So what’s super interesting is like our parents generation, they all came to the states for better opportunities to escape religious persecution whatever. And actually… Some people went to America simply to see us silent because they were like escaping a war torn Vietnam or somewhere else.

Therefore, the general ethos was you go to America… For the land of opportunity. This is what a lot of Koreans did, South Koreans, as the thing that’s very very interesting in Asian language, even in Chinese, America is called literally a beautiful country. “Mee-gook” (mee means “beautiful”) and gook means country. I think in Mandarin it is like “mee-gwwuh”– same word, beautiful country.

 now… In the year 2025, I think it is wise to think about first principles again. The question is… What is the purpose of country, why a country, why go to a country, or even when to leave a country?

So the first thing is I guess in regards to opportunity. For like 99% of people it was kind of like an economic opportunity thing. For example, to get a green card or a visa or even better… Citizenship in America was like the golden ticket because You would probably at least 1000 X the opportunity of your future family. For example even in today’s world… America has by far the largest economy on the planet, partly because of English language dominance and also the US dollar.

Now with bitcoin, we have to think about “cyber nationalism” (maybe I made this up). Or to be “cyber-national”. Not just International or transnational… Cyber national.

So for like most people… The only reason I think people stay in the states or LA or whatever is because they have a job there, and they look just like literally cannot leave even if they wanted to. I think most people are just like slaves to a corporate job, it doesn’t matter if you’re making $10 million a year at Apple, you’re just a well paid slave. 

Freedom

Well obviously the first one is freedom. Economic freedom, freedom of speech and expression.

I suppose the question is you just have to think critically about yourself your own family etc.

So for example, myself, I really think that politics is like watching wrestling on TV. Even Donald Trump was on wrestlemania like five or six times. He is like the world’s most experienced entertainer.

So if you still are watching the WWE or the WWF as I remember it, or even better… WCW as I enjoyed as a child in Bayside Queens New York shout out to my friends Spencer Aditya and Jonathan –> to be watching wrestling on television and if you think it is real, you are a super fool.

Politics is the same. If you’re watching politics and you think it is all real, you are even worse than a fool.

Yes, street photography is still the future. Why?

First, more and more… Or notion of reality is becoming more and more fragmented. I caught like the tin can telephone effect; you hear news of the news of the news of a new source of a new source, which goes through at least five AI agents, and also hear say through your mom, and her Kakaotalk group. 

Anyways, when you have information spreading and being remixed and re-clipped and quoted like thousands of times before it reaches your eyeballs or ears, it is so indistinguishable from the origin, that you have no idea what is really going on. For example, I call this the chicken nugget effect. Where in the chicken‘s body… do you find that chicken nugget “foot”?  Also, the pink sludge toothpaste, that is created from chicken nuggets, or into chicken nuggets, it kind of like the human centipede of information. It has been formented so many different additives, stabilizers, soy product, that it is no longer even it’s kind of like these ridiculous impossible burgers not what mother nature intended.

Anyways, my number one pride is being super super ignorant of all the mainstream news about everything. Why? Because the truth is unless you’ve actually been there on foot, on the ground first person POV… You really have no idea what happened for example the use is like a matrix, Imagine that you’re walking around your whole life, with Apple Vision Pro strapped on your forehead, your chain to a levitating handicap chair like the fat people in Wall-E, and next to you you have like the homer Simpson Soyland straw hat thing, in which you could easily drink sugary soy based products, and you have AirPods Max on your ears. And imagine that you’ve had it like this since you were born. This is like the new matrix.

Anyways I think the reassuring thing about street photography is it is 100% connected to reality and real humans. My personal thought is most Americans are actually quite lonely. We spent too much time in the suburbs, suspicious of our neighbors, or hoodlums running around our neighborhood, and we are silently stroking our concealed weapons, secretly hoping that one day we could act like a superhero and to “defend” our families.

Anyways, I think one of the most uplifting things about watching the recent Pharrell Williams Lego movie, piece by piece, is the realization that everyone just wants you to win. Everyone is on the same team. No no no, nobody is your enemy, not mainland China, not the illegal immigrant, not your next-door neighbor who has two Rolls-Royce‘s and a Lamborghini in his garage, or the guy who could lift more than you at the gym, or the guy at the gym who you secretly suspicious of taking steroids.

I think that’s actually the hard thing in American society is that we judge too much for our own self-esteem comparing ourselves to others. This becomes misdirected energy because I think it is actually false. Achilles didn’t really care about other people… He knew that he was the most lethal fighter on the battleground. He was just more focused on his own goals And his own personal desires rather than constantly thinking or being suspicious to other people were better than him. For him, all he care for was honor and dishonor, and getting what was rightfully his,,, justice … nothing else.

Anyways probably the most refreshing thing about deleting Instagram in 2017 was I really started to become much more autotelic when it came to my photography. Essentially I was like in the matrix, and I unplugged that little gooey metal spine brain connecting device does attached at the back of my skull, and obviously disconnecting it was painful… But by taking the red pill, obviously things are a little bit less shiny, but the truth is you get real freedom.

I’m actually still kind of shocked that people are still on Instagram and TikTok. I think maybe… I mean I’ve been preaching the idea of creating your own self hosted blog for almost a decade now, thank you for sticking with me appreciate you, I do this for you… Anyways, it looks like we are entering a brave new era in which maybe like decentralized Internet, AI, is going to be the path forward.

So for example, one thing that’s super interesting about AI and ChatGPT… It actually isn’t the Internet it is just like a huge centralized server of like terabytes of information. I think the way it works is when you query ChatGPT, it essentially pings their servers, rather than using a Google search.

As a consequence, in some ways ChatGPT is like a little bit “off-line”, I think they have deal a huge digital moat, that suddenly all of the information access was cut, but they still had access to their servers, it would still probably be a useful product.

Reality

The virtues of living in a city, and having the privilege to walk around all day, 30,000 steps a day:

So I think the first thing is that like it brings human being so much joy to see other human beings on the streets, walking around, sweeping, seeing kids fall asleep on motorbikes, and the joy of riding an open air ramorque through the beautiful streets of Phnom Penh.

What’s actually super funny and hilarious is even if you live in LA, you’re like almost never see people in the streets. Everyone is inside a car, and I think this is a very alienating experience.

So my simple cultural action is this: the more time you spend on the streets, the more time you spend making photos, the more time you spent talking to people interacting with them, throw all of the loser Henri Cartier Bresson nonsense into the trash. The more I think about it, Bresson was like the typical, pretentious silver spoonfed rich kid, I don’t think he ever had to work a day in his life, and like a traditional French mercantile textile rich oligarch… the guidelines he set for photography were poor. Essentially he shaped almost like a century worth of dogma. Time for us to rewrite this.

ERIC

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