How China’s Beauty Calendars Defined an Era’s Aesthetics | SixthTone – the history of China’s beauty calendars is the history of China opening up and closing back down again. The beauty calendars aren’t high art or pornography like the Perelli calendar of old. But for the time, they were at the bleeding edge of changing social norms after Mau. The calendars declined when the Xi administration stopped state owned enterprises giving or receiving calendars.
The UK Is Trying to Stop Facebook’s End-to-End Encryption | WIRED – THE UK IS planning a new attack on end-to-end encryption, with the Home Office set to spearhead efforts designed to discourage Facebook from further rolling out the technology to its messaging apps. – Unsurprisingly Patel is using child molestors as its excuse. No words about how metadata and good police work can get around the limitations of encryption. When you take this in account with the new police bill going through parliament, it all looks exceptionally authoritarian in nature
Elite wars – The Ruffian – I understand why campaigners and commentators are upset by Sewell’s tone and by the over-managed press launch. But loudly complaining about this kind of thing while refusing to engage constructively with the arguments of the report seems irresponsibly trivial. After all, what’s at stake here is far more important than a dispute between elites over tone, terminology and media management. Everyone is in agreement that racism is a serious problem in Britain. Shouldn’t we focus our disagreements on what to do about it? – well worth reading the whole article and the reports that it links to. The Conversation covered most of the opposing views high points here: Race commission report: the rights and wrongs | The Conversation
The split economy is used a term differentiate from the sharing economy. I first heard of it on the Robin Hood Snacks Daily podcast. The sharing economy has been discussed ad infinitum and is very popular. It encompasses high growth businesses like AirBnB, Uber and DoorDash.
The split economy is used to differentiate itself from the sharing economy. They have some elements in common. Like the sharing economy, the split economy focuses on maximising the utilisation of assets. The difference is that the consumer isn’t paying for a just a service, but also fractional ownership of an underlying asset.
An example would be fractional ownership of sports cars via ‘clubs’ :
Curvy Road
AutoXotica
Exotic Car Share
Fractional ownership of art:
Feral Horses
Masterworks
ArtSquare.io
None of these are necessarily ‘new’ business ideas, but they are now starting to get heat behind them.
Pacaso
Snacks Daily discusses a company called Pacaso. Pacaso buys high end properties and then divides it up into fractional ownership. They then charge a management fee to configure the home with personal pictures, a full fridge, fresh laundry and extensively cleaned. Its a sophisticated boutique experience, that is cheaper than full ownership, but with all the practical benefits.
Back in the day, Pacaso would have been described as a timeshare business. However the reputation of timeshares has been tainted by high pressure selling and criminality. Split ownership allows Pacaso to put distance between the timeshare sector and itself. It allows the business to ride the coat tails of valuations enjoyed by sharing economy companies.
Adult male virginity soars | Boing Boing – There are far more merciless forces in play, not least dating and hookup success being forced onto the same algorithmic curve as everything else on social media; the increasingly hypnotic impulse to live lives online; and the generally hopeless economic circumstances of young people who are getting very little out of life, but haven’t yet decided to burn it all down – interesting disparity between men and women in the data. I think the reasons behind adult male virginity soaring are multi-causal. I can see how adult male virginity trends will be be endlessly kicked around by a football to suit one viewpoint or another
China
How much will China grow as an export market? | Hinrich Foundation – Policy makers are currently in a conundrum over how best to engage economically with China. Underlying much of the debate is the assumption that China is a huge and rapidly growing market. While that has historically been true, the falling import intensity of China’s economic growth suggests a more limited market than foreign exporters assume
A number of Hong Kong oligarchs brought up in mainland China, initially made their money on smuggling materials into China. This was back when the country was closed off. This included luxury goods, oil, truck tyres, machine parts or antibiotics. For instance, casino magnate Stanley Ho made his first fortune during world war II and the aftermath smuggling luxury goods from Macau into China. So it didn’t surprise me to see Fujianese Chinese connections involved in smuggling crude oil into North Korea.
New York Times YouTube channel
The New York Times Visual Investigations team used a mixture of old school investigative journalism and open source intelligence techniques championed by Bellingcat to blow open the story.
A Brief History of Semiconductors: How The US Cut Costs and Lost the Leading Edge | by Employ America | Mar, 2021 | Medium – As the industry matured and the competitive environment changed, the policy framework shifted as well. Since the 1970s, industrial policy has been incrementally replaced by a capital-light “science policy” strategy, while mammoth “champion firms” and asset-light innovators have replaced a robust ecosystem of small and large production-focused firms. While this strategy was initially successful, it has created a fragile system. Today, the industry is constrained on one side by fragile supply chains narrowly tailored to the needs of a few firms with enormous investment moats, and on the other side by the many asset-light design firms who are unable to generate or capture process improvements – this going into reversal is going to offer a bonanza for semiconductor manufacturing equipment vendors
Hong Kong Cantopop singer Eason Chan cuts ties with Adidas after brands reject forced labour – probably one of the odder celebrity backlashes against western companies not wanting to use forced labour in its supply chains. Chan is a Cantopop singer, he has low to no exposure to the mainland. His fan base is in Hong Kong and amongst the Hong Kong diaspora. On balance, give the age profile most of his fans will be ‘yellow’ in terms of their viewpoint. He is doing himself no favours by putting his head over the parapet. His fan base will shrink because of his hyper ‘blue’ alignment. I wonder what brought about his performative outrage. It carried more weight than Hong Kong politician promising not to wear another Burberry scarf until the brand backtracked on using Uighur picked cotton.
Luxury Brands Are Moving Into Online Stealth Mode. But How Can They Measure Success? – At the beginning of this year, Italian fashion house Bottega Veneta signed off its social media accounts not with a bang, but with silence. The move, which was followed by the removal of its content on its Weibo account, was praised by many and marked a decided shift in the wider luxury market between brands that choose to be more inclusive in mindset, and those that are taking a more exclusive approach with their customers – I was surprised when many luxury brands went on to social media in the first place. On the flipside it makes complete sense for premium streetwear brands like Moncler.
H&M boycott in China intensifies over Xinjiang supply issue | Marketing | Campaign Asia – The statement surfaced on social media yesterday and sparked an online storm of opinions. Comments on Weibo included “get out of Chinese market”, “the company’s clothes sucks, and I will no longer buy”, and “I heard that you are boycotting Chinese cotton, then I will boycott your products”. Chinese actor Huang Xuan has also terminated his relationship with the brand, according to reports. On his Weibo account, he posted a statement that said he was “firmly opposed to any attempt to discredit the country”. Those calling for a boycott claim that international sanctions against China are unjustified and based on “biased reports in foreign media and from international human rights campaigners”. – its a day with a ‘y’ in it, which means that China will be waging war by other means. The most recent high profile example would be the way Lotte was run out of China. The sooner the west start boycotting the Chinese market and supply chain the better. More at the FT – H&M and Nike face China backlash over Xinjiang stance | Financial Times
Technology
Molson-Coors Discloses Cybersecurity Incident that Affected Production in 8-K Filing | Data Privacy + Cybersecurity Insider – Molson Coors Beverage Company (the “Company”) announced that it experienced a systems outage that was caused by a cybersecurity incident. The Company has engaged leading forensic information technology firms and legal counsel to assist the Company’s investigation into the incident and the Company is working around the clock to get its systems back up as quickly as possible.
I wrote a blog post back in February 2014 that highlighted 40 blogs that inspired me, revisiting this post I decided to write about 2021 blogs that inspire me. But first how did the original list hold up in 2021?
Original list in 2021
Name / Category
Description
Analysis
Wall Street Journal Corporate Intelligence blog
No longer exists, the link defaults to the Wall Street Journal front page.
Edge Perspectives with John Hagel
– No longer exists
Monocle Monocolumn
Monocle has kept the archive online, but the Monocolumn is no longer updated. It has been abandoned in favour of the Monocle Minute
The Asia Society have a blog which alternates between amazing photography from the region and analysis pieces with an academic / think tank type feel. It is still maintained
Still sporadically posted to by Robert Kelly a Korean-based professor of international relations, it has some interesting posts analyzing the complex relationships across APAC. In 2017, became better known when his children gatecrashed a television interview he was doing via Skype with the BBC
Bytes of China
No longer available
China Real Time
The blog has disappeared and now diverts to the WSJ’s Asian news section.
A ‘best of ‘ website that looks at different technology categories
What surprised me about the 2012 list is how many blogs covering different aspects of China in terms of the technology scene, culture and online life have disappeared or stopped being updated. Despite the fact that now, more than ever, they are needed.
Major media outlets have walked back from building blogs based on interest areas or personalities ( like a traditional newspaper columnist).
By comparison, I have a compiled an exemplar list of inspirational 2021 blogs. I look at more but that would be ludicrously long to compile.
Asian Sentinel is edited by a couple of veteran Asia based journalists. The content comes from a number of experts in the region in specialisms such as finance, economics and policy.
English language blog that collates Hong Kong celebrity news from Cantonese language media. It is was important for me to keep an eye on this when working in Hong Kong. It is also a good way to track the slow death of the Hong Kong domestic media industry.
English language version of a Japanese news site that focuses on ‘fun, weird, and intriguing news from Asia, particularly Japan’. It has some great Japanese consumer insight content including retail experiences
The South China Morning Post historically was the paper of record for Hong Kong. It’s medium-to-long term usefulness looks in question with the National Security Act and the Chinese government pressure for Jack Ma to divest media ownership
Colossal in their own words – “an international platform for contemporary art and visual expression that explores a vast range of creative disciplines.”
George Tannenbaum is a 40 year creative veteran in the advertising industry. His blog is a mix of smart thinking and ranting about ageism and other isms in the ad industry (there’s a lot of them to rant about)
France Telecom has a blog about the bleeding edge of technology. Alongside the usual 5G flag waving you’d expect from a major mobile network operator there’s some thoughtful content
Despite the name, covers technology and does some interesting business analysis. I really like the way everything is delivered in succinct bullet points
Porsche enlisted Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter (aka Bill & Ted) to promote their new electric powered sports cars. There is so much to unpack here.
I suspect Porsche wanted to target gen-xers (and more likely early millennials) with a mid-life crisis. They probably wanted something that was memetastic.
While I am in the right age group, I am not necessarily in the right income bracket, so I am not their target market. From my perspective, there was some interesting choices.
Bringing in Alex Winter alongside Keanu Reeves was to signal that this isn’t about the ‘cool’ Keanu of Point Break, The Matrix, Cyberpunk 2077 or John Wick. Instead its closer to the ‘Dad cool’ of Apple executives – not really cool at all, but it might be fun.
The film itself is shot in a style reminiscent of Top Gear, even going as far to feature former Top Gear US presenter Tanner Foust.
This didn’t make Porsche feel like the luxury good that it is. It didn’t make it aspirational to own a Porsche. And I think that’s a problem.
Netscape
Netscape Navigator was the first internet browser that I used on a regular basis. This happened whilst I was at college. There were a few other browsers SpyGlass which was bundled with some internet services (and eventually Microsoft Internet Explorer) and NCSA Mosaic. The word in the college computer lab was that Netscape Navigator was the one you wanted. My first copy was bundled on a floppy disk sellotaped to the front cover of MacFormat magazine.
This video goes into the rise and fall of Netscape.
TeamLab
Experiential agency TeamLab have come up with an amazing experience in central Tokyo sponsored by TikTok. It is held at the Rinkan Sauni in the Roppongi district of Tokyo.
Goddess of Spring
Disney’s Goddess of Spring is set to classical music like Fantasia. It was designed as a short and the study used these series of short films to experiment with animation techniques. This episode of ‘Silly Symphonies’ was the first time they had experimented with human animation. The techniques are gone into more depth here.
MacOS X
The modern Mac operating system is 20 years old this year. I remember getting it to run on the iBook laptop that I owned back then. MacWorld have put a potted history together on how the modern Mac operating system came into being here.
