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.

  • 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.

  • Knowledge economy + more things

    How does the UK rank as a knowledge economy? – Soft Machines – The big story is the huge rise of China, and in this context, inevitable that the rest of the world’s share of the advanced economy has fallen. But the UK’s fall is larger than competitors (-46%, cf -19% for the USA and -13% for rest of EU) – the definition of knowledge economy used in the research doesn’t play to the UK’s strengths in areas like financial services, education, legal services, accounting services and advertising. But there is no denying the overall pattern, that the UK failed to make the knowledge economy work for it in the same way that China, the US or the EU have managed to do over the last decade

    Do You Want to Buy Less Stuff? Three People Tell Us How – The New York Times – a few things about this. Ms Chai has a lot of nice things, it would be harder to do this if you were starting off with Ikea furnishing for instance

    Cultural institutions in crisis | Financial Times – Financial losses from Covid-19 are not the only challenges museums face. Well before the pandemic, environmental and social activists were holding western institutions vigorously to account. Museums were already struggling with issues of diversity — both in staffing and, more importantly, in representation in their collections — the status of objects in those collections and calls for restitution. The situation is further complicated by criticism of many traditional sources of philanthropic funding and ongoing concern for the environment. The Black Lives Matter movement and other world events put a renewed spotlight on racism, illuminating the “white gaze” of western institutions. Even as museums scrambled to promise that change was afoot, they found themselves ensnared in further criticism. “Did our lives matter when you STOLE ALL OUR THINGS?” retorted writer Stephanie Yeboah when Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum, tweeted solidarity for Black Lives Matter (paywall)

    As Understanding of Russian Hacking Grows, So Does Alarm – The New York Times – By staging their attacks from servers inside the United States, in some cases using computers in the same town or city as their victims, according to FireEye, the Russians took advantage of limits on the National Security Agency’s authority. Congress has not given the agency or homeland security any authority to enter or defend private sector networks. It was on these networks that S.V.R. operatives were less careful, leaving clues about their intrusions that FireEye was ultimately able to find. By inserting themselves into the SolarWinds’ Orion update and using custom tools, they also avoided tripping the alarms of the “Einstein” detection system that homeland security deployed across government agencies to catch known malware, and the so-called C.D.M. program that was explicitly devised to alert agencies to suspicious activity (paywall)

    Why Markets Boomed in a Year of Human Misery – The New York Times – the jobs lost were low wages compared to the knowledge workers who benefited from home working with increased savings

    Tesla blasts ‘ridiculously fabricated’ report raising quality concerns at Shanghai plant – giga sweatshop is quite a catchy sound bite

    The way we train AI is fundamentally flawed | MIT Technology Review 

    Why 2021 will be a bumper year for M&A | Vogue Business – the big three trends for M&A in 2021: conglomerates looking for an opportunity to consolidate, luxury brands stepping up vertical integration by investing in distressed parts of their supply chain, and a focus on investment in digital expertise and the APAC region. – more luxury related content here.

  • CD ROM history + more news

    CD ROM reflections

    How “God Makes God” is a 1993 CD ROM about probability, game theory, genetic algorithms, and evolutionary strategies | Boing Boing – I remember having my mind blown by this CD ROM at college. It reminded me of Jostein Gaarder’s book Sophie’s World in terms of its approach to making philosophy entertaining and accessible. I remember reading Sophie’s World around the same time as having played How God Makes God. There was something about HyperCard and the CD ROM authoring tools that followed. Amidst all the brochureware there were creators who drove extraordinary media projects, most notably for me was the game Myst, which I don’t think has been bettered. I suspect part of it was the excitement of new ‘hyper-media’, the limitations of the tools (though 640MB storage at the time seemed vast when I was using an Apple PowerBook 165 with 4MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive at the time) and the media economics of the time. CD-ROM authoring tools were becoming more sophisticated. CD manufacturing plants were proliferating, lowering the cost per CD ROM disk and CD recordable drives were relatively affordable in the price range of $10,000 – $20,000. Still eye wateringly expensive, but this was a vast improvement from just two years before and allowed for better prototyping, small production runs and testing across devices.

    Design

    3D printed IKEA hack experiences by Uppgradera on Etsy – really interesting aspects to the designs

    Ethics

    Instacart Is a Parasite and a Sham | The New Republic – The gig economy company, like many of its peers, has seen business skyrocket during the pandemic—while exploiting workers and even failing to turn a profit. That last bit reminds me a lot of the first generation dot com companies who tried to break through the wall of economics and succeed by moving at internet speed. This time they seem to have supplemented the usual ‘throw money at it’ approach with a lack of morality

    Ideas

    How Claude Shannon’s Information Theory Invented the Future | Quanta Magazine – the idea of binary encrypted signals

    Innovation

    Activist Firm Urges Intel to ‘Explore Alternatives’ to Manufacturing Its Own Chips – ExtremeTech – there are national security issues with this. I suspect this is just an opening salvo by Dan Loeb

    Regulators tell Jack Ma’s Ant Group to rectify five problems – the five areas included: Ant’s inadequate governance; regulatory negligence; unlawful profit-seeking; monopolistic practices and; infringement of consumer rights, said China’s central bank vice governor Pan Gongsheng.

    China orders Ant Group to rein in unfettered expansion as regulators put up fences around financial risks | South China Morning Post – Ant must return to its origins in online payments and prohibit irregular competition, protect customers’ privacy in operating its personal credit rating business, establish a financial holding company to manage its businesses, rectify any irregularities in its insurance, wealth management and credit businesses, and run its asset-backed securities business in accordance with regulations, the People’s Bank of China’s deputy governor Pan Gongsheng said in a statement on Sunday.

    Luxury

    From TikTok to Depop: Fashion’s new trend funnel | Vogue Business – trends like leather, feathers, neutrals or hot pinks, were relatively easy to follow: the trend funnel moved from runway to rack, with some help from popular culture along the way. This year, Gen Z users on TikTok and Depop jumpstarted a new trend funnel, quickly giving rise to aesthetics like “cottagecore” and “dark academia”, influencing young shoppers’s purchases. “If one of your favourite [TikTok] creators changes their aesthetic due to a particular trend, a whole style can be born out of it,” says Yazmin How, TikTok’s content lead. “The fashion industry is no longer the only voice directing the new season’s trends. People are tapping into TikTok to see what emerging styles are ‘in’ and what previously popular trends are coming back around.” TikTok trends manifest into purchases on Depop, where 90 per cent of users are Gen Z. In step with the rise of the cottagecore trend on TikTok, search for the term on Depop rose 900 per cent between March to August, when it reached its peak. Greater connectivity and increased time at home has boosted the amount of these consumer-led movements, and brands whose aesthetics fit the trends are benefiting, like LoveShackFancy, who specialises in the prairie dresses and gingham blouses associated with cottagecore’s countryside aesthetic – reminds me a bit of the Harajuku trends from the past 30 years. Culture and the trends that come out of it, are now massively parallel in nature

    Online

    FarmVille Once Took Over Facebook. Now Everything Is FarmVille. – The New York Times – legacy is in growth hacking techniques used to make it popular in the first place

    Why Bella Poarch’s “M to the B” video was the top TikTok of 2020 – Vox – TikTok automates the mix of all these topics, going farther than any other platform to mimic the human editor.” At the same time, he says, it’s also “an eternal channel flip, and the flip is the point: there is no settled point of interes t to land on. Nothing is meant to sustain your attention.” The result, he argues, is what essentially amounts to “soft censorship,” or a feed that becomes as “glossy, appealing, and homogenous as possible rather than the truest reflection of either reality or a user’s desires.” How did a perfectly average competitive dancer become the No. 1 internet celebrity in the world? Why did half a billion people watch Poarch’s face bob up and down? Because these two women are the logical endpoint of the world’s most powerful entertainment algorithm: young people centering their conventional attractiveness in easily repeatable formats

    Retailing

    Amazon and the Rise of the Retail “Sniffer” Algorithm | The Fashion Law – the “sniffer algorithm” – or better yet, “one or more” sniffer algorithms that not only sniff out topics that a speaker is potentially interested in but that also “attempt to identify trigger words in the voice content, which can indicate a level of interest of the user.” For example, as Amazon’s patent application states, “A keyword that is repeated multiple times in a conversation might be given assigned a higher priority than other keywords, tagged with a priority tag.” At the same time, “a keyword following a ‘strong’ trigger word, such as ‘love’ might be given a higher priority or weighting than for an intermediate trigger word such as ‘purchased.’” – when does assistance become creepy?

    Security

    NSO used real people’s location data to pitch its contact-tracing tech, researchers say | TechCrunch – and here is the original report on which the article is based Nso Group’s Breach Of Private Data With ‘fleming’, A Covid-19 Contact-tracing Software ← Forensic Architecture 

    Insecure wheels: Police turn to car data to destroy suspects’ alibis | NBC News – investigators have realized that automobiles — particularly newer models — can be treasure troves of digital evidence. Their onboard computers generate and store data that can be used to reconstruct where a vehicle has been and what its passengers were doing. They reveal everything from location, speed and acceleration to when doors were opened and closed, whether texts and calls were made while the cellphone was plugged into the infotainment system, as well as voice commands and web histories. But that boon for forensic investigators creates fear for privacy activists, who warn that the lack of information security baked into vehicles’ computers poses a risk to consumers and who call for safeguards to be put in place

    Web of no web

    Tencent backs Chinese healthcare portal DXY in $500M round | TechCrunch – China has done a lot of work to move towards telemedicine and technology augmented health. Tencent’s WeChat was used by local governments for their COVID certificates, tracking and tracing applications. More Tencent related content here.

  • Cyberpunk and things that made my week

    Cyberpunk history part one and two have been done by Indigo Games. I blogged about part one a while ago on the blog. But now I get to share both parts of this Cyberpunk history. The gap reflects the amount of time and effort that went into both series.

    Part one covers cyberpunk culture up to the early 1980s.

    Part two moves the cyberpunk story via personal computing, the end of the cold war, gulf war and mainstream Hollywood. I hadn’t made the Philip K Dick connection with Screamers. It also delves into a wide variety of early computer games that I didn’t know and the cult anime Armitage III.

    I can’t wait until their next instalment drops. Watch this cyberpunk history instead of the staid Christmas TV programming. More culture related posts here.

    Mercedes-Benz managed to create its own ‘Baby Yoda’ moment with the ‘plushie’ in this winter TV advert. However Mercedes don’t seem to have thought about how to exploit this cultural moment that they’ve created.

    https://youtu.be/-bE16foH9m0

    The Irish government’s department of foreign affairs has put together To Be Irish | at Christmas that provides an Irish experience to the COVID stranded diaspora. I’ve put together a playlist of Christmas music you can enjoy here.

    The Korea Culture Centre has put together online experiences based on the works of Korean artists. More here. They’ve made an interesting use of video and VR type experiences in this work. The KCC has kept its artist curation at its usual high standard.

  • Endeavour Christmas card and other things that caught my eye this week

    Creative agency Endeavour sent out the first Christmas card that I received. This year they focused on content rather than design with everything that you need Christmas 2020 – Endeavour.

    There was guidance on how to make paper Christmas trees including a green PDF that you can print out if you don’t like the snow white look of unprinted paper and a Spotify playlist.

    The Financial Times have put together a series article looking at The Future of the City. The City in question being the London’s international financial services sector, whose traditional home is the City of London – think Wall Street in New York, or Central in Hong Kong. I found How London grew into a financial powerhouse particularly informative and all the articles are chock full of charts.

    A relatively modern Carroll family Christmas tradition has been my Dad and I watching the BBC adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People. It will carry extra weight this year due to social distancing and the recent death of John Le Carre. My Dad read his books whilst working shifts during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He used to buy books second hand from a florrid looking book dealer in the local market. I in turn, read my Dad’s books (Len Deighton, Alistair Maclean, Hammond Innes, Robert Ludlum and John Le Carre) as I went through the early years of secondary school. Le Carre was the only one of these authors that I decided to read more than once.

    This time, we’ll both be watching them on Blu-Ray whilst keeping the video open on FaceTime to discuss it as we go along.

    It doesn’t get more 1990s than this. A skateboarder reading his self-authored poetry. Mike Vallely a professional skateboarder. If my memory serves me right, Vallely rode for Powell Peralta (Bones Brigade) factory team a few separate times during his career. In this video he gives the poetry reading in a LA skate shop back in 1996.

    https://youtu.be/QTr2Mvz873c

    The Luxury Society held a panel in Shanghai talking about luxury brands and the digital behaviour of the Chinese consumer. More luxury related content here.