Description of the book:
The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities dives into questions such as—how politicians in today’s world attain power, how nations become powerful and why human beings follow others unquestioningly, even if it is to their detriment. It examines the information environment to make sense of the operations of political parties, cybercriminals, godmen, nation-states and intelligence agencies from around the world to explain how the power to manipulate thoughts is being harnessed and how it is shaping our lives and world.
About the Speakers:
Shivam Shankar Singh is a data analyst, campaign consultant, and author of the bestseller, How to Win an Indian Election (2019). He started in politics as a Legislative Assistant to a Member of Parliament (LAMP) fellow; later, while managing data analytics for some of India’s most prominent political parties, he witnessed the process of conjuring political realities. He is a 2021–22 Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University, Beijing, a panellist on national television, and writes for several news publications on data and politics.
Anand Venkatanarayanan is a cybersecurity and privacy researcher. He was called before the Supreme Court of India as an expert witness for the Aadhaar case and has deposed before the Kenyan High Court for the country’s digital identity project—Huduma Namba. He is a public interest technologist writing extensively on cybersecurity and was one of the first to break the story on the hacking of the Kudankulam nuclear reactor in 2019. He studies reality creation techniques deployed at a population scale.