When you decide to read a book or watch a movie, you are making a conscious decision to engage in a very specific activity. Perhaps you even know exactly what kind of experience you are going for—murder mystery, space opera, slice of life. You choose to experience something and then you do what is necessary to gain that experience.

You don’t do that when scrolling a social media feed.

I often find myself puzzled these days when someone says they use social media for entertainment. I don’t think social media is entertaining. I think it is way closer to torture than it is to entertainment.

Jia Tolentino, in her essay The I in Internet, says, “…social media is mostly unsatisfying.” She was referring to the ways in which we are psychologically manipulated to keep scrolling our feeds.

The last time Hindi as national language debate was happening, it was 2020. I wrote a thread on Twitter (which I have since left) that went kind of viral then. I am reproducing it as a listicle below with some slight edits because you all are nice people who don't deserve the anger I had back then on account of being on a social network whose primary purpose seems to be to make people angry.

So this is for all you Hindi-as-national-language advocates. I am sure not all of you are deliberate deceivers. Some of you might simply be ignorant. So read on and maybe you'll get why people are opposed to the idea of Hindi officially being given national language status.

1. First, the universality myth. Hindi is not universally spoken all over India. That's a lie that some Hindi-speakers like to tell themselves because it feels nice to live under the illusion that you live in a linguistically united country. You don't. India is linguistically diverse and that's a good thing, not a problem to be solved by bulldozing everything apart from Hindi.

2. Second, the myth that Hindi is easier to pick up than English. It is not. Hindi has very little in common with languages in the South and North-East. If you think people unwilling to use it are being lazy, take some time and learn Tamil, Telugu, Axomiya and Odia. We will see how open-minded you are to Indian culture. According to a report in The Hindu, data shows that people in non-Hindi States are more willing to learn and speak new languages, while the same cannot be said for those in the Hindi belt. What is called Hindi imposition is often portrayed as a common sense measure meant only to make life easier for everyone. But in truth, it seems little more than an expression of laziness on some in the Hindi belt. They will have everyone speak their language but spend no effort on learning the languages that others speak.

3. Third, the myth of English as a foreign language. Facepalm! If English is foreign, then so is your computer, Twitter, the Internet, and maybe even your clothes. Abandoning or deprioritising things on the basis of where they came from is moronic. Consider utility, not emotion.

4. Fourth, if English is foreign, then so is Hindi... to those who don't speak Hindi. Why is this so difficult to understand? You can't employ the "foreign" logic selectively. If you can choose what is outsider and what is insider based on present-day national borders, others can do the same based on their state borders.

5. Fifth, NO, most of us don't hate Hindi. It's a wonderful language that we often use and consume entertainment in. Hindi might feel special to you if the language you speak at home is Hindi, but why would it feel that way to those whose native language is not Hindi? Think about it.

6. Sixth and last, this is a pointless pursuit. It changes nothing. It improves nothing. Even if implemented, it will do nothing. Connaught Place was renamed Rajiv Chowk ages ago. The only person who calls it Rajiv Chowk is the automated voice in Delhi Metro. Everyone else says CP.

A huge part of speculative and imaginative literature, especially its genre variants, is that strange things happen. But another part of it is that many of these strange things are actually plausible or at least credible.

It is not strange for the crew of a starship to encounter strange new worlds in outer space. The universe is big enough and we are ignorant enough to allow for that possibility. What is strange is that it happens on a weekly basis.

It is not strange for a detective to solve a mystery using the most unlikely of observations. People can be smart. The strange bit is that the same detective manages to do it in every case, week after week.

As someone who gets more than his share of Hindutva trolls, I learned some time ago the problem with calling Right Wing trolls names like monsters and maniacs.

The problem is that they like being referred to as monsters and maniacs.

They also like any epithets you might wish to bestow upon them that imply strength and/or ruthlessness. That is what they advertise themselves as to their base. Your despair and rage against their actions and intentions, when expressed in these terms, does little to dissuade them or indeed, to make them less palatable before the audience they are trying to cultivate.

I frequently write about generative AI from the perspective of a writer. Occasionally, a chirkut tech bro with the mental horizon as broad as a his dick will ask what gives me the right to talk about tech when I am not from a tech background. Here is a list of reasons for that unfortunate soul.

1. We all have a "tech background" now. Much as how every company is a tech company now. If nothing else, we can very authoritatively talk about our relationship with personal tech like smartphones, social media, algorithms, and now generative AI.

2. The writer was happy just writing. He didn’t have to talk about your precious AI. You dragged him into it when you plagiarised from him and his people by illegally scraping creative works from all over the internet. Because of this, you left him no choice. He will now talk about AI and you will learn to live with it.

3. I am a journalist by training who studied what was known as New Media in 2005 at one of Asia’s most well-respected journalism institutes. I have had a career in the very same New Media in one form or the other for the greater part of the last two decades. I have watched tech affect and be affected by culture and politics of the world over the same duration of time and written about it. I know this isn’t as fancy as being from the sixteen thousandth IIT from falana town and dhimkana village, but I am sure it counts for something, no?

4. I personally have been online for more than two decades now. In 2006, I was one of the first Twitter users of India and have seen platforms and tools and practices rise and fall like the tides of time. I’m pretty sure that qualifies me to at least have an opinion on what is going on right now, especially because, as pointed out before, it all directly impacts me and my ability to do my work.

As an engineer with little understanding of sociology or history, it is easy for you to float away in the waves of hype and propaganda about AI that is being shoved down all our throats by big tech. For those of us who have gained our perspectives by looking at larger trends, that proves harder. I wish I could be as gullible as you, I really do! But life and experience has made that harder. Ah the innocent optimism of youth unhindered by real life experience and fuelled by trending buzzwords!

1. Algorithmic Anxiety

I experience something I like to call algorithm anxiety when going through any feed because I know every action I take on there is being logged and will be used to change the landscape of my home page the next time it refreshes.

It doesn’t even have to be a click. The mere act of scrolling, stopping while scrolling, viewing something for more than a few seconds, clicking like or share — it is all being watched and logged by unseen machine eyes and filed away for later use.

A newsletter is a very personal thing. When I subscribe to yours, I am putting my trust in you that you will send me something of your making and that it will be a result of your own labour, your lived experience, and your expertise.

When you use AI to generate text and send that to me through your newsletter without announcing it as such, you are of course disappointing me, but you are also underselling yourself. I know there is a bunch of advice out there about “using AI to write” and make your life easy, but human connection is supposed to take effort. It’s not supposed to be automated.

The advice that works for content farms that are only interested in filling web pages with keyword-laden text is not advice that will do an actual writer any good. In a world where many are using ChatGPT to “write”, what differentiates you — the writer — from the rest, is the fact that you can actually write. You don't have to flush your uniqueness down the drain by jumping on this already creaky bandwagon.

For better or worse, we have all come to define our worth in terms of follower-counts. Having a lot of people waiting to hear what we have to say is seen as good and not having people interested is considered bad.

In an earlier age, being useful to a good number of people was a ticket to survival in our tribal reality. Those who were unable to assert their importance in the tribe got relegated to the sidelines and had access to fewer resources and often suffered because of it. Lions and tigers had strength, speed, claws and ferocity to help them survive in nature. Human beings had each other. Not having other human beings to stand with you could very well mean death.

However, because belonging was key to survival, people often sacrificed their individuality to do so. For example, an individual might lack belief in the religious claims or political beliefs of their tribe, but because expressing that skepticism would mean alienation, they might continue to lie and pretend so they don’t lose out on the support of their fellow tribesmen and die.

We often talk about technology as if it is just a tool and that there isn’t anything good or bad about it. The good or bad, we are fond of saying, comes from the use case. I myself used to believe this, but I have changed my mind in recent years. Technologies do come with an inherent ethic of their own and there is a limit to how much of a change our use of them can bring.

In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr writes about how the ethic of a technology exerts influence over the user. A gardening implement for example, turns the user of it into an extension of itself. A man holding a sword can’t do anything other than what a sword requires him to do. He can choose to not do it, but the sword is only an instrument to kill and cut and while the man is holding it, that is the only purpose he can serve. I wrote recently about how even something like a newspaper changes the person reading it. While reading it, you can’t do much else. It takes control of your ability to do things and keeps that control till you let go of it.

I feel the discourse on AI needs to be looked at in a similar light. A lot of people who defend its rampant use everywhere seem to be under the impression that it has no default nature and that everything depends on how we use it. I do think intention plays some role, but it is also clear to me that intentions can’t cross the barrier created by the inherent ethic of the AI tool.

Saw someone complaining on YouTube that every single planet the Starship Discovery goes to is ruled by a woman. Question is: Would the guy have raised a similar objection if every single planet had been ruled by a man?

Because here, in a nutshell, we have a very apt demonstration of every majoritarian victimhood complex. Here it is gender. In other places it may be religious or ideological. The majority stays silent when the system is overwhelmingly biased in its own favour.

But when the scales begin shifting even slightly in favour of a group or community that has historically been relatively invisible, it begins to see red and complains of discrimination. All it loses is absolute control but when it complains, what we hear is mortal fear and talk of oppression.

Hello friends.

After a long time, there is a writing-related video. I thought I would occasionally make a video about writing because, you know, I am writing. This channel is a channel by a writer, so there should at least be some writing-related content on it.

I put out a post in my posts tab—it used to be called a community tab, and things are confusing now. In the posts tab, you will find a post where I have asked people to send me their writing-related doubts, and I will do my best to answer them. I should warn you beforehand that a lot of what I'm about to say is how I do things. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to anything in life, and therefore you should take all of this with a pinch of salt. This is how I do things. This is what I think. This is not a universal, "do this and you will get X result" kind of thing.

So, having gotten that out of the way, let's look at the first question that I'm going to address. The topic of this video is a question from Johnny Walker, one, two, three, four. And it goes like this:

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast.

And today I want to talk about followers, especially I, as you may already have seen in the title to this episode, I want to talk about losing followers.

And when I say how to lose followers, it might seem like I'm trying to warn you about what not to do. Like I'm being ironical somehow. I'm being sarcastic. I'm telling you by saying how to lose followers. What I want you to think is that you shouldn't lose followers. But I'm actually being serious and sincere. I really am going to tell you how to lose followers.

Because believe it or not, sometimes... that is a good thing. We all create in social media and we are given to understand that having a lot of followers or having a huge platform is a good thing. And that's not entirely incorrect. But while a lot of us create content and talk and write, etc. online, thinking that we are giving people something, that we are bringing change in people's lives, what we remain unaware of is the fact that our followers also change us. And this happens more and more as time passes.

I sometimes get asked how I reconcile my atheism with my creative work. More specifically, I get asked why I write stories featuring gods when I don't believe that gods exist.

The simple answer of course is that I write fantasy, which by definition is fictional. If I can write stories featuring aliens, magical creatures, and giant robots, then why not gods? To my mind, there is no difference.

The slightly more complex answer is as follows.

Disclaimer: The following is a transcript of this video episode. It has been edited for grammar and clarity using an AI tool.

In India, we have this term called Godi Media, where a mainstream media outlet or a television channel or a newspaper, usually a Hindi newspaper (but English newspapers have also started doing this), has bent over backward to accommodate the needs of whoever is in power. This means that a politician, a minister, or a political party with a certain agenda asks them to treat certain topics as things that should not be spread, and certain topics as things that should be spread. They bend over backward to accommodate this. They do anything they can to make the minister, the political party, or anyone who follows that political ideology happy. They don’t care about anything other than the fact that their profit margins might be affected by those in power being unfriendly towards them, leading to the potential loss of government ads or some such issues.

Mark Zuckerberg, the guy who’s at the helm of Meta Platforms (the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and whatnot), has decided to go full-on Godi Media. In anticipation of Donald Trump’s return to power, he is making some bizarre changes to the social media platforms he owns and controls. I am not complaining that Facebook is going to end. I’m a huge fan of the current social networks ending and being replaced by something more valuable—something that is genuinely a social network. But even I did not anticipate that this manner of suicide would be committed by someone like Mark Zuckerberg.

Let me tell you what all he’s doing to Meta, and then you can tell me if you think this is better for the company or for social media. The first move is this: Meta now allows people to call LGBTQ+ people mentally ill. I don’t even know where to begin with this. You have a social network, and a huge number of people who use the social network are non-binary, non-heterosexual, or non-gender normative. They rely on social media as a place to express themselves because their family, friends, and the places where they live are not friendly toward their existence. They have managed to build communities online by making use of the social network. But now, the social network is saying, “We are going to subject them to the same kind of bullying that they experience in the real world.” Meta is not going to protect them.

It feels a little strange writing this essay. Partly because I am used to seeing the future as something that is yet to come, and partly because I am wrestling with a somewhat essential part of who I am as a writer of speculative fiction.

I am writing about writing about robots in a world where robots can write. Specifically, I am writing about how I write about robots and whether something needs to change in the way I do it.

I can press my finger against a certain interface element on my phone screen and move it to another place on the screen. I do this to make my digital space more comfortable and usable for myself. This customisation or personalisation is something I do to my digital devices for my convenience.

In earlier times too, people used to personalise their knowledge accessories. They used to underline text in their books and scribble in the margins. They used to mark channels as favourites on their TV for easy access. My phone is no different in this regard.

Though we can customise technology, the thing we don't often think about is that technology also customises us. Technologies as simple as the newspaper can exert influence over us when we plan our day according to them. Your teacup - its shape and size, its grip, how it feels in your hand - can exert influence over you, changing you in small ways. In pre-Internet days, the TV set, because of the central position it occupied in the house, changed the way a family lived.

I do not believe in the religious claim that a god or gods exist. That makes me an atheist. I am however, not unique in having this position. Plenty of people lack belief in the claim that god or gods exist. Many even make the positive claim that gods do not exist.

But it is not equally easy for all of these people to publicly identify as atheists.

Think about a popular influencer you know. They could be any kind of influencer - fashion, politics, literary, travel - anything. When you go to their social media profile, you will see their topic of choice reflected in every aspect of it, right?

Their bio will contain statements and links that serve as social proof of their topical expertise. Their pinned posts will be their most popular pieces of content. Their posts will all be about that one topic. In fact, many influencers refrain from posting about anything other than the topic that they have come to be associated with. It has to do with the nature of social networks, which reward topicality and punish deviations from what the algorithm has come to associate with you.

So powerful is the hold these patterns have over us that people literally start fresh accounts to talk about a hobby of theirs or to share personal pictures and videos. To do so on their 'main' - the account devoted to the topic they are known for - would amount to social media seppuku. A human being is complex and capable of change. The reason their social media profile cannot accurately represent them is because it calcifies into something unnaturally solid. The person behind the profile, for the sake of acceptability, has to continue to pretend that they too are only one thing, unchanging and immutable.

When you compete with someone, you become more like them. The longer you compete, the more you resemble each other. Eventually, you turn into clones of each other. It doesn't matter who starts competing, or even if the decision to compete is consciously taken. Market forces may force you into competition with someone or something, or consumer / viewer expectations might. The end result remains the same. Competing parties lose their identity to each other like victims lose their humanity to the vampire's bite by turning into vampires.

Facebook didn't have a feed architecture until it started competing with Twitter. When it got one, it became a little more like Twitter. Twitter, in turn, enabled the Like function in the form of the Heart button. Facebook then got the Share button on posts. Eventually, all that separated these two formerly distinct platforms was the fact that tweets could only be 140 characters long. But now that too is gone. Now, for all practical purposes, the two social media giants do the exact same thing and nothing distinguishes one from the other.

Wix and Squarespace were two website building tools that competed with each other, adding more and more cloned features. Now there is hardly anything that marks them as different.

Since we have been talking to a large extent about artificial intelligence and creativity and the future of human society, I think this is something that we all need to kind of think about a little bit. That is the future of creativity and the kinds of things that are advisable for creative people in the future and inadvisable.

Bear in mind that when I say the future, what I mean is not the distant future. I mean the medium-range future, the future of a few years from now, maybe three years from now. Beyond that, the only general conclusion I can come to about AI and creative work is that AI tools are probably going to become a part of the regular creative flow of any writer or artist, and no one is even going to talk about it a great deal. Technologies like RSS, blockchain, and NFT are destined to become part of the scaffolding of the internet. I feel like something similar will happen to AI, and it will become part of our everyday workflows as much as anything else, and we won't talk about it.

Before AI becomes an integral part of our workflows, it will be something outside it. It will be something that gets pointed at and described as an alien presence. In the coming few years, we are going to have to make some choices. I recently read an article about how AI is probably not going to start creating art and writing stories anytime soon, but very probably there is going to come a time when AI-created artwork and AI-created writing are going to be on the bookshelf next to the human-written book and the human-created piece of art.

I am personally of the opinion that people are always going to prefer human-created art. But then again, I am old-fashioned. I am from the year 2024. Who knows what the future will bring? If you look at the way AI tools work, it is very simple. The AI looks at all that has been done so far, all that is being done, and then generates responses on the basis of an understanding that it has created on the basis of that. Now, bear in mind that I am using the word "understanding" a little reservedly because I am not of the opinion that AI actually understands anything. It is a generative system. It is like your predictive text on your phone, except that it is slightly more complicated than that. Instead of predicting the next word, it is predicting the next sentence, the next paragraph, and the entire meaning of the thing that it is working on. But it is still a system that is working on things that exist.

Below is a transcript of a human-recorded podcast. The transcript has been formatted using AI tools while preserving the original content, including all speech patterns and informal language.

Hello, friends. This is probably, in fact, quite possibly the last episode of this podcast that I'm recording in 2024. You will be listening to this sometime in the middle of January because I, you know, schedule episodes in advance these days on account of the fact that I need to get rid of the tendency in me that has to do everything now. And I'm trying to bring more order to the way I make things and the way I work.

But, you know, new year resolutions are a dime a dozen. I think I did fairly well on the resolutions I made last year. I had promised myself that I will cook at least a full meal all by myself for my entire family and I did not do that. But I did promise myself that I will have some more discipline in my personal life as far as social media is concerned, as far as waking up and going to sleep is concerned and I did do that fairly well. I failed on occasion, but by and large, I did fairly well. And I also promised myself that I just spoke about social media. I promised myself that I will reduce my reliance on social media tools, etc. And I did that really well. I really quit Instagram and Twitter and Instagram. I'm now social media free and that I'm very happy about.

My father recently went to a school reunion. Everyone there, like him, was in their seventies. Some had back problems, some had their joints giving up, some had diabetes ruining their meals and some had had multiple heart attacks. Everyone was dying.

But everyone also had full heads of nice black hair. Everyone was dyeing.

Some time ago, a somewhat unoriginal young man tried to goad me into a "debate" with him on his tiny and rather vile YouTube channel, presumably in pursuit of social capital. One of the things he managed to come up with to anger me into playing his game was a joke about my "receding hairline". Turns out, he was rather fond of the phrase and tried to stick it on another long-haired YouTuber later that month. I guess he didn't want all the mental labour he had put into creating that joke (I'm sure it took a lot out of him) to waste. I can appreciate the hustle, feeble as it may be.

Someone wrote to me responding to my view that the capitalistic intent behind AI companies will send them down the same path of monopolisation as some previous information technologies, like social media.

Something about the response was off, so I pasted it into GPT Zero to find if it was AI-generated. Turns out, it probably was, partially.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the podcast.

In case you are not already kind of sort of off the school of thought that social media is bad for you because it is full of bad faith actors who are engaging in rage bait with the sole intention of generating engagement in the form of likes and shares and retweets, et cetera, so that they can maximize the revenue they make from that particular platform. Here is another problem that is going to raise its head. In fact, it has already raised its head. It's a problem that is going to get much worse in the months to come, even weeks to come. And that is bots.

This problem has already sort of started becoming apparent on BlueSky. But it is probably not even going to be something that anyone at Twitter or X flinches at, given the nature of the discourse there. You can now create bots that will interact with people completely on their own based on a certain prompt. I recently saw a video by Hank Green who was wondering what this might mean for us in the future about whether the solution to this problem is going to be whitelists or blacklists. And I have a different opinion on this, of course, I will tell you. And my opinion has to do with the fact that Twitter is not the problem. The problem is the format itself. To replace Twitter with another microblogging platform is replacing one disease with another. The very format where people post microscopic text updates and react to other microscopic text updates is not designed for a good, healthy discourse. In fact, it seems to be designed for the exact opposite.

These AI bots that I was talking about are basically, you know, automated accounts, which you can create and you can, uh, get a chat bot to generate responses to particular posts made by people. And you can have the chat bot generate responses that are of a certain variety. The one that Hank Green was talking about has to do with disagreement. So it's a bot that politely but firmly disagrees with whatever you have said. And Hank Green shows a few examples. Uh, there are also other things that it is possible to do with these bots, you know, so in discord it, the problem is the kind of problems you needed a human to create right now in the very near future, it will be possible to have tens of thousands of bought accounts that are creating that manner of problem without anyone actually having to engage or spend time on Twitter.

There was a short fantasy film some time ago on YouTube called Ahalya. It is only tangentially related to the point I am making here so I won't spoil it for you, but I am reminded of the feeling of being stuck inside my own body, unable to communicate that I am a human being.

I am writing this to you at 8:34 in the morning as certain worries tumble around in the back of my head and noise fills my soundscape and my body hungers for bread and butter. I am a human being expressing my humanity through the words that you are reading. I feel confident that when you read this, you will come to the conclusion that a human being like you has written what you are reading. At least, I used to.

Because text can now be machine-generated. It can be churned out in reasonably good quality and in large amounts. You can't know if I wrote what you are reading. I can no longer be confident that you will know that what you are reading was written by a human being like yourself -- that it was written by me.

If you have ever run into a reel or short where a gullible “podcaster” is engaged in an “interview” with an astrologer and wondered who these people are and why you have never heard of them despite their apparent authority and popularity, join the club.

Of course the simple answer is that this is a mix of familiar old marketing practices being put to use to poison our feeds and, by extension, our culture.

Much has been said about how the Liberal media of America inadvertently fed Trump’s popularity, but we don’t apply it to our political condition and how the same dynamics sustain demagoguery closer to home. Add to that the fact that there are numerous smaller demagogues in the making at any given point of time, building their tiny toxic empires on social media platforms.

Some amount of media literacy might put us on a path that leads out of this morass but it seems a distant dream in a country where people bathe in excrement in order to get rid of diseases.

It has been a year. Like any other year, it has had ups and downs. I am someone who kind of forgets the negatives and only remembers the positives. But I feel like the negatives exist to teach us something so they are worth remembering.

I am therefore, compensating for my selective memory shortcoming by making a note of what I learned from my mistakes this year so I maybe don’t return to these faults again.

This could get to be a habit. Who knows? Maybe even a good one.

If you want, you can watch this video on YouTube by clicking here.

Imagine there are two spoons. You go to decide which one to buy. One is made of aluminum. One is made of steel. One is quite beautiful and ornate. The other is just functional. One, it seems, will not last very long. The other will not only last, but it will also be nice to look at. But they both serve the same function. They're both spoons. They are both going to be used for the exact same thing, putting nutritious items—hopefully—into your mouth and feeding you or feeding the people you choose to make food for.

Two spoons are essentially the same thing. We find that we live in capitalism, inside markets, and the value of an object is decided on the basis of a few factors. In the case of these spoons, it is probably going to be durability because it is not even possible, I think, to improve the spoon as far as design is concerned. There is a book called This Is Not the End of the Book, where the authors—one of whom I think is Umberto Eco—talk about how there are some machines whose design it is impossible to improve. One of those things is the spoon. The other one, ironically, is the book.

I say ironically because the topic of this episode is what differentiates art and why it is not always healthy to describe art as a consumer product or a commodity whose value is only going to be decided by how much people choose to pay for it. While two spoons are essentially the same, two stories are not the same. They may serve a similar function as far as appearances are concerned. For example, for any two stories, the thing you’re going to do with them is read them and get some variety of edification. You’re going to find yourself happier, sadder, more excited, or wiser at the end of reading a story. Or at the very least, you’re going to be entertained, as in the story is going to help you pass the time. That is the function of a story.

But is that all a story is? Like the spoon, is the story eventually reducible to the thing that it does to us? I do not think so. I think that at the heart of art is uniqueness. The reason we go for art, the reason we consume art, the reason we appreciate art, is because we want something unique. We want a unique experience. We want a unique insight from the thing we have read. That is primarily why we go for art. We wish to find something relatable. We are different from other people, and we are looking to find something unique out there that would validate that feeling in us. Something that would tell us, "Yes, you are strange, you are different, but you are also equal to everyone else in the sense that everyone is different, and everyone is unique in their own way."

I was speaking to someone about the kind of issues we often have with our parents and chanced upon an expression of the problem that I had not used earlier.

"I think my father has trouble dealing with the fact that I am not him," I said.

My friend agreed. I feel a lot of people would agree. I think we all realise what the issue is. It has to do with the impulse behind reproduction and the drive behind parenthood.

We have this running theme that AI is going to help us fix the world. That AI is going to solve problems like climate change or bring the solution to cancer and things like that.

And we keep forgetting that ChatGPT doesn't actually do anything on its own.

ChatGPT or other similar chatbots or LLMs don't actually do anything. They only do what we ask them to do.

So when we say that AI is going to solve climate change, we seem to be thinking that, like this seems to be falling into a similar trap as before when we left things to God, where we said that...

Reference links

1. Is ChatGPT getting worse?

2. AI is hitting a wall just as the hype around it reaches the stratosphere

3. AI trained on AI churns out gibberish garbage

4. People liked AI generated art when they thought it was made by humans

5. No, today's AI isn't sentient. Here's how we know

6. on AI skepticism

I was looking to write something and felt stuck, so I asked ChatGPT to pretend to be an alien and ask me questions. Basically, I used it as a source of writing prompts. Questions it asked me are in italics. My answers are in regular type.

🖥️ What does it mean to be "alive"? How do you know you are not simply matter in motion, like the rocks and winds of your world?

Recently, an IIT boy was arrested for sending rape threats to Virat Kohli's little daughter anonymously on social media. Though the culprit has been arrested, many on the social web are wondering how an IIT student could have done this.

Here's why people - even right thinking people - are amazed that an IIT boy could have sent an anonymous rape threat to a little girl. In any society where the privileged maintain the illusion of superiority by claiming to be intelligent, over time, intelligence becomes associated with the appearance of the privileged.

India is no stranger to this. For ages, we have associated intelligence with the appearance of the Brahmin. Shaved heads or flowing white beards, and saffron clothes. It doesn't matter how stupid someone might be, all they have to do in order to be considered wise is take on the appearance of a "wise man". Look at all the pseudo-science spouting guru characters around you. We don't decide someone is wise after looking at their conduct or the content of their character. We do it by looking at their clothes.

There was once a centrist who wanted to be equidistant from both extremes. So he built his home at a spot that was 10 kilometers from the sea on the right and 10 kilometers from the edge of the forest on the left. He was thus satisfied that he was the same distance from both sides.

Time passed and the climate changed. Water levels rose, and the sea came closer. Deforestation caused the forest to recede away.

But the centrist kept telling everyone proudly that he was equidistant from both sides.

Time continued to pass. Eventually, there came a day when the forest had receded so far away that it wasn't even visible from the centrist's house. And the sea had come so close to the house that it was practically beachfront property.

The problem with tech bros looking to decide the fate of all humans is that they lack the multiple perspectives that are necessary to gain a holistic understanding of the human world. I am not claiming to have access to all those perspectives either, but then again, I am not looking to tell the tech bro how he should live his professional life.

There is a mediocre median that dominates the discourse surrounding technology in India. It is always _amazing_ and worth having. Not much thought is paid to whether the new toy is needed or necessary or even healthy. Our tech bros, having grown up in this morass, hardly pay any thought to these matters either. Their motto seems to be - can do, will do. The should of it doesn't feature anywhere in their mindscape.

Their Western counterparts are no different, but because they grew up in a society where the ethics of technology does feature in drawing room conversations sometimes, they at least pretend to worry. In India, the range of these worries does not extend beyond price, battery life, and packaging.

Our popular tech discourse is in serious need of an upgrade. People shouldn't have to be convinced that their privacy matters, that their humanity matters, that their brain and all they can do with it matters.

So, largely, there are going to be two kinds of people in your life—in anyone's life, really. These are going to be people who are good to you and people who are bad to you. People who you get along with and people who you don't get along with. People who care about you and people who don't care about you or actively dislike you.

The mistake a lot of us make is that, like, let's visually imagine them as two different folders: people who are good to you and people who are not good to you. People who are mean and nasty to you, people who are actively working towards your detriment, and people who care about you, people who want you to do better, people who want to help you, and people who do help you. Right? These are the two broad categories.

The mistake a lot of us make is that we want to live in a world where everyone is in this folder, where everyone is our friend and cares for us and wants to help us. We want these people—the ones who don't care about us—to be in the folder containing people who do want to help us. This is a mistake because it is never going to happen. You are never, ever going to live in a world where everyone likes you, cares for you, and wants to help you.

I call it a mistake because I find a lot of people trying to turn these people into these people. They want to spend time making sure that the people who dislike you become people who like you. I'm not saying it is impossible to do so. I'm just saying that the inordinate amount of time many of us spend doing that is mostly wasted time because you are never going to become absolutely successful at it. And even if you are a little bit successful at it, you will want to be more successful at it. And you're not going to be—it’s not going to be, I put in one effort and I got two result. Therefore, I will put five effort and get 10 result. There is an upper limit to it. Some people are never going to become part of this folder.

The Marvel series Loki introduces us to the idea of the sacred timeline. It is a singular view of the universe where things are allowed to happen in only one way. When someone diverges from this “one true way”, they are punished. This is a lot like some of us having this idea of “true history” — a singular view of the past that corresponds with our political views and how alternative ways of recalling the past are frowned upon or even punished. There are tribal histories, minority histories, Dalit histories and mythologies that are not remembered because they are the equivalent of divergent timelines. People who speak of these pasts are punished for doing so. So the MCU is perhaps not as much of a fantasy as it might seem because of the visual effects and the muscle mass that come with it.

And much like our real world and the leaders who seek to rule it, Kang offers an alternative. The climactic scene of Loki is almost a sort of “If not Kang, then who?” choice. The choice is simple — Should we let one individual’s control of the system continue or should we end it and allow free will to flourish. We saw something similar to this when Thanos was the big bad of Marvel. He also offered two choices — let chaos continue or bring “order” by killing half the people in the universe.

Order is a seductive idea. People like order. It allows things to be predictable and it offers no unpleasant surprises. Once we have gotten used to living an orderly life, any chaos seems like a threat. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying chaos is always a good thing. Chaos can be destructive. But when we remove the potential for unpleasant surprises, we also remove the potential for pleasant surprises. Surprises like a feeble young man becoming a righteous super soldier. Or an arms dealer becoming a superhero to protect innocent lives. We remove the possibility that the world might be saved from impending doom. We remove hope.

Hey everyone, so this is something new I'm trying. I'm just recording directly onto Substack, and I'm going to try to turn this into a newsletter.

The thing I wanted to talk about—this won't take much time, I promise—is that when AI tools came over the horizon, we were hearing a lot about how they're going to make people more productive. And there were studies to this effect. There is at least one study by McKinsey, which predicted a productivity growth of 0.1 to 0.6% by 2040 from AI use. But 2040 is far away, and until now, we haven't seen that. In fact, we may actually be seeing the opposite because a recent study done by Intel says that productivity is actually down.

They followed 6,000 employees in Germany, France, and the UK and found that AI PC owners were spending longer on digital chores than using traditional PCs. The reason behind this, of course, is that you cannot hold AI tools accountable. If you are someone who has AI tools, who has a workplace where AI tools are being used to achieve something, you can't fire an AI tool. In fact, you're paying money to use the AI tool; you're paying money to the company that made the AI tool. At the end of the day, the person you can hold responsible, the person you can hold accountable, is your employee. You can tell them that if this job does not get done, your job is on the line. You can't say that to an AI tool.

So, the work at the end of the day is still being done by someone who's using the AI tool. And now, while earlier they just had to do the job, now they have to train the AI to do the job, make the AI do the job, and check what the AI has done. And in some cases, probably many cases, fix the mistakes being made by the AI.

We are apes. We came from an ape-like ancestor roughly ten to fifteen lakh years ago. We have made our way on this planet by using a few qualities that evolution bestowed upon us. One of these qualities is imagination.

From human imaginations came structures that hold society together. These structures were not physical ones, but they did end up being the foundation for a lot of physical things in our lives — places of religious value, sacred artifacts, clothes that mark some members of society as being different from others (priests and monks), ideas like good & evil, morality, and even justice.

I have personally come to the conclusion that the idea of justice, more than anything else, is the reason behind the idea of an afterlife.

We keep wondering why aliens have not made contact with us. And we keep wondering why we have not been able to find intelligent life in the universe. But do we even know what we are looking for?

Imagine an anthill somewhere near the building you live in. In it, are ants who wonder if there is life outside the anthill. Their explorers venture out into the grass that extends in all directions and come back with nothing. Their astronomers (antronomers?) train their telescopes outwards and report that they can see no anthills. Largely, the ant community comes to the conclusion that they are alone in the universe.

Occasionally they see immense objects wandering about in the vicinity of their world. These are too large for them to make sense of and mostly stay clear of the anthill. The ants sometimes daringly climb up these objects to look for other ants but they find nothing and find themselves mysteriously brushed off by unseen forces. The view that they are all alone in the universe takes root among the ants.

I don't swear much. I have, in recent years, taken to using the word 'fuck' a fair bit, but that is mostly because the word lends itself to such an extraordinarily wide range of uses. It is a habit that will very likely surprise people who have not spoken to me in a few years.

As far as insulting goes, I prefer to be clever and tongue-in-cheek about it. So that rules out calling people names or putting labels on them that might imply they have sexual relations with family members (who I naturally have nothing against). I don't say bastard — it doesn't seem like there is anything inherently shameful about being a bastard. It is an aspect of one's being that would seem to be entirely out of one's hands.

The worst possible thing I might ever say to someone I have a catastrophic disagreement would be “fucking idiot”. It's mostly just “idiot” with a pinch of “fucking” thrown in for emphasis and flavour. I use this insult because I do think there is something contemptible about being ignorant and stupid, especially when it is wilful.

Some time ago, on an episode of Game of Thrones, Sam and Gilly were walking back to the wall from the far North. To pass the time, Sam the nerd starts telling Gilly all that he knows about the wall and the history of the night's watch. He knows dates, names, and events of key importance. This amazes Gilly. To her, the fact that Sam can know all these things by simply looking at small squiggly lines on paper, is nothing short of magic. As someone who writes to convey ideas and is rather acutely aware that every word he writes will outlive him by centuries, I often find myself struck by this very same sense of amazement. Writing is a powerful kind of magic that transcends the limits of a human lifespan.

When people first started writing, it was not a commonplace talent. Priests wrote, kings wrote (or had people write things for them and about them). The common folk only heard the stories. This is perhaps why, to this day, something becomes more worthy of trust if it is in writing. Think of the phrase “likh ke deta hoon”.

Isaac Asimov once speculated about the origin of the phrase “Cyclopean Wall”. A cyclopean structure is, according to the dictionary, ancient masonry made with massive irregular blocks. Asimov deduced that even though a civilisation (a Greek city state for example), might have had the technological know-how to build great walls with large blocks of stone, to a less advanced people, it might appear to be magic. In this case, it is possible that they thought these walls had been built by Cyclops — the mythical one-eyed giants of Greek myth and folklore. Since a non-scientific people could not wrap their heads around the idea of man being able to lift and use enormous rocks, they assigned magical qualities to the architectural style itself.

Wrote this originally in 2016, when I was still on Facebook.

A friend of mine mailed in to express her happiness that a recent photo she posted of herself got a gazillion likes. I think Facebook likes are somewhat like the page view counters of yore. They are fun and ego-boosting but entirely pointless in the long run.

One of Facebook’s goals is to be a reasonably accurate reflection of your real life social connections. This goal actually suffers because of the ease with which people can connect on Facebook. In real life, connecting with someone takes effort. You have to travel, you have to make small talk, at the very least you have to pick up your phone and dial a number. You know who is an important part of your life because they come through this filter – they make an effort to be in touch with you. On Facebook, because the amount of effort required to connect with someone is minimal, even people who don’t much care about you and the events in your life end up watching and reacting to your updates.

A large part of the discourse on the future of work leaves out huge chunks of the working class. Just as, a decade or so ago, the discourse on the connecting power of social media left out the capitalistic motivations of the corporations running these platforms. Every technology has an ethic of its own, and the ethic behind generative AI has so far proven to be somewhat akin to robbery on a global scale. Maybe things will change. Maybe they won’t. But questions need to be asked of this new system that seeks to govern how we see labour and how we define work.

In the age of artificial intelligence, we encounter creators and content makers who are deeply optimistic about its potential. Their enthusiasm is understandable; their livelihoods often depend on the increasing use and acceptance of AI. Many of these creators actively encourage others to embrace AI, presenting it as a tool that can revolutionize industries and transform workflows.

Recently, I watched a video where an AI advocate made a point that struck a chord with me. They said, "Customers don't care how the software is made." Their argument was straightforward: whether you write the code manually or use AI assistance, customers only care about the product's functionality. This mindset might work for software, but its implications for creative fields deserve deeper exploration.

Creativity is Personal

Unlike software, creative endeavors don’t operate solely on utility. Creative works depend on interpersonal relationships between the creator and the audience. For instance, if I write a story and share it with you, the relationship we form is based on my honesty about the work's origins. If I claim it’s entirely my creation but secretly relied on AI, you might feel deceived. Transparency here becomes critical.

A common defence of Capitalism is that at the end of the day, money is all that matters and that all the high-faluting talk about social justice, equality, and rights is secondary before the basic needs that everyone needs to consider - food, money, shelter.

This argument is then used to justify the claim that it is only money that has any kind of redemptive value as far as the human condition is concerned. It is described as the most basic of needs, and therefore by extension, the only thing that matters.

So you find people looking at everything through the lens of money. They say that Reservation for the marginalised will not solve the problem of discrimination, money will. They say that a truly independent woman who is financially independent. They say that the entrepreneur is more virtuous than the social worker because it is he who is solving his employees' money problems.

I discovered a little video clip showing a futuristic police robot of sorts. There was politics written all over it. Here, see for yourself.

A lot has been said about how technology can solve social problems and how focus on science and "problem-solving" is the way to an equal society. And the thing that all that idle talk misses is that before we can solve a problem, we must first understand it.

A riot control unit such as this will surely "control" riots. But what happens in situations where the police itself is helping the rioters? What happens when the police is actively participating in riots? What happens when a certain kind of rioter is dressed like the police and is in fact running the anti-riot machine - both physically and metaphorically?

I think we have made too much out of ‘authenticity’. In fact, we may have made more out of it than we should have. We are told to be authentic on social media, but ask yourself, do you really want to see people’s authentic selves? I know I don’t. I want to see good people’s authentic self. I don’t want to see the authentic selves of fascists and casteists and homophobes and transphobes. They can stay in the closet till they fucking die.

We harped on authenticity too much without really wondering if it was a good thing. We created an online culture that rewarded all that was ‘raw’. As a result, we now have raw bigotry and raw discrimination smeared all over our faces. Big Boss! Big Boss! Big Boss!

If it is all the same with you, I would very much like to return to the age where garbage human beings used to pretend to be civilised. An age before ceaseless chants of ‘be yourself’ and ‘show them who you truly are’ drew them out of their slimy burrows and unleashed them upon the rest of us. Fuck this shit forty-four times on Friday!

I am not saying authenticity isn’t a value worth pursuing. I am saying that it means nothing by itself. It has to be tempered with an awareness of what we are getting the most authentic version of. Because guess what? Gobar that is authentically gobar is still gobar.

I grew up reading Phantom. But a reboot of this problematic property is going to have to effectively destroy the legacy of the franchise. Because at the end of the day, we are talking about a White man sitting on a throne in an African tribe and being worshipped by them as a god.

The only acceptable way to revive the Phantom is acknowledging its deeply racist roots and consciously abandoning them to head in a new direction altogether. The Phantom’s origin story is devoid of cultural context and drenched in “White Man’s Burden” thinking. It shows not only in the aforementioned forest setting, but also in the globetrotting, foreign government destabilising, saving his white wife from being abducted by men of colour tropes that form no small part of the Phantom universe.

Lee Falk, the creator of the Phantom, had actually created the Phantom as something entirely different — a millionaire who dresses up in tights at night and fights criminals. But Bob Kane stole that premise and created Batman and was able to sell more. Falk, in an attempt to differentiate his character from Batman, changed his back story to something resembling Tarzan, another White guy being praised as a hero by tribes in Africa. Falk, who had probably never been outside of America, called the Phantom’s tribe the Bandar tribe (after the Hindi word for monkey) and the place Bengala (after the Royal Bengal tiger). He clearly couldn’t tell the difference between Africa and the Indian subcontinent and I doubt he and his contemporaries would have cared even if they knew.

Don’t say “you can do it” to people you don’t know. Learn who they are and perhaps you will find that the obstacles they face are greater than anything you are even capable of imagining. The problem with the online “motivation” market is that it doesn’t understand privilege.

More than half the “hustle” bros are also subscribers of modern toxic positivity culture. The only adversity they struggle with is “I didn’t get that thing I wanted”. It’s empowerment of the selfish. And the sad part is their faux motivation reaches those whose troubles are a result of social inequality. Young ones who end up believing they are not hustling enough. That if they just think positive and “work harder”, social discrimination will disappear from society.

And when it fails, these kids end up thinking they are inadequate somehow. That it was THEY who failed. Hustle culture motivation crap promotes the idea that societal inequality is not a thing that exists. And that the obstacles in the path of the privileged are the same as the obstacles in the path of those without such privilege.