Policy commentary
Shorter pieces, written roughly once a month since December 2024. This is where I work out in public what I have not yet worked out in private. Some of these questions I have come back to more than once.
The questions underneath the work
Policy design
Who a rule reaches
Policy as it is received rather than as it is written. A scheme can be published, funded and available and still not arrive. These are about the distance between a rule and the person it was written for.
Participation
Who gets a say
Whose voice counts, and who was in the room when a decision was taken about them. Whether being heard is the same as being served.
Civil liberties
Where the line on dissent sits
What a society permits to be said and done, what that costs and who pays it. Two of these compare Singapore with the United States directly.
Institutions
What makes a commitment last
Incentives, funding and durability. Whether anything holds once the attention moves on, and what makes a government or a platform keep to something when keeping to it becomes inconvenient.
When Protest Goes Digital: Visibility Is Not the Same as Power
Nepal's prime minister resigned within 48 hours. Elsewhere, the same tools produced nothing. The difference was never reach. Visibility is not the same as power.
The Algorithm Decides Who Gets Heard
Meta pulled its fact-checkers in January 2025. A year on, the moderation layer was never the real issue. Swapping it does not change what it sits on.
Preserving Culture through Policy
The Speak Mandarin Campaign launched in 1979, years before Mandarin became economically useful. The motivation was shared references and cultural memory.
The Paradox of Censorship and Control
India met the farm union strikes with barbed wire, then with takedown orders. X noted its disagreement and complied anyway. Platforms cannot be counted on.
The Activist’s Double-Edged Sword: Social Media
Platforms optimise for engagement, not accuracy. A movement that chases what performs well online can win attention while losing the argument.
Double Whammy: Climate Change and Social Inequity
Pakistan contributes under 1% of global emissions. The 2022 floods displaced 33 million people. The Loss and Damage Fund opened with pledges of around $700 million, against an estimated annual need of $400 billion.
The same question, wherever policy lands
The region
A vantage, not a subject
Singapore, Australia, Nepal, India, Malaysia, Pakistan.
A CPF form at a constituency office. A voting age argued in Parliament. Nepal’s prime minister resigning in 48 hours. India’s farm unions. Malaysian media ownership.
Read separately, posts about separate countries. Read together, one person looking at the same problem from inside a region rather than reporting on it from outside.
Policy
Followed past the argument
From what a rule says, to whether it reaches anyone, to who pays when it does not.
From Chalkboards to Change asks what a demonstration policy could not anticipate. Two years later, When Protest Goes Digital returns to it by name and asks what actually moves an institution.
That is implementation rather than opinion, and it is only visible if the two are joined.
Institutions
What holds, and what does not
Incentives, funding and the gap between a promise and its delivery.
The Algorithm Decides Who Gets Heard revisits its own assumption and lands on incentives rather than rules. Talking to the Machine reopens an earlier post and finds the divide was never access.
Both end where the durability question begins: what makes anything hold once the attention moves on.