Mind Tavern Edition 16
Welcome to the 16th 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 :)
This was a long long hiatus which I can easily blame on the corporate rut that my life has turned into but it was mostly because of plain old procrastination. As Tim Urban beautifully writes in his now quite popular thesis, where the rational decision-maker in us is distracted pretty easily by the instant gratification monkey. If you haven’t read the article yet I would highly recommend you do it right now. Read it here. Alternatively, you can watch his hilarious TED Talk on the subject.
The Perils of Audience Capture
I love Gurwinder’s blog, where he breaks down the ideas of the digital age. Here he talks about how the constant gaze of thousands of strangers transforms the influencers, authors and content creators into not what they are but what the idea of their audience of them dictates. An example of that I definitely find more commonly online is the people who started off as moderates on Twitter have been gradually radicalised by their followers into the fringe territory. Read here.
Put simply, in order to be someone, we need someone to be someone for. Our personalities develop as a role we perform for other people, fulfilling the expectations we think they have of us. The American sociologist Charles Cooley dubbed this phenomenon “the looking glass self.” Evidence for it is diverse, and includes the everyday experience of seeing ourselves through imagined eyes in social situations (the spotlight effect), the tendency for people to alter their behavior when in the presence of pictures of eyes (the watching-eye effect), and the tendency for people in virtual spaces to adopt the traits of their avatars in an attempt to fulfill expectations (the Proteus effect).
This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity. But amid such temptations, it's worth remembering that when you become who your audience expects at the expense of who you are, the affection you receive is not intended for you but for the character you're playing, a character you'll eventually tire of. So the next time you find yourself in the limelight of other people’s gazes, remember that being someone often means being fake, and if you chase the approval of others, you may, in the end, lose the approval of yourself.
Iphones and innovation, or the lack thereof
It is quite telling that I am writing this with my newly bought iPhone on my side table, but we can’t ignore the fact that the company is no longer what Jobs imagined it to be. He was the guy who rejected Macintosh’s earlier designs for months because the wiring inside wasn’t immaculate enough. He would be rolling in the grave seeing the company roll out near replicas of the product year after year. In this lovely article for the Atlantic, an Apple loyalist expresses his anguish at the new normal. Read here.
That’s a big part of the problem in a nutshell: The system erected around annual upgrades means that many, many people buy the iPhone and then live their life quite literally indebted to Apple, which is better than its competitors at locking people into a “walled garden”—or, as the writer Cory Doctorow has called it, a “feedlot.” What was once a bold consumer choice is now more like a sad dip into the trough.
The loneliness of Sporting Excellence
It would like seem Sydney Mclaughlin is a freak of nature when it comes to records and her personal achievements. She has frequently broken world records, making her competitors—none of whom are weak—disappear into the background as she pushes the boundaries of what is thought to be feasible in her line of work. But the other side of this human story talks about how she has constantly admitted in public to being depressed and becoming a project, a plan, a figment of the ambition of others. So she runs and dreams of just getting some sleep. Read here.
It’s 2022. Sydney McLaughlin is 22. She crosses the line and sits down on the track. There are no wild celebrations or overt displays of emotion. Maybe she’s simply stunned at the fact that she’s just run a world 400m hurdles final in a time that would have earned seventh place in the final of the 400m flat. Maybe she’s reflecting on the mathematical improbability of lowering the world record from 52.16 to 50.68 in the space of 13 months. Maybe she’s just thinking about the lactic acid still burning inside her legs.
It’s 2021. Sydney is 21. Three days ago she broke the world record at the Olympic trials. Now she’s sitting in her car, outside the shops, trying to fight back tears. “I don’t know what’s happening,” she says into her phone camera. “I achieved one of my life’s dreams. And the people who I thought would be most excited didn’t even care.” The rolling tears collect into sobs. “You can do everything right, and it’ll never be enough. There’s always a problem with you.” She pushes her hair out of her face. “It’s a sick world,” she spits into the lens, partly in disdain, partly in despair.
The morality of Mankading
In this beautifully written piece for Cricinfo, Sidharth Monga points out the imbalance in power whenever there is an incident of Mankading on the field. This moral superiority and power hierarchies continue to stand even though the rules have now been codified by the MCC. When captains to administrators are mostly batsmen, the first hierarchy of batters over bowlers keeps on getting stronger. The second more sinister one reflects the deep-rooted social construct around us. Read here.
Look around you. These hierarchies of power exist everywhere. The lower someone is in the power structure - a religious minority, an immigrant, a historically disadvantaged caste, non-male, non-heterosexual - the greater the onus on them to act righteously and carry the weight of their community on their shoulders. Those exercising the power hardly face that scrutiny. If someone from a disadvantaged background earns money and power, they are still liable to be excluded by vague codes.
As Abhishek Mukherjee has written on wisden.com, this mode of dismissal was prevalent before Vinoo Mankad too. No questions of morality were attached to these dismissals when English bowlers used to effect them. Such confusing, random and exclusionary codes of honour are also integral to hierarchies. In the wider world, these manifest themselves in the form of dress codes, customs, etiquette, convenient definitions of patriotism, blasphemy, and so on.
Australia's "hard but fair" cricket is an abstract notion that accommodates illustrious captains claiming catches off the ground, vicious sledging, their batters insinuating chucking when walking off after being dismissed by a bowler but crying murder when Virat Kohli questions their captain's integrity. When someone sledges them back, there miraculously appears a line that cannot be crossed, which is drawn by Australia and whose location only they know.
Infestation of Business Speak
I thought I would end the article recommendations of this edition on a funny note. Charlie Warzel has become a modern-day pioneer in using humour to dismantle the tech and business jargon-backed news cycles. Here he writes about the consultancies and major business firms using fine articulation to pivot when they have nothing new to say at all. This has mushroomed not just memes but an information economy on Linkedin and Twitter by the thought leaders of bullshit. Read here.
The article is a phenomenal example of what I’m going to call “business-dude lorem ipsum.” It is filler language that is used to roleplay “thought leadership” among those who have nothing to say: the MBA version of a grade-school book report that starts with a Webster’s Dictionary definition. Advanced business-dude lorem ipsum will convey action (“We need to design value in stages”) but only in the least tangible way possible. It will employ industry terms of art (“We’re first to market or a fast follower”) that indicate the business dude has been in many meetings where similar ideas were hatched. Business-dude lorem ipsum will often hold one or two platitudes that sound like they might also be Zen koans (“That value is in the eye of the beholder”) but actually are so broad that they say nothing at all.
Something very cool: Microplastics and the Galaxy
I am a sucker for good ad campaigns and this is one of the best ones I have seen in the recent while. In a series of images for WWF, the campaign tries to catch our eye with the fact that in 2022, microplastics in our oceans outnumber the stars in the galaxy by an astounding ratio of 500:1. Check all the images here.
Thread(s) of the week
This wonderful time-lapse video of The Eurasian Blue tit.
Since we are on the topic of Marketing, this glorious thread by Peter Della Penna is a definite read on the most recent incident. Read here.
Check out this comment on Reddit which breaks down the recent discovery in the field of Quantum physics, that earned a Nobel prize.
The Internet is beautiful
Fun stuff for you to discover!
33 of the best streets in the world, a very cool list by Time Out Magazine.
Stellarium: Google Maps, but for Stargazing. This is for all the dreamers out there. Enjoy.
Looking to kill time, check out this light word guessing game which you play with random strangers on the internet.
Gorgeous illustrations explain how a chameleon changes colours (it’s not how you think!).
Check out this year’s nominations for Astronomy Photographer of the year. Maybe this would help you find the destination for your next escapade.
A century-old archive of the rapidly vanishing world around us. Some really outstanding images here. Take a look.
Kahn’s team surveyed the world for more than 20 years, bringing back to France 4,000 black-and-white photographs, 120 hours of video footage and more than 72,000 autochromes, an early color photography process. Together, this material was to form the Archives de la Planète, the crux of Kahn’s lifelong humanist endeavor.
Trivia Corner: Dutch Courage to Go Dutch
In the quest for colonisation of South East Asia, Anglo-Dutch wars in the 17th century were quite intense and often took some unconventional routes. The British used the word "Dutch" to designate fraudulent or phoney things, such as Dutch courage, Dutch auction, and of course Dutch wife, as a result of this competition.
Dutch courage is a relic from the Thirty Years’ War. British soldiers fighting in the low countries would take a swig of gin to warm up and get going. They also noticed the Dutch side bolstered by the infamous tipple.
In one of my favourite books The Etymologicon, Mark Forsyth writes
Dutch courage is the courage found at the bottom of a bottle, and a Dutch feast is a meal where the host gets drunk before his guests. Dutch comfort is no comfort at all. A Dutch wife is simply a large pillow (or in gay slang something far more ingenious). A Dutch reckoning is a fraudulent price that is raised if you argue about it. A Dutch widow is a prostitute. A Dutch uncle is unpleasant and stern, and only tight-fisted diners insist on going Dutch. That’ll show them.