Category: Society & Culture

  • A responsible meritocracy

    Every story needs a hero, the one who stands up against injustice and wins. In the story of inequality, meritocracy has long been a hero. To be fair, it did quite a job, dislodging inequalities that had become systemic. But then again, to twist Ra’s al Ghul’s words “..if you devote yourself to an ideal, you become something else entirely.”

    One entity that has been at the centre of the debate around meritocracy is Silicon Valley given its influence on the immediate environment and clones developing across the globe. A popular line of thought among those who have made it there is that they earned it all on their own and are not obliged to give anything back to society. (read) (more…)

  • Currencies of hope

    In The Narratives of our lives, I had written about how, thanks to the advances of civilisation, many institutional narratives like religion, nation, culture etc have assumed increasing levels of importance in our lives, and how these (and our personal) narratives are probably our way of ensuring a sense of belonging. ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines‘, criticism on the concept of singularity notwithstanding, has convinced me on the cold, sanitised nature of evolution, so these days, I try to see what evolution’s play is, in these narratives.

    Thanks to a wine-induced pop philosophy conversation, I got thinking about theism and atheism. The epiphany (for me) was that they are just two sides of the same coin, and the currency was hope. Simply put, the foundation of the theist’s hope is God, and that of the atheist’s is the ability to determine his own future. ‘Our beliefs create the world we live in’, but across belief systems, hope is a critical ingredient for man’s survival. I realised that as long as we are the dominant species, hope has to hang around, or vice versa. By virtue of providing a common imaginary friend to a sufficiently high mass, religion not only addresses our need to belong, it also gives us hope. What each of us hope for is a very subjective thing, but collectively, it makes religion a really dominant narrative in many lives. When I thought about it, I recognised an even bigger force – money. (more…)

  • Immaterialism

    I was in Kochi recently, and was quite happy to find Uber there! About four years ago, a similar experience led me to write about how malls create a kind of homogeneity across cities. This is probably an advanced version of that thought, because I felt as though these were baby steps towards living in the cloud. If the apps (services) I use become available across geographies, how long would it take before location became irrelevant?

    “Of course geography is relevant. I have a home in Bangalore, what do I do with that?” leads me to the real point of this post – ownership. TC had a fantastic (guest) post sometime back (by Tom Goodwin) titled “The Battle is for the Customer Interface“. Quoting from the first paragraph – Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. The post, of course, moves on to the business impact of this, but I felt that it is absolutely applicable in a personal context. (more…)

  • The Entrepreneur and the Professional

    A fantastic article in The Atlantic titled ‘The Case Against Credentialism‘ traces the social-cultural and academic  roots of America’s current business dynamics. The part that interested me most was what the author calls the tension between the two cultures – the entrepreneurial and the professional. While both are cultures of achievement, the basic tenet of the latter is that he who goes further in school will go further in life.

    It gave me an impetus to write about this in the Indian context. Nothing as exhaustive, but a little note based on my experiences thus far, with much generalisation. My skin in the game is that it affects me personally and professionally. (more…)

  • Remember that we’ll be forgotten

    To my pleasant surprise, an old school friend commented on my breadcrumbs and Black Swans post. I continue to be amazed by how much digital has allowed us to find and discuss shared interests. The post was around a couple of themes – whether the set of digital breadcrumbs we are leaving now (courtesy everyone being a publisher) will allow generations later to have a better sense of our history, and whether, therefore, our species will be more anti-fragile thanks to this data and the predictive analytics AI can build out of it.

    My friend shared an article that talked of Vint Cerf’s warning about us being a ‘forgotten generation’. (I had read the Guardian version earlier) Essentially, his fear is that the lack of guarantee in backward compatibility of software means that documents stored many not be accessible at all. Both led me to Digital Vellum and Project Olive, which aims to establish a robust ecosystem for long-term preservation of software, games, and other executable content. (more…)