fiction topics like text books or biographies. A French climate scientist and illustrator collaborated to take a similar approach for climate change and the energy crisis. Their work cuts through false pre-conceptions and trite solutions with science.
Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski. Yablonski breaks down a number of heuristics or razors based on psychological research and how it applies to user experience. These included: Jakob’s Law, Fitt’s Law, Hick’s Law, Miller’s Law, Peak-End Rule and Tesler’s Law (on complexity). While the book focuses on UX, I thought of ways that the thinking could be applied to various aspects of advertising strategy.
I re-read Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal. Eyal’s model did a good job at synthesising B.J. Fogg’s work on persuasive computing, simplifying it into a model that the most casual reader can take and run with it.
Kapferer on Luxury by Jean-Noël Kapferer covers the modern rise of luxury brands as we now know them. Like Dana Thomas’ Deluxe – how luxury lost its lustre Kapferer addresses the mistake of globalised manufacturing and massification of luxury. However Kapferer points out the ‘secret sauce’ that makes luxury products luxurious: the hybridisation of luxury with art and the concept of ‘incomparability’. The absence of both factors explain why British heritage brands from Burberry to Mulberry have failed in their current incarnations as luxury brands.
Black Magic by Masamune Shirow is a manga work from 1983. Masamune is now best known for the creation of Ghost In The Shell which has been turned into a number of anime films, TV series and even a whitewashed Hollywood remake. Despite the title, Black Magic has more in common with space operas like Valerian & Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières than the occult. In the book Masamune explores some of the ideas which he then more fully developed in Ghost In The Shell including autonomous weapons, robots and machine intelligence.
Doll by Ed McBain. Doll was a police procedural novel written in 1965 that focused on the model agency industry at the time. The novel is unusual in that it features various artistic flourishes including a model portfolio and hand written letters with different styles of penmanship. The author under the McBain pen name managed to produce over 50 novels. They all have taunt dialogue that’s ready for TV and some of them were adapted for broadcast, notably as an episode of Columbo. You can see the influence of McBain’s work in the likes of Dick Wolf’s productions like the Law & Order, FBI and On Call TV series franchises.
Things I have been inspired by.
Can money make you happy?
Past research indicated that happiness from wealth plateaued out with a middle class salary. The latest research via the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania indicates that might not be the case instead, earning more makes you happier and there might not be a point at which one has enough. The upper limit on the research seems to have been restricted by finding sufficiently rich research respondents rather than natural inclination. As a consumer insight that has profound implications in marketing across a range of sectors from gaming to pensions and savings products.
AgeTech
I came across the concept of ‘agetech’ while looking for research launched in time for CES in Las Vegas (7 – 11, January 2025). In the US, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and American Association of Retired People (AARP) have put together a set of deep qualitative and quantitative research looking at the needs of the ‘aged consumer’ for ‘AgeTech’. AgeTech isn’t your Grandma iPad or your boomer CEO’s laptop. Instead it is products that sit at the intersection of health, accessibility and taking care of oneself in the home. The top five perceived age technologies are connected medical alert devices,digital blood pressure monitors, electric or powered wheelchairs/scooters, indoor security cameras, and electronic medication pill dispenser/reminders. Their report 2023 Tech and the 50-Plus, noted that technology spending among those 50-plus in America is forecast to be more than $120 billion by 2030. Admittedly, that ’50-plus’ label could encompass people at the height of their career and family households – but it’s a big number.
It even has a negative impact on the supply side of the housing market for younger generations:
The overwhelming majority (95%) of Americans aged 55 and older agree that aging in place – “the ability to live in one’s own home and community safely, independently, and comfortably, regardless of age, income, or ability level” – is an important goal for them. This is up from 93% in 2023.
The Mayfair Set v 2.0
During the summer of 1999, a set of documentaries by Adam Curtis covered the reinvention of business during the latter half of the 20th century was broadcast. I got to discover The Mayfair Set much later on. In the documentaries it covered how the social contract between corporates and their communities was broken down and buccaneering entrepreneurs disrupted societal and legal norms for profit. There is a sense of de ja vu from watching the series in Meta’s business pivots to the UK government’s approach to intellectual property rights for the benefit of generative AI model building.
It probably won’t end well, with the UK population being all the poorer for it.
The Californian Ideology
As to why The Mayfair Set 2.0 is happening, we can actually go back to a 1995 essay by two UK based media theorists who were at the University of Westminster at the time. It was originally published in Mute magazine.
This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, websites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich. Not surprisingly, this optimistic vision of the future has been enthusiastically embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, innovative capitalists, social activists, trendy academics, futurist bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians across the USA.
It reads like all these things at once:
A prescient foreshadowing from the past.
Any Stewart Brand op-ed piece from 1993 onwards.
The introduction from an as-yet ghost written book on behalf of Sam Altman, a la Bill Gates The Road Ahead.
A mid-1990s fever dream from the minds of speculative fiction authors like Neal Stephenson, William Gibson or Bruce Sterling.
What the essay makes clear is that Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are part of a decades long continuum of Californian Ideology, all be it greatly accelerated; rather than a new thing. One of the main differences is that the digital artisans no longer have a chance to get rich with their company through generous stock options.
Even Steve Jobs fitted in with the pattern. For a hippy he drove a 5 litre Mercedes sports car, parked in the handicapped spaces in the Apple car park and had a part in firing Apple’s first gay CEO: Michael Scott because of homophobia and Scott’s David Brent-like handling of Black Wednesday. It may be a coincidence that Tim Cook didn’t come out publicly as gay until over three years after Steve Jobs died.
… a European strategy for developing the new information technologies must openly acknowledge the inevitability of some form of mixed economy – the creative and antagonistic mix of state, corporate and DIY initiatives. The indeterminacy of the digital future is a result of the ubiquity of this mixed economy within the modern world. No one knows exactly what the relative strengths of each component will be, but collective action can ensure that no social group is deliberately excluded from cyberspace.
A European strategy for the information age must also celebrate the creative powers of the digital artisans. Because their labour cannot be deskilled or mechanised, members of the ‘virtual class’ exercise great control over their own work. Rather than succumbing to the fatalism of the Californian Ideology, we should embrace the Promethean possibilities of hypermedia. Within the limitations of the mixed economy, digital artisans are able to invent something completely new – something which has not beenpredicted in any sci-fi novel. These innovative forms of knowledge and communications will sample the achievements of others, including some aspects of the Californian Ideology. It is now impossible for any serious movement for social emancipation not to incorporate feminism, drug culture, gay liberation, ethnic identity and other issues pioneered by West Coast radicals. Similarly, any attempt to develop hypermedia within Europe will need some of the entrepreneurial zeal and can-do attitude championed by the Californian New Right. Yet, at the same time, the development of hypermedia means innovation, creativity and invention. There are no precedents for all aspects of the digital future. As pioneers of the new, the digital artisans need to reconnect themselves with the theory and practice ofproductive art. They are not just employees of others – or even would-be cybernetic entrepreneurs.
They are also artist-engineers – designers of the next stage of modernity.
Barbrook and Cameron rejected the idea of a straight replication of the Californian Ideology in a European context. Doing so, despite what is written in the media, is more like the rituals of a cargo cult. Instead they recommended fostering a new European culture to address the strengths, failings and contradictions implicit in the Californian Ideology.
Chart of the month: consumer price increases vs. wage increases
This one chart based on consumer price increases and wage increases from 2020 – 2024 tells you everything you need to know about UK consumer sentiment and the everyday struggle to make ends meet.
Things I have watched.
The Organization – Sydney Poitier’s last outing as Virgil Tibbs. The Organization as a title harks back to the 1950s, to back when the FBI were denying that the Mafia even existed. Organised crime in popular culture was thought to be a parallel corporation similar to corporate America, but crooked. It featured in the books of Richard Stark. This was despite law enforcement stumbling on the American mafia’s governing body in 1957. Part of this was down to the fact that the authorities believed that the American arm of the mafia were a bulwark against communism. Back to the film, it starts with an ingenious heist set piece and then develops through a series twists and turns through San Francisco. It was a surprisingly awarding film to watch.
Nakita – Nakita is an early Luc Besson movie made after Subway and The Big Blue. It’s an action film that prioritises style and attitude over fidelity to tactical considerations. The junkies at the start of the film feel like refugees from a Mad Max film who have happened to invade a large French town at night. It is now considered part of the ‘cinéma du look’ film movement of the 1980s through to the early 1990s which also features films like Diva and Subway. Jean Reno’s character of Victor the Cleaner foreshadows his later breakout role as Leon. It was a style of its time drawing on similar vibes of more artistic TV ads, music videos, Michael Mann’s Miami Vice TV series and films Thief and Manhunter.
Stephen Norrington’s original Blade film owes a lot to rave culture and cinéma du look as it does to the comic canon on which it’s based. It’s high energy and packed with personality rather like a darker version of the first Guardians of The Galaxy film. Blade as a character was influenced by blaxploitation characters like Shaft in a Marvel series about a team of vampire hunters. Watching the film almost three decades after it came out, it felt atemporal – from another dimension rather than from the past per se. Norrington’s career came off the rails after his adaption of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen did badly at the box office and star Wesley Snipes went to jail for tax-related offences.
The Magnificent Seven– I watched the film a couple of times during my childhood. John Sturges had already directed a number of iconic films: Bad Day at Black Rock and Gunfight at The OK Corral. With The Magnificent Seven, he borrowed from The Seven Samurai. It was a ‘Zappata western’ covering the period of the Mexican revolution and was shot in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The film did two things to childhood me: made me curious about Japanese cinema and storytelling. There are some connections to subsequent Spaghetti Westerns:
Eli Wallach played a complex Mexican villain in bothThe Magnificent Seven and Leone’s The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.
The visual styling of the film is similar to spaghetti westerns, though the clothes were still too clean, Yul Brynner’s role as the tragic hero in black is a world-away from the traditional Hollywood coding of the good guys wearing white hats (or US cavalry uniforms).
The tight, sparse dialogue set the standard for the Dollars Trilogy and action films moving forward
Zappata westerns were the fuel for more pro-leftist films in the spaghetti western genre. While The Magnificent Seven still has a decidedly western gaze, it took on racism surprisingly on the nose for a Hollywood film of this era.
Watching it now as a more seasoned film watcher only sharpened my appreciation of The Magnificent Seven.
Breaking News by Johnnie To feels as much about now as it when the film was shot 20 years ago. First time I watched it was on the back of a head rest on a Cathay Pacific flight at the time. Back then I was tired and just let the film wash over me. This time I took a more deliberate approach to appreciating the film. In the film the Hong Kong Police try and control and master the Hong Kong public opinion as a robbery goes wrong. However the Hong Kong Police don’t have it all their own way as the criminals wage their own information campaign. This film also has the usual tropes you expect from Hong Kong genre of heroic bloodshed films with amazing plot twists and choreographed action scenes along with the spectacular locations within Hong Kong itself. Watching it this time, I got to appreciate the details such as the cowardly dead-beat Dad Yip played by veteran character actor Suet Lam.
Useful tools.
Current and future uncertainties.
This could be used as thought starters for thinking about business problems for horizon scanning and scenario planning. It’s ideal as fuel for you to then develop a client workshop from. But I wouldn’t use something this information dense in a client-facing document. You can download it as a high resolution PDF here.
Guide to iPhone security
Given the propensity of phone snatching to take over bank accounts and the need to secure work phones, the EFF guide to securing your iPhone has a useful set of reminders and how-to instructions for privacy and security settings here.
Novel recommendations
I got this from Neil Perkin, an LLM-driven fictional book recommendation engine. It has been trained on Goodreads (which reminds me I need to update my Goodreads profile). When I asked it for ‘modern spy novels with the class of John Le Carre’ it gave me Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, Chris Pavone’s The Expats and Chris Cumming’s The Trinity Six. All of which were solid recommendations.
Smartphone tripod
Whether it’s taking a picture of a workshop’s forest of post-it notes or an Instagrammable sunset a steady stand can be really useful. Peak Design (who were falsely accused of being a ‘snitch‘) have come up with a really elegant mobile tripod design that utilises the MagSafe section on the back of an iPhone.
Apple Notes alternative
I am a big fan of Apple Notes as an app. I draft in it, sync ideas and thoughts across devices using it. But for some people that might not work – different folks for different strokes. I was impressed bu the quality of Bear which is a multi-platform alternative to the default Notes app.
The sales pitch.
I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
