I started my career working in laboratories measuring the particular attributes of a product. The focus was consistency and ensuring that the product fell into a certain range of measurements. But this focus was around consistency and fitness for purpose. When I got to read Robert M Pirsig’s Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance quality took on a difference aspect.
According to Pirsig quality, or value, as he called it, cannot be defined because it empirically precedes any intellectual construction of it. It exists always as a perceptual experience before it is ever thought of descriptively or academically.
Pirsig drew on his knowledge of western and eastern philosophy to try and define it by understanding its metaphysics. Inspired by the Tao, Pirsig proposes that value is the fundamental force in the universe. That it stimulates everything from atoms to animals to evolve and incorporate ever greater levels of quality.
He broke it down into two forms: static and dynamic quality. Quality is one, but it manifests itself in different ways.
So went much of the conversations that I had with my housemate and landlord Ian during my last year in university. I started my appreciation of quality through the influence of my father who was an engineer by both trade and inclination. Pirsig’s work tapped deep into my belief system and lodged there ever since. This was why you have this section of my site. Sometimes things grab me with regards to quality.
This gives an apparently random aspect to this category, but it isn’t really random at all.
Jeremy Deller is famous for examining 1980s events from the MIner’s strike to rave culture. Most notably his work Acid Brass, working with the William Fairey Brass Band on cover versions of early house and techno music. In this documentary he walks a group of sixth formers through the context that rave culture began in.
Jeremy Deller has hosted a reenactment of the Battle Of Orgreave and made an inflatable version of Stonehenge in a piece called Sacrilege.
Jacobs cream crackers
As a child, I would have eaten several cream crackers manufactured on this line. In more recent times the production of Jacobs products were moved abroad for cost cutting reasons. There is something mesmerising about watching the process of production.
Cyberpunk
Quinn’s Ideas exploration of Neuromancer pointed out some links that I hadn’t realised in the formation of cyberpunk as a genre and cultural force.
LA Noir
Why film noir happened when it did, and why it is so synonymous with the city of Los Angeles is explained in this documentary which features an interview with author James Eilroy.
EDC
Everyday Carry (EDC) – whilst having evolved as an online cultural phenomenon has been around for as along as men and boys have had pockets. My childhood friend Nigel was obsessing about Swiss Army knives and really small Leica binoculars back when I was in primary school. His Dad was a well-to-do dentist and Nigel fulfilled his EDC goals before coming a teen. It was only natural that it eventually became a thing when the internet came around. Kevin Kelly had been talking about cool tools on the the web for the past quarter of a century; Drop.com when it was founded over 12 years ago covered products that would be considered EDC today.
All of which leaves me more puzzled why EDC has sudden become the focus of media attention in the quality newspapers.
SCSI was a huge part of my early computer life. It was the way my Mac connected to external hard drives, printers, optical scanners and early optical drives.
Sun Microsystems computers used SCSI to and powered the dot com boom.
SCSI still lives on as a software layer in enterprise computer systems connecting storage together. It even exists within the USB mass storage device class.
SCSI is a reminder that technology is often build of layers of older technologies.
The slow death of downtown San Francisco | U.S. | EL PAÍS English – San Francisco’s problem is now as much reputational as it is economics now with the city labeled as being in a ‘doom loop’. Much of the blame seems to sit with the city administration under Mayor London Breed.
Great summary of the current state of rare earth metals processing. China appreciated the strategic nature of these materials before everyone else did and has been prepared to tolerate a high degrees of pollution in processing to build a monopoly.
Online
Skype was a thing in the early 2000s. I knew companies that used it in a similar way to FaceTime now. I used it for conference calls and video calls with friends around the world. I had completely forgot that eBay had bought Skype, I could only remember Silverlake acquired it and then sold it on to Microsoft.
I was sat thinking about a client project the other day. I was using Miro as a way to articulate my thoughts into something that the creatives could work with. As I stared off at a Post-It note on my wall that made up part of the prototype the idea that the tools are changing sailed in and sat at the front of my thoughts. I became deeply uncomfortable.
At a conscious level I know that technology and the tools that I use based on it are changing all the time. But what made me more uncomfortable was a deeper shift in the model of how the tools interacted with me and where the control sat. Sometimes it feels as if we longer use them, instead they use us. To what end has never been clearly articulated.
This quote from my first agency boss describes the nascent online landscape of the late 1990s:
After 50 years of radio and TV pushing marketing messages at people, it took technology to turn it around so that people pull in the information they want. Today’s new consumer has a cultural comfort with interactivity that just keeps building on itself, and it’s all because the technology is finally where it needs to be to let them do it.
I just couldn’t imagine the same thing being said about the experience of most netizens in our social platform dominated world today. The tools are changing, they now use us more than we use them.
I was particularly struck by this statement quoted in a BBC article and attributed to Thomas Bangalter
“Daft Punk was a project that blurred the line between reality and fiction with these robot characters. It was a very important point for me and Guy-Man[uel] to not spoil the narrative while it was happening.
“Now the story has ended, it felt interesting to reveal part of the creative process that is very much human-based and not algorithmic of any sort.”
That was, he says, Daft Punk’s central thesis: That the line between humanity and technology should remain absolute.
“It was an exploration, I would say, starting with the machines and going away from them. I love technology as a tool [but] I’m somehow terrified of the nature of the relationship between the machines and ourselves.”
A couple of my friends had home computers that were used as glorified games consoles. There was little technological value in playing Daley Thompson’s Decathlon or Frogger using the rubbery keyboard of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. My school had a computer lab with three seldom used BBC microcomputers and I had one lesson on using Excel during my time in school. This all meant that I really came to computing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I was a self taught Mac user. From someone who was used to hand writing or typing documents, cut-and-paste was a radical new way of creating a document.
Having my own Mac and printer helped me get through my degree relatively stress free compared to my peers who largely relied on the University’s computer and printing services facilities.
Over the time I have used computing, I’ve noticed that technology tools are changing and not for the better. Computers were seen to be personally empowering and enabling. This age of computing is encapsulated by a phrase attributed to Steve Jobs about the Mac being ‘a bicycle for the mind‘. Steve Jobs also used the analogy of a computing appliance and used both Cuisinart and Sony product philosophies as exemplars for the Apple II and Mac.
In many respect, this was similar to the vision that Stewart Brand had for the ‘back to the land’ hippie movement bible The Whole Earth catalog. The subtitle of the catalog was ‘Access to Tools’. The tools in question were an assortment of recommendations including books, maps, garden implements, specialised clothing, woodworking tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers, and personal computers.
Mother of All Demos
Throughout his life Brand has had a knack of being at the right place and at the right time. Including help facilitate Doug Engelbart’s ‘Mother of All Demos‘ – a public demonstration of prototype technologies that mapped out our digital age. Being in the audience for the Mother of All Demos must have been mind-blowing at the time. For an audience that would have found computer terminals transformative, there would have been a realisation that their tools are changing right in front of their eyes.
Cuisinart
Mac Classic
The rounded edges and corners of the Apple II’s plastic case was inspired by Cuisinart, as was the Mac Classic’s ‘sit up and beg‘ stance. The idea that the the Mac was a ‘computing appliance’; something that just worked. For IT professionals of a certain age who had invested in Microsoft skills, this was mistaken for the Mac being a ‘toy’.
Before the web, this led to a religious type split. I have been a proud Mac user since 1989, which gives you an idea on where I sat. The IT professionals did not believe in personal user empowerment, but they would also struggle with the way tools are changing now as well. The thinking of these IT professionals can be seen in the clunky experience of using SAP enterprise software today.
The overlooked HyperCard
Some of the tools were brilliant ideas but didn’t get widespread adoption. My personal favourite of software in this category would be Apple’s HyperCard. HyperCard was a framework that allowed you to build processes from an address book or digital brochures to mind-blowing experiences and even running factories.
For example, Northwest Airlines managed their entire plane maintenance management programme using HyperCard. Nabisco ran at least one factory using HyperCard as an enterprise resource planning platform.
HyperCard was ‘No Code Tools‘ before the founders of AirTable or Zoho Creator were even born.
Danny Goodman who wrote a lot of the guides to HyperCard, went on to write some of the best books for programming assorted web and mobile technologies from JavaScript to iOS development.
This empowerment extended to many web technologies and web services. Email, forums and chat apps radically changed business and personal networks. It was now easier to access information and expertise. The late 1990s and email saw increased worker collaboration across offices and departments. You saw services like Yahoo! Pipes provided to ‘power-user’ consumer netizens during the Web 2.0 era. RSS newsreaders like Newsblur do a similar job, as do social bookmarking services like pinboard.in.
Modal interfaces and software buttons
When electronic products first moved into the home they had mechanical buttons. Buttons limited functionality, but allowed for the creation of highly intuitive products. Buttons have since been proven to be faster and safer to use automotive applications than touch screens. The use of touch screens being driven as by the car manufacturers marketing department. Logic controls were buttons connected to servos that provided a slimmer finish, a more sophisticated looking product.
Depending on the device they also allowed for the use of software.
But sophistication gave way to confusion as buttons often had to do multiple jobs and use a modal interface. I spent a good deal of my childhood programming my parents video recorders and setting the time on their digital watches and clocks in the home and the car.
Modal interfaces have their place. During my time as a student I worked for MBNA in customer service roles. The modal interface of the CardPac software allowed me to move around a customer record much faster than a point and click ‘windows type’ application. This was particularly important handling stressed customers who have been waiting to speak to a customer services rep in a phone queue.
I would switch into edit mode and quickly tab through fields of data faster than scrolling down and hunting and pecking with a mouse and cursor.
It’s not so much fun if you make one error programming a mid-1980s video cassette recorder and have to go cycle through the rest of the process to go back to the beginning and start again.
You also started to see software defined buttons. This appeared on machine tools and music instruments first. If there was ‘Mac like moment’ for software defined switches, it was the launch of the first commercially successful digital synthesiser: the Yamaha DX-7.
The Yamaha DX7 was so powerful, yet challenging to use – that a veritable cottage industry of books and tutorial videos like the one above. One of the most prominent manual writers was Lorenz Rychner, who wrote guides for various Yamaha electronic instruments as well as later Casio, Kawai, Korg and Roland instruments that was inspired by the Yamaha DX7. Eventually when personal computers became used in music production, Yamaha DX7 editing software appeared as well.
Getting these electronic instruments to work saw a new artist credit appear on albums and singles; that of MIDI programmer. In the 1980s, the audio tools are changing, but experts are required to get the most out of them due to software defined buttons. Apple took this to its natural extreme with a MacBook Pro model that replaced function keys with a touch screen that changes controls based on what software programme is being used at a given time.
Pictures under glass
Technology allowed the entire display surface to become software defined buttons, directly with your fingers. This robbed people of the tactic feedback of a button, knob or lever to create a phenomenon of ‘pictures under glass‘. This changes our relationship between our tools and how we interact with them. It also opened up new ways of interaction.
Swiping and gestures
Korean smartphone manufacturer managed to reduce the kind of gesture tracking that was previously in living rooms with Sony EyeToy series of devices controlling a Sony Playstation of Microsoft Kinect into a smartphone handset.
Pantech’s Vega LTE smartphone allowed control at a distance. This was based on technology from eyeSight to do gesture controls.
Within applications, dating app Tinder created gestures that became ‘common language‘ – to swipe left as in reject an option. But the very gesture of swiping left was part of gamification as the tools are changing from working for us, to us working for them. They are no longer tools of personal liberation in terms of ideas and thinking.
Digital drugs
Captology to captured users
To talk about how tools changed and became items of personal enslavement one has to back to the late 1990s. B.J. Fogg is a combination of media theorist and technologist with a doctorate in communications and heading a behavioural design lab at Stanford University.
The insight that B.J. Fogg had was that with the right design cues, computers could become ‘charismatic’ in nature. They could manipulate behaviour. Professor Fogg converted his doctorate paper into a new discipline that he called ‘captology‘ ( from computers as persuasive techologies). By 2003, Fogg had realised that some of the methods had negative impacts on users. He flagged ethical use to his own students and in his book Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do.
Unfortunately, a number of Fogg’s students and readers took these unethical tactics into Silicon Valley businesses and used them as ‘growth hacks’ for brands as diverse as Tinder (swipe right) and Robinhood the stock trading app that gamified transactions. This was the dark side of ‘move fast and break things’ mentality prevalent in Silicon Valley at the time.
Other’s like Fogg’s student Tristan Harris saw what was happening and were horrified. Harris went on to co-found The Center for Humane Technology – an organisation raising awareness of the problems and holding the organisations to account.
Addiction
What was then termed internet addiction or video gaming addiction was by recognised as an issue by both the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Chinese government. As far back as 2006, China estimated the number of addicts in its country as numbering 2 million children and young adults.
Psychoactive tools
Modern technology didn’t bring a distortion of reality on their own. Regulation and media owners have a lot to do with it. The origin of the modern ‘filter bubble’ was said to be syndicated talk radio host Rush Limbaugh as media regulations were relaxed. This allowed media eco-systems to be created that catered to left wing or right wing views. There was no longer a common view, which people could hold different opinions over, but ‘the truth’ and ‘alternative facts’
“You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts,”
Kellyanne Conway quoted in The Atlantic magazine
A combination of societal isolation, reductive algorithmic models, bad actors and dark pattern designs leave users more vulnerable in the online world. Machine learning and internet content allow for the creation of an overwhelming amount of content.
Whole worlds can be created. This means that there is no social glue of common experiences. There is no consensus and technology enables the bar bell.
Being boring
So enough about digital drugs. Let’s back to something more boring. In the appropriately titled essay The Future is Boring by Eliane Glaser published by Monocle in its Monocle Companion Volume 2: 50 essays for a brighter future; the author discusses the pointless rituals of techno-capitalism. The reason for these pointless rituals is often that the tools are changing, providing useless digitally mediated services and access that is ultimately unfulfilling in both form and function.
Vintage Obscura Radio – back when I used to work at Yahoo! we had an editorial team who surfaced great websites like the Liveplasma, which allowed you to discover new artists and authors based on what you liked. Or The Cloud Appreciation Society. We used to package up the best of these sites in an event called The Finds of The Year. Vintage Obscura Radio would have definitely made the cut. What is Vintage Obscura Radio? It is web radio channel that surfaces songs from YouTube that have less than 30,000 views on YouTube at the time of discovery and were released before 1996.
It’s not powered by a machine learning algorithm, but by 70,000 music obsessed Redditors looking to surface nearly forgotten music. This takes us back to the best parts of the pre-social platform web, where there was more room for the weird and the wonderful. Vintage Obscura Radio is a pleasant distraction from doom scrolling.
Blind Spot Monitor
Ogilvy South Africa put together some clever in-dealership installations to bring the dangers of a vehicle blind spot to light for Volkswagen. Volkswagen were looking to promote the benefits of their IQ DRIVE system which eliminates blind spots for drivers, rather than eliminating other road users.
Gordon Murray’s five favourite cars
Gordon Murray designed some of the most iconic formula one cars for the Brabham and McLaren teams. He went on to design the McLaren F1 road car that preceded the current range of road cars, setting the bar for their looks, performance and handling.
Like Lotus founder Colin Chapman, Murray likes his cars small and light. I understand why, the most dangerous and most fun car I ever owned was a Fiat 126.
Gordon Murray’s five favourites are:
Lotus Elite / Lotus Type 14
DeTomaso Vallelunga
Lancia Appia with a Zagato designed and coach-built body
Abarth 1000GT Bialbero – a car I used to have on the wall of my bedroom as a teen. Bialbero means twin-cam
Alfa Romeo 1600 Junior Zagato
Murray admits that his collection skews towards the 1960s, which was when engineers often had to work with very little.
If
After a particularly trying week, one of our colleagues sent around the poem If by Rudyard Kipling. I found this version recited by Dennis Hopper from sometime in what I guess is some time in 1969 through to 1971.
Dami Lee on Studio Ghibli
Dami talks about the world building in Studio Ghibli films and how its creativity couldn’t have come out of ‘AI’.
Vending machine museum
Back when I first started work, we had a single Klix coffee machine which could just about vend cups of hot or cold water dolloped into a pre-filled plastic cup of coffee mix or powdered orange. These decades old Japanese vending machines put modern western machines to shame and are mechanical wonders.
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.
