Rashaad N Mohammed

What Have You Given to Your Country?

2026-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

What have you given to your country?

I've been sitting with this question for a while. And honestly, it gives me a headache. Not because it's impossible to answer, but because most of us have never actually tried.

The Two Extremes</h2>
Think about a soldier. He gives his life, completely, without negotiation.
Now think about a politician. He takes his cut, quietly, without apology.
On the surface, one seems noble and the other criminal. But here's the uncomfortable part: both are contributing to the country, one positively and one negatively. The machine keeps moving either way.
So the question isn't just who gives and who takes. The question is: where do you fall?

The Bodyguard Problem</h2>
Let me give you an analogy that changed how I see this.
A wealthy businessman hires a bodyguard to protect his family. One day, rivals attack. The bodyguard steps in front of a bullet and loses his life. The businessman's family is shaken, but they absorb it. They take care of the bodyguard's family. One household. Manageable.
Now scale that up.
A country goes to war. A thousand soldiers step in front of a thousand bullets. A thousand families are left behind. And instead of someone quietly taking care of them, those families are running to courts, chasing pensions, navigating systems that were never designed to move fast.
The government pays the soldier to protect the border. But who pays him for protecting you, your home, your child's school, your sister walking back at night?
That question is not rhetorical. It is a debt. And most of us walk around every day without acknowledging it.
A Country Is a Living Thing</h2>
We've been taught to think of a country as a flag, a government building, a border on a map.
But a country is more like a human being. It has an outer layer and an inner layer. The outer layer is the borders, the army, the institutions. The inner layer is the people, the values, the culture we quietly pass on to each other.
No matter how fierce the pressure from outside, if the inner layer is united, nothing breaks through.
The real vulnerability of any nation is never at its borders. It is always within.
We are safe today, genuinely and physically safe, because someone is standing at a freezing post so we don't have to. The least we owe that person is to not let the country he's protecting rot from the inside.
So What Do You Actually Give?</h2>
You don't have to enlist. You don't have to run for office. But there are things, simple and unglamorous things, that most of us quietly refuse to do.
Ask for accountability. The government exists for you. You don't exist for the government. Every time you accept corruption as normal, every time you shrug and say "that's just how it is," you are handing power to people who were never supposed to have it unchecked.
Be honest, especially when shortcuts are rewarded. We all know what it looks like: a student spends years preparing, grinding, sacrificing. And then someone with the right connections and the right stack of cash walks right in front of them. That injustice only survives because enough people stay silent.
Refuse mediocrity, especially in people with power. Our mothers used to compare us with that smarter cousin and we hated it. But I've realised something: that kind of comparison is exactly what the sixty-year-old running this country desperately needs and never gets.
Lift someone up. You're going to smell great just by walking into a perfume shop. Spend time with people who are sharper and more driven than you. Then turn around and bring someone else up to that level. Education doesn't end in a classroom.
Raise children who are better than you. Not richer. Not more obedient. Better more honest, more aware, more empathetic. If every generation genuinely improves on the last, one day we won't need to have this conversation at all.
A country does not become stronger when its borders expand.
It becomes stronger when its people do.
Eco signing off

How Algorithms Quietly Built Our Hypernationalism

2026-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

My mom is watching reels.
After every single one, she's commenting, not actually typing, just talking out loud to me. And every comment is defensive. Like she's protecting something. Something emotional. Something she didn't believe this strongly six months ago.
That's where this blog started.
I'm an ML guy. I build the kind of systems that decide what your mom sees next. So let me tell you what's actually happening, not from a journalist's chair, but from inside the room.

The Experiment I Ran on Myself</h2>
A few weeks back I tried something.
I usually watch tech content: papers, demos, terminal stuff. For a few days I went against my own grain and started watching right-leaning political content. Just watched. Didn't even like or comment.
I am a centrist by nature. I believe most things have nuance. But within days, my entire feed shifted. Every recommendation, every suggestion column, every reel that auto-played: right-leaning. The deeper I stayed, the deeper it pulled.
By the end of that week, I caught myself nodding along at things I would have argued against a month ago.
The algorithm had me convinced. Quietly. Without me realising.
That's what made me want to write this.
Why This Happens: The Boring Engineering Truth</h2>
The algorithm isn't ideological. Nobody at YouTube or Meta wrote a function called make_them_nationalist()</code>. The function they wrote is much simpler, and much worse:
Maximise time spent on platform. </blockquote> That's it. That's the whole thing. Every recommendation system at every major platform is, at its core, optimising for one number: engagement. How long you stay. How much you scroll. How likely you are to come back tomorrow. And here's the catch I learned the hard way as a builder: content that triggers identity beats content that triggers thinking. Every time. Outrage holds you longer than nuance. "They are destroying our country" gets more watch-time than "this policy has trade-offs." So the algorithm, doing exactly what it was told, slowly moves every user toward the most identity-triggering version of whatever they already lean toward. It's not a conspiracy. It's worse. It's a side effect. The Case Study Nobody Talks About Enough</h2> July 2018. India. At least 30 people were killed in mob lynchings across the country in a few months. The trigger was almost identical in every case: WhatsApp forwards. Fake messages claiming child kidnappers were in the area. Forwarded a million times. People went out with sticks. People died. WhatsApp's "feature", letting any message be forwarded to 256 people at a time, was the algorithmic decision that killed them. Not malicious. Just optimised. After the lynchings, WhatsApp dropped the forward limit to 5 chats. Violence dropped immediately. The same year: Cambridge Analytica. Then the Facebook Files in 2021, leaked by Frances Haugen, showed Meta's own internal research concluding their algorithm pushed users toward extremist content because extremist content kept them on Facebook longer. They knew. They had the data. They didn't change it because changing it would lower the engagement number. This is documented. This isn't paranoia. This is the engineering record. The Bubble, and the Catch</h2> So here's where my mom comes back into the picture. The algorithm has built her a bubble. Inside that bubble, she is the victim. There's a clear antagonist, usually whichever group the political party she watches wants her to fear. Everything she sees confirms it. The algorithm makes sure of that. It's like the frog in the pond who thinks the pond is the world. But here's the catch I want you to sit with: The antagonist of her bubble has his own bubble. And in his bubble, she is the antagonist. Both bubbles are doing exactly the same thing. Both feel justified. Both feel they're defending something. Both are being fed by the same engagement function on the same platforms. This is why argument doesn't work. You're not arguing with a person. You're arguing with a feed. When This Becomes Hypernationalism</h2> Political parties learned this faster than the platforms could regulate it. If you can use the algorithm to shape someone's mindset, what they see, what they fear, what they hate, you don't need to change their values. The algorithm changes them for you. And the cleanest, most efficient ideology to push through this system is hypernationalism. Because it gives you a country to love and an enemy to hate, all in one frame. Anyone who disagrees becomes "anti-national." Disagreement becomes betrayal. Conversation dies. That's not patriotism. That's a feedback loop. What You Can Actually Do</h2> I won't pretend there's a clean fix. The platforms won't change because their revenue is the problem. Regulation is slow. The damage is already a few elections deep. But three things, today: Search instead of scroll. Type what you want to know. Don't let a feed decide.</li> Follow people you disagree with. Not to fight them. To break your own bubble.</li> Remember: there's a world outside the reel.</li> </ol> The algorithm won't stop. But you can stop being its product. Eco signing off
Every Ideology is a Form of Propaganda 2026-05-18T00:00:00+00:00 I've been active in politics lately. I used to be a boy who thought politics was just a hoax. Not saying it's not but the only thing that changed between now and then is this: Earlier, I thought politics was just a hoax and it had nothing to do with me. Now I think politics is just a hoax and it has everything to do with me. We've all heard about that frog which thinks the pond is its whole world, right? Earlier, I thought the frog was dumb. But now, looking at countries' deteriorating situations, I think maybe he kept his world small for a reason. Let me explain what I mean. We've Forgotten How to Vote</h2> We have basically forgotten on what basis we give votes. Imagine a Chief Minister X from another state. He did something good, and he belongs to Party Y. Now Party Y is also running for elections in your state. My question is: how can you say that since person X did something good, we should elect Party Y in our state too? How can you assure they will provide the same results here? Don't you think you have already given them years of power based on very little certainty without even considering another contestant who may actually have more potential? Your vote should be unbiased. The only factor that should influence your vote is the candidate's drive for development. But whatever I said till now still has nothing to do with the title. That's because I wanted to interconnect propaganda with the current political situation. We Don't Understand What Propaganda Actually Is</h2> We automatically look at it as something negative. What I've noticed is that ideology has become a product. Every political party, every movement, every group wants to impose their ideology on you. Consider Adolf Hitler. He built an ideology, a negative one, but it was executed so well that even the Germans believed he was right. That's the scary part about propaganda. It doesn't work because people are dumb. It works because people believe it and blindly follow it. But when his actions unfolded, the world saw who he truly was. Another narrative spread, one that exposed the truth, and people slowly shifted. And here I noticed two things. 1. To defeat an ideology, humans create another ideology. From there, only two things can happen: it becomes a better version, or it becomes something even worse. If it's a better version, we will prosper and develop, which is good. But this will only be possible if we challenge it, not blindly follow it. When the thing comes to power, make sure we keep the man in power in place. 2. Every ideology eventually shows its true nature. But the problem is, when it finally does, it's usually too late. The damage has already happened. And sometimes that damage is irreversible. The only thing humans really do after destruction is sit down and learn from it. So Who Is Actually Right?</h2> I think every ideology is right only if it has two things: Good intentions.</li> A true owner.</li> </ol> What do I mean by a true owner? I mean the ideology should truly be yours. Not borrowed. Not inherited blindly. Not copied lazily from someone louder than you. You should have thought about it. Questioned it. Built it. Because remember, you are the frog. And so is everyone else. Everyone lives in their own pond with their own struggles, fears, environment, and experiences. So how can everyone possibly think the same way? Two people from completely different circumstances cannot naturally have the exact same ideology. That's why blindly following ideologies is dangerous. So next time you come across an ideology, don't just choose one because someone handed it to you. Ponder. Question. Create your own. Do not fall for propaganda. Create your own ideology and follow it with good intentions. Eco signing off