The Monday Media Diet with Patrick Kho

On subculture, the barbell media diet, and Kodwo Eshun

Patrick Kho (PK) is based in Hong Kong. He writes the excellent Substack The Chow.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a writer and strategist living and working in Hong Kong. On the internet, I’m the author of THE CHOW, a newsletter on “the business of subculture,” which is a snappy way of saying that my reporting analyzes subcultures, and what they can tell us about shifts in economics, business, and geopolitics.

I like making connections between odd subjects, thinking about how hip-hop might reflect U.S.-China relations and how DJs are creating the new Silk Road, or tracking the rising globalist punk movement and the crypto bros hijacking local rave scenes. But as of late, I’ve been interested in how Shenzhen nightclubs are nostalgic for ZIRP-era optimism.

“Subculture” has always been a very nebulous thing, especially as brands and social media have accelerated their attempts to commodify “underground,” “alternative,” or “independent” spaces. Part of the work my writing does is less a rejection of this phenomenon and more a confrontation: what happens when subculture comes into contact with economic, corporate, and business interests?

I’m also leading research at Adam Insights, a new advisory practice and a sister arm to Adam Studios (the creative studio where I currently work). We help brands and institutions of all sizes understand the largest, most populated, and most easily misunderstood region of the world: Asia.

Some interesting research is in the works, so stay tuned for that!

Describe your media diet.

Nassim Taleb uses the “barbell” to describe an approach to risk, but I think it’s a great way to use the internet. That is, I’m a huge advocate for the “barbell” media diet, where half of what I consume is lowbrow and the other half is highbrow. I spend time either reading books or scrolling through Instagram Reels or X, with hardly an in-between.

For books, I usually read two at a time: one in print and one on my Kindle. Right now I’m reading a thick hardcopy of Korean Messiah by Jonathan Cheng, which is a fascinating book on how Presbyterian missionaries were pivotal in the birth of North Korea, and on my Kindle, I am reading Blank Space by W. David Marx (sorry, I know, I’m very late to the party, but I needed to read it for an assignment).

When I’m not doing that, I really enjoy doomscrolling on X. It makes me wittier. I also use Instagram a lot, mostly because the feed aggregates a lot of the events I cover from local scenes in Hong Kong or other cities in Asia. And it also points me towards what books and magazines to buy. This week, I ordered Vice’s “The Not The Photo Issue” from a very well-designed Instagram carousel on a technocult; a week before, I pre-ordered Becoming Press’s forthcoming book, The Future is Not Lost, because of a very well-written caption.

Beyond this, I love newsletters like Sean Monahan’s 8ball, Katherine Dee’s default.blog, and anything written by Sam Kriss. I’m also a huge fan of Spike Art Magazine and Jack Self’s Real Review.

What’s the last great book you read?

Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis.

Ellis is genuinely a masterclass in party writing. I do a lot of nightlife ethnography in my newsletter, and my friend Edmond Lau seems to think my own reporting style is greatly influenced by Ellis’s prose.

Lunar Park is my favorite Ellis book because it’s got the same degenerate thrill that you’d find in works like Less Than Zero or The Shards, but the writing is dreamlike, and the narrator is much more earnest and easy to root for than in the author’s other works. Truly Ellis at his best.

What are you reading now?

Recently, I impulsively ordered a copy of No Way Back, a collection of magazine features from the late ‘70s to late ‘90s documenting early music subcultures. It’s a great archival project by the music journalist Andy Crysell, and the entire point is in service of “learning from, not longing for, the past.”

There’s a really great feature in the magazine titled “The Last Dance Underground” by the British-Ghanaian futurist Kodwo Eshun, where he covers the utopianism of early jungle music in London. I’m quite starved of positive visions of the future, so one of Eshun’s sentences really struck me:

Elsewhere in London, crowds escape from the hard times of ‘94 by going all the way back to the amniotic womb of ambient, but here, in an opposite which couldn’t be more extreme, the propulsive clatter of cyberdrums and the subdermal pulse of the bass triggers a furious frenzy of the feet, a jittery, skittery pandemonium, as if the entire crowd is willing itself into another future, fast-forwarding on and on until the tape of today runs out and suddenly, shockingly, it’s tomorrow, a new tomorrow.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

Read the most interesting articles first. Then look at the pretty images. Everything else is optional.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Gary Zhexi Zhang. He’s incredibly hard to pigeonhole into one field, and I think that makes his work so interesting. I’m always looking for new ways of seeing the world, and his Catastrophe Time changed the way I think about finance and risk management by approaching it through subjects like weather and divinity.

He’s an artist and theorist (he teaches at the Royal College of Art in London) but I don’t know if that accurately describes his work. He writes a lot. And a lot of his writing converges theories from quantitative finance, statistics, accelerationist philosophy (but not the evil Nick Land kind), China studies, esoteric religion... though I may be getting a lot of that wrong.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

Viber. It’s literally just a slower version of WhatsApp with a purple logo. But my family living in the Philippines lives on that app.

Plane or train?

Plane! The last time I took a train for actual, non-commute travel was in the United States, which was a long time ago.

What is one place everyone should visit?

Apo Island, the Philippines, especially if you dive. It has the bluest water you’ll ever see in your life.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

Months before the infamous Wasian meetup in New York City’s Central Park, I wrote about the rise of “Wasian eugenics” in my newsletter, which argued that, in the age of U.S.-China competition, the new form of prejudiced, “idealized” reproduction isn’t white, but rather Wasian. It led me toward fringe bioaccelerationist X accounts describing Wasian athletes like Eileen Gu and Alysa Liu in bizarre ways: as genetically optimized “human 2.0s” and “lab-grown Übermenschen.” I even caught a few people fabricating stories about the circumstances of both athletes’ births.

Since writing that essay, my X feed has been a mix of all sorts of fringe terms and concepts on race and futurism. Some examples: “PinkPanthress Great Britain,” “Lusotropicalism,” “Star Trek Liberalism,” and “Is Kazakhstan the Wasian ethnostate?” (PK)