Monday Cup Of Links #55 - On Antonio v. Apple, Hardayal’s Historiography, Ancestral Tomahawk
Covid is airborne!
Happy Monday!
As a programmer who moonlights as a writer, whenever anyone else in tech hits paydirt as a writer, I try to figure out how they did it and if I can do it too.
When I came across Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez, I knew I couldn’t do that for sure. He wrote with gay abandon about his time at a small company, then his YCombinator startup, and then Facebook, not caring about burning bridges. That is a rare quality in the tech industry. The only people who write ‘tech exposes’ are journalists who masquerade as tech employees for a short while, and then are appalled by a world that is seemingly different from their own (I remember this book by this old journalist dude who tried to work at a Boston startup and didn’t even try to like it. It was an awful read). But Mr. Garcia Martinez bought into tech wholesale, came back to work in ads tech after the book (and a short journalistic career), so his words mattered more.
His return to the Peninsula and a job similar to my own threw me a minor identity crisis, because all I’d wanted to do was to write a bestseller and quit my job, and when someone “won” that and yet opted to come back, I wondered if my ‘dream’ was even worth it. (I took a few months off work around then and realized I needed to keep a tech job because it made me feel alive).
There were murmurs recently that he was going to Apple to help them with ads, which was interesting because now Apple was getting into ads (what!).
And then he got fired. Because of his book.
A group of employees posited that his writing was misogynistic. There were a lot of criticisms about his book years ago, but misogyny wasn’t one of them. Just to be sure, I went back and read the book again, and the relevant passage seems to be taken out of context to me. There’s a part where he meets his then-partner, and writes about her like “in Silicon Valley, most women are soft, naive and full of shit, but my lady was different in that she was a tough survivalist”, but in cruder language. The first part of it is what caused the recent controversy.
The weird thing is, this is exactly how I would describe my husband, though not with that kind of language, because I’m not trying to write a swashbuckling bodice-ripping tell-all gonzo memoir. In a silicon valley full of limp-wristed, soft, naive men who had been so cloistered from the real world and the very customers they built products for, and who fronted their knowledge of the the world beyond their top university and FAANG job on their lame bike rides in La Honda and drives through “Real America” when they are heading to Burning Man, my husband stands out in his toughness, grit, survival instinct, and ability to connect with people with very different upbringings than his own.
And that’s the thing. Anyone in the tech industry who isn’t full of delusions about the state of the world and their place in it stand out for being “real”. You ask anyone who met their partner in tech, and you’d hear something similar, more so after they spent months or years on dating apps losing faith in romance, tech and humanity.
That’s kind of the point of Chaos Monkeys. An outsider-ish look at Silicon Valley. Mr Garcia Martinez exaggerates his outsider-ness, with bluster, hectoring and shocking language (at one point he talks about the varying smells of his cofounders’ poops, but I don’t see a bunch of people say they are uncomfortable sharing the bathroom with him… and I feel that’s a much more pressing issue).
In memoir-writing classes I’ve been to, I’ve been taught that the ‘you’ in the memoir is a character and your life you’re writing about is a plot, and there’s going to be some Save The Cat rephrasing of things. It seems a bit strange that you can be fired for writing a characterization of yourself that probably suited your plot, but wasn’t really ‘you’, even after your employers vetted you to make sure you aren’t really that character in your book. More so since Mr. Garcia Martinez has said publicly before now that he regrets writing his memoir the way he did.
In any case, apparently Chaos Monkeys has sold out physical copies on Amazon, and used copies are going for as high as $100, so I guess you win some and lose some.
Onto our links!
The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill. COVID is airborne. So ventilation, UV disinfection of central air systems, and being outdoors is what helps prevent it from spreading. I don’t know if washing groceries helped at all. It likely didn’t. I don’t know if handwashing really helped stem its spread to a great extent, but it’s a good thing to do to keep other illnesses at bay, so I’m going to continue to keep my hands clean. I’m probably only going to meet with other people outdoors for the foreseeable future, seeing as I am indoors most of the day with a child too young to be vaccinated.
Dr. Bhuvan Lall on writing the biography of Lala Hardayal, the Genius Revolutionary. I found Dr. Lall’s book a wonderful primary source about the Indian revolutionary movement. He has done a lot of primary research, something that is honestly quite lacking in this area. The only biography of Hardayal prior to that was by an American researcher, and the non-Indian gaze makes it hard for me to consume the book. Dr. Lall’s book on the other hand goes all the way from 1857 to Delhi of the late 1890s to London to Martinique to Berkeley and beyond, all the while keeping you engaged and intrigued by this one man whose thought is nearly a century ahead of his time. I enjoyed this piece about his journey writing this book, and it is very inspiring to see both how Hardayal still wields his influence on us all these decades later, and how Dr. Lall worked so hard to do justice to this man who carried forward the vision to induce the soldiers of the British Indian army to revolt and bring the empire to its knees.
Scientists in The Netherlands have now trained bees to stick their tongues out if they smell Covid. It’s actually this startup called InsectSense that has bees detect landmines, mineral-rich ores, and possibly what you had for dinner yesterday… and now they do covid! Apparently bees are much easier to train than dogs! Who knew!
Brett Chapman asks Harvard to return his ancestor’s tomahawk that they have in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. In 1879, Ponca chief Standing Bear was the first Native American to win civil rights in America (the history of civil rights for Native Americans is shocking and triggering for me, TBH). He gave his lawyer his ancestral tomahawk as a token of thanks and a mark of considering him part of his family and tribe. The lawyer’s descendants however gave away the tomahawk to the museum. Now, Brett Chapman, attorney in Oklahoma, and descendant of Chief Standing Bear, asks for it back. Now, the museum is in talks with the tribal chiefs to repatriate the tomahawk.
Following this saga has opened my eyes to the crime scene that museums are. Years ago, I took my mother to the Met, where in the Indian and Southeast Asian sections, there were all these murtis of various Gods and Goddesses. My mother prostrated and prayed to them right there, which, in my colonized state of mind, I found funny. But thinking back, those deities need to be in a temple! They don’t belong in a museum to be gawked at. They were made to be prayed to, decorated with silks and vermilion, and even taken out in a procession so people who wouldn’t usually get a glimpse of the deity could.
It really hit home when I saw Mr. Chapman talk about wanting his ancestor’s possessions back. Chief Standing Bear only passed away in 1908, and that’s very recent. I have family artefacts dating to earlier than that, and I probably wouldn’t be very happy to see them in a museum, especially if they were ceremonial and had significance by themselves.
On that note, there is the India Pride Project, which is the first crowdsourced heritage recovery project. They’ve done some great work in bringing back deities to India. Please support them in their worthy cause.