Kudos, Flipkart! You did the right thing by pulling out of Airtel Zero. I never agreed with the mob sentiment of uninstalling your app as a symbolic protest – it is symbolic and as easy as a Facebook Like. Thing is, people had choice – if they uninstall your app, they can shop offline, or on Amazon or Snapdeal. So, it is not as if they are losing something or doing something of a big value.
Ask them to disconnect their Airtel lines – that requires actual work! New number, porting number, getting another ISP and mobile phone provider etc. that require real work in the real world. And the options are terrible too.
Ask them to stop using Facebook or Twitter (they were available free too, not just Flipkart) – that won’t happen either because they are now deemed (by regular users) as essential services. And they don’t have options to fall back to either.
So, people chose the course of action that requires the least effort and losing the least as a symbolic movement to show their outrage. Cop out? Of course. From that pov, the protest was targeted at the wrong party that wasn’t the enemy and as unfair as Airtel Zero itself, that’s also discriminatory.
People chose the easy way out, lost nothing in the process and made a symbolic protest using the easiest scapegoat they can pile on to. Again, the counter argument to this is that the fact of Flipkart capitulating, getting off Airtel Zero discussions and sending a sign to Airtel and other potential Airtel Zero participants on how things may pan out if they sign up. So, in this case, the armchair activism ended up with a real result, though Airtel may still go ahead with its plans (imagine Airtel signing up IRCTC for the Zero platform and getting the Government to explain how beneficial it’d be to have millions more use IRCTC free!) and TRAI may still rule against Net Neutrality.
But, there is an upside – regardless of people calling Flipkart FlipFlopKart, it has showed that they do listen and act based on that listening. They have showed that they are not like stodgy old companies that move like a behemoth – they have shown that they are nimble and are not afraid to make mistakes and rectify them if pointed out aptly enough.
And this move sends a signal to Airtel, and other brands considering Airtel Zero. For that, Flipkart has done a phenomenal service to the cause being fought for, by spearheading the change.
Our online protest worked, no doubt, but the fact is we chose a protest vehicle that had least impact to ourselves and was easiest to activate. Just like a tweet, just like a Facebook Like. We continue to indulge in easy ways out, but this one ended well!
The big evolution is that these campaigns change the way we percieve activism – earlier, it was assumed to be time consuming, hard and requiring perseverence in the physical sense. Now, with social media, it is as easy as click of a button. Why not… after all, e-commerce removed the getting-out-of-house, getting-into-multiple-shops for buying into a single click process… so why can’t it be done for activism too? As long as someone/some group is in charge of the purpose behind the galvanization that happens online, I suppose this one has a legitimate role too, in enabling real change.
Armchair activism started getting a derisive tone with using Facebook Likes as a measure to rake up numbers for any cause/purpose. Remember this?
It seems to suggest that ‘you can now protest against a problem at the comfort of your air conditioned living room’. But, if there is a meaningful action/purpose behind all that online activism, then it is adding to something after all. There is perhaps merit in simplifying complex causes and let people ‘protest’ using the click of a button. Number gathering tasks (galvanizing) can be different from offering nuanced opinions to enhance the debate. The latter is usually a smaller number, while the former has a role too, in large numbers. We, after all, cannot expect everyone online to start offering nuanced responses.
But, is ‘lazy’ bad? Or, because it is able to bring so many more well-meaning (as good as a 2-second click can be well-meaning) people to a cause, is it good? Well, let me put it this way – Airtel Zero aims to gain from people’s laziness too (as much as Internet Explorer did, by being Windows default. It banks on users’ inertia to find an alternative, free or paid, cheaper or more expensive). If Airtel Zero is bad because it assumes that people won’t opt for a paid/costlier option that is not part of the platform, then the same logic can be applied for armchair activism – that is, if you condition people to opt for one-click activism, like Airtel Zero’s naysayers, could we assume that people will be unlikely to opt for the real-world activism when needed?
PS: This perhaps also indicates how Flipkart is treated as a disposable utility and not as essential as say, Facebook. This is something for Flipkart’s marketing team to worry about, but steps like going app-only and getting deeply entrenched in customers’ lives is a good start.
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