Metastable

Until a few hours ago, I thought Harry S. Truman had been one of the worst-performing American presidents of all time. I was wrong. I’d spotted an infographic on Twitter, drawn up by FiveThirtyEight and talking about how Donald Trump might soon beat Truman in terms of having the lowest approval rating as a sitting president.

However, go through Truman’s Wikipedia page and you’ll see that though his rating dipped to 22% (the joint-lowest with Richard Nixon in 1974) when he fired Douglas MacArthur as commander of the US armed forces in 1951, he’s within the top 10 greatest American presidents of all time. The biggest reasons: he desegregated the armed forces and federal offices, founded the United Nations, executed the Berlin Airlift, enacted the Marshall Plan and chaperoned the American economy from war to peacetime.

The effect of these successes on his public image is nowhere more apparent than in the 1948 presidential elections, which he was widely expected to lose but won with near-thumping margins, especially in the eastern and southern states. All stories of this sort – including Trump’s in 2016 – feature a part or whole of the mainstream press covering the wrong stories, missing the bigger picture and generally making predictions that it sticks to even in the face of opposing evidence.

In 1948, the press’s being-caught-by-surprise was exemplified by a headline printed by the Chicago Daily Tribute (today the Chicago Tribune) proclaiming “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” and 150,000 copies of which were actually sold on newsstands. When Truman’s victory was declared, a famous photograph was taken showing him beaming into a crowd, holding up the edition to the Tribune‘s eternal embarrassment.

How was this edition even sent to print? It seems that more than editorial presumptuousness and prejudice, the chief conspirators were a staff strike and technology.

The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which ironically Truman had vetoed but was still passed by Congress, had clamped down on labour unions and restricted labour actions. In response, the linotype printers of the Tribune had called for a strike and were absent on the day before the elections results were due. Around the same time, according to Lloyd Wendt, who profiled the Tribune for a 1979 book, the paper had switched to a new printing workflow: copies were composed on typewriters, photographed and finally engraved onto printing plates.

The result was that the paper required a lead time of “several hours” to be prepared before printing could begin – in turn forcing its editors to assume the outcome of the 1948 elections before the official word was out. Of course, that the Tribune had thought Dewey would win couldn’t be pegged on the Taft-Hartley Act and/or technology exclusively; there were many reasons for that, including the failure of American media at large to capture the popularity of Truman’s ‘whistle stop’ train tour. However, the workers’ strike and the technology in use conspired to preserve the Tribune‘s surprise, and subsequent embarrassment, forever.

According to a website called Chicagology, run by a man named Terry Gregory, a self-proclaimed “Chicagologist”, the Tribune‘s typesetting team once boasted that it was “more flexible as to schedule than any other paper” – a confidence born out of the leadership of one Leo Loewenberg, a seemingly noted printer and member of the newspaper’s composing room for 45 years.

Although such efficiency contradicts what happened on November 2, 1948, the cumbersome workflow was in place because the Tribune was transitioning between two prominent printing technologies of the time: from linotype to phototype. While linotype required the use of heated metal blocks to transfer ink onto paper, phototypesetting essentially photographed text from a magnetic drive onto paper.

Even though phototypesetting is clearly faster, the Tribune hadn’t yet been up to speed when Dewey and Truman were locking horns. Together with the prevailing shortage of staff that might have allowed its journalists to wait until closer to the official announcement, it was forced to call the result early. And it called it wrong.

Any journalist will tell you that these things happen. Though newspapers seldom screw up election result headlines these days, the nature of blunders has changed in keeping with the prevailing technology. The flexibility that Loewenberg boasted of in the early 20th century is, almost a hundred years later, so magnified as to be a near-meaningless consideration in the digitised newsroom.

However, what the Tribune did, rather accomplished, wasn’t any blunder. It was an inadvertent memorialisation of the constant reminders journalists everywhere seem to need to never presume familiarity with electoral politics.

Featured image credit: Bank Phrom/Unsplash.

Whenever I think of world-building – as in the fantasy exercise where you build out the lay of the land, and then the land itself where you’re going to situate your story – the first thing that comes to mind, of all things, is Ikea.

Yes, the Swedish furniture brand. You’re probably thinking that I think world-building is something like putting Ikea furniture to together, but that’s not what I’m thinking. I think of Ikea first when I think of world-building because of my first visit to an Ikea store, which was in Stockholm in 2009. It was the Ikea HQ, a large cuboidal building that looks more monolithic than its interiors actually are.

Excluding fire exits, the store has one point entry and one point of exit. It was designed this way, I was told, to force all visitors to walk all the way through the building, through all floors and every section on display, before exiting. By maximising the amount of time spent inside the store, Ikea wanted to maximise sales: every visitor would have to take a look at the dazzling variety of interior decoration options, and have little by way of chickening out of a purchase. The Ikea showroom in Dubai Festival City (IIRC) that I visited later that year is designed the same way. (I went there for the amazing breakfast buffet they have over the weekend: AED 3 for all you can guzzle/gorge.)

I’m a poor writer of fantasy, or of fiction in general. The only thing I ever wrote that experienced a feeble measure of success was a story called ‘The Sea’. It was published in one edition of a magazine produced by Them Pretentious Basterds, a Chennai-based writers’ group I was a part of. ‘The Sea’, you’ll see, is so sparse with details, it’s almost as if I was afraid of taking on something only to lose control. And this would be true. The other fantasy stories I have been comfortable writing were almost all smaller vignettes from a D&D universe that Thomas Manuel created for a campaign called ‘Taxmen: High Risk Unit’.

World-building to me has always been about building an Ikea store and then sticking myself, the writer, in it, forcing me to plot my way through and emerge alive at the end. To me, the exercise of writing fantasy begins in earnest with the world-building because this is where I’m already plotting to ambush myself, my plot and my characters. The fantasy world – to me – is the world that I’m going to experience, not the world whose fate I’m going to script. Once built, this world is set in stone as far as I’m concerned, and from there I simply live it out and write down what I’m seeing, sensing, feeling to create what others read as the story.

It’s not the ‘great clomping foot of nerdism’, as M. John Harrison called it. Instead, world-building is an exercise of gaming. The best games, especially of the video variety, give you control just as much as they don’t let you fly off the handle in terms of your in-game destiny. The stories of the best games are not the product of a choice between mechanical decision-making (e.g. by offering you multiple choices and then taking the narrative along what you’ve decided to do) and glorious visuals. Instead, they mimic life, forcing you to make the same choices in-game that the characters of celebrated works of literature do.

World-building would be the great clomping foot of nerdism if the world is expected to justify your entire experience of the game, or the story. To persist with Harrison’s view, world-building does “literalise the urge to invent” but it pays to ask what exactly is being invented. If you’re able to build a world whose physical, cultural and historical dynamics are together able to embody great stories – stories that force their writers to play games with themselves as they navigate fragments of their own creation – then world-building would have far outclassed the more insular view of the exercise Harrison seems to harbour in his exposition.

I realise Harrison and those who agree with him would’ve come to their conclusions because world-building as I use it is exceedingly difficult to shape and manoeuvre, and would be a horrible prescription for young fantasy writers such as myself. My defence of world-building is mine alone, and I don’t express it to rebut or rebuke Harrison. It’s the only way I can engage with fantasy. This is why, when I criticise films or books, I struggle to make sense of what the author or script-writer could’ve done better to make the product more engaging. Instead, I think to myself, “I’ve just witnessed a story unfold in this make-believe world, and it’s a so-so story”; my judgment ends there.

Ikea, in much the same way, has designed its Stockholm and Dubai stores to tell a story. If the story falls flat, I can’t blame the world because it is what it is. I can’t blame the story either because that’s what the world has engendered. The world, to me, is sacrosanct because, in my conception, they don’t exist to please. They just do, and I, the traveller, maybe even the trespasser, need to deal with that by myself.

Featured image credit: Saide Serna Marcial/Unsplash.

In the morning, I had managed to read a few pages of Karunanidhi: A Life in Politics, a new book by Sandhya Ravishankar about the DMK supremo, and noticed that even though it’s a journalist’s book, and even though Mukund Padmanabhan’s verbose foreword points that out, Ravishankar had written it quite well (note: I’m only about 50 pages in). I don’t mean she’s written it ‘good’, I mean she’s written it ‘well’.

Now, it might seem like I’m suggesting Ravishankar doesn’t usually write well or that journalists in general aren’t the best writers of book-level long-form. The former isn’t the case but the latter certainly is: journalists (by whom I mostly mean reporters) suck at writing. The best of them are the best because of the stories they’re able to get, not because they’ve mastered prose. And those that write well among them have honed the craft over many years. There are exceptions to this quasi-rule of mine, of course (Sowmiya Ashok and Pheroze Vincent come to mind) but they are few and far between.

In this sense, I say Ravishankar writes well because… well, it shows. I stopped reading the book as a reader and turned on my editor sense when I noticed that she had done something on page 14 that a regular reporter would almost never do but a regular writer definitely would. On this page, she quotes the noted author V. Geetha for the first time. However, Ravishankar doesn’t tell us everything about Geetha that would qualify her as a pertinent and important expert in this context. Instead, Ravishankar follows when I call ‘the proximity rule’.

I’m sure you’re thinking I’m a pompous arse, especially if what I’m going to tell sounds familiar, even pithy. I once read somewhere that definitions make the most sense when you place them narratively proximate to the words they’re defining. For (a very convenient) example, if an expert you’re quoting uses a technical term, then it helps if you interrupt the quote at that point to insert the definition and then bring on the rest instead of letting the quote finish, particularly if it’s long.

To illustrate:

“Although the Higgs field is non-zero everywhere” – a way of saying it has some potential energy wherever it manifests – “and its effects ubiquitous, proving its existence was far from easy. In principle, it can be proved to exist by detecting its excitations, which manifest as Higgs particles (the Higgs boson), but these are extremely difficult to produce and to detect. The importance of this fundamental question led to a 40-year search, and the construction of one of the world’s most expensive and complex experimental facilities to date, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, in an attempt to create Higgs bosons and other particles for observation and study.

… is better than to say:

Although the Higgs field is non-zero everywhere and its effects ubiquitous, proving its existence was far from easy. In principle, it can be proved to exist by detecting its excitations, which manifest as Higgs particles (the Higgs boson), but these are extremely difficult to produce and to detect. The importance of this fundamental question led to a 40-year search, and the construction of one of the world’s most expensive and complex experimental facilities to date, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, in an attempt to create Higgs bosons and other particles for observation and study.” A ‘non-zero’ field has some potential energy wherever it goes.

(Source of text: the Higgs boson’s Wikipedia page)

Of course, like all rules, this one’s not set in stone – especially when the writer has built up a flow that is so strong, so good that you want to preserve its continuity over striving even for clarity of language. (Sadly, Thomas Pynchon often believes there’s flow where there’s none).

Over pages 14 and 15, Ravishankar quotes Geetha thrice. The first time, she introduces Geetha as an “expert on the Dravidian movement”. This is because her quote is somewhat generic: “The personal appeal (of leaders such as Annadurai and Karunanidhi) cut across caste lines and drew the non-dominant communities to the DMK as well.” The second time, Ravishankar doesn’t embellish Geetha any further.

The third time, Ravishankar reintroduces Geetha as the author of Suyamariyadhai Samadharmam, a celebrated book on the politics and philosophy of the Dravidian movement. And this time, Geetha’s quote is also more specific, discussing how the DMK built support for itself among the backward castes of Tamil Nadu in the 1950s and 1960s but managed to exclude Dalits.

When a science writer quotes a scientist in a story, it’s important that the writer tells her readers what it is that the scientist does. Their profession as such – such as professor, researcher, RA/TA, etc. – doesn’t matter; I ask the writer to mention what it is they’re actually studying, whether they’re biologists or chemists or whatever. This is because it’s not the former that establishes authority; it’s the latter. Further, the former’s claim to authority often tends to be false, especially when presented in the wrong context.

Another example from this morning is a piece by Robbert Dijkgraaf, a tenured professor at the University of Amsterdam; Leon Levy professor at and director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion; and fellow of the American Mathematical Society, in Quanta, where he has attempted to provide a post hoc justification for string theory’s legitimacy as a theory of nature. However, all that matters here is that he’s just a fucking string theorist – which you’re reminded of when you read Peter Woit shredding Dijkgraaf in his usual style.

In the same vein, in Geetha’s case, Ravishankar has smartly split up her qualifications into two contexts, and presented just the right parts each time. I say “just right” because Ravishankar’s words essentially follow the proximity rule.

On page 14, Geetha is an author and expert on the Dravidian movement (the way I can be an ‘expert’ in high-energy physics), and so the relevant part of her qualification is placed close by. Then, on page 15, she’s the author of a famous book about the DMK’s formative years, and so she gets to speak about something very specific and rest easy that she will be taken seriously. However, if Suyamariyadhai Samadharmam had been introduced on page 14, it would’ve been overkill for what Geetha was saying and would also have robbed her of the reader’s awe on page 15.

On average, people don’t read as many books as they used to before because what we want to read has become available in more forms. We read articles on the web, tweets and posts on the social media, emails, WhatsApp notes and whatnot. This is why, while reading a book is still considered a unique experience, we don’t deserve as much derision. We’re still reading a lot, just not in books.

Now, what if we applied the same line of reasoning to writing? Do people write just as much as they used to before? The answer’s likely “no”, that the average person writes more these days because the volume of interpersonal communication that is textual has increased, so we spend more time composing WhatsApp notes, emails, tweets and posts on the social media and, of course, commentaries and blog posts on the internet.

If we’re reading and writing just as much, if not more, then what have we lost?

I think we’ve lost, or least we’re losing, the ability to read or write one big thing even though we can read or write many small things. The average reader of the 21st century does have a famously low attention span while the average writer – a.k.a. the arm-chair commentator on Facebook and Twitter – is adept at composing quick-fire opinions and bite-sized posts.

This is not a problem that technology can fix because the technological solutions already exist. Instead, it’s a question of adoption, of people moving as a society towards a slower yet more thoughtful mode of information dissemination. How can this be made to happen?

The National Council of Science and Technology Communication, under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), has floated a new initiative to promote science communication by researchers, particularly PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. It’s being called the ‘Augmenting Writing Skills for Articulating Research’ (AWSAR). According to The Hindu, the DST will award the 100 best articles by PhD students Rs 1 lakh each and a certificate, and the 20 best articles by postdoctoral fellows Rs 10,000 each and a certificate, every year under AWSAR’s banner.

The terms of the scheme appear to have changed since it was first announced in January this year, in the form of a larger corpus of funds being made available to disburse.

AWSAR is heartening news on two fronts. First, it means that the supply of informed science writing is going to increase. Second, if the initiative is well-received among researchers, especially mentors who can encourage their students to write about their work and help them secure the resources to do so, then it can only be good for the future of science communication in India.

Like all crafts that have presented unique rewards and insights to their practitioners, the hope is that young scientists will cherish the experience of writing about their research and, in time, find it is something worth doing irrespective of the DST’s prize. That they will use the initial prompt to measure their own research against benefits to society, in time, to enjoy writing about human knowledge for its own sake.

The Wire Science regularly features articles, reviews, essays and commentaries written by scientists around India, and welcomes AWSAR as an opportunity to continue its conversations with experts encouraging them to write more. As our audience of science readers has repeatedly reminded us, there is no topic that’s not interesting enough if the writing is good. In light of AWSAR, I reiterate my commitment, and extend the offer to scientists everywhere and of every age that I will work with you to help you write the best piece you can.

(I certainly don’t believe that all students of science can be good writers off the bat. This is why our science-writing submission guidelines contain some useful tips to get you started. These aren’t hard-coded, and you’re welcome to ‘break the rules’; you could also reach out to me at @1amnerd on Twitter or mukunth at thewire.in for further assistance.)

There are, of course, other questions that must be answered before the scheme can be assessed for its overall usefulness, such as whether articles with multiple authors, or in languages other than English, will be considered. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that AWSAR presents a valuable opportunity that, if carefully negotiated, can yield handsome benefits that might be otherwise difficult to achieve.

Because this is going to be a conversation between scientists and editors first before it can be a conversation between scientists and the people that the editors serve, we hope scientists and editors alike also take the time to understand the ethos of science communication and publish the best piece that can be published. This will not be possible without a community effort.

Here’s an example to illustrate why. Laudable as AWSAR’s aims are, one of its stipulations – that a researcher must write about her own work – comes right up against one of the central rituals of science journalism: the independent comment.

Now, imagine a setting where a doctoral or postdoctoral student submits an article about their work to an editor who is not familiar with the science. Editors will fail both themselves and the researchers who author pieces if they assume the contents to be completely and absolutely true.

Scientists must understand that this is not a breach of trust. On the contrary, it’s an exercise of trust whereby the editor can help the author be more reflexive about their study’s pitfalls and their own, often unavoidable, cognitive biases. As is often foolishly believed, acknowledging that these biases and confounding factors exist is not antithetical to good science communication – it is essential. Scientists must internalise this aspect just as much as the AWSAR evaluation committee should.

Instead, the editor would be well-served if she or he contacted another scientist in the same field and unaffiliated with the author to comment on its claims and spirit. This is why AWSAR’s success is going to be nothing short of a community effort, with the honest commitment of editors conversing with scientists and scientists conversing with editors.

Puja Mehra wrote an excellent breakdown of the Narendra Modi government’s economic performance of the last four years, the duration for which it has been in office. You should read it if you’re interested in this sort of thing (and you should be).

However, the article’s layout bothers me:

1. The references are listed at the end instead of in-line. The former is a vestige of print publishing, where it’s not possible to display layered text, so printers listed a citation in the page’s footer, or at the end of each chapter, for those would need to refer to it. In-line references, on the other hand, are far more convenient because they don’t require the reader to jump across the page, or pages, to find the citation; it’s inserted proximate to the claim itself.

2. For all the numbers, and the “empirical analysis” that the article is being lauded for, there’s not a single chart in it.

The first issue in particular is something I sense a lot of people conflate with “serious” and “solemn”: an article laid out such that it meets print’s publishing standards, which have been improvised over hundreds of years, and as if not concerned about digital publishing, which has been around in its current form for less than a decade.

Another concern is whether the publisher of Mehra’s article, The Hindu Centre for Politcs and Public Policy, is tracking the number of people whose eyeballs rest on the references portion of the page for a (statistically) significant period and the number of people who click on the links. (Of course, there’s a qualitative funnel here whereby a reader clicks a reference not to verify if it contains the claim to which it has been attached but to learn.

Excluding these people) I suspect a majority of readers will rest easier knowing that a specific claim _has been_ referenced (“blah blah gurgle nyah²¹“), and not bother to validate it themselves. That’s how we all read Wikipedia: we trust the platform to have robust rules for maintaining reliability and we trust volunteers to want to apply those rules.

When we take the existence as well as trustworthiness of this relationship for granted, we sow the seeds for a meta-design to take effect on the page we’re reading: where the mere presence of certain elements encourages us to interpret the substance on the page in this way or that. Put another way, because of its ubiquity and its heritage, print publushing brings with it an attendant set of processes that must be followed before a book, article, review, etc. can be published. When the published content contains symbols that suggest these processes have been followed, we assume due diligence has been done on the publisher’s part to check and prepare the content (especially since words once printed can’t be unprinted).

What’s curious here is that we believe we can trust an article more if it contains these symbols _irrespective_ of whether it has been published offline or online. For example, when you see a superscripted [?] next to a claim on Wikipedia (“blah blah gurgle^[?] nyah”), your mind immediately works to discard it from memory (at least mine does) – in much the same way I sit up and pay more attention when I read an article is laid out in two columns on the page with references strewn around it, because it’s likely a scientific paper.

Similarly, detecting the presence of such meta-design markers on Mehra’s article and trusting in the validity of the substance of those markers, we’re encouraged to conclude that the article is trustworthy and reliable. I would be interested in any scientific studies conducted to determine the strength of this encouragement and how readers’ impression of the article changes as a result, measured the extent of the article they’ve already read.

Featured image credit: Geraldine Lewa/Unsplash.

I got myself a new phone today – the iPhone 6S. Before the purchase, I had spent hours on Amazon looking for the right phone within my budget, and quite possibly went through at least two score models. During this exercise, I noticed many phones on the market that had unabashedly copied the fullscreen design of the iPhone X and called it their own.

The hallmark of this design is the absence of any buttons on the phone’s UI, and the presence of a ‘notch’ – a black bar at the top that’s host to two cameras, a few sensors, the mic, etc. The design by itself isn’t very revolutionary but Apple’s decision to change the look of a phone that’s maintained one specific look for a decade is, to borrow Marco Arment’s verdict, courageous.

However, I noticed at least five other brands – OnePlus, Vivo, Huawei, LG and Asus – with phones that sported the same notch (6, V9, P20, G7 and Zenfone 5 resp.). I’m sure there are many others nicking the notch, especially the China-based rapid prototypers like Xiaomi. (This article highlights a bunch.)

One reason they’re able to get away with this is because Apple doesn’t have a patent on the design. Additionally, while Apple designed the iPhone X’s screen thus to maximise display size, those who added the notch after did so to capitalise on the trend that was sure to follow.

Second, OEMs argue that there are only so many to maximise display size and that, if anything, Apple should also be criticised for considering edge-to-edge display after Samsung popularised the idea with its Edge+ model.

Evidently, the argument (or counterargument, depending on your POV) is that there is only a finite number of ways in which to combine UI elements to achieve certain UX goals. And at the other, minimal end of the interfacial spectrum is the question of what exactly it is that you’re patenting when all semblance of creative detail has been shaved off of your product.

This line of thinking brought an amusing anecdote to mind, involving the cult sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last month. When Apple sued Samsung for allegedly copying the iPad’s design for the Galaxy tab, Samsung hit back in mid-2011 with a crazy defence: that Apple’s patent was null because the iPad’s design had been copied from devices depicted in the film.

Of course, the sitting judge dismissed Samsung’s argument: Apple may have been inspired by the design as depicted in the film but the idea of the tablet as a product as such was its own, and Samsung’s ‘defence’ didn’t address that. The iPhone X notch has a similar identity: according to Android phone-makers, it’s an inevitable design choice, and doesn’t represent any new ideas as such.

I’ve got two things to say about my Elon Musk piece from yesterday. The piece was well-received, insofar as I was expecting it to be: there were a few bouquets, many brickbats. One troll called me “a Marxist in the garb of a science educator”. I thought that was a fine thing to be, though I’m sure he meant it to be offensive. Why can’t a Marxist be a science educator? Anyway, the two things…

First: The quality of the debate that my piece prompted on various social fora was quite poor. It just didn’t progress beyond bashing the piece, and me. I suspect the deteriorating quality of debates on the social media and in comment sections on news websites in general as well as that my piece couldn’t make its salient points effectively. And of the two, I can be responsible only for the latter. One point in particular I should’ve dwelled more on, I realise in hindsight, is about why self-regulation is the only form of regulation that can be effective in journalism.

Second: Are famous people on Twitter also responsible for the actions of their trolls? I think so. I wouldn’t have thought so if you’d asked me a couple years ago but I do now. The singular reason I changed my mind is the troll armies that the Tamil actors Vijay and Ajith command on Twitter. More importantly, theirs is not an active command but more of a passive condonement that the followers typically interpret as encouragement to continue doing what they’re doing.

Once in a while, following a particularly horrible bit of trolling, the actors issue a blanket statement saying they’re against all forms of violence, etc., and never being specific enough to be meaningful in any way. It’s clear that neither Vijay nor Ajith wants to alienate his fan base, the foundation upon which they’re both erected as “mass heroes” and on the shoulders of which Vijay has been nurturing political aspirations.

In one episode of Kaelvikkenna Badhil (‘What’s the answer to the question?’), a superb Q&A in the style of ‘Devil’s Advocate’ that Rangaraj Pandey conducts for Thanthi TV, he asks Kamal Hassan what happens when actors enter politics and bring their trolls along as party workers. Hassan slipped past the question (he has no such following) but I’m sure Vijay would’ve balked. The trolls also almost never think of what they’re doing as a form of violence, chalking up their verbal abuse to free speech.

The relationship between these actors and their troll-followers on the social media shaped all of my thoughts about culpability. Musk – like Vijay and Ajith – may not point his index finger at someone asking troubling questions and so direct a river of hate against the person, but – like Vijay and Ajith again – he must know, rather be aware, that his ire is not just his ire. It’s the ire of an institution, and that all of its supplicants will adopt it as their own. He must either actively discourage their behaviour or prepare to bear the brunt of it.

In fact, I’ve always believed that being a public figure is markedly different in some ways from being some random person. For example, if Jane Doe calls Bob an asshat and if Musk calls Bob an asshat, then we’d be in the right to be sterner in our response against Musk than against Jane. This is because public figures are not entirely individuals (as in the regular sense of the term) because they bear a responsibility that excludes them from that part of the social order – a responsibility to maintain cognisance that they don’t, rather can’t, be representative of themselves alone.

This is why Musk doesn’t get to hurl expletives at some John Doe and walk away.

Jean-Paul Sartre famously refused a Nobel Prize for literature (in 1964) because, he said, he didn’t want to be “institutionalised”. His eagerness to prevent this transformation wasn’t misguided. Perhaps more famously, at least among science journalists, many Nobel laureates in the sciences have turned into institutions after winning the coveted prize. Their presence in a room is typically interpreted as the presence of a Nobel laureate more than anything else.

By this measure, they bring along the weight of their awards and other honours as well as that of the research bodies with which they are affiliated to bear. As a result, they’re often taken more seriously than they ought to be – particularly when they’re commenting on subjects they’re not experts in.

Elon Musk is one such institution. He hasn’t won any highfalutin prizes yet but his successes as an entrepreneur (with PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX) have rendered him a techno-financial laureate of sorts among the people. His triumphs in the business sphere have put a halo on his head and the subtitle reads “Midas”. He’s a champion of the masses that speak English, have at least an undergraduate education, live in cities and make enough to dream about spaceflight.

His feats with SpaceX in particular are notable in this context: the CEO was a demigod willing to take risks towards achieving his outlandish ambition of landing humans on Mars in his lifetime – a sharp departure from his early competitors, the more fuddy-duddy United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, Boeing, etc. Musk was Spaceman Spiff in an arena of Bob the Builders.

Thus, he afforded the aforementioned middle class hope. And when they hoped, they also had to clear the path for their champion – which they did by raising a troll army and finding ways to rationalise their Supreme Leader’s gaffes. We’ve seen this story unfold thousands of times already. If you haven’t, you’ve surely experienced its strongest aftereffect: self-censorship.

You hold back. You don’t tag @elonmusk on Twitter because you don’t want your mentions to explode with expletives. If you’re a woman, you don’t tag @elonmusk on Twitter because you can’t deal with rape threats and threats of physical violence. Mika McKinnon, a science journalist, told Daily Beast, “This is the only person and company I deliberately avoid tagging out of a desire to not get swamped. It makes me sad that engaging in conversation is so painful, and it took me too long to realise it wasn’t worth the cost.”

You’re wary of hundreds of people who will miss your actual point and grind your argument into a fine semantic powder. Mostly, you’ll want to stick to the ‘nicer’ side of things, the parts Musk is getting mostly right, and stay away from anything that could push you into a pit of troubled introspection.

Last week, Musk turned his attention to journalism and – ignoring the importance of self-regulation in the enterprise – declared he would set up a Yelp for the fourth estate. His next target was nanoscience, the science of things that are best measured in nanometers. According to Musk, it’s “bs”.

In capitalism, one dollar equals one vote – so Elon Musk has 20 billion votes. And when 20 billion votes call an entire field of study “bullshit”, it’s a stress test like only sudden death can be. That field will now have to justify its own existence; its proponents will have to spend valuable time and resources talking about why they do what they do, and why that’s legitimate – as Upulie Divisekara did. This how much a billionaire’s ignorance costs.

But the worst is yet to come. This may not be the first time Musk has said something stupid but it’s certainly a flashpoint as his followers and fawns in the press wake up to the possibility that, hey, he can be wrong but not have to face the consequent blowback. This is usually the precursor stage of a cult, where powerful systems of self-rationalisation, self-preservation and hero worship insulate men from criticism and safeguard their ability to violate the rights of others (cf. #metoo).

The next stage is for Musk to do something about whatever he thinks is “bs” instead of just tweeting about it, and that day is not far off. His journalism credibility rating platform is doomed to fail, and when it does, who’s to say he won’t pull a Peter Thiel and sink Reveal (whose report about injuries at Tesla invited a federal investigation)?

To be sure, this isn’t a transformation on Musk’s part himself but one of public perception. It has always been in Musk’s nature to rework ideas from scratch, reinvent systems upstream if need be to accommodate his brainchildren and accumulate the necessary capital and weight of policy to do so – all paradigmatic of Republican aspirations. They don’t belong, at least not without more regulation, within areas where the benefits of state control and a socialist approach are well-known.

When his SpaceX launched reusable rockets – so penetrating one of the least regulated human territories – and when his Tesla made electric cars and power-storage batteries – so entering a market desperately looking for ‘greener’ alternatives – it was great. Nobody stopped to think about why a man who once released the patents on his cars into the public domain also wanted to ‘clear’ news reports before they were published, or why a billionaire enabled by tax money wants to set up a gated community on another planet.

But if he’s going to bring his brand of disruption to one of the pillars of modern democracy, his ignorance into the niches of scientific research and his trolls into a space for conversations about making the world a better place he appeared to have cleared some years ago – he shouldn’t be allowed to. This isn’t a fight to reduce the number of dollar votes he has but a fight to ensure a man who has done some sensible things brings that sensibility, and sensitivity, to bear on everything else.

After the IPL 2018 concluded last night, Star Sports TV has been doing reruns of the tournament, showing highlights from all the 60 matches as well as compilations of the performances by category. One of these categories is “longest sixes”.

Hitting a six is a combination of strength and skill: you need to get the ball off the middle of the bat, time it perfectly, you need a stable base for a smooth follow through, and you need muscle. For the biggest sixes, you need lots of muscle. That’s why the biggest sixes of IPL 2018 were hit by Andre Russell, Chris Gayle, MS Dhoni and (the exception) AB de Villiers. I’m surprised Carlos Brathwaite missed out.

However, I fail to understand how this is a feat worth celebrating the way we celebrate sport. The best sports are those in which those contesting a title are doing so on equal footing. What makes this the ‘best’ is the contest transcends each contender’s natural advantages and disadvantages, and forces them to draw from reserves that are available to everyone. They must only have the knowledge and the strength of will to summon them at the right place and time.

Hitting the longest six is not such a sport. Hitting a six itself may be part of a wider sport enjoyed by millions around the world but in and of itself it stands for nothing. Those able to hit the longest six are not better or worse cricketers than those who aren’t, leave alone being better or worse sportspeople.

Moreover, we don’t see such displays as those recalled repeatedly by Star Sports TV among female cricketers – it’s a man thing, it’s a masculinity thing. It’s a glamourised display of the machismo that has come to undergird much of men’s T20 cricket. This is more so in the IPL, where those who launch these tremendous hits are awarded with lakhs of rupees for just that.

On the other hand, there has been a measure of acknowledgment in women’s cricket that hitting sixes has nothing to do with being a man. In July 2017, Hannah Newman, then a PhD candidate at Loughborough University, Leicestershire, wrote in The Conversation that women cricketers hit sixes, too, and that an uptick in the number of sixes hit by the England women’s cricket team is one of the reasons the game has become more popular “among fans and players across the country”.

We can only hope that this more deliberated and less barbaric approach to the game, and to those who watch it and pay for it, is not subsumed by the same capitalist machinery that continues to devour men’s cricket.

Featured image credit: PDPics/pixabay.