Imagethief

When do the old rules of political communication become obsolete?

Note: There are two things that have been on my mind as I observe everything happening in U.S. politics right now. I am using this space to think through them out loud. This is the first topic. Second to follow when time permits. I am not sure how well this holds together. Feel free to debate!

On January 28th, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded just over a minute after lift-off. This was one of the defining, "where were you when...?" moments of my youth. I remember stapling my eyes to the television in a common area at my dorm at UC Santa Cruz.

Later that day, President Reagan addressed the nation from the Oval Office. I’ve never been what you’d call a big Reagan fan—he wasn’t popular in the bong-littered halls of Porter College—but it’s good. A classic of public solace, delivered to a traumatized nation. Go watch it if you have five minutes.

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Welcoming the year of the snake by remembering my weirdest pet

The following is the first chapter of a memoir I have been writing about my doomed attempt to co-found an internet game company in Singapore in 1995. It is snake-themed and, with the year of the snake arriving this Wednesday, I thought I’d publish it here.

1995

I had to get rid of a python.

This was not straightforward. The snake was thirteen feet long and weighed as much as a Rottweiler. You couldn’t just tape up a note with a bunch of tear-away phone-number tabs in the Peets Coffee down in the Castro. Home wanted for large snake. Loves baths. Eats live rabbits monthly. Hazardous to pets and small children. Or put her in a padded box on the corner like you would a litter of kittens. None of my friends had any business caring for a Burmese python. I had no business caring for a Burmese python, but I’d been doing it since my then girlfriend, Michelle, had gifted it to me.

That conversation, three years previously, had gone like this:

Her: "Hey, my friend’s son has a Burmese python that he can’t take care of any more. I know you like snakes. Do you want to adopt it?"

Me (trying to recall how big Burmese pythons get and playing for time): "Can I think about it?"

The next day I came home from grad school and the snake was in my apartment, in a much too small enclosure, with an infestation of some kind of snake lice and an unshed scale obscuring one eye.

I took the BART train from San Francisco across the bay to Berkeley, where there was an exotic reptile store, and bought a paperback guide to Burmese python ownership. The first paragraph boiled down to, "You, an idiot, should not own this snake." I also bought a brick of frozen rats, stuck together like miserable, furry burritos, and lugged it home. I was still not the weirdest person on BART.

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How many strokes do you want?

I’m back in Taiwan this week. Since the beginning of September I’ve spent more than a month here, spread over three trips. In general, it’s been a delight! And a welcome opportunity to dust off my appallingly decayed Mandarin.

But, man, am I struggling with traditional characters.

I was never what you’d call literate in Chinese. But I could navigate everyday situations, signs, instructions, menus, bank transactions and the like. That was generally enough to get me through life. With time to spare, and a dictionary, I could even manage the occasional lightweight newspaper article.

I started studying Chinese in Singapore and then lived in China, both of which use simplified characters for everyday purposes. This is not the case in Taiwan, which still uses traditional characters, and I’ve found myself catapulted back into more or less complete illiteracy.

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The long tradition of shady PR knife work in dark alleys

A few years ago, I had the exquisite experience of having my emails read back to me by lawyers.

There had been a snafu involving disclosure of financial information at my then employer. In handling the communications aftermath, I had emailed with several people involved. The lawyers were doing due-diligence so they could be prepared for any legal consequences, and a number of us had these meetings. I wasn’t in trouble. I wasn’t being deposed. I hadn’t written anything wrong or embarrassing. But it was still uncomfortable.

What did you mean in this part?

Was this line a joke?

To whom were you referring here?

This was a valuable experience. When we train people in communication, we stress that you should write every email, chat and text message imagining it being read back to you at a deposition. All these communications are subject to legal discovery and "attorney-client privilege" in the header isn’t a magic incantation, though people sometimes treat it as one. An internal investigation is a reminder that the lawyers you have friendly chats with in the cafeteria aren’t your lawyers1 and, by the way, the company sees everything you do on your work computer, and someday it might be opposing counsel reading your emails back to you.

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PR thoughts on the murder of an insurance man

Two weeks ago, Brian Thompson, CEO of big health insurer United Healthcare, was gunned down in New York. This created an epic amount of Discourse on social media, aggravated by the mysterious nature of the killer and his temporary escape. This week, a suspect named Luigi Mangione was arrested. He turned out to be a bit of a snack, which is causing weird undulations in the fabric of the media continuum.

The trajectory of the social discourse was amazing. Immediately after the news broke, there was a wave of gleeful social media posts. That was followed by a second wave scolding those making jokes and celebrating Mr. Thompson’s death. Completing the ouroboros, there was then a wave scolding the scolds for not acknowledging the depth of popular hatred of big health insurers.

If a prominent executive in your industry is gunned down on a sidewalk and the public response is party-poppers and dancing in the streets, you should ask yourself some hard questions!

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I surrender to the inevitable, plus a state-of-the-newsletter update

In 2004, in one of the great over-reactions of my life, I moved from Singapore to China because I was bored. This was a giant adventure and a hazardous level of culture shock. One of the ways I processed the experience was by writing about it.

This wasn’t new. I’d written for fun since high school and for money since college. I’d kept an infamously public journal of the experience of my ill-fated games startup in Singapore, which lasted from late 1995 until early 1997. This was the early days of the web and all of that, along with the rest of my "world wide web-site" (fancy!) was hand coded.

That journal is no longer online. It’s super cringe and very embarrassing. It is, however, a useful historical document and is providing the feedstock for a slow-gestating memoir of the game startup that I have been working on for a few years. This will also be cringe, but hopefully a bit more sophisticated. Maybe I’ll eventually publish it here, but I am currently stuck in the "why my parents’ divorce was responsible for everything" chapter. I’ve been stuck there for eighteen months.

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An unexpected lecture on the politics of European immigration

I went to Amsterdam for two days last week. This was a classic of hallucinatory, placeless business travel, more time on planes than in country, mostly a prisoner of the Airport Hilton Schiphol. All airport hotels are liminal, but at least I had an outside-facing room with sunlight rather than one looking into the atrium, which was a sort of luxury panopticon. I believe Nietzsche wrote, "When you look long into an atrium, the atrium also looks into you."

The Dutch have splendid cheeses, but don’t otherwise seem to be a big cuisine culture. I recognize this is dangerous turf for an American who was there for all of two days, but when you factor out cheese what are you left with? Stroopwaffels? Bitterballen? Hagelslag? When was the last time you went to a Dutch restaurant? Was it Rijsttafel? Thank the Indonesians!

Even Germany has managed a certain amount of cuisine and we go to our local German place periodically for beer and sausage. Admittedly, beer and sausage is a layup. But the Dutch had a spanning Southeast Asian empire, invented the global spice trade and fought a brutal war with the English over it. All that history, and the condiment hill they’ve chosen to die on is mayonnaise. That’s commitment!

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Everything on the Internet is bad or porn until proven otherwise.

Oops! CNN.com:

Toy manufacturer Mattel has apologized after mistakenly printing the web address of a pornographic site on the packaging of its newly launched "Wicked" dolls.

Instead of pointing readers to the official website of the movie adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical, information found on boxes of the special edition dolls leads to a page that requires users to be 18 years or older to enter, according to social media users on X.

"Mattel was made aware of a misprint on the packaging of the Mattel Wicked collection dolls, primarily sold in the US, which intended to direct consumers to the official WickedMovie.com landing page," the company said in a statement sent to CNN on Sunday.

"We deeply regret this unfortunate error and are taking immediate action to remedy this. Parents are advised that the misprinted, incorrect website is not appropriate for children," it said.

People who have already purchased the dolls are advised to discard the packaging or obscure the link, Mattel added.

"Misprint." Sure. Like the colors were out of registration. Could happen to anyone.

Honestly, this does not seem like a crisis. If Mattel had accidentally printed a porno URL on packaging for Barbie (25 percent of revenue in 2023), that would have been a crisis! And at that point possibly simpler for them to just go buy out the offending domain, though they’d be in a weak negotiating position. But on the "Wicked" movie tie-in dolls? I don’t anticipate a tearful CEO video apology for this, though I suspect some people in the packaging design and marketing teams got yelled at.

And rightly so! It was careless. Site unseen, what are the chances the domain "wicked.com" is a pornography website? Close to 100 percent, right? If you were doing the packaging for "Kinky Boots" dolls, you’d damn well check the URL before printing the packaging. (There does not seem to be either toys or a dedicated website for "Kinky Boots," so this is academic.)

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Can the administrative state get horny on main?

Cards on the table, I’m a fan of the administrative state. Societies are large and complex, and a little technocratic competence goes a long way in ensuring the availability of public goods and infrastructure. But there are some areas where the administrative state struggles. Sex, for one.

Or, more accurately, fertility. I’ve been thinking about this because a couple of weeks ago the New York Times Asian fertility desk1 was on fire. Over a few days they published stories on Chinese local officials pushing families to have more children, on Japan’s thirty-year struggle to raise its birth rate, and on South Koreans compensating for lack of children with pets.

Like China, my adopted home of Singapore advocated for limited birthrates during the 1970s "population bomb" panic, when it was widely agreed we were destined to devour each other like starving jackals. Singapore realized its demographic error in the 1980s, as its birthrate plummeted, and went through policy whiplash. When I arrived, in 1995, there was an advertising campaign encouraging young couples to have larger families. I recall lots of slow-motion video and gauzy photos of attractive young couples with cherubic babies, and an omnipresent theme song. Alas, it was too early to be immortalized on the Internet, but there is evidence of later campaigns.

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I asked for it, and I got it.

I’ve been on the road, which is why it’s been a minute since the last post. About a week ago I flew from San Francisco to Taipei. It turns out that all the flights on that route suffer from the same problem, which is that they leave San Francisco at about 1AM and arrive in Taipei at about 5:30AM.

I’m an early-to-bed / early-to-rise type, so going to the airport at 10:30PM is like going to hell. Who wants to deal with the TSA at midnight? Stupidly, I had allowed my pre-check status to expire five days before this trip so it was shoes off, belt off. At that hour, there was some risk I would just keep going, peel off my pants and lie down on the conveyer belt in my underwear. Wake me in Taipei.

My employers are frugal. I don’t blame them! You gotta spend the money on important things and fabs are expensive. But it means that we get premium economy for long hauls, at least at my job grade. This is better than regular economy, but it does not allow you to lie flat which, for me, is the only way I can sleep. I can sort of doze sitting up, but it’s just a rotating set of stress positions interrupted by brief periods of semi-conscious fugue state and fever dreams.

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