Category: Books, essays and others

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Books, essays and others Politics & government Society

[2992] Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message

Those concerned with the world would likely take Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me as an important work about racism in the United States. I could only believe the book’s importance would only rise further as the white identity politics entrenches itself in the western world. Coates there reveals the societal hypocrisy that exists in the United States with regards to racism vis-à-vis his experience as a black person. While the subject of Between the World and Me is grim, the language used by Coates across all its pages is beautiful.

Cover of Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Message.

When The Message came out in October this year, I was quick to pick it up. The controversy surrounding the book made me all the more curious about Coates’s latest work. That controversy involved him equating Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. He had visited Israel and Palestine (and a few other places) and the book was published as Israel continue to commit horrendous killing not just in Palestine but also in Lebanon, while proceeding with its illegal land grabbing exercise in the West Bank.

Coates’s latest is beautifully written, no doubt, but equating Israel’s behavior to apartheid is hardly a new groundbreaking point. That message and other criticisms he lobs in Israel’s directions are only controversial because pro-Israel readers (and non-readers) consider any criticism of Israel as racism/antisemitism. To the wider world, there is no controversy but only a nod to Coates signifying the lack of moral authority Israel has in order to make such accusation.

Israel is not the only subject of the book. He speaks of his visit to Senegal to explore the history of slavery in the US and his own roots. It is here I think where the language is at its smoothest, hence my favorite section of the book.

In both parts of the book, the seeds are quite clearly the points on racism discussed earlier in Between the World and Me. Realizing this, I feel The Message is an extension of Between the World and Me. The former is expands the reality perceived by Coates in his earlier work with the wider world in mind.

But the act of expanding older points does not make The Message unimportant. Sometimes, profoundness of points made is not the point itself. Sometimes, the point is the realization of something had to be done. In justifying writing The Message, Coates writes:

…The figure is you, the writer, an idea in hand, notes scribbled on loose-leaf, maybe an early draft of an outline. But to write, to draw that map, to pull us into the wilderness, you cannot merely stand at the edge. You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil. You have to discover the ravine is really a valley and that the stream is in fact a river winding south from a glacier in the mountains. You can’t “logic” your way through it or retreat to your innate genius. A belief in genius is a large part of what plagues us, and I have found that people widely praised for power of their intellect are as likely to illuminate as they are to confound. “Genius” may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.

And so he traveled and wrote.

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Books, essays and others Pop culture Society

[2987] Outsiders, disruptions and mainstreaming

The central theme of Michiko Kakutani’s The Great Wave is simple. It is written on the cover: outsiders drive innovation and they have been the cause of various disruptions in human history. It is not a groundbreaking argument to make.

The unremarkable observation would have made the book an uninteresting read for me, except she manages to pull me back in with her comment on arts and culture, an area where she is clearly an authority. Kakutani formerly worked as a book critic at the New York Times.

She tells how those living on the margin of US society—blacks especially but also immigrant communities generally—were cultural innovators who eventually dictated mainstream tastes in music, movies, literature and comedy. They were innovators because they were less bounded by orthodoxy of the (white) majority and that the dual nature of their identity (that as a member of a minority community and as an American) allowed them to reach out to multiple sources for inspiration.

Kukatani cites a long list of authors and artists to show just how prevalent the outsider-turned-insider phenomenon is in the US. The list feels like a long must read recommendation that reminds me of another book of hers, Ex Libris, which is a list of 100 or so modern-time books that she believes worth reading.

While going through that cultural section of The Great Wave, my mind wanders to another book I read earlier this year. Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties also has the outsider-insider theme, although it appears more implicitly within the context of the 1990s. Klosterman’s discussion is specific to the the evolution of the rock genre, which began as the favored noise among youth with marginal taste in music (in the 1950s if I recall correctly) and then turned into billion-dollar megabusiness that Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana rebelled against.

So, I find The Great Wave interesting in the sense that it is a companion to The Nineties. Kakutani provides a generalized theory that explains Klosterman’s specific cases.

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Books, essays and others Politics & government Pop culture Society

[2986] Maybe it was Klosterman’s The Nineties

Klosterman’s generation may believe in something or they may not. But they more likely to believe in it, if not by too much.

That something could be almost anything and that is the attitude taken throughout The Nineties, a 2022 book written by Chuck Klosterman. That is not to say he takes no position on an issue. He does and I feel he understands the 1990s (from Gen X perspective) exactly through this prism: a prism that suggests disagreements during the decade (in the US) was never too big to matter by too much. This idea is repeated several times throughout the book but the point achieves clarity at the very end when he discusses the competition between George Bush and Al Gore during the 2000 US Presidential election.

Klosterman argues that in the run up to the election, both candidates were really standing on the same policy platform and that made it impossible for many voters to decide who should be voted in based on substantive matters. So difficult it was that Klosterman highlights that voters were deciding who to decide based on whom they prefer to have a beer with. The answer is Bush, who was more affable and less aloof than Al Gore. So similar were the two that a third candidate—Ralph Nader—became the credible second candidate, as Bush and Gore merged into one candidate in the mainstream consciousness.

Of course, things changed after the election and definitely after the 9/11 attacks. And that was really the last time politics were taken so unseriously by US voters, or so Klosterman argues. Differences since began to become so big that that kind of ambivalence during the 1990s could not exist anymore.

But the book is not primarily about politics. The Nineties mostly tries to capture the mood of the decade and that means multiple references to hit songs and major movies. While I regularly refer to Wikipedia or YouTube to immerse myself into a book, this the first time I went through Spotify to listen to songs while reading. Nirvana’s Smell Like a Teen Spirit gets an early mention as the author explains how the band from Seattle changed everything we understood about rock music. Yes, Nirvana is more grunge than rock, but Klosterman rationalizes songs such as In Bloom evolved as a rebellion against the overcommercialization of rock, which itself was pioneered by unruly teenagers in the 1950s. When rock stars of the 1990s wanted fame and wealth, Nirvana (and Kurt Cobain especially) represented a new breed of artists who despise those. It was uncool to be famous and wealthy. Feeling so guilty of his success, Cobain took a gun and shot himself in the head. There are several other songs that Klosterman goes in detail. Alanis Morissettte’s You Oughta Know. Tupac Shakur’s is another. Each has an outsized influence on the 1990s US.

Reiterating the ambivalence of the 1990s, Klosterman discusses Seinfeld in a segment of the book. It is a comedy sitcom famously about nothing. What follows is a discussion on television programming, on how many sitcoms received high ratings only because they were aired in certain prime slots and that those slots were in high demand because many viewers were too lazy to switch channels after watching something earlier. People were watching only because, to paraphrase Klosterman who in turn quoting George Costanza, “because it’s on TV”, in reply to the question why would anybody watch it. Not because it was good or anything else.

But not all fell into that logic. Some drove the market and were ‘Must See TV’. Friends did that. Here, Klosterman describes Friends in the ambivalent contradictory way: “None of the characters were supposed to be cool, so the audience didn’t need to be cool in order to understand why they were appealing.” And there is Frasier, described as “a white-collar show openly obsessed with intellectual sophistication. Characters casually joked about Jungian philosophy, Sergei Rachmaninov and Alfred, Lord Tennyson… But its dynastic grip on critics and Emmy voters galvanized a paradox: Frasier was seen as brilliant television because it focused on characters who would never watch television.”

Again, later on the author’s commentary on the Star Wars prequel that came out in 1999: “Movie critics disliked The Phantom Menace, but diehards hated it more… Lucas tried pretty goddamn hard to satisfy an entire generation of strangers who likely wouldn’t have been satisfied by anything he delivered. Did such a mean-spirited categorization bother him? Maybe. But not really.”

You get the drift.

I find the yes-no-maybe noncommittal construction as slightly offputting. Yet, beyond the noncommittal statements are brilliant assessment of the 1990s. Maybe, the decade was that complex that it is difficult to be sure what was really going on, unlike the decades after that seem to be governed more by black-or-white logic; either you’re with us or against us even in the face of ever more complex world.

Maybe, the possible lesson here is that in order to solve our contemporary divisions, we just need to be less sure of ourselves.

Categories
Books, essays and others Politics & government Science & technology

[2983] Reading Chip War and some questions for Malaysia

I had expected it to be a technical reading but I was pleasantly surprised at the ease I read through Chris Miller’s Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. It is a 400-page book published back in 2022 at a time when chip availability was still a big problem that caused delays in delivery of everything that had semiconductors in it. Those goods included small electronics like cell phones and gaming consoles as well as large items such as cars. I had to wait for almost two years for the delivery of a new car from Japan. Even as the semiconductor market conditions improved by 2023, the issues discussed by Miller in his book remain relevant as the China-US tech war heats up further and as the use of AI among the public spreads.

For most parts, Chip War goes through the history of semiconductors and it is less so about contemporary contest between China and US. In this sense, I feel the title is a slight misnomer. When I first thought of the book title, I had imagined a little bit of reading notes from my work place: supply chain, industry interlinkages, international trade, policies, tariffs, war. While the author discusses these topics, they are all subsumed under the historical narrative that covered industry development during World War II and right up to the present day. And the historical narrative, in many ways, is written around multiple personalities (scientists, engineers, military men and politicians) who played (and still play) a role in the development of semiconductors. Contemporary issues are covered in a few chapters close to the end.

The author does provide brief technical description for things like early transistors, modern chips, and advanced equipment needed to make those chips. But that does not affect the readability of the book negatively, which is good thing. It is just not that technical. Some may find the non-technicality as a negative, since more than one engineer in multiple reviews have criticized Miller for oversimplifying various processes.

The United States is the main focus of the book, given its centrality in developing and the marketing semiconductors. Several other countries are mentioned extensively too. Soviet Union/Russia for its failure. Taiwan, South Korea and Japan for their successes. And China for being the new kid on the block and how the country is challenging US technological supremacy in a way the Soviet Union never could.

Malaysia has two or three mentions throughout the book, as the country plays major roles in testing and packaging of semiconductors. Those roles are not as sexy as designing or fabricating chips, but it is still essential in keeping the industry running.

Here, I want to touch something discussed in the book that has a direct impact on a specific Malaysian policy: the development of Malaysia’s 5G infrastructure within the context of China-US tech war.

Malaysia through its state-owned entreprise Digital National Berhad (DNB) is building the country’s 5G network with equipment and expertise supplied primarily by Ericsson. The selection of Ericsson is not without controversy, with the other contender being Huawei of China. The current government under Pakatan Harapan however appears unhappy with the DNB-Ericsson arrangement and has hinted that Malaysia should have a second network built by Huawei.

Of relevance here is that Huawei has come under strict restrictions imposed by the US, restrictions which have deprived the company from the latest chips needed to run 5G network. This has forced China to hasten the development of its own indigenous chip industry and indeed since 2020 when the US first tightened export controls on Huawei, the company and the general Chinese semiconductor industry have made progress in advancing its own chip design and manufacturing capability. Yet China is behind that of the US and its allies in terms chip technology. These allies include Taiwan that run the world’s most advanced chip manufacturing facilities (TSMC’s), and the Netherlands that makes the world’s most advanced chipmaking machinery (ASML’s). China is now able to design and manufacture 5nm chips (as of 2023?) but struggles to close the gap with 2nm chips that US-centric supply chain is now focusing on.

In more general terms, China might be 3-5 years behind the US chip technology. The 3-5 years gap might sound small, but for an industry governed by Moore’s Law, it is not something someone could shrug off.

Under these conditions, my question is, would it make sense to turn to Huawei for Malaysia’s 5G infrastructure (assuming building a second 5G network makes sense at all)?

From the way Miller described it in Chip War, Huawei faces difficulties in securing advanced chips needed for 5G equipment, unlike Ericsson.

And if Malaysia does get a second 5G network to be built by Huawei, would that 5G infrastructure be inferior to the first one due to restrictions faced by Huawei ?

Or is Chinese chip technology, wherever it is on the trailing edge, good enough for Malaysian purposes?

From Malaysian perspective, this does not sound like a geopolitical concern (Sinophobia?) that some in government make it out to be. Rather, it is a practical technological concern.

Categories
Books, essays and others Sci-fi

[2981] Reading, listening and watching The Three-Body Problem

There have been several science-fiction novels adapted to the screens in recent years. Apple TV+’s Foundation is one. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is the name. And the most recent is Netflix’s 3 Body Problem. In that immature adolescent pride that still exists inside of me, I am proud to say I have read all of them long before I have watched these three. So, I can understand criticisms some have about how unfaithful these screen adaptations could be.

I am not too fanatic about source fidelity. I can understand and accept different medium may require tweaks. What works in written form might not work on the screen. Foundation is the guiltiest in this sense. Despite its liberal interpretation of the books, I still enjoyed the series. Dune is also guilty but not by much. And it is not just science-fiction adaptations suffering from such criticisms. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings has details left out but the trilogy is just incredible. In contrast, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit appears to have added unnecessary draggy pages to make the movie series unbearable and an insult to J.R.R. Tolkien’s short book, and Jackson’s own adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.

3 Body Problem appears quite faithful to Liu Cixin’s original work The Three-Body Problem. Yes, there are some divergences as far as I can remember: the main scenes have been shifted from China to the UK and Europe (making the series whiter than it should) and several scenes including the multiplayer mode are new. But the storylines are intact as I far as I could tell.

Still, I have not watched all the episodes yet. 3 Body Problem was after all released on March 21, just three days earlier and I am not about to binge watch it. But I can say I recommend it (and the novel too, which I enjoyed thoroughly).

This brings me to a question I have in my head for some time now while watching all these adaptions. Does it matter if you either read or watch it? In fact, with the rise of audiobook, does reading, listening or watching something truly matter?

Does the medium matter?

I know different sensory approaches offer different experiences. Reading offers the greatest details but it can be a laborious exercise. Try reading The Wheel of Time from start to finish. Listening arguably offers the same level of details but, at least for me who I think processes information best through sights, the level of focus is just not there. Moving pictures losses the details but makes the material easier to understand (assuming it is not Tenet) and oftentimes, quicker as well.

I was a snob once, and that partly why I have read all these science-fictions. But as I grow older, I am realizing that there are too many books to read out there in the world. I just do not have the time to go through all of them. And even during my snobbish period, I came to know various work through the screens instead of through pages. The BBC’s Pride and Prejudice. An adaptation of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. The 1939 adaptation of Gone With the Wind. I have come to know many classics through televisions and the movies, not books.

Coming back to the question. If I were younger, I would say yes it matters. Now, upon the realization there is no time, I can no longer be a snob. Now, I will say no.