On being unsettled, sincerity in the age of storyselling, and developing a taste for friction.
This month, I’m operating from Hsinchu, Taiwan, in an urban cultural cluster called General Village. An opening for programming emerged when I discussed with our residency host, and we are now planning an iteration of Goblin Market in Hsinchu. The pressure builds naturally when attempting to run an experimental art market in a place where market culture is deeply rooted and vibrant.
Leading up to this trip, I’ve been fascinated by the unfolding conversations in the conspiracy theory corners of the internet.
A doomsday prediction has been circulating in the region. The story predicts tectonic plate movements between Japan and the Philippines, which are supposedly expected to lead to a massive tsunami. The prediction originated from a nightmare, detailed in premonitions recorded by manga artist Ryo Tatsuki in The Future I Saw. The story claims that the plate will shift upwards, causing the land to rise and connect Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines into a single landmass. Geologists explained that the process typically takes an unimaginably long period of time. It isn’t something that can be achieved through one seismic activity. Still, the prediction caught on, causing not only a massive drop in tourism but also a spike in “prepping.”
People have been posting numerous disaster preparation tips—most of them reasonable and pro-social: first aid, childcare, strategies for relocating elders to safety, and reminders to pack favourite snacks for emotional support. Amidst these posts, people offered each other solace and encouragement. Strangers on the internet shared strategies for coping and provided insights from past experiences on how to deal with the disorienting aftermath of sudden disasters. Many shared that they felt a sense of community, seeing people make these resources available with no incentives.
At 4 am Tokyo time, on July 5th, people stayed up chatting on Threads, posting that they’d remained awake all night to see the end of the world—and were relieved it was, after all, a false alarm. Weeks, if not months, of preparation felt like a rehearsal or perhaps an unintentional LARP with a precise end date.
What many dismiss as unscientific or superstitious actions, I see as an attempt to make sense of threats at an unimaginable scale. The precision of July 5th at 4 am offered assurance, the certainty of an end. This feels different from the continuity of real life, where the transition from one moment to the next doesn’t come with an alarm. What an apocalypse story reveals is a deep-seated fear of annihilation, but without knowing when that moment will arrive. What feels even more eerie is that, beyond all the go bags and emergency supplies intended to help people survive an annihilating event, lies the realization that this current moment’s safety isn’t permanent. While the doomsday prediction came with a precise date and time, it doesn’t show us the tools and ways to navigate what comes next.
It’s a relief that the ground beneath us didn’t shift abruptly like the manga had predicted. However, it doesn’t mean that the world hasn’t changed. Our detachment from the land, or perhaps better described as “environmental contexts,” has shifted us away from paying attention to the changes underway.
Tyson Yunkaporta reflects on becoming severed from land and losing the embodied attunement to land in Sand Talk:
All humans evolved within complex, land-based cultures over deep time to develop a brain with the capacity for over one hundred trillion neural connections, of which we now use only a tiny fraction. Most of us have been displaced from those cultures of origin, a global diaspora of refugees severed not only from land but from the sheer genius that comes from belonging in symbiotic relation to it. In Aboriginal Australia, our Elders tell us stories, ancient narratives to show us that if you don't move with the land, the land will move you. There is nothing permanent about settlements and the civilizations that spawn them. Maybe the reason all the powerful instruments pointed at the sky have not yet been able to detect high-tech alien civilizations is that these unsustainable societies don't last long enough to leave a cosmic trace. An unsettling thought.
Being unsettled isn’t a bad thing.
Just like the high place syndrome or “call of the void,” being unsettled offers an opening to reorient our attention. The apocalypse predictions are one of these moments. Those who dismiss doomsday preparations by trying to talk believers into their sense through science miss the point. Doomsday stories reveal more about losing trust in the future than about wanting to be correct. When authority figures no longer provide the assurance people once relied on, many turn to stories that are compelling and easy to grasp.
This presents another issue: when attention fuels an economy that shapes both consumer habits and political outcomes, storytelling becomes too similar to advertising and marketing. As Byung-Chul Han notes in Vita Contemplativa, storytelling has transformed into storyselling. Narration has become insincere. Superficial aesthetics compete to sell the instant gratification of a “more optimized version of oneself.” If stories no longer need to be sincere, why does it matter if their content is generated by a large language model from a prompt? People must compete for attention to survive. This, to some extent, explains why ethical debates about whether to use or avoid AI fail to change the fact that people will still use AI when they are threatened by the anxiety of being unoptimized for survival in a world governed solely by financial capabilities.
What does it mean, then, to be sincere?
With a mix of luck and serendipity, this site, General Village, highlights many aspects of living through significant changes and how we might view cultural interventions as living archives of evolving landscapes. Military dependents’ settlements （眷村） were common across Taiwan, but only a few have survived to today. People packed up to evacuate mainland China haphazardly, thinking they might return home soon after the war, but ended up spending a lifetime in diaspora. Due to this, many of these settlements were often constructed using affordable, readily available materials on public land. The food culture maintained distinct regional characteristics from all over China, yet developed unexpected flavours as they blended into Taiwanese local tastes. Temples and shrines often serve as one-stop shops for all the regional deities, emerging from a confluence of ritual practices from the diaspora. Despite most of the buildings becoming derelict and being replaced by new developments, this chapter of history remains alive through the traces it left on a distinctly Taiwanese culture—the flavours of food continue to adapt into new local tastes, merging with other cultures, and people are exceptionally supportive and helpful whenever you need a hand. These qualities stem from the necessity of cooperating not only with the elements of a new place but also with people from cultures that differ from one another. People believe in some discrepancy and ambiguity, as many things can’t be fully explained before action is needed, but it doesn’t stop them from acting with sincerity. This sincerity allows a diverse array of vernacular art forms to emerge out of necessity, making beauty a part of life, which was part of people’s toolkit for making living in diaspora less anguishing.
This toolkit has evolved over time and persists in people’s daily interactions with one another, despite being unspoken and largely undocumented. Pro-social activities, meaning-making, and glimpses of beauty and joy delivered through food, hawker market stalls, housing models, carpentry, clothing, music, and other vernacular art forms are living archives of cultural “technologies.”
I spent a fair amount of time reflecting on what value Goblin Market offers as an engagement and presentation structure. As of now, it feels most appropriate to propose that artistic endeavours are experiments and rehearsals for what’s coming, much like preparing for a post-apocalyptic life due to a premonition from a fictional story.
On the question of sincerity, prioritizing individual convenience has made it easier for us to be less sincere in our actions. Creating an environment where the exchange of value has been complicated ultimately prompts us to consider what we find precious and what we are willing to surrender. In the face of the Spotify implosion, criticizing the corporate platform through ethical debate is a straightforward task. Getting off the convenience of being served music on a platter at a low price is difficult. Coming up with new ways to discover, enjoy, and appreciate music is becoming increasingly challenging due to this inertia resulting from decades of designing for frictionless experiences.
What will we surrender when we acknowledge something is more precious than our individual convenience?
Can we cultivate a taste for friction and necessary inconvenience?
I always joke about how third-wave coffee has been so effective in cultivating this taste for friction and inconvenience. The humble acts of grinding beans and brewing a pour-over or espresso at home bring people who consume coffee into the labour chain as they complete the last step of the process. Automatic coffee makers and franchise coffee shops, built on the narrative of convenience and availability, have become a last resort for those who believe they have a good taste in coffee (i.e., me). Jokes aside, I actively seek out interesting coffee roasters when I travel, and I've had wonderful conversations that go far beyond coffee. (Remind me to tell you about this retired automation engineer who fell in love with the fact that coffee roasting, a full engagement of one's senses and embodied knowledge, can't ever be automated.)
Goblin Market is perhaps stewarding a similar process, where the audience must offer something of their own in order to complete the experience. Developing a taste for friction is necessary for reclaiming agency. It directs our attention and resources towards something other than what we've been served. It builds muscles for curiosity and interests.
On my mind lately: