a.nihil

What does the word terrorist even mean? Since the U.S.'s War of Terror starting from 9/11, it has become a catchall term for the all-evil, nefarious non-human that's out for the blood of the people but no uniform description exists of this person, except of the vague fear they're supposed to create. When a criminal's to be killed there has to be prosecutions and judgements but when there's terrorists to be killed there are executions and neutralization. By labeling a combatant as a terrorist, any humanity conferred to them is stripped and this dehumanized self is open for the brutalities of the savior complex, where bodies are desecrated without guilt.

This is for whole world to witness with what's happening in Gaza/West Bank/Lebanon, where Israeli forces are mowing down people under the guise of them being terrorists without any due process. These executions and calling entire groups of people as terrorists only furthers their dehumanization. There's no denial that there's violent resistance to Israel's violent expansionism but normalizing people being killed by the hundreds without giving them a name or face cheapens human life, not only in territories Israel's invading but also elsewhere on the planet.

We've been trained by the media relentlessly post 9/11 that terrorists are undesirable of our empathy and seeking glee in their extermination but it doesn't change the fact that they're a class of political criminal and are just as human as anyone else. Any form of reducing the value of humanity can and shall be used against masses of us when the time's right and nearly after a quarter of century of maligning the terrorists we need to find a way to humanely deal with the problems of violence, as hate begets more hate and giving room for dehumanization gives a broader leeway to exterminate larger groups of people.

#violence #politics

The Israeli invasions across the Middle East and the Western government and media responses to it, we in the 21st century get to witness what colonialism looks in real-time and that the colonialism of the past is not some vestige to be forgotten. The lies, the deception, the alliances and exploitation are all there for everyone to see but the existing State narratives and allegiances prevent from any kind of opposition to take the central stage in public discourse. And if England and France were the colonial powers of the past century, the United States of America have taken over as their key player, being the Imperial State to giving a blank check to their vassal states to have complete dominion over a region and its resources.

If and when there's opposition, people are promptly labelled as terrorists or any other cancelling label of their choices and if the situation goes out of hand then the arms of the police states are ready to break necks if the situation demands. What we are seeing in the current conflict now are that some lives are worth more than the others and countries aligned with the imperial power of the United States have a blank cheque to act with impunity against their enemies to further local agendas in line with broader American interests.

The fight of Palestinians in turn becomes the fight of all post-colonial states, for those who didn't witness what these power structures did in our lifetimes the livestreams of atrocities are out for everyone to see. This expansionist project would not stop on the Arab borders, as time passes and newer resources become lucrative, the arbitrary fangs of the neo-colonialism will find newer people to subjugate under its chains. It is in the interest of every person from the non-hegemonic backgrounds to resist and urge their governments to resist what the U.S. imperial ambitions bring about in the world.

In Palestine's freedom we find our own.

#America #imperialism #war

started writing this on the 23.11.2023.

The October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel and the following ploughing of Gaza by Israel have been the inevitable global headlines over the months. A lot of psyops from both sides have takes the Western world by fervor and fanaticism to both be on the side of the Israeli's and to further the Islamophobic fetish in vogue for over two decades now.

While the horrors of the October 7th attacks cannot be watered down, Israel's heavy-handed reaction by killing as many as 27,000 Palestinians, a majority of them women and children will not end in the total “elimination” of the Hamas but propel into future cycles of violence that will make look the current Hamas attack look like a pre-school Christmas party. Palestine is a young territory with a majority of the inhabitants unware of the historical connotations to their problem, instead for most their lives they only know the Israeli's as the aggressors who have shackled them without rights, water or freedom of movement, a state of siege that triggers emotional violent reactions than the measure ones of diplomacy that would commit to a peaceful solution to problem that has been in a gridlock for over a century.

The Western powers who carry the ghosts of World War II with them have unilaterally sided with Israel while glossing over the human rights violations happening in Gaza. Their narrative also fits well with the post 9-11 Islamophobia, with far-right anti.Muslim rhetoric gaining mainstream momentum in most parts of the mainland Europe and Asia. Take the case of Germany, which through its past horrors of the Holocaust is bound to respect the sanctity of Israel, but they take the devotion to far off that they actually forget the application of their rememberance culture, with “Never Again” being applied to the aftermath of the Holocaust and Holocaust alone, unaware that it was also responsible for the genocide of the Herero and Nama people in Namibia in the early part of the 20th century which it acknowledged only in 2015. But it's national discourse is heavily influenced by the Holocaust and that its only responsibility is towards the Jews (as it should rightfully should) but the learning from the Holocaust is that can happen to any group – Palestinians included.

05.09.2024

More than 40,000 Palestinian people dead, the entire Gaza Strip razed to rubble, Jewish settler violence legitimized in the West Bank and a pro-Israeli bias in the Western democracies that don't seem to tone down. Israel gets more American supplies of weapons and aid as the Gazans who've been starved, left to disease and die don't have a voice or representation anywhere in the world.

Israel, locked in an never-ending conflict wants to expand the fangs of war to neighboring Lebanon and Iran but the shooting only empty bullets for now. Looking at the map of the world there it looks obvious that America's strategic interest over Israeli supremacy is tied to its geopolitical location, within the Arab world as a non-Arab state and giving America a control over the valuable oil if it ever get more hungry.

The Israeli project against the Palestinians is an age old colonialist enterprise and though one thinks colonialism was a thing of the past century, it's interested to see it play out in the TikTok age where the violence and arrogance of power play out in the full face of the world. For now, the situation is in a gridlock and as some commentators pointed out, the only solution Israel has for the Palestinian apartheid is ethnical cleansing, which it's doing in full earnestness as we speak. But this circle of violence cannot go on forever, and what it takes is leaders who can build bridges and start anew but that's not happening anytime soon.

#Israel #Gaza #war

It's been more than a decade since the Snowden leaks about the extensive global mass surveillance spearheaded by the USA's National Security Agency (NSA) and its allies all across the world and we haven't heard anything new. The leaks back then revealed that almost all the traffic on the internet is monitored by agencies across the world and passed on to the NSA and one can only wonder the extent to which it has ballooned to now.

Back then the internet was still a nascent utility for most part across the world and now it has become ubiquitous, with a generation raised on the internet from Day 1 of their lives. Future activists, politicians, spies, military recruits, journalists and business people will all have substantial digital footprints which live-feeds directly to the NSA servers, giving granular access to the private behaviors of decision makers across political spectrum to the USA and its allies.

Given the power of this data it wouldn't be unreasonable to think that the powers wouldn't use it for their advantage for anyone toeing over the line, opening a range of possibilities from from blackmail to behavioral manipulation in order to maintain the current status-quo. What freedoms are we internet users forfeiting in exchange for using the shiny storefronts on the internet that demand evermore invasive data collection? Utilities like Whatsapp and Google that are almost impossible to live without themselves give a wealth of knowledge about our behaviors that the AI/ML trained models can easily crack. What's the state of the global surveillance apparatus now considering the leap in computing and ever scary policing methods that've become commonplace.

One thing's for sure, the promises of the early internet of boundless freedom and space for anarchy have devolved into a nightmarish Big Brotheresque scenario and we don't yet know how these powers will be used against us.

#privacy #surveillance #freedom

Social media has made the intricacies of our inner lives accessible as a never ending feed for the entire world. It's hard to be a person without having an account on one of the big platforms, where your very existence is in doubt if you're not a part of the digital roulette of hearts and shares. This information is ready for the giga-billionaires to tap about the human condition, along with state actors, advertisers and organizations with more nefarious intents, hoping to sow discontent and doubts about the very core of the modern world.

In this age of voluntary surveillance, what can the real luxury be than being invisible and yet still mattering to the world around you? Isn't that itself the definition of luxury, a good or a service that the plebs cannot have or even aspire to have. Being a ghost without the need to flaunt and yet being social is a new kind of luxury and it's out there for all of us to see. Think of the big superbillionares that barely give any interviews or own huge parts of businesses that become the bedrock of modern economy, you never hear about what they're doing or where they are and yet they influence our lives way more than a big-ticket influencer can. Or the super-secretive artists who put out high quality work without a sliver of their public lives leaving out. In a world that's evre connected being secretive becomes a commodity of its own, one that only a few can afford to possess.

Social media is a myth making engine, where we can glamorize our lives with the paparazzi snapshots of our selfie cameras but the best stories told are the ones we're forced to imagine and so becomes extreme privacy a signifier of extreme luxury.

#privacy #socialmedia

The new Ram temple in Ayodhya, consecrated by Narendra Modi and his BJP/RSS acolytes has resulted in a total national fanfare. Heralded as the first step in the creation of a New India, it conveniently buries the fact that the temple was built on the innocent blood of thousands of Muslims and Hindus across the nation from the initial Ram Janmabhoomi processions in the late 80s and 90s.

The initial conspirators have all been pushed out of the limelight with Mr. Modi taking the absolute center-stage in the media circus that has followed the inauguration, cementing his position as Hindu Hriday Samrat (“The King of Hindu Hearts”) before the 2024 National Elections. The ordinary populace of India aren't stupid to see through the designs of Mr.Modi, but his clarion call of uniting the Hindu vote has no virtually no opposition, making al other electoral issues irrelevant before the national elections. For a deeply religious country, the idea of a Hindu State can be appealing with the Muslims othered both in the international and national stage.

The long-term popularity of the Ram Temple can questioned, as the Temple itself was not a theological issue before the political appropriation of it. One might argue that in the span of history, the political converges into theological and the Temple might last a 1000 years, but that's for history to decide. But for now it's an opportunistic monument by a political ideology whose plans for relevance is in subjugation, ethno-nationalism and imposing cultural homogeneity. In this case, the Ram Janmabhoomi movements stands as a testament for everything that the foundational philosophies of the Indian nation-state were and reversing the idea of a secular democracy to a autocratic theocracy. Though India's flirtations with authoritarianism are still feeble, concocting religion with politics as have other countries in the region have done, will lead the country down the path of Pakistan than say the United States, because when you compare yourself too much to your enemies, you'll end up being just like them.

For now the Ram Temple is a fascist monument, one that will be remembered for the political change this young democracy had to go through. Whether it will be remembered beyond this decade, though the BJP wants to build a network of temples using it as a base remains to be seen. Whatever new symbolism the temple might imbue in the future, one mustn't forget what it stands for today.

#BJP #elections #RamTemple

The attention economy has taken over our lives completely. Unless one is enrolled in university or finds exceptional focus it is hard to get out of the content consumtpion loop and shift to the content creation side. After a day's work, doing the chores of adulthood and sleep there's little time to be spent learning new skills and finding the interest to develop them, while doom-scrolling bypasses this lack

The ubiquity of the attention economy makes sure that there's no premium on encouraging people to learn and the onus is put on the individuals to fight their battles with digital addiction as the corporations behind them make bank. Where does one even begin in a sea of distractions where having no phone or internet is equivalent to losing half of one's soul? Modern workplaces, relationships and bureacracy require one to be perpetually online to be on top of things, so being a Luddite and disconnecting from the world is not the solution, nor is the self-discipline, which is the equivalent of telling a coke addict to detox through song and prayer.

Unfortunately, this prevailing trend could have detrimental consequences for humanity in the long run. As more people are encouraged to consume content rather than contribute to it, and to adopt prevailing opinions rather than nurturing independent thought, society risks becoming insulated in a cocoon of global perspectives devoid of critical filtration. A populace accustomed to passive consumption might struggle to confront the unfiltered challenges of reality, impeding the cultivation of proactive and creative thinking.

How does one learn in such an environment? And to what purpose does this learning serve? One of the ways that seem promising is to use the internet as a tool to teach others, shares one's experiences and serve as a notebook of progress, refining one's own learning process while also inspiring others. Another would be to do a hard social media reset and a blanket wipe of distracting apps from every computing device and set-up a daily routine of distraction-free learning, though this method requires immense willpower and one also needs to find a greater purpose towards the goal they're learning for. Either way, the battle to regain our attention from digital corporations to individual selves requires an almost spiritual levels of patience and understanding of our thought processes, environments and the human weakness to procrastinate.

#work #internet #consumerism

Reddit's API changes have left a lot of subreddits in the dark, the long-term users in fury and have broken Google search. Elon's mood swings have reduced Twitter to a joke and the site feels like a standup comedian trying hard to make a joke but is unable to read the crowd. There's Mastodon and whatever that's happening there and the Twitter killer backed by Jack Dorsey, Blue Sky, that at the current moment is inhabited by queer sex workers and a particular shade of sad loneliness that only people on the internet can bask under. Twitter's implosion was a long expected outcome since Musk took charge last year after burning through $44 billion.

Though the fears of a billionaire controlling vast swathes of data became problematic, his purchase came with the tomfoolery last given by Trump as the President of the United States, in yet another demonstration that billionaires are not the infallible behemoths they portray themselves to be. Musk has lost face multiple times over the months making one nonsensical decision after the other and in the process losing a good chunk of his productive work force, while having an influx of Right Wingers and general advertiser exodus. With the unpopular rebranding of Twitter to X, even long-term loyal users are pissed at the changes which have come too fast without a warning.

This year has seen the biggest shift on the internet in a while, most services are becoming walled gardens with a log-in or app usage essential to have any kind of usability. The high interest rates dictated by the US Feds mean that the cheap money that propelled the internet in the past decade dried up and companies are now anxious in monetizing the users, creating silos of information that can only accessed through payment or logging in. Elsewhere, Google search has become a ghost land with advertisements and SEO fluff making a majority of search results, where one has to trawl to find relevant information. With ChatGPT and other LLM's poised to mine free user content to propel their learning models, companies are ever more cautious in letting their precious information out for free.

With a burgeoning influx of new internet users from across the world, whose primary interface to the internet is through social media, creating content for on the internet no longer means open for all but for an algorithmically selected audience, the polarization of the last decade is only set to increase. The old media juggernauts are now replaced by the new media juggernauts, run by people whose vanity is out in the open for everyone to see (the proposed Zuck vs. Musk MMA fight is the cherry on the top).

What is the way forward? One way to think to circumvent the walled gardens is to run personal websites run on one's own dime, giving a granular control on how the data can be accessed while moving away from the advertiser based model of the current internet. Here, away from the shackles from a platform (whose biggest USP is discoverability) one is free to post and maintain content without the fear of censorship or the vitriol that spreads when an idea goes against the thoughts of the mainstream. The other is to post content on social media platforms while still having backups on personal sites for interested users to navigate without privacy invading data being collected. The future of the web should be rooted in a personal ownership of one's data, one where a mega-zillionaire doesn't swoop to dig a massive X making a long history of posting irrelevant.

#twitter #web #socialmedia

The theatrics of Modi's superhero image

The Balasore train disaster showcased the Modi government's active propaganda machinery. In the preceding months, Mr. Modi and his associates inaugurated numerous Vande Bharat trains, which were presented as bullet trains for the aspiring middle class, generating significant media attention for an expensive transportation system. However, the disaster shattered the narrative of a “developed” India. Tragically, 280 individuals, primarily from the lower socioeconomic strata, lost their lives, their existence reduced to unrecognizable rubble that dominated national headlines.

Swiftly, the focus shifted from the victims of the accident to the Prime Minister and the Railways Minister springing into “action” mode. Cameras were activated, capturing a staged video-op featuring the Prime Minister, Home Minister, and the Chief of Staff of the Army, coached on the details of the accident at the site. Positioned at a long table with Mr. Modi at the forefront, seemingly photogenic, the cameras zoomed in on him as he assessed the situation. Subsequently, at the accident site, Mr. Modi, after changing attire, was observed aimlessly walking and engaging in conversations while in full view of the camera. He declined to respond to any media inquiries (not that anyone bothered to ask him questions), exposing the hollowness of his personality in stark contrast to the 280 lives lost in the background.

The entire narrative revolves around a cult of personality, relying on media amplification of the supposed abilities of this strongman leader. However, upon closer scrutiny of his countenance, the shallowness dissipates from the screen. He appears as a manufactured screen hero, devoid of substance and lacking genuine concern for the well-being of others. People who are exhausted from their daily lives or commutes are too fatigued to zoom in on the face and often fall for the rhetoric being presented. This media image lingers longer than the consequences of the actions.

This narrative strategy is also employed by Mr. Modi's Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, who wastes no time in promoting his hardworking common man image to deflect any questions regarding the lapses that his ministry may have committed in preventing the accident. Within a swift period of 51 hours, after a hollow proclamation of nationalistic slogans, the tracks were cleared and the dead were forgotten, with the media diverting their attention from the tragedy to find a new manufactured controversy where the leader appears powerful once again.

In Modi's New India the value of a human life has been reduced to less than zero. What matters is politics for perpetuating the idealogy of Hindutva power, a parasitic political manifestation of the RSS that mines people's religion to bolster statehood and identity. At this pace, the government works only for a select few with the rest let to fend themselves for their dignity and their lives.

#Modi #Hindutva #India

Freedom, the fresh air of hope that helps us go through life chained. We vote for freedom and desire for it, our yearning for money is in fact our yearning for freedom, where blue skies and endless beaches help us live life without constraint or worry. Freedom is no person or system dictating to us what we have to do, it is the ultimate human salvation to attain.

It is what we want for us and the people around us, the premise of politics is to ensure freedom for one and for all. Though in practice our experience of freedom (and the closest form of political organization associated – democracy) is enclosed in the system of organization of firms and corporations, where the dominant system is not democratic but quite the opposite: Autocratic. At work places, the system of rules are defined by a singular person (The Boss) or a group of people (The Board), who set aside for themselves the greatest part of the profit pie while treating everyone else as expendable. There is the promise of free speech and “innovation” but everyone knows that there's an invisible line that shouldn't be breached, that freedom of speech comes with its own caveats.

In such a system, how do individuals who rely on jobs, dedicating a significant portion of their waking lives to serving businesses, corporations, or institutions, foster democratic ideals? There seems to be a misguided notion that, since we live in a democracy, all our actions should be democratic. Yet, a considerable portion of our lives is spent confined to cubicles, following the directives of bosses and the whims of market forces. This is where the entire political theater of democracy unravels: our political systems enable the capitalist structure of regulated dictatorships, all the while attempting to whitewash us with the illusion of free choice.

The lines between formal and informal politics are often unrecognizable. If all acts are political (even the altruistic and mindless ones), then there is no barrier between what is expressed as formal and informal politics. Thus, what we see being represented is merely a sliver of the underbelly that props it up. While we celebrate democratic ideals and brainwash ourselves into believing that they are the end goal of political organization, the subliminal cues always point to something more sinister. Our brains, wired with a preference for super-tribalism, tend to seek a charismatic leader who will fulfill our political hopes. This trend is being revived from the US to India. Although freedoms exist on paper and on the ground, when questioned, we realize that they often come at the cost of ignorance. We are discouraged from asking too many questions both at our workplaces and our societies, and this dichotomy plays on the worldwide scale in the shape of fractious politics.

#politics #work #democracy #philosophy