Ethics: moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity. I went to school with people who ended up on the wrong side of the law. I knew more of them when I used to DJ which was my hobby since before I went to college.
I probably still have some post-it notes around the place that I used as bookmarks from when I used to work at a call centre but that was about the extent of my ethical transgressions.
My business experience meant that I dealt with a lot of unpleasant unprofessional clients, but didn’t necessarily see anything unethical in nature. When I started writing this blog I was thinking about culture rather than ethics and the most part still do.
But business and work changed. Ethics became more important:
When I started in social and digital campaigns I didn’t think about ethics as a standalone thing. It was just part of doing a good job. It went without saying.
I don’t think any of us back then would have foreseen slut shaming, trolling, online bullying, dark patterns and misinformation
Now things are different. The lack of ethics is impacting all parts of business life.
How ad tech data is used
How content is created
How services are designed
How products are made
I think that much of the problems with ethics is cultural and generational in nature. The current generation of entrepreneurs have perverted knowledge in the quest of growth hacking and continual improvement and change for its own sake. Its a sickness at the centre of technology
Bob Hoffman has been pointing out the problems with the way online advertising has been run for years. Bob’s book Adscam is probably one of the best critical examinations of the online media eco-system and the risks inherent in programmatic advertising.
Bob Hoffman got to speak with the European Parliament. Bear with it as audio improves through the recording.
He also spoke at the Digital Marketing is Broken event.
Interesting talk on the benefits and limitations of economic sanctions with a particular focus on Iran and Russia.
Ireland
I never realised that Sony had a factory in Ireland as early as 1960; Sony globalised production of transistor radios relatively early on in their production life. Compare this to the later US technology businesses setting up shop in Ireland over the next couple of decades. This also might go someway to explain why Sony was such a respected brand in Ireland and shows how visionary and experimental the Sony management were. These comments on Irish workers in 1963 versus their Japanese counterparts are interesting. The assembly workers don’t seem to realise the intrinsic value of (the Sony Japan-made) transistors that go into the products – this might be down to education as this was likely a soldering and screwing products together assembly line.
Suzuki-san points out what he thinks are flaws with Irish workers whilst recognising that this partly down to the different social contract between employee and business. Part of the problem was that Irish workers had the opportunity of going abroad without any government restriction compared to Japan. Suzuki-san didn’t believe that Irish workers are bad workers, but rather they require more investment to encourage them to become good workers.
Interesting perspective on the Windsor Framework from an Irish and EU perspective. Tony Connelly did one of the best podcast series on the Brexit process for RTÉ
Materials
I am a big fan of the Rose Anvil account for the way they take a deep dive into materials and shoe construction. Here’s a great example of their work which shows the design principle of what you leave out is as important as what you leave in a product.
Retailing
Olivia Moore on Temu e-commerce app. Her idea of ‘invisible AI’ is actually more prevalent than Ms Moore thinks, otherwise great conversation to listen in on.
Connie Chan does a short talk on the future of e-commerce.
Armani, the eponymous luxury fashion label of Giorgio Armani posted advertisements in the Financial Times this week. The advertisements harked back to Armani’s looks of the 1980s and 1990s. But what I thought was most notable about the advertisements was their promotion of made-to-measure menswear.
Armani via the FT
Armani is clearly putting its weight behind a return to the office. Presumably Armani think that this move back to the office will also mean a move to formal business dress. This doesn’t seem to be supported by what I have been seeing and is in a stark contrast to the current approach of rival Zegna. Armani have called a lot of past trends right. They were one of the first brands setting up a retail network in China. They were early to putting their catwalk shows on the web to gain a wider audience. Armani were clever in the way they approached licensing of their brand. During the 1990s Armani expanded into sportswear, watches, eyeglasses, cosmetics and home which looked prescient in retrospect.
We’ll see if Armani’s views on a return to the office pan out, I am not so sure it will be.
SVB’s First Failure – The Wire China – SVB’s Board had asked me to found a brand-new bank: the Shanghai Pudong Development Silicon Valley Bank (SPD SVB), a joint venture between SVB and the state-owned Shanghai Pudong Development Bank. The board had committed $100 million to establishing SVB’s operations in China, and I was filled with goodwill and optimism about the endeavor. Although I thoroughly enjoyed my time in China and the many friends I met there, from today’s vantage point, I firmly believe we were (and are still) being played.
For female journalists, covering China comes at a cost — Radio Free Asia – The sheer volume of vitriol targeting reporters given China’s size and the nationalistic fervor of many of its citizens can set the abuse apart. Compounding their anxiety is a fear that the intimidation is sanctioned, if not coordinated, by the Chinese Communist Party itself. “When, for example, an American female journalist gets trolled, it’s probably coming from right-wing crazies or some fringe corner of society,” said Vicky Xu, a journalist in Australia, whose reporting on abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang brought a flood of death threats. “The kind of role and voice they have is very, very limited.
Opinion | Xi’s visit to Putin should worry the West – The Washington Post – If you were looking for another reason why it’s important that Ukraine succeeds against Russia, consider the photos from Moscow. “The President of Eurasia” — I fear that’s the invisible caption of the pictures of Xi that we’re seeing amid the Kremlin’s golden doors and red carpets. The idea that a vast swath of the world is dominated by a China that stands so resolutely against freedom and democracy is chilling. If this alliance succeeds, we will live in a darker world
A Campaign to Remind Us That We Love New York (City) – The New York Times – The people who came up with We ♥ NYC say it is a mark for a different time. But they see parallels to the troubled era that gave rise to I ♥ NY. “We’re hopefully going to be able to cut through divisiveness and negativity” that accompanied the pandemic, said Kathryn Wylde, the president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a consortium of corporations and business executives that is leading the We ♥ NYC campaign. She said that besides rejuvenating people’s spirits, “we want to remind them they can make a difference, whether it’s on the block or in the city as a whole.” She added: “We want to remind them we don’t have to maintain these divisions that have grown up between business and labor and rich and poor.” She cited surveys her group had conducted during the pandemic. “The results we’ve gotten back are people in New York want to be part of fixing what they see as broken in the city,” – Interesting choices in this. Curious to know why they didn’t rally around the previous campaign? It was atemporal in design and a personal commitment, the NY aspect of it implying inclusion? The new one has a lot of challenges: it lacks visual symmetry & balance. Ironically the original works better in digital contexts (for instance as an app logo) than the new version. The emoji heart will date very fast. The font choice I don’t understand. And what about the exclusive nature of NYC rather than the inclusive aspect of NY – even a DE&I fail. ‘Tunnel people’ are a key part of NYC too.
IPSOS noted that global inflation likely peaked in 2022 (according to IMF), and negotiations are happening at the moment between retailers and FMCG companies. Consumers will still grapple with high prices for a good while yet. Ipsos posit that the inflation creates opportunities for growing market share via innovation, with a view to eventual revenue growth.
How Chinese Companies Are Reinventing Management – If a team splits up and some members form a new team, the leader of the new team must pay a fee to the original team for its previous training of the acquired staff. Moreover, the company’s financial system automatically transfers 10% of an acquired staffer’s bonus to the original team leader every month for one year. This system encourages each team to reorganize and generate new autonomous teams
Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder — The Information – Toyota doesn’t seem to need Alexa anymore. The automaker has dropped support for an app that allowed users to operate Alexa in their cars via smartphones in 2023 editions of several of its most popular models, including the RAV4, Prius and Corolla. And according to a person close to the automaker, Toyota plans to phase out Alexa integration from the rest of its lineup in the coming years. The automaker is now focused on improving an in-house voice assistant it launched last year and is considering integrating ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI, into it
Style
The influence of cyberpunk on tech wear and functional fashion. William Gibson’s Zero History talks explicitly about the function and tech wear nature of military clothing. They are a central part of the plot line.
Technology
Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder — The Information – Toyota doesn’t seem to need Alexa anymore. The automaker has dropped support for an app that allowed users to operate Alexa in their cars via smartphones in 2023 editions of several of its most popular models, including the RAV4, Prius and Corolla. And according to a person close to the automaker, Toyota plans to phase out Alexa integration from the rest of its lineup in the coming years. The automaker is now focused on improving an in-house voice assistant it launched last year and is considering integrating ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI, into it
Taiwan
I am currently reading Chris Miller’s book Chip War. This is a great talk by Chris about many of the areas covered in the book
Æon Flux’s surprisingly modern take on privacy and surveillance. | Slate – Æon Flux was a name that I hadn’t heard in at least a decade. I remember when it came out as I enjoyed cable TV in our student house. It fitted in with the wider cyber culture. The big beats and brash gravity defying visuals were everywhere from WipeOut to anime. The media was tech artefacts from a future counter-culture.
Macromedia Director and Flash produced animated video hardwired straight into our cortex. It was psychedelia but not as it had been experienced before. Asian animated and real world films weren’t mainstream but serious culture.
Æon Flux & The Matrix
The series came out in the early 1990s as part of a series of experimental animation on MTV called Liquid Television. It came out before The Matrix, yet drew from many similar influences:
Cyberpunk
Biopunk
Anime
Asian ‘gun fu’ action films
European comics in particular the space opera works of Möbius, Mézières & Christin. You can also see the influence that Chung had working with Ralph Bakshi on his fantasy animation
Gnostic beliefs
In another Matrix link; Æon Flux creator Peter Chung (피터 정) went on to create a segment for the Wachowskis’ The Animatrix which told part of the back story of The Matrix quadrology.
Privacy and the surveillance state
Each episode saw a conflict play out between an anarchic city and its authoritarian rival. Flux was an assassin from the anarchic city on undercover missions.
The animated series had been released on VHS, DVD and UMD – the Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) disk media that was the ultimate manifestation of cyberpunk storage. For some reason, it hasn’t been released on Blu-Ray yet.
It was truly transmedia with computer games and graphic novels to complement the animated series. Eventually Hollywood did a live action version that was vaguely related to the original Æon Flux. The original was too difficult and avant garde to be a Hollywood franchise, which is probably why the animated version has slipped back out of view.
Given that Æon Flux was influenced by cyberpunk was inevitably seen as a prescient take on privacy and the surveillance state.
Consumer behaviour
Taking Affection Back | No Mercy / No Malice – some interesting and intractable problems in society revolving around how men are set up for failure. Contrast the diagnosis with this article: The Great Feminization of the American University | City Journal – Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma. For university females, there is not, apparently, strength in numbers. The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus. Female students disproportionately patronize the burgeoning university wellness centers, massage therapies, relaxation oases, calming corners, and healing circles. Another newly installed female college president, Dartmouth’s Sian Leah Beilock, claims that the two “most pressing challenges of our time” are the “mental crisis among young people” and climate change. College institutions “really have a part to play in how we support students” suffering from that mental health crisis – correlation and causality aren’t the same thing
Why social class is advertising’s biggest diversity blind spot | Advertising | Campaign Asia – Social class might bring up antiquated ideas of British snobbery, but it exists everywhere. In Asia, social class is very pronounced. From obscenely wealthy ‘Crazy Rich Asian’ types, to a much reported on ‘rising middle class’, and a majority who are working class or live in poverty. The pandemic certainly brought class differences in Asia into sharp focus. Yet, despite making up the majority in society, advertising often fails to represent working class people. And when adverts do feature working class people, they usually perpetuate class-based stereotypes. Instead, the advertising industry is obsessed with targeting middle-class 18 to 34-year-olds, resulting in advertisements that seem to overlook the genuine diversity of society and instead mirror adland’s own demographic.
話題のChatGPTをLINEで使える「AIチャットくん」リリースから3日で20万登録突破 | みんなの便利な使用例を紹介 #AIチャットくん｜株式会社piconのプレスリリース – LINE adds ChatGPT gains 200,000 users in 3 days. ChatGPT speaks and understands Japanese, but uptake in Japan has been hampered, apparently, because you need to speak English to sign up. Line is the dominant messaging platform in Japan, and last week they added ChatGPT. You just add “AI Chat-kun” as a friend and start chatting. Up to five messages per day are free, and you can upgrade to unlimited messages for ¥680/month (about $5).
The Daring Ruse That Exposed China’s Campaign to Steal American Secrets – The New York Times – China publicly denies engaging in economic espionage, Chinese officials will indirectly acknowledge behind closed doors that the theft of intellectual property from overseas is state policy. James Lewis, a former diplomat now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recalls participating in a meeting in 2014 or so at which Chinese and American government representatives, including an officer from the People’s Liberation Army, discussed the subject. “An assistant secretary from the U.S. Department of Defense was explaining: Look, spying is OK — we spy, you spy, everybody spies, but it’s for political and military purposes,” Lewis recounted for me. “It’s for national security. What we object to is your economic espionage. And a senior P.L.A. colonel said: Well, wait. We don’t draw the line between national security and economic espionage the way you do. Anything that builds our economy is good for our national security.” The U.S. government’s response increasingly appears to be a mirror image of the Chinese perspective: In the view of U.S. officials, the threat posed to America’s economic interests by Chinese espionage is a threat to American national security.
Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them in Indonesia | Reuters – Reuters put trackers in usable secondhand shoes to see where they would end up. The main gist of the story is that Dow recycling effort was a failure, which is also embarrassing for their partner the Singapore government.
The idea was the sneakers would be made into playground surfaces. Reuters seems to have stopped investigating the story of Dow recycling shoes, but I was left with more questions about Dow recycling than answers from the Reuters report:
Were some of the shoes more distressed than others?
Do Reuters know what happens to unwearable sneakers that enter the Dow recycling process?
Is it more ethical to sell on lightly used shoes as affordable footwear to Indonesians or recycle them regardless? Reuters doesn’t have an answer to this issue
UK struggles with transition to manufacturing electric cars | Financial Times – foreign carmakers’ core concern is that Britain’s reputation as a stable and pragmatic place in which to manufacture vehicles has been shattered, initially by the 2016 Brexit vote, and more recently by last year’s political turmoil at Westminster. “They are asking whether the UK is a stable partner,” said one person close to the Japanese companies. – Brixiteer economic expert Patrick Minford openly discussed the demise of the car manufacturing industry
Women and ethnic minorities overrepresented in advertising industry, finds report – Women and ethnic minorities are now overrepresented in the UK advertising industry following a decades-long push to improve diversity, according to a new survey. A 2022 census found that an estimated 55pc of employees in the sector were women, compared to 45pc who were men. That was after the number of women increased from an estimated 11,600 to 14,400, an increase of 24pc, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) said. At the same time, the proportion of non-white employees increased by almost one third to 24pc, compared to 18pc a year earlier. Women made up 51pc of the population in England and Wales in 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics, while non-white ethnic groups comprised about 18pc. In London, where most of the UK’s advertising industry is concentrated, non-white ethnic groups represent roughly 46pc of the population. The IPA said there was more work to do on diversity, as women still only get just over one third of executive jobs in the ad industry, while non-white individuals only occupy 11pc of roles. – Daily Telegraph on how it feels that ‘woke’ addend risks becoming ‘out of touch’ with the British public, but doesn’t manage to make its argument very well.
Walt Disney vs Ron DeSantis: who really won the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ dust-up? | Financial Times – Instead of candidates with backgrounds in economic development or tourism, he packed the board with political allies. Two of them are leading lights in the culture wars that have helped DeSantis build a national profile ahead of a presumed run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Among them is Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of the conservative Moms for Liberty group and a champion of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” – Disneyland Florida is pretty screwed
I don’t care that much about the comings and goings of the Royal Family, let alone minor players like Harry and Meghan. I am a citizen of a republic not a subject of the Windsors. I can remember watching the first wedding of Princess Anne on our black and while television. But beyond the sound of the wedding march; I really didn’t have much of a clue of what was going on. My Mam went around the kitchen doing what she needed to be done. This was on in the background, but didn’t feel important.
By comparison, watching the state funeral Eamon de Valera; had much more of an impact. I could feel the seriousness of my grandparents and my Uncle who lived on the family farm watching the procession of the flag-draped coffin through Dublin to Glasnevin cemetery.
I have been vaguely aware of controversy surrounding Harry and Meghan, but not the detail. I know, that if I asked, my Mum would be able to give me a blow-by-blow account while my Dad would roll his eyes. If you’d have asked me three months ago if I would have been writing part of a post focusing on Harry and Meghan, I would have expressed a strong doubt.
South Park
That all changed when they saw South Park’s episode about Harry and Meghan’s ‘worldwide privacy tour’. It seemed to be a lightning rod for their collective doubts about the couple. I then had to give them a crash course on the cultural relevance of South Park. Hong Kong friends didn’t ask about Harry and Meghan, but instead asked why South Park used Harry and Meghan to pick on Canada?
