Ged Carroll

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  • The Killer

    The media environment that drove the popularity of The Killer

    Before talking about The Killer, it makes sense to talk about the media landscape. The late 1980s and early 1990s was when consumers first started to buy video films rather than only rent them. Retail video sales had been pioneered in the UK by the music labels who sold video albums and recordings of live performances.

    The prices of films suddenly became much more accessible. Not cheap, but the price of a couple of CD albums at the time. Consumers were becoming more film literate. Curated series like:

    • Moviedrome
    • The Incredibly Strange Film Show
    • Son of the Incredibly Strange Film Show
    • Jonathan Ross Presents for One Week Only

    These series were our film studies lecture theatre with Alex Cox and Jonathan Ross as our tutors.

    Young people’s expectations and interests expanded. Video companies started to address market needs. At first, video packaging was influenced by the rental market. The rental market needed display cases that would have hundreds of people handling a box. Durability and keeping things hygienic was the primary concern. But companies realised more consumer sales with nicer packaging. Companies like Tartan and Artificial Eye looked to people with niche interests.

    The video rights for these films were cheap and there was a ready audience to watch them. These cheap film rights were already well known, fuelling US grindhouse cinema in the 1970s & ’80s. So they were the ideal vanguard to get consumers to build their own video library.

    Magazines sprang up to address the need for consumer reviews. this included Anime UK, Empire (seen as the serious film buffs read), Shivers and The Dark Side.

    The Killer and I

    The Killer was one of a number of videos that I had bought at the time. It sat by my VCR (video cassette recorder) alongside Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow. All three were released on the ‘Made In Hong Kong’ video label. I also had a copy of the Japanese anime opus Akira. My collection was rounded out with a few spaghetti westerns including Keoma The Violent Breed. The westerns were released by Aktiv as part of The Spaghetti Western Collection. These were films that made a real impact on me and that I watched again and again.

    I was blown away by the visual experiences that both genres offered.

    Over time I have been building up my library of Blu Ray and DVD disks and managed to reacquire a copy of The Killer. Last week I watched The Killer for the first time in a few years.

    The perfect confection

    A perfect product is a mix of the right ingredients prepared in the right way for the right time. In the mid-to-late 1980s Hong Kong cinema was reaching its cultural peak.

    The Killer
    The original Hong Kong poster for The Killer

    The Killer is made up of layers. These layers were driven by a mix of:

    • Visionary directors
    • The febrile atmosphere in the run-up to re-colonisation by the Chinese communist government
    • A deep bench of talent
    • Hong Kong itself

    John Woo – visionary director

    Depending whose article you read on John Woo, you will get a number of different influences mentioned with regards to John Woo’s works of this period. This film has all of them on screen at once. John Woo is a Christian, and you see a lot of these motifs in The Killer‘s imagery and settings including the iconic church shootout.

    There is a stylistic nod to French new wave films directed by Jean-Pierre Melville like Le Samourai. Gun-fu was influenced by Japanese yakuza films with their honour code and no-holds barred violence. Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity series exemplified this genre. The pacing of his films owe much to Japanese chambara films like The Seven Samurai and classic Chinese novels.

    The reality is that the Triads were seldom rule bound or honourable isn’t allowed to get in the way of a good story.

    A combination of an appreciation of westerns and the works of Melville, with being in Hong Kong during the late 1960s and early 1970s meant that Woo entered the film world as a young script supervisor for Cathay Studios. He became an assistant directors at Shaw Studios. By the mid-1970s he made kung-fu films with fighting chereographed by Jackie Chan.

    In the mid-1980s he had a chance to pivot and take more creative control, which resulted in A Better Tomorrow.

    Much is commented on Woo’s use of white doves in The Killer and subsequent films. The dove is a Christian motif; Woo also referenced the white and black crows of the Spy vs. Spy comic strip. Finally pigeons and doves were kept in coops on the top of tenement apartment buildings in Hong Kong such as John Woo would have lived in after the Shek Kip Mei Fire burnt down his first Hong Kong home. They also end up on the menu at some of the city’s restaurants.

    Doves were also very much an 1980s cultural moment from Blade Runner‘s climatic rooftop scene to Prince. Though to my knowledge Woo never mentioned either of them as influences.

    Less commonly mentioned is the scene where the stray cat enters Jennie’s flat; it signals misfortune for the main characters in the film based on Chinese superstition.

    The febrile atmosphere

    The Hong Kong of the 1980s was a city with a sell by date. It had become a modern well-run city after reaching a nadir in the early 1970s but all that could be easily done away with. Hong Kongers moved freely around overseas Chinese communities in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Hong Kong and to a lesser extent Taiwan became media hubs. By the early 1970s, Hong Kong music was being sung in Cantonese around Asia, the films in Asian cinemas and Made in Hong Kong products were shipped around the world.

    Prior to 1984, there was a wide range of possibilities from the British muddling through and carrying on running Hong Kong to a Chinese invasion. Generations of Hong Kong emigres moved to the UK, Australia, Canada and America for education or a bolt hole if the worst happened. Post-1984 things became real.

    Vancouver’s Hong Kong community expanded during this time as middle class professionals followed the lead of ‘super man’ Li Ka shing and had their families based in the Canadian city while they visited from time to time. It also helped that Vancouver’s inner city core felt like the high density living of Hong Kong, as did the ocean edge.

    All this comings and goings meant that Hong Kongers were exposed to a variety of foreign and domestic influences like John Woo, rather than the more pedestrian content available in the UK at the time.

    The higher ‘moral’ values of The Killer were a line that connected modern Asia to an ancient Chinese past reassuring stability in a changing world.

    Star power – the deep bench of talent.

    The Killer was blessed with a strong cast of performers. Chow Yun-Fat had a perfect foil in Danny Lee. Sally Yeh is amazing in her performance as an actress and a musician. Taiwanese Canadian Yeh was already a successful Cantopop artist before acting in The Killer. The depth of talent in Hong Kong was down to the studio system operated by production companies and TV stations. Chow was a product of TVB’s actor training and made his name as a Cantonese television drama heart throb.

    Beyond the actors, you had a deep bench of technical talent to draw on such as cinematographer Peter Pau. Pau came up through the conveyor line approach to Hong Kong filmmaking and The Killer was his sixth film. Things needed to be done right first time, because films had very little shooting time in comparison to their western counterparts.

    People like Mr Pau are responsible for the professionalisation of the mainland Chinese film industry. The mainland-Hong Kong collaborations which snuffed out the Hong Kong film industry acted as a technical finishing school by Hong Kong filmmakers for their Chinese counterparts. In the same way that coercive technology transfer saw multinational companies train up their competitors.

    Hong Kong itself

    The Killer is one of the things that inspired me to move half way around the world. Hong Kong’s mix of claustrophobic yet homely flats in composite buildings, neon signage and the constant buzz of the city are something you won’t see anywhere else.

    the killer

    This contrasts with the small town feel of the islands. The Killer managed to shoot in locations like the busy Causeway Bay shopping district, which was done in just three hours.

    Just across the border mainland China feels too chaotic. Singapore too neat and ordered. Hong Kong got the mix just right, which is the reason why the anime Ghost In The Shell borrowed so much from the city’s mid-century architecture.

    All four elements come together to make a perfect confection:

    • Visionary directors
    • The febrile atmosphere in the run-up to re-colonisation by the Chinese communist government
    • A deep bench of talent
    • Hong Kong itself

    Impact

    The Killer‘s reception in the Hong Kong market was lukewarm at first, due the June 4th incident in Beijing. But by the end of the year it was a respectable 9th in Hong Kong box office earnings. What happened in the international markets was unprecedented for the time. The Killer was shown on the international festival circuit and became much more critically acclaimed outside of Hong Kong than within the city itself.

    If you’ve watched a Luc Besson film, you’ve seen a film influenced by The Killer, as have most Hollywood action directors making films in the mid-to-late 1990s like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… sampled the living daylights out of The Killer.

    Three decades on, The Killer still moves me. Given changes that have gone on in Hong Kong, we won’t see its like again.

  • Psychotherapy + culture

    Psychotherapy

    Psychotherapy is using psychological techniques to to help improve:

    • Happiness
    • Mental wellbeing
    • Behaviours, beliefs and compulsions that might be holding someone back from achieving their full potential in life

    It can involve sessions that are one on one, or be part of a group experience.

    Psychotherapy in culture

    American TV brought the emotional and mental anguish of life into its programming, for instance, this segment from from Thirtysomething.

    The TV series Frasier put the profession front-and-centre with both Frasier and Niles Crane being psychiatrists by profession. It even brought up the subject of therapy for animals.

    Hollywood has often looked to develop characters by showing them undergoing therapy.

    Matchstick Men
    https://youtu.be/GqskdnjYo_0
    The Joker

    Probably the most famous example is the relationship between Robin Williams as the therapist Dr. Sean Maguire and Matt Damon as his court-mandated patient Will Hunting in Good Will Hunting.

    Over the past 20 years therapy as an activity has become much more mainstream in the UK. And this has been reflected in the media, such as this plot line from the critically-acclaimed BBC comedy series Fleabag, which shows how mental health and therapy have become part of modern middle-class life.

    Age of anxiety

    Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation was published in 1994; yet feels very now. At the time of publishing it turned the drug brand Prozac into a household name. The black and white cover photo of a vacant Wurtzel fitted very much into the grunge aesthetic. As did the authors tale of being a young American battling against depression. There was even a counter-movement over the years of writers who looked to provide alternatives to Prozac (and its peers like Paxil and Zoloft). Their solutions ran from potatoes, to Plato or God.

    Moving forward some three decades and Wurtzel’s writing resonate with a generation battling anxiety and reshaping society around their angst.

    Modern world events from wild fires and climate change seems to have created the conditions for a collective sense of hopelessness and grief. A 10-country survey with a sample size of 10,000 people aged 16 – 25 published in The Lancet found high rates of pessimism. 45 percent of respondents were said worry about climate negatively affected their daily life. Three-quarters of respondents believed “the future is frightening,” and 56 percent said “humanity is doomed.”

    Roots of a crisis

    Wurtzel’s generation too grew up with climate changes, the ozone layer, economic uncertainty due to globalisation and deindustrialisation. They watched the most dynamic economic power on the planet hit a brick wall with the Japanese economic miracle, the internet bubble and imminent global thermonuclear war.

    Over the past half-century we’ve seen wealth flow to the richest while the middle class stagnates or shrinks.

    My Mother's Bible

    So the stressors for anxiety that needs psychotherapy are neither new, nor are they unique. But they have uniquely manifested themselves creating a mass market for psychotherapy in different forms. Like generations of children before them they were brought up as individuals with an upbringing influenced by Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care which shaped childcare from the post-war era onwards.

    Every family home didn’t have a copy of Spock on their shelves, but it shaped advice given out by medics, educators, social workers and the media.

    Like previous generations in the late 20th century their upbringing was marked by a new mass medium. (Previous new mediums would be popular radio, teenage culture including rock n’ roll music, television (and its subsequent proliferation of channels) and the web).

    kid (me) on BMX bike in 70's

    The big generational difference is likely to be level of childhood exposure to risk. Children growing up in the 1960s through to the early 1990s would be familiar with the ‘latch key kid’. They would have played outside with friends, maybe held down a part-time job or even had a degree of personal mobility with a bicycle that they used to cycle everywhere. Playgrounds were fun, but didn’t have the safety measures of modern playgrounds, the playgrounds of the mid to late 20th century had rusty swings and hard concrete surfaces. The decline in ‘outdoor play’ in favour of play dates and electronic amusements was cited as a possible factor by authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their book The Coddling of The American Mind.

    Lukianoff and Haidt’s suggested solution to this age of anxiety was to use a form of psychotherapy known as cognitive behavioural therapy to help boost mental resilience in children and young adults. There is a growing body of work that puts the blame on rising anxiety at the always-on nature of social media through smartphones.

    The age of anxiety has mainstreamed a number of niche product categories from gadgets like fidget spinners to weighted blankets.

    Rebranding psychotherapy

    Going back to the explanation of psychotherapy that I started off with, one of the bulletpoints was ‘behaviours, beliefs and compulsions that might be holding someone back from achieving their full potential in life’.

    A number of decades ago psychotherapy was seen to be something that tended to happen in hospital and the general thinking that a pill may provide the solution or at the very least a chemical cosh for the worst affected or most disruptive.

    The more well-heeled may have seen a therapist in a consulting office. In other communities the role may have been played by the social worker, (in rural Ireland it might have been the local parish priest) or a marriage guidance counselling service. Developments of different psychotherapy techniques over the 20th and 21st century owe as much to philosophy as they do to our scientific understanding of the mind and neuroscience.

    There are now a large amount of therapists and life coaches who have a wide range of certifications and experience addressing the behaviours beliefs and compulsions that might be holding someone back in their personal or professional lives.

    The changing nature of psychotherapy

    Technology and media are changing our relationships, the way we relate to each other and ourselves. Parasocial relationships are asymmetric in nature. Fans believe in an influencer who may not even know them. They supplement or replace friendships that would otherwise be in the fans life. These new forms of relationships can affect both the fan and the influencer when unrealistic expectations aren’t met. Exemplified by ‘Stans‘ in western culture.

    Parasocial relationships

    The kind of relationships that we have now are fundamentally changed. This is especially acute in culture. Influencers, and Asian idol culture mean that we’re much more invested in people we don’t actually know.

    YouTuber Aini has covered how this relates to East Asian pop artist fan culture. In particular young men or women who are in idol groups. Parakin fans go to extreme lengths to support their idol and guide their career in what they believe is the best direction. Parakin fans in China have the idol fulfil a role in their own lives that would otherwise be unmet.

    This is a world away from the model followed by Simon Cowell to Colonel Parker over the past 70 years of popular music.

    The Timepiece Gentleman

    A great example of parasocial relationship is playing out in the luxury watch collecting community at the moment. American watch dealer Anthony Farrer trading as The Timepiece Gentleman matched luxury watches with people who wanted to own them and took a cut off the top.

    Something went horribly wrong and Mr Farrer owes millions of dollars to fellow watch dealers, investors and individuals whose watches he was selling on their behalf. Oisin O’Malley goes into how Farrer’s parasocial relationship with his audience engendered trust.

    • Farrer told his audience his own personal story, complete with his faults and failings
    • He brought the audience inside his business and how it operates
    • He demonstrated a successful lifestyle.

    He was in their lives day-in, day-out. This meant that both industry professionals and consumers put more trust in Farrer than they should have. Farrer brought the formula of the Kardashian media empire to a formerly staid and overlooked retail sector.

    The manosphere

    Much has been shared about the manosphere and the Tate brothers in particular. But in the context of this post, I thought it was worthwhile exploring the role that Andrew Tate’s content fills in the lives of young men.

    First Andrew Tate in his own words

    You can’t slander me because I will state right now that I am absolutely sexist and I’m absolutely a misogynist, and I have fuck you money and you can’t take that away

    Javed, Saman (August 24, 2022). “Andrew Tate shares ‘final message’ after being banned from social media”. The Independent.

    Tate and his business partners offer content and services aimed at young men that ‘solve’ similar challenges to therapy (promising guidance on how to fulfil their full potential)

    For better or worse, Tate sets an example for his audience. The audience are looking for confidence and certainty. Tate provides the answers to the audience through:

    • Social media accounts that promoted an “ultra-masculine, ultra-luxurious lifestyle.”
    • Training courses run by his Hustler’s University business on accumulating wealth and ‘male-female interaction’ to copywriting and cryptocurrency trading.
    • Virtual relationships through a web cam studio described as a total scam.
    • The ‘War Room’ private network that sits somewhere between group therapy, a subreddit and a secret society complete with business networking

    Tate’s work has had an outsized impact in the media and classrooms of the UK. Something a Guardian journalist labeled the ‘Andrew Tate effect’.

    Therapy AI

    As machine learning and chat bots have become more prominent we’ve seen algorithm driven psychotherapy.

    Telemedicine primed market

    The market was primed for the rise of AI driven therapy sessions after platforms like MYNDUP connected people with therapists online or over a mobile app, as part of a wider boom in telemedicine. R/GA talked about telemedicine in terms of it being ‘a more human centred vision of health’ in their Futurevision report series. They saw a clear line of continuity between the kind of service and convenience we’ve received from Amazon and online banking to future telemedicine services.

    Looked at from this perspective, why wouldn’t you want to have online, on-demand therapy sessions?

    So we saw ChatGPT being used for ‘do-it-yourself’ therapy, alongside dedicated systems.

    Dedicated systems like Wysa, Heyy and Woebot use ‘rules based AI’ which is easier to manage from a medical, legal and regulatory point of view.

    Wearables are considered to offer an opportunity for more timely interventions.

    More related content here.

    More information

    Articles

    Esther Perel Thinks All This Amateur Therapy-Speak Is Just Making Us Lonelier | Vanity Fair

    Bessel Van der Kolk on Trauma, America’s Favorite Diagnosis 

    Does Therapy Really Work? Let’s Unpack That. – The New York Times

    The Therapy Issue | The New Yorker 

    Boy Problems – Mother Jones 

    The culture that is Portland – Marginal REVOLUTION 

    America Is Headed Toward Collapse | The Atlantic

    Have Parents Made Their Kids Too Fragile For the Rough and Tumble of Life? | Washington Post

    [Letter from Los Angeles] The Anxiety of Influencers, By Barrett Swanson | Harper’s Magazine – this reads more like something in a Cory Doctorow short story than real life. But its real life

    2021 and the Conspiracies of ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ | WIRED 

    Fitness tracker metrics give rise to health anxiety 

    Fidget spinners, weighted blankets, and the rise of anxiety consumerism – Vox 

    Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health | Financial Times

    Doomscrolling Is Slowly Eroding Your Mental Health | WIRED 

    The Great Feminization of the American University | City Journal 

    The West’s Struggle for Mental Health – WSJ 

    ChatGPT is giving therapy. A mental health revolution may be next | Aljazeera

    Books

    Adrift: 100 Charts that Reveal Why America is on the Brink of Change by Scott Galloway

    The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

  • TikTok quacks + more things

    TikTok quacks

    TikTok quacks is a bit of a harsh label for TikTok content. The reality is that similar content to that turned out by various TikTok quacks appear on YouTube, Instagram and other social media channels. Quack and quackery are synonyms for medical false claims or a ‘snake oil salesperson’.

    Snake Oil

    Social media not only spreads misinformation and false hope across a range of medical conditions, it allows the perpetrators to profit directly from their work. The rise of dodgy health businesses with commerce integrated into their social posts by the likes of TikTok (and Instagram) facilitates TikTok quacks.

    Below are just some of the content currently exposing this intersection between health, wellness, beauty and dishonestly obtained profits.

    More information

    China

    Country Garden facing ‘biggest challenges since our establishment’, chairwoman says, as debt woes, possible restructuring spur default fears – this implies deep structural problems in China

    Consumer behaviour

    What do lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Britons think the British public thinks of them? | YouGov

    AI Nation: Exploring Comfort With AI Applications – Harris Poll – how comfortable American consumers are with AI series across travel, financial services and healthcare

    Economics

    Can unions and industrial policy coexist? – by Noah Smith

    Gadgets

    Phones: dumb handsets outsmart high-tech alternatives | Financial Times

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong’s corporate lawyers test boundaries as Beijing’s influence grows | Financial Times – legal practitioners, including corporate lawyers, are concerned the broadening scope of a sweeping national security law could jeopardise the independence of the city’s legal system, a legacy of British administration, as Beijing tightens its grip. “There is general concern . . . that people are not fully understanding where the boundaries lie,” said a senior corporate lawyer with a global firm who has worked in Hong Kong for more than two decades – not entirely unexpected and a great opportunity for Singapore

    How to

    The Real Reason You’re Having a Hard Time Getting Things Done at the Office – WSJ – Bose noise-cancelling headphones and clear boundaries

    Use and abuse of Google Advanced Search

    Ireland

    Tesco to introduce free virtual GP service for staff | RTÉ – this makes sense in Ireland, given the two track private / public health system there

    Japan

    UNDERCOVER Jun Takahashi Solo Exhibition Info | Hypebeast 

    A weak yen helps Japanese carmakers compete in China | Quartz 

    Luxury

    ‘Quiet luxury’ trend gets a fresh spin in China | Financial Times – this makes sense give the cultural and economic environment in China at the moment

    Interesting for a few reasons:

    • Singapore’s bonded warehouses seem to be more ‘regional’ than Switzerland’s clientele
    • This indicates a continued interest in alternative investments
    • That the video repeatedly goes on to suggest that these items are from customers in ‘Southeast Asia’ i.e. not China, move along…

    Marketing

    APG Strategy Skills Survey 2023 – The Results 

    Materials

    Digital materials look to use different geometry of materials to replace other materials with special properties like foams. It does this through 3d printed lattices.

    Media

    Disney exits the metaverse | web3 is going just great and Disney+ with ads set for November launch in UK – The Media Leader 

    Multiple Google executives exit as UK MD restructures – The Media Leader – disclosure David McMurtrie was my client at ad-2-one Media and video transfer business IMD

    Mail launches football podcast amid audio expansion – The Media Leader – bit of an odd one as I wouldn’t have said that the Mail was well known for its sports coverage

    Online

    Sweden Is Not Staying Neutral in Russia’s Information War | New York Times – The Psychological Defense Agency also raised political concerns when it was proposed, but its leaders have emphasized that mandate allows it to address only foreign sources of disinformation, not content generated in Sweden. The challenge is one facing all democracies that, as a matter of principle, decline to enforce official ideologies, allowing divergent points of view of what is true or false. “The government can’t control the truth if it’s going to be a democracy,” said Hanna Linderstål, the founder of Earhart Business Protection Agency, a cybersecurity firm in Stockholm, and an adviser to the International Telecommunication Union, part of the United Nations. “The government can’t control the truth if it’s going to be a democracy,” said Hanna Linderstål, the senior cybersecurity adviser of Earhart Business Protection Agency.

    Why people — especially young people — are embracing voice notes – Vox – I read this and was reminded a lot of how older people were using WeChat a decade ago and thought about Push-To-Talk on Motorola’s iDEN mobile network technology

    Meta’s Twitter rival Threads unravels | Financial Times 

    Sound the Beats: Spotify’s AI DJ Spins Personalized Tracks | Gizchina – the next step on from Clear Channel’s pioneering of automated radio station selection and playing

    Retailing

    An Uber-backed robot delivery company is going public—but the industry has yet to really deliver – one of the biggest problems seems to be human opportunism and dishonesty.

    ‘The Brand Became Pointless’: Why Marketing Failures Lie At The Heart Of Wilko’s Downfall | The Drum – Wilko’s magic was at the till.

    Software

    ChatGPT In Trouble: OpenAI may go bankrupt by 2024, AI bot costs company $700,000 every day – not terribly surprising, it’s computationally intensive and hard to monetise. Look at how Google and Facebook have looked to squeeze computing power per watt out of their data centres, along with squeezing cost per server right down as well – they did this to reduce operating costs versus income. ChatGPT hadn’t gone there on design and instead uses 10,000 plus servers based around power-hungry top-of-the-range Nvidia graphics processors

    Style

    We’re All Preppy Now | The New Republic 

  • The Code – Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

    The Code

    The Code – Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara is the second book I have read recently about Silicon Valley, this review follows my review of Chip War by Chris Miller. The Code covers the history of Silicon Valley from the post-war to the present.

    Margaret O’Mara

    In terms of her background, O’Mara is a Clinton administration era policy wonk. When O’Mara left policy circles, she became an academic and is now a history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle – at the other end of the country. Her area of focus is on the history of the modern technology industry. She spent five years researching the book in the mid-2010s, just as Silicon Valley was going under a technological and social change.

    The lens shaping everything else that I have written here

    I am a sucker for books on the history of technology and like Chip War, The Code was right in my wheelhouse. It complemented, rather than overlapped some of my existing favourite technology history books like Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires, John Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said or most of Michael Malone and Steven Levy’s output to date.

    Like Miller’s Chip War, O’Mara brought a degree of distance from her material to her writing. She has done a lot of research and surfaced lesser known characters like community computing pioneer Liza Loop in her work, she doesn’t have the inside track.

    Bob Cringely with his work on InfoWorld‘s Notes From the Field column got an inside track from the Valley’s engineers before he went on to write is magnus opus Accidental Empires. Like Cringely, Michael Malone was brought up in the Silicon Valley area and then worked the business section beat as a reporter for the local newspapers. Cringely and Malone lived and breathed the valley. If you are are fan of Cringely and Malone’s works, expect something that is interesting but stylistically very different.

    On to The Code itself

    Other reviewers have used words like ‘masterful’ and ‘majestic history’ to describe the book – which while being a reasonable guide to overall quality aren’t really all that helpful. In contrast to Chip War which took me six months, I managed to storm through The Code in a week. This is partly down my familiarity to the material covered and the airplane view that O’Mara takes when writing about her subject. I enjoyed O’Mara’s writing, but could also see someone coming to it with a good grasp of American political history and current affairs, but no knowledge of Silicon Valley history enjoying it just as much.

    Being an academic O’Mara worked hard to source everything in The Code, she also provides a recommended reading list that goes into different aspects of the story that she laid out in more depth including John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said and Theodore Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley.

    HP's first product, sitting outside of Bill and Dave's office (in HP's headquarters)
    H-P’s first product taken by Robert Scoble

    The book starts in the post-war period as Stanford and Silicon Valley peaked as an area for military contractors. O’Mara references the political lives of the H-P founders alongside the growth of cold war technologies and the space race.

    O’Mara leans hard into Stanford’s defence industry connections that started pre world war II. The book then veers to the decline of the military industrial complex in the area due to a number of factors. The Vietnam war demolished the defence budget. The space programme started to wind down after NASA met Kennedy’s challenge to put man on the moon. Johnson’s social programmes took spend away from scientific developments. Finally the social climate in the US changed.

    The next stage of computing was shaped by counter cultural values which O’Mara covered the libertarian instincts of Silicon Valley pioneers alongside the more community orientated views of the counterculture folks. Unlike other writers, O’Mara also covers the Boston area technology corridor that Silicon Valley eventually overshadows.

    O’Mara focuses more on the finance of Silicon Valley covering some of the highlights featured in Sebastian Mallaby’s The Power Law. But O’Mara also delves into the public markets and the role of lobbying in the Silicon Valley finance machine.

    O’Mara tells how immigration affected the nature of Silicon Valley through the story of Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!. As is the case with policy wonks she puts a lot of emphasis on Al Gore, the information superhighway and the Clipper chip. The Clipper chip resurrected like Godzilla the libertarian Republican party arm of Silicon Valley elites and paved the way for the likes of Peter Thiel later on.

    The Code finishes on the future hopes for autonomous driving by university research teams and Google’s Waymo business.

    You can get hold of Chip War here. More book reviews here.

  • Gatekeeping + more things

    Gatekeeping

    I wish gatekeeping was a thing back in 2005 and 2006 when I was working on the international launch of Yahoo! Answers. The problem that we had was getting people to contribute answers to questions. Gatekeeping and the exhortation to not gate keep is about sharing knowledge and opinions freely – an in real life version of what we saw in early social publishing. Ironically gatekeeping stands in sharp contrast to oversharing as a social faux pas. The kind of knowledge that concerns about gatekeeping is particularly opposed to is opinion based knowledge or NORA.

    Now ‘your jam’ is no longer your jam, but instead offered up to be other people’s jam instead. Your individuality ready to be cloned at a moments notice. Will everything descend to being ‘basic’ or mainstream? Does it disincentivise possessing good taste?

    gatekeeper

    What the Internet’s Use of ‘Gatekeeping’ Says About Power – The rise of “Don’t gatekeep” has reframed keeping things to yourself as a selfish act. But not everything is for everyone! And sometimes the act of sharing does more harm than good. I’m thinking of how Anthony Bourdain felt conflicted about sending droves of tourists to mom-and-pop restaurants. I’m thinking of gentrification and what happens when certain neighborhoods are positioned as hidden gems.

    Beauty

    Why Groupe L’Occitane may delist from the Hong Kong stock exchange | Vogue Business

    Consumer behaviour

    My Generation, by Justin E. H. Smith – captures a sense of now rather than a generation

    Economics

    Study Times op-ed shoots down new policy options | Pekingology – translation from an article from the Study Times. Comments on infrastructure are particularly instructive in terms of the view point that they reflect: To debunk views such as “infrastructure overcapacity is wasteful,” “promoting infrastructure equates to taking the old path that’s inconsistent with high-quality development,” and “limited space,” it’s crucial to fully understand the role of infrastructure investment from a holistic perspective of national economic development. Infrastructure investment doesn’t only interact with the expansion of aggregate demand to stabilize economic operations, but also enhances macroeconomic efficiency, improves people’s living standards, and robustly supports high-quality development. Overall, there’s no issue of excessive infrastructure. On the contrary, there are areas that hinder the efficiency of the national economy and the improvement of people’s living standards. China’s per capita infrastructure capital stock only accounts for 20% to 30% of the developed countries, and public facility investments per rural resident are only about a fifth of an urban dweller, indicating potential for investment

    New analysis reveals how Porsche-VW ‘short squeeze’ distorted the stock market | The University of Kansas 

    Energy

    US airlines ally with farmers to seek subsidies for corn as jet fuel | Financial Times 

    FMCG

    Reckitt Benckiser: too many sterile quarters leave share price flat | Financial Times 

    McDonald’s Hong Kong and Kevin Poon “Coach McNugget Art World” Exhibition | Hypebeast – via Ian at Deft. This was to celebrate 40 years of the McNugget. McDonald’s have always done some smart cultural marketing work in Hong Kong (such as an McDonalds Big Mac themed issue of Milk magazine). Hong Kong seems like a natural home for these things, I remember activating a Coke Zero x Neighborhood collab while there.) But it isn’t only a Hong Kong thing, McDonalds has done some strong cultural marketing internationally as well: from the Cactus Jack happy meal to a bounty programme for rappers that namedropped McDonalds on their mixtape over the years. As my friend Ian observed this is at odds with their current UK positioning ‘ McDonalds is the perfect place for estranged parents to meet their kids for awkward conversations’. The implication in that McDonalds restaurants are a lower rent third space (than Starbucks or Costa) positioning. I have welcomed their value-priced coffee and breakfasts at the end of an all-nighter on a pitch or a long drive. But the UK’s the third space aspect loses all the joy that McDonalds manages to imbue in their children experiences – the treat, the birthday party, the expectation of picking up a much wanted toy in a happy meal. The child to adult disconnect in the experience is something cultural marketing like this can help bridge if done in the UK.

    Gadgets

    US Feature Phone Market Stages Comeback as Gen Z, Millennials Advocate Digital Detox | Counterpoint Research – the reasons are more diffuse than this article is letting on. People like my parents are being forced to get new feature phones by network upgrades. Some people can’t use a smartphone and then there is the digital detox brigade which spans generations, people who need tough phones AND people still needing second phones

    Germany

    TSMC’s New Fab in Germany – by Jon Y – focus around automotive just has Germany has been caught on the wrong side of the move to electric cars

    Chinese responses to Germany’s China strategy: Attack abroad, assuage at home | Merics

    Health

    Unravelling the Link Between Socioeconomic Status and Obesity | INSEAD Knowledge

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong’s corporate lawyers test boundaries as Beijing’s influence grows | Financial Times – legal practitioners, including corporate lawyers, are concerned the broadening scope of a sweeping national security law could jeopardise the independence of the city’s legal system, a legacy of British administration, as Beijing tightens its grip. “There is general concern . . . that people are not fully understanding where the boundaries lie,” said a senior corporate lawyer with a global firm who has worked in Hong Kong for more than two decades

    The Great Dilution: Hong Kong’s Changing Population Mix | Asian Sentinel

    Hong Kong delays Jimmy Lai trial as police question woman linked to exiled lawmaker | Radio Free Asia

    Innovation

    FDA Largely to Blame for Physicians’ Misperceptions on Nicotine | RealClearPolicy

    Materials

    DARPA looks to monetise the Moon | EE Times 

    Media

    Artificial Intelligence Lawsuit: AI-Generated Art Not Copyrightable – The Hollywood Reporter

    Online

    What is dark social and why does it matter for your brand? – New Digital Age 

    ICANN warns UN may sideline techies from internet governace • The Register – move towards China’s vision of cyber-sovereignty

    Retailing

    Small retailers and fans step in as Nike refuses to make replica Mary Earps shirt | England women’s football team | The Guardian 

    Security

    US nuclear submarine weak spot in bubble trail: Chinese scientists | South China Morning Post

    New Supply Chain Attack Hit Close to 100 Victims—and Clues Point to China | WIRED and Dark Reading’s take: Chinese APT Targets Hong Kong in Supply Chain Attack 

    Daring Fireball: ‘Changes to U.K. Surveillance Regime May Violate International Law’ – As I see it, the most likely outcome is that the U.K. passes the law, thinking that the grave concerns conveyed to them by the messaging services are overblown. That the platform providers are saying they can’t comply but they really just mean they don’t want to comply because it’s just difficult, not impossible. And when it becomes law, the platforms will hand it off to the nerds, the nerds will nerd harder, and boom, the platforms will fall into compliance with this law. That’s what they think will happen. What will actually happen, I believe, is that E2EE messaging platforms like WhatsApp (overwhelmingly popular in the U.K.), Signal, and iMessage will stop working and be pulled from app stores in the U.K., full stop. The U.K. seems to think it’s a bluff; I don’t

    Singapore

    Money Laundering Bust Puts Foreign Wealth in Singapore on Notice | Asia Sentinel – if that occurred at the behest of the China then we’re likely to see flight overseas from Singapore. It’s also interesting that these raids have come soon after China arrested a Shanghai immigration consultant to get hold of their database of UHNWI overseas (predominantly in the US). They second question I had would be why Singapore would cooperate with China on this?

    Software

    Now is the time for grimoires – by Ethan Mollick – With the rise of a new form of AI, the Large Language Model, organizations continue to think that whoever controls the data is going to win. But at least in the near future, I not only think they are wrong, but also that this approach blinds them to the most useful thing that they (and all of us), can be doing in this AI-haunted moment: creating grimoires, spellbooks full of prompts that encode expertise. The largest Large Language Models, like GPT-4, already have trained on tons of data. They “know” many things, which is why they beat Stanford Medical School students when evaluating new medical cases and Harvard students at essay writing, despite their tendency to hallucinate wrong answers. It may well be that more data is indeed widely useful — companies are training their own LLMs, and going through substantial effort to fine-tune existing models on their data based on this assumption — but we don’t actually know that, yet. In the meantime, there is something that is clearly important, and that is the prompts of experts.

    Style

    Where Streetwear and Tech Cross Paths: ASUS Vivobook X BAPE® – one of the more cynical collaborations that I have seen with streetwear brands

    Technology

    Deal to develop generative AI on quantum computer | EE Times – how will quantum computing affect a GPT type Bayesian model?

    Web of no web

    Trybals is a YouTube channel that features people from the less developed parts of Pakistan and asks their reactions about different aspects of the modern world. It’s an interesting bit of anthropology. In this episode the panel gets to try a VR experience.