Your Media is Hunting You

Your Media is Hunting You

Our smartphones make it easier than ever for our betters to stick their ears up our asses.

TikTok is a Chinese app and Bytedance is the parent company with a near 100 billion USD valuation. For TikTok, AI is key -- depending on what you watch and how long you watch it, the app will show you more of that. I had the app installed on my phone for a short time and within minutes I had an automated list of video feeds of Asian Bikini Girls jumping up and down on trampolines. Pretty neat. 

Foregrounds, backgrounds, music, ethnicity, location, facial expressions, fashion -- these are all encoded and then iterated to the user. A digital injection of realized psyho-graphics available anytime, anywhere.

Imagine the insights gained from the seemingly random  products stacked and piled around the rooms of millions of 17-year-old girls. For advertisers this is a gold-mine. And for the censorious, those with books by The Approved lining their bookshelves of their livestreams can be allocated celebrity streaming status, and those with books by The Condemned piled up on their bedside tables during a dance-off can be either shadowbanned in a liberal-democracy, or be tracked down and shot in the street by an authoritarian dictatorship.

If you are a parent with kids who do TikTok -- know that just by shaking their hips for free in return for dopamine hits of likes and shares, the Chinese Communist Party is building profiles. The personal space of children and teenagers is being segmented into psycho-graphics, commercial interests, and political influence campaigns in return for followers and emojis. But emojis are kind of outdated. These days reams of hearts bursting forth from the bottom of a smartphone's livestream are preferred. But it's free. Of course it is.

WeChat is an amazing app powered by Tencent, one of the most powerful companies in the world. Tencent streams the NBA in China, operates in Hollywood, and so on and on. They actually seem like a pretty cool company.

WeChat is on the chopping block in the USA because frankly WeChat technology is better and can operate a payment system outside of American creditors while giving Chinese residents the chance use their currency outside of China but also keep it inside of China via their app payments. The Belt and Road Initiative loves it.

In Japan, a lot of Chinese tourists (way down since covid) and Chinese nationals like to use their homegrown tech when they can, and in recent years a lot of Japanese shops have been implementing it to accommodate payments because money talks and bullshit walks. Since Japan has now banned Huawei from operating inside its telecom networks, and with Chinese tourism down 99%YoY it remains yet to be seen whether or not Chinese tech will continue to make inroads or if localized payment software can connect to China to create a buffer space. Like PayPal.

Before smartphones in 2007, English-speaking ex-pats in Japan relied largely on locally published media and the occasional bro that would have international cable in their 3LDK. Now though in Tokyo, foreign media has made its way into all of our smartphones. You can subscribe to the New York Times, Netflix, in addition to the SNS Apps more easily than you can check locally produced news sources if you don't have a TV. The technology is great, but it's possible to disassociate yourself with local culture when your smartphone with a reasonably priced app filled with nostalgia and must-see content is hunting you down with notification after notification.

My prediction is the foreign community in Japan will increasingly glare into their smartphones showing them the media they know and love while ignoring the Japanese media that plays unnoticed around them in return for an increased acceptance of surveillance capitalism.

I run the Japan WUT? Podcast. If you like what you read here, you might want to consider listening to “the Japan WUT? Podcast”.

★Japan WUT? iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/jp/podcast/japan-wut-podcast/id1489848400?l=en  

★Japan WUT? Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/77v5NR6YqKw7DizDA1jOMj  

★Japan WUT? Official Site: www.matthewpmbigelow.com  

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Matt Bigelow Blog: Your Face is a War Bond for the Facial Recognition Panopticon

I worked at a major Japanese telecom for about 5 years, and my students were engineers and they wanted to know about IoT, AI, and tech markets. So for that duration, that's what I did everyday. Finding tech, how telecoms are changing through the use of smartphones, and how emerging countries were taking advantage of smartphone tech and networks to make new and incredible things happen. 

Here are some common themes:

• Facial recognition ATMs in China -- just look at an ATM and money comes out of it.

• Smart Contactless Cash Registers -- just scan your baked goods and pay with a QR code.

• AI cameras that scan train tracks for preemptive maintenance -- smoother tracks mean more carriages which translates into more dollars

• IoT Go-Round Sushi -- keeps sushi fresh and shops can automatically order stocks when low

Incredible tech using incredible wireless telecom networks.

And incredible doesn't always mean positive.

Nuclear bombs are incredible

And so is facial recognition, an incredible tool doing incredible things.

It is time for everyone to consider their role in the upcoming network and tech world. Data is expected to be the fuel that powers the next century. Whoever gets that data gets the fuel to power their AI systems that rely on telecommunications networks. As Adam Curry likes to say, “Data is the new bacon.”
While facial recognition is only a tool, how it is used by the telecom or operator will determine if the tool will benefit or harm not only the user, but their society at large. So who do you trust with your biometric data?

Biometric war bonds.

A Facial Recognition Ticket Gate is tested in Osaka

A drone with a facial recognition and a thermal camera can help find a lost child in the woods. It can also be used to ethnically cleanse a rival group of people with enough weaponized drones equipped with ethnic readers.

Where you point your face will determine how that tech is applied in future after iterations backed with values.

China is probably the world's leader in the physical implementation of AI products and services being used by daily people on a daily basis in the 3D world. And the complete lack of privacy laws in China combined with its rapid acceleration to the world's number 2 GDP is really giving a fuck ton of governments, corporations, and telecoms pause. And by pause I mean shitting their pants. Why? Because the Chinese wireless AI technology tends to work really well, while at the same time totally disregarding the individual's concern for privacy, because in China privacy is not even an afterthought.
For the past few years, some schools in China have been using AI cameras to evaluate a student's in-class performance. The student's results are sent to the parent's smartphone in the form of a report. But the parent does not only receive their child's scores -- the parent receives the scores for the entire class with names included. Your phone goes beep and you now know how your student compares to all of the other students with cute photos of your child smiling in the class at 3:33 p.m. or whenever the timestamp is. Other Chinese applications monitor women and determine how "birth ready" they are and whether or not they are single or married. This data is collected in the open and is constantly being stored on open servers with no passwords.

Pushing further into China, we can look at the genetic monitoring of ethnic minorities, where their medical data is taken then stored as a QR Code. Combined with AI surveillance systems, these minorities can be tracked in real time and if their genetics are required by the state, then it’s essentially on-demand. Get the picture?
Group think is also established by algorithmically notifying the gen pop what to think and when to think it with state-sponsored news sent to everyone’s phones.
Furthermore Chinese nationals use their phones’ Chinese commerce apps outside of China which gives the CCP insight into how their citizens behave when out of earshot, and which also weirdly acts as a way to keep Chinese spending inside China through the use of Alipay and WeChat Pay.

Finally the name and shame approaches by the CCP also involves tracking J-walkers, and fining them in real time, and the infamous facial recognition toilet paper dispenser that allows you 70cm of toilet paper every 10 minutes through a face scan, so you don’t selfishly use too many shit-tickets.
But the list of these applications goes on and on and on, with little to no concern for individual privacy.

So what happens in the future if your country does not develop this technology? Will your leaders "Just import it from China. It's cheap, and it works!" That’s what Europe is doing. German trains using Huawei IoT networks and Swiss elevator companies equipping all of their elevators with hundreds of sensors connected to Huawei.

Or will your country develop facial recognition technology and limit its AI parameters, limit the data it collects, and store the info within encrypted in-country data centers? Considering the current batch of sketchy incompetent leaders across the Western world, they will just “import it and make it cheap!” and then go back to talking about global warming.

A facial recognition vending machine on display in Japan

But I’m in Japan! As facial recognition becomes more of a common sight in Japan, it's important to use it. Japan has very strict privacy laws and while violations occur, violators are subject to punishment by law as well as public scrutiny. In my time in the Japanese telecom, maintaining privacy of user data was a constant top topic, because if personal data is leaked in Japan, trust is immediately eroded and customers will choose another option. In America, you are rewarded for your successes, in Japan, they punish you for failure. Japan is a high trust society and the Japanese don’t like it when public trust is compromised as a general rule of thumb.

In order to provision Japanese companies with the data they need to offset Chinese Communist Party technological influences, consider using Japanese homegrown facial recognition technology. NEC and Panasonic are good places to start. I HOPE!
It's possible to exist anonymously in a facial recognition camera world. For example: Your face is not recorded. Your face's biometric data is recorded and anonymized into a code. When you are walking about the town, your face passes through the cameras without the cameras registering your data (in the present tense — your face could be searched super easily after the fact). If the police are looking for a dangerous criminal, they can release that criminal's biometric code into the telecom-network-supported AI camera systems, which will scan public spaces for the individual’s biometric code. Once that code is spotted, a redbox appears around his or her face in the camera, and now that suspect can be tracked in real time by the coppers while the innocent go about their day. Send in the drones!

What would you have this drone do?

The risk of abuse of this technology is obvious. I researched this “Over the Horizon Future” tech for 5 years and I disliked more than liked the overall use of its applications due to the possible rampant abuses by the main players. For example, I wonder about Israel and China teaming up to create an international AI spy-grid under our noses under the guise of "Mutual Cooperative Strategy in the Middle East" (my wording). I also worry about Facebook and Twitter establishing a defacto social credit score and punishing people for thought crimes. Facebook banned me from its advertising platform and I don’t know why but I suspect some of the crazy Marxists in the Tokyo music scene reported me for Wrongthink.
The more the CCP iterates this technology to monitor it's 1.4 billion civilians, the stronger their AI technology will become and it may become less and less feasible for your country to develop its own practical facial recognition technology.

So you might want to use your face as a war bond to bolster the AI technology in your own country before another country with closed and shady morals implements it for you. Remember: Data is a power source. The cleaner it is, the more valuable it is. It’s going to be scanned in public. One of the few options you have is who do you provision your biometric data to.

We live in incredible times. It's time to do incredible things with your face, oddly enough.

I run the Japan WUT? Podcast. If you like what you read here, you might want to consider listening to “the Japan WUT? Podcast”.

★Japan WUT? iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/jp/podcast/japan-wut-podcast/id1489848400?l=en  

★Japan WUT? Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/77v5NR6YqKw7DizDA1jOMj  

★Japan WUT? Official Site: www.matthewpmbigelow.com  

★Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/JapanWUT/

This is How Billions Are Made (Japan WUT? Blog #5)

WeWork was supposed to be the new office. Scalability! Networking! Free Beer! There was even talk of an artificial intelligence system that could act as a networker and link engineers with design teams based on individual workloads. WeWork was supposed to be a graph: A graph that you wanna get.

In addition there was a promise of an Internet of Things system that would predict office needs by using sensors with big data to self-design office space based on usability. The company boomed worldwide and became quite popular in Tokyo, climbing to 28 locations in 2020. 

The idea appealed to me as the business model meant a significant reduction of middle management. WeWork was going to offer an Initial Public Offering valued in the $40 billion USD range. People were set to make bank and transform the Office Space culture of the Office. 

Milton was just about ready to throw his stapler out the window. Steve Carrol perhaps had ideas for a spinoff. WeWere all about to jizz in our pants.

Turned out WeWork was kind of a sham. They had the office space, the payment plans, but the mysterious AI and IoT, while did exist on paper, failed to bring the rubber to the road and have the investors race down the highway to the liberal billionaires club where they could spend their days virtue signaling on Twitter.

At the beginning of 2019, WeWork had a $40 billion valuation thereabouts, and in June 2020, it was hovering around $3.5 billion. Still doing pretty good, but the would be billionaires that had attached their efforts into the rich-person's sunset are most likely ejecting in crazy numbers. At the end of2019, WeWork cut around 20% of its workforce.

I was disappointed because I thought the problems that WeWork were trying to solve made a lot of sense on paper. While on one hand we need a certain amount of middle-management, on the other hand developed nations have a massive middle management glut problem. I think that 90% of middle managers never wanted to become middle managers, and of those 90%, 99% of them don't make great middle managers. Many of them want to open their 10th floor window and jump to their deaths, knowing they will never climb to the top.  Most don’t because they have families and want to milk the company for all they can.

The proud, capable, motivated middle-manager is someone to cherish and behold.

So the WeWork bubble popped. When a whale dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean it attracts a lot of bottom feeders for a long-period of time, and everyone feeding on the rotting whale carcass agrees that it's awesome. 

While the scuttlebutt around the whisperers and hopefuls decry that WeWork may help offices and businesses post-COVID-19, WeWork may have to deal with a completely free and very usable tool: ZOOM.

ZOOM provides high-quality video and audio, digital whiteboards, and with existing business mobile infrastructure such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets, it provides more access for remote groups to share information across a wider field of candidates during a meeting. 

Need an interpreter? A smartphone with a pair of earbuds can provide live interpretation without the need for travel. In a presentation involving several people, the attendees not presenting can message and confirm details with each other without interrupting, thus bolstering their performance in front of a high-level sales meeting. It's potentially millions of dollars for free.

ZOOM meetings also open up the idea of digital avatars, so that a more professional you can be displayed via AI camera installed on your laptop. You are in your PJs drinking a beer in your home, but your digital avatar is wearing a 10-piece suit in a spacecraft drinking a $1000 cup of coffee from Zaltron 4. There is even talk of putting your digital avatar on a Blockchain to prevent others from abusing your digital you.

There are some backsides: ZOOM did close a video conference amongst some Chinese dissidents, and others have raised the issue about the locations of the servers and is most of COVID-19 ZOOM Meetings data being vacuumed into some mysterious Chinese AI-Fueled dragnet? 

Worthy questions, but there are short-term gains to be made!

As more and more companies move to a digital meeting paradigm, I expect office sharing to take more of a backseat.

So in future you may be in a ZOOM meeting while your blockchain-encrypted espresso-drinking digital avatar covers your ass as you pound back a few afternoon margaritas in your PJs at home during an online conference call hosted by ZOOM which uses WeWork as a scalable, highly flexible server zone to feed all of the office meeting data to secretive Chinese companies hiding behind the Great Firewall.

This is how billions are made.