Showing posts with label faster but more stupid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label faster but more stupid. Show all posts

Wednesday 13 October 2021

The Stupid - It Hurts



There are so many talented people who have put their careers and reputations on the line to take a brave stance against the vogue for stupidity, found in people most attached to careers and lifestyles that are going to evaporate anyway.

The masks are about control. You put one on, and you get left alone. 

When I was working for an ambulance service last year I was talking to a highly succesful, elderly jewellery designer (originally a sculptor) who was airlifted from France as he became suddenly ill. We sat and talked about his fascinating career mirrored by his wife who was a shoe designer for the Italian fashion houses.

He was completely sentient, clever, succesful and poorly, but nothing to do with Co-Bollocks™, yet I knew he had a DNR on his paperwork (Do not resuscitate) so the scamdemic could have inflated numbers. When this story as well as the elderly moved to care homes, and the Midazolam end-of-life drug information fully sinks in to the normies, who are strictly come dancing with the corporate lying-through-their-teeth media  there's going to be a reckoning.

In the mean time, take a couple of seconds to watch the video clip above. The stupid is everywhere but in the willingly blind's heads.


There's some dispute if the quote is H.L. Mencken's but there's no dispute that most people will do anything to keep the gravy coming in. Which is how the stupid persists.

Wednesday 7 November 2018

McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War




I've recently been working with people who have complex needs so I have a grasp of what it potentially means to send a five year old into a war situation. 

This is an angle of the Vietnam war that I hadn't come across before and it's very moving.

Robert Strange McNamara ordered 100,000 below intelligence recruits to Vietnam every year to make up the shortfall from draft dodgers who were excused from military service because their wealthy parents had excuses like they just had teeth braces fitted.

Sunday 8 June 2008

Chunking Express



This is a long and sweeping post covering Asia and Creativity and Survival. There's no way I am even close to being completely right and there will be gaps, mistakes and contradictions and could easily go on for much longer, but I think I've connected enough of the dots to write this down rather than endlessly repeat what I've been asked about through umpteen Skype/Coffee Shop/Phone conversations around the world even though it was a pleasure to do it one more time for my good man Mark in the early hours of Saturday morning (It was closer to 3 AM Mark, I lost track of time!)

I'm a committed environmentalist, green marketeer, sustainable energy man and yesterday, as promised, offered free B2B marketing consultancy to a Chairwoman I met on Friday night at a swanky hotel bar, who is trying to raise funds on AIM for biomass fuel resource development in China. So cut me some slack on buying this unecessary phone because it is now the stimulus for a long overdue post that I started with Quantity not Quality back here.


OK, so the phone is pictured above. I first saw one owned by the manager of a stall in a Xidan shopping mall that does those funky T Shirts with twisted slogans I love so much. She was kind enough to answer my questions about where to get one, although they were no longer available, and finally Gustavo emailed to let me know he'd spotted them at Silk Street Market.

I have no real desperate need for a secondary phone except as a backup, but here's the skinny. Its shaped in the style of those first 1985 models called the Motorola DynaTAC, only a lot smaller and it is in my opinion, the definitive ironic style accessory. But lets talk facts. It comes with some more stuff than the original despite being a fraction of the original size:

Extra Memory Card
Stylus operated PDA
Bluetooth
FM Radio
Two Batteries
Media Player
Camera
Sound Recorder
Video

and....... most importantly; a SOLAR PANEL on the rear for charging the battery, meaning I leave it in the sunshine and she's good to go. Oh yeah, and it carries two SIM cards so I can have a double life which is perfect because even though I turned down those alarmingly low paid but discrete approaches by people who insisted on being implicit and not explicit about what branch of government they worked for all those years ago, this phone has a telescopic detachable zoom lens so I can observe Al Qaida operatives long before they spot me, and way after they were called the Mujahedeen and funded by "The American Dream" to win the cold war that was also won by outspending the Soviets on Nukes instead of funding guerrilla fighters who wanted to protect their religion and culture. I digress but check the telescopic lens out.


Freaking neat huh?... Back to the point. Asia, and China specifically is staggeringly good at duplication, imitation, reproduction, cloning and replication. I don't mean that pejoratively at all, except that in general it appears very few give a fuck about the environment, but it's not like any fool can do it either. For a start, it takes an entrepreneurial mindset, lots of financial resource, the expertise to duplicate the latest technology, reorganise an existing manufacturing process, disrupt the in-process inventory model (which is a LOT of work), reconfigure supply side distribution management and believe it or not, try and do some marketing.

So even though Asia is brimming with the sort of creative output that humans all round the world are good at when given the right environment, the reality of the region and China specifically is that it does the industrially unprecedented, through scale and volumetrics, plus a monoculture that pretty much insists on a uniformity of mindset and collective action rather than the pluralism and creative tension of the Western model kicked off by ideas from Empedocles and Democritus. China is still closer to the pre-Socratic Eleatics in thinking and while I generally embrace all cultural idiosyncrasies I believe China should think very very seriously about how to embrace pluralism and how to work it together with collective endeavour outside of the neoliberal capitalist model for reasons I'll round up on once I've dusted off creativity.

Now there plenty of exceptions outside of China, of brilliant creative marketing executions. There are however insufficient Pan-Asian successful branding case studies to conclude that out of a few billion people in the Far East, only a handful have figured out how to build on their strengths rather than embrace the reality of not being innovation leaders. Lets list them. Singapore Airlines (had it, lost it), Sony (erratic), Honda (W+K London) erm Samsung/Epson/Panasonic/Asus et al (yawn) and shall we say that'll be the Daewoo? Because when I worked in London at HHCL, no creative could ever deliver a pun as an idea. Oh and by the way Hello Kitty is Asia's third strongest brand.

So back to the product because that is where Asia knows how to rock-it from a manufacturing, pricing and distribution angle. The phone above is a 3rd millenium mashup and I love its solar panel credentials (it's no toy feature) but there is nothing in it that was invented outside of an occidental environment. Hat tip to Charlie Gower for his post that highlighted it was the Japanese at Sharp in 2001 who put a camera into the first popular cellphone. Digital photography though is rooted outside of the country that implemented it first successfully.

Charlie Gower is also one of the most creative idea driven people I know and memorably suggested at The Endurance in Soho, that mobile phones cameras need a small detachable light connected by wire, for taking decent night time shots. He's right too. Lighting is in the top three things for a good picture with composition and subject matter. A serious Asian brand will never do it first because it hasn't been done elsewhere. Sony. You make the best camera phones. What are you waiting for?

And there my friends is part of the challenge.

Whether its manufacturing or marketing by the time it comes to that old chestnut called creativity the absolutely last thing on a serious Asian brand's mind is taking a risk. Monoculture is all about being risk averse.

The marketing psychology over here is all too often 'If everyone is doing the same shit, then its more than likely to be working'. If I go out on a limb I'm risking the whole shebang for some marketing glory. Why on earth would I want to do that? The agencies are quite happy to go along with the illusion of creativity because the remuneration for getting a regular kicking from their clients is worth it. Senior management just shuffle the spreadsheet finance numbers and it's those lower down the food chain that are bullied the most anyway.

Now I could go into the reality that there isn't much need to stuff Asian ads with the usual superlatives of shiny white teeth and happy sterile family stereotypes. In real GDP growth economies here in Asia of say 7% and above all we have to do is bash people over the head with a monologue and make money. Repetition, increased sound volume, general aspirational lifestyle imagery and a million wasted hours talking bullshit about brand values, propositions, transactional analysis (just kidding), rational versus emotional, link testing, likability versus memorability and the rest of that old marketing bullshit that invariably settles on the word passion because of course the client and agency believe the brand is ALL about PASSION. Of course they do! It pays their fucking mortgages for Christ's sake.

How do we move on? If Asia and China specifically wants to move on to having the glorious aroma of a brand that performs above and beyond product specifications, there is plenty of fertile territory that deeper analysis of the DNA and marketing context offers. So often the really sticky stuff that is insanely interesting about Asian brands are the humble roots of the people who started them, the scalability, the risk taking, the commitment and the reasons they put on their spreadsheet marketeer heads on each morning. For their families and for their dreams. The power of dreams as we all know is quite something which is probably where I should begin to wrap up because the reality is that while I know great brands can be built here in Asia that can go global and attract a lot of customer love we are all facing a much larger problem than flogging the latest tech gadget. The economic model we are using is broken. It operates by extracting resources from the ground, converting it into products and then disposing of them at an exponentially faster rate because that is why technology controls us and not the other way round.

The imperative marketing challenge for Asia and China particular if you are listening because it all rests with you until the Indian demographics kick in is to charge more for less.

More ideas less stuff.

More cost less consumption

How do you do that?

You build proper brands that stand for something your families would be proud of and that means embracing the word creativity and innovation with a view to doing nothing less than rewiring our economies and the corporations so that we have something to pass on to the next generations.

Its really rather simple, and very very complex at the same time.

There's also a lot of thinking some of us are doing about why digital is more sensible for explosive growth populations and why analogue is probably a more intelligent use of resource for the rich folk.

Wednesday 25 July 2007

trashbat dot cock


My clever academic and designer chum (Uni lecturer too come to think of it) pointed out to me a few weeks ago that computer operating system upgrades have a lot to answer from their impact on the environment. Each time Windows or Apple (and its not just computing platforms) launch an upgrade, the impact on our planet both in terms of resources 'screwed' from the ground, and waste chucked back into it is huge. All so we can work faster and less smarter while seemingly avoiding any thinking about the planet heating up. Go figure.... I say bring back a mandatory siesta. China? The U.S.? Just do it.

What makes it even more ugly is that each software upgrade just raises the hardware game so that the need becomes a self fulfilling prophecy - duh. Far more intelligent would be to encourage a proper geek culture for a tweaked and patched extended operating system life span. Windows 98 kept me happy far longer than the last notebook that ran it did. That piece of Japanese state of the art kit eventually buckled under the weight of huge CPU requirements for software upgrades (Adobe, MS Office, Symantec, Real, Java, Flash) around the same time as the physical keyboard.


So reading this today, I feel even more uneasy with the relentless and senseless upgrade to New New New New culture. (Terror, Terror, Terror anyone?). I understand that technology designers have a weakness called 'feature creep'. It means that they can't help but add functions that are largely useless to all but the biggest swinging remote control user. Anyway I thought I was going to cut my waffle down for this post but I've gone on like the bores I claim to be so mindful of. In any case when the President of Acer calls it like it is and says Vista is a turkey, I think its time to start telling Microsoft to Change the world or Go Home.