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.
I saw a LinkedIn post being shared about Cockneycide – the decline of speakers of London’s traditional working class English dialect. Or as it was put to me: Cockneycide describes conscious or unconscious acts that wilfully deny the existence of a cultural group. Disclaimer – I consider it to be an inappropriate use of the -cide suffix, but for the rest of the article I am going to let it stand.
The organisation behind the post on Cockneycide is Grow Social Capital (GSC). GSC is a social enterprise focused on social capital in society and how communities and individuals can increase it. They look at things like the role of record shops as third spaces within their communities.
Are working class people racist?
The train of thought that got to Cockneycide started with an initiative called Cockney Conversations Month designed to celebrate Cockney heritage and pride stumbled upon on anecdotal feedback that some people perceive ‘Cockney’ as being a racist identity.
The media stereotype of a right wing racist in the UK is usually working class heritage and are often portrayed having a Cockney accent. The reality of race and working class culture is more complex as London’s history from the Battle of Cable Street onwards shows.
National Trust Nazis
Oswald Moseley wasn’t working class and neither is Nick Griffin. Secondly, London has its share of what a friend calls ‘National Trust Nazis’. People who look middle class in their Barbour jackets and ‘National Trust’ enamel badges who feel its perfectly acceptable to tell people of colour in West London to go back home from where they came from.
The racist working class stereotype was seen by the group to reinforce discrimination and polarisation as even informing bad policy. One such policy that they consider to be bad is the Mayor of London’s Cultural Strategy which ignored accent bias as well as aspects of London’s indigenous culture. Apparently it doesn’t mention Cockney once.
Systemic working class discrimination?
As described Cockneycide is a microcosm of a wider pattern in the UK. GSC have done some research into identity and accent is bundled into this.
The numbers suggest a decoupling from mainstream culture of working class communities, of which Cockneys could be considered to be one of many alongside Scouse or the different variations on the Midlands accent. There is a decline in across the UK in regional accents being mentioned in printed texts over the past five years. Cockney with a decline of 3% does comparatively well compared to Brummie with a 10% decline and 15% for Scouse.
The factors causing this are likely to be multi-factorial in nature:
A century of mainstream media from the talkies, radio, television and voice services will all have an impact on language. Just in the same way that my childhood Irish accent was ‘run over’ by the Merseyside environs where I spent a good deal of my teenage years
Local population change. Within my lifetime accents have changed in areas were I lived. The small town of Neston on the Wirral used to have locals who spoke with a hint of the Midlands in their accent. Many were descended from miners who had moved up to the town during the 18th and early 19th centuries ago to mine coal seams. A former colleague from when I started work pointed out that the ‘nasal’ Cheshire accent of Ellesmere Port had changed in the space of a generation to a Liverpool accent
There aren’t featured in a positive light in the media, in London or Liverpool there aren’t news presenters with strong local accents. While we are seeing more people of colour represented in the media, there are challenges based on class.
A wider alienation of working class communities by elites. Part of this is down to the academisation of political thought focused on social justice over economics, rather than social justice and economics. Political parties and academics left working class and working poor communities behind way before these communities pivoted more towards reactionary politics
Londoners or cockneys?
I might be considered to be a Londoner. Like just under a third of Londoners, I am not British. The part of my childhood that I spend in the UK growing up was not in London, but I have had my home in London for about half my life now.
The reality is that my identity is complicated and multi-layered. My passport says that I am Irish, my accent is Northern but it would take a discerning ear to place it back to the Merseyside of my teen years where my Irish accent was overwhelmed by the Liverpudlian accents around me. I had a sense of being part of an outside group in Merseyside living in an Irish household and spending the other part of my childhood with relatives on the ‘family’ farm that my cousin now looks after.
I see my accent as something that happened to me like puberty rather than as part of my identity. My accent softened as I worked with colleagues from around the world and even spent time working in Asia.
It has been made clear to me that certain opportunities weren’t available to me due to cultural fit – aka I didn’t sound right, which again emphasised the ‘otherness’ of a perceived working class background.
Have I been in London long enough to be considered a Londoner, let alone a Cockney. Is my identity itself an aspect of Cockneycide?
The new Cockney and Estuary English
A good deal of indigenous Londoners that could have called themselves Cockneys were moved out beyond London in the post-war reconstruction period. There was also continual waves of immigration into London from my own people (the Irish), people from Commonwealth countries and Europe that continues to this day.
As far back as 1995 we were seeing academic literature on the new Cockney and how the accent and identity attached to it evolved. As the population spread out from London, so did the accent, admittedly changing and becoming what David Rosewarne called ‘Estuary English’ in 1984:
a variety of modified regional speech. It is a mixture of non-regional and local south-eastern English pronunciation and intonation. If one imagines a continuum with RP and London speech at either end, ‘Estuary English’ speakers are to be found grouped in the middle ground.
Rosewarne’s point about change and evolution is interesting. Is it an aspect of what GSC consider Cockneycide? As Brexit showed us, more reactionary politics tended to show up in populations who were concerned by the rate of change in their communities. It is also easy to see how Cockneycide could be seen as yet another anti-neo liberal fear of change.
Luxury Stores Across the US Hit By Mass Heists in the Same Week – Robb Report – this sounds like a classic example of steaming. Steaming is a British phrase describing the phenomenon of shoplifting, when a large group of (usually youths) enter a store en masse and engage in shoplifting. Steaming puts a strain on shop security, it often causes panic in the store and creates so many suspects for the police to chase down. For the shoplifters steaming reduces the individual risk of getting caught. In large department stores, steaming becomes easier because of the number of exits. There are usually enough people involved to push past hastily set up security checkpoints during steaming. Young people are particularly attracted to steaming for a couple of reasons:
Low risk, high reward
Low impact of criminal penalties for many depending on their age
Peer pressure from other older members organising the steaming group
When I was in secondary school, we had a trip to Paris. A good number of peers one day engaged in steaming. They managed to make off to a large amount of Lacoste and Sergio Tachini sports clothing which was popular in Merseyside at the time. Steaming was also a central part of football casual culture. Much of the sportswear back in the 1980s were fenced goods. Criminal gangs followed European football games and practiced steaming in the lead up to a match at major department stores across France, Spain and Italy. The items were then sold on to groups of football fans back home through informal networks. What surprised me about this group doing the steaming was the nature of their crime. They were steaming boutiques, which have less entrances and exits than department stores. Boutiques often have queues of people to get in and security on the doors that would be bad for practicing steaming.
So what went wrong with store security to prevent steaming? Has steaming been facilitated by a cut back in security for cost cutting purposes? If so, will insurance companies honour losses incurred through these steaming attacks?
Beauty
Prestige beauty: Inside Unilever’s growth engine | Vogue Business – Dana Kreutzer, project lead for beauty and personal care at US research firm Kline, says the acquisition “demonstrates the company’s focus on expanding its portfolio to include more digitally-led brands and clinical-grade skin care, which is a fast-moving segment in the skincare space”.
Opinion | We Spent a Year Investigating What the Chinese Army Is Buying. Here’s What We Learned. – POLITICO – the Chinese military is “intelligentizing” warfare by purchasing AI systems for all manner of applications, including autonomous vehicles, intelligence analysis, decision support, electronic warfare and cyber operations. At the same time, we found reason to be skeptical of the most ominous predictions about China’s efforts to fully automate warfare through “doomsday”-like weapons. Perhaps most importantly for U.S. policymakers, our investigation into the PLA’s buying habits shows how Chinese progress in military AI is being driven, in part, by access to American technology and capital. Our report highlights the critical role U.S. companies play in supplying China with data, software and funding. This points to serious shortcomings in the U.S. export control system, which wasn’t built to screen the high volume of technology transfer and capital flows into China, and which struggles to distinguish between military and civilian purchasers. Even as the United States attempts to decouple supply chains from China when it comes to American goods, it also needs to consider new strategies to prevent American know-how from inadvertently powering China’s technological advancements
In the Russian Arctic, China treads on thinning ice | China Dialogues – In order to reach its goal of becoming a ‘polar great power’ China will need to lessen its dependence on Russian support and expand its economic and political ties with other Arctic states. This may present Arctic states with an opportunity to set limits on China’s regional influence, but the benefits of any such limitation must be measured against the importance of giving China a stake in the fight against climate change. In the traditionally calm waters of the Arctic, China’s ‘Arctic Policy White Paper’ made much of a splash when it was first released in 2018. The paper showed, as was argued at the time by politicians and pundits, that Beijing would seek to establish itself as a new Arctic power, and in the process deprive the eight Arctic states of their control over the region’s abundant natural resources
Solomon Islands PM Manasseh Sogavare faces calls to resign over China diplomatic ties | South China Morning Post – The protest began peacefully, but schools and businesses were shut by the afternoon as crowds tried to enter parliament demanding PM Manasseh Sogavare step down. Protesters were angry about lack of promised development and the Solomons government’s 2019 decision to cut ties with Taiwan and establish a formal relationship with China – the big question is what will China do to keep Sogavare or his party in power and maintain the status quo?
Secret Chinese Port Project in Persian Gulf Rattles U.S. Relations With U.A.E. – WSJ – U.S. intelligence agencies learned this spring that China was secretly building what they suspected was a military facility at a port in the United Arab Emirates, one of the U.S.’s closest Mideast allies, according to people familiar with the matter
Is the China-Europe Express becoming a political weapon in the hands of China? | RailFreight.com – China launched the Belt and Road initiative with the purpose to enhance Eurasian transport links. It includes Chinese cities, transit countries through Asia and European destinations. Understandably, such a vast investment from the Chinese side, including involvement in other countries’ economies, could constitute a political and economic hazard. Maja Bakran Marcich, the Deputy Director-General for Mobility and Transport at the European Commission, had warned some months ago that good synergies between Europe and China should be characterised by mutual respect and control over the power relations.
It seems that when Marcich was saying that, she had a similar situation in mind. The New Silk Road is a crucial and fast-developing part of the global supply chain, putting rail freight at the forefront of transportation. However, it looks like it has the possibility of becoming a dangerous card on the table of diplomatic and political games. Should China have the liberty of just cancelling Eurasian train services in the name of political disputes? And shouldn’t the New Silk Road focus only on transportation purposes?
Chinese doctors query Beijing’s Covid contact tracing policy | Financial Times – the way that the Chinese government is going about it fits in with the concept of struggle in Stalinist thought. That the struggle is not only done but seen to be done. The doctors challenge therefore represents a much more profound dissonant voice against the CPC than the content in the article suggests. For this reason alone, they’ll likely spend some time down at the local public security office sitting in a tiger chair and agreeing to sign a document apologising. They will also have earned a huge black mark on their credit score at the very least.
Kevin Rudd: “China views the UK as weaker after Brexit” – New Statesman – three core ideological undercurrents that form Beijing’s economic and foreign policy. First, China’s domineering relationship with its neighbours is shaped by its perception that it sits atop a regional hierarchy rooted in its imperial past. Second, the Chinese Communist Party’s Marxist-Leninism results in the dual conclusions that China’s time has come and the struggle between reactionary and progressive forces places China in opposition to the United States. The third undercurrent is national reunification with Taiwan – what Rudd describes as the central organising principle of China’s plans for East Asia first and then globally. Hence China’s work in the Antarctic and inserting itself as an Artic power without any semblance of claims.
China Is Jihadis’ New Target – In early October, an Islamic State-Khorasan bomber killed nearly 50 people at a mosque in Kunduz, Afghanistan. That the militant group claimed responsibility for the attack wasn’t surprising, but, in a worrying new twist for Beijing, it also decided to link the massacre to China: The group said that the bomber was Uyghur and that the attack was aimed at punishing the Taliban for their close cooperation with China despite its actions against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. China was long seen as a secondary target by international terrorist organizations. Groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State were so focused on targeting the United States, the West more generally, or their local adversaries that they rarely raised their weapons toward China, even though they may have wanted to due to, for example, China’s mistreatment of Uyghur Muslims. But in Kunduz, this narrative was brought brutally to a close. China can now consider itself a clear target. – probably more worrying for China is the risk that this kind of action will pose to them in other geographies like the Middle East and Africa and along the parts of the belt and road that go through restive muslim majority regions of the former Soviet Union
Why Is Gen Z Acting Like Boomers Right Now? – Gen Z’s frantic, chain email-flavored TikToks prove naivety and gullibility is ageless. Not surprising given the younger cohorts in the resistor segment of COVID regulation compliance that research by Kings College London found last year.
Chinese parents find new ways to give their children an edge | Financial Times – parents have been seeking new ways to give their children an edge in the cut-throat university entrance examinations. Instead of signing up for foreign language classes, barred by the regulations, parents instead opt for non-core curriculum subjects like art, which are taught in English, says Ekaterina Kologrivaya, co-founder of Edtech Expand, a Beijing-based consulting start-up. Many of the large tutoring companies have closed their physical classrooms, transferring online to save costs. But Beijing barred local firms from hiring tutors located overseas, driving up demand for the depleted number of foreign teachers in China, unable to get into the country due to strict border controls. This has pushed up the prices of classes taught by foreigners, including debate classes, another crafty way for students to master prized English skills while abiding by the new rules
Is China’s catch-up growth over? – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – But all things come to an end. Every other spurt of rapid development has eventually slowed to the stately pace of a mature economy. There are basically two reasons this happens. First, as you build more physical capital — more buildings, roads, railways, machine tools, vehicles — the added output of each new piece of capital goes down, while the upkeep costs just keep rising. This is the basis of the famous Solow growth model, and we’ve seen this happen again and again to fast-developing countries. The second reason rapid growth peters out is that it’s easier to copy existing technologies from other countries than to invent new ones yourself. The real question is when this slowdown happens. Japan’s history provides an interesting example here. Here’s a graph of Japan’s income per capita (at purchasing power parity) as a fraction of America’s: You can see that Japan’s catch-up (at least, post-WW2) really happened in two phases. There was rapid catch-up until the early 1970s, then a few years where catch-up paused, then a resumption of catch-up at a slower pace for about 15 more years. After the bursting of the country’s famous land bubble, its economy actually lost ground to the U.S. (rapid population aging was also a big part of this), and settled in at around 75% of U.S. levels (fairly standard for a medium-sized developed country). Economists have found that this pattern is very typical. In a pair of famous papers in 2012 and 2013, Barry Eichengreen, Donghyun Park and Kwanho Shin found that fast-growing countries tend to slow down when they reach a certain income level – peak China
Finance
The ‘Tesla-financial complex’: how carmaker gained influence over the markets | Financial Times – the real importance and wider footprint of what might be called the “Tesla-financial complex” far outstrips the company’s market capitalisation. This is thanks to a vast, tangled web of dependent investment vehicles, corporate emulators and an enormous associated derivatives market of unparalleled breadth, depth and hyperactivity. Combined, these factors mean Tesla’s influence over the ebb and flow of the stock market is far greater than even its size would imply. It may even be historically unrivalled in its wider impact, some analysts say – is there a market squeeze opportunity? The parallels with Porsche in this regard are striking
Close Reading of the QAnon Shaman’s Conspiracy Manifesto ‹ Literary Hub – the legitimate skepticism inspired by historical events like the assassination of JFK (and the Warren report’s open-and-shut verdict on it) has mutated into a toxic skepticism that is not only hostile to government institutions but has turned on gatekeepers like the press, scientists, and medical authorities, provoking an epistemological duel to the death over facts and alt-facts, truth and truthiness. The effect of these attacks and counterattacks is “mutually assured disqualification,” Bratich argued, in a 2017 lecture, punning on the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. And the effect of that is what could be called epistemological vertigo—the pervasive sense of not knowing how to sort fact from falsehood; of being unmoored from the truth. It’s what makes so many grab onto the reassuringly black-and-white theology of conspiracism. And it is a theology, Manichean in its cosmic struggle between good and evil, apocalyptic in its conviction that we’re living in the end times. “There is a war on humanity, there is a war on religion, there is a war on human assembly,” said Naomi Wolf, on Fox News Primetime. “Big Tech wants to drive everyone indoors and dissolve the bonds between people.” – interesting, though the writer shows their own belief in conspiracy theories
Carbon Counter/EVs: cleaner electricity makes a big difference to emissions | Financial Times – In the UK, US and Germany such vehicles offer large emission reductions of 76 per cent, 60 per cent and 49 per cent respectively when run on the typical mix of power sources in mains electricity. Germany’s poor performance reflects its exposure to dirty lignite and coal as fuels. Hydroelectric-dependent countries such as Norway do strikingly better. However, a much smaller reduction in emissions occurs in China, at less than a fifth. China has the biggest market for plug-in cars. Fully electric vehicles accounted for 9 per cent of its entire market in the first half of this year, more than double the figure for 2019. Every year it adds more solar power capacity than any other nation. But as of November 2020, two-thirds of China’s electricity came from coal-fired generation, says the IEA. China’s huge appetite for coal means it plans to add almost a fifth to its coal-powered generation capacity of more than 1,000GW.
Disney CEO: We’re Ready for a Metaverse Future – The Hollywood Reporter – “Our efforts to date are merely a prologue to a time when we’ll be able to connect the physical and digital worlds even more closely, allowing for storytelling without boundaries in our own Disney metaverse, and we look forward to creating unparalleled opportunities for consumers to experience everything Disney has to offer across our products and platforms, wherever the consumer may be.”
The great resignation was one of the defining terms of 2021. In the wake of COVID-19 vaccinations; resignations in the US ran at a consistently high record rate.1
There is no definitive explanation of why the great resignation is happening. There may be a number of contributing factors:
COVID-19 had temporarily stemmed that natural level of resignations and taking on new jobs in the market. Glassdoor had estimated that there were 3.7 million less people quoting their jobs than their should have been during the COVID period.2
The pressure to return back to the office is driving push back from some employees. For instance, staff at Apple have been vocal about leaving3 and there has been a noticeable exit in staff at Jeff Bezos’ space travel business Blue Origin that CNBC wrote a story about.4
Others believe that the high level of resignations is due to staff burnout.5 As staff quit and businesses work on trying to replace them, this is likely to add additional pressure on employees, particularly in the services sectors.
The first recorded use of the great resignation was a quote from organisational psychologist Anthony Klotz in an article by Bloomberg Businessweek.6
Solving the great resignation
In terms of solving the great resignation, McKinsey is already looking at new models of working for employers to adopt, including flow to work operating models7 that seem to be a tactical way to address talent gaps.
Source: McKinsey & Company
However dynamic talent allocation is more likely to break team and personal bonds; creating added flow to the great resignation in the medium term. More related content here.
WeChatlization is a term that I heard from Xinhua News journalist Wang Zichen. He shared the term on a stream of tweets that I have compiled into a quote below.
If nobody has said this before, I am gonna coin the term WeChatlization: a growing number of Chinese public discourse is increasingly going – firstly if not exclusively – to the WeChat part of the Internet, at the cost of the traditional Google/Baidu searchable World Wide Web.
The numerous and increasing amount of 微信公众号, called by WeChat itself as WeChat “Official Accounts” but in fact WeChat blogs, are gradually eroding the territory of traditional dotcom Internet sites.
WeChat blogs are effectively not searchable via traditional search engines like Google or Baidu. So for the purpose of getting information, one gotta adapt to the change.
Example No.1: the World Peace Forum starting today at Tsinghua University in Beijing doesn’t appear to have an updated dotcom, dotedu, or whatever site, but you will find the list of speakers at their WeChat blog
WeChatlization poses a number of challenges to the rest of the world and the open web. It makes information harder to find than the open web. It cripples opportunities for other Chinese information startups. Its not healthy, but then neither is Meta. Which brings us to our next point WeChatlization isn’t a new phenomenon. Prior to the open web taking hold there were closed communities on CompuServe, Prodigy and even AOL. For the duration of Yahoo! Messenger, there was a vibrant community underpinning the brokerage of oil to fuel ships.
Outside of China you see media and communities that only exist, or publish first on Facebook. This is particularly true for lifestyle as well as current affairs based communities. Both of which are just as opaque to search engines as WeChat. Like WeChat, Facebook’s internal search mechanism leaves a lot to be desired.
Prior to that there was a similar phenomenon with MySpace and Friendster. For many years after its peak in popularity, MySpace still hosted a vibrant community of HR professionals attached to the CIPD.
You seem a similar phenomenon in AltspaceVR, a Microsoft owned VR social network that has hosted in-platform only business conferences. You have had similar kinds of happenings in games like Fortnite and both American electioneering and Hong Kong political protests happened virtually in Animal Crossing.
All of this puts the communities under the arbitrary rules of the platform owner, be it the constraints that support an authoritarian government or a rapacious online advertising model. The ethics challenge the perception of open communications that these platforms allege to promise each other. More related content here.
2008 was the best and worst of times for Chinese brands. The Beijing olympics was supposed to spur national pride. Included in this national pride was pride for Chinese brands – guo chao. Chinese athletics brand Li Ning took centre stage in the opening ceremony, screwing over Olympic official partner Adidas. For other olympics ambush marketing is severely restricted, but this was a national champion in China. Chinese pride usually means someone else’s humiliation, in this case Adidas.
Right after the Olympics in September that year, a major food adulteration scandal became public. Over 300,000 babies were harmed when melamine was added by baby formula. The reason why this was done was to boost its ‘protein content’ in tests. The main brand in focus was Sanlu – a local milk powder brand. Subsequent tests found that adulterated powder had been sold around the world, by multiple Chinese brands.
Chinese consumers hoovered up milk powder all over the world. Several countries and Hong Kong had to limit milk powder purchases, due to Chinese tourists and intermediaries cashing in on the demand for safe milk powder. During 2013, I was working behind the scenes at an agency for FrieslandCampina to try and combat the shortages in Hong Kong. The ban has been put in place indefinitely.
Move forward a decade and guo chao is mainstream
Everything is political, this is even more so in China. With the rise of Xi Jingping he sought to stop Chinese ‘irrational worship of the West‘. There are well loved domestic legacy brands in China, a prime example would be White Rabbit candy.
Guo chao brand ‘White Rabbit’ candy
Along with this inflated Han nationalism has gone a pride in domestic brands. Huawei handsets are as expensive, if not more so than Samsung and Apple – which equated to a perception of similar quality. The fact that Chinese live most of their online lives inside WeChat dulls the difference in software. The operating system is no longer important. This is similar to the vision that Jim Clark had for the Netscape browser. If apps were on the web and ran through the browser, that would negate the stranglehold Microsoft Windows had on corporate and personal computing.
Young adults in China now favour products with Chinese cultural designs and products made in China – guo chao. In one survey 75% of Chinese consumers surveyed state they like products that incorporate Guochao design elements. Design and colour choice is particularly important: doesn’t just mean “made in China” but embracing traditional Chinese elements and inciting national pride. Foreign brands have struggled to maintain market share. Guochao brands have built a good consumer reputation and market share by relying on the advantages of lower price, practical and competitive levels of quality. They have also suffered from the perception of being a copy or imitation of more expensive brands. Domestic brands have managed to use e-tailing to get over established foreign brand advantages in market penetration. More consumer behaviour related content here.
