It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.
One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.
My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.
I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.
My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.
Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.
That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.
Apple Captures 66% of the Smartphone Industry’s Profits in Q3 leaving all of their Competitors Combined in the Dust – Patently Apple – it is becoming a challenge for Chinese smartphone brands to increase their smartphone ASPs and margins due to a combination of longer consumer holding periods and Apple lowering pricing on some key SKUs, which has limited the headroom that Chinese vendors had used to increase their ASPs – in the long term Huawei having to be vertically integrated all the way up the stack could be to their benefit
Gildo Zegna: tailoring masculinity for changing tastes | Financial Times – luxury goods industry is feeling the heat of technological disruption, social upheaval and identity politics. Furthermore, within the high end fashion industry few items of clothing are facing more pressure from falling consumer demand than the one that made the Zegna family rich: the traditional men’s suit. “The big challenge we face is a rethinking of masculinity,” he says. – I think streetwear is interesting because of the reassurance it provides on masculinity. The basics of streetwear go back to the mid-century sports basics. The hooded top, jeans, t-shirts, plaid shirts, Letterman jacket, track jacket etc
A Surveillance Net Blankets China’s Cities, Giving Police Vast Powers – The New York Times – Chinese authorities are knitting together old and state-of-the-art technologies — phone scanners, facial-recognition cameras, face and fingerprint databases and many others — into sweeping tools for authoritarian control, according to police and private databases examined by The New York Times. Once combined and fully operational, the tools can help police grab the identities of people as they walk down the street, find out who they are meeting with and identify who does and doesn’t belong to the Communist Party. The United States and other countries use some of the same techniques to track terrorists or drug lords. Chinese cities want to use them to track everybody.
Is LVMH’s Digital Transformation Working? | Luxury Society – “Over the last few years our market has become highly fragmented,” it added. “Customer journeys and purchasing habits have become more complex. Now, in addition to magazines and other traditional media, our customers – especially young people – use a range of digital options to stay informed, communicate with friends and shop. Brand awareness and customer engagement are built on these many different touchpoints.”
Mariah Carey, media changes in 2020, coming shortages on rare earth metals, China and Russia’s threat to the west and the power of China.
Mariah Carey @ SingaporeGP 2010 by KWSW
I found it relatively easy this year to avoid a lot of the Christmas ads. Maybe because there are much bigger things to think about like the new UK government, protests from Chile to Hong Kong and the soap opera that is the Trump presidency.
My old colleague Andy at New York creative agency Praytell have pulled together a US centric set of ideas on media changes to expect in 2020. The anticipated changes to the NCAA and Instagram are very interesting. The NCAA is a very lucrative franchise and yet the players get so poorly rewarded for their efforts.
I’ve been negative about the focus of lithium ion battery power for everything and this talk gives compelling economic and environmental arguments to look at alternatives like hydrogen fuel cells. This presentation on the coming shortages in rare earth metals should be a call to action.
Great panel at The New Enlightenment Conference held in Edinburgh looking at Russia and China and what it means for the west and the threat they present.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies produced this video on the power of China
Mediatel: Newsline: Vodafone’s ‘matured’ digital strategy reappraises adspend – “Many advertisers, including Vodafone, have come to realise that a lot of the social platforms are high frequency but very, very low attention,” she said. “When you are launching a new brand or proposition you can’t communicate it in one and half seconds.” – stating the bleeding obvious dressed up as industry thought leadership. You could have realised that a decade ago. Social is poor for brand building, but what are Vodafone going to do with it?
Dubai Ports World and a New Form of Imperialism – report examines Gulf expansionism through a case study of the Emirates-based company Dubai Ports World (DP World). This multinational is one of the world’s leading global port operators and logistics giants—and a source of power for the United Arab Emirates. A close look at its operations in the Horn of Africa reveals the ways that a government can exert control through a modern state-chartered company. A closer look at the operations of DP World also casts light on a key driver of disastrous state fragmentation in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea. DP World functions like a modern-day version of the British East India Company, serving as both a foreign policy tool and a profit engine – which makes Chinese run ports and Belt and Road projects even scarier
Project MUSE – China and World Order: Mutual Gain or Exploitation? – signs are that an assertive realpolitik is China’s leitmotif. Frankopan’s New Silk Roads lays out the wide scope of China’s ambitions and hints at some of their genuinely internationalist dimensions, but it also documents the case for viewing China’s role as a wolf in sheep’s clothing—at least as rapacious as European and other imperialists in previous centuries. The latter view is supported by Burnay’s Chinese Perspectives on the International Rule of Law and the anthology Building a Normative Order in the South China Sea. Still other studies show that China’s cyber networks are establishing foundations for Chinese dominion over foreign resources and potential dependencies that, in time, can be pressured to do more than kowtow
China and Hollywood: Is the romance over? – SupChina – the upcoming sequel to Top Gun, a 1986 American action drama film, made headlines following the release of its first trailer, where two patches that had originally shown the Taiwanese flag appear to have been swapped out. Produced by Paramount Pictures, the movie has Chinese tech giant Tencent as its investor and primary promoter in the Chinese market.
The “New” Private Security Industry, the Private Policing of Cyberspace and the Regulatory Questions – Mark Button, – the growth of the “new” private security industry and private policing arrangements, policing cyberspace. It argues there has been a significant change in policing which is equivalent to the “quiet revolution” associated with private policing that Shearing and Stenning observed in the 1970s and 1980s, marking the “second quiet revolution.” The article then explores some of the regulatory questions that arise from these changes, which have been largely ignored to date by scholars of policing and policy-makers
Privacy, People, and Markets | Ethics & International Affairs | Cambridge Core – Most current work on privacy understands it according to an economic model: individuals trade personal information for access to desired services and websites. This sounds good in theory. In practice, it has meant that online access to almost anything requires handing over vast amounts of personal information to the service provider with little control over what happens to it next. The two books considered in this essay both work against that economic model. In Privacy as Trust, Ari Ezra Waldman argues for a new model of privacy that starts not with putatively autonomous individuals but with an awareness that managing information flows is part of how people create and navigate social boundaries with one another. Jennifer Rothman’s Right of Publicity confronts the explosive growth of publicity rights—the rights of individuals to control and profit from commercial use of their name and public image—and, in so doing, she exposes the poverty of treating information disclosure merely as a matter of economic calculation
Data and Digital Intelligence Commons – The digital economy can be understood as comprising intelligent systems running whole sectors, employing data based digital intelligence to re-organise and coordinate them. Within such a macro understanding, it is possible to apply the framework of Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) developed by Elinor Ostrom to examine the management of data and digital intelligence resources at the community level in a given sector, like transport, under the dominant model. Such an analysis reveals very suboptimal results on almost all the key IAD evaluation parameters; from efficiency and equity to accountability and sustainability
Steering capital: the growing private authority of index providers in the age of passive asset management: Review of International Political Economy: Vol 0, No 0 – with the shift towards passive investing, the three big index providers have become actors that exercise growing private authority in capital markets as they steer investments through the indices they create and maintain. Index providers define the criteria according to which companies or countries are included into an index. Thereby, they influence investment decisions and corporate governance norms as well as strategies of those companies and states (that seek to be) included into their indices. We argue that rather than technical expertise, the main source of authority are their powerful brands that are trusted by the international investment community and which are entrenched via network externalities
Noncompete agreements | Economic Policy Institute – Our survey results show that somewhere between 27.8% and 46.5% of the private-sector workforce—between 36 million and 60 million workers—are subject to noncompete clauses. High and low level employees are being covered by noncompetes. Given the ubiquity of noncompetes, the real harm they inflict on workers and competition, and the fact they are part of a growing trend of employers requiring their workers to sign a variety of contracts that take away their rights, the authors believe that they should be abolished – having been hobbled by one, I couldn’t agree more
Telegraphic Revolution: Speed, Space and Time in the Nineteenth Century* | German History | Oxford Academic – the impact of the ‘communications revolution’ upon experiences of time and space during the nineteenth century. Focusing upon the first three decades of telegraphic communication, it unpacks the assumptions underlying linear narratives of ‘acceleration’ and ‘time-space compression’ to understand the roots of Germany’s fraught relationship to modernity. In doing so, it highlights the importance of the changes which took place between the 1848 revolutions and the early years of the Kaiserreich and which laid the foundations for the peculiarities of the Wilhelmine Era. During this period, it argues, the perceived impact of telegraphic communication, the ‘expansion’ or ‘contraction’ of space and time, varied from one person and place to another, reflecting the technology’s progressive and uneven expansion across Germany. Access to new networks of communication was dependent upon, and in turn influenced, the changing status of individuals, towns and the countryside experiencing the forces of industrialization, market capitalism and globalization – more on the central idea behind this
Jazz Wars in the ’70s | The Village Voice – jazz in the ’70s boiled down to a debate between the noncompromising eclectics and the compromising eclectics, a debate that escalated into a class war. Monied groups with major record label affiliations played concert halls; a middle class of dependable mainstream-modern attractions monopolized the established jazz clubs; the new and avant were accommodated briefly by the loft scene, and then by a network of new clubs and theatres. Numerous exceptions to this picture don’t alter its veracity. Jazz radio became fusion radio, while the record industry, puffing away at the jazz-is-back myth with one overproduced confection after another – this explains Kenny G
Beyond scandal? Blockchain technologies and the legitimacy of post-2008 finance | Finance and Society – Harnessing the concepts of ‘moral economy’ and ‘scandal’, we identify both possibilities and limits for blockchain applications to legitimate a range of monetary and investment activities. However, we also find that a persistent individualisation of responsibility for failures and shortcomings with ‘live’ blockchain experimentation has undermined the potentially legitimating aspects of this technology. Combining a reliance on technological fixes with a persistent individualist moral economy, we conclude, works against efforts to confront head-on the tensions underpinning the on-going legitimacy crises facing finance – sociological reasons why much of fintech wouldn’t work even if the tech could
Swiping right: face perception in the age of Tinder – ScienceDirect – judgments of physical attractiveness are assumed to drive the “swiping” decisions that lead to matches, we propose that there is an additional evaluative dimension driving behind these decisions: judgments of moral character. With the aim of adding empirical support for this proposition, we critically review the most striking findings about first impressions extracted from faces, moral character in person perception, creepiness, and the uncanny valley, as they apply to Tinder behavior
What’s love got to do with it? Passion and inequality in white‐collar work – Rao – – Sociology Compass – Wiley Online Library – we argue that the passion schema has become a critical marker in the labor market for sorting individuals into occupations, hiring and promotion within organizations, and assigning value to people’s labor. Emergent research suggests that because the expression and perception of passion remain ambiguously defined in the workplace and varies by context, it is pivotal in reproducing social inequalities. In this review, we focus on how privileging passion in the workplace and interpreting it as a measure of aptitude impacts social inequalities by race, gender, and social class
CMA lifts the lid on digital giants – GOV.UK – interesting points: Each year, about 15% of queries on Google have never been searched for before. Other search engines like Bing will not have the same access to these queries, putting Google in a powerful position of being able to better train its algorithms and provide more accurate search results than its rivals. The CMA has also found that the default settings people are faced with online have a profound effect on choice and the shape of competition. Last year in the UK, Google was willing to pay around £1 billion – 16% of all its search revenues – where it was the default search engine on mobile devices such as Apple phones. – Looking at the the 15% of queries that are new to Google every year, is this cultural evolution, new brands and products or a combination of both?
Explainer: Behind the climb in Chinese companies’ defaults on bond payments – Reuters – state and private companies have missed payments on more than 100 billion yuan ($14.2 billion) of bonds in the year to end-October, not far off the 111 billion yuan for all of 2018, according to S&P Global. Reuters calculations show six state-owned firms and 42 private companies defaulted on payments this year.
China’s social credit system: The Chinese citizens perspective | UCL ASSA – The question of who to trust, and social trust more broadly is one that is pertinent to every modern society, not just China. Although the idea of someone being ‘trustworthy’ (chengxin) has long existed in the Chinese traditional moral system, it is widely believed this was fundamentally damaged in the past 50 years, starting with Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76), now seen as a period characterised by the ‘breakdown of public morality’. A turbulent period characterised by families turning on each other and being forced to denounce any friends or family members deemed counter-revolutionary, the Cultural Revolution has also had the effect of eroding the concept of chengxin and therefore also mutual trust over time
Unilever warns it will miss 2019 sales growth target | Financial Times – economic slowdown in south Asia — one of its biggest markets — and “difficult” trading conditions in west Africa. It also said trading in developed markets remained “challenging” and that while there were signs of improvement in North America, a recovery there would take time.
China’s TV, Film Industry Shrinks Amid Ongoing Censorship | RFA – Around 65 percent of 9, 841 actors and celebrities in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan hadn’t been on television lately, while the high-profile roles are generally shared among less than one percent of the profession, the report said.Around 95 percent have had more than a year without being offered work, it said. – It’s RFA so you have to take a certain amount of it with a pinch of salt but the numbers fit with what I’ve heard. The Chinese film industry has put its eggs in fewer and fewer baskets
The problem with pattern matching or prejudice by another name. Prejudice is a hot button topic in society. Racial prejudice, ageism, systemic racism. Embedding prejudice into technology through pattern matching will be the new frontier for social justice campaigns.
Singaporean telecoms firm SingTel does adverts that focus on traditional family roles and often run into unintended consequences. It is interesting that they focus so much on the reinforcement of tradition. Presumably, even with Singapores innovative housing policy and efforts at reducing prejudice through its one Singapore policy, it still taps into traditional Chinese values. The unintended consequences are cleverly woven into the creative. Take for instance take this advert / meditation on snowflake gen-z.
Jaguar launched its F-Type with this video – it taps into the nostalgia for Hot Wheels and reminded me of Honda’s cogs advert. The focus on Hot Wheels reminded me of the ignominious end of British toy car manufacturer Matchbox and Dinky. Both of whom would be familiar to those people who fall into the generation X age bracket. My childhood was all about the Matchbox Superfast line.
Tapping to the childhood delight of playing with cars is very smart because of its emotive nature. Though it is a world away from driving today.
Pablo Escobar’s family doesn’t strike me as the kind of progeny that you’d get tech gadgets from. Apparently Elon Musk’s Boring Company copied their previous product – a tech bro friendly flamethrower. Now they’ve come back with a foldable smartphone. The video has the kind of misogynist excess of the Michael Mann- produced TV series Miami Vice.
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.
