Unrest in Karachi
May 21st, 2012
For the various incidents of target killing in Karachi over the last week or so that have resulted in the loss of over two dozen lives, a resumption of violence would be a misnomer. In Karachi, it seems violence never goes away entirely, it just ebbs and flows with no discernible pattern. What makes all this bloodletting so frustrating is that everyone knows that both the fault and the solution lies with the city’s warring political parties and the criminal gangs they control and patronise. For the last few months, a new wrinkle has been added to this political fighting as the PPP, which has always enjoyed support in Lyari, has been locked in an internecine battle. The People’s Amn Committee, founded with the support of the PPP, has now turned away from the party and, as is always the case in Karachi, is voicing its disagreements with guns.
Meanwhile, activists of the MQM have been among the worst hit in the latest bout of violence. And if we know anything about the MQM, it is that they will hit back with even greater force. This means that the city should brace for further, even bloodier, violence in the days ahead. Apart from the devastating loss of life, the country’s economic hub will continue to suffer unsustainable financial losses. Soon, if there isn’t a significant stop in bloodletting, people will begin clamouring for the paramilitary Rangers to take matters into their own hands. What we all know is that shoot-to-kill orders and military involvement only compounds the problems in the city.
The obvious solution would be for the city’s political parties to abandon the battlefield and take to the negotiating table. This is unlikely to happen as all the various political actors find it easier to maintain control of their areas at the barrel of a gun. Cooler heads need to prevail at the centre, with the leaders of the PPP, the MQM and the ANP calling on their Karachi lieutenants to cease and desist. Karachi is too important to the rest of the country for this to be a purely local issue.
Facebook’s public listing
May 21st, 2012
That the stock market moves in mysterious ways was shown again on May 18 as the initial public offering (IPO) by Facebook was nowhere near as successful as most people had expected. The share price for the social networking behemoth barely budged from its opening price of $38, ending up just a few pennies above that price. This could partly be explained by hubris. The IPO may have overestimated just how much people were willing to pay for Facebook shares, especially since the initial price was wildly out of sync with the profitability of the company. And while Facebook relies predominantly on advertising for its revenues, it has not been anywhere as successful as its competitor Google in convincing users to click on those ads.
None of this is to say that Facebook is not a successful company on a strong footing. Its profits in 2011 exceeded one billion dollars and there is no reason to think those numbers cannot be maintained. But the IPO should lead to some humility in the company, which has come to see itself not just as the future of the internet but the future of the world too. Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg has continually innovated with new ideas and he will have to be on his best game for the company to continue its upward trajectory after going public.
Now might also be a good time for Zuckerberg — whose net worth has jumped to $20 billion after the IPO — and his company to take more seriously the many privacy concerns that have been raised by users and watchdog groups. Facebook has been exceptionally poor in that regard as it has often decided to use content posted by users for its own purposes and has always been lethargic in responding to complaints. In an age of over-sharing where we all have digital lives, privacy should not go out the window. Facebook’s profits are dependent on its user’s date but its morality will only remain intact if it does not take undue advantage of that.
A pointless ban
May 21st, 2012
Like Lazarus, the Pakistan government’s internet censorship efforts keep rising from the dead. In the name of protecting its citizens from blasphemous caricatures of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), the Ministry of Information Technology decided to ban for around a day social media website Twitter, which has hundreds of thousands of users in Pakistan. Clearly, the ministry needs to change its name since it has no clue how the internet works and its action seems to betray a totalitarian streak. Tens of millions of people use Twitter to share links and photos and post updates. Given the freewheeling nature of Web 2.0, a tiny minority of these users will invariably end up posting items that will not be to the liking of Pakistanis – but does that mean the whole website be banned? Going by the same logic, why not just go ahead and ban the whole internet? (Of course, some bright minds in the IT ministry will think that this can be done!)
As we don’t have much of the world already laughing at us or looking at us in disapproval, we now saw this overreaction of monumental proportions from the government. While the site was eventually unblocked, on orders of the prime minister no less, by Sunday night, the fact remains that the restriction shouldn’t have been imposed to begin with. A plan to build a giant all-encompassing firewall along the lines of the one in China was shelved after a public outcry. For some reason, the website of US-based pop-culture magazine Rolling Stone is still banned.
These bans all reveal that the government is fundamentally insecure and unable to trust its citizens to use the internet. Censorship is a tool of the weak, used to deprive people of information because the government is worried what might be done with that information. Blocking access to information used to be easier in the pre-internet days; now it is doomed to failure. All the government can achieve is making itself look ridiculous by censoring the internet. The fact of the matter is that the government has no right to indulge in such censorship in this day and age, lest it wants to appear as a fool in the eyes of not only the outside world but its own citizens as well.