Once upon a time, I started a website. It was called Wisdom of the East. It was loosely inspired by a zine out of L.A. called The Crash Site.
There were no blogs back then. Back then, if we wanted to call our websites something else, we called them zines. So I launched my first zine in early 2000. It bounced between a couple of free hosting platforms, none of which are around anymore, before succumbing to entropy. It was swallowed up in the black hole which had not yet been eradicated by near-infinite server capacity. Nowadays everything online is permanent, including and especially, all the dumb shit that you do. For the older stuff, we have to do a little work to make it come alive again.
I was living in Shanghai at the time and pretty much most of the content on the zine was China-related. Back then there basically were no English language websites in China, except Beijing Scene, the web version of the sorta-famous pre-TBJ, pre-CW print mag, and Chinanow.com.cn. By some miracle of goodness or delusion, Scott Savitt, the lead editor of the mag who was kicked out of China for trying to run over a police officer, still pays the registration and hosting fees every year. Chinanow was not so lucky. There was something else called Renao.com, but that only lasted a little while. They once tried to suck in my site, but I refused on principle.
Over the next couple of months, I am going to resuscitate some writings from the Wisdom period. Why? Because nostalgia matters. That and I can’t think of anything better to write about.
So, to kick things off, I have excerpted below the sum total of the ShockTherapy weekly updates which I used to send out to a small but influential list of people. This would have been your proto-traffic-driving newsletter. But I only saw it as a way to make people read what I was writing. Because I was convinced it was the best stuff in China. It may not have been, but at least it was way better than what I write now. Onward!
