Politics and Algorithms — Part 1 — The Global Scenario
For a long time, I had a pet project for which I had written the requirements and created some design diagrams. I used to call it the political party management system (PPMS). I never proceeded beyond my own occasional scribblings about the features and user experience.
As technology evolved from client-server to Web-based SaaS, from databases with reports to business intelligence and data mining, I kept making the changes needed to my system requirements.
Only once, in 2015, I met a young political leader in his office(his father was the CM of a state), and showed a PoC of two modules — a peer to peer video conferencing tool and a real-time intelligence gathering tool. I pitched to this gentleman that the video calling tool will allow him and his team to speak directly with cadre in remote areas and see what’s happening. The intelligence gathering tool will be the channel for public or party cadre to keep feeding info to the party, which will get displayed on a big monitor, with heat maps for most pressing issues. I am not going to say what happened next, but this political leader felt such a transparent communication channel may be good for party but could put the government under pressure.
And now we are in the age of AI and data analytics. We see social media behemoths collect peta bytes of data constantly and help shape people’s perceptions about events. We see synthetically generated videos and sound bytes.
In short, the AI algorithms and data processing power are the keys now to influence your voters. There are a number of technology companies specialising in AI-driven + real world evidence (trusted surveys of people) analytics. Almost every street and village is mapped.
At least in India, and may be across the world, I see political parties struggle to project the right messages and assess the impact on the ground. There are social media toolkit gangs comprising journalists, academics, celebrities and influencers that are used to create a negative perception about a government or a political leader. Narrative creation and manipulation has become a big industry. The narratives are mapped to the ecosystem creation and management.
At the heart of it all are the AI algorithms. Today, for the first time in human history, we are in a unique situation where the battles are being fought virtually between economic and political ideologies, and the result is impacting the real world politics — of control over resources.
Let us take a look at the competing ideologies today. In this article, we can take a global perspective. In the next article, we can review how this plays out in India.
The ideologies and ecosystems do not work in isolation. They try to coopt or collaborate with other ecosystems to amplify their message and/or bring new adherents/voters.
Broadly speaking, we have faith or religion-based ideologies — Christian Zionism, Islamism, and at least in India, Hindutva. And then we have market or economic ideologies such as free market liberalism, democratic socialism, radical socialism and communism. On top of these major ideologies, we can see territorial nationalism, ethnic nationalism as layers. Fascism is no longer in play. Though some analysts claim that nationalism and fascism are quite similar, there are some fundamental differences.
Just to make things simpler, let us define each ideology as briefly as possible.
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Christian Zionism — If Zionism is the movement to setup the political state of Israel as a Jewish state, and protect or expand its territories, Christian Zionism is the belief system among evangelical and Pentecostal denominations that support the state of Israel due to Biblical reasons. The state of Israel is seen as a pre-cursor for the Second Coming of Jesus. Hence, the support to jews and Israel.
Islamism — refers to an often heterogenous set of belief systems with the end goal of implementing Islamic state/law all over the world. In other words, a view of Islam as a political movement. All approaches ranging from democratic participation to militancy and terrorism could be found in the execution of this political philosophy.
Hindutva — refers to the fusion of multiple ideas ranging from establishing India as a Hindu state by law, to the territorial reunification of erstwhile Hindu regions of the Indian sub-continent into India (Akhand Bharat), to establishing India/Hinduism as the vishwa guru (teacher of the world) using both soft and hard power — the goal being getting India back in its ancient role as one of the poles or super powers of the world. Many people often confuse Hindutva with the European idea of ‘nationalism’, but it can be more correctly described as a civilisational dharma-based philosophy.
Note that all the above ideologies, though based upon religious scriptures, prophecies and world view, are primarily ideologies with political goals.
Free market liberalism — market economy with strong individual rights and minimal government intervention.
Democratic socialism- Essentially, a democratic political system with a socialist economy. Multi-party political system but with state control of major industries and economic activities. Private property is allowed though state can nationalise at any time. This situation mostly results in crony capitalism.
Radical socialism — Almost the same as democratic socialism, with the exception that private property is allowed only with limits and all industries are under state control. Many people think radical socialism is nothing but communism, but communism/marxism demands complete abolition of private property, no democracy and total control of the communist party over the state.
Fascism and radical socialism have much more in common than what the ‘experts’ would have us believe. However, fascism got a bad reputation due to the Italian and German governments between the two world wars, whereas socialism achieved respectability. Hitler’s Nazi party is actually called ‘The National Socialist German Workers Party’ or the ‘National Socialist Party’.
One might say democratic socialism is the most common type of system today, but the spectrum has a wide range. Countries might vouch for free market capitalism in their constitution, but implement many socialist-welfare policies and vice versa.
Today’s algorithms perform a key task. They gauge public opinion, feed into biases and prejudices, and shape perceptions through posts that go viral. ‘Facts’ are checked and double-checked, but by then, millions of people form their opinions based on digital media bombardment. It is subtle and also direct at the same time.
The major ideologies compete in this market where algorithms decide whether a particular viewpoint gains traction or gets subsumed under a more powerful viral messaging stack.
To help win in this market, ideologies join hands with each other either through a long term strategy or for short term gains. A clear collaboration is seen between the Islamist and radical socialist ideologies and ranged on the opposing side, we have the Christian Zionist-Free market liberals. New ideologies such as ‘woke’ and ‘climate change’ advocacies have cropped up under the so-called ‘progressive’ tag. These philosophies argue for inclusivity and sustainability, but in effect, bring out arguments for ‘cancel culture’ (exclusionism) and ‘trade tariffs’. It may also be the case that big business, deep state and other such multi-national ecosystems prefer a state of controlled chaos if it helps move more resources and wealth under the control of a few instead of the masses. A ‘Thanos-like’ world view about the overpopulation of humanity and the need for genetically-controlled vaccine regimes to prepare for the eventual resource scarcity, has taken shape, with multi-billionaires who made their wealth through the algorithms already planning for the nuclear winter or ‘end of work’ scenario.
In a scenario where the best users of the power of algorithms stand the greatest chance of political success, what is the optimal way to keep guardrails around these algorithms?
Is it even possible because humanity may have already reached the point of no return with the clash of civilisations?
