Mind Tavern Edition 12
Welcome to the 12th edition of Mind Tavern. Thank you for subscribing to this free newsletter, I don't intend to capture any data, but do consider sharing it on your social networks if you liked it.
The arbitrary construct of countries
This piece reminds us that countries are just fictional constructs and that the way we talk about the people and organisations inhabiting and controlling them is important. Most of the conflicts and wars are orchestrated by a group of individuals at a particular point in time, and the writer here makes a case that it is unfair to ask for reparations for those acts decades or centuries later. Read here.
It is extremely common to confuse a country with its government and also with a third separate kind of thing, the people who live there. This leads to statements that are strictly meaningless at best and deeply misleading at worst because they are category errors on the order of 'Green ideas sleep furiously'.
“Russia has invaded Ukraine.’ Countries cannot invade each other. Invasion is an action in pursuit of a goal, and places on a map lack the capacity for either. What is actually going on is that ‘the organisation that rules Russia is challenging the sovereignty of the organisation that rules Ukraine’. This is not ‘just semantics’. The two statements have quite different connotations. If we can’t tell them apart we will end up foolishly blaming things that happen to come from Russia (like university students) or are merely associated with Russia (like vodka brands) for the terrible things now happening in Ukraine. This will fail to do anything about the real cause of the problem: the organisation controlled by Putin.”
The eventual degradation of everything to attention Economy
This week I was reading a lot about attention discourse and how it is increasingly becoming a zero-sum game by rewiring our brains around the internet. We are drowning in information about everything. Nobody is putting anything online without the hope of obtaining something in return, making the economy of attention the natural state of cyberspace. Read here.
“Trend brain encourages us to simplify everything online into something either buyable, understandable, or moral – and therefore worthy of consumption. ... Anything that’s vaguely popular online must be defined or decoded – and ultimately, reduced to a bundle of marketable vibes with a kitschy label. ... The distinction doesn’t seem to matter, since TikTok – and the consumer market – demands novelty. It creates ripe conditions for a garbage-filled hellscape where everything and anything has the potential to be a trend.”
This longread also led me to a nice profile of Michael Goldhaber by Charlie Warzel, wherein he calls the physicist Cassandra of the Internet Age, who in the 1980s had an epiphany about the nature of attention in an age of information glut (and do note that this epiphany predates the rise of the commercial internet). Read here.
In 1997, Mr. Goldhaber helped popularize the term “attention economy” with an essay in Wired magazine predicting that the internet would upend the advertising industry and create a “star system” in which “whoever you are, however you express yourself, you can now have a crack at the global audience.” He outlined the demands of living in an attention economy, describing an ennui that didn’t yet exist but now feels familiar to anyone who makes a living online. “The Net also ups the ante, increasing the relentless pressure to get some fraction of this limited resource,” he wrote. “At the same time, it generates ever greater demands on each of us to pay what scarce attention we can to others.”
The psychological allure of free stuff
It is now pretty common knowledge that slapping free labels on things leads to people behaving very differently. Check out how this changes behaviour across store samples, shipping, and online content. In this article, the author quotes multiple studies to drive home the point. Read here.
In 2007, he (Dan Ariely) co-authored a study titled “Zero as a Special Price: The True Value of Free Products” in which participants were asked to choose one of the following:
A free Hershey’s Kiss
A $0.13 Lindt truffle (a superior product in quality that retails for multiples more than a Hershey’s Kiss)
More than 2x as many people chose the free Hershey’s Kiss than chose the $0.13 Lindt truffle. But when Ariely and his co-authors put a $0.01 price tag on the Hershey’s Kiss and adjusted the Lindt truffle price by a mere penny, participants overwhelmingly selected the Lindt truffle.
Zerodha and the art of User Disengagement
In this age of every app and product vying for your attention in the name of User engagement at any cost bordering on user entrapment, Zerodha’s CTO Kailash Nadh writes this detailed blog post on active user disengagement, wherein he talks about a philosophy which entails doing only what is truly useful and meaningful to end-users. They actively deploy disengagement at various levels, which filters customers without a strong intent to use their service and helps the existing users be financially prudent. Being a user myself, I can testify to this. Read here.
The idea of user “engagement” on its own may not be inherently unethical, but it often tends to seep into this realm, where software is specifically designed to regularly, forcibly, and artificially attract user attention for increasing “engagement”, even when the said software’s utility is completely out of the user’s mindspace. This is common in the form of “gamification”, shallow feature releases aimed at creating illusions of improvement, deluge of promotional and product update notifications and e-mails, manufactured red-dot cues on the UI that feign urgency, “exciting offers” that are “personalised”
Tsunami stones of Japan
A very thoughtful creative piece on how the environmental signals are ignored in the wave of rapid industrial development. Japan has been suffering from Tsunamis quite regularly in the last few decades and these stones make a cry for attention towards climate change. Read here.
For centuries we were beacons of safety. Even the smallest of us stood wakefully by the sea. We remembered the angry waves, the seismic past. We remembered water breaking around our shoulders. We remembered the destructions of 869, 1896, 1933. We remembered the cold, thick, black sea. For many decades we sang the same song of memory.
The origin story of Infosys
FiftyTwo is one of my favourite Indian publishers, which does these long reportages on a particular subject. Here, they delve deep into the history of the Indian IT industry and chart the path of Infosys. This article talks about how companies found a way around the archaic and stringent laws regarding the export and import of machineries. They also exploited loopholes in Indian and American laws to make a killing in the nascent market. Read here.
Opportunity lay in a government rule that allowed computer import as long as the importer committed to exporting 200 percent of the value of the machine. It was far from ideal, but a bunch of companies leveraged this rule to become pioneers of the industry: Tata Computer Systems (now Tata Consultancy Services), and Patni Computers.
This was why Infosys adopted what would become the initial model for Indian software exports: its engineers went to work “on site” in the US. “Body shopping became a derogatory term,” said Srivastava, “but at the time it was the only thing software exporters could do. We would tell the customer: here is a CV, please interview this person on the phone, we’ll pay for their airfare and Indian salary and you pick up all the local expenses.”
Something beautiful: Good Bones by Maggie Smith
A podcast you should check out: Ologies
This is a podcast that I recently discovered through a friend of mine. Now in its fourth season, each episode entails a long chat with a scientist, a professor, or some other eccentric expert—is about digging into not only quirky subject matter but the humans who choose to devote their lives to studying fringe fields. You’ll meet a nephologist (clouds), a nassologist (taxidermy), a cucurbitologist (pumpkins), and many others. She is generous and inquisitive, warm and never judgmental; when it comes to pulling touching stories out of scientists, Alie Ward has it down to an art.
Thread (s) of the week:
This Reddit post illustrates the remarkable longevity of The Office.
Netflix’s neat little content marketing strategy
A really nice thread by Buildd, where they talk about how they use the trending cultural paradigm to immerse themselves in the zeitgeist.
want to have fun with Google, check out these 17 hidden gems. Many of these I didn’t know, especially loved Google in 1998.
The Internet is beautiful.
Fun stuff for you to discover
Google is introducing a new immersive view in its Maps, which will give you an idea of what an area might actually feel like when you’re there. In other words, you can check out the location’s vibe now.
Two-of-a-kind: An extremely rare 1955 Mercedes-Benz has sold for $143 million, making it the most expensive automobile ever sold. Designed by Rudolf Uhlenhaut, Mercedes-Benz’s prized engineer at the time, only two of these were built in his trademark style. It is indeed a thing of beauty.
He was three seconds faster than Fangio, a five-time F1 world champion. Rudy’s polite comments after the test That Fangio-Fangio - should ‘practice’.A nice in-depth guide to using photography to elevate your brand.
Fairphone: With replaceable and sustainable parts, this company is trying to make phones that are a little gentler on the planet.
Accessible Social: This is an excellent resource for making what we post on social media inclusive and accessible to individuals with impairments. I only skimmed through a few sections but learned a lot.
This cool FT chart shows a very cool way to sum up the ebb and flow of the stock market since 2020. Zoom’s stock market value has collapsed to 27 billion from its high of 160 billion in November 2020.
Trivia Corner: Torches of Freedom
I learned about this in a brilliant 4 part documentary called The Century of Self. In the early parts of the 20th century, America was still fairly conservative and hence women smoking was frowned upon. The cigarette companies were not happy with this as it meant half of the population was left from the funnel itself.
So they employed a guy named Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, to solve this conundrum. He deployed the principles of mass psychology to make cigarettes which were considered a symbol of masculinity transform into torches of freedom.
He chose the annual Easter day parade in New York on 31st March 1931, to get young women light up cigarettes in public as an act of emancipation. He got some of the prominent influencers of that time to do that and published those defiant images everywhere sparking a nationwide feminist movement around the campaign.
It was so successful in its goals that Ruth Hale, a famous feminist activist, called for women to join the match saying,” Women, light another torch of freedom. Fight another sex taboo.” In 1923, only 5% of women purchased cigarettes, which more than tripled in 1935 to 18.1%.