to understand politics you need to understand people (part 3)

how the times made me, concerns for the future, and if the 'neutral point-of-view' is still relevant

in part 1 of “to understand politics you need to understand people” I wrote about India-Pakistan as the original two-state solution, dispelled the myth that partition was solely a colonial decision, and weighed the desires of contending factions within India at the time.

in part 2 I stepped into the stories of Gazans and Israelis, in the hopes that I could crack open an honest glimpse into the past and the present. the question naturally arises, what did any of this achieve? was the goal to formulate a coherent opinion?

to this I would answer with a quote from my previous post does writing matter?:

hope lies in text that can accomodate and keep alive our intricacy, our complexity, and our density against the onslaught of the terrifying, sweeping simplications of fascism (Arundhati Roy).

girl, so political

why am I so much more political than my sister who went to Stanford a mere six years before me? well, first of all, I was a student during two major social movements, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. my senior year Bernie Sanders rose to prominence and Trump was elected. I lived in a co-operative living house, studied art, and sang, in a somewhat radical a capella group, songs from the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.

the politics of the far left was life around me. this is not to express any regret, I’m a socialist and I will likely never shift right of that, but I wonder to what extent I was a byproduct of the culture as opposed to co-creating with the culture.

and then you layer on social media. to me, this is the most crucial piece, because I believe my being was systematically altered (unclear how permanently) by social media. I can accept that my friends or my Stanford education changed me, but did I want to be changed by a corporation?

I was young, impassioned, and political. I didn’t know what an online echo chamber was, and I didn’t fully understand algorithmic curation (despite being at Stanford!). so in some respects I was more vulnerable than young people today because I didn’t have the language to describe what was happening to me. just as my generation didn’t have language to describe many toxicities in society (e.g. racism, sexism, ableism) we didn’t know how to describe the social phenomenon that was social media (and perhaps this is why I feel a feverish need to write. to name what is happening to me). the feed fed me and everything it fed was mostly true, so I’m not saying I was browsing conspiracy theories, but I was undoubtedly fed whatever made me most angry or desperate.

writing as a way of vigilance

as I get older I am less of the opinion that change is negligible. that individuals, families, companies, or countries don’t really change and, sooner or later, they will revert back to their “original form” (possibly their “essence”) after a “phase”. but I have seen my family transform, little by little. I have seen our country transform, little by little. and even if they evolve into a form that looks familiar, it’s not the iteration I once knew.

this realization heightens my desire for a hand in positive transformation. to be vigilant of the small ways people think, speak, and ultimately act. my desire is to play a role for the people, institutions, and countries I love so that they head in the right direction. for example, just as you watch a friend, little by little, walk down a path you are weary of, I am extremely weary of our technological future.

phones, social media, AI, and modern youth in particular. I think we need more places like the School for Poetic Computation that asks technologists, what if you were building this product for someone you love?

social media & trust in the news

from 2010-2020, while social media grew and the news industry bottomed out, I began experimenting with new forms of media creation and consumption.

in 2014 my friends and I created Verbatm, a mobile-first multimedia storytelling platform.

in 2017 I joined an AI journalism startup whose mission was to restore trust in the news, using machine learning models. the idea, product, and team was ahead of its time, but the startup was not successful, and here we are yet again awaiting another Trump presidency. has American media made any progress in preserving and protecting itself, earning back public trust, or bringing polarized people, and their respective views, closer together?

ironically this startup was called Knowhere, inspired by Thomas Nagel’s View from Nowhere, which many journalists today, like Casey Newton, argue is implausible in this age:

The problem with the view from nowhere, professor of journalism Jay Rosen explains is that it requires journalists to share less than they know — to do all the work of understanding an issue on your behalf, and then stop short of drawing a conclusion… If in doing the serious work of journalism – digging, reporting, verification, mastering a beat – you develop a view, expressing that view does not diminish your authority. It may even add to it… when writers share their point of view with audiences, including their own values and biases, they build trust more effectively than writers who default to the View from Nowhere…

in 2021 I joined a global movement for free knowledge at The Wikimedia Foundation. here I learned that democratic processes work because they are slow and they still need hierarchies and clear roles. the slowness and structure of a democractic process is its strength. this allows Wikipedia to exist as a trusted, collective, and collaborative project. one that de-commodifies human intelligence and presents it for public benefit. but AI is changing the internet and while Wikipedia has already earned public trust, for how much longer will this last?

political binaries & untangling complexity

I believe, to some extent, what I’m trying to do with this newsletter is resist the technological forces of social media which have “unleashed cacophonous, tribal, partisan, and radicalizing forces”. it is my own small way I am resisting the pressure to simplify, to fall into line, or, plainly put, to be someone I am not. this is less an avoidance of social media and more an exercise in long-form. in deepening my attention span and thoughts, in the hopes that others are encouraged to do the same.

to answer the original question of this series, what do I believe about the issue of Israel and Palestine? as impossible as it currently seems and as violent as it will likely be, I still believe two separate states are the best way forward. and this is the beauty of in-depth engagement and long-form. we may still arrive at the same conclusions, but we, as people, have changed in the process and our end-point is not where we began. besides, the process of how we arrive at our conclusions is, at the end of the day, what we are fighting for.