The Lack of a Future Tense (LoaFT) 2023 Edition
The Lack of a Future Tense (LoaFT) 2023 Edition
hooooo boy
Back in the 90’s it used to be that you couldn’t really be called your name in the US. You had to become “Bobby” Jindal or “Nikki” Haley, for example. In the 2000’s you were told that “your accent isn’t good enough” or that “you don’t sound American”.
In 2023, a person named Vivek Ramaswamy is at the top of the Republican party nominations for a potential VP post and he’s not even 40. Vivek Ramaswamy. And he even pronounces it the right way and so do the news anchors talking about him. We’ve come a long way from Apu…
That he is in the Republican party, catering to an older, whiter, christian voter base who support him while he is openly Hindu is an important point. It says a lot about the United States, but it also says a lot about the “woke” movement that get criticised a lot these days. Maybe it pays to be genuinely tolerant, and if you can manage it, inclusive of diverse views and people but it is also important that they share the same values.
Richard Hanania argues quite convincingly that culture or cultural institutions are downstream of law/policy making. I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
In a few years I will have spent half my life outside of the country I was born in. This is a pretty curious state. Arguably, this is also a very common state for Indians who leave India but the representation of this particular perspective has so far been lacking. Representation is important (though if representation is going to mean caricature then I’d prefer no representation). The average cultural representation of the “NRI” (Non Resident Indian) is either an awfully accented aunty or uncle or their kids and their first world problems who are, to use a lovely hindi saying, neither of here nor of there (naa idhar ke, na udhar ke).
There’s really nothing out there that represents probably the majority of Indians abroad on their own wild journeys, with significant time spent abroad and much-more-than-token presence back home, forced to reckon with the idea of “global citizenship” but also to define, if not defend their Indian-ness.
In the last 8 years, this year is the most total time I’ve spent back “home”. And when I say home, I have to be very specific that it actually refers to the island city of 20 million people called Mumbai.
You know those movies where a person has traveled through time, or lost their memory and they have to grapple with memories of an old world superimposing themselves on their current observed reality? Or the representation of deja vu in The Matrix? That gets close to the sensation I’ve been having this time around. Home is still home. The people look like me, they speak my language, I “get” them while not necessarily agreeing with them, they get me while not at all agreeing with me. But its off. Its distant. Its 91 cms from reality. Its reaching for something thats usually in that place and that thing isn’t there.
To Indians living in India still - yes, it sucks but the change has been enormous. Unbelievable. You only need to live outside India for about a decade to really understand and appreciate the change. And of course its easier to appreciate India when you don’t live there..
To Indians living outside India - yes, pretty much the same problems but things are *moving* in a way that they probably haven’t moved wherever you’re living now. If you have long held notions about “first world” “third world” etc. it might be useful to pay close attention to the nuts and bolts of what’s happening in the civic life right around you.
In 2007 after hearing that I studied Electronics and Telecomms engineering, someone asked me how fast I thought 3G would roll out across India. I remember vaguely that my answer was a faintly disbelieving snort. 3G? India? I knew it could be done of course. The towers and the infra and the power distribution but..
Anyway, the experience over the next 3 years taught me one thing. I wasn’t paying attention. I started to pay attention. Then I got quite proud of my ability to predict how the rough shape of the future would take place. Then I learnt it was all ZIRP anyway so I stopped trying to predict things. Then I learnt that we’re back to the “natural order of things”which is comforting in its own way I suppose (I mean, in a Hobsons choice kinda way).
Living in Europe has been a bit of a mixed bag. In some ways, its important to remember that Leo Varadkar, Hamza Yousuf & Rishi Sunak have all come before Vivek Ramaswamy (I guess there’s been *some* kind of Indian century eh?)
But what has that effectively meant for the countries themselves? There has been a lot of talk about “Western Values” recently but is it fair to say that there are “European values” when Italian values are quite obviously distinct from Polish values? Technically, Europe doesn’t even believe in Free Speech in the exact same way that the United States does and there are vast differences in legislation. And if culture is downstream of law..
The shakeups in European politics especially over the last year have been very very radical. Germany loosens its citizenship policies, UK talks about reducing them, Finland aims to tighten up its immigration.
All the changes of a kind where if you’d told me they would happen, I wouldn’t have believed you. They don’t all look promising but I don’t bother with predictions anymore. But the rhetoric is Not Good. A lot of it, in fact, centers around “people who look like me”, “people who speak the same language” & “people who get me”..
You really cannot beat the air quality though. How much does just being able to go for a quiet walk around some trees and some water contribute to net life happiness?
None of this to explain of course, how Germany went about shutting down its nuclear reactors or fired up coal plants and tried to call them green. At least they shut down *some* wind farms. But, by 2045, Sweden expects to have the equivalent of 10 nuclear reactors which makes me very very happy.
The future isn’t evenly distributed, it is completely lopsided
Most people, Indians or not, keep forgetting that India is a socialist republic. You can quibble about whether that’s right etc but in law, in policy, where the government spends money, how the government gets elected, welfare and socialism is the foundation of it all. In fact, depending on what your barometer of such things is, India is the wokest country on the planet.
India elected its first transgender mayor back in 2018, 9 months after a “third gender” was legalized. Affirmative action isn’t a policy or a practice, it is absolutely enshrined in law and vigorously enforced in a country with the number of groups alone set to surpass the population of a small European country.
And if culture is downstream of law, that alone has huge explanatory power for India. And yes, I said I’m going to stop predicting but if you look at the legislation passed in the last 5 years alone, we’re about to see a hell of a lot more culture change in the next 30 years.
Does this contradict a New York Times image of India? Yes. Is it true? Also yes.
When was the last time humanity tried to steer a ship of 1.5 billion people democratically?
People keep talking about “first world problems” in a dismissive way. First world problems are the hardest to solve. This is not a category problem, this is a system design problem. We’ve made pretty significant moves in the “non first world problems” bucket. We know how to solve them. We know how to help a large chunk of humanity get past the basics and there are people, initiatives and funds on track to accelerate the process. Arguably, the “first world problems” are the hardest ones to solve. Because, past the basics who has solved it successfully & sustainably? Which culture doesn’t have the meme of the “spoiled kid from the rich parents”? You’d think that billionaires over the ages would have solved this problem but it looks to just be a really hard problem. And we should take them seriously.
The last time I wrote a “LoaFT” post was in 2021. Let’s recap a bit -
Consumer AI was just beginning to roll out - and we just got done with the whole OpenAI saga (apparently “safe” AI is now the issue)
I was on my way to quitting social media - that’s worked out well. I completed the Wheel of Time series (worth it) and a couple more. My love for fantasy still continues strong
We’ve had a couple of wars since then
We haven’t “really” recovered from Covid as much as we’d like
The crypto I bought didn’t work out at all (yeesh)
I actually gained a decent amount of muscle mass, got my blood work done but the Covid breathlessness effects have remained and I now value cardio more
I’m still in the same job! And I feel like I’m just getting started!
I really hope we’re done with cancel culture because I’m genuinely bored with the whole “cancel culture will destroy the world” shtick. I mean…
Most of all though, my kid is growing up. And when I see them standing out in a group of kids because they don’t quite look the same as the rest of the group, I’m very thankful for a world that is accepting of diverse people.
That I get to be one in a long line of people who had to look at their kids kindergarten photo and see that their kid is the one standing out from the group.