WE live in a dark phase filled with adversity. As dark and unpredictable as it gets. At this moment in the world, whatever flows, ruptures. Be it the flow (spread) of coronavirus, the flow of migration, the flow of money or the egregious flow of dis/information.
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Capturing the flow of dis/information campaigns in the digital ecosystem and the crisis of democracy is the nut graph of Martin Moore’s succinctly written book Democracy Hacked: Political Turmoil and Information Warfare in the Digital Age. The book is a primer on understanding the intersections between democracy, politics, deception and technological developments.
Digital media have reshaped contemporary politics in unprecedented ways. Moore argues that the old form of political communication has been supplanted by digital technologies, which have become a new force to reckon with. What Moore reveals in the book is downright desperation of political parties the world over to drub their opponents in uncanny ways by leveraging social media.
Cut to 21st century, social media and other platforms are being used to churn out deception and venom. Hatred and prejudice are in the networks as well as in the air. Moore details how social media, which had an idealistic agenda to begin with, have become indispensable to the political tumult in today’s democracy.
The author’s narrations reveal the seedy and sinister motives with which memes, texts and videos were produced, for instance, in the presidential elections in the United States in 2014. Donald Trump was held aloft while Hillary Clinton was downgraded on false grounds using mimetic warfare and trolling.
Images are used to ridicule, trivialise and ferociously malign people in the big league as much as ordinary people. Highlighting the key proposition of some businessmen, the author says that the object of using digital media in politics is to crush the mainstream media, which are presumably considered “left”.
The savage efforts to promote social media as a reliable source to seek information have caused truth to lose its ground and legitimacy in the public sphere. Instead, falsehood runs amok in the wildest manner possible.
The new plutocracy
The book underlines that technology is not inherently biased. It is the criminality of human minds that make it unleash nefarious activities. Moore sheds light on some of the digital dynasts who make plutocracy possible. One such plutocrat is Robert Mercer, who is anti-establishment, against climate change policies and oriented towards rupturing the public sphere and subverting democratic accountability.
He is neither a politician nor a public servant. He hunkered down for a while and, at the right moment, invested in digital media and big data. He led the frontal attack on democracy by scouring data from social media to target voters and manipulate their perceptions to his own ends, which is, say, to see that Trump won.
The author presents another plutocrat, Andrew Breitbart, who sees a plot in the arrival of the Frankfurt School scholars in the U.S. and alleges that they turned the country into a hotbed of Left ideologies. To jettison Left or “Democrat Media Complex” from the U.S. and the world is Breitbard’s arch mission.
The nexus between Mercer and Breitbart happened with the former investing in all digital schemes Breitbart executed. The author writes that Mercer continued to invest in several organisations building on the premise that all media are biased.
This led to Facebook, Twitter and other social media gaining traction and attracting people. Mercer next turned to Cambridge Analytica (CA), which is an offshoot of Strategic Communications Laboratory. No one knew the gamut of deception until the expose happened of mass-harvesting of Facebook users’ data that CA used to change the voting behaviours of people, be it in the U.S. or Brexit.
In brutal ways, CA used the harvested personal data to sell political ideas and ideologies to users, especially during Trump’s elections. All these point to the fact that Mercer and his ilk had only one goal to achieve—turn democracy on its head.
A new war
Subsequently, the author begins to scope out the widespread use of digital media to launch disinformation campaigns at geopolitical levels. It is the beginning of a new war, where there is no trench, no soldiers and no rationality.
It is a digital warfare with bots, algorithms, drones and the like on the frontline. It is not waged to conquer territories but minds. Moore argues that Vladimir Putin needed a framework to set up disinformation factories to establish Russia as a superpower. So, he spread the news that Russia was under attack from other countries and was being spied upon; its data hacked.
It is in the shadows of a lie that Putin constructed his digital empire, the author reveals. Russia, as part of its geopolitical guerilla warfare, identifies the weak spots in a country/person and inflames social media with divisive campaigns.
The task of controlling social media was not as easy as Putin might have thought. Internet is a vast architecture and he could not restrain the eruption of pluralistic views. Not the way he had TV and other media on a tight leash. This prompted him to establish battalions of content creators who needed to be nationalists and loyal to the Kremlin. The digital army of parties in India, as it is elsewhere, also commissions several people to write posts, create memes, produce disinformation campaigns, fill the space with fake news and spread disharmony and hatred.
Fixing elections
The second part of the book discusses how Facebook, Google and Twitter were used to fix and nix elections and how they helped many world leaders come to power. The author documents success stories of Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines who used influencers on Facebook to reach audiences. Barack Obama and Trump made the best use of social media for their election campaigns. In India, Narendra Modi pioneered the social media blitz in 2014.
The ambivalence in the ideological functions of social media occurred when an unholy truce was struck between politics, advertising/marketing and big data. Subsequently, Facebook said that its strategy “helps people to connect with each other” to allow unverified news streaming into its space. Recently, Facebook announced it would not remove false claims made in Trump’s re-election campaign advertisements even if they happened to be flagrant lies.
Facebook wants to connect people but for a much different purpose than what its punchline would indicate. The more the merrier—the more data it could get about more users, the more exchange value it would get by profiling them and selling them to the new crop of political evangelists who are also the biggest spenders.
In addition, Facebook ramped up its affordances by adding News Feed, Instant Articles, Facebook Connect and dark posts to its kitty. Moore explains the role of technological innovations in helping Facebook achieve its twin goals, intertwined though, of economic growth and political disruption.
Cradle of anarchy
The book describes Google as the cradle of anarchy. Google is a search engine without parallel and less fierce competition. It is also known for overturning its initial pledge that it would not be consumed by any greed to attract ads.
When Google was exposed to the possibility of data mining and got the taste of algorithm gold rush, it had less concern for users or for its ethical degeneration. The search engine turned into a relentless surveillance engine, tracking what people search and its related activities. It bundles our preferences and sells us to advertisers. In the process, its imperialism grew to an extent that it swallowed as many digital companies as it could, thereby having a stranglehold on digital services in the market.
To add to that, wearable technologies synced with Google has contributed to what is known as cognitive capitalism. Moore, in a masked provocation, details that our digital footprints allow Google to deepen its pockets. Advertising is not about buying media space, but buying people, he remarks. To its credit, Google has its own regime of advertising bludgeoned through keywords, clickbait and several other ad features.
The author begins his discussion of Twitter in a very positive way, highlighting its potential as an emerging news source. He argues that gatekeeping by journalists has shifted to the public, who have become alternative sources. Twitter is an alarm system for journalists to understand what people perceive, the author writes.
He also discusses the downside of the growing use of Twitter for journalism. Local journalism has taken a back seat as journalists now depend on Twitter for news updates and as field reporting has also come down. On a large scale, this has resulted in the sacking of many journalists in legacy media firms.
Later, the author puts in perspective how Twitter is also used to spread aggression-filled and offensive comments. If Trump’s tweets are anything to go by, or some of the tweets by politicians in any part of the world are any indication, Twitter distorts news. Craving for fast-food journalism through Twitter kills trust and accuracy. The author also points out that there are many whose voices are not heard as social media are too remote for them to access economically and otherwise.
Question of privacy
The third part of the book focusses on platforms gaining momentum in the digital sphere and the world’s pressing question of privacy, surveillance and the irredeemable loss of the democratic zeitgeist.
The efforts of Amazon, Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase to set up a remote digital health-care facility to address health issues in 2018 did give rise to new hopes. It led to Amazon partnering with the American Heart Association and much later even hosting the Cancer Genome Atlas that housed huge amount of molecular structures. Amazon accomplished this using its cloud computing facility. But its biggest asset was the data of patients.
Likewise, the author explains how Google along with Deepmind, a data company, partnered with Royal Free Hospital in the United Kingdom that shared all its patients’ medical records. Digital platforms realised that there was wealth in health. Moore says that platforms are like online bazaars. Unlike traditional bazaars, platforms track consumers and keep collecting data on end even after they leave.
Public transport platforms such as Uber, Ola and Lyft and over-the-top entertainment platforms services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime run on data that users put in and which are then processed by algorithms in enigmatic ways.
Aadhaar & surveillance
The chapter on surveillance begins with how Indian governments have linked Aadhaar number to our life—be it getting a scholarship, passport, or food rations. While the previous government touted that it was introduced to ensure proper transfer of benefits to people, the current government adds to the existing list saying it is a digital identity that could be used to prevent bank frauds and terror attacks.
With Aadhaar, it has now become easier for the government to track an individual. In other words, there is nothing that an individual can claim to be his/her private information that the state does not know about. When it was presented before the Supreme Court that Aadhaar takes away the fundamental rights of citizens, the court ruled that Aadhaar cannot be made mandatory. However, the government has not compromised on its intent and considers Aadhaar as its panoptic weaponry.
Singapore’s Smart Nation is similar wherein digital infrastructures are used to control the population. China is leading the charge with its social credit system that tracks its citizens, awards points to them on the basis of their purchase behaviour. For instance, someone buying a pack of cigars may lose points as opposed to one buying napkins. In addition, Moore highlights that increasing surveillance has led to a data and algorithmic bias whereby it could be used to target one group of people.
Moore has offered an unvarnished account of plutocrats, social media companies, states and their policies and agendas in grand detail. On the one hand, he has captured their economic growth and, on the other, their role in political disruption.
The book has some interesting and thought-provoking pointers one cannot dispense with. The author’s critical remark that social media have depoliticised the youth by alienating them from rationality is going to be foundational for understanding society, people and their perceptions.
It is also disheartening to note that many among the youth have become mercenaries in digital armies of political parties, engaged in labour, producing a product called hatred, whose exchange value is disharmony and violence. In this regard, the author appeals to sensitise ourselves to the way democracy is muted and mutilated.
The crisis of democracy can be perceived but is as invisible as coronavirus. As the virus of disinformation spreads, religions are not spared on social media. It is crucial to understand where hate and lie originate before they are circulated through networks. Hate originates in the hating body and not in the hated body. Much as coronavirus demands a new economic world order, it is time for the economies of love, and not hate, to endure.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.