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.
Amazing deep fake video of Richard Nixon based on the script written for a failed Apollo 11 moon landing. It’s the end of history as we know it. The deep fake video of Richard Nixon has some advantages, notably the relatively low resolution of recordings, Nixon’s distinctive voice and the amount of audio and video to work from to train the system.
The Coming Political Restrictions on Chinese Outbound Travel – The Diplomat – lots of foreign destinations will be breathing a collective sigh of relief. This is also a move to increase domestic consumption. The move to make Hainan a playground for China’s rich is also designed to reduce the amount of tax free luxury purchases abroad.
How to shop for men: Why so many guys are uncomfortable with the whole idea of receiving gifts. – So why do you think it’s so hard for men to articulate things that they want? I think it’s in part because they’re not conditioned to talk about what they need and what makes them happy. I do think that’s a big part of it. And so as a result, it expands from everything. From health care, and not talking about that, all the way through down to the somewhat mundane or trivial things in life—like a gift. – insightful stuff on gifting and obligations
Opinion | Living in Dark Mode – The New York Times – of the Hong Kong liberation movement was a plot device in a William Gibson novel, I would expect him to write a character like Karen. (Paywall) – dark mode is a great metaphor for the dystopian ennui. Yet I find it much easier to work in dark mode on my computer, which provides an interesting contradiction to idea
The white working class is a political fiction | The Outline – It turns the working class into something people are, not a function of what they do. It becomes a cultural description totally divorced from labor and wealth, only to be gleaned from outward displays of “class” that come with intelligence, appearance, taste, and all those things that make up meritocratic ideas of “workers.”
Sacha Baron Cohen won an award and made a speech on internet freedom at the Anti-Defamation League awards. He’s a really good orator. Sufficiently good that the likes of Alphabet, Facebook and Twitter must be thankful that he doesn’t have a political office (yet). Check it out, its well worth half an hour of your time.
It feels like things are coming to a head.
The landscape
China has been preaching cyber-sovereignty (and taking advantage of the laissez faire western platforms for its owndark ends). The parallels between 1930s Germany and the current Han nationalist policies of China’s communist party can’t be overstated.
The British government is afraid, and has failed to release its own report on whether Russian influence operations shaped UK election outcomes.
In the US, we have an armed man driving across the country and opening fire in a restaurant to investigate the veracity of a conspiracy theory posted online.
Baron Cohen outlines his own examples:
…when Borat was able to get an entire bar in Arizona to sing “Throw the Jew down the well,” it did reveal people’s indifference to anti-Semitism. When—as Bruno, the gay fashion reporter from Austria—I started kissing a man in a cage fight in Arkansas, nearly starting a riot, it showed the violent potential of homophobia. And when—disguised as an ultra-woke developer—I proposed building a mosque in one rural community, prompting a resident to proudly admit, “I am racist, against Muslims”—it showed the acceptance of Islamophobia.
The internet has come a long way since the Clinton administration heralded its rollout as a sign of great things to come. It has worked its way into our homes, replacing brown goods in the living room and empowering the home computer and games console. From there it has slipped into our pockets and on to our wrists through our cellphones and watches.
For many people, the internet mediates many of their daily social interactions. It is the channel for popular culture and current affairs. All of which has been curated by algorithms for them. It takes a considerable effort to step out of that.
I still:
Buy my music rather than subscribe to it
Pay for a news reader to curate my own online reading
Try and limit my reactions on social media to my own curation of content for others, rather than taking in content there
I work within the media industrial complex. I have a good idea of what’s possible.
That isn’t to say that there was a golden age where the internet was a haven of enlightened thought and polite debate. If you believe that, you’re wrong. As Baron Cohen eluded to in his keynote:
Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It’s as if the Age of Reason—the era of evidential argument—is ending, and now knowledge is delegitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march.
Firstly, the move to the fringe had been a relatively recent phenomena. Following his 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech, Enoch Powell had a 74 per cent approval rating amongst British people according to a poll done by The Gallup Organisation.
About the same time, my parents told me about the ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’ signs. These were found in many British towns at the same time that hippies were advocating peace and love
The fringe that Baron Cohen talks about existed in live music venues and concert sold music merchandise for bands like Skrewdriver. I was just that bit too young to see the National Front marches that happened in various cities in the 1970s. Rock Against Racism again was something I just missed out on. The 1980s had the right wing skinhead movement as much more on the fringes. This was complicated by the various tribes
‘Traditional’ skin heads who loved ska, loved their mates and weren’t afraid of a good fight
Left wing skin heads who tended to be more of a European thing
Anarchist affiliated skin heads, who were similar to anarchist affiliated punks
Skin heads who were affiliated with progressive causes such as animal liberation and gay rights
There were fanzines passed around. Books were given limited private pressings and sold via mail order. A guy I went to college with had a reputation being a ‘weirdo’. Everywhere he went (in US army surplus clothing including a cold war era steel helmet. Everywhere in his wake he left Combat 88 stickers and warned anyone who would listen of the coming race war.
European games programmers developed a concentration camp manager simulator with a game play mechanism similar to The Sims. This was distributed over bulletin boards and the ‘sneaker net’ – copied on to diskette and shared with other people.
Stormfront set up a dial-up bulletin board in the US, which then moved on to the nascent web.
There was hate speech, conspiracy theorists, paedophiles and worse on the internet. At first a certain amount of technical skill, provided a barrier between the mainstream user and the content. Not everyone had a handle on Usenet groups or IRC channels for instance.
Then as the volume of web sites increased massively there wasn’t an effective way to have these ideas served to you unbidden unless you had a dig around to find forums of likeminded people like Stormfront.
Stormfront’s founder said
“provide an alternative news media” and create a virtual community for the fragmented white nationalist movement.
Google’s search engine made it a bit easier to find web-based forums for pretty much anything under the sun.
Baron Cohen isn’t trying to remove all the fringe content from the web. It would be an almost insurmountable battle. It takes the Chinese government a lot of effort. And that’s dealing with:
One written language
A limited amount of internet companies
Absolute control over the country’s internet infrastructure
Tens of thousands of censors and engineers working full-time on maintaining a harmonious internet that still has a lot of hateful sentiment under the guise of Han nationalism
When platforms become publishers
The first thing that comes through about the the platforms that Baron Cohen discusses:
Alphabet (Google, YouTube)
Facebook (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp)
Twitter
All of these platforms (like Yahoo! before it) are afraid of being considered to be publishers. Being a publisher brings a host of obligations that require resources to address. Things like:
Editors
Respecting intellectual property rights
Defamation and slander law liability (outside US)
All of these things put you inside the remit of often contradicting laws of different countries. So it is in the financial interests of these companies to back ‘extreme free speech’.
As the popularity of these platforms increased a few things happened:
On social platforms, the amount of content available to view increased to a point that it became unmanageable for the average consumer
The situation is similar with video platforms
On search platforms, providing the best search provided competitive advantage by serving up whatever consumers wanted. If consumers don’t find what they want through your search engine, they may build up a habit with someone else’s service
They started to have a large amount of audience knowledge which they parleyed into targeted advertising
Why algorithms?
Algorithms are all around you.
They amplify easy paths. It’s when you start looking at a shopping site and they suggest other products that it thinks you might be interested in
It’s when Google knows that there are cats in a picture when you go looking for cats
It’s when you’ve finished Narcos and Netflix suggests that you might like Peppa Pig because parents fail to set up a separate profile for their children and have watched Narcos once the kids are in bed
On social it’s more subtle. It sees what you, or people it thinks are like you engage with ad serves up more of it. That way you no longer have to worry about wading through everything your contacts have shared
The problem is that this creates filter bubbles. And in the filter bubble it reinforces everything it thinks that you want to see. You’re no longer the one alien obsessed guy down the pub, but connected to alien conspiracy nuts just like you.
However all is not what it seems. Marketers, particularly agency marketers like myself when we get together bemoan the effectiveness of Facebook in particular.
Organic reach of a given post has declined massively. Ogilvy did some great research on it five years ago, aggregating data on client accounts of different sizes from around the world.
An appreciable amount of the audience for content on Facebook isn’t real. Viewable impressions could be only 60% of the total impressions served. Maybe less.
The average view time will be less than 5 seconds
In terms of brand building metrics such as memorability and landing messages it terms to be no great shakes
It can be great if you have a particular call to action like ‘buy now’
But it makes it much harder for us to believe fully in the picture that Baron Cohen portrays.
Is Facebook (and other social platforms) a horrible place. Yes it can be
Do the leadership of these companies have values that are way out of step with the countries that they live in. Absolutely.
Are they as powerful as Baron Cohen believes? Again, they can be. But probably not the universal power of evil overlords that the media would have you believe. That’s not about intent, I am sure they’d love the power. Instead, they’re just not that good.
Lets have a chat about machine learning
The secret sauce that a lot of these companies are trying to use is something called machine learning. Its the stuff that the media says will steal your job. You might hear the phrase AI or artificial intelligence used interchangeably with it.
It is good for some specialist things, but not nearly as sophisticated as the media would have you believe. Its no good in tasks that have a degree of uncertainty or ambiguity. Its not perfect at making judgement calls – just look at your email account’s spam email filter.
This is the technology that people expect to make calls about the kind of ethical issues Baron Cohen discusses – its not going to happen any time soon.
It’s not all about the internet
In Baron Cohen’s own words:
Zuckerberg says that “people should decide what is credible, not tech companies.” But at a time when two-thirds of millennials say they haven’t even heard of Auschwitz, how are they supposed to know what’s “credible?” How are they supposed to know that the lie is a lie?
Baron Cohen’s point is that when truth and alt facts are put together with equal weighting, the audience finds it hard to differentiate or retain the content. That lack of knowledge or mass ignorance isn’t solely a failure of technology. Collectively society has failed to make everyone air of shared objective truths.
Solutions?
Baron Cohen talks about freedom of speech not being equal to freedom of reach. The reality is that social content typically reaches 1% of followers. The exception is if the content becomes popular with that 1%. It is not algorithms on their own.
He also talks about regulating platforms in a more similar way to newspapers or TV stations. In truth social media is closer to public access television in the US around about the time of the 1984 Cable Communications Act. All be it, with advertising and reach that CNN could only dream of.
Slowing down the posting of content, Baron Cohen talks of this as a possible solution. It will certainly remove some of the heat. It’s not certain if he wants this to included a review of every post prior to publication. If so, that will require a lot of people to augment a lot of machine learning.
If a service becomes less agile, it would also leave the space open for new services to pop up – creating Mark Zuckerberg’s worst nightmare. Chinese companies stealing his market share and money that should go into Facebook’s coffers.
Not that simple
Let’s talk about shared truths for a bit. We can all agree on scientific truths such as the earth going around the sun, Newtonian physics and even quantum physics. Things start to come apart when one considers real world events. The Chinese will have a very different view to people in the west.
Imagine for a moment if China through the Hong Kong government could deprive the pro-democracy protestors of their ability to organise online? The Chinese government narrative would be something along the lines of:
They’re splittists
Spreading hate and violence against innocent Chinese
Racists against their own people
Or what happens to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny when he was recently interviewed by the Financial Times. Then there is the issue of what nation states do to each other
…the Kremlin’s success was less in manipulating the west than creating the perception it was able to do so. “You can spend $500,000 on Facebook ads and for several years the whole establishment of a huge western country will go nuts about interference, even though its real effect is risible. The investments are minimal but they give you front pages and power.
Most of the world would probably beg to differ, but once we go down the road of regulation it will open up new problems and dilemmas. Regulation wouldn’t save the Rohinga from the counter insurgency (COIN) operations of the Myanmar government.
The problem needs to start with people. We’re at our technologically most advanced and yet we seem to be living in the dark ages. A secondary issue might be the technological devices that we use to access the internet. Baron Cohen talks about the need to slow down the posting of content. This would be to reduce the frenzy of views and instant venting of pure emotion.
Part of that is down to the platforms, but part of it might be device design. I have been giving some thought to that last point. More in it another time.
‘Caveat Emptor:’ State Dept. Mocks Russian, PRC Weapon Sales In ‘Buy American’ Pitch « Breaking Defense – four Chinese-made Harbin Z-9 helicopters purchased by Cameroon in 2015, one of which crashed soon after purchase. Similarly, Kenya bought a handful of Chinese-made Norinco VN4 armored personnel carriers, “vehicles that China’s own sales representative declined to sit inside during a test firing,” he claimed. “Since going ahead with the purchase regardless, sadly dozens of Kenyan personnel have been reportedly killed in those vehicles,” Cooper said, adding “caveat emptor!” He also slammed Chinese CH-4 armed drones, which various countries in the Middle East have found “to be inoperable within months, and are now turning around to get rid of them… We have seen countries around the world leap at the chance to obtain high-tech, low-cost defensive capabilities only to see their significant investments crumble and rust in their hands” – buy China and pay twice, interesting to see this in the defence sector. Is the export quality worse than the products for the PLA? Or is China falling down on maintenance and services packages (customer service)? I think the Russian argument is harder to make given their decades of experience building simple, but effective defence products
Ireland Inc.: The corporatization of affective life in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland – Diane Negra, Anthony P McIntyre, – how a post-Celtic Tiger Irish government aligned with elite interests has doubled down on its commitment to corporate citizenship. Despite the depredations of this era being directly attributable to the irrational exuberance of the Celtic Tiger period and lapses in financial regulation, Ireland post-2008 is marked by a radical forgetfulness and defined by ‘Shock Doctrine’ regulatory policies that have installed corporatism at the heart of everyday life. Key features of this landscape include ongoing governmental facilitation of tax avoidance by multinational corporations, the hollowing out of public services, the normalization of under-employment and a burgeoning housing crisis. We show here how the popular images and narratives of the period index a shift toward corporate impregnability and a public culture in which individuals absorb greater risk and take up positions of heightened precarity
Glossy 101: How fashion brands are rethinking influencer marketing – Glossy – when brands work with micro-influencers, they’re paying less to work with people who tend to have a more engaged audience. A report from The Wall Street Journal estimated the micro tier charges between $400 and $2,000 per post, while higher tiers will charge anywhere between $10,000 and $150,000. It should be a win-win. However, by adding more people to the mix, brands are setting themselves up for a lot more work
Sprout Social its at IPO | Pitchbook – it will be interesting to see how they get on given the negative investor sentiment around the likes of Hootsuite
BT unveils biggest brand campaign in 20 years – created by Saatchi & Saatchi, the ad begins with a schoolgirl reciting Charles Dickens’ classic opening from A Tale of Two Cities as she walks through the dreary British streets. Set to Blinded by Your Grace, Pt 2 by Stormzy, it goes on to showcase Britain’s technological advances over the past few decades, from CCTV and Tube advancements to the emergence of broadband – is it just me or this or is this exceptionally dark. CCTV!
Measuring the effectiveness of creativity in marketing | Marketing Week – the ad industry will be forced to refocus on creativity. Yet marketers (and their counterparts in finance) have become used to the measurability of performance marketing. If the industry can’t prove the effectiveness of creativity, brands will continue to up spend on short-term sales activations rather than brand building. The majority of markets are trying to add some science to the art. An exclusive survey of more than 400 brand marketers conducted by Marketing Week finds 61.8% measure the effectiveness of their creative (compared to 76.5% who measure the effectiveness of media)
Don’t Let Metrics Critics Undermine Your Business | MIT Sloan Review – those lucky employees who haven’t been automated into professional obsolescence instead find themselves enduring what economic historian Jerry Z. Muller calls the “tyranny of metrics.” Numbers rule their workplace lives, and there’s no escape. “The problem is not measurement,” Muller declares, “but excessive measurement and inappropriate measurement — not metrics, but metric fixation.” “Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business,” warns Harvard Business Review’s September-October 2019 cover story: “Strategy is abstract by definition, but metrics give strategy form, allowing our minds to grasp it more readily. … The mental tendency to replace strategy with metrics can destroy company value.”
Hey – it could’ve been Regina Ip! | Big Lychee, Various Sectors – it seems Hong Kong officials use Reuters as their preferred conduit for leaks (or ‘scoops’ as media folk call them), while their Mainland counterparts prefer the Financial Times. The latter today reveals (paywall, etc, possibly) that Beijing will eject Chief Executive Carrie Lam, maybe in March, after things have ‘stabilized’ ha ha
Six Chinese men jailed for a hit job that was subcontracted five times – Inkstone – Pi Yijun, a criminal justice professor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, said the case reflected strong distaste towards litigation in Chinese culture. “People are not willing to go through the legal channel,” Pi told Inkstone. “Whenever they encounter disputes, they try to solve it privately, mediating through personal connections or taking the law into their own hands.” – Caveat Emptor
Andy Kessler: WSJ: Tech Treadmill Wears Firms Out – Max Hopper’s “Rattling SABRE—New Ways to Compete on Information,” and finally in 2013 we got Rita Gunther McGrath’s “The End of Competitive Advantage.” Each of these takes describes a different stage in the life cycle of corporate tech. Hopper was, as Harvard professor James Cash noted, “the first person who really defined the marketing leverage that could come from using technology.” In the late 1950s Hopper helped build Sabre, an automated flight-reservation system, and in 1981 he helped design the first major frequent-flier program to give American Airlines a competitive “AAdvantage.” Yet by 1990 he worried that the game was over, suggesting that technology was “table stakes for competition.” Hopper noted that “SABRE’s real importance to American Airlines was that it prevented an erosion of market share.” That insight comes to mind watching the Streaming War of 2019. Netflix and Amazon have a huge lead in streaming video. But eventually everyone uses the same technology. Tim Cook wants in, so Apple TV+ launches Nov. 1 with (probably overpaid) Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. Robert Iger wants in, and Disney paid (probably too much) for control of BAMTech, the streaming-video technology developed by Major League Baseball, which it is deploying for streaming services Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu + Live TV. AT&T wants in and paid (again likely too much) for Time Warner to create HBO Max. NBCUniversal wants in too. See the trend? Google ought to rename its streaming service YouTube TV Max+
Are Publicis’ problems reflective of a wider market malaise? | Advertising | Campaign Asia – By placing Publicis on top of Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett and Bartle Bogle Hegarty, they have destroyed those storied brands. By putting Publicis Sapient on top of LBi, Digitas, Rosetta and Razorfish, they have killed their digital brands too. As a result, now they are saying they have to transform the transformers – I agree that brands have been affected, but I’d also argue that the flight away from craft to disruption has also been probelmatic
Louis Vuitton Has a Factory in Texas Now, Marking its Third in the U.S. — The Fashion Law – LVMH – which is trudging ahead and abroad and “increasingly letting industrial logic and geopolitics govern supply-chain decisions,” per Dalton, while competitors, “such as Gucci, Hermès and Chanel have kept most [of their] production in Italy and France” – this is just business. And considering that LVMH’s Fashion & Leather Goods division, alone, brought in $15.8 billion in sales in the first 9 months of the year– with the group as a whole reporting revenues of $42.14 billion for the same period
Google goes back to the future with its paper phone experiment. Its an interesting commentary on the questionable benefit provided by smartphones. Google seems to be partly convicted. The paper phone experiment goes back to device prototyping. Handsrping founders used to carry around a block of wood in the shape of the PDA that they wanted to build. I was also thinking about Dan Greer‘s views on complexity in technology and what he might have thought of the paper phone experiment.
One-legged man’s Hallowe’en costume is the Pixar table lamp.
General Magic was a much storied, but ultimately failed technology company. This documentary about it looks epic on the trailer. You can stream the full documentary here.
Here is question and answer session from the Silicon Valley premiere of the documentary.
General Magic came up a device that Sony manufactured for AT&T. It was a PDA like the Apple Newton, but designed around connectivity. It had a built in dial-up modem. It had vCard type functionality that allowed you build up your address book from your email contacts over time.
Really interesting things here:
Techno-optimism needs to be tempered but still hopeful as an outlook
Ease to get to market now compared to back then
Technology industry is at an inflection point in terms of it does for mankind. As an industry it needs to get a better understanding and course track to go for a more positive future
The relative infancy of UX allowed for more trial and experimentation of visual elements
Here are some users talking about how they use the General Magic device.
DuckDuckGo launched a ‘terminal styled interface which I quite liked. You can try it here
It isn’t only retro cool but pretty useful, and works really well on a computer that is using a dark mode theme to its operating system.
Elena Botelho discusses how the characteristics of successful CEOs differ from the popular narrative
