English

Posts in English

Every time you log out…

Every time you log out from GMail, they count you as a YouTube user.

So sad to see what rubbish Google has become! Do yourself a favour: Try Tuta.

Silicon Valley’s Lost Decade

What happened in Silicon Valley in the 2010s ?

Airbnb: founded in 2008, raised over $6 billion, managed to destroy entire areas of Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris and Rome, among other cities, because rich tourists wanted to live like a local for a few days, and apparently failed to turn a profit…

Crypto: Silicon Valley’s favourite speculative asset and bullshit story was further improved by NFTs and their wet dreams of web3. In the meantime, in India they are working on real payments systems and are in talks about taking them to Australia and France.

Facebook: Zuck’s hot-or-not website turned into a juggernaut that resulted in the largest data abuse ever, violence against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar, Trump at the White House and Brexit. Not bad for a company that wanted to unite the world.

Google: they changed their name to Alphabet, dropped every pretence of not doing evil and stopped caring about the quality of their search results entirely. A crop of new search engines are emerging, including Brave, Kagi, Neeva, Qwant and Mojeek.

Scooters: Bird and Lime came from nowhere and raised $2 billion in an impressive play to save Americans from walking. A number of companies copied them in Europe, and cities were all too happy to let the market solve problems they are supposed to work on.

Tesla: in spite of cars and suburbia being America’s greatest failure of the XX Century, Tesla was hailed as the solution to the problem. Cars are a very hard addiction to kick, and it’s a lot easier to pretend that moving to EVs will solve our every problem.

Twitter: they helped spread democracy during the Arab Spring, in countries that are neither Arabic, nor have become democracies. On the other hand, they gave Trump a platform. If that were not bad enough, they are soon to be owned by Elon Musk.

Uber: bust taxis, create the illusion that cheaper and more luxurious rides were possible at the same time and traffic could be solved by magic by an app. $31 billion burned and a wasted decade in which nobody tried to solve our cities’ hard problems.

WeWork: only in Silicon Valley can a real estate company become a tech company — sure, that would be proptech, raise $22 billion, fail to turn a profit, go public etc. Another poster child of a decadent decade of hubris, groupthink and drinking the Kool-Aid.

Can’t Sell, Don’t Care

Advertising does not show us the benefits of a product anymore. In fact, it’s not even interested in selling anymore. Instead, it preaches. It tells us that we must hold some progressive and widely-held but not necessarily true belief about society, inclusion, the environment, immigration, gender or cosmopolitanism.

It’s London-centric and it lives in its own bubble. Steve Harrison, the Jonathan Pie of advertising, tells the story of how advertising turned its back to the job it was supposed to do and decided to focus on chiding the “deplorables” instead.

In politics, this led to or at least contributed to Brexit, Trump and Northern England voting for the Tories (!). In advertising, it led to companies chasing the next miracle-like formula, like with the infamous ice-bucket challenge, and totally losing contact with the “somewheres”, the people who belong to where they were born and live.

This type of advertising worked nicely for some companies, but only when the desired behaviour was linked to the product being advertised and the preaching was kept in check. In most cases, instead, it’s just empty virtue-signalling that doesn’t resonate and often antagonises a large chunk of consumers. It doesn’t sell, and it doesn’t care.

—

This is my review of Can’t Sell Won’t Sell: Advertising, politics and culture wars. Why adland has stopped selling and started saving the world on Amazon.

Definition of Social Media

This is my bullshit-free definition of social media:

Web properties that amass a ton of users — ideally in the hundreds of millions, track their every move on the platform and give advertisers the opportunity to target them with sponsored posts right in the feed.

It doesn’t matter how users entertain themselves: with memes and photos of cats, keeping contact with long-lost friends and crushes, fighting about politics while trying to sound smart, with sexy photos of themselves, by self-aggrandizing or watching funny videos.

Nor does it really matter whether they are connected to people they know, in which case one should be speaking of social networks, or just with people they find interesting or sexy, celebrities or authorites in a field or just with more of the same funny, dumb videos.

All that matters is that there’s a proprietary platform, free or cheap user-generated bullshit (UGB), a ton of users, serious tracking, an in-house targeting system and the possibility to advertise right in the middle of the feed, or do what they call native advertising.

Lies and bike lanes in Milan

Milan went through 8 weeks of total Covid-19 lockdown, from March 8 to last Sunday, May 3rd. Did City Hall work on pop-up bicycle lanes in the meantime? Of course not.

But then it became cool. Bogotà was doing it, and Berlin, and Oakland was closing off streets to cars. Somebody got jealous. Milan told The Guardian they had a plan.

On April 21, The Guardian took the bait, well before Milan published their new plan for 35 kms 22 kms of bike lanes, on April 24, or the Strade Aperte plan, on April 30.

Apparently, the story was too good to pass. Or to check. The Irish Times, The Independent, CityLab, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Fast Company and the BBC all fell for it.

A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes

– Jonathan Swift

Gisela Méndez, an architect and urbanist from Mexico City, discovered that a year earlier Milan’s mobility manager had promised, but not delivered, 85 kms of new bike lanes.

Disappointed, she published a post aptly titled El día que Milán engañó a todo el activismo ciclista mundial, or The day that Milan misled the whole world’s cycling activism.

I did some further research: on the left, you can see — in light blue, red and purple — the bikes lines approved in late 2018; on the right, what we are getting, in 2020.

What does the future hold for Milan?

More of the same — more cars! On the day after the article from The Guardian, the city of Milan put its congestion charge and its (formerly) restricted driving zones on hold.

It will be cars, rather than bicycles, that are and always will be welcome in this city.

Links to documents:

Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan, 2018

Table 6 of the above mentioned plan

The New Bike Lanes Project, 2020