Smoke and mirrors

I just finished reading the recently published book ‘Smoke and Ashes’ by Amitav Ghosh. This exquisitely researched work of non-fiction by the acclaimed author delves deeply into the centuries-long impact of opium on world affairs. The opiate pitted empire against empire, enslaved millions through its addictive properties, and made British traders and the British East India Company enormously rich.

In mulling over the book’s contents, I could not but help think about the significant parallels between the opium with botanical roots that Ghosh focuses on and today’s metaphorical opium, a digital version, the one that is rooted in information technology as exemplified by social media, AI and all things internet. What is different, however, is that while the disastrous effects of the botanical opium and its synthesized versions such as heroin, morphine and fentanyl have asserted themselves over a 300-year period, principally in China and India, a mirroring of these effects with virtual opium has occurred in just 30 years, not only in China but all of South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa. Using the latest AI techniques, synthesized versions of the virtual opium such as deep fakes are now entering and corrupting the information ecosphere. The opium merchants of yesteryear have been supplanted by the digital drug dealers of Silicon Valley in today’s society.

In order to understand newspaper headlines such as “Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are eroding our ability to control our own minds” and “Thirty countries use armies of opinion shapers to manipulate democracy”, we need to look at the parallels between real opium and its digital version, by focusing on three inter-related terms – free trade, innovation and entrepreneurship – terms whose meanings have only slightly changed over the centuries.

In 19th century India, when the British East India Company controlled much of the commerce in northern India, their greatest revenue came from opium exports to China. Faced with a huge addiction problem, when China banned the importation and use of opium, the resulting loss in revenue triggered two wars between Britain and China. Militarily overwhelmed, China ended up legalizing opium, granting trade concessions and territory, and paying reparations to Britain. ‘Free trade’ had won the day.

In today’s world, the digital drug dealers from Silicon Valley generate huge profits for their cartels, ably backed by the US via cleverly crafted bilateral trade agreements among whose many clauses are express prohibitions on any curtailment of e-commerce by imposing taxes, tariffs, or resorting to internet service interruptions, and elaborate mechanisms to protect intellectual property. Since free trade involves both goods and services, the latter has had a great impact on immigration laws and the employment of migrant labour in the US. The Empire can always strike back if there are any violations.

As for innovations and entrepreneurship, consider the following. Opium is produced by drying the white sap that is extracted by crushing the flowers of the poppy plant. In British India, the crushing was done by barefooted, barely paid coolies stomping on the flowers in large vats. Over time, machines replaced the coolies and a plethora of more potent versions of the opium such as heroin, codeine, morphine, and now, fentanyl and oxycodone for ‘medicinal’ purposes has flooded the market.

In the IT field, tens of thousands of badly paid workers have been employed by contractors for Big Tech under mind-numbing work environments in Kenya, Philippines and elsewhere to view hundreds of thousands of violent and pornographic images and listen to hate speech-filled audio clips for classification and labelling purposes. These workers, whose voices were effectively stifled by the many nondisclosure and non-compete clauses signed by the contractors, have now been replaced by learning algorithms using neural networks.

Incredible as it may seem, more people in the world view social media as the ultimate go-to place for news. For example, global internet statistics show that 58% of Nigeria and 99% of Myanmar obtain all of their news from Facebook (now Meta). As one writer quoted in Ghosh’s book put it, “Addiction is an illness of exposure. By and large, those who have access to junk become addicts.”

Is there really any difference between John Bull running amok in a China opium shop in the 19th century or Mark Zuckerberg moving fast and breaking things across the globe today? I don’t think so.