There is a joy in grappling, a joy so subtle that our fast-thinking, fast-moving, AI saturated moment is in danger of forgetting it. There is a pleasure in wrestling with an idea until it reveals something true. The joy of circling a problem from every direction, testing its edges, doubting your own assumptions, discovering that you were wrong and then right and then wrong again.
Working towards social justice and the realisation of human rights is a long-distance discipline. Presently, thinking about how to respond to our current polycrisis – political, economic, technological and ecological – is often the slow archeology of the self, and sometimes an unravelling.
You chip away at the problem, find a thread, and then lose it all over again. Rinse and repeat. If you’re lucky, something inside you grows muscles – intellectual ones, perhaps spiritual ones, that allows you to hold contradictions without flinching.
Meaningful change
This is not inefficiency, it is how meaningful change is made.
As the Campaign On Digital Ethics (CODE) enters its third year of operation, this is the posture that we are choosing to hold. The questions at the heart of technology, human rights, and democracy do not yield shortcuts or easy answers.
How do we hold powerful technology companies, and the billionaires behind them, accountable when they operate across borders, above regulation, and often beyond consequences?
How do we confront inequality when it is increasingly digitised, automated, and obscured behind claims of neutrality?
How do we protect people when technological harms move faster than the laws meant to prevent them?
Grappling is the work
There are no five-step frameworks. No neat theories of change. No silver bullets. Grappling is the work.
For us, it shows up in the strategic public interest litigation cases that we are building. These are slow, deliberate interventions designed not to offer easy wins, but to force accountability into public view. Litigation is itself a form of grappling with evidence, with harm, with precedent and with the current boundaries of the law.
It shows up in our digital literacy programmes, where the goal is not to turn people into technologists, but to equip them to ask better questions about the systems shaping their lives: like how algorithms influence what they see, who they trust, and what they fear. Critical thinking, grappling with nuance and diversity of thought, is the work.
And it shows up in our research, work that sometimes resists clean narratives and instead traces how digital systems intersect with democracy, inequality, mental health, and political power. Our research attempts to understand and value the complexity of the current time, rather than sanding it down.
The meaning of ‘azadi’
Of late, especially as mass murder of protestors unfolded in Iran, I’ve been thinking about the word azadi – a Persian word that means freedom. Freedoms, across the world, feel increasingly fragile. We see it in the brutal repression in Iran, the United States, and in the crackdown of anti-genocide protestors in Britain.
Back home we’ve also seen attacks on artistic expression by wannabe strongman, Minister Gayton McKenzie, who is eager to govern culture through intimidation.
Azadi feels under threat.
This is where the conversation about AI cannot be separated from the conversation about freedom. We are living through a moment where artificial intelligence is presented as a panacea – a way to think faster, decide faster, or even govern faster.
Rush to outsource thinking
The danger, however, is not that AI exists, but that in our rush to outsource thinking, and automate critical decisions, we risk abandoning the very practices that sustain freedom: slow thinking, disagreement, ethical wrestling, and intellectual diversity. A society that no longer knows how to grapple is a society that becomes easy to govern, easy to manipulate, and easy to flatten.
The joy of grappling is definitely not romantic. It is demanding and often exhausting. But it is also where freedom lives; not as a slogan, but as a practice. We have to remain committed to staying with the hard questions – and to resist easy answers. In an age that increasingly wants to think for us, choosing to grapple may be one of the most meaningful acts of azadi that we have left.
Kavisha Pillay is a social justice activist, former head of stakeholder relations and campaigns at Corruption Watch and founding director of the Campaign On Digital Ethics (CODE). She studied Journalism at the University of Johannesburg and shortly after she completed her final semester in 2012, she joined Corruption Watch. She is responsible for managing diverse work streams, which include the collection of whistle-blower reports, managing public mobilisation campaigns, and overseeing the organisation’s research outputs. In 2020, Pillay qualified as a data scientist and is currently exploring how big data techniques can be used to advance social justice.
