January 2025 – Pete Sime | A Personal Blog

I read The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas by Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express is a manifestation of the idea that travel is about the journey, not the destination. It details his journey – primarily by rail – from Boston, Massachusetts to Esquel, Argentina. This was a trip undertaken in the late 1970s, during the Carter administration. And so this book offers a glimpse into another time as well as – to me – entirely different geography.

Theroux outlines the contrast between the rich and the deeply impoverished he encounters in this book and one meeting with three homeless boys sleeping in a doorway in Colombia is particularly moving. They’d be in their sixties today if they still live and I have my doubts that they do.

The book also strangely echoes the contemporary world, highlighting the debate in Panama over the Torrijos–Carter Treaties of 1977, which placed sovereignty over the Canal Zone in 1999. With Donald Trump now threatening to annex the Panama Canal, this period becomes ever more relevant.

Theroux is fairly acerbic when it comes to tourists and backpackers in South America, especially the budget travellers who count every penny.

Finally, the book has a general literary tone. Theroux reads Lovecraft, Poe, Boswell and Kipling through his journey. And insofar as the book has a climax, it’s his experience with Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires.

This was an enjoyable read and leaves me wondering if I should try learning some Spanish.

The power of the blog

The internet has fallen. Over the past decade and a half, online life grew more and more concentrated into a handful of platforms. Twitter. Facebook. Reddit. Youtube. And lately, Tiktok. Three of those services: Twitter/X, Meta (Facebook/Instagram/Threads/Whatsapp) and Tiktok have demonstrated their fealty towards Donald Trump. Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter/X, performing a Nazi salute at the inauguration. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta has abandoned third-party fact checking. And Tiktok performed a stunt of an 8 hour shutdown, crediting Trump with saving the app in the US.

Reddit and Youtube are not quite so nakedly biased in the way they deliver their content, but the nature of AI slop and the fact their business models rely on retaining user attention means the quality is variable.

What I’m driving at is the users have lost control of these platforms. And the best way to counter that is to revert back to blogging. With a blog, you are in control. You can say whatever you wish and post whatever you want (within the law). And while it may for a while be yelling into the void, at least for me it is the change I want to see online.

I’m sick of enshittification. I’m shit of losing years of posts. I’m sick of missing out on seeing how my thoughts evolve on a topic and where I draw a line on various issues.

Most of all I’m sick of supporting companies whose interests are totally out of line with my own. This is a simple, concrete action to take if you don’t want to support what’s going on in the US and you don’t want to be in the hands of the corporates.

A blog is fairly simple to set up and if you want to self host on a Raspberry Pi – as I do – or a secondhand PC or a cheap mini one, it’s cheaper than a year’s worth of hosting on a commercial web host. And at least then you can claim your independence online.

This is only the beginning

Donald Trump was sworn in as 47^th President of the United States today. A key ally of his, Elon Musk, delivered a speech in which he performed the Nazi salute twice.

Trump has pardoned the January 6^th insurrectionists. He has issued executive orders to outlaw gender-affirming references in the US government. He has declared an intention to impose a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada. He is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord. And so many other disruptive things.

I can’t spend the next four years in a permanent state of outrage, and as a New Zealander I am shielded by some degree of distance. But this kind of shit spreads far and wide and with our right wing government we’ll see it percolate through more and more.

I cannot change or influence events in the US, except in terms of where I spend my money. Dialing back from Amazon would be a good start, I think.

The best way for New Zealanders to reject Trump is to reject those here who share his views. I won’t play my part as the triggered woke lib whining behind a keyboard as right wingers bait and troll the left. I’ve got more substantive mahi to do.

I read The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

It’s always a particular pleasure when you jump onboard a series of novels that have a lengthy back-catalogue. Charles Stross’s Laundry Files certainly qualify for that with 14 books so far. I’m indebted to the commenter on a web forum (Fark, I think) who recommended it.

The Atrocity Archives – published along with a novella, The Concrete Jungle, fills an interesting niche in the realm of modern Lovecraftian fiction. For starters it’s funny.

They are first-person narratives of Bob Howard, a system-admin and newly minted field agent for The Laundry – a branch of the UK civil service tasked with dealing with cosmic horrors.

The book was published in 2004 and is set in 2002-2003.

The blend of the mundane routine of the public service: training days, receipting, budgeting and office politics along with dark beings from other dimensions is rich vein to explore.

Stross himself began in tech and the book does fall into a little technobabble on occasion, but so long as you treat it as you’d find in Star Trek or Tom Clancy, you’d be fine. My suspicion of Clancy being an influence was confirmed in the author’s afterword where he was credited along with Len Deighton. And he made the point that the spy novels of the Cold War were in a way cosmic horrors themselves with the looming threat of nuclear annihilation in the background unless things went just right for the protagonist.

I think if you shook up Clancy and Deighton along with Yes, Minister and The X-Files and maybe an introductory comp-sci textbook, you’d probably get something like this.

I intend to read more. Recommended.

Some hope for 2025

It’s no great piece of political analysis to say that for those of us on the Left, 2025 is shaping up to be a bad year. Donald Trump’s second term begins in a little over a week, governments are being shaken up in Europe and here in New Zealand we have entered the second year of the most right-wing government this country has seen since 1991.

It’s not a good time. But I do have some hope.

First here in New Zealand we see it in how opposition to David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill has coalesced. Not only in terms of last year’s hīkoi, but also in how many submissions have been made on the bill. Over 300,000. And from my impression of social media, most objectors are not making duplicate submissions, which is indicative of the intensity of opposition. It is not mere slacktivisim where submitters simply fill out a mass-submission.

Another point of protest emerged last year over the government’s proposed cuts to the Dunedin Hospital build, with 35,000 angry southerners – myself amongst them – marching against the government’s broken promise.

My point is citizens opposed to this government are engaged, active and organised. Which I think is rare for a first term government, at least in my experience.

Turning to the broader international context, there really is very little that someone like me in New Zealand could do to impact the American government. Online life in the English speaking world is heavily weighed towards American defaultism. So we tend to pick up American attitudes and points of view even just by osmosis.

The techbro culture that has arisen in support of Trump makes easy targets for me to express my disapproval. And at the same time it offers a way to protect myself from the pessimistic doom-scrolling that I engaged in from 2016-2021. I already ejected Twitter/X from my digital ecosystem some time ago. My final post was in mid 2023 and I finally deleted my account in November.

Facebook is a tougher nut to crack – mainly due to Messenger – but I have deactivated Instagram, cancelled push notifications and removed the Facebook app from my homescreen on my phone.

Amazon is probably the hardest of all, and a complete boycott is likely impossible – consider how many sites use AWS, for example – but I can at least dial back on what I spend there. Instead of making number go up, do my bit to make number go down.

On the whole, though, I intend to stick to my knitting and worry about what I can change here in New Zealand. I’ve always resisted the idea that New Zealanders are insular hobbits with a Shire mentality, but I think it’s time to embrace it.

Recycling

My resolutions are pretty prosaic and are largely recycled:

● Read more.

● Lose weight.

● Reduce time online.

● Be political.

● Learn something.

● Travel somewhere noteworthy.

● Be a more diligent photographer.

● Keep this blog.

Happy 2025, everyone.