It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.
One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.
My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.
I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.
My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.
Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.
That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.
Fujitsu runs probably the world’s oldest working computer. I hear a lot of techies I respect like Grace Quek complain about the use of old languages like COBOL. Not even COBOL would run on the world’s oldest working computer. Lord only knows what they’d make of this electromechanical computer operated and maintained by Fujitsu. I love it, it reminds me of the community of tinkerers and engineers that have kept vintage trucks, tractors, trains and steam pumps alive. More over at the Asahi Shimbun here on the technician responsible for running the world’s oldest working computer.
https://youtu.be/24LZzvZhLIk
Via Fujitsu Japan
Large format high resolution displays are changing our environment and effects that would even astonish Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard. The COEX atrium in Seoul has a stunning installation by d’strict. A wave rolls around the screen. It offers an idea of the future potential of digital experiences in the real world.
Godspeed You Black Emperor is a 1976 16mm film following the adventures of a Japanese motorcycle gang, the Black Emperors. Groups like the Black Emperors went on to inspire Japanese streetwear designers like Neighborhood and WTAPS.
https://youtu.be/DoB6jooN19Y
Gilbert Shelton’s stoner comic series, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers is being adapted for television. Shelton satirised the establishment, drug culture and counterculture. Franklin, Freddy and Phineas are transported by the power of really far out weed from San Francisco in 1969, to the San Francisco of the present day.
The San Francisco of Google and Facebook is unrecognisable as the former world centre of counterculture. Cannabis is now legal, feminism has evolved so much as to become bewildering. Extreme gentrification has destroyed the San Francisco that they know and loved.
This pilot mini-episode has had a negative reaction, the wit isn’t as sharp as the books. But I am excited the brothers will be introduced to a new generation and hopefully inspire them to read the original books.
I guess where I should start this post in OSS is by going back. This time 20 years ago, we were in a time of economic irrational exuberance so large as to be like a fairy tale in comparison to Brexit and the coronavirus.
Irrational exuberance
Everyone believed that the future was going to be rebuilding the catalogue shopping business online. Consumers would have a raft of choice.
Advertisers were going to swap print and TV advertising for banner ads. Something that looked like small advertisements on the pages of newspapers at the time. Because of this, online display advertising was over-priced and everyone was happy.
In order to do these businesses, you needed a lot of servers and a lot of software. If you had the money you bought really good software and servers from Silicon Valley. Companies like Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics or Digital Equipment Corporation. These all ran variants of the Unix operating system.
If you were less fortunate you might be running on an Intel server running Windows NT, anything by IBM or repurposing a Mac from the design studio. The Mac made a surprisingly robust server solution mainly because the computer was so ‘dumb’. There wasn’t a lot that hackers could do to it at the time.
True hackers
People who were hackers in the truest sense realised that you didn’t have to pay for software to run on servers. If you knew where to go and had the right technical chops, you could have robust server software. You could end up paying good money to Microsoft and still need to use three times the amount of servers for a given load because Windows didn’t handle multiple threads as well. It couldn’t do as much ‘work’ as free software. You would get even more benefit if you were skilled enough to see how you could tweak it to meet your needs. Online communities also meant that you would find fellow travellers interested in similar tweaks and would collaborate with you.
A classic example of this would be Hotmail. Hotmail was founded on NetBSD servers and it took years for Microsoft to migrate away from it due to performance and scaling issues with Microsoft’s own software.
Yahoo! which used and contributed to various OSS projects including:
Debian Linux and later moved to an adapted version of Red Hat Linux
FreeBSD
PHP
A peer of Yahoo!’s founders David Filo and Jerry Yang, decided to make hacking together servers and web services easier for businesses and technologists. The founder was called Larry Augustin and the company he founded was VA Linux. VA Linux built workstations and servers for websites. VA Linux is now most famous for the largest opening day price increase on the NASDAQ; but they made seem really great computers.
For smaller businesses, a small start-up called Cobalt Networks came up with a relatively friendly server that could sit in the corner of an office called the Qube. This was popular in a number design offices as a file server and also ran numerous websites. As well as the cute form-factor, it made OSS more approachable for a lot of businesses and changed expectations about IT complexity.
Cobalt Qube
I was working on a mix of telecoms, enterprise and consumer technology clients. One of my clients . By the time I was working with VA Linux in April 2000, open source software (OSS) was a hot ticket. And both Cobalt Networks and VA Linux were at the forefront.
At this time OSS, in particular the Linux operating system was endorsed by IBM with a $1 billion investment in the community. This helped adoption by other large business technology companies including Oracle, SAP and Sun Microsystems.
Suddenly it was OSS everywhere. My client Palm was trying to move its photo-smartphone operating system to Linux underpinnings.
Where was Microsoft in all this?
Its hard to explain to someone under 30 how dominant Microsoft was a business at the time. They were steadily working towards a goal outlined by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in the mid-1970s
A computer on every desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software.
Paul Allen and Bill Gates, 1974 – 1975
Bill Gates wasn’t a cuddly billionaire who wanted to give the world toilets, but a dodgy looking technocrat who made Mark Zuckerberg seem human.
https://youtu.be/-hRUAdi3g5g
Microsoft had won the PC industry and was looking to extend itself into every aspect of business and home life. Microsoft injected investment into Apple at a time when the company was days away from bankruptcy. This made sense for a number of reasons:
The Apple Microsoft Office business was worth more than the investment into Apple
The deal allowed Microsoft to settle a number of patent disputes
It was a cheap distribution deal for the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser
The disappearance of Apple would have had serious issues in terms of antitrust regulation in the US into Microsoft’s core Windows business.
They’ve done a great job. They’re a company that’s done a great job. If you go back to 1997, when Steve came back, when they were almost bankrupt, we made an investment in Apple as part of settling a lawsuit. We, Microsoft made an investment. In a way, you could say it might have been the craziest thing we ever did. But, you know, they’ve taken the foundation of great innovation, some cash, and they’ve turned it into the most valuable company in the world.
Back then Bill Gates was the Mark Zuckerberg or the Sergei Brin of his day and even he almost missed the importance of the world wide web and the internet. Gates was paranoid about the next thing coming along and sweeping all his success away.
The internet represented one such threat.
Gates is as fearful as he is feared, and these days he worries most about the Internet, Usenetand the World Wide Web, which threaten his software monopoly by shifting the nexus of control from stand-alone computers to the network that connects them. The Internet, by design, has no central operating system that Microsoft or anybody else can patent and license. And its libertarian culture is devoted to open—that is to say, nonproprietary—standards, none of which were set by Microsoft. Gates moved quickly this year to embrace the Net, although it sometimes seemed he was trying to wrap Microsoft’s long arms around it.
Headliners: Bill Gates. – Time magazine. December 25, 1995
OSS represented a second such threat. Microsoft’s sales of enterprise software for businesses and other organisations was a high margin business. OSS was a threat to that business. Back in 2001, I started working with colleagues at an agency who were asked to deposition OSS products and the the underlying legal agreement (the GPL).
I was asked by my colleagues to write a briefing document of what OSS actually meant. It didn’t g0 down that well as it outlined the challenge of assailing an idea and a committed community. That didn’t stop our client Microsoft trying, mostly at the C-suite and policy level.
Decoding Xi Jinping’s Speech at the World Health Assembly – The Diplomat – The main target of Xi Jinping’s speech is the “global South” and, more specifically, the African continent. The terrain lost in Western democracies amid the pandemic will be hard to win back. However, in terms of global influence, the role of the global South and Africa is vital for China. There also, the image of China has been severely damaged. For the first time, African ambassadors to the PRC had to write a joint letter to protest how African residents were being treated in the PRC
Investigating China: COVID-19 and the CCP – The Diplomat – capitalizing on the growing crisis in the United States and Europe, the official media in China has been trumpeting China’s purported success in controlling the disease. China has also sent medical missions to countries such as Italy. Sending medical missions abroad had been a strategy the PRC used during the Cold War to promote a new international order: a “people’s revolutionary movement” against colonialism, imperialism, and hegemonism
Mixed reactions to current brand comms | YouGov – With the large number of brands clearly defaulting to the ‘all in this together’ message, it’s worth asking: ‘How well does this actually align with their brand values and how they are responding to the current crisis?’ Our research shows that 43% of Brits agree that brands/companies’ current messages and advertising are inauthentic. This figure increases to 52% of males (vs 35% of females). Furthermore, half of respondents (50%) disagree that brands/companies are putting their employees and their customers first and before the company and its profits.
The Crypto Price-Innovation Cycle – Andreessen Horowitz – crypto winters tend to indicate that like AI approaches before it, its not ready for adoption as a technology / use case. Success hasn’t really been in banking or logistics, where’s the adult entertainment play (which drove a lot of other technologies from 16mm cinema film to VHS and web video)
Thailand’s travel industry readies for relaunch | Financial Times – really interesting design hacks being deployed by the Thai tourism industry. It would be great if this positively moves the needle on Thailand’s reputation as a destination for miserly backpackers and adult entertainment
China’s ‘OK Boomer’: Generations Clash Over the Nation’s Future – The New York Times – China’s baby boomers, born in the 1960s and 70s, experienced a period of great opportunity, similar to American boomers post-WWII. After decades of political unrest and poor economic management under Mao Zedong, China was opening up, leading to abundant jobs and affordable housing. While the government maintained political control, society became more receptive to new ideas and access to information, including international websites, was available. This era offered a promising future.
In stark contrast, China today is very different, especially for Generation Z (those born after 1990). The economy recently experienced its first contraction since the Mao era due to the coronavirus pandemic, with unemployment estimated at 20%. Additionally, housing in major cities is now largely unaffordable for Gen Z, mirroring challenges faced by their counterparts in cities like New York and San Francisco.
Merkel cites ‘hard evidence’ Russian hackers targeted her | AFP.com – German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her deep distress over evidence of Russian cyberattacks against Germany, stating that these actions undermine her efforts to improve relations with Russia. She described the attacks as “more than uncomfortable” and warned that sanctions could be imposed if this malicious activity continues. Merkel also highlighted that German intelligence services have consistently reported Russian hackers attempting to spy on German lawmakers and politicians.
Troy Hunt: The Unattributable “db8151dd” Data Breach – interesting, looking at the headers, it looks like a wider scrape from multiple sources. It connects multiple social platform profile IDs alongside real world address data. Possibly a large CRM breach???
The report, confirmed by U.S. intelligence officials, claims that China threatened to withhold cooperation from the WHO’s coronavirus investigation if the agency declared a global health emergency. This is the second such report from a Western intelligence service, and it’s expected to worsen already strained relations between the United States and China concerning the pandemic, which has caused 280,000 deaths worldwide, with a quarter of those in the U.S.
Even if these allegations are not entirely accurate, their dissemination is negatively impacting the relationship between China and the U.S.
The VR winter — Benedict Evans – we haven’t worked out what you would do with a great VR device beyond games (or some very niche industrial application), and it’s not clear that we will. We’ve had five years of experimental projects and all sorts of content has been tried, and nothing other than games has really worked. Hell, even adult entertainment has worked as a driver
Is This the End of Drop Shipping from China? | Jing Daily – The profitability and success of the drop shipping model comes from a price disparity between the products manufactured in the Western Hemisphere and those from China, but also from a shipping price disparity. In other words, if the US government increases tariffs on Chinese products, or raises shipping rates for packages arriving from China, the whole model becomes noncompetitive. And this is exactly what has happened. This makes the likes of Shopify look like a Ponzi scheme facilitator. The UK edition of Wired magazine had an interesting article on the weird world of drop shipping: ‘It’s bullshit’: Inside the weird, get-rich-quick world of drop shipping | WIRED UK – In some ways drop shipping feels old to the likes of me. It reminds me a lot of TV shopping and multi-level marketing in terms of persistent agile middle men. This article goes into the get rich quick culture of drop shipping. What struck me was the extraordinarily negative view of the future that these people had. There was a dystopian emptiness at centre of everything that the drop shipping bros did. From this perspective drop shipping bros are different to their peers that would have sold time shares, life insurance, photocopier leases or even crypto currency. It also shows that Chinese manufacturing and business practices haven’t improved over the last decade. The only piece that these two articles miss is the the supply side postal subsidy that the Chinese government gives to domestic exporters. This fuels everything from drop shipping to Chinese Amazon marketplace vendors and Chinese DTC apparel vendors who advertise on Facebook. More on Chinese online marketplaces that fuel drop shipping here.
Mediatel: Mediatel News: “Mind-boggling”: the industry reacts to ISBA/PwC report – In a study of the “premium parts of the programmatic market”, including fifteen major advertisers, 300 distinct supply chains and 12 premium publishers, just 51% of advertiser spend on digital inventory was going to the working media. Meanwhile, 15% of marketing spend was disappearing into an “unknown delta”, and was unattributable anywhere in the supply chain. In response to the report’s findings, the market was warned that if it could not deliver standards and transparency, advertisers may take their money elsewhere and the Competition and Markets Authority might even intervene – the content came as little surprise, though it is nice to have numbers put to this. Timing-wise this is a body blow to the media industry. Its also concerning given the disruption-driven flight to digital by marketers – I don’t think you’ll see better multi-channel brand building media plans, but a greater focus on direct response instead. More here Mediatel: Mediatel News: ISBA/PwC: 15% of programmatic supply chain costs ‘unattributable’
Hamilton Bohannon: Disco Disciple & House Precursor | Attack Magazine – Bohannon was essentially creating dub mixes of soul records for club DJs. Except he created them with a band, not via studio equipment. In pioneering this minimal, dance-floor focused aesthetic, Bohannon pre-dated loop-based house records and the repetition of acid house and loop techno. On his Worldwide.fm tribute to Bohannon, Francois Kevorkian described the drummer as: “One of the most brilliant and original artists of his time who helped define as well as forge the template for the sound of dance music”. Bohannon, along with many other innovators, contributed to the development of what would lead to house and techno a decade later
How China Has Capitalized on the Coronavirus | The National Interest – Chinese government’s alleged efforts to hide the facts about the coronavirus. This process is necessary. Equally important, is the imperative to fix a national security vulnerability that the pandemic has revealed: China’s quiet net of influence over the agencies and international bodies that America has relied upon in the post–World War II era. Here, the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) early response to the coronavirus is an unfortunate object lesson. Bad assumptions about the good faith of the Chinese government can have devastating consequences – this is going to bring all kinds of unintended consequences
Apple’s repair policies are utterly shameful and should be outlawed – Digital waste is a huge problem, and Apple is a major contributor toit. All of these old MacBooks, iPhones, iPads and other products just sit around in the deep recesses of our closets, or worse, at the bottom of landfills. The fact that the FTC is willing to listen to right-to-repair advocates and examine the potential for policy change is promising
The Quietus | Features | Tome On The Range | Split: What Love Island Tells Us About Culture & Class In Modern Britain – researchers from the London School of Economics, Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, published a book called The Class Ceiling, summing up years of research on exactly this relationship between cultural aspects of class and social mobility. They were given unparalleled access to Channel 4 and interviewed a top senior commissioner at the broadcaster to find out how he got to the top of the company. Mark (not his real name) was honest about many of the economic privileges that helped him along the way: a private school education, a place at a top university and the ‘bank of Mum and Dad’ to secure London rent while he navigated the precarious world of the creative arts. He recounts how those without this crucial safety net ended up having to take safer and more stable jobs within the industry, such as more administrative roles but with less career progression. In his own words, without such privileges the risk of going for the top job would have been like ‘sky diving without a parachute’
What happens when a major media empire shuts overnight? | Digital | Campaign Asia – “Primetime segments, which aired key programmes aligned with the advertising of prominent brands, are now no longer available. Brands will feel the pinch with the redistribution of advertising spend, loss of audience reach and reallocation of audiences against different channels.”
HONG KONG: What NXT did next… | What Hi-Fi? – 3M uses its bending wave touch screens in the development of advertising and kiosk touch panels, while with its partner Qinetiq NXT’s producing solutions for use in transport applications such as high-end ex ecutive jets and even some locations on the London Underground.Work is also going on with printed electronics and other unusual applications: luxury birthday cards from Hallmark now use NXT technology to play high-quality greetings music when they’re opened! – NXT originally came out of work done on Saab fighter aircraft to reduce cockpit noise
Nintendo: Switch it up | Financial Times – interesting analysis on Animal Crossing and the Nintendo Switch. If the Wii taught us anything , it is that Nintendo marches to its own beat. Its games and audience are different to PlayStation and Xbox
Tencent surveils foreign accounts to aid domestic censorship | Financial Times – surveillance of private messages is also applied to accounts registered to foreign mobile numbers, in order to build up its repository of sensitive files and thus better censor China-registered accounts. The research shows how Tencent not only conducts censorship, but also informs and develops its own censorship strategies. In addition, the company is likely to support the government’s political research. “If the Chinese government has any need to regulate public opinion, they will certainly use the database of politically sensitive content by WeChat” to learn from, said a Beijing-based professional who has worked closely with the government. The professional added that WeChat’s database of sensitive content was “probably the most comprehensive and updated one in China”.
360 Deep Dive: Today’s Broadcast TV | Park Associates – TV antenna usage in US broadband households jumped to 25% in 2019 and is expected to grow as COVID-19 has kept consumers at home. Content styles and genres grow and change, while business models and transmission technologies evolve and cause disruption, but nothing changes the end consumers’ goal: to find video that they want to watch. Secondarily, consumers want to find that content in a manner that is affordable and easy
Future of Our Global Economy: The Beginning of De-Globalization – DER SPIEGEL – Industrial machine producers, of the kind that make a huge contribution to the German economy, have begun shifting priorities from making the supply chain as cheap as possible to making it as secure as possible – this sounds more like an acceleration in change rather than radical change due to COVID’19
Britain’s wartime generation are almost as pro-EU as millennials | LSE BREXIT – the prevailing political environment shapes the long-term opinions of those in their formative years. Given the current ubiquity of the Brexit debate, today’s arguments and events surrounding integration will almost certainly have a significant impact on the most recent generation, namely those born after the millennium. In exactly what way these debates will shape public opinion, however, remains to be seen. – Hmm, when I think back to the nasty Tory narrative of the Thatcher years that put Blair and Brown into power, I wonder if this won’t make them even more right wing….
WPP wins Unilever media duties in China | Media | Campaign Asia – Unilever and WPP also have a long history. More recent connections include a WPP ‘Team Unilever’ in-house partnership launched in Singapore in 2018 and led by Mindshare’s Sudipto Roy, and the appointment of former Unilever CMO Keith Weed to the WPP board in 2019.
Judge Timothy Kelly Stunned by Facebook’s Violation of Law | Law & Crime – The allegations in the Complaint reflect many ways in which Facebook purportedly acted improperly. Some of these allegations represent discrete and poorly considered decisions, such as allegedly encouraging users to provide phone numbers to better secure their accounts, but then using those same numbers for advertising without telling users beforehand. Others appear to reflect Facebook’s willingness to deceive its users outright, such as allegedly telling the public that it would not share their personal information with third parties when it was continuing to do so. And still others represent systemic oversight failures, such as allegedly allowing third parties to access users’ personal information without the users’ knowledge and without controlling how those third parties would use the information. Most of these allegations represent violations of the 2012 Order; several are new violations of law. But all of them suggest that the privacy-related decision making of Facebook’s executives was subject to grossly insufficient transparency and accountability
Stussy soundtrack to work to. Stüssy and music have always been a blend. Shawn Stüssy has talked about the soundtrack to his work. Soon after Stussy customers in punk, hip hop and beyond provided a Stussy soundtrack of sorts.
The International Stüssy Tribe made up of people who Shawn Stüssy had met as the business grew included Mike Jones of The Clash and Big Audio Dynamite and Alex ‘Baby’ Turnbull of 23Skidoo and Ronin Records. There was also Nigo and Hiroshi Fujiwara in Japan. At the time Fujiwara-san was famous for the Major Force record label. There was even at least one International Stüssy Tribe record.
From my record collection. I suspect that this was done by Alex and John Turnbull of Ronin Records. At least two of their artists at the time (Force & KZEE) feature on the vinyl, and it was pressed in at the same plant that their records were. Lastly, Alex was a member of Shawn Stüssy’s International Stüssy Tribe.
Now Stüssy has been the soundtrack breaking up a seemingly endless cycle of Zoom calls. You can find all of them here. My personal favourite is Stones Throw records stalwart DāM FUNK.
Really interesting product design. Russian designers have reached back into technological history to use vacuum tubes (valves) rather than digital or solid state (transistor) electronics that Bob Moog would have used to build his first instruments. You can find out more at APPARATUS Tube Synthesizer by Eternal Engine EMI
Interesting presentation on how behavioural science (nudge theory) is used for patient engagement. It is obvious that these techniques could be adapted across product and service design.
International Jazz Day saw an amazing array of talent performing online.
A great video about the Barbican complex that was shot in 1969.It is a London that is both familiar and alien to me. The city is now dominated by office tower blocks. The buildings for the Barbican complex of old and new building cheek by jowl. There is some beautiful B-roll shot at different times of the day across the Barbican area. That alone would make this interesting, even before it gets into the history.
