Ged Carroll

Category: jargon watch | 術語定義 | 용어의 정의 | 用語の定義

Jargon watch as an idea was something that came from my time reading Wired magazine. I found that in my work terms would quickly spring up and just as quickly disappear. So it made sense to capture them in the moment.

The best way of illustrating jargon watch is by example. I came across the term black technology through mainland Chinese friends. One of the key things that Chinese consumers think about technology products is the idea of ‘black technology’. This makes no sense to your average western reader. It equates to cool and innovative.

The term itself comes from a superior technology featured in a Japanese manga series plot. As an aside the relationship between Chinese and popular Japanese culture is becoming increasingly attenuated due to Chinese nationalism.

What might be black technology this year might be humdrum in six months as the companies quickly catch up. Black technology is a constant moving target, but generally its sophisticated and likely has a cyberpunk feeling to it.

I keep an eye out for jargon like this all the time, hence jargon watch. I find this content in my professional reading and in the sources that I follow online. What makes something worthwhile to appear here is purely subjective based about how I feel about it and how much I think it resonates with my ideas or grabs my attention. A lot of British youth culture doesn’t make it because it doesn’t have that much of an impact any more beyond the UK.

  • Green fatigue

    Green washing to green fatigue

    The idea of green fatigue encouraged me to reflect on FMCG marketing in the 1980s. In the late 1980s we’d started to see mainstream brands selling ‘green’ products: washing-up liquid and clothes detergents that were more friendly to the environment. Concerns about phosphate-based detergents in water supplies, organo-lead compounds in petrol and the effect of chloro-fluoro carbons on the ozone layer drove a wider consumer awareness of the environment setting a zeitgeist that was ripe to sell more environmentally conscious fast-moving consumer products.

    Sales of these products dropped as the recession changed consumers focus from being environmentally responsible to paying down personal debt and worrying whether they would have a job next year.

    Ipsos research

    According to Ipsos as reported by Le Monde; an increasing number of consumers feel ‘too much is being done about climate change‘. A combination of ‘green wash’ products.

    Green conspiracy

    It was interesting to see that environmental groups seen to be part of a green conspiracy (just look at your typical Greenpeace campaign and it kind of makes sense). Greenpeace themselves have admitted that they won’t let the truth get in the way of their campaigns. They have also ran some questionable lobbying campaigns in Africa as documented by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Manifesto.

    They also have a feeling that consumers greening efforts don’t move the needle in the first place. Le Monde describes this as green fatigue. Again a good deal of this is down to the nature of the way green campaigning is delivered. What is less apparent is whether there is a wider political aspect to this. Is there a fundamental divergence in values from the progressive consensus around globalist responsibility for climate change?

    More related content can be found here.

    More information

    It Ain’t Easy Being Green: First Signs Of Eco-Fatigue – WorldCrunch in partnership with Le Monde

  • Innovation starvation + more news

    Innovation starvation

    Innovation Starvation | World Policy Institute – in his article Innovation Starvation author Neal Stephenson talks about the decay of innovation in the west. Innovation starvation is about an inability to get big things done – I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy, and the computer to name only a few. Scientists and engineers who came of age during the first half of the 20th century could look forward to building things that would solve age-old problems, transform the landscape, build the economy, and provide jobs for the burgeoning middle class that was the basis for our stable democracy. Innovation starvation has multiple causes from a research mythical man month type problem due to increasing specialisation, lawyers, search engines, pressure groups and activists have a lot to answer for

    Economics

    More Conflict Seen Between Rich and Poor, Survey Finds – NYTimes.com

    Hong Kong

    China denounces ‘Hong Konger’ trend – The Washington Post

    How to

    Use the Ten Second Rule to Cut Impulse Purchases

    Innovation

    New details surface on the UPU: A next-generation CPU architecture | ExtremeTech

    [CES] Sony Develops Self-luminous ‘Crystal LED Display’ — Tech-On!

    Japan

    What’s happening in Japan right now?: Social Games in Japan – interesting that this is part of mobile gaming

    The Myth of Japan’s Failure – NYTimes.com

    Korea

    Samsung Merging Its Bada OS With Intel-Backed Tizen Project – Forbes

    Luxury

    What Luxury Brands Should Learn From Dolce & Gabbana’s Hong Kong PR Disaster – Forbes

    Media

    Microsoft hits pause on web TV service because shows cost too much – SplatF

    TVShack Admin Fights Extradition To U.S. On Movie Piracy Charges | TorrentFreak

    CES: Survey Finds Traditional TV Viewing Is Collapsing – Forbes – this is more about more personal, less social (within the family) media consumption and also consumers are exhausted by TV innovations that don’t matter. I still rock a Sony Trinitron from the late 1990s

    Online

    Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998 – Paul Graham on what the web used to look like when I first started off in agency life. The site looks curiously mobile friendly!

    Security

    Under voter pressure, members of Congress backpedal (hard) on SOPA

    Cars: The Next Victims of Cyberattacks – IEEE Spectrum – if this doesn’t scare the bejeezus out of you, it should

    Wireless

    Apple Suspends iPhone 4S Sales in Mainland China Stores – NYTimes.com

    CES 2012: Mr. Elop makes bold statements about Nokia in the Windows Phone space | ZDNet – ok what is important here is what Elop isn’t saying. No real reasons around Android and they seem to be having a problem building an on ramp that gets their ecosystem to support them

    Groklaw – Nokia Moves To Quash Barnes & Noble’s Letter of Request the ITC Sent to Finland Re Discovery ~pj – oh dear, sounds like Nokia and Microsoft have been caught looking a bit shady. Even if there is nothing here, it feels like there is which isn’t good from a reputational point-of-view

    Microsoft, Defying Image, Has a Design Gem in Windows Phone – NYTimes.com – this looks like a classic bit of PR-led storytelling – where you give the journalist the bread crumbs that lead him to the story you want to write. The most interesting bit of this is Microsoft  (whom I presume was the client) was willing to throw its other partners such as HTC and Samsung under the reputational bus to big up Nokia. Yet a lot of the hardware issues are due to Microsoft dictating specs to the hardware manufacturers.

  • Workampers

    The Wall Street Journal had an article that introduced me to the idea of workampers. The article was on the seasonal workers that Amazon.com uses in the US to help it with the surge in demand in the run up to Christmas.

    Who were these elves to Amazon’s Santa Claus?

    The article describes them as workampers. Older retired people who live a transient lifestyle by choice in an RV (recreational vehicle) for at least part of the year.
    CIMG1091
    Their motivations were diverse in nature. Some of the workers are similar to their ancestors during the Great Depression, who moved across the country following work were it was available.

    For others the reasons are diverse, from money to help with expenses to camaraderie with similarly nomadic peers or proving to themselves that they could still hack a task. A mix of forced earlier retirement and improvements in health mean that many seniors still have decades of potential work still in them that they want to take advantage of.

    A mix of ageism and globalisation have meant that there is a growing body of workampers. Future workampers might be in a worse financial state due to less generous pensions and health insurance, higher personal debt and automation. The move to a lower carbon economy will also impact the ability of a workampers to live out of an RV and transverse large distances at a reasonable cost.

    Workamper futures

    With an aging population and the decimation of working class communities due to the opioid epidemic we are likely to see more demographics like workampers as companies adapt to tap into an older work pool. With Amazon in particular, one has to wonder if more of their warehouse and logistics work can be automated and how it will be affected by a low carbon future.

    More explanations of of jargon terms can be found here.

    More information

    Seasonal Amazon ‘Workampers’ Flock to Remote Towns for Temporary Gigs – WSJ.com (paywall)

  • Systeme D

    According to Foreign Policy, the D in Systeme D comes from the French word débrouillard which is used to describe people who are ingenious or resourceful. In the Francophone companies being resourceful means operating outside of proscribed government regulation and bootstrap entrepreneurship hence, systeme D. Back in France, this might have been applied to people smuggling in a new fangled personal computer into the workplace.

    Foreign Policy writer Robert Neuwirth argues that this grey economy exists across the developing world and has been driving economic activity from Chinese factories to African bazaars. Back when I was first visiting Hong Kong, there was a stream of west African business people travelling to Hong Kong. They would go to Chungkung Mansion. Buy a suitcase full of electronics (predominantly cellphones)  and then get a flight home. 

    There was then larger scale players based in Shenzhen and Guangzhou buying product. They then either supplied the merchants of Chungkung Mansions or shipped product home by the container load. Who knows what would happen with the customs in their destination country. Systeme D often relies on the kind of manufacturers relying on shanzhai style innovation. 

    Whilst this black economy would be seen as detrimental in developed countries due to it undermining a system that broadly works (look at the Greek government’s problems with non-payment of taxes). In developing countries where governments are less likely to be looking out for their citizens interests – so the black economy can be considered to be having partly a positive impact.

    The latest trend is that a lot of mainland Chinese people who have worked on infrastructure projects in Africa staying behind and becoming merchants, cutting African entrepreneurs out of the Systeme D model. There are well over a million of these Chinese entrepreneurs now doing business across sub Saharan Africa.

    More information

    The Shadow Superpower – By Robert Neuwirth | Foreign Policy

  • Dealer chic

    If the working class and the lower middle class are worried about financial security with trends like extreme couponing; the upper-middle classes are also interested in the thrill of a good deal with the changing economic environment a distant secondary motivator. With this in mind Trendwatching talked about dealer chic; reading their profile its almost as if they are thinking about their lifestyle in business terms. Looking for:

    • Increased efficiency – getting more for less – the buzz of a bargain
    • Value add – provided primarily through an improved experience

    Dealer chic is supposed to be caused by a move towards perfect markets – the use of reviews and comparative pricing facilitated by the web parallels the kind of techniques that procurement professionals would use. It also echoes the promise of disintermediation that web 1.0 was supposed to bring use with the first generation of shopping comparison sites in the late 1990s

    A more worrying by-product of the dealer chic trend is that brands are increasingly commoditised and access to mobile devices have accelerated the consumer buying process by providing them with the necessary research and the opportunity for instant gratification – potentially having a micro-chunking time effect on the timings and tweaking of pricing strategies.

    It means that luxury goods are seen as an asset class. This will mean an acceleration in price appreciation, but in order for luxury brands to benefit they will need to get involved in running pre-owned platforms. They can add value in validating each and every item, for a commission. 

    The space won’t be uncontested. You have established players from eBay and Yahoo! Auctions to Japanese retail brands like Brand-Off are already in this space. The Japanese have built up a formidable opportunity

    More information

    Trendwatching | dealer chic – find out more about dealer chic and sign up for Trendwatching’s free email newsletters