Trump and curating our own bubbles

Over the last several years, my privilege as a member of the small community of those blessed with a public soapbox in this country, has given me an opportunity to be tested by a regular trickle of personalised abuse from those that disagree with me.

On television, and in this great newspaper, one’s privilege is protected by technology. These are both one-way media. I speak, and either you listen or you change the channel. I write, and either you read or you don’t. It is comfortable, in the most irresistible way. Social media on the other hand, is supposed to be anything but. Social media platforms like Twitter, and Facebook are, by definition, media that enable two-way communication. No matter what I say, or write, others have an opportunity to engage, to reaffirm, to challenge, and of course, to abuse.

But nobody likes to be abused. So we have mute buttons and block buttons. I use them liberally. Despite being genuinely interested in hearing views different from mine, I sometimes use technology to close the information loop off, and prevent access by people whose main contribution to my life is abuse. As it turns out, the democratising nature of new technology is that it is not all that democratising after all. On both Facebook and Twitter, the two dominant modes of social media interaction, the element of volition helps enhance and deepen separation, rather than foster any notion of togetherness, across different opinions, identities, belief systems, or politics.

Add to this the fact that Facebook has, over the last couple of years, taken away more and more of your volition and put that choice in the hands of software codes known as algorithms to determine what you like best, and new technology it turns out is as bad, or perhaps even worse, as old technology. It reinforces and fosters the echo chambers in which we hear ourselves, over and over and over again.

This is the curse of the modern closed information loop. As we are seeing in many places around the world, the closed information loops we weave around us, or our bubbles, may end up killing us all. The ecstasy and agony of closed information loop reinforced victory (for one group) and defeat (for another) has the potential to be the defining characteristic of democracy all over the world. Welcome to Trump’s America? No. Welcome to our world. What is it wearing? It is wearing Mark Zuckerberg.

A lot has already been said about the shocking nature of Trump’s victory. After having endured all kinds of invective from friends around the world for seeing Trump as a viable and credible candidate as far back as the summer of 2015, I began to trend towards the closed information loop of my own life by believing, by around mid-October, that Clinton would in fact eke out a victory. Why? Everything on my timelines, and in my WhatsApp groups, told me she would.

My closed information loop, or bubble overpowered my own powers of analysis. Like millions of others, I was wrong to have let myself be swept away by the bubble in which I live. My original conviction of Trump’s viability was based on solid instinct and analysis. My eventual relief that he would lose was based on a closed information loop. The fact that I started to think Clinton would win, with relief, tells most of the story.

We all occupy closed information loops, or our own bubbles. We curate them knowingly and unknowingly our whole lives. Our parents are the single biggest constructors of enduring closed information loops. If we are lucky, these bubbles are burst regularly, and brutally. I was very lucky. At university, I had teachers like Khaled Ahmed, and Dr Ijaz Nabi, all of whom did a demolition job on my baseline assumptions, and the superstructure of information upon which a teenager based his worldview.

Of course, my teachers were lucky. We all occupied a world back then, in which parents and teachers were the bedrocks of our unique closed information loops and bubbles. Today’s kids aren’t so lucky. The coders at Facebook that make the algorithms that determine what shows up on their timelines are more important informants of the closed information loops that our children live in than the imam at the masjid where we pray Juma. Teachers, imams, parents, aunts, grandmothers and elder siblings all over the world must now compete with videos on YouTube, more interesting people on Twitter and postings on Facebook to shape the information loop.

Regardless of which generation we are from however, as adults we have a responsibility to learn from experience. Trump’s electoral victory offers us all a chance to reflect, and perhaps deliberately burst the closed information loops in which we marinate so comfortably.

All the evidence thus far is that the Donald Trump election signals the rise of white extremism and the validation of disgruntled white men and women in America who don’t like how many gays, Jews, blacks, Hispanics and Muslims they have to deal with. At the mall. At Dunkin Donuts. And on television. Their nostalgia for a pre-Friends and pre-Eminem America has been turbo-charged by the social media phenomenon, in which we all curate personalised, self-affirming bubbles of comfort.

Both the coming together of Trump supporters and the crash landing of Trump-haters has been fuelled by this natural instinct to cultivate bubbles of social and political comfort around us. We like people who love the same things we do. And we hate things that we don’t understand. Put it all together and take away the filters and you have to wonder: aren’t we all, at some level, Donald Trump?

Big business and big politics is betting that we are. That we will curate and cultivate a likeness of ourselves around us, blocking from sight and from mind the things that are either unpleasant or too complex to deal with. In America, Democrats did this by wishing away white extremism as a fringe problem. Now their fringe is sitting in the White House. Steve Bannon’s America is, pure and simple, the fault of liberal Americans too blinded by their self indulgence to relate to, understand, or empathise with angry white people that don’t have ‘a black friend’.

Pakistanis gloating about our ‘better’ democracy had better be careful. I know this, because I am a gloater myself. Pakistanis never vote for extremists in any large numbers. Yes. This is true. And compared to the bleeding sore of hatred in India, and now in America, maybe we should gloat. But before we do, let’s ask ourselves a few questions.

How many people do we pass by on the road that don’t have as robust a love for pluralism as you and I do? (Do you?) How many Shias out there that are just sick and tired of Sunnis? And how many Barelvis that are sick and tired of Deobandis? How many times does a Pakhtun’s accent or a Sindhi’s accent bother us? And how many times do we blame our community’s failings on Punjabis or the army?

How many underprivileged Pakistanis see privilege as the province of only those that speak English? Are they wrong? How many privileged Pakistanis interact with the underprivileged? How many Daesh devotees are online, right now, in DHA Lahore, and KDA Karachi and F-6 Islamabad? How many Saad Aziz’s outside your house? And how many inside? How well curated is your bubble? And how long do you plan to keep cultivating it?

Trump’s America is everywhere. It is the place where we allow a separation between ourselves and those of a different worldview. Trump has promised a wall between Mexico and the US, but his victory was built on the 21st century walls that people everywhere put between themselves, between ourselves.

The wounded pride of well-meaning liberal Americans must not blind us to their devastating folly. We, in Pakistan, may not have elected extremists before, but past success is no guarantor against future failure. We should be afraid. And we should do our best to tear down those walls.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.