Some months ago the President of the United States of America posted an AI-generated video showing himself flying a fighter jet labeled “King Trump” and dumping shit on No Kings protestors, an act that in the long run didn’t attract any consequences, aside for some social media backlash. As usual, said backlash had no real effect - just like the No Kings protests, which are still on-going (the next one’s scheduled for 28 March) and also have had no effect.

If there’s one thing Trump’s Presidency demonstrates, is that all of the United States’ vaunted rhetoric about democracy and freedom was total and utter bilge water. In actuality, the power of the people is extraordinarily limited, and that now that there’s a cadre of the powerful who are simply ignoring them, it looks like Trump and his cronies can get away with anything they please.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Netflix is making shows designed for people who aren’t really watching them. If you’ve ever wondered why characters say what they’re going to do before doing it, and then explain why they did it after, you were probably watching one of these shows. Purportedly designed for people who are scrolling Tiktok while watching Netflix, what they really are is television for stupid people. Of course, that makes them annoyingly frustrating for the rest of us, who are actually paying attention and have enough braincells to deduce character motivation without having it spelled out for us. They’re also anathema for fans, because there’s no room for that speculation and theorising that happens in the space left by ambiguity.

Assuming that people are stupid and then ignoring them seems to be standard operating procedure in these dire times - and sometimes it happens the other way around: do what you want, ignore people, and if they ask questions, proffer answers that would only be satisfying to the stupid, such as virtually anything that Donald Trump has ever said.

(Quiet, piggy!)

How he managed to convince anyone to vote for him is a mystery that perhaps has something to do with appealing to the stupid. He sometimes hasn’t the patience to answer, and often takes being questioned as the journalist not being nice, or digging for fake news, which suggests that perhaps his understanding of what news is doesn’t match anyone else’s.

Just the other day Facebook said I was suspected of automated behaviour - which is ironic, coming from Facebook. Absolutely the worst timing. I’m one of the few people still using and posting to Facebook. Young people don’t use it, because it’s full of us ancients, and I don’t understand why Facebook (which hasn’t had a decent new feature in years, and continually deprecates my use of it - it’s absolutely useless for sharing links with friends, for example) wants to give me a reason to stop using it. At this point I’m using that platform because I lack a similar alternative, not because I want to - so it’s stupid to make it more difficult for me to use it.

Which is not to indict the stupid: there are circumstances in which any one of us can be stupid. Love, for example, can make one stupid. Sometimes even the idea of love can inspire acts of incredible stupidity (been there, myself). Sometimes stupidity results from a paucity of opportunity and exposure: if you only have limited experience, you understand everything through the lens of that experience.

(Explains digital natives, by the way: they’ve used the internet and online services all their lives, but like natives they only know what happens in response to what they do, and mostly have little to no understanding of how things happen. That hot bright ball in the sky? It causes the day, right?)

This is why reading (and education) is important: it makes you aware that there is more to life than your own lived experience. This is not nothing.

You can read a book and be transported to outer space, or to a kingdom with magic and knights and dragons. Or, if you’re this simple Singaporean boy, you can be transported to Mallory Towers, which is just as alien.

Today I’m trapped in some Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (written in the 20s, 30s and 40s) and my peephole to that world is the very tiny (but very special) e-reader pictured above. The XTEINK X4 seemed a bit of a curiosity, at first, but this tiny 4.3” e-ink reader is all the more charming because of its lack of features. No backlight, no frills, few font choices - I even had to reflash the firmware with the open-source community-produced Crosspoint Reader which adds some much needed quality-of-life improvements to what comes from the factory.

But it barely ever leaves my side, and is so small that I have little trouble whipping it out to read a few pages here and there, like when I’m waiting for the bus or standing in line at the supermarket.

(No, I don’t know why I don’t do that with my phone - maybe the lesson here is that I should!)

General crankiness aside, perhaps the problem is that we LET things become this stupid. It’s tempting to get someone else to do the heavy lifting (Cliff Notes, AI, social media algorithm) so that we can do something more enjoyable, but at this point, that “more enjoyable” thing appears to be doomscrolling through short-form video enjoying quick hits of dopamine while the world burns.