Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing an analog Thailand. What are we talking about here? Well let me just jump in. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Digital red flag. Quoting directly: "The worldwide IT outage on July 19 caused by a faulty software update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings, has served as a wake-up call to local organizations that it's time to ensure their systems are better prepared to deal with the unexpected." No. It is a wake-up call to maintain an analog component to our system of society, just generally. We're beyond talking Government here, this is just society. Transactionally, banking, the private sector, the Government sector, everyone is in this mad rush to get digitized and if anything was a harbinger of the possible ill effects of that or of going into that world too precipitously, it is this CrowdStrike situation.

As I discussed in another video, I think the CrowdStrike situation was a good example of why we should really be rethinking digital currencies just generally speaking here in Thailand because if one small software update can basically knock out half of the West, especially their overall travel infrastructure most notably, what kind of impact would that have in the event of a major shutdown of something related to the financial industry. It is my understanding down in Australia they recently had an issue associated with their digital currency or transactional system breaking down and because they had gotten rid of most of their Banks and their analog functions, people were kind of just left high and dry. At the end of the day, is that how we want things to work here in Thailand? I don't really want it to work like that. 

I am not against digitization per se, but why are we throwing away the analog version? We can maintain an analog option, an analog component of these digital systems and be perfectly fine. Quite frankly we should so that we have that component there as a backup in the event things sort of have a problem. I urge those who are watching this video, go check out that article in the Bangkok Post, Digital Red Flag, bangkokpost.com directly but when you get further into that, it's one of these classic things I see in this new era of technology. In fact there was a movie, I think it was called The Circle; it had like Emma Watson in it, Tom Hanks was in it. It was kind of this movie about a dystopian sort of Apple, that's why they called it The Circle; it looked like the Apple Headquarters, and not going after Apple in this video, but in the movie one of the things that always threw me off was, I noticed it because it was a real sea change from films I had seen as a kid or even in the past 20 years, 25 years now since the turn of the millennium, where at the end of the day when you would watch these sort of tech dystopian movies, the sort of denouement or the resolution of the film or the story would often be, well we need to sort of go back to our roots, get back to the fundamentals of things. In this film The Circle, the solution to the over surveillance within the Circle Community of this sort of Tech Company, was more surveillance. And what I think is hilarious in this situation if you read that article, it seems to me and I think it is more of an implied conclusion they are wanting you to draw, is the solution to problems with digitization is more digital components to act as “backups”, when in reality, the fundamental backup is just an analog option. That's it. Just maintain a real life, an old school option. Call it the "Paper Option", whatever. Now it may not be the easiest thing to deal with and convenience may not be number one, but I think Thailand really needs to look at maintaining; if anything Thailand is very good at maintaining her traditions and being careful about adopting, especially foreign notions and foreign protocols, foreign ways if you will, foreign methods if and when they don't comport with the Thai way of doing things.

This is one of those examples where we should be really looking at this and again not dismissing digitalization out of hand, but just maintaining an analog option for the long term because if we don't, what happens if they just shut everything down? I mean again and I guess people are just more okay with this post-COVID because they will say, "well how did we get through COVID?" Very badly is how we got through COVID. And it would be very bad if we saw our entire economic system, our entire financial system, our monetary transactional system just entirely knocked out on the whims possibly of some Tech magnate down the road or just from general incompetence, even negligence or just general chance; Murphy's Law - what can go wrong will. I mean at the end of the day, why not have a backup plan, and an analog component to all of this new digitization might be a good idea to maintain while at the same time, we are forging our way into the future.