The room laughed. The attendee sat down. That reply probably wouldn’t survive a conference today, but this isn’t about that.

The need to sort things into categories isn’t new… it art or design? Fiction or non-fiction? Drama or comedy? Tourist or traveller? Pop or indie? And at some point, is a hot dog a sandwich, a tomato a fruit, or cereal a soup? It keeps coming up because it feels like there should be an answer. Someone needs to know which box to put you in.

Categories are useful, sometimes. Nobody wants to walk into a library and find books piled randomly on the floor. You need a shelf.. a section... a box. The problem is when the box becomes the point and when the box becomes more important than the thing inside it.

What the debate assumes is that naming a thing correctly changes what it is. That the “ugly as hell” lamp is somehow less of a lamp because a few people won’t call it design. It doesn’t matter to the lamp. But it matters enormously to the people standing around it.

The category is administrative. It’s useful for critics, curators, grant applications, and conference speakers with strong opinions about lamps. For the person making the thing, it’s mostly noise.

When we started A Design Film Festival more than a decade and a half ago, we applied for a grant from the government’s design department. They said it was a film event, not design. So we went to the film department, who said it was art, not film. Then to the art department, who said, not surprisingly, it was design, not art. The event ran anyway for a good ten years.

The question isn’t what category something belongs to, but whether it was made well. Not is it this or that. The category is not the thing, and the name is not the thing, and the box is not the thing.

Make the thing well. Everything else is someone else’s problem.

—

Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous

Call yourself a painter and now you have to paint. Call yourself an artist and everything you do is a statement.

There’s a difference between saying I paint and saying I am a painter. One is an act. The other is a role and roles come with audiences, and audiences come with expectations, and expectations come with an obligation to keep being the thing you said you were.

People reach for the noun thinking it elevates the work (it doesn’t). What it elevates is the anxiety. Everything you make has to justify itself against the title you picked and the brand you’ve knowingly or unknowingly built around your name. The work, which used to be just the work, is now evidence.

The noun is useful, I get it. Nobody asking “so, what do you do?” wants to hear “it depends”. They want a noun. Something they can file you under and move on.

But the noun is also a trap, and most people who use it early don’t see the trap until they’re already in it. Saying I’m a writer turns it into something you have to live up to. Saying I write lets you just do the thing.

In Japan, craftsmen practise for decades before they’re comfortable using the word artist. They understand what the word means and that the bar is high. You don’t claim it. You wait until the word fits. Some wait until their eighties or nineties. Some never use it at all.

“I do this” asks less of you than “I am this.”

—

Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous

It reminded me of something I wrote on Threads:

Graphic design is a language.
Writing is a language.
Art is a language.

Having a bias towards one limits how we express and absorb ideas. The more languages we know, the better we can understand others.

Anything that shapes how we think or make sense of the world can be treated as a language. Art is a language for expression. Math is a language for patterns. Code is a language for building systems. Architecture is a language for shaping space. Photography is a language for framing what we see. Even cooking is a language, combining ingredients and technique to share culture and taste.

Language is old. Really old. Around a hundred thousand years ago, as humans started living in bigger groups, we needed ways to hunt together, share knowledge, and form tribes. It began as simple sounds and gestures and slowly became structured, eventually evolving into what we use today. Groups shaped their own dialects and decided who belonged and who didn’t. Language became glue, creating trust, belonging, and identity. But it also built walls. Speak one way and you’re in. Speak another and you’re out. Language connects and divides at the same time.

Learning a new language changes how you see the world. You notice things you would have missed before. You start seeing through someone else’s eyes, finding new ways to work together and share ideas. It rewires how you think, and over time, the edges of what you know blur. New connections start to appear.

A ‘jack of all trades’ is usually seen as a flaw. Maybe there’s another way to look at it. More like a polymath, someone curious enough to go deep in a few areas while noticing how everything connects. The world doesn’t run in neat lanes anymore. Complex problems need cross-disciplinary thinking. Innovation often comes from combining old things in new ways. Insight appears at intersections, where design meets writing, art meets psychology, music meets architecture. Being fluent in a few complementary languages can be more useful than being perfect in one.

New ways of thinking often appear at the edges, between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the strange, the old and the new. That is where ideas collide, patterns reveal themselves, and unexpected things appear.

Abraham Maslow said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” Stick to one language and that’s all you see. New ideas come from connecting what already exists in ways no one else notices. The more languages you know, the more patterns you find, and the more of the board you can see.

Breaking the Barrier was held at Famos Hub in Surabaya, Indonesia on 3 - 7 Dec 2025.

*This was previously posted on our studio’s field notes on 19 Dec 2025.

—

Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous

That was what John Jay, Global President of Creative at Uniqlo, said to me when we first worked on a research project for the brand. It was also how he helped Nike become the brand it is today in his previous role at Wieden+Kennedy. By going to the basketball courts on the streets of New York, observing the players, and learning from them.

We’ve worked with Uniqlo on several city reports: in Singapore and Manila when they were exploring flagship stores, and in Vietnam when they were opening their first stores. We also worked on reports for their store launches in India, Montreal, and Vancouver. Then I built a team to work on a regional report where we interviewed travellers in Southeast Asia about their travel habits, to help Uniqlo develop new market opportunities.

This was through our long working relationship with Portland-based strategy consultancy, Studioriley. We’ve worked together for 14 years on reports for PayPal, Nikon, Sonos, Internet.org, and more.

In many ways, Chris Riley and Ken Smith from Studioriley have been like mentors. When I first met and worked with Chris on the rebranding of the Nikon Photo Contest, together with Koichiro Tanaka and Sumiko Sato, I remember our first call. Chris was travelling and called from the airport. We could only hear his voice, and I had never met him. He began walking us through his presentation: “We are drowning in a sea of information…”

That call had a bigger influence on my career than any other moment. The clarity and humanness in how he presented data and narrative was concise, deep, and impactful.

It was then I realised I wasn’t content with just creating beautiful work. I wanted to create work that made sense beyond aesthetics, helped people see the world more clearly and brought impact to both business and community.

Looking back, the way the dots connected makes sense. As I wrote in my last post, the common thread in all our work has been to organise and edit information, present it in a way that is useful and interesting to people, and uncover insights that help them understand the world. And as I think about what I might one day write a book about, looking back at the city reports offers some clues.

Fieldwork, Not Surveys

For the city reports we did for Singapore, Manila, and Vietnam, we worked with a small team made up of a photographer, sound recordist and fixer. We interviewed 10 - 15 individuals to learn from them about their city, their lives, to uncover insights about cultural tensions, their dreams and aspirations. The questions rarely mentioned the brand. It wasn’t a typical marketing survey asking what products they use or how much time they spend online.

As Chris once told me: “Information is data. Insights are actionable.” People don’t learn much from reading charts. Stories are a better way to tell strategic narratives.

Our questions went deeper. What do they love about their city? What’s great? What’s not so great? What makes it unique or different from other places? How do people feel about Japan and Japanese products? These interviews were turned into a city report that was shared with Uniqlo’s management and sent all the way up to the president, Tadashi Yanai.

The reports offered a deeper understanding of a place, something desk research or quantitative data alone could not provide. They were also shared with Uniqlo’s local partners and agencies, who used the insights and strategic direction to build marketing plans and launch campaigns. This gave them a more nuanced view of the people and the place, helping them create more relevant communications and products.

A Book Written like Field Notes?

The reports are a deep dive into a place and its people. They are not travel guides telling you where to go or what to eat. They walk you through a city, its history, how that history shapes culture, how it shows up in everyday life, and what we can learn through the stories people share with us.

If I were to write a book, it would follow the same skeleton as a city report. Part research project, part travelogue. It would bring together observations, conversations, reflections, and the stories and insights I’ve found. To learn from people and the places they live. To observe the ordinary and uncover what it means.

My goal would be to ask what we can learn from the world, and about the world, that might help us understand our place in it.

*This was previously posted on our studio’s field notes on 1 July 2025.

—

Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous

The bartender wiped the counter, placed a glass down, and carefully added two cubes of ice.

With total focus, he poured the soda slowly, making sure it flowed between the ice and the glass without touching either.

All this, for soda water.

The way you do something is the way you do everything.

Not many people know this moment inspired the idea for 水 Shui, an illustrated book on water that we designed and published. It’s the first in a series exploring the five elements of the material world: Water (水, shuǐ), Wood (木, mù), Fire (火, huǒ), Earth (土, tǔ), and Metal (金, jīn), looking at how they influence our art, design, food, and culture.

The book is written by Yvonne Xu, and illustrated by Shu (Germaine Chong). It was later shortlisted at the D&AD Awards, Museum of Avant Garde, and Award 360.

Here’s the foreword I wrote for the book:

Water is a verb. A noun.

We need it to survive.
It is everywhere and is as important as air.

It is formless and ageless. And practically colourless, tasteless, and odourless.

Water gives life but can also be a cause of death.

It can be gentle, and violent.

It can heal and rejuvenate,
and wear out and damage.

It is ubiquitous and indispensable.
It is both the simplest and most complex thing on earth.

A substance that makes all life on earth possible.

Yet, most people don’t think about water. It is something that we only think about when it is absent.

The most obvious things are often the hardest to see.

Water is exactly that.
Hidden in plain sight.

It is easy to know the things that we know, and difficult to know the things we don’t know that we don’t know.

In June 2022, an idea dawned on me: what if there was a space to imagine the hidden possibilities of water and to make the unknown known to more people?

A place to experience this visible but unseen substance through all our senses: touch, taste, smell, sound and sight.

As I thought more about the space, it became clear that we first needed to start with a deep dive into water as a medium and material. To examine the many ways that it has influenced art, design, food, and culture.

It is with this deceptively simple yet complex task, that I turned to my friend and long-time collaborator, Yvonne Xu, to be the author of this book.

For over a decade, through the work that we do at Anonymous and A Design Film Festival, Yvonne has been an irreplaceable collaborator as a writer, researcher, and thinker.

She has an uncanny ability to make the complex simple and to articulate ideas in a way that is easily understood and inspires action.

In many ways, Yvonne is like water.

Adaptable.
Calm.
Clear.
Quiet.
Reflective.
Transparent.
Understated.

I am grateful to her for saying yes to writing this book (and also for not ignoring my calls and emails even after years of being agonized by my odd ideas).

This isn’t just a book about water.

It is about seeing beyond the obvious and increasing our awareness of how little we know about the world.

My hope is that this book will offer you a new perspective of water. From something we don’t think much about to a material and medium with new hidden possibilities.

Available at Anonymous Objects store.

*This was previously posted on our studio’s field notes on 13 May 2025.

—
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous

Most people like them, unless they work in one. They mark the start of a trip, a brief escape from the little things that fill life: unread emails, neighbours you avoid, bills stuffed in a drawer. For a moment, those annoyances fall away. You’re in a half-world, a limbo full of strangers, each on the same mission: to leave, to go somewhere else, to believe, if only briefly, that life is simpler.

But the excitement never lasts. Airports have their own chaos. People moving with bags that are definitely too big, weaving through crowds while scanning screens for gates. Coffee that costs too much and tastes average. Seats designed to keep you awake. Charging points that pretend to work but don’t.

Then the mental checklist kicks in: Did I pack everything? Turn off the stove? Where’s my passport? Anxiety and anticipation packed into one crowded terminal. You watch the gates, the signs, and somewhere in the chaos you notice the space itself. Empty yet full, temporary yet unavoidable. Maybe that’s why airports are called liminal spaces. Neither origin nor destination, they are a pause on the journey, sitting between past and future, familiar and unfamiliar.

At first, it’s fine, even exciting. Then the screen flashes “Delayed” or “Cancelled.” Suddenly, you’re stuck. Time stretches. You’re trapped in a space not meant to hold you. All you can do is wait, move your bags, pace, and wonder if and when you’ll get out.

Being stuck in life feels the same. You can’t go back. The path forward isn’t clear. Life becomes its own liminal space.

It’s as if the pandemic never left us

In the past few years, I’ve noticed more people feeling stuck. Careers stall. Businesses struggle. Restaurants close at record numbers. What once felt clear and full of energy is replaced by uncertainty and helplessness. Everywhere you look, there’s something to worry about: wars, divisiveness, climate disasters, floods, earthquakes, inflation, AI replacing jobs. The old idea that if you work hard, play nice, and keep going, things will sort themselves out doesn’t seem to hold anymore.

We’re told to adapt and everything will be fine. I saw an ad the other day. “If you’re not using AI, you’ll lose to the people who are.” A little fear-mongering, but not uncommon. A few years ago, it was motion graphics and UI/UX. Before that, coding. Now, apparently, plumbing might be the only safe bet. Technology moves so fast it feels like you’re chasing your own shadow. Change has always been constant, but now it feels faster, sharper, more visible. A strategist I work with describes it as “This isn’t a change of era. It’s an era of change.”

There’s a movie I love, The Terminal. Tom Hanks plays Viktor Navorski, a man from the fictional nation of Krakozhia. While he’s mid-air, a coup happens back home. By the time he lands in America, his country and passport no longer exist. Until a new government forms, he’s stuck inside the airport, figuring out how to eat, sleep, and get help from anyone who’ll talk to him.

This is what being stuck feels like. You don’t know what is ahead, and you can’t go back. The path forward is opaque, like throwing darts in the dark. You’re unsure how or if you’ll ever get out.

What being stuck feels like

Many writers have explored it. Seth Godin calls it a cul de sac, the point where no matter how much you dig, you don’t move forward. David Brooks calls it the valley between two mountains, where what you built before no longer feels meaningful. Steven Pressfield calls it resistance, an invisible force that shows up whenever we try to do creative work: fear, procrastination, self-doubt, all aiming to keep you from doing the work that matters most.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff puts it well in Tiny Experiments: uncertainty becomes fuel for anxiety. We overthink every possibility and conjure worst-case scenarios. Her approach: treat uncertainty as a playground. Small, deliberate experiments let us explore, learn, and gradually transform ourselves.

Carl Jung called it a phase of individuation. We cannot return to who we were, but we do not yet know what we are becoming.

Everywhere you look, there’s a book or article promising to show you how to get unstuck. But as the saying goes: to solve old problems, read old books.

Enter the Tao Te Ching

One of the most translated books of all time, dating back around 2,500 years, the Tao Te Ching is tiny: 81 short chapters, most not even filling a page. Yet the less it says, the more it reveals. A lifetime of wisdom you can read in an afternoon, and that slowly unravels the more you return to it.

Who wrote it? That’s a mystery. Lao Tzu might have been real, or maybe not. Some say it’s a collection of voices over time. Like much Eastern philosophy, the goal was simple: help people liberate themselves and see the world as it is, not as they wish it to be.

In the book, Lao Tzu offers practical ways to free ourselves from feeling stuck. There’s a lot packed in there, so I’ll just touch on three key ideas.

1. Non-Duality

We spend most of our lives seeing everything in opposites. Good or bad. Right or wrong. Ahead or behind. Tao Te Ching says it’s not like that. One thing only makes sense because of the other. Happiness exists because there’s sadness. Light matters because there’s dark. Everything is connected, part of the same thing, not a fight between two sides.

Non-duality is seeing life as it is, without judging it. Chasing only the good and avoiding the bad just spins you in circles. Pause. Don’t measure. Don’t try to control. There’s only what’s in front of you, this moment that won’t come again. Look at it. Really look. Stop liking, stop disliking. That’s when life starts to make sense.

2. Non-Interference

We assume action is progress. If we’re not moving or producing, we worry we’re falling behind. It’s easy to tie our worth to output. We do things to be seen, to prove we exist, to leave marks even when nothing needs marking. Doing nothing feels wrong, almost irresponsible. Sitting just to sit feels like failure.

The Tao Te Ching talks about Wu Wei, often translated as effortless action or acting without attachment. It’s not about doing nothing, but about acting without forcing the world to bend to your will. Water meets a rock and it doesn’t smash through. It slides past, finds another path, keeps going. Lao Tzu writes, “Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.” Water adapts, yields, flows, and still shapes mountains. We can do the same. Act only where action is needed. Let go of forcing. See the world as it is, move with its nature, and things will find their way.

3. Non-attachment

We’re told to do more, climb higher, grab bigger rewards. More profit, more recognition, more clients, more projects. Desire feels like a contract to be unhappy until we get it. And when we finally do, it rarely satisfies for long. There’s always the next thing to chase. The more we achieve, the more we feel compelled to keep going. It’s exhausting and keeps us from noticing what’s already here.

The Tao Te Ching offers a different way: simplify, let go, stop clinging to outcomes, rewards, or expectations. Life doesn’t need to be complicated. The less we desire, the lighter we feel, and the more we notice what’s in front of us. Act for the sake of acting, not for the reward. Where you are going does not need to matter more than where you are. Let go of wanting so much. The present becomes enough, and in that enough, everything else falls into place.

Return to the beginning

The self we carry is mostly a story. Memories, past versions, ideas of who we should be. Lao Tzu says forget it. Let go of the past, stop worrying about the future. There is only what’s in front of you. Empty the cup. Look at the world like a child, noticing things for the first time, without bias or expectation.

He speaks of Pu, the uncarved block or plain wood. Simple, untouched, full of potential. That’s something to aim for. Let the details and bigger picture reveal themselves naturally.

Stop trying to control everything and life becomes a kind of carefree wandering, open to what comes. You move about life like water: soft, yielding, unstoppable. It flows past obstacles, takes the shape of whatever contains it, gives without asking for credit. Being like water means staying flexible, present, and unblocked by fear or control.

A life chasing purpose too tightly misses everything. A purposeless life, moving without hurry or goal, misses nothing.

I don’t know

In The Terminal, Viktor is asked, “Are you coming or going?” He answers, “I don’t know. Both.” That’s what Tao Te Ching is about. An acceptance of uncertainty, rather than forcing a binary choice. Saying “I don’t know” frees you from attachment to outcomes, removing the need to control.

Eventually, you realise you understand nothing. Seeing everything as it is, “I don’t know” becomes deep listening. You notice each moment, the empty spaces, the possibilities hiding in plain sight. Seeing where you are without forcing or judging turns each moment into a fresh start. A chance to act without clinging, to move with the flow, to let go of expectations. A moment to be a beginner again, curious, open, unburdened. And if you don’t know what to do next, maybe that is exactly the point.

*This was previously posted on our studio’s field notes on 9 Jan 2026.

—
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous

So why are malls so popular?

One reason is convenience. In a city marred by traffic jams, a public transport system that’s not fully integrated, and few sheltered pavements or cycling paths, malls make daily life easier. Many are built close to or connected to train stations and come with several floors of parking for those who drive. If you need to visit the bank, grab groceries, have a meal, or watch a movie, malls provide a one-stop destination without getting stuck in traffic moving between places. There’s also the year-round heat and humidity, which makes malls an easy refuge.

The challenge is they all look the same. Same layouts, same brands, same offerings. There’s little to distinguish one from another. Remove the names and logos, and most look as though they were designed and built by the same company. Some try to make things more interesting with indoor gardens, sky views, water fountains, or scattered art sculptures, but they still feel like four walls and a ceiling with a basement.

That curiosity led me to visit Korea, Japan, and China to understand what else was possible. In Chengdu, I found the closest example of what people had described in our interviews, the kind of place they imagined and would have loved.

Opened in April 2015 (ten years ago!), Taikoo Li Chengdu takes a different approach to what a mall can be. Instead of tearing down the surrounding heritage buildings, the developer designed the site around them and restored the Sichuan-style architecture. It also integrates the historic Daci Temple into the development, giving it a strong sense of place.

Built around an open-lane, low-rise design, the pedestrian-friendly lanes connect boutiques, restaurants, tea shops, a cinema, and supermarket, with a direct link to the metro, making it feel more like part of the city than a mall.

Unlike a typical mall, there are no single entry or exit points, nor escalators that make you follow a set path around each floor. Most malls are designed like supermarkets, where essentials like milk are placed at the very back so you’re made to walk past everything else first. Taikoo Li Chengdu flips that logic. Its open-lane layout and multiple access points let you enter from different streets and wander freely without feeling trapped. The low-rise blocks and outdoor walkways make it easy to slip in for one thing and actually leave with just that, without being held hostage by four walls and a ceiling.

Maybe that’s why Taikoo Li doesn’t seem like a mall at all. It feels like part of the city, a place to pass through, linger, or get lost without being told what to do. And if there’s one thing that hasn’t changed across generations, it’s that young people don’t like being told what to do.

*This was previously posted on our studio’s field notes on 12 Sep 2025.

—
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous

Vessels?

A vessel is a container. A glass, a bowl, a mug, a tupperware, and even that jar of peanut butter you stick your finger in when you thought no one was looking. Yes, that one. Vessels hold things before we need them. They come in all shapes and sizes.

But what I really mean by vessel is a container that gives things meaning. A museum turns an object into art. Move the same object to the street and suddenly we call it junk or vandalism. Same object. Different vessel. Completely different meaning. The art was never the point.

Bookstores are vessels. Without books, just a sad empty room with shelves and a lot of opinions. A cinema without films is just a room with expensive chairs. You get the idea.

Most of them, especially the ones we have been putting stuff into for the past few decades, have gotten a lot worse at their jobs.

Old Facebook was a clean simple bowl. Specific context, specific people, clear purpose. New Facebook is the same bowl after someone sat on it. Still technically a bowl. You open it and are genuinely unsure why.

Old Instagram was a narrow bowl with clean edges. Photos only. New Instagram is wider, flatter, more cluttered, and whatever else was added when someone got drunk on kombucha. The original bowl is technically still in there somewhere. Buried.

Old Twitter was a tall clean glass. Narrow, elegant, specific. A vessel that knew exactly what it was. New X has the walls bulging outward in every direction, twisted, barely recognisable. Same name. Completely different object. One previous owner.

Old YouTube was a round compact bowl. Videos you searched for on purpose, made by people who had no idea what they were doing yet. You came, you watched, you left. New YouTube got flattened and stretched sideways. The algorithm pushes whatever keeps you watching longest. Which, it turns out, is frequently things that are not true.

TikTok was never really a vessel. More like a funnel pointed at you. Started as teenagers dancing. Now it’s the internet inside the internet. Same funnel, just wider and significantly better aim. You don't choose what comes next. You just get waterboarded by content.

The vessels we’ve been putting stuff into for the past two decades grew in every direction except the right one. Wider base. More cluttered. Forgot what they were mostly for but kept the same name.

Or, said less elegantly, they just went to shit.

What Makes a Vessel Work

A well-designed vessel knows what it is for. More importantly, it knows what it is not for.

The vessels we used to love, now mostly gone or forgotten (like that old aunt you sent to a home and promised to visit but never did), they mostly existed for a single purpose. Nobody asked them to be more. They were fine being what they were.

Flickr for photos. Ffffound for discovery. Tumblr for micro blogs, quotes, memes, and whatever strange obsession you had and called a hobby. Each did one thing well. We had these. We loved these. Then the bigger things looked over, liked what they saw, and absorbed what made them special into everything else they were already doing. The originals became irrelevant.

A well-designed vessel doesn’t require you to perform or be publicly judged by strangers at all times. The like count, the follower number, the engagement rate, the weekly dashboard that arrives in your inbox to remind you how invisible you are (except to that old aunt still waiting in the home who watches and likes everything you post without fail, god bless her). These are design decisions, not facts of nature. Someone somewhere knew humans are wired to measure themselves against others and decided to make that addictive. One of the things actually tested hiding like counts. Engagement dropped. They brought them back. That tells you everything you need to know about whose interests the like count actually serves.

Think about your favourite mug. Now imagine it liked when you poured coffee in but withheld approval when you poured water. You would become very conscious about what you put into it. You would start performing for the mug. You would optimise for the mug. You would never again just make a cup of tea without first considering whether the mug would approve. You might even start making tea that tasted like coffee just to keep it happy. Eventually you would forget you ever liked tea in the first place.

That is what happened to the thing.

What Comes Next. Or Is Already Here.

Honestly, I have no idea.

Most likely not back to one thing that connects everyone and everything. That era is mostly over, except for some places where people still need to document every meal, every outfit, every moment of every holiday, and every minor life milestone to signal to their friends that they are someone. You know who you are.

What seems more likely is fragmentation. Smaller communities. Vessels built for specific people and interests rather than everyone and everything. Some of these vessels already exist. Most people have never heard of them. That is not a coincidence.

Private group chats. Small, closed, lidded. Just people who actually want to hear from you. The vessel that was working all along while everyone was busy complaining about the feed. The oldest new idea on this list.

Direct to audience. Substack, Ghost, or a simple mailing list. A direct line between one person making things and the people who chose to receive them. The subscription is the lid. You chose to be inside it. The only thing deciding who sees what is whether they wanted to.

Private collaborative spaces. A sealed vessel with a password for a lid. DFOS (Dark Forest Operating System) by Metalabel is built on a simple idea: the public internet has become so overrun that the only sensible move is to disappear into the trees in small groups with people you chose, without an audience. Which sounds less like a theory and more like a nice weekend.

Three categories. Three needs. Belonging. Making and sharing. Building together. Which is also, more or less, everything the broken vessels used to promise and stopped delivering.

Make Vessels, Not Content

Building a vessel is harder than filling one. Which is exactly why it is worth doing. AI can fill a vessel. It cannot build one. Yet.

It learns from what has already been made, already been said, already been asked. What it cannot do is start from nothing. From a hunch. From a feeling that something is wrong without knowing what yet. There is no dataset for that. The ability to think of new questions is still human territory. For now. Enjoy it while it lasts.

The work worth doing is not making more content for vessels that are already broken. It is building vessels that give the stuff we put in them meaning. Small ones. Focused ones. Ones that know exactly what they are not for.

( )

Many years ago, I was at the Muji flagship store in Ginza, Tokyo. On the top floor there was an exhibition built around a single incomplete sentence.

"Design is ( )."

That is it. The whole exhibition. A bracket, waiting to be filled by whoever stood in front of it. Simple idea. The kind of question that sounds too obvious to ask. And yet nobody had framed it quite that way before, which meant nobody had the answer either.

That is the whole point. The bracket is the vessel. Empty by design. The emptiness is not a problem to be solved. It is what makes it useful. Without the empty space, there is nothing to fill. Without the question, there is nothing to think about.

Rather than filling vessels, build them. It’s what turns a white wall into a gallery, a dark room into a cinema, and an empty room into somewhere worth being.

—
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous

P.S. If you’ve made it this far, I already have enormous respect for you. Please don’t feel obligated to subscribe, because it’ll be heartbreaking when you inevitably change your mind and unsubscribe. If you’d prefer this in shorter, less considered bursts with a significantly higher chance of me regretting posting things, I’m on Threads. And if after all of this you still want more, there’s a subscribe button somewhere on this page.

What the Poster Didn't Say

If you love books, actual paper ones, you may or may not know how the business works for small independent publishers. Here is the not so secret machinery. It is not pretty, but neither is most machinery.

Before a book even reaches a store, it has to be printed. Say it retails for $20. Printing might cost between $3 and $5 per copy at a run of 1,000, which is often the minimum before a printer is interested. And 1,000 copies is not a small number. Not if you are one of the many hopeful small publishers you see at book fairs.

Print fewer, say 300 or 500, and the unit cost jumps to $5 or even $10, depending on paper, binding, special finishes, and how ambitious you got at 2am when you were still convinced this was a good idea.

Printing alone takes around 30 percent of the retail price.

Now, back to our friendly neighbourhood store.

Bookstores take between 30 and 60 percent of retail, depending on the deal. On consignment, meaning the publisher places books in the store and only gets paid when they sell, the publisher gets maybe 60 to 70 percent of whatever comes in. If the store actually wants your book badly enough to buy it outright, which is rare for small publishers and they know it, they will pay roughly half the retail price. Sometimes even less.

Quick recap.
Stores take 30 to 60 percent.
Printing takes around 30 percent.

The publisher keeps about 10 percent. On a good day.

That is barely enough for a meal at McDonald's. Not even the “healthy” option.

But wait, there's more. As they used to say on TV.

Art Book Fairs

The night markets of the publishing world. Loud, sweaty, and suddenly everywhere.

Art book fairs started in Japan in 2009, then spread. In Asia alone there is now a circuit running from October to December, covering Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and more cities every year. Which either means the movement is genuinely growing or everyone is just looking for somewhere to put their boxes of unsold books.

For a few days in each city, small publishers rent a booth, dress it up with magazines, books, posters, and stickers (there are always stickers). For a weekend, at least, it feels like a community. Or as if they are in a band, on tour, except the tour is mostly book fairs and the rider is a foldable table.

The energy is good. I have been to enough of these to know that part is real.

Here is what is also real.

Booth fees run from $150 to $450. Some organisers take a cut of sales on top of that. Fair enough. Venues cost money, tables cost money, and someone with mostly good intentions spent most of the year securing the space, renting the furniture, and herding everyone into the same room at the same time. It is only fair that exhibitors cough up a few hundred dollars for the chance to meet other creators, potential readers, and people who will photograph their stickers but not buy anything. I have been there. I get it. It cannot be free.

But the books on those tables probably took most of the year to make too. And they will be visible to the public for exactly three days.

Three days out of 365. Then back into a storage room, or a studio corner, or wherever books wait when no one is looking at them. Not as an image on Instagram. As an actual object, sitting in the dark, hoping someone remembers it exists.

Here is the part nobody puts in the recap post.

Not everyone doing this has deep pockets or a large inheritance or an investment portfolio paying out dividends every month. The money to cover flights, accommodation, food, transport, booth fees, and the cost of shipping the books and the merch and the display materials to each city has to come from somewhere. And this is not one fair. It is a circuit. Multiple cities. Multiple tables. Multiple boxes that need to get there and, eventually, back.

A lot of money. A very small window. A lot of stickers that didn't sell.

Bookstores don't make it economically viable. Book fairs don't make it economically viable. And yet people keep making books, packing them into boxes, rolling suitcases through airports, setting up tables, and selling them one by one to strangers who spend four minutes deciding and then buy a tote bag instead.

So Now What

The obvious answer is buy direct from the author or publisher. Cut out the middlemen. Keep the money where it belongs. We say we want to support independent publishers, and buying direct is the best way to do it.

Good idea. Mostly unworkable.

I tried this recently. A small publisher in the US, a book I had been looking for and couldn't find anywhere locally, 300 pages, about half a kilo, $30. Reasonable. So I clicked add to cart, then the bright blue checkout button, typed in my name, email, mailing address, and waited.

The cart refreshed. Shipping to Singapore: $40.

That is the moment the brain switches modes. Not the part that loves books. The other part. The part that does math. And the math said: you are paying more to move the thing than the thing costs.

So, unless FedEx and DHL decide overnight to become nonprofits and offer free shipping to everyone, everywhere, out of the goodness of their hearts, which has roughly the same probability as a fast food chain switching to organic beef, it is not really a solution.

Bookstores stock what sells. Art book fairs exist for three days a year. Buying direct costs nearly double by the time the shipping calculator is done with you.

There is no clean answer here. The system works. Just not for the readers, the people who make them, or the books (who by the way are still in a box, in the dark, waiting).

New Library

There is a fourth option. Or at least there was.

A few years ago, we started working on something called New Library. A private library focused entirely on creative culture. Books, magazines, zines from independent publishers around the world, organised by country, covering art, design, fashion, food, architecture, photography. The kind of publications you see online but will probably never hold in your hands. The kind that never make it into bookstores because they don't move fast enough, and never make it to book fairs because you weren't in the right city on the right weekend. And even if you were, some of these books cost $50, $100, or more. When the average monthly salary of a young designer in Bangkok is around $500, owning one is not really a decision about taste. It is a decision about rent.

The idea was simple. Pay the price of a movie ticket. Get ninety minutes with some of the most interesting publications being made anywhere in the world. Not a co-working space. Not a cafe. Not a place to hang out. Just a library where reading is the whole point. A radical concept, apparently.

We would buy books from creators at full price. No consignment, no 40 to 60 percent cut, no waiting to see if it sells. They get paid. Visitors who find something they love get sent straight to buy directly from the publisher. The math, for once, works in the right direction.

Bangkok was where it was supposed to happen. A city full of people making things, most of whom have never been able to afford the books that might inspire them to make more. We presented the concept to a museum. They seemed genuinely interested. Then they ghosted us. Which, to be fair, is something of a national pastime.

A few months later, something that looked quite familiar opened its doors.

Maybe it was a coincidence. These things happen.

The books are still in boxes. In the dark. Patiently waiting. New Library is still an idea looking for a space. The museum that ghosted us is still open, presumably doing museum things.

Somewhere out there, a young designer is probably on Instagram, looking at a book they will never be able to afford, made by someone who keeps about 10 percent of what it sells for. That someone spent most of last year making it. They will spend this weekend at a book fair trying to sell it. They will sell a third of what they hoped and come home with more than they left with (mostly other people's stickers), because the very people who can least afford to buy books are the ones who most want to.

The book will go back in the box. The designer will keep scrolling.

The book exists. The reader exists. Nobody has figured out how to connect the two without taking most of the money.

—
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous

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