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
Opinion | Living in Dark Mode – The New York Times – of the Hong Kong liberation movement was a plot device in a William Gibson novel, I would expect him to write a character like Karen. (Paywall) – dark mode is a great metaphor for the dystopian ennui. Yet I find it much easier to work in dark mode on my computer, which provides an interesting contradiction to idea
The white working class is a political fiction | The Outline – It turns the working class into something people are, not a function of what they do. It becomes a cultural description totally divorced from labor and wealth, only to be gleaned from outward displays of “class” that come with intelligence, appearance, taste, and all those things that make up meritocratic ideas of “workers.”
Sacha Baron Cohen won an award and made a speech on internet freedom at the Anti-Defamation League awards. He’s a really good orator. Sufficiently good that the likes of Alphabet, Facebook and Twitter must be thankful that he doesn’t have a political office (yet). Check it out, its well worth half an hour of your time.
It feels like things are coming to a head.
The landscape
China has been preaching cyber-sovereignty (and taking advantage of the laissez faire western platforms for its owndark ends). The parallels between 1930s Germany and the current Han nationalist policies of China’s communist party can’t be overstated.
The British government is afraid, and has failed to release its own report on whether Russian influence operations shaped UK election outcomes.
In the US, we have an armed man driving across the country and opening fire in a restaurant to investigate the veracity of a conspiracy theory posted online.
Baron Cohen outlines his own examples:
…when Borat was able to get an entire bar in Arizona to sing “Throw the Jew down the well,” it did reveal people’s indifference to anti-Semitism. When—as Bruno, the gay fashion reporter from Austria—I started kissing a man in a cage fight in Arkansas, nearly starting a riot, it showed the violent potential of homophobia. And when—disguised as an ultra-woke developer—I proposed building a mosque in one rural community, prompting a resident to proudly admit, “I am racist, against Muslims”—it showed the acceptance of Islamophobia.
The internet has come a long way since the Clinton administration heralded its rollout as a sign of great things to come. It has worked its way into our homes, replacing brown goods in the living room and empowering the home computer and games console. From there it has slipped into our pockets and on to our wrists through our cellphones and watches.
For many people, the internet mediates many of their daily social interactions. It is the channel for popular culture and current affairs. All of which has been curated by algorithms for them. It takes a considerable effort to step out of that.
I still:
Buy my music rather than subscribe to it
Pay for a news reader to curate my own online reading
Try and limit my reactions on social media to my own curation of content for others, rather than taking in content there
I work within the media industrial complex. I have a good idea of what’s possible.
That isn’t to say that there was a golden age where the internet was a haven of enlightened thought and polite debate. If you believe that, you’re wrong. As Baron Cohen eluded to in his keynote:
Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It’s as if the Age of Reason—the era of evidential argument—is ending, and now knowledge is delegitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march.
Firstly, the move to the fringe had been a relatively recent phenomena. Following his 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech, Enoch Powell had a 74 per cent approval rating amongst British people according to a poll done by The Gallup Organisation.
About the same time, my parents told me about the ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’ signs. These were found in many British towns at the same time that hippies were advocating peace and love
The fringe that Baron Cohen talks about existed in live music venues and concert sold music merchandise for bands like Skrewdriver. I was just that bit too young to see the National Front marches that happened in various cities in the 1970s. Rock Against Racism again was something I just missed out on. The 1980s had the right wing skinhead movement as much more on the fringes. This was complicated by the various tribes
‘Traditional’ skin heads who loved ska, loved their mates and weren’t afraid of a good fight
Left wing skin heads who tended to be more of a European thing
Anarchist affiliated skin heads, who were similar to anarchist affiliated punks
Skin heads who were affiliated with progressive causes such as animal liberation and gay rights
There were fanzines passed around. Books were given limited private pressings and sold via mail order. A guy I went to college with had a reputation being a ‘weirdo’. Everywhere he went (in US army surplus clothing including a cold war era steel helmet. Everywhere in his wake he left Combat 88 stickers and warned anyone who would listen of the coming race war.
European games programmers developed a concentration camp manager simulator with a game play mechanism similar to The Sims. This was distributed over bulletin boards and the ‘sneaker net’ – copied on to diskette and shared with other people.
Stormfront set up a dial-up bulletin board in the US, which then moved on to the nascent web.
There was hate speech, conspiracy theorists, paedophiles and worse on the internet. At first a certain amount of technical skill, provided a barrier between the mainstream user and the content. Not everyone had a handle on Usenet groups or IRC channels for instance.
Then as the volume of web sites increased massively there wasn’t an effective way to have these ideas served to you unbidden unless you had a dig around to find forums of likeminded people like Stormfront.
Stormfront’s founder said
“provide an alternative news media” and create a virtual community for the fragmented white nationalist movement.
Google’s search engine made it a bit easier to find web-based forums for pretty much anything under the sun.
Baron Cohen isn’t trying to remove all the fringe content from the web. It would be an almost insurmountable battle. It takes the Chinese government a lot of effort. And that’s dealing with:
One written language
A limited amount of internet companies
Absolute control over the country’s internet infrastructure
Tens of thousands of censors and engineers working full-time on maintaining a harmonious internet that still has a lot of hateful sentiment under the guise of Han nationalism
When platforms become publishers
The first thing that comes through about the the platforms that Baron Cohen discusses:
Alphabet (Google, YouTube)
Facebook (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp)
Twitter
All of these platforms (like Yahoo! before it) are afraid of being considered to be publishers. Being a publisher brings a host of obligations that require resources to address. Things like:
Editors
Respecting intellectual property rights
Defamation and slander law liability (outside US)
All of these things put you inside the remit of often contradicting laws of different countries. So it is in the financial interests of these companies to back ‘extreme free speech’.
As the popularity of these platforms increased a few things happened:
On social platforms, the amount of content available to view increased to a point that it became unmanageable for the average consumer
The situation is similar with video platforms
On search platforms, providing the best search provided competitive advantage by serving up whatever consumers wanted. If consumers don’t find what they want through your search engine, they may build up a habit with someone else’s service
They started to have a large amount of audience knowledge which they parleyed into targeted advertising
Why algorithms?
Algorithms are all around you.
They amplify easy paths. It’s when you start looking at a shopping site and they suggest other products that it thinks you might be interested in
It’s when Google knows that there are cats in a picture when you go looking for cats
It’s when you’ve finished Narcos and Netflix suggests that you might like Peppa Pig because parents fail to set up a separate profile for their children and have watched Narcos once the kids are in bed
On social it’s more subtle. It sees what you, or people it thinks are like you engage with ad serves up more of it. That way you no longer have to worry about wading through everything your contacts have shared
The problem is that this creates filter bubbles. And in the filter bubble it reinforces everything it thinks that you want to see. You’re no longer the one alien obsessed guy down the pub, but connected to alien conspiracy nuts just like you.
However all is not what it seems. Marketers, particularly agency marketers like myself when we get together bemoan the effectiveness of Facebook in particular.
Organic reach of a given post has declined massively. Ogilvy did some great research on it five years ago, aggregating data on client accounts of different sizes from around the world.
An appreciable amount of the audience for content on Facebook isn’t real. Viewable impressions could be only 60% of the total impressions served. Maybe less.
The average view time will be less than 5 seconds
In terms of brand building metrics such as memorability and landing messages it terms to be no great shakes
It can be great if you have a particular call to action like ‘buy now’
But it makes it much harder for us to believe fully in the picture that Baron Cohen portrays.
Is Facebook (and other social platforms) a horrible place. Yes it can be
Do the leadership of these companies have values that are way out of step with the countries that they live in. Absolutely.
Are they as powerful as Baron Cohen believes? Again, they can be. But probably not the universal power of evil overlords that the media would have you believe. That’s not about intent, I am sure they’d love the power. Instead, they’re just not that good.
Lets have a chat about machine learning
The secret sauce that a lot of these companies are trying to use is something called machine learning. Its the stuff that the media says will steal your job. You might hear the phrase AI or artificial intelligence used interchangeably with it.
It is good for some specialist things, but not nearly as sophisticated as the media would have you believe. Its no good in tasks that have a degree of uncertainty or ambiguity. Its not perfect at making judgement calls – just look at your email account’s spam email filter.
This is the technology that people expect to make calls about the kind of ethical issues Baron Cohen discusses – its not going to happen any time soon.
It’s not all about the internet
In Baron Cohen’s own words:
Zuckerberg says that “people should decide what is credible, not tech companies.” But at a time when two-thirds of millennials say they haven’t even heard of Auschwitz, how are they supposed to know what’s “credible?” How are they supposed to know that the lie is a lie?
Baron Cohen’s point is that when truth and alt facts are put together with equal weighting, the audience finds it hard to differentiate or retain the content. That lack of knowledge or mass ignorance isn’t solely a failure of technology. Collectively society has failed to make everyone air of shared objective truths.
Solutions?
Baron Cohen talks about freedom of speech not being equal to freedom of reach. The reality is that social content typically reaches 1% of followers. The exception is if the content becomes popular with that 1%. It is not algorithms on their own.
He also talks about regulating platforms in a more similar way to newspapers or TV stations. In truth social media is closer to public access television in the US around about the time of the 1984 Cable Communications Act. All be it, with advertising and reach that CNN could only dream of.
Slowing down the posting of content, Baron Cohen talks of this as a possible solution. It will certainly remove some of the heat. It’s not certain if he wants this to included a review of every post prior to publication. If so, that will require a lot of people to augment a lot of machine learning.
If a service becomes less agile, it would also leave the space open for new services to pop up – creating Mark Zuckerberg’s worst nightmare. Chinese companies stealing his market share and money that should go into Facebook’s coffers.
Not that simple
Let’s talk about shared truths for a bit. We can all agree on scientific truths such as the earth going around the sun, Newtonian physics and even quantum physics. Things start to come apart when one considers real world events. The Chinese will have a very different view to people in the west.
Imagine for a moment if China through the Hong Kong government could deprive the pro-democracy protestors of their ability to organise online? The Chinese government narrative would be something along the lines of:
They’re splittists
Spreading hate and violence against innocent Chinese
Racists against their own people
Or what happens to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny when he was recently interviewed by the Financial Times. Then there is the issue of what nation states do to each other
…the Kremlin’s success was less in manipulating the west than creating the perception it was able to do so. “You can spend $500,000 on Facebook ads and for several years the whole establishment of a huge western country will go nuts about interference, even though its real effect is risible. The investments are minimal but they give you front pages and power.
Most of the world would probably beg to differ, but once we go down the road of regulation it will open up new problems and dilemmas. Regulation wouldn’t save the Rohinga from the counter insurgency (COIN) operations of the Myanmar government.
The problem needs to start with people. We’re at our technologically most advanced and yet we seem to be living in the dark ages. A secondary issue might be the technological devices that we use to access the internet. Baron Cohen talks about the need to slow down the posting of content. This would be to reduce the frenzy of views and instant venting of pure emotion.
Part of that is down to the platforms, but part of it might be device design. I have been giving some thought to that last point. More in it another time.
Horace Dediu on the transformation of the car into a smartphone. Turning a car into a smartphone isn’t a technology revolution that particularly excites me. I prefer things that can kill me to be using highly reliable real time operating systems with no real time network connectivity – if they have to run software at all. Former Thai finance minister Suchart Jaovisidha who was locked inside his BMW limousine by its onboard computer is a lesson to us all.
China Mobile 5G launch video is absolutely terrifying and probably the best advert for LTE that I’ve ever seen.
Consumer use case doesn’t seem to be that high on their priority. So there’s no downloading of Netflix style TV in a flash.
So what is the killer app? It isn’t autonomous cars, or life saving tele-medicine. But dystopian omnipresent Chinese security. There’s no way I’d be buying a Huawei 5G handset after watching this. It has extra resonance with the current ‘Be Water’ protests going down in Hong Kong. More wireless related posts here.
I am guessing that China Mobile won’t be handing out copies of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Here some of the books main topics are discussed by Shoshana Zuboff, Carole Cadwalladr, Paul Hilder and Shahmir Sanni.
VCCP’s first campaign for Cathay Pacific is interesting. It has moved away from the professional business traveller to focus on the leisure travel market. This might be a bet on where the Hong Kong economy is going and a ploy to try and tap into the burgeoning Chinese luxury travel market. I suspect that a good deal of it is Cathay Pacific not being price and service competitive with the likes of Oatar Airways on premium long haul flights.
For me this was a generic ad highlighting Cathay’s overall service rather than the business class experience. which is wedged in awkwardly on the end.
Apple designed in California and sold in China. Is it now Apple souled out to China? Apple is often cited as being a technology brand with a purpose and profiitable. It is unique in mobile phones, computers, tablets and set top boxes. It has a throw back model to the pre-Windows age of computing. It is vertically integrated.
They make key software for their computer. They make the hardware. And in the case of every device except the Mac, they make the key components. It does all this without owning the means of production.
Apple doesn’t own its factories. It owns some of the machines in assembly plants. But if a legal dispute broke out, it would struggle to get those machines out of a partner factory. It’s production volumes are so vast; this puts a further constraint on partner choice. Apple’s electronic components are made around the world:
Germany
Japan
Korea
Taiwan
China
USA
The device chassis, battery and assembly happens in China.
In software, Apple is reliant on two types of partners:
The open source community. iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS are all built on open source software. Apple takes them building blocks and innovates on top of them
The Apple developer community. Apple’s computers are nothing without software. On the iPhone about half the game developers are China based
The Apple difference
Their differentiator for the first thirty years or so was computing for non-technologists. Over time this has been articulated as:
Computing for the rest of us. Computers with expert product design that made them friendly in consumer eyes. This was to try and portray computing as an appliance or piece of consumer electronics. Brands as diverse as Sony and Cuisinart cited as inspiration. Critics of the Mac interpreted this focus on product design to call it a toy. They didn’t think that it represented ‘serious’ computing
https://youtu.be/C8jSzLAJn6k
Think different. Apple needed to keep a fraying customer base together. They came up with the brand anthem that highlighted the diverse range of users. This ranged from technologists and scientists to artists and creatives
https://youtu.be/cFEarBzelBs
It just works. It just works was initially used as a way to describe the intuitive Mac interface. My key attraction to the Mac was discovering thoughtful design at every aspect of the software. Even now, once you learn a keyboard short cut it works consistently in all software. In contrast, Ctrl + Q on Windows is inconsistent between some Microsoft apps
Apple extended this process from the iMac onwards, making it easier to:
Get online. The modem was in the iMac’s case. You plugged your phone line into the computer. You plugged the computer in and followed the software instructions. Apple even carefully curated high quality dial-up ISPs (internet service providers)
Set your email up
Get your address book on to your phone – something that became even easier with the iPhone
Get your music on to your phone or iPod
https://youtu.be/rnzCnPSQM7c
The pivot to privacy started back in 2003 with the launch of FileVault. It makes it easy to encrypt a hard drive partition, CD ROM or USB key. This was to help the Mac find acceptability within business. It also benefited consumers. Eight years later Apple launches the iMessage service which encrypts text, image and video messages by default. It also launched FaceTime video calling with encryption. Two years later, Apple builds Secure Enclave into the iPhone; encrypting the entire device. Over time, the technology moved from being business friendly, to consumer differentiator. It gave Apple clear separation from Google and Facebook. Privacy fitted into a Cook narrative about a company that promoted social good. This was part of the move to a post-Jobs Apple. One that thought social purpose was more than addressing the education market with high quality products. Tim Cook and Apple stood up for American civil rights and progressive ideals.
Concepts that in retrospect look rather naive when going into China.
Compromises in China
Apple has already given over control and cryptographic keys of its services in China. Apple users in China do not enjoy the kind of privacy and security protections of users elsewhere. Apple has not gone to the mats on behalf of users. Apple’s service offering has been severely restricted. Apple’s book offering had to be withdrawn. The app store is without whole categories of applications. Apple Music has a much reduced catalogue due to censorship. Check out Six times Apple gave in to China | Abacus for more information.
Compromises to China
The protests in Hong Kong shone a light on corporate kowtowing that has been going on for years. HKMap Live is similar to map / data mashups done for other protest movements. It plotted crowd sourced reports of police on a map.
The data offered is not granular in nature. It might give you a pointer if you commute is going to pop-up in the middle of tear gas and baton rounds.
This means that Tim Cook was gullible, or compromised when he made the following false statement about HKMap.live
“…we received credible information, from the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau, as well as from users in Hong Kong, that the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are present.”
The problem is no one has come out and said in public what these instances were. Apple hasn’t provided any supporting evidence. One could guess that Apple’s calculus was that people can still use Safari to access the HKMap.live site.
But this comes on the back of Apple removing the Taiwan emoji from all iPhones using Chinese language input. That affects:
Chinese
Hong Kongers
Macau residents
Tim Cook has gone from progressive corporate citizen to Tolkein’s Gríma (Wormtongue). So what’s Apple’s pay-off?
Apple’s prospects in China
You could argue that Apple’s best days are behind it in China. WeChat has effectively built a smartphone OS inside its application. This has meant that the iPhone’s differientators and real world performance compared to Android are moot.
Tablets are less relevant due to Chinese preference for large smartphones.
Apple TV is crowded out of the market by Tencent content deals.
The Mac is a niche product that Apple is likely to maintain
In the face of a changing political environment and rising Han nationalism; Apple is in decline. It’s a question of how fast, which means that Apple feels obliged to placate a mercurial Chinese state.
Apple’s prospects on Capitol Hill
Big technology companies under the magnifying glass by lawmakers. Apple doesn’t have the issues that Facebook has. But it did develop most of the tax avoidance measures now used by Facebook, Google and Amazon. And the one thing both Republicans and Democrats can agree on is that China is a bad actor that needs to be confronted. Apple sits nice at the intersection of these two issues. Tim Cook took a high risk gamble positioning Apple in political crosshairs – in the run up to an election. I guess like Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook is hoping Elizabeth Warren doesn’t get in.
This also offers other technology companies a unique proposition. Their lobbyists could throw Apple under the regulatory bus for commercial advantage. Amazon’s lobbyists managed to blunt the threat of Apple Books to the Kindle book store. Do you think they or Facebook won’t offer Apple up as the sacrificial lamb?
Thinking about trade specifically. Apple has already moved up to a third of iPhone assembly outside China due to the US | China trade difficulties. This leaves the rest of its products under threat:
From Chinese government action in the supply chain
From US government action against the supply chain
If you’re an American politician, Apple looks like a corporate Quisling. On the right wing, it acquiesces to Chinese government pressure, yet won’t help the FBI. On the left, it avoids its tax responsibility and kowtows to an authoritarian regime that wants to displace America.
Apple’s prospects with western consumers
One can understand why Apple has thought it could get away with Chinese practices. It was something that other companies do:
Apple hasn’t had significant pushback or scrutiny of its Chinese practices. Unfortunately, Chinese government hubris, 愤青 (fenqing) and the NBA has brought Apple into sharp focus.
The HKmap.live app is just the tip of a China iceberg:
It has handed over all the cryptographic keys for iCloud services in China to the government
iCloud hosting in China has been handed over to a Chinese state-owned company
Apple has censored books and music on behalf of the Chinese government
Apple has got rid of whole categories of apps like VPNs at the request of the Chinese Communist Party
It has pulled the Taiwan flag emoji from many devices
It’s handing over data to Tencent that bundles IP addresses with URLs. Apple claims its technique protects privacy, unlikely from the Chinese government technologists. Given a wide enough data sets and enhanced interrogation, you can whittle it down
Apple has requested that content providers on its new TV service censor themselves – not to offend the feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese people. Guessing South Park won’t be making content for Apple TV+
This makes Apple look like a hypocrite.
The San Bernardino lawsuit looks less like a stand for privacy a la Edward Snowden. Instead Apple looks like it prioritises the interests of the Chinese government over the US.
There is a breach of trust for some Apple customers. Can you now trust Apple in other areas such as privacy?
How much of a threat would China have to make in order for Apple to hand over the keys to mail and messaging globally?
Or maybe just countries along the Belt & Road, which would include the European Union
Access to Apple’s global data would be an intelligence trove of kompromat. China wouldn’t be able to resist.
If you’re an Apple customer, you know Apple just isn’t cool. The trust in Apple’s privacy USP is blown. You can’t be sure what Apple won’t do to make China or other governments happy.
Western consumers are waking up to Apple having shattered an unwritten moral covenant, set by its progressive actions.
In trying to avoid hurting the feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese people, Apple has burnt the trust of everyone else. And most of those 1.4 billion Chinese people Apple avoids offending won’t buy an Apple product. Which doesn’t look that great when you’re a shareholder.
Apple and developers
Prominent developers like Maciej Cegłowski (founder of pinboard.in) have been active in supporting Hong Kong protestors. It has put Silicon Valley developers on the opposite side to Apple. Cook will realise that there will be Apple insiders who sympathise with the Hong Kong protest movement.
Taking the morality out of the equation for the moment, if you’re an Apple developer or employee; you know Apple won’t have your back. Why should you help them? Why would you help facilitate them use your open source code to build their products?
WSJ City | Young Chinese Spending Creates Worrying Debt – looks like a credit bubble waiting to happen. Worrying debt in terms of personal credit doesn’t create economic value in the same way that government debt on infrastructure does. Chinese corporates also have worrying debt also has shades of bubble era Japan about it. Since consumer spending is driving China’s 6 percent growth, what would happen if the credit bubble burst?
Nicolas Roope: “A different design language is taking over” – The challenge is how brands can adapt their propositions. Architecture demonstrates the formality of this new direction: what is now a series of gestures and actions that may or may not be involved in the surface will be critical to the success of the project. How do these buildings respond to the urgent requirements of energy use reduction and waste reduction? How do they perform as stories in hyperconnected environments where reputations are established in social media? Think Instagrammable hotel rooms…
The Economist | China’s thin-skinned nationalists want to be loved and feared – Zoe hit the jackpot. Over a million netizens responded to her poll, posted on Weibo, the country’s largest microblog platform, asking what followers think of foreign brands that “insult China”. Her timing was impeccable. Her survey surfed waves of patriotic indignation crashing over the Chinese internet, heightened by puffs of windy outrage in the state media. To give you an idea of how ridiculous it can sometimes be:
