By Bhabani Shankar Nayak
The digital revolution has not only created a post-truth society based on an industry of manipulation, misinformation and deepfakes but also fundamentally transformed the global scam industry, affecting people worldwide. Criminals are using digital platforms and technologies to defraud unsuspecting individuals. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) reveals that people lost more than $1.03 trillion to various digital scams. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has described the growth of online fraud and cybercrime as a “scamdemic.”
This digital deception affects people across the globe in different ways. However, it is not only about financial loss and other illicit activities facilitated by new technologies and digital spaces. The technologically driven digital revolution has also produced a techno-traditionalist paradox, in which people use technology and digital platforms to facilitate, preserve and promote different forms of orthodoxy and reactionary thoughts and practices in the name of religion, tradition and culture.
Such a technological trend creates conditions that actively obstruct the growth of progressive ideas and the radical social, political, and economic transformation of individuals, families, societies, states, and governments.
Criminals and terrorist groups use technologically advanced encrypted messaging apps and warfare technologies, whereas religious reactionary forces are using social media and other technologies to generate hyper-realist religious symbols and avatars to attract young people into their cults. The police and security services use new technologies to monitor and domesticate citizens. Religious forces and their followers use YouTube and many other audiovisual digital platforms for praying and conducting religious ceremonies in the absence of a priest. The digital reproduction of sacred digital spaces preserves reactionary rituals in the name of religion, culture and tradition.
Eurocentric and capitalist intellectuals use ‘multiple modernity’ to advance the notion of ‘digital modernity ’, and hegemonic practices preserve all forms of orthodoxies and reactionary traditions in the name of social stability. It creates a culture of compliance concomitant with the requirements of capitalism, justified in the name of cultural, religious, and moral relativism. The so-called ‘morality’ and ‘relativism’ compliant with capitalism are fundamentally opposed to the idea of progressive social change.
Technology increases the productive power of labour but opposes the growth of technological and scientific consciousness within workers arising from their working experience. Technological innovation was supposed to promote progressive praxis; however, in the name of constant updating, innovating, and disrupting, the technology-led digital revolution reproduces and preserves reactionary culture, tradition, and religion—all of which are compatible with the ideals of patriarchy, feudalism, and capitalism.
YouTube and similar platforms have not only replaced the authority and power of priests, rabbis, imams, and other gatekeepers in performing religious, cultural, and social rituals but have also created the inevitability of digital platforms in the everyday lives of people. This is neither a democratisation of spiritual and religious practice, nor does it carry any emancipatory logic; rather, it seeks rent while facilitating religion and other reactionary practices.
Just as priests, rabbis, imams, and other religious gatekeepers domesticate the minds and hands of working people, similarly, the digital revolution domesticates working people by reproducing reactionary religious, cultural, and social practices. The science of algorithms within the digital revolution did not destroy and dismantle reactionary culture, traditions, and religions in the way that the industrial revolution managed to weaken patriarchy and other forms of reactionary cultural and social practices.
The digital and divine interventions are not working for the working people within the echo chambers of the digital revolution. It has failed to bridge the digital divide and material gap in everyday life experiences between rich and poor. The AI-led technological and digital revolutions are creating and training religious chatbots to expand theological neural networks, addressing the spiritual needs of people while seeking rent from this religious performance and interaction in the digital space.
The clickbait culture of religion and the digital revolution move together to uphold the power of the powerful, while domesticating the working people in the name of religion and morality, where ‘like’, ‘subscribe’, and ‘share’ become divine duties in the digital space.
In this way, digital deception has moved beyond the financial world and entered into the social, religious, cultural, and spiritual worlds of the majority of working people, who struggle in their everyday lives while rent-seeking digital capitalism expands at the cost of people and their spiritual and material lives.
A new digital direction, governing digital and technological innovation and grounded in science and diverse secular knowledge traditions that emphasise questioning and collective ownership over digital platforms, can offer an alternative to the rent-seeking culture of digital capitalism, which is ruining the social, economic, cultural, religious, and spiritual lives of people by promoting digital deception. Collective ownership over digital platforms and technological knowledge production can reverse the growth of the reactionary, rent-seeking digital revolution.
If AI-led technological and digital knowledge traditions or any other knowledge traditions do not question all forms of power and promote a culture of compliance, they lose their emancipatory and democratising powers and become a tool and project of ruling classes and their cronies. Therefore, it is imperative to reclaim AI-led technological, digital and other knowledge traditions to serve society, promote peace, and prosperity.
The writer teaches at the London Metropolitan University.
