What would have happened to Mahatma Gandhi in the times of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook?

File photo of Gandhi | Commons

The artists and revolutionaries, scientists and poets, will break through the firewalls created by technocrats to control the world.

Politics has changed. Ideology is out. Technology is in. Manifestos are irrelevant. Manipulations matter. This seems to be the current belief, and the political parties and pundits appear to agree.

So, direct contact with people has no place in elections. Social media war rooms will decide the outcome of elections. Now, the party leadership and political affairs committees are being replaced by hi-tech message manufacturers.

The late Canadian intellectual Marshall McLuhan was prophetic when he declared, back in the 1960s, “Medium is the Message”. There were no personal computers at the time, or mobile phones, internet, Facebook, Twitter or WhatsApp. His well-known adage, “World is a global village”, is a part of that projection, that media would shrink the planet.

The Cambridge Analytica and Facebook controversy, and the inherent massive political manipulation, have brought into sharp focus the very idea of democracy. If public opinion and voting behaviour could be controlled through large social media armies, elections would create democratically elected authoritarian, or even fascist, regimes.

In such a situation, the ‘regime change’ game plans of the super powers, mainly the US, would not require gigantic military forces. Nor would nuclear armament be necessary. A cynic would say this was a non-violent way of changing regimes.

In this scenario consensus could be manipulated, support could be created, and even mass mobilisation achieved, as at Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2010, or for the 2011 Anna Hazare movement. Both these so-called mass ‘andolans’ brought about a regime change. So, it is argued, there is enough “proof” that mass manipulation is possible.

I am not a tech-savvy person. So far, I am not even on Facebook, nor do I have a Twitter handle. Therefore, I can say, I cannot be manipulated by these “weapons”. Of course, other media, like the television, the press or radio, could influence me. But, then, I decide what to read or see or hear. That “freedom”, I am told, is not there for those on Facebook, or social media in general.

Essentially, the question is that of communication, manipulation, reaching out to people, and the technology of political control.

But I have a few questions, which are of a psycho-philosophical as well as historical nature. Mahatma Gandhi led mass movements from Champaran to ‘Chale Jao’ from 1915 to 1942. All his mass campaigns, like the Dandi march and civil disobedience, gained huge followings. How did he manage to reach out to millions of people – Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and Parsis? Upper castes and Dalits, rich and poor, rural and urban? They all followed him, even though he never uttered a word of hatred, the hallmark of social media.

Under British control, the press did not promote Gandhiji. There was hardly any radio; the British controlled whatever there was of it. The press that supported the Independence struggle was censored and suppressed. The printing presses publishing pamphlets or even issues of ‘Young Indian’ and ‘Harijan’ were confiscated. In any case, their circulation was not large enough to galvanise people. And there was large-scale illiteracy. Television did not exist. The question of social mass media did not arise. And yet Gandhi could influence and inspire masses from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, and from Kolkata to Kutch. He primarily spoke Hindi, and occasionally Gujarati or English.

There was large participation at Gandhiji’s public meetings, but the microphone and the overall public address system took his voice to only a few of the people.

He never shouted, screamed or used high-decibel rhetoric to impress the masses. Narendra Modi would feel ashamed to deliver his melodramatic speeches or sit by a “charkha” the next time if he saw clips of those rallies. Loudmouth news anchors would wonder how Gandhiji could, without shrieking, move the masses to even sacrifice their lives.

Gandhiji was neither an orator nor an actor. He never appealed to people in the name of religion, despite being deeply religious. He hardly quoted scriptures. He did not condemn the English people. He never criticised his opponents. But he was the greatest communicator of all times. He used the post and telegraph. He would send hundreds of telegrams and write letters on the back of envelopes. Telephones were scarce. Yet he could create a national movement. He did not need Cambridge Analytica, nor Facebook.

He appealed to people’s conscience. The renowned brain researcher V. Ramchandran has named universal empathy “Gandhi neurons”. Through empathy, he believed, the entire humanity could be connected. Indeed, he succeeded in influencing Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, Richard Attenborough and Yehudi Menuhin. None of them knew him directly. None had met him. But Gandhiji’s medium of message was empathy, compassion and love. Today, in the Modi era and neo-liberal world, Gandhiji would appear like an idealistic idiot.

The question therefore is: Can media and social media manipulation influence voting patterns to the extent that it is being argued? Or can all this Facebook management kill free will? Are human beings live robots driven by neuro-electronic circuits?

Some philosophers argue that free will is a myth. Others say that, though everyone is like Pavlov’s dogs to an extent, each of us has an element of rebellion and self-assertion, and the urge to break away from the system.

The new concentration camps created by software technocrats cannot break the spirit, though we may be lamed and tamed for some time.

The artists and revolutionaries, scientists and poets, with their own minds and souls will break through the firewalls created by technocrats to control the world. Indeed, they will inspire the people, too, the same way the British repression could not stop Gandhiji and his millions of followers. Nor could Hitler sustain the Nazi system.

George Orwell could intellectually penetrate the oppressive Soviet system and alert the people of the spectre of 1984. Orwell died in 1949, but the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the USSR disintegrated in 1991.

The fear that machines will manipulate humans is quite old. The machines will play chess and bridge, organise war games and try political control, but eventually fail.

Of course, we have to be extremely alert to fight and defeat the likes of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook before they build global information concentration camps. But one must also remember that human creativity or free will cannot be manipulated forever.

Kumar Ketkar is a former editor and Congress member of Rajya Sabha