Ged Carroll

Category: culture | 文明 | 미디어와 예술 | 人文

Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.

Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.

Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.

Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.

Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.

More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.

  • Clubhouse & things that caught my eye this week

    Korean American security researcher Brian Pak looked at Clubhouse and some of the findings were very interesting. Pak posted a full analysis in Korean here. The key takeouts for me where:

    Some (probably early adopter) Koreans have been buying used iPhones so that they can try Clubhouse, since the app is currently iOS only.

    The concept of an audio chat app that isn’t new. Pak identified Clubhouse’s key strength as having an intuitive UI/UX and a large number of participants from various backgrounds.

    I found it interesting that Pak felt there might be technical difficulties in having Clubhouse for desktop (macOS / Windows) or Android. I suspect that the reason was more about managing the scaling of the app.

    Clubhouse is a closer to a mashup than a ‘real app’. It’s voice functions are based on Agora, a Chinese provider. Most of the rest of the features are using the Pubnub communications service platform. The way protocols have been handled was highlighted as a security risk. Stanford Internet Observatory got into this in more detail here.

    I can also recommend this coverage about how Clubhouse usage has evolved in Hong Kong, China, Japan and Nigeria.

    There was a major fall of snow in the US last week. It unfolded as a catastrophe across Texas. NBC’s New York affiliate set up a live stream at New York’s Time Square. It is amazing to zone out and watch. It could be considered to another entry in the slow TV genre pioneered by Norway’s public broadcaster NRK.

    I watched Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out Of My Head last week and wanted to track down some of the films in it. Here are some of them.

    Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain was a film about opposition to the Japanese invasion of China. filmed during the pre-communist phase of China.

    Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy is a Communist propaganda film describing how a communist infiltrated a bandit gang and helped the communists to destroy them. It was apparently based on an incident that happened during the Chinese civil war. Like the other Communist films featured here, it is extremely stylised using Peking opera techniques mixed with ballet.

    A ‘slave’ girl on Hainan island runs away and joins a female group of communist soldiers who are fighting a local warlord in The Red Detachment Of Women. The film was made just prior to the cultural revolution at Shanghai Tian Ma studio.

    https://youtu.be/zoPM9d18e9o

    Finally The East Is Red is musical dramatising from the Chinese communist party perspective; the decline of the Qing dynasty through to the communist takeover.

    The original film was produced in 1965, right before the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The prologue seems to have been added after the ‘Gang of Four’ were put on trial. There is certainly a touch of the classic MGM musical to the production style, alongside Beijing opera and ballet.

    Filipino brand Jollibee did a pandemic themed Valentine short films which was really clever. All of the films were made by local directors and are emblematic of the COVID-19 experience. Tonally it hits the right spot for the Philippines. What might seem to be too cute and emotional for UK audiences resonates well in that market. Thankfully, it isn’t the tear-jerking emotional rollercoaster that Thai ads can take you on.

    I particularly like the second one because of the twist in the plot.

    Jollibee’s overall approach on brand as media makes sense when you think about the nature of the Philippines media market and the good number of diaspora that they need to reach.

  • Golden bull & things that caught my eye this week

    Digital golden bull at Pavilion, Kuala Lumpur & Chinese new year

    The golden bull in question is on the digital screens of Pavilion, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Pavilion is an upscale shopping area and the animation was designed to tie into the year of the ox in the Chinese lunar calendar.

    The golden bull is supposed to be auspicious and is seen to break through the coronavirus that affected 2020.

    https://youtu.be/llFkwcAlFSk
    Pavilion Kuala Lumpur

    The golden bull execution is very similar to an installation done by a Chinese property developer that I found earlier this year. Both rely on corner screens and on understanding the viewing angle of pedestrian footfall streaming past the animation.

    Following on from my post collating adverts celebrating Chinese new year last week, Radii China had some additional suggestions that came out after I had written my original post. Let’s hope that 2021 lives up to the auspicious promise of the golden bull.

    Design & culture

    The Royal Shakespeare Company is looking at using a virtual set for a performance based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. RSC’s Dream will be performed live from March 12 – 20, 2021. It shows how the arts are looking to adapt to a COVID world and experimenting with cutting edge technology.

    RSC – Dream trailer

    My friend Arun has released a COVID inspired track available for purchase from Underbelly Music on Bandcamp. Check out the accompanying video here.

    Coffee Hype x Underbelly

    This weekend I will be watching the latest Adam Curtis documentary series – BBC iPlayer – Cant Get You Out of My Head it’s the only thing that I bother watching on the BBC now.

    Consumer behaviour

    Really interesting drill down into the American middle class by the Brookings Institute that came up with some concerning findings. I am slowly working my way through The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert J Gordon and much of this Brooking Institute findings fits in with this.

    Brookings Institute Middle Class Monitor

  • China crackdown + more things

    MACAU DAILY TIMES 澳門每日時報 » Hong Kong | Thousands flee for UK, fearing China crackdown – What’s surprising is not the content of the article itself. There are plenty of pieces in the English language media around the world about the fear of a China crackdown due to the Hong Kong National Security Law driving Hong Kongers away. (The reality is less likely to be a China crackdown and more likely to be a progressive anaconda-type squeeze.) I am surprised to see this article in the usually tame Macau media. Which left me with the question why? My initial thoughts were that space constrained Macanese could take up some of the slack in Hong Kong as locals vacate? If so it would solve problems in the housing market and the need to build additional infrastructure in Macau.

    Hong Kong Bar Association’s new chair on national security law and China ｜ Apple Daily – I can’t see Mr Harris’ tenure ending well, given his lack of alignment with the line of travel on Hong Kong’s national security law. We might see a more forceful China crackdown on the legal sector, than just the mainland media criticism so far

    Next generation of horseshit | The Ad Contrarian newsletter – more on why life stage is more important than generations

    Merrick Garland Wants Former Facebook Lawyer to Top Antitrust Division | Prospect – this could be good for Facebook

    Majority of B2B advertising is ‘ineffective’ | Marketing Week – Of the 1,600 B2B ads shown to a sample of 6 million people worldwide over the past four years, 75% scored one star or less on System1’s FaceTrace emotional measurement tool – so ineffective in brand building, but potentially effective in terms of performance marketing? We don’t know

    QAnon Is Alive and Well in Japan – The Diplomat 

    China-Australia clash may be more about Beijing’s economic fears than a coronavirus probe | South China Morning Post 

    Today’s jet fighter designers don’t get the point – Asia Times – the cockpit itself is “beautiful,” full of screens that allow you to bring up an incredible amount of information about the fighter with just a few finger swipes, and customize the data to tailor it for the particular mission. The F-35 is the first to use touch screen technology. Unlike switches, which take up permanent cockpit space, touch screens allow the same LCD screen space to be instantly repurposed, the report said. One minute, a display could be used to pull up data on an aircraft’s fuel reserves, and the next, it could help target an enemy position on a mountainside. That goes a long way toward simplifying the cockpit and not overwhelming a pilot with wall-to-wall physical switches, dials, and single-use displays, the report said. But the problem with touch screens, the pilot explains, is a lack of tactile feedback. Switches have a nice, satisfying click that instantaneously lets the user know they were successfully flipped, the report said. The anonymous pilot reports failing to get a result from a touch screen about 20% of the time – the need for haptics has never been clearer

    China Raises Threat Level Over Rare Earths — Radio Free Asia – “Rare earth ore exports are limited in value, and the global demand for raw materials is relatively low,” said Liu Enqiao of Anbound Consulting. But Liu added that the decline “might be partly due to China’s tightening of regulations on strategic resources” under the country’s new export control law, which took effect on Dec. 1.

    Asian Fans Turn Their Back on Korean Pop Culture – The Chosun Ilbo – a lot of the problem seems to be down to overexposure and the Black Sun club scandal

    Mystery surrounds huge rise in Huawei executives’ social media followings | Financial Times – they aren’t the first corporate to be apparently caught astroturfing and won’t be the last. The New York Times tackles this from a different angle point out how accounts like this were used to lobby against 5G decisions against Huawei in Belgium – Inside a Pro-Huawei Influence Campaign – The New York Times 

    Facing the Jackpot with William Gibson | Ploughshares at Emerson College 

    The EU must protect the right to privacy and not attack end-to-end encryption – interesting that so many vendors came together on this. Its also interesting that its missing big tech names

    US-China tech war: former Google chief and others call for action to handle ‘asymmetric competition’ from Beijing | South China Morning Post – US tech group, formed in July 2020 to tackle ‘the most difficult questions regarding US competitiveness with China on technology’ also includes Jared Cohen. Report calls for determined action to tackle tech competition with China and says a certain amount of ‘bifurcation’ is inevitable

    Elderly woman DJ becomes online sensation in China | South China Morning Post – to be fair she’s about the same age as a number of big name DJs in the west. Pete Tong is 60, Carl Cox is 58, Junior Vasquez is 71, DJ Hell is 58 and Georgio Moroder is 80.

    Artificial Intelligence Will Define Google’s Future. For Now, It’s a Management Challenge. – WSJ – most of Google’s problems related to AI are rooted in the company’s approach to managing staff, adding that science, and not ideology, should guide ethical debates. “Google is the coddler-in-chief,” he said. “Their employees are so coddled that they feel entitled to make more and more demands” regarding how the company approaches AI and related issues. – TL;DR – millennial and gen-z Googler snowflakes preventing the company from creating amoral shareholder value

  • Ahistoric technology & things that caught my eye this week

    Wired magazine had an interesting article on revisiting old technology magazines. The idea was that while in some ways technology has progressed. In other ways, good ideas got bypassed. There are a number of Good ideas that might have more currency now. There is a contrasting ahistoric technology view held by some Silicon Valley luminaries.

    The ahistoric technology viewpoint ignores things that are right in front of us. Fuzzy logic and early machine learning (based on software neural networks) desktop software do much the same things (with less computing power and network bandwidth) that Google and Apple do now.

    Bret Victor gave a presentation ‘from 1973’, showing the fallacy of the ahistoric technology viewpoint. These ideas will be of more relevance to the audience of programmers, but you can grasp the gist of what’s going on.

    One of the reasons I stuck with the Mac platform was that small development houses and lone programmers built useful software based on similarly niche concepts.

    Now these software applications, alongside web services that have been developed in a similar way, like Newsblur and Pinboard are a key part of my workflow.

    McDonalds Japan have a reputation for doing localised products to appeal to Japanese consumers. The flavours and the marketing are grounded in Japanese culture. They have tapped a well loved manga Touch (published during the 1980s) for an advert to promote the 30th anniversary of the chicken Tatsuda burger.

    https://youtu.be/vFJE_7atc30
    McDonalds Japan

    More on Touch here.

    The Oxford Union is trying to keep its programme of speakers going via online sessions. Including Hong Kong exiled dissident Nathan Law.

    Oxford Union

    Finally Asian Boss appealed to viewers for donations as they are struggling financially and are likely to shut down soon without money. This raises questions about the effectiveness of monetisation on YouTube, even with a lightweight structure media organisation like Asian Boss.

    Should you wish to do so, you can donate directly to Asian Boss here.

  • Collapse OS + more things

    Collapse OS — Bootstrap post-collapse technology  – a vision of dystopian technology that fits right in with William Gibson’s more recent views of the future with the Jackpot. A slow moving systemic collapse due to global warming, flooding, pollution, global conflict, terrorism and pandemics

    The battle inside Signal – Platformer – Casey Newton has pulled together an interesting portrait of Signal and how its developing as its user base scales

    Gay Dating App “Grindr” to be fined almost € 10 Mio by Norway due to passing on information to a variety of services

    Myopia correcting ‘smart glasses’ from Japan to be sold in Asia – Nikkei Asia – interesting design approach

    $2 Million for T-Shirts? How Supreme and Nike Cracked the Auction Market – WSJ – natural extension in the change in luxury consumers

    Online retailers are playing a risky game with the UK high street | Financial Times – like Arcadia and countless rivals, Debenhams had underlying conditions stemming from over-enthusiastic cash extraction. CVC, Texas Pacific and Merrill Lynch acquired Debenhams in 2003 in a £1.8bn leveraged buyout that needed just £600m of equity. The trio then extracted more than £1bn via property sale and leaseback agreements and floated it again for almost the same price in 2006 – the Times makes a really good case with regards private equity excesses. Other examples outside the retail sector include TWA and Eircom

    Hacker leaks data of 2.28 million dating site users | ZDNet – another day, another site hacked

    Element sees fivefold increase in signups after Whatsapp privacy debacle | Sifted – its more like a Slack or Teams rival

    Japan’s anime goes global: Sony’s new weapon to take on Netflix | FT 

    Sony Tries Sink-Or-Swim EV Gambit  | EE Times 

    Jim Slater and the warning from the 1970s that we ignored – BBC News – a very brief piece in the BBC Online reflecting on the legacy of Slater Walker. The reality is that there needs to be a far deeper reflection on the effect of his asset stripping model had lighting a touch paper that led directly to deindustrialisation, populism and Brexit.

    “Marketing is what you do when you have a sh#tty product.” – Christopher Lochhead – not particularly smart viewpoint, though great product and service design really helps marketing and helps reduce the amount that needs to be spent due to word of mouth. A second thought occurred to me, people with this mindset are building the entire martech stack….

    WHO Caught Between China and West on Frozen-Food Coronavirus Transmission – WSJ – the irony of the cold chain also distributing vaccines as well as the virus is an interesting one