Thinks 385

Nick Bloom: “It is becoming pretty clear that hybrid is here to stay. To give you three numbers which hold for the UK and the US pretty well: before the pandemic all-paid-days work from home was very rare, about 5 per cent of paid days. During the pandemic, it was roughly 50 per cent. Post-pandemic, it looks as if those employees are going to work, on average, two to three days a week in the office and two to three days a week at home, so you get to about 25 per cent of days. That is a fivefold increase. Pre-pandemic, working from home was doubling roughly every 12 to 13 years, so it is about 30 years of increase in work from home over the space of 18 months. This could be one of the biggest impacts from the pandemic in the long run.”

FT: “India’s buoyant economy disguises areas of vulnerability. Business community exudes optimism but profound social and economic inequalities persist…India remains a dual economy and a two-tier society, as Chakraborty puts it. Twenty per cent of Indians, or about 250m people, are doing just fine. They live in the formal economy, have secure incomes and jobs and aspire to buy electric vehicles. But the remainder inhabit the more precarious world of the informal economy, where job losses, declining income and reduced consumption in the wake of the pandemic are far more prevalent. “About 40 per cent of Indians can’t afford to even buy a packet of biscuits,” says Chakraborty — let alone a two-wheeled vehicle.””

NYTimes: “India, one of the world’s most water-stressed countries, is halfway through an ambitious drive to provide clean tap water by 2024 to all the roughly 192 million households across its 600,000 villages. About 18,000 government engineers are overseeing the $50 billion undertaking, which includes hundreds of thousands of contractors and laborers who are laying more than 2.5 million miles of pipe…The mission to deliver water to every household combines two of Mr. Modi’s political strengths: his grasp of the day-to-day problems of hundreds of millions of India’s poor and his penchant for ambitious solutions.”

Nayi Disha: A People’s Pipe for Prosperity (Part 11)

Narratives

There is no single narrative that will work. The approach to take is to build coalitions. I have mentioned NANV (non-aligned and non-voters), before. But it is not a monolithic block of voters. While the unifying theme can be that India’s politicians and parties are the biggest anti-prosperity machine in India, a few specific messages can help draw in more people faster into the broader Nayi Disha fold. Each of these messages can be communicated through the pipe. Emails allow tracking of opens and clicks, and thus specific narratives can be calibrated based on feedback from recipients.

There are three narratives which can serve as starting points. One of the obvious ones is that the controls need to be on politicians and not on the people. Poverty is an outcome of politicians getting a free hand to run amuck with policy interventions – India is replete with such examples. Prosperity results from constraints being put on those in power, thus ensuring freedom for people.

The second narrative can be about ending religious discrimination. While all public discrimination is wrong, religious discrimination is the most pernicious. One cannot change one’s gender or caste, but one can change one’s religion. Thus, policies can be crafted which actually encourage conversion. And the Indian government has been doing this for decades, irrespective of which party has been in power. Most Indians aren’t even aware of this, but once they know, they will feel the anger. The root lies in the Constitution which has enabled and encouraged all sorts of religious discrimination. (Of course, there is also caste-based discrimination, but that’s another story for another day.)

The third narrative can be about economic justice via Dhan Vapasi. The public wealth is being controlled by the government; this needs to be returned to the rightful owners, the people of India. This is the fastest track to creating an enabling environment for mass prosperity in India. (I have written extensively about Dhan Vapasi earlier – see under “Economic Revolution”.)

These can be the starting narratives. They address different groups of people. The first one about politicians being the problem can be addressed to the non-aligned and non-voters, who do not find the right party or candidate from among the choices on offer. The second narrative about ending religious discrimination focuses on the cultural right who want real secularism in India – where the government treats everyone the same irrespective of their religion, rather than favouritism and ministries for specific religious groups. The third narrative targets the poor, who are treated not as citizens but as votebanks – given freebies which actually diminish their future opportunities, in return for being reminded to vote for the Supreme Leader in whose name the theft is being done.

With the pipe in place, these narratives can make the political game competitive – all the politicians, parties and their supporters on one side, and everyone else who wants to dismantle India’s 250-year anti-prosperity machine on the other. With the pipe in place, it should be a no-contest!

Thinks 384

The Generalist on DST Global: “DST is a surreptitious power broker. Many of today’s founders may know little about DST Global. That hasn’t stopped it from becoming one of the largest and most influential venture firms in the world, with an estimated $50 billion in assets under management (AUM). Geographical arbitrage has served it well. DST has a knack for identifying a powerful business model, then investing in winners in different countries. In this respect, its approach is not dissimilar to Tiger Global, though the firms differ in meaningful ways elsewhere.”

NYTimes: “At first, Discord was popular only with other gamers. But more than six years later, driven in part by the pandemic, it has exploded into the mainstream. While adults working from home flocked to Zoom, their children were downloading Discord to socialize with other young people through text and audio and video calls in groups known as servers. The platform has more than 150 million active users each month — up from 56 million in 2019 — with nearly 80 percent logging in from outside North America. It has expanded from gamers to music aficionados, students and cryptocurrency enthusiasts.”

2022 Trends | 2021 in Review

Nayi Disha: A People’s Pipe for Prosperity (Part 10)

Distribution

I had written earlier about combining two distribution platforms together: email and WhatsApp. Email can provide the mass distribution, while WhatsApp takes care of the last mile outreach. Emails to superspreaders will work even better. They can then amplify it across their own networks – via their own email distribution lists or through WhatsApp groups. A WhatsApp-only system will not work for the pipe: there are limits on the number of members in a single group and hence hierarchies need to be made, which also means that the hops for messages increase. Also, WhatsApp is controlled by a corporate entity, which can change rules as per what it (or a government) wants. Hence, the need to combine WhatsApp with another distribution channel – email with its ability to send rich media wins over SMS.

So, to build a resilient pipe, here are the steps:

  • Create a website where anyone interested can opt-in with their email address
  • A small team can curate content and send out emails to the list
  • Recipients on the list can then distribute locally to their WhatsApp groups
  • Track all activity and incentivise actions via atomic rewards: this will allow superspreaders to rise to the top
  • Encourage the WhatsApp recipients to also sign-up directly via email to eliminate one hop
  • The goal over time should be to grow the direct email broadcast list as much as possible
  • Incentives can be provided for referrers who help with email sign-ups
  • Recipients of the messages can be encouraged to do their own local meetups – and thus recruit email recipients
  • Over time, the most powerful asset will become the email list
  • One of the incentives for superspreaders could be that they can, should they wish, become political entrepreneurs and contest primaries

Email has been the communications channel of choice for marketers for many years. It has had little or no use in Indian politics, which has largely depended on mass media and huge rallies. In the past couple national elections, social media’s role has increased – primarily, Facebook and WhatsApp. Both are controlled by the same entity, and any corporate entity can be pressured into blocking specific channels or users. That is where email shines. It is independent of Big Tech with no single person or entity in control.

One point to note is that any dependency on a single point of failure in such a system must be avoided. Therefore, it has to be a system without a single entity controlling it – which is where email works best. There is no intermediary between the sender and the recipient; unlike SMS (Big Telco) and WhatsApp (Big Tech). And any place where a corporate entity is involved, Big Government has the controls!

Thinks 383

Steven Johnson: “Modern computing history has seen three “inevitable” paradigm shifts in how we interact with our digital devices, advances that began as fringe experiences but swiftly became ubiquitous: the graphic interface, popularized by Apple with its introduction of the Macintosh in 1984; the hypertext links of the World Wide Web, which went mainstream in the ’90s; and the multitouch interface introduced with the iPhone in 2007, now almost without exception the standard interface for all mobile interactions…Will the metaverse eventually find its way into this pantheon?”

Hayek: “[B]ecause it was not dependent on organization but grew as a spontaneous order, the structure of modern society has attained a degree of complexity which far exceeds that which it is possible to achieve by deliberate organization. Even the rules which made the growth of this complex order possible were not designed in anticipation of that result; but those peoples who happened to adopt suitable rules developed a complex civilization which prevailed over others. It is thus a paradox, based on a complete misunderstanding of these connections, when it is sometimes contended that we must deliberately plan modern society because it has grown so complex. The fact is rather that we can preserve an order of such complexity only if we control it not by the method of “planning,” i.e., by direct orders, but on the contrary aim at the formation of a spontaneous order based on general rules.” [via CafeHayek]

12 Pros Reveal the Email Marketing Trends That’ll Dominate 2022

Nayi Disha: A People’s Pipe for Prosperity (Part 9)

Contagion

How do we go about constructing the pipe?

The objective is to connect like-minded individuals together and enable them to expand the reach of the network. In that sense, it is akin to how a virus works – infect a person, then spread to others through the proximity contacts of that person, and thus cause contagion. Adam Kucharski writes about ‘R’, the reproduction number, in his book, The Rules of Contagion: “R depends on four factors: the duration of time a person is infectious; the average number of opportunities they have to spread the infection each day they’re infectious; the probability an opportunity results in transmission; and the average susceptibility of the population. I like to call these the ‘DOTS’ for short. Joining them together gives us the value of the reproduction number: R = Duration × Opportunities × Transmission probability × Susceptibility.”

In the context of ideas, Kucharski writes:

If we want an idea to spread, we ideally need people to be both highly susceptible and highly influential. But Aral and Walker found that such people were very rare. ‘Highly influential individuals tend not to be susceptible, highly susceptible individuals tend not to be influential, and almost no one is both highly influential and highly susceptible to influence,’ they noted. So what effect could targeting influential people have? In a follow-up study, Aral’s team simulated what would happen if the best possible people were chosen to spark a social outbreak. Compared with choosing randomly, the pair found that picking targets effectively could potentially help things spread up to twice as far. It’s an improvement, but it’s a long way from having a few little-known influencers who can spark a huge outbreak all by themselves.

Why is it so hard to get ideas to spread from person to person? One reason is that issue of people rarely being both susceptible and influential. If someone spreads an idea to lots of susceptible people, these individuals won’t necessarily pass it on much further. Then there’s the structure of our interactions. Whereas financial networks are ‘disassortative’ – with big banks connected to lots of small ones – human social networks tend to be the opposite. From village communities to Facebook friendships, there’s evidence that popular people often form social groups with other popular people. It means that if we target a few popular individuals, we might get a word-of-mouth outbreak that spreads quickly, but it probably won’t reach much of the network. Sparking multiple outbreaks across a network may therefore be more effective than trying to identify high profile influencers within a community.

So, if we have to build the distribution pipes for ideas, we need to focus on the components of R: duration, opportunities, transmission probability, and susceptibility. And we need to think not just of high profile influencers in a single community, but also reach multiple influencers in different communities. Think of them as the superspreaders who help increase the R. Our challenge is that we need to create a repeatable process out of this – and thus create a pipe through which ideas can flow regularly.

Thinks 382

WSJ on Web3: “New technologies like blockchain present the opportunity to loosen the centralized stranglehold that companies and governments have over everything from internet platforms to intellectual property to the creation and distribution of money. These technologies operate by spreading responsibility or ownership among a group of users, who, for example, use their computing power to electronically fabricate—or “mine”—cryptocurrency, or record transactions for digital art. These technologies represent an evolution of cryptocurrency beyond bitcoin—which some in crypto communities now deride as mere “digital gold.” In addition to monetary value, the “tokens” that make up these systems are each also encoded with information that has some other use, whether it’s membership in a club, the right to vote on how a company conducts itself, or even just data. The blockchains that underlie all this are just ledgers of information stored on many different computers at once. This lets any given blockchain be resistant to control by a government or corporation, and lets people exchange tokens on that blockchain securely and transparently.”

George Will: “The invention of the individual, Oakeshott wrote, entailed the idea of the private — a zone of personal sovereignty independent of communal arrangements. Hence the American Revolution: Government exists to protect the individual’s right to the pursuit of happiness as the individual defines it, not the pursuit of the good life as government defines it. Government must be powerful enough to protect (in Oakeshott’s formulation) “the order without which the aspirations of individuality could not be realized” — security of person and property — but not powerful enough to threaten individuality.”

JK Rowling: “There can be a strange magic in human-made things. Not in all of them: not in plastic bottles or Q-Tips or batteries; but in those that are interwoven with our pasts, with our homes, with our great loves. These are things that have been mysteriously imbued with humanity — our own or other people’s. The magic of “things” often goes unnoticed until they break or are lost. We have favorite mugs and tea towels, comforting in their familiarity and utility; we treasure the lopsided objects our children made for us in nursery school, and we may still own those toys that soothed us when we were tiny.”

Nayi Disha: A People’s Pipe for Prosperity (Part 8)

Voices

There are many who have a sense that things are not going right, and a change and challenge is needed. But every such person feels they are alone, and therefore other than speaking over encrypted messages and calls, there is a sense of helplessness. This is not a Hindi movie where one hero can take on the system and survive. And so, we build our own small world — public acquiescence and silence blended with private frustration and outspokenness. Days go by and the little remnant resistance crumbles; life gets busy with other pursuits. There is no place for the “angry young man” persona.

But what if we could create an emergent, self-organising system that can connect us together? The big difference in the past 5-10 years has been the interconnectedness among Indians. Digital has become a necessity, even as it has become an escape. A few clicks and the world’s knowledge and entertainment are available to almost every Indian household. The slow, “downloading…” connectivity has been replaced with high-speed denoted by an ever increasing “G”. Kbps has been replaced by Mbps and Gbps beckons. The phone screens have become higher resolution resembling mini-TVs. Even as personal freedoms have diminished, digital freedom has increased. The always-on, anytime-anywhere world is upon us – thanks to our smartphones (new or used).

Until a few years ago, we were limited in the number of people we could individually communicate to – via phone calls or letters. Now, our “Good Morning” message can be sent instantly to all, or a delightful video can be forwarded with a few taps to dozens via WhatsApp groups. Each of us is a creator and micro-influencer, an ant in the digital kingdom, capable of producing great outcomes even as we go about just doing what gives us joy, recognition and dopamine.

Even as the content creation and mini-distribution problems are largely solved, what is missing is the curation and mass amplification. This is what will convert the micro-moments among the anonymous to a mass movement with local leaders and champions. A cruel state can suppress a few central nodes, but is powerless against a popular distributed uprising of the many. These many, suppressed and anonymous voices need to coalesce into a larger whole, glued together by digital threads.

What the voices need is a distribution system, a pipe. Just like a vaccine when injected into the body is carried by the blood to different parts, so also the pipe must take the voices and their messages across the nation – and perhaps even outside. Even as the content factory exists and improves with each passing day, it is the pipe which is missing. Content needs creators and their creativity; the pipe needs techies and their engineering skills. It is in their marriage on which lay hopes for a free and rich India.

Thinks 381

WSJ: “The metaverse marks another interface transition. Green and amber text monitors gave way to Apple’s and Windows’ graphical user interface, making computers much easier to use. Then slow modems connected us to the internet and we used the barren search-page interfaces of Yahoo and Google. Eventually graphics and photos sneaked in, especially as blogs and social networks boomed, and smartphones with cameras turned many into photo bugs. Then video was added, peaking this year with TikTok and multi-tile Zoom calls. Each interface iteration means humans spend less time navigating the computer and more time harnessing its power…Eventually, will we see virtual artwork and nonfungible tokens hanging on infinitely expandable walls? Virtual fitness fanatics? Real-estate developers buying up virtual worlds? Self-replicating virtual cyborg Terminators? Maybe, but I guarantee that the metaverse, like all new technology, will be far different from whatever we can dream up today.”

NYTimes: “Disgust shapes our behavior, our technology, our relationships. It is the reason we wear deodorant, use the bathroom in private and wield forks instead of eating with our bare hands…The more you read about the history of the emotion, the more convinced you might be that disgust is the energy powering a whole host of seemingly unrelated phenomena, from our never-ending culture wars to the existence of kosher laws to 4chan to mermaids. Disgust is a bodily experience that creeps into every corner of our social lives, a piece of evolutionary hardware designed to protect our stomachs that expanded into a system for protecting our souls.”

Mint on Indian labour’s lost decade: “A young labour force can be harnessed to achieve rapid economic growth, but only if that labour is actually employed to productive uses. As Thomas points out, “It is important for India that it translates the demographic ‘window of opportunity’ into favourable outcomes.” Unfortunately, this has not happened and the window in which this can be changed is rapidly closing. The Indian economy has not been able to catch up with the demographic changes in the last couple of decades. Thus, the very real danger that it will be stuck not just in a middle-income trap, but in a lower-income one, looms.”

Hindu Business Line on Netcore

Kurmanath interviewed me about Netcore’s future plans. Here’s his story. An excerpt below:

“We are planning to acquire a company that can give us a good customer footprint (in the US) or a company that can complement our products,” Rajesh Jain, Founder and Managing Director of Netcore Cloud, told BusinessLine.

Describing his company as a ‘proficorn’, a company that never raised funds yet profitable, he said the company would use accumulated profits to acquire a company with a ticket size of $50-100 million to give it an edge in the US market.

…Unlike most of the cloud firms that target the Western markets, Netcore Cloud has a strong base in India. About 85-90 per cent of its revenues come from India, with the Emerging markets of West Asia and Africa chipping in 12 per cent and 3 per cent from the US.

“We are going to change this (revenue break-up) in the next two-three years. We would like to see the Emerging markets and the US contributing 20 per cent each to our revenues, with India contributing 60 per cent,” he said.