Complexity in
society has increased manifold in the past few decades, not in a linear fashion nor in an organic manner, but
rather along an exponential path. This increase in complexity manifests itself in
every aspect of our lives, not least in the many jaw-dropping creations that
come out of the Silicon Valley. In things like encryption and hacking, in
simple financial transactions with things like crypto currencies and digital
transactions, in every aspect of system driven social and economic practice.
The ability to understand and manage this complexity leads us into an area that
requires a lot more attention to detail than has perhaps ever been the case. Take something as prevalent and omnipresent as Facebook or Google. How
much of your information, your online behavior or even your privacy is under
your own control is a complicated and confusing issue. Forget the ethics and
principles of it. Just understanding how meta data is used to profile and
program the population, how much one’s specific information, clicks, searches,
friend lists etc. may be tracked and used to target you for specific campaigns,
ads, news and views, is something that not everyone finds palatable much less
desirable. The inevitability of these technologies permeating your life if you
wish to stay in league with the world is obvious to most people. And this is
before we even get to things like Artificial Intelligence and other tantalizing
new fruits of technology. Information technology itself is just one of many
aspects of complexity in our world now. That people in general, but more so
people on the conservative right should balk at this and find a freewheeling, fallible candidate, simpler
and more understandable and therefore more appealing is not a surprise. That
you can get the class bully to show the middle finger to the goody two shoes math viz has its
appeal. But voting in the bully as the class president may not turn out well.
The fact is that
complexity is a fact of life. Getting Trump into the White House will not
change that. The fact that people find change threatening isn’t new, but the
speed of this change whether it be on issues pertaining to global warming, or
migration is hard for many to come to terms with. Obama and Hilary who have
embraced these changes and seem to be preparing Americans for a new and
continuously evolving world come across as part and parcel of this complexity.
Not so ‘the Donald’. He keeps it painfully simple. He wishes away the changes
and harks to the past calling for making America Great ‘again’. Which needs to
be read as make America simple again or make the world black and white again. I
find the binary left right, capitalism versus socialism based view of the world
increasingly insufficient. Such simple binaries, no matter how attractive, are
just not in keeping with the changing world. We all need to get used to that
and learn to live with a degree of complexity. Whether change becomes a
continuous phenomenon or settles down after a period of rupture, it will
inevitably become commonplace and the human mind will adapt or evolve to imbibe
it and use it. Just not yet, it seems.
Simple brick walls
on boundaries just won’t suffice. They may seem like the complete no nonsense
solution to people, but they are the equivalent of applying Band-aid to a
cancer patient. Maybe there is some placebo effect, but really, you need to get
into the cellular structure and bio chemical treatment to fight that level of
problem. Getting someone who understands the need for grappling with the
complicated issues and of taking on intellectually rigorous pursuits is a critically
important first step to attacking today’s ills fast. Needless to say Mr. Trump’s
bombast carries neither the sledgehammer nor the scalpel to these issues. If
there was a real meaningful leader from the right that brought the sledge
hammer, one could at least argue about the two approaches. Here there is a
nothing person with an ever changing view on every issue. Mr. Trump is simply creating
confusion, preying on the base fears and bugbears of honest to god people. Take
the ban on Muslims from entering the US for example. Trump has constantly
changed his position on that most visceral of issues. First he changed his
argument to allowing exceptions to the ban for people like London’s Muslim
mayor and rich Arabs and so on and now he has gone from that to saying that
Muslims from some troubled countries will be temporarily banned. That is a
nothing statement. He started with stoking the worst fears of people and
seemingly suggesting a strong ‘clean’ solution to their problems even though it
was full of holes and flaws from the start. His new position is no way even
close to what drew some of his supporters to him in the beginning.
Firewalls,
hacking, fiber optics, cryptography etc. aren’t things people feel comfortable
with. Increased information flow means people are more aware of the existence
of the complex inner structure of their computers and their digital lives, they
just don’t understand how it all works and it makes them nervous. Donald
Trump’s solutions and diagnosis of these issues is a convenient simplification and at times denial. Unfortunately for him, it’s just not sufficient.
The other aspect
that begs thinking is that perhaps no future election will
be free from the kind of scandals this 2016 election has been plagued with. All
the information, candidates’ work and lives in digital format will end
up spilling out or being dug out. Perhaps all future candidates will have their
private chats and emails brought out and discussed and made issues of. Maybe Artificial
Intelligence will develop enough to add further dimensions to analyzing
candidates, their personalities and agendas. The simple fact is there is no
running away from these developments and this last ditch effort to pour cold water in the
form of Donald Trump onto the system just won’t work. Its the equivalent of smashing your computer in frustration when you don't understand computing. All that happens is you end up with a broken machine, while the data, systems, and all these complex issues remain on the network or on remote servers across the world. Adapting to this
complexity, the way Obama has attempted to do, by pivoting away in the
direction of the future rather than trying to turn the clock back, is surely
the right approach to pursue. Little
surprise therefore that most people who deal with complexity and are good at
leveraging it, like the Silicon Valley mentioned at the start are almost all
supporting Hilary and the democratic ticket with a few rare exceptions.
The haze of
innuendo surrounding Hilary after her longstanding record as a public servant and the 'Teflon quality' as some have called it, to Trump’s base despite his many follies reflects this divergent
approach to the networked world. One where you get into the detailed nuances
and learn how to deal with complicated systems and look a bit messy and the other where you attack
the medium and try to negate and ignore it. The latter just cannot work.
There is another
big complication in this election, which has been
exacerbated by the communication deficit from the Obama administration during
the last 4 years. Unlike in the cold war, where there was an obvious outside
enemy to rally the people against, in this election, the complexity of a more
globalised society and a narrative that requires a leader to not rally against any
part of the world, but towards a networked future, makes it harder to appeal to
the right leaning centrists and near impossible to reach out to the far right.
We might even be approaching a point where the left versus right frame of
reference itself may be incomplete to deal with the emergent reality. When
robust and long standing principles like nationalism themselves are reaching a
degree of complexity due to network effects, transient capital & labour
markets and migration, a lot of the old terms need redefinition and I believe
we are just seeing the beginning of that process with this election. This
election is a precursor to a new generation of politics where a completely
different lexicon will emerge in the political discourse. I hope Americans will
not set the clock back by a decade by voting their insecurities into power, as
they take their time to adjust to the new reality. I hope they take the
positive step towards the future by electing as it happens, America’s much
belated first Lady President on November 8th.
-Anuj Kapoor