Future Plans

Cover image from Poorly Drawn Lines

What a milestone 2017 was. I really got to expand my horizons this year, being located in London but also getting the opportunity to travel very often back to Myanmar and to other fascinating places. Connected with so many wonderful people and, I think, built up a good foundation for a lot of interesting things to do in the future.

I apologise in advance for this post being so long and emo.

Things I feel guilty about

When people write these year in review things, I think lots of them focus on achievements, but the most memorable and lingering emotions I felt during the year was guilt about a bunch of different things. There were many days where I just felt gutted and conflicted because something I saw on social media would set me off on a repetitive cycle of over analyzing, feeling overwhelmed, then feeling guilty and trying to rationalise my way out of my shortcomings.

Biting off more than I can chew

This has been a perennial problem with me for as long as I can remember. Since childhood I’ve had a tendency to get excited and start more things than I would ever have the time to finish. In a way I’ve learned to accept it as part of who I am, and have somewhat learned to use it to my advantage rather than try to suppress my overeagerness.

Over the years this tendency has evolved to make me hustle like a crazy person, and I’ve gotten a lot more confident and outgoing in pitching random things to people and infecting them with my excitement. It was especially helpful for me this year. In January I was pretty much jobless in London and not exactly sure how I was going to pay rent, defaulting to “freelancing” (i.e. millennial-speak for “jobless”). And then I hustled like crazy, things serendipitously fell into place, and I got to work on a bunch of really cool gigs.

The difficult part is following through. For the last 6 months or so, I’ve been juggling 3 big commitments in addition to other side gigs and volunteer work. On many days in November, I had to wake up at 6AM, take a call with someone from somewhere halfway across the world for a research project, go to my 9-to-5 job after that, and then come back home to code and write. And those were the days when I felt productive. A lot of other days I’d procrastinate, or just be too tired, and those days felt like shit because it just adds more work down the road. I’ve had a couple of weeks of downtime here and there, but when it’s downtime that wasn’t allocated, it just felt like procrastination, and didn’t feel like rest.

I really want to be able to get better at not overcommitting and following through with things that I have committed to, but I think that will continue to be a struggle in 2018.

Politics in Myanmar

In some ways, I don’t know why I feel guilty about a situation that I have no control over. Maybe it’s a feeling of watching a train wreck in slow motion from sort of a distance, but for a train that you have thrown your lot in with. I’m going to be purposely vague on details here because this post is about my own thoughts and feelings and not socio-political commentary.

In April I voted in the by-election with some trepidation, and wrote about it on my instagram:

Just voted for the by-election! It felt really different this time compared to the first time I voted in 2015. Back then I didn't have to think much, and had decided who I was going to vote for long in advance (ever since I heard there was going to be an election). This time was very different. The NLD had been in power for a year and I won't get into details but let's just say I have mixed feelings (there's dozens of great think pieces assessing their performance in their first year that people have been writing in the past few days). I guess most people elsewhere get to vote in practice before they learn about voting and democracy in theory. For most people in Myanmar I think it's the other way round. When I was studying in the US I was fascinated by all the social science about voting and democracy (the median voter theorem, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, comparisons of first pass the post vs other systems, presidential vs parliamentary systems), and I was often frustrated that Americans weren't taking their privilege of being able to actually vote for their leaders seriously, or how they voted more based on gut feelings than on actual consideration of the candidates policy proposals. Well, now I can sympathise with them a lot. In 2015, the choice was very easy. Most people's votes were protest votes. We all have had enough of autocrats ruling us for over sixty years. This time around was when democracy got real. I was undecided right up until the point where I was walking towards the voting station. I knew the NLD was going to win my district by a large margin no matter what. And I wasn't against the idea of voting NLD again. But I was uncomfortable with the idea that they can just expect voters to show up and support them uncritically. That they have the "general will of the people" on their side so they don't even have to really try. The idea that you're not voting for an MP who has specific ideas for what he/she will do to represent you but you're voting for the party and for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. I wanted to protest against that. (Continued in next post...)

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At the voting booth! (Here's the second part of my thoughts continued from the previous post) So I looked at the options. I'll never vote USDP. The Arakan party are the most racist of them all. The others on the roster were all meh. There was one independent candidate who was a lawyer and he seemed promising. I thought I can vote for him and help show that there is support for alternative voices (yes yes I know, in a FPTP system independents just annoyingly split the vote, but at most this guy will be getting like 1-2% anyway). I frantically searched Facebook for the NLD guy and the independent candidate an hour before voting but could only find the NLD guy. It was pretty touching to see most of the posts were his daughter's, campaigning online and offline for her dad. But I was disappointed that he didn't post any policy proposals. I wanted to go for the independent, but as I walked from home to the voting station I got worried, since I couldn't find out information about him, what if he was a racist asshole? Won't want to be supporting those kinds of alternative voices. In the last few minutes I changed my mind. I thought of some stupid way to rationalise my decision. I thought, in all likelihood, through my work, I'll probably get to meet the NLD guy when he is an MP, and when that happens, if I voted for him, I will feel much vested in asking him to be accountable. Because I have vested a personal stake in him, not just on a theoretical level of "MPs should be accountable to their constituents". So I went in, stamped on the box beside the fighting peacock, and got my pinkie inked. Let's see what U Win Min can do for Hlaing Tharyar and for our country.

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Of course, that was back when things were relatively peachy. This man sums up my feelings in an understated but very accurate way.

I go on social media and balk at the ridiculous amounts of vile racism and hatred casually thrown around without any critical thought, and at the same time I feel like a lot of what’s written and said misrepresents, moralises and sensationalises. The guilt, I think comes from two places:

  1. I’d get really annoyed about something I see online and reply to someone, and then realise that it doesn’t change anything and it’s just a waste of time - and I should get back to doing my work.
  2. The feeling of distance. If my country retracts to becoming a quagmire again, I’m relatively unaffected. I don’t HAVE to care. I’m not rooted enough, and don’t have to be invested enough in Myanmar anymore to have to care. I am super privileged to be a rootless cosmopolitan, to have the social capital to be mobile, tied down only by the visa/immigration hoops that a Myanmar passport requires me to jump through, which is nothing compared to what millions of people in Myanmar have to live through each day.

Obviously I can write pages and pages on this. And hopefully I will write more. But my best hope for tackling the two points I made above is to not be publicly vocal, but to work quietly on the root causes and not the symptoms. I hate virtue signalling, but the alternative is working on things whilst feeling unsure, conflicted and hopeless for a long, long time to come. But that’s what my parents’ generation had to go through, and their parents too. It’s stupid of me to think a new, better world could just be handed to us to play with.

Five years ago, after the first by-elections, I wrote something in my old blog about being amazed by the prospects for positive changes, and it’s been a wild ride for the country since then. Now the fun parts of that ride are over and done with.

Not contributing enough to the community

I’m very thankful for being able to earn a living doing work in the nonprofit sector, and I hope I can keep doing that, or at least be part of community of people working on “doing good” (even with all its associated hubris and bad faith).

I feel guilty because we make the initial efforts to build a community, in my case in the “technology for social impact” sector, and then we move on, assuming the community has been built and that we can keep drawing on it without doing the work to continuously build it. What’s worse, we go around using “the community” as leverage, to further our careers while leaving it behind, for it to take care of itself.

This is the whole rootedness thing I said above at a more micro level. The difference is that at the level of the whole country, things are so complex and you can’t see the structure of how huge quagmires are built up through a interwoven mesh of little fuck-ups, and it all becomes a blur and you have to resort to making generalisations. But at the micro level, within the field that I work in, I can see the dynamics of how things fall apart, and at the same time also see where I can actually do more to make things better. In 2018 I really want to do more to actually give back to the community, and work on building more things online and offline. Not hustling to earn a living on the back of a community, but actually contributing to the community, just because.

Since I was a kid, my very buddhist parents always told me something very similar to that Steve Jobs quote, albeit phrased in terms of karma: “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

Getting fat again

All that cheap beer and cheese in London. One thing that kept me from ballooning earlier in the year was because I had the time to take really long walks, but then later I was super busy and wasn’t able to do that.

Since I’ve gotten back to Singapore in mid-December, I’ve been trying to make time to take long walks again, and gotten started on using Runkeeper to sort of gamify it. It’s been working so far for the past week at least.

Not keeping in touch with family

Always something that I feel guilty about. I really want to support my dad more in 2018, both emotionally and financially. Actually being physically present with him more too.

To a lesser extent, I also feel guilty for connecting more with my extended family and relatives. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t feel the need to talk to people beyond my immediate circle of friends and family that I’m closest to, but as I turn 31 this month, I feel like I can get away with it less. I’m less and less able to be excused as “that kid who grew up abroad who is still figuring out Burmese culture”.

That said, I don’t think I really want to resolve to try to become more of a proper “Burmese person” and all it entails. Because sometimes you just have to be proud to be the punk that you are. One of my favorite movies this year was Brooklyn, because I really identified with it as someone migrating between cultures, and it’s message that you don’t have to feel guilty all the time for not being tied to tradition.

Not investing in crypto

I was so close to buying Ethereum in the latter half of 2016, then freaked out a bit because of a sharp price drop. And then didn’t really look back at it for most of 2017. Now I can’t even register at an exchange to buy it because they’re all clogged from everyone rushing to buy crypto.

Earlier in December I just felt like shit thinking that even if I had put in a bit of money a year ago, I would have made more money doing nothing than I earned from juggling multiple jobs and working like crazy this whole year. It’s crazy how the world often rewards being at the right place at the right time a lot more than toil.

I have tried to think of it in a good light. Back in 2012 or something I was visiting Myanmar and one of my friends told me I should come back immediately because if “you didn’t get in now, all the positions will have been taken”. I FOMO’ed real hard, but it took me 2-3 more years to go back to Myanmar. And by all accounts, it has worked out quite okay for me. I think what I learned from that is that in an evolving landscape, opportunities are always there. If you are diligent and keep and eye out, there are many right places and right times.

Not reading enough

I read one physical book and listened to one audiobook this year. A lot less than usual. I did listen to a TON of podcasts though. Especially with all the political whirlwinds throughout the year, I felt glued to current affairs and felt like I had to be on top of the news all the time.

Only around November, I went on a break with the podcast listening and found that that was actually quite liberating, and gave me space to formulate my own thoughts more, without being hijacked by whatever topic the podcast was discussing. I will continue that next year, and will swap out podcasts for audiobooks as much as I can. Formulating well formed thoughts and getting lost in ideas and stories over hundreds of pages or dozens of hours is much healthier for me I think.

Things I'm thankful for

Now that we’ve gotten the bad stuff out of the way, let’s look at the things that filled me with happiness and hope this year.

London will always be my favourite city

I visited London for the first time in 2004 and only had a day to spend there. I remember being awed, thinking “wow, they used to rule half the world from this place a hundred years ago and now they can't even get the trains to run on time.”

I also distinctly remember watching a play called The Audience around 2014, in which the character playing Churchill was mansplaining to a young Queen Elizabeth about how constitutional monarchy worked:

“The British Constitution at first sight is a little odd. That’s why it works so well. It’s like a great ancient city - that’s grown and evolved with time - organic and mutant, full of cul-de-sacs and shortcuts, blind alleys, contradictions and follies. No planners could have come up with it. And at the heart of it - wrapped in a knot of mysteries and inconsistencies, is the relationship between you and me, Crown and Government.”

At the time, drawing from memories of my one-day visit to London, I thought that was a very succinct way of describing that ancient city. Now, after living there for a year, I still think it is. Mysterious and inconsistent, organic and mutant - that’s why it works so well.

I’ve never seen any other place where people from all over the world can come and live and feel like they can integrate and yet have ties to their roots. The music that gets created there for example. And the people themselves - every shade of color, but all Londoners. It’s like an everywhere city. But it’s also an everything city - if you take a few hours to walk from Shoreditch to the City to Westminster, it’s like taking a journey from Brooklyn, to Silicon Valley, to Manhattan, to DC, except with castles and 500 year old pubs tucked inside narrow alleyways to boot.

My wife and I are definitely scheming to find an excuse to revisit London soonish now that we’re back in Singapore.

I'll miss you, London. #nofilter

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All the people I got to connect with in London

British people get a bad rep for being cold and distant but I felt that they were anything but. I got to meet a ton of amazing folks from all kinds of different places who were based in London and working on fascinating things.

It was shocking to see the sheer number of friends who were based in Myanmar a few years ago who have now congregated in London to either study or work. In every tech event I went to like a meetup or hackathon, I’d run into someone who had worked or lived in Myanmar. That really helped me feel like I didn’t have to start over from scratch even though I was in a new city.

It was super easy to find people who were also really into whatever niche you were interested in. For me, things like Mozfest, Journocoders, Datakind, Open Data Institute, and the Newspeak House really felt like places where I can hang out with people that I can connect to instantly and geek out with.

There were also several times I was on an email with someone from another part of the world about some work thing and found out that they were coming to a conference, workshop or event in London, and I was able to just drop in and join them.

The School of Data Fellowship and Data Extractors Program

One of the best opportunities I got this year was getting to join the School of Data Fellowship and Publish What You Pay’s Data Extractors Program. I’m especially thankful for my colleagues from the Natural Resource Governance Institute for having enough confidence in me to set me up with these two programs. I really hope I didn’t disappoint them.

I’ve learned a whole lot about the global initiative to work towards more transparency in the natural resources sector, a whole lot of data skills, a lot about how the nonprofit sector works, got to visit the Philippines, Tanzania and Nigeria, but most of all, I am really grateful that I got to meet and work with these amazing, talented and passionate people who are also nerdy goofballs like me:

This year was the first time I've been to Africa and it was amazing to have a chance to visit two countries in the span of a month. First, overlooking the Indian Ocean from the Tanzanian coast and second, catching a glimpse of the Atlantic on the horizon beyond the sprawl of Lagos, Nigeria. They were both beautiful places with so much character that reminded me of home but also expanded my mental map of a part of the world I knew nothing about. But the thing that made the trips most memorable, rewarding and inspiring were the people. Communities, networks, coalitions, companionship, whatever you call it, it really drove home the fact the the work we do is and has to be global, that there are people you can instantly bond with from another corner of the globe that are passionate about the same thing as you are. I was super lucky to be part of School of Data Fellowship and Publish What You Pay Data Extractors program this year but even more lucky that I'll always be a part of this extended family. I know this sounds corny but these people really inspire me to contribute more, write more, share more, collaborate more, ask for help more. To help build more things up even when things in the world today seem like they get torn down way easier. I promise I'll write a longer blog post about all this ASAP. Please bug me if I don't. #opendata #scodacamp17 #pwypopendata #cchublagos #dlabtanzania

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Launching a new community effort with Open and Shut

Through another serendipitous series of connections, I also landed a part time job at Small Media, a tech advocacy organization, and was really lucky to be given the chance to build something I think is really cool and important: a global network of folks working on open data in closed societies.

I worked with a team to organise a conference called Open and Shut, and started a blog that tells stories about people working on open data issues all over the world.

I was really amazed at how a lot of people from the open data community were willing to lend their time to help out at the conference and give interviews for the blog. I’m super grateful for my colleagues for letting me continue writing for the blog next year although I’m no longer in London. And they were all so kind, patient, understanding and helpful as I fumbled through things.

Getting to watch some amazing gigs

So many amazing shows. And many more that I didn’t take pictures of.

Getting to work on side projects

I also co-authored two papers, one for a conference and one for an upcoming edited volume. They were definitely rewarding learning experiences, and I hope I wasn’t disappointing to my co-authors, but I think I won’t want to do more academic writing in the near future - that stuff is a lot of work.

I wrote a data journalism piece about the elections in Myanmar, a post about the potential of open data in Myanmar, and helped with another upcoming data driven advocacy piece about oil, gas and mining companies in the US. I did a bunch of one off visualisation projects, including a thing for the TEDxYangon event. I still struggle with making data viz, and I think a lot of stuff I make is crude, but I definitely feel like I’ve improved my skills over the course of the year.

Looking ahead

Before going into 2018, can I just say 2017 is the first year that I felt really lived up to science fiction imaginations of “the future”? You know, the kind that is filled with...

murderous sex robots

robot police kicking out homeless people

Instagram cult leader tech bros

billionaire geniuses launching private space programs

ginormous icebergs breaking off as the planet dies

ninja backflip robots

robot swarms

a frenzied gold rush for a decentralised digital currency thingamabob

Nazis marching proudly in the streets... more Nazis... more Nazis… more Nazis... more Nazis...

a megalomaniacal reality TV star in the White House…

And my best guess is that 2018 will be more of the same. Hopefully not a lot more because that would just be way too much chaos for even campy sci-fi writers tripped out on LSD to comprehend.

So what do I think I should do? I just want to be able to find some stability doing things that I care about.

Let me expand on that. I’ve never planned my career. I don’t think I even have what could be called a career, just a bunch of social capital and mixed bag of amateurish skills, which are cool to have but don’t automatically translate into money or stability. On top of that, as I said above, the world is nuts, my country seems like it’s jumped off a cliff, but also that there are always many many rights places and right times to be, especially when things are changing so quickly, like now.

The easiest way to get stability in one’s life I guess is to get a job at some established organisation or company, but the problem with me is that I suck at doing the same thing over and over again. I get super bored and incompetent. So either I grow up and stop being a whiny little brat (“I want to do things I’m passionate about myeh myeh myeh”) and get a real job, or I have to really commit to starting something seriously.

I know a lot of the shortcomings I listed in the “guilt” section above won’t be fixed this coming year and there’s no point making resolutions I won’t keep, but there is one thing I do want to commit to in terms of my career development.

My dream for 2018 is that I can go from “freelancing” to actually being a trusted professional who can provide valuable services in a narrow niche - as in start a company, hustle like crazy to work on projects that are at some intersection of open data, data visualisation and storytelling, regionally focused on Myanmar and Southeast Asia, but also building a brand as I go along, not in a scattershot way I did in 2017.

If in December 2018 I have a payroll to process that even has one person apart from me on it, that would be a dream come true.

Big dreams. Let’s see what happens.