Ged Carroll

Category: meme | 模因 | 밈 | ミーム

We think of the meme now as the lowest form of culture of a standard trope that is used to explain a situation by shorthand, but the reality is more complex.

The text book definition of a meme would be an idea, behaviour, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. Richard Dawkin coined the word meme in his book The Selfish Gene, I have also heard the concept articulated as an idea virus.

So that would bring in things in everyday life that you take for granted like the way we tie up shoelaces. People who have been in the military tend to use a ‘ladder approach’ versus going criss-cross.

Its what can bind tribal affiliations together. Many people support the same sports team as the people around them such as neighbours, peers or friends and family. The initial choice about the team to support is memetic in nature.

Memes have moved beyond being an analogy to being a badge of belonging and even the lingua franc itself. If one looks at 4Chan’s /b/ channel mostly consists of anonymous users bombarding memes at each other. Occasionally there will be a request to customise a meme image from a user and the community piles in.

Memetics became a formal field of academic study in the 1990s. The nucleus for it as a field of study was Dawkins books and a series of columns that started appearing in the Scientific American during the early 1980s by Douglas Hofstadter and Media Virus by Douglas Rushkoff.

  • Generations or life stages?

    Generations or life stages? – Why am I asking this as a question? I’ve had a bit of time to think about consumer behaviour. At the moment you can’t throw a stick without hitting ‘an’ expert in at least one of three generations:

    • Gen-Y or millennials
    • Gen-Z
    • Gen-A

    There are older generations that also exist but are only mentioned in passing:

    • Gen-X
    • Baby-boomers
    • Silent generation
    • Greatest generation
    • Lost generation

    The principle behind this is that each generation would relate to the world in different ways. The implication is that each would require different marketing considerations radically different to anything that has come before.

    This lens has a number of results:

    • It encourages marketers to segment markets in certain ways. This facilitates marketing assumptions that are unhelpful
    • It continues marketing focus on a set age group, rather than mining a portfolio for lifetime spend
    • It feeds into a wider marketing culture of ‘disruption’ that can be unhelpful

    A history lesson in generations

    Generational labels seems to have been started in journalistic essays. These essays tried to convey common experiences. For instance, the sense of loss and dislocation that many felt after fighting in World War 1.

    The massive scale of the war meant that armed service touched more people. Over time they have been used to illustrative effect by governments, media and business.

    Generations

    This has meant that generations varied in length. I reviewed a raft of reports and media coverage and found that from Gen X onwards there has even been an variation in definition of what the generational length was.

    Over time an industry of journalists and consulting firms has been built up. They point out the various flaws that are supposed to characterise each generation. They point out to company boards how their businesses will be disrupted if they don’t change the way they do business to meet the needs of a generation. This consulting mirrors the way consultants have preached a similar disruption message around different aspects of digital transformation and requires a regular cyclical refresh.

    Is this a deliberate ruse? Probably not, but book publishers need books and consultants need to bill. Both of which are insatiable machines that require a ‘new, new thing’.

    A final factor to consider in defining generations. Historically the definition of generations has been done with a global north, western-centric lens. If you look at markets like China the differentiation tends to be done in decades: post-90s generation, post-80s generation and so on.

    Now, we’re in a time period where the bulk of young people are going to be born in the global south. There is likely to be emigration north for economic opportunity. There is likely to be a corresponding need due to population decline in developed nations. A trip to Tokyo or London already shows the impact of this. From nurses and care home workers to combini staff and baristas; many of the workers are young and foreign. A global north, western-centric lens makes even less sense.

    Period trends and generation trends

    One of the things that the generations stereotypes can blind marketers to is cross-generational trends within a period of time. One of the stereotypical characteristics that Gen X was labelled with was cynical. Researchers found that Gen X did exhibit higher levels of cynicism than previous groups of 18 – 29 year olds.

    But Stanford University took the research one step further and looked the accuracy of this cynical label. What they found was that all generations at that time were exhibiting higher levels of cynicism. It was a period trend rather than a generational one. As a marketer, that might have a huge implication in the way you deliver messages beyond Gen X.

    What are the causes of this increase in disaffection? “Media commentators may be right in emphasizing the malaise-inducing effects of ‘historical underdosing’,” the researchers said. The term refers to the belief that history has come to an end, with such institutions as the family and government becoming ever more corrupt and exhausted. It suggests that the great regenerative struggles of the past, such as civil rights and feminism, have already been fought, and all that is left is the winding down and decay of present institutions. “Generation X commentators have, however, glossed over the possibility that such disaffection can just as easily affect older folks as younger ones. If anything, older individuals are especially vulnerable to romanticizing the past and thus becoming disaffected and disengaged with the present,” Grusky said.

    Oldsters Get The Gen X Feeling | Sci Gogo

    David Grusky, one of the two Stanford sociologists who conducted the study highlighted some great actionable insights that marketers at the time could have used when targeting older market segments. Unfortunately, the Gen X = cynical impression stuck, marketers failed to ask the right questions and got the wrong heuristic.

    Grusky’s work and the rise of social media adoption across all age groups does make me wonder about Gen Y’s reputation for narcissistic behaviour – when we could be living in a more narcissistic time.

    Unhelpful stereotypes

    Stereotypes are heuristics that help us make sense of the world. If we constantly had to analyse everything, we’d have been eaten by large predators whilst in a state of analysis paralysis. In a resting state our brain accounts for 60 per cent of our body’s glucose consumption. So anything that can drive energy efficient actionable insight would make evolutionary sense.

    It is unlikely that the modern marketer will be eaten by a pack of ravenous wolves. Yet stereotypical heuristics will make their way into the decision making biases of marketers and their management teams.

    Generational labels lend themselves to stereotypes and some of the biggest of them are questionable at best.

    • Boomers are selfish and don’t care about the planet. The publication of Silent Spring by biologist Rachel Carson, could be considered the point at which the modern environmental movement was born. Counterculture figure Stewart Brand lobbied for the release of the iconic ‘blue marble’ whole earth in space photo by NASA which galvanised the environment movement. His Whole Earth catalog series also went on to influence the ‘back to the land’ counterculture movement that sprang out of hippydom. It is no coincidence that groups like Greenpeace and Friends Of The Earth were founded around this time. The first Earth Day happened in San Francisco in 1970. As the counterculture movement went around the world in the early 1970s, so did green-orientated political parties. Without Boomers there wouldn’t have been an environmental movement. Extinction Rebellion (XR) stands on the shoulders of direct action groups like the Greenham Common women and Greenpeace. There is however, anecdotal evidence to suggest that public interest in environmental issues dips during an economic recession and this seems to have been the case after the 2008 financial crisis.
    • Gen X are slackers. They came into a world that had much less economic opportunities than their parents generation. The lack of balance in corporate culture was as unattractive to young Gen Xers as it was to Gen Y and Gen Z first jobbers. As outlined earlier, the move to deregulation and globalisation led to increased cynicism thoughout generations at the time when Gen X entered adulthood. Yet on the flipside, their entrepreneurship has been lauded over the years. Though often that entrepreneurship was forced upon them as industries globalised. It is interesting to see how the slacker label moves. The lying down movement in China amongst new graduates and 20 somethings sounds very like ‘slacker culture’
    • Gen Y are tech savvy, demand work life balances and are narcissistic in nature. Pew Research indicates that Gen Y do indeed adopt smartphones and tablets, but despite the research article headline of Millennials stand out for their technology use, but older generations also embrace digital life – the difference with Gen X is just three percent in terms of smartphone usage and tablet usage is broadly comparable across generations
    • Gen Z are digital natives and are socially conscious. A classic example of how the truth is more complex and nuanced than this is a recent Kings College London research done into UK attitudes and behaviours towards COVID-19. In it is a group called resistors. They buy into the fake news around the virus, are more likely to violate the lockdown regulations and the majority are in the 16-24 year old category.

    Massively parallel cultures

    Cultural movements used to align in a serial manner to moments in time and space. There was a serial progression as one cultural movement was created in reaction to; and on the legacy of another.

    The nature of media and connection changed with technology. Cheaper air fares mean’t that the world has become much more accessible. I am not saying that it is cheap to fly to Australia, Japan or Brazil – but it is cheaper than it was. In my parents life time in Ireland, families and friends used to hold a wake for members of the community emigrating to the United States or Australia.

    The reason for the wake was that the distance was only likely to be bridged by the occasional letter and post-departure it was unlikely that they would be seen again.

    Media is no longer something that has a time slot like the morning paper, drive time radio or prime time TV; but a membrane that surrounds us. It is in our pocket with us everywhere. We are the media; we have a portable broadcast studio of sorts in our pocket and the means of transmission.

    To give you an idea of how revolutionary this concept is, here’s a clip from Back To The Future which was released as a film in 1985. Note the sense of wonder that the 1950s era Doc Brown has when confronted with a 1980s vintage JVC camcorder.

    Victor legendary video camera
    The iconic JVC GRC-1 camcorder. It is branded Victor for the Japanese domestic market.

    The Victor / JVC GRC-1 camcorder had been launched the previous year and was the first all in one VHS camera and recorder – so at the time of the film release this was still cutting edge stuff.

    The ‘Mondo‘ series of documentaries shocked and thrilled audiences with practices from around the world that would have seemed fantastical. At least to the average member of the public in the Italy of the directors, or mainstream audiences in the US. As the introduction to the English dub of the film says:

    Intro to Mondo Cane

    By comparison e-commerce and websites allow us to sample culture and products from around the world. You have access to Korean dramas and beauty tips, vintage Hong Kong movies, Brazilian funk carioca music from the ghettos of Rio De Janeiro or Chinese rap. The web isn’t a perfect memory, content disappears or often never gets seen.

    Content is often mediated through algorithms governing e-commerce, search and social platforms. But despite those impediments; culture evolves and morphs in a massively parallel way. Which makes a mockery of generational stereotypes.

    Consumption is becoming an attenuated concept

    Part of the focus on generations is due to a focus on grabbing early life time spend. Brands want to get consumers as young as possible. An oft-mentioned heuristic was that half a consumer’s spend was done before they reach 35. There are a few things wrong with this approach:

    Marketing science research has shown that consumers are brand promiscuous. Light consumers are more important for brand sales than heavy consumers. So an exclusive brand building focus of going after young consumers like a game of ‘capture the flag’ isn’t the most effective approach.

    We also know that there are a number of factors attenuating consumption patterns and spend along the generations so a youth focus makes less sense:

    • Older people tend to have more assets and the ability to spend. This is due to property prices, historic performance of pension investments, life insurance policies and a lack of student loans
    • Earning power in real terms has been declining over time. Taking into account a parity in education and inflation; boomers earned more than gen x, who in turn did better than gen y. Gen x managed to keep ahead of boomers only by having both partners in a marriage go out to work, to compensate for the man’s reduced earning power
    • Younger people are having to spend a larger degree of their income on somewhere to live. Student loan repayments creates an additional drag on their income
    • People are delaying life stages like marriage later due to the financial burden and have been having less children in most of the world
    • People are acting younger for longer and this reflects in their consumption patterns. Part of this is down to ageism in the employment market and part of it is down to them continuing to do what they love. I know Dads of college age kids who still skate or do martial arts. I know pensioners who love to buy lip gloss. An exception to consumer attenuation is the luxury sector. Luxury consumers have become younger, but that is also because the centre of gravity in luxury has shifted from US consumers to east Asia. Scions of first generation entrepreneurs from China, Korea, Singapore and Malaysia are not afraid to embrace their affluence

    Life stages rather than generations

    Culture is very important in making brand messages resonant. Culture is also adrift of generational labels. It is ethereal and finds its way to people, now more than ever. Being massively parallel in nature has made culture more democratic.

    Thinking about the brand challenge in a consumer life stage way allows us to build strategic rather than short term communications. It allows to think about meaningful brand propositions across price, place, promotion and product. And then manifest it in a way that resonates culturally over time.

    In an industry when marketing effectiveness is failing and campaigns are taking an increasingly short terms approach. Peter Fields’ report The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness for the IPA highlights the dangerous position that marketing is in. It’s a big hill to climb, but a good first step would be to ditch ineffective stereotypes as part of an effort to improve the quality of long term thinking and ideas.

    Update (August 17, 2020)

    BBH Labs looked at group cohesion data and in the process added another reason why generations don’t make any sense.

    The Group Cohesion Score is our attempt at calculating the relative likemindedness of a group of people. Using TGI’s Jan-Dec 2019 UK dataset, we measured the size of the average majority viewpoint across 419 lifestyle statements. These statements range from the mundane (“I use a refillable water bottle most days”) to the profound (“There’s little I can do to change my life”) to the philosophical (“A real man can down several pints in a sitting”). The available responses are Agree, Disagree, Neutral or Not Applicable. These statements will elicit conflicting opinions in every group, but close-knit, homogenous groups (e.g. Mormons) will have larger majorities than weaker ones (e.g. left-handers). You can access the same data yourself through TGI – we haven’t manipulated it in any way.

    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. There’s an entire industry built on churning out Gen Z insights and it’s complete bollocks. They have no worldview.  

    Puncturing The Paradox: Group Cohesion And The Generational Myth | BBH Labs

    More information

    From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

    Generation X not so special: Malaise, cynicism on the rise for all age groups | Stanford News Service

    Gallup Historical Trends | Environment

    Living: Proceeding With Caution | TIME magazine

    X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking by Jeff Gordinier

    Creative effectiveness is collapsing, claims new IPA report | Contagious

  • Dumb internet

    Over the past 20 years has the modern web became a dumb internet? That’s essentially a less nuanced version of what media theorist Douglas Rushkoff proposed.

    Douglas Rushkoff at WebVisions 2011
    Douglas Rushkoff at WebVisions 2011 taken by webvisionevent

    In his essay ‘The Internet Used to Make Us Smarter. No Not So Much” Rushkoff outlines the following points:

    • Too much focus and analysis has been put in the new, new thing. Novelty gets the attention over human impact
    • Consumer movements or subcultures become fads when they lose sight of their purpose
    • Rushkoff thinks that netizens let go of the social / intellectual power of the web. This provided the opportunity for them to become yet another large corporate business
    • Bulletin boards, messaging platforms and email lists facilitated non-real time or asynchronous communications. Asynchronous communications channels allowed people to be ‘smarter’ versions of themselves.
    • The move to an ‘always-on’ medium has been detrimental
      Going online went from an active choice to a constant state of being. The resulting disorientation is self-reinforcing.

    Rushkoff’s commentary is interesting for a number of reasons. He had been a herald of how online culture would change society and consumer behaviour.

    But his essay posits a simple storyline. It wasn’t people that ruined the internet, it was big business that did it when people weren’t looking. So I wanted to look at the different elements of his hypothesis stage-by-stage.

    Too much focus and analysis has been put in the new, new thing

    With most technologies we see the thing and realise that it has potential. But it is only when it reaches the consumer, that we truly see its power.

    Different cultures tend to use technology in very different ways. Let’s think about examples to illustrate this. Technology research giants like Bell Labs and BT Research had science fiction writers onboard to try and provide inspirational scenarios for the researchers. So it was no surprise that mobile wireless based communications and computing was envisaged in Star Trek.

    Tricorder
    A replica of a Science Tricorder from Star Trek by Mike Seyfang

    And yes looking back Star Trek saw that the computer was moving from something the size of a filing cabinet, to something that would be a personal device. They realised that there would be portable sensing capabilities and wireless communications. But Star Trek didn’t offer a lot in terms of use cases apart from science, exploration and telemedicine.

    These weren’t games machines, instead the crew played more complex board games. Vulcan chess seemed to be chess crossed with a cake stand.

    Yes, but that’s just the media, surely technolgists would have a better idea? Let’s go to a more recent time in cellphones.

    Here’s Steve Ballmer, at the time the CEO of the world’s largest technology company. Microsoft Research poured large amounts of money into understanding consumer behaviour and tech developments. In hindsight the clip is laughable, but at the time Balmer was the voice of reason.

    Nokia e90 and 6085
    The Nokia E90 Communicator and Nokia 6085 that I used through a lot of 2007

    I was using a Nokia E90 Communicator around about the time that Ballmer made these comments.

    I was working in a PR agency at the time and the best selling phone amongst my friends in the media industry were:

    • The Nokia N73 I’d helped launch right before leaving Yahoo! (there was an integration with the Flickr photo sharing service)
    • The Nokia N95 with its highly tactile sliding cover and built in GPS

    The Danger Sidekick was the must-have device for American teenagers. Japanese teens were clued to keitai phones that offered network-hosted ‘smartphone’ services. Korea had a similar eco-system to Japan with digital TV. Gran Vals, by Francisco Tárrega was commonplace as the Nokia ringtone, from Bradford to Beijing. Business people toted BlackBerry, Palm or Motorola devices which were half screen and half keyboard.

    The iPhone was radical, but there was no certainty that it would stick as a product. Apple had managed to reinvent the Mac. It had inched back from the brink to become ‘cool’ in certain circles. The iPod had managed to get Apple products into mainstream households. But the iPhone wasn’t a dead cert.

    The ideas behind the iPhone weren’t completely unfamiliar to me. I’d had a Palm Vx PDA, the first of several Palm touch screen devices I’ve owned. But I found that a Think Outside Stowaway collapsible keyboard was essential for productive work on the device. All of this meant I thought at the time that Ballmer seemed to be talking the most sense.

    Ballmer wasn’t the only person wrong-footed. So was Mike Lazaridis of Research In Motion (BlackBerry) repeatedly under-estimated the iPhone. Nokia also underestimated the iPhone too.

    So often organisations have the future in their hands, they just don’t realise it yet; or don’t have the corporate patience to capitalise on it. A classic example is Wildfire Communications and Orange. Wildfire Communications was a start-up that built a natural language software-based assistance system.

    In 1994 the launched an ‘electronic personal secretary’. The Wildfire assistant allowed users to use voice commands on their phone to route calls, handle messaging and reminders. The voice prompts and sound gave the assistant a personality.

    Orange bought the business in 2000 and then closed it down five years later as it didn’t have enough users taking it up. Part of this is was that the product was orientated towards business users, like cellphones has been in the 1980s and early 1990s.

    But growth took off when the cellphone bridged into consumer customer segments with the idea of a personal device. There wasn’t a horizon-scanning view taken on it, like what would be the impact of lower network latency from 3.5 and 4G networks.

    Orange had been acquired by France Telecom and there were no longer executives advocating for it.

    Demo of Wildfire’s assistant that I found on the web

    In retrospect with the likes of Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant; Wildfire was potential wasted. Orange weren’t sufficiently enamoured with the new, new thing to give it the time to shine. And the potential of the service wasn’t fully realised through further development.

    The reason why the focus might be put on the new, new thing is that its hard to pick winners and even harder to see how those winners will be used.

    Consumer movements or subcultures become fads when they lose sight of their purpose

    I found this to be a particularly interesting statement. Subcultures don’t necessarily realise that they’re a subculture until the label is put on them. It’s more a variant of ‘our thing’.

    • The Z Boys of Dogtown realised that they were great skaters, but probably didn’t realise that they were a ‘subculture’.
    • Shawn Stüssy printed up some t-shirts to promote the surf boards he was shaping. He did business the only way he knew how. Did he really realise he was building the foundations of streetwear culture of roadmen and hype beasts?
    • Punks weren’t like the Situationists with a manifesto. They were doing their thing until it was labelled and the DIY nature of doing their thing became synonymous with it.
    • The Chicago-based producers making electronic disco music for their neighbourhood clubs didn’t envisage building a global dance music movement. Neither did the London set who decided they had such a good time in Ibiza; they’d like to keep partying between seasons at home.

    Often a movement’s real purpose can only be seen in hindsight. What does become apparent is that scale dilutes, distorts or even kills a movement. When the movement becomes too big, it loses shape:

    • It becomes too loose a network
    • There are no longer common terms of reference and unspoken rules
    • The quality goes down

    But if a community doesn’t grown it ossifies. A classic example of this is The WeLL. An online bulletin board with mix of public and private rooms that covered a wide range of interests. Since it was founded in 1985 (on dial-up), it has remained a disappointing small business that had an outsized influence on early net culture. It still is an interesting place. But its size and the long threads on there feel as if the 1990s have never left (and sometimes I don’t think that’s a bad thing).

    When you bring in everyone into a medium that has an effect. The median in society is low brow. This idea of the low brow segment of society was well documented as a concept in the writing of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World. Tabloid newspapers like The Sun or the National Inquirer write to a reading age of about 12 years old for the man in the street. Smart people do stupid things, but stupid people do stupid things more often.

    It is why Hearst, Pulitzer and Beaverbrook built a media empire on yellow journalism. It is why radio and television were built on the back of long-running daytime dramas (or soap operas) that offer a largely-stable unchanging backdrop, in contrast to a fast-changing world.

    Netizens let go of the social / intellectual power of the web

    When I thought about this comment, I went back to earlier descriptions of netizens and the web. Early netizen culture sprang out of earlier subcultures. The WeLL came out of The Whole Earth Catalog:

    • A how too manual
    • A collection of essays
    • Product reviews – a tradition that Kevin Kelly keeps alive with this Cool Tools blog posts

    The Whole Earth Catalog came out of the coalescence of the environmental lobby and the post-Altamont hippy movement to back to the land. Hippy culture didn’t die, but turned inwards. Across the world groups of hippies looked to carve out their own space. Some were more successful than others at it. The Whole Earth Catalog was designed as an aid for them.

    The hippy back to the land movement mirrored earlier generations of Americans who had gone west in the 19th century. Emigrates who had sailed for America seeking a better life. Even post-war GIs and their families who headed out to California from the major east coast cities.

    The early net offered a similar kind of open space to make your own, not bounded by geographic constraints. Underpinning that ethos was a certain amount of libertarianism. The early netizens cut a dash and created net culture. They also drew from academia. Software was seen as shareable knowledge just like the contents of The Whole Earth Catalog. Which gave us the open source software pinnings that this website and my laptop both rely on.

    That virtual space that was attractive to netizens also meant boundless space for large corporates to move in. Since there was infinite land to stake out, the netizens didn’t let go of power.

    To use the ‘wild west’ as an analogy; early netizens stuck with their early ‘ranch lands’, whilst the media conglomerates built cities that the mainstream netizens populated over time.

    The netizens never had power over those previously unmade commercial lands which the media combines made.

    Asynchronous communications channels allowed people to be ‘smarter’ versions of themselves

    Asynchronous communications at best do allow people to be the smarter version of themselves. That is fair to a point. But it glosses over large chunks of the web that was about being dumb. Flame wars, classes in Klingon and sharing porn. Those are things that have happened on the net for a long long time.

    In order to be a smarter version of yourself requires a desire to reflect that view to yourself; if not to others. I think that’s the key point here.

    The tools haven’t changed that much. Some of my best discussions happen on private Facebook groups. Its about what you choose to do, and who you choose to associate with.

    In some ways I feel like I am an anachronism. I try and read widely. I come from a family where reading was valued. My parents had grown up in rural Ireland.

    I remember that my Dad brought home a real mix of secondhand books from Modern Petroleum Technology and US Army field manuals for mechanics to Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Hammond Innes.

    This blog is a direct result of that wider reading and the curiosity that it inspired. I am also acutely aware that I am atypical in this regards. Maybe it is because I come from a family of emigres, or that Irish culture prides education in the widest sense. My Mum was an academically gifted child; books offered her a way off the family farm.

    My father had an interest in mechanical things. As the second son, so he had to think about a future beyond the family small holding that his older brother would eventually inherit.

    Being erudite sets up a sense of ‘otherness’ between society at large and yourself. This shows up unintentionally in having a wider vocabulary to draw from and so being able to articulate with a greater degree of precision. This is often misconstrued as jargon or complexity.

    I’d argue good deal of the general population doesn’t want to be smarter versions of themselves. They want to belong, to feel part of a continuum rather than a progression. And that makes sense, since we’re social animals and are hardwired to be concerned about difference as an evolutionary trait. Different could have got you killed – an enemy or an infectious disease.

    The move to an ‘always-on’ medium has been detrimental

    Rushkoff and I both agree that the ‘always-on’ media life has been detrimental. Where we disagree is that Rushkoff believes that it is the function of platforms such as Twitter. I see it more in terms of a continuum derived directly from network connectivity that drove immediacy.

    Before social was a problem we had email bankruptcy and information overload. Before widespread web use – 24-hour news broadcasting drove a decline in editorial space required for analysis which changed news for the worse.

    James Gleick’s book Faster alludes to a similar concept adversely affecting just about every aspect of life.

    Dumb Internet

    I propose that the dumb internet has come about as much from human factors as technological design. Yes technology has had its place; algorithms creating reductive personalised views of content based on what it thinks is the behaviour of people like you. It then vends adverts against that. Consumers are both the workers creating content and the product in the modern online advertising eco-system as Jaron Lanier’s You are not a gadget succinctly outlines.

    The tools that we have like Facebook do provide a base path of least resistance to inform and entertain us. Although it ends up being primarily entertainment and content that causes the audience to emote.

    But there is a larger non-technological pull at work as well. An aggregate human intellectual entropy that goes beyond our modern social platforms.

    If we want a web that makes us smarter, complaining about technology or the online tools provided to us isn’t enough:

    • We need to want to be smarter
    • We need to get better at selecting the tools that work for us as individuals
    • We need to use those tools in a considered, deliberate way

  • The dream garage

    My friend Adam came up with the dream garage. By some quirk of fate you are wealthy. No fucks given kind of wealthy. You have a garage and it has 10 spaces. What would you put in this dream garage and why?

    Assuming that you aren’t legislated out of using the collection in the dream garage; I thought about this in terms of use cases.

    I’d want at least a couple of vehicles that would be useful. A couple that would be fun and the rest would be kept for my appreciation of some part of their design. I’ve not given any thought to maintenance or depreciation and have assumed that any challenges can be handled with enough money.

    Useful

    BMW M535i (E28)

    1986 BMW M535i (E28) (preferably in a dark colour where the original owner opted for the debadged option. In its day it was a car that hid its performance with mediocre looks. Now its still a respectable performer that won’t turn heads. So ideal for nipping to the local supermarket for the weekly grocery shop. Its also mercifully free of computerised user experience.

    Mercedes G550 4×4 Squared

    Mercedes G550 4×4 Squared (not a US market car though). The Mercedes G-Wagen is a capable off-roader already. But re-engineering it to handle portal differentials from the Mercedes Unimog made it even more capable. The portal differential means that there are is less to catch underneath the car. This allows the vehicle to have a ludicrous ground clearance. You could have got away with a relatively modest diesel engine. But Mercedes wants to sell this to plutocrats and professional footballers. So you get a twin turbo V8 petrol engine and a luxurious interior. If I had the chance I’d have it refitted with a diesel, waterproofed electrics, a heavy duty winch, a truck like exhaust and air snorkel to aid fording water off-road. I figure that if you have a ten car garage, you probably also have a good deal of land to go with it that requires good off-road capability.

    Fun

    Fun is immensely subjective and this makes anything that I put in this use case open to debate.

    Mazda Familia GT-Ae

    Mazda Familia GT-Ae. In the mid-1980s the FIA shut down Group B rally cars because of some high profile accidents. They replaced them with cars that were much closer to production cars called Group A. Manufacturers like Lancia, Toyota and Mazda saw and opportunity further burnish their reputations through motorsports. Outside of Japan the Familia was known as the 323. The GT version was their entry into Group A. It featured a 1.6 litre engine. It had four valves per cylinder and used turbocharging to force air into the cylinders for more power. It saw some success in world championship rallying when it was introduced in 1985. The GT-Ae was released in Japan three years later. It had a number of enhancements including a rear viscous coupling differential and a little more power.

    The GT-Ae is less famous than peers like the Lancia Delta Integrale or the Toyota Celica GT4. But that means its relatively discreet by comparison, the average car buff wouldn’t realise what you had.

    I also like the idea of small, lightweight capable hatchback that isn’t festooned with electronics. The Familia GT-Ae is sufficiently rare that it is hard to find material about it on YouTube.

    Ford RS200

    Ford RS 200 was an attempt to claim back honour. The early 1980s saw Ford of Europe humbled by manufacturers like Audi and Peugeot. Ford had historically put a halo around its car line-up through motorsport and warmed up versions of its own road cars. That formula had been up-ended by the arrival of the VW Golf GTi in showrooms across Europe. Worse still, its rally cars, notably the Ford RS 2000 was rendered obsolete by the move to Group B and the Audi Quattro.

    Ford eventually addressed this with the RS 200. The formula doesn’t sound that promising. A small dumpy looking coupe, assembled by the Reliant Motor Company. The engine was a warmed over design from the 1960s which had originally been put in a failed project to build the Ford Escort RS1700T. The engine suffered terribly from turbo lag at low revs, which was part of the reason why the Escort RS1700T never got off the ground. But this is only half the story.

    Short and dumpy has benefits in handling like the Lancia Stratos. What owners bought was a lightweight Ghia of Turin designed couple, with handling developed by a designer who had cut his teeth in formula one. It had a low driving position and sure footed grip with Ferguson Formula derived four wheel drive.

    Yes Reliant cars were made so bad Ford had to have them reassembled. But Reliant did make lightweight composite plastic based cars. The interior had parts predominantly taken from the Fiesta and Sierra product lines. But that lack of luxury, also meant easier to replace parts and less weight than luxury switchgear. An article published by Autocar outlined the potential of the Ford RS200 if Group B rallying had continued.

    I wouldn’t want a highly tuned version because I am not a skilled professional driver, but I would like the high travel suspension. Again there is a lack of technology to distract from the driving experience.

    What looks like publicity footage shot by Ford to demonstrate their new car. It rides a bit high as the suspension is set up for rallying. The YouTuber claims that the driver is the late great Bjorn Waldegard. It is more likely to be fellow Swede Stig Blomqvist, it is definitely Blomqvist in the last bit of the montage as he is clearly recognisable behind the wheel.

    Art

    Honda S800 coupe

    I love small cars. For my sins the best and worst car that I’ve ever owned was a Fiat 126. The engine was terrible, as was the drum brakes and it was tiresome to drive anywhere for anything more than an hour. But it also put a smile on my face more times than any other car that I owned. It handled really well. You could go sideways around corners and still stay in lane. You had a ludicrously low seating position and an exceptionally direct gear change. But the Fiat 126 looks uglier than the previous Fiat 500 and wasn’t well made. But it made me like the idea of small cars. The first car that I chose was the Honda S800. This beat out cars like the Abarth Fiat 500, the various one-off Bialberos and the Alpine A110. I love the way the Honda engineers took motorcycle engineering to formula one and then to a small sports car for the road. And to top it all off they then made it look very pretty. Japanese car companies have continued to make sporty looking kei cars, but the S500 and subsequent S800 were the originals.

    Actor Daniel Wu has the version that I want. He built it and it was displayed by Honda at SEMA. Its a mix of gorgeous period details and warmed over specification and flared wheel arches. I’d like it in white in tribute to Honda’s 1960s era racing cars rather than low level gangsters.

    Via Hoonigan AutoFocus

    Porsche 911S

    The Porsche 911 needs no introduction. I particularly like the 1973 version. The Porsche 911S is the most advanced version of the car, that kept the purity of the original design. You get a moderately powerful fuel injected engine, the alloy wheels by Otto Fuchs KG, a five-speed manual gearbox and seats with head rests which provides a degree of comfort on longer drives. So why 1973? Later the design became adulterated and added to with detail elements like the US safety bumpers. The current models of Porsche 911 look too elongated compared to the 1973 model. So even though my bedroom wall used to have a Keith Harmer airbrushed painting of a wide body late 1970s Porsche 911, I actually preferred the clean lines and smaller stance of the ‘narrow body’ 1973 car.

    https://youtu.be/JN0DWXlhSZg

    Toyota 2000 GT coupe

    Most westerners know the Toyota 2000GT as the ‘E-type’ like sports car in You Only Live Twice. That’s the Sean Connery Bond film set in Japan with the ninjas and a paper mâché mountain as villains lair. The resemblance to the E-Type Jaguar is no accident. Body stylist Satoru Nozaki was inspired by European grand tourers including the E-Type.

    Yamaha did the engineering of the car. They offered it to Nissan first, who turned it down. They then took it to Toyota with low expectations and Toyota said yes. Yamaha took the engine from Toyota’s Crown saloon car and turned it into a sporty 2 litre inline 6 cylinder. When sold they cost more than Porsche and Jaguars of the day. Only a few hundred got made to provide a halo product for the Toyota vehicle range. Toyota reputedly lost money on each vehicle built. It’s just a gorgeous looking car and hence has a place in the dream garage.

    BMW M1

    During the late 1970s through to 1981, BMW built a stunning looking mid-engined sports cars called the BMW M1. The original idea what the Lamborghini would build them on behalf of BMW for production car racing. Lamborghini did engineering work on the car, but then went bust. James May alleged that BMW had to break into the closed Lamborghini facilities and steal back the M1 body moulds. Given Lamborghini’s reputation for temperamental cars around this time it was probably for the best.

    The body was glass fibre reinforced plastic, for light weight. It was styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro. This gave it a clean, futuristic, aggressive straight-lined design. Giugiaro then did designs in a similar vein for the Lotus Espirit. You can see the heritage of the BMW M1 design in the BMW i8. Giugiaro’s styling alone would get into the dream garage.

    The beauty of the BMW M1 was more than skin deep. The body panels were hung on a tubular steel monocoque frame. It had a 3.5 litre straight six cylinder engine. A version of which later appeared in the E28 BMW M5 and the E24 BMW M635CSI.

    It had a comfortable but basic interior and air conditioning. What you end up with is all the best qualities of an Italian and German sports car.

    Nissan (C110) Skyline GT-R (Kenmeri)

    The Nissan Skyline GT-R became famous in the early and mid-1990s. But the Skyline GT-R has heritage that stretches back much further. I chose the 1973 Nissan (C110) Skyline GT-R (Kenmeri) vintage car over later more capable models due to its styling which is why it sits in the ‘art’ section of my dream garage. The slope back, spoiler give it an amazing look. But it also had great technology for its vintage, notably disc brakes all around.

    The C110 Skyline GT-R was made for less than 12 months due to the 1973 OPEC oil crisis. It featured an in-line 6 cylinder engine designed by the Prince Motor Company, whom Nissan bought out in 1966. It had four valves per cylinder which was very rare at the time. This engine would also appear in the Nissan Fairlady Z 432R – a faster limited edition version of the Fairlady Z developed for production car racing.

    Nissan Autech Zagato Stelvio

    Boom-era Japan saw manufacturers like Nissan doing all kinds of interesting things, none more so than the Nissan Autech Zagato Stelvio. This was back when the land of the imperial palace was based on in Tokyo was worth more than the entire state of California. This also explains why Nissan tried to sell a car that cost 18 million yen new. Or more than a Honda NSX.

    Autech was Nissan’s equivalent of Mercedes’ AMG at the time. They had to improve on the Nissan Leopard coupe. Fortunately the Nissan Leopard coupe shared its floor pan with the equivalent Nissan Skyline. Autech put in a good effort working on performance, handling and braking.

    Autech reached out to an Italian design house to give the car a distinctive yet classy look. Interestingly, they chose Zagato. In the end you ended up with a distinctive Italian car with Japanese build quality – which sounds quite appealing. The interior reminded me a bit of the pre-Fiat Maseratis Biturbo models, particularly in the use of walnut wood veneer and leather.

    As well as the boom times of the 1980s property bubble, Japan also had a huge cultural surge. Anime from original manga like Akira and Ghost In The Shell coming out with their own take on cyber punk. I think its partly this time of creativity and cultural relevance that makes the Nissan Autech Zagato Stelvio dream garage material. It definitely looks as if it has come off the screen from the original Ghost In The Shell anime film

    A second reason is the way Zagato always seem to go off in their own direction from a styling point of view. Some of it might be ugly but it is highly distinctive. I know what you’re thinking, it weird as hell. And you’d be right, but it has some interesting ideas. Those front arches have the wing mirrors built into them to reduce drag.

    The wheels are specially designed to funnel air into the disc brakes for cooling and at the same minimise aerodynamic drag.

    The oddness of the car meant that only about 100 or so were produced in the end and hopefully one of them would make their way to my dream garage.

    I’ve talked through my ten choices. What would be the ten cars you your dream garage?

  • 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.

  • Truth decay

    Truth decay was a concept that I came across when reading Monocle’s Forecast issue.

    Donald Trump
    President Donald Trump

    Michael D Rich is the head of the The RAND Corporation – a not-for-profit think tank. When he was interviewed and described as being preoccupied with ‘truth decay’. Truth decay occurs when society and the body politic can’t even agree on basic facts.

    • Increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data
    • A blurring of the line between opinion and fact
    • The increasing relative volume and resulting influence of opinion and personal experience over fact
    • Declining trust in formerly respected sources of facts

    Truth decay. One point that we’ve made over and over again is that no important problem can be solved in the US within the span of just a four-year presidency or a two-year Congress. And the way those problems have been surmounted in the past is consensus and compromise. That’s impossible if two sides can’t agree on the basic facts.

    Thought Leaders – The Forecast 2020 Monocle magazine

    All of this sounds like the rhetoric used to describe Vladislav Surkov and his work for the Russian government, or Dominic Cummings and Cambridge Analytica. The idea is that language and truth no longer mean anything. There is no right, there is no left, there is no ideology except the other group and the desire for power.

    The RAND Corporation is America’s foremost think tank. It spun out of Douglas Aircraft Corporation. From national security it expanded to social and economic areas. It now has its own grad school and nine different research facilities. It’s website is a good source of resources across a range of areas.