it’s election season in Singapore, and for me personally the most striking thing is how little I seem to care about it. And I say this as someone who followed the 2011 general elections very closely, wrote blogposts about them, and was even described as an ‘activist’ by some media outlets. In 2015, I no longer had the capacity to blog as much since I was busy with work, but it was the first general election I could actually vote in. The 2020 general election happened during covid, which meant there were no public rallies, which I thought was very sad, because election rallies are the closest thing Singaporeans get to a lively protest/carnival atmosphere, and there’s a whole generation of young voters who haven’t experienced that yet. For the 2025 elections though, I find myself not even particularly interested in keeping up with the news, the candidates, the specifics. It maybe helps that I already know how I’m going to vote. My core issue has always been “I think the ruling party having a supermajority rather than a mere majority is bad for the long-term flourishing of the nation”. It seems obvious to me that they will win a supermajority again (more than 2/3rds of the parliamentary seats, ie 62 out of 93 seats).

I said I didn’t have the capacity to blog in 2015, which is partially true, but the deeper truth is that I no longer had the inclination to. I think many of my Singaporean peers, if presented with that information, might think something like, “well, of course, Singaporeans get older, less idealistic, more busy with real life problems, more apathetic.” I don’t think that’s precisely true in my case. I think I’m still idealistic, I still care deeply about wanting to make my country a better place. I just think– and I actually wrote about this all the way back in 2011–that the entire political landscape itself has been changing every year, thanks to the internet and then to smartphones. In 2011, blogging felt important, to contribute towards a more thoughtful, informed citizenry. By 2015, it felt like lots of other people had gotten similar ideas, and the way social media had evolved (likes, shares, retweets, etc) meant that anybody with anything interesting to say would get a chance to have their thoughts shared very widely, even if they weren’t themselves a media professional. It’s much easier to run an online blog than a print publication, but even then, it’s a bit too much effort for a lot of people who weren’t interested in it. But since maybe 2013 or so, anybody can write a facebook status and have it be widely shared. It’s no coincidence that blogs have been dying out. I wouldn’t point at any one particular blog-killer. It’s the entire landscape that’s shifted. (If there’s any interest, one of things I’d like to do with this substack is to write a couple of posts revisiting the y2k-era blogosphere…

There are many different angles to get into, and multiple books worth of material to write, so I’d have to do a bunch of project management, carving out littlle mini-projects and expeditions, which feels kinda tedious, which is part of why I haven’t done it already. I do have a bunch of notes here and there. I think there’s so much to say. I think the feminist blogs of the ‘00s changed culture almost everywhere, and yet this seems understudied, underappreciated. I think Singapore’s blogosphere was on a particular trajectory of disruption before smartphones kinda ‘disrupted’ everything all over again. Suddenly everyone’s much more international-minded than they were a few years earlier. This has had implications for lots of things, including our local politics. Prime Minister Lawrence Wong gave a press conference just a few hours ago about foreign interference in our elections. I imagine this wouldn’t have been as urgent an issue in the days before widespread smartphones, where people can forward each other images and videos on whatsapp….)

/abandoned