Wawasan Directory

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	<title>Wawasan Directory</title>
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	<pubDate>Fri, 17 Sep 2021 13:26:32 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>First Day Cover</title>
				
		<link>https://wawasan.directory/First-Day-Cover</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2021 15:07:06 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Wawasan Directory</dc:creator>

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FIRST DAY COVER for KARYA SENI ARCA AWAM - 2021 •&#38;nbsp;IZAT ARIF and ELLEN LEE


    &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;01: SETEM&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;
    
    
 &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;02: FIRST DAY COVER&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;
 
  
 &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;03: FIELD REPORT &#38;nbsp;


  	&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;
  &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp;✸&#38;nbsp;We are proud to present three exclusive new stamps commemorating&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; the future you promised us, 
which we cannot remember now. &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; This is what we did while we were waiting. &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;
 &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; ✸ Walaupun tiada kereta terbang dan sebagainya kita tetap bersyukur
&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; dengan segala bentuk pemodenan yang telah tercapai setakat ini.&#38;nbsp;

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   OPEN 


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   OPEN 
 
  
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</description>
		
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		<title>At the Dawn of the Millenium</title>
				
		<link>https://wawasan.directory/At-the-Dawn-of-the-Millenium</link>

		<pubDate>Fri, 10 Sep 2021 13:51:02 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Wawasan Directory</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://wawasan.directory/At-the-Dawn-of-the-Millenium</guid>

		<description>
AT THE DAWN OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM, OUR SPAN OF CONTROL IS ALMOST LIMITLESS  &#38;nbsp;•&#38;nbsp; CHUAH CHONG YAN, Y.L.S, ZHI WEE&#38;nbsp;


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  PRESS "RUN" TO LOAD VISION ✸ ✸ ✸
 
 
&#38;gt;&#38;gt;&#38;gt;
RUN
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︎︎ ROOM 1&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;

A PEOPLE THAT IS GRADE, LASTING AND PROPAGATING


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&#38;nbsp; ROOM 2&#38;nbsp;︎ &#38;nbsp;

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE DECADE, THERE EMERGED A GREAT STIR AGAIN&#38;nbsp;


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&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;ROOM 3&#38;nbsp;︎

THE STATE IS NOW THE MAIN MEANS OF BUYING THINGS, MAKING FURNITURE, SETTING THINGS ALIGHT, AND DISPOSING OF THEM&#38;nbsp;


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var txt = 'To be a subject of Wawasan is to be subjected to a strange set of temporalities. It is, in the words of Mahathir, a globalised age that “will find a way to not only forge forward but also to fast forward.” For Malaysians in the 1990s, this idea of a nation fueled by accelerationism must have been intensely felt. Time had sped up: Wawasan, supplemented by the forces of globalisation, would supercharge the country out of a fraught 1980s of crises and inertia, into the utopic 2000s. Wawasan replaced the world-weariness of the nation with an octane-powered ecstasy greeting a new millennium.@This accelerated modernity, however, can dangerously extend beyond our humanly grasp. As the foreman of Wawasan had proclaimed, to course along a frictionless informational superhighway is to also encounter “the flood of information which threatens to drown us sometimes”.In this future, processes run at such “ease and speed that reaction time is reduced to zero. Thinking is rendered anachronistic and obviously planning for the future is quite impossible. The gut has taken over from the brain.”@Mahathir had foretold an accelerated modernity that threatens to inundate us, what Baudrillard also termed ‘the infinity’—a dimension that leaves behind the finite human.@Isn’t it true, for example, that the proceduralism of our democracy today, built by and for the scale of the human, is a poor fit for governing the non-humanity that permeates our lives—the invisibility of surveillance infrastructures, the complexity of supply chains that snakes across borders, the instantaneous speed at which bits and bytes moves—processes which render our governing apparatuses obsolete. At the dawn of a new millennium, our span of control has met its bounded limit. The instinctive gut overtakes the brain.@In this collaborative project between Chuah Chong Yan (Artist),Y.L.S (political theorist) and Zhi Wee (Creative Technologist), we take seriously Mahathir’s forewarnings of the supersession of humanity by modernity. We run scholarly exegesis, speeches, advertorials and magazines produced in the time of Wawasan through GPT-3, producing a stream of text that simulates the futurity of 1990s for our times. We submit an AI-automatic critique against Wawasan’s inhuman/inhumane modernism. We let go our cherished assumptions of anthropocentricism, to imagine new ways of automatic critique at the scale of computational speed.@Proclaiming the intelligence of computers, Mahathir once said that the “more details we put in the more we can learn from the computer simulation of the product.” By extrapolating Wawasan with computational intelligence, we playfully engage with the 1990s utopic moment through contemporary AI technologies, charting a method of automatic critique on the terrain of Wawasan’s alter-humanism. What emerges is an AI-generated text that is at once alienating but strangely intimate, nonsensical yet authoritative in its technocratic blueprinting.@One reads from these texts Wawasan’s inchoate sets of meanings and its multiple buried figurations—simultaneously a blueprint for utopia, a superfluid modernity, a technocratic authoritarianism, and above all, a glitch in our computerised future.';

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		<title>The Contradictions of Postcolonial Statehood</title>
				
		<link>https://wawasan.directory/The-Contradictions-of-Postcolonial-Statehood</link>

		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Sep 2021 08:51:12 +0000</pubDate>

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WAWASAN 2020 AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF POSTCOLONIAL STATEHOOD &#38;nbsp;•&#38;nbsp; JEFFERI HAMZAH SENDUT&#38;nbsp;


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▲


  ×
  This piece invites readers to consider the potential for alternative futures for the 
Third World, beyond the state-centric approach adopted by Wawasan 2020. It undertakes a reappraisal of the Pedra 
Branca case to argue that the postcolonial state is simultaneously an instrument of liberation, and of repression.


Abstract ▶︎


Wawasan 2020 and the Contradictions of Postcolonial Statehood

Jefferi Hamzah Sendut


The law has a tendency to sit uneasily with contradiction. Ordinary legal method seeks to resolve contradiction, something as true in international law as domestic law. On first impressions, the much-publicised Pedra Branca dispute between Malaysia and Singapore is a case in point. Malaysia and Singapore had long held contradictory views over which of them had sovereignty

[1]

over three maritime features, the most prominent of these being a 137-metre-long island, 7.7 nautical miles from Johor, and 24 nautical miles from Singapore. 

Both states agreed in 1994 to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to resolve the dispute,

[2]

three years after Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad first unveiled Malaysia's Wawasan 2020 developmental vision.

[3]

The ICJ subsequently heard detailed argument by distinguished legal teams on both sides. It decided in 2008 that the island, referred to as Pulau Batu Puteh by Malaysia, and Pedra Branca by Singapore, was Singaporean territory. It further declared that one of the other two disputed maritime features belonged to Malaysia, while the final feature fell under the sovereignty of whichever state’s territorial waters it was eventually ascertained to lie within. Both states complied with the judgment.

[4]

Contradiction, however, is not so easily excised. It persisted in the Pedra Branca case, not despite the best efforts of the international lawyers and judges involved, but because of them. Resolving a territorial dispute through litigation often requires postcolonial states to trawl through archived records originally prepared by their previous colonial administrators.

[5]

More fundamentally, international law itself remains closely linked to colonialism and empire, even in the present day.

[6]

There is therefore a deep irony in two postcolonial states defending their sovereignty by recourse to international law, a point borne out in considering the arguments raised in the Pedra Branca&#38;nbsp;case.This piece examines the Pedra Branca&#38;nbsp;case in the context of Malaysia’s engagement with the international community in the Wawasan years of the 1990’s and 2000’s. It argues that the Pedra Branca&#38;nbsp;case offers important lessons for those considering Wawasan 2020, a vision which centred the postcolonial state as the vehicle for progressive change and a ‘psychologically liberated’ Malaysia.

[7]

As with the international law which constitutes it, the postcolonial state is simultaneously an instrument of liberation, and of repression. Reliance on a unitary idea of ‘Malaysia’ to effect change, as the postcolonial state demands, will therefore always be an affair rife with contradiction.


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Sedili Besar, Malaya, AMS L501 (HIND 1076), 1950


Eurocentrism, Sovereignty and Swiss Cheese
Key to the ICJ’s decision in the Pedra Branca case was the conduct of states, and their displays of sovereign authority. In the absence of a formal agreement between states on their territorial boundaries, territorial disputes are decided by reference to evidence of informal agreement. Actions which display that a state regards a given territory as its own are important indicators of such informal agreement. If one state has continuously displayed sovereign authority over an island, and a second state failed to object before later making a claim to it, this will suggest that the second state informally agreed that the island was the first state's territory.Sovereignty over Pedra Branca was awarded to Singapore on this type of reasoning, with the ICJ finding Malaysia had failed to object to Singaporean displays of sovereign authority. As a preliminary point, lawyers for both states contested whether Pedra Branca historically fell within the territory of the Sultanate of Johor, or if it was terra nullius;(no man’s land).

[8]
This was important because Malaysia’s position would have been strengthened by a finding that the island was part of Johor. If Pedra Branca was&#38;nbsp;terra nullius, Singapore would simply have had to show that on balance, its displays of sovereign authority over the island trumped Malaysia’s. If Pedra Branca had been part of Johor, Singapore would face the additional hurdle of showing some act of formal “acquiescence”&#38;nbsp;on behalf of the relevant Johor authorities, giving up title to the island.

[9]


In support of its contention that Pedra Branca had been terra nullius, Singapore raised what it termed ‘the traditional Malay concept of sovereignty’.[10]&#38;nbsp;Singapore argued that ‘unlike modern European States, the concept of “sovereignty” in traditional Malay polities was based, not on the control of territory, but on the allegiance of inhabitants’.[11]&#38;nbsp;It was therefore said that Pedra Branca, as an uninhabited island, could not have constituted Johor territory, despite its geographical proximity to Johor. Pedra Branca had no population which could pledge allegiance to the Johor Sultanate.[12]The contrast which Singapore sought to draw between territory-oriented models of sovereignty on the one hand, and historical Malay modes of political organisation on the other, was not without basis. For instance, Malaysian international legal scholars Haniff Ahamat and Nizamuddin Alias have argued that prior to their conversion into British protectorates, governmental authority in the Malay states ‘was not delineated by fixed territorial boundaries or centralised bureaucracy’.[13]&#38;nbsp;They attribute this to the adoption of originally Hindu-Buddhist characterisations of the monarch’s authority as radiating outward from a central point, in combination with topographical restrictions on settlement in the Malay Peninsula.[14]&#38;nbsp;What was less clear were the legal implications of these traditional arrangements. Malaysia argued in response that the ICJ should subsume any traditional Malay concept of sovereignty into the state-centric frame of international law. The argument put forward on Malaysia’s behalf by Australian international lawyer James Crawford was that international law could easily accommodate the way the Johor Sultanate organised itself in relation to Pedra Branca. There was no sharp divide between the territory-oriented model and an allegiance-oriented model, since ‘all sovereign authority depends on some combination of territory… and allegiance’.[15]The ICJ was persuaded by Malaysia on this point. It had not been disputed between the parties that the Johor Sultanate was by 1512 a state for the purposes of international law.[16]&#38;nbsp;The ICJ found that there was sufficient evidence that other sovereign states historically recognised that Pedra Branca fell under the Sultanate’s sovereignty.[17]
&#38;nbsp;This conclusion was confirmed by the documented travels of the local Orang Laut to the island, a ‘nomadic people of the sea’ over whom the Johor Sultanate ‘exercised sovereign authority’.[18]
&#38;nbsp;Although this point was not determinative of the overall outcome of the Pedra Branca&#38;nbsp;case, taking a step back reveals that it would be a mistake to underestimate its significance. Closer examination shows that this aspect of the Pedra Branca&#38;nbsp;case encapsulates some of the key contradictions in the idea of the postcolonial state, and by extension its promotion by Wawasan 2020 as the vehicle for Malaysian psychological liberation. There is an immediate irony in representatives of two Asian postcolonial states travelling to a European city to settle a dispute which has its roots in the period of their colonisation. A moment of brevity in the oral arguments on Malay sovereignty before the ICJ highlights this further. Malaysia labelled Singapore’s arguments a ‘Swiss cheese’ theory, full of holes. Not to be outdone, Singapore’s counsel, French international lawyer Alain Pellet, made a quick correction to Malaysia’s metaphor:‘Our opponents are guilty of an unfortunate failure to distinguish between Swiss gruyère ⎯&#38;nbsp;which has no holes ⎯&#38;nbsp;and French emmental, which does’[19]
Postcolonial states would hence be well advised to equip themselves to deal with the niceties of European cheese. Pellet went on to make the ‘even more serious’ point that Malaysia’s substantive arguments demonstrated a ‘Eurocentrism which is out of place’.[20]
&#38;nbsp;In Pellet’s view,[21]&#38;nbsp;it was Eurocentric for Malaysia to suppose that the Johor Sultanate had asserted sovereignty over Pedra Branca in the manner of a European state, the latter being far more concerned with its precise territorial boundaries than the former. On behalf of Malaysia, Crawford responded that international law treated the Johor Sultanate and European states equally — international law was ‘neither west nor east’, ‘not white or black’.[22]&#38;nbsp;While the Johor Sultanate may have operated differently to European states, its conduct in relation to Pedra Branca was still an assertion of sovereignty all the same.As admirably represented as both sides were, contradiction was inherent in this exchange. To be sure, it was not some ‘flaw’ in either side’s legal arguments which gave rise to contradiction — whether considered technically or rhetorically, this was advocacy of the highest level. Rather, the contradiction arose from how two postcolonial states, speaking through their lawyers, attempted to deal with Eurocentrism. We have seen that both Singapore and Malaysia were effectively suggesting Eurocentrism in the other’s position. Singapore’s message was that the Johor Sultanate’s conduct should not be interpreted as akin to Eurocentric territoriality. Malaysia’s message was that to ignore the legal relevance of the Johor Sultanate’s conduct had the Eurocentric implication that it was somehow foreign to universally-applicable international law. In reality however, neither postcolonial state was unable to escape Eurocentrism in their own arguments.In Singapore’s case, consider its invocation of the terra nullius concept. The problematic nature of the concept has been much discussed elsewhere. It suffices to note that the idea of a ‘no man’s land’ was often applied to land which had long been inhabited, only with populations who did not meet the racialised standard of ‘civilisation’ applied by colonising powers.[23]&#38;nbsp;The choice to deem indigenous populations as insufficiently organised to obtain legal status was a central justification behind colonialism.[24]&#38;nbsp;A contradiction is thus apparent when the concept is used by a postcolonial state in an effort to shore up its sovereignty.As for Malaysia’s arguments, they relied heavily on the ICJ’s previous decision in the Western Sahara&#38;nbsp;case. There, the ICJ famously declared that during the formal colonial period, ‘territories inhabited by tribes or peoples having a social and political organization were not regarded as terrae nullius’.[25]&#38;nbsp;In doing so, the ICJ attempted to draw a line under debates over whether indigenous populations strictly speaking had title to territory, answering this question in the affirmative. This formed the basis for Malaysia’s arguments that the Johor Sultanate’s conduct in relation to Pedra Branca could found title to territory and sovereignty over the island.In one sense, the Western Sahara&#38;nbsp;pronouncement was a ‘heroic’ move by the ICJ,[26]&#38;nbsp;which ‘aimed at enhancing, even retrospectively, the role and importance of indigenous peoples’.[27]&#38;nbsp;In another however, the pronouncement whitewashed international law’s past and present complicity in colonialism.[28]&#38;nbsp;As explained by Antony Anghie, a leading figure in the Third World Approaches to International Law movement, colonialism has ‘profoundly shaped the very foundations of international law, including the ostensibly neutral doctrine of sovereignty’ itself.[29]&#38;nbsp;By relying on the Western Sahara&#38;nbsp;case, Malaysia was therefore placed in a contradictory position, levying a charge of Eurocentrism at Singapore, while simultaneously engaging in it.None of this is to suggest that it would have been straightforward for the international lawyers on either side in the Pedra Branca&#38;nbsp;case to have made their arguments differently.[30]&#38;nbsp;After all, what might be appropriate in a critical analysis might not be appropriate for a courtroom setting — the ‘final arbiter of what works is nothing other than the context… in which one argues’.[31]&#38;nbsp;Nor does this piece contend that Malaysia should not have submitted the Pedra Branca&#38;nbsp;dispute to the ICJ. The case remains an illustration of international adjudication’s contribution to the peaceful settlement of inter-state disputes. But herein lies another contradiction. International law is at once an indispensable tool for the genuinely progressive aim of peaceful dispute settlement, while simultaneously embodying persistent colonial dynamics. If it is true that sovereignty and the postcolonial state are both constituted by international law, it follows that the same duality is inherent in the postcolonial state itself.


Wawasan 2020: The Individual Postcolonial State at Centre Stage
One cannot say for certain that Malaysia’s decision to take the Pedra Branca&#38;nbsp;dispute to the ICJ was directly influenced by the introduction of Wawasan 2020 three years prior. Nevertheless, what is true is that the Pedra Branca&#38;nbsp;case was the culmination of a period of engagement with international law and its institutions by Malaysia during the Wawasan years. The Wawasan years also saw Malaysia accede to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).[32]&#38;nbsp;Furthermore, by the time the Pedra Branca&#38;nbsp;case had been decided, Malaysia had already been directly involved twice in proceedings before the ICJ.[33]The connection between this international legal engagement and Wawasan 2020 is more than just temporal. The ideas behind Wawasan 2020 are bound up with global politics, and by extension the international law which undergirds it. Although Wawasan 2020’s vision of Malaysia attaining ‘developed’ nation status by 2020 seemingly had a domestic focus, this domestic economic goal also served a foreign policy purpose. The pursuit of developed nation status was partly a riposte to what Mahathir saw as Western attempts to confine states like Malaysia to the category of ‘Newly Industrialised Countries’.[34]The connections between Wawasan 2020 and international law are even clearer when considered against Malaysia’s evolving positioning as a Third World state. Like other Third World leaders of the time, Mahathir had been a proponent of the New International Economic Order (NIEO). The NIEO was ‘launched in the early 1970s with the hope of restructuring the world economy through legal means’.[35]&#38;nbsp;Through the NIEO and other allied initiatives, Third World states actively contested the prevailing economic and legal status quo. This was a ‘battle for international law’, which spanned fields ranging from the rules protecting investments from First World capital-exporting states, to the law of armed conflict.[36]It became evident however in the years leading up to Wawasan 2020’s inception that the NIEO would not succeed. Indeed, international legal scholar and historian Umut Özsu regards the NIEO as having been ‘effectively defunct with the consolidation of neoliberalism in the early 1980s’.[37]&#38;nbsp;The NIEO was unable to resist ‘an increasingly assertive mode of neoliberal capitalism that prioritized private property, freedom of contract, anti-union “fiscal discipline,” state retreat from social services, and across-the-board liberalization of trade in goods and services’.[38]Rather than asserting the potential for any transformational change, Mahathir placed greater importance on individual states and regional groupings pursuing economic development so as to improve their bargaining position against the West. He stated in a 1986 interview in the Third World Quarterly on the stalling of the NIEO:‘[The problem is we] are not negotiating with the North from a position of strength, not even as equals… The question is whether we are able to consolidate ourselves, and draw some strength from each other… I believe that every country, however small, is able to do something like this.’[39]Wawasan 2020 seemed then to consolidate in Malaysia a shift in strategy which was also visible across the Third World. In broad terms, this was a shift from the pursuit of transformative change to one more concerned with navigating the international order as it stood. Economically, Wawasan 2020 cannot be separated from the neoliberalism which defeated the NIEO — it is no coincidence that Wawasan 2020 coincided with the introduction of a Privatisation Master Plan by the Mahathir government in 1991.[40]&#38;nbsp;As for international relations, this strategic shift placed Malaysia as an individual&#38;nbsp;postcolonial state at centre stage. The postcolonial state had of course also played a foundational role in the Third World’s pursuit of an NIEO, with statehood used as a means to secure economic sovereignty. But this was balanced with a focus on international solidarity, framed as ‘collective self-reliance’.[41]&#38;nbsp;The strategic shift marked by Wawasan 2020 meant that while multilateral cooperation remained important, it would be for each postcolonial state to carve a niche for itself and its people in the final analysis.This background helps explain Malaysia’s active engagement with international law during the Wawasan years. Malaysia acquired and demonstrated fluency in international law, not to seek radical change on a global scale as the NIEO had, but in order to equip itself with a ‘sword and shield’[42]&#38;nbsp;to defend a certain conception of the national interest. The aforementioned dynamics at work in the Pedra Branca&#38;nbsp;case were mirrored in the Malaysian engagement with international law which preceded it. The Malaysian state's conduct, given effect by international law, was again characteristic of the contradictions of postcolonial statehood.No doubt, Wawasan 2020 did usher in the pursuit of some genuinely progressive initiatives. Through an energised Malaysian state, Mahathir acted as a ‘strident voice for the Third World’, challenging the inequities of the global trading system and the international economic law which underpinned it.[43]&#38;nbsp;Malaysia’s accession to CEDAW in 1995 provided a basis for regular monitoring of women’s rights in the country through the UN. It also gave Malaysian civil society an additional legal language through which to frame claims for much needed reform. And regionally, Malaysia made a significant contribution in the Wawasan years to the development of a more robust legal framework for the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), leading up to the adoption of the ASEAN Charter in 2008.[44]The seeds for these initiatives were planted in the text of Wawasan 2020’s vision of a ‘fully moral and ethical society’, and a Malaysia ‘respected by the peoples of other nations’.[45]&#38;nbsp;But as the Pedra Branca&#38;nbsp;case showed, contradiction is never far away when considering the lives of postcolonial states. For all of its genuine potential, Malaysia’s use of international law for these progressive aims came in tandem with deeply problematic consequences.&#38;nbsp;The same sovereignty which enabled Mahathir’s economic ripostes against the West was also exercised in Malaysia’s continuing decision not to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a treaty which could contribute to a more just distribution of wealth within Malaysian society.[46]
Malaysia’s accession to CEDAW came with the state’s extensive use of reservations, a mechanism permitting states to opt out of certain treaty obligations. One such reservation still deprives Malaysian women of equivalent rights to Malaysian men to pass their citizenship to their children should they marry foreign spouses, forcing affected women to pursue justice before the domestic courts.[47] class="c0"&#38;gt;&#38;nbsp;Finally in relation to ASEAN, while the ASEAN Charter has admirably protected ASEAN states’ sovereign prerogatives, this has come at the grave expense those in Myanmar now resisting a new period of military rule.[48]

ConclusionThis piece has sought to examine Wawasan 2020 through the lens of international law. It has attempted a cursory re-appraisal of the Pedra Branca&#38;nbsp;case to argue that the life of the postcolonial state is rife with contradiction. International law and its doctrine of sovereignty allowed Malaysia in the Wawasan years to assert itself against hegemony, and to pursue genuinely progressive aims. International law also meant however that Malaysia could not escape the colonial dynamics which shape the international order. These dynamics had, and still have, a real influence on the cards postcolonial states like Malaysia may play — often at the expense of the people of these postcolonial states.While the vehicle of the postcolonial state remains essential in navigating the status quo, it is hoped then that this piece’s discussion of contradiction encourages thinking beyond the state. Strategic compromise and all its contradictions may be necessary, but this should not stop the people of the Third World imagining ‘alternative futures’.[49]&#38;nbsp;As lofty as they seemed, Wawasan 2020’s aims must not be the limit of our horizons.
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  ✹&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;✹&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;✹


 In territorial disputes like the Pedra Branca case, the terms ‘sovereignty’ and ‘ownership’ are sometimes used interchangeably. At least on a standard view, where a state has sovereignty over a piece of territory, it has supreme authority over how that territory’s affairs are to be managed. Territory over which a state has sovereignty can therefore be understood as belonging to that state. See Sovereignty over Pedra Branca/Pulau Batu Puteh, Middle Rocks and South Ledge (Malaysia/Singapore) [2008] ICJ Reports 12  paragraph 222; Benedict Kingsbury, ‘Sovereignty and Inequality’ (1998) 9 European Journal of International Law 599.


 S Jayakumar and Tommy Koh, Pedra Branca: The Road to the World Court (NUS Press 2009) 33.


Mahathir Mohamad, ‘The Way Forward’ (Malaysian Business Council, 28 February 1991)  accessed 14 July 2021.


 Pedra Branca (n 1).


Prabhakar Singh, ‘Of International Law, Semi-Colonial Thailand, and Imperial Ghosts’ (2019) 9 Asian Journal of International Law 46.


Antony Anghie, ‘The Evolution of International Law - Colonial and Postcolonial Realities’ 27 Third World Quarterly (2006) 739.


 Mahathir (n 3).


 Pedra Branca (n 1) paragraphs 37-42.


The ICJ was eventually persuaded that a relevant acquiescence had occurred - see in particular Pedra Branca (n 1) paragraph 223.


Pedra Branca Oral Proceedings: Verbatim Record 2007/20 (6 November 2007)  42.


 Counter-Memorial of Singapore  18-23.


 Ibid.


 Haniff Ahamat and Nizamuddin Alias, ‘The Evolution of the Personality of the Malay Sultanate States’ in  Ignacio de la Rasilla del Moral and Ayesha Shahid (eds) International Law and Islam (Brill Nijhoff 2018) 252.


 Ibid., 251-252. See also Singh (n 5) 67-69.


 Pedra Branca Oral Proceedings: Verbatim Record 2007/24 (13 November 2007)  60.


 Pedra Branca (n 1) paragraph 52.


Ibid., paragraphs 68-69.


 Ibid., paragraphs 71, 74. See also Sookyeon Huh, ‘Title to Territory in the Post-Colonial Era: Original Title and Terra Nullius in the ICJ Judgments on Cases Concerning Ligitan/Sipadan (2002) and Pedra Branca (2008)’ (2015) 26 European Journal of International Law 709.


 Pedra Branca Oral Proceedings: Verbatim Record 2007/21 (Translation) (7 November 2007)  13.


 Ibid.


 On behalf of Singapore.


Pedra Branca Oral Proceedings: Verbatim Record 2007/25 (14 November 2007)  14.


 Anghie (n 6) 744-745. See also Pedra Branca (Declaration of Judge Bennouna) [2008] ICJ Rep 128 .


Ibid.


 Western Sahara Advisory Opinion [1975] ICJ Reports 12, paragraph 80.


Vasuki Nesiah, ‘Placing International Law: White Spaces on a Map’ (2003) 16 Leiden Journal of International Law 1, 13.


Antonio Cassese, ‘The International Court of Justice and the Right of Peoples to Self-Determination’ in Vaughan Lowe and Malgosia Fitzmaurice (eds) Fifty Years of the International Court of Justice (Cambridge University Press 1996) 360-361.


 See Pedra Branca (Declaration of Judge Ranjeva) [2008] ICJ Rep 103, paragraph 4. Judge Raymond Ranjeva of Madagascar warned that to adopt a Western Sahara approach to the formal colonial period was a ‘reduction of the reality of the facts to suit the… concepts and techniques of international law’.


Anghie (n 6) 748.


Cf. Pedra Branca (Declaration of Judge Bennouna) (n 23). Judge Mohamed Bennouna of Morocco, who voted in favour of the overall result in the case, criticised the ICJ’s reasoning as being beset by ‘hesitations between colonial law and contemporary law’. Instead of ‘losing its way in the labyrinth of the colonial night’, he would have preferred for the ICJ to have focused on the conduct of Singapore and Malaysia post-independence to decide the case.


Martti Koskenniemi, ‘Letter to the Editors of the Symposium’ (1999) 93 American Journal of International Law 351, 356.


 In February and July 1995 respectively. See ‘Ratification Status for Malaysia’  accessed 14 July 2021.


 Difference Relating to Immunity from Legal Process of a Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights Advisory Opinion [1999] ICJ Reports 62; Sovereignty over Pulau Ligitan and Pulau Sipadan (Indonesia/Malaysia) [2002] ICJ Reports 625.


Johan Saravanamuttu, ‘Malaysia’s Foreign Policy in the Mahathir Period, 1981-1995: An Iconoclast Come to Rule’ (1996) 4 Asian Journal of Political Science 1.


Umut Özsu, ‘Neoliberalism and the New International Economic Order: A History of “Contemporary Legal Thought’ in Justin Desautels-Stein and Christopher Tomlins (eds) Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought (Cambridge University Press 2017) 332.


Jochen von Bernstorff and Philipp Dann (eds) The Battle for International Law (Oxford University Press 2019).


 Özsu (n 35).


Ibid., 332-333.


Altaf Gauhar and Mahathir Mohamad, ‘Mahathir Mohamad’ (1986) 8 Third World Quarterly 1, 9-10.


Andrew Harding, The Constitution of Malaysia (Hart Publishing 2012) 66.


[41] UN General Assembly Resolution S-6/3202 (S-VI) (1 May 1974) ‘Programme of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order’ .


Walter Sim, ‘International Law Is “Sword and Shield” to Advance and Protect Singapore’s Interests: Tommy Koh’ (The Straits Times, 8 October 2015)  accessed 14 July 2021.


 Barry Wain, The Malaysian Maverick (Palgrave Macmillan 2009) 243.


 Walter Woon, The ASEAN Charter: A Commentary (National University of Singapore Press 2016) 18, 20, 22, 25.


Mahathir (n 3).


Olivier De Schutter, ‘Taxing for the Realization of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights’ in Philip G. Alston and Nikki R. Reisch (eds) Tax, Inequality, and Human Rights (Oxford University Press 2019).


S. Indramalar, ‘Malaysian Mums Go to Court to Challenge Sexist Nationality Laws’ (The Star)  accessed 14 July 2021.


 The Jakarta Post Editorial Board, ‘Half-Hearted ASEAN’ (The Jakarta Post)  accessed 14 July 2021.


 Roberto Mangabeira Unger, What Should Legal Analysis Become? (Verso 1996).


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		<title>Y2K</title>
				
		<link>https://wawasan.directory/Y2K</link>

		<pubDate>Sun, 12 Sep 2021 03:16:55 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Wawasan Directory</dc:creator>

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THE (UP)ENDING OF THE DIGITAL WORLD: WAWASAN 2020 AND THE MILLENNIUM BUG &#38;nbsp;•&#38;nbsp; ONG KAR JIN&#38;nbsp;


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The end of the digital world. 
That was the doomsday prophecy of the millennium bug, one that could derail the seemingly upwards hurtle of Wawasan 2020. The entire nation was mobilized to turn the threat into opportunity. This essay excavates government documents, newspaper articles, speeches, and more to illustrate the mobilization of the country to meet the challenge, and considers with seriousness the mindset that those preparing for the millennium found themselves in. In doing so, the essay engages with the idea of liberation that lay at the core of utopian visions of a technologically advanced Malaysia, Mahathirist interpretations of world history, and Wawasan’s contradictory, precarious relationship with technology.


Abstract ▶︎


The (Up)Ending of the Digital World: Wawasan 2020 and the Millennium Bug

Ong Kar Jin


“The result -- arithmetic delinquencies and confused systems. Imagine the confusion when computers define Jan 1 2000 as 01/01/00 and regards the year as 1900. This will leave us 99 years behind time! Scarier still, a credit card charged on Jan 1 2000 would have to&#38;nbsp;bear the interest of 99 years because the computers assume that the same transaction took place on 01/01/1900. The bug would render every calculation involving a date to provide wrong answers and interrupt public services, bank transaction, loan interest calculations, among others, causing formidable loss of billions of ringgit. The effects can be deadly, expensive and extensive as the bug affects hardware (real time clock), embedded firmware, languages and compilers, operating systems, random numbers generator, database management, transaction-processing, banking, flight scheduling and any system that deals with dates. Are Malaysia's computerised systems ready to stand this possible Y2K quake capable of trembling the world to its core?”


-&#38;nbsp;Bernama News Focus, 16 December 1999


Amid the roar of power saws and tangle of computer cable, workers put the final touches Wednesday on a Y2K command center to monitor Malaysia’s transition to the new millennium.


Come New Year’s Eve, technology gurus, police and National Security Council officials will gather at the million-dollar National Y2K Operations Center for a round-the-clock vigil over the Southeast Asian nation.


``If the Internet shuts off, we go to fax and phones. If that fails, we’ve got radio communications. Short of that, messenger boys will be on standby,″ Noriyah Ahmad, chief coordinator of the National Y2K Project Team, said during a tour of the facility.


``Ideally, they wanted a place with a helipad. That’s the only thing we couldn’t provide,″ Noriyah said. ``The VIPs will have to land in the parking lot.″


Malaysia has enlisted an American public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton, to spin its messages to the press.


``It’s either going to be a mess or a big party,″ Khairul Azmy Kamaluddin, a health ministry official, said above the noise of a power drill. ``We just hope it’s not going to be havoc.″


- Associated Press News, 9 December 1999


“I had to sit through so many damn briefings about that Y2K nonsense. It was mandated by the Securities Commission. We had drills and training sessions and were told to prepare for a total shutdown on all electronic trading, so we were prepared to trade stocks via phone line and shouting at each other. My colleague even told me to stop wearing my Casio digital watch because come the new millennium, it would stop working!”


- My father, a former stockbroker


The LRT would break down. The KLSE would become static, unable to execute any trades. Phones would lose signals. Water would cease to flow through pipes. The Tenaga Nasional grid would experience a prolonged blackout. Pumps at petrol stations would refuse to work. Malaysian Airlines flights would fall out from the sky. This was to be the result of the digital calendars of the world turning from 99 to 00. It was a picture painted by the most fearful and pessimistic of the technological world standing still, an exposure of how intertwined computers had become to the day-to-day of the nation. Many feared Y2K would precipitate the total collapse of modern society as we knew of it, an electronic cataclysm that signalled the end of times. In America, doomsday preppers made a mad dash for food, water, and firearms, barricading themselves into their own homes. In Malaysia, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad cautioned against panic, tasking Communications Minister Leo Moggie to head up the National Y2K Command Centre, a war room where the nationwide situation would be evaluated, where press conferences were to be held at the stroke of midnight. 


If true, it seemed a cruel fate to have the entire mad dash of the 1980s and 1990s towards “developed status”, towards a “knowledge society”, “an IT economy”, with its fanciful acronyms come crashing down, simply because most computers were not built to handle the year 2000. The flaw was that when programs were first written, engineers used a two-digit code for the year, as in “68” for the year 1968, leaving out the “19”. Thus, it was feared that come the new millennium, computers would believe that “00” would be interpreted as 1900 instead as 2000, causing major glitches in the system. In the worst-case scenario, banks would calculate rates of interest for minus 100 years, power plant maintenance routines would be completely thrown off (and precipitate nuclear meltdowns), the transportation schedule would go awry.&#38;nbsp;


It was perhaps, the worst timing for Malaysia. 1997 had seen the Asian Financial Crisis, where ringgit to the US dollar fell by nearly 50% from 2.42 in April 1997 to an all-time low of 4.88 in January 1998. Meanwhile, the KLSE, which was then the third largest stock exchange in Asia after Tokyo and Hong Kong, saw a plummet of 60% from June 1997 to September 1997. In 1998, UMNO had split in two, with Anwar Ibrahim fired from his position of Deputy Prime Minister. The International Monetary Fund’s offer of a loan for financial recovery had been firmly rejected. On 20 September 1998, the Reformasi movement staged a massive rally where nearly 60,000 protestors demanded the resignation of the prime minister. Amid the Commonwealth Games and Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Kuala Lumpur, riot police ran down tear-gassed protestors in the streets around Dataran Merdeka.


The millennium bug would come hot on the heels of both political and economic crises. It presented an immovable deadline, the strike of 12am on 1 January 2000. To some, it threatened to undo what little recovery Malaysia had made and could be the death knell to an already stricken country. Moreover, it was deeply ironic, a kind of twisted fate that Malaysia, in its drive towards Wawasan 2020, that the very thing that had been hailed as a great catalyst towards not only material prosperity, but societal harmony, would become the very thing that undid it. 


To prevent the millennium bug, the pepijat alaf, from destroying society, the entirety of Malaysia was galvanised to action. A National Y2K Committee was formed, with representatives from key portfolios such as Transport, Water, Health, and Telecommunications. The media constantly reported the dangers of Y2K, with op-ed after op-ed decrying the lack of awareness and complacency in Malaysians that would inevitably lead to catastrophe. Many companies appointed Y2K Heads, crafted contingency plans, and overhauled their IT infrastructure as best they could. In the financial industry, the Securities Commission mandated that all public listed companies were to undergo Y2K training, reviews, and announce their efforts to the public. Borrowers and investors were advised to mitigate their risk by diverting their money to Y2K compliant companies. Among financial institutions regulated by the central bank alone, a whopping 585 million ringgit had been spent to prepare for the looming cyber-disaster. Each industry went through a similar process, with hundreds of man hours, and millions of ringgit spent to become “Y2K Ready”.


The preparation for Y2K was an all-of-government approach to deploy all the apparatus of the state whether through regulators, ministries, or agencies, galvanize the private sector, as well as create consciousness among the public through a persistent and pervasive media campaign. It took the form of cross-industry committees chaired by the respective ministries; impressive command centres built with giant press conference halls; flows charts detailing Y2K committees at the ministry, industry, state, and even district level. It presented a form of centralized technocracy, one that adopted the structures of UMNO machinery in its attachment to committees, to appointing division chiefs, to integration from the smallest unit of the MSME to the public listed company. In other words, it was an exercise in mass mobilization, the latest in a long series of “movements” from Look East to Buy British Last to Wawasan 2020 itself that required an all-of-society approach.
 

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  ❮ &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;❯


[1] &#38;nbsp;[2] &#38;nbsp;[3] &#38;nbsp;[4] &#38;nbsp;[5]


We may sound very ambitious for a small country, but America itself was a small country in the 19th Century. At that time, England launched the Industrial Revolution, but America won it. Why? Because the technology could be moved to an environment much more conducive to realising its full potential. Malaysia has come late to industrialisation, and this has given us the will and skill to make sweeping changes that others cannot because we have much less to lose. The MSC provides all the critical components required to create the perfect environment to achieve the promise of the Information Age. Today, it is much easier to move technology and knowledge than it was 100 years ago. This is why we believe we can build the global bridge needed to move beyond the limits of the Industrial Age. While I may be an optimist, I believe this path to prosperity will be chosen over the alternative of hegemony and win-lose economic relationships. The globalising and harmonising forces of the Information Age will prevent a clash of civilisations or the Century of Asia. It will create the World Century, the true Commonwealth of the World.


…


We realise you are more advanced and that we have much to learn, but precisely because you are so developed there are very important things, we can do that you cannot. Malaysia is offering the world a special greenfield environment designed to enable companies to collaborate in new ways and reap the rich rewards of the Information Age. There are no legacies of artificial constraints created and perpetuated by entrenched interests. We offer the Multimedia Super Corridor as a gift to the world -- a global bridge to the Information Age that will enable genuine mutual enrichment for our partners possessing the vision to participate.


-Mahathir Mohamad, speech at Stanford University at the Silicon Valley Conference for Investors on the MSC: Global Bridges to the Information Age


In the Mahathirist lens of history, Malaysia, and every single country suffering under colonialism, was trapped in a cycle of debt, resource extraction, and economic powerlessness. Two World Wars and the result of the Cold War had resulted in near absolute American supremacy in the UNSC, IMF, and World Bank. While a country could try to break out of the cycle of anti-imperialism, efforts too strident in nationalization or even seizing foreign assets, especially in the climate of the Cold War, could trigger foreign intervention. &#38;nbsp;


Mahathir was not, by any means, a socialist. His instrument of choice in the Dawn Raid was a takeover of Guthrie on the London Stock Exchange, coordinated by the famous Jewish banking company, N.M. Rothschild and Sons. Buy British Last, was a campaign aimed at reducing Malaysian dependence on British companies while hitting them in their coffers. His logic was more that of a CEO eliminating his rivals, than that of a nationalizing hero in the mould of Nasser, or Sukarno. By appropriating the tools of the master, he believed the master would lose the moral right of accusing them of having broken the system; he would instead beat them at their own game.


Wawasan, unlike these early jousts with the British, was not a policy defined by opposition. It was, however, a policy that accepted the game of globalization, embraced it and wanted to become its new centre. Technology was at the heart of this. He believed, as many did, that technology was the one thing capable of breaking the cycle, and truly liberating Malaysia from the boundaries of geography, of history, and even of race and culture. Like many Silicon Valley technologists, the realm of the knowledge worker, where they believed they could upend America's staid, oppressive social hierarchies between nerd and all-star jock, Mahathir placed his faith in the power of technology to disrupt the status quo.


This was not a plan without antecedent. The Meiji Revolution, as Japan emerged out of centuries of Tokugawa isolationism and the humiliating Unequal Treaties, was one that emphasized the rapid adoption of Western technology, dress, and political structures. This was not only a physical transformation, or a simple technology transfer. Farmers' children were forced to go to national schools, even though in some provinces, these triggered riots and arsons. The government established a "standard language" replacing the various dialects as the official language of the country. A new constitution was written, to completely reorganize the political structure of Japan to have an Imperial Diet, a Privy Council, and to restyle the Emperor as a head of state in the fashion of other European monarchs. Of course, Japan also pursued a vast policy of expanding imperial power, often brutally suppressing ethnic minorities, annexing neighbouring peoples such as Ainu. To ensure they would never again need to bow to the Imperial West, they would need to be more Imperial than the original Imperialists. There was no in between - only supremacy or destitution; coexistence was, in the long run, impossible. But it was also a logic that laid the seeds of its own destruction.


Wawasan 2020 was somewhat "fortunate", in that it had alternatives to the Western imitation game of the Meiji Restoration. It was believed that Malaysia, could remain, distinctly still Malaysian (whatever that means), while achieving the goal of ultimate freedom. Japan itself had showed a path; the Look East campaign was a way of pointing out viable alternatives beyond abandoning one's own roots to become "a white man". Malaysia did not need a supreme, or even dominant power to ensure its freedom; it simply needed to become a crossroads, a meeting point of a borderless world where there were non-zero-sum games, where there could be multiple winners. But Wawasan too, in its fetishization of technology, was leaving fault lines in its own logic.


To some, the draw of technology, of the "knowledge economy", was in its lack of physical form. In cyberspace, identity was fluid and geography mattered little. Possibility brimmed. But Wawasan was not a policy that was ethereal in this sense; in its emphasis on infrastructure, on cables and grids and chip foundries and on location, location, location ("Malaysia lies at the crossroads of the world"), it was acutely aware that the digital was inextricably tethered to the physical. Cyberjaya, Putrajaya, Petronas Twin Towers; these were the manifestations of this desire to be "placed on the map" - Mahathir himself wryly remarked in a Wall Street Journal interview: "A country needs something to look up to...When one is short, one should stand on a box to get a better view...The twin towers is to our ego what the box is to a shorties."


Instead, the draw was the idea of leapfrogging, of sustainability, and of cultural change. Unlike oil, technology was not a finite resource bound to run out. The more one exploited oil reserves, the faster the country hurtled towards a swift collapse; technology promised a future unbounded. Unlike rubber, there would be diversity, a Malaysia that would not be at the mercy of fluctuating commodity prices or cartels. And crucially, unlike palm oil, technology had the potential to create opportunities where the workforce could escape from the labour of toiling in the fields, the agriculture, rural "provincialism" which Mahathir so condemned in his 1969 manifesto. To galvanize the country, a year, a specific time upon which this technological utopia could come to fruition, was essential. Without a year, it would remain nebulous, the object of lofty rhetoric; with a year, it took shape as a plan, a goal, and most importantly, a deadline.


Viewed in some ways, Y2K was an existential threat to Wawasan. Firstly, it flipped the narrative of technology; now, being overly dependent on technology could expose one to a total collapse of systems that were now digitized. Secondly, it brought forward the deadline of 2020, 20 years earlier to the year 2000; Malaysia had to act fast, upgrade their systems, or any outdated, non-Y2K-ready tech would end up harming, not helping the nation’s quest towards developed nation status. 


If it could not be overcome, it would also reflect poorly on the Mahathir administration and its grand ambition of becoming the new centre of the tech world. The preceding years had already seen deep challenges to its hegemony in the Asian Financial Crisis and Reformasi, but these crises could always be attributed as the result of agent provocateurs whether they be a seemingly all-powerful George Soros, or a lecherous, corrupt, CIA-affiliated caricature of Anwar Ibrahim. There was no figure to blame for Y2K and every country faced a similar spectre of impending disaster; arguably even more so for developed countries with vast swathes of legacy systems that needed updating. It was thus a test, a race against time, a moment of do or die.


MYR 800 million had been allocated to the public sector while private sector spending was estimated to be around MYR 1 billion to address Y2K. Tens of thousands of outdated computers had been replaced with new hardware, online reporting and monitoring systems had been implemented across dozens of industries, business processes and supply chains had been evaluated and contingency plans drawn up in the event of their failure. A new generation of technology firms had sprung out of seemingly thin air to service the needs of the hundreds of companies that needed to become Y2K ready. 


Leo Moggie, in an open letter on 3 March 2000, went on to say: “If we think about it, even without the Y2K issue, processes are reviewed, and equipment upgraded from time to time. This is an integral part of the continuous improvement process in most organisations…The fact that as a country we were serious in handling the Y2K issue pushed us up in the ratings and this gave confidence to both the international and domestic investors…. improved efficiency in organisations contribute to a more efficient nation.” The mass mobilization had proved to be an invaluable way of rallying the country to take a technological step forward. 


The millennium bug, while at first seemingly an existential threat, was also an opportunity. It promised a race to become upgraded, where nations with less legacy infrastructure could leapfrog into the new era while those encumbered with decades of now outdated computers would suffer the most. In Malaysia and South Korea, economic zones with a heavy emphasis on electronics, especially semiconductors, received a massive boost. Economist K.S. Jomo even posited that “the stronger recoveries in Malaysia and the Republic of Korea can be attributed to stronger fiscal reflationary efforts as well as increased electronics demand (probably in anticipation of the Y2K problem come the year 2000).” Semiconductor stocks such as MPI and UNISEM on the KLSE doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled over the course of a few years in the flurry of upgrading. In 2000, Malaysia was one of the world’s largest producers of integrated circuits and electronic components, with a 19.1% share of total global exports, easily dwarfing China (2.1%), Japan (8.9%), while edging out South Korea (14.3%) and Taiwan (14.7%). Y2K was potentially accelerating Malaysia’s progress towards liberation.


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[6]


Jan 1,1999, Kuala Lumpur -- Malaysia is seeking World Bank funding to remedy its Year 2000 problem, but experts fear it may already be too late.


World Bank spokesman Graham Barrett confirmed the government was now applying for a loan specifically to address the Y2K problem which will only likely be approved in early 1999.


The allocation is believed to be in excess of US$100 million.


…


The economic crunch make matters worse for ailing companies already struggling to keep their businesses afloat amid a recession, the country's first in 13 years.


"Most companies have not budgeted for Y2K solutions and are reluctant to acknowledge that the expense is unavoidable, and the deadline is non-negotiable," said Billy Chia, managing director of Y2K solutions provider Future Connections Sdn Bhd.


He said the problem is exacerbated by lack of public awareness and general apathy by some smaller companies that still do not see the date roll-over problem as critical to their businesses.


"These companies are still waiting for the traditional silver bullet, something they can download free from the Internet, but this will not happen," said Chia, whose company sells the Australian-made Uniwell Millennium Bug Toolkit.


He estimates that 80 percent of Malaysia's small and midsize companies running older generation PCs, up to speeds of 100Mhz, are affected and may need fixes.


-Nikkei Electronics Asia, 1 Jan 1999


It seemed for a moment that the millennium bug was going to derail the narrative of progress, and that threat had triggered a kind of mass hysteria or frenzy of activity. However, as the year in question approached, the government seemed to adopt an increasingly dispassionate, even unconcerned attitude.&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;


In the tabling of the 1999 national budget, Mahathir only routinely mentioned the millennium bug once in a matter-of-fact sentence simply stating: “To handle the problem of the millennium bug in the computer systems of government departments, a sum of 100 million ringgit has been allocated for the year.” For the 2000 budget presented by then Finance Minister Daim Zainuddin, there was much fanfare of the coming millennium, but not a single mention of the bug itself. 


When interviewed about it 3 days before the new millennium, Mahathir simply dismissed it saying: “I believe even if there will be problems, they will not be big ones…But steps have been taken to solve the Y2K issue.” He went on to nonchalantly address the (clearly) much more pressing issue of the rising prices of essential goods. 


Only Leo Moggie, the Minister of Energy, Communications, and Multimedia, continued to make frequent public statements about the “catastrophe”, mostly to reassure the public that he had full confidence that Malaysia was sufficiently prepared to weather the coming storm.


And then the New Year came and went. Nothing really happened, aside from a few calendars displaying the wrong year. The committee remained on alert until 1 March 2001, when fears that computers might encounter a second Y2K bug due to the leap year failed to come to fruition. 


The passing of the millennium, and then the leap year, was first greeted with relief as well as some measure of disbelief. John Koskinen, head of the US President’s Council on Y2K Conversion, said in surprise: “We literally are unable to find any significant Y2K-related incident as the world has gone into the year 2000.” In Malaysia, it became a point of pride. Leo Moggie announced: “The fact that we were operating ‘business as usual’ during the rollover and through all the critical dates brings about an elated sense of pride, achievement and confidence in ourselves as a nation. Malaysia Boleh!”


Sceptics and naysayers soon followed, calling the whole Y2K fiasco much ado about nothing. Some went as far as to say the entire thing was grossly exaggerated by so-called IT experts to manufacture demand for their services. 


Regardless, Malaysia had seen a vast upgrade of its computer systems, dragging many departments and companies kicking and screaming into the 21st century. It had solidified its place in the world of semiconductor manufacturing. The Petronas Twin Towers, Putrajaya, Cyberjaya stood. 


But these advancements were transitory, at least viewed through the lens of the ultimate Wawasan 2020 vision. A strong manufacturing base and upgraded infrastructure could ensure the transformation of Malaysia to a middle-income country, but it would still not be nearly enough to bring about the lofty liberation and immunity to the whims of geography that the Vision looked to. Implicit in the rapid ascension of Malaysia was a need to continue courting the interest of US and Japanese tech companies, in the hopes there would be enough technology transfer, enough expertise imparted, that Malaysia could ascend the value chain. This was similar to the strategy South Korea took almost in parallel. If not, Malaysia would simply be yet another convenient playground for multinational corporations; a shift in policy, geopolitics, and costs could see Malaysia easily supplanted. The ensuing years would see not a Malaysia that was boosted by Y2K into the utopia envisioned by Wawasan, but an altogether more humble, gradual growth. Y2K turned out to be much ado about nothing. 


In an alternate, if fanciful history, Y2K could have been a turning point. In this tantalizing vision of a world upended, the US and Europe would have been hit hard by cascading failures in the wake of Y2K. Malaysia, as the supplier of their lifeline: semiconductor chips to resolve such failures would have become the world’s most valuable resource. Having mobilized, centralized, and technocratized to rally the entirety of Malaysia’s collective will towards staving off digital apocalypse, Malaysia now stood as one of the few nations that had successfully prepared for the disruption of the new millennium and had reaped the rewards as a result. Cyberjaya and the Multimedia Super Corridor, supercharged by superior infrastructure, would be the “brains” the nation, an imagination that visualised Malaysia as the CPU in the computer system of an ASEAN linked by networks undersea internet cables. Having secured this commanding position in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Malaysia would be, in Mahathir’s words: “a gift to the world -- a global bridge to the Information Age”. Such a dream remained the realm of delusion, not reality. 


At the end of it all, the millennium had come and gone; the world, whether virtual or not, had not been ended nor had it been upended.


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  ❮
&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;   ❯


[7] &#38;nbsp;[13]
 

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 [8] &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp;[9] &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp;[10] &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp;[11] &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp;[12]


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 [14] &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp;


  ✹&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;✹&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;✹


 Listing of Y2K Ready Companies

❐


 Organisational chart of the National Y2K CP Steering Committee

❐


Mahathir Mohamad, ‘The Way Forward’ (Malaysian Business Council, 28 February 1991)  accessed 14 July 2021.

❐


Estimated amount spent for Y2K by financial institutions&#38;nbsp;❐


Chart explaining the different parts of the banking system that could be affected by Y2K&#38;nbsp;❐


Sector and Thematic Evaluation Division (OEDST), World Bank document detailing a loan to the Government of Malaysia under the Y2K Readiness Project; this was considered not so long after Mahathir had firmly railed against "US-controlled institutions" like the IMF and World Bank in his conflict with Anwar Ibrahim&#38;nbsp;❐


UNISEM (5005.KL) and MPI (3867.KL) stocks on the KLSE soared to astounding heights as the millennium drew closer. They peaked in that year then plummeted, causing considerable losses to pundits and investors. In the pandemic years, they have climbed once more, nearly at their 2000 highs.&#38;nbsp;❐


 Caption on the government Y2K website: Congratulations going around members of the National Y2K Operation Centre after a problem free roll over.&#38;nbsp;❐


The ICJ was eventually persuaded that a relevant acquiescence had occurred - see in particular Pedra Branca (n 1) paragraph 223.&#38;nbsp;❐


Caption on the government Y2K website: Congratulations going around members of the National Y2K Operation Centre after a problem free roll over.&#38;nbsp;❐


Caption on the government Y2K website: Congratulations going around members of the National Y2K Operation Centre after a problem free roll over.&#38;nbsp;❐


The Minister and his team at the press conference announcing Malaysia's successful rollover into the new millennium at 12.45am.&#38;nbsp;❐


The Minister (3rd from the left), the Secretary General (far right) and the Deputy Minister (2nd from left) of the Ministry of Energy, Communications and Multimedia at a tele-conference session with various critical sectors at the stroke of midnight.&#38;nbsp;❐


Bank Negara issued hourly reports on the status of their services the night of the turn to the millennium. It was the same for many other agencies and ministries.&#38;nbsp;❐


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		<title>Mega 2020</title>
				
		<link>https://wawasan.directory/Mega-2020</link>

		<pubDate>Sun, 12 Sep 2021 03:50:20 +0000</pubDate>

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MEGA 2020 •&#38;nbsp; DENISE LAI, PHILIP, PANG, SYUKRI A RAHIM, VICTORIA YAM&#38;nbsp;


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		<title>Malaya-1</title>
				
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		<title>Linear Noise </title>
				
		<link>https://wawasan.directory/Linear-Noise</link>

		<pubDate>Fri, 17 Sep 2021 13:26:32 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Wawasan Directory</dc:creator>

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LINEAR NOISE •&#38;nbsp; LIM SHEAU YUN, VICTORIA YAM


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&#38;nbsp;What’s in a line?
Where do you start in a straight line? There are two beginnings, two ends, and an endless temporal present. 
At every infinite point, another infinite place. Infrastructure, now “infrastruktur” in Malay, was originally rendered as the tongue-twisting “asasusunan,” a fusion of the two root words of asas (‘basic’ or ‘original’) and susunan (‘arrangement’).


[1] Rachel Leow, Taming Babel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 194. 
 

Infrastructure tethers foundation to origin. Where we begin is where we are from.

 
  Lines on a page. The past is a map.


Kuala Lumpur began


[2] “Kuala Lumpur began as a shop. On the banks of a river, connected and connecting, the city began as a shop. And people came from all parts of the East and then the West. I retrace an ancient cycle as I find the city for the first time. My primal image of this city is its primal essence, for my experience of Kuala Lumpur began with the Mall. Malling, as I named the act of wandering aimlessly around the innumerable shopping centres that sprout up everywhere like secondary jungle undergrowth, has taught me and opened my eyes to much of what I know about the city. Kuala Lumpur began as a late expression of the history that formed it… Connected and connecting KL describes all the cycles and circles enfolding the past, the present and the future.” Ziauddin Sardar, The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur, (London: Reaktion Books, 2000) 75. 


as a mall. Or rather, as a trading point, the mall’s 19th-century prototype. In the 1850s, it was a small hamlet at the confluence of the Klang River and the Gombak River, with the port of Klang. But its fortunes turned when the tin mines of Ampang and Ulu Klang opened to its right. By 1880, the Selangor state capital had been moved from Klang to Kuala Lumpur. The town quickly became an important supply collection and dispersal point, supposedly the highest point that supplies could be brought by boat.


[3] J. M. Gullick, “Kuala Lumpur, 1880-1895,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 28, No. 172, (1955): 9.


To attempt to travel by land was at best, extremely uncomfortable, and at worst, physically perilous and malarial.


[4]&#60;img width="379" height="70" width_o="379" height_o="70" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7e158bb59dfa22f010a3ba55c06b9187cb5bff55ad2cdd9ecc01e964b32bd720/4.png" data-mid="119195970" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/379/i/7e158bb59dfa22f010a3ba55c06b9187cb5bff55ad2cdd9ecc01e964b32bd720/4.png" /&#62; Frank Swettenham, as quoted in Gullick, “Kuala Lumpur, 1880-1895,” 9. 


If the history of Singapore is written in statistics,


[5] J. M. Gullick, “Kuala Lumpur, 1880-1895,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 28, No. 172, (1955): 9.


then the history of Kuala Lumpur is drawn in lines. By 1882, Frank Swettenham was appointed the third British Resident of Selangor. Swettenham’s 1875 sketch


[6]&#60;img width="1226" height="1564" width_o="1226" height_o="1564" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a99ea31cf32f9831081a2857268f1fb2764fc5445272d841dbc61a8476ab0fb7/5.png" data-mid="119196004" border="0" data-scale="16" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a99ea31cf32f9831081a2857268f1fb2764fc5445272d841dbc61a8476ab0fb7/5.png" /&#62; J.M. Gullick, “The Growth of Kuala Lumpur and the Malay Community in Selangor Before 1880,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 63, No. 1, (1990): 19.  


notes his biases.


[7]&#60;img width="409" height="665" width_o="409" height_o="665" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2f732a8418caeb7c4169546b55d8d7b7bb2159537a17a68638fa4389cef8d425/7.png" data-mid="119195971" border="0" data-scale="15" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/409/i/2f732a8418caeb7c4169546b55d8d7b7bb2159537a17a68638fa4389cef8d425/7.png" /&#62; Frank Swettenham’s Malay Sketches (London: J. Lane, 1903) disappointingly contained no actual sketches. Just racist caricatures. ❐ 


The Gombak River, which leads north further up the state of Selangor, was erased from the picture; only the Klang River, which snakes its way to the port, out of the inland remains. This exclusion belies the territorial politics at play. Goods made inland would be brought by boat to Klang, which in turn was the point of access to the Straits of Malacca. The river valley was a chokepoint: whoever controlled the river valley therefore commanded the entirety of the Klang River basin, including where Kuala Lumpur stands today. Removing the Gombak River was an excision of noise: in Swettenham’s colonial logic of capital, geography is rendered in terms of power,


[8] Jefferi Hamzah Sendut, “Wawasan 2020 and the Contradictions of Postcolonial Statehood,” (2021). ❐ 
 

not natural formation. Other points of interest on Swettenham’s map: Chinese Kapitan’s (Yap Ah Loy’s) house, market, gambling dens, mosque. Through the river, escape from sin, decay,
	
[9] “Sĕlângor is a most wretched place–worse than Klang. On one side of the river there is a fishing village of mat and attap hovels on stilts raised a few feet above the slime of a mangrove swamp; and on the other an expanse of slime, with larger houses on stilts, and an attempt at a street of Chinese shops, and a gambling-den, which I entered, and found full of gamblers at noonday. The same place serves for a spirit and champagne shop. Slime was everywhere oozing, bubbling, smelling putrid in the sun, all glimmering, shining, and iridescent, breeding fever and horrible life; while land-crabs boring holes, crabs of a brilliant turquoise-blue color, which fades at death, and reptiles like fish, with great bags below their mouths, and innumerable armor-plated insects, were rioting in it under the broiling sun.” Isabella Bird, The Golden Chersonese and the Way Tither (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883). ❐ 

and the reality of plantations, bringing materials made commodity to the world of the market. Modernity emerged out of the jungle.

However, this new town was structurally fragile. Successive floods and fires ravaged most of the buildings in the city centre: 1881 was an especially disastrous year, which started with a fire in January and ended with a flood on December 21. The fire began when an oil lamp fell in an opium shop, killing three people and leaving another 500 homeless, while the flood started when heavy rain caused the Klang River to overflow, destroying 92 buildings and the only bridge in Kuala Lumpur. As a result, dirt and disease were rampant, as were crises of homelessness. 


[10] Shapriza Sharif and Arba’iyah Mohd Noor, “The Brick-making Industry in Kuala Lumpur in the Late Nineteeth Century,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 90, No. 1, (2017):  62. ❐  


But Kuala Lumpur could be engineered and architect-ed into possibility. In 1884, Swettenham instituted building regulations, which called for structures to be built in brick, stone, and tiles. Flimsy mud walls and attap thatch roofs – which were vulnerable to the elements could not aspire to permanence – were replaced with brick and tiles. Narrow streets, some only 12’ wide, were widened and shaded arcades now known as five-foot-ways were added. The messy agglomerations of housing units were ordered into regular lines. Kuala Lumpur, wrote Governor Frederick Weld, “is fast becoming the neatest and prettiest town… Rows of sufficiently regular, yet picturesque houses and shops… form the streets.”
[11] Frederick Weld, as quoted in Gullick “The Growth of Kuala Lumpur and the Malay Community in Selangor Before 1880,” 45. 


Swettenham also initiated the construction of a series of government buildings, including the Government Offices (1894-7), now known as the Sultan Abdul Samad Building.


[12]&#60;img width="535" height="299" width_o="535" height_o="299" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e36b3aed3321388e0d22501547d93dd0b32ca75782f312b1456261337a397a3a/12.png" data-mid="119195972" border="0" data-scale="15" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/535/i/e36b3aed3321388e0d22501547d93dd0b32ca75782f312b1456261337a397a3a/12.png" /&#62; Gullick “The Growth of Kuala Lumpur and the Malay Community in Selangor Before 1880,” 35. 


R. A. J. Bidwell, a young architect of twenty-four, prepared the drawings under C. E. Spooner, the head of the Public Works Department who instructed him to make a building of “Mahametan” style.


[13] While the building is commonly attributed to A. C. Norman (a Royal Institute of British Architects accredited Government Architect) and A. B. Hubback of the Public Works Department, John Gullick has shown that it was, in fact, R. A. J. Bidwell who prepared the drawings under the guidance of C. E. Spooner, with contributions from Hubback after Bidwell left Selangor in 1895. Then, as now, RIBA certification was important for credit.


The Government Offices were unlike any building ever seen in Malaya but mimicked the Indo-Saracenic style pioneered in Indian colonial buildings that marked India’s transition to direct rule as a Crown Colony.


[14]&#60;img width="1990" height="1302" width_o="1990" height_o="1302" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ef3c053d1b62bf14cf73535d7c50200e5ffd209b3cecbb04caa89d05ec6ce6ca/14.png" data-mid="119196002" border="0" data-scale="10" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ef3c053d1b62bf14cf73535d7c50200e5ffd209b3cecbb04caa89d05ec6ce6ca/14.png" /&#62; &#60;img width="700" height="1280" width_o="700" height_o="1280" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f4345f8871c6ffc6d0b6d9a572fcc0997a1265cd811816b5b78b8e7ab30b430e/14.2.jpg" data-mid="119195973" border="0" data-scale="10" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/700/i/f4345f8871c6ffc6d0b6d9a572fcc0997a1265cd811816b5b78b8e7ab30b430e/14.2.jpg" /&#62; 

L: The Government Office, now the Sultan Abdul Samad Building, in Kuala Lumpur (1894-7). Image from the Farish Noor postcard collection, Malaysia Design Archive.
R: The countdown clock to the 1998 Commonwealth Games, reconstructed by Dennis Ong. It has since been demolished. The countdown clock was mere steps away from the clocktower on Jalan Raja, located in front of a building separate from the Government Office, but part of the same building complex. 


Ornamentally, it drew from the language of Egyptian, Moorish, and Mughal architecture, but its front elevation was solidly symmetrical, a nod to the British neo-classicism that dominated public buildings. Never mind that the Indo-Saracenic was seen to be a union of “European science” and “native art”,


[15] Sir Richard Temple in discussion of Major C. Mant of the Royal Engineers, Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 1st series, vol. XXXII (1881-82), 104. As quoted in Thomas R. Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire: India, 1860-1910,” Representations no. 6 (Spring, 1984), 56.
 even though there was nothing native to Malaya about Egyptian, Moorish, or Mughal ornaments.


To the architects of the Public Works Department, a line directly connected its colonies in the East, roughly bisecting the Orient and the West. Within this vast space, styles could be borrowed and remixed across time and space.


[16]See more productive misunderstandings, said with much authority, in James Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, 2nd Edition (1910). London: J. Murray. First published 1876.


In this way, “Eastern” architecture could enter the teleology of British rule. As Thomas Metcalf has noted, the creation of the “Indo-Saracenic” was not an attempt to describe buildings, but rather, by “lumping these historic structures under a common label together with their own, the British endeavoured to lay claim to a direct line of descent from the Rajputs and Mughals to themselves.”


[17]Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire: India, 1860-1910,” 53.


The lines that make a map, the lines that connect across a map, the lines of drawing on a page. The Indo-Saracenic, like the architectures that follow, is a myth of origin. It’s just another beginning.

“History? What history? We are creating fiction, Yatim. This is fiction. History is fiction.”
“What about historical truth, Mano?”
“… You can screw around with history, lah!”
- Kee Tuan Chye, We Could **** You Mr. Birch (1995)


Lines drawn in an instant. The future is a simulator.


Nearly a century later, in 1972, a Brit would once again land on the shores of Kuala Lumpur and draw some lines. The radical architecture collective Archigram


[18]The newsletter Archigram (a portmanteau of ‘architecture’ and ‘telegram’) was founded in 1961 and was later formalised into the architecture collective Archigram. They worked mostly in drawings and media, and were known for creating urban megapolises for a technological age. The six members of Archigram were Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb. See more in Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architects Without Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).


had been commissioned to design the Malaysia Pavilion at the Commonwealth Institute in London, and one of their members, Dennis Crompton, was surveying the young nation in a ten-day tour of the peninsula.

Like the Government Offices, authorities in Malaysia rejected the original approach of a more conventional design for the Malaysia Pavilion. The Commonwealth Institute, formerly the Imperial Institute, housed pavilions from former colonies of the British Empire, picturing the world for a British audience. The exhibits were constantly shifting with political developments, with updates to the Malaysian pavilion upon Sabah and Sarawak’s agreement to found the Federation of Malaysia and upon Singapore’s departure. James Gardner, the Institute’s go-to museum and exhibition designer, designed the early 1964 Malaysia Pavilion. Information was conveyed rather directly, with images and words illustrated on mounted panels, display models, and a kite hovering above it.


[19]&#60;img width="1024" height="780" width_o="1024" height_o="780" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/994aa3f59d4b9223caa21662eb4bb105f3248f4136ec961f2a7760d03b9081e1/19.jpg" data-mid="119195974" border="0" data-scale="10" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/994aa3f59d4b9223caa21662eb4bb105f3248f4136ec961f2a7760d03b9081e1/19.jpg" /&#62; 
Flying kites, based on the wau, are common tropes to convey “Malaysianness.” This image is from the Wawasan 2020 Collection at Malaysia Design Archive.
 

However, by 1972, Malaysia’s international image as a modern nation had been eroded by two major events: the 1972 oil crisis and the 1969 sectarian violence that spread like wildfire through the streets of Kuala Lumpur.


[20]&#60;img width="750" height="629" width_o="750" height_o="629" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/df2f761ea215762f94ebc6274c81babc0651723d78cc2d8d0e0c8cd6371e8018/20.jpeg" data-mid="119195975" border="0" data-scale="10" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/750/i/df2f761ea215762f94ebc6274c81babc0651723d78cc2d8d0e0c8cd6371e8018/20.jpeg" /&#62; 
Jalan Tun Perak in Kuala Lumpur in the aftermath of the May 13, 1969, riots. Jalan Tun Perak historically marked the division between Malay and Chinese quarters in the early days of Kuala Lumpur. This image was taken by the then constitutional head of state, HRH Sultan Ismail Nasiruddin Shah, who was well known as a photographer. 
❐ 
 

Then-Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak, known as Bapak Pembangunan (‘the father of development’), deemed the old pavilion insufficient for Malaysia’s global aspirations.


[21]Chee-Kien Lai, “Concrete/Concentric Nationalism: The Architecture of Independence in Malaysia, 1945–1969”, PhD dissertation, (University of California Berkeley, 2005), 332-4.


Archigram’s pavilion was a remedy. Tun Abdul Razak understood that media built nations


[22]See more in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso Books, 1991), Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). For Malaysia-specific literature, see more in John Postill, Media and Nation Building: How the Iban Became Malaysian, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).


and thus galvanized a wide range of its state apparatus in service of the pavilion, including the Visual Production team from the Ministry of Information, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Malaysia High Commission of London.


[23] Kelvin Chuah, “Instant Malaysia: Imagining a Nation at the Commonwealth Institute,” British Art Studies 13. ❐ 
 

The production of an Instant was contingent on months of bureaucratic management. In return, Archigram’s Instant Malaysia would not merely be modern: it would be radical. Three Archigram members, Dennis Crompton, Ron Herron, and Ken Allinson, worked on the project. Instant Malaysia, completed in 1973, is one of the collective’s few built projects.

Instant Malaysia was maximalist. Painted a banana yellow, it towered over its “conventionally tasteful”


[24]“Archigram as Architects,” Architectural Design (1974): 387–388. Project by Centre for Experimental Practice, “Malaysian Exhibition”, Archigram Archival Project (2010), University of Westminster. ❐ 


neighbours, the Hong Kong and Brunei pavilions. A glowing red neon sign “MALAYSIA” welcomed visitors.


[25]&#60;img width="1060" height="706" width_o="1060" height_o="706" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e3c1fa388b28b5773f78e860d9e6e3947842428c0560d7d8912fa4ab882e0eb3/25.jpeg" data-mid="119195976" border="0" data-scale="40" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e3c1fa388b28b5773f78e860d9e6e3947842428c0560d7d8912fa4ab882e0eb3/25.jpeg" /&#62; 
Tim Street-Porter,&#38;nbsp;“Instant Malaysia” exhibition, 1973, installation photograph. Collection of the Archigram Archival Project (166-203-TC01). ❐ 
 

The exhibition had two levels,


[26]&#60;img width="1604" height="1132" width_o="1604" height_o="1132" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b691a4fe404eca993d18b8275b4ad8590a275059d069eedaae483daab9de4097/Screenshot-2021-09-16-at-9.43.36-PM.png" data-mid="119196005" border="0" data-scale="30" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b691a4fe404eca993d18b8275b4ad8590a275059d069eedaae483daab9de4097/Screenshot-2021-09-16-at-9.43.36-PM.png" /&#62; 
Axonometric of the exhibition. Project by Centre for Experimental Practice, “Malaysian Exhibition”, Archigram Archival Project (2010), University of Westminster.  ❐ 
 

which in earlier drawings, were meant to be brought together by a double-storey palm tree,


[27]&#60;img width="640" height="464" width_o="640" height_o="464" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a7df1cbc950e13f5017fde9066fceb838b4f0cf2f639ffac617c691d4bbdc5d2/27.jpg" data-mid="119195977" border="0" data-scale="20" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/640/i/a7df1cbc950e13f5017fde9066fceb838b4f0cf2f639ffac617c691d4bbdc5d2/27.jpg" /&#62; 
Project by Centre for Experimental Practice, “Malaysian Exhibition”, Archigram Archival Project (2010), University of Westminster. ❐ 
 

as if in a satirical refashioning of Laugier’s primitive hut.


[28]&#60;img width="237" height="383" width_o="237" height_o="383" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0e394a4b7245e1b2e90f531773cbddddf4ac58834587b29ac1c6f25284bb63d1/28.jpeg" data-mid="119195978" border="0" data-scale="20" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/237/i/0e394a4b7245e1b2e90f531773cbddddf4ac58834587b29ac1c6f25284bb63d1/28.jpeg" /&#62; 
The frontispiece of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s  Essai sur l'Architecture, by Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen.&#38;nbsp;Image from Wikimedia Commons.  
 

The ground floor of the pavilion was made in the logic of the collage, bringing together disparate elements into the same space of the nation, a microcosm for the metaphor of the multi-ethnic Malaysia. The exhibition space was divided into six sections – “people”, “education”, “development”, “tourism”, “industry”, and “organized industry” – and showed texts, maps, charts, models, photographs, and the aforementioned trees, now reduced in size such that it sat within the box of the exhibition and rendered with more realism. Unlike the pleasing panels of the Gardner exhibit, Instant Malaysia married Archigram’s signature bold graphics with as many images as possible. It was an experience of everything-at-once, bringing together images, drawings, text that were “parts life-size, monster-size, micro-size, coloured, monochrome, photographic, drafted, sonic, illuminated, fabricated, ephemeral, solid, permanent.”


[29] “Malaysia Pavilion – Commonwealth Institute, London,” Domus No. 535, (May 1974), 28-29. As quoted in Lai, “Concrete/Concentric Nationalism.”


Information and noise co-existed, made legible and circulated into a familiar graphic system. Archigram was the mediator that would “consolidate, transmit, filter, and catalyze a changeable flow of information, energy and images.”


[30]Craig Buckley, Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s, (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 79.


Of particular note from the project archive are early drawings for the wall illustrations, likely drawn from Dennis Crompton’s travels in Malaysia. These, for unknown reasons, were never incorporated into the final exhibition. In a comic-like remake


[31]Denise Lai, Philip, Pang, Syukri A Rahim, Victoria Yam, “Mega 2020,” (2021). ❐ 
 

of Malaysia’s primary industries, commodity is cartoon. Timber logging, harvesting palm oil, rubber tapping,


[32]&#60;img width="640" height="470" width_o="640" height_o="470" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2426e97741bee23e26bbdf3f17f3c8da203ce0331902422db78e5d761a9aa3d1/32.jpg" data-mid="119195979" border="0" data-scale="20" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/640/i/2426e97741bee23e26bbdf3f17f3c8da203ce0331902422db78e5d761a9aa3d1/32.jpg" /&#62; 
Project by Centre for Experimental Practice, “Malaysian Exhibition”, Archigram Archival Project (2010), University of Westminster. ❐ 
 

and tin mining are reduced to line and caption. In the drawing on tin,


[33]&#60;img width="640" height="458" width_o="640" height_o="458" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d0b34ff6a2a1581a7d829fa134d1ef470942e94fdfc1347f9da46fa8ec22c859/33.jpg" data-mid="119195980" border="0" data-scale="20" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/640/i/d0b34ff6a2a1581a7d829fa134d1ef470942e94fdfc1347f9da46fa8ec22c859/33.jpg" /&#62; 
Project by Centre for Experimental Practice, “Malaysian Exhibition”, Archigram Archival Project (2010), University of Westminster.  ❐ 
 

gravel pumps and water “whooooosh” in onomatopoeic orchestration, its Comic Sans-adjacent font belying the monotonous thud of arms spinning shovels and the crunch of metal-on-metal of moving vast amounts of sand. Perhaps these lines had made the nation too legible, too uncomplicated. Beneath each drawing lay a violence of unspoken resource extraction


[34] Pantai Remis landslide on 21 October 1993, in Perak, Malaysia. ❐ 
 

inherited from a British colonial economy.

The simulator


[35]&#60;img width="842" height="800" width_o="842" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9af3d9bc0170be7aec427994f6d2f1f1cbddadc08fda5d347b07484f6e5b62d0/34.jpeg" data-mid="119195981" border="0" data-scale="20" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/842/i/9af3d9bc0170be7aec427994f6d2f1f1cbddadc08fda5d347b07484f6e5b62d0/34.jpeg" /&#62; 
Tim Street-Porter,&#38;nbsp;“Instant Malaysia” exhibition, inside the simulator, 1973, photograph. ❐ 
 

on the second floor, however, was the clear protagonist of the exhibition – at least, according to the architects. “Rightly or wrongly, this particular piece of hardware is much more intriguing than the content of the exhibition as a whole,” wrote Archigram.


[36]"Archigram as Architects."


The simulator was a roughly ovular capsule that fitted around fifteen people, its ceiling covered with a mirror. Inside the simulator, “in 12 minutes you experience the 90º atmosphere of the Malay jungle and the cool winds after the monsoon’,”


[37]"Archigram as Architects."


with a three-track recording playing while images were projected onto the walls and reflected onto the mirrored ceiling. Crucially, the simulator had a climactic component, reproducing the range of Malaysia’s climate, “from cool sea breezes to humid heat and tropical storm.”


[38]Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Brunei - A teacher's guide to study resources published by the Commonwealth Institute. Seen in Lai, “Concrete/Concentric Nationalism,” 339.


Visitors in London thus stood in the middle of a platform, surrounded by a panorama of multiple screens, harkening back to turn-of-the-century cycloramic paintings picturing cities and war. The recurring motif of the simulator was the Malaysian flag, juxtaposing the icon with images of life in Malaysia – from airplanes, architecture, forestry, dams, mosques, people, scenery, shadow puppets, etc.


[39]Lai, “Concrete/Concentric Nationalism,” 339, 63f.


The simulator has largely been interpreted as an attempt to transport someone in London to Malaysia; that is, it is seen to be in mimicry of the tropics.

[40]See more in Chee-Kien Lai, “Concrete/Concentric Nationalism,” and Kelvin Chuah, “Instant Malaysia.”

However, a wider examination of Archigram’s work suggests that the simulator was less an attempt at imitation than an attempt to push the boundaries of space.

By the 1970s, Archigram had become less interested in physical structures than in a “subject’s relationship to audiovisual telecommunication networks.”


[41]Buckley, Graphic Assembly, 73.


While Archigram’s earlier projects involved physical movement within a network structure, their work began to emphasize the regulation of the movement of media information, such as “electronic data transmission, traffic control, and administration, radio-telephone tower, communication and news service relay station, inter-commercial closed-circuit television hook ups, public television and telstar rediffusion centre.”


[42]Warren Chalk and Ron Herron, “City Interchange – Project,” Living Arts 2 (1963): 73, as quoted in Mark Wigley, “Network Fever”, Grey Room no. 4 (Summer 2001), 108.


As David Greene, the group’s poet, wrote in reference to Archigram’s well known “Plug-In City”:

Plugging-in, however, describes an attitude, not a style, a way of thinking that shows a shift of interest from building to the device. A shift from aesthetics to the way portable hardware restructures our behaviour.

The simulator was a hardware prosthetic. Plugged in, it allowed “the extension of one medium into another and a corresponding enlargement of consciousness into a new spatial condition.”

[43]Buckley, Graphic Assembly, 78.


The acceleration of time and space in an age of modernism had become so fast as to shrink time-lags to virtually nothing: hardware was an instrument for temporal and spatial reduction. Being modern was not enough, Malaysia could be produced in a priori brevity, in an instant. Instant information, instant affect, instant sound, all brought to life through the simulator.

But the pavilion was ultimately a national project. The theatre of media was made to rewrite the software of a nation. Subsumed into this new political entity, everything would be remade in a national vocabulary. A stock-taking of projected images are as follows: Forests – flag – people – flag – architecture – flag. In a sketch of the simulator, Ron Herron writes a tell-tale note: “People – Jungle Thro’ Future.”


[44]&#60;img width="1060" height="662" width_o="1060" height_o="662" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a2bde81ca9ae44824b5c903f07409f767e824a7bf37838a69ac2c1a8eef50a1e/44.1.jpeg" data-mid="119195982" border="0" data-scale="25" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a2bde81ca9ae44824b5c903f07409f767e824a7bf37838a69ac2c1a8eef50a1e/44.1.jpeg" /&#62; &#60;img width="213" height="376" width_o="213" height_o="376" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e2e84b205c2ba0bd02babfd7c861f3bf11dc1c7701f5cdc91346bafea075080b/44.2.png" data-mid="119195983" border="0" data-scale="5" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/213/i/e2e84b205c2ba0bd02babfd7c861f3bf11dc1c7701f5cdc91346bafea075080b/44.2.png" /&#62; 
L: The Instant Malaysia Simulator, published in Chuah 2019. 
❐

R: A diagrammatic plan of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, completed by Pelli Clarke Pelli in 1997. Galal Abada, “Petronas Office Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,” The Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2004), 28. 
❐
 

A linearity was being built into the exhibition: people would process through the slow, muddy ages of the jungle, then through the ground floor of accelerated industrial movement, made possible by colonial power, and finally to the instant national simulator.

In an alternate geography, perhaps Instant Malaysia could have realized its utopian dreams. The namesake of Instant Malaysia, Peter Cook and Herron’s Instant City (1968-70), was meant to upend the dynamic between city and town, in a way that one could have imagined an alternate Instant Malaysia upending the dynamic between colonial centre and periphery. Imagined as a kit-of-parts transported on an airship, Instant City would bring the cultural attractions of a city to villages across Great Britain: and “the net that could be spread by Instant City were dynamic enough things might perhaps reverse: the sum of the provinces might become the exciting scene, with the old metropolis becoming a cultural as well as physical embarrassment.”


[45]Archigram, “Instant City in Progress,” Architectural Design, (November 1970), 568.


But the net of Instant Malaysia was spun through the recycled tropes of colonial linearity. The fun graphics of Instant Malaysia take on a new sinister sneer once we remember it was meant to conceal violent racial riots.

Alas, the reality of the simulator did not quite match the imagination of Archigram. It was dysfunctional, prone to vandalism, and at one point had all its slides stolen from it. Its clunkiness was the only thing that allowed a safe distance between the total and totalitarian image. But it did set a precedent for “the value of a location or a place… as a function of its connectedness or disconnectedness to the groundless technics of electronic signal processing.”

[46]Buckley, Graphic Assembly, 124.

The obfuscation between groundlessness and placelessness would once again be seized by architects engaging with Malaysia in the tide of postmodernity.


  Big, Fat line


“For practical purposes, borders have already disappeared because knowledge, capital, company activities, and consumer preferences ignore lines on a map.”
– Mahathir Mohamad, 4th and 7th Prime Minister of Malaysia


[47]Mahathir, “The Silicon Valley Conference for Investors on the MSC: Global Bridges to the Information Age.” Speech, Stanford University, January 15, 1997. ❐ 
 

“The combination of these two forces of change [creativity and innovation, and globalization] will eliminate the natural barriers of time and space.”
– 21st Century Malaysia


[48]Tan Sri Dato’ Dr. Othman Yeop Abdullah, “Multimedia Super Corridor: Competing in Cyberspace,” in 21st Century Malaysia, (Kuala Lumpur: Asian Strategy &#38;amp; Leadership Institute, 2001), 76. ❐ 
 

In Malay and Indonesian, development is premised on building. Pembangunan (‘development’) is derived from bangunan (‘building’ or ‘structure’). Bangunan, in turn, is derived from bangun (‘wake up’, ‘stand up’, ‘get up’). The first recorded use of pembangunan I could find was in Al-Imam, a monthly magazine published in Singapore between July 1906-1908, in reference to the rise of Japanese ‘mankind’ (pembangunan umat Jepun).


[49]See more at the Malay Concordance Project. ❐ 
 

If development is dependent on building, then they are both central to the rise of a nation.


[50]&#60;img width="790" height="684" width_o="790" height_o="684" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/03a214c9e6f7f36f11e215be44c6060d7463f7beab369125afc7d6e1d8c8c01c/50.1.png" data-mid="119195984" border="0" data-scale="12" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/790/i/03a214c9e6f7f36f11e215be44c6060d7463f7beab369125afc7d6e1d8c8c01c/50.1.png" /&#62; &#60;img width="914" height="1394" width_o="914" height_o="1394" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ae67b5cbf56ce5a8bb68b023a9779d7368cd248425d53b69f9b374f50ef183aa/50.2.png" data-mid="119195985" border="0" data-scale="12" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/914/i/ae67b5cbf56ce5a8bb68b023a9779d7368cd248425d53b69f9b374f50ef183aa/50.2.png" /&#62; 
L: “The Progress Narrative,” from Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 2003), 16. R: The back cover of Korridor Raya Multimedia: Penjelasan PM, (Kuala Lumpur: Jabatan Penerangan Malaysia, 1997). 
 

Wawasan 2020 was seeped in pembangunan. If Instant Malaysia was made to repair Malaysia’s image as a burgeoning nation in the eyes of international powers, then the 1990s heralded an era where Malaysia was determined not merely to impress them but to join their ranks.
[51]Ong Kar Jin, “The (Up)Ending of the Digital World,” (2021). ❐ 
  While development-as-building was not explicit in the nine strategic challenges laid out in Mahathir’s ‘The Way Forward,’ as it was in the Sarawak Manifesto in 1991


[52]
The announcement of Wawasan 2020 in 1991 spawned a series of sub-ideologies, including the Sarawak Manifesto of 1991 under Barisan Nasional’s Taib Mahmud. One key point in the Sarawak Manifesto that did not appear in the national vision was “sustainable land development,” to turn Sarawak’s small-holder farming land economy to one with large-scale estate developments, timber processing, and a tourism industry. While it touted urban-rural development, its implicit aim was to urbanise inefficient rural areas. Unlike the aspirations of Archigram’s Instant City, the Sarawak Manifesto reinforces the hegemony of the idea of the urban. See more in Postill, How the Iban Became Malaysian, 92. 
Notably, another signature project of the 1990s was the Bakun Dam in Sarawak. It proposed to put a land mass roughly the size of Singapore underwater, kept at bay with a monstrous dam of concrete. Protest over deforestation, disease, and the disenfranchisement of indigenous groups went unheeded. The project slowly but surely trudged on – it was completed in 2011, after multiple starts-and-stops.


, it quickly became the definitive toolkit of the state to achieve the status of a ‘developed nation’ by 2020.

Kuala Lumpur was the crucible of these experiments. Now having acquired the catchy abbreviation ‘KL’ – half syllables, double-time – KL was imagined not merely as a meeting point between tin mines and a port but as a new centre of the world. To Mahathir, globalization has erased the geographic lines of a map: it allowed an opportunity for its rewriting in information.

The lines of KL and the net of Instant Malaysia would thus be replaced by the web.


[53]&#60;img width="1058" height="1198" width_o="1058" height_o="1198" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c8408f894c5e5f89638df3533447f7a985a94543ab647d77b261642e3c6c7266/53.png" data-mid="119195986" border="0" data-scale="15" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c8408f894c5e5f89638df3533447f7a985a94543ab647d77b261642e3c6c7266/53.png" /&#62; Irwin Dorros, “The Picturephone System: The Network,” Bell System Technical Journal 50, no. 2 (February 1971): 232. As seen in Tung-hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud, (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2015), xi. 


While net (jaring

[54]Also known as JARING, Joint Advanced Research Integrated Networking. Jaring Communications Sdn Bhd, formerly RangKoM (Rangkaian Komputer Network, or Malaysia Computer Network), was Malaysia’s first Internet access provider.

) evoked the nets of fishermen, web had no equivalent word in Malay – it would be unprecedented. Mahathir imagined a “multicultural ‘web’ of mutually dependent international and Malaysian companies… [which] will extend beyond Malaysia’s borders… In short, all parties touched by this ‘web’ will benefit and are enriched through their contribution to it.”


[55]“I see the MSC as a multicultural ‘web’ of mutually dependent international and Malaysian companies collaborating to deliver new products and services to customers across an economically vibrant Asia and the world. I fully expect that this `web’ will extend beyond Malaysia’s borders and out across Malaysia's multicultural links to our neighbours.  Component manufacturing can then be done in China, on machines programmed from Japan, with software written in India, and financing coming from Malaysia’s Labuan International Offshore Financial Centre. The product may be assembled in Penang and shipped to global customers direct through our new airport. 
“Over time, each of these Flagship Applications will generate a web of world-class and Malaysian companies collaborating to develop and deliver innovative products and services. They will take root and grow in an environment that provides the required lifestyle, infrastructure, laws, and policies. Equally important, I expect links will develop which will connect each of these webs together into one large MSC web. Indeed, it is these links which will allow the MSC to sustain its competitiveness over time. Malaysia is a country with a vision and a strategy to achieve the vision called Vision 2020. Our goal is to attain developed country status by the year 2020.  These interlinked webs will allow us to achieve the goals of Vision 2020 by developing a strong services sector to balance our already strong manufacturing sector while helping to improve the productivity and quality of life in the nation.” – Mahathir, “The Los Angeles Conference for Investors on MSC: Global Bridges to the Information Age.” Speech, University of California Los Angeles, January 14, 1997. ❐ 
 

In another speech, he continues, “like a spider, [the web] will weave ever more intricate webs of relationships… such a web could be the new model of development for the Information Age.”


[56]Mahathir, “The MSC Investors Conference in conjunction with CeBIT.” Speech, CeBIT 1998 at Hannover, Germany, March 20, 1998. ❐ 
 

In Mahathir’s vision, we would all be already entangled.


The web made new political subjectivities. “Web shapers”

[57]With thanks to Yap Lay Sheng for this archive find.

were the new agents for crafting this digital age, applicable to bureaucrats on an e-Government task force,

[58]See more in the comments section of Mahathir’s blog. ❐ 
 

enterprising private individuals, and even to companies.


[59]Mahathir, “The Official Opening of Cyberjaya.” Speech, Cyberview Lodge in Cyberjaya, July 8, 1999. ❐ 
 
Discontent with merely being a conduit, being a web shapers implied influence. In this age – much like the Instant Malaysia simulator – technology would become an extension of man. In a telling corporate image


[60]&#60;img width="944" height="687" width_o="944" height_o="687" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/256f258e57fa3dd45e9f862ae031fb02e1935414d34e3c944b132c72abaaa6cc/60.png" data-mid="119195987" border="0" data-scale="15" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/944/i/256f258e57fa3dd45e9f862ae031fb02e1935414d34e3c944b132c72abaaa6cc/60.png" /&#62; 21st Century Malaysia, (Kuala Lumpur: Asian Strategy &#38;amp; Leadership Institute, 2001), 74. 


published by the Asian Strategy Leadership Institute (ASLI), a man is placed in the middle of the page, arms raised, and legs slightly spread in the style of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man. But he no longer exists as corporeal, his body transparent and rendered only in faint lines against an endless void. The brightest parts of the image – and its focus – is not on the subject but on the series of lines and light emanating out of and into the man. These lines are helpfully labelled, “information,” “domain,” “data transmission,” “compressed, compressed, compressed, compressed.” The light shimmers with such brilliance it rewrites the world around it, with the skip-forward and go-backwards buttons glitching into multiples like a time-lapse photograph.

If the web shaper was to be the conductor of an orchestra of information, then he would need “both the physical and the psychological space for creativity.”


[61]Mahathir, “The MSC Investors Conference in conjunction with CeBIT.” Speech, CeBIT 1998 at Hannover, Germany, March 20, 2018. ❐ 
 

And “we are not just talking buildings,” Mahathir continued. Infrastructure – both physical and immaterial – pointed the way forward. More than physical structures made for travel, infrastructure promised scale, marrying the physical demands of a growing city with its aspirations for a digital age en masse. Self-sufficient structures would give way to formulaic interdependencies, where each project was both a node in a web and a web itself. Within this logic, infrastructure space becomes “repeatable phenomena engineered around logistics and the bottom line, with elaborate routines and schedules for organizing consumption.”


[62]Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft, (London: Verso, 2014), 9-10.


In this sense, these logics are also “a kind of conjuring, a dramatic performance,”


[63]Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univeristy Press, 2004), 57.


a formal and verbal rhetorical language that permeated all the actors on the stage. A litany of megaprojects was approved,


[64]A non-exhaustive list of megaprojects, entangling public and private: 
Agarta Universe Theme Park, Johor Bahru
Auto-City, Penang
Asia-America Gateway, Pacific Ocean
Bakun Dam, Sarawak
Balai Seni Negara (new site), Kuala Lumpur
Berjaya Times Square, Kuala Lumpur
Bukit Jalil Stadium, Kuala Lumpur
Bursa Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange) Building, Kuala Lumpur
Cyberjaya, Klang Valley
Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur
Klang Valley Integrated Transit System
Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Klang Valley
Kuala Lumpur Tower, Kuala Lumpur
Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace Exhibition (LIMA)
MEASAT Satellite System, space
The Mines Resort &#38;amp; Gold Club, Klang Valley
Multimedia Super Corridor, Klang Valley
Multimedia University, Klang Valley
North-South Expressway, Peninsula Malaysia
Palace of the Golden Horses, Klang Valley
The Petronas Twin Towers, Kuala Lumpur
Port of Tanjung Pelepas (PTP), Johor Bahru
Proton City, Perak
Pusat Sains Negara, Kuala Lumpur
Putrajaya, Selangor
SMART Tunnel, Kuala Lumpur
Trans-Kalimantan Highway, Borneo


among them the Petronas Twin Towers (1993-1999), and the unrealized KL Linear City (1994-).

The skyline of KL was emblematic of this new psychological space, with its crowning achievement of having not one but two of the tallest buildings in the world. Designed by Cesar Pelli, the former dean of the Yale School of Architecture, the Petronas Twin Towers (colloquially known as KLCC

[65]Known locally as KLCC, which should stand for Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, but I believe was subliminal messaging for “Kuala Lumpur City Centre.” Or perhaps it is because the mall is named Suria KLCC, and the mall is the unit of interest for the whole building.

) was paid for by oil profits. Clad in stainless steel, it glitters against the sky against the glare of the equatorial sun. Like the Government Offices, it would borrow elements outside Malaysia in a web of influence: the plan of the towers is based on the geometric motif of the Rub-el-Hizb, the Islamic Star, albeit with circles added on. The twin towers are minaret, office, skyscraper, and mall tightly coiled into two packages like a swiss roll. Mahathir famously compared them to what a “box is to a shorties,”

[66]Ong Kar Jin, “The (Up)Ending of the Digital World,” (2021). ❐ 

a platform from which Malaysia may stand alongside global powers.

KL LinearCity (KLLC) would be the alter-ego of the Petronas Twin Towers. Touted to be the longest building in the world, LinearCity would be “the happiest place in Asia… Some day someone may beat the KLCC, but no one will beatAA the longest building in the world,” enthused one executive. It is easy to understand the allure of the skyscraper in the modern age – of compactness, of transcendence, of overcoming – but what


[67]With thanks to Surry Schlabs for pointing out precedents for linear buildings in architecture.


are


[68]&#60;img width="594" height="600" width_o="594" height_o="600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0505047f199c17578f0f696bded46d3da4e69d1dbaab658a30c6013f4fe19940/68.jpeg" data-mid="119195988" border="0" data-scale="15" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/594/i/0505047f199c17578f0f696bded46d3da4e69d1dbaab658a30c6013f4fe19940/68.jpeg" /&#62; Sketch of Edgar Chambless' Roadtown from "The Independent", May 5, 1910. Image from Wikimedia Commons. ❐


the


[69]&#60;img width="1200" height="1166" width_o="1200" height_o="1166" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dfb4a0da8d4816e9ac35c0925c01118f779a9a5839384914a6692a8289ec9568/69.jpeg" data-mid="119195989" border="0" data-scale="15" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dfb4a0da8d4816e9ac35c0925c01118f779a9a5839384914a6692a8289ec9568/69.jpeg" /&#62; Le Corbusier, Plan Obus, Algiers (1930). As seen in Brian Ackley, “Le Corbusier’s Algerian Fantasy: Blocking the Casbah,”  Bidoun (Winter 2006). ❐


aspirations


[70]&#60;img width="1916" height="1526" width_o="1916" height_o="1526" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/beca91ae78a4c2bc1fc13ee65ecd244263e21141dad8365942e18ab623df5f96/Screenshot-2021-09-16-at-10.19.05-PM.png" data-mid="119196007" border="0" data-scale="15" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/beca91ae78a4c2bc1fc13ee65ecd244263e21141dad8365942e18ab623df5f96/Screenshot-2021-09-16-at-10.19.05-PM.png" /&#62; Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves, Linear City (1965). As seen in “Linear City,” Hidden Architecture. ❐


of


[71]&#60;img width="2586" height="1012" width_o="2586" height_o="1012" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/57b0d1fc308fb045906ea53e3156f66777c541816ff6e980455a9f89e99a4a8a/Screenshot-2021-09-16-at-10.18.52-PM.png" data-mid="119196008" border="0" data-scale="15" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/57b0d1fc308fb045906ea53e3156f66777c541816ff6e980455a9f89e99a4a8a/Screenshot-2021-09-16-at-10.18.52-PM.png" /&#62; Paul Rudolph, Lower Manhattan Expressway (1972). As seen in Robert Breugmann, "Paul Rudolph’s Strange Vision of a Cross-Manhattan Expressway (and Other Unfinished Projects)," LitHub, 2020. ❐


the


[72]&#60;img width="854" height="1604" width_o="854" height_o="1604" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4ccfb436e03e99f38d554d7b0211bc9fbb58a384c28b907d0de417a5b89883c8/Screenshot-2021-09-16-at-9.58.28-PM.png" data-mid="119196006" border="0" data-scale="7" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/854/i/4ccfb436e03e99f38d554d7b0211bc9fbb58a384c28b907d0de417a5b89883c8/Screenshot-2021-09-16-at-9.58.28-PM.png" /&#62;  Wu Guanzhong, The Great Wall (1986). Image from Wikiart.org. ❐  


linear


[73]&#60;img width="1920" height="1280" width_o="1920" height_o="1280" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1392e4e0db8723d55ea2a2817ae6d2e16902856657f21c0454b155eaabafd297/73.jpg" data-mid="119196009" border="0" data-scale="7" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1392e4e0db8723d55ea2a2817ae6d2e16902856657f21c0454b155eaabafd297/73.jpg" /&#62; Andy Goldsworthy, Storm King Wall. Image from Storm King Art Center. ❐  


? Distributed in space, over the expanse of a river, in an instant, LinearCity would not only contain “the majesty and murderous stupidity”


[74]Ben Lerner, 10:04, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 19.

of the time, energy, and labour poured into its body, but also stand strong enough to reconcile the contradictions through its sheer confidence. If KLCC was an exclamation, KLLC was a manifesto. In the words of Manfredo Tafuri on the Le Corbusier’s linear 1930 Plan for Algiers:

“Absorb that multiplicity, reconcile the improbably through the certainty of the plan, offset organic and disorganic qualities by accentuating their interrelationship, demonstrate that the maximum level of programming of productivity coincides with the maximum level of the productivity of the spirit… More precisely, form assumes the task of rendering authentic and natural the unnatural universe of technological precision.”


[75]Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1976), 125-6.


LinearCity was an architecture of an age. To make the web a reality, we’d have to draw a big, fat line on the map.


Move along


Arata Isozaki: I was thinking about [the Metabolist] concept of time: time is linear and grows or progresses from the beginning to become a utopia in the end. It’s a linear progression with no…
Rem: No deviation.
- Project Japan, page 40.

The penultimate track on crossover thrash band Pilgrim’s album, Achtung! This is Not a Metal Band from the year 2000, is a 50-second interlude titled “The March on Ampang River.” “You’d have to be crazy not to be scared,” whispers the gruff voice of Tommy Lee Jones, sampling from the 1998 movie “Small Soldiers” where he plays a toy soldier named Chip Hazard who is brought to life by artificial intelligence, but not safety tested due to corporate deadlines. Anchored by a snare, an electronic keyboard plays the melody, beginning with five notes and with a variation as a response. In the regular time of a militaristic march, the song moves on, blind to the variation and reverts to uniformity, repeating the five notes at the beginning. The song ends with another sample from “Small Soldiers.” “It’s a small world after all,” Chip Hazard intones, as the march disintegrates into synthetic, glitchy noise.

LinearCity was troubled from the start, seemingly sustained by the heady cocktail of fantasy and promise of a pay-out. The project was initiated by David Chew Keat Soon, a dilettante who studied engineering at MIT, and the business tycoon Tan Sri Vincent Tan, the lordly founder of Berjaya Corporation and a known crony of Mahathir Mohamad. Chew and Tan were first aligned in 1991 when Indah Water Konsortium Sdn Bhd, a joint venture between them, was awarded a 28-year sewerage concession to overhaul Malaysia’s sewage disposal system.

LinearCity was to be their encore performance. It had rather unheroic origins for such a heroic space: dredging and cleaning the Klang River, which had accrued years of government neglect. On a 12km along the Klang River from Jalan Tun Razak to Puchong, and a small stretch of the Gombak River, Chew and Tan proposed to make a deal with the government. They would clean and fortify the muddy river to mitigate persistent floods, build parking lots, and build a monorail train system, also known as the People-mover Rapid Transit (PRT) system.


[76]The eventual culmination of the KL Flood Mitigation Project was the Stormwater Management And Road Tunnel (SMART), a 9.7km long stormwater drainage tunnel that doubles as a highway, completed in 2007.


In return, Pripadu Sdn Bhd, a joint-venture company owned by Chew and Tan and capitalized for RM2, would be awarded the rights to build around and above the Klang River.


[77]The land was controlled by the Government under the National Land Code (NLC) and the Waters Act 1920 (A418) – to legally build, developers recommended that the government alienate the river reserve to Pripadu.


In the absence of space ripe for development in a city as crammed as central Kuala Lumpur, they would make space into property: a network of commercial and residential spaces would sit on top of the river itself. Where others saw air, they saw strata titles and the longest building in the world. The Klang River began as a trading hub; now, it too would be traded.

Huat Lim, a young architect who had just moved back to Kuala Lumpur, was appointed as the architect for the project. Fresh from a stint at Norman Foster’s office and his education at the Architectural Association, Huat saw the project as an opportunity to remake public space in Kuala Lumpur, so that the city’s “heart starts to beat again.”


[78]Interview with Huat Lim, October 7, 2020.


Rather than seeing the privatization of the riparian zone


[79]With thanks to KS Jomo for pointing this out.


around the river as an irreversible infringement on public space, Huat believed that it was the only way to return the riverbank to the people as habitable space. In the logic of late capitalist Malaysia, it was easier to make a deal with the lesser devil of developers than to attempt to affect any change within the protected ranks of government. Years of neglect had made the Klang River acrid, muddy, and unsuitable to the liberal vision of a modern city-dweller taking a relaxing stroll along its bank. In the eyes of Wawasan, the river provided neither physical nor psychological space for the new Malaysian, never mind the 1,000+ families who lived in Kampung Pasir Lama, Kampung Kicap, and Brickfields and would have to be evicted for the project to continue.

LinearCity saw the return of a familiar figure in the making of Malaysia: Archigram. Huat, having taught with Peter Cook and Ron Herron of Archigram at the Bartlett in London, pulled his mentors in to work on the project. Herron Associates was even listed as a “Future Systems Consultant” in the original masterplan. Archigram’s ideas, anachronistic in the West by the 1990s, gained new relevance in a nation seeking to build information into its infrastructure.  Working over bottles of white wine,


[80]Interview with Huat Lim, October 7, 2020.


they aimed to “achieve… scale in one quantum leap.”

[81]Pripadu, Kuala Lumpur LinearCity Volume One: Masterplan and Architectural Report, (Kuala Lumpur: Pripadu, 1994), 4. Hereafter “KLLC Masterplan.”


[82]Interview with Huat Lim, October 7, 2020.


In 1994, Huat, along with Cook and Herron, produced the first iteration of the LinearCity Masterplan for Pripadu. LinearCity touted itself as the “spine” of the city. KLCC would be “the Head”, Masjid Jamek and the historical area of the confluence would be “the Heart” while the surrounding old town areas would be “the Body,” and finally the industrial zones of Puchong and OUG would be “the Tail.” Instead of driving around town, the architects imagined that you would park your car in one of the 28,000 parking lots


[83]The parking lots were supposedly ordered by none other than Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad himself.


offered and ride the Monorail up and down the spine of the city. Instead of the metaphor of arteries and blood usually associated with highways, the spine – reminiscent of the language of Japanese Metabolists – carries information in electrical signals. Each firing of a neuron is an action potential.

Embedded from the Head to Tail was the potential of the LinearCity Information Highway. It looked toward the future, with a keen awareness of its own obsolescence: “The highway is permanent, the services transient and its usage is market led.” With cables running the length of the development and “switching gear servicing each building with branching connections to the surrounding city,”


[84]KLLC Masterplan, 56.


it would serve as case study and case-in-point for the line-as-web. One could live within the fantasy of LinearCity. The proposed (and later realized) National Registration Identity Card (NRIC) would contain fingerprint biometric data and digital currency on an in-built chip, all embedded in a thin piece of plastic. The MyKad, as it is now known, was imagined to be the one-stop access to LinearCity. Swipe in to ride the Monorail, to pay for your shopping at the mall, to withdraw money from the bank, to check into your office. Swipe out when you’re done.

It would take minimal architecture to contain this new way of living. Like its progenitor Instant City, LinearCity was a generic concept. In fact, in 1997, Huat would once again propose to build the same network of structures on Sungai Temiang, the main waterway in Seremban. Huat offered not buildings, but a range of “armatures, accessories, and components.”


[85]KLLC Masterplan, 35.


Suspended above the river with a series of Pringle-like transpar frames

[86]&#60;img width="3677" height="2813" width_o="3677" height_o="2813" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d3f5e95792e34aee4e2d2681850a8e5bcf05c0ca1d37b6f0050547a15c487f17/86.jpg" data-mid="119195990" border="0" data-scale="25" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d3f5e95792e34aee4e2d2681850a8e5bcf05c0ca1d37b6f0050547a15c487f17/86.jpg" /&#62; KLLC Masterplan, 38.


developed by Ove Arup, his proposed structures were so “fine, filigree, and non-threatening”


[87]Interview with Huat Lim, October 7, 2020.


that he imagined they could be blown away at any moment.

[88]&#60;img width="1516" height="3580" width_o="1516" height_o="3580" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3f08d9acea56d3e9b0bdedc8cd2d0bad168565cb81a8200f8b0dd41372a917a1/88.jpg" data-mid="119195991" border="0" data-scale="25" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3f08d9acea56d3e9b0bdedc8cd2d0bad168565cb81a8200f8b0dd41372a917a1/88.jpg" /&#62; KLLC Masterplan, 35.


Read without scale, they could almost be mistaken for telecommunication towers. 

LinearCity took one step further than the simulator of Instant Malaysia. If the simulator of Instant Malaysia was meant to dissolve a user into a stream of information, then LinearCity wanted to wield it. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the proposed Hydrophonic Parks,


[89]&#60;img width="3987" height="3617" width_o="3987" height_o="3617" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cbe121949b11454d8e22e391b497d098ab43495c7d3eeb18e2ec3b0d80bb26d3/89.jpg" data-mid="119195992" border="0" data-scale="25" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cbe121949b11454d8e22e391b497d098ab43495c7d3eeb18e2ec3b0d80bb26d3/89.jpg" /&#62; KLLC Masterplan, 54.


one at Central Market near the confluence of the Klang and Gombak River


[90]&#60;img width="1956" height="5780" width_o="1956" height_o="5780" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/04c116d399fd862fd3a13736b6fe46d67bd3f958eb818648ef66c7c01df26971/90.jpg" data-mid="119195993" border="0" data-scale="20" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/04c116d399fd862fd3a13736b6fe46d67bd3f958eb818648ef66c7c01df26971/90.jpg" /&#62; KLLC Masterplan, 61.


, and the other at Puchong. Rather than cover up the river, “KL LinearCity will enhance the river’s prominence as a feature of the city.”


[91]KLLC Masterplan, 30.


More than a promenade to walk on, LinearCity would put the river to work, using “siphonic technology to draw energy derived from water.” Meanwhile, a station would control satellite and microwaves, with an “intelligent solar system” and light-sensitive cladding panels. In Huat’s telling of the story of LinearCity, this was the early days of sustainable architecture in Malaysia, coherent with the “environmental design” promulgated by Ken Yeang through the 1980s and 1990s. Yet this was not the gardens-in-the-sky


[92]&#60;img width="749" height="1125" width_o="749" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ef8ea2ea66f4d65ca5e4748be49c7b748334c4ff4cbd7fa9534b359e32f0e9a0/92.1.jpg" data-mid="119195994" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/749/i/ef8ea2ea66f4d65ca5e4748be49c7b748334c4ff4cbd7fa9534b359e32f0e9a0/92.1.jpg" /&#62; &#60;img width="1500" height="1020" width_o="1500" height_o="1020" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e95641203d1d8ccdda1fb955f89a394134f14235193346f3dfdfae18795d69d8/92.2.jpg" data-mid="119195995" border="0" data-scale="17" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e95641203d1d8ccdda1fb955f89a394134f14235193346f3dfdfae18795d69d8/92.2.jpg" /&#62;Photographs of Ken Yeang’s Mesiniaga Tower (1992). From Wawasan 2020 Collection at Malaysia Design Archive.


proposed by Yeang, where nature and technology were brought together to offset one another. The hydrophonic park rendered environment as information, where air, water, invisible waves, and the sun were passed through a system of utility. Linear City took the dream of Instant Malaysia, scaled it up and adjusted it to the needs of a private corporation.

The building could operationalize information, and it aspired for its occupants, who would ideally be web shapers, to be able to do so as well. In another section, the report – sounding awfully like algorithmically-generated text


[93]See more at Chuah Chong Yan, Y. L. S., and Zhi Wee, “At the Dawn of the New Millennium, Our Span of Control is Almost Limitless,” (2021). ❐ 
 

– continues, “Occupants need to have the semblance of decision-making… this requires clarity and simplicity in environment-tempering. The concept should be responsive intelligence which allows an interaction between user and building and the degree of learning which is the essence of fuzzy logic control.”


[94]KLLC Masterplan, 57.


In the words of Deleuze, “controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.”

[95]Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, Vol. 59 (Winter, 1992), 4.


Control would no longer be totalising, but would operate like a switch, drawing geographies of connection and disconnection. In Wawasan Malaysia, we would all be points of, agents of, and subject to control.

Like the ASLI image of the web shaper as Vitruvian man, information was the protagonist. Architecture would become just a frame, a window, a background. If the promise of the simulator was as a prosthetic to plug a user into a different world, LinearCity wanted to render invisible the interface between user, software, and hardware. Its architecture was one of reduction, until it would threaten to disappear. Dematerialized with light membrane walls, held together by tension rods on transpar spans, and represented in the briefest lines in drawing, it was imagined as an impermanent system. Perhaps even the end of architecture itself.

A perspectival collage


[96]&#60;img width="765" height="381" width_o="765" height_o="381" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5f5c0fe2b3511e517c0662c38e2e300e2662fa428d7782dfd1e1cf201a8faced/96.png" data-mid="119195996" border="0" data-scale="30" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/765/i/5f5c0fe2b3511e517c0662c38e2e300e2662fa428d7782dfd1e1cf201a8faced/96.png" /&#62; KLLC Masterplan, Inner Cover.


– one of two produced in this document – suggests a bias toward the horizon rather than the interior of the building. A pillar and a mural cut off the perspective within the building. The view outside the floor-to-ceiling glass walls is the focus of the image: beyond, dense vegetation gives way to a view of other buildings in KL. LinearCity itself is a promenade made for looking outward, a platform from which to absorb the city. By reducing the foreground, the horizon becomes ripe for picturing: a yellow helicopter, a protruding helipad, jaunty circles of colour in the sky. Curiously, an oval with a gradient from orange to yellow to white occupies the far right of the picture. It hovers between the inside and outside, standing outside perspectival space.


The tail of a snake eats itself


[97]Chin Kar Yern, “Megaprosthesis,” (2021). ❐ 
 

When lines grow from drawing to space, frictions emerge.

Huat, Cook, and Herron’s vision of LinearCity was eventually passed over. In Huat’s telling of the fable of Linear City, the greed of developers led to an endless cycle of unfulfilled consumption, and the project increasingly became about maximizing plot ratio and built-up area and being the longest building in the world.


[98]&#60;img width="1500" height="1022" width_o="1500" height_o="1022" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3a51aa2437e33f50ebcc8568cf439393168350c99c771fd1650c883983a1b2b7/98.jpg" data-mid="119195997" border="0" data-scale="35" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3a51aa2437e33f50ebcc8568cf439393168350c99c771fd1650c883983a1b2b7/98.jpg" /&#62; Mahathir looks at a model of the 1996 design for KL Linear City. ❐  


The already complicated development took on additional layers


[99]&#60;img width="3545" height="3509" width_o="3545" height_o="3509" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/58df50d73318d32314c5304e38b8b710976abd1444462abf585ab0448d7249bd/99.jpg" data-mid="119195998" border="0" data-scale="25" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/58df50d73318d32314c5304e38b8b710976abd1444462abf585ab0448d7249bd/99.jpg" /&#62; The formal inspiration for this essay. KL LinearCity, KL LinearCity: Your Global Address in Asia, (Kuala Lumpur: KL LinearCity, 1996), 1. Hereafter "KL LinearCity 1996."


– hotels, boat rides that referenced Macao referencing Venice. Huat eventually left the project.


Under this new direction, LinearCity materialized as building.

[100]&#60;img width="3578" height="3526" width_o="3578" height_o="3526" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d7aa8c3acce7033ddf8bf9da76b1907701914cb9c9fbc935c00331bb0ee6aa2a/100.jpg" data-mid="119195999" border="0" data-scale="35" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d7aa8c3acce7033ddf8bf9da76b1907701914cb9c9fbc935c00331bb0ee6aa2a/100.jpg" /&#62; KL LinearCity 1996, 3.


Headed by starchitect Santiago Calatrava, the thin lines of LinearCity hardened into solid walls, metal rails, and glass walls so heavily tinted it was nearly opaque. The 28,000 parking lots in the original proposition became 40,000. A theme song was developed.


[101]&#60;img width="3543" height="3507" width_o="3543" height_o="3507" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/df3f4c10b71d6f953d3fe227829fec7827bce2d5bcb92c35773fc34b68ec626c/101.jpg" data-mid="119196000" border="0" data-scale="35" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/df3f4c10b71d6f953d3fe227829fec7827bce2d5bcb92c35773fc34b68ec626c/101.jpg" /&#62; KL LinearCity 1996, 22.


Chief among these new additions were GigaWorld,


[102]&#60;img width="2420" height="1762" width_o="2420" height_o="1762" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/644e05485776a0c4807339e9c1a1beab81b3b5fa96123170e86863cafcefcab4/102.png" data-mid="119196001" border="0" data-scale="45" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/644e05485776a0c4807339e9c1a1beab81b3b5fa96123170e86863cafcefcab4/102.png" /&#62; “GigaWorld, a typical cross section at the retail zone.” As seen in David Chew, “Vision of a 21st-century Public Place,” in Public Places in Asia Pacific Cities: Current Issues and Strategies, ed. Pu Miao, (Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, 2001), 337.


a bloated 2.4km long “unique urban commercial and tourism centre.” Colloquially termed “the Egg,” GigaWorld would be “a monumental urban landmark symbolizing in one great gesture the ties of man to nature.”


[103]Izat Arif and Ellen Lee, “First Day Cover for Karya Seni Arca Awam – 2021,” (2021). ❐ 
 

[104]KL LinearCity 1996, 9.

 
In other words, it was a mall. 

The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis was the death knell of the project. With Berjaya’s coffers emptied, the government asked to step in to complete the RM 2.2 billion monorail project while Vincent Tan would be free to pursue Linear City, as reported in the Wall Street Journal by economist KS Jomo.


[105]KS Jomo, “Malaysia Props Up Crony Capitalists.” Wall Street Journal, December 22, 1998.


In late 1998, Vincent Tan sued KS Jomo for an amount of RM 250 million on account of defamation. The case was dropped only after a decade.

Hegemonic projects “require and reproduce their own outsides.”

[106]Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiii.

Like other megaprojects, shells lie in its wake.


[107]Hirendran, “Malaya-1,” (2021). ❐ 
 

Three PPRs (Program Perumahan Rakyat, a low-cost government housing project


[108]The three PPRs and their corresponding units provided are: PPR Seri Anggerik (KL Linear City I) – 316 units, PPR Pantai Ria (KL Linear City II Fasa I) – 1264 units, and PPR Seri Cempaka (KL Linear City II Fasa II) – 632 units.


), the underutilized Monorail, and supposedly, a few shophouses in Brickfields that I have yet to be able to identify. When Linear City was shelved, more than 1,000 families who agreed to move from the riverbank area were left in limbo: they were promised medium-cost housing in Bukit Jalil, but by 2002 found the same plot of land occupied by a high-rise apartment.


The end of the line


“If the end might be predicted, or indeed had arrived, then the future was to be bereft of all but repetition.” – Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present, 194

We began from a mall and a grid. We ended with the failed promise of a web, and a mall.

Yet, the grid has never truly disappeared. The grid is what allows perspectival drawings of linear city, and the infinite column of the simulator of Instant Malaysia. The past is not forgotten, merely reconstituted.


[109]An Archive (2021). ❐ 
 

The aspirations of colonial officers, of Instant Malaysia, of LinearCity, all wished to step outside time. Whether it was in the overcoming of nature, the limits of the body, or of elements itself, the promise of utopia is in transcendence. Yet in an ironic twist, “the specificity of these articulations and collaborations also limits the spread and play of scale-making projects, promising them only a tentative moment in a particular history.”

[1A10]Tsing, Friction, 56.

Putting to paper, drawing on a map, or rendering in a digital drawing necessarily confines the universality of utopia to particularity. It would be far better for a project to exist in noise, in perpetuity, in delay.

The River of Life is the latest megaproject touted to “rejuvenate” the Klang River. With a price tag of RM4.4 billion, like its predecessors, it has been repeatedly pushed. These dreams, constantly delayed, are always just out of reach.


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		<title>Video 1</title>
				
		<link>https://wawasan.directory/Video-1</link>

		<pubDate>Sat, 11 Sep 2021 09:41:13 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Wawasan Directory</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://wawasan.directory/Video-1</guid>

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  STATEMENT
  

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A people that is grade, lasting, and propogating

Diagnosing the malaise of the country, Mahathir announces that we have “come late to the age of industrialisation”. 
To this, we can only have the “will to make sweeping changes”, to reconfigure our sense of selves, expressed as a mechanical mastery and modernisation over our bodies. Nothing short of a reordering of humanity can exhort this arrival of modernity. 

This video explores the figuration of the new Cyberjaya Man of Wawasan by looking at man’s sublimation into the things and infrastructures that his labour built. Through humanity’s absence, the video invokes the uncanny dissipation of man
in the accelerated era of Wawasan. Who remains to maintain 
this modernity? Who, or perhaps more fittingly, what does this blueprinted modernity serve? What does a Wawasan that has displaced Man look like?

Automaton manifesto:

Malaysia's new finance minister has called for Malaysians to embrace "the new normalisation process" and "do as the locals do as you would do anything to be a good neighbour to the locals". Dr. Mahathir exhorted the Malay community to follow a similar trend in “grade, lasting and propagating” their country in comparison to their European counterparts. The world was still to come, and Malaysia must forever be trivial. "Europeans will never be Europeans."
 
  
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		<title>Video 2</title>
				
		<link>https://wawasan.directory/Video-2</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Sep 2021 02:19:36 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Wawasan Directory</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://wawasan.directory/Video-2</guid>

		<description>

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  STATEMENT
  

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At the beginning of the decade, there emerged a great stir again

Like a glitch, social and economic crises in the accelerated timeline of Wawasan throws systems into disarray. Modernity does not merely stop, its vehicular chassis crashes along the superhighway.  

There is another sense in which time crashes, as when we have arrived at the future promised in Vision 2020. As it turns out, the future must be furtively deferred through clever bureaucratese: Wawasan 2020 is substituted with Wawasan Bersama Makmur 2030. But a Wawasan ‘future’ stripped off its utopic projections, is just the banality of hereafter in bureaucratic, developmental time. Without the immanent, utopic future, the ‘now’ we live in is reduced to a static point. The present crashes into a moment of immobility, inaction and stasis. 

Wrapped in an endlessly looping video narrating over economic, political and social crisis within Malaysia at the end of 1990s, the video magnifies the intensification of social inertia experienced by the public in the aftermath of Wawasan accelerationism. 


Automaton reading:

The Malaysian Government put forward several options for ways to mend the damage made by the "bargain". Some suggested that the government's punitive stance be extended to include any non-Malays who might be attracted to the "Malay" brand. Others argued that the removal of the stigma of "bargain"ability was worth the risk. None of the options were able to capture the attention of the general public more than the U.S. audience. The Malaysian audience was largely ignored by the media, with a notable absence in Thailand where the "Bargain" was signed.

"Why am I being treated to such a debauched dinner (in the morning) when I might have been served a large plate of fish."

At the beginning of the decade, however, there emerged a great stir again when, as a few days earlier, Mahathir had warned a large gathering of dignitaries not to fight in the streets and had not warned the delegates not to join organized labour. It was this great stir that set off a great deal of speculation about the likely link between the two.

 
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		<title>Video 3</title>
				
		<link>https://wawasan.directory/Video-3</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Sep 2021 02:28:00 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Wawasan Directory</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://wawasan.directory/Video-3</guid>

		<description>

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  STATEMENT
  

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The state is now the main means of buying things, making furniture, setting things alight, and disposing of them 

One of the most understated premises of Wawasan is the thorough reconfiguration of political society.   

Modernity is incompatible with bureaucratic inertia—"Every transaction with the Government would take an unconscionable length of time”. The civil service, deemed a stumbling block of Wawasan with their “old attitude[s]” and “unacceptable delays”, must give way for a more efficient system. Malaysia Incorporated, birthed in this atmosphere, sought to break down the boundaries of business and government to achieve a seamless, frictionless unity between private and public. Governed by a ‘tech’-nocratic rationality, with Mahathir at its apex, Wawasan is a political vision and a performance of high authoritarianism. 


The video dictates aloud some of the AI-formulated economic policies for Malaysia. Ranging from commentaries on oil businesses, workers’ productivity, mandatory training, resources efficiency, to the role of government, one is immersed in a world that is oppressively prescriptive in its techno-scientifism.  

Automaton treatise: 

Business elites believe that an economy without oil will be unable to thrive, that an economy built on oil will be unable to thrive, that an economy based on diplomacy will be unable to thrive, and that an economy based on rivalry and cooperation and mutual aid and cooperation and all the arts of diplomacy and cooperation and patronage and all the arts of manipulating the other's thinking will be unable to thrive. They believe that an economy based on rivalry and isolation and dependency and all the arts of patronage and control and all the arts of manipulation and manipulation and all the other arts of causing and responding to the other's effects will be unable to produce lasting change. And they believe that an economy based on rivalry and isolation and dependency and all the other arts of resistance and resistance and all the other arts of survival and growth and progress and all the other arts of consciousness and being and all the other arts of consciousness will be unable to produce either desired or desirable outcomes.


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