The Tragedy of Celebrating Shortcuts

A Cautionary Tale of the Tragedy of the Commons

There's an unsettling tendency in our society to celebrate clever shortcuts, particularly those that emerge in the face of rules and regulations. One such instance recently caught my eye: a LinkedIn post that lavished praise on a rather dubious restaurant listing on Zomato. The restaurant in question, it seems, offers only one item—a product code-named "Naughty Strawberry." While the post claims this is a vape cartridge marketed under the guise of a food delivery service, I have no way of verifying this claim myself. Clever? By half. But worth celebrating? Absolutely not.

This isn't simply a matter of someone finding a way around the system. The problem here is emblematic of a deeper, almost cultural myopia. What we see is ingenuity being misdirected—not towards creating value but towards skirting the law. It also creates a barrier to entry for genuine new entrants. Posts like the one on LinkedIn—which cheer on such acts of 'next-level ingenuity'—overlook the bigger picture. This is not an isolated, harmless bit of hustle. This is a perfect example of what economists and game theorists refer to as the "tragedy of the commons."

The tragedy of the commons occurs when individuals, acting in their own self-interest, exploit a shared resource to the point that it becomes depleted or corrupted for everyone. In this case, the shared resource is trust—the trust that consumers have in online marketplaces, and that society has in the institutions that are supposed to regulate commerce. But this is not just about trust. Such activities would compel either Zomato or the regulator to crack down on such initiatives, often leading to knee-jerk reactions that tighten entry for genuine new players. This, in turn, curtails the free market. We legitimize behaviors that ultimately make the entire ecosystem more fragile.

This episode also shines a light on an uncomfortable aspect of how we valorize 'jugaad'—that beloved notion of frugal innovation, of making do with limited resources. There is no denying that jugaad has led to some remarkable, scrappy solutions, especially in a country like India where constraints are aplenty. But there is a thin line between celebrating resourcefulness and normalizing cunning circumvention of regulations that exist for a reason. When that line blurs, we end up incentivizing cleverness at the cost of integrity.

What if someone unwittingly ordered this "Naughty Strawberry," unaware of its true nature? The workaround, according to the post, is a coupon code that distinguishes between the in-the-know connoisseurs and the clueless masses. If you know the code, your order goes through. If not, it gets canceled. How clever, right? But this safeguard is flimsy, and raises important questions: What would be the penalty for Zomato if such an item were delivered to a teenager? Unlike tobacco products delivered through quick commerce, where the liability is clear, the liability in this case is far less certain.

When we celebrate this sort of thing, we inadvertently endorse a mindset that there is honor in beating the system, that a clever cheat is admirable. We forget that these small acts of defiance add up. Every time we endorse one such instance, we inch closer to a culture that rewards bending the rules. It's like adding one more goat to an overgrazed pasture—at first, it seems harmless, but eventually, the commons are destroyed.

Imagine an ecosystem where restaurants and other services exploit similar loopholes, each believing they are cleverer than the rest, operating in their own narrow self-interest. What kind of trust would consumers have left in online marketplaces? The very idea that someone can, with a wink and a nudge, sell a banned product under the guise of a legitimate business undermines the credibility of the platform as a whole.

As Manu Joseph once argued about jugaad and frugality, there is a certain self-congratulatory tone that we adopt when we speak of these clever fixes. It's as if there's a romanticism attached to the notion of working around the system, an implicit belief that ingenuity is inherently virtuous, regardless of its consequences. But this kind of thinking can lead us down a very slippery slope. Not all cleverness is worth celebrating. Sometimes, what we need is to direct our creativity towards building systems that work for everyone, rather than subverting the ones we already have.

The real ingenuity, the kind we should be celebrating, lies in finding ways to innovate within the system, or even improving the system itself. If the rules are broken or flawed, fix them—don't just devise an underhanded way to bypass them. The story of the one-product vape restaurant may seem like a harmless bit of street-smart maneuvering, but it's a dangerous narrative to glorify. We should be wary of lauding such behavior, lest we find ourselves complicit in degrading the very fabric of our collective commons.

So the next time you come across a tale of "ingenious" rule-breaking, pause and consider what is truly at stake. The tragedy of the commons is not just a distant concept from an economics textbook, it is playing out right here, in our digital marketplaces, in our culture, and in the stories we choose to tell each other.

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Image courtesy: Jono Hey,?Sketchplanations