Author: Ajay Ohri

If Nietzche was on Twitter, what would he tweet? If Shakespeare was on the internet would he prefer Medium writing or Kindle Publishing. If Satre was a blogger would he still be offered the Nobel Prize. If Sartre was a blogger would he still have refused Alfred Nobel’s nobel honor. Or would he have said, dang it, the number of views will only go up.

What would Charles Dickens do to stand out on Facebook from Brad Takei and Dwayne the Rock Johnson. Would the Tale of Two cities be serialized in blog posts. How much would Dickens earn from Adsense anyway. Would you ask Beethoven to stream on spotify or Apple Music. Would Mozart  master Youtube the way Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga did.

How about a reality show on “Keeping up with the Shakespeares ” . Will it get enough ratings and Emmies. Will it be able to compete and beat ” The Game of Thrones”. Why does the Pope not use LinkedIn? The Pope doesn’t network?  The Vatican bureaucracy won’t use wikis to catalogue research on what really really happened.

Heisenberg would be uncertain if he could use social media. I mean the Breaking Atoms Heisenberg not the chemist. The funny cat of Heisenberg on the internet would be a meme. or not a meme. or you know you don’t know.

The intellectual dumbing down of the population continues. It started with student debt as a way to discourage the lower middle class from aspiring to intellectual pretensions. Educated populations are rarely persuaded to go to war based on jingoism. The Cold War demanded obedience from populations from both sides of the iron Curtain. The Digital Iron Curtain exists and it is helped by technology that is closed to the outside world . Izronically much of it was developed on tax payer money.

Today the Internet has an Iron Curtain in China, but the politicians are too busy facilitating the corporations to import microwaves and refrigerators. There is no God. God deleted his Gmail account.

What would Jesus do on  social media? Would he get 13 followers?

In cryptography, a nonce is an arbitrary number that may only be used once. A noun is a part of speech that denotes a person, animal, place, thing, or idea. The English word noun has its roots in the Latin word nomen, which means “name.” Every language has words that are nouns. Fuck you is a verb but you is a pronoun. Shit is a noun.

Take the nouns, leave the adjectives.

We sell nouns on the internet. Everything we sell is a noun. You can sell verbs as well but they are not very respectable.We use too many adjectives to do the selling. Adjectives Adwords  and Adsense all add up to a long tail of Ads.

After everything is sold and bought, we analyze. We pretend we are analyzing because we are smart monkeys trying to evolve to smarter humans. We pretend we analyze because we are God’s creation designed more intelligently than an iPhone made in China. Choose your theory on why you were created to analyze the text that surrounds you.

Actually we try to analyze to deal with buyer’s remorse and seller’s remorse. Quantifying our risk helps us sleep better. If you could analyze the thoughts of humans using the brain waves they generate they would build a temple for you on Mt Olympus. Instead you make do with analyzing who sold which noun where and when.

Why did anyone sell and not just swap? Because swapping is less mathematical though sometimes more fun than the precision of converting X apples into Y money to buy Z oranges. The Alphabet can help us make a beautiful soup but it won’t tell us the psychology of causality.

Human behaviour is predictable in short bursts of time and irrational over longer periods of time. Microscopic predictability of human behaviour is now possible thanks to open source free software, pay on demand cloud hardware, free tutorials on blogs and MOOCs. But comfort zone demands that we predict aggregated and macro human behaviour.

The same mathematics that is used to predict terrorism can be used to predict fraud, paedophilia and virtually every crime. Yet capitalism demands we spend a trillion dollars to find a tall terrorist but don’t spend a billion dollars to find the short tail of crime. Crime is the ultimate weapon the lower classes have in capitalism and yet it diminishes them more than the ones watching from the balcony of the sky tower. If predicting crime was as profitable as predicting terrorism the masses would vote the right kind of politicians into the right kinds of seats.

Instead we have compromises.  The machine algorithms that could be used to improve educational learning and deliver customized education to every kid’s device, is diverted to the flood gates of Advertising Heaven where a digital Mad Son Avenue dictates , nudges, cajoles, triggers , prods and converts your propensity  to spend money to increase the velocity of money in the economy.

Nouns are what we sell, but bullshit is what we buy. If you dont’ believe me, trust me on the Dont Be Evil It is Just An AD company that just turned into a General Eclectic of the Internet behemoth .

Trust me on this, I wont ever sell your data to your government funded by your money on your time captured by my machines and my code monkeys. Just click my ads and buy my nouns.

How do you make chut-ney out of chut-zpah. One shouldn’t. Sticky things have sticky ends. How do you make money out of your flamboyant savoir faire. You should not. One simply does not allow the flamboyance of the founder overtake the necessity of keeping up the reputation of the brand and the product.

Some of you are confused? What’s with the big words, little fellow.

What is chutney ? Chutney is a side dish in the cuisines of the Indian subcontinent that can vary from a tomato relish to a ground peanut garnish or a yoghurt, cucumber and mint dip

What is chutzpah? It  is the quality of audacity, for good or for bad. The Yiddish word derives from the Hebrew word ḥutspâ (חֻצְפָּה), meaning “insolence”, “cheek” or “audacity”. So Barack Obama should have written the book as ” The Chutzpah of Hope”. But Obama does not like Yiddish humour much.

What is a putz ? Schmuck is a name for someone who is mean, foolish, or inept. Putz is more offensive.  It means a stupid or worthless person. Actually it means phallus. What is a Phallus.  In India, we worship it every Monday. See Jimmypedia.

Who is a mensch?  It is a person of integrity and honour, someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. The key to being ‘a real mensch‘ is nothing less than character, rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, decorous.

Are you a putz or are you a mensch? How does one train the alpha monkey on top of the organisational ladder. By definition, the alpha is the one with the 800 pound gorilla smile and the right swing. How do you make sure your company’s King Kong does not climb a tall building and chase air ambulances.

The tech world is full of two kinds of closed communities. Jewish people and East Indian people.  They have similarities and contrasts galore. One of their biggest similarity is the focus on knowledge, on argument, on education and of course on music and culture to relax. One of the biggest contrasts is how they treat laughter and a sense of humour outside and inside their community. And that is the end of that !

Phew! That was a close call.  Why am I talking culture. Because culture eats strategy for lunch. Your startup is the sum of its people’s talents and hopes and energies. Trust me, you lose people because of culture more quickly than you lose it due to strategy. How do you divert and keep focus the energy of your people to ship code ship code ship code than focus on stock options, missed opportunities, slights and fights.

I don’t know. Yesterday I talked to a database called Mongo. Today I talked to it and it’s behaviour is still the same. People change though. Yesterday I talked to Alice and she was happy doing what she was supposed to do. This morning Alice turned into malice and started singing a Dickensian Carol on where she wants to be and the places she wants to see and the code she wants to own and the bugs she wants to disown.

Irrational predictability is one of the joys of people watching. How do you use the psychology of your team to make them more productive is your startup’s Human Resource strategy.

Are you creating a team of putzs or a you creating a team of mensches? Time will tell. Grace may save you but your team will never forget it if you break your promises to them. Are you fighting with the man in the mirror or are you trying to work with him on his right jab.