Bleeding out our Reflections

Since we are here on the net, I might as well start with my latest realizations therein. Certainly, the “net is vast and infinite” as Major Kusanagi contemplated in Ghost in the Shell. As much can be seen if you examined closely the trajectory of my status update (found at the top of this blog’s right hand column) across the web. Not only does this tiny string of information appear here, but also on my facebook profile, my twitter account, my pidgin status, and my friendfeed account. Each of these various websites/webservices has access to considerably different kinds of communities (varying in closeness to me, i.e. pidgin holds all of my instant message buddies, all people I’ve met face to face, whereas twitter has quite a bit of people I’ve never met before, but have access to their strings of information). In addition, I can edit this string via my cellphone for about 2,000 dong (about 13 cents). It took me a few days to set this up now, but it’s exciting to me nevertheless. Now, since I’ve been playing around with its inner workings, I’m thinking now of ways to use this in the workplace.

This summer I’l be hiring 8 students to work for me (I’ll pay them about 200,000 dong to 300,000 dong a month, which is about, 10-15 dollars). Now, twitter, has the ability to send text messages from the web into your phone, via your update. All of my students have a cellphone. Hm…what could I do there? Set up meetings and notify them of projects without having to spend extra money on a group text message? Sounds easy enough. In trying to problem solve solutions for vietnam that can utilize the net. Sometimes I wonder, you know, about Vietnamese culture and its reaction to technology. Maybe it seems more clear to me the reaction that Americans have to tech trends because I don’t have to think about how people will react. It’s not necessarily clear, but it feels natural. On the other hand, vietnamese people have a totally different reaction to technology and I’m always actively coming to grips with it.

If my friend calls me in the USA and I don’t call him back for a day or two, it’s pretty normal. Whereas, if my Vietnamese friend texts me and I don’t reply within the next few hours a number of things could happen: he’s insulted, hurt, thinks we’re not friends anymore, etc. There’s this almost need for hyper-immediacy here. I still don’t get it.

But that barely even scratches the surface of my weekly Vietnamese frustrations (mostly frustrated for fun, rather than for real, it keeps me sane). In other words, I’m developing a new sarcasm I didn’t have when I was hanging around bleeding heart Buddhism and Santa Cruz.

But being in Vietnam (as of late, and partly due to ruminations I’ve had with Emily) has made me realize how much I truly love capitalism. I’m definitely not an anti-communist, nor am I a communist, nor am I a capitalist, at best, I’m a Buddhist and Internationalist, but all that I could hope for would to be human. Nevertheless, all that mumbo jumbo aside, I love capitalism for two main reasons: it breeds professionalism and free enterprise.

Professionalism is something essentially lacking here. There’s a paucity of accountability, reliability, professional skills, and self-learning ability. I think that’s bred by that thirst for success that the American dream (in part) facilitates. In order to win, you gotta be the best, and the best have professional characteristics. Free enterprise is a wondrous utility. It produces people who do what they want. And because they are doing what they want, they produce things that they care about and thas has meaning for them. Although these two things aren’t totally ubiquitous in America, they are nevertheless two things that American capitalism plays a part in producing. It’s funny and sad that Vietnam has absorbed the consumerism that America prliferates but not the underlying threads.

Remember when during the Great Depression, people lost faith in money, and then all the money just disappeared as people flocked to their banks only to find that the money wasn’t even present in their banks? I wonder if the same will happen with Data…

This is something I never thought would happen, but it has. My friends who have left for the USA (eric and lillian) and my friend in Hue (Tyler) will not believe that this road has finally moved on to better things…