Hiro Protagonist is the main character of Neal Stephenson’s iconic novel Snow Crash. In the novel talks about the rise of the corporation to become a quasi-nation state, a winner takes all economy, a vision of a future metaverse, hacker culture and service hyper-competition with Uber-like employees.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Hiro Protagonist is a hacker who moonlights as a courier to make ends meet. The story starts with Hiro Protagonist trying to deliver a pizza at high speed. The idea is that the courier would deliver a pizza to any location, not just delivery to a building like getting pizza to work or home. Now we’re starting to see these kind of services being rolled out in real life, by building them into in-car systems and mapping applications. This will add more importance to dark kitchens over store fronts, but store fronts are important as they build brand experiences.
The playground behind the interviewee before it was refurbished in the early 2000s used to have a roundabout that I was thrown off at a tangent while it spun around when I was about 3 or maybe 4 years old and landed straight into a puddle. I wore a red hooded anorak made of a red sherpa fleece fabric with an elasticated hood, cuffs and bottom which soaked up half the puddle like a sponge. The photographer had his back turned to Grove Road and what is now an Iceland supermarket. Back when I fell off the roundabout it was a Kwik Save.
Struggling
Even back then it had a reputation of being a hard neighbourhood. Local shops such as Griffiths the butchers catered for a customer base struggling to make ends meet.
To the photographer’s left down the road a bit would have been a social club for (former) members of the Civil Defence. The Civil Defence Corps itself had been stood down in 1968. It was a solid working class area full of unskilled and semi-skilled workers who were employed either locally at the Lever factory next door or on the Mersey from the shipyards of Birkenhead to the chemical industry of the Mersey basin and assorted factories further afield.
Community spirit doesn’t pay the bills
By the 1980s, it looked worse for wear. There were few jobs, fewer still that paid well. And that was before unemployment and the heroin epidemic took their toll. As the economy picked up in the 1990s, the benefits didn’t make it to New Ferry. The one bright spot was a pirate radio station ran by community DJs playing house and techno records every night of the week close by to Grove Road playground. I’d held a couple of small (250 people) all night parties (acid house and garage) in the Civil Defence social club, with the blackout curtains keeping the noise and lights away from nosy neighbours and police patrols.
The people who ran the club put on breakfast for the revellers after the main event. We played ambient music from CDs supplied by a friend’s older brother (Tangerine Dream, The Orb, Vangelis, Kitaro, Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Abba’s Arrival) mixing between two Discmans as the tired revellers drank tea and ate bacon ‘bin lid‘ sandwiches while sprawled out on the floor.
Tickets were sold in advance and the venue details given out on the night by ringing an answerphone. Everyone involved broke even if they were lucky.
Despite being really hard scrabble there was a certain amount of community dynamism going on in the village hall. My Mum used to travel down there to go to knitting classes with older women, some of whom were Irish like her. They would knit for charity.
But all that won’t keep social decay from the door while the community is underemployed and underpaid.
No easy answer
The social decay described in the article isn’t something that happened overnight but over decades. There is no quick fix to the social decay of bad behaviour and feral gangs of children. It is not clear whether there is the commitment, investment, government will or the way to resolve this social decay.
The most individually logical thing to do in a time of social decay is thinking more about personal safety.
Techno-utopianism of early 2000s
Looking back the technology adoption of the 1990s and early 2000s was phenomenal. The mainstreaming of the cellphones, the PlayStation, home PC computers and internet access creating immediacy.
The changes wrought by mobile phones in particular are still rippling through the developing world.
Driving in Japan
I am a huge fan of walkabout and driving videos because you can tell so much about the environment looking at retail spaces, brands, clothing and social interactions going on around you. For instance Japan’s apparent rejection of the electric car for now, favouring hybrid vehicles instead. This particular one of a rural Japanese town gives you a good idea of where Studio Ghibli‘s work comes from.
Fintan O’Toole on Ireland
Great talk by Fintan O’Toole at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
Quiller came out of the cold war. The Quiller series were written under the name Adam Hall by Elleston Trevor who had actually been born Trevor Dudley-Smith. Elleston Trevor like most of the other writers had either served in the second world war or in the national service afterwards. Quiller features in 19 novels written from the mid-1960s to the last one in the mid-1990s.
The books go into a lot of technical detail about spy craft. While he is a man of action, he doesn’t live the high life like James Bond, but has to worry about filing expenses and grim and grey atmosphere of London and Warsaw Pact countries. He has a nervous tick when under stress and has to deal with ‘office politics’ of difficult personalities.
Like Bond Quiller appeared on film, The Berlin Memorandum was re-made as the Quiller Memorandum. Quiller was also made into a TV series by the BBC in 1975 for one season. I knew nothing about it until YouTube.
Spy novel industry
There was a veritable industry of British spy writers. Ian Fleming had James Bond which has been continued like some bizarre literary science zombification experiment long after Fleming himself had died. Post-Fleming’s death there has been 32 new James Bond novels written.
Len Deighton had the unnamed protagonist of his first set of books (though they would be given the name Harry Palmer in the film adaptations):The IPCRESS File, Horse Under Water, Funeral in Berlin, An Expensive Place to Die, Spy Story, Yesterday’s Spy and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy. As this wasn’t enough Deighton wrote ten books about the jaded intelligence protagonist Bernard Samson.
Anthony Price wrote 19 novels featuring Dr David Audley and, or Colonel Jack Butler.
All of these characters had more ‘derring do’ than John LeCarre‘s George Smiley. Deighton’s Bernard Samson’s character has the jaded aspect of Smiley. Anthony Price’s stories are best described as as somewhere between George Smiley and Robert Hannay with the past and ‘present’ woven together.
For the love of books
I picked up the bug of reading these books from my Dad. He used to go and buy these books along with Alistair McLean novels from a florid man in the local market. (Alistair McLean novels were basically the same book and same character with different names and locations).
My Dad left school at 13, he can’t spell but at that time he loved reading novels, engineering books and history. They were around the house at home, so usually after my Dad had read them, I started to read them myself. My childhood reading was a weird mix of ‘children’s books’, fantasy novels which were considered suitable for children (J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula LeGuinn), spy novels, text books and classic science fiction. My Mum made sure that I had a smattering of Irish folklore books in the mix as well.
One person’s literature is another person’s trash
Nowadays, alongside the weighty tomes of James A. Michener, you would be hard pressed to get an Oxfam shop to take many of these books off your hands.
While Le Carre & Fleming have their dedicated followers, the Quiller books, Len Deighton and Anthony Price will be overlooked.
The war on terror didn’t fire the imagination in quite the same way, yet as we go into a new cold war we might see a renaissance in Quiller-type archetypes in escapist fiction of our current times. Mick Herron’s Slough House series ground us too much in reality sometimes.
Abbott curated this interesting discussion on sports health. In my lifetime we’ve gone from football coaches giving players Guinness to bulk them up to this detailed scientific approach which I previously would have only associated with serious bodybuilders like my college friend Carsten who looking for marginal advantages.
Hong Kong
Brain-drained HK workforce marks historic decline – Asia Times – a few things here. The Chinese visa applicants (less than 15,000) coming in won’t plug the gap: 95% of Hong Kong Talent Visa Approvals Are From China – Bloomberg. Though this might not cover mainland Chinese graduating from Hong Kong universities. Secondly, once growth takes off Hong Kong will lose its relative attractiveness for Chinese from an economic point of view. Secondly, the brain drain of teachers, medical staff, social workers and middle class professionals is starting to become significant from the Hong Kong government’s perspective; but a rounding error from Beijing’s viewpoint.
Japan
Repost: Weebs! – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – While I was in Japan over the last two weeks, I asked some local startup founders, VCs, consultants, and random friends whether they had ever heard the word “weeb”. Not a single one had. I was pretty stunned, because Japanese cultural products have given rise to a whole worldwide subculture, and people in Japan itself are barely aware that that subculture even exists. It’s not like it’s a fringe thing, either — the latest volume of the anime Spy X Family was the bestselling book in North America this week, and soldiers at the front in Ukraine do Pikachu dances to relieve stress. Japan became a cultural superpower almost by accident – this was a new one on me. I thought otaku was still the label. NHK World on famous ‘Weeb’ Steve Jobs.
pearº – The World’s Biggest Social Experiment – Pear Ring – imagine if Match.com as well as extending into events for singles decided to allow people to have a badge that said ‘I’m single, date me’. That’s the premise of Pear, except that the badge is actually a ring that looks like fake jade…
Online bookseller Book Depository is closing down with some three weeks notice. It wasn’t a topic at work and barely made a ripple amongst British friends. The Hong Kong part of my social media bubble shared the news and were sad about it. The company had been owned by Amazon since 2011. I used it for a few reasons:
Free postage anywhere. I have friends around the world and Book Depository was a good way of sending a gift book. It made the process of international gifting so much easier. I bought a set of books there as recently as last week. Many of the upset people on social media were from Australasia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia
Getting hold of English books when I lived in Hong Kong. At the time I lived in Hong Kong there were a couple of nice chains that did English language books, but if I wanted something for my professional life or esoteric interests, then online made more sense. Dymocks, Eslite and the various independent stores would only get you so far. For everything else Book Depository helped out. This was partly down to book shops being a ‘lifestyle’ in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia. They carefully curate fiction but aren’t necessarily like the university book shops I spent my teens and twenties in
Arbitrage. Despite being owned by Amazon, there were a number of items that I bought where there was a price difference between Book Depository and their parent company
You could find a particular edition or format, with Amazon it could be a bit of a lottery
It isn’t full of tat like Amazon. Amazon Marketplace has been both a blessing and a curse. Amazon hasn’t done a good enough job curating Marketplace. I found Marketplace useful at the beginning, rather like a fixed-price eBay. Now its a dystopian retail experience littered with a substantial minority of counterfeit products and sub-standard garbage
Their ask the author section provided some interesting reading.
The brand
I always had it in my mind as ‘The Book Depository’ rather than Book Depository. It’s always the way I discussed it with other people. I had to go back and edit stray ‘The’s that slipped into this post.
Book Depository home page
Diminished ambitions
Book Depository is being closed by Amazon as part of cost cutting across its book and device categories. There is a certain irony in Alexa being in full retreat just at the time when LLMs were about to turn up. Alexa skills are likely to get loss in the subsequent withdrawal and LLM expansion. Book Depository helped plug gaps on the map where Amazon didn’t have native businesses. The decline of Book Depository implies an upper limit to Amazon’s global retail expansion.
Beauty bots drive R&D at Unilever’s £68 million facility | Vogue Business – The world’s highest concentration of robots doing material chemistry can be found at Unilever’s lab in North West England. Vogue Business gets a behind-the-scenes peek at the facility, which develops innovative products for brands including Hourglass and Living Proof.
Is China’s New Rocket Really Coal Powered? Deep Space Updates – April 2nd – YouTube – yes kerosene made from the kind of coal hydrogenation process similar to what SASOL used in apartheid-era South Africa. The National Coal Board had a pilot plant doing something similar during the late 1980s at Point of Ayr under what was called a ‘coal liquefaction plant‘. I used to know a few of the guys that had worked there previously. The plant had a number of experienced oil refinery technicians on the staff when it was running. The site was subsequently taken over and was where BHP Petroleum built their sour gas facility and brought natural gas ashore from the Liverpool Bay oil and gas field in the early 1990s. It also probably tells you everything you need to know about China’s climate related decarbonisation goals.
How the new generation of weight-loss drugs work | The Economist – the potential benefits of such drugs go beyond their ability to promote weight loss in individuals. By showing that molecular mechanisms hinder people’s attempts to lose weight, they show that gluttony is not to blame when people remain obese. That should slowly help to eliminate the stigma. Both weight-loss surgery and drugs are useful tools in the fight against obesity. But by changing the conversation these new drugs may remind health-system leaders that they need to do much more to encourage healthy lifestyles.
Hong Kong
‘Fair price, fine quality’: Hong Kong fast-food chains become go-to place for mainland Chinese budget tours | South China Morning Post – Established eatery chain Café de Coral was among those capitalising on the trend as it offered advance bookings for the tour groups, which have increased after the city fully resumed cross-border travel with the mainland earlier in the year. A Post reporter at 11.45am on Monday observed two mainland tour groups of about 30 people each being guided from their coaches and taken to Grand Waterfront Plaza, a shopping centre in To Kwa Wan, where they dined at the site’s Café de Coral outlet.
Online trolls are taking a toll in China – BBC News – In collectivist cultures such as China, those perceived as going against the norm tend to be severely punished, experts say. What makes it worse, they add, is a pervasive culture of shame. “A strong sense of collectivism in China can mean that cyberbullying, when perpetrated as a symbolic act of violence or aggression towards another in a public setting, may lead to drastic measures, such as suicide, to escape that sense of humiliation,” says K Cohen Tan, a vice-provost at University of Nottingham Ningbo China
NTC Volcano or NTC Vulkan in westernised Russian is an information security firm (think Crowdstrike, HackerOne, Mandiant or the part of BAE Systems formerly known as Detica). Information leaked from the company show that NTC Volcano has played a major role in Russian state sponsored cyber attacks.
NTC Volcano also work on protecting large corporates and include Sberbank and Aeroflot. NTC Volcano has partnered with IBM up to last year.
Like the Panama Papers before it, it looks as if there is going to be a succession of NTC Volcano related stories over the next few weeks coming out by the participating media outlets collaborating on the reporting.
Alibaba Reorg – by Kevin Xu – Interconnected – so many motivations wrapped up in this from conglomerate discount to dissipating market power that made them such a high profile target for Chinese government attention
Current state of US-China relationship. This doesn’t take into account the dumpster fire of China’s relationships with the likes of the European Union.
How China’s Spies Fooled an America That Wanted to be Fooled – Lawfare – Rather than untangle the ways in which the MSS seeks to gather U.S. government or corporate secrets, Joske argues that the MSS’s greatest intelligence strength is its massively successful influence operation against U.S. political and business elites – reinforces a lot of the findings in The Hidden Hand by Hamilton & Ohlberg.
The lengths some companies will go… the amount of money, time and effort they will spend… just to avoid paying women of color.
Jodi-Ann Burey
The reality its that AI-generated models aren’t about systemic racism; but the creative class equivalent of John Henry vs. the steam drill, or the Luddites against textile manufacturing machinery. At a systemic view: when capital and labour come into conflict, capital wins.
The only stakeholder group actually being considered is the company’s shareholders. They are usually put in place for efficiency gains that are traded off against ‘just good enough effectiveness’. The need has probably been accelerated by the inflation in influencers prices and the need for a faster turnaround time.
Finally you don’t have to worry about breach of good behaviour clauses which might occur with working models or photographers. It started with virtual influencers pioneered in Japan notably Imma who first appeared in 2018.
How the security strategy of European countries has changed in recent years. TL;DR – the peace dividend is over.
Software
How to Save Android | Digits to Dollars – Android is not in good shape. After 16 years on the market, Android remains heavily fragmented. This requires developers to build hundreds (thousands?) of versions of their app, and consumers face a bewildering array of user interfaces. Developers are deeply frustrated by this. We know many software developers who insist on using an Android phone out of principal, but their green message bubbles stand out as exceptions. Consumers, especially young consumers (aka customers of the future) prefer iOS by wide margins – the problem is testing rather than developing lots of versions
Beyoncé and Adidas mutually agree to call it quits – A Wall Street Journal report states that this development comes a couple of months after Ivy Park witnessed a 50 per cent decline in sales. The label pooled USD 40 million in 2022, however, the news outlet showed a projection of USD 250 million. This is a massive shrink from USD 93 million in sales in 2021. – the latest collection looked more like high vis workwear than stylish activewear.
