KAPOOKABABY

How to travel and pay zilch for accommodation

ninemsn

Tacheles stairs, Berlin

If you’re short on cash but up to your ears in time, you’d be surprised at the doors open to you when it comes to dodging hotel bills. Volunteer work, caretaking and couchsurfing are just some great examples for the open-minded traveller.

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The most bizarre clubs on the planet

ninemsn

Public Life in London

Even the most jaded of around-the-world clubbers will find something amazing in this, our compilation of the world’s most unusual and twisted places to have a boogie.

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Bubble boys and girls: China is an island

“Remember, none of them have been overseas,” the teacher mentioned, in reference to the rest of the class.

We had been discussing whether Australians found it strange that despite my Chinese appearance I didn’t speak any Chinese languages, and had an Australian accent. I replied that such a thing wasn’t so uncommon in Australia, but when I traveled the locals of places like Europe and South America, which have relatively small, Chinese populations, found it a little strange.

Her comment – that none of the Chinese students had been overseas (well except for one, who was ethnically Korean and had been to Korea) – or perhaps it was mine, was yet another reminder of how I differed to the rest of the students in the class.

Let’s imagine six villages.

The five villages are all interconnected: they communicate with one another, trade and share goods, news, information, ideas, and culture. There is a movement of people between the villages: be they short visits, work related or migration. So even though in each village the majority of the population stay in their own village and never set foot in the other villages – almost all of them know someone who has.

The sixth village, however, is isolated from the rest. It has little communication or trading and sharing of ideas with the other five, and there is almost no movement of people – either in or out. In this case, not only is there an even greater majority of the population who has never seen another village – hardly any of them know anyone who has.

Now, this sixth village is very, very big. So perhaps there is enough dynamicism within the village to rival the five villages put together. The thing is, there’s also a very powerful organisation in charge of this village, that attempted to eradicate many differences between families and put into place a culture of heavy conformity. This makes the sixth village an even more remarkably different place to the five other villages.

This may be an extreme analogy for China, but still, I am constantly struck anew by how “closed” China was, still is – although it’s changing, and wonder what the implications are. When I talk to a Chinese, it’s not just a case of realising they’ve never been overseas, but also that they’ve grown up in a world where no one they know has been overseas either.

Remember this girl I had lunch with, and who said I was the first foreigner she’d ever met? Many other Chinese students I’ve talked to said the first foreigner they’d ever met was their language teacher. Which Sydney-sider born and raised could ever even remember meeting their first “foreigner”? Sydney is packed full of them! They’re called … Sydney-siders.

And this is just the general experience for Chinese students attending a top tier Beijing university. Many of them may not have been overseas, but most of them will likely, at some point, have the opportunity to. It’s not the same story, however, for the nation’s majority countryside peasant population.

For more on how and why China is an island, head to this fascinating post by Kevin Kelly (via. Strange Maps, via. John Maudlin’s Outside the Box.)

Interesting fact: here, a “migrant worker” isn’t someone who’s migrated from overseas, but someone who’s moved from one province to another, within China. Imagine if you had to ask for – and it was difficult to get – permission to move from Victoria to NSW? But it makes more sense when you remember that China (1.3 billion) has a greater population than all of Europe (0.5 billion), and a greater land mass (9.6 million km2, 4.3 million km2 respectively).

This new documentary ‘Last Train Home‘ looks like a fascinating and moving treatise on the migrant worker experience here:


Why Internet freedom matters, in the West, in China

For those of you out there who, like me, have been living and breathing the Internet for the past decade, we know what it represents. It’s not just another media technology – it is the one that blows all the rest out of the water, and for many, has almost become a fundamental human right. If you think the Internet is already pervasive, it has nothing on what we’re going to see in the next 5,000 days. And as the excellent documentary “RIP: A Remix Manifesto” the future direction of the digital realm is being laid out now. And we’re in real danger of losing the vibrancy, diversity and freedom that makes the Internet so incredible.

While RIP focuses on the insidious nature of corporate greed, I can assure you there’s another bad monster you have to be wary of: government control. If you want to envision a nightmare scenario of what could happen to your Internet, just look to China for inspiration.

In Danwei’s fascinating video with China’s blogging big guns, writers that face serious potential consequences by blogging about what they do, almost all had the same answer when asked about the biggest changes to the Internet in China: this year the Party seriously tightened their control. Much of it was a response to the July 5 riots in Urumqi, plus stepping up national security for the 60th anniversary celebrations. Down went YouTube, down went Facebook and Twitter, down went everything hosted on WordPress (although that has recently been restored) and every day a few more blogs and sites were added to the banned list.

In the video, blogger Zhai Minglei says, “the control is so heavy that I would call this year Year One of Internet Control,” which doesn’t bode well for his predictions of the coming years. On the other hand, when asked in what way the internet had changed this year, blogger and grass roots philanthropist Tiger Temple had a somewhat more positive spin:

I have an answer which may sound self-contradictory. The online freedom is deteriorating due to the tightened controls. It is moving backwards. However we feel that we have more freedom to express our freedom. Why this paradox? Obviously the government has been increasing its efforts in terms of technology and control of public opinion, the environment is getting worse.

But why now we can see online discussions that we could not previously see? Some small blogs with supposedly “extreme” opinions are still around. Is it all because of regulatory negligence? No, I think it because we are now slow-boiling the frog. We used to be boiled by them, now it is the other way around. We are helping them get used to the freedom of speech. To make the Internet police feel how dumb their rules are. And we will prevail step by step.

Despite the fact that China has some of the most restrictive censorship laws of the world, somewhat paradoxically (or perhaps as a consequence of) the fact is that the Internet is just as prevalent here as it is back home – if not more so!

The thing with the Chinese is that, my impression so far is, they’ve never had the kind of diverse, independent, truth-to-power media industry that a country of their size warrants. Newspapers, television networks and books have always had a tight Government controlled leash around them. So it makes sense that the Internet – a place in which broadcasting is decentralised and therefore very difficult to monitor – has become a primary source of news and information for many Chinese.

Not to mention a safer (although not completely safe) way to organise, and voice dissent than IRL (in real life).

They, particularly the young, and particularly the urban, educated, are, for the most part, Internet savvy and active participants in the online world. More and more are using proxies to “scale the Wall“, and netizens are making a serious impact on events, such as in the Deng Yujiao incident.

From Australia, it’s hard to get a sense of the depth and vibrancy of China’s online sphere. Primarily it is a language barrier that creates the “insularity of the Chinese Internet” as blogger Chinayouren put it, and one that continues to frustrate me today. Nonetheless, “bridge blogs”, particularly those like chinaSMACK which even translate comments made by Chinese readers on Chinese stories, allow me to peek into that world.

When it comes to power, there are two critical components: information and organisation. The latter is self-explanatory, but the former equally vital. I’ve come to realise how much I take the Western media, with all its flaws, for granted. It is so hard to get an accurate picture of what’s going on in this country, and without which you have no idea what needs to change. You have no idea what has been taken away from you, from your neighbour, or from a community.

(It must be mentioned one gigantic flaw being that despite its more accurate reportage, the trade-off was advertising and the promotion of consumerism, so Western media is essentially complicit in consumer culture playing an unhealthy role in maintaining corporate control of our society.)

So until now, the people of China had trouble getting the first, and in the face of the most organised authoritarian government in the world, had even more trouble with the second. Then along came the Internet and in a single stroke were given the potential to access both. No wonder it has the Party nervous, and why “18 of the 24 journalists imprisoned in China work online“.

The Internet is here to stay, and the very future of democracy may live and die in its pipes. But your average person doesn’t know this. As an Internet obsessed person I forget most people are like my friend who today exclaimed “really?” when I informed him that even publications like the NYTimes have blogs these days. And to whom issues like net neutrality, or liberalizing copyright laws in the digital age seem trivial compared to climate change and the global financial crises etc.

But these things are important, and it’s critical that we netizens fight to preserve all the wonderful, revolutionary qualities of the Internet that we love so much: before corporate culture or scary governments distort, choke, sanitize, and eventually spiritually kill this amazing place.

Lastly, I’m going to leave you with a video poking fun of Tony Abbot, for your own local taste of netizen action:


Am I getting too old to ever reclaim my hipster identity?

It will be of no surprise to old-time readers to hear that in the summer of 2004-2005 I was a FULL-BLOWN HIPSTER.

Back then I was just 21 years of age, and a bartender of a club that hosted, what was, Sydney’s coolest party. I had just graduated from university and was also blogging, making zines, podcasts, indie dj-ing and volunteering at a community radio station. Nothing I made was very good, but at the time, I thought I was genius and on reflection, I still believe I learned a lot.

But really, as is the case for most scenesters, what I really lived to do was party. I partied while I worked (dancing behind the bar), and partied harder when I wasn’t. I was friends with other scenesters, and at every party we went to, we’d bump into other scenesters that we’d have short, trivial conversations with. We were always surrounded by musos, DJs, fashion designers, artists, models, who wore amazing clothes, took loads of drugs, and looked amazing on the dancefloor.

My hipster lifestyle kept chugging along when I relocated to London for a year, but when I returned to Sydney I found that things had changed. Whether it was me or the parties, the scene just didn’t seem quite so cool anymore. Then, six months later I started working my first proper job in the media industry – for a very, mainstream tabloid title – and my hipster lifestyle quickly began to fade away.

At some point I woke up and realised, without any intention, my hipster days were well and truly over.

And for the most part, I’m fine with that. The things I’m doing here in Beijing: my Mandarin language classes, learning about China, blog strategy work for a non-profit, freelance writing, it’s extremely interesting, creative, inspiring, meaningful and intellectually challenging. This is my “thing”, something I’d never really found in the world of hipsterism.

But every now and then, I do miss that time in my life.

Today, in the midst of memorising han zi, I decided to play on my iPod one of the old mixes from the DJs of that party I used to bartend at. I lost myself a little in nostalgia. I recalled the nervy thrill of the hours leading up to the party starting – because you knew what was about to come would be totally out of control. And then the room would fill with all those crazy, gorgeous creatures, out would come the drink, the drugs, the mob ecstasy of just being in a room filled with other crazy, gorgeous creatures.

I remembered all the heart-breakingly beautiful boys my friends and I had nicknames for and that we’d “see around” but never really knew (although I pashed a couple). I recalled, with some embarrassment, how cool I’d feel when I schmoozed with the scene’s micro-celebrities. And fondly, best of all, thought of the heightened sense of closeness I’d experience with my friends (they were my crew!) And the way the music, music, music would always possess us – ah yes, I miss all this.

Perhaps, as this post points out, we were “always trying so hard”. While there was something primal and essential about how present we were, dancing, flirting, drinking, drugs, making out – a lot of this was also performance. Every participant came knowing the deal. You dressed a certain way, you had certain values, lived a certain lifestyle, acknowledged a certain social ranking, and most of all, you acted a certain way in the club. There was an understanding – we’re here to go crazy – and that’s as much a responsibility as it was a privilege.

As “legitimate” as my life is now, there will always be a part of me that will yearn for those outrageous, glamorous days as a scenester (and I know why). However, Beijing provides little outlet to satisfy those desires and by the time I get out of this city, – with its oppressive grey skies, and its 12 million clock-punching Chinese – my youth will have passed with barely a wisp of fading smoke to remember it by.

And, alas, once one’s 20s have gone – they are IRRETRIEVABLE!


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