What constitutes a gadget? The dictionary definition would be a small mechanical or electronic device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.
When I started writing this blog the gadget section focused on personal digital assistants such as the Palm PDA and Sony’s Clie devices. Or the Anoto digital pen that allowed you to record digitally what had been written on a specially marked out paper page, giving the best of both experiences.
Some of the ideas I shared weren’t so small like a Panasonic sleeping room for sleep starved, but well heeled Japanese.
When cutting edge technology failed me, I periodically went back to older technology such as the Nokia 8850 cellphone or my love of the Nokia E90 Communicator.
I also started looking back to discontinued products like the Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro, one of the best cassette decks ever made of any size. I knew people who used it in their hi-fi systems as well as for portable audio.
Some of the technology that I looked at were products that marked a particular point in my life such as my college days with the Apple StyleWriter II. While my college peers were worried about getting on laser printers to submit assignments, I had a stack of cartridges cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol to deal with any non catastrophic printer issues and so could print during the evening in the comfort of my lodgings.
Alongside the demise in prominence of the gadget, there has been a rise in the trend of everyday carry or EDC.
McDonalds CSR activities came up a few times over the past day or so I thought I would visit it. CSR stands for corporate and social responsibility. A few American PR executives that I have come across used not to like the S in the middle, which sounded like socialism. The idea was doing good to enhance brand reputation – generally it was a strategic function.
ESG operates at a higher level. CSR predates ESG as an idea. McDonalds CSR is interesting because of the tactical way it seems to be employed around what a couple of rules that I have noticed.
Children are always a good universal focus of McDonalds CSR, which is the reason why Ronald McDonald House is a common theme throughout the worldwide operations of McDonalds
McDonalds CSR is on the side of authority, hence its support for the Metropolitan Police when dealing with XR protests and Korean national service draftees. There is a risk that this could make its conduct in authoritarian countries more problematic
To be a poem. – from the Web Curios newsletter ‘is a digital poem by Alicia Guo – it’s infinite and self-generating, and I don’t quite know how it works or where it’s pulling the words from, but each time it’s different and each time it’s fragmented and magical and silly and poignant and confusing and beautiful and I would like this to be read forever by a choir of machine voices until the heat death of the universe please thankyou.‘
Hiro Protagonist is the main character of Neal Stephenson’s iconic novel Snow Crash. In the novel talks about the rise of the corporation to become a quasi-nation state, a winner takes all economy, a vision of a future metaverse, hacker culture and service hyper-competition with Uber-like employees.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Hiro Protagonist is a hacker who moonlights as a courier to make ends meet. The story starts with Hiro Protagonist trying to deliver a pizza at high speed. The idea is that the courier would deliver a pizza to any location, not just delivery to a building like getting pizza to work or home. Now we’re starting to see these kind of services being rolled out in real life, by building them into in-car systems and mapping applications. This will add more importance to dark kitchens over store fronts, but store fronts are important as they build brand experiences.
Online bookseller Book Depository is closing down with some three weeks notice. It wasn’t a topic at work and barely made a ripple amongst British friends. The Hong Kong part of my social media bubble shared the news and were sad about it. The company had been owned by Amazon since 2011. I used it for a few reasons:
Free postage anywhere. I have friends around the world and Book Depository was a good way of sending a gift book. It made the process of international gifting so much easier. I bought a set of books there as recently as last week. Many of the upset people on social media were from Australasia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia
Getting hold of English books when I lived in Hong Kong. At the time I lived in Hong Kong there were a couple of nice chains that did English language books, but if I wanted something for my professional life or esoteric interests, then online made more sense. Dymocks, Eslite and the various independent stores would only get you so far. For everything else Book Depository helped out. This was partly down to book shops being a ‘lifestyle’ in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia. They carefully curate fiction but aren’t necessarily like the university book shops I spent my teens and twenties in
Arbitrage. Despite being owned by Amazon, there were a number of items that I bought where there was a price difference between Book Depository and their parent company
You could find a particular edition or format, with Amazon it could be a bit of a lottery
It isn’t full of tat like Amazon. Amazon Marketplace has been both a blessing and a curse. Amazon hasn’t done a good enough job curating Marketplace. I found Marketplace useful at the beginning, rather like a fixed-price eBay. Now its a dystopian retail experience littered with a substantial minority of counterfeit products and sub-standard garbage
Their ask the author section provided some interesting reading.
The brand
I always had it in my mind as ‘The Book Depository’ rather than Book Depository. It’s always the way I discussed it with other people. I had to go back and edit stray ‘The’s that slipped into this post.
Book Depository home page
Diminished ambitions
Book Depository is being closed by Amazon as part of cost cutting across its book and device categories. There is a certain irony in Alexa being in full retreat just at the time when LLMs were about to turn up. Alexa skills are likely to get loss in the subsequent withdrawal and LLM expansion. Book Depository helped plug gaps on the map where Amazon didn’t have native businesses. The decline of Book Depository implies an upper limit to Amazon’s global retail expansion.
Beauty bots drive R&D at Unilever’s £68 million facility | Vogue Business – The world’s highest concentration of robots doing material chemistry can be found at Unilever’s lab in North West England. Vogue Business gets a behind-the-scenes peek at the facility, which develops innovative products for brands including Hourglass and Living Proof.
Is China’s New Rocket Really Coal Powered? Deep Space Updates – April 2nd – YouTube – yes kerosene made from the kind of coal hydrogenation process similar to what SASOL used in apartheid-era South Africa. The National Coal Board had a pilot plant doing something similar during the late 1980s at Point of Ayr under what was called a ‘coal liquefaction plant‘. I used to know a few of the guys that had worked there previously. The plant had a number of experienced oil refinery technicians on the staff when it was running. The site was subsequently taken over and was where BHP Petroleum built their sour gas facility and brought natural gas ashore from the Liverpool Bay oil and gas field in the early 1990s. It also probably tells you everything you need to know about China’s climate related decarbonisation goals.
How the new generation of weight-loss drugs work | The Economist – the potential benefits of such drugs go beyond their ability to promote weight loss in individuals. By showing that molecular mechanisms hinder people’s attempts to lose weight, they show that gluttony is not to blame when people remain obese. That should slowly help to eliminate the stigma. Both weight-loss surgery and drugs are useful tools in the fight against obesity. But by changing the conversation these new drugs may remind health-system leaders that they need to do much more to encourage healthy lifestyles.
Hong Kong
‘Fair price, fine quality’: Hong Kong fast-food chains become go-to place for mainland Chinese budget tours | South China Morning Post – Established eatery chain Café de Coral was among those capitalising on the trend as it offered advance bookings for the tour groups, which have increased after the city fully resumed cross-border travel with the mainland earlier in the year. A Post reporter at 11.45am on Monday observed two mainland tour groups of about 30 people each being guided from their coaches and taken to Grand Waterfront Plaza, a shopping centre in To Kwa Wan, where they dined at the site’s Café de Coral outlet.
Online trolls are taking a toll in China – BBC News – In collectivist cultures such as China, those perceived as going against the norm tend to be severely punished, experts say. What makes it worse, they add, is a pervasive culture of shame. “A strong sense of collectivism in China can mean that cyberbullying, when perpetrated as a symbolic act of violence or aggression towards another in a public setting, may lead to drastic measures, such as suicide, to escape that sense of humiliation,” says K Cohen Tan, a vice-provost at University of Nottingham Ningbo China
I was started down the train of thought to think about the idea of a cyborg based on a discussion with my colleague Colleen with regards to the changes we had been seeing in consumer behaviour. With that in mind I thought I would reflect on what my understanding of what cyborgs are.
‘Moo-mail’ Yahoo! cow parade cow. The web appliance / cow cyborg hybrid used to stand in the lobby of building D, next to the Yahoo! branded merchandise store on the Yahoo! campus back when I worked there. It was originally created in 2000 as a buzz marketing gimmick to promote Yahoo! Mail – the company’s email product to New Yorkers. More here.
Cyborg in culture
I can just about remember playing with friends bionic man toys and primary school and remember the opening credits of The Six Million Dollar Man. The show ran from 1973 to 1978 and had a corresponding spin-off show called The Bionic Woman.
According to the show a cyborg was:
CY’BORG
A HUMAN BEING WHOSE ORIGINAL HUMAN PARTS HAVE HAD TO BE REPLACED TO ONE EXTENT OR ANOTHER BY MACHINES THAT PERFORM THE SAME FUNCTIONS.
According to the definition, at the time of writing my Dad is a cyborg, having had a pacemaker fitted a year or two ago. So would the character Batou be in Ghost In The Shell.
The cyborg was a feature of cyberpunk culture. The key difference was that people chose to have augmentation, not just as a repair but as a form of enhancement.
Optional enhancement
Johnny Mnemonic had a storage brain interface fitted that allowed him to be a giant walking thumb drive as a profession.
Fellow William Gibson creation Molly Millions has retractable razor sharp blades in her fingers and an augmented metabolic system. She has permanently fitted mirrored lens over her eyes that enhance her vision.
Captain Cyborg
Real life did a rather poor version of this cyberpunk fantasy with academic Kevin Warwick spoofed by IT paper The Register using the moniker Captain Cyborg for him. He did foolish things like implant himself with an RFID chip usually used for pet identification. And yes of course Warwick did a TED talk. I can’t tell whether the audience is laughing with him; or at him.
So what has an office conversation got to do with a cyborg?
Digital drugs
Which brings me to how an office conversation spurred me to reflect on how a conversation on compulsive behaviour got me to start thinking about cyborgs. Culture did envisage some form of device addiction. The premise of Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash revolves around a file that crashes a person’s computer and leaves a hacker called Raven with real-world brain damage in the process.
Long live the new flesh
Ten years earlier Videodrome featured a TV executive called Max Renn investigating a satellite TV show called Videodrome. It is described a socio-political battleground in which a war is being fought to control the minds of the North American population. Built into it is a signal that produces a malignant brain tumour. Renn’s reality dissolves over the rest of the film as he finds out more and then kills himself.
There is a clear analogy with the heroin and crack cocaine epidemics that ravaged the cities of the western world through 1980s and 1990s as drugs of desperation in the face of globalisation. Science fiction is as much about the past and the present rather than the future. Heroin and crack both cost large amounts of money, so children tended to be secondary and tertiary victims rather than addicts in their own right. It would also be problematic for the authors to contemplate gratuitous harm to children in their works back then, let alone now in more anxious times.
In both Snow Crash and Videodrome users suffer damage from technology that they are unwilling to put aside.
Back to now
Addiction is ‘real’
My colleague put forward the following points:
Screens now dominate our lives, and their presence is only getting stronger and more powerful
(Some) adults can control to a certain extent how often and when they use screens. But there is a commonplace screen addiction.
Smartphone addiction and drug addiction share some similarities including a neglected personal life, a pre-occupation with the subject of the addiction, social media as a mood modifier or for escapism. The implication is that smartphones are an unwilling appendage which add capabilities (some of which are of a questionable value) and can’t be put down. All of which reminded me of my childhood (and adult relationship with music). But it is why I started to thinking about the nature of a cyborg
Smartphone addiction
Smartphone addiction goes by many names including screen addiction, online or internet addiction. Japan identified the phenomenon of hikikomori. The term was coined by social scientist Tomaki Saito in a 1998 book. While the term itself meant socially withdrawn, it hinged around the person staying home and playing video games or living a virtual life.
By 2015, academic research indicated that somewhere between 1.9 – 2.5 percent of Hong Kongers aged from 12 to 29 might fall into the hikikomori category, compared to the 1.5 percent of Japanese believed to in the category.
Meanwhile in the early 2000s BlackBerry email devices were nicknamed Crackberry, often by users who admitted overusing them in anti-social contexts. There was a corresponding term ‘BlackBerry orphans‘ for children who were ignored by parents wrapped up in their BlackBerry writing and reading emails instead of engaging at home.
China was the first country to push for action to clamp down on children’s online time, in particular the use of online games. As far back as autumn 2005, China’s General Administration of Press and Publication had started trialling a fatigue system to limit screen time.
By 2007, the local government of Shanghai had a camp set up to help cure teens of internet addiction working with a pilot bunch of inmate aged between 14 and 22. And just a year later the FT was documenting how the Chinese government was struggling to combat the addiction throughout the country. This addiction implies a cyborg-like relationship with their internet access device.
In 2017, the substitute phone is launched as a kind of fidget tool. This provides the tactile experience of swiping and button pressing, but without any of the compelling addictive software.
By 2018, smartphone manufacturers were worried about smartphone addiction and came up with different ways to try and give their customers better information and control over their smartphone usage.
What about the children?
My colleague asked the following question: given the impact on adults, who haven’t grown up with screens, what does this all mean for children?
Remember the BlackBerry orphans earlier? My colleague proposed that now children are being taught once they are born that screens and smartphones are at the centre of life, rather than people. Parents use their smartphone as a substitute to toys, parent-child playtime or conversation or even reading to the child.
This is claimed to manifest in impacted social and emotional development. Expert opinion is that children below 2 years old shouldn’t have any ‘technology in their life‘.
There is a belief amongst experts that screen time can result in permanent damage to developing child’s brains impacting concentration, social kills and vocabulary. Some even believe that there might be a link between ADHD and TikTok.
But the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), the UK’s professional body most concerned with a child’s health, doesn’t publish any recommendations. There isn’t any research to indicate the ‘safe’ level and arguably commissioning this research would likely pose ethical questions.
By the time children enter secondary education, they are likely to own a smartphone of some sort. They maybe exhibiting a number of physiological effects:
‘Text neck’
Premature eye ageing
Sleepless nights
Admittedly, as a child I was told that reading after lights out and listening to the radio or watching TV in the dark would result in ‘going blind’ or a lack of much needed sleep.
Like television before it, online screen time adversely affects academic performance. My own exam grades were empirical evidence of this. China, South Korea and Taiwan both have different ways of limiting screen time. China has enabled technology with online games platforms. Taiwan has held the parents directly responsible and even fines them.
Questions
All of this prompted a number of questions with me:
Is it the device or is it the media?
Is it different to other waves of technology?
Moral panics – or what can we learn from the past & our cyborg future
Media
Rock music – academic research indicated that listening to rock music was linked to an increase of reckless behaviour including drug use, unprotected sex, casual sex, drunk driving, speeding and vandalism
Violent content – while violent content was considered to trigger a response in children, the overall risk associated with it was difficult to prove conclusively despite decades of research. Studies as far back as the mid 1990s indicated that there a lot of other factors to consider in addition to the exposure including mental health and cognitive ability.
Sexual content – the US Center for Media Literacy pulled together views on sexual violence in content. There wasn’t a lot of clarity in the plurality of views beyond the challenge of defining content to be of an overly sexual nature. What views were expressed were not backed by scientific research
Video gaming – because of the strategies used by players in video games. Academic research in 2015 indicated that video games might have a negative impact on brain development over time.
Devices
Personal stereos – the use of a Sony Walkman and later on the iPod was considered to a negative effect on hearing. They were also considered to have a social effect, depending who you ask it considered to be empowering or dislocating from society with increased narcissism. The positive autonomy based interpretation was called the ‘Walkman effect‘. The implication from this research is that not giving a child a smartphone at a certain point could have a detrimental effect on them – at some point the child has to become a smartphone | human cyborg.
Televisions – when I was a child I was constantly told to not sit too close to the television and that doing so would cause me to go blind. According to Scientific American, it isn’t the distance from the television that affects the child, but a long enough amount can cause eye strain.
The implication in past concerns about media and devices is that its the content that tends to do the damage rather than the device. This tends to indicate where action should be taken on ‘screen addiction’. As for our great cyborg future – it can’t be stopped.
Japanese soft power didn’t start with anime, manga or even Sonny Chiba. Asianometry posted a video covering how Japanese soft power was manifested in the 19th century through a mix of planning and happy accident.
Japan benefited from a sophisticated artisan culture for everything from food and drink to metal working.
Wikileaks
Talking about soft power. Task and Purpose goes back and looks at Wikileaks. This is interesting as it reflects on the US viewpoint of pro-Russian bias with the work Wikileaks did disclosing both Chinese and Russian secrets. The biggest legacy was likely reinvigorating investigative journalism at mainstream media outlets that had been cut back over the previous decade or so.
VFDs
Dutch YouTuber posts a love letter to VFDs or vacuum fluorescent displays. They were featured on stereos, VCRs, Blu Ray players and my Bose Wave (you can get your own one here). They feel nicer than LCD displays, don’t look cheap and don’t affect your sleep.
Streaming culture in China
While most people think about streaming is China’s e-commerce. But the offering of the streamer featured in this documentary is more ambiguous. Her audience feel some sort of romantic attachment to her. ‘Inside the Daily Life of a Live Streaming Star in China’ is as much about the imbalance in male and females in China due to the one-child policy.
It reminded me of Japanese and Korean ‘idol‘ culture, but designed for the mobile addicted COVID traumatised young adults. Buffeted by societal expectations and the economic issues by the government pivot away from economic growth to internal and external control.
Men
Scott Galloway has an interesting prognosis on the current crisis in the male population which seems to be in a socio-economic death spiral. I am not convinced by his solution. It’s very male-centred and assumes that parenting isn’t broken.
