Malaysiakini Information as virus

Nationalism as an ideology is inevitable, even necessary, in a world that began to be organised into nation-states a little over three centuries ago. It is a primary adhesive sentiment in an age in which nations have become the dominant global vehicle of group identity.
there seem to be two distinct nationalisms: inclusionary and exclusionary. One symbolises loyalty to a nation that is tolerant, accommodative and open to evolving cultures and mores. The other advocates a nation which must resist diversity and construct an exclusive ethno-religious identity that must be defended against any dilution the Other might bring into society.
 Petaling Jaya Utara MP Tony Pua has taken aim at Finance Minister II Johari Abdul Ghani for claiming that Malaysia cannot press charges over 1MDB without a full picture, pointing out that there were no efforts by the government to do so.Wrong Perception

One can drive a very large truck of suspect cargo through the door marked ‘patriotism’. Once the integrity of the nation is invoked and the spectre of social and communal unrest is seen as being at stake, the state buys for itself a lot of room for actions that might have otherwise seemed unpalatable. In that sense, the decision to impose some kind of regulation on social media in the aftermath of the Assam violence and the events that followed, might have passed muster on the whole, despite its problematic nature.

But instead, the government has chosen to act with staggering incompetence and transparent dishonesty, in deciding to use this discretion by trying to block  a reported 300 items that include websites and 21 twitter handles, many of which have nothing to do with Assam or what happened thereafter. As persuasively demonstrated by Shivam Vij and Sadanand Dhume among others, the list of those blocked is a bizarre one, as it includes journalists and politicians among others, and the names indicate that the Government ‘s intentions are mala fide in that there is a clear attempt to muzzle dissent as well as plain stupid given that there are some on the list who by the widest stretch of imagination, cannot be seen as a threat to anything, let alone something as lofty as the integrity of the nation.  What the state has effectively done is to confirm all anxieties that existed about its real intentions. That it has a fundamental discomfort with criticism and a deep hostility towards any attempt to ridicule its actions and that it will use any excuse it gets to launch an attack on the freedom of expression on the Internet. Besides, even if the attempt had been honest in trying to stop rumour-mongering, the actions taken were hardly likely to have the desired impact. The digital world is too agile and inventive for the lumbering machinery of the government to match up to, and would easily bypass these crude attempts at blocking the flow of information.

As the world is becoming more intricately connected, its relationship with information is changing in a fundamental way. Three unconnected events -the killing of innocent Sikhs at a Wisconsin gurdwara, the exodus of North-Easterners from many parts of India following rumours and the continuing saga of Julian Assange and Wikileaks all shed light on changing nature of our engagement with information and the new anxieties that surround its use and abuse.

In the case of the gurdwara shootings, what is striking is the power of ignorance that is determined not to know better. In a world overloaded with information, it would have taken a few milliseconds to find out a little more about Sikhism and come to the conclusion that it had nothing to do with 9/11 or any attacks on Americans. Horrific as all hate crimes are, here the horror is given an added edge by the fact that the shooter got his hate wrong by targeting people, who even by his warped standards, were unconnected with the imagined grievances he harboured in his mind. The incident suggests that no amount of information, however widely circulated and easily accessible can by itself overcome determined ignorance and pre-conceived prejudice. In a larger sense, in spite of the dramatically higher volume of information that circulates through the world today, it has made little dent on the volume of prejudice.

The sudden exodus from the North East from many Indian cities is almost entirely the result of a surfeit of information, the multiplication of motivated rumour by social media. Both the Mumbai violence and the North Eastern exodus were enabled by social media, in the former case, by way of morphed pictures and videos using footage from incidents outside Assam and in the latter by falsehoods and exaggerations. Even when the state uttered many assurances and for once politicians across parties closed ranks, the rush to leave continued unabated. The power of unsubstantiated rumour is hardly a new phenomenon; we have many instances of it in India. it occurs in almost every riot, political scandal and once in a while in the form of miracles like Ganesha drinking all over the country, but in this case the key role was played by a new technology, one that promises to free up information from being controlled by a few, enabling greater transparency.

In the third instance, we see how the truth too can be deeply contentious. The attack against Assange is unprecedented in the naked use of every instrument that is available to governments in shutting him down and locking him up. His offence is one that strikes at the heart of the anxieties of the state in having its inner mechanisms revealed. Wikileaks tells us for sure what we have otherwise suspected – that the state acts in ways vastly different from what it professes, and does so quite cynically. But the issue is not merely about showing us the true colours of most regimes; it has to do with the presumption that all information has automatic value.

By demonising all private information as a sinister form of secret, and making the truth, no matter how private or how sensitive, a public commodity, Wikileaks builds a crude model of our reality, one which ignores the need sometimes for information to be cloaked and for appearances to be maintained. Not all truth sets us free, and while the withholding of information has undoubtedly been used to create power asymmetries, not all information can carry an air of presumptive righteousness. By setting it free in its rawest form, Wikileaks shows us that truth too has limits on its value. Wikileaks makes the truth pornographic, by making it a titillating display of undifferentiated wares, a laying bare of the inner for the satisfaction of sight alone.

In an earlier era, when the transmission of information was centrally regulated, it was easier to think of it as a resource that needs to be shared more widely and made more accessible. More information was almost always better, and the battle to extract more was often a heroic one. The reason why journalism was seen through a lens of romance was because it represented the act of extricating the truth from the jaws of the powerful and the corrupt. The RTI act in India for instance has been a key instrument in enabling greater transparency and accountability of powerful and hitherto opaque institutions. But with the greater penetration of the market into media and the dramatic democratisation of information, not just in terms of being able to access but also in being able to broadcast it, the default belief in its inherent and limitless legitimacy needs to be rethought.

As media gets seen as having an axe to grind, its coverage of issues gets to be consumed with a filter in place. This creates many parallel narratives of truth, each claiming that it represents reality better. We don’t really know what happened in Assam for the news comes to us contaminated and our 0doubts about it taint it even further. And social media, which bypasses traditional channels of information, is in the name of freedom of expression, able to re-circulate rumours that speak to the deepest anxieties of those vulnerable. The valorisation of the freedom of expression is a product of its context; as information becomes less scarce, more motivated and less inhibited in its expression of human frailties, it might be time to evaluate whether we need more robust mechanisms for creating some sense of order. The value of free expression was derived in part from its scarce availability; today’s problem is the one that comes with its chaotic plenty. Not regulating this in any way may not be as a romantic an idea as it once was.

But there is an issue with social media that needs some introspection. When all readers turn broadcasters, what happens to the rights of those who are being written about? Earlier the freedom to expression was effectively outsourced to mainstream media and while it strove to represent public opinion, it did not allow the public to express itself directly, except in highly controlled ways. Getting a letter published in the Letters to the Editor space, for instance, was often a heroic struggle. Traditional media is governed, on paper, by a set of guidelines and rules that attempt to provide protection to those impacted by what they publish or broadcast and legal redress is available to those that feel aggrieved by the same. In reality, particularly in India, the act of going to court and pursuing a case of defamation is so difficult, expensive and time-consuming that the right for redress often  remains theoretical. The protection, such as it is exists, comes because news organisations have some internal guidelines about what they will or will not publish, and imperfect as they increasingly might be, at least they exist.

But when it comes to social media, even this filter is effectively absent. The question that might well lie at the heart of this debate is about the changing nature of the public and the private. Social media promotes a form of private musing that gets picked up by microphone and relayed all over the world; in its intimacy and immediacy it gives us the illusion of a private opinion expressed softly, but in its real time connectedness it makes the private extremely loud and public. We superimpose the codes of privately expressed opinion on a public platform in the name of freedom, without acknowledging that such freedom has never been available to us. In private thoughts and conversations, we are free to abuse people, make inappropriate jokes, wish them grievous harm, fantasise luridly about them and impute motives but we cannot do so in our public utterances without attracting potential consequences. Even in private conversation, we do not enjoy absolute anonymity as is often the case with social media. As the private becomes more public both wittingly and otherwise, the need to mark the boundaries and guard them zealously will grow. The real issue is here as much about the demarcation of the private, the ‘freedom from impression’, as it were,  as it is about freedom of expression. While the right to personal expression has always been an integral part of democracy, the right to a public platform with enormous reach, velocity of transmission and permanence has certainly not.

The sense that any public utterance can, in the name of freedom of expression, come without consequences is what drives a significant strand of behaviour on social media today. in theory, such consequences might exist, but we have seen very few examples of these being visited upon those that are guilty of crossing the lines that have been laid down. As last week’s column argued, in the new world of democratised and decentralised  information flows, the reflexive support for the freedom of all expression that is rooted in the assumptions of an earlier era need to be revisited. Till that happens social media will remain a space that bristles with the anarchic energy of freedom without providing adequate protection against the misuse of this freedom. This time, the government’s incompetence might have made it easy to summon up outrage and push back hard, but more subtle and insidious efforts are likely to follow. The fault line that exists between the technologies of democratisation and power structures that seek centralisation is a defining one in our times, and the battle between the two is by no means over.

 
 the message that Finance Minister II Johari Abdul Ghani  offers for 2017 is clear: those who turned corruption into a doctrine will pay a heavy price.
If you want to challenge corruption root and branch you cannot merely trim the branches periodically to appease public opinion. You have to attack the curse at the roots.
"Of course, we need the complete story in order to charge any person for a crime. However, the question is there must be a concerted effort to investigate the crime.Corruption is the mechanism through which a section of our elite has poisoned the credibility of our nation’s political and economic edifice. Governments have been either complicit or helpless as high end individuals, buoyed by the arrogance of unaccounted wealth, began to believe that they were above the law or beyond the reach of coercive instruments. 
"From what we can see happening in Malaysia at this point of time, there is no attempt at all to investigate the crimes everyone can see which have taken place in Malaysia," he said in a statement...
It may not be the Cold War redux. But a war of world views is in full swing. It isn’t communism versus capitalism; it isn’t old-style fascism versus liberalism. It is an escalating global war between rising forces of nationalist populism and the idea of liberal democracy.The Brexit vote last year approving Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union was an initial shot fired by an inward looking, England-first majority of voters. Then came the shocker of Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election. Open-minded, tolerant people gasped, wondering whether the liberal democratic world order would soon disintegrate.

Tell us, Mr Tony Pua The Bengaluru mass molestation incident is a different sort of massacre, but a massacre nevertheless. A massacre of dignity. While the Istanbul killings were universally condemned,The Bengaluru molestation was shamelessly justified, rationalised and condoned by people in positions of influence and power. Sickeningly, the narrative in India remains unchanged when it comes to women under attack. This is how it reads: They asked for it!  which law was broken ? Which crime committed? On the other hand, look at those brutes, look at the expression in their eyes as they drunkenly pounce on panic-stricken women screaming for help. If you can still justify what took place in beautiful city, you should quit your job. Trust me, Sir, had any female relative of yours been amongst the young girls being pawed that night, your sanguine, indifferent attitude would have taken a 360-degree turn. You would have moved swiftly to identify and round up the culprits. Your police would have thrashed them to pulp in custody. Charges would have been filed at record speed. But when molested/ raped/ knifed/ brutalised/abused women remain faceless, they are treated like fair game.
Prime Minister Najib Razak has reminded the people regarding crucial matters which could destroy the country including being the country's covert enemies or conspiring with the country's enemies.

The prime minister said they were the people who did not love the country and only wanted to see its destruction.

"As prime minister, the interest of the people is my primary concern. I will ensure Malaysia continues to succeed and remained peaceful while the people continue to have the opportunity to find a living in this country.

"To achieve this objective, it is important for me to remind everyone about matters which could destroy our own nation," he said in the latest entry in his blog najibrazak.com. last night.

Reminding the nation of the Lahad Datu incident, he said the country lost many patriots following the irresponsible actions of some quarters.

"We can still remember the incident in Lahad Datu where security forces personnel were sacrified because there were covert enemies. At that time, the intruders had obtained prior information on the movements of our security forces and ambushed our soldiers in a house," he said.

Recently, he said the people almost became victims due to the irresponsible actions of some acting to frustrate the country and nearly caused the loss of an investment by Saudi Arabia following the spread of slanders on the country's economy which was apparently going to go bankrupt and that it could not afford to pay the salaries of civil servants.

"This is completely not true. Thank God, after showing the actual performance of the country's economy, Saudi Arabia agreed to invest RM31 billion in Malaysia through the petroleum company Aramco," he said.

He said Malaysians would suffer losses if these irresponsible parties succeeded in their slanders.

Following the slander, Najib said the people would definitely be denied the employment opportunities of high income as well as opportunities from the supporting sectors from the Saudi Arabia investment.

At the same time, he was perplexed by a former national leader who was running down the country with news that were not true at all.

Corruption claims ‘a lie’

"According to him, Malaysia is among the 10 most corrupt countries in the world. This is certainly not true. We are actually at the 55th spot out of 176 countries in the 2016 Corruption Perception Index and there is room for improvement.

"But to lie, spread slanders and undermine one's own country, I ask where is the love of this national leader for the country?" Najib questioned.

As a leader, he considered such matters as challenges and reminders to build the nation.

"Nonetheless, we as the citizens of Malaysia should continue to find the way forward. In facing the challenges, we also witnessed the real potential of Malaysia when the people are united," he said.

"We are patriots if we conscientiously carry out duties as civil servants," he added.

He said teachers are patriots if they teach the children with dedication, parents are patriots if they ensure their children grow up as useful human beings while the people should continue to show their love for the country.

To build a nation, he said the people should stay united and the love for the nation should be continuously fostered with patriotism throughout the year and not just in the month of August.