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

  • Persuasive Technology by B.J. Fogg

    Persuasive Technology was published in 2003. It is still the bible for captology ( from Computers as Persuasive Techologies). Back when I was working inhouse at Yahoo!; copies of the book could be found on the desks of some product managers and designers. It has since gained a certain amount of notoriety. Questions are asked around the addictive behaviour of social network and gaming app users. Some consumers even find it hard to stop swiping dating apps.

    Persuasive Technology
    Persuasive Technology – Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do by B.J. Fogg

    Fogg realised that computers offered new challenges and opportunities. Persuasive Technology was written almost 20 years ago. How well does it now hold up?

    Relevant content

    Right from the start when Fogg starts going into the advantages of persuasive technology you can see the evergreen nature of the content.

    Some of the content is quite prescient with a section on surveillance technology creating persuasion through observation. The comments on simulation are equally applicable to modern VR environments, which has been proven in the treatment of PTSD amongst combat veterans. The application ‘In My Steps’ (page 76) designed to facilitate empathy among doctors for cancer patients echoes through the patient centric work that pharma companies are currently funding.

    Chapter 5 on computers as persuasive social actors is playbook for the way modern apps from freemium games to Tinder work effectively. If you don’t read anything else read this chapter.

    Tired?

    A cursory skim of the book would yield examples that are Windows Vista-era screenshots of crude applications. You have to remember that the book was written before mainstream social networks or the New York Times paywall. Back then, it was right at the end of the banner ad golden age in online advertising; surviving on ads was still considered an option for news media.

    Whilst the context has changed around the web and the way that we use it; the examples are still illustrative. They’re worthwhile sticking with when reading though the book.

    Misinformation

    The modern issue of misinformation gets a relatively small mention. Fogg realised the impact that misinformation could have on future computer credibility. He felt that as computers lost their ‘aura, their mystique, their presumed credibility’. He thought that computing ubiquity would make computing credibility more complex due to purpose and form-factor.

    He also worried about bad actors; though this largely seems due to hacker Adrian Lamo hacked the Yahoo! News content management system from his browser and was able to alter the quotes in stories. At the time subtly altering mainstream news stories was seen as the greatest risk

    …Peter Sommer, an expert in computer crime at the London School of Economics, says that carefully changing information posted to a major web site could be far more serious. 

    “If it is done in a subtle way then this could spread misinformation,” Sommer told New Scientist. “It’s unfortunate that Yahoo! is the largest and most important portal in the world.”

    Yahoo! is one of the most popular destinations on the internet. In June 2001 the site had more than 200 million visitors. Yahoo! takes news feeds from a wide range of news agencies and web sites. 

    Lamo says he was disturbed to have had access to the system during recent terrorist attacks on America, when internet news sites were in great demand. 

    “At that point I had more potential readership than the Washington Post,” Lamo told Security Focus. “It could have caused a lot of people who were interested in the day’s events a lot of unwarranted grief if false and misleading information had been put up.”

    Hacker re-writes Yahoo! news stories – New Scientist (September 20, 2001)

    In some ways Fogg’s vision came true. The Macedonian fake news publishing during the 2016 US election wasn’t driven by bad actors; but ad revenue hungry teens. The effect was the same as Lamo’s Yahoo! News hack a decade and a half earlier.

    Ethics

    The thinking in Persuasive Technology was weaponised in various products and services. Yet, the book, was ethically driven by design. Fogg had a good understanding of how his work could be used by bad actors. He devoted a whole chapter to the ethics of captology and pointed out times when an act would be unethical throughout the book. Fogg starts off with ethics in the preface on page XXVI right before the acknowledgements section.

    Chapter 9 goes into the various ethical pitfalls that may await the designer and the user. It’s interesting that many of the case studies focus on getting personal information out of children. Protecting children online has consistently been an issue since the start of the commercial web.

    It is also interesting in this chapter that he emphasises the role of education in protecting future users from the unscrupulous.

    Conclusion

    Yes rereading Persuasive Technology was like taking a time machine back to the post dot com bust web. But the lessons to be learned are still the same. We might have more stylish web design and responsive pages; but we still have the same problems. Whether you work in digital transformation, user experience or content strategy, this book deserves a place on your bookshelf

    More book reviews can be found here.

  • Hair Growth Helmet + more things

    LG Launches Hair Growth Helmet to Combat Hair Loss | HYPEBAE – this looks totally legit. NOT. Yes, the FDA has certified other hair growth helmet treatments, but that was to indicate that they wouldn’t harm you or interfere with medications. It doesn’t validate the hair growth helmet actually working. But on the other hand lasers in the helmet….. More beauty category related content here.

    Why loneliness fuels populism | Financial Times – depicting loneliness solely in terms of how connected we feel to our friends, neighbours and colleagues risks occluding its other potent forms. Loneliness is political as well as personal, economic as well as social. It is also about feeling disconnected from our fellow citizens and political leaders, and detached from our work and our employer.

    “Buy British”: The viability of a nationalist commercial policy | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal – attempts by successive UK governments in the 1970s and early 1980s to initiate such import substitution policies were fraught with economic and legal difficulties. Indeed, accelerating globalisation and the rapid growth of imports in intermediate products for assembly into ‘British’ goods raise significant problems in defining a ‘national’ product – and the growth of tradable services (such as insurance, education and healthcare) presents an even more intractable problem

    Arkady Bukh: Man in the Middle | CyberScoop – go-to lawyer for hackers

    China bans Australian academics in apparent tit-for-tat retaliation | South China Morning Post – this has followed soon after a good report by Alex Joske and book by Clive Hamilton on China’s influence activities abroad

    Facebook removes fake accounts with links to China and Philippines | The Guardian – Facebook says it has removed hundreds of coordinated fake accounts with links to individuals in China and in the Filipino military that were interfering in the politics of the Philippines and the US – not very surprising. More details in the South China Morning Post – How a Chinese network of fake Facebook accounts influenced online debate on South China Sea, US politics | South China Morning Post 

    Ebay ex-CEO, PR head shared texts about taking down critics: DOJ – Business Insider – probably one of the most disturbing and bizarre things that I’ve read in a while

    China has the upper hand in corporate proxy wars with US | Financial Times – Mr Trump gave Mr Xi what he wanted on ZTE — a reprieve in the form of a new US commerce department settlement that allowed it to stay in business — and mistakenly assumed that this concession would smooth over the other matters. China quickly pocketed the ZTE present but continued to withhold approval of the Qualcomm-NXP deal. When the trade talks later started to unravel, Mr Xi let Qualcomm-NXP languish in regulatory limbo, where it eventually died. – Trump gave a concession too early

    How a local messaging app defeated WhatsApp in Vietnam – messaging app Zalo has been taking the country by storm for nearly a decade now. Zalo’s got a pretty firm grip on Vietnamese consumers. And now that it’s integrated mobile payment service ZaloPay into its messaging app, there’s plenty of potential for it to expand beyond being just a means of communication.

    The landlords are back – The families of China’s pre-Communist elite remain privileged | China | The Economist – The old elite began to suffer almost as soon as the Communist Party won the Chinese civil war in 1949. China’s new rulers quickly set about seizing land from people in the countryside, redistributing it among the landless, confiscating private businesses and executing many rural landlords and people who had worked for the overthrown Nationalist regime

    Listen to an unheard Steve Jobs NeXT keynote from 1988 – “But why it matters is that those explorations and that fun were in the end quite significant. It’s always useful to look back and to realize that even though the tech itself might seem quite primitive today, the people were already sophisticated. We know a lot more facts, and we can do more things, but I’m not sure we have gotten that much wiser.”

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    Wieden + Kennedy put together this impressive tribute to Kobe Bryant and riffs on their pivot to individual sports performance rather than elite performers.

    The craft in the video is self-evident. There are bigger questions to be asked about addressing legacy and what we tolerate in greatness. The tribute to Kobe Bryant is a difficult one to reconcile with his legacy. On the one side, he was a great basketball player. On the other side the legacy of Kobe Bryant is also a messy sexual assault claim that he managed to pay his way out of.

    Is a tribute to Kobe Bryant appropriate in a ‘me-too’ world? Is it the right message for Nike to send? Having worked both agency-side and in-house, I would have balked at it.

    https://youtu.be/C9I-W1eTCbk

    Silicon Valley icon Carver Mead talks about the history of semiconductors and the related science behind it. Mead has a unique perspective given the role that he played in the development of Silicon Valley. He did foundational science that contributed to semiconductor development and a lot of the conceptual work on VLSI (very large scale integration). VLSI is the process of creating an integrated circuit by combining large numbers of transistors on a single chip. Over time this has gone from thousands, to millions and then billions of transistors. Mead co-wrote ‘the book’ Introduction to VLSI Systems. Although technology has moved past Meads work on VLSI; there couldn’t have been a smartphone without Mead.

    The Oxford Union hosted a couple of interesting web chats on Hong Kong that shared the perspectives of some of the pro-democracy camp and a former US diplomat and American businessman.

    Interviewees: Nathan Law: Hong Kong politician and activist. A student leader during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, he served on the Hong Kong Legislative Council until his disqualification in 2017. Eddie Chu Hoi-Dick: Social activist and politician. He founded the Land Justice League, a conservationist, pro-democracy group and was elected to the Legislative council of Hong Kong in 2016.

    Both provide a bit more context. What is missing is the Chinese government perspective delivered in a calm logical way rather than a shrill dogmatic manner. More Hong Kong related content here.

    Interviewee: Kurt Tong: American diplomat, serving as Consul General of the United States of America to Hong Kong and Macau between 2016 and 2019. He previously served as U.S. Ambassador for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

    The Avalanches have produced a track with the International Space Orchestra. The International Space Orchestra are musicians who happen to work for NASA or SETI as engineers. The whole things was filmed in lock down which is obvious from the Zoom-like theme in the video.

    The Avalanches – Wherever you go featuring the International Space Orchestra (live in Lockdown)

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    Burger King King of Stream campaign conducted in conjunction with Ogilvy agency DAVID based in Madrid, Spain. The King of Stream makes sense when you look only at the data. Target young people who do gaming. Presumably there is some group cohesion data or insight that shows a propensity to eat fast food with gaming.

    However what would have been an interesting half-formed idea in a brainstorm seems to have had a negative impact in real life. Often what makes sense on Excel isn’t that smart when it meets the real world.

    It reminded me of the introduction to Robert X. Cringely’s insiders story of the PC industry, Accidental Empires written in the 1991:

    … PCs killed the office typewriter, made most secretaries obsolete, and made it possible for a 27-year-old M.B.A. with a PC, a spreadsheet program, and three pieces of questionable data to talk his bosses into looting the company pension plan and doing a leveraged buy-out.

    Robert X. Cringely – Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date

    Spreadsheets and the data models inside them can be extremely powerful business tools and also weapons of mass destruction. And King of Stream seems to be the advertising equivalent.

    The use of bot powered donations to Twitch with the donation sizes related to Burger King special deals had an adverse effect on the gaming community on Twitch for a few reasons.

    • Burger King is a big brand, yet isn’t engaging with the community in a respectful way. It was culturally tone deaf.
    • This was the bit that surprised me the most given Ogilvy’s reputation around its use of behavioural economics or behavioural science in campaigns. The ‘donations’ are miserly. There is a lot of psychology around the value of donations or gifts. If it really want to engage with the gamers, why not sponsor them?
    • The execution was intrusive and felt like spam

    More on this can be found on the King of Stream by reading this thread here. More on other Burger King campaigns here.

    https://youtu.be/236KSswX7v4

    Celebrating Hong Kong style milk tea. According to the descriptor on this video is made by the Cui Brothers in Hong Kong; though I suspect it might be carefully edited from other films. It features classic Hong Kong dishes including French toast and pineapple bun with butter.

    Indigo Gaming have put together this guide to cyberpunk culture. It is called part one, was done months ago and there doesn’t seem to be a part two yet. Part one of this guide to cyberpunk culture is worthwhile watching on its own.

    The best of dance music over the past 30 years or so in a Soundcloud account – The Classic Mix CD Series | Free Listening on SoundCloud – mix CDs were time capsules of what was hot in different clubs at the time. They owe their origins to the mix (cassette) tape packs that club promoters used to sell of their nights. Mixmag took that concept and came up with the first properly licensed recordings.

    The original ones were done as one track per DJ mix. At the time CD players would in a space between each track recorded on a CD. Even early versions of iTunes used to do the same thing with both mix CDs and recordings ripped of mix CDs.

    At their height, they were an amazing money maker for record labels. They received steady royalty payments from licensing their tracks to appear on these mix CDs. For example Gat Decor, who had a break out single called Passion – appeared on 191 compilations and mix CDs.

  • Adult entertainment + more things

    Adult entertainment transforms during pandemic – Axios – accelerated move towards interactive and custom adult entertainment production. But US legal issues are getting in the way – Is OnlyFans Deleting Sex Workers’ Accounts? – Rolling Stone 

    Publishers and journalists on TikTok – Google Sheets – in case your dystopian life needs more dystopia

    Decoding Xi Jinping’s Speech at the World Health Assembly – The Diplomat – The main target of Xi Jinping’s speech is the “global South” and, more specifically, the African continent. The terrain lost in Western democracies amid the pandemic will be hard to win back. However, in terms of global influence, the role of the global South and Africa is vital for China. There also, the image of China has been severely damaged. For the first time, African ambassadors to the PRC had to write a joint letter to protest how African residents were being treated in the PRC

    Investigating China: COVID-19 and the CCP – The Diplomat – capitalizing on the growing crisis in the United States and Europe, the official media in China has been trumpeting China’s purported success in controlling the disease. China has also sent medical missions to countries such as Italy. Sending medical missions abroad had been a strategy the PRC used during the Cold War to promote a new international order: a “people’s revolutionary movement” against colonialism, imperialism, and hegemonism

    The Chinese luxury market after COVID-19 | Daxue Consulting – interesting how the retailing experience is being adversely affected by COVID precautions

    Mixed reactions to current brand comms | YouGov – With the large number of brands clearly defaulting to the ‘all in this together’ message, it’s worth asking: ‘How well does this actually align with their brand values and how they are responding to the current crisis?’ Our research shows that 43% of Brits agree that brands/companies’ current messages and advertising are inauthentic. This figure increases to 52% of males (vs 35% of females). Furthermore, half of respondents (50%) disagree that brands/companies are putting their employees and their customers first and before the company and its profits.

    The Crypto Price-Innovation Cycle – Andreessen Horowitz – crypto winters tend to indicate that like AI approaches before it, its not ready for adoption as a technology / use case. Success hasn’t really been in banking or logistics, where’s the adult entertainment play (which drove a lot of other technologies from 16mm cinema film to VHS and web video)

    Norske offiserer og soldater avslørt av mobilen – Norge – Norwegian military personnel location data found to be for sale

    Why Luxury Brands Are Raising Prices in a Pandemic | BoF Professional, This Week in Fashion | BoF – Luxury brands such as Chanel and Louis Vuitton are raising their prices. This appears to be a strategic move to increase profit margins, offset the effects of reduced sales, and take advantage of the economic recovery in China.

    Electric Vehicles Continue The Same Wasteful Mistakes That Limit Longevity | Hackaday – interesting meditation on software, hardware, design, complexity and quality. Or why a Tesla isn’t as great as Elon makes out

    Thailand’s travel industry readies for relaunch | Financial Times – really interesting design hacks being deployed by the Thai tourism industry. It would be great if this positively moves the needle on Thailand’s reputation as a destination for miserly backpackers and adult entertainment

    Millennials stand out for their technology use | Pew Research Center – Millennials stand out for their technology use, but older generations also embrace digital life

    China’s ‘OK Boomer’: Generations Clash Over the Nation’s Future – The New York Times – China’s baby boomers, born in the 1960s and 70s, experienced a period of great opportunity, similar to American boomers post-WWII. After decades of political unrest and poor economic management under Mao Zedong, China was opening up, leading to abundant jobs and affordable housing. While the government maintained political control, society became more receptive to new ideas and access to information, including international websites, was available. This era offered a promising future.

    In stark contrast, China today is very different, especially for Generation Z (those born after 1990). The economy recently experienced its first contraction since the Mao era due to the coronavirus pandemic, with unemployment estimated at 20%. Additionally, housing in major cities is now largely unaffordable for Gen Z, mirroring challenges faced by their counterparts in cities like New York and San Francisco.

    Merkel cites ‘hard evidence’ Russian hackers targeted her | AFP.com – German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her deep distress over evidence of Russian cyberattacks against Germany, stating that these actions undermine her efforts to improve relations with Russia. She described the attacks as “more than uncomfortable” and warned that sanctions could be imposed if this malicious activity continues. Merkel also highlighted that German intelligence services have consistently reported Russian hackers attempting to spy on German lawmakers and politicians.

    Troy Hunt: The Unattributable “db8151dd” Data Breach – interesting, looking at the headers, it looks like a wider scrape from multiple sources. It connects multiple social platform profile IDs alongside real world address data. Possibly a large CRM breach???

    Exclusive: As China Hoarded Medical Supplies, the CIA Believes It Tried to Stop the WHO from Sounding the Alarm on the Pandemic – A CIA report suggests that China attempted to stop the World Health Organization (WHO) from issuing a global alert about the coronavirus outbreak in January. This was reportedly at a time when China was accumulating medical supplies globally.

    The report, confirmed by U.S. intelligence officials, claims that China threatened to withhold cooperation from the WHO’s coronavirus investigation if the agency declared a global health emergency. This is the second such report from a Western intelligence service, and it’s expected to worsen already strained relations between the United States and China concerning the pandemic, which has caused 280,000 deaths worldwide, with a quarter of those in the U.S.

    Even if these allegations are not entirely accurate, their dissemination is negatively impacting the relationship between China and the U.S.

    How to arrange the perfect bookshelf – probably the most cynical depressing thing I’ve read in a while

    Wendy Carlos on her production process that pioneered electronic music as we now know it.

    Amazon releases Kendra to solve enterprise search with AI and machine learning | TechCrunch – interesting that Amazon is not offering Kendra in a box like Google did its enterprise search appliance. I suspect this about moving file servers on to the cloud rather than Amazon into the enterprise

    The VR winter — Benedict Evans – we haven’t worked out what you would do with a great VR device beyond games (or some very niche industrial application), and it’s not clear that we will. We’ve had five years of experimental projects and all sorts of content has been tried, and nothing other than games has really worked. Hell, even adult entertainment has worked as a driver