Tag: government

  • Prosperity’s moral code

    A few months ago, TechCrunch had a post debating the role of capitalism in a world that includes AI, where jobs are disappearing at a rate faster than new jobs coming in.  Capitalism has always been played as a finite game, focused on profit for a set of people, largely irrespective of the costs to others or society at large. As I wrote in “A shift in the world order“, its only real foe in the recent past has been the nation state, and its executive arm – the government. A foe increasingly struggling to even defend its own relevance, I’d say. As the dominant system of the world, we will then automatically (whether rightfully, is debatable) begin questioning capitalism’s morality codes. More than what we are doing currently, because the impact will not just be higher, it will also start affecting more people.

    Earlier this year, I had written on how if it intends to survive, capitalism needs to expand its scope, and play an infinite game – whose purpose is to continue the flow of the game, and bring in new players. Something similar to what Douglas Rushkoff calls digital distributism (read) a model that aims for the circulation of money rather than the extraction of money. An evolution that capitalism needs to go through, or it runs the risk of imploding. This, of course, is not really in line with the way an earlier generation of corporations, or Silicon Valley operates.  As Maciej Cegłowski writes in “The Moral Economy of Tech“, treating the world as a software project gives us a rationale for being selfish. We pretend that by maximizing our convenience and productivity, we’re hastening the day when we finally make life better for all those other people. (more…)

  • The India concept

    Ok, so maybe its not a concept to be questioned, but what’s the point in having a blog if i cant discuss what i want. Considering the effect it had on a couple of friends, I am expecting much angst.

    To begin with, let me make it clear that the idea of India still finds much appeal in my emotional side. I like the vastness and uniqueness of it all, and the fact that we have a shared history. But unfortunately, it doesn’t find favor these days in my logical side. I feel that we have created an entity that has become way too  large to handle for anyone. The events in Mumbai and a federal agency having to enter the fray added to this belief. No, the resignation of two ministers at the state level doesn’t quite capture the responsibility that the state/city administration should’ve taken on.

    Even though I keep in mind the fact that I dont need a passport or a visa to go to Goa or Rohtang, everything from the fuss over the TN number plates in Bangalore, to the language barriers, from the fact that my Kerala voter’s id is of no use in Bangalore, to the ‘Madrasi’ caricature in Bollywood, gives me the feeling that we’re just a forced conglomerate of states. And then we elect a couple of houses of MPs, from these states, so that the Communists, who can barely form the government in 2 states, play spoilsport to a nuclear deal. We form a central government which helps the state governments say that just about nothing is their responsibility. Once upon a time, we’d everything from shared memories to Doordarshan to give us a semblance of common identity. Do we have that now? And that’s when i ask, whether the gains from the concept of India are really more than the losses.

    If each state had more responsibility than a Central government, a mandate of taking care of itself – security, finance, infrastructure and so on, wouldn’t we have more accountability to governance, an accountability which can then be better put to use at local levels. My friend said that this has nothing to do with scale, but I think that by just being such a vast entity, we are actually laying ourselves open to divisions. Like the SMS forward I saw ‘Politicians divide us, terrorists unite us’. And meanwhile, Mumbai perhaps has a few more weeks before it gets into the archives sections, with hardly any retaliation or concrete action to be shown for the trauma.

    I agree that a discussion here won’t change anything, but humour me, what do you think?

    until next time, state your view