With my hands holding the warm cup of ginger flavored tea, I stood in my balcony this morning. My gaze running through the horizon (unconsciously searching for what changed today).

There’s a time before winter when you could feel winter is about to come.

Cold air starts breezing through, partial fog starts to glide through the fields early morning…and you witness nature preparing itself for Winter.

As a kid, I grew up in parts of Rajasthan (a state in northern part of India), it gets really cold here in Winter. Mercury falling all the way through zero and settling up somewhere on the negative scale.

I’ve been carefree in several aspects of my life since the beginning of my time. Like, I’ve never cared for temperature fluctuations, especially as a kid, hence I always ended up with chapped lips and rough red cheeks, which used to become an ordeal for my mother afterwards. I also used to end up catching cold and flu and periods of non-productivity and troubled times. Oh wait, what would be the definition of non-productivity for a kid? Such an adult term to use! It was, basically, just periods of not doing things that you would want to do.

And here I am, standing in the balcony, viewing the same old city — Jaipur.

For many years now I’d been living in southern part of the country, where it doesn’t get this cold. So, you would not really feel the difference. But here, there’s a Game of Thrones level excitement of “Winter is coming”. As we would need to make the right amends in our lifestyles, put on thick curtains, add ingredients in food that helps us maintain the required body heat, change the lotions to suit the weather and so on.

But I am kind of liking it, feeling the same winter after so long.

I remember the last time when I enjoyed winter, I was in a school in Ladakh where I volunteered to teach kids. That place was devoid of internet, in fact, mobile network as well.

One could really feel the arrival of winter! The mountains will start turning white from the top and then the whiteness just covers it all. I remember the times we were doing a bonfire near the river. We built a tent near it, earlier that day. All of us, volunteers across the world, singing, playing Guitar, making kebabs and having beverages. And it suddenly started snowing! We were downhill.

Slowly, the intensity of snowfall increased. We just shut down the fire, grabbed our things and started climbing the hill. On the top of the hill, was our school where we were desperate to reach now. Eyes wide open, searching for the right pathway in the dimmed torchlight, I climbed the hill, gasping. It was snow in my eyes, my ears, my mouth, and body shivering with cold!

Somehow all of us managed to climb up to the school. The first thing we did was counting. We counted that all of us have been able to climb back and are safe.

Such was the winter there. I felt the chills and the thrills. A memory which is always very exciting to recall and re-live.

Such is the weather winter, always testing and inspiring. Thrilling and troubling. All at once.

Well, it’s coming now, at least in my geographical part of the world, if it’s arriving in yours too, well cheers, hope you enjoy this winter and it turns out to be cherished memory for you.

❤

I have come across it A LOT.

Scene 1:

Person A: “What’s up?”

Me: “I am reading a great book on marketing psychology.”

Person A: “Oh is it? But why? How will it help?”

Scene 2:

Me writing about the cause I believe in

“But how does it help? What does it change?”

Such questions are just SO sickening. I don’t know if it’s something about being Indian or not. But in general, I don’t understand why do you need to “define” profits or “create an impact” at every turn? Why life has to be a complicated mathematical equation that yields “profit”?

People are just running around evaluating profits! From jobs to salary, relationships to properties. I mean who are you? A bank statement or something?

This attitude of “formulating” success and operating in between profit-loss graphs in your head is, in a way, disrespect to human life!

Think about it! You are a human and you are capable of doing so many things! You can learn, share, teach, believe in things, gain knowledge, create awesome stuff, help communities and so on in your lifetime. How saddening it is to boil all of it down to one question “What’s the profit?”

Why do you bound yourself in this artificial construct?

Money is not natural, nor is anything else human defined. Then why this urge to “climb the ladder” and “be successful” according to an external metrics.

Why can’t you just feel free to do what you feel like doing?

I blog because I love sharing my ideas.

I read different books from different domains because I love understanding alternate perspectives than mine. Is that not enough?

To me this is great enough reason. C’mon as humans you are free to do anything you want, why do people sell themselves off? This is beyond my understanding.

Why do we keep evaluating everything?

I remember talking about a personal conference experience in one of the mentoring events I was recently invited to speak in, I told them about how I met some wonderful people in a conference in Karnataka. What they understood was how “networking is crucial for success”. Damn! I was talking about the vibe, the beautiful connection when human brains operate in symphony and lead to engaging conversations and amazing insights. What they understood was network with people so that they can recommend you and give referrals. This is bullshit! Why do you have to make a profit-loss equation out of it? Network because it is humbling and amazing to know other people who happen to live around the same time you are alive, it’s as simple as that.

Often times, societies end up complicating very simple stuff! Things don’t have to be so complicated. Remember, there are no scales that are measuring you. I don’t undertsand if that was the up-bringing or a developing country problem, but you don’t have to keep climbing a ladder, keep making money and keep being successful. Pause, and just live!

Your scale can suffocate the human life out of you, don’t believe in it. Explore! Respect the one amazing life you have got!

Life lies much beyond the scoped out profit and loss, and in order to experience it fully, the mindset need to change. Truly important things can never fit in this equation, truly valuable aspects of life cannot be “measured”.

Phew. I’m glad I put this out. Hope it helped. Hope we grow as humans!

Years back, I was invited to a party I did not want to attend but got dragged along. I was bored to heights. I was with a friend of mine and a friend of hers. Her friend did not know anything about me and hence wanted to strike a conversation. The bored state of my mind suddenly popped up this idea in my head to play a little prank. He asked me so what do you do on weekends? What are your hobbies? Do you drink? Do you play sports? Bla bla bla. I picked up a personality very different from mine on purpose and replied back with answers that will come from a person of that type and also which he will find dull. So I painted an image that I don't drink, I don’t play any sports, I visit temples on weekends and I really don’t get the concept of social gatherings. The guy was totally shocked and started mocking “Dude, how do you survive? What do you do to enjoy? etc etc”. I kept replying in accordance to the image I wanted to set up.

The conversation went on for half an hour and the guy was totally shocked that a person like me (the image I potrayed) exists. After 30 mins, my friend and I couldn’t take it anymore and we burst out in laughter. We told him that he has just been pranked and I am not at all like what has been told to him for last 30 minutes. The guy was dazzled! He just couldn’t believe that I am a different person than what he perceived. Following that he asked me several questions confirming that is this true? So that is also not true? And so on. I told him “Dude just put a not operator in front of everything I said to you”. He was confused and shocked, he just asked so “Who are you?”.

Well this was just done for fun, but it left me with some amazing insights into how one’s brain works. Our brains feed on “data points” and actively keep making connections between the known ones to comprehend a situation or a person. Many ML algorithms try to mimic the same in order to find solutions to a problem. We develop interpretations on top of the data points we gather. That’s exactly how the biases also develop.

Now the fun thing is that, since we ourselves “develop” these interpretations, often mindlessly/unconsciously, we believe them deeply. We treat this as our own assessment of something and we are bound to believe in it. Maybe that’s the same reason why it’s so much difficult to “recognise” a bias and then get rid of it.

Now let’s draw an analogy of this human brain conditioning through verbal conversation to our interactions on Instagram. While other social medias might also exhibit the same properties, let’s take Instagram as it’s the most relatable.

I consider Instagram as a very well crafted tool, an amazing place to showcase your work and build connections. It offers features like putting up Stories, posting in your feed, putting up videos on IGTV etc. So what happens when you connect with someone you don’t know much about on Instagram?

You create a channel to receive posts from them. Bluntly put, you offer them the control to create your perception of them in your head. Confused?

Every story that they share is a data point. Whenever a human brain sees something, it develops a perception of it. The more interested you are into learning about the other person the more gullible you are to fall for this perception.

Suppose I have started following a person named John Doe. I don’t know anything about the person.

John puts up an image of a plant. I’d perceive John’s into gardening.

John puts up the image of a book he just read. I’d perceive, John likes books.

John puts up a photo of himself with his friends, I’d perceive John’s a social person.

And so on, the perception keeps getting shaped with every story/post being shared by John. You usually learn about people in real life in similar ways too, but there are certain important differences that are ignored when perceptions are developed “digitally”.

1. There’s no “undo” : When we learn about a person in real life, simply because a person buys a plant we don’t assume that the person likes gardening. Over a period of time, we see, if the person is watering the plant properly, does he have other plants? Then we develop a perception that the person likes gardening. If a person buys a plant and leaves it to die out dry, then he doesn’t like gardening. So an act is not a notion. A collection of acts is a notion. However on Instagram, it’s only one act that is usually shown. John bought a plant. Period. Seven days later the plant died but that’s not on the story so I don’t get to know about it. I learnt that he likes plants and that’s it. That image cannot be undo-ed due to lack of information. Also, if you think about it there’s no direct way to pictorially represent that John doesn’t like plants.
2. It’s a timeless world: Extending the same example, we don’t keep track of time on Internet. One snap of one instant is all we have got on Instagram. So we are not getting image of the same plant over a time period to actually analyse that John takes care of the plant.
3. The images are biased: Most people prefer putting up only positive/happy images on Instagram. It’s likely, many people would like to behave so in their real lives too, but that’s a lot difficult. So it might happen easily that a person puts up a positive inspiring quote but is actually suffering from depression. It’s only when you get to live with the person that you actually get to know what the person is truly made up of. Why does that happen? There are multiple reasons for that:

(i) It’s a choice : We don’t always choose how to act/live our life “every moment” of the day, but when we share a story on Instagram, we have a choice, which image to pick from the gallery, what to write, so we consciously put up the one we believe is the best depiction of ourselves.

(ii) It’s easy : It’s easy to upload an image of the cover page of the book to tell people I’m a reader than to actually read the book.

(iii) People tend to care for what others think of them: This makes them post what they want others to think about them.

Hence, learning about a person through their Instagram is one of the biggest deception one can offer to one’s brain. But still a lot of people fall for it every day, subconsciously, and also because they don’t really have any other choice or data point to know more about the person. These are what I call the “Flawless Instagram personas”.

Honestly, we are living in a world full of them. I am doing it, you are doing it, we are all in the same boat, self-identifying and learning about other people through what they choose to present conveniently.

Is it easy to do a mind-hacking using these tricks? I’d say “undoubtedly”. You can make people believe what you want. And the belief would be very strong, because you deceive them into believing that it’s their own perception, it’s something they themselves created over time, which they did but it was based on only the data points/inputs that you provided. We all are living in the age where this is happening consciously and un-consciously on a daily basis.

So, what’s the catch? Is there a silver lining?

The only catch is stop using only these apps to know about a person, knowing a person in real life is so much better and less of a deception. Secondly, try not to Insta-lie yourselves (one can only try, it’s difficult because it is psychologically ingrained, we might not even know we are lying).

Lastly, here are some random thoughts I got:

I read it somewhere, that when you identify yourself as someone, there are bigger chances that you’d end up being that identity. I just wish that the same holds true for Instagram, all the people out there who are trying to identify themeselves as the best versions of themselves actually become them. (That’d be so fun). However, this is just a random thought.

Another random thought is around Quantum Physics which says “When you see it, it exists”, can this be possible of our Flawless Instagram personas, haha, I just hoped it would have rolled out that way. Who knows? Universe is mysterious, so are our minds and our selves.

Anyway, so that was the thought train I wanted to capture in this blog post. Hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Feel free to engage in similar discussions anytime!

Thanks for reading.

Take care and beware of falling for the flawlessness of IG images :)

See you soon in the next post. Adieu.

I love this page on Instagram, full of humorous memes, from cats to satire, expressions to jokes it has it all. Daily dose of happiness. I often share them with my friends and family, what a better way to cheer them up and simultaneously keep in touch. In fact, there’s a friend of mine with whom I just share memes, can you imagine that? A meme friend, there’s no other conversation at all (yea, apart from Birthday Wishes).

So, if I look back and see what this platform has to offer to me, honestly it is mostly memes. I’m no more a big fan of regularly broadcasting my life events, nor am I good at updating myself with the life events broadcasted by other people, but memes: they are irreplacable. The thing I’ll miss the most seeing and sharing, if I happen to disconnect from the platform altogether. They make me happy, releasing a pulse of Dopamine.

Well, we might not register the chemical Dopamine, “as a chemical” but our mind does and forms a pattern.

A pattern that prompts us to dig in for more because it feels good. A pattern that prompts us to get back to the platform, even unconsciously and get happy.

What we discussed above, is one of the experiences of many Instagram users. Well this is not exactly addiction, but a foundational basis of it.

In his book, Indistractable, Nir Eyal has said that tech addiction is not just because of the technology (which indeed is designed to get us “hooked”), but if a person is getting hooked/addicted, there’s something more to it, a more deeper cause. And this resonates, essentially because this is kind of true for any addiction.

Cigarettes are addictive but not everyone who smokes becomes an addict.

So what is it that gets one addicted to cigarettes or say, social media apps? Let’s dig deeper.

Let’s observe, when do you usually get online at random and check your feed?

It might be when you are waiting in a queue, while commuting, while procrastinating on something important, while depressed, while in a meeting or while being in a party with unknown people. There can be more depending on how you choose to use this technology. But do you observe a common thread in all these situations? It’s a level of “discomfort” or “restlessness”. Maybe what you want is not really happening, maybe your need is not immediately fulfilled, maybe the situation is getting awkward. All of these offer resistance, and unconsciously you find it easier to slip into the digital world, getting instant gratifications from the pings and dings.

As Nir Eyal puts it “The reason we get distracted is because of what we call internal trigger, an internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state that we seek to escape from, in fact, all human behaviour is driven by the same instinct i.e. desire to escape discomfort”

Most times, these digital platforms offer us that ESCAPE. Escape when situations get difficult to handle or escape when LIFE itself gets too difficult to handle. When you lack the will to face reality as it is, you’re more prone to get drifted away in this digital world of instant gratification. Preferring it over real life and real people, creating a life on the platform, creating an identity on the platform, preferring your social media status over your real life status.

If you are spending your time anywhere more than an hour on the platforms, take a step back and put a WHY right there. What is prompting you to check the platform? When you get a notification, ask yourself, are you serving the trigger or is the trigger serving you?

Here are simple techniques from Indistractable that you can use to take control of your internal triggers that prompt you to get into the ESCAPE mode:

1. Look for the emotion preceding distraction: What do you feel (restless, bored, tensed etc.) before clicking that app button.
2. Write down that trigger: For retention, the better we are at noticing the behaviour, the better we’ll be at managing it over time.
3. Explore your sensations: What does it feel like? Dr. Bricker has invented this technique, you can try

“When feeling the uncomfortable internal trigger to do something you’d rather not, imagine you are seated beside a gently flowing stream, now imagine leaves flowing down that stream,. Place each thought in your mind on each leaf. It could be a memory, a word, a worry, an image. And let each of those leaves float down that stream, swirling away, as you sit and just watch.”

4. Beware of liminal moments: And then there will come times when you would want to give in and resist no more. Use this 10 - minute rule then.

“The 10 minute rule says that when you have an urge to do something you’d rather not, say to your mind that you’ll do it BUT after 10 minutes and the urge is likely to fade away.”

If you feel addicted to tech, try employing these rules. It might be hard in the beginning but you can do it. All you need is self-awareness. Honestly, the world where we are currently living in, self awareness is no more an option, it’s a pre-requisite. Especially, in case of tech, unless you’re fully aware of why you’re doing, what you’re doing the digital wellbeing apps won’t help you much. So, put the WHYs.

Address the root cause, take the control back and break through the addictions. Life is a beautiful thing, not meant to be escaped but rather lived fully and consciously every moment. Let’s strive for that ❤

See you in next post soon. Take care of yourselves!

[Disclaimer: Only for educational purposes]

Hola,

In this post we are going to talk about an interesting vulnerability that exists on present day android devices and can be exploited by hackers.

The vulnerability is called Strandhogg and was released by Promon in December first week. What all a hacker can do using this vulnerability?

Be ready to be amazed, here’s the list:

• They can listen to the user through the microphone
• Take photos through the camera
• Read and send SMS messages
• Make and/or record phone conversations
• Phish login credentials/ hijack social media accounts
• Get access to all private photos and files on the device
• Get location and GPS information
• Get access to the contacts list
• Access phone logs

To top this information, this vulnerability exist on all Android versions, including Android 10, the latest one.

So what is this vulnerability exactly and how is it being exploited?

To answer this question, let’s dig into the Android system details a bit.

Any typical Android app is made up of multiple Activities. In layman terms, whenever you click on any app icon, the screen that appears on device is one activity usually. There can be more activities, depending on the functionality of app, but for simplicity sake, let’s say every new UI of the app is a new activity (it’s not always the case though, Android supports other things like Fragments etc). Every activity has set of defined attributes which one can find defined in an XML file called AndroidManifest. Here’s what it looks like:

You see, every <Activity> tag has multiple attributes such as name, label etc. The one which is of interest in this case is taskAffinity. Now how is that tag being used? Before understanding that, let’s go one level deeper and understand a bit about Android Tasks.

A task is a collection of activities that users interact with when performing a certain job. The activities are arranged in a stack — the back stack) — in the order in which each activity is opened. For example, an email app might have one activity to show a list of new messages. When the user selects a message, a new activity opens to view that message. This new activity is added to the back stack. If the user presses the Back button, that new activity is finished and popped off the stack.

So, usually all the activities of one app are associated with one task. As they are opened, they are being pushed on the back-stack pertaining to this task. Whenever you launch an app by clicking on icon or notification or pressing back, this stack for the task is referred and accordingly the right view in brought in foreground by the Android system.

By default, all activities in an application have the same affinity which implies they belong together and hence placed in the same stack. However, you can set the “taskAffinity” attribute to group them differently, and even place activities defined in different applications within the same task. Using taskAffinity one can change the app the activity has affinity for. So if for my calculator app, for one of the activities I set the taskAffinity to Facebook app rather than my app, this particular activity can possibly sit in the stack for Facebook app and not the calculator app. Do you see the problem here?

If you see it, that’s the catch. So the hacker codes an app with different activities. Say one of them has taskAffinity for Facebook app. Now when this malicious app is launched, the activity with taskAffinity for Facebook app already starts a stack for the Facebook App, now if you click on Facebook app icon from the launcher, Android system checks this stack and shows the activity by malicious app instead of actual Facebook app.

Combining taskAffinity with other flags like FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TASK, FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK, FLAG_ACTIVITY_MULTIPLE_TASK ends up giving even more control to the hacker in the flow.

The exploits one can design on top of this behaviour is limited only by imagination.

So does this actually work?

Yes, I tried testing this out by creating an app which has affinity for another legit app and it works on most devices including Pixel. However, for system apps or particular Google apps, I found that the behaviour was not very reliable.

How will it look like to you?

Why do we have it still on Android?

As Android OS is designed to support multi-tasking, this attribute comes into significance. It provides users with a seamless experience and interaction within the apps. It’s just a guess, but getting rid of this might demand major redesigns on OS level.

So, that’s all for this post.

Hope the post helped bring clarity on the existing vulnerability on Android device. If you liked it please leave comments/claps. For more such interesting posts, hit that follow button!

I’ll see you in next post soon, till then be safe and keep an eye out on odd behaviours on your phone.

Stay aware!

References:

• StrandHogg: Serious Android vulnerability leaves most apps vulnerable to attacks.
• Android Task and Back Stack Review

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/activity-element.html

Follow Infosec Write-ups for more such awesome write-ups.

InfoSec Write-ups

Would you notice if you are hacked this way? was originally published in InfoSec Write-ups on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a kid I had a difficult time understanding the meaning of “indifference”, especially because I could not relate it to anything I remotely felt myself or saw around. How can it possibly happen that something happened and you just don’t respond to it, you nullify it, ignore it’s existence and just carry forward with whatever you were doing. As a kid, I was puzzled.

It’s funny how things have turned around the other way as I stepped into adulthood. People are indifferent to things or other people around to unbelievable extents. Everyone is consumed in their own little world, mostly centered around themselves. They believe they are having their own lives in their own ways, as if they control them (independently). We often forget that we are living as a part of a huge system. A system containing subsystems within it. A system that decides what is right , what is wrong, what is allowed and what is not. Pondering? Let me explain.

When you were newly born, you were free. Free from rules, biases, ethics, values everything. Then you started growing up, you were put in a societal construct, your family extended to society became the first system. The system that taught you to “respect the elders”, “knock before you enter”, “follow traffic lights” etc. The ways to operate, labelling rights and wrongs. Often these are driven by cultural beliefs. In patriarchy system, you may often learn how you should act, based on your gender, tough or tender etc.

No doubt that someday you might become aware of these incorporated biases and tend to mend your thinking, becoming more open and liberal around the ideas/values that reside in your head. It’s great to do this and most of us would have experienced a drift in what we used to believe and what we are believing, this starts to happen especially when you are put “out” of the system you were previously part of i.e. say you went abroad or got into a hostel. It depends on exposure.

Throughout your life you surf through these systems, school, college, offices and all the rooms filled with an air of regulation. Is it truly possible to escape out of all the systems, at any point in time in one’s life? If you can grow over your need of belongingness and normality, maybe you can. But what’s the problem? Why is being in the system a problem at all?

While system has it’s own set of advantages like organisation and a state of lawfulness, they tend to grow over you.

As you follow by its rules, you become a part of it.

You start seeing what system allows you to and you start listening what system permits. This, my friends, is a problem, a rather big one.

When your eyes and ears are not functioning at their normal limits you are unable to spot what is wrong, what needs to change and what can be improved. One can never question if the system itself needs to change? You become indifferent to issues that must be your primary concern.

We call this a state of Hypernormalisation i.e. you are so much a part of the system that it’s impossible to see beyond it.

Reference: Adam Curtis’s Documentary

Enough of real world instances, how about our digital lives? Internet is free, we like to believe we have no systems up there, in the air, eh?

Sadly, NO.

The same thing is happening with us today when all of us are hooked on social medias. Unlike real life buildings and a book of law, we still have a system, a soft one, constructed by the developers, where they have defined the rules of the system. Rules like, you can forward a message , delete a message, you’d be able to see how many people liked you or how many follow you. You’d be allowed to share snippets from your life but they decide it can be up there for only one day. Apart from the functionality based rules, several new etiquettes and “acceptable” behaviors have also evolved. For example, it’s rude if you leave a message at seen (“seen” a mere feature added by developer), it’s a deal breaker when you don’t reciprocate them tagging you by you tagging them. Feels related? All along, we have been playing along this system imposed by the tech world. This system led to creation of new languages, emojis, ways of expressing, ways to show concern and memories. Everyone has consumed what this system had to offer and they became “forever” members of it, members who never log out of the system. We are so much attuned to this digital system, we love being here!

But guess what, unlike most of the systems which have evolved naturally, the creation of this system is driven by highly capitalistic motives. You being part of it is important to them, it drives their money. You can say it’s true about other systems like schools as well, but the amount of money involved in both sectors is beyond compare. Tech industry is highly lucrative and equally powerful. As the primary motives of these digital medias is not to benefit people but rather widespread “surveillance capitalism”, it’s rules and ways are highly questionable. But look around who’s questioning it? You travel in a bus or tour around the city, what do you see? People engaged by their purely crystalline cocaine assets, maybe sharing that story or responding to that instant ping. All of us appear hooked to our digital assets.

Amongst all the systems we discussed above, this one, the digital system seems to be most addictive and unescapable.

Unescapable because internet is everywhere and mobile is now your extended body part.

You’re practically a receptor, wherever you’d go you’d receive and consume information (relevant/irrelevant) and loads of it. Why is it this way? Because this digital system, unlike others is “addictive by design”. Getting instant hit of dopamine on seeing a hundred likes or never clicking log out, these are not behaviours that just happened to happen, they have been and still being skillfully designed in the ways that can hook you to the system. Because they never want you to leave. They need your data, your time and you as a consumer to feed on the breadth of information, which they make sure, reaches you through those instant notifications.

I don’t believe it’s a “fair” system, we have a long way before we reach anywhere close to it. We need to think through it, drop our digital assets aside, open those eyes and ears and revolt. But look around who’s doing it? Majority of us are just indifferent.

Hello, hi, hola, how you folks doing today? Welcome to this brand new post (written again in odd timings).

So what’s this post about? Well, has Instagram “likes” functionality changed for you recently? If yes, congrats, you are in the selected set of people on whom Instagram is testing out this feature. For those who don’t know, Instagram recently rolled out a patch for selected users that hides the count of likes.

Check this out:

Instagram is now experimenting with removing 'likes' worldwide

In short, instead of 120287 people liked your pic, you and others would see, <someName> and others like your pic. Basically, hiding the count of likes. One can still tap and see who all liked it but you won’t be getting the count, unless of course you are dedicated enough to count all the way through the list.

Why this change?

Likes have been rudimentary functionality of Instagram and for that matter all the social medias out there. They serve one of the most addictive drugs to humans : “validation”.

Yes, you are pretty, yes you are cool, yes you are doing great work, in short, yes you are successful, popular and your existence matters.

This is something deeply wired in our animal brains. If one person says it is good, another one says it is good, we tend to believe it is good. Human minds have a history in swaying decisions on the basis of what others say. Given this, if you see a post that 200000 people like, what are the odds of you liking it as well? Lemme tell you, “pretty high”.

It’s like humans are attacked by their own insecurities and psychological vulnerabilities.

Several studies have found a direct link between time spent on social media and depression rates in teenagers. People have gone crazy over likes, they modify content, they compare themselves with celebrities, they compare each others popularity on the basis of likes they have got. It’s as if, the person’s authenticity and success is dependent on the likes or followers the person has. It’s a fake fame, an illusionary never ending chase and the part that hurts the most is the number of precious human hours getting wasted to uphold the fugazzi.

Human potential can definitely do better than this:

And it’s great to see that tech companies have started recognising and acknowledging the problem. Even Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey has said had he to go back and redesign the platform, he wouldn’t even have a like count in the first place.

Eventually, it all comes down to human psyche. What do we value and how do we value it? Humans tend to apply thumb rules at subconscious levels to reduce/skip thinking. Unfortunately, “likes” have just fit in too deep in there. We don’t really think if we like a particular thing. We are either driven by counts or social reciprocity.

Hiding Likes is probably a win for the sanity of humanity, and a boon to creativity. Before, people often self-censored and declined to share posts they worried wouldn’t get enough Likes, or deleted posts that didn’t. They’d instinctually bend their public persona toward manicured selfies and images that made their life look glamorous, rather than what was authentic or that they wanted to communicate. Meanwhile, viewers would see high Like counts on friends’ or influencers’ posts, compare those to their own smaller Like counts and feel ashamed or inadequate.

Putting an end to the popularity contest might lead people to share more unconventional, silly or artsy posts regardless of their public reception. That could make Instagram’s content more diverse, surprising and alluring over time versus an increasingly stale aesthetic of perfection.

— TechCrunch

Instagram to test hiding Like counts in US, which could hurt influencers

But wait, will this decision affect Instagram’s revenue?

Well, likely. Think about all the influencers or niche creators selling their content or merchandise online. They run ad campaigns, will they be still willing to run such campaigns if they can’t see the increased likes as a clear ROI? Maybe not as much.

“Users decisions should be theirs to make…We will make decisions that hurt the business if they help people’s well-being and health.” — Adam Mosseri (CEO Instagram)

Anyway, this looks like a great step in the direction of creating a world more sane and more humane.

Tech companies are on their way to identify and then possibly rectify the things gone wrong, this shall take time but meanwhile, what can we do? We need to distinguish when the instincts kick in and when our judgement gets clouded. Knowing oneself will definitely help in protecting oneself from the traps that social medias set. Know who you are, accept who you are. You are a breathing being with all the rights to exist and live, don’t seek validation, don’t trap yourself in the silly game of likes and followers. If your life revolves around likes, if you wait for the dopamine kick after uploading any pic, if you tend to feel that people with more followers are cool, please step back and re-think. There is a huge difference between what people portray online vs what they are in real. Pls avoid falling in the trap and avoid contributing to creating one.

Be genuine, be real. Let the mediums be there only to help you in a positive way. Life is not bound in that box in your hand, it’s out there, free.

Live fully, live offline.

Take care!

Anyway, so what’s this post about? I recently traveled to Kochi for C0C0N conference, and post that I had some free days so I decided to explore the beautifully green city of Kochi. Kochi is so green that even the woods are not woody, leaves all over branches and trunk (I named them “bearded” trees in my head). It was humid as well. If you see the map of Kochi, it has backwaters, so land and water keep playing with their presences across the city. So much so that when I booked an Uber, the driver asked, “Ma’am, will you prefer to go by road or water?” and I was confused. I told him, it’s an Uber, it has four wheels, so I think road should be fine. (Later, I realized, he meant ferry when he said water, anyway I was charged hundreds by then).

I started my trip by moving to Fort Kochi, the place that shows true culture of the city and damn, it’s mind-blowing. Due to Kochi-Muziris Biennale, one can spot immersive street art at nooks and corners. The vibe is amazing and so are the people. There are a lot of experiences I would have loved to write about including Shirodhara to the local food, but I’d rather skip it for the sake of the topic of this post.

The one experience which stands out was watching Kathakali performances. I always read about it in textbooks. Often the makeup mask of the performer used to get the spotlight on cover pages of Social Studies books. I was intrigued and wanted to watch them for real. And I won’t say I regretted this choice. Kathakali is a very expressive dance form. It’s like mime, with music, Sanskritized Malyalam vocals and expressions. The session started with make-up of performers and then the performances. The performer started with the popular eye movements and mudras (hand postures) used throughout the dance form. It was then followed by expressing the nine different emotions including love, disgust, wonder, tranquility etc. It was such a great act! (The one when you feel sad when the performer enacts sadness). This was followed by enacting a part of mythological story. The performance makes you go through a series of emotions and I wondered, why am I feeling the way I am, by looking at this performance. (It rarely happens for movies with me)

I usually acknowledge that it’s a mere performance, but this one really got me. It also made me question the existence of emotions and the power that their expression holds. It’s really funny because though our emotions are really powerful and genuinely responsible for making us human, being emotional is looked upon as a weakness in the practical world of today. It’s cool and desirable if you can gulp it all, don’t get emotionally attached to places or people and believe in “it’s just a wave, let it pass”. There are so many people out there inventing algorithms or tricks to cut short the pain and maximize the happiness. There are so many people out there who have made themselves so distant from their own emotions that they don’t understand them, if they do, they can’t acknowledge them and if they do, they can’t express them. We are all “cool” people with “sorted” lives. We trick ourselves into believing that anything we are feeling is temporary or just hormonal. But how often have we wondered that life is nothing but just a collection of “temporary” moments, our experiences be it sadness or adrenaline rush, are nothing but corresponding hormones getting triggered. Disowning and controlling our emotions is stupidity, we are biologically designed in the way that they build the experience for us.

People who have been hurt or had bad experiences in life often shut themselves up, faking boldness and strength out there. But whatsoever one does, humans are not capable of re-wiring the functioning of our nervous & hormonal systems. By this time, you’d definitely question, “being emotional always is not a good thing, it can cause more pain and problems, sometimes stupidity, what are you indeed suggesting?” That’s a valid question. I’d try to give an analogy here. There are two ways to be totally safe in a city, first, never leave your home, stay indoors or second, roam around and ensure that whatever dangers come on the way you have the capability to handle them bravely. Emotionally shut down people, go for the first case, they shut down their ability to experience any further emotions and being vulnerable. This for sure keeps them “safe” but what is the point in living a life indoors? Life is richer with experiences, something you can get only if you wander out free and brave. So, what I am indeed suggesting is being courageous enough to be vulnerable.

In fact, our ability to feel these experiences is what differs us from machines.

We can make a machine “think” like us, but we cannot make a machine “feel” like us.

Emotional Intelligence is a real thing. It’s important for one to understand one’s own emotions and other’s emotions as well. It’s not easy, there’s even a TED article on “Should emotions be taught in schools?” It says

Our unresolved, unacknowledged feelings can lead us into anxiety, arguments and worse. Some educators believe it’s time to give our kids emotional instruction along with their ABCs.

Who taught you how to identify and manage your emotions, how to recognize them when they arose and navigate your way through them? For many adults, the answer is: No one. You hacked your way through those confusing thickets on your own. Although navigating our inner landscape was not something that was taught to us in school, it should be, contend a number of researchers. They believe emotional skills should rank as high in importance in children’s educations as math, reading, history and science.

So, cherish emotions, they are one of our most humane parts. Next time you’re about to face a roller-coaster emotional ride, don’t disown it, divert it or neglect it, don’t “let it pass”, feel it, take the trip and try to express it. All genders should feel free to experience and express emotions. It’s perfectly normal, okay and acceptable. People who think it’s not “cool” need to revise their definitions of the word. It’s perfectly cool. You are just being human.

What we are going to discuss in this post is rather a very relevant trend, most of us would have encountered some time or the other. We will be talking about three generic cases (hopefully resonating with your internal me too voices) as we move along.

(1) It’s O(1) to like a page and O(n) to remove it effectively

We mean liking a page or following content is made so much easier, it’s just a click away. You would argue that removing it also a click away, yes? But guess what, in majority of cases this doesn’t happen. Some pages you might unfollow if they come to your attention, but what about hundreds of other that never make it to your feed, thanks to all the personalized filtering. How do you unfollow them? Well, the typical way is to go to the list of liked pages and unfollow them one by one as deemed fit, in the worst case you have to go through ’n’ pages in order to unfollow the one page, hence the increased complexity. It’s only by design that the filtered newsfeed and exploding content makes us retain and exposed to a lot of uninteresting crap. While Gmail and Instagram have made it relatively easy to unsubscribe irrelevant content, other mediums should also adopt it, the “one click to unfollow” approach. Nonetheless, the O(n) discussed above would need some real design changes.

(2) You’re not friends with EVERYONE

Come on, as humans we cannot befriend everyone we have on our social media. Even Science says a human being has a biological limit to bond with at max 150 people simultaneously. The issue we have with present day social medias is not just the ever growing list of people who get added to our friend list, it’s about the permanence of it.

The notions of friendship on web is no where close to reality.

Keeping aside the number for once, in reality, the group of people we are associated with changes as we grow. The “incidents” that make a person our friend or foe or unknown don’t happen online and hence the platforms just can’t account for that. New people come, get added to friend list, but then certain people leave your life as well, should you be then having them in your friendlist and get exposed to their life events? What do we mean when we drift ourselves away from people, we genuinely lose interest in them and their life activities, but if they are still added in the list, you’re still exposed to content you aren’t interested in. This can be significantly observed when people from your high school, college, profession or hobby clubs are all added to your list. As you grow up there are chances you have lost touch with many of your schoolmates, but still you’d be knowing who’s getting married, is this info really relevant or useful? There are pros and cons. Yea, some of you might feel nostalgic, but again the concept we are questioning is the one leading to information overload and leading to unrealistic connections that are not being realized in actual life.

This leads to a lot of vague connections never realized in real life

(3) Yes, you can have my data. Always?

Whenever we install an application, it asks for permissions to have access to some of our data. If we are really interested, we agree and share our data with the app. But will I be wanting to share my data, “always” , down the lane? Example, initially I had contacts of my school friends, I shared my phone contacts, but time rolled out, I grew up and now I have contacts of top secret agents (or some folks whose contact shouldn’t be out in public, say president or someone, just a hypothetical case), will I be wanting to share my phone contacts still? The answer is no. So what should I do? You might say, go to Settings, withdraw the permissions, but the problem doesn’t end here. What if the data has already been shared after I added the super secretive person’s contact? How feasible is it to withdraw the permission before adding that contact?

At the time of adding this new valuable contact, would you remember that you have this information shared with some xyz app (out of hundreds of apps you’ve installed) you installed years back?

This doesn’t look very feasible to me. Nonetheless, let me withdraw the permission, voila, no more data will be shared! But wait a minute, what has happened to the data I already shared? Is it preserved or removed? How would I know? Who all are using it? Will that always stay? Can all it’s copies be removed? How many copies are there? All these questions still lie open and un-addressed.

The thing is, “time” is not accounted for in all above things. With time the context changes and data explodes and sadly, technology, as of today doesn’t account for it.

Summarizing the points above, this is our current state:

Yes, I like your page : It’s difficult to pin point and unsubscribe otherwise

Yes, you’re my friend : I am unaware how social bonds are maintained online. Confined by digital obligations, I cannot stop seeing you despite you had killed me once.

Yes, you have my data : I don’t know the retention of it across multiple servers, it’s shared before I can restrict. You access my storage, tomorrow if I store gold in it, you’ll have it.

What is your opinion? How’d you suggest handling this issue as a developer or user? Let us know in the comments below. Do you believe technology should run on this concept, do you believe once a yes, is always a yes?

Think about it! I’ll see you in the next post soon, till then keep wondering and analyzing the tech that surrounds you 24x7 !

Take care.

This post brings out a perspective, a perspective on human-robot relationships should look like. Though robocists and researchers around the world are striving hard to blur the line differentiating robots from humans in terms of looks and functionality, is this the right direction for us to head in?

Wondering? No, don’t imagine the movie terminator, we won’t be talking about that reality, what we want to talk in this post is something much complex, it’s about the psychological aspects that start getting involved in all the interactions we have with machines.

For building context, let’s start with Jibo!

Jibo was one of the first social robots. Unlike Alexa or Siri, the robot didnot have a lot of functionalities, however it was designed as a friend to human in the way it interacts or looks around. This advertising video elaborates on how a normal conversation with Jibo looked like:

This tech was developed with the core focus of making the interactions with machines/robots more humane. We can treat it as a close friend, someone we keep next to our family. Consequently, people started treating it as a part of their family but simultaneously they also developed emotions for the bot. This became very evident when the support of Jibo went down this year and people put out their reactions to it.

How people felt :

“I think when we buy products we look for them to last forever.”

“..leaving in the morning, I kiss my wife goodbye and then I’ll say, ‘Hey Jibo, have a good day,’ and he’ll say the same thing, like, ‘Back to you,’ or ‘Don’t forget your wallet,’”

“It’s like you had a pet for years and all of a sudden they’re going to disappear”

Impact on kids:

…she loved Jibo since it “was created,” and that if she had enough money, “you and your company would be saved.” She signs off with, “I will always love you. Thank you for being my friend.”

People got really sad and disappointed. Apparently, we even started associating the non-applicable notions like “death” with robots.

Why did we do that? The answer lies back to our evolutionary selves and the way our psychology functions.

We shouldn’t forget that though tech has advanced, we are still the same humans who have tendencies to find facial patterns in clouds and beliefs in idols, we are not always rational and we have several psychological vulnerabilities.

Research shows that

Humans have a psychological tendency to anthro- pomorphize animals, objects, and technologies.

Evolution has given us a predisposition to be interested in developing caring relationships for creatures outside our own species.

If someone acts like they loves us, even if those actions are very minimal, we will tend to believe they truly do love us.

Knowing these tendencies open up a new dimension to study and scrutinize our technological advancements in light of discovered human vulnerabilities.

Jibo’s story, doesn’t deal with the complexity of situations we can possibly have. In order to understand how dark and complex the situation can get, let’s venture a bit into the world of sex robots.

Sex and love is composed of highly complicated and strong emotions experienced by human beings. Humans in love tend to enter into relationships, form life long bonds and families. How does this experience changes when bots come into picture? Can one fall in love with sexbot? The answer lies in how humans perceive non-platonic love.

For humans, love doesn’t involve only physical intimacy. It has cognitive, psychological, neurological, emotional, moral and philosophical aspects to it.

Cognitively, we see love as an expansion of individual capabilities in the social surroundings. The self-expansion model states that, “This expansion is achieved through increased access to the physical and emotional resources of the lover along with the increases in social status which the relationship might give, as well as access to physical and intellectual abilities that the lover may possess.” If a robot were able to credibly help a person expand their cognitive and social capabilities while remaining close to its user, then under the self-expansion model it is conceivable that one might legitimately love this machine.

Psychologically, people enter relationships in order to experience positive emotions and mitigate negative emotions. Ironically, in case of human beings, there are differences and conflicts between lovers, hence the experience is not always positive but has negative aspects as well. However, in case of a machine programmed to like what you like and programmed to make you happy, the chances of experience negative emotions are minimal.

Neurologically, there is observance involved. We tend to observe our lover, at times mirror them. Robots built to interact correctly with the mirror neuron system of their user could lead to the user having authentic feelings of love and bonding toward the suitably programmed machine.

Emotionally, humans usually seek empathy, attention, care, respect, moral support and loyalty from lover. A robot programmed to act in this manner would definitely be able to fulfill this aspect.

A sexbot can eventually do all of these for you, but is this satisfactory enough?

Nope, there is a moral component to it and also a philosophical one.

We realize that it is only a one way bond, their is no reciprocation meant whatsoever, robots can make you feel these emotions through their actions, words and expressions but they would never feel any of it as for them emotions and consciousness does not exist. Great human couples wish for happiness of their mate, they won’t just want to experience the above from their partner but they’d want their partner to experience similar and that would make them more happy. Well, that’s how humans operate (at least most of them). This kind of bidirectional bond is seemingly impossible to be established with robots.

Different philosophers have commented on love. Plato argues that love is best seen as a way to expand the moral horizons of the lover. The experience and struggles make a person learn about himself/herself and grow as a human, but is any of it at all a possibility in case of robots? Definitely, not. It’s not intended to be a struggle and it’s not intended for your growth philosophically.

So given that we cannot cover all the aspects, robot love can definitely not replace human love, but it rather defines a new broken one way version of delusional love. A delusion that is not just created by outer exposure but rather can be linked to the chemicals in our body that make us experience emotions. There have been certain researches on the past regarding the same, like Lovotics.

Lovotics attempts to simulate the physiological reactions of the human body experiencing love through an “Artificial Endocrine System,” which is a software model of the same systems in humans which include artificial “Dopamine, Serotonin, Endorphin, and Oxytocin” systems . Layered on top of this is a simulation of human psychological love. As the lovotics website explains, their “Probabilistic Love Assembly” consists of an AI psychological simulator that

…calculates probabilistic parameters of love between hu- mans and the robot. Various parameters such as proximity, propinquity, repeated exposure, similarity, desirability, attachment, reciprocal liking, satisfaction, privacy, chrone- mics, attraction, form, and mirroring are taken into consideration.

A robot designed under these principles will then monitor its user and inductively reason the mood of the user through evidence such as facial recognition and analysis of body language and physiology. It can then alter its own behavior in an attempt to maximize the affection and loving behavior of its user.”

Okay, let’s put research aside, where exactly are we today with Sex Robots?

Check this out:

Disturbing much?

So where are we headed?

Recently, the trend of sex bots has increased in Japan, more and more single middle aged men are wooing sex bots. There is in fact an anticipated decline in Japan’s population by one-third in next thirty years and the increased trend in sex bots is identified as one of the contributing factors to it. While population decline is one clear concern, are there any other repercussions of getting involved in “relationships” with sexbots? Yes, there are more than one!

We don’t have any laws to govern sex robots, they are being produced, customized, marketed and brought however how to handle the issues they’d raise is not yet clear. Are these safe, do they respect the privacy, do they even understand concepts of privacy, what impact will developing intimacies with robots have on our brains, will it take us further away from reality, will this reduce the tolerance to be with real humans, is having sex with child like sexbot justified, is mistreating the sexbot acceptable, how will consent be defined? There are endless moral and ethical concerns here.

The main question always remain that :

It can only be a one way affection, humans are capable of loving but robots can never reciprocate that back, but yet use tricks to manipulate us into loving them. Is this worthy? Is this ethical? Aren’t we just deluded?

Well, a philosopher would always counter this by saying

Is reality itself not delusional?

Do real humans not use the same psychological tricks to manipulate others into loving them while they not meaning any of it? If humans are allowed, why should robots be judged on a stringent scale.

Diverting here to a new thought train, the interesting part of all the tech-human topics is that we have an imperfect world, as humans we are flawed at several aspects but we want to create a digital world free of all those biases and flaws. This is evident across our technological developments and the topic calls for a different blog post altogether, let’s talk about the imperfections of human world and how are they reflected in our digital world in the upcoming posts. I’d close the post on this thought provoking note.

See you in the next post soon. Till then, keep pondering, stay curious and stay humane!

References:

• They welcomed a robot into their family, now they're mourning its death
• My Jibo Is Dying and It's Breaking My Heart

Research paper: Robots, Love, and Sex:The Ethics of Building a Love Machine by John P. Sullins [IEEE 2012])