[From Unsplash]
Good morning,
Jaron Lanier is someone we tune in to every once a while because he asks uncomfortable questions. The rise and rise of technology, in its current avatar, for instance. Is it desirable? He thinks not and asks that we rethink our relationship with the internet and question if the anonymity it offers people is worth it. He made up his mind about a decade ago and makes his case in his book, You Are Not a Gadget.
“This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result.
“The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse… Google came along with the idea of linking advertising and searching, but that business stayed out of the middle of what people actually did online. It had indirect effects, but not direct ones.
“Entrepreneurs naturally sought to create products that would inspire demand (or at least hypothetical advertising opportunities that might someday compete with Google) where there was no lack to be addressed and no need to be filled, other than greed. Google had discovered a new permanently entrenched niche enabled by the nature of digital technology.
“There can be only one player occupying Google’s persistent niche, so most of the competitive schemes that came along made no money. Behemoths like Facebook have changed the culture with commercial intent, but without, as of this time of writing, commercial achievement.
“In my view, there were a large number of ways that new commercial successes might have been realized, but the faith of the nerds guided entrepreneurs on a particular path. Voluntary productivity had to be commoditized, because the type of faith I’m criticizing thrives when you can pretend that computers do everything and people do nothing.
“An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook. Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of standardized designs like the blog, and these designs encouraged pseudonymity in at least some aspects of their designs, such as the comments, instead of the proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture.
“Instead of people being treated as the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sky or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources.”
Worth thinking about!
Learning from Will Smith
Thinking is hard work. That is why most people don’t like it. But there is a price to be paid for not doing it. This is something we take every opportunity to stress. This comes to mind now because the actor Will Smith slapping the host of the Academy Awards on live television is still fresh. While the debate on whether he was right or wrong continues, Esquire Magazine reports, Smith is beginning to feel the repercussions of his actions. It doesn’t look pretty.
“Smith's upcoming Netflix film Fast and Loose has reportedly slowed production, per The Hollywood Reporter. The film, which had already lost its director prior to Smith's altercation, was supposedly reprioritized following the Oscars. (It's not hard to imagine that it would be ramped up in priority had the evening passed without Smith's outburst.) Smith was set to star in the film, which told ‘the story of a crime boss who loses his memory after an attack.’
“That news comes on the heels of another one of Smith's projects derailments. Also according to The Hollywood Reporter, Smith was recently given the first 40 or so pages of the script for Bad Boys 4, but that production has also been slowed for the time being.”
Why is it that people act without thinking? Because most are not equipped with tools such as mental models. This is a theme our colleague Charles Assisi talks often about. In an essay on the theme, he attempted to answer a question on how to think about helping India. It was basis a conversation with Nachiket Mor and reading the works of the author Rolf Dobelli and a mental model that emerged called Inversion.
“If you want to help India, the question you should consider asking is not ‘How can I help India?’ Instead, you should ask ‘How can I hurt India?’ This will get you to look at what will do the worst damage. Now, you work to avoid it,” he wrote.
“The two approaches appear similar. But those who have mastered algebra know that inversion will often and easily solve problems that otherwise resist solution. And in life, just as in algebra, inversion will help solve problems you can’t otherwise handle.
“Between listening to Mor and reading up Dobelli, pointers started to emerge on what kind of questions to ask when examining inversion from a personal perspective: What will really fail in life? What do we want to avoid? Some answers are easy. For example, sloth and unreliability will fail. If you’re unreliable, it doesn’t matter what other virtues you possess.”
Dig deeper
- Will Smith’s Oscar slap is derailing movie productions (Esquire Magazine)
- Mental models from the school of life (Founding Fuel)
- Two idiots and three pigs (Founding Fuel)
- The Tao of thinking (Founding Fuel)
The disaster in Sweden
Now that lockdown restrictions are being lifted in most parts of the world, how public policy makers responded is being scrutinized. From our perch in India, we would have imagined Sweden would have responded well because as the most recent issue of Nature magazine writes, “Sweden was well equipped to prevent the pandemic of Covid-19 from becoming serious.” But the truth is not just different, it is horrific. “During 2020, however, Sweden had ten times higher Covid-19 death rates compared with neighbouring Norway.”
What went wrong?
“In 2014, the Public Health Agency merged with the Institute for Infectious Disease Control; the first decision by its new head (Johan Carlson) was to dismiss and move the authority’s six professors to Karolinska Institute. With this setup, the authority lacked expertise and could disregard scientific facts. The Swedish pandemic strategy seemed targeted towards ‘natural’ herd-immunity and avoiding a societal shutdown. The Public Health Agency labelled advice from national scientists and international authorities as extreme positions, resulting in media and political bodies to accept their own policy instead.
“The Swedish people were kept in ignorance of basic facts such as the airborne SARS-CoV-2 transmission, that asymptomatic individuals can be contagious and that face masks protect both the carrier and others. Mandatory legislation was seldom used; recommendations relying upon personal responsibility and without any sanctions were the norm. Many elderly people were administered morphine instead of oxygen despite available supplies, effectively ending their lives.”
There will be a lot of questions the monarchy and the government in charge will have to answer.
Dig deeper
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Warm regards,
Team Founding Fuel
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