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August 20 - September 14, 2017
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.
Although the amount of repression that Occupy participants experienced was substantial, it was still far less than what many other movements, for example, the civil rights movement, underwent for many decades.
The work Occupy Sandy chose to undertake fit the sensibilities of the movement: mutual aid, solidarity and direct participation rather than representation, and a refusal to engage with bigger power structures except through distrust.
If Occupy had tried to engage in electoral or institutional politics in the period after 2011, it might have looked at representatives of another movement with effective political representation: the Tea Party.38
As discussed earlier, protests serve many functions, and one of them is to demonstrate to others that a belief is widely held and to break “pluralistic ignorance”—the notion that a private belief is held in isolation rather than shared by many others.
We can call such right-wing movements “status quo” movements: reactions to changing times and the loss of privilege, especially ethnic privilege.
Occupy and the Tea Party were both organized without formal structures, and neither had official leadership. Occupy, however, was composed of people who were thoroughly disillusioned with the electoral process and opposed to the idea of representation. “Tea Party Patriots” wanted the policy makers to represent them, and they intervened heavily in the electoral process, using online organizing tools and grassroots efforts, along with support from wealthy donors.
SOPA/PIPA seems to be a Cinderella story of online activism leading to change, but there are complications to the happy ending. Protests are powerful to the degree that they operate as signals of capacity to threaten or disrupt the machinery of power or to bring about outcomes the powerful would rather avoid.
Keep in mind that attention, not information per se, is the most crucial resource for a social movement.
For the government, the communications blackout did not achieve any of the key goals of censorship in the digital era: impeding attention, discouraging people from participation, and trying to deny protesters control over the narrative.
even has a name, the Streisand Effect from an incident in 2003, when Barbra Streisand attempted to keep images of her Malibu villa from appearing in a series of photographs of the California coastline—
To be effective, censorship in the digital era requires a reframing of the goals of censorship not as a total denial of access, which is difficult to achieve, but as a denial of attention, focus, and credibility.
Despite the possible ways to circumvent censorship, the information environment in many countries remains challenging for an ordinary person interested in finding and understanding credible and factual news reports.
Without traditional trusted institutional gatekeepers, it is quite difficult for an ordinary person to know what is true and what is a hoax, or who is reliable and who is untrustworthy.
Almost two thousand years ago, the Roman satirical poet Juvenal wrote about how people’s demands for representation could be diluted by “panem et circenses” (bread and circuses), that is, by providing distracting entertainment while also making sure that they were fed.
It has been widely reported that Russia’s government employs a huge number of people in what is often called an “army of trolls.”
Their failures were recognized as failures, or at least as departures from standards they were supposed to uphold. However, these failures have contributed to declining trust in traditional media, making the public sphere even more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns.
The result is a frayed, incoherent, and polarized public sphere that can be hostile to dissent because the incoherence displaces politics. Unlike mass media failures, it is often not even clear who to hold responsible, or how to improve the situations.
The United States has often been accused of deliberately spreading misinformation against regimes it wanted to overthrow or destabilize in many countries.
The final effect is often not credulity that leans toward any one set of alleged facts, but a sense within people that the truth is simply unknowable, and an attitude of resignation that leads to withdrawal from politics and to a paralysis of action. This may well serve the powerful since those who want to bring about change need to convince people, whereas those who want to stay in power may need only to paralyze them into inaction.
In Russia, too, a poll found that only 17 percent of the respondents received their information about Russia’s involvement in Ukraine from the internet, and over half of the population believed the Russian mass media to be unbiased.
Information flows can also be hampered by the lack of intermediaries who can verify information and distinguish credible information from not credible—the role traditional journalism is supposed to serve, however imperfect in practice.
Activists made errors, jumped to conclusions and retweeted dubious claims without checking. Misinformation spread.
I heard similar stories from activists around the world: that citizen media were becoming less useful, not because there were fewer reports, but because there was an enormous increase in challenges to their credibility, ranging from reasonable questions to outrageous and clearly false accusations.
astroturfing (when corporations or governments pay people to create the appearance of grassroots efforts), direct nation-state intervention, or direct corporate campaigns.
They funded NGOs that acted as fronts for their industry, and they commissioned reports that were used by the press to support an “on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand” type of “balanced” reporting that presented the matter to the general public as an issue for doubt and debate long after scientific consensus had actually been reached.
One key lesson from the past is that our familiarity with a new and rapidly spreading technologies is often superficial, and the full ramifications of these technologies are far from worked out.
“The social media is always highlighted for its role in the Arab spring, especially in the Egyptian revolution. Well, I think it is time to let the world know that the social media is also destroying the Arab Spring.”
The moral of this story isn’t that “fake news” definitely swung the US election in 2016, or somehow the past was an ideal place of only facts and reasoned dialogue in the public sphere.
Perhaps the best approach is not to seek unified overarching answers, but to identify and delineate mechanisms and dynamics introduced by these new technologies and how they entangle with political, social, and cultural forces, with the aid of empirically grounded conceptual tools like those I and others have attempted to provide.
As Nobel Prize–winning economist Herbert Simon wrote in 1971, in an information-rich world, the real scarcity is in attention, and the key question is how “to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”28
All of this feeds political conflict, which is now deeply personal as well.
Activists must go where people are, and network effects mean that once a platform gathers a larger user base, it effectively shuts out competition.
instead of an aware public, there is often a lot of distraction, confusion, and partisan polarization about which claims are true.
Muddying the waters is often good enough for the powerful.
