09 November 2024 - Operating the Temple System
You know it is the future when you can can stand in the moss-covered corridors of a thousand-year-old temple -- until relatively recently hidden for centuries in the jungle -- and send photos of the experience to family and friends a quarter of the way around the globe, receiving their reactions in real time. The photos included trick-shots taken using techniques the tour guide had learned on YouTube. Gimmicky -- but in many ways a remarkable situation given what this country has been through in my lifetime.
LTE Network coverage in Siem Reap and its surrounds matches the quality I've experienced in many western urban centres. I stood amid the ruins contemplating the lives and dreams of the Temple's builders and users, marvelling at the craftsmanship and the wear and tear of countless generations of footsteps, to the tune of a playlist of curated from pretty-well every inhabited corner of the planet, compiled the night before, explicitly for the experience. The surreal but photorealistic cover art for the playlist was created on a whim, generated in seconds by an AI lurking in a machine room somewhere on the other side of the planet. If you had told me in high school about those tech-assisted threads woven into my 2024 experience of Angkor Wat, I'm not sure I'd have fully believed you.
Cambodia is certainly a lot more developed -- and peaceful -- than when I was in High School, and I'm pretty sure I'd have believed those aspects of the experience. While I think I even then anticipated the level of sophistication our technology has achieved, the level of commoditisation and penetration is not something I had predicted. Not by this point in time, anyway. I don't think we fully anticipated the impact such penetration would have not only on culture, but one's personal experience of the world. I don't think we anticipated how profoundly mundane, yet pervasive and invasive of every moment that digital technology would become. I guess I should have expected it. Mobile phones were only just becoming affordable for the middle class when I graduated high school, and I could see where they were going to go: I knew smart phones were coming before we had even agreed a name for the concept. I guess I should have predicted that the inevitable trajectory of this technology was for your Cambodian tuk-tuk driver to be watching Tik-tok videos while they lay in a hammock waiting for a fare. The only way to escape modern infotech is to fully detatch from contact with mankind itself.
Somehow, even though I am avoiding worship of the latest tech, the need for semi-current equipment has proven inescapable if I want to interact successfully with any aspect of modern civilisation. Especially when away from home base for an extended period. From a position of pragmatism, I have abandoned complete tech minimalism to ease this slow-travel exploration of the world. I still have a Haiku laptop and a dumb phone in tow, but I am typing this smolnet entry on a Macbook Pro, and carry with me a fairly current iPhone in order to be able to best navigate this journey day-to-day. I'm attempting to avoid the temple of tech consumerism, but the tendrils of big data are difficult to eschew when you need to get things done efficiently in the modern world. Even in the jungles of Cambodia. My government-issued Angkor Wat pass is digital, the QR code scanned off the phone screen when you enter the World Heritage site. Conveyances and tours are booked via app. When I got held up behind a gaggle of touring Europeans in a tight bit of the temple, I couldn't SMS or phone my tour guide, but I could What's App him. Here, tech minimalism is a luxury for the tech elite. I guess my lapse is nothing the gods of tech minimalism won't let me into Heaven for.
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♻️ (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) Bronzie Beat
Updated 20241110 Siem Reap, Cambodia