The times, they are a-changin’
It seems like all our stories begin with Covid these days.
This one is no exception.
Last April, when the worst of the Coronavirus second wave was about to hit India, I somehow thought it would be a good idea to pack my bags and get a new place to live in. So, I, along with three other idiots that I happen to call friends, went to look for apartments. To our surprise, we managed to lock one down as well. We paid a total of ₹ 2.5L (~$3.3k) as a deposit for the house, which is a pretty hefty sum. Normally, deals like these usually go something like this — the renter pays the money, signs some papers, and the landlord hands over the keys.
Except that in our case, we never got past that first step.
As we paid the money, one of the four friends who was supposed to occupy the place found out that his father had become ill and had to fly back. A week later, the Covid situation in Delhi became extremely bad. Another friend got to know that because both his parents caught covid. I had just come back from staying at home for a year and didn’t want the process to repeat again. But it was scary and there weren’t a lot of options. With the lockdown imminent, our choices were either to stay in the existing place or to go back home. We chose the latter, mostly because our relaxed lifestyle had left some crucial elements of a sustainable life missing. Like a fridge. Or a washing machine. Or cooking utensils. Or basic furniture.
So, we decided to go back. There was just one problem with that approach. We didn’t know when we’d be back and we had to ask for the ₹ 2.5L back.
I’m obviously not going to bore you with the entire story. It involves a lot of phone calls, emails, some of them angry, some of them frustrated. It was quite stressful, but we managed to get the majority of the money back. For a smaller sum that was still pending, it turned out that the landlord hadn’t received the money because I had paid it via UPI.
UPI, to the uninitiated, is an extremely popular payment method in India. It clocked about 3.55 billion transactions, (worth ₹ 6.39 trillion, or
$ 85.3 billion), in just August of 2021¹. When you look at the trend, it is incredibly impressive.
There can always be more numbers to show how impressive this rise has been. But there is a catch here.
I tried my best to figure out where the money had gone if it hadn’t reached the landlord’s account. I followed up with Google (whose UPI app I had used to pay the money). They confirmed again and again that the transaction had been done successfully. I checked with my bank. They confirmed the same thing. So, effectively, I was out ₹ 25k (~ $ 333) without any idea of where the money went and a landlord who was getting increasingly agitated as I kept following up.
And this was a baffling situation for me to be in. Because this had never happened to me. As a part of the younger generation, I had jumped on the UPI bandwagon pretty early on. By the time this transaction came along, I had been using the technology for more than four years. Since I had started using it, the demographic of UPI had expanded and people in the older generation had also started to use it. Its rise has been pretty noticeable, as evident from all the other countries that followed India to build a version of the technology.
So, what had actually happened?
At this point, this might begin to feel like a story about technology’s generation bias. But it is not.
However, it is no surprise that Big Tech has a very well-documented generation bias. On a free day, wander around the tech-parks in Bellandur (an area in Bangalore famous for its, you guessed it, tech-parks.) and walk into the offices or coworking spaces. When you do, drink that free cappuccino from the expensive machine, and then make your way to a bank. Compare the two demographics that you see.
I don’t really need to belabor the point. Technologies, especially communication technologies, are being built for younger and younger generations. Perhaps that is not intentional. Younger generations are easier and more open to trying new things out compared to the older ones that are usually set in their ways and follow reluctantly, if at all.
As one grows up, it just becomes difficult to keep up with all the new ideas that get thrown to your face. And it doesn’t help that there is just entirely too much happening in the world.
Last week, Facebook changed its name to Meta, setting an ambitious goal of creating a Metaverse that looks strikingly similar to the world of Ready Player One.
A few months ago, two billionaires, not scientists or astronauts — ordinary people, literally flew and touched outer space.
A few months before that, a bunch of world-famous musicians did super-successful virtual concerts in Fortnite.
A few months before that, someone sold a cat gif for half a million US dollars.
When you turn your head back and take it all in retrospect, it feels too much. It does to me, at least. As a species, we are getting ready to travel Space commercially, to jump into the virtual worlds as if they are just another reality, and to purchase whatever the hell cryptocurrencies are.
To be honest, I thought that these were just fads. And even if they were, they no longer are. There have been strides here that almost feel too illogical to believe. NFTs are a part of a large ecosystem now. People are using them to get the one-in-a-kind skin or loot or weapon in some game. Online artifacts used to be replicable. NFT makes sure that there is only one owner. This allows for someone to be the sole and certified owner of a dinosaur-shaped gun in Fortnite. I don’t know why one would want to do that, but apparently if one does, one can.
All of these things are groundbreaking. But that’s what brings me to the point of the post. It is a question that bugs me the most about these innovations.
Why?
The issue, it turned out, with the phantom transaction was that the landlord had no idea that a UPI id can be linked with any bank account.
That’s it.
That was the miscommunication that I had spent six months trying to resolve.
The landlord had created a UPI using the services of Bank A but had somehow connected the account of Bank B to it. And this is not an uncommon incident. Even I have a UPI id that belongs to the bank that I have never had an account in. I’m sure there is a logical explanation for that, but for a UPI consumer like me, that is a given assumption. It is a part of the premise while using the technology that the creators of the technology would have made sure that it was a foolproof system.
Not quite the same with the landlord. The transaction had been successful and it had gone to his Bank B account. The landlord had not bothered to check in the Bank B account, because to him, since he had never shared the information of this account with me, there was no way the money could have made its way there.
When I finally got to know this and reached out to him, instead of quickly checking, his reaction had been to defend his stance. And why not? If I did not understand something, my reaction would be to make sense of it using the logical process and mental models that I already have in my head. But in order to actually understand the logic of what had happened in this transaction, required understanding just how modular banking had become.
To someone who has stayed in the bank lines their whole life, following the processes that the bank staff had carefully laid out in front of them, and relied on the passbook to refer to the older transactions, even the change as small as a new payment system might feel monumental. I still remember being shocked the first time I did an international transaction and the portal hadn’t asked for an OTP. I’m sure the system would have made sure that the transaction was secure, but I felt that it was unsafe.
It is not difficult to draw parallels from this. When systems become too simplified, they somehow become complicated to logically understand for the people that have followed a different process. So it is not unnatural for it all to feel like sorcery and inherently untrustworthy. And when someone asks to follow this untrustworthy process, they must want to stick to their old processes and ask in return,
Why?
Meta, NFT, UPI, and so many things that will come in the future will make life more convenient. They will make life so convenient that the way we have been thinking about systems and structures will drastically change.
Words like drastic and incredible and monumental, quickly lose their significance when we cannot picture how it will actually look like. The reason I feel the story with the uncle who doesn't understand UPI becomes relevant here is that it is not a new story. Every generation has a story like this. The older generation becomes outdated with the new technology and cannot fathom how it works. And that cycle seems okay. After all, its existence itself is proof that the world is advancing.
The key difference here is the pace. The changes that were happening over the course of a lifetime will be happening in decades. Even quicker. Over the course of my 25 years of existence, I’ve seen four major revisions in the way payments are done. I have seen gaming go from arcade/Nintendo/GameBoy-style devices to virtual worlds where people hold music concerts. I’ve seen the internet evolve from being an accessory of the real world to almost replacing the real world, to now adding new worlds on top of our own.
Why is this relevant?
There will be a kid, ten years from now, whose profession will be making online jackets that can be used in Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. People might scramble to pay top money to get the first copy of the virtual jacket that they can wear to other virtual parties. It might boost up the value of their wardrobe. In case the jacket-maker becomes really popular, the buyer can display their jacket as one-of-the-first-ones in a virtual museum.
I don’t know.
I don’t know what we will do with all this.
But more importantly, I don’t know why we will do it.
Similar to why the landlord didn’t understand why there was a need for a UPI transaction in the first place.
To refund the original transaction, the landlord called us over to his place. Helmet-clad and riding on a bike in the morning, we traveled 16 kilometers to his place.
At his place, he made me write a hand-written letter saying that I had given the money and now I am taking it back. I also had to sign the letter. Because of his mistrust of the payment system and of us, he would use the letter as proof in court in case we try to fraud him.
There was no easy answer here. Any explanation on our part either came out condescending or silver-tongued-attempt for a further scam. His refusal to believe in the technology came off as infuriating and massively inconvenient.
This is a feeling that I think, a lot of us will feel going forward. As new systems collapse the older ones, they are going to make us feel old and out of touch. And as the new systems keep propping up, we might feel this way more and more often.
I began this article with the aim of writing about these ideas that their creators are claiming will be world-changing. And they sure will be. But here is the trick with the ideas that are going to be world-changing. Since they are going to change the world, we cannot evaluate them with the rules of the current world. We have to make sure to evaluate them in the context of the world that they hope to create.
Yes, communication will become even smoother in the Metaverse. In that glossy presentation, Zuckerberg showed that just by putting on VR headsets or just a pair of glasses, you can be with anyone anytime from anywhere. But that reality contains a very real possibility of someone spending their entire life inside a room. And although, when the glasses are on, it is a whole vibrant virtual world around us, we absolutely have to ask the question —
What happens when the glasses come off?
The ideas and visions will always contain the best-case scenarios. Projected stats will pretty much always contain the best-case scenarios. As we venture into these unknown worlds, we should also be able to talk about the stories that these ideas and numbers represent.
And more importantly, the stories these numbers miss.
I’m still looking for an answer to how one should process and deal with this. But if nothing else, one thing we can count on is for Dylan’s songs to never really go out of fashion.
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times, they are a-changin’
