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.

  • UK China relations + more things

    UK China relations

    What to know about UK China relations in 2021 — Quartz – interesting that the author frames UK China relations in terms of Brexification. The reality is much more nuanced

    Culture

    The Gen X Culture Warriors Who Never Grew Up | The New Republic – interesting take on things, though I disagree with a good deal of it

    Design

    Jeff Bezos and Amazon: A complicated design legacy – A major part of design’s value proposition is the process. Designers identify problems to create solutions. Amazon, on the other hand, has often identified solutions before naming the problem. Sometimes that approach worked. But often, it didn’t. And it created an ecosystem with a surprising number of hidden costs. “Amazon will never be a design-led company. It’s evident in the quality of the products they ship. And although the design is still thriving there, I don’t believe it’s fundamental to the core DNA of the company,” says a former Amazon designer who worked closely with Bezos on several products. “Just because there’s ‘customer obsession’ doesn’t mean there’s an investment in quality and design rigor.”

    Right to repair’ law to come in this summer – BBC News 

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong’s UA Cinemas lowers curtain for final time amid ‘devastating pressure’ of coronavirus pandemic; theatre chain had operated in city since 1985 | South China Morning Post – this felt big to me. Hong Kong has cinema attendance per head of population far over what you’d get in Europe which makes a city with the population of Denmark being historically the fourth largest cinema market. Some of the best times I had in Hong Kong revolved around trips to the cinema

    Japan’s SBI plans Hong Kong pullout on concerns over security law | Financial Times – I was surprised Yoshitaka Kitao came out so unequivocally against the national security law with the statement that ‘without freedom, there is no financial business’ – most companies have pussyfooted around the issue, like they have done around Brexit. SBI are also reviewing their presence in London

    StanChart tries to navigate moral minefield | Financial Times – really interesting read about he challenges that Standard Chartered is facing and how they are trying to manage them. It provides an unfavourable contrast for HSBC though both are a right mess

    Luxury

    Are Supercars a Good Investment? Experts Say Vintage Cars Are Risky – Bloomberg – interesting article

    Why No Other Luxury Company Compares To LVMH | Jing Daily 

    Dior Names Blackpink’s Jisoo New Global Fashion and Beauty Ambassador | Business of Fashion 

    Marketing

    Tymbals : The Agency of the Future – new agency conglomerate is financially engineered

    Media

    Netflix Begins Test to Crack Down on Password Sharing Outside Your Household – The Streamable – Netflix‘s next stage of growth

    Security

    The UK is secretly testing a controversial web snooping tool | WIRED UK – police and internet companies across the UK have been quietly building and testing surveillance technology that could log and store the web browsing of every single person in the country. The tests, which are being run by two unnamed internet service providers, the Home Office and the National Crime Agency, are being conducted under controversial surveillance laws introduced at the end of 2016. If successful, data collection systems could be rolled out nationally, creating one of the most powerful and controversial surveillance tools used by any democratic nation

    Technology

    Why I was wrong to be optimistic about robots | Financial Times – really interesting piece on the state of robotics in warehouse environments

    How Line built fact-checking into its encrypted messaging app – Rest of World 

    iCloud allegedly locked out a user over her last name | Engadget – I wonder if this affects other Oracle mail server instances

  • Ben Liebrand & things that caught my eye this week

    Ben Liebrand

    Ben Liebrand has been a name for as long as I have been buying records. According to Discogs; he has remixes that have appeared on over 800 albums, compilations and singles. This tells you a lot about the quality and longevity of his remixes. Dutch YouTuber Twan scored an interview with Ben Liebrand where he talks about his career.

    Lunar new year adverts

    WPP showcased work that had been done across their network for Chinese new year 2021. There was a mix of work there, some of it felt like WPP was having to do the creative equivalent of looking under the sofa cushions for change. For instance, Superunion showcased a browser game that they had built as a corporate greetings card for lunar new year. WaveMaker did a transport media buy branding a train interior for a hard candy brand. This could have been executed better. Yes it makes sense to drive awareness in high footfall areas, but shopping for lunar new year presents is usually done before travelling. Secondly, COVID meant that travelling home was discouraged; what was WaveMaker’s plan B for this scenario. Finally, the dressing of the train could have been done more creatively and involved more of a festive feeling.

    The highlight was a Mercedes Benz advert by Ogilvy shot by Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar wai – the film taps into the emotion that surrounds Chinese New Year. This mirrors the emotive brief that Mercedes Benz pursued in their US Christmas ad campaigns over the past few years.

    Ogilvy’s work for KFC China taps into the increasing interest in winter sports that is driven by the forthcoming winter olympics in Beijing.

    I was surprised that there was no Ogilvy work showcased from outside China, for instance Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan or Hong Kong.

    Machine learning stagnation

    Despite all the technology hype around deep learning, there is a lot of smoke and mirrors that conceals what innovation is happening in the field. The essay shows current machine learning development culture. The original essay is here and a video review of the Machine Learning Stagnation essay. Despite the title its a bit more uplifting than it implies.

    Retro Japan footage

    Yet more great stock footage from Japan in the 1980s. The first one is set to ambient music and shows everyday live in the town and country, alongside TV and film footage. Some of the footage seems to be near a US base. The significance of US cars in the footage is that they used to be popular with the yakuza – Japan’s native organised crime families.

    Fremantle Media have Thames TV’s complete archives including this b-roll of Japanese signage. They claim its Tokyo but some of it looks more like Osaka. It is a symphony of neon that Japan still does the best. It is worthwhile going through Fremantle’s b-roll archive if you’re an art director because of the variety of material that they have.

  • HSBC bank + more things

    HSBC bank

    China and the UK test HSBC Bank divided loyalties in Hong Kong — Quartz  – If HSBC Bank were to spin off its China operations, it wouldn’t be the first bank to reconfigure its ties due to a changed political situation. In the 1980s, the British banks Barclays and Standard Chartered pulled out of direct operations in South Africa amid global pressure against the apartheid regime. The bank’s actions “highlighted…the fact that financial institutions were not unassailable when faced with public pressure on ethical issues. HSBC Bank is betting that the screwing China will give it is still better than the west, more from the FT here: HSBC Bank shifts ‘heart of business’ to Asia in latest strategy revamp | Financial Times 

    Huawei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou takes HSBC to court in Hong Kong to seek access to bank’s internal papers – HSBC might not want this one to go to court. Possible clash with Chinese law on imposing unjust penalties. But if it goes ahead HSBC faces western sanctions. More related content here.

    China

    Book Review: Rural Youth Key to China’s Human Capital Crisis – Caixin Global – Rural China is so systematically neglected that it has become nearly invisible not only to most outside observers but even to urban elites within China. But this “invisible” part of China will determine its economic future. Instead of sitting in an ivory tower advising Chinese officials what to do, the authors and their team at Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Program (REAP) have been helping China’s rural youth on the ground in practical and realistic ways

    Exclusive: Scientists at top British universities worked with Chinese nuclear weapons researchers – Scientists at Britain’s leading universities – including Cambridge, Edinburgh and Manchester – have worked on a string of projects with researchers at China’s nuclear weapons research institution – it doesn’t necessarily mean that they were helping the Chinese build a new generation of warheads but its not a good look

    Consumer behaviour

    Cultural Differences May Affect The Outcome Of A Pandemic: New Research : Goats and Soda : NPR – Tight cultures tend to have had a lot of threat in their histories from Mother Nature, like disasters, famine and pathogen outbreaks, and non-natural threats such as invasions on their territory. And the idea is when you have a lot of collective threat you need strict rules. They help people coordinate and predict each other’s behavior. So, in a sense, you can think about it from an evolutionary perspective that following rules helps us to survive chaos and crisis

    Notice, Shift, and Rewire: Starting the Journey to Dismantle White Supremacy | by Anna Madill | Feb, 2021 | B The Change – interesting read. What struck me is how much this goes against efficiency and effectiveness in terms of everything one would have been taught in business management, to focus on what I’d call internal quality. It is predicated on a sufficiently slow rate of environmental change / client demands in order to allow this to happen. It is an ideal work environment (and I don’t mean that in the terms that they define it) but in a more general sense. It goes against the grain of the observations of James Gleick in his work Faster

    Culture

    How we made Theme from S-Express | Pop and rock | The Guardian 

    Design

    The US Air Force Quietly Admits the F-35 Is a Failure – ExtremeTech – its unreliable and doesn’t meet their expectations

    French law forces Apple to display repair scores alongside its products – not the same as the right to repair. Presumably if other countries in the EU followed this, it would force changes in the design process, though I am less convinced with Apple

    Energy

    Interesting how there is a groundswell of activity against the energy dead-end of reliance on Li ion batteries. Porsche Says Its Synthetic Fuel Could Make Gas-Powered Engines as Clean as EVs | Robb Report 

    FMCG

    Celebrating Lunar New Year: Filling Up on Food, Family and Content – Nielsen – really useful stats in here

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong citizens are being thrown in jail because of old British law | Business Insider – how British colonial law is being used against Hong Kongers by their government

    Luxury

    Rihanna and LVMH shut down Fenty Fashion House – CNN Style – not terribly surprising, a lot was being asked of the label

    Why L Catterton and Financière Agache snapped up Birkenstock | Vogue Business 

    Franck Muller’s Newest Watch Doubles as a Bitcoin Wallet, and You’ll Need Cryptocurrency to Buy It – for the tech bro that has everything

    Famous for Partying, Alexander Wang Could Become Infamous | New York magazine – fashion has a me too moment

    Security

    Finnish IT Giant Hit with Ransomware Cyberattack | Threatpost 

    Checkout Skimmers Powered by Chip Cards — Krebs on Security – the ingenuity that goes into these designs is impressive.

    Technology

    Connected Cars: Show Me The Money | EE Times – I am surprised that ad tech doesn’t feature this as data that they pull in

    Deepfake videos of Tom Cruise show the technology’s threat to society is very real | Input Magazine – perfect excuse for every political sex tape that drops in the future

    GitHub – igorbrigadir/twitter-advanced-search: Advanced Search for Twitter. – grokking Twitter

    Signal Stickers – some of these clearly violate IP

    Telehealth could be great in the post-pandemic world. 

    The Right Instagram Hashtags for Any Topic with One Click – Fanbase Karma blog 

  • Nexta & things that caught my eye this week

    Nexta

    Nexta media operation and its role in the Belarus protests was the main article in this weekend’s FT magazine.

    FT magazine on Nexta
    FT magazine on Nexta

    A few things about the article. The old maxim of ‘hearts and minds‘ is still true despite technology. Secondly, Belarus seems to view media and propaganda as a tactic rather than something strategic. This surprised me given that Belarus has always been authoritarian in nature and Soviet in terms of the way it operated. It is at odds with the way countries like Vietnam and China operate.

    Finally, the irony that the smartphone is the instrument of protest. Nexta seem surprisingly well organised in a way that wasn’t seen with voices around the Hong Kong protests.

    Most of the Belarussians will be using handsets based on technology from Google. Google doesn’t believe in privacy (apart from the privacy of its executives) and has a viewpoint of data that most authoritarian regimes would appreciate.

    Old Hong Kong

    YouTube has a lot of digitised archive footage. First up is unused footage shot in 1962 filmed for a Pathé film This is Hong Kong.

    The next reel was shot six years later. Again it was footage that ended up on the cutting room floor of Pathé. The footage was shot for one of its Colour Pictorial episodes. These were film magazines that screened prior to the main feature film in a cinema. Television would be soon squeezing cinema as the main form of video based news and documentaries.

    Some of this footage was familiar to me from my times going and living in Hong Kong, whilst other aspects of it were unrecognisable. Both of these films reminded me of Miroslav Sasek’s book This is Hong Kong.

    Japan

    This footage is said to be taken in Tokyo, Osaka and the countryside in Japan during the 1980s. Though the airplane through bamboo scaffolding footage from 0.23 – 0.25 seems to have been taken on the run in to Hong Kong’s old Kai Tak airport. Some of it is beautifully shot.

    It is underpinned by a an ambient track that works really well.

    Talking of Japan, ASICS have a shoes that reminds me of the bindings used to hold bamboo scaffolding together and the weaving of bamboo screens. Asics and a Japanese architect made a shoe inspired by bamboo weaving.

    ASICS have put together a film to promote the shoe.

    Berocca integration of radio and voice services

    Finally Berocca did an innovative radio advert to take advantage of voice services as part of its radio advertising campaign. Alexa has a well documented API stack for building skills, which is what Berocca is encouraging consumers to use. I could see this happening more as Alexa is rolled out in automotive environments.

  • 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.