Sunday Posts

Some people are angry at India for maintaining Net Neutrality! Marc Andreessen just tweeted (and then deleted) that this may be another mistake just like Anti-colonialism! He could not be more right! Mr Andreessen's point is, of course, that India suffered from anti-colonialism! This, apart from proving that every smart people can be woefully silly at times, seems to come from some standard text that many Americans seem to cling to, even if they have no idea what colonialists did, where India is on the map and how it feels to be an Indian. Partly, some Indians contributed to this narrative, making a big deal of the liberalisation of the 90s (which, at best, has produced mixed results), though this confusion between Anti-colonialism and Import Substitution is rather uniquely American. An aside is that this does not show just ignorance about Indian history, but also America's, which was an inward-looking country sustained by trade barriers well into the twentieth century (i...

We have two Jobs: One, the magical creator of iPhone, and even more, of the whole iGeneration, whose life story is one of a visionary, one that stayed steadfast through various failures and ultimately prevailed. The other is, of course, much more human, with all the failings, tempers and tantrums, who refused to accept parenthood of his own daughter and made life miserable for his colleagues at Apple so much that he managed to get fired from his own company. This latter story makes him no less visionary, but just a bit less perfect! The perfect millennium man, the first story eventually overshadowed the second story at the turn of the century, as the second coming of Jobs - his very successful return to Apple and making it the most valuable company in the world - played out, helped no less by his Cancer survival and finally, death. One can say I was watching Steve Jobs, a very good movie with Michael Fassbender as the lead. I am slightly weary of hero worship, and therefore, woul...

As far as euphemisms go, one can't do much worse than calling something a Sharing Economy which is neither about sharing nor an economy in the usual sense of the term. Consider the beginnings, all that excitement about technologies of connection and collaboration being available cheaply and at a global scale, which was thought to have the potential of unlocking the gift economy, those little things that we do for one another without necessarily expecting anything in return, and give it a scale and scope not otherwise possible. However, the Sharing Economy, as the idea was usurped, became exactly the opposite, a mad rush for monetising every little thing - a death sentence for 'sharing', that is.  And, this is hardly an economy. An economy is a system, not just one for commission-for-everything deal making. It involves people, winners and losers, yes, but not one where only bookies stand to win at everyone else's cost. And, indeed, it involves relationships, eve...

We consume a torrent of data as we live, and we produce the same too. However, the more we produce details of each little step we take to live, we obscure the little data more and more, such as feelings and pleasures of human exchanges. The Big Data, the faster, bigger and more complex stream of data, does not so much chronicle our life as much as it changes it. While the technologists and marketers of various descriptions celebrate its arrival, it is time to pause and reflect how it changes us, our lives and institutions, and further, what it means to be human in the age of big data. One would wonder why big data is any big deal, as data gets bigger with every passing generation. As our networks grow, we know more; our storage technologies get cheaper and better, and we store more. Having lived in the age of floppy drives and 4kb memories, the big leap into megabytes was as significant as moving from cheap gigabytes to plausible petabytes. While the rhetoric is that the torrent o...

The feeling at the news of Huffington Post being sold to AOL is - sadness. I have subscribed to Huffington Post for last couple of years. Every day, reading the daily update was my touching base with my left-liberal self. But, there was more: This was my commitment to the alternate news. In a way, I don't trust big media for all its worth. After Al Jazeera , it is plain to see what they are up to. For example, the BBC and the CNN completely omitted the news of the protests in Kuwait, which was in a way the first among the Arab democratic movements, may be just slightly ahead of its time. My daily media consumption is Huffington Post and Al Jazeera , the left wing editorials coupled with irreverent reporting. So, the sale of Huffington Post to AOL, which is only slightly better than its sale to Rupert Murdoch, feels like one relationship severed. There is no reason to feel that way, indeed: The Press Release says that it will remain business as usual, with full editorial indepen...

Web 2.0 versus the Web itself? With Facebook valued at $53 Billion by Goldman Sachs (who invested $450 million in the company now) and taking over the No. 1 spot for most popular website (dethroning Google), the question is getting louder: Is Facebook (and the likes of it) a threat to the Internet? After years of optimistic predictions about Internet changing the world, it has become fashionable to talk about the threats to Internet over the last year. The Economist ran a story about the Internet breaking down into various national networks, each with different rules. Then, Tim Barnes Lee and other founders of the World Wide Web spoke against the various Walled Gardens, such as Facebook (and Google), which are sort of private gardens in the cyberspace, each again with its own rules. In a way, these seem to be the 'old' society gnawing back into the cyberspace, and shackling its free for all flow with the the usual borders and fences that we are used to. How much of this is r...

Tim Barnes Lee warns that Internet is now threatened by the very beast it helped to create - virtual communities. He singles out Facebook , for its vast number of users and closed fence network, but this could be equally applied to the other darling of the Internet age, Apple. His points out that Facebook collects a vast amount of information which then is retained privately, which was not what Internet was created for. He calls upon everyone to 'defend' the Internet's Open standards and neutrality, and argues that this is essential for our liberty and continued progress. There is a lot of concern about the future of the Internet now a days. Jonathan Zittrain has written an engaging book on this, and The Economist recently wondered whether the Internet will soon be breaking down into smaller national networks , each nation demanding control over what information is passed on. This is a somewhat perfect antidote of the euphoria about the arrival of the network age. Call ...