Advice
At the end of her essay about the internet’s early years in India, Mala Bhargava writes: “No matter how amazed I am at how AI can be deployed to detect a disease or how one’s brain can be connected to and controlled by the internet, I no longer believe, on balance, that technology will make the world a better place.”
We went back and forth on it during editing. Was it too sudden? Too mournful? Too much of a swerve from the essay’s exuberance? Perhaps all those things, but I enjoyed it because it’s real. Academics go on about being right about tech and the internet all along. But out in the parts of Planet Earth outside sociology departments, getting to see and experience consumer tech still feels like learning to read a new language in a day. It’s always a sudden empowerment. It was not, and arguably still doesn’t feel irrational, to believe that the joy it provides is infinite. (That emotion is political, and I think it is as or more apt to influence progressive thinking than the latter’s less imaginative counterparts.) The shock of learning or recalling its costs is real, an emotional truth.
My first job out of college was in customer support at Google’s Hyderabad office, where I was surrounded by so many techno-optimists that I immediately started to think of myself as the skeptic, though I knew nothing about anything. In those years Googlers went about matter-of-factly dropping bombshells like: “oh, the perfect search is when the user finds a single right answer.” (Eric Schmidt explained this to us in a TGIF meeting.) I had only the language of the arts to criticise the sciences; I had only the barest minimum idea of how to form a counterargument.
It’s not even that I was a naysayer. In those days the question of whether Google would ever make money was actually not considered settled. I was the last, or maybe the slowest person in the world to brush against Big Tech when it saw itself as indistinguishable from Big Ideas. That brush was charged with the vestigial sense of this whole thing being an experiment. Long after my stint at Google I spent a full evening arguing with fellow editors at the Caravan that our style should be ‘the Internet’ and not ‘the internet’ because one of the few things I still understood and believed about “the Internet” was that it was a fragile, unique and temporary form. But so is the planet earth.
(I lost the battle. We don’t use ‘the Internet’ at Fifty Two either.)
I started writing this a year ago, because in my last newsletter in January 2021, I offered “agony-aunt style advice” to younger readers. One person asked me, “How did you go from working at Google to [a word I don’t like to use, and substitute with the Bombay restaurateur euphemism ‘helping run’ wherever possible] a publication?” as a prompt for providing career advice. I took it seriously and even consulted with my colleague Sidin to extract usable information from our personal stories. But it would be pointless for me to offer that advice because the answer on my part is, honestly, luck. When I left Google it was already clear that the momentum of the tech industry was going to dictate change not just for my generation but also for those to come. It was also clear that journalism did not have that momentum.
Still, I came of age in a very good decade. Fifteen years ago journalism was a fun job for someone of my age and station. You would not make as much money as your MBA peers but you could make more than your parents did in their early careers. It offered a public service that allowed you to do good, or at least help prevent active harm. It offered a fantasy of constant growth and improvement. I think anyone seeking those incentives today should probably work on their Instagram presence.
I am not being flippant. The job is obviously more urgent than ever but the shrinking of the industry is very real. Having spent the last couple of years in an airlock at the edge of the universe of venture capital created by my colleagues at All Things Small for our journalistic experiment, I still think there is an entrepreneurial battle to be fought at multiple levels, in convincing people with money that the service you provide is important to them, and to the world they live in. It doesn’t seem to be easy and I think a part of that is the fallout of it having been easy going for a few years, for a few people, including me.
But it is worth trying. Many people are still trying. I am even keen to see what emerges from constant, quick and sometimes deep changes in storytelling formats, even though these changes have been irritating and mostly for the worse for about thirty years running. Above all there remains the core job. Getting into journalism as an idealist is vital and will remain so even if things get much worse. I just hesitate to offer my experience as a useful indicator of any possible future, because getting into it as an optimist was not a risk when I started, and now it is.
(I know some columnists who would say “calculated risk,” but I have personally never met a journalist good at calculating things.)
So much for useful and timely advice! Sorry and I hope it at least made you laugh. I’ll do my best to improve.
I narrowly avoided making this newsletter a review-essay on some books I thought were relevant to the intersection of tech and writing, but I will offer a gloss, all the same. Kate Losse’s The Boy Kings and Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley are both B.A. English responses to the shock of seeing the world through the lens of Big Tech and, more crucially, I think, venture capital. I recommend Ellen Ullman’s A Life In Code, a memoir by a programmer who can both write and see the world politically. Robert Darnton’s essays for the NYRB on Google Books and libraries are very good examples of recent-ish thinking on public knowledge at the intersection of money and technological momentum.
Deepanjana and I dropped the second season of The Lit Pickers, our extremely personal books podcast, late last year. Thanks to our wonderful producers, Maed In India, for making it thinkable and possible.
We took a break after publishing fifty two stories on Fifty Two, but will be back soon. Please follow us or sign up for our very disciplined and useful newsletter to get updates straightaway. My colleagues also produced a second season of our space podcast, Mission ISRO; 377, a mini-series about the legal battle to decriminalise homosexuality, and much more.
Happy new year!
[1] –– This is still true.