notesbylinh-blog

[notesbylinh-blog]

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

Bertrand Russell, philosopher, activist, all-round top guy. Borrowed from Power: A New Social Analysis.

[notesbylinh-blog]

Tech is Not Neutral

I recently read a list of Facebook’s blunders in 2016 and it got me thinking about how intertwined technology is with society, shaping behaviour and politics. Since its inception, Facebook has been mining our data and selling it to advertisers, a large contributor of fake-news, disrupted the media industry, and admitted that it was exploited by the government to spread propaganda. Furthermore, its obsession with personalisation means information is becoming more privatised, which is not good for a democracy contingent on an informed public that’s aware of larger social issues. When Ferguson was happening, it was all over Twitter, but Facebook’s algorithm decided instead to show the ALS Ice Bucket challenge because it had celebrities taking part and was therefore more click-friendly. Justice was one-sided that day; meanwhile, Taylor Swift had more Instagram followers. 

This isn’t to single out Facebook, but to exemplify that the role of technology isn’t simply to be a tool. In life, if you want to learn about motives, it’s best to follow the money. What the Ferguson/ALS incident reveals is that getting what we want is a good business model, because then we’re engaged, and when we’re engaged, Facebook makes more money. It doesn’t strictly care about the content or making our lives better; it cares about clicks because that’s what it measures. Most of the richest companies today are technology-based, and these companies don’t make billions by serving us, but by selling us. 

Technology is not neutral. Yet some still insist that it is. The proverbial argument can be summed up by Noam Chomsky: "Technology is basically neutral. It’s like a hammer. The hammer doesn’t care whether you use it to build a house or whether on torture, or to crush somebody’s skull, the hammer can do either.” 

Chomsky is making the point that technology can only function in the hands of people, and people can do whatever they want with it. He’s claiming that technology cannot act independently of human action and so is passive until used, therefore it must be neutral. But its passivity says nothing about its neutrality. It says nothing about the origin from which that technology came, the political and economical motives that shaped its becoming. There is no such thing as a general-purpose tool: technology is an artefact, designed and used by us. A tool has built-in properties that when used, can always be used in a certain way. A gun, for example, is designed to shoot and can always be used as such because that’s its predicted outcome, even if it can serve quite different purposes. Just because the gun or the hammer doesn’t intrinsically care says nothing about how its design shapes its purpose. 

The fact that tech is not neutral is also demonstrated in how it shapes identity politics. Using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox tells others something about us. There’s also nothing neutral about the sports-like mentality of being on #teamAndroid or #teamApple. When I think about why I prefer Apple products, it has little to do with the technology itself but the success of its marketing. Apple is progressive, hip, creative—it’s about Thinking Different. These are not simply products but a lifestyle: like clothes or a can of coke, these tech-choices are culturally symbolic. 

Chomsky’s statement was also made with a focus on hardware, but software is today's dominant form of technology, manifested in the digitisation of society. Software is even less neutral than hardware. The information society means that data is now the new oil because data is what makes software successful. More data leads to more insight which leads to better services with the result of profit. 

Technology is the stuff of human beings. It’s built with a developer’s worldview, values and beliefs. And once it’s built, it’s then designed to persuade. There are designers out there getting paid thousands whose purpose is to design technology that is persuasive and addictive. Tristan Harris, a former designer at Google, wrote about his experience designing such products in How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind—From a Former Insider. It’s a chilling read, one that draws in questions of free will, exploitation and addiction. The average user checks their phone 150 times a day, but they don’t do so because the technology is inherently amazing, it’s because the technology has turned itself into a slot machine. Every notification from an app feels like a reward, every infinite scroll or autoplay creates a never-ending experience, making it harder for us to stop engaging. 

A lot of the things we can or can’t do are restricted through design decisions. Does freedom mean being able to choose from 20 different brands of toothpaste? Of course not. But the experience is so different online, where the choices seem infinite. We don’t see how much of our life is structured by menus, and that itself is restrictive. Does freedom mean being able to choose from this menu presented to us? Apparently so. We rarely ask: Why this menu and not another? What other choices are out there that we’re not shown? To be clear, we are making choices, just not as freely as we believe. 

We are living in an attention economy where we pay with our eyeballs. What’s the biggest cost in all of this? Our time. We simply don’t realise how much of our day is eaten up by social media, checking emails, browsing websites. There’s no hidden time cost to inform us that we’ve just spent 40 minutes on Instagram or 2 hours on Facebook. What we’re also doing when we flit between these activities is that we're teaching our brain to think it’s normal to be distracted. But what we actually want is the opposite: more work done, more focus, more time well spent. Cal Newport, a professor at Georgetown University, says that the future economy favours focused knowledge-workers, so if we want to insure our future, we need to start taking back our time. Those who can cultivate their ability to concentrate will thrive. 

Technology cannot be separated from those who own it, and it’s important that we’re aware of this. But the industry is difficult to judge and regulate because it’s such a black-box: technology is beyond the comprehension of most people, and we generally don’t question what we don’t understand. We respond to brands, not code. And the way technology is branded—as empowering, progressive, democratic—owes much to its impunity. Despite being owned by private individuals, these products are very good at appearing as public services.

Because tech lacks a serious code of ethics, this allows corporations to hide behind algorithms and avoid accountability. But sorry, someone wrote that code, someone ordered for it to be written, and these people should be held accountable when things go wrong. By putting people out of the picture owes much to technological determinism, meaning that the development of society and culture is determined by the technology it uses. I find this (and any hard reductionist philosophy) largely myopic. This is not a one-way street: we shape our tools, and in turn, our tools shape us. However, I do believe in some determinism. Technology can and does condition aspects of social change, such as how printing made information widespread and computers sped it up; and it's precisely that technology has deterministic qualities that it can’t be neutral. 

There is one variable where I’ve noticed strong determinism: work. The future of work is a precarious plane on which the livelihood of many awaits the takeover of automations. We may see the rise of what historian Yuval Noah Harari calls the useless class. If growth is the goal, then humans need not apply. The economist Guy Standing coined a term called the precariat class, which, unlike the working-class, are those who basically live in precarious conditions with economic and psychological insecurity. As technology empowers its owners and takes labour away from people, we will start seeing the rise of this class. This will shake the fabric of society; and it’s not something technology can necessarily fix. 

When I peel back the layers, ultimately it comes down to power. Here’s the thing: the technology itself isn’t inherently the problem, it’s the system. Issues like time cost and disrupted industries are minor in the face of how power is being distributed. Adopting the stance that ‘tech is neutral’ is actually disempowering because it overlooks the fact that many of our tools are designed to manipulate us for corporate interests. 

We need to change the perception that technology is neutral. Whenever we use an app, we should recognise that there are motives. It serves us to ask ‘who made this?’ ‘what was it made for?’ ‘do the benefits of using it outweigh the negatives?’

Now more than ever, it’s important to ask these questions, because what we are witnessing is a reverting of new power back to old power. If we pay with our eyeballs, then we can exercise our own power by choosing or not choosing to engage. 

[notesbylinh-blog]

It’s Time We Question the Value of Growth

In theory, economic growth is infinite. In practise, it’s not because it exists in a finite space. On the one hand, this goal towards growth has given us abundant food, medicine, energy and raw materials. Yet this same growth is also wreaking havoc on the ecological system and increasing income inequality. Growth is somewhat ironic, because economics is about using the fewest resources for maximum returns, yet we are so wasteful in our motivation for it. Indeed, there will come a time when we have to choose between economic growth or ecological stability/human thriving; and change only gets harder the longer we stall.

GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, is one of the primary indicators to measure the health of a country’s economy, but it doesn’t measure the living standards of its people. GDP measures only annual flow, but not stocks of wealth and its distribution. For example, India has a higher GDP than Singapore, yet many of its people still live in poverty. That’s because India has a higher population. Knowing that GDP is inadequate for measuring standard of living, economists use GDP per capita, which divides the GDP by population, as a better indicator. But this is still a measurement that blankets how the wellbeing of people are affected by various factors, and also blankets negative externalities like cigarettes and pollution from cars that also contribute to the economy.

Kate Raworth, of Oxford University, wants to get rid of GDP. Economics, Raworth reminds us, is not fixed like the laws of physics, but an ever-evolving system that can be redesigned. Her book, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist, argues that the aim of the economic activity is "meeting the needs of all within the means of the planet,” one that "makes us thrive, whether or not they grow.” Her doughnut model is two concentric circle to represent the ecological ceiling on the outside and the social foundation on the inside. Between these two rings is the "safe and just space,” meaning that there has to be social equity too. 

Growth is affecting not just our planet, but society itself. A growing concern is income inequality. Globally, people are living longer, have more access to basic goods, and income inequality is decreasing. While global inequality is decreasing, income inequality within most countries is increasing. Why is inequality increasing within countries if growth tells us everyone is getting richer? Simply, the rich are getting richer a hell of a lot faster. 

Richard Freeman, a Harvard economists, said that "The triumph of globalization and market capitalism has improved living standards for billions while concentrating billions among the few. It has lowered inequality worldwide but raised inequality within most countries.” Those earning a high income also have the freedom to invest in assets—stocks, bonds, home equity, etc—which accumulates to their wealth. In turn, more wealth leads to more income, making the rich richer. And wealth, as we have it, is distributed more unequally than income. 

There will always be income inequality; the problem is when the gap is so wide that it affects the welfare of its citizens. A wide gap in income inequality reveals itself in negative variables: lack of social mobility, obesity, lower life-expectancy, etc. Furthermore, what we’re also witnessing is a majority that is silenced by those at the top, who have lobbying power to influence policies. This is bad for democracy. Income inequality isn’t just economical, but political. Protests like Occupy Wall Street is one example of the social unrest that will probably keep emerging. 

The father of economics, Adam Smith, spoke of the dangers of the concentration of wealth in The Wealth of the Nations. He wrote that “all for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” Smith was talking about the merchants in his days. Today, it’s the corporations following the vile maxim, influencing policies in pursuit of their own interests. 

Capitalism, for Adam Smith, wasn’t the concentration of wealth, but redistribution of profit into productivity, allowing others to have a share. Greed is and can be good if it allows others to get richer too. After all, this isn’t a zero-sum world. Thomas Piketty, in his door-stop book Capital in the 21st Century, believes income inequality is rising because it’s the fundamental nature of capitalism, but I don’t think it’s that strict. Capitalism has done some good in the world: it's lifted millions out of poverty, improved life-expectancy and people are getting richer on the whole. But when capitalism is combined with a culture of excessive consumerism, then it erodes our sense of social responsibility. It’s the culture that also encourages inequality. 

When we think of growth, we think of progress. It’s undeniable that we’ve advanced technologically and scientifically, but humanity is slower to catch up. Human progress has been lionised largely by the deep belief in Humanism, arguably a religion that places us at the centre of everything. The philosopher John Gray thinks human progress is largely a myth. In Straw Dogs, and its sequel, The Silence of Animals, Gray explains how human progress deceives us like a metaphorical treadmill: we think we’ve come so far and yet things are still the same, they’ve just been redesigned. Slavery, for example, still exists. What was once overt has been outsourced to developing countries where sweatshop factory workers slave away for pennies a day. Racism, the wedge-issue of the so-called Land of Liberty, is manufactured in the mass incarceration of black men. These systemic mistreatments of people exist for profit; but I thought growth meant that these things were supposed to get better?

Arthur Miller wrote that "an era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted". Economic growth gives the illusion of hope because it’s grounded in the investment of the future, but this future is unsustainable. If we are true believers of progress, then we can do better, must do better. I’m becoming more and more convinced that a Universal Basic Income is the next step to our changing landscape. There’s already an experiment in Kenya started by the Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar. More than 26,000 people will receive free money in some form and it will be the largest UBI experiment in history. There are complaints that distribution doesn’t work because it slows economic growth. The problem with this is, again, still believing growth is the goal. If we change the goal, then it frees us to think of better alternatives.

[notesbylinh-blog]

The Problem with Media is Also Us

A pointed finger, said the poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky, is a victim’s logo. The moment that we place blame somewhere else, we undermine our resolve to change anything. Our reaction to shocking events like Brexit and Trump is bloated with reproach, in which we blame everything and anyone else but ourselves. Media should fix it, we cry, because it did a bad job of reporting by being biased and partisan. Or it’s all Facebook’s fault—it’s the reason why we have fake news in the first place. And the blame ranges on, to corporations, politicians, rich people for being greedy, poor people for being stupid, circulating ad nauseam.

And because we blame them, our logic is that they should fix things. How lower can our expectations of ourselves go? When we insist those we blame to do the fixing, we are just giving them more power, which is a dangerous thing, especially in regard to Mainstream Media or Facebook: they already have too much power.

Media literacy is often invoked in the spirit of solutionism—as The Answer! for our fake news problem. This appears sound, but is oversimplified. And the solution is not new. What does this tell us? That it’s not enough because the problem is still here today. There are underlying, fundamental problems at play that no amount of media literacy will solve, only manage better. This is because fake news is a by-product of the real world, not of media. What is happening in the world that causes some people to produce fake news in the first place? That causes politicians to lie? How have our tools evolved to make some things easier to spread, others easier to hide? What is it about human nature that exacerbates techno-phenomenons like filter bubbles?

These are old-fashioned concerns, domesticated by a new digital landscape.

Fake news is not new, it’s just currently hyped

History teaches us that people do things based on misinformation all the time. From the propaganda of Nazism, to Pol Pot’s brainwashing communism regime that resulted in the Cambodian genocide, to the excessive consumerism caused by the psychological warfare of advertisement today. So why are we so pissed off about it now? Simply, we have the technology that allows us to be more aware that fake news exist, but not necessarily what fake news is. It’s the hype that makes it seem unprecedented, but fake news has always been around, it was just more insidious.

News used to be controlled by a few publications at the top, and it remained so for a while because we didn’t have the tools or the options to seek information elsewhere. But times have changed. Industries have been disrupted because of the internet and a wonderful tool like the smartphone. This has shifted the power from publications to people. It’s now the demands of people that inform the supplies of publications. Deep engagement is the new economical model, and deep engagement is sustained by giving people what they want. In marketing, you may come across the saying ‘follow the eyes and ears,’ and that’s because attention is the scarcest resource today, especially online.

Some will do anything to get attention. The open nature of the internet means that not everyone will play fair: those with no moral backbone will hack in this fight for attention. One obvious example is the fabricated story of Hillary Clinton housing a pedophile sex ring. Fake news won’t go away, definitely not anytime soon. It may even get worse because it’s easy and cheap to produce and distribute. 

Some suggest controlling the flow of content, but that just means controlling what people read, which is totalitarianism. This ‘solution’ also goes against what the internet is supposed to be: open and democratic. Furthermore, there’s no economic incentive to restrict the flow of information because then people will leave—remember, attention is the scarcest resource. 

It’s not just media, because internet

Who decides what is news? Well, it’s not just the media anymore. The means of distribution has been revolutionised. Media is now networked, not centralised. The internet has stripped the original gatekeepers of media of their power, shifting it to the people. We control the media, because the resource they need is our attention, and if they want our attention, they have to give us what we want. 

On the internet, we are so spoilt for choices that companies are now chasing us, because we don’t need to stick around anymore. This is an age of unbundling, in which we can pick and select what we want: a song instead of an album, an article instead of a newspaper. It’s all about bite-size, not box-set. We’re creators now too, producing our own work and adding to the information ecosystem, and if we’re lucky, we get a fan base. We come and go as we please, choose the medium on which we want to experience our content: tv, phone, tablet, radio. Content is infinite and therefore our options are infinite. The new mission for media, then, if it wants to survive, is to understand the audience better, get closer, go to them directly. 

Media isn’t the enemy because look what the internet has exposed it as: people who need us, are just like us, and is us.  

Media is also not the world, nor is the internet: they’re as much a reflection of social, political and economical issues as they are causes. The internet, despite it being created as a democratic and open society, is created by people, used by people, and it mirrors that. It's democratic in the sense that anyone can use it if they have access to it, but it doesn’t control who gets to the top nor does it promote equality. Democracy just means the people, but people don’t live equal lives and that gets reflected on the internet, not solved by it.

Tech-critic Evgeny Morozov, provocative as always, wrote in The Guardian that blaming fake news hides the real enemy—the digital giants. We are living in an immature democracy, he claimed, which manifests itself in two types of denial: "the denial of the economic origins of most of today’s problems; and the denial of the profound corruption of professional expertise.” Morozov is on team Blame Facebook, as many of us are. We blame Facebook and Google because they have a monopoly on online information flow, but that’s because we keep coming back to them. We should hold these companies accountable, but perhaps for the wrong reasons, and we shouldn’t expect them to fix the problem. Is a rose a rose a rose?

When Facebook was at the apex of public vitriolic backlash, Mark Zuckerberg, in a plea for impunity, insisted that Facebook wasn’t a media company but a technology company. Is this true? Facebook is the biggest content platform in the world but creates no content of its own. Similarly, Google, behind that white, innocuous homepage, is one of the biggest advertisers in the world but creates no ads of its own. Yet both of these monolithic monopolies select, prioritise and present content. They’re clearly more than just tech companies. Their algorithms are the new gatekeepers of information, not editors. And if distribution and deep engagement are two of the defining characteristics of a media company, then Facebook is aptly that.

When Zuckerberg claims that Facebook is just a technology company, he is ignorant of the broader social and political context of its work. On Facebook, Zuckerberg wants the world to be apolitical and assumes and expects the platform to be as such. But claim and outcome never correlates. Saying something doesn’t make it so. A killer who is also an investment banker is still a killer and so on. This is a a big issue in communications policy, in which accountability is hard to ascribe because of how companies define themselves, which also defines their legal framework. Really though, this headache over names should be of less focus and more focus should be on the actions done and their consequences.

If actions speak louder than words, then Facebook is better at the talk than the walk. After changing his mind and appearing to admit that Facebook is now a media company, Zuckerberg wrote a techno-utopian manifesto in February called ‘Building a Global Community’ which, again, doesn’t reflect what Facebook actually does. Now it’s not just a tech company and media company, but a political party. Underneath it all, he’s saying Facebook should have more power in our lives, as if the solution should be more Facebook. But when we blame Facebook and demand it to fix the problems of today, what else do we expect? The better solution is to wean us off of it, but Facebook will never do that. 

Facebook already has incredible power in shaping media consumption, allowing it to do so in governmental policies is dangerous because no one company or person can figure out solutions for everyone on its own. Facebook won’t solve fake news or remove filter bubbles and we can’t expect it to. Instead, we should all be thinking about how much power we want Facebook to have in our lives. Humane-tech evangelist Anil Dash said that "perhaps the single biggest thing we can do is both the hardest and the easiest: We can change our own behaviours.” And he’s right. We should hold Facebook accountable because it played its part in distribution, but the onus should be on those who produce and consume content, which is all of us.

Human, all too human

There’s an analogy: If the fish is sick, do you treat the fish or do you change the water? The answer is, of course, change the water. But to add on another analogy by David Foster Wallace that will complicate the answer of the first: two young fish are swimming along, and an older fish happens to swim by. He ask them “how’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a bit, then one of them looks at the other and goes: “what the hell is water?” 

How can we change the water if we don’t even know it’s there?

Wallace said that "The most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” Matt Waite, a professor of journalism, wrote that this whole mess with media can't be fixed because we still don’t believe we’re the problem. It’s not just Facebook or media. It’s about the nature of human beings and how we consume and judge information. No matter how many tools they give us or how much media literacy education they provide for us, ultimately the decision is still up to us and what we make of the information we receive. In the case of Brexit and Trump, it’s voters who vote, not media, not Facebook.

Fake news is a human problem. Our actions and behaviour drive how these organisations are run because our attention is the scarcest resource. Demand now controls supply. And what we demand is predicated on the confirmation bias. Simon and Garfunkel in The Boxer said it best: All lies and jest. Still, a man hears what he wants to hear. And disregards the rest. Research has shown that once someone has made up their mind, both fake news and real news are ineffective. We stay when we hear what we want to hear. Facebook’s economic model is based on this knowledge of human nature. 

These issues that have blown up on the internet make it easier for us to forget the bigger picture. That life outside is intersectional and intersubjective, so terribly complex and complicated. We need better online structures, but we also need better economical, political, social and cultural structures. This kind of work is tiring and interminable—who is willing to do it? 

Getting rid of fake news doesn’t automatically make us more informed citizens. No amount of media literacy will do the same either. Every act is a biased act. Instead of demanding for the impossibility of non-biased news, we must learn to read biases, including our own. We need information literacy as well as media literacy, to interpret what we read. We could start paying for news again, so that publications will depend less on ads and focus on serving us. We could make more of an effort to use Facebook less, and meet other communities in the real world where personalisation algorithms don’t exist. But first, we could begin to own up and admit that the problem is also us, and to own that problem. If we really want to, we could do the work, we have more tools and information to do so. Making it a matter of ‘they’ should do it is choosing laziness over liberty.

[notesbylinh-blog]

Silicon Valley's Problem with Death Doesn't Serve Humanity but Itself

Peter Thiel wants to get rid of death. The tech-titan billionaire and PayPal co-founder, you see, is a transhumanist, meaning that he believes technology can emancipate us from our human limitations. In a 2009 essay written for the Cato Institute, Thiel wrote that he stands against the “ideology of the inevitably of death of every individual.” This struck such a chord with me that I couldn’t help but wonder: is there something funny in Thiel’s water? Death, in his sci-fi narrative, is another problem to be solved, to stand against, to cure. But that perception itself isn’t even the main issue. What I’m critical of is the motive: Thiel cares more about beating death than making life worth living. 

He has an investment firm, Founders Fund, to help him in this quest, which claims to "invests in science and technology companies solving the world's most difficult problems." However, what Thiel sees as the world’s most difficult problems are the problems of the few, not of the many. Instead of death, why not tackle poverty, wealth inequality or climate change? Thiel and the Silicon Valley elites are smart enough to be aware of these issues, but choose not to invest in them because they don’t affect them directly (perhaps climate change, though they’re figuring out how to get to Mars).

Disruption is the function in the valley and death is its ultimate goal. Through the lens of tech, everything is seen as a machine, everything is a code that can be cracked and therefore hacked. Granted, one of Silicon Valley’s admirable traits is that it can think long-term by focusing on trajectory. But because the question of the future will always remain open, trajectory can only be conceived from the reality of today. We can't get to where we want to go if the problems we have now don't improve, such as infrastructure, education and the economy. But the Silicon Valley elites don't care about the rest of the world; they only want to take winners in their proxy version of eugenics. It's no wonder that life-extension is a popular topic among those who already have everything.

To assume that just because death affects everyone, and therefore is everyone’s battle, is absurd. Most Americans, for example, don’t like the prospect of living longer. Many also see that such a treatment will only be available to the wealthy, and has bad consequences for society by putting a strain on natural resources. The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by palliative-care nurse Bonnie Ware adds another voice to the conversation around death. Regrets ranged from not having the courage to be true to oneself, working less, being happier and staying in touch with friends. Of course, an obvious argument for life-extension would be that it gives people more time to undo these regrets, but then we have to consider the priorities and circumstances that result in these regrets in the first place. More time could just mean more of the same things.

Extending life is the last thing on people’s mind if they live in environments where they’re struggling just to live. If we were to ask people to think about real social problems, I bet you living longer is further down the list of solutions for those problems. 

And what about the 800,000 suicides a year, not to mention the many more who attempt? Those who take their own life do so because life is fundamentally no longer worth living; and in the context of suicide, death isn’t the problem but the solution. Life isn’t hard because it’s short, but because it’s unfair and uncertain.

A tech company doesn’t just exist to solve all the problems of humanities but to make money for its shareholders. We all know by now that the bulk of Silicon Valley’s slogan Making The World A Better Place is just brand-speak for Raking It In. Disrupting death isn’t about solving the ultimate universal problem, but for the few who can afford to think it’s a problem worth paying billions for. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of money pumping into cryogenics programmes and anti-ageing technology. Thiel plans to live to 120 years, if not forever, via parabiosis, a practise that involves the transfusions of blood from young people. Parabiosis has been successfully tested on mice, but whether it translates well to humans is still unclear, as well as whether Thiel is currently receiving such treatments.

Calico, an anti-ageing initiative, backed by Google Ventures and created by Bill Maris, is one of the companies leading the way in the life-extension quest, alongside Unity, backed by Jeff Bezos, and Human Longevity. Though there’s nothing inherently wrong with these initiatives, my issue comes from what I see as disingenuous claims of interests: just whom are these companies truly serving? Bill Gates, when asked about Calico in his third Reddit AMA, answered that: "It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer. It would be nice to live longer though I admit.” Is it for humanity, or is it for the few? And even if it’s for humanity, who’s to say it’ll be evenly distributed? 

There are dystopian consequences for the utopian endeavours of the few. Life-extension isn’t really utopia if it perpetuates the activities of those on top, who are largely unaware of the relational character of their activities. Despite life expectancy increasing by 5 years since 2000, health inequality still persists. We still have a long way to go in regard to universal health coverage, but the journey is even longer when those who can afford to accelerate it choose a different route. Quality of life isn’t contingent on how long we live or the diseases we don’t have. Quality of life is also about access to the things that allows us to live well, such as shelter, food and sanitation. No one can deny how much technology has improved the world; but no one can also deny how technology isn’t as diversified as we think.

Innovation doesn’t make the world a better place by default. A problem solved may lead to new problems. Uber has streamlined transportation, but is accused of lowering worker’s wages; Airbnb has improved accommodation, but has come under fire for housing illegal hotels. Death, however, is a whole other realm compared to Uber and Airbnb: people’s lives are on the line. Healthcare is an industry highly subjected to regulations for this very reason. It’s no wonder that Theranos, the blood-testing start-up led by Elizabeth Holmes, is undergoing criminal investigation for fraud. Because when people’s lives are on the line, you’re going to need evidence-based answers for all the questions firing your way. The start-up has faced repeated questions about its technology, lab procedures and accuracy of its tests. 

It’s easy to get swept up in the latest tech trends, especially when tech has been sold to us as synonymous with progress. Everyone wants better things. Indeed, this is just a lesson to motivate us to better critics of tech. To do so doesn’t make us Luddites, but people who care enough to interpret the implications of what treatments like life-extension could do to us as individuals, the fabric of society, and existence itself.

Who wants to live forever? We may not all wish to go gently into that good night—that is fair—but Thiel’s claim that death is unnatural and that he’s ‘basically against it’ is alarming to hear because death is, well, very natural. Life is a cycle with finite resources, and for new life to emerge, the old life must go. This is evolutionary progress. But I do concede that the world does change and has changed as knowledge increases, and what it means to be human changes, too. We are, of course, always creatures of our time. Perhaps there’s a far-future where we don’t need to die. But right now, Silicon Valley’s quest for immortality is vain, misguided and expensive, and draws attention away from the world we live in; and for those reasons, I’m a reluctant immortalist.

[notesbylinh-blog]

Learning My Language, Learning My Voice

When Christopher Hitchens was dying from cancer, he expressed a great concern over losing his voice when the cancer started attacking his vocal cords. In his essay 'Unspoken Truths,' written for Vanity Fair, Hitchens reflected on the importance of a ‘writer’s voice.’  As someone known for his vociferous and vigorous diction, it was a hard hit when his voice was reduced to soft whispers. He recalled some years back a friend kindly advising him to write as he speaks to liven up his well-argued, but dull, work; and it was then he understood the duty he had to his voice. At the end of the essay, Hitchens expressed his highest desire:

“What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.”

Freedom is yearned for only when we know it’s gone. And this freedom of speech is often taken for granted because most of us did not have to earn it. We are privileged in that way. Though we all know of the power of language — as weapon or as pacifier — we don’t always remember it. When I read about Hitchens and his loss, I’m ashamed for not nurturing what I have sooner. My voice, whether I like it or not, is part of my identity. And my voice, whether I like it or not, has effects. 

It’s a weird phenomenon that when we read a writer’s work and listen to her read, her voice becomes the very voice of her fiction. For example, whenever I read The Wasteland by T.S Eliot, and then listen to his reading of it, I find no conflict. If The Wasteland was meant to be read in any way, it’s in that drawn out, low and melancholic voice, rich in timbre. Or take someone like David Foster Wallace, whose writing and speaking both retain that punchy, adjective-laden and gesticulating style. The person who writes the work is always the first person who reads it, and these two modes of expression overlap throughout the creative process. The writer cannot escape her voice. 

Writing and speaking are two sides of the same coin. Yet, it took me some time to accept this. I, like Hitchens, thought the two skills were distinct. Speaking was spontaneous and unfolding, a context I didn’t like. So I fell into a bad habit of not improving my voice as I had done with my words, and consequently developed a weird, even uncomfortable, dual-sense of living, in which I was both expressing and not expressing.

It’s a lot harder to say what you mean than it is to write what you mean, especially for me anyway. I used to be afraid of my voice. I was afraid of saying the wrong things or too much, and therefore of being ridiculed. That if I were refuted, I wouldn’t know how to defend myself. I was afraid that I would be incomprehensible, and therefore misunderstood.

All those complexes retreated me into writing. But if to 'write like you talk' is top advice for all writers, then I had to become a better talker. I had to practise my voice, to make sentences articulate, meaningful and most importantly, understood. Most of this fear came from knowing that speaking meant someone will hear, and knowing that the response may not always be kind. But we can’t control the response. What we can, however, because it’s also our duty as the speaker to do so, is to make sure we’re as clear as possible. Often, it’s our fault when the listener is confused, because we're not making the best use of language. My voice only functions when it’s comprehensible to others. Language, first and foremost, belongs to people. 

If we are what we think, and if you, like me, think in words, then words matter a great deal. Yet few of us don’t see the importance in expanding our personal dictionary. It’s no wonder that we struggle to express ourselves, and when the vocabulary is limited, we resort to action, which isn't always a good thing. It’s particularly hard to explain something because communication is one of the hardest things in the world. Perfecting our language is the work of a lifetime, and it should be a committed priority, because if we’re not in control of language, then language is in control of us. 

Livening one’s dead vocal cord is physiological as well as psychological, from the workings of the throat and tongue, to nurturing confidence and self-esteem. Often, it’s about just doing it. I had to learn to embrace conversations in real time — no edits or redrafts — which became a blessing in disguise. The room for constant failure is embarrassing only at the start, but soon the stutters start to soften, the mumbles coherent, and there’s less tongue-tripping on pronunciations. Indeed, I am learning my voice; and it’s a delight to hear that it can say all of these things, that it even dares to.

If life is a road, then so much of what I’ve said or not said has led me down this particular one. To say yes or no to something can cause change the same way as making a left turn down a street. We may not know it at the time, but the world has been changed nonetheless. Ian McEwan, in his novel On Chesil Beach, wrote that the entire course of life can be changed by doing nothing. And to that, I add: by saying nothing, too.  

[notesbylinh-blog]

10 Days of Silence is the Easiest Part

Meditation is now a growing practise to ease many of our modern ailments, such as anxiety, stress and insomnia. At its most basic level, it’s simply exercise for the brain. The practise itself is secular, supported by science but is also considered spiritual. Many begin with using apps, such as Headspace or Calm, both of which are decent guided meditations for beginners. Others attend drop-in classes to do it with a community. Some, like myself, may go even further, by going on a silent retreat for 10 days. It’s clear that meditation is now widespread. It’s also clear that many who go on a 10-day retreat want a lot more happiness and a lot less suffering. This is fair, because doesn’t everyone? Yet, after my retreat, I learned that wanting those things can misguide us from the practise. Though I’m not a fundamentalist when it comes to meditation, it does matter to me when something is taken for a lot more or a lot less than it is.

The practise of meditation does not exist to ease our ailments—though these are outcomes—it’s a method of introspection, and a way of experiencing life. From it, we may begin to understand consciousness, the self, and reality itself. One of the lessons of Buddhism, the context in which meditation was conceived, is that we should lower our expectations. A 10-day retreat where we sit for 10 hours a day, without speaking, sounds more extraordinary than it is, and though hard, isn’t extremely hard. Now, I’m aware I can’t speak for others, since the experience is different for everyone. The offering of my account is modest, so that you may lower your expectations, but not be dissuaded from trying it out. No one goes on this retreat without a bit of hope: to be better, to learn, to heal. The mind will naturally imagine various scenarios of what will happen, guided by one of the most prominent questions: who will I be after this? But questions can lead to expectations, because there are answers that we’re looking for. Again, my modest account is only to lower your expectations, and perhaps luckily, the outcome may exceed them greatly.

My retreat was in Kintamani, Bali. The ashram had an impressive view of a volcano and was situated on a fecund land full of fruits, from bananas, pomegranate, and jackfruit, which, unfortunately, we could not pick. I did a type of meditation called Vipassana, also widely known as Mindfulness, and is loosely translated to insight. Vipassana focuses on the breath and sensations all over the body. Why? Because the body is always here. The body is always in the present, whereas our mind jumps back and forth, to past and future. To be mindful of the body is to be mindful of the present, and to be mindful of its changing sensations is to be mindful of the impermanence of everything. Many are intrigued by the more pragmatic stuff, such as hours, rules, compromises, the food, but I won’t go too much into those because there’s enough information out there already. 

I just went for it. Which I found was the best way to go because resisting will only worsen the experience. You will give up most of your belongings, such as phones, books, music and accessories. You will nap a lot due to the early start, and I find it’s fatigue that will hit you first before any internal processing. Your shoulders, back and butt will start to hurt from so much sitting. You eat two meals a day. You cannot look at others and you cannot speak. Often, I wondered just exactly what I was doing there. And everyday it occurred to me just how weird it was. 10 days is quite some time, but it isn’t a lifetime. Really, the hardest part is keeping it up. The real challenge is sustaining it, incorporating it into the everyday. What made the retreat easier for me was understanding that it was relatively cushiony compared to the world outside: I was fed, I didn’t do much except strolled in the limited space, stared at the volcano, and of course, sat a lot. Some moments were hard, some were enjoyable, some were pleasurable. But they all came and went. I’ve met people who say it was life changing, others who thought it was very difficult, even painful, and I knew one who walked out halfway because she had never felt so angry. Indeed, at times it can be hard, the constant sitting, the early hours, the lack of a book; and then of course, all the universal human suffering that we sometimes feel will arise: loneliness, discontent, ennui. It must be said that how painful it gets depends on where you are at in your life. If your troubles are current, then the retreat will intensify them, and there’s no guarantee that 10 days of silence will make them better. After all, the retreat only scratches the surface, and mastery takes a lifetime.

I wasn’t profoundly changed, though I thought I was, but only because the high hadn’t worn off yet. I’m not disappointed by this, because Rome was not built in a day. Admittedly, these days I struggle to do one hour. Sometimes I still wonder why I’m doing it. To simply be present is one of the most difficult things in the world. But it’s important to keep it up, even if it’s just for 5 minutes, because it’s a good habit to build up for a good life. Meditation is a practise that itself is a journey, so it’s best to undertake it without an end goal. Meditation’s point is to have no point, though it has many outcomes. Whatever gain there is comes as part of the process.

My offering of my experience is only a kind of pointing, so don’t replace it for the real thing. Often in life we are satisfied with just the pointing, which is a shame, because intellectually understanding something can only go so far before we must experience things for ourselves. Life is not an intellectual game. There is much more to a life worth living than a mind worth having. 

[notesbylinh-blog]

You, inc.

Before we’re even potty-trained, the world tells us to figure out what we want to do, and to figure out who we are. But if, as Salman Rushdie once claimed, "our lives tell us who we are," then identity is something we’re constantly earning, not look for or figure out. This search for an identity is no new thing. And I’m not here to reprimand the sense of a self, which I think is vital for wellbeing and self-esteem. My concern is with how radical individualism has created an unhealthy culture of identity-making that’s no longer about expression but exclamation. You, inc. is an echo chamber of personal branding, self curation and brazen statements, declared, to superfluous extents, in various forms like a tweet, a beard or a tattoo. 

“It’s a nice thing to know who you are” said Zadie Smith in an interview with The FT, "but you’ve still got to act in the world.” I agree it’s important to talk about identity, but when we tightly tune into ourselves, we tune out the orchestra of the world. Our interests should go beyond being perceived the right way, which is to say the way we want, and shift to making things better. Because the truth is, though there is progress, this world is still far more attractive visually than it is socially. Really, it’s so much more than about identity. 

Right now, identity politics is swallowing the poison it tried to drain. It attempted to give minorities a voice but failed to do so, because to talk about one group is to exclude another. Everyone now feels like they’re marginalised, must too be represented, instead of working towards a common goal. Focus shifts from actual issues to people’s identity. We have every right to be heard, but that should not blind us from making genuine social and economical changes. Solidarity is more fruitful that identity politics, which is now a quagmire of a movement because it’s an insurmountable task to mention all groups at all times for every issue. That’s just not how reality works, and that’s just not how identity works either. 

In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay writes about the difficulty of consistently living up to what we claim to be, and how we’re actually full of contradictions (Milo Yiannopoulos is living proof that being gay isn’t in harmony with being liberal). She admits she's not a very good feminist because she likes pink and listens to thug rap and reads Vogue. Of course, she calls herself a bad feminist in jest, because it’s impossible to strictly adhere to the identity of feminist or any other identity, especially when it’s put on a pedestal with the expectation of perfect posture. Words are powerful, but we needn’t be so literal-minded about them. Words are also personal things, in which people are redefining loaded terms like freedom and feminism often because identity is part of the language game: no word has a rigid definition or an essentialness, and like a game, is understood depending on the context. Gay’s concern is with the inherent difficulty of harmonising action and ideology, because ultimately, before anything else, we’re flawed and human. But our culture is no enthusiast for nuances—polarisation is its preferred modus operandi. Identity labels like Feminist or Liberal or Privileged could do better to invite pluralism in and leave the myth of a one-dimensional personality at the door. 

Steppenwolfe, by Herman Hesse, is a book that challenges the idea of a single or even double identity; essentially, it’s about the illusion of identity. In it, Harry Haller struggles with his two selves, one that's human and civilised, and the other that's animalistic and wild. Harry’s discontent and suffering is so deep that he regularly contemplates suicide. He finds his position in society is also out of step because of his internal conflict. Towards the end, Harry understands that an extreme focus on his internal conflict will never consolidate his relationship with the world, for identity is more so about being at peace with oneself than it is about trying to be anything. What's different isn’t necessarily conflicting, nor mutually exclusive but can actually be complementary. The book concludes that identity isn’t singular but full of infinite possibilities that responds to the richness of reality and experiences. The philosopher Hume thought that the self was a bundle of perceptions, in which "self or person is not any one impression, but that to which our several impressions and ideas are supposed to have a reference.” The reference that is the self is not a consistent core but consists of variables, connected together like links in a chain. 

Identity is drag, and fixating on it can be a real drag. One of the mantras of our time is that no one can define us, that we are the sole author of our life. The reality is that our identity isn’t contingent on the story we tell ourselves. Others can define us, and do, by their own standards, which we can value as important or not. Society defines us, because we are subjects of our time. Our genetics define us. And so do our circumstances. To declare that only we can know who we are borders solipsism, in which we curve in on ourselves: You, inc. cannot be incorporated as such because it’s essentially bankrupt.  

[notesbylinh-blog]

Fake of Charge

The manipulation of media is not new. And though I’ve always been sceptical of the news, due to the recent proliferation of fake-news in our post-truth society, I and everyone else are on high alert, unsure of who to trust and where their sources come from. We live in a deeply insecure time. The system of media is severely broken, and in turn, it's breaking journalism. But what's really terrifying is that fake-news has dangerous, menacing, real-world consequences, in which readers will take actions from misinformation. Recently, Edgar M. Welch read online that a pizzeria was housing young children as sex slaves as part of a child-abuse ring led by Hilary Clinton. He then drove six hours to the place and fired at it with an AR-15 rifle. Luckily, no one was hurt; but this should not relieve us of its severity—events like this one are beyond a cautionary tale. If there is a time to take seriously the content we consume and its impact, it's now. 

Something is fundamentally broken about news. But, why it's that way isn't actually confusing. We must always remember that news is a business, and needs profit in order to survive. We used to pay for content a lot more, particularly in the form of print, but since the digital age, publications started giving out content for free, which reduced the demand of print. As a result, publishers turn to an ad-based revenue as one solution. Fake-news has a short-term advantage of business value scale—lots of clicks and traffic—but we don’t realise that in business, it’s not just about getting new customers but maintaining the ones we already have. In the long-term, credibility gets tarnished and trust is lost. 

The ad-revenue model is not as effective anymore for two main reasons: more people are using ad-blocks, and quality of content gets diminished. Henry Luce, a co-founder of Time in 1923, said that a business model for journalism that was solely reliant on advertising revenue was not only morally abhorrent but also economically self-defeating. He believed that a publication's primary duty was to its readers, not its advertisers. 

Ev Williams, founder of Medium publication, has raised concerns about generating better news, realising that “the [company's] incentives driving the creation and spread of content were not serving the people consuming it or creating it — or society as a whole.” Right now, the current system of media produces high amounts of misinformation, but it’s difficult to think of a model that is both profitable and trustworthy, of which Williams is aware. “It is too soon to say exactly what this [model] will look like,” he goes on, “This strategy is more focused but also less proven. It will require time to get it right, as well as some different skills.” Though Williams is unclear on Medium's new business model, I respect the acknowledgement of a broken system and consequent motivation to make it better. However, it frustrates me (though I understand why) that most publications are reluctant to turn to a model that already works: making readers pay for content.  

Making readers pay is not a new solution for news, but it does seem archaic when we're so used to free content. We see paid content as if it's the caviar of media. Yet, if publishers want to emancipate themselves from the pressure of advertisers, they must turn to readers for support, and if readers want trust-worthy news, then we should support them. Print, though less popular, is still respected for its credibility since it takes more time, effort and staff to produce. And its tangibility means we can’t just simply exit it like a webpage. However, because online is the preferred format of today, a subscription-based model is a more realistic option that’s both profitable and quality-focused.

The Financial Times is one example of successful editorial independence. Its model is a cheap trial subscriptions in which readers pay £1 monthly to read as much as they want without having to fully commit, should minds change. Two-thirds of its subscribers, whom are digital, generate more than half of its revenue. The idea is not revolutionary, but it's working. Friction is a dirty word when it comes to digital. We're obsessed with things going seamlessly, or else we won't pay. But friction here gives us pause to be more deliberate with the news we read. Boundaries can be good.

Blendle, a new media start-up, is playing its part too with its micropayment model, in which readers pay various fees from 19 cents to 39 cents for an article. This removes a full commitment to a subscription to fit our current transient nature of consuming content in different places. Blendle invites us to think: How are we OK with paying 99 cents for a song on Apple, but cannot afford to pay for an article? Though, to be fair, when media started putting out content for free, it reduces and perverts our perception of its value. Because it's not that we can't afford to, since we pay for Netflix and Spotify, it's because we don't see the value in paying for something we can get for free elsewhere, because we've been told we can. 

Our demand for free content comes at a cost. If we don’t pay for news then we must endure sponsored content, ad-banners, and consequently fake-news. Because the free stuff we want means publications have to figure out other ways to make money to the detriment of authenticity and truth in order to survive. We've been spoilt into believing we can get what we want for free and for it to be of great quality, while forgetting that an economic reality exists in which people still need to eat and pay rent. ‘Information wants to be free’ is an ethos that disregards the reality of people who produce the information, who are constrained by their economic limitations and can’t work for nothing. Also, it's useless and misleading to apply specific attitudes to inanimate objects. This is not a technophobic remark, but a reminder that the web is grounded in the real world. Paying for content doesn't make information less free, inaccessible, unavailable or hidden, it just means we have to pay to get it. Freedom of information does not mean that all content should be free of charge. 

The system needs to change but so do people's attitude. If we want quality, we have to pay for it, and we should. Yes we can educate ourselves to discern fake-news, but who has the time to fact-check every source? We rely on journalists to do that for us, so we must pay for that reliance. Because of the pressure to have free news, quality gets compromised. The qualities that used to make journalism a more respected field are dying, like reporting, fact-checking and having a duty to its readers. But that can be undone by reverting back to the business model of paying for content. Of course this isn’t the only solution, and it’s not easy, but until we find better models to reduce fake-news and raise quality, this one isn't a bad shot. 

Now that there are a lot of concerns over fake-news, I'm hopeful we might slowly be moving towards a future in which people realise that perhaps paying for news is a small sacrifice for the decline of misinformation. 

These changes aren't easy but we must exercise our spending power to make them happen. Better news can only thrive when it has support from its readers. Generally, when we pay for something it has more of our interest at heart, because in business, we serve those who pay us. If we care about what's happening to our media, and consequently our education and society, then it’s our duty as readers to prioritise quality over clickbait, and that means paying for services and content. Bear in mind: we are idealistic if we expect to find a news source that is unbiased—everyone is biased. Often these sources even deviate from their core editorial beliefs. But there is a difference between reporting an event through a biased lens, and simply making one up. It behooves us to reduce the latter. 

[notesbylinh-blog]

No New Year

Time is real but we experience it arbitrarily. We have calendars to envision our future, deadlines to structure our lives, alarms to keep us in check. And every year, we hope for more, we wish for better things, we promise ourselves we'll join the gym. And what better time to hope than the new year, right? The term practically invites such an outlook: A clean start, a fresh perspective, new year, new you. But the feeling of time and of living isn't the same as the understanding of it. Knowing it's the new year doesn't make it feel any more new because we all carry the years of the past with us. Life is a progression, a series of incremental changes, and it goes up and down. It does not adhere to calendars, deadlines or alarms. It still goes on once we hit deadlines, because deadlines still have consequences. These days, I care less about celebrating the new year, just as I care less about my birthday. I find these timely points underwhelming the older I get, like chores or duties that I do for the sake of others. I'm too aware of time, which is the outcome of getting older, so I want to try and celebrate every day, not twice a year. 

And what of resolutions? The word sounds fitting for the coming of a new year: bold, grand, sweeping. But we all know what the general experience is like when the clock strikes twelve: very ordinary. And so resolutions don’t sound so fitting anymore because there's no big event to spur us on. Better to ask ourselves what tweaks we'll make. In my case, writing more, exercising more, connecting with people more, eat less sugar, study economics, be more vulnerable, and write that screenplay—to name a few.  Joy is to be found in the motion, not in the arrival. Which is just a fancy way of saying it's about the journey, not the destination. The curse of ambition is impatience, and impatience can stricken me at times. So it's best to slow down a little bit, be a bit softer, try and enjoy the quotidian life.   Big changes? No, small ones, one step at a time, throughout a lifetime.

A new day is better than a new year.

[notesbylinh-blog]

Ways to Come Up With Ideas

Listen to people's questions; try to answer them.

Read.

Meditate.

Take a walk. An hour at the least.

Or three baths a day.

Eureka!

Procrastinate, like go on Quora, sometimes Reddit.

Interview people. There’s a world in every person, as there are words.

Reflect.

Make time to make sense of it all.

Insight is connection in context.

Sleep: see what you can find in your dreams.

No big secrets, really.

[notesbylinh-blog]

I learned that failure is by and large due to not accepting and successfully dealing with the realities of life, and that achieving success is simply a matter of accepting and successfully dealing with all my realities.

Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates. Borrowed from Principles.

[notesbylinh-blog]

A Better Death

This article was written for a content brief given by Farewill, a start-up that aims to change our culture’s relationship with death. To date, it's been one of my most interesting endeavours.

-

“Because death stirs people to seek answers to important spiritual questions, it becomes the greatest servant of humanity, rather than its most feared enemy.” — The Bhagavad Gita

Let’s begin at the end. Every present moment, every life, is on the brink of death. That’s the only raw truth there is. Certain, irrevocable, and bittersweet. What is at the great and formidable end? And when the answer arrives, how does life unfold?

One of the great challenges of our time is how to communicate death. We are a death-denying culture, for obvious reasons, but we need to question whether our reticence is doing a disservice to the dying, because would we want the same when it’s our turn? If the Golden Rule — that is, to treat others as we’d like to be treated ourselves — still stands, then our culture needs a change in attitude. Death needs to be acknowledged, because only from its point can we begin to think about how we want to die.

To avoid talking about death is to isolate those who are dying. Our avoidance and silence deny them a language in which to communicate, because why talk if no one wants to listen? Do we really want a society in which institutions play a larger role in the death of our loved ones, and eventually, ours? When it’s the end, where do we truly want to be? And with whom? Most of us don’t want to die in a hospital, but most of us end up there. It’s no surprise, then, that more than 50% of complaints on the NHS is to do with the care of a dying person. Clearly, end-of-life care is broken. 

Medicine has made great progress in treating the sick but there is a conflict in medicine. Though it has good intentions to cure, this intention can overshadow the person behind the sickness: the grandma who wishes to see her grandchildren graduate, the father who yearns to makes amends with his father, the little boy who dreams of superheroes. There comes a time when treatments don’t work, so we must turn our focus to care. There comes a time when it’s no longer about the medical condition, but the person as a whole, who has ambitions and desires and a history separate from her sickness. When treatments no longer work, priorities must shift. 

Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, says that it’s a failure of culture if we are unable to offer comfort or acknowledgement to the dying, and that medicine’s role, fundamentally, is to enable wellbeing:

“A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.”

We don’t leave the world in one vanishing act, we leave traces behind. Dying involves responsibilities, and as a society, we need to be open about death pragmatically as well as existentially. There are questions we need to ask: How do we register a death? What will happen to our loved ones? And our possessions and social accounts? What are the financial costs and legalities? There will never be the best time to think about these things, but there’ll be a time when it’s too late. We are, by and large, unaware of our options. Few of us know what to do after someone dies. In the face of grief and hurt, this can cause additional distress which can be mitigated if we equip ourselves for the reality, if we let our wishes be known beforehand.

Though death is universal, its cultural expression is not. Us Brits are well-known for being tight-lipped, holding it all in and dealing with things later. Fortunately, it’s not impossible to change culture, as resilient as it is. More of us are speaking up, extending and even encouraging the dialogue. There are already means in which we help people die well, from palliative care, dignity therapy, and death cafes. What it means to die well is, of course, up to the individual.

Today, it’s easier to plan for the worst and hope for the best. What’s the best we can hope for? More time. We’re living in an age that has great technological advancement, which allows us to live longer, take greater control over our lives, and have a better understanding of how, where and when we’ll die. We’re also more connected, given new mediums through which to communicate, even to grieve, to the extent that some of us are sharing our dying experience on social media. But let’s be clear: this is not a story about how ‘Tech Will Save Us All’ by disrupting death; it’s much humbler than that, though far from simple. It’s about expressing ‘The End That Unites Us All.’

Our story sits between life and loss. If we have the capacity for grief, love, happiness and sorrow, then we certainly have the capacity to talk about death. There is space within the human heart to invite it in, to understand and learn from it, and to talk to each other about it. Perhaps we can never face death with anything other than fear, so let’s face it anyway. 

The philosopher Spinoza believed that discussing death is a meditation not on dying, but on life. This belief is echoed by our contemporaries, through art, commencement speeches and cinema. They show us that death doesn’t have to always leave a void, but can light up a spark in others, inspiring them to live now and to live full.

[notesbylinh-blog]

Bye Berger Bye

Studying literature did not do what I had hoped: improve my writing. Instead, I wrote sentences and stories that were impenetrable, much like the ivory tower to which literary academia belongs. I abused jargon, jarring both others and myself. 

It sounds logical that reading and analysing books should help with writing, but that depends on who and what we read. The study of literature is not to cater to what we enjoy reading, but to appreciate and learn about the novels and canons that shape our world.

However, I realised I write better when I read books I enjoy. Because for me, to sharpen any skill is to look to others, to borrow from them, until we arrive at our own place. There were few writers I studied during my degree whom I wanted to emulate, who could help me hone my voice and style, and who spoke to me and my time. One of them was John Berger.

Berger, who died a few days ago at the age of 90, came to my life around 5 years ago. But before I read him, I watched him. It was his documentary, 'Ways of Seeing', a critique on art and the power of the image, that began my relationship with his work. After that, I went on to read: 'G', 'The Shape of a Pocket', 'And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos', ‘Hold Everything Dear,’ 'Why Look at Animals?' and more recently, ‘Confabulations.’ All really good stuff. And thankfully, there's still more to be read. Though the man is gone, he's left behind more work than I will probably be able to read in my lifetime. In this way, he's still new to me, still giving, causing mutiny like the quiet revolutionary he was.

Storytelling, for Berger, did not start with inventing, but with listening. When I read Berger, I am not solely amazed by the topics or themes, but in his ability to articulate. So reflective and revealing, and always personal. Listening is the edge of a knife on which writers sharpen words, but I know of few whose knife is as sharp as the one in Berger's pocket. The man could write: clearly, exactly, intimately.

Consider this passage he wrote on Vincent Van Gogh, taken from ‘And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos’:

“His paintings speak of this [creative act] more clearly than do words. Their so-called clumsiness, the gestures with which he drew with pigment upon the canvas, the gestures (invisible today but imaginable) with which he chose and mixed his colours on the palette, all the gestures with which he handled and manufactured the stuff of the painted image, are analogous to the activity of the existence of what he is painting. His paintings imitate the active existence—the labour of being—of what they depict.”

His paintings imitate the active existence, I found myself whispering on loop when I first read that line. How someone could talk about art in that way astonished me, a way that’s endearing and life-encompassing. It wasn’t just about Van Gogh’s work, but the painter himself and his journey. Art is work, which involves the gritty, the clumsiness, the sweat and suffering. When I look at a Van Gogh painting now, I see labour in its swirls and pigments, I see the making.

There was a time when I was disillusioned by art criticism, a bastion in which I believed only the elite and pseudo-intellectuals reign. Many had weak opinions, strongly held—a harsh view, I know, but that was the result of my disillusionment. That Berger showed me another outlook on art, one that's humbler, will always be invaluable to me. From him, I understood that though art isn't life, it can lead us back to life.

And he taught me a lot about life. Mainly that it's an activity in which we should participate, for what a shame it is to only be a mere witness. After all, life is as brief as photos. 

[notesbylinh-blog]

On Resilience as a Response

“Bad times, but I wasn’t unhappy … What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.” - Nina Simone

Times have always been hard, but nowadays we're more aware of it because we have easier access to the happenings of the world. 2016 has been an intense year not just because of the blunders of politics and the Syrian refugee crisis, but because we are starting to understand how we are all really connected, and how we experience things collectively. It's intense because the emotions of solidarity are intense. Whether we like it or not, we're in this together, even if we may not be on the same side. In many ways, despite the terrible, not to mention confusing, events that occurred, one good thing is that we have woken up to the interplay of complex situations, in which ripple effects are real and aren't just confined within the borders of our respective countries. Ever since humans learned how to fly and transmit information via waves, walls don't work the same way they used to.

Because of these events, we're all finding ways to cope, to understand, but secretly in conflict with also wanting to reproach. Over the past few years I have a greater awareness of suffering, the system that causes it, and the things we do to avoid it. There are many methods to mitigate, one of them is positive-thinking. But when times are this bad, this seems an unsophisticated tactic to suggest. The cult of positive-thinking concerns me, because it assumes happiness is everyone's goal. And it annoys me, because it's assimilating any life-technique out there into its literature, branding it Positive-Thinking TM. Though these intentions aren't unfounded, they're somewhat misguided: what if being positive isn't the point? The problem with positive-thinking is that it hardly leaves the realm of thought. Many of us don’t do anything about the better future we want, rather, we give ourselves over to our fantasies, snuggling against them while we avoid the truth. Last I checked, the world isn't covered in fairy-dust but pollution and bad politics. 

Then there's our culture's obsession with prevention. How could we have let this happen? We exclaim incredulously. We should have seen this coming, as if to assume the power of premonition. Hindsight is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But let's move this away from current global crises and take it down to the every day level of life. When we try too hard to shield ourselves from the inevitable adversity of life, we forget how to live.  Prevention is believing that we can control the course of things by predicting what will happen. But life doesn't work like that. Shit will hit the fan.  

There's no need to ask why we try to prevent bad things: we are scared of losing in life. The question is why do we spend so much time doing it? We exercise, eat right, take vitamin-pills, even go gluten-free, all for the cause of prevention. But we know that even the healthiest people get sick. See, the thing we call prevention is really just lowering risks. There's nothing wrong with wanting to take care of ourselves, but the issue is that when we spend so much time preventing, we are unprepared for what to do when bad things happen. And they will. There are too many forces happening in the world, all the way down to the atomic level, that we can't control or know about. When bad things happen, prevention is no longer an option. Then, we can only hope to make things better.

When bad things happen, resilience is a good response.  Its point is constructiveness. And because it's an ability, it can be built up. Like meditation, it works by training the faculty of the mind to look at life in a certain way. Rather than strength, it's about being able to adapt and bend to the forces of the world. Because if we don't bend, we break. Resilience is capacity, not toughening up. It's about how much we can handle, not how well we can shield against something. Capacity is clearing space to understand our situation, not to judge it, and if we can, to do something about it. The writer Amy Tan sees resilience as the ability to find humour in situations that would otherwise overpower us. The wonder of humour lies not only in its ability to help us see the funny side, but that there is another side to be seen at all. It expands the naturally narrow focus of our pain, and shows us another way. 

Prevention prevents the things that make up our becoming. Few people ever say it's the easy things that define them. Nothing truly worth it is easy since we only appreciate what we've worked hard to get.  It's not what happens to us that makes us who we are, it's what we do about it after. Because life is a vicissitude of ups and downs, resilience is a process, and we should harness it again and again to help us constructively navigate and adapt to the changes around us and within. I have learned that it can be healthy to be involved in my tribulations. I compare it to how people either run away from systems or try and change them from within. Sometimes the best way really is through. If we want to experience life, we can't always be preventing or thinking positive, we have to give in to our humanness, to humble ourselves to the truth of our fragility. 

What affects the world affects us. Resilience isn't just about individual empowerment, but a collective effort to pull each other through with the hand of change. Nina Simone had it right about change. If there's one thing I believe in the world, even more tangible than love or taxes, it's change. Change is the hand we can rely on to pull us through when we're feeling our way in the dark. The rest is just fleeting. 

[notesbylinh-blog]

My Unlikely Affair with Economics

I've been thinking a lot about privilege lately. And by that I mean the intersectionality of it: how we can be privileged in one way and not in another (e.g a poor, attractive white man). Lately, most of what colours my world are distinctions and the things that separate us: class, nationality, citizenship, income, politics, education, wellbeing, gender. Though I know that the world isn’t all divisions and conflicts, lately, those are what I'm reminded more of in this period of crisis. Perhaps I could do better to seek better news, knowing that sensationalism sells. Perhaps I could do better to detox from it altogether. But this has always been a reality, and hysteria is the blood running through it. 

I never thought much about what maturity meant until now. Before it was a vague opinion on how it's to do with independence and stability and confidence. But like womanhood or confidence, maturity is a state-of-mind. I understand now that maturity is a perception of sobriety. It's articulating that things aren't what we hope for them to be—the uncomfortable truth, that most things are beyond our control, and it's to work at seeing beyond our worldview. 

Despite my limited understanding of the world, there are some things I am willing to say. 

I am willing to say that meritocracy is largely a myth. That there is no such thing as the ‘self-made’ person because we do not build things on our own. Success and luck are more entwined that we'd like to admit. Yes, we put in hard work and talent, but those things are overstated compared to chance and context. Despite great progress in feminism, we still live in a patriarchal society. Women still get paid less than men and are underrepresented in many industries. One argument is that not enough women are applying for these roles due to lack of interest, but we retort that with a firm No, it's fear. Global warming is real and we're to blame. Materialism is eating us from the inside out, because we're lonely, because we're unhappy, because we want to be wanted, because of the Beauty Myth. Wealth is unevenly distributed. Black people still get pulled over just for being black. We, the affluent countries, are turning away refugees while the poorer countries, like South Africa, take them in. Perspective trumps the truth: life is fair or unfair depending on who wins or who loses.  

How can I understand better situations like these and all that they entail? How can I develop a more expansive and acute understanding of our humanness to complement my other lenses, such as literature and philosophy? For me, the best way to learn about something is to frame it around current interests. My fascination with human behaviour led me to economics. And the more I delve into it, the more I realised that it’s not so removed from my world. It's this big invisible thing that's all around us, and sadly, it's hugely underestimated. We may not all see ourselves as economists, but we’re economising all the time, simply by making choices. 

Economics is, at its core, a social science, so it’s not just about money or maths or graphs, it’s about human behaviour. And because human behaviour is so broad, it's natural to also learn about history, politics and psychology, which are complementary to the lens of economics. Secondly, economics is the study of scarcity and how we use our limited resources for maximum impact. This is what we mean by economising. Everything we do in life involves risk because we do not have perfect information. Scarcity is about choosing ‘or’ because we often can’t choose ‘and.’

Our limitations force us to make choices. And every choice comes with an opportunity cost, meaning that we have to give something else up. If I choose to go to the cinema it means I will cost writing this blog post. For some, earning lots of money is the goal, so they work many hours, neglecting other things in their lives, such as growing their social capital, self-improvement, or knowledge. Everything has an opportunity cost, and if everything has a cost, then nothing is truly ‘free.’ If there’s one valuable lesson that economics teaches us, is that we can’t have it all. 

We all live in accordance to incentives, information and preferences. Understanding why we make the choices we do requires information on the micro level: the life of the individual. Through that, economics allows us to think more about externalities: how everything we do in this world has an impact, from the things we buy to what we save up. Choosing to start a charity that promotes and creates clean water has the externalities of helping people live longer, maintaining their health, and eventually they’ll get into work and contribute to the economy. Or choosing to smoke has the high risk of getting lung cancer, which puts pressure on our loved ones to look after us if we're sick, so then more government money is spent on healthcare, which means higher tax. Externalities highlights the seriousness and consequences of our actions, and how they affect society as a whole. This exposure to the bigger picture is a good dose of reality because it removes us from our individualism, a dangerous cage into which many of us are entering.

The world is extremely complex, and economics doesn't try to simplify it by turning it into a story of good-vs-evil. It stands against such binary thinking and stresses the importance of having multiples lenses through which to see a situation, and it reminds us that our worldview isn’t right or better, it’s just one of many. 

To understand economics in everyday life is one of the best things we can do for ourselves. We learn how to become better decision-makers, so that what we do now will lead to a more prosperous future. It can also make us more compassionate and better empathisers. We are often too quick to point a finger at the Other. Instead, we are better off asking: What could be making this person suffer? Why did that person decide to steal? How did Trump become president? Economics is a window into humanity, but more specifically, humanity within the system. At its core is the study into the choices we make. Understanding this will help us shape our world for the better. 

[notesbylinh-blog]

I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

Antonio Gramsci