Ged Carroll

Category: ethics | 倫理 | 윤리학

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

  • Joy of ownership + more things

    Joy of ownership

    Visvim’s Toshiyuki Ueno in this film made in partnership with Porsche Japan, as we learn about the fundamental philosophy of ‘monozukuri’, or craftsmanship, behind the storied Japanese brand, as well as Ueno-san’s joy of ownership with long-lasting products.

    Ueno’s joy of ownership comes from products that are potential candidates of what I called on this blog ‘heirloom design‘. Something that might develop a patina, but manages to last a lifetime. EDC or everyday carry is a category of products designed around the joy of ownership. Products over engineered and made of easy to service parts, yet are used everyday.

    One can see this joy of ownership ethos in Visvim’s own products such as their iconic daypack. These look superficially like the classic Jansport design, but are over built in order ensure the bag outlasts the owner.

    The joy of ownership is at odds with many aspects of our modern world. People no longer have digital or music collections. Instead relying on play lists on streaming services to give them the right muzak for whatever they are doing at the time. Online business Rent The Runway does away with the joy of ownership and curation of your look, you no longer need a wardrobe beyond the basics. Luxury brands are now talking about a circular economy play where consumers are encouraged to only enjoy the joy of ownership for a short while and they might then be resold. At the other end, fast fashion from Shein and H&M.

    The much prescribed ethos of fast failure, agile methodologies and Facebook’s ‘move fast and break things’ are a world away from the philosophy behind the joy of ownership. This is the reason why Bang & Olufsen is a shadow of its former self, yet a vintage BeoSystem still provides the joy of ownership. More related content to the joy of ownership can be found here.

    China

    China scraps inbound quarantine rules in decisive break with zero-Covid regime | Financial Times and Coronavirus: could US restrictions on travellers from China raise tensions further? | South China Morning Post 

    Where is China’s Intelligentsia during the Covid Emergency? — re-reading Xu Zhiyong’s Letter to Xi Jinping – China Heritage 

    Financial trends: risky model will spawn new China crises | Financial Times 

    Xi Jinping shows his strength by muscling women away from power – Nikkei Asia – China’s path toward becoming a modern socialist country, as officials describe their aim, has historically been framed as incorporating gender egalitarianism. “Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole,” Mao Zedong wrote in 1955. By this measure, one would expect the Chinese Communist Party to at least signal that it cares about women’s representation in 2022. But last month’s 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party broke tradition by elevating 24 men and no women to the party’s Politburo, omitting its usual token female for the first time in 25 years. Women took just 11 of 205 seats on the new party Central Committee. Loyalty and utility to the top leader, above qualifications or affirmative action-style standards, are now the major determinants of officials’ prospects for promotion. Party leader Xi Jinping no longer feels any obligation to gesture toward gender equality – what this misses out on is that Mao Zedong’s public and private conduct were in sharp contrast. Mao was an avowed paedophile.

    Zhou Enlai’s posthumous triumph – Pearls and Irritations 

    China Evergrande crisis: world’s most indebted developer misses overhaul proposal deadline amid creditor talks 

    Economics

    Semiconductor Outlook 2023: Green Shoots – which has implications for only a short global recession as the semiconductor sector is the canary in the coal mine. This news from Infineon lends credence to the view point: Infineon ready to spend ‘billions’ on acquisitions, says CEO .| EE Times 

    TikTok ‘ghost mall’ indicator of problems with Malaysia’s failed Silicon Valley | South China Morning Post – “It’s the only Malay-Muslim concept mall in Malaysia,” Abdul said, adding that he feels attached to the mall as “there is a brotherhood here.”While the mall didn’t have many customers, I was struck by the lively camaraderie among the staffers working there. Outside the mall, I found a singer performing for a small crowd. A couple meters away stood a unit where a popular Thai restaurant once operated. While it’s listed as operating on Google Reviews, one of Fadzil’s staff told me it has “closed down for good.” The restaurant appeared to once have good reviews online, with diners describing the food as “affordable” and “delicious.” The lot was padlocked and the tinted glass walls obscured what was inside, but my fat zoom lens captured an eerie image of the restaurant’s interior. Kitchen tools were piled in a corner and dozens of bottles of beverages stood packaged together, unused. It looked like a scene that had been quickly and hastily abandoned. – retail is tough at the best of times, but there is also a constant tale in Malaysia of expensive white elephants and failed economic policies once it had been decolonised

    Ethics

    Filmmaker Andrew Callaghan Says Cable News “Ramped People up” for Jan. 6 – I think that January 6th is much more of a riot than it is an insurrection. And I think that the mainstream media is endlessly focusing on it because it’s, it’s very good eye candy. It makes great news. It makes all conservatives look like absolute morons, and it’s good for selling ads. So it was a terrible thing, but there’s reasons they’re dragging it out, and they’ll continue to drag it out until the next major conservative fuck up like that. I don’t feel, necessarily, that the frontline brainwashed Capitol riot soldier is to blame for what happened. I think it’s the people who push them into action, particularly on the fringe as well. I think mainstream media and social media play a role in ramping up division, but I think it’s people like Alex [Jones] and Enrique [Tarrio] who really are primarily just merchandise salesmen. We have a serious problem with media echo chambers and informational literacy in this country. We have to take it upon ourselves to be more educated and think on a different level. So what’s in it for influencers like them? The “MAGA-sphere” allows for a ridiculous array of hustles and grifts. There’s Forgiato Blow, who built a rap career around the MAGA train. Enrique Tarrio runs the largest right-wing t-shirt shop on the Internet. Alex Jones makes millions of dollars selling brain pills, basically. There’s so many ways to make money in the MAGA world. It’s really appealing for someone trying to get their start as an entrepreneur or a politically active person – probably one of the smarter views that I have read on January 6.

    Machine learning and ethics: The AI “Revolution in Military Affairs”: What Would it Really Look Like? – Lawfare and Pulse joins the Mozilla family to help develop a new approach to machine learning 

    Finance

    DOJ divided over charging Binance for alleged crypto crimes, report says | Ars Technica – Binance has already been censured in Singapore

    Germany

    Siegfried Muller’s interview shows the complexity in modern German history. Muller was plied with alcohol and interviewed by East German interviewers who then put together this film (presumably with editing). For Muller, the threat of communism was real. You can read more on Muller here.

    The War in Ukraine Highlights European Rifts – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – Despite the destruction Russia is wreaking on Ukraine, both Chancellor Olaf Scholz and sections of his Social Democratic Party and business lobbies hanker after the status quo ante. Herein lies the second rift. It is linked to EU member states’ varied historical experiences and the resulting threat perceptions. The EU as a peace project was finessed over the years without a voice from the Eastern or Central Europeans. They had to endure living under the dictatorship of the Soviet Union. Today, Western Europe, particularly France and Germany, considers a future European security architecture involving Russia in some form. For the East Europeans, security is about defending themselves against Russia. That is why the latter want Ukraine to win and Russia to be defeated. For them, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens Europe’s stability and security—a threat that would be compounded if Russia were to win

    Health

    Race is on to develop new generation of weight-loss drugs | Financial Times – this looks like a Viagra like gold rush, on the plus side there is a lot of scientific progress being made. The biggest barriers are socio-cultural in nature. Disclosure, I worked on the global launch of Wegovy – the current category leading treatment

    The start-ups seeking a cure for old age | Financial Times 

    Cyberattack Shuts Down French Hospital 

    Palo Alto Networks Announces Medical IoT Security to Protect Connected Devices Critical to Patient Care 

    Hong Kong

    China Lets Hong Kong Leader Override Courts Over Jimmy Lai Lawyer – WSJ – what’s interesting is that the Hong Kong government had attempted to kick this over to Beijng after the courts ruled against them. National People’s Congress Standing Committee did not ban foreign lawyers as widely expected. Standing committee clarified two clauses of law after city’s top court upheld earlier ruling that allowed jailed tycoon Jimmy Lai to hire British barrister for his pending trial, National security law: Hong Kong to pass legislative amendment ‘in months’ to ban British lawyer from Jimmy Lai trial, after Beijing ruling | South China Morning Post – Committee for Safeguarding National Security, chaired by city leader, expected to call meeting and lay down framework for amendment. Country’s top legislative body had on Friday clarified two clauses of the Beijing-decreed legislation, stating the matter required chief executive’s input

    Hong Kong committee can bar foreign lawyers from national security cases: Beijing — Radio Free Asia – “Now the national security committee gets to decide what is and isn’t a matter of national security in all cases, not just national security cases, but in any other court cases and also in all matters of government policy, without being subject to judicial review,” he said. “They could claim that pandemic prevention was a matter of national security, or education,” Yam said. “It’s not just about the judicial system.” “It affects legislation and anything that takes place throughout the entire government system.” – Australian lawyer Kevin Yam points out the weakness that anyone using Hong Kong as a legal jurisdiction in contracts should be concerned about. Is the counter-party connected to the government, in a strategically important sector, government owned or supported by government loans? Do they employ mainland employees who might be affected by the contract. All of this could fall within the national security law. Another take by Hong Kong based legal scholar and former judge Henry Litton: HKU Legal Scholarship Blog: Henry Litton: Red Alert: Hong Kong Judicial Independence Under Existential Threat (Comment on the Admission of Owen KC). Samuel Bickett’s take on things here: Beijing’s New Year’s surprise: awarding itself broad new powers over Hong Kong and NPC Observer: Explainer: NPCSC’s Interpretation of Hong Kong National Security Law over Jimmy Lai’s Foreign Defense Counsel – Beyond the confines of Lai’s case and the specific issue it raised, the [NatSec] Committee’s seemingly broad and unreviewable power to “make [enforceable] judgments and decisions” on whether an issue of national security is involved, regardless of setting, could be cause for concern. It awaits to be seen whether and to what extent it would invoke this newly declared authority to deal with other situations in the future.

    Free Hong Kong’s Fiercest Defender by Chris Patten – Project Syndicate – Chris Patten on Jimmy Lai

    The Wolves and Sheep case HKU Legal Scholarship Blog: Johannes Chan: The Village of the Sheep Case (HKSAR v Lai Man-ling) which is just embarrassing for Hong Kong HKU Legal Scholarship Blog: Henry Litton on The Case of the Wolf and the Sheep in Hong Kong (Pearls and Irritations) and The case of the wolf and the sheep in Hong Kong – Pearls and Irritations 

    Ideas

    Steve Barrett summaries behavioural change hacks.

    Innovation

    Three ways Big Tech got it wrong | Financial Times – Most of Big Tech got rich on software, which is easily updatable and basically free to distribute at scale. Such online innovation rightly places a huge premium on “failing fast”: getting a product out quickly, building a following and fixing the bugs later. The same is simply not true for a car, a medicine or even a new flavour of packaged meat. They have to work correctly and meet regulatory standards right off the bat. Production facilities and distribution networks cannot be conjured out of thin air, or easily amended after the fact. In the physical realm, an innovator can see its lead evaporate in the face of competition from rivals with experience in production and distribution. Tesla is discovering this the hard way. Tesla’s share of the US electric vehicle market has dropped below 65 per cent from 79 per cent five years ago. S&P Global Mobility predicts it will fall below 20 per cent by 2025 as other makers bring out electric trucks and cheaper models faster than Tesla can build new factories

    India’s start-up dream sours for fired tech workers | Financial Times – a good deal of the blame can be laid at the feet of the team that Nikesh Arora built and led at Softbank, alongside the wider macro-economic factors currently happening

    Applied Materials expands in Singapore, US | EE Times 

    What Happened To Amazon’s Employees After AI Automated Their Work 

    Huawei patents EUV lithography tools used to make <10nm chips | TechSpot – patents are one thing, getting it to work is something else entirely

    Ireland

    Over a million passports issued in 2022 | RTÉ News 

    Japan

    A few things on this. I believe that hydrogen will play a far bigger role in the energy mix for transport. These cars are Toyota Mirai vehicles. Secondly, look at how easy it is for the workers to get the fit and finish right on the cars, which says a lot about the precision of their component manufacturers to get to Toyota’s legendary reliable, rattle-free vehicles.

    https://youtu.be/FpmaNakvQRM

    Korea

    KOSPI Ends Year with Lackluster Performance – The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition) – to be fair this has been the same around the world

    North Korean hackers once again exploit Internet Explorer’s leftover bits | Ars Technica – again a good deal of this is down to Korea’s historical reliance on Windows

    London

    William Davies · The Seductions of Declinism: Stagnation Nation · LRB 4 August 2022 – The claim that everything has been getting worse for decades is a gift to Thatcherites and Brexiters, who promise a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of the nation, and would like to banish those who talk down Britain’s prospects. Edgerton went to considerable lengths in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A 20th-Century History to dispute the claim that the interwar and postwar British economy was a failure, or that it needed ‘reviving’ in the way Thatcher promised. For Edgerton (and the Resolution Foundation appears to agree), Britain’s current economic malaise began under Thatcher, when rent-seeking via the housing market, privatisation and financial ‘innovation’ became the basis of Britain’s economic growth. But even Edgerton would agree that we are now in a very bad way. The poor quality of the Tory leadership candidates and the unseriousness of the debate between them creates the impression of a country that can now only speak to itself in slogans, oaths and insults, and has no capacity to describe or explain its problems. Away from the theatre of the leadership contest, the signs are that Britain’s elites now intend to stake everything on another financial free-for-all. Inexplicably, the Bank of England recently abolished the regulations that impose affordability criteria on the sale of mortgages, meaning that lenders no longer need to check whether borrowers have the capacity to repay if interest rates rise further. A new Financial Services Bill, supported by Sunak and the current chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, will challenge the power of the Bank of England to regulate financial services, with the aim of releasing the City of London to engage in greater risk-taking. The Brexiters’ ideology, according to which Britain remains restricted by its conformity to EU rules, may have one more hurrah, if it can liberate speculators for another few years before the Ponzi schemes finally collapse

    USA vs. England: Which one is more deranged? | Slate.com – guess that free trade deal won’t be a high priority….

    Extinction Rebellion abandons disruptive climate protests in UK | Financial Times – not terribly surprising, they managed to alienate rather than get allies

    Materials

    EU looks at ban on non-rechargeable batteries | EE Times 

    Trashed lithium-ion batteries caused three garbage truck fires in California | Ars Technica – recycling these batteries is going to be very dangerous

    How Li Ka-shing backed start-up Notpla plans to replace plastic with a sustainable seaweed alternative 

    Media

    Turning tables: the UK’s new vinyl manufacturer riding the music revival | The Guardian – the collecting bug underpinning vinyl records is another part of the joy of ownership for many people. A more ethereal version of the joy of ownership comes from the secondary markets in sports and streetwear.

    Hollywood talent agencies seek new deals tied to Netflix advertising model | Financial Times – its basically the TV model from the 1970s all over again

    Philippines

    Philippines’ new SIM card law could be abused by corrupt officials, critics say | South China Morning Post 

    Retailing

    Flink hits €400mn in sales as German grocery app seeks to narrow losses | Financial Times 

    Security

    PLA Blows Hot and Cold over U.S. Air Force’s Multirole Heavy Aircraft – Jamestown 

    Spying on Chinese Living Abroad: A Visit To the City Responsible for China’s Police Stations in Europe – DER SPIEGEL 

    Fake ‘Rothschild’ Was Chased by Russian Organized Crime When She Took Pictures With Trump at Mar-a-Lago – OCCRP – the self-confessed grifter was a Ukrainian immigrant tangled up with Russian organized crime, a joint investigation by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and OCCRP has found. OCCRP and the Post-Gazette revealed in August how Yashchyshyn gained access to Mar-a-Lago without any background checks, making at least four trips to the estate in two days. The investigation and an FBI action that same month to retrieve documents from Mar-a-Lago renewed questions about security at the private club that has hosted powerful U.S. and world leaders. Those questions will only grow with the new revelations that the fake Rothschild was being chased by a serious organized crime figure as she mingled with prominent club guests and the ex-president himself.

    Keeping your information secure on the road

    DHS secretary says US faces ‘a new kind of warfare’ | Cyberscoop 

    Effective, fast, and unrecoverable: Wiper malware is popping up everywhere | Ars Technica 

    Never-before-seen malware is nuking data in Russia’s courts and mayors’ offices | Ars Technica – this looks like it might be designed to affect Russia’s ability to draft population and might have been done by Russians inside, or outside the country

    Rackspace Incident Highlights How Disruptive Attacks on Cloud Providers Can Be 

    SiriusXM, MyHyundai Car Apps Showcase Next-Gen Car Hacking 

    Singapore

    Singapore redevelopment of its harbour in the early 1980s is fascinating. The area is now a mix of bars, cafes and restaurants. Among the buildings lost was a cinema built and owned by The Shaw Organisation – who were responsible for the post-war boom in kung fu martial arts films and even helped finance Blade Runner. The Shaws came out of a merchant background and were big in pre-war Shanghai as one of the big three film studios. They diversified into amusement parks over a decade before Disney did; though the Shaws were not as single-minded in their focus on ‘family-friendly’ experiences as their US counterpart.

    The limits of growth in Singapore, some of these factors feel very Brexity, partly due to neo-liberalism

    Taiwan

    An International Lifeline: Taiwan’s Parliamentary Outreach – Jamestown 

    Taiwan counts on military conscription reform to deter China invasion | Financial Times – in the 1960s Singapore worked with Israel to come up with a defence strategy. This exercise offers a lot of lessons for Taiwan today, along with the agile national guard forces of Ukraine

    Technology

    Server supply chain migrating to North America and Southeast Asia, according to DIGITIMES Research 

    Telecoms

    After bankruptcy and war, OneWeb turns to a competitor for help | Ars Technica – a batch of 40 satellites is due to launch on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A in Florida. SpaceX, of course, is a competitor in satellite broadband Internet

    Interesting documentary on the AT&T Long Lines project. The closest AT&T has now is its disaster recovery and First Net services.

    Bell Labs did an explanatory film on the AT&T Long Lines microwave network

    Web of no web

    VR Shipments Declined by 12% in 2022, Casting Doubts on the Future of the Metaverse / Digital Information World and When it comes to the Metaverse, Brits don’t care about virtual environments – City Monitor 

    Gorillaz turn the world into a stage with augmented reality | Google Blog – a classic example of what William Gibson would call locative art

  • Valley of Genius by Adam Fisher

    Valley of Genius by Adam Fisher promises to be ‘the uncensored history of Silicon Valley’ based on stories that founders and programmers told to each other. All of which begs the question how much is myth making and how much is true?

    Valley of Genius
    Valley of Genius front cover

    Getting to the truth

    Having worked for Silicon Valley clients and in-house at Yahoo!; I recognise that the truth doesn’t get out there and the myth making is largely self-serving. There is also a big question about how far the collective memory actually goes back.

    Yahoo! star

    Secondly, the story of Silicon Valley has already been told a number of times, how will Valley of Genius compare to Dealers of Lightning, The Valley of Heart’s Delight, Where Wizards Stay Up Late or Accidental Empires in terms of telling the story of Silicon Valley?

    Finally, there is the challenge of how big tech companies have got so good at controlling their story in the wider world. Whether it was keeping close tabs on journalists like Fred Vogelstein found out while working at Wired magazine, through Frank X Shaw’s reputation for robust rebuttal, funded their own media outlets like Pando Daily and eventually disintermediated the media altogether.

    Adam Fisher

    Adam Fisher grew up in the Bay Area and became a journalist and later editor at Wired. He left there and freelanced for a number of publications, branching out from technology writing to other areas like travel and tourism.

    Style

    The most noticeable thing about Valley of Genius when you get into it is that there is no prose. It is all dialogue. Fisher has cut together segments of interviews to tell a story. Sometimes it feels like people around a table, other times it feels more disjointed.

    The book is described as an oral history and Fisher in his interviews describes the process as being like putting together documentary interviews.

    Fisher went out and interviewed many of the great and the good of Silicon Valley to get this material, however given some of the soundbites were things I had heard before such as Steve Jobs talking about a computer as a ‘bicycle of the mind’; I was not sure if these people like to self reference or if Fisher has interspersed his interviews with archival material. Right at the end of the book, Fisher comes a list of people by chapter and where he had to source secondhand quotes from.

    I’ve read a number of books on Silicon Valley over the years, so had a frame of reference and I had context, so I found Valley of Genius enjoyable to read. But for someone who is coming to the subject with just a cursory knowledge of Silicon Valley, there is benefits to having a guide. Reading the quotes without understanding the context, or having been to Silicon Valley still leaves you outside.

    I honestly don’t know if Fisher would have been a good guide, so him removing his voice from the book maybe less of a loss than we might think. But a new reader to the subject matter would benefit from a guide like Michael S. Malone or the insider snark of Robert X. Cringely (aka Mark Stephens). Fisher’s book Valley of Genius is a book for insiders and future academics who might be looking at the history of Silicon Valley in the future. According to Fisher, he managed to secure the last interview that Bob Taylor ever gave. Bob Taylor played key roles in moving Silicon Valley forward while in managerial positions at NASA, ARPA and XEROX PARC. In those interview quotes are more granular aspects of things, like Nolan Bushnell having a champagne party on the grass outside the offices of a recently bankrupt competitor, or that the video card to power the monitor used in Doug Engelbart measured about 3 foot by 4 foot in size.

    It’s also a very one dimensional view of Silicon Valley. It largely misses out hardware and hard innovation; which is problematic for a technology hub that is competing against China and India for that matter. There is no 3Com, Cisco or Juniper Networks. The hardware story is very much lacking, there is no Intel, AMD or Nvidia, Sun Microsystems or SGI. It is largely a consumer technology vision that writes out businesses like Oracle and Salesforce together with the characters that lead them.

    Plot line

    Valley of Genius ignores a good deal of early Silicon Valley, such as the the pre-war nature of Stanford, Varian, Bill Hewlett and David Packard’s garage start-up, Shockley Labs, the treacherous eight, defence contracting and the missile age.

    Mother of all demos

    Instead Valley of Genius history starts at 1968, when Dough Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute provides the Mother of all Demos to a mix of academics, government people from the likes of the department of defense and technologists.

    Engelbart talks about his developments in 1986

    He the talked about his career on the Google campus in 2007.

    Atari

    The story moves on to Atari and Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell was responsible for popularising computer games and arcade consoles. Bushnell was a bridge between the counter culture and Silicon Valley hustle. A few chapters later Valley of Genius also covers the acquisition and eventual (first) failure of Atari.

    Here’s Bushnell being interviewed for the 50th anniversary of Atari by IGN.

    Bushnell did a Google Talk a number of years ago as well.

    Xerox PARC

    PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) was a west coast R&D facility put together by Xerox to understand what the future of work would look like. They had already realised that it would be computerised. From PARC came modern computers, local area networks, file servers, laser printers and productivity software.

    Apple

    In separate chapters Valley of Genius covers Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s commercialisation of phone hacking tools, and the evolution of the Apple computer line up from the Apple II to the Macintosh.

    Retailer High Technology did the first adverts featuring the Apple II computer

    Which was a far more budget affair than Apple’s own launch of the Machintosh.

    The book goes on to cover the return of CEO Steve Jobs and the rejuvenation of Apple as a business including the iPod, iPhone and iPad through to the death of Jobs.

    The hacker ethic, or hacker culture

    The hacker ethic or culture, a digital equivalent of the person who tinkers away with things in a shed or garage has their own section. The section is atemporal in nature, which I can understand to a certain extent. Steve Wozniak came out of hacker culture, as have many software developers over time.

    Fisher focuses on what hacker culture is, rather than what it means (both good and bad). I would recommend Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution as a companion to this chapter in Valley of Genius. The copy I read years ago was published by Penguin, but O’Reilly have re-published it as the book this is part of myth-making and cultural norming in software development teams.

    The WeLL

    The WeLL was the proto-online community that is still going and features first generation digerati such as journalist Wendy Grossman, the founders of Wired magazine and cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling.

    Stewart Brand talked about the founding of The WeLL during a Google hosted talk

    The WeLL never scaled in the same way that we think about social networks now but it has quality discussions and is much kinder than Twitter or Reddit.

    VPL

    VPL was a failed start-up in the mid-1990s that set much of the expectations and tempo on VR to this day. You will most likely know it from the VR suit featured in The Lawnmower Man movie. I covered it in more depth in my metaverse discussion paper.

    General Magic

    Take a series of burnt out Apple employees and have them invent a predecessor of the net appliance or smartphone. That was General Magic and it was a glorious failure. Sarah Kerruish’s documentary on General Magic tells the story much better.

    Wired magazine

    Wired magazine gets its own chapter. it represented a way of melding culture and technology. I had read Wired before I had used the web, but it gave me a good idea of what to expect. But I don’t know if it is more important than ZDnet or other technology publishing houses. Valley of Genius goes on to celebrate Wired’s online endeavours including HotWired, Suck – a sarcastic version of Wired and Webmonkey – which taught a lot of people web development skills and probably doesn’t get the love it deserves in Valley of Genius. Mondo 2000, a rival to Wired in terms of setting the cultural zeitgeist for technologists also gets a chapter.

    Pixar

    Pixar as a Silicon Valley story is an accident due to two things

    • George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic being based in North California rather than in Los Angeles
    • Steve Jobs looking for a project post-Apple

    But it didn’t necessarily move Silicon Valley forward.

    Netscape

    The jump to Netscape as the first commercial browser makes sense. AOL, AT&T True Experience, CompuServe and Prodigy services were all driven by businesses outside the traditional Silicon Valley space.

    Bob Cringely, from what I guess was PBS’ Triumph of The Nerds

    At the time Netscape seemed as much about the crazy public valuation of the business which was emblematic of the dot com boom, as it was about the software that would kick off the open web. These kind of valuations re-emerged with businesses like Uber and WeWork.

    eBay

    eBay was the standout e-commerce play for Silicon Valley. Amazon was a Seattle company and so was an outsider in a similar way that Microsoft always had been. eBay was also founded by an ex-General Magic employee and so was part of Silicon Valley’s version of ‘Rock family trees‘. We see this even now with the ‘PayPal mafia’.

    Google

    Google changed the web experience that Silicon Valley had pioneered via Yahoo! and Excite. Brin and Page became a key point of focus in Valley of Genius. However, this ignores the complexity both around search and the development of foundational web technologies that other companies produced. If you are interested about the nature and history of Google, Steven Levy’s In The Plex is probably a better option to read.

    Google’s move to pay per click advertising gets its own chapter that greatly reduces the complexity of the real story.

    Napster

    Napster was the poster child of market value destruction and disruption that predated Uber and its ilk.

    Dot bomb

    The dot com boom can be charted from the last quarter of 1995 and reached its nadir in the last quarter of 2002.

    Eric Steiner tells his tale as the CEO of Inktomi through the dot com boom and bust

    Valley of Genius covers it in terms of its sociological impact on the Bay Area, as much as its economic impact. The reality is more complex, even the dot.com label attached to it is a misnomer. It encompassed telecoms, networking hardware, datacenters and more in terms of its impact rather than just e-businesses.

    Facebook

    While Facebook was an east coast invention, the movement of the company and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg west saw a cultural change in Silicon Valley that took it down a much darker patch. By comparison Twitter in its start-up phase looked more like Atari in terms of its counterculture influence.

    Future gazing

    At the end of the book there is a section on future gazing, which became what made Silicon Valley great. The business model was prioritised over innovation. Veteran journalist John Markoff even talked about how Salesforce had moved to a ‘vertical campus’ model with Salesforce tower. Which is how every other business in places like Singapore, Hong Kong and even Wall Street work anyway.

    There was a singular lack of reflection on challenges ahead or areas of introspection by the people telling these stories. If anything, that was what concerned me the most about the book. Innovation is at a technological, scientific and socio-cultural cross-roads and the inhabitants of the Valley of Genius apparently doesn’t have a clue. More on the book here. You can find more of my book reviews here.

    Extra content – Valley of Genius promotional tour interviews

    Panel hosted by Adam Fisher to promote the Valley of Genius book

    Leo LePort interviews Fisher on Valley of Genius at the time of its launch.

  • Uninsurable hacks + more things

    Uninsurable hacks

    As cybercrime has become more common there has been a move towards the incidents becoming uninsurable hacks in nature. 2022 looks like a watershed moment in the move to uninsurable hacks.

    Lloyd’s of London defends cyber insurance exclusion for state-backed attacks | Financial Times – Lloyds of London were looking at state backed exclusions. The parallel between a state backed cyber attack and and an act of war have clear parallels from an insurance point of view. An act of war would be exempt from most insurance policy cover. A state backed cyber attack then becomes an uninsurable attack. However, while a business could expect government retribution and likely support in an act of war, the uninsurable hack exists in a grey zone just below the threshold of government response.

    The closest thing that has happened was criminal charges filed against Park Jin Hyok for the Wannacry ransomware that affected the NHS, Bangladesh Central Bank theft and the Sony Pictures hack. Russia has attempted attacks against at an oil refinery in at least one NATO country likely due to the material support that Ukraine has been receiving. NATO isn’t in a state of war with Russia and there are likely to be few repercussions and deterrents. Chinese backed hackers dismantled Nortel and helped drive the business into bankruptcy. These would all be uninsurable hacks as the risk is unmanageable in nature.

    North Korea presents a particular type of risk for uninsurable hacks, using cyber crime to finance its sanction hit economy.

    Companies like NSO and service companies based in India have democratised sophisticated intrusions for legal firms and business purposes. Widening the risk even further and creating a shadow economy of such scale that it creates uninsurable hacks by his own nature. Some of these law firms may even work with insurance companies in other areas; indicating the kind of perverse business incentives that drive these uninsurable hacks.

    The final aspect ushering in uninsurable hacks is one of scale. Due to the economics of digital business – criminal or otherwise; they scale in a non-linear fashion. Insurance insiders see these as uninsurable attacks as they are ‘civilisation level’ attacks. Uninsurable hacks also come from an inability of the insurance industry to absorb pay-outs on a massive scale. But what can be done about uninsurable hacks since Pandora’s box has been opened?

    Business

    This story how Balkan organised crime groups completely compromised MSC is stunning for its audacity and impact.

    China

    Chinese business confidence falls to lowest in a decade | RTÉ 

    China to step up support for local chipmakers – supported businesses include NAND flash memory maker Yangtze Memory Technology (YMTC) and AI chip developer Cambricon Technologies

    Notebook component makers see large absences at China plants due to COVID – some notebook supply chain companies in China have seen infections in their plants affect up to 50% of their workers, resulting in the temporary shutdown of production lines

    China’s Bureaucratic Slack: Material Inducements and Decision-Making Risks among Chinese Local Cadres | The China Journal – We find bureaucratic slack among lower-ranked cadres to be caused mainly by the lack of material inducements, while higher-ranked officials are more discouraged by increased risks

    Mao and markets – great talk on the permeable membrane between communist thought and capitalism.

    China Makes Moves in Middle East After Biden’s Frosty Reception – An eagerness to offer “Chinese wisdom” to the Middle East’s problems is symbolic of Xi’s decade in power, during which time he has thrown off the humble shackles of his predecessors to raise his country’s stature on the international stage. Welcome or not, his offer signals to China’s domestic audience Beijing’s growing influence abroad and its capacity to advise others on successful governance. However, China’s exact role in realizing its peacekeeping recipe remains unclear. A frequent critic of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere, Beijing knows all too well the political, economic and military costs of becoming involved. Its willingness to do so is also a matter of constant debate. “China is cautiously increasing its presence in the Middle East, driven more by Middle Eastern states than its own ambitions,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “China sees the Middle East as volatile and an area still dominated by the United States. They are cautious about getting sucked into the region’s conflicts.”

    Consumer behaviour

    Why the U.S. middle class is feeling squeezed | Noahpinion 

    Fascinating talk by Scott Galloway

    Culture

    Mr Tape used custom modified reel-to-reel tape recorders. The reason why he can handle the reels is that its actually the tape capstans rather than the reels that are powered on a tape machine. So very different to how a cassette tape recorder works.

    Henry Cavill on his love for Warhammer 40K. He is seriously invested in the universe.

    Design

    Shedding some light on “dark patterns” and advertising regulation – ASA | CAP 

    Economics

    Making Products in America Means Stuff Will Be More Expensive | Business Insider – cost is less clear when one takes into account carbon tax. It is also worthwhile thinking about how this could drive an improvement in product quality as well as production moves away from China. Improved quality could help reduce consumption and improve environmental impact

    Ethics

    The Camp Fix: Infrastructural Power and the “Re-education Labour Regime” in Turkic Muslim Industrial Parks in North-west China | The China Quarterly | Cambridge Core – Drawing on worker interviews, government documents, industry materials and images this article shows that for-profit public-private industrial parks have been built as part of a “camp fix” mechanism centred on detaining and “re-educating” Uyghurs and Kazakhs at the periphery of the nation. It argues that these industrial parks concentrate forms of repressive assistance and “dormitory labour regimes” that operate at other frontiers of Chinese state power and point these strategies of disempowerment towards a seemingly permanent, ethno-racialized underclass, producing a “re-education labour regime.” It further argues that the material infrastructures of these surveiled and policed spaces themselves are productive in enforcing the goals of the “camp fix”: the creation of high-quality, underpaid, docile and non-religious Muslim workers who are controlled through the built environment – this is the environment that large corporates have used in their supply chain. Companies such as VW Group and Anta (aka Salomon, Arc’teryx etc)

    Finance

    Scott Galloway breaks down a number of financial stories from 2022.

    FMCG

    Starbucks Sales Forecast to Decline Due to Customer Cuts in Add-Ons 

    Hong Kong

    Visual Framing: The Use of COVID-19 in the Mobilization of Hong Kong Protest | The China Quarterly | Cambridge Core – messages and images posted on Lennon Walls between January and April 2020 have used COVID-19 to extend public expression of sentiment on the debates around the Hong Kong government and to further mobilize a sense of Hong Kong identity against China. The findings contribute to the understandings of how the cultural politics surrounding the pandemic became a collective action frame in the mobilization of a localized Hong Kong political identity against the Hong Kong and Chinese governments – this linking of COVID-19 to political discourse makes public health communications much more complex

    Hong Kong property: developers mourn demise of ‘coffin homes’ boom | Financial Times – Analysts, including Goldman Sachs, expect Hong Kong home prices to drop by 30 per cent by the end of next year. Shares of CK Asset and Henderson Land have fallen about a tenth in the past six months. The latter trades at 10 times forward earnings, which is more than 40 per cent lower than even 2014 levels — during the last property market decline — reflecting the dire outlook. – add into this also the amount of Hong Kongers leaving the city as well

    Indonesia

    Indonesia’s foreign retirees fear being driven out as new visa scheme targets ‘filthy rich’ | South China Morning Post 

    In Indonesia, ‘all-gendered’ priests are fighting to keep their traditions alive | South China Morning Post – With fewer than 40 Bissu remaining in areas across South Sulawesi, a community which once held divine status is now fighting against extinction. Many Bissu were accused of violating Islamic principles and faced persecution, but some are trying to preserve their heritage by performing cultural, shaman-like roles – the implicit influence of gulf Arab style muslim beliefs is not only about extremism but presenting a dead orthodoxy that will make Indonesia as unattractive as Malaysia has become

    Innovation

    Chipmaker TSMC in talks with suppliers over first European plant | Financial Times – it will take a while for TSMC to get a European project under way

    Ireland

    This is fascinating, it shows how Irish consumers have become much more sophisticated in the 50 years that Ireland has been in the European Union.

    Japan

    Sapporo, Japan Olympic Committee hit pause on Winter Games bid -Kyodo | Reuters – the scandal that encompassed Japan could be a good thing on balance as it allows Japan to press pause on a Winter Olympics bid. The IOC is more hassle than its worth for Japan. Japan already has a great reputation

    Korea

    Jinni’s shock departure from new K-pop group NMixx, just three days after its Loewe fashion campaign launched and within a year of debuting – | South China Morning Post – girl group seems to have been formed to become brand ambassadors for a luxury brand. Much of the money is in sponsorship but usually its mainstream brands like LG, Samsung, G-Shock etc

    Luxury

    From meme fashion to gamified drops: The top consumer trends of 2022 | Vogue Business 

    Rolex Sales: Pricey Luxury Swiss Watch Exports Jump to Record High on US Demand – Bloomberg – Americans snap up pricey timepieces, lifting exports by 33%. Retailers in Qatar stocked up ahead of the football World Cup

    From meme fashion to gamified drops: The top consumer trends of 2022 | Vogue Business 

    Media

    Google agrees NFL streaming deal as Big Tech chases sports rights | Financial Times 

    Online

    Legal basis for removing inaccurate Hong Kong anthem results from Google, John Lee says citing tech giant’s policy – Hong Kong Free Press HKFP 

    Read Zuckerberg’s 2019 Deposition on Facebook User Data | Business Insider – A 2017 report in The New York Times had said Cambridge Analytica previously claimed it could use data to glean voters’ inclinations. Zuckerberg appeared to address those types of news reports in his testimony to SEC regulators, saying it piqued his interest about how the company might have been using Facebook at the time.  “I kind of remember having this reaction to this, which is, if they are using our systems for advertising, then I’m curious to understand if they’re actually doing anything novel that matches the rhetoric that they have, or if they’re just kind of puffing up rhetoric around what would be a relatively standard use of our ad systems,” he told the SEC in 2019, according to the newly released testimony. – to be fair Zuckerberg’s reaction reminds me of a lot of discussions that I was having with peers about Cambridge Analytica at the time

    Netflix password sharing may be illegal – British government warns – Nadine Dorries has already confessed at sharing a password. I think we need a strong a approach to law enforcement and use her as a demonstration case. I think 10 years inside should do it ;-)

    Retailing

    Amazon hit by ECJ ruling on online sale of counterfeit goods | Financial Times 

    Security

    Why everyone needs a dedicated GPS device. TL;DR don’t rely on wireless networks

    How This Bombardier Challenger 650 Jet Became a High-Tech Spy Plane – Robb Report – interesting that this appearing in luxury publication Robb Report

    How SpaceX’s Starlink terminals first arrived in Ukraine | Quartz – Weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, the US began scrambling to find satellite communications equipment that could keep the Ukrainian government connected to the rest of the world, new documents reveal. Those efforts resulted in thousands of satellite-antenna terminals that connect to SpaceX’s Starlink broadband internet network being sent to Ukraine. They have proven vital to Ukraine’s war effort, but became a source of controversy for both SpaceX and the US over the service’s cost, and who is paying for it. Government contractor DAI began searching for the right equipment as early as Feb. 11, according to documents Quartz obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, shocking many, but not the US government, which sounded the alarm ahead of the invasion

    TikTok admits tracking FT journalist in leaks investigation | Financial Times – ByteDance, the Chinese owner of viral social media platform TikTok, has admitted it inappropriately obtained the data of users, including a Financial Times journalist, in order to analyse their location as part of an internal leaks investigation. Over the summer, four employees on the ByteDance internal audit team looked into the sharing of internal information to journalists. Two members of staff in the US and two in China gained access to the IP addresses and other personal data of FT journalist Cristina Criddle, to work out if she was in the proximity of any ByteDance employees

    Software

    How Amazon Uses AI To Automate Work In Its Corporate Headquarters – I was struck by how deeply artificial intelligence was already ingrained in their cultures. With in-house AI research labs that rank among the globe’s best, the tech giants were automating wide swaths of their operations and changing the nature of work within their companies. This commitment to AI in the workplace is newly relevant as powerful tools like Dall-E, ChatGPT, and their ilk make their way into the public’s hands. As access to this powerful technology spreads, nearly all companies will soon have tools like those I saw inside Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. So work inside our companies will change as well

    Taiwan

    Foxconn to sell stake in Tsinghua Unigroup, faces fine | EE Times 

    Technology

    Asianometry does a run down of Sun Microsystems history. A few things. When I started working agency side, this was what our client websites were hosted on. Sun had a partnership with Netscape to have a great software stack. Oracle’s hardware business is the old Sun Microsystems business. Cisco routers and other manufacturers as well were basically a Sun motherboard and a raft of ethernet ports together with a look-up database that handled the routing.

    Revenge of reality: how technology was discounted in 2022 | Financial Times 

    Vietnam

    Vietnam loses 25 ancient books related to culture and sovereign territory — Radio Free Asia – one of which is “relevant to Vietnam’s sovereign territory,” according to the deputy head of the literature department, Nguyen Xuan Dien. Posting on his Facebook page on Tuesday, a day after the institute’s annual meeting, Dien said the books were “extremely important for national culture.”The institute said Wednesday the books were among 35,000 volumes it had cataloged and preserved at the request of the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences When it inspected the inventory in April 2020, for the first time in over 10 years, it discovered that 29 books were missing. Four of the books were later found on the wrong shelves. Among the books still unaccounted for are four written by scientist Le Quy Don and two books which record the precise geography, boundaries and borders related to Vietnam’s sovereign territory, according to Dien. Those two volumes could help substantiate Vietnam’s territorial claims in the South China Sea – I would guess that these books have been incinerated in China, as it helps China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea and debilitates Vietnam’s rival claims

    Web of no web

    How successful are Roblox branded experiences? – Peter Gasston – low continued engagement

  • 2022 in review

    News stories of 2022 in review

    January

    2022 kicked off with the start of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a free trade agreement. It eclipses the European Union – it covers nearly a third of the global population and about 30 per cent of its global gross domestic product. [i] It’s hard to overstate how important this agreement is to the world economy. 

    Russia’s intervention in Kazakhstan to quieten unrest triggered by a rise in the price of LPG (liquified petroleum gas) and general government dissatisfaction is seen at the time as a good thing on balance.[ii]

    The number of global COVID cases exceeds 300 million worldwide[iii], contrast this with the estimated 250 million infections experienced in China alone right before Christmas 2022.[iv]

    By the end of January, we had 10 billion vaccinations conducted.[v] But that didn’t stop anti-vaxxers, including celebrity tennis player Novak Djokovic who was deported from Australia due to not being vaccinated.[vi]

    In other medical developments, we also saw the first successful heart transplant from a pig to a human. The operation was carried out in the US. [vii] This represents a huge step forward in dealing with the shortage of available organs for transplantation. 

    February

    The winter Olympics were held in Beijing, China. The International Olympics Committee have found it harder to get countries to host both the summer and winter Olympic Games. Holding these events in authoritarian countries posed hard questions for sponsors and legal sanction including the Beijing Winter Olympics Sponsor Accountability Act bill submitted to the US Congress.[viii]

    No sooner had the Winter Olympics finished than Russia started its invasion of Ukraine, and the west made a remarkably cohesive response in terms of sanctions, this would be followed with military aid throughout the year.[ix] By the end of February,[x] Russia had indicated a willingness to use its nuclear forces. This was a remarkable turnaround from just seven weeks after Russia, as part of the United Natios Security Council affirmed that ‘a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.’[xi]

    March

    The global death toll due to COVID passes 6 million worldwide.[xii] In a potential resurgence of corporate Japan, Honda and Sony are partnering in creating sophisticated electric vehicles.[xiii] Equality may have taken a major step forward in the US, with young women in 22 major cities have a higher average salary than their male peers.[xiv] Part of this might be down to a decline in male participation in higher education and economic activity.[xv]

    April 

    Global food prices rise to their highest ever price according to the UN’s Food Price Index, which began in 1990. This adds to supply chain related inflation due to COVID and energy price rises.[xvi] [xvii]

    May 

    There was an outbreak of monkeypox first recorded in the UK[xviii], which sparked concern about a possible new global pandemic.[xix] A mix of demand for electric vehicles and continued supply chain problems meant that Volkswagen had sold out of electric vehicles.[xx]

    June 

    Amazon finally closes its Kindle e-book store in China. [xxi] Low economic growth combined with supply side inflation due to disrupted supply chains and the war in Ukraine causes concern about the short term and long term future of the UK economy.[xxii] Meanwhile perceptions of China across Europe reach a new nadir.[xxiii]

    July 

    Heatwaves pummelled Europe, killing 53,000 people through July and August.[xxiv]

    August

    September

    The UK was hit by a double whammy. Queen Elizabeth II died.[xxv] The queen had been a constant in the life of most Britons as the country had moved through imperial decline. Her death was notable for the sustained wall-to-wall media onslaught. Secondly, the 50-day career of prime minister Liz Truss shook up the UK economy due to her proposed government policies. [xxvi]

    October

    Footage is released that shows construction of linear city The Line is already well under way.[xxvii]

    November

    The FIFA World Cup was held in Qatar and managed to survive controversy which also engulfed sponsorships. FIFA managed to dodge many of the brickbats slug at the IOC. But both events raise questions for western brand sponsorship strategies moving forward.[xxviii]

    December

    Will 2022 be seen as the start of the fusion age? In February, the JET (Joint European Torus) facility in Oxford managed to produce more energy than had been created in a controlled fusion reaction. At 59 megajoules over 5 seconds, it was twice as large as the previous record set 25 years earlier.[xxix] But the ‘Wright Brothers’ moment for nuclear fusion may have occurred in December. The US government managed to achieve nuclear fusion with net energy gain.[xxx]

    2022 in review for this blog

    Site basics

    No review of 2022 would be complete without looking at you, the readership of this blog

    Audience 

    The internet has become a global phenomenon, but my audience numbers read like they could from the late 1990s. My readership is predominantly from the US, which surprised me a bit. 

    Top five countries that my audience comes from

    %Country
    33.2United States of America
    9.53Indonesia – this surprised me 
    7.41United Kingdom 
    3.95Japan 
    2.72Germany

    Most trafficked blog posts

    RankTitle
    1Metaverse discussion paper – or why the ‘open’ metaverse won’t be happening anytime soon. Web 3.0 doesn’t solve any of its problems and neither do 5G wireless networks. 
    2The Line – Saudi plans to build a high rise, high density linear city. 
    3Hino Trucks – one of my regular round-up posts, but it led with a celebration of the Hino Truck brand and how it took Irish roads by storm during my childhood
    4AI and Creativity – the results of an exploration and me and a colleague did into Midjourney and the likely impact it would have on creative agencies. 
    5The Gay Blood Collection – a project by Mother London to highlight and protest against a long-standing regulation that keeps gay blood donations restricted in comparison to other members of the population 
    6Moviedrome – probably one of my largest long form posts ever (excluding the Metaverse discussion paper) looking at the impact of a long running weekly film screening on BBC curated and presented by film director Alex Cox
    7The World of Visuals – was a trend presentation that provided Adobe’s perspective on areas like artificial intelliengence. 
    8StetWalk – a trend that has sprung up amongst book editors, where they talk a walk outside to clear their heads and be inspired by their surroundings. I was introduced to the concept by my friend Siobhan. 
    9Naked Power Politics – the invasion of Ukraine was a transgression of several norms and seems to be part of a movement to a more ugly world. 
    10Bong Bong Marcos – the scion to the Marcos political dynasty became a president in the mould of former president Duterte. 

    [i] Mullen, A. (1 January 2022) What is the RCEP, the world’s largest free trade that is under way? Hong Kong: South China Morning Post

    [ii] Auyezov, O. (5 January 2022) Kazakh president fails to quell protests, ex-Soviet states offer to help. United Kingdom: Reuters

    [iii] (7 January 2022) Global Coronavirus Cases Top 300 Million. United States: The New York Times.

    [iv] Liu, Q., Leng, C., Yu, S., McMorrow, R. (25 December 2022) China estimates 250m people have caught Covid in 20 days. United Kingdom: Financial Times

    [v] (28 January 2022) The world surpasses 10 billion vaccine doses administered, but gaps persist in how gets the shots. United States: The New York Times

    [vi] (16 January 2022) Novak Djokovic: Tennis star deported after losing Australia visa battle. United Kingdom: BBC News

    [vii] (10 January 2022) The University of Maryland School of Medicine Faculty Scientists and Clinicians Perform Historic Transplant of Porcine Heart into Adult Human with End-State Heart Disease. United States: University of Maryland Medical Center

    [viii] Waltz, M. (28 May 2021) H.R. 3645. United States: US Congress 

    [ix] (26 February 2022) Joint Statement on further restrictive economic measures. European Union: European Commission

    [x] (28 February 2022) Ukraine invasion: Putin puts Russia’s nuclear forces on ‘special alert’. United Kingdom: BBC News

    [xi] Ostroukh,A.  (4 January 2022) ‘No one can win a nuclear war’: Superpowers release rare joint statement”. Australia: The Sydney Morning Herald.

    [xii] McPhillips, D. (6 March 2022) Global Covid-19 deaths surpass 6 million. United States: CNN

    [xiii] Lewis, L., Slodkowski, A., Sugiura, E. (4 March 2022) Sony and Honda plan electric vehicle tie-up to take on Tesla. United Kingdom: Financial Times

    [xiv] Gregg, A. Bogage, J. (28 March 2022) Younger women now earn at least as much as or more than men in 22 metro areas. United States: The Washington Post

    [xv] Thompson, D. (14 September 2021) Colleges Have a Guy Problem. United States: The Atlantic

    [xvi] Ahmed, K. (8 April 2022) Global food prices rise to highest ever levels after Russian invasion. United Kingdom: The Guardian

    [xvii] Boffey, D. Oltermann, P., Davies, R. (27 April 2022) Russia accused of blackmail after gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria halted. United Kingdom: The Guardian

    [xviii] (16 May 2022) Monkeypox – United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Switzerland: World Health Organisation

    [xix] Fischer, R.S.B. (10 August 2022) The Monkeypox Epidemic Is Unusual: Here’s How I Know. United States: Medscape

    [xx] Miller, J. Vladkov, A. (4 May 2022) VW sells out of electric cars in Europe and US. United Kingdom: Financial Times

    [xxi] Olcott, E. (2 June 2022) Amazon to close China Kindle Store after losing out to domestic rivals. United Kingdom: Financial Times

    [xxii] Wolf, M. (26 June 2022) Grim times lie ahead for UK as inflation combines with low growth. United Kingdom: Financial Times

    [xxiii] Silver, L., Huang, C., Clancy, L. (29 June 2022) Negative Views of China Tied to Critical Views of Its Policies on Human Rights. United States: Pew Research Center

    [xxiv] Reuters staff (16 September 2022) EU saw 53,000 excess deaths in July amid record heatwave: report. Canada: Global NEWS

    [xxv] (8 September 2022) Queen Elizabeth II has died. United Kingdom: BBC

    [xxvi] (23 October 2022) Sunak warns of economic challenge as he prepares to become PM. United Kingdom: BBC News

    [xxvii] Ravenscroft, T. (19 October 2022) Drone footage reveals The Line megacity under construction in Saudi Arabia. United Kingdom: Dezeen

    [xxviii] (17 November 2022) In defence of Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup. United Kingdom: The Economist

    [xxix] Amos, J. (9 February 2022) Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy. United Kingdom: BBC News

    [xxx] Wilson, T. (11 December 2022) Fusion energy breakthrough by US scientist boosts clean power hopes. United Kingdom: Financial Times

  • BSPDN + more things

    IEDM: DTCO & More than Moore – by Doug O’Laughlin – The future is about Design Technology Co-optimization (DTCO), and Backside Power Deliever Networks (BSPDN) is a huge part of the roadmaps forward post-gate-all-around. A good place to start on what exactly Backside Power Delivery Networks (BSPDN) is is my post I wrote a few months ago about the bold bets Intel is making there. The big takeaway is that BSPDN is clearly going to be inserted in the design processes, and there is a small roadmap of improvements afforded by BSPDN. But after that, BSPDN will change the design process to allow adding more features, like moving functions on to the backside of the chip. By splitting the signal and power layers, there’s a whole new set of ideas of how to design chips with the space afforded from the power layers. This is Design Technology Co-optimization (DTCO) and System Technology Co-optimization (STCO) at it’s best. BSPDN looks like it has several years of obvious scaling potential, so it will be a huge part of the incremental semiconductor process from here until 2030. It will not only improve the energy delivered to the chip, but actually shrink the cell size. Think about it like a new way to organize the room, and now we can fit more in less even though its the same room filled with the same objects. Next, the roadmap in the long term after we have fully achieved backside power contact networks means we could open up the wafer on the other side of the chip. If we are opening up the other side to be a functional signal layer, there’s a potential we can start adding backside devices to the chip! This blew my mind, and the options for stacking layer, memory, and other devices (like energy capacitors) is endless! This is huge! – BSPDN is a key part of Intel’s technology roadmap. BSPDN is a mix of process lithography and logic technology to decouple the power grid from the design.

    tsmc fab12
    TSMC fab 2 by 曾 成訓

    The proposed technique delivers power from the backside of a thinned device wafer, which allows for greater wafer sizes in terms of the amount of logic in a chip

    Business

    Jeep-Maker Stellantis Is Laying Off 1,350 Workers, Blaming EVs | Business Insider – interesting and complex picture being painted. In general, electric cars have less parts for assembly than their internal combustion engine powered equivalent cars. The costs must be coming in component costs and or research and development

    China

    Fashion factory: Mango brings production closer to home in rethink on China | Financial Times – “In this debate about whether 30 years of globalisation will continue or go backwards, the most important thing for us to follow in detail is the China issue,” he said. Asked if Mango would reduce the proportion it buys from the country, Ruiz replied: “I would say yes, but we’ll be very alert to how things evolve.” Mango gains some freedom from the fact it has only six stores in mainland China and consumers there contribute little to total sales, which it predicts will this year surpass its 2019 record of €2.4bn. Other brands have already moved more decisively. The US jeans maker Levi’s and UK bootmaker Dr Martens have been reducing their sourcing from China since before the pandemic.

    Economics

    Tertiarisation like China | CEPR – which screws future growth numbers

    Energy

    ‘The Godfather, Saudi-style’: inside the palace coup that brought MBS to power | Guardian 

    Chinese battery makers set to dominate Europe’s car industry | Financial Times – not great given yet another form of dependence that’s being set up

    US scientists boost clean power hopes with fusion energy breakthrough | Financial Times – if true its a big moment. The issue is that the diagnostic measurement instruments were damaged during the ‘breakthrough‘

    Ethics

    Car Brand Tesla, VW, and GM Exposed to Forced Uyghur Labor: Researchers | Business Insider

    Health

    If you thought business jargon was bad . . .  | Financial Times 

    Masking could fight the ‘tripledemic’, experts say. Will anyone listen? | The Guardian 

    Hong Kong

    Innocent-sounding ‘care teams’ spark fears of heightened surveillance in Hong Kong — Radio Free Asia 

    Innovation

    Why NASA Hasn’t Put Astronauts on the Moon in 50 Years | Business Insider – politics and a lack of money, something that the Chinese space programme won’t suffer from

    Is AI Adoption Reaching a Plateau? / Digital Information World 

    Japan

    Asia’s advanced economies now have lower birth rates than Japan | The Economist – japan now has higher birth rate than China

    Online

    China’s internet darlings seek growth after zero-Covid | Financial Times 

    My Mastodon profile in case Musk manages to sink twitter

    Security

    ‘The Godfather, Saudi-style’: inside the palace coup that brought MBS to power | Guardian – this sounds like a Tom Clancy novel

    Tools

    Cheap Books! – a meta search engine for books

    Web of no web

    Forty Years After ‘Tron,’ Storytellers Are Moving onto the Metaverse – Variety