Brain Dump | Morning Musings

Are you in control of the content you're consuming or do you let big tech control what you consume? this applies to hive experience to some degree as well...

It has come to my attention again that somehow we have the power to curate our own experience online. I guess we're past that stage and people are more aware how to curate their experience online. To some degree, in the past sometimes it feels pretty depressing to see what's going on all around us and we see just about anything on our recommendation feeds. I have a couple of different accounts and they all show me different kinds of content. Somehow, one account was a lot more depression than the others where I was liking a bunch of news content and political commentary. However, one account was only filled with the aestheticism that there was almost no recommendation about what's truly going on in my surrounding. It certainly creates its own echo chamber that sometimes makes us unaware of an important thing all around us.

For some reason, yesterday I came in contact with the latest news about indonesia from a foreign correspondent. The account reported about massive demonstration in the capital trying to fight for democracy. It seems like the country is in deep trouble where people share blue screen pictures with the country's logo and saying " emergency situation".

I was simply baffled because this could have led to something similar, a crisis back in 1998. That crisis was memorized as the May Riots and the victism were mostly Chinese-indonesian who were abused, raped and have their livelihood destroyed. It was a culmination of different aspects from economy to political and social tensions. During that time, the country was also under an authoritarian regime that felt like a utopia for most. The family that ruled for about 31 years was backed by military and it took thousands on the streets to topple the regime.

Indonesians protest against proposed changes to election law, threat to democracy

Today, something similar was about to happen. The current president wanted to pave way for his children to seep into the political power. The elder son has been vice president elect and now, the youngest was about to apply for governor election. Since both of the sons were not eligible by constitution the laws were changed to pave their way. They were both only around 30 and 29, an age that seemingly too young, to rule billions of Indonesian. At the same time, their political track record needed some polish and more experience. It fueled people's anger that they took the streets the other day.

When I was telling my mom what happened, she told me that her lives wasn't really affected. There were significant price hike and Asia at the time was also hit with financial crisis. The aftermath of 1998 was also an increase in poverty, unemployment rates as well as further decline in the country's currency value. While sometimes we think that this political unrest won't affect us, one way or another it will.

Interestingly during the political unrest, the stock market and the currency weren't down that bad. In fact, just a day after it rose up again and it's back to business as usual. The economic implication of it are something that I am most likely following as it interest me more than any other aspects.

I spent hours checking the news and realized, how it get depressing the more I read it. So, well I sanitized my account and finally my recommendation changed once more, something a lot less depressing.

Anyway, these whole thing could also happen on hive. When you only consume drama, the drama is all you get. I think there has to be some type of balance and that's what I am curating my experience on hive lately. Something that I enjoy consuming but also things that I need to know and the progress of this chain along its future.

My coffee is running out, see you in my next brain dump!