It is a dystopian world out there in any case. The tiny Kiribati island-state in the central Pacific, with most of its population of 1,19,000 living on coral atolls, are leading a frenetic campaign on social media—Facebook, YouTube, the works—to avert the Final Tide. They are, quite literally, hanging on to the last sliver of their land before it disappears. For them, climate change is not some abstract theory, or some distant debate filled with ifs and buts. It is an undeniable reality of their lives, they face it every day, it is what they talk about and struggle against every day.
Nearer home, we keep seeing endless cycles of flooding in cities (Chennai, again, being the latest), wildfires and, yes, drought, without ever bothering to read patterns into them. Juxtapose them against parallel events. Lake Tuz, Turkey’s second largest lake, has entirely dried up this year. What has been cited as the reason? Climate change, aggravated by faulty agricultural practices. Declining rainfall, climatologist Christos Zerefos says, is turning Crete and the Aegean Islands in Greece into deserts. A woman struggling to breathe in the aftermath of the raging wildfires in Kootenays, in Canada’s British Columbia province, was diagnosed as a “climate change patient”—probably the first one. And surely not the last.
In this backdrop, if there was any hope of the Glasgow summit going beyond promising another set of future deadlines for zero emissions, it was broken. One of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, China, was absent. It’s too busy dreaming up war games for world dominance. Saving Planet Earth perchance sounds like a rather boring assignment for the Bossman of Beijing, so he just sent in his speech. To be sure, he has cleaned up the air around most of China’s important cities, much better than Delhi. So what if there are a few holes in the atmosphere and a bit of dangerous colonial-style exploitation in and around the melting North Pole? Not enough to drive a convergence of purpose that can pull us out of the way of a calamity that’s advancing upon us.
The islanders of Kiribati who think the stray surfer-cum-YouTuber will bring deliverance for them from the rest of the world, become part of the embankments they are desperately putting up … well, they are wrong. Please-put-off-your-air-conditioners, please-say-no-to-coal, please-save-us … those cries don’t reach too many people. In a world where suicidal games of dominance and fast bucks drive the agenda, appeals to good sense simply don’t work. Hate does! Online campaigns against climate change naysayers, against the still-criminally-violating developed world, can yield results and a following in billions only if they generate anger and hate. Nothing else works—not ‘likes’, nor those soft emojis, only the angry ones. (Yes, emojis are our new world language.) Articulated anger offers itself as the only way for the meta-narrative to be turned on its head—at least, that’s the illusory comfort it holds out. The likes of Mark Zuckerberg can make their billions and maybe a few island nations can still be saved from sinking.
Hate is capital. It can be mined endlessly from the nether regions of those online behemoths. Can people play the bully and not get bullied by those living off them? AI systems won’t detect, or detect only about 49.4% of the violent hate, misinformation and bullying that goes around. Hate is also its own form of climate change. Thank heavens India achieved Independence much before Zuckerberg’s progenitors were born! Gandhi would have sunk just like those Pacific islands. No Frances Haugen, no whistleblower would have sufficed. Godse and friends would have had far more followers back then! FB would have spent, just as it does now, only a minuscule proportion of its billions on hate detection machinery, enforcement reports, community standards and compliance, despite the huge numbers India would have supplied to it. Gandhi’s satyagraha may have been conducted on a wholly different plane, against colonisers of the mind. In both the centuries, the last one and this, the colonisers have one tactic in common: divide and rule.
And what-ifs aside, what exactly is India doing now besides endless crisis management, battling natural and human-induced disasters in one state and then the next? It’s playing footsie with the climate agenda, making the right noises, and playing footsie with Zuckerberg’s company too, getting loud on hate. Much before the whistleblowers got wind of the fact that FB internal research papers found hate sells better and more, we in India had it all figured out. Want to be a social media influencer? Or merely want a gig economy job as a troll army foot soldier? Just dip your quill into that bottle of poison ink and let it flow into the ether. In this dystopia, that’s investment.
Want evidence? Just wait for the next round of election campaigning to heat up in the plains of Uttar Pradesh or Punjab, in the hills of Uttarakhand or the coasts of Goa. Hate will be on full, unadulterated display. What about climate change? What’s that? Mamata Banerjee may again descend on Goa, trying to transplant her ‘grassroots politics’ onto a new meadow. The Yogi-Akhilesh-Priyanka show will rattle on through, past and beyond Lakhimpur Kheri. And whoever-is-the-latest-CM in the hill state will try to save himself from political landslides under him. Punjab, of course, is Punjab—an ousted Captain, a former batsman, and one who was called a 90-day wonder, besides other teams. Climate catastrophe? Let’s repeat that question: what’s that? We are too united in our ways of being hateful to bother about the real world.
Santwana Bhattacharya
Resident Editor, Karnataka, The New Indian Express