This appeared on the 1st day of the year

There are two broad polarised views on the start of the new decade – those who believe that the new decade starts in 2020, and others who believe that it starts next year. And, they are called the cardinal and ordinal method, respectively. Both groupings have ardent supporters. And, both sets of people will give you ample evidence to tell you why they are right. Each will refuse to agree with the other, and each will say that they are experts and the other set are charlatans. While the issue of whether the decade began this year, or will begin next year might seem trivial, and the extreme disagreements in this are may seem comical, it is the pattern which most disagreements follow.

The explosion of social platforms in the last decade has seen unbridled enthusiasm for people from all walks in life, all corners of the globe, to connect based on interests, opinions, passions, and causes. And instead of being platforms that allowed for more interchange, exchange, and conversations – as was the promise – it ended up being platforms that created echo chambers and filter bubbles. And, the outcome of this is that anyone outside the filter bubble is the ‘other’- to be demonised, degraded, labelled, and termed ‘traitor’. That traitor can be traitor to the cause, the ideal, the faith, the religion, the nation. The concept of ‘other’ is an enemy embodied with all the qualities that you detest and believe is harmful to humanity as a whole; and the implicit message is that maybe the world will be a better place if they – the other – were gone.

We see it all the time in our public spaces. News anchors who label opposition to ideas as coming from the ‘tukde-tukde gang’; people who should know better labelling them as ‘urban naxals’,  calling the other side as practising “bigotry and narrow minded exclusion”, we have gotten used to terms like Nazi and Fascist, Libertard and Islmaofascist being used to describe the other view. And the litany of insults continue, till the atmosphere is so vitiated that no one wants to have a conversation with the other. And, rightly so. Would any of us want to interact with people who are questioning our very right to be who we are.; to profess in what we believe in.

And, this really is what the internet has enabled in the last decade – the ability to otherwise people and ideas, and try and impose the one view as the dominant one. It does not matter whether we are talking about Robert Pattison taking over the Batman role, or Greta Thunberg talking about the environment, or Indians talking about citizenship, the ability of the extremes to marginalise moderates on their own side, and shout out the other side, is huge. The internet that has come to be is without filters, which allows congregation of a certain kind of extreme mindset that will do everything to extinguish the other point of view. The conveniences enabled by digital platforms is overshadowed by the polarisation they have wrought on line, and their ability to spread that in the real world.

Digital giants such as Google, Facebook, and their holdings have been quiet as their platforms have gotten more polarised, possibly because they have realised that the more vehement, the more committed abusers also spend a lot of their time online, engaging with others. The algorithms that push engagement possibly recommended this as a path to greater audience numbers. And the toll of this approach has been paid by society.

If the first 10 years of this century were marked by the optimism of digital, this 10 years while building on the optimism, has also exposed us to the great wild west of the internet, where there are no rules, where people band together to keep each other secure, and where might is right. As more governments get into the act of regulation, and as the rules on hate speech and fake news become more pronounced, the technology giants are going to see their wings clipped in what they will be allowed to do to maximise engagement. While this may not root out the ‘othering’ of people, it would definitely mitigate it.