Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

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.

 

  • 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.

  • Cobblers

    Much of the work in the developing world relies on self employment. Be it farming, fisheries, a small retail operation or repairing products like cobblers or seamstresses. In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, self employment accounts for over 70 per cent of the workforce *.

    my tie-dye Toms are here! I LOVE THEM. thank you @annzas!!!!!!!
    A pair of tie-dyed Toms shoes by Rachel

    Let’s use the brand TOMS for a thought experiment about self-employed cobblers.

    TOMS brand purpose came from supplying shoes to the poor. The brand story was that the founder met a lady in Argentina who was providing shoes to shoeless children. The iconic TOMS shoe is actually an alpargata. This is a style popular in Argentina. Blake Mycoskie came up with the TOMS name from ‘tomorrow’. The business promised to donate a pair of shoes for everyone bought.

    You could argue that those people who get the shoes, would likely be unable to buy their own. That it isn’t disrupting delicate market economies and the livelihood of some people in the developing world. But if you could afford to buy local shoes and chose to wear a donated pair – it would be rational decision to make. That would then disrupt the delicate market for cobblers.

    Globalisation

    Back when cobblers and boot makers started to disappear from the high street in the UK, the work started to disappear gradually. There was also a long process of industrialisation to make up for the jobs being lost. There was a process of creation and disruption in the job market. Cobblers business of shoe repairs and boot making bifurcated:

    • The Timpson type model that can repair some issues with modern formal shoes. The heels can be repaired on women’s shoes if they snap off. They cut keys, change watch straps, fit watch batteries and do engravings to keep the business ticking over
    • The Jermyn Street model where one buys a pair of shoes at a premium. They are made on a last with your name on; and repaired and resoled as necessary

    A lot of people now wear sneakers and casual shoes for most of the time. The way that they’re manufactured means that there is little that can be done to repair them.

    So going to a cobbler is no longer a mainstream regular activity for much of UK society. I very rarely wear formal shoes. I have a pair of black leather loafers by Churchs. I used to get them repaired by and old Irish gentleman called Mr Cavanagh. He eventually closed his shop when the business rates meant it was no longer viable. But until he closed I would bring shoes home to be repaired by him, as my Mam and Dad had also done.

    Getting back to our developing world cobblers. The problem in a lot of developing world countries is that there isn’t a similar employment substitution happening for local cobblers. Donated shoes come on top of deindustrialisation. TOMS does try to negate this impact and currently manufactures shoes in Kenya, India, Ethiopia and Haiti.

    But most manufacturing has been centralised in South and East Asia.

    Brand purpose and unintended consequences

    Mark Ritson discussed how brand purpose shouldn’t boost profit, but should become before profit **. When Uncle Ben’s changes its name to Ben’s *** and Aunt Jemima **** because of racial overtones, that isn’t brand purpose (or putting purpose into a brand).

    When an FMCG company stops using palm oil in their food products, that isn’t brand purpose. Brand purpose would be putting money into ways to support farmers so that they didn’t resort to slash and burn palm oil plantations.

    More marketing related content here.

    IZA World of Labor – Self-employment and poverty in developing countries *

    Marketing Week – A true brand purpose doesn’t boost profit, it sacrifices it**

    Marketing Week – Mars put purpose into Uncle Ben’s rebrand ***

    Business Insider – 15 racist brands, mascots, and logos that were considered just another part of American life ****

  • Rival device makers on Amazon + more

    Amazon Restricts How Rival Device Makers Buy Ads on Its Site – WSJ – interesting that his is confirmed by both according to Amazon employees and executives at rival companies and advertising firms. Would rival device makers have an antitrust case? It would be harder for Amazon to argue that it doesn’t have a monopoly position in retail. More on Amazon here.

    China’s Sina Agrees to Go Private in Deal Valued at $2.6 Billion – Bloomberg – will probably list on a home stock market like Shanghai, Shenzhen or Hong Kong

    Oxford moves to protect students from China’s Hong Kong security law | The Guardian – one can see this is a direct reaction to Hong Kong’s national security law and also as a reaction to Chinese influence operations on campuses across the western world

    Will The Chinese-Owned French Luxury Brand Baccarat Survive? | Jing Daily – combination of bad management and circumstances. It is interesting that the owner Coco Chu has disappeared

    Mark Riston: It’s time for ‘share of search’ to replace ‘share of voice’ – Peckham’s Formula posits that when you launch a brand you should set its advertising budget based on your desired share of market. Specifically, your initial share of voice should be 1.5 times the desired market share you want to achieve by the end of the brand’s second year.

    Older People Have Become Younger – Neuroscience News – in terms of their mental faculties

    Netflix called out for “Three-Body” author Liu Cixin’s Xinjiang remark — Quartz – Mulan seems to have become a verb in US media in a similar way to ‘it’s all gone Pete Tong’ in late 1980s vernacular English. Although originally ‘gone Pete Tong’ meant that something had gone commercial and mainstream – in effect a sellout, which was a bad thing in the 1990s, when credibility was everything. Netflix might be able to see dramas into China a la the BBC and Sherlock; but I can’t see it being allowed to be a platform. China already has QQVideo iQiyi and PPTV

  • The merge

    I first heard of the merge from Sam Altman’s blog. He said that it was a popular topic of conversation in Silicon Valley to guess when (not if) humans and machines will merge. In a meaningful way rather than just a Johnny Mnemonic-style walking data storage unit.

    When I heard of this definition of the merge, I immediately thought of the digital series H+.

    H+ The Digital Series

    H+ told the tale of a technological hack that killed people by disrupting the implants in their heads. Some of the few survivors were out of cellular network reach in the basement of multi-story car park.

    He went on to explain that it may not be a hybridisation of humans literally with technology but when humans are surpassed by a rapidly improving (general purpose) AI. The third possibility was a genetically enhanced species surpassing humans in the same way that homo sapiens surpassed the neanderthal.

    What’s interesting is that some of the people don’t give ‘the merge’ a name at all. Back during the dot com boom, when Ray Kurzweil published his book Age of Spiritual Machines it was given the name The Singularity.

    Part of the resistance to this established term was that The Singularity implies a single point in time. I don’t think Kurzweil meant it in that way. But its been almost 20 years since I read Age of Spiritual Machines, and I suspect most of the debaters have only read about it from a Wikipedia article.

    Alton points out that in some ways the merge has been with us for a good while.

    The contacts app on our devices and social networks take the place of us remembering telephone numbers. I can remember my parents landline number and the number of the first family doctor that we had. But I wouldn’t be able to tell you my parents current cell phone number; or the number of my current doctor.

    On a grander scale; general knowledge and desire to read around has been depreciated by Google and Wikipedia. Our phones, tablets and laptops are not implanted in us, but at least one of them will be seldom out of reach. I learned to touch type and I am now not conscious of how I input the text into this post. It goes from my thought to the screen. Only the noise of the keys gives away illusion of mind control as I stare at the screen. Ironically voice assistance makes me more conscious of ‘the other’ nature of the device.

    But it no longer just about memory and our personal connectedness of the devices. Our device control us and suggest what to do and when. Social media platform curation affects how we feel.

    As Altman puts it:

    We are already in the phase of co-evolution — the AIs affect, effect, and infect us, and then we improve the AI. We build more computing power and run the AI on it, and it figures out how to build even better chips.

    This probably cannot be stopped. As we have learned, scientific advancement eventually happens if the laws of physics do not prevent it.

    Sam Altman – The Merge

    Innovation often spits out the same process in several waves before it works. Before Siri, Alexa and Google home there was Wildfire. Before Wildfire there were various speech recognition technologies including Nuance for call centres, Lernout & Hauspie, Dragon Systems and Kurzweil Computer Systems. The last two were founded in the mid-1970s. SRI International’s AI research started delivering results in the mid 1960s.

    AI in its broadest terms has gone through several research booms and busts. The busts have their own name ‘AI winters’. The cadence of progress could easily be far slower than Altman imagines.

    One could easily argue that machine learning might run its natural course to technical maturity without much more improvement. Google and other technology companies are basing their work on research done at Canadian universities in the 1980s during an ‘AI winter’ characterised by a lack of basic research funding. Canada continued to support the research when others didn’t.

    Silicon Valley companies not engaging in basic research themselves. As Judy Estrin observed in her book Closing The Innovation Gap back in 2008, Silicon Valley no longer engages in ‘hard innovation’. Without that basic research; a general purpose AI envisioned by Kurzweil and Altman maybe out of reach. Which is why Silicon Valley pundits put the merge as somewhere in a 50-year window.

    Altman also caveats his prediction based on the laws of physics. Aaron Toponce : The Physics of Brute Force provides an idea of the physical limits imposed by cracking cryptography. It would not be inconceivable that a general purpose AI may hit similar challenges. More on machine learning and innovation here.

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    Frank Herbert was interviewed in 1965 about the origins of Dune. He started researching an article on the control of sand dunes. He makes the fluid mechanics of sand dunes sound fascinating. That was the start point for him creating a science fiction epic. In the interview he covers a wide range of issues including environmentalism, colonialism and philosophy. He also talks about his process of working through is copy as an oral product that happened to be in books.

    Herbert is very self aware of his own writing and analytical in his process. He is also critical of people recording, rather than experiencing events. This was fascinating to read some four decades before Instagram culture.

    Here is a later talk at UCLA from 1985 with Frank Herbert as a bonus.

    Palace the streetwear brand have collaborated with the Happy Mondays for a capsule collection. It’s interesting to see Shaun Ryder and Bez still inspiring and being relevant some 25 years after the peak of their cultural relevance. More streetwear related content here.

    https://vimeo.com/457691937

    COVID comes to Sesame Street. Oscar The Grouch stars in a mask etiquette. Admittedly this comes with a grouchy reason: that he doesn’t want to see children’s happy smiling faces. Sesame Street hits out of the park again on content.

    Sesame Street – wear a mask with Oscar PSA

    George Carlin mashed up with Mad Max: Fury Road. It completely changes the feel of the film and is a stinging indictment of human behaviour.

    Finally an amazing collection of 1980s TV advertisements and station idents Beta MAX – YouTube. What struck me about this channel was the variety of categories that used television advertising extensively for brand building and activation. Some of the creative would still stand up today and were strikingly similar to work that I did for Unilever.