Who’s Paying the Piper?

Thousands join HK anti government rally. ‘We’re not for sale’ Greenland tells Trump. US-China trade war: ‘We’re all paying for this’. Houthis attack Saudi oil plant. Russia completes Crimea security fence. North Korea launches more projectiles, rejects talks with South. US issues warrant to seize Iranian oil tanker off Gibraltar. Hundreds detained in Kashmir as anger grows.

Were you at all moved when you read that last line? Did you feel anything? A twitch, perhaps? If you identify as a Pakistani, then you must remember the video that showed up on Facebook last week… the one about Indian soldiers bashing Muslim women in Srinagar. Now do you feel anger over India’s move in Kashmir? As a woman, how could you not? As a man, you must have too. If that isn’t enough to make you angry then remember those Facebook threads about the Indian newspaper columns titled ‘Indian men can take Kashmiri brides now’. Know it was there. You saw it. It happened.

Those are just a few headlines by one of the news outlets that feed information to an estimated one billion people in over 100 countries. When the Washington Post tracked breaking headlines from 12 different outlets including CNN, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal through May 2017, there were an average of 44 alerts per day. A headline is seven words on average; easy to digest until there are too many headlines. Some headlines are tweeted and then retweeted on Twitter. In 34 languages, about 6000 times per second. Chirp, chirp, chirp. That’s 500 million tweets flying around per day! Since Twitter threads are limited to 280 characters, a tweet amounts to 40 words on average. Here’s one that caught fire last week: “China pays Twitter to promote fake news attacks on Hong Kong protestors”. These headlines are unchecked, retweetable and may amount to disinformation as much as they may amount to information.

Too much information?

If so, don’t worry. You won’t see the irrelevant particulars if companies like Twitter and Facebook (parent company of both whatsApp and Instagram) are getting their algorithms right. Especially when organisations like Cambridge Analytica are around to pull insights from these algorithms. They think they know your triggers; what upsets you and what makes you happy, based on feelings that you like to share. What you read and see is increasingly being tailored to you and your likes. To your data. To your clicks and your scrolls, as your fingers use the apps that they’ve come to know so well. With more data points and an estimated 5 billion mobile users, they probably are getting something right.

Not all the world’s internet users are on Facebook, whatsApp, Instagram or Twitter though. One billion users are in China, where the aforementioned have been banned. WeChat dominates the market there, and has been subsidised by the Chinese government since 2011. It is now part of a project to issue virtual ID cards across China. There is also the Russia-based VK.com, with half a billion users, and whose founder Pavel Durov resigned (or was dismissed) in 2014. He claims that the company is controlled by ‘allies of the Kremlin’.

Hang on, I’ve just receieved a notification from Al Jazeera. Breaking news: ‘Genocide under way’ warns AJK President. “I thank the international media for not choosing one sided reporting at this time” he says.

After reading that, you may feel even worse if you think about your Kashmiri grandmother, whose arms cradled you when you cooed and whose hands made you pink, pistachio-dipped chai every winter until she died. You were missing her recently, so you decided to share an old photo of her in Kashmir on Instagram. Oddly, instagram sent you a reminder about the photo after you shared the president’s statement. Her stories about Kashmir were utopian in comparison to today’s near- dystopia. They were a bit like the Kashmir of Bollywood; fair skinned women, cotton clouds in deep blue skies, rolling hills of green and walnut trees. Now there’s the dystopia of military rule. No phones, no wifi, soldiers patrolling streets, protests, slander and headlines like this: “Activists describe life under lockdown in occupied Kashmir as grim”.

Dystopia. A wonderful word for life today, isn’t it? Ah, and remember those times when the streets were safe and the air was clean. All those good times you’ve heard so much about, but never seen.

So, who’s fault is the Kashmir issue anyway? Is it the fault with the Indian people who elected Modi or is the fault with the Modi government? What about democracy? What about the British when they colonised the subcontinent? So many options. Or are you still undecided? And while we’re talking about dystopias, how do you feel about Trump and his treatment of minorities in the US? Are you perturbed by him or is he mildly entertaining? A kind of modern-day Bonaparte; wig-headed, imperialistic and all. Except that Trump’s a capitalist who says he wants to buy Greenland. Now pay attention to how Trump constructs language about Mexicans and ‘other’ Hispanics, who are essentially 1 in 5 Americans but are extraordinarily underrepresented in public-facing roles like policy, arts, film and culture. The Trump rhetoric seems to fill this vacuum with wholesome bans, borders and big, great walls.

If you’re from the other ‘M-word’ minority community in America, then you should hear President Trump on his foreign policy in Iran. Iran, a country that has stood up for Palestine, Syria and Yemen, unlike oil and blood-stained Saudi Arabia, right? A recent headline was ‘Iran wants to talk but does not know how,’ says Mr. Trump in his trademark toupee and iron voice. “I-ran” he says and I run! Here’s our modern-day iron curtain man, except now, “Trump to discuss Kashmir mediation with Modi.” He can’t be all that bad, right?

There’s also the possibility that you feel nothing when you think of Trump, Modi, Kashmir, Iran, China and all the rest. Trump isn’t America, says a reasonable voice in your head. It could also be that you’re simply indifferent to the news. Too much noise. Perchance you don’t have an opinion on what to feel about headlines or maybe you’re disillusioned by it all. There’s also the off chance that your mind changes with headlines. Perhaps, you are mildly unsettled by the humanitarian stuff- just momentarily- when you read the headlines. In that case, psychologist Leon Festinger found a name for your state of confusion in 1957. He called it ‘cognitive dissonance’, or the state of holding two or more contradictory beliefs. If true, then nearly 61 years later, data-mining companies like Cambridge Analytica have actually found a name for you. You could be one of ‘The Persuadables’ and here’s how you become a ‘Persuadable’.

Assume that you have an internal need to for consistency between your beliefs and the external world or ‘reality’. Imagine holding a belief in God but entertaining the possibility of God’s nonexistence at the same time. It takes away from your ability to make sense of the world. Cognitive dissonance causes a disruption in your internal fabric, by entertaining the possibility that two equally plausible but incompatible beliefs might exist at the same time. If you can’t change your beliefs, the discomfort from an inability to rationalise conflicting beliefs is said to give rise to an emotional response that may stoke an angry flame in your belly. Freud called the feeling ‘uncanny’.

So if you are one of the Persuadables, then information could be used to change your mind, right? Unless you’re protected by the GDPR or by some other data bill that promises protection against misinformation and misuse. At least, that’s the promise in Europe and the U.K, for now. All you have to do is read through boxes of data consent forms, service agreement lists, and click that somewhat uncomfortable “I agree” button, assuming that you know the difference between old privacy agreements and new ones. All you really have to do is to give your cookies up to some invisible monster who has his hands bottom- deep in the glass jar. There’s your power.

Even with data protection laws, targeted information or misinformation is not always overt in its targeting. Information is embedded in platforms, in the form of advertisements for the vast majority of young people who do not open news applications directly but share via whatsApp or Instagram, both owned by Facebook. So, to reiterate, all those videos, articles, likes, shares, re-shares; it’s all in the family and the family isn’t going anywhere.

It’s also important to make note of one underlying assumption in all this talk about targeted information and cognitive dissonance. It is assumed that your behaviour is predictable. So, even if you don’t share your information with all these platforms, even if you aren’t online, it doesn’t matter. So long as decisions are democratic and the majority wins, normal distribution applies- statistically speaking, that is. There are enough people who will continue to share their data with important algorithms, that will then continue to produce important behavioural insights for important customers. Insights will lead to the development of new types of groups, like ‘The Persuadables.’ These statistical populations will only increase with higher rates of internet accessibility.

In Europe and North America, internet penetration is already estimated at above 90 pc. The African region is one of the largest captive populations in the world, and mobile penetration here is at 37 pc today. Internet penetration in Middle Africa is predictably the lowest, at around 12 pc. As penetration grows, people will bring more data points, increased cultural variety in sample sizes, and higher predictive accuracy. Unlike China, India and Russia, African’s captive population is fragmented, meaning that the politics of polarisation may be less controllable. However, there is a clear move towards public initiatives to get people online. For example, in the Tshwane District of South Africa, the Internet is considered a merit good, like health and water. Through private-public partnerships and public funding, South Africa may see WiFi being rolled out for free in the near future. However, who might control and have access to the data on these networks, is unclear but if the government is paying for it, then it’s anyone’s guess.

With more information on group types like the Persuadables, who might experience states such as cognitive dissonance, comes the possibility of stronger algorithms that can then target people to feel certain things that will drive their behaviours based on the information they receive. Information may take the form of particular headlines or advertisements that evoke feelings of anger, fear, or excitement, convincing people to align themselves with particular leaders, ideologies, countries and even populations. People may even believe that entire populations are either good or bad.

As the digitalisation of Africa and South Asia increases, it will be interesting to observe the tone of information that will trickle from powers like the USA and China, who are heavily invested in the regions. The tone of information dissemination is reminiscent of Cold War politics. There may not have been a pervasive internet then but in 1950, the newly-formed CIA spent over 80% of its budget on covert cultural intervention through the Congress for Cultural Freedom; a cultural front for the West. Authority and funding was tied to the Marshall Plan’s ‘blank cheque’ and the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, both of which provided a free-hand over CIA spending. Part of this budget was directed towards covert cultural interventions that enabled the targeted spread of anti-communist and pro-capitalist information at the time. This allegedly included sponsoring cultural magazines like Partisan Review and the Encounter, and events like the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Soviet Tour. The difference between then and now is that the Internet allows covert, observable feedback on whether targeted information is changing minds and behaviours or not.

To add to all that, think about the scientific fact that we have only 52 million square miles of land on Earth to live on. Of this, Russia, the USA, China and India are amongst the largest land owners. This includes the supply of food and freshwater, biodiversity, energy production, and now carbon capturing, and according to the IPCC’s most recent report, more than 70% of the earth’s ice-free land is being used by humans. With climate-change threatening all of the above, it’s little wonder that the by 2020 four of the world’s most powerful and populated economies will probably be ruled by strong protectionist and somewhat expansionist figures. These are Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi, some of whom’s governments have been directly linked to centralised data collection through platforms like WeChat.

And remember Trump’s offer to Greenland? Think about the last time the US bought a territory in the Arctic, it turned out to be one of the most abundant states in natural resource terms; they acquired Alaska in 1867. Reminiscent of the early 1900s, these figures and their allies are also being criticised for expansionist land policies, protectionist economic policies, polarisation politics, and subversive state activities, except that today’s countries are ‘democratic’ and digital. Do you know what that means? Either way, there’s a different song in the air but it might just be following an old tune.

So, going back to some of the headlines of this week: Hong Kong protest moves peace fully to mob attack subway (Reuters). Peer influence amongst factors blamed in HK (China Daily). Ethics body to improve oversight in tech (China Daily). Putin awards pilots with country’s highest honor for saving 233 lives (RT). Russia fines CNN broadcaster for volume violations (Reuters). U.S drone shot down over Yemen: officials (Reuters). Iran’s Zarif warns U.S that Tehran may also act ‘unpredictably’ (Reuters). India’s security officer killed in Kashmir clash (BBC).

Now tell me, who is paying the piper to sing?