What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?
‘Unstoppable force’ and ‘immovable object’ — these two entities exist only in the realm of philosophy (and fantasy), and so we may never know the answer to the question. But, dilute your expectations a wee bit and you might just be able to discover the faces of Indian Government and Facebook behind these entities instead.
The opening act:
In recent years, the Indian Govt. has been relentless, even ruthless, in the pursuit of its goals. And, almost always, it has been able to get its own way, till very recently.
In a move aimed to plug security loopholes (which some are calling an attempt at ‘mass surveillance’), the government asked WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) to enable message traceability (to identity first originator of a message). It was a simple enough demand, justified through the ever-green rationale of ‘national interest’, and the private entity was expected to play along and say ‘yes, your highness’.
But surprisingly, Facebook (the owner of WhatsApp) went off-script. You would not be mistaken to think that this was some kind of a clerical error and that Facebook would surely mend its egregious ways. But when Facebook went to court to stop the Indian Govt. from enforcing this rule, you knew that Facebook has dug in its heels and is looking the Indian Govt in the eye, as an equal.
Indian Government. The unstoppable force.
Facebook. The Immovable object.
The unstoppable force takes on the immovable object.
The rarity of the spectacle should get you salivating.
Yet the underlying tragedy is too hard to miss
That the spectacle is being played out at the cost of you, as a citizen and you as a consumer.
Whatever be the outcome of the battle, You are already the loser.
Act 2: Indian Government. The unstoppable force.
‘With great power comes great responsibility’ may make for a clap-worthy cinematic line, but what’s true is “with great power comes even greater power. Power begets power, nay, power demands more power. Power is the means and it is also the end — sole purpose of power is the acquisition of more power, till you have absolute power.
Governments are designed to wield unparalleled power. The construct of democracy leads to citizens ceding power to their representatives, who then, at least in the Indian context, assume control over their destiny.
So, it should not surprise anyone that the current Indian government has become an epitome of colossal power.
What is mildly-surprising, though, is the quantum of power accumulated by this government which contrasts so sharply with the previous regimes that those regimes seem nearly gentle-natured in comparison. Not to say that the previous regimes didn’t intend to accumulate power; their flailing attempts at power-grab met with resistance both internally and externally.
The colossal power at the disposal of the Indian government is an outcome of two simultaneous, but not independent, occurrences. The ruling party’s ascendance is both the cause and the result of the waning fortune of the opposition. After decades of coalition governments, euphemism for a car with many drivers, 2014 general elections threw up an undisputed winner (BJP crossed the majority mark), which meant a free-hand in ruling the country, unlike the experience of earlier regimes.
Power is a zero-sum game. Concentration of power is a result of vacuuming it from elsewhere.
With a near-absolute mandate by its side, the central govt set out to smoothen any wrinkles in its quest for power. Our institutions, malleable even in good times, on being cajoled or coerced, became even more pliant. The 2014 loss demoralized the main opposition party so much that it lost the appetite for a good fight and a probing question.
Unquestioned and unchecked, as power gathered at the centre, it’s been sucked out of the institutions and opposition parties, and ultimately from the citizens, who, in the absence of these pillars of democracy, are like a speck of dust getting blown away by the violent gust of wind that the centre is.
It’s a travesty of democracy, when the only way to secure your interests requires you to unconditionally align with the ruling party, when the voice that sings praises of the govt. is the only one that’s heard and when the ‘representatives of the people’ become the ‘representatives of the govt’.
The unstoppable force also means a powerless citizenry.
Act 3: Facebook. The immovable object.
It is remarkable, nevertheless a sad commentary on our democracy, that the entity standing up to the might of the central govt. isn’t one our constitution envisaged, but a private entity. And this courage comes not from any moral or ideological underpinning (even when Facebook might want us to believe that it’s a flagbearer of ‘right to privacy’) but through sheer business clout.
And that business clout comes from the fact that Facebook isn’t just any other technology behemoth. It’s the face of infinite possibilities that technology opens up and the unlimited power that it bequeaths. And in this, Facebook has the company of Google, another giant with an equally outsized influence.
The enormity of this influence can be seen in their customer base and valuation — both companies reach half of the world population (Google: 4 Billion [400 Crore], Facebook: 3.5 Bn) and are worth $ 1 Trillion (appx Rs. 72 lac crore) or thereabouts. The numbers, no doubt staggering, still don’t reveal the true source of their power, the one which makes them stand apart — and that is DATA.
Facebook isn’t in the business of connecting people nor is Google in the business of answering your curiosities. They are in the business of data. The sheer magnitude of data available to these companies would make any kind of scale look embarrassingly tiny. Every day, Facebook** generates enough data to write a 300-page book about each of its 3.5 Bn users: one-book-per-user-every-day. And every year, an average Google^^ user asks over 200 questions, some informational, many others revealing, to the search engine.
And these companies use this data to build a ‘digital you’ — with your personality and your eccentricities.
What Facebook and Google do, also called as data mining, isn’t too different from the art of painting. An artist brings a person to life on canvas — she uses colour, composition and brushstrokes to add story and richness to her subject’s personality. So do Facebook and Google — they bring together humongous bytes of data, add machine-based intelligence and create an evocative, soul-baring caricature of their users. There’s one difference though — the artist, most often, paints with the subject’s consent, while most Facebook and Google consumers are unaware of the scale and nature of their data being collected.
Calling data as the new oil is an attempt to blind us to its true power & mislabel the current means of data-gathering as innocuous. Data is the new DNA, that too a new and improved one. Data can trace your past, point to your present and guide to your future. The precision in human understanding which data enables cannot be matched by even the luckiest of astrologers. And when you see the quantum of data that these tech giants gather, often without user-knowledge, it isn’t far-fetched to say they have usurped the power over human destiny itself.
The immovable object is also the tombstone of consumer’s privacy.
The Closing Act:
On the face of it, Governments and private tech giants don’t have much in common, after all isn’t ‘private’ the opposite of ‘public’. But peel a few layers, and they start to look similar. Both of them supposedly work for your interests, one by asking for your vote, the other by asking for your info. Both also dehumanize you, one by stripping you out of power through its policies, the other by reducing you into bytes of data to be monetized from.
Be it power vested by law or power by data, too much of it is inimical to the one at the receiving end — the citizen and the consumer.
When the unstoppable force meets the immovable object, we know what has already happened.
That you and I have already lost.
**Facebook generate 4 petabytes of data. 1 e-book is typically 1 MB in size. So 4 PB translates to 400 Cr books
Source: https://research.fb.com/blog/2014/10/facebook-s-top-open-data-problems/
^^On average, the typical internet user searches Google 4 times a day++, out of which 14.1%# are questions (Others are navigational like typing Youtube or Facebook to go to those sites)
++https://backlinko.com/seo-stats
#https://99firms.com/blog/google-search-statistics/
Image sources:
The Joker image is sourced from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/29224712@N08/5229239530
The Superman image is sourced from: https://wordsfromtheloft.wordpress.com/2014/06/04/an-unstoppable-force-meets-an-immovable-object/
