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First Night in Bangkok

Christopher Hitchens once said that however hard you try to avoid cliché, visiting communist Czechoslovakia forces you to reference Kafka at some point.

Anyways, Bangkok really is a fucking trip, man. I feel like I died two days ago and reincarnated in a William Gibson novel. So very much.

Inhuman cybercapital futurity assembling itself in a thousand gleaming Hong Kong-domiciled gigabanks and digital nomad cafés and dancing girls as it chokes old Buddhist temples and shantytowns and struggling palms in a traumatically transcultural miasma of a myriad reactive nitrous oxide species coughed up by a million two-stroke motors.

After a brief nap in my luxury burbclave hotel, security guard and English-fluent beaming hotel staff staff at post, me trying to do battle against 15 timezone hours' worth of jetlag, I register for the first time that I've been dissociating. I'm hobbling around on the air cast I wear for my foot sprain and a collapsible Walgreens cane, of the kind I imagine two-bit hustlers using to beat drug dealers poaching on their turf. But I'm in my favorite mass-market synthetic ink tie dye shirt, made somewhere in Central America I don't recall off hand, my blue tourist shorts, and my Buddhist beaded mala, engraved with Sanskrit I cannot read, on plastic draw string, so hopefully everyone knows I'm a chill dude.

I am in an eight floor mega shopping mall. There are robots serving white frat boys and dutiful waiters in white masks who could be robots serving local Thai prep school kids in sky blue school uniforms 500 baht sirloin steak dinners.

There are as many languages spoken here it feels like as New York City. And hotels, restaurant, massage parlors, tailors, purpose built to pander to rich Arabs, rich Chinese, rich Americans.

There is a strange amodernity to all the floating signifiers. White spring break kids approximating Thai names and wai hand clasps. Chinese shirts with a Markov chain’s chants of floating English prestige nonsense. Transcontinental fake gold watch arbitrageurs. More virtual market makers than a Jersey City server farm somehow spun up and cast into human form.

Sub-orbital resort vacationers in one corner. The state messages of the network monarch on a giant billboard overlooking a four-story expressway overpass on another. Everyone communicating in signs, gestures, and humble Buddhist bows. Hindu, Christian, Mormon, Jew, Shiite, Sunni, and so many Buddhists, all sitting and eating and shopping and praying and coughing and sputtering and fucking and bowing to one another at the end of the world before the self-aware chatbots reconstitute all the anthropomass on the third rock from the nuclear furnace. And of course, on TV, a narcissistic reality TV star in orange bronzer and an oversized navy blue Brioni suit and red tie is inaugurated president of the United States for a second time.

And my $4 dinner, served by surgically masked waitstaff at the shopping mall of the omega point. The terminal object in the category of mass market commercialism. Another floating signifier: a featured photo on Wikipedia of beautiful Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where I've actually been, here mobilized as a metonym for the kind of steak restaurant this place is supposed to be. Of course, probably no one who works here has been to America. It reminds me of Gilles Deleuze’s characterization of capitalism as an inherently deterritorializing process—one that makes every place into every other place, until no one knows where they are.

And the strangest thing is that somehow, between the tourists trying to immerse themselves in the fakery, and the shop workers trying to perform, something genuine is created, even though the thing the performance refers to is fake—and everyone knows it.

Actually, maybe the craziest moment was when I was walking past the clothing hawkers. Of which there were just so unbelievably many. And they were selling wildly unlicensed branded merch for Luis Vuitton and Ralph Loren and Balenciaga and GUESS, etc. Some of them laughably implausible. But others effectively the real thing. The Asian tourists love those in particular. And I asked myself, “how did these knockoffs get so good?”

And then I remembered: Thailand is the place where all of this crap actually gets made! It’s all outsourced to here. They’re just cutting out the middle men seeking rent on the brand. And so I’m not really sure who’s the fraud here. Is it the unlicensed shirt hawker trying to take me for a ride and fudge their “tax” calculations? Or is it the Italian fashion house trying to charge me 20x what it costs the Thai sweatshop workers to make?

I see a case for each.

Obviously not JUST Thailand makes this. There’s also Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Honduras, Costa Rica, etc. All the groveling satellite states trying to scramble up the value-added ladder that capital and IP and telecom flows have turned into the 21st century's Manchester. All part of that big globalized textile mill.

Anyways, I got a pretty nice white dress shirt for like $15 and a truly label-less white bucket hat for $5. And I’m almost sure I got taken for a ride, but I was waaay too tired to haggle, and anyways, by any standard of justice as globalized as these clothing flows, I'm the one taking them for a ride.

I message my mother, half way around the world. It's 7:30 AM on the Eastern Seaboard of the US. It's 7:30 PM here in Bangkok. My mother says, "Keep your wits about you, man. You have to play the haggle game. It's in your Albanian blood. My grandmother would have taught you plenty, had she been there."

I can't help but think that they’d have been like, “no, please! Just take it! For free!! ” after 3 minutes of that. Those Bangkok street hagglers have never met an Albanian orphan.

Gonna go to a Buddhist temple tomorrow. First, tonight, a cocktail bar overlooking the city. In my $1000 black John Varvatos jacket with the Mandarin collar over the $15 off-brand shirt I just bought.

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He may seem like a nice guy who just wants to make it easier to have kids and/or bots, but watch out: he actually accepts an INSANELY strong form of the repugnant conclusion!

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The Counsel of The Boys has been summoned to Dudes' Rock. They will decide on a course of action brewskies acrack, in vino veritas, befitting tradition.

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Nothing I love more, and nothing that less inclines me to commit acts of domestic terrorism, than when I'm trying to fill out health insurance intake forms and both my insurer and the provider add fun little surprises to the web UX like turning the control key into a reload button or using JavaScript to keep my group ID extra secure from ne'er-do-wells who want to trick me into copying and pasting it.

Honestly, I've never had so much faith in the ingenuity, fearless willingness to tackle challenging technical problems in the service of me the user, and sense of mission of my fellow software engineers, nor so much confidence in the thoughtfulness and humanity of large organizations a badly confused person might mistake for the point at infinity where the parallel lines of greed and sheer incompetence finally meet.

And, lest this all be so easy that it feels boring, in the same way that playing tic tac toe is, I can always count on the track pad of my contracting employer (whom I'm not taking insurance from since they understandably thought defaulting a six figure professional into an ACA-complaint plan that actually covers things like catastrophes was rather austentatious indeed—what next, flying around on Air Force jets on the taxpayer dime like John fucking Sununu?) operating in some truly interesting ways that challenge both the process of filling out said forms and my understanding of just what sorts of properties human beings have been able to wring out of things like the Hall effect and capacitive touch sensors.

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Entropy bagels, huh? Like the things from EEAAO?

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When you're the tyrannical emperor of some small system and the guy at your bedside says, "I'm more...Culture-adjacent, I guess," you know you're really fucked.

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I'm blocking the kettle.

@regexkind: I need to get by you to reach the boiling machine.

me (who heard "boyling" instead of "boiling"): I've seen a security hologram of Anakin...killing boylings.

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@etirabys: I'm sad my memory's bad cause we've made each other laugh so many times and I'll never remember it. Tears in the rain.

@lovelanguageisolate: Me too. But it's okay. Some day, computing will be so advanced that we'll be able to determine the initial conditions of the universe and simulate it in enough fidelity to recreate any moment, so that people can retrieve every dumb little joke we ever made.

eti: Oh.

eti: Promise?

me: ...no, I can't.

me (who'd just reviewed this): But you know that well past the heat death of the universe, unfathomably many eons thence, quantum fluctuations in the vacuum will spontaneously ignite new big bangs and the births of new universes, so the process can start all over again.

eti:

me: And if the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, in some minute fraction of all new universes thus created, the initial conditions will be exactly—

eti: No. Stop!

me: —the same as in this universe, so that everything we've ever done will happen again, infinitely many times.

eti: :(

me: Nietzsche was right.

eti: No! Stop him! Stop that awful man!

me: The eternal recurrence was real.

eti: Amor fati.

me: Yes. Amor fati.

eti: Did you know that "amor fati" means "love the chubby bits"?

me: I did not!

me: You know, I amor your fati.

me: *grabs Eti tummy*

me: Especially here. This is my favorite fati.

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The Making of the Atomic Bomb details Leo Szilard's catty attempts to wrest control over atomic energy from the military during the Manhattan Project and then Vannevar Bush's similarly catty attempts to shut him down. In typical academic/scientist/policy advisor/bureaucrat/eminence grise fashion, the language they use is always polite and legalistic, even with the trappings of unimpeachable charity and patience, but if you can read between the lines at all, you can see where the dagger is being twisted. If you don't know what this looks like, I recommend watching Yes Minister.

It reminds me of something I noticed at an NSF-funded summer school for PhD students: that becoming a successful academic seems to depend on coming from a culture that has at least a dozen polite ways of saying, "go fuck yourself."

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Even if you proved to me that Evangelion sucks, I would still love it. One reason: it evokes many different feelings no other show before or after has for me.

All the scenes where Shinji refuses to save humanity because he first wants the adults in his life to acknowledge that they're being fucking assholes—wow, Shinji, that's obnoxious, but your actions...speak to me. It feels like I'm discovering the moral roots of all the spiteful behavior The Last Psychiatrist tends to write about.

The entirety of the scene where Shinji strangles Asuka in End of Evangelion is one of the most painful things I've seen in my entire life. I don't have familiar words for it. As Asuka scratches Shinji away and Shinji climbs her like a tree: Please, stop hurting each other. Shinji, how can you be this abusively clingy? Asuka, how can you be so cold and mean? My God. And then Shinji strangling her was like mainlining incel spree killer stuff into my psyche. The fact that they were both 14 made it worse. It felt so awful that I needed a solid week to recover from the depressive episode that sent me into. No other show has done that to me.

The early adolescence of the pilots and the way it so violently collides with the circumstances they're in—the world needing those scared, self-centered, horribly mistreated kids—I'm just a sucker for it. I'm sorry. I have been for that kind of storytelling since I was 13 at the latest, and I guess I still am now.

There's also a lot of other stuff that, while not absent from other things, doesn't seem so thoroughly explored. What is it really like to be a teenage boy who is surrounded by women you mistrust but are also attracted to, and in whose contemptuous gaze you eventually find a strange comfort? What is it like to be a teenage girl who knows she's fully replaceable and rolls her eyes at people who don't feel duty is enough? What's it like to be a teenage girl who is really all alone? What is it like to feed on attention but never feel full because you don't respect the judgement of those giving the attention? Why are crushes formed in early adulthood often so painful? Why do family members who can't get along force themselves to spend time together? These questions are too vulnerable to really make light of, so the show doesn't except in very light-hearted ways. The show is sexual without being prurient. The show is also prurient, but the most sexual parts of the show aren't really offered up for gawking (except, of course, by fans. Who...have gawked, on their own...a great deal in fact).

Freud is still one of the best thinkers about sexuality, and Evangelion is kind of what convinced me about that. The sheer volumes of doujinshi and stories about Eva seem a vote in that direction. Some eva fanfics are among the best essays on trauma and sex ever written. Woody Allen is such a lightweight, honestly.

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All aquariums are seafood restaurants if you're rich enough.

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Interestingly, HuniePop is on this list but not for the reason I would have thought.

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One of the things about Paradise Lost that works extremely well for me: the stream of consciousness blur of it all that elevates feelings, intentions and sensory experiences over concrete places and instants.

The demons are described as in a "lake with liquid fire" at one point and then in frozen and icy continent in another. Pandaemonium where the demons are forced to meet and co-mingle is cramped and dark, but hell is also a boundless, barren waste.

Satan himself is simultaneously grieving the loss of God's approval and resolving to get as far from God as possible. None of the fallen angels is ever like, "dude, maybe calm down and figure yourself out," even though the devil is, ostensibly, in the details. The choice coheres—congeals—like the keen of an estranged child or bitter screed of a jilted lover, but it is always off-balance, unable to stand on itself, doomed to sink and fall apart, like a foundation lain in quicksand.

And all the while, there are so many embedded clauses that it's often impossible to tell who is doing what or what is being referred to or in what order anything is happening. I'm not an English major and never was, and maybe I don't know how normies wrote in Milton's day, but I'd hazard this is very deliberately chosen and not in the service of the meter.

I think this choice—to be temporally, spatially, causally vague, if not incoherent and contradictory—serves the narrative extremely well.

We get away from the stupid, childish literal-mindedness that plagues so much religious art, especially, I think, in Christianity.

Hell, in Paradise Lost, isn't a particular bat-roosting cave where the AC has gone out. Nor is hell a perpetual time-out room when we don't do what God "wants". Hell is the totality of every way you can be out of harmony with the world, nature, and God at once. We descend deeper into it as Satan's choice to estrange himself from the divine runs to its logical conclusion. This bad conscience, maybe existing from the instant choice entered the picture and it became possible to choose pride over God, doesn't happen once but reverberates throughout mankind's fall too and is replicated in every prideful and obtuse act humanity takes. And in this way, the real spiritual pattern of Milton's Christianity comes to the fore, palpably, where parochial details buttress the story without trapping us.

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It's appropriate for me to acknowledge and recommend C. S. Lewis' Preface to Paradise Lost, which besides being very good has surely influenced my impression.

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Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves a powerful culture warrior.

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I'm actually reading Nick Land's “Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest”, and it's like...high quality continental post-Marx alter-globalization critique in the Immanuel Wallerstein vein of viewing third world maldevelopment as a structurally necessary feature of modern capitalism. It's a little schizo, to be sure, but less than I was expecting. Like early Nietzsche.

It's partially overcome by the Fukuyamaist argument that by embodying the lordship-bondage dialectic, neoliberalism is "doomed" to elevate the peripheral subjects that it "wants" to keep down into a reciprocal relationship (because, within this logic where the developed world exploits the undeveloped, the people who produce end up having power over the decedent consumer class on a long enough time scale). And it seems like the logical counter has to do with managerial/technocratic elites clinging to power by dint of an information advantage and the ability to get Plaza Accords signed.

I'm so puzzled that the Land writing this becomes an alt-right chauvinist.

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Math affirmations:

You are necessary and sufficient.