The Quiet Trap: How Convenience, Algorithms, and AI Are Reshaping India Without Noise
India is not under attack. India is not losing a war. And no foreign power is controlling us directly. What’s happening is quieter — and far more effective. We are slowly outsourcing our attention, our thinking, and our digital future to systems we don’t own, don’t control, and rarely question. And history shows that dependency doesn’t need force to work . We Didn’t Ignore the Warning. We Just Got Comfortable. In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed how the National Security Agency accessed massive volumes of global digital data through legal and technical cooperation with private technology companies. Emails. Metadata. Search behavior. Social graphs. Snowden later wrote: “Privacy isn’t about having something to hide. It’s about having something to protect.” ( Permanent Record , 2019) The revelation wasn’t about spying on individuals. It was about understanding behavior at scale . Europe responded with regulation. China responded with digital sovereignty. Most users responded by scrolling....