My story with the Casio DW-100 began in the school canteen. One of the people that I used to hang with as I ate my packed lunch was a guy called Neil. Neil was one of the better off people in my school, he had a maths tutor. His Mum ran a green grocers and we occasionally heard about giant spiders turning up in boxes of bananas that had been picked up from the wholesale market.
The Chiba connection
Neil’s Dad was a ships carpenter by trade who ended up working for Shell. He was assigned to different places and inspected tankers that were under construction or being repaired. Because of this, he worked away for most of the year. During the summer or Christmas Neil would get to visit his job in places like Nigeria, Singapore or Japan. He spent a good deal of time in Chiba, Japan as his Dad was inspecting ships being built at Mitsui Engineering and Shipbuilding.
When you have a well paid parent who doesn’t see you very often and access to the latest greatest products, you end up the most well heeled kid on the block. At the time, a lot of the best Japanese products didn’t get as far as the UK. Neil had a better Walkman than anyone else and he had the Casio DW-100.
Casio DW-100
After coming back from visiting the Far East Neil came a new Casio DW-1000.
Why Casio?
Casio watches had a battery that would usually last a couple of years, which was why they were holding their own against competitors like Commodore or Sekonda. Before the lithium ‘coat button’ batteries, watches had smaller ‘shirt button’ sized batteries that lasted 12 months if you were lucky. The smaller buttons also seemed to leak ruining the watch beyond repair.
Back then our equivalent of Hodinkee magazine was the Argos catalogue. My local Rolex authorised dealer seemed like it was a space ship from another world. My Dad’s 1960s vintage Omega felt like adult unobtainium. Seiko and Citizen watches were things I aspired to have when got to hold down a job in the adult world of work that felt so far off at the time. It was the 1980s so even being able to work felt more hopeful than reality.
They were also cheaper than the likes of Seiko or Citizen digital watches. It was fortunate to have a Casio Marlin W750; which was a step above most digital watches at the time with water resistance of 50 meters. This was the best Casio digital watch that was available at the time in Argos catalogue. This 50M water resistance capability was shown with a marlin fish on the front of it. Otherwise it looked like every other Casio watch. What that meant that it was able to survive getting washed or having a shower. This was important as my school was full of light-fingered pupils.
The G-Shock before the G-Shock
Neil’s Casio DW-100 caught the eye for a number of reasons:
It was an unusual combination of resin strap and metal case
The strap was beefier
The case was predominantly brushed finish rather than shiny and discernibly larger
It had a plastic bumper on the front to protect the easily scratched plastic glass
“Water Resist 200M” embossed on plastic bumper. Dive watch level water resistance seemed like an ability to blast off into space.
Staring at the grey glass a bit harder and you would see a stylised scuba diver where my own watch featured a marlin.
Function-wise it was very similar to my own watch. The screen had the exact same three segments on the screen. There would be a half hour chime function, which was the soundtrack of my classroom in the same way that iPhone alerts are the soundtrack of the office today.
While these watches were robust, they would soon resemble a hard-working Land Rover. The front bumper scarred and chewed up as if it was mauled by a lion. Many of them were probably prefectly useable up to the day that they were thrown away or put in a drawer. One of them featured in an advertising campaign that Casio ran in the US in 2019.
The development of the G-Shock also implies that many of the drops that the DW-100 damaged it in a similar way to cheaper watches. The LCD screen would break and there wasn’t the kind of replacement services that we know have for broken smartphone screens.
Cult item
While the Casio DW-100 was not well known in the UK, they were sold in the US as well as Japan. in 1986, they were a key item in an episode of the TV show MacGyver. And have now been coveted by watch collectors and adult fans of the show.
Epilogue
I haven’t spoken to Neil in decades, we fell out of touch. He got sponsored for his first degree; did a doctorate after leaving the sponsor and has spent the rest of his career in the oil industry. The last I heard of him he was involved in oilfield maintenance and engineering in the Middle East.
2022 kicked off with the start of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a free trade agreement. It eclipses the European Union – it covers nearly a third of the global population and about 30 per cent of its global gross domestic product. [i] It’s hard to overstate how important this agreement is to the world economy.
Russia’s intervention in Kazakhstan to quieten unrest triggered by a rise in the price of LPG (liquified petroleum gas) and general government dissatisfaction is seen at the time as a good thing on balance.[ii]
The number of global COVID cases exceeds 300 million worldwide[iii], contrast this with the estimated 250 million infections experienced in China alone right before Christmas 2022.[iv]
By the end of January, we had 10 billion vaccinations conducted.[v] But that didn’t stop anti-vaxxers, including celebrity tennis player Novak Djokovic who was deported from Australia due to not being vaccinated.[vi]
In other medical developments, we also saw the first successful heart transplant from a pig to a human. The operation was carried out in the US. [vii] This represents a huge step forward in dealing with the shortage of available organs for transplantation.
February
The winter Olympics were held in Beijing, China. The International Olympics Committee have found it harder to get countries to host both the summer and winter Olympic Games. Holding these events in authoritarian countries posed hard questions for sponsors and legal sanction including the Beijing Winter Olympics Sponsor Accountability Act bill submitted to the US Congress.[viii]
No sooner had the Winter Olympics finished than Russia started its invasion of Ukraine, and the west made a remarkably cohesive response in terms of sanctions, this would be followed with military aid throughout the year.[ix] By the end of February,[x] Russia had indicated a willingness to use its nuclear forces. This was a remarkable turnaround from just seven weeks after Russia, as part of the United Natios Security Council affirmed that ‘a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.’[xi]
March
The global death toll due to COVID passes 6 million worldwide.[xii] In a potential resurgence of corporate Japan, Honda and Sony are partnering in creating sophisticated electric vehicles.[xiii] Equality may have taken a major step forward in the US, with young women in 22 major cities have a higher average salary than their male peers.[xiv] Part of this might be down to a decline in male participation in higher education and economic activity.[xv]
April
Global food prices rise to their highest ever price according to the UN’s Food Price Index, which began in 1990. This adds to supply chain related inflation due to COVID and energy price rises.[xvi][xvii]
May
There was an outbreak of monkeypox first recorded in the UK[xviii], which sparked concern about a possible new global pandemic.[xix] A mix of demand for electric vehicles and continued supply chain problems meant that Volkswagen had sold out of electric vehicles.[xx]
June
Amazon finally closes its Kindle e-book store in China. [xxi] Low economic growth combined with supply side inflation due to disrupted supply chains and the war in Ukraine causes concern about the short term and long term future of the UK economy.[xxii] Meanwhile perceptions of China across Europe reach a new nadir.[xxiii]
July
Heatwaves pummelled Europe, killing 53,000 people through July and August.[xxiv]
August
September
The UK was hit by a double whammy. Queen Elizabeth II died.[xxv] The queen had been a constant in the life of most Britons as the country had moved through imperial decline. Her death was notable for the sustained wall-to-wall media onslaught. Secondly, the 50-day career of prime minister Liz Truss shook up the UK economy due to her proposed government policies. [xxvi]
October
Footage is released that shows construction of linear city The Line is already well under way.[xxvii]
November
The FIFA World Cup was held in Qatar and managed to survive controversy which also engulfed sponsorships. FIFA managed to dodge many of the brickbats slug at the IOC. But both events raise questions for western brand sponsorship strategies moving forward.[xxviii]
December
Will 2022 be seen as the start of the fusion age? In February, the JET (Joint European Torus) facility in Oxford managed to produce more energy than had been created in a controlled fusion reaction. At 59 megajoules over 5 seconds, it was twice as large as the previous record set 25 years earlier.[xxix] But the ‘Wright Brothers’ moment for nuclear fusion may have occurred in December. The US government managed to achieve nuclear fusion with net energy gain.[xxx]
2022 in review for this blog
Site basics
No review of 2022 would be complete without looking at you, the readership of this blog
Audience
The internet has become a global phenomenon, but my audience numbers read like they could from the late 1990s. My readership is predominantly from the US, which surprised me a bit.
Top five countries that my audience comes from
%
Country
33.2
United States of America
9.53
Indonesia – this surprised me
7.41
United Kingdom
3.95
Japan
2.72
Germany
Most trafficked blog posts
Rank
Title
1
Metaverse discussion paper – or why the ‘open’ metaverse won’t be happening anytime soon. Web 3.0 doesn’t solve any of its problems and neither do 5G wireless networks.
2
The Line – Saudi plans to build a high rise, high density linear city.
3
Hino Trucks – one of my regular round-up posts, but it led with a celebration of the Hino Truck brand and how it took Irish roads by storm during my childhood
4
AI and Creativity – the results of an exploration and me and a colleague did into Midjourney and the likely impact it would have on creative agencies.
5
The Gay Blood Collection – a project by Mother London to highlight and protest against a long-standing regulation that keeps gay blood donations restricted in comparison to other members of the population
6
Moviedrome – probably one of my largest long form posts ever (excluding the Metaverse discussion paper) looking at the impact of a long running weekly film screening on BBC curated and presented by film director Alex Cox
7
The World of Visuals – was a trend presentation that provided Adobe’s perspective on areas like artificial intelliengence.
8
StetWalk – a trend that has sprung up amongst book editors, where they talk a walk outside to clear their heads and be inspired by their surroundings. I was introduced to the concept by my friend Siobhan.
9
Naked Power Politics – the invasion of Ukraine was a transgression of several norms and seems to be part of a movement to a more ugly world.
10
Bong Bong Marcos – the scion to the Marcos political dynasty became a president in the mould of former president Duterte.
KanDenko is a Japanese construction company that specialises in infrastructure. This advert communicates effectively what they do in a creative manner. KanDenko must have spent a good deal of money to have this film produced. But it is well worth it.
Vintage Singapore
Footage of Singapore‘s North Boat Quay circa 1983. This area has now been redeveloped with the shop houses refurbished and now holding cafés, restaurants and bars. What this video shows is traditional Chinese life that would have been similar to the mainland prior to Mao’s ‘new China’ which culminated in the cultural revolution.
Thankfully overseas Chinese and Taiwan had preserved the culture and beliefs.
Stussy x Nike
Nike and Stüssy have collaborated on bringing an old Nike model back to life.
New Order’s Blue Monday on 1930s instruments
The BBC made a video of Orchestra Obsolete using early electronic instruments (including a Thermin) alongside traditional instruments to reproduce New Order’s Blue Monday
Distorted Kowloon City
When I first saw this footage of Distorted Kowloon City, I was reminded of the locative art discussed in William Gibson’s novel Spook Country. I read this shortly after being switched on to where 2.0 services while working at Yahoo! on search and Flickr offerings. Yahoo! bought Whereonearth, to better understand what ‘local’ meant with its InternetLocality product set. At the time Whereonearth worked with Three on local mobile services and was a data provider to the likes of insurance companies and credit reference agencies. Yahoo! engineers like Dan Catt and Paul Hammond worked on projects like ZoneTag and including location data in the EXIF metadata of photography; something we just accept as normal on smartphones now.
Distorted Kowloon City is a piece of immersive digital abstract art. Or according to The Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC)
Kowloon City is full of collective memories of Hong Kong people. Spanning the old town with restaurants and specialty shops, Checkered Hill (also known as Radar Hill), tree-lined parks, the historical remains of the Kowloon Walled City and the former Kai Tak Airport, Kowloon City is as diverse as Hong Kong.
To re-interpret how we perceive, how we feel and how we see Kowloon City, moon.moon weaved the sensory data elements of the real world into an 360-degree audio-visual experience with the aid of original music and technologies (e.g. Point Cloud Processing and drone photography), allowing the public to re-discover Kowloon City from abstract art perspective.
Design Inspire | HKTDC
From this explanation, its a mix of history, Hong Kong culture and geography blended into the art work.
The work was done by local digital artist Moon Hung.
Fractured markets
The effect of low interest rates in the aftermath of 2008 on financial investors was to encourage increased risk taking and one of the first casualties of interest rate increases were UK pensions under management. The FT goes into more depth in a video documentary.
AT and T True Experience sprang out of the the mid-1990s. At that time AT&T was thinking about how they could own the customer as the internet superhighway became a reality.
David Hoffman
David Hoffman worked on promotional videos for AT&T at the time including a video showing a service based on General Magic internet appliances for business, personal use and telecommuting.
AT and T True Experience outlined in this video looked to be:
Customers relationship with the nascent web would be mediated through AT&T
AT&T also wanted to build an e-commerce shopping mall similar to what AOL later set up
AT and T True Experience went on to join similar services like Apple’s eWorld, CompuServe and AOL in irelevance as the first generation walled gardens fell away.
The tech ‘nepo babies’ are coming | Financial Times – SEC research found that seven or more years after listing, companies with perpetual dual-class shares underperformed. Still, founders continue to push for them
Refreshing our approach? Updating the Integrated Review – Foreign Affairs Committee – China ‘a significant threat to the UK on many different levels’ and dependency should be curbed, MPs warn. While supporting a potentially risky shift in using stronger language towards the economic and military giant, the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) argues it must be backed up by action rather than “empty rhetoric”.
COMAC’s challenge to Airbus and Boeing and the perils of forced technology transfer.
Wall Street Journal on how financial companies are now buying up YouTuber back catalogue content in the same way that they have previously bought up music back catalogues
The buzz in part of our office about Midjourney has subsided to be replaced by buzz about ChatGPT, rather than Christmas. ChatGPT is is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text. ChatGPT was considered to be a superior example of a chatbot down to the power of machine learning used in creating the content.
I was curious about how good ChatGPT actually was given the following commentary from The Verge:
The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce
Vincent, J. (2 December, 2022) AI-generated answers temporarily banned on coding Q&A site Stack Overflow | The Verge
The Verge article was interesting. Most of the places where chatbots might be needed: providing customer services, regulated industries like finance would suffer from confident, but incorrect answers being provided to customers.
Secondly, media outlets decided that ChatGPT was a potential Google challenger, with outlets like CNBC comparing the two and equity analysts at Morgan Stanley feeling the need to come out and say that ChatGPT was not likely to replace Google.
Sample of conversation
Google’s innovators dilemma
What became quickly apparent Google’s narrative about being an innovator full stop, has been threatened by ChatGPT. Google as an incumbent is now stymied by Clayton Christiansen’s Innovator’s Dilemma. Google is no longer cool, its conversation related products are seen to be behind the curve and the company is seen as being too big to out-innovate itself easily.
So what’s ChatGPT like to use?
I have shared a picture of some of the better responses I had from the service. I started off with a certain amount of ambition. I asked it about who it felt might win the current war in Ukraine. I found that the training set of data used to power it was finished in 2021. This was obviously done to filter out the worst of the internet from the content, getting around rather than solving problems that previous chatbots have suffered from like Microsoft’s Tay project.
Eventually I managed to get on to safer ground for ChatGPT. It answered questions about what an AI winter was, whether fuzzy logic is a form of artificial intelligence (it is), whether Baye’s Theorem was a form of AI (it isn’t per se, but it is employed to solve some AI problems there similar to the kind of uncertainty challenges fuzzy logic solves.
ChatGPT said that AI (like Bayes Theorem) could be used to provide a solution to buffer bloat – which massively increases the latency on data networks.
I found out quantum computers could make an optimised AI more power efficient and the business expert systems popularised in large companies during the 1980s and 1990s were analogous to modern day AI systems.
It reminded me a lot of content I had read on Summly, the mobile news app that mashed up an AI service API with news sources to summarise articles. This start-up was bought by Yahoo! a decade ago.
In this respect, I do wonder whether ChatGPT is truly the quantum leap forward that many seem to think, or is it merely a reminder of how well understood technology can be applied in different ways?
Can India build a military strong enough to deter China? | Financial Times – I think that this is down to the lead China has in manufacturing capability and innovation as much as anything else. There is a substantial risk that India could lose many of its northern provinces in theory. In theory being the operative phrase here. Ukraine has show what’s possible with people fighting for their homes. It makes more sense for India to think about assymmetric and grey zone tactics at scale to bleed China’s financial and human lifeblood. From hacking well in advance of a conflict, to militias trained and equipped for guerrilla actions allowing for attack in depth once China crosses the threshold.
China boosts military aid to Africa as concerns over Russia grow – Nikkei Asia – China has kept its forces from direct engagement in crises in Africa as part of its noninterference policy, it has also taken an increasingly high profile in United Nations peacekeeping missions. It has sent more than 1,000 troops, police and specialists to oil-rich South Sudan, for example. “When Chinese interests were threatened by insurgencies in Nigeria, China issued a statement, as it still lacks the military commitment. This can, however, change in the future,” Ali said. Experts say China is more focused on economic and national security interests than on peacebuilding. Beijing prefers strategies centered on development that help to alleviate poverty and provide stable governance, but do not necessarily advance protection of individual rights and free markets. But this growth-first attitude may be counterproductive over the long term. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, China has a very close relationship with the government, but attacks in the resource-rich east of the country by a number of rebel groups pose threats to its mining interests. “Insurgencies happen as the product of social exclusion,” Nte said. “There must be a stable political climate to address economic degradation caused by the wrong policies.”
UK economy rebounds by more than expected in October | Financial Times – the second largest contributor to growth in October was performance of the health sector in administration of vaccine boosters and flu shots, the biggest sector was construction. But construction has started to slow since then with sites halting work in November
How Putin’s technocrats saved the economy to fight a war they opposed | Financial Times – tough moral questions to be asked. However, Central Bank governor Nabiullina’s moral calculus reminds me a good deal of convicted German war criminal Albert Speer, in particular the “Speer Myth”: the perception of him as an apolitical technocrat responsible for revolutionising the German war machine. The close alliance with Iran should allow both countries to pool expertise in sanctions busting.
Meanwhile air travel is going great guns according to airlines like Lufthansa who are bringing back their Airbus A380 jumbo jet airliners.
Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai’s sentence casts chill over relaunch, analysts say — Radio Free Asia – “If you can’t say anything anyway, then you might as well locate [your office] in mainland China,” Chow said. “Using Hong Kong as a jumping-off point to the mainland is a waste of money, because rents are much more expensive than in mainland China.” – there is also the tax aspect (expats pay much more tax in Mainland China) and a transferrable currency, but otherwise the point is pretty valid
A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will Any of Us Survive It? – In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated. Monahan, who is 35, breaks down the three vibe shifts he has survived and observed: Hipster/Indie Music (ca. 2003–9), or peak Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, high-waisted Cheap Mondays, Williamsburg, bespoke-cocktail bars; Post-Internet/Techno Revival (ca. 2010–16), or the Blood Orange era, normcore, dressing like The Matrix, Kinfolk the club, not Kinfolk the magazine; and Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016–20), or Drake at his Drakest, the Nike SNKRS app, sneaker flipping, virtue signaling, Donald Trump, protests not brunch
Amazon’s heroic phase is over | Amazon Chronicles – My first theory is that capitalism doesn’t stop evolving. The evolution of the microprocessor, digital computing, the internet, the personal computer, the World Wide Web, and the tech giants that have emerged in their wake are all transforming capitalism as we experience it and the culture produced by it in ways we don’t even fully understand. These are the biggest companies in the world and the ones with the greatest impact on how we think, work, shop, and communicate. You can’t understand capitalism in the twenty-first century without understanding how technology is changing it. I think this theory is pretty uncontroversial. It’s certainly not new. My second theory is that the arc of capitalism traced by Marx and Lukács and others writing in their tradition can also be retraced on a smaller scale. Like those early modern bourgeoisie, big tech has moved from its initial chaotic and subterranean strivings, to a heroic universalist phase where it championed political and economic liberation. Now these companies are consolidating their dominance by reducing or eliminating their workforce, shifting away from consumer goods, and brokering compromises with state power.
