On Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Digital Millennium: An Open Letter to Vishal Sikka

Gandhi and his wheel in the famous picture by Margaret Bourke-White.
Gandhi insisted that White learn how to spin before consenting to be photographed by her.

Note: This is an open letter to Vishal Sikka, CEO and Managing Director of the computer services company Infosys (current market capitalization, just over $31 billion), in response to an essay he posted on the blog site of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, subsequently reposted on Medium.

Dear Vishal,

I hope you won’t mind me addressing you informally. I’m writing because I was intrigued by your recent essay, “Why Technology Actually Makes Us More Human.” 

To be honest, “intrigued” isn’t an entirely accurate description of my reaction to your piece, but I’m trying to remain civil here. I’d like to accord you the respect you deserve. I say this not because you’re the CEO of a major multinational corporation but because I don’t doubt your comments are sincere, and because from what I’ve read, you seem a perfectly decent guy.  

I also feel a need to tread gently because what bugged me about your essay were your comments about Mahatma Gandhi, and Gandhi is considered the father of your country, not mine. (I refer to the country in which you were born and raised; I’m aware that you’ve since obtained American citizenship.) It stands to reason, therefore, that you might be more familiar with the great man’s legacy than I am. 

Nonetheless, sir, I have to say: On the question of Gandhi’s spinning wheel, I’m pretty sure you got it completely wrong.

Specifically my objections have to do with the analogy you draw between the spinning wheel — the charkha — in Gandhi’s era and computer technology today. Just as Gandhi believed that the spinning wheel represented hope for the advancement of the human condition in India, you contend, so digital technologies represent hope for the advancement of the human condition globally today. 

“Among his many other initiatives,” you write, “Gandhi encouraged Indians to spin and weave, and wear clothing made from this homespun fabric….Today, computing technology can serve as humanity’s charkha.”  

Your essay is short on specifics and long on generalities, as these types of visionary statements tend to be. Your second graph, however, seemed to sum up the basic point: 

“The digital revolution has positioned us at the epicenter of change and opportunity. We are surrounded by technology that enables us to do more, with less, for more. I believe this exponentially increases our individual and collective ability to achieve our true potential, and enhances our freedom to evolve.”

Vishal Sikka

Now, as I say, I’m no expert on Gandhi, but I couldn’t help but wonder if equating artificial intelligence and automation with the charkha could possibly be faithful to his message. I decided to investigate. Sure enough, a couple of hours on the web and a few hours in the library confirmed my suspicions. Far from being analogous, the spinning wheel revolution Gandhi proposed and the digital revolution you proclaim are aimed in pretty much opposite directions.

You write that for Gandhi the wheel represented the “freedom to be innovative” and the ability “to find our own insights.” To the contrary, in an era of rampant technological expansion, Gandhi saw the spinning wheel as representative of traditional skills that needed to be revived and reincorporated into daily life. Spinning wasn’t about finding the new new thing, or about disruption. It was about recovery and preservation. 

You go on to argue that by encouraging Indians of all castes and religions to spin, Gandhi hoped to foster “a national revolution built on the tenets of human creativity, self-reliance and entrepreneurship.” This, you add, was one of the earliest manifestations of a “maker movement” and a strategy “aimed at turning India into a manufacturing hub to trigger its economic transformation.”

That’s half right. It’s true that Gandhi envisioned spinning as a way for the masses of India to affirm their desire for independence while at the same time producing products that would help them attain it. He wasn’t, however, advocating entrepreneurship, at least not in the “billionaire or bust” sense typically associated with that word in Silicon Valley. Nor was he advocating turning India into a manufacturing hub on anything more than a local level. 

Independence for Gandhi wasn’t about hitting the jackpot with stock options but about finding a way for villages, and the values villages nourish, to survive. Spinning was a catalyst of “rural mindedness,” and thus an antidote to the giganticism and exploitation that were, in Gandhi’s view, inherent in industrial capitalism.

“You cannot build non-violence on a factory civilization,” Gandhi wrote, “but it can be built on self-contained villages….Rural economy as I have conceived it eschews exploitation altogether and exploitation is the essence of violence. You have therefore to be rural minded before you can be non-violent, and to be rural minded you have to have faith in the spinning wheel.” 

One phrase you use in your essay, Vishal, threw in especially stark relief the distance between your conception of technology’s potential and Gandhi’s. It appears in the midst of your discussion of computer literacy. “Just as the charkha did many decades ago,” you write, “computer literacy will help make makers out of us, help us weave our dreams into reality.” Two things are needed to make those dreams come true, you say: “advances in tooling and better abstractions.” 

Advances in tooling and better abstractions. No offense, but I can’t help thinking only a computer engineer could come up with a combination like that. And here again, you’re half right. 

Gandhi was definitely in favor of advances in tools (according to Wikipedia, he invented a small, portable spinning wheel that could be folded into the size of a small typewriter), but he wasn’t into abstractions. Indeed, he saw the spinning wheel as the antithesis of abstraction. The hands-on experience of spinning — the physicality of it — was precisely the point. What Gandhi called “charkha atmosphere” was a result of being fully grounded in the present. Spinning was a form of active meditation and a means of connecting to community and to nature. “Unless our hands go hand-in-hand with our heads,” he wrote, “we will be able to accomplish nothing whatsoever.” 

John Ruskin

These ideas are clearly less in tune with Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Ray Kurzweil (among the more prominent of your fellow believers in the Digital Millennium) than they are with those of Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich and E.F. Schumacher. The book that Gandhi credited with inspiring his spinning wheel campaign, and much else in his life, was Unto This Last by John Ruskin, a leading figure in the original “maker” movement and one of industrialism's greatest enemies. “We shall be remembered in history as the most cruel, and therefore the most unwise, generation of men that ever yet troubled the earth,” Ruskin said, “— the most cruel in proportion to their sensibility, — the most unwise in proportion to their science.” 

It’s no small irony, Vishal, that you published your essay on the occasion of the World Economic Forum, an event at which packs of super-rich executives arrive in private jets to discuss, among other things, global warming and the potential impact of automation on employment. (Reports list your own salary at somewhere around $7 million a year.) Perhaps more than anything, Gandhi objected to the concentration of wealth that modern technology tended to promote and the greed that drove it. 

Gandhi dedicated his life to personal austerity, to improving the lot of the poor and to spiritual rather than material gain. He often spoke of his admiration for the spirit of discovery in Western science and insisted that he wasn’t against all technology; what he opposed was the way technology was frequently used. “I do want growth, I do want self-determination, I do want freedom,” he said, “but I want all these for the soul…It is the evolution of the soul to which the intellect and all our faculties have to be devoted.”

To be fair, Vishal, I don’t doubt your hopes for humankind are the same as Gandhi’s: progress toward a better future for all. But please, can we acknowledge that the charkha and the computer embody substantially different ways of getting there? 

Yours Truly,

Doug Hill

(References that proved especially helpful in research for this letter include Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule and The Essential Writings; Rebecca M. Brown’s Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India; “Towards an Understanding of Gandhi's Views on Science,” by Shambhu Prasad; and “Gandhi and the Concept of Alternative Technology” by K. Gopinathan Pillai. Although his essay doesn’t mention it, Sikka may have been influenced by Sudheendra Kulkarni’s book, Music of the Spinning Wheel: Mahatma Gandhi's Manifesto for the Internet Age.)





©Doug Hill, 2015    

Authenticity, continued: Holding existential uncanniness at bay

Warhol's "Flowers"

Synchronicity strikes!

I was so busy writing my earlier post about the lure of ersatz authenticity (see "Authenticity and the 'pumpkins' next door") that I failed to notice the New York Times had run an interesting article on exactly that subject in its Home & Design section the day before. 

The ostensible thrust of the Times piece was that people are getting tired of the "authentic" or "vintage" look. Apparently it's no fun being authentic if everybody's doing it. The article devoted at least as much attention, however, to the efforts of home design conglomerates to cash in on authenticity.

Pottery Barn, a division of Williams and Sonoma, has a division called "Found," for example, while CB2, a division of Crate and Barrel, has a sub-brand it calls "One of a Finds" and another called "Hand-Touched." The suggestion that a line of products could be considered authentic because they've actually been touched by human hands is an indication of how far we've come.

The Times article generated quite a few interesting comments from readers, but only one or two mentioned what to me is the most salient point about the authenticity craze, and that's how alienated so many people feel – consciously and subconsciously – by the technological society.

It's not surprising that when almost everything we touch or encounter is mass-produced, a deep longing exists to find something real – something "organic" – to hold onto. At the same time many of us have become so distanced from the real and so conditioned by the artificial that we're willing to accept ersatz authenticity as a substitute for authentic authenticity.

         

One laughable comment in the Times article came from an interior designer who said our hunger for authenticity was triggered by the trauma of 9/11 and exacerbated by the recession that followed. In truth our longing for authenticity goes back a lot further than 9/11. Nostalgia for earlier, more settled times has always been with us, I suspect, but it emerged as a significant social phenomenon during the Industrial Revolution, when the upending of the familiar became an increasingly disruptive and increasingly consistent fact of life. 

A Victorian retreat from the Industrial Revolution

No accident that during the Gilded Age those who could afford it indulged in what Lewis Mumford called "a cult of antiquarianism," celebrating medieval chivalry and piety while lounging in Victorian drawing rooms that excluded, as Mumford put it, “every hint of the machine.” The Arts and Crafts movement spearheaded by William Morris and John Ruskin reflected a conviction that there was value in authenticity and that it was being crushed by mechanization. “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things," Morris said, "the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.”

         

Our efforts to counteract the loss of authenticity with made-to-order authenticity constitute one of the great ironies of the technological era. Henry Ford spent millions of dollars and years of his life creating Greenfield Village, a life-sized facsimile of the small town he remembered from his youth, the kind of place his automobiles had done so much to destroy. The biographer Robert Lacey quotes Ford's personal public relations man as explaining that his boss's goal with Greenfield Village was to recall "the real world of folks…that honest time when America was in the making." The implication being that "the real world of folks" had already passed us by, and would now exist only as a tourist attraction.

Greenfield Village

Several readers who commented on the Times article noted that they take pains to surround themselves with objects that don't just look authentic but actually are authentic. It's clear that what accounts for the distinction is accrued meaning – personal meaning – through investment of experience and association over time. "I have been collecting Christmas tree ornaments since my childhood," wrote Pamela from Los Gatos, California. "My family's Christmas tree is unique because I only buy the items that tell a story – represent my travels, life events or speaks to me."

This resonates with a point I spend some time on in my book: To a greater degree than we're usually aware of, we are in relation to the objects around us, and for that reason they effect us, profoundly. Their influence is so pervasive that we tend to take it for granted, and so overlook it, as we make our way in the world – a world that is now overwhelmingly technological. 

         

Family heirlooms

In their book, The Meaning of Things, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rocheberg-Halton explore the sorts of relationships people develop with objects in their homes. An exchange of "psychic energy" occurs, they say, between individuals and the things they possess. That exchange can either be uplifting, if the feedback we get is affirming in some way, or enervating, if the feedback is unpleasant. I think it's fair to say that objects we describe as "authentic" are objects that reassure us. They help us feel anchored in a tumultuous world.

The point I make in my book, and that comes across loud and clear in the Times article, is that we feel the need to build a wall of authenticity or pseudo-authenticity around us at home to fend off the inauthenticity that assaults us outside the home.

Hopper's "Nighthawks"

The theologian Paul Tillich wrote powerfully on this theme. Technology, he said, is a means by which we can hold off the "uncanniness" of the human condition by constructing a world that is safe and predictable, a world we think we can control. Like so many palliatives, however, the technological barrier against existential uncanniness turns out to be false, because technology produces its own sense of uncanniness – one that cannot be relieved by more technology. 

“The stronger and more complicated the technical structures are,” Tillich said,

the more they take on a life of their own, independent of human beings, the more difficult it becomes to control them, the more threatening they become…As the technical structures develop an independent existence, a new element of uncanniness emerges in the midst of what is most well known. And this uncanny shadow of technology will grow to the same extent that the whole earth becomes the “technical city” and the technical house. Who can still control it?

The answer to that, of course, is that we can control it, simply by choosing appropriately authentic home accessories, available from scores of friendly retailers, online or at the mall!       

       

©Doug Hill, 2012