“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”
– Lao Tzu
The Data Stream Where Care Died
My neighbour stood in ankle-deep water at 10:30 pm on New Year’s Eve. We’d spent the evening watching our screens—the MyCuaca radar bleeding red over Kuching, the Taman Sejoli WhatsApp group exploding with warnings from upstream Matang. The data told us it was coming. He looked at me, exhausted.
“We knew,” he said. “We all knew.”
Here is a man who did everything right. He attended the May meeting at Petra Jaya Flood Committee meeting. He reported the clogged drain on Jalan Akalifa with photographic evidence. He mastered the portals and apps of modern, digitally-engaged citizenship.
And still, his blood pressure medication floated past us in the dark.
Everyone asked: “Why didn’t we prepare better?” But nobody asked the harder question: “Why did a small group provide six months’ warning and still spend New Year’s Eve underwater?”
There is a question beneath the question.
The Digital Zen Paradox
We have more flood data than the JKR engineers of the 1980s could have dreamed of: real-time telemetry, satellite imagery, predictive models, GPS-tagged complaints, and cloud-stored, fully searchable meeting minutes.
The paradox is this: the more precisely we can measure the problem, the less effectively we solve it.
We have digitised observation without digitising action. We have automated information without automating care. We have built elegant systems that tell us exactly when we are drowning—then leave us to tread water alone. This is the koan at the heart of modern governance: What good is knowing if knowing changes nothing?
When Accountability Had a Face
In the 1980s, the Ketua Kampung had no smartphone. He had a phone call from a resident, his own eyes on the monsoon clouds, and the authority to get a truck to a clogged drain within two days. The JKR officer lived two streets over. Shame was local; pride was communal. The covenant was unspoken but absolute: we see you, therefore you matter.
December 2025. Same neighbourhood. Same monsoon. The exact same drain, photographed and reported in May. We received an automated acknowledgement. Our concern was minuted: “Matter noted and forwarded.”
Then, the great digital silence.
On New Year’s Eve, as the red band settled on our phones like a bruise, the official channels were mute. No SMS from disaster management. No update on the promised pumps. At 2 AM, the water reached Haji Sharkawi’s serambi. He is 73. He helped build this neighbourhood.
The data was perfect. The response was silence.
The Morning After: The Arithmetic of Care
First day of the new year. Its 8:00 AM. The water receded, leaving the signature Kuching flood mud and stench. This is when we needed help most. Not data. Human beings with mops.
In the 1980s, the gotong-royong would have been underway by dawn. The Ketua Kampung organised; neighbours arrived with hot kopi-o and strong backs. Care was built into the social fabric.
January 1st, 2026. We hauled our ruined lives to the roadside, alone. Haji Sharkawi’s kitchen,destroyed as so with ours.
Nobody came.
By 10 AM, we saw it on Facebook: other, larger areas were getting visits. Leadership in yellow vests, official photographers capturing the aid. “We stand with our affected residents,” the statements said. Just not with us. Not with our cluster of twelve households.
This is not malice. It is mathematics. Visibility operates on an economy of scale. A crisis of 200 families is politically urgent. A crisis of twelve is statistically invisible. The system is optimising for impact per unit of political capital. We are a poor return on investment.
The logic is rational. The humanity is elsewhere.
What Now? The Return to Covenant
The water will recede. The minutes will remain filed, perfect. The drain will remain clogged. And we will know, with digital precision, the exact moment the next flood arrives.
So, we must choose a different path. Not as victims of a system, but as citizens reclaiming a covenant. This is where principle meets practice.
First, name the pattern, not the villain. At the next meeting, we must ask with Stoic clarity: “Are small, chronic cases systematically deprioritised? Is this the explicit covenant we agree to?” We focus our agency not on blame, but on dissecting the system’s failure of duty. This is the discipline of focusing on what we can control: the questions we demand be answered.
Second, build parallel care. Since the system’s “Dao” flows only towards large-scale visibility, we must work with the grain of this reality. We will map our own vulnerable households. We will reactivate the gotong-royong. This is wu wei—the Daoist principle of effortless action. We are not futilely fighting the river’s current; we are digging a new channel for community, flowing around the obstruction. This is not a protest. It is practical insurance, paid in sweat and presence.
Third, document for wisdom, not for archives. We will timestamp the silence. We will record the help that arrived elsewhere and the help that never came here. Not for dispute, but to make the invisible mathematics of our neglect undeniable to those who have chosen not to see.
The Awakening Question
We have been trained to be perfect clients of a system—to provide flawless data into a void and call it civic duty. We have outsourced our expectation of care to optimized processes that cannot feel it.
So, here is the question for our hearts, not just our next meeting:
When we silently accept that a neighbour’s suffering is below the threshold of official care—when we understand the mathematics of their invisibility and clean up our own mess alone—what have we agreed to un-learn about our own humanity?
The drain on Taman Sejoli is still clogged. The question is, what else has silted over in us while we were waiting for the system to acknowledge our data?
The grandfathers’ community was not naive. It was a radical, practical assertion: we see you, therefore you matter. Our task now is the deeper upgrade: to reclaim the authority of our own gaze, and to stare down the elegant, efficient logic that tells us some of us deserve to be seen, and others only to be documented.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
