Quietness is a luxury in Jakarta.
You can retreat to your home, but the sounds of traffic, the unmaintained mopeds (or worse, modified), and local mosques’ adzan and prayers would always penetrate your abode. This Nyepi (Seclusion Day) long weekend, we decided to retreat further south, to Portibi Farm (Lodges Ekologika) in Sukabumi. 1,5-hour drive from Jakarta (two hours when we returned, the traffic).
We passed through kampung. Attached to an industrial complex, most of the villagers earn their living in factories and warehouses, not from farming. These are not the idyllic kampungs portrayed in Orde Baru propaganda. The roads are paved but potholed, most buildings are made of concrete and painted with poor man’s green. The atmosphere of vapid poverty is similar to suburban Jakarta.
Portibi is in the secluded areas of Sukabumi. Where large properties—villas owned by rich Jakartans—are located. These properties can afford to counter the urbanisation and the industrialised aspirations. They also provide employment and business opportunities for the locals.
Portibi is rustic. In the farm, you get to experience that kampung asri. On the grid electricity and wi-fi are only available in the main buildings: the kitchen, the dining hall, and the bar (and some of the cottages). Cell phone signals are patchy.
We stayed in Limas Gede. I feel immersed into Indosiar’s silat flick soap opera Angling Dharma, but with much better artistic direction and creative design. The cottage is powered by solar panel, only sufficient for powering the lights at night. The cottage has an open-air shower room and toilet, with the luxury of hot water powered with LNG (the small green tank, ‘for poor people’).
All cottages’ architecture style is open design. Naturally, bugs and mosquitoes and creepy crawlies insist on sharing your place. Don’t worry, the beds are comfy and clean and protected with mosquito nets. One night, however, a big spider got into the net. I managed to remove it unharmed with a broom. A family of chivettes seem to reside on our roof. Being nocturnal, they were busy at night. We could hear their rushed footsteps outside and on the roof.
These are not nuisances. They are simply a part of the idyllic farm life.
Come 5am. The local mosque blasted their supercharged speakers. The noise went nonstop until 10am. Then again in the evening.
I am conditioned with Jakarta’s mosques but to blast your speakers non-stop for hours is another level.
Portibi provides ear plugs, but I am paranoid whenever one of my senses is restricted. I don’t even like to wear my Airpods in public places.
After the prayers and preachers came the firecrackers.
I can’t help to judge that the kampung lyfe is boring for those who must actually live it. That these noises are byproducts of the villagers looking for excitement and entertainment. To paint a stereotype that orang-orang kampung are contented and wise is like believing Disney’s fairy tales. As if the lives of Grimm’s princesses were not as grim as the mediaeval times they lived in.
Portibi is not a resort. If you expect room service, you’d be disappointed. They do not provide any. The farm is designed so people would lounge at the common areas: the Pacifist Cannibal bar, the kitchen, and the dining hall. No shoes/sandals there. I should have brought house slippers, walking barefoot on flat concrete with my flat feet hurts.
The food served was excellent. All ingredients are sourced locally, either farm produced or bought at the local wet market. Ayu is a great cook. Her salads were always the star of the course. The bread and pizzas are homemade. The cuisines are Indonesian but with fresh western influence at a perfect balance—not too strong but never bland. Be careful of the sambal and chilli flakes. They look harmless, but they are spicy.
The only thing that tops the food served were the conversations, at the bar or at the dining hall. Jocean is such a great host. He stored his collection of LPs and CDs there. Played them on vintage audio sets.
Jocean played Bjork’s ‘Venus as a Boy’ and ‘Big Time Sensuality’ with gamelan orchestra arrangements. I never knew such a version (and they are not on Spotify). Jocean got a bootleg Bjork CD in Barcelona.
Despite being secluded in Sukabumi, the Pacifist Cannibal bar is well supplied. Beers (craft or otherwise), wines, vodkas, whiskies. Their signature gin and tonic is mixed with passion fruit from the farm. ‘All tips go to the staff, not to the bule bartender.’
I don’t smoke, but I tried Sukabumi’s local cigarette brands. One of them is Gudang Karya, a knockoff of Gudang Garam kretek (clove) cigarettes. Outside Jakarta, the tobacco market still has room for local, often knockoff, home industry brands. Some people actually collect these local cigarettes from their travels around Indonesia.
The Farm’s library is stacked with an interesting collection of books. Many are bequeathed by the guests; Jocean requested them to write their thoughts about the book in the last pages. Our friends, Maesy and Teddy, owners of the indie bookshop Post Santa wrote their co-authored book The Dusty Sneakers and left a signed copy. Among Paulo Coelho’s books, I found one that catches my interest: You are not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier.
Lanier is one of the creators of virtual reality. The book is a warning against the dehumanising design of the Web 2.0: the social media. The book was first published in 2010, the early years of social networking services. At that time, most people—including me—still bought the idea that Facebook is ‘connecting’ people, a force of good who can muster the power of the masses in inciting social changes which the established institutions could not or are too slow to mobilise people’s power.
The Web 2.0 put so much, too much, emphasis on the wisdom of the crowds. The hive mind, the collectivist ideas, rule them. Unleashing the inner trolls by their design and serving the advertising god. Silicon Valley pre-Web 2.0 was anti advertising. But when targeted advertising first came into being, they justified that it is not that kind of advertising. Thus, the ascent of the lords of the clouds and the digital serfs.
The author prophesied that the Web 2.0, if it stays at their design course (which it does), would be a threat to individuality. It will create technologists-oligarch and disenfranchise artists, musicians, intellectuals; culture and aesthetics will be dictated by philistine masses manipulated by advertisers. The creative and intellectual workers are expected to give away their ‘products’ i.e. information/cultural expressions—[self-published] books, music, and films—for free. Their remunerations will depend on popularity (views, likes, followers—metrics which algorithm depends solely on the platform’s changing business models). With scarcity removed, the economic value of the information nosedived.
Lo and behold, as I read Lanier’s words, I am witnessing—living—in a world where his prophecies came true. The extreme ephemerality, often badly made, TikTok reels; the attention deficit; the bullying culture perpetuated, masked as ‘pranks’ and ‘jokes’; trolling mobs armed with cancel culture ignoring due process; the increased status anxiety as consumers; the race to the bottom in ‘online business’; the death of privacy powered by acute narcissism and exhibitionism; fintech is basically traditional banking but with an app; clickbait journalism.
Fortunately, public awareness on the dark sides of social media improved. Streaming services invented the subscription business model. Some people are willing to pay for quality information and to become actual users—instead of being used by the platform. The K-pop industry adopts and successfully monetise the collectible ‘dongles’, merchandises of the beloved idol-artists.
The blockchain technology has created an opportunity to reinstate scarcity to digital assets and cultural expressions without the need of centralised governance. However, just as the oil barons and traditional bankers can buy out the lords of the cloud—who disrupted their businesses—to their side, the wealthy have more leverage to be wealthier with cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
I should have read You are Not a Gadget ten years earlier. But the book chooses me. In 2022, the midst of a pandemic. At the stage when I have learned about the fallacy of Facebook ‘friends’ according to Dunbar’s Numbers (that our cognitive capabilities can only sustain a maximum of 150 close personal relationships) and how finite is our mental bandwidth to pay attention.
The Web 2.0 and the advancements of information technology have made the pandemic more bearable. Read Camus’ La Peste and you’d understand that a quarantine in the era of telegraph and telephone was much more isolating compared to our 21st century’s. However, our human behaviours, our selfishness, and our heroism during turbulent times have not changed much.
Lanier contends that the best of social media is brought by the people, not the engineering or design. An example is the oud online forum where he is a member. The forum brings together people who share obsessions with such musical instruments. The forum is a true internet community, where trolls are mitigated by the passionate admin. As an engineer, Laurier wanted to improve the rudimentary software design. But he realised that what makes the forum healthy is the people behind it, not the software design. It is another testament that people matter. Individuals matter.
The digital world is only a representation of the analogue world. In the digital world, everything is flat. The flatness simplifies, therefore, helps in our conceptual understanding of the universe. However, some nuance and context are lost. Smells still belong exclusively to the physical world. Our olfactory faculties require molecular interactions. Unlike lights-images and sounds, we have not been able to pixelate or digitise them, yet. Digital/cybernetic totalism and the singularity advocated by the lord of the clouds are still (mostly) the stuff of science fiction.
Social media’s rigid interface tends to be a template for cataloguing people. Status (‘Single’, ‘In a relationship’, ‘It’s complicated’). Political views (‘Liberal’, ‘conservative’, ‘libertarian’). Age, sex, profession. To a certain extent, it is useful in profiling. But, like a CV, it is often insufficient to establish one’s character—the qualification that matters the most in a human being. Of course, public display of troll-like behaviours online make it easier to identify red flags. At the very least, you can know for sure that the person is stupid enough and/or have no decorum for posting thoughtlessly. In the creative space, templates can be limiting—like MIDI format to music or 8-bit to paintings.
I may not be ready to read Lanier’s prophecies back in 2010. I have not experienced the breakneck speed and the unintended consequences of hyper-connectedness. Now, as a person who championed the modernising of the law firm I am working for; a reader who reads paper and e-books; a photographer who uses both film and digital camera; a writer who writes his essays with a fountain pen or a typewriter and digital word processors, I know how relevant Lanier’s manifesto even—no, especially—now, at the beginning of Web 3.0:
> Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
> If you put effort in Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract the people who don’t yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
> Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
> Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
> Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
> If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.
J Lanier, You are not a Gadget
The two nights stay at Portibi Farm has been meditative and educational.
Portibi’s lack of connectivity is one of its charms. We trekked the Gunung Salak National Park and toured the farm. We put down our phones and played boardgame (I played ‘Junta: Viva el Presidente’ with people working for UNICEF and the World Bank. In that game, the players are members of a military junta ruling the Banana Republic; the objective is to steal as much as foreign aid monies as possible—how uncanny). Puppy and Bruno, the resident dogs, demanded our attention. We were present.
The space-time travelled was not just Jakarta-Sukabumi, but Jakarta-Silicon Valley across the last decade and cyberspace and to the future. Travelling and reading have once again created their virtuous cycle. The multiplied opportunities as they are seised.
Oh, and I managed to capture our moments in monochrome. With Summicron 35mm and 50mm lenses on Typ246’s CMOS sensor and M3’s Ilford Delta 100 film.
