Ged Carroll

Category: culture | 文明 | 미디어와 예술 | 人文

Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.

Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.

Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.

Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.

Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.

More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.

  • Ahistoric technology & things that caught my eye this week

    Wired magazine had an interesting article on revisiting old technology magazines. The idea was that while in some ways technology has progressed. In other ways, good ideas got bypassed. There are a number of Good ideas that might have more currency now. There is a contrasting ahistoric technology view held by some Silicon Valley luminaries.

    The ahistoric technology viewpoint ignores things that are right in front of us. Fuzzy logic and early machine learning (based on software neural networks) desktop software do much the same things (with less computing power and network bandwidth) that Google and Apple do now.

    Bret Victor gave a presentation ‘from 1973’, showing the fallacy of the ahistoric technology viewpoint. These ideas will be of more relevance to the audience of programmers, but you can grasp the gist of what’s going on.

    One of the reasons I stuck with the Mac platform was that small development houses and lone programmers built useful software based on similarly niche concepts.

    Now these software applications, alongside web services that have been developed in a similar way, like Newsblur and Pinboard are a key part of my workflow.

    McDonalds Japan have a reputation for doing localised products to appeal to Japanese consumers. The flavours and the marketing are grounded in Japanese culture. They have tapped a well loved manga Touch (published during the 1980s) for an advert to promote the 30th anniversary of the chicken Tatsuda burger.

    https://youtu.be/vFJE_7atc30
    McDonalds Japan

    More on Touch here.

    The Oxford Union is trying to keep its programme of speakers going via online sessions. Including Hong Kong exiled dissident Nathan Law.

    Oxford Union

    Finally Asian Boss appealed to viewers for donations as they are struggling financially and are likely to shut down soon without money. This raises questions about the effectiveness of monetisation on YouTube, even with a lightweight structure media organisation like Asian Boss.

    Should you wish to do so, you can donate directly to Asian Boss here.

  • Collapse OS + more things

    Collapse OS — Bootstrap post-collapse technology  – a vision of dystopian technology that fits right in with William Gibson’s more recent views of the future with the Jackpot. A slow moving systemic collapse due to global warming, flooding, pollution, global conflict, terrorism and pandemics

    The battle inside Signal – Platformer – Casey Newton has pulled together an interesting portrait of Signal and how its developing as its user base scales

    Gay Dating App “Grindr” to be fined almost € 10 Mio by Norway due to passing on information to a variety of services

    Myopia correcting ‘smart glasses’ from Japan to be sold in Asia – Nikkei Asia – interesting design approach

    $2 Million for T-Shirts? How Supreme and Nike Cracked the Auction Market – WSJ – natural extension in the change in luxury consumers

    Online retailers are playing a risky game with the UK high street | Financial Times – like Arcadia and countless rivals, Debenhams had underlying conditions stemming from over-enthusiastic cash extraction. CVC, Texas Pacific and Merrill Lynch acquired Debenhams in 2003 in a £1.8bn leveraged buyout that needed just £600m of equity. The trio then extracted more than £1bn via property sale and leaseback agreements and floated it again for almost the same price in 2006 – the Times makes a really good case with regards private equity excesses. Other examples outside the retail sector include TWA and Eircom

    Hacker leaks data of 2.28 million dating site users | ZDNet – another day, another site hacked

    Element sees fivefold increase in signups after Whatsapp privacy debacle | Sifted – its more like a Slack or Teams rival

    Japan’s anime goes global: Sony’s new weapon to take on Netflix | FT 

    Sony Tries Sink-Or-Swim EV Gambit  | EE Times 

    Jim Slater and the warning from the 1970s that we ignored – BBC News – a very brief piece in the BBC Online reflecting on the legacy of Slater Walker. The reality is that there needs to be a far deeper reflection on the effect of his asset stripping model had lighting a touch paper that led directly to deindustrialisation, populism and Brexit.

    “Marketing is what you do when you have a sh#tty product.” – Christopher Lochhead – not particularly smart viewpoint, though great product and service design really helps marketing and helps reduce the amount that needs to be spent due to word of mouth. A second thought occurred to me, people with this mindset are building the entire martech stack….

    WHO Caught Between China and West on Frozen-Food Coronavirus Transmission – WSJ – the irony of the cold chain also distributing vaccines as well as the virus is an interesting one

  • Mask shops & things that caught my eye this week

    Mask Shops In Hong Kong

    Mask shops have now become a thing. When I lived in Hong Kong, you would buy your masks from the local pharmacy chain store depending whether you were near a Watsons or a Mannings. It was good form among locals to wear a mask when you felt unwell; particularly with cold like symptoms. COVID-19 drove the importance of masks. With this has come dedicated mask shops.

    New mask companies sprang up to deal with the need for locally made trusted, good quality masks. Mask Lab built their own factory in the leased space of a former garment factory, now vacant due to the deindustrialisation of Hong Kong with China’s opening up. Mask shops started in residential areas with lower retail rents alongside online sales.

    Mask Lab shop

    Now these businesses have managed to move into flagship retail locations. Looking at this photo Mask Lab seems to be in the Central district of Hong Kong, close to luxury retail stores and the high-end Landmark shopping mall. More related posts here.

    Mattel collaboration with Stüssy

    Mattel collaboration - Stüssy magic eight ball

    The eight ball motif has been a design staple for Stüssy since at least the late 1980s. It was only a matter of time before they did a collaboration with Mattel – maker of the Magic Eight-Ball. There is a capsule clothes collection and a co-branded magic eight ball with a special dice inside it. Magic “8” Ball™ Tee – Mattel Collaboration | Stussy 

    Climate crisis font

    Climate crisis font | Helsingin Sanomat – is a lovely free font that visualises the impact of climate change. Helsingin Sanomat is the largest subscription newspaper in Finland.

    Appalachian Mountain Music

    David Hoffman shot this great documentary on Appalachian mountain music and one of its prime advocates during the early to mid-20th century. The film’s protagonist Bascom Lamar Lunsford collected and promoted Appalachian mountain music and dance in poetry and storytelling.

    Bandulu

    Bandulu Street Couture use customised embroidery on Nike and Nike ACG garments that is sympathetic to the base garments. In their own words:

    ‘Bandulu means fake, bootleg, ghetto. Like that white tee from Marshall’s with the name of some couturier, screenprinted in gold. That little bit of luxury gives clothing a story, with or without vanity. Bandulu believes in adding this quality to the clothes of our world, through upcycling and craftsmanship. Bandulu takes quality, vintage clothing and rejuvenate life into them through hand embellishments. Quality therefore becomes less about reputation, and more about integrity. You know its real if its fake.’

    Bandulu Street Couture

  • Fractured tech lobby + more things

    The fractured tech lobby’s uphill battles – Axios – The fractured tech lobby is a sign of too many firms working at cross purposes. – The Internet Association was founded almost a decade ago to be Silicon Valley’s voice in Washington. But now its biggest members — companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon — increasingly bump heads as they each seek to channel policymakers’ fury away from themselves, and they can have wildly different goals from smaller members. Facebook, for instance, has signaled that it’s open to new federal laws introducing privacy regulations and modest updates to Section 230, tech’s liability shield. Smaller companies worry giants could handle the burden of complying while they’d struggle to survive. – The fractured tech lobby is going to offer a bounty for law firms and K Street lobbyists. It will also open up investigations around the world from the EU to Seoul, Korea. China won’t be involved since it blocks most of the key members of the Internet Association – the fractured tech lobby in question.

    The Kremlin’s Anti-Western (and Remarkably Successful) Middle East Media Project | Interpreter magazine – Dr. Naila Hamdy, an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the American University in Cairo, noted how “RT may have filled up that gap” left in Egypt and the wider region following the Arab Spring, when an increasing number of viewers began to see Al-Jazeera as closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties. This increasing regional polarization erupted in the summer of 2017 with the Saudi-led embargo of Qatar, with Saudi and its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) partners demanding the closure of Al Jazeera as punishment for Qatar’s alleged support for the Brotherhood, as well as Iran and its regional Shiite proxies

    The Radicalization of Kevin Greeson — ProPublica – interesting article and an under-covered subject. The flpside of this article is how the Democrats have lost their base in these communities and it reminds me a lot of how Labour lost its base outside the major cities in that respect. They no longer represent working people, but are instead considered to be playing identity politics, the economics of new-liberalism is largely universal

    China’s rich spent US$54 billion at home on luxury goods last year with coronavirus halting overseas trips | South China Morning Post 

    From Dialect to Grapholect: Written Cantonese from a folkloristic Viewpoint by Chin Wan-kan Hong Kong Policy Research Institute Ltd. – fascinating white paper on Cantonese culture and language. What becomes apparent is that Beijing’s adoption of Mandarin demonstrates its inability to decolonise its culture, by taking the language of the Manchu people who conquered the Han people and others. (PDF) More China related content here.

    Sony takes wraps off secret Unreal Engine project, unveils new subsidiary: Sony Immersive Music Studios – Music Business Worldwide 

    Unilever workers will never return to desks full-time, says boss | Working from home | The Guardian – to be honest with you, this was the way Unilever operated with its hot desking policies way before COVID-19. Global headquarters 100VE had way less seats, phones, desk space and meeting rooms than were needed

    Xi encourages Starbucks to help promote China-U.S. ties – Xinhua | English.news.cn – one has to ask where is the line that executives from businesses like Starbucks and Goldman Sachs cross to be viewed as foreign agents in the US due to their relationship with the Chinese government

    Sheryl Sandberg downplayed Facebook’s blame for Capitol riot, but evidence points to role – The Washington Post – Fliers and hashtags promoting the pro-Trump rally circulated on Facebook and Instagram in the days and weeks beforehand

    Ad Aged: Standing up for truth. (Haha.) – For a society or an industry to function it needs to have a set of common facts. It’s really that simple. If you hear an assertion, ask for evidence. Whether or not you agree with it. If you make an assertion, be prepared to back it up with a piece of paper.

    WhatsApp fights back as users flee to Signal and Telegram | Financial Times – The encrypted messaging app, which has more than 2bn users globally, and several of its senior executives spent Tuesday trying to clarify forthcoming privacy policy changes covering the data that can be shared between WhatsApp and its parent now that it is deepening its push into ecommerce. Signal was downloaded 8.8m times worldwide in the week after the WhatsApp changes were first announced on January 4, versus 246,000 times the week before, according to data from Sensor Tower. The app also got a boost when Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, tweeted “Use Signal” on January 7.  By contrast, WhatsApp recorded 9.7m downloads in the week after the announcement, compared with 11.3m before, a 14 per cent decrease

    Detained US lawyer urges Hong Kong to look to Ireland for inspiration | Financial Times – Look at Irish history . . . They were completely hopeless for so long, but eventually they got part of Ireland — they got a republic,” Mr Clancey told the Financial Times. “In a difficult situation we shouldn’t just give up and have no hope for the future.” Mr Clancey was still asleep when police arrived to detain him last Wednesday. After his arrest, police escorted Mr Clancey, a Hong Kong permanent resident, to his office to conduct a search. His firm, headed by veteran lawyer Albert Ho, is known for representing anti-government activists. His arrest has stirred fears authorities will target lawyers in Hong Kong who represent opposition figures in political cases — a tactic common in mainland China

    Chinese freight platform to raise more cash on huge investor demand | Financial Times – investor frenzy bidding seven times the amount that Didi Chuxing was looking for when doing a capital round for its freight business

  • Ikea Symfonisk speaker and other things that caught my eye this week

    A great YouTube teardown of the Ikea Symfonisk bookshelf speaker. The speaker works with a Sonos equipped home and was designed in conjunction with Sonos. The Symfonisk bookshelf speaker is part of a range. They’re built for convenience rather than high fidelity.

    Don’t expect it to last long after its warranty is over. The Sonos product design on which it’s based doesn’t deserve the premium that has been put on it historically. The Symfonisk looks like a low quality product which exists to help Ikea and Sonos cross-sell and upsell consumers on other products.

    The Trump supporters protest ‘Stop the Steal ‘looked to an outsider like an absurdist performative art performance that went wrong with criminal damage and five dead at the time of writing.

    https://twitter.com/dublonothing/status/1347078502412009476

    If like me, you were left wondering what just happened? And then asking yourself what on earth is QAnon? Bellingcat has you covered.

    At the moment American politicians are calling it a coup attempt and asking for the participants to be locked up and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I get it. What the politicians are failing to do is come up with the better, more attractive belief system than QAnon. I think that’s a problem. It’s why over 25 years after the Oklahoma City bombing, the far right is stronger than ever.

    Jailing participants creates as many problems as it solves. It provides martyrs to a cause, like McVeigh became. But not jailing them says that their conduct is within the realm of respectability. As for a better idea, you could do worse than look at the Depolarization Project.

    Stop The Steal, January 6, 2021 St. Paul, Minn.
    Protestors out side the Governors residence in St Pauls, Minnesota as part of the Stop The Steal protests / coup attempt.

    Drum and Bass seems to be having a renaissance, with it getting more prominence in the likes of Mixmag and elsewhere. A great example is this recent guest mix by Carl Cox for Edible Beats.

    Sony’s Trinitron was a byword for the best quality TV experience when CRTs ruled display technology. This history of the technology shows Sony at its engineering best for decades.