The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.
Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.
Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.
Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.
Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.
Dot as a post came out of me being zoned out and listening to a podcast while shaving as part of my weekend morning routine. Then it hit me whamo! The podcast I was listening to was by CSIS – a US think tank called The Truth of The Matter hosted by Andrew Schwartz.
The Truth of The Matter podcast in Apple’s Podcast app
At the end of the podcast I was listening to, they gave out the web address for the Center for Strategic and International Studies
C-S-I-S dot O-R-G
The Truth of the Matter
The first thing that struck me was ‘dot O-R-G’ rather than ‘dot org’; but then I started to think why wasn’t it period org (or O-R-G) for that matter.
In the UK and Ireland we call the dot at the end of a sentence a ‘full stop’. In the US they call it a period. Which made me wonder how we got to describing email and internet addresses in this way?
The history of top level domains has been well documented, but the history of the linguistics of top level domains hasn’t been.
Top level domain names potted history
What we would recognise as top level domain names like found in URLs and email addresses seems to have come about as part of the ARPANET developed and ran between 1969 and 1990. The Stanford Research Institute was responsible for the HOSTS text file that mapped IP addresses with domain names, it was assisted in this by part of the University of Southern California. It was a small network, so this ad-hoc system worked at the time. This evolved into a database based domain net system (DNS) in 1983, developed by University of Southern California when HOSTS performance started to slow the network down excessively.
Use of ‘dot com’ as a term
Since we are delving back into pre-web times, I used Google Books Ngram tool as a way of understanding the use of the term over time. 1993 was when the term took off.
This clip from NBC’s Today programme sees one of the presenters pause after each domain element rather than say ‘nbc dot ge dot com’
By the time I was watching The Site on my landlord’s cable TV in 1996, Soledad O’Brien, along with her animated co-host Dev Null* were dotting their way through email addresses and URLs like it was perfectly normal.
It’s usage peaked in 2001 and then declined as it became associated with the first internet business related bubble. Other domains such as org and net follow a similar track, but at a much lower volume.
Now the address in written form is enough, or even just a QRcode to be scanned. Oral usage lives on all around us.
Western fast fashion brands have managed to spread around the world, despite concerns over working conditions, product quality and impact on the environment. But things have gone into reverse for western fashion brands in China. Just over a decade ago saw China as a potential growth market. But over the past five years things have gone badly for them.
Looking at western fast fashion brand H&M’s presence in China, there has been a consistent decline since a 2017 peak of 507 stores in China.
Data via Daxue Consulting and South China Morning Post
The reasons cited by Chinese consumers online include:
Western fast fashion brands aren’t cut / styled for ‘Asian body types’. This sounds like a need for extended sizing
Local trends: the clothing doesn’t fit with local trends in design in the same way that local rivals can. Brands to keep an eye out for include Urban Revivo and JNBY
Other foreign brands meet the needs of young Chinese consumers better. These include Brandy Melville, and its “Malibu beach babe” look, while Chuu, is a Korean brand with K-pop aesthetics
Dentsu warns brands over tech ‘battling’ to increase ad revenue – The Media Leader – Global media buyer Dentsu’s forward-looking report said there had been an “explosion of the ad-supported segment” and that next year will see “an intensification of competition between ad platforms” with more lookalike apps, data partnership possibilities, premium subscriptions and a further proliferation of advertising formats and offerings. “Brands will have to balance these opportunities with risks to alienate audiences”, the report said. Especially given the fact digital adspend is forecast to hit $450.6bn in 2024, but its year-on-year growth is slowing to 6.2%. This means tech platforms are “battling” to increase their advertising revenue by launching new formats and carrying more placements. Some examples the report highlighted included: developments in adoption of search advertising on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, the rise of retail media on commerce sites, ticketing platforms and delivery apps, forecasted “spectacular growth” in advertising on connected TV (CTV), advertising video on-demand players launching new formats like YouTube’s unskippable 30-second ads, and major streaming players (and Amazon’s Audible) trialling or launching ad-supported plans
Gulnara Karimova Accused of Running Criminal Organization in New Swiss Indictment – The Diplomat – Swiss federal prosecutors filed an indictment against Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Uzbekistan’s first president Islam Karimov, and an unnamed former general director of the Uzbek subsidiary of a Russian telecommunications company for alleged involvement in a criminal organization, money laundering, bribe taking, and forgery. The charges extend over a period of time running from 2005 to 2013 and mark the latest expansion and extension of criminal proceedings against Karimova and her associates. Karimova, once envisioned as a possible successor to her father, lived large and fell hard.
Power drives SK Telecom to AI pyramid strategy | EE News Europe – The AI Infrastructure plan consists of data centre, AI semiconductor, and multiple large language models (LLM) will serve as a technology platform. This will introduce energy-saving technologies including immersion cooling system and hydrogen fuel cells, and expand into the AI hosting business that generates higher margins by bundling these energy-saving solutions with Sapeon’s neural processing unit (NPU) and SK Hynix’s high bandwidth memory (HBM). – I am surprised that we haven’t seen similar ventures from Oracle, IBM and Fujitsu so far
Back in November 2012, my friend Wadds was researching and writing a book that would turn out to be Brand Vandals. I had a campaign going into mothers-and-babies screenings at cinemas and was in the final stages of preparing for a move to Hong Kong whilst launching an innovative facebook app for The National Lottery. The app featured a ‘scratch card’ mechanism within it, something I haven’t seen done since.
By this time Wadds and I had known each other for the best part of a decade and a half, having worked together on the 3Com (now part of HPE) and LSI Logic accounts at the start of my agency career in London.
Brand Vandals followed Wadds and Earl’s earlier book Brand Anarchy – the publishers were not enamoured with the original working title of Brand Fucked.
The Brand Vandals conversation.
The Brand Vandals conversation took place in The Stockpot in Panton Street. The Stockpot had a few branches in London was known for really cheap but good comfort food. Breakfast meant a fry up, which fitted in with our shared Northern sensibilities.
Wadds opened up with the question – had the social web failed to live up to initial expectations?
My reaction at the time was to point out the dissonance between social discourse and real life society. Twitter (or X) was where the bulk of political and media discussions happened, yet it was a small eco-system. Society in many respects hadn’t moved on from Roman times. While the intelligentsia might have had heated discussions in the forum (or on Twitter), these conversations didn’t reflect the vox populi. I name checked Juvenal, referencing Satire X ‘bread and circuses’ because it illustrated the two worlds neatly. The world of the political elites and the world of the common people with their different interests.
Ten years on, social channels have become much more ubiquitous. The early netizens who blogged and participated in forums and on Twitter have been joined by everyone else. The algorithms give people what they want, so political Twitter has its hecklers and fringe elements but still doesn’t reflect the voice of the people.
Facebook also had its fringe elements of discussion where the angry and paranoid could come together, rather like the USENET of old, but more accessible.
At the time, while I realised the digital inequalities that could be created by the data that consumers shared from the quantified self and telematics to the geolocation via their IP address. Tools in mining structured and unstructured data together with new devices putting telematics in the hand of everyone. All of that data was rip for (ab)use by corporates.
I don’t think that either of us fully realised how the world changes when it goes online.
In his book, Wadds quoted liberally fromThe Cluetrain Manifesto. What now could be seen to the last gasp of the libertarian bent of techno-hippy political thought. Doc Searls and David Weinberger’s book had more in common with The Whole Earth Catalog, The WeLL, John Perry Barlow and the back to the land counterculture movement than the modern web. Mark Zuckerberg et al represented the culture of Reagonomics rather than the ‘summer of love‘.
Scale has an effect of its own.
ONS data on amount of UK population online.
We didn’t fully realise what scale would do. Just like when social interactions and norms change when you go from a dinner party to an all-day music festival, the online rules changed. Looking back the scale is staggering, when you go from about a quarter of the UK population online during the dot com boom of 2000 to 88% online 12 years later. Between 2000 and 2002 the online population doubled in the UK. Part of this was driven the nascent mobile web, affordable internet service providers (giving a model more like the US) and adoption of broadband. Modern smartphones accelerated access further.
Hints of what could happen.
We had hints of the dark side through Chinese netizen culture and the phenomenon of human flesh search engine (人肉搜索) moral crusades, showing how people could come together in a common cause and be weaponised. This went back as far as the early 2000s. As far back as 2008, the Chinese judicial system was alarmed by its power and called it ‘cyber violence‘. It has been since turned loose on the wider world.
Joe Trippi, the political strategist behind Howard Dean’s campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, showed how the web could be use to communicate, organise and fund raise back in 2004.
Information warfare found a febrile media that was ideal for its needs and was easy to scale operations on. It was no wonder in retrospect that the internet became toxic.
The Humane AI pin has been hyped for a while. Now it’s been launched as a product with what seems to be a small initial batch based on a waiting list and drop type distribution model. I thought I would wait a bit to post on the Humane AI pin and let the dust settle.
The Humane AI pin is an interesting take on a personal device. particularly with its ‘AI experience’ switching – picking the right smarts for the right task. This seem to fulfil the kind of vision that the likes of Kevin Kelly have outlined in the past. It also seems to access communications services like messaging services and the audio design in the product seems interesting. There is also a projected interface of sorts on the Humane AI pin. It’s an interesting alternative direction to the spatial computing vision of Apple’s Vision Pro.
The Humane AI device falls down in being such a network-centric device. Although it has onboard machine learning technology, its reliance on a relationship with T-Mobile US’ cellular network is problematic. Cellular connectivity is not ubiquitous. It is one of several device visions that have been articulated over the years, but what I still don’t understand is the ‘why?’
What’s going to be more interesting is what the Humane AI pin does next?
US law firms rethink China future amid economic woes, data crackdown | Reuters – Of the 73 largest U.S. law firms with a presence in China, 32 shrank their attorney presence in the last decade, according to a Reuters review of data from Leopard Solutions, which tracks law firm hiring. In Beijing, 26 of the 48 largest U.S. law firms drew down their presence since 2018. Worthwhile reading with: US consultancy Gallup withdraws from China | FT – market research was sensitive when I worked in China. Gallup’s business was closer to consulting than a pollster to get around these challenges. Interesting that they can no longer thread the needle in China
China’s family-run businesses face succession challenges – Nikkei Asia – more than 80% of China’s 1 billion private enterprises are family-owned, with about 29% of these businesses in traditional manufacturing. From 2017 to 2022, around three-quarters of China’s family businesses are in the midst of a generational leadership transition
Post-pandemic party’s over as Americans shun cognac | FT – Half of all cognac in the US is drunk by African Americans, a demographic that has been disproportionately affected by the cost of living crisis, according to analysis by Bernstein. The skew to African American consumers is in part due to the fact that French spirits producers ignored the segregation mandated by America’s Jim Crow laws and “cultivated the African American market segment in ways that other producers did not,” said David Crockett, professor of marketing at the University of Illinois Chicago. French spirits producers at the time marketed to Black-owned and targeted publications. As early as the 1970s the advertisements conveyed a message of upward socio-economic mobility, said Naa Oyo Kwate, a sociologist at Rutgers University
Wong wanted to enter the U.S. consulate. The diplomats told him that only the rooms in the St. John’s Building were on offer, and that the office tower did not offer the protection of a diplomatic compound. In Washington, Ngo took the matter up with one of Hawley’s policy advisers, reasoning that the ultra-Trumpian senator might have the president’s ear. Responding at 1 a.m., Hawley’s staffer promised to pass the message on to his boss, but nothing changed. On July 1, the national-security law passed. The diplomats’ positions were the same: Wong couldn’t enter the consulate and couldn’t apply for asylum from outside the United States. Wong and Ngo knew the rules. But they were asking for the same pathway to haven that had been granted to Fang and Chen…
The focus in Washington has moved on from Hong Kong to Taiwan. The island is under constant military threat from Beijing, which claims the territory as its own, even though the Chinese Communist Party has never controlled it. But for those in Taiwan who cherish their democracy, Hong Kong’s story offers a cautionary tale. The United States gave Hong Kong’s cause its vocal backing, then abandoned the city in its time of greatest need.
Asia is much more important to U.S. interests than the Middle East | Noahpinion – East Asian cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, and until recently, Hong Kong are arguably the world’s most magnificent — hyper-dense and efficient and bustling with life and creativity and personal freedom, but also extremely safe. East Asia is a wealthy region with high quality of life across the board, rivaled only by North Europe and parts of the Anglosphere. Maciej Cegłowski called them “Zeroth World”, and I think that is an apt description. – the burn for Hong Kong on this is real
Ideas
The challenges of sustainable societies and solar punk.
The one where Chandler Bing’s impenetrable job defined a generation | FT – André Spicer, Executive Dean of Bayes Business School, suggests a new category altogether: a “Chandler Bing job”, one indifferent to finding meaning, “low on existential rewards but relatively high on extrinsic rewards, like pay and promotion”. Chandler’s stoicism more broadly reflects Gen X’s tacit acceptance of their lot: the forgotten latchkey kids squished between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials. Jennifer Dunn, author of Friends: A Cultural History, says he “showed that we might not all find fulfilment in the first, or even the longest lasting job we will ever have.” Compared to today’s employers who are increasingly concerned about making their younger colleagues happy, few cared about Gen X’s work-life balance.
Is Open AI the equivalent of Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim? Maxim invented the Maxim gun. A belt fed machine gun that helped colonial powers grab territory in the scramble for Africa. It was reputedly used by one British official to help clear game from land that was soon to be put to farming use in Kenya. Later on it was used by both sides in the Russo-Japanese war and World War 1, due to Maxim’s business associate Sir Basil Zaharoff.
Investors are betting that Open AI will have a similar role in the battle shaping out between tech giants over generative machine learning related processes.
Sam Altman of Open AI
When a company that has issues with making profits can raise money at a valuation of $85bn, it becomes abundantly clear that investors in generative AI have taken leave of their senses
I can understand the argument that Richard Windsor is making with this argument. While others might point out how dominant funding drove Amazon’s present-day monopoly, there are other precedents like Netscape, General Magic, Uber and WeWork that others can point to.
There are bigger questions about whether the LLM approach is in itself a limited model to pursue? If so, Open AI could look more like when IBM bet the farm on Josephson Junctions. The use of synthetic data implies that LLM scaling might already be at its limit. Nvidia looks like a better bet from this angle despite its own extremely high valuation.
Brand purpose has a lot of issues, but it’s worthwhile bearing in mind the kind of marketing Unilever was pushing out prior to buying fully into the concept. These efforts came to light from social sharing about the the British ‘vulgar wave’ that contextualised Russell Brand.
Unilever Heart Brands UK
While China’s ads skewed conservative compared to the UK’s vulgar wave of 1997 – 2012, this Axe (Lynx in the UK and Ireland) ad isn’t exactly on brand purpose. The spokesperson in the advert is Edison Chen. At the time Chen was a star in Hong Kong’s entertainment circles. But getting involved in street fights and a leaked hard drive full of pornographic images of girlfriends he dated meant he withdrew from the industry. Now he is better known for owning streetwear brand CLOT.
Dove Sparks Boycott Calls Over New Partnership—’Never Buy Them Again’ | Newsweek – controversial question, but have Unilever gamed out that conservatives are more likely to use Irish Spring or similar products over Dove? I suspect that there might be something in the semiotics of cleanliness in this. African Americans by contrast might have challenges like ashen skin that would benefit from soap that cleans and moisturises, hence the popularity of shea butter based products.
Hong Kong
Architect Demi Lee on Kowloon’s Walled City. The comparison with the idea of rhizome was very interesting.
Ideas
Demi Lee’s video on how elements of cyberpunk are leaking into our current reality.
