Take control!

CTRL (Hindi, 2024)

Director: Vikramaditya Motwane

A toddler looks at a portrait on the wall and automatically swipes his hand, expecting to see another picture. Every child from every crook and nook of the house burrows out the moment the WiFi router is turned off, blurting, in their weary red eyes, “The WiFi is not working!” Never mind that the house is burning!

We have become digitally addicted. Social media is closely linked to this connectivity. So gratifying has this media interaction become that people would rather communicate via their devices than in person. It simply simplifies things. One can do away with the customary curtsies and communicate when necessary and on the go.

The serotonin infusion given by likes and thumbs up has reached such alarming levels that children have been known to have bitten off the hands that fed them. Mothers have been bludgeoned by their children in tantrums.

Never in human history have people been scrutinised so minutely as in Instagram and Facebook posts. Filters and enhancement techniques have turned people into porcelain mannequins that they are not, appearing unblemished with infantile innocence.

To complicate this unstoppable monster comes deepfakes and artificial intelligence that highlight the natural stupidity of humans. Lured by fame and that one-minute spot under the spotlight, they are willing to lose all decency and privacy. What we need to realise is that it comes with a price. We become open books for devious conglomerates to own us, monetise us, commoditise us and wrap us up around their fingers.

Under the cloak of anonymity, humans, too, become emboldened to blurt out things with no filter that we would not otherwise do in person. We threaten, bully, haunt, and act like a mob would. We clamour in excitement when someone falls from grace. It becomes our next teatime or Twitter conversation. For some, the stress of this fall is too much for their simple minds to handle and find an easy exit.

This movie, a new format for an Indian film, shows the evil that new computer tech companies can and will do to spy on people and manipulate them for their own monetary gains. It is a fresh movie with a fresh face that blends well into the world of influencing and internet stars. It highlights the narcissistic nature of the current generation and how ever ready they are to pose and come out with a picture perfect at the drop of a coin.

The lesson is that we are doomed. We cannot live without digital connectivity, but at the same time, we have signed off on ourselves and our liberty to the big companies who call the shots now. They have infiltrated every fibre of our modern lives. They have become the modern-day imperialists with big gunboats and canons, too mighty for peasant natives to fight with spears and blowpipes.

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Real courage is in living!

Sajini Shinde ka Viral Video (Sajni Shinde's Viral Video, Hindi; 2023)
Written & Directed by: Mikhil Musale

People who profess that humanity is very much alive have not been trolled on social media before. Just because they are behind the cloak of anonymity, perhaps with a fictitious name or a fake account, they have the fortitude to bait users into a vicious argument with the intent of causing hurt to an intended person or parties. It is a cyberbullying. The problem is sometimes it is self-made. We put too much information on our social media; sometimes, we need to think. Not everyone out there is going to laugh with us with our goofiness. Many create mountains out of molehills. And not everyone is going to handle criticism kindly.

Pew Research Center reported in a 2022 survey that 46 % of U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 have experienced some form of cyberbullying, which may include trolling. Amongst adults, what goes online is scrutinised by others and made a big deal, and soon, netizens will deem it inappropriate. Soon, the unthinking public, with the might of numbers, like sheep, would demand punitive actions without applying rational thinking or mindfulness.

Adult behaviour outside working hours is no longer his private affair but is scrutinised with a fine-toothed comb to be judged and given exemplary punishments. Only some have the tenacity to withstand all these pressures. Before due process is complete, netizens ripe with cancel culture go full-throttle to crucify the accused. First, people exhibit their pictures to share their joy. Next, these same pictures bring them misery. How ironic.

In this movie, a teacher had her partying picture online. It was her birthday, her friends got her inebriated, and she started dancing on the bar top. Her picture was taken by someone who inadvertently made it online and went viral. The administrators of her school, parents of her students, her parents and her fiance were livid. It was out of character. The school board wants to terminate her services. Then, she goes missing after writing a suicide note online. 

Life is a challenge. It just became more complicated with connectivity. It was meant to make people more informed with information at their fingertips. Still, nobody thought it would be like this - causing anxiety, depression, risk of being manipulated by business moguls and being a pawn in geopolitical wranglings.

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Away with human interaction?

Jexi (2019)
Director: Jon Lucas, Scott Moore

There is nothing groundbreaking about this movie. It reminds me of at least two films which dealt with the same theme. In 1984 'Electric Dreams', a desktop computer, Edgar, falls in love with the protagonist's crush. After successfully wooing his beau with the help of his computer, his life turns into a living hell. His computer controls most of his home devices and goes hyperdrive to sabotage the protagonist's work and love life. In 2013 'Her', the protagonist falls in love with an Operating System, AI.

All three films show us how hooked we are to our digital devices. We avoid human interaction and feel most comfortable left to our devices. Furthermore, interaction with the same kind becomes increasingly more difficult. Even though we were told that we are social animals who thrive on human dealings, somehow, it becomes more and more an uphill battle. People demand. They want to be treated special. They demand the right not to be offended. We need to be politically correct when addressing them. The power dynamics put them in such a place that they can get away with murder. 

They say the customer is always right, so they demand their rights to be served as if the servant has no rights. There is no such thing as implied consent. It seems like everything has to be written, signed and glazed with a seal of legal approval.

As human interaction becomes increasingly laborious, many find solace in the company of sologamy and interactive digital devices. It can be switched off at will and does not leave a substantial legal bill. Maybe not. Our digital footprints stay in the cloud forever, waiting to be picked up and used against us when the time is ripe. If you do not believe me, ask Rashmi Samant, who won the Oxford Union Presidentship in 2020. She was cyberbullied and forced to resign after her past internet entries of years previously alleging racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, you name it!

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The problem of information overload!

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at Cecil Hotel (S1 E1-4; 2021)
Netflix Docu-series.

This case shows how information in the wrong hands can create a lot of unnecessary tension and can sometimes be potentially dangerous. With the ease of access to an ocean of information literally at their fingertips, everyone goes around with a halo thinking that they are better than the professionals who spent half their lifetime learning and doing the things they are trained to do.

In 2013, a 22-year-old Canadian girl, Elisa Lam, goes missing in Los Angeles (LA), where she went for a short holiday all by herself. The police were alerted when the girl failed to call home daily as promised. Three days into the investigation but the police were at a dead end. They knew she stayed in Cecil Hotel, and the hotel had a CCTV recording of her acting bizarrely as she was entering a lift. Even the sniffer dog could not locate her. All investigations revealed was that she had a personal blog on Tumblr, where she poured all her inner feeling. Her parents and sister revealed that Elisa suffered from bipolar disease.

At this stage, the police decided to release the CCTV footage to the public to obtain more about the missing person. That started an avalanche of input from internet sleuths from the world over. Many self-appointed armchair investigators and You-tubers spent many many man-hours scrutinising and dissecting the recording with a fine toothcomb coming up with many theories; some were quite outrageous. A group of them accused the hotel staff of tampering with the CCTV tape as the video flow was not smooth and the time recordings were smudged. There was the insinuation of the hotel covering up for its personnel, and police corruption was mentioned. At the time of Elisa Lam's disappearance, there was a tuberculosis outbreak among the homeless community in Skid Row in LA, where Cecil Hotel was located. Healthcare workers were doing random testing on potential victims using a kit named LAM-ELISA. This sparked a conspiracy theory that somewhat Elisa Lam was a biological weapon in a secret governmental project!

Cecil Hotel had indeed seen better times. Built during the heady times of the swinging 20s, it fell into hard times after the Great Depression and never really recovered. It drew in seedy characters and was the venue for murders, drugs, prostitution and many more. It housed vagabonds and serial killers. Against this background, that part of LA, known as Skid Row, became the USA's poorest part, probably the world. Because of its location and local housing rules, Cecil Hotel developed part of the building to house in the society's disadvantaged segment. It was the same building but with clear demarcations except for the elevators. Hence, there is a certain level of interaction of the hotel guests with the hapless long-staying renters.

Another idea floated around was that Elisa was on recreational drugs, hence, the abnormal gestures seen in the lift footage.

About 19 days after her disappearance, hotel guests complained of plumbing issues. The janitor who inspected the water tanks found Elisa's body in one of four water tanks, naked and decomposed. The police, in their press statement, in narrating the find, described how the janitor had to open the hatch to discover Elisa. (It was later corrected).

The coroners' report classified the cause of death as indeterminate awaiting toxicological findings. As the authorities dragged on with the final report, the internet sleuths became more restless. There was a lot of yoyoing between suicide and homicide. It was Youtubers from the four corners of the world who wanted to have their say. The whole scenario mirrored that of the Korean paranormal blockbuster 'Dark Water'.

Around that time, a Death Punk artiste named Morbid (aka Pablo Vergara) stayed at the hotel. As his song describes death and murders, some eerily similar to Lam's death, the social media vilified him as the possible murderer. He took it so badly that he developed suicidal thoughts and had to be institutionalised.

Elisa Lam

The coroner's office finally issued the cause of death as accidental drowning with bipolar disorder as a precipitating factor. Her psychiatric drugs levels were almost non-existent, indicating that she had not been compliant with her treatment. Elisa had had another similar a couple of years previously.

This unfortunate case shows how a simple, straight-forward tragedy with a simple explanation ends up with various other equally compelling arguments. There is no such thing as beyond reasonable doubt. The element of suspicion can be conjectured by creative minds to escape conviction. There must have been so many wrongful convictions based on compelling circumstantial evidence aided by our tunnel visions and laissez-faire attitude of people commissioned to perform specific tasks. It must be the cruel twist of fate that made the innocent pay time for crimes they did not commit. Some call it the misalignment of his stars; others call it paying dues of past karma.

Sometimes unrelated events change the course of the trial and subsequent fate of the accused. I think the shut hatch of the water tank can be explained like this. I guess the opened hatch must have been noticed by the hotel workers who frequently hung out at the roof. They must have inspected the tank and did not find anything as Elisa could have had submerged. He must have shut it thinking that it was an oversight by the plumber. How one action can change the narrative?

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Lynching in the 21st century!

Our world has become one which is ruled by mobs. We thought we had cancelled mob behaviours when we started engaging in intellectual discourses and discarded our weapons for civilised dialogues. We were made to believe so. The muffled undertones of passive-aggressiveness were always there in the background. It never really disappeared. In those days, the dominant ruling forces called it resistance, reformation or revolution. We learnt that numbers matter and recruiting the masses worked best to overthrow a seemingly impregnable and cruel regime. Most new religions came about through these ways - show the unthinking inebriated public the virtues and purpose of existence, riled their emotions to unite them against a particular cause, sometimes a self-serving one. The major Abrahamic religions began thus, creating a sense of fear, perpetually assuming that they would be besieged.

Fast forward to the present time. We thought that in modern times, with the ease of information at our disposal, we felt that we would be widespread in the depth of our knowledge and be empowered to choose what is best for us. We were never so wrong.

The law of the jungle and the Neanderthal code of ethics, if there ever was, is the law that prevails in cyberspace. The loudest, the most devious and the most insincere, wins the arguments hands down. Anyone who does not conform to the voice of the majority is mercilessly crucified. The 'voice of the majority' is not actually the plea of the most, but narratives of ringmasters of who are paid tools of their puppetmasters with vested interests. If in the medieval times, muscle power, blood and gore put the weak statehood in submission, modern-day cyber warriors do the same through cyberbullying, mass hypnotism and peddling of fake news. Oft-repeated nonsense gains credibility via mere repetition without giving opportunity for critical assessment. Anyone who even utters whispers of differing viewpoint is instantaneously shot down through cybertrooping activities, public shaming and cancel culture. Lynch mobs on social media are out for blood to sow communal hatred, assault on scientific knowledge and insult to our thinking faculty.

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A field day for the dark triad!

The Hater (Hejter, Polish; 2020)

It is not something that we do not already know. The cyberspace has become where everything is made possible; a false narrative can be oft-repeated the gospel truth. Truth can be bent to suit the flavour of the day. A non-issue can be made the next game-changer. Deepfakes can change the path of one's career or fate. Destiny is determined by the trolls and influencers.

There is a concerted effort by news spreaders to mould one's thought process in sync to the agenda of their paymasters. 

The modern world, it seems, is divided into the right conservatives who yearn for the good old times when the world was a place of milk and honey, where politicians were honest, policemen cared for the public (not look at them as perps) and outdoors were healthy. At the red corner is the leftist who basically plays devil's advocate aim for anarchy and pushes the boundary to the point of entropy. 

The leftists, outwardly seem to have the downtrodden at heart. They appear to fight for the plight of the oppressed and the minorities. They go all out to tarnish governments and civil societies just to create mayhem. They are the true wolves in sheep clothing but the internet has the ability to expose these but who is buying it? It looks like the democratisation of information does not make people wiser, but rather more confused.

The Hater shows us the modern world of the 21st century. Social media is the primary way to access people and get people's assessment of anything the 'majority' feels relevant. The problem is that the 'majority' is not the true majority, but a fake one propagated by paid trolls. They spread 'lies' (or bent truth, who knows?) of alleged fascism, Islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny or abuse all over the net. Are they opportunistic scumbags, victims of online culture that has destroyed decency or are there just to earn a living?

Tomasz, a law student who got expelled from his law school accused of plagiarism, moves around in a daze, hiding the fact even from his sponsors. His sponsors, a rich couple who delves with art pieces and moves in high society, had earlier taken a liking to him during one of their summer vacations. Tomasz realises that his guardians are putting a front when dealing with him. He proves it by leaving his mobile phone recorder on as he left their home, just to their vile sneering. 

He is living during heady times in Poland, where the society is struggling to keep its borders closed to immigration. Tomasz's sponsors' associate, a left-wing politician, is sympathetic towards immigrants.

As the movie progresses, we see Tomasz's almost psychopathic behaviour as he uses his position as a computer whiz in a PR firm to expose the hypocrisy of the leftists and make himself a hero through a series of truth-bending social media messages. 

It seems that the militant ultra-right-wing terrorists have another platform to communicate. If radiofrequency or cyberspace can be intercepted, now they can communicate freely incognito via the numerous game platforms that computer gaming can offer. Peoples' brains have all been so fried up that they cannot appreciate what is real and what is mirage anymore. We have way past passing the Turing test. And we do not know what is good and what is bad anymore.

The net has become a fertile ground for individuals with nefarious

intentions to churn out untruths and spew vile baseless accusations

under the cloak of anonymity. The globalist has set the agenda and
anyone found not conforming this narrative is cancelled off in this
new culture. Back during the pre-internet days, to break a 

functioning society it took slippery Machiavellian manoeuvres. 

In the cyberspace, psychopaths are having a field day. A single 
negative remark and the herd will follow, aided by the algorithm.

(Credit: AqS)

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A private eye to the world

Don't F**k With Cats (Netflix 3-part documentary, 2019) 
Hunting an Internet Killer

I just happened to bump into this as I was on the treadmill and I was hooked. It was not much of love at first hello, but I liked the quite convoluted storyline. It illustrates the twisted nature of human behaviour, but at the same time, there are people who, through their actions, show that humanity has not died. But life, as it is, is never straight forward.

In life, Occam's Razor states that 'entities should not be multiplied without necessity' does not solve all puzzles. Things are more complicated than they seem. Simple answers may not be the correct one. 

It is not an easy watch and is not for the faint-hearted. Few viewers could pass beyond the first 20 minutes of the show as the subject matter is unpleasant. It is based on a true story that happened between 2010 and 2012. It involved many countries, including Canada, the UK, France and Germany. But I guess when it consists of the cyberspace, these borders are arbitrary.

The documentary starts with a youtube clip that came out in 2010 of a couple of kittens which were brutally killed in broad daylight under the full view of netizen with a live recording of them being placed in a plastic wrapper and slowly vacuum sealing them! Concerned cat lover netizens, including the narrator, Deanna Thompson, a data analyst from Vegas, who goes under the screen name of Baudi Moovan, started discussing this heinous crime. Pretty soon, they started trying identifying the location as well as the maker of the clip. Everyone chipped in with their amateurish investigative skills. The need to apprehend the perpetrator became more acute as a second video appeared online. In that clip, a cat was fed to a python. 

The internet sleuths slowly browse through pictures over pictures online, scrutinised in between the images, with the help of Google Map and all, managed to pinpoint the crime to a Luka Magnotta. Now, to pinpoint who Magnotta was and his whereabouts, that was an enigma itself. It appears like he was a globetrotting celebrity. The armchair investigators also try to analyse the character. In midst through it all, to avenge the death of cats, an innocent man was wrongly accused. And he took his own life due to the humiliation!

Another problem with this type of crime is jurisdiction. Who is to investigate these crimes when nobody knows where it happened.

The issue became more problematic when the video maker made a chilling clip of a person being stabbed repeatedly with an ice-pick.

The documentary makers cleverly put in the element of doubt into the whole story. They inserted interviews taken with Magnotta's mother. She threw a spanner to the works. She told of a manipulative character named 'Manny'.

From then on, the pace picked up. Police forces from many countries became involved, and the suspect was an Interpol's 'Red List'. It all came to a dramatic end with words like paranoid schizophrenia and bizarre role-playing of movie characters thrown in. Disturbing.

With all the benefits that the internet offers in improving lives and empowering people, there is a dark side to it. It becomes a convenient playground for weirdos and the mentally deranged for their one moment of attention in the world stage and sometimes to create mischief under the cloak of anonymity.

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Sex sells

The Erotic Engine: How Pornography Has Powered Mass Communication from Gutenberg to Google (2011)
Author: Patchen Barss


Pornography has always been frowned upon as the destroyer of civilised societies. It has been put in the same decadent basket of other vices of man including cheating and gambling.

On the contrary, the idea of voyeurism goes back as far as our cavemen ancestors. They had been so fascinated with human anatomy, like excited schoolboys and toilet graffiti, that they decided to draw what they saw during the day on the wall of their dwellings. The early human civilisations were quite liberal with sexuality and nudity. Ancient sculptures of couples in various stages of undress and in acts of copulation are general knowledge. The Indian book of Kamasutra is the living proof of this. Even as late as the European Renaissance, the human body was immortalised in paintings.

Science and technology propelled the human race forward to meet various challenges. It helps Man to explore newer frontiers. Before the industrial revolution and the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press, books and illustrations were handwritten and drawn. It was expensive, and it catered for the rich, who was also coincidentally literate. The general populace could not read; hence, it did not matter what was written. The Books at that time were filled with erotica, but the learned were thought to be able to handle it.

© Roy Singh

The democratisation of printing opened this bag of worms to all. The middle class, who had their own moral standards, were ill-prepared to handle these. The Church which was the de-facto moral guardian of the masses intervened. The naked body became immoral, and its depiction against the law. Nevertheless, the interest never wanes but goes on underground. It created a new branch of a discipline called pornography to the masses but fine art to the high heeled.

The next wave of information dissemination came in the form of photography (pictures) and moving pictures (movies). Again the human body became the fascination of the makers and consumers alike. Peep shows, watching fuzzy pornographic plates became a cheap thrill. When a succession of photographs became cine, for the first time, people had the option of starring at a human body without raising the eyebrow of the other.

It was a godsend. To hide out in a dark theatre in anonymity watching ‘dirty picture’ in near lifelike visuals and audio.

Erotica continued tickling minds. The demand for it continued. It propelled advances in cinematographic techniques and optics to meet requests. Slowly explicit pictures made it to the mainstream. In the 80s, it became a norm for a Hollywood flick to have the mandatory flashing of breasts to hit it big in the box office.

Betamax - a relic of the past ©Yahoo

The video was the next thing to hit the market. Porn consumers were particularly enthralled. In the comfort of their homes with the company of a stag (or maybe mixed) party, in anonymity, they could watch all the smut they want to their heart’s content. The video was the in-thing in the 80s, creating trade wars and advances in the storage of visual data.

Computer games gave a shot in the arm towards this end. With interactive capabilities, the end user-provider barrier slowly starts to become interactive. Again and again, porn financed improvements in technology. VHS and Betamax graduated to LaserDisc and to DVD for that elusive high definition. UHF transmissions and cable TV were riding on pornography for profitability.

With time, silicon chips became a mode of the information revolution. Computer games gave users the freedom of creating their own avatars. It metamorphosed to their choice of a partner not only in the war games but something more intimate, like cybersex. From dirty talks using keyboards, it moved to joysticks and now the tip of the finger.

Next giant step in broadcasting must surely be the internet. Again, in its infancy, porn-related stuff was its best seller. It had an essential role in pushing the process of going on-line a breeze. For a seamless, uninterrupted flow of erotica, good bandwidth was needed. Poof, came protocol to this end. 


What is the meaning of all these if money cannot be collected properly? The model of consuming first and pay later is notoriously unreliable in the porn industry. As it is a shady business, its patrons, naturally act dishonestly. Hence, there needs to be a safe encrypted secure way of collecting money before consumption. This sole intention must have improved our current way of internet shopping and credit card transactions. The need for anonymity helped online privacy and data protection.

 Comfortably Numbed - VR © Slate.

To keep up with piracy of dirty pictures, the porn industry developed its own way of tracing the source of copying and protection of its 'intellectual property'. This was later found useful in tracking down paedophiles and serial rapists.

It appears like there is no limit in satisfying the demand for porn. Its consumers demand more even when newer avenues are made available. It seems that sensations acquired through virtual reality are insufficient. In the near future, the industry hopes to venture into the field of haptic stimulations. This technology tries to transfer temperature, texture, motion and pressure stimuli to its end-users to satisfy their ever-expanding sexual gratifications.

A deep link exists between pornography, the tools and techniques of human communication. Sexual depiction is a powerful source of creativity and a driving force in innovation. Many modern search engines, online retailers, video/photo sharing sites and media moguls owe their success to pornographic websites.   

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