I am week 1 into a four month experiment in Digital Nomadry. This means: moving to Laos in a short-term basis and seeing if it works. If it does I might try becoming a digital nomad for a year or so.

First results are in: it is been so liberating it’s slightly unnerving. Having said that it’s not been all roses. Also I promise there won’t be any photographs of me “working” while I’m on the beach. Yes there have been some pleasant surprises but there have been some shocks too.

Here’s why I did it and what it took me to get here.

Why do such a thing?
After living through one of the world’s longest lockdowns, a breakup, relocation to living alone, another lockdown I needed to get out of my head.

A short trip in July for a few weeks involving a long-distance train journey from Singapore to Laos had taught me a few things. I desperately needed a break from my routine. While incredibly...

The thing about being in a rut is that sometimes it is invisible. For me, it was only when I went on a 3000 kilometre train journey that I clambered over the parapet and upon looking back I saw that I was stuck and had lost all perspective. It happens so slowly and subtly that it is difficult to notice but I had ground myself ever deeper into the same place, driving ever down further limiting my ability to move and see.

And so what is a rut? It’s when your life becomes a shadowland of habit, your actions so ingrained that your life is one large routine. The consequence of this is your perspective narrows, small irritations scale up to appear as major problems. You lose freedom of movement. You have the vague sense that you are squandering your life because nothing new ever happens, opportunities fail to arise.

I had two years of COVID of living with an ex-partner, breaking up, moving...

Much has been made of the anti-war protests in Russian cities but it is worth understanding that much of Putin’s support comes from the provinces. There has been the impulse to present this wholesale invasion of Ukraine as fundamentally different from the invasion of Crimea in 2015 from which Putin’s popularity surged. That too was an appalling illegal action conducted against a neighbouring country with a shared ethnicity and a shared history. There are obvious differences too, most notably scale and bloodshed. 2015 was a relatively bloodless act of aggression - whereas the human toll the current invasion might already be too horrific for the Russian people. There are certainly signs that this is the case.

The issue though is the patchwork foreign coverage of Russia - that relies overwhelmingly on correspondents in the cities. The bias here is to overstate the opposition against Putin...

Last night I watched Dan Olson’s Line Goes Up - The Problem with NFTs which is a two and a quarter hour critique of Nonfungible Tokens (NFTs) beginning at first principles - which starts at the GFC. I have heard so so many explanations of the mortgage backed security crisis yet I never get sick of it. The causal chain driven by greed and wilful ignorance for which we are still experiencing the fallout is still as grimly thrilling as a slomo plane crash.

What is fascinating about Olson’s docco is that it depicts crypto and the NFTs as a continuation of that same mentality where it was presented as a solution. The GFC is narrowly diagnosed by crypto proponents as: too much power and money invested in banks which grew too large. Such concentrations of wealth, the opacity of their operations were the seeds of unchecked corruption that had infiltrated the government, ratings agencies and...

Question: Why is the best television about crime? The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad. Theory: They work the contrast between the viewer in the comfort of their homes while allowing them to immerse themselves without risk in the desperation of the underworld. How thrilling and validating to watch the consequences of bad decisions, somewhat open to us, play out - the lieutenant on the brink of betraying the boss, the store owner scrambling to pay back local thugs. Watching these through a little window in the corner of our living room, while we enjoy the security of our safe decisions. No such contrast is possible with romance - too ideal, war - too large for the screen, comedy - not serious enough. Only crime lets us peer through an inverted periscope into the underworld.

This week I finished Gomorrah which is one of those shows that snaps into meaning only once the final piece few...

Thanks to COVID everyone is talking ‘supply chains’ yet few can cite the decisive miles-stones of such a distributed, globalised economy: wheat grown in Ukraine can be milled in California to be baked into naan in Delhi. How was it possible for such a supply chain to exist, with price of shipping seemingly unmoored from the immense distances. The important development is stunningly routine: the shipping container.

In 2006, Marc Levinson published the first edition of The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, an oddly compelling account of the development of containerisation, a process that began in the 1950s and has continued refinement to today. Today, we are reaching the limits of innovation in this space: it would be difficult to imagine shipping being made more efficient and it is not possible to have shipping costs to the consumer of...

I’m sure that I have met Ben in the dark corner of a hostel bar. Well not actually Ben but his type. He, sweating through his third beer of the evening, discretely burping is desperate to download his truly excellent opinions of Vienna or Seoul or Marrakesh onto whichever backpacker is unlucky enough to pick the wrong man to sit across.

“Nah mate Budapest is shit. It’s 20XX and hardly anyone there speaks English. It’s like ‘if you want my money you’re going to have to learn to communicate.’” the chuckle of disbelief that such a place could even exist.

For a long time tourist writing has been due a reckoning. Fortunately, it is simply too light - too insubstantial to rest anywhere for long - more akin to copy than writing.

One moment please, to contract tourist writing with travel writing: travel writing is that of Paul Theroux or Bruce Chatwin. In it, the writer stands exposed, open...

Honesty time - when I first played through Cyberpunk 2077 it was with a crooked CD key that I found for a suspiciously low price ($4) on Ebay. The condition of using it was that I needed to download the game and play it without connecting via Steam to the internet. This essentially insulated my copy from the updates that were hurridly compiled then beamed down from the Steam mothership. The point is that through my own cheapskatery, I was playing an air-gapped ultra-early version of Cyberpunk that was riddled with bugs, probably longer than the more honest players were. The reputation the early Cyberpunk gained, that of a barely playable mess is well earned, yet the rage it stirred seems disproportionate and shows how we in the gaming world struggling to entertain ambivalence without the negativity consuming the good. Then again - they paid full price.

From this ambivalence comes a...

It was 2012 and on the outskirts of a Chinese city I cannot remember - perhaps it was Xian - I was in a taxi. As taxi drivers do, this was racing down a freshly laid freeway with the graceful elevated curves you would expect from LA. The shoulder was fair game and the taxi used it to pass trucks and semi-trailers.

Outside we passed identical block after block of apartments like a looped backdrop of a cartoon chase. The blocks were about four stories tall, so hardly towering but each were rooted in a courtyard of tiles. As new buildings and entire new cities did in China it clung tightly to its prefabricated character. This made it look very new but also cheap - that it would soon look old and cracked. The blocks themselves were clearly empty - it was possible, even from this distance to see when passing windows at the front and rear align without ever the silhouettes of furniture...