The Digital Landscape of Southeast Asia, from fake news to 5G
Anti-Dystopians 2.1: A conversation with Kyra Jasper and Andreyka Natalegawa
August is like if Sunday was a month; so September must be Monday morning. And with that, the Anti-Dystopians are back from our summer holiday!
To start off Season 2 of the Anti-Dystopians, we’re zeroing in on some of the global aspects of technology politics. This week, it’s Southeast Asia. I talked to Kyra Jasper and Andreyka Natalegawa about the digital landscape of SE Asia, from Facebook’s relationship with the junta in Myanmar and fake news laws in Indonesia to Huwaei’s plans for 5G and ASEAN Smart Cities.
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Articles mentioned in this podcast
Articles by Kyra and Andreyka
Articles on Southeast Asia
Articles on Myanmar
Articles on Indonesia
Articles on Thailand
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Short Summer Reading List
A brief list of some of the things I’ve been reading
This week, Max Chafkin’s biography of the PayPal and Palantir founder The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power is released. (I’ve definitely not been eagerly anticipating it for 12 months.) We spoke to Andrew Granato, whose seminal article on Thiel is featured in Chafkin’s book, last November about Thiel.
Congratulations to @chafkin on The Contrarian, and a thank you for his generosity in credit. Working on Thiel’s story was a tremendous experience and I’m thrilled that it has been useful to reporters working on covering one of the most fascinating people in America.
You can listen to the Anti-Dystopians episode here, or check out the newsletter here, in case you missed it. Also quite good, a review of the book by my supervisor David Runciman in the LRB.
The entire FSGxLogic series on technology has been outstanding, and Alec MacGillis’s book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America is no exception. Despite my desire to devour everything and anything relating to Amazon, I was behind on Fulfillment—but it was well worth the wait. With absolutely masterful story-telling, the book brings together so many disparate threads in what is ultimately a history of American cities, as well as tech. Highly, highly recommend.
The FAA has grounded Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic after it turns out that some very dangerous things might have happened during the billionaire’s highly publicized flight to space. 🙃🙃🙃 #ICYMI — my Boston Review article on the private space race (spoiler alert: I think it’s bad).
How many philosophers do you know who get Vogue covers? Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex is supposed to be phenomenal, and the snippets I’ve read stand up to the hype. Check out the NY Times excerpt: What’s Wrong With Sex Between Professors and Students? It’s Not What You Think.
The Other Afghan Woman is a phenomenal long read on Afghan women in the countryside, for whom the American occupation has not been a liberating experience, and what the Taliban takeover means for the “two” Afghanistans
The new issue of Logic Magazine “Kids” looks great, especially Victor Petrov’s article “Socialist Cyborgs: When Bulgaria tried to save communism with the kids.”
In some schadenfreude news, it turns out that the best predictor of how quickly people learned to code was language aptitude, rather than mathematical ability. How nice.