December 2011
34 posts
3 tags
Influence marketing as Ponzi scheme
Ah the challenges of having an original idea! In the process of transferring my longer-form posts here to my new domain JayOh.net, I find that the themes in my last post Influencer marketing: two speculative stories were prefigured by Tom Ewing over a year ago:
There are “influencers” who live in the world of “social media”, and if you influence these “influencers” they will say nice stuff...
3 tags
“These extremes are called civilisation and barbarism - or savagery. But the use...”
– Georges Bataille, Eroticism p. 186 (Marion Boyers, London 2006)
3 tags
Influencer marketing, peers and trust - two...
01. The attraction of influencer marketing is in being able to leverage word-of-mouth and peer recommendations.
02. This is valuable because peer influence is the most effective form of influencing what we buy, or what we feel about a brand. [source]
03. Peer influence has this impact because it’s advice from people we trust. Key to almost every definition of an influencer is their...
3 tags
Michael Wheeler, THINKING BEYOND THE BRAIN:... →
[…] Andy Clark’s memorable description of human beings as natural born cyborgs. What this phrase reminds us is that although it is tempting to think of our cognitive symbiosis with technology as being a consequence, as opposed to merely a feature, of a world populated by clever computational kit, that would be to ignore the following fact: it is of our very nature as evolved and embodied...
6 tags
Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an... →
“Within the next few years an important threshold will be crossed: For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders—every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every...
2 tags
3 tags
3 tags
1 tag
5 tags
2 tags
4 tags
Peak freedom?
I read an article a week ago which argued that this - here, now - is what peak oil looks like
A decade ago, those few of us who were paying attention to peak oil were pointing out that if the peak of global conventional petroleum production arrived before any meaningful steps were taken, the price of oil would rise to previously unimagined heights, crippling the global economy and pushing...
Crooked Timber » » DeLong, Scott and Hayek →
Brad DeLong has a review of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State which I found pretty useful in clarifying some of my disagreements with him (Brad, not Scott). What he sees as a fundamental problem in…
Spaces of Appearance, Spaces of Surveillance, and... →
[READ W/ REGARD TO SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING] Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault developed different but complementary theories about the relationship between visibility and power. In an Arendtian…
The Robot-Readable World – Matt Jones, BERG →
“What if, instead of designing computers and robots that relate to what we can see, we meet them half-way – covering our environment with markers, codes and RFIDs, making a robot-readable world”
"Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity" [DANAH... →
No matter how many times a privileged straight white male technology executive pronounces the death of privacy, Privacy Is Not Dead. People of all ages care deeply about privacy. And they care just…
5 tags
Things that will be banned during the London 2012...
Maintaining Olympic advertisers’ expensively-purchased monopolies of signification is a legal requirement for host cities. This means new laws:
Section 19: Advertising Regulations.
(4)The regulations may apply in respect of advertising of any kind including, in particular—
(a)advertising of a non-commercial nature, and
(b)announcements or notices of any kind.
(5)The regulations may...
Homelessness in Central Park →
hkhuntingblog:
These photos from @HKhuntingblog are from the Great Depression, where homeless people were living in shacks in Central Park.
A roof over their heads and public visibility at the centre of the city? It strikes me that this may have offered somewhat more dignity than homeless people are today able to find in America, where Occupy Wall Street may be helping but only under...
2 tags
“Whenever we talk about the Internet, the “mythological machine” in our...”
– Wu Ming, Fetishism of Digital Commodities and Hidden Exploitation: the cases of Amazon and Apple on MUTE. NB that Wu Ming is a mysterious collective of guerrillla novelists from Italy - not a singular individual.
Posted because this is a useful reminder following my last post Seeing Like A...
4 tags
Seeing Like A Database: the problems with big data
“Big data” has been one of the buzzwords of 2011, and grand claims are being made for its power:
The world is becoming data-ized as digital information and numerical measurement is being applied to all aspects of what people do, particularly things that couldn’t be measured before because it was impractical or impossible. (Think: using wireless and GPS in cars to base insurance...
5 tags
The Hudson's Bay Boys
Watching an exceptional documentary on The Hudson’s Bay Boys [BBC iPlayer] about the last generation of Scots who went out to work for the Hudson Bay Company in Arctic Canada in the 1960s - 1980s.
As 20-year-olds they moved half way round the world to work in the trading posts and general stores, appraising seal-skins and selling flour, sugar, (cigarettes, alcohol) - but more than that,...
1 tag
“What is the cultural temperament of this era?
Well, I think it’s got a good...”
– From Bruce Sterling’s Reboot 11 speech (25th June 2009), available here.
Think he’s very much on the money with “dark euphoria”, but I’m less sure about his other neologisms. That said, they’re phrases that still seem to be getting flung around by @justinpickard...
3 tags
“In the British Civil Service (from where much of this language originates) there...”
– A particularly illuminating comment by @DGHFrost following an Economist article on the joys of euphemistic understatement in British management speak. This is another version of that “What the English say vs. what they mean” document that’s been going around the intertubes in the...
4 tags
3 tags
“My own area of research relates to what might be called ‘design with intent’,...”
– Dan Lockton in Ballardian. J.G. Ballard & Architectures of Control (via protoslacker)
3 tags
Bugged planet
New Wikileaks release on the ‘bugged planet’ - the $5-billion mass surveillance industry selling telecoms and internet monitoring technology.
To date, we have documented a total of 133 of these surveillance weapons dealers, including 36 in the United States, 18 in the United Kingdom, 15 in Germany, 11 in Israel and eight in Italy. As with “traditional” arms dealers, most of them are...
1 tag
Germany is haunted by 1920s hyperinflation
“For the average American, inflation means the home price is increasing and the value of debt is going down, whereas the German invested in life insurance and sitting in an apartment he rented is much more vulnerable to inflation.” [NYT]
- Peter Bofinger, a prominent economist on Mrs. Merkel’s independent council of economic advisers, cited by Nicholas Kulish in Haunted by ’20s...
3 tags
