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.

  • Innovation signalling

    What is innovation signalling?

    Innovation signalling has some similarities with its counterpart virtue signalling in terms of authenticity in terms of behaviour and the projected image. An organisation looks to demonstrate its ‘high degree’ of innovation with actions and projects with the external image firmly in mind. There may be an internal learning, or business benefit to this as well, but the image projected is the main objective.

    How to Complete Label’s Fashion Challenge in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

    As I wrote this post a collaboration between Moncler and Adidas dropped putting innovation signalling at its core involving both involving NFTs and AI generated designs and models.

    Open Sea has an NFT where the owner gets a Rolex watch on submission of the NFT. This has since been extended into the US market by CRM Jewellers in Miami.

    AI has its place for instance, simulating and optimising product design based on physical properties. NASA has used AI for just this purpose in conjunction with additive manufacturing techniques for small production runs of parts needed for the space programme.

    It’s not just the luxury sector

    This might read like I have been picking excessively on the luxury sector. I use them as exemplars mainly because their examples are so high profile. But there are examples in other sectors. For instance, Walmart partnering with IBM to use block chain to track individual lettuce heads from farm to customer trolley.

    There were similar partnerships that IBM hatched with Unilever, Nestlé and Dole Foods as well, but the fruits of these projects were not publicised to the same degree.

    You can find similar posts here and this metaverse discussion paper that helps to cut through the blockchain and metaverse hype.

    More information

    Dior takes its Chinaverse presence to new heights with second virtual showcase | Digital | Campaign Asia

    How the metaverse downturn is benefitting digital designers | Vogue Business

    Kim Jones designs skins and vintage car for Dior’s gaming debut | Vogue Business

    Inside The Metaverse Strategies Of L’Oréal And LVMH | The Drum

    Meta’s new digital fashion marketplace will sell Prada, Balenciaga and Thom Browne | Vogue Business

    When it comes to Roblox, Gucci is not playing around | Vogue Business

    Gucci Town Lands on Roblox With Activities and Shopping Experiences – Robb Report and Gucci Cosmos Land brings physical heritage to the metaverse | Vogue Business – on The Sandbox

    VR Experience for Santos de Cartier Launch – Virtual Reality Marketing

    Cartier Plugs into VR to Sell Historical Watch Story to China | Jing Daily

    LVMH’s Arnault is wary of the metaverse “bubble”. Should luxury be? | Vogue Business

    Marni introduces digital fashion with new virtual world | Vogue Business

    Tiffany’s Alexandre Arnault joins the NFT Cryptopunks community | Vogue Business

    Roblox earnings: Why enticing brands is key to the future of the metaverse platform – Digiday

    What fashion week looks like in the metaverse | Vogue Business

    Luxury brands are ditching KOLs for virtual influencers in China: how Alexander McQueen, Dior and Prada are turning to digital avatars and AI idols to woo millennials | South China Morning Post

    An Outfit to Match Your Chain – Google Drive – Highsnobriety has interviews where these intersect with luxury and fashion. It will be probably handy for a couple of client presentations

    NASA Turns to AI to Design Mission Hardware | NASA.gov

    From Farm to Blockchain: Walmart Tracks Its Lettuce – The New York Times

    Walmart and 9 Food Giants Team Up on IBM Blockchain Plans | Fortune.com

  • Technonationalism

    Technonationalism as a term has started to spring up in Chinese policy discussions regarding technology trade with the US and China.

    Technonationalism origins

    Technonationalism is a term used by economist Robert Reich in 1987 to describe the relationship between technology and national security. Reich used the term in an article that he wrote for The Atlantic. It originally referred to the intervention of the Reagan administration in the United States to prevent the acquisition of Fairchild Semiconductor by Japan’s Fujitsu. Reich felt that the Reagan administration mis-understood the the technology problems faced by the US and blocking the Fujitsu-Fairchild deal was the wrong thing to do.

    Fairchild Semiconductor
    Elkor Labs photo of Fairchild Semiconductor exhibition stand.

    The China effect

    In English language usage, it started to be mentioned in publications as far back as 1969 and seems to have had two distinct peaks. The first was from the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union through to 1990. The second peak coincides with China’s rise.

    techno-nationalism

    From a Chinese perspective, strategic conflicts between major powers have revitalised the concept in the international political arena. Of course, this ignores China’s own actions and their perceptions by other countries:

    Today, the competition between China and western democracies is focused on critical materials like pharmaceuticals and a range of strategically important advanced technologies.

    These sectors include:

    • Electric vehicles (or as they are called in China new energy vehicles)
    • Drones, virtual reality,
    • Various type of machine learning ‘artificial intelligence’
    • Big data and data mining
    • Robotics and automation
    • 5G networks
    • The Internet of Things (IoT),
    • Synthetic biology

    This conflict is considered more severe than the US – Japanese semiconductor trade friction of the 1980s. But Japan and the US were largely aligned from a political, defence and economic perspectives during this time.

    The technology related to disputed sectors are seen as key to the next generation of defense systems, industrial capabilities and information power China and western democracies.

    Neo-liberalism & technonationalism

    This implies that economics is an extension of defence rather than completely separate, as implied by the western neo-liberal laissez-faire approach to globalisation. This places company leadership dead set against the wider interest of their own western countries. During the cold war with the Soviet bloc western companies were much better aligned with their country’s interests.

    Palmer Luckey’s Anduril represents a notable exception in Silicon Valley and its attitude is remarkably different to the likes of Apple or Microsoft.

    Post-war Asian miracle model

    While technonationalism as a term was given voice in the mid-1980s, one could consider the directed economy efforts by the likes of MITI in Japan and its counterparts in Taiwan and South Korea as being technonationalist in nature.

    From this perspective, technonationalism played a crucial role in post-World War II economic and industrial policies, fostering domestic industries, promoting scientific and technological innovation. These polices propelled Japan to become a global technological power. Korea took a similar tack with Park Chung Hee’s compact with the chaebols and the Taiwan government was crucial in the roots of Taiwan’s dominance in semiconductors.

    Back to the present

    The current increase in technonationalism by China and western democracies means that international trade in many fields will continue to change due to national security concerns evolve. This is often masked in language such as de-risking, de-coupling and de-globalisation.

    More related content here.

    More information

    警惕日本的技术民族主义

    The Rise of Techno-Nationalism | The Atlantic

    Is ‘Made in China 2025’ a Threat to Global Trade? | Council for Foreign Relations

    Chip War by Chris Miller

    How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region by Joe Studwell

  • MCN

    MCN stands for multi-channel network, these are companies, often based in the likes of China and Japan who actively develop popular influencer channels. They work with influencers to help them improve the quality of their content and then build their audience. In return the MCN gets a cut of the revenue from the influencers channel. In some respects it is similar to the traditional model of record labels, in particular their A&R and ‘plugging’ functions.

    Classic examples of MCN augmented influencer channels

    Li Ziqi (李子柒)

    Sichuan native Li had worked in a number of jobs including being a singer and DJ, prior to returning home to the countryside to care for a sick family member. She initially developed video content to help support the family business selling agricultural produce on TaoBao. Eventually she partnered with MCN Hangzhou Weinian Brand Management to shoot and distribute content. This partnership included building a 17.7 million strong subscriber base at the time of writing on YouTube.

    Li has stopped producing content in 2021 due to a dispute with Hangzhou Weinian, the full details of which haven’t been disclosed.

    John Daub

    Daub is an American living in Japan. He started his career in Japan as an English teacher, settled down and married a local woman with whom he has a child. Eventually John Daub got experience in front of the camera as a reporter for NHK World. NHK World is the Japanese equivalent of the BBC World Service.

    Eventually Daub took his NHK World experience online and create his own content alongside his occasional NHK World presenter work. Only In Japan filmed content around the country focusing on food, technology culture and places to visit. Daub partnered with the WAO Corporation in an MCN style relationship to built a channel called WAO RYU!Only in Japan.

    Daub and WAO parted company in 2020. At the time the YouTube channel had 1.35 million subscribers. WAO has continued the add content to the channel but only managed to grow it to 1.44 million subscribers at the time of writing.

    Daub set up a new channel and an audience of 277,000 subscribers. WAO and Daub’s separation seems to be more amicable than Li & Hangzhou Weinian Brand Management. But if they had remained combined, they would have likely become more successful.

    MCN eco-system in China

    mcn

    The MCN eco-system in China has grown in leaps and bounds. This could be everything from houses of live streamers, that are basically e-commerce sweatshops through to TV programme level productions like Li’s channel content. Live streaming services featuring virtual gifting and e-commerce integration was responsible for that step change between 2018 and 2019. This happened despite Chinese government efforts to ‘purify’ internet content.

    More related content can be found here.

  • Clustomers

    Intuit Mailchimp are brave in terms of the the approach that they take to their marketing and Clustomers is a prime example of this.

    Clustomers is a great campaign that builds on the frustrations that marketers face about segmentation and personalisation of communications. It is fantastically single-minded in its execution, which is what you want in an effective advert. I could have been seen how the rats nest of people could have come across as creepy rather than surreal and the art direction gets the tone right wonderfully.

    But I think that the communications around clustomers to be more nuanced.

    The Clustomers campaign

    The Clustomers advert itself is the first point of evidence I would use is a brand building, distinctly non-personal campaign. The fact that I am writing about it, speaks a lot to its ‘talkability’. It has carved out its own small part of culture.

    It looks to place MailChimp as the marketing technology vendor for start-ups and small to medium sized businesses. But like many political campaigns, it promises a simple solution to a challenge that might be more complex.

    But this isn’t a campaign that will be only seen by the small business owner, or someone with a slide hustle. The message of personalisation might be received, without the nuanced understanding of marketing that MailChimp has demonstrated in the way that they’ve built the campaign. CFOs don’t have a sufficient understanding of marketing to understand this. For many of them it’s just a set of line items on the wrong side of a spreadsheet.

    C-suite misconceptions

    As I’ve said, I think that the message Clustomers gives is problematic in a wider context. A good deal of that problem is down to business founders and the C-suite having fundamental misconceptions on what marketing communications purpose is and how it does it.

    Advertising isn’t fluffy or all about colouring in. It’s a legitimate and important tool for driving business success. The trouble is that CEOs, CFOs, founders and investors sometimes forget that fact. They’re sceptical about advertising at the best of times and often pull the plug when the economy feels wobbly.

    Dr Grace Kite, Marketing Week

    Clustomers fuels a perception that personalisation is the key to marketing and by implication performance marketing is the only marketing required. The reality is more complex. The Ehrensberg Bass Institute’s Byron Sharp talks of ‘smart mass marketing’ and brand building as being the key for the majority of marketing activity in conjunction with personalised communication. The Institute of Practioners in Advertising has been doing sterling work trying to educate the C-suite, but technology specialists like Adobe, Google and Meta have been negating a lot of that good work done.

    Portumna

    Prior to COVID-19, back when I presented a lot more in public I used to present the following slide and when I talked to it I probably reflected some of what MailChimp customers would look for, and was behind Clustomers.

    Portumna is the closest market town to where my family originated. My cousin still works part-time on the family farm. Portumna has been a commercial centre for centuries because of geography. It sits at a strategic crossing of the River Shannon. The Shannon divides the east of Ireland from the west of Ireland and has been a shipping way from centuries past to the present day.

    portumna

    A number of the shops including grocery stores, hardware and farm supplies, the sub-post office and the local pharmacy are family businesses. At least four generations of shopkeepers in the town knew my family and did business with them over the centuries.

    There were life-long relationships formed. When I go home, I am loyal to the grocery store and pharmacy that my Uncle and grandparents used. The shopkeepers understood the needs of relatives who lived in the area and the kind of farm that they ran. The kind of online marketing that clustomers seeks to bring forward, is the kind of relationships that were in place in Portumna for centuries.

    But those relationships were not just about personalised communications. There was a wider cultural context and even ‘brand’.

    • The fact that the family in question had built up trust in the community.
    • That they were known to be ‘respectable’.
    • That they had delivered for my family and people that they new in the past.
    • These brands were local oligarchs. They had one or two competitors at best.

    So the customer mental models around farm supplies, the butcher or the grocer were very strong and constantly reinforced. And this is the kind of stuff that advertising as part of non-personal communications is best at doing.

  • Technopolarity

    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.

    Bremmer, I., Kupchan, C. (January 3, 2022) Risk 2: Technopolar World. United States: Eurasia Group.

    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”

    Colin Kahl, former under-secretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon
    Starlink

    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.

    More related content here.