Back in November 2012, my friend Wadds was researching and writing a book that would turn out to be Brand Vandals. I had a campaign going into mothers-and-babies screenings at cinemas and was in the final stages of preparing for a move to Hong Kong whilst launching an innovative facebook app for The National Lottery. The app featured a ‘scratch card’ mechanism within it, something I haven’t seen done since.
By this time Wadds and I had known each other for the best part of a decade and a half, having worked together on the 3Com (now part of HPE) and LSI Logic accounts at the start of my agency career in London.
Brand Vandals followed Wadds and Earl’s earlier book Brand Anarchy – the publishers were not enamoured with the original working title of Brand Fucked.
The Brand Vandals conversation.
The Brand Vandals conversation took place in The Stockpot in Panton Street. The Stockpot had a few branches in London was known for really cheap but good comfort food. Breakfast meant a fry up, which fitted in with our shared Northern sensibilities.
Wadds opened up with the question – had the social web failed to live up to initial expectations?
My reaction at the time was to point out the dissonance between social discourse and real life society. Twitter (or X) was where the bulk of political and media discussions happened, yet it was a small eco-system. Society in many respects hadn’t moved on from Roman times. While the intelligentsia might have had heated discussions in the forum (or on Twitter), these conversations didn’t reflect the vox populi. I name checked Juvenal, referencing Satire X ‘bread and circuses’ because it illustrated the two worlds neatly. The world of the political elites and the world of the common people with their different interests.
Ten years on, social channels have become much more ubiquitous. The early netizens who blogged and participated in forums and on Twitter have been joined by everyone else. The algorithms give people what they want, so political Twitter has its hecklers and fringe elements but still doesn’t reflect the voice of the people.
Facebook also had its fringe elements of discussion where the angry and paranoid could come together, rather like the USENET of old, but more accessible.
At the time, while I realised the digital inequalities that could be created by the data that consumers shared from the quantified self and telematics to the geolocation via their IP address. Tools in mining structured and unstructured data together with new devices putting telematics in the hand of everyone. All of that data was rip for (ab)use by corporates.
I don’t think that either of us fully realised how the world changes when it goes online.
In his book, Wadds quoted liberally fromThe Cluetrain Manifesto. What now could be seen to the last gasp of the libertarian bent of techno-hippy political thought. Doc Searls and David Weinberger’s book had more in common with The Whole Earth Catalog, The WeLL, John Perry Barlow and the back to the land counterculture movement than the modern web. Mark Zuckerberg et al represented the culture of Reagonomics rather than the ‘summer of love‘.
Scale has an effect of its own.
ONS data on amount of UK population online.
We didn’t fully realise what scale would do. Just like when social interactions and norms change when you go from a dinner party to an all-day music festival, the online rules changed. Looking back the scale is staggering, when you go from about a quarter of the UK population online during the dot com boom of 2000 to 88% online 12 years later. Between 2000 and 2002 the online population doubled in the UK. Part of this was driven the nascent mobile web, affordable internet service providers (giving a model more like the US) and adoption of broadband. Modern smartphones accelerated access further.
Hints of what could happen.
We had hints of the dark side through Chinese netizen culture and the phenomenon of human flesh search engine (人肉搜索) moral crusades, showing how people could come together in a common cause and be weaponised. This went back as far as the early 2000s. As far back as 2008, the Chinese judicial system was alarmed by its power and called it ‘cyber violence‘. It has been since turned loose on the wider world.
Joe Trippi, the political strategist behind Howard Dean’s campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, showed how the web could be use to communicate, organise and fund raise back in 2004.
Information warfare found a febrile media that was ideal for its needs and was easy to scale operations on. It was no wonder in retrospect that the internet became toxic.
The Humane AI pin has been hyped for a while. Now it’s been launched as a product with what seems to be a small initial batch based on a waiting list and drop type distribution model. I thought I would wait a bit to post on the Humane AI pin and let the dust settle.
The Humane AI pin is an interesting take on a personal device. particularly with its ‘AI experience’ switching – picking the right smarts for the right task. This seem to fulfil the kind of vision that the likes of Kevin Kelly have outlined in the past. It also seems to access communications services like messaging services and the audio design in the product seems interesting. There is also a projected interface of sorts on the Humane AI pin. It’s an interesting alternative direction to the spatial computing vision of Apple’s Vision Pro.
The Humane AI device falls down in being such a network-centric device. Although it has onboard machine learning technology, its reliance on a relationship with T-Mobile US’ cellular network is problematic. Cellular connectivity is not ubiquitous. It is one of several device visions that have been articulated over the years, but what I still don’t understand is the ‘why?’
What’s going to be more interesting is what the Humane AI pin does next?
US law firms rethink China future amid economic woes, data crackdown | Reuters – Of the 73 largest U.S. law firms with a presence in China, 32 shrank their attorney presence in the last decade, according to a Reuters review of data from Leopard Solutions, which tracks law firm hiring. In Beijing, 26 of the 48 largest U.S. law firms drew down their presence since 2018. Worthwhile reading with: US consultancy Gallup withdraws from China | FT – market research was sensitive when I worked in China. Gallup’s business was closer to consulting than a pollster to get around these challenges. Interesting that they can no longer thread the needle in China
China’s family-run businesses face succession challenges – Nikkei Asia – more than 80% of China’s 1 billion private enterprises are family-owned, with about 29% of these businesses in traditional manufacturing. From 2017 to 2022, around three-quarters of China’s family businesses are in the midst of a generational leadership transition
Post-pandemic party’s over as Americans shun cognac | FT – Half of all cognac in the US is drunk by African Americans, a demographic that has been disproportionately affected by the cost of living crisis, according to analysis by Bernstein. The skew to African American consumers is in part due to the fact that French spirits producers ignored the segregation mandated by America’s Jim Crow laws and “cultivated the African American market segment in ways that other producers did not,” said David Crockett, professor of marketing at the University of Illinois Chicago. French spirits producers at the time marketed to Black-owned and targeted publications. As early as the 1970s the advertisements conveyed a message of upward socio-economic mobility, said Naa Oyo Kwate, a sociologist at Rutgers University
Wong wanted to enter the U.S. consulate. The diplomats told him that only the rooms in the St. John’s Building were on offer, and that the office tower did not offer the protection of a diplomatic compound. In Washington, Ngo took the matter up with one of Hawley’s policy advisers, reasoning that the ultra-Trumpian senator might have the president’s ear. Responding at 1 a.m., Hawley’s staffer promised to pass the message on to his boss, but nothing changed. On July 1, the national-security law passed. The diplomats’ positions were the same: Wong couldn’t enter the consulate and couldn’t apply for asylum from outside the United States. Wong and Ngo knew the rules. But they were asking for the same pathway to haven that had been granted to Fang and Chen…
The focus in Washington has moved on from Hong Kong to Taiwan. The island is under constant military threat from Beijing, which claims the territory as its own, even though the Chinese Communist Party has never controlled it. But for those in Taiwan who cherish their democracy, Hong Kong’s story offers a cautionary tale. The United States gave Hong Kong’s cause its vocal backing, then abandoned the city in its time of greatest need.
Asia is much more important to U.S. interests than the Middle East | Noahpinion – East Asian cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, and until recently, Hong Kong are arguably the world’s most magnificent — hyper-dense and efficient and bustling with life and creativity and personal freedom, but also extremely safe. East Asia is a wealthy region with high quality of life across the board, rivaled only by North Europe and parts of the Anglosphere. Maciej Cegłowski called them “Zeroth World”, and I think that is an apt description. – the burn for Hong Kong on this is real
Ideas
The challenges of sustainable societies and solar punk.
The one where Chandler Bing’s impenetrable job defined a generation | FT – André Spicer, Executive Dean of Bayes Business School, suggests a new category altogether: a “Chandler Bing job”, one indifferent to finding meaning, “low on existential rewards but relatively high on extrinsic rewards, like pay and promotion”. Chandler’s stoicism more broadly reflects Gen X’s tacit acceptance of their lot: the forgotten latchkey kids squished between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials. Jennifer Dunn, author of Friends: A Cultural History, says he “showed that we might not all find fulfilment in the first, or even the longest lasting job we will ever have.” Compared to today’s employers who are increasingly concerned about making their younger colleagues happy, few cared about Gen X’s work-life balance.
The New Working Class by Claire Ainsley is unashamedly wonkish in nature. Ainsley comes from the left of the political establishment. She is an executive director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. She had previously worked for Unite and as a government advisor.
Ainsley posits that the Labour Party is out of touch of who the working class are and what they care about. Deindustrialisaton and immigration has changed the nature of what working class means. They might have lower middle class incomes working in the services sector. Traditional blue collar roles declined to represent about 14 percent of the British population.
Ainsley’s The New Working Class is a testimony to how out of touch policy makers and advisers with the society that they claim to represent. This also makes wonder about the usefulness, and or, the attention paid to polling and research done by political parties in the UK. The Conservatives understanding of hard-working families shows at least some understanding at a high level of who the new working class are.
What struck me about the book is that much of the ‘new’ working class isn’t actually that new at all. The struggle to make ends meet is one that Orwell would have recognised the best part of a century earlier. The challenge of unemployment is one that haunted much of the 1970s and 1980s.
Family is still important and while society is secular, working class communities have been more socially conservative. That doesn’t mean that they hate gays or immigrants, they take a common sense approach to fairness but they will be concerned about family. The rate of change in society and the desire for working opportunities has been more of a driver over immigration than outright racism back to the rise of Enoch Powell.
I had thought I would gain new consumer insights in the same way that I have had in the past, reading books by like likes of American pollster Mark Penn, but this wasn’t the case with Ms Ainsley’s book. Ms Ainsley has clearly written for a different audience. Instead of the ‘new new’ insight, her work is a 101 guide for politicos to the society that the profess to live in and represent. That scared the hell out of me. More on the book here. You can find more book reviews here.
Beyond Disruption by W Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne moves their focus from general business strategy in their book Blue Ocean Strategy. You can read my review of Blue Ocean Strategy which I originally read a number of years ago. By contrast this book looks at the idea of non-disruptive innovation. Non-disruptive innovation as a topic makes sense within the blue ocean / red ocean model.
Beyond Disruption book cover
Success has its own challenges.
Kim and Mauborgne face a Augean literary challenge. Blue Ocean Strategy was so successful at the time, that any subsequent book will look diminished in its success by comparison. Blue Ocean Strategy had something for everyone. To marketers it spoke of differentiation and salience, for business management types it was about differentiation and innovation. Beyond Disruption delves deeper into the nature of that innovation in a way that Blue Ocean Strategy didn’t.
In Beyond Disruption the authors posit that their blue ocean strategy approach was a blend of disruptive and non-disruptive growth.
Difficult narratives
Disruptive innovation by its very nature means destruction of existing businesses as a new one is created. A classic example of this would be the battles between regulators and taxi drivers with Uber, or city governments looking to protect the needs of their citizens from AirBnB. The ideas of Joseph A. Schumpeter fit in with the innovation stories coming out of Silicon Valley. Apple and Google didn’t invent the smartphone, but they came up with a design that captured larger scale consumer interest than Nokia devices and captured the market.
It is the predominant narrative in the media and business community at the moment around innovation. Disruptive innovation fits in with the conflict driven narrative of business. It is reinforced by adaption of military thinking in a literal manner to business strategy. The authors themselves point out about how much business decision-making is driven by aggression and fear.
Approach of Beyond Disruption
The approach of Kim & Mauborgne to ‘nondisruptive creation’ in Beyond Disruption is broken into two parts which cover
What it is and why it matters.
How to realise nondisruptive creation.
What it is and why it matters
Kim and Mauborgne focus a lot of time in the first part of the book explaining the economic and social impact of non-disruptive creation. The idea is that creating new markets doesn’t destroy existing marketplaces. In theory, value will be created on top of the existing economic order, rather than being substitutive in nature.That narrative is largely true, but there are exceptions to bear in mind.
If we think about the smartphone as a device category, even prior to Apple and Google displacing Nokia, cell phones were displacing existing categories. Sales of answerphones dropped, as did the sales of chocolate to children and the incidence of children smoking. Instead the pocket money was spent on handsets and PAYG (pay as you go) mobile tariffs.
Beyond Disruption outlines four sources of business advantage to non-disruptive creation:
Avoiding direct confrontations with established incumbents.
An effective way to respond to full-on disruption.
Support from internal stakeholders who will view non-disruptive innovation as less emotionally charged.
No evident backlash from external stakeholders.
The authors see this approach as a way to address the challenges of ESG and the fourth industrial age of automation.
How to realise non-disruptive creation
The authors start with the idea of the right perspective. This involves:
Leaders moving away from the ‘startup story’ of an innovative founder or co-founder. Instead the problem to be solved needs to be recognised first.
Don’t confuse the means with the end.
Focus on the many, not the few. Have a product that is likely to be adopted by a range of customers.
Identifying opportunities is considered in a separate section, the key point of which was the idea of empathetically observing newly emerging or unexplored problems. These ideas can then be explored further by understanding the scale of the challenge (amount of people affected etc) and understand the assumptions others have made that persuaded them to avoid the opportunity.
In conclusion
With Beyond Disruption, Kim and Mauborgne are looking to encourage a business more in keeping with the needs of stakeholder capitalism. More on Beyond Disruptionhere.
Is Open AI the equivalent of Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim? Maxim invented the Maxim gun. A belt fed machine gun that helped colonial powers grab territory in the scramble for Africa. It was reputedly used by one British official to help clear game from land that was soon to be put to farming use in Kenya. Later on it was used by both sides in the Russo-Japanese war and World War 1, due to Maxim’s business associate Sir Basil Zaharoff.
Investors are betting that Open AI will have a similar role in the battle shaping out between tech giants over generative machine learning related processes.
Sam Altman of Open AI
When a company that has issues with making profits can raise money at a valuation of $85bn, it becomes abundantly clear that investors in generative AI have taken leave of their senses
I can understand the argument that Richard Windsor is making with this argument. While others might point out how dominant funding drove Amazon’s present-day monopoly, there are other precedents like Netscape, General Magic, Uber and WeWork that others can point to.
There are bigger questions about whether the LLM approach is in itself a limited model to pursue? If so, Open AI could look more like when IBM bet the farm on Josephson Junctions. The use of synthetic data implies that LLM scaling might already be at its limit. Nvidia looks like a better bet from this angle despite its own extremely high valuation.
Brand purpose has a lot of issues, but it’s worthwhile bearing in mind the kind of marketing Unilever was pushing out prior to buying fully into the concept. These efforts came to light from social sharing about the the British ‘vulgar wave’ that contextualised Russell Brand.
Unilever Heart Brands UK
While China’s ads skewed conservative compared to the UK’s vulgar wave of 1997 – 2012, this Axe (Lynx in the UK and Ireland) ad isn’t exactly on brand purpose. The spokesperson in the advert is Edison Chen. At the time Chen was a star in Hong Kong’s entertainment circles. But getting involved in street fights and a leaked hard drive full of pornographic images of girlfriends he dated meant he withdrew from the industry. Now he is better known for owning streetwear brand CLOT.
Dove Sparks Boycott Calls Over New Partnership—’Never Buy Them Again’ | Newsweek – controversial question, but have Unilever gamed out that conservatives are more likely to use Irish Spring or similar products over Dove? I suspect that there might be something in the semiotics of cleanliness in this. African Americans by contrast might have challenges like ashen skin that would benefit from soap that cleans and moisturises, hence the popularity of shea butter based products.
Hong Kong
Architect Demi Lee on Kowloon’s Walled City. The comparison with the idea of rhizome was very interesting.
Ideas
Demi Lee’s video on how elements of cyberpunk are leaking into our current reality.
