Tinkering, Worldbuilding, Resisting and Reconnecting
Living with Shoggoths is a Global South perspective on creating space to live a meaningful life in a world facing massive technological changes, by tinkering, worldbuilding, resisting and reconnecting
Disruptive change is powerful, yet terrifying. I should know.
A decade ago, I got to be right at the center of a society that underwent a ridiculous amount of change in a short span of time. I am from Myanmar, a country that most of the world had never heard of. But in the 2010s, we transformed from a dictatorship to a teetering experiment with democracy, the overnight abolition of censorship created a blossoming of freedom of expression, and cheap smartphones brought the whole country online.
Suddenly, everyone was excited about Myanmar. International NGOs and foreign workers poured into my hometown of Yangon, overseeing the millions in development funding that flowed in. Investors hoped to cash in on the last remaining “frontier market” in Asia, thirsty for a piece of the country that had become the latest ‘’donor darling’’. Alongside the internationals was a returning diaspora eager to reconnect with their home and to connect their home country to the world. I was one such eager returnee.
I was and still am working in tech. My big focus is on how we can use technology to empower people who are creating social impact, like those in civil society, media, public policy, and entrepreneurship. Just like everyone, I was caught up in the euphoria too. I evangelized non-stop about how exciting this new Myanmar was.
Fast forward to today. The euphoria did not last. Following a military coup in 2021, Myanmar is in the midst of a civil war. The last few years have been brutal for me personally, and unimaginably more so for millions of my peers. I’ve lost loved ones, burned out, struggled with depression and survivor’s guilt. On top of that, I came close to shutting down my business because of financial troubles, and my marriage of nine years fell apart.
I’ve been slowly clambering up from rock bottom, and found a new home in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Over the past year, I’ve finally moved on from being in frantic survival mode, to the beginnings of finding a new steady rhythm for my life.
The world, however, seems to be spiraling further into chaos with each passing day. There are so many overlapping global quagmires that they even have a name for it—the polycrisis. We live with emerging technologies that are likened to Shoggoths, the amorphous blob-like creatures from H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror stories that have the tantalizing potential to metamorphose into anything. They were magnets for hubris, and destroyed ancient civilisations that tried to harness and tame them.
We don’t know if the future will have jobs, stable governments, fundamental rights or even breathable air. At the same time, we now have very powerful tools at our disposal to shape that future, and yet we haven’t even begun to properly imagine it.
Well, at the very least, all the imaginings I’ve seen leave out the majority of the globe. Recently, I got a chance to connect with an international group of fellow techies from what they named the “Global Majority”—a new term for those of us from the Global South. To me it was a term that instantly resonated and felt so empowering. More than anything, it highlighted to me that we need to imagine a meaningful future from our perspective and not outsource it to others.
What do we do now?
For a long time I’ve had ideas swirling around my head but never felt the need to write them down for a public audience. During the rare instances that I have written my thoughts down in the last few years, I found the experience very cathartic, but I’ve only shared them with close friends. I haven’t felt the urge to share something with the world, until now.
Just in the last month or so, I felt like my not-so-well planned decision to move to Chiang Mai has landed me right at the intersection of a cluster of socio-technological transformations. It was like winning the lottery for a second time. I felt like I did in Yangon back in 2015, where I found myself at the epicenter of profoundly disruptive changes that were exciting rather than terrifying. Chiang Mai is a place that provides harbor for nomads and exiles, and these people have built cloistered communities that are just beginning to bleed into each other. There are techies, hippies, migrants and journalists, all seeking kinship and freedom in this corner of Northern Thailand.
I have finally found the headspace to document my own journey and share my thoughts and observations. I am figuring out a practice for myself, that tentatively I’ve grouped into four themes: tinkering, worldbuilding, resisting and reconnecting.
Tinkering
I love learning new technologies and coming up with new ways to solve day-to-day problems. I’ve found that playing around with something and trying to make it fit into your way of interacting with the world is the best way to learn about something. Between my work at my day job running a data consultancy, my collaborations with community groups, the volunteering that I do, and my random side projects, there are endless opportunities for me to try out new things.
A few months ago, I came across the concept of the writer-builder, and was immediately drawn to it. I love to write and reflect, but also feel like the best insights that I get come from being in the trenches, building new things. I am not the kind of person who can be comfortable as an armchair “thought leader”. Conversely, I believe that when I reflect on the things that I am doing, it crystallizes the “why” of it for me—random hands-on explorations find their way to fit into a bigger picture.
Worldbuilding
Growing up, I was one of those kids who was always spaced out and daydreaming. Over time that had evolved into a habit of building elaborate worlds and stories in my head. During some of the dark times in 2021 and 2022, my worldbuilding provided much needed escapism. Parsing traumatic experiences that were happening to my country, my people and myself through a lens of fiction gave me the distance I needed to process them.
As I’ve gotten my mental health more in check in the past year and became involved with real world communities that I feel incredibly connected to, I’ve come to understand that worldbuilding is an essential part of community building. Especially in times of mind-boggling uncertainty, we need to really articulate the futures we want to live in, and not just be in a constant mode of firefighting panic trying to avoid dystopian futures.
Resisting
The phrase “you are part of the resistance now”, seems to be thrown around a lot these days. I’ve definitely had people tell me that in multiple contexts ranging from the almost whimsical to the deadly serious. It’s unsurprising that people from all over feel that need for solidarity against a whole cast of destructive things wrecking their worlds in this time. Through this newsletter, I want to practice a holistic way of resisting that resonates with everyone, regardless of how privileged or underprivileged you are.
We all live under the crushing weight of comfortable defaults. If we are not careful about the small decisions we make every day, algorithmically curated brain rot is the default when we pick up our phones. Even worse, it pulls us into circles of polarization and cycles of not being able to understand one another outside of the bubbles that we have been herded into by surveillance capitalism.
A very good friend of mine from Myanmar recently told me he quit smoking, as an act of resistance. He picked up the habit twenty years ago as a teen, because everyone around him was doing it and he didn’t know any better—it was the comfortable default for a kid living in a country where public health knowledge was scarce and no one cared if you decided at a young age to destroy your body.
This is what I mean by resisting—doing what we must in ways that we can1. A wide range of practices, from decolonisation, digital detox, and mutual aid, to reading history through a critical lens, building healthy exercise habits, and immersing yourself in fiction from voices you won’t normally encounter.
Reconnecting
I come from a tradition where spiritual and communal connections are woven into the fabric of our lives. I believe vipassana meditation is Myanmar’s most valuable cultural export to the world. Memories of my childhood in Yangon are filled with festivities where family, friends and relatives come together to cherish each other. For the longest time, I didn’t believe that I had what it takes to inherit that tradition.
Since I was sixteen, I had been intermittently living, studying and working abroad, alongside many people from my generation who sought out greener pastures. We became western educated, grew up into a disenchanted world, and in adulthood, time zones and work schedules disconnected us from each other.
I believe now more than ever that we live in a world that is metaphorically and literally magical. My staunchly scientific and skeptical view of the world has found itself bending back towards my roots, in a way that is entirely non-contradictory.
My hope is that in writing this newsletter, I will be inviting serendipity. By opening myself up to be vulnerable, I hope to form new connections with people, ideas and experiences I would have never otherwise encountered, and reconnect with those that I have strayed apart from.
I will keep asking myself why I’m trying to write, and my instincts right now tell me it is to tinker, worldbuild, resist and reconnect. In a time of technologically accelerated polycrisis, we don’t have a choice but to be resilient to constant disruption. Those of us who live on the periphery are used to seeing the canaries in the coal mines. The Shoggoths are here and we have to learn how to live with them.
Unironically, for those elder millennials in the audience.