Power, for All

by Julie Battilana

  In addition to ideals of equality, the activists harnessed another intangible resource to expand their networks: solidarity. Attending community meetings, bringing supporters to protests organized by other movements, advocating for these movements’ demands—solidarity is a highly valued resource, especially among activists. The Federation consistently showed up in solidarity with retirees, union workers, migrant groups, people with disabilities, Afro Argentinians, and others. In this way, they not only developed strong relationships with activists in other movements, but also won the support of many people who were initially opposed to gay rights. Additionally, the support of larger, more established social movements gave the Federation leverage over legislators, because they had more control over an invaluable political resource: votes. This strategy paid off, when the head of the country’s largest labor union—“a burly truck driver,” as María described him—publicly declared his support for marriage equality in the weeks leading up to the Senate’s vote.

  To change the country’s hearts and minds in favor of marriage equality, one more ally was essential: the media. María and her peers enlisted their support by giving them access to a resource they are always hungry for: personal, emotional stories that couples who had been together for decades despite being unable to marry were willing to share publicly. “I remember one of our first couples,” María told us. “They were both living with HIV and needed marriage in order to share their social security benefits. Their story showed people why the law for marriage equality mattered.” Once a couple thoroughly understood the proposed law and was able to defend it, they would invite the press along with all their family members and friends to the Civil Register, where they would request to be married. They were denied, of course. But the moment provided an opportunity to humanize the struggle by linking the law to the stories of real people who suffered from this injustice.

  Neuroscientists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock have studied the role of transportation, the extent to which people are engrossed in a story and connect with its characters, in changing their beliefs and perceptions of the story’s protagonists. The evidence supported their hypothesis that transportation—characterized by emotional reactions, mental imagery, connection with the characters, and focus on the narrative—has a persuasive effect. Study participants who were transported into stories about the importance of loyalty and friendship, for instance, exhibited stronger belief in loyalty and friendship as well as positive perceptions of the protagonists, even when no such moral was explicit.36 This insight crystalizes one reason stories can be a source of power for movements: They help to build empathy and support for the cause, expanding its ranks, exactly what María hoped for.

  The Catholic Church did not stand by quietly as marriage equality activists launched this historic campaign. The Church used its deep pockets and even deeper network of influence in government, the media, and the population to rally opposition. María and her co-organizers had another detractor as well, one from within their ranks: A subset of gay rights organizations were advocating with legislators for the more politically viable option of civil union. “Our own became our biggest adversaries,” María fumed. The risk the movement faced was that their demand would be diluted—a risk orchestrators often face as they try to address the needs and desires of various groups in their coalition.37 The balance between expanding the ranks of the movement to tip the scales of change, while maintaining the loyalty of the most ardent supporters, is an issue most orchestrators have to grapple with. María and the Federation overcame this risk by refusing to compromise. They were confident in their approach, because they had been warned of the risk and advised how to deal with it by the activists with whom they had connected in 2005, when Spain won same-sex marriage: Do not settle for civil unions, even when members of your movement try to make you.

  The tension between the two factions escalated until the final months before the vote. But the proponents of civil unions could not match the Federation’s orchestration prowess, and “when they saw we were gaining momentum, they jumped on board. Not everyone in our team agreed that we should take them back and give them a platform, and our meetings stretched loudly into the night. But ultimately, we were laser focused on passing the law. That’s what mattered most.” So they welcomed them into the movement, even introducing the law together to the Senate on the day of the vote.

  This moment underscores another trap orchestrators must avoid. People who have played the role of agitators, as many in the movement for marriage equality had, can struggle to pivot from raising public awareness and condemning those who uphold the status quo to broadening the coalition and uniting the different parts of the movement. The change in posture from an agitator’s “us vs. them” identity to an orchestrator’s stance as mediator and unifier is essential, as María understood; but it can be a tricky shift for agitators to make.38

  The movement’s extensive network building positioned the Federation at the center of a growing coalition. A joint letter, signed by the most prominent human rights organizations, was sent to congressional legislators in support of the law. The country’s largest unions publicly announced their support in the media. The country’s leading university urged legislators, on human rights grounds, to extend the right to marriage to same-sex couples. Spanish LGBTQ+ activists sent a delegation to testify to the importance of the law. Coupled with the media stories, support from telenovela celebrities and other public figures, 70 percent of Argentines supported the law by the time of the vote.39

  “In 2010, we achieved legal equality,” María recounted, “but there is a long way to go for real equality. Women gained legal equality a long time ago, and yet we’re still waiting for the day when we will actually be treated equally. It’s the same for the LGBT+ community. We need to continue fighting for public policies and we need to keep working to bring about a cultural change. Sustaining the engagement is necessary, but difficult.” This is the final hurdle: movement fatigue. After the novelty of being in the media and the urgency of outright injustice fade, sustaining active participation can be challenging, let alone expanding the membership base. Surmounting this hurdle comes down to persevering, so that the movement is ready to respond and drive change whenever opportunities arise. To this end, its members must continue to agitate to stimulate outrage, innovate to adapt to a changing context, and orchestrate change in the status quo.

  IS IT GETTING ANY EASIER?

  The twenty-first century has ushered in an explosion of online agitation. Following the revelation of sexual abuse allegations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein in early October 2017, the #MeToo movement took off with incredible speed, its hashtag spreading across the world in just a few days. In France and Belgium, it became #BalanceTonPorc, in Spain and Latin America, it was #YoTambien, in Italy #QuellaVoltaChe. Women finally had a powerful channel to voice their stories of sexual harassment and assault, and be heard, as public shame brought previously untouchable men tumbling from their positions. In its first year, the hashtag was used an average of more than fifty-five thousand times a day in at least eighty-five countries.40 But it is a mistake to think that the #MeToo movement happened online overnight. Sexual assault survivor and activist Tarana Burke launched it a decade earlier to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and assault. When Hollywood stars and prestigious institutions like the New York Times shone a light on the issue, Tarana’s essential work was initially overlooked until outraged activists agitated to set the record straight and give her the credit she deserved, propelling her into the spotlight.

  There is no question that social media platforms have made it easier for Tarana and other activists to agitate, congregate, and share. But, as a seasoned activist and community organizer, Tarana was quick to point out to us the limits of digital activism.41 Despite their mobilizing potential, social media can pose risks even for agitators, since messages aimed to enlist others’ support for the cause may reach only those who already agree. People’s pr
eferences, combined with algorithms and machine learning, tend to reinforce online divides. Knowing how important it is for movements to mobilize broad bases of support and build far-reaching coalitions, the challenge for agitators in the digital era is to share information with new audiences and across groups not connected to one another.

  Innovators face risks as well. Though their innovations can be more broadly disseminated and shared in a digital world, technical fixes rarely change deeply rooted power hierarchies.42 Even when technology is part of the solution, change is always a political matter. Yet the advent of the digital age has led many innovators to overemphasize technological solutions to problems—a trend we’ve seen among the social innovators with whom we have been working over the past fifteen years.

  As for orchestrators, technology offers useful tools for connecting with various constituencies and building coalitions. In particular, social media make it simple for people to engage in “click activism,” in which individuals are encouraged to “click,” “like,” or “share” items on social media in support of change.43 Yet as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci notes, “Modern networked movements can scale up quickly and take care of all sorts of logistical tasks without building any substantial organizational capacity before the first protest or march… However, with this speed comes weakness.”44 Without the long and grueling work of movement building, participants risk having shallow connections and little experience in collective decision-making, strategizing, communicating, and organizing, all of which play a critical role in ensuring a movement’s resilience and effectiveness. In The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, Alicia Garza, the cofounder of Black Lives Matter, goes to the heart of this challenge: “You cannot start a movement from a hashtag. Hashtags do not start movements—people do. Movements do not have official moments when they start and end, and there is never just one person who initiates them. Movements are much more like waves than they are like light switches. [They] ebb and flow.”45

  Ultimately, the power of movements comes not from merely assembling large numbers of people, but from using their sustained collective action to influence people’s beliefs and behaviors and effect change.46 This requires understanding what these people need and want, and figuring out how to use the power of banding together to control access to those valued resources.47 The successful movements we analyzed in this chapter were able to do that. As Marshall Ganz eloquently puts it, for movements, “it is the ability to capitalize on opportunities by turning the resources one has into the power one needs, which transforms possibility into results.”48 While the ascent of new technologies has created new opportunities for collective movements to gain and exercise power, in some parts of the world they have also made it much harder for social change-makers to be heard. In the hands of dictators, new technologies have become tools of surveillance and censorship whose effectiveness is unprecedented. Depending on who controls them and what they are used for, new technologies may either enhance the power of collective movements or constrain them.

  What is true for collective movements is also true for every one of us. New technologies can empower us or oppress us, depending on who controls access to them and what they are used for. Let’s see how.

  Chapter 7 Power Doesn’t Change—It Just Changes Hands

  When everything seems to be changing at breakneck speed, the resulting uncertainty may lead us to believe that power must be changing too. Sure enough, this is a common assumption. In 2013, as traditionally powerful institutions and players were losing clout to nimbler grassroots entities, journalist and scholar Moisés Naím declared that the end of power was upon us: “In the twenty-first century,” he wrote, “power is easier to get, harder to use—and easier to lose.”1 In a similar vein, five years later, entrepreneur and political activist Jeremy Heimans and social impact executive Henry Timms argued that connectivity has brought forth a new form of power: networked, informal, collaborative, transparent, and participatory. It is the kind of power that lives through the energy of the crowd, the kind #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have harnessed. Its opposite, the two authors say, is “old power”: closed, inaccessible, and mostly hierarchical.2

  Whether the end of power or the emergence of new power, both analyses aptly describe important shifts in where power is located and how it can be exercised today. But as you will see, power itself hasn’t changed. The changes we are witnessing are just another manifestation of the power fundamentals that are always at work.

  THE FUNDAMENTALS OF POWER ARE TIMELESS

  Consider two technological shifts that transformed how humans live and relate to one another. The first occurred about ten thousand years ago, when the agricultural revolution—the farming of crops and the domestication of animals—turned our ancestors away from nomadic wandering to permanent settlements.3 No longer required to spend every waking hour searching for food, a few group members could now engage in activities other than hunting and gathering. The agricultural revolution changed the distribution of power on two levels: geographically, by favoring societies rich in farming resources, like domesticated animals, crops, and farming technology; and within those societies, by liberating a new social class to devote their time to intellectual, technical, commercial, and political pursuits that further consolidated their hold on power.4

  Much later, in the mid-1400s, the course of human society was radically changed again by the invention of movable type. Gutenberg’s invention spread like wildfire, with entrepreneurs who had learned to build and operate the new technology opening printing shops in commercial centers across Western Europe. Merchants, literate peasants, and intellectuals alike could now access and share unprecedented amounts of information. Scribes, however, were displeased: For centuries, they had been guardians of knowledge, thanks to their unique ability to read, write, and copy sacred texts. Now that ability was becoming increasingly obsolete. In 1492, the German abbot Johannes Trithemius wrote In Praise of Scribes to express his concern that the loss of handwritten transcription harmed the spiritual development of monks, because copying both occupied them and exposed them to constant learning, and to decry the inferior material and aesthetic quality of printed books.5

  It was a losing battle: In the fifty years following Gutenberg’s invention, millions of books were printed in Europe with far-reaching consequences, including the democratization of knowledge and the acceleration of cultural movements like the Renaissance and religious movements like the Protestant Reformation.6 Even those who opposed the invention, like Johannes Trithemius, couldn’t resist its appeal. Some say that even In Praise of Scribes was disseminated not through handwritten copies, but by the very machine its author decried in the text!

  As each of these waves of technological change dramatically altered people’s lives, something else changed too: the power map. For those who experienced these disruptive changes in real time, the shift was both exhilarating and overwhelming. Different as those changes were, they were driven by the same dynamic: What made the farmers, landowners, and printers powerful was their control of access to newly valued resources. From one period to another, the pattern remains the same: Each era of technological change creates new resources that become highly valued. In turn, those who control these new resources—either because they know how to operate them, or because they own them—have tremendous power. This is why technological changes shift the distribution of power.

  Power changes hands for other reasons as well, of course. Natural events, for one, have upended the distribution of power on our planet time and again, sometimes in an instant (as when the impact of a massive asteroid sixty-six million years ago annihilated the dinosaurs that had dominated the earth for 135 million years), and sometimes over the course of centuries (as when volcanic eruptions in the late 530s CE darkened Europe’s skies7, causing dramatic cooling that intensified the political and social upheaval following the fall of the Western Roman Empire). But when it comes to human-made changes in the distribution of power,
for better or worse, technology is perhaps the biggest power-shifter of all. And that has never been truer than now.

  TECHNOLOGY CHANGES POWER MAPS

  Nezuma was born on the island of Unguja, off the coast of Zanzibar, in a village with but one road leading in and out. Though she had never planned to leave her community, in 2016, the mother of six moved twenty miles away to Kinyasini, to study to become a solar engineer. After five months of training, she returned to her village bringing a hitherto unavailable and most valuable resource: electricity.

  How had Nezuma, who was illiterate, become a solar engineer? The answer can be found more than three thousand miles away, in India, where social activist and educator Bunker Roy founded Barefoot College. Bunker, who recalled having “a very elitist, snobbish, expensive education”8 in India’s private schools, believes that his real education started in 1966, when massive droughts and crop failures led to devastating famines in the provinces of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. That was when he decided to dedicate his life to helping poor rural communities become self-reliant.

  At first Bunker contributed by digging open wells for drinking water. But he was convinced that, given the opportunity, the villagers he was working with could be trained to use even the most sophisticated technologies, and he was determined not to allow illiteracy to get in the way. In 1972, he came up with an idea: suppose there were a special kind of school, focused on educating and training poor, rural people through learning by doing. That same year, he created the non-governmental organization, Barefoot College, to orchestrate the implementation of his vision. Its first training center was established in India, where visionary educator and dedicated teacher Bagewat Nanda Sevedan developed innovative pedagogical tools to enable students to learn by doing. Other training centers followed in Burkina Faso, Madagascar, Liberia, Guatemala, Fiji, Senegal, and Zanzibar, which is how Nezuma got the opportunity to study and become a solar engineer.