Nishant Shah

While we mourn the loss of connection with the moon, remembering a digital blackout closer home When the news came, I was struck with a profound sense of loss. The iced coffee on my desk wept condensed tears as social media started flooding with the news that we have lost contact. There is a complete communication blackout. The last minutes which were the most critical, are now shrouded in mystery. We are doing all we can to reach out, to ping, to find a way to get some information — any information — that tells us that things are all right. People are waiting with bated breath to see if a connection will be made. There is widespread anxiety that comes from knowing that something historic has happened but there is a complete lack of knowledge about it. At this point, all attempts at trying to get more information are proving to be futile. The devices that we have pinned our optimism to — seldom remembering that hardware fails — and the streams of communication that have become our digital Continue Reading …

Social media turns everything into a crisis, and a crisis into a spectacle. When it comes to social media, everybody loves a good crisis. It allows us to vent, it stages encounters between polarised viewpoints, it spawns smug hashtags that give voice to our disengaged participation, it makes for hours of dramatic witnessing of trolling, counter-trolling, post-trolling, and other juvenilia that make up the zeitgeist of the social web, and it even produces memes and survivor stories of that famous fight of that night, when we all called each other fascists. The fascinating part of this now-familiar trope is that almost any crisis immediately evolves into this pattern. Be it a fight between two teenagers, or a political conflict, the structure of how a crisis unfolds is exactly the same. No matter what the scope and the scale of the problem at hand — Bollywood celebrities making vacuous remarks about patriotism, elected leaders detained as political prisoners reflecting on the state of things — on social media they find an equal footing, vying for screen-time in the crowded and saturated Continue Reading …

Cyberbullying is the dangerous new normal. I found myself in three very different contexts these last couple of weeks, bound together by a normalising of cyberbullying. The first was a conversation with a professor, who had punished a group of students in her class for disruptive behaviour involving their cellphones. As a form of retaliation, they photoshopped her face in a set of pornographic and explicitly profane images and made her into a meme. In the course of a week, many others piled on to this viral phenomenon, and the professor was now suddenly finding her private information, and her face being shared and commented on in ways that she could not control or process. When the four students responsible for the first meme were identified and questioned, their first reaction was that they couldn’t understand what the problem was. “This is what everybody does these days,” was their first collective response. While they were punished and made to recognise their crime, the images of this professor are here to stay on multiple social media sites, with more people sharing Continue Reading …

Facebook’s Libra is designed to take control of our digital lives. In the early days, when we were still discussing the possible implications of building a data-surveillance system like Aadhaar in India, one of the persistent narratives was that in return, Aadhaar will build the infrastructure that gives legal and financial identity to the homeless, underserved, and the unbanked populations of the country. I remember how, at one consultation, Nandan Nilekani had jokingly mentioned that the single entry login framework of Aadhaar is easy to understand as the “Facebook of government services”. There were actual rumours that Aadhaar was seeking to collaborate with Facebook to see if we could log in to the public delivery systems using Facebook’s technical infrastructure. The probable Aadhaar-Facebook collaboration never happened, but the other idea of Aadhaar enabling mobile payment, financial inclusion through digital outreach, and the possibility of leapfrogging an entire demography into digital transactions, has a different take. Aadhaar did not necessarily build a public infrastructure for banking. However, in establishing a unique identity, it did pave the way for the notorious demonetisation that pushed Continue Reading …

Concerns about privacy, aimed solely at users, are better directed at owners of digital infrastructure.  want to write about our data, your security, and the ever-burning question of privacy and its discontent on the social web, all triggered by the viral FaceApp challenge. Timelines have been flooded by people using this free app to see what an AI thinks they will look like 20 years from now. And they haven’t stopped at just themselves. Their friends, their families, their pets, their favourite celebrities, and stars have all been morphed by this “free” Russian-made app, which takes data, overrides all consent, and shows your future old-face. However, I know that by the time this column reaches you, you will not only have moved on from the viral seduction of FaceApp, but will also have been admonished by every critic, activist, advocate, and woke friend on Facebook, for trading your privacy and personal data to join the mass-sheep movement that we call social apps. You are either irritated by now about people lecturing you of the risks of using apps that exploit your Continue Reading …

These are dark times. We had not anticipated this but it happened. We knew it was inevitable but when the news came in, we were taken by surprise and then shock. There were expressions of grief and anguish flooding my social media. The voice of reason, of hopeful scepticism, of cautious promises, had died. The face that has become the most memorable icon of our time was staring back at me in woeful grumpiness and meme after meme was witnessing this catastrophic event. Grumpy Cat, aka Tardar Sauce or Tard, is dead. Tard, who is possibly the most recognised shorthand for “I am not pleased”, with his deadpan eyes, down-turned lips, and a judgmental sneer, passed away in the arms of her owner at the age of seven. The world is never going to be the same. Tard was an internet phenomenon. Second, perhaps, only to Hello Kitty (who is not a cat at all!), Tard was one of the first “petfluencers” who launched a million-dollar business in memetic merchandising and even got her wax replica in Madame Tussauds. Tard’s Continue Reading …

If there is one thing that has been building more suspense and drama than our politicians this election season, it is the microblogging site TikTok. From complete ignominy to viral popularity, and then the dramatic ban by a high court to its resurgence offering Rs 1,00,000 daily reward prizes, #ReturnofTikTok has been trending with great enthusiasm and being embraced by the populace, who obviously think that 15-second videos are the pinnacle of human cultural production and expression. But, my friends, followers, TikTokers, I come here not to bury TikTok, but to praise it. At first glance, TikTok appears to be just a miniaturised version of the popular social media platforms we know — YouTube, Vine, Snapchat — and merely one more step in figuring out how granular we can make our appified attention. With each video post that can only last 15 seconds, TikTok is often heralded as naturalising the new unit of attention in an informationally saturated environment. Many have looked at it as competition to the grandfathers of social media apps, like Facebook and Instagram, and there is much speculation Continue Reading …

By Nishant Shah If we think of trust as a physical concept, it becomes immediately apparent that it has intensive and extensive qualities. On the one hand, the feeling of trust – its perception, its experience, its affect, and its emotion – is subjective, customized, and personal. It is subject to both temporal decay and contextual collapse. The sheer ineffability of trust and the surety that it might be broken when least expected from actions and sources unpredictable, makes it an intensive and an intense experience. It requires a continued negotiation, interrogation, and suspicion. Among friends, or other similar interpersonal relationships, the covenant of trust comes with the promise of betrayal. There is no doubt that things/people/ideas we trust, will eventually, even if willy-nilly, lapse and let us down, thus resulting into a constant surplus and deficit of trust. It is precisely because of this contingent and ephemeral quality of trust as an intensive property – that there has been so much attention paid to its extensive measures. Trust needs to be designed, enumerated, quantified, measured, delineated, fixed, and produced Continue Reading …

Your digital age can easily be measured by one simple concept: the influencer. In descending order of age, there are people who have no idea what it means, those who roll their eyes at the word, those who have friends who are influencers, those who are, or think of themselves as, influencers. Despite studying and following (and sheepishly trying to imitate) influencers on social media, I still find it difficult to explain lucidly who exactly an influencer is, and what it is that she does. An influencer is a person who has many followers on social media and they influence the behaviour of these followers. They are not celebrities who influence others, but they are celebrities because they can influence others. They are not famous like traditional stars, but they are stars because so many people listen to them. They are famous for being famous, but, more importantly, they are famous as themselves — as authentic, genuine, real people who you like, and, hence, listen to. So great is the influencer phenomenon that celebrities are now adopting the genre. The Continue Reading …