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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.

Hell on Earth, Filmed on Earth: Revisiting ‘Sorcerer’

By the mid-1970s, the audacious William Friedkin had already made two signature American films of the decade - The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973). The former pushed the envelope in the crime genre with its gritty urban realism, while the latter set a new standard for dread-etched occult menace.


With ‘Sorcerer’ (1977) Friedkin - a prominent knight of the ‘American New Wave’ of the 1970s (others included Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Hal Ashby) - pushed even further into the void. On its surface, ‘Sorcerer’ was a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 classic ‘Le Salaire de la Peur’ (The Wages of Fear), itself an adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s novel.


But Friedkin’s version was to be rawer and more visceral, and a (criminally underrated) posthumous masterpiece in its own right. The film opens with four vignettes, detailing the violent underhand activities of the movie’s four ‘protagonists’ scattered across the globe - from Mexico to France to Jerusalem to New Jersey.


All four, who are on the lam from some outfit (police, government or mafia), end up marooned in a seedy and decrepit Latin American village, doomed to eternal damnation. It’s a globetrotting preamble worthy of Graham Greene.


When a nearby oil rig explodes, the American conglomerate that owns it needs to transport crates of nitroglycerine - unstable and ready to detonate at the slightest jolt - through 200 miles of treacherous jungle and perilous mountain roads. Our four desperate protagonists agree to take up this ultimate assignment from hell in order to secure the money with which they hope to escape their South American hellhole.


Beneath ‘Sorcerer’s’ blistering tension is an unflinching critique of capitalism’s cruelty. The film is saturated with the logic of exploitation as our anti-heroes are thrown into a jungle purgatory.


Friedkin, never a director to shy away from logistical madness, made sure the hell his protagonists endured, was real. There are action sequences in Sorcerer (filmed in the Dominican Republic) that defy logic and sanity. The most infamous involves the two trucks, named ‘Sorcerer’ and ‘Lazaro, crossing a rickety rope bridge in a torrential downpour.


In this jaw-dropping scene, the rusty trucks, weighed down with dynamite, sway perilously above the chasm, tires slipping on soaked wood as the wind lashes ropes and water crashes below. It is a scene of such excruciating tension that it borders on the surreal. No CGI, no safety net, no score - just rain, torque and the groan of collapsing faith.


Flushed with the success of his last two films, Friedkin had carte blanche on casting. Friedkin had hoped for Steve McQueen in the lead, alongside Marcello Mastroianni and Lino Ventura. When this dream cast collapsed, he finally cast Roy Scheider - the only big name in ‘Sorcerer.’


Fresh off the success of Jaws (1975), Scheider gives the most intense, haunted performance of his career in ‘Sorcerer.’ Tangerine Dream’s electronic score gives Sorcerer its otherworldly pulse, humming, throbbing, radiating dread. It lingers like a fever dream.


The most remarkable thing about ‘Sorcerer’ is how thoroughly it resists escapism. This is an adventure film where the adventure is a death march, where the destination is not salvation but obliteration. Even ‘Apocalypse Now’ (where Francis Ford Coppola nearly lost his sanity filming in the Philippines) with which Sorcerer shares a spiritual kinship, offers the catharsis of madness. Friedkin offers no such relief.


When ‘Sorcerer’ was finally released, it collided headfirst with ‘Star Wars.’ Audiences didn’t want grit. They wanted galaxies. Critics dismissed it. The title only added to the confusion. Was it a horror film? A fantasy?


The failure of Sorcerer at the box office sapped Friedkin creatively. Like Coppola, who barely survived the making of Apocalypse, Friedkin would never again scale the heights he reached in the 1970s.


But time has a way of rewarding the cursed. Today, Sorcerer is recognized as a criminally underrated masterpiece of the ‘American New Wave.’


For my money, it is Friedkin's finest work: a fevered portrait of men with no past and no future, grinding across a landscape that actively wants to kill them.


Watching it today feels like a message in a bottle from a vanished era of personal, risk-laden filmmaking. One where danger was not just part of the story - it was the story.

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