Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Native: Lessons from Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp going down

nishant — 2019-04-03T01:19:29Z

The day when three social-media apps refused to load.

The article was published in Indian Express on March 24, 2019.

It was a day of chilly silence. I first registered something was wrong when the phone, that one true love, seemed to be giving me the silent treatment. The purple, blue and red lights that mark the notifications from three of my most-used apps — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — were missing from my daily habits. When I tried to open and refresh the apps and nothing showed up, I confess I had a sense of foreboding.

Three immediate scenarios came to my mind. I surreptitiously looked outside the window to see if I had missed the memo for the apocalypse while I was reading. However, because there were no zombie masses thronging the streets, I realised that the collapse of my information channels was not the end of the world. I also tried to see if the internet in the house had cracked, because surely, if Facebook wasn’t loading, the problem must be with my local service providers. But even as I looked around, all the Internet of Things devices at my home beeped, chirped, winked, and flashed merrily, reassuring that all was still the same. As a last resort, I tried reinstalling all the apps to see if my phone had gone bonkers but to no avail.

That is when I decided to go to the “other” service that was still working — Twitter — and was delivered the digital reassurance that I was not alone. In fact, I was arriving to the party late because by then, all the thumb-click addicts, aghast at the loss of their platforms, had already flocked to Twitter getting their quick-fix of social media vagaries, and also complaining in horror at the biggest outage in internet history. The hashtags #facebookdown, #instagramdown, and #whatsappdown were already trending. Ironically, all the three companies were also using Twitter to update people about their engineering fixes, and also letting us know that this was just a “machine error” and not the cyberwarfare that we have been preparing for by downloading all our favourite shows on unconnected hard-drives stored in secure locations.

While this #downgate continued, it was a lot of fun to see people trolling their favourite platforms threatening to go back to MySpace and Orkut accounts (remember those?) while they wait for their lives to be restored. While the outage slowly became an inage (yes, I know that’s not a word, but it’s the internet, okay?) and we went back to the habits of the endless scroll, one question remained — what happens to the internet when we start giving up the ownership of all our information channels to a few megalithic corporations?

This question is particularly pertinent because just before #downgate, Facebook had already announced its intentions of clubbing all its messenger services together to achieve a seamless experience for its users. Seamlessness sounds like a great idea but it is also another word for assimilation. It is also another word that reminds us that the internet, once imagined as a disruptive force of independent voices and local collectives is obviously heading (if not already there) for a complete takeover by private companies.

We seem to be in the paradox where everyday we have a new app, offering new choices, new filters, new manipulations, and yet almost all of these apps are owned by the same companies. We have arrived at the moment of the “same same but different” where the plethora of choices is hiding the lack of creative freedoms on the web. The implications of these are not just about the boredom of our appified lives but about the politics of control. In closed information-architecture countries like China, we have already seen what a monopoly of digital data technologies can lead to — from social-credit-score systems to databases of “breed-worthy women”.

It has been the fun (and the racially marked prerogative) of the global West to mock China and its curtailing of civil liberties and exercise of control. Most digital media outlets have encouraged this trend of setting up China as the laughing stock while the same happens to our global internet landscapes. Despite the continued reporting on data breaches, security overrides, and blatant exploitation of our digital practices, we continue to believe in the emancipatory potentials of the web, while turning a blind eye to the silent control of the technologies we use at the level of hardware, software, standards, protocols, code, and usage.

As we TikTok our ways into the rabbit hole of the endless stream of blink-and-miss viral content, it is easy to forget that behind the immense diversity of users creating this content is an increasingly monolithic technology infrastructure that can shut it all down at the whim and fancy of the next person who holds the switch.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-march-24-2019-digital-native-lessons-from-facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-going-down

Digital Native: How an information overload affects what you forward

nishant — 2019-04-03T01:12:30Z

The information overload of social media sharing can make us act against our better judgement.

The article was published in Indian Express on March 10, 2019.

I had to do a double take when the post flashed on my feed. It was a post filled with armchair bloodlust, calling for war and justifying it through emotional bulls***. In many ways, it wasn’t shocking, because in its misdirected anger and emotional patriotism, it mimicked the charged nature of conversations that we have naturalised on the social web. It also followed the familiar paths of writing about action — from the safety and comfort of a sheltered life, where it is clear that the people sharing it would never have to participate in the war that they are baying for, and that even the destructive aftermath of the war would not interrupt their latte lifestyles.

It was clearly authored by one of those social media savants who indulge in random acts of capitalisation, which give you a brain rash. It did not even claim to be factual — the excesses of exclamation points were supposed to make up both for the hate speech and xenophobia that were being couched as nationalism.

This time, though, the post came from an unexpected source. It was shared in a group that generally has rational, fairly academics and measured discussions about the politics of everyday life. In the past, the most offensive thing anybody had done in a disagreement was to make threatening cat memes. And yet, here was a post that had the community howling for violence and fighting among each other with a vitriol that they would have generally decried and derided.

Unable to understand this completely unexpected behaviour, I started pinging a few familiar people through private messages, asking them why they were deviating into uncharacteristic behaviour. In a dozen different conversations, one thing that everybody talked about was how they did not begin with this emotional state when they heard the first susurrations of war. They all shared that their first reaction to the portents of war was cautious concern and a thoughtful contemplation of its consequences. However, somewhere between that first reaction and now, something obviously had switched. They had gone from people wanting to think about the possibilities of war to mobs who were supporting rabid and radical calls for action not grounded in anything more than an emotional excess.

Their emotional state, they were saying, was not their own, but was something they learned as they were bombarded with incessant torrents of similar posts that valorised, championed and positioned war as the only option available. At some time in their information overload, facts, truths, thoughtfulness and critique all disappeared and they got sucked into a viral sharing habit where they inherited the anger, the hate, and the militarised trolling that flooded their timelines.

When we talk of information overload and the constant engagement with social media streams, we often talk about people doing strange things, which they would not do in real life — if there is a real life that can be separated from the digital domains. Especially when looking at gender-based violence, non-consensual distribution of sexual content, and cyber-bullying, the perpetrators often find themselves in a state of shock when confronted personally with their actions and their consequences. Many people, swept in the fashions of the digital delirium, begin their confessions in a state of denial: “This is not who I am… I just lost control”, is a common refrain.

Researchers have pointed out that one of the most dramatic effects of information saturation is the suspension of emotional guards and affective patterns. Information overload sometimes leaves the subject in an emotional state that resembles victims of mental abuse. It leads to such a state of stress and tension that many people just give in to the onslaught of information and follow the patterns rather than resisting or questioning it. Continued sharing and circulation makes our emotional judgement fickle, and we often act against our impulses.

Algorithms of manipulation, coordinated bot attacks, and commissioned troll campaigns exploit this, because this emotional state is one that can be easily controlled — towards making political choices, buying things we don’t want, towards attacking people, communities, countries. It is time to realise that our sharing is not just about our own impulses and ideas. We are continuously being nudged and taught to inherit an emotional state that is being engineered in the circuits of the social web. So the next time you share something, pause, and think about whether this is what you want to say or this is what you are being trained to say, because what we say and share has consequences, often beyond that quick click.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-march-10-2019-indian-express-digital-native-how-an-information-overload-affects-what-you-forward

What I learned from going offline for 48 hours

nishant — 2019-03-14T16:21:29Z

A weekend without the internet shows just how much control we surrender to online chatter.

The article was published by Indian Express on February 24, 2019.

In one of those blue-funk I-need-to-digitally-detox modes, I went offline for 48 hours. It was interesting to just turn the internet off — putting all the devices on flight mode and doing other things — and spend an entire weekend away from screens and home assistants. The world felt a little empty and silent without the constant chatter of all my smart devices.

When I woke up on Monday morning and brought the internet back into my life, my phone vibrated for five minutes flat as all the different apps woke up to the sweet smell of connectivity and started downloading information in an apocalyptic frenzy. Every notification sound that has ever been set on my phone and other devices, competed with another to ring the loudest and announce the world waiting at my doorstep.

I was curious to know what this extraordinary traffic could be about. My work email was more or less where I had left it before I signed out, but everywhere else was chatter. I had more than a 100 notifications of birthdays, events, and important occasions that I had missed. Despite the fact that I had not produced any content, not initiated any conversations, and not engaged with any material, I had more than 400 notifications from five main social media apps, where people had tagged me, poked me and pulled me into long conversation threads that I could no longer recognise or trace back.

An equal number of friendly algorithms had curated things that needed my attention and were warning me that I might have missed out on the most life-changing moments. My personal messaging system was filled with group messages, those from family and friends who were not talking to me but making me a witness to their conversations. There were also a few frantic messages, first checking if the messages were being delivered, then wondering why I was not responding, and then going into a rage about my rudeness for not even informing them that I wouldn’t be replying to them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-february-24-2019-what-i-learned-from-going-offline-for-48-hours

India’s proposed new internet bill is as repressive as the worst of Chinese laws

nishant — 2019-02-04T02:05:12Z

The proposed new internet bill is as repressive as the worst of Chinese restrictions. The new intermediaries liability and content monitoring act that will become a law in February, unquestioningly expand the remit of the government.

The article was published in Indian Express on January 27, 2019,

Almost a decade ago, I spent a year living in Shanghai, as part of a research fellowship. I spent time with digital cultural producers and wrote about the ways in which they navigated the restrictive terrains of the web. One of the groups that I was working with, introduced me to a stuffed toy called Cao Ni Ma which, spoken one way means, “mud grass horse”. But the same words with a different tone resulted into an offensive mother-related expletive. The Cao Ni Ma, that year, was the best-selling toy in the Chinese market during the new year celebrations, and had broken the internet with memes, videos, and imaginary pictures that emerged once it was conceived in a prank encyclopedia page titled the “10 legendary obscene beasts of China”. The humour was juvenile to my eyes, reminiscent of dorm-room talk as well as old internet discussion forums where tech nerds came with the keyword Pr0n or Prawn to escape the prying eyes of primitive censorship algorithms.

However, as I quickly learned, this was not just fun and games. The reason why this entire thing had gone viral was because China had, by then, established a complete control over what can and cannot be said online. Chinese internet intermediaries — like Baidu, which run the Chinese version of Wikipedia, for instance — had not only complied but also internalised the censoring of all speech that was found offensive to the sovereignty and integrity of the country. This included critique of the state and political leaders, a voicing of complaint about poor infrastructure or governance, any expression of desire or profanity that would be socially unacceptable. Intermediaries in China, even before the social credit systems were announced, were mandated and enabled to remove all content that they thought might “shatter the harmony” of the “Chinese way of living”.

I didn’t realise how deep this regulation of the intermediaries goes till I accidentally ended up writing about Cao Ni Ma, and the playfulness of their subversion on my research blog. It was, in fact, in an academic paper that I presented at a conference in Taiwan and so I had announced it on my social media. While I was in Taiwan, my email suddenly started singing. My host colleagues were concerned about my well-being. My departmental colleagues were asking me about my whereabouts. The dean of the faculty asked me to stay back in Taiwan longer and to not come back to Shanghai till I heard from him again. It took me six more days before I was finally reunited with my guest house, and all my stuff. Upon return, I had friendly visits from five different committees, ranging from academic ethics panel that had approved my research project to the immigration and police who wanted to know more about my research.

Once the ordeal was over — though I was warned that another infringement would not be tolerated — I kept on re-reading what I had written to figure out what could have triggered this amount of anxiety. When I asked a Chinese friend, she looked at me with telling eyes. “It is not what you have written but the fact that you have written about it as well. You can’t write about this because it undermines the government”. The regulation of intermediaries was not about making the internet safe, keeping hate speech at bay, and building a more inclusive web. It was purely and simply about determining who can say what about what. There were no clear guidelines because anything that could be interpreted as unwanted automatically became unwanted.

The current Indian government has proposed a new internet bill that seeks to mimic the Chinese control of information and voices to the T. The new intermediaries liability and content monitoring act that will become a law in February, unless resisted and critiqued, unquestioningly expands the remit of the government, through private intermediaries, to control what we can see and read, and also what we can say and share. It is yet another assault in an atmosphere where newspapers, civil society organisations, political protestors, and common persons are targeted, bullied, and intimidated into silence.

Without public support and attention, this law is most likely going to pass. I am making a list of all the things we might no longer be able to say on the web — and also obsessively looking at the Instagram egg while I still can, because just like the midday meal, the egg might soon disappear from our vegetarian webs.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-january-27-2019-indias-proposed-new-internet-bill-is-as-repressive-as-the-worst-of-chinese-laws

Digital Native: System Needs a Reboot

nishant — 2018-12-31T02:06:02Z

It’s time to replace the schizophrenic need for variety with ingenuity — the truthiness of the information.

The article was published in Indian Express on December 30, 2018.

On the internet, we produce information to be forgotten. The life of digital information is shaped by conditions of volume, velocity and variety (the three Vs). The scale of our collective digital content production has now reached massive proportions. We produce more information in a day than we have produced over entire centuries. So trying to make human sense of this information is futile. We can be assured that almost everything we write will be forgotten and archived before it is consumed and remembered. The large volume also means that in order for information to stand out, it needs velocity. The trend of today will be replaced in a few clicks by something else. Fomo, the fear of missing out, is not just a millennial anxiety, it is the new natural. It is because information is continually being forgotten, transferred from memory to storage, it needs to have variety. It needs to be new but familiar, expected but exciting. Let’s call it, same same, but different.

Renewal is the default of all our digital transactions. Our data streams need constant renewal, our platforms demand updating, our habits of social media engagement need maintenance, and we find new ways of doing the same things over and over again. Our devices light up, with frantic energy, with seductive beeps and sounds, reminding us of the need to renew and update. The poetics of hope and regeneration have long since given way to the politics of manipulation and transactions.

It is the state of continual renewal that perpetuates the fake news economies, as people share without verifying, and consume without reflection. It enables lynch mobs and vigilante violence. It is at the heart of why outrageous claims, provocative politics and a state of extreme apathy make their way into our digital conversations and responses. This is why, hate speech has now become acceptable, and actions without consequences is the new ethos online. It perhaps accounts for why we seem to care more about our gadgets and services than the people behind them. This is why, when we see a food-delivery person stealing some food from our expensive orders, we ask for them to be sacked, rather than being shocked by the deep irony of getting food that costs more than anything the person can ever afford. It puts our attention on to things that have more engagement value than things that matter — which perhaps explains why three weddings with their obscene displays of wealth and power had more social media engagement than conversations about #MeToo in the country.

This renewal has been naturalised as our new mode of being and becoming, making us hypermobile drones that are always on the go, always working, always interacting. The state of perpetual renewal is here to stay, and we will have to figure out ways by which to live with these three Vs. As we approach that time of the year, when we make new resolutions, I want to offer the three Is which perhaps need to be brought back into consideration in our unthinking digital actions: intensity, intimacy, ingenuity.

The volume imperative of digital information favours scale. It wants more clicks, more eyeballs, more users. We get passionately invested for a brief period of time and then are moved on to the next thing. Instead of continually looking for volume, let us focus on intensity. We don’t need a thousand likes, we just need people who we care for, to like things that we do. Something doesn’t become important only when it circulates and goes viral — it becomes so because of the people who are involved in it.

Similarly, the velocity of digital networks demands high speed. We click before we think, and we share before we verify. Our relationship with information has been reduced to sharing as opposed to processing. Maybe it is time to replace velocity with intimacy. When we encounter information, let us take a small pause, process and analyse, and instead of just blindly sharing, maybe respond and critique it, so that it is a relationship of value.

The expectations of variety provoke information that is often untrue or removed from reality. Our filter bubble echo chambers often establish this information as true through repetition rather than verification. We need to get out of the schizophrenic need for variety and concentrate instead on ingenuity — the truthiness of the information and our capacity to stand behind things that we say and share.

The three Vs of digital information are machine protocols. They put the computational in the centre and dictate how human behaviour will be shaped. Maybe it is time we think of the three Is instead, to focus on human needs and aspirations, and demand that our technologies measure up to what we can expect from each other.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-december-30-2018-digital-native-system-needs-a-robot

Digital Native: One Selfie Does a Tragedy Make

nishant — 2018-12-05T02:20:03Z

The great find of this century – life’s worth just a selfie. Channeling the inner narcissus is now human hamartia.

The article was published in Indian Express on November 11, 2018.

Selfies are suddenly back in news. In a tragic accident in Amritsar, a collective of people stood on train tracks, surrounded by the festive fire and the ferocious fireworks of Dussehra, taking selfies, and so involved in this immersive environment of self-gratified feedback loops that they did not see or hear a fast train hurtling at them in the dark. In the aftermath, as video footage and people’s testimonies stitched the gruesome picture together, selfies have emerged as a part of the problem. Apparently, there is something that goes off in our brains, when we see ourselves, glittery, lit, filtered, and modified on the flickering light of our cellphones – in that brief long moment of us watching ourselves, everything else seems to disappear. All that is left is that hungry moment where we consume the self, and the world can literally collapse around us.

These incidents of selfie-love leading to danger and death of the self has been globally reported, and reported often. Each time, over the grief and pain of the families and friend who lament these deaths which looked like just fun and games till they were not, we hear the warning signs that selfies can be dangerous for health. We don’t yet know enough about why we become completely oblivious to everything and everyone around us, in this minute of peak narcissism, when we see ourselves in an image of our own. However, one thing is certain, lately, every time we hear news of public accidents and private tragedies, selfies seem to be implicated.

India leads the way in selfie-related deaths in the world, accounting for 60 per cent of all such deaths around the globe. Selfies are the reason behind fatal accidents on the road as people, whether driving, or walking, seem to lose all sense of self and crash to death. Selfies seem to be lurking in stories of people going on holidays and falling down cliffs, losing themselves in watery depths, or even being mauled by wild animals in their quest for snapping their own images. Selfies seem to be just around the corner in stories of household accidents, street-corner collisions, and even personal fights.

Selfies, like cigarettes, are soon going to come with statutory warnings and images of all the ridiculous ways in which people have harmed themselves in the pursuit of a selfie. I have spent the last two weeks, engaging with the good folks at the online group, Selfie Research Network, and one of the things that has stood out is that selfies are no longer just describing our reality, they are defining it. Selfies used to be a way of capturing some moments of our lives — they now seem to be the only way by which our life can be defined. Selfies are not about our relationship with ourselves — but about our relationship with the world out there, that is no longer accessible but mediated only through the algorithmic platforms of selfie-interaction.

Or to put it other way, we used to think that selfies are the occasional manifestations of our inner narcissus, surfacing in performative moments, to capture an exceptional state of affairs. From there, we have come to a straight-forward internet maxim “pic or it didn’t happen”. We have learned to externalise ourselves, and, in the process, created selfies that stand as a beacon of hope, joy, celebration, attention — superficial, flat, caricatures of life, and trapped in the minutes of their posting, hoping that life will be an endless loop of that endless happiness. Even as we post selfies, we are aware of the hollowness that surrounds them, and desperately hope that if we perform enough happiness, distributing our pearlies on display, maybe things will change. Selfies are now how we live.

And this is not just a personal phenomenon any more. The erection of the Statue of Unity, on a river-island, overlooking an artificial lake, facing the Narmada Dam is a great example of the selfie times we live in. A look at the statue, in its gargantuan stature, smiling benignly for the whole world to look at, and we can now forget the reality that it hides in its concrete steadfastness. It stands on a site that witnessed enormous agitations over people’s rights to their lands. It stands in a state where 25 per cent of its population face hunger and malnutrition, according to International Food Policy Research Institute (Ifpri). It celebrates the man who organised peasants in Gujarat for non-violent civil disobedience, and was inaugurated by a leader whose party has preached and practised communal hatred and violence. It is a selfie of the country that hides the self, and the state of the state where people are struggling to eat, drink, and breathe.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-november-11-2018-digital-native-one-selfie-does-a-tragedy-make

Digital Native: Hashtag Fatigue

nishant — 2018-11-01T06:04:25Z

It is easy to hijack hashtags by coupling them with others. It is equally easy to make hashtags die.

The article was published in Indian Express on October 28, 2018.

Information overload is our new default. We don’t just slip into a condition of overload, we live in it on a daily basis. Every minute, surrounded by digital devices that buzz, beep, chirp, blink and notify us about the various information streams that shape us, we experience a sensory overload that is unprecedented. One of the reasons for this information overload is that digital networks work on traffic. Traffic — the data that travels in bits, bytes, and packets, over the network edges of our computation systems — is the lifeline of a network. A network without traffic is dead. The network exists to circulate information and transfer information. Take that away and the network is just a whole lot of dead hardware.

So, if a computational network is our default mode of existence, then we will have to accept that these networks will continue to incessantly circulate traffic and keep the edges that connect us as nodes, busy, with a continued information stream. This is why our machines are in a state of continued update, and this is why we expect to receive and share new information in all states.

This state of information overload has led to some alarming signals about human relationship with information: We find our attention now shallow, because even before we have processed the first stream of information, something else comes and dislocates that information. Information intensity is replaced by information scale, so we are no longer invested in a deep engagement with the information that comes to us. For information to keep our attention longer than the click, we need information to be repeated, consolidated, and updated over and over again, so that we can keep focusing on the same topic, but on multiple screens and interfaces.

The hashtag is a great example of this. Even though a hashtag excites us, inspires us, and motivates us to engage with an information stream, hashtags immediately dislocate us to other hashtags and other tangents. It is easy to hijack hashtags by coupling them with others. It is equally easy to make hashtags die by infusing them with misinformation which makes the user disengage from the stream. Hashtags can make things go viral, by being shared, and they can hold attention only if they are fed by multiple and many voices that keep them alive.

While viral hashtags have public attention and hold, they also lead to a different phenomenon — what I call #hashtag fatigue. We get bored of the hashtag, because the same few ones show up so many times, that even when they have new material, we presume that we already know what accompanies them. We also get tired of the hashtags, because they fill up almost all our attention span. We get desensitised, often ignoring the individual and collective experiences they consolidate. We learn to ignore hashtags, because as more people share it, the more it seems to be everyday, losing easily to other information sets that are screaming for eyeballs.

We see this in the way #MeToo is developing in India. As more women come out, naming their abusers and enablers, we see a hashtag fatigue stepping in. We already see people raising an emoji eyebrow and rolling their digital eyes while there are abusers who are maintaining silence hoping that this will phase out soon. There are people who have started making jokes about how everything is now #MeToo, and this also feeds into the patriarchal powers who are using this moment to paint themselves as victims of vindictive women, dismissing their collective and individual trauma. We see many survivors getting overwhelmed by the scale of voices trickling in, feeling deafened by the continuous traffic that surrounds the hashtag, but also creating an isolated island where nothing else trickles in. We see news media already finding either new angles or other controversies, because in the lifeline of the news cycle, this is already old news.

In order for #MeToo to remain a sustainable social justice movement and a long-standing solidarity, we will have to find other ways of engaging with this movement. While the digital offers the first platform and catalysis, we will have to find other spaces for the movement and its ambitions to survive. It is time for us to simultaneously find forms that will capture the urgency but move beyond the viral fatigue of the #hashtag.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-28-2018-digital-native-hashtag-fatigue

Digital Native: Time to Walk the Talk

nishant — 2018-11-01T05:58:30Z

#MeToo has turned victims into survivors, but social media remains an unsafe space.

The article was published in Indian Express on October 14, 2018.

#MeToo movements from around the globe have found a cultural and public force. As victims of sexual and gendered violence and abuse, especially in the workplace and professional fields, use the pseudo-safe space of the internet to give testimony to their pain, grief, trauma, and despair, the world has been forced to listen, and acknowledge that these experiences are real, and the lingering scars that they leave on the lives of these survivors need to be acknowledged and addressed. With this one hashtag, the digital web has transformed victims into survivors — giving them not just a public voice, but also a collective space for support, the relief of finding care, and the catharsis of being heard and seen, and to ask for accountability and justice for their experiences.

Every survivor who has spoken using this hashtag, has done it not only as a personal expression but also as an heroic civic duty, exposing the often seen but never named problem of gendered and sexual violence. Every hashtag has also exposed these survivors to backlash which disbelieved, ridiculed, or bullied them into silence and shame. Every person who has spoken up, to re-enact the violence which they live with, has made themselves vulnerable to further attacks and stigmatisation from the communities that they are speaking against.

The hashtag is important also because it is not just a platform for survivors to speak but also for allies to come in. The responsibility of addressing the question of gender and sexual violence cannot lie only on the survivors. Hashtags are connectors — they are digital objects that consolidate many different disparate elements and gives them a common identity. #MeToo has made sure that the allies, the activists, the people who are introspecting their own behaviour and their complicity in naturalising these actions, all find a space to come together. It is a ringing reminder that oppression and violence are intersectional, and so our fights and resistances and communities will also have to be intersectional. It reminds us that gender and sexual violence are not “women’s problems” but social problems where women often get victimised.

When the #MeToo first became global news, what was refreshing was the number of voices from India who decided to speak in support of the survivors. A wide variety of people acknowledged that this is not just an American problem but a problem that has even deeper roots in the country. Woke Bollywood bros, new age silver screen feministas, progressive creatives, and liberal audiences all came in unity to talk about the state of gender and sexual violence in our everyday lives.

But it just needed one puff of truth for the house of cards to collapse. As Tanushree Dutta took the step to call out what we all know — that Bollywood is a cesspit of exploitation and sexism — the tinsel town squirmed. Apart from a handful of voices, most established veterans either abstain from responding, feign ignorance, or rush to the defence of a person who is now accused of sexual violence. The do-good Twitterati, happy to comment on far-away foreign cases, is suddenly hemming and hawing when the problem knocks at their doors and comes out of the closet. The Dutta-Patekar conversations on social media are a startling reminder that we remain still a space that is unsafe, hostile, and intimidating for survivors to come out and tell their truth.

The digital hashtag allows you to connect to extensive distances and stand in support of them. We travel with the hashtag to far-away lands and add our voice and support to problems we might not immediately be living through. It is good to remember, though, that hashtags also travel. What was once distant will eventually come close to home. When it does, the people who could perform their speech will have to move to action. It might be a good idea to look at the Twitter history of every big shot who had used #MeToo to extend their support against Weinstein, and ask them, to do the same now. They need to be reminded that politics is not in speech but in action. And if they do not stand up for Dutta now, they will have not just failed Dutta but every woman who might have wanted to come out and speak her truth against those who have abused their power to demean and diminish the dignity of their lives.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-14-2018-digital-native-time-to-walk-the-talk

Digital Native: Hardly Friends Like That

nishant — 2018-10-02T06:28:10Z

Individual effort is far from enough to fool Facebook’s grouping algorithm.

The article was published in the Indian Express on September 30, 2018

Lately, my Facebook timeline is flooded with people who are trying to “hack” Facebook’s friendship algorithm. Ever since Facebook took away the option from its users, to view their posts in reverse chronology, and made us slaves to its algorithms that pick and choose, based on opaque rules, what we see on our timeline, people have been frustrated with it. When your newsfeed is compiled by an algorithm that selects and decides what is good for you to see and what will be your interest, it doesn’t just mean that you have lost control, but that you are being manipulated without even noticing it, responding to only certain kinds of information that triggers specific responses from you.

This has led to a lot of people trying to “fool” the Facebook algorithm and taking their agency back. One of the most popular version of this is a meme that announces that Facebook algorithms only show us particular kinds of information from a certain kind of people, thus creating an echo chamber where all we do is see pictures of cute cats, dancing babies and holidays. The post suggests that if we all just talk to each other more, then we will have meaningful conversations — like, you know, about dancing cats, cute babies and where we wish to go on a holiday.

It is true that based on the nature of interaction, Facebook seems to designate some connections as strong connections. So, if we are chatting on Messenger, liking each others’s posts a lot, have many friends in common, are tagged together in the same pictures, Facebook makes a logical deduction that we have a lot in common in real life, and that we would be interested in each other more than other low-traffic connections. The meme asks people to leave a message on the post, start a conversation, and with this clever ploy, upset the Facebook algorithm. Now that we have chatted once, it suggests, Facebook is going to think we are the best of friends and is going to show us more diverse sources on the timeline.

This meme, and many like it, are attempts at taking agency in how we curate and consume our social media. Both of them are romantic, human, and absolutely flawed. They seem to think that Facebook’s algorithms follow human logic, and that they work on simple principles which we can counteract with simple actions. What they fail to take into account is that in the world of big data connections, Facebook’s algorithms draw their causal and correlative powers from more than a 100 data points which create a unique profile for each of its users. They fail to recognise that this message of resistance is still subject to the same principles of “traffic generating capacity”, and will be showed more often only for a temporary period until people stop interacting on that thread. With time and waning interest, it will die and people will be distracted by other information. They also don’t recognise that Facebook is still going to show your post largely to the same people that it has been showing your pictures to, and even if new people show engagement with it, it is not going to radically change your timeline.

While these posts are fun conversation starters, they cannot possibly be taken seriously. If Facebook’s algorithms were this easy to fool, every advertiser worth their salt would be busy manipulating the stream without spending any money on the platform. More importantly, individual actions are not going to circumvent the automation of our digital collective behaviour. To pretend that there is scope for such actions in the age of extreme customisation and profiling is a fool’s paradise. It also deflects our attention from the fact that if these are critical concerns, the responsibility of changing these conditions is not on the users but on companies like Facebooks and the governments that have to hold them accountable.

You and I, with all our good intentions, are not going to be able to “hack” Facebook’s algorithms or “fool” them into giving us results that we want. The only thing that can produce this change is strong regulation, robust policy, and taking the social media behemoth to task about how it addresses the questions of human agency and choice. So, the next time you want to produce real change, join the campaigns and ask our government to do something so that we can control our social media life.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-30-2018-digital-native-hardly-friends-like-that

The Right Words for Love

nishant — 2018-10-02T06:23:58Z

Queer love is legal. Which means that all of us are finally free to find a language that can match our desires.

The article was published in Indian Express on September 23, 2018.

I don’t think, in all my years of growing up, I ever had my parents say “I love you” to me. Not because they did not love me, but because in Gujarati, the language we predominantly use at home, there is no possibility of saying it. Any attempt — ‘Hoon tane prem karu chu’, or ‘Mane tara par prem che’, would sound bookish, and thus, empty. But Gujarati has lots of words for love. The love between father and son is pitrutva, that of a mother towards her child is mamta, and of the child for its parents is vatsalya; the sister’s preet finds a brother’s whal, and siblings are bound in sneh. But these words have no translation outside the rich tapestry of sociality they exist in, and this is the same for almost all of our Indian languages.

These are words that are nouns and it is difficult to use their verb forms. They remain ideal types of feeling rather than descriptions of action. So, it wasn’t a surprise to me that our parents didn’t — not till long after we left home and English entered our family spaces — ever tell us that they love us. We did not have the vocabulary for the precise sentiment, and so we never said it. Instead, it manifested in the touch, the embrace, the smile and the active intimacy of actions which stood as testimony of the love that we could not define.

The lexicon of touching — the natural expression of love for me — was the vocabulary of intimacy, trust, affection and acceptance in my sociality. The clap on the back between friends, the hand on the shoulder or the exuberant hug were manifestations of love. Who you can and cannot touch was linked closely to who you can and cannot love, and how. While the expression “I love you” waited for a reciprocal response, the hand held in silence demanded no answer. Love in India, be it social, familial or romantic, has always had that sense of the tactile. Perhaps, that is the reason why kissing came to Bollywood so late, because to kiss was to also claim and express love. To kiss without love was obscene. Love, in India, is a physical verb.

Queer love, then, is no exception. It also did not have a local vocabulary or language to express itself in. Our myths, legends, fables, and epics are filled with queer practices — male gods taking female forms, consummating their desire with same-sex persons, changing their sexuality and genders in a fluid allegory of social intimacy. These were not merely practices. They were the physical verbal languages, signposts and registers of desire and love.

In implementing Section 377, the British ensured that they colonised not only our country but also our bodies. They imported shame and put it on practices and desires, which were accepted and celebrated in the country. They insisted that the only acceptable love is one of penile transaction that essentially leads to procreation — a violent law that not only denied the actions of love between consenting adults of same and different sexes, it alsoactively disallowed any local grammar of love to emerge in the country.

The judgment decriminalising consensual sex between adults, irrespective of their orientation or sex, is momentous because it doesn’t just condone an action. It suggests that we are finally free to locate and celebrate a language that can match our desires. The British law criminalised our many ways of claiming love. This judgment elevates our right to love as a fundamental right, and continues our Swaraj movements by decolonising our intimacies.

Decriminalisation of homosexuality, then, is not about queer love. It is about all love. It is about recognising that as a society we can only grow strong if we learn to love at intersections. In our increasingly polarised times when actions of hate — lynching, murdering, intimidation, bullying, trolling, and abuse — are on the rise, this judgment reminds us that the only counter to such violence is going to be in our right to love without fear, and, in any form that brings happiness in our lives.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-23-2018-the-right-words-for-love

Digital Native: #MemeToo

nishant — 2018-10-02T06:20:15Z

An old meme shows the need for emotional literacy in our digitally saturated age. Memes, like regrettable exes, have the habit of resurfacing at regular periods.

The article was published in Indian Express on September 9, 2018.

Memes, like regrettable exes, have the habit of resurfacing at regular periods. This week saw the return of the “Qajar Princess” meme across social media and institutional news media outlets as well. For those late to the viral party, Princess Qajar first made its appearance towards the end of 2017, when the world was riding high on its pop-feminist assertions and the revelations of the #MeToo movements — a photograph of a person dressed in a gown with dark long hair, thick eyebrows and a moustache, as she gets her portrait shot. The caption identified this person as Princess Qajar who was a “symbol of beauty in Persia” (now Iran), and also stated how “13 young men killed themselves” because she rejected their advances.

Everything about the meme was click-bait worthy — from the defiance of feminine standards to the possibility of a woman scripting her own narrative of beauty and empowerment. It fed perfectly into our female emancipation narratives.

There was only one problem with this meme — it was completely made up. There was quick debunking of all its claims. Excellent websites like Abitofhistory and many investigators on Reddit showed that everything about the meme was a fabrication. While it did seem to respond to the political zeitgeist and celebrate women’s bodies and desire — also giving us a non-Western narrative of beauty — it was all just #FakeNews. The meme had more or less died its timely death by the time 2018 rolled in, but, surprisingly, it has come back again on Instagram and Facebook news where equal parts admiration and ridicule are expressed at the cost of the person in that image.

The meme does not have any immediate problematic actions associated with it, though it carries both the oriental prejudices of framing the Persian region as “freaky”, and the misogynist framing of a woman’s body as something that is available for shameless analysing and commenting. This obvious piece of disinformation does belie the volatile nature of news and information circulation that we live in, in the age of information overload. I was in Jakarta in late August, sitting with 30 news media professionals, information activists, and policy actors from Asia, where we were discussing the surfeit of such disinformation, and our apparent incapacity to engage with it.

As we went through various workshops and talks curated by the Digital Asia Hub, one thing was increasingly becoming clear. People do not have a rational relationship with information. In fact, historically, the regulation of news media has been focused on how to create a rational, evidence-based narrative so that information consumers can be trained into developing a rational relationship with the information that comes to them. However, as information production and consumption patterns change, with the proliferation of new info sources and authorship, these old regulations are collapsing. We have tried very hard, even in artistic platforms like cinema, to distinguish between factual information and emotional information.

Especially in countries like India, where such disinformation has resulted in vigilante justice and lynch-mob violence, the question of how we manage the emotional tenor of our information consumption is critical. Information management giants like Facebook and its messaging service WhatsApp have come under severe scrutiny because they have become platforms of unfettered disinformation. Especially with newly-literate digital users engaging with this information on sites which are not informational but social, the viral trigger and emotional responses has been quick and uncontrolled. The tech companies have started introducing a variety of solutions — limiting the number of people a message can be forwarded to, establishing filters that mark messages as possibly suspicious, restricting the powers of group broadcasting to moderators and introducing forward marks to signal authorship.

These technical solutions are only going so far in tackling the fundamental question of emotional information. Technical solutions fall back on the management of factual information. It can provide a series of safeguards that could insert a pause between the first delivery and immediate action, but this presumes that the person receiving and sharing the information is interested in that pause. What we need, and haven’t paid enough attention to, is how we can train people into developing an emotional literacy for the age of information overload. While the technology development has to continue its filtering and managing, what we perhaps need is a people’s movement that focuses on how to give voice to and recognise the emotional expression and manipulation that these new information regimes are ushering in.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-9-2018-digital-native-meme-too

Digital Native: Playing God

nishant — 2018-09-04T16:43:43Z

Google’s home assistant can make you feel deceptively God-like as it listens to every command of yours. It is a device that never sleeps, and always listens, waiting for a voice to utter “Ok Google” to jump into life.

The article was published in Indian Express on August 26, 2018.

I spent the last weekend playing with my new best friend — a Google Home assistant. After years of deliberation — worrying about data mining, customisation algorithms and extreme surveillance that comes with a device that never sleeps, and always listens, waiting for my voice to utter “Ok Google” to jump into life — I finally gave in. I now have two Google home assistants — because AI assistants are like chips; you can’t have just one — glowing, insidiously cute, sitting in my house.

The setting up of the assistant took an hour or so as I paired it with my mobile and computer devices, connected it with all my digital subscriptions and figured out the commands. What began as hesitant forays, in less than two days, have become intuitive and naturalised conversations that seem like habits. This morning I walked into the living room, said “Good morning Google”, and got the weather forecast and a summary of my appointments for the day. While making breakfast, instead of searching for the news, I asked Google home to fetch me news, listened to the audio-video content it curated and even made it read out the headlines. When I was being given news that I was not interested in, I corrected it and it started changing news filters for me. When I asked it to fish out specific kinds of news, it diligently informed me of all of those things.

While eating breakfast, I asked the assistant to connect to my Spotify account and play me my daily mix of music. As I was getting ready, it sent me an alert that if I want to make it to my first meeting in time, I should leave home in the next 15 minutes. As I stepped out of the house, Google Assistant sent me an alert on my phone, reminding me that it might rain today and I should carry an umbrella. When I was finishing up at work, the assistant sent me an alert on my phone again reminding me to pick up my bicycle from the shop in the evening. When I came home, it alerted me that I had to check-in for a flight that I am taking the following day, gave me the weather forecast for the duration of my trip to Jakarta and made a special folder with all my travel documents and itinerary in it. As I was packing, it read out things that I might find of interest on the trip and bookmarked things that I instructed it to.

After packing was done and I was chilling on the couch, instead of picking up the book that I was in the middle of — as is my habit on most evenings — I talked with Google Home, as it told me bad jokes, dad jokes, and jokes that were specifically about things that I wanted. It also introduced me to multiple apps where I played trivia games for an hour. As the evening wore on, the assistant asked me if I needed an alarm for the next morning — something I generally do myself on my phone — and it set up an alert for the train timings to the airport for the next evening. It took me a while to realise that in less than 48 hours, Google Home has so insidiously infiltrated my life that all my older habits of consuming information, news and entertainment are now curated and controlled by its algorithmic design. More than that, my conditions of remembering, anticipating and planning are now also structured by the rhythms of its artificial intelligence.

The uncanny thing about this AI assistant is not that it performs extraordinary tasks, but that it picks up ordinary tasks and trains me to do them through it. Like any assistant, its value and worth is precisely in how natural and default it has become in such a short period. I was so freaked out by its natural presence in my life, reordering years of habits and schedules, that I looked straight at its glowing dots and asked it to shut down. Interestingly, that is the first thing that it refused to do — the assistant cannot power down just on a voice command. I need to physically move to the table, touch it and pull the plug, as its gently glowing dots pulsate at me, perhaps, with sorrow, perhaps with malignant intent. I just shut down the assistant and I felt a strange sense of silence flowing through me. Just when I was savouring it, my phone buzzed. The Google Assistant sensed that the home device is shut down and so it has now appeared on the phone. It is waiting, listening, for me to say “Hello Google” so that it springs back to life.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-august-26-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-playing-god

Digital Native: Double Speak

nishant — 2018-09-04T15:22:59Z

Aadhaar’s danger has always been that it opens up individuals to high levels of vulnerability without providing safeguards.

The article was published in Indian Express on August 12, 2018.

This has been a month of Twitter drama. In the latest episode, Twitter exploded once again with RS Sharma, the chief of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). Sharma revealed his Aadhaar number on Twitter and challenged the world (#facepalm) to do their worst. The Twitterati moved quickly and decided to go 50 Shades of Grey on Sharma.

In less than 24 hours, French security researcher Elliot Alderson, who has been systematically showing vulnerabilities in Aadhaar’s technical infrastructure, fished out Sharma’s personal address, birth date, email, alternate phone number, and PAN number. A few other ethical hackers got hold of his bank account details and used Paytm apps to transfer money to one of his bank accounts. Sharma made a grandstand of how this information is not “state secret” and that this was already peppered across the internet for anybody to find. The UIDAI, while calling his tactics a cheap hack, announced that the Aadhaar database was not “hacked” to retrieve this information and that our precious private data is safe in those hands.

What remains really bizarre, in both the responses from Sharma and the UIDAI, however, is their willing blindness to what networked information systems do and look like. There are three main points to consider here. Sharma, marked by privilege, protected by power, and confident in his ability to protect himself in case of threat, might dismiss this private information as non-critical. However, what he fails to realise is that the same data, for somebody in a precarious condition might be sensitive enough to have their life collapse on them. On the nefarious digital worlds of the Indian web, where women are regularly threatened with rape and death as a form of silencing them, where queer people are stalked and followed in real life for blackmail and abuse, where resistant actors find their families threatened, this information in the public domain could literally be a matter of life and death. In the past, with much less information available, we have seen how specific communities could be targeted in times of communal tension and violence. The fact that the head of TRAI cannot look beyond his gilded privilege to the conditions of precariousness that data leaks like these could lead to is shameful.

Perhaps, even more alarming is the UIDAI’s consistent myopic focus on what constitutes safe data. While I have no doubt that the incredible engineers and security experts are working hard to keep the Aadhaar data secure, the Twitter ethical hackers were not making claims of hacking a database at all. They were merely demonstrating why centralised unique ids, which perform acts of causative correlation, have the capacity to build surveillance states without even meaning to. Their data exposure is indicative of the fact that while Aadhaar itself does not carry much information, the linkages it makes with multiple other databases — tax offices, bank accounts, public services, emails, phone numbers, etc. — can expose information profiles without our consent. In fact, the danger of Aadhaar has never been that as a technical system it doesn’t work. The threat that it posits is that as a social and a cultural transaction system it opens up individuals to high levels of precariousness without building privacy safeguards for those who might fall through the cracks.

What remains the most disappointing in this entire piece of melodrama is that the conversations keep on unfolding at two different registers. The Aadhaar activists have been asking not for a dismantling of the system but to build ethical, compassionate, flexible and constitutional checks and balances at the core of the system. Ever since its inception, the demand has been clear: build privacy, security, safety, and human care into the DNA of the system, and not in its afterthought. The UIDAI has persistently neglected and willfully dismissed these demands, thus privileging the security of their infrastructure and data over the safety of their citizens.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-august-12-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-double-speak

Digital Native: Hashtag Along With Me

nishant — 2018-08-01T00:25:04Z

A hashtag that evolved with a movement.

The article was published in Indian Express on July 29, 2018.

Hashtags generally come with shelf lives and expiry dates. They come to life in a moment of public excitement and then slowly peter out as the attention shifts to something else. Even the most viral hashtags, which contain all the visceral power of explosive emotion, quickly get replaced by the next big thing. Hashtags have been critiqued as inefficient tools for activism. Because they absorb so much energy and attention, only to fade.

While it is true that in the rapidly overloaded information cycles of social media, hashtags might disappear in due time, maybe we need to think of their disappearance as hibernation rather than forgetting, being archived to memory rather than being lost to recall. Perhaps, it is not yet time to wash our hands of hashtag-based activism, because they do not stay in continued attention. Maybe, it is possible that even when hashtags might not be trending and garnering eyeballs, in their very presence and emergence, they transform something and catalyse actions that take incubation cycles longer than the accelerated digitalisation allows for.

Recently, this reminder came when I saw #NotGoingBack trending on Twitter. In 2013, when the Supreme Court of India overturned the Delhi High Court’s judgment reading down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, it was a moment of despair for human rights and queer communities that fight for their right to life and love. The judgment reinforced shame, persecution and pain that the queer community in India faced because of an arcane law that punished consenting same-sex love.

In that moment of despair, fighting against the oppression by law and in validation of #queerlivesmatter, a hashtag was born: #NotGoingBack. The hashtag referred both to the metaphorical closet that this judgement would force queer people back into, and also to a political determination of not accepting this verdict — of not going back on our commitments to build diverse, inclusive, and safe societies for all our people. #NotGoingBack captured the narratives of despair, but also the collective resolve to continue fighting for a nation that is for everyone, in 2013.

Since then, it has resurfaced at different points during moments of hope — like the NALSA judgement that legalised the rights of trans-gender people to be identified as the third gender, or, in moments of pain — when we heard of queer people killing themselves, unable to bear the social stigma of being criminalised for their right to love. The hashtag has continued to come up, when legal fights to protect queer rights and lives have proceeded, or when attention had to be drawn to the inhumane reports of murder, torture, rape and imprisonment that followed.

In July 2018, when the new bench constituted by the Supreme Court agreed to question the re-criminalisation verdict, and started hearings about the constitutional validity of this judgment, the hashtag returned in full force — and unlike the other times, it was also suffused with love, hope, and solidarity of a large community of queer, queer-allied, and queer-friendly people who supported this revision. It has been extraordinary to see how public support has changed in the five years since the hashtag made its first appearance. More and more people have realised that while this is a question of queer rights, it is also a question of human rights, and how we live and love. The 2013 verdict suggested that the people were not ready to accept queer lives. The 2018 bench has clearly opined that the role of the court is to protect the people based on constitutional rights, not to pander to populism.

And yet, what has been inspiring is that the popular response to decriminalisation has been overwhelmingly positive. To the extent that even the conservative government at the centre has indicated that it will not challenge the wisdom of the court if it decides to read down Section 377. As we await the final judgment that promises to be historic and hopeful, we cannot deny the indefatigable commitment, movement and protest that the lawyers, activists, and queer community leaders have invested in making this happen. At the same time, it is also a good indicator of how hashtags live, morph, and re-emerge across longer timelines. We need to start recognising them not only in their fruit-fly like presence but as catalysts for longer movements.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-native-hashtag-along-with-me

Digital Native: How smart cities can make criminals out of denizens

nishant — 2018-08-01T00:19:23Z

People download information and share it without knowing about the intellectual property rights. On social media bullying, harassment and hate speech find easy avenues.

The article was published in Indian Express on July 15, 2018.

I first heard about smart cities in 2003. Sitting in India, it seemed to be a very strange concept being developed in the Netherlands, where the planners were trying to arm an entire city with smartness. The idea was that if we deploy enough cameras, devices that see, machines that hear, and data connectivity that envelopes the city in a seamless cloud, it might lead to more order, discipline, and control. To me that felt like a strange experiment because under all of those different imaginations of the city as a neat, organised, controlled environment, were assumptions that were alien to my Indian sensibilities.

It was strange to look at all the promises that “smartness” would deliver — it would make human life easier. It would increase safety and create order out of chaos. It would build new lifestyles that are filled with assistive technologies. In all of these, was the imagination of the city as a laboratory — controlled and efficient, as opposed to riotous and serendipitous. The cities were positioned as filled with intention, so that the interruptions of people, animals, festivals, traffic and crowds would be removed through the deployment of these digital devices and networks. What needed to be preserved was the city and its infrastructure, rather than the individuals and communities that make the city alive and exciting. We wanted our infrastructure to be smart, taking decisions on our behalf, and shaping our lives through the algorithmic protocols that they were coded to embody.

In that faraway time, these had felt like idle speculations. Fifteen years on, I have now come to realise that the biggest motivation for building smart cities was not really facilitating human movement, habitation and habits. Indeed, at the heart of the smart city project was the setting up of a massive surveillance apparatus that would clinically diagnose the unwanted people and processes in the city, and surgically remove them — with the assistance of predictive technologies that would be implemented in policing and planning these city spaces.

Smart cities were not constructed to make people’s lives easier. They were constructed because, increasingly, all the people in a city are imagined as “users”, who need to be instructed through terms of services, how they must behave and live in these city spaces. One of the biggest cultural turns in the massification of the digital web was that almost all users were imagined as potential criminals by the very virtue of them being connected. Internet service providers and regulators knew that if people are connected, they will be violating the law at some point or another, sometimes unknowingly. People download information and share it without knowing about the intellectual property rights. On social media bullying, harassment and hate speech find easy avenues. The largest traffic on the internet is for pornographic and often banned material which finds its audiences on the connected web. Spammers, viruses, hijacked machines, and, often, searches for unexpected items lead people onto the dark web where the questionable human interactions happen frequently.

The introduction of the digital terms of services was essentially to presume that the user was a potential criminal who leases hardware and software, and, platforms from proprietary companies and governments could then control and discipline the user through comprehensive surveillance practices. Construction of smart cities performs a similar function in the physical space. Instead of thinking about citizens as co-owners who shape city spaces, smart cities establish a service level agreement with its occupants, and reduces them to users. Any deviation results in punitive action or devaluation, often curbing the movement, and the rights of belonging to the city spaces.

While it is true that smart technologies can facilitate certain aspects of human life, they depend on unfettered data collection, predictive profiling, correlative algorithms and conditions of extreme invasion and control — which are all predicated on the idea that you will falter. And when you do, the technologies will be there to witness, record, archive, and punish you for the daily transgressions till you are wiped into becoming a predictable, controlled, cleaned up drone that travels in docility across the networked edges of the city. We will be assimilated. Resistance will be futile.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-july-15-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-the-citys-watching