Ged Carroll

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  • December 2023 newsletter

    December 2023 newsletter introduction

    I put the December 2023 newsletter together early because I know how December goes.

    https://flic.kr/p/2pEXND8

    It used to be that Christmas parties and a gradual disappearance of clients and colleagues meant that the month effectively ended on December 15.

    87P_0957
    Christmas card from the old Adidas Originals boutique on Newburgh Street (as I write this the store is now occupied by Ralph Lauren’s RRL brand

    In recent years all that went out the window. Clients called pitches for early January, which meant working up to and over the Christmas period. New projects came in that absolutely, positively had to have a first round of creative for the first week in January. 

    Whatever the holiday season throws at you, and whatever your favourite festival of choice to celebrate it is called. Have a great one! (Here’s a soundtrack for the vibes.)

    Being thankful.

    A good deal of December is about being thankful. The people and things that I am being thankful for (a by no means complete list).Things and people that I am being thankful for (a by no means complete list). 

    • My strategy brethren: Parrus Doshi, Lee Menzies-Pearson, Sarath Koka, Colleen Merwick, Maureen Garo, Conall Jackson, Alice Yessouroun, Makeila Saka, Zoe Healey and Calvin Wong
    • Client services and creative partners who were in the thick of it: Greg Barter, Francisco Javier Galindo Aragoncillo, Anthony Welch, Ian Crocombe,  Leanne Ainsworth, Stephen Holmes and Noel Wong
    • Other smart people in the industry: Stephen Potts, Jeremy Brown, Darren Cairns, Robin Dhara, Martin Shellaker and Lisa Gills
    • Things: WARC, the IPA

    With that done, let’s get into the December 2023 newsletter!

    Things I’ve written.

    • Thinking about listening pleasure and the amount of factors that affect how we listen to music.
    • Omakase – how a personalised experience migrated from high end Japanese sushi restaurant to reinvent food and beverage practice in Korea. What is it likely to mean for the rest of us?
    • Beep – time, time signals and changing consumer behaviour.
    • Soft girls and slackers – why generational dropout is likely to be a fiction and the true picture of how engaged we all are at work.

    Books that I have read.

    Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis posits that Europe has already moved to a post-capitalist (and post-political) technofeudalist state where technology platforms are the defacto rulers. Varoufakis is more important in the way his book will likely influence future regulation and digital policy than as an analysis of the current zeitgeist per se. His viewpoint on the rentier economics of technology platform businesses is shared by other thinkers and academics including Lina M. Khan of the US. Federal Trade Commission.

    Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements by Mary Buffett and David Clark. What I would have given for this book when I was studying my finance module in the first year of college. Buffett and Clark break down a bit of the history of Warren Buffett and what to look for on financial statements of publicly listed companies in a very homespun style. I don’t know if it’s a deliberate effect but even the cutting of the thicker than normal pages and inconsistent printing adds to its homespun feel.

    Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy by Harry Farrell and Abraham Newman and Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror by Robert Young Pelton. Both of these books were recommended by friends directly involved at one time or another in GWoT – the global war on terror.

    Licensed to Kill reminded me of Kipling’s portrayal of ordinary British soldiers in India. Their stories were never told by the historians. It is a similar state today with the contractors that serve in the conflict. There is at least one example where they are whitewashed out of a story in real-time by the US military, who instead gave credit elsewhere in their press statements. It’s fascinating and hugely dispiriting all at the same time.

    The surprise for me was that the US reliance on contractors didn’t go back to the first Gulf War, but all the way to Vietnam where oilfield services and engineering contractor Brown and Root were responsible for 85% of the infrastructure deployed. Something I’d never seen mentioned before.

    Underground Empire focuses on how financial and trade measures were used by the United States during the conflict and since. My main criticism of the book would be its singular focus on the US, whereas we have also seen these tools used by the European Union, China and Russia in more recent times – with varying degrees of success.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    The power of nostalgia is constantly underestimated in brand marketing. It’s why you remember ads and jingles decades later – the ‘long’ of The Long and The Short of It. Nothing is more wrapped into nostalgia than what marketers call ‘moments. Christmas is a classic example of a ‘moment’. Christmas in the Carroll household means working with my Dad to get his electro-mechanical control unit and Christmas tree lights down from the attic and carefully assembled in the front room. These lights are old, filament bulbs. Amazon’s plethora of LED lights for the tree mean that you no longer have the opportunity for training in zen-like patience on a December afternoon; checking and replacing each bulb that was blown in order to get the lights to work. Each year my Dad’s tobacco tin of spare bulbs gets precipitously closer to empty. 

    The tree itself was proudly made in Hong Kong sometime in the late 1960s or very early 1970s with authentic looking plastic pine needles held on branches of tightly wound wire about as thick as a coat hanger, held upright by an ancient plastic-legged tripod. The mechanism to run it is something my Dad cobbled together soon after buying the tree. The lights are wired into a giant disc of metal contact and a former radar motor swings around an armature to activate each contact in turn. All of this is held on a stout board that also has a circuit with a dully glowing bulb to provide resistance. The heat given off by the board and the dull light in a darkened room when it’s going is a reasonable substitute for an open fire in the smokeless zone where my parents live. 

    The smell of carbon bushes burning and old electrical products warming up is as much Christmas to me as cinnamon or an Old Spice gift set. 

    Once everything is running optimally it is covered in fibreboard boxes that are still wrapped in unblemished vibrant kitsch 1970s Christmas paper.

    Another element of Christmas in the Carroll household is Jim Reeves’ 12 Songs of Christmas album that my parents have on repeat from December 1st onwards. 

    I took a trip down to the Young V&A museum in Bethnal Green to see their Japan: Myths to Manga exhibition. It’s designed for little people but delightfully curated.

    IMG_1871
    Sailor Moon drawings from the animation cells

    This month, I have been mostly listening to Patten’s second album alongside all the Christmas music. Patten uses AI created samples as his instruments on his tracks. His first album using this technique Mirage.FM reminded me of early 1980s techno in terms of its avant garde, at times discordant sound and tempo. The latest album Deep Blue feels much more organic, closer to hard bop jazz.

    I was inspired by an end of year wrap-up by the folks at Superheroic AI on the leading edge of creative tools, which will feed into something I will drop in the new year.

    McSweeney’s reimagined Spotify (and last.fm‘s) end of year recaps as if WebMD had done it…

    But Ged, why no Christmas adverts?

    By this time of the month, I am over Christmas adverts already, instead here’s a vintage clip from the Republic of Telly that explores some of the tropes of Christmas ads. I suspect that this was strongly influenced by campaigns mobile phone network Three Ireland had run over a number of years, but neatly skewers the cliches in much of Ireland’s adverts that come to focus on family members who can’t come home.

    RTÉ television

    Ok, ok, I will give you a Christmas ad, just not one of the ones that you’re expecting. In Japan, Christmas is when people eat KFC (this is down to KFC’s first Japanese franchisee marketing to expats looking for a turkey substitute on Christmas in the 1970s, which then became a wider thing in Japanese society). It is also a kind of mid-winter version of Valentine’s Day since it’s not bound by its western context. Which is why Sky condoms dropped this advert below. Thankfully there is no awkward fumbling with a drunk colleague in the stationery cupboard in the advert.

    Going beyond Christmas and into 2024, Trendwatching have created an interactive web page outlining 15 industry-specific trends and 45 innovations related to the trends. Worthwhile going through for thought-starters, more here.

    Things I have watched. 

    It’s cold and dark and I make no apology for my films being unapologetically escapist and and entertaining to try and counterweight the drab conditions.

    Bosch Legacy season 2 – Titus Welliver as Harry Bosch is a great bit of casting and I have yet to tire of the Bosch series on Amazon Prime.. Part of this is down to Michael Connelly’s involvement, who has done a good job keeping the show in tune with his books. Season 2 is based on The Wrong Side of Goodbye and The Crossing. If you haven’t watched any of them start at the beginning with Bosch season 1 and work your way through to the Bosch Legacy series.

    Reacher season two – I always found Tom Cruise’s adaption of the Jack Reacher books a bit odd. I liked watching him play opposite Werner Herzog, but Cruise wasn’t Reacher. In the Lee Childs books Jack Reacher’s a blond blue-eyed man mountain. He’s not a weirdly intense Napoleon-sized fragile soul – the very things that made Cruise fantastic in Magnolia. In the Amazon Prime series, that is not an issue because former teenage mutant ninja turtle Alan Ritchson fits Childs’ character to a tee and the character development is really well done. Season one was amazing and season two is off to a great start. This season is based on the book Bad Luck and Trouble.

    The Lord of The Rings – I was in primary school when I first got to see this film. We’d just read The Hobbit and aped around hall acting out part of The Lord of the Rings that we were reading in class. Ralph Bakshi’s animation of the first book and a half of LOTR amazed me with its mix of animated characters and rotoscoped backdrops.

    Ralph Bakshi in his own way has been just as much a visionary as Walt Disney, he brought a ‘realism’ to his animation. Due to a dispute with the studio Bakshi refused to make the second part of this film which is a shame. When you get to see Peter Jackson’s trilogy, the first film in particular, draws on Bakshi’s work shot for shot in parts (as well as the famous BBC radio drama from 1981). I have enjoyed watching this regularly since, along with Bakshi’s other works: Wizards and Fire & Ice.

    Useful tools.

    TeuxDeux.

    It’s hard to get a to do list that works for you. Trust me I have tried a number of them. What works for me may have variable mileage for you. I have been finding TeuxDeux working for me at the moment and it’s $36/year. Secondly, I like small software companies that are more invested in their software or service and won’t ‘sunset’ (that’s Silicon Valley-speak for shutting down a service) it at the drop of a hat like Google, Yahoo!, Meta etc.

    EmbedResponsively.

    An oldie but goodie, EmbedResponsively provides a simple service that allows you to put video on a page that will adapt to the viewing device.

    FREEKey system

    I needed keyrings for my parents that were easy to put keys on or off. My Mum isn’t particularly patient and a broken nail spurred my search for them. The Swedish designed FREEKey system of keyrings solved that problem.

    Infogram

    Infogram is a service that makes it easier to create data visualisations of different types that I have found useful over the past couple of weeks.

    Control Panel for Twitter

    Twitter is style annoyingly useful at times. I have got around the worst aspects of it through the use of lists of trusted accounts in certain areas. Control Panel for Twitter is a plug-in that rolls back some of the amendments that Twitter has undergone by Elon Musk.

    In terms of my own post-Twitter active social channels, you can find on Mastodon and Bluesky. I am still recovering from the trauma of Pebble closing down as it had the best community of all the post-Twitter platforms. 

    Cyberduck

    When I first started using Cyberduck, it was to access FTP servers for images and videos being transferred. Now it’s more about accessing cloud storage facilities such as Google Drive and Dropbox, without having to synch all the files on to my computer. It can even work with Egnyte within reason.

    The sales pitch.

    Now taking bookings for strategic engagements or open to discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done to date here.

    https://flic.kr/p/2pjXZRc

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my December 2023 newsletter. Be excellent to each other, have a great Christmas and New Year, I look forward to seeing you back here in 2024.  Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues. See you next month!

  • October 2023 newsletter – 3rd time’s the charm

    October 2023 newsletter introduction

    As I write the October 2023 newsletter. it’s getting noticeably darker outside earlier, but the sunrises reward us with a wider variation of colours. And we all have Halloween to look forward to. This is the third issue and I am still finding my way writing these things. I hope that the third time’s a charm, but I will let you be the judge of that. You can read the earlier ones here.

    https://flic.kr/p/2pEXND8

    I looked into where the phrase ‘third time’s a charm’ came from. Apparently it comes from Old English Law, if a prisoner survived three attempts at hanging and survived, they would be set free.

    https://flic.kr/p/6HfrRi

    You can find my regular writings here and more about me here. Let’s get it started!

    Things I’ve written.

    • Climate despair – how NGOs and companies are failing young people in the way they talk about climate change and what they can do to change their communications to increase active participation in reducing the degree of climate change.
    • Technopolarity – how technology is subverting the power structures of elected governments and instead empowering the likes of Elon Musk.
    • Clustomers – how Intuit MailChimp’s ad campaign, whilst clever, might reinforce C-suite misconceptions around marketing and advertising

    Books that I have read.

    • These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life – RyanHoliday.net – whilst its not a book, it does contain great advice for readers
    • Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. Fogg’s simple model for understanding individual behaviours has helped drive everything from health campaigns to online services. Tiny Habits how consumers and businesses can help foster behavioural change, one tiny habit at a time. More on my review of the book here. 
    • The long awaited Mick Herron book The Secret Hours did not disappoint. It’s from the Slow Horses universe, but not a Slough House story per se. More than a nod to Boris Johnson’s stint as foreign secretary and prime minister. I will leave it at that rather than give you plot spoilers.
    • China A History by John Keay. Keay’s book was recommended to me by a number of people. In 535 pages he attempts the impossible in terms of covering China’s history as a civilisation through the start of Xi Jinping’s first administration. It’s a dense read – it’s well written, covering the complexity of history well. The current communist government is barely a footnote (ok exaggerating a bit here), but it puts things in perspective.
    • Spain A History edited by Raymond Carr. The book highlights the notable trends, intellectual and social, of each particular era in its history. Roman rule created the notion of ‘Spain’ as a distinct entity. The chapters on the Visigoth monarchy, Moorish Spain, the establishment, an empire, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, all chart the cultural, political and economic arc of Spain. It then goes on to explore 19th century liberalism and the pivot during much of the 20th century towards authoritarian rule, followed by a return to democracy and onwards up to the 21st century. My favourite chapter was about the Visigoths, which was a period I didn’t know much about prior to reading this book – the author did a particularly good job of bringing the Visigoths to life on page. 

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Halloween. I have been looking forward to the holiday for at least a month. Growing up in an Irish household with rural origins, I had an appreciation of the changing seasons and loved the traditions around Halloween, especially tales of the fairy forts and the banshee. It’s also a big money earner, in the advertising world allowing for interesting tactical executions that couldn’t otherwise be attempted. Outside advertising, ignoring increased food sales, a third of consumers will spend 51 – 100 USD on putting together their own costume, or buying one off the rack. The most hardcore 10% of those surveyed admitted to spending 250+ USD.

    I was not into costumes, instead I look forward to the most is my Mum’s barmbrack. For the first time in a few years my Mum baked a few barmbracks and sent one of them to me. It’s a Halloween tradition. The barmbrack itself is a spicy fruited bread with a texture somewhere between brioche and and a pan loaf. Traditionally, the brack would contain a ring or trinket, which would turn up in a random slice.

    When I was small, commercial bakeries still used to have a an aluminium ring that looked like it was from a cheap Christmas cracker contained wrapped in greaseproof paper baked into the brack.

    barmbrack

    Downloadable recipe PDF here (Dropbox) or here (Google Drive) if you fancy baking your own over the weekend.

    While we’re on the subject of food, Hope & Glory’s collaboration between Lick paint and Heinz ketchup for a ketchup shade of wall paint creates talkability, though I wouldn’t be buying it for my own home.

    https://flic.kr/p/2p1jBHy

    Buoyant Bob – I am stil not sure if Buoyant Bob is a social object, a brand, both or something else. Buoyant Bob was a successful entry into the US cannabis marketplace. The brief in the campaign was to work around restrictions in cannabis advertising and show it as the most fun brand in the space. 

    Buoyant Bob was released as a single: retail takeovers, vinyl records at dispensaries, and fans sharing Instagram Stories using “The Man Who Got So High” all followed.

    OnlyWatch – an auction in Geneva in aid of research Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy features one-off luxury watches from all of the major Swiss timepiece houses. Some of the entries are unique colour ways but Bulgari went the extra mile with their Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Marble. Their watches are already well known for being some of the thinnest timepieces available. A tourbillion is a demonstration of the watchmakers art. The one in this watch is just under 2mm thick – that’s just over double the thickness of a credit card for a moving mechanical assembly. And then they managed to cover the entire titanium case and strap of the watch in marble and make a marble dial – without making the watch any bulkier than its usual ridiculously slim case. It’s not something I would wear even if I could afford it, but I am in awe of the ingenuity. 

    DSC01594
    Bulgari for OnlyWatch – Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Marble

    Finally Dentsu Health published a great must-read byline on how media and entertainment can aid health equality. More here.

    Things I have watched. 

    I got to see The Boy and The Heron early at the BFI London Film Festival. You won’t get any plot spoilers from me here. Official release is December 26 in the UK, December 8 in Hong Kong. It’s Studio Ghibli, what else do you need to know?

    General Magic – a great documentary about a Silicon Valley start-up of the same name.. Back in the early 1990s General Magic was as visionary as Apple and as hyped as WeWork. If you’ve ever worked with a start-up or care about technology give it a watch. More on my thoughts here.

    The Pentagon Papers – Despite this being a made-for-TV film, James Spader does a great job of playing Daniel Ellsberg; the RAND researcher to gave the materials to the media. In terms of pacing acting and storytelling, I would put this on a par with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman’s film adaptation of All The President’s Men. 

    Tampopo is a beautifully shot Japanese film with comedic moments that tells the story of a widow, her son and their ramen shop. More on what I thought of here.

    A relatively modern Halloween tradition in the Carroll family has been watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown – recommended for young and old alike. While my Dad and I usually end up watching The Crow later on.  If you want more classic horror, then you could do worse than watching the livestream by the Creature Features show.

    Useful tools

    ITV Adlabs and Magic Numbers recovery budget planner

    Pretty much essential to look at if you have responsibility for UK media spend at a brand. This allows you to examine various scenarios and see likely outcomes based on media spend. More here.

    Google bundles generative AI and LLM with search

    I downloaded Chrome especially to try this out, it looks a bit more mature than Bing’s initial integration of ChatGPT. Go here to give it a try if you’re a Chrome browser user.

    Post-It Z-Notes

    You’re workshopping something with clients or thinking something through on your own – Post-It notes are key. The own brand ones can vary from really good to useless, so spend a bit more and get proper Post-It notes. In fact, I’d advise that you go one step further and get Post-It Z-Notes. The notes alternate sides in terms of where the ‘sticky end’ is and if you lift them from the pad you get a ‘Z’ before they peel away. They come away effortlessly and work brilliantly if you have them in a desk holder.

    Foldable wireless keyboard

    At the start of my career, I used to have a Palm PDA ( personal digital assistant – think a smartphone, without the phone and communications bit). I also had a long commute to Luton on a daily basis. I got a lot of reading and writing done thanks to a ‘Stowaway’ foldable keyboard made by a company called Think Outside. The company no longer exists, but the desire to be able to turn my iPhone into a simple writing tool lives on. Recently, I have been using this foldable Bluetooth keyboard. It folds up, can be used on a train seat table or even an economy class aircraft seat and recharges easily. The keyboard isn’t the usual rubbery mess that you tend to get in a lot of these devices. It’s one fault so far is that it feels flimsy, but I have already got my money’s worth out of it in just a few months. I fire up the iPhone’s notes app and get to work. I can then edit and refine once I have a bit more time on my Mac at a more convenient time.

    The sales pitch.

    Now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my October 2023 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. DON’T FORGET TO PUT YOUR CLOCKS BACK BEFORE YOU GO TO BED ON SATURDAY. Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues. 

  • Technopolarity

    Ian Bremmer at the Eurasia Group has been talking about Technopolarity throughout 2022 and has amped up the discussion in recent months.

    Bremmer’s hypothesis is that big technology companies and their leaders will create power structures that will challenge the powers of governments. I was reminded of the different ‘country franchises’ that populated the future America of Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. Snow Crash envisaged a Randesque libertarian hellscape with no power centre.

    The biggest technology firms are designing, building, and managing an entirely new dimension of geopolitics. In this new digital space, their influence runs deep, down to the level of individual lines of code. They’re writing the algorithms that decide what people see and hear, determine their economic and social opportunities, and ultimately influence what they think. Individuals will spend more time in digital space in 2022, at work and at home. Much of this time will be spent in the “metaverse”—an emerging, more immersive version of the web where all the problems of digital governance will be magnified. The metaverse (or more accurately, multiple metaverses) in turn will increasingly rely on economic systems based on decentralized blockchain platforms that governments are already struggling to control.

    Bremmer, I., Kupchan, C. (January 3, 2022) Risk 2: Technopolar World. United States: Eurasia Group.

    Aside from the power of the metaverse, Bremmer & Kupchan largely got things right. The Eurasia Group positioned technology giants along three axes. The degree to which the companies matched the following archetypes:

    • National champions.
    • Globalists.
    • Techno-utopians.

    In general, Chinese companies were national champions, while their American counterparts were predominantly globalists. The European Union has attempted and largely failed to bring a degree of control, curbing the excesses of technology companies.

    China has cracked down on companies that it felt was too big. The digital space itself has a Randian view of global leadership, ignoring the consequences and the responsibility of their power.

    Algorithms as destiny

    Bremmer’s initial thinking on technopolarity was focused on the role of algorithms underpinning online services. More recently, he has focused beyond platforms to look at the nature of ‘artificial intelligence’ and its ability to upend geopolitics.

    Emotional contagion

    As far back as 2012, Facebook had conducted a study in ’emotional contagion’ by altering the news feeds for 700,000 users and it was all completely legal. The feeds were changed to reflect more positive, or negative content – to see if seeing more sad messages makes a person sadder. The experimental subjects were not given any warning and their emotional state was by analysing changes in their language on the platform.

    And I am not even pointing out the effect that social media can have on its audiences in general without experimentation.

    Elon Musk’s Technopolarity

    Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk; brought the concept of Technopolarity to life. In the book Isaacson discusses decisions and actions that Musk made over the Ukraine war. Musk because of his personal concern about Russian escalation, disabled the Starlink service covering occupied Ukrainian territory to disrupt Ukraine’s military efforts including marine drones. So Elon Musk essentially made a decision that directly affected US defence efforts to support Ukraine. It could have even resulted in the destruction of American military equipment donated to the defence of Ukraine.

    Musk has had conversations with Vladimir Putin like he was a head of state and even the US government has been careful about how they deal with him.

    “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue”

    Colin Kahl, former under-secretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon
    https://flic.kr/p/2nteCTr

    Kahl’s attitude to Musk is at odds to the fate of former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio who went to jail after he was found to be a barrier to the NSA’s domestic surveillance plans, in particular the MAINWAY database. Nacchio was convicted of insider trading. Nacho’s successor also held outing after 4 years, discussions with the NSA went nowhere. A quick trawl of Twitter history would be enough to find evidence to put Musk on trial should the US government wish to do so. What’s happened to government power in the decades since Nacchio went to jail?

    The New Yorker went on to describe Elon Musk’s power as ‘shadow rule‘. Musk isn’t elected. He isn’t even responsive to his shareholders. His Twitter account is a testament to his mercurial nature.

    What’s more concerning for US government wonks is that Musk’s Tesla mega factory in Shanghai leaves him exposed to manipulation by the Chinese government. For instance, they could pressure him to turn off Starlink across the Pacific adversely affecting Taiwan, Japan, Australia and US forces in the region. The Ukrainian experience suggests that Musk would not hesitate to put American lives on the line, or see Taiwan handed over the horrific barbarity of Chinese invasion.

    More related content here.

  • General Magic

    General Magic has a reputation of being the technology equivalent of the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls, but it ended up going nowhere. I never got to see the device in person, it was only available in Japan and the US. It’s as famous much for its alumni, as it is for its commercial failure.

    https://flic.kr/p/4JWV1u

    This is captured in a documentary of the same name. For students of Silicon Valley history and Apple fan boys – the team at General Magic sounds like a who’s who of the great and the good in software development and engineering.

    General Magic started within Apple with a brief that sounds eerily like what I would have expected for the iPhone decades later.

    “A tiny computer, a phone, a very personal object . . . It must be beautiful. It must offer the kind of personal satisfaction that a fine piece of jewelry brings. It will have a perceived value even when it’s not being used… Once you use it you won’t be able to live without it.”

    Sullivan M. (July 26, 2018) “General Magic” captures the legendary Apple offshoot that foresaw the mobile revolution. (United States) Fast Company magazine

    The opening sequence tells you what the documentary is going to lay out. Over carefully curate images of Silicon Valley campuses, Segway riders and the cute bug like Google autonomous vehicle a voice talks about success and failure. That failure is part of the process of development. That General Magic has a legendary status due to its status as precursor to our always-on modern world and while the company failed, the ideas didn’t.

    https://flic.kr/p/ALLYpS

    The genesis of the spirit of General Magic goes back to the development and launch of the Macintosh with its vision of making computers accessible. The team looked around the next thing that would have a similar vision and impact of a product. The Mac had got some of these developers on the front cover of Rolling Stone – they were literally rockstars.

    You get a tale of dedication and excitement that revolved around a pied piper type project lead Marc Porat, who managed to come to the table with a pretty complete vision and concept of where General Magic (and the world) would be heading. The archive of footage of the offices with its cool early to mid 1990s Apple Office products still amazes now. The look of the people in the archive footage, make my Yahoo! colleagues a decade later seem corporate and uptight by comparison.

    Veteran journalist Kara Swisher said that she started following the company because it was ‘the start of mobile computing, this is where it leads’.

    What sets the documentary apart is that it tapped into footage shot by film maker David Hoffman who was hired to capture the product development process. The protagonists then provide a voice over of their younger selves. Their idealism reaches back to the spirit of the 1960s. You can see how touch screen screens and the skeuomorphic metaphors were created and even animate emoticons.

    I’ve never known a development process with so much documentary footage. Having been in this process on the inside, the General Magic documentary portrays a process and dynamics that haven’t changed that much.

    The ecosystem that the startup assembled including AT&T, Apple, Motorola and Sony made sense given the ecosystem and power that Microsoft had behind it. It’s hard to explain how dominant and aggressive Microsoft was in the technology space. Newton came out as a complete betrayal and John Sculley, who is interviewed in the documentary comes across worse than he would have liked.

    The documentary also has access to the 1994 promotional film where General Magic publicly discussed the concept of ‘The Cloud’ i.e. the modern web infrastructure – but the documentary doesn’t dwell on this provable claim.

    Goldman Sachs was a key enabler, the idea of the concept IPO set the precedent for Netscape, Uber, WeWork and the 2020s SPAC fever.

    In a time when there is barely one thing changing the technology environment, General Magic were pursuing their walled garden of their private cloud and missed the web for a while. Part of this is down to their relationship with AT&T.

    The documentary covers how project management dogged the project. Part of the problem was perfectionism was winning over the art of the possible and not focusing on the critical items that needed to be done. The panic of having to ship.

    It’s about getting the balance between ‘move fast and break things’ versus crafting a jewel of a product.

    But shipping wasn’t enough, the execution of shopper marketing and sales training was a disaster. The defeat was hard given the grand vision. But the ultimate lesson is that YOU are not representative of the mainstream market.

    The documentary post-mortem featuring thinkers like Kara Swisher and Paul Saffo points out the lack of supporting infrastructure, that would take years to catch up to where General Magic’s Magic Link had gone. Paul Saffo uses a surfing analogy that I had previously read in Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires about catching the right wave at the right time.

    John Sculley over at Apple made similar mistakes to the General Magic team which resulted in him being fired from Apple. Sculley makes the very human admission that being fired from Apple took him about 15 years to recover from personally.

    IBM Simon

    The documentary gives a lot of the credit (maybe too much of it) to General Magic as the progenitor of what we now think of as smartphones. The reality as with other inventions is that innovation has its time and several possible ‘inventors’; or what author Kevin Kelly would call ‘the technium’. This is the idea that technological progression is inevitable and that it stands on the layers of what has gone before, like fossils found inside rocks several foot deep. For instance, IBM created a device called Simon which was ‘smartphone’ which sold about 50,000 units to BellSouth customers in the six months it was on the market. Motorola – who were a General Magic partner also launched a smartphone version of the Apple Newton called the Motorola Marco in January 1995 and there are more devices around the same time.

    Reality is messy and certainly not like the clean direct line that the General Magic documentary portrays, even the Newton was only part of the story.

    The Wonder Years

    I was thinking about what I liked so much about the General Magic documentary. I immediately thought about it reminding me of my falling in love with the nascent internet and technology, which then bought me to the start of my agency career working with Palm (the company that eventually helped kill off General Magic’s product ambitions) and the Franklin REX which came out of sychronisation pioneers Starfish Software.

    But it was deeper than that. The Silicon Valley portrayed in the General Magic documentary wasn’t the dystopian hellscape of platform firms, generation rent, toxic tech bro culture and ‘churn and burn’ HR culture. Instead the General Magic documentary story represented a halcyon past of Silicon Valley portrayed in books like Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Fire In The Valley and Insanely Great. Where talented people motivated by a fantastic vision thing, with a user centred mission worked miracles. The darkness of fatigue and god knows what else is largely hidden by a Wonder Years TV show feel good nostalgia. Maybe it gives us hope again in the tech sector, despite Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Elon Musk? Maybe that hope might inspire something great again?

    Marc Porat’s personal tragedy and Tony Fadell’s business failure brings a hint of the real world through the door. The documentary uses Fadell’s link with the iPod and iPhone as a point of redemption, resilience, perseverance and vindication for General Magic.

    There’s also a cautionary tale full of lessons learned for new entrepreneurs, who often get the vision thing but forget about the details. More on General Magic here.

    More reviews here.

  • McDonalds CSR + more things

    McDonalds CSR

    McDonalds CSR activities came up a few times over the past day or so I thought I would visit it. CSR stands for corporate and social responsibility. A few American PR executives that I have come across used not to like the S in the middle, which sounded like socialism. The idea was doing good to enhance brand reputation – generally it was a strategic function.

    https://flic.kr/p/7wWbqf

    ESG operates at a higher level. CSR predates ESG as an idea. McDonalds CSR is interesting because of the tactical way it seems to be employed around what a couple of rules that I have noticed.

    • Children are always a good universal focus of McDonalds CSR, which is the reason why Ronald McDonald House is a common theme throughout the worldwide operations of McDonalds
    • McDonalds CSR is on the side of authority, hence its support for the Metropolitan Police when dealing with XR protests and Korean national service draftees. There is a risk that this could make its conduct in authoritarian countries more problematic

    More information

    Beauty

    Social media is fueling enthusiasm for new weight loss drugs. Are regulators watching? – Endpoints News

    China

    Chinese businessman with Tory links ‘hosted secret police station’ | The Times 

    Top 10 NPC delegate Proposals: AI, Escape Rooms, Baby Making, and Taiwan

    Consumer behaviour

    Why the UK is a long way from a consensus on social mobility | British Politics and Policy at LSE

    Culture

    To be a poem. – from the Web Curios newsletter ‘is a digital poem by Alicia Guo – it’s infinite and self-generating, and I don’t quite know how it works or where it’s pulling the words from, but each time it’s different and each time it’s fragmented and magical and silly and poignant and confusing and beautiful and I would like this to be read forever by a choir of machine voices until the heat death of the universe please thankyou.‘

    Economics

    Britain in Crisis: The UK Faces a Steep Climb Out of a Deep Hole – DER SPIEGEL

    Economic development is doing OK – by Noah Smith 

    China stock rally highlights health of consumer rebound – Asia Times 

    Finance

    A hat-trick of genuinely interesting papers relevant to the banking mess | Financial Times

    Gadgets

    Tony Hawk is face of Citizen CZ smartwatch, will skateboard in X Games | FastCompany

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kongers rally around the world to support defendants in ‘subversion’ trial — Radio Free Asia

    2 Hong Kong secondary schools to merge next year due to declining student population; education chief says teachers’ jobs not her priority | South China Morning Post – Students at school in Southern district will be forced to commute to Tung Chung as two Caritas institutions merge in September 2024. Secretary for Education Christine Choi welcomes decision, says interests of students come before ‘stability in the teaching industry’ – this is partly due to an ageing population and partly due to migration of families impacting school numbers

    Innovation

    Bob and Alice enable Long-distance quantum teleportation | EE News Europe 

    Hyundai Mobis shows world’s first rollable automotive display | EE Times Europe 

    Japan

    Japan is in the process of a huge transformation that is going largely unnoticed by the general public

    Hayao Miyazaki Selects His 50 Favorite Children’s Books | Open Culture 

    Amazing design choices in Kyoto

    Korea

    Ukraine War Turns Korea a Major Arms Exporter 

    Luxury

    Hong Kong Loses Ultra-Rich to Mainland, Singapore | Asian Sentinel

    Media

    ‘A hard business’: UK’s illustrious ad industry tainted by burnout and inequality | Advertising | The Guardian and Advertising’s Problem with Working Class People | LBBOnline. Interesting associated read: Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre | UK’s creative industries would need to employ 250,000 more working class people to be as socio-economically diverse as the rest of the economy  

    What over 50 looks like: interview with MullenLowe’s Ayesha Walawalkar – MediaCat

    Linear TV Viewers Still Include Gen Z and Millennials, For Now | Morning Consult – the inconvenient truth for Bytedance, Meta and Alphabet

    Daring Fireball: BuzzFeed News Is Shutting Down – online news is difficult to monetise. Insider Media have been struggling even with their subscription model

    Online

    April Fools’ Day On The Web – handy reference of past ideas

    Red Alert: ICANN and Verisign Proposal Would Allow Any Government In The World To Seize Domain Names – FreeSpeech.com 

    Whipling on Twitter: “RIP “China state-affiliated media” tags~ / Twitter – Elon Musk hewing towards China after conflict with NPR and BBC. Tesla Motors factories in China also probably weighs on his thinking, as it did when he pulled Ukraine’s access to StarLnk.

    It’s time to take back control of what we read on the internet – The Atlantic – The Atlantic recommends using RSS including using Newsblur

    Security

    “Opportunity Is Always Out There” With Simon Mann | Palladium 

    Farming: Satellite failure ‘cripples’ farmers as GPS-guided tractors grind to a halt | Sydney Morning Herald

    Russia worried too reliant on Chinese tech: memo  | The Standard 

    Laser Attack on AI speakers | EE Times Europe 

    Software

    China’s Newest Dating Craze: Real-Life Meetups With Virtual Boyfriends

    Tesla to continue EV price war, eyeing long-term profit brought by autonomy | DigiTimes

    Huawei cuts itself off from reliance on foreign ERP systems

    Wireless

    MediaTek is rumored to work with Inmarsat to promote satellite D2D communication service | DigiTimes

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