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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Mint-on-sunday/  I’m a mobile, independent nation
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I’m a mobile, independent nation

Men like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and governments across the world are arrogant. But all arrogance can be subverted. That is what makes us human

(Left) Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Photos: BloombergPremium
(Left) Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Photos: Bloomberg

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com Inc., comes across to me as a psychologically deranged man. I am willing to punt that the world’s largest customer centric company may not outlast him. I could be entirely wrong. But before I get to that, may I urge you to take eight minutes off and listen to this outstanding talk he delivered to the graduating class at Princeton in 2010. Else, nothing of what follows will make sense.

I discovered this recently after I stumbled across a compelling post on Medium by Julia Cheiffetz, executive editor at HarperCollins Publishers Llc. It had me stunned for a while. “I had a baby and cancer when I worked at Amazon. This is my story," she wrote.

She concluded: “Jeff, You asked for direct feedback. Women power your retail engine. They buy diapers. They buy books. They buy socks for their husbands on Prime. On behalf of all the people who want to speak up but can’t: please, make Amazon a more hospitable place for women and parents. Re-evaluate your parental leave policies. You can’t claim to be a data-driven company and not release more specific numbers on how many women and people of color apply, get hired and promoted, and stay on as employees. In the absence of meaningful public data — especially retention data — all we have are stories. This is mine."

Until then, all I had heard were stories of what a great company Amazon is and the genius that is Jeff Bezos. If you listen to his speech above, for instance, it is easy to think of him as a super intelligent human with a heart. And why not?

“What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy—they are given, after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you are not careful, and if you do, it will probably be to the detriment of your choices," he tells the students.

But between Julia’s essay and a pointer that led me to a long investigation by The New York Times on what really happens to people Inside Amazon, particularly white-collar workers, I am compelled to once again reassess Jeff Bezos.

The NYT writes, “Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. ‘If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,’ said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.

“In Amazon warehouses, employees are monitored by sophisticated electronic systems to ensure they are packing enough boxes every hour. (Amazon came under fire in 2011 when workers in an eastern Pennsylvania warehouse toiled in more than 100-degree heat with ambulances waiting outside, taking away labourers as they fell. After an investigation by the local daily, the company installed air-conditioning.)

“But in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more. ‘The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff,’ said Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer."

And then, there is this little bit from the report that stayed in my head: Noelle Barnes, who worked in marketing for Amazon for nine years, repeated a saying around campus: “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves."

Or for that matter, consider this damning part from the NYT story:

“A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. ‘I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,’ she said her boss told her. ‘From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.’

“A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a ‘performance improvement plan’—Amazon code for ‘you are in danger of being fired’—because ‘difficulties’ in her ‘personal life’ had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.

“A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. ‘What kind of company do we want to be?’ the executive recalled asking her bosses.

“The mother of the stillborn child soon left Amazon. ‘I had just experienced the most devastating event in my life,’ the woman recalled via email, only to be told her performance would be monitored ‘to make sure my focus stayed on my job’."

So, what do we have on hand? A man who relentlessly monitors his people and the entity he runs? An obsessive man unwilling to let go? A dichotomy between the public persona and the creature that runs his organization?

It is only pertinent then you ask why am I asking these questions? On the one hand, I have screamed loudly from every platform that matters, including this one, that the only religion that matters to me is science. To that extent, data is also a science. But any science that refuses to remain open to scrutiny, humanity and the humility to admit “I don’t know" doesn’t pass muster.

So, on the other hand, you can scream back at me and call me a creature of the heart. But I refuse to buy that argument.

Why? As recently as last week, I had written that Elon Musk is one among my heroes. This, because he is among those who places a premium on science. Musk of Tesla Motors Inc. is in the news after the automaker’s car was involved in a fatal accident in the US when it was cruising on autopilot mode. The incident is being probed by auto safety regulators and evoked furious debates as the screen grab from the Twitter timeline of Raju Narisetti, the founding editor of Mint, shows. Musk’s responses have been rather petulant and left me shocked to put it mildly.

If you believe in science, you ought to believe in falsifiability too. But the way Musk sounds now, he stands as just another creature in the mould of Bezos, to whom nothing matters but data and pig-headedness.

But is that all there is to life? Science says no. I’m in the middle of an archived course on Edx on the philosophy of minds and machines. Alex Byrne, chair of philosophy and linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, starts the course by raising some pertinent questions I had not thought of earlier.

“Biologists study living organisms and their environments. Particle physicists study fundamental particles. Mathematicians study numbers, sets and so forth...

“A biologist might ask, what explains why the male peacock has such a long tail? What explains that? What’s the explanation of that? A philosopher might ask, what is a scientific explanation in the first place? What is it to explain something? What makes one explanation better than another?

“A mathematician might ask, is Fermat’s last theorem true? A philosopher will ask how do we know that 1 plus 1 is 2? How do we know any mathematical truths at all? Come to that, are there such things as numbers? After all, the number 17 is not something that you can trip over or put in a box or examine under a microscope.

“In other words, we are (philosophers) interested in how things ‘hang together’ in the broadest sense of that term."

It is an interesting course and I intend to complete all of it and the attendant reading material that comes with it. This, because the most formidable thinkers in history, scientists included, have kept philosophical thought as part of their arsenal.

But men like Bezos and Musk come across as obsessed with nothing but predictability, data and ambition. Their minds seem closed to everything else. They have the temerity to believe that armed with computational prowess on hand, they can manipulate the likes of me any which way they want to. Why them? Every government, my elected government included, thinks that.

But allow me to assure you, Mr Bezos, Mr Musk and governments across the world, if you think that way. And if you think that isn’t possible, Mr Bezos, right now, your servers don’t know where I reside. I choose to log in from India when I need to pay in rupees. When I need to buy from your American store, I am resourceful enough to subvert the system to do that.

Yes, I understand a lot of my reading material resides on the proprietary Kindle I love so much, but you have access to it. But because I don’t trust you anymore, I have backups in encrypted formats you cannot access.

My government insists on playing nanny. It thinks I ought not to access certain websites because these may “corrupt" me. How much more silly can it get?

Truth is, none of you know where I am online right now. Between my government, Google, Facebook and you, Mr Bezos, you would much rather I only see and read what you will think appropriate. I do not download pirated material. Not because I can afford all of it. But because I believe creators ought to be paid for their efforts.

But if you try to control how I access them, not just me, but citizens will wage war with you on your turf. A single line of code is all we need to download anything we need from anyplace. We don’t need torrent clients with potential malware or governing Trojans watching us. We know the answers. I don’t intend to divulge it here. But it rests on Quora of all the places—among others.

Allow me to assure you, Mr Bezos, Mr Musk, and those of you in the government— you do not, and you cannot own or control us in any which way. If you think you can, we will subvert you. We see through your platitudes.

Personally, I think of myself as a mobile, independent nation. And I will secede if any entity, commercial or otherwise, seeks to impose any boundary on me. You exist because of me, not the other way around.

Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel Publishing.

His Twitter handle is @c_assisi

Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com

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Published: 10 Jul 2016, 02:07 AM IST
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