Smart Mobs

by Howard Rheingold

  The regulatory aspects of WiFi are coming under pressure as Moore’s Law reveals itself in the industry: Over the past thirty months, Intel has increased the communication capacity of its WiFi chip by 5,400 percent and dropped the price by 82 percent.85 Sony is planning to put WiFi chips in every TV set and PC it sells in Japan, and Microsoft is planning a launch in the fall of 2003 for Mira, a wireless computer tablet with a WiFi Internet connection built in.

  Lessig believes that WiFi is a sound start for a wireless commons, even with its imperfections. “People who say that 802.11b is an imperfect technology forget that it’s always imperfect technologies that get people into this radical destabilizing mode of operation that eventually takes down the Goliaths of the era,” he told me.86 “Who said that modems crossing telephone lines to get access to computer networks were perfect technologies? They were slow and unreliable. But what that did, because it was not controlled, was create strong demand for much higher quality connections which drove adoption of the Internet. Imperfect but decentralized and free technologies are a critical way to induce innovation and grow the network.”87

  David Reed, during our lunchtime conversation at MIT in 2001, emphasized that “this is the worst time to allocate property rights to spectrum in ways that block others from using it.”88 Reed told me then that “ad-hoc wireless networks now can be designed so that capacity grows as the number of stations increases, and each station uses less power as the stations get closer together—a virtuous circle. Physics meets cooperation.” Reed, who played an important part in facilitating innovation through the end-to-end architectural principle underlying the Internet, told Werbach, “We could have the greatest wave of innovation since the Internet (and probably bigger in impact, because more pervasive) if we could unlock the spectrum to explore the new possibilities.”89

  New technologies have a history of destroying the dominance of prior technologies or making them obsolete. Joseph Schumpeter claimed that “this process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”90 Lessig reminded me of Machiavelli’s counterpoint to Schumpeter: “Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new.”91 Those who created an infrastructure in which the devices (telephones, televisions, and radios) are inexpensive and dumb, the network that connects the devices is highly specialized and expensive to install, and the service is sold on a metered basis (telephony, cable TV, and wired Internet access) are challenged by new enterprises in which cheap devices are the network, and no private enterprise owns the medium that carries their messages. The old telecommunications regime, if it is to survive, must either block challenging innovations politically, acquire the companies that challenge them, or change into different kinds of enterprises themselves. The market and the consumer have no obligation to remain loyal to obsolete technologies when something better comes along; just because Western Union had a large investment in telegraphy doesn’t mean that telephony should have been prevented through regulation or legislation.

  In his 2001 book, The Future of Ideas, Lessig proposed a mixed regulatory regime:

  The ideal mix in the short term would be a regime that had both a commons and a property component, with the property component subject to an important caveat. There would be broad swaths of spectrum left in the commons; there would be broad swaths that would be sold as [economist Thomas] Hazlett proposes. But in light of the emerging technologies for sharing, even the spectrum sold as property would be subject to an important qualification: Other users would be free to “share” that spectrum if they followed a “listen first” protocol—the technology would listen to see whether a certain chunk of spectrum were being used at a particular time, and if it weren’t it would be free for the taking.92

  The regulatory regime that will shape the future of wireless technology is not the only crucial unsettled policy issue. Who will have control over the use of the cloud of personal information smart mob technologies transmit, as mobile and pervasive communications evolve and merge? In each of the converging technologies that constitute smart mobs, issues of control remain to be resolved.

  Many-to-many mobile communications, such as texting, empower cooperative bands of intercommunicants in urban spaces, whether they are teenagers in Tokyo or Helsinki, or as we’ll see in the next chapter, political activists in Manila and Seattle.

  Wearable computing, open-source software, and encrypted communication provide a means of giving individuals more control over their personal data clouds.

  Tactics of distributed control, lateral cooperation, and governance through reputation create leverage in several different realms, from human communities sharing irrigation resources to supercomputer swarms attacking diseases.

  The Internet, highways, public streets, parks, beaches, scientific findings, works in the public domain, and the electromagnetic spectrum produce more value for more people when they are held in commons and self-managed to prevent tragedy than when they are divided as private property and managed by Hobbesian authority.

  Only the earliest signs of future smart mob behavior are observable as the constituent technologies leave the laboratory and enter the product cycle, but important clues to the future of political action can be found in what happened in Manila and Seattle in 2001.

  7

  Smart Mobs: The Power of the Mobile Many

  Bypassing the complex of broadcasting media, cell phone users themselves became broadcasters, receiving and transmitting both news and gossip and often confounding the two. Indeed, one could imagine each user becoming a broadcasting station unto him or herself, a node in a wider network of communication that the state could not possibly even begin to monitor, much less control. Hence, once the call was made for people to mass at Edsa, cell phone users readily forwarded messages they received, even as they followed what was asked of them.

  Cell phones then were invested not only with the power to surpass crowded conditions and congested surroundings brought about by the state’s inability to order everyday life.They were also seen to bring a new kind of crowd about, one that was thoroughly conscious of itself as a movement headed towards a common goal.

  —Vicente Rafael, “The Cell Phone and the Crowd:

  Messianic Politics in Recent Philippine History”

  Netwar—Dark and Light

  On January 20, 2001, President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines became the first head of state in history to lose power to a smart mob. More than 1 million Manila residents, mobilized and coordinated by waves of text messages, assembled at the site of the 1986 “People Power” peaceful demonstrations that had toppled the Marcos regime.1 Tens of thousands of Fil- ipinos converged on Epifanio de los Santas Avenue, known as “Edsa,” within an hour of the first text message volleys: “Go 2EDSA, Wear blck.”2 Over four days, more than a million citizens showed up, mostly dressed in black. Estrada fell. The legend of “Generation Txt” was born.

  Bringing down a government without firing a shot was a momentous early eruption of smart mob behavior. It wasn’t, however, the only one.

  On November 30, 1999, autonomous but internetworked squads of demonstrators protesting the meeting of the World Trade Organization used “swarming” tactics, mobile phones, Web sites, laptops, and handheld computers to win the “Battle of Seattle.”3

  In September 2000, thousands of citizens in Britain, outraged by a sudden rise in gasoline prices, used mobile phones, SMS, email from laptop PCs, and CB radios in taxicabs to coordinate dispersed groups that blocked fuel delivery at selected service stations in a wildcat political protest.4

  A violent political demonstration in Toronto in the spring of 2000 was chronicled by a group of roving journalist-researchers who webcast digital video of everything they saw.5

  Since 1992, thousands of bicycle activists have assembled monthly for “Critical Mass” moving demonstrations, weaving through San Francisco streets en masse. Critical Mass ope
rates through loosely linked networks, alerted by mobile phone and email trees, and breaks up into smaller, tele-coordinated groups when appropriate.6

  Filipinos were veteran texters long before they toppled Estrada. Short Message Service (SMS) messaging was introduced in 1995 as a promotional gimmick.7 SMS messaging, free at first, remained inexpensive. Wire-line telephone service is more costly than mobile service, and in a country where 40 percent of the population lives on one dollar a day, the fact that text messages are one-tenth the price of a voice call is significant.8 A personal computer costs twenty times as much as a mobile telephone; only 1 percent of the Philippines’ population own PCs, although many more use them in Internet cafés.9 By 2001, however, 5 million Filipinos owned cell phones out of a total population of 70 million.10

  Filipinos took to SMS messaging with a uniquely intense fervor. By 2001, more than 70 million text messages were being transmitted among Filipinos every day.11 The word “mania” was used in the Manila press. The New York Times reported in 2001:

  Malls are infested with shoppers who appear to be navigating by cellular compass. Groups of diners sit ignoring one another, staring down at their phones as if fumbling with rosaries. Commuters, jaywalkers, even mourners— everyone in the Philippines seems to be texting over the phone . . . . Faye Slytangco, a 23-year-old airline sales representative, was not surprised when at the wake for a friend’s father she saw people bowing their heads and gazing toward folded hands. But when their hands started beeping and their thumbs began to move, she realized to her astonishment that they were not in fact praying. “People were actually sitting there and texting,” Slytangco said. “Filipinos don’t see it as rude any more.”12

  Like the thumb tribes of Tokyo and youth cultures in Scandinavia, Filipino texters took advantage of one of the unique features of texting technology— the ease of forwarding jokes, rumors, and chain letters. Although it requires effort to compose messages on mobile telephone keypads, only a few thumb strokes are required to forward a message to four friends or everybody in your telephone’s address book. Filipino texting culture led to a national panic when a false rumor claimed that Pope John Paul II had died.13

  Many Filipino text message jokes and rumors were political. Vicente Rafael, professor at the University of California, San Diego, sees Filipino texting culture as inherently subversive:

  Like many third world countries recently opened to more liberal trade policies, the Philippines shares in the paradox of being awash in the latest technologies of communication such as the cell phone while mired in deteriorating infrastructures such as roads, postal services, railroads, power generators and land lines. With the cell phone, one appears to be able to pass beyond these obstacles. And inasmuch as such infrastructures are state run so that their breakdown and inefficiencies are a direct function of governmental ineptitude, passing beyond them also feels like overcoming the state, which to begin with is already overcome by corruption. It is small wonder then that cell phones could prove literally handy in spreading rumors, jokes, and information that steadily eroded whatever legitimacy President Estrada still had.14

  The “People Power II” demonstrations of 2001 broke out when the impeachment trial of President Estrada was suddenly ended by senators linked to Estrada. Opposition leaders broadcast text messages, and within seventy-five minutes of the abrupt halt of the impeachment proceedings, 20,000 people converged on Edsa.15 Over four days, more than a million people showed up. The military withdrew support from the regime; the Estrada government fell, as the Marcos regime had fallen a decade previously, largely as a result of massive nonviolent demonstrations.16 The rapid assembly of the anti-Estrada crowd was a hallmark of early smart mob technology, and the millions of text messages exchanged by the demonstrators in 2001 was, by all accounts, a key to the crowd’s esprit de corps.

  Professor Rafael sees the SMS-linked crowd that assembled in Manila as the manifestation of a phenomenon that was enabled by a technical infrastructure but that is best understood as a social instrument:

  The power of the crowd thus comes across in its capacity to overwhelm the physical constraints of urban planning in the same way that it tends to blur social distinctions by provoking a sense of estrangement. Its authority rests on its ability to promote restlessness and movement, thereby undermining the pressure from state technocrats, church authorities and corporate interests to regulate and contain such movements. In this sense, the crowd is a sort of medium if by that word one means the means for gathering and transforming elements, objects, people and things. As a medium, the crowd is also the site for the generation of expectations and the circulation of messages. It is in this sense that we might also think of the crowd not merely as an effect of technological devices, but as a kind of technology itself. . . . Centralized urban planning and technologies of policing seek to routinize the sense of contingency generated in crowding. But at moments and in areas where such planning chronically fails, routine can at times give way to the epochal. At such moments, the crowd . . . takes on a kind of telecommunica-tive power, serving up channels for sending messages at a distance and bringing distances up close. Enmeshed in a crowd, one feels the potential for reaching out across social space and temporal divides.17

  The Battle of Seattle saw a more deliberate and tactically focused use of wireless communications and mobile social networks in urban political conflict, more than a year before texting mobs assembled in Manila. A broad coalition of demonstrators who represented different interests but were united in opposition to the views of the World Trade Organization planned to disrupt the WTO’s 1999 meeting in Seattle. The demonstrators included a wide range of different “affinity groups” who loosely coordinated their actions around their shared objective. The Direct Action Network enabled autonomous groups to choose which levels of action to participate in, from nonviolent support to civil disobedience to joining mass arrests—a kind of dynamic ad hoc alliance that wouldn’t have been possible without a mobile, many-to-many, real-time communication network. According to a report dramatically titled, “Black Flag Over Seattle,” by Paul de Armond:

  The cohesion of the Direct Action Network was partly due to their improvised communications network assembled out of cell phones, radios, police scanners and portable computers. Protesters in the street with wireless Palm Pilots were able to link into continuously updated web pages giving reports from the streets. Police scanners monitored transmissions and provided some warning of changing police tactics. Cell phones were widely used.

  Kelly Quirke, Executive Director of the Rainforest Action Network, reports that early Tuesday, “the authorities had successfully squashed DAN’s communications system.” The solution to the infrastructure attack was quickly resolved by purchasing new Nextel cell phones. According to Han Shan, the Ruckus Society’s WTO action coordinator, his organization and other protest groups that formed the Direct Action Network used the Nextel system to create a cellular grid over the city. They broke into talk groups of eight people each. One of the eight overlapped with another talk group, helping to quickly communicate through the ranks.

  In addition to the organizers’ all-points network, protest communications were leavened with individual protesters using cell phones, direct transmissions from roving independent media feeding directly onto the Internet, personal computers with wireless modems broadcasting live video, and a variety of other networked communications. Floating above the tear gas was a pulsing infosphere of enormous bandwidth, reaching around the planet via the Internet.18

  From Seattle to Manila, the first “netwars” have already broken out. The term “netwar” was coined by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, two analysts for the RAND corporation (birthplace of game theory and experimental economics), who noticed that the same combination of social networks, sophisticated communication technologies, and decentralized organizational structure was surfacing as an effective force in very different kinds of political conflict:

  Netwar is an emerging mode
of conflict in which the protagonists—ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side—use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of net-war is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting.

  From the Battle of Seattle to the “attack on America,” these networks are proving very hard to deal with; some are winning. What all have in common is that they operate in small, dispersed units that can deploy nimbly—anywhere, anytime. All feature network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. They know how to swarm and disperse, penetrate and disrupt, as well as elude and evade. The tactics they use range from battles of ideas to acts of sabotage—and many tactics involve the Internet.19

  The “swarming” strategies noted by Arquilla and Ronfeldt rely on many small units like the affinity groups in the Battle of Seattle. Individual members of each group remained dispersed until mobile communications drew them to converge on a specific location from all directions simultaneously, in coordination with other groups. Manila, Seattle, San Francisco, Senegal, and Britain were sites of nonviolent political swarming. Arquilla and Ron-feldt cited the nongovernmental organizations associated with the Zapatista movement in Mexico, which mobilized world opinion in support of Indian peasants, and the Nobel Prizewinning effort to enact an anti-landmine treaty as examples of nonviolent netwar actions. Armed and violent swarms are another matter.

  The Chechen rebels in Russia, soccer hooligans in Britain, and the FARC guerrillas in Colombia also have used netwar strategy and swarming tactics.20 The U.S. military is in the forefront of smart mob technology development. The Land Warrior experiment is scheduled to field-test wearable computers with GPS and wireless communications by 2003.21 The Joint Expeditionary Digital Information (JEDI) program links troops on the ground directly to satellite communications. JEDI handheld devices combine laser range-finding, GPS location awareness, direct satellite telephone, and encrypted text messaging.22 Remember the DARPA-funded startup MeshNetworks from Chapter 6, the company whose technology enables military swarms to parachute onto a battlefield and self-organize an ad hoc peer-to-peer wireless network? Small teams of special forces, wirelessly networked and capable of calling in aircraft or missile strikes with increasing accuracy, were introduced by the United States and its allies in Afghanistan: netwar.