Transcript of the above video: 

There has been a lot of talk lately about the digitization of Thailand; we're going to digitize this, and digitize that. And yeah, I've been talking that I have got serious issues with it. We're seeing it in the banking sector where we have just got this Orwellian biometric regime, and now all the digitization that has rolled out has made everything harder. People were fine two years ago doing their banking, and now at the behest of the World Economic Forum under the rump Coalition of the last Government that we had here in Thailand, in came the old Organization for Economic Cooperation and so-called Development OECD and all their supranational undue foreign influence brought in a bunch of just banking nonsense that has just added nothing but obstacles and difficulties in doing banking here in Thailand which is going to not auger well for liquidity and velocity of money in this economy, and could therefore cause this economy to go into a level of stagnation if only based on that overreach in the banking sector. And at the end of the day it's really, really troubling but all of this, it's making everything worse.

A perfect example is this cartoon; we will put it on screen. And I like this because I used to like to go to the movies, and now I really hate it because you go there and there is this one surly employee standing where the ticket counter used to be, next to a bunch of digital screens and you just say, "hey, can I just give you my cash and you hand me a piece of paper?" Oh no, God no. They're all mad about that. And then you have to go through, and like they say on here, and this is true not only for the private sector, but the bureaucracy is becoming like this. We're seeing it across the board because we deal with Work Permits, Visas. For the Work Permit here in Thailand now, they brought in this like private sector intermediary and it has made everything worse. They have quotas on how many appointments they have at any given time that never existed in the public sector. Again, these public-private partnerships that come in, the entire ethos of the World Economic Forum is “public-private partnerships”. And by the way, Mussolini said "the Marriage of State and corporate power is Fascism", so what are we talking about? 

Now I understand there are public-private relationships here in Thailand. Thailand has a different political history; it has a different history entirely. That's not exactly what Thais are doing when they're doing that stuff; the stuff that has sort of has organically grown up here in Thailand. It's a different animal. But this stuff that is being brought in, again it's undue foreign influence, I don't think it's making anything better here. If anything, from what we are seeing - again in the public or the private sector - it's making everything worse. Again this cartoon - go ahead and put it up on screen - it's a woman that's standing at a ticket counter again, and this is for a train station, same could be for movie theater whatever, or the bureaucracy, one of the biggest things that galls me now - I remember sitting in American Citizen Services back when we could file cases at USCIS locally and pay the fee locally, and have to sit over there and wait around to pay the fees and you'd see people interact with the window, and I don't blame people for getting frustrated over this. 90% of the time, or 99% of the time, I tended to be sympathetic to the people that worked at ACS. Over the years I have met people that work in the Embassy, and I told them myself I wouldn't work in ACS for all the whisky in Ireland. it's like the DMV if it was actually run by the devil in a certain way. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the way ACS runs things, but you deal with a lot of hostile people because it's bureaucracy, and it's things that are important to them, so you are just in a kind of a high stress environment so don't get me wrong. But yeah, I remember seeing this with folks sitting there and this is the one galling thing that used to bug me when I would see folks on the other side of the counter say, "well you can go on our website to do that." The person is standing right there! What kind of answer is that? 

But getting to this cartoon, she at the train station, there's a sign that says "tickets" but that's been crossed out, now it says "info hub" and then there's a machine that says "out of order" and quoting: "Okay, one more time" - and this is an old woman in the photo - "Go home and log on to our website from your computer, create an account and purchase your ticket with your credit or debit card, download the ticket to a smartphone, then come back at the allocated time... Just what part of 'easier and more convenient' don't you get?" Sums it up. This digitization is a bad road to go down, and quite honestly common sense would - there are certain things we get digitalization is probably helping things, but there are certain things where it's just clearly not. And then meanwhile, where we see this sort of global push toward just overly Orwellian, just apparati that you have to deal with to just live your life. I have to say the juice is not worth the squeeze on this whole thing. I'm very hopeful Thailand - especially with this new sitting Parliament - will realise just the folly we're going down, and maybe; I'm not saying end it all, I'm not saying we can keep from the digital world, it's coming. Things are digitizing because computing power is moving faster etc., but where it is clearly antithetical to the underlying process, where it's, again like this cartoon, where at one time you could just walk up to a window, pay for something, and move along and now they say, "no, no, you have got to go home; you have got to do this, you got to have a special code to get into that, then you get the special code to bring back to us, but have you got to put it in your phone, and then do this, that and the other thing; who is that helping? What value is being added? 

Meanwhile, I truly believe that this is coming from an entropy which has set in in the West. It started in 2008 with money printing, and then ever since quantitative easing and on down the line, we have seen the productive capacity of the economies of the West atrophy because people are doing less and less, because there has been money printing to paper over serious issues in the economy that should have been dealt with, the creative destruction of capitalism, which is what should exist, wasn't allowed to occur. So more and more, you just have a bunch of people in for lack of a better term BS jobs, that are just make-work, and this digitization phenomenon is just adding more make-work. It's more obstacles. 

This is a moment in time when Thailand truly needs to reassess her position in the world on this issue and many others that we're seeing associated with digitization, but this new sort of Neo-Soviet kind of thinking, that ironically is emanating from the West, it has been kind of the default thinking paradigmatically of Thais, especially in certain policy making circles, that if the West is doing it, Thailand needs to go ahead and do that. If you go back into Colonialism and things in that era, it was a defense mechanism because Thailand could not be seen to be "backward" or anything, because then somebody would use that as a pretext to try to colonize them. So I understand where it comes from, but it's seriously time for Thailand to rethink this, because this is not going to a good place. And what kind of economy do we want? We want an economy where it's just a bunch of make work - and we are adding obstacles to productivity in order for what? For people that have a BS job that they don't actually do anything productive at? Again, that is where the West has gone, and I think it's time for Thailand to sort of set out on her own path, because failure to do so, I don't want this economy to look like what we're seeing from back in the West right now. And I'm not saying everything over there is terrible, but overall, it is not a recipe for value production, for value creation and for an innovative dynamic economy. I'm very hopeful cooler heads, wiser heads will take another look at all this digitization and maybe say, "hey there's some of this that's good, and there's some of this that we just don't need."