Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Starting about a year back, the Chinese government has started shaking things up. Within China. Sharply and suddenly, writes Peter Hoskins: “Everything from insurance agents, private tutoring firms, real estate developers and even companies planning to sell shares in the US have come under intense scrutiny.” What’s going on? One can’t be sure, since China's leaders do not give interviews. So one can only guess the reasons.   A couple of problems have been looming for some time. China’s population is beginning to age, and they need more young people to keep the economy growing. Hence the decision to allow upto 3 children per family. Another issue is the lack of “common prosperity”. There is an ever-increasing number of super-rich folks, a huge middle class and yet… there’s still a big chunk of the population that is not well off at all. Some of the recent moves would certainly seem to be based on these troubles-on-the-horizon.   The tech industry bore the brunt of...

Maciej Cegłowski gave this talk on the dangers of the Internet : it was great when it started but the impossible-to-anticipate effects are becoming the problem. A big issue is that the Internet never forgets. He compares it to the concept of the “permanent record” in American schools, which were made to sound as follows: “The permanent record would follow you through life, and whenever you changed schools, or looked for a job or moved to a new house, people would see the shameful things you had done in fifth grade.” We feared the accidental deletes that could end up “undoing months of work with a single keystroke”. And so when storage costs dropped to the ground, “we learn to save everything, log everything, and keep it forever (because) you never know what will come in useful”. But on the Internet, the problem has become that “everything is recorded by default, and you may not know where or by whom”. The tech companies’ response to that: “Wake up, grandpa, this is the new ...

Politicians love to give soundbytes, catchy phrases that stick. They don’t care if it’s just talk, doesn’t mean anything and will never be fulfilled anyway. And then there’s Neil Gaiman, author of science fiction, fantasy and children’s literature who is such a good speaker that “he has millions of devoted fans who eat his every word like air”. He doesn’t do soundbytes, he enthralls you with entire paragraphs! Back in 2012, at a keynote address at the University of the Arts , Gaiman said: “The problems of failure are hard. The problems of success can be harder, because nobody warns you about them.” I was curious about the second line, the problems of success. In another interview , he elaborated based on his own experience: “This (success as an author) has huge problems, which are mostly about writing. I’m currently dealing with how to go back to being a writer. Rather than whatever it is that I am. A traveller, a signer, a promoter, a talker, a lecturer. I’m building new w...