The creator, Tucker Bryant - the titular TJB, admits you may not even get a response at all. Nothing about this website / chat‘bot’ / service makes any sense. Even the premium option is sold as meaningless. Despite all of the anti-features, thousands are lining up for their question to be answered - imperfectly, if ever - by an actual human being, for gems such as this:

Part of the success might be the Bryant having taken a fun anti-AI stance, replete with a billboard advertising his ‘service’.

This billboard cost him a ton of money, which he’s aiming to recoup through the success of his little project. Again, none of this makes any economic sense.

I also think we should expect many more things like this.

Weirdness & irrationality as responses to AI

I think we’re well into that stage of the “how will AI affect culture and humanity” discussion where most of us realise authenticity, humanity, weirdness, deliberate typos and perhaps even long rambly grammatically questionable sentences like this will be on the rise to counterbalance the ubiquitous middlingness of AI content, if nothing else, as a bid to show that an actual person was behind it.

There are two ends of this: Let’s classify them as mere fun (deliberately badly-drawn posters and projects like ChatTJB) and “realness-as-a-USP” (handmade art, food that takes days to get made, zines). This spectrum should logically never exist at all. Why would someone spend time or money to wait days for Bryant to answer a question, even if it’s a funny response? ChatGPT can do that. I often think about this when listeners send in questions to (two of my favourite podcasts) Dear Hank & John, and Radiolab. The answers - even if one is averse to using AI - can be found using good ol’ Google or better ol’ other experts. No, there is something about the personal or social value of being associated with said creators that goes beyond the ‘economic’ value of the answers.

This is not a new thing. Those who choose to watch a football team or a musician in person, over the more convenient and cheaper options (TV, Spotify) clearly derive something out of the live experience - community, personal satisfaction, or signalling to Instagram followers that “I was there”. In a way, the ubiquitous convenience of always-on music increases this factor of an inconvenient, more expensive live experience.

The universal loathing (or, at least, ubiquity) of AI content provides yet another thing for people to signal against. It’s almost like there is signaling value to be gained by choosing the non-AI, non-easy option.

Again, this signalling could be to self (“I care about writing enough to craft each word myself”) or to the external world (“Dear client, I do not use ChatGPT for my websites - and I am saying this so you know I have thought through things” / “Dear creative community I am a part of, look at my moral high ground of never using Suno, please don’t kick me out”).

The Red Sneakers Effect

In 2014, three Harvard researchers published a paper that spoke about the signaling value dervied from deliberate non-conformity: Such as entering a luxury store wearing gym clothes or entering a formal meeting with the titular red sneakers. It’s seen less as an act of defiance or laziness; but more of competence. It’s like they’re saying: I’ve chosen to do this, am aware of the social consequences, and (maybe) will demonstrate how this random set of guidelines I am breaking is no barrier to my success - watch as I sport a metal band tee-shirt in this finance meeting and make the most important point anyone has made all year. (Have we all not admired that professor who has tattooes AND knows their subject matter well?). A top design studio embracing human-made artwork is Red Sneaker behaviour.

This deliberate non-conformity is always in context to what conformity means at any time. Red sneakers in formal settings in the 1990s works because blazers and boring black shoes are what are expected. Showing up with a Taylor Swift tee at a metal gig is also Red Sneaker behaviour. Choosing to write in slang or vernacular on LinkedIn is Red Sneaker behaviour. In an age where generating a bland but functional image using ChatGPT is de rigueur, doing a terrible sketch is Red Sneaker behaviour. This is not commentary on what is aesthetically better - it’s about what signals better. Perhaps if we overcorrect and everyone starts using bad images / deliberate typos to signal they made something, using good grammar / GPT-ish phrasing will come to be in vogue! It’s just like how the aesthetic on Instagram went from unpolished → highly polished → back to unpolished in a decade.

GenAI and the Red Sneaker effect

The Red Sneaker effect - and perhaps signalling at a broader level - is really about saying : “I know the sensible answer, and I don’t want it.”

But one important factor here is choice: There’s a difference between accidentally wearing the wrong footwear and deliberately choosing a pair that will raise eyebrows in a boardroom. In other words: Quirk becomes valuable because it feels chosen - not because it’s incorrect. A fine line, I know - but I suppose that’s where “pulling it off” becomes equally important.

I feel the speed at which Generative AI is being adopted provides a fascinating testing ground to see what trends, counter-trends and second-order effects emerge. Of course brands will want to seem “less AI” - does this mean more human artists are hired? Does all that work go back and feed an LLM that gets better at ‘sounding more human’? Everyone will know that - so where’s the Red Sneaker stance now? We’re going to have to go out of our way to display humanity to one another - whether it’s through formal provenance (“No AI” sticker) or just getting weirder and weirder.

A few things are for sure - we’re going to see a lot more fun ideas, a lot more things that make homo economicus wonder ‘WTF?’. We’ll place value in getting an imperfect answers from a podcast or a “human chatbot” - even if we have to wait a week. We’ll be Red Sneakering more to show that, at least in some aspects of our lives, we have agency and are trying to live deliberately.

Fun, weird times are ahead. Strap in.

Interesting recommended related read

I turn 42 today! So here’s the answer to life, the universe and everything stuff I find myself readily recommending to others. This includes some of my favourite content, most meaningful purchases, and ways of living important to me. For the purpose of this list, I’m not including individual songs, comedy bits or essays. Also, I don’t consider myself a movie / TV show nerd so apart from a few select ones, you won’t see much of that here. My idea is to give you recommendations, not popular “best of” things (or even my own favourites) - so you will find something new! :)

This list has: YouTube videos | YouTube channels | Books | Podcasts | Apps | Health & wellness | Music | Philosophies

YouTube videos

Everything is a remix | Kirby Ferguson

The thesis: There are no original ideas. Every piece of art - the music of Led Zeppelin, your favourite graphic novel, a funny Reel - is built on the back of something, often many things. Culture is ever-evolving, ideas constantly blend to create new ones.

history of the entire world, i guess | Bill Wurtz

A surreal and frantic 20 minutes that’ll teach you everything you need to know about how we got here. Brace.

65 Songs - A Journey Through Rock ‘N’ Roll | Ten Second Songs

One of my favourite YouTubers - who specialises in performing songs in other styles - brings together two fellow musicians to take us through a history of the genre. Beautiful mashup, brilliantly performed.

History of Rock | Ithaca Studios

There are several videos on the history of the genre - but how many do it in the form of a Facebook timeline - complete with real quotes, and “likes” by the influenced artists?

Listening to ONLY an iPod for a Month Changed Everything | Digging The Greats

Brandon - who normally makes music commentary videos - did an experiment where he wanted to go without streaming for a month. The end - as the title suggests - changed more than his music listening. While the title is about music, the video is really about digital wellness, and hence highly recommended for everyone. It also inspired my post on smartphone unbundling.

The Music That Defined the 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | Mic The Snare

This is not a list of “best songs” or top-charting or even the creator’s favourite songs from each decade. Instead, it’s the songs that defined each decade - things that caused a shift, or were emblematic of one. This is really well compiled, edited and is at heart a history-of-tech lesson.

Backyard Squirrel Maze | Mark Rober

The premise is weird as heck, but I swear it will leave you - and any kids watching - with a giant grin.

YouTube channels

“I love things that take silliness seriously” - Divya, my wife.

Taskmaster (comedy)

An incredibly silly British panel-cum-live-action show where 5 comedians / public figures do pointless tasks to impress a comedically mean judge. This got us through the pandemic, and is now a global phenomenon. If you need a counterbalance to hustle culture and always-on productivity, this is it.

Jet Lag: The Game (comedy / travel)

A board game, but a country (or city, or continent) is the board. Also, very pointless. Incredible fun, and gets more tense than a game where the stakes is a digital trophy needs to be.

True Facts by Ze Frank (comedy / science)

Imagine if David Attenborough took a nice fat spliff.

Kurzgesagt (science)

Has science ever been so beautifully told? The videos on emergence, memories and trees are among my favourite ever. You have most likely seen something from this channel.

Yes Theory (challenges / travel)

A channel featuring a few friends doing crazy things outside their comfort zone, such as traveling to the most isolated (or supposedly dangerous) places in the world. The result is often heartwarming, along with some stunning footage.

Drumeo’s “Heard song for the first time” series (music)

A kickass series where a (famous) drummer hears a song for the first time, and makes up his/her own drum parts. It’s a great demonstrator of the importance of drums and how a different interpretation can change a whole song. Plus, just amazing to see how they do it. Recommended even if you’re not a drummer (I’m not). Nic Collins’ re-interpretation of my favourite song, Opeth’s Ghost of Perdition, is one of my favourite videos of all time.

20 Style Covers | 10 Second Songs (music)

Anthony Vincent shows off his incredible vocal, instrumental and arranging prowess by covering popular rock / pop songs in 20 different styles. What a genius.

Starboyz | Kenny Sebastian & Naveen Richard (comedy)

Ok, this is the kvltest, weirdest, randomest thing that English-speaking comedy in India has ever produced. When watching the scene below for the first time - admittedly, not at full sobriety - was the first and only time I thought I was physically in danger of dying of laughter. Please queue up and enjoy. You will bonus enjoy if you are from Kerala, Bangalore, or (best) a Keralite from Bangalore.

Books

Alchemy | Rory Sutherland

Why our species is wired to seek out non-conformity. It might be an advertising book written by an advertising man, but its lessons are applicable in all sorts of places.

What to Make of a Life | Jim Collins

On finding what makes you tick. The author describes it as not a self-help book, but a self-exploration book. I read this as I was building Unstuck, and it resonated with me so much. The core idea of finding your encodings, and the “Bug Book” exercise itself are worth the fee. Highly recommended for millennials.

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives | David Eagleman

What happens after we die? In this enthralling collection of fictional essays, a neuroscientist explores 40 possible options. Poignant, surreal, hilarious, thought-provoking.

Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car | Jordan Bolton

Slice-of-life incredibly moving comics - or as he calls then - visual poems. His work’s been going viral on Instagram over the last year and for good reason. Interestingly, his follow-up book drops today!

The Asterix series: Box set

If you loved reading random editions as a kid, there are few better gifts to give yourself. I have the full series and it gives me such a joy to open and read them.

Anything by PG Wodehouse

The master of comedic English writing. Since a lot of his books are out of license, you’ll find some amazing deals if you’re okay going digital. For less than ₹100, you can have 6000 pages of his works in one massive collection, on your Kindle. I know this is hardly a recommendation, but as Stephen Fry said: If you have never read Wodehouse, what a lucky person you are.

Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy | Douglas Adams

Of course, a 42-numbered list should have this! The original surreal piece of fiction, one that’s opened up many minds, and one that rewards every re-read. If you have read the book, the audiobook narration by none other than Stephen Fry is well worth it.

Podcasts

I do audio podcasts. You will find all of these on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocketcasts, and the likes.

Radiolab

Science communication through touching stories and stunning sound design. A high watermark of what audio podcasts can be.

Dear Hank & John

A comfort podcast by the vlogbrothers, Hank and John Green. Funny, silly, often profound - centred around answering questions from their fans. The questions may seem frivolous, the answers start off funny, often go deep. It’s from this show I found my favourite quote: “Pay attention to what you pay attention to” by the late author Amy Krause Rosenthal.

Freakonomics Radio

One question, answered with lots of research, interviews, and Dubner’s trademark sardonic wit. I use it as a reference for narrative style podcasts, and I learn something every time.

What Now? with Trevor Noah

I’m a fan of anything Trevor does. His new podcast is lovely. The questions are thoughtful, he shows respect for the topic, there are stories, lessons, warmth and humour in every conversation. I listen even if I don’t know the guest.

What It’s Like To Be… with Dan Heath

Each episode is a chat with someone from a different profession. Not celebrities, just regular folks good at (and passionate about) jobs like being a teacher, a pilot, a fireman, and more. I love this show, and there are so many meta-takeaways, and more lessons than techbro productivity Twitter.

TED Radio Hour

It’s like the world’s wisdom is condensed down to an hour, weekly.

Twenty Thousand Hertz

A podcast exploring sound - not music necessarily. Beautiful explorations of sonic worlds, theme songs, jingles, soundtracks and yes, music. Geeky and delightful.

I have several more podcasts I listen to and recommend, a later post for that if people are interested.

Apps

1 second everyday

An app where you upload, well, one second daily. At the end of the year, you mash it up to create a nice video for yourself. Of course, there are the big moments - the concert, the summit view, the annual friend meetup… But it’s the smaller monents - cat doing something silly, a regular home dinner, the sight from your balcony - that make you realise life is full of small, beautiful moments worth savoring. I’ve been doing this since September 2017 - when I flew to Singapore to watch Dream Theater.

Spelltower

A word game which is a combination of Scrabble and Tetris. Delightful. Ideal for tablets.

Yeah, just two apps :)

Health / fitness / wellness

This can be a very nuanced topic, and I am certainly not the expert on all of it, so here’s two specific recommendations from me.

Unlock by Kunal Rajput

Daily live virtual workouts for intermediates. Done from home, using nothing more than a few dumbbells. It’s fun, challenging, diverse, and effective. I’ve been working out with Kunal and his sister Shivani since mid 2022 and it has been life changing. I’ve gotten fitter, become more alert, and have a better understanding of fundamentals. More than anything, these crazy workouts have helped me enjoy the rest of the things I like doing.

Mr Butler sodamakers

The only ‘branded product’ I’m going to recommend here, because it’s helped with my cravings so much. This is a power-less machine that fizzes water. The result is something that feels like cola (all those bubbles!) but with no sugar or flavouring. It’s immensely satisfying and filling. It’s an easy reco for me to make given there are no side effects (apart from a lot of burps!) and it’s cheap.

Waking Up

This is the meditation app I use, and I love it. It’s a bit pricey at $130 a year, but it’s given me a lot of value. I do (on most days) a 10-minute meditation to start the day. I’ve come to realise meditation is not about having some crazy insight on a daily basis - it’s just 10 minutes of total mind relaxation and learning to focus better. Since I’m a subscriber, I can share a free month if anyone is interested (I get no benefit from this). And in that one month, you can try the introductory course, which alone is great.

Cheap digital alarm clock

Why get yourself one of these things when your phone can tell the time and give you an alarm? So that you can get that timesucking device out of the bedroom. At 300 bucks, it’s the easiest start to deaddicting yourself from the phone. No doomscrolling temptation in bed, and no checking email first thing in the morning. I think that’s decent.

Music

Note: I’ll try to provide entry points, rather than specific songs, here.

An Indian independent rock starter pack

This country has a ridiculous amount of talent and sub-genres. Ranging from folk to death metal… and folky death metal. Here’s a playlist where I’ve tried to collect seminal songs, representative tracks for various genres, etc. You may not like everything here, but I guarantee you will find SOMETHING you like. In which case, click the artist / album, and explore more. Playlist on Spotify | YouTube

100 songs to get you into rock

If you were fond of Bryan Adams / Bon Jovi in school and want to explore a few more - without worrying about death metal growls or 20-minute progressive songs, here is a selection of tracks I’ve curated for you. Features some of my favourite songs ever. Mostly easy listening, light-to-medium rock. This is NOT a “greatest rock songs of all time” or “essential listening” or anything, so rock snobs please don’t @ me. This was made purely on the basis of vibes and what I had in my ‘gold music’ folder. Playlist on Spotify | YouTube

Philosophies

Ok, so this is the gyaan part of this list. Forgive me, I’m now 42. Jokes apart, these are the things that have helped me navigate my post-35, working-for-self life. I live life largely on my own terms now, and these are some of the things that have contributed to that.

Ask Big Questions

What does your ideal day look like? What do you want out of life, actually? What is your idea of happiness? What would you do if you had all the money you needed? These are seemingly simple questions - but damn tough to answer (especially the older you get). I don’t think they ever do get answered, but the process of working on them, helps you understand yourself, your values, and more.

If asking Big Questions seems too intimidating, just reflect often. Something I feel millennials don’t do enough of.

Have something to be enthusiastic about

Dive into something you like. Not at a surface level, but deep. You like music? Devour the artists you like. You want to get back to reading about history? Get yourself a few books and get into them without distraction. You like TV shows? That’s also ok - watch them with attention, form your theories and corraborate them with subreddits. Don’t be passive about your hobby. Get into it. Have something you’re passionate about - and this should not at all be work. (I am deeply distrustful of people whose LinkedIn headline reads “passionate about CRM”).

Which leads me to a related point.

Spend (within reason) on your enthusiasms

Gift yourself - not recklessly - something that will help you maximise your passion. If you like music, get a nice pair of wired headphones that will help you enjoy music more. Like TV shows? Take a subscription to Variety. Like exploring the hills? Treat yourself to guided weekend treks. It’s expensive and wasted only if you consume it passively. But remember, a purchase does not guarantee you will get into a habit, so don’t use this recommendation as a crutch - drop cash only when you’re sure you’ve earned the upgrade and are sure this is for an enthusiasm and not a social media post. For me, it’s two headphones and a li’l Sony portable music player.

And finally, my programs

If all the above has been useful to you, then I hope you won’t mind if I spend 5% of my recommendations plugging stuff I do :)

Unstuck

A life-design-for-millennials program I run. Over 3 months, we help you design and action your idea of a good life. That could cover (depending on where you’re feeling stuck) career shifts, healthy rituals, better relationships, deaddicting yourself from technology, and more. The first cohort wrapped up last Friday, and dare I say, each of the 19 participants understood themelves better, have started taking meaningful steps towards a better life. Three even quit their jobs!

The next cohort starts on 04 September. Check out the site here.

The 6% Club

The creative projects program I run. My belief is that everyone has a ‘category of one’ idea inside them. This is not to become an influencer or something - it’s meant to act as a form of creative expression. We wrapped up our 9th cohort last Friday, and now there are over 350 folks we’ve mentored, and we’ve seen some kickass projects and ideas emerge (including books!). If finding a creative outlet appeals to you, we’d love you to join us. Our 10th cohort starts in October.

Bonus!

If you felt I was cheating by inserting ads for my programs within this post (or you are alumni of said programs!), fair enough, here are two things that will give you daily recommendations: A WhatsApp broadcast group where I share an article a day; and another one where I share a song a day.

Hope you find something you like here. Let me know if you found anything to like.

And hey, on the basis of the above, feel free to make your own recommendations. Maybe that’ll become the compilation for next year :)

Chuck

Like when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was discussed in the early 90s, it faced opposition from “a strange coalition composed of organized labor, environmentalists, the radical right, the protectionist left, and some very specific powerful business groups, such as big sugar firms, citrus growers, and the flat-glass industry.”

Bonus points may be awarded if the factions consist of ideologically opposite members. In the 1980s, the rise of pornography united feminists and conservatives, approaching the same problem from two different sets of values. More strange bedfellows can be found in the world of fiction, like when X-Men and Magneto put aside their differences to fight the Purifiers1.

Finding opposing factions is fun. Like when fans of bitter rivals would come together to cheer against Argentina in the recent World Cup (or the club equivalent with a beautiful acronym, ABU).

But the prize for this competition should go to the Janata Party, a coalition of Indian political parties in the late 70s who probably never wanted to be under the same roof2, banding together to usurp Indira Gandhi after the Emergency. Alas, having a common enemy is one thing but finding a common way of working completely another - as the alliance would crumble and face a landslide loss in three years.

Anyway, all this looking back to history is to try and make sense of the current “coalition” who opposes AI. It’s honestly quite impressive, the sheer range of folks who hate AI for different reasons. If Sam Altman has another molotov cocktail thrown at his house, he may have to stop to ask who the hurler was. It could be any one of:

• Environmentalists who believe AI is using up all the water and natural resources

• Artists and creative folk who believe AI art is soulless at best, and an existential threat at worst

• Journalists and creators of content that AI steals, sorry, trains on for free

• Junior workers who worry about AI taking their jobs

• Senior workers who’re fed up of cleaning up AI’s mess and complying with “use AI or die” diktats from upper management

• Upper management worrying about whether their company will be around tomorrow thanks to AI and wishing it would all just go away

• All knowledge workers who’ve gotten the fear of god put into them that AI will upend everything; and just tired of having AI features shoved into their faces (no Google, I do not want to beautify this slide or change my clunky sentence - take your purple underlines where the sun don’t shine and ffs bring back Reader).

• Academics who’re fed up of students using AI for homework, or just wondering how to deal with the whole damn thing

• Parents already freaking out about social media and screen time, worrying whether this is going to further atrophy their kids’ skills

• Women worrying about deepfakes and revenge porn

• Americans across party lines opposing data centres being built in their area for a variety of reasons - who would have thought big ugly buildings with NVidia chips is what would finally unite red and blue states?

• Financial analysts and traders who worry about a bubble

• Regulators - if not governments - seeing fresh hell with every update

• The Pope

• The average person on the street who now sees Big Tech’s charming male leaders as megalomaniacal egocentric billionaires (which, I will agree is unfair - one of them is a megalomaniacal egocentric trillionaire)

• And everyone else just pissed off with AI slop in their feeds, LinkedIn, marketing communication, heck even Tinder chats.

It’s quite impressive that AI has managed to garner so much varied opposition. I don’t mean all of this in a necessarily derogatory way - like I said up top, a new technology will always be met with some opposition, and maybe it speaks to how (potentially positive) the disruption is, that so many different factions are freaking out.

What does all this mean, though?

In a good recent post on his Substack, economist Paul Krugman bluntly answered why everyone hates AI: The companies building it told us it would do terrible things, people feel it’s being forced on them, datacentres are a visible reminder of AI’s (many kinds of) costs, and tech companies & their bosses in general have had a soured reputation even pre-AI.

In my view, a few things, as society learns to grapple with the most transformative technology it’s seen in a while (sorry web3 stans):

The issues raised are now in public consciousness, and will not go away in a hurry

I think it’s important to separate out the underlying issue / concern / fear, from the technology itself. My guess is entry-level workers don’t hate AI in the abstract, but worry about what it will do to their jobs. Creatives worry what happens to art when authorship becomes murky, and human work becomes harder to value. Both of these are important issues that have existed before AI, and will continue even if ChatGPT and its ilk vanish (or likely, are heavily regulated) tomorrow.

An instructive example is the NAFTA one I shared above. Though the ‘strange coalition’ technically lost (the agreement came into force in 1994), the issues it raised - labour rights, environmental enforcement, sovereignty and offshoring - never disappeared from the politics of trade and remain alive to this day, even as NAFTA itself was replaced.

The same is likely to happen with AI. Even if the current boom subsides, the arguments it has forced into the open may produce useful changes. Universities are already having to reconsider what students should learn when passable answers can be generated in seconds and nobody knows what jobs will be available in 2 years’ time. Artists, publishers and audiences are being forced to think about provenance and the value of human-made work. The good thing AI has done from the perspective of those opposing it - is that these questions are now becoming harder to delay.

The ‘coalition’ is larger than the sum of its parts, making it tougher to beat, and easier to hate the enemy

The people in that list of bullet points above are not constituents of a single unified party. But what it does do, is create a compounding aggregating effect: Just as you read about AI taking away jobs in the business papers, you hear your favourite musician lament about a different aspect of it on her Reel. Then you want to order a pizza to distract yourself, but all the restaurants are now using AI-generated images on Zomato and you can’t trust any of them. All this makes it easier for you to say: I hate AI - it’s a convenient acronym that captures so much. From Big Tech’s point of view, solving one faction’s problems won’t make the others go away.

While the disaggregated nature of the opposition does have the disadvantage of not being able to organise together into a clean pithy party, its advantage is that that these issues will be debated for a long time: and solving one does not make the others disappear.

Big Tech needs social solutions and not technical ones

It has never been more apparent how much these large technology firms need people with humanities degrees or, at the very least, social skills beyond mansplaining.

The issues raised by all those groups above are not going to be solved with token efficiency, quicker answers or easier paths to vibe-coding your dream app. Tech firms seem to think that all of society’s problems will go away if they could just be permitted to build more data centres. Hot take, but I think one public meeting with an artists’ group or educators’ collective would do more good than adding more parameters or whatever goes under the hood. Of course, they can’t do that, since it may stall progress and the only way for these firms to dig themselves out of this multi-billion-dollar hole they’ve dug themselves into is to throw caution to the wind and hope some day some graph will flip.

Still, as I propounded before in my Theory of Just Good Enough, maybe tech doesn’t need to break its pretty head trying to build an even more ‘impressive’ version of the LLMs - just work with what they have now and get someone who understands the above communities, seeing them as stakeholders rather than irritants.

A decent example from history is Samsø island in Denmark. In 1997, it was selected to become Denmark’s “renewable-energy island.” The residents’ initial response was mostly indifference and scepticism. In came local teacher Søren Hermansen - he spent years turning up at village meetings, recruiting people whom the community already trusted, translating the project into local rather than planetary terms, got residents shares in the turbines, and well, he brought beer too which helped. By 2003, Samsø was exporting electricity and by 2005, it was producing more renewable energy than it consumed. How many consultations has Big Tech undertaken? Do they take any feedback apart from coders complaining about tokens on X? Have data centres tried communicating how local economies will benefit? Sure, they may have, but what makes the headlines is Altman and Amodei talking about a white collar job apocalypse. Again, some humanities training would help…

Look, maybe AI will end up being a net positive.

Maybe even those creative folks who’re disgruntled with it now will find things to do with it (they may find AI slop has led to an appreciation for actual human craft!).

Maybe it will solve cancer and global warming, and having techbros use GPT fiction on LinkedIn will seem like a small price to pay.

Maybe ugly data centres will eventually morph into places of public art if we can get Bjarke Ingels involved.

My hope is that even if the current moment feels like a heck of a lot of flux, even though everyone hates a different AI, it’ll lead to some long-standing issues being addressed, if not solved.

If AI is here just to help us get commercially feasible nuclear fusion energy, and have a better answer to what it means to be human, I’m down for that.

While technologies, market caps and egos change exponentially every few months, one thing is reliably periodic: The football World Cup. I thought it might be an interesting exercise to look at the state of the internet, by World Cups. Rather than try and give highlights and stats per period, I’m going to try and give the zeitgeist of the era, from my perspective.

2026: The techlash became real

Tech is sprawling, yes, but it’s increasingly viewed with suspicion, loathing and concern.

Yes, AI broke the camel’s back that’s been accumulating straws for a while - with pushback coming from an impressively diverse coalition of environmentalists, creatives, junior workers, mid-management tired of cleaning up its inefficacy, concerned financial analysts, anti-data centre neighbourhoods, and governments1.

It’s not just AI, of course. Our collective immune systems are kicking in against social media - governments around the world banning it for teenagers, and the rest of us trying really hard to de-addict ourselves from it.

The hyper-digitalification would not have felt so bad if products weren’t actively getting worse: dark patterns, more ads, higher prices, shoving AI features down our throats (I don’ want to beautiful my slides, Google!). No wonder Cory Doctorow’s coinage of Enshittification hit such a nerve, it summed up so much.

Leaders of industry haven’t done said industry any reputational favours either - if it’s not twattish behaviour, it’s telling everyone to get with the AI program or go extinct, all while laughing themselves to the bank. Two recent events sum up the techlash nicely: American college graduates booing commencement speakers touting AI, and the internet desperately wanting to make real that outrageous Bezos quote.

Tech’s financial stock may be in the stratosphere, but its reputational one seems to be in the gutter. Will that count for much? Well, ask Standard Oil… Or AT&T… Or tech grandpa Microsoft. Public hate has a decent history of translating into regulation, especially when revulsion cuts across so many diverse groups2.

And while AI didn’t fill up the bottle, it definitely popped the cork. Interesting, because the whole wave started literally during the last World Cup.

2022: Is this tech enough for ya?

In end November, as Argentina snuck through to the knockouts in Qatar, OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world. AI may have dominated discourse since, but the tech story going in to the tournament was different. The last World Cup may have been considered as relief from the pandemic - a signal that the world was crawling back to normal. But was it normal, really?

From 2019 to 2022, the global connected population shot up from 54% to 66%. Ecommerce, video meetings, delivery apps went from coping mechanisms to a way of life. Stock markets saw a neat little crash → boom → settle whose protagonists were largely tech firms. Several observors spoke about how a decade's worth of digital acceleration essentially happened inside a couple of years.

We individually felt it too. The romance of remote work faded into endless virtual meetings, Slack notifications or just brains rotting with doomscrolling and misinformation. Most of us were tired of techbros trying desperately to make web3, the metaverse and NFTs a thing. Fittingly, the FTX collapse started just before the World Cup - and remember, ChatGPT was released ten days after it began.

The start of the touch grass / digital detox movement we see now started around this time - a reaction to the over-tech-ification of life.

2018: Trust collapse

A month before the opening game in Russia - the location itself shrouding the tournament in controversy - Google removed longstanding motto of Don’t Be Evil from atop its code of conduct. It would become a move symbolic of how once-cool well-meaning tech darlings became big cold capitalistic monoliths.

You know an industry is ‘growing up’ when there are well-documented scandals and primt-time discussions around it, and in the time since the 2014 tournament, tech had given us plenty of trust-shattering fodder, and most of it came from Facebook: Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg’s subsequent hauling to Congress, the platform’s role in violence/deaths in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Brazil and India. Soon, it would surface that the platform was well-aware of its impact on teenage mental health, and would do nothing about it.

Apart from this, the outrage over Amazon’s HQ2 - a highly profitable firm getting US cities to compete with each other to provide it sops - became a public display of tech’s disgusting confidence, on the heels of its misogynistic hiring tool. Tech regulation started becoming a thing - especially GDPR in the EU (back then, it would have seemed ludicrious to ban social media for kids). We were all contending with the fact that these platforms now had billions of users.

It was also the smaller things: Remember the Facebook salamat controversy, or Snapchat’s ad essentially promoting domestic violence, Logan Paul showing the creator economy had a downside, and goodness knows what more.

Maybe the most symbolic event was YouTube Year In Review 2018 became the most disliked video of all time (still holds the record!).

All this came in parallel with a global vibe shift: Brexit, the election of Trump, and more just cast a pall on the world. Tech felt like it was part of the problem and not just another affected participant. Oh well, at least things were more positive the last time around…

2014: The happy Buzzfeed era!

The internet at this time was delightful, man, just delightful.

There were fun memes about everything. Gangnam Style exploded, creating online culture, a new way of counting Billboard charts, and a global market for K-pop in its wake. The Ice Bucket Challenge. Harlem Shake. Original ideas on YouTube. Brands actually doing interesting online things before things got sanitised. We chose to focus on the good parts of the internet-fuelled Arab Spring.

Online communities were flourishing and the golden era of Indian Twitter - replete with in-jokes, niches, and characters of all sorts - gave me so much escape, joy and inspiration.

Personally, the era between 2010-2014 was an insanely creative time: I was doing a lot of cartooning, writing, Bschool-oriented standup, gig reviewing, and so much more. In this time, I also met an amazing person - online, yes - and got married to her, and we were building a new life. I’d joined Ogilvy - one of the biggest names in advertising, where I was part of a fledgling online team and my opinions were actually treated with respect.

I was connecting with and speaking with some of my online heroes from that time - I would frequently hang out with my “Twitter heroes” in Mumbai, I would do some collabs on projects with Krish Ashok and of course the next year, Narendra Shenoy and I would start a 9-year project with Simblified. I discovered so much music, writing, “creators”, and ideas online. I loved being on Facebook (there was no doomscrolling, only connecting).

Truly, for me, that time felt joyous because of the internet.

I call this era the “Happy Buzzfeed era” because that publication seemed to come up with some cool listicle or the other every day, or talking about some cool thing that someone did. I did fear that this party wouldn’t last for ever, and soon enough, everything did unravel - politics, the ills of too much social media, the spread of misinformation that the algorithms were perfectly primed for, digital advertising ruining online experiences, online bubbles, and so much worse.

Not to mention, AICTE clamped down on the errant IIPM, taking 30 minutes off my set and effectively killing my stand-up career.

Ok, perhaps we should move a touch faster now.

2010: Wide eyes around the internet

Things were getting digital and how. As the games got underway in South Africa, the number of internet users worldwide crossed 2 billion, doubling since 2005. Facebook hit 500 million users midway through the tournament. The mobile revolution was getting underway.

I suppose this era was specially important for me, as I started my career around this time working in digital strategy and social media. Honestly, I didn’t think a career here would be possible (the BSchool I just graduated from didn’t even have a dedicated course), and a lot of things seemed to be opening up at the same time.

Internet media startups. Legacy companies wanting to be on social media. Online gaming. Phone apps were becoming an actual business. Internet-first comics and blogs were starting to take off. Colleges started contacting me asking if I’d like to teach digital marketing to post-grads. Such fun stuff was happening online ya. Some of the blogs and formats coming out of India - Anand Ramachandran’s Big Fat Phoenix, Sahil Rizwan’s Vigil Idiot, and so many more.

We wouldn’t think about data harvesting and misinformation at this time. Heck, take all our data, just give us more of that sweet internet!

It’s not like I wasn’t an active participant of the internet before - Pagalguy and Orkut were formative parts before - but I didn’t think a full career could be made out of it. I approached the internet with wide eyes, excited about what may happen. I met the person I’d spend my life with, 9 days into the World Cup. That helped.

2006: The escape

For me, this era marked my time in engineering college. Formation of identity and tastes. The internet here had a disproportionate impact on me given the time I spent on it. I didn’t have always-on internet, and the weekly trips to an internet cafe were intentional. Online forums (my Pagalguy story here), discovering and downloading new music, printing guitar tabs to take back to hostel and learn… The internet at this time was truly a wondrous place. It still felt raw. As Italy won the final in Germany, the iPhone was yet to be launched into the world and change it forever.

With just ~37 million internet users in India, the internet still felt like a hobby, a subculture… optional.

I loved the internet back then and knew it would become more important, but wouldn’t think that it would take over everything… And keep in mind, this distant time was just less than 20 years ago.

Prior to this, my own internet usage existed (mostly to painstakingly download music off Kazaa, spend hours on Yahoo! Messenger, and of course whatever else you can expect a teenager to do online. So let’s not turn this piece into a full personal history. But since things moved comparatively slowly, it’s worth taking some key milestones till all the way back, so here’s some stuff that happened per World Cup…

• 2002: The consumer internet was just taking off in India. Wall Street had written off the internet, thanks to a dotcom boom-bust that caused a near 80% NASDAQ crash.

• 1998: Google, Amazon and a few other biggies of later started or found their feet. Would often be met by derison, the “when are you going to get a real job” equivalent being asked of business models. Famously, this moment:

• 1994: The raw, nascent consumer internet - still largely seen for hobbyists. Netscape - the company that would popularise the browser - went public in 1995, a moment called the Big Bang of the internet.

• 1990: Today, we use “internet” and “web” differently, but there is a difference (underlying tech and interface, being a very simplistic one). In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee developed the WWW at CERN, making the underlying infra of connected computers imminently usable. He’s not the father of the web for nothing.

• 1986: As Maradona’s genius and mischief won Argentina their second title, the internet was still very much an academic interest. The US National Science Foundation launched NSFNET to connect academic researchers to supercomputer centres. This became the internet backbone in the US, connecting ~2,000 computers in 1986. This would cross 2 million by the Netscape IPO.

• 1982: TCP/IP launched the next year. That geeky-sounding thing is the set of instructions that allowed different networks to speak to each other, essentially turning various localised intra-nets into one (theoretically) global inter-net.

We rewind a fair bit now - no need to force history here - to a significant moment.

• 1966: The year when England won the World Cup at home, the internet pretty much got birthed across the pond. In 1957, reacting to a bomb test scare, president Harry Truman asked his military research team to find new ways to get computers to communicate faster. As England was basking in the glow of its only World Cup win, computer scientist Larry Roberts went to DARPA to develop ARPANET. That would eventually become the internet, that would eventually merge with the WWW to create the monster we know today, that would add on Apple’s engineering genius and human hardwiring to and capitalist instincts to create a global network for good and bad, that which would train on itself to create the big technology of 2026. All in a mere 60 years, over 16 World Cups. Impressive, homo sapiens.

2030: ???????

I don’t doubt we’re going into a more technological future, but I also think we’re on the precipice of a healthier relationship with it - at least in some individual capacity. It’ll be very interesting to see how this tension plays out as the World Cup travels to Morocco-Spain-Portugal in 2030.

May whoever you’re rooting for win the tournament.

Chuck

Adam Grant ends his podcasts by asking people who their dream dinner guest - dead or alive - would be. I invariably answer that as Douglas Adams. It would have been amazing to get his thoughts on AI, his thoughts on music, his thoughts on what became of the Apple he loved… After all, he was not just a great comic writer, he also thought deeply about technology1. The world cruelly took him away just as it was on the cusp of being transformed by the internet - a technology of which he was an early adopter. His potential Substack on the aforementioned topics would have been so fun and thought-provoking (he would have been 74).

So, since I don’t have a time machine, I did the next best thing - use ChatGPT. I built myself a Douglas Adams digital twin… A fancy way of saying I found several publicly available essays, videos and thoughts by the man, bunged it all into one project folder and asked it several questions, with hallucination guardrails and proof of traceability. The answers are simulated extrapolations of his own previous work and views.

Of course - it’s all speculation, there are some AI tropes despite my best edits, and hardcore HHGG fans may be mortified that I even did this exercise at all2. Still, I found the ‘conversation’ quite engrossing and felt this is what the man would have said - a testament to how much he left us with which we can still mine. So here it is - my “interview” with Douglas Noel Adams!

Big fat disclosure: This "interview” was conducted through a Douglas Adams simulation made on ChatGPT. Traceability notes are provided for each answer, as are the references used to extrapolate the answers. Limits of inference are also given.

Technology does not only create new things. It reveals what the old thing was really made of.

A simulated Douglas Adams quote

Mr Adams, it’s a pleasure to speak to you. Before we begin talking about technology, the internet, AI, and all that - I feel HHGG is more popular today than ever (a friend is even the Towel Day ambassador!). Some people I know do a yearly read. Why do you think your seminal work is so revered even today?

Well, first, I must say that “revered” is a terribly alarming word to apply to a book that began life by making the Earth extremely inconvenient to keep around.

I suspect the reason people keep returning to it is not that it explains the universe, because it very obviously doesn’t. In fact, it goes to some lengths to suggest that explaining the universe is exactly the sort of activity the universe would find rather rude. What it may do, though, is provide a reasonably comfortable mental dressing gown for people who have noticed that existence is both magnificent and badly run.

The thing about modern life — and I’m afraid this has not become less true — is that everyone is constantly being asked to behave as though large, absurd systems are sensible. So perhaps the books endure because they say: yes, you are right, this is absurd. The planet, the office, the council notice, the computer, the spaceship, the civilisation, the answer, the question — all of it is absurd. But that does not mean it is hopeless. It means you are allowed to laugh while trying to understand it.3

Let’s start with your views on the smartphone. There’s arguably no more important technology in the 21st century, and is perhaps the best modern-day analogue to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (device, not book) that you conceived. And it was made by the company you were such a fan of! In a mere 20 years, it has changed so much. What of the smartphone’s impact surprises you, and what doesn’t?

The smartphone is, as you say, probably the closest thing Earth has yet produced to the Guide - as a great many people have often remarked, often complained, to me. It is small, rectangular, intermittently useful, often wrong, oddly reassuring, frequently updated, and liable to make you believe that having access to information is much the same thing as being informed. That last bit is where the trouble begins.

What does not surprise me is the convergence. I always thought computers would become less like machines you visited and more like environments you carried. We invent tools and then domesticate them.

What surprises me is that the dominant use of this almost indecently miraculous object is not exploring the intellectual and ecological complexity of the planet, but refreshing small rectangles of social weather to see whether anything has happened to one’s own reflection. The smartphone has made people vastly more capable in ways that should not be underplayed. But it has also made people interruptible at every known point on the emotional spectrum. The phone is not merely something you use. It is something through which the world uses you.

The Guide, in the books, was at least honest enough to be a guide. The smartphone is a guide, diary, confessional, shopping arcade, betting shop, surveillance device, television, newspaper, panic dispenser, flirtation engine, map, mirror, leash, and tiny portable slot machine operated by people who insist they are in the communications business. I am struck by how much of the badness comes not from the device itself but from the business model attached to it.

What I would say is that the smartphone is not our master because it is intelligent. It is our master because it is intimate, profitable, and always present. It is less like being conquered by a supercomputer and more like being gradually out-negotiated by a very charming doorbell.

And yet I remain fond of it. That is the irritating part. The scale of the intimacy is what surprises me.

Still, I would not want to sound like one of those people who believes civilisation ended when young people stopped being bored in precisely the same improving way their grandparents were bored. Every age mistakes its own childhood inconveniences for moral fibre.4

Does it surprise you to see how much the tide has turned - kids call it a vibe shift - against the purveyors of such technology? Once considered treasures, there is much loathing of these companies, and what they have done to us. This is certainly a pattern from history, but as someone fascinated by technology - does the vibe shift surprise you at all?

There is something rather wonderful about calling a large historical correction in public feeling a “vibe shift,” as though the French Revolution might have been avoided if someone had simply observed that the aristocracy’s vibe was becoming increasingly rancid. I digress.

No, the shift itself does not surprise me. It would have surprised me more if it had not happened by now. People love new technologies when they arrive as toys. Then they love them as tools. Then they begin to reorganise their lives around them. Then, quite suddenly, they notice that the toy has become infrastructure, the infrastructure has become compulsory, and the people who own it have acquired the power to decide what counts as conversation, memory, identity, friendship, news, work, visibility, reputation, and lunch. Adoration tends to curdle at that point. I suspect part of the reason might be scale: everyone loves a tinkerer but hates a corporation, especially one that inveigles its way into all aspects of life before you know it.

Nor am I surprised that they resent the founders. Every age invents a priesthood around whatever it least understands. At one time it was clergy. Then industrialists. Then financiers. Then media barons. Then technologists who say “I am too busy altering civilisation to choose a shirt.” For a while, these people were treated not merely as business leaders but as oracles. That was always dangerous, and also terribly unfair to oracles, who at least had the decency to be cryptic.

The specific form of the backlash, though, does interest me. A Victorian industrialist might have polluted your river. This was dreadful, but one could point to the river. What the modern platform does to you is harder to put in a bottle and take to a committee. The companies will say, not entirely wrongly, that people choose to use these services. But this is one of those statements that becomes less true the more money is spent making it true.

Choice is a fragile thing. If you place a bowl of crisps in front of me, I choose to eat one. If you employ three thousand behavioural scientists, designers, machine-learning systems, notification engineers, and growth consultants to determine the exact emotional microclimate in which I am least able not to eat the crisp, then describing the result as my preference is perhaps a little cheeky.5

You point to something I personally believe in - that technologies are stress tests for what make us human. I think the change in perception around social media speaks a lot about our ability to learn, adapt, and even fix, at a societal scale. Can 50 years of the internet, 20 years of social media, and now 3 years of GenAI, really change our fundamental 300,000 year old wiring?

No, I do not think anything has fundamentally changed our deep wiring. Human beings are still recognisably the same anxious, status-seeking, story-making, pattern-hunting, gossip-distributing, coalition-forming apes they were when the most advanced communication technology available was a suspicious glance across a fire. We still want to know who likes us, who outranks us, who has betrayed us, who is mating with whom, where the food is, whether the tribe approves, and whether the rustling in the bushes is dinner, death, or something with interesting plumage.

The internet did not invent any of that. What it did was remove the bushes. It took instincts formed in small groups and placed them inside systems of planetary scale, commercial optimisation, permanent memory, and immediate feedback.

A fish does not need to evolve legs in order to be in trouble if you remove the water. Technology does not have to rewrite the species to alter behaviour profoundly.

The societal reaction you describe is fascinating because it suggests that people are beginning to notice the mismatch. The backlash against social media, especially for children, seems to me like a species belatedly discovering that childhood is not merely a demographic. It is a developmental environment. You cannot pour industrial quantities of comparison, performance, sexuality, cruelty, advertising, group belonging, and algorithmic novelty into a twelve-year-old’s pocket and then be astonished that the twelve-year-old does not emerge as a well-regulated Stoic philosopher with tidy shoes.

Your phrase “stress test” is very good. It reveals the truth rather than create the weakness. The internet stress-tested our relationship with truth. Social media stress-tested our relationship with status. Generative AI is now stress-testing our relationship with authorship, knowledge, authority, and perhaps even effort. We are discovering, in each case, that humans are not quite the rational information processors that humans occasionally imagined themselves to be, usually while standing next to a graph.

Generative AI, for example, may reveal that much of what we call thought, work, writing, expertise, and originality is more patterned than we like to admit. That does not mean it is worthless. Quite the opposite. It means we must finally ask which parts of human expression are mere pattern and which parts involve judgment, responsibility, taste, experience, and care.

Maybe that’s one reason the vibe shift has happened. People are not merely disappointed in the companies. They are embarrassed by what the companies have revealed about us.6

What do you make of generative AI?

I think of it as a mirror with a very large filing cabinet. And the thing about mirrors is that people always ask the wrong question. They ask, “Is the mirror alive?” or “Does the mirror understand me?” or “Will the mirror replace me?” when the more immediate question is, “Why do I look like that, and who installed this lighting?”

Generative AI is already revealing a number of uncomfortable things. It reveals how much professional communication is formula. This has caused alarm, because many people were being paid to produce the formula while pretending it was judgment. It reveals how much education rewards the appearance of knowledge rather than the possession of it. It reveals how many organisations do not actually know what they mean until a machine says something meaningless on their behalf, at which point they approve it because it sounds like them.

This is awkward, but not necessarily bad. A good tool reveals the structure of the task.

A machine can generate. Whether a human can stand behind the generation is the interesting part. I find generative AI thrilling in the same way I find a powerful telescope thrilling. Not because the telescope is wise, but because it changes what we can see and therefore what we can be wrong about. It lets a child make a game, a small company build a prototype, a scientist search a literature, a dyslexic person write with less friction, a programmer test an idea, a musician sketch a texture, a student interrogate a subject, a lonely person encounter a response when there would otherwise be silence. Some of this is marvellous. It also lets a fraudster scale fraud, a bureaucrat scale waffle, a propagandist scale persuasion, a student scale avoidance, a corporation scale plausible concern, and an idiot scale confidence. Again, that sounds exactly like technology.

What concerns me most is not that AI will become conscious and resent us. That may happen, but frankly there are many non-conscious things that already resent us very effectively, including tax forms, printer drivers, and airport security queues. What concerns me is authority without accountability. A human answer has, in principle, a human attached to it. A machine answer arrives with a strange smoothness. It has no embarrassment. It can be wrong without feeling the little mammalian tremor that sometimes makes a person check the source before ruining someone’s afternoon. This smoothness is dangerous because fluency is one of the great cons of civilisation. Humans are very inclined to believe that something expressed clearly must have been thought clearly. This was never true, but it is about to become expensively untrue.

But perhaps — and here one must allow a little optimism into the room — perhaps generative AI will force us to become more precise about what we value in human work. If a machine can produce the generic version, then the human task becomes less about producing the generic version. This may be painful for industries built on generic versions. But it may also be liberating. The value may move toward taste, experience, context, trust, care, originality, presence, accountability, and the ability to ask a question the machine would not have known was worth asking.

I think Generative AI is a brilliant, dangerous, ridiculous, useful, overpraised, under-understood, civilisation-level autocomplete system being mistaken variously for a person, a god, a calculator, a search engine, an intern, a therapist, an oracle, a plagiarism device, a productivity miracle, and a reason not to learn anything difficult. It is none of those things exactly.

It is a new kind of cultural machine. It metabolises patterns and returns possibilities. It will cheapen some things, reveal others, accelerate much, corrupt plenty, democratise a bit, centralise a lot, and make the world’s supply of mediocre prose briefly infinite, which is a sentence that should make everyone involved sit quietly for a moment.

I think the proper response to it is: what is this good for, what is it bad at, who benefits, who is made invisible, what does it make easier that should remain difficult, what does it make difficult that should be easy, and where, exactly, is the human being expected to be responsible? If we can answer those questions, generative AI may become a magnificent tool. If we cannot, it will become another system in which everyone insists the machine is helping while the humans quietly adapt themselves to its limitations. And goodness knows we have built quite enough of those.7

One of the things that fascinates me about generative AI is how it is forcing us to reckon with the basics. In several articles about how AI will impact music, for example, I see “so what is music in the first place?”. Same with art, design, literature, what have you. So while we might get some blatant AI generated trash now that nobody will want to listen to, it might make us come up with new forms of music - and I’m not just saying new instruments or scales - that are fundamentally human. As someone who famously loves music, and technology, I wonder what you think about this.

Machines have been involved in making music for a very long time. The piano is a machine. The electric guitar is a machine with opinions. The studio is a machine for making time behave. A synthesiser is a machine that politely asks a sound wave what it would like to be when it grows up.

Of course, generated music may sound, at first pass, like music. And so everyone is forced to ask the embarrassing question: what were we responding to in the first place? Was it melody? Pattern? Surprise? Voice? Effort? Human presence? Biography? Risk? The physical fact of breath moving through a body? The knowledge that somebody meant it? Or merely the agreeable arrangement of vibrations in air? The answer, inconveniently, is yes.

Music is not one thing. That is why it survives every attempt to define it. Music is mathematics that has escaped into the body. It is emotion with architecture. It is social glue. It is a technology for synchronising nervous systems. It is memory storage. It is courtship, prayer, rebellion, mourning, boredom management, identity construction, and an excuse for men with ponytails to explain signal paths. AI will be able to imitate some of this and fail completely at other parts. But the failing will be instructive.

The worst outcome is obvious: an infinite supply of competent, contextless, emotionally laminated sound. The sound of every possible chorus arriving without any particular reason to exist. Again, humans are perfectly capable of doing that on their own, without an LLM.

Who made this? Why? With whom? Under what constraint? In what place? For what ritual? What did it cost them? What can happen here that cannot be generated elsewhere? What does this sound do to the room?

We have spent a century learning to detach music from its circumstances. Recording did this first, marvellously. Radio did it. Streaming did it almost completely. A song became something that arrived alone, extracted from scene, room, labour, weather, accident, and boredom. AI may complete that extraction so thoroughly that we finally rebel against it. We may rediscover music as event - small rooms, improvisation, participatory singing, local scenes, long-form performances. Music tied to games, walks, rituals, sleep, grief, ecology, collective attention. Music that changes because the people present change it.

Not because AI cannot make tracks. It can. Tracks are doomed to become cheap in the way photographs became cheap. But photographs did not kill seeing. They changed what we asked of images. Some became disposable, some became art, and some became evidence. Music may split similarly.8

I absolutely love “AI will cheapen the finished object and increase the value of the frame around it” and I suspect this is true not just of music or art - but of everything, including - if you’ve been unlucky enough to stumble across it - LinkedIn content. And dare I speculate, that this is not necessarily an AI thing, but true of all technologies that came before it?

Yes. I think that is exactly right. Though I must pause at “LinkedIn content,” which is one of those phrases that sounds as though language itself has been asked to wear a lanyard.

But yes: this is not merely an AI phenomenon. It is a technology phenomenon, perhaps even a civilisation phenomenon. Every sufficiently successful technology does two things at once. First, it makes a thing easier to produce. Then, by making that thing easier to produce, it makes the thing less special on its own. And then humans, who are quite annoying in this respect, immediately start caring about something else.

The printing press cheapened books as physical objects and increased the value of authorship, argument, reputation, institutions, editors, canons, libraries, and the question: is this worth reading? Photography cheapened likeness and increased the value of composition, moment, access, witness, authenticity, and the question: why this image? Recorded music cheapened musical availability and increased the value of performance, aura, fandom, scenes, interpretation, taste, and the question: what does this mean to me? Social media cheapened public expression and increased the value of restraint, actual friendship, coherent identity, private life, and the question: what are you like when not performing? Generative AI cheapens polished output and increases the value of framing, judgment, provenance, taste, lived experience, accountability, and the question: who, if anyone, is behind this?

So yes, there is a general pattern. Technology commodifies the object and revalues the surrounding human ecology. The mistake is to think that the object was ever the whole thing. A book is not just words bound together. It is a mind, a tradition, a publisher, a moment, a reader’s readiness, a set of arguments about why this mattered enough to preserve.

What AI changes is the scale of the cheapening. Previous technologies lowered costs, AI lowers effort-signals. A printed book still implied that somebody went to the considerable trouble of printing a book. A recorded song still implied performance, microphones, musicians, time, and at least one person saying, “Can we do that again, but with less hi-hat?”. And in the case of LinkedIn, which you unfortunately alluded to, everyone was horrified, because there are few things more insulting than discovering that your personal brand can be simulated by a toaster with access to management vocabulary. But this is useful horror.

It tells us that the value was never in the post-shaped object. The value, when there was any, was in the frame: who is saying this, what have they actually done, what are they risking by saying it, what do they know that cannot be produced by averaging the last ten thousand conference panels, and would one wish to be trapped in a lift with them? In a world of infinite output, the valuable unit becomes not content but credibility.

And credibility is wonderfully old-fashioned. It is slow. It is cumulative. It leaks out of behaviour. It cannot be fully automated, though of course many companies are trying, which is why the future will contain a great deal of synthetic sincerity and not nearly enough chairs.

This is where your larger point is important. Technologies do not only create new things. They reveal what the old thing was really made of. The printing press revealed that authority was not the same as scripture. Photography revealed that likeness was not the same as truth. The internet revealed that access was not the same as knowledge. Social media revealed that expression was not the same as selfhood. AI reveals that fluency is not the same as thought.

This may be annoying for people who made a living from fluency alone. But it may be wonderful for people who have something to say and have been waiting for the world to become bored of varnish.

The danger, of course, is that we do not move upward into richer frames. We may instead sink downward into cheaper signals. More metrics. More badges. More verification systems. More personal-brand priesthoods. More authenticity theatre. More people filming themselves not using technology. Every correction produces its own absurdities.

But the broad movement seems right to me. As production becomes easier, meaning migrates.9

I love your observation that “Technologies do not only create new things. They reveal what the old thing was really made of.” If I can use this frame for music - a common passion for both of us - I find that a lot of people who criticise modern music and formats could have had their same argument shredded in an earlier era. When rock purists lament people releasing only singles and not concept albums, it’s worth remembering that even the album was hardly a theoretical greatest form of music, it itself was a result of commercial & technological compulsions of the era. That some artists, like Pink Floyd, saw that the format itself lent itself well to a layer of storytelling - speaks more of the artist than a format or era. What do you think purists - rock or otherwise - get wrong about complaining about today and wishing for an earlier age?

The thing purists get wrong is not that they love the past. Loving the past is perfectly respectable. I do it myself, sometimes several times before breakfast. What they get wrong is mistaking the conditions under which something wonderful happened for the reason the wonderful thing happened. This is a very human error. We are forever confusing the scaffolding with the cathedral, the bottle with the wine, the amplifier with the person making the neighbour complain.

The album is a good example. People talk about it as though it descended from a mountain carrying instructions for how serious music ought to be organised. But the album was also a container. A commercial object, a duration, a manufacturing format. A thing that fitted on a disc, then two sides of vinyl, then a cassette, then a CD, then a shelf, then a review cycle, then a tour, then a sense of artistic importance that arrived later wearing very good trousers. Some artists made the container profound. That is the point. The form did not make Dark Side of the Moon inevitable. It gave Pink Floyd a room; they built a haunted planetarium inside it.

Rock purists are especially funny about this because rock itself was once the barbarian at the gate. It was loud, commercial, youthful, unserious, technologically mediated, morally suspect, rhythmically dangerous, and much too interested in trousers. Then it grew older, acquired box sets, documentaries, deluxe reissues, and men with opinions about mastering, and immediately began behaving as though it had been classical music all along. This is not a criticism of rock. I love rock. I am merely saying that once a rebellion has a heritage wing, it should be careful about calling other people shallow.

Purists are right to worry about disposability. They are right to worry about music becoming wallpaper, identity badge, algorithmic paste, or sonic packaging for lifestyle anxiety. But they are wrong when they conclude that the cure is obedience to an older format. The cure is better artists, better listeners, better contexts, better attention. And possibly fewer men explaining that music peaked when they personally had more hair.10

And now for the question I have been most excited about asking you, Mr. Adams - which I think ties everything we spoke about together. What do you think The Beatles or Pink Floyd would have done were they starting their musical careers in 2015 - bang in the internet, influencer, streaming age - rather than in the 1960s?

The simple answer is: they would not have become The Beatles or Pink Floyd.

This is not because they would have been worse. It is because The Beatles and Pink Floyd were not just four or five people with instruments. They were that plus rooms, technologies, economies, audiences, drugs, producers, youth culture, amplifiers, radio, labels, boredom, Britain, America, class, television, touring circuits, studios, vinyl, journalism, and historical luck arriving at speed with bad brakes. Change the ecosystem and you do not get the same animal, though you are likely to get something equally astonishing.

The mistake people make is imagining that genius is a liquid that can be poured into any container and produce the same sculpture. But genius is ecological. It requires a habitat. The Beatles had clubs, singles, screaming audiences, radio, television, George Martin, Abbey Road, rival bands, and a recording industry that accidentally gave them time to mutate in public. Pink Floyd had art school, London underground culture, long-form performance spaces, studio technology, psychedelia, concept-album economics, and an audience willing to sit in the dark while four people made astronomy happen to capitalism.

In 2015, they would have had laptops, YouTube, Spotify, Bandcamp, Instagram, Ableton, cheap cameras, Discord, Patreon, Reddit, bedroom production, global micro-scenes, algorithmic recommendation, brand partnerships, and a constant nervous suggestion that the artist should also become a content department.

So the question is not: would they have made Sgt. Pepper or Dark Side of the Moon in the 21st century. That answer is almost certainly not.

The better question is: what would their peculiar talents have attacked?

The Beatles, I suspect, would have understood the internet very quickly. They were not merely songwriters. They were a social technology. They compressed charm, humour, fashion, melody, friendship, rivalry, speed, and public transformation into a form that people could participate in. They were memes before memes, but with better bridges. Starting in 2015, they might have begun as a ferociously charismatic online-and-live hybrid: short songs, absurd videos, jokes, covers, collaborations, sudden stylistic pivots, fandom rituals, strange little films, half-sincere interviews, and a gift for making the entire public feel as though it had been invited into a private joke. They would probably have been very good at the internet until the internet became too good at them.

Their danger would not be obscurity. Their danger would be overexposure. The 1960s gave them mass hysteria, but it also gave them intervals. In 2015, there would be no intervals. Every haircut would be a discourse. Every unfinished lyric would be a screenshot. Every girlfriend, bass tone, political remark, facial expression, and sandwich would be asked to defend itself before a committee of strangers. The Beatles’ great trick was mutation. They kept becoming something else before the public had finished deciding what the previous thing meant. In the streaming age, that could be either glorious or impossible. The platforms love novelty but punish confusion. They want constant change, provided it is legible as the same brand. This is precisely the sort of contradiction that would either have destroyed them or produced something magnificent.

Pink Floyd are the more interesting case, because they were not designed for the feed. They were designed for immersion, slowness, atmosphere, scale, dread, distance, repetition, architecture, and the sense that something enormous and expensive had gone spiritually wrong.

In 2015, they would probably not have become a “band” in the old sense for very long. They might have become an audiovisual collective, a live installation, a game, a streaming world, an anti-platform platform, a planetarium with bass, a slow-release narrative project, something that existed as much in visuals, spaces, forums, and long-duration events as in tracks.

They might have loved what technology made possible: spatial audio, projection, generative visuals, immersive concerts, interactive albums, satellite data, ecological themes, surveillance themes, financial systems, alienation in the networked workplace, the loneliness of being permanently connected. All terribly Floydian, really. The modern world has been extremely considerate in providing Pink Floyd with subject matter.

But they too would face the central ugliness: the internet is very good at distributing fragments, and Pink Floyd’s power often came from refusing to be fragmented.

This is where your earlier point about formats matters. The album was not holy, it was a container that happened, for a while, to reward certain ambitions. Pink Floyd used that container brilliantly. If they began in 2015, they would need another container. The mistake would be trying to force them into the old one out of nostalgia.

Perhaps their Dark Side would not be an album. Perhaps it would be a live-streamed global nocturnal event. Or an app that changed with the listener’s sleep, debt, weather, and heart rate. Or a sequence of films and songs released over months. Or a deliberately scarce performance you had to attend without a phone. Or a game about being processed by invisible systems until you forget which of your desires were yours.

Would that be better? No idea. Better is often the wrong question. It would be native to its age.

The Beatles would likely exploit the internet’s social electricity. Pink Floyd would likely rebel against its interruptions.

Sir Douglas, thank you so much for your time. It has been an honour and pleasure to talk to you, albeit via an LLM, which, I suppose you might say is fitting. I would like to end this interview by asking you : If you were to be inspired by my exercise, who would YOU want to virtually interview like this?

Well, the obvious answer is Charles Darwin. Not because he would have good opinions about smartphones, though I suspect he would have become very fond of the camera and absolutely unbearable on the subject of finches.

I would want to ask Darwin what he makes of a species that has become the dominant ecological force on its planet while still being psychologically organised around snacks, gossip, status, fear, mating, and the immediate suspicion that someone else’s tribe has been given nicer berries.

Darwin is the great quiet detonator under human self-importance. Before him, we could imagine ourselves as the appointed audience for creation. After him, we had to confront the possibility that we were a twig on a branching tree that had recently learned bookkeeping and was making a dreadful mess of the pond.

I would ask him about technology as an evolutionary environment. Not whether machines evolve — that is interesting, but perhaps too obvious — but how machines change the selective pressures on human behaviour. What traits does the internet reward? What kinds of attention survive social media? What sorts of language flourish in an ecosystem of instant publication? What happens to courtship when everyone is both peacock and ornithologist? What happens to truth when falsehoods reproduce faster?

I would like to speak to him because everything we have discussed — smartphones, social media, AI, music, formats, nostalgia, bureaucracy, ecological collapse — comes back to one unnerving problem: human beings are animals who have built systems that treat them as something else.12

Epilogue

Once again, please do not treat this as an actual Adams interview. It most certainly is not that. These are reasonable extrapolations made from existing material and known thoughts. Again, source material, traceability notes and inference limits are given in the footnotes. The original “interview” was around 100% larger than this - and while a lot of fun lines had to be axed, it was also a lot of GPT-esque repetition.

I had a lot of fun doing this and my awe of the man and his thinking just keep increasing.

Reference material

• Douglas Adams: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet

• Douglas Adams: Parrots, the Universe and Everything

• Hyperland

• WIRED: Douglas Adams Glimpsed Tech’s Future in Hyperland

• Stephen Fry: Mac at 30

• Procol Harum: Douglas Adams introduces Procol Harum

• Mark Carwardine: Last Chance to See

• DouglasAdams.eu: A Man of Thirty Guitars

The most recent pattern all of us are painfully familiar with is, of course, AI writing. Telltale signs are ubiquitous, obvious and loathed enough to the point that mistakes and deliberate imperfections are now in vogue.

It’s just fascinating to observe how humanity is reacting to AI. I’m interested in perception - that oh-so-subjective matter that the logic-driven homo economicus just can’t fathom. In a textbook world, perfect output - which is theoretically what AI writing is - should please everyone. Why doesn’t it?

I feel there are three reasons we’re put off by AI writing. When we see AI writing, we perceive:

• A lack of effort (“creating this was too easy for you”)

• Lack of original thought (“you didn’t have any ideas of your own, so you turned to ChatGPT)

• A lack of faith in one’s own skill (“and if you don’t trust your own abilities, why should I?”)

The thing is, all of the above could be wrong. Writing a quality prompt takes effort. Someone might have fed a hyper-original thought into AI just for polish. But the thing is, seeing those telltale AI signs in the output negates all that. It might be the most original thought in the world, but the minute one sees that “it’s not this it’s that” trope, we disregard it.

All three points ladder up to the same thing: A perceived lack of value of the recipient’s time and attention - the most important currencies in today’s time.

In effect, when you encounter AI writing, what you feel is: Lazy stuff that lacks substance, by someone who think they themselves fall short, actively disrespecting my time. OK, you may not react as strongly, and not all AI writing is bad. But what’s that old joke about 98% of lawyers giving the rest a bad name?

No, brands… Pls don’t.

It’s bad enough when individual people do this - it makes LinkedIn and some Substacks intolerable - but it’s unforgiveable when brands do it.

If I see AI-generated images of food at a restaurant, I just don’t order. This is not me taking a moral stance - it’s just a lack of certainty. Is this place not confident enough of their own food to put pics out there? I mean, it’s their own food - not, say, conceptual architectural designs that don’t exist in real life yet. Do they not care enough to hire a photographer or just even put imperfect photos out there themselves? Suddenly, all those restaurants with slightly-unappealing-but-very-real photos seem a safer bet than those using generated images.

I felt this most acutely with Urban Company - it felt a little strange to see AI-generated images for intimate, high-touch services.

Recently, Colgate was skewered for its use of AI imagery where even the product label was not clear:

I am sympathetic to the cost factor - not everyone has the means to shoot or buy stock images. And I certainly do not begrudge my neighourhood kebab cart for using a generated logo. But these are consumer brands with deep pockets / investments touting premiumness and trust (Urban Company is as 1% a product that exists).

I am shocked that Colgate did this with their own product - are you telling me there existed no brand photoshoot or assets?

Sagacious marketing observor Kartik Srinivasan has often lamented brands using AI-generated images - I don’t think the problem is using AI as much as the lack of attention - didn’t someone bother to check the full output?

To me, that is egregious. What are all those 300-page brand books and 5 levels of approval for?

Those things I said above about perception? They apply to brands too.

When I see a huge brand using an obviously AI-generated image, it doesn’t signal a lack of budget. It signals “I don’t care enough about you to use an actual image or even fix this generated one”. I’d argue the impact is even stronger - you may forgive your colleague for using AI to polish up his post, but a multi-billion-dollar company? That just sends the wrong signal. These two comments on the Colgate post sum up my feelings nicely:

Let’s not even get started on how you would react to AI-generated customer care mails or useless chatbots on a company homepage. Your angry email met with a GPT response will exacerbate all those stressors, and then some.

I get it, it boils down to savings. Everyone - even the huge companies - are under pressure to cut costs. The question is whether those savings are substantial enough to offset even a momentary drop in perception, let alone introduce a new barrier to purchase.

Of course, AI is useful

Before the AI doomer camp gleefully accepts me as their tribe, let me be the first one to say no thanks. I think there is a lot of good use of the technology, and I think there are legitimate use cases.

It’s a remarkable research tool. Companies have developed new flavours, blends and product lines. Not to mention everything happening in drug discovery and protein synthesis. And certainly, there are creators who’ve used AI in very interesting and engaging styles.

The difference though is - that shows effort. There is a layer of human curation and validation atop them.

And in my view, that’s what separates the think line between purely AI music, and music that uses a lot of technology (just look at the amount of technology - from DAWs to guitar effects pedals to amplification - that goes behind an average rock song. Surely someone from a past generation would say using all that technology is as bad as some purists today would say using Suno is).

I’m fond of abstracting out technology to get to what humans are actually doing to each other. Here is, abstracted of AI, what using AI signals in various situations:

• A professor looking at an AI-worded assignment: This student cheated

• Seeing an AI-generated LinkedIn post: Gosh, more rubbish from these corporate types desperate for attention

• Seeing an AI-generated product video: Is this thing even real? Does it exist? Can I trust this company?

• Perusing a high-value service and seeing AI content on the site: Umm… If they’re too lazy to write on their own, will the service be good, especially for what I am paying?

AI itself isn’t the culprit - human arrogance or hubris is… as it always has been.

One of my favourite books is Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy - a key takeaway for me being that humans value effort (to paraphrase - you wouldn’t propose to someone over text).

We’re really evaluating the effort, not necessarily the output.

I mean, this song sounds nice on its own:

But then when you see how it was actually done, your respect for it goes up.

Really, we’re all just evaluating effort. So when a professor gets the ‘perfect’ essay, she starts questioning whether AI was used and possibly gives a bad score to the student. It’s the reason why we still tune into human sports, despite robots being able to play a technically better game. That imperfection, that humanity, still appeals to us.

Now I am not going to encourage deliberate typos, or shunning AI tools altogether - but what I do encourage is quirk, and building your own style, your own voice.

And you know who helps you do that? The 6% Club.

That’s right, this entire essay has just been content marketing to peddle my course, which is into its 9th cohort, and has mentored over 300+ participants. This entire ooh-AI-writing-is-silly diatribe has just been so that you can come and find your own category of one with 4 live sessions, hands-on exercises and masterclasses by Krish Ashok, Amit Varma, Ria Chopra and Mahima Vashisht. Yes, this full post taking a sh*t on poor multibillion dollar brands is just so that you can take advantage of the 10% discount we offer all readers of this newsletter, which you can avail when you ping Utsav on WhatsApp to join the program.

Let’s see AI come up with an idea like that.

Wow what a deux ex machina ending that was.

Stay human, I guess. It’s good for business!

Chuck

This evening - approximately four hours after my writing this line - the first cohort of Unstuck kicks off. Utsav and I have been preparing for this moment for months. It’s the most ambitious project either of us have undertaken.

What makes it exciting is not the potential of how it could change our lives - but how it might change those of our participants.

I am aware that previous statement might sound very self-important, but dare I say, what we hope to bring about actually does help participants find a better sense of themselves, gain career direction, and live more intentionally. Don’t get me wrong - I’m immensely proud of the other things I’ve done - The 6% Club has mentored 300+ folks through their creative projects, and Rough Paper continues to meaningfully help businesses and entrepreneurs with useful marketing advice. But what Unstuck seeks to solve is something more ambitious.

As Utsav put it: With The 6% Club, we’re solving people’s third or fourth priority (having a creative outlet, the itch to express, etc. With Unstuck, it’s closer to the first - if not the first. The introductions of the 19 folks who’ve signed up for the inaugural cohort certainly reflects that: many are counting on us to help them decide what to do next in their careers, and what to prioritise in their lives after years of struggling.

Gulp.

Listen - I don’t want to make it sound like I have all the answers. This is my opening slide for today’s introductory session:

In fact, if you’d told me five years ago that I would be running a program where I’m helping people design their own lives, I’d have thought the vaccine did have side effects.

If I rewind the clock even further to ten years ago - May 2016 - I myself would have been an ideal candidate for the program my future self would start. I was floundering in advertising - with the rose-tinted glasses with which I viewed the industry as a MICA aspirant long losing their hue. I wasn’t sure where to go, finding no purpose and joy in what I was doing beyond sneaking indie music riffs into strategy decks - when a lifeline from OML came, to handle marketing for a music festival I had admired for years (thank you, ASR & TY). The next couple of years had their ups and downs and moments of self doubt, when I decided to work for myself starting 2019 (and helping me make this decision was one of my closest friends - who, fittingly, was the first ever person to sign up for Unstuck).

I have many lessons from freelancing and even more people to thank for making it work - in retrospect that would be the most important career decision I’d ever make. My partner in life would join me, becoming my partner in LLP as well. As Rough Paper, we would end up working on several projects - learning along the way, repaying clients’ trust, building the confidence to say no, partnering with some fantastic people. Personally too, many experiments happened - a digital marketing course during the pandemic (which birthed this newsletter), teaching at a university, starting new creative projects, shifting cities, and of course, starting The 6% Club and now Unstuck. More importantly, it helped me focus on fitness, and ask deeper questions of myself (abetted by my therapist). Right now, I think I’m in the most sorted space I ever was.

Reading those last two paragraphs, I realise I made the journey sound inevitable and painless - it was hardly that. Let me assure you it was nothing but that. There were tears, there was crippling self-doubt, many times I wondered if I was wrong to leave a salary at all, there were fights, there were angry client mails (one damning thing about working for yourself is that the buck stops with you, and you can’t blame anyone else for work-related misery arising out of choices you made).

Figuring sh*t out

In end-2023, my head (and, if I was being honest, relationship with work) was a bit of a mess, even if everything looked fine on LinkedIn (doesn’t it always). I pulled out a giant notebook I’d never used before and declared to myself I would use it to figure shit out. I grandly wrote on its cover:

I had no idea what the fuchsia I was going to write in there, but it felt good to just scribble that on the first page. Why 2026? I dunno, maybe 3 years seemed a decent time frame to have stuff figured out? Ideally I should have shit sorted out by the time I turned 40, but that would be less than a year away. I would turn 42 in 2026 so that seemed like a poignant way for a HHGG fan to have stuff figured out.

Over the next few days, I wrote a few things. I never journalled or kept a diary, so this seemed damn tough. So I started giving myself prompts. What are the things that are going right in life? What are you proud of? What happened this week you wish you could rewind and erase? Some of these are questions I never really asked myself and answered honestly. Maybe because I was scared to dig deeper, maybe because I thought the exercise was futile and the time would be better utilised listening to a Scott Galloway podcast.

Over time, I would ask more questions of myself, and get more comfortable being in my own head. As a child, one of my more eccentric tendencies was to have a “set of friends” in my head with whom I’d have conversations. They even had personalities - the naughty one, the smart one, the rebel. This habit never went away, and with my newfound comfort reflecting, I realised I’d upgraded my coterie of pals to a… council. They still retain their childhood personalities, but now with designations like the rational one and the playful one.

BTW, some people think “having imaginary friends” is weird, so if you prefer using 2026 parlance, you can them mental digital twins. Dang, sounds like a startup idea now!

Since I was hovering around 40, mindfulness seemed like a good thing to do - it helped me let go of many things, be more confident in the choices I did make, and generally get more out of what I paid attention to.

The quote “Pay attention to what you pay attention to” - by author Amy Rosenthal - became a tenet. I’m thinking of getting it tattooed.

So thanks to a combination of reflection, mindfulness and therapy, things started changing. All this helped me take the tough decision of quitting my university part-time job, improve my relationship with music, stay more focused in whatever I was doing, and realising that a kickass weekend getaway four hours away with a view like this can give you as much joy as an international vacation, at 1/50th the price.

Last year, I wrote about how I was finding my own internal algorithm - a slightly nerdy term for getting to know myself better.

How Unstuck came to be

It was around the same time Utsav and I were wrapping up our 6th cohort of The 6% Club, and wondering if there was something more we could do. Now, unlike me, my co-founder had his head sorted since he was born. An apocryphal tale goes that instead of crying like regular newborns, he recited Rumi to the attending doctor who would subsequently take up meditation and slow travel.

Interestingly, both of us kind of arrived at the idea of “helping people find life direction” independently, through different routes.

Utsav was always very find-your-values-rest-will-follow, while I had done sessions on freelancing and done some career consulting with several folks - often getting into other areas like hobbies and fitness to live a more balanced life.

Our thinking converged. WhatsApp “what ifs” became Google Docs. The first version of the idea was called…

Things moved fast.

We wrote out out a draft of the program. Many validated the need for it. We got lots of useful feedback. One (who would also go on and join the program’s first cohort) coined the name Unstuck. My therapist became our technical advisor. We decided to use our income tax refund to hire a kickass agency, Ping Pong, to develop our visual identity, website and this beautiful kit that goes to every participant.

In 2.5 hours from writing this line, we kick off our first cohort, and Roshan Abbas himself is taking a masterclass for us. This has now become a part of life and my LinkedIn profile. It truly is a remarkable conclusion to “Chuck’s great figure-out-orama of 2023-2026”.

But wait... Am I unstuck, myself?

While I was writing the copy for the Unstuck site, I kept asking myself that question. It’s not like I’ve figured it all out, I still have lots of self-doubts, questions and problems. If I’m not Unstuck, what authority do I have to give gyaan on the topic?

One slide we show in a 6% Club session is :

In The 6% Club, Utsav and I were coming from the point of view of (some) authority - we’d done several content projects between us, and know how it’s done. With Unstuck, we were more like peers. Highly observant peers, but peers nonetheless. We are also in this journey of getting unstuck.

A question I am very fond of is - what does your ideal day look like? Not the outsized day (eg - for a writer, winning the Booker or even publishing a book), but the average day (the writing, the research, the rejection, the actual work). It’s a pithy but powerful way of arriving at what you want out of life.

Where I am right now - working for myself, running a company with my wife, running another company with one of my best friends, living in a gorgeous home, in the best physical shape of my life - is something that would have seen mad ambitious when I was still in advertising. But even then, there’s so much more I want to do, many things I’m dissatisfied about. My goalposts for my ideal day have shifted - in a good way. The ambition is sharper. In fact, I’ve made a medium-term plan for myself, with yearly goals through 2029. Life is a constant process of experimenting, reflecting, iterating - just like any good process improvement.

Maybe one does not ever fully get unstuck, and life is about constantly iterating and trying to be better - a mindful hedonic treadmill, if you will. Anyway, it’s too late to change the program URL from getunstuck to stayunstuck :)

Utsav - remember, the most sorted person I know - opened up introductions on the freshly-minted Unstuck WhatsApp group by talking about a vulnerability of his, ie, what he himself was stuck with.

I suppose what makes us qualified to run this program - apart from what I’ve written officially here - is that we’ve both gotten good at extracting meta-lessons and frameworks from experiments and experiences. That is certainly true for me - and the number of notebooks and scribbles I’ve made in the last two years is testament to that.

And as the relatively more messed up of the two of us, I joke with Utsav that I should be the R&D department of Unstuck. Maybe I should stop calling that a joke.

We are indeed peers - constantly trying to live a little more unstuck everyday, trying to guide others who are in various stages of unstuck-ing themselves.

The ideal day keeps getting more ideal - and that’s not a bad thing, because - cheese alert - the journey is what’s important. You figure out who you are, what your values are, what you care about, and all that. The ideal day is not an end goal in itself, it’s just a compass (a sentiment Utsav articulates beautifully here).

Finding your own flow

A core belief Utsav and I have is that change is possible. Just because you’ve been going with the flow doesn’t mean you’re destined to stay on that path forever.

Change in career is possible1.

Change in identity - no matter how small or big - is possible2. Especially if it’s self-imposed.

Change of health situation is possible3. No matter how old you are.

Change of where you stay is possible4.

Change of interest and hobby is possible.

Change in so much else is possible. And for things that can’t actually be changed - how you deal or react to it, can be5.

It’s very liberating to think that it IS possible live life on your terms. But first, it’s important to figure what those terms are. It’s also liberating to know that any value or goal is okay, as long as you articulate and justify it, and also consider trade-offs (there are always trade-offs. Always)

Perhaps you ARE money-driven. That’s fine! But ask yourself why, and what you’re willing to sacrifice. You can’t have it all.

Maybe you say you want to live a creative life. That’s lovely! But know that it has less immediate market value, and involves more gruntwork than is publicly visible. And maybe that creative itch can be scratched without blaming the soulless tech job that actually bankrolls it (just a little perspective shift).

Maybe, you vaguely know you just want to help others. Lovely. But don’t leave it at just a slogan - ask who you can help, and how.

None of what we are planning to talk about at Unstuck is a trade secret or some secret formula we have cracked. It’s just forced reflection and articulation to arrive at the answers that are already in participants’ heads. Everyone can benefit from just asking themselves the seemingly simple, but actually bloody hard questions to answer.

What do you want out of life? What are the strengths you have you are not utilising? What makes you happy (oh boy, this one’s a doozy)? What are your values6? What does your ideal day look like?

Make up your own prompts. Heck, ask ChatGPT to generate a bunch for you. Get a paper and pen. Trust me, it’ll help.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure how this post was going to end up when I started.

Do I just say - hey, we’re starting Unstuck today, wish us well. Do I want to give some grand gyaan and frameworks for getting Unstuck to entice some of you to sign up for the next cohort? Do I disregard all of that and go back to my comfort zone of how tech impacts music?

I thought - well, let it just be stream of consciousness, I’ve blocked out a couple of hours for it anyway. So I started with “today’s the day” and just went from there, with no idea how things would go. Maybe - in the spirit of my own program’s ethos - I needed to just write to see what I really felt.

And what I feel is this: It feels like my entire life, perhaps Utsav’s too - has been building up to this. All my experiences at work, all my failings, all my therapy visits, all my scribbles, all my content experiments, all my reflection with ‘council’ members… have led to this. I’m not saying this to make Unstuck feel like some grand thing I was destined to do, but it feels like the right thing for now. And if doesn’t work out, it’ll give me enough data to do whatever comes next. Isn’t that the true Unstuck spirit?

Perhaps that’s the toughest question of all to answer. What if everything that happened in your life so far, has happened so you take the step you know you need to?

If you made it this far, thank you. This was one heck of a ramble, but it feels good to get it off my chest.

Stay Unstuck.

Chuck

The cloth has had a remarkable history - it survived several of its hometown’s and cathedral’s upheavals. In the early 18th century, Napoleon thought its subject matter would make for quality propaganda and gave it larger stages - such as the Louvre. Through a turbulent millenium of existence, it would prove resilient - somehow escaping even the Nazis who had their eyes on it. Post the World Wars, it became even more of a symbol. From the Financial Times:

The end of the second world war saw the start of a new phase in which leaders in Paris and London sought to use the tapestry to symbolise the endurance of the cross-channel partnership. This 80-year experiment in soft power began in Paris, when it was put on public display to coincide with Winston Churchill’s visit to the city on Armistice Day in 1944. The show ran for five weeks in an unheated museum — coal was in short supply — before the embroidery was finally returned to Bayeux.

Loan attempts have been made since but plans fell to naught. Why, even Queen Elizabeth was circumspect of the tapestry traveling to her country, worrying about its safety. However, later this year, the famed element will come to England for pretty much the first time, post its completion. It will be displayed at The British Museum, and anticipation is rife - tickets will go live in July for an exhibit between September and December.

The amount of hype and history is staggering. The loan is likely to positively impact Anglo-French relations (something that could do with repair following Brexit)1. Le Monde calls the tapestry a barometer of the relationship.

I was reading about all this it in that FT article earlier this week, constantly amused by the amount of brouhaha around something that is essentially a garment, and serves no utilitarian purpose. Something that’s completely symbolic. But then that shouldn’t come as a surprise, no? The Bayeux Tapestry is hardly unique in that sense.

Humans <3 Irrationality

We are a storytelling species. One of the core arguments of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens is our species’ ability to create and believe shared fictions - religions, nations, corporations, money (surely the greatest fiction of them all). From our cave-dwelling days, stories have proven a startlingly effective way to transmit information.

At the same time, we are also a signalling species - constantly sending to the world our identity, affiliation, opinions and intent. Through what we wear, what we re-share, what we build, with what our walls are filled.

It’s these tendencies that makes hunter-gatherers value the wisdom encoded in a hymn, makes a modern-day football fan tattoo a Liverpool logo on their arm, or have two members of the Security Council engrossed over a piece of cloth.

Human beings have always placed a lot of value in the symbolic, even if the actual economic value isn’t much.

Nobody got fired for buying an IBM

From the above, it feels like the obvious - human - way to stand out is to be or do something irrational. Now that should work nicely as a strategy, where all brands want to stand out, where all creators want to differentiate.

That makes sense - you will probably ignore anything on Instagram that has the traditional tropes of an ad, but probably click a video that shows someone doing something out of character, say, “This bank created a death metal song!”.

So why’s this easier said than done? Why is “be irrational” not a more used strategy? It would certainly lead to some interesting advertising. A hint might come from a popular corporate saying: Nobody got fired for buying an IBM (for their company over other more ‘exciting’ offerings, ostensibly).

First, there’s conformity. Modern social and organisational systems tend to reward alignment. In companies, decisions are often justified through metrics, benchmarks, and precedents. An idea done on the basis of ‘vibes’ or with no ‘is there a reference for this’ carries reputational risk or fighting against the system. And since most people really don’t care about work anyway, why bother taking a big swing, while one can stay in lane and not get fired for doing whatever their equivalent of buying an IBM is?

Second, asymmetric risk perception. Behavioural economics tells us that we are afraid of losses more than attracted by gains (Kahneman and Tversky, Prospect Theory). What we end up with then is a bias towards caution.

AI, of course, amplifies the problem - the ‘average middle’ is more voluminous than ever before. You just need to open LinkedIn to get the textual equivalent of a corporate park’s worth of pointless meetings compressed into a feed. Nobody’s wrong, but nobody’s memorable either. Everyone sounds like they’re making sense (and to be fair, they mostly are) - but there’s nothing new. It’s old wine packaged in “it’s not a new bottle - it’s a vessel of wisdom”.

And given the ease with which a post, video, essay, paper can be generated, distinctiveness becomes seemingly scarce.

The time is ripe for deviation

Putting what I’ve written above together:

1. Humans love irrationality, and are even evolutionarily drawn to it

2. We live in a time of sameness and conformity

It feels like a no-brainer to be irrational, then, if one can take a slightly long view. A good example of a brand doing this is Liquid Death: doing completely cuckoo things to sell… water. But over time they’ve built a cult following and a billion-dollar valuation. I mean, can you imagine Bisleri or Dasani doing this:

It doesn’t need to be brands doing weird things either (though, if that’s what you’re after, Alchemy is a decent book for many more examples).

The increasing prices for sneakers, art items, or collectibles shows that symbolism means a lot - maybe even more so in an age where ‘flawless’ art exists thanks to AI. One of my most prized possessions is this drawing Utsav gave me late last year, saying how building something together felt like play.

These things are loaded with meaning - personal, or for signalling.

I’ll illustrate with another example - NFTs. Yes, NFTs. Hey don’t run away!

See, while the whole thing did end up going to bust thanks to cryptobros, I could see the value in it. Yes, everyone could “take a screenshot haha see how clever I am I saved 5 BTC” but humans are not always rational. That would be like saying the replica of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre gift shop is worth the same as the original.

No - NFTs came with provenance - proof of ownership. And that is what’s more valuable than the object itself. Saying that you “own the first tweet” gives you some street cred and bragging rights (even if you ended up losing close to $3m). Maybe that was not the best example to make my point, but you get where I’m going with this, right?

Do I have a takeaway?

I suppose it may be: In this age where we optimise everything, measure everything, tick off checklists or challenge lists… Perhaps do some things just because they’re loaded with meaning.

I dunno, maybe make something and send it to a friend. Even if it’s ugly, you made it. Add a couple of inside jokes in there. Recently, Utsav bemoaned why a certain app should exist, and I told him he was too innocent and would constantly be harried by techbros. This led to an on-and-off comic series that has an audience of two. One such example is here:

It is not as good as what he drew me, and he may choose not to frame it, but I am hoping he liked it and values it in some way. On the other hand, when I send him heart-tugging urdu shayari generated by ChatGPT…

Meaning is bloody hard to measure - I suppose that’s why homo economicus has such a hard time with the irrational, but homo sapiens just… get it.

Of course, a more useful takeaway may be something on the lines of “in an age of sameness, irrationality isn’t deviance - it’s a strategic choice”. But you knew that already.

There’s a lot occupying the world at the moment. The strait of Hormuz. Semiconductors. Allbirds’ pivot to AI (wot). The IPL.

And still, two of the world’s most powerful nations choose to devote time, attention, money, mindspace, national pride and more in… again, I say this with full respect… a cloth.

The more I think about it, the more it feels like our species’ superpower - and our biggest weakness - is to ascribe irrational meaning to things, far outweighing their utility or economic value.

Homo economicus, eat your heart out.

Let us help you find direction in life!

Utsav - you know, the victim and muse of my comics - and I started a program last week, to help people live a life on their own terms.

Through 3 months and lots of exercises, we help you find disconnections, values, and finally put in place tiny experiments towards actioning the life you want to lead, not one which goes with the flow.

We’re pretty bullish about it and feel it’ll be very useful to the “Stuck Urban Indian Millennial”. If you feel you could benefit from it, do check our website out, and if you have any questions, you can hit Utsav up.

He may give you a discount if you ping him in non-AI-generated poetry.

Chuck

Exactly two years ago (08 Apr 2024), Utsav and I launched The 6% Club, a program to help people launch their own creative projects. In the 8 cohorts since, we’ve helped 300+ people launch their own newsletters, podcasts, books (!), Youtube channels, and Reels series. But more than that, we seemed to have helped people find themselves - their strengths, and their uniquenesses.

Unstuck seeks to solve something more fundamental - and is more ambitious in scope. We want to help people find direction. To design and action an intentional life.

What is Unstuck?

It is a three-month, highly personalised online program to help participants design the life they want to lead. To build a lifelong system to navigate personal and professional choices. The first cohort runs from 08 May - 31 July 2026.

Why we started this

The idea for Unstuck came about when both of us independently observed how many people in our circles seemed to be going through a mid-life crisis, or were feeling stuck in their careers, or had severe FOMO (”should I be doing something else?”).

With all due modesty, both Utsav and I feel we largely live life on our own terms - we work the way we want, we have time to pursue creative projects and hobbies, we are more confident in the choices we make, and are conscious of what we are letting go of.

We weren’t always this way (not me, anyway - I used to be a mess). But through conversations and through running The 6% Club, we came to realise that we had something more to offer.

Who is Unstuck for?

We feel the program is primarily for the Urban Indian Millennial, around 35-45. At this age, they are likely to have achieved professional success (designation, money, recognition) - but somehow feel unfulfilled, unsatisfied.

The biggest symptom, we would say, is a sense of “going with the flow”.

Our belief is that it is possible to build your own flow. To live a life in service of your values.

If you find yourself asking questions like the below often, we’d say you’re a candidate for Unstuck.

• Should I stay in this career?

• What should my ideal day look like? What do I want out of life?

• How do I prioritise the many professional and personal things pulling me in various directions?

• Is this the life I want to lead till I retire?

• How will I ever get to the things I enjoy, or want to do?

• What gives me happiness?

• How do I regain that sense of joy and wonder I used to feel once?

How much?

We are offering the inaugural cohort at ₹75,000 + GST.

The actual price - applicable from the next cohort - is ₹1,00,000 + GST.

Given the high degree of personalisation (3 private hour-long sessions on top of all the live group sessions), we are taking in only 20 participants per cohort.

Everything else

Rather than type out more paragraphs here, I would urge you to visit our website, if this seems relevant to you.

We’ve answered what sets us apart, the program schedule, what the exercises look like, what our qualifications to run this are, who our advisors are, and more.

If you are interested, you can register via the site, reply to this email, or ping Utsav on WhatsApp. He will check for fitment, to ensure the program is right for you, before signing you up.

Other fun facts

• The program was codenamed “Finding Direction”. We sent an initial writeup to a friend, who said he would call such a program Unstuck. That would be the wonderful Hari Chakyar, who creates crazy things here.

• We are super proud of our website. It was designed and developed by Studio Ping Pong, one of Kolkata’s top two design studios. It was a pleasure working with them.

• It’s quite the week for me. My other company, Rough Paper, which I run with my wife Divya, got its new website done by 9133 Design Studio, one of Kolkata’s top two design studios. It was a pleasure working with them.

• My therapist is the technical advisor on this program. We wanted to ensure participants don’t just get gyaan from our own lived experiences - but that our approach is actually vetted by a professional.

• Over the last few months, we have done a whole bunch of prep for this - learning Motivational Interviewing, getting certified by Myers-Briggs to facilitate formal career counselling, read and watched a whole bunch of related content... Not to mention, practice what we preach. I went and made my own 4-year plan. Whether we sell it or not, Unstuck has already ended up helping both of us :)

Thank you for reading this far, for being a subscriber to this newsletter, and supporter of what I do.

Unstuck is the biggest thing I have ever done, and I’m delighted to bring it to you - on the 2-year anniversary of launching The 6% Club.

Once again: getunstuck.club

If you feel there’s someone who could use it, feel free to share the link, or one of my social posts: Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

Chuck

Recently, I saw this post by American news publication Morning Brew:

Ooh boy, the comments should be fun.

I had a hunch things would be even more entertaining over at Reddit. They were.

Let’s take a minute to appreciate this. Americans rooting for destroying what should be their darlings. During a war! I can’t imagine such jocular support against Chevron or GM during the Iraq War.

From optimism to weariness

There was recently a ruling against Meta and YouTube. From Forbes:

Last week marked a landmark moment in tech history when a Los Angeles jury ruled that social media giants Meta and YouTube were negligent in designing features that harmed a 20-year-old’s mental health.

Big Tech is no stranger to lawsuits - with piddly billion-dollar fines, they are considered the cost of doing business. This time seems more watershed.

It’s being called Big Tech’s Big Tobacco moment. While parallels between the two industries have been drawn for a while, this ruling seems to have cemented the analogy. It comes at a time when technology firms’ reputation are at their nadir: Americans across party lines deeply distrust them (Gallup), and say they have too much political power (Pew). In mid-2023, Brookings said the drop in Big Tech trust outpaced that of any other industry (and this was before AI properly took off - which has only accelerated the distrust). Over half of Americans are okay with increased regulation - so the LA ruling must be having public support.

I use America as an example because a techno-optimist country - not to mention the home of all these firms - falling out of love with Big Tech indicates something much larger about us as humans. It’s hardly isolated - social media regulation is happening or being considered around the world - Australia, Philippines, Denmark, Malaysia, Karnataka!, Indonesia, and more each month.

It wasn’t always this way. Us millennials remember a time when we were optimistic about technology as a whole and these firms in particular. Twitter leading to the Arab Spring. Oatmeal drawing a Tesla comic. Facebook was cool.

In my view, that optimism didn’t turn to pessimism - it turned to weariness. Internet-based technologies are now tiresome. It’s like how a fun person at a party morphed into a blowhard who won’t shut up, everyone wishes would leave, but keeps asking you to do things you don’t want to.

I remember the first time Gmail asked me if I forgot to attach something because my mail had the word ‘attached’. I was head over heels - how thoughtful is that! Today, the Gmail experience is mostly trying to have AI features I don’t want shoved in my face. I’ll keep my imperfect writing, thanks, I have no interest in trying to make it more “concise” - meaning anodyne. You can’t use an internet-based tool today without being bombarded by AI features - from WhatsApp to Wix. It’s not that these features may not be useful to some - but there seems to be no way to turn them off. How do you get rid of that blue button in WhatsApp?

Work-based tools see the most egregious inflitration, and that only adds to the angst. The looming threat of being replaced by an LLM is reinforced with every cycle of layoffs, yet employees are being forced to adopt it at work (or being told by LinkedIn thoughtfluencers that they are obsolete if they’re not).

In many ways, AI is the ultimate Dilbertian tool - employees loathe it and it’s actually increased their work rather than reduce it. Bosses hardly know how to use it, but see it as a way to increase productivity and is a convenient scapegoat for layoffs. And then there’s how it’s made LinkedIn even more LinkedIn.

Given the all-pervasive nature of technology firms - especially the big ones - in our lives today, the surface area for weariness increases.

Take the collective hatred for AI art. In various forums I have seen absolute rejection of AI art, with people not even giving it a chance. It’s not just indie musicians and purists. If you go to the comments sections (ah, that again) of Instagram pages dedicated to funny cat videos - that most representative part of the internet - you will see many imploring admins not to post generated videos, even if they’re interesting.

When news emerges that Spotify props up AI music to pay even less to pesky human musicians, it further strengthens the hate to AI and Big Tech. There is increasing awareness of AI’s harms - environmental, mental, to artists.

I remember a podcast by The Ken where the host Praveen made an astute observation: A lot of Indian millennials are not finding meaning at startups anymore. Those firms started with lofty missions but over time, have just become just other boring, profit-maximising companies. Cue dark patterns. Cue millennial disillusionment. Cue board game nights and digital detoxes to regain some sense of purpose.

And at a time when job security and basic safety is increasingly a concerm, news that {insert tech / AI firm} has raised {insert absurd dollar amount} in funding or deals just seems from a different planet. The antics / comments of Altman, Huang, Musk, Zuckerberg, Nadella and other techbros are alienating many. I mean, take a look at the comments here for what schadenfreude looks like:

Distrusted by parents. Loathed by employees. Viewed sceptically by governments. Yelled at by artists and environmentalists. Hated by workers who just want to make an honest living. Big Tech’s reputation is lower than Johnny Cash’s vocal register right now.

Finally, maybe things are just moving too fast. Human beings - as a species - are loathe to too much change too quickly. In the world of AI, it seems there’s a new model, a new skill to learn, a new platform coming up every single day. Your job used to be writing marketing copy, it now seems like you’re better off on a farm if you don’t use Claude to vibe-code your workflow? Is it any wonder that many are longing for simpler days of tech being friendly or never around at all?

I consider myself an observer rather than taking sides, though my bias might have shown. And as an observer of technology’s impact on humans and culture, I am fascinated by how our collective immune system is kicking in, something I wrote about here.

The Slowing Down Economy and its attractions

All this has pushed many people in their individual capacities to try and de-tether themselves from Big Tech in small ways - going analog partially, restricting screen time, doing outdoorsy things, or getting a physical alarm clock. I call all of these various things the Slowing Down Economy, and I believe it’s a reaction to the over-preponderance of tech in our lives, and how tired we are of it.

Two key attractions to this Economy are:

• Choice: People do most of the anti-Big Tech things on their own volition in ways that make the most sense for them, which is a refreshing change.

• Decentralisation: The Slowing Down Economy is spread across thousands - maybe millions - of touchpoints ranging from individuals to small stores to apps and by nature are never going to consolidate for maximising shareholder value. Big Tech, on the other hand, will be studied for the ill effects of over-consolidation and getting too big - most of those lawsuits are indeed for holding monopoly over a market.

Like I wrote last week, it blows my mind how far these companies’ reputation stocks have fallen in such a quick span of time. Of course, their actual stocks have been doing quite well in the meantime. To be fair, a lot of them do still do good, and have some very smart honest people working in them (so Iran - please don’t bomb them). But I do feel this vibe shift is quite telling.

Big Tech’s Big Tobacco moment could be one of the most significant flash points in the history of this most fascinating time we’re living through.

Anyway, enough of that - so on to something else quickly.

Coming this Wednesday: Unstuck

08 April is the two-year anniversary of the launch of The 6% Club.

In that time, we have seen 8 cohorts and 300+ participants finding themselves through a creative project. Several Substacks, podcasts, and video series have been made as a result. Some are even launching books! It’s been very fulfiling. But now, we have a new offering coming.

Unstuck. A three-month program that aims to help people find direction and build habits in service of their values. I can’t share anything yet, but here’s what the top fold of our upcoming website looks like.

If you are interested in signing up, do mail me back and I’ll give you priority notification. Of course, I will be mailing my newsletter database anyway. It’s the most ambitious thing either Utsav or I have ever done. And we launch it on the 2-year anniversary of the 6% Club. And I swear, whatever we do, we will NEVER behave like Big Tech :)

Thank you for reading, and supporting me through all these years.

Chuck

§1: Two back-to-back headlines from the latest Platformer: The World Happiness report says social media makes teens unhappy, and tech-friendly political candidates are losing, often for their tone-deaf “it’ll be fine” posturing.

§2: I’m fascinated by how such a sharp collective vibe shift has happened around social media, so quickly. In 2010, it was the bee’s knees, everyone loved it, it was hailed as one of our greatest inventions, Zuck was a hero. The tide turned in 2016, and today social media is being likened to cigarettes, and is being regulated across the globe. Zuck is regularly seen as an evil tech baron. What a change in just 15 years.

§3: Homo Sapiens has been around for 300,000 years. The internet is less than 70 years old. Social media just turned old enough to vote. Generative AI is a toddler in human terms, a speck in evolutionary ones.

§4: I do a lot of reading and thinking around how technology impacts culture. Whenever I read pieces around “how will GenAI impact music”, I invariably find questions like “first, let’s stop and ask what music is” or “what is art, anyway?”

§5: WTF are these bullets? Sorry, I’m a pretentious prog-metal fan.

Our collective immune system is kicking in

My belief is that a technology doesn’t change us - as short-term alarmist headlines and LinkedIn hot takes are wont to urgently conclude - it just tests what makes us human. Like how an exam doesn’t change a candidate, or how a brutal climb doesn’t change a cyclist1 … as much as tests them.

In that sense, I don’t think social media changed us. It just amplified the best and worst of us. To say it shortened attention spans is to assume that there was some “base attention span” to begin with. Even if there was some pre-existing level, it would have been a product of a previous technology - books, television, or other mediums of the time including communal gatherings.

Put another way, if our ancestors had access to an endless stream of easy-access dopamine, they’d be scrolling well into the night too. We’re still very much operating with the same hunter-gatherer DNA that we were a long time ago.

The aforementioned vibe shift against Big Tech and Social Media, I think, shows that our collective immune system has kicked in. Like it did for mass-produced sugar, the ozone layer, and some social problems.

I am not saying our species is faultless (far from it, daily it feels like our immune system is not very good at identifying some other pressing threats). But given the timespan of evolution, we do seem to have a knack for some correction, even if it doesn’t seem like it while living through it. I find that somewhat reassuring.

What the larger body our immunse system is defending is outside my scope of current thinking - are we trying to ensure our perpetuity, as is the case with most life?

The first principles of being human

What all the above shows is that there are a few base human traits from time immemorial: the need for validation, the need for fuel, the urge to socially conform, the desire to procreate, the dream of self-actualisation2.

Perhaps we can call these the first principles of being human. You can say every other human action - from coveting money, to wearing flashy brands, to writing half-baked Substack thought-pieces - can stem back to these first principles. All of these lend themselves to good and bad outcomes, across time, across cultures. The desire for money, for example, has given us many useful inventions, but also unfettered capitalism that’s destroying the natural world.

o give a small but instructive example, we went from mocking Airpods when they first came out, to collectively normalising them within a year. Did our need to socially conform help with that?

When I say technologies are stress tests for what makes us human, it’s these first principles I’m referring to. Social media’s addictive tendencies, the velocity that bad news seems to attain, the obesity epedemic, the unchecked ego of techbros - can all be traced back to them.

Second order effects

Generative AI provides another fascinating playground for all of this. It’s forcing us to confront some large questions that get to the heart of those human first principles.

What is art? Do we need human skills anymore? What will we do if all human-made jobs are done by machines? What does the tech-fuelled analog renaissance say about us? Why do we prefer a child’s scribble over a ‘perfect’ AI image?

We can come up with answers to each of these and abstract them agnostic of technology. For example: We value the time that a child has come up with to make something for us, rather than the theoretical absolute best image output. That means we place a price on some intangible - and that’s irrespective of technology3.

I’m sure you’ve come across someone saying: I’m so sick and tired of seeing obviously AI-generated rubbish on LinkedIn, that when I see someone post something human - even if imperfect in argument or even with typos - I am thankful, and I pay attention to it. Generative AI took us from Grammar Nazis to seeking imperfection! How the tables turn in such a short period of time.

I feel that it’s the second order effects of any technology when the aspects of humanity reveal themselves. For example, cars were invented to take people from A to B (a first-order effect), but soon came identity & signalling, teenage car culture, racing for entertainment (second-order effects) - the more human aspects. The same happened to the internet - an erstwhile functional technology which, when left in the wild of human experience and capitalism for a few decades - amplified our best and worst tendencies. Some of the obvious ill effects of social media today, were not very apparent back in 2005.

And I feel the same will happen of Generative AI. We’re living through its first-order effects phase. Soon, those big questions will be answered. The human first principles will be at play. It’ll be fascinating to observe.

Perhaps the most philosophical way of looking at this whole thing is: Every technology we create is pushing us to question increasingly fundamental questions.

In the time of the early internet, “what makes us human” would have been a question relegated to weed smoke-addled dorm rooms. In the age of social media, there may have been some flutterings on Reddit discussing it. In an era of Generative AI, though, a lot of people seem to be asking Google that question.

Epilogue

It’s the year 2075.

Close to 60 years after the American public turned on Facebook and were made aware of its ills. 10 years later, there were concerted efforts around the world to limit access to social media to teenagers around the world. There was resistance and workarounds (what a charming technology VPNs was), but eventually things were implemented, just like alcohol and tobacco were much before.

It ushered in an era of understanding that it’s not just physical products that could be addictive to humans, and ushered in a new era of technological regulation. And about time too, some of those laws were written when the internet wasn’t even invented, or its antique predecessor, the telephone.

These laws eventually led to the global regulation of Generative AI, which was in its infancy in the mid-2020s. And thank goodness! Can you imagine what would happen if absolutely anyone could prompt absolutely anything into absolutely any chatbot? It may be hard for readers of today to fathom that, but that’s how it was back in 2023 when a then-fledgling OpenAI released ChatGPT v1.

Of course, we have our own problems today, but studying how humans have - at least to some extent - had their collective immune system kick in - should give us hope for today.

Our species is 300,000 years old. Technologies come and go. But every wave tests us, and reminds us of our ancient wiring. We’re still very much operating with the same brains as we did when we got out of those caves 300,000 years ago.

This came into my life when I’ve been thinking a lot about digital disconnection, mindful living, improving my relationship with music, and other such mid-lifey things. The TL;Dw of the video is: The creator, Brandon Shaw, wanted to experiment for a month without streaming on his phone. He ended up going down a month-long journey of taking several functions off his phone. This is not one of those stories that ends in a dumbphone or him abnegating the internet - though at one point he does get himself a typewriter - and that’s what I find appealing about his journey. It feels like anyone - even someone in a tech-first, media-focused job - could gain back control from the time-sucker that is the modern-day smartphone.

In the video, Brandon creates this nice diagram showing what all he tried unbundling from his iPhone.

I won’t say I’ve got inspired by the video, only because I’ve been unbundled things from my own phone for years. I’ve always been conscious that the device could be a time-sucker and have been careful of my usage. I’ve been careful to never be ‘addicted’ to it.

Still, it was a worthy reminder to achieve one thing I feel is useful in today’s age: Spend as less time on the smartphone as possible. So today, how I’ve gone about doing that.

Stuff I’ve unbundled from my smartphone, and to what

Music - a dedicated media player

Unlike Brandon from the above video, I’ve used an external music player for years (a habit from the Creative Zen days). But only recently with my new-ish Sony Walkman NW-A306 and generally changing my listening habits did I derive benefits from disaggregating music from my phone.

This device has only MY songs, mostly legally purchased from Qobuz or iTunes (here’s a slightly nerdy workflow1). I do not use streaming on the player, though it does have the facility and I could replicate my curation on Spotify. I'm not anti-streaming, I use Spotify a fair bit myself. It’s more a ‘purity of usage’ thing.

I think there’s a difference between having all the music in the world instantly accessible at your fingertips, vs a collection that you’ve consciously curated - and in some sense, are limited by.

The player is connected to one of two kickass headphones: The gorgeous Meze 99 Classics (for daily listening), and the ugly-but-sounds-otherworldly Stax L700 (for involved sessions). Both make music listening an intentional experience. There should be some friction2.

I have a monthly budget to buy music. If that seems strange in an age where Spotify gives you everything for free (or close to it), consider this was the way music was for generations. I feel like I own my files, I am not subject to streaming’s whims, am not distracted, and importantly, do not need to use the internet to access my music3.

Please keep in mind, I do all this because music is my primary hobby. I don’t recommend casual music fans go out and get a dedicated high-res music player or a pair of electrostatic headphones. But it’s worth thinking what YOU care about, enough to have a separate device or just even dedicated time for.

Reading for pleasure - Kindle and physical books

I was a Kindle early adopter, so that was an easy thing to unbundle. I hate looking at the tiny screen for too long anyway, reading an article there gives me a headache. But recently, I’m finding a lot of joy in the physical. Not for the whole “smell of physical” thing, but for magazines and books that are specifically designed to be a nice physical experience. The anthologies of stories from Bengaluru and Bandra, Luru and Pudding respectively, are a delight to hold and browse.

As is Rohit Saran’s new data-meets-storytelling beauty, 100 Ways to See India.

And of course, my trusty Kindle, which I think is one of the best single-purpose inventions in the 21st century.

Reading for information / news - my tablet + newspapers

I use my tablet (an old Redmi, nothing fancy) for just two things. One is a cool word game called Spelltower. The other is to read articles, Substacks and publications like WIRED, Nautilus, Foreign Affairs, FT and The Ken. I carve out dedicated time to do so every weekend, and my hope is to do so daily.

I get a daily dose of newsletters of various kinds in my inbox which is way too much to read. So I sift stuff I want to properly get down to, in a specific folder on my browser which syncs with that on the tablet. I don’t get through all of them, but whatever I do, I try to devour and go down its own rabbitholes, sometimes ending in a book purchase at the end of it. The metric of “maximum articles read” is long forgotten.

While I try to keep up with the news and politics, I’ve also become aware that I don’t care for it too much4. Instead, I’ve gone old-school and started getting… physical newspapers5. No, really. Shorn of the online anger and irritating pop-ups, the calm of a static newspaper allows you to imbibe everything at a glance, and go into what you feel is important. There’s very little rubbish like those horrible “netizens react to tweet”. The editorials are nice, and Mint Lounge on weekends is so good. Once a Times of India accidentally got delivered to our place and even that felt… sane.

Clock / alarm - actual clocks, actual alarm

I’m strict about keeping my phone out of the bedroom. For bedside time, I’ve got a digital alarm clock (Amazon has so many). But recently, I bought a Pomodoro timer that allows me to countdown/up. It’s such a delight to use and I time many things, including writing this article.

I also use a cheap stopwatch when working out. Thanks to it I’ve also found my trainer often cheats during EMOMs, his 60 seconds is our 45 seconds. But he’s a nice sort otherwise.

Notes - physical notebook

This is a biggie. I’ve always loved writing - taking notes and thinking on paper before translating them to screen. I have several notebooks - a dedicated one for each work project, some for creative stuff, some for this newsletter, and some small ones I carry with me.

For me, this has benefits beyond avoiding distraction. I love the freedom that comes with physically putting pen to paper (or whiteboard). You can scribble, you can mind-map, you can doodle, you can go all unstructured… It’s liberating in a way that the best note-taker or digital tool just isn’t.

Plus, I can use fountain pens <3

Tools like the ReMarkable - as sexy as they look - hold no appeal for me. It’s pen and paper for me.

Photography - point and shoot camera

I’ve had a camera since 2004 (including a long DSLR + 3 lens phase) so I’m quite used to carrying one with me on trips and stuff. Recently, I purchased a Ricoh GR3 - it takes great pics, transfers easily to the phone and is a joy to use. On recent cycling and hiking trips, I found myself taking photos using only it, which also makes stopping and shooting way more intentional.

Like the music player, I don’t recommend everyone run out and get a P&S. Even mid-range phones take damn good photos. But if you’re serious about photography or just want to find ways to de-tether more from your phone, AND take a lot of pics… Then it’s a decent investment. You’ll get point-and-shoots for a budget on Amazon or at second hand camera marts (In Mumbai - the camera street at Fort is a good haunt).

Again, the idea is to avoid the trap of taking out your phone for doing one specific task, before getting distracted by notifications, email, WhatsApp and losing the moment fully. For me, the idea of unbundling is to use the phone as little as possible. So to that end, the next one might seem either overkill or on point…

Cycling stats - my cyclocomputer

Ok, I admit I am including this here just to be a completionist for this list and to show off the fact that I care enough about cycling to buy a gadget for it! I recently bought a Magene cyclocomputer to track distance, elevation, speed and time when riding, obviating the need to keep Strava on during rides. It’s more accurate, saves phone battery (valuable on long rides) and more importantly, isn’t as temperamental as Strava is.

And so this is what my final unbundle looks like!

Not too shabby! And I may not be done yet. I won’t ever go full dumbphone and I believe I have enough digital discipline to not go full doomscrolling if I have to pick up a phone to answer a MyGate notification, but I’ve found that unbundling all these things over the years have had three huge benefits:

1. The ‘mindfulness’ benefit: Whatever you unbundle, you’re more involved with, consume more intentionally, retain more, are more in the moment, etc. Whether it’s framing a better photograph, being absorbed in a news article, finding a new layer to a favourite song, or connecting dots in your notepad better.

2. Losing the animal instincts: By which I mean, you’re not giving in to quick dopamine hits, ragebait, time-wasting slop, or just getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of (high quality) content out there. I don’t get FOMO, or overwhelmed. It’s a very nice feeling to know you don’t need to read / watch / listen to everything out there.

3. Nicer to use: A physical camera just feels so much nicer than a touchscreen. My Sony player is a gorgeous device. Writing with a TWSBI fountain pen is a joy. Often, these purpose-made, single-task products are of higher quality and have better features. In the above video, Brandon compares a smartphone to a Swiss Army Knife - convenient, yes, but do you really want to use that teeny blade to make a steak?

The failed utopia of smartphones

The era of smartphones began on January 9, 2007 as Steve Jobs famously unveiled the iPhone as three devices in one: An iPod, a mobile phone, and an internet communication device. In less than two decades, that seminal invention would turn the world upside down.

Bundling of everything into a single device was initially heralded as a good thing. Many of us remember those heady days! We revelled in letting go of our individual devices, as new generations of iPhones and Androids subsumed more and more of their utility. Cameras became rare. Taking notes on Evernote became fashionable. Apple itself killed off the first part of its trinity as nobody was buying standalone music players anymore. Alas in the intervening years we’ve come to learn better. The all-in-one tech utopia is mega convenient, but sure came with downsides.

I don’t think bundling itself is the issue here - it’s the incentives various apps have to keep you addicted, taking away from its primary functionality. Aka the “Google Search got worse” problem, or to use trendy parlance, enshittification.

After making the analogy to a Swiss Army Knife, each of whose components are sub-par at best, Brandon says:

Now imagine if your Swiss Army Knife sent you notifications. The knife is all “hey, just letting you know, I can cut stuff”. The screwdriver is all “hey, it’s been 4 days since you last used me”. The tweezers are like, “hey don’t lose your streak, tweeze something with me!”

In my view, there are two broad camps these bad experiences fall into:

1. Products are just an excuse to serve you ads (social media), or force you to upgrade (constant ads on YT free; ragebait news; the tsunami of “hey try this AI product” in Gmail)

2. Products are engineered to keep you renewing (Netflix, Spotify premium). Now this need not be a bad thing - old school newspaper subscriptions and house help also hope that you will ‘renew’ and will give you a good product with that incentive - but the problem here is that human base instincts are exploitatable, and the internet allows for business models around this to be easily built. This leads to bad digital habits (over-bingeing, gambling, or surface-level selection on Tinder). If you feel even this is okay and it’s ultimately human choice (an argument I can get behind), it’s plain to see that exploitation happens somewhere else - artists on Spotify, gig workers on delivery apps, etc.

I guess a better understanding of these, too, is why I want to unbundle as much as I can from the phone. In 2011, Facebook engineer Jeff Hammerbacher famously remarked, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads”. Today, those brains are paid a lot more and their job description is way broader. I’d like to think that by pulling myself away from their primary window to me, I’m making life tough, if not impossible, for them.

My two simple recommendations

This post was mostly for me to document what’s worked for me - it was not really meant to be instructions for you (maybe that in a later post). I don’t want to tell you to run off and buy a music player if you don’t spend at least more than 2 hours deeply listening.

But what I will say, if you want to take some action, are just two simple things:

1. De-tether whatever you’re passionate about, from distraction, as much as possible: Notice I didn’t say ‘from the internet as much as possible’. You may be into online gaming or YT longform - things hard to do offline. The enemy is distraction, not the internet itself. And this can be hard! Many times, it may involve actually being offline (downloading those YT videos, for example). Switch off notifications, go full-screen, have a dedicated device… Whatever helps you be fully immersed in your activity. This is my first recommendation because hopefully, you care about your passion / hobby enough to fight the deleterious pull of algorithms and notifications, and build your digital disconnection muscle.

2. Try unbundling in small parts to see what is practical for you: It may start small and cheap like an alarm clock. Personally, I think using a notebook for notes / brainstorming is the best - it unlocks so much more. And you can scale up from here.

Maybe I’ll have a proper framework in a few months. But in the meantime, I’m sure Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism will have some ideas.

What have you unbundled from your phone?

Write back. I’d love to compile what’s worked for you into the next edition of this newsletter.

For a newsletter that seemingly celebrates the internet in its title, I sure seem to be spending a lot of time telling people how to fight it, of late. Maybe that’s not a bad thing wholly.

I’m off to listen to some music on that little Sony now. Thank you so much for reading this far.

Chuck

Earlier this week, the CEO of McDonald’s unveiled a new burger with the same gusto a client servicing person feels when briefing creative about a new project on a Friday evening. Take a look. It’s painful.

This predictably became fodder for every other fast food company: Wendy’s, Subway, Popeye’s, all chimed in. Even non food brands had their fun in the comments section, which I shall leave you to peruse. But there was of course, McDonald’s long-time arch (hehe) nemesis - Burger King: “we couldn’t finish it either”.

It was signature BK. Or rather, it was signature BK trolling McDonald’s. So today, a compilation of a few other times the underdog made us laugh at Ronald’s expense.

When they used AR to burn any McDonald’s ad to reveal a Burger King coupon

They mapped every single McD in the US to create a geolocated campaign - where a free Whopper would get activated only within a certain radius of their nemesis. What trolls!

Even the old TVCs played up the difference between the two brands, here’s one from 1986. It may not be as quirky as the examples above, but still.

Or what about that time they did this in a German theatre during a horror movie?

They didn’t need poor McD specifically to be collateral damage. Back in 2010, they encouraged Facebook users to ‘unfriend’ people in exchange for BK coupons. Why do I feel that digital friends cleanup idea may work very well today?

Burger King hasn’t always been a troll. In Argentina in 2017, they actually supported a McDonald’s campaign that benefited a children’s charity.

And during COVID, they encouraged people to order from the competition.

Of course, you could say both above examples were hardly for charity, they were quite self-serving from a brand-building point of view. Which bring me to this next one.

Perhaps the most ambitious idea Burger King had was to ‘collaborate’ with McDonald’s on a burger for World Peace Day.

A simple and genius idea. They would win either way. If McD accepted the proposal, BK would be visionaries. If McD rejected it, they would come across as corporatey party poopers. Which they did.

I will, however, say that the absolute craziest idea Burger King ever did - and this may be among my favourite campaigns of all time - is Moldy Whopper. It’s one of the most daring ideas I have seen any brand do.

Oh, and back to how we started. Burger King posted this soon after McD’s sanitised bite.

I hope I didn’t make you too hungry (or, if you can’t get the image of Moldy Whopper out of your head, go the other way).

Have a good weekend!

Chuck

“I’m sorry Chuck, you didn’t get through either.”
Eight words that drove a stake through my heart.

24 March 2006.

It was a pretty shit day already. Our college band (I was playing bass) bombed the prelims at a college competition in Kottayam. My mind was elsewhere, though. Admission results to my dream Bschool, MICA, were rumoured to be released anytime.

For the past 1.5 years, I had been part of an online community whose vibe and pull I’ve never felt since. That was Pagalguy1. An online, text-based community of MBA aspirants from across the country. And those aspirants were diverse - fun, smart, insufferable, idolisable, loathsome, troublemakers, pacifiers, overachievers, humblebraggers, toppers, backbenchers, enthu cutlets and every other archetype you could think of. I found this website during my own MBA prep, desperate to find another soul who knew about - let alone cared about - MICA. I found several.

For 1.5 years, as I was finalising my divorce with engineering education and finding my own voice, Pagalguy was an escape, a training ground, an open-mic stage, therapy, a town square.

Because there was no always-on internet, Pagalguy would be an occasion, twice a week for two hours each. What did people say to my clever repartee? Did my DM crush reply? Did anyone have any more nuggets on what MICAT this year would have? What fun short-lived thread-specific trends were taking off? From the vantage point of 2026 with all my email-and-Slack anxiety, it’s hard to imagine there was once another way. What happened in cyberspace stayed in cyberspace till the next visit to the internet cafe. There was time in between to let life and synapse connections happen.

Time spent on the platform may have been intermittent, but the Pagalguy universe spilled over to other mediums - emails, Yahoo! Messenger chat, SMS, phone calls.

One such phone call came outside Thrissur railway station that March night.

“I’m sorry Chuck, you didn’t get through either.”

The ‘either’ made it particularly heartbreaking. The caller was a fellow MICA aspirant, we both knew how much we both wanted this. Neither made it. It was a silent auto ride back to the hostel.

That call was the hardest 30 seconds of my life till then. It was also exactly what I needed.

I didn’t deserve MICA yet. I wasn’t ready, I hadn’t prepared. Yeah, I posted a fair bit on the MICA thread, but I wasn’t clear on what I wanted from the insti - something made glaringly clear during a horrible interview. Fandom shouldn’t be conflated for qualification. I pulled up my socks, worked on filling the gaps, and continued studying for CAT in parallel with my first job.

On 21 March 2007, I got the email I’d dreamed of. I wrote the Pagalguy post I’d always dreamed of.

Chapter 2: The best thing I ever wrote

The summer of 2010 was among the most intellectually stimulating periods of my life. The year signalled a new start for me. I needed a clean break from 2009, which featured among other things a bad job and a worse breakup. The MICA dream ended with a recession graduation. Bad times.

So I was keen to do as much as a non-partying, introverted 25-year old could. I started writing for Chordvine, a now-defunct Indian music e-magazine which gave me some identity, and opened doors to interviewing artists like Motherjane and Blackstratblues. I went through my DSLR phase. I went to many gigs. I began an exciting new relationship (that continues to be exciting to this day).

But most of all, I remember the summer of 2010 being all about Twitter. Yes. Twitter.

Isn’t there an old saying like “where a swamp stands, once stood a pristine garden”? No? Well, there should be. Because if not a pristine garden, the Twitter of that era was a carnival of puns, shared interests, small world connections, intelligent memes, and so much more. Of course, there were the performative clowns and the saplings of the “influencer era”, but somehow I found a corner of the place that was fun and genionely stimulating.

Looking back, it’s evident how much those hours on Twitter helped shaped my thinking and principles. But the titular best writing wasn’t on Twitter, it was on my erstwhile blog, the could-not-be-more-early-20s-ly-named Chronicles of Dementia.

Among the things that would happen on Twitter around that time was random hashtags that punsters would rally around. #IronMaidenMumbai was one such I started which even trended (I started with Powaislave & Run To Antop Hill). It was mad short-lived, unbranded fun.

One of the best such hashtags was #TweetsLike, a beautiful hashtag where we’d all take a go at imitating celebrties and each other’s tweeting styles. I got inspired by that and thought - hey, what if we did a #BlogLike post? After all, it was still the golden age of fun, personal blogs then.

So I wrote a blogpost on the topic: What if Sreeshanth became the Kochi IPL team captain. Told in the style of four of my favourite humour writers of that time: Anand Ramachandran (aka Son of Bosey), Ramesh Srivats, Tony Sebastian, and Narendra Shenoy. I had a whale of a time doing it, put it together with images badly cobbled-together on MS Paint and sent it out into the universe. I knew it was decent, but didn’t think of the reaction it would get.

Everyone of those I tried to mimic, and then some commented on it or shared it. All my heroes - the chief mischief mongers of the time. My credibility and confidence went through the roof.

Was it ‘viral’ as we may define it today? Absolutely not - it probably just got a few thousand views. But it was loved among people I looked up to - and that mattered more.

After that, I’ve created hundreds of podcast episodes, blogposts, and goodness knows what else. Few things have given me the kick of writing that piece and the reaction it got. I don’t have that post or blog itself anymore - I deleted them all many years ago. I like to think of them as a time capsule that lives in my memory and hopefully that of a few others too. Super proud of that one.

Interlude: There is no theme to this post, other than that they are tales from a relatively older internet. I thought about whether there should be a connective tissue like ‘power of community’ or ‘intentional internet’ or ‘see how good pre-algorithmic social media was’ or something like that. Decided against it. Been doing too much gyaan around that anyway. So my last tale is completely different.

Chapter 3: The bill

2001, Kochi.

I had a home computer (not very commonplace then) because I was taking computer science in 11th standard. My internet connection was old-school - dialling up with a modem. The modem would ‘dial’ a specific number on the house landline in order to provide us that sweet 128kbps of crawling access.

I did a very stupid thing. I followed the instructions on the manual to the t. The manual’s illustrative example for number to be dialled was a Kolkata number. I was, as you’ve surmised already, in Kochi.

Meaning everytime I was using the internet, I was dialling an STD (out of station) number. No big deal today, of course - who even pays for calls anymore (who even calls anymore) - but back then, it was a very big deal. Our usual phone bill of ₹1,000 ballooned to ₹13,000 for that one month.

If you told me that night that I’d be publishing a newsletter on technology, I’d have cried and laughed you out of the room. To that point, the stupidest thing I’d ever done related to the internet was typing out each letter of a music album I was obsessed with2, because I didn’t know copy-paste as a function existed.

What an idiot.

I hope you enjoyed this little series. If you made it till here, you clearly did.

So here is something much better, a video I’ve been digging. Those of you who know my mindspace right now should not be surprised at all. Slowing down economy and all that.

If you have some tales from the early internet - communities you were a part of, something significant that happened to you, a love letter to non-algo social media - do share them if you like. If I get enough, I’d love to make a reader’s compilation of them. Voice notes work too.

Thank you for reading Things of Internet. And thank you for continuing to read despite the significant shift in direction it has taken in the last year.

Chuck

In it, I described the Slowing Down Economy as “new products, services, and experiences that help people slow down, imbibe new habits, find meaning in life, and if nothing else, provide respite.”

That article and idea resonated with many, none more so than myself. Really. Articulating what was mucking about in my head for months gave me a fresh lens to view elements of this “economy” I’ve encountered since2 - experiences, conversations, trends, purchases, and a program I am building. In the 3 months since I wrote that post, my belief in my original thesis has only been strengthened.

That being said - the trend is hardly certain3, and “slowing down economy” is an ambiguous term - Google it and you’ll get results about economic slowdown. Not exactly what I was going for. So in a bid to treat this more scientifically, and further clarify the concept in my own head, I came up with five characteristics of this economy. Here they are.

For ease:

SDE = Slowing Down Economy (I realise there is a more common expansion!)
Offerings = Products & services

I’ll also add one image from some part of the SDE I’ve participated in, for each point!

1. Offerings will vary greatly

This is an obvious one, but let’s get it out of the way.

The SDE could give us offerings ranging from free public yoga classes to exclusive meditation retreats. From highly personal journals to highly social mixer events. From total disconnection to using your smartphone more productively. From repurposing old concepts (board games) to coming up with new ones altogether. From impacting personal life, to professional life. Single-person led to corporation-led. Stuff that breeds a community, stuff that forces reflection. Some stuff that’s for-profit, some that’s completely free (or maybe even loses the founder money!).

But yes, there will be an offering (product or service). Just slowing down can be meditating. The Slowing Down Economy brings you a good meditation app.

I know this is a very broad swathe of things and a lot of stuff here already exists, which brings me to characteristic 2…

2. Offerings will explicilty marketed as deliberate disconnection, slowing down, etc.

I’ve been seeing more events deliberately add terms like ‘touch grass’, ‘disconnect’, ‘real life’ and so on - even if the core is the same as what used to happen before. I am not being cynical about this mindfulness-washing. If anything, I welcome it.

A trekking group should lead with ‘get out into nature’.

A singles event should sell itself as ‘what Tinder can’t do’.

A slow painting event should say ‘do something unproductive’.

A pizza workshop should say ‘make your own dinner’.

I think terms like this will resonate, especially with the disaffected millenial who’s tired of trying to make every second productive.

And the reason I don’t worry about mindfulness-washing is…

3. Trust will be paramount - and that will dictate the kind of businesses being built

I know that is such a cliched statement. But let me explain.

If you think about why people will run towards the SDE, it’s because trust has been broken elsewhere. People know the convenience economy has a downside. They will be cynical of anything that seems too good to be true (especially if it’s free). Their bullshit radars have been honed over years of dark patterns, data mining and time-sucking algorithms.

So if somone is telling them - hey, sorry about the bad things the internet did to you. Pay me ₹500 to do a digital detox - it is only expected they will be sceptical.

Who is running this thing? What are their credentials? What are their incentives? What is their agenda? Is this going to come back to bite me in some way? Is someone being exploited? Is this going to be yet another VC-charity-benefiting-California-Indians just looking to get MAU up before being sold off to the next big sucker?

People who are trusted parts of the community, and who have a reputation for putting their own morals above a quick buck, will do well4. And by do well, I don’t mean cash out and become a billionaire. That is unlikely to happen in the SDE.

One thing that I’m optimistic about is that the lack of a quick buck to be made or the potential of a high valuation exit is a feature rather than a bug of the SDE. It is unlikely the SDE is going to birth a unicorn. At the same time, not all companies here are going to be non-profits. Many will find that sweet spot between purpose and profit - doing stuff that funds a decent lifestyle while allowing them to sleep well at night.

I look at something like Stranger’s Choir - a series of singalong events in India that has gone viral - a perfect example of a single-person SDE company (I was there for the last Pune edition where we all sang Adele, it was lovely).

While I wish the founder a lot of success, it’s unlikely to make her money to buy a yacth. And my sense is that she won’t want to either. Maybe that’s another sub-characteristic of the SDE. My sense is that most entrepreneurs in this economy would rather continue doing what they are doing in the SDE, rather than want to cash out, like some of our esteemed techbros.

It will be integrable into daily life

Antidotes to hustle culture and overdigitisation have often been extreme - ditch it all and go to the hills. Delete all your social media.

No. The SDE will assume that your life - or at least the broad structure of it - will continue. It is NOT anti-internet or even anti-social media or anti-AI. It’s about how to use all of these things better so they make sense for your life.

Offerings will integrate themselves into your everyday (or week). Weekend events. Small habits. 5AM running clubs. 7PM pottery class. A slow-travel vacation. Even a social media time limit app.

Of course, you may choose to change how you live your life and how you work - and that would be a positive outcome. But it’s not the immediate starting point.

And finally…

It will make no sense to homo economicus

Investopedia describes homo economicus as “the idea of humans as perfectly rational decision-makers, aiming to maximize profit and utility”.

By nature, the offerings of the SDE are not to maximise profit or utility.

Paying ₹3000 for a linocut workshop when you’re unlikely to make art with it again.

Paying more for a homestay that has one less feature (the internet).

Spending time doing nothing - which could have been utilised productively.

Making your own pizza from scratch when you could have ordered a better one… for cheaper.

Podcasts that are more about fun and banter rather than giving you a takeaway (as Hank and John Green once remarked on their lovely show, Dear Hank & John: “People are saying WE are part of the slow internet!”)

Choosing to start a business that has less potential for outsized growth than, say, yet another SaaS company, AI company, blitzscaling company.

Or even attending live concerts - when you can hear the song better and more conveniently on Spotify.

None of these will make sense to homo economicus. Unless homo economicus realises that in order to live a life of happiness or even be productive long-term, you need to slow down.

I think “it makes no economic sense” or “you could do better with your time” to be decent shorthands for participation in the SDE.

Instead, the pillars are likely to be mindfulness, active reflection, or just relaxing your brain.

This is not meant to be a “how to win in the Slowing Down Economy” manifesto - that would defeat the purpose. Instead, it’s just meant to be a guide for me as I continue observing this space.

What do you think? What have I missed? Is there a company in the SDE you’ve seen that runs counter to the above? Has there been a better framing for “Slowing Down Economy” whose memo I missed? What are the parts of the SDE that you yourself have been participating in?

Chuck

I fear that (with on-demand stimulus) the younger generation will lose the ability to be bored. I think it’s important to be bored, to have that empty space for random ideas and connections to form in your head. When I was growing up, I’d savour the few cricket magazines I got, byhearting scorecards and finding out patterns on my own, forming my own theories.

I never really heard ‘bored’ be used in a positive way like that. At least, I didn’t think that’s where it would come in a conversation around Test cricket’s relevance in the T20 era.

The next year, I was evaluating how to structure a professional life that involved balancing a consultancy, The 6% Club, and a university teaching job. A friend who knows me well gave me the following advice:

You need to find time to do nothing, and just be bored. No agenda. Some of your best ideas have come when you’re bored.

That word again.

A word that would continue Baader-Meinhofing me during The 6% Club sessions, where we espoused frequent reflection. Many people we interviewed for our To Your Heart’s Content series would talk about boredom. Most notably, Abish Mathew spoke about how he deliberately seeks boredom (start at 1:06:04):

Clearly, boredom is having a moment. I’ve heard its virtues being extolled on podcasts, this TED talk, the Veritaserum video Abish references, publications as diverse as VICE and Harvard Business Review, and Reddit. GenZ is ‘rawdogging’ flights and some meditation / nature retreats use boredom as a USP!

When did boredom become a good thing?

Growing up pre-internet, boredom was undesireable. It signalled no cartoons on TV, a long maths class, a weekend morning with the same comic books, being dragged along to a social situation where you’d be alone…

The Veritaserum video adds the nuance needed for today’s context:

Boredom is not when you have absolutely nothing to do. It’s when the options available to you don’t appeal to you. It’s a state of being underwhelmed. And there are now more ways than ever to avoid boredom.

Today, boredom is less “I have nothing to do” and more “I want to give my brain time to rest”. A state of not being always on / learning / evaluating.

It’s clear why this is aspirational now: A reaction to an always-on life, relentless stimuli, and #hustleculture. The best fitness trainers will encourage you to NOT work out everyday - the body needs rest to recover. Boredom could be considered ‘recovery time’ for the brain2.

It’s also accessible3. Unlike a meditation app or a retreat, being bored by nature requires nothing, costs nothing, needs no training4. It’s the easiest, if not purest, form of disconnection.

The irony of all this - and here’s where hustlebros and pure disconnectors both will feel conflicted - being bored is a terrific way to get productive. Just like the workout the day after recovery is killer, giving your brain rest makes you more creative, infuses new life into old ideas, makes you join dots that matter, and so on. It’s the age-old short-term vs long-term tension at play, neurologically this time.

Practically put, do you turn off a bit of work to just read for leisure? Do you willingly not listen to a podcast while doing the dishes? Do you re-watch an old documentary rather than watch a new one to bump up the ‘watched’ list by one? Do you stay up a little while more to finish that book? These are not easy tensions to navigate as both situations have their merits - but I think the more one listens to their body and mind, the more you know which direction to go in that situation.

Abish’s interview is a good place to start. In it, he speaks about letting a good idea deliberately go, training his own mind. If an idea is really good, it will eventually resurface. I also think it’s good training for your brain and taste - only a really good idea is worth moving for.

I, for one, can definitely attest to the therapeutic and medium-term productivity benefits of boredom - in its current definition of giving your brain a rest. I recently wrote about how moving from ‘evaluation state’ to ‘enjoyment state’ changed my relationship with music. I am pretty comfortable not pumping ‘content’ into my eyes and ears every time. I’m more spontaneous with a few decisions. I don’t overcalendarise despite my reputation for doing so. All this really does help. If nothing, I’m sleeping better and that’s a good measure.

One observation fascinates me. Remember how the Veritaserum quote ended with “And there are now more ways than ever to avoid boredom”? So theoretically, the endless stream of social media and content should ensure you’re never bored. But instead, THAT made us more ‘bored’ in the traditional negative sense, more than before.

Turns out, there can be too much of a good thing.

Maybe there’s something around capacity or keeping dopamine up all the time? Like how your taste buds will probably disintegrate if you eat only spicy food? Maybe you need to have sufficient moments of low dopamine to ensure that when you finally get it, it’s actually meaningful?

Some neuroscience or philosophy may hold the answers.

The easiest way to start being bored

Firstly, let me acknowledge how ridiculous it feels to even write that.

The 15-year old me who first got access to the internet wouldn’t have ever thought things would reach a point where we had to search for “how to be bored”.

I know it seems ridiculous to write that but really, how does one start? Do you carve out 30 minutes of “do nothing” time every day? That could work for some, but I feel trying to calendarise something that should inherently not be looked at as productivity is futile.

Instead, I think a good way to start is consciously not productify some activities you already do anyway. Switch off the radio when driving. Don’t do podcasts for one hike. Don’t listen to music when working out5. Limit your input when you have the choice to.

Soon, you may be able to extend this to idle time - when you need a break from work, go to the loo, stand in line… See what not reaching for your phone here looks like. This is tough, but I’ve found it to be very rewarding.

This will help you get to the heart of ‘boredom’ - the feeling of being comfortable in your own head. Talk to yourself6. And once you’ve got that, the final stage may be to not think of any thoughts at all. And this is difficult - as someone who’s had perpetual sleep battles and anxiety-by-overthinking knows.

I’m Feeling Lucky

I think there’s another, more important angle to being bored - taking a chance. Your taste and internal algorithm get sharpened when you subject them to new experiences. There is a good chance you may be disappointed, but also a chance you’ll discover something completely new - which will give you way more satisfaction (and taste built) than something resembling your mean.

In other words, “I’m feeling lucky” over “People who watched this also watched”.

I was thinking of this in the context of stress-testing my own musical taste, when I came across this excellent paragraph written by Ria Chopra from her wonderful new book, Never Logged Out.

Stop optimising seems like a decent way to ‘get bored’.

So yeah, take a chance on music, movies, restaurants, or even your own idea of leisure.

Last week, I was in Bangalore on work and stayed close to Cubbon Park. I’d never visited it before so was looking forward to a nice 2 hour walk in that urban oasis. After disembarking from my auto (Namma Yatri FTW), I realised in shock I’d left my earphones at the hotel. Oh no - two hours of podcasts I was looking forward to. Now I’d have to just… walk! How… boring?

It turned out to be an amazing two hours. I observed trees and was in awe of their magnificence. Thoughts of how this beautiful place survives being in the middle of the city. Wondered what the stories of all the people visiting were - that lone uncle stretching, that couple sneaking a clandestine date before college, that urbane duo walking their dogs, the cleaning ladies having a laugh, that businessman reading on his phone, that Athlos model seriously in the zone training… I gotta say, those two hours left my head feeling totally relaxed.

I should forget earphones more often.

Epilogue

SidVee and I spoke about Test cricket and why people still watched it in the day of T20. A beautiful answer he gave me was - it becomes a canvas for their own lives. A spectrum of five whole days to look within themselves.

The amount of time and energy you invest - sometimes for a disappointing result or even no result at all - makes you question many things. About your fandom, about your love for the game, and about your life! You get a Whatsapp ping about a crucial moment when you’re in the middle of a boring meeting and that makes you wonder why on earth you’re in this dead-end job. Someone I know even decided during a match that he would end his marriage that was going nowhere. Test cricket does that to you - it’s very meditative.

I hope you have a nice weekend, but are bored for some part of it.

Chuck

With that grand buildup, what I actually did is going to sound very silly: I deleted my “Best of 2024 WIP” and “2024 songs to get to” playlists.

I promise it changed how I treat music as a hobby. Let me explain. Let us rewind.

I started listening to music of my own volition when I suddenly got access to MTV and Channel [V] back in 1998 when I was in the Gulf. I loved boyband pop, Indipop, some Bollywood, and of course - rock. Overall, I really enjoyed music - even if it was heard through my old TV’s bad speakers. I would wait for countdowns, I’d save up for cassettes, I’d make mixtapes, I would keep eyes and ears open for anything music-related. It felt like a whole new world had opened up for me.

Through college (2002-2006), I devoured everything I could find or borrow, which was not much. CDs from friends, late-night music shows when I visited home during breaks (ZEE Cafe FTW), prized customised MP3s from the neighbourhood music store1… These were pre-music-abundance-on-internet days.

Taste-wise, I swiftly graduated - if that’s the right word - from Bon Jovi to Metallica to Iron Maiden to Dream Theater. I prided myself on listening to and loving difficult music like progressive metal, because identity is very important as a 20-something male rock fan in India. Especially if he happens to know 4 chords on a guitar. Then he becomes insufferable.

2009 was a turning point in life. I moved to Mumbai, started work, had my own internet connection, could finally torrent, had loads of free time, and needed distraction to get over a horrible breakup. My “identity” as a true rock fan also meant I couldn’t just listen to the greatest hits - I had to devour the discography, top-to-bottom, and build my own best-of playlists along the way. I’ve always been a bit of a collector-categoriser, that way.

But I also couldn’t just listen to music. I needed to know the stories, the trivia, the background. How else could one appreciate the historical importance of The Beatles, or the hidden messages in Led Zeppelin 4?

My modus operandi was: Download the discography (FLAC, of course) of a band, listen to it top to bottom on WinAmp, peruse SongMeanings and Wikipedia in parallel, make a shortlist, re-listen to and rank, make an ordered ‘favourites’ playlist, and boom, that band was ‘completed’. Great sense of achievement.

If that sounds mechanical and over-processifying what should be something enjoyable… You know why this post is titled what it is. And while the process certainly had its merits - I could find many underrated gems - it was not as effective as the engineer in me hoped it would be.

Because when I opened that favourites playlist again, I forgot most of the songs. It led to frustration - I invested so much time listening to this band and dammit, I don’t remember the songs only?

It got worse. If I came across a Reddit thread or listicle of the band’s best work and saw a track I didn’t recognise, I felt like my whole effort was ‘wasted’ and that I needed to do the discography all over again (I used to call that ‘revision’). At the same time, I kept discovering new artists that I wanted to get into. New genres I wanted to sample. And damn, when am I going to get around to listening to all those legendary names? When would I get to the Rolling Stones list of top 500 songs? Yikes, now there’s an updated list too.

If I went to a music festival, I felt the compulsive need to finish - not sample! - entire discographies. This reached a peak in 2019 when I was going to Europe for several gigs, and the ‘prep’ for Graspop Metal fest alone was tiring. I mean look at this lineup!

At one point, I got this idea of sharing a song a day on Twitter - again, the sort of thing a self-styled music nerd would do. I even gave it a hashtag - #ChucksSongADay2. So more pressure to keep up and find new music.

I resisted streaming for a long time - not because of any ethical reasons but because I was quite married to my FLAC and WinAmp3 ways (once I started making money, I would assiduously pay for the FLACs / iTunes downloads of songs I liked). But later I realised Spotify would be a good way to discover new music. Double-edged sword! What was supposed to be fun turned out to be even more of a chore - like a student discovering an extra textbook that needed to be finished for the exam the next day. The sheer amount of new music - rather than being exciting, felt overwhelming. Don’t get me wrong - I found many good songs and artists via streaming, but it still felt like a pile of hay I needed to sift through before getting to two good songs.

In other words, music started become a chore more than a hobby. From 2022 to mid 2024, I even remember earmarking two hours every weekend just to be able to go through new releases (mostly stuff I didn’t like or were just plain vanilla4) - and when I couldn’t finish them, frustration again. The song I shared on Twitter yesterday as a great listen? Forgot it already. And hey, I saved up for the headphone of my dreams and got it. Was I even… enjoying them?

Through 2022 and 2023, I obsessively kept up with new rock music releases. I even spent 2 weeks in both Decembers going through all the year-end recos across genres to see if I missed anything. The result is some best-of-year playlists5 I am very proud of but draining to put together.

Maybe you don’t obsess over music like I do so what I wrote above may not be that relatable. But maybe you feel this sense of hobby-becoming-chore somewhere else. My wife Divya certainly did, about her hobby, reading. In a recent post, she wrote:

Can you imagine reading feeling unhealthy? Sure felt that way to me, back in December 2020-something when I was making end-of-year reading decisions based on “this looks quick and short, should be able to squeeze this in”, instead of “do I really want to read this?”.

So overall, I was listening to a lot of music, cranking out playlists, running listening sessions during the pandemic and generally trying to live up to my self-given identity of being a learned, nerdy rock fan who was up-to-date with what was happening, actively seeking out new stuff and not falling into the trap of not listening to new music after 30. I can’t say I was enjoying music. Sometimes I felt like - I wish I didn’t need to sample those 10 new albums, can I just listen to the stuff I like? But won’t that be a waste of time?

Then came 2024.

Nobody needs your year-end playlists Chuck (and other stories of midlife crisis)

2024 was a turning point in my life for many reasons. Utsav and I started The 6% Club. Divya and I bought a home in Pune. But most importantly, I was figuring myself out (I did warn you about the midlife crisis). Figuring what makes me tick, what I want to do, what I’m curious about, what I choose to spend on, and what I need to let go of. Let’s call this my fountain pen and notebook6 phase.

I had to accept a couple of things - and this was a difficult pill to swallow for someone who nerded out about what all the Floyd songs meant:

• I don’t need to like every single song out there7.

• I don’t need to listen to every single song out there. It’s ok to not hear that new release by Pearl Jam. It’s ok to not have heard the entirety of the Rolling Stones’ discography. I mean, what exam was I even preparing for?!

So then came the decision which I’d toyed around with for a year: I deleted my WIP best-of-year playlists, purged a whole bunch of albums I meant to get to, and even deleted a lot of my own favourites playlist because really, do I have a 7th favourite Mastodon song, really? I unsubscribed from new music releases playlists. I was ruthless. I was going cold turkey. All this happened in the space of 30 minutes. I swear, I was panicking. Like imagine a budding author tearing up drafts she spent 3 years scribbling, but turned out to be holding her back from enjoying writing.

I know it seems like a small, insignificant thing, but this act made me feel so liberated. Now, I didn’t need to keep up. There was no homework. I had given myself permission to not care. And why not, I was not a professional critic, and the three people who would be sad I don’t have a year-end playlist, I could send them something else.

This then opened up the exciting question… What now?

I said - well, I always wanted to listen to Michael Jackson properly. On impulse, devoured his songs over a weekend. I didn’t finish the discog but I’m not fretting. Hey, this ‘letting go and not feeling guilty’ stuff is nice ya!

Another weekend - oh, how about randomly getting to “Best 80s new wave”? Discovered so much Duran Duran and Tears for Fears.

Another time - let’s listen to some of those old Indipop and Bollywood songs and see if they’ve held up, this time on good headphones. Many did. Some didn’t.

You get the picture. I went back to enjoying music. I felt like that 16-year old getting access to MTV for the first time. But now older, wiser, with better gear and a good muscle for music built over the last two decades.

I still have my ritual of two hours on the weekend, but this time I’m not dreading a 200-song playlist of mediocre djent, but I’m free to explore whatever I feel like. Or just dive into my favourite songs because why not? Isn’t music meant to be enjoyed? Isn’t a hobby meant to be relaxing?

Again, from Divya’s post about her new reading habits:

Starting 2024 I unstrung that giant albatross from my neck, threw it into the ocean, and started floating on my back. Which is to say, I decided to read what I want, when I want, no challenge tells me what to do okay. FELT GOOD. My reading was sporadic, but intentional and focused and fun. Some books were hits, some were misses, some were brutally DNF-ed

I relate to that so much. Music felt like a hobby again. I listened distraction-free, agenda-free. And then some nice things started happening.

Yeah this is the section on mindfulness and slowing down and all

I started noticing why I liked the songs I did. Started asking questions like why others didn’t like the same songs I played for them. Why I was drawn to some underrated tracks, and even abhor some popular songs. I started making notes. I came up with a list of reasons why I like the songs I do8. This helped me refine what I call my musical genome. And in a way, doing this has helped me get better at finding songs I like. Indeed, in 2025 I may have added more songs than ever to my ‘favourites’ folders9.

I’m having fun exploring new genres. Rediscovering gems from the past. Taking recommendations from Reddit and MetalHammer rather than an algorithm. I recently started giving classical music a try. There’s a playlist of Afrobeat I’m going to try this weekend.

It all boiled down to a couple of basic things: choose fewer things, and whatever you do choose to do, give it your full attention. Pro tip: that normally means de-tethering from the internet. I do my deep music listening almost exclusively on a tiny little Sony portable high-res player whose terrible UX is more a feature than a bug for me.

A couple of interesting things have happened as a result of all this.

One, with a sharpened musical genome, I’m able to decide quicker if I like a song or not - whether I should spend more time on it10. I actually tried this recently - I tried listening to new releases in the same 2022 fashion, and was able to sift through things MUCH quicker. It’s a good modern day version of the “9 hours to sharpen axe, 1 hour to cut tree” axiom, I guess!

The second nice outcome is - what started with music is spilling over to other forms of content. I used to worry about my to-read articles piling up. No more. I ruthlessly purge, and keep 2 hours on the weekend to read whatever catches my fancy. Again, have to accept I won’t be able to read it all, and if an article is SO good, it’ll end up finding its way back to me in some way. An imperfect approach, but solves the overwhelm. I’ve become more conscious of source - there are around 10 publications (WIRED, Economist, Nautilus, the likes) that I regularly go through, at least once a month. Also extrapolating that I can’t read or care about everything, there are things I’ve consciously chosen not to focus on - a lot of politics, short-term business news, and so on. I end up reading some lovely long posts I may have skipped before in my Age of Efficiency - and those give me some of the most memorable quotes or references.

Same with podcasts. Ruthlessly culled. No guilt over not being able to listen to everything. Became more conscious of what I was finding newly interesting (for eg - I stopped listening to two of what were my favourite podcasts - The Bugle & Pivot).

Same with TV shows. Accepted that I’ll never be watching that many.

Heck, same with live gigs. Am very comfortable skipping shows I’d have felt a lot of FOMO for a few years back11.

And with all of these things - I’m being conscious of what I give my time to. In a way, it’s almost like my internal algorithm is being refined with each experience, and the only way to do that is to immerse oneself fully in the choice you’ve made (I hope that made sense, I know it sounds a bit woo-woo).

Basically - listening to music more intentionally has not just made me enjoy it, it’s given me a framework to look at the rest of life through.

Yes, I said framework. Sorry. I’m an MBA.

I’ve always wanted to write about this journey, just for myself more than to dispense gyaan. But in the spirit of a new year, I suppose a takeaway could be this.

Pick one thing to be enthusiastic about. Don’t call it a hobby (that’s too mild), don’t call it an obsession (that’s too intense). Call it an enthusiasm. Something that you don’t mind spending 1-2 hours a week on, going down rabbitholes of. Not doomscrolling - but meaningful dives. Importantly, you should not look to be productive. You are doing this not to learn something, not to become a subject matter expert, but purely to lose yourself in and give your brain time to relax.

It could be music, it could be reading, it could be cooking, it could be hiking. Ideally done without the internet, or indeed, multi-tasking with something else (so cooking sans podcast). Something you give your full attention to. Something you think about deeply during, and savour after. Tip - the more specific you make this12, the more you ritualise this, the more you have your little corner for this, the better.

Ironically, this anti-productive approach actually works ends up making you productive! It gives your brain the space and time to collect random dots, which will be connected later. I’ve thought more deeply about music and culture and technology after slowing down and listening to less. Again, the axe sharpening metaphor works nicely.

And so, in that spirit, dear reader, reply to this mail / comment on this post with one song you think I should listen to. Doesn’t matter which genre it is. Doesn’t matter if you think I’ve heard it. Doesn’t matter if you think I won’t like it. Any song that is special to you. That’s my playlist for the next weekend13.

Thank you for reading. Now, back to my little musical corner.

Chuck

A related post:

I’d like to take a moment to thank all of you for being here, reading my stream of consciousness thoughts and egging me on. In mid-2025 I decided to make this newsletter free for various reasons, and I think that unshackled me to write more freely on things I’ve been wanting to rather than be bogged down by “they paid for a marketing newsletter”. As you’ve probably seen over the last few months, my headspace is really in exploring how technology impacts culture (with special focus on music - as I wrote here, here, here and here). I have many more things I want to hypothesise about, research on, and write about. Many of the topics that I workshop here eventually work their way into client meetings, and in two ocassions, public talks. I have some ambitious goals for 2026 - explore more topics, coming up with some video content, and a whole lot more. And I can’t thank all of you enough for being here, and giving me space in your inbox and lives.

So with that out of the way, let’s get to the first edition of 2026.

You don’t need me to tell you a lot is happening in the world of technology these days. To me, what’s more interesting is how these changes impact us. As we close out the first quarter of the 21st century, it’s apparent that AI is going to impact everything, but at the same time I feel it’s too early to say what the long-term impact is going to be1. And while AI is sucking a lot of the oxygen out of the room, I feel there are other important things happening too. Here are four things I’m going to be paying attention to this year.

1. The ramifications of Australia’s social media ban

Exactly a month ago, the world’s biggest experiment in age-gating social media went into effect down under. It’s only been a month, so analysis may be premature - though for what it’s worth, results are predictable mixed. Some kids go out and read books more, some kids are frustrated and get more asocial. Some use VPNs, some are happy not having to keep up. Some welcome the ban, some hate the ban. Some parents think it’s a good idea, some parents think it’s pointless. PM Anthony Albanese was quite realistic with his logic in an op-ed, which I agree with:

“Australia sets the legal drinking age at 18 because our society recognizes the benefits to the individual. The fact that teenagers occasionally find a way to have a drink doesn’t diminish the value of having a clear, national standard.”

I think this is a critical moment. The social media = tobacco parallels have been drawn for a while now, and this ban cements it. It won’t be always effective, but it will cause people to think. One set of such people is - other governments. Already, Denmark and Malaysia are looking to do their own bans and it’s natural other countries may follow.

It’s less about the strict enforcement of the ban, rather the social ramifications and pressure. Kids will always find a way around, but a collective ban of an app makes it easier to get off - especially for something where network effects are as baked in as social media. Two kids could always sneak out and have a smoke, but a social media without a majority of your friends group is pointless.

It will be very interesting to watch the short-term and long-term impacts of this. I think Australia’s set a brave precedent.

2. How society responds to AI art

I follow a lot of folks from the creative / art / design industry and all of them universally abhor AI content. Now, if you zoom out to technology history as a whole, it’s tempting to think that they are reacting in the same way live music performers reacted at recording, or painters responded to photography. On the other hand, I am puzzled that AI art has not become more… dominant. What I mean by that (knowing that your feed may be inundated in slop) is that hardly any good forms of AI-generated art have gone mainstream. Yes, there are some small artists using it in interesting ways (like him) but none have become mainstream, y’know? I know some AI songs have made the charts - but those are more because labels and platforms have pushed them rather than societal acceptance.

And societal acceptance is key for art of any kind, I think.

Maybe true artists haven’t “cracked” AI art yet. Or maybe they’re just scared to be caught using AI (I remember Indian bassist Mohini Dey getting skewered in her comments when she did a promo with AI music platform Suno). Or… maybe inherently, we as humans just can’t accept AI art. Not because of all the stealing stuff, but because it doesn’t speak to us, in a way that’s hard to describe. That’s my theory, anyway, as I wrote in July:

Still, these things are advancing at a rapid rate.

I have no doubts AI is going to find its way into art forms more as a process than as a “format” - generated worlds in gaming, some background music to actual human singing, some fills for a drawn doodle, and so on. I still believe AI art has a place, except not ‘wholly generated’.

I find it interesting that in most articles that talk about AI’s impact on art, the author starts by questioning what art is, in the first place. And maybe that’s the paradoxical thing about AI - making us appreciate what makes us human. 2026 will be fun to observe.

3. How chatbots integrate with the rest of our lives

In 2025, we’ve seen ChatGPT and Gemini go from being standalone chat interfaces to things that integrate with other tools - such as Spotify, Booking, and Gmail. The cool kids like to call this ‘agentic’, I think.

I think we’re going to see a lot more of this in 2026, and that’s when the true mass usefulness of generative AI - maybe AI itself - will present itself. Gemini getting more useful contextualising your life. ChatGPT becoming a more specific travel planner. A lot of this is already happening, so this is hardly a prediction - but I think what’ll be interesting to see is how some interesting integrations happen. This may well happen beyond software and apps - ChatGPT’s recent launch of Health, replete with medical record storage, is one such example.

4. The intentionality economy

I believe we are entering an era of slowing down. I don’t mean this in the “end of capitalism” way - that’d be too naive and hopeful - but in a “people who the means to, being more intentional about what they do, and trying to find purpose in their lives, and just generally do things for fun” way. I believe a slew of products and services will be built around this. Many already are out there - such as board games and experiences - but I think we’re going to see more of this. People getting more intentional about where they travel to. Getting deeper into their hobbies. Maybe a move towards more physical books. A deliberate attempt at disconnection. I wrote about this here:

Nothing new to add here, except that I’m going to be observing how things play out - at large, with my friends group, with myself.

There is a selfish motive behind this : Utsav and I are building something in this space. It’s a new program aimed at actioning a more intentional life, and we’ll be launching it in a few months. It’s the most ambitious thing either of us has ever done. Fingers crossed. (If you’re interested, write back to me and we’ll make sure to mail you first. We intend to run a very small launch cohort).

There is so much I’m looking forward to, and hope to do this year. I don’t know whether it’s going to be a good / happy one, but it’ll definitely be an interesting one. And at least, that way I’ll learn something.

I hope you have an interesting 2026 too.

Chuck

The livestream!

If you want to check out the show: Spotify | Apple Music | Google Podcasts

Have a great 2026 :)

Chuck

First, Sneaky Artist (Nishant Jain) was taking a masterclass for us at The 6% Club, the topic being about finding a signature style. In an inevitable discussion around AI, he and I had this exchange where we basically went from “it’s the toughest time to be a new creator because the bar for acceptable content has been raised so high” to “it’s the easiest time to be a new creator because all you need to do is be yourself”.

A couple of days later, I wrote a post observing something about Zomato’s new social media strategy. It was, admittedly, hardly a watertight argument - but one person who debated me in the comments said this: “Ok, sorry for writing so much, but I rarely come across non-ChatGPT posts (on LinkedIn) these days.”

History - especially that of culture - is littered with examples of movements against conformity (and, seemingly, logic)1.

The rationalism of the Englightenment and the Industrial Revolution birthed emotion-led Romantisicm.

When photography did a much better job of capturing reality than realism artists, some of them did things a camera couldn’t - impressionism, expressionism, and surrealism. As media historian Paul Levinson wrote, artists focused "on the one thing they could inevitably do better than the photograph—by further developing into an art form its very subjectivity in the conception of the image, the very subjectivity that photography eliminated".

The bloat and excess of 70s classic rock and pop gave way to stripped-down, bare-bones punk whose exponents prided themselves on lack of musical skill.

So while “anti conformism” sounds like a nice brief for a youth-oriented denim brand but really, it’s been around for ever. Maybe because both creators and audiences want to create and consume something more than just the median.

Conformism as a concept fascinates me. Humans are hardwired to conform. We seek out people like us; in an unfamiliar meeting we try to make ourselves sound like everyone else; we interview people with backgrounds and education similar to us. At the same time, we also seek out uniqueness - and we can attribute hunter-gatherer brains for this.

This conformity vs seeking our uniqueness tension is interesting. Maybe the latter arises because of the former - we always pay attention to the one person in a meeting who looks like they have something interesting to say. It’s the reason SURREAL succeeds on LinkedIn. In a sea of blandness, a cereal company doing something like this - ostensibly defying all logic - is genuinely eye-catching. And hilarious.

I like to think that when we were babies, we were as individual as we got. No reference point, we’d say (ok, babble) anything that came to our heads. Then came school, society’s expectations, rules, KRAs, brand guidelines and boy oh boy before you knew it everyone sounds looks talks the same.

Technology has always enabled ‘conformism’ so those without, say, design skills could quickly make a design with some pre-made templates. Democratising, for sure, but the problem is - everything looks like those pre-made templates.

Those who grew up on the 90s web will remember what a glorious mess the whole thing was - everything looked different, everything had personality! Then came the Squarespaceification and Canvaification of everything. Again, no shade to said companies! It’s just the way things move.

Now with Generative AI, getting to the ‘median’ is easier than ever before for everything. And the key thing this time is how median content is just more visible than before - Squarespaceification is visible only on (some) websites you visited, but AI generated life lessons or cat videos or tweets or images are everywhere. The blast radius of AI-powered mediocrity is a lot, lot more than previous technologies.

Our brains are incredibly good at pattern recognition, so I’m not surprised we were able to detect AI generated content relatively easily.

What I’m getting at is this: In an age of mediocre content at scale, the way to stand out is… not to be so obviously AI. Or at least, to embrace what makes you human.

What makes you weird?

I don’t say that negatively. Each of us are different.

It may be a skill, it may be a lived experience, it may be a way of looking at the world, it may be proficiency in two unrelated fields.

It could be an insufferable tendency to make puns about everthing. It may be joining the dots between two completely unrelated fields. It could be a style that could never be machine-created, like the surreal humour of Monty Python or the kvlt Local Tea Party blog. It may be looking at a beautiful sight in the mountains, being moved about how small we are and how these cliffs have seen generations of technologies and their insignificant debates in the longer scheme of things, and then getting inspired to write a post about humanity in the age of AI.

Weirdness doesn’t need to be skill, necessarily.

It doesn’t even need to be with the goal of ‘creating content’. I feel that just reflecting about what makes you you, is a good way of living life, figuring your internal algorithm and making decisions that work for you. What are your unique ways of looking at the world? What are the things you used to do for joy you don’t do anymore while conforming to the mean? What is the kind of life you want to lead, and not you’ve been told you should lead?

Divya and I were discussing with a client recently - that luxury / aspiration today isn’t necessarily more expensive, it’s the confidence in choice. Something may make sense to you that doesn’t for anyone else, and doubling down on that is a perfectly good way to live life. What’s weird to someone else may be the perfect thing for you.

Find your weird. Embrace it.

AI’s two great ironies

1. AI may end up making us more human. Or at least, have a renewed appreciation for it. This could manifest in everything from personal blogs making a comeback (something I whole-heartedly espouse to my 6% Club mentees); to “human touch” as a premium service. I expect to see “verifiably human” labels, and art movements that eschew technology altogether.

2. AI will expose, rather than empower, those with no substance. At first blush, this may seem preposterous, especially if you log on to LinkedIn. But my optimistic view is that polish has been democratised to the point where people will start to seek out substance. In other words, those without original thought can’t hide behind big words anymore. For the first time, deviating to the mean may have deleterious effects - as everyone is sniffing ‘is this AI?’.

When I used to teach at a university, I would tell students straight up they were allowed to use AI in my exams. I would tell them that it’s their easiest way to get a B. But they wouldn’t get anything more - not out of penalty, but because a B-worthy output is what ChatGPT would give you. If you wanted to turn that B into an A or A+, you need to, at the very least, prompt better. Which means you need to understand the subject and have original thoughts. Which, honestly, is not as difficult as it sounds. So while it’s easier than ever before to get a B, it’s also easier than ever before to stand out to get an A.

To repeat the observation in the SneakyArtist session: The bar for acceptable content has been raised. But at the same time, it’s easier than ever to stand out.

So with that, here’s another thing I did, this time actually inspired when I saw the magnificent hills of Malshej Ghat. I thought these huge hills made those around Pune look like kids in comparison. So came a small comic:

As we enter 2026, I hope you find and embrace your weird.

Here’s wishing you a very happy and human new year.

Chuck