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.