[TLDR (too long didn’t read): This time, the Reader assembles a list of ‘iron questions’ I have found here and there depicting something that deeply troubles us human rights activists. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].
-Give a kid a fish and you feed her/him for a day. Teach her/him to use the Internet and s/he won’t bother you for weeks, months, maybe years.
1. Is a state of ignorance being imposed on the public? Have private citizens today come to feel rather like deaf spectators sitting in the back row? Are public affairs in a truly convincing way their affairs? Are they, for the most part, invisible? Are citizens managed from some distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powerful operators? (Walter Lippmann, 1889-1974)
2. Are a bunch of rapidly evolving technologies (e.g., social media and other platforms, geospatial and artificial intelligence, block chain…) and alternative financing –often owned and resourced by and through the private sector– relentlessly impacting and challenging human rights (HR) outcomes? Are they increasing the armor of tools available to governments and to the powerful to infringe on HR while also blocking pathways for HR action? [Human rights practitioners need to acquire and master these technology-based skills and tools to promote the right advocacy, the funding, the research and the HR prevention, starting with demanding regulatory action and limits to governance decision-making on the negative role this technology is now having on society especially our youth]. (Shelley Inglis)
3. Is the conscious and intelligent manipulation of our habits, opinions and behaviors (particularly as consumers) an important element of the so-called democratic societies we live in? Are those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society an invisible government that, de-facto, is the true global ruling power? (Edward Bernays)
4. Are the same inequalities and gaps that people are trying to tackle in the real world being portrayed in online spaces? (Bibbi Abruzzini) [The non-focused cruising the internet results in only randomly taking-in non-verifiable facts that have little, if any meaning]. (Noam Chomsky)
‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ (Hamlet)
5. Do we live in an era of radical conformism? Is what characterizes today’s communications a ‘communication without community? Do we live in the midst of an era of ‘dataism’? Are algorithms now going to make the new man?* Does the problem reside in the fact that the ‘narcissist in us’ is blind when looking at others? (Byung-Chul Han) [Universities now have clients and only form workers, –and they do not form them with critical skills. Man is no longer sovereign in his thinking, but is the result of algorithmic operations that dominate him without him realizing it. Big data is about macro-data that make thinking superfluous because, if everything is ‘numerable’, all is the same… Interpersonal relationships are being replaced by connections that bring us together only with equals. What is digital has no weight, does not smell, cannot be touched, does not oppose any resistance; you make ‘click’ and there it is! Today, being observed is a central aspect of being in the world. Narcissism is at the service of s/he who consumes. The more persons are equal, the more production increases; that is the current logic. Capital needs us all to be equal. Neoliberalism would not function if, as persons, we would be different]. (B-C. Han)
*: The most important debate in social media today is about the algorithmic decisions that shape our information universe more powerfully than any censor could. (Mother Jones)
6. When TV tells us “the international community condemns…”, do you know who is condemning and who are the condemned? (Louis Casado)
7. Do public opinion polls gratuitously assume that the ‘public opinion’ is enlightened, illustrated, rationally motivated, free of prejudice and/or of manipulations and that it opines after a free debate of the contradictions is at play? [Simply put, the conditions do not exist that allow the formation of an illustrated and free opinion]. (L. Casado)
8. And then, ask yourself, what additional wealth could ten Twitters, twenty Facebooks or a hundred Tik-Toks create? [The answer to this can be found if we imagine Twitter, Facebook and Tik-Tok tomorrow disappear. Would the world be a poorer place?]. (L. Casado) [I assume channel surfing and internet browsing contribute to a decrease in people’s attention span. I am not familiar with any scientific proof though while working as a teacher I found that some students may be exhausted when five minutes of a lesson has passed and begin fingering on their smartphones. They might also complain if a text is longer than half a page, while finding it almost impossible to read a book. (Jan Lundius)]. Maybe we are all incapable of keeping a focus…
9. Now, after eight paragraphs, ask yourself all these questions –slowly and one by one. Then I will be able to sleep better tonight …but not you.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
-I do not know about you, but how many webinars have you attended in the last year? And what do we have to show-for from them in terms of action? Are we not talking mostly among intellectuals and mostly talking to the converts? …and not only talking, but repeatedly talking around the same analyses and similar suggestions? Am I being a cynic?
–Are we perhaps deceiving ourselves thinking that we have the right (or left…?) solutions since we are talking to ‘insiders’? What does throwing webinars at our problems achieve/do to actions needed ‘outside’there? Do not many of the liberal or radical views we ventilate in webinars rarely serve the ultimate interests of those rendered poor? Do we really ‘represent them’? …What will you and I do differently come next Monday morning?
-Who will be/are the doers that will ultimately change things around? us? If not us, who should we be webinaring with …to learn from their non-scholar/reality-rooted analyses and suggestions for action? Does the real energy to find workable solutions not ultimately only come from the oppressed themselves?
[Note: I do not even want to start to talk about what is achieved by the dozens of petitions we are asked to sign that are sent to governments, agencies, individuals, decision makers… and that end up in their inboxes to die a quiet death. We all know the problem with petitions is that it is easy to sign-on and then forget about the fact that prompted us to sign them]. Go back to paragraph 9 above.