by Paul Mason
Now, as formerly, students live in garrets, bohemians in lodgings, physicians without patients and lawyers without clients in lonely offices … so many Brissots, Marats, Dantons, Robespierres, and St Justs in embryo. Only for lack of air and sunshine they never come to maturity.8
Taine put his finger on what, in 1789, had turned the normal rebelliousness of impoverished graduates into a force that would reshape the world. He saw that the ‘worm-eaten barriers [had] cracked all at once’. Technology, social change, institutional decay had unleashed something bigger than teenage angst.
If this sounds like an eighteenth-century version of the ‘death of deference’ complaint, well, it was. A deep social crisis was under way, then as now. But with one big difference: today, in every garret there is a laptop.
The Jacobin with a laptop
There has been high prominence given to technology and social media in explanations of the global unrest—and for good reason. Social media and new technology were crucial in shaping the revolutions of 2011, just as they shaped industry, finance and mass culture in the preceding decade. What’s important is not that the Egyptian youth used Facebook, or that the British students used Twitter and the Greek rioters organized via Indymedia, but what they used these media for—and what such technology does to hierarchies, ideas and actions.
Here, the crucial concept is the network—whose impact on politics has been a long time coming. The network’s basic law was explained by Bell Telephone boss Theodore Vail as early as 1908: the more people who use the network, the more useful it becomes to each user. This is known as the ‘network effect’: what it describes is the creation, out of two people’s interaction, of a ‘third thing’ which comes for free. Because network theory originated in the boardroom, this ‘third thing’ has tended to be identified in terms of economic value. But, in recent years, it has become clear it can provide much more than that.
There’s another difference: when it was first theorized by Vail’s technologists, the ‘network effect’ seemed like a by-product, a happy accident. Today we are conscious users and promoters of the network effect. Everyone who uses information technology understands that they are—whether at work, on Facebook, on eBay or in a multiplayer game—a ‘node’ on a network: not a foot-soldier, not a bystander, not a leader, but a multitasking version of all three.
Vail’s customers probably had no idea that, by buying and using telephones, they were enhancing the technology’s value for others and creating spin-off effects for Bell’s other businesses (what are now termed ‘network externalities’). Nowadays, many of us have a very clear understanding of all this. The result is that, in the past ten years, the ‘network effect’ has blasted its way out of corporate economics and into sociology.
The most obvious impact has been on the media and ideology. Long before people started using Twitter to foment social unrest, mainstream journalists noticed—to their dismay—that the size of one’s public persona or pay cheque carried no guarantee of popularity online. People’s status rises and falls with the reliability and truthfulness of what they contribute. This is a classic network effect—but it is not measurable as profit and loss.
If you look at the full suite of information tools that were employed to spread the revolutions of 2009–11, it goes like this: Facebook is used to form groups, covert and overt—in order to establish those strong but flexible connections. Twitter is used for real-time organization and news dissemination, bypassing the cumbersome ‘newsgathering’ operations of the mainstream media. YouTube and the Twitter-linked photographic sites—Yfrog, Flickr and Twitpic—are used to provide instant evidence of the claims being made. Link-shorteners like bit.ly are used to disseminate key articles via Twitter.
And the democracy of retweeting (or sharing on Facebook) filters out the trash. In this way, key contributions to the dialogue that’s going on around the action get promoted as if by acclaim, as happened to the original ‘Twenty Reasons’ blog post. Activists describe this process as ‘memetic’, drawing on Richard Dawkins’ proposal of information ‘memes’: ideas that behave like genes, fighting for survival and mutating in the process.
Underpinning the social media is mobile telephony: in the crush of every crowd we see arms holding cellphones in the air, like small flocks of ostriches, snapping scenes of repression or revolt, offering instant and indelible image-capture to a global audience. Cellphones provide the basic white sliced bread of insurrectionary communications: SMS. SMS allows you to post to Twitter, or to microblogs, even if you don’t have Internet access and can’t read the results. Texting is traceable, of course. But as all fans of The Wire understand, you can thwart surveillance if you use a cheap, pay-as-you-go handset, which you can throw away if you’re in a tight corner. What’s more, for many of the impoverished youth and slum dwellers, pay-as-you-go is all they can afford.
Finally, there is blogging. Though blogging was an early form of social media and has been heavily colonized by the mainstream press, 2011 saw a revival of what was essential about the format: the ability to express your own agenda through montaging stills, movies, words and links to create indelible statements of attitude and contempt. In some countries, residually, bulletin boards have played a role: the Athenian revolt of December 2008 was initially organized through newsflashes on the Indymedia bulletin board.
Blogs have been most influential in the Arab world, where the mainstream press has been subject to various degrees of censorship and self-censorship. But in all the theatres of revolution, blogs have offered that vital resource: somewhere to link to. They have become, like the newspapers of the nineteenth century, journals of record. Their impact can be measured by the fact that, in 2011, 7 per cent of Middle Eastern bloggers surveyed reported they’d been arrested by their respective security forces.9
The ability to deploy, without expert knowledge, a whole suite of information tools has allowed protesters across the world to outwit the police, to beam their message into the newsrooms of global media, and above all to assert a cool, cutting-edge identity in the face of what Auden once called ‘the elderly rubbish dictators talk’. It has given today’s protest movements a massive psychological advantage, one that no revolt has enjoyed since 1968.
Suddenly, the form of today’s protests seems entirely congruent with the way people live their lives. It is modern; it is immune to charges of ‘resisting progress’. Indeed, it utilizes technology that is so essential to modern work and leisure, governments cannot turn it off without harming their national economies. And, as Mubarak, Gaddafi and the Bahraini royals discovered, even turning it off does not work.
Because—and here is the technological fact that underpins the social and political aspects of what’s happened—a network can usually defeat a hierarchy.
The pioneer of network theory, Walter Powell, summed up the reasons for this as follows: the network is better at adapting to a situation where the quality of information is crucial to success, but where information itself is fluid; a hierarchy is best if you are only transmitting orders and responses, and the surrounding situation is predictable. Above all, ‘as information passes through a network, it is both freer and richer [than in a hierarchy]; new connections, new meanings are generated, debated and evaluated.’10
However, the early network theorists were only studying the advantages of, say, collaborative workshops in the textile industry versus big factories. Now we are studying networks with many millions of individual nodes, and they are in conflict with states. Once information networks become ‘social’, the implications are massive: truth can now travel faster than lies, and all propaganda becomes instantly flammable.
Sure, you can try and insert spin or propaganda, but the instantly networked consciousness of millions of people will set it right: they act like white blood cells against infection so that ultimately the truth, or something close to it, persists much longer than disinformation.
In fact, this quality of Twitter means, according to the South
Korean authors of the first data-based study of it, that it is not really a ‘social network’ but more like a news service. Services like Flickr, MSN and Yahoo involve a high level of ‘reciprocity’, since about 70 per cent of relationships are two-way. Facebook is constructed in such a way that this reciprocity is 100 per cent: I ‘friend’ you, you ‘friend’ me. On Twitter, by contrast, only about 22 per cent of relationships are two-way—there is a much higher ratio of ‘followers’ to those being followed.11
A second implication is that forms of protest can change rapidly. Whereas the basic form of, say, a Leninist party, a guerrilla army or even a ghetto riot has not changed in a century, once you use social networks the organizational format of revolt goes into constant flux. Even in the period between the Iranian uprisings of July 2009 and the time of writing (autumn 2011), changes have taken place in the way protesters use social media, in the way rioting is directed (as with the ‘Blackberry riots’ in England in 2011), in the way people evade Internet shutdowns and in the tools used for ‘denial of service’ attacks by hackers.
Indeed, during the actual course of the Iranian uprising of 2009, the ways of using social media visibly evolved. Protesters called the process ‘wave creation’, using email, blogs and SMS to evolve the protests in real time. Looking at this phenomenon, Stanford scholar Saeid Golkar concludes:
The Internet enables users to suggest new mechanisms to expand protests and gather feedback on these suggestions. On one hand, this makes the movement more flat and democratic, and on the other hand, it makes its activities more rational, with lower costs of action.12
As the real-world revolt was suppressed, activists took to the digital rooftops: launching ‘Googlebombs’ against Ahmadinejad and cyber-attacks on government websites, while putting psychological pressure on members of the repressive forces by naming them and disseminating their details. In response—in what remains the best-documented example outside China of cyber-repression—the regime trawled Facebook for the identities of activists, unleashed cyber-attacks against their networks and instructed 10,000 members of the Basij militia to set up their own, rival, blogosphere.13
The new technology, then, makes possible a new relationship among protesters themselves and between protesters and the mainstream media, and gives protest movements increased leverage over NGOs, multilateral bodies and guarantors of international law. It provides instant evidence of truth and can facilitate swift neutralization of lies, including those of state propaganda. All this, however, is only a side- effect of the much bigger change this technology has brought about: the change in human behaviour.
The iconic image of this decade is a young person sitting in Starbucks, her face blue from the screenlight of a MacBook. She could be hanging out, composing chart-busting electro-pop, creating more value than the whole Starbucks branch with some high-tech research project; or planning a revolution.
To an older generation, steeped in the culture of collectivism, these Starbucks Kids were the epitome of egotistic isolation. But it turns out these young people were not wasting their time: they were pioneering a major expansion in the power of the individual human being.
The networked revolution
In the middle of the biggest upsurge in labour protests for a decade, it seems impolite to mention the name of André Gorz. Gorz was a French Marxist who for twenty years was spat on by left commentators for writing a book entitled Farewell to the Working Class (1980).
Gorz asserted that the old proletariat had been dissolved by modern technology and that the class struggle would be replaced by individual personal politics. He was wrong: the world economy has created 1.5 billion extra workers since his book was written. He was also wrong to claim that capitalism was destroying skilled work. And yet parts of the book now bear rereading, in particular Gorz’s definition of revolution:
Taking power implies taking it away from its holders, not by occupying their posts but by making it permanently impossible for them to keep their machinery of domination running. Revolution is first and foremost the irreversible destruction of this machinery. It implies a form of collective practice capable of bypassing and superseding it through the development of an alternative network of relations.14
By this definition we are in the middle of a revolution: something wider than a pure political overthrow and narrower than the classic social revolutions of the twentieth century. Out of the very values and practices of free-market capitalism—individualism, choice, respect for human rights, the network, the flattened hierarchy—the masses have developed a new collective practice. They can bypass and supersede the machinery of power via, as Gorz predicted, an ‘alternative network of relations’.
In the space often years a whole new form of behaviour, consumption, culture and even human consciousness has sprung up which has changed our attitudes to hierarchies and to property. It is already possible to find, on any demonstration, self-described ‘communists’ for whom the idea of a Leninist party is alien. Every nightclub contains people—maybe even a majority of people—who are happy to pay the entrance fee, and for their drugs, but who find the idea of paying to own the music itself as, again, incomprehensible.
The network, in short, has begun to erode power relationships we had come to believe were permanent features of capitalism: the helplessness of the consumer, the military-style hierarchy of boss and underlings at work, the power of mainstream media empires to shape ideology, the repressive capabilities of the state and the inevitability of monopolization by large corporations.
Richard Sennett, writing in 2004, believed the destruction of hierarchical work and its replacement by consumption as the main source of self-esteem had been wholly negative:
The insurgents of my youth believed that by dismantling institutions they could produce communities: face-to-face relations of truth and solidarity … This certainly has not happened. The fragmenting of big institutions has left many people’s lives in a fragmented state. Taking institutions apart has not produced more community.15
But what we’ve seen since then, above all in the events of 2009–11, are revolts led by fragmented and precarious people. They have used the very technologies that produced the atomized lifestyle in the first place to produce communities of resistance.
And here’s where it becomes essential to understand what that ‘third thing’ is, that gift arising from network relationships. To the business gurus, it was only ever profit: but to individuals it is something else. It’s been described as a ‘free dose of personal well-being’.
Technically, when we participate in e-commerce, we’re just nodes in a consumer network—bidding for bargains on eBay, buying stuff on iTunes or Amazon. In return we are contributing not only money but our own intellectual property for free, in the form of reviews or star ratings (or even just our behaviour, surreptitiously logged by the company’s CRM systems). The raw trade-off is that if I contribute a truthful review of an item I have bought, I might find an equally truthful one of something I would like to buy. But, as everyone involved intuitively understands, you are not just in it for the raw trade-off. There is a third ‘party’ in the transaction and that is the network, or community, itself. The transaction leaves a residue of collaboration.
Now, this understanding of the intangible, hidden value inside the network relationship has begun to permeate not just commerce and work, but protest. When doomed graduates, precarious workers and the poor use social networks to coordinate protests, they are waging a human fight-back against the atomizing effects of the modern marketplace.
However, there is a problem. Networked protests—as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his famous New Yorker diatribe against them—have the same downside as modern work and culture: they promote only ‘weak ties’.16
That is, they reduce the level of commitment needed to be involved in anything. They allow users to adopt multiple identities, a pick-and-mix attitude to commitment, a kind of learned mercuriality. They allow instant concentration upon a targe
t (as with Tahrir Square, or the Manet painting at London’s National Gallery), but equally instant fragmentation and dispersal. They make every action the subject of negotiation between the participants: unlike with an infantry battalion or a trade union, you cannot assume the support of the same group of people who acted together before.
Gladwell’s attack on social networks is an attempt to defend the old, hierarchical forms of organizing in the face of this new reality. He writes:
The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy.17
However, some military theorists have concluded the opposite. They have noticed that even where ties are weak, individuals can come together in ways more effective than the old hierarchical models allowed. They have noted that ‘swarm’ tactics often defeat hierarchical structures—even where the hierarchy has greater strength and a better information system.
In Millennium Challenge 2002, a military exercise conducted by the USA, an opposing force modelled on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard controversially ‘defeated’ the US Navy by using swarm tactics. It ‘sank’ an aircraft carrier and half of the American fleet by concentrating every single cruise missile onto a single target. It broadcast commands verbally from minarets, instead of using radios; it dispatched motorcycle couriers; it mounted Silkworm missiles on pleasure boats and launched suicide attacks with propeller planes. Defeat prompted the US general staff to halt the exercise, ‘refloat’ the fleet and change the rules. The elderly genius who’d designed the swarm attack—Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper—resigned, warning the Bush administration that it had no clue about how to deal with the modern world.18