Farrukh Khan Pitafi’s Official Website

Breathing space | February 28, 2008

The internet that we use today is nothing new. Decades ago the Yanks had it in their military operations under the name of ‘Arpanet’. The idea was that since during the Cold War an attack could take out the data centres causing all information to fail in an instant, it was wise to decentralise the information base by introducing a peer to peer network ensuring that if one peer was taken out, enough databases would survive to the restore the back up. That was, however, the military use. The situation at the scholarly or the public level was, however, quite different.
Carl Sagan’s novel, Contact, written in 1985 highlights this issue at an intellectual level quite clearly. The absence of any data network between universities and scholars is what he vociferously complains about. When I recall having read the novel in late 80s for the first time, I recollect too that perhaps owing to my young age I had misconstrued Sagan’s farsightedness as a scientist’s wishful daydreaming. Could this faint imitation of human intelligence connect us to other human beings and organisations in such an awesome way? Well, I was indeed proven wrong for the technology has progressed really fast and today instead of imagining things we are fiercely debating the digital democracy and the improvement in the bandwidth rate. Since science fictions have come under discussion, let me also mention a fabulous short story by Isaac Asimov titled The Last Question. In this story, evolving generations of super computers are asked one question by evolving generations of human beings: can the entropy, or energy’s conversion into unusable forms, be reversible? Computers keep telling the questioners that they need more data to figure it out. Naturally the question is asked repeatedly because the world is gradually wearing out its energy base and stars are dying. Then comes a time when the computer has evolved to such a level that it does not need any hardware to survive and exists in a hyperspace. The last voice of man in a dying universe puts the same question to the computer that surrounds him and is everywhere. In return comes the same reply. Humanity finally perishes and entropy forces the world to collapse. Meanwhile, the computer keeps working out the solution and at last solves the problem. Its first command then is: ‘let there be light’.
While the futurists have always written fairly interesting things about technology (my personal favourite being Alvin Toffler’s The Future Shock, which I had read during my teens), there is one book that takes the cake. Tony Schwartz in 1983 wrote a book called Media: the Second God. The idea should have sounded a bit diabolic at that time, but surely no offence to organised faith was intended. All the author did was to point to the direction where Asimov has in the past. The influence of the media, especially in recent years of internet, on our lives is enormous.
At a time when this communication capacity is burgeoning cancerously, the establishment in Pakistan has not quite emerged out of the denial stage. I do not imply that it pretends that the technology does not exist at all. Far from it. What we are repeatedly shown, however, is that our access to the internet is at the government’s mercy. That might be true to quite an extent, especially because the war on terror has momentarily revived the stature of the nation states and those who cooperate in the war have acquired clout and means to fight the growth of technology. However, it cannot be denied that in the longer run the nation states cannot stand in the way of the democratising and globalising impact of technology. While you cannot call media a second god, you can certainly call it a super, albeit anarchist state.
During the recent emergency rule when channels were forcibly closed even in the foreign lands owing to the Musharraf regime’s influence, the channels that had to rely on their websites to convey their message also complained that their websites were continuously being attacked by nefarious activities aimed at crashing their servers. One such example is the Denial of Service (DoS) technique where artificial clicks are generated with such a speed that the server goes in a limbo and then crashes. I would have believed this to be a mere conspiracy theory had my own website (www.pitafi.com/weblog) not faced a similar ordeal. Fortunately since my server is located outside the country and is properly fire-walled, it did not crash. Yet the advertising services like Google’s Adsense had to withdraw owing to the malicious activity.
It is funny how technology and influence can be employed by an embattled authoritarian regime to wreak havoc. If the media clampdown was evident in recent months, what we witnessed this Sunday was certainly beyond our imagination. A failing regime usually blames everything on its critics and redoubles its efforts to avenge. The government of Pakistan, which only until fairly recently believed in an eerie concept called ‘enlightened moderation’, decided this weekend that Google’s owned YouTube that hosts and plays video clips submitted by citizens, somehow could jeopardise its national interest. While as an excuse it claimed that some anti-Islam material could trigger agitation in the country, the actual message was to the dissent in the country. Where perceptions are considered more important than reality and a ruler claims that even opinion polls can cause violence, allegations of blasphemy sound at least a bit rational excuse. What the government did to block the website will not be forgotten for years. It copied the site’s code and through softwares redirected the traffic to a fake site. This censorship, however, got copied beyond Pakistan’s own territory and caused two hour long global outage of the YouTube service. It is sad that the government triggered a chain reaction that further damaged our image abroad. Thanks to this experiment we are now considered freaks in this aspect too.
The question arises: to what extent the nation states, especially the authoritarian regimes, would go to fight technology? Thanks to folks like Osama bin Laden, the neo-cons and their willing accomplices, namely the authoritarian regimes, the states have got an excuse to squander more resources in feeding the war machinery rather than spending them on exploration and invention. Like the mulefa in Philip Pullman’s world, internet was not supposed to have a spine. Yet the war on terror, the intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) and the non-state actors have temporarily developed a central polarising system that is affecting the digital democracy and better future for all of us. Likewise, the cost of technology is another impediment. Our recent elections, the coming elections in the US and elsewhere may play a critical role in improving our chances for digital democracy. We need statesmen of Al Gore’s calibre to solve our future problems and fight the negative impact of the establishment.

Posted by farrukh at 15:14:24

Posted on March 3rd, 2008 under Old Posts •  Print This Post •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback