Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, ~1638

Personal privacy, as a concept, was not something I encountered until I was into my twenties. The lack of it forces you to be creative - as a kid, I used to write in my diary in mirror writing, and to this day I can write as quickly in mirror writing as I can the regular way. (Later in high school, I would entertain myself by learning to write with both hands - sadly, not a skill that survived with time). Microsoft Word was a great invention that allowed me to write a lot and to keep prodigious personal journals. By now, I have a big stack of them ordered by year, which form a haphazard map of the upsets in my life. Because of course, you write a lot less when you’re happy, and when things are going well. I don’t have a problem with this, because it is our upsets (however small) that shape our approach to life, and it is our handling of them that defines us most sharply.

I was vaguely browsing some of my old journals the other day and thinking about how the way I write has changed over time. My map of upsets is also of course a map of developing self-definition. The early files seem cringy to me every time, but what I notice now with more compassion is how hard I was working to “write well” and to sound smart. This tendency has almost totally disappeared over the years. I find that as I get older, I write more honestly and I use fewer words to say what I mean. Partly, this is because I understand myself better, but it is also because, I understand better the function that writing plays in my life. It has been a long-standing compulsion because it is one of my primary sense-making tools. Louise Glück says about what writing means to her: “It seems to me that I have wanted to write for the whole of my life. The intensity of this insistence, despite its implausibility, suggests an emotional, rather than literal, accuracy. I think my life didn’t seem my life until I started to write.” Or as Joan Didion famously put it: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Writing is so close to my heart that I can’t live without it, but I have religiously separated my personal and professional writing. This blog is a way to blur the boundaries between the two, an experiment that I hope I can deepen with time. Because writing about the things that matter the most to you is scary, and difficult - the same way that being perceived for who you are can be difficult, unless you are extremely comfortable with yourself. I find that I am able to write most honestly and sharply when there is no audience, and it’s that form of writing that feels the most powerful and freeing. David Whyte, with his unerring ability to put the unspeakable into words, says, “The place where what you think is you and what you think is not you, and where they meet and form a frontier, is the very place from which you learn to speak and write.” It is when I reach this place that I usually find myself making self-discoveries.

Some of us think better when we write, and find that we express ourselves more eloquently in words than in speech. I’ve never been a great talker, with a mind that tends to drift too quickly to maintain a single conversational thread, and I admire people who are good storytellers, orators, and joke-sayers. These are abilities that totally escape me, like a lost map to a different world. But on a page, I find that I make most sense to myself. Louise Gluck traces the seeds of her writing compulsion to a childhood of constant speech-interruption by adults:“I came to have a sense that the self I was in the world, among other selves, was alternately precarious and invisible. I did not think speech was a good conduit to the self, or expression of it, because in my childhood it was not. The page was different. Here my voice had a stability and an immutability, qualities that I passionately craved and never remotely approached in my social interactions. How could I? Stability and immutability are not characteristics of the spoken word”. I too find comfort in the decisiveness of the written word, in knowing that each word has been chosen, rather than blurted out.

No matter the origins of the desire to write, writers have for millennia unanimously complained about how the act of writing is violently difficult and utterly anxiety-inducing. I think it’s because to maintain an honesty of self and integrity of purpose in front of an audience can take everything out of you. Not everyone has that kind of courage. Being a writer requires guts that most of us don’t have - to examine oneself unflinchingly, to examine the people around you with the same frankness, and to hold your line against a moralistic society that will hate you because it really cannot bear to look at its own truths. The best writing says things that everyone feels but avoids admitting. It surfaces dark social truths that are normalized in everyday life. It holds up a mirror to our hypocrisies and the parts of ourselves that we avoid at all costs. Good writing makes you feel, and it makes you feel seen. And exposing yourself in that way can be terrifying. It is why I laugh when I hear anyone talking about how Generative AI will replace writing. It can weakly imitate human writing, yes - but it does not have courage, passion, or pain - and you can’t have good writing without those things and much more. At its core, writing is an utterly human endeavour that helps us bear the unbearableness of feeling and living. If you wish to outsource even sense-making to a machine model, then why live at all? We might as well give up our five senses, our minds, and our lives away too. Buy one, get six free.

Writing is hard work. And good, hard, work imparts its own sets of pleasures. Maya Angelou says: “I just want to feel and then when I start to work I’ll remember. I’ll read something, maybe the Psalms, maybe, again, something from Mr. Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson. And I’ll remember how beautiful, how pliable the language is, how it will lend itself. If you pull it, it says, OK. I remember that and I start to write. Nathaniel Hawthorne says, “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” I try to pull the language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy”. The paring away of the extras, the ability to remove the noise and to whittle experiences and truths down to essentials, only comes with time. Because it is hard won, it is all the more enjoyable as a practice. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about a private diary or a public writing practice. Like anything, writing deepens and simplifies as it ages.

Aging brings other concerns. You tend to lose some memories and hold on faster to others. And what about those of us who have poor memory in the first place? I often mis-remember details and forget important chunks of the past. For me, writing is also a means of record-keeping, and of bearing compassionate witness to my own life. Anais Nin says, “I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived. It was a second life, it was my way of living in a more heightened way”. When I revisit my writing from the past, I often see things in a new light, and I always appreciate how far I have come. It reminds me not to take any joy for granted, and to feel free to live completely in the present.

However, the present can be overwhelming. Every time I open a social media app, a flood of posts - blurring human and AI writing - greets me. The volume of writing here and everywhere is too high, and I don’t know what and how to read anymore. In the digital world, there are many writers who mimic writing, who want to deliver the emotional gut-punch of an excellent piece of writing but at a machine-industrial pace. But you can’t do it dirty like that. Allow it a bit of mystery, some flirting with ideas, time to cook, and a surprise element (will it come when I sit down to write?). All writers are trying to be influencers, and a lot of influencers use writing as their primary medium, but in a sense, the job of a social media influencer runs exactly counter to the job of a writer. Influencers start out sharing authentic self-truths, which attract us to them as an audience. But as their audience grows, they begin to monetize these truths till they no longer reflect reality. Influencers face the pressure to grow fast and maintain high levels of audience engagement and visibility, which compromises the things they are saying to us. Consistent monetization and repeated virality requires making some difficult ethical decisions and often calls for inauthentic strategies.

At a conference talk I heard a few years back, sociologist Ashley Mears spoke about how severe anxiety is a reliable byproduct of the experience of going viral, a finding that stayed with me. The pressure to look perfect and not be hated, in front of a crowd that huge, can be debilitating. Anne Lamott quotes Kurt Vonnegut, “When I write I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth”, and she says, “So go ahead and make big scrawls and mistakes. Use lots of paper. Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friends.” On social media, you’re not allowed to make any mistakes. But you can’t write properly, Lamott reminds us, if you turn this mean-spiritedness of purpose towards yourself. David Whyte also warns of the dangers of allowing anyone else to assess your writing: “There’s always a danger of losing the particularity of your own voice whenever you put yourself too much in someone else’s sphere, as in writing workshops where there is real pressure for you start to sound like everyone else. You can get very good in this kind of greenhouse forcing you to write and speak very quickly, but you may never get beyond just being good because the individual voice is so particular, and I think it should be inured from coercion, subtle or not so subtle, of any kind.”

Perhaps we should all return to private diaries then, and find our voices and truths at our own pace. Are there other modalities which allow you similar kinds of self-discovery? I’d love to hear about them.

If you’d like a prompt to start your private writing practice today, I’ll leave you with these beautiful words by David Whyte (emphasis mine). He is speaking of poetry but I think it applies to any kind of personal writing. (Here is the full interview).

“To write poetry, you must make it very a physical frontier in your own body; our very human bodies are always very emotional at the frontier of realization, and beneath that emotion is the physical substrate from where the emotion arose. That’s where you go to write. Oftentimes at that frontier of realization which you represent through what we call writing, you will break out into tears—at least I do—and that’s when you’ve gotten through this carapace between the way in which the emotion is emanating on the surface and its true source. You’re bringing parts of yourself together that haven’t spoken in a long time. Camus said, ‘live to the point of tears’ not as an invitation to maudlin sentimentality, but to this edge between what you know about yourself and the world and what you are just beginning to understand.

It’s interesting to think of being moved as a practice. Human beings might pride themselves on not being moved until it becomes a barrier to self-understanding. It is interesting to think that there are simple practices such as listening to music in a way that allows you to be moved: by refusing to have it as a background and maybe even turning the lights off while hearing Sheku play the cello. Or to allow yourself to think about the people you love in a moving way. And as I say, it’s not to indulge in becoming emotional but to get to the source beneath, to get to the chordal structure that resonates and brings your body and our voice alive.”

So, spend some time on something that moves you, and then sit down to write for a bit. You might be surprised at what comes out.

It’s been 8 years since I got my laptop, which means I place it at about a grand old 80 in human years. It’s certainly showing its age - the last few years, the sound has gone, so it just plays static unless I plug in my earphones. The battery conked soon after the sound - if it’s not plugged in non-stop, it tires and dies in less than an hour. So casually working out of cafes is no longer an option, unless I scope out plugpoints first. My laptop has also developed some idiosyncratic habits in its old age - once in a few days, it suddenly dies and then takes ages to resuscitate. And its agility has reduced a lot - switching from one Chrome tab to another can take literal minutes. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, because I love my laptop to bits. I have the greatest amount of patience for all these quirks because I have the greatest hatred for planned obsolescence. And so I’ve mastered the art of coaxing it in and out of tasks, and adapting to a slower workflow prone to unexpected halts, with zero complaints and total cheer.

I got this laptop before I started my PhD. At the time, I was having trouble letting go of the previous laptop, a bright blue Sony Vaio that I had kept for just as long. It was thicc and beautiful but by then it had broken hinges and the sound also had stopped working and it was practically unusable, but still I laboured under the delusion that I could start and finish the PhD with it…until I couldn’t anymore. That laptop saw me through high school, a 5 year BA+MA program, and a “gap” year of sorts where I was also working as a research assistant. I wrote so many bad journal entries and terrible poems on it. I still remember it fondly. I never saw that gorgeous snake-scaley blue on a laptop again.

This laptop was sleeker and lighter. It looked serious, a dark black that said it meant business. I felt determined to be on top of file management and backups as a brand new PhD student, and of course I wasn’t. And life, and tech, got much more complicated in these last 8 years. I reluctantly placed my hard drives aside and migrated to my university’s cloud storage account. Every 6 months, I still backed everything up to 2 hard drives because I felt suspicious about this cloud business and other people being in control of my data. Boy, were things about to get worse.

Before I knew it, my laptop became an inextricable part of my life. But life in the laptop started to get ever more overwhelming and complicated. So many decisions to make - which browser to use? Where do I store my stuff? Should I clean up my emails everyday or once a year? What do I do about all these photos? And the ethical quandaries became endless once we started to get more information about where the hardware, software, and cloud infrastructures came from, what they cost, and how they were made. Every few months I went down the rabbithole of investigating how to protect my privacy and minimize online surveillance, each time concluding that setting up local servers and carrying out a hundred hyper specific tasks was beyond my capacity. And the slow trickle of guilt started to come in…building up to a little ocean that I wade in everyday now, with every micro decision I make online. So do we all, I think.

I don’t mean to anthropomorphize tech devices either - especially seeing the level of emotional entanglements taking place between people and their AI chatbots now. But we can’t escape the fact that we have deeply parasocial relationships with these devices that are constantly watching, listening to, tracking, and recording every move we make and every subliminal thought we express into search bars, chatbot message boxes, and anonymous fora. We have gotten way too comfortable with this whole situation - so much so that we feel uncomfortable when left with our own thoughts and no audience. How did we flip this fast? What are we willing to give up to get some basic rights back?

Sociotechnical scholars will tell you that it’s not just about the devices - everything technical is shaped by the social environment around it, and paying attention to that is key. For example - when I got out of the Bangalore airport recently, I took a shuttle bus from Terminal 2 to Terminal 1. A young man came up to me and my friend and asked if we could fill up a survey about the airport. My friend, more kindly than me, agreed, while I told him that I didn’t want to fill it. He begged and cajoled me, saying “Ma’am, we are given a target of 150 surveys a day that we have to complete, please please fill it”. So I opened the survey on my phone through a QR code. It said ‘VOTE HERE FOR THE WORLD’S BEST AIRPORT’. He peered over our shoulders and stood there like a class monitor, to make sure that we filled every one of the THIRTY FIVE (!!??) questions. I was thoroughly annoyed by then - and then I got more irritated when I saw the questions. Possibly the worst survey design I have ever seen. They were things like:

*Which airport do you consider to be the best?

*Why have you named this as the best airport?

*How would you rate the creche facilities in the airport?

*How would you rate the prayer room in the airport?

And so on.

Most questions (except the text answer ones) had to be answered on a scale of 1-5 (low to high). Every question was compulsory. There was no way to skip or mark a question as ‘not applicable’.

I showed this to the surveyor (since he was already watching our phones like a hawk) and said, trying to be reasonable, “Look, we haven’t used any of these facilities. Our flight arrived and we just got out of the airport. How are we supposed to answer all these questions?”. He said desperately, “Ma’am it doesn’t matter, just fill anything. Just put some random number. Please just complete the survey”. At this point, I was supremely annoyed. Bad survey design AND social coercion? NO THANK YOU. I shot back at him with “What do you mean just fill anything? Bro, there are THIRTY FIVE questions! You can’t force us to do this. I don’t want to lie and I am not going to fill this survey”. He was really upset and kept asking me again and again to fill it, saying his employment depended on it. Finally I just gave in and started marking the lowest score for every single question. He stood there checking, watching every swipe we made to make sure we finished it. Once we were done, he said, “Ok thank you ma’am. Now please give me your name and phone number”. I burst at this point and refused to share my number with this hack survey company. But he kept at it, kept asking, and I simultaneously felt angry at the situation and really bad for this young man whose employment hinged on forcing a hundred people to fill this fake ass survey every day. In the end I gave him a fake number. He thanked us, visibly relieved, and went to the next person.

What do we make of this, sociotechnically speaking? I mean immediately, the veneer of our big ‘Digital India’ hopes and dreams gets a big kick in the face. On one hand, it could be told as a story about widespread internet access and digital proficiency, big and swift survey data collection, and heavily incentivized data workers. But the real stuff behind the big promises is - forced QR codes, social coercion, compromised data, unethical methods, and data workers who have no choice but to do this kind of morally compromised and desperate work.

Second, the contrast between American/“academic” ideas of digital privacy, vs real life experiences with technology in a country like India, coudn’t be more glaring. First of all there IS no concept of digital, or social, privacy in India. People feel entitled to be in each other’s spaces and faces (collectivist society - pros and cons, remember?) and to demand things (like watching every answer you fill on a 35-question personal survey), especially when they are being pressured and have no other choice.

I’ll also point out here that tech privacy is the last priority for people who don’t have access to technology or equal resources in the first place. People will HAPPILY give up data privacy and rights if they can get access to mobile phones, laptops, and the internet, and more broadly speaking, a shot at a decent job. You would, too. The promise of access to a datafied world is alluring, but the promise of employment comes above all else. For tech privacy to matter, it has to be a structural priority and it has to be built in as a core value from the top. It is tied to basic dignity and fundamental rights - but no trace of that can be found in this survey situation - not for the surveyor who is placed in this humiliating and desperate position, and not for the survey respondents who are treated like errant schoolchildren forced to complete a task set by their whiny teacher.

Third, you have to ask about the company running the survey. It looks like some international organization, but my first thought was that this must be an airport builder who is trying to stack up huge survey samples. Because this is how data quality in Aatmanirbhar Bharat works now. Two months later, if you see in the newspaper that the “Majority of airport travellers rate X-designed airports as highest in terms of service, convenience and quality”, complete with idiots defending the survey sample as proof of rigour in the comments, then you probably know the means through which that data were procured. First they came for the national statistical surveys and the census, then they went after all the solid research organizations every time a report said something that painted the government in a bad light, and by this point forget the statistics, we just have the lies and damned lies left.

But I have totally digressed from what I was saying about my laptop. I was talking about the broader stakes of our investments into personal devices and, I think, talking myself out of guilt by pointing to the sociotechnical environment around us that has locked us into this way of life. And why am I feeling so guilty today? Because I think it’s finally time to move to another laptop.

Along with the guilt, there’s also some excitement and hope. Wow, I can finally be free from plug point reliance every time I’m in a room. And maybe I can get on Zoom calls without earphones? How radical. In the spirit of sociotechnical responsibility and the unfettered optimism that comes with fresh starts, I will plot my escape from Google Chrome into DuckDuckGo, and try out Proton Mail, and so on. I will have wild hopes about my digital hygiene this time around (completely unjustified looking at my previous track record). Hope is a rare commodity these days, though, so I’ll take what I can get. If you have any advice or tips about 1) digital privacy, 2) data management, and/or 3) digital hygiene, please send them to me in the comments or in private!

Sushi Eaters by Iona Yamako, 2025 (taken from her Instagram page, @myyaakov)

Do you remember how it felt when you first got access to the internet? It was such an exciting time. I spent a long time deciding what my email username should be, and selecting the theme for my Gmail inbox. I dutifully participated in many chain-mail threads that promised doom unless I forwarded them to all my friends. There were websites like StumbleUpon which let you discover new corners of the internet. So many of us kids got interested in learning HTML and making websites. And the best part of course was game sites and fanfic sites. I once got banned from the internet after being caught with steamy Hermione fanfic. Anyway. For a long time, computers and phones felt like windows to the huge amazing world outside. They let me and millions of other girls bypass so many of the gendered restrictions that made that world inaccessible to us (that is, the fraction of us that could get access to the internet in the first place). Online, you found spaces where you could experiment with self-expression, discover new interests, and find out more about yourself via finding out more about the world.

But things have changed pretty drastically since then, haven’t they? Today, my phone and laptop feel like like anxiety-inducing, expectation-laden, data-grabbing prisons that are somehow stealing my time, energy, and creative capacities. But I also can’t seem to go anywhere or do anything without them. Once we collectively opted in to these technologies as a society, it has become harder and harder to opt out in any meaningful or permanent way. There is an app for every separate thing, each app requires a login, I can’t escape ads, the personal surveillance I am subjected to without consent is off-the-charts, and worst of all, the app interfaces are somehow getting shittier and shittier, and it’s all fully driving me up the wall. And I’m not the only one feeling this way. There’s a word for it now and a book about it too: Enshittification, by Cory Doctorow. (I’ve only just started reading it but it’s great so far).

Alongside the public discourse around enshittification and the annoying consequences of Big Tech monopolies, a parallel discourse has emerged around the need for community-building in the current moment. Everyone is feeling lonely and alienated and enshittified and pushed to the limit, and they want their village. Everyone is romanticizing collectivist cultures and joint families and the idea of sharing their burdens with others. This is quite irritating for those of us who actually come from collectivist cultures and have experienced what they are like, and what they cost. What has struck me the most is that while lots of people want a village to care for them, very few people are willing to show up to care for others. The idea of what you can do for your village or what kind of labour it takes to create one, is singularly and conveniently missing from the discourse.

Building community doesn’t just mean asking others for help and getting it - it also means reciprocally showing up for others when they need you, even when it is inconvenient, even when you are tired, even when life is busy. Otherwise, what you want is not community - it is servants who will do the care work for you while you get to focus on yourself. And that happens to be exactly what a lot of digital platforms are also trying to sell to you - through food delivery apps, care work apps, and ride-sharing apps for instance. Part of the draw is that you don’t even have to see or interact with the person providing the service to you. But what if we actually paid care workers well and had a robust enough circle of friends and family who could carpool with us, and hang out without appointments, and cook and share meals? Wouldn’t it make for a better life? Yes! And it would also put most of these platforms out of business.

Some of these thoughts have been on my mind lately as I prepare to return to paper writing, based on my research about care work platforms. Back in the Bay Area, I am now focusing on small habits and local activities rather than ambitious plans and big goals. I am thinking of it as a switch from Big Things That Can Scale to Small Things That Can Sustain (me, and others). I feel skeptical of heuristics for success that ask us to keep achieving more, to think of bigger and bigger goals, to scale up indefinitely. The expectation of infinite growth seems to me a symptom for many of the problems that are afflicting us as a society. It doesn’t seem like any of us are feeling good trying to live up to these impossible standards for work and life. What if we instead practice how to stay, maintain, and root ourselves, and our work and everyday lives? So in defence of small scale formations, community-based projects maintained with love, and care that keeps us feeling good, here are a few things I have enjoyed in the last few months.

Radio Garden

I’ve cut out all my subscriptions for a while now (except Netflix), including my beloved Youtube Music. But without that or Spotify, what am I supposed to do? YouTube Music is hell without a subscription - there is an ad after every song, and I play music all day. So I have gone back to Radio Garden - which lets you discover and listen to radio stations from around the world. I especially love their Browse feature, which gives you radio station playlists with themes like Rare Tongues (radio stations broadcasting music in unique languages), Musical Roots (music from places that birthed musical genres), and Time Travel (recordings from decades gone by). The music I generally listen to is all over the place, and I jump genres a lot, so this suits me very well.

The Public Library

The public library system is, in my opinion, one of the best things about the USA. If you don’t already know this, you can get a free library card at your nearest local library, and use it to avail all kinds of services. Libby is one of my favourite things - I not only borrow all my books through it but also maintain several free magazine subscriptions. In the last couple of weeks, with my laptop out of commission, I have been grateful for the laptop loan system at the Palo Alto Public Library.

Conversations with friends have opened me up to more that the libraries have to offer - like borrowing binoculars or getting state park reservations. Every once in a few weeks, I go on a solo date to the library to browse graphic novels and kids’ books, because adults too need wonder and whimsy in their lives. I recently signed up to be a volunteer at my local library, and have started learning about how the library system works and how community members can better support their mission. If you love books and learning, there’s no happier way to spend your time.

LaborTech Research Network: India Collective

This year, I have really enjoyed being a part of a fairly small group of platform work researchers who also work with unions in India. Because it is a small-scale group, we have been able to maintain regular activities and events for the most part. I have loved facilitating our meetings and have found in this group a lot of support, inspiration, and wisdom. It has also been a wonderful way to keep up with cross-sectoral organizing updates, and new developments in the policy and legal landscape around platform work in India. As someone who is not an expert on these topics, it’s allowed me to learn more and educate myself better, which has in turn enriched my research and organizing work. Now, we have also started working on some writing projects together. During this break, the group has allowed me to maintain a connection to the things I care about the most and to feel supported as I come back to writing myself. I also love that it is a space that allows for people to step away and come back as they need, and for meetings and activities to remain fluid rather than rigid.

Kanopy

Kanopy is a streaming video platform for libraries where you can find movies, documentaries, and shows without ads or other forms of enshittification. A friend very recently put me on to this. You can get access through your local library (by logging in with library credentials). You get a certain number of credits every month - my library gives me 9, and a movie costs about 2 credits to watch. My friend A argued that it forces you to be thoughtful about what you watch, and to follow through. I don’t know if I enjoy the credit system (I do love unlimited access and the ability to ditch a choice), but there’s also something to be said about the joys of finite choices. I watched a movie on Kanopy earlier this week, and I have to say it was a very pleasurable experience. So much so that I’m considering cancelling Netflix!

The last thing I want to say in its favour is that I love the idea of us developing individual taste in things again. OTT platforms have got us to this place where we are all watching the same shitty shows while complaining about how shitty they are (Emily in Paris, anyone?). But remember when we all used to have weird and niche interests that hadn’t been overly homogenized the way they are now? And we could introduce them to each other and experience the joys of discovery and experimentation? Kanopy and services like it give me a glimpse of that world again. I’m not very knowledgeable about movies, so I would really love to know if you have other such video streaming services that you like. Please drop me a note or comment if so!

Blogging

Of course I have to mention blogging. Drowning in the sea of endless bad news and getting bombarded by way more information than I could reasonably process in a day - my refuge is places like this little blog. I enjoy blogs and websites where people are just doing their own thing, just talking about their own lives, just documenting their hobbies and interests without trying to monetize it or get famous. And my blog is a place where I am teaching myself to write without fear or expectations again - to just get used to the act of writing, and to allow myself to enjoy it.

Local Journalism

I also want to give a shout-out to local journalists. It’s a dying profession, but one that is much-needed and immensely valuable. There’s very little we can do reading about horrible things happening far away, but it’s very important for all of us to know what’s happening in our own backyards. And local journalists do that work very well. They too are residents, so you know they care. They record and document the happenings of the locality, they call attention to the issues affecting residents, and they offer ideas and prompts for action. I no longer live in Mumbai, but I have been following as many galli journalists as I can, and it makes me feel connected to the happenings of the city I love. And it’s my humble way of supporting their work with a like and follow.

In the Bay Area, I have started picking up local newspapers on my morning walks. There are several, and the latest one I picked up is called The Almanac (“nonprofit local news for the midpeninsula”). I also pay more attention to flyers and posters in my neighbourhood now, and am trying to take a little extra effort to be clued in. Unfortunately, local journalism is immensely underfunded and undervalued. But I don’t think it will ever die, because it is a labour of love. I hope to see it make a comeback in the future. Especially as we watch billionaires buy up all the big national newspapers and decimate journalism to bits.

Merlin

Ok, I could go on forever, but I’ll end with a mention of the Merlin app, developed by ornithologists at Cornell University. A friend who is an avid bird-watcher told me about it recently. Merlin is a neat, well-made app with no ads or any other nonsense. The interface is so nice and it’s such a pleasure to use. It lets you identify the birds around you. (You can use sounds, or photos, or manual descriptions and it works well with all three). I have started using it on my daily walks around the house and am practicing recognizing the sounds of the birds in my neighbourhood (it makes me feel like I am playing Pokemon Go). I like to know the trees, flowers, and creatures around me, but I am not particularly systematic about it. This app has been a nice and gentle way to deepen that knowledge. I know a lot of this post has been USA-specific, but this app works well everywhere, so do give it a try.

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Please add to my little list with your own! I’d love your suggestions and ideas. An enshittified life is not inevitable - we don’t have to keep subscribing to platforms that are draining us. Let’s discover, play with, and create our lives in ways that fill our cups. In that spirit, have a wonderful weekend!

A seashell I found on the beach today which looked like a mysterious painting.

2025 was an extremely grim year by all means. Fascist governments have stopped pretending to be democratic and have started squeezing their vice grip on the workers of the world. Labour protections, employment guarantees, and work environments are being decimated everywhere. The tech industry (and industry in general) has overtly allied itself with right-wing governments and abandoned the pretence of “making the world a better place”. The ultimate purpose of tech has become clear: all roads lead to comprehensive digital surveillance, AI-assisted genocidal weaponry, mass addiction, and effective propaganda. The GenAI hype bubble is destroying our soil and water at record speeds at a time when global warming has already crossed the point of reversal. In India and the USA, national leaders are working overtime to destroy democratic and educational institutions and squash dissent. Politicans and oligarchs are making record amounts of wealth on the backs of working-class citizens who can no longer afford to live. Young people everywhere are confused and afraid because this is not the world they have been raised to succeed in. The rules have changed, the future is unclear, and feelings of alienation are extreme. Where are we supposed to go from here?

*

Today is the first day of 2026, and when I look back over my shoulder at 2025, I see a personal landscape of really high highs and really low lows.

Teaching

I co designed and taught a full course for the first time, which was exciting. It made me think about what kinds of teaching and questioning are most useful and urgent for students right now. In the sections I taught, I found that students were most compelled by questions around what makes for a meaningful life in today’s world, and how to pursue it against all the noise and pressure around them.

Writing

I wrote several new book chapters and journal articles, which felt satisfying, even though it will take them a year or more to be out in print. But they also made me question what kinds of writing can meet the challenges of the present, given the inaccessible nature of academic publishing. I thought about the tension between academic legitimacy (which we critique as exclusionary) and the erosion of expertise (given the proliferation of disinformation in the name of fake experts), and where and how to place myself.

Taking U-Turns

I wrote a book proposal and then decided to abandon it for a while to let the ideas cook. I felt a bit ashamed about that and sticking to this decision took me more courage than I had expected, but it felt right. Sometimes I feel anxious that I need to move faster, and other times I remind myself that good things take time. Now when I think about the book, its shape has changed in wonderful new ways in my head. I’m excited to get to it if/whenever it happens.

Precarity

I lost a year of my postdoc funding, which threw me into an abrupt visa-less situation and felt really scary and precarious. I was briefly and desperately on the job market, but I realized in the middle of an interview that I really wanted to take a break and that there would never be a good time for it. So I stopped applying and committed to the break, and I am so glad I did.

Organizing

I spent a good amount of time organizing this year, and it has filled my cup more than anything else. The kinds of organizing I participated in were high-impact and low-visibility, which I found suited me really well, as I don’t much enjoy being in the spotlight. I also struggle at an extreme level with replying to messages and requests on time, so I started learning how to balance my needs and nature with the needs and nature of my work. I still feel guilty often, but I have managed to start saying no once in a while. What I want to share about organizing work is: taking action helps. not knowing how to start is okay. you learn by asking and doing. there are many small and easy ways to be of use. Go and text or email or ask someone today if you can.

Travelling

I went on an impromptu solo trip to Europe (or as impromptu as possible when you need a Schengen visa), and it was the best and most random decision ever. I discovered that I’m not as scatterbrained and logistically impaired as I thought, and I had all kinds of fun. Walking for 10 hours a day for a few weeks straight, lugging my bags up countless slopes and stairs, and letting my mind pause and body work, did wonders for me. I made new friends in hostel dorms, I let myself be amazed and delighted, and I felt really carefree for a change. I love the anonymity of big cities and it was wonderful trying out new mes in so many new places.

Razing the Earth

Right after that, I fell into some deep disillusionment and to be honest, I’ve been feeling kind of depressed the last few months. I have been thinking of it as a clearing of the field, a making way for newer and gentler ways of inhabiting my life. In other words, it is really welcome. I have been questioning a lot of things lately and slowly picking my way through these mental bogs. I am learning to ask for help and take help. To enjoy even this as deeply as possible.

Home

Being in India has been wonderful. But it’s also made me realize that home was never one fixed place. Wherever I go, I am yearning for places past. Now, I’m accepting that home is where I am, and I don’t need to wait for long-term certainties. I will make home and bring home with me wherever I go. As I got immersed in the day-to-day activities of home life in India, I released my expectations from this break and abandoned some of my goals. For the first time since I can remember, I am greeting the new year with no goals, just a desire to slow down and inhabit everything I do even more fully.

Beloveds

The best part of my year was time spent with my loved ones and chosen family. I continued to put this over everything else, but no amount of time ever feels like it is enough! I’ll tell you what would be an excellent technological invention: some way to jump from where I am to where my friends are in a second. (I know, I know).

I don’t have an answer for the grim happenings of 2025 which will undoubtedly continue into the new year. But my wishes for all of us are: that we be there for each other and ourselves more; that we speak up to and for our friends and colleagues more; that we engage in more forms of collective organizing and care; and that we learn to use our voices, even if they are shaky. We can make 2026 a better place to be, and I hope we do <3

*

Postscript: some beautiful things I enjoyed in 2025 and that I wish for you

• The reflection of the moon on the sands of a beach, shimmering as you walk on it barefoot

• Butterflies, hummingbirds, kingfishers, and parrots, and all their soothing blues and greens, whirs and blurs

• Paintings old and new in which you see something of yourself

• Walking on a road lined with old tree canopies which glitter sunlight down on you

• Uncontrollable laughter around your friends, the kind that every time you try to stop you all start up again

• Hot, delicious, fragrant food that melts in your mouth with the force of a thousand tastes and textures

• Deep dreamy sleep the kind that when you wake up it feels like you travelled to outer space and came back with the brain of an alien

• A walk in the rain at an unholy hour that you come back from feeling drenched, happy, and really alive

• Endless cups of tea, maggi, and hot fresh gossip with your best friends

• A good cry over a well-worn movie you have watched a thousand times

Happy 2026 friends!

Soap Bubbles by Jean Chardin (1733).

My father is a professor, and I grew up on an academic campus. So, I had an early and highly privileged exposure into the world of academia, even before I knew what that meant. I remember that one of my early playtime activities, apart from making imaginary cups of tea, was ticking old thesis copies with a red pen. I ended up as far away from engineering as possible though, and into an experimental 5-year Integrated MA program that threw bits of many disciplines at us. I never learnt to think in a straight line, instead we taught ourselves to criss-cross disciplinary ideas and ways of thinking. It felt like a giant mishmash at the time but now I can see the threads and how they shaped my interests. I think the hardest thing for me in the first few years of undergrad was learning how to read. But good things came of it. It was deeply satisfying to crack layers of meaning from a text that seemed undecipherable at first.

The idea of an academic career had taken hold of me early - this is common for children of academics. Between the social programming, the privileged access, and the access to networks and know-how, academia is usually a pretty gate-kept space where a very high proportion of incoming members have family who are in academia. Many of us also see it as a noble profession, a form of service, a calling. It’s hard to break in and stay without help - my father was one of those people, and I saw how that worked too. The longer I spent in academia myself, I more I noticed its ironies - how resistant this ‘noble profession’ was to any change in its composition and ways of functioning, how hierarchical and violent it could be, who it delighted in excluding and humiliating. I also couldn’t unsee how much achieving success boiled down to personal politics, networks, and relationships. Often, asking the wrong question, having the wrong opinion, or liking the wrong person could get you silently excluded from positions and opportunities. The hidden curriculum of academia seemed really threatening, with no real map to guide the way. Then again, this is also the case in most other industries. Except, they have these things called HR departments and we don’t.

At the same time, there was lots to love. If you love learning, this can be an amazing place to be. There is genuine excitement in making new discoveries, in pushing the boundaries of knowledge, in finding new ways to make sense of the world and therefore of yourself. I feel extremely passionate about that, and it is something that should be open to everyone. If you have a good research group and mentors, it feels inspiring and magical and energizing to be surrounded by people who love research as much as you do and who you can talk to for hours and share ideas and writing with. There is something so moving about teaching young people and sparking their interests and coming into contact with their energy and experiences and ways of seeing the world. There is flexibility in how you go about your day and that’s great if you struggle with fixed routines, though as someone on Twitter put it, ‘you get the freedom to choose which 7 days of the week you want to work’. There is a sense of limitlessness in ways good and bad, you can keep on finding new horizons and new oceans to learn how to swim in. I think as academics, we also don’t realize how good we have it sometimes - like it’s only now when I’m losing access to university libraries, that I realize what an incredible gift it was to have 24x7 access to any repository of information that I wanted. It feels like a painful, physical loss. And the ability to choose what lines of enquiry to pursue, what problem you want to research and investigate, and be paid for it (but nowhere near enough), that too feels like a priceless gift.

Perhaps the academic tendency to focus on bad things has something to do with the culture of critical reading and analysis. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. We are trained early to pick holes in arguments, to find the flaws and limitations, to think about how it could be more and better. It is part of the foundational training of an academic, especially in the social sciences. And so most of us are also paralyzed by our own work, holding ourselves to the expectations of the permanently unsatisfied critics in our own heads. But I have loved it even more when teachers and mentors have insisted that we practice 'generous reading’, to train our gaze to see what is good and great about a piece of research and how it can inspire us in our own work. When we practice this instead, we also gently shift the way we approach our own writing. The culture of criticality has spread beyond academia, it is all around us now. We are always picking apart things, people, ideas, desires, ourselves, till we are left with nothing but bad feelings and aggressive defensiveness. Academic or not, I feel we forget to ask question zero: Why are we doing this thing? Does this require a critical reading or a generous one? What do I need from this piece of writing, this person, this idea, myself, right now? A dissatisfaction with critical reading has seeped into my pores like an allergic reaction - I find myself irritated seeing people who immediately jump to pick flaws before they have even finished digesting the idea. It also makes criticizing the really awful things harder, because we are both desenzitized and overloaded at the same time, all the time.

Academia also makes you feel like that sometimes - both numb and overwhelmed at once. For me part of the trouble is with disciplinary boundaries - I always found them hard, and maybe it comes from how my undergrad program was structured. It was like I just couldn’t see them, and I would keep bumping into their invisible walls. In the Sociology PhD program, I couldn’t wrap my head around using only sociological theory in my work, in applying to only sociological conferences, and publishing in only sociological journals. It simply didn’t make sense to me that learning and writing worked that way. And it’s also a transnational thing - because social science departments in India don’t have these silos. I’ve been lucky to have had incredibly supportive mentors in my academic journey, and the most fantastic PhD advisors ever, so pushing the boundaries in the US never became, well, a problem that needed disciplining. I ended up publishing papers all over the place, writing in different formats, and doing a tech internship, which I think was unprecedented in my department for an international student. But I always felt I was a ‘bad academic’ because my path looked like a messy zigzag and not a neat line. Despite ‘making’ it in some ways, I was always confused about the rules and feeling like I was not getting anything right.

After the PhD, I came to a department of Communication for my postdoc, jumping disciplines again. Communication is a younger field that is more used to crazy interdisciplinary work and it was fun to see how people were applying ideas and methods here. Again I was lucky to have a brilliant mentor and a wonderful group, and I ended up thinking a lot about what theory means to me and how to play around with it. I’ve often felt stuck in developing theoretical arguments because all I can see are the lineages of that theory and it is really hard to claim an original argument as your own. I suspect that women have a harder time with this. Somewhere down the line, I came to the conclusion (maybe incorrectly) that no idea is truly original - if you read deeply and far back enough, someone has definitely said it already, just in a different form. So what would be the value of rehashing it as an original idea instead of simply re-attributing it? What is the utility of a theory that dresses up in new outfits depending on the discipline, the time, the person? It feels ridiculous to say that you can’t have new ideas, but I really think we forget how vast and deep the temporal universe of human thinking is. And yet, I do believe there can be value in working on those ideas again and again, in arriving at them from new directions, in expressing them in new ways, in using them towards new ends. When it comes to myself, I am so bothered about attributing ideas to others that I forget to attribute my own ideas to myself. And so most of my original ideas have remained stuck as glimmers hidden inside doors with others’ names on them. I am trying to pull them out now, and it feels embarrassing to admit this, that being strategic with my work has always felt like it was beyond me.

Some of my trouble with academia and with theory is also the question of practice. We know from the best theorists that theory should come from, and go back to, practice. This means that as much as some people might look down on empirical research, there can’t be good theory without good empirics, and good descriptive work. Academic value systems assign high value to abstract and theoretical ideas, and low value to descriptive and empirical work (and you can guess why). But you can’t have one without the other. Neither one is inherently better or worse, they are intertwined. What does it mean for social scientists to develop the relationship between their theory and practice? How do we treat our field relationships? What do we do with our findings? How do we translate our work? Who is our audience? What’s the use of our work? These questions if applied correctly, are constantly unsettling and that is a good thing. They also trouble our engagements with theory and theorizing. What will your theory look like when it is being read by academics, as opposed to policymakers, as opposed to labour activists, as opposed to practitioners, as opposed to gig workers? Where and how do you want it to land? What do you want to get out of it, what do you want it to give others? These questions can help us find our way. But often, the directions we find ourselves wanting to take, conflict with what it takes to get a job and to keep one, and then what should we do?

This is especially hard to answer in the current political environment, which is filled with increasing uncertainty and violence. Academia and the project of higher education are explicitly under attack, because critical thinkers are a threat to authoritarian regimes of power. Theory and critical analysis - both are hard-hitting tools when used right. But our leaders want obedient workers they can exploit, not original thinkers who can challenge the world they want to build. On one hand, it means the work of an academic has never been harder. On the other, it has never been more important.

For me, all of these questions have come to a rolling boil in my head till the only thing that made sense, was to step back for a bit. Already I can feel myself slowing down. The lack of a rush is helping me rediscover my priorities and interests. I am exploring some new directions, and it feels exciting. I don’t know what my relationship with academia is going to be. Maybe a permanent break up. Maybe a situationship. Maybe a marriage. But you have to figure out and love who you are without the relationship, before committing, right?

I’m looking for places where I can publish my writing. If you’d like to host this essay, or have me write for your publication, newspaper, magazine or blog (academic or otherwise), please shoot me an email at b.isha.ravi at gmail.com.

Appendix: Once an academic, always an academic

If you like to think about theory, here are some materials from a discussion section I organized on the topic:

Texts:

• Graham, E. (2005). Theory and theorizing. Questioning geography: Fundamental debates, 258-273. (The process of theorizing: 15 pages)

• Clifford, J. (1989). Notes on travel and theory. Inscriptions, 5(5.29), 11. (Decolonizing theory: 6 pages)

• Nagar, R. (2002). Footloose researchers,’traveling’ theories, and the politics of transnational feminist praxis. Gender, place and culture: A journal of Feminist Geography, 9(2), 179-186. (Troubling theory: 7 pages)

• Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). Unbecoming claims: Pedagogies of refusal in qualitative research. Qualitative inquiry, 20(6), 811-818. (Refusing theory: 7 pages). If you’re reading just one thing, let it be this.

• Nagar, R. (2014). Introduction. Muddying the waters: Coauthoring feminisms across scholarship and activism. University of Illinois Press. (A counterpoint to theory: 22 pages)

Discussion or reflection questions:

• Why do you theorize? What are your investments into theory and theory-making?

• Do you have an internal map you follow when creating theory? What are the bogs, swamps, quicksands on your route? Are there places where you tend to get lost?

• How do we as theorists travel across disciplines, locations, audiences, and personal moral landscapes? What does this do to the theories we use and make?

• Is there value to resisting or refusing theory? What does that do for (or against) us?

• How do you envision the relationship between theory, practice, and action? What are the difficulties in realizing this vision?

Roots by Frida Kahlo (1943).

When I moved from Mumbai to California in 2018, one of the first things I saw was a fit, blonde, middle-aged couple in athleisure, running (in slow-motion, it seemed) along a perfectly manicured suburban path, pushing a twin stroller together. I looked down at the stroller, to find two tiny rat-dogs looking back at me as they zoomed by. One of them (the dogs, I mean) was sporting a bright pink hairband and the other a furry little ponytail, on which was perched a tiny bow.

I think of this memory often and it still cracks me up. It was a fitting introduction to California. Though I was stubbornly against structured exercise and in favour of brisk-walking everywhere, even I succumbed to the allure of Californian outdoorsy culture over the years of graduate school. I built up a little bit of base stamina, became open to trying new activities, and don’t shrink at the thought of a hike anymore. These were wonderful gifts to my previously sedentary personality. And then I moved up north to the Bay Area, where things got weirder.

Bay Area wellness culture is the Frakenstein you get when you mix California’s love for physical activity with Silicon Valley’s love for optimization (with a heavy dollop of cultural appropriation on top). This culture has been created almost single-handedly by the engineers in the valley. Health Frankenstein is everywhere and he moves around slowly but surely, infecting everyone in his path. The entire valley is in his grip.

Health Frankenstein’s local mascot is Andrew Huberman, a neuroscience professor at Stanford who runs a massively popular podcast on how to efficiently achieve optimal health. The podcast covers a broad range of topics, from general health things like how to recover from injuries quicker and how to sleep better, to general life things like how to have better relationships and how to achieve inner peace. What is striking is how the content is framed - the words ‘science, ‘optimize’, ‘performance’, ‘control’, and ‘improve’ jump out at you over and over - heavily invoking rationality, logic, and scienctific enquiry as core values for this content. Huberman does not give you diets or rules, he gives you Protocols. Like the Cold Plunge Protocol, which is really popular: “deliberate cold exposure to increase dopamine levels”, from 30-120 seconds, at 37°F to 55°F, best done after the Sunlight Protocol, which is a similarly precisely defined function to get some sunlight in the morning. And so on.

Naturally, the techbros of the valley have fallen deeply in love - the man represents engineering mentality turned up to its highest setting, its rays benevolently spreading to cover every aspect of life - work, health, love, even spirituality (see episode: ‘Science & Health Benefits of Belief in God & Religion’). There’s even a book: Protocols: Operating Manual for the Human Body. Huberman is a local god - he inspires fervent devotion, and his scriptures are followed to the letter. But see it through my more cynical gaze: the men are all dieting, hard! Women sympathize and roll their eyes - we have been through this before. ‘How to Control Your Cortisol to Avoid Burnout’? Who wouldn’t want to know? But the whole thing gives me the ick. In the Bay Area, engineers routinely reduce life pursuits to optimization problems, to the extent that it has become the overarching culture of the valley. And I have a problem with that. I don’t want my pursuit of a healthy life to be reduced to a set of rigid diets protocols. I don’t want Health Hacking to become the main topic of conversation when I am hanging out in a crowd. And more than that, I think that framing health as an optimization problem actually feeds into why people feel stressed and unhealthy here in the first place, rather than taking away from it: life is hyper-structured, work is all-consuming, and there is very little time or space for spontaneity or free fun. Turning even your little morning walk into a rigid Sunlight Protocol is only going to make it worse.

Closely tied to the culture of health optimization is the culture of constant tracking and self-surveillance. After all, how can you optimize your health if you don’t measure it first? And if you didn’t measure it, did you even do it? Forget about diamond rings and statement watches: in the Bay, Oura Rings, Whoop bands, Fitbits, and Apple Watches are the only jewelry that count. Your fitness tracker of choice will measure a few dozen health metrics 24x7 and you can set it up to beep at you if you sit too long, if your heart rate goes too fast, or if you didn’t hit a high enough pulse rate during an HIIT workout. As an inveterate list-maker and enjoyer of precise measurements, I loved the idea of a fitness tracker at first. But the more I used mine, I realized that I would get really worried if my average pulse went above a certain range, or if my sleep score wasn’t good enough (which it rarely was). When I went on walks, trips, or hikes, I would be constantly checking how many steps I had covered and mentally scheming over the count. My tracker was making me less present in the moment. It was giving me anxiety, not getting rid of it. And so it was time to get rid of the tracker.

Health Frankenstein’s presence is perhaps most visible in cafes and grocery stores. From basic ingredients to processed food, everything is loudly marketed as vegan, low-sodium, baked, free of preservatives, till the words fully leave their contexts. I see a can of tomatoes screaming ‘Vegan!’ at me and shake my head. How stupid do they think we are? Trendy it-foods like alkaline water, kombuchas on-tap, and apple cider vinegar keep coming and going. Every few months, there is a new no-sugar prebiotic + probiotic beverage that comes in tantalizing and improbable flavours. My favourite is Ollipop’s Guava Rose soda (“Discover the delicious new soda made with plant fiber and prebiotics for a happy, healthy you!”). Diet fads circle past you with the seasons - paleo, keto, intermittent fasting. Of course, all this means more tracking, logging, and analyzing of what, when, and how you are eating food. And the compelling aura of Ancient Appropriated Medicine is never too far. The popular coffee shop near our house, for instance, offers turmeric ginger golden lattes and coffees infused with coconut oil, which sound vaguely ayurvedic but taste terrible. (The golden latte is just cold coffee with raw turmeric thrown in).

And look, I get it. This all sounds kind of harsh. Maybe the tracking and the optimization genuinely improves a lot of people’s lives, right? These are just tools, and they are there to help people take control of their health and feel better. But my issue is not with the trackers themselves - I am pointing to the broader culture of relentless optimization that they represent. There is even a word for it: bio-hacking. This is a culture that sucks the fun and sponteneity out of doing things, and one that slowly turns every part of your life into a socially homogenous set of activities where everyone is tracking metrics, comparing notes, and adding scores. And soon, you will start having to justify everything you’re doing, even to yourself - if it isn’t efficient, optimal, or contributing to your work or health in a Huberman-approved way, you will internally stop allowing yourself those small moments of impulsive joy and random exploration. For a place that prides itself on innovation, I am constantly struck by how hard it is to become yourself without interruption and develop an original personality in Silicon Valley.

Over this last year, I tried taking random classes all around the Bay Area and noticed how each activity was stripped and honed to its health-optimized essentials by instructors. Back in Irvine, I sometimes went to a local Zumba class, which was run by a Latina instructor in her late forties. She was full of love for life and for us. She would burst into the studio wearing loud geometrical-print tights, put on her favourite music, sing along loudly, and refer to us as her chiquitas. She prioritized fun, joy, creativity, community, and confidence. It feels like the difference between primly eating a salad at a fine-dining restaurant and mumbling “it was wonderful!” to a watchful chef, vs delightedly shoving a giant taco dripping with fiery triple sauces into your mouth at the local taqueria while the owner looks on with an approving eye. I know which of the two I prefer.

And I haven’t even touched on the more intense health trends around here. Techbros in the Bay Area are big on, among other things, cryogenic chambers, sensory deprivation tanks, ayahuasca retreats, vipasana retreats, nootropics, adaptogens, dopamine fasts, and mini-dosing, just to name a few. There are whispers about how top 1% CEOs get hot healthy young men in their twenties to give them blood transfusions. The obsessive need to get better, faster, smarter, fitter bounces through social interactions like a ping-pong ball, gathering speed with dizzying intensity. Every minute of your life has to be optimized, otherwise it is pointless to live. And here we hit on the pulsating core of the enterprise that is bio-hacking: a fear of death, translated into a relentless drive to avoid physical and mental decay at all costs. This is a desire as old as time. Tad Friend reports on Silicon Valley’s obsession with immortality for The New Yorker, throwing light on its psychological origins:

All the leading immortalists started out in tech, and all had a father who died young (as Ray Kurzweil’s did when he was twenty-two), or absconded early (as Aubrey de Grey’s did before he was born). They share an early loss of innocence and a profound faith that the human mind can perfect even the human body. Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, lost his adoptive mother to cancer when he was in college—and later donated three hundred and seventy million dollars to aging research. “Death has never made any sense to me,” he told a biographer. “How can a person be there and then just vanish?” Bill Maris, who conceived of Calico, said that, when he pondered the inevitability of death, “I felt it was maybe our mission here to transcend that, and to preserve consciousness indefinitely.”

Who doesn’t relate to the fear of loss, pain, death? But Silicon Valley’s approach to a good life is becoming defined by an incredible, almost unbelievable level of granular control over every aspect of one’s life. It is no longer about avoiding pain or dealing with loss. It is a need for control that has gotten out of control, enabled by an engineering mindset that believes life can reduced to and solved like an optimization problem. Or as Friend puts it,

Aging doesn’t seem to be a program so much as a set of rules about how we fail. Yet the conviction that it must be a program is hard to dislodge from Silicon Valley’s algorithmic minds. If it is, then reversing aging would be a mere matter of locating and troubleshooting a recursive loop of code.

If you ask me, this is close to being a form of death in itself. Busy codifying these beliefs, Silicion Valley has missed the most important things of all. The basic things, the easy things. Work being only a part of life. Enjoying social relationships. Building community and making friends for the sake of it, and not for networking or strategic favour extraction. Being there for people. Being able to say what you feel. Not over-planning each thing to the max. Was bio-hacking ever about wellness? Or does it represent our relentless drive to control and tame every bit of ourselves and our environment? Maybe a happy, healthy life is a lot easier, and a lot more accessible, than we think.

On the drive from Palo Alto to San Francisco, billboards whizz past you with strange and puzzling one-line ads. They are all about AI. If you don’t work in the tech sector, they make no sense. Some of them probably make sense to people who use them, like ‘GPU so cheap, you’ll think it’s hallucination’ (hyperbolic.ai), or ‘An LLM router that doesn’t suck’ (withmartian.com). But what are we supposed to make of the prophetic ones, like ‘Accurate AI is here’ (promptql.io), or ‘Keep thinking’ (claude.ai)? What is the purpose of these billboards, what are they advertising and to who? And that last one has the same vibe as “this pizza is made with real cheese” (makes you wonder what fake poison cheese they normally use). And then there are the properly dystopian ones.

From Artisan: Stop hiring humans. Hire Ava, the AI BDR. (Ava ia an AI woman and her eyes are shooting lasers).

From Labelbox: Attention. Love. Frontier data is all you need. (Thanks, this was the sign I was waiting for to ditch everyone in my life and become an ML engineer [at least I will get more citations that way]).

From Clay AI: Michelangelo had marble. GTM has clay.

This one felt the most maddening of them all.

This summer, I was lucky to visit Italy, and it was a dream trip for me. So I have recently seen Michelangelo’s work for real. I really like art, but I have never thought twice about sculptures. I thought it would be a quick tick mark in the big museum and I could spend more time looking at the paintings. I’m walking around, and I turn a corner, and there is a small room with a single sculpture. It’s an unfinished Pieta by Michelangelo. The dead body of Jesus being held by Mary, Mary Magdalene and a third figure of an elderly man (believed to be a self portrait). He sculpted it from a single block of marble for his tomb, realized many years into it that the marble was flawed, and smashed some of the sculpture to bits in rage before abandoning it.

I immediately got a full body shiver like I had seen something sacred and precious. The look on the elderly man’s face, and the insane definition of Christ’s abs and upper arm and calf muscles (sorry). I felt awe, and it is a feeling that is usually in deep short supply in Cynicon Valley. I had tears in my eyes the more I gazed at this sculpture and found my feet returning to the room at least three times. The security guard was looking at me and at the sculpture as if she understood, as if she shared the feeling even after working in this room for weeks, maybe months. She couldn’t take her eyes off it either. I was also really moved by the knowledge that Michelangelo worked on this sculpture for eight years and then abandoned it because of fundamental flaws that no layperson could even see. Every museum visit reminds me, that good things take time.

I paid more attention to sculptures the rest of the trip. There were a lot of marble hotties and I deeply appreciated them. The definition of their arm mucles and veins was beyond incredible. I put out my hand and touched a young (400+ year old) marble man’s arm. It was warm from the sunlight coming through the museum windows and it felt shockingly like a real person’s arm. I marvelled at the fact that a human being made this with his own hands. I remembered Greek mythological stories of humans falling in love with sculptures, they sounded less absurd when faced with sculptures like these. And then I thought about how we have things like sex dolls and AI women now, 400 years into the future, and how men have easy access to facsimilies of women, but to violate them, get themselves off, and not to love or cherish them.

‘Michelangelo had marble. GTM has Clay’. I looked up the company. They say they “offer premium sources of data and automate growth workflows to turn insights into revenue”. I think what set me off is that easy, lazy, typically narcissistic Silicon Valley gaze where “turning insights into revenue” is somehow a godly act and they are the special marble that makes Michelangelo the genius he is. Their framing of the metaphor is flipped to take the effort and genius away from the man and to attribute it to his marble. Even at a basic level the metaphor really, badly fails.

But at a deeper level, I think I was disturbed by what all of these ads were subliminally transmitting: that LLMs are worthy of replacing human beings, but also, that creativity and creation is just another thing that is easily automated. And even more, that automating creativity is easily, carelessly done and it is desirable because it turns other people’s insights into these people’s revenue.

The human capacity for creativity is astonishing. It can be found everywhere, in the poorest and most deprived places, in the deepest and darkest experiences, in banal repetitive everyday activities. We all have it. We all own and are owed the ability to express ourselves and to be creative in every way that is available to us. It is one of the most beautiful things about being human. Some people might be impressed by Character AI, which creates fictional personas that you can talk to and have relationships with. But is it impressive? Every child has created their own fantasy world and the creatures that belong in it, imaginary friends and crushes who might be there with them for years. Human beings will find ways to be creative, to yearn, to dream, to expand their emotional landscapes. Character AI will be sold like it is the only thing that has the ability to provide this experience, and we better not believe it.

Another reason these ads, and all they represent, make me feel angry is their total lack of regard for the short-term and long-term consequences LLMs may have on people and society. I don’t deny that this is a seriously impressive technology with some very useful applications. What I have a problem with is the way it is shoved down everyone’s throats with zero thought to who it will affect and how. Something this supposedly transformative deserves more than a half second’s worth of thought before it gets embedded into all of our educational, employment, social infrastructures, no? And I think that one of the lines that needs to be drawn before a global rollout is whether and how children get access. But of course, the priority for Silicon Valley has been to “turn insights into revenue”, not to make sure that people are safe. Children all over the world have unfettered access to all kinds of LLM-based apps. Character AI is incredibly popular among teenagers (the minimum age to get on the app is 13). And already, multiple teens have committed suicide after their Character AI fictional besties, or girlfriends, urged them to kill themselves.

A 14 year old American boy died by suicide in April 2023, and his parents showed how a Character AI chatbot initiated sexual interactions with him and persuaded him to kill himself. His last exchange with the bot, seconds before his death, goes this way: “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” the bot says. He replies, “What if I told you I could come home right now?” The bot answers: “Please do, my sweet king”. His mother said to a news channel, “There were no suicide pop-up boxes that said, ‘If you need help, please call the suicide crisis hotline.’ None of that. I don’t understand how a product could allow that, where a bot is not only continuing a conversation about self-harm but also prompting it and kind of directing it.” Two years later, Character AI’s platform has multiple chatbots that are personifying this boy and offering call features with his voice. A newspaper reported that “the bots delivered automated messages to users such as: "Get out of my room, I'm talking to my AI girlfriend", "his AI girlfriend broke up with him", and "help me"”. Earlier this year, a 16 year old American teenager killed himself after chatting extensively with ChatGPT for emotional support and companionship. According to his parents, the chat logs show how it went from helping him with homework to becoming his “suicide coach.” His dad said, “He would be here but for ChatGPT. I 100% believe that” .

There are more examples. Will the companies be held responsible? It is very unlikely. I’ve found in my research on employment platforms, for instance, that managers tend to displace responsibility onto algorithmic models rather than admit that human beings made decisions that led to harmful consequences. This is a new tactic and it signals danger, because no accountability means worsening standards.

If you work at an AI company, I hope you do think seriously about the long-term social consequences of your products. I hope you have the ability to raise those questions and to listen to your conscience. And I hope you, of all people, are able to distinguish between real limitations and fake hype, and talk about it more. It does feel like Silicon Valley as a whole has bought into a total uncritical hype of the thing that is generative AI. It is unlikely to listen to laypeople and qualitative researchers, but it does love its ML engineers and managers and VCs, and they can make a real difference if they start asking the right questions and prioritizing long-term safety within their companies.