Challenges ahead and our response

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The global war of tariffs initiated recently by the United States is pushing us into a world of economic recession. The new age is the age of economic warfare, tariffs, recession and increasing nationalism. Given the circumstances, we must address some of the pressing problems that this new age is creating for us. Doing this would require not only some of the bold initiatives that our policymakers and rulers must undertake, but also finding the right answers to some of the relevant questions to live in this difficult age governed by digital anarchy. What are those questions?

Under the current circumstances, what is driving us apart? What is the ideal way to bring society together and rebuild it? What can we do to ensure that democracy remains compatible and survives the digital age? What can we do to ensure that voices raised by human beings have a greater chance of creating influence than voices being raised by bots?

How to fight the menace of digital anarchy? History is not only about the past but about change, rather more about change. We will suffer if we don't make efforts to adjust and adapt to the change. One big change that unleashed its immense powers in the past was the Industrial Revolution. Countries that were quick to understand and adapt benefited, developed, and exploited the revolution to the full.

Those that were slow to catch up stayed behind and struggled to become part of the modern, developed world. Now, in the digital world and the age of nationalism, if the same countries don't undertake urgent reforms, the age of economic warfare, nationalism and digital anarchy will eat into their social fiber and gradually tear it apart. History tells us how looking at the 1929 economic depression through two different lenses brought about two different outcomes.

One outcome was for Germany, and the other for the United States of America. The lenses through which Germany looked at solving the problem were totalitarianism, imperialism and militarism. Germany in 1929 was prospering as a democracy, and the unemployment rate was about 4.5%, but by 1932 it climbed to 25%.

The promises that Hitler made to his people brought about the most brutal totalitarian regime in the history of Germany. In the United States, unemployment too reached 25%, and the average income of workers fell by 40% between 1929 and 1933. But there was no Hitler, Lenin, Stalin or Mussolini who had taken over in the United States. Franklin D Roosevelt used liberal democracy as a tool to find answers to the great depression that the United States suffered.

In the industrial age, Hitler, Stalin and Mao industrially murdered millions of people to fulfil their strategic ambitions and goals. In the years they ruled, the world witnessed a proliferation of totalitarian regimes, world wars and genocides.

If the past is a precedent, we can avoid individual and collective disasters while learning from history. Many current ruling regimes in the world have their fears and are scared. In their rush to prevent damage and promote order, many ruling regimes are transforming into surveillance regimes. This is costing every person in society a right that they hold most dear — their privacy, both in the physical and the digital space.

The ruling regimes need to find answers to digital totalitarianism as that leads to digital anarchy. The way forward is not to limit the rights of the people under the garb of maintaining social order or to curb the institutions and deprive them of their freedoms and longstanding traditions.

The way forward resides in the promotion of liberal democracy. The current age is far more powerful, and the challenges it is throwing up are far more destructive. What should we do to meet these challenges?

The essence of democracy is in human speech. Censoring human speech causes public outrage. Free debate and institutional trust must share a common space. The best available space is parliament and all the other constitutional forums that must be utilised to generate free and objective debate on all the pressing problems.

There is no common sense in not holding a dialogue. All the politicians and their political parties must realise is that in the battle of hearts and minds, there is no substitute for political intimacy and holding dialogues and debates. Social disruption in the digital age is being caused by social media; and only the politicians can decide that the army of bots deployed to influence public opinion must be banned and discontinued. The public sphere needs to be cleared of computer-generated fake news. Ban bots, not ban human beings from public platforms.

The age of nationalism, sub nationalism and digitalisation is facilitating the buildup of various politicians more as each other's enemies than rivals. They must look at each other only as political rivals and utilise public spaces for free debate for the people to understand whom they have voted to power and whom they should and should not vote to power.

The old generation is tuned to employing gatekeepers to manage and control the access to information by the public in the radio, TV and newspaper age. It was possible in that age and no longer possible in this digital age. Unless we create a more inclusive democracy, our democracy will remain subjected to abuse — something that we should not plan to pass on to our next generation. There are new viewpoints, new risks, new threats and new interests. All of them must be debated and heard.

Democracy working in silos or from behind the bars is not a democracy that Pakistan deserves. Legislators are the true representatives of the public opinion. They are the true gatekeepers of the true values of our society that we need to uphold and pass on to our next generation. Allowing the manipulation of public opinion or annihilating public privacies is not something that anyone should hold dear, as that is a recipe of greater social disorder and pain.

The biggest challenge that our country faces today is creating compatibility of our democracy with the digital age. As an opinion-maker, my job is to throw open a subject for debate. Many brilliant minds can make sense of what must be done to ensure we have a peaceful, prosperous and progressive Pakistan.

If we sleep over the challenges we face, the digital age and the age of nationalism will be as unforgiving as the age of industrialisation was for those who didn't adapt and change.