The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.
Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.
Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.
Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.
Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.
Hyundai have pushed out a campaign to teach British people how to pronounce the companies name properly. This is a well trodden path for foreign brands like Hyundai. My childhood featured ‘Nestle’s Milky Bars’ as the advertising jingle ignored the é at the end of Nestlé. I can only presume that it would be assumed to be too sophisticated for our palates rather than a playground staple.
More recently, I spent a couple of minutes coaching Arsenal footballing legend Ian Wright on how to say Huawei prior to him shooting some online video content for a smartphone launch. So I can relate to the challenge that Hyundai faces in gaining the correct pronunciation.
Getting the pronunciation right will allow Hyundai to use global English language assets, rather than having to do localisation. A small but important saving as it looks to compete for the UK and Irish electric car markets.
The advertising plays on the common pain-point of Siri and Google Voice failing to pick up on pronunciation in order to use humour to get Hyundai across correctly.
Older women and younger men relationships explored in this documentary. Prior to going to college in the mid-1990s I worked for a company that put coatings on materials to make stickers, stamps and labels. My boss there was a guy called Mark who married the PE teacher from school, once he’d finished his university degree. At that time Mark’s relationship was considered unusual in nature.
Design
Great film compilation of retrofuturist footage
Watching this film on the intersection of military clothing design and fashion reminded me of William Gibson’s Zero History novel.
New China-focused think tank staffed and advised by a number of prominent Hong Kong dissidents: China Strategic Risks Institute
Mainland Chinese visitors start to return to Hong Kong after Covid-19 restrictions lifted, but most tours low-cost and short stay, figures reveal | South China Morning Post – Tourism figures from February to this month show 86 per cent of tour trips from mainland China lasted one to two days and 54 per cent cost less than 500 yuan. Travel Industry Authority confirms it is investigating allegations of cigarette smuggling by mainland Chinese tour groups – it will be only a matter of time before the impact of this behaviour change ripples out to Hong Kong’s retail landlords and the luxury brands who have stores in the city. Hoteliers and the hospitality industry haven’t benefited from opening up the borders
Indonesia
Indonesia is an economic powerhouse in the making, but there are forces ripping away at its society that could leave it as inequitable as its neighbour Malaysia – which has been suffering from a brain drain and political stagnation. Indonesia like Malaysia before it seems to be coming under the sway of Gulf Arab traditions of Islam rather than the indigenous variant of the belief. Singaporean news programme CNA Insider did a good documentary on it all.
If we go back to 1949 Dutch economics Petrus Johannes Verdoorn came up with a law – the long run productivity generally grows proportionally to the square root of output. This law addresses the relationship between the growth of output and the growth of productivity. Faster growth in output increases productivity due to increased returns.
“in the long run a change in the volume of production, say about 10 per cent, tends to be associated with an average increase in labor productivity of 4.5 per cent.”
Causes of the Slow Growth in the United Kingdom Nicholas Kaldor (1966) Cambridge University Press
A heuristic called Vandoorn’s coefficient of 0.484 was found in estimates of the law following Vandoorn’s original publication. Nicholas Kaldor who made similar points as far back as 1960 in his work Essays on Value and Distribution. Kaldor built on Verdoorn’s Law observing that manufacturing was the best way of increasing output.
Slater, Walker Securities
The UK economic hole isn’t anything new. Back when I was a child we saw UK industry disappearing at about 1.5% of industrial capacity a month. The source of the destruction was apparent in the post war period, although manufacturing innovation had been underbanked and under invested for decades. Jim Slater and his financial vehicle Slater, Walker Securities was the harbinger of forces that unleashed the UK economic hole.
The State We’re In
Economics editor Will Hutton wrote the The State We’re In and I got to read it while I was in college. It caught the policy wonk zeitgeist of the future Blair administration – making the argument for long termism and manufacturing as a creator of wealth together with Keynesian economics.
Slow Growth Britain to Cool Britannia
Hutton wasn’t alone in his viewpoint but building on the expertise and experience. Wilfred Beckerman in his book Slow Growth in Britain: Causes & Consequences published in 1979 is a case in point. As you read these books the same points are made over and over again about what has become the UK economic hole. The discovery and exploitation of North Sea oil provided a sticking plaster from 1982 through to 1999. But production in UK oil and gas fields have been in decline since. Any economic productivity benefit provided to British industry through a massive shake out was transferred to unemployment relief. Secondly industrial eco-systems or ‘clusters’ as Richard Florida would term them in his work Who’s Your City? disappeared, causing the manufacturing base to lose critical mass. Any gains were largely spent by 1990. Manufacturing was a driver and a shock absorber for productivity related issues – this is important for the subsequent UK economic hole.
While Hutton was read by the future Blair administration they did little about it, due to the Augean task that confronted them.
Following the decline of manufacturing the UK, focused on financial services which turned toxic in 2006. There were additional smaller bets on professional services and the creative industry (remember pre-millennium awkwardness of Cool Britannia)? As an economic rational decision maker, I pivoted my career out of industry and into the creative sector – thankfully I was young enough to be able to do it. Many couldn’t and were trapped in low value services jobs or living on long term sickness benefits to massage unemployment figures.
Young tax-paying workers
The collapse of financial services saw the current productivity collapse and stagnation amplifying the long standing UK economic hole. Brexit could be seen as a wail of pain and anger. The reality was that being in the EU allowed cheaper skilled workers to move to the UK and use existing manufacturing plants for the likes of Cadbury’s and Unilever. So the UK benefited from young tax-paying Europeans, but lost out in terms of wage depression. Brexit severed that last gasp of productivity increases.
What is really driving ExxonMobil’s clean energy commitments? | Financial Times – the decades long algae biofuels programme failed. Back when I worked in the oil industry at the start of my work life, ExxonMobil had the best research and development / innovation team in the oil industry. They were way ahead of the likes of Shell or BP. The heuristic within the industry went something along the lines of: BP could find oil anywhere, Occidental could get a contract to drill anywhere, Shell could market any product successfully and ExxonMobil could out-innovate the rest of them.
Mobil 1 oil on the shelf at a motor factors courtesy of Mike Mozart
For instance Mobil were decades ahead of everyone else with their Mobil 1 synthetic lubricating oil back in 1974. Castrol was processing petroleum oil and calling it synthetic, they were eventually caught out in 1998 – with Mobil winning a moral victory if not a court case. The point is that if ExxonMobil can’t get algae to work, I doubt any company can – energy desperately needs its semiconductor moment.
Talking about a semiconductor moment, one of the places where this would be really welcome would be green hydrogen. I had hoped that Ireland would be able to convert its wind power bounty into generating hydrogen by electrolysis as a way of moving and storing energy in a way that electrical batteries can’t match.
Only the Global-Health Emergency Has Ended – The Atlantic – “This virus is here to stay. It is still killing, and it’s still changing,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO – the cadence of an emergency might be finished but there is still subtantial health risk. It has declined to ‘only’ the fourth most common cause of death…
Genesis G80 Electrified vs. BMW i4 M50 | MACAU DAILY TIMES 澳門每日時報 – the G80 is closer to a 7 series than the i4 which is somewhere between the 3 and the 5 series. Overall I would prefer to go with a Genesis given the reliability issues that BMWs have had for the past two decades.
The Disconnect on Undersea Cable Security – Lawfare – The fibre-optic submarine cable sector is a vital, but ignored, part of the world’s critical infrastructure. Many members of Congress and the U.S. government, see the risks to subsea cables quite differently than cable owners and manufacturers. Brookings Institute’s Joseph Keller examines this disconnect, suggesting ways that the policy community can protect and advance this critical industry.
Thailand
Thailand legalised cannabis and an industry boom occurred. A key part is trying to integrate and provide value to the country’s hospitality, tourism and travel sectors.
Japanese sportswear brand Asics (アシックス) have launched a campaign that’s training AI to create more inclusive and representative images of fitness as an activity beyond über fit athletes.
Asics called these über fit representations exercise airbrushing.
https://youtu.be/eo13_v_Ase8
Generative AI is only as good as the source material that it gets to work from. And this has meant a lot of content that is heavily skewed what is the aggregate image. Think about the kind of content that already creates body dysmorphia across society. This can be corrected by training AI on a wider range of images.
In the words of Asics EMEA communications director Caroline Fisher
We’re training AI to see the real power of exercise.
Ask AI what exercise looks like and it’s likely to generate images of chiselled jaws, muscles on muscles and six-packs. Because AI has been taught that exercise is purely about aesthetic gain … and it’s learnt this from us.
This focus on exercise purely for physical transformation is feeding into unrealistic body standards and impacting our mental wellbeing.
In response, we’ve created an AI Training Programme to help AI learn what exercise really looks like. Our aim is to teach AI that the benefit of exercise is not just on the body, but also on the mind.
Everyone can help change the way AI sees exercise by posting their exercise images online with #TrainingAI and tagging ASICS.
To learn more, see the link in the comments.
We are ASICS. Anima Sana In Corpore Sano, a Sound Mind in a Sound Body.
Another great mid-century chambara film to follow up the 47 Ronin that I shared in an earlier post.
Nissan borrows from YouTube culture
Nissan borrowed from the Lofi Girl YouTube channel to make this four hour advert for their new Ariya electric vehicle. The illustration is wonderfully done and there are Easter eggs buried in the Japanese driving scenes. From Nissan iconic model name drops to mecha and more.
Judi Oyama
Judi Oyama is a Japanese American skateboarder and graphic designer who was there at the beginning of Independent trucks and Santa Cruz boards. At 63 years old she’s still a pro-skater.
WWE on fan engagement
Interesting video having different generations of WWE wrestling stars talk about fan engagement at SXSW. Elements of what we’d call method acting were talked through by The Undertaker. The para-social links of fanbase and stars that has been amplified via social media.
Flow state
I wish I had watched this when I first started DJing. I did my best work when I was in a flow state. It is hard to get in it consistently.
China on war path
China’s rapid militarisation discussed by Singapore public broadcaster CNA (Channel News Asia). There are some interesting points in it.
Elliott Management wrote this opinion piece on Apple and China: Apple is a Chinese company | Financial Times – interesting assessment of risk exposure with a focus on the Apple share price.
The Apple and China relationship started before China joined the WTO. Taiwanese contract manufacturers had built huge industrial sites in Shenzhen, China and later in other parts of China. The best known of which was the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen. Back in 2010, I was driven around the perimeter of the site, which went on for miles.
The only site that I had seen which would be comparable would be the Mercedes-Benz manufacturing site in Sindelfingen which is part of the Stuttgart metropolitan area. I spent part of my childhood and early adult life living next to a General Motors car plant, a shipyard and a couple of oil refineries, so I am used to scale of industry.
As Apple came back from a near demise in the mid-1990s, it needed manufacturing scale so the combination of Apple and China happened due to that. Over time the Apple and China relationship drove manufacturing expertise and new ways of doing business, such as using CNC machines at scale. Prior to Apple and China, smartphones were plastic mainly due to product engineering influenced by Nokia’s work on its feature phones.
Over time, the Apple and China relationship evolved. Chinese developers make up about half of the programmers making iPad and iPhone applications. Chinese component manufacturers replaced US, Korean, Japanese and European suppliers. Apple and China has become tightly entwined as Chinese manufacturers look to dethrone Apple at the same time.
Apple and China national security focus
China’s state and national security focus has spilled into the economic and social aspects of policy which has a high probability of reaching the Apple and China relationship. Apple already compromises on its privacy tenet in the way it handles China’s data. It actively supported China versus Hong Kong protestors – doing everything it could to disrupt the protestors self-organising tools.
China has shown that its ever expanding security considerations trump business so Apple and China may come to a rapid and disruptive break. Apple is trying to de-risk production outside China but it might be too little, too late. Apple and China are due for a relationship reset.
China’s assessments of Soviet Union’s collapse is very interesting as they offer a playbook of Xi Jinping thought
China’s ‘men in black’ step up scrutiny of foreign corporate sleuths | Financial Times – “It’s hard to attract capital if you can’t get a report from a global due diligence firm,” said one international services executive. That could run counter to the government’s efforts to revive animal spirits in China’s economy, consultants and investors said. “Maybe this is the intention,” said the head of one consultancy in Beijing, “to choke off investment and get the state to step back in, to stop the ability of investors to place bets.”
Xi Jinping Can’t Handle an Aging China | Foreign Affairs – less convinced this assertion is true, when we look at natalistic policies in authoritarian regimes such as what happened in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu with Decree 770 which was one of the strictest anti-abortion law at the time, or Nazi Germany’s breeding programmes
US Companies in China Grow More Pessimistic of Ties: AmCham Survey – Bloomberg – Some 87% of respondents to a flash survey taken last week said they were at least slightly pessimistic about US-China ties, according to the survey published Wednesday by the American Chamber of Commerce in China. That was 14 percentage points higher than the chamber’s previous poll. “Bilateral relations between the United States and China have substantially deteriorated,” said Lester Ross, chair of AmCham China’s Policy Committee. “It’s hard to see at this point when they will begin to improve — and this, of course, affects the ability of business to operate across borders.”
China Ratchets Up Pressure on Foreign Companies – WSJ – Business executives who have consulted with Chinese authorities say a central tenet of the effort is the desire to more tightly control the narrative about China’s governance and development, and limit the information collected by foreign companies such as auditors, management consultants and law firms that could influence how the outside world views China… Some foreign business executives say they worry the rewriting of the espionage law means that many topics, ranging from the status of Taiwan to China’s human rights record to technology such as semiconductors, are now becoming off limits in discussions with their Chinese counterparts. The recent trouble for foreign companies in China is drawing criticism in Washington. Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin who chairs a congressional committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said in a statement Thursday, “Our business leaders need to take off their golden blindfolds and recognize that the recent police raids of American companies Bain and Mintz are not one-offs, but part of a long, proud tradition of exploitation.”.. The push is driven by a deepening conviction within China’s leadership that foreign capital, while important to China’s economic rise, isn’t to be fully trusted – if I was a brand planner in China or Hong Kong I would be very wary at the moment as this will spill over into agency life (paywall)
Longitudinal consumer behaviour change around increased empathy in western markets
A lot of this focus on the expertise in the ‘aspiration economy’ sounds like brands back in the early 1990s again. The kind of expertise exemplified by Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity or the characters Randall Graves and Dante Hicks in Kevin Smith’s movie Clerks.
The new industrial policy, explained – by Noah Smith – the speed and disruptiveness of China’s entry into the global trading system destroyed the career trajectories of large numbers of American workers and hurt the economies of whole regions. Second, U.S. complacency about the trajectory of Chinese politics, combined with a massive campaign of technological espionage, hastened and encouraged the rise of a new, hostile superpower. By the mid-2010s, only economists thought that free trade was still an unquestioned good, and the country wasn’t listening to economists the way it used to
Too Big to Challenge? | danah boyd | apophenia – the tech industry represents 9% of the U.S. GDP and only five Big Tech companies account for 25% of the S&P 500. Prior to Covid, most of the growth in stock market came from Big Tech. Now, as the U.S. economy is all sorts of wacky, Big Tech is what is keeping the stock market’s chin above water. In the process, Big Tech is accounting for more and more of the stock market – edited for brevity
The gender pay gap is not a myth, it’s math – it’s mostly not a discrimination story, it’s a parenting story. But more flexible employment is likely to be more of a discrimination story
Microsoft-branded mice and keyboards are going away after 40 years – this reminds me of when a new exec joined Bill Gates era Microsoft in the late 1980s/1990s. The company had unintentionally had in warehouses 3 years sales worth of Microsoft mice ready to sell. Their hardware with the exception of an ergonomic keyboard haven’t been great products that were superior to other technology companies
Interesting that even state broadcaster Deutsche Welle is complaining about the poor quality of modern German cars. Back in the early 1970s BMWs had a reputation as being clever fragile rust buckets, but the decline of Mercedes is far more dramatic in terms of quality. The decline seems to be in lock step with the globalisation of these companies and an increased focus on shareholder value.
Compare and contrast with older Mercedes cars across the Middle East and Africa.
Project MUSE – China’s Hong Kong Affairs Bureaucracy: Factional Politics and Policy Consistency – “From the perspective of factional politics, this article sheds light on the functions and operations of the Central Liaison Office and the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office (the “two Hong Kong offices”) throughout the history of the Communist Party of China (CPC), focusing on the 2013–22 period. The authors posit that the stronger the factional relationship between the top leader responsible for Hong Kong affairs and the heads of the two Hong Kong offices, the greater the policy consistency between the two offices and the central authorities on Hong Kong issues. This article uses text mining techniques to measure the degree of policy consistency between Chinese President Xi Jinping and the two Hong Kong offices from 2013 to 2022. In 2020, Xi appointed his protégés as directors of the two Hong Kong offices, thus regaining absolute control over Hong Kong affairs. Xi may further tighten his hold on Hong Kong in the future, thereby undermining the region’s autonomous status.” – Interesting aside: The Party and State Institutional Reform Plan (党和国家机构改革方案) unveiled in March established the Hong Kong and Macao Work Office of the Central Committee (中央港澳工作办公室) on the basis of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council. The latter has essentially become a Party body instead of a state body, and the arrangement is now “one organisation, two nameplates” (ie., two identities). – expect even further ratcheting of authoritarian measures in all aspects of Hong Kong life and economy
Culture and technology adoption’s effect on Japanese information design online. It reminds me of the early web portal designs were more like print newspapers.
Interesting that the Korean government is allowing these strikes to go ahead given the central role of Samsung in the country.
Luxury
Alibaba, Partners Fight Fraud and Root Out Counterfeits – Over 730,000 IP rights were under Alibaba protection by the end of 2022. 98% of IP takedown requests by rights holders were handled within 24 hours for the third consecutive year – I wonder what Amazon numbers look like for this?
I didn’t realise that Taiwan’s semiconductor expertise went back this far. DigiTimes has unprecedented access to the elder statesmen and experts on the early Taiwanese semiconductor industry
Amazon have launched a new TV series to stream called Citadel. Citadel seems to be their spring tent pole TV series. The series is produced by the Russo Brothers. The Russo Brothers are responsible for four of the Marvel films up to Avengers Endgame. My favourite work by them is Welcome to Colinwood, a remake of the 1958 Italian comedy caper film I soliti ignoti (known in English speaking markets at Big Deal on Madonna Street or Persons Unknown). Unfortunately Welcome to Collinwood lost money at the box office, but has become a classic since.
It stars Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas alongside Stanley Tucci. Madden is famous for his roles in Game of Thrones and BodyguardTV series. Chopra is famous in Bollywood film circles and was the star of the TV series Quantico.
Season one has launched just two episodes at the time of writing. So its too early for me to make a call on if Citadel is worth watching. I can tell you that it isn’t the most cerebral TV series and lags well behind Amazon’s adaption of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan in this regard, but it might offer the escapism of a Bond film. So far it has well choreographed action scenes, a standout performance by Tucci and CGI sequences that are distracting in nature rather than causing you to suspend believe. The story itself seems like an update of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. – where the good guys are pitted against a transnational organisation dedicated to chaos and destruction.
In this respect it probably feels like familiar territory to the Russo Brothers time making Marvel films with The Avengers, SHIELD and an assortment of enemies from Hydra to Thanos.
As seen on TV
Regardless of what I think about Citadel; Amazon are all-in on the series in a way that I hadn’t seen for The Terminal List, The Man in The High Castle or the Jack Ryan series. With Citadel, Amazon has taken a leaf out of Netflix’ book; creating a line of merchandise. The merchandise is less thoughtful than what Netflix came up with for Stranger Things and is more reminiscent of when everyone I knew in the mid-90s had anX-Files logo t-shirt in their wardrobe somewhere.
Amazon marketplace vendors Citadel lookbook
But Amazon didn’t stop there. Amazon also created a ‘look-book’ for each of the main characters, allowing fans to buy the look from Amazon’s eco-system of Chinese manufacturers, who sell on the platform via the platforms Marketplace offering.
This mix of entertainment has been done better before by the likes of GirlWalker in Japan who host the famous Tokyo Girls Collection. A number of companies have experimented with in-show shopping to augment product placement in the past and this looks to be where Amazon is going. This set of pages seem to be the first stage of experiment to link Amazon Prime Video more closely with commerce in the future.
I am curious to know how much of an uplift in sales that the look-book generates and will it inspire an uptake in red bodycon dresses from Aberdeen to Andover?
