Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Before the Brexit polls, my dad asked me the reasons for Leave. I googled and didn’t find any reasons which sounded very convincing. And yet Brexit happened. What was I missing? What articles had Google missed?! Today, you’d think that the usual after-the-event geniuses would be able to come up with reasons. So what are we hearing now? Why did they vote to Leave? 1)       There were those who always hated being part of the EU, joined by those who thought immigration was taking away jobs, and the racists who just hated immigrants. (Funnily enough, the immigrant issue wasn’t really that big a deal. At least not for Britain. I wonder if Angela Merkel rolling out the red carpet for Syrians created a perception problem that couldn’t be fought with facts). 2)      Then there were the many who felt that only the city of London benefitted while the rest of Britain got nothing. 3)      For some politicians, this was a...

Thanks to the Internet, the gatekeepers of content and what gets published are dead. Anyone can post a blog, tweet his view, or post a comment below an article and the whole world can see it. But that’s not always a good thing, says Alan Jacobs : “What if your ideas are crap? What good does it do — for you or the world — if you are clever and efficient in communicating thoughts that are carelessly arrived at, or ill-formed and incompletely worked through, or utterly unimaginative repetitions of what people in your would-be peer group have already said?” Reading a lot isn’t the solution. If you read stuff from a certain era only (say, present day), then CS Lewis warns that you are blinded to the “great mass of common assumptions” shared by most people in any age. Lewis’ solution? “ The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.” No, not because the classics are smarter: “Not, ...

During the Brexit campaign (should Britain stay or leave the EU?), a British MP was murdered. It was surprising that such a thing could happen even in a developed country. Alex Massie explains why it happened and the reasons are scary because they extend well beyond it was a mad man who did it. First, because the stakes are so high: “A referendum is one of those moments when it counts. There is no do-over, no consoling thought in defeat that, at least, there’s always next season. No, defeat is permanent and for keeps. That’s why a referendum is so much uglier than a general election.” Next, because the stakes are high, the campaigns become ugly. And that creates what Massie calls “multiplier effects”: “Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their pr...

Killing in the name of God: it’s been done for centuries and continues to happen today. But killing people because they are gay? That’s a phenomenon unique to the “Abrahamic God of the desert”, writes Richard Rodriguez . The most recent example of that was the massacre in a gay club in Florida, the worst mass murder in the US since 9/11. But what’s the connection of the “desert religions” to homophobia? Is it just coincidence? No, says Rodriguez: “In such a place, the call to belief was tribal, not individualistic. Sexuality was an expression of faith to increase the tribe. Allegiance to God and to one’s ancestors was fulfilled by giving birth.” Rodriguez also raises a very interesting point about context being very important in how we perceive the same (or similar) actions: “(Florida murderer) Mateen might have been offended by the sight of two men kissing in Orlando, but one wonders what he have would made of Arabian and Afghan societies, where men stroll arm in arm and e...

Back in school, I remember this text on the black American boxer named Cassius Clay: after winning the Olympic medal, he expected to be “accepted” by the white majority. Of course, nothing of the sort happened, and Clay was disillusioned. He converted to Islam, changed his name to Muhammad Ali and continued to express his views on many topics, regardless of how unpopular they might be. Like the treatment of blacks. And the Vietnam war. Christopher Gasper pointed out the contrast from modern athletes : “Ali was an athlete with a voice and a social conscience who wasn’t afraid to use his celebrity to make a statement or take a stand… There will never be another Ali because he was   sui generis, but also because most of today’s transcendent athletes are too busy protecting their bank statements to make a political statement.” So true. Then again, is Santosh Desai right when he asks: “Do people revered as heroes in any culture have a moral responsibility to speak up fo...

The lyrics of a song by the band, Talking Heads , says: “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” Since hell is the opposite of heaven, Nicholas Carr flips that line and takes it to its logical conclusion : “Hell is a place where something always happens. One would have to conclude, on that basis, that the great enterprise of our time is the creation of hell on earth. Every new smartphone should have, affixed to its screen, one of those transparent, peel-off stickers on which is written, “Abandon hope, ye who enter here.” Today, things have moved so far down that road that there’s even something called “phantom phone vibration syndrome”. Simply put, it means thinking your phone is vibrating or ringing when it’s not! Larry Rosen says; “We are now so primed with anxiety….that we misinterpret a simple signal from our neurons located below our pocket as an incoming message rather than as an itch that needs to be scratched.” Rosen even coined the term “iDisorders” to d...

Tom Nichols wrote this article on how expertise is increasingly become a reviled word. And this is a fairly recent phenomenon, he says: “Once upon a time — way back in the Dark Ages before the 2000s — people seemed to understand, in a general way, the difference between experts and laymen.” But today things are different: “Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy.” It’s that last part about democracy that gets on to Nichols: “Equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge.” But that’s not what more and more feel nowadays, which is why: “I fear we are witnessing the “death of expertise”: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden colla...

A while back, I wrote about how venture capitalists (VC) have to think illogically   to decide which companies to invest in. And Ben Evans just showed that the VC’s job is even harder . He starts with an obvious point: “It hasn't been possible to have read 'everything' for a couple of hundred years (since Erasmus, perhaps). It hasn't been possible to understand all of engineering or technology for perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty years. And today, it isn't really possible to understand all even of the internet or mobile - not all at once. There are simply too many things going on for any one person even to know the key basics in every relevant field, never mind become an expert or have some insight.” That inevitably makes it extremely hard, if not impossible, for anyone to predict where technology is headed. On the other hand, this very ignorance may be the cause of the next Big Disruption: “People are so ignorant that they don't know somet...

Some time back, the WWE wrestler Hulk Hogan sued Gawker Media for publishing a sex tape video. He won $140 million in damages. And that was that. Until it came out (later) that Hogan had been financed in his lawsuit by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal. Because, a decade earlier, the same Gawker had outed Thiel as being gay. It was Thiel’s revenge, cried some. Gawker is disgusting and sleazy and meddling in people’s private lives: they deserved it, said others. Is this the beginning of a trend where the rich can destroy media companies they don’t like, worried others. Are we on a slippery slope to muzzling the media, asked others. Ben Thompson quoted the famous Spiderman line (“With great power comes great responsibility”) and went on to point out the complexity of the issue : “No matter how badly Thiel was personally hurt by Gawker, or how morally wrong their actions were, he is the one with far greater power, and the appropriate approach is not to leverage...

It’s hard to imagine that just a few decades back, people bought electronic items for the long term. Long term as in years, sometimes even decades! Not just in India, but all over the world. And then manufacturing got outsourced; components shrunk in size, got faster and cheaper; and product release cycles speeded up. To add to all that, as Joshua Topolsky says : “The appetite for the new, especially in the US, was perpetually whetted by bombastic and hyper-sexualized marketing.” Of course, this is no longer just limited to the US. Global product release cycles are not just aligned with US spending holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas anymore; they are also aligned with Diwali and the Chinese New Year as well! Topolsky points out that the Age of the Upgrade started in the early 90’s in the field of, hold your breath, video game consoles! As in: “8-bit was the old version. 16-bit was the "upgrade."” He says the video game’s 16-bit “upgrade” was the moment ...