Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.
I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.
Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.
I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.
I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.
Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.
I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.
I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.
The Code – Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara is the second book I have read recently about Silicon Valley, this review follows my review of Chip War by Chris Miller. The Code covers the history of Silicon Valley from the post-war to the present.
Margaret O’Mara
In terms of her background, O’Mara is a Clinton administration era policy wonk. When O’Mara left policy circles, she became an academic and is now a history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle – at the other end of the country. Her area of focus is on the history of the modern technology industry. She spent five years researching the book in the mid-2010s, just as Silicon Valley was going under a technological and social change.
The lens shaping everything else that I have written here
I am a sucker for books on the history of technology and like Chip War, The Code was right in my wheelhouse. It complemented, rather than overlapped some of my existing favourite technology history books like Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires, John Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said or most of Michael Malone and Steven Levy’s output to date.
Like Miller’s Chip War, O’Mara brought a degree of distance from her material to her writing. She has done a lot of research and surfaced lesser known characters like community computing pioneer Liza Loop in her work, she doesn’t have the inside track.
Bob Cringely with his work on InfoWorld‘s Notes From the Field column got an inside track from the Valley’s engineers before he went on to write is magnus opus Accidental Empires. Like Cringely, Michael Malone was brought up in the Silicon Valley area and then worked the business section beat as a reporter for the local newspapers. Cringely and Malone lived and breathed the valley. If you are are fan of Cringely and Malone’s works, expect something that is interesting but stylistically very different.
On to The Code itself
Other reviewers have used words like ‘masterful’ and ‘majestic history’ to describe the book – which while being a reasonable guide to overall quality aren’t really all that helpful. In contrast to Chip War which took me six months, I managed to storm through The Code in a week. This is partly down my familiarity to the material covered and the airplane view that O’Mara takes when writing about her subject. I enjoyed O’Mara’s writing, but could also see someone coming to it with a good grasp of American political history and current affairs, but no knowledge of Silicon Valley history enjoying it just as much.
Being an academic O’Mara worked hard to source everything in The Code, she also provides a recommended reading list that goes into different aspects of the story that she laid out in more depth including John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said and Theodore Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley.
H-P’s first product taken by Robert Scoble
The book starts in the post-war period as Stanford and Silicon Valley peaked as an area for military contractors. O’Mara references the political lives of the H-P founders alongside the growth of cold war technologies and the space race.
O’Mara leans hard into Stanford’s defence industry connections that started pre world war II. The book then veers to the decline of the military industrial complex in the area due to a number of factors. The Vietnam war demolished the defence budget. The space programme started to wind down after NASA met Kennedy’s challenge to put man on the moon. Johnson’s social programmes took spend away from scientific developments. Finally the social climate in the US changed.
The next stage of computing was shaped by counter cultural values which O’Mara covered the libertarian instincts of Silicon Valley pioneers alongside the more community orientated views of the counterculture folks. Unlike other writers, O’Mara also covers the Boston area technology corridor that Silicon Valley eventually overshadows.
O’Mara focuses more on the finance of Silicon Valley covering some of the highlights featured in Sebastian Mallaby’s The Power Law. But O’Mara also delves into the public markets and the role of lobbying in the Silicon Valley finance machine.
O’Mara tells how immigration affected the nature of Silicon Valley through the story of Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!. As is the case with policy wonks she puts a lot of emphasis on Al Gore, the information superhighway and the Clipper chip. The Clipper chip resurrected like Godzilla the libertarian Republican party arm of Silicon Valley elites and paved the way for the likes of Peter Thiel later on.
The Code finishes on the future hopes for autonomous driving by university research teams and Google’s Waymo business.
You can get hold of Chip War here. More book reviews here.
I wish gatekeeping was a thing back in 2005 and 2006 when I was working on the international launch of Yahoo! Answers. The problem that we had was getting people to contribute answers to questions. Gatekeeping and the exhortation to not gate keep is about sharing knowledge and opinions freely – an in real life version of what we saw in early social publishing. Ironically gatekeeping stands in sharp contrast to oversharing as a social faux pas. The kind of knowledge that concerns about gatekeeping is particularly opposed to is opinion based knowledge or NORA.
Now ‘your jam’ is no longer your jam, but instead offered up to be other people’s jam instead. Your individuality ready to be cloned at a moments notice. Will everything descend to being ‘basic’ or mainstream? Does it disincentivise possessing good taste?
What the Internet’s Use of ‘Gatekeeping’ Says About Power – The rise of “Don’t gatekeep” has reframed keeping things to yourself as a selfish act. But not everything is for everyone! And sometimes the act of sharing does more harm than good. I’m thinking of how Anthony Bourdain felt conflicted about sending droves of tourists to mom-and-pop restaurants. I’m thinking of gentrification and what happens when certain neighborhoods are positioned as hidden gems.
Study Times op-ed shoots down new policy options | Pekingology – translation from an article from the Study Times. Comments on infrastructure are particularly instructive in terms of the view point that they reflect: To debunk views such as “infrastructure overcapacity is wasteful,” “promoting infrastructure equates to taking the old path that’s inconsistent with high-quality development,” and “limited space,” it’s crucial to fully understand the role of infrastructure investment from a holistic perspective of national economic development. Infrastructure investment doesn’t only interact with the expansion of aggregate demand to stabilize economic operations, but also enhances macroeconomic efficiency, improves people’s living standards, and robustly supports high-quality development. Overall, there’s no issue of excessive infrastructure. On the contrary, there are areas that hinder the efficiency of the national economy and the improvement of people’s living standards. China’s per capita infrastructure capital stock only accounts for 20% to 30% of the developed countries, and public facility investments per rural resident are only about a fifth of an urban dweller, indicating potential for investment
McDonald’s Hong Kong and Kevin Poon “Coach McNugget Art World” Exhibition | Hypebeast – via Ian at Deft. This was to celebrate 40 years of the McNugget. McDonald’s have always done some smart cultural marketing work in Hong Kong (such as an McDonalds Big Mac themed issue of Milk magazine). Hong Kong seems like a natural home for these things, I remember activating a Coke Zero x Neighborhood collab while there.) But it isn’t only a Hong Kong thing, McDonalds has done some strong cultural marketing internationally as well: from the Cactus Jack happy meal to a bounty programme for rappers that namedropped McDonalds on their mixtape over the years. As my friend Ian observed this is at odds with their current UK positioning ‘ McDonalds is the perfect place for estranged parents to meet their kids for awkward conversations’. The implication in that McDonalds restaurants are a lower rent third space (than Starbucks or Costa) positioning. I have welcomed their value-priced coffee and breakfasts at the end of an all-nighter on a pitch or a long drive. But the UK’s the third space aspect loses all the joy that McDonalds manages to imbue in their children experiences – the treat, the birthday party, the expectation of picking up a much wanted toy in a happy meal. The child to adult disconnect in the experience is something cultural marketing like this can help bridge if done in the UK.
Hong Kong’s corporate lawyers test boundaries as Beijing’s influence grows | Financial Times – legal practitioners, including corporate lawyers, are concerned the broadening scope of a sweeping national security law could jeopardise the independence of the city’s legal system, a legacy of British administration, as Beijing tightens its grip. “There is general concern . . . that people are not fully understanding where the boundaries lie,” said a senior corporate lawyer with a global firm who has worked in Hong Kong for more than two decades
Daring Fireball: ‘Changes to U.K. Surveillance Regime May Violate International Law’ – As I see it, the most likely outcome is that the U.K. passes the law, thinking that the grave concerns conveyed to them by the messaging services are overblown. That the platform providers are saying they can’t comply but they really just mean they don’t want to comply because it’s just difficult, not impossible. And when it becomes law, the platforms will hand it off to the nerds, the nerds will nerd harder, and boom, the platforms will fall into compliance with this law. That’s what they think will happen. What will actually happen, I believe, is that E2EE messaging platforms like WhatsApp (overwhelmingly popular in the U.K.), Signal, and iMessage will stop working and be pulled from app stores in the U.K., full stop. The U.K. seems to think it’s a bluff; I don’t
Singapore
Money Laundering Bust Puts Foreign Wealth in Singapore on Notice | Asia Sentinel – if that occurred at the behest of the China then we’re likely to see flight overseas from Singapore. It’s also interesting that these raids have come soon after China arrested a Shanghai immigration consultant to get hold of their database of UHNWI overseas (predominantly in the US). They second question I had would be why Singapore would cooperate with China on this?
Software
Now is the time for grimoires – by Ethan Mollick – With the rise of a new form of AI, the Large Language Model, organizations continue to think that whoever controls the data is going to win. But at least in the near future, I not only think they are wrong, but also that this approach blinds them to the most useful thing that they (and all of us), can be doing in this AI-haunted moment: creating grimoires, spellbooks full of prompts that encode expertise. The largest Large Language Models, like GPT-4, already have trained on tons of data. They “know” many things, which is why they beat Stanford Medical School students when evaluating new medical cases and Harvard students at essay writing, despite their tendency to hallucinate wrong answers. It may well be that more data is indeed widely useful — companies are training their own LLMs, and going through substantial effort to fine-tune existing models on their data based on this assumption — but we don’t actually know that, yet. In the meantime, there is something that is clearly important, and that is the prompts of experts.
Trybals is a YouTube channel that features people from the less developed parts of Pakistan and asks their reactions about different aspects of the modern world. It’s an interesting bit of anthropology. In this episode the panel gets to try a VR experience.
The politics of Prada challenged what I knew about the luxury brand. I knew that Prada started off as a handbag company that then pivoted into apparel. I also realised that some Prada items probably borrowed from military clothing design and fabric technology, such as Prada’s iconic black Pocono fabric backpacks.
This is pretty common across Italian design with Stone Island CP Company being prime examples. If you would have asked me about the politics of Prada, I would have expected it to be part of the wider anarcho-far left hatred of all prestige brands.
I didn’t realise that Miuccia Prada’s clothing designs reflected her own left wing, pro-feminist politics. The connections of Prada with yachting has less to do with the politics of Prada and more to do with the passion of her husband and business partner Patrizio Bertelli.
One forgets how politics in Italy, had elements of the far left with the Communist Party and the Red Brigades pitted against reactionary right including the Propaganda Due (P2) masonic lodge and the Bologna central station bombing on August 2, 1980. The politics of Prada is by its nature Italian. More related content here.
Aimé Leon Dore x DJ Stretch Armstrong
Aimé Leon Dore got Stretch Armstrong in for a set playing sublime vintage soul 45s.
Scott Galloway on the intersection of economics and technology
Professor Scott Galloway on the intersection of economics, social trends, consumer trends and technology.
Iran-Contra affair
The Iran-Contra affair was how the president Reagan administration, specifically ‘rogue’ elements within it like Oliver North and John Poindexter, came to swap heavy weaponry with the terrorist sponsoring government of Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages, and how money from these deals came to be diverted to a secret and illegal war in Central America.
Sean Munger provided one of the best accounts of it that I have seen outside of the Congressional report.
The most Hong Kong thing I saw all week
HKIB News – a cable and online TV news channel featured a news story about the first trip of local bus company KMB’s electric double decker bus. At the bus stop was a mix of young and middle aged (mostly) male business enthusiasts. In Hong Kong, bus enthusiasts is much more mainstream in the UK. There are shops that sell die-cast scale models of buses in different liveries, so you can get an exact period-correct bus. Bus enthusiasm and the continued popularity of radio controlled car builds as mainstream hobbies were two distinctive aspects of Hong Kong culture for me.
Much of this is down to the limited size of Hong Kong and the public transport infrastructure. Generations of small children have enjoyed some of their happiest memories starting and ending with a bus trip. Buses are the first line of public transport. Hong Kong, (and Singapore) have a good number of young men and women for which it is the dream career. Which is remarkable given that these are part of the developed world and have a good education system.
Instead in the UK, you have a job that pays minimum wage that no one dreams doing.
MLM or multi-level marketing is where people who need to make money buy product from a company like Avon, Amway, Herbalife, Nu-Skin or Tupperware. Usually the franchisee doesn’t buy directly but through a contact. They may be a long way down in a chain of sellers, which means you end up with a pyramid scheme. Some have described the onboarding and seller communications as a cult. (Disclosure, I did a bit of agency work on Nu-Skin when I worked in Hong Kong, I got to see products, but not how they were sold).
Financial freedom
The real product of MLM seems to be hope. Discussing the downside of MLM at this time is important. Financial freedom is going to sound particularly appealing to struggling middle class households wrestling with the cost of living crisis and rising mortgage interest rates.
These videos by Sean Munger give a really good insight into Amway.
Ponzinomics
Robert Fitzpatrick’s self-published Ponzinomics seems to be the most cited book talking about the underbelly of MLM. Here’s an interview with him.
Soviet space programme
Enough time has gone buy for us to know how innovative the Soviet space programme was. Some of the innovations were dictated to them by limitations in production campacity. I came across these films about it.
And how Russian closed cycle rocket engines surprised NASA after the cold war.
I, Claudius
Robert Graves period drama novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God were remade in 1976 as a 13 part TV series. (The first two episodes are called 1a and 1b, presumably to avoid an episode 13, given that theatre as a whole is superstitious). In 1965, the BBC had done a documentary about the unfinished 1937 film version and had found bringing their version to television difficult due to production rights still tied into the 1937 production.
I, Claudius was considered to be a high water mark from point of view of audience viewership of more high brow material and latterly critics consider it to be one of the best TV programmes ever on British TV.
Hello Hong Kong
I received post from friends in Hong Kong and the package had a large sticker highlighting the Hello Hong Kong campaign which the government has been using to paper over the cracks left by its authoritarian pivot.
Hello Hong Kong mandatory sticker.
One part of me thought that ambient media such as the sticker might be a good side hustle for mail services everywhere. As I dug into it, I found out that the staff ‘had to’ put these stickers on the packaging and at least some of them were doing so reluctantly. At least some customers were reluctant for their packages to be ‘propaganda banners’ for the Beijing backed regime. Meanwhile 7/21 alleged government backed triad actions are still fresh in the mind of locals.
YKK
You don’t think about how YKK clothes zips work effortlessly, but this Asianometry documentary gives you insight into the Japanese zip manufacturer.
Starbucks Rewards as massive bank
I used to use the Starbucks pre-payment system back when I could use it in both the UK and Hong Kong, but a rupture came in when Starbucks removed its rewards scheme from stored value cards to an app. So I found this video by ColdFusion reframing the Rewards scheme as a large bank like pool of money more akin to PayPal’s float than Avios loyalty points.
Apollo project astronauts off the record
On everything from the context of Project Apollo through to their views on climate change.
Restaurant of mistaken orders
A Japanese pop-up retail project with restaurant servers who are suffering from dementia. I was sent the link by a friend of mine from Japan – the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders really brings the impact home.
By the 1980s, radio dramas were in decline. This is in stark contrast to the first half of the century when famous literary and comic book characters had their own shows which covered everything from science fiction and fantasy to crime and horror. Famous names like Sherlock Holmes, Count Dracula, Batman, Superman, The Spirit, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade all appeared on radio. The Star Wars radio dramas started as a project to fire interest in the genre.
An academic at the University of Southern California looked to respark interest in radio dramas, using the local campus radio station to rejuvenate NPR Playhouse – the umbrella vehicle for radio dramas on the US National Public Radio (NPR).
These aren’t the droids you are looking for by Scott Beale
The university students moved on from adapting short stories and suggested adapting Star Wars. Director George Lucas was an alumni of USC and helped the production licensing the music and sound effects for a nominal dollar fee. The BBC helped out in return for broadcasting rights in the UK and some of the original stars including Mark Hamill signed on as cast members.
USC went on to dramatise two out of the three films from the original Star Wars trilogy. While they were originally multi-part series, an enterprising YouTuber has put them all together.
Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi: originally 6 episodes (1996) – made by HighBridge Audio instead of NPR or USC. HighBridge had distributed the previous recordings as a recording box set and when NPR and USC couldn’t make the recordings, they stepped in to do it instead.
The Star Wars radio dramas, alongside vintage recordings are enjoying a second life on YouTube in parallel to the increased consumer interest in podcast documentary dramas and Audible’s rejuvenation of audio books.
Jack Ryan final season
Amazon Prime’s adaptation of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan franchise is probably the best adaptation that I have been. But all good things must come to an end and we are seeing the final season being rolled out. John Krasinski has arguably played the best version of the titular character and the writers have managed to modernise the show sympathetically. They have managed to make each season very relevant. This time Ryan is investigating a conspiracy of crime that might envelope the entire ‘black budget operations’ of the intelligence and defence communities.
The roads lead back to Myanmar via Shan State rebels and an NGO ostensibly set up to help victims of human trafficking. I look forward to seeing where the rabbit hole goes next.
Threads
I am on Threads – a new micro-blogging alternative to Twitter; so far it’s been underwhelming despite the rapid climb in new members. I am also on Mastadon and Post.News.
Godzilla Minus One
While American adaptions of Godzilla feel grandiose and bloated in nature, Japanese adaptions by Toho Pictures have managed to refresh and take an interesting new take on the titular character in Shin Godzilla. Godzilla Minus One changes things up by setting his rampage in a post-war Japan already devastated by the United States.
