>>Male Presenter: All right.
So, I have a little bit of an introduction
to make and I will be reading most of it.
So, we are pleased to welcome Anand Giridharadas.
I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
I'm sure I'm not.
>>Anand Giridharadas: If you can't get it
right, nobody can get it right.
[laughter]
>>Male Presenter: to the Authors at Google
program.
Anand is an author, columnist, writing about
a world in transition.
He's the author of "India Calling," which
you all see before you.
And it's about returning to the India his
parents left.
He writes the "Currents" column for the New
York Times and its global edition, and the
International Herald Tribune and also writes
for the New York Times magazine.
He's reported from India, China, Norway, Haiti,
Brazil, Columbia, Nigeria, and the United
States.
Born in Cleveland, he was raised there and
in Paris and outside of Washington, DC.
And he was educated at the University of Michigan,
Oxford, and Harvard.
He's a former consultant for McKinsey and
later reported from Bombay for the Herald
Tribune and the Times for four and a half
years.
He wrote about India's transformation, Bollywood,
corporate takeovers, terrorism, outsourcing,
poverty, and democracy.
And I just, to add a personal note, I was
in India for two years also.
I'm also Indian American.
Born here of Indian heritage.
And I was part of a fellowship with 20 other
Indian Americans.
And we read Anand's New York Times columns
whenever they came out.
And they felt like he was speaking as one
of us.
And that's a large part of the reason why
I've decided to bring him here.
And finally, he's appeared regularly on television
and the radio in the United States, internationally,
including on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The Daily Show,
and other forums.
And he's lectured at Harvard, Stanford, the
University of Michigan, Sydney Opera House,
United Nations, the Asia Society, PopTech,
and Google.
I'm pleased to welcome Anand.
[applause]
>>Anand Giridharadas: Thank you.
Thank you for that introduction--an abundant
introduction, overabundant.
I have to say, my appearance at Google, which
you mentioned, does not include today's.
So, this is the second appearance at Google.
Thank you for having me, but I have to start
by telling you that I mean it when I say that
Google completes me.
Without your maps, I wouldn't have been able
to get here today.
Without your Gmail, I wouldn't have gotten
the note inviting me to be here today.
Without your calendar, I wouldn't have known
it was Friday.
And frankly, I sometimes use Google Instant
to remind myself of the spelling of my last
name.
So, Google is very, very important to me in
a number of ways.
You invited me here, I suspect, because of
a book that I wrote that's on your chairs.
But today, I'm not gonna speak directly about
that book.
Instead, I'm gonna speak more generally about
the vocation of writing in these strange,
exhilarating times of ours.
I'm gonna put forward some reflections, some
tentative first steps at what is coming to
mean to be a writer in this world that you
at Google are working to rewire and remake.
In short, I'm gonna meditate aloud with you
on the proper place for the writer in ever
more digital times.
And what feels more and more like a tweeter's
world.
And I raise these questions for a particular
reason.
The world of writing and the world of technology
need each other.
We'd have nothing to read on our devices without
the people who bear witness to our times and
string words together for a living.
And those people will have no living to make
if they don't figure out how to write for
a world in digital upheaval.
But the world of writing and the world of
technology often find themselves in a kind
of conflict.
Our lives are increasingly defined by the
assumptions, the values, the rhythms of digital
life.
But those assumptions, values, and rhythms
are in many ways in tension with the writing
life.
Today, I want to speak about three features
of the universe that you, here at Google,
are building.
Each of these, I would suggest, poses a challenge
to the traditional idea of what a writer is.
I wanna explore with you each of these tensions.
And then to ask, what of the writer's role
should persist despite these changes?
And what must adapt?
So, what are these three features of what
we may call "the Googley world?"
My sister once worked here, so I know the
inside lingo like that.
The three features I wanna talk about today
of your world are, among others, instantaneousness,
feedback, and openness.
Now, I've chosen these words almost self-consciously
as corporate buzz words.
I'm sure every one of you could pull out your
phone and find within the last two emails
you've received, some variant of each of those
three words.
They are, you might say, the clichés of the
Googley world.
But what I wanna suggest today is that these
words, commonplace as they are, harmless as
they seem, pose a challenge to our customary
understanding of what a writer does and is.
Let's start with instantaneousness.
Not long ago, some of you might have even
been part of this, Google came up with the
notion of finishing our searches for us.
You called it instant.
It was a very apt technology for our times
and fitting for a company that bothers to
tell me that it took only point three six
seconds to fetch me those 203 million results.
A contemporary innovation was the second coming
of the iPad.
That machine's most celebrated improvement
over the first one was that glorious new cover
that removed five point one seconds--unbearable
seconds--from the process of getting the tablet
going.
This is an instantaneous age.
And velocity has achieved a moral status once
reserved for things like fidelity and chastity.
It goes far beyond Google and the iPad, of
course.
In an instantaneous age, our cable TV pundits
must respond at once to every minor happening
in American life.
We must watch the Super Bowl.
And instead of waiting for tomorrow's water
cooler reviews of the ads, simultaneously
keep our eyes on a second device full of hash-tagged
chatter about what is happening on the first
device.
Photos from a party must be uploaded now,
at 3AM.
Otherwise, it's like your party never happened.
Journalists no longer have the daily deadline
at 5PM.
They file throughout the day for the web,
maybe once an hour.
This instantaneous culture can be hard on
the writer, whether the novelist or the White
House reporter, or the literary critic.
The overwhelming pressure of this culture
is to burp out the thought that you have right
now, regardless of how good it is, regardless
of how it relates to your other thoughts,
regardless of whether it is a thought better
sowed in the fields of the mind, left to take
root unseen, harvested only when its time
has come and it has grown into true insight.
Of course, the writer can opt out, can withdraw
from Facebook, withdraw from Twitter.
I should say withdraw from Google+.
Perhaps turn on that wonderful program called
freedom, which liberates you from the connectivity
that Google works so hard to spread.
But such is our present culture that withdrawing
can be confused with non-existence.
Not to offer these easy reactions, not to
lend these breezy thoughts, is almost to declare
I was in my time, but not of it.
I learned something about this when I had
the chance to interview one of my literary
heroes, the writer, VS Naipaul.
I filled a notebook with questions--some about
his books, some about his life.
But many about the planet that we shared.
I wanted to take his mind, in the short time
that I had with him, and stretch it to apply
it to these vexing questions of our age.
But he loathed these big questions, these
prompts for punditry and off-the-cuff analysis.
I asked how his convictions had changed over
the years.
He answered, "That's writing my books all
over again.
It's too big a question."
I asked how his idea of the good society had
evolved.
He answered, "I haven't worked it out like
that."
Narrowing it down a bit, I asked whether he
had come to love England, where he settled
after leaving Trinidad.
He answered, "That's a provocative question.
I wouldn't answer it."
I asked about all the talk of the decline
of the West.
He answered, "I haven't thought of that idea."
Since this Nobel Laureate seemed not to have
thought about any of the things that I was
thinking about, I asked him what ideas he
had been thinking about, what questions he
most wanted to answer.
He answered, "I will know later.
I can't tell you now.
Not because of secrecy, but because I have
to find out."
Now, VS Naipaul, for those of you who've read
him, is a famously cantankerous man.
He is a man who revels in his own cantankerousness.
But something more was at work here.
The more we spoke, the more I realized that
Naipaul was defending a certain idea of writing
that was at war with the culture of instantaneousness.
Let me quote what he told me a bit later.
Quote, there are two ways of talking.
One is the easy way where you talk lightly.
And the other is the considered way.
The considered way is what I have put my name
to.
I wouldn't put my name to the easy thoughts
because you can often have outrageous views,
passionate views, and that's the source of
your thoughts eventually.
But when they occur, they are very rough and
brutal.
And so, a lot of writer's time is spent in
working out or refining coarse thought.
End quote.
As I say this today, I cannot help but think
of my fallen colleague, Anthony Shadid, who
died yesterday in Syria.
One of the finest journalists of our era.
As his old colleague, the columnist Mike Barnicle
from Boston, put it on television this morning,
and I'm paraphrasing, "Anthony didn't tweet,
he reported.
He listened to the people in the field.
And then he thought about what they said before
writing it."
This ethic is worth remembering in these new
times.
The question we must wrestle with is, how
do we preserve the act of writing as the refining
of coarse thought in a culture that is so
voracious for our easy thoughts?
Now, a second important feature of the world
you are building is feedback.
As much as by rapidity, this new universe,
the Google universe, is defined by feedback--loops
and loops of it.
Big data.
Advertisements that are continually refined,
minute by minute, based on who is searching
what, who is clicking what, a world that constantly
adapts to us, responds to us, learns from
the last time.
For the writer, there is no seduction greater
than that of feedback.
Find me the writer who doesn't live to know
what you think of the sentence she'd just
written.
But that same writer will invariably tell
you that she has a complicated relationship
with feedback.
She pines for it on the one hand.
On the other, she knows that her art requires
removing herself from feedback for a time
to go deep and go long and go into the creative
wilds to let her mind roam free.
And then, only when it's time to return to
the world and be judged.
With no judgment at all, her art would die.
But with judgment always on, it may never
reach the level of art.
But feedback everywhere beckons to the writer
today, from the Amazon sales rank to the most
emailed list, from the Twitter account to
the news room memos that tell the staff who
is winning the page view war.
The writer knows how she's doing almost as
she does it.
We speak of standardized tests impelling teachers
to teach to the test.
Well, rankings and rating impel writers to
write to the ranking.
Yet, it's a temptation that many writers will
tell you undermines their craft.
But here, too, there is no turning back the
clock, nor should there be.
We live now in a feedback world.
The writer will have to adapt.
How, though, can she seize these benefits,
be part of the interactive responsive world,
without losing her craft to the creative suffocation
of pandering?
A third feature of our digital life is openness.
How many of you would declare yourselves to
be against openness?
No takers.
Openness is big these days, particularly here.
Open source software, an open encyclopedia
that anybody can read, write, and edit.
Open publishing so you can bring out your
own books without a publisher.
Open sourcing of the news such that CNN, which
used to only report to us, now asks us to
report for them.
The fetish of openness even extends to the
kitchens of fancy restaurants, where you can
now witness how it's all done.
Once again, this open source ethic is a provocation
to the traditional notion of writing.
In so many ways, writing has not been open
at all.
The writer has tended to style himself as
a solitary figure, working in isolation, cut
off from everything, impermeable to the world
beyond and his readers.
The writing industry, too, has never been
open.
It is hard to get an agent, harder still to
get a publisher, hard to get your book reviewed
and placed on the faster-moving shelves of
the bookstores.
Exclusivity defines the writing world.
It is something special to be a writer, something
not available to anyone who would try.
Of course, in reality, the writer has always
been less isolated than she likes to imagine--embedded
in a literary tradition, financially tied
to the money pots of her age, allied with
and opposed to other writers.
But it is this vision of the writer as a priest
of words--remote, exclusive, authoritative--that
is challenged by the ethic of openness that
marks our age.
One of the most successful writers of today,
Paulo Coelho, recently spoke about his own
embrace of digital values.
And specifically, of his addiction to Twitter,
where he seems to produce almost as many words
as he does through books.
Here is what he said about the old way that
writers were conceived of in the society and
the emerging new way.
Quote.
They used to see writers as wise men and women
in an ivory tower, full of knowledge.
And you cannot touch them.
The ivory tower does not exist anymore.
If the reader doesn't like something, they'll
tell you.
He's not, or she's not, someone who's isolated.
Once I found this possibility to use Twitter
and Facebook and my blog to connect to my
readers, I'm going to use it.
To connect to them and to share thoughts that
I cannot use in the book.
Today I have on Facebook, six million people.
End quote.
He also noted in that interview that he had
more Facebook followers than Madonna.
[chuckling]
What he did not mention there, but later did,
was use a webcam and Twitter to allow anyone
with an internet connection to watch him at
his desk writing his next book, which I did
and discovered to be a surprisingly boring
thing to watch.
[laughter]
My friend Baratunde Thurston, a comedian and
author of the new and bitingly hilarious book,
"How to be Black," did something even more
radical.
I suggested to him one day that he use a screen
sharing site called join dot me to reveal
to his fans what his word processor screen
looked like as he finished the last chapter
of his book.
He's one of these guys who's up for anything,
so he did it.
And so, as he finished that last chapter,
people tuned in and watched his screen the
same way he was seeing his screen.
And it created amazing conversations and connections
between him and his readers--connections that
he never could've gotten by coming around
and doing a book talk like this, which is
still the traditional understanding of how
to do it.
And it demystified--this is the important
part about the world of openness--it demystified
this process of writing that is so magical
to people, but closed and inaccessible at
the same time.
It showed that you sometimes delete things
and then rewrite them and then delete them
again.
And it shows the contingency of something
that seems so polished and formal, but is
not.
And yet, I can see this terrifying many writers,
this screen sharing, including this one right
here.
I don't think many of us are yet ready to
do what Baratunde did.
Writers will perhaps resist this culture of
openness for a time.
But is Paulo Coelho right?
Must the writer accept a fundamental shift
in what is opened and what is kept closed?
Must she accept that she is no longer a priest
hovering above her readers, but now a pilgrim
walking among them?
So, I've suggested to you three ways, among
others, in which digital culture, the assumptions
of the digital world, pose challenges to the
writer as traditionally understood.
What I don't want to imply is that the world
you are building, here at Google, is inherently
threatening to the writing life.
What it threatens is the conventional, the
received, idea of what a writer is.
But the best writing exists to overturn the
received and the conventional.
So, we must be open to the visions and revisions
of writing that new realities inspire.
For a young writer like me, early in his career,
there is much, seemingly, to be gained from
this new universe and its new equations of
influence and authority.
My friend Anne-Marie Slaughter, a wonderful
scholar at Princeton and former State Department
official under Barack Obama, speaks of every
profession's having to adapt to these new
equations of power and influence.
"The leader," she says, "must become a catalyst.
The public relations agent, a convener.
The diplomat, a connector.
The reporter, a mapper and crowd sourcer.
The editor, a curator."
In each of these shifts, an older exclusive
authority is diminished.
Influence in this new way lies in catalysis.
What elsewhere has been called power with
others rather than power over others.
And writers, too, must ask themselves, "What
does it mean now to have power with and not
power over the reader?"
If you look at this generation of writers,
not VS Naipaul's generation, but the generation
rising up now and even some older writers,
people are finding ways to be true to the
writing vocation and yet, be part of this
new reality.
Whether it's Paulo Coelho opening up his writing
process and yet knowing when to shut it off
and go within, whether it's Teju Cole, the
Nigerian novelist, who has taken to Twitter,
but not to talk about the Super Bowl, but
rather to remix and rewrite the Nigerian news
headlines in a brilliant and literary novelistic
way, or Salman Rushdie, getting into Twitter
wars and pally banter, even as he remains
wearing another hat among our most serious
defenders of writing with a capital W.
The question perhaps is this.
As a writer gives in to these new possibilities,
or to put it more positively, learns to profit
from and bask in them, what would be his or
her special role in the instantaneous, feedback
driven, open world?
Is there still a special role for those more
considered thoughts, for those ideas that
take time and must be unwitnessed to mature,
for those things that cannot be crowd sourced?
That special role is something I believe in.
It's something I would urge you to believe
in, too.
And it consists, I think, in something that
is just about the opposite of the algorithms
for which Google is famous.
What remains vital in the writing vocation,
when it is practiced most ably, is the critical
consciousness, the wry voice, the ironic observation
that cuts against the grain of contemporary
understanding.
Algorithms make us more similar.
They believe in the possibility of right answers.
The critical consciousness resists easy answers.
Indeed, always seeks to complicate things.
It seeks out lovely incongruities.
It insists on what it sees when the crowd,
however numerous, is wrong.
It seeks not to answer, but to explain.
Not to search, but to give meaning.
It seeks to turn human beings into that magical
invention called characters.
People even fuller in words than they seem
in real life, brimming with contradiction
and complexity.
At its best, writing stands with legs in our
own time and eyes outside of it.
It questions the basic assumptions of an age
that are as normal to us as waves are to the
fish.
To take one example, the faith so common to
this time, that regressions of data are the
pre-eminent expression of truth.
In a season when big data rules, writing stands
for the usefulness of intuition, for the proposition
that things needn't always be scatter plottable
to be true.
The best writing is often the truth that people
don't want to hear, not always the aggregate
of each of their private understandings of
the truth.
Above all, perhaps, and in closing, writing
is how we give one person the experience of
being another, of seeing the world as another
does.
When it does what it ought to do, and what
I hope it continues to do, writing is a blissful,
fleeting reprieve from the encumbrance of
knowing only ourselves.
Thank you very much.
[applause]
I'm happy to answer any questions about this
and I know I did not talk about the book on
your chairs.
I'm happy to talk about India and if you would
like, to do a short reading from the book
as well.
But go ahead.
>>MALE #1: So, I guess one can think about
maybe the demise of certain great writer or
this priest of writing that you think about,
on the other hand, there's this destabilizing
force by breaking all these barriers, right?
And anybody now can potentially be a writer
and maybe there's more spontaneity.
So, I'm thinking the Arab Spring reports [ inaudible
]. Nobody really planned or considered or
orchestrated anything.
So, I was wondering if you had any thoughts
about the more positive side of more free,
open, and less controlled speech.
>>Anand Giridharadas: Absolutely.
And I think in a way there's a difference
between words and writing, but one of the
things that differentiates the Arab Spring
from things that happened even ten years ago
that were similar is that it was 98 percent
of the words that were written about it were
by the people there on their phones.
New York Times correspondents and Washington
Post correspondents account for a very small
fraction of all the words generated by that
crisis.
Now, a lot of it was crap.
And a lot of it was wrong, but that doesn't
matter.
You have, as you say, this extraordinary opportunity
to turn everybody into a writer, to write
about their little piece.
What's most useful from those tweets and other
forms of expression is often not their literary
quality, it's just their informational value.
A reporter can't be everywhere.
And so, the opportunity to say, "This happened
here and this happened here and to look at
trends and all this stuff," is very useful.
I think if you were to reflect, however, on
how you came to understand the Arab Spring,
how you came to make a different kind of judgment
about it--.
For example, should America intervene or not?
Would America intervening and standing up
for the people help or hurt?
Those more complicated strategic judgments,
which are very important judgments, I'm not
sure if the tweets alone would've helped you
make that kind of judgment.
I think there is still a huge place for context,
history, the weaving of those tweets into,
"Yeah, but every time people talk like that
in the last hundred years, this has happened
actually."
There's all these ways in which, to go back
to what Naipaul was saying, are easy thoughts
are not always the right thoughts.
So, there's a huge fluorescence in the world
today of easy thoughts.
So, part of what you're saying when many more
people can write and these barriers breaking,
it's a proliferation of easy thoughts.
I think the question that I'm raising is what
does that do for hard thoughts?
It doesn't necessarily destroy hard thoughts,
but it creates a culture in which the premium
on hard thoughts may be reduced.
And I think the ability to make some of the
choices like, do we intervene or not, or does
Google thinking about very complex ethical
choices around privacy, these are deep questions
that require a deeper level of scrutiny that
I think writing has traditionally stood up
for and that I hope it continues to stand
up for.
>>MALE #2: You've had a lot of international
experience and I've read quite a lot about
it.
I'm curious as to whether you see these three
trends of instantaneousness, openness, and
feedback if you find that their impact is
more or less equal across the world.
And if you could, talk about the democratization
and global nature of these kinds of trends.
Do you find that there are communities that
are left behind?
And connected to that, something else you've
written a lot about--this is two questions--is
the role of the United States and the future
of the way we see ourselves in our role internationally,
do you see that changing because of this?
>>Anand Giridharadas: On the first point,
it's totally not evenly distributed.
So, that's an obvious point which has to do
with the way the internet works and the way
censorship works.
It's still extremely possible, despite the
rhetoric of internet openness, like countries
routinely opt out of entire platforms.
And those companies often support that decision.
So, the internet is not as universal as we
often think it is.
But I would say that even in places where
there's a high degree of what sociologists
call power distance, which is the sense people
have, the people in power have, how far they
are from them.
Not physically, but psychologically.
Even in places with high power distance, like
India, the things that this technology does--all
these elements--the ability to tweet at certain
ministers who actually tweet back is something
unimaginable for a middle-class Indian.
It's something that creates an opportunity
that he has not had, or she has not had, in
any way at all.
There's absolutely nothing like it.
You take something like being a foreign correspondent
in India, which is a relatively privileged
role, and how hard it is to get through the
maze of phones to get at a minister to interview
them, right, which is why everybody uses cell
phone numbers because you can't get through
the official land line channel.
There are assistants and deputy assistants.
And then suddenly, some guy in a village can
tweet at Shashi Tharoor.
And Shashi Tharoor tweets back.
It is such an upheaval to that person in the
village's traditional understanding of what
power is and how it works and yet, that person
goes home to there being on and off water,
no electricity in the village, and totally
corrupt local officials.
So, I think we often tend to imagine that
if this stuff arrives, it wipes out everything.
It doesn't.
But it's still extremely powerful in the intervention
it makes in traditional equations of power.
To your second point about America's role,
I think it's one of the reasons
I came back from India and still write about
the world, but from a base here for a newspaper
here because I actually think this commitment
to writing and bearing witness to something
special as a craft is more respected here
still and has greater institutions that defend
it than anywhere else in the world.
And even though these internet and technological
trends are, in large part, originating here,
it is also that older idea of writing is something
worthy of protection that flourishes here.
I don't know that I could do--.
I certainly don't think I could today do what
I do having grown up in 90 percent of the
countries in the world.
Not because of freedom or censorship, just
because of the kind of atmosphere and education
it takes to be able to see things critically
and to see outside things and to into people's
lives.
There are very few countries that allow that
kind of consciousness to form.
>>MALE #3: There are two aspects to what you
presented to what we're discussing now that
are very compelling.
The first aspect is the construct of content
creation.
And the second is content distribution.
The tool sets and facilities that we have
these days are the computers that we have.
Plus, content creation can be universally
shared by everyone.
Everybody can use the same tools to create
the content.
Just as in the music industry and in desktop
publishing revolution, the tools just became
better and better.
Now, in terms of distribution, the internet
has turned out to be a great equalizer there
in general.
So, what I mean is that it used to be that
music, artists were at the mercy of the studios
to have any chance of getting their music
heard globally.
>>Anand Giridharadas: Right.
>>MALE #3: That is no longer the case.
>>Anand Giridharadas: Right.
>>MALE #3: And I would argue that writers
may be moving into a convergence there, whether
or not the quality of their work is as good
as those that did not have those advantages
at an earlier stage in time.
>>Anand Giridharadas: Absolutely.
And I think that's the trade-off.
So, given that the problem of writing--.
It's hard to imagine something more ripe for
disruption, to put it one way, right?
A process where--I mean, just think about
it-- a process where you have to know people
who have an agent.
And then the agent has to know people to get
a publisher.
And it's based on random forces, etcetera.
That's based on all the premise of printing.
So, all the rituals, even publishing an eBook
today, you need to go through all the rituals
designed for the print world.
But when it's not scarce, when it's effortless,
basically costless, to distribute, it's almost
silly for any publishing company to restrict
who they publish.
They just publish everybody.
But certain kinds of work--.
I think what you would do, very simply if
you were to switch to that world, would be
to drastically improve your discovery of voices.
Right?
So, it's the money ball thing.
You'd find all these writers who for some
arbitrary reason of our judgment and our structures
in the world don't get published, and you
publish them.
>>MALE #3: [inaudible]
>>Anand Giridharadas: Right.
But I think what you also would do, I think
you'd kill a lot of the kinds of writing that
have also been important to the world because
you would, in a way, there's certain kinds
of writing that require the judgment of a
publisher to approve it, to stick with you
for three years--to publish it, to edit it,
to pull it out of you in a time when the market
would not reward you for those three years.
And if you had to make it on your own in the
market world, you wouldn't last three years
and then you'd quit and you'd go work at Google
or do something more sensible.
>>MALE #3: [inaudible]
>>Anand Giridharadas: You might be.
So, I think we'll increase, but those things
go together.
I think we'll find more of JK Rowling's right?
But there are a lot of people who would not
get that investment because it’s basically
marketizing the writing world.
That's basically what we're talking about--making
it more open market, which means you discover
more talent, but what you don't get is the
kind of publisher at Knopf who sees a 26-year
old writer, sees what they can be five years
early, develops them in a way that's totally
not ever gonna pay itself back, pushes them
and creates a literary great.
And that is a big part of the industry of
publishing.
So, that would be my concern.
But I think overall, in a writing world that
is dominated by so few voices from so few
places, this is in the main an extraordinary
chance to hear other voices.
>>MALE #4: This is a two-part question and
I don't have time to praise your talk with
your book.
So you talked about how a villager in India
can now tweet with a minister and get a reply.
But then, that also was partly responsible
for the minister losing his job because the
country wasn't quite ready for that.
>>Anand Giridharadas: Absolutely.
>>MALE #4: So, what do you think it will take
for countries like that to get ready and embrace
the fact that everyone can be open and encourage
ministers to be open and aren't, be scared
of that?
And taking from that, what do you feel the
key difference is between say, India, and
other countries and the US you talked about
in your book?
>>Anand Giridharadas: I mean, I think in your
first point it will not be accepted for an
extraordinarily long time because it rationally
should not by those other people.
Shashi Tharoor is a different kind of minister
who's suggesting a different kind of Indian
power equation.
And the kind of Indian power equation he believes
in, which is in some ways more familiar here,
where he spent the last 20 years of his life,
is deeply threatening if you are a traditional
Indian minister with guys in white kurtas
waking up outside your house every morning
calling you "sir, sir" and lines of sycophants
coming to tell you how wonderful you are every
morning, what he suggests is a totally different
idea of power.
Those people will absolutely reject this idea
of power.
When you talk about barriers being broken,
it is them, those people, who are being broken
because that villager, when he realizes that
that minister is actually an ordinary guy
who can respond to me, is gonna start asking
why other people don't.
And part of this shift--and Shashi Tharoor,
interestingly, is a writer as well as a politician--this
is happening to writing, too.
And it's very--.
It's a bit abstract, but it's also very practical.
The practical question is, while you're writing
a novel, should you tweet and share little
bits and ask, "What do you think about that
sentence?"
Or should you not?
It's a very practical question.
How do you spend your day?
Should you, every time you have an interesting
idea, get it out there and road test it?
Or should you hold them, let them stew, let
them go through the Darwinian process within
you, let the bad ones die and the good ones
endure?
And then, share when it's the right time.
These are very different choices and they
have to do, at the core level, with how you
think about power and influence.
And I think writers don't tend to think of
themselves in terms of power and influence,
right?
But I forget the exact number, but I think
they found recently--I think it may have been
Google that found this--that there have been--I
forget the exact number--but they found the
number of books that have ever been written.
And it worked out to about one book per thousand
humans who've ever lived.
It sounds about right.
So, one in a thousand people who have ever
lived have produced a book on average.
Now, it's that kind of specialness around
writing that I think is under threat, but
it's probably a very good thing that it's
under threat.
I think everything else in the world that's
being disrupted, these things were less special
than they seemed and deserve to be opened
up.
But you don't wanna lose the core of what
also made them work.
>>FEMALE #1: So, one other thing they've really
driven home here at Google about like, Google+
versus other social networks, is one, they
really tried to make Google+ or Facetime more
educated and involved conversations.
Not like on Twitter, supposedly Facebook encourages
something else.
And I'm just wondering your opinion on what
it would take to--.
'Cause I mean, right now we have more knowledge
available at our fingertips than any other
time, so we should be having these conversations.
But there's a lot of other distractions going
on that take us on other passages.
I'm wondering what you think about that and
if there is a forum or the right place that
will develop those conversations.
>>Anand Giridharadas: And I think that's a
great point.
And it goes back to the point raised earlier,
which is that I think one of the great disappointments
of the democratization of information is how
poorly a lot of us have used it.
I think I would be slightly more excited by
all this barrier breaking if its primary effect,
or at least one of its primary effects, was
liberating all these new voices.
I think if you go to Reddit, the primary effect
so far has been to unleash a lot of human
ugliness.
That's been much more of an important effect
in a way of the last ten years.
And then there's the Arab Spring and these
things that happened that are different.
But 95 percent of these unleashing of new
voices is people being at best, kind of fine,
and at worst, mean, racist.
I mean, racism now has received a second wind
from the opening up of these communications
that you don't realize it really hadn't had
in a long time.
Where were those sentiments going 15 years
ago?
Maybe to your family, and that's it.
These are things that you couldn't say at
work.
People now openly utter racist things in these
social forums that actually, they have no
other place to utter in polite, American society
anymore.
So, I don't know what the answer is.
And again, this is part of, we don't live
in the world where Walter Cronkite brought
all of us the news of President Kennedy's
death at the same time and 40 million of us
watched that, or whatever it was.
And the next day, we could go in and say,
"Where were you when Walter Cronkite told
you that--?"
It's not a synchronous mass culture world
in that way.
And that's probably for the good, but I think
one very serious question is, why is our ugliness
such a prominent feature of what we feel like
expressing when all these new voices are allowed?
And I think for you guys, the interesting
technological question is, are there algorithms
and rules of engagement that actually influence
our behavior?
Is it that we've designed the internet wrong?
Is it a design problem?
Are we just terrible people?
Or, is it design choices?
So, one very famous design choice is anonymity,
which was a choice someone made.
The internet could have been not anonymous.
And it's anonymous.
The choice to make it anonymous has allowed
an ugliness to flourish.
That, for example, on Facebook, which now
pushes more and more for actual identity and
you can't even use a given name if it's not
your passport name in theory, it makes it
a little bit harder.
So, I think that whole debate, which you guys
know about, persistent identity, is one solution
even if you say in the Arab Spring situation,
it doesn't have to be your real identity.
But you have to maintain a single persistent
identity throughout these conversations.
But I think it's a very interesting technical
question to think about, besides persistent
identity or true identity, what are ways of
hacking these conversations to allow them
to be free and open, but to bring out some
of what's good in us, rather than most of
what's bad?
>>MALE #5: So, earlier when you were speaking,
you were talking about several factors that
were driving the art of writing, or the world
of writing, towards more spontaneous and perhaps
somewhat less deep thinking and expression
and that kind of thing.
How likely is it do you think that there's
some sort of critical style writing will actually
survive, given that there are these macroeconomic
forces against it?
>>Anand Giridharadas: I mean, I think I'm
never pessimistic about vocations as much
as I am about industries.
There's a difference between the vocation
and industry.
The industry could well die.
But that's like saying the CD industry is
dead, but music is not dead.
I mean, is it a worse time for music than
it was ten years ago?
Absolutely not.
It's better.
It's a worse time for people who make CDs,
though.
It may be a worse time for musicians, but
it's not a worse time for music.
And I think the same thing will happen for
writing to an extent, that it will be a worse
time possibly for writers.
Certainly a worse time for people who publish
writing--the companies that publish it.
And there will be all kinds of new opportunities.
So, today, a young friend of mine who's in
graduate school here, we'd been talking about
her career and she wants to be a journalist.
And what I tell her is, "You should learn
to do everything.
So, you should write," which she does very
well.
"You should learn to write in European languages
and in English," which she's partly doing.
"You should learn to shoot video."
Because the premium is less on good video.
It's on video that a company's--.
The same person that was doing the writing
was able to do video, was able to do an audio
interview, was able to live blog.
I spoke to an editor at a very large American
magazine yesterday, who said that magazine
is moving in the direction of--.
This magazine has very long cycles of publication.
It may be a year between the time they assign
a story and the story in print.
So he said throughout that year, that person
can actually live blog the production of the
story, the work that goes into it, they can
send photos.
You can tease the story for a year and then
the magazine piece becomes this final hoorah
after a year.
So, there's definitely ways in which this
stuff will get remixed and remade to be even
better than it was before.
But I think the real question behind your
question is in a way after all this sorts
itself out and the companies go and change
and some new forms are created, some new forms
die, where will the vocation be?
What will the person who wants to be a writer,
who wants to, as I said earlier, stand against
the grain of the time, what will be their
place?
Will they have to work other jobs, which is
not necessarily a bad thing?
Sometimes, it gives you an exposure to real
life.
So, you could have changes like writers need,
for the sake of employment, to be employed
and write on the side.
Which is what a lot of 19th Century writers
did.
You could have the idea that all publishing
becomes self-publishing, which means we have
a much more market-driven publishing industry,
much less curation.
That would be good.
That would be bad.
But I think the question is, where will the
voices that in a way we don't wanna hear,
but need to hear, where will they go?
There's certain things that will not trend
on Amazon, but need to.
Those are the things that I think are worth
worrying about the most.
>>Male Presenter: All right.
So, we have a gift for you.
And please join me in thanking Anand for speaking
with us.
>>Anand Giridharadas: Thank you all.
[applause]
