Eleven stories that take you on a rollercoaster ride of myriad emotions. As the blurb promises, the stories provoke and entertain.
The subjects range from mythology, fantasy and social media influencers to murder, sexuality and horror. That last one (The Itch), I thought, had the potential to spin off into a standalone book/series. There’s also a mix of narrative styles – first person, letters, a YouTube monologue. What this achieves for each story is a character, flavour, and mood that is uniquely its own. What also stands out is the complete lack of a pattern, including the pace of the narrative. Some proceed at a leisurely pace, while others pack a lot in within a few pages.
In just around 150 pages, there are worlds and corners that you will discover. I have at least five that I liked a lot. Smoke & Mirrors and The Herpetologist for the insight into the human condition and the empathy, Mariam’s Tears for the absolutely bizarre pop in the middle of the book, The Price of Apples for its innocence and sensitivity, and Kalika for the smart dose of philosophy. Pick it up to find your favourite. 🙂
(I know the author, but though I feel really happy for her, I can safely say there is very little bias in the review)
Towards the end of the book, the author cites a survey which found that “almost a third of Americans would rather give up sex for a year than part with their mobile phone for that long”. Sex has been hardwired in us by evolution, and it’s a testament to technology that it has managed to hack even that! But then again, there was a time when even the printing press was called the biggest source of distraction. So this isn’t a new story. But we do live in a world in which the attention economy has optimised its notifications and nudges to ensure that it is heard/seen/felt. All the time. Whether we need it or not. It has us hooked and sometimes we don’t even know how much!
This is the challenge that Nir Eyal writes about in Indistractable. He approaches it with a simple framework of internal and external triggers and distraction and traction (some nifty wordplay, that). The first thing to focus on, he says, is our own motivations – internal triggers. Not just the proximal reasons that are making us distracted, but the root cause. Our distractions are more often than not a way of escaping something we do not want to confront. He also believes we never run out of willpower and warns us against labelling ourselves as “easily distracted” or “addictive personality”. An opinion that I am not sure I agree with.
The rest of the book is a step by step guide on how to get to an “indistractable” state – from making time for traction (things we value) to taking control of external triggers by various means in personal and professional lives, and in social settings as well as when you’re by yourself. The suggestions are practical and quite doable once you decide that they need to be done. Ironically, the section that I found most interesting was how to inculcate this quality in children. Ironic, because I don’t have any. What made it interesting was the logical approach, one that seemed quite feasible.
The book keeps it simple, and is a good guide if you find yourself distracted more often than you’d like to be. I have been doing my own wrestling with “staying in the moment” for a while now and found most of the things mentioned a validation of what I try to practice.
Around the same time last year, I remember tweeting a quote attributed to Jamie Bartlett – “The end result will be ad targeting so effective that you may well question the notion of free will altogether“. Connecting digital advertising to free will seems absurd, but it wasn’t a facetious remark. It reflected the reality of our times. This is the reality that Shoshana Zuboff explores and confronts in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, frequently echoing the thought that keeps cropping up in my mind – how did we get here?
She begins with a deeply personal story about her home, and brings up an “aware home” project in 2000, which among other things, assumed that the rights to the knowledge would lie in the hands of the human living in it. She then juxtaposes it against the current privacy policy and usage agreements of Google’s Nest, which all but completely gives the ownership to the search giant. This is just one example.
Industrial capitalism thrived by exploiting nature, and surveillance capitalism is thriving by using human nature as a resource. That means that even though, due to rapid industrialisation and mass production, we got to a “second modernity” that provided millions access to experiences which were until then the preserve of a smaller elite, we are now being led back into a “neofeudalism”, a consolidation of elite wealth and power. How did this happen?
Google plays the primary antagonist in this narrative, and though Brin and Page were initially reluctant, the 2000 bust set Google on a path that used the “behavioural surplus” generated by users. At a basic level, it is probably difficult to imagine that when one carries out a search on Google, the machine is searching for patterns in the expressed intent, and making rapid incursions into one’s life. And yet, that’s exactly how it works. It then leads to prediction products, economies of action and future behaviour markets, fuelled by an ever expanding scope of information extraction. Those ridiculous permissions apps require make sense now? And how does a corporation create and grow a future behaviour market? Simple, behaviour modification, whether you realise it or not.
Over a period of time, Google has institutionalised its invasions into private human domains, helped in the beginning by the national security imperative following the 9/11 attacks. Chrome, GMail, Android, Photos, YouTube and so on have created a dependency that now borders on feeling left out of the societal narrative if one is not using these. The behind-the-scenes look at Pokémon Go is chilling – in terms of how users were giving away data of their own volition, how partners were brought on board to expand the scope of surveillance, and how human behaviour was controlled at global scale.
Facebook makes its presence felt in the latter half of the book, thanks to its exploitation of social connections. By creating a prototype of a hive mind through the weaponisation of peer group reinforcement, it increasingly shapes minds and behaviour, especially that of young adults. The author uses Goffman’s framing in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and shows how the “backstage”, where individuals are truly themselves, is now shrinking thanks to the omnipresence of social incursions. Where does this lead to? One example is when the state starts using this power – China’s social credit system now has a direct impact on an individual’s life, driving economies of action in the real world. More broadly, totalitarianism, driven by powerful corporations.
The consequences are that there is increasingly no refuge, no sanctuary, from the relentless efforts of corporations that are intent on controlling every facet of an individual’s existence. At a broader level, it threatens the fabric of society and democracy itself. Capitalism’s latest avatar has clearly gone rogue, refusing to abide by the reciprocal nature of every kind of interaction we have experienced thus far. Regulation isn’t really keeping up, except for some efforts by the EU. But there are those who refuse to give up – activists, and artists who use technology to keep out surveillance. However, this is a fight we have to contribute to, because what’s at stake is what makes us human – free will, or at least the notion of it. This is not an easy read, but it is a must-read.
The other primary activities – travel and eating out – took a hit in 2020, but reading prospered! Not just in terms of number of books, but the quality too. That’s why this year has a larger set, and that’s after some painful culling. And the numbers are enough to warrant a group photo, unlike last year!
Enlightening! While a part of the title reads “exposing data bias in a world designed for men”, I think it extends well beyond that. It provides perspectives that I had not even considered, even though in the last few years, I have tried to be more conscious of the challenges that women face at the workplace, in public spaces, their everyday lives, and how the world works differently for them in the many, many things that men take for granted. This, therefore, is a book that I think men and women should read, for different reasons.
For women, it will probably serve as an insightful articulation of many things that they have thought about, talked about, or attempted to change, and give them information about how women around the world have taken them up as challenges and sometimes succeeded in setting things right. I will stop at that, and not be presumptuous in assumptions.
For men. Where do I even start? I think we will see the world differently after reading this book. The challenge for us would be to be conscious of the inherent bias in our thinking, our behaviour, and the way we design objects and systems. As the blurb says, imagine a world where the phone you use is too large for your hand, where the safety of the vehicle you travel in has not really been designed with you in mind, and the medicine you have been prescribed is just wrong for you because you weren’t adequately represented in trials! In essence, “the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall.”
The author uses data and case studies from multiple domains to highlight how women haven’t been fairly represented, and in many cases to also show how correcting this could lead to a better result not just for women, but for humanity overall. Public transport, urinals (ever wondered why there’s always a queue for women while men seem to find things much easier), workplace practices, product design, medicine, disaster relief, the pain is everywhere. And they are at various levels of seriousness. Some made me say “oh, I didn’t think of it that way”, many made me grimace, and most are just appalling.
It has given me many perspectives, and a resolve to work harder at contributing to fix this. One really doesn’t have to be a genius to understand the impact better representation can make, at an individual and species level. With all that being said, in the end, I also have to admit, quite sheepishly, and to underline the point, that while many of my favourite authors are female, I might have completely missed this book if my wife hadn’t made it part of our list! See? 🙂
