A link dump featuring: Public decay
Picture me as A Person Who Stares At Infrastructures, focusing on anything to do with repair, a lot of tech, low-carbon experiments, and a bias towards Asia-Pacific.
#linkdump #vietnam #taiwan #Asia #tech #sts
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Let me know what you think of such a dump.
I’m sitting in front of a screen in the capital of Vietnam, and we’ve seen some curious trouble recently. We, meaning: the caste of expats. There have been rumours of the most important man, the general secretary of the CPV, being sick. Perhaps deceased.
And then he turned up in a parliamentary session. www.bloomberg.com/news/arti…
What strikes me is how some men were quite sure and eager to discuss the matter. Being ahead of things. You found this mostly on former Twitter, of course, a place that cherishes public decay.
There is another hot topic during the Winter months. Air pollution not only keeps expats busy and wondering how to do things differently. Still, it’s the expats (like me) who set up sensors and think about this very often. Some of them move.
vietnamweekly.substack.com/p/the-air…
This reminds me of a fierce discussion in Delhi a few years back. Journalists openly called for others to leave. There is a colonial touch in this cleanliness fetish, which just recently has been captured beautifully in a podcast episode of Radio Web MACBA that I highly recommend. It emphasizes how infrastructures are political, and entangled with historical burden, in multiple ways.
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Cory Doctorow has been very busy explaining how monopolies are at the heart of tech companies, which is problematic for most humans except the billionaires attached to it.
Such a system produces engines that cannot tame SEO bullshit.
And corporate blogging platforms that should not exist in the first place.
badnewsletter.substack.com/p/all-the…
But there are interesting, almost surprising developments on other tech fronts. Notably, the right to repair. On the one hand, sure:
Apple embraced the movement half-heartedly a while ago, but in reality, it is still going for software-based locking of its system and pushing its robot-driven recycling, aka shredding system. Alison and I have written about this a while ago.
www.ephemerajournal.org/contribut…
It is also worth noting that Apple keeps on drifting away from its security features, not only with its messenger integration wars but also when it comes to AirDrop exploits that harm Chinese citizens (and China proudly shared its strategy of exploiting Apple devices),
Yet on the other hand, there’s Google, this week entirely going down the right-to-repair road. Let’s see how this plays out.
It may have to do with a new regulatory environment wary of monopolies.
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In other news, the Taiwan democracy had a little ballot thingy. China is not happy, but neither is the youth. This is of major regional and global relevance>
China apparently tries new economic strategies to exert power, yet its force is limited. So far.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s semiconductor powerhouse, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, aka TSMC, oscillates between bad closing and awesome prediction numbers. Taking part in these evaluations is wild and perfect for analysts to play with.
I am currently working on an academic comment bringing together insights from semiconductor industry events in Asia-Pacific, and I make the case that the realities on the ground need to be acknowledged and brought together with how we envision digital things to work. This is how I think of staring at infrastructures.
Let me close with a little gem I found this week. A little dated it may be, but very helpful for building low-carbon digital tools. Websites, really. try keeping the main load below 14kb. It comes at multiple benefits and makes users happy. As nicely visualised by this post:
So much for the link dump, a new experiment in my note-taking.