Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

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.

 

  • Revenge on society + more stuff

    Revenge on society

    China has had a number of ‘lone wolf’ attacks on the public all of which had a common theme of ‘revenge on society’. It might be that the perpetrator had economic setbacks or a sense of being wronged by a government decision that set them on this direction.

    The profiles of the attackers are often middle-aged men. The revenge on society attacks all seem to be driven by people who feel that they have little to lose. While attacks that meet the revenge on society profile have been documented at least as far back as 2004. There seems to have been an acceleration in the occurrence of revenge on society attacks in 2024. Unlike Uighur related incidents of 2013 and 2014, there isn’t a particular group that China can suppress to reduce the incidents easily. Revenge on society attacks are more likely to be dealt with using mass-population surveillance and reporting a la Minority Report’s preventative crime approach and raised security.

    Raising security against revenge on society attacks requires a mix of infrastructure investment like bollards

    Police car

    A Suzhou school bus was attacked by a knife-wielding attacker looking to kill and maim Japanese children. He killed the school bus attendant who defended the children from his attack.

    September 18th saw a 10-year old Japanese child was stabbed to death by a 44 year-old man. Anti-Japanese sentiment is fanned by Chinese government rhetoric and a constant barrage of content on Chinese media. The attack happened in Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong.

    On September 31th, 3 were killed and 15 injured by a revenge on society attacker in a Shanghai branch of Walmart. He had been arrested by police who said that he was angry due to a personal financial dispute.

    The following day on October 1st, while most were celebrating China’s national day holiday – Chinese man conducted a revenge on society attack in Zurich, Switzerland. He attacked and injured three children near a daycare centre. He was a postgraduate student who publicly expressed extremist nationalist views.

    A 60-year old man convicted of previous attacks stabbed two students and one woman outside a primary school in Guangzhou on October 8th.

    On October 28th, a 50 year old man attacked and injured three children and two adults in Beijing in an attack that had all the hallmarks of revenge on society.

    A revenge on society attack on November 11th killed 35 people and injured 43 more because the 62-year old attacker was unhappy with his divorce settlement. The Chinese government attempted a news blackout of the incident. The incident happened in Zhuhai, a city just across the border from Macau.

    On November 16th, a Wuxi third level education college was the site of an revenge on society incident that killed eight people with a knife attack and 17 others injured. A 21 year old male was detained.

    On November 19th, the 39 year-old perpetrator drove into students arriving at a primary school in Changde. He was eventually stopped and beaten by a crowd until being taken into custody by the police.

    Words of the Week: “Revenge on Society” Attacks Lead to Government Monitoring of “Individuals With ‘Four Lacks and Five Frustrations’” (四无五失人员, sìwú wǔshī rényuán) | China Digital Times

    Consumer behaviour

    How many toys is too many? | Vox – One reader told Vox recently that her family was “absolutely drowning in toys.” And while adults have been complaining about kids’ junk for generations (please see my father’s fruitless search for my brother’s one-inch-long toy wrench in Los Angeles International Airport circa 1992), many millennial and Gen X parents have the sense that something is different now — that kids have more toys than in past decades, and that they seem to arrive in ways Randall describes as “unintentional” and Parents Are Stressed About Playtime. Their Anxiety Is a Goldmine. – WSJ – same as it ever was

    Could shifting beauty standards have predicted Trump’s win? | Dazed

    Economics

    Putin’s «Deathonomics» – Riddle Russia – the Kremlin seriously expects a positive economic outcome from the creation of a high-salaried contract army. If we assume that the number of mobilised and contract-based soldiers ranges from 400,000 to 450,000, then their minimum total allowance will amount to approx. 1 trillion roubles a year. The government will have to allocate about the same amount for compensations in case of killed or wounded soldiers, even if there are 50,000 or 100,000 such people in a year. These sums represent nearly 10% of pre-war federal spending, and some people are already predicting the emergence of a social group of «the young rich» and even making plans for how this money will contribute to long-term investment programmes. – Deathonomics is allowing the Russian government to shape its population pyramid to reduce the burden of the aging population on the economy.

    The costs of maritime supply chain disruptions: The case of the Suez Canal blockage by the ‘Ever Given’ megaship – ScienceDirect

    Endless business closures, through the eyes of a Chinese consumer | Following the Yuan

    Ideas

    If an alien could speak, could we understand it? – Leeds Trinity University Research Portal

    How These Men Left the Manosphere — and Why Some May Never | Teen Vogue – “The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms and say, ‘this is where you belong. If those people don’t understand you, they’re just a bunch of triggered snowflakes or whatever,’” Miller-Idriss says. Another tactic, she says, is to point out the commercialization of the manosphere in which everything is for sale including courses, supplements, and crypto-currencies. Pointing out the profit motive of these influencers can be effective, Miller-Idriss says.

    That’s part of what got Tom out of the manosphere, which he says he fell into when he was 27, after leaving the Army and finding himself “stuck trying to look for work consistently, having basically no social support, having no options other than to just work, pay bills, work, pay bills, in an increasingly difficult world to do that.” He was lonely, he says, and the influencers he followed had some pretty good talking points, he thought: men were more affected by things like incarceration rates, workplace death and injury rates, and mental health and no one was taking it seriously.

    “The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms.” Pasha Dashtgard, an assistant professor at the Polarization & Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, says this is a common entry point. “They start their conversations with, ‘men are in crisis and no one’s talking about it. It’s like, that’s true, men are in crisis and we should be talking about it… [but] that opens up, ideologically, the door for them to be like ‘and now, here are the solutions’ and it’s this horrible, toxic nonsense.” But after after a couple months in the manosphere, Tom realized that, while men’s health is a serious subject, he wouldn’t find the answers he was looking for in the manosphere, which was overrun by what he calls “grifters, frauds, or sort of religious zealots.” Now, Tom says he doesn’t actively use the label ‘feminist’ but “considers it part of my worldview.”

    Indonesia

    Indonesia rejects Apple’s $100 million investment offer | Techxplore

    Luxury

    From Edition to Ritz Carlton, how global luxury hotels are localizing their strategies amid expansion | Jing Daily – interesting comment on staff as ‘intelligence agent’

    Marketing

    Is there a future for personalisation? | WARC – Right person, right place, right time: for over a decade this idea has been an ideal in advertising. But an alternative point of view is that personalisation is self-defeating because advertisers chase a moving target when they are unable to prove return on investment. 

    Patagonia’s Restructuring Has Led to Employee Fallout – Business Insider – Patagonia’s historic worker commitment is less well known than it’s sustainability credentials which probably explains why recent moves haven’t led to the kind of brand dissonance amongst consumers that the likes of Bud Light or Nike experienced.

    Jaguar rebrand

    Jaguar’s teaser campaign for its rebrand and new vehicle model prompted immediate feedback. I am not clear on what the ask was by the marketing team, so have kept an open mind. Here offered without comment are some of the related commentary:

    Media

    Baidu Q3 2024 earnings| CNBC – the interesting bits in here are static online marketing business revenue and increasing AI / cloud services business

    AI-Powered Buzzfeed Ads Suggest You Buy Hat of Man Who Died by Suicide

    The Rise, Fall, and (Slight) Rise of DVDs. A Statistical Analysis

    Online

    How a 15-Year-Old Gamer Became the Patron Saint of the Internet | WIRED

    The Fantasy of Cozy Tech | The New Yorker – cozy gaming came from COVID and Animal Crossing – gaming and cute

    Let’s check in on MrBeast – by Taylor Lorenz – User Mag

    Retailing

    Ted Baker relaunches website in the UK – Retail Gazette

    Security

    China’s Surveillance State Is Selling Citizen Data as a Side Hustle | WIRED

    Philippines recruits civilian tech talent to fend off cyber attacks – Rest of World

    How Silicon Valley is prepping for War – by Michael Spencer

    Software

    Apple Working on ‘LLM Siri’ for 2026 Launch – MacRumors

    HarperCollins Confirms It Has a Deal to Sell Authors’ Work to AI Company

    Style

    Streetwear Has Lost Its Popularity. Is That a Good Thing? | HighSnobriety – if it kills drop queues I’ll be happy

    Technology

    Qualcomm – Falling Behind or Laying in Wait? | Digits to Dollars

    Telecoms

    I Don’t Own a Cellphone. Can This Privacy-Focused Network Change That?

    Web-of-no-web

    Meta brings certain AI features to Ray-Ban Meta glasses in Europe | TechCrunch

    Receiver enables dead reckoning when GPS/GNSS fails | EE News

  • November 2024 newsletter

    November 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my November 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 16th issue. 16 is a low power of two which saw it used in weighing light objects in several cultures. For instance in the British Imperial system of weights 16 ounces were in one pound. This lived on far longer with British drug dealers who looked to sell cannabis in ‘teenths’ (16ths) or eighths of an ounce. Prior to decimal being implemented in China 16 taels or liǎng equalled one catty or jin. Chinese Taoists counted on their finger times and joints of the fingers with a the tip of the thumb, so 16 can be counted on each hand.

    The highlight of November was meeting up for brunch with Calvin who I used to work with in Hong Kong and collaborate with on occasion for projects going in-or-out of China. He was passing through London on his way to Web Congress in Lisbon, supporting one of the burgeoning number of start-ups coming out of Shanghai.

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here. 

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • Ghost Signs – how legacy signage allows us to peer back into history, camcorders having their ‘lomography’ moment and much more.
    • Layers of the future – or how innovation doesn’t exist in a fully-formed world, but instead exists within layers of progress over time.
    • Presidential election beliefs – amongst the autopsies of the campaign that have been discussed, one of the things that struck me was the role of presidential election beliefs that have wrong-footed analysis
    • Klad & more stuff – a Russian pioneered integration of dark web markets and concealed ‘Amazon locker’ type infrastructure to deliver a new approach to drug dealing. Other items include bottlenecks in gadget manufacturing, internet maturity and more.

    Books that I have read.

    • Dead Calm by Charles Williams – the early 1960s crime novel packs a lot into the story. Trauma, mental illness, murder and intrigue on the high seas. Dead Calm was later made into a film and relocated from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.
    • Jipi and the paranoid chip by Neal Stephenson. A short story that fits into the Cryptonomicon universe of Stephenson’s books – shares the story of Jipi a former flight attendant who works for Mindshare Management Associates Inc. – an agency that distracts tourists to Manila from the rapid construction work taking place during a China-like economic miracle. Because of her personality, Jipi has to track down errant AI powered car alarms fitted with plastic explosives that were designed to deter thieves, but AI happened. If you’ve ever had to write prompts, you’ll likely appreciate it.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    The fame game

    Rosemary_Smith
    Irish rally driver Rosemary Smith, had the skills but never did get the fame. Smith even got behind the wheel of a Renault formula 1 car to get a test drive at 79 years of age.

    I am by no means a sports addict but even in my psyche I know the names and reputations of several famous sports stars across hurling, gaelic football, motorsports rugby league and even soccer. Sid Lee and Appino have raised the issue of how this fame gap is bridged in women’s sports drive into long term mainstream success. Where is the women’s sport equivalent of Stig Blomqvist, Arnold Palmer or Michael Jordan who are hailed in a similar way? Want to know more, reach out to Rory Natkiel.

    Yes, Christmas really is getting earlier

    He's back from vacation, there are already Christmas decorations and Christmas cookies everywhere

    My local supermarket started to sell mince pies right after the August bank holiday this year. It had Christmas decorations for sale before the Halloween ones. Christmas seems to be coming earlier this year. The Guardian researched how Christmas was arriving earlier each year, from charting music to mince pies and Christmas puddings going on sale. This year lo-fi girl had their first Christmas soundtrack up on November 4th. If you want a change from the Spotify Christmas list, try this old mix from former streetwear boutique The Hideout.

    WARC noted how companies like John Lewis with dedicated Christmas campaigns look to gain a first-mover advantage to aid the talkability around their campaign and gain the full benefit from their emotion driven campaign bedding in and building new memory structures.

    WARC predicted that Christmas advertising spend would rise 7.8% to over £10.5 billion. Big growth for search, online display and out of home compared to last year. The biggest losers including TV, direct mail, magazine and print news media.

    Things I have watched. 

    Famous Hong Kong cinema film director Johnnie To criticised Hong Kong’s national security regulation in an interview for the BBC’s Chinese language service. With that in mind, I thought it prudent to buy up as much of his back catalogue as possible because the classics amongst them may be harder to get hold of in the future.

    PTU – PTU starts in a similar way to Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog with a policeman losing their duty weapon. However that’s where the parallels finish. In Stray Dog the young detective looking for his gun feel empathy at the end with the criminal who used his weapon. The moral being two-fold – crime starts with a few wrong choices, but are still human. In order to deliver law, over time the policeman needs to become less empathetic, losing a bit of their humanity. PTU on the other hand shows how police blurred the line between the law and crime with extra-legal methods to solve crime. It also highlights the complex relationships between criminal gangs and the police. To keeps the tension going with PTU throughout the film. The ambiguity between police and criminals would not be allowed in future Hong Kong films thanks to the National Security laws that have come into force.

    Election – The literal Cantonese title for this film is ‘Black Society’ – which as a term covers all kinds of organised crime groups. Two members of the Wo Lin Shing are up for election become leader (aka chairman or dragonhead) of the organised crime group. It’s a common trope in Hong Kong cinema that these elections happen on a regular basis. Wo Lin Shing is a stand-in name of the very real Wo Shing Wo – a group that have a side hustle doing wet work for the Beijing forces at work in the city.

    The film focuses on the election and immediate fallout. Lok runs a more rational campaign, whereas Big-D runs a showy campaign offering money for votes. The elders appoint Lok and Big-D tries to steal the symbol of power. To moves the tension and action on at a rate of knots. It features many of the heavyweights of Hong Kong cinema including Simon Lam, Louis Koo, ‘Big’ Tony Leung, former policeman Nick Cheung and Lam Suet.

    Not a Johnnie To production, but I have been enjoying Detective Chinatown on Amazon Prime. The show is similar to the BBC show Sherlock and CSI in the way its plot devices and how its story arcs work. It has been interesting to watch for a number of reasons. The series was produced for Chinese streaming platform iQiyi – think Chinese Netflix. The series is based in Bangkok, Thailand. The senior Thai police representative is portrayed as dramatic, volatile and religious in nature – interesting stereotyping by the Chinese production team. The plot line has a very supernatural aspect to it, which is generally considered to be a no-no with Chinese censors. I am curious to see where they take the show.

    Useful tools.

    Mac keyboard shortcuts

    Alongside David Pogue’s Missing Manual series of reference books for each version of macOS, MacMost’s videos are a great resource for the Mac user. MacMost now have a free downloadable table of Mac keyboard shortcuts.

    AI-powered diagram creation

    Ever sat in front of a blank Keynote or PowerPoint slide and wondered how to represent something? I am across the Napkin AI which takes your written text describing something and renders it into a diagram. I don’t use these diagrams as the finished product, but as an inspiration for me then to artwork together in Keynote, OmniGraffle or PowerPoint. You can output from Napkin AI as a PNG file. At the moment it’s free to use as a beta product.

    Woznim

    Woznim allows you to record the names of people and where you met them to try and aid in recall of of them if you run into them again. It reminds me of Foursquare and social bookmarking. Foursquare because of its where 2.0 location based data and social bookmarking because if you develop the Woznim habit it could be life-changing, but if it doesn’t gel with you it’ll be dropped as a service in no time. At the moment it’s an iPhone-only app.

    Bluesky

    Bluesky has been having a moment as another tranche of social media users follow The Guardian’s lead to leave Twitter and need a micro-blogging service. Bluesky has got a good deal of attention because of its starter packs and list features. Whether Bluesky will continue to grow into a vibrant post-Twitter place isn’t certain yet. But if you are going to use Bluesky then these two tools might help:

    • Bluesky tools directory. There is a surprisingly rich set of tools available rather like ‘golden age’ era Twitter.
    • Starter packs. Starter packs are a set of curated recommended accounts to follow based around interests. This site has a large directory of them covering everything from professional interests to sports passions.

    The sales pitch.

    I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from January 2025 onwards; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my November 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into the Christmas season and the rush to complete projects before clients disappear on holiday.

    Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

    Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.

  • Klad + more stuff

    Klad

    Klad is a new trends in illegal drug distribution. Klad sprang out of the online anonymity of the darknet. Breaking Klad: Russia’s Dead Drop Drug Revolution | Global Initiative goes into detail about how the Klad system works. Klad seems to be the narcotics equivalent of an Amazon locker. The customer pays the money via a dark web service and is directed to a concealed geocache with their product in it. These caches are refreshed by low level network members whose soul role is to service the klad network.

    Understanding Russia’s darknet markets and the logistics systems underpinning it offers insight into the future of drug trafficking (and other crimes) worldwide.

    Klad is likely to be further complicated by the tight linkage between the Russian state and international organised crime groups.

    China

    Blackpink’s Lisa ignites controversy on Chinese socials with cabaret performance | Jing Daily – an old article but shows the tension of feminist and male-centric themes, modern mindset versus tradition.

    Consumer behaviour

    The Future of Men from TEDWomen 2017 – by Jack Myers

    Climate emotions, thoughts, and plans among US adolescents and young adults: a cross-sectional descriptive survey and analysis by political party identification and self-reported exposure to severe weather events – The Lancet Planetary Health – more data supporting the idea of climate despair – poor mental health related to concerns about climate change.

    The Game Theory of Democracy – The New York Times – Adam Przeworski developed a theory that democracy is best understood as a game, one in which the players pursue power and resolve conflicts through elections rather than brute force. Democracies thrive when politicians believe they are better off playing by the rules of that game — even when they lose elections as it maximises their self-interest over time. It works when the stakes of power remain relatively low, so that people don’t fear electoral defeat so much that they seek other methods reversing it. Winners of elections need to act with restraint. They can’t make life miserable for the losers, or foreclose the possibility that future elections would allow the losers to win. But recent years suggest that even “working” democracies can be far more fragile than was once believed; Przeworski doesn’t see an obvious way to protect it from being weakened further.

    Using F-word at work is no sacking offence in the north, rules judge | The Times – As rude as the comment was, the so-called f-word had become commonplace “in the public sphere” — and that was particularly the case in the north of England. “Mong” is a derogatory term for someone with a learning disability, especially related to Down’s syndrome, and is also used as a synonym for “idiot”. Shergill was hearing a claim from Robert Ogden, who was said to have made the jibe during an office discussion about doughnuts and losing weight. His colleague was said to have felt “violated and shocked” by the remark and was left in tears before reporting Ogden to bosses, who eventually sacked him. Ogden is now in line for compensation after the judge ruled that his “lawless and toxic” office was rife with similar comments.

    Design

    Ideas We Love: Re.Uniqlo Studio

    Energy

    Norway’s electric car sales set new world record | VoA

    Finance

    Inside Goldman Sachs’ years-long power struggle over its China venture FT – Goldman Sachs had their face ripped off and they are still enthusiastic about the Chinese market. Senior executives gave themselves bonuses while the business shelled out a billion dollars for very little. In addition, looking at market timing it’s unlikely Goldman Sachs will realistically get the kind of returns their shareholders would want ever.

    FMCG

    Starbucks needs to cut the crap from its brand positioning | MarketingWeek – Starbucks is more than coffee. It does have brand appeal. But it’s more basic than its highfalutin mission would have you believe. It’s a combination of being in the right places to answer the right category needs at the right time, with a small but not unimportant wedge of American quality and efficient delivery.

    There is plenty of brand equity in Starbucks, it’s just apparent that Starbucks never actually worked out what it was. Professor Dolly Parton has the best definition for positioning: find out who you are and do it on purpose. To use her analogy, Starbucks never got to first base never mind second.

    Yes, Starbucks grew under Schultz’s second tenure. He was an exceptional leader twice over. However, there was a vacuity within the brand that was palpable when you entered its stores. The commoditisation of Starbucks that Schultz spotted so brilliantly continued, offset by other excellent decisions that kept it growing.

    The brand’s nonsensical mission statement did not harm it. It did not lose the company money. But its fundamental stupidness and overreach meant that the potential benefits of a more prosaic, practical, accurate position were missed. A problem deferred. Contrast with Why am I optimistic about Starbucks China ☕ | Following the Yuan

    Gadgets

    Why has the Internet of Things failed? « Pete Warden’s blog

    Interesting video by The Verge that covers how supply chains are crippling cassette players and compact disc players. Bottle necks include magnetic heads, cassette mechanisms (one factory in China makes a bad dupe of an old Japanese company design), laser pick-ups and compact disc mechanisms have a similar problem. The programme also misses out that the likes of Dolby Labs no longer licence their noise reduction technology.

    Health

    Telehealth’s GLP-1 ‘gold rush’ is powered by these medical groups | STAT News

    Hispanics and Mental Health: Gaming as a Pathway to Self-Care | Ideas Exchange by Klick Health

    Hong Kong moves to restrict business use of medical terms such as ‘treatment’, ‘clinical’ | South China Morning Post – Under the planned ban, which has already been added to the Private Healthcare Facilities Ordinance but not yet enforced, premises other than licensed healthcare facilities or exempted clinics would not be allowed to use terms such as “clinical”, “healthcare”, “medical”, “treatment” and “therapeutic”. Currently, it is not uncommon to see such descriptions used in non-medical settings. An online check by the Post found a gym claiming it could offer “targeted pain treatment” with a procedure called myofascial release. Another centre also claimed to treat various pain conditions “commonly seen in the city” by stretch therapy.

    Hong Kong

    Trump, Harris both like ‘poison’ for Beijing, says former top US envoy to Hong Kong | South China Morning Post – while the story leads on Kurt Tong being the former US consul general – you could rewrite the precise of the article as head of strategic advisory firm advises Hong Kong to employ advocacy tactics to detoxify Hong Kong government reputation in Washington (presumably including lobbying and think tanks).

    Innovation

    Watching Nintendo think out loud about radar and music (Interconnected)

    Marketing

    Great video hosted by Kantar featuring Mark Ritson on the benefits of consistency in brand building. I can’t embed here, you have to go to YouTube to watch it.

    Huddle 001 – Is strategy sick? – Outside Perspective

    Media

    OnlyFans Has Paid $20 Billion to Creators Since 2016, CEO Says | Variety

    Retailing

    Asos CEO ‘not worried’ about Vinted or Shein despite mounting losses | Retail Gazette – interesting. I wonder how the brand building work is going? I have seen lots of ads, but they’ve felt disjointed and flat

    John Lewis partners with Klarna for ‘buy now pay later’ option – Retail Gazette – the middle class now need the digital equivalent of ‘lay away’ – not a great economic indicator

    Security

    Chinese Group Accused of Hacking Singtel in Telecom Attacks – Bloomberg

    Software

    Split mixed tracks with LANDR Stems | SOS – this is huge

    Style

    Kizik Hires Nike Footwear Veteran Andreas Harlow as SVP of Design – Footwear News – moving prior to the new CEO Harlow was responsible for design of the Jordan line of footwear, but makes sense when you read my John Donahue and Nike related post.

    Technology

    She Built a Microcomputer Empire From Her Suburban Home | Every

    Telecoms

    Interesting article on the state of the internet. It looks as if the network might be maturing: Is the (US) Internet Really Slowing? – On my Om

  • Presidential election beliefs

    Why presidential election beliefs as a topic? The US presidential election happened and Democrats are looking at analysing the fallout.

    While it is easy to blame the qualities of the candidates, I wanted to take a look at the presidential election beliefs that underpinned the campaign. The reason why I am publishing a while after the fact is that I wanted the clarity of slower thinking rather than being wrapped up in the maelstrom of analysis, this then naturally took me to analyse presidential election beliefs rather than other aspects of the campaign such as the qualities of the candidates.

    GSFC_20211105_2022-1529-0_090
    NASA/Taylor Mickal

    I think that their campaign was built on presidential election beliefs that would seem foolish in retrospect.

    • Gen-Z would vote Democrat
    • Substance matters
    • Taking the moral high ground
    • Trust in the mainstream media
    • Vibes over policy

    Gen-Z would vote Democrat 

    I won’t get into the debate over how representative and helpful generations are as a descriptor and assume on good faith that this is just short hand for young adults. Evidence would suggest that this belief was untrue in election performance and underlying research available prior to the election.

    Group cohesion scores

    BBH London looked at  TGI’s Jan-Dec 2019 UK dataset, measuring the size of the average majority viewpoint across 419 lifestyle statements.

    As an entire populace, the UK’s Group Cohesion Score is 48.7%. In other words, the average majority opinion is held by 48.7% of the population. …On average, the generations have a Group Cohesion Score of +1.3, making them only marginally more like-minded than the nation as a whole. For Gen Z, this score falls to +0.2. People born between 1997 and 2013 have no stronger connection to each other than to the rest of the country. 

    This viewpoint was supported by a piece of research conducted by Stanford University researchers back in 1998 and presented to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. The researchers found that the beliefs attributed to young adults at the time in terms of cynicism, bleakness about the future and personal unhappiness were actually increasing across all ages – an empirical demonstration of group cohesion similar to the TGI data cited.

    Criteria affecting progressive political themes

    Oxford Analytica published a paper looking at the criteria affecting progressive political themes on a global basis, which had some lessons at a national level as well:

    • Manipulation of religious divisions will prevent an improvement in religious tolerance.
    • Wealthier economies correlate with better support for proactive measures to support women’s rights.

    A comment by Alexander Stubb at the Norwegian Business School struck me about this concept of wealthier economies. President Stubb was talking about struggling to understand Brexit, he recalled a politician commenting on how the UK benefited in terms of GDP, to be interrupted by and event attendee commented ‘Yeah mate, perhaps your GDP, but not mine’.

    What a wealthier economy is, is as much contextual as nation level quantitative data.

    This would probably explain why less well off women didn’t universally rally behind the Harris over Roe versus Wade when they may have been pre-occupied by the impact of inflation on their households.

    It also may partly explain the progressive / conservative political split between the genders highlighted in the FT. A new global gender divide is emerging – documented the split.

    gender split

    Richard Reeves in his book Of Boys and Men highlighted some of the factors driving it that affect the context of a wealthier economy by gender from the gender split in education attainment to better quality social support networks.

    Economically independent women can now flourish whether they are wives or not. Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess. Compared to married men, their health is worse, their employment rates are lower, and their social networks are weaker.

    Substance matters

    I was divided over whether I should include this in the next section as substance and taking the moral high ground seem to be closely paired. I think that this is based on a number of factors:

    • In most careers there is a fallacy where we think others think our work matters more than it actually does in the minds of the general public, the same goes for policy wonks.
    • From the Roman satirist Juvenal discussing ‘bread and circuses‘ to Orwell’s description of the ‘proles’ in 1984 it is obvious that their vision of a general public that want to be entertained rather than informed. The higher role for media exemplified by the likes of John Reith at the BBC is at odds with this reality. This goes hand-in-hand with the power that Elon Musk’s voter registration sweepstakes and Joe Rogan’s podcasts seemed to have; despite them being the antithesis of John Reith’s vision.

    Taking the moral high ground

    The Republican campaign threw out a number of ‘dead cat’ tactics that distracted media, outraged their political opponents and entertained their supporters:

    The average member of the public probably doesn’t care about the high ground. We can see this in marketing history. Going back to Christmas 2016, Poundland’s social campaign around its ‘naughty’ elf on a shelf that outraged the ad industry and regulators at the ASA, received positive responses from the general public online. We see this mirrored in the interests and pleasures of the ‘proles’ in George Orwell’s 1984. Elections aren’t a debate class, but entertainment.

    Trust in the mainstream media

    One of the great differences between the campaign run by the Democrats and their Republican counterparts was the role played by the mainstream media. The Harris campaign relied on institutions like Saturday Night Live and interviews with serious journalists.

    By comparison, Donald Trump gave his interviews primarily with podcasters (though some of those podcasters were faces in the mainstream media before becoming podcasters like Sean Hannity) including:

    • Sean Hannity
    • Let’s Go! with Bill Belichick, Maxx Crosby, Peter King & Jim Gray
    • Brian Kilmeade (Fox Radio podcast show)
    • The Joe Rogan Experience
    • Six Feet Under with Mark Calaway
    • The Dan Bongino Show
    • The Glenn Beck Program
    • Bussin’ With The Boys
    • Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant with Akaash Singh
    • The Ben Shapiro Show
    • The Ramsey Show also syndicated in their clips podcast The Ramsey Highlights
    • The Howie Carr Radio Network
    • Lex Fridman Podcast
    • The Dr. Phil Podcast
    • Shawn Ryan Show
    • This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von
    • The Adam Carolla Show
    • Impaulsive with Logan Paul

    Altogether Trump appeared on 22 podcasts in 2024 alone. Many of them on multiple occasions. If you discount mainstream media programmes republished in a podcast format, Harris appeared less times in less podcasts than her rival. In terms of absolute reach the Joe Rogan Experience is bigger for US audiences than equivalent shows on Fox News. Progressive-leaning TV networks MSNBC and CNN combined are about only half of Rogan’s reach.

    The problem is that trust in mainstream media has declined, at a faster rate than their newer online media rivals according to research conducted by IPSOS. So the Democrats spent time focusing on ineffective media interactions in comparison to their Republican rivals based on presidential election beliefs about the primacy of mainstream media publishers with regards to politics.

  • Layers of the future

    This post about layers of the future was inspired by an article that I read in the EE News. The article headline talked in absolutes: The external power adapter Is dead. The reality is usually much more complex. The future doesn’t arrive complete; instead we have layers of the future.

    GITS 3

    Science fiction as an indicator.

    The 1936 adaption by Alexander Korda of HG Wells The Shape of Things To Come shows a shiny complete new utopia. It is a tour-de-force of art deco design, but loses somewhat in believability because of its complete vision.

    https://youtu.be/knOd-BhRuCE?si=HfIDYsaa7nUZKrYE

    This is partly explained away by a devastating war, largely influenced by the Great War which had demonstrated the horrendous power of artillery and machine guns. The implication being that the layers of architecture assembled over the years had been literally blown away. So architects and town planners would be working from a metaphorical clean sheet, if you ignore land ownership rights, extensive rubble, legacy building foundations and underground ground works like water pipes, sewers, storm drains and cable ducting.

    In real-life, things aren’t that simple. Britain’s major cities were extensively bombed during the war. The country went under extensive rebuilding in the post-war era. Yet even in cities like Coventry that were extensively damaged you still have a plurality of architecture from different ages.

    In the City of London, partly thanks to planning permission 17th century architecture exists alongside modern tower blocks.

    Contrast the blank sheet approach of Things To Come with the immersive story nature of anime Ghost In The Shell; which based its architecture on Hong Kong.

    GITS 2

    You can see a mix of modern skyscrapers, tong tau-style tenements and post-war composite buildings that make the most of Hong Kong’s space. Given Hong Kong’s historically strong real estate marketplace, there are very strong incentives to build up new denser land uses, yet layers of architecture from different ages still exist.

    COBOL and other ‘dead’ languages.

    If you look at computer history, you realise that it is built on layers. Back in the 1960s computing was a large organisation endeavour. A good deal of these systems ran on COBOL, a computer language created in 1958. New systems were being written in COBOL though the mid-2000s for banks and stock brokerages. These programmes are still maintained, many of them still going long after the people who wrote them had retired from the workforce.

    Computer History Museum 10

    These systems were run on mainframe computers, though some of these have been replaced by clusters of servers. IBM still serves its Z-series of mainframe computers. Mainframe computing has even been moved to cloud computing services.

    In 1966, MUMPS was created out of a National Institute of Health project at Massachusetts General Hospital. The programming language was built out of frustration to support high performing databases. MUMPS has gone on to support health systems around the world and projects within the European Space Agency.

    If you believe the technology industry all of these systems have been dead and buried by:

    • Various computer languages
    • Operating systems like UNIX, Linux and Windows
    • Minicomputers
    • Workstations
    • PCs and Macs
    • Smartphones and tablets
    • The web

    At a more prosaic level infrastructure like UK railway companies, German businesses and Japanese government departments have been using fax machines over two decades since email became ubiquitous in businesses and most households in the developed world.

    The adoption curve.

    The adoption curve is a model that shows how products are adopted. The model was originally proposed by academic Everett Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovations, published in 1962. The blue line is percentage of new users over time and the yellow line is an idealised market penetration. However, virtually no innovations get total adoption. My parents don’t have smartphones, friends don’t have televisions. There are some people that still live off the grid in developed countries without electricity or indoor plumbing.

    Diffusion_of_ideas

    When you look at businesses and homes, different technologies often exist side-by-side. In UK households turntables for vinyl records exist alongside streaming systems. Stuffed bookshelves exist alongside laptops, tablets and e-readers.

    Yahoo! Internet Life magazine

    yahoo internet magazine

    Yahoo! Internet Life magazine is a microcosm of this layers of the future co-existence . Yahoo! is now a shadow of its former self, but its still valued for its financial news and email. The company was founded in 1994, just over 30 years ago. It was in the vanguard of consumer Internet services alongside the likes of Wired, Excite, Go, MSN, Lycos and Netscape’s Net Center.

    Yahoo! Internet Life magazine was published in conjunction with Ziff Davis from 1996 to 2002. At the time when it was being published the web was as much a cultural force as it was a technology that people adopted. It was bigger than gaming or generative AI are now in terms of cultural impact. Yet there was no incongruity in being a print magazine about online media. Both existed side-by-side.

    Post-print, Yahoo! Life is now an online magazine that is part of the Yahoo! web portal.

    Technology is the journey, not the destination.

    Technology and innovation often doesn’t meet the ideals set of it, for instance USB-C isn’t quite the universal data and power transfer panacea that consumers are led to believe. Cables and connectors that look the same have different capabilities. There is no peak reached, but layers of the future laid on each other and often operating in parallel. It’s a similar situation in home cinema systems using HDMI cables or different versions of Bluetooth connected devices.