Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.
I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.
Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.
I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.
I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.
Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.
I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.
I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.
DeBeers have resurrected their tagline A Diamond is Forever. What’s interesting is that DeBeers is focusing the campaign only in China and the United States. Whilst the heritage of A Diamond is Forever may resonate with the American audience. I am less sure about how it might resonate for Chinese consumers.
While diamonds are a good store of value, the move towards guo chao – Chinese things for Chinese people is another dynamic that may affect receptivity.
Beauty
Gen X men prefer gently-scented bodycare products over heavily-scented ones | Mintel – Despite having body odour concerns, Gen X doesn’t go for heavily scented products as they have dry, sensitive and acne-prone body skin. Among Gen X, itchiness, excessive sweat and rashes concerns stood out from those of other consumers. They are also concerned with the odour associated with the result of sweat.
Welcome to the Anti-Woke Economy | The New Republic – A fledgling parallel economy has emerged on the right, hawking everything from coffee to vitamin supplements to anti-abortion protein bars. But can a business movement born of political and cultural grievance be viable over the long term?
An inconvenient truth: Difficult problems rarely have easy solutions | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core – Individual-level interventions are often interesting and easy to implement, but are unfortunately ill-equipped to solve most major global problems (e.g., climate change, financial insecurity, unhealthy eating). Resources spent developing, pursuing, and touting relatively ineffective i-frame interventions draw resources away from the development and implementation of more effective s-frame solutions. Behavioral scientists who want to develop solutions to the world’s biggest problems should focus their efforts on s-frame (system level) solutions
Ideas
The AI and Leviathan series examining what it means if AI did actually change everything including extreme techopolarity.
Part 1 – institutional economics of an intelligence explosion
Dentsu launches paid search tool that uses AI to speed up creativity and optimization – Digiday – d.Scriptor — a new proprietary offering it’s developed to supercharge paid search, mainly in the area of ad copy development but also as a means to optimize and adapt execution. Dentsu is announcing the tool today, after pilot testing over the last several weeks. It’s meant to help with boosting the volume of creative messaging with an eye toward improved engagement rates, as well as to speed up the process of creative experimentation, and cut down on the time required to perform optimization tasks – the more variants that you cram into a Google Adwords programme the better a job it can do on optimising display based on what works. I spent a lot of time coming up with variants in spreadsheets to do this when I was freelancing
We’re Updating our Community Standards – Linktree – changes on conditions, particularly focused on sex work, presumably to cover themselves from US legislation. There are also restrictions on regulated sectors like vaping and alcohol
Ian Bremmer at the Eurasia Group has been talking about Technopolarity throughout 2022 and has amped up the discussion in recent months.
Bremmer’s hypothesis is that big technology companies and their leaders will create power structures that will challenge the powers of governments. I was reminded of the different ‘country franchises’ that populated the future America of Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. Snow Crash envisaged a Randesque libertarian hellscape with no power centre.
The biggest technology firms are designing, building, and managing an entirely new dimension of geopolitics. In this new digital space, their influence runs deep, down to the level of individual lines of code. They’re writing the algorithms that decide what people see and hear, determine their economic and social opportunities, and ultimately influence what they think. Individuals will spend more time in digital space in 2022, at work and at home. Much of this time will be spent in the “metaverse”—an emerging, more immersive version of the web where all the problems of digital governance will be magnified. The metaverse (or more accurately, multiple metaverses) in turn will increasingly rely on economic systems based on decentralized blockchain platforms that governments are already struggling to control.
Aside from the power of the metaverse, Bremmer & Kupchan largely got things right. The Eurasia Group positioned technology giants along three axes. The degree to which the companies matched the following archetypes:
National champions.
Globalists.
Techno-utopians.
In general, Chinese companies were national champions, while their American counterparts were predominantly globalists. The European Union has attempted and largely failed to bring a degree of control, curbing the excesses of technology companies.
China has cracked down on companies that it felt was too big. The digital space itself has a Randian view of global leadership, ignoring the consequences and the responsibility of their power.
Algorithms as destiny
Bremmer’s initial thinking on technopolarity was focused on the role of algorithms underpinning online services. More recently, he has focused beyond platforms to look at the nature of ‘artificial intelligence’ and its ability to upend geopolitics.
Emotional contagion
As far back as 2012, Facebook had conducted a study in ’emotional contagion’ by altering the news feeds for 700,000 users and it was all completely legal. The feeds were changed to reflect more positive, or negative content – to see if seeing more sad messages makes a person sadder. The experimental subjects were not given any warning and their emotional state was by analysing changes in their language on the platform.
And I am not even pointing out the effect that social media can have on its audiences in general without experimentation.
Elon Musk’s Technopolarity
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk; brought the concept of Technopolarity to life. In the book Isaacson discusses decisions and actions that Musk made over the Ukraine war. Musk because of his personal concern about Russian escalation, disabled the Starlink service covering occupied Ukrainian territory to disrupt Ukraine’s military efforts including marine drones. So Elon Musk essentially made a decision that directly affected US defence efforts to support Ukraine. It could have even resulted in the destruction of American military equipment donated to the defence of Ukraine.
Musk has had conversations with Vladimir Putin like he was a head of state and even the US government has been careful about how they deal with him.
“Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue”
Kahl’s attitude to Musk is at odds to the fate of former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio who went to jail after he was found to be a barrier to the NSA’s domestic surveillance plans, in particular the MAINWAY database. Nacchio was convicted of insider trading. Nacho’s successor also held outing after 4 years, discussions with the NSA went nowhere. A quick trawl of Twitter history would be enough to find evidence to put Musk on trial should the US government wish to do so. What’s happened to government power in the decades since Nacchio went to jail?
The New Yorker went on to describe Elon Musk’s power as ‘shadow rule‘. Musk isn’t elected. He isn’t even responsive to his shareholders. His Twitter account is a testament to his mercurial nature.
What’s more concerning for US government wonks is that Musk’s Tesla mega factory in Shanghai leaves him exposed to manipulation by the Chinese government. For instance, they could pressure him to turn off Starlink across the Pacific adversely affecting Taiwan, Japan, Australia and US forces in the region. The Ukrainian experience suggests that Musk would not hesitate to put American lives on the line, or see Taiwan handed over the horrific barbarity of Chinese invasion.
I started thinking about climate despair last month as I was researching my post on psychotherapy + culture.
Depth of climate despair
The driver was a research report that appeared in The Lancet in December 2021. Researchers surveyed 10,000 respondents aged between 16 – 25, in ten countries across the Asia Pacific region, North and South America, Europe and Africa. The respondents were drawn from Kantar’s LifePoints online research panel. Of those who started the survey less than 70 percent completed it. The gender split was slightly overweight towards males: 51·4% male, 48·6% female.
The survey was developed by 11 international consultants with expertise in climate change emotions, clinical and environmental psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry, human rights law, child and adolescent mental health, and young people with lived experience of climate anxiety. Which means that there was an incentive to come out with the findings they received and that may have biased the results. But the indications are clear in terms of direction around climate despair.
Key datapoints supporting the sense of climate despair amongst respondents:
Survey respondents across all countries were worried about climate change (59% were very or extremely worried and 84% were at least moderately worried)
Over half of those surveyed reported each of the following emotions: sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless or guilty
75% of those surveyed said that they think the future is frightening
Derek Read – “C̶l̶i̶m̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶C̶h̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ We Change”
The report says:
Distress about climate change is associated with young people perceiving that they have no future, that humanity is doomed, and that governments are failing to respond adequately, and with feelings of betrayal and abandonment by governments and adults. Climate change and government inaction are chronic stressors that could have considerable, long-lasting, and incremental negative implications for the mental health of children and young people.
Hickman, C.,Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R.E. & Mayall, E.E. (December 2021) Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey. (UK) The Lancet Planetary Health
The article then goes on to hold governments accountable for a moral harm on the young people. However, a good deal of the moral harm is also due to the way companies and NGOs actually talk about climate change.
Anecdotal evidence from therapists interviewed by the New York Times suggests that climate despair tends to be more prevalent in young female patients that they see. However, this might be down to a young men being less likely to see a therapist than a young woman.
Positive reinforcement
This video from WARC features research why it is ineffective to play into the constant environment doom loop if we want action. A change in approach should start to combat the deeply entrenched feeling of climate despair.
When the environmental issue is considered a sudden disaster, negative anthropomorphism is more persuasive.
By contrast, when the environmental issue is viewed as an ongoing tragedy, positive anthropomorphism results in a more favourable attitude, higher willingness to pay, and more money being donated.
Consumers’ connectedness to nature serves as the underlying mechanism in this messaging. If this level of connectedness to nature is low, nonprofit organizations and companies must alter these perceptions by choosing a more appropriate anthropomorphic valence and cause acuteness in their green advertising.
All of which seems to point to a possible challenge amongst both NGOs and companies over their inability to discern the difference between important and the most urgent elements. If collectively they can’t understand the categorisation, it’s no wonder that a significant minority of their audience slips into climate despair and is discouraged from taking a more active role.
Secondly, working on consumer’s connectedness to nature is a major communications JTBD (job to be done).
The September 2023 newsletter time came around quickly. As I write this, it’s almost the end of September and it feels like no time since I curated the last edition. If you’re reading this, and it’s your first time welcome! If you read the pioneer issue; I hope that this isn’t the newsletter equivalent of the difficult second album.
If this continues to go well I will put one out each month. You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Rolex Submariner 5512
Analysis on the Bucherer acquisition by Rolex – which shook up the luxury sector in the run up to the end of August.
Psychotherapy and culture. How psychotherapy has been mainstreamed via culture, and in turn influenced culture.
Digital abortion clinics. How tele-health businesses are trying to address the challenges posted by US state abortion bans and how these services should be doing a better job protecting their patients, in particular their privacy.
Books that I have read.
The Code by Margaret O’Mara. O’Mara’s work like my last month’s recommendation Chip War is a history of Silicon Valley. The key difference is that O’Mara approaches the history through the lens of the American political environment, whereas Miller’s Chip War considered it more in terms of global geostrategic politics. You can read more of my take on The Codehere.
Deluxe – how luxury lost its lustre by Dana Thomas. Thomas’ book came out in 2008, but much of it is still relevant today, particularly around what my friend Jeremy dubbed the ‘Supremification’ of the luxury sector. You can read more of my take on Deluxe here.
Things I have been inspired by.
Lately I have been listening to Kurena an album by Japanese jazz musician Kurena Ishikawa. I reviewed the album here.
The Korean Cultural Centre in London has a series of rotating art exhibitions. I got to see Audible Garden by Jinjoon Lee. Lee is a multimedia artist. The exhibition usesculptures, drawings, a wall painting, prints, videos, and directional sound installation to create an experience that blends inside and outside landscapes. If you’re involved in creating experiences you’ll want to see it. The exhibition is on until October 13, 2023.
My friend Natalie Lowe runs The Orangeblowfish with her husband in Shanghai. One of the projects that they worked on was helping media agency Mindshare rethink their office space and employee brand through the power of comics.
We talk a lot about the benefits of neurodiversity in business thinking. But a less explored area is that of cognitive diversity. While Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is an imperfect measure, this work by UCL and Sense Worldwidehighlights the benefits of cognitive diversity in envisioning new possibilities.
Swatch Group continues with its Mondelēz International -like brand mash-ups (a la Cadburys Dairy Milk x Ritz crackers), this time Swatch x Blancpain. I wonder what this does to luxury brand caché? I imagine that there will be a short burst of hype tempered by existing customers concern about paying $800,000 for a watch from a brand that also puts its name on plastic tat. Omega were a well known premium watch brand, often seen as a cheaper alternative to Rolex. Blancpain is the oldest brand in Swiss watchmaking with the longest most storied history of horology. It is a brand for die-hard watch fans, they made the first automatic self winding wrist watch and still make sophisticated complications like the 1735 Grand Complication and the highly regarded Fifty Fathoms range which pioneered modern dive watches. The company slogan has been:
Blancpain has never made a quartz watch and never will
Blancpain
It seems the resale value on these watches on secondary market platforms has dropped almost immediately after launch.
Finally Alzheimers Research put out a fantastic animated film to illustrate the impact of dementia on a life.
Things I have watched.
Moving on from the French new wave works of Jean-Pierre Melville that I viewed in August, this month I revisited works from the Hong Kong new wave. Chow Yun Fat’s performance in the John Woo-directed film The Killer blew me away when I first watched it on VHS tape and still moves me today, more on that here. I followed this up with John Woo’s second best well-known film Hard Boiled. Watching it for the first time in several years, gave me a slightly different perspective on the film – I can see obvious influence it would have had on 1990s Hollywood – in particular the Die Hard series; but the ‘new wave cinema’ elements felt like stylistic add-ons rather than a crucial part of the story.
Netflix has a couple of sleeper Japanese language series:
Sanctuary is about the journey of a young man from a broken family in the world of professional sumo.
Informa is a tale of revenge and assassination played out in modern day Japan highlighting the close links between the yakusa, local politicians, the construction industry and the media.
Useful tools
Small fridge magnets
Working with colleagues who had a fantastic whiteboard, this whiteboard was vast like the rolling door on a freight carriage. Everything was brilliant but for the fact that Post-It notes wouldn’t adhere at all to the surface for some reason. Thankfully, I’d had a run through on the room a few days before and found this out by accident. So I got some fridge magnets that were ideal for using with Post-It notes on the day. I now have three dozen of them in my loadout for in-person workshops.
Flight Delay Compensation
If like me you’ve had problems with airline delays and cancellations, Moneysavingexpert have put together:
An explanation of your rights
Links to tools that make claiming comparatively painless
Now taking bookings for strategic engagements. Contact me here.
The End.
Ok this is the end of my September 2023 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other. Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
Psychotherapy is using psychological techniques to to help improve:
Happiness
Mental wellbeing
Behaviours, beliefs and compulsions that might be holding someone back from achieving their full potential in life
It can involve sessions that are one on one, or be part of a group experience.
Psychotherapy in culture
American TV brought the emotional and mental anguish of life into its programming, for instance, this segment from from Thirtysomething.
The TV series Frasier put the profession front-and-centre with both Frasier and Niles Crane being psychiatrists by profession. It even brought up the subject of therapy for animals.
Hollywood has often looked to develop characters by showing them undergoing therapy.
Probably the most famous example is the relationship between Robin Williams as the therapist Dr. Sean Maguire and Matt Damon as his court-mandated patient Will Hunting in Good Will Hunting.
Over the past 20 years therapy as an activity has become much more mainstream in the UK. And this has been reflected in the media, such as this plot line from the critically-acclaimed BBC comedy series Fleabag, which shows how mental health and therapy have become part of modern middle-class life.
Age of anxiety
Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation was published in 1994; yet feels very now. At the time of publishing it turned the drug brand Prozac into a household name. The black and white cover photo of a vacant Wurtzel fitted very much into the grunge aesthetic. As did the authors tale of being a young American battling against depression. There was even a counter-movement over the years of writers who looked to provide alternatives to Prozac (and its peers like Paxil and Zoloft). Their solutions ran from potatoes, to Plato or God.
Moving forward some three decades and Wurtzel’s writing resonate with a generation battling anxiety and reshaping society around their angst.
Modern world events from wild fires and climate change seems to have created the conditions for a collective sense of hopelessness and grief. A 10-country survey with a sample size of 10,000 people aged 16 – 25 published in The Lancet found high rates of pessimism. 45 percent of respondents were said worry about climate negatively affected their daily life. Three-quarters of respondents believed “the future is frightening,” and 56 percent said “humanity is doomed.”
Roots of a crisis
Wurtzel’s generation too grew up with climate changes, the ozone layer, economic uncertainty due to globalisation and deindustrialisation. They watched the most dynamic economic power on the planet hit a brick wall with the Japanese economic miracle, the internet bubble and imminent global thermonuclear war.
Over the past half-century we’ve seen wealth flow to the richest while the middle class stagnates or shrinks.
So the stressors for anxiety that needs psychotherapy are neither new, nor are they unique. But they have uniquely manifested themselves creating a mass market for psychotherapy in different forms. Like generations of children before them they were brought up as individuals with an upbringing influenced by Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care which shaped childcare from the post-war era onwards.
Every family home didn’t have a copy of Spock on their shelves, but it shaped advice given out by medics, educators, social workers and the media.
Like previous generations in the late 20th century their upbringing was marked by a new mass medium. (Previous new mediums would be popular radio, teenage culture including rock n’ roll music, television (and its subsequent proliferation of channels) and the web).
The big generational difference is likely to be level of childhood exposure to risk. Children growing up in the 1960s through to the early 1990s would be familiar with the ‘latch key kid’. They would have played outside with friends, maybe held down a part-time job or even had a degree of personal mobility with a bicycle that they used to cycle everywhere. Playgrounds were fun, but didn’t have the safety measures of modern playgrounds, the playgrounds of the mid to late 20th century had rusty swings and hard concrete surfaces. The decline in ‘outdoor play’ in favour of play dates and electronic amusements was cited as a possible factor by authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their book The Coddling of The American Mind.
Lukianoff and Haidt’s suggested solution to this age of anxiety was to use a form of psychotherapy known as cognitive behavioural therapy to help boost mental resilience in children and young adults. There is a growing body of work that puts the blame on rising anxiety at the always-on nature of social media through smartphones.
The age of anxiety has mainstreamed a number of niche product categories from gadgets like fidget spinners to weighted blankets.
Rebranding psychotherapy
Going back to the explanation of psychotherapy that I started off with, one of the bulletpoints was ‘behaviours, beliefs and compulsions that might be holding someone back from achieving their full potential in life’.
A number of decades ago psychotherapy was seen to be something that tended to happen in hospital and the general thinking that a pill may provide the solution or at the very least a chemical cosh for the worst affected or most disruptive.
The more well-heeled may have seen a therapist in a consulting office. In other communities the role may have been played by the social worker, (in rural Ireland it might have been the local parish priest) or a marriage guidance counselling service. Developments of different psychotherapy techniques over the 20th and 21st century owe as much to philosophy as they do to our scientific understanding of the mind and neuroscience.
There are now a large amount of therapists and life coaches who have a wide range of certifications and experience addressing the behaviours beliefs and compulsions that might be holding someone back in their personal or professional lives.
The changing nature of psychotherapy
Technology and media are changing our relationships, the way we relate to each other and ourselves. Parasocial relationships are asymmetric in nature. Fans believe in an influencer who may not even know them. They supplement or replace friendships that would otherwise be in the fans life. These new forms of relationships can affect both the fan and the influencer when unrealistic expectations aren’t met. Exemplified by ‘Stans‘ in western culture.
Parasocial relationships
The kind of relationships that we have now are fundamentally changed. This is especially acute in culture. Influencers, and Asian idol culture mean that we’re much more invested in people we don’t actually know.
YouTuber Aini has covered how this relates to East Asian pop artist fan culture. In particular young men or women who are in idol groups. Parakin fans go to extreme lengths to support their idol and guide their career in what they believe is the best direction. Parakin fans in China have the idol fulfil a role in their own lives that would otherwise be unmet.
This is a world away from the model followed by Simon Cowell to Colonel Parker over the past 70 years of popular music.
The Timepiece Gentleman
A great example of parasocial relationship is playing out in the luxury watch collecting community at the moment. American watch dealer Anthony Farrer trading as The Timepiece Gentleman matched luxury watches with people who wanted to own them and took a cut off the top.
Something went horribly wrong and Mr Farrer owes millions of dollars to fellow watch dealers, investors and individuals whose watches he was selling on their behalf. Oisin O’Malley goes into how Farrer’s parasocial relationship with his audience engendered trust.
Farrer told his audience his own personal story, complete with his faults and failings
He brought the audience inside his business and how it operates
He demonstrated a successful lifestyle.
He was in their lives day-in, day-out. This meant that both industry professionals and consumers put more trust in Farrer than they should have. Farrer brought the formula of the Kardashian media empire to a formerly staid and overlooked retail sector.
The manosphere
Much has been shared about the manosphere and the Tate brothers in particular. But in the context of this post, I thought it was worthwhile exploring the role that Andrew Tate’s content fills in the lives of young men.
First Andrew Tate in his own words
You can’t slander me because I will state right now that I am absolutely sexist and I’m absolutely a misogynist, and I have fuck you money and you can’t take that away
Tate and his business partners offer content and services aimed at young men that ‘solve’ similar challenges to therapy (promising guidance on how to fulfil their full potential)
For better or worse, Tate sets an example for his audience. The audience are looking for confidence and certainty. Tate provides the answers to the audience through:
Social media accounts that promoted an “ultra-masculine, ultra-luxurious lifestyle.”
Training courses run by his Hustler’s University business on accumulating wealth and ‘male-female interaction’ to copywriting and cryptocurrency trading.
Virtual relationships through a web cam studio described as a total scam.
The ‘War Room’ private network that sits somewhere between group therapy, a subreddit and a secret society complete with business networking
Tate’s work has had an outsized impact in the media and classrooms of the UK. Something a Guardian journalist labeled the ‘Andrew Tate effect’.
Therapy AI
As machine learning and chat bots have become more prominent we’ve seen algorithm driven psychotherapy.
Telemedicine primed market
The market was primed for the rise of AI driven therapy sessions after platforms like MYNDUP connected people with therapists online or over a mobile app, as part of a wider boom in telemedicine. R/GA talked about telemedicine in terms of it being ‘a more human centred vision of health’ in their Futurevision report series. They saw a clear line of continuity between the kind of service and convenience we’ve received from Amazon and online banking to future telemedicine services.
Looked at from this perspective, why wouldn’t you want to have online, on-demand therapy sessions?
So we saw ChatGPT being used for ‘do-it-yourself’ therapy, alongside dedicated systems.
Dedicated systems like Wysa, Heyy and Woebot use ‘rules based AI’ which is easier to manage from a medical, legal and regulatory point of view.
Wearables are considered to offer an opportunity for more timely interventions.
