Very online feelings

About the author

Crystal Abidin

Crystal Abidin is an anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, focusing especially on the Asia-Pacific region. She has published six books and more than 250...

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Non-fictionThe hacker ethos helped solidify the idea that computers weren’t just utilitarian devices that performed tasks – they had expressive potential and could be used to facilitate new forms of art and activism in the right hands and under the right conditions. But this perpetuated a myth that anyone with access to computers could try their hand at being creative and participate in a new, digital culture. While the ethos achieved a great deal in the acculturation of utopian and countercultural values, a neoliberal core soon began to emerge – especially as early tech pioneers got rich.

From the hills of Killea

Non-fictionShe lived alone with five horses, five dogs, three cats, three geese and two ducks. She had escaped Manchester under Thatcher, gone off the grid in Tipperary and never returned. She said mass suicide was the only answer to climate catastrophe. She was the most interesting person I had ever met. Before dawn, I would write. By daybreak, I would find a pair of wellies and then muck out the stables, wheeling huge barrows of horseshit across her yard to a pile the size of a fire truck. There was little time to rest. The stove needed to be fed, constantly, with bricks of peat to keep the house warm. The horses needed to be given hay five times a day. The geese needed guarding from the foxes. I learnt to care for animals, to give them my attention.

Culture warrior

Non-fictionMishima’s use of science-fiction tropes to describe contemporary life alienated critics and readers in a way that his reactionary psychodramas did not. That the Mishima Incident was met with public horror does not obviate the fact that his literary overtures to Japan’s imperial past – replete with the veneration of death central to Bushido, and the taboo-ish trope of lovers’ suicide – were a hit with audiences. However eager the Japanese public might have been to forget World War II in its sincere commitment to postwar democracy, the past remains more legible than the future, let alone the present.