Posting from Taiwan at the End of the World
Hi, I'm in Taiwan. It has come to my attention that the world may be ending.
Well, kind of. For some of us, in a sense.
I can't begin to catalog the horrors here since January 20th: a lot of people are working on that (like the people running this Choose Democracy website).
I expected Trump 2.0 to be exceedingly bad, as I am an inveterate political pessimist. I was not expecting "the dismantling of U.S. hegemony, the ostentatious and illegal murder of USAID, and a bunch of rich-kid rat boys deployed to gnaw through the copper wires of America's government agencies."
I also did not anticipate that pretty much all of my usual sources of consulting funding would be directly targeted, one way or another, by the Musk/Trump junta. I'm fine, and I've got a runway, but unfortunately I'm now one of the many thousands of people who have been professionally smacked upside the head by the rapid dismantling of the United States. Please do drop me a line if you know of fully-remote or international consulting or employment opportunities related to drones, data, GIS, and tech policy.
In the meantime, I'm going to write here more frequently. Everyone tells you that during an omni-crisis, you'll go insane unless you choose specific areas to focus on, and I intend to follow that advice. Here are some of the things I anticipate writing about:
- Drones, drone policy, and the god-knows-what that the Musk/Trump junta will inflict on us with regards to them. I now fully expect a Chinese drone ban, except it's also possible that Donald Trump could suddenly decide that Chinese drones are great actually, and change his mind, and so the cycle will continue. Also, I appeared on NPR's "On Point" radio show the other day to discuss Chinese drones and U.S. national security, if you're into that kind of thing.
Jonathan Chang
- The culmination of basically every paranoid fear me and a bunch of my colleagues who work in tech ethics, data, and privacy have had about the ever-more-ominous behavior of the planet's tech bro legions for many years. It's a weird feeling. Expect something soon about "why the only data that's safe is data you never collect," since humanity continues to refuse to learn the Lesson Of Data Minimization.
- The history of drones, because I have a lot of stuff queued up on that for my book project, and it is at least distracting.
I am also going to publish more travel writing here.
After all, I've been doing a lot of traveling.
I've been in Asia since mid-December, and I'll be in Asia for a while longer - at least until April. It started as my usual "I have to leave Boston every winter or my debilitating winter seasonal depression will turn me into a gibbering wraith" jaunt, and now I admit that it's also become a "stay out of the USA for as long as possible" sort of endeavor. This is facilitated by the fact that I have time on my hands, because of the aforementioned "all my usual consulting clients are being specifically targeted by the MAGA hordes" thing.
Ironically, I am actually spending less money overall wandering around Asia than I do living a normal life in Boston, because it basically costs $100 to leave the house in Boston, much less to purchase a brussel sprout at Whole Foods, in Donald Trump's America nowadays.
So, where have I been?
First, I joined my nomadic parents - no, really, they don't actually live anywhere and haven't since 2019 - in Vietnam for a month, over Christmas. I'd been to Vietnam three times before, back when I was based out of Phnom Penh and working as a journalist. But it had been a while: I'd last been in Vietnam in 2014, and it was great to return to observe the incredibly rapid clip of development throughout the country over the last decade.
We started in Hanoi, which I'd always wanted to visit, which was a very interesting and atmospheric place, albeit cursed with really bad air quality. This visit also inspired me to start reading a lot more about Ho Chi Minh, a man with a life story that is becoming more and more topical by the day. Next, we headed to Hue, Hoi An, and then Saigon, where we spent about three weeks, with the exception of a few nights on the Mekong Delta at Can Tho.
There's entire renovated palaces at the Hue Citadel that just weren't there when I last visited in 2014, big swaths of Saigon are brand new, and there's a general optimistic energy in the air among Vietnamese people (as well as a lot of particulate matter, but they're working on that, supposedly). Which is nice, because at least someone on this ever-more tense planet is feeling optimistic. Also, the food is spectacular, and I have always loved how the Vietnamese have developed one of the great, good-natured "if they're messing with you, they like you" cultures. I hope to get a chance to come back soon.
I'll write about Vietnam in more detail in the near future.
From Vietnam, I flew to Seoul in mid-January, where I met up with my partner. We'd be traveling together for three weeks to celebrate our 10th anniversary, and also to get my partner out of the U.S. during the Trump 2.0 inauguration for sanity-preservation reasons. (My partner and I met on Twitter. That's another story).
It was great to finally visit South Korea, as I'd been hearing about it my entire life: my mom and her sisters partially grew up as expats in Seoul, and our family photo albums are filled with images of what the still-rebuilding city was like back in the 1960s. My mom remembers ice-skating as a kid at the pond at the Gyeongbokgung Palace, pictured above.
My grandparents apparently attended more than one South Korean state function in the same pavilion, including one that was held for, for some reason, Billy Graham. (My atheist grandparents apparently conceded that he was pretty charming, but I guess that's how Billy Graham got to be Billy Graham).
We also attended an amazing drag show on the night that South Korean protesters ransacked the Seoul Western District Court, which we heard nothing about because we were too busy throwing money at ladies in very high shoes.
After a very enjoyable and mostly-tolerably cold week in Seoul, my partner and I then proceeded to Japan, where we visited Fukuoka, Miyajima, Hiroshima, Kyoto, and Tokyo.
The itinerary meant that we spent our last week in Tokyo in a hotel room directly overlooking the U.S. Embassy and diplomatic residency, with Mt. Fuji off to the left. We'd wake up in the morning, look down at the official buildings, and wonder to ourselves about how hellish a day the people below must be having. And then we'd go off and guiltily spend another day being tourists, trying to drag ourselves away from the ever-unfolding onslaught of real shit news on Bluesky.
I'm grateful that we were able to sort of distract ourselves from the last four weeks of carnage by the simple expedient of "being in Japan," though I'm also mad that we tried to go to Nara and could barely focus on anything, including the extremely forward deer, because that was the day it was revealed that Elon Musk's little DOGE rats had burrowed their way into the U.S. Treasury.
Now, I'm in Taiwan, where I've been for the last week and a half, and where I''ll be until I leave for Thailand on March 5th. I am still trying to get a hang of the balance between Distraction and Witnessing the Horrors. But I admit it is easier here, in a place outside of my usual context, where I can put my laptop down at any time and wander outside and try to order some food in really, really bad Mandarin.
I remember that in the weeks between the election and between January 20th, a lot of people, including myself, were posting about how it might be prudent to allow ourselves to pay less attention to Trump 2.0 than we did to Trump 1.0, simply to ensure we didn't burn ourselves out with generalized rage.
No one is saying that now. And for good reason. But I miss it all the same.
Maybe travel writing is my way of Balancing the Horror, at least right now.
I mentally resisted the idea of getting back to doing travel writing on this newsletter, at least a few weeks ago. At least at first. "Isn't it a little decadent to do travel writing at the end of American hegemony?" I thought to myself. "Isn't it a little offensive of you to be posting about having a generally nice time on a different continent than North America?"
But here I am, traveling, and I would like to hope and to believe that other people will continue to get to do so too. Or perhaps, will be forced to travel - and those forced into exile, whatever that looks like, can use some travel recommendations, of one kind or another, too.
There is also the matter of spite.
In this era of ascendant techofeudalism, in a time when the powerful are systematically sneering at every human pursuit that doesn't directly make money for some Silicon Valley chucklefuck in ill-fitting street wear, then it is a rebellious action to do something as totally disconnected from profit margins and marketability as long-winded travel writing. In these dark and stupid times, perhaps we should all be indulging our least-practical creative impulses.
Indeed, fuck practicality. It's dead and the Boer and the Antichrist killed it, along with so many other careers and so many other dreams. If the MAGA government decides that people like us don't deserve to have jobs, for the sin of devoting our careers to something other than pure profitability, then we may as well fill our time with something else. There are so many ways to annoy a vain and ravenous beast.
And if I cede to the darkest possible outlook: all travel writing eventually turns into history, into a record of times and circumstances and places that no longer exist. Sometimes faster than we'd expect. It is important to be keeping a record, even of the little stuff like restaurants, amusing signage, and pretty vistas.
The beasts are trying to take away all that was ever good about the Internet - but they haven't taken using the Internet to simply share what we see around us in a huge and ever-shape-shifting world, not yet.
We should not permit the beasts to do so.
As both the fulfillment of a project and as an extended middle finger to the Trump administration's deranged targeting of, for God's sake, our allies in Canada, I'll soon be finishing up a travel guide to Quebec's Gaspé peninsula, which we road-tripped around last August. It was a beautiful place. I want to finish writing about it. And I hope we'll be able to go back there again. (I keep coming back to my friend Paul Musgrave's point about how war over Greenland or with Canada remains highly unlikely, but Trump has rendered it thinkable - which is terrifying enough).
I'll also be writing about Taipei, since I'm here, and other highlights in Taiwan. I'm headed to Thailand after this for a while, and then to Indonesia where I intend to revisit scuba diving in Sulawesi.
When times are hard, go and look at a really weird octopus, as the ancients used to say.
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