Game Changer?

“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.”….. Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)

Although, I am not fan of fictions, particularly Science fictions but I couldn’t resist reading Isaac Asimov’s a few works sporadically, both out of curiosity and also because it was introduced to me by my uncle who was always an inspiration for me. In an interview (1988), Isaac Asimov had predicted that, internet will change levels of learning; Public education was a change from personal tutors for those who could afford to class based lectures, in which the students were expected to learn with an equal pace. The internet will not only allow each individual to learn with his/her own pace and timing but more importantly, it makes learning, a lifelong process. Asimov was not alone in speculating, how internet will change things as these speculations are still continued. After a decade of “worldwide” internet availability, we must be able to see some of the most evident changes and test some of the speculations. Here, I would like to link the fate of the three most popular, internet based movements.

 If eusociality have allowed humans to conquer the earth, it has also been a source of debates, conflicts and perpetual struggle between individuals and society, each side trying to increase the spheres of their influences.  By introduction of internet, this relationship disturbed as never before, as it has empowered both governments and individuals. Iranian green movement, Arab Spring, London riots and 99% movements came as a test of the levels of empowerments and to redefine relationships. Although, all these movements had the same characteristics like, absence of central leadership, no ideological basis and no clear lists of demands but the results were very different. While Iranian green movement, London riots and 99% movements could not survive, the Arab Spring evolved with mixed results. The Iranian, British, American governments were proved to have evolved with technology and were organized enough to easily deal with their respective popular movements so nothing happened. Arab governments that had not reorganized themselves collapsed in the face of popular uprising.

Aside from higher intelligence, higher culture and language, what makes humans unique from the rest of social organisms is that; all normal individuals can reproduce, make and shift alliances across all social levels and this flexibility is one of the main reasons for increasing sophistication of human individuals, society, culture and intelligence as a whole. Using imaginations to use past experiences and creating future scenarios to evaluate the consequences of their decisions is uniquely human and main cause of human’s deep interests in others and in socializations. This is why, Asimov could predict that by invention and spread of internet (socialization of computers; a human technology), individuals’ will gain a control over their learning; to learn at their own pace and timing and topic of choice.

After a decade of entering into this new level of socialization, at least one thing has become even clearer; in relationships of individuals with society and within groups, adaptability and organization are still the yin and yang of triumphs. The perceptions that internet has changed the old game of central leadership and ideologue have proved to be wrong as still, it is the central leadership and a common ideology that organize people. 

Although, I am myself, doesn't like central leadership and ideology as they both retard people in following them but, it is a fact that, the bigger and more efficient an organization is, the easier, it controls over individuals and smaller groups and organizations. For this we even don't need to think much as Empires of the past, powers and multi-national companies of our times are all standing evidences. It may not be wrong to say that, although, human societies are unique in flexibility of social mobility but the function of society as a whole is no more different than the colonies of other eusocial organisms. 

Al-Qaeda Service Pack 2

Sometimes I question, why there are imaginary heroes like Superman, Spiderman, Batman and so on in our times? Why we can’t have real life heroes in our time? Answers immediately follow without much thinking. It is because modern men do not have set of values that they could identify themselves with and those who stand for them become their heroes. One group’s heroes are other groups’ demons. It is not that there is total lack of values but instead because the values have reduced into tools of power struggle. In modern language, it is called, “Soft Power”. Now, power is not something promising for everybody but instead, the control of few over others. Let me dare to say, it is pleasing to convince ourselves as men of conscious and conscience standing for humanistic values but the fact is that, we are mere docile laborers of Soft Power.

Anybody who has watched “Troy” that is based on the Homer’s Iliad, can’t forget the contrasting characters; Hector and Achilles who were symbols of honor and bravery versus characters of France and Agamemnon, the first one is representing lust of beauty and pleasure and second one representing lust of power, with both having a common selfish feature of putting their personal drives above everything else resulting in a lengthy war that had cost countless deaths and total destruction of the               Troy.  Horace writes it,

“All because Paris loved another’s wife,

Greeks and barbarians clashed in baneful strife”

Archaeological layers in the ruins of Troy

Here, I do not intend to tell, why Homer’s Iliad is appealing to people of all ages and still fascinates  people of modern age as it is common knowledge that human nature has not changed despite of advances that humans made. Like all times, Agamemnons still sacrifice Achilleses and Hectors for their personal drives. I remembered Troy and its characters because these days, almost every day, the news of Syrian civil war is making headlines. It is amusing to see the Cold War Scenario is back and the rivalry is played around the character of President Assad. To a layman like me, President Assad is presented as France who is destroying the Troy (Syria) for his personal drive. If it was ancient Greek times, where the only narrative available was those of victorious Greeks, spiced up with legends of dramatic events, people would celebrate Agamemnons as Heroes. However, in the age of information technology, the roles of the Saudi and Qatari Sheikhs are like Agamemnons that  do not have any values whatsoever and their only drives are their personal lusts; lusts for power and pleasure at the costs of lives and freedoms of the whole Middle Eastern people. It is just their luck that they have found niche for their lusts due to global rivalries. I don’t know, how global players expect people would get fooled, that it is just a single person’s arrogance and lust that is limiting people’s freedom. I don’t know what kind of freedoms Saudi, Qatari and Al-Qaida Sheikhs are standing for that fit perfectly with UN charters and Western countries’ values? Back in the 1980’s, the West and Arab Sheikhs made an alliance against Soviet Union that gave birth to Taliban, Al-Qaida and affiliated groups that not only attacked West but are proudly killing innocent people in South Asia, Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa.

I am just sacred and feel sorry for coming generation as the new alliance of West and Arab Sheikhs to hijack Arab Spring for creating a Cold War scenario to contain Russian and Chinese economic power (While US and Europe’s economies are in trouble) are grooming an upgraded version of Al-Qaida and Taliban that will be more lethal as they are getting equipped with much sophisticated technologies and strategies (not to forget the basket full of experiences that were gained from three decade long terrorist operations). The naïve citizen are still believing that they are standing for democracies and Human Rights in the Middle East and North Africa while ignoring the ideologies and motivations of those people who are fighting on the ground and their backers. How short are the memory of modern men that have forgotten the 9/11 attack and “war on terror” that are still taking victims on daily basis.

There is a Persian saying, “Victims of snake bites fear black and white ropes”. I don’t care if Assad stays in power or not but I do care about the militants who fought in Libya, fighting in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and are preparing the ground in Egypt. Arab Spring was promising at the beginning when youths stood for democracy but now it seems that the season has changed and the Arab Summer has started. I fear that, sand storms of the Arab Summer cross Atlantic and Indian Oceans. From what is happening, I feel that, just like our generation, the coming generation will enjoy (more) the Taliban and Al-Qaida’s upgraded version. I can just tell them, Have Fun; You will never get bored as all their shows are thrilling J

Internet Shock

Before my first visit to USA, I was introduced (First Time) to term, “Cultural Shock” and then last summer when I went back home, I heard another term, “Reverse Cultural Shock”. I guess, before both of these shocks, I had experienced another shock and I had no term to describe it. Although, I was feeling the need for a term to be able to communicate the experience but at the same time, I was thinking that, Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” is explaining the phenomenon. People like Huntington had long sensed that a “Global Village” in “Post Ideological Divide” will resurface the historical divides and the basis of so called, “Cultural Fault lines” would be historical boundaries of the cultural landscapes.

Parallel to physical world, now we have a digital world and today’s World Wide Web is no more, just a place to find information, publish information or exchange information. It has evolved into a socializing space and people have started calling it “Second Life”. With current growth rate, Facebook is expected to become the largest country of the world. If there are physical cultural fault lines then it is natural to expect that those fault lines will also find space in the digital space. Unlike the physical cultural landscape that has its own costs for the cultural activities that go beyond the means of lots of people; internet provides most of the services free of cost. If walking across cultural landscapes gives initial cultural shocks and retuning back gives initial reversal cultural shocks then it is logical to expect having both of these phenomena on internet.

Current estimate; Facebook population is 900 million people (Though, it is an old illustration but I like it because of the multi-level comparisons)

 Seeing the exchanges of debates on social networks and on comment sections of blogs and sites, on daily basis, I am realizing that, the divide is not just on “Cultural fault lines” but it is much deeper.  Subcultures, subgroups and even groups that do not fall into any category, encounter each other with the zeal of Orcs. Sometimes, these encounters are temporary on occasional events that are just good for a no purpose chatter (The street chatters are now on the pages of social networks).

In short, it is not just cultural fault lines or sub-cultural variations or even within small groups’ differences of opinions that keep the buzz of fuss going on but it is part of human nature to buzz around things necessarily or un-necessarily. So, if the “Cultural Shock” means to experience big cultural differences then it exist and show up with much details on internet and this might legitimize the term, “Internet Shock” as parallel to “Cultural Shock”.  

Edward O Wilson (Some consider him as Darwin of 20^th Century) in a recent article, “Evolution and our Inner Conflicts” argues that conflicts are pre-determined by multi-level selection. Although, I may not agree with it as a whole however, two of his paragraphs are interesting and relevant to our topic…

……….“A second diagnostic hereditary peculiarity of human behavior is the overpowering instinctual urge to belong to groups in the first place. To be kept in solitude is to be kept in pain, and put on the road to madness. A person’s membership in his group — his tribe — is a large part of his identity. It also confers upon him to some degree or other a sense of superiority. When psychologists selected teams at random from a population of volunteers to compete in simple games, members of each team soon came to think of members of other teams as less able and trustworthy, even when the participants knew they had been selected at random.”…….

What I take from this paragraph is that, if you come across a post, a comment, article and video that call you or what you recognize yourself with, as “Stupid” , it might shock you or even anger you but as it is part of human nature to see others inferior to relative to themselves so there is no escape from it. Better to accept it and learn to live with it. It is what Wilson is also recommending in its final paragraph,

…….”The eternal conflict is not God’s test of humanity. It is not a machination of Satan. It is just the way things worked out. It might be the only way in the entire universe that human-level intelligence and social organization can evolve. We will find a way eventually to live with our inborn turmoil, and perhaps find pleasure in viewing it as a primary source of our creativity.”………..

If there is a partial truth in those two paragraphs of Wilson then internet shock is a real phenomenon and it will remain no matter even if global village shrink to global home. 

I tried to keep it short but it just expanded (redundancy is another internet phenomenon :) 

Indiana Jones: The True Story PART 1/5

Horace, Men of Faith and Gates

By turn of century, war on terror began and then reduced to drone attacks, green revolution sprout in the streets of Tehran and then shrank to pages of BBC Farsi, Wikileaks sprang out of nowhere to shake the capitals of world and reduced to few interviews, Arab Spring came to change the face of Middle East and ended up changing the faces of a few old men who were already needed rest for medical reasons. Although, most of the expected BIG events proved to be ephemeral but unlike the rest of world, Pakistan is unique in that, she doesn’t rest at all. Here, a Big event is forced into dormancy just by another Bigger event. Take the examples of Gates series; Just like Bill Gates Windows series, there are upgrades of gates in matter of weeks to months, memogate, family-gate and now media-gate. Are there more gates in the pipeline? Who knows?

Like every other Pakistani, I grew up hearing time and again about the Iqbal’s “Man of the Faith” in books, in newspapers, in TV talks and songs. To see, men of faith in actual was like expecting to see the spiderman in subways. May be, as some conceive, Iqbal’s words were so dense that the very men of the faith for whom they were written, weren’t able to decipher them.  People say that, “Great men think alike” so I turn to another great lyricist like Iqbal, Horace just to not offend those who take Iqabl’s words as sacred poems. As the media report, Malik Riaz had distributed Villas to remove his anxieties. Horace says,

“Reason and sense remove anxiety,

Not villas that look out upon the sea”

And

“Try to bend things to them, not them to things.”

But, these bookish advices are of no use to hardheaded elites of Pakistan as they know well that, there are two parallel lines of logic in the world, reasoning and money. There is no one who doesn’t understand the logic of money while, there are  few people who are convinced by reasoning. So, if they had read the Horace by any chance, they must have read these lines,

“Let him show mastery over a fighting foe,

And clemency when he has brought him low”

And

“When riches fail, I praise

The safe and simple life, content with humble ways;

But then, when better, richer fortune smiles on me,
I say that only they live well and sensibly

Whose wealth in country manors glistens brilliantly”

But, wait a minute, Iqbal’s Man of faith was supposed to be like Eagle or in Horace words,

“Wise, and master of himself,

Fearing not death, or chains, or lack of wealth,

Disdaining honors, firm against desire,

Within himself well-rounded and entire,

Beyond the reach of all external pain,

Against whom even fortune strikes in vain?”

Perhaps, Iqbal had realized that his men of faith are much sharper than Eagles and are more practical than bookish wise men and that was why, he said, “Why should I ask wise men; whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought; where will be my end?”

Still, each one of the more than 180 million citizen of the country are busy worrying, Where will be their end?