Bali's Breaking Point

Smoothies and selfies - is Bali being eaten alive by the algorithm?

In Canggu I was sitting at one of those cafes imported from Melbourne, writing in my journal, when a man from the next table approached me. He noticed I was writing in a paper journal. Would I be interested in hearing how AI could transform journaling? 

He had relocated from Canggu from LA and had been working on a program where you journal to an AI - and then it acts as a life coach, keeping you accountable and setting you goals. 

I was intrigued. I wanted to do something similar with a Stoicism project I’d been thinking about. But instead of telling AI your problems, my project connected you with people  - real people. I wanted to focus on solutions for men. Men helping other men with their problems.

This guy recoiled. There was no way he would share his problems with another dude. It was too personal - no, the good thing about an AI coach or a bot therapist was that you could tell them anything, and no one would know. We swapped handles and I contemplated the reach of his project. The death of paper journals, human life coaches - and maybe even the need for friendship and intimacy itself?

*

After Canggu I went up to the remote mountains to stay at an eco lodge with my friend Mel. She wanted to space out so hard up there that she forgot her own name. We set about emptying our minds. It wasn’t too hard. There was bad wifi at the lodge, none in the room and apart from visiting nearby farms -  not much to do. The only book in our joglo was the Accelerationist Reader - a dense collection of essays on the rather prescient philosophy, which calls for the ‘drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, and other processes of social change to destabilise existing systems and create radical social transformations.’

Up here in the mountains - away from the traffic jams down south - the book was a strange, discomforting companion. 

The days passed in a pleasant fugue state. We could have been anywhere - but we were here, staring out at a canopy of green, eating macrobiotic food, reading about the need to speed things up.  There were fewer tourists up here and not many digital nomads. We met an out of work yoga teacher in the sauna (“there is an over-supply of yoga teachers in Ubud,” she told us), where she and her friend sat in the heat and played the Tibetan bowls and I broke the meditative, sweaty trance to talk about the mushroom murder trial back home. 

*

I have been thinking about digital nomads and Bali. The feeling of ‘this is a cool, aspirational lifestyle’ has morphed (or milkshake ducked) to a trend that is not just bad for the inhabitants (loneliness, alienation etc) but terrible for communities and the local economies.

Infrastructure for digital nomads in say Canggu (the AI guy was a digital nomad) make living and working frictionless. There is the promise of a cheap massage at the end of a long day at your desk, and a decent Melbourne coffee at the start. But the strain on Bali’s resources - including water, is immense.

I see Bali as a second home - but of course I’m part of the problem. The problem is there are too many tourists, too many nomads. But the problem is also the economy is heavily reliant on tourists. In 2019, tourism accounted for 61% of Bali's GDP, and since the introduction of a visitor tax (around $55 AUD per person) , millions of dollars are pouring into the country’s coffers before tourists have even left the airport. 

Ask a Balinese person who works in the tourism industry about life during the pandemic and they look genuinely freaked out and tell you about having to go back to their village to work on a chicken farm, rice field or digging roads.  

Things are back to normal now - in fact better than normal. In 2024, Bali welcomed 6,333,360 foreign tourists, marking a significant increase of +20.10% compared to 2023 which stood at 5,273,258. 

But there is a growing sense of precarity every time I visit the southern part of Bali. Where is the tipping point? When will it occur? How much is too much?

*

Down from the mountains, back in Ubud - I see the signs of decline everywhere - but maybe only because I have been looking for them (and reading the Accelerationist Reader). 

On a sweet, small path with overhanging blossoms and views of the volcano - a woman in athleisure, wearing earbuds, roughly pushes me aside, as I’m reading the community noticeboard for upcoming ice bath workshops. 

At an expensive vegan cafe - a woman at a nearby table, maybe in her 40s sitting alone - contorts her face as being told to suck cement from a straw. Her face is pulled and pained. She’s taking a selfie. She puts the phone down and goes back to looking contemplative, even sad. She picks up the phone, checks the photos and does the whole thing again - different angles, getting her drink in the shot, getting more cleavage. 

I can’t look away. Sure, I’ve seen people taking selfies before but this seemed somehow emblematic of something bigger. It spoke to the gap between what we present as ourselves as being on-line (hot, on holidays, in a vegan cafe in Bali) and what is our actual reality (alone? bored? disconnected?). In Ubud that week, I sensed as a palpable force, the loneliness of the digital nomad - alone with a phone, earbuds in, eye contact avoided, a screen between you and them.

*

Perhaps when I started coming here 11 years ago - I was someone else’s dog barking, someone else’s tipping point. Maybe they saw me in the Savannah Moon cafe near the Palace - doing something vain or stupid or just not within keeping of the place - and decided it had all gone to shit. 

I shouldn’t judge. (Yet I do). I wonder if the accelerationists predicted growth would look like this.