A Common{s}Place Book

A log book on the journey to being an [academic] researcher

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What's next?

Trying to collect where all my thoughts are at the moment. I could ELI5 it, I suppose. We’re in the bottom left corner of the map, near (0,0) if you like. We know that a much better life is off to the right or the east (no hidden meaning here, about oriental wisdom), and it would be a better life for most people, comparatively speaking. Those who are currently super successful want to keep going on our traditional path of due north, the top end of the map. This is the path of incremental improvements to the status quo, and apparently if we keep struggling for long enough everyone will be rich. I think we’ve gotten to the point where most people know that’s a lie. It’s more likely if we keep going that way, we’ll all end up dead. But somehow, we aren’t ready to head off to the right-hand side; we’re just not used to an easterly heading. Or are we meant to go west? I mean, the Pet Shop Boys thought that was a good idea.

We’re heading for collapse. If not total, at least a major setback to what we currently label as civilisation. Whether folks want to admit it or not, it’s certainly a mood that’s been  hanging around a long time, maybe since the 2008 financial crisis that we don’t seem to be recovering from. We keep waiting for things to get better – the next election, an upswing in economic recovery, another war to end… Progress was something we used to take for granted, or at least that was the narrative from the Boomer generation when I was growing up. Anyone who has seriously studied history would already know that this ontological approach was a lie, and now we have to face it. That’s kinda hard for most people, because it means grieving for a lost future, embracing uncertainty, and sitting with difficult emotions. We’re not good at that. We’re especially not good at facing a bleak future for our children.

So, what about this collapse? It has been called different things, especially by the media that won’t use such an alarmist term, from a climate emergency at it’s simplest, to a poly-crisis, perma-crisis, and so on. One of my MBA professors loved to call it VUCA; that was the closest any of those professors came to admitting we might have to stop worshipping at the alter of capital.

Something about the way we live is coming to an end, and this is linked to failures in the systems and institutions that we think helped get us here. Part of that is our trust in the incrementalist approach in existing socio-political structures that are were meant to keep things on the up and up. Things like standard of living, society, inequality, injustice, and the climate. If we can’t trust that anymore, what’s next?

Coming up in part two… why technology isn’t going to save us.

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"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

I’ve been away from this blog for too long. I’d like to say that I miss connecting with all of you, but I suspect there is only about one person that reads these musings. Life has been a whirlwind of sorting through relationships, family matters, and working to regain the fitness and health I had pre-COVID. A lot of the other content sections of this blog have drifted and probably need updating… (wondering off to check the other pages now…). Okay, that’s a bit better.

My reading has been quiet erratic recently too. Although I feel better about reading the same book twice than I do about watching the same movie twice. It’s easy for a movie to be subpar, and that leads me to forgetting it and then accidentally rewatching it. Books on the other hand… I feel like there are so many books, that they must cross a certain threshold before they come to my attention. Re-reading always sheds some new light, if only on how I’ve changed.  I just re-read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? –  by accident. They should have kept the electric sheep in the movie. Maybe I understand the ending with the toad now? Not sure. And that’s partly what makes this book so good: our faith in the author to deliver something meaningful, even if we still don’t get it after the second reading. I wonder what it would have been like as a David Lynch movie – I mean the whole flipping between reality and artificiality is totally up his alley.

I’m working my way towards a PhD in anthropology at the ANU. The next post will wax on about directions for research. I think I have an angle that could work, although as per usual it is way too broad, and I need to narrow things down. Still, it’s hard to resist the allure of the big existential questions, but for a baby researcher I need to stick to more well defined terrain.

Good news: I finally have another article published. It took a year in the review process. Mostly that was waiting for editors and reviewers to do their thing. It’s just a provocation or opinion piece but somehow it got mislabelled as hardcore research, which meant it got torn apart by nine reviewers who were left wondering how this flimsy piece of writing was offering deep knowledge… Yeah, got through that eventually, and thanks mostly to the main author. I would rant and rave against the reviewers, and she would valiantly tone down and smooth my vitriolic responses. It’s true what they say about reviewer 2, but the real devil was reviewer 3 (cf. Peterson, D.A.M. (2020), Dear Reviewer 2: Go F’ Yourself. Social Science Quarterly, 101: 1648-1652. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12824). There should be a mechanism to give feedback about the reviewers. (In case you were wondering, no, I’m not doing footnotes/endnotes. This is a blog post!! And the quote in the post title is from a Yeats' poem).

One of the areas I’d like to research and learn more about is narrative or storytelling. When I look at the arguments that occur around me in society, they’re usually about facts. We can’t even agree on what a fact is anymore, which is kind of crazy. However, if people are sharing a story it seems to generate more empathy and from that understanding. This is more than the lived experience argument. A simplistic example: it’s easy to complain about immigrants taking jobs or using up space in a hospital, but it’s much harder to do that when you stand in front of a real person who is struggling to feed their family and is in need of urgent medical care.

I’m telling you all this because my plan is to spend next year studying screen and media, and photography. I want to delve into visual storytelling. This gives me more time to work on a refined version of my waffly research proposal and to consider using new media techniques in the research phase and maybe as a research output. Also, some journals accept photo essays, and I’m convinced they’ll have less than nine reviewers for those… My parents programmed me to stay busy, so I’ve also thrown into the mix Toastmasters, joined a choir, and am a volunteer radio announcer on a community radio station. And next year I hope to make a short film and start an anti-discrimination study group to build allyship in the community.

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Coffee is a fluid

I've taken a long hiatus from this blog, but it's time to come back to this journey. I guess everyone has stories of covid disrupting their lives, and partially this is just another one of those stories, and then bunch of other things happened like falling dominoes.

A time of rest and reconnecting with family and friends turned into a period of honest introspection as so much has changed, and somehow I didn't notice and hadn't adapted.

Have I walked through the valley of death? I don't know. Am I stronger for facing my demons? No, I wouldn't say that. Maybe more resilient, but mostly just more aware of my limitations and my humanity.

I feel acutely aware of assumptions these days, and I mean this in quite a simplistic manner. For example, sitting in a coffee shop I can only see what is happening in front of me. What is happening behind me, I assume, is not that different to when I last looked that way, but actually I have no idea. (To be honest, I'm not even that aware of what is happening in front of me, cf. the gorilla video, but let's keep this simple). My limited sensory ability forces me to make assumptions, and then build a model of that world behind me. It's such a small and simple thing that I suspect most people never think about it. We also know these models are always flawed, because they are by their nature simplifications of reality. Anyway, my coffee shop somehow turned into a pizza parlor, and it happened at least ten years ago, without me noticing. It's been quite a disorientating discovery. Some of the people sitting in front of me even told me what was happening, but I didn't pay them enough attention.

So how do you go forward into a world that you thought was solid, but never was? That's a rhetorical question, by the way. I've always embraced the idea that things are always becoming and not static, that we live in a fluid/dynamic world. But I guess I was never really living that, and it maybe now is the time to try harder to embrace that.

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Skillz

If you read my previous posts, you will know by now that I am skilled at procrastinating through preparation. Here’s what I’m using to procrastinate at the moment:

Get organised by reviewing GTD by Dave Allen

Get focussed through reading Cal Newport

Taking better notes by learning zettelkasten

Seeing better by learning photography

Learn Spanish so I can walk the Camino de Santiago

And that leaves audio recording, interviewing and videography as things to learn later... Did I mention there are books on research, writing, and PhDs that ‘need’ reading?

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Is quitting undisciplined?

I don’t have a satisfactory answer for this and am essentially sharing some early thoughts. Sorry if you were hanging out for something more mind blowing.

I have been reading a few academic texts recently and, maybe unsurprisingly, they are really unengaging (I wanted a better word than boring, but yeah). One solution has been to channel my dissatisfaction into writing a rebuttal of the original text. But there is a deeper question: when to quit reading a book?

I don’t like being labelled a quitter, and I am sure you feel the same way. At the same time, who wants to waste time reading something unsatisfying? We all want to use our time effectively (efficiently? enjoyably?).

How do you decide when to persist with a text and when to switch to something else? For academic texts, it was suggested that you can skip chapters that aren’t adding much value. That will depend on how the book is written and it does seem common for academic chapters to be independent; sometimes they feel like padded out journal articles all jammed into one book, and in that case, it feels fine to jump around. Then it can be a bit like reading the (Christian) Bible: I mostly know the start, the Jesus bit, and some other random stories and that’s about it. That’s not a fair representation of the content of the Bible.

What about sunk cost fallacy? I think that having finished most of a book, even if the last few chapters are drivel, that I should push through to the end. And there’s a sort of appeal to authority fallacy - should I persist with books suggested by people I respect (eg famous people, friends, etc)?

Some framing questions might help:

Why are you reading this book? (big goal)

What are you expecting to get out of the book? (personal goal)

What kind of book is it? (fiction/non-fiction, edited compilation...)

Is the book above/below your level? That’s a tricky one...

My answer at the moment is to push on, but to break up heavy texts by reading a magazine article. Do you have any tips?

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What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

Disturbing, compassionate, sometimes humorous personal essay about coming to grips with climate change, resource crises, environmental meltdown, and the demise of the American lifestyle. Friends and experts analyse historical, social, and psychological factors driving us toward human extinction. This ruthless assessment challenges the audience to face terrifying times with courage and integrity.

This was good. I watched it on double speed because of the overlap with a lot of the material I’ve been studying recently. That can be a good thing, because sometimes I feel like I’m beating a lonely drum, and it’s nice to hear a voice saying a lot of the things I try to tell friends.

There are worrisome parts, such as interviews with people of unknown background (the everyman or the author’s friends?). The second half was better than the first, and it ends without offering easy answers (of course there are none for our current predicament, and I was astounded to see a one-star reviewer being upset that the meaning of life was not revealed, ha!). But it does offer honest hope and a way to move forward that I found reassuring.

“One path leads to despair and hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” -- Woody Allen

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Seeing more

I’ve been interested in photography for a while, but never took the leap into owning good equipment until recently. Many iconic photographs were taken on cameras far less sophisticated than my mobile phone camera, so I hoped to be able to explore photography through my phone: mostly thinking about composition and colour. 

Photographs are a way to document your own work, as part of ethnography, and are an inescapable part of modernity with image replacing reality in more instances than you would like to accept. I’m also hoping that it sharpens my eye, and I feel that already. As I walked around on the weekend my eyes were already starting to look at the world in terms of colour, contrast, and composition. The trick here is to see more without being stuck in a new frame of vision; the world we design designs us back.

I started with George Nelson’s How to See, which while a classic didn’t really push me that far. Next up are The Art of Noticing (Walker) and How to See the World (Mirzoeff). In the meantime, I am trying a fundamentals course from National Geographic and the Great Courses. Mostly I just need more practice. Last weekend I tried the bird aviary with some success, but nothing worthy of sharing.

Post-production is a whole other world (of pain). I’m trying to avoid that for now, but YouTube lessons are going to be the answer there. Oh, and then there’s sound... how on Earth does anyone mange to do a solo documentary film??

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Momentus

I haven’t written much since nothing momentus has happened recently. But in a way that is momentus too. How do we stay focused and on track? Actually, I have tried most of the tricks in the book and I have no idea. Since the pandemic and the various lockdowns, I’ve found myself emotionally drained. But that doesn’t mean I have been doing nothing, alhough at times it certainly feels that way.

Work continues, which is a combination of research and report writing on possible future directions our undergraduate syllabus could take. My spare has been stretched too thin across learning Spanish, learning to take photographs, and belonging to two bookclubs. In between I get dragged into various work projects that I can’t say ‘no’ to... project archiving, digital asset management, journal editing, and social media.

I need a sharper focal point.

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Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter.  It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it.  Get rid of distractions in your life.  Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life. ... The days are long but the decades are short.

Sam Altman

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Selecting a Supervisor

I’m at that stage where I need to look for a supervisor for my thesis. Meh, there’s still lots of preparation work to do, but they do say start with picking the right person and worry about the other details later. I mean there’s lots to do, and you don’t want to head off in the wrong direction and find you have to start over. Although does that really happen? Surely, it’s just a case of tweaking things...

So, after spending a full day trawling through the web I found someone who sounded amazing, was at the right university and loves the same topics as me. I started skimming and scanning her articles, to start building up my case on why we should work together.

And then I discovered the problem... she had died two years earlier :-(

Note to self: make sure they’re still alive before getting too excited. I don’t think anyone’s supervised a thesis from the grave.

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An asexual city

One of the many things that I hate about the city I live in is its asexuality. Totally unromantic, having no lust, no trace of love.

It’s a young city full of young people (or maybe robots or zombies) – I learned that the average age here is 32 but you’re wrong if you presume the residents are energetic or passionate. Nope. They (by they I mean the general they) are fucking zombies who shovel themselves up in those ugly-looking buildings that are so fucking tall that make you dizzy and work their asses till late having no love life nor sex life nor even masturbation because they are too fucking tired to even think about it.

Even if they do have that so-called love life, it’s a distorted one. I ran into heterosexual couples at restaurants and shopping malls at working day’s night  and they sickened me and yes it’s called heterophobia. Example: today at a restaurant next to me there were two people (a guy and a girl) who seemed to be on a date. The girl was busy crunching her laptop while the guy complained about her being ignorant and annoying with a sense of self-importance (as he would do to all other women). What a douchebag. I wish I did something against this his gender violence. I wish he choked on his stupid Gyudon. Those men and women who are so well-shaped by their gender stereotypes cannot be truly be together as there’s always a conflict rooting in the gender roles endowed by the almighty system.

The shopping mall and its consumerism make all these even worse. Couples lingering in shopping malls instead of hitting home and fucking the hell out of the world. I know love life is not only about fucking, but it seems to me that they don’t fuck at all. I see no couples kissing, no hand-holding nor hugging. Only boys taking pictures for girls and what the fuck is the point of that. No affection. No chemistry. Not to mention no sign of queer couples. I myself had one or two romance in this shopping-mall-based city. Here I don’t blame the omnipresent hetero – there’s literally no place to go except for shopping malls alike. No good food. No quiet coffee shop. We are all drowned in consumerism.

Oh, and if you open up your dating app, it’d be like a ghost town where people are lonely as fuck but no one makes the first move. I once met a guy from one of the dating apps. After lunch he invited me to his apartment but then he started cleaning his house and I just sat there watching him doing housework for a fucking hour. I wondered if he ever got horny because I certainly did not. Maybe he was turned on by tidying things. Maybe I am crazy.

Anyway, this is just another piece of outrageous writing of my misanthropy, misandry, lonesomeness, sense of being exiled, which inevitably and eventually amount to my self-hatred. This asexual, loveless, consumeristic city that I never like or understand is driving me crazy.

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This reminds me of my own struggles to separate out romance from money. Is it possible to be romantic in a simple setting? Why is Paris considered romantic and Hong Kong not, yet Hong Kong’s harbour skyline is far more romantic than stepping in dog shit in Paris.

I’ve also noticed a kind of dysfunctional younger relationship, where the couple spends so much time on their phones (even when face to face over dinner) that I wonder if they have real sex or maybe they only send each other links to Pornhub videos... I’m sure you’ve seen them (those couples, not the Pornhub videos, although not judging if you have), and couples ignoring each other is nothing new but what happened to the passions of youth?

I have a couple of ideas about this. One is about boredom and is linked to the usual criticisms of social media; if you have nothing to do, you can easily and mindlessly spend time on social media. The cost of cognitively switching in and out is very low (i.e. it’s tolerable to be disrupted compared to reading a book). But boredom is the space before daydreaming, which can feed into deeper thinking, new ideas, creativity and invention. Or you can just look at old ideas on Pinterest... 

The other emotion, since boredom is an emotion, is anxiety that is no doubt in the background of (young) dating. How do people manage their anxiety? I think, many people use distraction, such as phones or perhaps tidying your apartment obsessively. But that’s avoidance, and this is the real worry. Rather than facing or dealing with awkward situations, it’s too easy now to hide in your phone and even easier if the people around you are doing it too.

Are we seeing further delayed development? Childhood has been delayed for decades now, to the extent we have the label “kidult” to describe those adults who seem to avoid all responsibility in favour of play. And kids are fairly asexual (trying to avoid Freudian stuff here about the desires of little boys)...

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A (semi-)critical look at industry 4.0

There’s a lot to be researched and written about this topic, and I have no doubt I’m not the first. I haven’t done extensive research but wanted to pull together some thoughts based on my last post.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica will be my guide for defining the four stages of industrial development. The entry is written, no less, by Klaus Schwab from the World Economic Forum. I guess that gives you a taste of the ideological direction before we even start!

I had a look at Wikipedia, but it seems to give up on the idea after the first and second industrial revolutions and appears to align with my thoughts that we’re on a longer arc of technological development.

Let me try to re-frame the four stages from Britannica. We should paint a bigger picture than what Britannica presents. In the table below, I honour the four stages, but I’m not putting dates as that may imply a hard start or cut off point when all these things overlap messily. My thoughts on what is missing from Brittanica:

And here are the original sources that inspired some of this rambling (click to enlarge):

Schwab, K. (2018) The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Encyclopædia Britannica [Online] Available: https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Fourth-Industrial-Revolution-2119734

Gardien, P., Djajadiningrat, T., Hummels, C., & Brombacher, A. (2014) Changing your Hammer: The Implications of Paradigmatic Innovation for Design Practice. International Journal of Design [Online] 8:2. Available: http://www.ijdesign.org/index.php/IJDesign/article/view/1315/635

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What’s next for design?

There’s an assumption that there is a next for design, as if things move in blocks of time. I doubt that very much, which is probably true for most historical shifts; they only become obvious shifts when we look back with hindsight.

What might be driving this desire for change? I’m not so sure. One aspect might be the pressure for designers to always come up with something new. Innovative is a buzzword that seems tagged onto everything these days, especially things that are not innovative at all. Sure, we all like to be cutting edge and pushing boundaries, but I would argue that design is not even one cohesive concept, let alone a clear-cut industry. So, which boundaries are we pushing against, exactly?

Another aspect is industry 4.0, which I have to admit baffles me a bit. Oh, not the content; I’m quite familiar with the idea. But did you notice us move through stages two and three? Were those industrial changes, societal changes, or just one long arc of technological development forced into neat blocks so you can be sold on the latest innovation? And how does this correlate with design?

Here’s a table where I try to do that:

Does this kind of model even make sense? Sure, design and industry are linked, but they aren’t in lockstep with each other.

Is this about the flow of capital? Handcrafted was rare and expensive, and was elevated above other work. Technology solved the price problem with mass production, and the craftsman was devalued. Once computing became cheap and labour outsourced to developing countries, then graphic design was devalued. It seems not particularly far away when AI will be able to handle a lot of basic digital design work. So, what are designers doing? Running as fast they can away from the technology which is eating up their livelihood?

The fuzzy front-end of user research isn’t going to be replaced with AI anytime soon. What is possible is that humans will become dumbed down and manipulated into making false choices that lead to increased profits, rather than maximising whatever it is that humans want (e.g. tastier ice-cream). You wouldn’t need user research at that point. No need to predict actions when you can dictate them, and even better is that the user doesn’t even know they were manipulated.

It appears to me that the next stage for design will be political. How we do challenge the grip that capital has on our societies and reframe the narrative around the healthy development of ecologically minded systems?

Could the stages of development be something like this -

making things & images

making ideas & mindsets

making ideologies & realities

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Focus your attention

I read recently (maybe in Wired) that the number one skill that will be in demand in the future is focus. The ability to avoid all the distractions of life. I can relate to that... I seem very distracted these days and find it hard to focus on what I’m supposed to be doing... although to be honest, I don’t have too much trouble focussing on the things that I’m not supposed to be doing. In the opinion of my boss that is; in my own opinion, I’m quite happy dithering around for the moment.

Achievement -- getting stuff done. That’s the name of the game for some people. But maybe there is another way to do all of this. Maybe focus isn’t what we need, and we should think about ways of creating environments that support emergent ideas. I mean honestly, we’ve all had that great idea in the shower when we weren’t focussed on anything in particular. Suddenly taking a shower went from chill to productive.

The answer here is obviously not to install a shower next to my desk, which is covered in Gantt charts and to-do lists. (Is that obvious? Maybe with work from home, this could be a thing...) The obvious thing here is balance, right? Don’t be too driven by work, and allow time away from the desk for creativity to bloom. Feed the to-do list into the brain, then turn it off and allow the brain to work subconsciously, and hope it will spit out the required answer (maybe in the shower). I’m sure you’ve heard something like that before too.

But I think we are bumping into another, maybe, hidden issue here. Work-life creeping into leisure time is not something new. Should my shower time be occupied by my boss? Or should we be able to chill a bit more at work, to create space for ideas to bloom?

Being able to focus is important. I worry that prioritising a skill like focus encourages busywork - don’t disturb me now, can’t you see I am focussed. But on what? Is it useful? Maybe going outside for a brisk walk would be more useful...

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Economist Dani Rodrik has argued that democracy, national sovereignty and deep global economic integration (or 'hyperglobalization') are mutually incompatible; we can combine two of the three, but it is not possible to have all three together in full. … Deep global economic integration requires an elimination of transaction costs to trade and finance across borders. However, nation states are a major cause of such costs. Therefore, the only way to have both a significantly more globalized system and democracy would be to have some kind of global federal democracy, which is unrealistic. Rodrik argues that to maintain national democratic systems, a more restricted form of globalization is required.

Dasandi, Niheer. 2018. Is Democracy Failing? : A Primer for the 21st Century. Edited by Matthew Taylor.

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Freedom

This has been a word that has bounced around either in the background or the foreground of my thinking for the last couple of years. One part is due to my proximity to China, which seems to have a very different idea about what this word means to the one I grew up with. The other aspect is learning about how fragile our (my) individual grasp on the steering wheel of life is.

The prompt for this post was another person’s musings that maybe freedom is an illusion. I don’t think they meant in a lack of free will (vs determinism) way, but simply that the sort of freedom that young people aspire to simply can’t be achieved in today’s complex world.

Yeah, well, while I might agree, I think the real underlying issue here is first language and the way we use it as a shortcut (shortcut to avoid thinking!). There are lots of words like freedom, which have a dozen meanings and subtle aspects. Maybe more importantly, these concepts often cannot exist in isolation. If you want some more examples: democracy, capitalism, privacy, and free speech are a few that spring to mind.

Democracy is the one that grates me the most, with those standing against the idea understanding it simply as the right to vote for politicians. That’s not enough if you want the benefits that are touted to come with democracy; a free press, the rule of law, human rights and an independent judiciary are also required. It’s a package deal, that once it is unbundled doesn’t really work. The whole thing is about creating a system of checks and balances... freedom is the side effect. (Getting rich may also be a side effect, but it isn’t clear if getting rich is a pre-requisite or a result of a working democracy). 

What about this freedom idea then? I haven’t thought about this enough, so what follows is going to be flawed. But I suspect that we mostly frame freedom in terms of what we don’t have, rather than by what we do have. That’s obviously a human trait: to pine for what we lack rather than enjoy what we have.

We have a lot more choice in life, but the question is “Does that matter?” There are more clothes, computers, Netflix (TV Channels), and so. A lot of stuff is on demand and instantly available. You can even select your sex, with gender reassignment surgery. Oh, that wasn’t what you meant by freedom? Take your pick from academic freedom, intellectual freedom, scientific freedom, economic freedom, political freedom, civil liberties, and liberty. And I suspect it is that last one, liberty, that most people are talking about when they say freedom. But this new word is just as messy and complex as the others.

I’m not really worried about whether we have freedom or not. What worries me is the growing underlying narrative that “there is no alternative” to the system we have now. We have somehow bought into the whole “end of history” idea that places neoliberal democracy on a pedestal, and the new contender is only totalitarian or authoritarian regimes like China. We are suffering from a lack of imagination, not a lack of freedom.

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Hobbes vs Locke

I guess this is an old debate, but for some reason one that has slipped my mind. 

It is interesting to watch China grapple with becoming a superpower in the world, and infuriating when they have such a different value system from what I am used to in a Western context. This is quite stark when looking at the outbreak of coronavirus in Wuhan, with the Chinese government’s actions often labelled as draconian. I can’t imagine any “developed” country responding in a similar way, but maybe that’s for the wrong reasons.

If we accept Hobbes over Locke, then China’s actions suddenly make a lot more sense. For me, it re-shapes the whole way I look at Trump, Duterte, Putin and so on.