Shining a light on the Dark Forest theory of the internet
In Against the Dark Forest internet writer and thinker Erin Kissane (who has just been killing it recently) re-assesses then challenges the notions of the Dark Forest (and by association the Cozy Web). People in my corner of the internet will already be familiar with the writing of Yancy Strickler, Maggie Appleton and Venkatesh Rao, all cited in the piece.
Figure: Maggie Appleton’s now famous illustration of the layers of the web.
Kissane’s piece is long but worth it. A couple of choice quotes:
On the other hand, the predators are clearly us: Individual people doing galaxy-brain bad-faith readings of other people’s banal posts for the juice
She points out “we all can’t be Buddhas.”
But all these platforms and attendant dipshits will be replaced, eventually, and what happens next isn’t guaranteed. The British East India company was a commercial atrocity factory at near-global scale; what came after it was direct colonial rule. The assumption that “Twitter but decentralized” or “Facebook but open-source and federated” will necessarily be good—rather than differently bad—is a weak one.
Nice provocation.
our failure to remember that it doesn’t have to be this way is a failure not only of imagination, but of nerve.
PREACH! As David Graeber said: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
it seems questionable for technologists to cede the territory of the public internet to their fellow-but-worse technologists and the predatory forces they assemble and arm
Yes, we do need to build local communities of mutual aid and respect, take care of our neighbours, etc, but we should not disconnect completely from the larger context.
no longer think that it’s possible to mount an effective defense of the physical world—and of each other, in our fleshy vulnerability—without unfucking our networks.
This. People have heard struggling with how I can fight the climate crisis: I am not the engineer that can invent the revolutionary carbon capture or universal solar battery. My skills and experience are on the internet. However, the climate crisis is the biggest coordination problem known to humankind, and the internet is the best global coordination mechanism we have. So I have doubled down by dedicating myself to make the Internet global, free and open — that is how I personally can fight the climate crisis.
Anyways, this is the kind of writing that energies me and so many people around me to just DO something. Go read the piece, then let’s do something!
Neverpost, a show about the internet
Why do young content creators scream into their mics and blowout all the sound? When you need to reply to an important email, do you do it on your phone or wait until you get to a computer? What is the internet “megadungeon”? What about Poster’s Disease? Why does nobody use hashtags anymore, and who ruined the Laser Eyes Meme? Is it right to create an AI or generate photos of your departed parent?
These questions and much, much more are covered by Neverpo.st, a podcast, nay, an “audio magazine”, that covers the “internet.”
Okay, that’s a lot of scare quotes, let me explain.
The show is produced by experienced sound people including one of my fav YouTubers of yore Mike Rugnetta of Ideas Channel. Each episode opens with a short news-reading then moves on to two segments separated by short interstitials which tickle that ASMR section of your brain. It can be things like binaural recordings of the state fair, meditative ambient music, or a person walking on gravel. I used to listen to the show on long walks around Osaka Castle, and every time an interstitial comes on I get transported back to that place. It has a real power to create a “space” in your mind when you are listening to it. Finally, the show often ends with some amazing poetry. The topics are broad and every ep is different, but they all sound great. This is why “audio magazine.”
“Internet” is… well, it is impossible to cover the entire internet. Neverpost tends to be on the cultural side rather than the technical. Internet aesthetics, nostalgia, meme culture… these types of topics. But they are still very much grounded in the issues of the day. Take this short clip from their most recent episode:
I find Neverpost a relaxing “read” at the end of the week. It is very discursive, hyper-reflective, nerdy, neurotic, and possibly obsessive… so right up my alley 😄 The hosts are all younger than me and American, so theirs is a different Internet than the one I experience, but also one that I can recognize. It makes me think about generational experiences of media… the kind of question that could be a segment on the show! Anyways, I enjoy the show and wanted to recommend it. Everyone involved is very cool AND it is worker-owned independent media! (listen to Episode 0)
Renunciation and technology
“But why wouldn’t you use it? It’s so convenient!”
I was surprised that he was surprised. I was talking to a very intelligent technologist, someone who thought deeply about his craft. It got me thinking about the respect shown to renunciation in this culture, compared to other places I have been.
Nine years ago I renounced the eating of meat. At the beginning most people questioned it, but our culture has really come around to plant-based diets. When I was 18 my first alcohol experience was embarrassing and I swore it off. For the next decade it was “Oh, just a little won’t hurt, right?” Nowadays people don’t question it. During my year as an Upāsaka I took the 5 Precepts among other commitments. After years of living as a minimalist it was not that difficult, and very rewarding. I think I got the least pushback over that… maybe because it is religious?
Of all the renunciation choices in my life the most pushback I get from people are technology choices, like the person at the very beginning of this post. It’s okay when I tell people I quit Facebook in 2010 (Facebook is no longer fashionable anyways) but if it is a particularly popular or widespread app, I get disbelief (or dismissed as an unwashed hippie 😅).
Free and Open Source crusaders have been fighting the fight for ethical software for decades. We finally started to see some regulatory movement against tech monopolies, and I have seen more general discussion of Luddism in the zeitgeist. I was hoping for a change in the culture but now that Big Tech has captured the White House, I think we need to look elsewhere for that change. This is certainly a new opportunity to be talking more about mindful decision-making in tech adoption.
Where to start, and some provocations
Traditionally, renunciation is a practice about removing attachments to gain freedom, it is a path to personal liberation. It is about pursuing a purposeful “good life”. Renunciation of conveniences or consumer products can free up time/money/attention/etc to be spent on more deeply engaging with meaningful pursuits.
But what should we renounce? In 2018 I taught digital ethics to a Computer Science 101 class using Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting, an excellent resource for thinking about the practice of moral self-cultivation in a technological world. She notes:
Aristotle explains that, just as a geometrically wise person will ‘see’ that what is mathematically significant about three intersecting lines is that they form a triangle, a practically wise person (a phronimos) will reliably ‘see’ and attend to the morally significant facts of concrete situations.
There is more consciousness-raising about tech ethics that needs to be done. Renunciation is a practice of moral cultivation, but one must have a certain level of cultivation before they can properly pursue renunciation.
I ended that first CompSci class with the following Questions to think about which I will leave for you to consider and maybe to comment on:
- What do you consider when you use or adopt a new technology?
- Can you think of examples of when new technology is a wholly positive thing? How about a negative thing?
- Are there any examples of technology that you have adopted that harms others?
Here are some more provocations:
- Think of your fav tech product, or the one you use the most. Are you aware of a friend or coworker that chooses not to use it? If you can’t think of anyone, why not?
- Do you do digital detoxes, or even more general practices like camping, Lent, Ramadan, or Uposatha? How do these practices inform your tech choices?
Check out my Uses page where you will find a list of things I DO NOT use. I am by no means a perfect paragon of technology ethics ("we all can’t be Buddhas"), but this supposed to be a practice, which means it is ongoing. If you make a DO NOT USE list, please share. All of our lists do not need to look exactly the same, everyone has their own life contingencies, but I relish the free and open discussion.
Slide from my Computer Science 101 course introducing the technomoral virtues from Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting
CITED is back and taking on "economics"
The CITED podcast is back! It has been a few years. I’ve previously enjoyed their work on the reproducibility crisis in scientific publishing and many of their critical episodes on their original run in the 2015-2018 era. Gordon Katic and the CITED team have an engaging narrative technique for introducing listeners to complex topics, so I know this new series is going to be good.
This time they are taking on the issue of expertise in economics and how it is abused.
A quick, illustrative personal story: back in the early 2000s I met a professor at a tiny coffee shop tucked away behind an ivy wall north of my university in Kyoto. The flower print ceramics and doilies made me feel like I was taking tea at an English nan’s house. In this setting I asked for advice: “how can I prepare to study regional conflict in grad school?” He was quick with an answer: “Study economics.”
I did go on to study regional conflict and counter-terrorism in grad school, and encountered much economic thinking, including a prof who worked for NORAD using complex mathematical models to fight the Soviets during the arms race in the 1980s.
Economics is the science with an answer for everything. That does not mean those answers are right. In the past few years there have been a new raft of books challenging mainstream economics, and the power of economists and economic thinking in our political life. This is in some part due to society slowly coming out of four decades of neoliberalism. (I first came upon that word a decade ago reading things like Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century and Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years — another pair of books that make you question economics as a field — but finally that word has entered the mainstream, even being denounced by global leaders like former Japan PM Kishida and US President Joe Biden. This just goes to show how things had evolved over the past few years).
One of my favourite recent books is The Economist’s Hour: The Rise of a Discipline, the Failures of Globalization, and the Road to Nationalism. That was my fav book of 2021. While that book exams how economistic thinking weaseled it’s way into our political system, I recently finished The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality which examines the legal methods used to prepare the soil for those seeds of thought.
In terms of what society reaps when you sow such seeds, I really recommend Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (my GR Review and chapter notes) which very much brings this debate into today’s political reality. There are still reactionary elements out there, many active in my are of the internet and startup-land, so read Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (my GR Review and chapter notes) to understand where they are coming from. And if you want to imagine an alternative to global capitalism as driven by the thinking of mainstream economic thinkers, take a walk into the forest and read The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.
Okay, so this turned out to be a giant book recommendation post, but it is also a podcast recommendation. Check out CITED. I will be listening along. So far the first ep on Simon Kuznets and the history of the econometric measure of GDP already has me angry. Let me know what you think, and what we can do to have better ways to think about social political issues today and tomorrow.
Causal Islands Berlin
“What if people could just… do things?”
This was one of the themes of Causal Islands Berlin, the fourth iteration of the “Future of Computing” conference, and the first one to take place in Europe.
I flew out from Vancouver last week to reconnect with some old friends and meet new potential collaborators. I have been involved with CI since the beginning but this was the first one I could attend in person. The Hallway Track is legendary, and I can tell you I made so many great connections here in Berlin!
The talks covered the technical and the artistic, and there was an underlying message of keeping the bar to participate low so that more people can engage with technology on their terms: less power to giant centralized corporations, less siloing of our information, less intrusive surveillance, less disparity. But this is about more than merely the individual, it is about computing with our communities. To paraphrase one of the presenters (an actual poet who said this much better than I can reproduce here):
I want to co-train and co-own an LLM model with my friends. I would love to see me in their work and them in my work, since this is already happening.
💞
More local control, more agency, more flexibility, more room to remix and reform and customize software, more collaborating with friends, more parody and jokes, and many more experiments. More of what we saw on the Causal Islands stage.
The videos of the talks will be released in the next few weeks. I can’t wait to share them!
Thank you to all the attendees and supporters of Causal Islands. I look forward to continued discussion on the Causal Islands Discord, and I look forward to the next event!
(You can see some more snaps on Bluesky)
Taiwan Trip Report pt 3: Taipei
This post is part of a series. See the introduction here →
Despite being the beginning of May Taipei was very warm. The sun was out as we walked the wide sidewalks around Taipei Station downtown, cars and scooters zooming by. Even when it was cloudy, crossing the Keelung River through the tech area of town (I spotted the Foxconn tower), the lush green mountains of the north were a tropical reminder. When we took the sky train to the eastern part of the city at Nangang, zooming along the edge of the pretty lake at Dahu Park, I was thankful I brought my sandals.
Half our time in Taiwan was spent in Taipei, a city that houses nearly 40% of the country’s population. It was nice to see some other cities and towns (as with most countries the capital city/economic center is not representative) but Taipei is a very enjoyable place. We travelled on trains and buses quite a bit and walked a few of the neighbourhoods. Taipei is a bustling city with way better international food than Japan (outside of Tokyo I suppose). Between trips to nightmarkets like at Raohe Street where we saw some great “bird fortune-telling”, we had tacos and steak and tacos again! The second floor of Taipei Station has all sorts of Thai and Korean and Japanese food. One late night when I was on my own, I finally partook in a Taiwanese Mos Burger, which actually was different than in Japan.
Highlights of Taipei
On the first hot day we took breakfast at a Soy Milk shop, a cramped little restaurant with a giant line of hungry tourists and locals out the front. We over-ordered many different breakfast delicacies and sampled all the little spicy and sweet sauces, crowded around a wooden table, our heads nearly touching. At the table in the corner I watched and old man rolling the dough for bao. He was in his own world, completely unbothered by the crowd, and quickly producing units of the perfect thickness with his practiced hands.
Hot stepping through the morning shadows to avoid the sun we made it to the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial, a massive white building at the end of a long strip of lawn that we avoided due to fear of being cooked. The grounds are bordered with a covered walk, so we took the coward’s way and I had to satisfy myself with some photos of the building from its corner. Inside was shaded but still sweltering. Up the long stairs is an open-faced alcove. The ceiling is decorated by an intricate pattern around the sun emblem found on the Taiwanese flag. Seated at the back of the hall is a giant statue of Chiang Kai Shek, the man who brought the Republic of China to the island of Taiwan after his defeat in the Chinese Civil War against Mao’s Communist forces. A few industrial fans moved the hot air around the room, but I couldn’t let myself feel sorry for myself. At least I was not in full dress uniform like the military guard! We timed our arrival perfectly to get a good view of the changing of the guard, an elaborate and excruciatingly slow and exacting performance. I almost fell over with heat stroke just holding my camera to capture it all! After 15 minutes of slow motion goose-stepping, then rifle spinning, then standing perfectly still (for the next hour I suppose) the process was over, we took some quick selfies and then retreated inside the air-conditioned building below.
The Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Building houses all sorts of displays and shops, but the main two areas really sum up Taiwan’s split personality with regards to its modern founding. When you walk into the main museum hall you turn left into a wing that lionizes Chiang Kai Shek, the military dictator of the country for 25 years, with displays of his letters, cars, and slippers. If you turn into the rightward wing of the museum you walk through a maze of photos and videos featuring the journalists and political prisoners that Chiang Kai Shek’s regime imprisoned.
CKS is certainly a complex person, and the pastiche I have just painted is particularly simplistic. But standing at the entrance, looking left and right, I was struck by how Taiwan is still dealing with its history. (Something I also felt at the National History Museum in Tainan)
(see the whole album in full screen on Flickr here)
Dragons
Later in the trip I had the opportunity to walk these streets at night. This area of the city has wide boulevards lined with many official buildings, all terminating at a giant roundabout where you get a great view of the President’s offices. I wasn’t able to get a good photo of it since I was rudely interrupted by a scooter accident that happened right in front of me. It happened like right in front of the National Taiwan University Hospital and a block from the Taipei City Police Department so the authorities were on the scene in a flash. Everyone seemed okay thankfully, but no cool night photos for Chad.
Luckily, I was able to go to Lungshan temple in the evening. Once again I was alone, so I could take my time photographing the elaborate rooves adorned with dragons. After feeling some cool spray from the purple-lit waterfall at the entrance, I crossed into the busy temple, where many people were throwing Moon Blocks over and over again. Waling the circuit of the temple complex, I peeked into each cubby trying to identify gods and goddesses. The place was overflowing with energy. I even picked up an omamori protective charm as a souvenir.
A lack of cabbage
Tucked into the lush hills on the north side of the city is the National Museum. As mentioned above, Chiang Kai Shek escaped the mainland during the Chinese Civil War. When he did he brought many treasures from China. 18 years later China went through the Cultural Revolution when the Red Guards destroyed much of China’s cultural artifacts. So many treasures lost! As a result, the national Museum in Beijing is pretty skint. But the National Museum in Taipei! Wondrous! There are so many pieces that you could return many times over to properly enjoy them. The tiny cabbage carved from jade is the most famous. Unfortunately it was not being displayed while we were there. I did get some good closeups of the jade meat though.
One highlight was seeing artifacts carved with kanji (Chinese Characters) dating back to the 13th-11th Century BCE! My kids said if they ever got access to a time machine they would go back and destroy these so they would not have to study kanji at Japanese school anymore.
There are amazing treasures here. One of my favourites is an ivory balls carved from an elephant’s tusk. The ball is carved with another ball inside, which moves! And inside that ball is another ball! The ball took over a hundred years, was started by the grandfather and finished by the grandson. Can you guess how many balls-inside-balls there are? (Hint, a lot more than Inception). Check the gallery below to see photos and the answer.
(see the whole album in full screen on Flickr here)
Actual Animals and Secret Slides
In Kaohsiung we saw a Grand Hotel but in Taipei we got to see the Grand Hotel. About twice the size of the one in the south, this hotel has hosted many famous dignitaries from around the world. Intricately designed there are many many details. The lobby alone features 144 pillars, 71 lanterns, and 220,000 dragons! We took a tour which included the secret slide installed to evacuate VIPs in case of emergency!
At the back of the hotel is the Centennial Dragon, which was a gift from Japan to the Taipei Jinja, the Japanese Shinto shrine that used to be on this spot. The story of the statue includes how it survived a plane crash. They know it is “obviously” a Japanese dragon because it only has 3 claws, which is how they did it back in the Tang dynasty. Since then Chinese dragons have evolved to 5 claws, but since Japan never changes…
(see the whole album in full screen on Flickr here)
For our final day we visited the Taipei Zoo, originally constructed about a hundred years ago by the Japanese (who really love their zoos!) We were able to get up close to many animals! The first section is Formosa animals: tiny deer, goat-like things, boars, the leopard cat, and then a huge sun bear. The zoo was too large for the half-day we had dedicated to it though, so we missed a bunch and went straight to the bird area which had the most amazing Nicobar pigeons.
(see the whole album in full screen on Flickr here)
At the end of the day the family took a gondola to the top of the mountain behind the zoo to get some nice night views of the city. Meanwhile I went back into the city on my own to meet with a local Microblogger at a lovely vegetarian restaurant. We had an amazing conversation, and made a great connection. I love meeting random internet people!
Next post I will try to consolidate some thoughts and impressions about Taiwan.
Comparing ambiguous apples and polysemous pigs
From pages 24-25 of Babel by R.F. Kuang, where the Latin teacher scolds the student Robin for not remembering his macrons:
‘Even the length of a single vowel matters, Robin Swift. Consider the Bible. The original Hebrew text never specifies what sort of forbidden fruit the serpent persuades Eve to eat. But in Latin, malum means “bad” and mālum,’ he wrote the words out for Robin, emphasizing the macron with force, ‘means “apple”. It was a short leap from there to blaming the apple for the original sin. But for all we know, the real culprit could be a persimmon.’
This parable for accuracy in documentation reminded me of the death of the historical Buddha, Siddartha Gautama. When the blacksmith Cunda delivered the Buddha’s last meal sūkaramaddava “pig’s delight”, was it actually pork or some kind of truffle that gave the Buddha dysentery? The truth has been lost to transliteration.
The prevalence of lexical ambiguity and world-turning food items in religious texts is shocking, is it not?
#craigsgymclass begins! plank 🪵 squats 🏋️♀️ pushups 🙇
Now that I am back from summer holidays and things are settling here in my new home in Canada it is time to start taking care of my health for the first time in years. I have been walking lots, building back up to jogging, but I decided to kick off September with something I did a couple years ago: #craigsgymclass
Craig Atkinson, an active member of the Anglo-Japan-Twittersphere, inspired a bunch of us with a simple way to kickstartour way to healthier living. The rules are below. I am going to take this challenge again, and will post my progress at #craigsgymclass. Join me! Let’s get work up some support from the community! 💪 👏 🫂 😭 😊
Recognize the ills, let's do better — Short summary of
Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short) by Ruha Benjamin 📚
In order to flourish as individuals and a society we must free ourselves from the strictures of standardized testing, industrialized education, “accelerated learning”, technocratic utopianism, solutionism, longtermism, white supremacy and eugenic thinking, the carceral state, credit scoring and the “ordinal society” (See Fourcade and Healy), and more! It is hard to be imaginative when we are oppressed… but we have to be imaginative to overthrow the oppressors. In an ultimately hopeful argument, Benjamin provides example after example of real projects where humans work together to protect one another and lift one another up. She argues for “radical interdependence” and building a safe, equitable society to further our collective “radical imagination.”
Jiufen
This post is part of a series. See the introduction here →
(see the whole album in full screen on Flickr here)
The gold rush at the turn of the 1900s caused a boom in the small mountain town of Jiufen, with its sweeping views of the sea towards both the northwest and northeast. The narrow road switches back upon itself numerous times as you climb up the rugged mountainside. Across the valley, deep in the forest (with no visible road to get there) is a monastery poking through the trees. Once you make it to the town the road narrows even more, hairpinning around houses almost stacked upon one another. Take care to drive slow as knots of tourists suddenly run across the road to take photos of the rolling green valley below, or spill out of souvenir shops and the covered “Old Street” full of shops selling everything from ocarina to stinky tofu.
Our driver took us to the top of the mountain, the far side of the town where we had a view of the valley below. Down the hill we saw the telltale shapes of the family grave sites, which sorta look like the ones you see in Okinawa (cultural connections!). In fact, when you look on a map, you realize that half the town is graves!
It was raining when we arrived. In fact, it rained almost the whole time we were in Jiufen. Our driver could not navigate through the narrow streets and called our B&B owner who retrieved us on a scooter. We followed him on foot wheeling our luggage down the steep road lined with graves.
A few switchbacks later we made it to the B&B and dropped our luggage. “How do we get to Old Street?” He just pointed “That way!” and we were off, picking our way between houses, down random-seeming stairways, passing stray cats. There were no people, but these were no roads. We were silent as ghosts, scared to wake anyone. As long as we were heading down we knew it was the right way. Soon we came upon a narrow stairwell between two buildings leading down to a river of tourists flowing left and right in the covered shopping street.
Jiufen Old Street greeted us with the loud sounds and colours and smells of a crowded shopping area. Following the flow we branched off, stopping in a restaurant eddy where I had my first Vegetarian Red Vinasse Taiwanese Meatball. Continuing on were shoe stores and tea shops and every kind of knick-knack you can imagine, all hauled up to the top of this mountain to be sold to visitors who hauled themselves up here to buy.
But why? One reason, at least for the Japanese, is the A-Mei Teahouse, a distinctive building that has been said to be one of the inspirations for the bathhouse in Spirited Away (though Miyazaki denies this, and there are a number of onsen in Japan itself which claim this title). The souvenir shops cashed in with all sorts of Totoro and Ponyo and other Ghibli goods. The guy in the ocarina shop playing Joe Hisaishi tunes was actually pretty talented!
We took photos in front of the A-Mei Teahouse, and with a statue commemorating the gold miners in front of the building, but we took refuge in another teahouse further down the street, one with a fantastic view of the valley. This was my first Chinese tea experience. Not quite the same as cha-no-yū, but still with a recognizable level of ritual. The gentle spa music lent to the relaxing atmosphere as we drank cup after tiny cup of the smooth tea, watching the wind blow clouds up and over the mountain ridge above us. I recalled one of the one-stroke calligraphy pieces by Master Hsing Yun, the founder of Fo Guang Shan: Your mind a mountain, letting the clouds pass by.
It started to rain again so we huffed up, up, up! Stairwell after stairwell we got progressively more soaked as we poorly navigated the maze back to our lodgings. Once back it was straight into a hot shower to ward off any sickness. Later, my wife and I walked back down and had a browse, picking up some dinner to eat back in the room. After dark we climbed up yet more narrow stairs to the roof of our B&B to take in some night views.
Waking early the next morning it was back down to Old Street before breakfast. The whole scene was very different: shutters closed, the street empty of tourists. Where yesterday there were throngs of people, now vans and trucks drove with their headlights on and barely enough clearance on either side. The narrow one-way street meant we had the pleasure of experiencing Jiufen’s daily morning traffic jam: each vehicle forced to park for long minutes as the vehicle in front finished its job of loading garbage or dirty hotel sheets, or dropping off a batch of tofu ready to be steeped in the stinky broth for the day’s sales. It was kinda like the feeling when you leave your hotel in the morning and the cleaning staff is getting to work, the mystery of the night before gone.
We stopped in the Family Mart for a little coffee and morning snack. At the back of the convenience store was a seating area with large windows, overhanging the cliff. Probably the best view from a convenience store I have ever seen. After breakfast we hiked back up to the top of the mountain and took in some more views. As I was photographing the valley we could hear the distant sound of drums, the popping of firecrackers, and see the occasional firework launched high into the air below us. May 1st.
Before noon we caught a taxi for the 45 minute drive back to modern Taipei, which is where we will pick up the story next time! 🚕
Kaohsiung and Tainan, featuring Fo Guang Shan
This post is part of a series. See the introduction here →
(see the whole album in full screen on Flickr here)
Kaohsiung is a port city in southern Taiwan, developed by the Japanese as an important industrial hub. We hired a tour guide who carted us around to different locations including the port area, the old British consulate, the art walk, and to one of the most intensely nerdy coffee shops I have ever seen (run by what I am pretty sure are devotees of the Falun Gong new religious movement , check out the art to see what I mean).
Driving the streets of a non-capital city gives you another perspective into the lives of regular folk. I like just cruising and taking it in: a crowded row of store signs in bright Chinese characters pass by; students leaving university crossing the street as scooters wend past our vehicle to crowd the crosswalk; commuters in various Japanese and European cars; trucks hauling goods; glimpses down side streets as people take out their laundry or play basketball at the courts. Snapshots of lives. After the expertly brewed coffee came a sumptuous condensed-milk infused shaved ice topped with mangos and strawberries to cool off and consider all that was seen.
Fo Guang Shan
One highlight was visiting Fo Guang Shan (album) one of the four major temples of Taiwan, and home to a Buddha Tooth Relic, of which there remain only three in the world. This temple complex, built in the 1990s, is absolutely massive. Once you pass through the main entrance building which features an information center, a couple of restaurants, a bunch of souvenir stores, and a Starbucks, you are on a wide path lined by eight pagodas that leads to a main hall. Behind that hall is another building with a giant Buddha statue, overlooking the entire complex.
Each pagoda in itself is a museum of sorts. We went into just two: an information center with the history of the temple and teachings on the Noble Eightfold Path. The other pagoda we visited featured the One Stroke Calligraphy of Venerable Master Hsing Yun, the founder of Fo Guang Shan, who took up calligraphy after losing his sight — thereby restricting him to using just one stroke since he could not see where the characters were on the page.
We did not have time to peek into all of the pagodas, and since it was raining we followed the covered path that runs on the outer edges of the main route. Here we brushed our fingers along the dark stone walls, engraved with the names of every single person that donated money to the construction of this holy complex (photo). (We spotted a number of Japanese and English names too!)
Unfortunately photos were restricted in the main building. In the lobby I was able to take a shot of a carving of the 500 Arhats sculpted from roots of a 1000 year old camphor tree. Beyond that were a number of sub-shrines in this building. We navigated through groups of pilgrims and into the main temple dedicated to Guanyin (Kannon in Japanese). This was a very modern facility, circular with glass walls emblazoned with important religious figures, backlit by neon lights. The main altar featured a statue of 1000-hand Guanyin and some animatronics, and a line of small plastic bottles with red caps. At the direction of a helpful attendant, we paid our respects to Guanyin, and he filled one of the little bottles full of holy water from a dispenser in the altar. Later that night I poured some of the holy water over my head in the shower, and I think it worked! I never got sick the whole time in Taiwan, and I famously get sick on the fourth or fifth day whenever I travel abroad. We kept a few bottles to take home and put on our home altar as offerings to our ancestors.
Anyways, behind the circular shrine is a very square shrine with a heavy-looking gold statue of the Shakyamuni Buddha gifted from Thailand. This was another opulent room, which can be a little disorienting if you are used to understated Japanese temples. Next was the main show: the tooth relic. This large shrine room has a very high ceiling with wood panels carved in the images of famous Buddhist temples from around the world. I recognized Bodh Gaya right away. At the front of the room is a large Buddha, lying on one side, carved from white jade from Myanmar. Above is a little nook with the reliquary which contains the tooth. At the prompting of a nun, we each took a little battery powered candle and reverently walked up to the altar, placing it there as an offering. I just sat and stared for a while enjoying the ambiance until a large tour group came in — which is always my cue to leave.
The final area of the complex to see was the giant Buddha statue. We took a bunch of photos here, and circumambulated the Four Noble Truths Stupas on the four corners of the Main Hall, each shaped like the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya. Symbolism is everywhere at Fo Guang Shan.
After this we took a very lovely vegetarian meal and browsed the shops. In all we spent just a few hours at Fo Guang Shan, but you could very well spend a couple of days here.
A few more spots around the south
Back from Fo Guang Shan we stayed at the Kaohsiung Grand Hotel (album), a much smaller (and ahem… cheaper) version of the Grand Hotel in Taipei.
Here we relaxed in the pool, I caught up on some writing, and we watched some local television. A Fo Guang Shan channel had a bunch of religious information. An “ethnic” channel featured indigenous programming in languages that sounded very different from the Mandarin and Hokkien we heard on the streets.
For our last day in the south we drove up to Tainan, about 45 minutes north with our guide where visited the large and newly made National Museum of Taiwan History. We spent as long as we possibly could until the kids were tired out learning about the full history of Taiwan from prehistoric times, the settlement of mainland Han Chinese, indigenous communities, repelling the Dutch, the Japanese era, the postwar economic miracle, and a bit about the issues facing Taiwanese today and in the near future. I took many notes, but to be honest the facility raised a lot more questions.
After the museum we rounded off our stay in the south by visiting the old Dutch fort (Chikhan Tower) and doing some shopping at the narrow Shennong Street before catching the High Speed Rail north to Taipei. Being the evening train on a holiday weekend, it was packed, so we had to stand for the one and half hour journey.
Next time, northern Taiwan! 🚅
Taiwan trip report - Introduction
Taiwan has been on the bucketlist for a while. In the year 2000 I was an exchange student in Kyoto learning Taiwanese from a fellow exchange student who was so excited for elections that he flew back to Taiwan to vote. That was only the second presidential election since the military dictatorship (which ruled from 1949) had transitioned to democratic elections in the nineties. In 2000 things were very exciting since it was the first time an opposition party won the presidency.
My wife too had a Taiwan connection in 2000. She was friends with a different exchange student, a Korean Buddhist nun, who went on to live and study in Taiwan for many years. That was when I first learned how much of a Buddhist religious center Taiwan is, hosting monastics and scholars from all over the world. Taiwan’s religiosity also contributes to its high percentage of vegetarians, which is second only to India.
In the intervening years I have had many friends travel and live in Taiwan. When I said I was finally going, everyone was excited and encouraging: “You are going to love it!” And you know what? I did love it. And I would love to go back someday. Mostly because so many of my questions about the place were not answered… but more on that later.
I am no expert on Taiwan. Our trip was only 8 days and we mostly engaged in sight-seeing. Thus, I cannot bring you any deep insights into the politics and culture of the country. Furthermore, travelling with kids meant my opportunities to spend hours in museums or engaging in discussions at teashops was severely restricted. All I can offer are impressions, to paint with a very broad brush. If my impressions are off, you are wholly invited to correct me in the comments. I encourage it, and want to learn more!
We flew into Kaohsiung in the south, drove to nearby Tainan for a day, then took the high speed rail up the west coast to Taipei. From there we drove out to Jiufen for a night, and then spent the rest of the time back in Taipei.
I took a lot of photos. I have whittled them down and posted to Flickr, but here I will accompany each album with a bit of explanation to give you some context.
I am going to break this up into a few posts which I will link to here:
- Introduction (this post)
- Kaohsiung and Tainan, featuring Fo Guang Shan
- Spirited away to Jiufen, featuring tea houses, graves, and (lots of) rain
- Taipei, the famous jade pork, and the hotel emergency escape slide
- Conclusions (where I may put my foot in my mouth, we shall see)
So, if you are ready, let’s fly to southern Taiwan! 🛫
It could be better for everybody — a review of Limitarianism in just 335 words
📚 Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns is an ethical framework advocating for limiting excess wealth and redistributing to the benefit of wider society. The book builds its case by historically analyzing the rise of inequality over the past 50 years through global neoliberal policy; the social problems that inequality cause or exacerbate; how taking a Limitarian stance could improve things for everyone including the wealthy; and what needs to be done to get there. She starts off the book with her proposal that there be a “political” wealth cap of 10mm $/€/£ per person, and an ethical limit of 1mm $/€/£ per person. Basically, she comes out of the book fighting. Then, throughout the author provides many shocking statistics and refers to many different academic studies. Furthermore, she runs though many of the counter arguments that have been posed to her by the public and the media, naming and taking apart each objection as a trained philosopher should. She brings a lot to the fight, and in the end settles basically on a strong welfare state (I would like to a see an anarchist argument). Altogether is a strong package. It is not the kind of thing you pass to the proverbial conservative uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner table. He will scoff, reject it outright, and recommend Thomas Sowell or some other ghoul. But for people who do not pray to Ludwig von Mises or one of the Mont Pelerin set, but do not necissarly have a strong critical bent or are not as politically aware, it might serve as a good catch-me-up and help them understand why they think we might be in the Bad Timeline. I really appreciate Robeyns’s call at the end for more political engagement by regular people. Our democratic muscles have atrophied in the decades of consumerist atomization. As the classic Graeber quote goes, “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
See my short chapter notes on Goodreads or Bookwyrm to get a peek into the details of the book.
Just enough capitalism – A quick review of Slow Productivity
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport 📚
Cal Newport’s latest advice book tackles the question of productivity in knowledge work. Factory work can much more easily be measured and systematized. Newport points out that office workers, writers, artists, and scholars are often assigned tasks and must come up with their own individual system to be productive. These systems are opaque to managers, who end up relying on “visible activity” (which many busy office workers are familiar with) as the proxy for productivity. Add in always-on email and instant messaging apps, plus a global pandemic and people trying to work from busy homes, and you end up with a lot of burnout.
The initial chapters of the book will have many knowledge workers nodding along empathetically, sharing in the sense of exhaustion and overload. Taking inspiration from the “slow food” movement Newport quickly moves into his three solutionary principles:
- Do fewer things
- Work at a natural pace
- Obsess over quality
Each principle gets its own chapter full of tips in how you can step out of the hamster wheel of “psuedo-productivity”, take back your time from your employer, and focus on truly great work. Newport takes a lot of inspiration from classic figures like Isaac Newton, Copernicus, and Madame Curie. (Pretty intimidating for your average cubicle warrior…)
Ultimately, the book is not interested in deeper, critical questions of why we are burning out. Despite calling for a “revolution” in the conclusion, Newton drops some snide comments about Marx and leftists in the text. Challenging the system is not his job. Perhaps expected of a “productivity” blogger, he remains very much imprisoned in the self-exploitative work camp of the “late-modern achievement-subject” (see The Burnout Society by philosopher Byung Chul Han, an overview and link to my review here).
Maybe I am being too “obsessed over quality.” A cynic might say this is a short book that capitalizes on people’s dissatisfaction with their work life and then doles “life-changing” advice between mentions of all his other books (on sale at all fine bookstores! And I admit I would like to get at least one more!). The advice basically boils down to: get really good at something, raise your rates, and lower the amount of time you spend engaging in capitalism. It is burnout mitigation on the level of a corporate mindfulness retreat. But that’s okay. It is better than nothing, and sometimes a reader needs a bit of prodding to be self-reflective, and the book did spur me to think about my own working habits. And though I have my issues, it is much better than other “make your bed”-style self-help books. I enjoyed the first bit and there are a few good nuggets in there. I think it would be a good jumping off point for discussion in a book club or office setting. So if you need something to spark a little rethinking about how you are doing things, this could be a good quick and moderately stimulating read. 3 stars!
Rewilding the internet
The “internet is not an ecosystem. It’s a zoo.”
Robin Berjon and Maria Farrell not only show how we have arrived at this online monoculture (and the dangers therein), but how we can take steps to seeding more diversity (and therefore resilience) for the good of the whole forest.
This article really sums up the work I have been doing over the past couple of years as a sort of armchair internet ecologist. Very happy to share it wide, hoping the seeds sprout into action by the internet-using public… which is all of us!
Networking our networks
The HN Tokyo Meetup. As one Kansai person told me: “I can tell it’s a meetup for people who are into frameworks.”
Last week I went up to Tokyo on my annual pilgrimage to meet with old friends and make new connections. I timed my trip to coincide with the monthly Hacker News Tokyo Meetup. These social events regularly see a hundred or so hackers, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts of all kinds come out to drink and be merry. This month we were on the rooftop of the PARCO building in Shibuya. It was a bit windy but that rooftop is really gorgeous, offering excellent views of the city. Over the five hours I was there (including an after-party at a craft brewery around the corner) I met a ton of interesting people.
A small sample:
- an Elixir programmer considering a side gig as a an artisinal cheesemaker
- a death metal singer that flew from the US to make connections and try to get a job
- a data analyst who made a “moneyball” database for Columbia Records for discovering hidden talent (I was finally able to learn from him exactly what an “A&R” is!)
It was a blast.
Community members gather to listen to announcements.
Engaging with a community of your peers is fun and rewarding. You never know who you will meet or what you will learn. And who knows what opportunities it might bring in the future?
I was a member of the HN Tokyo Slack community for 4 years before I even went to an event. In fact, I was introduced to it by a guy in the Fukuoka startup community. I am still in touch with those Fukuoka comrades… last year I was able to meet up with some at the Maker Faire in Kyoto. Nowadays I have been engaged with the the local Kansai HN and programmer community.
During the HN Tokyo event I introduced myself as a “diplomat from HN Kansai”. Many people came up to me afterwards, interested in hearing more about Kansai. I invited everyone to stop by our community meetups if they were ever in Osaka or Kyoto. I was even able to recommend places to visit in Fukuoka!
I enjoy going around to different communities and meeting people. As someone who has been between cultures (and locations!) for a long time, I suppose I also enjoy bridging different communities.
Back when I lived in the Okanagan every community had their “Geek Beers”-style of tech meetup. Working with friends in the neighbouring towns such as Vernon, Kelowna, Penticton, and Kamloops, we started an event where everyone in the region would congregate in one community. It was an annual summer event with a rotating host. We called it #megageekbeers. One year we even got corporate sponsorship to cover a bus to drive people to the next community over so they could arrive and get home safely!
I am still connected to the Kelowna and Vernon startup communities. We share job prospects, industry information, and memes 😜 through these networks across communities and now across borders.
Networking opportunities are super valuable at a personal level, whether for professional or fun reasons. We are all taught this early. But cross-community networking is how we can build movements. “Federation” has become a keyword in online social media the past couple of years. I think there is a huge opportunity to realize this concept IRL: let’s network our networks!
Community members step up to the mic to deliver announcements.
"we all can't be Buddhas"
I am posting this publicly so that I can reference it in links going forward. There might be a more common way to express this sentiment, this is just the way that I often do in conversation. It is something I came up with in discussing intentional communities with my wife a while back.
Oftentimes, communities will tear themselves apart simply over battles over who is “pure” enough to belong. We see this political infighting in all sorts of communities at all sorts of scales. The “narcissism of small differences”, right? Holding an unreasonably high bar of acceptance is completely counterproductive to building the kinds of broad-based movements that we need today in order to tackle the problems all of our societies face, whether at the international or local levels.
One of the great lessons of anarchism that I learned from David Graeber over the years is how to actually go about developing the vitally effective community characteristic of diversity: learning how to listen to and respect individuals, their choices, experiences, and opinions. We cannot let “intellectual purism” prevent us from building (or burning!) necessary bridges. That is not to say there isn’t a limit. The Paradox of Tolerance is also something we need to contend with. But in general, we should approach community building with a “Big Tent” attitude.
The Buddha was a perfectly enlightened being, a singular achievement. Yet the sangha, the Buddhist community, has survived for more than 2500 years.
We all can’t be Buddhas… but with the right attitude, there are plenty of other ways that we can participate, and be together as part of the community.
Footnote
At the end of my 1 year Upāsaka program, I was given the Pali name of Sanghapāla — “protector of the sangha” — so one could say I have a spiritual devotion to community-building! 😊
GitHub's Innovation Graph
Rest of World has a piece on the fastest-growing countries for software development featuring GitHub’s Innovation graph. I got a peek at this last year at the GitHub booth at the IGF2023 in Kyoto. One of my favs is Economy collaborators which represents international collaboration on projects. It is the sum of git pushes sent from one country to another. This is some real CIA Factbook or Atlas of Economic Complexity-like stuff but for software development.
More on Decentralization
Of course a couple days after writing my post consolidating thoughts of decentralization I found a piece by Nathan Schneider in my Omnivore called: What to do once you admit that decentralizing everything never seems to work
This further makes the point that the centralization-decentralization debate is nuanced, and Schneider quotes another scholar saying we must go “beyond the centralization-centralization dichotomy.”
Schneider discusses entrepreneurship, co-ops, blockchain, and more, introducing three characteristics of applying the decentralization principle:
- Decentralization is a process, not static. It is not one-way. Centralization is like reverse-entropy.
- Decentralizing systems should be heterogenous, incorporating multiple forms of decentralization.
- We must plan for centralization and ensure that it is accountable. This rhymes with Mark Nottingham’s point of the need for checks and balances.
Read the whole piece: What to do once you admit that decentralizing everything never seems to work
On decentralization
I really appreciated Mark Nottingham’s memo RFC 9518 on Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards. In it he provides a wide-ranging and balanced introduction to the topic in quite a short article. I have been collecting bits of arguments for decentralization (in a centralized location of course 😉) for the past couple of years, with the intention to write something round-up, but have struggled. I am so glad Mark did it, and so much better than I could!
I wholly recommend reading the piece. Below I will expand on it with some more wide-ranging sources. You don’t have to read his article to understand this post, but I hope by the end you will be even more motivated to go check out his.
The RFC 9518 memo covers different types and harms of centralization in an internet context, and indicates what can be done by standards organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Nottingham notes that standards orgs cannot prevent centralization, but can make sure to consider “centralization risk” when evaluating a standard, and promote those that enable decentralization.
Yet he warns:
while decentralized technical standards may be necessary to avoid centralization of Internet functions, they are not sufficient
This is a problem for a certain sector of blockchain and web3 enthusiasts and why some pragmatic proponents came up with the term “sufficient decentralization.” Nottingham covers blockchain-style consensus in his memo. I also found Alice Yuan Zhang’s challenge of the “myths” of decentralization in web3 is a fun read. A quote from her:
Decentralization as praxis is rooted in direct action, striving to abolish capitalistic economics and supply chains which encode mass oppression into large-scale systems with many actors and minimal accountability.
Nottingham agrees, writing that centralization becomes a problem “when it has no checks, balances, or other mechanisms of accountability”. Architectural decentralization can certainly help, but it isn’t enough as explained in Capture Resistance by Robin Berjon.
Furthermore, we may not want total decentralization. Nottingham gives the example of content moderation as something that benefits from centralization, and makes the point that centralized structures such as “governments, corporations, and nonprofit organizations” can be useful. This level of nuance is what makes Nottingham’s shortish piece extra valuable. Nobody is under the illusion that decentralization is a panacea.
In discussing internet fragmentation, “public interest technologist” Mallory Knodel writes:
Sovereignty needs to be balanced against interdependence. Globalization – and its technologies – arose from the idea that interdependence prevents conflict. Economic interlinkage, or entanglement, disincentivizes attacks because it raises the risk of collateral damage and unintended consequences for the attacker. Perhaps some healthy fragmentation provides greater opportunity for interdependence beyond interconnectivity, and is an example of how to embrace a more complex internet landscape.
“Healthy fragmentation”… centralization and decentralization in balance. How do we combine them appropriately? Mike Masnick used the canonical example of the US interstate system in his essay Decentralization in All the Things:
having centralized infrastructure that is open and on which others can build in a decentralized manner can open up tremendous possibilities.
One main way we can do this with regards to internet protocols is to ensure interoperability and lower switching costs, which is where Nottingham says standards orgs can play a role. In this he is in agreement with Cory Doctorow, whose latest non-fiction book The Internet Con is a podium-pounding preachment on how “Network effects are merely how Big Tech gets big. Switching costs are how Big Tech stays big.” Interop lowers switching costs, and puts agency back in the hands of the people (see the presentation version of the book by watching Cory’s talk at DefCon last year).
Cryptography and Privacy researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis says:
Decentralization is important because building systems that distribute power is important. Building systems that resist abuses of power is important.
She argues that centralization/decentralization should not be conceptualized in terms of simple things like % control over a number of nodes, but “how trust and power are given, distributed and interact.” I think she puts it admirably when she writes, “Decentralized systems are systems that rely on the distribution of power to secure the system.”
That last sentence is certainly one to mull over.
But it is her point about who has access to power that makes decentralization such a wide-ranging topic. Once we start to go beyond the bounds of internet protocols the topic becomes more complex.
Twenty-five years ago the United Nations Development Programme’s 1999 report on decentralization stated that “Decentralization is not an alternative to centralization. Both are needed.” The report notes that subsidiarity is an important principle for:
… increasing the overall quality and effectiveness of the system of governance, while increasing the authority and capacities of sub-national levels. … Decentralization could also be expected to contribute to key elements of good governance, such as increasing people’s opportunities for participation in economic, social and political decisions; assisting in developing people’s capacities; and enhancing government responsiveness, transparency and accountability.
In general we might say decentralization is a substrate for agency.
In her lovely book How Infrastructure Works, Deb Chachra thinks about the future of infrastructure over the next 50 years in the face of climate change. For her, decentralization is a key to resilience, an important ability for the climate fight we are in as we rebuild our massively centralized infrastructure systems so communities can build to their own needs. Diffuse, diverse, and distributed… which also happen to be the founding principles (values?) of the internet itself.
… like forests our infrastructure systems have the potential to be modular, networked, decentralized, responsive, and resilient
Decentralization is a technological, architectural, political, and philosophical topic that I think underlies most if not all of our coordination efforts, whether in the realm of making the net better, or battling climate change. Because it is such a wide-ranging topic, entangled in so many debates, I have struggled to solidify my personal take and capture it in a succinct blog post. The lack of a single canonical answer to “how much decentralization” makes it a slippery topic. It’s a valuable principle to guide our decision-making and I am glad to see it enshrined here in an RFC so that standards organizations like the IETF can take it under consideration as we build the next generation of internet infrastructure. Mark Nottingham has done an excellent job writing such balanced and accessible memo in a handy, shareable document to get people familiarized with the concept and its nuance. That link again: RFC 9518: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards