Happy Malaysia Day to all of you who are from Malaysia!
On another and related note, those of you who know me probably know that I am a big fan of Lee Kuan Yew.
Well, that’s a bit of a small understatement. I mean, it would have to be for someone who was somehow so moved that he decided to write an entire book about Lee Kuan Yew, which is by the way exactly what I did.
This Malaysia Day, 16 September, I’m very happy to announce the release of “One Date, Two Destinies: Lee Kuan Yew and the Birth of Malaysia and Singapore”, at a (Malaysia Day) discount!
This was a fun project to engage in, writing about the entire track of Lee Kuan Yew’s history from his birth up until the end.
I think it is crucial to look back at the past to understand history better, and this is one of the first things that a person will understand, I think, if they look just a little bit beneath the surface of Malaysian history and that which we call Malaysia.
I don’t think that there is quite a project that is like this, but I think that it was an extremely fun one – It contains many of my own personal reflections about Mr. Lee and the role that he played in Malaysia and Singapore, and in our shared history together, one that was born from a time of what can rightfully be called trauma.
I hope that you will find it meaningful and valuable for your own personal development and growth even as you reflect on these stories.
Thank you for your support in advance if you would like to purchase the book!
I really want to start treating this like a diary again. I have failed before, but hopefully this is a small success. If it does end up as a failure, you will notice because it won’t update. I will try. Failure is normal, it is expected, and I probably will again and again. Anyway, here’s my attempt.
One of the things that I’ve started to do is to read Edward Said’s Orientalism, and I think it is a fascinating book. It’s not often that I spend more than a single day reading a book, yet somehow I’ve been captivated by Professor Said’s scholarship. Reading it has become a daily activity for me. As I walk and I run, I read passage by passage, because it is just that interesting and that worthy of the evaluation on a day-to-day.
Interestingly, it’s also one of those things that makes me want to capture down what I think and what I don’t think, and not necessarily even in a perfect way. Even in searching the immediate impressions that it has left, I find that it has left so many different footprints which I have yet to completely explore or traverse.
What stands out most immediately is this idea of how representations shape reality, and how what we see is affected by the assumptions and the way that we think about this given world.
Amongst other things, it showed to me how just a few people can end up shaping how entire groups of people think of countries, nations, people, civilizations. I think that that is a fascinating insight, because, amongst other things, it is one of the beautiful embodiments of the realization that in any given society it is not necessarily the great mass of people who would decide how civilization would see itself.
Rather, it is only a few people who, although they might be limited in their access to the world at large, might somehow still end up shaping what people think about, appreciate, and eventually understand, in a game of what one might call—perhaps in a way that Professor Said would not approve of—Chinese whispers.
This is how we understand the world, one might say: the scholar or the like just read a book and decide that that is indeed how certain people are, how certain classes of people are, how others should see whether Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, people of every single race or religion, mediated through little representations made with sensors that we use to appreciate only small, local, and immediate parts of it.
It is quite surprising to think about this idea.
At least for me, it has been interesting, because I didn’t always reflect upon this: how, in fact, the things that we read end up distorting reality, even if they are meant to create factual representations of it. It is a funny insight.
I wonder if the books that I have read all this while have been giving me a false representation of the world.
Somehow or another, they feel as though they have not yet.
Somehow or another, a lot of the things that I have thought about have been confirmed by them.
Of course, maybe that’s one of the symptoms of being a victim of representations—or, if not a victim, then a selector of these representations and the things that they show to us.
It is also nice somehow to learn a whole ton of new words, and also about skills of thought, just because Professor Said mentions so many different concepts that I find interesting and that I find myself inclined to just research and understand for long stretches through the reading.
To say that I have synthesized everything would really be a lie, and I’m sure that this thought process is going to shift and evolve in response to new information in the days ahead.
For now, what I can say is that all of this is fun, and it’s nice to act like a student and also to write like one again.
As I was practicing the cello this morning, I remember feeling a big sense of frustration that I wasn’t hitting the notes properly. In that moment, I caught myself in an interesting thought: “Shit, Timmy is going to scold me later.”
I thought about how my fingers were clumsy and how Timmy would stare into my soul, judging or pondering what I had failed to do in the course of the week.
Somehow, though, in the course of that thought a small shift took place in my frame.
“What if that happened to him?”
I remembered, at that instant, that my teacher was an actual musician and got paid to do shows. I imagine making the mistakes that I make on a stage in front of a paying audience. Wouldn’t that be catastrophic, somehow? Performance is part of the art of any creator and creative, and the logical end point of practice is doing, to the extent that we are paid or compensated for the things that we manage to successfully do.
It is never about practicing for the public, but instead showcasing the byproducts of a completed thought process: the willpower of somebody who did everything that they needed in order to succeed. Whether it was to do it without mistakes or to somehow accomplish the goal or the task that they set out to accomplish without errors, that’s what it takes to make it, I thought – it was the willpower to actually just do it right.
It was a small starting point, but it has made me start to rethink and think about everything else that I do in my life. These years are short and they are brutal, but the question is whether you should accept a reality where you don’t make it, where you’re not giving every single ounce of your energy into bringing the things you want to life.
Your awareness of things
Your financial success
Your skills and abilities in the things you value, appreciate, or say that you like
Your relationships with those around you whom you can say that you love
It gave me food for thought that even now I am chewing upon, and I anticipate myself chewing upon in the days, minutes, and seconds ahead.
As Claude Fable is released into the world, I think we have hit a critical point that has made me reflect and recognize that being a human in the AI age… Is just flat out weird.
Look at the world around us now.
You open emails, and they’re written with ChatGPT – you look at comments on Facebook, and they are AI slop made to prove a sloppy point.
Once upon a time, “art” was human – you could confidently look around the internet and say that the pictures, the artworks, the memes were all made by other humans.
What does it mean to live in an era where to create is not to prompt ourselves inward, but to prompt ChatGPT?
In a world where we are told that we can produce anything that we want (whether blog posts, reflections, videos, or ideas), perhaps we are either forgetting or never learning that we discover new things through the act of creation. Ideas do not just form spontaneously, and they are not taken out of the box that is our mind. If it were so, then we could think of the mind as a series of tiny workers unloading cartons inside a warehouse, as opposed to a conveyor belt system to unload the very same. In reality, it is not so.
As humans, we do not just unload things. Instead, we polish the products that we create, none of which is just a box but the small work of art, the fruit of our consciousness, to ripen and to grow – something alive yet imperfect.
We are like centaurs, say the critics – only now instead of humans atop horse bodies, we sit atop technological marvels built upon the most sophisticated computers in the world; but what happens when we steadily move from prompting ourselves to prompting the computers into prompting the computers to prompt themselves, and eventually abandon the very idea of prompting itself in leaving our minds to their own devices?
We appreciate that which is human, that is true – we seek authenticity and we laugh when Ronnie Chieng says “Fuck AI” repeatedly at the pulpit that is the Harvard University graduation dais; it feels that there is something intrinsic, true, and immutable about that wish for human connection and want that can never be replaced by the machines…
…Then you realize that you could very well produce a Ronnie Chieng diatribe of your own with ChatGPT and Claude and begin to ask yourself what being human actually means.
Granted, it is true that even the fact that you can see this right now is the fruit of a technological collaboration. If not for the internet, which would not have been possible 40 years ago, you would not have seen your first bulletin board posts without connectivity. You would have never seen your best mate’s drunk texts or been able to browse funny cat videos on TikTok.
All of this that we look to when we remember a so-called human age is and has been nothing more than a single blip, a technical aberration in the technological history of mankind, but I will say this.
In our era of AI slop, it feels a bit like these are some of our last days watching that unique historical moment in that technological history; it feels like the last days of seeing humans create for humans on the internet.
But our feelings can also sometimes lie to us – as the fact that this blog post was entirely human written after my morning coffee attests.
This was my human attempt to manage some of these thoughts, and it is necessarily incomplete; the slop is evolving, and it will not be disappearing anytime soon – it is the going concern of our era, and if this internet isn’t dead and you live and breathe and think as well, it is one that I, you, and everyone else who’s still human will continually engage with.
