TECHNOLOGY IS A DANGEROUS FRIEND

Conversations about technology go back a long way. Progress has always been symbolised by technological advances. Yet what it’s constantly done is to promise a better life. Promises. Promises. 

The most difficult conversations in recent times have circled around communication which is curious given our glorious command of language for hundreds of years. People I knew learned swathes of Shakespeare . Richard Burton was said to have all 39 plays off word perfect. I guess that was his job. Now I’ve been told forget about memory because that’s best left to machines.

I’m puzzled.

The idea was surely that technology would make life easier and give us more time for leisure and thinking. Instead it’s become divisive, separating those who can and those who can’t or those who will and those who won’t.

Take a recent video of the smart-home where  everything in a house operates to voice commands. The owner asks for jazz to be played, smoothies to be made, heating to be turned up or down and the front door opened and closed. In the 17th century slaves did that sort of thing;  now we use virtual slaves which is rather ironic. The owner goes to the dentist. He has various injections and returns home with his paralysed mouth and muffled voice. His smart-home proves impenetrable as his anaesthetised voice commanding “open the door” is not recognisable.  To his fury he is not the master any longer. 

Social media was allegedly a concept for improving our ability to “share.”  Yet an ex-President’s primary way of running America was through Twitter. I know smart young people who have abandoned social media as trivial, time-wasting and potentially a source of acrimony. I see little evidence that social media is social or sociable. Quite the reverse as Twitter belatedly realised.

Is it easier to write using technology? I’m using a PC now. It’s kinder on arthritic hands and enables me to edit more vigorously and effectively. Does it let me write better? Probably not. Quicker? No. But it provides me with a strange illusion. That what was in my head has magically become the work of a third person. An author who writes in perfect Calibri or Garamond ready for publication.

Technology exists like Outwrite or Grammarly which claim to “help you eliminate errors and find the perfect words to express yourself.” 

Scholarcy and Summly are tools for summarising articles or books. Is this such a good idea?

Here are some famous summaries – at least they’re quite funny.

“War and Peace” – everyone is sad. It snows.

“Moby Dick” - Man v. Whale. Whale wins.

“The Odyssey”- the hero takes forever to get home. Then he kills everyone.

So am I antediluvian and a technophobe? I hope not. I just think we’ve become deluded by devices for the sake of cleverness or money…

At $7.2 trillion Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Samsung dwarf the GDP of the world’s third biggest economy -  Japan (just $5 trillion). So they’re selling stuff that people want to buy. 

That’s why my mobile phone provider keeps ringing me about “an upgrade” – the new Samsung S21 5G. When I say I actually want a downgrade – a tool that  does what I need, they laugh.

It’s time to think, not get machines to do it for us – which they can’t. 

The inventiveness of man is stupefying but I wonder if people like Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos’ ambitions to become space travellers isn’t indicative of them realising terrestrial technology isn’t enough: that the Tesla’s already maybe just a bit out of date.

TIME AND PLACE

Last week the amazingly wealthy Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said of time well-spent he needed to sleep at least eight hours a day as he had to live in the future making crucial decisions. Living in the future, especially if it’s a faster moving version of today, would make me tired.

Time is strange stuff. How fast it seems to move is nothing to do with clocks it’s to do with how we feel. Our obsession with marginal time-saving which HS2 provides or which the fast food/dating/reading crowd pursue seems a bit futile to me.  Taking time to relish what’s happening seems a lot smarter. Taking your time though is hard if you’re surrounded by bustle, fast-talkers and deadlines. That’s the trouble with capital cities yet what, at the same time, makes them so exciting. (And please don’t tell me you find New York boring.)

However attitudes to place are changing. The ability to hold a Board Meeting in the south of France wearing a linen jacket and crisp white shirt on Skype and a swimming costume down below is not only possible, it’s happening.

So where you are doesn’t matter then? Well … actually it does. Hence the Dick Whittington urge for that streets-paved-with-gold-London-urge. The ambitious gravitate to share space with like-minded, ambitious souls.

That’s why I found the story about Naples I heard recently so fascinating. In the past Naples hasn’t had a great reputation. Handback snatching, Mafia, poverty, with 50% unemployment amongst the young … not a fantastic place to live.  Until 2016. That was when Apple set up its Apple Development Academy there. It’s in a glass, shiny-steel building and has big working spaces with sofas and round tables. There’ve been 600 graduates so far, 70% from the Calabria region.

Terrific news. But it’s been the knock-on effect which has been even more extraordinary. Big companies like Cisco, and Deloitte Digital have followed Apple and Naples is now the second region in Italy after Milan for young start-ups (18 – 32 year olds). People are coming home from Brighton, Berlin and other tech centres. One described Naples, his home town as “the most beautiful place in the world where I want to be with family and friends; where I want my children to grow up and work too.” Naples derives from “Neapolis” – new city. At last this seems an appropriate name.

We can’t just live on Skype (although Skype’s got its place). We need to meet people, see them and decode their body language. We also need to be based in a place with a community of creative and disruptive spirits shaping the future in the sure knowledge that the future isn’t going to be an 8 – 6 office in a skyscraper. We need the place, the human contact and the time to think and create stuff be it apps, plays, stories or things that make life nicer and better for humanity.

See Naples at work and you’ll believe in a new future.

BASTARDS DON'T ALWAYS WIN

Pete Shuttleworth, the founder of a new and very successful Film Production Country, Hoi Polloi, leaned over the table of Café Coho near Brighton Station and asked me if “bastards always won”.

Outside the sun was shining and people trudged along the pavement. In Brighton there’s a curious “sod you,” lumbering walking style which I put down to a shortage of hunger. In London everyone sprints.

Being a bastard works best if you’re a rich genius like Jobs, Bezos or Zuckerberg. It worked for Stalin and Attila too. Bezos comes up with great put-downs like:

“Are you lazy or just incompetent?”

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tried not to be a bastard. He sent an internal memo out last Tuesday announcing that 336 employees were leaving the company. He wanted to avoid corporate speak, messed up by talking about “roadmaps” and “streamlining” but, to be fair, it was a reasonable try. The corporate bastard took over in the hands of HR (aka the Grim Reapers) closing down Twitter and e-mail accounts of the unfortunate 336 with the cryptic words  “you have been removed”. 

Anyone who hasn’t seen the opening of “Margin Call” should. In a major downsizing exercise, HR assassins in the film swoop into the New York offices of a New York Investment Bank slaughtering as they go,.

But the fictional CEO (Jeremy Irons) and Dorsey aren’t bastards, they are just doing what CEOs do when under critical profit pressure, they cut cost.

The really nasty people are the prevaricators and those who stop talent being as good as it should be. These are the death-eaters of management who suck the energy and creativity from people who work with them. I worked for one of these. There are a lot of them around. And one of their characteristics is they interview well and they’re brilliant presenters. But deep down they are evil. They feed greedily on the talent of others and they are devoid of any generosity of spirit.

Back to those lumberers outside the café in Brighton - well at least they were all smiling - and Pete who got it spot on in saying the key to the business who knew best - advertising - was to be “smart and hard.” 

You also have to strive to work with the best people. As Bezos (again) said:

“Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful”

At Netflix they say what makes a great business is not perks but “stunning colleagues” who are smart, hard and driven to do great work. When you work alongside really great people, as they also discovered at Pixar, great stuff happens.

But this is a competitive world and to win you have to remember this - the words of George C. Scott in the film “Patton":

”Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his county. He won it by making the other poor bastard die for his country.”

BEWARE TREATING FASHION TRENDS AS PERMANENT

When I was very small I was shaken awake by mother one Sunday night. She had urgent news for me.

“It’s wonderful. Wake up. Bird Dog is number one”.

She’d been listening to Radio Luxembourg and she was living proof that being old didn’t mean you couldn’t join in. Or was she? At that moment I wondered if the Everly Brothers were meant for me.

The recent controversy over social media this week made me think about age.  The trouble is if you are in that quarter of the population over the age of 60 who are struggling to either comprehend the way to make it work or to come to terms with whether it actually matters, social media seems as hard to understand as the Sex Pistols were to our parent’s generation.

Much of the problem lies in the sheer inappropriateness of MPs and mature citizens, with their aching extremities, pretending they are young and trendy and merrily tweeting their passing thoughts. It also exposes the dangers of playing a game where you don’t really know all the rules.

As Daryll Scott the Creative Director of Noggin advised us: don’t try and join in because whilst it’s second nature to the young it’s not for you. You trying to be techno-cool is embarrassing, as embarrassing as a 60 year old trying to dance the invisible horse Gangnam style. After all do you remember watching your father doing the twist?

Enter 17 year old Jordan Hatch. Government is now advised by teenagers like him. We’ve seen him this week in his shorts and trainers talking very sensibly about websites. Someone who knows how to interpret fashion trends and predict what will be important and what won’t.

Many people say the world has been usurped by a conspiracy between technology and youth – that quarter of the population aged between 15 and 30. But beware they have discarded their laptops for their mobile phones and the social media they like and use are way beyond Twitter and Facebook. They’re Pinterest, Snapchat, Kik and Tumblr. Things are changing very fast.

But what is fashion and what’s sustainable?

What price the Washington Post?

Actually it’s $250 million. That’s what Jeff Bezos of Amazon paid for it. He has a brand that resonates with truth; a brand that’s been around for nearly 150 years; a brand that could link past, present and future handled right. (Look at the success of the Mail Online which is,  now, the world’s most popular news site.)
The trick will be to do what happens in Dr. Who – regenerate every so often as the Mail has done.
So when they shake you awake now they’ll be saying.

“It’s wonderful. Private Eye Online has overtaken the Huffington Post. Honestly.”

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