Antonym: baseless predictions edition
2023. Things can only get...
Dear Reader
Congratulations on unlocking level 2023 of the game.
The US is experiencing a TRIPLEDEMIC, a term that hasn’t taken off in the UK in the same way, but we’ve been suffering from it anyway: a Christmas buffet of viruses including influenza, Covid-19 variants and RSV (posh for a nasty cold with a particularly bad cough). I think by next year we’ll just call it winter. But anyway…
Schadenfreude section
But let’s cheer ourselves up.
Imagine if the founder of Wetherspoons and Nigel Farage building an anti-immigrant defence barrier at Dover, only for it cause part of the White Cliffs to break away and become part of France. Well, the equivalent may actually happen in ‘Merica…
A Texas consortium of businesses that built a three mile border wall to stop immigrants.
A three-mile-long fence built with private funds is now useless, and could potentially redirect the Rio Grande in such a way that part of the land becomes part of Mexico, reports the New York Times:
The fence, constructed three years ago with private funds, was once at the center of a bitter national debate over border security, its builder touted by President Donald J. Trump and promoted in a fraudulent scheme by Steve Bannon known as “We Build the Wall” that resulted in criminal indictments and convictions."
Now, the three-mile-long barrier is essentially orphaned, functionally useless — because of a federally constructed border barrier a short distance behind it — and, according to an engineering report commissioned by the Justice Department, at risk of falling over in a major flood and floating away."
And because of its location and construction along the water’s edge, federal officials worry that the fence could end up redirecting the Rio Grande in such a way that the land it sits on would end up as part of Mexico."
LOL.
Too many predictions
After three years where, in sequence, no one predicted the pandemic, everyone predicted a boom because it was over and then most people (wishfully) predicted that Russia would not invade Ukraine, you’d think we’d had our fill of start-the-year Soothayers. Far from it: there are more than ever…
The turn of each year sees “thought leadership” efforts by everyone to say what will happen in the next 12 months. Doesn’t matter that they will be wrong, may be too vague, or too similar to everyone else, it’s an urge that’s hard to beat. It’s lists, and lists indulge our need for certainty even though the world has given us years of severe shock treatment to remind of us of the extreme uncertainty and unpredictability of the world.
What can you do when everyone in the world is trying to produce predictions for the year ahead? Aggregate the analysis and do a meta-analysis, of course…
Piers Fawkes – a legit trends expert in the media and marketing world – had a moment of horror at the volume of predictions just before Christmas when he saw a folder of more than 130 (at last count) trends reports, and one document with links to even more.
Is this the end of trends research? What does it say for the practice when you can gather a folder of over 100 end of year trends reports? I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Trends research is definitely a meme.
Anthony Cheung has done a similar service for the financial sector with a “macro outlook” round up, aka a list of major banks’ forecasts for the year, which FTAlphaville called “semi-useful” and added a few of its own.
Predictions and trends are catnip for the story-telling, pattern seeing mind of homo sapiens. We just can’t help writing and reading lists of things that probably won’t happen.
The only sure-fire certainty apart from death and taxes in 2023 is that come October marketing and analyst teams across the world will be drafting their 2024 analysis…
In for a penny…
I’ll make one prediction.
Artificial intelligence will blow your mind, scare you, disappoint you and bore you at all once. Why?
It’s getting personal.
It’s speeding up.
It’s bloody useful.
We’re so, so, so early in its application and use.
As Scott Galloway put it in his 2023 predictions (definitely worth reading):
Like Web3 last year, artificial intelligence is on track to be the most hyped technology of 2023. Unlike Web3, however, AI will (mostly) live up to the hype. We’ve already witnessed the immense capabilities of image- and text-generating AI programs, including Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and ChatGPT. I wrote a post a few weeks ago showcasing the expansion of AI capabilities. An influx of capital and attention in 2023 will accelerate the category’s growth
A lot of the 30 Antonyms in 2022 were devoted to AI’s burgeoning capabilities in relation to creative and knowledge work.
AI being big is a safe prediction, it’s a unmissable, undeniable trend, unlike the massive, near baseless leap that “the metaverse” was this time last year. What we don’t know is how it will be big and how it will surprise us, and that’s because we’re inventing it all right now. It’s not something to wait for, it’s something for everyone to get involved in. Why? Because you will be confronted with it in someway, challenged, if only to have a point of view. It will move quickly and if you’re not aware and involved, others will invent this future for you.
You can start getting a sense of how AI works just by playing… If you’ve yet to have a go, start here…
Copy this paragraph:
Re-write the following paragraph in the style of DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: AI being big is a safe prediction, it’s a unmissable, undeniable trend, unlike the massive, near baseless leap that “the metaverse” was this time last year. What we don’t know is how it will be big and how it will surprise us, and that’s because we’re inventing it all right now. It’s not something to wait for, it’s something for everyone to get involved in. Why? Because you will be confronted with it in someway, challenged, if only to have a point of view. It will move quickly and if you’re not aware and involved, others will invent this future for you.
Open ChatGPT in a browser (sign in or set up an account if you haven’t already – it’s free and quick)
Paste the paragraph and then either replace DAVID ATTENBOROUGH with the name of a writer or public figure you like.
Press the send button.
The process should look something like this:
And here’s Dora the explorer being re-written as an example:
Have fun. Then think about the implications if this were – as it will be – a part of everyday life. Of work, of entertainment, politics, crime, art…
The reverse-engineered marketing game
Minor acts of marketing communication sometimes snag my attention and I can’t help but reverse engineer the meeting or the process that got a business to the point where it made some words and pictures to represent it in a certain way. This week and estate agency near my house presented me with this image.
Helpfully, the estate agent has self-anonymised this piece of promotional material – odd move, that – so I don’t think it is too rude to speculate on its backstory here.
Because unfortunately this line has been spoken for, as it were, in popular culture, where the evil corporation in Succession uses it as a counter to accusations of terrible crimes by its executives…
…and then was unwittingly repeated by Kwasi Kwarteng, the least successful UK Chancellor of the Exchequer by several measures.
Image: Succession official Instagram.
So, the game is to guess how we got to this:
Scenario 1. The copywriter watched Succession and forgot about where this line came from. Not to worry… different sector.
Scenario 2. Marketing team watched Succession and hate the brand so much they thought they would have a little joke.
Scenario 3. The business hates its customers so much it wanted to laugh in their faces. “Every time we make a sale we yell ‘We Get It!’ And then ‘The commission that is!’”
Alternative scenarios on a DM to the usual address…
Links of note
The Year Tech Bro Lunacy Was Exposed - Medium, by Douglas Rushkoff
Summary: In 2020, the “tech bro” lunacy that has been propagated by tech billionaires and Silicon Valley startups have finally been exposed, says Douglas Rushkoff. Several tech companies have been accused of manipulating the public, as well as creating an uneven playing field when it comes to the economy and wealth distribution. The article argues that this type of behaviour has been going on for some time, but only now have the public become aware of it.
I mean, obvious, but it’s always better to hear Rushkoff pull the strands of misery together into a single, neatly-labeled, historical moment.
Death of the Narrator? Apple Unveils Suite of AI-voiced Audiobooks, The Guardian
Summary: Apple has released a suite of audiobooks with artificial intelligence-voiced narrators. The AI narrators are designed to be capable of expressing emotions and replicate the tone of a human reader. The technology could potentially revolutionise the audiobook industry and may lead to the less use of human narrators.
Naturally this is bad news for voice actors. What’s interesting as a listener to audiobooks, is that it might be possible to get decent narrations of some books which have no audio or poor audio. Quality ranges from sublime to the aggravating, and all at the same price. Le Carré’s reading of A Delicate Truth unlocked all of his books to me by connecting me with his tone, Donna Tartt’s narration of The Secret History gives the text new depth even to a multiple-re-reader of it, and similarly Ben Miles’s versions of the Wolf Hall trilogy audiobooks gave new ways into texts I loved. Meanwhile any of Neal Stephenson’s books that involve different accents are hard to listen to at all. I use Readwise Reader’s audio feature a great deal for listening to articles, and VoiceDream is an app which offers a huge range of voices for reading out texts.
The Secrets of the French 75, Financial Times Magazine
Summary: The French 75 is a potent cocktail that originated in France and is made up of various combinations of gin, sugar, lemon, and champagne. It was made famous by Harry Craddock at the Savoy in London in the 1920s, although the recipe has changed over time. The drink was originally made with calvados apple brandy, but is now served with botanical gin, absinthe, sugar, and lemon juice. In the US, Prohibition led to simpler drinks, but the cocktail re-emerged in the early 2000s when Arnaud's Restaurant in New Orleans created a new version with brandy and lemon, sugar, and champagne. Today, the French 75 is a popular drink, served around the world in different variations.
If you’re doing dry January, mazel tov. If you think that no month requires booze more, then this article will delight you with the strange history and many evolutions of the French 75 cocktail. For the record, I make it with gin, lemon juice and champagne, but some of these variations sound incredible.
Fact of the week: the UK is de-automating carwashing
Although British media worry about robots taking everybody’s jobs, the reality is closer to the opposite. “Between 2003 and 2018, the number of automatic-roller car washes (that is, robots washing your car) declined by 50 percent, while the number of hand car washes (that is, men with buckets) increased by 50 percent,” the economist commentator Duncan Weldon told me in an interview for my podcast, Plain English. “It’s more like the people are taking the robots’ jobs.” — Derek Thompson, The Atlantic (Oct 22)
Weird, right?
Reading this week…
Bookshops have an embarrassment of riches to choose from at the moment. My book pile has been bolstered by gifts and voucher-fuelled visits to Afrori Books, City Books and Waterstones in Brighton, all of which are doing a fantastic job. It’s a good time to be a reader.
Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson.
I think the genre is “near future hard sci-fi, easy on the dystopia” for this Stephenson epic. While like many good sci-fi writers Stephenson is often light on character, he goes big on ideas and I’ve learned to re-frame what some might call bagginess as space to think about big concepts. Here the concept – the main one at least – is geo-engineering, that is trying to counter climate change with big engineering projects. What Stephenson action- and suspense-leavened plot does is give the reader a place to reflect and consider what the geopolitics of schemes like changing the atmosphere might be. I’m enjoying it.
Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas
Right now I’m in thrall to this book about desire and modern sexual politics. It’s told from the perspective of a college professor in her late 50s. Her husband is the focus of a #metoo comeuppance, which annoys her, but she has other things on her mind like her much younger lover, Vladimir.
Here’s a sample from early on:
I could tidy the cabin-the limes from our drinks are squashed on the counter, our shoes in the mudroom point every which way. I could write more, work on my book, but instead I want to sit and stare at the light as it moves across him. I am aware of this moment as a perfect example of liminality. I am living in the reality before Vladimir wakes. I wish some of my students, who have a postadolescent passion for literary terms, were here. I am sure if they were, they could feel it. The no-place-ness and no-time-ness of now. The pulsing presence of this moment between moments.
Golly.
And scene...
That’s all for this week, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this Antonym. Let me know what you think…
Antony
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