In April 2020, there were two fears which dominated our lives, the big, bad, and novel virus replicating invisible to us and unleashing a maelstrom of illness, and misery. The other, the jobs, would we have them the next day? So we worked from home more, much more than we would have from offices because the bills you know.
Suddenly the stock market blew up, and tech folks were awashed with jobs and business opportunities. The Animal Spirits to quote one famous economist were unleashed. After a banner year, and half, the big recession talk is in vogue, let us break down the layoffs data in India for you.
Job losses have been dominating the headlines. Layoffs are happening everywhere (See Figure 1), but has the fire reached closer to home? The following is an analysis by the Behavioural team to make sense of the chaos. Do read and see.
In India, the last three years saw a rapid expansion in the startup space. However, at the moment, more and more startups are restructuring and changing their business models by downsizing their staffs.
Despite a series of massive layoffs due to COVID-19, last year saw aggressive hiring and talent wars in the Ed-tech platforms. Unfortunately, it is now facing the most burn. As soon as the offline classes began, startups like Unacademy and Vedantu saw a massive drop of 38% of the total layoff of the startup ecosystem. The heat caught up more than 1000 employees in the sector. We have compiled the data to give you a better picture.
The domino effect of layoffs, hammered by the global macroeconomic conditions requires us to brace up for the impact. The month-by-month numbers show the highest burn in the previous month, and it only seems to be increasing. Experts in the industry are expecting at least 50000 employees from startups to be without a job.
The research on the platform economy needs to focus on ensuring that job losses due to capital flight or investor squeeze has to be minimised.
As seen in figure above, among different cities, Bengaluru faced peak slashing. The layoffs are across the tech spectrum. After a banner year of tech jobs, the layoffs do not seem to stop anytime soon. Daily announcements of layoffs are becoming a new normal. Can over-hiring during growth period be one of the unsaid reasons? Employment research using behavioural economics could be a way forward.
In the next section Escobar would like to interest you in a phone.
Escobar! A name infamous worldwide. The first thing which comes to one’s mind is drug deals and murder, but did you know that this name is also associated with a corporation which sold phones? Well, ‘sold’ in the loosest sense of the word possible, more like scammed people into believing they would receive a revolutionary product destined to blow the hard-earned legacy of giants like Apple and Samsung right out of the ballpark, which turned out to be a little pamphlet about Pablo Escobar and his already famous exploits.
On December 4, 2019, Escobar Inc began its journey to scam people all over the world into willingly parting with their income on a simple promise, a nonsensical promise of “not a phone, but more”. On this day, they released the ‘Escobar Fold 1’. When foldable phones were all the rage, Escobar Fold 1 was the greatest, with a price of 1/4th of all others in the market. Accompanied by scantily clad posing European models, this phone was launched on the Escobar website.
Along with this, there were photos of two other people, the older brother of Pablo Escobar as the Founder and former Chief of ASSASSINATIONS, Roberto de Jesús Escobar Gaviria (yes, that is true, you can check it out on the still-active website, though we suggest using a VPN) and Olof Gustafsson as the CEO. Per expectations, there was an uproar among the simple public, who were simultaneously curious and understandably sceptical about this new fad. Many who had the courage (or curiosity) ordered the phone, including famous YouTube tech reviewers. And to the utter surprise of no one, they all received nothing but a hole in their pocket. That’s not entirely true, and this is where the absolute cunning of the people at Escobar Inc and the utter naivety of simple ignorance of the public is evident.
The only payment options available on the websites were non-refundable ones. From direct bank transfers to paying in cryptocurrency, all the methods were a way for the consumers to put their money and never see it again. And as far as the products being good enough for YouTubers to review them positively, they said the hell with that. Instead, they employed a concept born out of the psychology of the human brain called the Streisand Effect. In essence, due to the intuitive and curious nature of human beings, when often told not to do something (commonly through the internet), said human beings feel like doing the exact opposite thing. Hence, when YouTubers bombed on the phone and told people not to buy it (partly because it was very suspicious and mostly because it was in fact a Samsung Galaxy Fold 2 with a golden sticker on it!), people did exactly the opposite just because they wanted to see what would happen. And lo-and-behold, instead of getting the promised phone, they got a pamphlet about Pablo Escobar’s history, just so that when questioned, the company could show that they had indeed shipped something to the consumer and hence completely side-step any questions (the most brilliant thing they did according to me).
Hence, using this simple behavioural pattern that humans exhibit, Escobar Inc could take advantage of people not once but twice! The second time is the excuse of the phone being refurbished for the meagre price (this time a 24k gold plated iPhone 11 pro). They amassed a profit of millions before people realised that maybe it’s not the best idea to spend money on this.
It is clear at this point that Escobar Inc uses the infamy of the Escobar name in order to promote their products. Another example of this is Dietbitcoin (DDX), a form of cryptocurrency released by Escobar Inc, which they also accepted as a payment for the phones which they were selling. All of the publicity for Dietbitcoin was through propaganda established by Roberto Escobar. During the release of DDX, Escobar claimed to be the first person “to publicly come out and claim that Bitcoin was created by the American government”. The reason he gave for establishing Dietbitcoin was “the world is going to wake up ... to see that this was created by them. And when they see it, it is too late, and when the CIA [finds] out that the world knows about this, the CIA is going to sell all of their coins, and they will destroy the value of bitcoin.” He also claimed in the book titled “The true story by Roberto Escobar: Pablo Escobar’s Dietbitcoin” that it was Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious figure behind bitcoin, who gave him the idea of launching DDX. Though he further goes on to say that he believed this to be a setup by the American government to infiltrate Escobar Inc. The said book was released as a PDF which could be downloaded at the same time DDX was launched.
Hence it is evident that fame (or in this case, infamy) can be used to gain attention. In fact, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., son of Ferdinand Marcos sr. based his whole campaign for presidential elections on this idea. Using currently popular social media sites such as TikTok and YouTube, Bongbong has attempted to whitewash his family image, and has succeeded in most parts.
When once his father’s name was marred for corruption, human rights violations and stealing from the national treasury, now many have started believing that he had brought glory and peace to the land of Philippines. This is because a lot of ardent followers of the Marcos family have been spreading misinformation on said social media sights. People like Joey Toledo, who was interviewed by TIME, refuses to believe in the well documented history of the Marcos family and instead thinks it fit to posts pro Marcos videos stating that Marcos was the “best president in the world” during his time in office. Such incidences of spreading of misinformation on social media is the reason why Bongbong has essentially managed to rewrite history. This is not even a recent phenomenon. According to a post by The Washington Post, this has been going on since the era of Friendster and Flickr, which were used to portray Ferdinand Marcos Sr. as the ideal president.
People who try to state facts, such as Mona Magno-Veluz are overwhelmed by self-proclaimed critics who are too young to even know what happened. This seems to be one of the reasons why Bongbong has been successful. A large majority (around 56% of 65.7 million registered voters) in Philippines are under the age of 40. With no first-hand knowledge about the time of Martial Law under Ferdinand Marcos Sr, these young, impressionable minds are willing to believe in whatever information is available to them. The fact that the succeeding governments after Marcos Sr. haven’t been able to address basic social problems does not help either.
Over a fifth of the population living below poverty line and the majority of the wealth being concentrated in the hands of businessmen and political families making the idea of a new leader more attractive to the public. Another possible reason for the success of this scheme may have been due to the fact that more and more people want to become famous on social media. With over 36 million Filipinos using the app, the struggle for success is extreme. In this situation, people often tend to post things which grab others’ attention, and such contradictory information about a big name such as Marcos is easy bait. According to Toledo, he finds it fun to make Pro Marcos videos as he gets the most views on these videos. Along with this, Bongbong has been known to pay as much as $4700 to political content creators who aid his cause. Hence, when poverty is so rampant, people find it convenient to earn such a large sum of money, even if it means spreading false information.
This helps Bongbong paint a picture which shows him in a good light. Unfortunately, this painting cannot be defaced by using fact based websites such as Wikipedia either. This is because according to the same Washington Post article mentioned above, the Wiki society of the Philippines, a group of volunteer editors who monitor pages related to the country, ensure that not even a single person can sully the family name. They are constantly on the lookout for words such as “dictator” and “kleptocrat” and remove them from any website they see. Whilst Wiki editors are engaged in this constant battle with the Wiki society, Bongbong has managed to become the current president of Philippines and so it seems unlikely that more and more people become aware of the lost truth. On the contrary, it seems only feasible that as time goes on, this skewed version of the past will be passed on as history and will thus become the accepted reality.
Contribution by Fazli & Everyone @TBR
