Numbercaste Quotes

“Familiarity may breed contempt; but perhaps it would be more truthful to say that familiarity breeds blindness”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“Sri Lanka is a beautiful little island nation parked perilously close to India; a little too hot, a little too humid, and perhaps too expensive, but to its credit are fantastic beaches, strangely melancholy hills, and the ruins of kingdoms past.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“I have always loved being behind the camera. I love how it sets you apart in a crowd, so that you can float at the edges, pausing only occasionally to capture a moment.
In its own way it’s easier than writing. As a writer, I have to know people, to talk to them, to barge into silences with a dozen of those little lighthearted quips that lead up to a conversation. And even then, they’re guarded around you. Nobody wants their drunken conversation written down somewhere.
Being a photographer is different. People come to you. They smile. They flirt. They make sure you see only their best side. Nobody wants to upset the camera.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“Back in 2015, a volunteer group called Bitnation set up something called the Blockchain Emergency ID. There’s not a lot of data on the project now, BE-ID - used public-key cryptography to generate unique IDs for people without their documents. People could verify their relations, that these people belonged to their family, and so on. It was a very modern way of maintaining an ID; secure, fast, and easy to use. Using the Bitcoin blockchain, the group published all these IDs on to a globally distributed public ledger, spread across the computers of every single Bitcoin user online - hundreds of thousands of users, in those times. Once published, no government could undo it; the identities would float around in the recesses of the Internet. As long as the network remained alive, every person's identity would remain intact, forever floating as bits and bytes between the nations: no single country, government or company could ever deny them this. “That was, and I don't say this often, the fucking bomb,” said Common, In one fell swoop, identities were taken outside government control. BE-ID, progressing in stages, became the refugees' gateway to social assistance and financial services. First it became compliant with UN guidelines. Then it was linked to a VISA card. And thus out of the Syrian war was something that looked like it could solve global identification forever. Experts wrote on its potential. No more passports. No more national IDs. Sounds familiar? Yes, that’s the United Nations Identity in a nutshell. Julius Common’s first hit - the global identity revolution that he sold first to the UN, and then to almost every government in the world - was conceived of when he was a teenager.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“Watching a parent die is a terrible task. My father, faced with something he could not talk down or browbeat into submission, spent his days with the bottle, as if he determined to drink himself to death, as if his alcohol could hold back the disease that swept through his brain.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“On some days it felt like we owned the Earth, and the only place left to expand to was the next planet down the line.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“The world I grew up in was a brutal one. The murder rate was once seven people for every hundred thousand. The average American on minimum wage could barely afford to keep themselves alive on canned food. Millions died over private oil fortunes. Wealthy men and women ran the world for profit. Fools and charlatans got into our Parliaments and set the world on fire. We had everything on paper - checks, balances, freedom, democracy - and yet to live was to be a slave.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“Discrimination is not just racial now. It’s also about the kind of body parts you have.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“I have never seen anyone drink like he did. To say he drank with a vengeance is almost understating it: it was almost as if there was a thirst there, a deep and insatiable craving that made the man keep going back for more and more until he sat down in one corner with a bottle.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“Then I realized that the history of the world is largely a history of sustainable systems. Every so often a system comes along that completely changes the world. People never notice these systems until they're right there in their faces and all the alarm bells are going off. Agriculture. Christianity. Guns. The Industrial Age economy. P2P networks. Take any major event in history and I'll show you a system behind it. “Consider Bitcoin. Monetary revolution. A chance to break out of a rigged system. P2P and the pirate sites? Copyright, theft, yes, but they also moved American culture around the world without bottleneck of price or service availability. American movies, American TV shows now projected American dreams and nightmares onto the rest of the world. Every great system had a far more powerful effect hidden beneath this obvious layer of icing. “Just like agriculture for humans, all of these systems have repercussions far beyond the first few decades of their existence. The trick is that these systems have to be sustainable. There has to be enough incentive, on a human level, to keep them running. If there is - well, there you go: that's your history-maker right there.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“The Buddha, Christ and Mohammed had to rely on God and karma and human priests for judgement; we don’t. We have data. We have algorithms. We have Guidance. God is now available as an application, on your mobile phone or in the cloud, twenty four seven, three sixty five.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“This is how we progress as humans. We went from horseless carriages to self-driving, self-organizing transport in a hundred and fifty years. We went from powered flight to putting a man on the moon in sixty years. We’ve always progressed in leaps and bounds. It is our ability, no, our duty, to do what is efficient, and to do what is best, to evolve not just our vehicles and our cities and our homes, but also the social structures that hold us back”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“I recounted my adventures, just as I recount them to you now. I told him about Bombay, which glowed in the night like a lamp. I told him about Bangalore, about the beaches of Goa, of Pune, where elaborate retirement homes and ashrams ringed India’s ferociously competitive colleges, and liberals went to experience transcendence without getting their feet dirty. I told him of places you could expand your mind and still be within walking distance of the nearest McDonalds.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“What did journalists know of tech, anyway? Who gave a damn about the press? We were the Good Guys. Changing the World. Doing the Important Stuff.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“We would sneer sometimes at how pointless it all was, all those bourgeois souls wrapping themselves in luxury, isolating themselves from the raw edges of the word; and in between puffs, we would smile, and dream of owning those streets, dreaming the same dreams that we scorned others for.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“What strange and thoughtless creatures we were, back in those days. We would go up to the rooftops to smoke, Wurth and I; and there in the company of other insomniac souls we would look out at the vast expanse of lights and glamour. We watched the towers as they climbed higher, and higher, as humanity reached for the skies.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“Julius used to say that we stood on the shoulders of giants. To me it always seemed like we were in their shadow. It never occurred to me that we were the shadow that they projected, and that one day we would rise up and overwhelm them”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“Bunch of people go out to the Valley, create something new. Us out here in the world go hmm, that's interesting, and start using it. Meanwhile the Valley guys are convinced they're the second coming of Christ and start overhyping and doing all sorts of things that aren't even useful anymore. The tech press clap and clap until it's time to write the obituary.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“Every New Yorker thinks they’re automatically better than everyone else in every other city on the planet: even their unnems were a better class of beggars.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“Beautiful women have a following all their own. If that sounds misogynistic, I’m sorry, that’s the way the world works. Homer said the Greeks went to war over a woman. I can’t get a battle, but I can get a few hundred thousand views with the right face in a skirt.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“The only things I can’t offer you are children and politicians: the first is illegal and the second is expensive”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“We have every piece of data on 200 million people,” he said, ticking off his fingers. “We have their bank accounts. We know how much they make and how much they spend and where. We have their social media. We know what they talk about, who they influence and how much. We know exactly how important each and everyone one of them is.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“here was a particular kind of energy in those early days, something I've only really found in startups. The regulars - the boring 9-to-5 people - haven’t invaded the world yet. All around you are people who practically buzz with mental adrenaline - the kind of people who sneer at words like policy and dress code and fill the office at nights with pizza and bad jokes and the relentless tip-tack-clack of keyboards. They push boundaries, turn small ideas into game-changers and small arguments into fistfights.
No company can last forever this way: it’s a bit like being in a cage. Eventually the strange ones move out and give way to order and conformity and all the things that make for a smoothly operating machine. But that brief chaos is what really gives a company its soul.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“Sometimes respect is as hard a currency as money is”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“We’re going to tell these people that they dropped because Facebook dropped us. We're going to say the Number needs the data and it's their right to share it with us. And we’re going to drop their Numbers again. And again. Until they riot on the Internet and make those Menlo Park motherfuckers come to us with their hats in their hands.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“This book is a story, and like all stories, it should be taken with a grain of salt.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“This is the Number. It is in the things we do, the people we meet, the ID cards that we carry. It's part of our identities, our credit cards, our social interactions. It takes our influences, our biases, morals, lifestyles and turns them into a massive alternate reality that no-one can escape from. It lives on our phones, in our televisions, in the cards we swipe to enter office. At its best, it’s an exact mirror of how human society actually works - all our greatness, all our petty shallowness, all our small talk and social contacts all codified and reduced and made plain. At its worst, it’s also exactly that. It’s how poor and rich and famous and desirable you are. It’s the backchannel given a name and dragged out into the limelight for everyone to see.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste

“Funerals are for the living, not for the dead.”
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste