Energy has come to define our history over the past few hundred years. The industrial revolution was defined as much by the use of coal and steam power as it was by breakthroughs in technologies.
The industrial age was defined by the spread of electricity, electro-magnetic waves and the use of oil and gas in the energy mix.
Alkaline, dry acid batteries and rechargeable batteries liberated technology. Making it firstly luggable and then truly portable.
Without innovative approach in battery technology you wouldn’t have the ubiquitous smartphone. Nor would you have much demand for three wi-fi in coffee shops, or multi-screening.
Digital photography would still be more of a niche interest and there would be no Instagram or Tinder.
On the other hand you would be less likely to responding to emotional content on Twitter straight away, unless you were glued to your desktop computer or connected TV.
The aspiration for a low carbon economy is another aspect that affects energy and not just oil and gas. 99 percent of materials that we use, even for batteries and capturing renewable energy are not sustainable. Turbine blades are made from composite that eventually end up in a landfill site. Battery technologies rely on rare earth metals, lithium and nickel. They feature a polymer liner in lithium ion battery.
Energy is at the centre of the progress of innovation, design, climate change, consumer behaviour and even culture. Far more so, than people actually realise.
We tend to not pay attention to energy unless there is a problem. A power cut, a price jump at the petrol pump are the times when we notice.
Clutch Cargo was an animated series first broadcast on American television in 1959. Clutch Cargo was created by Cambria Productions – who were a start-up animation studio. Cambria used a number of techniques to radically reduce the cost of producing the animated series.
A key consideration was reducing the amount of movement that needed to be animated. There were some obvious visual motifs used to do this:
Characters were animated from waist height up for the majority of the films, this reduced the need to animate legs, walking or running.
Much of the movement was moving the camera around, towards or away from a static picture.
To show an explosion, they shook the camera, rather than animate the concussive effect of the blast.
Fire wasn’t animated, instead smoke would be put in front of the camera. Fake snow was sprinkled so that bad weather didn’t need to be drawn.
Cameraman Ted Gillette came up with the idea of Syncro-Vox. The voice actors head would be held steady, they would have a vivid lipstick applied and then say their lines. Gillette then put their mouths on top of the animated figures. Cambria made use of it in all their animations with the exception of The New Three Stooges – an animated series that allowed Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Joe DeRita to be voice actors after their movie contracts finished and they were affected by ill health.
These choices meant that Clutch Cargo cost about 10 per cent of what it would have cost Disney to animate. The visual hacks to cut costs were also helped in the way the scripts were developed. Clutch Cargo avoided doing comedy, instead focusing on Tin-Tin-like adventures. ‘Physical’ comedy gags create a lot of movement to animate. By focusing on the storytelling of Clutch Cargo. The young audience weren’t bothered by the limited animation, as they were captivated into suspending their beliefs.
Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back. – The New York Times – Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, the chief executive of Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, told Bloomberg that food-industry executives had been calling him. “They are scared about it,” he said. Around the same time, Walmart’s chief executive in the United States, John Furner, said that customers on GLP-1s were putting less food into their carts. Sales are down in sweet baked goods and snacks, and the industry is weathering a downturn. By one market-research firm’s estimate, food-and-drink innovation in 2024 reached an all-time nadir, with fewer new products coming to market than ever before.
Ozempic users like Taylor aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite but to rewrite people’s desires. They attack what Amy Bentley, a food historian and professor at New York University, calls the industrial palate: the set of preferences created by our acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives. Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant.
Apple resumes advertising on Elon Musk’s X after 15-month pause – 9to5Mac – the negative reaction to this that I have seen from Mac and iPhone users that I know is interesting. It’s the scales have dropped from their eyes about Apple’s performative progressive values. Yet the signs have been out there for years – in particular with regards anything that is even tangentially connected to China.
Zuckerberg’s rightward policy shift hits Meta staffers, targets Apple | CNBC – employees who might otherwise leave because of their disillusionment with policy changes are concerned about quitting now because of how they will be perceived by future employers given that Meta has said publicly that it’s weeding out “low performers.” Meta, like many of its tech peers, began downsizing in 2022 and has continued to trim around the edges. The company cut 21,000 jobs, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023. Among those who lost their jobs were members of the civic integrity group, which was known to be outspoken in its criticism of Zuckerberg’s leadership. Some big changes are now taking place that appear to directly follow the lead of Trump at the expense of company employees and users of the platforms, the people familiar with the matter said.
Welcome to my February 2025 newsletter, I hope that your year of the snake has gotten off to a great start. This newsletter marks my 19th issue – which feels a really short time and strangely long as well, thank you for those of you who have been on the journey so far as subscribers to this humble publication. Prior to writing this newsletter, I found that the number 19 has some interesting connections.
In mandarin Chinese, 19 sounds similar to ‘forever’ and is considered to be lucky by some people, but the belief isn’t as common as 8, 88 or 888.
Anyone who listened to pop radio in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s would be familiar with Paul Hardcastle’s documentary sampling ’19’. The song mixed narration by Clark Kent and sampled news archive footage of the Vietnam war including news reports by read by Walter Cronkite. 19 came from what was cited as the average age of the soldier serving in Vietnam, however this is disputed by Vietnam veteran organisation who claim that the correct number was 22. The veteran’s group did a lot of research to provide accurate information about the conflict, overturning common mistakes repeated as truth in the media. It’s a handy reminder that fallacies and trust in media began way before the commercial internet.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Zing + more things – HSBC’s Zing payments system was shut down and was emblematic of a wider challenge in legacy financial institutions trying to compete against ‘fintech startups. I covered several other things as well including new sensor technology
The 1000 Yen ramen wall is closing down family restaurants across Japan. A confluence of no consumer tolerance for price elasticity due to inflation driven ingredients costs is driving them to the wall. Innovation and product differentiation have not made a difference.
Luxury wellness – why luxury is looking at wellness, what are the thematic opportunities and what would be the competitors for the main luxury marketing conglomerates be successful.
Technical capability notice – having read thoroughly about the allegations that Apple had been served with an order by the British government to provide access to its customer iCloud drive data globally – I still don’t know what to think, but didn’t manage to assuage any of my concerns.
Books that I have read.
World Without End: The million-copy selling graphic novel about climate change by Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain. In Japan, graphic novels regularly non-fiction topics like text books or biographies. A French climate scientist and illustrator collaborated to take a similar approach for climate change and the energy crisis. Their work cuts through false pre-conceptions and trite solutions with science.
Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski. Yablonski breaks down a number of heuristics or razors based on psychological research and how it applies to user experience. These included: Jakob’s Law, Fitt’s Law, Hick’s Law, Miller’s Law, Peak-End Rule and Tesler’s Law (on complexity). While the book focuses on UX, I thought of ways that the thinking could be applied to various aspects of advertising strategy.
I re-read Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal. Eyal’s model did a good job at synthesising B.J. Fogg’s work on persuasive computing, simplifying it into a model that the most casual reader can take and run with it.
Kapferer on Luxury by Jean-Noël Kapferer covers the modern rise of luxury brands as we now know them. Like Dana Thomas’ Deluxe – how luxury lost its lustre Kapferer addresses the mistake of globalised manufacturing and massification of luxury. However Kapferer points out the ‘secret sauce’ that makes luxury products luxurious: the hybridisation of luxury with art and the concept of ‘incomparability’. The absence of both factors explain why British heritage brands from Burberry to Mulberry have failed in their current incarnations as luxury brands.
Black Magic by Masamune Shirow is a manga work from 1983. Masamune is now best known for the creation of Ghost In The Shell which has been turned into a number of anime films, TV series and even a whitewashed Hollywood remake. Despite the title, Black Magic has more in common with space operas like Valerian & Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières than the occult. In the book Masamune explores some of the ideas which he then more fully developed in Ghost In The Shell including autonomous weapons, robots and machine intelligence.
Doll by Ed McBain. Doll was a police procedural novel written in 1965 that focused on the model agency industry at the time. The novel is unusual in that it features various artistic flourishes including a model portfolio and hand written letters with different styles of penmanship. The author under the McBain pen name managed to produce over 50 novels. They all have taunt dialogue that’s ready for TV and some of them were adapted for broadcast, notably as an episode of Columbo. You can see the influence of McBain’s work in the likes of Dick Wolf’s productions like the Law & Order, FBI and On Call TV series franchises.
Things I have been inspired by.
Can money make you happy?
Past research indicated that happiness from wealth plateaued out with a middle class salary. The latest research via the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania indicates that might not be the case instead, earning more makes you happier and there might not be a point at which one has enough. The upper limit on the research seems to have been restricted by finding sufficiently rich research respondents rather than natural inclination. As a consumer insight that has profound implications in marketing across a range of sectors from gaming to pensions and savings products.
AgeTech
I came across the concept of ‘agetech’ while looking for research launched in time for CES in Las Vegas (7 – 11, January 2025). In the US, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and American Association of Retired People (AARP) have put together a set of deep qualitative and quantitative research looking at the needs of the ‘aged consumer’ for ‘AgeTech’. AgeTech isn’t your Grandma iPad or your boomer CEO’s laptop. Instead it is products that sit at the intersection of health, accessibility and taking care of oneself in the home. The top five perceived age technologies are connected medical alert devices,digital blood pressure monitors, electric or powered wheelchairs/scooters, indoor security cameras, and electronic medication pill dispenser/reminders. Their report 2023 Tech and the 50-Plus, noted that technology spending among those 50-plus in America is forecast to be more than $120 billion by 2030. Admittedly, that ’50-plus’ label could encompass people at the height of their career and family households – but it’s a big number.
It even has a negative impact on the supply side of the housing market for younger generations:
The overwhelming majority (95%) of Americans aged 55 and older agree that aging in place – “the ability to live in one’s own home and community safely, independently, and comfortably, regardless of age, income, or ability level” – is an important goal for them. This is up from 93% in 2023.
The Mayfair Set v 2.0
During the summer of 1999, a set of documentaries by Adam Curtis covered the reinvention of business during the latter half of the 20th century was broadcast. I got to discover The Mayfair Set much later on. In the documentaries it covered how the social contract between corporates and their communities was broken down and buccaneering entrepreneurs disrupted societal and legal norms for profit. There is a sense of de ja vu from watching the series in Meta’s business pivots to the UK government’s approach to intellectual property rights for the benefit of generative AI model building.
It probably won’t end well, with the UK population being all the poorer for it.
The Californian Ideology
As to why The Mayfair Set 2.0 is happening, we can actually go back to a 1995 essay by two UK based media theorists who were at the University of Westminster at the time. It was originally published in Mute magazine.
This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, websites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich. Not surprisingly, this optimistic vision of the future has been enthusiastically embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, innovative capitalists, social activists, trendy academics, futurist bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians across the USA.
It reads like all these things at once:
A prescient foreshadowing from the past.
Any Stewart Brand op-ed piece from 1993 onwards.
The introduction from an as-yet ghost written book on behalf of Sam Altman, a la Bill Gates The Road Ahead.
A mid-1990s fever dream from the minds of speculative fiction authors like Neal Stephenson, William Gibson or Bruce Sterling.
What the essay makes clear is that Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are part of a decades long continuum of Californian Ideology, all be it greatly accelerated; rather than a new thing. One of the main differences is that the digital artisans no longer have a chance to get rich with their company through generous stock options.
Even Steve Jobs fitted in with the pattern. For a hippy he drove a 5 litre Mercedes sports car, parked in the handicapped spaces in the Apple car park and had a part in firing Apple’s first gay CEO: Michael Scott because of homophobia and Scott’s David Brent-like handling of Black Wednesday. It may be a coincidence that Tim Cook didn’t come out publicly as gay until over three years after Steve Jobs died.
… a European strategy for developing the new information technologies must openly acknowledge the inevitability of some form of mixed economy – the creative and antagonistic mix of state, corporate and DIY initiatives. The indeterminacy of the digital future is a result of the ubiquity of this mixed economy within the modern world. No one knows exactly what the relative strengths of each component will be, but collective action can ensure that no social group is deliberately excluded from cyberspace.
A European strategy for the information age must also celebrate the creative powers of the digital artisans. Because their labour cannot be deskilled or mechanised, members of the ‘virtual class’ exercise great control over their own work. Rather than succumbing to the fatalism of the Californian Ideology, we should embrace the Promethean possibilities of hypermedia. Within the limitations of the mixed economy, digital artisans are able to invent something completely new – something which has not beenpredicted in any sci-fi novel. These innovative forms of knowledge and communications will sample the achievements of others, including some aspects of the Californian Ideology. It is now impossible for any serious movement for social emancipation not to incorporate feminism, drug culture, gay liberation, ethnic identity and other issues pioneered by West Coast radicals. Similarly, any attempt to develop hypermedia within Europe will need some of the entrepreneurial zeal and can-do attitude championed by the Californian New Right. Yet, at the same time, the development of hypermedia means innovation, creativity and invention. There are no precedents for all aspects of the digital future. As pioneers of the new, the digital artisans need to reconnect themselves with the theory and practice ofproductive art. They are not just employees of others – or even would-be cybernetic entrepreneurs.
They are also artist-engineers – designers of the next stage of modernity.
Barbrook and Cameron rejected the idea of a straight replication of the Californian Ideology in a European context. Doing so, despite what is written in the media, is more like the rituals of a cargo cult. Instead they recommended fostering a new European culture to address the strengths, failings and contradictions implicit in the Californian Ideology.
Chart of the month: consumer price increases vs. wage increases
This one chart based on consumer price increases and wage increases from 2020 – 2024 tells you everything you need to know about UK consumer sentiment and the everyday struggle to make ends meet.
Things I have watched.
The Organization – Sydney Poitier’s last outing as Virgil Tibbs. The Organization as a title harks back to the 1950s, to back when the FBI were denying that the Mafia even existed. Organised crime in popular culture was thought to be a parallel corporation similar to corporate America, but crooked. It featured in the books of Richard Stark. This was despite law enforcement stumbling on the American mafia’s governing body in 1957. Part of this was down to the fact that the authorities believed that the American arm of the mafia were a bulwark against communism. Back to the film, it starts with an ingenious heist set piece and then develops through a series twists and turns through San Francisco. It was a surprisingly awarding film to watch.
Nakita – Nakita is an early Luc Besson movie made after Subway and The Big Blue. It’s an action film that prioritises style and attitude over fidelity to tactical considerations. The junkies at the start of the film feel like refugees from a Mad Max film who have happened to invade a large French town at night. It is now considered part of the ‘cinéma du look’ film movement of the 1980s through to the early 1990s which also features films like Diva and Subway. Jean Reno’s character of Victor the Cleaner foreshadows his later breakout role as Leon. It was a style of its time drawing on similar vibes of more artistic TV ads, music videos, Michael Mann’s Miami Vice TV series and films Thief and Manhunter.
Stephen Norrington’s original Blade film owes a lot to rave culture and cinéma du look as it does to the comic canon on which it’s based. It’s high energy and packed with personality rather like a darker version of the first Guardians of The Galaxy film. Blade as a character was influenced by blaxploitation characters like Shaft in a Marvel series about a team of vampire hunters. Watching the film almost three decades after it came out, it felt atemporal – from another dimension rather than from the past per se. Norrington’s career came off the rails after his adaption of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen did badly at the box office and star Wesley Snipes went to jail for tax-related offences.
The Magnificent Seven– I watched the film a couple of times during my childhood. John Sturges had already directed a number of iconic films: Bad Day at Black Rock and Gunfight at The OK Corral. With The Magnificent Seven, he borrowed from The Seven Samurai. It was a ‘Zappata western’ covering the period of the Mexican revolution and was shot in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The film did two things to childhood me: made me curious about Japanese cinema and storytelling. There are some connections to subsequent Spaghetti Westerns:
Eli Wallach played a complex Mexican villain in bothThe Magnificent Seven and Leone’s The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.
The visual styling of the film is similar to spaghetti westerns, though the clothes were still too clean, Yul Brynner’s role as the tragic hero in black is a world-away from the traditional Hollywood coding of the good guys wearing white hats (or US cavalry uniforms).
The tight, sparse dialogue set the standard for the Dollars Trilogy and action films moving forward
Zappata westerns were the fuel for more pro-leftist films in the spaghetti western genre. While The Magnificent Seven still has a decidedly western gaze, it took on racism surprisingly on the nose for a Hollywood film of this era.
Watching it now as a more seasoned film watcher only sharpened my appreciation of The Magnificent Seven.
Breaking News by Johnnie To feels as much about now as it when the film was shot 20 years ago. First time I watched it was on the back of a head rest on a Cathay Pacific flight at the time. Back then I was tired and just let the film wash over me. This time I took a more deliberate approach to appreciating the film. In the film the Hong Kong Police try and control and master the Hong Kong public opinion as a robbery goes wrong. However the Hong Kong Police don’t have it all their own way as the criminals wage their own information campaign. This film also has the usual tropes you expect from Hong Kong genre of heroic bloodshed films with amazing plot twists and choreographed action scenes along with the spectacular locations within Hong Kong itself. Watching it this time, I got to appreciate the details such as the cowardly dead-beat Dad Yip played by veteran character actor Suet Lam.
Useful tools.
Current and future uncertainties.
This could be used as thought starters for thinking about business problems for horizon scanning and scenario planning. It’s ideal as fuel for you to then develop a client workshop from. But I wouldn’t use something this information dense in a client-facing document. You can download it as a high resolution PDF here.
Guide to iPhone security
Given the propensity of phone snatching to take over bank accounts and the need to secure work phones, the EFF guide to securing your iPhone has a useful set of reminders and how-to instructions for privacy and security settings here.
Novel recommendations
I got this from Neil Perkin, an LLM-driven fictional book recommendation engine. It has been trained on Goodreads (which reminds me I need to update my Goodreads profile). When I asked it for ‘modern spy novels with the class of John Le Carre’ it gave me Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, Chris Pavone’s The Expats and Chris Cumming’s The Trinity Six. All of which were solid recommendations.
Smartphone tripod
Whether it’s taking a picture of a workshop’s forest of post-it notes or an Instagrammable sunset a steady stand can be really useful. Peak Design (who were falsely accused of being a ‘snitch‘) have come up with a really elegant mobile tripod design that utilises the MagSafe section on the back of an iPhone.
Apple Notes alternative
I am a big fan of Apple Notes as an app. I draft in it, sync ideas and thoughts across devices using it. But for some people that might not work – different folks for different strokes. I was impressed bu the quality of Bear which is a multi-platform alternative to the default Notes app.
The sales pitch.
I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
HSBC’s Zing shuts down. It didn’t manage to compete effectively against Revolut and Wise. Zing provided cheap foreign exchange. On the face of it HSBC had a number of use cases in its main retail banking markets that would have made sense.
Hong Kong:
7+ percent of the population are expats. This has been pretty constant over previous decades, though people are constantly coming and departing. A big group of these communities are domestic workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. All of whom would benefit from cheap foreign money transfers.
Like other developed Asian countries, many young Hong Kongers study abroad. Having a way to cheaply transfer money to and from Hong Kong would be useful for this second group.
Finally Hong Kong has a diaspora, with families being spread across the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.
UK:
30+ percent of Londoners were born outside the UK. Overall, the UK had ethnic minorities which make up 8 – 10 percent of the population. Many of them have multi-generational links with their homelands.
The NHS in particular has a large proportion of skilled foreigners working for them from Filipino intensive care nurses to Greek X-ray technicians.
Zing decided to launch only in the UK. Despite HSBC’s footprint, it didn’t grab the visibility or market share achieved by Revolut or Wise. It also failed to make money and HSBC seems to have taken a shorter term view to succeed or quit compared to its startup competitors. One could charitably view Zing as a correct view of the ‘fast failure’ model, if learnings from it are taken from it by HSBC and applied effectively.
Zing is emblematic of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma where established companies lose market share as they fail to disrupt themselves to compete against new upstart businesses.
Financial innovation is hard. Barclays closed down their mobile payment system Pingit, NatWest stepped back from its digital bank offering and Vodafone has struggled to expand M-Pesa.
US TikTok ‘refugees’ make surprise move to China’s ‘RedNote’ | FT – Xiaohongshu’s technical team were not ready for the complexity of a western audience. What’s interesting is that the move was a political statement to US politicians and a tacit rejection of Meta’s competitor platforms very soon after their ‘pivot to free speech’.
Vintage | Hi-Fi News – modern reviews on classic hi-fi models that give you a realistic understanding about how they compare to the current state-of-the-art. A number of the pieces come off much more favourably than I was expecting.
Obsolete Sony are doing a great job at documenting Sony’s history:
Kameron Hurley: There Have Always Been Times Like These – Locus Online – Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom. –Ursula K. Le Guin
Luxury
ISSUE #1 — ARTSUMERISM – Power Dynamics by COPE – massification of luxury goods might have taken the artisan out of luxe. But has enabled it to develop an art collaboration somewhere between patron and influencer relationship.
Shoemaking experts Rose Anvil interview Fitasy on the advantages and challenges of using additive manufacturing for shoes. Fitasy provide a more realistic perspective on the circular economy benefits of filament printing at the end of the interview.
Will Video Kill the Audio Star in 2025? | Vulture – I find it a bit odd as an idea, but then I do listen to a lot of talking heads YouTube channels without looking at the participants such as TLDR, Chip Stock Investor et al and much of the CNBC content I listen to is an audio track from their TV feed.
UK’s elite hardware talent is being wasted. | Josef – this reminds me a lot of working in the chemical and petrochemical industry at the start of my career. When enough people opt out the capability collapses in on itself.
Foreign workers in Singapore parlance are people who come from around Southeast Asia and South Asia to do blue collar and pink collar jobs in the city state.
In a number of Asian countries including Hong Kong and Singapore; Filipino and Indonesian workers came to care for old people at home, look after children and conduct household tasks.
This group of foreign workers freed up middle class married women in Singapore and other countries to participate more to their economy, capitalising on their education and ability to earn more in fast-growing economies. They had higher levels of workforce participation than their female counterparts in Japan and South Korea.
The Philippines relies almost five-fold more on remittances for its GDP than similar countries like Indonesia.
What’s less reflected upon is the social upheaval and challenges that these foreign workers face in their new homes. They are in a different culture, away from friends and family as a support network. They have tremendous pressure to remit as much money as possible home.
They only have each other to rely upon. This skate team is just one of the activities that foreign workers do. From informal gatherings with friends to sophisticated beauty pageants, volleyball and basketball leagues. More Singapore related content can be found here.
Beauty
China’s beauty market is a sight for sore eyes | FT – The brand keeps prices of its products, from face powders to creams, closer to those of premium international brands, in line with L’Oréal’s Lancôme and Shiseido’s Nars. The rise of a domestic premium brand points to a significant shift in mainland shoppers’ buying habits as well as highlighting improvements in the quality of domestic products
Y3K: Futuristic fashion trend sweeps China | Jing Daily – Inspired by AI, VR, and the metaverse, and propelled by K-pop idols and Korean brands, Y3K is rapidly gaining popularity among Gen Z. – very William Gibson ‘Burning Chrome’ era
Economics
Diverging demographic destinies: Cars and the middle class | WARC – According to Pew, the American middle class has shrunk significantly in the last few decades. The top 20% of earners now take more than 50% of aggregate income because theirs has grown faster. 88% of Americans have less than $2000 in their checking account and 50% have less than $500 in savings. The average cost of a new car in 1984 was $6000 and the average household income was $27k. Today average household income is $80k [Fed] but averages conceal the widened gap between maxima and minima: the median income per person is around $35k [Census]. The average price of a new car is almost $50k, which is surprising enough that CNN wrote an article about it. They explain that “much of the reason Americans are paying nearly $50k for a car is that automakers decided to go all-in on expensive cars. The more they charge for a car, the more money they make off it.”
Whereas forty years ago an average new car cost about a fifth of an average annual salary, a new car is now prohibitively expensive for most. That’s why Americans have a record $1.6 trillion of outstanding car debt and delinquencies are rising.
Biden’s Move to Block US Steel Deal Is No Way to Treat Japan – Bloomberg – In the executive order preventing the deal on spurious national security grounds, staffers for President Joe Biden appeared to accidentally copy-and-paste the title of a previous presidential order — one ordering a Chinese crypto mining company to vacate property near an Air Force base. The left the Nippon Steel directive entitled: “Regarding the acquisition of certain real property of Cheyenne leads by MineOne Cloud Computing Investment.”
Luxury
Interesting research from two sources that don’t quite square with each other. Walpole’s The State of London Luxury 2024 report came out and painted a rosy picture about the ultra high end aspect of the London property market. Meanwhile over at the FT, Why London’s property market is stagnating points at the same end of the market as being moribund in nature.
Japan Re-Emerges is Ulrike Schaede’s riposte to the neo-liberalist dogma that Japan is done. Since the bubble era finished, corporate Japan has been reinventing itself and building blue ocean strategies to stand up and out against the rise of China and South Korea. Schade has turned this journey into a book, Japan Re-Emerges. This interview was conducted at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan.
Going back to neo-liberal doctrine, Japan Re-Emerges offers a way out of the terminal societal and economic death role that many middle powers like the United Kingdom and Germany are currently undergoing – if they have the leadership who can make it happen. I’ll let you know how I get on with Schade’s book.
The Detroit of Asia
Thailand earned its name as the Detroit of Asia thanks to factories assembling vehicles like the Toyota Hi-lux and manufacturing a wide range of car parts. Nikkei put together a film on how Chinese electric vehicle makers have entered Thailand poaching staff, expertise and market share from Japanese manufacturers representing an existential risk of non-Chinese businesses and threatening how Japan Re-emerges.
Futurama
General Motors was a large conglomerate in the 1960s. This seems to be based on footage made at the New York World Fair of 1964/65. This Futurama exhibition was a homage to a similar one done at the 1939 world fair. The themes of the exhibition at the time reflect big societal concerns including overpopulation and creating adequate food. The seabed was seen as an equally momentous destination as space. Deep sea exploration was post-war phenomenon and the first submarine that had gone under the north pole did so only six years previously.
The space and modernist themed architecture feels like it’s from a different universe to our current world. Despite M Hubert King warning about peak oil in 1956, concerns about energy seemed premature at the time when nuclear power seemed to have so many uses and man was actively exploring outer space implying a technological solution was possible for everything. Out of this World as a film builds on the Futurama work done by General Motors as a cohesive vision of the future. While the Ford Motor Company still uses futurists, General Motors subsequent history is one of missed future opportunities, from the German, Japanese and Korean ‘invasions’, its futuristic EV1 car project to efforts in autonomous driving efforts.
Cadillac racing
At first I thought that the idea of a Cadillac racing programme was an oxymoron. As a European my idea of a Cadillac is the black armoured land barge that ferries the US president around, or its historic civilian equivalents that represented mid-century luxury prior to the German invasion of the U.S. car market. So I was curious when I came across No Perfect Formula.
What was more interesting about this film for me was that it was part of a wider trend. While Liberty Media’s Drive To Survive series looked to bolster its Formula One motorsports franchise, manufacturers like Cadillac and Porsche have been producing their own feature-length content and publishing it on YouTube – disintermediating brand partnership type deals with the likes of Netflix or Amazon Prime in favour of YouTube. This makes sense when one thinks about YouTube in terms of raw reach.
Where I think it gets more interesting is what is says about the value of the latent endorsement of a partner media brand and what this will mean for the likes of BBC Worldwide and non-subscriber revenue streams for streaming platforms.
