https://amw.livejournal.com/470841.html
The best thing about not working is that i have a bit more time to think about things that during the other 49 weeks of the year i struggle to find the mental or emotional space for.
For instance, sometimes when a topic like UBI comes up you'll get this flippant question like "since you hate work so much, what would you do if you weren't working?"
And the answer is - i don't have a fucking answer because i have to use up all the energy available to me just doing this job that i don't want to do. That's literally the point. Because work is all there is, i don't even have the energy to imagine what else there could be. That's what work does to me - it destroys all motivation to do anything else, to even consider what a different world could look like.
But, on this briefest of weeks off, i can at least start to think about these things in a way that is a little deeper. It's still starting from a shallow context, however.
Yes, i am going to talk about TV and YouTube again.
As an aside, i suppose that YouTube itself has made the point that TV doesn't have to be shallow, because there is now an entire generation of kids that has grown up watching deep video essays that deconstruct popular media. Media criticism has evolved into a whole new genre of informative entertainment. There's even a whole subgenre of self-referential meta criticism that come across like "video essays: a video essay". Turns out people love to use entertainment as a springboard for pontificating and i guess that's the whole point of art anyway, so in the great tradition of everyone since ever, here we go.
What do i want to do with my life?
What would i do if i wasn't working?
I have a lot of interests. Electronic music. Space exploration. Vegan food. There's a bunch listed on my LJ profile. Some of these interests like certain types of food are small and simple things i can slot into pretty much any lifestyle. Others are deep areas of scientific research or technical skill that i would never be able to master at this point in my life and simply enjoy paddling about in as an amateur. If i was not working, i could put more energy into those things.
Cynical people might make a case that amateurs by definition cannot earn a living from their hobby and thus have nothing meaningful to contribute to society in pursuing it, but i hope there are none of those on LiveJournal because this very platform is an outlet for amateur writers to share their writing without any intent of fame or fortune. And yet we still enrich one another's lives. Our hobby still has an impact!
So, if i never had to work again would i become a full-time hobbyist? Sure. But is that practical? No. It's a lot closer for me than for most people thanks to the inheritance i received when my mother died, but it's still not quite feasible, financially. Ironically, people with more family and less money might have better options.
One TV show i watched recently was a Netflix comedy series called Mo. It's about a family in Texas who have been stuck in the immigration pipeline for over 20 years and are also stateless because they were pushed out of Haifa in the Nakba, then moved from the Israeli-occupied West Bank to Kuwait as migrant workers, then fled Kuwait during the Gulf War. The background story is pretty heavy, but the show is typical light sitcom fare. There is no attempt at grit, it's filled with over-the-top situations and implausible escapes. The story is centered around toxic masculinity and family melodrama, not the geopolitical situation.
Anyway, there is a point in season two of Mo where (spoilers but not really) they finally get travel documents and go to Palestine to visit their family. And although there are a couple of scenes that are reminiscent of the Louis Theroux settler documentaries and touch on the real-world challenges of life under occupation, the main point of it is about the emotions the main character experiences as he visits this place where his grandparents lived and where he still has extended family.
The show made me think about my life as a migrant and how strongly i identify with the migrant experience, but also to some degree the experience of feeling stateless. In the case of the characters in Mo, their notion of statelessness is concrete - not holding citizenship of anywhere. For me it's more a sense of holding on-paper citizenship of two countries, while not feeling a deep ancestral connection to either one.
To be fair, my Canadianness was always a citizenship-of-convenience, but even my Britishness is more of a colonial accident than a meaningful ethnicity. I was born in England, sure, but my mother and her family were Dutch and my father holds New Zealand citizenship by descent, which is odd because i only ever knew of my grandfather as a resident of Hong Kong and later the Philippines. I think this is why Brexit hit me so hard, and why i still feel traumatized by it - because i had the only part of my citizenship that actually reflected a real component of my cultural heritage torn away from me. My legitimacy as a European citizen has been stripped and it still hurts me so, so fucking much.
I wonder if this background led to me feeling drawn to China after Brexit, and why i picked Guangdong to live specifically. I cried and shook for an hour when i visited Hong Kong again 8 years ago, decades after the first time. Just like Mo going back to Palestine in the TV show, it felt like rediscovering a piece of my family heritage that previously had just been experienced through letters and phone calls.
It's these stories that connect with me, stories of displacement, stories of migration, of unusual connections to the land.
I am part-way through season 4 of Le Bureau des légendes, and the arc in this season is about cyberwarfare. There was a throwaway line in one of the episodes about whether a certain hacker could be persuaded to change sides, and the point that was made was that this hacker cared more about solving tough problems and getting to play with the best tech in the world over any particular political allegiance.
Political apathy is a common trope applied to hackers in TV shows, but it's not without a basis in reality. There really is an element of anti-statist or post-statist sentiment in hacker culture. The "an cap" libertarian types imagine a world where their smarts led them to deserved riches and feel that government only gets in their way. Some folks may think back to the less angsty and meritocratic elements of the hacker manifesto: "This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud... We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias..." One naïve hope i held was that people would come to see supremacism as absurd in a world where information flows freely.
In this story i can see my career intersecting with my personal interests and also my migrant identity. The work that i do in my job right now is similar to the work that i would do if i was employed by a three-letter agency - building tools that consume streams of data in order to analyze signals and spot anomalies that could indicate abuse... but i like to imagine i would feel more fulfilled at work if i was doing it for an organization that ostensibly exists to defend human rights rather than one that exists as for-profit entity under capitalism. In reality it's an idle fantasy because i don't have an ideological connection to my countries of citizenship and no third party with an ideological carrot to offer would seek me out anyway because - unlike the character in the show - i am not a singular genius. Like most so-called "software engineers", i am closer to a plumber than a mathematician. There are millions of people who can do the exact same job i do, and few that come with my baggage.
So imagining myself as a spy is escapism. Could i ever leverage my career into something that matters to me? No. It will never happen. I am so fucking tired of people helpfully suggesting that because i know computers it must be trivial to find meaningful work in government or at an NGO where i can apply my expertise. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a doctor. It's like selling production line workers the myth they, too, might become millionaires if only they worked a little bit harder.
Another throwaway line in season 4 of Le Bureau was that because the hacker to be recruited was 26 he was basically past it. The next generation will surpass him. While that might be true for virtuoso cryptographers, it's probably not true for code peasants like me. But it's still true if what you're hiring for is not skills but ambition. Young people will put up with more shit, they are more able to be molded into what the organization leadership wants, they are cheaper, they have more energy... The Russian was right: i am past it. At my age the only skills that are transferable outside of my niche are management skills, and i fucking hate management.
Ugh, this tangent is hitting too close to home, especially as the Sunday night blues start looming.
But i still like to watch a TV show about spies because it gets at these other topics that resonate with me. Politics and religion and ideology and all of these institutional conflicts that displace people and cause them to question their identities and their loyalties and their convictions... That stuff feels so fucking real to me, it feels personal and relatable, it's humanity engaged in the most human of struggles. That is the space i would want to work in, if i could do it all again. That is what i am interested in, what i am passionate about. And perhaps the appeal of the context of it being a spy show is that the characters are deeply engaged with these topics, while also standing removed from them, existing in the space where they have to be the cold and analytical ones. What makes the stories impactful is the tension between realpolitik and human compassion.
Which sort of leads me back around to the topic of a YouTube series i've started watching recently. I hesitate to link it for fear of it looking like an endorsement, but it's recordings of a teacher at a top-tier school in China giving grand, sweeping lectures on geopolitics that went viral on TikTok in June because he predicted in early 2024 that Trump would win the presidency and the US would attack Iran. (Okay, here's a viral snippet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pG-8XLLaE0) The framing of his lectures is Asimov's Foundation series, which is a sci-fi story about building an algorithm that can predict the future by examining history. I've watched a handful of the lectures so far, and my sense is that he is presenting a "Guns, Germs and Steel"-like pop science take on history, where the world is reduced to simplistic stories that pithily explain every major event as a logical outcome of the social structures that preceded it.
The interesting thing about the videos, though, isn't the content so much as the context. These kinds of pop science "theory of everything" takes are dime a dozen on YouTube, including more tankie perspectives like this one. Like misinformation, it features cherry-picked and outdated facts that create an air of plausibility, but by leaning on them too heavily it results in questionable and sometimes demonstrably incorrect conclusions. What's interesting is - assuming this isn't a very sophisticated CCP psy-op - this provides a neat insight into an educational project aimed at the highest echelon of Chinese kids. There is one point where he pauses to take questions from the class and although we can't hear the students, it's clear that they are really struggling with the concept of what life might be like to be poor, which instantly busts the myth that modern China is even just a little bit communist.
And that's what makes the videos a fascinating watch. If you lived in China or spoke to the children of Chinese elites overseas (university students etc), you might find that either they are very politically apathetic or they have strong convictions about the world that sound very much like this guy's lectures. This isn't the Chinese nationalist view of the "little pinks" or the "wolf warriors", this is more a reflection of the intellectual class who's read Kissinger and Chomsky and Žižek: "and here are 327 citations that show how America is losing the war it started in Ukraine; and we pity the poor, working class Americans whose racist and unequal society is about to collapse due to the hubris of their imperialistic rulers; and when America inevitably does collapse - if they don't delay it a few years by invading Iran - Japan is destined to become the preeminent power in East Asia, because China is still a poor, developing nation, after all; which, by the way, is why we so deeply understand the oppression of the Global South by colonial powers" etc etc. It's hard to engage with this kind of rhetoric as a westerner because it's coming from a perspective of reality where China is always the victim. The same books, the same philosophers, the same basic facts are used to draw weirdly different conclusions about the world.
I think this is something people in the west misunderstand about authoritarianism. It's not an active "brainwashing" - at least not for the highly-educated class, who are the ones who will become the power-brokers of tomorrow - it's more subtle than that. It's coming to understand things through the lens of a very particular worldview that is pushed through every corner of the media. And, to be fair, many have suggested that Americans have the same problem in American exceptionalism. I like to think that's not the case because the media is objectively much freer in America than it is in China, but that might not be as true for their educational system, judging by the YouTube commenters who seem amazed that anyone could ever talk geopolitics at this level in high school. And, guys, this is not a high level!
It made me think back to my own schooling and various homework we had to do on current events like Nelson Mandela going free or the collapse of the USSR. An anti-nuclear educational activity we did back in the early 90s to this day lives in my head rent-free. I fondly remember Religion and Social Studies teachers in the Netherlands who spoke their political views with great conviction and tried their hardest to get us kids interested in and excited about political affairs in the Netherlands, in Europe and around the world. I credit at least some of my interest in social justice to these teachers, even if it took me years after high school to really understand what they were saying. I don't know what the fuck they're doing in American schools if kids aren't talking about racism or poverty or contemporary military conflicts, but this kind of education isn't all that unusual in other parts of the world.
So, with all that in mind, i also kind of like what this teacher in China is doing, because even though he is teaching from a problematic point of view, he is also lecturing in a way that is engaging. If i give him the benefit of the doubt, he may know that his simplification of history is not accurate, but by presenting the information in a story-like way that links it back to current events, it makes it more interesting for the kids. Rather than going on to study international affairs because they feel it's their duty as the sons of party elites, they might go on to study it because they're really excited by this story, this idea of what might happen in the future, and the thought of what they might be able to do to influence it! That's really the point of education, right? It's not just teaching kids some facts, which they could anyway find out on Wikipedia, it's about getting them enthused about a particular area of study.
And that is actually pretty rare in China, where the more typical form of education is just to memorize and regurgitate various facts and figures. In the context of China, this is probably as good as it gets! Which then makes me think that if American kids are getting a similarly shit education in their schools, then having them flip over to watch this guy on YouTube might at least get them inspired about global affairs... which is exactly what we will all need in the future if we want the next generation of politicians, diplomats etc to NOT start a world war and trigger another humanitarian catastrophe.
Which, finally, leads me back to thinking about what i want to do if i can ever break free of being a software engineer. And, it's this. I know i can't be a traditional educator. Going back to school myself will take too long. Also, quite frankly, kids are fucking stupid and would probably drive me crazy to be around all day. But something in the direction of trying to inspire, agitate, organize... This is something that i think would be rewarding. But how does that work? If you managed to read this whole spiel then you know a big part of my identity is that i feel stateless, or homeless... and i have no life outside of my job. I don't have family. I don't have a community. Traditional politics happens in your local area, but i have no contacts or connections. Maybe that's why i feel such affinity with transients. If i was still a European there would be places i could try to volunteer, learn French, learn Arabic, help out refugees at the grass roots and see what happens next. But i'm not a European any more so that's not an option.
Seriously, fuck Brexit.
Anyway, this post is way too long. It's literally taken me all Sunday. But the fact i'm able to write it all out is a testament to having had the week off, to letting my mind go to places i wasn't able to while i was working. I haven't really solved anything, but i feel like i've started to get more honest. If i do try to get involved in social work if or when i ever quit tech, i feel like helping migrants is something i care most deeply about. Whether helping them to settle into a boring, suburban, consumerist lifestyle if that's what they need, or helping them organize and raise awareness of the situation of their family, their peers, their people... I care about this corner of society. I care about equality and justice for people who are living with less rights simply by misfortune of where they were born or some political conflict that happened outside of their control. I can't singlehandedly build the Star Trek utopia where there are no borders, no nations, just people... but maybe i can do something small that plants the seed in the minds of others?
I dunno, this is my mid-life crisis. I don't have kids so i'm entertaining some white savior fantasy instead, right?
Except, like... these people are me too, and that's the point. I used to think i was some high class, white colonizer, jetsetting globalist fake of an immigrant. The same kind of impostor syndrome i have about being a woman because i'm trans. The same kind of impostor syndrome i have about being trans because i don't take hormones or make an effort to pass any more. I have the same impostor syndrome about not being a real immigrant because my job is fucking tech and i'm too rich to understand the struggle. When, actually, i lived almost my entire life as a non-citizen migrant, and then the one time i didn't, my own fucking citizenship got ripped out from underneath me.
So now i'm owning it. I know i'm privileged, but i'm still a migrant. I still lost my citizenship. And i want to find companionship in that, and i want to share the privileges that i do have with my peers who don't. I'm just not sure how. Not yet.
To be continued?
https://amw.livejournal.com/470841.html
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bill_schubert
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