भाड़े का टट्टू (Bhade ka tattoo) - "Hired Pony"
“30 years ago, Carl Sagan predicted what the United States would be like in the future. How accurate is it today?” "I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...” ~ Carl Sagan There have been so many rushing emotions and conflicting thoughts for almost the whole past year which has challenged me constantly, on how to find a direction in work, where multiple interests conflict and navigate with the micro, and macro trends in politics, economy and sustainable financing (a.k.a. greenwashing). Eat the rich, nuh, a little desi angle because this is not new and we have seen this unchecked power before across multiple geography and societies. भाड़े का टट्टू (Bhade ka tattoo) means a ‘hired pony’ in English but in this context, it's the corporate slave or the CEO of the Evil Corp. hired by the stakeholders or board members.
Mr. Robot (TV series) Elliot, a cyber-security engineer suffering from anxiety, works for a corporation and hacks felons by night. Panic strikes him after Mr Robot, a cryptic anarchist, recruits him to ruin his company. #evilcorp
Premchandra, an Indian writer wrote a short story of the same title back in 1922, more than 100 years in Unindependent India.
I am 26 as I am writing this, there is a dead CEO of a major health insurance company on a New York sideway killed by an Ivy League graduate with a 3D-printed gun and was found by police in a McDonalds, a Netflix drama for the future. He has nothing to lose, to be honest, he is not a middle-class living paycheck-to-paycheck, well-read with a Goodreads account and a spam of memes and iconisation of this event surfaced in the last 2 months. By the amount of Superhero movies and comics I have consumed, he is the ideal who took things into his hands, the elites and pundits are on the run and this event eventually is a point where the corporates get intertwined with the militarisation, CEOs will have more protection.
New Heroes - Franco “Bifo” Berardi - https://www.e-flux.com/notes/649956/new-heroes
The funny aspect was how the CEO was freely roaming the streets as if he had done nothing morally wrong, unaware of how bad the system is and how corporate greed has normalised this system. We say, there are 8 billion people on this planet but with corporate personhood which is legally considered the "person", where the individual stakeholders are not legally responsible for the corporation's debts and damages, there are more fictional/invisible entities legally assigned, a fictional owner to our labour and time. It's fundamentally obvious, that Americans actually work more than medieval peasants, if an average American works 1,801 hours per year, or 37.5 hours per week, the average workload of an adult male peasant in 13th-century England was approximately 1,620 hours a year, historians say. Like him, there was another event in San Fransisco, when the former employee of OpenAI, Suchir Balaji, 26 years old was found dead in his apartment. He killed himself (possibly a murder) after knowing how OpenAI has been violating copyright law. According to a BBC report: "The San Francisco medical examiner's office determined his death to be suicide, and police found no evidence of foul play." After working at OpenAI for four years as a researcher, Balaji concluded that "OpenAI's use of copyrighted data to build ChatGPT violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet". Now, what's the play, how to survive this oppressive right-winger tech oligarchy where ethics and morals (Slavoj Žižek and Peter Singer did a talk on morality) are flushed down the drain for the competition and profitability? How do you function in this society when you are well aware of the consequences of how things are bad, really bad and it's not going to change? Another lesson to learn from history is the French Revolution, all forms of power go unchecked from time to time and it was a similar case where the power was concentrated for the top 1% of the population which I can say is true for today itself. The three-part division of King with divine rights, the first and second estates of Catholic clergy and the nobles and the third estate of middle-class merchants, the craftsmen and the 20 million peasants. And while we celebrate the French Revolution's ideals, we still struggle with many of the same basic questions raised over two centuries ago. French needed the revolution so that they all could live like kings ethically exploiting the Françafrique countries (which for the last 10 years had multiple coups and military uprise). Not only that but the same model of vertical hierarchy is clearly visible between the global north and the global majority part of the world, to say, the developed, the developing and the under-developed.
“La légende « A faut espérer q’eu se jeu la finira bientôt » utilise le langage du paysan, signe d’une revanche à venir du tiers état sur les deux autres.” (The caption "We must hope that this game will end soon" uses peasant language, a sign of the coming revenge of the third estate on the other two.) https://dhooop.substack.com/p/bhade-ka-tattoo-hired-pony