The non-politics of outrage

The non-politics of outrage

What has happened?

We are witnessing mass outrage over certain actions or non-actions of Facebook (FB) and a British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica (CA), regarding the use of personal data for political messaging during the U.S. presidential elections.

CA’s role is long known

Now after a whistle-blower’s account and an undercover investigation, if those responsible for data and digital policies behave as if any of this is news to them, it is either disingenuous or unacceptably naive and incompetent

Why the outrage?

• As FB has clarified, the only illegal element here is that a research company transferred data to CA against FB policies.
• But both the company concerned and FB itself could have legitimately used the same user data for the same purpose of psychometrics-based micro-targeted political messaging for any of their paying clients
• Question: What exactly do we then have a problem with? Just with violation of FB’s policies, or with psychometrics-based political messaging and the collective national damage that it causes? Is it, for instance, alright if FB itself did similar things for its paying clients, which it has provisions for

Cause of Concerns

Complete Control by major companies:Complete data-based control over all activities and actors in a sector by platform companies e.g. uber

Informational Warfare:

• Countries such as the U.S. have extensive informational warfare projects based on social media and other micro-informational sources for various countries
• Global digital companies such as Microsoft and Google are known to cooperate closely with the American establishment, and, when insisted upon, prioritise the latter’s interests even over their own economic ones.

No Control on data being transported abroad from India

• As this data gets converted into digitally-intelligent services in all sectors — from transport, commerce and tourism, to education and health, to agriculture and manufacturing, we are getting structurally sucked into foreign-controlled digital value chains from which any attempts to escape may soon become too difficult and costly

What needs to be done?

Regulating data:An enabling cover of jurisprudence and political economy being thrown over critical data and digital intelligence such data, which ensures assertion of collective rights to it, and, where needed, the corresponding laws and regulation

Checks on platform companies: Platform companies, when exceeding certain data sizes, need to be closely regulated like utility companies.

Compulsory reporting

Is the Indian government willing to come up with a white paper on such extensive data markets that also exist in India?

Threat: A Utopian Dream of upper middle class

• Are we as a nation ready to develop the needed political response to this new age of data?
• The biggest roadblock in this necessary direction is the same upper middle-class that is currently outraged on the CA issue, but resists due regulation of the digital sector because it threatens its hyper consumptive culture and runs counter to its anti-political biases.
• It still wants to savour for some more time the utopian dream that the Internet finally delivers them of governments.