Design was something that was important to me from the start of this blog, over different incarnations of the blog, I featured interesting design related news. Design is defined as a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, interfaces or other object before it is made.
But none of the definition really talks about what design really is in the way that Dieter Rams principles of good design do. His principles are:
It is innovative
It makes a product useful
It is aesthetic
It makes a product understandable
It is unobtrusive
It is honest
It is long-lasting
It is thorough down to the last detail
It is environmentally-friendly – it can and must maintain its contribution towards protecting and sustaining the environment.
It is as little design as possible
Bitcoin isn’t long lasting as a network, which is why people found the need to fork the blockchain and build other cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin uses 91 terawatts of energy annually or about the entire energy consumption of Finland.
The Bitcoin network relies on thousands of miners running energy intensive machines 24/7 to verify and add transactions to the blockchain. This system is known as “proof-of-work.” Bitcoin’s energy usage depends on how many miners are operating on its network at any given time. – So Bitcoin is environmentally unfriendly by design.
On the other hand, Apple products, which are often claimed to be also influenced by Dieter Rams also fail his principles. They aren’t necessarily environmentally friendly as some like AirPods are impossible to repair or recycle.
Zynternet is a portmanteau made up of Zyn and internet. If you’re reading this internet is self-explanatory, the Zyn in question is tabacco-free Skoal bandit type nicotine pouches. Zyn comes in a tin and has various flavours.
According to journalist Max Read, the Zynternet is a kind of 90s to early 2000s sports obsessed ‘lad’ type culture; but in the 2020s. There are shades of ‘white van man’ in there as well.
a broad community of fratty, horndog, boorishly provocative 20- and sometimes (embarrassingly) 30-somethings–mostly but by no means entirely male–has emerged to form a newly prominent online subculture.
Despite Read’s definition defining it as a 20 to 30-something thing, the subculture seems to bleed into 40-something Dads and draws on creators like Barstool Sports. They’re less extreme than the Andrew Tate acolytes. They care more about sports and professional golf than they do about current affairs and politics. But they’ll be voting Republican. They like college sports, sports betting, light beers and Zyn nicotine pouches.
The culture has grown prominent on the laissez-faire Musk era Twitter.
Zynternet stretch
It would be very easy to point to the Zynternet audience and draw parallels to the ‘proles’ of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. And then go down a dystopian k-hole.
I’ll leave the last words to David Ogilvy for those despairing about the Zynternet:
You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. Three million consumers get married every year. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year will probably be just as successful with those who’ll get married next year. An advertisement is just like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar and keep it sweeping.
David Ogilvy
TL;DR if you’re not reaching the zynternet, you’re probably not doing political marketing properly. More related content here.
Content or couture? Balenciaga’s 30-minute dress becomes the flashpoint of the season | Vogue Business – “It feels a little like a fast fashion iteration of haute couture,” says Victoria Moss, fashion director of The Standard, of the swirling mass of black nylon. “This feels at odds with what fashion at this level should be, which is exquisitely made pieces that somewhat justify their extreme pricing.” She adds that many invest in couture to have garments perfectly fitted to their bodies — and made to last for years.
“Is it beautiful? That’s debatable. Is it impressive? Not really. Is it brazen? Absolutely. Is it a meditation on the creative process? Maybe. Are we bored of these kinds of gimmicks at Balenciaga? Clearly not, as Demna’s work continues to be both a lightning rod and a conversation starter. “Call it ‘pret-a-polarize’,” says fashion journalist and ‘Newfash’ podcast host Mosha Lundström. “To my eye and understanding, I see this look as content rather than couture.”
Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks | Reuters – yes stories like this are funny because ‘modern’ Japan with its flip phones, fax machines and floppy discs are an anachronism. But there’s a few other things to consider. There might be issues in terms of investment a la the NHS and critical systems that for whatever reason can’t be ported on to modern systems (like the problems had with security based on ActiveX).
Dumb systems also have security benefits, you can’t steal nearly as much data on even a compressed floppy disk as you can on a USB stick.
Interesting use cases for generative AI in China which sounds like a plot line from Ghost In The Shell.
Baidu – World No. 1? – Radio Free Mobile – is Baidu ERNIE really the number one generative AI service? It depends on if the numbers are true. 14 million developers, 950,000 models within the eco-system
China plays down importance of lithography tools in semiconductor challenges – Interesting report from Taiwan’s DigiTimes semiconductor trade magazine: China seems to be deliberately playing down the importance of lithography tools as it identifies the challenges for the development of its semiconductor industry in a recently published dossier.
Welcome to my June 2024 newsletter, it’s been a bit of a mad month with the European Union elections foreshadowing a rightward lurch in policy direction. The snap call for a French general assembly election and the bizarre spectacles happening in the campaign efforts of the UK general election. And before you say it, the UK general election is not a TikTok election. In the northern hemisphere midsummer (21 June 2024) – the longest day of daylight taps into something primal bringing us back to nature with campfires to meet the dusk, seasonal food and the beauty of summer on display.
This newsletter which marks my 11th issue. The number 11 is a mixed bag associated in medieval theology with the ’11 heads of error’. However there are more positive associations for those who believe in numerology. In Chinese its sonic similarity to the phrase ‘definitely fine’ gives it a positive association. For me it’s forever associated with the old bingo call of ‘legs 11’.
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.
Collapsing the funnel is a term that I have heard thrown around a lot on blogs, LinkedIn posts and podcasts, but what does it really mean?
Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. Perlstein is an American historian with a progressive eye on history. His book name was passed around earlier on in the spring given perceived parallels between Biden and a likely second Trump administration, together with increased activism. It is one of a series of books that Perlstein wrote documenting post-second world war. Reaganland documents the Carter administration and America’s pivot to Reaganism. Before The Storm which looks at the rise of the modern American libertarian conservative moment and the decline in cross-party consensus – viewed through the lens of Barry Goldwater’s campaign to become the republican party candidate against Richard Nixon. I started reading Nixonland before the US college protests started, which gave the book added resonance.
Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino. The first thing that jumps off the page when reading Cinema Speculation is the deep abiding love that Tarantino has for film. Film permeated every part of his life. His Mum took him along to films at the cinema that he probably shouldn’t have been allowed to see. In this respect he was a cinema media consumer in a time when mainstream television had already eaten Hollywood the first time around. The second thing that comes through is the way his deep knowledge allows him to build connections and linkages in non-obvious ways. Something that we lose the ability to do as we mediate knowledge seeking through Google and Perplexity instead of going through library newspaper clippings and reading magazines. I then realised that was a similar red thread in Perlstein’s Nixonland. Tarantino writes how he speaks and I was able to devour the book in two sittings despite suffering from a summer cold at the time. If you like to hear someone writing passionately about the New Hollywood movement of the early 1970s, then read Cinema Speculation.
It was third time lucky for me with Red Queen by Juan Gómez-Jurado. I was recommended the book by my friend Ian Wood and tried to read it a few times, but only really got into it at the third attempt. Once I got into it, I enjoyed it. There are the surface comparisons with Stig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (The girl with the dragon tattoo and sequels). Without giving plot spoilers I found this comparison lacking. Instead I think of it as a modern-day version of the Sherlock Holmes novels of Arthur Conan-Doyle, but that view may change as I work my way through the series.
Things I have been inspired by.
Bad Times Disco.
Bad Times Disco put together eclectic parties bringing out music like Japan’s 1980s ‘city pop’ sound and art to secret venues.
For their closing event until autumn in Hong Kong they had developed an equitable pricing policy that allows an equally eclectic crowd.
Come join us for our season closing party on June 21st, in a spacious and very central location, filled with BTD regulars, our loving staff, and a great lineup of vinyl-centric DJs. More than a party, BTD is truly a community and we want to see all the regulars for this one.
* Multi-functional space layout *
* Special set design, group exhibit of multidisciplinary art, and more special touches *
* Sober friendly party *
Presales: 270HKD
Phase 1: 330HKD
Phase 2: 380HKD
Last min: 420HKD
Solidarity ticket: 500HKD. If you are a landowner, homeowner, or have generational wealth, please consider purchasing a solidarity ticket to our party and making it possible for lower-income folks to attend the party.
*Limited Low Income Ticket*: 150HKD – This is *only* if you are a service worker in Hong Kong, working class, or unemployed without a safety net in Hong Kong. We will trust you to choose this option for yourself if you need it.
Design Discoveries: Towards a DESIGN MUSEUM JAPAN.
Japan House London has an exhibition of industrial design that reflects on the paradox of Japan having great design, but not a museum of design. Japan has a culture of good design; it’s a living thing and expected. By comparison, the celebration of good design could ironically indicate a norm of mediocre to bad product design. The exhibition runs until September.
Digital mortality.
David Webb is a long time activist investor in Hong Kong. I know of him by reputation since before I first went to Hong Kong and China in the mid-2000s. He has a long-running website that is invaluable for all things Hong Kong business-related – and is likely even more valuable given the recent regulatory and legal changes in the city. In a time when Hong Kong’s retail investors are disadvantaged by the large families and opaque Chinese government, Webb-Site is one of a few assets that retail investors can use for research. The site shows its late 1990s web design roots and makes extensive use of RSS to power its content.
David has been receiving treatment for cancer since 2020 and is now thinking about how his website might live on as a crowd-sourced online database. At the moment he is looking to bring on board volunteer editors. Part of the reason for this is that the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission didn’t embrace XML data output, that sites like David’s could ingest and process. More details here on how you can get involved.
Kantar’s blueprint for brand growth.
Kantar’s blueprint for brand growth uses a decades worth of its client’s data to refine their approach for success. It broadly meets what you would expect from the marketing science corpus built up by the likes of Ehrensberg-Bass and the IPA. They boiled down this blueprint for brand growth into three points
Predispose more people – which boils down to a mix of salience and fame.
Be more present – which equates to marketing penetration to capitalise on the increased number of people predisposed to the brand.
Find new spaces – this is about innovating in communications and new ways of achieving market penetration.
This last point is particularly interesting. Much of Kantar’s clients would be mature well-known brands so breaking out into new spaces represents a blue ocean approach, designed to move beyond the fractional gains against entrenched competitors.
Michael Page 2024 talent insights
Michael Page have launched their annual talents insights report. It has content on a diverse set of areas including working locations (remote, hybrid and on-site), artificial intelligence and perceived job security. TL;DR – hybrid seems here to stay, AI usage is in the minority at the moment and the majority of workers feel secure in their current roles.
Quiet pride.
Probably not the right section in this newsletter, it would fit better in a section of ‘things I have been disappointed by’. Campaign Asia and Campaign US ran the following article: Brands plan for a quiet Pride Month. The iPA ran a similarly themed article. I guess ‘pride washing’ of brands will be less of a problem this year, but the lack of visibility is a concern.
The articles imply a wider rollback from brand purpose, indicating a hollowness to the buy-in from large corporates.
The hesitation around Pride may also be related to executives’ increasing reluctance to speak out on social issues more broadly. Wolff pointed to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, which found that 87% of executives think taking a public stance on a social issue is riskier than staying silent. “Essentially, nine out of every 10 executives believe that the return on investment for their careers is not worth the support during this turbulent time,” said (Kate) Wolff. “This is clearly problematic for both the community and the progress we have made in recent years.”
Brands plan for a quiet Pride Month – Campaign Asia.
It offers a different angle on the broader issue that people like Nick Ashbury with his new book The Road to Hell have been driving at with regards the state of brand purpose.
Things I have watched.
I am a bit of a Federico Fellini fan and finally got to watch Roma. Roma is semi-autobiographical in nature. It is a series of vignettes all based around the city of Rome which go from the 1930s to the 1970s and cover various parts of city life with some of the aspects such as Roman frescos turning to dust on first viewing in a millennium to a religious fashion show having an especially fantastical aspect to it. The deconstructed nature of the film is also interesting from a storytelling point-of-view.
Delicatessen was part of a wave of dystopian movies that were produced during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Films like Richard Stanley’s Hardware and Dust Devil. Given that its French there is a distinct mid-century modernism sensibility to many aspects of it such as the vehicles use. In terms of the plot it is similar to a futuristic Sweeney Todd meets Brazil. The directing and writing team Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro went on to make more popular films including City of Children.
THX 1138 was George Lucas’ first professional film based on his student film. It feels modern and fresh despite being shot in the early 1970s. It captures the impersonal socially isolating aspects of modern technology. The film proper opens with Robert Duvall speaking with a system about how he is feeling echoing the nascent current use of AI for therapy. While Lucas became famous from his directing of the film, a good deal of credit is due to Walter Murch’s futurist soundscape and Lala Schiffin’s tonal soundtrack which isn’t that far away from the likes of Jóhann Jóhannsson. It’s no coincidence that later on Lucas named his audio company THX.
Murch although less well-known is a multi-Oscar award-winning film editor and sound mixer who pioneered the use of Apple’s Final Cut software in Hollywood.
I got a good deal of my license fee’s worth of the BBC going through the 1960s Royal Shakespeare Company performances of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Edward IV and Richard III which together make up the telling through an English protestant lens of the War of The Roses. Peter Hall’s direction is spot on. I only wish that I had seen this while I was studying English literature in secondary school.
Useful tools.
Basic Excel formulas guide.
Nicolas Boucher usually works with finance teams looking at adapting AI, but he put together a PDF with 21 Excel commands and examples. Some of them can be handy in digging your way through quantitative data. You can get your copy of the PDF here.
Bookfinder
The everything store Amazon, a fair few times hasn’t had what I wanted. There are also sound moral arguments to want to buy elsewhere, or you might want to buy cheaper. That’s where Bookfinder comes in. It is fast, has a front end that looked basic back when when Netscape Navigator was your tool for coasting on the information superhighway and surfing the worldwide web.
LittleSnitch 6.
If you’re a long time Mac user who can remember back when Adobe creative suite came in a box, then you might know Little Snitch. It was popular for people running bootleg copies of PhotoShop and InDesign by stopping the software from ‘phoning home’ to Adobe.
In reality Little Snitch is so much more, it’s my go-to software firewall. It allows Mac users to retain a fine control on what goes in and out of your computer stopping dodgy connections in their tracks.
Additional MagSafe 3 cables.
I have a surplus of USB-C chargers now, but the move towards the MagSafe 3 charging connection on newer Macs is a great back to the future move. They are magnetically connected, allowing the connection to be broken before your laptop is dragged to the floor like the original MagSafe connectors that Apple had in two versions from 2006 to 2017.
They got rid of it, and long time users like me moaned about it as USB-C, felt like a backwards move for mobile workers. Apple brought it back with MagSafe 3, which now works with USB-C chargers.
Third-party MagSafe 3 cables are now available so you no longer need to pay the Apple tax of premium priced cables. My favourite is the BeckenBower USB C to Mag-Safe 3 Cable, which has worked out really well for me so far.
Organiser.
I work from home and usually have Bloomberg or Yahoo! Finance on in the background at a very low volume ambient noise if I am not listening to podcasts. I had the classic living room problem of hunting down remote controls to turn devices on and off. I was inspired to build on existing behaviours of looking around the TV first for the remote control and bought an organiser to hold them and a supply of spare AAA, AA batteries and the lightning cord for my Apple TV remote. The one I eventually settled on was Blue Gingko Multipurpose Caddy Organiser. It’s well made from plastic and thoughtfully designed which is why I was prepared a bit more to get something made in Korea, rather than made in China.
If you are using it for artwork or as a go pack for a workshop you can stack several on top of each other.
The sales pitch.
I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my June 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into the dog days of summer!
Don’t forget to like, comment, share and subscribe!
Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
The IT director is seeing a return to power and its thanks to the power of hackers and AI. The smartphone, the resurgence of Apple and SaaS saw IT decisions become more organic thanks to increased access to online services that provided better features than traditional enterprise software companies and the rise of knowledge working. IT teams found management of mobile devices onerous and faced hostile users.
Michiko Fukahori of the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology at ITU TSB – 8th Chief Technology Officers (CTO) Meeting
This meant that the IT director became less important in software marketing. A decade ago marketing had pivoted to a bottom up approach of ‘land and expand’. This drove the sales of Slack, Monday.com and MongoDB.
Two things impacted this bottom up approach to enterprise innovation:
Cybercrime: ransomware and supply chain attacks. Both are not new, ransomware can be traced back to 1989, with malware known as the AIDS trojan (this had much cultural resonance back then as a name). Supply chain attacks started happening in the 2010s with the Target data breach and by 2011, US politicians were considering it a security issue. Over COVID with the rise of remote working, the attacks increased. The risk put the IT director back in the firing line.
AI governance: generative AI systems learn from their training models and from user inputs, this led to a wide range of concerns from company intellectual property leaving via the AI system, or AI outputs based on intellectual property theft.
The most immediate impact of this is that the IT director is becoming a prized target on more technology marketers agendas again. This takes IT director focused marketing from back in the 1980s and the early 2000s with a top-down c-suite focus including the IT director. This implies that established brands like Microsoft and IBM will do better than buzzier startups. It also means I am less likely to see adverts for Monday.com in my YouTube feed over time.
This doesn’t mean that the IT director won’t be disrupted in other parts of his role as machine learning facilitates process automation in ways that are continuing to evolve.
Brands plan for a quiet Pride Month | News | Campaign Asia – The hesitation around Pride may also be related to executives’ increasing reluctance to speak out on social issues more broadly. Wolff pointed to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, which found that 87% of executives think taking a public stance on a social issue is riskier than staying silent. “Essentially, nine out of every 10 executives believe that the return on investment for their careers is not worth the support during this turbulent time,” said (Kate) Wolff. “This is clearly problematic for both the community and the progress we have made in recent years.”
Chinese Firms Are Investing Heavily in Whisky Market | Yicai Global – Although international liquor giants have developed the local whisky consumption market for many years, the market penetration rate of overseas spirits in China, including whisky, is only about 3 percent. This means domestic whisky producers will need to develop new consumption scenarios, Yang said. Whisky consumption in China centers mainly around nightclubs, gift-giving and tasting events held by affluent consumers, Yang noted, but in these scenarios, imported whisky brands with a long history tend to be more popularly accepted,, so it will be difficult for domestic rivals to compete. According to the latest report from alcohol market analysts IWSR, China’s whisky market was worth CNY5.5 billion (USD758 million) last year, having grown more than fourfold over the past 10 years. It is expected to reach CNY50 billion (USD6.9 billion) in the next five to 10 years.
Yoox Net-a-Porter exits China to focus on more profitable markets – Multi-brand luxury clothing sales platform Yoox Net-a-Porter is closing its China operations, this against a backdrop of other brands also pulling out of Chinese e-commerce including Marc Jacobs fragrances. The corporate line from Richemont was “in the context of a global Yoox Net-a-Porter plan aimed at focusing investments and resources on its core and more profitable geographies”.
Ignite the Scent: The Effectiveness of Implied Explosion in Perfume Ads | the Journal of Advertising Research – Scent is an important product attribute and an integral component of the consumption experience as consumers often want to perceive a product’s smell to make a well-informed purchase decision. It is difficult, however, to communicate the properties of a scent without the physical presence of odorants. Through five experiments conducted in a perfume-advertising context, our research shows that implied explosion, whether visually (e.g., a spritz blast) or semantically created, can increase perceived scent intensity, subsequently enhancing perceived scent persistence. It also found a positive effect of perceived scent persistence on purchase intention. In conclusion, the research suggests that implied explosion can be a powerful tool for advertisers to enhance scent perception, consequently boosting purchase intention.
Mat Baxter’s Huge turnaround job | Contagious – interesting perspective on his time at Huge. What I can’t square it all with is what we know about marketing science and declining effectiveness across digital media
On my LinkedIn, I couldn’t escape from the Cannes festival of advertising. Partly because one of the projects I had been involved in was a shortlisted entry. One of the most prominent films was Dramamine’s ‘The Last Barf Bag: A Tribute to a Cultural Icon’. It was notable because of its humour, which was part of this years theme across categories.
震災復興から生まれた刺し子プロジェクトをブランドに！ 15人のお母さんの挑戦！ – CAMPFIRE (キャンプファイヤー) – ancient Japanese craft – KUON and Sashiko Gals are part of a new generation of designers keeping the traditional Japanese technique of sashiko alive. And together, they are bringing the decorative style of stitching to our favorite sneakers (including techy Salomons!). Sashiko is a type of simple running stitch used in Japan for over a thousand years to reinforce fabrics. It’s typically done with a thick white thread on indigo fabric and made into intricate patterns.
Nationalism in Online Games During War by Eren Bilen, Nino Doghonadze, Robizon Khubulashvili, David Smerdon :: SSRN – We investigate how international conflicts impact the behavior of hostile nationals in online games. Utilizing data from the largest online chess platform, where players can see their opponents’ country flags, we observed behavioral responses based on the opponents’ nationality. Specifically, there is a notable decrease in the share of games played against hostile nationals, indicating a reluctance to engage. Additionally, players show different strategic adjustments: they opt for safer opening moves and exhibit higher persistence in games, evidenced by longer game durations and fewer resignations. This study provides unique insights into the impact of geopolitical conflicts on strategic interactions in an online setting, offering contributions to further understanding human behavior during international conflicts.
The West Coast’s Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico | WIRED – “Not so long ago, bike theft was a crime of opportunity—a snatch-and-grab, or someone applying a screwdriver to a flimsy lock. Those quaint days are over. Thieves now are more talented and brazen and prolific. They wield portable angle grinders and high-powered cordless screwdrivers. They scope neighborhoods in trucks equipped with ladders, to pluck fine bikes from second-story balconies. They’ll use your Strava feed to shadow you and your nice bike back to your home.” – not terribly surprising, you’ve seen the professionalisation and industrialisation in theft across sectors from shoplifting, car theft and watch thefts so this is continuing the trend.
OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game – The Atlantic – The Scarlett Johansson debacle is a microcosm of AI’s raw deal: It’s happening, and you can’t stop it. This is important not from a technology point of view, but from the mindset of systemic sociopathy that now pervades Silicon Valley.
Apple Intelligence is Right On Time – Stratechery by Ben Thompson – Apple’s orientation towards prioritizing users over developers aligns nicely with its brand promise of privacy and security: Apple would prefer to deliver new features in an integrated fashion as a matter of course; making AI not just compelling but societally acceptable may require exactly that, which means that Apple is arriving on the AI scene just in time.
‘Rare, vintage, Y2K’: Online thrifters are flipping fast fashion. How long can it last? | Vogue Business – as secondhand shopping becomes increasingly commonplace, this latest outburst brings to light the subjectivity of resale. What determines an item’s worth, especially in an age of viral micro-trends and heavy nostalgia? Is it ethically moral to set an item that’s the product of fast fashion — long criticised for not paying workers fairly — at such a steep upcharge, and making profit from it? If someone is willing to pay, does any of it matter?
Perhaps due to the febrile nature of the times we live in, the tech-savvy community seems to have become aware of various trends, leading them to conclude that #theinternetisdying. This term itself is imprecise. The internet is a series of abstractions, ranging from physical infrastructure to software and functions upon which communication, messaging, video streaming, app data, transactions, and web pages operate.
So technically, #theinternetisdying is actually #thewebisdying.
So why now?
I believe the most intriguing question regarding #theinternetisdying is this: why now? What has occurred is more about internet users awakening from their ‘comfort zone’ and abruptly realising how rapidly things have evolved? I believe that a number of inciting incidents are the cause of this sudden wakefulness:
Google as regressive ‘tax’ rather than marketing channel exposed.
Continued deterioration of Google web search.
Link rot.
Online media businesses look to make money by selling proprietary and user-generated content to LLMs as a revenue stream.
Realisation that a lot of web content is adapted or created using LLMs. The non-English web has been expanded by machine translation of English language content. Secondly, LLMs have been used to create a lot of good enough content in English for publications like Sports Illustrated.
The reality
In reality, what’s happened to the web as netizens knew it has happened over time. To use a vintage web phenomenon as an analogy. It’s like the vintage Joe Cartoon interactive Adobe Flash animation Frog in a Blender from the late 1990s.
A cartoon frog sits in a blender and admonishes the viewer, claiming that they wouldn’t dare to to blend him. The blender has settings from 1 to 10. 1 is mildly agitated water, 10 is instant blended frog. Silicon Valley has slowly upped the power of the blender and netizens realise that things have got weird.
Google tax bias
Google search has been on the shit list of websites as engineering documents from inside Google were leaked. They revealed some aspects about how search actually worked that Google had been denying for decades. A few of the key findings were:
Google search learns from ‘external devices’, so things like Chromecast dongles. Data from the Chrome browser is used in a similar manner, despite Google repeatedly claiming that it wasn’t in the past.
Google values quality, relevant sites, BUT, that value is caveated by restrictions it puts on small quality sites and the benefits it provides to large platforms detailed below.
Popular sites receive higher search levels through the ‘Navboost’ system. This reinforces platforms and established sites. Smaller sites would need to spend proportionately more on Google advertising to match their larger competitors traffic funnel. This designed imbalance is the digital equivalent of John Pierpoint Morgan’s nefarious involvement in railroad transportation, or the Vanderbilt and Rockefeller agreement on oil transport in the 19th century, which drove much of the subsequent anti-trust regulation in the US – this is the Google tax. It’s a regressive tax that is levied on smaller businesses and the ‘free web’.
It is deliberately set up to hold back small sites, many of whom have seen their traffic drop by up to 91 percent. This adversely affects sights that might have deep domain knowledge, specialist retailers and netizens who host personal sites and blogs like this one.
Google has even lied in court and in parliaments to hide these facts. Disclosure of these details have rippled through the search engine marketing industry and strongly discouraged numerous web businesses once the truth came out – for a lot of businesses #theinternetisdying.
For Google the timing couldn’t be worse:
It is seen to have dropped the ball on LLMs, despite having developed most of the key technology powering the likes of OpenAI and Anthrophic.
Google’s local business advertising for the likes of coffee shops or nail clinics have suffered due to the cost-of-living crisis post-COVID and consumer behaviour changes in various countries.
Traditional Google search advertisements for e-commerce are being rapidly eroded by retail media. That is ‘search style’ adverts on the likes of Amazon, Tesco and eBay.
Google is perceived as having set itself up as the ‘start page’ to the open web, while all the time sticking the proverbial knife in all of which adds an inevitability of the feeling of #theinternetisdying.
Decline of Google search
Back in June 2022, The Atlantic complained about the declining utility of Google. This echoed similar themes on discussions that had happened earlier in the year on Hacker News and Reddit. The consensus was that they searched Reddit, StackOverflow, Hacker News or StackExchange as it provided a richer, more relevant base of search results.
I have been using social bookmarking service Pinboard and photo service flickr for search for similar reasons for the past few decades.
Pinboard allows me to search 65,000+ web pages that I have found over that time for something that might be useful. My act of saving the page link in pinboard allowed me to categorise the page saved and implied a certain ‘good enough’ quality to it. I also get to search the public links of other netizens that do a similar thing. Pinboard is insufficiently popular to reward spammers, so the quality quotient is relatively high. Reddit offers a more expansive corpus of links and information, without the same level of quality control.
The reason why Google’s web search has degraded has its roots in Google’s pivot to mobile two decades ago. Google abandoned key areas of interest to web users:
Boolean search terms, which would have been harder to do on early mobile devices.
Blog search because it was non-mobile content.
Google News and RSS, in favour of nascent mobile social platforms that it lost out to.
And the list goes on, I am less sure why it has suddenly surfaced into the public consciousness now?
Link rot
A month or so go my friend Matt in his newsletter recommended a website that allowed you to search Google to find out the oldest mention of a term. So I put my own name in, and nothing came up prior to 2004.
That meant all records of my early agency work had been expunged from the web. Work that included big brands:
BHP-Billiton
Ericsson
MTV Networks
Palm
Sony
Verizon
Alongside startup brands that fizzled out almost as quickly as they had started. Maybe there is still some traces locked somewhere in behind LexisNexis or Haymarket Media paywalled databases.
Author and veteran member of the digerati Cory Doctorow wrote about link rot this year, partly prompted by research from the Pew Research Center. Pew found that 38 percent of content surveyed disappeared over a ten-year period.
But link rot isn’t a new concern. Interest in link rot seems to have peaked 20 years ago.
Link rot is a subset of a wider concern called bit rot, where digital media degrades over time, or can no longer be read due to issues with software file compatibility. Bit rot as an issue was explored in a series of short stories by Canadian author Douglas Coupland in a book of the same name back in 2016.
Web of data to walled gardens
Of all #internetisdying factors, this one surprised me as much as link rot. Closing of Twitter API access was considered to be a defining moment for #theinternetisdying. However it fails to acknowledge that the high point of the web of data was web 2.0 and the comparatively free access to APIs. Facebook with its closed wall by design set the standard for subsequent services like TikTok and Instagram. Like link rot, the awareness timeline feels a decade too late. The closure of Google Reader is an equally big impact back in 2013, stopping mainstream adoption of RSS in its tracks.
LLMs
Journalist Steven Levy has been chronicling Silicon Valley for decades. He wrote a few of my favourite non-fiction books includingInsanely Great, Crypto and Hackers. In the summer of 2023, he wrote an article for Wired magazine: What OpenAI wants. This became a cover story for the September 2023 issue of the magazine under the header ‘Dear AI Overlords, Don’t Fuck This Up’. Less than a year later, the consensus from netizens seems to be that they already have.
Several things have happened, here are three of them:
Imitation became mainstreamed. OpenAI used a female voice that was apparently a copy of Scarlett Johansson’s voice due to Sam Altman’s infatuation with the premise of the Spike Jonze film Her. A Ukrainian YouTuber found her likeness being used as an avatar to sell Russian goods to Chinese consumers.
Misinformation had everything from the Pope wearing a designer down jacket and fake black supporters for presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Scott Galloway talked about ‘corporate ozempic’ where AI being good enough to reduce human tasks allowing for corporate headcounts to disappear. The CEO of Klarna freely admitted that they used AI to replace 700 employees in customer service roles. AdVon was used to write articles for SportsIllustrated driving anger and anxiety in readers and journalists.
Automation has eaten blue collar roles for decades, but it has taken the automation of white collar roles to create the panic and sense that #theinternetisdying and AI is killing it.
The Sky Is Falling In
As a child I fell in love the Asterix The Gaul books. In them was the Gaulish village chief Vitalstatistix – who is portrayed as mostly reasonable, well-informed, fearless, (comparatively) even-tempered and unambitious. Vitalstatistix was known for his irrational fear that the sky may fall on his head tomorrow. I was thinking about Vitalstatistix as I wrote this post on #theinternetisdying.
Back in the late 2000s, Dr Ira Wolfe wrote a book that discussed how online behaviour and Google services were creating irreparable damage in the workplace and beyond. His book was merely the latest in a series of panics about societal destruction:
Emmanuel Macron’s ‘decivilisation‘ facilitated through social media connections and content.
Video gaming had some negative effects associated with it in the 2010s according to academic research.
Television faced similar accusations, but there was only evidence of eye strain with long watching sessions.
Back in March 1997, Wired magazine had their own version of the #theinternetisdying, they believed that web browsing (or web surfing as it was termed back then) was about to be killed off by ‘push technology‘. This episode of The Computer Chronicles gives a good overview of push technology at the time.
You may already be using push technology without realising it, such as receiving mobile notifications for breaking news or localised weather alerts.
In conclusion, #theinternetisdying? really?
Previous technological shifts introduced new challenges, but we adapted and progressed. There’s no reason to think the current ‘#theinternetisdying’ phase is any different from those before. Perhaps in 15 years, I’ll be writing about how people feel the ‘metaverse’ has become closed or some other futuristic concern.
In my take on the 2024 iPad Pro I am going to look at things through three lenses and after the initial hot takes have cooled down. These three lenses are:
Hardware
Semiconductors
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Apple and Microsoft both push their most powerful tablets like the 2024 iPad Proas creator tools. However, at the time of writing I have been working alongside creative teams in a prominent ad agency and both the creative and strategic elements of the work we were doing were pulled together using different software, but the same hardware. Apple MacBook Pro computers and large secondary monitors. An illustrator attached a ‘graphics tablet‘ alongside their laptop to provide additional tactile control, just in the same way I am known to use an outboard Kensington trackball for additional fine control in creating presentation charts.
Where I have seen iPads used:
Senior (older executives) replying to emails – I suspect its because the screen is bigger than a smartphone.
As a media player device. The iPad is the travel and bedside equivalent of the book and the portable DVD player.
As a presentation device. Friends that give a lot of public presentations at conferences and one who works as a university lecturer both use the iPad as device to present from in place of lugging around a laptop.
In all of these use cases, there isn’t that much to differentiate iPad models and the main limitations are user intent or software-related.
My parents use an iPad I’ve bought them to keep in touch with me. We started using an iPad as a Skype client over a decade ago. Then iMessage and FaceTime started to make more sense, particularly has they started getting Skype spam. It’s the computing equivalent of a kitchen appliance: largely intuitive and very little can go really wrong – that’s both the iPad’s strength and its weakness.
Secondly, there is the confusion of the Apple iPad product line-up, which is at odds with the way Apple got its second wind. In Walter Isaacson’s flawed autobiography of Steve Jobs, one of the standout things that the returning CEO did was ruthlessly prune the product line-up.
He made it into a 2 x 2 grid: professional and consumer, portable and desktop. For most of past number of years, the iPhone has gone down this ‘pro and consumer’ split.
The iPad line-up is less clear cut to the casual observer:
iPad Mini
iPad
iPad Air
iPad Pro
In addition, there are Apple pencils – a smarter version of the stylus that used to be used prior to capacitive touchscreens became commonplace. Some of these pencils work with some devices, but not others. It’s a similar case, with other Apple accessories like keyboards that double as device covers. All of which means that your hardware accessories need an upgrade too. This is more than just getting a new phone case. It’s more analogous to having to buy a new second monitor or mouse every time you change your computer.
With all of that out of the way, let’s get into hardware.
Hardware
The 2024 iPad Pro launched before the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, so we had no idea how the device will work together in conjunction with iPadOS 18. Addressing long term criticism of using the iPad is as much about software as it is about hardware.
The 2024 iPad Pro still doesn’t have a definitive user case, but Apple decided to focus on creativity in their marketing.
Presumably this is because the main thing to celebrate about the 2024 iPad Pro is increased computing power and creative apps are the most likely to make use of that power. For many ‘non-creative’ use cases, the previous generation of iPad Pro is very over-powered for what it does.
Some of the choices Apple made with the hardware are interesting. The existing iPad Pro is a thin, lightweight computing device. The 2024 iPad Pro is Apple’s thinnest device ever. This thinness is a clever feat of engineering, but so would be an iPad of the same size, but with more battery capacity. Instead Apple made the device made things a bit thinner device with exactly the same battery life as previous models.
The iPad Pro uses two screens one behind the other to provide deeper and brighter colours at a resolution that’s extremely high. This provides additional benefits such as avoiding screen burn-in which OLED screens were considered to be vulnerable to.
The camera has moved from the side to the top of the 2024 iPad Pro in landscape mode. This has necessitated a new arrangement of magnets for attachments, which then drove the need for new accessories including the new Apple pencil pro.
Semiconductors
The M4 processor is Apple’s latest silicon design and represents a move on from the current processors in Apple’s Mac range.
It is made by TSMC on a leading edge 3 nanometre process. This is TSMC’s second-generation process. Having it as the processor in the 2024 iPad Pro, allows Apple and partners to slowly ramp up production and usage of the new processor to match gains in semiconductor chip yields. This will give them the time to iron out any production challenges and resolve any quality issues. Relatively low production volumes would be a good thing, prior to the processor being rolled out more widely.
Apple seems to be designing the M-series processors in parallel to the A-series processors used in iPhones and iPads in the past. They seem to have them in mind for a wider range of devices.
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Apple previewed an advertisement to promote the 2024 iPad Pro.
Crush has been executed with a high degree of craft in the production. It had a lot of negative reactions from celebrities and current Apple customers who saw it in terms of:
It being a wider metaphor of what technology was perceived to be doing to creativity. For instance, Hollywood actors and screen-writers are concerned about streaming and the effects of large language models.
Destroying real-life artefacts that consumers have attached meaning to. For instance, I use digital music, but also have a physical music collection that not only reflects my taste, but much more. Real-world experiences now provide respite from the digital world.
With product launches like the iPhone 3, Apple created adverts which were less of a literal metaphor for everything that could be crammed into the device by using show-and-tell.
Reversing the Crush! ad makes a similar point, but in a less oppressive way.
And as with everything else in life, there is seldom a time when an idea is truly new. There was an ad done by BBH London which used a crush metaphor to demonstrate all the features in LG’s Renoir phone circa 2008. As this circulated around Apple was perceived as being a copycat.
Presentation
Given that Apple events are now largely virtual post-COVID we didn’t have a positive live audience reaction amongst those who ‘got it’ to guide public opinion. Instead it was left on social media ‘contextless’.
The Apple exhibition centre at the new ‘space ship’ campus, doesn’t seem to be used in the same way that Apple did live events prior to 2020. Apple held small event screenings for journalists in New York and London.
But was Crush! bad?
When I first saw it, I thought that it was good from a craft point of view. I was a bit surprised at how dark the lighting was, it felt a little off-key.
My personal opinion about the concept was that it felt a bit heavy-handed because it was so literal. The creative brief done by a strategist is usually the jumping off point, not the literal creative concept.
But that doesn’t make it bad advert, it just felt not particularly clever for someone who is probably more media-literate than the average person. I would go as far as to say, it would have been unlikely to win creative advertising awards.
But I was also aware that my opinion didn’t mean that the ad wouldn’t be effective. Given the 2024 iPad Pro’s role as M4 guinea pig, Apple probably weren’t hoping for barn-storming sales figures and in the grand scheme of things the advert just wasn’t extremely important.
I was probably as blindsided as Apple was by the depth of feeling expressed in the online reaction.
TL;DR I don’t know if Crush! really is ‘bad’. Let’s ask some specific questions about different aspects of the ad.
Am I, or the negative responders the target market?
Maybe, or maybe not. I don’t have a place in it in my current workflow. I still find that a Mac works as my primary creative technology device. What about if Apple were aiming at college kids and first jobbers? These people wouldn’t come to buying the 2024 iPad Pro with the same brand ‘baggage’ that me and many of the commentators have.
Working in marketing, the 1984 ad and the Think Different ads were campaigns were classics. Hell, I can remember being a bit of an oddball at college as a Mac user. I helped friends get their secondhand Mac purchases up and running.
Going to coffee shops or working in the library and seeing a see of laptop lids emblazoned with the Dell, Gateway, Toshiba and H-P logos. If people were a bit quirky they may have a Sony Vaio instead.
I remember the booes and the hisses in the audience at MacWorld Boston in 1997, when Apple announced its partnership with Microsoft.
Even when I worked at Yahoo! during the web 2.0 renaissance, Mac users were second-class citizens internally and externally in terms of our product offering.
In the eyes of young people today Apple was always there, front and centre. The early iPad or iPhone experience as pacifier. The iPhone has must-have teenage smartphone. The Mac at home and maybe an Apple TV box.
Finally many high performing adverts of the past aimed at young adults have left the mainstream media and tastemakers non-plussed.
How did the ad test?
According to anecdotal evidence I have heard from people at IPSOS; in a survey they found that about half the respondents surveyed said they would be interested in finding out more about the 2024 iPad Pro. The younger the respondent, the more likely they were to be interested in the device.
System 1, tested the ad and found that it performed 1.9 out of a possible maximum score of 5. In System 1 parlance this indicates somewhere between low and modest long term brand growth derived from the advertisement. The average score for US advertisements is 2.3. But over half of ads that were run in the Super Bowl this year scored between 1 and 2. Which would imply that the ad could be improved; but the devil might be in the details as implied by the IPSOS research.
Is Crush! just a copy cat?
You can have the best creative director in the world who has seen a lot of advertising, but they might not know all advertising. Secondly, the advertising industry is getting rid of long term professionals. According to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising no one retired from the industry in 2023, as staff were ‘phased out‘ of the industry way before retirement age. All of which means that there isn’t the historical memory to know if a campaign is sailing close to plagiarism.
And it isn’t just advertising. Earlier in my career, I got to see former business journalist and newspaper editor Damian McCrystal speak at a breakfast event. One thing stayed with me about his presentation, in which he talked about the financial industry:
The reasons why we make the same mistakes over-and-over again is because ‘the city’ has a collective institutional memory of about eight years.
Damien McCrystal
So we had Northern Rock, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, despite the fact that pretty much every financier I have ever met had read Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis. This was based on his experiences as a banker navigating the Savings and Loans scandal of the 1980s and 1990s.
So no, despite the similarity of the LG Renoir advertisement, I don’t think that Crush! was an intentional copy.
