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[failtoplan]

Saving Capitalism from Itself

I used to think I was an anti-capitalist. From the Rage Against the Machine posters on my bedroom wall, the Che Guevara tattoo I almost bought myself for my 21st birthday, to my continued dislike of speculative finance and its exotic instruments; the notion that our lives should be in service of the market sat uneasily with me. But I also like nice things, and have for a decade and a half have made a career out of playing games with value and culture in the marketing services industry; so I have always wrestled with dissonance.

But it’s this dissonance that is at the heart of what makes us human, and what has made humans so successful. We possess both the urge to compete and to co-opt. Both of them were – are - vital to our success. It’s why despite the obvious bloody brutality and aching banality of warfare, there is still a certain glamour that comes with the whiff of cordite and cold steel. It’s why we still venerate and decorate our war heroes. It’s also why self-sacrifice is as often praised as victory. Its almost certainly why the most lucrative sports; those most watched, most written about, most fervently followed are team sports that combine both belonging and rivalry. Despite respectable audiences, its why there will never be any golf riots or tennis ‘Ultras’. It’s why the Olympics is the one time when individual sports are most likely to spark the collective imagination; when they are in the context of an ‘us’. Cooperation within competition.

In its most elemental form, capitalism is simply ‘the market’. The market is both competition and co-operation. As soon as humanity moved beyond basic subsistence, it was this mechanism of exchange that allowed fair co-operation and fair competition when it came to things; assets, resources, time. This meant division of labour, exchangeable surpluses, efforts that could be re-deployed elsewhere; in language, in literature, in philosophy and religion and the stories that allowed us to progress along our zig-zagging but ultimately upward trajectory.

But markets have never been without rules, because they were always defined by and designed for, specific socio-political goals. There are countless examples. The guilds of the mercantile age aiming to keep limits on certain professions, medieval zoning keeping theatres and brothels out of the City of London, tariffs to tilt the tables for key industries at countless points in the history of trade; consumer protection, regulations and child labour laws; they have all been part of the ongoing negotiation of the ‘moral limits of markets’. And these have always shifted, based on our times. I mean, we used to trade humans – including I would presume some of my forebears - until we decided that was ‘not cool’. The proscribed footprint of the market and its rules of engagement have constantly evolved to meet the needs of societies that they served.

This is why ‘Capitalism’ - with a capital C - is so problematic in the 21st Century. In its purest, Marxist, sense it is incredibly useful to understand the industrial capitalism of the 19th Century; Marx was always a better historian and analyst than theorist; As a framework for understanding a period of time when the mass populace was seen primarily as a labour force it is invaluable, but does it work if we project it backwards into pre-industrial mercantile capitalism of the 16th, or forward into the 20th Century’s consumption-driven society, where we the people were primarily seen as drivers of demand? The Market – capitalism – evolves according to the society which it serves.

The problem I had – have – is with the Neoliberal Capitalism that I grew up under, the only capitalism I have personally know; the one where we are all incentivised to be mini ‘Capitalists’, privileging competition over co-operation, in order to serve the market itself. The reason why the market, why capitalism, has become so unappealing for so many now is because this neoliberal market lacks any idealogical prefix. For better or for worse – and in the big scheme of things it has ultimately been for better – the market had always been a means serving a society’s ends, but now the market is now the ends and our socio-political lives are the means.

Without understanding the fundamental role that the market, in its most elemental sense serves; to mediate between our urge to compete and our need to co-operate, it has been allowed to run amok. Neoliberal Capitalism is placing brick on the accelerator and then jumping out of the car. The market is a tool and we are responsible as a society, as a polity for how it is used. There is no such thing as a ‘Capitalist Society’.

No wonder we are rebelling in all directions. In the face of increasing wealth and decreasing worth, empty economic growth and chasmic inequality we turn wherever we can see an alternative. Nationalism, nativism, economic Luddism. Orban, Corbyn, Bolsanaro. They all diagnose the problem. And more frighteningly, for those of us of the left, all of us who could loosely be termed progressives the Right may be closer to getting it right when it comes to providing a direction and a solution. Illiberal Capitalism at least begins to provide a purpose for the market, a direction. It makes the market once again the means to an ends. It’s just that this ends leads towards the border wall and the purge, the lynching, the internment camp, perhaps war. But it may succeed because is is a vision for shaping the market, not simply the desire to burn it down.

The issue with anti-capitalism in the 21st century is that it is fighting the previous war. The classic Marxist rhetoric is designed for overthrowing industrial capitalist world that no longer exists. The sentiment is admirable, but times have changed.

But there are similarities. Much like industrial capitalism was for the few, neoliberal capitalism has been for even fewer. Current upheavals may well represent its death spasm. It can’t come soon enough. We are in a time of flux, but we must not mistake the gross unfairness of this version of capitalism with a fundamental flaw with the market itself. This is the time to radically reimagine what the purpose of the market itself is. What are the rules of engagement? What are the behaviours we want to incentivise? Changing the world to be as we would wish it is Judo, not boxing; we must work with natural momentum not against it, we must work with the seemingly contradictory angels of our nature. And this does not mean I believe there is not a role for the state. But where we allow competition and where we do not should be decided with an eye firmly fixed on the future. Many experiments in privatisation have not worked because the incentives have been wrong. Railways and utilities should probably be renationalised, so they can be greened and subsidised with road charging nationwide; we subsidise the internal combustion engine by building highways, yet we privatise clean mass transit. A carbon tax on every item bought that reflects its true cost to the planet. Monetary policy that targets the Gini coefficient rather than GDP growth. I am not a policymaker, but these are the places I would start.

The path to this Damascene moment has been a long one for me. I am not against Capitalism. I am against this Capitalism.

[failtoplan]

Future Imperfect - On Capitalism, Technology and Ideology

Looking out from the 31st floor balcony, it doesn’t seem high until you look down. Shenzhen stretches 80 kilometres east to west, but is only 10 deep, North-South. The city snakes laterally, littorally, between the hills of the Hong Kong border, along  Shenzhen Bay to the Pearl River delta, like a badly kept concrete lawn, with clumps of seventy and eighty story towers sprouting like steel weeds. The 115 story Ping An Tower, the worlds 4th largest, the town’s own tall poppy. When night falls, the entire town lights up like a circuit board, streaming with steel and light. The immaculately kept, perpetually swept, cycle path along the Dasha river is filled with office workers on dockless rental bikes, hired by the half hour, headed to one of the city’s many tech clusters, downstream, deeper into Nanshan district. They’ve phased out almost all the old taxis, replaced with a fully electric fleet. The same for the buses. Pretty much every transaction, from street-corner noodles to legal fees are carried out with QR codes and digital wallets. Cashless, silent, sleek.

This is not ‘The Future’, but it is ‘A Future’. Two days a week I commute from Shenzhen to Hong Kong. The journey takes around an hour and a half, but the time travelled is greater than the distance covered. After getting stamped out of Mainland China and into Hong Kong at the vast Shenzhen Bay checkpoint, coaches and cars spiral up onto the five-and-a-half-kilometre bay bridge to cross over to the New Territories. As we roll up the overpass onto the bridge, the plaiting of concrete weaves carriageways from right-to-left and left-to-right. The first sign that they do things differently here. At least for now.

Hong Kong, like Tokyo, represents a certain obsolete near-future in the collective imagination. Having had its image and form repeatedly appropriated by Hollywood as a stand-in for numerous dystopias, the familiarity can make it seem almost underwhelming. Hong Kong looks exactly like ‘Hong Kong’ - a trait it shares with New York. It also feels like yesterday’s vision of tomorrow. The stuttering neon signs and diesel-streaked streets, PoMo towers and marble-lined lobbies are a particularly sharp contrast with Shenzhen’s unironic modernity. From its peak in 1993, Hong Kong has declined from twenty-seven to less than three percent of China’s GDP. But beyond the numbers, it feels like a city in decline. Slowly, megaprojects such as the Hong Kong-Macao-Zhuhai bridge and the China High-speed Rail Link are stitching the territory together with the mainland, bringing Hong Kong’s greatest fear ever-closer, becoming just another mid-sized Chinese city. With the perceived erosion of its Rule of law, the Special Administrative Region has become a contested space. The acute confrontation over the ‘two systems’ principle, is also representative of a bigger conflict between two ideas. Two visions of what the future could be.

Words can be problematic; they are both the obstacle to articulating a thought and the best way to try. This clash of ideas, in which Hong Kong is just one front, isn’t easily reduced to opposing pairs as the Cold War once was. Capitalism’s ‘victory’ over Communism was always an artificial, lexigraphic binary that pitted an economic system against a total political, social and economic order. ‘Capitalism’ is synecdochic, an easy shorthand for ‘democratic capitalism’ and the free and limited, markets, open societies and shared small-L liberal consensus regarding the primacy of the individual. Democratic Capitalism is Limited Capitalism. And it was ‘Limited Capitalism’ that ‘won’. The front line crossed by the arcing span of the Shenzhen Bay Bridge is not the battle between capitalism and communism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is Capitalism unencumbered by Democracy. It is the front  line between Total and Limited Capitalism.

Limited Capitalism was never an outright winner, but in its rhetoric, it strived to achieve the illusion of permanence. The rights of the individual – the societal sidekick to the economic superhero - has never been inevitable and maybe not even natural. Increasingly this relic of our post-Enlightenment experiments feels like a humanistic blip. In the face of Brexit and Trump, Bolsanaro and Orban, I have found myself increasingly having to defend the ‘pragmatism of the primacy of the individual’ to friends not just in Singapore and Shanghai, but Boston and Berlin. Yes, it is the freedom to screw up, but it is also the freedom not to be screwed with.

When measured in terms of human development Limited Capitalism has been a great success. But ‘Capitalist Democracy’ is a productive tension, not a synonymic pair. Capitalism privileges results, Democracy, the process. One is fast, the other is slow. The market is majoritarian, while the democratic enshrines the individual, not merely responsible to a simple majority. This makes elections, perversely, the least important aspect of a democracy. Limited Capitalism is an uneasy hybrid. You are free to consume, you are free to participate, but the between the two there is no equivalence. The human flourishing this has propagated cannot be measured by statistics alone. It is this tension that universalised the franchise, enshrined judicial independent and – aspirationally -declared Universal Human Rights. Less tangibly and more significantly it gives each of us a hope of genuine human dignity and all of us some faith in a societal-level trust. Maybe it was easier to win hearts and minds in the late 20th century with Right to Buy than the Rights of Man, but failing to promote the civil alongside the economic conflates consumption with participation, creating the opportunity for Total Capitalism.

-- Shenzhen’s subway tunnels are lined with motion-synced LED screens that animate adverts outside the carriage windows selling pizza and pet food station to station. My connected TV won’t switch on without first showing me a short film promoting the latest toilet paper or plastic surgery procedure. Pop-up ads and promotions are a pervasive part of every single product or service, physical or virtual that I use. Upsell, cross-sell, resell. The imperative to consume is everywhere, the Chinese Dream constantly reinforced as the route to individualisation and self-actualisation. Judged by the old Communist clichés of a “decadent West,” focussed on temerarious consumption, contemporary China is the most “western” place I have ever lived or been. One where I am no more and no less than the sum of my purchases. I buy therefore I am.

At the same time deep integration of seamless technology has evolved a new species of human as consumer, Homo Emptus. The local branch of KFC lets me buy a Family Bucket with nothing more than my face, using cameras linked directly to my virtual wallet which holds my credit cards and fictive cash. Recently I was walking through the precinct by my block, when a young woman ran up to me, apologising. Her cleaner’s phone had stopped receiving transfers and she didn’t have the cash to pay. Did I have any? Pulling a handful of 100 yuan notes out of my pocket, she pulled out her phone, scanned my wallet and transferred me the 300 kuai which I had in cash. In less than a minute I had become a human ATM. It was demeaning and thrilling at the same time, I imagine not dissimilar to the excitement felt by the freshly humiliated submissive.

Sometimes living here can feel like magic. But if you only immerse in the wonder, you miss the cost. Recently, a group of cyclists in Shanghai rode past a police officer, stopped by the side of the road, deep in an animated discussion with the driver they had just pulled over. The group, aware the policeman was otherwise occupied, slowly rolled through the red signal ahead, traffic light on a quiet Saturday morning. Fifteen minutes later by the time they had reached their café stop and pulled out their phones to pay, they had all been fined. Facial recognition cameras mounted on top of the police car had ID-ed them and then allowed the officer digitally ensure justice was done. When we are defined only by our consumption, this make complete sense, our economic life is simply ‘life’, giving the state unprecedented control in return for our convenience. Seamlessness may be fast, but to protect Limited Capitalism, we need seams.

The reality is though that our willingness to conflate commercial choice with civil freedoms has makes it easy for us to walk backwards into Total Capitalism. Using ‘Capitalism’ as a shorthand for so long has meant a lack of focus on the social and political dimensions that has allowing the market to perform as a poor stand-in for the whole. This has led to declining trust in the very institutions that underpin both our societal freedom and our consumer choice. The recent World Values Survey shows a minority in both Europe and the US of people born after 1970 believe it is ‘essential to live in a democracy.’ If this is the case then we have collectively failed to remind ourselves what ‘democracy’ really entails. It has also led to the bizarre inversion for many on the neoliberal right who see any democratic limit placed on the market as ‘undemocratic’

The rising indifference to the democratic can be seen in part as a consequence of Limited Capitalism’s success. Just as a fish does not know that it is wet, we take for granted the protections afforded the individual. We have collectively and systemically failed to remind ourselves of the importance of the water we all swim in. Political leaders and populist demagogues who owe their very existence to the small L liberalism that underpins Limited Capitalism have failed to give credit, choosing instead to pee in the pond for short term gain. Taking our collective socio-political foundations for granted has led to their erosion. Ignoring them has also reduced the success of a state to its economy alone. Whilst freedom of speech won’t feed my children, GDP won’t make them happier or more morally rich. This tyranny of the economic means that states which favour the fast and the outcome will be judged the best performing, outshining those that optimise for the slow, the process, the individual. By judging a state by its economy rather than their humanity, we set up a framework in which the Total Capitalism is not only increasingly easy to admire, but objectively ‘better’, with no way to quantify its glaring qualitative flaws. The fallacy that our economic lives are an adequate stand-in for our civic ones provides the ideological misdirection to pull the trick off. Only what is counted is valued.

Total Capitalism, by succeeding on these terms, promotes a worrying model of growth and unfreedom, chipping away at the old liberal consensus. As pervasive technologies allow ever-greater accumulation of information, we are reaching an inflection point, two divergent versions of how this data is used and its implications for how we live. Progress marches an there is a decision to be made, inaction is not possible. A battle that is waged by only one side, even one of ideas, is not without bloodshed; it is a massacre.

Unencumbered by the limits that the state apparatus of Limited Capitalism places on it, technology can quickly become dystopian. The Limited Capitalist model is not just a check on economic entities – as the EU has proved with its fines on Google and Microsoft - but also on governments. And it adds an implicit societal dimension to the economic role. When Apple refused to provide a back door to iPhone for the FBI, it was asserting its social responsibility, not just its economic function. It helped that these two impulses were congruent here, but the difference between that and the case of the Shanghai cyclists is stark. Tencent, makers of the ubiquitous WeChat Wallet in question, were doing nothing wrong by allowing the state to pick pockets; they were fulfilling their duty, legally obliged to do so in the People’s Republic. The FBI’s response to Apple’s refusal was that American lives might be lost, but people died enshrining the rights Apple was upholding. Do we still believe the defence of the individual is worth dying for?

It would be worth asking that question to the millions of minority Muslims constantly surveilled, or interred in camps in Xinjiang. Advanced monitoring technologies, sharpened to scalpel-like precision, have created an unprecedented digital panopticon. The whole region is monitored at a level of detail that previously would have taken vast armies of watchers and handlers. Now instead, the state has the ability to micromanage human life at a macroscale;  facial recognition, device tracking and digital monitoring turn an entire country-sized region into a prison colony. Xinjiang is not just a tragedy though; it is a testbed. China has rolled the same systems across the entirety of its domestic train network as well as at every airport, port and major public area. More disturbingly, it is a showroom for the implementation of its own particular strain of Total Capitalism. A sinister demonstration of how to unshackle the market from democracy, providing economic liberation whilst maintaining total control. For parts of the world that were previously faced with the choice between an all-inclusive version of modernity, open society and all, China offers an alluring alternative, a cake-and-eat-it model powered by pervasive technologies and financed by Belt and Road loans. And it is one that has succeeded by our own ‘Capitalist’ yardstick.

Total Capitalism is by no means inevitable, and its vision of the future not the only one. Technology is neutral and can be used co-opted for community as well as commerciality. The liberal limits within Liberal, Democratic, Limited Capitalism have allowed it to do both. But our willingness to collapse the social, political and economic into one big flat now have left us at a critical juncture. Hong Kong’s fight is an imperfect allegory for the decision that we need to make about what we should measure and what really matters, particularly in the developed world. We cannot take for granted what we already have. An era is only named after it has long passed. It is up to us to decide if we are to witness the end of this one.

[failtoplan]

Letter to Prof Appiah

I recently read ‘The Lies that Bind’ by Anthony Kwame Appiah. I thought it was fantastic book and left me with many thoughts and responses. I wrote him a letter, but he didn’t reply, so I shall share it here… Hopefully some of them make sense for those that haven’t read the book, and for anyone who has, would be fascinated to hear.

——

Dear Professor Appiah

Firstly, apologies for this unsolicited note, and the second rate undergrad-level thoughts it contains.

After finishing ‘The Lies that Bind’, I really wanted to put down some thoughts - I hope you don’t thing its too weird that I have then sent them to you….

I have been thinking a lot about the ideas that you explore about identity within your book. Identity -  and in particular nationality and it’s composite bits - is something that I have been thinking about a lot recently and a little bit for a long time, particularly as mixed-race Afro-caribbean Brit living in an British Asian former colony (Singapore) for the last four years. (I could write multiple emails just picking apart my observations on identity here in response to some of your writing - one of my neighbours told me the story of how, as a young boy, he went to bed waving one flag and woke up waving another 53 years ago)

On a personal level I really connected with the elements you wove in of your own story and how your unique viewpoint allows you to describe the absurdity of reductive and singular notions of identity that essentialists and ethnocentrists cling to. Having in my own small way straddled multiple worlds during my own experience; most obviously of race, but also of class and of culture, I have always had a sense that ‘obvious’ category divides and definitions aren’t particularly natural or clear or obvious, but I also feel that is the gift of a privileged viewpoint. I smiled when you referred to yourself as ‘English’ as I remember one particularly revealing late night debate with a very good friend (he still is now) from my college who vehemently denied me use of the title because I “don’t have the blood”.

The thing that really struck me as I read your work was the outsized role that Country or the Nation plays in tying together the contemporary versions of the four other sorts of identity that you explore. It seems that (to borrow one of your most lovely turns of phrase in the book) Nation, or the Nationalism born of the industrial nation state is the ‘Medusa Gaze’ that fixes and reduces the other facets identities. Between the French Revolution, the 19th Century romantic liberal-national movements and the technological and economic shifts of the Industrial Revolution, the overlapping, multilayered versions of identity that still lingered at the time of Ettore’s birth were hammered flat, collapsed and co-opted by modern Nationalism. Ironic that what at the start of the 19th Century was the great ideal of the liberal (I remember studying why ‘Deutschland Deutschland Uber Alles’ was a message initially to inspire citizens of a patchwork of grand-duchies and principalities to ‘feel’ German above ‘Protestant’ or ‘Hanseatic’ or ‘Prussian’) became the refuge and strength of the authoritarian. Perhaps natural too, as once the liberal-national dream to ‘create’ has been fulfilled, the logical next step is to ‘conserve’?

Then  of course this was exported to the rest of the world, through amongst other things the ‘Census, Map, Museum’ as Benedict Anderson puts it, and as you recognise when you talk about the invention of the Hindu (the same is true of the definition ‘Malay’ in Singapore - there has been some fantastic work done on how this authoritarian island utopia is a post colonial government deploying unreconstituted colonial structures and powers.

By lashing together states-wide tribalism for mass mobilisation - for war and for industry, using the vines and tentacles of creed and colour and culture, Country became Nation and it fixed these ideas, creating a mass cultural product that was compellingly simple and dangerously compelling. The lies we tell ourselves aren’t a problem in themselves - as you highlight in so many of your pre-industrial examples, until they are denied the elasticity and vibrancy to continue to flex and grow. Some of the examples you use from religion and evolving consensus on values highlight this beautifully, and in part I wanted to write to you to see what your response would be to the thought which struck me -  namely, that it was this industrial homogenisation of these other elements by the Nation-State (to which I would add language, at least as a historical category to this) which caused so many of the problems we see now in ‘identity politics’; that identity politics as we see it, is a product of this process. Religious fundamentalism, racial essentialism and cultural ossification are all modern industrial products, and like Nationalism, are profoundly unsuited to the reality of the contemporary  world - it’s no coincidence that it primarily is supranational bodies like the EU that are suited to - and have at least had some limited success being - a counterpoint to transnational corporations.

When you then went on to argue the opposite when it came to class, that we do not pay enough attention to it’s continuity and the myth of meritocracy (our 20th Century version of Mayer’s ‘Persistence of the Old Regime’) I was even more excited. Perhaps here I push my reading of you work too far into my limited (and rusty) intellectual realm as a historian by training, a democratic socialist by inclination and someone working in the ‘commercial application of social sciences’ (I say grandiosely - I am but a humble market researcher…) but could in some ways this be the counterpoint to Nation? Maybe I have been listening to Paul Robeson sing ‘Joe Hill’ too often recently, but it struck me that if the two work in opposite directions and by making class as you describe it more visible, class could provide a counterpoint to the problems of Nation? Or at least as a lever to prise back apart some richness and layers?

Lastly, as a liberal, the thing that you touch upon which touched me most is in your section on Cultural appropriation. When other ‘liberals’ throw it round cheaply, I shudder. That is truly (to use another of your phrases - and I have been using these a lot talking to people recently, so it’s not just here to flatter you in this email) a source code fallacy. By engaging on those terms, they truly are reinforcing exactly the essentialism that you rail against, and having had this argument with so many people recently, and ‘tarnishing’ my ‘correct’ cosmopolitan/liberal credentials it was relief to read someone far more eloquent and intelligent and me articulate the sentiment. he yardstick of ‘respect’ is a useful heuristic for making the phrase redundant. There are a few copies of the book along with specific pages called out already on their way to some people. You express the idea far better than I have ever managed!

Anyway, I hope you have time to read this, and certainly don’t expect a reply, but I really just wanted to say thank you for writing something so thought provoking and refreshing - definitely one of my books of the year so far,

Best

Adam

(human)

P.S I do also really wonder if you have read any, and what you think of the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates, but I feel like that must be an irritating question you get asked all the time, and the FT was wise enough to avoid it in their recent interview with you, so I shall do the same. His work does remind me of a bad joke someone told me - Why is race like Santa Claus? They are both not real, but have both caused so much genuine sorrow and suffering…

[failtoplan]

PostBrand Brand Thinking

I came back to the notes for this piece recently and as I thought about some of the things I have been asked to do, I wondered, Are Tech Companies bad at ‘brand’, or rather, have they forgotten that they have already smashed down the old battlements of what brands were...

The Persistence of the Ancien Regime

It scares me the extent to which modern companies, often “tech” companies mimic the old. Like the 19th Century industrialist, who after making themselves rich through disruptive production and facilitating rapid urbanisation, builds a grand country house, pastiching an older style. Here they play the part of the country Lord, clothing themselves in the fabric of the past - literally and metaphorically.  These wealthy arrivistes saw the old ways as both respectable and aspirational. At the same time as the very way in which they created their wealth, the rapid innovation, disruptive technologies and scant regard for regulation (and in this case, child labour) made that old world and it ways anachronistic. Vanity and the weight of history however play their part. Their desire to ape the past, for the legitimacy it confers is as illogical as it is understandable.

What was a brand

In the case of 21st century’s techno-industrialists, the retrograde vanity comes in the form of ‘brand’. A brief historical detour. Brands, or rather ‘branding’ in it's modern form, was conceived in the mid 20th Century as a reaction to what Rob Walker in Buying In calls “the very good problem”. Previously, product alone made a difference; one thing was almost certainly better than another. But rapidly production techniques improved and costs fell and the reality was from Soap Powder to Cigarettes, almost everything was better than people needed or could tell apart; everything became “very good”.

When quality can’t differentiate, in steps brand, intentionally created distinct value to defend against ‘functional parity’. In an era of mass one-way communication, this proved a hugely effective way of shaping what people thought about and associated with your product. This was ‘branding and advertising’ as most still understand it. Communications across touchpoints (the “5Ps” product, price, place, pack & promotion) were all designed to give an impression, or rather a cluster of impressions that formed some tags - emotional metadata - around a product to help tell them apart. There is of course functional data there too - what is it good for, when should I use it, but for many categories (disinfectant, running shoes) this is pretty similar - a reductive, functional shorthand in a flat media world. Pepsi was Now, Nike was Achievement,  Newport was (infamously) Empowerment.But we’ve come a long way, baby….

The problem is that this is reliant on a one-way-world, where there are few channels to control, no feedback loop beyond sales, and messages can be simplistic and reductive. The reality of the landscape that has been created by the FANG companies and they ilk is that it is no longer possible to be so reductive. A fragmented and individually ‘curated’ consumer and media landscape means that we can look behind, under and inside the ‘brand’, rather than just at it. We can pick it up, throw it against the wall, see what others think of it. This has implication for how we communicate and interact as marketers and how we think about the idea of a (Post)Brand. More below.

New Titans

New technology companies were instrumental in creating this new reality. They both gave the tools and channels through which people could look at, interact with and talk about companies in 3d. That is not to say that people spend most of their time talking about your business - if they spend 5 seconds in a day you are one of the lucky, famous few, but it does mean the ways in which they hear, and what they hear are increasingly diffuse. Rather than a world of Brands, which are reductive, we are entering a time of PostBrands which are expansive.

These tech titans should be best place for this reality, they created it and they are also some of the few companies selling products that aren’t cursed by the ‘very good problem’ - The experience of Facebook through is size, functionality and reach is different to another platform. YouTube excels when compared to Daily Motion in both content and delivery. And if you have ever tried a Bing search, you’ll know…

Yet like the 19th Century Mill owners, my experience of these companies as a consultant has been that they have focussed on old vanity metrics, have talked about values, love and positioning like a soap-powder and looked at their 3D world in a 2D way. They aspire to be loved brands in a world where they have been instrumental in exploding the anachronistic myth of Brand Love

PostBrand Thinking

Ironically, it has been many of the old guard who have been forced to adapt and change. Unlike the arrivistes, the 20th century’s biggest brands have adapted faster to becoming PostBrands because they have not had the luxury of near-monopoly positions, or heavily functionally differentiated disruptive offerings.

Companies trump Brands

A PostBrand doesn't fabricate a flat emotional backstory, it explains and dramatises the one it has. It makes the company easy to grasp, rather than hides the company inside a ‘brand’ - Google’s use of the Doodle on their homepage embodies this beautifully, but more broadly, this idea that “Companies>Brands” informs the next four points that follow

Augment Equity, don’t write positionings

Positionings are useless. Seriously. As an aspiration they have a use internally, but really they are a purpose statement. And be damn sure it draws on your equity. To both butcher and invert Austen; Positioning is what we would think of ourselves, Equity what we would have others think of us. Positioning is irrelevant if it doesn’t shape equity, and purpose has to align with equity... and where it doesn’t it's a long journey… Imagine moving Coke from ‘happiness’ and ‘refreshment’ to ‘Sporty Health’ - product is part of this, but equally Mountain Dew aligns with some sporty and active elements - along with a healthy dose of sugary, high-caffeine rebellion.

Apple would struggle with ruthless efficiency too...despite making computers

Think & Act Purpose

Internally, externally, in product, comms, pack. It's trendy to point out TOMS here, but I would rather talk about the much less sexy 1990s Tesco - the UK supermarket who decided that ‘Every Little Helps’ was going to be their guiding principle. Open a new till when there was more than two people in front, empower store staff to help and inform, bring out own brand ranges of great value essentials from canned soup to school clothes. And this was the 90s. Of course, it slowly descended into distress discounting. Then 2008 and Lidl happened. But the point is Purpose does not have to mean ‘Social Purpose’ (which also isn’t CSR, but that for another blog…)

Build meaning, don’t ‘message’

All of the touch points through which we communicate about our company's layer towards this idea of PostBrand. It's impressionistic, layers of fuzzy paint and chiaroscuro, not a photograph and a map. This is liberating - there is no such thing as ‘on message’ or ‘on brand in the narrow sense. Rather you need to be in the right area, helping add to the right association, the right ‘tags’. It also means that what people working on brands find repetitive isn’t. We live this stuff, whereas people live their lives instead

Storytelling, but no Navel-gazing

So naturally, this means tell stories, tell stories about your company and your product and process, but be realistic and be respectful. Start from the assumption of ‘why should anyone give a shit’. Not in a confrontational way (unless you are my employer in certain geographies…!) but because people need to see you as resonant in their lives - and ideally a product that is useful.

And I say resonant here, rather than relevant for good reason. Relevant in a comms brief ends up with audience mirroring in ads. And no-one really wants to look at themselves for that long if at all...

[failtoplan]

Talent, and the power of ‘doubt’

(not THAT doubt, but it beats clipart)

Sitting in a windowless conference suite in Tokyo last year a few weeks into a new role at a new company, I listened to a company chief sketch out the conundrum which he saw the business in. He explained, that morning, to the half-bored, half-hungover leaders and middle-managers that, because ‘we had optimised for IQ,’ we were inevitably short on emotional intelligence. In his eyes, because they had hired so many (allegedly) ‘brilliant smart people’ such as those assembled in the room, that we were low on empathy and understanding. This was, in his view, because ‘EQ and IQ tend to be inversely correlated. I have to say the blinding idiocy of this has stuck with me for a long time and makes it hard for me not to think I am in the wrong place. 

Then again, it's probably statements like that which mean I am exactly where I am needed...

I fundamentally disagree with this assertion for a number of reasons. Not least of which is that it is heavy enough with implicit gendering that you could throw it into the deep end of the school pool for swim-test day. Likewise even if we were to assume that a certain kind of analytical business-focussed brains did preclude emotional smarts ( and that is a fucking big pass…) then it would be an admission that they were hiring only one very specific strain of what could be considered intelligent. Countless studies have shown that a diverse group of average or even ‘below average’ (whatever the fuck average means) people outperform a monoculture of overachievers. Not the smartest move. But there is a third element here that I want to think about - doubt.

Now, doubt can be seen as an unwanted side-effect of EQ, but I would argue that doubt and emotional sensitivity are part of the same thing. If you wrongly assume that you are hiring the most intelligent when you hire the most self-assured you create a self-fulfilling prophecy. And you may not hire the smartest people.

Think of it this way - how smart can you be if you are really sure? Would you stake your next three months salary on that thing that you are sure of? Your entire career? A relative's life? Fantastic if you can. The world needs believers. The world also needs clear-headed analytical thinkers that can take emotion out of a decision when they need to. But their EQ in many way is unrelated. And with emotion comes doubt. It is the awareness of others, other possibilities, the consequences of other convictions and beliefs, even if they could be wrong.

The very best people I have worked with have combined self-awareness with doubt. They know what they are good at, they understand their abilities as well as their limitations and are unafraid to articulate them. But they do not ‘believe’ their own hype. They may light fires at work, but they never suck the oxygen out so that there is no room for alternative viewpoints. The very best leave space in their own minds for the ambiguities. They can be decisive when they need to, but they decide having looked at something from all side and through the eyes of others. They are hugely intelligent because they harness their emotional understanding in order to do that. It is that same understanding that allows them to hire people who aren’t like them, diametrically opposite even, because they can see what they bring.

Be wary of anyone that claims to be certain.

[failtoplan]

The Political Ideology of the Cloud

“Among the declarations of faith in the future is the act of buying. Each time we go out and buy a new car or decide to purchase a new suit, a pair of shoes, a house, we base our decision on a philosophy of a life, a Weltanschauung. Buying is more than a commercial function...The real salesmen of prosperity and therefore democracy, are the individual who defend the right to buy a new car, a new home, a new radio.”

Ernst Dichter - The Strategy of Desire (1960)

------

Dichter’s muscular defense of the right, and rightness of consumption is understandable given the man, the time and the context. Fleeing Vienna in 1939, he was part of the wave of emigre's shaped by experience of the old world that went on in the years after the Second World War to shape the new. He was to advertising what Bernay’s was to PR. ‘Motivational Research’ as he called it provided the foundation for much of the second-rate persuasion I have spent the last ten years of my career working on, as well as theoretical framework of sorts to sit behind it. This, however, is not the place to dive deep into that.

Having recently been working with a number of large tech firms, consulting on product development and marketing strategy before (perhaps rashly?) joining one, I have been reading Dichter in the light of that work. Above, he essentially describes purchase as a political act. An ‘vote’ with your chequebook for a particular version of the future cast by checkbook rather than ballot box. What he describes above as democracy is in truth a very specific strand - consumer-capitalist democracy -  which however you feel about it has created the environment in which we are now living. What we see around us is a ‘world according to Dichter et al’, whether you believe in the Congruence of Consumer Capitalism and Democracy or not. Again, for another time. But his work is of a particular time - of a bipolar world of Sputniks and Studebakers, of H-bombs and the Berlin Wall. It was a time when you were truly ‘with us, or against us’. However, in it's early 21st Century incarnation, it has, like so many things become far more fragmented, much more multiple, and considerably more complex. Where buying was once a blunt instrument, a first past the post race for the line, it is now plurality of purchase. If buying is an ideological statement, whether intentionally or otherwise, there are far more ideas for sale.

These competing visions of the future - for an ideology is a just a grandiose way of explaining how you see ‘what could be’ - range in scope and implication from the petty to the profound. And how conscious we are of their implications is mostly inversely correlated with their profundity. Choosing organic milk or washable nappies are some those that lie at the obvious and small end of the graph. Chromebook or Macbook may be at the more profound for the second and third order future visions that you are unknowingly choosing between.

Before I am accused of creating my own forced binary between Apple and Google, I am aware that I am exaggerating to make a point here, but this is caricature to contrast, rather than a fabrication. In these two corporate citizens we are offered an implicit choice between two competing visions of what could be.

Apple, for all it's relentless, glossy shining modernity is offering what could be described as a conservative ideology. For all it's brushed aluminium minimalism, sleek lines and the Kubrick-futurism of their stores, they are selling the past. That the references are mid-century modern, whether cinematic or aesthetic is telling. They use a well-spoken vernacular of ‘visions of futures past’ to make you feel a comfortable part of a certain future; bleeding edge contemporaneity forged from deja vu. It is little wonder that buying their computers or phones is a bulletproof decision, one where no-one questions why. There is nothing futuristic about being taken for granted.

The bigger point about Apple though is not the ‘how’ of their execution, but their focus on the execution itself. They are a ‘Temple to the Thing’. Discussing my thoughts here, a good friend pointed out the strength of their ecosystem, of iTunes, App Store and iCloud; this is where I exaggerate for effect. Of course they are not just about the thing, the artefact, but they fetishises the artefact, beatifying objects with the faux-modesty of the lowercase ‘i’. The ecosystem is in service of the object. They are a makers of things. Ideologically speaking they are a highly polished 21th Century incarnation of a comforting, nostalgic 20th Century thought - the reassuring comfort of the possessed object.

Apple’s product design is very intentionally designed to evoke feelings of the numinous. They are meant to be worshipped rather than understood. Curved, clean construction and their own crisp glyphs make them feel like artefacts from another civilisation. Increasingly the physical product itself is seamless, with no access to change a battery, upgrade memory or view its workings. As technology regulates more and more of our world and the imperative to understand how it does this increases, Apple urges us not to look behind the curtain. The sacred cues continue into the packaging itself - jewel cut crystal-like plastic boxes, common on their smaller devices evoke modernist reliquaries. Phones and Laptops come sitting on their own altars - you lift the lid to reveal the device sitting like sacrement on it's matte white ‘cloth’. The theme runs onto the stores themselves, mentioned already which have more than a whiff of the Reform Church or the Rothko chapel. The influences are multi-denominational, but unmistakably meant to make the object an article of faith, a crux of belief. It is at it's heart a conservative faith that continues to celebrate modes of consumption that tie us all the way back to Ford.

For Google, the ‘thing’ is not the thing. The thing is simply a means. Google’s benevolent supra-statist ‘taxes’ our every activity in return for free stuff. But the stuff they focus on is digital rather than physical. Though they do produce some of their own physical products, they are not a ‘maker of things’ in that sense. In fact the stuff they do produce that exists virtually, digitally is as they would have us say ‘surface agnostic’. That means it doesn't care what it happens to be residing in or displayed through at the time - that is just a temporary physical ‘host’ (apologies, the spillover of the religious language is not intentional, but it is the best explanation). Google’s version of ‘what could be’ is indifferent to the physical world, and as such, indifferent to the object. Ideologically it represents, whether knowingly or not, a vision of a new, thoroughly 21st century worldview. More so than the ‘gig economy’ or the  ‘uberfication’, Google’s mass cloud applications offer a new kind of (non)consumption.

Once you place the Data above the thing, there are a raft of ramification. When every app and every photo on your phone is automatically backed up, down to background and settings and that identity can be switched from one handset to another in minutes, or reloaded to a new one if the first is broken - is that original phone even your phone? When the docs you work and collaborate on exist neither on one person's machine or another, when they no longer need to be sent place to place but are simply able to ‘be’ on their own corporeal plane, indifferent to how you access that plane, why do you need ‘your laptop’? Why need a possessive when the thing that matters is not the terminal, but where you are using it to access. The emotional centre moves from the tangible to the intangible, with the emotional value and irrational significance placed on the tangible thing steadily decreasing. Why be careful with your phone, when the phone is ‘a phone’ - and ‘your phone’ is a set of configurations and information that resides nowhere and can be anywhere. Suddenly the thing becomes a commodity, a functional rather than emotional good. A good far more easily shared, even provided as a public good or given away as a loss leader. Handed person to person when needed. I can check “my computer” - a collection of information independent of the physical through any terminal. I could edit a file from a street corner touchscreen, then notify clients via a strangers iPad. Ideologically, this is profound stuff; purchase of the thing is optional, rather than essential for participation.

In Dichters world, the choice was really, what to buy; it was that or being accused of being a ‘red’ or dropping out of the mainstream. Not to buy was not an option in a binary world. However, a glimpse of a ‘post-object’ version of consumer capitalism gives just a hint of world where buying at all is a choice, and a world that is object agnostic. And it has profound implications for anyone who is betting on the old world of ‘things’.

[failtoplan]

Cars: From ‘Driving’ to ‘Being’

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transport” Gustavo Petro

 The car as it currently stands is a beautiful anachronism.

As a mystic sign of (primarily male) potency and a totem of freedom it's glory days were, at least in the ‘West’, sometime between the 1950s and the 1970s. The democratisation of ownership that came with the post war golden age of consumption deified the automobile as a symbol of individualisation, autonomy and possibility. In the US particularly, its fetishisation was tied up intimately with early sexual experience as recognised by Ernst Dichter; a first space in which agency could be expressed, where you could get away from the parental gaze in the exurban sprawl of the 50s consumer boom.

The car meant escape, freedom, possibility and both product evolution and the marketing myth reflected this. Shots of convertibles, top-down, endless stretches of empty tarmac ahead, Headlines proselytising power, speed, muscular potential. Increasingly powerful engines, aggressive styling, ridiculous names (Jensen Interceptor!?!) all catalysed the myth. 

As the late 20th Century saw a move from a ‘bactrian’ to ‘dromedary’ graph of global affluence, carmakers sold this same legend to places as diverse as Dubai to Davao; the myth of driving. 

However we are at an inflection point. The open road is a myth. The UN reported in 2014 that the majority of the world’s population now lives in cities, a significant proportion of which lives in densely populated ‘megacities’. If you have ever got in a Taxi in Shanghai or Sao Paulo, you will understand what this means for the this fallacy of driving freedom. The RAC estimates cars in the UK are, on average parked and unused 96.5% of the time. Parking wastes valuable urban spaces and forces longer commutes and in the most expensive cities is often extortionate. Owning a car is increasingly a burden rather than a freedom. And there are signals of this in the growth of car-sharing schemes, the role of products such as UBER’s in freeing up cities (let us park the flurry of criticism which they are currently under... ) At the same time, self driving technology seeks to free us up from the burden of sitting in charge of a vehicle in traffic, turning time that would otherwise be wasted crawling along behind the wheel into productive hours. The very real threat of self-driving is that it will catalyse the move away from ownership altogether in the traditional automotive sector…. The weak signals are already there…

So it's all pretty grim then for car-makers? Not necessarily. Based on my recent observations, despite ‘driving’ becoming more and more of a chore, there is still some magic left in the car yet. But to harness it, and set-up their brands for future success as the the automobile is dragged and disrupted kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, auto-makers will need to reframe what the category really is. Historically it was about ‘driving’ but in reality now, it is about ‘being’. People still value the time, space and privacy of being in their own car, even in a traffic jam, so long as you can make that experience a rewarding one. The category, even though it hasn't realised it yet itself is in the business of selling ‘time well spent’.

The implications of this are huge. Think hero features such as soundproofing, intelligent cruise control, audio system and In-car entertainment and connectivity. Designer interiors and hero shots of upholstery rather than exterior angles. And think about how fundamentally differently you you talk about that ‘being’ experience. Whether by accident or design, Lexus hinted at it as early as 2002 ( http://randomarchitecturememories.com/home/lexus-sc430-rome-saatchi-saatchi-carl-erik-rinsch ) and cult cars such as the Nissan Cube and others are implictly about that experience.

 Of course there will still be moments that are about ‘driving’ but the reality is they are losing relevance as they decrease, and will lose resonance when it comes to purchase. If car-makers want to fight against a world of mass private-public transport and post-ownership automobiles, they need to sell a unique experience that comes with ownership. And that experience is about ‘being’ not ‘driving’

[failtoplan]

The Generational Anomoly

The current generational model that many pop-sociologists, newspaper columnists and marketers cling to may be a convenient framework, but it is one that is not fit for purpose in an ever shrinking and ever fracturing and more complex world. The most robust academic work in the field, the grandly titled Strauss-Howe generational model is, even to its champions, an Anglo-American-centric tool for historical framing and to its critics, a vast generalization with little empirical evidence to support its core thesis. As appetizing as an academic deep-dive on this may be, I shall limit this to thinking about recent generations and their utility (or otherwise) as a tool for understanding people, cultures from a brand perspective

 The idea of these 20-year monocultural blocks in human time was born out of the post war baby-boom, particularly in the united states and were the beneficiaries of the post-war American high, rapid growth of mass culture and mass consumerism as well as a marked increase in living standards and leisure time. They were also the first group to be dissected from the outside by marketers, and in many respects it the reinforcing messages made the idea of a ‘generation’ and its particular spirit and outlook a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 That the ‘boomers’ and then after, the Gen-Xer, in the US were the two most convincingly coherent cohorts and that may be no coincidence, not just because they were researched, written about and sold to in a way that molded them into a coherent whole, but also, economically speaking, in the west, they were more ‘whole’. On the ‘soft side’ you have a golden age of mass broadcast media and on the hard side you have, what is in the long history of pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial capitalism an anomaly – a decrease in inequality. Now, not to get all Piketty about it, but with good working class wages and earnings doing better than assets, there was a chance for people of the same age across a broadly similar cultural backdrop to have similar experiences, and similar possibilities open to them, socially, professionally, educationally. Historically, this is a aberration, as the young country squire and the young peasant would have never felt part of a similar generational identity, but with decreasingly inequality, relative prosperity, mass media and a world that still felt big and un-PC enough to forget about those defined as the ‘other’ – non-capitalist, non-white, non-EU/US, we could lull ourselves into thinking that this was a world where neat 20-year blocks of people could be in it together.

 Of course if we had of take a global view in the 70s when the idea of the ‘boomer’ the first marketable generation was being popularized we may have seen the fallacy of that, but we didn’t, it stuck and now in an ever shrinking world we can somehow post-rationalize the theory because we all have smartphones. Of course, we cant, and in fact, everyone doesn’t have a smartphone at all. The world is smaller for those who can afford to shrink it, which is a self-selecting and self-confirming sample. The reality is, birth year is a very poor proxy. A 24 year old urban Jakartan vs. a 24 year old in an agricultural area of Sumatra will be very different. The Jakartan may have a lot in common with a 24 year old in downtown Sao Paulo, but likewise he may have with a digitally saavy 53 year old in Berlin. Likewise the our son or daughter of the soil in Sumatra might have more in common with a middle aged Bavarian farmer.

 An age based- monocultural theory works in a monoculture, as the post-war US was to a large extent ( god forbid anyone do anything as pluralistic as declare themselves a socialist, or be black and ask for rights, for that matter) but so the what was age acting as a proxy for in that self-selecting blinkered process. What are some of the key axes, the indicators that can allow us to start forming some useful cohorts, that we can map against populations?

 Urban vs Rural

A key indicator, which has a huge bearing on your views, outlook and interaction with the world – shapes the kind of influences that you are expose to, the amount of risk and reward available to you and the kind of stimulus you have to shape your view. A rapidly urbanizing world offers us a dangerous confirmation bias to the idea of homogenous aged-based international cohorts…

 Education Level

Which itself acts as a proxy for many things, including affluence and even more strongly, political inclination – the higher your educational attainment, generally the more liberal you lean, at least within the normative framework for your cultures political spectrum

 Key Life stage Markers

Another where Age was a useful proxy, but longer, less linear lives and changes in aspiration (when it comes to kids and settling down) and hard headed reality, especially when it comes to urban housing mean that it is not an accurate or useful global proxy any more)

Marriage, parenthood and Home/property ownership are all massive deciding factors shaping someone outlook and view. Where many of the western-centric generalizations about Millennials fall down in Asia is that it fails to remember how much younger people still have children and that, particularly in less equal, more patriarchal skewed set-ups, as 24 year old without a child is more different to a 24 year old with than she is to a 40 year old without

 Digital engagement

One that,, if Google and many over tech utopians have their way, will eventually disappear as a discerning factor, but the reality is that globally we are not yet at a stage when this can be disregarded. Access is uneven, can be patchy and often for many as a proportion of income (another key factor) too expensive to be ‘always on’

 Optimistics vs. pessimistic

How do you see our future? How do you see the world? Naturally this will be influenced by any number of things, but it is important to take into account. There are many with huge advantages in developed nations who are negative in their worldview, and the converse is true in many more difficult to live in cultures and situations. The importance of outlook should not be overlooked

 Of course, taking a mapping based on these, you would expect to see age, driving certain clusters in certain countries, but interesting to see is how that matched up against other groups else way. A Vietnamese urban 20-something might really tally with an affluent, upbeat suburban boomer on America’s east coast…!

 Of course the danger here is veering in the opposite direction, but the point is we must realize that time and age are a poor proxy and no guarantee of some kind of universal human generational experience

[failtoplan]

Fear and Loathing and Facebook

The leading execs of Big Pharma, Big Oil and those managing payday lenders really ought to get themselves to the Googleplex for a crash-course in image management. Compared to these industries which are often burdened with toxic reputations (sometimes literally rather than figuratively) Google is seen as a benevolent public institution rather than publicly listed profit-generator. Tax issues ebb and flow across the foreshore of public consciousness, but ultimately fail to wash away the general positivity and goodwill.

Likewise, raising concerns about privacy feels like praising the latest Yotam Ottolenghi cookbook at a dinner party in Herne Hill; it's one of those things that one is socially obligated to go through the motions of...  Germany aside, (where frankly, there are some longer standing issues around ‘files’ and ‘secrets) - protests about data security sound generally anemic. I don’t know anyone using ‘Duck Duck Go’ and most privacy settings go mostly unchecked. Frankly, I am more worried about my bank than my browser. The reality is that this a company that could - and often, by our ‘consent by default’, does know everything about our online selves. Which in 2016 amounts to an awful lot of us. Probably more than our partners. I wouldn't share my entire browsing data with mine. Would you?

I am writing this on Google Docs, in Chrome browser, at a cafe I searched for, or rather ‘Googled’ with their Search Engine and then found with Maps on my Android powered phone. If you have watch some content from YouTube or replied to an email through Gmail between these devices you are providing more and more cumulative understanding of who you are, so they can sell that ‘who’ to the highest bidder. Their argument is that they want people to be able to sell to you in a way that is more rewarding for us all. Whatever the reason is, most of us are okay with the Faustian pact we are entered into. We take the free stuff in return for becoming their product. At the same time, they want to cover the world with balloons in the sky the broadcast internet and they have just released an AI-powered device that will one day run your entire home through their systems. How you feel about that depends how dystopian/lazy you are feeling in any given moment. I have a sneaking suspicion that rather than this being the result of careful reputation management, it's more like watching a horror film seated 6 inches away from a megaplex-sized IMAX screen; you never see anywhere near enough of the whole picture to realise how incredibly fucking scary it is.

By contrast, Facebook should be a big cuddly blue bear, right? It's where all your friends are, your pictures, your contacts. You spend hours there, they know that, they have the data; you’ve been there swiping up, swiping up swiping up for the last four hours! You LOVE it! Or so that’s their pitch to advertisers. They are all about the love. And they are working on giving us more love. I woke up today and fired up Ol’ Blue to find it telling me “Good Morning Adam - Stay dry Today in Singapore - Rain is forecast”. THANKS Ol’ Blue. Great to know. Or sometimes it's a message to tell me it's International Peace Day, or Pizza Day, or whatever. I don’t know, but they were thinking of me!

Snark aside, Facebook, like the rest of the internet, trade on our attention. Just like Instagram (which they own) or Snapchat or Twitter, it is our engagement that they sell ( or fail to, if you’re Twitter). And Facebook feel threatened by lots of other social channels coming onstream that are growing and engaging users rapidly, including messaging services such as Line or the also-Facebook owned WhatsApp.

But online as well as off, Engagement comes in many different flavours. Websites may measure it quantitatively (time spent on page, Unique Monthly Visits etc.) but there is also a strong qualitative element to it. Why are they engaging; what is the mindset, mood and motivation at the moment? There was a time when Facebook was probably loved. Or at least liked. When it was small, when it was amusing, when it felt intimate. But it became a vast all-encompassing thing, and it aims eventually to include everyone. Somewhere along the way, it became so big that it became an institution. In fact, it became infrastructure. Having a Facebook account is akin to what having a phone line was in the late 20th century, or a mobile phone just a little before now in the 21st. It's like running water and sanitation. No-one loves their toilet, but you are pretty angry when it doesn’t flush. But Facebook still wants to be loved and still wants attention - it's like a 30 year old man who still acts like the overindulged toddler he once was (!). So it creeps me out with messages about the weather, about what's happening in the world, about my ‘last year in review’. Confronted with myriad platforms that are more novel and more compelling, it tries even harder to make you love it.

The big problem is there is a massive disconnect in how it wants to be seen, and how people see it. And this comes from this quantitative measure of engagement. By looking at how long people are on their app, scrolling their feeds and equating this with how much people care, or even love your app, they are making a dangerous mistake. And from this dangerous mistake they are building an even more dangerous strategy’ trying to make their news feeds stickier and stickier, getting people to dwell longer and longer, making their messenger ever-more intrusive. Because this time does not equate to love. Simply put, people hate themselves for using it. And the more their functionality tries to encourage that, the more resentment and loathing it builds. To go back to the toilet, it would be as if it only allowed you to flush once you had sung a late 80s Madonna hit to it. You’d do it, but you’d really rather not...

Facebook, like Google is now a grown-up part of the internet. It is one of the foundational elements from which all the lovely, interesting, grotesque and surprising bits of the internet spring. Whether by accident, design, or simply the nature of the core products they are pushing, Google is acting like an elder statesman, whereas Facebook doesn’t want to grow up. But neither did Myspace or AOL.

Facebook’s function as a universal sign it, it's role as the depository of contacts and personal photos and a whole bunch of other core functions it plays within people’s online lives are vital - it is somewhere between a filofax and a permanent scrapbook, a fixed social CV that means I can be found (like a sexier version of the Phone Book) are really useful. Much of the rest is not. And by trying to fight the ‘new’ at the periphery it obfuscates it's core. How many party invites, events or groups have migrated to (mercifully for them, FB-owned) WhatsApp, whose utilitarian, user-driven structure seems ever more appealing. That should be a space they own. Why build chatbots for Messenger, when people are already querying businesses via WhatsApp?

So what is the result of all this? The eponymous Fear and Loathing. People hate themselves for using it and is seeing diminishing returns on the ‘useful’ parts, even if the headline ‘time on site’ show we still think it's wonderful; other tools are getting a greater share of more meaningful interactions. It doesn’t help that their leadership is either sucking up to China, much to the derision of both the Chinese internet and the West, or patronising the developing world. The worse part is the fear - FB is the one that constantly suffers from privacy issues, from accusations about how it uses people’s data, it's the one that ‘knows too much’ even though in truth it's Google that probably has the deeper insights. But Google is the Elder Statesman and Facebook is the 30 year old man-child. Who would you rather trust with your all of your browsing and personal data? Me or Kofi Annan?

[failtoplan]

Reflections on Brexit

(As ever here, un-proofed, unedited, and as is....)

The Daily Mash headline said it all. UK now officially assigned ‘clown country’ status.

The Mash has a habit of being spot on when it comes to the British cultural zeitgeist. For those not wholly familiar, it’s the Onion with more self-loathing (and all the better for it). Other than permanent joke status, Brexit has revealed a few interesting truths and brought some others into sharp focus. I didn’t want to write about it immediately. I have also been reluctant to take on the subject after a rather long hiatus from blogging (thanks damn promotion and extra responsibilities and adult shit). It’s a topic that everyone is currently doing to death (like a snuff film starring ‘Horizontal Breton Stripes’) whilst all the while doing greater justice to it than I will.

So yes, anyway, fear of globalization, the rise of nationalism in a world that is becoming post-national, sharp divides between interconnected cities and alienated hinterlands, the unintended consequences of ‘political correctness gone mad’ and the need for the right to offend and therefore discuss openly – else the publicly enforced taboos of ‘liberal fascism’ drive up pressure that then needs to finds a Haider, Trump or Farrage shaped valve.

So… in no real order and with little to really stitch this together, some thoughts…

We live in an echo chamber Almost everyone I personally know expressed ‘surprise’. Investment banks were briefing their clients the night before that there was no chance that Britain would leave. Let me spell this out; if you were surprised, then it goes a long way to explaining why it happened. The ever-decreasing levels of social mobility make our peer groups ever less diverse. Universities, where many of those who were ‘surprised’ met their partners are increasingly stratified and less mixed. We spend most of our time with ‘people like us’.

Our information sources, digitally and socially plough and ever-narrower funnel thanks to an ever-fractalised media landscape that allows us to pick from more and more niche voices. I gave up reading the Guardian and follow UKIP-ers on Twitter to try and combat this very danger. Increasing choice means that we increasingly choose ‘people like us’ and voices that we agree with. Which means the grievances of so many, their fears, hopes, aspirations and ambitions are ignored by those who have never met someone like them and who are in positions of political, economic or cultural power.

This is bigger than how many Etonions are in the cabinet; its how many London-raised-lefty liberal are in our professional classes. From Westminster and Whitehall to the figurative ‘Fleet Street’ and ad agencies of Soho. The problem is as much in the middle as it is at the very top.

I’ll repeat the point in clearer terms – if you are angry with those who disagreed with you in this vote- you are an undemocratic, unfeeling, narrow-sighted fool, lacking in empathy and have undoubtedly helped cause this problem. Am I surprised? No. Disappointed? Terribly

Debate is in the gutter People, particularly those who align on the ‘lazy left’/’liberal fascist’ end of the spectrum – and I count myself as a rehabilitated past offender – are not willing to engage. Discussion has in the past been about testing and exploring ideas, using the didactic to torture test ideas; there is good Orwell quote in one of his essays about totalitarian ideas never taking root in Britain because of a natural skepticism towards dogmatic beliefs and principles. This is no longer the case. Rather than discuss, people draw lines in the sand. Those who don’t agree with you are idiots. Empathy and exchange has been sucked out of public politics and I have no idea how we get that back. No longer do people disagree with what you say, but defend to the death your right to say it, nor the obligation to constructively debate it.

In all honesty, I find that the left is guiltier of this, with smug assumptive assertions that usually start with “Of course we all know…” I have had more personally rewarding and intellectually illuminating conversations with those who’s view lie far to the right of my own wooly, social-democratic thinking. Drawing battle lines doesn’t help people to progress or to get to solutions.

Truth is now multiple, not singular Following on from the death constructive debate – the idea that two (or more) sides engaging with a subject matter, will through that dialectic move towards greater knowledge and human wisdom. Instead there has been a collapse in the hierarchy of information. Which has given us Citizen Journalism and SBTV. Which is awesome. But it has also led to the frightening but correct assertion by Micheal Gove that  “people in this country have had enough of experts”. Fragmented media landscape, collapsing barriers to ‘broadcasting’ (including in its widest sense, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and other digital soapboxes) and decreasing trust in established sources leads to a vertical suspicion that undermines facts and the idea of a singular truth.

This is post-enlightenment skepticism on steroids, where once the questioning was meant to bring us to a higher truth, but instead now is an ends in itself. Doubt is cast over everything and people believe nothing. Everything is equally  (in)valid, negating debate and leaving us with the mudslinging, as above, and meaning that a new definition of a ‘fact’ is ‘something you say to support what you want to believe or hear’. This was put to great effect by the Brexit campaign itself. But they were right, once people stop believing in ‘expertise’ they rapidly get sick of experts, as we are all one now. (I blame the internet – after all this is me pretending I am an expert whilst I type)

A victory for voting and a defeat for democracy? An X in a box, particularly for a referendum is not where democracy starts and ends. But hopefully this can provide new impetus to rehabilitate some of the other key bits. Civil Society is as important as casting a vote, and we need to get broader engagement as well as a high caliber of debate. The potential split of the Labour party could be a huge boost for this, as would a move towards PR. However those I have spoken to who from mainstream Labour and the Corbyn side are behaving like toddlers. The talk is possessive – lots of ‘our party’ ‘the people’. It sounds dangerously like the language of totalitarianism on both sides. Its not going to help get over the long-term decline in respect for politicians. Lets not forget if they were really greedy and self-interested, there are easier, less high profile and high-pressure ways to get ones snout in much bigger troughs. Likewise the press needs to raise its game. For all the issues with phone hacking and ethics, the UK press is one of the most vibrant in the world and is a key element of an active functioning democracy. With gutter debate, multiple truth and journalists in their own echo chamber we need Fleet Street to up its game and provide clear voices to provoke constructive debate and honest reporting that can begin to rehabilitate the quaint old notion of a ‘fact’. Never let a good story get in the way of a truth?

Currently resident in Singapore, I have to constantly defend the idea of democracy because we got the ‘wrong answer’. Fundamentally, I don’t believe that there is a ‘wrong answer’ in a popular vote, but I do believe that the rest of our public sphere needs rehabilitation

Remainers will leave Whether geo-politically in the case of Scotland, rhetorically and culturally in the case of London, or literally in the case of many of those individuals who voted for their own transnational world view; those who see themselves as a citizen of the world as well as a subject of Britain will be making their own Brexits. The last category, the individuals who cause the spike in emigration searches, is in many respects the most worrying. It is those who are most mobile, most globally marketable and potentially most valuable to a Splendid Isolation global trading Britain who will be first out the door.

Conversely the influx that has made Britain so vibrant and has fuelled growth will stop. Whether the laws change or not, the rhetoric, no matter how many times Sadiq might say otherwise is that we are closed, and that is a dangerous position for a country who’s most important export in the 21st century is ideas

[failtoplan]

Thailand as a psychosocial contruct

A few weeks ago, I was in Thailand to race my bicycle. Now, that sounds like an exotic, alluring and indulgent confession. Or worse still, a blog that starts with a #humblebrag. It’s not, it is the opener for another rant on my part. Which probably makes this even more indulgent. But bear with me, there is sense to this seeming self-indulgence; that ‘Thailand’ doesn’t exist, and Thailand is a pretty mediocre holiday destination. It is the gold standard of mediocrity ( in the category of holiday-making at least) in a world that is increasingly tending towards an inoffensive, palatable median. And if you don’t already agree with me, then it’s likely that you may already be part of this profitable collective delusion that it is not….

‘Thailand’ (as opposed to Thailand), is an incredible collective folk legend in which many areinvested. Say ‘Thailand’ to anyone in a major global city, or anywhere in a temperate, developed (post-/) industrial nation, and it instantly evokes paradise island idylls. It’s backpacker adventures, away-from-it-all-Luxury, freedom and exploration, endless massages, being waited on hand and foot by lithe young men and women and raging undertones of, primarily sexual, domination of the other. These ideas of escape, freedom and power; underpinned by assumed economic leverage and cultural superiority, are the product we are being sold. Fascinatingly, this is not longer just a Western Orientalist fantasy, it’s an Eastern Orientalist fantasy too. Ask any middle-aged, middle-class dentist or desk-jockey in Singapore, Shenzhen or Seoul… Thailand is to escapism what Paris is to High Culture. It is a totem. THE totem And like Paris has its very own Syndrome, brought about by the gaping abyss between the idea and the reality, ‘Thailand’ Syndrome is a clear and present danger.

Simply put, for all the imagined allure, the reality of Thailand is that it is a tourist conveyor belt. An early Asian entrant into the global tourist industry, it became synonymous with the West’s orientalist fantasies, as captured in Alex Garland’s The Beach, and most sinisterly evoked in Houlbecq’s Platform. And now in an economically multipolar, globalized world has continued to sell these on to any bidder. It positioned itself as a passive, untrammelled territory ready to be ‘discovered’ by any white tourist daring enough to get on a commercial airliner. Ever-cheapening global air-travel has democratized the Thailand ideal, not just to these new colonialists, but also Asia burgeoning middle class. I do not resent the democratization of travel, but as a destination, it trades off the illusion of distance, of carefully manicured exoticism and ‘eastern promise’.

When you travel halfway round the world and spend half a month’s wages to get a piece of this illusion you are already invested. You’ve bought the idea before you bought the ticket. You have too much emotionally riding on that expense to see anything over than what you want to see; it is white sands, drinks in coconuts and sex under palm trees. But deep down, you know the reality is just another commoditized destination. You feel it as soon as you step of the plane to get your transfer bus, or if you kid yourself that you are somehow ‘roughing it’, to haggle with your cut-throat, small-C capitalist cabbie. Every overpriced bottle of mineral water or lacklustre excursion, plays on you subconscious intuitive awareness that you are simply an optimized asset class in a global game. But you tell yourself that it’s a ‘A Holiday of a Lifetime™’  and you take the pictures, instagram the illusion and Facebook the fallacy. And that is how the mythology becomes a kind of cultural ponzi scheme; as long as we all keep paying in, none of us need to face up to the middling holiday that we just shelled out for. None of us need to face that Thailand is in fact like any other heavily developed tourist destination, selling Made-in-China (or rather now, Vietnam) tourist tat, with half-scruffy beaches lined with umbrella bars, drunk spring-breakers, confused Japanese tourists, pink-drunk Brits and local hustlers. It’s the Costa del Sol via Edward Said.

There are undoubtedly undiscovered corners, hidden beaches and empty vistas, but during your ‘Seven days in the Sun’, you will be funneled to any one of a number of hotspots with other sunburnt globe-skippers such as yourself who are kidding themselves that they have come to somewhere otherworldly. More than anywhere else, Thailand represents how modern tourism sells ideas rather than places or cultures. It markets the idea of travel in a reality that is ever more touristified, commoditised and homogenised

[failtoplan]

On Truth - Photojournalism and Ethics

(^Its shit like this that gives real photographers a bad name...^)

Is truth a feeling? Can a photograph ever be honest? These were the questions that were never asked, but were ringing in my ears when I left the World Press Photo panel discussion on Ethics and photo-journalism, ironically held in Singapore and ‘sponsored by the Straits Times’, as our moderator managed to tell us repeatedly with a knowing smirk.

I would like to say at this point, that I am an outsider. I do not take pictures, let alone make photos and I have a huge amount of resepct for the profession, which is why I think unpicking what was really going in is fascinating and yield some significant insight into the state of photos and photojournalists.

The discussion itself was fascinating and I am sure there are many good précis’ of the comments from Sim Chi Yin, Sarker Protick and Pete Muller, all three of whom are hugely respected, immensely talented and with unimpeachable integrity. But the most interesting part was the narrative arc that was formed as the panel discussion went on. Taking the starting point as the recent jump in detection of photo manipulation, all three were robust in their defence of the profession against manipulation, both digital as well as the much harder to detect, but far more insidious staging of shots. Yet, as the talk went on, the clarity of ethical lines being drawn became increasingly blurred.

The pieces of their own work that they shared mid way through the talk all contained as much of them as it did their subject. From Ms Sim’s incredibly moving story of Chinese gold miners suffering from silicosis, to Protick’s intimate portraits of his ageing grandparents, or Muller’s work looking at the masculinity and violence. It was their very involvement that made them moving. As the panelists themselves said, the decisions they took before and right up to the moment of shooting, as well as the editorial and selection decisions made afterwards, their role was to make sense of the story or to create one out of the disparate pieces. Now as an outsider, this act of storytelling is in itself a manipulation of sorts. As they went on to talk about how they ‘make’  (not take) picture, it struck me that the ethical lines that they had started off drawing – never stage, only ever correct in post, don’t alter, no cloning etc. – were more like arbitrary guardrails than hard and fast rules. Though the wire photographers of AP and the like have strict guidelines, many publications do not, and with such a proliferation of photo makers and takers, the hard rules in one part of the industry meant nothing to another.

Thinking about it in historical context, the idea that, face with ‘new’ manipulation there is a need to uphold and enshrine the eternal ethical code of the press photo seems almost laughable. This is not to say that there are no ethics, but rather it is an individual act of conscious and what the rules are in any situation change shot by shot. Ever since someone first picked up a camera to tell a real story, we have all been manipulated. The photograph is possibly the single most effective means of deception. Shot choice, framing, captioning, what you choose to omit from a visual story all helps build a deceit that look like a truth. In light of this the quest to uphold ethics seems quixotic. And this is before we even get into the modern technical ability to manipulate which the initial discussion was so preoccupied with, but somehow seems the least interesting part, or the eternal, psychological one – the Hawthorne-effect inducing presence of the camera and its wielder on their subject. All this is even before we begin to ponder why the photographer has picked up their camera in the first place. This is not to say that I resent their view, opinion or prejudices, but rather to acknowledge that you take those with you, whether you want to or not when you head into field. Arguably, it is those views that make for the best photographs. If there wasn’t that thinking, those convictions, agendas, even, then all photos would be equally mediocre.

The photo itself is never just the photo either. By going into the industry, you are entering into a socio-historical discourse; the mythology of Magnum and the iconography of the past. You are not just capturing an event; you are entering a live discussion about what even constitutes an event, what counts as history. Powerful decisions to make. And with that great power comes great responsibility. And it is that responsibility that leads so many to take the profession so seriously, and rightly so. Every time they go out and shoot, these photo journalists are making decisions that should not be taken lightly, and there are no clear cut rules… So why the big push for codification now?

Fundamentally, the push for codified ethics in their industry is not about manipulation and questions of values but about profound questions of professionalism. The problem with digital is not the proliferation of manipulation, but the proliferation of photographers.  Equipment has not only got cheaper, it has also made taking photos easier. The craft skills are being eroded by the efficiency, accuracy and ease of a DSLR compared with taking actual photos  - I occasionally use a new digital professional camera and once in the past took up an old East German Werra 35mm camera for a summer, and other than both capturing images, they have nothing in common; like the difference between a model T Ford and a self-driving car. Couple that with cheap airfares and a huge increase in affluence and travel, every kid with a Canon and an appetite for destruction things their Robert Capa. Just look at the sales figures for Leica-badged digital camera. All this tech is eroding the craft making it easier to take good pictures, and very few of us can actual tell the difference between the good and the great anyway. It is worse for photojournalist that writers even. I can’t put this piece through Aftereffects and stop it from being mediocre. Faced with this a Guild-like codification serves the purpose of protecting their livelihoods from erosion by Amateur-enthusiasts, but more importantly, allowing them to vocalize their integrity. For it is a question of integrity, not ethics. The ethics has always been blurred of going to war, famine, suffering disaster, misery or just common garden sadness, joy or fear. Profiting from evoking human emotion is a difficult line to tread, but one that I am happy that the professionals do, in the name of educating, teaching helping us to understand the world and ourselves through these events. It has always bee about integrity, as there can be no hard rules in these situations. So the subjective values of the photographer are the only thing there to guide. I think we should celebrate that.

The best photographs help us feel something that we struggle to comprehend. They do not paint 1000 words, they evoke an emotion. And delivering emotional truth, telling a story from the complexity of these situations requires enlightened subjectivity. It requires the first manipulation of picking up the camera. All subsequent manipulations after that pale into insignificance. I understand the desire for some kind of code, but I feel it does the talent of these visual storytellers a disservice.

[failtoplan]

The Pragmatism of Principles

Democracy has been having a rough time of it. I should know, I have been having to do an awful lot of defending antiquated liberal ideals since moving East. Unsurprising really within the context of this region, and with the population of this island where I currently stay rightly proud of the achievements of the last 50 years wit a system that values collective advancement over messy individualism  (as an aside…people always say ‘stay’, they never ask me how long I have ‘lived’ here… but that is another piece yet to be written about what it feels like to be a guest, and how certain experiences have made me even more determined to welcome migrants of all varieties… I mean, free movement of capital for the rich should also mean free movement of labour for rest? Fair’s fair? Anyway, for another day)

Apologies for students of political theory... and to anyone who is taking these assumptions as read...great, but I have been having to do a lot of arguing from first principles....

The argument that I am perpetually rebutting is primarily the one known as ‘Freedom of Speech won’t feed my children’. There are a number of variants on this including the ‘isn’t America, the land of the free, a joke’ version (thanks to The Don for turning that one up to 11, though the perpetual filibustering and shutdowns haven’t helped) where I have to explain there are other democracies. Or the sub-argument ‘its just plain rude’ so you shouldn’t be allowed’, which means I need to roll out – ‘who decides the moral arbiter?’ But mostly its ‘500 million Chinese Citizens can’t be wrong’ thesis. And it’s a powerful one. But it has its limitations. Massive fucking dangerous limits actually. Yes, moving fast, breaking things and people might be excusable to some when it is lifting millions out of poverty ( and even I am not convinced about that). Democracy and its accouterments – Civil Society as I will call it- are an albatross round the neck of progress and many I speak to call me out for indulging in principles – as if it is some kind of decadent degenerate luxury. And trying to apply it all round the world is simply putting a brake on the progress of the rest of the world that was exploited rather than exploiting…my lofty words lack that most crucial of elements. Pragmatism. 

Personally though, i disagree with that...

Strong leadership can divine some general will, bring about progress and benefit everyone. Strong leaders now best and can chart a course. Everyone benefits.

There is a catch 22 here and that is that in an uncivil society, the only opinions aired and voices amplified are those who are on the ‘winning side’. That may be most people initially as a population is moved beyond subsistence level existence, but as the growth shifts the question from ‘how much is there’ to ‘who gets what and when’ (the very bread and butter of politics) then top-down decision making becomes more contentious. Without channels to hold those making these decisions accountable or to hear about, let alone directly from, those who might be losing out in the process, people might get lost or left behind… or worse.

The top-down power structures that allow a vast nation like China’s rapid growth may be effective at increasing GDP by building bridges and dams, but more contentious decisions centrally made and then imposed raise dangerous questions.

If my own desire to enshrine the rights if the individual within the group are seen as detrimental, that means that someone else gets to decide what can or cant be done with someone. Essentially there is an implicit inequality-, an object-subject divide, or better put, an acknowledgment that some animals are more equal than others. Which is fine, if you are a ‘winner’ in this arrangement. Or if all the farm needs right now is more hay. But what happens when needs become wants, and demands more diverse? Conveniently without these individual freedoms of a proper civil society there is little word from those who lost out. So when your home is deemed in the way of a major project, or your opinions deemed to undermine the program, you shouldn’t be surprised if you property or your person disappears. Now I personally have less interest in property rights, but I am still as vigorously inclined to defend them.

Without enshrining the rights of and equality amongst, individuals how do we decide who makes the decisions for the ‘greater good’? For every Lee Kwan Yew, there is a Marcos or a Mugabe lurking. This is not to say that there is any comparison between these figures, but if we do not start building a society through a mutuality of individuals, then we are subject to the whims of whoever is as the top. They might be a visionary who brings prosperity; they may be a demagogue who brings genocide and misery. Most likely, they will be, like the rest of us, fallible, well-meaning and human. Which leaves us at the mercy of their mistakes.

Individual rights aren’t a highfalutin ideal that is a nice to have for overdeveloped, pampered nations. They are not a luxury, they are a necessity; they should be applauded for their pragmatism. Rather than hope or presume that one individual or body of individuals can look out for everyone’s interests in an enlightened, dispassionate, practical and considered way. Now if enshrining them means I get to depict of describe in great detail lurid, imaginary anal sex between political leaders that is an unfortunate side effect. But you may hate what I say, but you should probably defend to your death my right to say it. Not for my sake, but for your own.

Now no doubt, there is an element of justifiable resistance to anyone coming from outside and saying this is how you should run your affairs, particularly when for many rapidly growing states in Asia this advice comes through the distorting filter of the past atrocities of Colonialism. But these ideas need to be seen through the lens of humanity, rather than hemispheres. Rapid growth means that the questions of who gets what are getting more and more significant and strong leadership is likely to increasingly create winners and losers as the importance of absolute poverty decreases and relativity comes to the fore. Telling this world that some opinions are more valid than others will become increasingly difficult. We can see the weak signals of the practical limitations of strong governments in increasingly complex scenarios in the way they deal with (or rather fail to deal with) minority groups.

The rhetoric of lifting millions out of poverty still rings true as there are millions more to lift. In that sense it is not mere rhetoric, but reality. But looking forwards, the importance of this will only decrease and there is a need to anticipate the next challenges- an ever more varied and diffuse set of desires and demands from an ever-more informed and ambitious populace. Suddenly it becomes less and less practical to say ‘I’ or ‘we’ know best. Individual rights may mean messy discussions and longer timeframes to ‘get things done’ but starting from these basic principles is the most practical way to deal with the reality that life is for your population can no longer simply be measured in industrial output.

Someone pass the KY jelly, because Civil Society, in its truest sense, is a necessity we must afford…

[failtoplan]

Against Small Talk

The silence has been deafening.

Flicking to failoiplan, I realise that it has been over four months since I have written anything. But this is “week one” and I have promised myself that I will write every week. That means that the quality may not be very good - but then again, it never really was - but that I will practice, rather than simply freeze for fear of not writing anything good.

It’s not been a lack of thought during the back end of 2015 that has stopped me, but rather a lack of space to think. There are pieces on the fallacy at the heart of neoliberalism, the uniformity of cool ( which I have been thinking of since last july, and the same few drafts on Singapore that I haven’t yet grown the balls to post yet. But I will make time for myself; one of the things I have also promised myself is saying no to things.

The other is saying no to saying things. Silence is powerful, important and rare. We are surrounded by noise constantly, actual or digital. And we are surrounded by voices, people stories, words and questions.

It manifests itself in our lived urban experience, where so many are lonely, but never alone. It is reflected in our preferences when we travel, where so many of us even if we are getting away from it all, we are going away to it all. Most profoundly it is through the always on communication travels where our own friendships become a series of overheard fragments, as if we are sitting next to ourselves on a train, overhearing our own interactions in fits and starts. Interactions with people become collages made up of our previous interactions with them, and with others. All becomes relational, all becomes derivative. There are no new conversations, only new voices. Or some bullshit like that.

The effect is to make us loquacious, constantly burbling, or burbled at, or burbled about. The problem this causes is that quality decreases inversely to the quantity. A huge amount of small talk.

Small talk does not in itself cause problems. It is a useful tool.

Small talk acts as a promissory note. It is the fiat currency of our social connections- an IOU for friendships, an expedient method of exchange for professional connections, a shorthand for situations where there is not time to do justice to a depth of feeling. Better to acknowledge with an exchange based on the trust that it is backed up by more. The well meant good morning when passing in a hall, the banal exchange on the street with an old friend, the short email that promises a longer one or the pointed ‘like’ from a neglected friend. All of these act as a placeholder for conversations yet to come - the substance, the meaning, the second-glass, settle-in, solve the problems of the world moments. Languages own intrinsic associative qualities let us do this effectively. We allude to depth that we do not have time to plumb in order to prime the pumps for another time.

Small talk becomes a problem when it is the only talk. increasingly people construct entire friendships on the basis of this surface exchange alone. Maybe people always have, but I am seeing this for the first time.

Living somewhere as transient, for foreign guests at least, as Singapore devalues the currency of friendship. I have made very few friends here. I struggle to see the value in friendships based on nothing more than IOUs.

Small talk is no substitute for conversation

[failtoplan]

London: A farewell, for now

It’s been almost 6 months since my last fresh blog post. My rolling list has 10+ pieces on it that I want to write and I have two, potentially never-to-be-published draft pieces on Singapore, rights and liberalism sitting on my desktop (One with the working title ‘ Just Because Your Paranoid’ and the other ‘The Pragmatism of Principle’- for those I know personally, if you want to have read, drop me an email). This very personal piece was drafted on a fast train London to Bristol to present my final UK debrief for a while to the marketing department of TSB (appropriately branded as ‘Local Banking for Britian’). And the High Contrast remix of Adele’s ‘Hometown Glory’ has come on shuffle… the last song I listened to before I flew home temporarily two months ago. So bearing that in mind, you will excuse my indulgence in writing this piece rather than ‘The HDB Social Contract’ or ‘The Uniformity of Cool’ that are both still unwritten

Two months to close-up shop in London has been both quick and slow- the length of time I needed practically, but a strange, testing stretch. By the end, people in my office were commenting that they thought I had left already. Too short to get back into the rhythms of London; long enough to drink away the decent fitness I developed in 7 months of clean(ish) living in Singapore. Long enough to see the people I love and care about, but not long enough to do more than catch up and reminisce. And then back those relationships go into an odd kind of suspended animation, aging at a fraction of the speed of life.

So I am leaving London. Parting company with a city that is inextricably linked to my sense of who I am, and always will be. There are selfish reasons for this (smaller office, better career trajectory in a more placid talent pool), frivolous reasons (no reason not to gallivant round SE Asia for a few years of cheap sun and easy living) practical reasons (better wages and lower cost of living) but I want to talk about my philosophical reasons for the great love of my life and going ‘on a break’ while I have a fling with the Singaporean City-State’s great social experiment. Perhaps what follows is an intellectual alibi rather than a reasoned decision, but I think it doesn’t make the points any less valid.

I would like to caveat this, with the genuine belief that London still remains the cross the board leading global centre. There is a toughness and a care, a beauty and depravity, a blend of high culture and low morals, international ingredients marinated in local flavor that make it the accomplished all-rounder. New York lacks the self-effacement, San Francisco lacks the past, Paris lacks the Future. Sao Paulo the concentration of  ‘Stuff’. Berlin lacks the work, and Singapore in truth, lacks the Play. I will always be a Londoner. And I will always give you a reason why ‘my town is better than your town’, even if I have never been to ‘your town’. But I have been privileged enough with this job to go to a lot of your towns and see the insides of your museums and markets and bars, not just the boardrooms and Business districts. And my town IS better than your town.

The problem is that London’s ‘better’ is no longer ‘good enough’ to justify the Faustian pact that you enter into when you top up your Oyster or sign your next Assured Shorthold Tenancy. The rent’s too damn high, the tube doesn’t work, it rains a lot; at rush hour it feels like a seething, stewing brooding ball of thinly suppressed resentment. You feel tough because you are part of it. As a do-eyed newcomes you suck it in and after 18 months call yourselves a London ( you’re not…just FYI… if your teen years involved being ferried by car to friends houses, then you just aren’t). If you grew up and/or started your professional life, anything else feels like a holiday, a dilettante indulgence. An unreality. Working 60 hour weeks in Singapore, I still felt like I was on holiday. I felt guilty. I rode my bike every morning. I read the weekend paper on the beach. I took a clean, seamless underground rail network to work that cost 35p a single journey. (Singapore is NOT expensive if you have lived in London; the Economist cost of living index is skewed by always including car ownership. Which is ridiculous as there is nowhere to drive and a Taxi all the way across the island is little more than a tenner) Singapore is in particularly stark contrast and I have my own reservations and thoughts, which remain in those unposted articles for the same reasons that they outline within them (consider the ‘message in the (lack of) medium’ in this instance) but my ex is in Glasgow now working as a neurosurgeon and she lives in a beautiful central neighbourhood in a two bed tenement flat for little more than her share of our old London rent. There is an art school, some museums, a vibrant music scene, great restaurants, local produce, Whisky. But every major city has some of this. And by major, this is not about global Alpha cities. There is a beauty amongst the Betas too. Yes, of course its easy to cling to the idea that London is better. Because it is. Better clubs, better galleries, better plays, better parks (that one is debatable) attracting better global people, forging better global links, hosting better businesses. But are any of these good enough to justify the structural issues. The creaking infrastructure and its vast expense? The lack of housing, exacerbated by (irony or ironies) Singaporean dentists and Russina Oligarchs alike buying flats as a new class of Global bond asset.

Unless I become a dotcom millionaire, I can’t see myself ever being secure and settled (and that could mean long term tenancies, not just ownership) in my hometown. Either you work in finance, are part of the global super-rich, or you persuade your parents to give you the deposit you have no chance. Raise your hand if you own in London. Good. Keep it raised if did this WITHOUT family money. Great, anyone left? Okay, and now keep it there if you don’t work in FS. Anyone there? Hmmmm…..

So the tense, (un)holy trinity at play here….’Variety’ (of people, things, everything), ‘possibility’ and (I am loathe to admit) ‘money’ made London, as I knew it, possible. Now money is choking out the other two. It is turning London into ‘London™’, a theme-park city that starts publicizing its own myth as ‘Greatest City on Earth™’ whilst forgetting what made it able to claim that. This is of course where I get accused of being one of those inverse snobs who is anti-nice things. I am not against change, I am against displacement. When Londoners don’t feel that there is a London for them. That everything that the city creates is as (a)overpriced, and (b)designed with a certain audience. These young, upwardly mobile, easily bored 20 and 30-somethings (and their middle-aged imitators), have the economic leverage to suck the air out of anything that isn’t an ‘artisnal’ ‘pop-up’ ‘street food’ ‘warehouse’ ‘craft’ crap-monger.  This dystopian village is some way off, but it starts to look like whether by accident or design, that is the position that London will come to occupy in the global firmament. And to me, that isn’t London.

I know this second point is new and probably needs more explanation, but my train is pulling in soon, and any cogency of thought that I may have had is collapsing rapidly. This theme park London thrives on a confidence trick that supports the Cultural Ponzi Scheme that is ‘Greatest City on Earth™’ as well as an actual ponzi scheme that is the housing market (purchase and rental). I worry Theme Park London is far too profitable to be stopped, and will soon be ‘too big to fail’

If I were a braver man, I would work in a planning department of the GLA; I would join a think tank or work in social research. But I am a coward. So I am running away from home for a few years. It will always be home. I just don’t know if I will recognize it.

[failtoplan]

The Myth of Ostentation

Rob Walker, New York Times Marketing correspondent, in his book ‘Buying In’ outlines an interesting thesis. His book focuses on the dialogue between individuals and the things they buy. One of his ore ideas is that one of the most important factors for people in deciding what brands they ‘buy into’ is not what these items say to other people about us, but what they say to us about ourselves- think of the middle-manager with the MacBook, assuring himself that he is in some ways creative, more than just an Excel Sheet drone...

Now clearly every product, service or company has a network of associations within culture that effect its brand, and it is the commonality in these that people buy into, which of course means that this isn’t a pure one-to-one dialogue between buyer and brand. (I would actually argue that, a brand ONLY exists in culture- marketers do not position a brand, they shepherd, nudge and cajole a living web of values and equities that inhabit the space between the company & product and the people who buy or use it- as well as those that don’t, but that perhaps is for another time…) However, far too much emphasis is placed on what people are telegraphing to others with their choice of symbols and artifacts that they surround themselves with. Without this reflexive side to the dialogue, how else would we explain designer underwear? (low-slung urban jeans-wearers aside).

Many jaded Brand professionals are particularly quick to criticize the newly rich, and aspirant emerging middle-classes in fast growing emerging economies for their love of branded bling. Often the logos and the Louis, are dismissed simply as a new-world Nouveau Riche display. If we try and see these purchases (legitimate or imitation) through the lens of that reflexive narrative, then it takes on a rather different character. As opposed to a gauche display of new wealth, a keeping up with the Nguyens, da Silvas or Patels, we can read this as a quest for markers and means of finding and understanding ones place in this world.

Newly mass-affluent populations are, in many cases, in uncharted territory. Previous generations may never have had the opportunities to achieve their material comfort that they now possess. Many of these rapidly growing markets were even closed societies that did not afford the opportunity to engage in these consumer interactions. Many of the aspirant individuals we speak to at Flamingo are planning ahead. Saving for homes, marking out milestones, experts at delayed gratification earning and waiting patiently to enjoy the fruits of their labour. Not really the kind of person who is indulging in ostentation for its own sake. What these brands can say to them ( as opposed to telegraph to others) is that, I am doing okay. They can make you feel modern, they provide signposts and markers on this newly trodden path. They can tell the purchaser that they are progressing. Less about ‘I am doing better than you’, much more about ‘I am better than I was before’.  This is not to say there isn’t an element of display involved, but there is also internal dialogue. We must understand that in many ways, Luxury is a necessity.

[failtoplan]

Brands as Intersections and Negotiated Space (Or Why Brand Manager is a crap title)

First published for Campaign Asia 

Whoever decided that the job should be called ‘Brand Manager’ has a lot to answer for.

It perpetuates the idea of a direct relationship between a brand and the company that seeks to control it, as if you can calibrate its every nuance, direct its every move. ‘Positioning’ doesn’t help either- conjuring images of pieces being shuffled round on tactical maps in some fusty operations room, as if you can just move a brand out of one territory and into another like a corporation-sized game of risk.

Brand Positionings, as a set of values in a presentation, a manifesto on a page, or layers of an onion are a key part of our trade. These models give us a common language to understand what we want a product or business to mean as well as a way to communicate these aspirations to our partners, both agencies and other brands. But what is important to remember is that they are just that- models; a way of explaining and describing a thing, but not the thing itself.

September 2014 saw Flamingo gather in Istanbul for its inaugural Expo, focused on the theme of ‘intersections’, Cultural, Geographic, Narrative and Commercial. The intention of this piece is to argue why we must see brands themselves as intersections, ones that encompass all four of these areas in their breadth; that is, brands are not ‘owned’, ‘managed’ or ‘positioned’ by the companies that gave birth to them, but exist as a negotiated space, a conversation between the company, product or service and the consumer and their cultural context.

The idea of brands as a psychological and social crossroads, as shared liminal spaces, may fill many Brand Stewards with dread, but in reality, they have always been a joint undertaking by the companies that produce and the people that consume, whether we have been aware of it or not. Simply put, a brand is what people think and feel in about a product, rather than what they are told they ought to think and feel. All of our outputs are simply inputs to this thing that we call a ‘brand’.

The intersections metaphor is apt here. Influences come from multiple directions, like vehicles speeding towards a neural junction. Product experience, others people’s opinions, packaging, cultural associations, socio-historical context and the artifacts that a Brand manager may put into the mix (the brand’s Comms) all combine to affect what a brand is. A newly launched challenger may have lighter traffic on their roads, but it’s never a one-way-street. The relatively recent proliferation of 2-way channels has made this more apparent, but we must remember brands have been ‘social’ since long before ‘Social Media’.

What this means is that a positioning is an evolving set of ideas, a conversation, and that brand ‘values’ or ‘essences’ are at once both true and also questionable; valid hypotheses rather than proved theorems. It means what we capture on a page or in a PowerPoint is a snapshot of something bigger, markers put down at a rough median between marketing aspiration and consumer reality, with the distance between those two poles roughly reflecting the how successfully that brand is doing ‘in the wild’.

If this all sounds a little bit hopeless, its not meant to. Acknowledging this has a profound influence on how we think about brands. Firstly it means brands are far more powerful than ‘positioning’ or ‘management’ gives them credit for. They are forces of nature that have powerful connections with people and exert their influence in culture. Now that has to be more exciting than words on a page. As ‘Brand Influencers,’ we get to play a kind of ‘cultural judo’ (NEW WORD?) with them, deftly using their weight and momentum to shape those negotiated spaces. It also means Brand Influences shouldn’t try and ‘fight’ or deny them. A ‘repositioning’ that denies a brand’s long heritage or scale is destined to fail through dissonance as one vehicle comes hurtling head-on into the juggernaut of history, habit or culture. Acting and thinking like a challenger brand is powerful for a big company, but to deny ones own baggage and nature will almost always fail.

So why is this so important now? Where previously we sent the marketing mix into this negotiated space and waited hopefully to see second-order results through sales and share, the mass proliferation of digital and social has allowed us to close the loop. People have always been involved in this dialectic, but now they can be heard. This increases the appetite for brands that are ‘open’, where they can see their own inputs and influence played back. This means that the ‘positioning’ is a start point and a wish-list rather than the end-goal. Rather than feeling like a tightly defined, reductive thing, we need to aspire to shape brands that have clarity but at the same time have texture and layers within that clarity, elements clustered round an agreed shared space and meaning. Rather than everything needing exactly the same voice, it now just needs to feel that it is in the same register. This is hugely liberating for brand influencers, it gives us freedom to try things, to stretch brands at the margins and play at the periphery, as well as offering alternative viewpoints on their core. This means not only engaging in discussion with consumers, but also between different elements of your media plan. Encourage conversation, in the broadest sense rather than put up a roadblock’; have your brand ask questions rather than answer them.

Or we can continue to try and simply ‘manage’… But ultimately this liminal space will continue to be negotiated and renegotiated whether we are there or not.