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Steven Pinker might have some facts about there being less violence (at least in the developed world) on this planet than before, but I am with John Gray and don't believe humans have become peace-minded animals.

Truth: We are too busy with our smartphones to go out, riot and kill, and too fearful of army-like police and CCTVs everywhere, where even small crimes may result in big punishments.

Saying 'millennial' all the time doesn't mean we all have become more 'moral'. Doc Searls writes about the decline in usage of the term 'non-violence' in searches and books.



Does it mean we mean we are not interested in 'non-violence'? Does it mean we are thinking about 'violence' more? Does it mean our language has changed, that we project our anger, frustrations and policies in other words when writing books or searching? I want to go with the third explanation. You?

Yes, yes, we have all read, heard and seen many things about the land of meritocracy, of capitalism, of this and that... but evidence suggests otherwise. The land of the great American Dream, where every man is one's own master and all that, has been exporting a more stifling form of bureaucracy to other countries. From The Baffler:

Americans do not like to think of themselves as a nation of bureaucrats—quite the opposite—but the moment we stop imagining bureaucracy as a phenomenon limited to government offices, it becomes obvious that this is precisely what we have become. The final victory over the Soviet Union did not lead to the domination of the market, but, in fact, cemented the dominance of conservative managerial elites, corporate bureaucrats who use the pretext of short-term, competitive, bottom-line thinking to squelch anything likely to have revolutionary implications of any kind.

Read this article in The Atlantic, which also mentions famous people such as Woody Allen and Winona Ryder not using mobile phones.

Sure, there are all sorts of philosophical reasons to forego the latest gizmos, but the bottom line is this: these people can afford to do so. Emailing, browsing the web, loading a phone with apps, movies, and music -- all of these things are basically grunt work.

Aldous Huxley wrote a letter to George Orwell in 1949, soon after Orwell's seminal and prophetic work 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' was published. Again, the discussion is about what will cause our downfall: an ever-intrusive, controlling government, or our tendency to engage with entertaining things 24*7, willfully ignoring all that is essential in this world, and eventually becoming living, breathing time-pass, exploitable organisms for the governments of this blue planet.This is so, so true in this age of internet.

Wrightwood. Cal.
21 October, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

...May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual's psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud's inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sincerely,

Aldous Huxley

Via Lettersofnote

Everyone is a troll nowadays. Including all the glorified TV News anchors forcing down or throats their biased, belligerent opinions, believing their half-assed reasons (boosted by their right connections in positions of power) are the only ones that matter. Read this essential post on 'Foxnewsification of news'. It is about American news media, but it pretty much applies everywhere else. The part that I like most:

Fox News killed the internet trolls. All of them. Or, you know, Fox News gave jobs to a few of them and legitimized the rest creating what I like to call “The Foxnewsification of mainstream media”. These days, MatrixMansplainers really mean what they are saying. Their sexism, racism, hatred, bigotry, their anger are not just argumentative tactics, they are legitimate drivers for policy making. 

In a post about how blog search engines died, giving Google blogsearch an easily-won monopoly, Doc Searls writes about howThe Near-Death of Blog Search

 I hope they keep it (Google Blogsearch) going, because it's an essential resource for finding the kind of news that's syndicated live, still curates itself, and isn't just about pushing or riding whatever happens to be buzzing at the moment.

And how Twitter and Facebook have changed news (for the worse)

(Twitter and Facebook)'ve buried real news — stuff worth keeping around — under a mountain of buzz, all of which melts away after minutes, weeks or, at the most, months.

Related: Why Blogging still rules and reports about its demise are incorrect

Probably the best description of a society in the age of social media marketing (Twitter, Facebook), search engine optimization (Google), where our likes, shares, tweets, et all, have to mean something, have to sell something. Read it in full here.

Best part #1 (sorry for over-aggregation, but can't help it)

....we’re all in showbiz now, walking on eggshells, relentlessly tending our customer base. We’re all selling something today, because even if we aren’t literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial ideal, more and more of us are), we’re always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted.

Bands are still bands, but now they’re little businesses, as well: self-produced, self-published, self-managed. When I hear from young people who want to get off the careerist treadmill and do something meaningful, they talk, most often, about opening a restaurant. Nonprofits are still hip, but students don’t dream about joining one, they dream about starting one. In any case, what’s really hip is social entrepreneurship — companies that try to make money responsibly, then give it all away.

A Hallmark card for this age.

Found at

"You didn’t cause this.
You don’t deserve this.
You simply have to get through it.
And I know you will,
Because I know you!"

Amen.

The search for friends on the internet may be over, but it is meaning that is more and more difficult to find.

Scientific historian George Dyson says“We live in a world where information is potentially unlimited,”  where “Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive."

And that
“it is always easier to find answers than to ask the right questions”

Read here

The first four horsemen of our ultramodern 'consumeropocalypse' are:
1. Apple - gadget culture, cult of we-are-cool-you-aren't, Foxconn sweatshops/suicides, versions after versions, must buy newest version, walled garden)
2. Google - pseudo-organizing the world's information, more Google products listed in search results than ever before, precedence to spammy aggregators like Huffington Post, copying newer online successes all the time, Google+ social networking, Android - more people use mobile phones, more people search Google
3. Facebook - where all our time goes nowadays, oversharing by people, timewasters as Facebook's main product, copying newer online successes all the time, soylent green 2.0
4. Amazon - cloud data service, digital media, book publishing, kindle, superstore...

Farhad Manjoo writes about these big four.

Then, there are two more:

5. The telcos, the wireless companies, the ISPs - gatekeepers, anti-net neutrality
6. The credit-card company - damn, no one gets big by telling us not to buy, buy, buy, and we are drowning in the all the fine print

Between these extremes of consumerocracy, we are all fucked. And, the scariest part:

The best tech companies stay at their peak for a decade at most. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have the potential to be exceptions.

Whatever the future will look like (I like Clifford Stoll's idea that the future is not being about what tools we will be using, but to know the future, ask the kindergarten teacher), it increasingly looks like we will end our lives as serfs of these big four/six.

So, you got "coached". Passed the entrance exams. Got yourself on the path to a secure life ahead. But, what do you actually contribute to society? Do you live up to the reputation of how "brainy" you are?

I often hear stories about arrogant IITians in companies who treat students from lesser institutes (as well as people with experience) with disdain, doing little work, bossing over others, and obsessing over EMIs and latest consumer aspirations. Same goes for IIM type people. I wonder how many of these stories are true.

Is this all what the IIT/IIM dream was about? Becoming rabid consumers? Is Meritocracy a sham? Nothing but fancy-word, poster art for the aspirational middle class?

Relevant Read: What becomes of Asian-American overachievers after the test-taking ends?

There is indeed such as thing as a sane person. There is no such thing as a Mac person, or a PC person.  Or a Facebook person or Twitter person. Doesn't it all sound fascist? I use an Apple computer. So, I must be a better person than others who don't use Apple computers.

Recently, Hunch.com, a site I don't know what it does, but it has been around for while, surveyed its users on the popular rant-generating topic of Apple vs.Windows users and somehow came to the conclusion that Apple users are more liberal than Windows users. It is 100%B.S. I guess someone inferred the results by analyzing the great people from all those "think different" ads.

Comparisons, especially concerning 'who buys what and what does that mean', are distasteful, waste sinks of time, and shallow as well.

What is wrong with cults? In brief:
1. Consumer cults such as Apple and followers of sports clubs exhibit illiberal tendencies. 
Rephrasing Agent Smith: Cults are the disease of modern consumerist life. Self-importance is only a step away from fascism.

How? You ask. In his last book, Kingdom Come (2006), JG Ballard, wrote about consumerism being equal to fascism. This book review is from the Observer:

Ballard's central idea is that consumerism slides into fascism when politics simply gives the punters what they want, becoming a matter of consumer-style choices...

A Hacker News commenter said some time back about the Apple fanboys:

Mac fanboys are like the Goth kids of the adult world - they profess individual expression, but all act and dress the same.

It's amusing that a group that touts themselves as valuing individuality and creativity all use the same restrictive devices with very little choice.  

Graph from Google's NGram Viewer shows the rise of the phrase 'mission statement'. Evil lurks among us. It is making us into latent fascists. It is called business buzzword.

Did Alexander, Abraham Lincoln or Gandhi have a mission statement?

Graph via Undernews 

It is not only art directors for movies and TV shows that fall prey to Apple's subliminal selling push. Apple targets schools with a vengeance, adding further cost to the already expensive education, education which may or may not be fruitful in the long run. Now, students of the the Missouri School of Journalism have spoken against the school's directive to buy an iPad before they sit in a class.

The students write,

Leave it up to the student to decide if they’d rather record an interview on a new iPod touch or a simple tape recorder. Massive, general technological requirements do little for productivity, considering they are rarely utilized, if at all. 

And,

We strongly urge the J school to stop requiring new technologies for their students, especially when they haven’t even found useful ways to utilize the current ones, like the iPod touch. 

And, then this,

...They aren’t even friendly recommendations — they’re endorsements.

Everybody asks, "What effect has the internet had on religion?", but nobody asks what effect has religion had on the internet.

The general explanation for the effect of the internet on religion is something like what Professor Heidi Campbell, author of 'When Religion Meets New Media' explains,

"The distinctions and differences (between religions) are amplified online."

That about sums it up. But, what about the effect of religion on the internet? For example, is religious conservatism linked to the Internet-Controlling measures such as Net Neutrality, Net Censorships, and such? Or, are we talking about a different kind of religion here? The religion of power?

Or, is the cult of Apple online affected by the cult of Scientology? The cult of Scientology, as you know, is a like a multi-level-marketing program where a member's worth is increased by the number of people he brings in to the fold. Similarly, having once purchased a needlessly expensive gadget, which puts limits to your extent of using it, the buyer is compelled to promote the cult of Apple, as there is no other way he could justify his excessive spending in today's times of economic turmoil. 

What's an 'unskilled, underutilised, frustrated young population' to do? There are two roads for the young of India. The first road is is the one taken by Gandhi and Democracy. It is a long road. There are many false ends and mirages. On this road, the people who have had a head start, will reap the most benefits - rich people, powerful people and the dynasties.

The restless young is tiring of all this mess. All this inequality and hypocrisy is making them scream inside.They know the Anna Hazare fast has been hijacked by the Media, the opportunists and the pretentious. They have been to the Jantar Mantar and they have seen the circus.

They know it is impossible to make politicians and bureaucrats accountable and responsible. They know they don't have the means to win over money power in politics. They know their ashes will be down at the sea floor before any bureaucrat is actually sent to jail for his crimes.

Which brings us to the second road. This road is not pretty. We got to this road during the bloody French revolution. And the Russian revolution.

Blood flows on the streets. Sanity takes a holiday. Evil takes over. It is not a good time to be on anybody's hate list. It is a great time for future storytellers.

This second road will be the bloody, immortal epitaph for a generation that can have no other claim to history in these aspirational, consumerist age.

We will never have so many young Indians alive ever.

Also read:
Home Ministry Fears Young India: Bad governance and too many expectations will lead to violence

In one way, Hollywood is becoming more and more like Bollywood. Bollywood's bad films are the dominant form of literature for most Indians. Similarly, Hollywood's incessant supply of comic book superheroes and fantasy films may be hurting the cause of good literature in America. You can call the first decade of 21st century the Comics/Fantasy decade.

Canadian actress Neve Campbell, of the "Scream" series and "Wild Things" fame, says in an interview with The Guardian:

There's not a whole lot of courage from the studios,...It's actually very sad where movies, and the studios, are at the moment. Every single comic, every book, is being made into a film. Do you know an author pitching a book nowadays is asked to consider whether there's a possibility of making a film from it? So films are even starting to limit the kinds of books we'll be able to read.

Read this post 

“Thanks for joining us tonight Mr. Bieber. What are your views on climate change? How do you feel about Iraq? And what do you think of the criticism levied against the parents of the Columbine shooters?”

...that like a celebrity, you must answer; it would be inhuman not to lament a tragedy, callous not to join in the universal support of a victimized people, immoral not to condemn the latest injustice; and like a celebrity, you have only a few words —perhaps 140 characters— and small tokens of your feelings: a ribbon on a tuxedo, an icon on an avatar;

Evgeny Morozov, author of "The Net Delusion", who often writes about the political effects of the internet, does a review of a new book by 'technology guru' Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine, titled "What Technology Wants". He explains brilliantly why the gurus write books with cute, fancy names.

Morozov quotes from Kelly's explanation for why he wrote the book:

These “wants” of technology provide a long-horizon framework for business—your business. I’ll be doing as many talks at companies and organizations about “what technology wants” as I can in the coming months.

Kelly is not the first technology guru to make a living by selling advice to corporations.

 ...But it is hard to imagine the previous generation of serious thinkers about technology—the likes of Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford and John Dewey—moonlighting as corporate advisers to Danone and Halliburton. 

 ...In contrast, most of today’s technology gurus-from Kevin Kelly to Clay Shirky to Douglas Rushkoff—take special pride in publicizing how deeply embedded they are in the very industry that they are supposed to scrutinize. 

Kelly’s project, by contrast, seeks to deepen the moral void -— and to establish its normative character by claiming that it is propelled by the same forces as evolution. But can evolution really explain the plight of child laborers mining for cobalt—a key ingredient in batteries for mobile phones—in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Zambia? (According to a 2007 study by SwedWatch, a Swedish watchdog, there were some fifty thousand workers under the age of eighteen involved in this practice.) Is exploiting minors for cobalt mining something that technology wants, or is it something that certain businesses, here disguised under the innocent label of the “technium,” require? To claim that such processes follow the normal direction of evolution is to let the mining corporations off the hook far too easily.

In the eyes of the business elites, humans are valuable because they are wage slaves, whose progress is only measured in terms of productivity - articles per day, calls per hour, time to answer questions..., and nothing else.

Hal Varian, who is some sort of a glorified philosopher at Google, says:

"If you look at the history of the world, up until 1700 nothing much happened."

Why? Because productivity statistics were not available then.

The Da Vincis, Thoreaus, and Shakespeares of the world do not matter in this Six-sigma-worshiping world.

Living to work, to pay the bills, is the only thing that matters.

We are all just Facebook-enabled animals.

This is what the business elites would like us to believe, rising inequality be damned.

All we got to do is be useful for the businessman around the corner.

In the 19th century, horses held the same position.