TimeWarner travails

I have recently upgraded modems with Time Warner. As expected, the process was not smooth. Nevertheless, for a company that took three years to replace some waterlogged cables in my building, there were some surprisingly clever bits of customer service.

Initiating the process

One day, out of the blue, my modem reset. This isn't exactly as rare an event as it should be, but it's never good. When it finished rebooting, I had some brief trouble accessing the Internet, until Time Warner redirected me to a webpage where they told me that my modem was out of date and took me through the process of ordering a new one.

The good:

• This is the first time ever that Time Warner has proactively let me know that my equipment was out of date, rather than waiting until it began to cause problems, and then sending a technician to say, "Oh, this box is really old!"
• The ordering process was remarkably simple, and the new modem showed up in just a few days.

The bad:

• There has got to be a better way to send push notifications than by unceremoniously turning off my Internet. 

Grade: B+

Installation and setup

Here's where it got hinky. I plugged in the modem, which replaces my Wi-Fi router, connected it to the cable line, et voila, I was able to get onto the new modem's Wi-Fi, sign in to the config page, and change the name and password of the Wi-Fi network. 

According to the manual that came with the modem, the next thing that would happen is that I'd get taken to a page to initialize the modem. And I got taken to a page ... with a 404.

I went back to my old modem because I was busy and wanted to use the Internet. A few days later I gave it another try, with the same result. I called the dedicated support line for modem installation issues, and through the automated system I was able to ask that the modem be initialized. The call ended, the modem reset, and I was online! I was about to go to Ookla Speedtest to see how fast my new "ultrafast" modem really was, and then ... nothing. I checked the modem, and the Wi-Fi lights were off.

Time to call Time Warner again. After the phone tree and maybe 10 minutes on hold, I spoke to a friendly technician who explained that Wi-Fi was not enabled for my account because my old modem didn't have any. That makes a certain amount of sense, except that Time Warner knew they were sending me a Wi-Fi modem, right? It seems that part of that process could've been enabling my account for Wi-Fi.

Once I got the modem running, it was fast. Like, 100 Mbps fast. Good stuff!

The good:

• Time Warner provided a dedicated number for modem issues, making it easier than the usual torture to get through the phone tree. And the initialization process was automated, which was smart.
• Fast Internet!

The bad:

• The manual said something would come up that didn't come up. 
• Wi-Fi is something that needed to be enabled for my account and wasn't, and it took a phone call to make that happen.

Grade: C-

Fixing the inevitable problem

This morning I was happily using my very fast new modem, when suddenly the thing rebooted. When it came back on, my Wi-Fi network was gone. It had reverted to the default network, which was the serial number on the bottom of the box, and for which I didn't have the password. Another call, another long wait.

Finally I got a technician, who'd never heard of such a thing happening and quickly passed me on to a supervisor (or, rather, to a period of hold music, followed by a supervisor). The supervisor had also never heard of such a thing, but gave me the password to get me on the modem again, and I was able to get back in and set up my Wi-Fi network with my own name and password. 

The good:

• The problem was pretty quickly solved.

The bad:

• I have a brand new product that has done something inexplicable and problematic, and the technicians had never heard of it. Doesn't exactly build confidence. Hopefully my Wi-Fi network will still be there when I get home, but who knows?

Grade: B

Overall grade: C+

Which, for Time Warner, is a remarkable improvement over every other experience.

Freedom is a pretty strange thing

Freedom is a pretty strange thing. Once you've experienced it, it remains in your heart, and no one can take it away. Then, as an individual, you can be more powerful than a whole country. -Ai Weiwei

Right now, Liberty in North Korea is raising funds to rescue 200 North Korean refugees. That might seem like small potatoes against the daunting power of the North Korean state. But I'm gonna go with Ai: freedom is a pretty strange thing.

Last night, at a fundraiser, I spoke for a long time with Joseph Kim. He's a sweet kid. We talked about North Korea, and we talked about Max Weber and sandwiches and cheap ways to travel. His English is better than it was the first time I met him, and he's studying hard in school.

He's just one individual with freedom in his heart. And it makes him powerful. It's voices like Joseph Kim and Ai Weiwei that the dictators of this world fear most: people who speak the plain truth.

And it's not that they speak without fear. In Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, the documentary where Ai spoke about freedom, he admits that he's afraid -- maybe more afraid than most other people, which is why he realizes that he must speak now. He sees the danger of not speaking.

LiNK is working hard to bring 200 more Josephs to freedom. They won't all do TED talks. Many may choose not to be activists at all -- but choice is exactly the point. Given the resources and opportunities of freedom, North Korean defectors might open a kimbap stand together on the outskirts of Seoul, like the mother of a defector friend of mine and a few other defectors. Or they might get degrees in political science at one of Seoul's top universities, like someone else I know.

But their acts of freedom, large and small, have an impact. They change the way the world sees North Korea and North Koreans. And many North Korean defectors remain in contact with their families back home, sending them money, sending them information -- and planting the experience of freedom in their hearts.

If this matters to you, now is an especially good time to give because your funds will be matched. Even small donations make a difference -- most of LiNK's 265 rescues to date have been funded through the efforts of college students who've done things like bake sales. Sometimes it can make a difference just to talk to the people around you. Whatever you can do to give the experience of freedom to others, on this issue or somewhere else, please do it. Once you've experienced it, it remains in your heart, and no one can take it away.

Smiles and gunfire

North Korean officials recently dropped in on the Asian Games in South Korea and offered to renew talks between the two nations, an offer that South Korea was happy to accept. Meanwhile, North and South Koreans are exchanging gunfire across the border. What's going on?

One of the most common misunderstandings in international relations is the belief that nation-states act like coherent individuals. People say things like "North Korea wants engagement" or "The United States has shifted its focus to Iraq" or, as I did above, "South Korea was happy to accept," as if these countries were individual people.

Now, you could question whether even individual people act coherently all the time. But when it comes to large nations whose governments comprise thousands and thousands of people, it shouldn't be strange that some of these people are working at cross purposes, or simply don't know about each other's intentions. In democracies, these variations are made explicit. We have presidents and legislators and appointed officials from different parties, and we have layers of government at the local, regional and national level. Politicians openly debate with each other.

In dictatorships, however, disagreements are hidden, as is so much else about how government works. It's easy to believe that in a totalitarian state like North Korea, everything flows from the leader, and all government actions are under his control. But the reality is more complex. First of all, it isn't always clear what the leader wants, and in fact dictators are often cagey about how much they reveal of their intentions. It isn't just the outside world that has to struggle to parse Kim Jong-un's intentions. North Korean officials have to take actions and make decisions based on cryptic instructions, or none at all, and they can face dire consequences if they guess wrong.

Second, we need to remember that information flows less effectively in dictatorships than in democracies. Totalitarianism is not the same as efficiency. Totalitarian states expend enormous effort to limit the flow of information, and that very much includes the flow of information within the middle levels of government. The top leadership must ensure that no individual or group is able to organize sufficiently to be a threat. That means siloing leaders and siloing information. Any system of information distribution that would allow a high-level minister to call a mass of people to action -- the banality of a foreign minister sending a general memo to the full staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs -- is a danger to the leader. The leader needs multiple paths of information that lead to him, and he needs to limit the ability of those below him to share information widely.

So what does all this mean in terms of the gunfire at the border? Possibly nothing much. Peace talks, after all, do tend to happen in the context of conflict, and that's what's going on in Korea. The exchanges of fire, which led to no casualties, had to do first with North Koreans trying to shoot down balloons sent over the border by South Korean private citizens, and later with South Koreans warning North Korean soldiers not to move any closer to the demarcation line. Who ordered the North Koreans to fire at the balloons? Quite possibly a low-level border officer who knows absolutely nothing about the recent high-level exchanges with South Korea. Who ordered the South Koreans to shoot back? Probably a South Korean officer with standing orders to do exactly that, and whose orders don't change because of the vague possibility of a thaw at the highest levels of his government. And why did the North Korean soldiers approach the demarcation line when they did? Who knows? But it strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that they did so as part of some kind of clever cat-and-mouse game ordered up by Pyongyang. Instead, like so much else from North Korea, it's probably just noise.

Religion words

In traditional Chinese religion, people worship gods and ancestors.

For those who know their way around East Asian religious studies, it seems like an uncontroversial statement. But the deeper I get, the more it seems fundamentally incorrect. Two terms seem especially problematic (though you could quibble about pretty much all of them): worship and gods.

We can start with the latter. According to Myron Cohen, scholars of Chinese religion decided to reclaim the term "god" from the Judeo-Christian context in which it was most often used. And there are ways in which the Chinese gods resemble the gods of India or classical Greece and Rome. But the differences loom large. "Gods" can be both guei and shen, or (for lack of better terms) ghosts and spirits, although my ancestors might be your ghosts and vice versa.

But East Asians don't necessarily treat their "gods" with the kind of respect and veneration -- in a word, worship -- that a Westerner might expect. When a local god wouldn't provide rain, officials were known to take it out and leave it in a hot field to suffer, thrash it with sticks, even smash it if no rain came. You can't do that to Yahweh or Jesus or Allah, or even Zeus or Odin, although maybe you could with some minor god.

And from the problem with gods, we can see the problem with worship. Even if we set aside such cases of spirit abuse, more orthodox ancestor veneration or propitiation is simply not the same as what we usually think of as worship. For one thing, ancestor rituals very closely resemble the respect paid to living ancestors, and no one thinks East Asians are actually worshipping their living parents or grandparents. If your dead parent is being fed and bowed to the same way he was when he was alive (with minor differences), why is it now worship? Care or propitiation or veneration seem like better terms.

It is never easy to find the right balance between translation and obscurity. To say that Koreans engage in god and ancestor worship and that shamans perform exorcisms is misleading in all sorts of ways, but to say that Koreans perform kut and chesa for shin and gajok is difficult for the layperson. I haven't got a satisfactory solution to this problem, but I think it's worth noticing that the problem is there.