Whatsapp v Humanity. Judgement pending.

Prameet Kamat
Aug 25, 2017 · 6 min read

A year and a half ago, I wrote about why an unregulated internet in its current shape and form is not sustainable for a heterogenous country. In it, I made a couple of points — there are billions people on the internet now, and not all of them have the resources or reasoning and patience to separate fact from flame. And the rules are changing from one of weak collaboration and engagement to the digital equivalent of a street market — seething, transacting, ugly, tacky and very prone to impulse. Popular feeds are like tabloids, driving content, images and news for the masses. And in its current form, it’s simply too dangerous a tool for governments to leave unregulated.

I was, at the time, merely observing that it didn’t seem to be possible for this to go on, and not really batting for a regulated internet. Today, I am going to.

In his book “Everybody Lies”, US data scientist Seth Stephens‑Davidowitz uses his analysis of Google search results to make the point that we are not the people we say we are, in various aspects of life. One of the aspects he touches on is Social Prejudice — he looks at racism in the US in particular, something we all believed was getting better on an aggregate level. The world saw the US electing a black President twice and a more liberal environment at least from what we saw in mainstream media. The belief was that most white people felt that any racism in current days is the result of a leftover culture and more implicit in its nature than genuinely explicit and offensive.

Well, Seth analyses google search data for racist terms and racist jokes and actually found they peaked at key points during Obama’s election wins. A google search for a racist joke or term(and other more worrying associations) is not really an implicit attitude. It is explicit, and shows what people do on the privacy of their phones and computers. Using this data, he went to develop a “racism map” of the US- states which had high searches for racist terms (specifically, the word “nigger” had the strongest correlation) and observed that this map correlated really well with states where Obama fared poorly and eight years later, Donald Trump went on to a surprise victory by winning in most of these states.

Racism is alive. Just better hidden. And not just implicit or old habits that aren’t dying. There is genuine hostility there, and it doesn’t look like it is going away. Doesn’t look like it’s going away in the most developed nation on the planet today.

On a corn field in Assam in north eastern India, I am talking to a young farmer who talks intelligently about his 4 acre plantation and his farm ideas. He invites me into his house and we continue talking. A family member, maybe a younger brother, offers me some black tea and biscuits. As we talk, I realize with a start that its a Muslim home, the farmer is a Muslim, and immediately hate myself for noticing it (I am supposedly Hindu). I focus back on the crop conversation and at some point, I am fascinated enough to ask him if he has any pictures of last year’s crop. He remembers he may have some pictures on his phone, and pulls it out. I walk up, lean over his shoulder, and watch him animatedly show me pictures of the previous year’s crop. It was excellent and he beamed with pride as he scrolled through.

I took the phone and kept swiping until the set ran out and before I knew it, I had swiped through a few more pictures. They were all deeply religious pictures. I was embarrassed for having crossed into personal territory and I handed the phone back. The rest of the afternoon passed by and much later, on the drive back to the city, I couldn't help thinking about what I had seen. Here was a bright young man in a peaceful and remote village of Assam, clearly one of the best farmers I had seen in the area — barely connected to urban civilization by a 72 km highway, prospering and happy but being bombarded by hundreds of religious texts every day. Life gets lonely there and there aren’t many other things around him for him to feed his mind with. I don’t know what his beliefs are, neither he nor his faith aren’t the point. How he handles this constant messaging, how they impact his mind, his conversations and his aspirations is.

In this tinderbox of one and a half billion people — five USA’s in one-third the space — and home to nearly every religion in the world, Whatsapp is a devastatingly powerful tool to leave the way it is today. It’s 200 million strong, viral, it’s private and it reaches you. You don’t have to go to it.

In the period 1919 to 1945, Adolf Hitler gave a sum total of 110 speeches, wrote nine books and sponsored a number of articles in newspapers, journals and magazines. The largest audience he spoke to was 30,000. Der Sturmer, a prominent Nazi tabloid format newspaper had a peak circulation of 486,000 (1937). Mein Kampf sold 10 million copies in sixteen years.

He wrote in Mein Kampf “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.”

If he wanted to run a similar campaign today, this could be his prescribed framework of a Whatsapp campaign. Except that he would have a 1.2 billion subscribers across the world and 200 million in India to choose from. It’s free and can broadcast millions of words and images and rely on it’s incredibly viral power to send his message hundreds of times a day, full of unbalanced narratives, provocative images and fake news to the “great masses” who would then forward it to each other. All of it encrypted and so private that no one can read them. Not even the Government. Yet.

Turn it off I hear every day that I have a choice of “turning it off”. I can. You can. What about everyone else? Are we choosing to turn it off? Are there gullible, deprived populations in our country, full of stories of persecution in our country? If there are, are they turning it off? Is there an unsatisfied middle-class who want a “cleaner” country? Are they turning it off?

This young man in Assam certainly wasn’t. I don’t know how it is impacting him or his attitude towards his country and neighbours. I would be surprised if it wasn’t. This is the nature of our self-selecting digital bubbles.

Thanks to Whatsapp, ethnophobic messages are entering nearly every living room in the country today, affecting majorities and minorities, offering them their own personalized persecution narrative, stoking conversations, coalescing rigid beliefs and providing an improbable safety in numbers.

Seth’s analysis is showing us that that countries and civilisations aren’t just rough cut utopias in the making — getting better every day. In fact, we are a very, very fragile aggregate — barely held together by a few imaginary beliefs, economics, sports and entertainment with some of our most fundamental beliefs running at cross purposes to each other.

If you were the head of any large, populous, heterogenous nation, your biggest concern would be what’s going to happen next. How do I know who’s aggregating where? Enemies are on the border — I can have watch posts and technology. How do I protect my own people from themselves?

We are vocal about our right to choose what we do on and with the internet. But do we really understand what we are choosing? And are we even the best people to decide?

The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.”
Arnold Joseph Toynbee

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Prameet Kamat

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https://about.me/prameetkamat

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