The Nigerian government banned the powerful micro blogging site, Twitter, a couple of weeks back. It sounded like the impossible had been done, but the state retains the power to determine what to allow and what not to. Every rule under globalisation and international trade has provisions and exceptions for national security. So all the Nigerian government had to do was dive under the national security excuse. Enough knocks and blows have followed the decision, with a few taps on the back, notably from Donald Trump, a former US president, who was totally humiliated by the tech platform. Trump’s supporters believe that these new tech platforms are biased towards the liberal left anyway, and that they might have become political in support of democrats.
The Nigerian government has also laid heavy allegations against Jack Dorsey, for his not too covert role in the protests that rocked Nigeria to her foundations in October, 2020.
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The Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, claims that Dorsey has questions to answer for his open support for and financial sponsorship of the #EndSARS protests.
Well, every action and inaction does have consequences. The war between Twitter and Nigeria may be long and drawn out despite the opprobrium that the Nigerian government has attracted, including words of rebuke from the embassies of top countries. But it is hard to wash Dorsey clean of these allegations.
My thinking is, you can provide a platform, and enforce your rules strictly without anyone having to know your name or see your face. However, when you start to tweet in favour of one party or the other, and when you direct such actions against one of your customers, then you have openly taken sides and are no longer a fair adjudicator. Dorsey is a politician, much more than Mark Zuckerberg, even though Zuckerberg controls 2.5 billion people compared to his (Dorsey’s) 300 million.
If Facebook was a country, it will have the population of China and India combined. That is phenomenal. Twitter, however, has the advantage of being able to pass instant information. The psychologist behind the business model of Twitter must have in mind the need to feed on people’s restlessness for information (most of which they do absolutely nothing with), as well as their Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), hence the limiting of texts in twitter to just 280 characters per tweet. It used to be 160 or thereabout. Facebook’s psychologist must have had in mind the secret desire that people nurse to show off their real or imagined achievements–and their computer-enhanced looks of course.
It is not only in Nigeria that Twitter has encountered issues. It had in India and in a number of locations around the world. In 2011 as the UK contorted under widespread riots, PM David Cameron threatened to shut down Twitter. Germany, France and other western European countries criticised what they call ‘digital oligarchy’ after Facebook and Twitter shut down Trump. China never allowed Twitter in, rather getting some of her smart young people to build their own.
Twitter was very effective during the Arab Spring and indeed undid Hosni Mubarak. At the heart of that protest was a certain young man named Wael Ghonim, who was then an executive with Google Egypt. These tech companies, with reach into the bedrooms – and the minds – of billions of people around the world, have become so powerful. Indeed they can make or mar societies. They can bring down or install governments. They can set a country on fire, or attract visitors, tourists and investors. Therefore, the CEOs of these organisations have emerged as the real world leaders. Except we negotiate with them urgently, and figure how we stand with them, we are facing a different kind of tyranny, even as we try to run away from the civilian dictatorships that have riled us for so long.
I have repeated ad nauseum, the speech by PM Boris Johnson, which he gave at the United Nations in September 2019. It was a most-frightening speech, to those who can digest what exactly he meant. I shared this speech especially around the time that COVID-19 held the world by the jugular. There were references to vaccines by Johnson even as at then, but what frightened me the most were his references to some system that ‘they’ the powerful countries were putting together which will hand over a lot of power to technology and tech firms. He asked them – even if rhetorically – that we speak up now and ensure that some of our values in today’s ‘normal’ world (which is no longer so normal since COVID-19 made its debut), could make it into the new world that ‘they’ were creating. He said that machines will not know any ‘extenuating’ circumstances as they will determine who gets what going forward. Hear him:
No one can ignore a gathering force that is reshaping the future of every member of this assembly; there has been nothing like it in history. When I think of the great scientific revolutions of the past; print, the steam engine, aviation, the atomic age, I think of new tools that we acquired and over which we the human race have the advantage; which we can control. And that is not necessarily the case in the digital age. You may keep your secrets from your friends, from your parents, your children, your doctor, even your personal trainer. But it takes real efforts to conceal your thoughts from Google… And if that is true today, in future there may be nowhere to hide. Smart cities will polulate with sensors, all joined together by the Internet of Things; pollards communing invisibly with lamp posts, so that there is always a parking space for your electric car, so that no bin goes unemptied and no street unswept, and the urban environment is as antiseptic as a Zurich pharmacy… But this technology could also be used to keep every citizen under round-the-clock surveillance. A future Alexa will pretend to take orders, but this Alexa will be watching you clacking her tongue and stamping her toes. In future, voice connectivity will be in every room. Your mattress will monitor your nightmares, your fridge will beat for more cheese, your front door will sweep wide open the moment you approach, like some silent, invincible butler. Your smart meter will go hustling on its own accord for cheaper electricity and every one of them minutely transcribing your habits in tiny electronic shorthand stored not in their chips or in their innards; no where you can find it, but in some great cloud of data that lowers ever more oppressively over the human race; a giant dark thundercloud waiting to burst and we have no control over how or when the precipitation will take place….Data is the crude oil of the modern economy and we are now in an environment where we don’t know who should own these new oil fields.
