NANDAN NILEKANI AND TANUJ BHOJWANI

The Art of Bitfulness

Keeping Calm in the Digital World

PENGUIN BOOKS
 CONTENTS

Part One: The Problem

1. A Toxic Relationship
2. The Problem with Us
3. The Problem with IT

Part Two: The Individual

4. How to be Bitful
5. How to Think Clearly
6. What to Think About
7. A Poverty of Attention
8. Create Mode
9. Communicate Mode
10. Curate Mode
11. How to be Left Alone
12. How to be Together

Part Three: The Collective

13. Slippery Slopes of Scale
14. Cryptomania
15. India’s Stacks
16. Architecting the Future

Appendix
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
 To Tanush, Janhavi, Shray, Nihar and Rohini
—Nandan Nilekani

To my parents, Lalit and Radhika, who taught me how to be curious; and

therefore everything else.
—Tanuj Bhojwani
 PART ONE
THE PROBLEM
 1
A TOXIC RELATIONSHIP

OUR TOOLS
About eight hours before his flight, Prabhkiran Singh got a text from his friend
that he was backing out of their vacation.
As the CEO of a growing start-up, Bewakoof, Prabhkiran often felt like he
could never switch off from work. He had made plans with a friend to take a
week-long vacation to Port Blair. He had booked flight tickets but had not done
much else to plan the vacation. Prabhkiran decided he still needed the break, so
he set an alarm and texted his friend to say he was still going to go.
Port Blair is the capital city of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, located in the
Bay of Bengal, about 1400 kilometres away from the Indian mainland. In August
2020, the Indian government finished laying an optical fibre between the islands
and the mainland. This optical fibre finally enabled 4G services and wired
broadband on the islands. What this means is that if you landed there in 2017, as
Prabhkiran had, you’d switch on your phone to find that you didn’t have any
cellular data or Wi-Fi and, consequently, no access to the internet.
Landing in a new place without the internet was strange and made Prabhkiran
slightly nervous. He couldn’t look up hotels or make reservations online. He
couldn’t look up a map to decide where to go or book a taxi to go there. He
hadn’t even saved any music on his phone because he was used to the idea of
streaming music on demand. Prabhkiran admits that when he first realized there
was no internet, he slightly regretted his decision to fly unprepared. But, over the
next seven days, he had the best vacation he has ever had.
Instead of looking things up on his phone, Prabhkiran had to talk to people to
make his way around. When bored, he couldn’t scroll social media or sneak a
peek at his email. Once he reached the resort, not only was there no internet,
there was no cellular reception either. Most days, he didn’t even carry his phone
with him. The best part was that everyone else on the island was disconnected
too. He found that people were more sociable and friendly. Strangers would join
him for dinner and share stories from their travels. Prabhkiran carried a book
every time he’d go on vacation, but this was the first time he actually finished
reading it. After a very long time, he felt present in the moment and at peace.
By the end of his vacation to the islands, Prabhkiran realized that being
unplugged wasn’t as scary as he had first imagined. He vowed to spend less time
on his phone and more time amidst nature or in the company of friends. He
deleted social media apps from his phone. After his return to Mumbai, every day,
at 5.30 p.m. sharp, he would leave his phone on his desk and walk with a friend
to Powai Lake to soak in the sunset. He found himself less stressed and more in
control of his day.
If this were a movie, this is where the story would have ended.

You probably know what happened next. For a few weeks, Prabhkiran still
caught the sunset every day, but he started taking his phone with him.
Eventually, he stopped going. First one, then another; soon, all the social media
apps came back. Work slowly started eating into his personal life, and
Prabhkiran found himself exactly where he began—feeling overworked,
overwhelmed and always connected.
We all know this conflict. Our devices make our lives incredibly convenient,
but at the same time, they take something away from the quality of our lives.
Yet, it is impractical to disconnect. Prabhkiran, for instance, would be unable to
run his company without his smartphone. Even cutting down screen time is very
hard. We may be able to do it for a few days or weeks, but, eventually, we all
slip up and get back to where we started.
In an ideal world, our technology would be less distracting, and we’d be less
easily distracted. We, however, do not live in an ideal world. Our technology is
addictive by design, and we’re easily addicted by nature. Focusing on only one
side of this problematic equation will tell an incomplete story. This book is an
attempt at fixing the relationship we have with our digital tools, by looking at
both sides of the equation.
 We must begin by understanding how we shaped our tools and how they, in
turn, are shaping us.

OUR EXTENDED MINDS

Most tools and technologies we’ve invented for a major part of human existence
involved manipulating atoms and energy, amplifying the work our bodies could
do. The steam engine, the fundamental invention of the industrial revolution,
allowed us to convert heat into mechanical work. The information revolution had
a different aim. Computers could manipulate bits of information, amplifying
what our brains could do.
Over forty years ago, in 1980, Steve Jobs called the personal computer the
‘bicycle of the mind’. Compared with the technology of 1980, today we have the
equivalent of personal Formula 1 race cars and 16-lane ‘broadband’ highways to
connect the whole world. There has been a ridiculous increase in the capacity,
capability and velocity of information technologies. They remain, however, a
vehicle for our minds to augment how we think and sense. In their purpose,
therefore, not much has changed.
Instead of viewing information technology as something outside of ourselves,
we want to look at all aspects related to information technology—our computers,
smartphones, smart devices, the apps on them and the data we access through
them—as being prosthetics for our brain. Every time we use these technologies
—searching for something online, clicking a like button, paying on an e-
commerce site, sending a text to a friend or taking any other action—we
generate a data trail. This data trail is the electronic manifestation of a thought
that originated in our minds. Our data fuels these information technologies, but it
is not any new oil—it is our naked selves.
Our devices, all the software that runs them and the data that powers them, are
an extension of our mind.
Our extended minds support the way we think, talk and engage with the
world. In the obvious sense, we connect with our friends over social media,
instant messages or phone calls. In the less obvious sense, what we talk about
offline is shaped by what we see online. Even in offline, face-to-face
interactions, we pull out our phones to share pictures, videos or texts. Our
extended minds help us share what we see and experience, enriching our
connection with others.
Even if we don’t call technology an extension of the mind, we can still feel it.
Most of us would hesitate to hand over our unlocked smartphones to others. The
loss of privacy online makes us feel violated in real life. Simply running out of
charge on their smartphones gives most people anxiety. If you’ve lost a phone or
a hard disk with personal data you hadn’t backed up, you know what you felt is
genuine grief.
Over the last two decades, digital technologies have integrated into all parts of
our lives. Our extended minds are now an essential part of how we live, love,
learn, and earn. There is a good reason for the growing influence of digital
technology in our lives—they can often feel like superpowers.
Do you remember the first time you booked a taxi using a ride-sharing app?
For those of us old enough to remember the uncertainty of finding a taxi on the
streets, apps like Meru, Uber or Ola were nothing less than magic. There’s every
reason to believe the future will have more inventions that make our lives better.
Therefore, we are not advocating ways to disconnect or detox, only to go back to
the same problems in a few weeks as Prabhkiran did.
We don’t want to avoid these superpowers. We want to avoid the kryptonite
that comes along with them. This book does not look at technology as something
outside of ourselves that we need to minimize. Instead, we want to integrate
technology into our lives to help us achieve what we want. The idea behind this
book is not to spend less time on our devices.
The goal is to spend our time on our devices better.

OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH OUR TECHNOLOGY

In the conversations that led to this book, the most common complaint we heard
was losing a sense of time.
Dhruv described it best with his experience. Dhruv is a musician. As much as
he loves his job, there are tasks he doesn’t like doing. One such task is doing
receipts and balancing the accounts for the studio and equipment rental. It was
3.55 p.m., so he decided to browse Instagram for five minutes before cracking
on with the task.
 It was 5.07 p.m. when Dhruv finally realized he had ended up going down a
rabbit hole. He felt a sudden pang of guilt and shut the Instagram app. He was in
a state of panic because he had lost time. His mind started to race, thinking about
the task ahead. Almost involuntarily, Dhruv did what he often does when he’s
feeling anxious—surf Instagram. It was nearly 5.30 p.m. before he realized he’d
done it again.
Dhruv explains, ‘I find myself browsing social media automatically. After
twenty minutes, I won’t even remember what I was looking at, and whatever I
just saw would mean nothing to me. Somehow I keep going back for more.’
Instagram is relatively new; the problem Dhruv describes is not. People have
been procrastinating since millennia. Our specific form of distraction may be
new, but the part of the equation that has remained constant is us and our
tendency to avoid certain tasks. We all care about making our lives better, so
why do we not do what we definitely know will help us?
After decades of research, scientists now believe that procrastination is not a
time-management problem but an emotion-management problem. We feel good
when we finish the task at hand. But we also know that the act of doing the task
will not make us feel great. It could be tedious, stressful, or maybe we are just
afraid of not doing it well. Whatever be the particular reason for our anxiety
about the task, our brain procrastinates to prevent us from facing those anxieties.
When we take the human propensity for procrastination and add a smartphone
to it, we have a recipe for disaster.
Our smartphones encourage a behaviour where we instantly act on our every
fleeting whim. We pick up our phones and start searching or scrolling on
autopilot. The starting point may be finding an answer to an innocent question,
recollecting the name of a song we’d heard weeks ago, or simply wondering
what our friends are up to. Each new result leads to another question, and
another search. We promise ourselves to get back to what we were doing after
this one quick digression. The answer we seek always remains a click away.
Dhruv’s experience is not unique, nor is it specific to Instagram. Everyone we
spoke to has experienced this lost sense of time. It is not always social media
either. Sometimes it’s the news, games or simply going through Wikipedia, page
after page. There’s nothing inherently wrong with five minutes of Instagram or
YouTube or whichever app catches our fancy. The problem is that it hardly ever
stays just five minutes. Instead of looking at each app as an attention problem or
a privacy problem, let’s step back and ask a larger question:
What is the nature of our relationship with our technology?
We’ve become co-dependent on these technologies. They need us to give
them attention, and we need them to take our attention away from our problems.
Yes, these technologies are addictive, but we’re not just addicted to ‘tweets’ or
‘stories’. We’re addicted to avoiding our anxieties and boredom, and our
smartphones are more than happy to oblige us with an infinite feed of
distractions.
We want our technology to be a trusted sidekick, make our jobs more
manageable, and support the life we want. We want it to free up our time so that
we can accomplish more. Often it becomes that toxic friend—one who indulges
our vices, makes our jobs harder, and demands more than we can give. It often
takes up so much of our time that we end up feeling like we aren’t doing enough
with our lives.
Most of us are in a toxic relationship with our technology and in denial about
it. It is why taking a break can feel liberating, as Prabhkiran felt in Port Blair. It
is also why once we get back to our daily lives, we repeat the patterns of co-
dependency, only to get right back to where we started.
The only way to fix this relationship is to take an honest look at how we use
our extended mind. We need to fix the patterns that cause us to lose our time,
attention and privacy.

INTRODUCING THE ART OF BITFULNESS

Even without the distractions of modern technology, our attention wavers often.
Science tells us that our mind wanders for about 50 per cent of our waking
hours, making it hard for us to keep our attention on the task at hand. Add poor
mood, stress or threat of danger (like a global pandemic due to a novel virus),
and this number goes up. In March–April of 2020, just as most nations in the
Western world started entering lockdowns, the number of people searching for
‘meditation’ went up by as much as 100 per cent.
Amishi Jha is the associate professor of psychology and director of
contemplative neuroscience, Mindfulness Research & Practice Initiative at the
University of Miami. Her research focuses on the brain bases of attention,
working memory, and mindfulness-based training. She studies what causes
attention to wander and, most importantly, how to bring it back.
Jha describes attention as a flashlight. There’s far too much information in our
environments for our brain to meaningfully absorb. When we move the
flashlight of our attention on one thing, it allows us to ignore information from
everything else. If our brains are computers, our attention is the processor’s
control unit. As Jha writes, ‘Wherever attention goes, the rest of the brain
follows—in some sense, attention is your brain’s boss. But is it a good boss, and
can we train it?’
According to Jha and her more than eighteen years of research, the simple
answer is—yes. You can train your attention with practice. The way to do it is to
practise mindfulness. Jha explains, ‘From our work, we’re learning that the
opposite of a stressed and wandering mind is a mindful one. Mindfulness has to
do with paying attention to our present moment experience with awareness and
without any kind of emotional reactivity of what’s happening.’
The critical idea in mindfulness is not to look at a wandering mind as
something inherently good or inherently bad. It is something that simply is.
What matters is our persistent but gentle effort to bring our minds back to the
present moment. A good metaphor is to imagine oneself sitting on a bench at a
busy railway station. The trains that pass through are our thoughts. Typically, our
mind tends to follow these thoughts causing us anxiety or stress. We may try to
block or stop the thoughts, which only backfires. The key idea is to notice the
trains come and go without reacting emotionally.
Over time, bringing our attention back to the present becomes a skill. We start
seeing the benefits of the ability to be present on our entire life. We realize that
sometimes our impulsive first thought does not need to be chased down. People
who practise mindfulness report being better able to handle stress, modulate
emotional responses and deal with distractions.

One way to frame our toxic relationship with technology is that our extended
mind is wandering. Instead of helping our brains think, these technologies
amplify the tendency of our minds to wander. Our devices have given us the
ability to chase every train of thought, and it is hard to keep it focused on the
right one. Practising mindfulness helps focus our minds on the present, ignoring
stray thoughts. Can we learn how to focus our extended minds too?
Our struggle with our technology is part of a challenging class of problems.
We struggle to keep our weight in control in an age of readily available high-
sugar and high-fat foods. We know that obesity is associated with many diseases.
Yet, this knowledge is insufficient to cover the gap in practice. We experience
the same problem when trying to quit addictive substances such as cigarettes and
alcohol.
The most common misconception whether we’re trying to lose weight, quit
smoking or focus our extended mind is that it requires an iron will. In fact, for
success, we need precisely the opposite. There are numerous behaviour change
studies which demonstrate that instead of relying on maintaining willpower, we
are more likely to succeed if we change our environment to avoid junk food or
cigarettes. Instead of aiming to lose ten kilograms, you want to focus on
something in your immediate control, like not snacking between meals. You
want to make small changes, each adding up bit by bit, to create healthier habits
that are easy to maintain, even on days when your willpower is low. The desired
outcomes automatically follow.
While we can’t change our minds to start disliking high-sugar or high-fat
foods, the good news is that our extended minds are programmable. We can
spend some time becoming aware of how we falter and then put systems in place
to prevent it from happening. Instead of exerting willpower to stay focused, we
can design our technology to guide our attention to the task at hand. We can
sustain new digital habits much more effortlessly than dieting or exercising
because we can configure our devices to assist us instead of distracting us.
This awareness-driven environment design and habit change are what we call
The Art of Bitfulness.
We, the authors, have both personally experienced frustration from technology
overwhelming us. We have also found that it exists, to varying extents, amongst
our friends and colleagues. Everyone we know has come up with their own rules
and strategies to manage the overwhelm. Nandan, for example, does not use any
instant messaging apps—he sends and receives SMSes only. For Tanuj, most of
his contacts are on WhatsApp. But the way we deal with messages is similar.
Using them as and when required rather than letting incoming notifications
dictate our attention. Those few friends, family and colleagues who may need to
reach us urgently know which channels to use and our devices are configured to
let them. Some differences in our approach emerge due to the age at which we
started using these technologies. Nandan got a smartphone only at age fifty-five.
Tanuj had one since he was twenty-one. Being in very different stages of life, we
had different aims for our extended minds. Being connected to friends was
essential to Tanuj, and he made allowances for limited use of social media.
Nandan believes social media is not very useful for him. So, he sends emails to
his friends or picks up the phone to call them if he can.
Despite the thirty-four-year age difference between us, we found that we have
a lot in common in our approaches to manage our relationship with technology.
We realized that there were principles that remained common, even though the
specific apps or technologies we used to attain similar goals varied. We both also
acknowledge that giving up the internet is not a desired option for us. This book,
therefore, does not recommend quitting or detoxing from any particular
technology. The aim is to have a sense of calm and control over our interaction
with our technology.
We both believe taking a thoughtful approach towards when, where and how
we interact with our technology has greatly benefited our sense of well-being. So
how do we go about fixing our toxic relationship with technology and being
more bitful?
As with all toxic relationships, you don’t focus on the people; you focus on
the patterns.
 2
THE PROBLEM WITH US

THE HARDEST THING

A December 2020 survey of 2000 Indian urban smartphone users revealed that,
on average, users spent 6.9 hours on their smartphones every day. About 74 per
cent said they get moody and irritable when they stop using their mobile phones.
While 73 per cent said they ‘feel compelled’ to check their smartphones
continually.
‘84 per cent people check their phones within the first 15 minutes of waking
up, and 46 per cent respondents said they pick up the phone at least five times in
an hour-long conversation meeting with friends’, said the India Director for the
smartphone brand that had commissioned the report.
In the same report, 70 per cent agreed that if their usage continues at the
current rate or grows, it is likely to impact their mental or physical health.
Seventy-four per cent of respondents agreed that it’s vital for them to have a life
separate from their mobile phones, and 73 per cent agreed that they would be
happier if they spent less time on their smartphones.
By definition, it takes two to make a toxic relationship.
A lot has been said about social media companies and their role in users
feeling the compulsive need to check their phones. As any therapist will tell you,
fixing a toxic relationship requires genuine self-reflection. It means
acknowledging that it is not just your partner to blame. Your own responses and
behaviours also contribute to the unhealthy pattern of behaviour. In this chapter,
we want to pause and reflect on our role in this situation.
The data is stark. Most users seem to understand that spending excessive time
on their phones is a severe problem affecting their well-being. Yet, we continue
to use our phones compulsively. What makes us repeat these behaviour patterns
that we know are not helpful?
 Exercising any sort of self-control is known to be ‘phenomenologically
aversive’. In plain English, doing what we know we should do feels hard. The
science behind why we do not act in our own self-interest still puzzles scientists,
but the effect is well-documented. Your own experience probably corroborates
these findings. Whether it is losing weight or quitting smoking cigarettes, you
probably know how exhausting it feels to keep going, even when you know
what’s right for you.
Exercising self-control in our relationship with technology is even more
challenging. Every time we use our phones or computers, we make a lot of tiny
decisions. Should you check your email now that you have unlocked your
phone? Should you reply to that instant message or do it later? Our devices give
us the capacity to follow every stray thought or worry at any time. Every
moment with our devices tests our self-control. Is it any surprise then that we
often falter?
In this chapter, we go over the three ways in which our devices demand our
self-control. These three demands on our self-control combine and wear down
our ability to make good decisions. Sooner or later, we all get tired and decide to
give in. We enter a state of mindless scrolling or bingeing that we later regret.
If we want to spend our time on our devices better, we first need to understand
what makes it so hard.

#1 SWITCHING CONTEXTS IS HARD

The big problem with content feeds on the internet is that they are infinite. Even
before the internet, the volume of books, periodicals, radio and TV shows
available was far greater than our capacity to consume them. So why does this
glut of information bother us so much more now?
Before the internet, there were barriers to how we could consume that
information. We had to go to a library, or purchase a magazine, or settle down in
front of the television at a fixed time to consume content. Our environment gave
us clues that helped us put boundaries around tasks and stay in context.
We can now look up almost any book, magazine, movie or television show
instantly and anywhere, on demand with nearly zero physical effort. Our
computers and our smartphones function as our TV, typewriter, library,
calculator, newspaper, video game console, gossip line, among many other
things. Worst of all, it is all of these things all of the time. It is not just the
amount of information but also our access to information that has increased
dramatically.
In theory, having access to all this information should help us live better. In
practice, it quickly becomes a trap. When we have access to all the information
in the world, we don’t have to spend time or energy memorizing. Instead, we
have a new problem.
Every moment, we need to decide what to focus on.
Before we had always-available access to the internet, our options were
limited to what was available in our physical environment and context. Digital
technologies allow us to access any context from any environment. With the
internet’s infinite choice, the responsibility of being disciplined and exerting
self-control falls on us.
If you worked in an open-office environment, you’d be less likely to open
social media or a game on your desktop during work hours. You’d be worried
that your colleagues would see what you’re up to. But your smartphone is small
and private. You may have turned on your phone for a legitimate purpose but
ended up checking distracting content. From the outside, no one can tell what
you’re up to.
Digital technologies dissolve boundaries and muddle contexts that are sharply
defined in equivalent analogue technologies. We switch rapidly and often
between work and leisure, not fully immersed in either. You feel like you don’t
get enough done at work and bring it home. At home, you feel like you’re not
paying enough attention to your loved ones because you’re also engaged in
work. If the pandemic made you work remotely from home, this boundary
probably became increasingly blurry. Even though you are in one environment,
your mind can be in another. Our phones, due to their sizes and designs, are most
guilty of promoting this frequent context switching.
Context switching happens on our computers too. As most applications moved
to the internet, much of our time and attention on our computers shifted to the
browser. Too many open tabs slow down one’s computer. They also act as a
reminder of the tasks we need to get done, adding to our stress. Since our work,
entertainment, and social life are all just tabs, it’s tough to stay focused.
 Smartphones and browsers let us follow our stray thoughts into virtual worlds.
Especially our phones—which allow us to dwell on every little worry that
crosses our mind at any time. It could be during dinner with family, when some
stray remark about money made us start thinking about how our investments are
performing, and we end up interrupting family time to check on our investments,
just because we can.
Recently, many people have started measuring the time we spend on the
screen. It is pertinent to note that total screen time hides the fact that we’re not
focused on the task at hand for a few minutes before and after each distraction.
We’re constantly switching contexts due to these interruptions. Switching
contexts has cognitive costs. It is hard to get back to the task we were doing
before the interruption.

Researchers have found that most humans are terrible at multitasking. Yet, we
overestimate our ability to multitask. We can multitask when using different
physical faculties, such as walking and listening to a podcast. But when we have
to do two things that require the same attentional circuits, such as writing a
document and replying to texts simultaneously, we suffer on both tasks. It takes
time to switch contexts, and our focus doesn’t bounce back as quickly. Overall,
we feel more stressed and get less done.
 Computers are general-purpose machines, i.e., unlike a screwdriver which can
only perform one function, people use computers for many different purposes.
Computers work significantly faster than humans and can do these many things
simultaneously. Multitasking is their strength, but our weakness. Humans are
good at doing only one thing at a time. Yet, our digital lives are designed around
the computers’ multitasking ability rather than humans’ single-tasking nature.
Every moment you spend on your devices, you must exert self-control to
maintain boundaries and preserve context. By design, it is incredibly easy to
falter.

#2 CHOOSING IS HARD
In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper published a study on
the ‘paradox of choice’. They presented one set of shoppers at a supermarket
with an assortment of twenty-four gourmet jams. To another set of shoppers,
they displayed an assortment of only six jams. In their experiment, the larger
assortment drew more visitors. But those shoppers were only 1/10th as likely to
purchase something compared to those shown only six jams. Though the smaller
assortment pulled less of a crowd, its shoppers chose meaningfully and
purchased what they liked.
This anomaly in our behaviour came to be known as the ‘paradox of choice’.
Further studies have shown that excess choice not only produces a ‘choice
paralysis’, but even for those who do choose, it reduces satisfaction with their
choices. Choice paralysis holds when choosing between chocolates, paintings
and even jobs. Too many options lead to many ‘what-if?’s. Even with the
freedom to choose exactly what we want, we end up being more unhappy with
what we’ve chosen.
We already see this happening in the online sphere. Many users complain of
indecision due to the many choices of what to watch on Netflix or YouTube. Or
worse, of spending thirty minutes on deciding what to order from Swiggy or
Zomato. We browse through catalogues, hoping to find something that will
surprise or delight us. The endless choice encourages a behaviour where the act
of deciding itself becomes addictive, keeping us hooked to the product. We hear
a similar complaint about dating apps. The easy, instant reward of a new match
over the challenging, time-consuming task of building an authentic connection
keeps people addicted to swiping. We end up dissatisfied because we spend more
time deciding what we’d like than liking what we’ve decided.

One would think that given this paradox, the right thing for technology
companies to do would be to reduce the amount of choice that is available to us.
Yet, search results stretch on for thousands of pages and social media feeds are
infinite.
Growth is the primary driver for these companies. Having the widest choice
attracts the most people, just like in Iyengar and Lepper’s experiment. We are
drawn to novel information. ‘Stickiness’ can be solved using other ‘growth
hacks’ such as recommendations, personalization and social feeds.
 In fact, recommendation technologies would be meaningless if we didn’t have
too much choice in the first place. We wouldn’t need gatekeepers, rating scores
and algorithms if the amount of content were manageable. Too much choice is
what keeps us coming back for more, hoping that luck will be in our favour this
time and we will discover something surprising or exciting. Too much choice is
why we let autoplay decide our next video. If we give people too much choice
and the option to let the machine decide for them, most will prefer to not exert
self-control and handover the reins to the machine.
Too much choice obfuscates the most meaningful choice—our choice to stop.

#3 THINKING IS HARD
We’ve all either said it ourselves or heard someone else say, ‘my head hurts to
think about that’.
Cognitive effort is known to be hard. Scientists from McGill University,
Canada, set up an experiment to ask people to choose between a cognitively
demanding task or experience painful heat. In their results published in 2020,
they conclude,

‘This provides compelling evidence that cognitive effort is aversive and the
desire to avoid it can be quite strong. Put simply, people preferred to
experience physical pain rather than do something mentally demanding. In
fact, participants made effort-avoidant choices even when faced with the
maximum ethically permissible pain level: on average, participants
accepted the painful stimulation, calibrated to 80/100 (100 = “extremely
intense” pain), approximately 28 per cent of the time to avoid performing
the cognitively difficult 4-back task.’

The resistance to cognitive effort varies across individuals, but all of us show
some degree of resistance. We can overcome it, but doing so feels tiring. When
we’re stressed, distracted or tired, we’re less likely to think about our own best
interests and do what’s mentally easy instead. Even if the mentally easy option
involves physical pain.
 Aversion to thinking too hard makes us take all sorts of decisions that may not
be in our favour. We click the button to accept all cookies because it is coloured
a familiar blue. We don’t uncheck the box next to ‘sign me up for marketing
communications’ because it is selected by default. Not wanting to think is also
why habits are so successful. Familiar pathways of action are the ones of least
resistance for our brains.
In 2014, in a popular book called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming
Products, Nir Eyal lays out the process for piggybacking on this fundamental
human trait to make apps addictive. The mechanism for hooking users is simple
—present users with a trigger, and if they act on that trigger, reward them. But
there is a secret ingredient. On his website, the author advises businesses, ‘At the
heart of the Hook Model is a powerful cognitive quirk described by B.F. Skinner,
in the 1950s, called a variable schedule of rewards.’
The famous psychologist B.F. Skinner proved that you could teach animals
seemingly intelligent behaviours by reinforcing desired behaviours with rewards.
In a very popular video, Skinner uses reinforcement to teach a pigeon to make a
complete turn. He does this in under a minute. The ‘cognitive quirk’ that Eyal
mentions is that something strange happens when you make the rewards
unpredictable. Skinner demonstrated that variable rewards resulted in most
instances of the desired behaviour. It also led to behaviours that were the hardest
to extinguish. Skinner compares this effect to a slot machine in a casino. He says
that the uncertainty of rewards makes each iteration of the desired behaviour like
a spin of the slot machine. For the subject, the desired behaviour can become as
addictive as a slot machine.
The reason we find it so hard to look away from our phones is the same as the
reasons for which we procrastinate. It is an emotion-regulation problem. Instead
of doing what we know we should, we perform an easier, automatic and familiar
behaviour to avoid the task. It could be scrolling through social media, catching
up on group chats, reading the news, checking email or whatever particular way
you tend to lose time. Without even noticing it, we’ve learnt to perform a habit
whenever we feel discomfort.
Unsurprisingly, the strength of this automatic habit is strong. One detailed
2016 study installed special software on people’s phones to capture every
interaction with their phones over the day. They learnt that the average user
picks up their phone about seventy-six times a day. The average user will touch,
tap or swipe their phone 2617 times a day. The top 10 per cent of users in their
sample were touching their phones daily more than 5427 times over about 132
different sessions.
That’s approximately over one million touches per year over 27,000 sessions
for an average user.
Think of each of those sessions as micro-training for your brain. The
interactions where we pick up our phones in response to our boredom and
anxiety reinforce our toxic habits. Quitting our phones is, thus, tough. We’ve
conditioned ourselves deeply over millions of interactions to look at our phones
and avoid negative emotions.
Variable rewards create powerful habits. Whether rats pressing levers or
humans touching their phones, a variable reward schedule can make us behave
compulsively. It can ruin our ability to self-control, even when we know we
should. Smartphones aren’t the only technology to take advantage of this
behavioural oddity. To understand more, we need to look at casinos.

THE ZONE
In her book, Addiction by Design, researcher Natasha Dow Schüll documents
techniques used by casinos to keep people addicted.
There are fascinating insights in Schüll’s book about the attention to detail in
designing gambling environments. Various skilled professionals spend their time
maximizing ‘Continuous Gaming Productivity’, a metric that measures how long
gamblers are using slot machines. ‘Our best customers are not interested in
entertainment—they want to be totally absorbed, get into a rhythm’, says a game
designer in the book.
Casinos are built to have no sharp edges by design, to keep people from
thinking too hard about decisions on where to go. Casinos don’t display clocks.
They want to keep you from noticing the time and deciding to stop. The payment
mechanisms have gone digital. You don’t need to put coins in the machine or
fiddle with credit cards. The chairs are specially designed to keep the gambler’s
legs from falling asleep and allow them to be seated for hours without getting
up.
 Schüll points out that slot machines are by far the most successful of all
gambling equipment. More people play slot machines than any other game in
casinos. Slot machines constitute about 70 per cent of the average US casino’s
income. She says there are three reasons in the design for this—continuity, speed
and solitude. Every other game—whether horse racing, roulette or blackjack—
has natural pauses that give you time to reconsider. However, the slot machine is
automatic, continuous and fast. There are slot machines that can have users play
as many as 1200 games an hour. Most insidious of all, it is private. There is
nothing between you and the machine, no human in the middle who can slow
things down. Slot machines are the smartphones of the casino world.
Schüll’s most insightful commentary is about why people use the slot
machine. You would imagine people want to win. But according to Schüll,
players are playing to ‘get in the zone’. Schull describes the zone as ‘a mental
state in which time falls away, space falls away, and importantly for the
gamblers, a sense of monetary value disappears, and sometimes even a sense of
self. Awareness of other people, everything drops away, and you’re just in that
loop with the machine.’
The most convincing arguments come from the user experiences she relates.
Schüll summarizes this surprising motivation for gambling in one of her
interviews.
‘Another gambler by the name of Shannon told me, “you know, it’s so strange,
but sometimes when I win, I get really tense and really frustrated and almost
angry.” And I heard this over and over again in my interviews. What was going
on was that winning interrupted the zone. It interrupted the flow of play because
the machine freezes up. Suddenly there’s music. Suddenly people are looking at
you. You’re back in time, you’re back in space, you’re exactly where you don’t
want to be.’
Think about the last time that you were in one of those rabbit holes.
Say you decided to check out your favourite distraction. It could be a news
site, social media, streaming video or something else. Each link you clicked,
feed you scrolled or the recommended video you watched; all of these pushed
you into automatic, fast and continuous behaviours. You probably lost more time
to them than you wanted. You were in the zone.
But what made you open the distracting app in the first place?
 The likely answer is that you open it out of force of habit in the moments
between finishing a task and starting another. You probably even know what
important thing you should do next, but your brain pushes back on exerting self-
control. You feel a sense of discomfort that manifests either as boredom or
anxiety. That is when you seek the zone.
In the past, when you felt this discomfort, you may have decided to comfort
yourself by opening one of these apps. The infinite choices offered by these apps
never give you a sense of completion, so you keep going. Each scroll, refresh or
click gives you new content that may or may not be useful, just like the slot
machine’s variable rewards. These continuous, fast and variable rewards take
you into the zone. You’re able to avoid thinking about whatever anxiety that
triggered you to use the app because you’re in the zone.
From the brain’s perspective, this action actually resolves the task. We were
facing discomfort in anticipation of the task. When we avoid the task and are in
the zone, we don’t feel anything. Our brains now associate reaching for our
phones as the solution to all such discomfort. Over our millions of interactions
with our phones, we’ve repeated this behaviour enough for it to become a habit.
The apps have managed to train us to associate the cue of discomfort with the
behaviour of picking up our phone like Skinner trained pigeons. We reach for the
apps or news feeds that make us lose a sense of space and time.

Eventually, one would get bored of any slot machine and stop. But, our
computers and smartphones are portals to multiple slot machines. Moreover,
there are no boundaries between these apps and browser tabs. We end up moving
from one virtual slot machine to another, chasing the zone.

The next time you find yourself losing time as Dhruv did, ask if you were truly
present in what you were doing, or if you were simply chasing the zone. All of
us indulge in this escapist behaviour sometimes. But our devices can make this
escapism into an insidious habit. And the habits that have been reinforced
millions of times by our daily actions become very hard to break.
People often frame their phone-addiction problem in terms of what they do on
the phone. People believe they are addicted to Twitter or Instagram or YouTube.
The real problem is not what they use, but when they use their phones. We’ve
trained ourselves to reach for our phones in response to an unpleasant emotion.
We seek to get into the zone so that we don’t have to face these difficult
emotions.
Unlearning this deeply ingrained habit is going to take time and effort. It will
involve changing many behaviours that are now automatic and easy. Often, we
fail in our attempts because the challenge is vast, and we’re seeking quick and
easy answers.
The most toxic answer is that you simply need to do better.

WILLPOWER
One half of our toxic relationship with technology is due to our own lack of self-
control. Surely, if we managed to exercise our willpower better, we could stop
ourselves from getting into the zone and losing time?
While this approach sounds correct, it misses a critical point.
Runners and athletes often describe a similar experience of being in the zone
and losing a sense of time when they are fully engaged in their sport. Our digital
slot machines are designed to be engaging, but often when we lose time to them,
we feel guilt and shame. Now imagine if you spent an hour being in the zone,
but while running. You are likely to feel happy and fulfilled. The difference is
primarily that when we are lost on our phones, we are unintentionally in the
zone. Whereas, when we are running, we are intentionally looking to be in the
state of singular focus. The problem isn’t that we chase the zone but that we
spend our time in zones that we do not intend to.
It is the gap between our intention and our attention that makes us unhappy.
As we’ve said before, the goal of bitfulness isn’t to spend less time on our
phones. It is to spend time better.
Hence, depending on our willpower alone is a bad strategy. Not being able to
exert sufficient self-control is how we developed these behaviours in the first
place. Relying on willpower alone is like trying to quit smoking while carrying a
cigarette packet with you wherever you go—you can exert self-control on most
days, but sooner or later, you will have a moment of weakness and reach for that
packet.
The real problem is that our technology usage is often designed around who
we wish we were, not who we are.
We wish we were someone who only looks at their phone when necessary. We
wish we were not easily distracted and always made healthy choices. We wish
that we only checked messages and emails when convenient to us, and not
compulsively. We wish that we only used social media for entertainment and not
scroll through it mindlessly. In reality, we are capable of focusing but often slip
up. We are ambitious and conscientious but also prone to procrastination and
laziness. Apps and platforms exploit this gap between our self-image and our
reality.
Our self-image of being a conscientious, rational and motivated human being
only gets in the way of fixing our relationship with technology. Instead of fixing
the causes of toxic behaviour, we try to exercise more self-control on its
symptoms and fail. We blame ourselves for not being capable enough or strong
enough to change. We’ve been tricked into believing that because we have the
choice to switch off, not being able to switch off is a personal failing. This belief
is both untrue and unhelpful.
When it comes to addiction, we tend to focus on two things—the addict and
the substance. There is a third factor we often fail to consider—our environment.
In 1971, the US military noted that 15 per cent of American soldiers in
Vietnam were heroin addicts. Heroin is extremely addictive, and few thought
there was a chance for these soldiers to be de-addicted. But, when these soldiers
reached home, the statistics were astonishing. Less than 5 per cent of the soldiers
relapsed in the first year, and less than 12 per cent in three years. Scientists had
to challenge their current understanding of addiction.
The basis for deciding if a substance is addictive was tests carried out on
laboratory rats who were isolated in small cages with two drips that they could
choose from. One drip usually contained water or food, and the other contained
addictive substances such as morphine or cocaine. What most of those studies
showed is that rats would obsessively choose the drugs over food or water, and if
they were allowed to, many would overdose.
Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander set up a series of experiments in
the late 1970s to see if changing the environment that the rats were in would
change their behaviour. So, he designed a rat park—a space with 200 times the
floor area of a regular experiment cage. Other than the usual two drips, it
contained a play area, food, and most importantly, other rats to socialize with.
Alexander demonstrated that rats in this environment rarely chose the drugs.
Even those that did never overdosed. Surprisingly, even the same rats that would
obsessively choose drugs in the solitary cages would wean off their habit once
they were introduced into the rat park.
It is not simply the neurochemistry of our brain interacting with the substance.
It is also our environment and our social context. When the soldiers came back
to the very different environment of their homes, or rats came to the rat park,
even the most deeply ingrained habits learned on the battlefield could be
overcome.
The way to practise bitfulness is, therefore, awareness-driven habit and
environment change. In Part Two of this book, we will thoughtfully design our
extended mind. Instead of exercising willpower, make it easier to stay in
context, minimize choices and reinforce good habits. If we design our
environment around who we are, instead of who we wish we were, we can guide
ourselves towards making healthier choices automatically.
There are no tricks that will help you unlearn these toxic habits overnight. Our
focus isn’t on eliminating all toxic habits. Instead, we will focus on fixing our
relationship with technology by creating tiny good habits. We will design our
extended minds to make these good habits automatic. Some of these
environmental changes will help these habits stick instantly, and some may need
tweaking. Bit by bit, we can reset our relationship with technology.
Remember, it does take two to make a toxic relationship. This chapter only
covered how we contribute to the toxic patterns of behaviours. In the next
chapter, we will learn how our technology contributes to this toxicity.
 3
THE PROBLEM WITH IT

THE THIRD CRISIS

Our relationship with technology was not always toxic.
The first personal computers were to be used the way personal calculators
were—as tools to support an individual’s thought process. The internet changed
this thinking tool into a gateway. Your extended mind has unrestricted access to
a vast amount of information through a global network. The flip-side is that the
global network has unrestricted access to your mind too. Businesses soon
realized that the internet is the most cost-effective way to reach their customers
and grab their attention.
The internet, thus, hijacked our extended minds. Our technology is no longer a
bicycle to help our mind ride to its destination. Instead, the internet tends to opt
us into rowing someone else’s galley. Rather than technology helping us achieve
our goals, we seem to be helping technology achieve its goals.
The internet has changed the fundamental logic of personal information
technologies. Not just our phones, but also our refrigerators, TVs, lights and
microwaves are becoming ‘smart’ by connecting to the internet. Once connected,
businesses hope to extract something of value from us continuously—whether
it’s our money, attention or data.
On the other end of the equation, the internet has changed the fundamental
logic of businesses too. Online companies have to build their businesses in a
very different way from offline companies. The capital and resources available
to them make them favour massive speed and scale. The business logic driving
these companies is affecting their relationships with their users.
Our individual relationship with our technology turning toxic is only a
symptom of a much deeper crisis facing humanity. The internet, as it is today, is
not capable of making everything in society digital, while still upholding the
values we want our society to protect. We can already see some fault lines start
to emerge as people begin to question the role of social media in our protests and
our elections. If we continue building the internet this way, we risk an existential
crisis.
Humanity is already facing two major crises in the physical world with
pandemics and climate change. There is a third crisis brewing in our digital
world.
This digital crisis combines the worst aspects of humanity’s other two global
crises. It is exponential in its spread like a pandemic, and its immediate
convenience masks its more long-term harmful effects like the climate crisis. It
may also cause economic and social damage in the long run, even as we all think
our individual lives are getting better in the short run.
We’d still rate the internet, unequivocally, good. Overall, building an open,
decentralized, digital communication network that connects everyone has been
one of humanity’s greatest achievements. The Third Crisis is not that we are
going digital.
The Third Crisis is that how we are going digital will lead to an imbalance of
power in society.
To understand this crisis, its causes and its consequences, we have to go back
to how the internet hijacked our extended minds. It all started with the internet’s
original sin.

THE ORIGINAL SIN

In 1989, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, also known as TBL, was frustrated by not
being able to find the right files, so he invented the World Wide Web.
Established in 1954, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also
known as CERN, is a research organization based in Geneva. It operates the
largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Due to the size of the project,
thousands of scientists collaborate at CERN. As an organization, it probably
generates the most amount of scientific data and knowledge in the world.
However, TBL invented the WWW because CERN was also losing a lot of that
knowledge.
 Many scientists would join CERN for research purposes for some duration
and leave. As a result, a lot of the knowledge about their work and research
would leave with them. CERN enjoyed access to the internet, but this was the
internet of 1989. It connected computers into one universal network. But it
wasn’t very helpful in knowing what was on those computers.
Inside the computers, people organized documents according to their own
specific hierarchies. Searches only worked if two people used the same keyword
for the same thing. Even though the knowledge was all on one network, it wasn’t
usable yet.
So Berners-Lee decided that he’d change the way people shared knowledge.
Instead of using the traditional hierarchical approach of files and folders, TBL
was inspired by a technological idea called hypertext. In 1990, he created an
open standard called the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and the first
browser to parse HTML, WorldWideWeb. According to the world’s first-ever
website, still hosted at info.cern.ch:

The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval

initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.

Berners-Lee had created a way to decouple information from the computer on

which it sat. Instead of saying ‘I want a file from this folder on that computer’,
the web allows you to say ‘I want the file residing at this URL’. The browser’s
job is to decode that URL, i.e., Uniform Resource Locator, to locate an actual
file somewhere on a server on the internet, retrieve it and display it to you.
The biggest innovation of hypertext was hyperlinks. Imagine how much
harder Wikipedia would be to use if there were no links and you had to navigate
to each page by digging through a folder tree. Webpages and weblinks allowed
the connections between two files to be contextual. They made finding the right
information considerably easier than the old files and folder system.
Though painfully bland by today’s standards, TBL’s invention was path-
breaking for its time. The internet has existed in some form since 1969, but it
was the World Wide Web in 1990 that kicked off the storm. In 1991, the internet
became accessible to the public. The internet was still a public good, a garden of
Eden where interesting people came together to share interesting things. A group
of academicians and others formed a not-for-profit to govern the newly born
web’s specifications.
Around 1992, the web started attracting more hobbyists and entrepreneurs.
The internet was seen as a platform with infinite possibilities. One person it
inspired was the then twenty-two-year-old student Marc Andreessen. Andreessen
created the Mosaic browser at the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications, a largely government-funded research centre based out of the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Mosaic was one of the first browsers which would add images inline to the
web. Mosaic wanted the web to be more than just an elite research tool. They
made the browsing experience as accessible as possible, and as a result, Mosaic
spread like wildfire. Marc Andreessen eventually graduated, left the NCSA,
launched Netscape Navigator as a private corporation, and ended up barefoot on
TIME magazine’s cover. Thus, marking the beginning of the internet revolution.
In 1994, the web reached an inflexion point where the popularity and reach of
the internet had begun to outpace the architects who helped create its
foundations. Entrepreneurs on the internet wanted to get paid for what they were
building. But the internet had no inherent way of letting them collect money. The
sceptics had begun to ask if the internet could sustain real businesses or if it was
just hype.
One of the artefacts to have gained mainstream cultural popularity from the
internet is the 404 error, i.e., ‘page not found’. Fewer people know about the 402
error, i.e., ‘payment required’. The web creators had imagined that the web
would be a peer-to-peer technology, and people would trade with each other
directly over the web through micropayments. The web creators wrote the ‘402’
error as a to-do to themselves—an error code reserved for a future when people
could pay each other directly for content.
An internet native micropayments system never got built. Instead of waiting
for the technology that enabled payments on the internet, internet entrepreneurs
got around this inconvenience by changing their business model.
On 27 October 1994, the online magazine hotwired.co.uk found a solution to
this missing infrastructure—displaying the first banner ad.
Advertising meant that new internet companies did not have to wait for the
technology to collect pennies from millions of customers. Instead, they could
collect cheques worth thousands of dollars from a handful of advertisers.
Advertising also helps reach more users since the content can be made free.
Given the lack of payment technology, choosing advertising as a business model
makes perfect sense. The early web entrepreneurs couldn’t have known that
taking a bite of the juicy advertising apple would eventually lead to the loss of
the internet’s innocence. This moment is now considered by many to be the one
when the internet went from a collective project to being a commercial project.
In an article in The Atlantic in 2014, Ethan Zuckerman, the creator of the pop-
up ad, called this moment the internet’s original sin.

TARGETING
All advertising has a particular weakness, best articulated over a hundred years
ago by department store magnate John Wanamaker: ‘Half the money I spend on
advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.’
When it began, advertising on the internet did not look very different from
advertising on billboards. It was a large banner designed to capture your
attention as you went around surfing the web on your own business. Marketers
soon realized the internet is not a billboard. It didn’t take long before someone
asked, ‘Why are we showing the same ads to everybody who visits our site?’ If
you were surfing an article about cars, wouldn’t it make sense to show you an ad
about cars? If you were reading an article about books, wouldn’t it make more
sense to offer you an ad about books instead of cars? Thus, ads began to be
targeted based on the content and context of the web page.
The internet promised to answer Wanamaker’s question. You could find out
how many people saw the ad, how many clicks your ads were getting, etc.
Getting data this fast was very unusual for marketers in the 1990s. Until that
point, a campaign cycle would take weeks to plan and execute. Feedback would
only arrive in a quarter or two when the sales results came in. Online advertising
was the first taste of data for advertisers, and they would soon get hungry for
more.
In 1996, DoubleClick was launched. This online ad agency changed the way
marketers thought about their jobs and would go on to be acquired in 2007 for an
eye-popping US$3.1 billion, all in cash, by Google. In the late 1990s, though,
DoubleClick was still a small operation. Through early tracking technologies,
they were able to tell their clients what ads people saw and when. Essentially,
data on ad performance. It wasn’t long before advertisers realized they could
target even better if they started asking who exactly is watching these ads.
That is, data on people.
Targeted advertising is a seductive idea. If you’ve ever had to sell anything,
you would know that getting people to part with their money is hard. But what if
you could put your product in front of those exact people who are looking for
something like it? This part-oracle, part-cupid matching of seekers and sellers is
the ultimate promise of all online advertising firms. They collect data to help
target ads to the customers who are likely to buy them. In theory, a win-win!
Targeted advertising is, hence, a lucrative industry. Companies such as
Google, Facebook, and others match ads with viewers at great scale and speed.
Global spending on digital advertising was roughly US$333 billion in 2019, i.e.,
50 per cent of all advertising spend globally. It is still growing.
Information wants to be free, but it still costs money to deliver it. Advertising
makes the internet accessible to everyone, claim its supporters. Google could
serve us all of the world’s information for free in exchange for a few ads.
Facebook connects you to all your friends in return for a few sponsored posts.
The web allows us to create more information than ever, cheaper than ever.
What’s the harm with tacking on a little more information on behalf of an
advertiser, if it pays the bill?
Nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Simon saw things differently. ‘What
information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its
recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.’ If you
think this is an accurate description of the internet, it is worth mentioning that
Simon said this in 1971.
The advertising model made attention the real currency of the internet. Selling
targeted ads was how companies encashed your attention. Targeting is why
AdTech companies like collecting user data. Data helps match users to
advertisers.
In effect, the lack of payments infrastructure on the early web has led us to our
current attention and data-hungry internet.
 WINNERS, TECH, ALL
We’re facing the Third Crisis today because there was a vacuum at the core of
the internet.
David D. Clark, head of the Internet Architecture Board through most of the
1980s, recalls this exchange with an unnamed economist in his book, Designing
an Internet.

Economist: The internet is about routing money. Routing packets is a side

effect. You screwed up the money routing protocols.

Clark: I did not design any money routing protocols!

Economist: That’s what I said.

As there weren’t any ‘money routing protocols’, individuals couldn’t transact

with each other without an intermediary to facilitate this transaction.
Entrepreneurs and Venture Capitalists (VCs) saw an opportunity in this flaw.
Online businesses could become these intermediaries for everyone on the
internet.
With the help of plentiful capital, entrepreneurs started inventing and evolving
ever-faster ways to make money on the internet. In the early internet days, it
became clear that online businesses need not have a natural ceiling the way other
offline businesses had. Costco could have a great business model, but if it didn’t
have a store in your area, it didn’t matter. But amazon.com could be accessed by
anyone, anywhere. Amazon could become bigger than Costco while incurring
fewer brick & mortar costs.
Becoming big also triggered another positive feedback loop. As more people
started transacting on the web, they would now look to the existing, trusted big
brands on the web, such as Amazon. And if you already had many sellers on
your platform, your platform was better than the competition. Any early leads
you get serve as a barrier to your competition. Entrepreneurs understood that as
opposed to the cautious strategies of building offline businesses, online
businesses were about speed and scale. The biggest would also be most likely to
keep getting bigger, faster.
 A lot of investors poured money into the dot-com boom of the mid to late
1990s. Even the Wall Street Journal advised personal investors to ‘rethink’ the
‘quaint idea’ of profits and take an interest in internet stocks. Common slogans
popular between entrepreneurs and investors in the late 1990s are simply blunter
versions of what we hear today. They included ‘get big fast’ or ‘get large or get
lost’.
Although the dot-com bubble burst, the investors were unlucky, not incorrect.
The internet business models they were betting on were winner-take-all by
design. They attracted a lot of capital because once the dust settled, the eventual
winner would have a very stable hold over the market—a virtual monopoly.
Once a sufficiently large player emerges, most investors would stop putting
capital into alternatives. The competition would get wiped out because the big
tend to get bigger, and the smaller ones shrink to zero. None of this was illegal.
It was simply uncharted territory.
This fundamental winner-take-all logic is still how we fund and build internet
businesses today. VCs explicitly want to fund online businesses with a ‘moat’.
That is a fundamental systematic advantage in their design, which is a legal but
difficult barrier for the competition to overcome. Once VCs fund companies,
they encourage them to burn money to become unicorns. That is, ‘get big or get
lost’, but phrased in more contemporary terms such as ‘blitzscaling’. Companies
start focusing on improving the product, solving consumer problems, offering
adjacent services, etc. to scale.
But this focus on scale is also how the toxic patterns begin. Many companies
start making tweaks to increase their metrics. These tweaks, like autoplay or
infinite feeds, do lead to an increase in our usage. But, increased usage is not
always in line with the user’s goals. The increased usage isn’t always from free
will, and could sometimes be from addiction.

We, the authors, have spent nearly the entirety of our careers in the space of
information technology and related policy. Despite the thirty-four-year
difference in our ages, we share a sense of wonder and excitement in what
information technology has achieved and continues to achieve. For both of us,
the internet has been a fantastic opportunity to learn and connect with wonderful
people. It is full of exciting problems to work on. We’re both optimistic that the
answer to society’s problems lies in more, not less, technology.
Optimism is not the same as naivety. Our excitement about technology is
specifically about humanity’s increasing ability to do marvellous things. Using
that ability to benefit all of society is another challenge altogether. Our current,
winner-take-all internet does not meet this challenge.
Although the internet started as an open and decentralized network in the
1980s, private companies have built most of our modern web over the last three
decades. The original creators of the internet may have laid the foundation with
an open communications network. But, we’ve outsourced building the rest of our
internet infrastructure to players building walled gardens.
Companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon or other such large tech
companies are large because they each fulfil an essential function on the web.
Facebook is how we communicate with our social networks. Google has built an
index of the web. Amazon has created the largest marketplace. They are all
digital infrastructure, and in the pursuit of market share growth, they have all
been designed to be winner-take-all.
A handful of tech companies effectively own the roads and highways of the
digital world. We are looking at a future in which these companies are not just
the winners of their own markets but also have the power to decide who wins in
all adjacent markets. For example, the online travel industry alleges that Google
favoured its own hotel and flight booking products in search results. Amazon has
been accused of propping up its own brands on its marketplace search results.
Uber drivers are often protesting about how the company’s fare policies work
against the drivers’ interests.
Tech companies maintain they are acting in the users’ best interests, but their
competitors see an unfair advantage in their ability to change search results or
set prices. Even without those systematic advantages, competing with these
giants is challenging because of the vast resources they have now amassed. In
April 2020, the top five tech companies alone were sitting on US$555 billion in
cash and cash equivalents. These companies have achieved their dominant
position by genuinely building innovative products and giving users what they
want. Just because they have near-monopoly power doesn’t automatically imply
they will abuse it.
But the question to ask ourselves is why even afford them the chance?

The original internet had a simple idea built into its design. The network that
connected everyone was not to be controlled by any single one. The internet
belonged to everyone and no one. This is not a radical decision. The precursor to
the internet was built as a defence research project by a collaboration of
scientists across many universities. In a few years, development of the
technology moved to academia. The time and effort that went into the internet
was essentially funded by public institutions, i.e., by all of us. It is hardly
surprising that the output of the combined efforts of thousands of scientists and
engineers, funded by public money, was a technology that belonged to all of us.
Our current internet infrastructure looks very different from what the internet
was supposed to be. Instead of belonging to all of us, critical parts of the internet
are under the control of a few players. Internet companies gloss over this
difference because they maintain that what’s good for the user is good for the
business. In the presence of alternatives, customers will choose the product that
serves their needs well, and affordably. This is true when the control over the
infrastructure is used to help users achieve their goals. However, it is when user
goals and the platform’s goals misalign, that we should be worried about their
power.
In 1998, two graduate students, funded by a public grant, wrote a paper
talking about this problem in the context of search engines. ‘The goals of the
advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search
to users,’ they wrote. ‘We expect that advertising funded search engines will be
inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of
the consumers.’
Who had this foresight in 1998? Sergei Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders
of Google.
We do not doubt that the people who start, or work at internet firms are honest
individuals trying to do good. But as they say, the road to hell is paved with good
intentions. The issues we have today with the internet—misinformation, loss of
privacy, losing attention, increase in polarization, election meddling, etc.—are
all questions around the design of our digital infrastructure, and hence, are all
questions about control over our digital infrastucture. The imbalance of power
over critical infrastructure is not amenable to an equal or just future.
Regulations can check some excesses of internet companies, but they can’t
resolve the fundamental paradox created by private infrastructure. If we continue
funding and building the internet the way we currently do, we risk upsetting not
just our livelihoods and our economy but all of our major societal institutions.
While we can learn how to manage ourselves better and practise bitfulness, we
also need to fix the underlying problem in our relationship with technology.
We need to rebuild our digital roads and highways in the way we build our
regular roads and highways—designed to serve us and not for us to serve them.

WORKING TOGETHER
Disease is as old as humans, but pandemics are a side-effect of civilization. The
COVID-19 virus may have originated in a single city in China, but our transport
and logistics networks made the new disease a global pandemic. Even the Black
Plague, which killed approximately a quarter of the population in the fourteenth
century, was spread from port city to port city by rats travelling on merchant
ships. Our transportation network also leads to increased fossil fuel consumption
and climate change. Every time humans have created networked technologies,
we have created a new class of complex problems.
When it comes to the other two existential crises facing humanity, we have a
reasonable plan to address problems emerging from our technology, even if it is
hard to follow.
During the pandemic, in just a few days, we figured out that to prevent
catching COVID-19, people must wash their hands, wear a mask, maintain a
minimum distance of six feet, and avoid unventilated rooms. For climate change,
we know that we must move to cleaner fuels, minimize consumption of plastic,
eat less meat, travel less and by foot where possible. These are simple measures
that we can all take to lessen the problem.
 These individual solutions, however, help manage, not eliminate, the problem.
To end a pandemic, we need collective action. We need countries to invest in
testing and health infrastructure, develop and administer vaccines, implement
better pandemic preparation plans, among other measures. To fix climate change,
we need better policies such as carbon taxes, clean air legislation, better
monitoring of pollution, promotion of renewable energy, and other big ideas.
Every new global technology creates problems, but our history demonstrates
we can solve those problems if we coordinate and cooperate. Our most recent
progress on vaccines for the COVID-19 pandemic shows us what we can do if
we are willing to do what it takes and do it together.
The internet is the first technology to connect everyone and give everyone a
voice. It is connecting people who have never coordinated before. There are
bound to be complex problems that emerge as this technology becomes widely
adopted. We do not call the internet’s missing infrastructure a crisis to make it
sound graver than it is. We call it a crisis because it affects all of us, and like any
crisis, it will require collective action to fix. In the absence of our collective will,
our digital infrastructure become walled gardens. We have some freedom but no
control over the design of the infrastructure itself. As more of our lives become
digital, the power over this infrastructure will equate with power over all
dimensions of our lives. We need to reach a consensus on what our digital
infrastructure should look like and what values it should protect. In Part Three of
this book, we cover what we can do to solve The Third Crisis collectively.
Before we do that, we’re going to start by fixing our individual relationship
with our technology. We want to restore a sense of calm and control in how we
use our devices. In Part Two of the book, we go over some specific strategies to
reclaim our time, attention and privacy. We also cover the principles that guide
them so that you can adapt these ideas to your own personal situation.
Ultimately, these principles represent a simple truth—if you don’t design your
technology around your life, someone else will design your life around their
technology. If you want to control your time, attention, and privacy, you will
need more than just willpower or quick hacks.
You need a system.
 PART TWO
THE INDIVIDUAL
 4
HOW TO BE BITFUL

A QUIET MIND
In 1972, Timothy Gallwey, a college administrator and part-time tennis coach,
wrote a book that would change how all professional athletes trained. Instead of
teaching stances, grips, swings or other technical details of tennis, the book
called the Inner Game of Tennis focused entirely on what happens inside a
player’s mind.
Gallwey believes that most people need to stop consciously trying to play well
and instead quieten the mind. Our mind places obstacles between us and our best
performance in the form of self-doubt, criticism and lapses in concentration. We
all have an inner critic, telling us how we’re failing or that we need to do better.
Allowing these thoughts to take over can dampen any player’s performance. A
quiet mind silences the inner critic. It allows our subconscious to focus
exclusively on playing and not on judging how we played. Hence, Gallwey
believes that the most important skill for good tennis is relaxed concentration.
He offers a slightly unsportsmanlike method to test his theory.
The next time you are playing an opponent having a ‘hot streak’, Gallwey
suggests you ask them, ‘What are you doing so differently that’s making your
forehand so good today?’ Most will acknowledge the compliment and take your
question sincerely. They will reply with how they are swinging or meeting the
ball in front and other such details. When you get back to the game, your
compliment is likely to do more damage than any insult. Your opponent will try
to follow their own advice. Their mind is now paying attention to the very things
they advised you about. Their effortless hot streak will falter as they try to put
conscious effort into their shots.
The ideas in Gallwey’s book were groundbreaking for their time. The role of
psychology in sports performance hadn’t gained mainstream popularity when the
book was first released. The first Journal of Sports Psychology was published
only in 1979. The 1984 Olympics would see the first sports psychologists travel
with some of the teams. By the next Olympics, most teams had multiple of them.
Gallwey’s book clearly articulated what every professional sports team would
soon realize: ‘The opponent within your own head is more daunting than the one
on the other side of the net.’
Gallwey’s observation is just as valid outside the tennis court. The publishers
had expected this niche book to sell maybe 20,000 copies to budding tennis
players. The book has sold over a million copies, not only to athletes from all
disciplines but also business leaders, musicians and anyone else trying to
improve at something. None of these other readers wanted to learn about tennis.
They wanted to learn about the mental state of relaxed concentration that allows
one to excel at anything.
Unsurprisingly, scientists have since then given this mental state a name and
studied it extensively. In 1996, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote the seminal book
on this mental state titled Flow. He describes ‘flow’ as a mental state in which a
person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus,
full involvement and enjoyment in the process of the activity.
All of us have experienced flow.
Whether in sports, at work or in pursuit of a hobby, we have had the
experience of being fully immersed in an activity. We have full concentration on
the task at hand. We lose a sense of time and place. Action and awareness merge,
and making the next move is effortless. We don’t need external motivation to
continue. Our minds naturally quieten, and we are intensely focused yet relaxed.
If the Flow mental state sounds familiar, it is because it describes exactly The
Zone from Chapter 2. Natasha Dow Schüll, the author of Addiction By Design,
claims that the designs of slot machines naturally lend themselves to this flow-
like state where players lose a sense of time and place. The two states are
indistinguishable in their effects on us. The only difference lies in the alignment
of our intention and attention.
Gallwey’s fundamental insight is as relevant to our screens as it is to sports. If
we are trying to spend less time on our screens or forcing ourselves to be
productive, we are not unlike the tennis player on a ‘hot streak’ reminded of their
forehand. Our conscious effort only makes it harder to actually do our best.
 The more daunting opponent is within your own head. Self-doubt, self-
judgement and other negative emotions get in the way of our best work. Our
minds seek refuge from these unpleasant emotions and often find it in the
distractions on our devices. Over time, these toxic patterns get reinforced and
solidify.
Instead of giving in to these patterns, we need to learn the art of bitfulness.

HOW TO BE BITFUL
Most of us think of our devices in the same way in which we think of hammers.
We see our technology as a tool that we use to get things done. As the old
adage has taught us, a bad workman always blames his tools. Being good
workmen, when we are unable to focus, we blame ourselves instead. We think
the solution to our problems is to concentrate harder. We use willpower to direct
our minds to focus on the task. If we have a focused mind, we will be better
operators of our tools.
This model puts the cart before the horse.
Yes, we operate our phones as tools, but the relationship isn’t one way. These
tools affect us deeply in a way that no hammer ever can. An experiment was
conducted with 800 smartphone users by Professor Adrian Ward from University
of Texas. In the experiment, people were randomly divided into groups where
one group had to keep their phones on their desks, face down. Another group
had to keep their phones in their pockets or bags, but out of sight. The third
group of people were asked to leave their phones in another room during the
tests. In all three groups, some were asked to turn off their phones.
The participants were then given tasks that needed cognitive effort. Even
though all participants reported giving their full focus and attention to the task at
hand, the participants whose phones were in the other room significantly
outperformed those whose smartphones were on them.
 It didn’t even matter if those who had their phones had turned them off. If the
phones were near or on them, their capacities diminished.
‘We see a linear trend that suggests that as the smartphone becomes more
noticeable, the participants’ available cognitive capacity decreases,’ Ward said.
‘Your conscious mind isn’t thinking about your smartphone, but that process—
the process of requiring yourself to not think about something—uses up some of
your limited cognitive resources. It’s a brain drain.’
In the internet age, our devices are more than just tools. Our devices don’t
merely connect to the internet. They also represent our connection to the world.
A large part of our social interactions now happen through these devices. Your
acceptance letter for college, that email about your promotion, the texts from
your partner, the results of your blood test, the graphs showing whether your
investments are going up or down—our phones are the physical manifestation of
all this information that affects us deeply. As Professor Ward discovered, simply
the presence of a smartphone is enough to reduce cognitive capacity as we try
not to check it.
Now imagine the ability of your phone to affect your mental and emotional
states when you are looking at it. We use our devices to get things done, but our
devices are also doing things to us.
Our attempts to spend less time on our personal distractions often fail because
we fail to consider the two-way nature of this relationship.
We look at restricting screen time the way we look at restricting calories—as
an act of self-deprivation. Trying to restrict screen time requires us to constantly
exert willpower against our desire to pick up our phones and check in on the
things we care and worry about. Exerting willpower is already hard but it
becomes harder when we’re fixating on a negative rule that deprives us. Trying
to not use your phone is like trying to not think of an elephant. The more you
think about NOT doing something, the harder it becomes to NOT do it.
Instead, we need to focus our energy on a different but positive rule. We need
to pay attention to the quality of the time we spend on our screens rather than its
quantity.
Each time we use our devices, we access them in one of two modes. Either we
can use them mindfully— in flow, focused on what we want to do, or we can use
them as an escape—mindlessly chasing the ‘zone’ to avoid doing what we
should do.
We think of bitfulness as the ability to spend our time on our devices better.
Specifically, we want to focus on making sure that the time we spend with our
devices is mindful and aligned with our intentions. We understand that advising
someone who is struggling with focus to be more mindful is akin to asking
someone feeling low to be happier instead.
The hard part is not knowing what to do but how to do it.
The next eight chapters of this book deal with the how. We cover practical
strategies to spend time on our devices mindfully and quieten the inner critic.
But to help us bridge the gap between knowing what to do and knowing how to
do it, it is useful to understand why these strategies help.
The art of bitfulness comes down to three fundamental principles.
1. Mirrors, not Windows
2. Don’t swim upstream
3. Define our selves

In the rest of this chapter, we explore what each of these means.

MIRRORS, NOT WINDOWS

Being mindful means being aware.
Specifically, it means being aware of one’s own state of mind without
judgement. When we are aware of our state of mind, we can make calm
decisions rather than react emotionally. Using our devices mindfully doesn’t
mean having to be a zen monk and detaching from the worldly pleasure of our
devices. It also doesn’t imply that we will never end up wasting time on our
devices. Being mindful allows us to step away from our usual frame to see our
context, thoughts, emotions and actions in perspective.
It means that the next time we catch ourselves scrolling aimlessly, we won’t
jump to conclusions like ‘I am useless because I always procrastinate’ or ‘This
app is addictive and hence I waste time.’ Instead, being mindful means you can
reflect and ask, ‘Why did I choose to scroll rather than do X?’. Answering that
question honestly holds a much better chance of fixing our problems than any
‘hack’.
Science tells us that the most likely answer to why we procrastinate lies in our
emotions.
As we said before, procrastination is not a time-management problem; it is an
emotion-regulation problem. Dr Fuschia Sirois, professor of psychology at the
University of Sheffield, says, ‘People engage in this irrational cycle of chronic
procrastination because of an inability to manage negative moods around a task.’
The cycle goes like this:
You think about doing a task. Your brain projects into the future and imagines
what doing the task will feel like. Your brain predicts that doing this task will
generate a negative mood. This prediction of a future negative mood puts you in
a negative mood right now, often causing us to avoid and delay the task.
 The reasons for negative moods around a task may be many. It could be that
the task is boring or inherently unpleasant, like scrubbing the toilet. A lot of
people put off making their will, even though it is both easy and critical because
it involves thinking about the unpleasant idea of their own death. Another reason
for a negative mood could also be that the task triggers deeper feelings of
insecurity, low self-esteem, self-doubt or other anxieties. For example, someone
may be delaying updating their resume because they have a latent fear of being
rejected. In every case, our brains avoid the potential negative mood by avoiding
doing the task altogether.
Feeling a mixture of emotions around a task is not unnatural. If anything, it
probably means you care about what you’re doing and are invested in getting it
right. We can’t and don’t have to change how we feel about a task.
What we need to change are the toxic patterns of behaviour we’ve learnt with
our devices when we encounter those emotions.
Whenever we feel these emotions, we reach for our phone or switch to a new
tab and seek escape. Reinforcement over the hundreds of times we touch our
phone every day means that this pattern is an almost automatic habit. We may
open the offending app mindlessly before we even realize that we have.
The Third Crisis is further aggravating our toxic relationship. Internet
businesses need our attention to sustain. The logic of their business model means
that our devices are configured to nudge us toward these windows of escape.
Wherever we are, whenever we like, our phones act as portals to other worlds.
This can be a useful property sometimes, but not when we’re procrastinating.
Since procrastination is an emotion-regulation problem, we need to look
inwards, not outwards.
We don’t need windows; we need a mirror.
Our devices are much more useful when we use them to become aware of our
emotions rather than give in to them. Instead of escaping on our devices, we can
use them to check in with our own minds and untangle the thoughts racing
within. It could be as simple as a reminder to meditate, tracking the time we
spend on mindless apps, or a journal to write in.
It is not just emotions, though. Using our devices as mirrors means we use
them more generally as tools for reflection.
 Our devices can help us think more and think clearly. Our total screen time
has risen to as high as eleven hours a day on average. It has absorbed all those
idle pockets of time when we normally would have thought about hard problems
or the future. In Chapter 6, we focus specifically on how to think with
computers.
Although these tools for reflection are easily available, we use them rarely or
only when we are particularly stressed. However, the best time to fix a leaky roof
is when the sun is shining. We need to build regular habits of reflection if we
want to break our irrational cycle of escapism.
Chapters 5–6 cover strategies to build such habits.

DON’T SWIM UPSTREAM

How does one quieten their mind?
If we were playing tennis, Gallwey would advise paying attention to the ball.
All tennis players are obviously paying attention to the ball. Still, Gallwey asks
players to pay attention to the ball like they’ve never seen one before. To
carefully observe how its seams are moving in flight. He also recommends that
players say out loud ‘Bounce’ when the ball bounces and say ‘Hit’ when their
rackets connect with the ball.
Gallwey observed that when his students were absorbed in the rhythmic
activity of tracking the ball and saying ‘Bounce–Hit’, tended to quieten their
minds. They become engaged only in the present moment. They are able to play
from muscle memory and intuition. Their inner critic quietens down too. They
do not have the mental space to get distracted by their self-doubt, judgement or
worries about the score. Their better inner game improves their outer game
naturally.
The practice of Mindfulness Meditation uses a similar technique. Meditation
techniques understand the mind’s tendency to wander and do not look upon stray
thoughts as a problem. They expect the mind to wander. Every time this
happens, they only advise gently bringing back attention to one’s breathing. With
practice, taking slow, deliberate breaths occupies our complete attention, and our
mind quietens.
 It is pointless to force the mind to be quiet. Instead, what really makes our
mind quiet is engagement in an activity. This activity could be as simple as
focusing on your breathing or as complex as playing tennis. A quiet mind does
not mean that your brain is inactive. In fact, your mind is quiet because your
brain is fully occupied by the activity. We are engaged so deeply that we do not
have the bandwidth for negative thoughts or distracting mental chatter. Our
actions and responses come from a deeper place than our consciousness. Such a
state of complete engagement with the task at hand is what Csikszentmihalyi
called flow.
Csikszentmihalyi believes that people can experience flow in any part of their
lives. To understand the mechanics of flow, Csikszentmihalyi interviewed
thousands of people from diverse backgrounds who experienced flow in their
work, including Dominican monks, blind nuns and Himalayan climbers,
amongst others. In his research, he identified three preconditions for activities
that get us into a state of flow.

The first is to have a clear goal and clarity on how to achieve it.
Second, there must be immediate feedback to our actions.
Third, there must be a balance of skill and challenge.

Essentially, taking action towards a well-defined, challenging but achievable

goal gets us engaged and into a flow state. You can see these preconditions in
action in any video game. Video games are optimized for flow. People who play
games regularly will describe the feeling of losing a sense of time and place to
the game. Most addictive games give players a goal—either a score or a ranking
to maximize. All video games give immediate visual or auditory feedback,
including an explicit score, to their players that tell them how they’re doing. As
players learn new skills, the challenges presented by the game get increasingly
tough. Most games don’t give players any rewards for playing, yet people pour
hours into them because they induce ‘flow’.
Engineering flow makes motivation unnecessary. If you are absorbed in what
you are doing, you don’t need an explicit reason to do it. At work, we depend on
deadlines, commitments or willpower to motivate us to finish our tasks. We do
things because we tell ourselves they need to be done. We try to suppress our
emotions about the task and force ourselves to work. Motivating oneself to finish
a task requires exerting cognitive effort and can be tiring. On the other hand,
video games can pull us in even on the days we don’t feel like getting much
done.
Being in flow means being able to sustain our focus without effort. It is a state
of relaxed concentration.
Our minds are still highly suggestible. We are usually not aware about how
our tongue feels in our mouth, but simply reading this sentence probably shifted
your focus onto your tongue. The flow state is both elusive and fragile. Anyone
who has experienced it knows it is hard to achieve and easy to lose. For a truly
quiet mind, we need to pay attention to friction.

In the context of ‘flow’, friction is anything that requires you to switch context
and apply cognitive effort to another task. This could be a notification from a
messaging app we decided to check or a noisy environment. Besides the usual
suspects, it can also be all the stuff that simply gets in our way.
Imagine you are making a presentation for your office. You need to pull up a
spreadsheet of the previous quarter’s results for a chart. You go looking for the
file on your computer. You know you saw it a few days ago, but don’t remember
what it’s called. Soon your focus has moved to the task of finding that
spreadsheet. You wander through folders and then eventually land up in your
email inbox. While you’re there, you end up checking your email. Even when
you eventually find the spreadsheet, switching back to the original task is now
more challenging since your ‘flow’ is lost. Your train of thought has been
derailed.
Friction is the most overlooked waste of our time. We often blame distractions
such as Facebook, email or other notifications for interrupting our work.
However, a study has shown that people who have just been interrupted for any
reason are more likely to check their email or Facebook before getting back to
the task they were doing. Thus, on average, workers in the study took anywhere
between fifteen and twenty-five minutes to get back to the same state as they
were before the interruption. We’ve all experienced this delay between being
interrupted and getting back on task. At twenty minutes per interruption, a dozen
such interruptions in a day can mean we waste half our working day trying to
work rather than working.
The concepts of flow and friction taken together tell us an interesting property
of our own attention: Our attention seems to have inertia.
Newton captured the idea of inertia with the first of his three laws of motion.
A body at rest or in motion continues to remain at rest or in motion unless acted
upon by a force. Something similar happens to our minds. A deeply engaged
mind continues to remain engaged on a single topic until context is switched. A
distracted mind continues to be distracted until we deeply engage with a new
context. Switching between the two states is cognitively hard and costly on our
time.
This summarizes the second principle of bitfulness: Don’t swim upstream.
You wouldn’t prepare for exams by taking your books to a nightclub. And
although you could, you wouldn’t want to drink and dance in a library in
daylight. In physical spaces, we understand the obvious idea of a conducive
environment. However, we lose sight of the same digitally.
Our technology habits are designed around the hammer model. We expect a
superhuman version of ourselves, who cannot be distracted, will show up and
execute the task no matter what the environment.
The human brain may have been the inspiration for computers, but it is not a
computer itself. We cannot shut down one task and start another seamlessly in
our heads as we can on our devices due to attentional inertia. If our environment
is distracting, we are spending effort in trying to stay focused rather than being
completely engaged such that focus is effortless.
Not swimming upstream means that instead of fighting the mind, we learn to
quieten it. Chapters 7-10 cover how we can achieve a quiet mind by maximizing
flow and minimizing friction.

DEFINE OUR SELVES

No person is an island.
A lot of people feel compelled to check their devices because their workplace,
familial obligations or other commitments require them to. The fact that our
devices can connect us anytime and anywhere has become as much a curse as it
is a gift. We expect everyone to be connected all the time and everywhere.
Especially in remote work or when working across time zones, the lines between
work and not-at-work start blurring.
It is obvious that this is not healthy. Many workplaces still hold on to the silly
idea that longer hours equal sincere, hard workers. In all likelihood, such a
culture is burning out one half of employees and creating fear or resentment in
the other half who have non-work commitments.
Before the digital era, our routine was divided in both time and space. We left
for the office in the mornings in our work clothes. If we were to meet friends,
we’d go out in the evenings looking very different. Even if we were to go out
with colleagues for a celebration, ties would be loosened, sleeves rolled up and
hair let down. These little rituals may seem insignificant, but they acted as
signals to our brain. It knew where you are, and therefore who you had to be.
People wear many identities. Depending on the context, they are either a
parent, a partner, a friend, an employee, a colleague, a boss, a volunteer, a citizen
or one of many others. We are so adept at switching our identity throughout the
day that we don’t even notice we’re doing it. Our current internet makes this
much harder to do.
Our phones require us to switch rapidly between our multiple identities.
Whereas once our routine was divided in time and space, a hyperconnected
world means that we could be required to act in any capacity at any time. We’re
not just switching tasks but also identities. One moment you’re answering emails
to your boss, and the next you are sending memes to your friends. This is how
the lines between work and non-work begin to blur.
On the internet, especially on social media, our multiple identities collide
because there is context collapse. This means that your posts are on display to
multiple audiences simultaneously. You may tell your colleagues that you need
to skip the office party to look after your child. Normally, this would be a white
lie with no harm and a polite way to refuse. However, it is going to be awkward
in the office the next day when someone tags you in a picture from the close
friend’s party you did go to instead.
As more and more of our life goes online, we are putting a lot of these
identities out on the internet. Outside of socially awkward situations, we also
have to worry about our privacy. Part of the reason we shifted identities in
different contexts was to define how much of ourselves we reveal to others. The
Third Crisis is taking away that choice from us in the pursuit of their business
model.
Removing the nuances of context and a bounded audience also leads to one of
social media’s biggest problems—conflict. No matter what our message, or
intent behind it, if it reaches an audience that does not share our context, it is
very likely to offend or upset someone. Our need for privacy becomes even more
critical in this constant conflict. A motivated and skilled actor can cause much
financial, reputational or even physical harm with our data.
This brings us to the third principle of bitfulness: Define Our Selves.
The skill of moving between our identities and adapting as per context was
effortless in the real world. We knew who we were, depending on where we
were. In the digital world, we have to develop this skill intentionally. Privacy is
the act of maintaining this separation of selves, even in the online sphere.
We can’t let the internet or social media define who we are, we need to define
our selves and limit who has access to each of them. Chapters 11-12 cover
strategies to protect your privacy online.

CHOOSING CALMNESS
The mind, as they say, is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.
When we are able to control our attention, quieten our mind and focus on a
task, we can achieve great things. However, that is not how we behave by
default. Our mind’s default response is controlled by our emotions.
This is not a bug but a feature. Our brains help us process the information in
our complex environment and past memories to figure out what we should do
next. Logical, rational thinking is a useful skill, but survival depends on the
speed of our reaction to dangerous situations. We would not survive if we waited
for danger to occur before action.
Our emotions offer a shortcut to reasoning. For example, we feel scared when
we approach the edge of a cliff in anticipation of a fall. Our body stiffens, we
move more carefully and are more alert. From an evolutionary perspective, it
would be quite useless if we felt scared only after we fell.
 While our emotions are good at predicting what happens if we fall off a cliff,
they aren’t necessarily well-calibrated to more modern perils. Our emotional
predictions are low-fidelity and biased towards survival, making them inaccurate
models for our modern, day-to-day tasks.
The Third Crisis further exploits our brain’s reward mechanisms. Our time,
attention and data drive a large part of the internet economy. We know variable
rewards, and other such user-hostile design keeps us addicted. However, even
without social media’s algorithmic feeds or the flow-inducing immersive worlds
of video games, the internet still offers infinite novelty. Novelty itself is highly
addictive because of the way it triggers a dopamine release in our heads. It’s
hard to not feel curious or excited about the unknown and the undiscovered, all
from the safety of your phone.
The dread we feel about an assignment is probably not a good prediction of
how dangerous it is to us overall. The excitement of a new video posted on
social media does not actually correspond to how much satisfaction that video
will give us in the long run. Both these emotions are counterproductive for the
situation we are in. They drive us to reach for our phones and use them
mindlessly instead.
The challenge isn’t to stop feeling these emotions. The brain will continue to
keep predicting what we should do next, and those predictions will continue to
manifest as emotions. The key idea of bitfulness is that we become more aware
of how our mind works and change the way we use these devices to reflect that
understanding.
The real trick is to listen to our emotions and notice when we feel
overwhelmed. Are our devices helping us calm down or are they causing the
overwhelm? The goal of bitfulness is for us to be more self-aware about our
emotions during the time we use our devices and change our behaviour so as to
be calm. A lot of advice in this book mirrors productivity advice, but the
objective isn’t to get maximum things done; it is to feel the least stress.
Productivity will follow.
In the next eight chapters of this book, we deep dive into each of these three
principles. We focus on how to reclaim our time, attention and privacy.
This is, undoubtedly, a hard task. We recommend making these changes one
tiny habit at a time. Identify and focus on one behaviour pattern that you want to
change. Apply whichever strategies fit you and your problem the best. The best
part is that our brains are constantly learning. Do the new behaviour often
enough, and you can actually update your brain’s defaults, making the new
behaviour a habit.
After all, the most daunting opponent is in your own head.
 5
HOW TO THINK CLEARLY

THINKING BEFORE DOING

How do you look for keys you’ve misplaced?
A lot of us, especially if we’re in a hurry, tend to start rummaging. We search
frantically and in an unfocused manner. We move things around, with no plan in
particular. If the keys are in an obvious place, this method works. When they
aren’t, we tend to spiral.
Not being able to find the keys makes us panic more. Our search becomes
even more frantic. We think looking harder means moving more. We jump from
one area to the next and often go over the same places again and again. We
check the fridge or even under the mattress, just in case.
We already know that the calmer, more effective way to look for our keys is to
be systematic. First, try to remember the last moment where you did have the
key. Recreate what you did after that in as much detail as possible. Start by
looking in the most likely places, and once you’ve searched an area, do not circle
back.
The plan itself is not brilliant, but being aware enough to push back against
the panic, and make a plan instead, is a rare trait.
Our instinctive method of thinking is very similar to how we look for the
keys. We don’t really have a plan. We start rummaging through our mind for all
our thoughts about a subject. We often flit from one thought to another. We circle
back over the same thoughts. As long as our mind is moving, we think we’re
making progress.
Our screens exacerbate this tendency. Our devices give us the ability to jump
right into things, and we often do so without a plan. Say we’re thinking of a
larger goal like losing weight. Our minds may start fixating on a minor detail.
Usually, something easy and not unpleasant, like which fitness smartwatch we
should buy. If we have a screen around, we start looking through reviews and
unboxing videos. We will then probably decide to check notifications, scroll
through feeds, or get into other such mindless activities before getting back to
thinking about our weight.
Technically, we did do something about our goal, but was this really where we
were going to find the key insight (sorry), or were we just looking in the fridge?
When we focus on a thought, we inherently overestimate its ability to
influence us. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel-prize winning author of Thinking
Fast and Slow, calls this cognitive bias his ‘fortune cookie maxim’. The focusing
illusion is pithily surmised by Kahneman as ‘Nothing in life is as important as
you think it is while you are thinking about it’. Money is the easiest example to
understand the focusing illusion. Ask people if being richer would make them
happier, and they say yes, because they imagine themselves with better things
and fewer problems. Data proves that more money does make people somewhat
happier but definitely not as much as they think it will. This difference between
fact and reality is what Kahneman calls the ‘focusing illusion’.
Thinking is hard. It is even harder to realize when we’re thinking irrelevant or
unimportant thoughts because of the combined effect of the focusing illusion and
our smartphones. Instead of letting these devices be windows we use to escape,
we ought to design them as mirrors to reflect on what is on our minds.
Since our current technology is encouraging our tendency to avoid thinking,
everyone jumps to the conclusion that we should try to minimize its use. The art
of bitfulness frames the problem differently:
Instead of being a tool to avoid thinking, can our technology help us think
better?

WRITING IS THINKING
In an Oral History of Richard Feynman, a set of interviews recorded and
transcribed by historian Charles Weiner, there’s an interesting aside that reveals
how the great physicist went about his thinking. During the conversation,
Feynman has trouble remembering the details of the events Weiner was asking
about.
 Feynman said, ‘If you’ll wait a second, I have things by which I can
remember. [. . .] So if I look at that thing, I can remember better what I was
doing at different times.’ The thing that Feynman was describing was his
notebooks. The audio breaks here, and the two return after having found the
notebooks. Weiner, the historian, sounds very pleased that a ‘record’ of
Feynman’s thoughts exists in written form. Feynman responds irritably. He
objects to the notebooks being called a ‘record’. Later in the same conversation,
we get this exchange:

Weiner: Well, the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still
here.

Feynman: No, it’s not a record, not really, it’s working. You have to work
on paper, and this is the paper. OK?

What is the relationship of our notes to our thoughts?

Many people believe what Charles Weiner did. Your notes are something you
make to record thoughts. It could be your own ideas, facts, appointments, to-do
lists but basically a record of things we would rather not forget.
Feynman is suggesting that the notes serve a very different purpose for him.
Feynman isn’t recording his thoughts for posterity. As he explains, we don’t do
the thinking in our head, we ‘have to work on paper, and this is the paper’. For
Feynman, writing is thinking.
Not all our thoughts occur to us well-formed. Sometimes, we only have a
vague sense of an idea. The process of thinking is the clarifying of this vague
sense into concrete knowledge that we can articulate and use. Writing thoughts
down helps them develop into something that we can recognize and understand.
American author Mary Flannery O’Connor put it in a simpler way—‘I write
because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.’
Feynman is not the first to have such a collection of thoughts in one place.
There are examples dating all the way back to Seneca in the second century AD,
and possibly earlier. Many thinkers in history had such notebooks, most
famously Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci’s notes contained ideas that would seem
absolutely ridiculous or impossible for the fifteenth century. It also contained
measurements of everyday things. But he still wrote those ideas down and even
made elaborate drawings of his future inventions. Not all his notes were
masterpieces, but the act of writing them down must have helped him think.
Why else would he have obsessively written everything down?
Often people resist the idea of writing, because it is ‘not for me’. Don’t be
fooled into thinking that writing is something just writers or academicians or
fifteenth-century geniuses do. You are writing your own thoughts for yourself.
The quality of the writing doesn’t matter as much as the act itself. It is a
surprisingly effective way to understand your own thoughts about any part of
life. Warren Buffet, another fan of writing to think, once said,

Some of the things I think I think, I find don’t make any sense when I start
trying to write them down. You ought to be able to explain why you’re
taking the job you’re taking, why you’re making the investment you’re
making, or whatever it may be. And if it can’t stand applying pencil to
paper, you’d better think it through some more.

The idea of using an extended mind to organize and develop your thoughts is not
new. The technology could be as simple as pen and paper. The real difference is
in our attitude towards it. We need to be humble about our own ability to think
clearly. Both Feynman and Buffett are often portrayed as geniuses of their own
respective domains. But even they don’t trust their head enough to do all their
thinking solely inside it.
Thinking is like any other skill. You get better at it through deliberate practice.
Writing is a time-tested, effective way to practise understanding and develop
your thoughts. Your extended mind can help make this deliberate practice an
effortless habit.
Which is why the first exercise we recommend to think clearly is Bitfulness
Meditation.

BITFULNESS MEDITATION
What is Bitfulness Meditation? It is easier to explain in comparison to the
Mindfulness Meditation you are probably familiar with.
Both are tools to increase your self-awareness. Mindfulness Meditation
teaches you how to ignore all stray thoughts in your mind. Bitfulness Meditation
teaches you how to focus on a single train of thought in your extended mind.
Mindfulness Meditation is about observing your thoughts without judgement and
letting them pass. Bitfulness Meditation is about observing your thoughts
without judgement and writing them down.
We recommend following along with this exercise.

1. Find a comfortable, quiet place

Being disturbed in the middle of this process will not help. So, find a time and
place where you are sure you can commit at least fifteen minutes of
uninterrupted time.

2. Create a space on your preferred device to write down your thoughts

This could be a text document on your laptop, the notes app installed by default
on your phone, or some other app. You only need to make sure this space is
easily accessible and what you write in it remains private. You can even change
this later, so just pick one now to get started.

3. Clear your mind by writing about what’s on it

Start a timer for at least five minutes. Now, simply start writing whatever is
presently on your mind, in a stream of consciousness style. Make it personal.
You can try starting with ‘I think . . .’ or ‘I feel . . .’. Do not try to sound smart or
even coherent. Ask yourself questions and then answer them honestly. No one is
reading this but you.
Write without any judgement or edits on what you are writing. You do not
need to fix typos. You don’t even have to stay on one topic. Simply focus on
letting your fingers translate your current thoughts into keystrokes till the timer
runs out. If you have more to say even after the timer is over, keep going. Many
find this part of the exercise is the most beneficial in becoming aware of their
emotional states.
4. Write about what you want to focus on

Once you feel like you’ve cleared your mind of all thoughts, you can now focus
on one task, thought or intention you want to work on. In all likelihood, this
worry would have featured in the text you just wrote down in Step 3. Simply
start writing about that task. Describe what needs to be done in the same style of
writing. If there are any problems or fears, write those down too.
In a fashion similar to Step 3, write without judgement or without correction.
If this is hard for you, cover your screen as you write. This way you simply can’t
read what you’ve written so far and will be less tempted to make corrections.
You may go off topic, and your mind may begin to wander. Whenever you sense
that you have gone too far astray, pause. Simply scan a few lines up, and pick up
from where you left off.
You can use a timer to decide when to stop or simply write till you feel clarity
of thought.

5. Step back and reflect on what you just wrote

Now that all your worries and doubts are out of your head, you should be feeling
a slight sense of calm. Depending on how much you wrote, you must be feeling
either a slight or great increase in your sense of control. You’re no longer in the
grip of the ‘focussing illusion’. Read through what you’ve written and without
editing or deleting, summarize for yourself what your thoughts are telling you to
do.
Hopefully, the next immediate action for you to take is clear, and so is your
motivation to do it.

Why does this work?

This exercise works because it is nothing but a form of journaling. If you tried
it, you might have felt some clarity. If you didn’t, you’re probably skeptical that
writing your thoughts for a few minutes is going to make a dent to the big
problems in your life.
 A lot of scientists were skeptical too so they put it to the test. Psychologists
and neuroscientists alike have found that journaling correlates with tremendous
health benefits, even if they are unable to ascertain why. Journaling reduces
stress, helps you cope with anxiety, increases positive mood, reduces symptoms
of depression, improves interpersonal relationships and even increases your
‘working memory’. Studies have shown that gratitude journals, where people
record a list of things that they are grateful for, even when recorded only once a
week, boost happiness.
Anyone who journals will readily tell you its mental health benefits. Where it
starts to get eye-popping is when you see reports of expressive journaling being
the difference that leads to lower blood pressure, significantly better quantity and
quality of sleep, increased T-Cell count and even faster healing of wounds. The
most probable explanation is that journaling lets you identify your own stress
and helps deal with it better, leading to health benefits. Simply writing down
what’s bothering you converts it from an abstract, all-consuming worry into
something much more contained and manageable.
Every time you start to feel stuck, overwhelmed or stressed, your head is
probably full of thoughts that you haven’t untangled yet. The brain has a
working memory that works similarly to that of a computer’s RAM. Whatever
we’re thinking about needs to be held in the working memory, and it has a
limited capacity. Any form of journaling empties your working memory, making
more room to think. Doing it digitally, like in Bitfulness Meditation, helps create
a habit of being self-aware while being in front of a screen. It becomes a ritual
that helps you ease into a state of relaxed concentration. It also creates a record
of those thoughts, so that you can later analyse what’s happening in your own
head to unstick yourself.
Often we try to plan our next move by thinking hard. We have a jumble of
ideas and problems, and we think of an action but also think of a downside to
that action. We think of other things we should be doing and other things causing
us worry. All of these interweaving thoughts send us into analysis paralysis. We
try to ‘think harder’, but we’re just doing more of the same incoherent mess.
However, writing is thinking. You’re not really planning unless you’re writing
your plan down. To-do lists or business plans force us to crystallize our thoughts
into actions before we write them down. Like O’Connor and Buffet, we too
won’t know what our thoughts are trying to tell us till we write them down so
that we can read them. By building the habit of Bitfulness Meditation and
writing freely, we think about structure after we’ve emptied our mind of all our
thoughts. Thus, letting us think clearly about what we need to do.
We can only guess why this practice works, but we can assure you that it does.
The next time you’re feeling overwhelmed or stuck, repeat this exercise. You
can repeat it as often as you need, as many times a day as you want. But to really
benefit from writing as thinking, we need to build this practice into a system.

HOW TO BE MORE SELF-AWARE

Pausing to think clearly helps us do more than just locate our keys.
Often, our first thoughts are not our best ones. Taking some time to be patient
and deliberate with our thinking would help in doing most things. However, we
know thinking is hard. Thinking takes time and effort. It also doesn’t give the
impression of doing much. Whereas, taking decisive action based on our first
thought feels like progress.
Time spent thinking does not take more time; it frees it up. The point of
thinking isn’t always to generate brilliant ideas. Thinking deliberately helps us
see all the ways in which we take useless action. Taking time to think helps us
prioritize and plan so that we need to take less action for the same results, and
feel much calmer while doing so.
To build a consistent habit of thinking clearly requires making the process of
thinking significantly easier. To do this, we believe that everyone needs an
explicit working memory. That is, we want a central place where everything we
want to think about is written. From our working memory, the process of
clarifying, organizing, and processing our thoughts can begin.
This is the simplest ‘hack’ that you can implement to break the toxic
relationship with your screen. Currently, every time you feel overwhelmed,
anxious or unmotivated, you use your screen as a window to escape. With a
working memory, you gain the ability to use it as a mirror, to reflect on what’s
really going on in your head. Its effectiveness is determined by how consistently
you use it to think.
 You can use the notes app you chose in the Bitfulness Meditation, or
something else, to be your working memory. There are now many types of note-
taking apps and word editors, all of which have fanbases that claim they’ll help
you build ‘a second brain’. Pick any one, since the most value comes from
collecting all your thoughts in the same place, rather than any other feature.
What really matters is accessibility: having the ability to record and retrieve your
thoughts easily, wherever you are, online or offline.
Even if you already write to think, collecting your thoughts in one place has
many advantages. The obvious advantage is that you can much easily find things
you had forgotten or misremembered. But once you build a consistent habit of
thinking by writing, it lets you see your own thinking evolve with time. This is
what Feynman did in his notebooks.
When Weiner first read Feynman’s notes, he thought they were a record
because of the way they were written. On the audio, he remarks that Feynman
wrote them,

almost in a first-person diary form asking yourself questions and then

setting out an agenda for work, indicating you spoke to so-and-so today and
you got this idea and then you want to pose yourself a certain agenda and
then tackling it. Each page is dated. Some pages have a later date on them
because you have gone back to them and said, well, this problem didn’t
work out, or it was solved in terms of the work done on 5 June 1968, or
incorporated into that. And so this represents the record of the day-to-day
work.

The way Weiner describes it, Feynman seemed to be mapping his thoughts to
work with them, rather than put down a record. The text wasn’t static, but
something that changed as his mind did.
Even in our digital world, Feynman’s notebooks have a lot to teach abut how
to build our working memory.
Feynman is also known to have said, ‘If you can’t explain something in
simple terms, you don’t understand it’. The notebooks tell us that Feynman
didn’t wait to find some novice to explain physics to. He used his working
memory to have a conversation with his own thoughts. He clarified his thoughts
by explaining them to himself, which is what probably made him such a great
explainer. He put a date on each page and then started writing what he thought
he should be doing, whom he spoke to, and even questions he’d answer months
later.
We recommend doing the same thing in your ‘working memory’. Make sure
there’s a new page or section for each date, and then note everything worth
noting that day on that page. You can plan your day. Ask yourself questions in
first-person form, and write down your own answers without judgement. If you
do the Bitfulness Meditation exercise, that could also be written here.
Essentially, you can capture any information that you want, as long as you’re
capturing it all in one place. Having determined an explicit place to do all your
thinking reduces the friction that comes from the question of ‘where do I store
this?’.
The rule to follow is simple—Everything you think today goes on today’s
page in your working memory.
Some of these thoughts will lead to actions. A lot of thoughts will simply
collect in your working memory, ready to be retrieved when you next need them.
We will cover how to process these in a later chapter. If you’re just beginning,
worry more about consistently capturing your thoughts than organizing them.
Habits are built by repetition.

Think of the working memory as a framework for daily reflection rather than
just a collection of notes. You can capture progress on a habit you’re trying to
build by noting down if you did or did not do it that day. You can make journal
entries to track your mood as well. You could also store external information you
came across that you find interesting or useful as Da Vinci did. It could be ideas,
quotes, jokes, recipes or stories too. All the half-thought thoughts that you plan
on thinking more about later can go here too.
There are advantages to being able to record things quickly and think about
them later. For example, you can understand how consistent you’ve been with
your habits by looking back over the data. There’s also the case of losing
information because you don’t use it in time. Often people recommend a book,
podcast, movie, article or artist to us just when we don’t have the time. You can
write this down in your working memory, including details on who
recommended what. Whenever you do have the time to read or watch something,
you can browse through your list of recommendations, rather than surfing the
internet. It might even prompt you to send the person who recommended it a
thoughtful thank you.
If you already do some version of note-taking, you may have observed a
problem. When your notes become numerous, it is hard to find something if you
only vaguely recollect what to search for. Search fails because it requires you to
remember exactly what you wrote. The easiest way around this problem is to
‘Save by Context’. In practice, saving by context means to tag extensively and
generously while making notes. In your notes, you can just add #idea, #quotes,
#recommendation, #habit or other such tags to group related ideas. There’s very
little penalty to over-tagging, and there is no such thing as too many tags. The
tags and links help create multiple paths to land at the same chunk of knowledge.
Since you save these notes by date anyway, they are already associated with the
context of other things on that day.
If you save by context sincerely, you are able to not only retrieve ideas you
had weeks or years ago but also retrace your steps and see what else you were up
to when you had that idea.
Over time, your working memory will become the starting point for all your
future work. It contains all the hard-earned knowledge and wisdom you’ve learnt
over the years. By writing down your own thoughts in one place, you ensure that
you don’t have to think the same thought twice. You can make reusable lego
blocks of knowledge that you can use to construct more advanced and original
thoughts.

USING YOUR WORKING MEMORY

AS A PLATFORM FOR REFLECTION
Like we said, the working memory is a platform for reflection. It really is a
wonderful tool that can help us excel at anything we’re trying to be more
thoughtful about.
Sharad Sharma of iSPIRT uses his technology to be more thoughtful in
conversations. One of the remarkable things about Sharad is how he can recall
details of past conversations you have had with him. If you ask him for advice,
he often recalls, in merry detail, conversations he has had with others who have
been in a similar bind as you. You may have mentioned a trivial fact to Sharad
about your family or a worry about a project. Sharad makes it a point to ask
about it in the next conversation, even if the next conversation is months later.
Sharad says that his memory is actually terrible, he simply follows a system
inspired by Azim Premji. In the summer of 2004 in Bangalore, Sharad had a
fleeting moment of conversation with Premji at an event. Sharad invited Premji,
who was then India’s richest man, to give a speech at his company in Pune.
Premji promised that whenever he was in Pune next, he would get in touch.
Sharad assumed this was a busy man politely declining another request for his
time.
Sharad was surprised when in January of 2005, Premji’s office got in touch.
Premji was coming to Pune and had asked his office to arrange a talk at Sharad’s
company if Sharad was still willing. Sharad says he had nearly forgotten that
brief exchange and was mind-blown that Premji remembered. When the two
finally met, Sharad asked Premji how he had managed to follow up after all that
while.
Premji told him that he aspired to be a man of his word, so he made it a point
to deliver on all his promises, whether small or big. Premji showed Sharad a set
of 5×7 index cards he carried, on which he wrote down all promises he made
that day. He later filed them in a way that made them easy to recall when he
needed them. This is how he remembered a quick promise made in a corridor,
more than six months later. Not superhuman memory, merely a system of storing
information and retrieving it as needed.
Five years later, Sharad quit his job and started iSPIRIT to help Indian start-
ups build world-class technology products out of India. In his new role as an
ecosystem builder, he says his success was making sure others succeeded. He
wanted to help Indian entrepreneurs reach their personal definition of success.
He had dozens of conversations with entrepreneurs every week. He wanted to
make sure he was helpful to each of them on their own personal journey.
He soon realized that he couldn’t help them in just one conversation. Nor
could he do it if he had forgotten their definition of success by the next time he
met them. So, inspired by Premji, he created his own working memory system.
 Here’s how Sharad’s system works. Whenever he has a few quick minutes, he
uses a note-taking software to record the highlights of every conversation he has
had with people throughout the day, often in the car ride right after a meeting. He
has these organized by the name of the individual to see the thread of
conversation. He says that recording isn’t that hard once the habit kicks in. Over
time you learn to calibrate what’s worth recording and what’s not. One persists
when one sees the value in it.
We often think of our digital devices as places where we go to do digital work
or where we go for entertainment. When we think of our devices as extended
minds, we can use them to help change how we think and behave in the real
world. We would all like to be as dependable as Premji or as thoughtful as
Sharad. What this story tells us is that these are not innate personality traits; we
can build a system that helps us become so.
You could use a working memory for cultivating any good habit or getting rid
of a bad one. You could use it to be more thoughtful in our relationships or at
work. These are all things that a working memory helps you do.
The more important question in designing your working memory is what do
you want it to help you become?

LONG-TERM MEMORY
STORAGE AND SEARCH

The analogy between computer and human memory is useful in our quest on
how to think better.
Memory serves two purposes in computers and humans. We already spoke
about RAM or working memory. The other kind of memory is what goes on
your hard disks—basically, a space for long-term storage and retrieval.
Computers are excellent at long-term storage, and humans are prone to
forgetting. Theoretically, we could just store everything we need to remember on
our devices. But the problem is one of retrieval. Where should I keep this file, so
that future-me can retrieve it easily? Where should I write down this information
so that I won’t be hunting for it when I need it? Where do I save this task so that
I know it will be done in the future?
 You may be thinking that computers have search. There is one wrinkle.
Computers search by comparison. Whereas, our memories work by association.
The most unique thing you may remember about a PDF you’re trying to find is
that your friend recommended it to you. If one can only remember a small
fragment of that document’s contents, search will be useless. Also, search results
become noisier the more you store.
Is there a way to organize our long-term storage that can guarantee we will
find the exact files we need when we need them?
Well, the simple answer is—No. The fundamental problem is that the only
person who can answer if an organizing system is useful is future-you. We do
not have a way of divining what our future self will be searching for. Organizing
systems often fail because of this fundamental unknowability. We overinvest in
creating structure, but that structure turns out to be useless anyway.
At the same time, clutter on our devices can feel stifling and overwhelm us.
We’ve all wasted time looking for that important file. Worse, we start looking for
the file, only to end up working on something else entirely. Organizing often
becomes an activity done for its own sake, to create a false sense of order and
peace.
Our take is that the system that is easiest to maintain is the system that works.
We need some organization, but don’t want to invest too much time in doing it.
If your system requires significant upkeep, it is not a good system. Since the best
organizational structure is fundamentally unknowable, it might be useful then to
leave most of the task to our future self. Instead of investing heavily in
organizing, we will do the least possible required. While you can’t be sure what
the future-you will be looking for, we can make sure the future-you is looking
for a needle in a drawer, not in a haystack. Anything more would be premature
optimization.
If you already have such a system in place, skip this section. But if you don’t,
we can tell you what works for us.

THE TOP-LEVEL HIERARCHY

We believe that you only need to have three top-level folders—Desktop,

Downloads and Documents—on any computer or even mobile. These
correspond to files that you need immediately, temporarily, and in the long run,
respectively.
The Desktop is for files that you are currently working on. It acts as an inbox
for files that need your attention soon. You should strive to have absolutely no
files on your Desktop except those currently required or in a queue to process.
Once completed, the file can either move to long-term storage in Documents or
be deleted if unnecessary.
The Downloads folder is for temporary storage. Let’s say you download a
PDF report on COVID-19 cases in your area that day. You do not need this
information again. Instead of filing it, you can safely leave it in your downloads.
Your downloads folder should always be in a state where even if all files in it are
suddenly deleted, you will not miss any of them. Your browser, email application
and all others should download files to this folder by default. If there is a file that
you may need longer than an instant, consciously move it to Desktop or file it in
Documents.
The Documents folder is your long-term storage. This is where everything that
matters to you lives. This is where you will need to go when you’re trying to
search for a file you have worked on previously. You may also need to store
receipts, tax records, health records and other such minutiae.
If you strictly keep data only in these three folders and nowhere else, you
solve one of the most important problems with long-term data—backups. We
recommend setting up a cloud storage account to automatically backup your
Desktop and Documents folders to the cloud. The advantage of this is simply
peace of mind. Even if you lose your devices at any point of time, your most
important files will always be safe and accessible.
The problem of organizing knowledge amongst many scientists at CERN is
why Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in the first place. Instead of
hierarchies, the hypertext markup language (HTML) championed the use of
links. Multiple branches of associative links emanating from every document
make up the ‘web’ of the world wide web. Links reduce the friction in following
your train of thought to the document or information you really need. Links can
be referenced easily in other documents, notes and emails so that the file is
available in context.
 Other than backup, links are the other advantage to cloud storage. Most cloud
storage providers will provide a unique link, i.e., URL, for every file we upload.
This link remains consistent even if we change the folder in which it is placed or
change the filename. This makes links even more robust, especially for sharing
files and folders with others who may have their own way of organizing their
files. You can simply add this link to your working memory with relevant
hashtags to remember the context. This makes finding the file even easier since
it associates the file with all sorts of context for that day.
If you only organize into three folders, back up to the cloud and save links in
your working memory, you have a fairly robust system. You should just be okay
with the mess inside these three folders. By simply separating the current and the
important from the temporary, you will solve a lot of your problems. However, if
you can’t or don’t want to trust online cloud storage services, in the next section,
we dive deeper into organizing your Documents folder.

ORGANIZING YOUR DOCUMENTS

Once you have all your long-term files in your Documents folder, they can still
become quite a mess if not attended to. Here’s a simple algorithm to organize
them.

Create a folder for every new project you begin

Put as much context as you can in the name of the folder.
Store everything related to the project in that folder and nowhere else.
Whenever you need a file, search for the folder and look in it for your
file.

This sounds very simple, and it really is!

First, a project is a specific outcome that you are trying to drive by a particular
date. For example, suppose you are collaborating with Rahul to publish an
annual report for your startup by December of 2021. In that case, the folder
name could be ‘2021-12 Startup Annual Report with Rahul’. If you remember
even some of those details, then you should be able to locate the folder.
 Trying multi-level hierarchies, or splitting files by categories such as home
and personal, is not really necessary if you follow this method. If you really have
more context that you want to include, add it to the folder’s name, rather than
hiding that folder inside another.
The advantage of putting the date and month upfront consistently is that you
can create a timeline of your projects inside your Documents folder by sorting.
Having this timeline in a flat structure instead of in hierarchies may also reveal
additional clues from context, which will help your brain with recall. For
example, you may not remember the exact name of a project. Still, you
remember it was happening around the same time as when you were planning a
community fundraiser. You can search for the fundraiser instead. Then one of the
project folders just above and below may be the one you are looking for.
Some categories, such as health records or family photos, are timeless. You
may want to group these together. We recommend using your birth date as the
project date for these. This way, these folders will collect either at the bottom (or
top) of your documents folder. Your most recent projects will always collect at
the top
(or bottom) of the documents folder. This makes life simpler, without having to
really organize too much. Such a system adapts to your context, without having
to put in the effort.
If the records inside these folders get really numerous, split them into two
projects to make the containers small again. The number of project folders
should not concern you, just as the number of webpages on the internet doesn’t.
The idea is to rely on search to narrow down, not go through the list of folders
one by one.
If you are just starting on this method and have a mess of files on your
computer, just put them all together in one new folder with today’s date and call
the project ‘Archive’. Do not attempt to organize that folder now or in the future,
unless the need really arises. We access our archives a lot less often than we
think.
If you find yourself going back into the archives for specific files,
pull those files out of archives and put them in an appropriately named folder.
This is a battle-tested method. Nandan has been organizing his projects this
way for nearly twenty-five years. In 2019, when the legendary American
economist Paul Volcker passed away, Nandan wanted to post a tribute to him.
His fondest memory was a fishing trip he had organized for Volcker, an avid
fisher, near Bangalore. He quickly retrieved from his folder system a picture that
was then twelve years old. Because he had saved it in a folder called 2007-02
Volcker India Visit.

CLEAR YOUR MIND

None of the strategies we suggested are set in stone. There are many software
tools and knowledge frameworks on how to journal and how to organize your
data. Pick whatever works for you. If it isn’t working, try something else. If
you’re just getting started, focus more on creating a habit of capturing your
thoughts, notes and files consistently. Once you are able to do that consistently,
you can optimize further.
The only thing that matters is that you instinctively know where to save
something so that it is out of your head, but not lost.
Remember, thinking is hard, and there is no need to make finding your own
data harder than it needs to be. Together, your working memory and long-term
storage offer a way to offload a large part of your thinking and remembering
onto your extended mind. This helps bring clarity in your thoughts.
However, thinking clearly alone is not going to solve our problems, if we’re
not thinking about the right things. The next chapter talks about how our devices
can help us not just think better but also focus on what’s important.
 6
WHAT TO THINK ABOUT

LOSING TIME
Have you experienced a long, busy day of much activity only to realize that you
didn’t even start what you set out to finish?
In 2016, Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School, and her
colleagues analysed the data from 43,000 patient encounters at Emergency
Departments of hospitals. They found that when the number of patients arriving
increases, the Emergency Department (ED) doctors start dealing with ‘easy’
patients first.
It is not an unreasonable system. Since more patients were coming in, more
patients needed to get out. The easy patients could be treated faster. However,
easy patients usually corresponded to less sick patients. They could probably
have waited without their condition deteriorating much. The ones who ended up
waiting were the serious patients, for whom the wait could make things worse.
Moreover, when the serious patients did get their turn, doctors were likely to be
more tired and less effective because of all the patients they had to treat before.
Behavioural scientists call this tendency to tackle easy things first ‘completion
bias’.
Completing a task gives us an immediate psychological reward. The quick
win can even help up our self-confidence and motivation for the next task. The
problem starts when this motivational trick turns into a toxic pattern. Like the
ED doctors faced with a surge of patients, we get into a habit of only doing the
easy things while the hard things get sicker.
Completion bias is why even when we don’t waste time on distractions, it
often still feels like time slipped through our fingers. We complete easier,
smaller tasks and it makes us feel productive in the short-run. But over the long
run, doing small tasks doesn’t feel like fulfilling progress.
 Most of us are likely to have some system of calendars and to-do lists, but
success in sticking to these varies. Often the problem with these is that they are
designed for a narrow definition of productivity—i.e., getting the maximum
number of things done.
In the internet age, productivity is not a quantity problem, but a quality
problem. Doing things has become easier—you can get products delivered
straight to your house, you can hire professionals online, you can automate bill
payments, you can set up meetings on video and you can look up any
information at any time.
The progress goes both ways, though. It is now much easier for people to
reach us via email, text or call and add to our list of things to do. Because of all
that choice and incoming information, it is easy to get overwhelmed. Doing
things has become easier, but doing the right things has become much harder.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Your extended mind can not only help you
think better but can also help you decide what you should be thinking about.
This chapter is about how to focus your attention on the things that truly matter.
If you already have a system for picking the right things to do, you can safely
skip ahead to the next chapter (Chapter 7) where we cover strategies for sticking
to the task. If not, let us see how we can align our attention with our intentions.

PRESENT SELF VS FUTURE SELF

The reason we find it difficult to do the right things is because we think of our
future selves in the same way in which we think of strangers.
Imagine yourself at your birthday party, twenty years from now. Most people
would imagine themselves in third person, looking at their older selves from
outside, as if watching a movie. Whereas, when you think of more present
experiences, like your next birthday, you probably imagine yourself in first
person, blowing out the candles on your cake.
We don’t just imagine our future selves as strangers; we behave as if they are
strangers too. In a study called ‘Doing Unto Future Selves As You Would Do
Unto Others: Psychological Distance and Decision Making’, students at a
university were asked how much time they could dedicate to tutoring weaker
students. The researchers asked students to predict how much time they could
dedicate in the current and next semester, as well as how much time they
believed their friends could volunteer for the same task. They were cautious with
their own time in the current semester but believed that their friends and future
selves would have much more time than their current self.
Social psychologist Hal Hershfield of the UCLA Anderson School of
Management went one step further and actually measured how people thought
about their future selves under an MRI machine. His studies showed that when
we think of our future selves, the same regions of the brain get activated as when
we think about strangers. Building on his research, he showed retirement savers
a picture of themselves aged algorithmically by thirty years. Those who saw the
pictures saved roughly 40 per cent more than those who weren’t shown the
picture.
Our brains are deeply wired to prefer short-term pleasure, even when it comes
at long-term costs to ourselves. Whether it is eating a slice of cake, or
procrastinating that assignment, we prioritize the needs and wants of our present
self. We treat our future selves as though they will somehow have more clarity,
willpower, determination or strength than our present selves. We expect them to
work like machines and not have the same human foibles that we have currently.
We just need to look at our past record to see that this is untrue.

Instead of sabotaging our future selves, we need to learn to work together.

We all know what we want from our future selves. We want to be more
successful at work, become healthier, spend more time with loved ones or finish
a passion project. Even though we know what we want, our plan on how to get it
is often vague.
Think about which of these is more effective—‘I will lose 10 kilos’ versus ‘I
will do ten squats before I sit at my desk’. An imprecise intention leads to
insufficient motivation. Without a predetermined plan with clear intentions, we
get overwhelmed by the infinite choice the internet offers us. Our day begins to
drift away from us. As the day progresses, our attention moves further and
further away from our already vague intentions.
 Planning helps, but only up to a point. The more detailed your plan, the less
room it has for disruptions. Once your day begins to veer off course, every time
you finish a task, you have to make a fresh decision—‘What should I be doing
now?’ You are likely to start completing unimportant tasks or, worse, fall into a
distraction rabbit hole.
In the best-selling Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Gallwey diagnoses
correctly that most people do not need coaching on technique. The problem is
‘not that I don’t know what to do, it’s that I don’t do what I know!’. According
to Gallwey, sportsmen trying to improve are hampered less by their lack of
knowledge and more by the voices of self-criticism in their own head. They are
listening to the internalized words of others telling them how they are wrong and
what they should fix. What Gallwey advises is to quieten the mind. Instead of
paying attention to the criticism, he advises paying attention to the ball instead.
He encourages them to be fully immersed in the game by observing the ball and
saying ‘Bounce’ and ‘Hit’. He offers no further instructions and simply lets
players focus on their game. Usually, he says, people learn to fix their own
problems without further coaching.
If you feel like you aren’t using your time to the fullest, you probably already
know what to do, but doing it is hard. Criticizing yourself for being too busy,
procrastinating too much or wasting too much time is unlikely to help. Like all
the tennis players Gallwey has coached, what we need isn’t a more advanced
technique, but rather a return to the basics. Before reacting emotionally to it, we
need to truly observe where our time is going. We need a simple way to become
mindful of where our time is going, versus where it is supposed to be going.
The goal of this part of the book is to develop such an anchor for our time. A
simple structure to keep us moored to our intentions, but with enough slack that
we can deal with the natural ebb and flow of the day. We also need to cultivate
awareness to notice when we’re drifting away from the plan. Doing the right
things with our time comes down to mastering two related skills, each of which
can be done more mindfully with the help of our devices.

1. Making Time
2. Using Time
 MAKING TIME
SHOW ME YOUR CALENDAR,
AND I’LL TELL YOU YOUR PRIORITIES

If time is money, why do so many people pinch pennies but waste away hours?
Here’s a simple exercise to get you thinking about how your time aligns with
your intentions. In your working memory page for today, create a list of your
most important priorities—What are the top five goals in your life that you want
to give time to? Now, evaluate your calendar from the last week and write down
how much time you actually gave to these priorities. It is important to do this in
writing, so that you can hold yourself accountable. Be honest, and write zero if it
is zero.
The time and money equivalence is more than just a cliché. Your time is the
most valuable asset in the world. Every objective that you want from your life
needs time, and there’s only so much you can give. Unlike money, even if
someone else has time to spare, you cannot borrow or steal it from them. You
may be able to delegate some work, but no one else can spend time with your
family on your behalf, which means that your time should be focused on your
biggest priorities.
You need to realize that ultimate control over how you spend your time
resides only with you. All of us have obligations, but even if you only have an
hour to yourself every day, you decide how you spend that hour. You decide how
you’re going to get the maximum out of it. People say they can’t find the time to
work on their goals. However, time is something you make, not find.
If your biggest priorities do not have space on your schedule, then you’re not
busy, you’re just procrastinating.
Some people feel the same helplessness about their money. They think they
don’t have enough to save for the future. The most important advice financial
advisors give clients is to change the way they think about savings. Usually,
people think that their Savings = Income - Expenses. Financial advisors teach us
that this equation is actually Expenses = Income - Savings.
 If we spend what we want and save the rest, we will always spend more and
save less. A better way is to treat our savings like rent, i.e., as our first and most
important expense that we cannot skip. When you get paid, first set aside the
amount you want to save to meet your goals. Then pay for all critical expenses
such as rent, food and utilities. What is leftover can be spent in any which way
you desire. When we budget money, we can save enough as well as enjoy
spending guilt-free. Building the habit of saving is extremely valuable, even if
we save a very small amount.
We want to budget our time in a similar way.
 Rather than picking the easy things, we want to first spend time on our most
important priorities. Instead of responding to emails or clearing out your to-do
list, look at your priorities and ask—‘What’s the most important thing I can do
today to make progress towards my goals?’ Even if you do just one thing in a
day, as long as it is a step towards your goal, it is a day well spent. You can
spend the rest of the day doing whatever you feel like, and it would be a bonus if
you got any additional work done.

The easiest way to implement this strategy is a method called time blocking.

MAKE TIME BY BLOCKING TIME

Time blocking is a stupidly simple method to make time for your goals.
Instead of hoping to get to work on something important at some time today,
you make a commitment to do it at a specific time. The idea is as simple as it
sounds, but it can be highly effective in practice. The easiest way to find out is to
try it yourself.
In your calendar, block a chunk of time for your most important work. You
don’t need to know currently what that work is. All you need to commit to is that
during this time, you will only be doing your most important work and nothing
else. Do not schedule any other event or call in this period.
If possible, make this a ritual. Block the same time every day for your most
important work. Preferably, this time is early in the morning so that other events
don’t get a chance to disrupt your day before you get to it. Sit in the same spot,
grab your favourite beverage, put your phone away, and let everyone know
you’re not to be disturbed. The more consistent you are, the easier it will be for
your mind to settle in and focus.
Time blocking helps make time for important tasks but can also be a way to
limit time for unimportant tasks. You can make thirty-minute blocks for
checking email or checking social media, and commit to yourself that you will
only do these activities within that time block.
Often, when we’re trying to change our own behaviour, we bite off more than
we can chew. Don’t try to micromanage your whole day. We recommend you
start by creating one block only for your most important task and focus on
meeting that commitment each day. Only when you feel confident in your ability
to stick to your first block of time, then add another. Behaviour change is more
effective when we treat it as a muscle to be built with repetition.
People who use time blocks further benefit from dividing their blocks by
context rather than content. Even if you have multiple projects going on, it might
be useful to block your mornings for deep work, and your afternoons for
meetings. This helps minimize context switching, which can quickly drain your
time. You can schedule creatively demanding work when you are most creative
and answer emails when you are not. A simple way to enforce this time block is
through automated calendar assistants. [See the Appendix for a list of apps.]
These allow you to set up time blocks for meetings and allow anyone to book an
open slot directly via a link.
 Time blocking is remarkably simple but effective. But, it won’t save our day
unless we throw away our to-do list.

THROW AWAY YOUR TO-DO LIST

The most common contract between our present selves and our future selves is
the to-do list.
Our present selves write down things that we expect our future selves will do.
Our future selves do the best they can, but the list never seems to end. It is
obvious why the list only grows—it is much easier to write down a task in our
to-do list than it is to clear things out of it. When we can’t decide what to do
about a task, we simply write it down in our to-do list and make it our future-
self’s problem. These overhanging, unimportant tasks then compete for attention
with the important ones. Every time we look at the list, we have to make a
decision on ‘What should I be doing now?’ Like the ED doctors, we tend to pick
the easy to-dos first. This leaves us with no time for the harder tasks. We write
them down on our to-do lists instead, and the pattern of bad decisions
perpetuates.
There’s a simple solution to this problem—throw away your to-do lists.
A task without the time to do it is a wish, not a to-do. These wishes only
weigh us down. When we don’t have a to-do list, we’re forced to make decisions
now rather than leave both planning and doing to our future self. How does one
get things done without a to-do list?
First, if the task is easy enough to do immediately, do it. Don’t keep things
pending that don’t need to be. If you need to send an email after a meeting or
share your notes, do it immediately. Leave a gap between your appointments so
that you can use it to ‘wrap-up’ your previous session. Since the context is still
fresh, doing this task takes less time now than it would if you did it later. Getting
a sense of completion right then and there will help you concentrate fully on
your next task. Moreover, tasks that could be done immediately don’t become
baggage for later.
If a task can’t be done immediately, think about the next actionable step. The
more clear, specific and atomic you make the next step, the less time your future
self has to spend in figuring out the task.
 Finally, put this actionable next step into your calendar.
In a 2001 paper, British researchers showed that a single intervention helped
jump up the number of people exercising at least once a week. There was a
control group and two treatment groups. When the results came, in 35 per cent of
the people in the control group had exercised once a week. However, 38 per cent
of the people in treatment group A and a whopping 91 per cent in the treatment
group B exercised. What was the difference?

Treatment Group A participants were told the benefits of exercise. However,

Treatment Group B had to write down their intentions explicitly. Each member
of the group had to write down ‘During the next week, I will partake in at least
20 minutes of vigorous exercise on [DAY] at [TIME] in [PLACE].’
Deciding the time and place for when you’re going to do an action
automatically increases the chances of you doing it. Putting this intention on
your calendar helps turn this insight into a habit. If you use time blocking, this
becomes significantly easier to do, since you will have your day roughly divided
into blocks of focus already.
 Using your calendar as your to-do list acts as the missing link between your
time and your workload. Your calendar becomes the one place where you have
all the information about what you need to do next. You are now able to think
about using your time more meaningfully since it lists out all the promises
you’ve
already made.
Initially, putting tasks on your calendar will seem more cumbersome than
making a simple to-do list, but the friction is the point. It forces you to
realistically consider how much time you have. If you don’t think about the time
you genuinely have, you might overpromise and underdeliver.
If you still think you don’t have time, you probably don’t know the most
effective productivity trick known to mankind.

USING TIME
THE MOST EFFECTIVE PRODUCTIVITY
TRICK KNOWN TO MANKIND

We make much more prudent decisions with our money than we do with our
time.
You wouldn’t buy a Mercedes if you could only afford a Maruti. Yet we sign
up for tasks and projects, whether work or personal, that require more of our
time than we can afford. Moreover, the guilt of those unfinished projects weighs
on us, adding to our stress, clouding our mind.
The single biggest productivity trick known to mankind is saying ‘no’.
We say yes to projects because we see them as exciting or interesting. We
don’t think about whether they are exciting enough for the time they will require.
Every ‘yes’ is an investment of our time. Just like with money, if the investment
isn’t generating sufficient returns we should get out, and not sink more money
(or time) on a bad decision.
Ultimately, time is zero-sum. If you’ve signed up for more work at the office,
you are probably spending less time with family or on your hobbies. Unlike your
bank balance, you don’t see your time balance deplete when you overspend your
time on something you can’t afford. This lack of feedback can be actively
harmful.
One helpful tool in deciding when to say ‘no’ is a time budget.
On a new page in your working memory, create your time budget. Out of the
twenty-four hours in a day, we need at least seven or more hours for sleep. We
need another two to four hours for exercise, meals, hygiene and other daily
chores around the house. We should be making the time to spend with friends
and family too. Out of the 168 hours we have every week, just these would take
away roughly half or more of our time. We still need to subtract the unavoidable
things like meetings we can’t skip, time spent on commuting and social or
familial obligations. The idea is to not sweat the details but to just make an
estimate.
Your budget need not be precise down to the last minute. It is only a tool to
help us make better decisions about what we can and cannot commit to. Think of
it like the fuel gauge on our car. It won’t tell us exactly how many litres of fuel
we have, but over time, we get better at deciding if we have enough to make the
trip or not.
In any given week, on average, you may have maybe thirty hours to spend on
your goals—let’s call these your time balance. Your personal number may be a
bit higher if you have fewer obligations. Your time balance is the number of
hours that are actually available to you to split among your work, your hobbies
and any leisure time.
Now ‘invest’ your time balance towards things that matter to you. Use the
priorities you wrote down in the previous exercise. Be careful to not use up all of
your time balance, though. You should ideally also have spare time for
unplanned exigencies, serendipity or just being idle.
If it looks like you aren’t able to make enough time to actually do justice to
one or more of your goals, the problem isn’t that you’re not productive. The
problem is that you’re trying to do too much. You have to drop something or you
risk doing everything poorly. You also have to refuse any additional projects till
your time budget goes up again. Calculating your time budget every few weeks
or after the start and end of projects will help you make better decisions about
your commitments.
 People feel uncomfortable saying no because they are concerned they will
come across as snobbish. In our experience, this is untrue. People appreciate
clear, rapid and genuine answers irrespective of whether that answer is
favourable to them or not. Going from a gut-based system to a framework-based
system of saying ‘no’ also helps communicate why you’re saying ‘no’
authentically.
Saying ‘no’ is the biggest superpower you have.

SHOWING UP
The maximum resistance we feel towards doing anything comes right at the
start.
The task ahead seems most daunting when we’ve made no progress towards it
at all. This is why almost all advice on getting something done is to just get
started. If you have already worn your running shoes and are out of the house, it
is more likely that you will run. Instead of trying to motivate yourself to run five
kilometres, just try getting yourself to put on your shoes and get out. If you can
bring yourself to simply take that first step, following through becomes much
easier.
If you’ve blocked time for your priorities on your calendar, just decide for
yourself what the simple first step for each is. If we want to focus on deep work,
maybe the first step is to put away our phones, close other distractions and sit at
our desks. Turn these first steps into rituals that you do consistently. The more
consistent your rituals, the better your mind becomes at knowing that it is time to
focus.
Half the battle is showing up.
The other half is doing what you’re supposed to do. We know that we
procrastinate because of our inability to cope with our negative emotions around
a task. But most people would rather admit to being busy than to being afraid.
We often try to minimize the guilt of procrastination by being busy doing
something else instead.
The second most important habit for successful time blocking is to treat
blocked time as non-negotiable. Once we’ve scheduled a block for work or for a
hobby, we only have two choices—use it or lose it. That is, either you spend
time doing what you scheduled, or you don’t do anything at all. No other
projects, no reading news, no checking emails, no browsing social media or
anything else if it is not on the schedule. Prolific author Neil Gaiman describes
how this rule works for him.

‘I think it’s really just a solid rule for writers. You don’t have to write. You
have permission to not write, but you don’t have permission to do anything
else. What I love about that is I’m giving myself permission to write or not
write, but writing is actually more interesting than doing nothing after a
while. You sit there and you’ve been staring out the window now for five
minutes, and it kind of loses its charm. You’re going, “Well, actually, let’s
all write something.”’

No matter how good our system of managing our to-dos and appointments, there
will be days when we don’t feel like starting. Like Muhammed Ali, the record-
breaking boxer, once said, ‘Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the
face.’ Our plans are often upset by our own emotions, energy levels, the weather,
events around us, and many other reasons. It is on those days that we need to
remember just two simple rules for keeping our promises with our past selves.
No matter what, show up.
You have permission to do nothing, but you do not have permission to do
anything else.

IT IS NOT A SYSTEM IF IT ISN’T SELF-

CORRECTING
Our system so far is to budget our time to reflect our priorities, say no to
unimportant things, and put what’s important on the calendar. These are tools to
anchor where you should be spending your time. But even when we know
exactly what to do, we can still feel resistance or lose focus. How we actually
spend our time every day will vary from the plan.
If you can stick to the methods discussed here, you should have no trouble at
all in focusing on the right things. But we know this is not how it goes. As Yogi
Berra once said, ‘In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In
practice—there is.’
Self-correcting systems need a feedback loop. Our plans for where our
attention should be can improve only if we know where our attention actually
goes. Hence, the final piece in managing our time better is using our working
memory as a daily journal. In the previous chapter, we describe Bitfulness
Meditation as a journaling exercise that helps us become self-aware. We can use
this exercise throughout the day to become more aware of where our time really
is going.
Open up your working memory page for today and start writing about what
you were just working on. Mark the time, and write a few lines about what
you’ve done, and what you were thinking you’ll do next. Don’t try to be too
rigid about the format, and just write down whatever is on your mind. You will
be revisiting these notes later. For example,

10.00 a.m. Just finished writing an article on the N-DEAR ecosystem. It is

still not finished, but I have an outline in place and the introduction is done.
Will share with Shankar for feedback.

Writing down what you were just working on and how to wrap it up allows you
to close the ‘open loop’ in your head. Every time you finish one thing or are
about to start another, take a moment to make an entry in your working memory
page on today’s date.

10.05 a.m. I’m now starting preparation for next week’s board meeting. I
will first read the reports that were sent and note my comments.

Sometimes your attention will want to wander in the middle of a task. Instead of
acting on your urge for distraction, get it out of your head and into your journal.
By writing down your thoughts, you slow down enough to be able to not react to
your instincts and choose carefully.

10.14 a.m. What happened to the report that was supposed to be launched
last week? Must follow up with Kamya. #call #followup

If you get distracted anyway, make it a point to spend a minute in your journal to
reorient yourself before starting.

10.43 a.m. Was looking up that tweet by Ganesh for the article. Ended up
spending 20 mins on twitter. I am now going to rewrite the first three
paragraphs based on the information I just found.

Maintaining a work journal is very useful in being able to recover from

distractions. You can see your own train of thoughts and what you were up to
right before you got distracted. Usually writing just a few lines allows you to
remember where you were mentally and regain context that much faster.
Using your working memory as a daily journal reduces the penalties of
switching contexts often. The ‘system’ only works if it self-corrects and adapts
to your needs. Else, it is not a system, it is just a guess.

YOUR GPS, NOT YOUR BOSS

Remember, the purpose of writing down the trivial details of what you’re doing
day to day is not to create a record; it is to think.
The real advantage of the habit is that you start paying attention to how you
actually spend your time. You become much more self-aware about how you
lose time and how to recover when you do. You may realize that whenever you
get a WhatsApp notification, you tend to abandon work to first reply. You may
realize that you are scheduling too little (or too much) time for something
important. You may be trying to do too many (or too few) things.
Instead of overthinking in the abstract, with a feedback system we can focus
on more actionable details. ‘Am I spending too little time with family? Am I
failing at work-life balance?’ to ‘Did I block time for family this week? Did I
show up for it?’ You can take concrete steps to fix the problem by reassessing
your priorities, adjusting your time budget and blocking more time for what you
need to do.
Many people find it strange to put ‘Dinner with spouse’ or ‘Change the sheets’
on the calendar. They instead limit their calendar use to synchronize meetings
with colleagues for work only. For some other people, the idea of planning itself
is aversive. They believe they will become too restricted if so much of their day
is planned and quartered. They think they are better suited to ‘go with the flow’.
Your calendar isn’t your boss, it is your life’s GPS.
On any given day, as you navigate the distracting, noisy internet, these
systems—your time budget, your schedule and your daily journal—tell you
where you are in terms of progress towards your most important goals. You can
still make changes every day and adapt your calendars to your mood and
situation that day.
What is important is that having these systems allow you to tell if you’re
keeping the promises you made to yourself over the long run. In an office, your
employer would hold you accountable to your responsibilities. If you shirk them,
you might be reprimanded, lose pay or even your job. We don’t face any such
immediate consequences for the promises we make to ourselves. However, we
pay for the promises we miss in terms of lost potential.

What we described in this and the previous chapter are thinking tools. They help
you think clearly and help think about the things that matter. And you don’t just
think at work. The reasons we put meetings with others on our calendars are the
same reasons we should do it for our own selves or with our loved ones. It shows
us our commitments in one place so that we can make better decisions with our
time. It helps us to prepare and show up for important events on schedule. It tells
our loved ones we respect their time. If you feel embarrassed, you don’t have to
share the invite with them, but it is still useful to have it on your own calendar.
Having a system is even more critical for those who tend to go with the flow.
If we make a habit of quickly capturing all tasks and appointments as they occur,
this system doesn’t require much upkeep. If we are in a habit of capturing
everything, we can start relying on our digital systems entirely. It is a wonderful,
calming feeling to know that we don’t have to think about what to do next. It
frees us up to go with the flow of our thoughts, without worrying about whether
we’re missing, forgetting or falling behind on something. It lets us be truly
present in the moment.
 Another common mistake is that we tend to design personal productivity
systems for an ambitious version of ourselves to do the maximum number of
things. We design the system for someone who always shows up, does every task
in exactly the time available, takes copious notes and files everything
systematically.
Instead, to have maximum peace of mind, design your personal productivity
systems for your laziest self, the one who forgets to add tags, who writes ‘send
email’ as a to-do but doesn’t specify what email or to whom, and the one who
will take notes but will forget where they took them. You will have more success
when future-you does not expect past-you to be extremely diligent. If your
system works even on days you don’t feel like working much, you’ve made the
best system.
It is very easy to start over-engineering these systems such that they become a
form of distraction themselves. On the internet, this tendency even has a name
—‘productivity porn’. You should iterate, experiment and personalize till you
find something that matches your personal workflow. Do remember that
designing the perfect system is meaningless, because our lives are too dynamic
and constantly evolving for there to be one perfect, static system.
Success comes from the compounding effect of consistent habits. Instead of
maximizing ‘productivity’ or number of to-dos completed in a day, maximize the
number of promises met by your future self. Building a consistent habit of
reflection by using your extended mind as a mirror allows you to think clearly
about your long-term goals. Most importantly, it helps you make the time to
achieve them.
 7
A POVERTY OF ATTENTION

ENVIRONMENTS AND BOUNDARIES

In 2004, researchers Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein asked an intriguing
question, ‘Do defaults change lives?’
Johnson and Goldstein were studying organ donation rates across Europe.
They were investigating why some countries had a perpetually high rate of
donations every year, whereas some had a perpetually low rate. This was very
perplexing because organ donation rates in Sweden and Denmark, which were
similar to each other geographically, demographically and culturally, stood at
85.9 per cent vs 4.25 per cent, respectively. The researchers ruled out all
potential causes for the difference in rates, until only one remained.
Out of the eleven countries shown on this graph, all of those with high
donation rates had one simple design decision. They had made organ donation
the default and asked people to send a form to opt out. The countries with low
organ donation rates asked people to opt in for it. Asking people to send in a
form was friction enough to stop people from donating. Just making a simple
change to the process could change donation rates. Or as Johnson and Goldstein
put it, changing the default can save lives.
The lesson here is generalizable to more than just policy design. The design of
how a choice is presented affects the choice itself. The consequences of the
design are simple to understand when there is a form asking you to opt in or opt
out. We make many more complex choices every day based on the information
presented by our environment. If we are not mindful of our environment’s
influence, we might be making the wrong decisions.
 In the purely analogue environment of the past, there was friction that would
enforce some boundaries between different parts of life. Before smartphones,
one was much less likely to get caught up reading a magazine article at their
desk instead of working. To do that, one would have to intentionally bring a
magazine to work or go out and find one. These tasks impose a significant
cognitive effort and deliberate break from routine. We are likely to have paused
and realized that we could read that article later. With smartphones, your friend
may forward you a link to an article, and you end up reading it before you even
realize you’re doing it.
We can change a lot about our digital behaviour by simply changing our
information environment. The information environment means the entire
ecosystem of devices, apps and data that make up our extended mind. From
which device we use and where we use them, to the apps on them, can be
selected and configured deliberately to assist us in focusing on our goal and
steering us away from distractions.
You can try this yourself if you’re not convinced. Most of us carry our phones
with us wherever we go, even when we’re merely moving from one room in our
house to another. A straightforward way to keep your phone use to the minimum
when at home is to simply leave it plugged in, away from your desk, in an area
where there are no chairs, beds or other seating around. If we’re not comfortable
while on our phones, our feet will eventually remind us to look up and go do
something else.
The curse of technology available anytime, anywhere, is that we end up using
it all the time, everywhere. Digital technologies that vie for our attention depend
on our laziness. While they give us plenty of choices to turn distracting features
off, or log out entirely, they put in a lot of friction to those choices. For example,
one needs to go through a multi-step process to deactivate one’s Facebook
account, including providing a reason why one is shutting down. But, simply
logging in reactivates the account. They choose the defaults, so the defaults are,
unsurprisingly, configured to get more of our time and attention.
Every time we drop in on our screens, we end up in front of an information
environment, and its design is going to affect us whether we like it or not. By
default, these environments make it easy to get distracted. We need to design our
environment for maximizing flow and minimizing friction.
We believe that with mindful use of technology, we can make laziness our
advantage instead of our weakness. Instead of trying to fight the tendency to be
lazy, we align our objectives with it. We can design an environment such that
focusing on the thing we want to do is the lazy option, and slacking off is the
difficult one. We can learn how to not swim upstream by splitting our
personalities.

SPLIT ACCOUNTS, NOT DEVICES

There’s very little that our phones, tablets and laptops can’t do. We confuse that
possibility for necessity.
Our devices are usually configured to have all the apps we could ever need in
every context. By default, our social media is the same number of clicks away as
our email on our phone, and both are available to us all the time. If we were to
configure our technology mindfully, is this how it would look?
The lack of friction between these very different contexts means that at every
moment, the only thing stopping us from getting distracted is our own willpower.
It would be akin to trying to stay on a diet with a pocketful of our favourite
candy.
 As we learnt earlier, humans perform optimally when they are single-tasking
with full engagement on a challenging problem. This state is also known as flow.
Multitasking or switching contexts often carries a heavy cognitive penalty and
breaks flow. Keeping our attention on a single task is hard if our environment is
always presenting us with incoming, novel information.
One way around this problem would be to have different devices for different
contexts. You could dedicate your laptop to doing work only and your
smartphone to personal browsing. Or you could buy additional devices.
However, buying additional devices soon becomes unwieldy, not to mention
expensive. Until brain implants become a reality, we will still need to access the
digital world through a physical device. For convenience, you want fewer
devices to manage and charge, not more. This bottleneck is one that you can use
to your advantage.
Nandan already divides his devices the way he wants to divide his time. He
only does work on his PC. When he’s on the computer, he’s working. He checks
his email for a long stretch twice a day, first thing in the morning and last thing
at night. He batches emails that he has to send so as to not get lost in his inbox
often. He consumes a curated selection of eight news subscriptions every day on
his iPad and, occasionally, Twitter. When he wants to relax, he uses the same
iPad for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ Hotstar. His phone is for
him to make calls and send texts. His phone is always on silent since this allows
him to think. He has no email on his phone and no other apps that bombard him
with information. The only game he plays is FreeCell (badly).
Admittedly, having multiple devices and the discipline to follow through on
separating them is a tough ask. It may work for you, as it does for Nandan.
Instead of having multiple devices, we can also have the same device configured
for different modes by managing our identities. As users, we don’t pay particular
attention to how we manage our identities. We tend to use the defaults suggested
by our technology. We think in terms of usernames, passwords, accounts and
profiles, but managing our identity can be much richer than that. Designed well,
managing our identity can be extremely effective at helping us stay in control of
our attention and manage our privacy.
On most laptops and smartphones, one can set up multiple user accounts. Each
account created acts as a completely new and independent virtual space. This
simple trick lets us effectively have many virtual devices, even when the
physical device remains the same.
With multiple virtual devices, we can configure each identity thoughtfully for
a purpose. We can give each account a ‘personality’. For example, if you are a
writer, other than your usual account, you could have an account on your
computer which has no other apps except the word processor you use. To do
anything else, you’d first have to log out and then log in to another account.
Instead of exerting our willpower every single moment, we can invest time
once in designing these accounts purposefully. On a daily basis, we simply need
to choose which ‘personality’ we need to be in now. If we’ve configured these
different contexts well, the opportunities for getting distracted reduce
significantly.

Splitting your personality is essentially a pre-commitment strategy. These are

also known as ‘Ulysses pacts’ because of the use of this concept in Homer’s
poem Odyssey. The hero Ulysses is sailing his way back home, but he must pass
the Sirens. The Sirens were infamous for singing an irresistible song that led
men to their deaths in the treacherous sea. Ulysses plugged the ears of his crew
with wax. He instructed them to tie him to the mast and to stay the course no
matter what he says in the future. Ulysses knew that his present self before being
enthralled by the Sirens was a better decision-maker than his future self. He set
up his environment accordingly.
In the digital world, you can lock yourself out of your social media accounts
by logging out. Or simply give your phone to a loved one and ask them not to
give it back to you till you finish some important task. Some pre-commitment
strategies themselves are either high friction or not rigid enough to be useful.
Splitting your personality lets you implement pre-commitments in a flexible
manner.
People are often hesitant about pre-commitment strategies. They look at these
pacts as inflexible, rigid constraints that limit freedom. A mindset shift is
required to appreciate their power. These rigid boundaries do not keep us locked
inside or restrict our freedom. Instead, these boundaries are meant to keep the
constant din and noise outside so that we can be free to really focus.
Writers have often complained of procrastination. It might console you to
know that even the best, most celebrated authors suffer the same problems as
you do. The problem predates modern technology. Victor Hugo, the famous
French novelist and poet, had signed a contract in 1829 to write a book he had
titled The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Hugo spent the next twelve months
entertaining guests, taking up side projects, and generally doing things other than
writing the book that would eventually make him famous.
In September 1830, his publisher got furious with him and gave him an
incredibly challenging six-month deadline to submit the novel by February of
1831. Hugo knew he was prone to being social, and this was his biggest
temptation. He then made a Ulysses pact. He packed all his clothes and gave
them to his attendant to keep away from his chambers. But for a shawl, Hugo
was completely naked. Thus, with no option to go out or receive guests, Hugo
worked on his novel non-stop.
He finished the 1,87,000-word novel two weeks early.

CHOOSING HOW TO SPLIT

How should we design our personalities?
For a lot of people, the primary objective is to get back some work-life
balance. We’re often Facebooking at work and emailing at home. You might be
tempted to create two profiles for home and office. But, this distinction is not as
clear-cut as it first seems. Even in the office context, activities like emails and
group chats can be a source of distraction and procrastination. We end up doing
‘research’ for two hours, when we should’ve written what we knew already.
Our recommended approach is to not base these identities on any extrinsic
categories like office, school, personal, etc. Instead, it is much more useful to
base these identities on intrinsic motivations and the tasks we want to
accomplish.
Consider two environments. The first is a library. Everyone is quiet, the room
is well-lit and there’s plenty of desks and chairs. The other is a party in a living
room. The TV is playing a cricket match, some of your friends are talking in a
group in one corner, and loud music is playing in the background. If you had to
do a hard task that requires your focus, such as figuring out your personal
savings plan or making an excel model for work, in which environment do you
think you’d get quality work done?
Even though we understand this about physical spaces, we make no effort to
extend this logic to our digital spaces. Our computers are configured to be more
like the party than the library. Every distraction—group chat with friends, videos
via Netflix, or memes via social media—is always just one new tab away.
As Herbert Simon said, ‘a wealth of information creates a poverty of
attention’. We believe that certain activities such as email, social media or just
general browsing will always contain extraneous or novel information. Our
brains are wired to shift attention to these. Hence, these apps are inherently more
prone to derailing our focus.
Instead of categories like personal or work, we recommend splitting identity
based on the quality and type of attention you need for the task. Since attention
is inversely proportional to the information in your environment, you can design
these ‘personalities’ to regulate how much information you receive.
Specifically, every time we turn on any of our devices, we think there are
three modes of attention that we should decide between. These three modes are

1. Create
2. Curate
3. Communicate

The Create mode is one where we want to bring our full and deep attention to the
task at hand. We want no distractions in this mode. We want to be Ulysses tied to
the mast, not changing course, no matter what the Sirens are singing. What one
wants in this mode is to create—to make meaningful progress on the goals that
matter.
The Curate mode is the opposite of the Create mode. Whether we’re looking
to get inspired, catch up on the news or simply take a break, we seek content to
consume. But we often get swept up in consumption. What one wants to do is
curate—to be deeply immersed in the content—while still being in control at a
high level of the quality and quantity of what we consume.
 The Communicate mode is our planning and management mode. Emails,
instant messages, group chats and other inboxes contain a stream of information
that we must deal with. These streams contain a mix of signal and noise. Some
are urgent, some are important, many are neither. The critical task is to quickly
decide how one wants to deal with this information. In the Communicate mode,
we want to be able to parse a large amount of information, but not get too caught
up in any one thing. Instead, we want to strategize and communicate. We want to
be able to respond to incoming requests from others with clear responses. We
also want to communicate to our future selves the shifting priorities to help us
rethink what we should do next.
The next three chapters are deep dives into how we can set up these three
modes. We also go over strategies on how to split your time between them. But
first, we want to dive deeper into why we believe you should be splitting your
personality by mode of attention.

WHY SPLIT BY MODE OF ATTENTION

To appreciate the difference between these modes, think about the ‘flow’ of
information in each of these environments. We are in a state of flow when the
kind of information environment we are in is complementary to the mode of
attention we want to inhabit.
In Create mode, there is no incoming ‘flow’ of information. Instead, there is a
still reservoir of knowledge—notes and documents from your working memory
and long-term storage. From that, only draw what you need for the task at hand.
You can choose to work on that important presentation for the office or on
writing a thoughtful letter to a friend. What’s important is that there is nothing to
pull you away. This helps you create without getting distracted.
In the Curate mode, one deals with the rapids—information streams that are
too voluminous and forceful to be tamed, such as social media or newsletters.
Just like white-water rapids, these streams are often shallow and fast-moving.
Getting on them can be a thrill, but keep going long enough and you will get
wet, fall over or capsize, no matter what your level of experience and expertise.
You want to be able to curate the best and consume with intent, instead of
consuming mindlessly.
 In Communicate mode, we deal with dams. There is an incoming flow that we
cannot ignore, but at the same time, we cannot be driven by its rhythms. We let it
collect in our inboxes and deal with that information on our own time and on our
own terms. We want to be able to segregate the urgent and the important from
the noise.
There is no hierarchy between the three modes. The deliberate boundaries
between these modes help us create thoughtful information environments that
support us in what we’re trying to do. For a balanced life, you will probably be
spending time in each mode.
Splitting personalities reduces the amount of cognitive overhead required to
focus on the present. It brings a sense of calmness while immersed in any given
task. This is as true of curation as it is for creation. We find that we tend to enjoy
our time engaging with curated content when it is done deliberately at a time of
our choosing.
Most importantly, attaching each mode to a different identity creates a
valuable moment of pause. Before we begin doing anything, we need to login to
our computers or our phones. We now start this process with a conscious
decision. Given our energy levels and the time we have and the list of things we
need to do, what is it that we feel like doing right now? Are we going to Create,
Curate or Communicate?
In the next three chapters, we go over how to set up and use each one of these
personalities in detail.
 8
CREATE MODE

PRINCIPLES OF CREATE MODE

The Create mode is where your deep work happens.
You want this to be an environment where you can easily get into flow. Hence,
this is where you go when you want to work on any project that demands quality,
focused attention. Whether you need to do accounts for work or write a poem for
pleasure, to be in flow, you need to be deeply engrossed. Remember, the
conditions to enable the flow state are a clear goal, immediate feedback and a
balance of skill and challenge. As long as we’re able to focus on our most
important goal and have a clear objective for our time, we have everything we
need to trigger the flow state.
The real challenge is friction. Both external and internal triggers could derail
us from our state of relaxed concentration. In Create mode, we want to block the
internet by default. We want to allow our future self only very specific tunnels to
those sites and apps that are absolutely critical to focused work. Nothing else is
allowed by default.
Some of you may have cringed as you read that. Just the thought of not having
the internet for even a few minutes is worrying for some people. The Create
mode is just one of the modes on our computers. Getting out of that mode and on
to the internet will always be possible. We’re just trying to make it harder, so that
we do it less often when trying to focus.
Now that we know what we’re trying to achieve, let’s set up our Create
personality accordingly.

SETTING UP CREATE MODE

The first step is to choose the primary device for Create mode.
 For many of us, our primary device for doing deep work would be our laptops.
Some of us can do all our work entirely from a smartphone. The strategies that
follow can be applied to either. However, choose your primary device carefully
to make Creating easier.
If you can work from either a laptop or a smartphone, it might be worth
considering moving to a laptop simply for ergonomic reasons. Most android
phones can support multiple accounts, but iPhones do not. If you can only work
from your iPhone, consider purchasing an additional device to separate your
deep work from the rest of your day.
On the device that you have chosen to be your primary device, create a new
user account. The process to do this varies depending on your operating system.
The Appendix explains how you can do this on the most popular ones. Once
activated, you will notice that this account is as good as a new computer or
phone. From this point on, you need to be extremely careful about what you
install in this account. Do install the basics such as the calendar app and the app
you use as your working memory. If you use cloud storage for your long-term
memory, make sure you have access to that too.
Before you add anything else to this account, it might be worth writing down
in your working memory what you plan on doing in the Create mode. This will
help you be more thoughtful about the apps to install. You must show
ruthlessness in saying no to all possible sources of distraction or any app that
constantly has novel information. Even the ones that may look like work at first.
This especially includes your email, instant messaging apps and group chat apps.
Your default should be to not install any new tool or app in this account, unless it
explicitly helps you considerably in doing deep work.
The Create mode is a virtual environment, but creating is a physical activity.
We want to help our body and mind align with our extended mind by changing
our physical environment too.
If you work consistently from an office or from home, try to sit in the same
place on the same desk every day. If possible, at the same time too. These clues
help your brain understand that it is time to focus. Do make sure that this space
is set up to be both comfortable and ergonomic. Bad ergonomics can cause
repetitive strain injuries that can affect parts of our fingers, wrists and elbows,
which can cause further complications in our necks and backs.
 Once you have the basics set up, it is time to start blocking out distractions.

DEALING WITH EXTERNAL DISTRACTIONS

No matter what your profession, at some point, you probably need a web
browser for your work. Web browsers are a terrible sink of your attention since
you have literally all the world’s information at your fingertips. The simple way
out is to make a Ulysses pact using a website blocker.
Website blockers are apps that prevent us from accessing distracting websites.
Most have a pre-populated list of common distracting websites like social media,
news sites, gaming sites, etc. We can add the ones that are our personal sinkholes
of time.
Most of these blockers allow us to work in sessions, blocking these websites
for certain times of the day. We recommend that for the Create profile, you block
these distracting websites permanently. You will need to leave a short
‘maintenance window’ when the blocker isn’t running so that you can change the
settings as needed. Also, lock the settings that allow you to quit the session in
the middle. Tie yourself to the mast.
Your particular profession may require you to look up things online often.
Lawyers need to find judgments and programmers need to look up
documentation. As far as possible, use tools that download these datasets offline.
Where this isn’t possible, you can also whitelist websites. That is, the blocker
will block everything except these specific reference sites. Try to use this option
sparingly.
As far as possible, completely block social media and other distracting apps
that are fuelled by attention. For a few professions, however, social media is
needed for work. HR professionals may need to access LinkedIn. Journalists
may need to look up specific tweets on Twitter. If you block social media
aggressively even though your job requires it, pretty soon you will abandon the
system of split personalities.
Instead, make a distinction between personal social media and that which you
need to look up for work. Whitelist only the ones you need for work. You can
also use specific tools such as the browser extension ‘News Feed Eradicator’,
which blocks out the news feed section of most social media. It removes your
feed and replaces it with a quote reminding you that you do not want to get lost.
Further, use your identity on social media to your advantage. Stay logged out
of the social network where it is possible to view the content anonymously, for
example, Twitter or Reddit. You will still be able to access the content you need,
but staying logged out prevents the platforms from tracking and knowing your
identity. Without knowing your identity, they can’t show you personalized
content from friends, family or topics of interest that can take you down rabbit
holes.

DEALING WITH INTERNAL DISTRACTIONS

Many people have an aversion to software that permanently blocks their access
to the internet. Some have used it and eventually abandoned it because they were
too ambitious in their blocking. In our system, the blocking applies locally to the
Create personality. If you really need access to a specific website urgently, you
can log out from that personality and log in to something else.
However, nine times out of ten, it might be a better idea to delay gratification
and not actually switch modes. Our internet-connected devices make it
extremely low-friction to simply switch contexts and tasks to follow our every
whim instantly. You want to put some time and distance between when you have
a desire and when you act on it.
Most times, this pause will help you realize that what you wanted to look up
was simply another way of getting distracted. But your brain won’t let you pause
unless you get the ‘open loop’ out of your head and into a system.
This is when you should use your working memory to make a note of
whatever was distracting you. If you’re already using your working memory as a
journal, you will have a series of entries.
You can simply write down whatever is bothering you in your journal in your
working memory. When writing into the working memory, don’t worry too much
about organizing or even about writing clearly. Simply write till the distracting
thought is out of your head so that you can go back to creating.
Remember, like Ulysses, when you entered the Create mode, you had a plan to
focus on what’s truly important. Instead of using willpower, the idea is to simply
let your environment prevent you from making a costly error.
We will learn how to process these distracting thoughts you just wrote down
in the Communicate Mode.

USE NOTIFICATIONS MINDFULLY

The cocktail party effect states that our subconscious is constantly filtering what
we hear and deciding what we pay attention to. Even when we are in a crowded
party, with many overlapping conversations and sounds, if someone says our
name, we stop mid-sentence to look over. A loud explosion, or the sound of our
own name, causes our attention to switch rapidly to the source.
Many scientists who study the link between attention and smartphones now
concur that smartphones have come to occupy a ‘privileged attentional space’.
They are as powerful a signal to our brain as someone calling out our name at a
party. We respond to it immediately, dropping whatever it is we’re doing, like we
would to a tap on the shoulder. This is quite a lot of power for any device to have
over us.
By default, our smartphones and computers exploit this ‘privileged attentional
space’ via notifications.
Turning off all non-essential notifications is the simplest but most effective
intervention you can make to reduce the overwhelm in your life. You can turn
them off completely for Create mode, but some of these strategies may be useful
more generally. Turning off notifications from non-essential apps stops you from
losing attention to apps, such as games or e-commerce, which you want to use
only when you intend.
Switching off notifications can also backfire. If we are anxious about missing
messages from colleagues or family, we may end up unlocking our phone more
to check if we’ve received a text when notifications are off. Hence, we believe
that you need to mindfully architect your notifications to suit your context.

1. TURN OFF ALL TIME-INSENSITIVE NOTIFICATIONS

The first thing to do is to turn off all notifications that don’t really require our
immediate attention. Most people who have done this report feeling less stressed
and having a better sense of control over their time. This is an action that won’t
take two minutes to set up but the pay-offs are tremendous. The hard part of this
exercise consists in deciding which notifications are truly urgent, and should be
kept on.
We suggest starting by turning everything off. Let your calendar and phone
notifications pass through as these require your immediate attention. As you
experiment with this for a few days, you’ll realize which other notifications need
your urgent attention.
If you haven’t already turned off all notifications on your phone, do it now.
From today onwards, every time a new notification appears on your screen, and
it appears useless, don’t just dismiss it. Take an extra second to block all future
notifications of that type from that app by long-pressing the notification.

2. BATCH THE TIME-SENSITIVE

NOTIFICATIONS YOU CAN’T TURN OFF

Notifications can be useful in one very narrow way. A lot of us are in the habit of
checking text messages. With all notifications blocked, we do not know if there
are new messages without opening the app. We might just tend to go overboard
in picking up our phones and checking the instant messaging apps every few
minutes, even when no new messages have arrived.
On the other hand, if we do turn on notifications, when new messages do
arrive, they will keep bothering us at times we’re trying to focus. One way to
deal with this problem is to get an app to batch the notifications. All the
notifications will be sent at fixed periodic intervals of our choice. For example,
you could choose to get all your email notifications at 11 a.m. and then only
again at 4 p.m. Or you could get all your text notifications five minutes past
every hour. This way, instead of constantly checking in, you can quickly glance
at your phone to see if it requires your attention.
If you do batch notifications, remember it is still critical to block the useless
ones. You can block notifications entirely from useless apps, but at times, you
can also block specific notifications from within an app. In WhatsApp, muting a
group or a sender prevents notifications from them while still allowing
notifications from others to be batched. See the Appendix for a list of such apps
under the heading ‘Batch your Notifications’.

3. USE DO-NOT-DISTURB MODE TO

SCREEN NOTIFICATIONS.

Due to the nature of their work, some people may simply be unable to avoid
turning notifications off completely. If you’re a doctor, then maybe calls from
your office are critical for you to attend. Almost all phones come with a ‘focus
mode’ or ‘do not disturb mode’ where your notifications do not ring and only
specific callers or messages are screened through. Learn where this option is on
your phone, and make a shortcut to it. Use it often!

MAKE YOUR PHONE FOCUSED

Our problems don’t end with simply managing notifications. Our smartphones
have slowly turned into everything-devices and it is very easy to lose context.
The University of Texas study from Chapter 4 told us that people lost
cognitive capacity to their phones, even when it was switched off but in front of
them. If you can create on your laptop only, consider simply putting away your
phone, out of sight while you’re creating. You won’t be spending all your time in
this mode, so you can afford to stay away from your phone. But if you need to
have your phone on you, you can still choose to make it a more focused device.

1. SPLIT IDENTITY ON YOUR PHONE TOO

Most Android phones also allow us to create new user accounts on our phones.
Just like we did with our laptops, it is a great idea to create a second account on
our smartphones for focused work only. For most phones, this is done in the
phone’s settings, under an option called ‘Users and Accounts’.
It is as good as getting a second phone, with a fresh install. When creating this
account, you will be asked to login to a Google account. Make sure the email
you use to login is not your primary email account. Using your primary account
means you’ll be able to check your email from this identity as well, which we
want to avoid. Get a fresh email so that this second identity is completely air-
gapped from your primary identity. You should now be very intentional about
which apps you add to this account.
Ideally, this profile should only be able to make calls, check your calendar and
take notes. Any utilities that do not have an infinite feed of new information are
okay to keep. This could mean maps, taxi apps, listening to music, etc., are ok.
But email, instant messages and others are not. Do not install any games or other
possible distractions on this second account. Just like you did on your laptop,
make sure this identity has no extraneous apps that become time-sucks.
You can also set everything from ringtone to do-not-disturb settings
differently, without affecting your main account. Try to stay in this account
whenever you’re in Create mode. If you notice yourself on some apps that are
making you lose time, delete them from this identity and reinstall them in your
primary account if needed.
Switching between identities is easy, but not smooth. This friction is
intentional and will help you stay in the right mode.

2. DISTRACTION BLOCKING APPS

We strongly recommend getting a website blocking app that syncs with your
smartphone as well. The appendix lists some of these apps that allow you to start
a focus session on one or more of your devices simultaneously. When you’re
trying to be focused in the Create mode, the software should block distracting
apps on your phone as well. This way, even if you do accidentally or out of habit
try to open a distracting website on your phone, it will stop you from doing so.
If you do follow Step 1 above and create a second identity for the Create
mode on your phone, we strongly recommend blocking all websites by default
on this profile at all times. The advantage of creating a second identity is that
most software services treat this as a completely new device. You can set
blocking rules for the Create mode differently from the other user identities on
your phone. If you really need access, you can switch accounts. We’re trying to
increase friction just enough to block the unintentional, automatic behaviours
that we have learnt.
 3. CHANGE YOUR HOME SCREEN

The home screen was designed to let us access all our apps quickly. At least for
the Create mode, this is the wrong principle. We want to be able to only access
the apps that let us create easily and increase friction for those that don’t.
On Android phones, you can change your home screen to be significantly less
distracting by changing the default home screen to a minimalistic launcher. See
the Appendix for some suggestions. Even if you don’t change the launcher itself,
do remove all shortcuts to distracting apps from your home screen.

MAKE IT PERSONAL
Finally, make your Create mode personalized to your needs.
The Create mode is your personal mute button for the internet. Don’t be afraid
to ruthlessly block websites, apps and other distractions that you find too
tempting from this mode. Whenever things get overwhelming, you can simply
log in to this account to block out the noise.
Customize the theme on this account to make sure it looks visually different
from your other accounts. Change the wallpaper to something that motivates
you. It could be a quote, a scene, a goal, your role model, but anything that is
deeply personal to you. You could simply write in a large font what your most
important goal is. This cues your brain into remembering that when you’re here,
you should be in a state of flow, working towards what’s important to you.
Remind yourself not just of what you need to create but why you’re doing it.
Standing at the base of any hill, the path ahead always seems formidable. True
motivation comes from progress. While it sounds like a strict set of rules,
remember that the Create mode is ultimately about making progress on your
most important goals. Over time, you will actually enjoy coming back to this
distraction-free space because you will get addicted to the feeling of progress
you create when you aren’t distracted.
The Create Mode maximizes flow, and minimizes friction. If you spend time
in Create mode every day as a ritual, your brain will learn to be focused at that
point every time. You will see tremendous returns on the habit. After all, in a
distracted world, true focus is a superpower.
 9
COMMUNICATE MODE

PRINCIPLES OF COMMUNICATE MODE

We deliberately left out things like emails, instant messages and other such
communication tools from the Create mode. Whether email, chat, group
messages or even your own notes, you constantly have to deal with new
information, tasks and decisions. We will refer to all of these generically as
inboxes consisting of items. If we don’t have a plan for dealing with this new
information, it is easy to get lost in the deluge. We recommend creating a whole
new personality on your devices for these ‘inboxes’ we call the Communicate
mode.
Most inboxes are designed to simply collect all items that come their way and
order them by recency. This may not reflect your priorities or the urgency of the
tasks. A bill that is due in twenty days is displayed equally prominently as an
urgent work thread that needs your input by tomorrow. Given a menu of items to
choose from, our mind will wander to the easier ones that do not require us to
exert cognitive effort. We start reading newsletters during work because they are
in our email inbox. We push tasks that raise unpleasant emotional responses onto
our future selves. Unresolved items don’t just stay in our inbox, they also remain
an ‘open loop’ in our minds, becoming a source of latent stress.
The meta-task of dealing with an inbox is different from the task of dealing
with any particular item in that inbox. Instead of trying to switch between the
contexts of dealing with our inboxes and dealing with the items in our inboxes,
when in the Communicate mode, we should be focused on one thing only.
Getting to Inbox Zero.

INTRODUCING INBOX ZERO

Inbox Zero is a very popular strategy to deal with emails that many on the
internet abide by. It is inspired by the extremely popular 4D Time Management
method prescribed by David Allan, author of the massive bestseller Getting
Things Done. The basic tenets can be extended to any sort of inbox—whether
instant messages, group chats or any other.
In a nutshell, the Inbox Zero strategy requires one to be disciplined about
going through inboxes regularly, and each time, getting to zero items pending.
This is achieved by processing items in the inbox, one by one, without skipping,
till one gets to zero items pending.
‘Processing’ here means following a simple pre-defined algorithm. Each item
must either be Delegated, Done, Deferred, Documented or Deleted. Based on the
urgency of the item and the effort required to deal with it, choose from one of the
following options:

Delegate to someone else if the task is more relevant to them.

Do the item immediately, ONLY if it can be done in under two minutes.
Defer doing it to a specific time by putting it on your calendar.
Document it in your working memory if it contains information that
might be useful later.
Delete (or Archive, if you want to retain a copy) the item from your
inbox if it doesn’t require any action or is no longer relevant.

The central idea always is to have a well-defined, limited set of choices for how
to process each item in your inbox. Each choice should not take too long to
execute. Do NOT leave items pending in the inbox. Also, one feels a clear sense
of completion and achievement when one gets to zero.
The specific algorithm for your own inbox can be modified as per need and
type of inbox. Inbox Zero applies to all categories of inboxes, even if the apps
don’t call them that. For example, Tanuj religiously archives his conversations
on WhatsApp. WhatsApp and other direct messaging tools can be overwhelming
because conversations online don’t really seem to end. Every new reply feels
like it requires a reply too. A conversation then slowly degrades into single
emojis or generic lols. Instead, use the archive button to take it out of your
inbox, and tell yourself that the conversation has ended. Having a visual
representation of no open threads is helpful to bring calm to our minds.
 Some user-hostile platforms have actually not enabled or removed the ability
to archive. One can still use the delete chat option. A lot of people are
uncomfortable with deleting chats. In which case, ask your friends to move the
conversation over to other channels that you do prefer. Having fewer active chats
or threads ensures we don’t get lost in a rabbit hole or stretch a conversation.
When cleaning our inboxes, we want to stay focused on the act of triaging
rather than getting deep and solving any particular item. You want to have your
attention focused on high-level executive decisions around processing.
The Inbox Zero strategy is very aligned to the pre-conditions of flow we
discussed in Chapter 4. It has a clear goal—getting to zero. The set of choices or
rules to attain these goals are well-defined. The feedback is immediate—one can
see the unprocessed/unread count dropping towards zero in real-time. Inbox
Zero turns processing emails or tasks from an amorphous chore into a more
well-defined, almost-fun activity.
Inbox Zero is easy to maintain if you do it consistently. However, it is hard if
you don’t do it already or only do it sporadically. If you can’t naturally get to
zero, feel free to declare bankruptcy.

DECLARE BANKRUPTCY
For many people, getting to Inbox Zero can be daunting because of the number
of items that you already have pending in your inbox. Most often, people tend to
have unread emails from weeks ago. Those who have to-do lists also tend to
have a lot of residual tasks from long ago. For all of these, feel free to declare
bankruptcy.
Declaring bankruptcy is the act of allowing yourself to fall short on your
inbox obligations. Bankruptcy is accepting that it is time to let go of the 12,478
unread emails that, to be honest, you were never going to get to anyway.
Specifically, this is how you go about declaring inbox bankruptcy.

1. Ensure your inbox is sorted by recency.

2. Start by completely archiving items more than a month old. There is nothing
special about one month. You can choose two months or just seven days,
depending on the state of your inbox and how relevant the items are to you.
3. Next, scan the remaining items, and star only the ones that seem worthy of
retaining.
4. Archive the remaining non-starred items.
5. Now process through the starred items using the Inbox Zero Algorithm and
get to zero.

Newsletters are one common reason why email inboxes get overwhelmed.
Newsletters are more suited for ‘feeds’ such as social media, rather than
‘inboxes’ such as your email. If you do subscribe to more than a couple of
newsletters, consider creating a completely new email account for them.
Whenever you’re subscribing to a newsletter, use this new newsletter-only email
ID rather than your personal or work email ID. This way you can deal with those
feeds in the Curate mode, rather than in the Communicate mode.
Declaring bankruptcy is almost always less drastic than we believe. Do not be
afraid to use this as often as you need. If you’re thinking about bankruptcy, you
probably need to do it. But do try to use this moment to reflect on what you need
to do to prevent this next time? Do you not check email regularly? Should you
be unsubscribing to some emails or groups? Should your work team move some
discussions away from group chats to email or vice versa?
So declare bankruptcy if you need to, and then, let’s set up the Communicate
mode on our devices based on the ideas of Inbox Zero.

SETTING UP THE COMMUNICATE MODE

The first thing you want to do is to create another identity on your devices for
the Communicate mode. Make sure that you have the basic apps installed first.
As a reminder, this includes:

Your notes app for your working memory.

Your calendar app for your time blocks and tasks.
Website blockers to prevent distractions.

Install all the apps you need to manage your inboxes. This includes, but is not
restricted to:
 Email
Instant messaging
Direct messages from social media
Group chats
Tasks
Any other app that functions as an inbox you care about

Where possible, try to use a single app to manage all your different services
rather than using a browser. For example, most modern email applications let us
manage multiple email ids. This way we get a unified inbox across all our email
inboxes. Similarly, software such as Rambox lets us see a unified inbox across
all our messaging apps. See Appendix for a list of such apps.
You also want to make sure that you do NOT install any apps that may distract
you. Do set up the website blockers to block your personal time-sinks. If you
need access to social media, try to make sure you have blocked the newsfeed at
least. Try not to login to social media from this personality at all.
Unlike in the Create mode, your smartphones are actually well-suited for the
Communicate mode. The mobile user interface makes implementing Inbox Zero
on smartphones easy. Most inbox apps allow us to use swipe gestures to archive,
delete, etc. We can make them a part of our Inbox Zero routine. We can even
choose to respond to emails or messages only from our phones, forcing
ourselves to be quick about it.

YOUR WORKING MEMORY IS AN INBOX TOO

We recommended creating a working memory where every thought would land
up before you process it. We also recommended that when you’re trying to focus
on any one task, write down any unrelated distracting thoughts that occur in your
working memory.
Your working memory is an inbox too. But it starts looking like a hodgepodge
of ideas, thoughts, to-dos, links to content and other such items. What does
Inbox Zero on your working memory look like?
The specific algorithm for processing items in your working memory is not
very different from regular Inbox Zero. You go through your working memory
line by line, and process each thought. If the thought requires action, you can
add the task to your calendar, on a corresponding time block.
But often the action you take to process an item in your working memory will
be to clarify and ‘describe’ the thought better. As you go through each item, ask
if this thought is written clearly enough for your future self to understand. If you
come back to this thought two months later, will it still make sense to you? Does
it have all the relevant tags you need so that you are able to find it in the future?
For example, you may have written down ‘Interesting mail and article from
Sanjay re: startup. Should read about health AI, known founder. Are there
more?’
You can then translate this into ‘Sanjay Jain sent an interesting article
(https://..) about a #healthcare #startup called detect.ai. They are working on an
automated #cancer detecting #AI starting with early detection of breast cancer.
The founder is Deepak Singh, who has worked previously in Manipal Hospital.’
You may even want to add a task on your calendar to research more such start-
ups. As you can see, it is much more likely that the second message will show up
in one of your searches. It will also be saved in your daily page in your working
memory, grouped by context.
Treating our working memory as an inbox allows us to take two chances at
storing our thoughts. This gives us some leeway during the initial capture. We
don’t have to get every little tag and detail correctly in the first go. Our focus
should be on getting the thought out of our heads, so that we can free up our
minds for whatever we’re doing now.
The second pass helps better crystallize our thoughts for future use. It shapes
our working memory into a formidable store of knowledge, without having to
pre-decide a rigid organizational structure. The tags you choose can help you
create connections so that future retrieval is easier.

YOUR COMMUNICATION PLAN

A lot of people believe that if they are not constantly on top of their email or
instant messages, they will lose out on some precious opportunity.
There are some jobs where this kind of responsiveness is probably warranted.
If you are a day trader, having the right information at the right time could be the
difference between losing or saving money. It is highly probable though that
your job is not like a day trader’s.
Checking your email once or maybe twice a day suffices for most jobs, and
checking your instant messages once every couple of hours at best. What the
exact frequency should be depends on your specific role and responsibilities. It
is highly likely though that we’re doing it more often than really required.
We tend to overlook the real costs of this habit. Imagine how much more
focused time you would have if you weren’t breaking the flow to check email
very often. Imagine all the things you could’ve gotten done sooner if you
weren’t switching contexts between social media and work.
If you use time blocking, set up fixed times to check your inboxes. Try and
only use your Communicate personality within this time block and try to get to
Inbox Zero. If you finish early, you can reward yourself. Spend the rest of the
time block on whatever distraction you like. Overall, whether you check your
email every ten minutes or once a day, you’re likely to go through the same
amount of email in a day. But when you batch them and focus on Inbox Zero,
you spend a lot less time on each email.

Often people can’t switch off their phones, because they worry about missing
critical communication from their colleagues. Even though none of us explicitly
asked for it, we have inadvertently ended up creating unhealthy expectations
about response times. Because we’re always connected, we feel the pressure to
reply. More often than not, this pressure is self-imposed.
The real problem is that we have not set expectations clearly.
Add a little note to your email signature that lays out your own personal
communication preference. For example, ‘I usually read emails within 3 days
and respond to each item. If it’s urgent, call’. You can even put a similar message
on your WhatsApp or Slack status.
Like with any other problem, if you’re overwhelmed by emails or texts, 80 per
cent of the problem will come down to 20 per cent of the actors. Most people are
respectful and will comply with your instructions on how to communicate. You
only need to put in effort to set expectations with these 20 per cent bad actors.
 You can prepare a saved, polite template to send to someone who texts instead
of emailing or vice-versa. ‘Hi, could you please make sure this is sent on my
work email john@work.com and not text next time? I’m unable to keep track
and this may result in something important being missed or overlooked.’ You’ll
be surprised at how few times you actually have to do this once you start
communicating clearly.
It is easier to set expectations with people messaging you one on one. The
harder problem is in social settings and groups. Group culture is hard to change
once it’s set. If you’re overwhelmed by too many group texts, find the noisiest
group chats and mute or exit them. You don’t need to be present in all
conversations.
If you can’t exit, find whoever is posting the most on them, and message them
privately to request them to slow down. Alternatively, make a duplicate group
with the same members that are ‘Announcements Only’. Meaning, these groups
must be strictly used for important announcements only, no memes, forwards or
‘good morning’ messages should be allowed. Remove those that don’t comply.
In some workplaces, the problem is systemic. Everyone is in one large chat
group, and everyone is expected to be available all the time. People CC everyone
in their email chains because they don’t want to be accused of leaving someone
out. Everyone’s inboxes are flooded, but individual employees don’t want to be
the ones to call it out, because they don’t want to be seen as the ones
complaining.
If you feel this way about your workplace, you may want to talk to your
colleagues one-on-one first to check if they feel the same way too. If others are
also feeling overwhelmed by the state of affairs, then a change in how the office
communicates may be required. Usually, communication culture devolves
because no one attempted to design it mindfully. Like the emperor’s new clothes,
these broken systems chug along till someone stands up and points out the
obvious. Voice your opinion along with others who feel this way, and you’ll be
surprised how many people agree.
No one wants to work all the time. But in today’s distracting world, even
leisure can’t hold our undivided attention. To really switch off and play, needs a
little bit of work. That’s why you need Curate mode.
 10
CURATE MODE

PRINCIPLES OF CURATE MODE

The Curate mode is better defined by what it is not. It is where we are not doing
deep work and not communicating.
In an always-connected world, disconnecting needs to be a deliberate act. We
need a space to simply be ourselves. This is the Curate mode.
When you know what you’re really looking for, the internet can be a
wonderful place. It has amazing content in any format you can ask for. Whether
text, images, audio or video, content is available in many languages, and large
parts of it for free. You feel the satisfaction of having learnt something that you
intended to learn. Or simply be entertained.
It is important, however, that you do not use the Curate mode only to
mindlessly consume.
If you’re simply checking your feeds out of habit, without any self-awareness
of why you’re doing it, you’re much more likely to end up zoning out. You end
up feeling like you wasted time. The content you consumed was probably not
low-quality; it was simply not what you intended to do at the time.
The internet is an infinite content-generation machine. Most of this content is
delivered to you through infinite ‘feeds’. Social media, news sites, public
discussion forums, podcast subscriptions, video channels—all are feeds. Even
newsletters are feeds, just less frequent than the others. The totality of such feeds
is an endless buffet of content. There is no way in which you can consume all of
it. But just because you can’t consume all of it, doesn’t mean your brain doesn’t
try. Whether a buffet of food or content, you tend to over consume when
presented with that kind of variety and choice.
How does one manage this information overload to only get to the best and
most relevant content?
 The short answer is you can’t. There is no ‘best’ content. There is no way in
which you can ensure that your feeds only contain high-quality relevant or
timely content that you will definitely enjoy. There will always be noise. Content
creators are human, and their quality varies too. Our taste changes with time, so
does the definition of ‘relevant’.
Besides, even if you could somehow select ‘best’ feeds or have Artificial
Intelligence select them for you, then all the content would probably be too
narrowly selected from a series of topics you definitely care about. You would
lose the serendipity you get from stumbling into something novel, interesting or
weird that you would never have selected for yourself.
Instead of looking for ways to get only relevant content, we can ask a related,
but different question.
How do we make the most out of our time when consuming content, so that
we walk away feeling intellectually, emotionally or spiritually nourished?
This framing acknowledges that there is no ‘best’ in this infinite buffet. What
we want to do is align what we are consuming to what we need in the moment.
The objective isn’t to manage our content or feeds, but to make mindful use of
our time.
The way to do that is to set up your Curate personality and forget your
passwords.

SETTING UP CURATE MODE

If you’ve been following the recommendations so far, you should have three
identities on your device by now. You should have created two new users for the
Create and Communicate modes. Your original user account can be your Curate
mode. After that, you can begin by removing all the software that you do not
plan on using in this mode, especially any work-related or communication apps.
If you use a separate newsletter-only email ID, you may want to set that up here.
You will want to use a website blocker here too. However, instead of blocking
social media, news, games and other such sites, you may want to lock yourself
out from doing serious work in this account. This ‘anti-block’ helps build the
habit of doing focused work only in the Create or Communicate mode, and not
in the Curate mode.
 As we mentioned before, there is no hierarchy to these modes. The reason we
have an explicit Curate mode is not just so that you can’t be distracted when
you’re working. It is also so that you don’t start working when you’re supposed
to be relaxing. You should aggressively block out work from this personality,
just as you blocked distractions from the Create mode.
The point of these personalities is to create boundaries between the different
parts of your life. While we all acknowledge that the internet is distracting us
from important work, we also need to acknowledge how it is distracting us from
true leisure.
When you are in this account, you are here to spend time on leisure activities
guilt-free. Feel free to install whatever you need. From now on, any new apps
you want to try, games, or other software can be installed here.
Now that you have three modes, before we get further into curation, you want
to forget your passwords.

FORGET YOUR PASSWORDS

Once we have the three identities on your computer with a clear split in purpose,
we want to make sure they stay that way.
Most web-based applications are accessible from the browser. Keeping these
environments separate can be really hard, because we can simply log in to
Twitter or Facebook from the browser in the Create or Communicate mode.
There is one simple trick with identity management to increase friction towards
our worst tendencies. The best part is that this also makes our online experience
safer. This trick is to use a password manager to manage your identities.
Password managers remember passwords, which means that we can forget
them.
Let’s say you find yourself logging in to Twitter when you’re supposed to be
responding to emails. First, log in to the Curate mode and go to the offending
website. Use the reset password option. When prompted for a new password, use
your password manager to randomly generate a really long password, which
would be impossible to remember. For example, below is a randomly generated
thirty-character password, which should be quite a headache to recall and type:
 vqk3@gs3FNHA5HRV4r$ku7X*MNYyuc

Make sure that this password is only stored in the password manager in your
Curate mode. If you don’t remember the password, you simply won’t be able to
access your Twitter feed from anywhere else. You should also make sure that the
password to your website blocker app is also only available from the Curate
mode. This way you won’t be able to fiddle with the blocking settings from
inside the Create or Communicate mode.
You can apply this approach to the passwords of the three user accounts
themselves. You can choose shorter passwords for your Create and
Communicate accounts and a longer password for your Curate account. You may
even choose a password that will remind you of your priorities. For example,
you can set your password to ‘Have I spent time with family?’
If you’re on a deadline and trying to stop yourself from accessing all
distractions, you can change the password to your Curate account to a random,
long string. Write down this random password carefully on a piece of paper, and
seal it. This password is the master key to all your distractions. Depending on
your ability to self-regulate, you can either hide it or leave it with a trusted
friend. You can even ask your friend to not give it back to you till you prove you
are done with the work you were supposed to finish.
Bear in mind, however, that the objective isn’t to avoid spending any time in
the Curate mode. If anything, this is probably where you will have your best
ideas. If used well, you can learn a lot from the internet and meet interesting
people too. But like with focused work or efficient communication, it needs to be
done mindfully.
Let’s understand how we can do this.

CURATE WITH CONTEXT

The way we usually lose time to content is when we try and sneak in just a quick
look, but go down a spiral. To avoid this, many of us open tabs, or email/text
ourselves links, with the intent of reading them later.
Most of us will never get around to these.
 Yet, these unopened tabs and links sit there, demanding our attention, adding
to the list of ‘open loops’ that do not help us in keeping our mind clear. With
open tabs, one can actually feel the open loops weighing down on the extended
mind, as it slows down one’s computer.
There already are popular apps designed to help with this tendency. Pocket,
Readwise and Instapaper are the most popular ones. These allow you to add
links from anywhere with just one press of a button. When you have the time,
you can read/watch all the links you’ve saved for later. Separating curation from
consumption is, generally speaking, a good idea.
But most users of these apps with whom we spoke told us that they never
really go through or finish what is in the app. The problem is the act of browsing
through our feeds and saving a link for later is more instantly gratifying than the
act of actually going through the backlog and reading it. Even when we do try to
go back, we find it hard to recall why this particular link was of interest to us.
Instead of using any of the apps, we recommend using your working memory
to make your own Read Later list. Whenever you come across a link you want to
read later, or if your friend recommended a link to you, save it to your working
memory.
The only difference is that we want to slightly increase the friction of saving a
link, so that we don’t create a huge backlog for ourselves. Instead of only saving
the link, write a sentence or two about the context in which you came across the
link and why you want your future self to read it. For example, ‘#Recommended
by Priyanka. this (link) #podcast discussing the new book by Michael Lewis. She
told me it has good writing advice and also recommendations for good reads by
Lewis. Leisure Listen. #ReadLater’
Add a standardized tag such as #ReadLater. If it was recommended to you,
mention that too and mention who recommended it. Use tags or other details to
classify the link by either category, project or priority. Make the system as
personal as you want.
Next time you have only a few minutes, try and view an item from your Read
Later list in your working memory rather than browsing a new feed. The
advantage of this list is that it is truly a personalized, highly curated list made by
someone who knows your preferences and desires intimately—you. If done with
patience, it would even include helpful commentary on why you should pick
them. There is no feed in the world that will match your tastes better than the
content in here.
Once you finish an item, move it out of the list or at least delete the tag that
marked it as saved for later. You can go back and add some feedback to the list
after you’ve read the article. Another advantage of separating curation and
adding feedback is that over time, you will be able to see the quality of
recommendations from each of your sources. You will start getting a sense of the
people and publications that send you good content versus those that do not.
This method hopefully adds enough friction to slow down the open tab
backlog, but it won’t eliminate it. For that, we have to use the Nuclear Option.

THE NUCLEAR OPTION

One of the reasons we hoard content to consume is because we overestimate the
time and energy our future selves will have. We keep adding things to our list,
believing that someday we will find the magical, herculean energy required to go
through everything.
To solve this, strictly implement the nuclear option.
Every week at a fixed time, you must delete all items from your Read Later
list, whether you’ve read them or not. If you have some programming skills, you
can even set up your computer to do this automatically. This deletion part of the
curation process is the most important. If you don’t do this, there is no incentive
for you to actually consume the content you’ve curated. Or maybe the content
you saved was not good enough.
Either way, it is a new week, and you start with a clean slate. Try to do better
this time.
The more strictly this rule is implemented, the more real the stakes become.
As the deadline gets closer, you start looking at the content you’ve saved with
very different eyes. You start prioritizing items with value and discard those not
worth your time. The time that has passed between when you saved and when
you consume helps you re-evaluate whether it is still relevant. The context that
you’ve saved along with the item helps with this task immensely.
If you flush a bunch of saved links often, it will start changing your patterns of
curation. You’ll start saving less or adding better context. The feedback from this
process will start helping you adjust what content you see and when. For many,
the nuclear option will seem too harsh. People who think this are exactly those
who need it. This is why it is called the nuclear option.
It is okay if you want to save a copy of this list for that rare future occurrence
when you want to find a specific link you had once come across. As long as you
are not treating the archives as an active list, saving is fine. The idea is to make
the stakes real and to clear our minds of open loops. Personally, Tanuj saves all
recommendations from people permanently in his working memory but only
deletes the #ReadLater tag.
All of this is only useful if we consume with intent.

CONSUME WITH INTENT

If the objective is feeling calm and in control over our information diet, curation
is insufficient; we also need to change the way we engage with content.
The overload of content makes us want to spend less time on each piece of
content, not more. We learn how to skim and speed-read. Next to every
interesting talk or video are recommendations for five more that seem equally, if
not more, interesting. We listen to podcasts and videos on 2× to blaze through
the ideas. Often, we go through these feeds and links without really engaging
with the ideas or thoughts within.
This approach may help us plough through more content, but are we getting
value from it?
We will forget an overwhelming majority of what we read, watch or listen.
The less time we spend on something, the less likely it is that we will remember
the ideas in it. For any idea to have an effect, you need to be able to give it
deliberate attention. You need to be able to think about the ideas for at least some
time.
Thankfully, we are already aware of a way to give our focused attention to an
idea. It is to use our working memory to take notes. Every time you’re reading or
watching something, open up your working memory and make some notes about
what you just saw. Slow down to put the idea in your own words. Make
connections with ideas and thoughts you’ve had previously.
 As Feynman and Buffet did, try to explain the idea in clear terms to your
future self to help you think better now. The pleasant side-effect is that you also
create a record of your own thinking. Your future self will thank you. If you
forget the ideas you had, your notes will explain them to you.
When you make taking notes the objective of your consumption, the process
of consumption goes from passive to active. Your mind finds it easier to focus.
You gain a sharper eye for what is and isn’t good content. You learn to skip over
content that has nothing new for you. Over time, you’ll be able to start ignoring
entire feeds that no longer teach you anything new.
Active consumption doesn’t increase the amount of content you consume. Nor
does it increase the relevance of the sources you’ve picked. What it does is
ensure that the time you spend on a piece of content is meaningful. Your notes
become the tangible outcome of what you’ve learnt.
Furthermore, you end up collecting all the ideas you learn in your working
memory. This alone is a huge benefit. You will be able to see connections
between ideas you’ve had years apart. These connections will help you have
original ideas, since the specific universe of content you’ve seen is as unique as
your fingerprint.
Instead of going through most content, you engage deeply with curated
content. You start seeing exponential growth in your own knowledge and
creativity.

NURTURE YOUR CREATIVE SELF

During the pandemic, many of us had more than usual idle time.
Quite a few of us started filling up the time with more consumption on the
internet and, in general, spending more time collectively on social media. People
could identify that this was a drain on them emotionally. This draining but
compulsive act came to be known as ‘doomscrolling’.
The problem with attention economy companies is that they are trying to take
over every second of our idle time. They want to replace it with more and more
content consumption. The CEO of Netflix once said that one of Netflix’s
competitors is sleep. People are staying up late to watch shows, so that’s where
he expects the increased watch time metrics to come from. ‘And we’re
winning!’, he added.
When we have time to spare, the choice of simply passively consuming a
video or scrolling through a feed is much easier. We understand that
overconsumption is harmful. But it is incredibly hard to stop. All the strategies
we present in this book will help, but we’re aware that they aren’t bulletproof.
The only sure-shot way to streamline your consumption is to nurture your
creativity.
Even when we curate well, consume actively, and use the Nuclear Option to
clear the consumption backlogs, we’re still only consuming. Humans have an
innate desire to express themselves. Whether it is fashion, writing, making
videos, jokes, poetry, drawing, sculpting or anything else, we’re significantly
more engaged and fulfilled when we’re making art and expressing our identities.
We don’t even need much of an audience; the act of expressing itself is enough.
You can change the internet from a source of distraction into an outlet for your
creativity. Sharing on the internet is wonderful because there’s an audience for
everyone. You don’t need to be world-class to be sharing on the internet. If what
you make helps even one person, then the two of you are better off for it. The
feedback you get from sharing can be invigorating and make you want to get
better at your art.
Creativity also requires us to value our idle time. Being creative is about
seeing connections between seemingly unrelated things. This is impossible if
you are always being productive. We don’t believe that there is a hierarchy
amongst the modes we’ve created. The aim isn’t to spend as little time in the
Curate mode; it is to be fully immersed in whatever mode you need to be.
Dr Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University, is the
creator of the incredibly popular online course ‘Learning to Learn’. In her
journal article titled ‘The Middle Way: Finding the Balance between
Mindfulness and Mind-Wandering’, she claims that both focused and diffused
attention are essential to learning. We absorb information in focused mode, but
in diffused mode, our brains make connections between them. This is why so
many of us have novel ideas that just ‘came to us’ when we were in the shower,
driving or walking in the park.
 Creativity requires balancing consumption with creation. You need to
consume and create in cycles, just like you need to breathe in and breathe out.
When you have creative projects, they tend to dictate the shape of what you
consume to learn. What you consume inspires and shapes what you create.
The problem is that instead of being our creative selves, many of us have
become the ideal consumers of the attention economy. We’re willing to forgo all
our idle time, even our sleep, so that these companies can keep growing. This
was never the original purpose or the plan for the internet. The internet was
meant to connect us so that we could share ideas, not passively consume content.
If you want to change your relationship with technology, you’re going to have
to change the idea of yourself from being a passive consumer to being an active
creator. Your extended mind isn’t just a way for you to get information or
content from others. It is a way for you to put your own content out there, adding
to the collective experience.
To really get the most out of the internet, you need to put your selves out
there.
 11
HOW TO BE LEFT ALONE

OUR SELVES
Before the COVID-19 pandemic threatened our lives, an increasing number of
researchers had begun to identify a new epidemic. Just like we discovered that
obesity is linked to heart disease or smoking is linked to cancer, this lifestyle has
been linked to various physical and mental health issues. Douglas Nemecek,
chief medical officer for behavioural health at the large insurance firm Cigna,
said that this new epidemic ‘has the same impact on mortality as smoking 15
cigarettes a day, making it even more dangerous than obesity’. What is this silent
killer?
Loneliness.
Scientists have proven that isolation can have various detrimental effects, not
just on humans, but on many social animals. Isolation increases the levels of
cortisol, the stress hormone, in pigs and monkeys, just as it does in humans. Fruit
flies have reduced lifespans when isolated. Rats are more at risk of obesity and
Type II diabetes when isolated. It isn’t surprising that loneliness is deadly in
humans too. Group foraging and hunting may have been critical for human
survival thousands of years ago, but they seem much less important in today’s
modern economy. Then why does loneliness persist?
Humans are social animals. Our ability to cooperate was selected by evolution
because it helped us thrive. The pain of loneliness made us socialize, just like
hunger makes us eat or feeling cold makes us seek shelter. Even the language we
use for social failures—‘She broke my heart’, ‘He hurt her feelings’, ‘I was
burning with shame’—speak of it as if it is literal pain. We’ve managed to
overcome our primitive lifestyles, but the social instincts that made us who we
are still persist. It is in our very nature to care about our relationships and our
social standing. All humans have a deep need for connection and belonging. We
find it hard to be ourselves, without also belonging to something larger than our
selves.
Loneliness may be a killer, but that also doesn’t mean that we’re designed to
be with everyone all the time. We need and enjoy solitude just as much as we
need and enjoy company. Sometimes, we just want to be left alone or be wholly
interested in our own pursuits. We want space from others so that we can relax
and be who we truly are. We may have thoughts and feelings that we do not want
to share with others. Sometimes privacy is a need that arises precisely because
we care so much about our social standing. We have secrets, often embarrassing,
that we do not want widely known because we care about what people think
about us.
As humans, all of us have had to learn to walk the fine line between figuring
out who we truly are, while also managing what others think we are—a
balancing act between our desire for socializing and our desire for privacy.
In the digital age, this fine line has become vanishingly thin. We leave digital
breadcrumbs wherever we go, revealing things about ourselves to corporations
and prying governments we don’t even tell our closest friends. Moreover, a lot of
our social interactions have shifted online, and social media has become the
place where we go to fulfil our desire for connection and belonging. Social
media has become critical to our lives, but does it really give us the social
connections and sense of belonging we seek? If not, then why do so many
people spend so much time there?
In this chapter and the next, we try to develop a bitful approach to both these
competing desires. In this chapter, we cover how to keep to your self, i.e., how to
reclaim your privacy. In the next chapter, we cover strategies for how we can use
our technology more mindfully when connecting with others online.
Let us start by learning how to be left alone.

PRIVACY IS BOUNDARY MANAGEMENT

Privacy is a big problem on the internet.
Nearly all online activities generate a trail of data. Someone or the other
always knows what you’re doing in every moment of time. For every
commercial transaction, at the very least, your payments provider will have a
record. For every website you visit, your internet service provider will know
where you’ve been. If you spend time on any website with ads, many third-party
data brokers and other ad-tech firms will know that you visited. Each of these
intermediaries has a portion of your data and is in the market either selling what
they have or buying more of it.
It is impossible to prevent this data generation in the first place. Ideally
companies should only record data that is necessary to deliver a service. The
data should only be used in ways aligned with our interests, such as to improve
the product or to troubleshoot a bug. In reality, companies collect a lot more data
because it is cheap as well as lucrative to do so. For one reason or another, our
data ends up in a server somewhere. What we should be concerned about is what
happens next.
A lot of this data is up for sale. Some of it directly in targeted advertising
markets. The games you install may sell your location data to marketers.
Sometimes if the data is not up for sale, the company itself could be. In 2016, the
Beijing-based Kunlun group acquired the US-based gay dating app, Grindr. The
Committee of Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS) soon sought to
reverse this deal, citing national security concerns. Grindr had data about the
sexuality, HIV status, and private messages of more than 27 million Americans.
Due to CFIUS’ intervention, the company was eventually acquired by a set of
US-based investors.
Generation of data is inevitable, but its use for surveillance is not. In a mostly
online world, privacy is not the same as anonymity.
Privacy is boundary management.
Privacy means being able to assert control over who has access to what data
about us. It means being able to express who doesn’t have access or what they
can’t use it for and knowing that our wishes will be respected.
 The fundamental tool that we will use is the same as the previous section—
our identity. The previous section used identity to help create a boundary
between goal-oriented use of our devices from other general-purpose or leisure
use. In this section, we want to see how well-defined identities can help us create
boundaries around our data and ourselves to help us reclaim a sense of privacy.

PRIVACY IN PRACTICE
Many companies now market privacy as a feature. This leads many to believe
that privacy is simply a binary, either something has privacy or it doesn’t. In
practice, depending on what measures you have taken, you will have a degree of
privacy.
Configuring for privacy almost always involves some trade-offs. At the very
least, you’ll need to put in a little bit of time to configure your devices and learn
the habits you need to maintain your desired level of privacy. To do this
optimally without feeling overwhelmed, one first needs to answer—what is my
desired level of privacy? and what am I willing to do to meet it?
To be able to answer what your desired level of privacy is, you must be aware
of what you are protecting and from whom. For some people, merely the idea of
being tracked makes them shudder. It makes them willing to invest in any
measure to protect themselves. For some, browsing history being tracked for ads
does not seem creepy, but privacy to them may mean the right to not be
bombarded with spam emails or incessant marketing calls.
Most of our privacy is not lost to clever hackers; instead, we lose it through
oversharing. The companies that benefit from advertising are also the ones in
charge of configuring our privacy preferences. By default, these preferences
favour their business model over the individual. If you really want to protect
your privacy, you will need to put in the effort to change settings and learn new
behaviours.
Once you understand the risks and your own preferences, you need to design a
plan for yourself that you can implement easily. We list some strategies below
that might help you decide what you are willing to realistically protect.
First, you need to be practical. It is more likely that you will abandon an ill-
designed plan that was too ambitious. A simpler plan that protects your basics
without much effort might serve you better in the long run.
We recommend that, at a bare minimum, everyone must learn what it takes to
protect:

Identity Credentials: Passwords to emails or social media accounts that

may be used to impersonate you. Any identifiers such as national
identity numbers, drivers license numbers, etc., which are meant to be
secret, should be protected too.
Financial Information: Banking details and details of credit cards, etc.
These are the most common targets of all cybercrime.
Communication: Being able to have completely private conversations.
Location and Addresses: Whether GPS coordinates or physical
addresses to prevent you from being physically tracked or harmed.
Other Personally Identifying Information or Sensitive Data: Any
other data or documents that you’d rather not be in the public sphere
such as your browsing history, your journal or other personal documents.

It is also important to understand what you cannot control. Every time you use
an online service for a transaction—to order food, do shopping, call a taxi, book
a hotel, etc.—you will generate a log on their server, and possibly with some
intermediaries such as your payments provider. These companies and
intermediaries will retain this information for as long as their privacy policy
states. These companies may then sell this data or hand it to the government if
requested, as per their policies and the laws of the land. This is not something
you can individually change, but you can be mindful of when deciding your
desired privacy level.
Since these individual transactions happen on different websites, once again it
is your identity that helps them connect these pieces together and create a deep
profile of you. If you are concerned about details from various aspects of your
life being associated, do pay attention to which identifiers (emails, phone
numbers, etc.) you are revealing to them.
Ultimately, there is no magic bullet solution to privacy on the internet. There
are only measures you can take to be a harder target to trace. In the sections that
follow, we’ll be going over how to attain specific types of privacy.

PHRASES NOT WORDS

In October of 2020, Donald Trump’s Twitter account was allegedly hacked by a
Dutch researcher. He had access to the account of the then President of the
United States and could read his direct messages. There was no elaborate code or
trick. He simply guessed the password and apparently got it on his fifth try. The
researcher claims Trump’s password was ‘maga2020!’
We’re often told that we should make our passwords difficult to guess by
adding special characters or numbers, but this is bad advice. The creator of this
2003 standard, Bill Burr, has admitted he regrets having written the document.
When humans try to follow this best practice, they come up with very
predictable passwords. Replacing ‘a’ with @, adding exclamations at the end of
passwords, using anniversaries and birthdays for random numbers, etc.
Worst of all, this makes passwords harder to remember for humans. We end
up using the same password in multiple places. This is terrible for security. The
password to your bank account is now only as safe as the security protections on
the weakest website where you reused the password. A simple phishing attack,
that is, someone making a fake website asking you to login, would be enough for
you to lose access to most of your accounts.
 Most hackers who would simply guess would try to use computers to guess.
For a computer, guessing ‘maga2020!’ is the same as guessing ‘dfaa9183@’.
The most important criterion isn’t variability of characters, it is the length of the
password. The longer your password, the more guesses a computer has to make.
This means that instead of a password, you might be better off thinking of a
passphrase. The longer the phrase, the better.

The other way hackers attack is password reuse. If you use the same password
everywhere, the security of your bank account is only as much as the security of
neopets.com. Hackers simply guess passwords you’ve used on other sites to get
into more sensitive apps or websites.
Ideally, you should have different passwords for each website. This will
prevent password reuse attacks, but it leads to using a lot of passwords. You can
use a password manager to store all your passwords. Password managers help
you generate random, long passwords that are hard to guess. It then fills in these
passwords automatically when you are browsing, if you have logged into the
password manager. This means that you don’t reuse passwords on any site, but
still only have to remember one master password.
Most password managers also allow you to save other secrets such as your
banking details, credit card numbers, ID numbers, software license keys, etc., in
an encrypted manner. The advantage is that all your secrets are safely stored as
encrypted files rather than plain text. They are in one convenient location and
can even be autofilled directly where you need them. The trade-off is that there
is now a single point of failure. But you can offset some of that risk by using
two-factor authentication (2FA) on your password manager.
A second factor of authentication is basically an additional way of confirming
that you are really you. Ideally, your password is a secret that only you know.
However, in case your password has leaked, the 2FA confirms your identity by
sending a one-time password to a device that is known to be in your control.
In fact, as far as possible, you should be using 2FA on all your important
accounts, especially your financial accounts. There are multiple choices for
second factors as well, and they have their own trade-offs between security,
convenience and costs. If you can afford it, try to get a physical security key
based on an open standard such as U2F to act as your second factor.

PRIVACY FROM BEING ANNOYED

When we imagine our privacy being lost, we imagine a motivated stalker or a
determined enemy is trying to ascertain what we’re doing, whom we’re meeting
and what we’re saying in an attempt to harm or harass us. This happens to a lot
of people, especially women. For men and women alike, it is much more likely
that they face the less dangerous, more common, but still annoying problem of
being bombarded by an incessant stream of marketing calls, messages and
emails.
Many businesses, online or offline, ask us for our number or email to transact
with them. Some residential as well as office buildings also ask for these details
to permit entry into them. This data then makes its way, either directly sold by
the company or indirectly by an unscrupulous agent, to a marketing database.
From there, it is sold repeatedly to anyone who wants it. Even if the company
has a privacy policy, if they don’t implement security well, this data can leak.
Now you have a spam problem and your details are also easily available to any
motivated attacker or stalker.
Whether stalking, surveillance or spam, the underlying problem is the same.
Our communication channels are architected to be open to anyone who has
our unique identifier. That is, anyone with our email address can email us and
anyone with our phone number can call us.
The architecture favours the harassers. Even though regulators such as the
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) have instated penalties and a
National Do Not Call registry, enforcement is hard. For a motivated spammer or
stalker, the costs of getting a new number or a new email are very low. Neither
we nor the regulator can humanly keep up with the task of blocking each new
number or email ID that they get. On the other hand, the personal cost and
inconvenience of changing our number, resending it to all our family, friends and
acquaintances is high.
We can protect our privacy from such annoyances by splitting our identity.
 Emails and phone numbers usually act as our primary identifier across SMS as
well as chat apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal. Managing email ids
and phone numbers is, thus, a good bottleneck to manage privacy preferences
across all of these applications and channels.
Just like we split our personality on our devices by the quality of attention, we
should split our communication channels by the level of privacy we desire. Just
like we talked about three kinds of information environments, consider the
following levels of privacy.

1. Trusted Contacts: This includes friends, family and others who should be
able to reach you whenever they desire.
2. Utility Contacts: This includes services like a plumber or a delivery person
whom you share contact details with for a specific utility. During a specific
context or time period, you want them to be able to reach you, but not otherwise.
3. Burner Contacts: These are places that force you to hand over your email or
phone number. You don’t really want to hear from them, but it is the price of
admission. You may want to share an identifier to gain a one-time entry, but you
don’t care at all about hearing from them again.

The internet makes creating new email ids very easy. The appendix lists some
places where you can create burner email ids for temporary use. The most
common use of temporary email ids is to get to content on sites that force you to
register and then later bombard you with emails. Burner email ids are completely
air-gapped from your real one, so you don’t have to worry about future spam.
Today, there are services available that let you make virtual numbers as well.
Virtual numbers are numbers different from your main number and can be
operated through apps. They can be set up to receive calls and SMSes without
requiring an additional subscriber identity module (SIM). Calls from unknown
numbers can be automatically blocked, while those from trusted numbers can be
redirected. These numbers can also be used to register and create a secondary
account on services like WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal.
We can use different identities for different levels of privacy. Setting up a new
email or virtual number should take you ten minutes at most. Once you do, you
now have an air-gapped email or phone number, which you can use as a utility or
burner and share without fear.
 Instead of using your real name, number or email, consider creating a
completely unique, unrelated identity for e-commerce deliveries. This way even
if the address leaks, they are not linked to your real-world identity.
It is helpful in general to use a burner email to subscribe to new, unimportant
services. This has multiple advantages. First, the email ID that makes it to most
databases is not the primary email you use for services such as banking or for
private correspondence. As we discussed in Chapter 10, you can even use
another email ID for collecting newsletters. Separating newsletters into another
ID means your personal inbox is not filled with newsletters, promotional emails
or spam, drastically cutting down the volume of email you have to deal with.
It may seem like a task to juggle multiple identities, but most of it becomes
automatic if you’re using a password manager. Password managers don’t just
remember your passwords, they remember usernames too. When you visit any
website or app, they let you simply pick from all the identities you have
registered on that website.
Even important services require you to register using an email address, and
some of them don’t respect your privacy from being annoyed. You can set up a
dedicated email ID only to sign up for these services. This way, all the
unnecessary notification emails do not crowd your primary inbox, protecting not
just your privacy but also your attention.

PRIVACY OF YOUR CONVERSATIONS:

END-TO-END ENCRYPTION
We don’t need to spend any time explaining why the secrecy of our private
communications is very important. Only when our conversations are secure, can
we feel free to say what we need to. We want to focus on how our conversations
can leak and what we should do to prevent it.
There are essentially three ways in which our conversations can become
public:

1. In transit by intermediaries
2. Through compromised personal devices
3. Intentional or unintentional disclosure by the receiver of communications
The first scenario is when the people responsible for delivering your messages
can read them. Lately, end-to-end encryption has become widely available on
our instant messaging apps. Due to their design, SMSes should be considered not
private for all practical purposes. You may want to look for an end-to-end
encrypted email service as well. See the Appendix for a complete list of services.
Even if your communication channel is end-to-end encrypted, the ends
themselves can still leak. It is alleged that the assassination of journalist Jamaal
Khashoggi was coordinated with the help of information obtained from leaked
WhatsApp conversations with another Saudi dissident, Omar Abdulaziz.
Abdulaziz’s phone had spyware delivered by a masked link, masquerading as a
tracking link for a package. There is little one can do if the devices themselves
have been compromised by motivated attackers. If you’re really in need of
strong privacy, you have to make sure that both you and your conversation
partner are using a secure device.
All of us may not have to worry about protection from heavily resourced state
intelligence apparatus. However, there is no saying which of the conversations
we had today will leak in the future and create a problem for us. The problem
with maintaining privacy is that it is not a bounded problem. An end-to-end
secure chat between you and a loved one today may end up being compromised
in 5 years’ time due to a malicious app that your child accidentally downloaded
while playing a game.
Our best hedge against this unbounded risk is to choose ephemerality.

FORGETTING AND FORGIVING

Since computer storage is cheap, many providers default to saving all your
messages and posts. This seems like a great idea because you can go back and
search for every message that someone has sent you. However, when you think
about privacy, it is worth asking if every message is really worth saving.
As a society, we underappreciate the value of forgetting. It is not just privacy,
it is about our emotional well-being.
Since we’re used to looking up old links, or jokes or memes that our friends
sent, we have started believing that having all messages stored forever is a good
thing. However, just because some messages are useful to look up later, doesn’t
mean saving all messages is beneficial.
We’ve all said things when we’re hurt or angry, in person, on text or on social
media, that we regret. There are also things posted that simply fall out of favour
or become inappropriate with the passage of time. In person, we forget most of
our conversations. If someone said something hurtful, we eventually even
forgive them. In digital mediums, such messages remain on record forever.
Whether they are on the sending or receiving end of regrettable messages, some
people tend to go back and ruminate on these unhealthily.
Many instant messages now allow you the option to make your messages
ephemeral. That is, they disappear after a certain period of time. Some services
allow you to even set the time period of this disappearance. We recommend you
use this feature extensively on your most personal relationships, especially with
your spouse or partner. By default, the messages you sent each other will
disappear.
This doesn’t mean you can’t save messages. Services that provide
ephemerality also usually provide a method to save important messages, such as
starring or forwarding. It increases the friction of saving a message. This small
speed bump allows us to be more mindful about what we save. Instead of saving
all the hurtful messages, we can ensure that our chat history only contains
delightful memories. Opening the chat history presents you with these memories
rather than the more mundane everyday stuff. Besides, you don’t have to use
these ephemeral messages with everyone, only for truly personal or sensitive
conversations.
Ephemerality is not foolproof: anyone can still screenshot or save the
messages you sent. It is only protection against the unknown unknown. It
reduces the chances that sensitive information or pictures about you got leaked
because, say, your friend’s phone got stolen or someone forced their way into
your phone. You don’t have to turn on the feature with everyone. For example,
with clients or work colleagues, it may be useful to have a history of
conversations. These conversations usually also pose less of a privacy risk.
Where you use ephemerality and where you don’t is a boundary you need to
set, based on your personal expectation of privacy.
 PRIVACY FROM TRACKING
The strongest argument to prevent tracking is the asymmetry of risk and reward.
There is generally very little for you to gain from targeted advertising or other
surveillance, but the potential harms of a motivated attacker having access to
your entire browsing history could be huge.
You should adopt as many of these measures as you comfortably can based on
your assessment of your privacy risks.

PROTECTION FROM THE UNKNOWN UNKNOWN

Sometimes you might need to be extra sure that there is no trace of what you’re
doing. You may find it useful to use Tor Browser.
Tor is short for The Onion Router. The internet is basically one large open
network. You can use encryption such that only the intended recipient will be
able to read the contents of your request. However, the meta-data, i.e., the data
about who sent the request, when and to whom is sent openly. Think about the
postman and the envelope. The envelope protects the contents of the message,
but what’s on the address is public, so that the postman can deliver the message
to the right address. There is a certain degree of privacy loss if someone can read
the addresses you communicate with, even if they can’t read what you’re
communicating about.
Instead of taking the shortest route, the Tor browser routes every request
through multiple, random servers. At each hop, information is masked, and a
layer of encryption is added (hence, the ‘onion’ router). Even if a hop is
compromised, it could, at best, only know the addresses of one hop ahead and
one hop behind. Because of the layers of encryption, no hop individually can
decrypt the information. At no point in the journey does any one computer know
both the original sender and the receiver, offering a truly anonymous browsing
session.
Tor is the safest browser, but also the slowest. Tor’s multiple hops make page
loading slower. An alternative strategy is to simply protect yourself from
tracking at two levels. First, protection from the ISPs who track you using the
hardware they provide to connect to the internet. Second, protection from
advertisers who track you using browsers, apps and other software you use to
use the internet.

PROTECTION FROM YOUR ISP

Your ISP is the bottleneck to all your internet usage. All requests from all your
devices pass through them. They know what all the members of your family are
up to. You can do two things to make sure you’re safe.

1. Use HTTPS everywhere: The original protocol of the internet didn’t

really have security in mind. All your data was transmitted in plain text
and could be read by anyone in the middle. Using HTTPS prevents them
from being able to read the contents of the websites you are accessing.
Using https is as simple as making sure the uniform resource locator
(URL) you are currently on begins with ‘https://’. Most browsers also
have a visual indicator to show that you are using https. Usually this
looks like a green lock.
2. Use a paid, secure, non-logging VPN: Anytime you visit a website or
access an app, all ISPs can see the internet address of the destination,
even if you’re using HTTPS. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) route
your traffic through their own private servers. The ISPs can now see the
address of the VPN but will not know your final destination.
Beware that there are many ‘free’ VPNs that may protect your data from
your ISP but may instead sell it themselves or make available your
history on request. If you really want to be private, opt for a paid VPN
that does not log traffic.
3. Ensure that your DNS is private too: The way the internet is
architected is that internet addresses are pure numbers called IP
Addresses, for example, 123.45.67.89. However, since humans are bad
at remembering these numbers, we created domain names such as
google.com, apple.com, and so many more. A domain name server
(DNS) translates between human-readable addresses and IP addresses.
Every time you click a link or type in a URL, your request is first sent to
a DNS, which translates that URL into an IP address. This is another
 potential source of leakage, even if you do use VPNs. The Appendix
lists open DNSes and how to change them.

PROTECTION FROM THE ADVERTISERS

The other entities likely to track all your browsing history are the adtech
companies. The very first thing to remember is that they use your identity to
recognize you. Due to rising awareness of the extent of data collection, many of
these companies have started offering privacy choices.

MANAGING IDENTITY

The primary way that ad networks track you is because you’ve logged into their
products. For browsing that you do not want to be linked to your identity, you
can use the incognito mode. Or even install a different browser if that works
better for you. If you do install another browser, remember to never login to your
existing social media or email accounts, else advertising companies will be able
to set a cookie knowing that you are you. If you’ve already split by identity, you
can set up your browsers in each personality for the level of privacy you desire.

CHANGE YOUR DEFAULTS

There are a few steps you can take to prevent adtech networks from creating
profiles of you. You can also stop re-targeting ads which will no longer try and
tempt you with things you almost purchased. The following checklist
summarizes the steps you can take to prevent your data being collected at all.
Some specific sites may not function correctly because of some of these, but
those should be the exceptions, not the rule.

Opt out of all participating ad networks on youradchoices.com

Opt out of ad personalization and data sharing from Google and
Facebook
Change your default search engine to something that does not save your
 history
Change your browser to a more private one such as Brave or Firefox.
Change your current browser’s settings to ‘do not track’ and block third-
party cookies
You can use different identities on your browser to prevent linking of
browsing history and targeting of ads.
If your browser supports it, get privacy-protecting extensions from the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) such as privacy badger, HTTPS
everywhere, etc.
Reset advertising IDs on your smartphone as often as you can

A recently updated detailed how-to of each of these steps is available at

bitfulness.com/privacy.

PRIVACY ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media poses a much more challenging problem to privacy than any other
kind of app or website. The strategies outlined in this chapter focus on
preventing inadvertent sharing of personal data and identifiers that could result
in harm if shared outside of trusted circles. We do this by protecting our real
identity from those who would track us.
On the other hand, you go to social media precisely to share personal
information or, at the very least, information relevant to you personally.
Everything you see, post or do on social media reflects who you are. You are
revealing your self to the world, and the world is welcome to react to it directly.
The other challenge of social media is that we need to not just regulate the bits
we exhale, we also need to regulate the bits we inhale. What we subscribe to,
what we share, what we like is also causing changes to what our news feeds
show. There’s a feedback loop at work here that is opaque to us. However, this
feedback loop determines our news feed. Through our feed, it affects our world
view, our social circle and even our peace of mind.
To understand how we can have a bitful approach to social media, we need to
first understand what social media really does.
 12
HOW TO BE TOGETHER

THE DRESS
In 2015, Cecilia Bleasdale used her phone to take a picture of a dress at Cheshire
Oaks Designer Outlet north of Chester, England. Bleasdale planned on wearing
this dress to her daughter’s wedding and sent her daughter the picture to get her
opinion. Her daughter would eventually post the photo to Facebook to ask her
friends a simple question:
What colour was The Dress?
The picture Bleasdale’s daughter posted is the famous meme that divided the
planet on whether The Dress is black and blue or gold and white. It originated on
Facebook but went viral across all social media networks. Major television and
print news outlets covered the story. Fans wanted to know whether celebrities
saw blue or gold. News items about The Dress itself went viral. Wired
Magazine’s article by Adam Rogers on The Dress got over 32.8 million unique
visitors. The hashtag ‘#TheDress’ was generating more than 11,000 tweets a
minute. At one point, there were more than 8,40,000 views a minute of the
Tumblr post. Buzzfeed’s poll on The Dress broke its then-record for most
concurrent users live on the site.
The Dress exemplifies how social media really works.
If you are curious to know, The Dress was black and blue, but more than two
thirds who saw the picture saw it as white and gold. There is no scientific
consensus as to why people saw discordant colours. But The Dress went viral
precisely because it divided opinion in a manner that can’t be settled definitively.
In a rare instance, The Dress was one of the things that divided us but was also
incredibly low stakes. You could disagree with someone but also laugh about it
together. Usually, for more high-stakes questions such as politics, policy, gender,
justice or even sports, the conversations can get acrimonious rather quickly. The
resulting hate attracts even more people into the brawl and drives more
engagement.
Social media has its upsides too. For example, in the second wave of the
COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Twitter users in India self-organized to move
huge amounts of relief in the form of oxygen cylinders, medicines, plasma and
other materials. Cryptocurrency founders put together a relief fund for India that
received nearly US$400 million in relief funds from across the globe. Although
the verdict is still out, it is a group of Twitter users who incessantly researched
and collaborated to put the lab leak hypothesis back on the table. Social media is
undeniably interesting and covers niches you wouldn’t even dream existed. You
can genuinely build connections with people across the globe, or across the
room, in a new and different way. There have been real social movements that
have been born and grown on social media.
Social media has become an inextricable part of society. Whether you
individually decide to opt-in or opt-out of social media, it still deeply affects
your life anyway. Hence, it deserves much more of our scrutiny.
People are often worried, and rightfully so, about What is social media doing
to society? Or, at a more personal level, What is social media doing to my data?
We believe we need to start with a more basic question—What is social
media?

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA?

Social media is both a slice of public opinion and the thing that shapes it.
Social media posts don’t always come with the right (or even any) facts, but it
always carries the point of view of those who post them. This is both its appeal
and its curse. Scientists set up an experiment where they took a set of photos and
displayed it in an Instagram-style feed to subjects under a functional magnetic
resonance imaging (an fMRI) machine. They experimented with the feed,
showing the same photos to everyone, but a different number of likes. The brain
scans showed that subjects consistently paid more attention to the photos with
more likes. It didn’t matter if the photos were the ones they posted or the ones
they saw. The results revealed a simple truth.
We pay a lot more attention to information others value.
 On social media, we don’t just learn about what is happening in the world, we
learn a thing that’s even more important—what others in our networks have to
say about what is happening in the world. The beliefs we adopt are not formed
independently, we adopt beliefs that serve us socially. Influencers exist because
we’re surprisingly easily influenced. We make complex judgements such as
which brands we trust, where to take our next vacations or whom we will vote
for, based on what others say on social media. Even if we aren’t conscious of
doing so.
In turn, this is also social media’s curse. We use people to value information,
but we also use information to value people. We tend to agree with things said
by people we like and disagree with those we don’t, even if we don’t do that
consciously. We tend to share articles that confirm our world-views, and we look
at how much an article is shared by our network as evidence of it being true.
Fake news spreads far because we’re not looking at the news, we’re paying more
attention to who shared it. Simultaneously, we call news shared by people we
dislike, fake. Social media is where we express what we have to say about what
is happening in our world and where others judge us on the basis of what we
express.
This judgement can have terrible consequences for people and often arrives in
full force and without warning. Once a group has judged someone or some
institution worthy of scorn, extreme elements in an online tribe tend to harass
and abuse their victims with impunity. While they may represent only a small
fraction of their large community, for an individual on the receiving end, the
absolute number of messages of hate, abuse, death or rape threats can be quite
overwhelming.
Social media is really hard to quit. As social animals, information about what
others are doing and what others think about us occupies a special place in our
brains. Improving, or at the very least maintaining, our social standing occupies
large parts of our attention. Social media plugs right into this primal desire.
This is why the bitful approach to social media isn’t to stop or ignore it.
Instead, it is to be a lot more intentional about what you want out of social media
and configure your technology to make sure you get it. The exact recipe to do
that will vary from person to person. However, the first step is the same for
everyone, which is deciding what you really want from social media.
 Is social media where you learn new things? Or is it where you catch up with
friends? Maybe you use it to relax by switching off and watching mindless
content. Don’t judge your uses, just note them down before you get to the next
section. Once you know what you want from social media, we dive deep into the
strategies to get it in the next section.

A BITFUL LENS TO SOCIAL MEDIA

In theory, social media is our window to the world. In practice, social media is
not a window but a lens.
When we look at the world through social media, we need to be more mindful
that it is a distorted view of the world. You do have some autonomy over what
you post and who is in your network, but largely the social network decides who
sees what exactly. The algorithm we know selects content that magnifies
differences.
Researchers at Facebook and Cornell proved the control your feed has over
your emotions with a chilling experiment. They manipulated the content in the
feed of over 7,00,000 users to either suppress or increase posts with emotional
content. What they found was striking. First, emotions increase engagement.
Remove all negative or positive emotions from a user’s feed, and the user will
post less. They also proved the existence of ‘emotional contagion’, i.e., when
users were shown positive emotional content, their own posts were more positive
and vice versa.
Social media companies control user feeds to run targeted advertising
campaigns, which is how they earn. To maximize earning, they need to
maximize engagement. They do this by algorithmically matching content to
users. This matching of content to users is the fundamental dynamic at the heart
of social media. Hence, you do not see the entirety of what the world sees; you
only see that which the news feed algorithm chooses to show you to maximize
engagement. Similarly, the algorithm decides the reach of your posts, thereby
presenting a distorted image of you to the world. It sets you up for conflict, as
your most provocative posts, even if they are comparatively rare, travel the
furthest.
 The end result is that everyone’s a celebrity, everyone’s a critic, and there’s
always conflict. Unless existing social media change drastically, getting the most
out of them while protecting ourselves from harm is currently our own
responsibility.
In practice, we tend to forget that social media is a distorting lens. We update
our beliefs based on the world we see online and forget that it does not represent
the real world but a specific collection of information deliberately selected to get
a reaction out of us. The quickest way to get a sense of this is to swap phones
with someone with reasonably different interests than you. Their social media
news feed will look very different than yours.
Social media controls the fundamental dynamic, which means how our
content is shared and displayed is not in our control, and neither are the posts we
see. What is in our control are three dimensions—the identity we present, the
content we share and our networks. These three levers of control allow us to
push back against the distortion that social media pushes on us. Let us
understand how we can put these into action.

SPECIALIZE
To design your own usage, you need to first answer: what do you use social
media for? There are many uses and it would be impossible for us to list them
all. But broadly, you can classify the uses into four categories—Connection,
Fraternity, Community and Entertainment.
Connection represents our intimate relationships. People with whom we
would like to share our personal joys, sorrows and everything else. Fraternity is
those relationships where we share a common passion or interest. We want to
share our knowledge, our questions and curiosities. Community represents the
roles we play as members of society. We want to present our best selves and
participate in conversations about the future of our communities. Finally,
entertainment is just that. It is leisure that doesn’t require a reason.
Our simple strategy is to separate these four uses into four different social
media networks or, at the very least, into four different accounts. Similar to how
we split our personalities by attention mode in Chapter 7, we want to split our
social media use by intent. The biggest upside is that it makes social media use
much more intentional, with much less effort.
For example, if your friends are on Instagram, you can limit its use only to
catch up with friends. Remove all content sources that are unrelated to your
friends and family. You can use other networks such as Twitter, Reddit or
Facebook to catch up on the news and explore your interests. Yes, this split adds
friction, but that is the point. You want to be deliberate about which self you’re
being, rather than letting the social media algorithm decide your mood for you.
On a daily basis, instead of trying to limit your overall social media use, you
can specifically limit use for Entertainment or Community or whatever you want
to balance. It becomes easier to save your time and mental health, because you
can block the specific social media app that is making you lose time or causing
you distress. Connecting with friends on social media and seeing their happy
moments is a true joy. Especially when in a world without social media, those
moments may never have reached us at all. However, we start using social media
with one intent, but often end up scrolling mindlessly till we’re doing something
else entirely.
Using social media to engage with our friends online has been shown to
actually be positive for our well-being. Studies have shown that shallow
engagements such as likes don’t really make us feel connected online. When you
see something that’s interesting, try to leave a comment. If you’d rather talk to
them one-on-one, even better!
In fact, if you truly want to use technology for connection, the best social
network can be one you make. Let’s call it a simple social to-do list. Write down
a list of people you want to stay in touch with. Whenever you next have time,
scroll till you find someone you haven’t spoken to in a while. Drop them a
message with a few updates about your life. Maybe mention a fond memory the
two of you shared. Ask them when they’re next available to talk over a phone or
a video call. Once you’ve spoken to them, move them to the bottom of the list,
so that your list always surfaces those whom you haven’t spoken to in a while.
Once a year or so, add or subtract names from the list to make sure it truly
represents the people that matter to you. This simple list will help you create
more meaningful connections than liking or sharing posts ever can.
 CONTROL THE AUDIENCE
Social media’s emphasis on follower counts and friend counts has led us all to
add everyone to our one account, leading to the collapse of context. Today your
best friend from college is as much as your ‘friend’ on Facebook, as Raj from
accounting with whom you shared 6 sentences at the office party. Managing your
privacy and preventing harm is harder if you use the same account for your inner
and outer social circles.
If you do use social media to not just check but also to post updates, then the
second dimension of control is very important. You should tightly control the
audience of your Connection network to only your most trusted network and
make your profile unsearchable. This allows you to be more vulnerable and
share more intimate details with less fear of unintended consequences. This
automatically improves your experience on social media, since you have a space
where you can express yourself safely.
This is already how teenagers are using their social media. Many of them feel
the need to present their best selves on their primary account—perfect pictures,
celebratory moments and support for serious causes. However, they are also still
teenagers. Sometimes they just want to be goofy or weird. So, they create a
finsta, that is, a fake Instagram account. Here, the audience is limited to only
other finstas of their closest friends, so that they can express their unedited
selves to a more intimate audience.
It is easy to create a new account with a limited audience, but it is hard to keep
your audience limited once you get going. Sometimes, you will meet people in
real life who will ask to connect with you on social media. Often, this is an
awkward moment where most people can’t decline the request. Having separate
accounts for Community and Connection lets you easily manage this problem.
Give your Connection profile only to those whom you want to have in your inner
circle. Treat your Community profile as you would the classifieds section in a
newspaper. Only post that which you are comfortable knowing that the whole
town could be reading tomorrow.

CHOOSE YOUR IDENTITY

As we’ve seen in the previous chapter, managing your identity can be a powerful
way to enforce privacy preferences. Many social media platforms allow you to
use pseudonyms. This means you can use them under a pretend name and not
connect the account to your real identity. Pseudonymous accounts offer you
identity flexibility. You can always reveal your name and make it your public
account if you wish.
Pseudonymous accounts are best suited for Fraternity, where we are learning
about new topics or engaging in discussions online. The obvious benefit is that
they air-gap your real identity from the consequences of any conflict your
pseudonymous account may stumble into. Having a pseudonymous account also
helps you loosen up and really act as a beginner.
Pseudonymous accounts are also useful if you want more control over the feed
you consume, especially if you want to use social media for Entertainment. For
most of us, our social media feeds are maybe 10 per cent personal updates from
friends, and 90 per cent a mess of news, commentary on the news, activism,
celebrity gossip, memes from accounts that we joined as a joke and marketing
for brands, etc. Every time you decide to scroll through this mess, there’s no
telling what mood you’ll come out with.
As we will explain later in this chapter, researchers from DeepMind, Google’s
super specialized AI research firm, have shown that once the algorithm has
selected a certain kind of content for you, it is very hard to break out of the
mould in the eyes of the recommendation algorithm.
Use an alternate pseudonymous account that only subscribes to things that
relax you, rather than overwhelm you. If this account’s feed starts to degenerate,
you can abandon it and open another one.

FORGET
The idea of Ephemerality is useful in social media as well. Recently, most
platforms have moved to a ‘stories’ format of posting, where the post disappears
in 24 hours or so. This increases our privacy tremendously. When we post about
more intimate areas of our lives such as where we eat or where we are travelling,
we reveal a lot more than we like. Especially, with a whole timeline of such
posts, we cannot fully know what a malignant actor might be able to derive
about us.
In September 2020, a cybersecurity expert was able to decipher the location of
a secret bunker from just one picture. The picture showed some mountain peaks
and a helicopter taking off. Anonymous sleuths on the internet were able to
identify the make and the maximum range of the helicopter, as well as its take-
off spot from publicly available data and reverse image searches. The
cybersecurity expert then used Google Maps to identify the peaks which were
visible and drew some perspective lines to figure out where the hidden bunker
was!
Data is weird that way. Each of our individual posts may not reveal much, but
taken in aggregate, it could reveal something even we don’t know. Moreover, if
not the data itself, the meta-data—when we post, how often we post, where we
post from, etc.—also tells a story about us. The easiest protection against this
unbounded risk is to create a bound on how long the data is ‘live’ for. Posting
stories on social media allows us to keep our privacy by reducing this risk to 24
hours.
The flip side of course is that these ephemeral formats also create the craving
for more social media. For those consuming content, it creates the incentive to
check in regularly, because of the short half-life of the content. Similarly, for
content creators, it requires them to keep posting to stay visible.
Over time, from the pages-long discussion forums of the early internet, to now
with TikTok, the format in which we communicate has become a race to the
bottom towards ever shorter attention spans. This isn’t coincidental. Just like the
slot machines from Chapter 4, one way to keep us hooked is to increase the
speed of play. TikTok, Instagram/WhatsApp Stories, YouTube Shorts—all have
adopted the latest 15–30 second vertical, auto-advancing, full-screen video
format.
Even with every strategy we outlined here implemented rigorously, it is
genuinely hard to not get hooked to the short format videos that are popular
these days. This is why the path to bitfulness doesn’t just stop at our own use of
social media.
If we’re going to really fix our relationship with technology, we need to fix the
fundamental dynamic.
 THE FUNDAMENTAL DYNAMIC
Underneath every social network, there is a fundamental problem to solve. Out
of the literally millions of things posted every second online, social media
companies need to select the exact content that would most engage each of their
users. Social networks solve this by building recommendation engines.
The belief is that the more data a company has about an individual, the better
this engine understands the taste of that individual. Like the Netflix documentary
Social Dilemma depicted, with more data, it can create deep psychological
profiles and recommend the exact content that would resonate with you or
change your mind.
This is not entirely incorrect, but it is not exactly correct either.
The primary asset of any social network is its social graph. The social graph is
basically a dataset representative of all user behaviour that happens on the social
network. First of all, all individual accounts on the social network are nodes of
the graph, as are all the posts, pictures and other objects on the social network.
Every interaction between your account and a post, picture or another account is
stored as an edge of the graph. Over time, a vast and complex maze of
connections emerges.
Recommendation engines are typically built using machine learning over the
social graph. Specifically, the most common machine learning technique to
recommend content, or even people to follow, is called collaborative filtering.
Collaborative filtering is simple to understand. Each of us ends up creating a
footprint on the internet based on our activity. This footprint is not used to create
a deeper psychological profile. Instead, your footprint is used to find other users
like you. Two users whose footprints are similar are assumed to have similar
interests. Recommendation algorithms are simply filtering people who behave
like you do online. They recommend to you what people with footprints like you
are seeing.
 Collaborative filtering is the real secret sauce of advertising giants online, not
just on the content side, but also on the monetization side. Ad platforms offer
advertisers the ability to target ‘similar audiences’. For example, advertisers
upload a list of users who have already purchased from them. Ad platforms then
use all the data they have about the users on the list to filter similar users who
are not on the list. These new similar users are then served the ads that
advertisers want.
Often people worry their social media is listening to their conversations. If
your friend was telling you about a mattress they just bought, many are surprised
they start seeing mattress ads too.
The ad companies aren’t spying on either of your conversations, picking up
mentions of the word ‘mattress’. The mattress company your friend purchased
from adds the ID of your friend to their ‘similar audiences’ list. Ad platforms are
then simply making guesses about who is similar to your friend based on their
data footprint. It is much more likely that we will buy similar goods and
services, or relate with similar content as our friends. Especially those who live
in the same area and have similar interests.
Collecting data is important to the model, but it is neither for mind-reading
nor mind-control. It is to help with collaborative filtering. The underlying data
about who you speak to is much more important from a targeting perspective,
rather than what you actually said. What collaborative filtering does is to create
cohorts of similar users, who are then shown similar content because of their
similar history of consumption.
Your preferences and privacy are betrayed more by what people like you are
doing online, rather than because they have built a deep profile of you. In fact,
this creates what researchers at Google DeepMind call a ‘degenerate feedback
loop’. Based on a guess, the algorithm selects for you content that it thinks you
will like. Even if it is not what you like, you end up going through some of the
content and maybe even engaging with some of it.
Since the algorithms are now all AI, the data about our usage is fed back to
the algorithm as a score of its accuracy. Because we engage with the content, no
matter what we’re shown, it cements the algorithm’s assessment of you. Since
the collaborative filtering guesses are being reinforced by its own
recommendations, it may become impossible to escape the algorithm’s
judgement of you. The feedback loop confirms its own beliefs and becomes
degenerate.
It is not a surprise, therefore, that social media is driving polarization. The
fundamental dynamic at the heart of social media is dividing us into groups that
each sees a different reality. If you share posts about a certain topic or follow
certain people from a group, the algorithm will then encourage more of it
because of degenerate feedback loops. Moreover, the algorithm then promotes
content that magnifies the differences between these groups. Because that
maximizes conflict and, hence, engagement.
While we do have the choice to deactivate or delete our social media, we can’t
control everything about it. Collaborative filtering, the attentional race to the
bottom and all their consequences are not problems that we as individuals can
change or fix. However, these problems affect us deeply.
The fundamental dynamic that creates the problems also makes the good parts
of social media what they are. Fixing these problems will require not just one
small change but probably a massive overhaul of social media. There are no easy
answers, but that doesn’t mean there are no answers.
We just have to ask the right question.

OUR DATA, OUR NETWORKS, OUR SELVES

Once you understand the fundamental dynamic of the social graph that really
powers a social network, it leads to a bigger question.
Whether matching ads to users or showing personalized feeds, companies are
mostly using collaborative filtering to recommend content. This means, it is not
your data or my data in an individual sense that is valuable, it is our data that has
the most value. The social graph reveals so much more about us as a species,
than any one of our individual data sets alone ever could. The value derived
from the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. Hence, the bigger
question:
Why do a handful of companies decide who benefits and in what way from
our data?
The bargain of social media was supposed to be that we get a stage and an
audience, and in return, they show us a few ads. In reality, we’re giving them
something much more valuable—our social graph. All the problems we see on
social media—misinformation, polarization, abuse, etc.—stem at least in part
from what recommendation engines have been built atop our social graph.
This is a question that we need to ask not just of recommendation systems, but
of the technology industry as a whole. All the new Artificial Intelligence (AI)
technologies fall primarily into three basic paradigms—supervised learning,
unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning learns
by playing games against itself, such as AlphaGo did to defeat the world’s best
Go player. However, the other two paradigms depend on data. Data that we
generate. Yet, we neither have a share nor a say in how these algorithms profit
off of us, segregate us or otherwise affect us.
It becomes more perplexing when you consider that data is non-rivalrous and
cheap to duplicate. George Bernard Shaw explained what non-rivalrous means
most simply.
 ‘If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange these apples
then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I
have an idea, and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two
ideas.’

You can’t create economic value from something that is not scarce. To create
scarcity, one has to ensure that the subset of user data they have is meaningfully
unique from data that others have.
Google has a large, unique collection of user search data because it has more
than 92 per cent market share of online search. In exchange for search results,
we tell the search bar things we probably do not tell our closest friends.
Facebook has unique social data. We tell Facebook who we are friends with and
whom we follow. Our interactions further betray which of these bonds are
stronger and which are not.
We cannot limit the creation of data. Our every online action and interaction
will leave a trail. In fact, sometimes we would want this data to exist for our own
sake. Imagine if your bank lost data about your transaction history. What we
need is more control over what happens after that generation. Should it be
stored? Who gets to store it? What can they use it for? What if we don’t like
what they do with it? Can we ask them to delete it?
Companies like Facebook and TikTok have control over the social
infrastructure. This enables them to get our data and prevent the competition
from having that unique subset of user data. Also, why wouldn’t they? It makes
definite business sense to do so. Anyone else in their position would’ve done the
same.
The original sin of the internet was that we decided to sell our attention to pay
for the missing infrastructure of the internet. Today, this logic has given rise to a
few players who essentially own the critical infrastructure of the internet. The
owners of this infrastructure are using our data to further their control. No matter
what we do individually, we can’t fix this till we fix the vacuum at the heart of
the internet. This is why The Third Crisis is a collective problem, and we need to
find solutions collectively.
Social media is likely to remain a broken place till we make sure that our data
is on our networks, so that we can be truly free to be our selves.
 PART THREE
THE COLLECTIVE
 13
SLIPPERY SLOPES OF SCALE

EXPONENTIALS
In mid-April of 2020, when most countries struggled to get the testing
infrastructure in place for the COVID-19 pandemic, an intriguing news item
found its way around the Indian internet. A technology developed by three
young bioinformatics students from Mumbai was being piloted by a university in
Rome. The technology could, allegedly, diagnose COVID-19 from voice
recordings of the patients. Put simply, you would speak into a smartphone, and it
would tell you whether you were infected with the coronavirus or not.
If you’re reading this in the year 2021 or beyond, you’d be looking at the
news of a voice-based AI test sceptically. If there was a voice-based AI test for
coronavirus, we’d have seen it by now. But that wisdom is the gift of hindsight.
In mid-April 2020, India was still in week 3 of a very stringent lockdown. All
news channels were busy explaining the nature of exponential growth curves to
audiences. What seemed like a few cases today would become many thousands
of cases in two weeks. In a couple of months, we’d be looking at hundreds of
thousands of cases. Rapid testing was crucial to flattening the boundless, ever
upward-climbing growth curve of COVID-19.
The authors of this book are unqualified to predict the efficacy or accuracy of
this voice-based diagnosis technology, and it also is beside the point. We’re
using this story as a springboard to ask a different question: what would happen
next if this technology had actually delivered even some of what it promised?
If we suspend our disbelief and imagine that such a technology was possible,
it would be a breakthrough discovery in April 2020. At that time, a cheap,
widely available, non-invasive, self-administered test could’ve genuinely
changed the course of the global pandemic. Even if the test wasn’t 98 per cent
accurate, and needed reconfirmation via an RT-PCR, it would still give us more
and better information to make wiser policy choices. It could be deployed
globally because of the nature of digital technologies. Even if the voice-based
test was not accurate, but simply good enough, it would still be a powerful tool
in civilization’s arsenal against COVID-19. Individuals would be able to check
on their own health and reduce their anxiety.
Instead of blunt lockdowns at a national scale that crippled many economies,
countries could selectively target and enforce lockdowns in hotspots. Even in
countries with a milder lockdown, businesses were still crippled by the public’s
lack of trust in the safety of going outside. Physical businesses would be able to
screen patrons at the door by checking their voices. Along with masks and social
distancing, this test would help ensure confidence of the public in their
establishment.
This voice-based diagnostic technology could collectively save billions of
dollars and maybe tens of thousands of lives. The advantages of this hypothetical
scenario are obvious and easy to imagine. What we don’t usually imagine are the
side effects. What would be the path of this technology from an early pilot to
potentially testing everyone worldwide? What would be the other consequences
of taking that path?
We said in Chapter 3 that the real crisis is that how we are going digital will
lead to an imbalance of power. We want to explain what we mean through a
hypothetical scenario. For this next part, imagine that it is April 2020 and that
you are in the driver’s seat of this ground-breaking innovation. If you had just
invented this technology to diagnose COVID-19, you’d be asking the obvious
question—how do you get this technology to everyone, everywhere fast?
In Silicon Valley parlance, you’d be asking—How do I scale?

STAYING SAFE
In startup culture, ‘bigness’ is proof of goodness.
This is often the first and the foremost defence against criticism of internet
companies. Supporters claim companies wouldn’t be big if they weren’t
innovative and customer-centric. They claim that to become big, a company
must be good at what they do and serve a real customer need.
 The argument isn’t entirely without merit. No tech company can grow to a
meaningful size if it doesn’t actually solve a consumer need for a reasonable
number of people. But once they have found a consumer need, to grow to a
stratospheric size requires a different approach.
To demonstrate, let’s go back to the example of the Artificial Intelligence-
enabled, voice-based COVID-19 diagnostic test and see how you would scale
this product.
First things first, you pick a name for your new invention. ‘Artificial
Intelligence enabled voice-based COVID-19 diagnostic test’ is quite a mouthful,
so you choose ‘SaySafe’. It is easy to remember, a clever play on ‘stay safe’ and
highlights the voice-based nature of your technology. Most importantly, the web
domain saysafe.ai is available.
You built the pilot using your university’s computers. For the real world,
you’re going to need to put your algorithms on dedicated hardware to ensure
they run reliably. You have a few critical choices to make on distribution. You
could install the technology on specialized, portable devices so that people can
carry out this test anywhere, anytime, even without the internet. Imagine
Amazon’s Echo smart speakers, but for the singular purpose of COVID-19
detection.
However, it is April 2020 and the manufacturing hub for such devices, China,
is under a severe lockdown. Global supply chains have been disrupted. Suppose
you try to make a dedicated device. In that case, you’d be unlikely to make and
ship enough devices in the pandemic for your technology to benefit enough
people. Besides, as any tech pundit will often tell you, hardware doesn’t scale as
well as software.
You realize that people already have microphones in their smartphones. It
would be best if you simply made your test work on the internet and let people
use their own devices to access your technology via an app. This distribution
method has advantages of maximum reach and minimum maintenance. You only
have to make it once and can then deploy it everywhere. Serving the app online
allows you to collect data and improve your model over time. The updates make
their way to all users immediately—no waiting to buy another version or need to
replace their devices. The problem is you’ve never made anything that can
handle the volumes you’re targeting. You start looking for good engineers to
help you.
To get engineers on this task, you’re going to have to pay them. You don’t
have the money to spare for that, nor does your university. A research grant
would take weeks, if not months, to come through. Given that this technology
can save billions of dollars, your professor suggests that you build a start-up and
raise venture capital. The government had recently launched a mobile app to
help entrepreneurs such as yourself set up a new company in under a day. On
Monday, you register your company online and email VC firms. Because your
app is so timely, they all want to see you on Zoom on Wednesday.
The VCs go over a demo and are impressed. They all tell you that they’ve
seen four other companies trying to do what you do, but you are ahead on the
pilot due to your university’s data. If they give you the money, they want to
make sure you get a lead in the market and retain it. They ask, ‘what is your
business model?’ You say you’re going to charge per test to cover the costs of
servers and engineers. They tell you that this is a bad idea. One of the other four
companies might charge lower than you and people will opt for the cheaper test.
‘What’s important,’ one of the VCs says, ‘is that you show consistent growth.
How about making the test free? HealthTech is a hot space right now, you can
always figure out how to make money later’.
You decide that it is much more important to let people know their COVID-19
diagnosis than make money. Moreover, the VCs seem reluctant to give you
money if you charge people and eager to sign a cheque if you don’t. You see this
as a win–win and accept an offer from a reputed VC firm. In return, you hand
over some equity, a board seat and agree to hire a ‘growth hacker’. You’re
excited to have the money to hire the engineers you wanted and get to work.
It is now June, and the SaySafe online app is ready to go. Customers log in
with their email address or phone number. You give them a fixed prompt to read.
They simply read out the text in their own voice, record it and send it to your
cloud. An AI algorithm analyses the fresh voice sample against previous voice
samples from that user on the cloud. Some of your most eager users submit their
temperature every day or submit their results if an RT-PCR test came back
positive. The algorithm is continuously tweaked by your engineers based on this
feedback. People begin to use your service, and in just a few days you’ve done
more than 10,000 tests.
Your user base is growing fast. With the volumes you’re expecting, you’re not
going to be able to serve all your users without footing a costly server bill. Your
algorithms need quite a lot of computational power, and your engineers need to
be paid astronomical salaries. You begin to see your bank balance dwindle. So
you go to a bigger VC firm which offers you more money. Once again, they ask
for equity, and another board seat and that you hire a ‘Head of Business’ in
exchange for the money you need to keep going. You had started this company
with the vision of ubiquitous testing, and you’re still far from that goal. So you
agree, sign the deal, and soon the money hits your bank account. You get back to
work.
When you reach a million users, your new Head of Business asks what
SaySafe does with the user once the test is over. You explain that you’re a
diagnostics app and after you show the results your job is done. The new
business head looks disappointed with you. He explains that this is a wasted
opportunity. ‘We’re not a diagnostics company, we’re a Health Tech company.
We need to leverage technology to provide our users with the best end-to-end
healthcare solutions.’
Your business head recommends that SaySafe start diagnosing for more than
merely COVID-19. Lots of other diseases can be detected by voice. If the results
are positive, SaySafe can directly connect users to the hospitals and clinics
around them. By asking users to give data about their insurance, SaySafe can
even recommend hospitals covered by your provider. SaySafe can earn money
by getting independent doctors and hospitals to bid for incoming leads from your
diagnostics app. This will all be free for users, since you get paid by the doctors.
Your board of directors, largely comprising the two VCs who funded you,
thinks this is a wonderful idea. The VCs recommend you raise more money to
grow the team and hire the new engineers you now need. You also realize you
now need a ‘Head of Product’ to manage all the engineers you hired.
Patients who login to check their COVID-19 status and are now also being
diagnosed for other diseases at no additional cost. Doctors and hospitals who had
seen fewer patients due to the lockdown start lowering prices, outbidding each
other to get your leads. Since you allow users to conveniently book
appointments, you see some growth in the number of users. It helps that booking
through your platform is cheaper than booking with the clinic directly, thanks to
the money provided by your VCs.
Your head of product made it a point to measure every little detail of how
users are behaving by recording their data. People are logging in less frequently
to check if they are sick, he points out. They are also getting stressed by
worrying about COVID every day, so they’re avoiding the voice tests. Good for
them, but bad for SaySafe’s business. You still are spending on salaries and
servers but don’t have enough income. Your board suggests you need to keep the
growth going if you don’t want to run out of money.
Someone in your engineering team suggests that SaySafe can pivot into
mental health diagnostics. ‘What if we could replace the fixed prompts with
open-ended questions instead? Prompts like “How are you feeling today?” or
“What’s on your mind?” While we will continue to use the voice samples to
diagnose their diseases, we will use AI to recognize variations in stress levels
day-to-day. I’ve already written a proposal and can help you present it to the
board.’ The engineers are excited. Your board is elated. An investor is willing to
sign another big cheque if you expand from merely Health Tech into the growing
‘Wellness’ industry.
Still, SaySafe won’t sustain its lofty valuation if you can’t convert some of
that traffic into revenue. You call your team for brainstorming, and many suggest
selling the data. You put your foot down and say that constitutes a breach of
trust. You don’t want to sell user data; you’re not that kind of company. So you
agree to sell ads instead. However, the ads are targeted to users depending on
what they said, to make them more relevant. Your team starts building the
upgrades.
The clickthrough rates on these ads initially were high, but in a few months,
they begin to fall as people grow tired of the ads. The board pulls you up for not
delivering on the promised numbers. You are now desperate for anything that
will turn around the revenue numbers. When getting more users was no longer
an option, someone from the ads team had another suggestion on increasing
revenues. ‘People aren’t just using SaySafe for health anymore. They’re
discussing their problems like they would with a friend. We know who’s
thinking of buying a car, who’s thinking of taking a vacation, etc. Moreover, the
daily prompts guide what they talk about. What if we could allow advertisers to
pay for prompts to their target audience. An e-commerce retailer would pay to
ask someone in their mid-twenties “What are you thinking of buying for your
mother this Mother’s Day?” etc. This could be as big for us as video ads were for
Facebook.’
Your board approves the idea, and your team implements the feature. Slowly,
your prompts start driving sales more than ads. Soon, your valuation triples. The
public starts worshipping you as a tech genius.
What started as a diagnostic app becomes a full-fledged surveillance tool.
Eventually, even surveillance does not suffice for the manic growth that
everyone expected of you. The only way to surpass that expectation was to
incept thoughts into the minds of your users. You started in April 2020 with a
wonderful idea and a genuine desire to change the world. In a few short years,
you realize that your nightmare is that you did change the world but not in the
way you intended.
The specifics of this hypothetical example are deliberately far-fetched, but the
trajectory is not that far from reality. ‘How do we scale?’ is a fundamental
question every new technology or business idea faces at some point in time.
Thirty years ago, when the worldwide web didn’t exist, there was a different
playbook for information technology products to grow. But over the last thirty
years, we’ve seen various models emerge, fail and reinvent themselves till a
particular model has become the de facto method to succeed.
The model is to scale at any cost or perish trying. Profits are not what they’re
chasing; an unshakeable control over a large part of the market is what they are
after. VCs invest billions of dollars in these start-ups, who in turn subsidize users
by providing services for free, or cheaper than analogue competitors to grow
their online business. Often, this means the companies are making losses
happily. Once they reach a certain size, economies of scale and network effects
work together to cement their market position. This strategy has become the
default across many domains and products—whether online advertising
(Google/Facebook), digital payments (Alipay/Wechat), ridesharing (Uber/Ola)
or food delivery (Zomato/Swiggy).
This strategy has many names, but let’s stick with the name that Reid
Hoffman gave it, blitzscaling.
 BLITZSCALING
Reid Hoffman was one of the co-founders of PayPal. PayPal was one of the early
successes of the internet. Veterans from PayPal, such as Elon Musk or Peter
Thiel, would go on to become successful tech entrepreneurs with multiple
ventures. Hoffman went on to found LinkedIn, which was eventually sold to
Microsoft for US$34 billion. Hoffman coined the term blitzscaling for this
strategy of dazzling growth fuelled by burning investor money.
According to Hoffman, ‘Blitzscaling means that you’re willing to sacrifice
efficiency for speed, without waiting to achieve certainty on whether the
sacrifice will pay off. If classic start-up growth is about slowing your rate of
descent as you try to assemble your plane, blitzscaling is about assembling that
plane faster, then strapping on and igniting a set of jet engines (and possibly their
afterburners) while you’re still building the wings.’
If the proximity to ‘blitzkrieg’ bristles, do remember that he coined this term
in early 2016. This was a different era. This was before news of the Cambridge
Analytica scandal broke and the public mood soured on tech. At that time, these
startups were darlings, not just on Wall Street, but in public opinion too. Reid
Hoffman wasn’t writing a takedown of tech by comparing it to a Nazi Germany
strategy. He was praising the strategy for its counter-intuitive nature.
As Hoffman put it in an April 2016 interview to Harvard Business Review, ‘I
have obvious hesitations about the World War II association with the term
“blitzkrieg”. However, the intellectual parallels are so close that it is very
informative. Before blitzkrieg emerged as a military tactic, armies didn’t
advance beyond their supply lines, which limited their speed. The theory of the
blitzkrieg was that if you carried only what you absolutely needed, you could
move very, very fast, surprise your enemies, and win. Once you got halfway to
your destination, you had to decide whether to turn back or to abandon the lines
and go on. Once you made the decision to move forward, you were all in. You
won big or lost big. Blitzscaling adopts a similar perspective.’
What’s wrong with scaling? Inherently, nothing. Economics has always lauded
efficiencies of scale as a way of increasing productivity and prosperity. Lots of
companies borrow money from the stock markets or through bond markets to
grow bigger and compete. In fact, to make the distinction clear, Hoffman calls
this regular kind of growth fastscaling. Fastscaling is where companies sacrifice
some efficiency to favour growth. The catch here is that when a company which
has figured out its market and product, but is now trying to grow market share
scales, it is only considered fast. It is not blitz.
To be blitz, you have to deliberately throw caution to the wind and take huge
bets on things you don’t fully understand. According to Hoffman, ‘When a
market is up for grabs, the risk isn’t inefficiency—the risk is playing it too safe’.
Hoffman recommends blitzscaling precisely for those new technologies whose
consequences and impact on society are not fully understood. If you’re hesitant,
then blitzscaling start-ups is not for you. ‘Do or Die’, reminds Hoffman.
Where you stand on a matter depends ultimately on where you sit. Investing in
blitzscaling companies gives huge returns in a blitz. As a general of the tech
industry and a partner at the VC firm Greylock Ventures, Hoffman is glorifying a
strategy that typifies what he likes to invest in. However, if you were one of the
incumbents being disrupted, maybe the other World War II metaphor that you
would find more apt for this strategy would be kamikaze.
Hoffman is by no means an outlier, or the lone purveyor of this strategy. Even
before Hoffman, others have said essentially the same thing. One of the biggest
names to promote the same strategy has been Peter Thiel, another co-founder of
PayPal. In his very popular book, Zero to One, Peter Thiel essentially advocates
a similar approach in an effort to ‘escape’ competition, ‘Monopoly is the
condition of every successful business . . . All happy companies are different:
each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies
are the same: they failed to escape competition.’ Hoffman spoke of the process,
whereas Thiel is explicit about the end goal—a unique monopoly.
Blitzscaling might be a great strategy to differentiate yourself from your fast-
scaling peers. However, if you blitzscale, it usually means that your competition
has to blitzscale too or they will get left behind in winner-take-all races. As a
society, we all hurtle towards an uncertain and risky future at jet speed with the
afterburners on. One of the blitzscaling entrepreneurs might even succeed in
building the wings, but no one really has a working steering and absolutely no
one is building the brakes.
We believe the real problem here is the one left unsaid. When chasing a
unique monopoly, or trying to grow really fast, you enter a dangerous game we
call the Slippery Slopes of Scale. By making certain decisions early on, such as
raising capital that’s premised on hyper-growth, entrepreneurs essentially force
their own hand. This is what we wanted to demonstrate with the SaySafe
example. It is not evil people looking to conquer the world, but reasonable
people trying to do something good that causes The Third Crisis. Burning
bridges, going big or going home, whatever metaphor you may choose to phrase
it, the strategy is designed to be self-fulfilling. You may have your initial doubts,
but once you commit to it, you really have no way out except to go further in.
The problem goes back to the internet’s original sin. Because there was no real
way to send money on the internet, businesses had to take their money from
elsewhere. This money from investors came with the expectation of phenomenal
growth, and even today, technology start-ups are synonymous with a chance at
rapid, astronomical wealth creation. Advertising made the first wave of internet
businesses such as Google and Facebook free.
However, since mobile devices and the internet have become more
commonplace, a second, and more pervasive internet business model has
emerged called ‘Aggregation’. If we don’t address it soon, this model threatens
to spread The Third Crisis from a few industries, such as online advertising, to
every industry and job.

AGGREGATION
Conducting commerce on the internet makes a lot of sense.
For consumers, e-commerce provides the widest variety of suppliers. For
sellers, it reaches the widest audiences. However, as economists would say, the
marginal utility of every additional choice quickly falls. Add enough choice and
it may even turn negative.
Humans are not good at dealing with infinite choice. Once you could buy
anything from anyone, anywhere, it became harder to decide what to buy, from
where. Thus, the internet gave rise to a second kind of business model to solve a
problem it had itself created. This business model was aggregation. It involved
aggregating sellers and matching them with interested buyers.
The adoption of the smartphone has spurred the aggregation model to expand
from simply selling products to selling services. Once we all had a portable
computer in our pockets, we could use it to order cabs, get food delivered, and
purchase other services on the fly.
The fundamental aim of the aggregation model is to create an online
marketplace where buyers and sellers transact. The transaction infrastructure is
provided by the aggregator and is called the platform.
Aggregators solve two key problems for e-commerce transactions—Discovery
and Trust. Discovery is the ability to find the right thing that you need from the
right sellers. Trust is making sure that both parties are playing fair and don’t
commit fraud. Many tech companies deploy the aggregation model. AirBnB,
Alibaba, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, GrubHub, Oyo, Ola, Swiggy, Uber, UberEats,
Zomato, etc., are all aggregators. The difference in their approaches is how they
solve for transactions, discovery and trust.
Online shopping for products is often cheaper. E-commerce shortens the
supply chain and brings in efficiencies of scale. Inventory & logistics can be
optimized, wastage & returns can be reduced, and automation can drive down
costs.
However, the fundamental cost of driving a taxi does not reduce when one
company aggregates millions of them. So what makes the aggregation model so
popular for services?
Because it is the model most amenable to blitzscaling. The aggregation model
relies on two ideas. The first is that aggregation will cause the markets to
concentrate. Second, you can speed up that concentration by blitzscaling.
Aggregation naturally encourages concentration in any industry due to
Network Effects. If there were two platforms, all else being equal, as a buyer,
you’d prefer the one with more sellers. Similarly, as a seller, you’d prefer a
platform with more buyers. Basically, when we want to participate in a network,
the bigger it already is, the more attractive it is. Any platform that is able to take
a lead on either buyers or sellers, therefore, usually manages to draw the other
side. The big networks get bigger, and the winners take all. This results in a
virtuous cycle of growth, helping these companies grow even faster.
 Network effects are everywhere in internet companies because they offer a
defence against competition. Most famously, Amazon explicitly made network
effects their strategy. They called this model the ‘flywheel’. Better customer
experience—wide selection, two-day shipping, easy returns, etc.—means more
traffic, which improves the variety of products by attracting sellers and makes
overheads cheaper. The money saved is invested in making the customer
experience even better, driving even more traffic.
The Blitzscaling strategy combines very well with network effects. VCs
bankroll companies to build a pool of sellers and buyers inorganically, without
worrying about near-term profits. While capital remains cheap, these tech
companies are often subsidizing the real costs of goods and services. The Indian
start-up ecosystem is awash with stories of how people have gotten goods and
services at below costs, because of cashbacks and promotional offers by
blitzscaling start-ups.
Our personal favourite (possibly apocryphal) example is the gentleman who
wanted to move his bed from one apartment to another in Delhi. Simply hiring a
truck and labour would have cost him nearly a thousand rupees. Instead, he had
the genius idea of selling it on OLX and using another account to purchase it
from himself. OLX took zero fees and paid for the transportation and labour. He
used PayTM to pay for the purchase, which gave him a cashback for the
purchase. He moved his bed, and ended up netting 200 rupees profit, funded by
blitzscaling VCs.
Analogue competitors find it hard to compete with Blitzscaling. Without
access to the kind of deep and cheap capital that internet startups get, these
analogue competitors tend to fall behind. This increases our dependence on these
big platforms and accelerates The Third Crisis. Only those who are playing a
well-capitalized blitzscaling strategy can compete, but network effects make
even this competition hard to sustain. The result in the long run, one way or
another, is concentration.
Once demand concentrates on their infrastructure, these aggregators have a
much larger role to play than simply connecting a buyer and a seller. They have
a thumb on the scales. They can redirect traffic to their preferred sellers, extract
fees or even compete with independent sellers. They own critical data such as
user purchases across all sellers, which is not available to any individual seller
on the marketplace. Moreover, even when consumers don’t purchase, only the
aggregator knows what people are searching for and clicking on. Aggregators,
hence, know consumer interest and trends better than any seller.
Information about what sells is incredibly valuable. Independent sellers invest
what little capital they have in experiments with new products and positioning to
learn about consumer demand. Aggregators get this knowledge off of the sellers’
backs for free. This can be problematic since some aggregators have in-house
brands that compete with their own sellers for user demand.
If you think you’re simply a consumer and are not going to be affected by
aggregation, think again.
The move to e-commerce has been accelerated. The supply chain of products
was already being rewired. The massive opportunity now is in the supply chain
of labour.
Your income is either the result of selling goods directly in a market or
indirectly as an employee, selling your labour as a service. Somewhere upstream
or downstream of you in the supply chain is a tech company planning to
aggregate the market. Unless you earn your income purely from capital such as
being a landlord, or an investor, aggregation will eventually affect you. It has
already happened to cab drivers and delivery riders. There is no reason why
aggregation can’t happen to accountants, brokers, consultants, doctors and
engineers too.
For that much power over the fate of so many businesses and employees, there
is hardly any oversight or rules that require aggregators to compete fairly.

EVITABLE
When asked about the disruption Amazon caused to the books and publishing
industry, CEO Jeff Bezos has an oft-repeated quote, ‘Amazon did not happen to
the book business. The future happened to the book business.’
Many, like Bezos, do not believe that The Third Crisis is a man-made
problem. They claim that the changes to individual lives and entire industries are
due to more powerful, mysterious forces outside of themselves. Jeff Bezos
blames ‘the future’ for the plight of publishers today. He claims that Amazon is
merely the messenger of an inevitable disruption.
According to this world view shared by some in the industry, the future is
what it is. Its consequences on people’s lives and livelihoods are unfortunate in
the same manner that being in a tornado’s path is. Stand in their way, and they
will imply you simply do not understand the future nor their role in it. Internet
companies claim that the rewiring of every business, not just books, is
inevitable. They are merely trying to deliver the future the way they do
everything else—guaranteed one-day delivery and free shipping.
To their credit, they aren’t entirely wrong. Most people would agree that
calling a taxi by wandering on the streets and waving your hand is a lot more
unpleasant and uncertain than ordering a taxi from an app.
The catch is that this does not make an Uber or an Amazon inevitable. In the
long run, most things will get digitized. But the way they get digitized is not an
immutable law of physics. The current set of aggregators are simply a model
amongst many others. Usually, they end up becoming the model because they
are the blitzscaling-friendly model.
Founders, VCs, tech employees and other beneficiaries of the Slippery Slopes
of Scale want you to believe that ‘the future’ is an inevitable force of progress.
They want you to believe what they’re doing is innovative. Therefore, the
business practices that go along with the innovation must be justified. Businesses
today use questionable practices to get more users and then use the growing
number of users to justify their practices.
If you want to find an honest admission from the internet startups of what they
are really up to, you’ll find it in surprising places. Uber’s former CEO and
founder, Travis Kalanick, speaking at a conference in 2014, before the public
mood turned on Uber, said ‘We’re in a political campaign, and the candidate is
Uber and the opponent is an asshole named Taxi.’ Opponents would disagree on
who the asshole is but would agree that the structure of our economy is a public
affair.
This is about politics and power, as much as it is about innovation and
technology.
In the early years of information technologies, decisions and compromises
were made in designing the internet. There was a vacuum in the centre of the
internet, which we overcame with the original sin of choosing advertising. It is
now being compounded by aggregation. We are where we are then, not because
of the future, but because of the past.
Even though it does feel like we’re headed towards a winner-take-all future,
powered by a jet engine with afterburners on, there’s still reason to hope. The
point of this chapter is to convince you that the future isn’t inevitable; it is an
extrapolation of design choices we made in the past. As a society, we’ve faced
similar big questions of how to design society, and often, we’ve come out ahead
with ideas such as liberal democracy, human rights and peace winning in the
long run. There’s no particular reason to believe we can’t do the same again.
Therefore, it is not the future that happened to the books business, but merely
a future, favourable to some tech companies. The next two chapters describe two
alternative models for a future that do not slide us up the Slippery Slopes of
Scale. We want to describe the alternatives for our future, because we cannot
predict it. The choice of what future we get is still open and depends on how we
act as a collective.
To know the future, it is wise to look at the past. History has repeatedly shown
us that this particular future where a handful of people hold all the power is, in
fact, very evitable.
 14
CRYPTOMANIA

DESIGNED-IN DANGERS
The enduring narrative around technology, especially touted by those who build
it, is that it is a tool, neither good nor bad in itself. They claim that the toxic
patterns in our relationship with technology are problems arising from how
people use these tools.
Before 1965, this was precisely the argument around fatal automobile
accidents. The American automobile industry was very similar to the tech
industry of today. It had consolidated into 3 companies. Over 93 per cent of the
cars sold in America and 48 per cent of those sold worldwide were American,
majorly sold by these three companies. The number of fatal accidents had been
rising every year. Many in the industry argued that it is not the cars, it is the
drivers. The industry narrative was that the drivers should be driving under the
speed limits or paying more attention while on the road.
In 1965, consumer advocate Ralph Nader wrote a book called Unsafe at Any
Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. The title itself
gives away the key argument—It wasn’t the drivers, it was the design of the car
itself. Chasing ever cheaper and more fuel-efficient cars, the automobile
manufacturers were prioritizing costs over safety. The specific examples in the
book are still challenged by some experts. However, few doubt the results of the
conversations that followed. In a 2015 article in The New York Times, a reporter
summarized the changes fifty years after the book was published.

A host of new safety requirements led—often after stiff opposition—to new technologies such
as airbags, anti-lock brakes, electronic stability control and, recently, rear-view cameras and
automatic braking.
Indeed, the death rate has dropped strikingly. In 1965, there were about five deaths for every
100 million miles travelled according to the traffic safety agency. In 2014, the most recent year
available, there was one death for every 100 million miles.
We believe it is time for a similar conversation in technology. Yes, when
someone posts graphic or violent messages on social media, it is not Facebook or
Mark Zuckerberg who got them to do so. However, the fact that millions of
people feel addicted to their phones or social media is not because we are using
the tools wrong. In fact, this is the outcome of these tools doing exactly what
they were designed to do.
There is no denying that these platforms are tools. However, that doesn’t
absolve internet startups of responsibility from the consequences of the
platform’s usage. Every little design detail they choose has a ripple effect on our
lives as consumers and businesses. How they configure our software determines
how we spend our time, money and attention online. Just a few tweaks can make
lasting changes in the moods and lives of billions of people, affecting our lives
and livelihoods in profound ways. In short, the design of these tools is the design
of our individual and collective future. As long as we can change the design of
these tools, no one future is inevitable.
The question then becomes—how can we design our technology to serve all
of us rather than serve its makers?

KNIFE TO A GUNFIGHT
Regulations are an oft mentioned solution to make technology serve us all.
It is a widely accepted position that these companies need to be regulated. In
fact, the biggest of ‘Big Tech’ actually welcome regulation. The debate comes
down to the finer points of how these companies should be regulated.
Aggregators find lacunae in existing regulations. Uber, Lyft or Ola may fight
amongst each other for a market share of ride-sharing, but they are all competing
against existing taxicab operators, public transport and car ownership. By using
elaborate but legal arrangements, aggregators manage to shirk responsibilities
traditional employers and service providers have to bear. Moreover, they claim
this is progress and, thus, inevitable.
When the pandemic hit, Uber and Lyft contractors in the US weren’t eligible
for unemployment insurance, because Uber and Lyft hadn’t paid those taxes
claiming drivers were contractors. Studies have now shown that rather than
decrease car ownership, ride-sharing apps increase congestion in cities.
Similarly, AirBnBs and other short-term rentals can drive up rents in zoned
areas. They make local housing unaffordable in tourist destinations, while
simultaneously taking away tax revenues from local governments.
On their mission to blitzscale, some even go a step further into potential
malpractice. The US-based food delivery aggregator GrubHub set up as many as
23,000 misleading websites for restaurants on its platform without the consent of
the restaurant owners. They optimized these websites to be the top hits on search
engines, sabotaging the restaurant’s own web presence. However, this fake
website had GrubHub’s phone number instead of the restaurant’s. Customers
believe they are placing an order directly at their local restaurants. Whereas, they
were actually placing it on an automated line set up by the aggregators. The
restaurants still got charged commissions on these orders.

Governments try to bring into effect newer legislations to level the playing field
but can be often outgunned by the aggregators. Aggregators are able to finance
both legal challenges as well as policy advocacy efforts. In California, Uber, Lyft
and Doordash came together and spent US$205 million to campaign for a ballot
initiative called Prop-22, wielding more than 10x the funding of the campaign
against Prop-22.
Prop-22 allowed these particular aggregators to seek exemption from a law
that required them to classify their delivery and transportation agents as
employees. Instead, they created a new category of employment called the
contract gig worker. Contract gig workers are not afforded the same protections
as full-time employees.
Of course, many gig workers and platform sellers are happy with the way
things are right now. When the tide is rising, it lifts all boats. The problems start
on the downturn when the low prices and high commissions do not leave enough
on the table. During the pandemic lockdowns, food delivery apps became the
primary source of orders for struggling restaurants. Without walk-in customers,
the price of commissions on the delivery orders pinched already struggling
restaurants.
 Tech companies like regulations once they are big, because they impose
disproportionately larger costs on those smaller than them. Moderation of
content, for example, takes human reviewers or massive investment in AI
systems. Both of these investments see efficiencies of scale. AI systems, further,
get better with more data. Regulations that are not designed to be progressive
and proportional have the counter-intended effect of reducing competition from
smaller platforms. Thereby, increasing concentration and aggravating The Third
Crisis.
Instead of a reactive approach to the excesses of the technology industry, we
can orient policy towards proactive measures. Internet startups adapt and
respond to changes in the regulatory landscape by updating their software and
their business model. Regulators are slow by design, whereas startups move with
blitz. While the legal challenge is being disputed, analogue markets continue
being eroded, and the aggregators continue to accrue network effects. Purely
legal instruments will always be a step or two behind tech companies. If we want
our information infrastructure to serve our goals, we need a bigger say in its
design.
A few internet startups are building the core information infrastructure and
networks of our digital future. Hence, they have control over critical questions
about our collective well-being, such as: How is the value generated on these
platforms distributed? Who decides the pricing and the rules? What agency do
users have in voicing their complaints, or exiting the platform? Who has the
ultimate say in matters under dispute? Are we fine with a group of privately
controlled entities taking these decisions for us?
If we want to take back control, we can’t bring a knife to a gunfight. We need
to bring technology to bear on this problem created by technology. Instead of
trying to check power with just regulation, the answer is to build the digital
infrastructure we desire, in the manner we desire. We can re-architect the
infrastructure so that we can transact digitally, without centralizing market power
to a handful of entities. Instead of weakly enforced laws, we can then embed the
rules we desire in the code of these platforms itself.
Starting in 2009, two different ideas took root in two different parts of the
world. They both put individual sovereignty at the heart of their mission to build
technology for society. In the rest of this chapter, we deal with the first of those
ideas—Cryptocurrencies and the decentralized web.

THE WEB 3.0

In 2009, some person (or possibly a group of people; we still don’t know) by the
pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper called ‘Bitcoin: Peer-to-
Peer Electronic Cash System’. This paper outlined a way in which you could
send a payment from one person to another without going through a financial
intermediary. Thus far, banks kept track of who had how much money in which
account. The banks kept accurate records of all transactions, and in turn, they
were kept honest by the central bank, the regulators and the courts.
Nakamoto described a system of maintaining this ledger in public in a way
that replaced all the oversight by force of law with a trust in math. Anyone could
propose an update to the ledger, but to prevent fraud, only the records that were
legitimate would be accepted as valid. The legitimacy of a record was assured by
the use of cryptography. Hence, Bitcoin and its successors came to be called
cryptocurrencies.
The underlying principle is that instead of trusting a single authority,
cryptocurrencies use some form of a consensus algorithm amongst a group of
decentralized peers. That is, instead of one ledger maintained by a big bank,
everyone has a copy of the ledger that they each participate in maintaining. Now,
some bad actors may want to change the ledger to benefit themselves. This is
where the consensus algorithms come in.
The various consensus algorithms—such as Proof of Stake or Proof of Work
—all have one job. They incentivize honest behaviour in maintaining a ledger
and penalize dishonest behaviour. The way each algorithm does this is slightly
different and not important in this context. What we need to take away is that the
primary motivation for good behaviour is financial incentives/disincentives that
lead to an honest consensus amongst many distributed participants. Instead of
one institution or person held accountable by the law, many people are kept
honest by their own financial interests.
In the last decade, cryptocurrencies have grown to have over US$3 Trillion in
market capitalization. The underlying public ledgers are now called blockchains,
and are being applied to problems other than electronic peer-to-peer cash
transfer. The idea is to try to rebuild the internet as a true peer-to-peer system,
without centralized platforms. Technology such as blockchains is now being
used to create a whole new internet, where not just financial, but many other
intermediaries are eliminated. This is often referred to as the web3, and the new
applications built on top of them are called decentralized apps, or dApps.
In the last few years, there has been an explosive increase in the use of
cryptocurrencies. There is tremendous excitement and interest in the space, and
often this leads to rising prices of tokens. Which in turn generates more returns
for token holders and attracts even more people to cryptocurrency. You may
have already heard some things about cryptocurrency, and you may have plenty
of questions. Is it real? Is it useful? Isn’t it used for terrible things, like drug
trafficking, and by hackers? Will it bring world peace1?
We are not going to answer those questions. We feel compelled to point out
that these were questions being asked about the internet in the 1990s as well.
What we can say is this: there are individual ideas in cryptocurrency that make a
lot of sense. Being able to maintain immutable ledgers in public, having no
single point of failure, etc., are great ideas, implemented well by
cryptocurrencies and will find much use in real life.
However, the playbook for legitimacy of cryptocurrencies has been the same
as it was for the internet in the early 1990s. Believers of crypto, who are usually
also invested in cryptocurrencies, will tell you that it is ‘the future’ and that the
replacement of regular currency is ‘inevitable’. True to form, their consensus
around this belief is aligned with their own financial interests.
The real question to ask is if the underlying goods deliver what is promised on
the package.

THE CRYPTOGRAPHIC PROOF OF THE PUDDING

In theory, the decentralized web has the potential to revolutionize the way we do
everything. In practice, though, things are far from perfect. Scratch under the
surface and you will realize that:

1. things aren’t necessarily as decentralized as promised, and

2. that decentralization solves some problems, but often creates many of its own.

Although a full and detailed discussion of these topics would need a book of its
own, we want to summarize the key arguments in a manner that readers
unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies can follow. Thus, we will be generalizing in
some places, and we encourage our readers to do their own research to dive
deeper. We recommend the essay ‘On Collusion’ by Vitalik Butalin, the founder
of the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum. Also, none of what
follows is investment advice.
First of all, Web 3.0 is a decentralized technology where, in theory, anyone
can participate in the consensus building. In practice, it often becomes a
plutocracy. Often, validating or verifying the public ledger is done by specialized
entities that we will call ‘miners’ for ease of discussion. All these miners spend
computational energy, or stake capital, towards building consensus on the
blockchain, and some are rewarded for the work they do. Moreover, the way the
incentives work, bigger miners often have a better chance of winning that
reward. Becoming a miner is not yet so easy that any one of us can do it. It may
require specialized equipment, and definitely requires specialized skills. This
often leads to outcomes where a majority of the miners are just a small group of
people who have power over what is recorded (or not) on the blockchain. Other
individuals such as founders of cryptocurrencies, by virtue of their holdings and
influence in the community, have a large say in what happens on the blockchain
too.
This brings us to the second, even more worrying problem of collusion. The
decentralized web depends on the decentralized actors not being able to
coordinate easily. If enough of them could coordinate, they could rewrite the
blockchain to benefit themselves at the cost of others. As long as malicious
collusion is hard, it makes the ‘right’ outcome the easiest one to coordinate.
However, in practice, since there may be only a handful of actors, collusion may
not be that hard.
Anonymity—one of the key weaknesses due to which collusion is hard to
defeat on the decentralized internet—is a feature that the Web 3.0 often touts as a
strength. Anyone can create an account on the blockchain, without revealing
who they are. This also means that anyone can create many accounts on the
blockchain. The design of the decentralized system will then determine the kind
of collusion that can subvert it. If you give each account one vote, then you
incentivize the creation of many sock puppet accounts to get extra votes. If you
make each vote cost money, then you create a system that again favours the
interest of the wealthy over that of the masses, leading to a plutocracy. This is a
trade-off that even Butalin admits is going to be hard to solve in an identity-free
environment.
In the real world, we already have a centralized answer to the problem. Think
about secret ballot elections in a democracy to solve a similar problem. You want
to guarantee every citizen a vote, and to protect democracy, you need to ensure
no one gets more than one vote. The answer is in the voter ID card issued by the
centralized, sovereign government. The voting list in most countries is also a
public ledger albeit a centralized one. Everyone is guaranteed a vote, and only
one vote. Moreover, the votes are counted, while keeping the voting preferences
of each voter secret. If their privacy is not protected, they may be subjected to
coercion by those in power.
It is interesting how some simple problems in the centralized world become
complex problems in the decentralized world, and vice versa.

Just as we blitzscaled our way into the centralized and monopolized internet,
there is a feverish, almost cult-like reverence for decentralization that’s gripping
the tech world now. If connecting the world was the rallying cry of the
centralized web, freedom from regulators/governments seems to be the rallying
cry of the decentralized web. There’s no doubt in our minds that decentralization
offers advantages and protections that the centralized web simply cannot offer.
However, the converse is true as well. The decentralized web leaves us
vulnerable in ways that the centralized web didn’t.
If, heaven forbid, your house gets burned down or flooded and you lose all
your documents, you will still be able to go to your bank, prove who you are and
get your money. If the bank itself tries to steal your money or goes under, federal
insurance on deposits protects citizens from losing all their money. The trust-no-
one feature of cryptocurrencies means that if you lose a password, no one can
help recover that money. It is estimated that at least 2.56 million coins, i.e., more
than US$ 100 billion worth of bitcoins are lost due to forgotten passwords or
keys. This isn’t just about bitcoins; it happens across all decentralized
cryptocurrencies.
The other trade-off is that preventing centralized control means we can’t use
centralized regulations to prevent things we would not want as a society.
Cryptocurrency is disrupting the criminal economy, the way the internet
disrupted the regular economy. It is leading to increased sophistication and
specialization of the criminal supply chain. As one anonymous researcher said in
a ZDnet article. ‘The centralization of fraudulent activity in a handful of markets
mirrors similar economic and commercial patterns in real-world financial
markets. This phenomenon may seem like a ripe opportunity for law
enforcement agencies to effectively shut down a sizable portion of cybercriminal
activity; however, as we’ve seen in the past with the shutting down of markets
like Alphabay, Hansa, and Silk Road, threat actors quickly migrate their
activities to other markets.’
Decentralization is not a silver bullet, and centralization is not always a
problem. So how do we design a system that is not under the control of a few
players, while also being able to use the law to protect the vulnerable?
To answer this, we need to go back to the other idea that started in 2009,
halfway across the world in India.
 15
INDIA’S STACKS

IDENTITY CRISIS
The New Yorker’s most reproduced cartoon ever is from July 1993. Two dogs are
in front of a computer—one sitting atop a swivel chair, with one paw on the
keyboard. The dog using the computer is talking to the other dog, seated on the
floor, listening intently. ‘On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’, reads the
caption.
 The cartoon is obviously facetious, but like every great political cartoon, this
too managed to put a finger on the heart of the issue in a single panel. Being
online was synonymous with being anonymous. The internet connected you with
anyone, anywhere in the globe, but no one had any way of knowing who was
behind the keyboard.
But this feature of the internet was not very compatible with the business
model that eventually powered it. Advertisers needed to know if you are indeed
a dog, or a dog parent, or just hate dogs, so that they could sell things to you
accordingly. How do they figure this out?
This is the problem of identity. Every individual website or app, for the
purposes of analysing traffic, or storing data about you, or transacting with you,
or displaying a personalized advertisement, needs to identify if you have visited
before. It is a much more involved problem than it appears. Even today, one
can’t always be entirely certain that on the other end of the line, one is
transacting with a human. Although today the offender is more likely to be a bot
than a dog.
India in 2009 was also facing a crisis of identity.
A significant portion of its residents lacked formal, individual identity
credentials that were universally accepted. Take Rajni, a vegetable seller from
rural Maharashtra. Rajni had a voter ID, and was also listed on the family’s
ration card, though it didn’t have her picture on it. But for purposes such as
opening a bank account, the voter ID alone is not considered enough, and the
ration card identifies a family, not an individual. Rajni was invisible to the
system, for no particular fault of hers. When in need, she couldn’t borrow at
reasonable rates from banks and had to turn to informal money lenders. As an
unfortunate consequence, people like Rajni, who needed money the most, had to
take the most expensive loans.
On the flip side, the government too could not be sure if all the people on its
beneficiary lists were real people who existed or were simply forged entries to
siphon resources from the state’s welfare budget. The government of India in
2005 estimated that 58 per cent of subsidized foodgrains and 38 per cent of
subsidized kerosene disbursed under various government programmes did not
reach their intended beneficiaries. Billions of dollars of welfare money from a
developing nation were lost to unscrupulous middlemen instead of helping the
poor.
On the internet, advertising giants, especially Google and Facebook, set out to
solve the identity problem.
Google gave away free email accounts, and Facebook made you create your
own profile for free to connect with your friends. This incentivized people to tell
them who they were. They invented ‘login with Google’ and ‘login with
Facebook’, doing away with the need to remember multiple logins and
passwords. They even contributed money and effort to open source projects in
the space of identity management such as OAuth. These made it possible and
convenient to use your Google or Facebook identity on other websites, making it
more likely that you would use them as your identity credentials across the web.
This also allowed services to integrate better, such that various apps could share
your data between themselves. Your social media app, for example, may add
birthday reminders to your personal calendar because of a shared identity—your
email.
Just as highways, bridges and ports are physical infrastructures, components
such as identity or payments are digital infrastructure. They are essential to a
smooth internet experience, as roads and railways are to a country’s people. Like
infrastructure, these systems are complex to build in a safe and secure manner
and require specialized talent. They require large investments upfront but also
offer economies of scale.
Investing in identity infrastructure on the internet was not just necessary but
also lucrative. By building this critical touchpoint that affected every website, ad
networks were able to track your activities across the whole web, not just their
own products. This allowed them to offer better targeted advertising than anyone
else, and led to their dominance in the online advertising market. Advertisers
were willing to pay hand over fist for the data these companies had. In 2019, at
about US$ 333 billion, the total global spending on digital ads exceeded that of
ads in the physical world.
But in India, no private player found it lucrative to solve Rajni’s problem.
The US advertising market, online and offline put together, is worth US$ 240
billion. The same number for India is only US$ 8.5 billion, despite having
roughly four times as many people. Although Rajni would benefit as much as
anyone from the internet and a digital footprint, advertising revenues were just
not incentive enough for private players to take Rajni digital.
This is a classic example of what economists call a market failure. India in
2009 realized that to bring the kind of prosperity, progress and convenience that
the internet promised, it needed to take digital to everyone, not just the rich.
In the West, private players were willing to invest because of the size of the
market, and because they could see people conducting commerce online. In
India, even if they could somehow get it to her, people found it hard to imagine
what Rajni would do with the internet.
The reality is, tragically, the opposite. In the West, the internet made a lot of
new things possible, but it mostly made old things more convenient. To Rajni,
the internet brought a world of opportunities she had never experienced before.
The internet didn’t care if Rajni was illiterate. It could bring her videos of things
she’d never seen and help her learn skills she never knew before. She could get
welfare benefits digitally, saving her time, money and peace of mind. Rajni
could even get a loan, start a business and lift herself out of poverty. The
difference that the internet can make to Rajni’s life is much more meaningful to
her than simply bringing her convenience. Yet, in the advertising model, she gets
left behind.
India decided that it was going to have to build its own digital infrastructure.
And, crucially, India would build this digital infrastructure as a public good.

PUBLIC GOODS
Economists define public goods as non-rivalrous and non-excludable.
To understand what public goods are, think of the humble street light which,
once installed, gives light to everyone equally on the street. Short of destroying
the street light, no one can block another person from using it, i.e., street lights
are non-excludable. Nor does one person’s use of the street light affect the use by
another. The same light is shared by all, making street lights non-rivalrous.
We all derive benefit from the street light, but someone has to pay for it. The
simple and fair thing to do is that since it benefits all of us, it should be paid for
by all of us. This is why governments fund the creation of many public goods
with the taxpayer’s money. It is not just street lights; public parks, open
highways, the public health system, and the public education system are funded
with public money. Remember, a public good is not defined by who funds it, but
by who can use it. Andrew Carnegie, steel baron from the 1800s and
philanthropist, funded the creation of almost 1700 public libraries across the
United States. They remain non-excludable and for all practical purposes, non-
rivalrous, and so are public goods funded by private capital.
Essential services such as identity, payments and data exchange are critical
touchpoints of the internet that all of us need. By allowing these critical
touchpoints to be entirely under private control, we give up a lot of power over
our digital lives to the companies that build and run this infrastructure.
One simple fallout of letting this infrastructure be private is that they often
build it to capture network effects. Network effects are the positive externalities
that come from creating a network, because the value of the interconnected
whole is more than the sum of its parts. Take the example of WhatsApp versus
email. You can send an email from your Gmail account to someone else’s
Hotmail account. But WhatsApp restricts you from sending messages only to
other WhatsApp users. The problem here isn’t technical capability, it is a
business decision by WhatsApp to capture network effects. Thus, what could be
a public good becomes an exclusive club.
In India, the critical digital infrastructure for identity was built by the
government instead.
Aadhaar is a digital identity system which has issued a unique identity to more
than 1.25 billion residents of India. Residents can authenticate their identity with
their own biometrics or by using an OTP, allowing them to prove they are who
they claim to be. It is used to solve the problem of identity in many different
contexts. But, since Aadhaar is funded by the Indian Government and not
designed for targeted advertising, it is designed to collect as little data about you
as possible. The logs of authentication, i.e., where you used your Aadhaar, are
designed to protect the privacy of citizens from the UIDAI itself. Moreover, the
logs are required by law to be deleted after a certain period.
With the ability to prove their identity at the fingertips of every resident,
millions of Indians were no longer invisible to the system.
Between 2011 and 2017, more than half a billion people in India opened a
bank account. Simply opening an account may not sound like a big deal.
However, for many like Rajni, who had been excluded from the formal financial
system, it was their first ever bank account.
These bank accounts then powered the country’s move to Direct Benefits
Transfer. Corruption in the public welfare delivery system has been a problem
hounding India for decades. In 1985, the then prime minister publicly announced
that of every rupee spent by the government, only 15 paise reaches the needy.
Welfare delivery systems were elaborate. There were many layers and
middlemen in the supply chain. Each had discretionary power, and therefore,
there was a lot of leakage. With Direct Benefits Transfer, instead of elaborate
systems, money could be sent directly into the accounts of those who need it.
With a unique identity, the government could also have more confidence in the
legitimacy of the beneficiary lists that they maintained.
Of course, Aadhaar is no magic pill. It can’t prevent all forms of fraud, nor
can it plug every leakage. But it does make it easier, cheaper and faster to prove
that you are truly you and make a claim on your benefits while making it harder
for fraudsters to forge a claim on the benefits that are yours. It reduces the power
that local tyrants and black marketers have over residents, since the subsidy is
not going through a middleman.
Aadhaar was the backbone needed to digitize and modernize government
welfare delivery experience. A simple example is benefits portability. Earlier, to
prevent double-dipping, residents could only purchase ration from the ration
shop they were assigned to. With Aadhaar, local governments can track in real-
time the subsidy consumed against each account. Since the people’s identity was
simply a number and their own biometrics, they could authenticate anywhere. So
some state governments have done away with the assignment system completely.
They allow any citizen to take their ration from any shop, as long as they use
Aadhaar to prove who they are and not double-dip. This is extremely useful in a
country of more than 400 million internal immigrant workers, who travel from
their villages to other districts for seasonal employment. The ration shops which
used to be mini-monopolies because of the assignment system now faced the
heat of competition. Many ration shops started offering home-delivery and other
services to attract eligible residents.
There are other advantages to having your own digital public good for
identity. In April 2020, the government was able to transfer relief payments to
more than 200 million women within a few days because this digital financial
infrastructure existed. Aadhaar was also crucial to the rapid rollout of the
vaccine program.
However, Digital Public Goods don’t always have to look like Aadhaar did.
Remember they are public goods because of how they are used, not because of
who funds them. One simple example would be Wikipedia. Wikipedia is non-
rivalrous and non-excludable. It is not, however, built by a government or any
public entity. Wikipedia is run by the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation,
which in turn gets its money from donations, and also the in-kind efforts of its
volunteers and community.
Aadhaar was only the first in a long line of digital infrastructure that India
invested in. Once Aadhaar’s versatility was understood, India started building
layer upon layer of digital infrastructure in other critical areas such as payments
and data exchange. The collection of these layers came to be known as the India
Stack.
The digital public goods approach has proven itself worthwhile.
As of today, more than US$ 240 billion of subsidies have been transferred
directly from the coffers of the government to the intended beneficiaries. This
money is leading to an increase in the use of bank accounts. The Bank of
International Settlements, the central bank of central banks, in a paper published
in 2019, said that the outcomes that India achieved in financial inclusion with
digital infrastructure in seven years, would have taken nearly half a century by
traditional growth processes.
 It was not long before many started wondering if the effect that digital public
goods had on financial inclusion, could be repeated in other critical development
areas such as improving healthcare access or education outcomes.

WHAT WORKS AT SCALE

What does it take to run a single classroom?
At the bare minimum, you need a set of students at a similar learning level.
You need the appropriate content to teach and a teacher familiar with the content
to teach it. You’d still need the teachers to be superhuman, as many are, since
they would also take on other responsibilities of running the classroom.
In an actual village, children of different ages differ in learning levels, so you
need a school, not just a classroom. A school needs multiple teachers, multiple
classrooms, and administrators to manage all of it. Learning doesn’t end in
school. Parents help create a learning environment at home so that children can
meet learning outcomes.
When you think about running the entire Indian education system, scale
changes everything.
There are more than 1.5 million schools, with nearly 10 million teachers,
teaching almost 250 million students in schools. They aren’t all learning the
same thing, either. There are more than sixty educational boards in thirty-two
languages of instruction across the country. Each issues its own curriculum to
suit local context, which varies greatly between states.
India’s educational system is, to put it mildly, complex and diverse.
Technology has the potential to help improve learning outcomes, but the
education system is too unwieldy for any single app, portal or platform to
manage. It is too complex even for a prescriptive set of features or solutions. The
education system isn’t one problem to solve. It is just the collective name we
give to the 250 million unique learning journeys that we owe to our children and
our future.
Often these sorts of grand problems attract grand solutions.
Many in the development sector want to make an impact at scale. They try
new ideas in pilots, pick the ones that look most promising and try to scale what
works. Many such solutions have seemed promising at the start, but lose their
efficacy when scaled up. Some may work at a small scale with a dedicated team,
but are too cumbersome to be implemented nationally. Other solutions simply do
not work when the context and underlying assumptions are changed as we scale
up from one region to multiple others.
In the face of this complexity and diversity, we need a humbler approach.
Instead of governments or even not-for-profits trying to ‘solve’ the problem at a
large scale, we need to distribute the ability for people to solve their own
problems. Instead of scaling what works, we need to ask:
What works at scale?
Energized textbooks are a great example of something that works at scale.
Energized textbooks distribute the ability to solve, rather than solve a problem.
Students often have trouble understanding the concepts from their primary
material. Energized textbooks have mapped individual learning concepts to QR
codes that are pre-printed in textbooks. Any capable device can scan the code to
identify the concept and retrieve additional digital content to help learning. The
magical part is that the content can be much more suited to the child’s actual
needs—eg. explanation videos, practice questions, interactive simulations and
worksheets—delivered in the local language.
Take Rui. Rui is a smart, energetic and lively five-year-old and studies in a
government primary school. Her school-educated mother is worried that Rui is
not ready for grade 1—she cannot read well or write in Marathi; they speak Urdu
at home. Rui’s mother consults Rui’s teacher, who shows her the QR codes of
the concepts Rui struggles with.
Rui’s father used the codes to print worksheets, download videos and
activities on his phone. Rui and her mother now listen to stories, learn new
words and do math activities using utensils, sticks, and stones available in and
around the house. After her dad gets home, Rui loves beating her own high score
in a game of identifying letters, words and number operations. Her dad got the
link to the game from one of the QR codes in her textbook.
Energized textbooks allowed more than thirty-five state and central boards of
India to roll out digital content for school education in over thirty languages.
More than 600 million printed textbooks with 10 billion QR codes are now being
used by school children and teachers all around the country.
Energized textbooks are one example of a ‘building block’.
By itself, each building block performs a simple, atomic function. The
energized textbook by itself, is just a regular textbook, with some QR codes
printed in it. But when you combine that with other building blocks, you start to
get solutions that can really impact learning outcomes.
India has built DIKSHA, a digital infrastructure for education, consisting of
many such building blocks. It is designed to deal with the complexity and
diversity of India by not being overly prescriptive. Even the assumption of
always-on connectivity cannot be taken for granted. Teachers as well as students
use DIKSHA to learn and to share what they’ve learnt. DIKSHA works at scale.
More than 3.6 billion learning sessions have taken place on DIKSHA,
accounting for a total of more than forty-four billion minutes.
DIKSHA, in turn, is based on the open-source Sunbird digital public good,
developed and maintained by EkStep Foundation. Sunbird was a counterintuitive
solution to the problem of education. Instead of aiming to serve a finished dish,
Sunbird aims to give everyone the ingredients they need via building blocks.
The building blocks in Sunbird have been proven to be useful in more than
just school education. Sunbird’s credentialing mechanism, which allows students
to record their school achievements, was quickly adapted to create DIVOC—
Digital Infrastructure for Vaccination Open Credentialing. Basically, as we all
got COVID-19 vaccines, we needed a safe, reliable, cheap and privacy-
protecting way of proving that we were vaccinated. Left to themselves, each
vaccination centre would have issued a certificate in their own format. As the
world reopened, it would be hard to confirm if someone was holding a genuine
certificate. DIVOC provided a digital standard that all vaccination centres could
adhere to, which couldn’t be spoofed easily, and could be verified by anyone.
Each one of the more than a billion doses of vaccines given in India via COWIN
comes with a DIVOC-enabled vaccination certificate.
Instead of the ‘scale what works’ approach, which first determines a solution
and then tries to impose it at scale, the ‘what works at scale’ approach only
determines what blocks to create. Solutions emerge from the creativity and
gumption of the people. The best part is the surprising ways in which people
reuse and remix these blocks into surprisingly creative solutions.
A building block approach to digital public goods is being followed in
healthcare as well. The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) aims to
develop the backbone necessary to support the integrated digital health
infrastructure of the country. It creates the missing links between the various
health providers in our country, and allows patients to see a unified view of their
health data. The Health Stack, as it is called, is starting from scratch, including
creating its own health ID. By starting with a new health ID, the ABDM allows
users much more granular control over their identity, their data and its privacy.
There is still an important role for the private sector in a Digital Public Goods
future. While infrastructure is essential and must be built, much of the delight on
the internet comes from private innovation and start-ups trying new ideas. We
can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. For a successful Digital Public
Good, we also need to think about how we can create the right incentives for
private players to continue to innovate and deliver better, faster and cheaper
services that are aligned with user needs.
This was the intent behind India’s other big digital public good success story,
the Unified Payments Interface, or UPI. If we want a vibrant future, both the
public and private sectors need to be building technology as per their vision. The
question isn’t either public or private.
The real question is how do we work better together?
 16
ARCHITECTING THE FUTURE

PROTOCOLS AND INTEROPERABILITY

The art of bitfulness shows how to mindfully use technology for our personal
use. However, that’s only going to treat the symptoms, not the cause.
As we said in Part One, our relationship with technology is a two-way street.
We don’t usually stop to ask why a certain software is architected a certain way.
We don’t think about what constraints drove its design, and what that design
does to us. However, just because we don’t pay attention to something, doesn’t
mean it isn’t capable of influencing us.
If we want to fix The Third Crisis, we need to become more mindful of our
relationship as a society with our collective technology.
There probably is no better example of fixing our relationship with our
collective technology than digital payments in India. For a country of more than
1.3 billion, there are only 30 million credit cards in India. Cash is still dominant
here. In 2016, the Indian government demonetized select currency notes and
nudged the economy towards formal, digital modes of payments.
However, unlike the west, credit cards were not going to be enough. India
needed a low-cost, fast payment technology that could work on mobile phones,
when on the go. There are many private players operating in the mobile
payments space globally. Most take their inspiration from the success of mobile
payments in China where two giants, Alibaba and WeChat, have split the market
between them. Alibaba, WeChat and their global copycats crafted their ‘wallets’
as closed-loop systems—users could only pay other users of the same wallet.
The closed-loop design is not a necessity of mobile payments technology. It is a
deliberate exclusionary design to capture network effects.
This is why, in 2016, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)
launched the interoperable Unified Payments Interface, more popularly known
as UPI. In the five years hence, the success of UPI has been tremendous. As of
October 2021, there were more than 4.2 billion transactions taking place
monthly on UPI, transacting a value of over INR 7.71 lakh crores (about
US$103 billion). UPI now makes up 10 per cent of all retail payments, and the
total value transacted annually comes to about 30 per cent of the country’s GDP.
In just eighteen months since launch, the volume of transactions on the network
exceeded the combined volumes of credit-card and debit-card transactions in
India. UPI has allowed the Indian economy to sustain cashless, contactless
transactions when it most needed it. First, in 2016–17, when cash supply was
low as select currency notes were demonetized. Also, in 2020–21 when due to
the pandemic, transactions had to be done remotely and with minimal contact.
However, UPI is not a platform, it is a protocol.

A protocol is simply a set of rules that makes coordination simpler.

The simplest example of a protocol is the set of basic traffic rules in a country.
Everyone agrees to drive on the left (or right) side of the road to avoid collisions.
There is nothing special about either direction: the benefit comes from everyone
being coordinated.
Protocols establish a shared language of communication between all
participants of the network. Irrespective of their own internal processes, structure
or design, all participants can coordinate through shared protocols. The internet
is itself a suite of protocols implemented across billions of devices that direct
traffic of data packets. Which is why, the IP in IP address stands for Internet
Protocol. All the devices on the internet are, thus, speaking the same language
and can understand each other.
UPI defined a standard set of rules around the sending and receiving of money
in the Indian banking system. It allowed any two banks, which may be running
their own custom software in the backend, to be able to talk to each other in a
shared language. Moreover, since this shared language is a public good, it was
available to private players to build innovative apps and services on top of it. It
made payments interoperable, and unbundled the payments transaction interface
from the bank account provider.
In simpler words, you could now use a State Bank of India app to transfer
money from your Citibank account to a friend using the Google Pay app to
manage their HDFC bank account. You could even consolidate bank accounts
from multiple banks under one app. All users can register a payment address,
such as nikhil.kumar@upi. Anyone using any payment app can send money to
that address without knowing the underlying bank details or even which bank
they transact with.
UPI opened up competition and innovation in the digital payments sector
without encouraging a walled garden or a monopoly. UPI users can easily
change providers if they believe that their current provider is not meeting their
expected level of service or is violating their privacy. Because each transaction is
linked to a Know Your Customer verified bank account, there is no added risk of
misuse.
Protocols can work without central platforms, and thus, already offer
protection against monopoly. All modern email works on the Send Mail Transfer
Protocol (SMTP). The wonderful thing about SMTP is that it has been designed
to be interoperable. Each of us can have our own email address provider, and use
different email apps on our phones and desktops. Unlike instant messaging,
which requires the sender and receiver to be on the same app, you can send an
email to anyone with a valid email address. You are not tied to any particular
platform. New start-ups can create better email clients. Existing users will not
need to give up their existing email IDs, or forgo old emails. Thus, interoperable
protocols reduce the costs of switching between services and make competition
possible.
Protocols are not a radical new invention. They are how the original architects
of the internet built it. The internet started as a tool for academic and military
knowledge sharing, built from research and defence spending. The early
architects were remarkably self-aware of what they were building—a shared
infrastructure. Hence, they had a deep commitment to interoperability. The
driving concern was not to ‘escape competition’. This reflected in the
architecture of the open networks they had built. Somewhere since the original
sin, we’ve faltered.

Even before digital, we have required interoperability from our other network
infrastructure. Telecom services do not require both users to be on the same
network, you can call any number irrespective of who their provider is. Telecom
companies are also required to provide mobile number portability. That is,
TelCos must provide a mechanism to change providers without the user facing
the inconvenience of changing their phone number. We should be demanding the
same from modern digital infrastructure.
Protocol-driven interoperability is probably our most effective tool against
concentration. Remember, there is nothing technically stopping these platforms
from being open: it is a careful business decision to not do so. Instead of
regulating their behaviour, which is often hard, countries can think of a
combination of a digital public good such as a protocol, and a law which
compels internet platforms to be interoperable to the protocol.
There is now an effort to apply these principles to the markets where
aggregators operate. Beckn is a not-for-profit organization building an open
protocol for distributed commerce. Beckn aims to create interoperable networks
of sellers, starting with the domain of ride-sharing and final-mile delivery. It
creates a shared infrastructure whereby each of the sellers can come to the
network directly, through their preferred service provider. However, once on the
network, these sellers are interoperable. This means that a cab on the Beckn
network is available through any ride-sharing app on the Beckn network. This
means drivers and users have portability, the way our mobile numbers are
portable.

Protocols do not kill platforms, they simply change what they do and how they
compete. Protocols make platforms amenable to competitive pressures. In the
blitzscaling models, competitors would have to reinvent the wheel. They would
have to make their own competing network, and spend on acquiring users to
make the network viable. Via interoperability, protocols make it easy for anyone
to build alternatives to part or whole of the dominant platforms.
Interoperability dramatically reduces the cost of switching services. Your data
is not lost to a walled garden when you leave. Individual sellers are independent
and have a choice between the platforms that are aggregating demand. The
aggregator platforms will not cease to exist. However, the strategic playing field
changes considerably.
Without lock-ins to protect their network, a blitzscaling strategy only makes it
easier for the next competitor to poach your customers once you’ve spent money
on acquiring them. The network effects accrue at the network level, rather than
with any one player. Users can select providers that suit their own privacy levels
and feature requirements. This forces innovation and competition to focus on
what users want rather than use large amounts of capital to buy the loyalty of
users and suffocate competitors.
Today, the private provision of digital infrastructure has led us to outcomes
where even what truly belongs to us is being captured by internet startups.
For example, the data around traffic and congestion in a city. Uber and Google
Maps have better information about things like how transportation is affected by
weather patterns. This data could help us understand and build better physical
infrastructure to decongest cities. However, scientists do not often get access to
this data, and even when they do, it is costly or comes with strings attached.
Even though this data is generated by the public, it is not a public good.
Interoperable protocols solve many problems with the current blitzscaling
approach, but not all of them. Private platforms will continue to provide major
services due to the size of their investments, the speed of their execution and
their innovation. However, their current business model requires controlling
access over the generated data.
We must remember that even if it is their network, it is still our data.

THEIR NETWORKS, OUR DATA

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted all our lives.
Social distancing and the lockdown disrupted all our routines, but for some,
the shock went much further than that. For many individuals and small
businesses, the accelerated move towards digital led to adverse financial impact.
Incomes dried up, and expenses, especially medical ones, threatened to
destabilize families. Even businesses that were doing well needed capital to
make it through the tough times.
Our financial system was not prepared for this system-wide demand for credit.
The process to obtain a loan requires time, patience and paperwork—all three of
which were harder to come by during the pandemic. This often led to individuals
and small businesses turning to the informal sector for capital. The informal
money lending market is usurious. It places unfair terms on the borrower, and
the collection process can be very unpleasant. However, people flock to it
because it is able to deliver credit to the needy with a speed that the formal
sector is still unable to match.
Ultimately, it takes money to make money. Without access to credit, the poor
are sentenced to poverty forever.
India has under-penetration of formal credit. Indian households aren’t
borrowing from banks as much as households in other countries. A few bad
apples amongst the borrowers have made banks hesitant. Banks do not lend to
those without collateral to back a loan. Hence, the poor in this country never get
that first seed capital to improve their lives.
Financial data can sort the good apples from the bad. It provides insights into
your spending habits, your discipline, etc. However, this data is in different silos
in different accounts with various providers.
Today, your financial services providers keep your data locked with
themselves for compliance and safety and do not share it with anyone. This
practice may be safe, but the tragedy is that if we could liberate this data, it could
change millions of lives.
India’s Account Aggregator network allows this data to be read together in a
secure and encrypted manner.
On 2 September 2021, eight banks joined the Account Aggregator network.
Three hundred million bank accounts now can share their data seamlessly,
securely and instantly with any financial service provider that requests it.
The Account Aggregators themselves will not be able to read your data. They
are consent managers. Think of them as traffic cops that direct data from one
place to another. They are simply collecting your consent to share your data from
one account to another. They also enforce the conditions under which this
sharing must occur.
Account Aggregators act as fiduciaries to you. That is, just like a personal
financial advisor, AAs are legally obliged to act in your best interest and can’t
have a conflict of interest. When a technology like AA empowers people with
their data, they can take charge of their financial lives. Their data fills a gap that
the collateral offered: to demonstrate trustworthiness.
When the masses can establish trust based on their data, it offers banks a
chance to extend a loan even when there is no underlying asset to back up the
loan. Moreover, since the data comes directly from the source financial
institution, there is no physical paperwork to check. There is also no collateral to
inspect. Aadhaar and the India Stack had already solved the problem of identity
verification. This means someone can apply for a loan, get approved and receive
it in their bank account, all digitally—faster than you get groceries delivered.
This is not a tall claim. Already, the Open Credit Enablement Network
(OCEN) rails have been used in closed beta by sole proprietors on the
government’s e-marketplace (GEM) procurement platform under a program
called SAHAY. These sellers are typically small vendors who suffer from a lack
of access to credit. Loans ranging from Rs 238 to loans worth Rs 3,98,600 were
disbursed, all under ten minutes and digitally to qualifying suppliers. In the
feedback video made after the loans were disbursed one supplier called the loan
‘doobte ka sahara’ (a lifesaver), whereas others simply called it a ‘miracle’.
The Account Aggregator network is part of India’s ambitious Data
Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA). Our usual conversations
around data have always focused on privacy and protection. What is missing
from these conversations is the power of self-determination that control over
your own data brings. Remember, privacy is boundary management. Sometimes,
even with the best intentions, the boundaries others set may not be in our own
best interests. DEPA and AA believe that the user is best placed to determine
their own boundaries, in a way that best enables them to live their own lives. We
need to build protections, but we must empower, not mollycoddle, the user.
DEPA’s principles can be expanded to data in any sector, not just financial
services. We can imagine a future where our social media, ridesharing, e-
commerce and other such data too is being aggregated by consent managers.
The first and second wave of internet companies traded free services for
capturing our identity and our data. We were not paying for it, so we became the
product. It is hard to judge this trade-off in black-and-white terms. What we can
say is this:
Trading control over our data and our digital infrastructure in exchange for
services may have been how the internet was built. But it cannot be how it
sustains.
The future is not inevitable, it is a blank page. We need to decide as a
collective what we’re going to write on it.

SUSTAINING THE FUTURE

Whether it is software or buildings, architects do not get enough credit.
Through the seemingly innocuous placement of doors, windows and walls,
architects make decisions like how much sunlight we get and the acoustics of a
space. Using the same elements, they make palaces grand or prisons bleak. They
make libraries quiet and music halls loud, or frustrate us by doing the opposite.
The architectural considerations of the buildings we work and live in usually
recede into the background. But they are ever-present, influencing our
behaviours in subtle and sometimes profound ways.
The same goes for software.
 We need to become much more aware of how our digital infrastructure is
architected, and how this architecture is affecting all of us. If we continue
building our digital infrastructure the way we do, we risk concentration of power
in every industry. To get out of this Third Crisis, there are no easy answers and
no clear villains.
But, we stand in a unique moment in history. The digitization of our lives
presents our generation with an opportunity to rethink and rebuild the
fundamental architecture of our society. Instead of mindlessly going along for
the ride, our most meaningful choice is to stop, pause and really think about the
future we would like to build.
Can we build a future where the leading technology is one that serves us better
rather than technology that is better at making us serve it?
If we think of our collective technology as a public good and not an
opportunity for blitzscaling, we can. The good news is that building digital
public goods is neither very hard, nor very expensive, if we are smart about its
design. As with UPI, the actual digital public good may be as simple as
designing a protocol. The early drafts of the protocol were written by a team of
three technologists put together by NPCI, in their spare time. There are not-for-
profit think tanks, such as iSPIRT, which contribute volunteer expertise and time
towards the task of building and promoting digital infrastructure such as the
India Stack and now the Health Stack. Seeking a different challenge, and looking
to make an impact with their work, high-quality tech talent with previous
experience in global tech firms now work at not-for-profits such as Beckn or
EkStep to create digital public goods and building blocks. One notable example
is Dr. Pramod Varma. In 2009, he was Chief Technology Architect at the global
technology company, Sterling Commerce, a part of IBM. He quit his job to
design digital public goods for India. He was Chief Architect of Aadhaar and
played a key role in the architecture of Beckn, DEPA, EkStep, and UPI, amongst
others. The actual work of writing code, hosting it on servers and maintaining it
still costs money, and depending on the task, can be funded by private players,
philanthropists or even the government.
The funding of these digital public goods can also be supported by a digital
tax.
 Already European countries are demanding a digital tax, because online firms
often take advantage of tax residency in a country with low tax rates, while
operating globally. The revenues from the digital tax can be directed towards
creating digital public good alternatives to critical infrastructure where there is
threat of concentration.
The digital tax can be waived or reduced for those companies that are
interoperable with the underlying digital public good. This way, when private
infrastructure usage or walled gardens start to go up, so does the digital tax
collected. The tax collected can be used for funding competing digital public
goods. As the industry moves towards more open infrastructure and
interoperability, the tax collected from these industries automatically reduces.
These self-regulating mechanisms create both the incentive to be interoperable,
as well as the funds to create an interoperable alternative if companies choose
not to be.

Digital Public Goods, thus, offer a public-policy solution that is much more
effective than regulations for a simple reason: it is proactive rather than reactive.
Regulations try to coerce companies into following both the letter and spirit of
the law, through the use of penalties, punishments and permissions. However, in
Digital Public Goods, the code is the law. User rights can be enshrined in the
architecture of the underlying design itself. Privacy and anti-trust rules can be
embedded into the design. For example, no private operator on UPI can block
payments to a specific competitor. If they do, they risk losing their access to the
network. Of course, we will still need supporting laws and policies, but they
have a much better chance of being implemented well if there’s an underlying
DPG.
Digital Public Goods also make our collective data generated by the
underlying digital infrastructure into a public good. The anonymized insights
from our behaviour as a collective will be available to citizens, scientists and
entrepreneurs alike. We can channel this data into research and development,
better governance, or to make services like insurance cheaper.
 A lot of these goals are shared by the decentralized web. A public blockchain
is non-rivalrous and non-excludable by definition, and thus, a public good. We
do not believe that there is even a debate between centralized versus
decentralized technologies. They are both different philosophies of building
technologies, and each offers different trade-offs of advantages and
disadvantages.
While a centralized system and its creators have tremendous power, they can
be held accountable with the force of law. A decentralized system has no leader
issuing orders, and instead depends on the infallibility of its code and economic
incentive structure to keep the system running as intended. Neither one is
‘better’. In fact, the best probable outcome for us as a society is two thriving
ecosystems. This gives users the choice between these two different systems.
The force of competition between them will nudge both to keep innovating and
improving.

If you believe that the reason for our current set of problems is because some
corporation is evil, you’d be wrong. The concept of good and evil is not
sufficient to describe the complex set of incentives and interactions that drive the
behaviour of platforms and people. Like we described with the SaySafe example
in Chapter 13, even with good intentions, companies can end up on the Slippery
Slopes of Scale.
Ultimately, this book is not anti-tech, it is pro-you.
Our essential argument here is that the digital infrastructure we create has
significant influence over our lives, and thus, is too important to be left only to
the private sector to control. The current model, blitzscaling, prizes the full and
complete capture of user time, attention and data above all else. They fund
building the underlying infrastructure as a winner-take-all to support this goal
and ‘escape competition’. The private sector brings innovation and choice to the
table, while the public sector brings stability and inclusion.
The real trick is achieving balance.
Governments, civil society and the private sector each play an important part
in our society. They each have their own strengths, weaknesses and blind spots.
Letting any one of them have absolute control over our technology is probably
not a good idea. We need to find a way to build Societal Platforms. That is,
where everyone in society plays their respective part in shaping our collective
technology, and hence, shaping our collective future.
Our proposal for the future is not very radical. In 2005, Stanford held a big
event to commemorate the birth of the internet. They revealed a plaque
acknowledging not one creator, but about thirty people working in different
teams at different universities. The plaque acknowledges that even that list of
thirty is incomplete. It says, ‘Ultimately, thousands if not tens to hundreds of
thousands have contributed their expertise to the evolution of the internet’.
This is a heartening representation of what the internet was supposed to be.
The internet was supposed to be a way for curious humans to share knowledge
with each other, even if they are oceans apart. The point was that ideas are non-
rivalrous. As George Bernard Shaw had said, ‘if you have an idea and I have an
idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.’
The internet, our social networks, and our marketplaces are too important to
be controlled by anyone. They should belong, simultaneously, to all of us, and to
none of us.
Now is the time we architect that future.
 APPENDIX

The Art of Bitfulness is about having a mindful relationship with your

technology. We do this by managing our time, attention and privacy thoughtfully.
Given below is a set of tools that could help you on this journey. Chapters 5—12
provide detailed instructions on how to integrate these tools into your life. This
appendix is also available online at bitfulness.com/links, or you can scan the QR
code below.

MANAGING TIME
The single biggest problem with our smartphones is how much time we lose to
them. The tools below can help change the way we use our devices. Chapters 5
(How to Think Clearly) and 6 (What to Think About) provide more detail on
how to spend our time on our devices better.

1. Use a note-taking software for thinking

Evernote (Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, browser extension)

Roam Research (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Obsidian (Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Linux)
Notion (Windows, Mac, Android, iOS)
Google Keep (Android, iOS, Chrome, browser extension)
 OneNote (iOS, Windows, Mac, Android, Windows Phone, Apple Watch,
browser extension)
Simplenote (iOS, Android,Windows, Mac, Linux, Linux, browser
extension)

2. Use Bitfulness Meditation to take charge of the moment

The amount of information available to us can often overwhelm us. As we try to

focus and make good use of our time, the first step is to be able to calm the
mind. We recommend journaling in your note-taking software to declutter your
mind. Detailed instructions about this exercise and how to process your thoughts
are available in Chapter 5.

3. Time blocking

Reduce friction in your workflow by designating specific blocks of time for

different activities. This helps maintain context and eliminate interruptions.
Always block time for your most important tasks first. Treat this time as non-
negotiable.
Fill in the remaining time with other tasks, like meetings. You can allot blocks
of time for distracting tasks such as checking email or surfing the web. Having
done that, try not to do these tasks outside of this time block. Here are some
calendar apps that help you time-block quickly and easily.

Google Calendar
Clockify
Skedpal
Plan
Hourstack
TogglTrack
Calendly

4. Create a Time Budget

Even though time is more valuable than money, people pinch pennies but waste
hours. Create a time budget so that you have access to high-level awareness of
where your time should be going. A detailed description is given in Chapter 6
(What to Think About), under the heading Using Time. This table is available
digitally on bitfulness.com/time.

MANAGING ATTENTION
Technological conveniences come with massive flows of information. Get free
from information overload by being smart about where your attention goes.
Since you have finite mindspace, occupy it with tasks that matter to you. Given
below are some tools for dividing your attention in a savvy way.

Split Your Personality?

The noisier your environment, the less likely you are to focus. Using new user
accounts allows you to create different virtual environments for different kinds
of focus. Chapters 7-10 describe in detail how to create three personalities to get
into three modes of attention.

1. Create a new User Account

It is easier to make a new user account sparse and clean than to make your
current user account less distracting. Here are the steps to create a new user on
your device.

On an Android phone: Go to Settings (gear icon) → Users/Users and

Accounts → Click the add user button → Sign in to your Google
account (you can use a different email for this user profile if you want)
→ Calls and SMSes are disabled by default—you can change that if you
like.
To change, switch back to your main user account. To switch accounts,
pull the notification shade down and tap the user icon. You’ll see a list of
users. Select your main account → Go to Settings → Users → Select the
user you just created → Tap the gear icon → Switch on turn on phone
calls and SMS.
On an Apple computer: Go to System Preferences → Users and
 Groups → If the lock at the bottom left is locked, click to unlock and
change your settings → Click the plus sign to add a user → Choose type
of user (admin/standard/sharing-only) → Enter a name and password
and click ‘Create’.
On a Windows XP, 2000, 2003, Vista or Windows 7 PC: Start →
Control Panel → User Accounts and Family Safety → Add or Remove
User Accounts → Create New Account → Choose between Standard,
Admin, and Guest → Log out and log in to toggle between users.
On a Windows 10 PC: Go to Settings → Accounts → Family and
Other People → Add someone else to this PC → In the Microsoft
Account window that pops up, click ‘I don’t have this person’s sign-in
information’ → On the next page, click ‘Add a user without a Microsoft
account’ → Type in the login details for your new user, and click ‘Next’
→ You’re redirected to the list of users within Settings.
On iOS devices (iPad and iPhone): iOS does not allow for multiple
users for legal accountability, traceability and security reasons.
However, you could use different email services for each profile. For
example, Outlook for work, Gmail for personal communication, iOS
Mail app for creative work.

2. Use a website blocker

Web browsers are rife with distractions that encourage mindless scrolling. Block
these distractions during specific periods of time, or even permanently. Here is a
list of browser-based website blockers.

StayFocusd (Chrome)
LeechBlock (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Edge) – Browser
extension
Limit (Chrome)
WasteNoTime (Safari, Chrome)
Pause (Chrome)

3. Batch your notifications

To remain mindful about notifications, turn off the non-essential ones. You can
also toggle your notification settings so that certain notifications are silent.
However, you might end up checking your phone more often to see whether you
have missed anything important. One solution is to have your notifications sent
to you at specific intervals of time. Here’s how to do that.

iPhones have an in-built option to schedule notifications. To do this, go

to Settings → Notifications → Schedule Summary. Now, select the apps
whose notifications you would like to batch → Choose the times at
which you would like to receive notification summaries. The default is
twice a day; you can tap ‘Add Summary’ if you’d like more than one.
If you have an Android device, here are some apps that you can use to
manage your notifications:
Batch
Daywise
Spren

4. Use the in-built focus mode

If your work cannot allow for batching notifications, filter non-essential

notifications using your phone’s in-built focus mode. Customize this mode to
allow specific notifications and block others.

For iPhone users: Go to Settings → Focus.

Apple offers five default focus profiles to choose from: Do not Disturb,
Driving, Personal, Sleep, and Work. You can click on each one and take
a look at the in-built notification settings. If you’re happy with the
default profiles, use them.
If not, you can select the + icon on the Focus page to add a new mode.
Customize this profile as you wish. You can even automate or schedule
when it switches on. For example, you could choose to schedule Sleep
mode at 11 pm every night.
For Android users: Go to Settings → Digital Wellbeing. Here
[bitfulness.com/focusandroid] is how to use it.
5. Block access to distracting apps

Eliminate disruptive influences by restricting access to apps where you tend to

waste time. Here are some apps that help you regulate what you have access to
and how much time you spend there.

Freedom (Windows, Mac, iOS and Android)

Forest for gamified focus (iOS, Android)
Cold Turkey Blocker (Windows, Mac)
SelfControl (Mac)

6. Streamline your Home Screen

Remove distracting apps from your home screen to help yourself get to the work
that really matters. Here are some launchers for Android phones that are meant
to increase productivity and make it easier for you to focus.

Minimalist Productivity Launcher for Focus & Goals

Ratio
Niagara
Lawnchair
Indistractable
Olauncher

7. Merge your inboxes

The content from all your inboxes—messages, emails, SMSes—can get

overwhelming and lead to a lot of tedious scrolling. One simple solution is to get
an all-in-one inbox that merges all your textual communication. Here are a few.
Don’t forget to use the archive and delete options liberally.

Franz (Windows, Mac, Linux)

Rambox (Mac)
All-In-One Messenger (Windows, Mac, Linux)
IM+ (Mac, iOS, Android)
Disa (Android)
 MANAGING PRIVACY
Our current relationship with technology means that we cannot give up our
devices in order to remain ‘off the grid’. We can, nonetheless, be smart about
how we use technology. Resist getting overwhelmed and paranoid; instead, take
these few simple steps to stay protected. Here are some simple steps that will
cover against the most common privacy threats and identity theft.

1. Use Password Managers

Reusing the same password or variations of it is how most security breaches

happen. Your passwords should be long, rememberable to you, but unguessable.
Skip the hassle of trying to memorize multiple secure passwords by using a
password manager. These have in-built password generators that churn out
complex passwords. Here are some password manager apps you can use.

LastPass (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Edge)

Keeper (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, Chrome, Safari, Firefox,
Opera, Edge)
Avira (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)
DashLane (Chrome)
Bitwarden (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox,
Safari, Edge)

2. Use a temporary email address

Email addresses are one of the most requested pieces of information online. You
might be filling a form or surfing websites that force you to sign up to gain
access to their content. Sharing your actual email address might lead to a flood
of unwanted promotional emails. Here’s where temporary email addresses come
in useful. Since they expire within a set period of time, they make for secure
anonymous correspondence and file transfers as well. Here are some websites
that provide temporary email service:

https://tempmail.dev/
 https://10minutemail.com/
https://www.guerrillamail.com/
https://www.throwawaymail.com/en
https://temporarymail.com/

3. Virtual Number

Keep your personal phone number private by using a virtual number. It’s
common to have to verify an account login or signup by using your phone
number. Giving out your actual phone number might lead to spam or make you
vulnerable to security leaks.

Doosra
Receive SMSes—to receive one-time SMSes

4. Get end-to-end encrypted email

Using an encrypted email service protects you against snooping. Here are some
secure email services with whom you can create an account.

ProtonMail (Also has Android, iOS apps)

Tutanota (Also has Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, Mac apps)
Mailfence
Hushmail
Mailbox

5. List of open DNSes

DNSes translate readable addresses like ‘www.google.com’ into a format that

computers can process. The translated address is public, making it possible for
third parties to log your web activity. Change your DNS into a safe public DNS,
the top several of which are listed below:

Google: 8.8.8.8
Quad9: 9.9.9.9
OpenDNS Home: 208.67.222.222
 Cloudflare: 1.1.1.1
CleanBrowsing: 185.228.168.9
Alternate DNS: 76.76.19.19
AdGuard DNS: 94.140.14.14

Go to bitfulness.com/changedns for a step-by-step on how to change your DNS

server on your router.

6. Anti-Malwares

Malwares are all kinds of malicious software, including viruses. Malware attacks
often hold your computer hostage and steal your passwords and usernames.
Anti-malwares protect your device from phishing, ransomware and key-logging.
See below for some well-known anti-malwares.

Malware Bytes
Avast
Comodo
AVG
Spybot

7. General dos and don’ts

Don’t use public Wi-Fi

Log out of public computers every time you use them
Never re-use your passwords
Be careful of what you post on social media
Check your privacy settings from time to time

8. Extra protection measures

Use a VPN
Use a secure browser, like Tor
Pay anonymously and securely (cash, cryptocurrency)
Delete your search history and Google activity regularly
Switch to a secure messaging platform like Signal or Jitsi.
1 In an interview at a bitcoin conference in 2021, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said
that he believes bitcoin will bring world peace. His argument is detailed at
bitfulness.com/worldpeace.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The book cover says this book is by Nandan Nilekani and Tanuj Bhojwani.
However, we consider that to be an oversimplification. This book is built on
inputs and ideas from many people, and we are grateful to each and every one of
them.
First of all, we’d like to thank Arun Mohan Sukumar, Matt Sheehan, NS
Ramnath, Onaiza Drabu, Rahul Matthan, Ramachandra Guha, Rob Fitzpatrick
and Samar Halarnkar, who offered words of encouragement and advice, drawing
from their own experience of writing books. If you like our words, you’ll love
theirs.
Brave souls like Kamya Chandra, Karthik Sivaram, Mandakini Chandra and
Priyanka Asera volunteered to be our test readers and suffered through the early
drafts so that you didn’t have to. We are very grateful to them.
Secondly, we’d like to thank the teams from iSpirt and EkStep for their
extraordinary patience. The volunteers and builders at these organizations make
the work you read about (in Part Three of the book) a reality. We’d like to thank
Karthik KS, Pramod Varma, Sanjay Jain, Shankar Maruwada, Sharad Sharma,
Siddharth Shetty, Sudhanshu Shekhar and Vivek Raghavan for their support. A
special mention to Sanjay Purohit of Societal Platforms and Viraj Tyagi of eGov
Foundation for always being available to answer our questions.
What we wrote wouldn’t be so slick without our in-house and Penguin India’s
design and editorial teams. Special thanks to Meru Gokhale, who called the first
draft of this manuscript incoherent (and rightly so). Along the way, we had
editorial guidance from Sandra Wendel, and a herculean effort from Ila Deep to
get every detail correct. We’d also like to thank Akangksha Sharma, Aparna
Abhijit, and Shreya Punj from Penguin for helping put polish on the book and its
cover. Most of the diagrams you see in the text are from Esha Singh and Nancy,
who have been very patient with our frequently changing requests.
It is not just what goes into the book, though. The most valuable contribution
came from those who have kept us calm and sane during the hardest parts of the
writing process, in an already hard pandemic year. Tanuj would like to thank his
friends Anna Rego, Deepender Singla, Hobbes, Meghana Reddyreddy, Mubeen
Masudi, Naman Pugalia, Nikhil Kumar, Prabhkiran Singh, Prajakta Kuwalekar,
Roshni Durai Rajan, Sahil Kini, Sambhunath Barik, Shalini Prasad, Srijoni Sen,
Susan Atai, and Vivek Nair for being available when he needed them. There is a
big list of people who have helped us in many little ways. We remain thankful to
all of them.
Both authors are grateful to their family for putting up with their obsession to
retreat and write. We can only hope they find this book worth the sacrifices they
made for us.
Finally, thank you, dear reader. We’ve been told reliably by many in the
publishing industry that no one reads acknowledgements anymore. So, if you’re
reading this sentence, know that we’re grateful to you for getting this far. We
hope it was worth your time. Find a little treat for yourself at
https://bitfulness.com/thankyou.
 THE BEGINNING

Let the conversation begin…

Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@penguinbooks
Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/penguinbooks
Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your Pinterest
Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook.com/penguinbooks
Find out more about the author and
discover more stories like this at Penguin.co.in
ALLEN LANE
USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia
New Zealand | India | South Africa | China
Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at
global.penguinrandomhouse.com

This collection published 2022

Copyright © Nandan Nilekani and Tanuj Bhojwani 2022
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket images © Akangksha Sarmah
This digital edition published in 2022.
e-ISBN: 9789354923852
For sale in the Indian Subcontinent only
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired
out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than
that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.