Less Engagement, Disengagement and Other Ethical Ways
ALSO READ: An Approach to Deal with Technology Dominance (Part 1)
Technology-led Vision Blindness
More than technology dominance that can be sooner or later disrupted (with global consensus and mutual efforts), we will have to be concerned about its side effects. Somehow our current Internet generation thinks that by the accumulation of the abundance of information from the Internet/social platforms they are gaining knowledge and intelligence (which they would be able to upload into some cloud servers in the future, as these companies often claim). But this idea is flawed at its core; the human mind is not designed to work that way! After reading, listening, and watching, we need some time without outside distraction to think and make sense of all that we have observed.
The ability to foresee future events, threats, opportunities and different patterns related to these have a role in the policy/ direction of a nation. Our current generation has stopped practicing this and, like any other art this is also not a privilege, one may lose it. But the question is – can we afford to lose this skill? The absence of this skill can develop a ‘vision blindness’ syndrome and, when a community/society or nation turns vision blind, it always pays a cost for that.
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The notion of ‘Vision Blindness’ has its roots in the historic experiences of the Jewish community. In his book “The Founding Fathers of Zionism,” historian Benzion Netanyahu has mentioned that “the Jews, which in the distant past produced many personalities who excelled in prognosticating the future, became during the Exile a people that seemed to have virtually blind in this faculty.”He said that “we did not discern the greatest disasters even a short while before they occurred.” This was a period in which one may say that “vision disappeared from the people of Israel.”
Time to steal the firewood from under the pot has come!
The patterns of Technology Dominance are so complex that upon investigating the matter, one may reach a point where things seem to go into an uncertain and never-ending loop. But in the classics of war strategies, it is said that when faced with an enemy or force too powerful to engage directly, you must first weaken him by undermining his foundation and attacking his source of power (‘The Thirty-Six Strategies’, collection of ancient Chinese war tactics).
The source of Technology Dominance lies in an over-engagement and growing dependency of the people on these platforms. The more we get engaged, the more powerful these apps become. And this dependency is not natural as well, it’s a proven fact that these platforms are designed to arouse the addiction hormone in the users, just like any other addictive element, and the more we get engaged, the more powerful they become. So, the first step to tackle Technology Dominance must be reducing over-engagement on these platforms. We can call it the first step – Less Engagement.
Less Engagement means reducing our dependency on these Big Tech platforms and moving toward our local options – not just being vocal for local but embracing the local apps too. In the last few months, several homegrown alternatives to these popular apps have emerged such as Bharat E Market (a platform developed by Confederation of All India Traders, after a tussle with Amazon), Zoho Mail and its web hosting suite, Koo app, Sandes (government’s messaging app equivalent to WhatsApp) and payments apps like BHIM, PayTM, etc. We will see many more options in the coming days and we can expect some apps to be jointly developed with like-minded nations, too. When a user will have some options to select from, the psychological effect of these apps will automatically get minimized. Once we win that psychological war, dominance will be over.
After Less Engagement being successfully implemented, we can start disengaging from these tech platforms too!
Disengagement
This may sound offensive to some but who said that computers, the Internet and smartphones were the only technology on the planet and only by using these apps one could remain productive and technical! Who established this norm?
The original purpose of these products was to make our routine operations fast and easier. When these tech companies entered India, they came with a typical salesmen gesture and offered some very routine products like the office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), mail, search and some entertainment services – chat, networking, music, videos, games, and shopping. None of these must be given our 24/7 attention and productive energy. So the idea of Disengagement is – if we are using these products other than for their original purpose or their key functions – it means that we are over-engaged on these apps and we are over-engaged because these companies have addictive elements inbuilt in their products. This over engagement is crushing our inherent capabilities, our self-consciousness and without self-consciousness we cannot build great things. To end this addiction, this over-engagement and dependency, we will have to practice some Disengagement from these apps.
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The question then arises – how this Disengagement exercise can be promoted on a large scale?
We need to understand that computer technology, the Internet, smartphones, Big Data and AI are all some of the most successful business models of our time and they are leveraging their success to the fullest. A large portion of humanity (approx 4.66 billion people) is either over-engaged on tech platforms/ products or is over-influenced by their marketing. To disengage people from these business models, we will have to think about developing New Business Models. The New Business Models is an approach to coin some new ideas, thinking something new, more productive and more interesting and thrilling than all current dominating tech products. Continuing in this space and coining different jargon to leverage the market dominance can be a part of their calculations as they put a lot of effort to reach this stage. But a country like India must think about moving beyond this stagnation!
For a huge consumer segment, these augmented realities (AR), virtual reality (AR) and drone tech-based products, the users are offered thrill, pleasure and sense of adventure. They can be disrupted only with something more adventurous and more thrilling, something in the real world. If we aim to be shaper and more decisive, we will have to think about coining our improvisations and shaping some New Business Models, capable of competing with all the existing ones.
Interestingly, recognizing the stagnation and limitation of their products, these Big Tech founders have gradually started shifting toward new ventures. Agriculture, ocean, sky, air and space kind of domains are their new interest areas! Then why have we restricted ourselves to their products/ improvisations? We must think about going beyond smartphones and the Internet. We are a country surrounded by ocean, gifted with gigantic mountains and some of the world’s rarest natural resources and vibrant diversity. The need is to only explore and think in this direction. New Business Models originated from India can disrupt Big Tech hegemony!
Other Ethical Ways
Other than the Less Engagement and Disengagement process, what else can we do? We can adopt some other ethical ways, such as taxation, regulations, compliances and every single move that is needed for the health of the market and help these companies stay to do business, not to govern!
Recently, the Government of India issued some new guidelines and digital media ethics codes (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code 2021) that provide a progressive and liberal framework to deal with the challenges of social and digital media platforms. The Code includes a well-defined mechanism for grievance redressal, some guidelines for social media intermediaries, provisions regarding removal of unlawful information, as well as ethics codes for online news, over-the-top (OTT) platforms and digital media. This can be called a good beginning.
Public opinion and public pressure often seen as the key instruments of power. These cannot be allowed to be handled irresponsibly. Shaping the narratives, promoting porn and illegal trade, branding protest models, influencing election results and facilitating non-state actors to achieve their goals – these were not the ideas with which the Internet and digital technologies made their way into our life. With a broken security system and massive privacy flaws, these technology platforms dare challenge the constitution of the world’s largest democracy. We can hope that these ethical ways will help in curbing their aspirations.
Conclusion
The three moves – Less Engagement, Disengagement and Other Ethical Ways – together can provide a framework to deal with technology dominance and there is always a possibility to explore more innovative ways.
We have 28 states and eight union territories (UT), where each State/UT (and every district of the state) has its unique potential, a vast part of which is not leveraged. From space to sky to ocean to mountains, India has a lot to explore and a lot to create. The need is to stimulate the power of imagination of our young minds and to take that to a new level. Bharat can give at least 36 New Business Models to the world, based on its unique ability and instincts. The time for investing in that direction has come!
