Francis* is in an interesting phase in his life. He’s unemployed—by choice. His advanced degree programme is starting in a few months, so he’s taking it easy while he finishes the required paperwork.

“Because I’m not working, I can do whatever I want. And because I don’t have any responsibilities, no obligations, I just wanted to indulge myself. This might not be something I can experience again when my study starts,” Francis said.

“When you get the chance to do anything, your idea is, ‘I get to have more screen time’. Why is that?” I asked, bringing up a point he made earlier in our conversation.

Francis had previously told me about his lifelong relationship with doomscrolling—or a version of it, back when “doomscrolling” was yet a thing. He believes it started when he was a kid. He was a big gamer. He would look forward to Sunday—the only day of the week he was allowed to play his console games—and spend the entire day gaming. He would wake up as early as possible and sleep as late as possible.

“That was a really, really fun period in my life. But I had a conversation with an older cousin who told me that life is not all about games. It was a wake-up call, and it got me thinking, ‘Oh, what else is there, then?’ I ended up switching to social media,” Francis said, enticed by the social aspect of the platform. “One bad habit to another.”

These days, he averages around eight to nine hours of screen time per day. He attributed it to a lack of compelling alternatives.

Francis currently lives in Jakarta, after spending some years abroad, in cities better suited to his disposition to wander around. In the city where he used to live, any time he felt bored, he would take a stroll. It’s not as enjoyable doing that in Jakarta, he reckoned. Jakarta’s streets are packed to the brim. Not to mention the humid climate and heavy pollution.

“Over time, I went back to my old habit. I would stay in, be on my laptop. Or, I would visit a cafe, to scroll. And eat, and try out the coffee,” Francis said.

He expects his screen time to go down once he moves cities and starts a new routine.

I asked Francis a similar question I asked people I’ve conversed with: What role does doomscrolling serve in your life?

“The first thing that comes to mind is nothing but a time killer,” he replied. It’s pure entertainment, and it’s not even quality entertainment. In the sense that he wouldn’t be able to recall the ten Reels he watched the previous day. It’s more of a distraction. “Maybe if we think of it as a person with a hole in their heart, it’s just there to temporarily patch up that hole.”

“This plug—as in a time plug or emotional plug or activity plug? What does the plug solve?” I asked.

“Maybe emotions. It removes feelings of boredom, feelings of… Maybe sometimes when I feel anxious, or I’m feeling an unpleasant emotion, I unconsciously scroll social media to distract myself from the feeling,” Francis explained.

“In periods when those anxious feelings arise more often, do you spend more time doomscrolling? Is that the case?”

“I’m generally an anxious person. I don’t know why, specifically. But I don’t think social media is the ultimate contributor.”

Francis has been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. It is something he has now learned to manage, but he still wonders to what extent social media affects his well-being. It’s context-dependent, he said. He remembers struggling with his anxiety during the pandemic years, but that was also because there were so many things happening at the same time—he had to deal with social isolation and losing a relative, among other things. Naturally, by virtue of staying indoors, his screen time skyrocketed. But eventually he learned how to cope with it—the Covid-related anxieties.

At this point in our conversation, I had noticed Francis’ laissez-faire attitude when it comes to doomscrolling. It was clear to me he didn’t see it from a moralising lens—as in, he wasn’t weighed down on whether or not he should or shouldn’t be doing it. It seemed to be the case that, from his point of view, it is simply something he does. He would do more of it in certain periods of his life, and in others, less. As he said, it’s context-dependent.

So, I asked: Were there periods in which you were more critical and periods where you were more relaxed about it?

Yes, he said. There were times he was very conscious and self-critical. During those periods, he would actively try to limit his social media usage. At one point, he deleted all social media apps from his phone. But he realised he couldn’t find an alternative as satisfying and stimulating as scrolling down his feed.

“It reminded me of the time when I was little and was monitored by my parents to not play PlayStation outside of weekends. When I recalled the feeling, it made me wonder, ‘Why am I self-regulating myself this much?’ It felt like I was punishing myself,” Francis explained, adding that he felt worse off with excessive self-regulation.

“That’s so interesting. So, in what phase are you in right now?” I asked.

“I’m in a phase where I’m very much coddling myself,” he replied.

I wanted to explore a bit more about the relationship between his anxiety and his social media usage. I asked him whether it was okay for me to inquire further. I brought up the point about how he uses social media to regulate his emotions and asked: “When you doomscroll, what is it that you feel?”

“That’s the thing. When I doomscroll, I don’t feel anything,” he replied.

Most of the time, there are no feelings that arise when he doomscrolls. If anxiety can feel overwhelming, feeling nothing is a refuge.

Of course, there are moments he gets affected by rage-bait content, making him feel, in his words, “hopeless and helpless”. But there have also been instances where he’s nudged to be more mindful and grounded.

There are hidden gems on the internet, Francis told me. He showed me one he stumbled upon while he was doomscrolling. It’s a quote he now has as his phone’s wallpaper. I read it out loud.

It will probably work out. Instead of feeding worst-case scenarios, I relax my grip and trust that what I need will arrive in its own time.

“That’s beautiful.”

*Note: The name is pseudonymised.

This edition is part of a series called “An Algorithmic Becoming”. I’m exploring how our lives have become deeply entangled with algorithms and algorithmic technologies. Follow along to see where it leads.

Read the previous editions here:

Some reflections on the way we talk about doomscrolling (i.e. things I’ve been pondering about from conversations I’ve had):

Number one. There is this slippery slope language we tend to use. As in, we often tell the story that we are not exactly aware we’re doing it until it becomes a problem for us. It creeps up almost unnoticeably, and then BOO! It’s two in the morning. (The intended bedtime was a few hours earlier.) This thing, this mild, harmless thing that is supposed to be of no consequence whatsoever, has morphed into a time suck. It’s not supposed to be this way. We don’t intend for it to be this way. We don’t intend for it to be anything, really. Which brings me to my next point.

Number two. There’s no higher purpose to the activity. Or at least, we don’t frame it as such. Our lack of clarity on why we do it suggests we’re not really looking for anything in particular. This lack of intentionality is most apparent when we compare it to other habits we’re allocating our time of day for. To read is to be more informed, to exercise is to get fitter. Doomscrolling exists as an end in itself. It gets a bad rep for being a mindless activity, but what if that’s the point? That it allows us to be mindless beings? To exist in a zone where we are of no consequence to the world. (Note: this is a working hypothesis.)

Number three. It’s overwhelmingly talked about as a mental thing. As in, it’s discussed as a form of stimulation that gets our brain fired up, only to leave it fried and ruin our chances for a healthy functioning of our neurotransmitters. People use the term “brain rot”. If you think about it, the imagery of a brain slowly decomposing before meeting its impending doom on an otherwise functioning body is quite grotesque. We’ve normalised this idea. But what I’ve found interesting in the way we’ve rallied against the harms of doomscrolling via this widely recognised term is how we’ve skipped discussing the more immediate effects altogether. We’ve somehow failed to recognise the way doomscrolling registers on us physically and emotionally. The fact that we refer to the activity as “scrolling down our feeds” as opposed to “flicking our thumbs against our screens” is probably telling. For the most part, we’ve yet to consider the ways our bodies respond to doomscrolling. More on this shortly.

All this is to say is that doomscrolling is a conundrum. We are only beginning to map its riddles.

Jona* was recalling what happened two days before our call.

“It was half past eleven. I swear I was going to sleep. I shut down my laptop, I prepped my bed. I was already feeling tired after my bath. I laid down on my sofa because I wanted to watch TV. But then I picked up my phone and scrolled, scrolled, and scrolled. I ended up sleeping half past one.”

“There was another time I thought was quite acute. I came back from an evening out. I arrived at the apartment around 1 AM. I was hungry, so I made Indomie (Indonesian instant noodles). I knew I should’ve slept right after. But while I was eating, I looked up news on Twitter, then I watched YouTube. I ended up sleeping half past three. I felt tired. I was so tired, I wanted to sleep. It sucked when this happened.”

Jona told me he felt like a fool when he found himself in such a scenario. He knew he was going to speak with me about doomscrolling, which made what happened the other night even worse because he wasn’t planning to add a new example to his story.

“You expressed several emotions. One of them is regret. Can you list other emotions you would associate with doomscrolling?” I asked.

“Mostly exhaustion. Feeling super regretful. When it’s really bad, it’s anger,” Jona replied.

This might sound contradictory, but Jona sees doomscrolling as a kind of rest. It helps him unwind. He started noticing that doomscrolling had become a part of his daily routine a few months ago—a relatively new awareness. He had figured it was probably an extension of his bedtime ritual formed during childhood. When he was a kid, he would always watch TV before bed. Now, it’s his phone and social media.

On most days, the habit doesn’t present itself as an issue in urgent need of resolving. If anything, it helps him create a boundary between his work and personal life. By the time he’d be in bed and doomscrolling, he would cease any engagements with work communications. It’s his time to laze around and relax, he said. The emphasis of this time slot being something he owns for himself, and thus, is his to waste, I found to be quite interesting. I made a mental note that this was something I could explore further.

“What do you get out of it?” I asked Jona about his doomscrolling habit.

“Hm, that’s a difficult question,” he responded. He was considering a few reasons and said, “I think kids these days would call it decluttering.”

Interesting word choice. Decluttering. I wonder what he meant by that. Is it that doomscrolling helps him filter out unnecessary mental load from work during his rest time? I guess the more stressful the work, the more one requires a mechanism to distract oneself from the stressors.

So, I asked: “On a scale of one to ten, how stressful would you say your job is?”

“The funny thing is that I don’t think the work I’m doing is very stressful. Maybe five or six.” In other words, if there were any work stressors, they were pretty manageable.

I’m beginning to wonder whether mapping out the reasons as to why we doomscroll is an impossible task. There are so many mixed, conflicting signals. Am I asking the wrong questions? Or have I been unnecessarily burdened by an undeclared goal of arriving at a Grand Answer where there is none? Maybe people just have wildly different reasons, and the work of documenting them is interesting enough. Maybe I just need to focus on capturing these different stories and try to connect the dots much later in my inquiry. Or, maybe I shouldn’t be focusing too much on the way we doomscroll. Maybe I should take my own direction seriously and start asking more questions about the lives being lived around doomscrolling as opposed to trying to understand this compulsion in isolation.

That’s for the next edition.

Until then.

*Note: The name is pseudonymised.

This edition is part of a series called “An Algorithmic Becoming”. I’m exploring how our lives have become deeply entangled with algorithms and algorithmic technologies. Follow along to see where it leads.

Read the previous editions here:

It was late at night on a Tuesday in January 2024 when Bumi Himara* checked herself into a hospital.

It was not the first time she had experienced this type of pain in her body. But it had never gotten as bad as it did that night. Like many young professionals who migrated to the city—Jakarta—she was living by herself. In an unexpected situation such as this one, she found herself having to manage on her own as well. She was a 20-something-year-old at the time.

Then came the bad news: the doctor would not be arriving until morning. So, there she was, assigned to a room, trying to rest on a hospital bed, unable to sleep, unable to do much of anything, trying to wait until morning came.

The only thing she could afford to do was to doomscroll. And that was what she did. From 11 PM until 8 AM, she scrolled, scrolled, and scrolled.

Himara was one of the people who responded to the Instagram story I posted in January. I wrote: How often do you doomscroll?

Himara replied, “Almost every day.” I asked if she would be interested in sharing more via a call. We conversed on a Sunday afternoon in the same month.

After about 20 minutes of discussing media habits, social media usage, and preferences, Himara told me about that night in the hospital.

“How did you feel throughout those nine hours of doomscrolling?” I asked.

“I was just in pain. I can’t think of anything else. I was trying to redirect my attention [away] from the pain,” she said.

This is a different mode of doomscrolling.

On a regular day, Himara would scroll right after she wakes up, before she starts getting ready, and then right before bed, after she takes her evening shower. From time to time, she would find herself scrolling longer than she expected herself to. But on the whole, doomscrolling is a part of her daily routine, not a disruption to it. The way Himara describes it, it is an aid for her to ease into and ease out of her day.

That night, it functioned more as a painkiller.

I wanted to get a sense of what Himara was watching during that nine-hour doomscrolling session. What could possibly be a good distraction when one is dealing with an emergency alone in a big city?

Himara shared during our call that she enjoyed watching medical content. After the call, I asked her if I could have the names of the content creators she was watching. She told me on the night of her emergency, she was watching a lot of short-form videos from @steveioe, or Steven Ho, on Instagram.

Ho is a retired ER technician who posts comedy content inspired by his real-world experiences. At the time of writing, he has 1.3 million followers on Instagram, 11.5 million on TikTok, and 3.25 million subscribers on YouTube.

I scrolled down Ho’s Instagram account all the way to videos he posted before Himara’s night at the hospital. There were skits of Ho dealing with a patient who: faked their urine sample; refused height measurement and stated they were 7’11”; refused to see a doctor who shared the same first name as her cheating husband. There were also clips from his stand-up comedy show. In one of the clips, posted in August 2023, he started the set with the following prompt: “We’re going to play a game. Is it an emergency?” With that alone, the audience erupted in laughter.

I could understand how this helped Himara take her mind off things. It has this effect of normalising medical emergencies in such a way that makes them less scary.

I also couldn’t help but find it quite amusing how one dealt with one’s own emergency by laughing at skits of other people’s emergencies.

Life loops itself in a funny way.

Himara isn’t the only person who has relied on doomscrolling as a kind of painkiller. Kin* has also found herself doing something similar.

“What was the longest doomscrolling session you’ve ever had?” I asked Kin over the phone. It was a Friday afternoon in January. We hadn’t spoken for years until that call. She responded to my Instagram story, and we got talking.

“Honestly, I never count the hours. But I guess it was during the time I was unemployed,” Kin replied.

Kin went through three layoffs in the past five years—one was a contract work that did not get extended, but it felt like a layoff regardless. There was a period in between work where she decided to pause her job search and counted it as a break from her professional life.

It had been some rocky few years of being exposed to job vulnerabilities that were outside her control. A company that went bust. A department that got dismantled. A changing government regulation—effectively shutting down her line of work. Promising work in emerging fields soon enough became a source of precarity.

“I would wake up, open my phone, and doomscroll. I would have my meal, go back to bed, doomscroll again. In the evening, I would eat, go back to bed, doomscroll again,” Kin said.

“During that period, I wasn’t going anywhere. And I was a bit depressed, so I wasn’t really taking care of myself, aside from having meals. I wasn’t eating that much, either. It [doomscrolling] took up almost the entire day. And it wasn’t just a day or two. Maybe three days a week when I wasn’t going anywhere, when I was staying in. So I was doomscrolling at all times, outside of bedtime and mealtime.”

Other alternatives felt taxing—mentally, physically, financially. Even meeting up with friends came with expenses, and her spending capacity was limited at the time. Doomscrolling, on the other hand, is free. “All you need is your phone,” Kin reckoned.

“When did you stop with that pace?” I asked Kin.

“I think when I started working,” Kin said.

But that period in her life left a mark. She worries that whenever she has the day to herself during the weekends, she would regress and spend her day doomscrolling instead. She has ideas of things she would rather do in her free time at home—reading a novel or playing a game—but the thought of her slipping up and doomscrolling prevails. It has morphed into a kind of fear. She’s afraid that she would end up wasting her time.

This tendency of hers to doomscroll was something she had discussed in passing with her therapist—she went to therapy regularly during the period she was unemployed. The therapist suggested slow living, a lifestyle built on the principles of mindfulness and intentionality, which would require her to address her constant need to pick up her phone. From her sessions with her therapist, she got the impression that she might be dealing with phone addiction. She has yet to explore this further.

“Do you think you’re addicted to doomscrolling?” I asked.

“I guess, I guess. I mean, like when I was unemployed, it was very apparent it was an addiction. I was spending the whole day in bed with my phone. Isn’t that not normal? Even if you’re unemployed, I think that’s not normal,” Kin said.

Having a job helps. A job means routines, money, and the discretionary spending to go out and do activities with her friends.

But that she can’t sit still and let her mind wander off on its own bothers her.

“When I drive by myself, I would still doomscroll. As in, when I’m stuck in traffic, and it’s not moving. I would open TikTok, I would open Twitter, and I would scroll. It already crossed my mind that I should probably stop. But I can’t. I can’t just let things be still. And I already have the music on when I drive. That’s already something that fills up [the space]. But still, I need something I can consume.”

Just my luck. The week I was supposed to be reporting for this series about doomscrolling, I fell ill. A few calls were rescheduled. I was bedbound for two whole days. My head was dizzy, I felt nauseous. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so weak. With family members away or otherwise occupied during the day with work, the few hours I was up and awake, all I could do was scroll through my phone.

The irony didn’t escape me. The coincidence of it all felt rather comical. The universe has a dark sense of humour, I thought to myself. If I weren’t the butt of the joke, I would probably appreciate the narrative alignment. “Good one!” I’d say.

But self-pity aside, I reckon these initial conversations are pointing to something we’ve perhaps taken for granted. That only so much about the way we use technology is about the technology per se. A lot more has to do with the lives we live around it.

For that reason, I believe the more interesting question, and the one we have yet to ask ourselves enough of, is not how technology is shaping the world, but what our technology usage says about the world we live in.

What is the state of the world we are trying to navigate? How could the way we use digital technologies become a window into our lives? Our plights and grievances? Our hopes and joy?

I’m beginning to wonder what kind of modern life we are living to make doomscrolling as irresistible as it is today.

I’ll try to explore that in my next edition.

See you next week.

*Note: The name is pseudonymised.

This edition is part of a series called “An Algorithmic Becoming”. I’m exploring how our lives have become deeply entangled with algorithms and algorithmic technologies. Follow along to see where it leads.

Read the previous edition here:

This is the first edition of a series called “An Algorithmic Becoming”. I’m exploring how our lives have become deeply entangled with algorithms and algorithmic technologies. Follow along to see where it leads.

On 14 January, I reached out to my network—posted a story on Instagram—to ask people about their doomscrolling habits. “How often do you doomscroll?” I asked. Thirteen people responded.

“Way too often it’s unhealthy.”

“Sadly, it’s becoming the first and last thing I do in a day.”

“To the point where I mentally do not want to do it, but I physically can’t stop.”

Most of the replies carried the same undercurrent of self-judgment. I can relate to it.

I’m a doomscroller myself, if there is ever such a description. I think there isn’t because people think of doomscrolling as something they do, not something they are. If anything, it’s something people claim they try not to do. Hardly something one would like to be known for.

But doomscrolling is a fact of modern life. I’d argue it’s a fact we don’t talk about enough, considering how common it is and how few frameworks we have at our disposal to understand it.

It could very well be that we just don’t know how to talk about it. What is there to say about doomscrolling other than it being something one confessed to when asked and signalled a desire for change upon realising how much it has crept up on one’s life? At least that was the impression I got from having conversed with five out of the thirteen people who had responded to my outreach on Instagram.

I was—and still am—not that interested in making a case on why people shouldn’t doomscroll; why they should stop and outgrow it. It’s not a project I’m currently pursuing (although I can see how it could be a valuable enterprise). I am more interested in understanding why we do it. Why do we doomscroll?

It’s a deceptively simple question to ask because it seems like we know the answer already. We scroll because we are habituated to it, because our social media is designed as an addictive interface, because attention is money, and because Big Tech capitalises on our unassuming, impressionable nature.

But I don’t want the top-down explanation. I wanted a more grounded answer. Something that resonates with me.

Maybe it is to help me feel like I can actually do something about it. Maybe it helps make the issue seem less obscure. I’m not sure. I’m still figuring it out. Intention is a thing that shapeshifts and escapes when pinned down.

The main point is: I wanted a different take.

What I didn’t expect from having the conversations that I had—even when they are in total still a small number (five)—was how personal they became. It turns out, when you ask people about their doomscrolling habits, you are essentially knocking on a door to their innermost worlds. It’s like seeing the interiors of someone’s house for the first time, and you are introduced to the owner’s quirks and peculiarities—ones you wouldn’t have known without the visit.

I’ve learned that doomscrolling has occupied a special corner in people’s lives—whether they like it or not, regardless of how they are inclined to moralise it. It fills up people’s most private time. It is a companion one leans on during one’s alone time, whether that aloneness is by choice or by circumstance. There’s an intimacy there that we have yet to fully appreciate, or are unwilling to, perhaps because it feels somewhat odd to declare doomscrolling as anything other than despicable.

Immediately, the issue seems to be that it’s difficult to get a straight answer as to why one doomscrolls. It’s possible it’s because there isn’t one. From conversations I’ve had, there is the impression that it’s an answer that is still in formation. The response of “Ah, I haven’t really thought about it” is quite common. It points to the different levels of reflection required in answering questions about behavioural patterns vs questions about intentions. As in, it’s markedly easier to share that one doomscrolls every morning before work and every night before bedtime, but harder to explain why one does it. We would rationalise and come up with reasonable guesses, of course. But certainty is never a given. Intentions are elusive creatures, as I, too, have recognised myself.

I’ve found this lack of directness quite interesting. It shapes the way I approach my inquiry. Instead of asking the big, vague, intimidating question of, “Why do you doomscroll?” I broke the question down into a few lines of inquiries I thought were easier to answer (they are still difficult questions, but at least they have a more concrete shape). Among the questions I asked were: “How does doomscrolling make you feel?” and “Are you looking for anything in particular when you doomscroll?”

My conversation with Gaia helped me with that direction.

Gaia* is a longtime friend. She was among the thirteen people who responded to my outreach on Instagram. In the DM, she told me she doomscrolls a lot. She was the first person I spoke to for this series.

We caught up on a Thursday evening in January while she was in town. I suggested a pastry shop I’ve come to frequent as a meetup spot. The place used to be very busy some years ago. But these days, when I come by, it’s usually conducive enough for work sessions and coffee chats.

Gaia has worked as a psychologist and is currently pursuing further study for the profession. She told me this chat we were having felt like a therapy session.

“Who’s the client? Who’s the therapist?” I asked.

“You’re the therapist,” she responded.

“But you’re the one with the psychology degree.”

“Well, I’m on a holiday.”

We both laughed.

Gaia told me she would usually start her session by asking her client: What do you want to talk about today?

I took the liberty of putting on the therapist hat and asked my dear friend that very question.

“So, what do you want to talk about today?” I asked with a smirk.

“What do I want to talk about today? I want to talk about… I don’t know,” she replied with a chuckle. “See, this happens in therapy.”

It’s common for people to reply with an “I don’t know” when asked why they’re in that therapy chair. But they feel the need to be there, she explained.

She would encourage her client to say anything that was on their mind, and, along the way, she would help them recognise their thoughts, feelings, and actions—the former two often get mixed up. Usually, when she asked her clients about their feelings, she would get a response about what her client was thinking instead.

“We are never taught to recognise it [our feeling]. We always treat emotion as a secondary element and cognition as the primary.”

The topic of doomscrolling had emerged in therapy sessions my friend had hosted. The people she had spoken to would doomscroll after work or during their commute back home. It became the one thing people felt like doing after their working hours. They didn’t feel like reading, they didn’t feel like talking to other people—these alternatives felt too tiring. So, they would scroll away. It gave them the illusion they were doing something without actually doing anything, Gaia reckoned.

Most people are on autopilot when they doomscroll, as Gaia herself had noticed about her. It took her a therapy exercise with her peer to arrive at a deeper understanding as to why she doomscrolls.

“I noticed I would start doomscrolling when I feel exhausted. When I feel overwhelmed. When I feel lonely. When I’m afraid of my own thoughts. When I think that I cannot be left alone with my thoughts.”

Gaia wouldn’t have recognised these tendencies if not for the exercise. But one session of inquiry alone is barely enough to cover the many ways doomscrolling reflects on her life and choices.

She told me she often caught herself doomscrolling even when she didn’t intend to. As if it’s a reflex in her body. In the morning, for example, when she reaches for her phone to turn off her alarm, she would find herself scrolling right after.

“Do you know what you’re looking for?” I asked her.

“I don’t know.”

Doomscrolling has become a habit for her. And when something is a habit, one stops thinking critically about it. One simply requires its presence in one’s daily routine because if it’s not there, something feels missing.

What I’m noticing from my conversations so far is that the point of doomscrolling changes with context. There is the doomscrolling we do as a habit, which contributes to giving a sense of rhythm to our day. There is also the doomscrolling we do as a coping mechanism, which provides us with a sense of comfort when we’re facing life’s difficulties.

I would make the case that acknowledging these two modes and identifying when it’s the former or the latter would help us in understanding why we doomscroll.

I’ll explore this distinction in my upcoming editions, starting with what doomscrolling as a coping mechanism looks like.

Stay tuned.

*Note: The name is pseudonymised.

My friend chuckled.

We were in her car on our way back from a spot in North Bali, having spent three days there on a New Year’s trip. It was a long drive. About 3,5 hours. I had gotten familiar with the songs on her playlist during the drive up north.

How did you come across this song, I asked. TikTok, she said. She opened her Spotify and told me the ‘fishnet’ song was on this playlist. We’ll get to that song eventually. Is this whole playlist from TikTok, I asked her. Yes, she said again.

In case you’re wondering, the song I was referring to was Heidi Montag’s I’ll Do It, originally released in 2010. It was part of Montag’s debut album Superficial, which, at the time of its release, “flopped spectacularly”.

In the first week, Montag sold less than 1,000 copies—a sad 600-something count—and received scathing reviews from music critics. One review wrote: “Despite having 10 cosmetic procedures in one day to improve her look and help boost her career, Heidi Montag has failed to capitalise on her new face and body.” Another review gave the album one star, and said: “The album has no life, no emotion, no passion, and sadly, that’s not even the worst part.”

The worst part? Montag spent almost US$2 million of her own money to make the album. That, according to Montag, was every single dollar she had ever earned. She had gone broke during the making of the album, which took her three years to complete independently.

In an interview in 2010, she was asked, “What happens if you don’t earn your money back?” To which she replied, “That’s not even a possibility. I think within the first week, we will definitely make our money back. The songs will make an impact in pop history.”

Well, it did. It just needed an extra thirteen years.

The sped-up version of I’ll Do It went viral on TikTok in 2023, bringing newfound appreciation to Montag’s work. To date, her song has been used in over 87,000 TikTok videos. The TikTok virality has led to the production of a music video for the song—it never had one—which premiered on January 16, 2025.

At the time of writing, the music video has been viewed over 15 million times. The release of the music video happened in the same month Montag and her husband lost their home in the devastating Los Angeles wildfires. Support from fans and celebrities came pouring in, bringing the song to the top of multiple music charts.

I didn’t know all that when I first listened to the song in my friend’s car. I just liked it because it was catchy. Especially that ‘fishnet’ part. Stilettos and fishnets, if that’s what you like. There is something about the sound of the esses that is so satisfying to listen to.

I wonder if the algorithm understands that.

It’s contentious to conceptualise algorithms as a subject that has agency. What do you mean the algorithm understands? That it sees? That it decides?

An algorithm is a set of computational rules. It’s inanimate. The critic would point towards people’s tendency to anthropomorphise objects—to give non-human entities human-like qualities, including our human ability to experience and act upon things.

But to focus our efforts and attention on dismissing emerging frameworks that attempt to offer an understanding of how algorithms work is, I would argue, counterproductive to the goal of demystifying the technology. And demystify it we must.

Algorithmic technologies—from TikTok’s For You Page (FYP) to credit scoring systems used by online lending platforms—are often seen as a black box. You can document the input and the output of the machine, but you can’t see what’s happening in the middle. This invisibility has consequences. It removes accountability.

Who is to blame if, rather than recommending Montag’s I’ll Do It, the algorithm pushes content promoting self-harm and suicide to vulnerable young users because the algorithm predicts—and accurately so—that this content would effectively drive up engagement among this specific cohort of users?

Or in another scenario: Who is to blame if someone with poor financial means is given a loan but fails to make their monthly payment, when in fact the algorithm has already flagged the borrower’s low repayment capacity and compensates for that by charging a higher interest rate?

These are ongoing debates that hinge on our ability to understand our interactions with algorithmic technologies. Having laid out these debates, I should make a point by saying that the story of algorithmic technologies is not limited to matters of accountability. But it’s important to highlight that because it gives us reasons to take this work seriously—the work of documenting how our lives have become so entangled with algorithmic technologies, and how to make sense of it all.

One thing is for certain: our algorithmic lives are evidence of a changing world that refuses to be simplified.

While some are exposed to harm through an algorithmic feed, others find support and community that they do not have access to offline. While others are trapped in cycles of indebtedness, some discover lucrative opportunities by having their professional profile boosted by the algorithm.

There is no one story about algorithmic technologies. These are multiple worlds unfolding. So, when we talk about algorithms, we must remember that they do not exist as a single, solid, stable entity.

If there is such a thing as “The Algorithm”, then the so-called algorithm with a capital A is a cultural entity. An abstraction of all the things we believe an algorithm is or should be. Much in the same way we talk about The Society or The Government, The Algorithm is no longer just a series of technical arrangements. It is culture.

For that reason, I am borrowing the anthropologist Nick Seaver’s framework that argues against the notion of algorithms being in culture. Instead, he argues for algorithms as culture. The first framework sees algorithms and culture as distinct entities—algorithms may shape culture and be shaped by it. The second framework sees algorithms as being composed of collective human practices. They are “culturally enacted by the practices people use to engage with them,” Seaver writes.

In that sense, when the algorithm becomes a throwback machine that resurfaces a 13-year-old song, it wouldn’t be an accurate read to say that the algorithm has changed people’s taste to the point of altering what once was a flop to now a global hit. Rather, it is a reflection of a changing time, a changing era.

Back then, when there were fewer discovery channels, cultural gatekeepers had more say as to who got exposure and what kind of exposure that was. Sixteen years ago, Heidi Montag’s work was overshadowed by her choice to get 10 different plastic surgeries done in one day, in what was a 10-hour operation. That was all the media talked about. Her choice brought attention to her as a celebrity, and drove discourse on the addiction to plastic surgeries, and the message her surgery is sending to young fans. Her wish to be recognised as a pop star gets sidelined in this beauty discourse.

Now, people don’t seem to care how many plastic surgeries she had. A good song to vibe to is a good song to vibe to. In a 2023 interview, Montag said, “This generation is actually kind of who it was made for.”

This idea of letting time pass and reveal different truths is something I am incredibly drawn towards. There are things you will only understand in hindsight, but the work of documenting things as they happen must still continue. It is the only way we are able to connect the dots later on.

That is the work I intend to embark on this year. I want to document this ‘algorithmic becoming’—the process of humans becoming algorithmic beings. That is, the many ways our lives have become deeply entangled with algorithmic technologies, what they reveal about us, and the frameworks we create to make meaning out of our relationship with the algorithms. Essentially, it is a coming-of-age story. We are kids of the internet, and now we are adulting with the algorithms.

This is going to be a series of inquiries. I am setting myself out on a mission to gather the building blocks to understand this ‘algorithmic becoming,’ and I’m taking you, dear readers, on a journey with me as I figure this out.

And what better way to start our inquiry than to explore our propensity to doomscroll? My thinking behind this starting point is that there is a reason why our lives have become algorithmic. And that’s because we’ve spent so much time with algorithmic technologies. Most of it, it seems, is through the act of mindless scrolling through our social media feed.

There’s a lot that has been said about ‘doomscrolling’. It’s a story about Big Tech’s creation of ‘the infinite scroll’, designed to get you hooked on your devices, placing you as if you’re a rat in a Skinner box. You are incentivised to press the levers with the hopes of getting a reward, and the only way to encourage you to keep pressing the lever is to design a reward system that activates unpredictably. That’s the science behind addictive technologies in a nutshell.

There’s also plenty of neuroscience takes on doomscrolling on the internet, discussing how our brains release dopamine when we doomscroll, and how our habituation to these tiny dopamine releases is causing us to lose motivation to engage in activities that require more commitment than merely scrolling down our feed—activities like reading a book, exercising, and whatnot.

But I’d like to formulate a different question. Not how Big Tech gets us to doomscroll or what happens to our brains when we do, but to put forward a more unassuming one: What are we actually looking for when we doomscroll?

Why is this an interesting question to ask with all that we’ve known so far about doomscrolling, you might ask?

That is for the next edition. I’ll see you then.

Bonus footage: Behind the scenes of recording the voice-over for this edition.

Saturday, 13 December 2025

20:33

I’m in my living room on the lazy chair with my laptop on my lap. The TV is on. Nobody’s watching it. My older brother is sitting on the sofa next to me, telling my niece—his daughter—that she needs to finish her papaya, then carries on playing a video game on his iPad. My Mom is in the dining room having dinner, and my Dad is upstairs, probably reading his newspaper. It seems that my niece has disposed of the papaya on the floor, to my sister-in-law’s disapproval, and this 2.5-year-old proceeds to hop on her pink balloon as if it were a ride-on horse. She abandons that game pretty quickly and is now occupied with trying to figure out how the digital thermometer works, producing beep-beep sound as she goes. In the coming weeks, the house will be noisier as family members return. I should probably get all my work done before then.

Life update. I’ve been home for about three months now. (By home, I mean Bali, in case you’re a new reader.) I’d say most things I need to set up are already in progress. I have my own workspace. It’s on the second floor with windows facing the big tree in front of my building. The first evening I spent working there, I noticed two squirrels actively going up and down the tree, hopping freely from one branch to the next. After a while, I realised there are probably more than two. Sometimes they would use the power line as a kind of highway to get from one part of the neighbourhood to the next.

Squirrels aside, being back home after being away for some time has made me quite reflective of my life’s choices—past and future. I am confronted again and again with the reality of the work that I do, and I find myself being utterly stubborn that I’ll find ways to make things work at some point, be it in the near or distant future. With enough gravelling and trials and errors and strategising and brainstorming and writing and embarrassing myself on LinkedIn, I think I can make something worthwhile. More on that later.

I received a call earlier this month while I was out for brunch from someone I don’t know, who got my number from someone I also don’t know, who got my contact from someone I know a little. I was offered a chance to interview for a role I hadn’t really considered until that point. It’s within my field of interest, but it’s an entirely different profession. I would have to relocate to a different city if I were to take it. This past week, I’ve been sitting on it, and the broader themes that must be considered with it. It’s forcing me to answer questions I should probably have pondered thoroughly by now: how badly do I want to do the things I said I wanted to do (i.e. build my own platform)? Why do I want to do it? Why does it matter? Why does it deserve my full attention and the limits of my efforts?

There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with the elephant in the room: my profession is changing, and I must change along with it.

I’ve been warned that journalism is a sunset industry since I first entered the scene. In the past couple of years, I’ve seen enough turnovers, resignations, burnouts, layoffs, and outlets closing to know that this is not an industry you’d go for if you’re looking for job security. Or a decent living—but that one I’d say is arguable. (I don’t want to perpetuate the notion of impoverished journalists.)

That is to say that for so long, I haven’t been deterred by the gloomy outlook of this world. Up until recently. The integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in my industry—media and journalism—has made the work less and less appealing to me. I’ve wondered to myself: could it be that I’ve changed and I just don’t have it in me anymore? That oomph to go work on exciting stories? That drive to do something meaningful with my time? But from what I know about myself, I don’t think that’s true. If that were true, I wouldn’t even bother writing this down, trying to decide a way forward. I’m more persuaded to believe it is a symptom of an industry changing. And it has changed quite a bit.

For one, AI has become so pervasive in editorial departments. This is not just an individual preference; it’s institutional. There are organisations whose work is to produce editorial pieces, which have externalised a good chunk of their work to AI. There are AI writers, AI editors, and AI illustrators. Sometimes editorial teams would flag the output as AI, sometimes they don’t. While some people, be it the producers or the consumers, don’t seem to mind (as long as it’s good work, who cares if it’s AI?), it seems to me that its adoption to the editorial workflow is mostly done uncritically. It is this lack of thought that has been gnawing at me.

I’ve been sitting on this for long enough to know I’d be better off writing this down. So, this is me, writing this down. What I’m trying to point towards is the scope of impact I have personally witnessed, as well as how it’s affecting me, a practitioner in the media industry.

It would probably help to have some kind of framework to imbue a sense of direction to this accounting. I’ll use what I’ve been working on for the past couple of years as that framing. Let’s start with setting intentions.

I’ve been on a search. I’m trying to find a voice. I think the hallmark of a good writer is that they are distinct. They have a voice. What does that voice sound like? How do you describe it? Is it ever something that you can essentialise? That is, reduce to a single idea? How do you find a voice?

I’ve been pondering these questions for some time now, albeit crystallising them into this framework of “finding a voice” is a recent development. But wordings aside, the spirit of this inquiry has led me to quit a decent paying job; to live off of my savings for a little less than a year (9 months, to be exact); to put my head down and prep for a new chapter (which felt like a big risk because I was aiming to secure a full-ride scholarship the same year I started trying—for context, it’s common for people to try over and over, with stories circulating of how some only gotten the scholarship after trying 7, 8 times); to move halfway across the world to a country I’ve never been to where I know, basically, no one; to go on another chapter of “soul-searching” after that programme ended; and then to start anew again.

I don’t normally frame things in this light—as if it’s some kind of this grand thing. My outward tendency has been to make things smaller than they actually are, so they don’t weigh on me that much, so I don’t make promises I can’t keep. But on this rare occasion—where it’s fitting—I’d like to embrace the weight that surrounds the search. I have been betting a good part of my adult years thus far on this pursuit. I think I’m doing myself a disservice by not acknowledging that.

This voice has been something I’ve been made aware of upon entering the media and journalism industry. It was an awareness that had helped me adapt relatively quickly to media organisations I’ve worked for in the past. My former editor and mentor at The Jakarta Post said I was one of the fastest learners in the newsroom, having witnessed my switch from writing as a City reporter to a Business reporter. Three months in my next company, The Ken, I was made employee of the month. My editor commended me for my learning curve, having seen noticeable improvements in my drafts. I’m not saying this to brag (okay, maybe a little), but mainly it’s to point at the conscious effort to identify and emulate what this specific publication sounds like. They all sound different, regardless of how slight. I gave myself the time to adapt to the tone and texture of their sounds, but always with the understanding that this is their voice, not mine. It’s also the reason why I’ve held back from making a public presence during my time working in my previous companies. I didn’t want their voices to be mine. I’m happy having developed the muscle to operate these different voices, but there is this nagging feeling, intuition, or whatever you want to call it, that the voice I’d like to be known for is distinct from the voices I’ve learned to echo. That is the basis of the search.

What exactly is this voice? Experientially, at least in the past, the voice feels like putting on a mask where, once you have it on, you adopt a certain kind of worldview, sensibility, value system, as well as an imagining of who the readers are, how they behave, and your unique relationship with them. The voice dictates what kind of writer you get to be.

At The Jakarta Post, for instance—in this case, at the business desk where I served—there was an understanding that you’re speaking to time-pressed readers. Most of them are scanning headlines and paragraphs, so you need to get the information out quickly. Business news, especially that of the stock market, which I covered for a bit, is meant to feed a larger machine of decision-making, so it needs to be templated and clean. No unnecessary bits. The voice is lean and effective. At The Ken, it was that of a critical business manager. I needed to think like a capitalist to sound like a capitalist to write for capitalists. The voice I operated with values rationality, clearheadedness, and prestige; it sees numbers as a guiding and defining metric of worth. You could say that the voices I’m describing here could be generalised into their broader category: the voice of a general news outlet for the former and a tech-business outlet for the latter. But the point I am trying to make is: they are all pretty arbitrary! Somebody woke up one day and decided this was how things should be done, and they iterated along the way, and then the voice solidified. When it did, it made it seem like it was the most natural thing—to speak in this particular way—as if it’s the only way to go about doing things. (It is not.)

The concept of “having a voice” takes on a new level of significance now that everyone is using large language models (LLMs) to write. I shouldn’t be exaggerating by saying everyone, but it’s more to the effect that it’s so normalised. Its adoption is currently at a point where it’s widely used, but, at the same time, there’s still a level of disdain to its usage, where you would find people going on a witch hunt trying to identify the sounds of LLMs—the vocabulary, style, and phrases. Oh, if there are too many em dashes! If there are no typos! If they speak too clearly! If they repeat the “it’s not X, but Y” framing! What we’re witnessing is an erosion of trust in good writing. But the thing is, good writing does not equal having a voice. Having recurrent sounds does not make a voice. Sounds can be borrowed, traded, and altered. A voice is something else. There is now more urgency than ever to have a voice.

A few months ago, I was asked to judge a student essay competition. It was a small one. I only needed to read 8 essays (the committee was expecting almost twice the number of submissions). It was my first time doing it, and it became an interesting experience taking on that role at a time when AI is already widely used.

I had run some prompts on the essay topic before receiving the submissions, trying to get a sense of what the topic could explore. I noted them down, keeping them in mind as I prepared a presentation about essay writing, to be delivered as part of a workshop for the participants. I made a note about how it’s important to be in tune with the reason why one writes, especially when it’s easy to outsource that work today. I argued that writing is a process, it’s an exercise—to get you from one point of not knowing to another point of knowing a little better. I wanted there to be a sense of commitment to the process of writing.

When the submissions got in, and I went to give my first read, it struck me how there were so many overlaps in ideas. They’re not bad ideas. In fact, they’re pretty interesting as stand-alone pieces. And if I wasn’t aware of the results that came from my quick prompting session. I didn’t exactly mark the pieces down for using AI. First, you can’t outlaw the use of AI entirely (at that point, I had also been using AI’s assistance for research purposes). Second, my hunch was still in the realm of allegation (it wasn’t like there was a truth-finding committee in place). But I couldn’t give a high score on originality. You can’t win that aspect when others are presenting more or less the same thing.

It does put things into perspective. As a writer in an LLM world, it’s not enough to be correct. In a sense, being able to tick all the boxes that need to be ticked. Yes, the ideas fit with the topic of the competition. Yes, some of them were presented adequately. But if the marketplace gets more crowded and is increasingly awashed by mass-produced, undifferentiated goods that are easily replaceable by one another, what is the value of another good that’s similar? It left me with plenty of food for thought about the work I’d like to do going forward. About the kind of writer I’d like to be.

I’ve mostly associated myself with the role of a tech-business journalist. But in the past year, from conversations with several tech and business outlets, it’s not the best market to be a techbiz journalist these days, especially in this part of the world—Southeast Asia—where things have been persistently slow compared to the peak of startup investing in 2021 and early 2022. Readership of tech from the region has gone down significantly. Yes, you could write about AI startups emerging from the region—they still have currency in this market. But if you’re an investor looking to invest in AI startups, you’d probably look more closely at what’s coming out of Silicon Valley, or you’d look further east—maybe Japan or South Korea, if China is not an option. What does a tech journalist who’s based in this region get to write about then?

What I’m saying is tech journalism has changed. What has sustained it thus far is being eroded. The funding rounds that used to drive much of tech reportage do not attract as many eyeballs. One, there have not been as many and as large rounds as there used to be. Two, many journalists who used to cover these rounds had been laid off. Three, people find them less interesting, less relevant. A few funding rounds here and there do not change the gloomy outlook that overcasts the industry. Four, even if there are newsworthy updates, chances are, AI would write these pieces. This is the state of industry I’ve found myself in.

Two years ago, on my first week in London, I attended a report launch event at the Financial Times office on Friday Street. The report was about the adoption of AI in global newsrooms. Earlier that year, I had joined a self-paced course set up by the event organiser—Polis, LSE’s journalism think tank—that covers, among other things, how AI is used in journalism and how to start an AI project. I finished the course’s material feeling rather inspired. In the feedback survey I submitted, to the question of whether my perception of AI changed from before I started the course, I said yes. Many interesting use cases were brought to my attention, especially in the area of audience engagement and system-building—the way newsrooms can utilise AI to build recommendation algorithms for their audience and how AI can be used to investigate AI. That is to say, I was quite open to a world where AI is embedded in newsroom processes, putting into consideration the ethical dilemmas surrounding its usage. But for some reason, we—the media industry—haven’t been particularly good at acknowledging and addressing these dilemmas. Perhaps this exchange shared during the question and answer session at the report launch captures the attitude of many media organisations across the globe:

Journalist: We know that AI models are morally compromised, and we don’t know how morally compromised they are because we can’t exactly see how they’re trained. How do we deal with that?

Panellist: We still use X, we still use Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, and we know they’re morally compromised as well. As long as we keep the human in the loop and are transparent with how we’re using the tool, it’s not dissimilar to the use of these other tech products.

(I wrote my thoughts about this in a separate blogpost.)

I find there’s something quite odd about the media industry’s critical outward outlook on the world and its unwillingness to use that same lens towards its own industry. I’d say the result of that is exactly what we are—or I am—seeing today: instead of interesting use cases of AI, there are more sloppy ones. The ones that are there because newsrooms couldn’t be bothered. They couldn’t be bothered to train new journalists. They couldn’t be bothered to commission illustrations to accompany their written pieces. They couldn’t even be bothered to disclose that they have AI writers. How do you expect to have a clear voice in a scene so muddy?

There is a case to be made for a different kind of technology writing. One that is more humane. One that puts the humanity of the readers, the subjects being covered, and the journalist front and centre. I’m building digital field notes to explore what that could look like. I want it to be a home for stories that make you feel more human, as opposed to more detached and disconnected.

I’m starting a new chapter for this project. 2026 will be different. It will be bolder. It will be more grounded.

I’m embracing this project of finding a voice for myself that is in service of this mission to humanise technology. I’m not going to promise that this is going to be a linear process. Perhaps it’s going to be a bit messy, a bit chaotic. Maybe it’s the adult equivalent of my niece picking up the papaya, then dropping it to the floor, experimenting with using the balloon as a ride-on horse, and seeing what this weird-looking object that’s making the beep-beep sound is about.

What I can promise is that every inquiry will come from a place of genuine curiosity, and they will be stories you would like to sit with, and they will be stories that stick around long after you finish reading them. I hope to meet you again this time next year with a recap of what those stories are.

Until then, to a new chapter.

I’d like to propose an argument. The world doesn’t run on a numbers game. It might have been in the past. It doesn’t anymore. The arena has morphed so indefinitely that it couldn’t be operated and navigated like it’s a numbers game.

Let me first elaborate on what I mean by “a numbers game”. Picture this: you’re on a search—be it for a partner, a job opportunity, or what have you—and people keep telling you what you need to do is to play the numbers game. Go out on more dates. Send more applications. This is the gruelling part. At the end of the day, you only need one yes. And then there’s a recounting of a success story: “I sent 70 applications to get that one call back. Just keep trying.”

It’s encouraging for a time. And I appreciate it as a form of encouragement—I’ve been a grateful recipient of this many times. But I’d argue that as a framework, it’s becoming increasingly useless. In today’s world, if you play the numbers game, the odds of success are incredibly low that it’s a game not worth playing anymore—unless you intend to play with the full awareness that the game is already rigged.

In that case, you’re entering the job market, the dating market, or any market for that matter, like you’re entering the casino: you’re playing it like a slot machine. There’s no guarantee you’ll hit the jackpot. So, you walk in with the hope—not the expectation—of winning. These are two different modes, separated by the degrees of wanting.

But the need to make a living, to find a partner one can build a life with, dare I say, shouldn’t be a “jackpot”. They should be attainable wins. And for these needs not to be that in the state of the world we are in is deeply problematic.

This is nonsense, I thought to myself. A classmate was recounting how his friend sent over 500 applications to land a job. That figure is only possible because the friend used AI’s assistance. I, for one, can’t imagine writing 500 cover letters manually, always slightly tweaking the next one as I go, only to realise that the odds of success have now changed from 1:500 to 1:1000.

That’s the thing with the state of today’s numbers game: it’s infinite. The number will only go up over time. And as the benchmark number rises, each submission being sent out will be easier to dismiss. And if that’s the case, what’s the point of painstakingly writing your own applications? Just automate.

Do you see how the numbers game is a vicious cycle at this point? Do you still think it’s a wise piece of advice?

The issue is, the numbers game is offered as a resolution to those who are most at the mercy of the numbers game. In the case of the job market, it’s those entering it for the first time. The people in this cohort are less likely to have someone opening the door for them, to vouch for them, or to help them with warm introductions. So, it’s a strategy this group of job seekers need to learn to hyper-optimise.

The recruiters are noticing.

Oddly, there’s a sense of reassurance that comes from knowing the change is as bewildering to me as it is for those doing the hiring. I was sitting in for a talk on AI at the British Academy some months back, and one of the panellists was sharing about the time her institution was opening a small post for a research assistant. She received 120 applications, an unusually large number for such a role.

“There’s something odd about this,” she told her colleague. “They keep explaining what their journey was. I don’t remember asking anything about people’s journeys. That’s strange.” It turned out that was what ChatGPT was telling people to write at the time.

But even this stood out as a deviating scenario—an employer actually reading applications?

You’ve probably heard it by now: the state of the job market today is of employers creating job postings with AI, to collect applications written by AI, which will then be parsed through by AI. Here lies a new system of governance: of AI, by AI, for AI.

This brings me back to the point I wanted to make. Maybe we should stop playing this like it’s a numbers game. We’d probably lose out if we approach it like it’s a numbers game. The more we treat it as such, the more the field is spoiled.

Do we then just stop the search? Of course, not. I’m not advocating for despair. But I’d like to spend some time delving into this notion of the numbers game, if you allow me. It’s the whole point of this project, digital field notes—to inquire into taken-for-granted assumptions.

What does the numbers game do? Why is it so persuasive? What kind of world does it represent?

One can’t make a case against the numbers game without fully acknowledging its place in the world.

The numbers game, in the way it’s being used, is an instrument of hope. We use it because we are hopeful, or we want to be hopeful. It’s a bridge between the present and the future—one that makes the former bearable, and the latter worth anticipating. What I mean is, if you believe what separates you from the next big thing is five applications away, you’d likely put your head down and just focus on the work.

If anything, “the numbers game” comes from an inclination to see the world as orderly and just—that if we do enough, something will come our way; that if we do enough, our chances get better. That’s why we call it a game. To imagine something as a game means we assume there are rules providing guidance and parameters to our actions.

In that sense, it’s a comforting narrative to indulge in: believing that all you need to do is to do more. Repetition, to an extent, is easy. It’s about building momentum and doing whatever you can to keep that momentum going. The path is more clear-cut in a world that runs on a numbers game. That is to say, it’s a narrative I’d happily take up at perhaps a different time. But repetition has its limit. We shouldn’t be on a quest to extend that limit.

Perhaps that framework is so persuasive because it says something we’d like to believe about our own sense of agency: we want to believe that our actions are consequential; that they matter; that we’re continuously building on top of the last thing we send out, not starting from square one on every new pursuit. But it’s becoming difficult to defend that framework in the few instances where the numbers game are most in use.

A call to abandon the numbers game is not a call to stop trying. It’s a call to try differently. To try different things. To do the work of inquiring into how our agencies would stand uniquely in a world where all the boring routes—routes that used to provide equal opportunities to social and economic mobility—have been overtaken by machine-generated output.

There is room to imagine differently. But first we must put this numbers game to rest.

Dear readers,
I’m slowly building a multi-media platform. If you’d like to support my work, consider following these other pages: YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
As always, I appreciate your sustained attention.

I guess this is it.

I’m going back home in two weeks.

For good?

Yes, for good.

I kept hearing that phrase — “for good” — being uttered as a question in response to my announcement. The repetition has made me wonder how often this set of two words permeates the day-to-day conversation. Is it a common thing to ask in any other instance? If someone were to announce, “I stopped smoking,” would the question “For good?” be appropriate in that context? (For the record, I do not smoke.) Or, if I were to say, “I stopped speaking to my ex,” would a friend ask, “For good?”, or would they simply respond with a statement? Perhaps a “Good for you!”?

There’s something about moving location that inspires inquisition in a way other life changes do not. Maybe it has to do with the baggage of it all — literal and metaphorical. There is so much work that goes behind uprooting and rerooting oneself. And in the context of my social reality, one can only uproot and reroot oneself so many times in one’s life. There’s too much capital that goes behind every move, and, frankly speaking, I do not operate on an unlimited budget.

So, for that very reason, perhaps the question is indeed appropriate. Perhaps, it struck me as something noteworthy because it forced me to come to terms with this version of reality I’m currently living in — where there exists a timeline, a cap, a full stop. At some point, perhaps best sooner than later, I must come to terms with the finality of it all.

Some friends have suggested that I might come back at some point. Who knows, right? But I am well aware that the duration for which I get to stay here is already more than most people from where I come from could afford.

It’s time to go back.

Many things await my return.

I don’t know how much backstory I’d like to provide for now. I’ll give you the short version because there are other, more important things to talk about.

Long story short, I returned to London to look for a job, and I haven’t managed to secure one. Initially, I gave myself six months. And then it became eight, as I waited for updates. The announcement came, and I didn’t make the cut. I was sad for a whole evening (cried to my Mom and everything). But the next day, I got up and went about my day as usual. At the end of the day, I wanted to keep my word. I gave myself a timeline to figure things out, and I’m at the end of it now.

Here’s the slightly longer version: I moved to London from Indonesia to do my Master’s in 2023. Completed that in 2024. Went back home for a bit to be with family. Went back to London. Got a new visa this January. Tried job hunting the first few months of 2025. Ditched that because it was getting kind of silly (I couldn’t for the life of me justify all the hours spent tweaking my CV and rewriting cover letters for my application to only be rejected by AI — I might do an edition on this at some point). I decided to give myself the permission to work on things I wanted to work on, which is how this newsletter got to its current state (it’s still a work in progress, but there is some progress; more on that in a bit). In between that, I took on part-time shifts on a once-a-week schedule for a few months (it didn’t move the needle, but it did make me feel less guilty about digging into my savings). The point is, I decided to make room for myself. I went out, met people, introduced them to my project, and kept building on my story bank.

Some of the work I’ve done is published here, on digital field notes. But the majority of the work thus far is still in the archive. They are research notes for possible inquiries, a list of people I’d like to converse with, initial conversations to be followed up upon, and jotted ideas to be expanded and rewritten. I could perhaps go on and on operating in this mode — exploration for exploration’s sake. In a way, it’s such a privileged state to be in. I do what I want, set my own agenda, and answer to no one but myself. That’s a journalist’s/writer’s utopia. I’m immensely grateful for the many months I get to put on this hat. I don’t take this for granted, not in the slightest.

What’s going to happen after this? I’ve spent the last two weeks going around the UK (8 cities in total, and a few more on my list). The next two weeks will be for packing (honestly, I don’t even know where to start). Then, I’ll spend some quality time with my family. During that period, I’ll be based in Bali. After that, there’s a sibling’s wedding — my brother’s getting married next month! And throughout all that, I’ll be on the lookout for reporter/writer roles based in Indonesia. There’s a plan to relocate from Bali to Jakarta sometime this year. I’m looking to establish a living and working setup I’d be happy with for the upcoming two or three years. So, an upcoming project for me would be setting up that new living arrangement and building myself a proper work station (I’ve relied on my laptop and cafe hopping for far too long).

I’m excited. There’s a lot to look forward to.

What’s the update on digital field notes?

I’m happy to share that as of 1 September, I hit 100 subscribers! I know it’s a considerably small mailing list, but considering I’ve only published 8 editions so far, it’s not a bad figure. Plus, I have three paying subscribers! Yes, they are all people I know. No, they are not my parents or my siblings. Despite my best efforts to convince my sister to support my project, she has yet to do so.

I’m also expanding digital field notes’ content. I started a YouTube channel. Initially, I thought of it as an extension of this newsletter, but increasingly I’m imagining it as a standalone project. I uploaded my first video a few weeks ago (attached below). At the time, I was working on a piece about love and dating apps, so the main topic of the video is of that (I’ve since put that work on hold so I could enjoy my last few weeks in the UK, but that edition’s coming out at some point).

Back to the video. I recorded it on a Sunday hangout with a friend. I’ve had this format in my head for a while now. I envision a laid-back conversation out in the open where people get to be somewhat anonymous. It’s a space to just be and converse. No emphasis on names, titles, or faces. I wanted to break away from the archetypal video podcast format of indoor studios, large mics and conversation for publicity’s sake, as opposed to conversation for the joy of it. I’m being very creative with the title by naming it “Conversations with Friends” (a friend pointed out the Sally Rooney’s reference — it’s actually not related; or maybe it is, I still need to read the book first to draw the connection). I’ve recorded two more of “Conversations with Friends” — they still need to be edited, but the material’s already there. If you want to be notified, consider subscribing to the channel!

Aside from video content, I’m also thinking of doing a spoken format for my upcoming newsletters. I’ve been doing trial runs to get a sense of what an audio version of my newsletter would sound like. They sounded alright. No fancy intros and outros yet, but I thought even a bare audio recording might be a nice addition.

In conclusion, there’s a lot more to come!

I’m keeping this project alive because I find myself actually enjoying the work. Yes, it can be laborious. Yes, some people just scroll through it. Yes, there’s no obvious outcome. Yes, it doesn’t pay the bills (at least not yet). But it’s allowing me to exist in the world as me, and that’s worth keeping.

So, what is digital field notes exactly?

It started as a platform for me to share insights from my dissertation. And then I decided to turn it into a project to explore London’s tech scene from a cultural standpoint. Going forward, it will be a space for me to write whatever it is that interests me that lies within the intersection of business, technology and culture. I could be exploring the chokehold of neoliberalism in today’s dating apps and dating norms, the changing venture capital landscape, or the role of social media in driving today’s social movements. It’s a wide canvas. I’d like for it to remain that way.

I don’t exactly know how to picture an audience for this project at the moment. But also, I don’t think it’d be wise for me to do so. The plan is just to put things out there and see to whom the writings resonate. For those of you who regularly click on my email every time a new edition comes out, you have my thanks. I plan on doing this for a long time. I hope this can be an enduring relationship, a meaningful one for both you and me.

As always, I’m happy to listen to feedback, so drop me a note anytime.

Sincerely,

Dita

This edition is quite long. I thought about publishing it in parts, but decided against it. For carving out the time to read it in full, you have my utmost thanks. The point of this newsletter project is to connect with people who care about understanding the world through the big picture and the granular detail — those who revel in the amusement of connecting the two. Without further ado:

The whirling sound of tiny wheels greeting the surface of concrete streets is present across the city — on any day, at any time of the day. Loud enough for fellow passersby to notice, common enough for it not to be a nuisance.

It did strike me as a curious scene the first few times I saw it — the steady stream of people going around London with their suitcases with them. Huh, there are always people with suitcases here. I would counter the claim that it’s an ordinary scene in any major tourist city in the world. I grew up in Bali, and it still stood out to me as something peculiar.

The more I notice it, the more I find it to be a comforting scene, especially these days, as I’m pondering the possibility of moving back to Indonesia. The auditory cue from these tiny wheels acts as a reminder that the city is filled with people moving in and out, and that this migration — whatever it represents, be it between houses, cities, or countries, be it temporary or permanent — is a constant part of London living. It paints the everyday picture of what it means to be part of the city. A departure from knowing a city for its landmarks, to knowing it from having walked it; from having moved about it.

Walking is a method of inquiry, and from it emerged an embodied knowing of a place. No, you probably won’t cover all possible surface area, let alone memorise all the paths you’ve travelled across. But it is a kind of knowing still. In the case of my London walks, they have brought forth this imagery of the mobile and transient amidst buildings and monuments that have stood for centuries. There’s great poetry there, deserving of a write-up.

And for that reason, I’m taking it up as a theme of today’s essay.

I am exploring a framework that sees a city as an idea; that a city is not just its grand infrastructures or a series of top-down master plans set up by figures of authority and power. A city is what the people within it represent, how they carry themselves in relation to the city, and the way they move about it — informed by their baggage, destinations, and all.

As someone who writes about technology, my take on the idea of London as a city will take up a more niche inquiry of understanding it as a hub of innovation. What themes come about when one inquires about the current state of its tech industry? What notions arise and form our knowing of the city from having shared space with technologists and people working in tech more broadly?

My “leisurely walks” entail attending tech events with no set agendas and giving myself the freedom to chat to whoever I feel like chatting to. There isn’t a pressure to come up with a story idea, to schedule an interview, or to do a write-up about the event. The point is just to share presence.

Given the freedom to just be, themes emerged on their own, without much of my prodding.

This piece is built upon those themes, which come about from a series of anecdotes. The goal is not to be all-encompassing. Rather, it is to present a series of photographs.

That is to say that what is represented is the photographer’s limited point of view, and also that the state of the subject matter could very possibly change (some would argue that it should).

I’ll break this into three parts: defeatism, hope, and optimism.

Let’s start in the trenches.

Negative spaces

I wonder why people often bring up other cities when assessing London. They would mention San Francisco, New York, Paris, or Berlin, with the context being that London has much catching up to do. “London’s lacking this, City X has more of that. Why can’t London be like that, too?” These are some of the sentiments I’ve come across so far.

I don’t know if it’s an extension of the culture of self-deprecation, or if it’s rooted in something more fundamental — a lack of self-belief, perhaps. Whichever is the case, this constant comparison left an impression upon me.

During my time writing about the Indonesian tech industry, rarely was the attention given to another country’s industry. Granted, we’re a nation of 280 million people; we make up the biggest economy in Southeast Asia. We could afford focusing on our home turf. If anything, the battle to win is the one fought within our borders.

Here, in London, a theme that emerged from attending industry talks and conversing with people is that there is a nagging need to contextualise London against other cities or against the global arena.

You could probably argue it’s for the best. We’re setting the city, and to that end, the country, up to high standards, and that the gap between where we are and what’s ideal is a much-needed motivator for change. That’s the encouraging, future-looking interpretation.

But in the here and now, what has resulted from the constant comparison is a city that is understood not for what it stands for, but for its negations. That when one has to think about an idea that encapsulates the city, the idea that emerges is that it is not that of something else. Not big enough, not capitalised enough, not ambitious enough, not crazy enough, not growing enough. A negative space, in a sense.

We’ve built a city that could not exist by its own standards. Everything has to be benchmarked elsewhere

There are, of course, nuances to this dynamic. If you situate London as part of the UK, you would see it as a place with a high concentration of digital talent. If you situate London as part of Europe, the city is understood as part of a larger collective of innovation hubs that are equally overlooked. But in the context of its standing against other cities, the sentiment is that London is competitive, but not competitive enough. Especially when placed side by side with Silicon Valley. (I’ll talk about building a tech city within the image of Silicon Valley in the next section.)

There’s a larger, ongoing debate that informs this. Any self-respecting industry-oriented technologists would have to think deeply about the choice of building in the UK vs the US. It’s still a divisive topic. But if you’re a pragmatist, or being pragmatic, the choice writes itself. As a founder, you’d get better access to bigger pools of capital in the US. As an engineer, you’d get better salaries. As a venture capitalist, you’d have more options to choose from because many ambitious founders have made the choice to be based there. (Recent political climate is changing this dynamic. However, the broader themes remain.)

But more fundamental questions of what it means to innovate and build tech businesses are still present. People still grapple with the questions of what it means to leave, what it means to stay; where one’s allegiance lie; to what extent must the neoliberal subject give a damn about the agenda of nation-building; how compelled must one feel to bear the burden of contributing back to a country that has not made it easy for one to be a risk-taking subject.

These are big questions. And the project of making London (and the UK) a place where people would gladly choose to be requires work — attracting more venture capital to support not just startups, but also scale-ups, lobbying for policies to remove red tape, etc. Against the backdrop of these difficult questions, what I often find is a persisting belief that the city (and the country) is risk-averse.

I’m not an industry person, merely an observer of the industry. My introduction to this risk-aversion does not come from encountering it first-hand. Rather, it is in the form of rhetoric. It is presented as a mode of belief, often to justify doing the pragmatic thing.

It seems to be operating as a mask for defeatism — the acceptance of how things are at present, with no intention of shaking up current dynamics.

I’d argue defeatism is different from pessimism. Pessimism leans on believing that things will end badly. But defeatism is believing that the game is already over before it has started. That it’s impossible for a meaningful change to take place. That we are already so far behind. And unlike pessimism that can oftentimes be constructive — it could inspire change — defeatism is a dead-end. Defeatism is subtle and silent, and for that reason, possibly more dangerous. While some people moan, others just let out a tiny sigh and accept the status quo. The cause of stagnation is not in big failures; it’s in these silent acceptances.

The price of hope

I live in East London. It’s the area I moved into when I first moved to London and I’ve stuck around for familiarity’s sake. What I quickly learned from the seemingly random banter about residential areas, is that there are layers of subtexts attached to your choice of dwelling. Allow me to recall a brief conversation:

“Where do you live?”

“I live in [an area in East London].”

“Oh, no wonder you want to move back [to Indonesia].”

I had previously disclosed that I might not be staying in London for all that long, but I didn’t say anything about not liking the area where I live. I’m quite fond of it, actually. And, it so happens to be the area where the dream of building a tech city in London is situated.

To be fair, I get where the sentiment was coming from. East London is home to some of the poorest boroughs in London — which, in a way, makes the initiative of an East London Tech City all the more transformational.

What is present in an initiative like this — and becomes further apparent in the context of East London — is the set of assumptions about the role of tech clusters in shaping cities; and more abstractly, the role of technology in shaping societies.

People look towards tech as a panacea — an antithesis of slowing economic growth, social decline, and institutional decay. It is in this hope of reversal and reinvention that the dream of London’s tech city was introduced 15 years ago.

On 4 November 2010, in a speech to tech leaders and entrepreneurs in East London, Prime Minister David Cameron declared the government’s ambition to turn London’s East End into a tech city that could rival Silicon Valley. Here’s an excerpt from his speech:

“We’re not just going to back the big businesses of today, we’re going to back the big businesses of tomorrow. We are firmly on the side of the high-growth, highly innovative companies of the future. Don’t doubt our ambition.

Right now, Silicon Valley is the leading place in the world for high-tech growth and innovation. But there’s no reason why it has to be so predominant. Question is: where will its challengers be? Bangalore? Hefei? Moscow?

My argument today is that if we have the confidence to really go for it and the understanding of what it takes, London could be one of them. All the elements are here.

And our ambition is to bring together the creativity and energy of Shoreditch and the incredible possibilities of the Olympic Park to help make East London one of the world’s great technology centres.

I know this can’t — and won’t — happen overnight. But today, I want to show how we can get there.”

(You can find the full transcript of his speech here.)

In the same speech, Mr Cameron announced: £200 million of equity finance for businesses with high growth potential, £200 million for new Technology and Innovation Centres, £15 million on tech support and the creation of a presence in East London, the creation of a new Entrepreneur Visa, and a review of Britain’s IP laws to make them fit with the internet age better. He also shared plans to work alongside a dozen or so companies to bring the tech city dream to life — Facebook, Google, Cisco, Intel, Barclays, and Silicon Valley Bank were some he mentioned.

It was an ambitious project for the government. But the ambition didn’t start there. By 2010, there were already over 3,200 digital economy firms in Inner East London, according to a report. Two years before Mr Cameron’s speech, the Financial Times wrote a blog about the up-and-coming “Silicon Roundabout”, where tech entrepreneurs set up shops, lured by cheaper rents and the area’s vibrant scene.

15 years after the rebranding from Silicon Roundabout to East London Tech City, we still haven’t seen the birth of a Silicon Valley-like tech cluster. Instead, within those years, The Standard reports: “Rents for good quality space around the Old Street Roundabout have increased by 70% in the last 15 years, while the same grade of buildings in the wider London market have seen rents grow by over 60%.” The case that had initially attracted startup founders to huddle around Old Street is no longer as strong as it used to be. Why stay in an area where the rent rises steeper than in other places?

One thing to be made clear is that the tech industry is not dependent on there being a tech city to exist. It’s a good-to-have, but certainly not a must-have. London still has an active, rapidly growing tech industry, despite not having its version of Silicon Valley. That is not to say that startups have all fled East London. Just that they don’t only congregate in East London. What we have is a more distributed ecosystem.

The UK is not unique in its dream to replicate Silicon Valley. Many governments across the world have dreamed, attempted, and to varying degrees, failed, in the pursuit of copying the ambition, innovation, and grit seen in Silicon Valley. But perhaps there’s something to celebrate in having that desire alone.

Allow me to break the pace a bit here and recall one of the first events I attended after the pandemic restrictions of hosting large gatherings were lifted.

It was December 2021. I was still based in Bali at the time. I decided to check out a startup summit to see if there was anyone interesting I could meet. I stayed until the end, and right at the very end, all the attendees were asked to stand up and chant along to the tagline of #SiliconBali. The speaker would start by loudly proclaiming, “Silicon Bali!”, and the rest of us were required to reply with, “Go! Go! Go!”. (I went deep into my gallery and found the footage from that evening. Attached below.)

If this feels cult-ish to you, let me just clarify that Indonesians are very big on theatrics. You can be sure there would be some elements of performance, be it traditional dances, mass karaoke, or, the mildest version of it, slogan chanting, in gatherings like these.

Anyway, I’m veering off. I hadn’t been to large meet-ups like the one I went to that December in a long time. Having forgotten about our inclination for theatricalities, I was caught off guard, and, unironically, deeply amused.

Let’s be clear, even if you say “Silicon Bali!” out loud three times, no genie would appear and grant your wish of transforming a place into a tech hub. So, yes, it was gimmicky and was probably there for the photo op.

But there is also something so earnest when you see it as a form of hope for renewal, for reinvention. It’s a declaration for declaration’s sake. Like a statement of unconditional love, without the need for accountability. No one’s running to ask the person who came up with the slogan to take responsibility over this “dream”. Where’s the follow-up? The ten steps? The investment board? The proposals and blueprints?

It’s a shout out to the void, but in the most jovial kind of way. A statement that cements, “I haven’t given up on the dream, and neither should you.”

I like that about hoping. It’s free.

The point I wanted to make is that the idea of replicating Silicon Valley is there for its enchantment’s sake. It’s not about being able to create an exact replica. It’s about existing in a state of mind where that possibility is within reach, despite what the case studies and historical records have shown you.

I’d argue it’s due to its impossibility, rather than its practicalities, that the dream of a Silicon Valley-like tech city perseveres. In a way, we can only claim that we are ambitious when we tie our goals onto working on these impossible dreams.

The East London Tech City initiative has largely fizzled out over the years. But the project of turning London into a city where its tech scene is taken seriously is still underway. Some might say, it’s more alive than ever.

A case for optimism

It was the weekend from two weeks ago. The sun was out. I took myself on a walk around the city, with a quick stop at a nearby bubble tea shop. And then I walked, walked, and walked, sipping my bubble tea joyfully while enjoying the sun and the breeze.

I did have a destination in mind. I wanted to check out an AI hackathon happening in East Central London. When I arrived, the demos were already in session.

That Saturday, while it seemed like the rest of the London population was out enjoying themselves, around 50 people had decided to spend their weekend staying indoors, hacking for 8 hours straight. They had been there since 10 AM. I, on the other hand, arrived around 6 PM. Those who had showcased their demo seemed chill and laid back. A few others were still tinkering with their presentations on their laptops.

The remnants of what the previous 8 hours looked like were present in the empty pizza boxes stacked at one corner and the empty cans of Coca-Cola and Diet Coke sprinkled around the room.

That evening, I watched some interesting projects being presented, and met with some interesting builders.

The next day, on Sunday — also a lovely day to be out and about — I visited another hackathon, this time in South London. Over the past two days, a few dozen builders, designers and policy hackers had been busy coming up with solutions to fight back against overlooked problems of piling trash, unsafe streets, declining education quality, among others.

It’s clear to me that there is a growing momentum in the city.

Before the demos started, a few speakers took the stage to speak on the importance of spaces like these. Echoes of tech solutionism — the belief that technology can solve all societal problems — were present in their speeches.

“It has become fashionable to talk Britain down. […] First, we need to be confident that this is an amazing city, an amazing country. When you improve this country, you are improving the world,” said one of the speakers.

There was a logic of amplification present. That to make the city amazing, you first need to believe that it’s already amazing, to begin with. But the need to remind the city of its greatness is rooted in the increasing self-doubt the city has over its own future.

There’s an interesting dynamic about what it means to be an optimist present in rhetoric like this. It’s not about always looking at the bright side of things, and in the process, being in denial of systemic failures. It’s essentially about building a relationship with the future. One that feels worthy of anticipation and labour.

In this case, optimism is a temporal framework — it’s a bridge to fast-forward the future into the present, allowing that vision of the desired future to take precedence over present states. In taking on that framework, the way in which we carry ourselves in the present changes. In many instances, it nudges us to become more of a risk-taker.

These are the series of snapshots I’ve gathered from my walks. And I present them to you here as a showcase of how one might arrive at an understanding of a city, guided by the limits and affordances of using “walking” as a method for knowing.

The themes — defeatism, hope, optimism — are, in a sense, modes of being. As modes of being, they don’t exist in isolation. They are interlinked. Defeatist modes feed into the need for hope, feed into the need for optimism. Much in the same way modes of optimism feed into the need for defeatism — like a hedging strategy to prevent the bubble from getting too inflated that it’ll pop off on its own. And as modes of being, their presence is always in a state of flux, always up for being questioned and challenged.

Just like the people walking around London dragging their suitcases across the city, these modes are transient in nature. They are always on the move. Always with the next destination in mind.

I am dedicating this edition to Dipsy, a 16-year-old cat I had the pleasure of befriending. He died a few days ago due to declining health. Rest in peace, Dipsy. You are missed.

Many thanks to my dear friends for their inputs — Hasna for the edits and Wina for the social media design consultation session.

It wasn’t a particularly alarming scene, but something didn’t sit quite right with me. I was watching a lineup of product demos showcased at a storied venture capital firm’s London office on a Wednesday evening. One demo caught my attention. It was from an online video editor startup. The presenter was announcing a new product rollout: an AI-powered text-to-video feature.

Now, anyone can create professional-looking influencer content without needing to pick up a camera or collaborate with an influencer, for that matter. Just type in your prompt, say, “Create an ad for a beauty product,” and, in under a minute, you’ll get a 30-second video of an AI-generated avatar voicing a script made by AI, with captions by AI, background music by AI, as well as B-roll clips by AI. Video marketing has never been easier.

At the time, I didn’t have the words to articulate what exactly felt off, but surely I wasn’t the only one who felt it? I looked around the room and tried to gauge where everyone was at based on their expression. Mostly neutral, if not amused. I couldn’t find a hint of concern. For the next few weeks and until the time of writing this, the question continues to linger — what is it exactly that bothered me?

Was it the idea that a technology like this would make newcomers in social media influencing redundant? Was it the worry about AI taking over everybody’s jobs? But I’ve sat with that issue for months now. I’ve listened to the concern of AI replacing human labour being raised in various settings — academia, industry talks, podcasts, and conversations with friends. And, as I have learned over time, especially from attending industry talks, the issue of employment (or rather, unemployment) is not something that the tech industry takes seriously.

There is always a distantness in the way industry people talk about the likelihood of AI eradicating the vast majority of jobs. As if it’s a question posed by outsiders who have yet to embrace and embody what technology is about. It’s about automation! Automate or get automated! Duh! The unfortunate spokespeople who have to answer to these questions always talk about being on the other side of the equation; the winning side. That is, if you position yourself correctly, there are more opportunities to be seized than losses to cope with.

Simply put, I don't think the feeling of dissonance I felt at the demo came from the concern of widespread loss of job opportunities, despite that being an issue worthy of inquiry. (I’ll likely explore that in a separate edition.) My gut feeling was pointing towards something else.

In hindsight, it was a feeling of dread from AI-generated content taking over the internet. Of having to be on the other end — in this case, the “target market” — scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, through an endless AI-generated landfill.

Kangaroos leaving clues

“Have you seen that kangaroo video?” a gamer-turned-software engineer I met at the Wednesday event asked me after the demos ended.

“I think I know what you’re talking about. I saw it on my feed recently.”

“Did you know it was AI-generated?” he asked.

As a matter of fact, I didn’t know it was AI-generated. I quickly scrolled past it without delving much into the lore behind the viral post.

If you don’t already know, the video is of an emotional support kangaroo being denied entry from boarding a plane. I didn’t even see it as a video prior to that conversation. What I saw was a screenshot of the video being posted on X. (The video first appeared on Instagram.)

infiniteunreality

A post shared by @infiniteunreality

You would think people would be able to tell AI-generated content apart for its sheer absurdity. A kangaroo carrying a boarding pass on a plane?

But a Reddit thread under the forum r/singularity brings attention to the fact that people are increasingly unable to separate what is real and what is AI-generated. The post goes: “this emotional support kangaroo video is going viral on social media, and many people believe it’s real, but it’s actually AI”. Discussion within the thread includes people admitting not knowing it was AI-generated, notes as to why it looked real (for instance, the fact that it was made as if someone filmed it on their phone), and people picking apart details that give away the video being AI-generated upon further inspection.

At the time of writing this, the kangaroo video, posted on 25 May by the Instagram account @infiniteunreality, has been viewed over 17 million times. The person behind the account describes himself as a visual effects artist — that and the Instagram handle should have been big giveaways, but as with anything that travels on the internet, most context gets lost during transport.

In an interview with Thom Waite from Dazed, the person running the account, a 25-year-old tech worker based in Los Angeles, said: “I consider everything that I post shitposting.” There are over 300 other videos he has posted on his account since February this year. One of them, captioned “First Male Birth”, raked up almost 150 million views. It’s an absurd thing to describe. I’m not going to. If you want to scroll through the account to find it, consider this a trigger warning: the account is filled with disturbing content.

As to what goes into making these viral videos? The 25-year-old told Dazed that the kangaroo took him only three minutes to make.

There’s something about the ease of making this type of content and how difficult it is for viewers to tell it apart and make meaning out of it that feels very dystopian. Allow me to highlight a brief excerpt from the interview (you should read the whole piece; it’s eerily fascinating): “…it’s going to be very difficult for people to know what’s real and what isn’t, and there’s going to be people fighting and arguing about it to the point where it’s going to take too much energy for the average person… They’re not going to care anymore. They’re just going to let it happen.”

Over the past two years or so, I’ve witnessed how AI-generated content crept up on my social media feed. Around mid-2023, there was the turn-yourself-into-K-Pop-idol trend I saw on my Instagram. A few of my friends uploaded an AI rendering of their selfies using image generation apps to see what they would look like if they were a Korean idol. (Indonesia has one of the largest K-Pop fan bases in the world.)

In the same year, there was the uproar over the AI-generated image by German artist Boris Eldagsen that won the Sony World Photography Awards’ creative open category. (Eldagsen declined the prize after he revealed the image was AI-generated.)

Earlier this year, I stumbled upon an “a day in my life” TikTok video that creatively imagined what life as a princess of the Majapahit kingdom would look like. I thought to myself, “That’s a cool way of teaching history.” (The Majapahit kingdom was a Hindu-Buddhist maritime empire which prospered between the late 13th and early 16th century. The span of its empire forebears Indonesia’s modern state boundaries. I had to learn about it from dry textbooks as a schoolkid.)

And, as we all know, there’s the Studio Ghibli viral moment after ChatGPT released its new model. (At the time of writing, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman’s profile picture on X is still a Studio Ghibli-ed image of himself.)

All this is to say, I shouldn’t be surprised with companies building more tools to make AI content generation easier for the masses. There’s definitely an appetite for it. Can a profit-oriented entity be blamed for capturing market opportunities?

But that’s not the issue I’m highlighting here. I’m highlighting a new worry surfacing. For the longest time, the concern has been about the ethics behind AI content generation — how AI models are built on top of exploitative labelling practices, how they scraped data from unconsenting subjects, how they perpetuate stereotypes and biases. I’ve followed these discourses and have my own personal views as to how much AI I’d allow into my own workflow.

For the most part, I let AI-generated content be because I perceived it as a different kind of content — an art style, perhaps, or merely a trend that comes and goes. For the longest time, AI-generated content has been distinguishable; it reeks of its AI-ness. I think what bothered me when I watched the demo that Wednesday evening was how believable the AI avatar looked. If I happen to just scroll past them, it might not cross my mind to consider whether these videos are AI-generated. Sure, they look commercial and generic. But otherwise pretty believable. And judging from my encounter with the emotional support kangaroo, I probably wouldn’t even bother to do a critical assessment of the video on a regular day.

There is something fundamentally changing about our day-to-day reality online. I’m guessing it’s affecting our psyche in one way or another. Do we have it in us to guard our sense of reality from being eroded by AI?

A break from reality

In the middle of working on the draft for this newsletter last week, my friend sent me a link to a report by The New York Times’ journalist Kashmir Hill, published on Friday, 13 June. “I’m not yet done reading but NGERI BGT COK [translation: THIS IS SO SCARY],” she texted me. It was a story about generative AI chatbots altering people’s sense of reality, driving them into states of psychosis.

As my friend was going through the article, she sent me screenshots of the things that baffled her. One of them was this quote: “‘What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation?’ [...] ‘It looks like an additional monthly user.’” The quote was from Eliezer Yudkowsky, known for his work on AI alignment and safety. He was one of the first and most prominent figures to warn against the existential threat posed by advanced AI.

I don’t believe people go into tech with the intention of driving people insane. But if the endless pursuit of driving user engagement has brought user insanity as a side effect, an analysis of the processes and incentives that have made such an outcome possible is warranted. I would argue that there’s a kind of metaphor there for how products resemble the culture of the people building them. Bear with me for a moment. I’m still hypothesising.

The explanation offered in the article as to why conversing with a chatbot — in the article’s case, ChatGPT — could cause breaks with reality was because it tends to be sycophantic, a term we use for someone who uses flattery to get what they want. Essentially, the model optimises for user engagement by agreeing with the user, like a personal hype man. Its job is to keep you hooked. On the company’s dashboard, this translates to longer time spent on the platform, more back-and-forth interaction, and, eventually, more paid users. It’s the case of technologies being used for self-reinforcement in the name of pushing user metrics.

I would argue that this self-reinforcing tendency is a defining feature of the culture of technology. That very culture becomes apparent when it manifests in the products we are building and impacting users’ lives in a fundamental way.

Let’s zoom out for a moment to take a look at where these technologies are situated. Within the tech industry, there are many machineries that work under a self-reinforcing logic. The venture capital machine, for example. There’s an interesting feedback loop that’s embedded in the way venture capital moves. The bigger you think you are, the bigger you end up becoming. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Even frameworks used to justify venture strategies have a circuitous logic. A lot of ventures are founded on the notion of inevitability. As in, there’s a belief that the world would inevitably move in a certain direction, hence certain ideas would gain traction, and hence why certain companies need to be built — to capitalise on that opportunity.

It’s because of the belief that things are inevitable did they eventually become so. It’s what justifies a “do whatever it takes to make it happen” kind of mentality, further increasing the likelihood of the envisioned future becoming a reality.

In conclusion, it's hard to create a product that doesn’t promote sycophantism if the culture of building that product is defined by sycophantism.

Social media algorithms, as a byproduct of the same culture, are self-reinforcing too. The more I look into AI-generated content taking over the web, the more I encounter it. I saw an AI mukbang that looked passable until the AI avatar took a bite of her fried chicken; monkeys doing ASMR (surprisingly calming), a how-to thread about making money from creating AI videos, and 82-year-old Baddie Betty giving dating advice (don’t let your boyfriend stop you from finding your husband, she said).

@baddiebethanyThis is my one and only tiktok account 💘 #baddiebetty #streetinterview #veo3 #ai

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The way we are experiencing reality is changing. It is putting regular users like you and me in a position where we feel like we are being tricked all the time. “Is this AI-generated?” is a question I would stumble upon more and more on the internet. In this new reality, the burden is on us to tell the difference. The blame is also on us if we are unable to.

But even if one is equipped with the digital literacy to tell AI-generated content apart, the work of making meaning of what it’s actually doing to us is a separate inquiry. Perhaps we could do with a self-reflection: is the unexamined life of doomscrolling AI-generated content a life worth living?

P.S. In case you’re still wondering what happened to the emotional support kangaroo, you’d be glad to hear that, as per 29 May, the kangaroo decided to board the plane by itself, ignoring the two women feuding over its permission slip. Well, was it able to enjoy the flight? I swear I saw another video of the kangaroo on the aisle seat with snacks. Or am I imagining it?

I’ve been thinking about what it means to see in the past week, and what teaching computers to see teaches us about seeing.

Let me start with a few questions. How do you make sense of what you see? What mental notes do you make in your head? What categories? How do you make that split-second judgment that something is worth looking at? How do you act upon those observations? And, perhaps more importantly, why is it that you take notice of the things you take notice of?

All these musings started on a Tuesday evening at the lower ground floor of a bar in Soho. I was there for an AI pitch night hosted by startup community The London Network in partnership with The AI Fellowship, an AI builders programme.

With a glass of lemonade in my hand, I watched a total of eight startups pitch their AI ventures to a crowd of 80 people, most of whom were wearing name tags with a small round sticker with preassigned colours — red for founders, green for investors, and yellow for ecosystem operators.

It was the second AI pitching event I attended in London. The last one also had a system to categorise the audience based on their profession. (I was given a black lanyard at the previous event and was mistaken for an investor. The people I spoke with seemed disappointed when I told them I wasn’t.)

I’ve been trying to get a sense of what the AI scene looks like in the city, especially from the builder’s perspective. Who are the people building in the space? What ideas are being built? What’s the vibe of the builder community here?

For context, I used to work as a tech journalist in Indonesia. But the years I spent reporting on tech back home were the years of the pandemic (2020-2022). Most of my interaction with the tech community — founders, investors, and tech employees — happened online, mostly via Zoom.

I wanted something different for my next chapter writing about tech and the tech industry. I wanted experiential learning. The snowballing kind. The learning that comes with chance encounters and luck. This newsletter, digital field notes, is built with that in mind. It’s a way for me to document how I stumble my way into understanding what the London tech scene is about. One event, one conversation, one topic of interest at a time.

That evening, standing close to where the pitches took place, I couldn't help but notice the few startups building on top of computer vision technologies.

Computer vision is the field within artificial intelligence that teaches computers how to see. Essentially, it’s the project of equipping machines with algorithms to identify, categorise and label items that appear in images accordingly. For example, how does a computer recognise a cat as a cat? Is a cat a cat because it has two pointy ears, a round face, an upside-down triangle as a nose, and whiskers? But what if the cat is curled up like a croissant? Does the computer recognise it as a cat or a croissant? That inquiry falls within the field of computer vision.

The eight founders took turns pitching their startups in front of a pull-down projector screen in a somewhat dimly-lit room with three judges — SFC Capital venture partner Jonathan White, Mercuri venture partner Isabelle O'Keeffe, and The AI Fellowship founder Zohaib Khan — tasked with asking questions right after the delivery of each pitch.

The first founder to pitch was Venu Tammabatula of Pulse AI. He is building a virtual ward for cancer patients, and he’s using computer vision to predict, prevent, and monitor cancer. Up next, Mohamed Binesmael of Advidan. He is developing video analytics that identify vehicles and analyse traffic to help shape smarter cities. Following him was Anas Achouri of DONAA, who is developing software to detect defects in 3D printing of manufacturing machines, reducing the costs incurred by errors.

Three computer vision startups in a row.

That’s interesting, I thought to myself. Building computer vision startups stands at odds with today’s trend of building generative AI or agentic AI startups, with the latter usually being powered by the former. While this is strictly anecdotal, the founders I’ve met in networking events like these are overwhelmingly building AI agents of some sort.

So, what’s the deal with computer vision?

I left the pitch night with notes.

And just like that, in what seemed to be overnight, everything suddenly became computer vision.

Now, I see it everywhere.

It’s in my phone’s camera. It’s the way portrait mode enables the identification of a person and separates them from their background. It’s in my gallery. The automatic groupings of photos based on faces, location, and memories. It’s the camera on top of the self-checkout machines in grocery stores. The one alerting customers if an item is not being scanned properly. It’s the autogates at airports. In international airports in Bali and Jakarta, machines do the work of verifying documents and carrying out facial recognition functions. It’s the emojis that appear if I do certain gestures on WhatsApp’s video calls, which I discovered by accident (peace sign for balloons, heart sign for heart emojis, thumbs up for thumbs up emoji, and thumbs down for thumbs down emoji). It’s also probably in the software that processes records from cameras installed on the platform of the Elizabeth line (I just noticed those cameras last week).

This brings me back to the question of what it means to see. How do machines make meaning of the things they see? How is it related to the way we, as humans, make meaning out of a scene? How do they differ?

Let’s go back to the pitch night for a second. If in an unlikely scenario the three startups were to offer the exact same solution, what makes one computer vision startup better than the other two? One of the judges asked a similar question that evening. The founder in question replied that his startup was able to recognise objects more accurately, and it had to do with gaining access to quality data with a wider variety. In short, a better dataset means better training, which in turn means better machines.

It might sound intuitive today, but in the history of computer vision, the decision to establish a large training dataset was a critical juncture that transformed an interesting — albeit niche — field in computer science into what now powers technologies that are present and ubiquitous in our daily lives. Scale was the tipping point.

One of the groundbreaking projects in the field of computer vision was ImageNet, a visual database used for the study of object recognition. Fei-Fei Li, then working as an AI researcher at Princeton, started the project in 2007. At the time, researchers working in computer vision weren’t really focused on the pursuit of expanding their training datasets. They were mostly occupied with building models and algorithms. But Li realised this wasn’t going to be sufficient. Remember the croissant cat example? The reason human eyes can identify a cat despite its croissant-like shape is that our vision is trained by real images. We can recognise cats in their many irregular poses. Li reasoned that it wasn’t enough to equip machines with algorithms that can identify a cat based on its universal features. It needed to learn from seeing a vast number of cat images.

“In hindsight, this idea of using big data to train computer algorithms may seem obvious now, but back in 2007, it was not so obvious,” Li said in her 2015 TED Talk.

By 2009, ImageNet had categorised 15 million images into 22,000 categories. There were projects of a similar nature, but to put things into perspective, they were considerably smaller in comparison. Caltech 101 data set, created in 2003, has 9,000 images; PASCAL VOC, created between 2006 and 2012, has 30,000 images; LabelMe, created in 2007, has 37,000; SUN, created in 2010, has 131,000 images.

“There’s a new way of thinking visual intelligence, it’s deeply, deeply data-driven,” Li, now the Sequoia Capital professor of computer science at Stanford University, said in a 2024 lecture at the University of Washington.

ImageNet was a massive undertaking. The project outsourced the manual work of individually sorting images through the gig marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk, employing 50,000 workers across 167 countries. At one time, it became the biggest employer on the platform, according to Li. (There is an ongoing discourse about the exploitative nature of these data-labelling practices. Calls have been made to pursue an ethical AI.)

Stepping beyond the world of research into venture building, access to a large database is also the make-or-break factor for the UK’s first computer vision unicorn, Tractable, a startup that helps insurance companies assess damaged vehicles using AI. Tractable founders were only able to close their $8 million Series A round in 2017 after securing a data partner that could provide images of vehicles in various states of damage to train its AI model, Business Insider writes. The company reached its billion-dollar valuation milestone in 2021.

There’s something to be said about seeing here. The project of creating vision has taught us that seeing is meaningless without context. Sight is nothing without memory. To see is to simultaneously remember and memorise. That is to say that at the heart of seeing is the ability to understand that of which is being perceived. What catches our attention and what is comprehensible to us, as computer vision has taught us, largely depends on our training data.

It’s true for machines as it is true for humans.

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The week before my search was filled with all things computer vision, I was spending time with my parents. It was graduation week for me, and my parents flew from Bali to London to watch me graduate (it was a 19-something-hour flight for them, so I was, and still am, immensely grateful to have them for the week). Being the good daughter that I am (wink), I made the itineraries, booked tickets for all the sightseeing, and fit in as many activities as I could fit in a day without tiring my parents out too much.

I don’t get to spend that much time with my parents, not only because I now live halfway across the world from them, but also because they are generally busy people. Both of my parents are builders, in a way — Mom’s the more structured kind (she studied civil engineering in university), Dad’s the more scrappy kind (the more cost-effective the better). They are now well past their retirement age, but none of them has stopped working. There are always active projects to attend to, sites to check, and people to coordinate with.

So away from home, and away from work — the time difference made it hard to communicate with people back home — I got to witness both of my parents just soaking in the city. And I found myself being amused at the many observations they threw at each other, and at me, throughout their time here.

It wasn’t the grand architecture they marvelled at. It was the seemingly ordinary and otherwise ignorable parts of the city that they noticed and took notes on. It was the border between the garden and the pavement at Victoria Embankment Gardens. “Look, it’s made of scrap wood.” My Mom pointed out, followed by the observation that if you were to use cheap material properly, it could look decent and neat. The buildings my Mom saw from the train window on our way to my flat on the day my parents arrived in the city. “Look at the material of that building. We don’t have that kind of material back home.” When entering any new space, both my parents would take notice of the build. “If you look closely, that kind of table is not expensive, but it’s well-designed.” One evening, I found a note on the dining table that my Mom had made — it was a sketch of the place we were staying at, with an approximation of the dimensions of each room. The city had become a huge Pinterest board for them.

Would they have noticed the same things if they were not builders? Probably not.

We see what we’ve been trained to see.

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On the podium was Louis Jordan, an engineer at ElevenLabs, a software company that provides AI voice tools that allows you to turn text into speech, and vice versa, among other services. The company secured $180 million for its Series C funding earlier this year, which brought its valuation to over $3 billion. That evening, Jordan was doing a demo of ElevenLabs’ latest product.

“This is the most stressful live demo I’ve had to do,” Jordan said.

The task? Ordering a pizza.

Just three days ago, ElevenLabs announced its model context protocol (MCP) server. The server allows users to integrate ElevenLabs’ voice tools into their AI chatbot platform. Say you’re building an AI agent on Claude. With ElevenLabs’ MCP server, you can now have an agent with voice functionalities that could, in the context of this live demo, order you a pizza.

“This is the first ever exploration into giving agents tools,” Jordan said, adding that now, more companies are looking to explore this critical paradigm.

Most people in the audience have built an AI agent, but building with MCP is still considered quite new, even among developers. Before the demo, a speaker had asked the audience: “Who here has built an AI agent?” I saw many hands raised in the room. But when asked about having experience with MCP, notably fewer hands were raised.

Let’s go back to the demo. In theory, Jordan could make an agent tasked with making a call to a local pizza restaurant and ordering a margherita pizza on his behalf. Because the agent now has access to Jordan’s voice he had stored on ElevenLabs, it could use his voice to have a conversation with the shopkeeper. And with access to Jordan’s Stripe account, the agent could also carry out the payment for the order. All Jordan has to do is wait for the pizza to arrive at his designated address.

But as with anyone who has done a live demo before, there’s always that chance of the technology glitching at the last minute, even when it had tested out fine in previous attempts, as Jordan had done during a recorded demo uploaded on X.

“Let’s see what happens. I’m not sure this is going to work, but we’ll find out very quickly,” Jordan said when he started running his code.

There was a brief silence as we waited for the machine to do its thing. “I’m going to give it two seconds, and then I’ll restart the service.”

“Come on the internet!”

“Okay, let’s just run it again. Second time’s the charm.”

“I’ll try it one more time. If not, I’ll just go to the backup demo.”

“Okay, I think it’s kind of working. It’s creating the agent. It’s giving it a personality. It’s telling it to order a pizza on behalf of the user. Now, it’s listing my phone number, which is a good start.”

But for some reason, the agent wouldn’t make the outbound call.

Then, Jordan said something I thought was interesting: “The demo gods are definitely not [cooperating].”

The demo gods?

I didn’t know there was such a thing called “the demo gods”. That was the first time I have ever heard of the term, but it wasn’t the last. In a different demo session I attended, there was another mention of the demo god, also in the context of a demo not working out the way the developer had hoped for.

I became increasingly curious about this entity. Does it exist in singular or plural? Is it the demo god or demo gods? What is the reason for its existence? Why do we call upon it, or them, in times of need? What does it say about the developer to mention the demo gods in certain contexts?

This edition is about that: me exploring this curious creature called the demo gods. This is my take in four points:

That technical glitches are not the technical person’s fault.

Isn’t it fascinating that at the preview of technical failures, we create an invisible, untouchable entity responsible for technical glitches in the systems that we’ve built? It’s as if we’re saying, this is definitely not my fault! But if it’s not my fault, the person who built this machine, then whose fault is it? The only natural answer must be that the gods are playing with me.

I thought it was interesting how there was an unspoken consensus about the technical person not being the one to blame for technical failures or glitches, and how natural it felt to call upon the demo gods in these contexts. What this reveals is an underlying assumption that the technical person is effective, is exhaustive; that they get the job done to the best of their capacity.

We imagine the technical person to be highly committed, highly engrossed in the machines that they build, so much so that we are quick to believe that they surely would have done everything they can to make sure the systems run smoothly. Hence, when things glitch, it is that. A glitch. An irregularity. It must be for something that is outside of the technical person’s control. To make myself clear, this is not a sarcastic remark. I’m making a case as to why the placing of blame onto the demo gods felt natural. And that is because we have certain assumptions about the character of a developer that put them at odds with complacency. Which brings me to my next point.

That the world of codes does not submit to the coder’s wishes.

At least not always.

I found this to be an interesting juxtaposition. We think of coders as the makers of the code universe. But the mention of an imagined higher entity — the demo gods — indicates that developers do not see themselves as occupying the most powerful position in the room. This reminds me of anthropologist Nick Seaver’s study on a music recommendation company.

“Again and again, I heard people working on music recommender systems take up similarly pastoral metaphors to describe their work. Despite the supposed rationality of machine learning, the makers of music recommendation rarely described their work as orderly calculation. Instead, they were bushwhackers or park rangers, gardeners or farmers; they were explorers or guides, cartographers or surveyors,” writes Seaver in his book “Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation”.

Seaver explains that these pastoral metaphors reveal the way power and responsibility are thought of by music engineers. I thought it was a helpful reference to understand the demo gods. “The demo gods”, when seen as a metaphor, showcases how developers relate to the products they build. That there is a limit to the control coders have over their codes. That they, as developers, are not omnipotent and omniscient. An imagery of an entity who are — the demo gods — solidifies the lack of power developers have over their creation, especially when the creation is acting out.

That mischief is always just around the corner.

What does this say about the demo gods? That they are mischievous creatures. They are desperate to be recognised. Nobody acknowledges the demo gods when things work well. Developers wouldn’t chant, “Praise the demo gods!” when things run smoothly. Which is probably why the demo gods are irksome.

I thought this notion of gods that wreak havoc was particularly fascinating. It becomes a reminder of a world that does not run on determinate terms. That there will always be circumstances unforeseen, circumstances that can’t be prepped for. It is a reminder that the world is a game of chance, of luck. That the world does not run entirely based on skills and merit. This brings me to my last point.

That there is a need for a framework to deal with the indeterminate.

“The demo gods” is an attitude towards the indeterminate in the sense that even the people we imagine to be entirely technical and binary also have to deal with uncertainties and need frameworks to navigate them. We run towards comforting narratives when we are pressed by the limits of our own agency.

An uncertain world births myth-making tendencies to tame the existential dread that comes from operating in a world where the floor is quicksand. The more you try to wiggle your way out of it, the more you get stuck. The best you can do is stay still and try to find comfort in that stillness. The existence of the demo gods is a reflection of that — a form of coping mechanism when things don’t go our way.

What does all this say about technology as a cultural product?

It’s that technology is not something that can be entirely figured out. Perhaps like a garden, developers do the work of planting the seeds, creating fences, tweaking things around, in the hopes that things will grow according to the garden that the developers have in mind. But they will never have 100% oversight as to what’s going on all the time. There still lies the magic of waiting for the plants to grow, the flowers to bloom, much like the wait during the running of codes, and the letting of machines to do their thing.

All this is to say that the world does not cease to be a mythical place even when it’s made up of 1s and 0s.

Additional note (added May 6, 2025):

When editing this newsletter, I took out a paragraph explaining my train of thought as to why I wrote an analysis of something seemingly so trivial. The reason was that I didn’t want to feel like I needed to justify why I write what I write in every single newsletter I put out. One, I worried about becoming repetitive. Second, it felt like an overcompensation for a lack of belief in the case I was making. I didn’t want that impression.

But after a conversation with a friend, I decided to add it back via this “additional note.” I am now of the view that in taking up a project where I experiment with my writing formats, an explanation of why I choose to explore the things I explore the way I explore them would only add to the reading experience rather than subtract from it.

On that note, the paragraph goes as follows:

You might think to yourself while reading this edition, “Dita, you’re reading waaay too much into this. It was merely a joke! A passing comment! It doesn’t warrant this kind of analysis.” To that, I would reply: But that’s the whole point! This newsletter, in its current form, is about exploring worldviews (read more about it here). The point I want to make is that worldviews often appear in these taken-for-granted utterances. They might seem trivial, which makes them easy to dismiss, but upon further inspection, they reveal a way of thinking, a system of values, that can manifest in other “more important” instances — vision statements, business decisions, product strategies, etc. I hope to explore more of that in future editions.

Dear readers,

It’s official. I’m launching a publication. It’s a tech newsletter, but with a twist. I’m writing about technology as culture — the “culture of technology”, to put it another way.

What does that mean and, more importantly, why does it matter?

Technology has been written as a product, something that is built and exchanged. And to that end, a financialised one, something for investors to back and profit from, as well as trade in public markets. Technology has been covered as a platform, a digital space for people to live their lives (think social media). Technology is also data, both the thing to be mined and to extract value from, as well as the thing doing the mining and extracting. Technology is labour, a whole new kind of work — digital labour — has emerged from new technologies, and will continue to emerge.

Technology as culture is the thread that connects all these different ways of looking at technology. It’s what’s most likely overlooked when we talk about technology, because, more often than not, we focus on the tool and not the people. Technology as culture, in the way I’m using the phrase, is the set of assumptions that govern the relationship between the tool and the tool maker, as well as the tool user. I’ll explore more of that in a bit.

Before that, what is culture, exactly? Culture is not corporate slogans. It’s not company’s branding. It’s the common sense that people take for granted. Only when confronted with a different set of “common sense” do people start taking notice and go, “huh?” Think of your experience travelling or living in a place that operates differently from where you grew up. You probably wouldn’t have questioned all the ways your value system manifests in the things you do had you not been exposed to a different way of living.

This newsletter is about that. It’s an exploration of notions that make up the “common sense” in the world of technology. Essentially, my job as the writer for this newsletter is to put on an anthropologist's hat, hang out with technologists — people working in tech, or, more broadly, people whose work is tech-related — and understand what is commonsensical for them that might not be as commonsensical for other people.

The keyword here is worldviews.

Worldviews are delicate creatures. They are the frameworks that people hold in their heads that help them systematise how the world works. It’s the kind of framing that makes the world, in all its messiness and fluidity, digestible; governable. The project is not to moralise certain viewpoints as good or bad. The main goal is to do the work of describing what that worldview is, and then breaking down all the ways in which that worldview materialises in the day-to-day.

As I see it right now, this project doesn’t necessarily fit into a pre-existing template, at least not the templates I’ve come to learn to operate with. It’s an amalgamation of different kinds of writings. It’s part journalism, part ethnography, part creative non-fiction, part blog, part essay. The way I imagine it right now, some writings will be more reported than others. Some more of an argumentative exposition. The idea is that I want it to be an open canvas where I get to experiment with different ways of writing up the things I’m exploring and learning, to come up with different formats, and to see what resonates — with me and with you, the readers.

I believe that the project should change its form as I go about spending more time working on it. But the spirit at the centre of this project should stay the same. It’s about discovering hidden wisdom in spaces overlooked. It’s about opening up the world to different possibilities of what it could be. I’d like the writings I’ll be working on for this newsletter to be driven by a sense of wonder and awe, without losing a critical lens to assess what it is I’m witnessing.

I find that to be important because wisdom gets lost quickly in the world of tech. It’s easy to lose sight of why we build the things that we build and fund the things that we fund. Perhaps we’d find ourselves wondering how, in the process of building machines, we have become one ourselves. I think being able to locate what makes us human, in the context of the world we’re living in right now, becomes an increasingly important topic to explore. Wisdom helps us with that. It allows us to balance the difficult task of maintaining wonder and awe while keeping a critical outlook on the projects we’re building.

Readers, I still have much to work on to make this newsletter worth paying for. I’m working toward publishing more consistently. That is to say, I haven’t figured out what my publishing schedule will look like, so expect my emails to come on a random Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Or Friday. Or Sunday. But the intention of building something worth paying for is there. If I have your support very early in this process, I will have the utmost thanks.

Who is this newsletter for? It’s for the tech-curious. It’s for people working in tech, or trying to find work in tech and wanting to learn the subtle rules of the industry; for people who have no specialised knowledge in tech and are curious to understand how the tech world runs, as well as for people with specialised knowledge and are curious to see their worldviews reflected on them; it’s for people who are keeping an eye on the tech space and want a more intimate look to what’s currently going on in tech. But above all, it’s for people who are looking for a fun, engaging read.

“What do you have in mind for the things you will cover?” you might ask. Well, I’ve been busy trying to get a pulse on London’s tech scene recently, and I’ve been taking notes.

In the past month: I went to a public talk featuring researchers studying algorithms and artificial intelligence; attended a networking evening hosted by an advocacy group that campaigns for policy measures against superintelligence; joined a research discussion about mapping online discourse around the manosphere; listened to industry leaders talk about the future of observability in an AI world; watched a dozen founders pitched their AI startups on stage; went to an AI developer meetup where most people have built an AI agent; followed an AI hackathon online; went to a conference and listened to presentations from people building in the decentralised science space; attended a panel featuring founders and investors in the Web3 space discussing agentic AI; sat in for another series of presentations, this time from researchers exploring the developments in GenAI for the application of 3D generative modeling.

My list of things I can explore is extensive and continues to grow.

In most of these instances, I arrived with no prior knowledge of the space. Many of the terms mentioned previously — superintelligence, observability, decentralised science, agentic AI — are new to me. But tech is not only for technologists. It is for everyone. This newsletter is my effort to unpack these jargons to make the world of technology more accessible to more people. On that note, I’m taking the leads I’ve gathered in the past month for my next few newsletter editions. Expect to see a write-up about how AI is changing the job market, how agentic AI is making us rethink why we work, how attitudes toward security vary within the tech world, and many more. In the process, I hope to illuminate the fascinating dynamic of how our worldviews are embedded in the tools we build and how those tools shape our worldviews.

Your readership means a great deal to me. If any of these intrigues you, like, share and subscribe. I’ll see you again next time!

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This is part three of a series of newsletters based on my dissertation about the subjectivities of Indonesian venture capitalists (VCs)—essentially, the personhood one has embodied as a result of being in the space, and simultaneously, the personhood that affects the way the space runs; it’s a co-constitutive process.

If you are a new reader, welcome! In case you haven’t read my previous posts: in Series 1, I talked about why I decided to do an ethnographic research on venture capitalists as an anthropology student; in Series 2, I explained how I went about immersing myself in the world of VCs. In this series, I’m exploring a question I stumbled upon as I conversed with my informants: why do VCs insist they are different from other VCs?

As a side note, I’ve been absent from publishing for the past couple of weeks as I am exploring different things to write about in my newsletter. I’ve been attending more tech and tech-related events in London in the past few weeks, and I’ve been inspired to take this newsletter in a different direction. Wouldn’t it be fun to sort of crash networking events where I have close to zero knowledge about what’s been happening in the industry? I’m aiming for as many “fish out of water” encounters as possible. But before that, I thought it would be nice to finish this series, or even to alternate between writing up past and current explorations. Stay tuned!

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I noticed lingering scepticism among Indonesian venture capitalists (VCs) when it comes to their peers’ branding practices.

“A lot of what they’re saying is basically bullshit,” Marcel (not his real name), an Indonesian-born VC based abroad, told me over a video call. Marcel has been working in the investment industry for about a decade. I met him at a networking event in Jakarta one evening in May 2024. He was flying back the next day, so we reconnected on LinkedIn and set up an online call, which coincided with the end of my fieldwork (late June 2024). By the time we spoke, I had gotten the chance to review my field notes, and I brought up some of my observations for him to weigh in. I asked him the one question that immediately came to my mind when I first started interviewing my VC informants: Why do VCs say they are different from their peers?

“There’s a lot of flexing in VC because you need to build your brand. Hey, I invested in these guys, so you need to invest in me because I found them, and I can find another one,” Marcel explained, giving an example of a common way VCs try to establish their brand in the industry. But a lot of VCs’ selling points are interchangeable, said Marcel. For example, a VC can pitch to founders who do not come from a financial background that they can help the founders with financial planning. Such a skill set, however, is not exclusive to one VC alone, considering that many came from a background in finance. There lies an inherent tension of having to differentiate yourself from your peers when there are not many unique ways to differentiate yourself. Hence, why Marcel thought of this act of differentiation as “bullshit”.

The expression of suspicion in the branding of others within the industry appeared in conversations I had with various informants. There were portrayals of “the other” as a scheming, untrustworthy, ego-driven individual—in other words, inauthentic.

In portraying others as inauthentic, I’m making the case that VCs are simultaneously presenting notions of authenticity. By establishing distance from the inauthentic “others”, they consequently attach themselves to an imagery of the idealised subject—the authentic subject. I’m not making any claims that one is a more successful investor than the other. It is likely that both the “inauthentic” and “authentic” subjects are equally capable of generating decent returns to their funds. But, the idea is that the authentic subject possesses an additional ability to enchant as they manage to establish themselves as successful while being perceived as moral and competent at the same time. Such is the subjecthood that the Indonesian VCs seem to strive for.

Many of my informants have shared rhetorics that capture ideas of authenticity. They perceive their work in venture capital as part of a desire to innovate, an extension of a love for the art of entrepreneurship, or as a way to encounter novelty constantly. Because you’re trying to capture “the next big thing”, no day is the same for a VC, and that sounds like a more ideal form of labour.

These seemingly “pure” desires stood out in the finance industry, which is widely understood by both people outside and within finance as an industry that runs on greed, corrupt desires, and making money for the sake of making money. In Karen Ho’s ethnography of Wall Street investment bankers, “Liquidated”, published in 2009, for instance, she writes how money was regarded as the most important motivation for work by investment bankers, and that compensation is the biggest personnel issue on Wall Street. This, however, is not exactly the case in venture capital.

The informants whom I spoke to who took financial compensation into account as a determining factor as to why they wanted to pursue venture capital were noticeably the young VCs who recently entered the industry. But most of my informants, having had years in the field, did not present money as the be-all and end-all reason for the work that they do. They try to establish that there is a bigger, more “genuine” reason why they are in the space.

Other ethnographies of finance have captured this desire from VCs to differentiate themselves from other financial people. In Tianyu Xie’s doctoral dissertation of Chinese VCs in the United States, “Making Connections and Investments: An Ethnography of China-to-US Venture Capital Business”, published in 2021, she writes how VCs view themselves as “lofty and adventurous Silicon Valley thinkers”, separate from the Wall Street fund managers who are seen as aloof and “(sort-of) ‘evil’”.

In my encounters with VCs, I found it interesting how VCs' act of differentiation extends beyond separating themselves from other financiers; they also differentiate among themselves, which seems to be an essential labour within their industry—it is an act of branding, if anything. You may think to yourself, that sounds like an oxymoron: branding oneself as authentic. The idea of deliberately creating an image of oneself stands in contrast with being true, being real.

But I am limiting myself from delving into that philosophical debate. I’m taking a more pragmatic approach—I’m writing it how I perceive it. Authenticity is a branding strategy. I’m not differentiating between real authenticity and manufactured authenticity. I’m making the case that either way, authenticity as a brand helps VCs to stand out in a sphere where others are believed to be untrustworthy. Sometimes the branding comes subtly, other times it’s very overt.

Here’s a brief excerpt from my interview with a VC who portrayed themself as the only good actor in an industry where everyone else is conniving:

Informant: The VC world is mean. People are so mean.

Dita: Have you stumbled upon a good VC?

I: This! That’s why I’m here. (“This” refers to the company where the person works.)

During that conversation, as I’m sitting opposite to my informant in a crowded restaurant in the posher part of Jakarta, some parts of me believed that this person really do think that they are “one of the good guys”, or to be more accurate to what’s being implied in the conversation above, “the only good guy”. I can’t help but wonder how comforting that worldview must have been. To so decisively separate oneself from the failures and missteps the industry has made.

It’s kind of like being a journalist, if I think about it. During my previous role working for a publication that focuses on writing long-form as opposed to covering news, I kept having to explain to people I spoke to how we were covering stories differently. “We don’t cover the fluff, we cover the real stuff.” Something along that line. Said more politely, of course. Did I believe it? Of course, I did. I didn’t work so hard for a journalism vision I didn’t believe in. But was it also true that that worldview became a sort of trap? Probably. Beliefs of exceptionalism feel incredibly assuring, especially in a world where there is very little stable footing.

In practicing self-reflection, I realised I did hold on to that belief so tightly at a time when everything else felt unstable. It was during Covid-19. Newsrooms were hit hard. There was more to cover, but burnout was prevalent. The idea that we’re doing good, in a sense that we labour for “the good stuff”, which consequently makes us one of “the good ones”, felt nice. It felt grounding.

I noticed the same kind of pattern in the world of venture capital.

It’s a disruptive industry; you are looking for disruption, for change. You’re making bets on a future that may or may not come to be. And you want to be on the profit-making side of the equation. You labour in an uncertain world, make profits out of uncertainty, and in the process, make the world more uncertain for others. Operating in such a world, you have to become a certain kind of individual and embody a certain kind of subjectivity. The authenticity as a branding is a manifestation of that subjectivity, I would argue.

Portraying oneself as authentic is a practice that a self-enterprising, self-reliant individual has to be adept at as a form of strategy to cope with the uncertainties that emerged from a changing world, a neoliberal world—a world where traditional forms of safety nets have become unreliable, or are never present to begin with. The pressure to create a good life is increasingly placed upon the individual, and away from social institutions. A neoliberal subject is formed in the process.

In my dissertation, I’ve argued more thoroughly how the subjectivity of a venture capitalist is that of a neoliberal self. (I’m conscious of writing too long in my newsletter, so I’m leaving the more “academic” discussion out. If you’re interested in reading that version, send me a message!)

I argue that this neoliberal self becomes most apparent in the scepticism VCs have over the branding practices of the neoliberal others. The idea is that as a neoliberal subject whose main goal is self-survival, one must operate under the framework that others are also trying to get the best deals for themselves, even if it’s at the expense of other individuals. If you are not constantly looking out for yourself, others would “steal your lunches”. The mistrusting, outwardly critical attitude displayed by the Indonesian VCs is part and parcel of the self-economising, self-reliant, self-directing neoliberal subject; the entrepreneurial self.

But why does the differentiation have to come in the form of presenting oneself as the more authentic subject?

It’s a way of producing hierarchies. I’m making the case that embedded in the work of differentiating oneself is the work of class formation. In presenting oneself as authentic, that one cares about the industry and strives to conduct oneself in what one believes to be the ethical way of doing business, a VC is making a statement that they are a subject that gets to be authentic, that gets to care, that gets to be ethical. Care and ethics are an extension of power and privilege.

Whereas others invest just to flip deals and make money, I invest to make innovation accessible to the world. To support founders. To find the next big thing that will make a difference in the world. You get the picture. I’m not describing this with a note of sarcasm, just to be clear. I don’t have a personal stance as to what’s the right motivation to be a VC, and I am not making a case that there is a right motivation to be a VC. I am merely describing things the way I see them.

In conclusion, why do VCs say they are different from their peers?

It’s because in the world of VCs, standing out is required to fit in. For one to operate in a world where everyone is self-economising, one needs to constantly be on the lookout for one’s own survival. One needs to constantly make a case for oneself why one is more useful, more competent, more connected, more successful, more interesting, more unique, more special than other VCs. In a world where the benchmark for success and the rules of the game are always changing, the internalisation that one is different, and that being different will improve one’s odds of “winning”, becomes a required mindset to participate in the arena.

To be different is to belong.

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I was sitting in a meeting room within one of the skyscrapers that decorated the skyline of the Sudirman Central Business District, more commonly known as SCBD. It’s an area spanning 45 hectares located in South Jakarta, Indonesia, which hosts many of the country’s big companies, including local branches of international corporations such as Google and Microsoft. It is a bustling hub of office buildings, hotels, shopping malls and entertainment centres. Additionally, it serves as the country’s financial district, with the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) located on its premises, home to 951 publicly-listed companies with a total market capitalisation—the aggregated value of companies traded on the stock market—of US$755 billion as of January 2025, according to data from the IDX.

I was invited to conduct my interview with a senior director of a venture capital firm at his office in SCBD in June 2024. We had met about two years prior, during my time as a journalist covering the Indonesian startup landscape. This time around, I approached him to be part of my anthropology research on venture capitalists (VCs)—investors who fund early-stage businesses. As I waited for his arrival, I looked around the room and walked over to the sight that had captured my attention the first time I walked in: the window view. Rows of high-rise towers glimmered in the golden hour light. What a lovely scene. I glanced down to assess the traffic situation below. That’s not so bad. I went back to my seat, and, in an attempt to keep myself occupied while waiting for my interviewee, I found myself wondering, “What is it about the quietness of this space that startled me?”

It dawned on me that hours ago, as I was preparing for this interview, working from the room I was renting for this fieldwork, I found my attention constantly getting distracted by the sounds outside—there were the usual call to prayer from a nearby mosque, which you would hear just about anywhere in the city, five times a day; neighbours chatting; the sound of manual labour close by; and, of course, of the traffic the capital city is infamously known for. I was reminded that this was just the reality of working in Jakarta. It’s a noisy city. You can expect that from a place located within the world’s most populous island, Java.

But a few dozen floors above ground, the day-to-day sounds that make up the city don’t travel far up enough. Up here in this office, there are no noises. Just the pretty view.

I took many more of these meetings in the span of my one-month fieldwork—I spoke to 26 people in total between 20 May to 26 June 2024. They are either working in VC firms or are working closely with them. Four of these conversations were informal. They were aware I was researching about venture capitalists, but I did not record our conversation. They serve more as background information on the latest happenings within the VC world.

From the other 22 informants, 15 were working in venture capital firms, 3 were ex-venture capitalists, 2 were working on building startups, 1 was an investment banker, and 1 was a fund manager at a family office. Of my 22 informants, 6 were people I knew before conducting this research, the rest were new connections—5 were made through LinkedIn, 5 were referrals from people I had spoken with, and 6 were people I met at networking events. My conversation with these 22 informants lasted anywhere between 30 minutes to 1,5 hours. 6 were done online, 3 in offices, and 13 in coffee shops or restaurants.

For most of those whom I met in person, I let them decide our place of meeting. From these 13 in-person coffee chats, 8 were done in SCBD, of which 6 were at ASHTA, one of the newer malls in Jakarta. I also attended a total of six events—two dinner gatherings, two networking events and two live pitching sessions. Depending on the size of the crowd, I had spoken and exchanged contacts with as few as three to as many as 25 people within a single event.

In meeting with my informants, one thing became obvious to me. These offline establishments—the malls, upscale coffee shops and restaurants—have become a microcosm of modernity and affluence. Although, not one that reflects Indonesia. At least not yet. One of my informants, a young VC managing a new fund—let’s call him Yeremia—made the following remark: “We’re in SCBD but this is not Indonesia. This is more like Singapore.”

Most of my VC informants’ offices, if they have an office (not all do), are situated in SCBD. The mall ASHTA is within walking distance of their office spaces. That’s worth noting, considering Jakarta is not known to be a walkable city. Efforts to make Jakarta a more pedestrian-friendly city have only occurred within recent years—starting in 2019, under the leadership of then Jakarta’s governor Anies Baswedan.

As someone who was born and raised in Indonesia, I found myself making a similar remark to Yeremia’s as I walked around the district and frequented the dining areas in SCBD.

“We’re in SCBD but this is not Indonesia. This is more like Singapore.”

Indonesia has long been associated with imageries of a holiday getaway, not of a metropolitan life. And yet, at ASHTA—which I would visit a few times a week to meet my informants—the crowd is that of office people and professionals wearing neat smart casuals, some with lanyards carrying their office access cards hanging around their necks.

In a country in which the economy is built on the back of producing goods, these lanyards have become a status symbol. Whereas, the cafes and restaurants in SCBD have become extensions of the office spaces. They are cafeterias for those working in nearby buildings, as well as go-to places to take meetings, whether in a one-on-one or a group setting, evident by the lingering crowd of working professionals on the dining tables way past lunchtime.

That’s also where I met Yeremia, at one of the fine dining restaurants in SCBD, a spot that he chose.

There seems to be a degree of deliberateness from these VCs in choosing to be situated in places like these. Places that are meant to be distinct; to stand apart from the broader context of Jakarta’s messy public spaces and Indonesia’s growing middle class. By that I mean, a conducive work office in one of these tower buildings and being able to eat out every lunchtime at a nice restaurant does not reflect the reality of the majority of the Indonesian working population. It’s an aspirational gap, as Yeremia would argue. One he tries putting to good use.

Dita: Why do you choose to meet people in these places?

Yeremia: We sort of want to create the illusion, right? VCs are salesmen. Where we meet is a sales point. We sort of sell them the dream, you know.

D: To the founders?

Y: To the founders. When you’re just starting.

D: What dream are you selling them?

Y: That you can have a big office in SCBD. Who doesn’t want that? It’s basically a higher life, in a way. A higher socioeconomic status.

To Yeremia’s credit, the restaurant where we met did have a nice ambience.

At the beginning of my fieldwork, I briefly negotiated for access to the offices of these venture capital firms, wanting to practise the participant observation method the discipline of anthropology is known for. (Participant observation is a research method where the researcher participates in the day-to-day activities of a group they are studying to gain a holistic view of the group’s cultural viewpoints, values and practices.) However, it became immediately clear that that kind of access would be difficult to acquire. VCs deal with sensitive and confidential data. It makes having a researcher on-site following people around not an ideal arrangement for them.

I kept the participating and observing element alive by going to events where VCs were present, but eventually, most of the insights I gathered came from the more intimate, in-depth interviews. Within the field of anthropology, interviews have long been assigned a secondary position to participant observation. Ethnographic research wants to document not only what people say but also what they do, and the two usually differ, which makes relying on insights gathered from interviews less than ideal. But from the process of carrying out my fieldwork, I found that in the context of VCs, interviews are great tools of ethnographic inquiry.

I noticed halfway through my fieldwork that in interviewing my informants, I was not just listening to them explaining about the work that they do. I was listening to how they make sense of the (venture capital) world as well as their place in it. I was observing how that sense-making gets translated into how they carry themselves and deliver their sales pitch. In other words, while the relationality established during these meetings was that of researcher-informant, it seemed to be the case that from the venture capitalists’ perspective, this was just another work meeting where they would have to network, present themselves, and share their expertise.

In a sense, in doing these interviews, I was not taking these venture capitalists out of their social field, I became embedded in it. It was also a more intimate way of “being with” my informants compared to the networking events I attended. In the networking events, conversations were short. The primary goal of these spaces seemed to be to get as many contacts as possible of the people one believes to be relevant to one’s work, or to say hi to familiar faces briefly. Arguably, I wouldn’t have gotten as much insight by relying on observing the way venture capitalists network in these instances.

During my fieldwork, I became aware that by catching up with the venture capitalists one-on-one and by allowing them to pick our meeting spot, I ended up becoming situated in places where they would normally take their meetings.

In a way, my interviews became a modality to participate in the world of venture capitalists.

As to what was shared in these conversations, that’s for next time.

Note: As I’m turning my dissertation into a series of newsletters, I’m getting back in touch with the informants of my research. For this post, the aforementioned senior director and Yeremia have consented to their contribution being published on this newsletter.

My work as a journalist introduced me to finance. First, at The Jakarta Post, a national Indonesian newspaper, and then at The Ken, a Bangalore-headquartered media startup that writes about business and technology.

At The Jakarta Post, as part of its training programme, newly-recruited reporters received an opportunity to train for different “desks”, or departments that handle specific news. I was assigned to the “Business” desk, which covers business and economics, after a stint at the “City” desk, where I covered local affairs in Jakarta.

Business reporting came to me like a new language. I remember one of the first events I had to cover as a business reporter was a press conference by a bank. I sat through and listened to what felt like a barrage of jargons—“non-performing loans”, “net interest margin”, “net interest income”. I was lost, to say the least. How was I supposed to write a report due either that day or the next day when I couldn’t understand what the speakers were saying? On the ojek (motorcycle taxi) ride from the conference venue back to The Jakarta Post office at Palmerah, I messaged my editor. I barely understood a thing, I told her. She was kind enough to give me the time and confidence to work on my comprehension. (I did manage to get a hang of it in time.)

From business reporting at The Jakarta Post, I moved on to covering startups and technologies at The Ken. Another new “beat”—an area of specialisation—for me. I found myself evaluating startups’ “business models”, assessing their “path to profitability”, and gauging a reader’s interest based on the startup’s “valuation” and recent funding rounds—“Series A”, “Series B”, “Series C”, etc. I found myself in a similar position as I was when I first started reporting for The Jakarta Post’s Business desk: I had entered a new world that operates with its own language.

In both instances, after being dazed and confused, I eventually found great satisfaction in understanding and deciphering these new languages. The jargon—specific terms that kept being repeated—became an entryway to understand things considered to be of value in these specific industries. If anything, being able to not only “crack the code” but also use it as a part of my inquiry makes my journalistic endeavour all that more interesting.

Studying venture capital ethnographically was essentially that for me. Yes, I was exposed to the world of venture capital through my reporting on startups. Yes, I did interview a few dozen venture capitalists during my work as a journalist at The Ken, mostly as part of a coverage on startups. But rarely was the spotlight on the venture capitalists. My understanding of the world of venture capital, I would say, was limited before taking it on as a topic for my dissertation. (I’d like to think I understand it slightly better now.)

In one of my conversations for this research, one of my informants asked why I was interested in writing about venture capital. I gave them a version of my answer, but only so much can be said in one meeting. In this preface, I’ll attempt to write a more complete reply.

Firstly, I am drawn to the idea of deciphering its language. When I use the term “language”, I don’t only refer to the specific terms that are commonly used within the industry, but also the set of value systems, and the way the industry operates. I would say it’s a chicken-and-egg situation between my interest in the particularities of the industry and my interest in the study of anthropology. It would be true to say that anthropology allows me the opportunity to formalise this interest of mine, but it is also true that anthropology makes the case for the inquiry interesting.

Before I go any further, to shed light on the field of anthropology, I’ll borrow anthropologist Tim Ingold's definition of anthropology in his book “Anthropology: Why it Matters”: “Anthropology, in my definition, is philosophy with people in it.” Anthropology as a practice is about trying to inhabit a world just as the participants of that world would inhabit it. The goal is “to share in their presence, to learn from their experiments in living, and to bring this experience to bear on our own imaginings of what human life could be like, its future conditions and possibilities,” as Ingold wrote in his book.

In short, my project is about what it is like to live life as a venture capitalist in Indonesia.

That leads me to the second reason for my endeavour, which also serves as a reflection on my positionality in my research. So far, I’ve talked about how my journalism work shaped my research interest. I also took the time to ponder whether and, if so, how, my personal attributes—nationality, gender, economic status, religion, ethnicity, etc—affect the lens through which I view the world.

According to a World Bank report published in 2020, one in five Indonesians are middle-class. It is a cohort that has been growing faster than other groups. There are now at least 52 million economically secure Indonesians. While more recent data showcases that Indonesia’s middle class is now shrinking, I grew up with Indonesia’s fast-expanding middle class as a backdrop. My parents were part of that group making their way into economic security. Props to them, I did grow up with a sense of financial stability and ease. But being newly financially secure, as I understood from my parents’ stories, came with the perspective of seeing money as something fickle. It comes and goes, and you need to save up for rainy days. It is to be reserved, not spent.

My exposure to the world of venture capital has given me plenty of food for thought when it comes to what is considered as value in the world, and the ways to materialise that which is deemed to be valuable. Money has become a different breed in the world of venture capital. Its purpose is to feed the growth machine. My positionality—in this case, the economic condition and beliefs I was raised with—has allowed me to notice that gap between what money means in a country with a fluctuating middle class and what it means in the world of high finance where venture capitalists situate themselves. I am of the view that many of the insights I wrote about in my ethnography came from the ability to notice where things are juxtaposed.

Last but not least, I thought this inquiry was worth the while as I witnessed the consequences of money that comes in waves and moves fast—as opposed to the slow build-up and “leaky” as I grew up to see them.

When I joined The Ken in 2020, the startup and tech scene was booming despite the pandemic—or rather because of it—reaching its peak in 2021. The landscape was busy with funding announcements and tech companies going or planning to go public. A few months into 2022, however, the sentiment shifted. I started writing about startup and tech layoffs, as well as their closures. I spoke to people from both ends—the employees being laid off and the venture capitalist who approved of said layoffs. I noticed a sense of detachment between the two. I saw how employees took on a “neoliberal selfhood” (a concept I’m exploring at length in my project) while the founders and financiers cited “an uncertain macroeconomic outlook” in their press releases to justify the layoffs. I wanted to further inquire where that sense of distantness comes from; how it came to be. How did finance come to be understood as a set of macroeconomic headwinds and tailwinds as opposed to a product of people’s agency?

It is this interest that kickstarted my study of finance from a cultural standpoint.

You might ask, “What is it that you’re trying to say through your project? What is the takeaway? Where is the list of actionable items?” In its current format, my 15,000-word ethnography (and from it, a series of much shorter articles) does not come from a place of wanting to reach a conclusive statement on what venture capital should be or what venture capitalists should be doing. Rather, it is a critical read of how it is now, based on the author's particular interpretation of things. The reader should be the one deciding what to make of it.

Stay tuned.

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