MEET three people who do not exist, and whom you have known all your life. They are composites, but the Kuching they live in is real.
Bujang is 24 and plays bass in a band that rehearses above a hardware shop. He owns more paperbacks than shirts, every one second-hand, and the books he actually wants are on no shelf in town.
Rahman is 38 and guards a car park from ten at night until six in the morning. He left school early to earn, and he has spent twenty years being told, kindly or otherwise, that without paper he is nobody.
Cikgu Linda teaches secondary school. She marks until midnight, writes lesson plans on Sundays, and cannot remember the last book she read for pleasure.
In 2016, each of them was stuck behind something different: books they couldn’t reach, a qualification they didn’t have, hours they couldn’t find. Education meant fees. Software meant licences and a trained operator. A library meant a building with opening hours.
Today AI sits in the phone, the search bar and the spreadsheet. Science fiction keeps arriving. Total Recall’s talking robot taxi of 1990 has driverless descendants in some cities, and Back to the Future Part II promised video calls, which we got. The question is no longer whether the future has arrived. It is who has noticed. Here is what three free links do to the chances of these three.
Bujang and the library: Gutenberg.org
Punk was never against knowledge. It was against permission. Learn three chords, start a band, ask nobody. Gutenberg.org is that creed for readers. It is a volunteer-run library of almost 80,000 free ebooks, begun in 1971, mostly older works whose copyright has expired. No fee. No sign-up. It takes its name from Johannes Gutenberg, whose fifteenth-century press began the long road from the scribe’s desk to the screen.
The ancient world would have envied him. The great library of Alexandria, founded under the Ptolemies, is said to have copied the scrolls found in the cargo of ships that docked in its harbour, so hungry was it for every book on earth. Kings spent fortunes to gather what Bujang now carries in his back pocket.
For him, that means Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Thoreau on civil disobedience and Emma Goldman’s essays on anarchism, the exact voices a young punk goes looking for. He reads them on the bus, in the queue at the night market, between songs.
It will not make him famous. It will make him well read, which in a three-chord scene is an unfair advantage. He becomes the lyricist with something to say and the vocabulary to say it.
Rahman and the classroom: Alison.com
Rahman’s problem is not ability. It is a blank line on a form where the qualification should be.
Alison is a free learning platform with thousands of courses, from short certificate courses of a few hours to longer diplomas. Studying and sitting the assessments cost nothing. He starts before his shift with something practical: workplace safety, customer service or basic bookkeeping.
In ninth-century Baghdad, the House of Wisdom gathered scholars to translate and argue over the knowledge of Greece, Persia and India, and what mattered there was the work, not the family you were born into. Alison is a small echo of that idea, available on a night shift.
Now the honest part. The certificate itself is paid, and no free site replaces a degree. But a first line on a CV that was empty, proof that he finishes what he starts, and hours of study that cost him nothing but sleep: that moves the supervisor’s desk closer. It is not a promise. It is a better chance than a blank line.
Cikgu Linda and the spatula: Easy-Peasy.ai
Linda does not lack knowledge. She lacks hours.
Easy-Peasy is an all-in-one AI platform for writing, images, transcription and speech, with a free plan that has modest monthly limits. She asks it for a first draft of a worksheet, ten comprehension questions, a marking rubric, a polite note to parents. Then she edits every line, because an AI tool will sometimes state nonsense with a straight face.
Archimedes is credited with saying that, given a place to stand, he could move the earth with a lever. A tool is a lever. It does not replace the teacher; it multiplies her. It hands back a Sunday evening that she can spend on the student at the back of the class who needs a person, not a worksheet.
Three poverties, three free links
Look at what the three have in common. Bujang was poor in books. Rahman was poor in paper. Linda was poor in time. None of these is poverty of intelligence, and for the first time in history, a phone can address all three at no cost. Socrates claimed to know only that he knew nothing, then spent his life asking questions that anyone could ask. These three links hand that same habit to anyone with a signal and the nerve to start.
The Daoist sage Zhuangzi tells of Cook Ding, whose knife stayed sharp for nineteen years because he followed the natural seams instead of forcing the blade. Mastery, he teaches, is daily use, until the tool disappears into the hand. And the first word revealed in Islam was Iqra: read. A faith that begins with an instruction to learn would recognise all three of our characters. It would also ask why anyone still has an excuse.
This week’s practice
It does not matter whether you are a teacher, a cleaner, a police officer or a student. Choose the one of the three who is closest to you. Lao Tzu wrote that a journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet, and the first step here is small: seven days, twenty minutes a day. Nothing grand. Just the next step, taken daily.
- • The reader: Download one book from Gutenberg.org. Read ten pages a day.
- • The learner: Pick one short course on Alison.com in something you have always said you had no time for. Finish the first lesson.
- • The overwhelmed: Hand one chore to Easy-Peasy.ai, edit the result, and note how many minutes it gave back.
Ten years ago, the door was locked. Today it is open. Bujang, Rahman and Linda are standing in the doorway. So are you. The only thing left to decide is whether you step through.
Digital Zen appears every Saturday. Until next week, enjoy the weekend.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
