#
While planning this episode of The Scene and the Unseen, I was filled with gratitude at
#
one point. Gratitude for my independence. No one tells me who to call on my show or what
#
to discuss. As far as the content of the show is concerned, I am a one man team. As far
#
as the production of it is concerned, I had teamed up with a podcast production house
#
for a while, but now I produce the show myself. I have contracted with my editor Vijay Doifode
#
and my illustrator Alika Gupta, and while we work together, I make all the decisions.
#
No Maibab interferes from on top. And I have no difficulty distributing the show and getting
#
to such a vast audience. It would not be like this if I worked for a mainstream media house
#
today, even if I would have made much more money working for one. I thought of this while
#
reading the excellent book Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci, where she quoted a
#
journalist in Turkey who once said the following words to her, which frankly could be said
#
in India in 2020. The unnamed journalist said, quote, I first censor myself as I know I'll
#
be in trouble if I write something critical of the government and then my editor censors
#
me if I haven't been mild enough. And then owners of the newspaper also check to make
#
sure nothing too critical gets through. And if something is published anyway, especially
#
if in defiance, someone from the government calls our boss and then the tax inspectors
#
are sent in to find something to find the newspapers with. Stop good. This quote is
#
from Turkey. And this kind of clam down of the media ensures that the media can often
#
be a propaganda machine. Take the problem of the Kurds. For example, the Turkish people
#
were constantly brainwashed with misinformation about the Kurds. For example, to Fetchi writes
#
quote, during the military regime of the 1980s, the Kurds were referred to in the mass media
#
as mountain Turks, Turks over a little misguided about the ethnicity and language rather than
#
an actual minority. This was, of course, ridiculous. Turkish and Kurdish don't even belong to the
#
same language family. But in the censored military regime, such outlandish claims could
#
be made with a straight face. Stop good. A few years later, something happened that could
#
be considered a routine incident. Turkish military jets flew near the Iraq border and
#
bombed and killed 34 Kurdish smugglers. Smuggling was routine. The authorities knew about it.
#
And at worst, you would arrest smugglers and give them a shakedown, not bomb them with
#
military jets. Anyway, the Turkish military then spun the incident. And all that was reported
#
in the news was that a few terrorists had been killed at the border. Reporters and managers
#
at mainstream media outlets were uneasy. They knew something was off, but they couldn't
#
report it. Then one reporter, Sardar Akinan, working in a newsroom where his bosses had
#
shut out the incident, took the initiative. He bought a plane ticket on his own dime,
#
flew to the nearest airport, took a cab and went to the village, which was the center
#
of the action. As he entered the village, he spotted what Tufekci describes as, quote,
#
a snaking line of coffins coming down a small hill as families wailed all around. Stop good.
#
The coffins passed him and went on and on. The wailing went on and on. Akinan broke down.
#
In another day and age, in the 1980s or the 1990s, this would have been the private grief
#
of a surprised outsider. But this was 2011. Akinan took out his smartphone and snapped
#
a picture of the snaking coffins. He put it on Instagram. He put it on Twitter. And soon
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen. My subject for today is radically networked societies.
#
Once upon a time, there were constraints to how fast and how much information could get
#
out, constraints of both technology and the coercive state. But today, thanks to the internet
#
and smartphones and social media, we are radically networked. One of the consequences of this
#
is what we saw in the famous Arab Spring of almost a decade ago, with popular uprisings
#
in country after country enabled by technology forming spontaneously from the bottom up instead
#
of directed from the top. Reading Tufekci's book, Twitter and tear gas, I was struck by
#
some of the parallels between those protests and the protests that have erupted in India
#
over the last few weeks. My eyes almost popped out, in fact, when Tufekci wrote about how
#
one common element to many of these protests was that a library would spring up in the
#
middle of it. And I thought of Shaheen Bagh. Democracy, it struck me, must surely be deeper
#
in a radically networked society. But there are also challenges. One challenge is that
#
there is a flip side to this as well. And radical networking can also be used to spread
#
misinformation such as rumors about outsiders kidnapping children that have led to so many
#
lynchings in India. Also, there is a question of whether the coercive power of the state
#
also enhanced by technology is still too strong to counter. From a philosophical perspective,
#
also questions arise about how the state should deal with the ill effects of such radical
#
networking. There has always been a trade off between liberty and security. Is this
#
a false binary? If not, how do we traverse this new landscape? To discuss this, I've
#
invited my friend Prane Kutasane, one of the smartest people I know in India, who I absolutely
#
love discussing ideas with. Prane works at the Takshashila Institution in Bengaluru and
#
he has not just thought deeply about the subject of this episode, he has also taught it. But
#
before we get to our discussion, let's take a quick commercial break. If you're listening
#
to The Scene and the Unseen, it means you like listening to audio and you're thirsty
#
for knowledge. That being the case, I'd urge you to check out Storytel, the sponsors of
#
this episode. Storytel is an audiobook platform that has a massive range of audiobooks from
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around the world. Their international collection is stellar, but so is their local collection.
#
They have a fantastic range of Marathi and Hindi audiobooks. What's more, I do a weekly
#
podcast there called The Book Club with Amit Verma, in which I talk about one book every
#
week, giving context, giving you a taste of it, and so on. Download that app and listen
#
to my show. And as long as Storytel sponsors this show within this commercial itself, I
#
will recommend an audiobook that I liked on that platform every week. My recommendation
#
for this week is At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. This has been described
#
as a science fiction horror novella, but its mad delights cannot be adequately explained
#
in genre terms. Lovecraft writes an eldritch, overblown prose that is so very bad that it
#
is very, very good. And there is a cult around his writing, of which I am a devoted member.
#
At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft on Storytel. Download their app or visit Storytel.com.
#
Remember that's Storytel with a single L, Storytel.com. Pranay, welcome to the Scene
#
Pranay, one of the things that I really like about you and why all our discussions are
#
so much fun and why I even learn from your attitude is that I find that you never really
#
take hard positions and speak with certainty about everything. You've always got this intellectual
#
humility and this openness to actually listening to what the other person says. And like in
#
an episode I did a few weeks back, Paramita Vohra referred to a certain class of pandit
#
as men with beards. And it strikes me that even though you have a beard, you are not
#
a man with beard. You could say a Schrodinger's beard. So kind of tell me about your attraction
#
to policy and the kind of studies that you do, the kind of fields that you work in and
#
you know how that has been shaped over the years.
#
Yeah. So first of all, that happens because I really don't know much. So still trying
#
to learn. That's the main reason. And I think the way I have looked at a lot of policy spaces,
#
I try to call myself an aspiring Harfan Mawla. So I want to learn a lot of things, right?
#
So the frame that I use is that there are lots of disciplines, like you have economic
#
reasoning, you have psychology, you have cognitive science, etc. And you can at least get a few
#
frameworks from those and then apply them across domains. For example, there's a lot
#
of public finance work that can apply to geopolitics. So I truly believe new knowledge generation
#
happens at the intersection of disciplines, not necessarily in the pigeonhole disciplines
#
as they are right now. And I'm just trying to explore them.
#
And would that be because people who are stuck into one particular discipline and you don't
#
have that multidisciplinary interest, think in particular rigid ways. And one way of breaking
#
out of that is by getting insights which might have popped up in other disciplines and that
#
kind of informs it. Absolutely. Yeah. So let me just give an example, right? So we always
#
talk about, say, foreign aid, you know, how has US aid to Pakistan affected it or how
#
has China giving money in the form of CPEC going to affect Pakistan, right? Now, conventionally,
#
you will have geopolitical analysts looking at really, what did did CPEC lead to a new
#
power industry or did it lead to new transportation, things like that, right? And what were the
#
political relationships? But just look at it, public finances, there is a whole bunch
#
of literature which talks about what happens when you give grants to another government,
#
right? Does that lead to actually increase in the supply of what you wanted, the product
#
that you wanted to increase, right? Or if you don't give a grant and instead you give
#
a voucher, you know, you will start a scheme to actually do certain things, say a centrally
#
sponsored scheme kind of thing. What is the impact of that? So these are already analyzed
#
in another discipline. So maybe you can apply some insights from that and get a new knowledge
#
generation happening. And you mentioned economic thinking, which is probably what I do too
#
much of perhaps. And when you were saying this, I just thought back to when I was, you
#
know, traveling through Pakistan in 2006, I was covering the cricket tour there. But
#
I also was writing for the Wall Street Journal and doing other stories and blogging from
#
there. And someone told me at the time that it was in Pakistan's interest to keep the
#
war on terror going, because Pakistan had now become, it was almost a failing state
#
before 9-11. And it had now become completely reliant on foreign aid, which was a lifeline.
#
And my Pakistani friend said to me that Al-Qaeda should actually be called Al-Faida. And I
#
thought of it from the point of view of incentives and whatever the geopolitical imperatives
#
may be, it is clearly obvious that just looking at the incentives, they are going to keep
#
terror going. Yeah. Yeah. And things like trade-offs and opportunity costs, these are
#
applicable across disciplines, right? These are, so yeah, economic reasoning is the study
#
of human behavior. And that's why it applies to so many other things. A man after my own
#
heart come to my arms. So I have listened to all the episodes. You have been on some
#
of the episodes and I have to tell my listeners, please I will link some of those earlier episodes
#
from the show notes. But Pranay is being extremely modest when he says that his openness comes
#
from not knowing much. He knows a lot about a lot of areas. You're considered in many
#
circles of like a foreign policy expert or an IR expert. Is that fair or is that sort
#
of pigeonholing you again? I'm not an expert first. So I'm a foreign policy student and
#
I'm really interested in finding things out about that. So yeah, and I do some things
#
on public finance and some work on public policy. That's also a lot of my interests.
#
I really like to understand why certain policies change when that policy change happens, when
#
it doesn't things like that, right? Like just for now, for example, fast tag implementation
#
is going on in India. So it's a natural experiment for us to investigate, right? Why is the implementation
#
so shitty as it is and what are the steps that government is going to take? How is this
#
going to work out? So that really thrills me. Let's see how it goes. And other, you
#
know, before we get to the subject in hand, since you, one last question, since you sort
#
of started your career into the point where you are now, is there any fundamental way
#
in which your thinking has changed? Yes. So I come from an engineering background, right?
#
Like many of us here, it's just like a rite of passage after 12th, you do engineering.
#
So until then, once I came here in this field, I think economic reasoning was something that
#
truly blew my mind, right? Because you always had this idea of trade-offs in the back of
#
your mind, but you could never articulate it in a way that makes sense across a lot
#
of disciplines and across a lot of questions which come to mind. So I think economic reasoning
#
brought that fundamental change in thinking. So now any question that comes up, you have
#
a set of tools at least to start off with. And based on that, you can then explore more
#
ideas. In fact, you know, if I were to ask myself a similar question, one of the concepts
#
that really blew my mind when I internalized and understood it is something very relevant
#
to the subject of this episode, which is spontaneous order, which of course is how there are beyond
#
a certain level of complexity, you can no longer direct things from the top. You know,
#
no one designs a language or gives dictates on how a word should be used. It evolves spontaneously.
#
That's spontaneous order. You know, markets work like that, societies work like that.
#
And we see a lot more of this action in radically networked societies. Now, before we sort of
#
start talking about it, I want to kind of divide this episode into two broad themes.
#
One is about radically networked societies or RNS, which is a short form we can use to
#
sort of understand what has changed and what is the nature of the change and what are the
#
trade-offs involved and what are the difficulties, of course. And the second part to talk about
#
something that you've written about at length also about how the state should respond to
#
these changes in society because society of course is, you know, now flat and radically
#
networked, but societies remain very hierarchical and still stuck in old structure. So let's
#
kind of start with definitions. What is a radically networked society?
#
Yeah. So this term radically networked society is Nitin, my colleague, coined it and we've
#
been working together to explore this in greater detail. So radically networked society or
#
radically networked community definitionally is a web of connected individuals possessing
#
an identity which is either imagined or real and are motivated by a common immediate cause.
#
Okay. So look at it as a triangle, which has three elements to it. One is the scale. So
#
the networked aspect is the scale. One is a sociological aspect, which is the identity
#
and one is a political aspect, which is a cause. So when these three things come together,
#
what you have is a radically networked society. At this point, I would like to say that the
#
word radical is not, we are not talking about the terrorism and radicalization that area
#
the radical here just means fundamentally networked societies. Right? So that is what
#
we are referring to. Now, why is it important? So the significant change that has happened
#
in the information age is that our societies are now fundamentally networked, whereas our
#
states are still optimized for the industrial age. Right? So they are, like you said, right?
#
Top to down, they are structured in a way that information has to flow from the bottom
#
to the up. All decision-making is concentrated at the top. So these states are functioned
#
like that. Like just think of a company 100 years ago, right? Which is doing on a shop
#
floor. So the state is somewhat similar in organization. So decision-making happens at
#
the top. Information flows are slow, latency exists, et cetera. Now contrast that with
#
how the society exists. Now with the internet, you have people who are radically networked
#
with each other and the information flows are fundamentally different now. Right? So
#
in the protests also, for example, that you see, we call this leader less, right? But
#
actually it means there are multiple leaders, right? So there are multiple leaders and the
#
information flows are happening from one node to the other without necessarily being coordinated
#
by one guy who is controlling this entire function. Right? So that's why societies
#
are networked. Information flows are different. Whereas the state, which is still hierarchically
#
structured, the information flow is quite different. So latency, let's say you organize
#
a radically networked protest today, right? And the state needs to respond. Now how will
#
the state respond? There will be a police who will probably get in here about this.
#
If the WhatsApp message reaches you, then they will go to the, let's say the commissioner
#
of Bangalore and then after that it will go to the home minister here. Then they'll decide.
#
And by that time, the protest has already started because the information flows in societies
#
are very different. So that is how we sort of conceptualize this. And all these protests
#
that have been happening since 2011 have an element of this digital network tools being
#
used to actually create these protests and manage them. So that's how we came to it.
#
And what you and Nitin, this is Nitin Pai, of course, who runs the Takshashila Institution.
#
What you guys elaborated on in your joint paper, which I'll link from the show notes,
#
are the three essential properties of radically networked societies, where you talk about
#
a sociological aspect, a political aspect and a networked aspect. And here I'll quickly
#
clarify that in my introduction, when I spoke of radically networked society, my conception
#
of it was society in large and is radically networked. And where you are sort of defining
#
it and we'll continue speaking about it in these terms, as we go deeper, is more of these
#
sort of communities that form, for example, these communities during times of protest,
#
like we saw in the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, and so on. And like to some extent,
#
we have seen in India over the last few weeks. So, you know, can you elaborate on each of
#
these sociological aspect, political aspect, network aspect?
#
Yeah. So let's start with this. Let's discuss what are some examples of movements or entities
#
which are not radically networked society. So that sort of helps clarify the frame. So
#
let's look at examples of communities which have scalability and an identity aspect, but
#
are yet to find a cause. Okay. So for an example for that is fan clubs. Okay. So when you have
#
these fan clubs, which are there, so you have an imagined identity. I'm a Rajnikanth fan
#
or I am Amitabh Bachchan fan. I've been told by Shah Rukh Khan fans. So you have a strong
#
imagined identity, which brings people from across the places together, right? Something
#
which motivates you to come together. And it might even be an online fan club, or it
#
might just be very well networked offline as well. So you can have the scalability aspect,
#
but there is no immediate cause to mobilize this particular fan club, right? So this is
#
one type of entity, which is not yet a radical. Unless Amit Verma has written an astri review
#
of race, which becomes a temporary cause that might bring together people, right? Let's
#
take another example, right? Example of community mobilizations, which have cause and a scalability
#
aspect, but a much weaker identity. Okay. An example for that is like, you have these
#
change dot or petition drives that happen. So you have a scalability aspect because through
#
internet, you are connected to a lot of people. People say Bangalore, you want to fix a street
#
and there will be people from across the world who will be pitching in on this. And there
#
is also the cause, which is the roads, et cetera. So, but again, there is no identity
#
aspect here, very weak. So it is not a radically networked society. Let's look at the third
#
one, examples of community mobilizations, which have cause and which also have an identity,
#
but have not been able to scale their protest. Now, an example of this is many localized
#
protests, which happen. So I'm sure like Shiva Sena organizes a band in Andheri, okay. For
#
a particular thing that's happening there, a local protest. So that is an example where
#
there might be a cause and there might be an identity element also involved, but it
#
is not scaling it. So this is another example where it is not yet a radical in network societies.
#
Now, only when these three things come together, that's when you have a very potent mix, where
#
you can have large amount of mobilizations, which can sustain over large periods of time
#
and can challenge the state significantly as well. So an example of what is a radical
#
in network society, right? So for example, I would say the Ram Mandir movement was an
#
example of a radical in network societies before the advent of the internet as well.
#
So you had a strong identity, an imagined identity, the Hindu identity, right? You had
#
a cause, you wanted to build a temple and it was networked as well because they were
#
able to mobilize people across India towards this cause. So it was a radical.
#
Their grassroots workers were like physical routers.
#
Yes. Yeah. And then you also have more recent examples, right? Like the Partidhar mobilization,
#
which happened in Surat by Hardik Patel, that also had a radically networked element. So
#
the immediate cause was regarding jobs and reservation.
#
The identity was this Partidhar identity and the scale was through the internet. A lot
#
of Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups were used to mobilize these protests. So this is
#
what radical in network societies are. Why are they important? So why is this imagined
#
identity part important, right? So even though these radically networked societies, a few
#
of them, like we discussed, existed in the past. The internet as a medium has thoroughly
#
changed that scalability aspect of it, right? It has changed the speed of communication.
#
It has changed the depth of communication. So that is making it easier to bring latent
#
identities and causes to the fore or sometimes even creating new identities and new causes,
#
which was not as much possible before the internet. It did exist, but now it has reached
#
a completely different level, right? And that's why you see lots of these protests where consumers
#
are coming to oppose something which didn't happen earlier. You would have protest by
#
workers, but now they are protest by consumers. So that is what is different now.
#
And so I'll briefly sum it up. When you talk about the sociological aspect, what you mean
#
is that's a shared imagined identity, to use Benedict Anderson's phrase. When you talk
#
about the political aspect, you mean the cause. And when you talk about the network aspect,
#
you mean the speed and scalability, which is today, of course, enabled by technology.
#
And a couple of interesting points you made. One, by giving the example of the Ram Mandir,
#
you pointed out that RNSS existed before the internet. And another classic example of that
#
where you see the role of the internet played by something else is the People's Spring in
#
1848. The Arab Spring of 2010-2011 was actually named after the People's Spring of 1848,
#
which had the sociological aspect, which had those common identities, which had a
#
political cause. And their scalability came from the popularity of newspapers and telegraphs.
#
And especially, and most people don't think of it as a channel of communication, but especially
#
of railways, because railways were what ferried newspapers and books and pamphlets across
#
the country. So think of it as like a meat space version of the internet. Who says such
#
a thing? Shame on me. And the other thing that also struck me when you mentioned the
#
Partidar agitation was that a liberal listening to this may put a halo around RNSS because,
#
you know, he can look at a lot of agitations which he identifies with, which have happened
#
because of this radical networking. But it's a value-agnostic term. Radically networked
#
society can also be a community which, for example, assembles to carry out pogroms at
#
large scale. And we'll talk about some of the sort of negative aspects of this after
#
a while. And I was also sort of struck by this phrase I came across while prepping for
#
the episode which was Ethan Zuckerman's cute cat theory. And you've heard this phrase?
#
No. No. So the cute cat theory is that earlier when you're communicating via technology,
#
the most effective mediums, the most effective ways to communicate are through social media,
#
which people at large are using anyway. They're not using for this purpose. So the thing is
#
people might be using Facebook to share pictures of cute cats, therefore the cute cat theory.
#
And that therefore becomes the most effective way to build a revolution because a lot of
#
people are there for cute cats and then you feed them your revolution. So which is sort
#
of quite fascinating. Yeah, you don't need to create a different medium as such for creating
#
a revolution, right? Actually, the reason is you want people at the margin to be supportive
#
of these, right? So people at the margin will be supportive of this if they can participate
#
in it at lower costs to them, right? So if you are on Facebook for a bunch of other things
#
and you just see these things coming up, the cost for me to engage with this really low
#
as against you saying you install this revolution TM app and we will cause a revolution then
#
people only the already converted will participate in it. And the low cost also means that let's
#
say some influencer tweets something which I really like and I retweet it. My action
#
of retweeting it sends it to all of my followers, you know, so the scalability that you can
#
reach with these tools of Facebook like the Twitter retweet are just kind of off the charts.
#
What are sort of like having looked at radically network societies and such movements come
#
up over the last few years and I'm referring to those specifically now enabled by the internet
#
and social media. What are the things? What are the commonalities that you would say that
#
they share? Yeah. So protests are one of the manifestations
#
of radical in network societies, right? Like we discussed, they could also be flash mobs.
#
They could be lynching mobs, which has been the case in India. But now let's look at protests
#
in and what have what have been the commonalities across the last few years in that. So when
#
we talk about protests, a few common things are first, a large number of these protesters
#
have been young across the world wherever these have taken place. OK, so maybe it has
#
to do with these are the young people who are at comfort with the scalable aspect of
#
this arenas. They are native to that and hence they have been able to use it because technology
#
is reflexive. I have a couple of figures to back this up in Tunisia where the Arab Spring
#
all started. Most of the young were unemployed, but the under 30 population in Tunisia was
#
60 percent of the population of the country. So, you know, their demographic dividend,
#
if you want to call it that. Similarly, in Egypt, over 54 percent of Egypt's population
#
as of last year was made up of the under 24 demographic. And in 2011, 24 million Egyptians
#
were between the ages of 15 to 29. And, you know, in the demographic security field, apparently
#
the term they use for this is fighting age. OK, so that is one. The second thing is it's
#
not just that these are the young people. These are young people who are connected to
#
the Internet. Right. And in Tunisia case, also a large number of the penetration of
#
the Internet was significantly high as well. Right. So what is different about Internet?
#
Like we discussed, it allows people with really dispersed interests also to mobilize at lower
#
costs and at higher scales. That is significantly different. And that's what you see in these
#
protests. Third thing is they are not necessarily the poorest people who are protesting, which
#
is again backed by theory earlier that it's the opportunity cost for a person who is at
#
the poorest rung is too high to get engaged in any political activism of sort. So it will
#
be people who will be disaffected. So unemployed people, but still people who can afford a
#
mobile, people who can read things, etc. Right. So that is another asset. And also largely,
#
you know, as protests go on and become prolonged, there'll be a lot, you know, students will
#
be overrepresented because working people will, for example, the opportunity costs will
#
be high. They can't be there all the time and so on. Yeah, that's a good point. Then
#
another point, which actually Tyler Coven makes in one of his piece is that this is
#
a lot of these recent protests are consumer protests rather than worker protests. OK,
#
so conventionally, we think of workers mobilizing quickly because they have leadership structure.
#
They have a cause, which they have something, a policy change, which affects them in a concentrated
#
manner. So it is not difficult for them to protest because they know the benefits of
#
them will be accrued, accruing to all of them. Right. But when you are a consumer, the benefits
#
of any policy change are actually quite dispersed. Right. So it's quite easy for a government
#
to do client politics in. So there's a Wilson's matrix in public policy, which says that if
#
the benefits for a policy change are concentrated, whereas the cost of that policy change are
#
dispersed, that kind of politics is easy to do. And that's what many of the governments
#
do. Right. So let's say you raise tax and you float air India. OK, classic case of client
#
politics. But with the Internet, it is now possible for consumers who are affected in
#
a dispersed manner to still come together at lower costs and at higher scales. OK, so
#
that's why you see a lot of the protests in the recent year. I'll just give a few examples
#
are consumer protests. Right. So, for example, in Chile, Metro prices hike led to a huge
#
protest a few months back in Ecuador. The protesters have been demanding restoration
#
of fuel subsidies. Petroleum prices again have a role to play in the Haitian protests
#
there. In Lebanon, there has been a tax levied on WhatsApp and that led to protests. Even
#
in Uganda, something similar. Again, in Sudan, there has been food and fuel subsidies. So
#
they took away a bit of subsidies and that led to consumers being able to mobilize on
#
a large scale. OK, so what do you see is consumers are able to sort of mobilize to an extent.
#
Even you could say like, say, India against corruption, for example, would also be. Would
#
you call that a consumer's protest because they're consumers of government services and
#
they're protesting corruption. Corruption as such is a dispersed cost to a lot of people.
#
Right. So but yet people were able to mobilize on one identity that we are all the disaffected
#
people because of this evil called corruption. So it created that new imagined identity.
#
Right. And the cause immediately was instances which kept coming up during that time frame
#
about government corruption, 2G and all those things. And that led people to coalesce around
#
it. So one of the questions that I have here and which is sort of a mystery to me is that,
#
OK, so, you know, whenever I read public choice theory, I'm always kind of or applied to something.
#
I'm filled with a little bit of despair because, you know, everything seems so intractable.
#
How do we get positive change happening? An example of that is what you just spoke of
#
that in so many things, the benefits are concentrated, the costs are dispersed. So, for example,
#
if the government, you know, puts a tariff on something from outside, you know, all common
#
consumers might be paying 10 Pesa or 20 Pesa or more for the product, but they don't even
#
know that. And the costs are so dispersed. And similarly, the small retailers who benefit
#
from that protectionism can form a lobby and give funds to the government. Or the example
#
you gave of Air India that all of us are actually paying for it every single day to keep an
#
unprofitable airline running. But we don't care because the costs are dispersed. The
#
cost to me for Air India could be something like 10 rupees or 20 rupees. I don't even
#
know what it is, but it's dispersed and it's invisible. So I don't care. So and typically
#
this then becomes a reason for skeptics like me to then bemoan the possibility of change
#
because we will be like that. How do you motivate people for whom the costs are dispersed and
#
often invisible to actually come together and protest? And the second point you pointed
#
out also, you know, which from public choice is a free rider effect, which is that let
#
us say that there is something that I want to protest for, but I don't need to protest
#
for it for it to happen. I can just let other people protest and I can free ride and benefit
#
without doing anything. And this is a common cause for why many protests don't take off
#
at all. Now what I am finding to my immense confusion and feel free to give me examples
#
from elsewhere that either counter this or demonstrate this. But what I am finding in
#
India is for example, the anti-CAA effect, the anti-CAA protests. A lot of the people
#
who are protesting aren't directly affected by it and won't even be. You do find a lot
#
of upper caste Hindus even joining the protests while they will really not be affected by
#
this government, not the specific policy. Everyone's affected by the disaster that is
#
our great economy. So what motivates so many people? And this is not just about retweeting
#
something where you're right, the costs are very low. So you can show your protest by
#
retweeting on Facebook, but you've had spontaneous demonstrations throughout the country where
#
people are going out on the streets to look at places like Shaheen Bagh where people are
#
spending days and nights and days and nights in this horrible winter and amid this pollution
#
to protest. So what's going on here? I don't understand.
#
Yeah. I've thought about this and sort of the answer that I can look to if I apply this
#
RNS frame is that the government has been responsible for creating this imagined identity
#
of people and that imagined identity of people has only grown because of the actions that
#
government has repeatedly taken. So the CIA then there was talk about the NRC. Now they
#
are saying that NRC doesn't exist. And even before that, there have been instances of
#
lynching, etc. And the government's response was quite lackadaisical. So there have been
#
over the last four or five years, many such actions because of which this imagined identity
#
of people who think who reject that idea has sort of grown over time. And that has led
#
to a significant critical mass of people being sympathetic to what people who will be affected
#
by this, right? And then this CIA just becomes a cause, the second leg of this triangle and
#
that cause eventually mobilizes people. That's how I have thought. I'm sure there must be
#
So what you're saying is that it's cascade of effects which are then strengthening these
#
dissenting identities, so to say, against these guys and the CIA comes right to the
#
end of it. I mean, another thing that struck me and that is actually heartening is that
#
there isn't any one identity at play when you look at the anti-CIA protests. You do
#
have Muslim groups who are out there saying Allahu Akbar. You also have people who are
#
saying, no, that's not secular. Let's not protest that way. And my personal stand is
#
let a thousand flowers flourish. Let everybody protest in whatever way they see fit. No one
#
should dictate to others. But there is also a diversity of identity in all this. And of
#
course, they are united by their antipathy towards a very restrictive idea of India that
#
is now coming up, which is the Hindu Rashtra idea. But I mean, I'm trying to sort of process
#
this interplay of identities.
#
Actually, for an imagined community to form, you need two aspects. Okay, one, you need
#
commonality of certain things, right? So you need, generally it is language or religion
#
or common historical experience or whatever. And the second is for you to be able to differentiate
#
against the other. Okay. So here you have the second element. You are clearly differentiating
#
what we are not. Okay. And the second element, I think the idea of secular India constitution
#
has become that element, which is what we are together, what we share. That's why this
#
preamble, I mean, who would have thought preamble would be, you know, reiterated and repeated
#
on the streets of India. I mean, that's, so there is that element, you know, it's not,
#
it's not on probably on religious language grounds, but it is still on a shared experience
#
of probably 70 years of India. And we have a conception of what India is like and what
#
joins us as Indians. I think that is one element. And don't forget the third node of this,
#
this scalability aspect of it, right? The internet being able to communicate these ideas
#
across India has been a significant boost as well to the protest, right? So these three
#
things are coming together here as well. And I guess every picture of a protest somewhere
#
makes a sympathetic person more likely to go out and protest himself, thereby acting
#
against the free rider effect. And maybe there is something expressive to that also that
#
by going out to protest, you're not even if you are hopeless about change actually happening,
#
you are asserting your identity and your values. Yeah, actually, I was just observing this
#
narrative shift on Twitter, right? First few days was like, why are people protesting?
#
After a few days, it was why aren't you protesting? Oh, yeah. So I mean, what's wrong with you?
#
So if you see the, it has shifted. If you are a right thinking person and you believe
#
in the idea of why weren't you protesting, right? So that narrative shifted. And that
#
is actually a manifestation of what you said, right? It has now a lot of people have thought
#
and the internet has been able to spread this idea very effectively. And that's why it is
#
now the norm has shifted that you should be there and you should oppose this. I mean,
#
there are just two more aspects to what joins some of these protests together. So for example,
#
one thing is that these protests have been across the political spectrum in the world
#
as well, right? So it's not just that only left leaning groups or right leaning groups
#
have been involved in this. The last one, which I found quite fascinating was that migration
#
has been an issue which has caught on for a lot of RNSS, either in support of migration
#
or in opposition to the migration, both, right? Maybe this is because in migration is an issue
#
where identity and cause quickly overlap with each other, right? Because you already have
#
an existing nation, national identity. So whenever there are say in France, for example,
#
for the yellow vest protest, which are still going on, one of the issues in the beginning
#
was that there is too much migration, right? And the idea was people then quickly see we
#
are friends, we are different. Why are these people coming here? So that there is an inherent
#
identity aspect which already exists and the immediate cause becomes a flow of people coming
#
in or a migration flow. So those two potent things already exist. And then you add the
#
scalability aspect to it and you have protests which emerge. On the other side, you also
#
have the current protests which are going on in India are actually sort of probe. They
#
are saying that why are you dividing people who are coming into India as well, right?
#
So but this migration aspect sort of is leads to these RNS is quite quickly. And it's interesting
#
that when we talk about RNS is when we talk about the three things you need identity,
#
cause and scalability. Scalability is now become something you can basically take for
#
granted because the internet is there and you can achieve scalability. So it's only
#
you need an intersection of the other two for it to happen. Yeah. And you know, if we
#
say, like when I was reading to Frenchy's book, Twitter and tear gas, which I'll link
#
from the show notes and recommend to everyone. And one, I noticed a lot of commonalities
#
between what is happening in India now and earlier radically network movements like this.
#
But what also struck me was that many of those commonalities, many of those features that
#
they have in common actually led to those movements not being able to achieve what they
#
set out to achieve. For example, there is the leaderless aspect of it. Now it's a good
#
thing. I think it's a very good thing that you don't have people trying to co-op leadership
#
or you know, it's all spontaneous. It's, it's whatever, but that also then leads to what
#
the Frenchy calls tactical freeze in the sense that then you cannot change the movement,
#
cannot change tactics midway. There is always confusion about that. You cannot really negotiate
#
with the government who is negotiating on your behalf. How do you know that person hasn't
#
been co-opted? And there are, you know, when there is a general commitment to a set of
#
values, it is okay if the specific aims are diffused and dispersed. But when you are actually
#
get into a position of telling the government, okay, give us a B C, this is what we want.
#
You know, that specificity doesn't come around. And on a day to day basis, there is what is
#
called an adhocracy. Things happen in an ad hoc kind of way. And other movements have been
#
let down by this. Like if you look at what happened in Egypt, fine, great. They got rid
#
of Mubarak, but the three years later, you know, you had a military dictatorship again
#
and you know, a similar kind of mess. They didn't really achieve their ultimate aims.
#
Maybe they achieved one small proximity, but they didn't achieve their ultimate aims. So
#
looking at that, what can you know, what lessons can these protests draw from such protests
#
of the past, which have so much in common with it beyond libraries?
#
So what we see from the previous movements, the lessons that we learn are that what happens
#
is generally these protests, once they take place, the remember the state is still going
#
to react to this rate. So once the state reacts, it depends on how the protest will then shape
#
up in reaction to what the state does. So for example, take the Hong Kong case, okay.
#
So Hong Kong, there has been this radically network protest going on there for many months
#
now. And the ultimate cause for that was this anti-extradition, the extradition bill, which
#
probably said that whoever is found guilty of some crimes in Hong Kong, they'll be tried
#
in China, right? So now this became an immediate cause. The identity was this Hong Kong versus
#
the China divide already. So this was the main demand, anti-ELAB. But once the state
#
actually accepted that this anti-ELAB will not go ahead, the demands then proliferated.
#
Now there are many more demands and some one or two of those demands will never be accepted
#
by the Chinese state because they are like going right against what the party state wants.
#
So what if you have these protests which morph into multiple demands and you're not able
#
to control them, then they won't be successful, right? In at least achieving them. The second
#
thing is often the states are able to divide these communities at a later point of time.
#
So classic, right? If you can divide and rule kind of.
#
And these communities often divide themselves that, you know, with their quest for ideological
#
purity and they're silly in fighting. Exactly. I mean, do you want to be holier than thou?
#
And then you actually end up reducing that imagined identity you had constructed in the
#
first place and you split into multiple RNCs, all of them having their own identity aspect
#
and cause aspect. So once you split that, then again, you will not be able to achieve
#
what you want. So those are two, three things that these protests can learn, probably.
#
And also, you know, just sort of taking that diffusion of aim forward, the question that
#
comes up, for example, with these anti-CAA protests, you know, you could ask what is
#
the final aim and what all the protesters are fighting is not just that specific Citizenship
#
Amendment Act, but also that way of thinking, that narrow view of what India means and so
#
on and so forth. Now, the question there is what is the aim and when do you know that
#
you won? Because it's very easy, for example, the government won't do it, but we are recording
#
on January 23rd. But if the government were to just come forward and say, okay, we won't
#
do the CAA, fine. You know, that doesn't end it because they'll still do the NPR. And you
#
know, the overall program will continue even if one or two elements don't, when you call
#
the protests off. What is the reason for calling the protests off? If the protest is not being
#
able to achieve its proximate aim, is that reason enough to call it off? Or should you
#
continue for larger reasons? Like all of Gandhi's Satyagrahas pretty much failed in their proximate
#
aims, but they achieved something much larger in terms of mobilizing the people and mobilizing
#
Yeah, absolutely. Like to use Tufekchi's framework itself, right? She divides that generally
#
social movements have sort of three capacities, right? Narrative capacity, that is the aim
#
of changing the narrative and the stories that people think in terms of. Second is disruptive
#
capacities. Basically, if you are movements able to stop business as usual. And the third
#
one is electoral or institutional capacity, whether you are able to bring about a change
#
in the head of the state, or are you able to actually change the electoral structure
#
itself, right? So now, if you look at social movements aided and abetted by digital media,
#
what the capacity which is enhanced most is the narrative capacity, right? So you are
#
able to significantly change narratives very quickly. You can put out a new story there
#
and it will be consumed by a large amount of people. But the digital protests are not
#
so strong when it comes to the other two ideas, right? So not all digital protests have been
#
able to even do the disruptive aspect and to get the third one, electoral change, that's
#
No, and again, it strikes me and this is again going back to public choices, right? You know,
#
at one point in time in India against corruption, the movement happened, which actually didn't
#
achieve any objectives really. But at that point, they decided to do something about
#
the electoral objective and the Aam Aadmi Party was formed and there was much dissent
#
within the movement about that. But fine, they were formed. But the moment that party
#
was formed, it becomes prey to the incentives of regular politics, where all that matters
#
is gaining power somehow and principles cease to matter. So things that they would have
#
stood up for in the past, for example, they made Vishal Dadlani apologize to that Jain
#
Sadhu who felt offended. For example, they actually supported the abolition of 370 in
#
Kashmir a few months ago and they haven't at all spoken out against the CAA and how
#
it threatens the idea of India. And I don't blame them for this at one level because I
#
understand that they have reconfigured themselves as a party of good governance and they are
#
saying we are doing education, we are doing schools and they are saying it's important
#
for us to win the election and get the BJP out of there. So we will not stand up for
#
all of these things. But then what happens therefore is that even if a movement, even
#
if a sliver of the movement is to try and gain electoral capacity, they are still subject
#
to the incentives of politics, which is always to get power to get votes and to use power
#
to make money so that people donate to you. And the whole process gets corrupted very
#
fast as in my opinion has happened with our Madhavi Party, whatever else one may feel
#
about them. How does one get past this? I mean, you know, are all movements then destined
#
to either be corrupt in whatever electoral form they take to be corrupted and to be diluted
#
or are they destined to just sort of fade away? Yeah. First of all, I think we need
#
to decide what we mean to call a protest successful. Right? True. I would say the fact that we
#
don't, whatever our Madhavi Party, the fact that despite all the incentives, which are
#
heavily loaded against any new party, the fact that a new formation has come about because
#
of ISE is itself, you can say it is a success. Yeah. It's politically successful and you
#
can even say that it's successful in terms of governance because they've provided better
#
governance than the alternative would have. Yeah. But the construction of the alternative
#
itself is a success. I forget about the good governance that they have done. Even if they
#
weren't able to, the fact that a new entity came up and it was able to at least win is
#
a change from. But it's almost, it's almost a tangential success. The main aim of the
#
movement, which was let's do something about corruption, which first of all, they were
#
articulating wrongly because you cannot solve corruption by increasing instead of reducing
#
government, the discretion of the state and the power given to it. But that hasn't happened,
#
you know, so, and not come closer to happening either. Yeah. That is true. But what I'm saying
#
is that there is, we need to then say what was the aim of these protests. And the problem
#
there is that these aims will always be so dispersed, so diffused. And as they go on,
#
more things will be added to them. And that's why we have this. And I guess Syriza in Greek
#
was an example of a movement which became a successful political thing, right? Yeah.
#
Syriza, there have been other examples as well. And in Tunisia also, you were able to
#
completely change the government, et cetera, right? So Tunisia is like one odd success
#
element, but in many other countries, you actually, you reverted back to the normal
#
levels, regression to the mean. So that has happened. But overall, it is not a very positive
#
story to say like, I can't say that this is the way digital protests have significantly
#
changed. And the research on that also shows that they significantly change narrative capacity,
#
but disruptive and electoral capacities are much, much difficult to change. Because remember,
#
you are up against the state and the state has a very coercive power with it. And when
#
it comes down heavy handed on the protesters, it becomes very difficult for them to bring
#
the change in the other two dimensions. No. And if I might speculate, I've, you know,
#
in the last five minutes, I've actually kind of changed my mind a little bit on that listening
#
to you, because it strikes me that we need to figure out how do we define success. And
#
I would say that even if the CAA, the citizen, the amendment act itself remains on the bill
#
and the government does whatever it does, and they proceed according to plan and we
#
haven't been able to disrupt them, regardless of that one way in which the movement has
#
been a big success is in changing the culture. So many people now know the preamble, at least
#
by heart, though I wish it was the Ambedkar version and not the Indira Gandhi version
#
with the word socialism part of it. But regardless, so many people have a greater awareness of
#
constitutional values and the fact that it's supposed to safeguard individual liberties
#
and act as a check on the state and so many more people are now willing to come out on
#
the streets for that augurs well for the future, would you say? Absolutely. So the narrative
#
has shifted, right? And we are conceptualizing what it means to be an Indian and what is
#
not Indian, what is an Indian in a sense, right? And so these are important distinctions
#
which are being made through digital media and elsewhere. So that is a success, right?
#
Yeah, that is a success. You know, we'll take a quick commercial break now. And after we
#
come back from the break, let's now talk about the philosophical and policy questions that
#
this brings up about the interplay between the state and radically networked societies
#
and you know, what the role of the state should be because not all radically networked societies
#
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unseen for 15% off at indiancolours.com. Welcome back to the Seen and the Unseen. I'm chatting
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with Pranay Koteswane about Radically Networked Societies. And one of the things I forgot
#
to mention in the first half of the show before the break was I wanted to ask Pranay specifically
#
about the Hong Kong protest because he's actually written and thought about it a fair bit. Go
#
ahead. Yeah. So Hong Kong is actually an RNS, which is still going on. Okay. As even as
#
we speak and it's sustained over many, many months. So it's an interesting case study.
#
I just wanted to bring out a few elements of how digital media has a role to play in
#
those protests. Okay. So the overall phrase that I use for this is the Hong Kong movement
#
has been about moving your information trail offline while moving your decision making
#
and narrative online. Okay. So that is how I put it together. So what does it mean? Okay.
#
So moving your information trail offline. Now remember, everyone knows the surveillance
#
power and the authority of the Chinese state that they use. Right. So that's why the Hong
#
Kong protesters have been trying to move their information trail offline. So they use a lot
#
of cash. They don't. So they are actually intentionally moving off the internet on for
#
some purposes, right? So using cash, not using ATMs because then you will be able to track
#
people. They are turning off a FaceTime ID or touch ID on their phones because they again
#
feel that people might use it. In many times they have been using airdrop and Bluetooth
#
file sharing in protest venues instead of the internet because again, they fear that
#
they can be tracked. So that is interesting. The second part of it was to move decision
#
making actually online. So just look at this. There was this report in BBC that some of
#
the groups on Telegram, etc. have around 70,000 active subscribers. Okay. And that represents
#
1% of Hong Kong's entire population. Wow. It's quite significant. Right. And they also
#
have specific groups for specific purposes. So there are groups for taking decisions.
#
So they did like an online referendum of sorts, right? So whether we should continue protest
#
the next day or not, that was quoted on some of these groups with large memberships, right?
#
Also there were other groups which were more purpose oriented. So there were groups for
#
medics, groups for supplying food when these protests were happening. So, you know, you
#
see entire decision making and the organization of this protest also moving online. Okay.
#
And the tools used were Telegram, Signal, which they thought was less under control
#
of the Chinese state. So this is very fascinating, right? So digital media enabling the construction
#
and the continuance of a protest is seen in Hong Kong quite clearly. And this is really
#
interesting because I am specifically interested by Hong Kong as you know, because the technology
#
and the ways of communication there are evolving so quickly that in some cases to get away
#
from the Chinese government, they have to do what one could term radical de-networking
#
and just kind of get off the internet. And it also reminds me of a time where, you know,
#
it isn't as if, you know, a technology may be built to share cute cat pictures, but within
#
that users themselves build features which can be used for radical networking. For example,
#
the hashtag, right? The hashtag is really something that users innovated with first
#
and then they became a thing and now you can identify trends by it and so on and so forth.
#
And there's kind of a bit of that happening in Hong Kong and do you think India will also
#
sort of over here as well will go in some of those directions as the imperatives to
#
keep protests going get stronger? Yeah. So one interesting thing about the protests
#
that are that have happened over the last years are they have been prolonged in many
#
of the countries. Some protests have been going on for more than a year as well. So
#
it might play out that way, but that depends on the other aspect that we are going to talk
#
about how the state will react. Just one point here about the Hong Kong protests to talk
#
about the weak points of this, you know, one thing again, this BBC report, which excellently
#
captured all this said that these groups which were used to do a referenda type of decision
#
making. So a lot of people said that whenever there is a black and white decision to be
#
made, these groups really work well. But when there is an advanced position to take, then
#
these groups don't work as well as they would. We would want them to write. So that is something
#
which we'll experience in other protests also through these tools. Exactly. So let's let's
#
kind of talk about the state. But before we bring the state in, let's also, you know,
#
we've been talking about all of these protests and many of these are liberal protests, which
#
you and I are sympathetic towards. But let's also acknowledge that one radical network
#
societies can be value neutral. You can, you know, use the scalability of the internet
#
to actually organize pogroms or genocides or has in fact happened lynchings and so on.
#
And you know, before Mohammed the Clark was killed, for example, there were photos on
#
WhatsApp which had these narratives about, you know, perpetually showing pictures of
#
neatness, fraze and all of that nonsense. And we've had a problem in India, which I
#
discussed at length with Pratik Sinha last year when I did an episode on fake news with
#
him about this mysterious sort of these rumors which keep propagating across WhatsApp with
#
details changed from locality to locality about how outsiders are coming in and kidnapping
#
kids, which led to a lot of alarmist lynchings that you saw an outsider in a strange car
#
and you assume that he must be one of those kidnappers and leave aside the motive behind
#
such rumors being spread as irrelevant. But I think it's clear that in cases like that,
#
the state needs to sort of step in and do something. And this is probably a good time
#
to sort of examine the role of the state and its duty vis-a-vis citizens as well, which
#
is something you discussed in your paper with Nitin.
#
Yeah. So let's look at this. So fundamentally, we are seeing a clash between hierarchically
#
structured states and their radically networked societies, right? So this is a fundamental
#
clash. The problem as we discussed is information flows in these network communities will always
#
be faster than the decision-making cycle and information flows in the state where it has
#
to go from bottom to up, decision gets made, gets filtered to bottom, right? That's going
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And I think the way you guys put it was that states are relics of the industrial age and
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are radically networked societies or products of the information age.
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Exactly. So there's a fundamental mismatch, right? So states realize that. Now, what will
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be the state's reaction when they realize that, you know, things are happening too fast
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for us. It's getting out of hand. What states do what they do best, that is excessive use
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of force is one response that we see across these protests, right? Whether in Chile or
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in Lebanon and even in India now. So you will see the excessive use of force for this mismatch.
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So the state will use law and order machinery to attack the protesters and say that that
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is the only way we were left to clamp down these protests. Okay. So that is one sort
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of response that comes up.
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The second kind of response is let's take the other extreme. What is a more enlightened
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type of response that you would want the state to have? One way would be for the government
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to have better emergency communication systems to at least refute misinformation, which might
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happen, right? So for example, I have an example of this. So a few years back there was a bomb
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at Church Street, you know, which went off and the rumors started spreading on that also
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very quickly about first it was bomb on Church Street. Then the next tweets started coming
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that bomb near a church. And then third there were also tweets a bomb in a church. I mean,
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completely untrue, but this misinformation was trying to take it in a certain direction,
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probably make it a communal thing of sort, right? But it was quickly clamped down because
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you had a very credible presence of the Bangalore police online, not just Bangalore police,
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but the commissioner of police had a very visible presence and a reputation on that
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platform that he'd built over time. So he was quickly able to come into the picture
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and say, Hey, that's not wrong. It has happened at such and such place. We are looking at
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the incident and trying to take note of it. So that actually ended some of these speculations
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and which might have led to, you know, more nastier things from happening. So if the governments
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are also embedded in these networks, they understand it better and they have emergency
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communication systems in place on how to tackle these. We might have a more liberal response
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at least to one aspect of it, which is misinformation. Okay. So that's the second way to deal with
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it. Okay. Third part of it is increased surveillance is what many States are moving towards. So
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they are saying that the only way to do this is we need to have key control over the encryption
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keys that WhatsApp users or others other platforms use in order to get control of this. Again,
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quite illiberal response, but this is what the States are looking at. The fourth one
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is where governments are saying we will put constraints even before this type of information
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is shared. And that is what you have this 66A of the IT Act kind of response, right?
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Where the government is saying if you share any information, which is broadly defined
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as offensive or of menacing character, we will have some penalties, etc. You might be
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put in jail and all that. So this is another kind of illiberal response, which exists.
#
So now what you see overall is the state realizes or sees, perceives this as a fundamental threat
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to them and they are being responding with largely illiberal responses, which exists
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as either preconditions on what can be shared or you have increased surveillance or you
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have increased use of force, all three quite negative. And on the other end, you have a
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more liberal response of having better emergency communication systems and largely States are
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still opting for the illiberal responses across the world. And we are moving towards that.
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Even in India, the narrative is now the fact that we see WhatsApp enabling this is a very
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easy excuse for the state to actually say, yeah, the problem is not us. The problem is
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actually WhatsApp. So give us the encryption keys. We will be able to regulate this better.
#
And also states have a monopoly on violence, which they are used to. So the instinctive
#
response is to react with sort of violence. And like you, I feel the only one of these
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four responses, which you laid out, which I completely agree with and is the right response
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is that the government itself establish a credible presence across networks. So it can
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stop misinformation from spreading. There's a larger question here. And the larger debate
#
here, which you've written about for years as well, is the tussle between say, liberty
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and security. And to sort of give a little bit of very quick context for the listeners
#
on why this is an age old tussle or at least a tussle since enlightenment value shaped
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the state is that the whole purpose of the state as liberals like me and Pranay would
#
view it is to defend our individual rights. But there is a trade off here that if we want
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our freedoms to be safeguarded by the state, we have to give away some rights to enable
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the state to do this. So we give the state the right to have a monopoly on violence.
#
And of course, the existence of the state is based on our taxes. So, you know, we accept
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that there will be some coercion and therefore some infringement on our rights on our liberties
#
for the state to exist. So we give away a little bit of our liberty for the amount of
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security that we want. And this equation is different across the world. Like you've pointed
#
out in your paper in the US, they might give away 10% of liberty for whatever. And in other
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places you give away far more liberty like in North Korea, for example. And this is a
#
tussle that also comes up in the context of radically networked societies because many
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of these measures that you spoke about, like the surveillance state, there is no state
#
capacity to actually surveil everyone, but like the surveillance state or like just getting
#
into a protest and beating up protesters and so on, you know, go towards the side of infringing
#
liberties too much for protecting and imagined security. So how has thinking on this evolved
#
Yeah. So I think there are some positive things to it. So this is a liberty security trade
#
off that we spoke about, right? What percentage of rights that you give to the state in order
#
to experience security and that trade off varies across different nation states. Now,
#
what you would see in the past is when this RNS emerged first, the immediate response
#
was taking the argument of in favor of security just prevents liberty in all sorts. So the
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classic response was stop the internet and India is the internet shutdown capital, right?
#
So that is one more response that they have used.
#
Which doesn't work as you pointed out.
#
Yeah. It doesn't work because these networks are very resilient. So even after you break
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down the internet, there will be other ways that people, if ones that identity and cause
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has been established, people will find other means to edit it. Like in Hong Kong's case,
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people use Bluetooth file sharing or AirDrop to share documents. In other places, people
#
can use satellite phones or other ways to basically keep the network going on. Okay.
#
So that was what the state started with that response of shutting down the internet. But
#
now states realize at least some of them that maybe that is not the way to go forward and
#
that's where they are exploring other means either in terms of let's say surveillance,
#
which is problematic for us, but the states are exploring that and the emergency communication
#
system as well. So these are what states are realizing, but again, you know, varies across
#
states. So in India, I think we would still say we are in the midst of this policy debate
#
where all these options are currently open, right? Internet is still being closed down
#
in many places. Even as we speak in Kashmir, it is still down and the state is also exploring
#
this NAT grid that has been there for a long time that we should have a national grid.
#
There have been talks about your WhatsApp login should be linked to your Aadhaar kind
#
of things as well. Right? So all this, we are in the midst of that policy debate and
#
it will be interesting to see where it actually takes us.
#
And also my question to you is around one, what axis does one think about this in terms
#
of instrumentality or morality? For example, you know, Sunil Abraham pointed out that there's
#
a false dichotomy between privacy and security and I'll quote him where he says quote an
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optimization approach to resolving the false dichotomy between privacy and security will
#
not allow for a total surveillance regime as pursued by the US administration. Stop
#
quote. And his point is that there is like a hockey stick curve that there is a point
#
at which is optimal where you take away some liberties, but you provide a certain amount
#
of security and that's where you should stop. The analogy he uses is like salt in cooking
#
that you know, food without salt is tasteless. But beyond the point, if you put too much
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salt, it is also tasteless. So you have to get the amount right. And this is an approach
#
which would look at it in instrumental terms that we are trying to provide this much security
#
and therefore we take away this many liberties and it becomes almost an engineering problem
#
as it were. But the other approach would be to also take into account the moral aspect
#
of it and say that no, I don't care what the instrumentalities are beyond the point. You
#
cannot take away my liberties. Yeah, I think I think both of us fall on the other side
#
of the moral argument, right? You would want the state to have as little a role in restricting
#
liberties as it already districts are liberties in many, many areas. Yeah. So you don't want
#
another additional tool in the hands of the state. So we are wary of that. And that's
#
why there are other responses, right? But the thing is you need to have state capacity
#
to be able to execute any of those, right? Let's say you want excellent emergency communication
#
systems or ways for states. Let's say if there is actually a real case of a riot happening
#
because of these information system, it is reported. Can states probably consider in
#
a very localized way, probably slowing down the scale of the spreading of this information
#
either through appearance of credible information on WhatsApp or even say, let's say considering
#
slowing down the internet in a very localized area. Again, it is, there is a problem of
#
illiberal thing that we are approaching. But as a moral point, you don't want definitely
#
internet shutdowns are not the way to go, right? It's just a severe restriction of liberty
#
of a large number of people in the name of security. And because of a few rioters, you
#
are going to affect a lot of other people as well. Oh, many of these responses actually
#
which we talked about are violate that moral stand that we come from, right? And yeah.
#
Yeah. And I mean, I'm just thinking of the counter arguments. For example, I'm against
#
torture, but one counter thought experiment that is often made up, which is often presented
#
to me by people arguing the other side is that what if there's a nuclear bomb in the
#
middle of Bombay and you know, it's about to go off and one person has a code and you
#
know he has a code, but he's not giving it away. Should you torture him? And that, you
#
know, it's again instrumentality versus morality, but then it seems a no brainer that yeah,
#
you have to save the lives of so many people. So what do you do? And a similar argument
#
could be the government has made similar arguments. It's not a thought experiment in the case
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of Kashmir by saying that we had to shut down the internet because terrorists will communicate
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with each other. And this of course is a rubbish argument, but this is a sort of argument which
#
people are making where the state also can say that, listen, I accepted the only job
#
of the state. I'll get, I'll consider a libertarian point that the only job of the state is to
#
safeguard you and safeguard your rights, but I need to do this for that. How do such arguments
#
play out? How have they played out in India in the policy space?
#
Yeah. In the Indian case, I think we already have, there are not many qualms about the
#
state acquiring more power, unfortunately. So the state has been able to clam down on
#
freedoms more easily. And it's normalized. Most of India doesn't give a shit that Kashmir
#
hasn't had internet for almost six months. Yeah. So that's what the Indian case has been,
#
unfortunately. And that liberty argument, which we are making is not the one which is
#
very popular currently. Right? So yeah, that's where we are. So, you know, before we go,
#
I'm, you know, just thinking back for a moment beyond radically networked societies into
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radical networking per se, like just as a lot of these liberal movements have been enabled
#
by technology. I mean, I often say that even as states grow stronger and stronger, the
#
best libertarian hope is that technology will empower individuals, which also seems to be
#
happening. But it's equally true if you look at it another way that a lot of these right
#
wing populist movements that have come up have also been enabled by technology in the
#
sense, and this is something I've written about, and we've spoken about in the past
#
on how what social media perhaps did was that it created preference cascades in the sense
#
that, and these are the words of Timur Koran, he talks about how people typically carry
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out preference falsification, that they don't express what they really feel about something
#
because they're not sure if there are others like them. For example, Soviet dissidents
#
under the Soviet Union who did not know that if they felt anger at the regime, they would
#
not say it because they didn't know there were others like them. But then a moment comes
#
when you realize that everybody shares, there are enough people and you have what is called
#
a preference cascade. And Glenn Reynolds, the old school blogger, once wrote a piece
#
about how Trump's rise, according to him, was enabled by preference cascades because
#
suddenly a lot of people realized that the thoughts that they were otherwise wary of
#
expressing because it didn't seem politically correct, were actually shared by a lot of
#
people. And this coming together of silent majorities, you know, enabled Trump to come
#
to power. And in a similar sense, it could be argued that the rise of Modi to some extent
#
was enabled by this, where a lot of people, you know, in some cases, perhaps where a lot
#
of people suddenly realized that everybody shares whatever it is that draws them to Modi's
#
vision of India, maybe the desire for a Hindu Rashtra or a hatred of Muslims or bigotry
#
or sexism or whatever. And I'm sure there are positive things also. I don't want to
#
indicate that everybody who voted or votes for Modi is necessarily falls into one of
#
these categories. Though at the moment, I can't imagine too many positive categories
#
of voting for him. And all of this has also been enabled by social media. So there are
#
these countervailing things, processes sort of happening within society. And at the same
#
time, the coercive power of the state has also been enabled by technology. Like I retweeted
#
something someone pointed out a few days ago about how a lot of people who were near a
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protest somewhere in Kerala, I think, were got notice got show cause notices from the
#
government at what were you doing there? And how did the government know they were there?
#
Because their cell phone signals are picked up by the cell phone tower, something of that
#
sort. And the government, of course, has like incredibly scary surveillance technologies
#
that they might even be listening to this podcast at the time of recording and not at
#
the time of release. Hello, bureaucrat, if you're listening. So looking ahead into the
#
future where technology is both a cause for hope and despair, what is sort of a worst
#
case scenario 10 years round the line and a best case scenario 10 years round the line?
#
Right. So the best case scenario I would say would be where these imagined communities
#
which are there might be they are able to create new communities, new imagined identities,
#
which didn't exist earlier on the lines, which sort of are more human towards each other,
#
which see each other as an individual rather than as a part of a specific background, right?
#
So their caste, color, religion, but just seeing it as we are all human. So just because
#
of that, we need to be more sympathetic to each other. If that happens and we are able
#
to form new imagined identities on those lines, maybe the world will move towards a very philosophical
#
thing. But I don't I don't have a concrete answer to say the second one on that would
#
be the negative part would be these identities actually reaffirm our existing biases. And
#
there are new RNSs which happened on already existing caste class lines. So that again
#
leads to a lot of problems. Look at the cause angle, you know, and as we discuss about how
#
consumer protests are being take place, a negative scenario also is maybe now increasing prices
#
of anything or decreasing subsidies of anything will become difficult because there might be
#
radically network mobilizations in opposition to these. In fact, TikTok for a while had like
#
356 million views for some hashtag which are onions in it, which and there were thousands
#
of videos protesting the price rise of onions, which was radically networked entertainment,
#
but not exactly a movement. Yeah. And so that's a problem, right? So because you already have
#
these strong endowment effects, especially in India on everything, right? We get so much
#
tax benefit. So we are that endowment effect is there. And if the government wants to end
#
these, imagine there is a radically network mobilization, which takes this as an immediate
#
cause. The identity aspect might be built in over years, but it will become even more difficult for
#
these subsidies to be taken out as well. So that's a sort of a negative scenario.
#
And I guess it might be an element of populism as well. For example, one legitimate cause,
#
which everyone should protest is a rising unemployment in India and the jobs crisis.
#
But one unproductive way of protesting it is when groups like the party that's for example,
#
come together and just ask for more government reservations for themselves,
#
which does nothing to solve the structural reasons for the problem. But, you know,
#
the structural reasons of the problem are so sort of abstract and counterintuitive that they're not
#
going to get, you're not going to mobilize masses around those things. So you have the right cause,
#
but a movement that demands perhaps the wrong action or action, which doesn't really
#
solve the problem. And you can have more localized RNSs around these.
#
One more we can look at sort of a negative aspect of it is look at the role of the elected
#
representative. That also fundamentally changes in the sense that, you know, there has been an
#
age old debate about what is the role of the elected representative? Is he an ambassador
#
for whatever the constituent thing or he or she can apply their mind to a particular policy
#
problem? There is Edmund Burke's famous speech to the electors of Bristol. It talks about all
#
these, right? So now imagine how will that play out when everyone is radically networked?
#
It becomes difficult for a person to take a position against the stream of opinion,
#
which already exists. So imagine already people have hardened their opinions and stance through
#
a radically network community, mobilized on that. Will that representative, can they afford to take
#
a position against this? It becomes slightly difficult. And it also might lead to something
#
of a status quo bias in the sense you're scared of doing anything at all, because doing anything
#
at all raises a risk for you from a radically networked and very polarized populace. So you
#
just try to sort of stay invisible and stay out of trouble. Let's end on a positive note.
#
There might be some imagined identities which are formed across the barriers of our nation state,
#
across the barriers of our immediate communities, right, which are there. So therein lies the hope
#
that these new communities will be able to transcend some of the already existing fault lines
#
and they will push the agenda of the governments in a direction which is beneficial for both sides
#
across that. And who knows, this community could be listeners of the seen and the unseen. We can
#
call them unseeners. Pranay, thank you so much for coming on the show again. Thanks, Amit.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do check out the papers I referred to,
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which will be linked from the show notes. You can follow Pranay on Twitter at Pranay Kotas,
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one word. You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes
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of the Seen and the Unseen at www.seenunseen.in and www.thinkpragati.com. The Seen and the Unseen is supported
#
by the Takshashila Institution, where our good friend Pranay works. So check out more about
#
their public policy courses at takshashila.org.in. Thank you for listening and go out and protest somewhere today.
