We are living under algorithmic governmentality. Governmentality is a term coined by Michel Foucault to indicate the new ways Government and the market control large groups of people. It leads to the massification of the individuals. Ideologies like Hindutva for instance is a governmentality which massifies people into a large motley domesticated crowd. Life has suddenly become almost fully digital. We have become data generating machines. It has led to the production of huge amounts of data and we have stepped into data economy and data politics. Data belong to our past but it comes to haunt our future. Data is a memory of the future. The Big Business is using our data to condition what we desire in the future. This means data is used to trigger and control our expectations and volitions. We are indeed dispossessed of our future. The horizon of our future is colonized.
The success of the Big Business is based on data intensive computing that we call Big Data. Some scholars had predicted that the reign of Big Tech, Big Data and Big Business developed in US after President Bill Clinton government gave tax exemption to some business houses that would go to become giants of the web , GAFA ( Google, Amazon, Facebook ( Meta), APPLE) and later joined by Microsoft will lead to a fuller realization of Barbarism in the sense of Horkheimer and Adorno. Adorno and Horkheimer spoke of the barbarism of the educated. It was not a return to Barbarism of the good ancient days. They spoke of the tendency of ‘enlightened’ societies to regress into the forms of domination, violence and irrationality. Maybe we might see this form of barbarism at work in our country on the power new communication technologies which brought Big Tech to us. Perhaps, Horkheimer and Adorno did not imagine how far this could go on the noetic plane.
The smart phone powered this barbarism in us and is firing it continuously. It has been used craftily to divide and disintegrate our society. It invades our personal lives. It penetrates, parasitizes and destroys social relations at lightening speed. Our socio socio-psychological as well as cognitive energies appear to be steadily depleted and we are sliding on slope that might transform us into zombies. Unfortunately, we are facing automatic nihilism.
But this is not the end. There is some light at the end of the tunnel. This light does not appear to be the headlight of an engine coming to crush us down in Zizekean sense. We have an opportunity to see reason. We are not going to be the last Indians in Nietzsche’s terms. India will survive this dark age and come to new enlightenment. This reigning madness will go. We have the courage to hope. Our desolate time is reaching its expiry date. Data analytics being a disruptive technology is opening doors to light to come in. The vote Chori data analytics of Rahul Gandhi, the opposition leader in our country has opened new vistas to use data not just for expoitatve wealth creation and political power but also to expose these very maladies and open a new future that cannot be robbed by Big Tech, Big Data and Big Business as well as Big Politics.
Data analytics is a double edged sword. So far it has been used only in one direction. Data protection in the name of privacy prevents it from being used for public good against Big Business and Big Politics. We can discern this clearly in the plight of Rahul Gandhi and his team that is finding it to be very difficult to access vital data from the Election Commission of India. Yet we need to credit Gandhi for working hard with the data that he got to lay his hands. What if we think of Data as belonging to the commons. This would mean data belongs to the public and has to be released for public good. This would enable us to develop a counter gaze that could interrogate, contest and dismantle the panoptic power of the reigning Big Business and Big Politics. This possibility of converting data into a public good needs a leap of consciousness. We easily accept data as a private good and want it to be protected. But this unfortunately opens its use under this very same cover against us. since data is private we cannot scrutinize its use. If data is thought as public good, data of individuals and their privacy will have better possibilities of being guarded and also being used for public good as demonstrated by Gandhi.
While we have time to consider the wider implications of the data analytics of Gandhi and his team, it is urgent to understand the immediate consequences of the same to the politics, constitution and the democracy of our country. There is no doubt that his findings cannot harm but strengthen our constitution, constitutional bodies and our democratic politics. Data is the memory of the future although it belongs to the past. Being memory of the future it becomes a powerful tool that can awaken us from our dogmatic slumbers ( in Kantian sense) induced by the charm of the Big Tech and Big Politics. The people of India are finding a nirvana moment. The vote chori allegation is getting traction is fast translating into a conviction.
Astonishingly in a BJP’s rally in Bihar, people shouted that Rahul’s yatra in Bihar was about to vote chori to the pointed question of home minister Amit Shah although the answer he expected was ghusapaithiya. Thus, future now seems to have opened and not closed as the ruling benches may want it to be. Our libidinal desire has shifted. This is why the slogan vote chor gaddi chod has not just rigged in the parliament but is said to have come to resound in the far flung villages of country.
Indians thus seems to have chosen to be ahead of the Big Business and the Big Politics that have come together with the reigning treasury benches. Fortunately, the disruptive power of data analytics seems to have brought this transformation. This means we Indian can dream again. Although, the dream of Ache dhin turned to be a worst night mare, we can see a common horizon of convergence. This common horizon promises peace , prosperity, harmony to all sons and daughters of mother India regardless of caste and creed. It opens a common future far beyond the exclusionary narrow future that is promised by the ruling dispensation.
