15 October

“Atham-Lebbe Farsith, a waiter in a one-room curry house in Ampara did not understand why the customer was So Fucking Angry. All of the customers were angry. The man at the counter was waving his plate at Farsith, screaming at him in Sinhalese, as the other customers added their voices to his, complaining that Farsith had added something to the meal. Flour perhaps? The Tamil-speaking waiter thought they might be angry because of the unfortunate lump of flour he could see quite clearly in the curry sauce. The flour was meant to thicken the gravy, but it had not broken down. He and his brother were not trained chefs after all. They’d worked a couple of brutal years as labourers in Saudi Arabia, long enough to earn the money needed to start up this small restaurant in their village in the green fields of the Gal Oya Valley, in south eastern Sri Lanka. Farsith tried to ignore the angry diner, but the man kept shouting at him that he had ‘put it in’. Well they had, hadn’t they. Flour was in the recipe. So in his poor, halting Sinhalese he answered, “I don’t know. Yes, we put?” The mob erupted, surging over and around the counter to beat seven kinds of hell out of the brothers, destroying the restaurant and rolling on to burn down the local mosque. As you do...sparked by a viral Facebook post claiming that police had seized thousands of sterilization pills from a Muslim pharmacist in the village. The pills were part of a cunning Islamist plot to depopulate Sri Lanka of its Sinhalese Buddhist inhabitants by chemically castrating the males. It was, of course, utter bullshit. But Facebook’s algorithm does not discriminate against utter bullshit. Indeed, if the content is measurably ‘sticky’ and ‘sharable’ the Zuckbot gets very excited and starts pimping it out with extreme prejudice.“ John Birmingham