THURSDAY THOUGHTS: "It's like if Instagram came to life as a place."
It really is and it's freaking me out!
Right now, I have the great fortune to be on holiday in Bali, Indonesia. Bali is the westernmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands and is just over eight times larger than Singapore, where I departed from.
Being from Singapore, it is easy to forget just how big other places can be and thus how much more diverse their flora, fauna, people and cultures. Having been to Bali thrice before (it's really not far from Singapore), I had a good idea of what to expect from this trip…or did I? Previously, I had spent time in the beachside paradise of Seminyak and the moped-mobbed urban centre Ubud. But this time I am in Canggu and it's very, very different…
First up, I don't think I have ever seen a place with more gyms per capita and, consequently, more people wandering around in lycra, spandex and whatever those shorts are made of that seem to go right up the bum crack. Every man here is, to attempt their vernacular, "jacked" or "ripped" or "shredded" and every woman appears to be sponsored by Lulu Lemon.
Second to the gyms are coffee shops. Bali is famed for its local coffee known as Kopi Luwak, made from beans retrieved from the droppings of the Asian palm civet. But none of these cafes are serving extract of cat shit; their chalkboard menus are scrawled with Espressos, Americanos and Gitchie-Gitchie-Ya-Ya-Mocha-Chocolata-Creole-Lady-Marmalades. Their interiors are almost exclusively finished in concrete with Edison lamps dangling from the false ceilings and shelves of books that somehow look well-thumbed without anyone ever picking them up. In short, they look like they belong in Brooklyn. Oh, and white people are EVERYWHERE!
Now, as a white man in Asia let me say I've nothing against my melanin-challenged brothers and sisters but I don't think I have ever seen such a concentration of aggressively white people anywhere in Asia before. And by aggressive, I don't mean towards locals, I just mean they seem to have taken white culture and turned it up to 11! There is almost no one without a yoga mat strapped to their back, a vat of coffee glued to their hand and some sort of man-made fabric trying to set up camp in their arse crack. Add a dream catcher tattoo and/or a man-bun and that’s a full house! (I realise that nearly all of these things have been appropriated from other cultures but we haven’t got time to get into that right now).
“Would you please stop staring at her arse?” my wife asks me, quite reasonably. I try to explain that I am staring at it from a sociological perspective but she doesn’t believe me. She’s been in the supermarket stocking up on instant noodles whilst I’ve been sitting outside trying to decide if our plane got hit by lightning during last night’s storm and I have somehow been zapped into ‘The Matrix’. Both are equally valid uses of time. Grasping for answers I pinged my buddy
who lives elsewhere on the island to share my observations (in green), and get his thoughts (in grey), below:
See that last line? What a perfect turn of phrase, (to be fair Fraser is a journalist and published author), in fact I think it deserves a pull quote!
“It's like if Instagram came to life as a place.”
Fraser Morton, Journalist, Author & Wit
In that one sentence Fraser captured the precise aesthetic I was witnessing. It really is like everyone in Canggu is living their life either for Instagram or guided by it. It put me in mind of the must-read article by
entitled 'The Age of Average' in which a global aesthetic, powered by algorithms, has taken over the planet. Does any even know what they, personally, like any more? Or are we so frequently and pervasively assaulted by images of industrial-chic coffee shops and artisan avocado-on-toast that we have forgotten there are other choices?I am hoping to have some answers to this conundrum soon because I have just started reading
’s new book 'Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture', but in the meantime I did something much quicker and simpler that I haven't done in a years but can highly recommend.
Just before I boarded my flight to Bali I bought a magazine; a proper, glossy, printed magazine. Why? To be surprised, to be confronted, to see something that I wasn't expecting, that wasn't based on my prior magazine-buying history and, believe it or not, to see artful ads made with care and a decent budget as opposed to shitty pop-ups that obscure the screen.
The magazine was Tatler and on the front cover was Amanda Lee Koe, one of Singapore's most brilliant and controversial literary voices. She was photographed in slightly soft-focused monochrome posing as Marlene Dietrich, one of the characters in her last novel. Her top hat, cocked at an angle revealing striking silver lacquered hair, obscures the masthead and there is a single bold headline in all caps: REBEL ROUSER. The cover's understated elegance stood apart from the other titles, which appeared to be jumping up and down, screaming for my attention with their outlandish headlines, whereas Tatler simply raised an intriguing eyebrow at me from the across the rack that I couldn’t resist.
Inside and alongside Amanda I discovered chefs, authors, designers and creators I would otherwise NEVER have come across, some of whom form part of Tatler's 'Generation T', a community they have built to "discover, support and help increase the impact of Asia’s most promising young leaders" at https://www.tatlerasia.com/gen-t, and all for less than S$9 - hardly a prestige price for such a prestigious publication.
We all know that what we put in to our bodies eventually shows up on the outside but so does what we put into our minds. If we only scroll algorithmic feeds of shallow, conformist content we will become shallow and conformist ourselves. Our world’s will become smaller, our influences and interests less varied, our personalities more predictable. It’s funny, all this time we’ve been worried about machines becoming like people, we didn’t notice the people becoming more like machines.