A Personal Manifesto
(Originally a Facebook Post I wrote on January 19th, the eve of my 32nd Birthday, the day when the men in blue conquered Gabba against odds)
Let me leverage Team India’s victory for armchair philosophising, and leveraging the strange momentum I have while writing Facebook posts to write a succinct version of an annual update mail I have been meaning to send the people who have been kind to give me attention and mind space as I remain callous with the social-contract of replying to messages, or even having a standard number.
India is 1.3 billion people. What happened today should be a probable outcome. But it wasn’t and it wasn’t for long because we did not have an ecosystem.
IPL did for cricket in India what Capitalism did for the western countries. It is what good intentions say Farm Laws would do for agriculture. Like IPL was touted as a death bed for Test cricket. Farm Laws are touted as a death bed of a way of life.
If land is an asset and farmers own that asset, creating an ecosystem around it would be a positive-sum game.
So where is the issue? My father captured the issue very succinctly: before independence and land reforms the majority of people were landless labourers, and it’s a matter of time they will become that. The sense of ownership and ownership will be lost. That seems more or less true, as we open the flood gates of capital.
But this opposition is valid for capitalism in general. Thomas Piketty’s r>g captures beautifully the fact that capitalism is an unstable algorithm, actually a greedy algorithm. It has two parts, the fiat currency part, which reduces the combinatorial complexity of barter, and the property rights part, where property rights are definitive and forever. I believe the greedy algorithm of chasing the highest returns with indefinite property rights is fundamentally an unstable algorithm. And that’s true everywhere.
Capitalism does create more possibilities, opportunities and wealth, but sucks them back in time enslaving the people. Thus, farmers are right that doom will happen eventually, and they may not be wrong at thinking that doom will come to them sooner because they really don’t have leverage here. Their leverage was the government provided womb of state procurement and MSPs in part, which the government intends to take back. The only way they can fight this is by relying on democracy.
Democracy, it’s the stabilizing force against capital. It is the actual manifestation of the virtue of socialism. Socialism, like fairness, makes sense as a virtue, not a system. Capitalism is a system. That’s where socialism and communism seem foolish, neither do they recognize the limited bandwidth of conscious centralized decision making in a distributed system, nor have they come up with a scalable distributed algorithm. On the other hand, capitalism unleashes sovereignty and individuality and, thus, possibilities and efficiency; but of course is greedy and eventually unstable without a correcting force: democracy. So conceptually, the prevalent notion that if we ensure democracy keeps functioning properly, capitalism will be kept in check and we’ll reap the benefits and avoid the pitfalls, seems about right.
But in reality errr… corruption, money in politics, lobbying and full blown crony capitalism. So much so that close home those money bagging politics might be gifted banks in the near future. Thus capitalism is undercutting democracy. All you need to do is buy the swing votes, or make the members of state or central legislatures swing.
So, I am saying capitalism unchecked by a counterforce, a functioning democracy, is bad, and farm laws protests are, to some extent, a manifestation of capitalism being checked by a democracy fearing the slippery slope. Though we must do better at checking capitalism than totally stopping it fearing a capital runaway (like a thermal runaway).
I am not just an armchair philosopher, in that I won’t only write shit, I love trying to get my hands dirty too. Though I love being lost in thoughts just too much, so much so that I perpetually struggle with any set of tasks I bring unto myself.
My Story
This brings me to me, by the time I finish this post it would be the eve of my 32nd birthday. Born on the day Bush Sr. took oath, I’ve lived through his 4 years as an infant intrigued and lost in surrounding objects, Clinton’s 8 as a child building blocks and Bush’s 8 indulging encyclopedias, discovery and dial-up web. Was a hopeful and idealistic 20 year old when Obama stepped into his 8, and a hedonistic 28 year old when Trump stepped into his 4. What has been common in all these years is the perpetual struggle to do whatever task needs to be done, with a persistant fantasy universe playing in the head all the time, and boy I have used antics to focus.
I used to love daydreaming in class in the primary classes, looking out of the windows. Hated reading. Detested spellings. But I liked the overall feel of the school. The pink and green benches in primary classes, the activity, the conversations, only if I could be left alone there. Thinking of it, it was weird the kind of shit we were talking about even when we were small. It was in second or third, most probably third, that a classmate, my bench partner at the time, accused me of saying “bade hokar hamari shaadi hogi” and it played out for sometime till a friend walked me out of that by out arguing her. This friend with his stupendous academic performances would be around as my Sharma ji ka beta over the years of School. I also remember being sent out of the class to stand outside the door often, one instance was for saying “Ganja Gandhi” after drawing the potrait of Gandhiji in a scrapbook in 3rd standard, and then making this comment on it, which somehow reached the class teacher. Then there was another incident in 3rd when we were sharing our hobbies, and I explained opening things up to see what’s inside, which also didn’t seem to go that well with the class teacher, or the class for that matter. I don’t remember her name, but I remember the persona, and I am pretty sure that she, my 3rd grade teacher, detested me; actually, I know, I overheard her.
This went on, though most of the teachers that followed had a soft corner for me, which I remember abusing. When we reached 6th grade, sports happened. I sucked at it. Though being the guy who was always in a look out for new shores, I was one of the early birds who got into all senior-teams in 6th. Only to be relegated to extras in the subsequent years. No fault of thiers though. I clearly remember a cricket match on our school compound, it’s sixth standard, and ball finally comes towards me, and I, ofcourse, am lost in my thoughts. Not just it was a missed catch and 4 runs, when I threw the ball back it hit one of the only poles in the line of sight, and went back to the boundary, instead of the bowler. Still, I got the certificates, and my enthusiasm was never diminished. It wasn’t just sports, it was all kinds of extra-currics, I remember bungling reading the news in the assembly with our principal asking me to re-read it. That was embarrassing.
Mumma’s perpetual efforts, the prevalent academic-social hierarchy ensured that I never slid back too much but boy every time papers were distributed, especially hindi and sanskrit, it was a sea of red. No wonder the year I passed Engineering Services, I tanked hindi in Civils. But that’s not to say my scores were ever good in other three attempts anyways. In school, I was always around 10th position in a class of around 50 and oscillated between 2nd to 4th in boys who were around 11 in 50. Tenth was a rude shock when I think I slid back to being 20th in 50 or something with everyone scoring exceptionally, the good thing was we were now all away into a hostel in Chandigarh prepping for college entrance. It was a weird sight with the hypothetical Sharma ji ka beta and actual Sharma ji ka beta both of whom were now in the same hostel fighting it out on who topped the School, and I knew I needed to find a way to focus.
The antics became crazier, I used sit with chair on the bed, put table over the table, sit in balcony, make weird contraptions just to be able to perpetually focus on what’s in the book. And boy it was hard. Chemistry toh made me cry. Everytime I’d try to make sense of the chapter and try to do questions at the back they seemed to be from another topic entirely. Neverthless, I remained overconfident as always, to the extent of carrying the book with me everywhere, especially the mess.
Though I became more free spirited in +2, watchin 25 movies in the theatre, jumping hostel walls, walking streets of Chandigarh alone, though still antics were the only way I could focus for long. I used to sit in car and study, I had noticed that I could focus for long while driving, but not while sitting anywhere at home. So I thought if I studied while sitting on the driving seat. It worked sometimes.
IIT was equally torturous in terms of focusing and interpreting the badly written books. Just hated Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering by Vincent Del Toro. Though the theory actually was fine, and somewhat intuitive. It’s just the freakin way they write the books. And then the percentage of boring professors, who were more in their heads than in the class, or plainly couldn’t articulate and failed to recognize the curse of boredom they unleashed. The good ones were amazing. Why can’t there be just interesting theories and good professors? Also, electric wiring is archaic it should change big time, I’ll write a blog on open wiring sometime.
My struggle to focus manifested by me failing to make good PHP (Physics Lab) and CYP (Chemistry Lab) reports. I hated them. For all of my love of physics, PHP somehow made me as sleepy as I used to be when I used to be little and go shopping with Mumma and Di. It also manifested in me saying yes to everything in the first semester only to recognize after the GPAs came, I could do only as much. Reading Room and Library came to the rescue, but again it was me forcing myself to study. Ofcourse I still carried books to mess in college too. Bad jokes. and great friends made it an amazing ride though.
UPSC prep was also part learning interesting stuff, part forcing myself, and seemed a natural fit for a guy who took books everywhere, to the loo, to the mess. But once I got into doing actual jobs, including own startup, a big startup, government all were worse, only made fun by the fact, and to the extent I got either to work on my vision or work ’n’ chill among interesting people. The thing is that to me getting actual work done felt boring, lame and mundane.
This meant that despite 5 years of reading about anything about the world, after a sincere 4 year attempt at learning engineering, and rigorous 2 years of basics of maths and physics, nothing in the various diverse execution ecosystems I hopped mad it easy for me. I realized, for me to get done anything is hard, like hard hard. HARD. And because visions only metamorphize when someone builds them, as everything else is really a realm of speculation, perhaps because rigorous proofs are harder than actually building a vision in a lot of areas.
As everyone does something, I have to do something. And because doing anything is hard for me, because focusing is hard, it makes only sense that I should do the hard work for the actual hard things. Otherwise, I was happy in Vipassana, thinking bad jokes and overthinking reality that ought to be, wondering without a worry. Though, I was also happy slogging and cracking bad jokes in college, perhaps because I believed gaining this knowledge would make me capable of actually achieving my visions, which to be honest even in hindsight is not entirely false.
So, today, at the eve of the advent of the Joe Biden phase of my life, I announce my vision, not wholly but subtly, as a kind of out-there moment, so that in the weak ones I don’t succumb to the current (Peter Griffin Laughs).
Vision
Property Decay — Capitalism in which property rights decay with a time constant — say 100 years. This will make capitalism inherently stable. Everyone within the ecosystem gets ownership of the company — producers, workers (this is the more involved part, but it broadly uses geometric progression, will publish details in some time). It is based on two simple ideas: first, the expectation of ownership of effort is natural, so everyone should have ownership of their efforts, two, such ownership should decay, so we are not creating a headless force of capital.
Sustainiable City — Cities should be sustainable and playful. A more sustainable city will be one with low energy consumption, designed onto human scale with self driving wheel chairs and actual basic smartness. It must be in some place with good weather, because it’s the energy consumption for transportation and maintaining artificial weather that make cities unsustainable. Low coercion, smart law and order. I don’t understand the need to arrest people in large number of cases when there can be GPS collars.
Democracy+ — Deeper more meritocratic & more accountable democracy. A democracy where there is a portal to reach your public representative with whom you have discussion over a platform, where such representatives are elected by voting on the platform, and such representatives then discuss their issues with actual elected or shadow representatives again elected on the platform. All combined throughout the country make a party. And people crowd source through the platform. The platform would publish reports and keep track of raw minutes of meetings.
Virtual Food ATMs — Just make a map of places as per thresholds of estimated missed meals per week per person. Then set up virtual ATM’s by placing a mobile on a street light and making circles in its camera view. People can come and do specific gestures for specific time to get food. You can have higher time requirement for able bodied men, and extremely low for women, children and old people. Once you have people clearly expressing the need, and some time-effort expression a steady-state is easily possible where people and organizations who are nearby service the need.
Youth Movement — Youth should get out of their parents home. Express themselves, skills themselves and become the engine of the economy. The first step of doing something is to need to do that something and that arises out of wanting things. We have been poverty infested for too long so that the natural reaction of our youth is to suppress their consumption, expression… suppressing the kind of life they can have and robbing the country of it’s destiny.
Talk App — A place where anyone can talk to anyone, where attention is priced, and you can ask for attention for everyone. There is monetary pricing and there are meritocratic, reference, interest-driven ways mimicking real life. Should eventually transform into an app where anything is done.
Chemistry — A dating platform that increases the probability of people being intrigued by each other by enabling progressively checking out of a crowd with escalating access. This while also solving for the probability of interaction in real life. This is especially required for elder people, it is beyond comprehension so many of my friends have parents who have lost their partners for some years now, and no one is doing anything for them to get a partner again.
Order Live — A learning platform that leverages the fact that imitation learning happens before understanding learning. And that any job only requires a limited set of complete vocabulary to get started. It can be imagined as a live streaming fake company that gives you whatever role you want, and eventually, get’s you the role when you are good at it. This will also lead to open companies that live stream all execution, leading to the exceptional pace of learning and innovation.
Cerebro — A communication platform like Twitter, but which promotes conversations, and doesn’t allow people to just jaar in. Where you can travel like Cerebro in a global brain looking at conversations people are having and joining them. And it’s beyond me why it is that hard to make, it’s so much easy in natural life — people enter a conversation only when the slight comment they make is responded to. There is an etiquette of conversation, and people who barge in, spew hate, propaganda or unrelatable diatribe should find it difficult to disrupt conversations. Seems easy enough a protocol to code.
Podcast — I have had the pleasure of knowing some of the smartest people and it makes me sad they are either making the rich richer or tiring themselves out serving an archaic setup that infested with corruption and vested interests slowly numbing down to suffering. This will be an attempt to connect back and motivate them and the likes with joining these projects.
I have had distracting ideas that I find have value for quite some time. I have had bad execution for quite some time. Both are not going away anytime. So high time I do something about it. So, hopefully, they are good ideas and are made better over time by people who join and are eventually executed by more people, to create a sustainable tomorrow.
I have been going about some of these for some time now to the extent that my closest friends zone out while listening to them. I recently found this written in my journal: “People zoning out when I am telling them something means they do not believe it can be done due to some meta patterns that they have seen. To be safe I should run my plans through an alternate smart person.”
There are few more ideas, but we’ll get to them once we have some momentum. I would like to conclude by saying today is fun and we can make a more fun tomorrow. Some things I keep obsessing on lately, things we can perhaps share a coffee over: that structure is what has value; that general AI is a big threat; that we are in a simulation; and that the only job of masculinity is survival, though the way it ensures that is by hogging power, so beware of that.
Wandering
It has been bugging me for some time that what’s valuable within any corporation is the structure, it’s the structure has value, and in my opinion, capital is just one way of creating structure, I have always envisioned that it can be created through information technology. Also that in our heads, consumption is not the only high, there are wandering highs, there are learning highs, why can’t we leverage those to create structures, and depend on those structures to celebrate and live. It sounds easy, and it is easy, well what else there is to do anyways.
I still remain extremely concerned about the rise of general AI, and it’s really around the corner within the next 5–10 years. It’s not that first day we’ll have humanoid robots hunting us down, but we will have more resources dedicated to building more compute power. The day we are spending more resources in building more compute power than the welfare of people we are in the end-game. The only way out of it would be to fry most of the compute power, which becomes improbable by the day.
Are we in a simulation, seems yes. Actually multiple times over, even within the reality we see. Any layer of abstraction that is turing complete, is effectively a simulation. It is weird though, if we are in a simulation, why is there so much poverty and suffering ?
Masculinity or order can solve for survival, but can’t nurture. To nurture we need to embrace disorder, including disorder within us. It’s like, embrace the dance of disorder and life begins, because unbridled masculinity confuses aspirations with survival necessities, making us miserable as we try to optimize the unoptimizable. Think of it as letting go of Newtonian direct causation, to appreciate statistical quantum world ruled by probabilities. Murphy’s law says what’s probable at one layer of abstraction becomes the reality of the next layer of abstraction. A corollary would be what’s probable in one cycle, would be the reality of a 1000.
Want to go on but I’ll spare the trouble of going more into masculinity/femininity & order/disorder, that’s for when we catch up. Also, feel free to ping me if any of the ideas resonate with you. The world is descending into hate because the idealistic and hopeful solutions are not working. (And this is mainly because our version of capitalism is flawed and cracks are showing). Chao
If we would be celebrating venturing into doubling the age as birthdays this would probably be my (second?) last opportunity to do that. 2⁵
Tribute & Commitment
But beyond all this my life has been a celebration of amazing teachers, family and friends. Friends I made in school, in +1, +2, in IIT, in UPSC prep, in Railways, in Craftsvilla/Mumbai, in Amritsar/Ferozepur, in my ventures. I hope to be around more for all of you, more bearable, with better bad jokes, while trying to solve for humanity, one failure at a time.
