iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The discussion ranged across semiconductors, cloud and compute infrastructure, Open RAN, export controls, and the possibilities and limits of technological autonomy. Many thanks to Le Hong Hiep and the Vietnam Studies Programme at ISEAS for the invitation and a terrific discussion.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I spoke about Vietnam’s efforts to build AI capacity amid increasingly concentrated and fragmented technological infrastructures, and why the familiar US–China binary can obscure the forms of strategic manoeuvring taking shape elsewhere.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

A thoughtful write-up from ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute of my recent talk, ‘Between Empires: Vietnam’s AI Ambitions and the Limits of the US–China Frame’. www.iseas.edu.sg/media/event-...

iseas.edu.sg

Webinar on “Between Empires: Vietnam’s AI Ambitions and the Limits of the US–China Frame”

Dr Dang Nguyen discussed Vietnam's AI ambitions.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The paper asks what becomes visible when we take these practices seriously as part of the platform economy itself: not marginal curiosities, but ordinary ways of finding income, managing uncertainty, and building automation from whatever tools are at hand.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Drawing on research on make-money-online communities, content arbitrage, dropshipping, and phone farming in Vietnam, I develop the concept of *the earning web* to describe the informal infrastructures through which people navigate platforms, automation, risk, and unstable forms of digital earning.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Building on my work on infrastructural nonalignment, I’ll argue that the US–China frame obscures more than it reveals about Vietnam’s AI ambitions: its calibrated dependencies, domestic experiments, and continuing attempt to preserve authorship within infrastructures it does not fully control.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Very pleased to be giving this webinar for the Vietnam Studies Programme at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. ‘Between Empires: Vietnam’s AI Ambitions and the Limits of the US–China Frame’ 16 September, online. www.iseas.edu.sg/mec-events/b...

iseas.edu.sg

Between Empires: Vietnam’s AI Ambitions and the Limits of the US–China Frame

VIETNAM STUDIES PROGRAMME About the Webinar Vietnam’s emergence as an AI actor is increasingly—and misleadingly—viewed through a US–China binary that reduces smaller states to mere sites of great-powe...

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Reposted by Dang Nguyen

David Gunkel @davidgunkel.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Back to my NIU office and waiting for me were two new translations. 1) The Vietnamese translation of "#AI for Communication" @routledgebooks.bsky.social. And 2) the Japanese translation of "Communicative #AI" @politybooks.bsky.social which was co-authored with @coeckelbergh.bsky.social.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

But anyway, the sheer quality of the television. Two people sitting in chairs, speaking in complete paragraphs, trusting the audience to follow a distinction for longer than seventeen seconds. We don't really see that anymore.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Once some people are defined as grasping reality while others remain governed by shadows, unequal political authority becomes extremely easy to justify.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Then: - political authority begins migrating toward the people supposedly capable of seeing beyond appearances. - the philosopher-king is not an incidental authoritarian flourish pasted onto Plato’s epistemology—it follows from the distribution of epistemic competence built into it

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

And that leads directly to the political danger. If: - goodness depends upon knowledge; - genuine knowledge concerns stable intelligible structures rather than appearances; - only a demanding philosophical education provides that knowledge;

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

The Forms answer a modelling problem: how can knowledge remain knowledge when everything encountered through experience is particular, mutable and imperfect?

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Socrates repeatedly refuses lists of courageous or just actions and asks what courage or justice itself is. Once that demand is taken seriously, Plato begins separating the stable object of knowledge from its variable worldly instances.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

The person is no longer a unitary knower but an internally differentiated arrangement whose elements can cooperate or contend. That produces a much richer model of agency, but it also introduces governance inside the subject: reason must educate, coordinate and rule the other parts.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

And then Plato’s development becomes equally revealing. Socrates’ intellectualism struggles to explain internal conflict: if I know the good, why do appetite, fear, anger or ambition pull me elsewhere? Plato’s tripartite soul—reason, spirit and appetite—is partly an answer to that difficulty.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Knowledge is not successful symbolic availability but a transformation of the agent.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Under the ordinary contemporary conception, it nevertheless “knows” the principle because it can represent and articulate it. Under the stronger Socratic conception, it plainly does not: nothing has been ethically reorganised by what the system says.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

That distinction is actually useful for thinking about AI. A language model can: - state the correct ethical principle; - explain why it is correct; - apply it persuasively to hypothetical cases; - and then participate in conduct entirely inconsistent with it.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

If you genuinely know what is good, that knowledge necessarily reorganises your conduct. Deliberate wrongdoing therefore becomes conceptually peculiar: what appears to be knowingly choosing evil must really involve some failure of knowledge.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

The most interesting proposition is the Socratic identification of knowledge with virtue. Socrates does not treat knowledge as information that someone possesses while remaining otherwise unchanged.

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Dang Nguyen @digitaldang.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Thanks, perfect book reference for this!

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