e Magus

Have you uploaded your photograph, reimagined in the grainy, sepia toned glow of the 1980s, onto social media? Congrats! You are now part of millions who queued up and are still queuing up to be aged backwards by an algorithm, all in the name of a little harmless fun. And it was fun. It always is, in the moment. But have you ever given it a thought on what’s happening underneath the filter, something our very human, very forgetful brains are not quite built to notice. We are, all of us, terrible at holding on to things. We forget names within seconds of being introduced, we recognise a face across a crowded room and cannot place it. This gap, between knowing of someone and truly knowing them, is one of the oldest and most forgivable of human failings. It is also, it turns out, the one thing that machines have been patiently waiting for us to close. For years now, the platforms we live with have been collecting the parts of us that don't need a face — what we like, what we fear, w...

A friend asked me the other day, “Since you are working remotely, what is the one thing you miss most about working from an office?” In jest, I replied, “Using—and hearing—the bad words.” Having spent many years in the advertising industry, I lived in an environment where our daily conversations had very few filters. Brainstorming rooms, office corridors, coffee and smoke breaks, late-night deadlines—these were spaces where the so-called forbidden four-letter words, along with their far more colourful Hindi counterparts with elaborate familial references, flowed with ease. They were not always expressions of anger. More often than not, they signalled excitement, disbelief, frustration, admiration or simply emphasis. A creative idea could be described as “bloody brilliant” in one breath and torn apart with equal linguistic intensity in the next…with a combination of same word.   Nobody paused to take offence. The words, stripped of much of their literal meaning, functioned almost li...