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.
This week has seen a couple of mind boggling marketing moves. First of all Vaseline made Valentine’s themed content that in retrospect probably doesn’t seem like the smartest idea now.
I am not sure what this a parable of:
The decline of corporate communications and legal in a company as reputation guardians?
The decline of critical thinking in brand marketers? It certainly wasn’t culturally appropriate for the UK
The high price of cost reduction in content where the agency folks no longer give f__k? You can’t commoditise heart, but you can kill it
I have been listening to this great mix by Peggy Gou
Munich animal shelter
ZAK Agency’s weekly ‘Cool Sh*t’ newsletter flagged up some lovely videos from a Munich-based animal welfare charity
I love this ‘conspiracy film’ trailer from Taco Bell starring Josh Duhamel. Great content doesn’t need to be constrained by a six-second chunk optimised for social.
Mood Swing Rebrand – World Creative Studio – interesting take on MTV’s rebrand in terms of approach to the communications challenge. What is even more impressive is that it is coming out of MTV’s inhouse World Creative Studio
An Ad Executive Often in the Vanguard Peers Into the Future – The New York Times – The one thing that’s kind of disturbing about all of this to me and potentially The New York Times is: Are we moving into a world where the dominant platforms of media consumption are basically getting close to a point where they’re blacklisting the monetization of news? It seems that there is no huge demand in Google’s program commissioning to commission news. I don’t see there’s a big appetite for Facebook saying, “We would like 20 news organizations to provide news bulletin programming for Facebook Watch.” We know there are dozens and dozens of news organizations around the world, or at least a dozen or two that include The Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, the BBC and so on, who are, for the most part, the keepers of truth in news and the people who keep the public informed. And it seems odd to me that if you have aspirations to take up a very significant part of the media consumption time of the public that you do not have an overt policy for the dissemination of news – actually its not odd at all if you look at consumer research about media
Intel Warned Chinese Companies of Chip Flaws Before U.S. Government – WSJ – so basically Intel betrayed the US, Russia and most western governments, almost all its client base in the server market. It is a pity that Oracle and its SPARC business aren’t in a position to take full advantage of it, but Qualcomm might
General and Surprising – Pul Graham – The most valuable insights are both general and surprising. F = ma for example. But general and surprising is a hard combination to achieve. That territory tends to be picked clean, precisely because those insights are so valuable.
Cheap as hips: why Malaysia is the best place for Chinese to retire | South China Morning Post – interesting article, but what about the socio political aspects of living in Malaysia? Malaysian interpretation of Islam is moving closer to that practiced in the Gulf. This is exasperating the discrimination against Chinese and South Asian ethic origin Malaysians such that the country is suffering a brain drain More China related content here.
Dark Satanic Mills immediately looked like the kind of graphic novel that I would like. I grew up with British dystopian science fiction with a fascistic bent. From the numerous franchises within 2000AD magazine to Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta.
The tone of these stories was set by a UK dealing with:
Decolonisation and trying to work out its place in the world
Economic chaos due to inflation, a shrinking manufacturing base and globalisation
A battle of elites against working people
The rise of right wing populist nationalism a la Britain First
The rise of racism
It sounds rather similar doesn’t it?
The Sedgwick brothers Dark Satanic Mills fits right into this very British genre of graphic novels. The illustration style is similar to the stark black and white kinetic styles of 2000AD or Moore’s From Hell. It should be of now surprise that the jacket copy was written by Pat Mills of 2000AD. It almost felt like the baton was being passed on to the next generation.
The book has a premise that is similar to the body of work in 2000AD. It taps into Moore, channeling not only V for Vendetta, but also his love of mysticism.
William Blake’s Jerusalem and The Bible fit into a post-apocalyptic backdrop. Blake fits the bill perfectly: his association with the English identity often misused by ‘patriots’, his innate distrust in systems and of organised religion make his words the ideal foil.
The heroine Charlie is a dispatch rider who ends up in possession of a manuscript that will expose the populist government and the religious zealots it uses as a paramilitary force.
The religious zealots called the Soldiers of Truth are a chimera of Britain First and the droogs in Kubrick’s film adaption of A Clockwork Orange.
Charley ricochets around an England where rational thought, tolerance, logical analysis and experts are enemies of the state. It echoes Michael Gove‘s
“I think people in this country, have had enough of experts.”
Without giving too much more away, the story finishes in an ambigious way leaving Charley and the authorities open to a future largely unwritten. Again the ambiguity of a post-Brexit future is an obvious analogy. The fact that Dark Satanic Mills was published in 2013 makes it feel curiously prescient: a parable for our times.
I love Connie Chan blog posts and presentations. In this talk she covers how Asian applications manage to squeeze so much more features into their apps than their western equivalent to provide a fuller eco-system of services that she terms super-apps.
Connie Chan isn’t only smart, but manages to talk about Chinese eco-systems in a simple coherent way, which is an art in itself. More Connie Chan related content here.
For These Young Entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley Is, Like, Lame – WSJ – for most of the 18 entrepreneurs and investors, and especially for those in their 20s and 30s, last week’s visit largely failed to impress. To many in the group, northern California’s low-rise buildings looked shabbier than the glitzy skyscrapers in Beijing and Shenzhen. They can’t believe Americans still use credit cards and cash while they use mobile payment for almost everything back home – not terribly surprised. Silicon Valley is no longer the place ‘where wizards stay up late’. Agencies work harder than their Bay Area tech clients and it is full of hubris
Luxury is thriving in China again, thanks to millennials — Quartz – Chinese millennials start buying luxury younger, and they buy high-end products more frequently, the firm says. (It undoubtedly helps that they have more spending power than previous generations did at their age.) What they’re buying is also different. Bain surveyed about 500 Chinese millennials and found their interests leaned toward casual and street-inspired fashion – Supreme rather than Prada, put into context here
Huawei – Really Convincing Story, Not. | Radio Free Mobile – this means that this feature (RCS – Rich Communication Services), like its AI assistant, AI chip and its now commoditised imaging offering will be unable to generate any differentiation for Huawei in its devices. This leaves it exactly the same boat as all of the other Android handset makers who differentiate purely on the basis of hardware
Chad Dickerson’s Fieldnotes – Fieldnotes is an email newsletter from one of the key people during Yahoo!’s web 2.0 geek golden age and former CEO of Etsy. Chad Dickerson was in charge of Yahoo!’s Brickhouse incubator and the Yahoo! Developer Network. He then went to be the CTO of Etsy and was then promoted to CEO. Dickerson came from a background in technology for online media, having worked at CNN, Salon.com and InfoWorld before Yahoo!
Shipping time lapse
This is the second time lapse film I’ve seen done by an officer on a ship. I get it. No internet would give you a lot of time to put the film together. It opens up a world that I had only heard of from people older than me who had served on ships when westerners were sailors. I love the way clouds boil away, time lapse allow you to better see the liquid nature of clouds.
20 choice edits and reworks
Greg Wilson put together this mix of his favourite edits that had been done in 2017. Everyone of them are are an amazing track. Wilson was one of the original resident DJs at the Hacienda. He was the first UK DJ to be seen scratching on TV. He took a break from DJing and returned later to both DJing and production. Wilson is one of the pioneers in the nu disco movement.
LV Pass Apple Messenger icons
Louis Vuitton’s LV Pass app did some really nice integration with Apple’s Messenger stickers. It is based on Jeff Koons artworks and the iconic Louis Vuitton brand. More related content here.
Switch off for the holidays
Fair play to Nokia for running this campaign on their website over Christmas. They realise that consumers are over connected and need a screen break, so they have been encouraging consumers to switch off and connect in real life for the holidays.
