This blog came out of the crater of the dot com bust and wireless growth. Wi-Fi was transforming the way we used the internet at home. I used to have my Mac next to my router on top of a cupboard that contained the house fuse panel and the telephone line. Many people had an internet room and used a desktop computer like a Mac Mini or an all-in-one computer like an iMac. Often this would be in the ‘den’ or the ‘man cave’. Going on the internet to email, send instant messages or surf the internet was something you did with intent.
Wi-Fi arrived alongside broadband connections and the dot com boom. Wi-Fi capable computers came in at a relatively low price point with the first Apple iBook. I had the second generation design at the end of 2001 and using the internet changed. Free Wi-Fi became a way to attract people to use a coffee shop, as a freelancer it affected where I did meetings and how I worked.
I was travelling more for work at the time. While I preferred the reliability of an ethernet connection, Wi-Fi would meet my needs just as well. UMTS or 3G wireless data plans were still relatively expensive and slow. I would eventually send low resolution pictures to Flickr and even write a blog post or two. But most of the time I used it to clear my email box, or use Google Maps if I was desperate.
4G wireless services, started to make mobile data a bit more useful, even if the telephony wasn’t great
Machines for emoting, is the problem of our internet in the palm of our hands? Over the past few years the sentiment towards the internet has changed dramatically.
Before the internet
Going back to the 1960s, 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. And when Enoch Powell made his rivers of blood speech; 70 percent of British people surveyed agreed with him.
Real world media and underground subcultures traded blows over racism at a slower pace. Though many of those blows were real.
Is it the internet?
This is no longer the information superhighway of Al Gore. The reasons for the changes aren’t obvious. One popular narrative is that algorithms are to blame. It is common to hear that narrative in news media.
But academic research suggests that it isn’t ‘radicalisation’ by algorithms isn’t true.
Is it the devices we use?
There were smartphones before the iPhone. They were made by numerous companies including Nokia, Palm, SonyEricsson, Panasonic and even Microsoft (who partnered with a number of manufacturers). In Japan, NTT DoCoMo put the ‘smart’ in the network through iMode rather than building a mini-PC in the phone itself.
Smartphones had initially started with business users and gradually broadened its base. Quite early on, phones focused on social functions, a classic example would be Danger’s Sidekick model which was designed for messaging. Nokia first popularised the app store and security signed apps that Apple and Google built upon.
The move to the ‘pictures under glass’ interface that we now know from Android and iPhone devices coincided with a surge on social.
Social media existed before 2010, but not as we now know it. Few of us had smartphones in 2009. Facebook’s active user base has grown sevenfold over the past 10 years, and there simply aren’t enough people for that to happen again. Instagram and WhatsApp were both launched about a decade ago, and swiftly absorbed into the mother of all social networks. As for Twitter, let me simply note that Donald Trump only started tweeting in earnest in 2011.
Did the pictures under glass metaphor and apps designed to utilise it make social too easy to share? It allows people to emote. From mild emotions usually expressed with emoticons or GIFs to visceral anger that seems to flood Twitter – there seems to be evidence of correlation if not causality. So how can design slow the hose pipe down to encourage more considered responses?
If that’s the case then user experience design has to play a part in resolving some of the worst issues online, given that people can’t seem to be able to respond appropriately by moderating their behaviour.
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.”
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.
Horace Dediu on the transformation of the car into a smartphone. Turning a car into a smartphone isn’t a technology revolution that particularly excites me. I prefer things that can kill me to be using highly reliable real time operating systems with no real time network connectivity – if they have to run software at all. Former Thai finance minister Suchart Jaovisidha who was locked inside his BMW limousine by its onboard computer is a lesson to us all.
China Mobile 5G launch video is absolutely terrifying and probably the best advert for LTE that I’ve ever seen.
Consumer use case doesn’t seem to be that high on their priority. So there’s no downloading of Netflix style TV in a flash.
So what is the killer app? It isn’t autonomous cars, or life saving tele-medicine. But dystopian omnipresent Chinese security. There’s no way I’d be buying a Huawei 5G handset after watching this. It has extra resonance with the current ‘Be Water’ protests going down in Hong Kong. More wireless related posts here.
I am guessing that China Mobile won’t be handing out copies of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Here some of the books main topics are discussed by Shoshana Zuboff, Carole Cadwalladr, Paul Hilder and Shahmir Sanni.
VCCP’s first campaign for Cathay Pacific is interesting. It has moved away from the professional business traveller to focus on the leisure travel market. This might be a bet on where the Hong Kong economy is going and a ploy to try and tap into the burgeoning Chinese luxury travel market. I suspect that a good deal of it is Cathay Pacific not being price and service competitive with the likes of Oatar Airways on premium long haul flights.
For me this was a generic ad highlighting Cathay’s overall service rather than the business class experience. which is wedged in awkwardly on the end.
Here’s One Reason the US Military Can’t Fix Its Own Equipment – The New York Times – the irony of the US military being restricted by US legislation and lack of ‘right to repair’. US military withdrawal from R&D hasn’t help things either. DARPA does pure research, but the focus on COTS (commercial off the shelf) solutions by the US military has seen a withdrawal from more practical applications. Where is the modern US military equivalent of things like the Piccatinny rail standard? More security related content here.
Facebook’s fake numbers problem — Lex in depth | Financial Times – Facebook’s own estimates suggest duplicate accounts represent approximately 11 per cent of monthly active users while fake versions make up another 5 per cent. Others claim the total is higher. Yet Facebook continues to promote its user base as an incredible 2.45bn per month — close to one-third of the global population.” – ok so some of the logic is wonky, but the underlying point is very interesting
Sidewalk Labs document reveals company’s early vision for data collection, tax powers, criminal justice – The Globe and Mail – The community Alphabet sought to build when it launched Sidewalk Labs, she said, was like a “for-profit China” that would “use digital infrastructure to modify and direct social and political behaviour.” While Sidewalk has since moved away from many of the details in its book, Prof. Zuboff contends that Alphabet tends to “say what needs be said to achieve commercial objectives, while specifically camouflaging their actual corporate strategy.” – some of the most sinister stuff I’ve heard of, that hasn’t been originated by Chinese Communist Party cadre
Chaebols and firm dynamics in the Republic of Korea | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal – Moving from low- to high-income status implies that countries escape the middle-income trap. This implies institutional reform to create innovation-based growth. The column uses firm-level data to show how the Korean government’s chaebol reforms in the late 1990s transformed the economy from an investment-based to an innovation-based model. There are lessons here for China.
Opinion | Why Google’s Quantum Supremacy Milestone Matters – The New York Times – In everyday life, the probability of an event can range only from 0 percent to 100 percent (there’s a reason you never hear about a negative 30 percent chance of rain). But the building blocks of the world, like electrons and photons, obey different, alien rules of probability, involving numbers — the amplitudes — that can be positive, negative, or even complex (involving the square root of -1). Furthermore, if an event — say, a photon hitting a certain spot on a screen — could happen one way with positive amplitude and another way with negative amplitude, the two possibilities can cancel, so that the total amplitude is zero and the event never happens at all. This is “quantum interference,” and is behind everything else you’ve ever heard about the weirdness of the quantum world.
5G will only be as revolutionary as the devices we design for it — Quartz – “When we’ve spoken with consumers who carry the latest smartphones today, and you talk with them about 5G, what these users are saying is that the current form factor and feature sets cannot take advantage of the promise of 5G,” Sethi told Quartz. While smartphones are great for reading the web, watching videos, and checking emails, there’s not much that a considerably faster connection speed will do for them that they can’t already do.
IPA | IPA reacts to Twitter’s political ad ban – If online platforms won’t commit to a publicly available, platform-neutral, machine-readable register of all political ads and ad data online, then they should consider following Twitter’s lead in banning political advertising – and even then what would the first solution solve, given the failure of legislative regulation – what’s the point of a register when you have both major parties more crooked than a yakuza convention, but without the style?
IPA | Legal Update 31 October 2019 – Google announced that they are making changes to YouTube to address the substance of the FTC’s concerns and will apply these changes globally. The changes, which will be rolled out from January, include:• moving families over to YouTube Kids through notifications and educating parents about its benefits;• identifying Made for Kids content on YouTube via a combination of input from creators and machine learning; and • no longer serving personalised ads on Made for Kids, for all users regardless of age, and serving only contextual ads on this content
