Soundtrack for Neon Empire
July 16, 2019
By dminh
I put together an imaginary soundtrack for Neon Empire. It follows thematically with the chapters of the book. Check it out on Spotify!
1984 Seventy Years Later
June 20, 2019
By dminh
On June 8, 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. Seventy years later, Orwell’s warnings still ring true. Orwellian. Not many people can claim an adjective, and I’m sure if George Orwell were alive today he’d have mixed feelings about it. “Orwellian” has become synonymous with “dystopian” — humorless, drab, authoritarian, all-seeing, all-disrupting, anti-human. We see references to Big Brother — the surrogate God …
Writing as an act of defiance
May 29, 2019
By dminh
Anybody who’s ever taken pen to paper has probably asked themselves: why on earth am I doing this? The endlessly reproducible medium of digital has decimated the old media model – forcing book, newspaper and magazine publishers to pivot to new business models. Writers no longer get big advances, lavish launch parties, or, frankly, the …
What Aldous Huxley Taught Us
May 27, 2019
By dminh
Fifty-five years ago, on this day in 1963, Aldous Huxley passed through a psychedelic portal to the other side. His death was overshadowed by the assassination of JFK on the same day, but the legacy of his most popular novel, Brave New World, lives on. Even fifty-five years after his death, Aldous Huxley’s best-known work, the …
We’re All in a Tabloid Now
May 27, 2019
By dminh
How The Real World, OJ Simpson and Kim Kardashian paved the way to our tabloidized lives on social. Kim Kardashian once described taking photos of herself as the “the purpose of life.” From the reality show which she helped launch, to her sisters following in her footsteps, the tabloid-like buzz the Kardashians create about themselves …
Generation #Ad
May 27, 2019
By dminh
Social media allows us to monetize anything. But should we? Last September I published this deep dive into how monetization works on social media: its origins, its manifestations, and where I see it going in the future. It’s a 23-minute read with embedded media files. If anything, it will give readers of my book, Neon …
Engines of Polarization
August 29, 2018
By dminh
A small change to an algorithm is at the heart of fake news, tribalism and extreme behavior on social media. In October 2009 Facebook made a fateful change to its algorithm which has had profound and polarizing effects on society. It’s a lesson in unintended consequences — for, on the surface, this tweak to the platform was …
Confessions of a Content Moderatation Kingpin
August 29, 2018
By dminh
The following were writing prompts for this satirical piece: The Impossible Job: Inside Facebook’s Struggle to Moderate Two Billion People – in which the herculean task of moderating content is explained. Also this, article: Inside Facebook’s Fast-Growing Content-Moderation Effort. Next to sex doll cleaning, moderating extreme content on Facebook has to be one of the worst jobs humanity …
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Now hiring: Doll Cleaner/Visionary
August 29, 2018
By dminh
Sometimes I like to riff off of current headlines. The recent news of the first sex doll brothel opening in North America spurred me to think about the poor souls who have to clean the dolls after they’re used. What would a job listing look like? I’ve been on the market lately, so this is …
Ïnsta (a Wikipedia article from the future)
August 9, 2018
By dminh
The following is a thought experiment. I’ve always been fascinated with proto-humans like Ötzi, the mummy found in the Tyrolean alps, who has become our best insight into Copper Age humans. Teams of forensic scientists have examined him and made educated guesses about what his daily life might have been like. Given that this was many …
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What we need
July 23, 2018
By dminh
Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You is a fresh dose of sincerity, which we so badly need right now. Even though it’s set in a hyperbolic version of our own reality – with surreal and absurd moments sprinkled throughout – it rings true for the entire one hour and forty-five minute runtime. I went in …
Diary of a Madman
July 19, 2018
By dminh
Yesterday I did something I haven’t done in years – revisit my old blog, Guirilandia. It was curious to see that the analytics looked like, and was surprised to see it still received a steady stream of traffic. One of the most popular posts is one titled, The Real Gas Natural. The title was a …
Character in Sicario
July 3, 2018
By dminh
Some quick thoughts on Sicario: Day of the Soldado, the sequel to 2015’s Sicario by Denis Villeneuve. Soldado was written by Taylor Sheridan, just like its precursor, which was brilliantly written, but I was initially hesitant to see it due to a horrible marketing campaign. With creative assets filtered through social media which made it …
A Crucible of Extremes
June 13, 2019
By dminh
There’s a remarkable sequence at the end Black Mirror’s Nosedive episode where the main character, driven mad by her quest for higher social media status, winds up in a jail cell, bedraggled, makeup smeared, staring at motes floating in the fluorescent overhead lighting. Bereft of what gives her validation in her outside life – streams …
Isn’t there something in living dangerously?
June 26, 2018
By dminh
The Savage nodded, frowning. “You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ’tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end …
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Keep it simple, stupido
June 25, 2018
By dminh
It was the year 2000 and life seemed simpler. The world seemed simpler. 9/11 hadn’t happened and I had no material possessions except for a backpack with about three changes of clothes and an ever-rotating paperback book – usually something I traded with someone in a hostel, so as to not carry extra weight while …
Fiction & Lies
June 25, 2018
By dminh
We like affirmation of our own thoughts, especially when they’re inchoate and scattered – I know I do. Despite all the sentences I’ve churned out over the years, I often need someone else to articulate an incomplete thought process, much like a house needs an architect to draft a blueprint prior to being built. In …
Subtlety in Atlanta
June 25, 2018
By dminh
Discovering great works of art is always deeply inspiring to me. Even if imperfect, Atlanta, is one of those. I just binged the first two seasons and it’s uneven and ragged, but like a lovable shaggy dog, there’s just something about it which I find endearing. Donald Glover, who I’ve just discovered (forgive me, for …
The burden of self curation
June 26, 2018
By dminh
In the days since Anthony Bourdain’s death, I’ve been reeling in a mix of emotions, and have only been able to vent these feelings to my wife. Let’s just say I’ve harbored some politically inexpedient opinions about certain people involved in that affair that could easily be twisted out of context. Especially in my social …
My Anthony Bourdain story
June 28, 2018
By dminh
It may seem strange to start a story about my encounter with Anthony Bourdain with an anecdote about Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, but if it weren’t for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu – BJJ for short – I don’t think I’d ever have appreciated him in the way I do. Because of BJJ I met the man first, …
The newspapers of Utopia would be terribly dull
June 8, 2018
By dminh
I’m reading 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke for the first time ever, after an interview with Christopher Nolan about his 70mm restoration of the movie adaptation piqued my interest in the book. I had always put off reading 2001 because I felt I already knew the story. Kubrick’s science fiction masterpiece had left …
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Impressions
June 8, 2018
By dminh
Having a nearly 4 year old daughter obliges me – in a way – to see the world through her eyes. Everything I do around her is filtered through her eyes and I try to perceive things as she would. The world is strange, bold, full of surprises. If you look at the world in this way …
2003
January 4, 2015
By dminh
So one of the resolutions I have for 2015 is to keep a blog – yep, just like it was 2003 all over again when all the cool kids were blogging. Now that we’re all supposed to post on Facebook and share ephemerally via Snapchat, it’s a little absurd to even think about blogging, not to mention …