Issue 3 | 13th Feb, 2021
Hey there, and welcome to the third issue of the Curiosity Catalogue. Recently, I’ve been quite fascinated by the ways in which war, and countries’ efforts to avoid/win wars, have impacted the world we’ve created. This week, I’m specifically going to be talking about how wars fought in the last century contributed to the creation of the device you’re likely reading this newsletter on - the smartphone. After that, some musings on my recent reads, and my attempts to figure out how to make sense of them.
Before that, though, a slight correction/adjustment to the previous issue. While writing about the impact a country’s climate can have on its wealth, I realise I might have overstated the relationship between the two. I stand by the facts I presented, and the overall argument I put forward. But there’s something I should have made clear(er) - I don’t think that climate is the most significant factor influencing wealth, or even one of the most significant factors. I wanted to introduce it as a sort of hidden variable that might otherwise go unnoticed, but I do think that it’s one that can be overcome through proper governance, political institutions, and economic planning - at least in the present. The impact that climate change might have on the matter is entirely different, and perhaps the subject of a future issue.
With that cleared up, on to war.
War tends to pose an existential threat for any society engaging in it. Governments, therefore, tend to be comfortable spending a lot of money keeping this existential threat at bay, constantly increasing their capacity to inflict harm. This remains true despite wars becoming less frequent, and us currently living in some of the most peaceful times in human history. The USA, unsurprisingly, leads the way, spending either $705 billion or $934 billion this year, depending on how you calculate its defence budget (the former is just the budget for the Department of Defence; the latter includes costs of allied departments like Homeland Security). This is greater than the budgets of the next six countries combined, and would be the 17th or 19th largest GDP in the world on its own (depending on which figure you use). Even for countries in the developing world, defence spending remains a priority - In India’s most recent budget, it’s five times the health spending.
Here’s the thing - a lot of this isn’t actually spent on fighting wars. It’s spent on technological innovation that makes countries more capable of winning wars. Unsurprisingly, a lot of this technology has uses beyond the military, and over time does make its way into the civilian world.
Uncle Sam built your phone
Here’s where the smartphone comes in. While including it in his list of 50 things that made the modern economy, Tim Harford talked about how the most important creator of the smartphone wasn’t Steve Jobs, who masterminded the iPhone, but the US Government. Harford referred to Mariana Mazzucato’s research, which showed that all of the twelve key inventions in the smartphone were funded by government research (usually the US government), and generally for military purposes. These twelve features, according to her, are:
Micro-processors | Memory chips | Solid state hard-drives | LCD screens | Lithium batteries | FFT algorithms | The internet | HTTP & HTML (languages that make the internet accessible) | Mobile-networks | GPS | Touch-screen | Voice assistants, like Siri
I won’t go through the entire list in detail, but here are three examples of how governments funded the creation of the hardware and software behind your phone:
Perhaps most known among these is the story of the the internet, which began life as ARPANET. This was a wireless communications system the US military put in place in case the Soviets targeted their wired communications systems. Later, Tim Berners-Lee, widely recognised as the founder of the modern internet, created the world-wide-web while at CERN (also a government-funded research facility).
GPS was a product of the space race in the Cold War, and came in handy to military personnel trying to bomb targets in difficult circumstances. It was only in the late 1990s that became available for civilian use, but in the time since it’s become central to the global economy, and is responsible for much of what your smartphone is capable of. Interestingly, it wasn’t just the USA that was inspired by war to launch such a system - India’s own efforts to create its own GPS network were launched in earnest after the Kargil War, when the USA allegedly refused to share satellite imagery of Pakistani military positions.
Siri, who has since inspired Alexa, Cortana, and the Google assistant, began as a voice assistant developed by the US military. It was only in 2010 that Apple bought it, and repurposed it to make it what it is today.
It’s all intuitive
Smartphones, though, are more than just the sum of software and hardware. Part of what makes them ‘smart’ is the ease with which they can be operated. Their user interfaces are designed to be intuitive to the extent that little to no active thought is required to open apps, scroll through news feeds, and spend about half a day watching random videos on YouTube.
This idea of intuitive design, taken to a whole new (unhealthy) level by smartphones, can once again be traced again to war. The story, according to Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant, begins with plane crashes. A lot of them.
At some point during World War Two, enough fighter planes were going down for the US Air Force to go “something doesn’t seem right here.” It was initially put down to human error on the part of pilots, so they hired a psychologist named Paul Fitts to solve the problem. While going over the data, though, Fitts saw that most crashes occurred around the time of landing - random human error wouldn’t be concentrated in this way. After conversations with surviving pilots, he discovered why this happened. According to the pilots, the buttons that deployed the landing gear looked exactly the same as those that raised wing flaps. While landing - a high-pressure situation where pilots had to pay attention to a whole lot - some of them pressed the wrong buttons and crashed soon after.
The solution was simple, but revolutionary. Consoles were then designed with differently-shaped buttons for different functions. This practice, known as shape coding, tried to intuitively match the function to the design (think of “up” buttons on an elevator with an upward arrow on them) so they could be operated without thought.
This philosophy of intuitiveness has become the hallmark of design thinking, a domain that aims to create a world with little unnecessary thought spent on trivial acts. Smartphones, like I mentioned, take this philosophy to unhealthy extremes, where little thought is required to lose yourself to them. They aim to become an extension of you, used by default when in hand, and provoking anxiety when not.
Made in China
It’s not just the software, hardware, or underlying philosophy of your smartphone that can be traced to war. The actual making of it in a factory in China or some other part of Asia is largely an unintended consequence of the Cold War.
It started with Vietnam. In the 1960s, as the US government sent troops into the country, it encountered a logistical nightmare. South Vietnam was utterly unsuited to supporting a modern military’s requirements - there was a single, largely dysfunctional rail line, poor roads, and one deep-water port. Getting supplies in to keep soldiers going proved difficult. The solution that emerged has, without exaggeration, changed the world we live in.
A transport entrepreneur called Malcolm McLean proposed to build a container port in Cam Ranh Bay, on the east coast, which brought supplies from the west coast of the USA in huge shipping containers.
Why was this revolutionary? Though trade via shipping had been around for millennia, this was the first time standard shipping containers were used for this. Shipping containers simplified the logistics of trade immensely - earlier, just loading and unloading the average trade ship that plied between the USA and Europe could take about ten days, because of the thousands of individual packages and shipments on board. With containers, you could transport about 20 times the cargo, and have it loaded and unloaded in a matter of hours.
Here too, the military use of this development spilled over into the civilian world. The containers carried cargo from the USA to Vietnam, but there was no reason to have them come back empty. This was also the time that Asian economies like Japan were becoming major manufacturers, making everything from apparel to transistor radios to cars and industrial equipment. Japan jumped at the opportunity to export its products, and began setting up container ports along its coast as well. Over the years, other countries like Korea, Taiwan, and of course, China joined in, and the supply chains and shipping routes that eventually brought you your smartphone were created.
Ways of Reading
As I’m sure many of you do, I set somewhat unrealistic targets of books to read every year (52 for 2021 - fingers crossed). To help reach this goal, I decided to put my scepticism of audiobooks aside for a bit and give them a shot.
It’s led to what I think has been the highlight of 2021 so far - listening to Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince on Audible. I’d wanted to re-read the book but couldn’t find the time to pick it up, so figured I’d try listening instead. Boy, was it worth it. I spent about a week addicted to the voice of Stephen Fry narrating it, considerably cutting down on social-media scrolling and YouTube binges. I brought the 21 hours of audio down to less than half by listening at 2x (and later 2.5x) the speed, and found that I could keep up just fine. If I didn’t have to wait another two weeks for my next Audible credit, chances are I’d be losing myself to Order of the Phoenix right now.
I’m still trying to figure out, though, what genres suit this format best. Non-fiction doesn’t seem to work well, at least for me. While listening to the Psychology of Money by Morgan Hausel or The Four by Scott Galloway, for example, I couldn’t make highlights easily to revisit later. True, I could add bookmarks in Audible, but audio-bookmarks are far less convenient to go through that visual ones.
Especially with non-fiction, I’m realising that physical copies also have limitations. For one, I have almost no space left for more books, and I'm actively thinning my library by selling a few books. More importantly, though, accessing highlights and notes is still a little inconvenient with them.
What I’ve found most effective for this is using my Kindle along with softwares like Readwise. If you haven’t come across it yet, what Readwise does is collect your highlights and make them easily accessible from a computer, where you can search through them pretty conveniently. Espeically with my need to refer regularly to these while writing the newsletter, for example, this is a god-send.
If you’d like to check it out and get a month’s free trial, click here. Also, if you have recommendations for books best consumed as audiobooks, let me know by replying to this mail.
The Round-up
Though my first recommendation to you would be to listen to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince all weekend long, here are a few interesting things I’ve read recently that you might like to check out. Both of them, incidentally, have been shared with me by very close friends, who are also readers and cheerleaders of this newsletter.
This Is What It’s Like For Men With Eating Disorders: Last time, my recommendations included a podcast and article about gender-bias in our design and perception of the world, which tended to privilege the male perspective. This manifested in medicine as well, where conditions ranging from heart-attacks to autism aren’t often diagnosed in women because the commonly-known symptoms are those men present with.
Since then, I’ve come across a case where the opposite is true - anorexia and other eating disorders. The rise of the ultra-ripped body on screen has triggered this in men, though this isn’t often realised because most clinical guidelines are based on how these disorders manifests in women (one criteria for an anorexia diagnosis, for example, was missing a period). For men, the motivation is as much to slim down as it is to bulk up (again differentiating it from its manifestation in women) and though little recognised, has severe consequences.Judy: The Dog who became a prisoner of war: On a lighter note, here’s the story of a little known British hero of the Second World War. Judy, a dog on board a gunboat in East Asia, had quite an adventurous few years of service, where she saved countless lives by alerting the crew to the presence of enemies, finding freshwater supplies when stranded on an island, distracted guards in PoW camps when they were punishing soldiers, and saving crew members when their ship was torpedoed. How her story hasn’t been turned into a movie yet is beyond me
About me: I'm Shantanu Kishwar, a history buff turned policy-wonk, travel fanatic, and hummus-maker extraordinaire. I currently work as a Teaching Assistant at FLAME University, Pune. You can follow my sporadic updates on Twitter and Instagram, if you’d like.
If you’ve enjoyed the newsletter, do share it with other curious people you know. I’d really appreciate it, and I hope they will as well. If you’re new here and want to subscribe, you can do so above. Feel free to reply to this mail with any interesting recommendations for book, articles, podcasts or whatever else you think I might like.