Today, November 30, is my last day at The Wire Science and The Wire. I was part of their founding team and the seven years since have made for an exciting and enriching ride.
The two things I’m most grateful for were all the new friends I made in this time and the freedom to imagine a ‘The Wire‘s brand of science journalism’. We published a lot of science, health, environment and spaceflight writing of the very highest standard, and it’s my privilege to count the bylines of several stellar writers on the pages of The Wire Science.
Many of our articles have won awards and, equally importantly, renewed interest in areas of study and work, became books and teaching materials, the starting points for PhD programmes and, perhaps most gratifying of all, prompted people to think about science a bit differently.
Come January 2023, I will be joining The Hindu in a role that I’m quite excited by. I’m especially looking forward to focusing on my own work, which I haven’t been able to do for a while. Running The Wire Science was (and is) an exacting task and at The Hindu I’m also looking forward to lightening some of that load.
Thank you all for reading what The Wire Science has published – and, I hope, will continue to do so. Going ahead, please also divert a little bit of your reading time to The Hindu. 🙂 I’m counting on your constructive criticism, as always.
At the start of this month, I began my first vacation in six years. A friend and colleague had done a similar thing recently and said that it takes a week just to switch off from thinking about work. My experience has been a little different, and the time off has also afforded a clearer view of the way I feel about what I do. I’m still to switch off from work, per se, but not because I’m so committed to the job. I think it’s because what I do for a living is a marginal extension of what I do in my default state: think about science, write, and keep learning. The last two are in fact my most favourite things to do. Work requires in addition to these things a scattering of obligations that I’m happy to fulfill and in exchange for a suitable fee. More recently, with India’s social and political climate being what it is, I realise that the things I like doing have acquired yet another layer of identity: that of being salvaged material – stories and ideas protected from the violence of misinterpretation, forgetfulness and irrelevance. I admit I much like the idea that my blog is a safe haven in this sense, but because it is, I also feel compelled to collect the preservation-worthy stories and ideas of others (as words or as permalinks). Most of all, it directly imbues the act of writing, within the framework of the internet and online publishing, with purpose. Purpose is easiest to acknowledge when its temper is evident in the smallest, most nuclear elements of the thing it inhabits. The purpose of war for example finds simple and complete expression in every plan conceived and bullet fired, in the direction of and against the welfare of Others. But it is much harder to answer the question “Why do you write?”. So when an answer presents itself, however briefly, you seize upon it, treasure it. You want more than anything to remember it because the instruments with which you express and understand purpose – words – are, to every writer, whether of postcards or of magnum opi, the same instruments with which to make and wield a million other meanings, and in the churn of which purpose is at constant risk of corruption. Words are semantically ergodic: they are capable of visiting every point in the universe of all possible meanings available to be constructed. This is infinitely beautiful but also diminishes the opportunities for historicity – of a sequence of events that is meaningful because of the sequence itself, instead of no one sequence being able to be privileged over any others. I can’t possibly write to visit every point in this universe, nor do I wish to; I write to construct a history that I find meaningful, and my heuristic of choice is the identity and evolution of purpose. Right now, it seems, the purpose is to salvage, and I’m grateful that it is as strong as to be immutable even in the articles and the commas of this silly post.
None of the images in this post are available to reuse.
I visited Jebel Jais, or the Mt. Jais, mountain in the UAE yesterday. It is a part of the Al Hajar Mountains, which in Arabic translates roughly to ‘The Stone Mountains’ (جِبَال ٱلْحَجَر). These mountains line the northeastern border of the Arabian peninsula, running the length of and almost parallel to Oman’s eastern coast. In the UAE, it pierces into the emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, and that’s where Jebel Jais is located as well.
A small group of us drove from Sharjah a few hours after a sandstorm had hit, sending the visibility plummeting and rendering the whole desert landscape with a dystopian brush. The way from Sharjah to the Al Hajar is largely empty, dotted now and then by a government building, a petrol station or unused housing colonies. But if you pay attention to the sand, you’ll see it changes colour from a pale orange to dark grey to bright orange, and finally to a dull grey as you reach the mountains themselves. I couldn’t capture this on my phone camera.
En route.
The tectonic context of the Al Hajar: the Arabian plate is moving into the Eurasian plate in the north, deforming the crust along the Makran subduction zone in the Gulf of Oman and the Zagros fault in Iran. Beyond this, I found a dispatch in the April 2015 issue of Gazelle, a publication of the Dubai Natural History Group, that matched much of my local experience around the mountains. So let me quote from there at length:
Twelve DNHG members, led by Sonja Lavrenčič, headed to Ras al Khaimah on April 10 for an exploration of Wadi Bih; an extensive watercourse which once served as a caravan route through Ras al Khaimah and Musandam. [Wadi in Arabic is roughly ‘stream’ or the path of a stream.]
The wadi lies under Jebel Jais, considered one of the highest points in the UAE, and presents a magnificent though very harsh landscape. At the time of our visit all the channels were completely dry and one branch of the watershed was barricaded by the Jabana landslide.
A little before my group’s visit, in fact, there had been a heavy downpour due to which the waters had flooded the drains along the sides of the road, breached the high water-mark in the plains and triggered a half-dozen landslides.
A drain along the side of the road.A view of the valley.
The rocky debris collected near the feet of the mountains due to a landslide.
Between two ridges is a broad alluvial plain with a scattering of acacia trees, and our route took us in a loop around this area, skirting the edges of the slope.
The valley has a small modern settlement, and we encountered signs of earlier habitations at intervals. A tributary ravine named Wadi Ghabbas shelters a handful of ruined stone houses among Sidr trees [Ziziphus spina-christi], and another collection of homesteads stands across the plain under the opposite slope. …
Notable monuments to the exertions of earlier residents are the heavy stone walls of terrace fields seen around the wadi. The retaining walls were built over several seasons in locations where they would catch layers of alluvial wash; the accumulation of moist deep earth would then yield a crop of high-grade barley, which was packed off to the coast and used especially for sfai flatbread.
We examined two cisterns, stone-lined and of rounded rectangular form. In other environments the green opaque water with its drifting skim and fringe of withered grass might not be thought enticing but, in this desiccated terrain, whatever is wet is welcome.
The ascent to Jebel Jais begins in about 140 km and is picturesque from the start, especially if you can appreciate the features of arid landscapes. I lived for four years in the middle of nowhere in the UAE a while ago. I didn’t enjoy life then but you start to understand the desert and find pleasure when the heat is drier. On the day of our visit, in fact, the relative humidity was 40% and there was prediction of rain. Ras Al Khaimah is often the wettest of the seven emirates of the UAE, partly because of the Al Hajar.
The Al Hajar is at the centre of Ras Al Khaimah’s aspiration to become as prosperous as the emirate of Dubai. You might see some of these photos sport unusual linear shadows – they’re of cellphone towers. The UAE’s two cellphone networks have towers across the mountains. Almost all the towers bear the words “Jebel Jais – Ras Al Khaimah”. Perhaps the thinking is that if your phone works all over the place, you might be less averse to spending time here at any time of day. We did see one group of people hosting a barbecue halfway up Jebel Jais and quite a few others on picnics.
There are also spacious viewing decks with dumpsters, clean public toilets and – near these decks – solar-powered water purifiers and street lamps. We also spotted a (speed-controlled) roller-coaster and what’s purported to be the world’s long zip-line. It was closed for service when we visit because of the sandstorm. Someone said there’s a proposal for a five-star hotel near the Jebel Jais peak, plus other restaurants, cafés, camps and outdoor activities in the area.
A mobile cellphone tower.
In early 2021, the UAE’s Hope probe entered into orbit around Mars. Where R&D is concerned, UAE might be considered naïve but also extremely wealthy, allowing it to throw money at problems that would indeed benefit from more money. The Hope probe’s development had involved some scientists in the UAE as well as three American universities, which had also put the probe together. But the probe flew with the UAE flag and its orbital capture was timed to happen in the 50th year of the country’s existence. The UAE is effectively using the achievements of spaceflight available to achieve today to elevate its international standing and advertise its ability to think progressively, even if in a superficial sense.
Closer to ground, en route to Jebel Jais, you might spot a labourers’ camp or two, where conditions have only recently improved to include minimum wages for Indians. This contrast is inescapable throughout the UAE but especially in its rapidly urbanising parts. Ras Al Khaimah itself is a wealthy emirate whose highways feature sophisticated traffic cameras and radar imagers even as they’re flanked by petrol stations operated by overworked, underpaid Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants.
Near the feet of the Al Hajar, in fact, the emirate has been doling out land (and water and power) to Emiratis for them to build large houses on, anticipating the area’s impending, inevitable prosperity. There’s nothing similar for the immigrant workers who laid those supply lines.
A panoramic shot of the Jebel Jais landscape. Ignore the smear.
An important thing that the emirates, their companies and their contractors are doing is exercising a latent resentment of the aridity. The workers’ work to ‘develop’ Jebel Jais is hardly distinguishable from an exercise in transforming the desiccation into a tenuous urban paradise, in much the same way Dubai has been expanding by gradually swallowing sea and sky and Abu Dhabi has been by exploiting hydrocarbon extraction and export.
I’m not sure what Ras Al Khaimah’s long-term plans are, to be honest, but if they’re anything like those of Dubai, one has to think they also include proposals to ‘reclaim’ the sea, afforest large areas of the desert, roll out cloud-seeding programmes, create and expand a ‘financial district’, attract tourists and spread the gospel of consumerism.
We had started our ascent at around 4 pm and reached an altitude of some 1.5 km by 5.40 pm. We couldn’t go much further because the road work hadn’t been completed beyond that point. The peak of Jebel Jais itself was another 0.5 km upward. There was no wind and for the first time there was some blue in the sky, which meant we were above the sandstorm. It was also 6º C or so cooler than it was on the ground.
The end of the road.
On the way down, we stopped for some cotton candy (at a small restaurant a local had set up in one of the viewing decks) and continued on. Two new sights we were able to catch were of the mountains we couldn’t see properly during the ascent, because of the sand in the air, and some cirrus clouds in the sky.
Beholding something colossal is a distinctly unsettling feeling. Something so large that you realise the smallness of your own body, and the bodies of other people, and simultaneously the largeness of the world around you. Especially the ability of little things – pebbles, motes of sand, splinters of rock – to crenellate on and on, not stopping when they’re as big as you, as your house, as your airplanes. They keep going like a deliberate reminder by the forces of nature of the scale at which they’ve been labouring for millennia. Thus, you’re forced to countenance the simple and immutable weight of perspective. Like tens of thousands of people join a protest until parliaments and palaces tremble, the mountainous accretion of diminutive objects can loom large enough to render human intelligence and ingenuity itself of doubtful value. This, they seem to say, is the world. Welcome.
Just as we reached the highway and began on the road home, a second, more intense sandstorm had hit the region and the hillscape became martian. The wind and the sand whipped so incessantly around that they scattered sunlight meaningless. You could easily defy its brightness and look directly at it. Thanks to millions of motes of sand, your star is no longer blinding.
The team operating NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) released its first full-colour image early on July 12, and has promised some more from the same set in the evening. The image is a near-infrared shot of the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster some 4.6 billion lightyears away. According to a press release accompanying the image’s release, the field of view – which shows scores of galaxies as well as several signs of gravitational lensing (which is evident only when very large distances are involved) – is equivalent to the area occupied by a grain of sand held at arm’s length from the eyes.
I’m personally looking forward to the telescope’s shot of the Carina Nebula: the Hubble space telescope’s images of this emission nebula were themselves stunning, so the JWST’s shot should be more so!
Gazing at the JWST’s first image brought to my mind the sorites paradox. Its underlying thought-experiment might resonate with you were you to ponder the classical limit of quantum physics or the concept of emergence as Philip Warren Anderson elucidated it as well. Imagine a small heap of sand before you. You pick up a single grain from the heap and toss it away. Is the sand before you still in a heap? Yes. You put away another grain and check. Still a heap. So you keep going, and a few thousand checks later, you find that you have before you a single grain of sand. Is it still a heap? If your answer is ‘yes’, the follow-up question arises: how can a single grain of sand be a heap? If ‘no’, then when did the heap stop being a heap?
Another way to conjure the same paradox is to start with one grain of sand and which is evidently not a heap. Then you add one more grain, which is also not a heap, and one more and one more and so forth. Using modus ponens supplies the following line of reasoning: “One mote isn’t a heap. And if one mote isn’t a heap, then two motes don’t make a heap either. And three motes don’t make a heap either. And so on until: if 9,999 motes don’t make a heap, then 10,000 motes don’t make a heap either.” But while straightforward logic has led you to this conclusion, your sense-experience is clear: what lies before you is in fact a heap.
The paradox came to mind because it’s hard not to contemplate the fact that both the photograph and the goings-on in India at the moment – from the vitriolic bigotry that’s constantly being mainstreamed to the arrest and harassment of journalists, activists and other civilians, both by the ruling dispensation – are the product of human endeavour. I’m not interested in banal expressions of the form “we’re all in this together” (we’re not) or “human intelligence and ingenuity can always be put to better use” (this is useless knowledge); instead, I wonder what the spectrum of human actions – which personal experience has indicated repeatedly to be continuous and ultimately ergodic – looks like that encompasses, at two extremes, actions of such beauty and of such ugliness. When does beauty turn to ugliness?
Or are these terms discernible only in absolutes – that is, that there is no lesser or higher beauty (or ugliness) but only one ultimate form, and that like the qubits of a quantum computer, between ultimate beauty and ultimate ugliness there are some indeterminate combinations of each attribute for which we have no name or understanding?
I use ‘beauty’ here to mean that which is deemed worthy of preservation and ‘ugliness’, of erasure. The sorites paradox is a paradox because of the vague predicates: ‘heap’, for example, has no quantitative definition. Similarly, I realise I’m setting up vague, as well as subjective, predicates when I set up beauty and preservation in the way that I have, so let me simplify the question: how do I, how do you, how do we reconcile the heap of sand that is the awesome deep-field shot of a distant galaxy cluster with the single grain of sand that is the contemporary political reality of India? Is a reconciliation even possible – that is, is there still a continuous path of thought, aspiration and action that could take a people seeped in hate and violence to a place of peaceability, tolerance and openness? Or have we fundamentally and irredeemably lost a part of ourselves that has turned us non-ergodic, that will keep us now and for ever from experiencing certain forms of beauty?
Language and the words that we use about ourselves will play a very important part here – the adjectives we save for ourselves versus those for the people or ideas that offend us, the terms in which we conceive of and describe our actions, everything from the order of words of our shortest poems to that of jargon of our courts’ longest judgments. Our words help us to convince ourselves, and others, that there is beauty in something even if it isn’t readily apparent. A bhakt might find in the annals of OpIndia and The Organiser the same solace and inspiration, and therefore the virtue of preserving what he finds to be beautiful, that a rational progressivist might find in Salvage or Viewpoint. This is among other things because language is how we map meaning to experience – the first point of contact between the material realm and human judgment, an interaction that will forever colour every moral, ethic and justicial conclusion to come after.
This act of meaning-making is also visible in physics, where there are overlapping names for different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum because the names matter more for the frequencies’ effects on the human body. Similarly, in the book trade, genre definitions can be overlapping – The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu is both sci-fi and fantasy, for example – because they matter largely for marketing.
One way or another, I’m eager, but not yet desperate, for an answer that will keep the door open for some measure of reversibility – and not for the bhakts but for those engaged in pushing back against their ilk. (The bhakts can go to hell.) The cognitive dissonance otherwise – of a world that creates things and ideas worth preserving and of a world that creates things and ideas worth erasing – might just break my ability to be optimistic about the human condition.
Featured image: The JWST’s image of the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI.
My first byline as a professional journalist (a.k.a. my first byline ever) was oddly for a tech story – about the advent of IPv6 internet addresses. I started writing it after 7 pm, had to wrap it up by 9 pm and it was published in the paper the next day (I was at The Hindu).
The first byline that I actually wanted to take credit for appeared around a month later, on July 4, 2012 – ten years ago – on the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe. I published a live blog as Fabiola Gianotti, Joe Incandela and Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the spokespersons of the ATLAS and CMS detector collaborations and the director-general of CERN, respectively, announced and discussed the results. I also distinctly remember taking a pee break after telling readers “I have to leave my desk for a minute” and receiving mildly annoyed, but also amused, comments complaining of TMI.
After the results had been announced, the science editor, R. Prasad, told me that R. Ramachandran (a.k.a. Bajji) was filing the main copy and that I should work around that. So I wrote a ‘what next’ piece describing the work that remained for physicists to do, including open problems in particle physics that stayed open and the alternative theories, like supersymmetry, required to explain them. (Some jingoism surrounding the lack of acknowledgment for S.N. Bose – wholly justifiable, in my view – also forced me to write this.)
I also remember placing a bet with someone that the Nobel Prize for physics in 2012 wouldn’t be awarded for the discovery (because I knew, but the other person didn’t, that the nominations for that year’s prizes had closed by then).
To write about the feats and mysteries of particle physics is why I became a science journalist, so the Higgs boson’s discovery being announced a month after I started working was special – not least because it considerably eased the amount of effort I had to put in to pitches and have them accepted (specifically, I didn’t have to spend too much time or effort spelling out why a story was important). It was also a great opportunity for me to learn about how breaking news is reported as well as accelerated my induction into the newsroom and its ways.
But my interest in particle physics has since waned, especially from around 2017, as I began to focus in my role as science editor of The Wire (which I cofounded/joined in May 2015) on other areas of science as well. My heart is still with physics, and I have greatly enjoyed writing the occasional article about topological phases, neutrino astronomy, laser cooling and, recently, the AdS/CFT correspondence.
A couple years ago, I realised during a spell of daydreaming that even though I have stuck with physics, my act of ‘dropping’ particle physics as a specialty had left me without an edge as a writer. Just physics was and is too broad – even if there are very few others in India writing on it in the press, giving me lots of room to display my skills (such as they are). I briefly considered and rejected quantum computing and BECCS technologies – the former because its stories were often bursting with hype, especially in my neck of the woods, and the latter because, while it seemed important, it didn’t sit well morally. I was indifferent towards them because they were centered on technologies whereas I wanted to write about pure, supposedly boring science.
In all, penning an article commemorating the tenth anniversary of the announcement of the Higgs boson’s discovery brought back pleasant memories of my early days at The Hindu but also reminded me of this choice that I still need to make, for my sake. I don’t know if there is a clear winner yet, although quantum physics more broadly and condensed-matter physics more specifically are appealing. This said, I’m also looking forward to returning to writing more about physics in general, paralleling the evolution of The Wire Science itself (some announcements coming soon).
I should also note that I started blogging in 2008, when I was still an undergraduate student of mechanical engineering, in order to clarify my own knowledge of and thoughts on particle physics.
WordPress.com announced a new ‘Starter’ plan for its users on May 25 after significant backlash from many members of its community of users that a previous price revision had completely disregarded the interests of bloggers – by which I mean those writing to be read and discussed, and not primarily to make money. My own post on the matter blew up on Hacker News and caught the attention of WordPress.com CEO Dave Martin and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg.
All of it was warranted: the previous price revision eliminated the ‘Personal’, ‘Premium’, ‘Business’ and ‘E-commerce’ plans in favour a single plan that combined all their features into a $15-a-month bundle that, WordPress.com added, users could only pay for 12 months at a time. WordPress.com’s rationale appeared to be that the ‘Pro’ plan was an almost perfect substitute for the ‘Business’ plan but was $10 cheaper.
But the company management, led by Martin, overlooked a few crucial details in the process: the pricing change was sudden and unannounced, and included an anathematic traffic limit on the free plan (which it removed shortly after); there were no plans between the free and ‘Pro’ plans, forcing even those indifferent towards making money – which was most bloggers including myself – to shell out $180 dollars a year just to add a custom domain; in exchange, these users received a trove of features most of which were useless (e.g. to sell products); and the free plan had its storage decreased by 66%.
I know “free” doesn’t really mean that when coming from the mouth of an internet platform or provider of internet-related services, but WordPress.com had set up exactly this expectation among its users: that they should never have to pay if they’re on the free plan. Look for Matt Mullenweg saying some version of “we want to democratise publishing on the web” (LMGTFY) and you’ll see what I mean. But it needs to acknowledge that what you get for free is less and less usable. I’m not saying don’t shrink the free plan; I’m saying stop pretending that it’s still just as good.
Members of the WordPress.com team should in effect stop claiming that they are rooting to improve access to any kind of publishing because the company’s actions on the pricing issue thus far haven’t been the actions of one with that vision. Instead, it should be more honest and recognise the conflict between increasing access to publishing tools and platforms on the one hand and its need to increase its profits on the other, and take cognisance of its apparent struggle to balance these priorities in its products and communicate the changes to its users.
This brings me back to the new ‘Starter’ plan. It costs $5 a month, also billable only yearly, and has two big changes from its most comparable legacy counterpart, the ‘Personal’ plan: it offers Google Analytics integration and it doesn’t remove ads. The former is confusing because almost none of the people who commented negatively on the WordPress.com post announcing the ‘Pro’ plan and the subsequent forum discussion mentioned wanting access to Google Analytics. The native analytics are pretty good and suffice for bloggers. The latter is more confusing because the ‘Personal’ plan cost $4 a month and removed ads. Why should I pay a dollar more every month and still put up with ads? Unless WordPress.com makes a lot of money through these ads (which I’ve been unable to ascertain with five minutes of googling). The confusion is exacerbated by the fact that most people who wanted a cheaper plan wanted the ability to add a custom domain and to remove ads.
(Interestingly, WordPress.com has many thousands of blogs lying dormant or unused, all of which also carry ads from WordPress’s WordAds network. If WordPress.com deleted these sites, would their hosting costs drop? Of course, doing so will raise questions about the importance of WordPress.com’s commitment to keeping the sites it hosts online forever.)
This said, I’m not very particular on this issue, especially after Dave Martin indicated to WPTavern that they need to make more money on subscriptions: “Finding the right balance between the value that we deliver to our customers and the price that we charge in exchange for that value is something that generally has to be iterated towards. We plan to do just that.” Costs are increasing, I understand.
But I’m still disappointed on three counts:
Importance of monthly pricing – Martin told WPTavern that the company plans to “experiment” with monthly billing, suggesting that it’s no longer on par in terms of importance with the pricing itself. I would have liked to sign up for the ‘Pro’ plan by paying $15 a month to access the ability to add plugins, use premium themes and access the “advanced” SEO and social media tools. This would have been comparable in benefits to managed hosting by Flywheel or LightningBase (no affiliate links), with the bonus that the people who make WordPress also being in charge of my blog’s hosting. But a one-time expense of $180 (or the new India price, Rs 10,800) is not one I can bear, nor, judging by the comments on the ‘Pro’ plan announcement post, most other bloggers who are not in North America or Europe.
India prices – The region-specific price for India for the ‘Starter’ plan is the same as that in NA/EU, and for the ‘Pro’ plan, it hasn’t come down by as much as would be required to make annual payments affordable. I don’t understand how/why the ‘Starter’ plan costs as much in India as it does in NA/EU when the erstwhile ‘Personal’ plan cost 1.5x lower in India – except perhaps if WordPress.com is eyeing big growth in India.
Uncertainty and triumphalism – Martin responded to my post, wrote on the forum and told WPTavern that his team’s communication deserved to be called out. But the ‘Starter’ plan announcement on the WordPress.com blog, which has more than 90 million subscribers, is bereft of any admission of wrong-doing (which Martin spelt out in other fora); together with a triumphalist tone for the announcement itself, issues with the ‘Starter’ plan and no clear roadmap on what comes next (“this was the first of a couple of phases of changes”, Martin told WPTavern), the announcement wasn’t nearly as fulfilling as I expected it to be.
This brings me to the last and also the most grating issue for me: “we are listening”, both Martin and his support-staff colleagues repeatedly said on the forum, but as one comment pointed out, listening is a passive activity. Listening when people are shouting at you out of frustration, disappointment and confusion is the bare minimum and not a virtue. And it’s because I know WordPress.com can do better that I take the trouble to say that it needs to do better.
What we wanted, and want, from WordPress.com was/is a constant and intimate awareness of the (not-insubstantial number of) people who don’t give a damn about using WordPress.com to make money but give a big damn about using it to publish posts for the world to read and talk about. We need to know whether WordPress.com intends to maintain this awareness going ahead, and whether it will listen to its bloggers first – as the least common denominators – the next time a big change is around the corner.
(A similar thing appears to have happened with the proposal of the ‘WordPress performance team’ to make WebP the default image type on hosted sites.)
Thinking about the number ’10’ is hard. It’s the number of years I will have soon been a journalist for (as will my ACJ batchmates). Why commemorate it?
In this time, I’ve seen many of my colleagues and peers in different organisations quit journalism for communications jobs in non-journalistic settings, which pay better and are likely easier on the mind and on life. So to be able to persist for so long in this profession, also rendered more treacherous by a vengeful state, is to question one’s privileges on various levels.
Ten is a round number, and that roundness has I suspect something uniquely bio-psychological going for it. Our choice of the decimal number system is surely rooted in the number of fingers on our hands, which makes counting in multiples of 10 intuitive. Other than this, the value of 10 – that is, to have 10 of something – seems inscrutable. Do we commemorate six years of something? Or 11 or 4.5? To celebrate 10 often seems to be a privilegement of our own biology – especially when we have achieved little else.
When The Wire Science interviewed physicist Kip Thorne in 2017, the interviewer asked him if the discovery of gravitational waves 100 years after Einstein’s development of general relativity meant anything special to him. Thorne said: “Oh no, not particularly. We just happen to use base-10. If we used base-9, it wouldn’t work. Maybe I have faith in our choice of the base.” Modern classical as well as quantum computing use base-2 systems (0s/1s and two-dimensional Hilbert space, respectively). It’s all a matter of convenience – which I only say to conclude that commemorations based on time alone seem inherently meaningless (except when the passage of time is itself a virtue).
In December 2018, I wrote to a close friend in an email: “On December 23, 2018, I will be 3.94 galactic seconds old (one galactic year is the time Earth takes to go around the Milky Way, about 240 million years). Isn’t that simply more celestial? On May 26, 2019, I will be 4 galactic seconds old.” A nice, round number – but comfort in what is this? Positive integers? Rational numbers? But most importantly, it’s a reminder that there is no fixed way to measure time.
I wrote this post today, May 10, 2022, Tuesday. I’ve developed a habit of making anagrams when I’m bored, and found Anu Garg’s wordsmith.org as a result when I was looking for an anagram animator. I also subscribed to Garg’s newsletter about words and made a donation to support his work on it; you don’t find many newsletters dedicated to words whose authors don’t also bother their readers with too much of their own writing (e.g. Maria Popova). The weekly theme in the newsletter for the week of May 9 is words related to time. Opportune. The word for Monday in particular was timeous: “in good time”. Example: “I knew Bridget always ran out of supplies during a party and thought I should make timeous provision” (source: Andre Brink; Before I Forget; Sourcebooks; 2007).
My commemoration of having been a professional journalist for 10 years wouldn’t be timeous.
WordPress.com squandered the trust of bloggers it had accrued for almost a decade (approx. since the advent of their Calypso editor) with the decision to introduce the Pro plan the way it did. There were many proclamations – direct and indirect – in between, chiefly by Automattic CEO Matt Maullenweg, about how this trust was important to the company. Now I’ve got to think that the Pro plan rollout was a true reflection of how WordPress.com perceived the trust, and wonder how WordPress.com will treat hobby bloggers in future.
The most popular request in responses to WordPress.com’s post on its blog and CEO Dave Martin’s post in the forums is that WordPress.com needs to bring back its old plans (which the Pro plan replaced) quite simply because none of the users found them confusing. I tend to agree. Both Martin and Mullenweg have said that WordPress.com created the Pro plan because the old plans were confusing – but considering I’m yet to come across a WordPress.com blogger who feels the same way, I suspect this is something WordPress.com wanted to do to “score the investors a higher multiple”, but which “seems like a move that is incongruent with the mission statement and the strengths of the existing brand” (source). And once they made this decision, they retconned it by claiming that it was what bloggers wanted. I’m glad all the bloggers in the post comments and on the forum spoke up.
Third, there are some WordPress.com staff members who are periodically encouraging WordPress.com users to keep sharing their feedback as responses on the forum. The WordPress.com blog post also said that they’re listening to users’ feedback, implying that users should keep it coming. I found this heartening at first but now, almost three weeks since the abrupt price change, these calls seem disingenuous. How much feedback does WordPress.com really need to understand the extent to which it screwed up? If it’s a lot, then it would mean the company screwed up big time. (I think this might be a valid concern based on this line in Martin’s forum post {emphasis added}: “We plan to test adding monthly pricing back in, but we don’t have a specific date for this just yet.”) Surely it’s the responsibility of the top management to obviate such a tremendous need for feedback by anticipating what it is that its users want. This also makes me doubt the short surveys that used to appear on the WordPress.com dashboard and what the people running it took away from the responses.
It’s annoying that WordPress.com staff constantly ask for feedback to be given right now, instead of in the many, many years in which bloggers were happily publishing on the platform. This is exacerbated by the fact that none of the staff members are able to provide a deadline for changes to the Pro plan, which I can only take to mean that the company didn’t anticipate any of these changes.
I recently wrote that I’ve stuck with WordPress.com for so long, for all its purported limitations, because its features fully suffice the committed blogger whose content is textual for the most part and because the company behind WordPress.com is running a good business, with the right ideals. (To the uninitiated, here’s an explanation of the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.) But in the last two or three days, WordPress.com has jolted both these beliefs with a surprisingly wide-ranging rejig of its paid plans.
Earlier, there were five plans: free, personal, premium, business and e-commerce. The free plan came with no custom domain and 3 GB of storage – which is great for people looking to just write and publish and because WordPress.com subdomains had tenancy: it kept them alive even if the blogs at those locations had long died and it didn’t, and still doesn’t, allow people to register a subdomain that used to be owned by someone else and has since been deleted.
But at some point late last week, WordPress replaced all of the paid plans with a single ‘Pro’ plan and reduced the storage on the free plan 6x, from 3 GB to 500 MB. It also imposed a traffic ceiling on both plans where none existed: 10,000 visits a month and 100,000 visits a month (and it hasn’t said anything about overages – so far). As these changes were rolled out to user dashboards over the weekend, many users have also reported that the changes had been imposed on their old blogs as well, whereas the norm is to grandfather old user accounts with preexisting subscriptions (i.e. allowing them to continue on those plans and restricting the new plans to new users). There hasn’t been any official announcement from WordPress.com either about what we’re seeing, whether these users’ experiences are the exceptions or the rules, or anything else.
With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps we should have seen this coming: the new full-site editing option has rendered premium themes, and thus the premium and business plans redundant; the Gutenberg upgrade allowed users on free as well as personal plans to do some of the things that were previously only possible with premium or business plans. But to be honest, the hindsight doesn’t explain why WordPress.com – whose free plan, pro-open-source stance and focus on making publishing technology more democratic made it many a modern (non-technical) blogger’s host of choice – would pull the rug out like this.
I for one am particularly bummed because neither the storage space nor the traffic cap on the free plan work for me. The Pro plan currently has only an annual payment option (the older plans had monthly options) and it costs Rs 13,800 a year. I could arrange to spare this much money every year, sure, but it’s a ridiculous amount to pay for WordPress.com’s features – especially those I will really need to use.
Imagine looking for a good-quality surgical mask to wear in a park but finding out that the most reliable vendor in town has suddenly decided to sell only chemical safety masks. The next-best thing for me to do right now is to find and move to a well-reputed, reliable managed hosting provider, but there’s a reason this wasn’t the best option to begin with, which is what we stand to lose right now: WordPress.com “being there” for bloggers who just want to blog, without being in need of any of the complicated features that businesses seem to need, and WordPress.com being both a good-spirited technology company (unlike, say, Medium or Wix) out there whose prices were entirely reasonable.
On a related note, I’m also frustrated because WordPress.com had recently reduced its paid plans’ rates for the Indian market. For example, the business plan of old cost around Rs 7,400 a year whereas the new Pro plan, which matches the business plan feature for feature (plus an e-commerce option), costs Rs 13,800 a year, i.e. effectively going from $8.x a month to $180 a year. Again, this may be great for businesses – but it’s a shit move for bloggers. Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, which runs WordPress.com, recently said in an interview: “I’ll tell you a stat most people don’t realize. Half of all users who sign up for WordPress.com every day are there to blog.” I’ll tell you that for all of these people as well as the people who are using WordPress.com to blog (including me), the new plan is a betrayal of our interests.
Update, April 3, 2022, 7:46 pm: WP.com CEO Dave Martin responded to this blog post after it went big on Hacker News (thanks!) here. Gist: traffic limits based on honour system, region-specific plans en route (vis-à-vis the separate rates in India), à la carte options on free plan coming soon, and communication wasn’t great. I already feel a bit better than when I wrote this post. I’ve also asked Dave to adapt his reply on HN for an update on the WP.com blog – I’ve been checking it regularly for an announcement on the Pro plan and I’m sure others have been as well.
In 2018, I discovered that my blog posts since mid-2014 had taken on a somewhat different character than those before, becoming more critical and paralleling my increasing, and increasingly nagging, questions about what it means to be a journalist – particularly a science journalist – in India at this time. So I reorganised my blog at that point to support this character more, including to truncate the archives at June 2014. And I discovered a short while ago that on this new blog, I have published 1,000 posts. The milestone to me is nominal (references to such round numbers always bring to mind a comment by physicist Kip Thorne, that to celebrate multiples of 10 is mostly to celebrate our choice of a decimal system). This said, it’s gratifying that such a large number of posts have had readers and subscribers – sometimes one, sometimes a few thousands, but never zero. So thank you all for reading along. It means a lot to me. 🙂 Take care.
