Journal

The technologies unleashed by Silicon Valley are not neutral. They contain within them the worldviews of the people who develop them; and when they go unquestioned, we allow those very people to make important decisions about how and for whom our society should operate without any democratic deliberation. When we assume that technology can only develop in one way, we accept the power of the people who control that process, but there is no guarantee that their ideal world is one that truly works for everyone. They champion ideas that would ensure that automobiles continue to dominate our transportation system, that active mobility becomes a rentier service as its adoption grows, and that sidewalks are converted into a space for robots instead of people. Such a future would be hostile to the goal of more egalitarian cities and would make us more dependent on commercial interests rather than trying to free us from their control. The futures suggested by the technologies profiled so far are not the kind of world we should be striving toward.

Not a bad overview of how the incentives of corporations and society often do not align. The book is a straightforward and well-structured/argued read. If you have more than a cursory understanding of the recent going-ons in the tech industry, much of the book will not be new to you, and might not be a great use of time. However, the conclusions the author draws and arguments they make were great. Perhaps skimming the histories one is familiar with is the way to go on this book.

While I enjoyed the book it also make me feel a little more disillusioned with the current state of United States infrastructure. The book did give examples of cities and nations that have done iterative things to improve their infrastructure to make it more human-centric. But it’s unclear to me how exactly we could achieve similar things in the United States. Unfortunately.

Ultimately, building better cities and improving people’s lives requires challenging the very structures of capitalism itself, structures that are designed to serve profit before people. We can build transportation systems that empower people, facilitate social connections, and reduce the environmental footprint of mobility. But that requires altering social and economic relations to ensure the planning of those systems is based in community needs, not delivering financial returns.

Happy new year! Once again it’s time for me to reflect on how I’ve spent my time in the last year and set some directional goals for how to spend my time in the new year.

Before reflecting on my goals from last year, I decided to pencil in what my goals for this year could be. While it had been a while since I thought about the 2024 edition of this post, there are unsurprisingly a lot of similarities between last year’s goals and this year’s. Below is what I decided on for 2025.

Replace some amount of my coffee drinking with tea

This is a relatively small goal of mine. Years ago I didn’t drink coffee, but over the last couple of years it’s been slowly becoming more and more of a daily habit for me. I’m not super worried about caffeine dependence at the moment, luckily, but I am worried about some of the side-effects I’ve noticed while drinking coffee. Specifically, I’ve noticed I sleep much worse and it seems to make me more tense. And I swear it makes running harder (could it be blood pressure?).

Ideally I’d drink coffee only a couple of days a week—Friday and Saturday—but I’m not explicitly making that the goal here. Generally, I just want more of my morning drink routine to involve tea over coffee.

End the year with fewer things than I started it with

I’ve always strived to be a person who doesn’t own a lot of stuff. Unfortunately, over time, it’s easy for stuff to build up. For me—and I’d imagine for most—it’s harder to part with things than to acquire them and this asymmetry makes it hard to remain a minimal person. Entropy or something.

I’ve set goals like this before and not been successful. I’m not yet sure of the right approach to take here, but I’d like to end 2025 with less stuff than I started the year with. This will be a hard one.

Manually track all exercise

It’s pretty typical for me to set an exercise goal. Often this is duration, distance, or volume based. This year I want to try something different. While I still want to maintain—or even increase—my volume for a variety of activities, that hasn’t been my main challenge in the last year.

My challenge has been spreading myself thin across three different activities: running, rowing, and tennis.

I’d like to maintain a bit more balance across these and I think by forcing myself to manually track these activities I might have a better shot at noticing—and correcting—imbalance issues between them. The idea is to be mindful and intentional with where my time is going. This will be another hard one.

Spend more of my free time reading

Speaking of mindfulness, these last few goals are also related. Per usual, I’d like to spend more of my free time reading and less of my free time on less productive outlets like the internet. When I have a book ready to go this often isn’t a challenge for me, but sometimes I just don’t have a book handy that strikes the mood of that moment. In 2025, I should try to have a few books ready at all time so that I have the best environment possible for this.

Spend less of my free time on the internet

In the last couple of years the internet (or at least the sites I frequent) have really devolved in quality. Especially sites like Reddit. Growth at all costs and LLMs are starting to make the internet feel particularly dead.

Since I don’t gain a lot by browsing the internet these days, I should just avoid it. I should aim to make my relationship with the internet in 2025 really purpose-based and only go on it when I have something I need to do. Otherwise, there’s better uses of my time.

Spend more of my free time sitting

Sometimes the best use of time is just sitting. Like a lot of folks, I have a problem with trying to always be doing something. This isn’t necessary and I’d like to spend a higher proportion of my time in 2025 just being.

One of the themes of the goals above is time (as it always is). Specifically how little of it I have. I aim to be mindful of where I spend my time in 2025. I will focus myself on the things that matter and try to steer away from the things that don’t.

Happy 2025—may it be great!

The term ‘Southeast Asia’ suggests a misleading degree of unity. On nearly every metric, the region presents a picture of bewildering diversity. It is ‘Muslim, Buddhist, Catholic, Confucian-Taoist,’ writes Benedict Anderson, ‘Colonialized by Spaniards in the sixteenth century, by the Dutch in the seventeenth, by the French and British in the Nineteenth, and by the Americans in the twentieth.’ Today, its people speak a profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages. It includes gleaming Singapore and improvished Laos, and stretches from the azure waters of the Banda Sea to the dun foothills of the Himalayas. That this collection of lands and people came to be grouped into a single geographic unit is an outcome of both political convenience and historical contingency. Yet as Donald Emmerson argues, assigning a name to the region, however arbitrarily, also ‘helped to bring about the reality to which it now refers.’

This is my book review for In the Dragon’s Shadow. For the full notes, see this post.

In the Dragon’s Shadow is a packed history book focused on international relations between Southeast Asian countries and China. Each chapter in the book focuses on a single country in the region and goes through the recent happenings of these countries both internally and externally, especially as related to the world super powers.

I thought it was effective and I certainly learned a lot. The book feels like a great primer to learn about this area of the world and the ‘further reading’ list feels like it would provide some compelling deep dives.

For better or worse, there were some countries I was more interested in learning about than others and that made the second half a bit of a slower read for me. But that’s mostly on me.

While I think this book was good, I am not sure I’d recommend it to most people unless you’re particularly interested in this part of the world. It’s a bit more information than the average person will want or need. But interesting nonetheless.

These are my raw notes from In the Dragon’s Shadow. For the review, see this post.

Chapter 1: Pivot of the Indo-Pacific

• China has a southward movement similar to the USA’s manifest destiny moment (14)
• Overall SE Asia is a relatively new concept, and even giving it a name changes what it is (17)
• China has mostly focused on Economic influence over political influence (21)
• The notion of “debt-trap” diplomacy (24, 32)
• Over time China’s posturing to its neighbors has changed; so has other nations views towards it

Chapter 2: Marching towards the tropics

• China was constrained by geographical position historically with mountains and oceans bordering it
• John Garver termed the modern ability to bend this terrain to the will of the nation as “technological subjugation” (42)
• Chinese scholars considered the push southward “inevitable” (49)
• Because China is geographically higher in the west than their southeast neighbors, their damming efforts affect the Mekong and this gives implicit control of neighbors (58)
• One way of influence is infrastructure financing, which has led to an “‘infrastructure arms race’ between Beijing and Tokyo” (62)

Chapter 3: Vietnam

• One Vietnamese described China as “a two-faced friend”, meaning that China is both an important ally and competitor (66)
• Vietnam and China have a lot of historical connections, with many Vietnamese artifacts of Chinese culture touching on things such as mandarin system and Confucianism (67)
• In contrast to the Chinese government, the Vietnamese government has less control over the narrative—leading to differences sometimes in what subsets of the population believes and the party line (77)
• Vietnam is hugely dependent on Chinese trade and tourism, giving China a bargaining chip (79-80)
• US and other countries see Vietnam as the holding line for the South China Sea, which is why there has been a huge focus on diplomatic relations with the country (81)

Chapter 4: Cambodia and Laos

Cambodia

• China aligned itself with the Khmer Rouge for strategic reasons, desiring to counter Soviet Union and Vietnam (86)
• China supported leaders in Cambodia that aligned to their interest, including one, Hun Sen, who closed a Taiwanese office. China provided money and goods as the west backed away (90).
• Cambodia acted as a blocker in ASEAN response to China’s claims in the South China Sea (91).
• There’s a good amount of anti-Vietnamese sentiment due to historical land-grabs and a belief Vietnam still wants to take over the nation. Cambodian leaders see the “enemy of my enemy” (China) as their friend because of this (94)
• Chinese support is much faster than Western or Japanese support (95)
• Cambodia had to choose between Western and Chinese support, and threat of sanctions along with perception of ability to choose their own destiny made them choose China (102)

Laos

• Laos is effectively a creation of the French and colonialism, nothing similar to it existed prior to their creation of these borders (106)
• China provides financing without many strings, unlike Western powers (109)
• Vietnam maintains close ties and influence on Laos. There’s a quote about Laos taking money from China but being more influenced by Vietnam (114)
• “Adaptation is our politics” (116)

Chapter 5: Thailand

• Chinese tourism to Thailand has increased quite dramatically in the 2010s (perhaps due to a film) but so have complaints about Chinese tourists. China has released a guidebook called Guidebook for Civilized Tourism to help guide foreign travel for its citizens (118-119)
• It’s fun for the Thai to complain about tourists, but need them for the economy (120)
• When Thailand had a military coup, China and the US had very different responses. The US cut financial support while China considered it an internal concern within Thailand (123)
• Thailand has been a close US ally since WWII (124)
• China gave financial support to Thailand when their economy collapsed, while the US did not (126)
• Support of the USA is a generational thing in Thailand with older Thais having a bit more reverence for the US and younger generations “more ambivalent” (128)
• Almost all Thai leadership is ethnically Chinese (130)
• “Bamboo in the wind” is a Siamese saying of being rooted while also being flexible enough to move with prevailing wind (132)
• Thailand is a large enough economy to have room to negotiate with China (132)
• Mekong expansion might continue to expand Thailand’s deficit with China (136)
• Kra Canal is an idea that’s been around for a while and never acted on. If it were acted on, it would adjust the importance of other ports/straights within the region dramatically (137)
• “in Thailand, the bureaucracy dominates” (140)

Chapter 6: Burma

• Myitsone dam was a project schemed by the military in Burma without public knowledge. This caused a huge public outcry and caused it’s pause (143)
• During the Obama administration, the US started normalizing relations with Burma. Historically Burma had little strategic value to the US, so the US had no reason not to define the relationship in the values the US says it believes in (146)
• Burma tried political neutrality for many years post-colonialism to prevent being sucked into China’s orbit during Cold War (152)
• Violence against the Rohingya started in 2017 and there’s a connection to the arbitrary and without-thought colonialism of the British (158)
• Burma is a “map maker’s fiction” (159)
• Anti-Rohingya violence was spurred on by internet and Facebook suddenly being widely available in the country (160)
• The US and Europe reimposed sanctions during this time but China considered it Burma fighting terrorism and “internal” to the country (163)
• China has a desire to stabilize the region for mostly economic reasons [connecting southwest / trade] (168)
• 2021 brought a military coup [not discussed much in this book] (171)

Chapter 7: Singapore

• Malacca straight has had importance for many centuries due to geography. At one point there was the city Malacca that was an important port but it fell off. Later Singapore has taken a similar position (178)
• The Ming withdrew from sea exploration but modern China is returning to wanting to explore/control the sea (182, 183)
• South China Sea is important for China’s shipping lines (184)
• There was a documentary “River Elegy” that encouraged China to return to the sea—though there was some message about openness here too (185)
• Zheng, the Ming figure, is sometimes considered a metaphor for how China’s return to sea will be different, though history doesn’t always agree with the pedestal he is placed on (187)
• Singapore is second largest container port after Shanghai (191)
• Singapore was seen by neighboring countries as in partnership with China—Singapore held off from diplomatic relations with PRC until 1990 to reassure these neighbors (after they had developed these relationships) (192)
• Singapore is an important partner to both China and US (unique position) (194)
• The Kra canal is a potentially existential threat to Singapore (Chinese financing could give China leverage) (197)
• Pro-Chinese media has made older generations more pro-China, though younger generations are less connected (202)

[My focus on this book and note-taking quality declined dramatically at this point.]

Chapter 8: Malaysia

• Forest city is a Chinese project that brought in both Chinese investment and immigration. To locals, this felt uneasily similar to historical colonialism and the historical Singapore split (208)
• Malaysia has been of interest to many colonial powers, including Portuguese, Dutch, and the British due to the geographical importance of the Malacca straight (208-209)
• China leveraged 1MDB scandal—leaning in while other countries leaned away. Once again focusing on the messaging of “non interference” with internal issues (212)
• Malaysia is less vocal about South China Sea intrusions than its neighbors (219)
• Ethnic Chinese in Malaysia are decreasing in proportion and are a scapegoat for many (225)

Chapter 9: Indonesia

• Chinese traders have been in the Indonesian region since Song times and have intermingled throughout (231)
• Indonesia once had the third largest communist party in the world and deviated in the “September 30th Movement” with US cheers and (maybe) support (233)
• Asian financial crisis brought back memories of colonialism when IMF came in to assist. China offered emergency medical aid in a perceived-to-be-less humiliating way (236)
• Illegal fishing has been a major point of contention, leading to conflict with China and other neighbors (239)
• Majority has become increasingly more vocal and Chinese minority has been the focus of racial conflict (244, 247)
• Indonesia is “inward looking” in recent times (252)

Chapter 10: The Philippines

• The Philippines had historically had conflict with China over their Exclusive Economic Zone but recently shifted away from the US and towards China with Duterte (258, 259)
• In 2018, 83% of Filipinos had a positive view of the US (260)
• Freedomland was a small island nation created by an individual but never recognized. The Philippines reasserted its control of this land and this is a key location for expression of their EEZ and conflict with China (266)
• Military leaders in the country saw the US as insurance against the rise of China and pushed back against pushing the US military out (270)
• Duterte believes in close ties and alliances with China and this is the one topic that he is unpopular on locally (272)

Afterwards

• Southeast Asia is highly fragmented but some consider this a good thing as a robust defense against being controlled by any one power (289)

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how he or she could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized stratum of the universally reviled unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.

It was truly a wonderful surprise just how good Bullshit Jobs turned out to be. I thought this book was going to be a simple, fun little exploration into the drudgery of those everyday jobs that feel pointless. But it was much more than that. David Graeber really dug in on the history of pointless jobs, the human toll they take, and the societal/political implications of removing them.

David broke the types of Bullshit Jobs into five sub-categorizations—interesting in itself—but the comparison to feudal times was what really resonated with me. The role in leadership being rewarded for growing their organizations above all else (into little kingdoms!) matched with what I’ve observed in life:

If the organization grows in size, higher-ups’ importance will almost invariably be measured by the total number of employees working under them, which, in turn, creates an even more powerful incentive for those on top of the organizational ladder to either hire employees and only then decide what they are going to do with them or—even more often, perhaps—to resist any efforts to eliminate jobs that are found to be redundant.

I might have this book tagged “Sociology” but in reality it’s more “Anthropology”. The stories and interviews that David did with a number of people who consider their jobs to be bullshit was particularly interesting.

Near the end of the book, David starts imagining solutions to this. David suggests UBI as one way to solve this issue. Why would someone work a bullshit job if they already were paid to do something more fulfilling?

Overall, this book was almost five stars for me. But it is a very solid four and I’d recommend it to practically anyone.