Dear friends,

Spring has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere—how are you all doing? It’s been nearly four years since I started my own newsletter after the closure of Apple Daily. To mark this week’s 200th issue, I’d like to talk a bit about writing itself, as a kind of commemoration.

Before I began writing, I naturally assumed I’d be talking about AI. But after rereading my 100th issue, “Why I Persist in Writing,” which I wrote not long after ChatGPT launched, I realized that my views on AI’s role in writing were already established back then. Looking back now, I find there’s nothing to revise—in fact, I’m even more convinced that writing letters to friends is irreplaceable, and no matter how powerful AI becomes, it can only ever be an auxiliary. The reason is simple: writing to you all was never about efficient communication, but about belief.

Writing letters? Isn’t it just writing articles? Belief in what? Please allow me to start from 30 years ago.

Back in the 1990s, when the internet was just taking off, I was an avid reader of Wired magazine and even subscribed to the print edition. Every time I received a copy from overseas, I would immediately flip to the last few pages to read the column by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT (not Made In Taiwan :) Media Lab. Besides the eye-opening theme of “Move bits, not atoms,” I was also enamored with the email-style layout—Date, From, To, Subject, and the message body. I thought to myself that one day I’d write my own column in the format of an email.

Later, when I finally got to write a column, I naïvely suggested to my editor that we design it like an email. Of course, the answer was no—how could a small column like mine get that kind of layout and resources? Unexpectedly, after I’d long let go of that wish, years later I started the DHK newsletter, truly combining email and column writing.

So, I’m not kidding when I say I really approach every article with the mindset of writing a letter to friends. Perhaps it’s because of this mindset that, over time, the current format of cover photo, brief announcement, article, and p.s. gradually took shape. Unlike a regular publication, the four parts of my letter often feel like a “Frankenstein’s monster” of unrelated things stitched together. I can’t help it—I want to share bits of my mood with friends, but don’t want to bombard you with extra emails, nor do I want to battle algorithms on social media. So I use random snapshots from daily life as cover images, and toss miscellaneous life updates into the p.s., even when they’re off-topic.

I’ve never explained this before, but it seems my friends have long understood my style, each dealing with my letters in their own way. For example, lawyer L says she knows me so well that she can guess the content just from the title, calling herself a “loyal reader with a low open rate.” J doesn’t read most of my ramblings either, but she saves them and looks them up when a relevant topic comes up. Translation expert T occasionally replies, sometimes with comments, sometimes to point out typos. Of course, there are those who read but don’t reply, and even more who neither read nor reply (let me curse them here—don’t worry, logically, those who read this won’t be cursed, and those who are cursed won’t read this :) Oh, and there’s my friend M, who once responded to my p.s.—I praised him for reading to the end, but M, unafraid of hurting my fragile feelings, said he skips the articles every time and only reads the p.s., which left me both amused and exasperated.

I often adopt new technologies early, but rarely care about their intended design, instead inventing my own clumsy ways of using them—like a caveman throwing a pistol at a wild beast. For instance, I started using Instagram not long after it launched, but would often dump an entire article into what was supposed to be a short caption, and just use the photo as an illustration (I haven’t used Instagram in years, but I hear this kind of usage actually became popular!?). I approach the newsletter the same way: even though email is free and most people don’t care much about the number of emails, I still stick strictly to one letter per week, with only two special editions and one resend due to a 90% delivery failure—never any promotional emails. Even though I’m no longer limited by logistics, I obsessively send it out the night before, nostalgic for the days when “the late bird gets the worm”—buying a freshly delivered, not-yet-stacked Apple Daily at the newsstand near the Mong Kok red van late at night, or even earlier, waiting at the newsstand on Thursday nights for the chance to get Chinese Hero a night ahead of release. Even though I’m no longer tied to traditional media, I still hold myself to the standards of column writing—or rather, even stricter standards. No more editors chasing deadlines, no team for proofreading, layout, illustration, printing, or distribution. I have to work even harder to maintain quality, to be worthy of your time spent opening my letters.

That said, I don’t believe in perfectionism—in fact, I’d say I’m an imperfectionist. By imperfectionism, I don’t mean not striving for perfection, nor do I mean seeking imperfection, but rather striving for perfection within heavy constraints and tight deadlines. I see perfectionism as the greatest enemy of writing, the main culprit behind works that never see the light of day. More harshly, but also more logically, I’d say: only works that actually come out at a particular time and place can possibly be perfect; missing the moment in pursuit of quality is itself imperfect. Therefore, the principle to uphold isn’t perfection, but doing one’s utmost—doing my best with limited resources, under various red lines, and before each weekly deadline. No matter what, finish before the deadline and aim for the highest quality possible. This isn’t “settling for less,” but the true meaning of imperfectionism.

“Friend J,” Zhang Jieping, founder of The Nowhere and Matters, once said, “Writing is the smallest unit of freedom.” But if freedom is measured in units of writing, what is the unit of writing? Only in recent years have I realized that writers must choose their unit of creation, which can also be understood as genre. The unit of creation could be an article, a book, a poem, or even a social media post, and then further subdivided into long and short forms, novels and short stories, Threads and Facebook posts, and so on. Just as a runner must choose whether to run 100 meters or 42.195 kilometers, a writer must choose their unit of creation to know what they’re aiming for; likewise, readers know where to look for the finish line, that is, in what form to appreciate and support a work.

Thanks to everyone’s support, over the past 200 weeks I’ve established the newsletter as my main creative unit. However, because of the “Tetralogy of Freedom” project, books are also another creative unit for me, and I’ve been exploring how to balance the two. Early on, my articles about blockchains varied greatly in style and length, and the unexpected writing space brought by the pandemic meant that Sociology of Blockchain evolved from a planned collection of articles into something almost completely rewritten from scratch. The second book, Moneyverse, mainly collects articles from my columns in Ming Pao and Apple Daily, extensively rewritten and supplemented with new material, edited into eight chapters.

My director friend T once explained to me that making a movie is like sculpting: you carve away the unnecessary parts from an abundance of raw material to create the final work. Making animation, on the other hand, is like building a model: you plan all the parts from the start and then make and assemble them one by one. The first two books of the tetralogy were like poorly planned movies—lots of footage, but hard to piece together in editing, requiring a ton of post-production and even reshoots. For the third book, I tried to approach it like animation, preparing a storyboard before drawing the frames: first setting the new book’s table of contents and chapters, then filling in the chapters with newsletters. Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that the newsletters were particularly long and technical for a while—that’s because I’d already designated them as specific chapters for the new book while writing.

It sounds reasonable and efficient, but in reality, creation isn’t like building with Lego, and the “two birds with one stone” approach gradually created problems. First, 4,000-word, ultra-serious newsletters put pressure on readers, and some kept their distance. Second, since the topics came from the new book’s chapters, they often had nothing to do with current events—when the whole world was watching tariffs, my article might be about privacy. Even if the importance was undiminished, it felt even more out of touch. Finally, fifteen 100-meter sprints don’t add up to a 1,500-meter run. Even if it’s tens of thousands of words, stringing together dozens of newsletters is fundamentally different from a book on a single topic in terms of structure, tone, pacing, and coherence. Even if I reuse articles, it still requires a lot of rearranging, editing, and supplementing—otherwise, it’s just a collection of articles at best.

With this realization, I stopped expecting to reuse the newsletters and focused on clearly expressing what I most wanted to say in the week. Whether or not it gets included in the tetralogy later is up to the fate of the work; editing will sort it out, and there’s no need to be attached. Rather than seeing the newsletter as a process of filling in chapters, I prefer to enjoy writing as a journey of discovery. Even if these words never make it into the new book, as long as they reflect my thoughts, they’ll naturally become nourishment and, in some form, part of the tetralogy—just as Steve Jobs said in his Stanford commencement address: “You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

Back to my inspirations: besides the Wired column, Negroponte also wrote Being Digital, one of the books that influenced me most when it was published in 1995, and one of the few paperbacks I couldn’t bear to give away even without the author’s signature. When only 10% of Americans were online, Negroponte explained the differences between the digital and physical worlds in simple terms to both politicians and the public, even predicting DAOs. But what moved me most was the afterword, where Negroponte talked about his elderly mother learning to email him every day. I’m ashamed—thirty years have passed, and while I teach people everywhere how to get on-chain, I’ve still never managed to help my own mother use a smartphone. Our communication is still the “warmest” kind: face-to-face. A bit of a tangent, but I should add that Being Digital was actually expanded from 18 Wired columns. Negroponte never planned to turn his columns into a book, but the result was that both the columns and the book were just right—each a great work in its own right.

Even as a book lover, I can only spell out the Greek surname “Negroponte” by copy & paste. Last month, I traveled to Negroponte’s homeland to see the sky city Meteora. For once, I joined a local tour, and at dinner, I sat with some ever-chatty Americans. When the inevitable “What do you do?” came up, as an introvert, I politely replied, “I’m a writer.” The first time I identified as a writer, it took me two seconds to realize the weight of that self-introduction.

Although I’ve been writing for years, it’s only recently that I’ve truly felt the weight of words, and so I’ve devoted my full energy to writing, publishing, selling books, curating, and preservation. Sometimes, we feel we’re facing the harshest censorship and silencing, but compared to certain places and eras, it’s really nothing. Recently, I watched the fictional-but-true “Orb: On the Movement of the Earth,” which depicts generation after generation of believers in heliocentrism in the theocratic country of P enduring persecution in the 15th century, yet gritting their teeth to pass on knowledge. I was deeply moved, especially by the scene where people use their flesh and blood to enact “decentralized publishing”—it gave me goosebumps, my hair standing on end.

In episode ten of the story, Oczy, who was illiterate at first but later recorded the hardships of heliocentrism research, begins to develop a curiosity for knowledge. He asks Jolanta what it feels like to understand words, and Jolanta says:

“Our lives are trapped in this era with no escape, but only when reading can we hear the voices of great people from the past speaking to us. In that moment, I feel as if I’ve left this era behind. Thoughts that are turned into words will live forever and can even continue to inspire people in the future. Isn’t that a miracle?”

This is what I believe in—the power of words.

kin
HK
2025.04.16

p.s. The photo is of the Prison of Socrates, taken at Philopappos Hill near the Acropolis in Athens. It is believed to be the prison where Socrates was held more than 2,400 years ago, and where he ultimately took poison to end his life. According to records, after being sentenced to death for corrupting the youth and disrespecting the gods, Socrates had the chance to escape from prison and Athens, but chose instead to die with dignity. Some may think Socrates was foolish, but the nature of conviction is that it transcends rational calculation. Clearly, remaining silent could have spared him arrest; admitting guilt could have won him a lighter sentence; leaving would have allowed him a new life. All these sound familiar. Yet, some people would rather pay a heavy price than abandon their beliefs.