Rahul, Marx, Dhinchak Pooja

In a landscape dominated by social media, everything begins to matter less for what it is than for how many likes or re-tweets it can generate

Recently, a report from news agency ANI claimed that Twitter accounts re-tweeting Congress Vice-president Rahul Gandhi could be automated bots. Without getting into the accuracy of the story, take a look at the bigger picture: that it’s not the people or their work that matters but the data, in this case re-tweets, that their activities generate. If I close my eyes and think about what all the bots are up to on Twitter, I am less likely to see automated legions cranking out re-tweets than the face of Karl Marx, captioned “all that is solid melts into air”. That phrase