Essays · 32 articles
Every technology revolution follows the same pattern — it creates enormous wealth and enormous misery, rarely for the same people. These essays trace that move from the first granary to AI: who takes, who pays, and who fights back. They are the long-form companion to the book Captured.
Ten thousand years of history, one recurring move. This is the through-line behind every essay here — the five steps by which the gains of a new technology get captured, and the one step that can still be rewritten.
Every technology mania in history has had a morning after. Whether or not AI is a bubble, the more useful question is what happens when the euphoria breaks — and who is left holding the bill.
If the call has just come, the next two days matter. Here is a calm, practical checklist for the first 48 hours — and a clear-eyed look at who actually decided your role was redundant.
'Technology always creates more jobs than it destroys' is the reassurance everyone reaches for. It is sometimes true, often late, and it hides the one variable that actually decides who wins.
The consolidation of AI into a few hands is not a law of nature — it is a choice, following a very old playbook. How the monopoly formed, and why it didn't have to.
Shoshana Zuboff gave our era a name. Stripped of the jargon, surveillance capitalism is simple — and once you see how it works, you can't unsee it in your own day.
A product manager walked out of Facebook with tens of thousands of internal documents. What the Facebook Files actually revealed — and why the hardest part was that the company already knew.
For millions of gig workers, the manager is not a person but a system — one that hires, ranks, pays and fires without ever explaining itself. Here is how the invisible boss works.
The Indian middle class was sold a life in monthly instalments. It works beautifully — until an income stops. The quiet maths of the EMI trap, and why the fragility was built in.
A private firm with shareholders, a board — and its own army — came to rule a subcontinent. The story of the East India Company is the origin story of corporate power itself.
Most attempts to redistribute land fail. Kerala's largely succeeded — moving real power from landlords to the people who worked the soil. Hard proof that capture can be reversed, and what it took.
For a generation, antitrust slept. Now it is back, and Big Tech is the target. The tools on the table — from the Standard Oil breakup to the app store — and how far they can really go.
The machine learned to write, draw and compose by reading almost everything we ever made — most of it without asking. The lawsuits now deciding who owns the output are really deciding an older question: who gets the gains.
A cheaper, open model shook the giants and the stock market with them. But 'open source' and 'ours' are not the same thing — and the gap between them is the whole story.
Banning phones in class is the rare tech-policy fight parents and teachers mostly agree on. It works — but it also quietly concedes who captured a child's attention in the first place.
Everyone asks how powerful AI is. Far fewer ask who owns it. Follow the compute, the data and the capital, and the more important question comes into focus.
The tasks we once handed to juniors are the tasks AI does first. When the bottom rung disappears, the whole ladder is in question — and every revolution breaks a ladder before it builds a new one.
‘White-collar bloodbath’ makes a great headline and a poor forecast. Here is the honest version — the tasks genuinely exposed, the ones that aren't, and who books the savings.
Is the phone in a child's hand rewiring their brain, or are we blaming the device for the age? The evidence is messier than either camp admits — and the business model rarely gets named.
‘Data is the new oil’ is a cliché — but clichés can be true. If data is the resource, India is one of the richest fields on earth, and the question is the old one: who owns what gets extracted?
She co-led Google's ethical-AI team and co-wrote a paper warning about the very models now running the world. Then she was gone. What she said — and why saying it was so costly.
Before data was enclosed, land was. The centuries when England's shared fields were fenced into private property are the original template — and once you see the move, you see it everywhere.
Behind the euphemisms — ‘restructuring’, ‘skill mismatch’, ‘bench rationalisation’ — a familiar machine is running. Here’s what’s actually happening to Indian IT jobs, and what history says comes next.
The honest answer isn’t ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It’s that technology has always created wealth and misery at the same time — and rarely for the same people. Here’s how to read your own odds.
‘The cloud’ sounds weightless. It isn’t. It is a physical thing that drinks water and electricity — increasingly from Indian aquifers and grids. Here’s the bill nobody printed on the invoice.
‘Luddite’ became an insult meaning ‘afraid of technology’. The real Luddites weren’t afraid of machines at all. They were asking the one question the AI age keeps dodging.
India built the most impressive digital public infrastructure on earth — cheap, fast, inclusive. That is exactly why the quiet part deserves attention: it is also the largest behavioural ledger ever assembled.
A word coined by an ex-finance-minister is suddenly everywhere. Strip the jargon and technofeudalism describes something you already live inside: paying rent, in data and attention, to landlords you never chose.
You are not the customer, and you are not quite the product either. You’re the raw material. Here’s how your attention became something to be mined, refined and sold — and how to take some of it back.
For one year, hundreds of thousands of farmers camped on Delhi’s borders and refused to go home. Then the most powerful government in a generation backed down. Here’s how — and what it teaches an age told that AI is ‘inevitable’.
If the machines take the work, the pitch goes, just pay everyone a floor to live on. It’s a serious idea worth taking seriously — including the part its champions skip: a cheque doesn’t change who owns the machine.
Gig workers have total dependence on the platform and no ownership of it. What if the drivers owned the app? India has already run this playbook once — with milk.