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Comment by 用心涼Coooool 1 hour ago

[iCONADA Research Team] Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory(ANT)～～In the context of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the social world is not made of abstract "structures," but of dynamic, relational webs woven by both human actors (decision maker, public, content creators) and non-human actants (algorithms, social media platforms, oil pipelines, religious institutions).

ANT has historically been notoriously difficult to map because tracking the sheer volume of micro-interactions between humans and non-humans requires massive empirical labor. Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can serve as the ultimate methodological toolkit to operationalize, track, and build ANT networks.

iCONADA hereby proposes that how AI can assist in building and visualizing Actor-Network Theory, specifically applied to analyzing political realities like the ones we discussed thus far:

1.Mapping Non-Human Actants: Tracing the Digital "Allies"
In ANT, a non-human entity (like an algorithm) is not just a passive tool; it is an active participant that modifies human behavior.

Algorithmic Auditing: AI can reverse-engineer and audit how social media algorithms (the non-human actants) accelerate the "post-truth phenomenon." By analyzing recommender systems, AI can map how specific political rhetoric (e.g., the "Barbarians are coming" narrative) is selected, amplified, and fed into Chinese-language echo chambers.

Network Translation: AI can track how a digital actant "translates" (Latour's term for transforming meaning) a complex political debate into a 15-second emotional soundbite on TikTok, showing exactly where a factual "Matter of Fact" mutates into an emotional "post-truth" artifact.

2.Large-Scale Trace Ethnography (Following the Actors)

Latour’s primary methodological command is: "Follow the actors themselves." In the digital era, actors leave millions of digital footprints that are impossible for human ethnographers to trace manually.

Comment by 用心涼Coooool 5 hours ago

Cross-Platform Deep Scraping & NLP: AI can deploy Natural Language Processing (NLP) to crawl and analyze millions of interactions across distinct linguistic and cultural spheres simultaneously. It can track how a "Middle Eastern political strategy" deployed by Malay leaders translates into grassroots sermons, and contrast it in real-time with how it is re-interpreted inside Chinese-language WhatsApp groups or Xiaohongshu.

Semantic Vector Mapping: AI can analyze text not just for keywords, but for relational distance. It can map how words like "unity," "threat," or "secularism" change their relational meaning depending on which nodes of the network they pass through.

3.Visualizing Dynamic and Fluid Networks (No More Static Charts)

Traditional sociology relies on static categories (e.g., "The Chinese Community," "The Malay Elite"). ANT rejects this, arguing that these groups only exist if they are constantly being performed and re-knitted.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs): AI can use GNNs to build real-time, 3D interactive knowledge graphs of political ecosystems. These graphs do not show fixed demographics, but fluid connections. Users can see how human political figures are connected to funding networks, media platforms, and religious institutions.

Weighting Network Alliances: AI can dynamically adjust the "thickness" of lines between nodes based on interaction frequency, sentiment intensity, and transaction flows, showing exactly which alliances are holding a political narrative together at any given second.

4.Simulating "Crash Tests" (Predicting Network Durability)
Latour noted that reality eventually hits back against post-truth illusions through "crash tests" (like extreme climate events or economic crises) that shatter digital bubbles.

Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) powered by LLMs: AI can simulate thousands of autonomous "agents" (representing different segments of the Malaysian electorate, media nodes, and economic variables). Researchers can run simulations to see how the current "post-truth/fear-mongering" network would react when hit by a real-world material crisis (e.g., an economic recession or a subsidy rationalisation).

Vulnerability Identification: The AI can pinpoint which specific node or non-human actant (e.g., a specific piece of legislation or an independent media outlet) is the "weakest link" or the most critical anchor keeping the network stable.

Bridging to iCONADA's Cultural Critique: AI as a Tool for "Down to Earth" Politics

If the contemporary crisis of the Malaysian Chinese community is a "structural ignorance"born of digital self-enclosure, AI can be the tool that breaks the bubble. Instead of using AI to generate more clickbait, progressive leaders can use AI to build ANT dashboards.

By using AI to map the actual socio-economic anxieties, institutional connections, and Middle Eastern geopolitical influences affecting the Malay majority, the minority community can move away from abstract, online emotional fear.

They can use AI to achieve what Latour called "landing on the
Terrestrial"—gaining a precise, empirical, and scientific blueprint of the ground realities of the nation. It allows modern leaders to see the world as Tan Cheng Lock and Tunku Abdul Rahman did: not as a battle of online caricatures, but as a complex, material network of interlocking interests that must be pragmatically negotiated and built together.

Please Help explore how an political movement today could practically design an AI-driven ANT framework to map out a new, cross-ethnic political consensus?

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on August 3, 2026 at 12:32am

The Case Against Travel By Agnes Callard

It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best.

What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.

The opposition team is small but articulate. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage:

I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.

(June 24, 2023 The New Yorker)

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on July 29, 2026 at 6:42pm

If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.

One common argument for travel is that it lifts us into an enlightened state, educating us about the world and connecting us to its denizens. Even Samuel Johnson, a skeptic—“What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country,” he once said—conceded that travel had a certain cachet. Advising his beloved Boswell, Johnson recommended a trip to China, for the sake of Boswell’s children: “There would be a lustre reflected upon them. . . . They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China.”

Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?

Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveller’s delusion.

To explore it, let’s start with what we mean by “travel.” Socrates went abroad when he was called to fight in the Peloponnesian War; even so, he was no traveller. Emerson is explicit about steering his critique away from a person who travels when his “necessities” or “duties” demand it. He has no objection to traversing great distances “for the purpose of art, of study, and benevolence.” One sign that you have a reason to be somewhere is that you have nothing to prove, and therefore no drive to collect souvenirs, photos, or stories to prove it. Let’s define “tourism” as the kind of travel that aims at the interesting—and, if Emerson and company are right, misses.

“A tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.” This definition is taken from the opening of “Hosts and Guests,” the classic academic volume on the anthropology of tourism. The last phrase is crucial: touristic travel exists for the sake of change. But what, exactly, gets changed? Here is a telling observation from the concluding chapter of the same book: “Tourists are less likely to borrow from their hosts than their hosts are from them, thus precipitating a chain of change in the host community.”

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on July 24, 2026 at 9:33pm

We go to experience a change, but end up inflicting change on others.

For example, a decade ago, when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?”

So I went. I suspect that everything about the falcon hospital, from its layout to its mission statement, is and will continue to be shaped by the visits of people like me—we unchanged changers, we tourists. (On the wall of the foyer, I recall seeing a series of “excellence in tourism” awards. Keep in mind that this is an animal hospital.)

Why might it be bad for a place to be shaped by the people who travel there, voluntarily, for the purpose of experiencing a change? The answer is that such people not only do not know what they are doing but are not even trying to learn. Consider me. It would be one thing to have such a deep passion for falconry that one is willing to fly to Abu Dhabi to pursue it, and it would be another thing to approach the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of developing my life in a new direction. I was in neither position.

I entered the hospital knowing that my post-Abu Dhabi life would contain exactly as much falconry as my pre-Abu Dhabi life—which is to say, zero falconry. If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting.

Tourism is marked by its locomotive character. “I went to France.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to the Louvre.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to see the ‘Mona Lisa.’ ” That is, before quickly moving on: apparently, many people spend just fifteen seconds looking at the “Mona Lisa.” It’s locomotion all the way down.

The peculiar rationality of tourists allows them to be moved both by a desire to do what they are supposed to do in a place and a desire to avoid precisely what they are supposed to do. This is how it came to pass that, on my first trip to Paris, I avoided both the “Mona Lisa” and the Louvre. I did not, however, avoid locomotion. I walked from one end of the city to the other, over and over again, in a straight line; if you plotted my walks on a map, they would have formed a giant asterisk.

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on July 23, 2026 at 8:53pm

（Con't）In the many great cities I have actually lived and worked in, I would never consider spending whole days walking. When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time. You suspend other standards as well, unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational activities. After all, you say to yourself, the whole point of travelling is to break out of the confines of everyday life. But, if you usually avoid museums, and suddenly seek them out for the purpose of experiencing a change, what are you going to make of the paintings? You might as well be in a room full of falcons.

Let’s delve a bit deeper into how, exactly, the tourist's project is self-undermining. I'll illustrate with two examples from “The Loss of the Creature,” an essay by the writer Walker Percy.

First, a sightseer arriving at the Grand Canyon. Before his trip, an idea of the canyon—a “symbolic complex”—had formed in his mind. He is delighted if the canyon resembles the pictures and postcards he has seen; he might even describe it as “every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!” But, if the lighting is different, the colors and shadows not those which he expects, he feels cheated: he has arrived on a bad day. Unable to gaze directly at the canyon, forced to judge merely whether it matches an image, the sightseer “may simply be bored; or he may be conscious of the difficulty: that the great thing yawning at his feet somehow eludes him.”

Second, a couple from Iowa driving around Mexico. They are enjoying the trip, but are a bit dissatisfied by the usual sights. They get lost, drive for hours on a rocky mountain road, and eventually, “in a tiny valley not even marked on the map,” stumble upon a village celebrating a religious festival. Watching the villagers dance, the tourists finally have “an authentic sight, a sight which is charming, quaint, picturesque, unspoiled.” Yet they still feel some dissatisfaction. Back home in Iowa, they gush about the experience to an ethnologist friend: You should have been there! You must come back with us! When the ethnologist does, in fact, return with them, “the couple do not watch the goings-on; instead they watch the ethnologist! Their highest hope is that their friend should find the dance interesting.” They need him to “certify their experience as genuine.”

The tourist is a deferential character. He outsources the vindication of his experiences to the ethnologist, to postcards, to conventional wisdom about what you are or are not supposed to do in a place. This deference, this “openness to experience,”is exactly what renders the tourist incapable of experience. Emerson confessed, “I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated.”

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on July 16, 2026 at 5:20am

（Con't）He speaks for every tourist who has stood before a monument, or a painting, or a falcon, and demanded herself to feel something. Emerson and Percy help us understand why this demand is unreasonable: to be a tourist is to have already decided that it is not one's own feelings that count.

Whether an experience is authentically X is precisely what you, as a non-X, cannot judge.

A similar argument applies to the tourist's impulse to honour the grand sea of humanity. Whereas Percy and Emerson focus on the aesthetic, showing us how hard it is for travellers to have the sensory experiences that they seek, Pessoa and Chesterton are interested in the ethical. They study why travellers can't truly connect to other human beings. During my Paris wanderings, I would stare at people, intently inspecting their clothing, their demeanor, their interactions. I was trying to see the Frenchness in the French people around me. This is not a way to make friends.

Pessoa said that he knew only one “real traveller with soul”: an office boy who obsessively collected brochures, tore maps out of newspapers, and memorized train schedules between far-flung destinations. The boy could recount sailing routes around the world, but he had never left Lisbon.

Chesterton also approved of such stationary travellers. He wrote that there was “something touching and even tragic” about “the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like.”

The problem was not with other places, or with the man wanting to see them, but with travel's dehumanizing effect, which thrust him among people to whom he was forced to relate as a spectator. Chesterton believed that loving what is distant in the proper fashion—namely, from a distance—enabled a more universal connection. When the man in Hampstead thought of foreigners “in the abstract . . . as those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them.” “The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion,” Chesterton wrote. “It is rather an inner reality.” Travel prevents us from feeling the presence of those we have travelled such great distances to be near.

The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on July 13, 2026 at 10:09pm

（Con't）If you think that this doesn’t apply to you—that your own travels are magical and profound, with effects that deepen your values, expand your horizons, render you a true citizen of the globe, and so on—note that this phenomenon can’t be assessed first-personally. Pessoa, Chesterton, Percy, and Emerson were all aware that travellers tell themselves they’ve changed, but you can’t rely on introspection to detect a delusion. So cast your mind, instead, to any friends who are soon to set off on summer adventures. In what condition do you expect to find them when they return? They may speak of their travel as though it were transformative, a “once in a lifetime” experience, but will you be able to notice a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any difference at all?

Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?

One is forced to conclude that maybe it isn’t so easy to do nothing—and this suggests a solution to the puzzle. Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. If you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as “More and more of this, and then I die.” Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation. And it does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody. You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it.

（The Case Against Travel：It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we're at our best by Agnes Callard，June 24, 2023，The New Yorker)

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on July 3, 2026 at 4:00pm

[iCONADA Research Team] Proletarianization

Proletarianization is the socioeconomic process by which individuals shift from self-employment or ownership into wage labor. In Marxist theory, it describes how people lose control over the means of production—such as land, tools, or specialized knowledge. Consequently, they must sell their labor power to survive, expanding the working class. Historically linked to industrial factories, this phenomenon actively shapes the modern global economy.

The historical foundation of proletarianization lies in the separation of producers from their resources. During Britain’s Enclosure Acts, common lands were privatized, forcing agrarian peasants into rapidly growing cities to seek factory jobs. Similarly, the rise of industrial manufacturing outcompeted independent artisans. They could no longer match the scale of mechanized factories, leaving them no choice but to enter the corporate workforce. This dynamic concentrated wealth in the hands of capital owners while standardizing the experience of the working mass.

In the twenty-first century, proletarianization manifests in white-collar and digital industries. The expansion of the gig economy exemplifies this shift. Rideshare drivers and freelance digital workers function as independent contractors on paper, but algorithmic control strips away their true autonomy. They rely entirely on centralized platforms for income, mirroring traditional wage dependency without the associated legal protections or job security.

Furthermore, advanced technology accelerates the de-skilling of professional fields. Artificial intelligence and complex software now codify specialized tasks in law, medicine, and education. As corporate entities absorb independent practices, professionals like doctors and lawyers find themselves operating under rigid corporate metrics rather than autonomous judgement. Their specialized knowledge becomes institutional intellectual property, effectively proletarianizing highly educated tiers of the workforce.

Ultimately, proletarianization highlights the persistent imbalance between capital and labor. From nineteenth-century textile mills to modern digital platforms, the mechanism remains identical: the loss of autonomy and the commodification of human work. Understanding this continuous evolution is essential for navigating the future of labor rights, economic inequality, and worker agency in an increasingly automated world.

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on June 25, 2026 at 6:57pm

[Golongan Penyelidikan iCONADA] Transformasi atau Pelanggaran Sempadan? Apabila “Otak Kiri McKinsey” Bertemu “Otak Kanan LUNAR”: Peralihan Paradigma Pendidikan Kreatif di Institusi Pengajian Tinggi

Pada tahun 2015, gergasi perundingan global McKinsey & Company mengambil alih firma reka bentuk industri terkemuka LUNAR. Penggabungan antara dunia strategi perniagaan dan kreativiti ini bukan sekadar pengembangan korporat, tetapi menjadi simbol perubahan besar dalam industri kreatif: kreativiti tidak lagi dianggap sebagai hiasan akhir, sebaliknya menjadi elemen strategik dalam mencipta nilai perniagaan.

Sebelum ini, reka bentuk sering dilihat sebagai proses “kemasan” selepas pembangunan produk dan strategi perniagaan selesai. Namun, gabungan McKinsey dan LUNAR membuktikan bahawa pemikiran reka bentuk (Design Thinking), pengalaman pengguna dan inovasi kreatif kini menjadi sebahagian daripada proses membuat keputusan di peringkat tertinggi organisasi. Kreativiti telah berkembang daripada menghasilkan objek menarik kepada menyelesaikan masalah kompleks masyarakat dan perniagaan.

Perubahan ini memberi cabaran besar kepada pendidikan kreatif di universiti. Model pendidikan tradisional yang memisahkan bidang perniagaan dan reka bentuk perlu diperbaharui. Dunia kini memerlukan bakat dwifungsi yang memahami estetika, budaya, teknologi serta logik pasaran. Oleh itu, institusi pengajian tinggi perlu menggalakkan pembelajaran rentas disiplin seperti “reka bentuk + perniagaan”.

Selain itu, pendidikan kreatif harus beralih daripada sekadar penguasaan kemahiran teknikal kepada penyelesaian masalah sebenar. Pelajar bukan hanya perlu tahu “cara menghasilkan reka bentuk”, tetapi juga “cara menggunakan kreativiti untuk mencipta impak”. Pemahaman terhadap data, penyelidikan pengguna dan nilai komersial juga penting agar idea kreatif dapat diterjemahkan kepada strategi yang bernilai.

Namun, transformasi ini turut membawa risiko. Jika pendidikan kreatif terlalu tunduk kepada KPI, keuntungan dan kecekapan pasaran, kreativiti mungkin kehilangan sifat kritikal, kemanusiaan dan keberaniannya untuk mencabar norma. Universiti bukan sekadar kilang menghasilkan tenaga kerja industri, tetapi ruang untuk memelihara pemikiran bebas dan inovasi yang melangkaui keuntungan jangka pendek.

Kesimpulannya, masa depan pendidikan kreatif memerlukan keseimbangan antara rasionaliti perniagaan dan sensitiviti seni. Kreativiti perlu mempunyai nilai ekonomi, tetapi pada masa sama mesti kekal mempunyai jiwa, kritikan sosial dan kemanusiaan.

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