“In the United States, though, convenience was everything; it still is. We were plugging anything we could into the internet, at a rate of 127 devices a second. We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society. There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web. We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control. And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.”

―
Nicole Perlroth
This is How They Tell Me The World Ends

//

Zero-day exploits, passwords, airgap systems, multi-factor authentication, attacks on the grid, spies, a market for cyber weapons… the arms race all over again.

The book induces a breathlessness, an anxiety that you do not let overwhelm you because you know we are all screwed. Because you know that some things have already bolted out the door, the likely outcome already set in motion many years ago, when the world was a more naive place. This is a sobering read, and my helpless self proceeded to pat my password manager, change some old passwords, and set up multi-factor authentication for more accounts.

Highly recommended.

“Throughout the worst of the pandemic I, like everyone, thought of the many things I’d failed to appreciate back when life was normal: oh, to be handed an actual restaurant menu; to stand so close to a stranger that you can read the banal text messages that are obviously more important to him than his toddler stumbling off the curb and out into traffic…”

―
David Sedaris
Happy-Go-Lucky

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If anybody has the energy in this pandemic to write about this pandemic, it would be Sedaris. A collection of personal essays, you can expect the usual offbeat observations, sometimes drily expressed. He is always interesting and given the details he inserts, it makes me want to keep a journal, an audio record even, but perhaps I am meant to live my life more prosaically.

This is a wonderful record of the pandemic years. Everyone’s experience is of course different, but some of the broader themes are there, soothing to see in the written word.

//

“Too much free time, and too much time together. I’m normally away from Hugh between four and six months a year, and when the pandemic canceled the tours I had scheduled, I panicked. We were in New York at the time, so I sought out his old friend Carol. “What’s he really like?” I asked her. “I think I sort of knew once, but that was twenty-five years ago.””

“I daydreamed about going to gigs, seeing arthouse cinema, having intellectually stimulating conversations, and being in the midst of the next great literary movement. I could not find any of this at home. My classmates and I were brought up on the belief that nothing was more important than securing a job that would eventually buy us a flat, a basic human right that had become nearly impossible for my generation, and these jobs were usually soul sucking. Hong Kong’s brand of capitalism makes it easy to live in a place and never engage with it.

I thought that when I eventually became an adult I would be one of those people who power-walked in heels across the bridge of the International Finance Centre in the central business district.”

―
Karen Cheung
Impossible City

//

This is one person’s memoir, from a person who lives in Hong Kong. Some things are more universal and familiar to a Chinese person who grew up in South-east Asia. But at some point, the unique, thorny situation of being a relatively younger Hong-Konger in the 2010s becomes a puzzle. It is an unenviable place to be, and Cheung captures the heartache and despite all the difficulties, the hope of her generation.

Capitalism, belonging and forces that insist on bearing down on you instead of letting you be. What a heady mix. I enjoyed the book, and appreciated Cheung’s writing and the way the chapters jump around. It is a little disjointed but life is like that.

//

“I caption photos with #wanderlust unironically, chatting up fellow backpackers and believing that they could serve as conduits through which I could understand more about a world of which I had seen so little.

At the two on-campus Starbucks I rotate between, I keep tabs on tech sites and start-ups, holding on to the millennial delusion that a good business idea or a new app could radically improve our world. Being loud online on issues like climate change and racial inequality lets me pretend I’m part of a global conversation, yet at enough distance for it to not affect my daily life.”

“It was in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe that it would be anything but awesome.”

―
Chuck Klosterman
The Nineties

//

This book was awesome to read. A child of the nineties now has a book that accurately captures the feeling of that era. I found myself nodding at various sections, and then I laughed at having taken this book a little too seriously. But well, it is really nice to chuckle at the caricature of a person who absorbed too much of the 90s vibe – progressive but not too much; hopeful but not too optimistic. And oh, the days of being a nobody, with no pressure to be on brand, to even have a personal brand…

//

“The enforced ennui and alienation of Gen X had one social upside: Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool…. If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy. Ambiguous disappointment wasn’t that bad.”

“No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.”