Welcome to Onerag Manaswarma Podcast. This is episode 60 where Professor Joyjit Pal will discuss about the history of social media and misinformation networks. How these misinformation networks in US are different from India. In India people spread fake news through WhatsApp forward. So it would be very interesting to understand that how does it happens in US. In this podcast we will also discuss about Elon Musk whether he is a genius or a ruthless evil capitalist. And how his adventure or misadventures are related to what the Professor Joyjit Pal says the frontier spirit of USA. We will also discuss about how tech talk is challenging the hegemony of American social media companies. And lastly we will discuss about the tech chaos in the future or job market in the era of mass firing. This might be perhaps the last podcast of this year. So I'm very happy to tell my listener that the podcast this year have been among top 1% most shared globally on this Spotify. Although these are number which are not necessarily enough to tell us about the emotional bond that this podcast forms with the listeners. But I think such achievements can be important for podcast which is working outside the corporate setup which is exploring the themes that are not mainstream in India. So that also says a lot about the audience who are listening to the podcast and actively helping it to exist in the overcrowded domain of podcasts. I really want to thank all my listeners for continued support to those who have supported it by donating generously on many different platforms. I'm really sorry that I'm often unable to send a reply note to people who donate because there is no option to reply back. But if you want to say something to me then you can always email me on unragged minus
[email protected]. So many of my listeners are students and also those who can't support the podcast financially. So I really want to thank them as well for actively being with the podcast through many different means. Podcast remains totally free to consume because I believe that any source of knowledge should be available to anyone who uses the internet. And I think this is the, this should be in fact the spirit of internet. But it remains very difficult to survive through these model when you are bypassing the brands corporate and their expectation and pressure to dictate how the podcast should be. So once again I request those of wonderful listeners who are in position to afford and those who love this podcast to please support it on various mediums such as Patreon which is a preferred medium or instant mojo that supports you pay or buy me a coffee or paypal for those who are living outside of India. Your support will be very crucial for the survival of the podcast in the upcoming year. So please do consider it. And now let's start episode number 60 of unragged minus orma podcast. So welcome to unragged minus orma podcast. This is episode 60 of the podcast and today our guest is Professor George Ethpal. He is an associate professor at the University of Michigan prior to this he was a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research India. His recent work has been on the usage of social media in mainstream politics particularly in India. As a part of this he also studies misinformation networks and discourses. In the past he has been a visiting scholar at the research center for advanced science and technology University of Tokyo in 2013. And at the center on democracy development and rule of the rule of law at Stanford University in 2015. So I met Professor George Ethpal at Michigan University where he has invited me on a panel to talk about the podcast journey and the social media in general. We couldn't talk that much at that time because because of the hectic schedule of the event. But this podcast seems like a nice place where we can have a conversation in fact where we can listen to his insight on American politics culture and changing dynamics of social media. So Professor George Ethpal first of all welcome to honorack minus orma podcast. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. So my first question is about the networks of misinformation. For example in India we know that there are so many mediums of misinformation be it WhatsApp Twitter, Facebook or other social media networks. And these are the networks which are exploited by many different stakeholders to spread misinformation. So obviously the ruling party does it in a very extreme forms but I think all ideology somehow spread misinformation through these networks in their own way. Also in India lot many people think of internet still think of internet since it is very new that they think that whatever is on internet may be true. But the same situation is not in US where people are accustomed to internet. It's not recent like in India it started after that georevolution or you know how then in US this idea of fake news misinformation spread. And how the general public become victim of it in terms of misinformation. It's important to back up a little bit to understand when people got on the internet for the first time. So an entire generation of people would have got on the internet with their first experience with cross border communication if you want to call it that as being email. So I for instance my first experience with the internet was on email and that is changing over time. So after some time you see the next group of people their first interaction with the internet was browsers then it became tablet screens and then finally now it is mobile interfaces like WhatsApp or so and so forth. So if you ask a new internet user in India what is the internet well they think that YouTube and WhatsApp are internet the reason why this is important is that people in the past. If they came on the internet they understood what the Nigerian scam was because it was the most pervasive scam of the old days where someone would say on an email that they are a prince from some principality of Nigeria. There are some grandfather has just died and left them a kingdom but they need to set up some bank account for which you have to front some number of money some amount of money and then once you do that then you know then you can take part of their be get half of their inheritance something ridiculous like that right. Over time this Nigerian scam stayed as a Nigerian scam you might wonder why are they still calling it a Nigerian scam why don't you represent it as something new etc. And the logic behind that was that they only wanted the most gullible people so that somebody who will fall for a scam which so many people are seeing already that if you're still willing to fall for without it being changed then you are a good target right so it's a self-self selection method anybody who replies to that is likely to fall for this right. What we have now is that especially in the aftermath of geo and various other parts of the world where price of mobile has dropped dramatically a lot of people have come online without the idea that you can be tricked that information which is online is not necessarily all to be taken as truth. Now this doesn't mean that those people are necessarily more gullible than anybody else and it's very important to understand that you and I are exactly as likely to fall for misinformation as somebody else given the right circumstances to answer your question most directly which is the most relevant point of misinformation and social media in the political sense is what is called social misinformation. And that tends to be driven by a certain kind of misinformation being more comforting to your social group okay so let us say you take that your social group is Bengalis and then the neighboring social group is oria and then there is this misinformation on Rasulullah is actually from Bengal now you don't actually know the history of whether Rasulullah is from Bengal or not but because you say okay I have Bengali I will say okay it's definitely this must be from Bengal and you. Push that upwards right and so that is the most pervasive form of political misinformation where people are willing to believe something bad about the next person because they see their group as somehow fundamentally being a threat from the other group. Okay and the cases of this is there's a great case of this when there was a poster of Sebastian Robots there was pictures of this online picture was of actually a murder.
a movie star in West Bengal and it was shown as though the president of India is unveiling this picture of the movie star as the real Subashan Robose. And liberals are very quick to say, oh, look at this government disobeyed that they think this film star is so much under both. And it was a great case of many people thinking that they were above misinformation, falling for misinformation, which aligns with their belief that the government is stupid, okay, or it doesn't really care, or whatever it is. So, so this, the same situation is probably true in the US where we are seeing a huge level of polarization where one group is willing to believe all kinds of ridiculous things about the other group. And this is not necessarily true that liberals are less likely to believe extreme things about conservatives than vice versa. But the discourse has definitely been driven by some of the more extreme cases, QAnon being the probably the most important one, which has in fact grown on Twitter in recent days, which believe that there is this large conspiracy involving pedophilia and a pizza shop in DC, which is sort of a shadow government for the country and all that. And there were a lot of right-wing extremists who believed in it and acted on it. So, this kind of environment where a person sees someone else of a different political philosophy, not just as something different on one aspect of their lives, but as something which is just totally incompatible with your being makes you much more willing to accept misinformation about them. And that is exactly what is happening in the US right now is that politics is so divided that there is seen as no common ground. And anything extreme said about one side or the other is willingly accepted by the other side. And that obviously has political risks, but it also has real, real, in-person risks, if you will, of the kind which is driven by say mass shootings, several of the recent mass shooters have been known to engage in extreme communities, which engage in various forms of extremist information. That's true because a lot of many people think that fake news only means right-wingers or conservatives. But I think there are many people, many liberals who have been maybe the victim of the fake news, for example, Nidiraazdan became victim of that Harvard scam. Or recently those who have seen how wire became the victim of the fake news regarding that ex-checker story of Amit Malviya and all that. But my question initially was, what are the networks of fake news? In India, it's WhatsApp. So in the US, what are those networks where people actively spread fake news? Look, in the US, it's okay. So firstly, whether it is misinformation or whether it is inuendo is an important question. So if I say that Anurag has some kind of fear of being in a state of fear, that is misinformation. I hope so. And if I say, what is Anurag in a state of fear of being in a state of the school, then that is inuendo. It's not explicit misinformation. And what we are seeing right now is that Yichu Inuendo Kabadhi, he, her platform, and going from exactly, it is going from television all the way down to direct interpersonal communication. If you look at Facebook and Facebook's most engaged news platforms on Facebook, okay. Number one, two, and three are Daily Wire, BBC, and Daily Mail of UK, okay. Of these Daily Wire and Daily Mail are both completely overrun by misinformation inuendo and very tabloid-style news, all right. And these kinds of things have found the new way of finding buoyancy online, which they would not find in the normal old school way in which their content was consumed, which was in the US when you are standing in the checkout counter of shopping markets. So in India, if you go to a reliance fresh, then the checkout will be in the US. So, in the US, that element was just before you put your things on that you cable there, that conveyer built it, just outside of that, there used to be these tabloids, daily enquirer, all these kinds of things. And these were known for nonsense news, okay. Something like John F. Kennedy was actually murdered by aliens, and those people used to read while they were waiting to check out, okay. And people generally understood that, yeah, this is like nonsense news, time pass, okay. Then there would be news about film stars having affairs, etc. etc. That kind of things. What has happened is now that people have mobile phones, nobody picks them up, because when you're standing in line to check out your groceries, you are looking at your mobile phone, you're scanning through whatever you're doing, that magazine is just lying there. So these magazines, which were basically spreading garbage, have had to refashion their business model. And one of the ways they've done it is by showing up on social media feeds. So really the question is, is it the medium which is doing it, or is it something which is much more centralized, which was just using the medium as a means of output, but what it is doing is it is doing the work of radicalizing. And once you have radicalized the people enough, then whatever else goes out there is fair game. So you have a mix of social media, you have extreme, extreme levels of hate and polarization on radio, which has actually been traditionally true for US. You actually, you know, if you're actually seeing it, first your question is, where was the really aggressive misinformation or hate speech coming, it was always what is called top radio, okay. Top radio, AM radio, okay. These channels, you know, whether it is religious channels, whether it is highly polarized channels, these were all on radio. And partly because they didn't have the funding to go on television, and television was generally, there were some small number of national broadcasters, NBC, CBS, ABC, etc, which were seen as largely neutral, and there were some which were seen as slightly moving in one direction or the other. Fox news, when it started becoming more and more conservative, that drew the first set of a true highly conservative, highly polarized content on broad cable television. And what you're seeing now, which are people who are too radical for Fox News, they think that, "No, you're not in this, you're not in this," because they're mainstream, they're going on podcast, or they're going on these channels, these daily wire kind of websites. And they're getting plenty of content from there. In the US, it's not the same as in India where there is one thread on WhatsApp which is moving from person to person. And here, in fact, if someone uses WhatsApp, you can understand that it's not a US-based relationship, otherwise, it won't be able to use WhatsApp, right? Because over here, in general, people don't use it, people just text on whatever. Interesting, but our podcast is so popular that they are reaching to general public, like in India, it's still not that popular medium. No, no, podcasts are fairly popular here. And besides podcasts being fairly popular, there is also something called Sirius Radio, which is a high bandwidth satellite radio. And that also tends to be highly conservative leaning. And in a nutshell, over here, most of the radical content, tends to be more oriented towards white nationalists who are perceiving this as a moment where they are losing power in society and marginalized from several states, etc. And so it's a kind of revivalist movement in that population. And you know, and Trump came into the picture, he really gave a strong boost to that population, and which is, like I said, it exists on now various mediums. It's not unusual, for instance, everybody has access to a mobile device, so it's very easy to plug that.
into your car study or listen to it at home. So that's that's fairly widespread. - One question I had is about the influence of social media, and especially in the times when, there are so many changes are happening within the social media. So how influential, let's say Twitter is still in the setting of the political discourse and changing the public perception, because there are so many articles which are coming recently like when I read about age of social media is over, which argues that these changes in tech where the advertisers are moving out of Twitter and Zuckerberg is losing hundreds of billion. And there's an overall sense of general sense of user fatigue that suggests that social media may not be that relevant in the coming years. So how do you see these changes, especially in the economic changes that are happening behind the social media? And also one question just to add to that, like recently they have one band Trump on Twitter, but still that Trump is not that interested in coming back to Twitter. So what does it see is about the influence of this platform on American politics? - Yeah, that's a great question. So in general, these things follow kind of a wave. So no tech is permanent in that sense. If you think back to the late 1990s, there was what is that six degrees? I don't know if you remember if you played around with that. Basically it said you're 60 degrees away from anybody in the world, right? And people would get online to figure out well how many degrees am I away from whoever it is. And that's of course very central to LinkedIn's architecture today, right? It tells you how far you are from somebody. And then that died then, when a friend's turn came, then friend's turn vanished. And there was my, well, friend's turn, my space was sort of at the same time. In fact, LinkedIn I think is probably the oldest one which is still in existence, right? But then there was other ones high five came, then if you remember, or could when, or could came, then that became the big thing. And every time when one of these was around, we thought, here, this will never go away. This is just so many people are using it, so many people are online. I mean, there were even people who on Google plus who were posting there all the time, right? And at some point, the company decides, especially if it's a company which has multiple properties, like Google plus, in this case, and all good in this as well, they're okay, this is not sufficiently valuable for the overall state of the company. And then we might decide to contribute. Now, what has happened with Facebook in particular is that the iOS decisions around profiling and add spending around profiling, has made a serious dent on Facebook. And this, of course, relates to all the tech layoffs and the things that are happening around there. And what has also happened is TikTok has started eating dramatically into the overall mind space in terms of engagement with social media. So Instagram is suffering from TikTok's engagement. Twitter, of course, has started using TikTok very aggressively. We'll see the viral content from TikTok shows up on Twitter. And so there's overall deflation of American social media sites, yeah? But on Twitter, the advantage that Twitter has is that it is the established at this point, the pre-eminent means by which politicians do their outreach. And just because Trump is not doing his outreach on it, that doesn't mean that the mainstream politicians who are there, now they've started to put all their communications on Twitter. Every journalist worth their salt is on Twitter for the most part in the states. And so what matters is what you're seeing on the news is highly driven by the content which is consumed by the journalist on Twitter. So in other parts of the world, the head of government might not even show up in front of a press room, right? In the US, Joe Biden, even Donald Trump, when he was at his most antagonistic relationship with the press would still stand up in front of a press room and answer questions. He might have said some offensive thing afterwards, but on Twitter, but on the whole, whereas in many other parts of the world, you look at India, for example, what politicians say about that press? They're all sitting behind on Twitter. So if you're a journalist and if you have to do some kind of a new story on it, you have to take the sound whites from Twitter. So that has not gone away, that level of activity overall by politicians because we study this thing has not declined. Whether there is a change in perception of certain platforms is a different question. Whether we are at a moment where social media in and of itself is going to decline is also a different question because social media as we knew it till I would say probably the explosion of Instagram was one to one social media. Means who are your contacts? So what is they call the mutuals on Facebook? And what is the content that they are producing that you are consuming? Okay, so you were looking at pictures, "Hey, Anurag, toaj, Chau mein kharai, wah wah, voodajah." So you were commenting on those things because you are watching each other. That has changed to a broadcast medium where the majority of content people are engaging are from influencers, are from people who are producing the content for money. So the notion of social media as social, meaning me looking out for what you are doing has been changed by the nature of how we understand engagement, where we care about who engages how much with our content and vice versa, we want to engage with the content which is coming with the verification of the rest of the world that "aha, ye tobohta, achai, uriman, nao, lae, paar, saye." So, "chalo, dekte, everybody's watching it." So that nature of social media itself is now, it's a consumption media, it's not a exchange media in that sense. And obviously, meta itself is looking at Facebook as a declining platform, which is why it's playing with things like Metaverse, et cetera. So there is definitely a lot of validity to this idea that social media, as we know it, is going through a dramatic change and decline. But certain elements of social media have become broadcast media. And Twitter, as a news source, is not, is definitely far from going away. If anything, it continues to be the preeminent source of news even after Elon Musk's takeover. But it's interesting, if the US companies who are always on social media and are challenging them completely, then why is US government not doing anything to cut their own taxes? For example, in India, they didn't take it and sell it. So do you think the US is not doing it? [SPEAKING KOREAN] Yeah, actually, it's a little complicated. Because it's not unheard of. Actually, I don't know who tracked this. But there is a serious trade war going on between US and China right now over semiconductors. US blocking semiconductor access to China. And before that, US has banned or sanctioned Chinese companies including Huawei, et cetera. The problem with TikTok is that it is too enmeshed in the American sense of free speech today. So if you were to ban TikTok, then you have a bunch of people who are like, wait, what happened here? Why is this being banned? So unless the government is able to conclusively show that this data, [SPEAKING KOREAN] they can't just say that, how are our anti-competitive here? It's not even anti-competitive. It is competitive. In fact, in every fair sense of the world, they are beating American companies at their own game. TikTok is challenging Google on Search. I mean, that is unthinkable. That nobody has challenged Google on Search in-- Really? --at this point. Yes, it's challenging Google on Search for certain kinds of things like people who want to look for ways of doing certain things like-- Like makeup or something like that. So that is completely now moved onto TikTok, which is a very interesting change. So the US government can't just say that, yeah, Chinese company, our companies are a chakra, to chalo, because for most part, I mean, are you going to say that FTX is a Caribbean company? I mean, a lot of these companies have their headquarters based wherever the hell it is. Bahamas, yeah. Bahamas, we'll get it right. So--
This is true for a lot of companies in the past which had an antagonistic relationship at a country level with the US. Toyota being a great example when Toyota first came and started selling cars in the US. There was a really antagonistic relationship between US and Japan and there were people like Don't Buy Japanese Cars, You Buy Japanese Cars, You're Parking Lot, Rakhowekoya, Koyanda, Pekekospeya. That kind of relationship was there and so Japan set up operations in the US and then brought out the case that we are making jobs for Americans. And so in some sense, TikTok is in the same space. There is no real legitimate argument for what would be the basis of banning it unless you're able to show that the company is doing something shady. But how do you look at these recent changes that are happening at Twitter especially when Elon Musk has, what do you think is going on? What do you think is going on? You know this is partly tied in with the overall flattening in tech which has been happening of late which is no longer history for why that's going on. But in Elon Musk's case one thing that everybody should recognize here is that he has shaved down dramatically the number of people who are working on Twitter and just about every day we have heard that Twitter is going to crash and we have not seen it crash. And that should be a very telling sign to you that I think this is a sign of how tech might go in the future which is more and more from believing that they can operate their entire their company at a much smaller number of people higher than they have already. So let's take a side two things. One is what Elon Musk is doing to the organization of Twitter and how many people work there, what are their functions, etc. And the second is what is he doing to the output on Twitter? Now for all practical purposes Elon Musk and the kinds of things that he says on Twitter he would probably band in the old Twitter like most recently his attacks on you or Fauci. Yes and Fauci would be cases of attempt to you know engineer. Arigated attacks. Arigated attacks against these people right. So what Elon Musk as a central figure which he was an important figure but he is not that who has never seen Elon Musk's name in the past few weeks. You can't say that. You can say that you will start a Twitter account in the village of Jackmawar so you will be able to see Elon Musk quickly, there will be a control over it. So the point is that he has become such a dominant figure in the discourse that that in and off itself is worth talking about like what that does to the platform to have an owner of the platform where the owner is so much in your face right. Yes. So you could say that okay there is a reliance. Perhaps the only place where the owner of a platform is so much in your face might be not in the room. Just a little bit of it. You can't go anywhere. You can go to the airport. You can go to the building. So in the sense that this is one case where the private, the nature of the organization being private has really been put in the faces of everyone who was using that platform and and has been extremely painful for those who were users of the platform who were particularly not Musk or did not like Musk. Now they are all like stuck having to watch Musk and Musk clearly from his past engagements enjoys this kind of super villain status right. He very likes rubbing people the wrong way. He likes firing people, shaming them etc etc. Isn't it a recent thing or it has been happening since very long because earlier at least in India we used to think of him as some kind of a visionary and who was mostly silent. He was not speaking that much. I think first unusual image was that when he came to Joe Rogan podcast and he smoked that weed and that time it changed a little for people. Was it always like that or is it a certain change in his persona? Well, okay. So for one, smoking weed on a podcast is over here. It starts with a big deal. It's also like an Indian maybe. That's one part of it. The second part of it is that see let us not dispute the fact of whether or not he is a visionary because even if you say that he does not have the engineering jobs or he simply hired the right staff to work with him etc etc. This is not some Sam Bankman free. He is not a lowly fraud. He is not a real man. He is an asshole because the kind of things that he does online is things which are intended to mess with people and whether you think that every visionary is necessarily a jerk like there is a bunch of people who would say that Steve Jobs looks like the worst person in the world to work with and Bill Gates looks like the worst person to have as the boss or whatever and many of these things are probably true but that doesn't detract from the fact that the person might also be a visionary and very competent at what they do. Now with Twitter I think it has given a certain ability to his most negative instincts and really accentuated that in front of us rather than whatever else he is doing and some of these are outright stupid right to ask somebody to show their code. That just is not how code works. You can't look at my code and say, "No, I was just debugging it." So you have not written in code. Get out of the office. This is firing like people like that. He is asking people to show up with their code. That just isn't how you work with code right. It's not like a classroom where you give a particular assignment and you go out and do this. So there's some elements of that which make him look like he's stupid but none of us are inside the room and even the people who are major detractors including Yol Roth for instance has said relatively good things about him as well. Now that being said, you have to understand that Elon Musk had a stepwise increase in persona in broad acceptability over several years. US may bill gates has said wonderful things about Elon Musk. Donald Trump has said wonderful things about Elon Musk. Neil DeGrasse Tyson has said wonderful things about Elon Musk. So this means that you can see that somebody who is held up as an icon for the left. Bill Gates at least before his sexual misdemeanors were put out there was a major icon for business as well as liberal philanthropy etc. Neil DeGrasse Tyson who is a really iconic figure as a black academic in the US and somebody who does really high quality output on television etc. And of course Trump who is on the other end of the spectrum. And all these figures saying that this guy is one of the greatest visionaries we've ever seen. So this reputation was well in place much before he came onto Twitter and with liberals he was already a hero for putting out the Tesla. And so Tesla has said what has happened to the US automobile market because of Tesla is that every company has now started making electronic vehicles. Now you can say what was it because of Tesla? Was it because of regulation or credits being offered to companies? One of a lot of things in there but the point is it has changed the nature of automotive experience in the United States and the car is genuinely a very, that there are certain really great things about the car the way it picks up etc. Okay. And also realize that in the past that we've been doing this for a long time.
1% was really, really wealthy and we wanted to show off Airbus. How much money did you have? He was purchasing Porsche. Porsche, that car is not the car of choice of the wealthy people who want to show up. For the simple reason, that this gear-waller car, so no one knows how to drive it. So, what will you do with the Porsche? He doesn't have to shift gears. So now everybody is okay. The person who is really wealthy, they are getting a Tesla. That driving experience is that of a Tesla. And you immediately associate the Tesla with Elon Musk. So he is coming in with this reputation. He is coming in with a person who sent a rocket up in the sky and made it land, which is unheard of before this. And while it is unheard of before this, it seems like a pretty simple logic. Why was it unheard of before this? Simply because nobody in the vision said that. And he is talking about living on Mars. Well, you and I might think that is a ridiculous idea. But somebody is out there thinking about it. And so you learn to fear and all. Someone who brings out that nature of discourse. And that is what Trump, sorry, that is a, you know, interesting mix-up. Elon Musk has brought as an entrepreneur in this country. That is interesting. So if I answered your question, I went into a, No, no, no, no, no, no. It was very interesting. But just to add up to that, I am also curious to know that what the average general public of US thinks about these kind of ruthless billionaires. Let's say, what extremely ruthless who are openly jerks. And you know, we don't care about humility or, you know, being humble or anything. For example, in India, this idea of humility, which mostly is fake, but is considered as a very good thing about billionaires. Like people like Narendra and Murthy or Ratan Thatta because they are humble. They are giving chalk to people and whatever. At least that image of them is built like that and people like it. So does the people, does it concern people of the US when these billionaires behave in, such kind of ways in which shows no kind of empathy to their worker or people in general. So this is a very good question because this is at the heart of what is referred to as the frontier spirit in the United States. In the 19th century, when immigrants would come to the United States, they would be allotted a piece of land by the government. Somewhere in the frontier, when I am saying frontier, I mean that so you think about the US growing from the East Coast all the way to the West Coast. Slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly. So the East Coast was populated, a little bit more and more. Can you name one or two measures so that people in India would get the context of East and West because I don't think that people would get it. So the traditional East Coast of the US would be states like Massachusetts, Virginia, New York. And New York is of course like an iconic city, when you think about immigration to the US, you think about people showing up at the port in New York with suitcase and all that. So, when you come to the West Coast, you will see that there are many places where people are moving up and down the East Coast of the US along the Atlantic Ocean. And then slowly, there was a growth of plantation economy in the south of the United States. But that was largely seen as an exploitative economy driven on the backs of slave labor. The frontier economy was when the US slowly, slowly started moving inwards into what is called the Midwest of the US partly because there was like wars that US and etc. that was with France which brought a new bunch of territory into the United States. And then eventually there was a war with Mexico which brought California, New Mexico, etc. in the United States. So, you understand that this country is going to be going to be going from one small area in the East side of the country all the way to the West Coast to what is today, California. And this is going to be going from the East to the West, so there is no one here to stay here. So, what is happening is that there are no people here, there are no Native Americans. But there is no one here in the US government at that point, so all the new ones are coming. So, as a way of developing those lands which were towards the west of the country, the US government started just giving parcels of that land to people who would come and that those parcels of land were almost always given to white people. So, you understand that you are not going to be able to do anything here in the new country, but you were given a small piece of land, this is a square plot, this is where you have to go to the temple and do whatever you want to do. So, that has a really valuable portrayal in the US history where somebody would go to a totally new piece of land, animals, trees, whatever they are. And there are aggressive Native Americans who have given land to you, who don't know that you are the one who is the name of the people, you have to get rid of all these and then build a farm over there, build a ranch over there. So, that was seen as a very manly, a frontier spirit that you go into an unknown space, you conquer that space. So, this notion of individualism which comes in the US is very tied to this frontier spirit of going there and making it on your own. So, whereas in India we have a much more communalist spirit in which we say that if you are a marwari, what are you doing in this new place, what are you taking from here, what are you taking from here, what are you taking from here. Here it was that my family, I am going to build something for us and that was a line of respect that you would get out of that. So, historically the US has had what is called the robber barons, which is the Railroads set up in the US. Those people were highly exploitative people who used slave labor, Chinese labor to set up railroads in terrible conditions and they became extremely rich and today Stanford University is basically the name after somebody was a robber baron. So, similarly there are other people who are iconic in the US, the Carnegie is the Rockefeller, these are names that you will hear the Fords, these are names that you will hear around the world with foundations and these people in their lifetimes were among the worst type of people including Andrew Carnegie who set up a foundation because he was such a bad person and he wanted to offset it in some way. So, if we have a history, this is actually I am not pulling this out of my hand, this is very well documented in his own story. So, if we have a history of respecting people who have not been able to get their own people, the notion of taming, you tame a horse, you tame the land. In the same way, these people who built empires, they tamed the environment for themselves and Elon Musk is a continuity of that frontier spirit. He has tamed the market for electronic vehicles, he has built something which did not exist. He is going to be seen as the person who has tamed Mars which in my lifetime I don't expect to see but what am I. So, that explains why he just has such respect from one quarter of people who see his abusive behavior online as a reaction to this kind of liberal empathy, if you will. For people who are different from themselves because that is seen as diluting the American culture of individualism. That is very interesting. And in fact that also explains the foreign policy of US like the way it goes into other nation and other people. That is the notion of US exceptionalism which US has traditionally believed that US is somehow better than the rest of the world. And therefore the values that the US espouses is something that it can and should impose on to others. Of course that has a longer history with empire and colonialism. So then you have the notion of the dark continent in Africa and the people who are going to go to the West and go to the West. And that is considered as something that white people are giving as a donation to the poor black people of Africa or India or whatever it is. So that is slightly different because that is the notion of empire coming from.
your leadership rather than coming from individual people who work against the system. This is a very important distinction. So in the empire, still the central figure is the government. Here, it is the central figure is the entrepreneur who works despite the government. So the notion of small government and why that is such a central part of US public discourse is exactly the same thing which makes somebody like Elon Musk such a massive figure because he shows that you can or actually appears to show which is kind of like very ironic because if you are a descendant of the country, you can do this without the government supporting you, without the rest of the automobile industry supporting you. It is slightly different than what is called the white man's burden in traditional sense. But he also says a lot about destroying the killing of the woke virus and making fun of pronouns and everything. So I was also interested to know in general, is there general sense of disgust of people against social justice warriors or that quote and quote at least I would say woke culture and these kind of thing which he is in caching on. Is that a general mood of American people? That's definitely true. I think the election of Barack Obama was a foundational moment in that because for one set of Americans, that settled the race question. If Barack Obama can get elected president, then clearly we are not a racist country. That is the kind of idea. And what happened alongside the election of Barack Obama is also a dramatic rise in a liberal discourse which embraced diversity. And so when Barack Obama stood for election in 2008, at that time he was asked for gay marriage and he and Joe Biden at the time said no, we are not from gay marriage. In four years, during the second re-election, the time he changes tone a little bit. But the point is that both the issues of race as well as the issues of sexuality, these are the two big sticking points in conservative America. Both of these were seen as taking off during the Obama period. And so as a result when the Obama period died down and the rejection of Hillary Clinton, which definitely had a significant amount of misogynistic content, both of these were seen as marking moments with the late Obama period as being the period where we started talking about gender issues as beyond just like LGBT where we were talking about transgender issues. So all these things became sticking points among the conservative right because it seemed to impinge upon that frontier spirit, the individualist spirit of how we want to be treated and how we want to treat others. So this notion that you call somebody by their pronouns where you do for them what they want done in terms of how they wish to be treated. This was seen as a major sticking point. There is also this sense among especially the Christian right where that requiring to treat people equally for say commercial services. So the big case which broke was one around a cake, some gay couple wanted to buy a cake for their wedding and then this baker said that they refused to do it because it was against their values. And it became a major sticking point where several of these cases have gone all the way up to the Supreme Court where you can argue, well, is this something which on the basis of my values can I reject this? And in the same way that hospitals started saying, well, we are a Christian hospital, we don't believe in abortion. And therefore we will not provide the service. So this this this this tussle between what is considered individual rights versus what is considered communitarian rights was something which escalated in the late Obama period where Obama ironically would be referred to repeatedly as a dictator. And this was in some part because under Obama both the US Congress and the US Senate were Republican but Obama still managed to push through a lot of his agenda. So he was considered as as dictating to the US people how they should be treating other people in their communities. And ironically when Trump came came about he was seen as the antithesis to Obama which in many ways he is. But he said speak your mind freely if you think Muslims should be banned from entering stop Muslims from entering. So when Trump first said ban Muslims people like what the hell and how can a president say that or presidential candidates say that? Even Republicans were shocked by it. Then when he referred to El Salvador and Honduras as shit hole countries and he was like wow who says something like that being a president. But he broke the rules and people appreciated him for breaking the rules because he was exactly that frontier person. And it is a dramatic shift away from the leader who tries to be someone who holds up a certain set of values that they want you to accept. To somebody who says I'm going my way you can follow me if you wish or you can go your way and also respect you for going your way. And the make America great again brought out this notion of a unified idea of what will make America great and it was this powerful America which goes into places and looks for its own interests irrespective of what are the global interests case in point climate change. The climate is well a we don't accept that there is climate change in the United States that was the Trumpian argument and be even if there's climate change is this going to hurt us. Like it was it was a complete shift away from discourse where you're talking about like yes what is good for the planet we are all in this together. And no make America great again if Mexico goes to hell well then so be it build a wall around America so that the Mexicans can't jump over when everything that they have falls to dust because of whatever whether it's NAFTA climate or whatever it is. So it was a real change in nationalist argument because Trump completely focused on domestic versus global which was what Obama was and so if you want to understand where today's discourses really you have to think back to Obama and how that changed everything. So just one final question about these companies that are firing people in in you are so many companies and so many companies are seizing the new recruitment so how is the situation of recession and the job market or let's say and what could be the repercussions in country like India let's say I'm a new graduate looking for job. So do you think what kind of situation it is going to be in the in the job market in the tech field in the coming years is it something to be extremely worried about. So the the the layoffs which have happened right now are driven by a range of factors the most important being the pandemic itself and the hiring that followed the pandemic right so then you have this. pandemic set up this huge amount of people sitting at home and using technology which increase the amount of demand there was for data services skyrocketed so you saw the shares of all the companies which were in data services just go through the roof you looking at Amazon Microsoft Facebook just had remarkable increases in in valuation during that period and so they ended up hiring a lot of people. And what has essentially happened is both that that perceived expansion and demand has been seen to be untrue and so some of that has led to layoffs in these companies and in in particular in the social media space that has so in data space that has been true so so reducing back the number of people got hired then in social media space is just a lot of people. So some of the social media space is also been true because meta versus kind of fallen on its face nothing's really happened there and the expansion of the Facebook was literally at some point of point a time of willing to hire you at twice of what you were making in one of the other major companies.
to move into its expansion around metaphors. So that reduction, which has happened, is partly driven also by the question which you asked earlier, which is that are people less interested in social media? Clearly, metaphins that Facebook is at a risk of not being the same long term project that it was. And this is also driven by iOS's decision, for instance, of not letting Facebook monetize people's data, for example. So that changes your revenue model as a major company. So there is these things which are happening, which are affecting companies. And what are their projected revenues for coming quarters, which is driving down both their demand for new hires, and also shaving down what they have. But these same companies, they are not pleading money. And this is a very, very important point. This is what we are telling you, this tech company is a family. You come to this company, and now you are part of this great family of whatever these people are, and so on, etc. So the company is the people who work there. And this has been exposed completely by this recent move of layoffs, where companies, which are not losing money per se, they could have replaced that person and put them into other tasks if necessary. Google had a very good history of doing this is that even when somebody was kind of redundant, they would just figure out somewhere else to put the person. Because the overall quality of life for everyone who joins Google to see themselves as part of this firm, and that as being an important sense of identity was something that they wanted to preserve. So that myth has largely been punctured in the US for one. And in India, you can argue that that myth was never there, because in India, the attrition rates, they see that in the major companies, they are in the range of 20% to 25%, which means 25% of your people are changing their company. So there is not that, I am an enforcer, I am a roach, I am a teacher, I am going to be a teacher. So it's not that same sense of community or identity that people feel with the company. So however, the decline in hiring has not moved the graph from where it would have been if the huge spike in pandemic period had not happened. Okay, so essentially we are seeing a correction of the market rather than a dramatic decline. But there are certain elements which are nonetheless important to keep in mind, which is that what does this do to the future of people who are middle-level management who are not, who are being paid a certain amount of money. Not necessarily in a very strictly controlled monetary sense of how much is this person worth to me. Yeah, so somebody works on commission, well clearly, how much is this person worth to me is dictated by their commission. But salaries are otherwise kind of arbitrary and the notion is that as somebody stays in the firm longer and longer, you pay them more and more. That notion is going to change as the notion of employee stocks. These things have been completely changed by what has happened in the last one year, both in terms of the inflation that happened during 2021, when you went to, if you got a job in 2021, you got a deal which was unthinkable even for a few months ago from there. To what is happening now, where Elon Musk is setting an example by saying that everybody who works for me has to expect that they're going to work weekends. Hardcore work. Everybody who's working, yes, is hardcore work. Everybody who's working for me should understand that I am waking up from under the table at 7 AM when they're showing up for their shift. If I'm like this, who do you know? The Japanese kind of work culture where everyone will sit in the office until the boss leaves so that after that they can say that how boss is a jada kam kia me. So if the work culture moves from one in which your company is constantly telling you that work life balance, work life balance, area up to work life balance or DI initiatives can each do job. If you went to a US company in like a couple of years ago and now Elon Musk is changing that rule. He's saying that what work life balance you want to work, you have to do great things and the only way you will do great things is to ignore your weekends, you ignore your family. This is what we want. And that sense of what it means to be a productive member of a tech firm has implications for everywhere in the world. Traditionally, it was the Europeans who kept us in line. You're working in a company. You have to buy a phone at night because your partner in the US then the Indian people will sit on the money and sit on the money and they will look at it. Somehow the other people stay awake. You will not get a European to stay on the call if it is scheduled after 4.30 PM. In their time because their work culture is particularly different. India tends to pick up the work culture which is told to us from US. The US may be in Sarathkambhara or upon me Sarathkambhara. And there is a continuity from your engineering college days where you were sitting up all night and working then you will continue that. Yes. This is a kind of unconscious priming which will seep into the Indian work culture. There are other firms which are integrated into the US social media economy particular which are going to see some of these things happening. And so it is not like the Indian companies are outside are safe from some amount of back peddling. But my concern is more for the longer term impacts of what this will do to the culture of work. And that of course remains to be seen. One company and one leader doing that is not a frame for the rest of the organization. But there is clearly like there is a very masculine style in the way that he is doing it. So you can't women at work are not going to be able to do some of the same things that young males at work are going to be doing. What does that do to the notion of diversity at workplaces? So these things really are left to be answered. Very interesting. Thank you. Thank you so much Professor George it Paul. It was very fantastic to listen to you to listen to your insight. I learned a lot from from this conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming to the podcast and taking out your time. Thank you. So this was today's podcast. Please support it on various platforms such as Patreon by meh Kaffee Insta Mojo or PayPal. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast.
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