Guest speaker at the World Indonesianist Forum (October 2018)

Here be Dragons

About two years ago I ran my own, self-imposed, social experiment… one I don’t encourage anyone to repeat: I joined several anti-oil-palm groups on Facebook. Not being much of an anti-anything myself this was my ‘here be dragons’ moment; my personal blank space on the map to explore. I meant to learn more about the global concerns over oil palm and to add some local context to these concerns. But the thunder of dragons I expected to find was but a mass of petty minds, whipped into a frenzy of prejudice through selective posts by a few super brands. It quickly became – quite literally – too depressing to continue.