One month of mayhem. The push towards the digital economy is happening as a mode of survival. Reflexive rather than proactive. The dabbawala took bank transfer this month. This was a watershed moment for me. The digital economy has a surveillance and a panopticon lens. Inclusion has a mainstreaming effect. The narrative frame is of the ’emancipatory’ spirit. Critical thinking needed, to unravel the various layers of this techno deterministic move. Overall, the common man is so helpless reacting to various top down policy interventions as a clueless lost kid at the train station.
Author: changethinker
Born and raised in Mumbai, India with an undergrad degree from Oman and a masters degree from the National University of Singapore. I am an Environmental Professional with a passion for Sustainability, Social Innovation and Governance related issues. A Change Agent in the making who believes that small is beautiful and that impact can be achieved -one soul at a time.
My take on Demonetization on a BBC World Panel Discussion
This is the first video in six years on this blog! My panel discussion on Demonetization yesterday evening (28th November 2016) on BBC World Flagship Program ‘The Global’. Some plain speaking to puncture the holes of a technocratic dominant discourse where cashless and digital are operative syntax. The common man matters who is in queue for hours as well not only investors in e wallets. Yes, ‘The minor inconvenience’ is not minor. The official BBC video clip helps.
Interview on Forbes on the Demonitization Crisis
I was interviewed by Forbes on the demonetization crisis in India. Here is the link;
Coping with Political Disruption: Time to build new vocabularies of resilience
This has been a truly unprecedented week for global democracy with Mr. Trump being elected as the president of the US, when no one apart from Micheal Moore out of all folks, gave him a shred of hope to win. Like, Brexit, earlier this year, the intelligentsia was overwhelmed with the disruption from a population who saw no use of global mobility of their passports while they get by on food stamps. While the liberal elite might snigger at the thought of Nigel Farage or Donald Trump, they certainly have a pulse on the ground. Donald Trump being the charismatic salesman, understood the latent requirements of the consumer.
I have been digesting the volumes of post mortem analysis of the Trump victory, that seeks to be an effort into semiotic reading of the events of the week. The Route 128 or Palo Alto tech tribe might be jittery at the prospect of a vision of a man they do not endorse, but often as i have written, the tech industry does not understand the dynamics on the ground with people who have lost jobs overseas and the old way of living with added automation in shop floor work. The banker on wall street with high frequency algorithmic trades is often disconnected with the margins of cosmopolitanism and that ignorance will cost the tech and finance sectors dearly. The vote against global elites is loud and clear, that the economic realities are far more salient. Realities are embedded in everyday lived experience and are always micro in character. Society is three skipped meals from a revolt, as the old saying goes. More anthropologists should study the impact of tech disruption on brick and mortar communities to gain a thorough understanding of the impending events.
Times of disruption call for a new aesthetic vocabulary of understanding the present while building empathy, execution and inclusive leadership to re-imagine a future in which subaltern voices shall count. There is a Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, and there is a different politics which might feel that this present politics of dissent is not enough. The internationalist politics of the left has been inadequate to account for the grievances of the inner cities. In India, Bengaluru, the technology capital of India faced water riots over sharing of the resource with neighboring state of Tamil Nadu shutting down the city for days as on the ground contacts had shared real time experiences. In India, the parliamentary left has been decimated part from Kerala and Tripura with the mantle of anti-globalization politics with the regional players including the Aam Aadmi Party.
We live in a world which is constantly evolving, and business has to adapt with the local political realities of the day. Time to integrate PESTLE analysis in to business continuity risk assessments then and listen and cater to the needs of the community, and not just the token CSR event. Time has come to rethink the lexicon in which we think.
Reclaiming the Narrative Against Hyperbole
In my conversations with the tech wrapped class in Urban India, have a blind spot regarding the members of the informal economy. The informal economy is something to be not considered at all. If Autowallah and Taxi Wallah’s have a union, which is irrelevant in the era of Uber, that tech is a silver bullet against predatory, discretionary pricing, but surge pricing is market economics.
The bank employee who has a stable job is lazy versus a start up employee who is entrepreneurial. We, have something very imprecise in our aesthetics, which seeks to celebrate jobless growth, no medical coverage and one pay check away from homelessness. We have some how allowed Economic Times to frame our discourse. Read some EPW, or even OPEN for a change. The language of activism needs to reclaimed or reframed in this digital era. The food that we eat is still grown by a farmer in the hinterland.
Conversation on Digital Disruption with an Auto Wallah
I was sadly stuck in a terrible traffic snarl today in an auto rickshaw, where I decide to ignite a chat in Bhojpuri infected Hindi. The crux of the conversation was to understand the adaptation of the non digital auto wallah, against their smart phone connected counterparts in OLA or Uber. The auto wallah said, you do not waste time, waiting for the OLA or Uber driver as he is not usually a local from this area. These drivers ask us for directions all the time. We are cheaper and own the roads.
When I asked about air conditioner and other comforts, the middle aged gentlemen quipped ‘there was no OLA five years back, and there were summers in Delhi then as well’
He complained about the traffic during the peak hours, as these are the times where they get rides or ‘bhada’. Where the OLA driver can fetch a ride at midnight in a jungle.
The Auto Wallah is strategising against digital disruption. I would like to understand more narratives on the ground of evolving livelihoods on the front lines of automation. Life is not only about numbers in a World Economic Forum Report. Local knowledge is a key USP.
Tech Hype Cycles : A Quick Thought
For industry peers, especially fresh grads buying into the current Big Data/AI/Machine Learning hype cycle, partially underway, at a very macro level (as technologies take time to permeate through institutional structures, cultures and need to switch personal behaviour as per the Social Construction of Technology thesis and other technology diffusion frameworks) that Big Data, is more a process to turn everyday processes in to ‘data points’ and is not a silver bullet as Biotechnology a decade back and Sustainability a few years ago.
Every hype cycle fades away, with the realization that profits are not delivered and the next big thing on the horizon crops up. Our fetish with the future of the future and evolving values of the constantly modern, breathes life in to these ‘new’ technologies. The questions will be answered by big data or small. The proof of the pudding will be when any off this Big or small data will solve entrenched issues of the day deeply intertwined in vested power structures.
New Work Rules for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Economy
Start ups are serious engines of economic progress. They hire in a recession and lend neighborhoods a good vibe. There are people investing their lives, and especially their youth on an idea. They are not places to get your pre MBA work ex. These are not places for folks with no risk appetite. The era of the public sector job in India is a relic of my Father’s generation. In this fourth industrial revolution era, one needs to re-skill and re-imagine the future as a perennial negotiation, and not an annual review activity. Stay healthy and save for a rainy day are good old school values to follow although investing in reskilling is to add value. Your job is to be replaced two financial years away if you are in consulting. Creative destruction at its neoliberal best.
Consulting Skills Decoded
A consultant (strategy or technical) is a strange creation of late capitalism. The person has to be a dynamic sales guru who at the same time, is a versatile thought leader gaming the market trends, while staying true to cold data, in narrative and quantitative variants. Schizophrenic at best, as he has to define the problem, while simultaneously solving it.
Downloading the ‘Social Justice’ App: Rebooting the emerging technologies conversation
Technology is aspirational as well as embedded in the micro practice of everyday life. Technology has enveloped and ensconced us in its bear hug embrace. Technology has inherent values of its founders which drive its proliferation and its outreach of this sociotechnical construct. Apple, the maker of the now less than iconic iPhone, with its repeated ‘static’ variations believes in the working philosophy of dishing out the cutting edge even if the consumer is not ready, as it creates a white space and then waits for the audience to pick up the tab, such as the headless jack in its latest variant. The product managers at Apple are not the biggest fans of user centric ethnography certainly.
Smart Phones are getting more sophisticated by the day with AR/VR (Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality for the uninitiated such as the latest Samsung Device) external add ons, which redefine the user experience. The digital revolution is the outcome of the twin drivers of a ‘Flat World’ and Globalization (although due to Brexit, the reverse de-globalization is now fashionable), which a less than USD 50 smartphone available in the global south. Prices of data packages have hit rock bottom, due to telecom price wars such as in India with Reliance Jio triggering a market consolidation. As investor Naval Ravikant had quipped in a lengthy narrative journalistic article in The New Yorker, that Uber happened due to ecosystem effects of GPS, market demand and the smart phone, all of which was not Uber’s contribution [1]. Uber was simply at the right time, at the right place as a transportation technology company. ICT4D or leveraging the power of Information and Communication Technology for Development for bridging the digital divide or for bringing the power of Web 2.0 to the unserved communities in the global south, is carried out as a Bottom of the Pyramid market expansion strategy as the developed markets are not rendering the right margins on the NYSE. Profits are the cornerstone for unleashing the tamed spirits of neoliberal capitalism (pun intended).
As Phillip Mirowski states, neoliberalism is a constructivist political project as it needs the government to actively curate the market space (Mirowski, 2009 in Davies, 2016).
The purpose of this article is not to sing uncritical paeans to the myth and magic of unfettered Silicon Valley style techno capitalism but to breathe back the spirit of social justice into this testosterone fueled paradigm (think about the film Social Network about the founding of Facebook for a cultural analogue). Emerging technologies as a cognitive framework is driving the conversation on ‘Smart Cities’ to ‘Digital India’ in its namesake India to the ‘Smart Nation’ narrative in Singapore. Sociologist Shiv Visvanathan writes eloquently that an idea of a smart city amputates the idea of a city in to an amputated grid of IT technologies without integrating the informal sector of the economy such as the migrants and the scavengers [2].
Prof Visvanathan captures the pulse of the narrative that frames ‘aggressive’ emerging technologies paradigm as a silver bullet to the issues of the day. When political solutions to governance problems dry up, the emerging technologies messaging comes in handy as a smoke screen. Emerging Technology as a concept ties in the growth mindset of neoliberal thought which weaves in with modernity and profit motive very well. The angel investor behind a technology would not share the same egalitarian values as a principal investigator of a National Research Foundation research project. The values of solidarity, liberty and equity are in contradiction with emerging technologies that find resonance in the valuation imperative. The unicorns are the stuff of legends while millions struggle to drink clean water. The market is an exceptional adopter of good ideas whose time has arrived such as financial inclusion through digital resources such as blockchain as physical retail banking assets shall not be required to serve the unbanked consumer, but digital healthcare would still need to be aligned with incumbent public health systems with real doctors to heal the sick.
The context is critical for emerging technologies to be mapped as a social good with embedded values of social inclusion. Science is a social institution and the mainstreaming of an ‘emerging technology’ in the marketplace would require the ethic of social justice, as the consumer who pays for the product or service is ultimately as much a member of the socioeconomic community as the startup founder.
References:
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man (information retrieved on 28th September 2016)
[2] http://www.dailyo.in/politics/indian-media-cities-sewage-chikungunya-swachh-bharat-dalits-demolition/story/1/12971.html (information retrieved on 28th September 2016)
Change Thinker 