Pandemic Chronicles

My blog posts while being in self-quarantine/isolation during the time of COVID-19 Pandemic

97 days later

The current societal crisis in America, highlighted by the large scale protests in most major cities (and some small towns) has pushed the COVID-19 pandemic off the front page of our mind. But let’s not forget — it still is out there. And it continues to ravage society unevenly, and unjustly. I suppose we can all think and focus on one thing at a time — maybe because we have only so much emotional capacity to deal with the harsh realities of life. 

Who knows where we will be in a few weeks when basketball resumes, or baseball is on television, and life returns to our malls and shopping areas? Will we have the emotional wherewithal to deal with the virus, its impact?

With enough distractions, will society continue to care about racial injustices and inequalities in our cities? Will we have the energy to keep fighting for change? Or

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Musings
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Why don’t we listen

Another sleepless night. The events of recent days and the agony of being forced indoors by the pandemic are having a cumulative effect on my emotions. I am treading water through waves of sadness, anger, frustration, and most importantly, shame.

Shame on me for being so involved in my own petty little problems to not pay attention to a bigger problem in society. Shame on me for shirking the moral responsibility to be more focused on inequality and injustice. Shame on us that we are so easily mocked by the Chinese propaganda machine.

black and white labeled bottle
Photo by Donovan Valdivia on Unsplash

I feel shame for my country — not the country of my birth, but the country of my love and my life. America is an opt-in for all of us who hope for a better future. It is the idea that a nobody can become a somebody. When I became an

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Musings
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Sadness

There are days when outside events start to influence your productivity and mental health. The growing discord in our society, the tone-deaf nature of our leaders, and the sheer magnitude of death that is sweeping the planet got the better of me Friday, which is usually when I start to write down my big newsletter.

Sometimes I think social networks and the media hype cycle have distorted our sense of reality and amplified our fear and anxiety. Even a few minutes of news is enough for me to shudder. You feel that the whole world has gone mad, and the feeling of helplessness becomes overwhelming. The divisions in society, the lack of control, and the inability to overcome the injustices of modern society have exploded on our screens. Minneapolis is no different than Hong Kong.

How can one not be anxious and distraught when 100,000 of our fellow citizens have

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Musings
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What really is time in the time of pandemic

I wanted to go out and make photographs. Instead, I turned off my alarm and just lay on my back, looking at the ceiling, as if constant staring could turn it into a big blue vista. I kept thinking about a dubious milestone: 90 days in…whatever you want to label it: self-isolation, lockdown, quarantine.

The irony of our “new now” isn’t lost on me. While our attention is getting fractionalized (even atomized), the past 90 days have been a big, gelatinous blob. I desperately want not to think about how it was winter when I started to isolate, and now the summer is gently knocking on the window of my tiny apartment. It used to be 55 degrees during the day. Today, it is already in the mid-60s before 7 am.

Will the pandemic finally break us free from the traditional idea of time and all its trappings? Whether it

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Musings, Technology
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Why every tech downturn has a silver lining

San Francisco was a very bleak place in the aftermath of the dot.com meltdown that began in the spring of 2000. Every single day of that summer I woke up to the news of more layoffs, more shutdowns, and a general sense of despondency which only got worse when the tragic morning of September 11, 2001, brought a swift end to whatever innocence and optimism remained. I remember feeling under a pall of gloom, going about with a dark cloud over my soul and tears in my eyes. The months that followed that horrific event were particularly difficult but I found a way to react, and that was to write. So I started writing on my blog. About technology. About the networks. About the Internet. I wrote about jobs lost. I wrote about things that could be. And things that would be. Deep down, I believed in one thing for

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My Essays, Technology
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Real reasons why tech giants are hugging “Remote Work”

This past week Facebook became one of the largest proponents of remote work. It made headlines for considering allowing people to permanently work from home. In doing so, it joined the likes of Twitter, Square, and Shopify, all of whom are recent, post-pandemic converts. (The idea is not so new to companies like GitLab and Automattic.)

This is the same Zuckerberg who felt compelled to force employees to move closer to Palo Alto. The one who resisted the idea of a San Francisco operation. This guy is suddenly the poster child of “working from home?” Why this abrupt shift in the management philosophy of companies like Facebook?

To answer this question, you need only to abide by the golden rule: follow the money.

Those fancy offices, catered lunches, and all the other luxuries that allow people to pretend that they are still in college and getting paid for it —

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Technology
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[Podcast] Stuck@Om w/Wired Editor Nick Thompson on the pandemic, its impact on technology and change + why we mistrust media

In this episode of Stuck@Om, I chat with one of the great human beings on the planet — Nicholas Thompson. He’s the Editor in Chief at WIRED Magazine, an avid marathoner, and has penned one of the best essays I’ve read in recent times. In this conversation, Nick and I talk about how media outlets have to shift the way they write stories to generate “clicks” over “subscriptions.” 

A good friend and occasional editor of my words (at The New Yorker and once at Wired), Nick is a genuinely funny guy, as you can judge from his throwaway line: “My ambition in life has always been to be a LinkedIn video celebrity.”

We also converse about the reputation of the media and how it hasn’t improved during the coronavirus crisis. “The work we’re doing has never been more important. On the other hand, the financial model is more challenged than

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Podcast, Technology
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[05.18.2020] Signals

This just might be the best thing you read today. “This virus has been, both literally and metaphorically, a disease of modernity. Why? Because It attacks via the vectors of modernity: trade linkages, obesity, diabetes, air travel, mass transportation, urban density, social media, etc. Understanding long-run change requires understanding where modernity itself is under threat, and whether those threats will lead to meaningful and investable change.” Paul Kedrosky: Sub criticality, Spread, and Future of Now.

For about thirty minutes this month, the world had a chance to get a first-hand experience of the power of Facebook. Well, at least the world that uses mobile apps on the iPhone. The social platform was having technical problems and as a result for about half-an-hour apps from companies big and small were all broken — thanks to a minor server configuration glitch. This is a problem when you rely on one company, or

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Technology
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80 Days

Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash

Today is yet another Monday in the pandemic — my 12th, to be exact. And just like that, I am on day No. 80 of self-quarantine. It feels as if life has always been this way. Today starts like so many of the others: Wake up. Go for a walk. On the way back, see people jogging or biking along The Embarcadero. No one is wearing masks — willfully ignoring the physics of how the virus has already killed nearly one hundred thousand Americans and many more around the world. 

When I started this quarantine, the weather was not as lovely. Colder than usual, gray skies with occasional fog — it was as if the weather was reflecting our collective moodiness. These days, the sun rises early and shines brighter for most of the day. It is warmer, and it feels like May in San Francisco.  The

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Musings
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