top of page

By:

Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Algorithmic Anarchy

The NEET paper leak protests at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar should have remained a legitimate expression of student anger over the collapse of examination integrity. Instead, as the agitation escalated into clashes with the police, abusive sloganeering and an increasingly radical political campaign, Meta’s algorithms emerged as an invisible force multiplying the unrest. The controversy surrounding the brief removal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s message to the youth in the aftermath of the...

Algorithmic Anarchy

The NEET paper leak protests at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar should have remained a legitimate expression of student anger over the collapse of examination integrity. Instead, as the agitation escalated into clashes with the police, abusive sloganeering and an increasingly radical political campaign, Meta’s algorithms emerged as an invisible force multiplying the unrest. The controversy surrounding the brief removal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s message to the youth in the aftermath of the protests only reinforces that concern. Meta has attributed the takedown to a “technical glitch” and apologised. But when the world’s largest social media platform can temporarily suppress the message of the elected leader of the world’s largest democracy during a politically charged moments, the issue extends well beyond a single deleted post. Who decides what India sees? That question has become impossible to ignore during the Cockroach Janta Party’s protests. Across Instagram and Facebook, users have reported being inundated with CJP videos, reels and protest clips despite never following the organisation or engaging with similar political content. Whether this resulted from coordinated paid collaborations, recommendation algorithms or both deserves a thorough investigation. But the larger democratic concern is that public opinion is increasingly being mediated not by citizens, journalists or elected representatives, but by opaque algorithms designed in Silicon Valley and optimised for engagement rather than democratic responsibility. Meta’s recommendation engine is not a passive notice board. Every piece of political content that reaches millions has first been selected by an algorithm whose workings remain largely hidden from public scrutiny. This is hardly unique to India. Around the world, Meta has repeatedly been accused of amplifying polarisation, misinformation and political extremism because outrage keeps users engaged. From elections to ethnic conflicts and episodes of civil unrest, the company has faced persistent criticism that its commercial incentives reward divisive content over balanced discourse. Democracies cannot afford to outsource the architecture of public debate to corporations whose primary obligation is to shareholders rather than constitutional values. While citizens are entitled to challenge governments and demand accountability, there is an important distinction between a movement that expands because people are persuaded and one that appears to be algorithmically amplified into omnipresence. Equally disturbing has been the normalisation of abusive political language during the protests. When such content is repeatedly amplified through recommendation systems, platforms cease to be neutral intermediaries and become active participants in degrading democratic discourse. Platforms that influence elections, protests and public opinion must explain how political recommendations are generated and why particular narratives receive extraordinary amplification. Silicon Valley companies insist they are merely technology platforms. But their algorithms increasingly exercise editorial power. When software determines which protests dominate national conversations and whose voices disappear, technology has already become politics.

Gene Hackman: The Last Great Everyman

Updated: Mar 3, 2025

Gene Hackman

Gene Hackman, who has died aged 95 under mysterious circumstances, was an actor of such unassuming brilliance that it is easy to take for granted just how consistently he delivered performances of raw, lived-in authenticity. A central figure of the American ‘New Wave’ of the 1970s, Hackman stood shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Warren Beatty, James Caan, Robert De Niro. Yet unlike them, he possessed neither the countercultural magnetism of Nicholson nor the simmering intensity of Pacino or De Niro. He was, instead, a master of the unvarnished, the unpretentious, the sublimely natural.


Like Robert Duvall, Hackman was often referred to as an ‘actor’s actor,’ but that designation risks understating just how much of an elemental force he was.


His breakthrough came in 1967’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ in which he played Buck Barrow, the doomed, amiable brother to Warren Beatty’s Clyde. In ‘I Never Sang for My Father’ (1970), where he played a widowed college professor navigating the difficult terrain of familial duty, he fully demonstrated his great range.


Then came ‘The French Connection’ (1971), and with it, cinematic immortality. As Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle - the coarse, unrelenting narcotics detective rampaging relentlessly through the streets of New York in pursuit of a French heroin kingpin, Hackman’s Oscar-winning performance was as combustible as it was convincing.


The 1970s, the finest decade of Hackman’s career, was a time when American cinema embraced ambiguity, moral complexity and a kind of grounded realism. Few embodied this era more effectively than Hackman, whose face seemed to belong less to the realm of movie stars than to that of real people - working men, cops, criminals, politicians, coaches, spies. There was ‘Scarecrow’ (1973), an understated gem in which he and Pacino played vagabonds drifting through the American landscape, each as broken as the other.


There was ‘Night Moves’ (1975), Arthur Penn’s brooding neo-noir in which he played a detective struggling to make sense of his unravelling world.


But his greatest performance came in Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’ (1974), a role for which he incredibly wasn’t even nominated. As Harry Caul, a surveillance expert so consumed by paranoia that he can barely function, Hackman eschewed his usual volatility, replacing it with a wound-up performance of restrained anguish that made his very presence feel like an act of concealment. The final scene, with Caul alone in his wrecked apartment, sawing away at the floorboards in a fruitless search for hidden bugs, is as haunting as anything the decade produced.


Hackman’s versatility extended well beyond the brooding antiheroes of the 1970s. He possessed an easy facility for comedy, often slipping into a wry, world-weary charm that underscored the absurdity of his characters’ situations. His Lex Luthor in ‘Superman’ (1978) - bald cap askance, chewing scenery with a mischievous twinkle - was a gleeful departure from the hard-bitten men he so often played. In ‘Get Shorty’ (1995), as the hapless Hollywood producer Harry Zimm, he delivered a masterclass in comedic timing.


While he was at home in the cynical, auteur-driven cinema of the 1970s, Hackman didn’t fade with the arrival of the blockbuster era. He was splendid the beleaguered high-school basketball coach in ‘Hoosiers’ (1986), the compromised Secretary of Defense in ‘No Way Out’ (1987), and especially as the maverick FBI agent fighting the Ku Klux Klan in the searing ‘Mississippi Burning’ (1988), a role that earned him another Oscar nomination. Playing against Willem Dafoe’s by-the-book idealist, Hackman brought a blend of charm and barely contained fury to the role, turning Anderson into a man whose folksy affability masked a relentless, dangerous intelligence.


Hackman cemented his legacy with Clint Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’ (1992), where he was cast him as ‘Little Bill’ Daggett, a sadistic sheriff with a perverse sense of justice. It was a role Hackman initially resisted, wary of its brutality, but his eventual performance - alternately jovial and truly terrifying - earned him his second Oscar.


Unlike many of his peers, Hackman knew when to walk away. He retired from acting in 2004, resisting the temptation of late-career indulgences, avoiding the spotlight. Watching him, one is struck not by artifice but by a lived-in truth. His gift was making us believe in the reality of his characters, whether they were cops, criminals or coaches, each as flawed and contradictory as the world around them. He made it all look effortless. He was, quite simply, the real thing.

Comments

bottom of page