The Tyranny of Big Tech: The Sultans of Big Data and Human Liberty

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Josh Hawley, the Senator from Missouri, has fired a powerful salvo against the Mega Tech Corporations-- Google, Twitter, Amazon and FaceBook. The book is a broadside against the erosion of human rights and freedom as a consequence of Big Data and Big Mega Tech Corporations which collect and manipulate the data. Hawley wants all these corporations to be brought under the Anti Trust Laws, as they have become monopolies and as such contravene the Anti Trust Laws passed in the early decades of the last century.  He spends nearly half the book on the Robber Barons who were the virtual industrial aristocracy of USA as it was emerging as an important economic power. He argues that if the Steel and Railroad magnates could be stripped of their monopolistic hold, it stands to reason that these later day Corporations too should be brought under the ambit of the anti trust laws.

However, these Companies do not produce anything tangible. They enjoy huge profits without production. Economics cannot explain why FaceBook is today a multi billion dollar establishment. And it produces nothing. It sells nothing. And yet its profits are huge. Since these Corporations do not produce anything tangible bringing them under the anti trust laws may for that very reason be difficult. Some US states have begun steps to curtail the power and reach of these Sultans of Big Data. But these attempts are few and lack a central focus. Hawley has identified what he thinks is a chink in the armour: the lack of competition and the virtual monopolies these tech companies have acquired in their respective domains.

All these four tech companies have one feature in common: they acquire and store huge amounts of personal data about their users. FB for instance has a user base several times bigger than the population of more than half the countries of the planet put together, And Mark Zuckerberg is quoted as saying that the Corporation is "built to accomplish a social mission". It is precisely this messianic ideology of the Mega Tech Companies that makes them suspect. Unlike political parties that carry out their mission in public, these Big Tech Corporations are shrouded in a veil of secrecy. And the alliance with "Wokeism" makes companies like Twitter engage in political brinkmanship without any concern about public good or welfare. The huge capitalization of these tech giants protects them from public scrutiny and gives them unprecedented power over the political sphere. The fact that Donald Trump was deplatformed by Twitter is not surprising. What was remarkable was that they chose to wait till the results of the controversial elections were declared. Josh Hawley himself is at the cross hairs of the Big Tech Giants fr his role in rallying opposition to the declared victor in the November 2020 Presidential Elections. Twitter is at the moment engaged in a heated battle with the Government of India over its partisan role in what is now called the "tool kit controversy" in India. It is still too early to say who will blink--Twitter or Government of India. The point here is compliance with National Law. Do States have the ability to police these digital East India Companies. 

All these Mega Tech Corporations collect Data in the form of personal data, online transactions, communications, bank details, geo locational data  surveillance data etc. While much of the data stored is probably useless, the data points provide the basis for the prediction of behavior and it is here that the political reach of Big Data comes into play. In USA where 85 % of the population has smartphones and is online 24*7, Data stored when shared with political action groups can tilt the outcome of elections. It is certainly possible that the hostility towards Dona; Trump uniformly displayed by these tech giants played an important role in the Elections. 

Hawley is a conservative and hence he sees the danger of Constitutional Rights and Liberties eroded largely as a fall out of the hunger for Big Data. With statistical Data Mining Programmes it is possible to use the aggregate data for marketing political campaigns and consumer behaviour. The Algorithms are powerful enough to seize changes in behaviour. After the January 6th 2021 Protests the FBI was given access to the Data from Banks located in the bloocks around the Capitol and all those who visited Banks for purely banking transactions were now parsons for interest for the FBI.

Josh Hawley has written an important book. I have no doubt that just as it took a few voices in the wilderness to raise the anti Slavery Movement, the anti Big Tech Movement will also gather strength. What is at stake here is the future of Humankind.

The Persistent Myth of the Aryan Invasion: New Research and Findings

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Tearing Down the Aryan Invasion Myth

Dr Shiv Sastry

Bangalore Education Research Broadcasting

April 2021.

From the Eighteenth Century, 1784 to be precise when Sir William Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal, one strand of interpretation has virtually dominated the discourse on early History of India. This line of interpretation denies the indigenous people of India Sovereignty over their land and delegitimizes efforts at reconstructing the past of India on its own terms. When William Jones postulated a common origin of Indian, particularly Sanskrit, and European languages such as Greek and Latin, he unleashed demons that are yet to be laid to rest. This is the alleged  Aryan Invasion Theory or as now modified the Aryan Migration Theory or Hypothesis. 

The book under review is an excellent introduction to the historical context in which the AIT (Aryan Invasion Theory) emerged and its ramifications over nearly two and a half centuries of debate and discussion. The recent findings from the Harappan site of Rakhighari in Haryana has clearly demonstrated that the Indian population does not have distinct European or Central Asian DNA. Genetic evidence from other important sites also support the view that the Indian population was not predominantly a population that either came as invaders or immigrants but were indigenous. It is unfortunate that even after DNA evidence has come into play, there is sustained effort to reinvigorate that AIT hypothesis. 

There are two facets to the AIT: Language and Horse. The obsession with the origins of Sanskrit language and the ideological compulsion to situate the language in either Europe or Central Asia led to philologists and experts on folklore like the famous Grimm Brothers postulate the existence of  "Indo European Languages" which explain the perceived similarity in the morphology of early languages spoken in Europe. The interesting implication of this theory is that it is not necessary  to have an Indo European homeland to explain the perceived similarity in word forms across the early European landscape, Brother, Mother and Father from a common root Brthr, Matr and Pitr can just as easily be explained as originating in India and spreading outward. The constant compulsion to decry and deny the sovereignty of the indigenous people of India has been an enduring theme in the Historiography of India. The creation of a mythical Race of Aryan by Max Mueller was a direct outcome of the common Homeland theory. As a consequence white American "scholars" like Sheldon Pollock and others can saddle India with part of the responsibility for the Holocaust perpetrated by the Germans. The Aryan Invasion Theory found some traction in India in the early twentieth century when leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak ransacked the Rg Veda and its references to stars to argue an Artic Home for the Vedas. It is now clear that the Rg Veda was composed on the banks of the Indus and the exact locale may evade researchers due to changes in the landforms and geomorphology of the Indus floodplains. Now the question of Equs/ Horse.

Another charming vignette  of the AIT is the horse riding warriors from Central Asia riding into India, defeating the native inhabitants and pushing them out of the lands they "occupied". This theory is another strong underpinning to the denial of the Sovereignty of the Indigenous people of India. And the theory has had devastating political consequences. The non existent Aryan is juxtaposed against the Dravidian which was identified with the indigenous population and the "Critical Caste Theory" comes in handy to equate existing social groups within this category. A flourishing political dynasty in Tamil Nadu thrives on this fake   equation identifying Dravidian as a binary opposite of Aryan. Unfortunately, Indian historians like Romila Thapar and other Marxists still cling to this outdated and vicious theory in an uncritical manner. The discovery of the Horse drawn chariot in a Chalcolithic site, Sinauli, in Uttar Pradesh. And the fact that the horse was domesticated in India is also attested by the discovery of true horse bones in post Neolithic sites of the Deccan like Dholavira and Navddatoli. It is higly disappointing that Yashwini Chandra in her The Tale of the Horse: The History of India on Horseback repeats this discredited myth. 

The author has covered a wide swathe of historical inquiry with almost professional precision. He rightly contests and rejects the notion that Avestan was a different language and the Mitanni Inscription found in Assyria which contains the list of Rg Vedic deities and the author rightly do not prove the Indo European origin theory.

This is a book that must be read and discussed by students of History as it is based on comprehensive research.

Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe Niall Ferguson's Analysis of the COVID 19 Pandemic

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Niall Ferguson is provocative, prolific and perspicacious. Provocative because this book taken on the now popular ideologies of "systemic racism", "global justice" and "climate change". Unlike the journalists who find easy explanations in politics and personalities, the historian necessarily has to take a more nuanced position. As he has shown, Trump was not more responsible for the COVID pandemic than Bill Clinton was for the Rwandan Genocide or the War in the Balkans. He is a prolific writer as he and his team chum out books almost at an industrial rate and get it published to catch the latest headlines. And he is perspicacious as he has shown the strong lines of continuity between the present Pandemic and those in the past starting from the earliest ones known from historical sources and he finds a pattern. Governmental interventions in disasters are vital towards finding a solution, but the middle bureaucracy  can subvert the best laid plans of Presidents and Prime Ministers.

Those who come to this book with a background in History, as I do, will find this book rather inadequate. Many of the arguments were already made several decades back by William McNeil in his Plagues and People. And Of course, Alfred J Crossby in his Columbian Exchange has traversed this territory of pathogens and their impact on History. However the book is the first serious attempt at looking at the Global History of a Pandemic that is still reaping its macabre harvest the world over. While Ferguson rightly states that China was responsible for the Pandemic he avoids the question: Did China unleash a bio logical weapon against an unsuspecting world? Given the response to the outbreak in Wuhan, this question has a great deal of salience. Why did China suppress the human to human transmission and delay the confirmation of the deadly outbreak until it had spread to nearly 67 countries. The WHO which played an effective role under Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former Prime Minister of Norway, was rendered ineffective, indeed an accomplice in shielding China from international scrutiny. Dr Tederos was quite unconcerned about the responsibilities WHO had towards the World.

Niall Ferguson has provided a tour de force through all the major Epidemics and Disasters in History and he zeroes in on the 1918-19 Global Influenza Epidemic. This Pandemic which cost nearly 40 million lives was also a Corona virus which was effectively dealt with by a combination of medical intervention and sanitation without the use of Lockdown as strategy. The US Government under President Trump went in for total lockdown which was effective in bringing down infection rates but tanked both the economy and the political future of Donald Trump. 

An interesting feature of the book is the critique of the public health policies and measures adopted b different Governments. In UK the first instinct of Neil Ferguson (not to be confused with the author of this book) advocated herd immunity. Allow the virus a free run and hope that at the end of the dance people will be immune. From this ridiculous policy the team, New and Emerging Respiratory Threats Advisory Group  (NERVTAG). jumped to an alarming and obviously unrealistic daily rate of virus transmission. Like Generals fighting the last war, epidemiologists are busy preparing for the last Great Pandemic. The course of the pandemic has defied all theories, statistical extrapolations and models deployed by experts. 

Added to the noise of the experts was the cacophony in the Popular Press. Captive of the big Corporations like Google, Amazon, Twitter and FaceBook the Press took a negative stance e towards political  leaders of Democratic countries. For example FB prevented the use of its platform for contact tracing thereby helping to spread rather than contain the Pandemic. And mega tech companies, reluctant to alienate China as its Market was huge, branded Trump's China travel ban "racist" though they knew that the disease had traveled from Wuhan, China. Niall Ferguson rightly condemns the 'morality play" quality of COVID 19 reportage as though popular political leaders were responsible for the disease. Quoting from Washington Post, the author has demonstrated that the paper consistently downplayed the threat posed by the disease and  certainly shied away from asking searching questions about the role of China. Of course this has nothing to do with the fact that Jeff Bezos is both the owner of Amazon and Washington Post. And China is a huge market. In a happy eloquent phrase which will resonate with those who cherish human freedom, Ferguson writes, "the East India Companies of the internet have plundered enough data; they have caused enough famines of truth; and plagues of the mind". 

This is a book which is topical and timed to sell as the flavor of the season is COVID.