Imitation Game redux: Homogenising the globe

The Digital Alarmist

While the internet has made access to consumer goods and fake news all the easier, a slow but noticeable homogenisation of ideas, values and lifestyles has also been occurring across the globe. This is especially true in India, perhaps the most diverse and cacophonous nation on earth.

Aldous Huxley’s fictional world (Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited) presupposed a society where truth is buried in too much information, narcissism is paramount, and people neither think nor read books since they are kept busy being entertained. Armed with a smartphone, we have been able to create, in just a few years, such a type of society so perfectly described by Huxley. However, today’s society is a world presaged by Sinclair Lewis in his novel Main Street, written nearly a hundred years ago, well before Huxley, electronic computers and the internet.

Here are some select excerpts from Main Street, suitably paraphrased to fit an India context.

“Anand had sought to be definite in analysing the surface ugliness of Bengaluru. He asserted that it is a matter of universal similarity; of flimsiness of construction, so that the cities resemble shanty towns; of neglect of natural advantages, so that the hills are hollowed out, the rivers shut off by highways, and the lakes lined with dumping grounds…But a city in an India which is taking pains to become altogether standardised and ‘smart’, which aspires to succeed America as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer provincial but cosmopolitan, but content in its imitative ignorance…Such a society functions admirably in the large production of cheap automobiles, cheap watches and blended-cotton shirts…to make gigantic hoardings of all that is cheap, and in the twilight talking not of originality or creativity but of the convenience of WhatsApp…

“It picks at information which will visibly procure money, political or social distinction. Its conception of a community ideal is not the lofty ideas, the aesthetic, the generosity of spirit but cheap labour for the global marketplace and rapid increase in the price of land…Nine-tenths of the Indian towns are so alike that it is the completest boredom to wander from one to another. Always, south of New Delhi, and often, east of it, there is the same pathetic government hospital, the same dirty bus station, the same Hyundai garage, the same Coffee Day or Starbucks, the same boxy concrete flats and garish malls. The malls show the same standardised, nationally advertised wares such as whitening creams and insurance schemes; the newspapers of sections two thousand miles apart have the same ‘syndicated features’; the boy in Imphal displays just such a colourful smartphone as is found on just such a boy in Chennai, both of them iterate the same slang phrases from the same sports pages, movies and TV shows whose themes have been borrowed from the US, and if one of them is in college, elite or abysmal, and the other is a barber, no one may surmise which is which.

“…If Anand were snatched from Bengaluru and instantly conveyed to a town hundreds of kilometres away, he would not realise it. He would go down apparently the same Gandhi Street (almost certainly it would be called Gandhi Street); in the same Apollo Pharmacy, he would see the same young man serving the same diet pills to the same young woman with the same Samsung phone in her palm.”

The same fate is sure to befall the rainforests of the Amazon (not the Silicon Valley one with which you are so familiar) and the tribal regions of North-East India, two of the few regions of the world left that have not yet been ‘civilised’ and dragged into the ‘Information Age’.

In a poignant essay that appeared recently in the Guardian, Nemonte Nenquimo of the Waorani tribe in the Amazon writes “…the less you know about something, the less value it has to you, and the easier it is to destroy. And by easy, I mean: guiltlessly, remorselessly, foolishly, even righteously” and “…our elders are dying from coronavirus, while you are planning your next moves to cut up our lands to stimulate an economy that has never benefited us.”

Much of this article is imitative, I must confess. I hope you are flattered.