“You have to break up a nation first if you want to put its pieces together the way you want.” These words attributed to Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign manager Steve Bannon sent chills down my spine.
The Great Hack, a Netflix documentary about the Cambridge Analytica scandal and how the company played a key role in hacking into Britain’s psyche to precipitate the Brexit crisis and then used the same tactics to get Trump elected, shows us how susceptible democracies are to being manipulated, broken up and rearranged.
The nonchalant way in which a Cambridge Analytica whistle blower says that the Brexit campaign served as a petri dish for the Trump campaign shows us what we have suspected all along and what the documentary says categorically. That the threads of connectivity that were supposed to bring us closer have now becomes chains that can and do yank us in different directions not just to buy and consume but to be consumed. And to serve as little pixels in rearranging a new world order where political campaigners with the most amount to spend on technological warfare against their opponents, the dissemination of fake news, misinformation, propaganda and hate will achieve their ends.
We are already familiar in India with how many different media platforms have been turned into warfare zones and how electoral battles are won not with facts but by skewing perceptions.
We by now know the play book by heart.
Spurious sites spewing malicious videos encouraging violence, invisible and visible mind benders coining phrases and nicknames to mock dissenters and rivals, the falsification of history with morphed pictures and fake quotes. Because of course, you must delegitimise what has been built in order to destroy it. And so your data is mined to allow mind gamers to teach you to doubt, to hate, to fear and to give tacit acceptance to the demonisation and dehumanisation of the “other” so that new ground can be cleared for a new model of governance where there are no checks and balances and the unthinkable becomes the new normal.
A whistleblower conveys in the documentary that the psychology of two nations (Britain and the US) was broken up in pieces for the Brexit movement and the Trump election.
India is witnessing a similar breaking up little by little everyday as its democratic institutions get stymied while power gets increasingly monopolised by a few.
The fact that some of the world’s most profitable companies deal with our data and personal information, should tell us something. That our only purpose is to be influenced and to think, buy, hate, fear what we are taught to. And to serve as the building blocks of a new world order where we matter the least.
Reema is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a translator who recently interpreted Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an RJ and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US . She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.