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.

  • The merge

    I first heard of the merge from Sam Altman’s blog. He said that it was a popular topic of conversation in Silicon Valley to guess when (not if) humans and machines will merge. In a meaningful way rather than just a Johnny Mnemonic-style walking data storage unit.

    When I heard of this definition of the merge, I immediately thought of the digital series H+.

    H+ The Digital Series

    H+ told the tale of a technological hack that killed people by disrupting the implants in their heads. Some of the few survivors were out of cellular network reach in the basement of multi-story car park.

    He went on to explain that it may not be a hybridisation of humans literally with technology but when humans are surpassed by a rapidly improving (general purpose) AI. The third possibility was a genetically enhanced species surpassing humans in the same way that homo sapiens surpassed the neanderthal.

    What’s interesting is that some of the people don’t give ‘the merge’ a name at all. Back during the dot com boom, when Ray Kurzweil published his book Age of Spiritual Machines it was given the name The Singularity.

    Part of the resistance to this established term was that The Singularity implies a single point in time. I don’t think Kurzweil meant it in that way. But its been almost 20 years since I read Age of Spiritual Machines, and I suspect most of the debaters have only read about it from a Wikipedia article.

    Alton points out that in some ways the merge has been with us for a good while.

    The contacts app on our devices and social networks take the place of us remembering telephone numbers. I can remember my parents landline number and the number of the first family doctor that we had. But I wouldn’t be able to tell you my parents current cell phone number; or the number of my current doctor.

    On a grander scale; general knowledge and desire to read around has been depreciated by Google and Wikipedia. Our phones, tablets and laptops are not implanted in us, but at least one of them will be seldom out of reach. I learned to touch type and I am now not conscious of how I input the text into this post. It goes from my thought to the screen. Only the noise of the keys gives away illusion of mind control as I stare at the screen. Ironically voice assistance makes me more conscious of ‘the other’ nature of the device.

    But it no longer just about memory and our personal connectedness of the devices. Our device control us and suggest what to do and when. Social media platform curation affects how we feel.

    As Altman puts it:

    We are already in the phase of co-evolution — the AIs affect, effect, and infect us, and then we improve the AI. We build more computing power and run the AI on it, and it figures out how to build even better chips.

    This probably cannot be stopped. As we have learned, scientific advancement eventually happens if the laws of physics do not prevent it.

    Sam Altman – The Merge

    Innovation often spits out the same process in several waves before it works. Before Siri, Alexa and Google home there was Wildfire. Before Wildfire there were various speech recognition technologies including Nuance for call centres, Lernout & Hauspie, Dragon Systems and Kurzweil Computer Systems. The last two were founded in the mid-1970s. SRI International’s AI research started delivering results in the mid 1960s.

    AI in its broadest terms has gone through several research booms and busts. The busts have their own name ‘AI winters’. The cadence of progress could easily be far slower than Altman imagines.

    One could easily argue that machine learning might run its natural course to technical maturity without much more improvement. Google and other technology companies are basing their work on research done at Canadian universities in the 1980s during an ‘AI winter’ characterised by a lack of basic research funding. Canada continued to support the research when others didn’t.

    Silicon Valley companies not engaging in basic research themselves. As Judy Estrin observed in her book Closing The Innovation Gap back in 2008, Silicon Valley no longer engages in ‘hard innovation’. Without that basic research; a general purpose AI envisioned by Kurzweil and Altman maybe out of reach. Which is why Silicon Valley pundits put the merge as somewhere in a 50-year window.

    Altman also caveats his prediction based on the laws of physics. Aaron Toponce : The Physics of Brute Force provides an idea of the physical limits imposed by cracking cryptography. It would not be inconceivable that a general purpose AI may hit similar challenges. More on machine learning and innovation here.

  • Social cryptomnesia

    Historically, social cryptomnesia has been used as a term to talk about the way movements don’t get credit for societal change. For instance, activists such feminism or the green movement don’t get credit for widespread acceptance of women’s rights or climate change. Instead politicians like Al Gore got the credit. Instead feminist groups and environmental groups are still stigmatised.

    Hong Kong Protests 2019
    Jonathan van Smit – Hong Kong Protests 2019

    The BBC think that ideas espoused by groups like Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion maybe incorporated into mainstream thinking. Even as these organisations are demonised.

    Although most of the discussion about social cryptomnesia revolves around activist groups, I think it’s bigger than that. We can see social cryptomnesia in wider cultural shifts. Hippies were thought of as soap dodgers and weed heads. Yet the values of free love and existentialism defined much of the behaviour change in mainstream society through the 1970s and into the 1980s.

    Long after most punk rockers had shaved out their mohawk and put away their Vivienne Westwood bondage outfits; the DIY entrepreneur ethos lived on in media and publishing. You wouldn’t have had independent record labels, football fanzines or Vice magazine without punk.

    Cryptomnesia is a term for when a forgotten memory is repackaged as one’s own. Think a lot of new age concepts like past lives, memory regression or alien abduction.

    It also happens in more prosaic environments, where a memory is mistaken for an original thought. So when a colleague repeats something you said as their idea, they might genuinely believe its their idea rather than yours.

    There has been a whole body of academic research done into the link between cryptomnesia and inadvertent plagiarism.

    More posts in ‘Jargon Watch‘.

    More information

    Majority and Minority Influence: Societal Meaning and Cognitive Elaboration edited by Stamos Papastamou and Antonis Gardikiotis

    Influence without credit: How successful minorities respond to social cryptomnesia. APA PsycNet

    Cryptomnesia and Plagiarism – The British Journal of Psychiatry

    Cryptomnesia: Delineating inadvertent plagiarism. By Brown, Alan S.,Murphy, Dana R. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 15(3), May 1989, 432-442

    ‘Social cryptomnesia’: How societies steal ideas – BBC Future

  • Dark stores and coercive diplomacy

    I came across a couple of interesting terms recently: dark stores and coercive diplomacy.

    Dark stores

    Gartner for Marketing (formerly L2 Inc.) were talking about a new development at Amazon’s Whole Foods subsidiary. It was what Gartner called digital dark stores. The first one has been established in Industry City to serve much of Brooklyn, New York.

    Amazon themselves called it a ‘permanent online-only store‘ on their blog.

    So whats the difference between dark stores and the ‘last mile’ warehouses that Amazon uses for fulfilment in places like London?

    • Looking at the limited amount of photos available, this doesn’t feel warehouse-like. There wasn’t obvious automation in the pictures. Instead it feels like a supermarket that’s well stocked, but lacking price tags and shopper marketing accoutrements. Gartner describe it as ‘technically a grocery store’, which implies that there might be zoning or planning regulations that they might be working around
    • It is only for the Whole Foods brand; rather than fulfilling Amazon Fresh and Amazon Prime Now items

    This isn’t just an Amazon thing. Gartner points out that American supermarket brands Kroger and Giant Eagle have also embraced the order-only store model. More at Gartner for Marketing here.

    Coercive diplomacy

    The Australian Strategic Policy Institute published a report on September 1, 2020 called The Chinese Communist Party’s coercive diplomacy. It was written by Fergus Hanson, Emilia Currey and Tracy Beattie. Hanson, Currey and Beattie analysed ten years of Chinese government diplomacy. In there words:

    The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is increasingly deploying coercive diplomacy against foreign governments and companies. Coercive diplomacy isn’t well understood, and countries and companies have struggled to develop an effective toolkit to push back against and resist it.

    The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is increasingly deploying coercive diplomacy against foreign governments and companies. Coercive diplomacy isn’t well understood, and countries and companies have struggled to develop an effective toolkit to push back against and resist it.

    This report tracks the CCP’s use of coercive diplomacy over the past 10 years, recording 152 cases of coercive diplomacy affecting 27 countries as well as the European Union. The data shows that there’s been a sharp escalation in these tactics since 2018. The regions and countries that recorded the most instances of coercive diplomacy over the last decade include Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and East Asia.

    There seems to be an escalation of economic and non-economic measures deployed. Economic measures would include:

    • Trade sanctions – such as the recent ban on German pork products. This was rolled out just a few days in advance of a trade negotiation meeting between China and the European Union
    • Investment restrictions in strategic industries such as the ‘agreement‘ that Yahoo!, Softbank and Alibaba had over Alipay (which included what would now be Ant Group). Strategic industries like state security is notoriously (and deliberately) ill-defined in China
    • Tourism bans
    • Popular boycotts such as Korean corporate Lotte being driven out of China and the 2012 anti-Japan protests where the public smashed Japanese stores, attacked factories and burned Japanese cars

    Coercive pressure is also applied at below state level on businesses. It may also be applied on individuals, based on the data leak provided from Zhenhua Data seems to imply.

    Non economic measures include:

    • Arbitrary detention. The best example of this would be Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor detained as part of China’s dispute with Canada. Another example might be Australian citizen Karm Gilespie. China didn’t admit it had detained him for over six years, until they announced his death sentence in the summer
    • Restrictions on official travel
    • State-issued threats which are usually issued on a regular basis as part of wolf warrior diplomacy. (Wolf Warrior is a set of two films with a Chinese action hero, a la Rambo – but with less humour).

    Some of the imputus for coercive diplomacy might come from the Chinese Communist Party’s continued rancour over Qing dynasty-era unequal treaties. More China related content here and more on retailing here.

  • Orchestrated media

    I decided to revisit the idea of orchestrated media recently. I had been working on the SEO of a post from 2011. This post linked out to an article by BBC research and development on orchestrated media.

    Picture of a test card from CCTV in Beijing
    Test card from Chinese public broadcaster CCTV.

    The BBC where aware that media consumption had become more complicated. Attention whilst watching the TV at one time competed with the occasional trip to the kettle; or flicking through a newspaper that was to hand but otherwise undivided. What became the TV changed with the advent of content distributed over internet connections to the web and mobile devices. But it wasn’t only about the proliferations of screens, but also how it interplayed with other media.

    It doesn’t necessarily imply simultaneous consumption of content via these different media forms. Nor does it imply the consumed content is related across the screens (e.g. an audience member may be using Facebook or Twitter for a completely unrelated purpose, while paying less attention to the TV show).


    Thinking in those terms is perhaps unnecessarily limiting in scope and misses the broader picture around the opportunities of social media, creating more seamless media experiences, and how these flow from home environment to beyond.

    Jerry Kramskoy on the BBC R&D blog on ‘orchestrated media‘

    This gives marketers a number of interesting things to think about. When is TV not TV. Think about live event programmes like The Apprentice or Britain’s Got Talent where social acts a ‘giant sofa’ as viewers share their opinions on what they see on screen. Twitter has tried to tap into this link between TV and discussion in its marketing efforts.

    As broadcasters, the BBC started to think of the potential in a two-way conversation that was far more democratic than SMS polling, email or letter bags and phone-ins.

    Orchestrated Media (OM)to refer to this experience of interaction, synchronisation, and collaboration of programme and companion content across devices. OM creates a new form of audience engagement with the broadcaster. Let’s start with some high level goals

    • Enable interactivity around the content (voting, games) and synchronisation thereof, based on time and/or events (such as a producer-console triggered “button push”)
    • Enable richer exploration of programme
    • Enable social network interactions through sync-related information and content identifiers for replay purposes
    • Migrate content between the TV and mobile devices (such as a load-and-go service that runs overnight to load the mobile with video corresponding to the unwatched portion of a program, or a resume-for-home service that picks up viewing on the TV from where it left off on mobile)

    Some of the necessary components in reaching these goals include
    • Visual feedback of shared interactions on TV screen
    • Private interactions on mobile screens
    • Support for not only live experience but also time-shifted and on-demand and pay-per-view ones
    • A back-channel to broadcaster for interactions, behaviour etc
    • Audio for different languages, directors commentary, clean audio etc, selectable per individual, synchronised to the programme
    • Accessibility for all above
    • Application life-cycle and runtime management

    Orchestrated Media – beyond second and third screen (II)

    This seems to be aimed to provide a seamless anytime, everywhere experience. Think of the way services work in the background as part of Apple’s ‘Continuity’ service layer. As marketers, if we’re thinking about an orchestrated media landscape, how do we hand off between channels and provide prospective customers a similar kind of seamless experience. How do we manage long term and short term attribution and feed these insights into proportion of media spend?

  • Yellow economic cycle

    The yellow economic cycle has manifested itself as a positive boycott.

    The anti ELAB protest movement in Hong Kong exposed the fracture lines between pro-Beijing (blue) and pro-Hong Kong sides (yellow). Some of Hong Kong business community came out and criticised the protestors. This resulted in consumers boycotting their business.

    Maxim’s

    The classic example of this was when Annie Wu criticised Hong Kong protestors. Wu’s father James co-founded Maxim’s Caterers Limited. Maxim’s is has a wide range of restaurants for all budgets. It also owns bakeries, provides catering for universities and businesses. Maxim’s even has a joint venture with Starbucks. Starbucks coffee shops in Hong Kong and southern China are run by this joint venture called Coffee Concepts.

    Mainland businesses, especially Chinese state-owned enterprises like China Mobile and Bank of China were defaced by protestors. McDonalds restaurants in Hong Kong and China are majority owned by CITIC – a Chinese state-owned investment company.

    Garden Bakery

    Garden Bakery’s Life bread ended up becoming a yellow brand by default when it was criticised by members of the Hong Kong Police. Hong Kong protestors rallied around and even brought along loaves to demonstrations.

    #AnywhereButChina Challenge

    Consumers bought everyday products that weren’t made in China and shared the product and its country of origin online. This becomes quite tricky as products from western brands like Wrigley chewing gum or pair of Nike sneakers could be made in China.

    It’s particularly interesting as it raises questions about long term perception of quality. Back before the protests when I was living in Hong Kong LG and Samsung smartphones being sold advertised with pride that they were made in Korea. It was a similar story with high-end Sony TV sets. #AnywhereButChina channels China’s political and quality related issues in one meme.

    Solidarity with their customers

    Many small businesses in Hong Kong started to do what they could for their young customers. And the customers paid them back with loyalty. By trying spend their money only in yellow businesses and avoid blue ones by creating a yellow economic cycle.

    Yellow economic circle

    Online assets were created to point customers in the right direction. Here is one of the posters that have been circulating on Twitter. The use of QRcodes is much more common in east Asia than Europe. The code takes you through to a Google Maps overlay of Hong Kong featuring Yellow businesses which would be preferable to shop and eat at. Green businesses which are preferable to blue businesses. Blue businesses will be avoided wherever possible.

    Reviews of yellow shops and restaurants on review sites like Open Rice have been poisoned by pro-government supporters placing bad reviews and protestors piling in to defend their yellow economic circle members. At its worst, even the most hardened Wikipedia editor would be daunted by the pitched battles going on.