Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Fredrik de Boer wrote this anguished piece in the aftermath of the insurrection in the US to overturn an election that Trump lost. While he condemns the levels to which Trump and his supporters will go, his article was more about “my despair over the response from the left”. He wasn’t talking of the American left’s reaction to the rioting in particular, but what the left seems to have become.   The left, he says, seems to be only interested in identifying injustices: “I sometimes wonder if people understand that there is more to politics than saying “this is wrong.” But they show no interest in proposing solutions: “Proposing meaningful solutions is much more fraught. Solutions are hard. Solutions are messy. Solutions are inherently unsatisfying.”   The left demonizes all forms of power so much that they then have no option but to “constantly make appeals to the heavens because they believe, very deeply, that if you identify injustice often enough some cosmic ...

On slavery, historian Katie Kelaidis points out: “Millennia of great moral teachers sought to come to terms with slavery and to mitigate its inhumanity, but no one—not Jesus, not Buddha, not Muhammad, not Socrates—considered the complete liberation of all slaves.” I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it reminded me that bringing about any change on aspects deeply ingrained into society’s fabric requires political will. Moral preaching alone will never suffice. When Daenerys tries to abolish slavery and faces the inevitable backlash in Game of Thrones , Ser Barriston Selmy’s statement strikes her with full force: “No ruler can make a people good.” And yet, to bring about change, a ruler needs support on the ground, as Daenerys reminds herself: “To rule Meereen I must win the Meereenese however much I may despise them.” The continuous hit-and-run attacks by those who were the beneficiaries of slavery means the price is being paid by Daenerys and innocents alike. ...

I love that song with the line, “Everybody wants to rule the world”. In Silicon Valley, the mantra is different, as annunciated in a Huffington Post ad that said: “Don’t just take your place at the top of the world. Change the world.” Changing the world: that’s Silicon Valley’s mantra. Ever since Steve Jobs famously asked the CEO of Pepsi whom he was trying to recruit: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Some of that confidence/ arrogance is justified. As Heather Havrilesky wrote : “Today the term "information superhighway" no longer feels like hyperbole.” At other times, though, that mantra does seem like hyperbole, as exemplified the time a character in the serial Silicon Valley said: “Because if we can make your audio and video files smaller, we can make your cancer smaller, and hunger smaller, and AIDS.” On the other hand, as Robert Pogue Harrison wrote , hasn’t Silicon Valle...

In a recent blog, Santosh Desai says that democracies seem to be increasingly supporting actions that have a common theme: “These are all focused on dismantling existing systems without having a clear idea of what the consequences are, and what needs to be put in their place. Each dismantling is in response to an angry impulse for sweeping change and each is a product of the democratic process.” He was basing this on Trump, Brexit and demonetization. He worries that this isn’t just a “short-term and cyclic phenomenon”: “A new grammar of democracy has begun rooted not on the lofty ideals of how humanity should aspire to be, but on what it might really be deep down.” But is Desai right? Haven’t people always feared change and its consequences? Remember why Plato was worried about the invention of writing? “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembr...

Take these 2 quotes about the purpose of a corporation. The first one is by Brad Bird, winner of two Oscars: “Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus. Speaking personally, I want my films to make money, but money is just fuel for the rocket. What I really want to do is to go somewhere. I don’t want to just collect more fuel.” The second one is by Jony Ive, Apple’s user interface God: “We are really pleased with our revenues but our goal isn't to make money. It sounds a little flippant, but it's the truth. Our goal and what makes us excited is to make great products. If we are successful people will like them and if we are operationally competent, ...

Monopolies are evil. Or at least that’s the common belief. The obvious fear with monopolies is that a company with monopoly status can raise prices and we’d have no alternatives but to cough up. Another less commonly known reason (until you hear it) is that a monopoly kills competition and thus kills innovation, something that is bad in the long run. And monopolies inevitably use their monopoly status in one segment to promote their products in another segment. Remember how Microsoft used its Windows OS monopoly status to force Internet Explorer down our throats a little over a decade back? As with everything else, monopolies get complicated in the age of the Internet. Google argues that while it is a monopoly in search, people can switch to competitors like Yahoo or Bing in a jiffy (if they want to). And if users can switch so easily, what is the danger of Google’s monopoly status, they ask? Then there’s the flipped version of monopoly: monopsony (“a dominant buyer with the...

If you knew what the future would be, could you change it? Sci-fi loves that question; philosophers argue about it since it impacts the determinism v/s free will debate. And then are people who analyze the question with data! Like Scott Adams, who framed the Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters : “Simply stated, my observation is that whenever humanity can see a slow-moving disaster coming, we find a way to avoid it.” Adams’ examples of disaster scenarios that got averted because we anticipated them and had time enough to do something about it include the Malthusian doomsday (population would grow exponentially while food production would only grow linearly) and the Y2K problem. I think there is something to Adams observation. Except that he should an additional condition: People should have the freedom to do something about it. To see why that additional condition is needed, think of George Orwell’s prophetic books, Animal Farm and 1984 . Guess what? Communism played...