Chasing Innovation and Geek Heresy: Two Book Reviews for the Price of One

Everybody wants to write about India. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Adam Smith were all deeply influenced by the experiences they had with India and Indian thought. Maybe it is the profundity of its society, the richness that sits at the heart of it, that generates both theory and narrative. Maybe it is its ability to absorb, assimilate, emigrate, and integrate, its openness, that leads to encounters of civilizations, thieves sharing notes in the night. Or, maybe it is in its layers of inequality and domination, a pervasive form of exploitation, where culture, religion and power are indistinguishable.

Whatever the case, people indeed like to write about India. And so it was with two recent books that I read — Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (2019), by Lilly Irani, and Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology (2015), by Kentaro Toyama. Beyond choosing India as their geographic context of choice, both authors examine various “development by design” projects that were in vogue from the late ’90s until recently, purportedly to discredit widely held myths about “technological solutionism”. They also rely heavily on first-person accounts, from very different methodological perspectives - Lilly relies heavily on field notes and ethnographic observations, while Kentaro provides a more “managerial” perspective.

Beyond these similarities, Lilly and Kentaro arrive at some very different conclusions about the role of human agency in development, despite both superficially being ardent critics of technological approaches to solving development problems. In reading these books, I found that I did not agree with either of them. I think there is something fundamentally different about how they and I look at the world, and there is some value in teasing apart what that is. So in this essay, I propose to look at the arguments in each of their books, to compare and contrast their perspectives, and to provide my own contrasting views where appropriate¹.

In Chasing Innovation, Lilly interrogates her experience working at a design consultancy in Delhi over an 11-month period, sharing many examples of how the development discourse at that time was heavily influenced by tropes like entrepreneurialism and user-centered design, imported through the efforts of global (although really “American”) business thought leaders like McKinsey, Ideo, and Stanford. She is well-positioned to offer this discourse, given her prior background in the heart of Silicon Valley at such institutions as Google and Stanford, and the access those credentials provided her to observe and write about the inner workings of the Indian design/development scene in that period.

She connects this ethnographic work with a historical analysis of the development of the “entrepreneurial citizen” in India post the 1990s trade liberalization. She points to a range of policy and cultural measures that reinforced and valorized this mode of citizenship in India, including preferred immigration programs, new investment vehicles, and changed intellectual property protections, situated in the context of a general decline in state capacity and services. These trends manifested in the education sector through an increased emphasis on things like “design thinking” and “interdisciplinarity”, in contrast to the more traditional focus on science, math, and engineering.

In reading these early chapters, I found myself largely agreeing with Lilly’s critiques. The change in Indian imaginaries was palpable throughout the turn of the millennium². I also experienced these shifts when I was working in India in the early 2000s. There was great excitement amidst the “middle class” that Lilly so frequently refers to about these increased entrepreneurial and educational opportunities, as well as the access to consumer products and luxuries that trade liberalization provided. In the development sector, this translated into a plethora of “market-led” approaches to solving fundamental capacity problems (including microfinance, a pyramid scheme that I am embarrassed to say that even I contributed to³).

Lilly is right to point out the political nature of this choice, and the fact that many “others” were excluded from this narrative, or, as in the case of microfinance, included on exploitative and unequal terms. She is also right that it represented a clear shift in the Indian state, in its planning and central coordination of development initiatives. This market-led approach was unlikely to unwind all of India’s historical injustices, achieve sustainable development, or build India’s state capacity, a project that had seemingly been abandoned in favor of neoliberal approaches, no doubt influenced by multilateral institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.

However, in her critique, she barely discusses the role of these global institutions in this transformation, who forced these decisions, not only in India but around the world, by influencing global flows of capital, and altering the political and economic foundations of literally dozens, if not hundreds, of countries. Nor does she lend her critical eye to the American peddlers of easy solutions, the Stanfords (Lilly’s alma mater), the IDEOs, the McKinseys of the world, who so often provided the managerial and design “expertise” that facilitated the transition into neoliberal institutions and policies. Were Western actors not complicit in these decisions and strategies? Were they not the “model” for the path that India was following?

Instead, her target is “elite” Indian men (and women), whom she repeatedly caricatures to advance her politically fashionable but ultimately short-sighted and orientalist critique. For example, Professor Anil Gupta, a man who has tirelessly worked for decades in the service of rural innovation in India, under multiple political administrations, becomes a Gandhian who “served the Modi government as second-in-command of the National Innovation Foundation”. This is equivalent to saying someone who worked at NSF worked for Donald Trump, during his administration⁴.

In a similar vein, Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel laureate, poet, and staunch anti-militarist, becomes a “nationalist from the landowning classes”. And so on for a range of indigenous intellectual giants and modern luminaries, ranging from Sam Pitroda to Sri Aurobindo, Gandhi, all the way down to local educational activists like Brij Kothari. For Lilly, only Harvard-based international development “experts”, like Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (of the “randomista” cult) could understand the true nature of informal capital in India, unlike the “kurta-wearing”, elite dregs of Indian society.

One wonders why she focuses her critique only on Indians, and her caricatured notions of them, and not on any of the Western actors who were certainly influential in these shifts? Is it more fashionable and convenient to point out flaws in cultures other than one’s own? Was Lilly afraid of alienating groups like the “D-School” at Stanford, or “The Design Lab” at UCSD, of which she is a proud member, which are no doubt influenced (and funded) by some of these same actors? I guess it is always easier to critique something when you have nothing to lose by doing so.

And how did Brij, and Sam, and Prof. Gupta, and all of these pesky middle-class Indians get these high-minded ideals? According to Lilly:

Those I met at design studios, hackathons, and development workshops sometimes spoke of “the bias to action” — a temporal ethos that valorized the production of venturesome experiment and derided longer deliberation, political demand-making, or the extended work of meaningful political inclusion. This “bias to action” was familiar to me from my time at Google and Stanford; its ethos deflected the work of care with the adage “ask for forgiveness, rather than permission.” The bias to action was popular across Silicon Valley.

The “bias to action” had to be imported to India from Silicon Valley? Had she ever read the Bhagavad Gita, the seminal text of the Hindu philosophical tradition? In quoting Aurobindo, Lilly says that “(t)he Gita does not teach the disinterested performance of duties but the following of the divine life.” When she wrote this, did she understand the Gita, what it is saying, and how central it is to so much of Hindu spiritual life? Did she know how influential it must have been to many of her targets, how it would have affected their actions and perspectives? After all, many of her quoted Indian targets refer to it in some way or another; several (Aurobindo, Gandhi, Tagore) of them having written translations of and commentaries on it.

The Gita’s core message is a call to action, to the disinterested fulfillment of one’s duties⁵. This is the principle of dharma, of one’s moral duty to perform selfless acts in the service of higher civilizational ends. That is why, on the battlefield at Kurukshetra, Krishna reassures Arjuna when he is disgusted at the prospect of killing some of his closest family members and most cherished heroes, by explaining Arjuna’s responsibility to conduct war in fulfillment of his moral duty as a Kshatriya⁶.

The Mahabharata includes many stories about caste and caste-related duties, while at other points questioning those beliefs, reflecting the complex relationship between the structure of social groups (like the state or corporation), and the unequal power relationships that those structures create. Marx, and his intellectual descendants (including most significantly Lenin) all confronted the challenge of organizing society without reifying traditional hierarchies of class, culture, and expertise. Their experiences show that it is not easy to organize human social structures under a “flat” social structure, and that the state, like any other bureaucratic structure, is not immune to elite capture, and may be even more prone to it.

In this sense, couldn’t the rise of the “entrepreneurial citizen” be an improvement on India’s past, where the ability to aspire was narrowly limited to specific castes and groups? Where one’s aspiration and duties were not limited by one’s hereditary position in society? Or, was there some egalitarian golden age in India that I might have missed? Professor Gupta is one of the people who has arguably done the most worldwide to advance the entrepreneurial interests of everyday people, including from a variety of castes and indigenous tribal groups, and in the protection of their intellectual property rights in the face of exploitative global arrangements like TRIPS, and against large corporate interests, from both India and the West. Lilly acknowledges the importance of these protections, even as she neglects Professor Gupta’s pioneering work on these topics⁷.

At one point, she does imagine technological solutions that could impact the lives of average Indians, such as “photographic and digitized paper,” “interactive voice-response phone systems, rural kiosks, or SMS-based systems.” Unfortunately, the boutique design consultancy where she worked managed to develop only a simple web-based prototype. Maybe if she had looked a bit deeper, beyond the hackathons and design sprints where she seems to have spent most of her time, she would have seen that many others were already working on all of these things — including myself, and many other researchers from the ICTD ecosystem.

Of course, for Lilly, both good ideas and bad have to be imported from the West. Only Western intellectuals like her can be the great “explainers” who can help us come to our senses. She claims not to treat her subjects as “cultural dupes”, but in the end, she does just that. It certainly seems like a great oversight to ignore how the “bias to action” is nothing more than Krishna’s advice to Arjuna, repackaged for yet another time in Indian history. Perhaps if she had this cultural knowledge, she could have written a book like Max Weber’s The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, an apologia for the unequal and hierarchical nature of Western society, as well as a testament to its successes. Instead, she wrote yet another orientalist book filled with innuendo that speaks to an audience with a very limited understanding of Indian culture and history.

Kentaro’s book Geek Heresy carries a very different message. While it critiques some of the same technological ambitions and initiatives that Lilly’s does, it comes to a vastly different conclusion about the importance of individual human action. While Lilly’s book valorizes state capacity and institutional development; Kentaro’s examples celebrate individuals that possess the “heart, mind, and will” to surmount the wicked and thorny problems on the path to sustainable development, those that heed the “call to action”, as it were.

The first half of his book is an expansive reflection, filled with numerous examples, on the idea that technology does not have agency on its own; that it can only manifest public and social good when it is supported by a person and institution with the right intent, something he calls the “law of amplification”. To support this claim, he documents a number of examples where technology, or other kinds of “packaged” interventions, do not scale beyond the initial pilot application, and that the reason for this is variances in individual and institutional capacity⁸.

Of course, this is true; having a hammer does not make one a good carpenter — the very definition of technology is something that extends human capabilities through the application of procedural and/or material supports. Thus, the “law of amplification” is a tautology. That said, it serves a useful and timely antidote to those who think there are “technological fixes” to all manner of problems — from climate change to inequality, to democratic governance.

In part two of his book Kentaro lists a set of “positive” examples of people who had the vision and wherewithal to use technology and other means to solve wicked and thorny problems. Kentaro’s case studies all consist of extraordinarily charismatic individual human actors, including several from his own research group at MSR India, often from the same “middle class” groups that Lilly maligns (with the notable exception of his taxi driver in Bangalore, in classic Thomas Friedman fashion).

Kentaro’s favorite example is Rikin Gandhi, “a dreamer whose chiseled facial features belied a methodical intensity”, a description that could be pulled from the Mahabharata itself. Rikin had wanted to be an astronaut, but was derailed by a problem with his eyesight, so instead, he travels to rural India, to work and live with Indian farmers to understand their problems and needs, and to design solutions appropriate for them. The result is a grassroots system to create videos about agricultural (and other) topics, featuring local actors and expertise, that are then screened by volunteers in other villages to inform them about beneficial farming practices and other useful knowledge. This project became Digital Green, a non-profit organization that has received tens of millions of dollars from international philanthropic organizations like USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Kentaro paints Rikin’s as the quintessential Indian story, with its near allegorical depiction of human will as manifested in the body of a “slim boy”. Unfortunately, he doesn’t mention that the original visionary behind this system for asynchronous delivery of video content was a Chinese-American computer scientist named Randy Wang, who had previously been denied tenure at Princeton. Working with an educational activist named Urvashi Sahni, he had implemented a system in Lucknow, India to deliver educational videos to children from both slums and rural villages. Rikin learned about this approach, and the socio-technical systems needed to support it, by working with Randy in Lucknow. Only later did he join Kentaro’s lab at MSR India, and adapt his ideas to agriculture, working with a NGO called the Green Foundation, which became the inspiration for the name “Digital Green”⁹.

While Kentaro mentions this intellectual lineage in a short footnote that foregrounds MSR’s support of Digital StudyHall, he says nothing about Randy, his relationship to Rikin, and the deep connection that Digital Green ohad to Randy’s vision (rumor has it that there was some personal animosity between Kentaro and Randy, although that is just hearsay). I guess the story of a failed Chinese-American systems professor living on a diet of beef jerky in one of the poorest regions of North India did not fit Kentaro’s narrative of the handsome Greek hero, sent down to liberate the huddled masses. Nothing personal against Rikin- I think he is a wonderfully intelligent and capable human being who has had an outsized impact both in India and around the world. But he also benefited from the work of so many before, including Randy, who mentored him directly.

Kentaro also neglects to mention the fact that his personal connections to Bill Gates, and more specifically to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is what allowed Rikin to raise the millions of dollars needed to fund this enterprise. Since then, these connections have only multiplied, with many other large and influential multilateral donors to Digital Green’s work, and its numerous forms and guises over the years. Kentaro says that “technology amplifies preexisting differences in wealth and achievement”. But maybe those differences just matter by themselves, with or without the amplification provided by technology? Maybe it is not just “heart, mind and will” that led to all these great successes? Maybe it is not just who you are that leads to success, but also who you know?

Kentaro’s book is sometimes patronizing in how it deals with the everyday Indians who are the targets of the magnificent benevolence of these charitable do-gooders. According to him, “beneficiaries, too, need heart, mind, and will. Farmers must have some desire to improve their own lives (intention), basic agricultural knowledge and the ability to pick up new practices (discernment), and the willingness to expend effort to learn (self-control).” Wow, if only farmers knew that the solution to the agrarian crisis was a self-help book and a dream! How many lives could have been saved for the lack of the right “heart, mind, and will”!

In short, there is little room for for Indian culture and values in either of these narratives; for Lilly, the “call to action” is yet another Western import by way of Ideo and McKinsey, and while Kentaro mentions the “Hindu ethic to work uncomplainingly at the task at hand”, it is only to say that Weber might have written a similar book had he spent more time in India. They do not relate that these kinds of imperatives come from a much deeper place in the Indian religious psyche.

Even more, both of these books make the assumption that the problem of correct action is solved; that it is always clear what any of us should (or should not be) doing, and that the world consists of heroes (like Rikin) and villains (like any of the Indian elites that Lilly critiques), who are doing it all “right” or “wrong”, respectively¹¹. In this way, both of the books take the form of classic tales of good and evil, like the Ramayana, the other Indian epic, that is quite clear (for right or wrong) in its position on moral issues. On the other hand, the Mahabharata (of which the Gita is a part) is full of episodes loaded with ambiguity, where the “right” choice is unclear, and often dependent on context and perspective¹².

So, in the words of Lenin, “What is to be done?” The short answer is that nobody knows, including Lenin, Lilly, Kentaro, and least of all, me! What I do know is that there has to be a space between the hubris of agency, and the denial of it, because that is where all of human life exists — an idea that is so eloquently explained in the Gita. This is the balance and humility that I seek in my own life and work; unfortunately, there is too little of either to be found in either of these books.

I close by quoting a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, as translated by Debal Deb:

Lo and behold — the ants! Those wee thin red creatures are the ants, called Formica in Latin. I am a Myrmica, descendant of the great family of Myrmicinae; I feel much amused to watch those ants.

They are so tiny, and moreover, I watch them from a considerable height…. only a little guesswork sufficed me to have understood everything about them… I will write a treatise on them in Myrmicine language, and will give seminars, too.

I feel great pity for the ants though, when I see them. And I do feel a great urge to do them some good. I even would if I could, for some time abandon the civilized Myrmicine society and live… among the ants in their colony… heck, to that extent am I prepared to sacrifice.

They develop more and more, we eat more and more sugar — only such an arrangement can maintain peace, law, and order. Or else, there are chances of hell breaking loose. We are so careful, because we bear an immense onus of responsibility, you see.

What if the whole race of ants becomes extinct due to a want of sugar and an excess of law and order? Then of course we shall have to go elsewhere to spread development. For we, Myrmicines, are highly developed, by virtue of our elongated legs.

— —

[1] To provide some background as to what qualifies me to offer my opinions, I was one of the people that introduced Kentaro to ICTD. I organized a weekly discussion seminar at Microsoft at Redmond, that served as a background and primer for his forays into the area. I was the first intern that MSR India ever hired, and in exchange, I organized a field visit for Kentaro to one of my field sites that I believe was one of Kentaro’s first experiences in rural India. With Lilly, my interaction was more at arm’s length, but I did introduce her to one of the case studies she documents and critiques at length in her book — the Honey Bee Network, and its founder Professor Anil K. Gupta, with whom I worked for two years. I also have independent and first-hand knowledge of a lot of the contexts and institutions in both of their books.

[2] Joyojeet Pal does a great job capturing some of these shifts in some of his early papers on the Indian education sector.

[3] Although, in my defense, my work was with self-help groups, or SHGs, which encourage local autonomy and internal savings rather than institutional dependency and indebtedness.

[4] I was there when the NIF was founded, under the Bajpayee administration, and which continued to receive support under the subsequent UPA government. The primary advocate for NIF was R.A. Mashelkar at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the kind of public sector institution that Lilly yearns for in her critique. Mashelkar is a legendary pioneer in advancing scientific and technical research in India, someone who could be compared to J.C.R. Licklider in the USA.

[5] I am not contesting Aurobindo’s interpretation, because the Gita is a synthesis of a number of philosophical schools. But I do believe that what I am explaining here is the most conventional interpretation of it.

[6] Kshatriyas, along with Brahmins, have traditionally been the two “highest” castes in Indian society. Much of Indian history, including in the Mahabharata, can be understood as cycles of competition and collusion between these groups.

[7] She does, however, make time to note that Professor Gupta often wore a kurta, suggesting that this was some kind of performative act, and not the daily attire of more than one billion people. Of course, for Lilly, even authenticity must be an imported quality.

[8] An observation that he attributes to Peter Henry Morris, and his “Iron Law of Evaluation”.

[9] Similarly, Digital StudyHall takes its name from Urvashi’s school, simply called StudyHall. I know a lot about this project because several of my students, as well as my cousin, worked there.

[10] Hegel crudely dismissed the Gita, likely because it presaged his ideas by almost two thousand years, unlike his rival Schopenhauer, who considered the Upanishads, of which the Mahabharata is a part, among the greatest philosophical achievements of mankind.

[11] This is a common trope nowadays in the HCI and AI “ethics” communities, who characterize technologists as evildoers who are damaging the very fabric of our society, only held in check by a team of benevolent do-gooders who only possess the moral clarity to identify injustice wherever they see it.

[12] This is something that at least Lilly should understand, with her background in Science and Technology Studies (STS), an area that Kentaro glibly dismisses as a “cottage industry”.