If you have ever had a computer, you know that like all material things, their components degrade and fail over time. About 10 percent of hard drives fail within the first three years, and 20 percent fail in the first four years. Netflix, with about 150 million subscribers, is the world’s second largest video streaming service, after YouTube. As of 2016, it ran a setup consisting of 36,000 drives in about 1,000 locations across the globe to deliver its service. A simplistic analysis shows that this works out to about five hard drive failures a day, and then consider that there are many other components that can break. With a setup as large as Netflix’s, failures are not exceptions, but part of the routine.

To assess the resilience of its service to constant failures in its infrastructure, Netflix developed Chaos Monkey, an application that randomly turns off virtual machines instances (computers) on which its service is running. As Netflix puts it, “The name comes from the idea of unleashing a wild monkey with a weapon in your data centre (or cloud region) to randomly shoot down instances and chew through cables — all the while we continue serving our customers without interruption.” This exercise in chaos engineering proved so successful in helping Netflix build a resilient service that they followed up the development of Chaos Monkey with other applications following the same philosophy (Chaos Gorilla and Latency Monkey), but also some performing helpful tasks (e.g., Doctor Monkey, Janitor Monkey, Security Monkey), collectively called the Simian Army.

When you attack something and it breaks, you might call it fragile. When you attack something but it does not break, you might call it resilient. But also what do you call something which when attacked not only survives, but becomes stronger and more resilient? In its quest for resilience by deliberately and constantly subjecting itself to breakages and failures, Netflix’s service made itself anti-fragile. Nassim Nichola Taleb coined the term anti-fragile in his 2014 book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.

Over the last few years, successive governments in Pakistan have been subjected to the political equivalent of chaos monkeys, i.e., opposition parties marching on Islamabad demanding anything from wanting to be seen to overthrowing the government. This recent tradition began with the PTI and PAT’s joint march, shortly before the 2013 elections. About a year later, we saw the Azadi march, the Model Town incident in Lahore, and the dharna in Islamabad from August to December 2014. In February 2016, Mumtaz Qadri, the vigilante assassin of Salmaan Taseer, was executed, which became cause for supporters of the religious far-right to march on Islamabad. Spring 2018 saw the Tahreek-i-Labbaik Ya Rasoolallah (TLYR) march on Islamabad and occupying the Faizabad intersection, and as I am writing this, the JUI-F has just left Islamabad after its march and sit-in.

Marches and sit-ins have become almost routine in Islamabad, more than ever before. Containers, used by the police to block roads and intersections, and used by the leadership of marching protesters to camp out, are now an integral part of Pakistan’s political lexicon. Law enforcement agencies, which rarely had to deal with such large marches and protests, are developing and improving their SOPs with each new experience. Police also seem less nervous and less trigger happy following the tragic Model Town incident in 2014. In some ways, we are witnessing a slow gradual evolution of our political culture. Whereas in years past even small protests would ultimately end in lathi charge, teargassing and arrests, we now see a maturing of this protest culture. Governments that come to power through the ballot box need to be more confident of their mandate, grow anti-fragile and not have their knees buckle at the slightest sign of discontent.

There is also some visible improvement on the protesters’ side. As recently as during the 2018 TLYR sit-in, people died in ambulances due to blocked traffic at Faizabad. But only a year later, in the JUI-F protest, we have seen footage of crowds parting to give way to ambulances. This last one might also have been inspired by a similar video of the Hong Kong protests making the rounds on WhatsApp. While I cannot see myself vote for the Maulana (ever!) for a litany of reasons, we ought to appreciate the peaceful manner in which his supporters have conducted themselves, relative to protesters that had descended on the capital in the past. If demonstrations of this kind become a regular feature, it ought to be welcomed, and should be taken as a welcome sign of gradual maturing of the domestic political culture.

Nevertheless, residents of Islamabad dread every announcement of marches/dharnas for the disruptions they cause. There needs to be a better way for protesters to register their message without inconveniencing residents of the capital. What can the city and government do to ensure that citizens can exercise their right to free speech while not disrupting residents’ daily lives? Most world capitals feature city squares or parks that serve as assembly points and are available for protests and celebrations. London has Trafalgar Square, Washington DC has the National Mall, cities in Europe have town squares, etc. Even among less open societies Beijing has Tiananmen square and Moscow has Red square.

Despite being a well-planned city, Islamabad has no such assembly point near the seat of government. Even moderately attended demonstrations can easily disrupt rush hour traffic flows converting a 30-40 minute commute into hours of backed up traffic. If demonstrations like the JUI-F’s are to become a regular feature, it is worth exploring if the city can develop an open area of the kind many other cities have, to provide a permanent location for sit-ins, protests, near enough to the seat of government to satisfy their desire to be seen and heard.

Islamabad has some prime real estate that is currently languishing in disuse that could be repurposed and developed into such a place, i.e., the area bounded by D-chowk and Blue Area in one direction, and the PTA headquarters and parliament lodges in the other. Now that military parades on Pakistan Day on March 23 have their dedicated parade area in I-7, there is little justification to maintaining the parade area in front of parliament as it is. It could be repurposed as a large public square, permanently open to the public, year-round for sit-ins, and protests, as long as they remain non-violent. It would do away with the hand-wringing the CDA and law enforcers have to endure every time anyone wants to vent their frustration. It could become our version of Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park.

This would introduce a new tradition that strengthens our democratic culture, serves as a release valve in a society where everyone always seems under pressure and move us towards becoming a more confident, anti-fragile state, more accommodative of multiple, opposing viewpoints.

The writer is an independent education researcher and consultant. She has a PhD in Education from Michigan State University. She can be reached at arazzaque@gmail.com