I started a “stress note” in my Notes app where I keep a list of whatever I’m anxious about. Anytime I add something new I reread my past worries and if they no longer matter (which is usually the case), instead of deleting them I apply the strikethrough style. There is something very calming and self-affirming in doing this, and as the list grows I actually find it very beautiful to look at.
I have an on again off again journal I have kept for the last ten years. And while it is gratifying to read about issues that consumed my mind that I’ve now forgotten about, the stress note that the writer describes makes for more short term revisiting, and has its own value.
When parents can order “perfect” babies, will they? Would you take your chances on a throw of the genetic dice, or order up the make and model you wanted? How many people are prepared to buy a car at random from the universe of all available cars? That’s how many, I suspect, would opt to have natural children.
Everybody will live longer, look better and be healthier in the Gattacan world. But will it be as much fun? Will parents order children who are rebellious, ungainly, eccentric, creative, or a lot smarter than their parents are? There’s a concert pianist in “Gattaca” who has 12 fingers. Don’t you sometimes have the feeling you were born just in time?
I have only to venture into the streets of my own neighborhood, the West Village, to see… by the thousand: younger people, for the most part, who have grown up in our social-media era, have no personal memory of how things were before, and no immunity to the seductions of digital life. What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale… I dare to hope that, despite everything, human life and its richness of cultures will survive, even on a ravaged earth.
I understand how the technology and electronics industry spends unimaginably large amounts of money and manpower to keep us in a state of perpetual distraction, a state in which they can leech data and serve ads throughout the day. We have examined this both on this site and on Reclaim Attention.
At the same time, I don’t think it’s a problem for people to spend their time in multiple online and ‘real-life’ spaces simultaneously. In fact, we are often different people in different spaces at the same time.
Dr. Sacks termed this a neurological catastrophe. I think this rapid rewiring of our brains is a neurological revolution. The young don’t retain facts, phone numbers, commitments because the internet and their devices do. And that’s ok. As is the fact that "a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort."
It’s also why I think the high-level assumptions underlying the design of features like Apple’s Screen Time and its Android equivalent are fundamentally flawed: the amount of time spent on one’s devices is not inherently inversely correlated with mental health, and I suspect the younger you are the more obvious this is.
As I’ve written earlier, our online lives are an escape from the dreariness of our daily lives – even when in school. They’re safe spaces for marginalised people. They’re stages on which to express our talents, however well or poorly. They’re rabbit-holes down which we indulge our curiosities. They’re 24×7 telegraph and long-distance lines over which to sustain and deepen relationships with people no longer a few streets away.
I think we’re only now realising that globalisation is as true for human attention as it was for goods.
Before drugs, my friend assumed his eyes would always work like… well, eyes! Everyone’s eyes are different of course, some people can see better than others, some people are blind or visually impaired in some way, but he had assumed that eyes generally acted within the bounds of some laws set by the universe. Eyes were a thing that absorbed the world to the best of their ability and reported back to the brain as honestly as they could.
Then he did acid and entered another dimension for a bit.
When he came back, his understanding of reality had been toppled. He was like, “Wait, how did my body even do that? What is reality?! What are eyes?!”
He hadn’t realized he had been living under assumptions about the axioms of the universe, but these false pillars became visible in their acid-induced shattering. If all it took was some chemical cajoling for his eyes and senses to transport him to another planet, what were the actual rules? Are there rules, or are there only defaults? What other invisible false pillars was he living his life by?
And this is why he liked recreational drugs — because he could explore and challenge and unlock a new relationship with reality.
Though my friend didn’t quite put it that way. The way he phrased it to me was, “When I do acid, it’s like messing with the operating system for humans.”
Today, I don’t define success the way that I did when I was younger. I don’t measure it in copies sold or dollars earned. I measure it in what my days look like and the quality of my creative expression: Do I have time to write? Can I say what I think? Do I direct my schedule or does my schedule direct me? Is my life enjoyable or is it a chore? In a word: autonomy. Do I have autonomy over what I do and think? Am I free?
For my entire career, I’ve made decisions based on what I now call optimising for optionality, the ability to pick and choose what I want to spend time, money, attention on.
That means avoiding and eliminating long-term commitments, thinking very carefully about what to commit to, but then committing to those fully.
This means disappointing people, not least myself, and letting go of relationships. But I’m in control of my time most of the time, which is what’s important to me.
And autonomy is optionality by a different name. It’s why I get instinctively what Holiday’s talking about.
I’d recommend having a solid optimisation function for your life. And revisit it every year.
One thing that is so reliably upsetting about spending time with these social-media influencers is that they are all so garrulous and kind that for a minute you can’t help feel that they actually like you and enjoy having you around. The boys continue to refer to me by my on-court cognomen, Beanie Barrett, and they punctuate this endearment by enlisting me in several complicated handshakes, which makes me feel like a high school freshman.
But it’s especially discomfiting to realize that the influencers have a tendency to treat virtually everyone in their social orbit with the same kind of backslapping effervescence with which they have treated me, and that this stems from their inexorable online habit of entreating their viewers to like and leave comments on all their social-media posts, not because they’re sincerely interested in what their followers have to say, but because this kind of “engagement” with their content is the sole barometer by which brands—i.e., their employers—determine their online relevance.
… I watched a group of computer engineers hold a meeting in a drab hotel on Edgware Road, London, which discussed whether or not to introduce new internet protocols to counter hacks on western utilities such as energy systems.
For hours, they debated an anti-hacking protocol with the unwieldy name “draft-rhrd-tls-tls13-visibility-01”. Then came the moment of truth: a white-bearded engineer named Sean Turner solemnly addressed the crowd: “Please hum now if you support adoption [of this tool].”
A collective hum, like a Tibetan chant, erupted, and then Turner asked those who opposed the move to hum as well. A second — far louder — sound erupted. “So at this point there is no consensus to adopt this,” he declared. The protocol was put on ice.
This might seem odd; after all, the Internet Engineering Task Force is the group that built the internet and computer geeks appear to live in a “rational”, maths-based world. But the IETF has embraced this “fuzzy” ritual in recent years because the techies like being able to sense the mood of the entire group via humming — and get the type of multidimensional information that simple “yes-no” votes cannot reveal.
Indeed, these engineers are so attached to this ritual that they were very upset when they lost the ability to hum together during the Covid-19 lockdown — and although they tried to replicate what they liked about group humming with computer code, they realised it was impossible.
One of the reasons the COVAX multi-national vaccine initiative exists is because small, low-to-medium income countries lack the negotiating strength to compete individually against the developed world, especially when most vaccine developers and manufacturers are from those developed countries. It’s unrealistic to have not just states but individual bodies compete for supplies.
Another equally important aspect of this is that there is no global market for vaccines. Unlike a stock market, there is no counter-party holding on to vaccines waiting to sell them to the highest bidder.
The other [plan] was that we should go and bid in the global marketplace for vaccines. If that was the case, some rich trader at Goldman Sachs would have said, I’ll buy up the whole vaccine supply of the world, and you come and trade with me every day. I would have created a market for vaccines. That can’t be the case because there is no marketplace. Otherwise, some dark pool would exist for vaccines right?
The few companies with vaccine know-how plan their manufacturing based on the orders that they get from countries/groups of countries:
It is highly unlikely that in the face of an EU order for a billion plus vaccines, that Pfizer will entertain a 0.4 million order from Navi Mumbai, or a 1.5 million order from Pimpri-Chinchwad.
Ditto with Moderna, whose commitments until the end of the year “include delivering 300 million doses to the US, 150 million doses to the EU by the end of this year, 50 million doses to Japan, and roughly 50 million doses to Canada and South Korea”
Novavax, who has contracted the Serum Institute of India to manufacture its vaccine, is limited by the US’ reluctance to export enough raw materials to get production lines rolling:
So finally I have an answer to what has happened to Novavax production in India, thanks to the difficulty getting raw materials out of the US. The news was worse than I expected.
There is says, Stan Erck of that firm, a "global raw material supply difficulty". https://t.co/AHpGSBuoYQ
Still other vaccine makers like AstraZeneca are hamstrung by capacity constraints and export bans in India. In any case, the national government has ruled it’ll purchase, at a pre-determined fixed price, half of any doses manufactured in India. That leaves less for states and municipal corporations.
Full circle – it should be no surprise that Mumbai’s municipal corporation has received no bids: vaccine supplies are not listed on a globally liquid supply-and-demand marketplace; on the contrary manufacturing itself is planned based on pre-paid advance orders; other vaccine manufacturers are facing constraints on raw materials and production. I hope states’ global tenders receive responses, but I am skeptical.
When you block someone on Clubhouse, it doesn’t just affect communications between the two of you, as it would on Facebook or Twitter. Rather, it limits the way that person can communicate with others too. Once blocked, they can’t join or even see any room that you create, or in which you are speaking—which effectively blocks them for everyone else in that room. If you’re brought “onstage” from the audience to speak, anyone else in the audience whom you have blocked will be kept off the stage for as long as you’re up there. And if you’re a moderator of a room, you can block a speaker and boot them from the conversation in real time—even if they’re mid-sentence.
Imagine a live panel discussion in which each member of the panel has the power to cut the mic of any other member, at any moment and for any reason, and also the power to have that person dragged from the lecture hall by security. That’s roughly how blocking works on Clubhouse. This is not just a personal decision, but a social act, with implications for who can speak at what times and in what settings.
There’s even a visible emblem of this regime. When a user you don’t follow has been blocked by some unspecified number of people whom you do, that user’s profile will appear on your app with an ominous icon: a black shield with a white exclamation point. Clubhouse calls this feature a “shared block list.” Some users call the badge the “black check mark”
Today’s techniques to control our own social media experience have been designed for algorithmic feeds. Here, each person has their own list of who they follow. Tools like block, mute account, mute keywords apply to one’s own experience.
A Clubhouse room is by its design a continuously shared experience. Giving one particiapnt the ability to control their experience affects others. This is not to judge Clubhouse’s tools – I have not thought about them well enough – but it is clear that different social experiences are emerging, Clubhouse-like rooms perhaps being the most promiment among them [1], and designers will need to create different tools for each of them.
[1] Venmo, the person-to-person payment app, also shares your payments on a public and semi-public feed, creating a different social experience. While you have some control over privacy, as the USA president Biden learnt, it’s not always enough.
Think about how McDonald’s does procurement. If you have 1000 McDonald’s stores across the length of the country, McDonald’s doesn’t say each of these 1000 independent franchisees should go and procure the potatoes and the oil themselves from the local daily market. The reason you have centralised procurement is precisely because it’s the most efficient way to do it.
The only possible reason I could think of the national government’s refusal is that importing vaccines would be a reversal of its messaging of being the ‘pharmacy of the world’, a claim made publicly as recently as mid-March 2021. I hope there is another reason to have states compete against one another.
Then there’s the claim made by a member of the national Covid task force that over two billion doses would be available between now and December 2021.
If those doses actually materialise, they would be enough to vaccinate the entire adult population and more.
This Economic Times article has more details on the delivery schedule. I couldn’t find a definitive answer to whether the national government has committed to paying for these doses in advance, or according to a schedule – something that every major country worldwide has done.
As the graphic above states, these numbers don’t include imported vaccines. That is, the very doses that states and municipal corporations are ‘floating tenders’ for. So the country may well end up with more vaccine doses than it needs. State governments looking at this estimate have also probably wondered whether their procurement, costing a significant percentage of their state budgets, is redundant – once again, puzzling.
The well-known heart surgeon and hospital founder Devi Shetty also called for national vaccine procurement – and urgently:
… whatever has happened has happened; now for the vaccination the country has to buy together. So the bulk order will give you huge leverage in terms of negotiating for the best price. And unless these companies get money in advance, they won’t commit. We need at least five different vaccine manufacturers to come forward and say, okay, you give me the money, I will deliver you on this time.
We should just open our door for any country’s vaccine company to come here, set up the shop, and sell it to us. But they have to give it to us within the next three months. After that, it may not make that kind of a difference.
Q: Multiple states have floated global tenders, corporates have asked the government to liberalise vaccine import… A: All of them should come together as one vaccine procuring agency.
