23 Oct 23 Monday Briefing

Lovely symmetry in today's lunar date – 9th day of the 9th month, or Double Ninth!

October’s conflagration continues apace, and while you should not look away, you should take a breather, and distract yourself for an interlude. Today is also the Double Ninth Festival, or Tsung-Yeung, and traditionally in Hong Kong and Macau we haul our kids to pay respects at their ancestors’ graves.

Dark Waters

The next pandemic will be bacterial, not viral. If that doesn’t immediately terrify you, consider that humanity has a known, growing resistance to antibiotics, in no small part due to over-prescription. India has been producing excellent small-screen productions for a global audience, and Kaala Paani on Netflix, its latest foray into medical thrillers, is no exception. If you do nothing else this week that will distract you from the conflagration, binge on this show.

“I did not expect to like it as much as I did”, in the words of my partner. Nuanced, layered characters – no one is ever only just the hero or the villain, thought-provoking portrayals of indigenous vs “city” people, the moral calculus of who gets to live or die… what’s not to like when all of that is crammed into a 7-episode show, indeed.

Gaslighting. Times 10.

If you get the low key – or perhaps even high key – feeling that you’re being gaslit by your media consumption this month, unplug your modem and router (after reading this briefing of course), and long read this very good book on Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East, which I’m currently plowing through.

Less salubriously, in the words of Foreign Affairs, “By the time readers arrive at the end of Jones’s astonishing examination of social media in the Middle East, they will be completely persuaded that it is now impossible to tell whether anything they read online is true.”

If I Die Young… (please, do not bury me in satin)

My government, in a continuous effort to digitally transform its citizens, released My Legacy, an online portal for citizens to store their last wills and testament and wishes in a digital vault. What seems to be missing, however, is the digital component that has been an inevitable part of our lives for at least 20 years now. Will unscrupulous companies attempt to profit from the detritus of our digital lives, post-death? Eurgh.

Bits and Bobs

The shape and structure of languages, the constraints of technology, and the evolution of said constraints and technology, all in a fascinating X thread!