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July 19, 2017 - October 29, 2020
When people protest because of their great distrust of traditional institutions and electoral politics, as often happens today, their choice of participatory and antiauthoritarian methods of organizing is not simply an afterthought. Instead, the environments that demonstrators are quite deliberately fashioning are a major part of what makes participation in protest worthwhile.
Libraries express a set of values that are aligned with the deeply held values of the protesters.
Gezi protesters I interviewed often mentioned the presence of the library as a symbol of how the park was different from everything wrong with “out there.”
Perhaps more than anything, libraries represent a public good and a public space that is non-monetized and shared. In setting up the library, protesters also express a desire for people over profits or money, a slogan that comes up in many such protests.
From Toronto to Oakland to Hong Kong to Tahrir, libraries were among the first spaces protesters provisioned in occupied protest encampments, exactly because they encapsulated the spirit of the protest: that people can and should interact with one another and exchange ideas in a relationship not mediated by money.
Many people are drawn to protest camps because of the alienation they feel in their ordinary lives as consumers.
in most protest camps I visited or people told me about, there was always a surplus of donated food, clothes, blankets, and raincoats because people wanted to give.
Tahrir protesters repeatedly cleaned the square, even setting up recycling stations—and neither street cleaning nor formal recycling is common in Egypt.
There is a practical side to the popularity of cleaning in protest camps: authorities often claim that such protest camps are filthy and need to be closed because of unsanitary conditions. But beyond practical considerations, this incessant cleaning is a statement about the sense of sacredness of the space, and the prodigious amount of cleaning performed by activists in these places stems from that desire to protect their “home” and their space of rebellion.
Many protesters turn up to take part precisely because they desire to have a voice, have lost faith in delegating responsibility to others to act for them, and believe that all leaders will inevitably be corrupted or co-opted.
There was a widespread belief among protesters that the lack of leaders empowered to make decisions for the group was a positive feature.
People without jobs (and thus with time on their hands) tend to be overrepresented in assemblies. Over time, this imbalance leads to students becoming dominant blocs of influence, which can limit the scope of the movement.
The famous 1972 essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” by feminist Jo Freeman outlined how movements that eschew typical hierarchies become dominated by unaccountable leaders and informal and exclusionary friendship networks, often much like today’s horizontalist movements.
A protest, if nothing else, is a community.21 The evolution of community occupies a great deal of space in twentieth-century sociology.
Solnit recounts how the authorities sometimes respond to disaster scenarios with paranoia and repression, while ordinary people act with altruism and solidarity.
Obviously, protesters are not pining for death or threats, but rather for the interruption of ordinary life they experience under conditions of mutual altruism. Many protesters I talk with especially hold dear the moments when a total stranger helped them through tear gas, pressurized water, live bullets, camel attacks, or whatever came their way.
protests brought together people from very different walks of life, people who rarely had an opportunity to talk to one another.
A common media trope imagines connectivity devices functioning as mere “alienating screens.”28 In fact, especially in protests, they act as “integrating screens” because many people use their devices to connect with other people, not hide from them.
in the context of rebellion and protest, digital technologies play a fundamentally communitarian role.
even a hashtag storm can create a sense of belonging.
sometimes it is unclear whether online or offline protest is riskier. Tweeting a protest hashtag connects a person to the protest in a way that is more easily traceable by the authorities; while offline protest risks tear gas, online protests risks surveillance.
these protests are characterized by a desire for nonmarket human connections, participation, voice, agency, community, and diversity.
For protesters, digital tools and street protests are parts of the same reality.
They objected to the intense focus on technology’s role in social movements from an ethical viewpoint, arguing instead that the conversation should be about people fighting bravely to overthrow dictators against enormous odds.
They felt that the media was not giving Middle Eastern activists credit for the genuinely innovative and novel uses they had developed for these tools.
the influence of social and cultural factors on how we define race, a fluid category, does not mean that race as a category has no effects or is somehow unreal.
the powers-that-be may not even have to censor it in Iran. Facebook’s algorithmic environment would bury them, anyway.
A study based on a survey of Tahrir Square protesters—that I co-authored—confirms that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter drove the crucial early turnout of protesters in Tahrir Square that triggered the avalanche of dissent.
Internet-freedom advocate Rebecca MacKinnon was prescient in identifying the core problem: the growth of privately owned spaces that functioned as a new kind of public space, as if street corners or cafés where people gathered were owned by a few corporations.
The term “network effects” (or “network externalities”) is a shorthand for the principle that the more people who use a platform, the more useful that platform is to each user.
Now, one person can reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of people with a live feed on a cell phone but only as long as the corporate owners permit it and the algorithms that structure the platform surface it to a broad audience. Neither of these is always assured for political content.
Facebook’s decisions in the design of its algorithm have great power, especially because there is a tendency for users to stay within Facebook when they are reading the news, and they are often unaware that an algorithm is determining what they see.
if the content a social movement is trying to disseminate is not being shared widely, the creators do not know whether the algorithm is burying it, or whether their message is simply not resonating.
Algorithmic governance, it appears, is the future and the new overlords that social movements must grapple with.
Wang found that young people enter China’s vast, sprawling anonymous online networks, not necessarily for political communication, but for the moments of honest conversation they offer.
The Chinese authorities allow some political expression online as a pressure valve for the population, and also because they use it to keep abreast of the mood of the citizenry.
As with many of the issues I study, it is difficult to have a coherent and unified normative view or a simple rule that would apply in all cases that all doxing is good or bad by itself. There are always trade-offs. These judgments have to be made in the context of whose rights are allowed to trample whose, what ethical values will be protected and which ones disregarded.
Very few modern social movements succeed via brute force, and most of them do not seek such direct or violent conflict, which they would not win anyway.
Huge numbers of participants alone are not magic either, especially because there are always large numbers of people who are not participating in a protest as well.
The role of repression in countering social movements is crucial to all discussions of movement efficacy and impact, and should never be overlooked.
Strength of social movements lie in their capacities: to set the narrative, to affect electoral or institutional changes, and to disrupt the status quo.
The willingness (or lack of it) of police and the army to side with the government may be decisive at crucial turning points.
Even in more democratic capitalist societies, movements that threaten the interests of corporations or advertisers can find themselves left out of news coverage, a subtler form of censorship.
Unsurprisingly, there is a trend for people to become wary of representative democracy as a solution to social problems because they have seen it fail repeatedly.
Although disruption sounds as though it is generally a flash in the pan, disruptive acts sometimes continue for years, if not decades.
The Occupy movement had both strengths and weaknesses that were surprising. The movement quickly influenced the conversation (narrative capacity) in ways that were unusual for such a young movement, but it had little or no direct electoral or disruptive capacity (outside of a few minor incidents) in the immediate aftermath.
A search in Lexis, a news database, for the phrase “Occupy Wall Street” during the first weeks brings up more international articles about the movement than articles from the U.S. news.
The smarmy tone of early news coverage of Occupy—“protesting with faulty aim,” “till whenever”—signaled the possibility of a similar trajectory, in which the mass media would frame the movement as frivolous, or fringe events would drown out substantial and grave issues.
Occupy’s impressive narrative capacity was not matched by electoral or institutional capacity partly because of emergent conditions of the movement and partly because of the cumulative choices of its participants.
With little organizational structure, though, the movement could not easily undertake large-scale efforts beyond the occupation, its original step. It had no effective means to make decisions to do anything else, or any strategic capacity for shifting tactics.36 It did not signal an electoral, institutional, or disruptive threat to power.
