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.
IEDM: DTCO & More than Moore – by Doug O’Laughlin – The future is about Design Technology Co-optimization (DTCO), and Backside Power Deliever Networks (BSPDN) is a huge part of the roadmaps forward post-gate-all-around. A good place to start on what exactly Backside Power Delivery Networks (BSPDN) is is my post I wrote a few months ago about the bold bets Intel is making there. The big takeaway is that BSPDN is clearly going to be inserted in the design processes, and there is a small roadmap of improvements afforded by BSPDN. But after that, BSPDN will change the design process to allow adding more features, like moving functions on to the backside of the chip. By splitting the signal and power layers, there’s a whole new set of ideas of how to design chips with the space afforded from the power layers. This is Design Technology Co-optimization (DTCO) and System Technology Co-optimization (STCO) at it’s best. BSPDN looks like it has several years of obvious scaling potential, so it will be a huge part of the incremental semiconductor process from here until 2030. It will not only improve the energy delivered to the chip, but actually shrink the cell size. Think about it like a new way to organize the room, and now we can fit more in less even though its the same room filled with the same objects. Next, the roadmap in the long term after we have fully achieved backside power contact networks means we could open up the wafer on the other side of the chip. If we are opening up the other side to be a functional signal layer, there’s a potential we can start adding backside devices to the chip! This blew my mind, and the options for stacking layer, memory, and other devices (like energy capacitors) is endless! This is huge! – BSPDN is a key part of Intel’s technology roadmap. BSPDN is a mix of process lithography and logic technology to decouple the power grid from the design.
The proposed technique delivers power from the backside of a thinned device wafer, which allows for greater wafer sizes in terms of the amount of logic in a chip
Business
Jeep-Maker Stellantis Is Laying Off 1,350 Workers, Blaming EVs | Business Insider – interesting and complex picture being painted. In general, electric cars have less parts for assembly than their internal combustion engine powered equivalent cars. The costs must be coming in component costs and or research and development
China
Fashion factory: Mango brings production closer to home in rethink on China | Financial Times – “In this debate about whether 30 years of globalisation will continue or go backwards, the most important thing for us to follow in detail is the China issue,” he said. Asked if Mango would reduce the proportion it buys from the country, Ruiz replied: “I would say yes, but we’ll be very alert to how things evolve.” Mango gains some freedom from the fact it has only six stores in mainland China and consumers there contribute little to total sales, which it predicts will this year surpass its 2019 record of €2.4bn. Other brands have already moved more decisively. The US jeans maker Levi’s and UK bootmaker Dr Martens have been reducing their sourcing from China since before the pandemic.
While everyone from from organised criminals to Chinese government hackers were robbing governments blind during the COVID crisis, in the UK the scandal surrounding PPE Medpro seems particularly egregious. The tale of PPE Medpro goes back to the VIP programme that the UK government used to secure PPE through politically connected companies. PPE Medpro was one of the companies who benefited from £10 billion squandered on these PPE purchases.
Michelle Mone with former Spice Girls singer Mel B
PPE Medpro got contracts through the VIP programme after a Michelle Mone, a member of the House of Lords lobbied on their behalf. Mone had previously set up a successful clothing brand with her first husband, then moved into diet pills, fake tanning products and even an aborted cryptocurrency launch.
In return PPE Medpro is alleged to have paid Mone £29 million, the subsequent investigation led HSBC to freeze her bank accounts.
China
China risks 1mn Covid deaths in ‘winter wave’, modelling shows | Financial Times – China is easing restrictions after the Chinese COVID protests. 1 million is on the low end of numbers I have heard quoted. However, it is also politically evocative. The Chinese people have been constantly reminded that 1 million people lost their lives to COVID in the United States and the communist party ensured that just 5,000 people have died in their country.
Germany confronts a broken business model | Financial Times – Chief executive Martin Brudermüller announced that BASF would downsize in Europe “as quickly as possible, and also permanently”. Most of the cuts are expected to be made at the Ludwigshafen site. BASF is not alone. Since the summer, companies across Germany have been scrambling to adjust to the near disappearance of Russian gas. They have dimmed the lights, switched to oil — and, as a last resort cut production. Some are even thinking about moving operations to countries where energy is cheaper. That is triggering deep concern about the future of German industry and the sustainability of the country’s business model, which has long been predicated on the cheap energy guaranteed by a plentiful supply of Russian gas. Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution, has said Germany is a case study of a western state that made a “strategic bet” on globalisation and interdependence – based on this experience why would you want to ‘bet’ on China or any other authoritarian country? Once the basic industries like BASF go, the higher end industries will follow
Auction sales slide in Hong Kong | Financial Times – Six-monthly auction sales in Hong Kong have had their worst results since 2018, with this season marking the third consecutive drop, according to ArtTactic. Its analysis finds that the October-to-December evening sales made a total of HK$1.7bn ($220mn, before fees), a fall of 34 per cent since the equivalent sales last year and more than 50 per cent down from their peak in spring 2021 – this is interesting given how much has been invested in the past couple of years by the major auction houses into Hong Kong
How Do Korea’s 1% Get Rich? – The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition) – The wealthy prefer deposit and savings accounts as the best short-term investments over the next year now that interest rates are high. But they pointed to real estate, both to let and for use as their own homes, as the best investment over the longer term. Their hopes for gold and jewelry or bonds also increased.
Being a creator and relying on YouTube ad revenue sounds like rather like being a musician and relying on Spotify. For reference £1 is worth about ₩1611 at the time of writing, which means they make less than £50/month. This anecdotal evidence fits right in with an analysis piece in the FT – The Lex Newsletter: the cratering creator economy | Financial Times
New Power by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms was recommended to me by a friend of mine who works with a number of campaigning organisations. It took four years after it was published for me to take it down from the shelf and get stuck in.
Since then, we have had the Hong Kong protests, January 6 disturbances in the US Capitol building where both of their legislative houses operate from. We’ve also had movements around cryptocurrency and the infamous OneCoin scam.
The book promises to reveal:
How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World – and How to Make It Work for You
Front cover of New Power by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Jeremy Heimans
Heimans is an ex-McKinsey consultant who now runs a social impact agency called Purpose. So one could think that New Power is basically part of Heiman’s marketing strategy. Make of that what you will.
Henry Timms
Timms heads up the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York and has been heavily involved in promoting philanthropic donations.
Old Power and New Power
Heimans and Timms provide a model for what they think old power is. A top down power structure, think everything from mainstream advertising, government responses to the COVID-19 epidemic, authoritarian regimes like China’s crushing of dissent or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
By comparison, new power is participatory in nature and more of a peer to peer relationship. Examples include memes, crypto bros, the leaderless movement that fuelled the 2019 Hong Kong protests, support for populism and ISIS. ISIS recruitment is actually used as an example in the book.
How power works in our hyperconnected world
Heimans and Timms provide an analysis on the general thinking behind how campaigning works in a way that would be most familiar to anyone who has run a social media marketing campaign. I would describe it as a primer for typical corporate management types.
How to make it work for you
I personally think that this is where the book falls down. New Power isn’t replicable in the same way that a business process rengineering exercise might be. Sometimes these things take off, sometimes they don’t. They talk about some of the factors in the book, but movements often need a catalysing event like the recent apartment fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang that sparked anti-zero COVID lockdown protests in China.
You can try and create a catalysing event, but too often it’s astro-turfing that no one ever sees, particularly if you are relying on a dominant platform algorithm. Your new power is actually reliant on old power held by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. Instead these platforms have been successfully mastered by authoritarian regimes including the Chinese government who manage to demonetise and have content taken down on western platforms.
Secondly, the authors try to claim showing a bit of moxie is new power. The example they give is a junior employee speaking to a senior executive that they manage to meet by chance.
Finally, the book lacks the intellectual rigour and scientific method of Mark Ritson or Byron Sharp’s work, instead relying anecdotal evidence, similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s body of work or Paul Polman’s Net Positive.
So, should you buy this book?
If you like TED talks model of learning a little bit about a lot of things and are reading for your own personal interest or to get a high level understanding of campaigning organisations might work, buy New Power. If you are thinking about changing your business into a more purposeful organisation, read this first instead (and its free).
You you can find out more about New Powerhere, find the rest of my book reviews here, and the books that I find most useful here.
The heat from radioactive processes within the planet’s interior causes the plates to move, sometimes toward and sometimes away from each other. This movement is called plate motion, or tectonic shift
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declaration of a zeitenwende or epochal tectonic shift following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Part of this tectonic shift is Germany’s desire to become a security guarantor in Europe. A lot of coverage has focused on how far away Germany is from this aspiration in terms of military preparedness and over-reliance on the very countries likely to threaten European security.
In an opinion piece Chancellor Scholz asked a rhetorical question
How can we, as Europeans and as the European Union, remain independent actors in an increasingly multipolar world?
Scholz implies that the tectonic shift also adversely affects the United States efforts to jumpstart green industries and contain a globally more aggressive China. One could argue that Scholz’s approach is business as usual. For decades, large German enterprises have encouraged the government to work with authoritarian regimes, creating a Germany highly dependent on bad actors.
Indonesia set to penalise sex outside marriage in overhaul of criminal code | Reuters – the new code could be passed by as early as next week. The code, if passed, would apply to Indonesian citizens and foreigners alike, with business groups expressing concern about what damage the rules might have on Indonesia’s image as a holiday and investment destination. – the question is if this is going to take Indonesia on a similar path of economic stagnation as Malaysia has taken?
Twitter’s decline continues. I noticed this morning that Twitter allowed me to post the exact same Twitter post twice. That isn’t something that was possible previously and I could see how it could be used for nefarious reasons.
My twitter account this afternoon when I checked it
Shein Confusion: The Fast-Fashion Giant’s New Resale Site Doesn’t Make Buying Easy — The Information – Annie tries out Shein Exchange, the e-commerce brand’s foray into the bustling resale market. On its face, the platform seems like a good idea, given the ongoing controversies over Shein’s cheap, disposable, landfill-clogging apparel. But there is something distinctly off about the brand’s effort to sell used clothes
Amazon’s new AI tool may take over work from employees facing layoffs and buyouts – Vox – the tech giant has been working for at least the last year to hand over some of its recruiters’ tasks to an AI technology that aims to predict which job applicants across certain corporate and warehouse jobs will be successful in a given role and fast-track them to an interview — without a human recruiter’s involvement. The technology works in part by finding similarities between the resumes of current, well-performing Amazon employees and those of job applicants applying for similar jobs
The US Army’s Land Warrior programme was in development for some 33 years. The idea behind it is that better informed soldiers who are connected to support assets can do more with less and survive.
Chris Capelluto put together a good accessible history of the programme.
Burning chrome
About a decade after the rise of cyberpunk developed as a literature genre, the defence thinkers realised the potential of modern technologies that would have sounded similar to Case’s cyber deck in Neuromancer.
Head up displays, small but connected and powerful networked computers and connected weapon sights of the Land Warrior programme have taken over three decades to fulfil the original vision. Technology takes time, while Land Warrior has taken three plus decades; artificial intelligence is taking a lot longer again.
Human factors
Even now the Land Warrior programme isn’t completely sorted. The Microsoft Halolens AR displays are said to cause debilitating nausea, headaches and eye strain. More than 80% of those who experienced discomfort suffered symptoms within three hours of using the Land Warrior AR headset.
The wearable computer of the Land Warrior programme is an Android powered Smartphone sized device, but would be using very different networks. The network is both the strength and the point of weakness in the Land Warrior programme.
How the networked structures of Land Warrior will fully affect military culture and power structures will be interesting. All of it will be creating tensions in the millennia of ‘hard-wiring’ humans have had since before the dawn of civilisation as we know it and the impact will be much deeper than just the physical tiredness from head up display googles.
Just think about the benefits and ills of social media, or how the world has shrunk through video calls. In my parent’s lifetime, people leaving their homes in Ireland to emigrate to the US or Australia used to have a wake at their leaving. In some respects that departure was a form of death. That is very different to the relationship that I have with family and friends around the world now. Changes coming through from Land Warrior might be equally deep over time.
A lament for the age of apathy | Financial Times – Turnout in the US election of 1996 fell below 50 per cent. In Britain five years later, it was the lowest since the Great war. Most pop culture either side of the millennium wasn’t even allusively or allegorically political. You can read Jane Austen — goes the old line — without knowing that Napoleon was cutting through Europe. You can watch Friends without knowing that America has a government. The peak of the apolitical age was Big Brother, which, in sealing contestants from the news, didn’t disrupt their lives much. – I think a large amount of society still live in that bubble
I was watching this video and I could it imagine something similar being done to describe the luck of many market towns in the west of Ireland with the identikit feel
The video below is a good run down on the short term aspects of the current state of the UK economy. However UK productivity has been going wrong for decades. Several reasons:
The UK relies on services rather than manufacturing – While the UK was in the EU, those factories that remained imported more productive workers from the east. With Brexit the manufacturing and warehouses went east instead along with income tax revenues
The UK has a serious skills gap, there isn’t the prevalence of night colleges any more
The UK has been declining in automation. The classic example is trying to find an automatic car wash. During the 1970s and 1980s these were all over the UK. Now you get a bunch of people with buckets. UK warehouses are much less automated than most other places. This is partly down to several decades of short termism that Will Hutton wrote about back in The State We’re In circa 1995
Brexit has permanently re-eingineered supply chains around the UK
Too much UK investment has gone into real estate, you only have to see all the developments in London and Manchester
Universities are now developed for the benefit of foriegn students rather than domestic talent growth, innovation. And the universities are over leveraged in property development and are likely to go under if there is a reduction in foreign students or a rise in interest rates
Epson to End All Laser Printer Sales by 2026 – ExtremeTech – quietly chosen to stop selling laser printer hardware by 2026. The company will instead focus on its more environmentally-friendly inkjet printers, according to a statement obtained by The Register. Although the company stopped selling laser printers in the United States a while back, it had maintained the line in other markets, including Europe and Asia. Consumers will no longer be able to purchase new Epson laser printers as of 2026, but Epson has promised to continue supporting existing customers via supplies and spare parts. Epson itself claims its inkjets are up to 85 percent more energy efficient than its laser units and produce 85 percent less carbon dioxide. Interesting move, western companies would be virtue signalling the hell out of this.
Really impressive piece of technology and engineering by Sony. But I can’t work out why it was done. By this time Citizen, Casio and Sony were already making LCD televisions. Back in the day Sony used to some products, just because the engineers could. I also love how this looks like a miniature version of a Sony 14″ portable TV circa 1984, even down to the homage to the Trinitron branding.
There seems to be a lack of appreciation for economic trajectory that Hong Kong is on; inextricably linked in China
They don’t seem to understand the political trajectory Hong Kong is on
They aren’t the kind of talent that Hong Kong needs to plug losses in healthcare, education, social services and the creative industries
More developed countries aren’t likely to want ‘stepping stone’ Chinese people from Hong Kong. Their choices might be as limited as are on the mainland
This will only accelerate simmering nativist hostility and more Hong Kongers may leave via BNO visas etc.
If Hong Kong has been in a recession, what must the real state of the China economy be? Are they way worse than PMI and official numbers seem to suggest?
Finally, China has disliked Hong Kong being a vehicle for capital flight. With a greying workforce and declining birth rate will they dislike the talent flight of middle class Chinese through ‘stepping stone’ Hong Kong?
Ideas
Interesting viewpoint on Russia from author Ian Garner. You can find out more about his book here.
China’s puffer jacket obsession: Its not just Moncler and Canada Goose, homegrown brands are taking off | Campaign Asia – Domestic Chinese and international puffer jacket brands are battling for market share in the mainland. We take a look at which names are emerging victorious. China’s puffer jacket obsession: Its not just Moncler and Canada Goose, homegrown brands are taking offWhen temperatures in China started to cool down in early October, one of the biggest fashion trends to return was the puffer jacket. Alongside higher-priced brands like Canada Goose — which saw 20 percent higher sales compared to the previous year — homegrown puffer jacket labels such as Bosideng, Xue Zhong Fei, and Yaya all reported that their gross merchandise value (GMV) growth rate on Tmall exceeded 100 percent. Meanwhile, European brand Moncler sold out of its classic Maya coat on the first day of its debut on Tmall Luxury Pavilion in October.
Media
Why Hong Kong’s outdoor advertising is underperforming | Media | Campaign Asia – Based on a recent study by Hong Kong Baptist University, OOH ads are failing to capture people as they severely lack creativity. Dang, I feel bad for you son, that’s burn to the Hong Kong agency scene right there. Seriously though I would be curious about the methodology
The $300 Million Sneaker King Comes Undone – WSJ – In May, Mr. Malekzadeh’s fiancée—also the company’s finance chief—pushed for both of them to come clean, according to people familiar with the situation. Federal prosecutors a few months later charged the couple with bank fraud and Mr. Malekzadeh with wire fraud and money laundering. Customers claim they paid millions of dollars for shoes that never arrived. A court-appointed receiver is sorting out the remaining inventory of the entrepreneur’s company, Zadeh Kicks. Early last year, Mr. Malekzadeh collected orders for about 600,000 pairs of Air Jordan 11 Cool Grey sneakers months before they hit stores, netting over $70 million, according to prosecutors. He priced the sneakers between $115 and $200 a pair, cheaper than their expected retail price of around $225
