10 Common Features of Communist Regimes

The primary source for this list is Dalrymple’s account of his visits to 5 Communist countries as described in his book The Wilder Shores of Marx (Dalrymple). Dalrymple visited these countries in the late 1980s, and several of these countries have since turned to democracy. The 2 other major sources that have influenced me would be movies about life in Eastern Europe during or right after the 2nd World War (such as Pianist (2002)) and Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. More recent sources include the Vox episode about Cuba released in 2015 and contemporary travel vlogs from North Korea. For lists such as this one, it is hard to pin point where exactly the idea originated from. I would say that the list is an amalgamation of the information provided by the sources I have mentioned and the impression they had on me about the life of ordinary people in the remaining Communist countries of the world. Other media has also influenced me, notably Casey Neistat’s reflections about his trip to Cuba, Conan’s hilarious series of shows from Cuba and the Korean drama Crash Landing on You, in which the protagonist is a North Korean army officer. (An upcoming review of McGregor’s The Party, an account of the governing system in China, will clarify why China did not conform to the typical Communist regime expectations either when Dalrymple visited the other states or today; its curious mix of capitalist economics with Communist ideology has borne the greatest success story in the past half century.)

(I structured this as a list after reading Dynomight’s post supporting lists as a tool for effective communication.)

Losing Control of Our Screens and Data

After nearly a decade of using the internet daily, it is clear that users have little control over what is displayed on their screen. The control has been ceded to capitalists wishing to sell you something. I am not just talking about the algorithmic social media that is the rage these days. (TL;DR Tik Tok is becoming more popular than Instagram because their algorithm is better and Instagram is getting anxious about it.) I’m talking about advertisements. Newspapers, radio and television have never given the viewer any option about the advertising content that they hear/see. On those mediums, it was easier to distinguish between content and advertising. When the commercial break begins, I can mute the television. With newspapers, I can skim past pages that are advertisements. When an ad is disguised as a search result marked by a greyed out “Sponsored” label which is very small and designed to be hard to notice, the user has no choice but to engage with the ad as if it were a legitimate result.

The Keyboard Logs

I have been experimenting with keyboards for the past several years and in February this year, I switched to a keyboard which I hope will be the last keyboard I ever buy. The whole point of switching keyboards all this while was to buy the right version of this keyboard, the Ergodox EZ. It is a split keyboard with an ortholinear layout. It is an expensive keyboard and can be customized to an (almost) limitless extent. It has several extra keys which can be programmed to do whatever you want them to such as function keys or macros. This post is a log of the keyboards I bought (and sold off) during this process.

Book Review: Global Economic History (Allen)

Allen’s Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction is a 200-page masterpiece. It packs a huge amount of history. It looks far enough into the past to set the scene for the Industrial Revolution and the economic gains seen as a result of it. Then, Allen retreats into the fundamentals of economic development and goes over the main reasons some countries are perennially stuck in the “middle income trap.” He has some advice for such economies and what they might be able to do to get out of this trap. This book is solidly based in data. But Allen does not prioritize data over the story. Economics is the story of real people who live in each of these countries. Allen never loses sight of this, and always puts large economic shifts in context by stressing on how it impacts everyday life. This emphasis on personal experience makes the book a study in the government policies that work and the pitfalls to keep in mind.

Using TikTok for 1 Month

TikTok is the most talked about social media platform now. Articles about the impact it is having are published regularly in mainstream publications. People are constantly writing editorials about what it is, how it became popular, how it is owned by a Chinese company (and thus, controlled by the Chinese government), etc. I had read enough of it that I wanted to give it a try. I wanted to be a viewer on TikTok for a week (originally) to understand what it is really like. I ended up being on it for about a month. This was because I was not completely convinced that I had used all the features in the product after a week. Then, I gradually realized what was really going on: TikTok is incredibly simple; it requires no interaction from the user except for scrolling down. It is built with a singular focus on convincing people to imitate the trend that is “going viral” at any given point. There are many moving elements around the screen, and some of them are integrations with other businesses, which TikTok or the creator possibly makes money from. I think that TikTok is popular today because it solved a content creator’s biggest problem: The requirement to be original. Nothing is original on TikTok. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. But these are not copies. They are participants in a trend.

Goodbye Pi-hole. Hello CoreDNS.

I understand the economics behind advertising. Advertising can be used to subsidize content. However, I refuse to accept that Bloomberg.com needs to show advertisements to a paying subscriber.¹ This comes down to personal preference: If you believe that advertisements are a net good and support the work that you are viewing “for free”, so be it. I do not believe that. If I must pay for content that is ostensibly “free” by having my attention distracted by an advertisement which I did not ask for and am not interested in, then I reserve the right to use every tool in my arsenal to avoid seeing the advertisement. All of this is just a preamble to a recent change I made in one of the central components that I use to browse the Internet: my DNS server. I switched from Pi-hole, a popular adblocking DNS server, to CoreDNS and a plugin for ad blocking which I wrote. This is a post about why I decided to reinvent the wheel.

Notes and Review - A Burning (Majumdar)

A Burning is ostensibly about 3 people. Their lives are entwined in rather banal ways: teacher, a former student, a young woman helping a slum dweller learn English, a transgender beggar who is learning acting, an acting teacher who has never had a real audience. Their hopes and dreams are conventional: The young woman gets into a good school and manages to escape her past and moves solidly into the middle class. The slum dweller hopes to learn acting and make it big in the movie industry. Under this shroud of normalcy, and sometimes using it as a tool, Majumdar captures the depressing nature of the life they lead. And these characters stand-in for a whole group of people; the group that has missed the social mobility bus; the bus was packed in the 1970s with first-time engineers and doctors and lies overturned on the side of the highway today.

Gaslit on Twitter

Gaslighting is a catch-all term. I understand it as the act of relentlessly bombarding a consumer of information with a large amount of irrelevant statistics and facts to such an extent that the victim can no longer convincingly explain (even to themselves) their fundamental beliefs. There is a lot of talk of “gaslighting” in media environments where there is a single source of news. In India, nightly news shows are a great example. It is also relevant in environments where a news source is seen as biased. The biased news source’ reporting is criticized using a bunch of unrelated facts.

On the 28th and 29th of March 2022, there was a 2-day strike call in India. This news was reported by the New York Times, and crucially, it was included in the “Daily Briefing” newsletter’s Asia edition on 28th March, 2022¹. I had not heard about the strike. (Not surprising, as I don’t live in India and have been more out of the loop than usual lately.) None of the people I know in India mentioned it to me over the previous weekend. When I read about the strike, I did not think that NYT was reporting a lie. I accepted it as fact and went to a few Indian news websites to read more about the strike. Quickly, I started questioning what was going on and why real people (not “trolls”) were saying absurd things online. I am not the first person to go through this disorienting experience and I won’t be the last. I want to talk about why I felt disoriented, how I battled with this feeling, and how I managed to resolve my disorientation by doing some research.

"Absurd Customer Service" - Part 2, Suggestions

I am not one to balk when it comes to writing rants and leaving it at that. However, when publishing rants, I think it is worthwhile to also think about the problems and try to figure out whether there is some solution to the problems that one is ranting about. Often, there is no such solution. If an easy solution did exist, there would be no need to find catharsis through the process of writing a rant. In the case of the Absurd Customer Service problem though, there are some solutions. Some of these are practical and can be adopted in our daily lives. While others are absurd; for the absurdity of the solution must mirror the absurdity of the problem.

(This is the second post in a 2-part series about absurd customer service experiences. You can read the first part here.)

"Absurd Customer Service" - Part 1, The Problem

Over a series of several occasions last year, I experienced the absurdity rife in modern customer service. I don’t think that things have always been like this. Customer service was a pain and you would often by stuck on 30 minute phone calls trying to explain your situation to the other person. But there was a person at the other end. And after those grueling 30 minutes, they would understand your situation and do something to rescue you from it. My experiences did not conform to this pattern. It looks like this problem is widespread enough to warrant feature articles in magazines.¹ Indeed, in all the cases that I encountered, the problem was eventually resolved in a miraculous and bizarre fashion; with my interventions seemingly making no impact on the course of things. My experiences were with multiple businesses and in different industries: telecom, banking, and retail. But I think that there are some common trends which can be pinpointed. These trends have made the experience of “reaching out to customer support” in India a painful and exasperating experience. In this, the first of a 2 part series, I briefly recount my experiences. Hopefully, the reader has not been through similar experiences and can read them simply as an amusing recounting of events that will never happen to them.