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.
I discovered The X-Files at college. I had just purchased a Casio TV with a screen the size of a postage stamp from a pawn shop in Huddersfield. I bought a power block from Argos to save on batteries. The internet was only available for me during college time, so destination TV was a thing. I would tune in without-fail to watch the show.
The X-Files was of a time and a place. The Berlin Wall had just come down and the military industrial complex still existed. It existed without a wider purpose. The Thatcher years seemed petty with aspirations for authoritarianism at the time; in the way that Teresa May does now. Area 51 was the home of stealth planes, and so wrapped in mystery. Nuclear annihilation was as much a part of society as terrorism is now.
The six episode relaunch caused me to revisit the show. It was interesting to see who it felt current and still had changed. Mulder and Scully used mobile phones, email, the internet and databases. From a technical point-of-view it feels current. Although Mulder and Scully should count their blessings for not living in our always-on connected world. Japanese technological skill now feels off-key. Whilst Japan is still very technically advanced, it doesn’t feel like the technological titan it seemed to represent in the 1980s.
China was still in the early stages of opening up and had yet been let into the WTO. The latest gadgetry was instead being made in Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan.
The use of optical media was interesting. I still prefer the quality of audio CDs over streamed music or MP3 downloads.
The authors understanding of technology and the online world is much more muddied. AOL would have been a thing in the US. Al Gore and Bill Gates would have talked about the information superhighway and cyberpunk had made a huge impact on culture. Series 7 episode First Person Shooter muddles online computer gaming, virtual worlds and reality and feels like it was written by William Gibson whilst extremely drunk.
The storytelling definitely hit a low in series 6. Series 7 saw some interesting series mash-ups and changes:
Lance Henriksen from Chris Carter show Millennium appears in one episode as a plot crossover
There is a special episode of COPS (X-Cops) where the show format changes to ‘reality TV’
The Smoking Man becomes a trickster character like Loki than the sinister hand of the military industrial complex
The Lone Gunmen seem quite niave and childish in their quest for the truth. There was a failed effort to crack a Las Vegas convention where banal details of black ops were discussed over poker. It would be interesting to see what they would look like in a post-Snowden world.
Series 8 seems to be a self conscious effort to re-inject tension into the franchise. Robert Patrick joins as a by-the-book FBI agent dealing with shape-shifting bounty hunter aliens. This is an interesting juxtaposition as he was previously best known for his role as the liquid metal policeman T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day. In this series it was Mulder’s turn to get abducted by aliens.
Series 9 loses something in the awkward working threesome of Scully, Reyes and Doggett. There is something fitting about the final episode which features black helicopters and the smoking man.
The Truth Is Out There was the oft-repeated mission statement in the show. Now it really is out in public and profoundly depressing. Despite this, I found re-watching the first five series of The X-Files very rewarding.
Back on February 9, 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote his declaration of of the independence of cyberspace. The declaration pointed out the folly of trying to govern something thought to be virtually ungovernable at the time.
Barlow first came to prominence writing lyrics for The Grateful Dead. His ethos came from the libertarian do your own thing ethic that underpinned much of the hippy movement. This probably come more naturally to Barlow than other people having grown up on a cattle ranch and being the son of the Republican politician.
By the time he wrote the about the independence of cyberspace; he was already had published extensively about the internet. He was on the board of directors of The WELL – an online community that sprang out of Stewart Brand’s back to the land influence catalogue of useful things The Whole Earth Catalog (The WELL stands for The Whole Earth eLectronic Link). He contributed to Wired magazine (founded by aging hippies Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand), Barlow’s essay Economy of Ideas published in the March 1994 issue provides a clear view of the thinking that prompted him to write the declaration. He had already founded The Electronic Frontier Foundation with by John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor in response to a series of actions by law enforcement agencies that led them to conclude that the authorities were gravely uninformed about emerging forms of online communication.
The declaration was a reactionary document, brought upon by the 1996 Telecommunications Act in the US. The act eventually resulted in consolidation of US media ownership.
I suspect the similarities in style between the declaration and the Doc Searl’s et al later Cluetrain Manifesto are an intentional nod to Barlow on cyberspace.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
So two decades later, how does Barlow’s declaration stand in comparison that what’s actually happened? At first blush not very well. The digital economy outside China is dominated by an oligarchy of four main players: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.
Scott Galloway’s presentation at DLD conference this year, highlights the winner take all nature of the online world. This is partially down to the nature of the online platform. Amazon grew to critical mass in the US as for a critical amount of time buyers didn’t need to pay state sales tax until state legislation started to catch up.
Zuckerberg and his peers marked a changing of the guard in Silicon Valley as yuppies took over from the the hippies.
Inside China there is a similar state-directed oligarchy of Alibaba, Tencent, Netease and Sina.
The oligarchy impact has been most pronounced in Europe, where consumer demand and a lack of effective competition saw Google go to 90+ percent in market share across the EU, when the US market share was less than 70 percent at the time.
Futurist and science fiction author Bruce Sterling summed it up rather well:
“Globalization” is over for 2016. We have entered an era of Internet Counter-Revolution. The events of 1989 feel almost as distant as those of 1789. The globalizing, flat-world, small-pieces-loosely-joined Internet is behind us, it’s history. The elite geek Internet could not resist those repeated tsunamis of incoming users.
It turned out that normal people like the “social” in social media a lot better than they ever liked the raw potential of media technology. In Russia and China in 2016, digital media is an arm of the state. Internet has zero revolutionary potential within those societies, but all kinds of potential for exported cyberwar. The Chinese police spy and firewall model, much scoffed at in the 1990s, is now the dominant paradigm. The Chinese have prospered with their authoritarian approach, while those who bought into borderless friction-free data have been immiserated by the ultra-rich.
In the USA it’s an older American story: the apparent freedom of Henry Ford’s personal flivver has briskly yielded to the new Detroit Big Five of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and, in last place, Microsoft.
In 2016, everything that looks like digital innovation, “big data,” “the cloud,” the “Internet of Things,” are actually promotional slogans that play into the hands of the GAFAM “Big Five.” Anybody who lacks broadband and a mobile OS is in deadly peril, especially the digital old-school likes of IBM, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle… and the hapless TV networks, whose median viewer age is now in the 60s.
The GAFAM Big Five, the “Stacks,” will turn their wrath on the victims closest to them, well before they complete their lunge for control of cars and thermostats. However, their destiny is obvious. The rebels of the 1990s are America’s new mega-conglomerates. Google is “Alphabet,” Apple pruned the “computer” from its name, Amazon is the Washington Post. In 2016, that’s how it is, and in 2017, 189, 19, much more so.
So the not-evil guys are the new evil guys, but don’t be scared by this. It’s quite like watching the 1960s Space Age crumble from giant-leaps-for-mankind to launching low-orbit gizmos for profit. It’s comprehensible, it can be dealt with. Sure, it’s tragic if your head was in the noosphere, but if you have any historical awareness of previous industrial revolutions, this is really easy to understand. It’s already in your pocket and purse, it’s written on every screen you look at It could scarcely be more obvious.
Yes, Internet Counterrevolution is coming, much of it is here already, and it’s properly considered a big deal, but it’s not permanent. This too shall pass.
And this post hasn’t even touched on how government has looked to plug itself into all facets of online life in the interest of discovering terrorist plots, organised crime or paedophile rings. Assaults on cyberspace sovereignty are numerous, from Pakistan’s special editable version of YouTube to several governments looking for cryptographic backdoors.
At DLD 2016, you have a German politician talking about the mechanism of how the government needed to rollback citizen rights to privacy to give German start-ups a chance. In this winner takes all world, the beneficiaries are likely to be Google, Facebook Amazon and Microsoft rather than a local champion.
I started on this post in mid-January and scheduled it to go out on February 8, 2016. danah boyd also published on the declaration of Cyberspace and I recommend you go and check out here. More privacy related content here.
Things that made my day this week included mac pioneer Susan Kare, Luxxury, Greg Wilson and JG Ballard:
Great interview with Susan Kare. Susan Kare is famous for her icon designs that appeared in the first nine versions of the MacOS. Even now veteran Mac users will have a reaction to the ‘Dogcow’ that Susan Kare used to illustrate orientation of paper in a printer. More Mac related topics here.
Luxxury
Luxxury have cut a new slice of post-disco, pre-house 1980s dance music that Maze or Hall & Oates would have been happy with. Take it Slow is out on iTunes
JG Ballard
JG Ballard’s High Rise makes it to the big screen alongside some great late 1960s / 1970s set dressing and a great Kraut Rock soundtrack that Daft Punk would love.
Apple Watch
Finally, an Acceptable Use of the Apple Watch | Hackaday and 3D printing for that matter. A lovely Mac Classic homage as watch stand. You can now find this in silicone on Amazon, if you don’t want to 3D print your own version.
Greg Wilson & Francois K
Great interview with Greg Wilson and Francois K talking about the early days of modern dance music. From DJing to production and everything in between. What becomes apparent is something that Robert X Cringely, pointed out in his book Accidental Empires. That the same set of (48) names keep cropping up again and again in the development of something. In Cringely’s case, this was the personal computing revolution. Watching this video; you ge the same sense in the development of dance music.
Greg Wilson helped develop the culture at the Hacienda and brought beat and scratch mixing to UK television in the early 1980s. Francois K’s impact was as a DJ and producer since the early 1980s. The career longevity of these pioneers is fascinating.
Focus On The User – interesting lobby and direct consumer action that is very EU focused. The idea of Focus On The User brings to mind past antitrust remedies against Google and Microsoft. It will be interesting to see where Focus On The User goes. More posts related to antitrust in the EU specifically here
Recovering Teletext data from VHS recordings / Boing Boing – it takes such “phenomenal processing power” to accurately and reliably scan VHS recordings of text that we’re only now on the cusp of being able to do so. That hundreds, even thousands of frames of each teletext page are required to OCR each one is also a powerful tribute to just how astoundingly awful VHS is.
Microsoft decrees that new PCs will ONLY be able to run Windows 10 | SiliconAngle – Microsoft is stepping up its efforts to push the world onto Windows 10 by revising its support policy in a way that means newly purchased PCs will no longer support older editions of its OS. Given how much of China is on cracked versions of XP; expect legal trouble ahead
How Tumblr Can Save Yahoo — Thoughts on Media — Medium – there is delicious irony to this post being hosted on Medium. The problem is that a lot of the magazine content which has failed is also hosted on tumblr, how could Yahoo! be trusted to monetise third party content any better
SMARTPHONES: Hungry Huawei Eyes US Smartphone Market – Huawei’s move into the US smartphone market looks like a logical and necessary step to consolidating its place as a top global brand, but will require years of major investment to succeed.
Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells – Marco.org – The better question isn’t why anyone still buys the 101, but why the rest of the MacBook lineup is still less compelling for the 101’s buyers after almost four years, and whether Apple will sell and support the 101 for long enough for newer MacBook models to become compelling, economical replacements
Circus Ponies – great Alphabet Inc parody by defunct Mac developer
richard sapper (1932-2015) DesignBoom – Richard Sapper was the designer behind Lenovo and before that IBM. The ThinkPad was influenced by bento boxes. You had the butterfly keyboard of the ThinkPad 701 and titanium chassis before the famous PowerBook
