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.
You are not safe was a theme that echoed through a period drama on Silicon Valley yet is equally applicable today.
I have been catching up on Halt and Catch Fire. It is a fiction based on various aspects of Silicon Valley lore. I have enjoyed watching it immensely to a point.
I was especially struck by episode eight in the third series. One of the main characters in series three hacks his employer and releases their anti-virus software online for free. But its the mid-1980s through a thoroughly modern lens. It resonates because it speaks to our age, not to the 1980s or even the mid-1990s.
YOU ARE NOT SAFE
I, Ryan Ray, released the MacMillan Utility source code. I acted alone. No one helped me, and no one told me to do it. I did this because ‘security’ is a myth. Contrary to what you might have heard, my friends, you are not safe. Contrary to what you might have heard, my friends, you are not safe. Safety is a story. It’s something we search our children so they can sleep at night, but we know it’s not real.
Yes, there was software piracy, it was a mainstream part of computing culture which had sprung up from the ‘homebrew’ mentality. Prior to founding Apple, Steve Wozniak used to give out the schematics of what then became the Apple I. Punched paper tapes of software used to be exchanged between members when they met up in aMenlo Park garage and later on in an auditorium at Stanford University.
Back then the narrative was overwhelmingly positive in terms of technology. The main problem was whether the Japanese, Microsoft, Intel or IBM was going to crush the rest of the technology eco-system in Silicon Valley. Consumers had a bright new world of technology ahead of them. Video games were still a niche interest compared to VCRs (video cassette recorders). VHS versus Betamax was as important a format war as Windows versus Macintosh.
Here’s the thing. This show (rightly or wrongly) may frame the way a lot of people think about this part of the digital age. For those who aren’t well read about the history of Silicon Valley OR didn’t live through the 1980s – it will colour their view of history. That detail rankled me a bit; I’m not quite sure why. Part of it is knowing where we’re going is understanding where we have been in past.
That’s all very nice, but why does this matter? It provides you with perspective and the ability to critique ideas. Either way you are not safe. More related content here.
Wadds came up with 13 theses about the media of me with more than a nod and a wink to The Cluetrain Manifesto. The main thrust of it is that the media model is broken, technology has a lot of the blame at its door.
Picking through it are some worthy aspirations, but it was diagnosing symptoms rather than causes. I believe that the main problems in the media of me are wetware, not software. People and civil society rather than networks and servers.
Technology has its own momentum
As with many things, the reality and where we are going is much more complex. Kevin Kelly posited that technological progress is a natural force of its own. He called this force the ‘technium’. It is not moral, it doesn’t understand good or bad. It can be slowed down for a time, but never stopped.
Even during the European dark ages, the golden age in Muslim countries saw Arab scholars:
Collate classical knowledge
Translate it into their own language
Build upon the body of knowledge
This knowledge came back into Europe. It helped provide a foundation for the renaissance.
We’re not going to be able to stop bots or algorithms. As they improve; their impact will be harder to discern. There will be a tension in online platforms; shareholder value versus good citizenship.
Digital is a winner takes all world
As with many previous technology markets such as the PC and smartphone operating systems online is an oligopoly of two. Digital media provides a disproportionate amount of benefit to very few platforms.
Facebook and Google count for 85-90% of online advertising growth.
In China, online media is dominated by Tencent and Baidu. We could ‘Balkanise’ the media landscape. But that would mean a poorer experience for users outside the US and China. The technology sector does not have:
Commercial scale in funding
Sufficient talent
Comparable addressable markets
Timms & Heimans hypothesis of ‘new power vs. old power’ rubs up against technology as an uncomfortable vector.
This all means that the tensions in society, civic society and societal discourse is accelerated and amplified.
From the perspective of technology platforms this isn’t their problem. They are only tackling it with reluctance, they don’t have a silver bullet solution. In their eyes:
‘Online’ isn’t a problem, it is the breakdown in social norms, which are then amplified and gamed online
In the real world we’re insulated from views unless we chose to explore alternatives. Algorithms have amplified this process further to create a filter bubble. Algorithms are only mimicing our natural desires. This is mirrored in the lack real-world discourse and polarisation of views
Algorithms are accused of having a reductive effect on an individuals breadth of media consumption. News feed algorithms jobs are to make platforms money. Before their widespread use netizens widely flocked to chatrooms and forums with a similar narrow focus. News readers using RSS which would allow individuals to read widely have proved to be only a niche interest
Reading widely is important to be being well informed, but its a conscious choice that people have to make. But in order to read widely one has to be:
Sufficiently educated to be confident in their reading ability
Confident enough to ignore any scorn that might come from ‘books, learning and being an expert’
Sufficiently curious to have the motivation to read
Having sufficient time to be able to read
These bullets are affected by quality of education, social norms and income. If you are just getting by with a series of side hustle jobs you might too time poor to read widely.
These are not universal traits in society. In the UK the idea of the self-educated literate working-man who goes to classes at the Mechanics Institute is long dead. That wasn’t done by Facebook or Google.
The notion of an easily swayed populus wasn’t an invention of Cambridge Analytica, Google or Facebook. The Roman poet Juvenal famous for the concept of ‘bread and circuses’ would see something similar in populist politics. From Brexit, to Germany’s AfD the focus on diversion, distraction and immediate satisfaction ‘palliative’. A significant amount of common people are selfish in nature and often pay little attention to wider concerns.
A quote from near the end of Jean-Paul Satre’s play No Exit sums it up quite well
“All those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE!”
Whilst in a democracy, all opinions should have the opportunity to be voiced; should they have a right to be heard? Should politicians really reflect the will of the people? I think there is a strong argument to be made against it. I am not advocating authoritarian rule, but that we need leaders who reflect on the greater good. Edmund Burke – one of the founding fathers of British conservatism is a widely cited example of a politician who didn’t reflect the will of the people. Burke recognised that democracy can create a tyranny over unpopular minorities. He didn’t consider politicians to be delegates; conduits for votes without moral responsibility.
He is widely cited as being a better man for it:
Burke viewed the British conduct in India under the East India Company immoral
He advocated representation for American colonists
Acknowledgement of wrongdoing by the Crown in America and an appropriate apology
Facts versus Emotion
Facts and emotion have always duelled and facts have frequently come off the worse for it. Western politicians from Adolf Hitler to Barrack Obama have little in common except being successful exponents of rhetoric and emotion in their speeches. Technical skills and knowledge don’t make the cut. A classic example of this is the dissonance between the advice of John Redwood as a strategist with Charles Stanley versus his political stance on Brexit. Mr Redwood knows what works as a politician.
Those that wield emotion now, have a greater understanding of how it works. It is why populist organisations win. It is why experts fail to persuade voters to act in their own interest. That won’t change with technology but with stonger, harsher electoral commission powers.
Fact versus Fiction
Yellow journalism and fiction has been with us for as long as civilisation existed. It’s modern roots are in the American media industry of the late 19th century, as publishers battled for circulation. They work because audiences love ‘good stories’. A good story is one that:
Surprises
Entertains
Reinforces our own beliefs
American journalist Frank Mott listed the following characteristics of :
Scare headlines
Lavish use of images
Faked expertise: misleading headlines pseudo-science and false learnings
All of Mott’s points sound like a thoroughly modern media playbook. Yellow journalism pioneers Hearst & Pulitzer were only stopped by public vilification and shame. The Pullitzer Price, like the Nobel Prize was a penitent act at the end of a successful commercial career in media. Hearst & Pullitzer were owner-proprietors, it is a lot harder (though not impossible) to shame a public company today. The bigger issue is that a century of mass-media practice has lowered the bar in standards for ‘new media’ companies. A brutal legislative machine that would replace compliance through guilt with compliance through fear is a possible solution. However the legislative executive by its nature tends to favour the wealthy.
Soothsayer in the Hills Sees Silicon Valley’s Sinister Side – The New York Times – “If you’re a mark of social media, if you’re being manipulated by it, one of the ways to tell is if there’s a certain kind of personality quality that overtakes you,” he says. “It’s been called the snowflake quality. People criticize liberal college kids who have it, but it’s exactly the same thing you see in Trump. It’s this kind of highly reactive, thin-skinned, outraged single-mindedness. I think one way to think of Trump, even though he is a con man and he is an actor and he’s a master manipulator and all that, in a sense he’s also a victim. I’ve met him a few times over 30 years. And what I think I see is someone who has moved from kind of a New York character who was in on his own joke to somebody who is completely freaked out and outraged and feeling like he is on the verge of a catastrophe every second. And so my theory about that is that he was ruined by social media.”
Design
IBM Type – IBM have open sourced their tailor-made corporate font Plex
Marketing
Huawei’s new global corporate brand swagger | Analysis | Campaign Asia – Huawei so closely reflects China’s new ambitions that it would be easy to consider the tech giant as a proxy for Brand China. But Tan bristles at the suggestion. “Huawei is a global company,” she reminds us. “You can see our overseas revenue is larger than China, so we really want to position our brand as a global brand.”
Apple CEO Cook breathes new life into old iPhones | Reuters – how Apple’s lower models contribute in markets like India. Older iPhones resold also drive services sales on an ongoing basis, whether the older iPhones are based on to children or sold on
aibo | Sony Japan – Matt’s commentary on this from his Web Curios newsletter‘When I was about 20 I was obsessed with the idea of Sony’s Aibo, the robot dog that was JUST LIKE A REAL PUPPY but with no hair or faeces or propensity to maul people.; now Sony have announced a rebooted version which is slightly less robotic and slightly more cute, and doubtless far more sophisticated in its ability to dance and caper and charmingly present to demand tickles that will never feel. The weird thing is, though, that now I am older I look at this and feel nothing but a deep and abiding sadness at the thought of the sort of people for whom this actually designed – not rich twats who want a toy, but the terminally lonely for whom a small robotic dog and stroking its plastic, unfeeling case in lieu of actual biological contact. Imagine that being your only interaction with another ‘thing’ for days and days and days on end. I don’t want to grow old.’ Not too sure if this a manifestation of his realisation of mortality that usually kicks in with the start of middle age. It does reflect the resurgence of Sony and how it thinks about consumer products for a greying market.
WPP’s PR Units Slip as Sorrell Warns on ‘New Normal’ – O’Dwyer PR – “It does seem that in new normal of a low growth, low inflation, limited pricing power world, there is an increasing focus on cost reduction, exacerbated by a management consultant emphasis on cost reduction and the close to zero cost of capital funding of activist investors and zero-based budgeters,” wrote Sorrell in WPP’s trading update.
About Amazon – Working at Amazon – Dogs of Amazon – interesting page on the Dogs of Amazon. I worked at Yahoo! which tried to have the nanny dot com culture coupled with the work hard but laid back Silicon Valley vibe – it wasn’t pet friendly like Amazon proports to be. I can’t work out if Dogs of Amazon is a relic from when Amazon was a small dot com era startup.
Dogs of Amazon is that at odds with the narrative about Amazon being a hellish white collar employer. I know friends who described their Amazon middle management experience in very negative terms. I also couldn’t reconcile this dog friendly culture with their warehouse and logistics operating conditions for employees.
Origins of PowerPoint
The Improbable Origins of PowerPoint – IEEE Spectrum – built by a couple of former Apple employees and sold to Microsoft. Microsoft also bought MS-DOS (which was a hacked together clone of CP/L, which in turn tried to copy the experience of the PDP-11 mini-computer)
Carhartt
There was a great talk at Google from Carhartt about their brand and approach to products
The Soviet internet that never happened
InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network – (PDF) – it is interesting how the discourse on the networked country moved from being extremely positive for communism in the early 1960s due to its ability for economic control. The rise of ‘economic cybernetics’ sprang out of the end of the Stalin era as there were shortages and production distortions as central planning was failing to control the economy. Decentralising solutions built a massive bureaucratic infrastructure which affected things further. The Soviet Academy of Sciences suggested advocated for the use of computers for statistics and planning. You can see some of the influence of this now in the uptake of networking, machine learning and technology by the Chinese government over the past few decades.
