The internet is a cruel joke. One minute you’re scrolling through a recipe for sourdough, and the next, you’re staring at the formalization of the Dark Ages. This week, the digital void screamed back when Swara Bhasker, the Bollywood actor who treats her X account like a high-stakes debate stage, took aim at the Taliban. Her target? A fresh set of "morality laws" that effectively turn domestic violence into a state-sanctioned pastime in Afghanistan.

She called them "absolute monsters." She isn't wrong. But in our hyper-connected, algorithmically driven hellscape, saying the right thing feels increasingly like shouting into a hurricane while the hurricane charges you for the privilege.

The Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice recently dropped a 114-page manifesto that reads like a manual for erasing half the human population. It’s not just about the hijabs or the long beards anymore. They’ve codified the silencing of women’s voices in public. Literally. A woman’s voice is now considered "awrah"—something private that shouldn't be heard outside the home. And then there's the green light for domestic "discipline," a move that Bhasker rightfully shredded as the work of monsters.

It’s the kind of news that should break the internet, but the internet is already broken.

Bhasker has a history of this. She’s the rare celebrity who doesn't just post curated thirst traps or brand deals for luxury watches. She picks fights. In a world of "neutral" influencers, she’s a lightning rod. But here’s the friction: she’s screaming into a platform owned by a man who thinks "free speech" means letting anyone—including the very regimes she’s slamming—keep their blue checks as long as the engagement numbers stay high.

There’s a specific kind of irony in watching a Bollywood star use a Silicon Valley megaphone to call out a 7th-century mindset. The Taliban isn't hiding in caves anymore; they’re on social media. They have official spokespeople with better uptime than your local ISP. They use the same fiber-optic cables to broadcast their misogyny that we use to stream Netflix. While Bhasker uses her reach to signal-boost the horror, the platform itself treats her outrage and the Taliban’s decrees as equal units of "content" to be monetized.

We like to think that digital activism—the "slamming" and the "calling out"—does something. We want to believe that when a person with millions of followers points at a monster, the monster flinches. But the Taliban doesn't care about a PR crisis. They don't have a board of directors. They don't care about ESG scores. They’ve found a loophole in the modern world: you can use 21st-century tech to enforce a pre-industrial social order, and the tech companies will still serve you ads.

The trade-off is glaring. We’ve built a global infrastructure that prizes connectivity above all else, assuming that more talk would lead to more progress. Instead, we’ve created a direct line for the most regressive forces on the planet to bypass traditional diplomacy and speak directly to the world, while the voices of the people they’re crushing are systematically muffled by new "laws" that prohibit them from even speaking in the street.

Bhasker’s "monster" comment went viral, as these things do. It was liked, shared, and reposted by people who already agree that human rights are generally a good idea. But behind the screens, in Kabul, the reality doesn't shift because of a viral quote. The price of this digital "engagement" is the realization of our own impotence. We’re watching a humanitarian catastrophe in 4K, commented on by celebrities, and delivered to our pockets via 5G, while the actual power to change it seems to have evaporated somewhere between the data center and the drone strike.

It’s easy to call them monsters. It’s the truth. They are architects of a system that views women as property and violence as a legitimate tool of governance. But what do we call the systems that allow these monsters to tweet alongside us? What do we call a digital economy that finds the dismantling of women's rights to be just another "trending topic" to be optimized for time-on-site?

We’re all stuck in the same feed. The activist, the actor, the monster, and the user. We’re all clicking the same buttons, feeding the same machine, and waiting for a moral clarity that the algorithm isn't programmed to provide. Bhasker did her part; she called it what it is. Now, we just wait for the next push notification to tell us which atrocity we should be angry about before lunch.

If a woman’s voice in Kabul is now illegal, what is the actual market value of an outrage tweet in Mumbai or New York?