Introducing the I; A Futurist Brit Wandering 中国 (China)

Good evening from the outskirts of 深圳 (Shenzhen).

After nearly a year of China and encountering the frustrations of needing a VPN (along with difficulty transferring currency) I realised I needed a new platform. Having spent years practicing writing, maintaining social media profiles to varying degrees and rattling off diverse blog posts I decided I needed a more wholesome place to pour my energy.

Finding Steemit was wonderful, and sifting through the variety of community contributions, and contributors, has been a slightly confusing joy. I'm partly going with the old adage 'lurk more' until I learn, and partly going to try posting from the off to renew good writing habits with tangible force.

The last year has been an ex-pat/immigrant adventure in the worlds most populous country. For 9 months I lived in the eye of the storm they call 北京(Beijing), air dense with dust and political presence, before shifting south. I've travelled some, learned some, and uncovered both the isolation and liberation that comes from leaving the comfort of your own culture.

My background is like a lot from Anglicised cultural space over the last three decades, my persona moulded by videogames, philosophy and the birthcry of the internet. I've walked through the valley of the shadow of death known as existentialism, replete with anxiety and depressive bouts, and come out the other end a slightly anarchic, tentatively optimistic, futurist.

My belief in the power of the internet not just as a useful network, but as the most major shift in human consciousness since mass literacy, lead me to up my life and fly across the world with little but some cheap t-shirts and a beaten up laptop. Partly I blame a diet of Cyberpunk and Anime, so awash with the inevitability of the rise of techno-asia, but I still could not have predicted boots-on- the-ground life in modern China.

It is nigh on unframable, with echoes of hundreds of years of history co-existing alongside bleeding edge technology. I frequently travel cashless and use QR codes to pay street food vendors, I've crossed the country on the fastest trains in the world and had a six digit door code to a fourteenth floor apartment in a towering, crumbling apartment block. That's before we even get to the ubiquitous nature of WeChat...

My focus in life is on understanding, on identity and reality, on how we frame the narrative of our existence and the impact that has. I believe the narrative techniques we utilise to shape, and re-shape, our collective identity will become increasingly powerful and malleable, blurring old lines and creating more novel, more empowering ones. Moreover, with the blockchain reinvigorating the original visionary aspects of the internet I increasingly witness it happening everywhere simultaneously.

And that lifts my spirit like nothing else.

I hope I am able to contribute meaningfully to this community, even if in some small way, as I attempt to negotiate it's idiosyncracies. The content I'll be outputting will have three major focuses; My time in China, contemporary culture and speculative philosophy. In the background I'll be working on utopic sc-fi/speculative fiction short stories, and if I remain dedicated enough will also post here.

Thank you for reading if you made it this far, I truly appreciate it. I'm off to slam on the AC, sweep the room for mosquitos and prep for another day in the Middle Kingdom.