Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service; a George Gilderesque subscription newsletter, the likes of which were very popular in the mid to late 1990s. The Strategic News Service process is an interesting ‘anti algorithmic’ analysis in action. A counter point to the world that Google now represents, I don’t buy all that Anderson and the Strategic News Service says, but this is very interesting to watch.
The synthetic voice of synthetic intelligence should sound synthetic. Successful spoofing of any kind destroys trust. When trust is gone, what remains becomes vicious fast.
— Stewart Brand via Simon Willison. It seemed very appropriate when considering the Google Duplex demonstrations from the other week.
Singapore’s utopian clean looking city and high quality Japanese animation are a marriage made in heaven. Makoto Shinkai directed this for the forthcoming Singapore Thomson East Coast Line on behalf of Japanese construction giant Taisei Corporation. More Japan related content here.
This would usually be the part where I would talk about how I am looking forward to Deadpool. But I won’t. I wanted to marvel at the collective hullucination of Deadpool marketing. Deadpool marketing isn’t trying to get you to go and see the film, but instead brings elements of the film to you. Once you are properly tuned in, it then makes perfect sense to see the film. The problem is that there are so many fragments from DVD rewraps to teasers and TV appearances that it would be impossible to capture or choose a favourite.
Instead I am going to share a video of the Korean show King of Masked Singer, where Ryan Reynolds preformed Tomorrow from the musical Annie in a unicorn mask.
Fans in show panel and the audience lost their shit
The debate over privacy on Facebook got me thinking about the internet we envisaged. Reading media commentary on Tim Cook’s recent address at Duke University prodded me into action.
What do I mean by we? I mean the people who:
Wrote about the internet from the mid-1990s onwards
Developed services during web 1.0 and web 2.0 times
I’ve played my own small part in it.
At the time there was a confluence of innovation. Telecoms deregulation and the move to digital had reduced the cost of data and voice calls. Cable and satellite television was starting to change how we viewed the world. CNN led the way in bringing the news into homes. For many at the time interactive TV seemed like the future of media.
Max Headroom
Starship Troopers
The Running Man
Second generation cellular democratised mobile phone ownership. The internet was becoming a useful consumer service. My first email address was a number@site.corning.com format email address back in 1994. I used it for work, apart from an unintended spam email sent to colleagues to offload some vouchers I’d been given.
My college email later that year was on a similar format of address; on a different domain. I ended up using my pager more than my email to stay in touch with other students. Although all students had access to the internet at college, the take-up was still very low. At college I signed up for a Yahoo! web email. I had realised that an address post-University would be useful. Yahoo! was were I saw my first online ads. They reminded me of garish versions of classified ads in newspapers.
After I left college I used to go to Liverpool at least once a week to go to an internet cafe just off James Street and check my email account, with a piece of cake and a cup of coffee. I introduced my friend Andy to the internet (mostly email), since we used to meet up there and then go browsing records, clothes, hi-fi, studio equipment, event flyers and books at the likes of HMV, the Bluecoat Chambers, Quiggins, The Palace and Probe Records.
I found out that I had my first agency job down in London when I was called on my cell phone whilst driving around to Andy’s house to catch up after a week at work.
The internet was as much as an idea as anything else and the future of us netizens came alive for me in the pages of Wired and Byte. Both were American magazines. Byte was a magazine that delved deeper into technology than Ars Technica or Anandtech. Wired probed the outer limits of technology, culture and design. At the time each issue was a work of art. They pushed typography and graphic design to the limits. Neon and metallic inks, discordant fonts and an early attempt at offline to online integration. It seemed to be the perfect accompanyment to the cyberpunk science fiction I had been reading. The future was bright: literally.
Hacking didn’t have consumers as victims but was the province of large (usually bad) mega corps.
I moved down to London just in time to be involved in the telecoms boom that mirrored the dot com boom. I helped telecoms companies market their data networks and VoIP services. I helped technology companies sell to the telecoms companies. The agency I worked for had a dedicated 1Mb line. This was much faster than anything I’d used before. It provided amazing access to information and content. Video was ropey. Silicon.com and Real Media featured glitchy postage stamp sized clips. My company hosted the first live broadcast of Victoria’s Secret fashion show online. It was crap in reality, but a great proof of concept for the future.
I managed to get access to recordings of DJ sets by my Chicago heroes. Most of whom I’d only read about over the years in the likes of Mixmag.
All of this pointed to a bright future, sure there were some dangers along the way. But I never worried too much about the privacy threat (at least from technology companies). If there was any ‘enemy’ it was ‘the man’.
In the cold war and its immediate aftermath governments had gone after:
Organised labour (the UK miners strike)
Cultural movements (Rave culture in the UK)
Socio-political groups (environmentalists and the nuclear disarmament movement)
I had grown up close to the infamous Capenhurst microwave phone tap tower. Whilst it was secret, there were private discussions about its purpose. Phil Zimmerman’s PGP cryptography offered privacy, if you had the technical skills. In 1998, the European Parliament posted a report on ECHELON. A global government owned telecoms surveillance network. ECHELON was a forerunner of the kind of surveillance Edwards Snowden disclosed a decade and a half later.
One may legitimately feel scandalised that this espionage, which has gone on over several years, has not given rise to official protests. For the European Union, essential interests are at stake. On the one hand, it seems to have been established that there have been violations of the fundamental rights of its citizens, on the other, economic espionage may have had disastrous consequences, on employment for example. – Nicole Fontaine, president of the european parliament (2000)
I advised clients on the ‘social’ web since before social media had a ‘name’. And I worked at the company formerly known as Yahoo!. This was during a brief period when it tried to innovate in social and data. At no time did I think that the companies powering the web would:
Rebuild the walled gardens of the early ‘net (AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy)
Build oligopolies, since the web at that time promised a near perfect market due to it increasing access to market information. Disintermediation would have enabled suppliers and consumers to have a direct relationship, instead Amazon has become the equivalent of the Sears Roebuck catalogue
Become a serious privacy issue. Though we did realise by 2001 thanks to X10 wireless cameras that ads could be very annoying. I was naive enough to think of technology and technologists as being a disruptive source of cultural change. The reason for this was the likes of Phil Zimmerman on crypto. Craig Newmark over at Craigslist, the community of The Well and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The likes of Peter Thiel is a comparatively recent phenomenon in Silicon Valley
We had the first inkling about privacy when online ad companies (NebuAd and Phorm) partnered with internet service providers. They used ‘deep packet inspection’ data to analyse a users behaviour, and then serve ‘relevant ads.
Tim Cook fits into the ‘we’ quite neatly. He is a late ‘baby boomer’ who came into adulthood right at the beginning of the PC revolution. He had a front row seat as PCs, nascent data networks and globalisation changed the modern world. He worked at IBM and Compaq during this time.
Cook moved to Apple at an interesting time. Jobs had returned with the NeXT acquisition. The modern macOS was near ready and there was a clear roadmap for developers. The iMac was going into production and would be launched in August.
Many emphasise the move to USB connectors, or the design which brought the Mac Classic format up to date. The key feature was a built in modem and simple way to get online once you turned the machine on. Apple bundled ethernet and a modem in the machine. It also came with everything you needed preloaded to up an account with an ISP. No uploading software, no errant modem drivers, no DLL conflicts. It just worked. Apple took care selecting ISPs that it partnered with, which also helped.
By this time China was well on its way to taking its place in global supply chains. China would later join the World Trade Organisation in 2001.
The start of Tim Cook’s career at Apple coincided with with the internet the way we knew it. And the company benefited from the more counter culture aspects of the technology industry:
Open source software (KDE Conqueror, BSD, Mach)
Open standards (UNIX, SyncML)
Open internet standards (IMAP, WebCAL, WebDav)
By the time that Facebook was founded. Open source and globalisation where facts of life in the technology sector. They do open source because that’s the rules of business now. It is noticeable that Facebook’s businesses don’t help grow the commons like Flickr did.
Businesses like Flickr, delicious and others built in a simple process to export your data. Facebook and similar businesses have a lot less progressive attitudes to user control over data.
Cook is also old enough to value privacy, having grown up in a less connected and less progressive age. It was only in 2014 that Cook became the first publicly gay CEO of a Fortune 100 company. It is understandable why Cook would be reticent about his sexuality.
He is only a generation younger than the participants in the riots at the Stonewall Inn.
By comparison, for Zuckerberg and his peers:
The 1960s and counterculture were a distant memory
The cold war has been won and just a memory of what it was like for Eastern Europeans to live under a surveillance state
Wall Street and Microsoft were their heroes. Being rich was more important than the intrinsic quality of the product
Ayn Rand was more of a guiding star than Ram Dass
They didn’t think about what kind of dark underbelly that platforms could have and older generations of technologists generally thought too well of others to envisage the effects. You have to had a pretty dim view of fellow human beings. More on privacy here.
Is Public Relations A ‘Bullshit Job’? | Holmes Report – If you find yourself in a company that doesn’t use public relations in a way that you find meaningful, and even occasionally inspiring, you’re in the wrong place. That doesn’t mean public relations consulting is a “bullshit job” but it may be an indication that you’re working for a shitty organization. – when I started in agency life I wondered if my new career was a mistake: was it a bullshit job? It didn’t help that I was working with a bunch of dot com startups and enterprise software companies.
I’d previously worked in industry formulating plastics and in the petrochemical industry. The chances are that if you drove a car from the early 1990s to the 2000s, I’d either helped develop part of your car, or helped provide the road surface that you drove on.
Agency life isn’t like that. It took me years to become comfortable on whether I had a bullshit job. That came as I started to see the difference to businesses that my work did. More related content here.
Folli Follie folly | FT Alphaville – interesting read, QCM used the companies own store finder function on their website – in order to determine that Folli Follie’s distribution wasn’t as healthy as claimed
I had an amazing opportunity to see the V&A exhibition The Future Starts Here as a preview. The Future Starts Here is a collection of 100 objects that the V&A think might be indicators of the near future. smart appliances to satellites, artificial intelligence to internet culture, this exhibition brought together more than 100 objects as a landscape of possibilities for the near future.
This includes
Smart appliances
Autonomous sailing ship
Micro-satellites
3D face scanned sculptures
Masdar City, the world’s first carbon-neutral, zero-waste city, Foster + Partner
The local Unilever business in Hong Kong did their own version of a Dove advertising campaign. What’s interesting is how it differs in tonality from the usual Dove work.
‘Appreciate don’t adjudicate’ is very local. Cantonese is laden with puns and symbolism. It is a fluid living language (despite the efforts of the Communist Party of China). Or as Campaign Asia put it:
The campaign is “by locals, for locals” and because Cantonese is famously colloquial and fond of wordplay, the use of Cantonese lingo is expected to resonate with the audience.
Armed with better perspective, Sir Martin Sorrell vows to ‘start again’ | Marketing Interactive – this is interesting, particularly as a number of clients put WPP on review after he left. I am not sure that he will be able to build another WPP; but he could build a great consultancy for procurement departments at major brands. I hope that he doesn’t go digital only, or go and work for a platform like Google or Facebook; selling Facebook video advertising
The Netflix generation doesn’t do compromise | The Times – a few things about the media consumption in this. There are still shared experiences: landmark shows like Sherlock, McMafia, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, or Black Mirror. Fragmentation of audiences didn’t start with Netflix but with video cassette recorders, multiplex cinemas, Channel 4 and cable and satellite TV. There was a certain delicious irony reading about how media plurality is ‘bad’ in a paper owned by the Murdoch media empire. I committed a greater sin than the Netflix millennials and opted out of watching TV quite happily for seven years until I was gifted a Sony Trinitron TV set by a friend who was getting a flat screen – which would probably count as even more ill tempered. The comments on online discussion are natural. Do Times readers invite objectionable opinions around to dinner parties in the name of diverse thinking? I would imagine not that often unless there are other ties (like familial links). (Paywall)
