Content consumption was different at a few kilobytes per second. We only looked up for things that intrigued us. Fast forward to 2020, our mental bandwidth won't allow us to keep up with the free-flowing information. The only itch we now have is to pick up the device.

The internet influenced me in many ways. It is a critical component in shaping my world-view. It sometimes created an urge to know more about something that I didn't know existed.

But, I remember the internet to be much bigger than my feeds. So, I've asked myself a few questions. How often do I find an unpopular video or an article about something I don't like? Why (and how) does popular content even become popular? Why is it becoming harder to find infamous stuff?

The answers turned out to be in the addictions to briefed information, platforms that we use, sticking to the familiar and popular content, and the influence it has on us. The creation of the content is intertwined with the consumption of it, and it gets harder to find useful but unpopular stuff if we keep valuing the popular. We need to think beyond the conventional metrics like most-popular and most-liked.

People made fortunes by protecting information. Now that most of it is free, polishing is a way to capitalize on it. Polishing is hard for an individual but is easier on an aggregate level. Popular content that we often come across passes through a lot of human filters. A noticeable flaw is that polishers search for different ways to make it look good and remove details that do not interest them. On-demand content creation changes the whole landscape of consumption. Billions of dollars are being spent on knowing the trends and producing content based on the buzzing keywords.

After all, It certainly makes sense to work on popular things. But the whole social phenomenon can gradually boil down a 500-page text into a single picture. The one-size-fits-all images can be tricky. A picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, we cannot derive a 1000 word text from it just by looking at it. Our understanding is limited by how we see the world.

Stuff that fits into the world view of more people goes trending, and everyone then starts saying the same thing, not because they all have the same opinion. But because everyone's saying it. We don’t want to be insulted for not knowing stuff everyone’s talking about. After all, everyone saying the same thing will make it sound like common sense. Not knowing what’s perceived as common sense is risky. We value stuff that fits our world-view. But what forms our world-view is more likely the stuff we consumed initially.

Popularity also restricts our stars. It demands them to say safe things. When whatever you say draws a lot of attention, you cannot say seemingly contradictory things. One way to escape from that is to remain silent and tweet birthday wishes. So, it turns out that there will be nothing new with our stars.

What's more effective than popular content and click-baits is the stuff that is 'recommended for you.' The platforms on which we consume content don’t want us to leave. A brilliant tactic to keep you hooked is to show stuff you love. The more you engage with content, the more they know about you. And gradually, your feeds get narrowed down to what you like.

This can be seen more with news and politics. Surprisingly (or not), people trust sources that report what they want to hear. Having an opinion is the new cool. We always categorize stuff into right or wrong. More opinions mean more clashes. The more contradictory something gets, the more you’ll be surrounded by content you love. Believing is more comfortable and takes less time than a mathematical assessment.

We search for ways to support what we believe. Often, the reason for the cyber-fight is the belief-system and not the new reform. People who support X do not want to believe in the positive news about Y. So, they find fact-checkers to be on their side.

Fact-checkers cannot become popular because they do their investigation 'after' stuff gets viral. A fact cannot go viral because it merely tells us if the viral news is true or false. Fact-checkers cannot come up with clickbaity headlines like, 'The politician is a cold-blooded liar.'

What platforms can sense about is not just limited to the shopping recommendations. We'll sometimes never know we're being targeted. Cookies are bad. Private mode is an antidote.

Even if algorithms keep finding new ways to eliminate manipulators, it’s easy to find a way to bypass and come up with pretty appealing stuff.

A seemingly counterintuitive way to avoid the Popular and ‘tuned for you’ content is to dilute it by deliberately creating more original stuff. And actively avoiding things just because they are popular.

With unpopular stuff, Exploring may take more time. And a Google search may not yield results that are as exciting as some random page on the wiki. Loading our feeds with more stuff works too. When you subscribe to every interesting thing you come across, the post on the top of your feed will most likely be random.

Information is not a commodity. We can’t make use of everything we know. And we’ll never know what’s useful. Ideas won’t come with a tag on them. Things that make you think don’t necessarily have to be right. But the things that make you believe have to be right. And most of the time, they’re wrong. We have to prioritize content that makes us think.

- Thanks to Aditya Uddagiri for reading raw drafts of this

“Growing up, I slowly had this process of realizing that all the things around me that people had told me were just the natural way things were, the way things always would be, they weren’t natural at all.” ― Aaron Swartz

Stuff that’s useful and scalable always won. We've been discarding obsolete things and coming up with useful and more superior ones. But, scalable and economically viable stuff always came with tradeoffs. Choosing oil & gas over wind & solar is an example.

There are impressive projects that are literally undoing the damage by turning carbon from tires into graphite. Alternative energy sources on the other hand, may not undo the damage that's already done but considering the projections, finding alternatives can be as significant as undoing.

Coming up with solutions that won’t create new problems is the new normal. It can be hard. But healthy ideas are easier compared to undoing the mistakes. Building healthy things after all just ducks the net negative impact.

We have to deliberately keep pushing ourselves into a find-realize cycle. Individually or globally, we can start with finding mistakes if we have enough humility to realize that we are prone to making mistakes too.

A way to undo is usually laughed at and expensive. It’s easier to pick a quarrel over small things as much as picking oil over solar. Fortunately, we have access to more capital and humble people now. A way to push more alternative solutions seems to be between economies of scale and increased per capita.

August 2020

Reading about productivity hacks is so satisfying that we will want more even after reading all the productivity books on the planet. I didn't read every book but, most of them I've read, focus on how to use time effectively. But reading them turns out to be a waste of time.

A few resonate with us but the hacks don't work. Hacks offered in a few may look promising, but they won’t resonate. Some of them are not even closer to reality. They are made up, assuming an ideal condition in which methods they offer work.

There are self-help books that went popular as well. The problem is that everyone knows them. The people on whom I tried a few techniques are smart enough to know that I got them from a book by Carnegie. Maybe I failed to pretend. So are a lot of people. The phenomenons mentioned in the books are real and observable. But reverse-engineering them and following the techniques didn’t work for me.

The 'how-to' part, which focusses more on the methods to accomplish, is easy to understand and sounds like common sense. Prioritizing, for example, using the recommended methods seems easy. But are there a lot of tasks? Even if there are, It requires more processing power to prioritize.

We cannot get away from what we planned to do just because we have put a lot of time into planning it. It works both ways. We can trick ourselves into doing things. If we need continuity, we have to generate momentum, and momentum drags us back.

Getting more done in a little time is a nice vanity-metric. But when we try to do stuff that's outside our circle-of-competence, the time it takes to complete it is unknown. The metrics to measure progress against are unknown. We tend to underestimate the time it takes to get things done. Sometimes, we don't even care about the time. A common thing I've noticed every interesting person saying is to standardize the tedious stuff. And to be predictable with the known parts to leave space for the unknown.

There are golden standards to productivity but, we fail to differentiate between works-for-me and works-for-all. The ultimate productivity hack that fits you has to be figured out by you. It’s much easier to figure it out ourselves than to try every method out there. It’s just the ‘how-to’ part. Focussing more on it won’t help you with anything other than pushing another productivity hack into the market.

August 2020

What if the number of days of the ruling is proportional to the number of votes? When all the parties get to rule based on the percentage of votes, will it increase the competition between the parties to perform at their best? Can we give ‘limited’ powers to people who got the majority?

What if there is a ‘test’ to qualify voters? A test that can assess how biased we are and evaluate our political knowledge. A lot of us know about the ‘party’ first and politics later.

When was the last time we debated about a ‘policy’? What if every policy is put to vote by the qualified voters? Putting everything to vote, of course, generates friction and delays the policy. But there has to be a sweet spot with more optimality where we can classify bills into votable, non-votable.

The more I dissect my way into this, the more I drag what I know to fit into it. But it feels great to imagine.