Tag: capitalism

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

[3027] The enshittification of the internet and the rise of technofeudalism

The internet was supposed to be a wonderfully liberating medium. A force for good that equalized power by circumventing gatekeepers of all kinds: information wanted to be free. Almost all internet-based companies was a social crusader out to right some wrong when it all started back in the day. Google’s motto was ‘Don’t be evil’. That was the promise of the late 1990s and the early 2000s when the internet was still new in its anarchic stage where almost everybody competed to do good. Nobody online had market power.

But anarchy is always a transient state. By the mid-2010s, it is clear many had placed too much hope on what is a tool that could either improve or hurt society. And that tool increasingly has been used to drag society towards worse equilibria.

For some time now, the internet is a shitty place to be in. We cannot live without it but we are miserable with it. More than anything, the internet collectively has inverted its promise. The cyberspace is now a surveillance tool masquerading as a crack designed to advertize and sell everything.

Enshittification by Cory Doctorow is a 2025 book that attempts to explain how we got here. The term enshittification as Doctorow defines it is a process of internet platform decay from the perspective of its users.

The concept itself could be used to describe other services off the internet although these days the internet has proliferated everywhere that it is not helpful to make the online/offline distinction anymore, as much as it is unhelpful to call any company a tech company. If Grab a tech company, or just a transport company? Is Stashaway a tech company, or just a financial service provider company? Is Amazon an internet and tech company, or just a retail platform?

The enshittification process

Enshittification is a 3-stage process.

It starts with platform operators (Twitter/X, Facebook, Amazon or Google etc), being good to everybody and that means generating massive consumer surplus to individual users. This is stage 1 (the so-called be good to users stage).

Once the number of users hits critical mass, stage 2 (the abuse users for businesses stage) begins with the platform treating individual users badly in order to attract business users. The bad treatment generally include targeted and intrusive advertisements utilizing personal and private data tracked by within the platform and elsewhere too. Here, the platform operators are draining consumer surplus and redirecting it to sellers. As a result, businesses flock to the platforms. Individual users feel and understand the abuse but most of them could not leave the platform because their social network is already entrenched on the platform. Only the determined would exit and seek social interactions via other means.

Stage 3 (the stage of abuse businesses for the platform) is when there is enough business users around with the platform becoming the essential marketplace where all the businesses’ customers are. To exit the platform is to lose a chuck of customers and revenue. Platform operators then proceed to treat businesses badly by draining producer surplus towards themselves. This is done via various platform fees and advertisement requirement (pay to be seen or we place your product on page 999 instead of page 1). At times, the platform itself competes with its business client by cloning the business and placing its products above the clients (similar to the cheatings that happened in various stock exchanges as told in Michael Lewis’s The Flash Boys). There are various details in the book showing that much of the advertisement is fraudulent (paying for ads that do not really exist or ads with no noticeable effects on earnings) but businesses could find no way to hold the platform accountable. And the fees are pure rentseeking and structured in a way that prevent businesses from selling elsewhere (and if businesses do sell outside, they are forced make it more expensive).

The end result is that everybody except the platform operators gets stuck in a shitty environment where most producer and consumer surpluses get channeled to the platforms.

For all the technological advancement we have seen in the past 2 or 3 decades, in the end, the whole internet gets boiled down to an age-old phenomenon: the middle men abusing their (dominant) position.

Generalizing an old competition problem

In many ways, enshittification appears to be the new term to describe an old problem reappearing in the digital world. It is an old-known problem in competition or anti-trust where the dominant player abuses his or her position to extract surpluses from consumers. It is what a monopolist/oligopolist does.

First, you dump into the market to kill off all competitors and once monopoly power is established, you engage in predatory pricing. In Malaysia, we have witnessed this with Grab that now charges exorbitant fares after all its effective competitors have been driven off the road due to aggressive discounts in the early days of the service.

When Doctorow offers a way out, the solutions he gives are more competition in the market along with more rigorous anti-trust actions by the state and greater labor power through unionization.

These are the typical suggestions against monopolistic power but of course, the difference between textbook solutions and the problems outlined by Doctorow is that the technological, political and regulatory challenges in the real world are many times more complex than what discussed in a competition university classes. Internet monopolists are more technologically competent than the regulators, which makes running anti-trust policy more difficult to execute when compared to more traditional sectors like aviation or steelmaking. Many times too, regulators do get captured by the monopolists.

An old condition in a new world: technofeudalism

All those platform fees are simply rent with another name.

The rise of rentseeking as a major source of revenue from internet giants causes Doctorow to digress and borrow Yanis Varoufakis’s concept of technofeudalism, explained in his 2023 book Technofeudalism.

It is a neologism describing a condition where an increasing portion of revenue gets derived from rent (revenue arising from just controlling some assets/resources) instead of profits (revenue arising from productive activities minus the cost of running those activites). Varoufakis insists this represents a new kind of economic condition more akin to feudalism where long ago, landlords exacted rents from the working peasants who largely had no other choice but to work as farmers on someone’s else land. The peasants had to pay rent in various form to the landlords, regardless of profitability/harvest. Varoufakis further insists that this is a post-capitalism age, as capitalism is less about rent and more about profits.

A major component of enshittification of the internet fits Varoufakis’s framework well. Varoufakis is of course famous for this:

He is also the former finance minister of Greece during the European debt crisis, the former economist for Valve, the owner of the gaming platform Steam and all around leftwing economist.

Gamers should recognize these technofeudal trends quickly, where instead of buying and owning the games, they have to pay for subscription to play. There are also microtransactions (the worst of it, pay-to-win), which I would take as a subset of this trend.

But internet platforms are not the only guilty parties. Subscription-based model is proliferating in other sectors. In Malaysia, Perodua is selling its electric vehicles but with the battery must be rented from the manufacturers. Battery-as-a-service, as it is called. And then there is the more established term: software-as-a-service. SaaS is the ultimate example of technofeudalism; SaaS is a fancy term for rent-based businesses.

Electronic locks and anti-circumvention law

Central to much of the rentier tech economy (tech is a very loose term here) is the cover provided by a defective but mainstream intellectual property law.

Instead of copyrighting a new way of doing things productively, companies are copyrighting electronic locks to various machines (computers, printers, cars, etc) that should be open in the first place. Since the lock is copyrighted, hacking or breaking the them amounts to a crime while using the machines itself in whatever way mostly is not.

For example, a printer should be able to use third-party ink cartridges but the printer manufacturing prevents so by introducing an electronic lock. The lock allows only the use of the manufacturer’s own cartridges. Without the electronic lock, any ink with the right configuration would work with the printer. In fact, the use of any ink for the printer you own is not illegal. But the lock itself is copyrighted and breaking the lock is a crime. The protection for the electronic locks is the anti-circumvention law.

Because of this, the manufacturer, upon selling a printer, gets to enjoy repeat business through future ink purchases. And this is a rent and the law protects rents while stifling innovation instead of protecting intellectual property in order to encourage innovation.

Printers and cartridges are simple and maybe petty examples. But if you start to think about your smartphones and the restrictions its manufacturers impose on the users (famously, this is Apple), then the whole thing starts to become a more serious matter.

And one of the solution Doctorow proposes to fight technofeudalism, and rentiers in general, is to reform intellectual property law so that it returns to its original purpose: encouraging innovation.

No longer a curiosity: first degree price discrimination

Finally, I want to visit a section of the book that discusses the ability to track customers through all the private and personal data collected and sold by internet platforms through apps and in general, cookies everywhere, along with the ability to change prices dynamically/instantaneously based on those data due to the availability of electronic price display connected to the clouds.

Imagine two persons visiting an aisle just minutes apart. The first person would see a set of price different from the second person, because the retailers now have the technology to know a specific person’s preference (the tracking is so precise that you would think the apps are listening to you) and change prices based on that preference. By the way, this is already happening online where changing any price is a technological a trivial thing.

This is first degree price discrimination, where the seller is able to discriminate individual customers so effectively and completely that all consumer surplus gets extracted.

The concept itself is not at all new but 20 years ago when I was an economics undergraduate, such a thing was taken a did-you-know theory but with impossible application in the real world. It was a curiosity much like how the demand curve could slope upward. Today, it is not just a possibility. First degree price discrimination is becoming common and in all likelihood, the standard way of pricing if no regulation is forthcoming.

Perhaps this is the point of overly long book review: rapid technological advancement in the past 10 or 20 years is forcing a rethink of what we know of the world.

Categories
Economics History & heritage

[2833] The meandering history of joint-stock company

I read a nice little article on the New York Times today on the history of British foreign trade policy during Elizabeth I. Here is an excerpt:

Elizabeth’s Islamic policy held off a Catholic invasion, transformed English taste and established a new model for joint stock-investment that would eventually finance the Virginia Company, which founded the first permanent North American colony. [Jerry Brotton. England’s Forgotten Muslim History. New York Times. September 17 2016]

There is more to the part where the author writes “established a new model for joint stock-investment that would eventually finance the Virginia Company, which founded the first permanent North American colony…”

Before that, we need a digression:

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On to business.

I think I would trace the evolution of joint-stock company up to 500s-600s Arabia, where the model was innovated in the 1000s-1300s by early Renaissance era Italian cities, and later improved in England (and in the Netherlands?) by the 1500s-1600s.

The development was not random. They had a common origin in Arabia. The Italians imported the model through their trades with the Arab world, and later, the Italian way became the northern European law.

Arab traders formed temporary partnerships to finance long-distance trade. This preceded Islam. Muhammad participated in several before he became a prophet. It was especially a venture capitalist-merchant partnership. While this kind of economic cooperation probably happened elsewhere too, in Arabia it was  a common successful institution and that distinguished it from other common partnerships that might have existed in the 500s-600s or earlier elsewhere.

Italian merchants made the partnerships more permanent in the 1000s-1300s. Theirs was a merchant partnership although these merchants later became bankers themselves. Again, there was nothing extraordinary about such partnership except for one key feature: this was the first time in the world that a company could outlive the lifespan of its partners, leading to the possibility of intergenerational capital accumulation. Previous partnerships would usually dissolve once a partner quit or died. This very idea, commonplace now, was revolutionary and one of several components that gave birth to modern finance directly. Proof: when calculating the value of a company through its long-term dividend, we will take the timeline as going infinitely into the future. The method is called the discounted dividend model. We use the geometric series — ‘1/(1-r)’, an infinite series — to calculate the present value of dividend streams.

The English later refined it by introducing the joint-stock company, the first true company in the modern sense, taking to heart the Arabic and the Italian traditions and making ownership of wealth more democratic. I can recommend two books to explain the evolution. Kocka’s Capitalism and Koehler’s Early Islam and the Birth of Capitalism.

I like this article because it sets the context and explains why England needed a joint-stock company law: the monarch had no money to finance trade with the Ottomans and Morocco to bypass Catholic lands. Funny how history ties its ends. It meanders so violently.

And, British involvement in these Ottoman lands would escalate beyond trade one or two centuries later.

The same kind of law — company — did not evolve in China until much later during modern times. All Chinese foreign trades were done and financed by the Chinese emperor. There was no room for private initiative that much (that only changed several decades before the Opium War, and that company was (largely?) the East India Company, a British joint-stock company).

I’m unsure about company history/tradition in India or other places though. But we all know, the EIC ruled India for a long time.

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Society

[2818] God in the marketplace

There are times when books of different focus and field would run parallel with each other and reveal new insight on a specific idea, making that particular idea richer.

I recently finished Jürgen Kocka’s Capitalism where he touched on, among others, the shift of power from feudal lords to the merchant class. I am currently reading Karen Armstrong’s A History of God and this is what she has to say on the (somewhat) same subject:

The story of Elijah contains the last mythical account of the past in the Jewish scriptures. Change was in the air throughout the Oikumene. The period 800-200 BCE has been termed the Axial Age. In all the main regions of the civilized world, people created new ideologies that have continued to be crucial and formative. The new religious systems reflected the changed economic and social conditions. For reasons that we do not entirely understand, all the chief civilizations developed along parallel lines, even when there was no commercial contact (as between China and the European area). There was a new prosperity that led to the rise of a merchant class. Power was shifting from king and priest, temple and palace, to the marketplace. The new wealth led to intellectual and cultural florescence and also to the development of the individual conscience. Inequality and exploitation became more apparent as the pace of change accelerated in the cities and people began to realize that their own behavior could affect the fate of future generations. Each region developed a distinctive ideology to address these problems and concerns: Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India and philosophical rationalism in Europe. The Middle East did not produce a uniform solution, but in Iran and Israel, Zoroaster and the Hebrew prophets respectively evolved different versions of monotheism. Strange as it may seem, the idea of “God,” like the other great religious insights of the period, developed in the market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism. [Page 27. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong. 1993]

Heh.

Categories
Books, essays and others Economics History & heritage

[2816] A short history of capital accumulation

Capital accumulation as an idea sits close to the center of modern economic growth theory. Any introduction into the field will begin with physical capital accumulation, before population growth, technological progress, human capital and even institutions are progressively thrown into the mix to explain the real world.

As far as modern macroeconomics is concerned, I think I can trace the idea of accumulation as the key to growth right up to Harrod-Domar as formulated in the 1940s. The model has a naive mechanics. William Easterly lays out the world of Harrod-Domar within the context of international aid and points out the model’s weaknesses in his 2001 book The Elusive Quest for Growth. Those same criticisms led to the articulation of the famed Solow-Swan growth model in the 1950s, which in turn was improved in the 1960s through the Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans model. About twenty years later, the so-called new growth theory with its endogenous models dominated mainstream macroeconomics.

Harrod-Domar is the earliest modern growth theory with capital accumulation at its heart that I can think of. If I try really hard, I think I could cite Karl Marx in the 1850s-1860s and even Adam Smith in 1770s although both of them did not produce a model while I do not think Marx’s idea of accumulation is directly related to growth as we understand it today. I struggle to trace the evolution of the idea beyond Marx and Smith, although a quick search on the internet points towards St. Aquinas and Ibn Khaldun, and possibly right up to Greek philosophers.

But the tracing of these models and works only describes the evolution of the idea. It is not the history of accumulation per se.

Jurgen Kocka recounts the history of physical capital accumulation in Capitalism, a nifty book on the history of capitalism. First published in German in 2014, the English translation came out this year. It is only available in hardcover currently with a price tag of MYR142. I bought a copy from Kinokuniya in Kuala Lumpur. Kocka is a German historian focusing on German and eastern European labor history.

Kocka writes consumption pattern gradually switched from a period of instant gratification when personal accumulation was hard if not impossible for the majority to a time when where they began to care for the next generation and were able to gather private wealth and transfer it to their children as inheritance. Although Kocka does not use the term, this is the intergenerational capital accumulation.

The intergenerational accumulation happened in a limited fashion in the middle age be it in Europe, Arabia or Asia. Even among the merchant class, the accumulation and transfers were limited among a few families before the Industrial Revolution. Wealth produced by a person was generally consumed within his or her lifetime, with limited opportunity for intergenerational transfer. This happened as feudalism worked in the background, the great institution that prevented the majority who were serfs from accumulating capital. The personal wealth of the serfs generally belonged to or easily extracted by to feudal lords. What is the incentive for work when the fruits could be appropriated freely by the local lords?[1]

Private wealth accumulation in Europe began only during the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s. Rapid economic pace in the cities suddenly made accumulation faster than ever in history for most. That attracted serfs from the rural areas to the town and cities which led to the crumbling of feudalism as there were fewer and fewer pairs of serf hands to work for the feudal lord. Now freed from serfdom, common workers were able to accumulate private wealth and participate in intergenerational accumulation. It was a slow process and never a straightforward one judging from the various labor unrests and even revolutions during the industrial age but it did start the process of capital accumulation among the masses nonetheless.

But even before the Industrial Revolution, early companies in the 1100s in Venice played a role in intergenerational capital accumulation. A company, a product of various traders and merchants coming together to pool resources and diversify risk extended the accumulation horizon beyond the lifetime of a person. The application of the new social technology — along with the creation of double-entry accounting to keep track of the company’s resources — means the endowment got bigger and bigger, which encouraged bigger accumulation that was possible if wealth was restricted within one’s lifetime.

Some of these traders and merchants went on to form their own banks (as company) to finance their and others’ various business requirements. Jurgen in his book points to the 1300s as the turning point, when rich trading families first established banks in northern Italy. This made the financial market more efficient, which in turn aided them and other banking consumers to manage and amass their wealth better.

The evolution of companies continued in London and Amsterdam, capitals of the trading nations England and the Netherlands. The joint-stock companies were developed and more and more individuals and entities got together to pool their resources to finance, among others, the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company, the first true multinationals in the world.

But the greatest enabler of capital accumulation was, of course, technological progress, as stressed in the Solow-Swan model. Indeed, wealth per capita soared during the 1800s Industrial Revolution after thousands of years of largely stagnation that began in northwestern Europe.

Gregory Clark in his 2008 book A Farewell to Alms claims it happened in England and the Netherlands because they had the institutions that enabled the Industrial Revolution to take place in exactly those countries first. He goes on to suggest, controversially, that these institutions which were absent in other places led to a deep cultural change that made the industrial age possible.

Kocka does not challenge that in his book. While explaining the connection between industrialization and capitalism, he writes:

One the one hand, when industrialization began, capitalism already had a long history to look on. Not even in its proto-industrially expanded form did merchant capitalism, which was widespread throughout the world, lead inescapably to full-fledged industrialization. There are many cases illustrating this point. Conversely, the case of the Soviet Union substantiates how it is also possible for industrialization to exist in a noncapitalist form. The concepts of capitalism and industrialization are defined by different features, and it is advisable to make a sharp distinction between the two of them.

On the other hand, preindustrial-commercial traditions of capitalism, whenever they persisted, significantly promoted the breakthrough to industrialization, whenever that happened in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, industrialization took place within capitalist structures everywhere. Alternative models of a centrally administered economy were tried out under Communist auspices between 1917 and 1991. They proved to be inferior. China’s rapid industrialization also began to take off only when the country’s party leadership decided to loosen political controls step by step and make room for capitalist principles. There obviously was (and is) a pronounced affinity between capitalism and industrialization: for both, investments are of decisive importance. An inherent part of industrialization is the permanent search for new projects, as is constant engagement in new configurations; to this end, pointers and feedback from markets were and are irreplaceable. A decentralized structure that disperses decision-making among many different enterprises has proven indispensable. So far, any effort at industrialization expecting to be successful over the long run has presupposed capitalism. [Page 99-100. Capitalism: A Short History. Jurgen Kocka. 2016]

But accumulation did not always happen peacefully through hard work, production or technological progress. In the middle age, pillages, plunders and wars were a common way to accumulate wealth. There were a lot of cases in Europe and elsewhere as well. This continued into the 1800s during the colonial age where European mercantilism helped European powers accumulate more wealth.

Such mercantilism meant accumulation for European was the dis-accumulation for the rest of the world.

Kocka does not go into the dis-accumulation as he is focusing on European capitalism mostly. But he does mention the slave trades between Europe, Africa and America, where African slaves were used to man the plantations and fulfil European demand. It does appear to me the slave trade and European colonial policy decimated Africa.

In Asia, especially Malaya, colonialism seems to have the opposite effect. Although European powers, the British in Malaya especially, were still accumulating wealth, the colonialism did have an accelerating effect on domestic growth in the 1800s and the early 1900s. Perhaps the reason for that was that the colonial administrators in Malaya was importing European advancement along with various institutions from the Industrial Revolution, hence boosting technological growth in this part of the world.

So, was colonialism good or bad for Malaya in terms of capital accumulation? I guess the only way to answer it is to address the counterfactual: how would capital accumulation have progressed if Malacca was not defeated by the Portuguese war fleet? How would the area now called Malaysia have fared if it had never been colonized by the British and the Dutch?

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedMohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedMohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[1] — Let me digress slightly. Anthony Milner in The Malays believes the feudalist structure explains the lack of the Malay merchant class during the 1700s-1800s. The sultan as the feudal lord owned everything and the idea of private wealth among the masses did not exist. Everything within the realm ruled by the sultan belonged to him. Milner, if I recall correctly, cited Munshi Abdullah who lamented in his writing about the lack of security to self and property of the masses due to tyranny of the sultans in the 19th century Pahang, Terengganu and Kelantan.

While this sounds like a rival explanation to Syed Hussein Alatas’ as outlined in The Myth of the Lazy Native where he postulated that European colonialists killed the Malay merchant class by regulating trade in a way that granted monopoly to European traders, I feel both arguments can be true. Milner is describing the effect of the sultans’ influence on the masses while Syed Hussein focusing specifically on the merchant class. Indeed, Milner’s point is more general and hence, the effect of European monopoly could well happen within Milner’s explanation. So, it was a double-whammy for Malay traders.

Categories
Conflict & disaster History & heritage Politics & government Society Travels

[2584] Better commercialization than communism

Cambodia has a dark modern history and I always knew that. That knowledge did not bother me much previously because I did not really relate to it. Cambodia despite being so close to Malaysia appeared farther away from me than, for example, the United States where I spent my undergraduate years.

Cambodia was some land far away from my consciousness. Farish Noor once lamented that Malaysians knew more of New York, London and Paris than Jakarta, Bangkok and Manila. I am guilty of that.

My travels to Cambodia, specifically to its capital Phnom Penh, were my effort to turn his statement untrue. I started out in Siem Reap up north trying to relearn my Southeast Asian history. It was an adventure, going through and climbing all of the famous Angkor temples and more, and then getting lost in the obscure ones, which were no less impressive than Angkor Wat or Bayon. Only the fear of landmines prevented us from being too adventurous, on top of constraints involving time and money.

Warnings of landmines are a stark reminder of Cambodia’s dark past. Too many landmines were planted across the country by participants of the Cambodian civil war. While the war has long ended, efforts at clearing up the mines are still under way and there are new landmine victims every day. The past will not just go away quietly.

Even in the capital Phnom Penh, time passed slowly. I felt as if I was still living in colonial times during my stay there. French influences are remarkably strong still. There are many French tourists and expatriates even. It was as if they refused to leave in the first place.

That is understandable. The capital, located at the meeting of Tonle Sap and the fabled Mekong rivers, is beautiful. Rows of old buildings stand along the banks, providing a lively waterfront. If it wasn’t for the devastating civil war, Phnom Penh would have been one of the great cities of Southeast Asia.

The city was emptied during the communist Khmer Rouge regime. It is hard to imagine the beautiful Phnom Penh devoid of life but it was a ghost town in the 1970s, as were other towns in Cambodia in the same period.

The communist Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1975. They had a terrible idea of equality and wanted to create a classless society. But more than that, they did it in a hurry. Their solution was to turn everybody into a peasant overnight.

To do so, they forcefully relocated urbanites to the countryside. There were no doctors, engineers and other professionals under the Khmer Rouge. All were peasants. Peasantry, in reality, was a euphemism for forced labor. Many realized that. Those who questioned the Khmer Rouge were tortured and killed. The intelligentsia were murdered to protect the communist revolution, before Pol Pot turned on the Khmer Rouge itself in the name of power and ideological purity later in the late 1970s.

The failure of China’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, which aimed at creating a communist society quickly, was unheeded. The Khmer Rouge thought they were a better implementer of communism than their Chinese counterparts.

Well, judging by the result, maybe they were. According to the World Bank, there were more than seven million individuals in Cambodia then. By the end of the Khmer Rouge regime, between two million and three million were dead according to the United Nations. That was a significant proportion of total Cambodian population.

Yet, statistics are just cold numbers. It is always hard to humanize numbers that run to the millions. Being in Cambodia gave me the chance to understand exactly those numbers.

I visited the Tuol Sleng museum while I was in Phnom Penh. The museum was formerly a school, which the Khmer Rouge turned into a prison and a torture house. The turning of a school into a prison more than symbolized what the Khmer Rouge and, really, what communism in practice is all about.

Despite the purpose of the museum to remind us all of the past, entering that museum felt like an act of trivializing history. It cost two US dollars to enter the museum. There was something sacred about the museum that I could not explain. Yet, here, like many places in Cambodia, history had been commercialized. Past pain has been repackaged as a product of tourism. It was about making money. It felt wrong.

As I was about to condemn the commercialization as a scam, what I saw inside prevented me from protesting after all.

The first building was where the last tortured prisoners were placed in, and died. There was an empty rusty metal bed frame in each cell, with photographs of the last victims hung on the wall by the curators. The photographs were not pretty. The photographs were shot by the invading Vietnamese army as the Khmer Rouge regime fell. The Vietnamese came too late to save anybody. They found only rotting bodies bound to metal beds in the torture house.

The next two buildings had even punishingly smaller cells. It was much smaller than my bed at home. Judging by the condition of the cells, one could imagine the impossibility of life during the time of the Khmer Rouge. It was a kind of environment that if I were put inside, I would die almost immediately out of sheer despair. Out of the thousands who passed through the gates of Tuol Sleng, only a few survived it. Most were destined for the infamous Killing Field located a number of miles outside of the city, if they were not killed here.

What made the visit to the museum unbearable for me were pictures of hundreds or thousands of victims pasted on countless boards. Many prisoners were clearly scared of things that were to come. One particular face was on the verge of crying. That particular image haunted me throughout the day.

I decided I could not stand it anymore after seeing all of the photographs. I could not explore the rest of the museum to make good of the two dollars. It was then that I made an emotional connection to Cambodia.

As I sat on a bench outside in the open space, disturbed at the capability of the Khmer Rouge to do what they did, I became angry. Just before I exited the building, I spotted some writing on the wall. A visitor had penned that no God would have let this happened. I understood that person.

I came to think of the two-dollar entry cost. During the communist rule, this would have been illegal. Commerce in general would have been illegal. There was only one profession in the name of equality. The peasantry produced for the benefit of the communist state. That policy of unreasonable equality produced famine and exacerbated the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge.

Only now are Cambodians coming out of the shadow. They are eager to do commerce and improve their lot, something that was not possible under the communist Khmer Rouge.

The two-dollar entry cost is only part of the effort to come out of the hole that communism created. If the commercialization of the dark past brings about a brighter future for Cambodians, then let it be. Nobody, foreigners the very least, has the right to condemn the commercialization.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved
First published in The Malaysian Insider on August 20 2012.