Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere Read online

  The past ten years have seen disruptions in the pattern of social life that mirror what happened in that era. But this time, it’s happening at high velocity and across the canvas of all humanity.

  What the new Zeitgeist clashes with are the power relations of the old hierarchical world. And this is the materialist explanation for 2011: it is as much about individuals versus hierarchies as it is about rich against poor.

  The Masai with a mobile

  The driver of behavioural change has been technology. There’s been a revolution in the recording, storing and searchability of information; in the networked availability of information; in the digitization and globalization of commercial transactions; and finally, through social networking, in the ability to form connections away from the old hierarchical channels of the past. In each technology, the ‘node’—or individual—has been empowered at the expense of the hierarchical central core, which is the state or corporation—or even the tribe.

  When I travelled across Kenya in 2007, following the cellphone signal from Mombasa into the Rift Valley, it was clear that mobile telephony was causing a micro-level social upheaval. I met minibus drivers suddenly able to contact their bosses when pulled over by corrupt police in search of bribes; hairdressers who, by simply collecting the cellphone numbers of their clients, had freed themselves from the decades-old tyranny of the ‘madam’ who owns the parlour; slum dwellers mobilizing by text message to fight evictions; villagers able to receive cash remittances at the touch of a button through a cellphone money-transfer system.

  Even in the red dust of Masai country, tribespeople living in mud and grass huts had been able to procure cheap Chinese cellphones, which they charged using solar power. One woman explained how life had changed:

  You can phone up your cowhand to see how your cattle are doing. If somebody is sick you can phone an ambulance. But the biggest change is that the husbands have learned how to use that button which tells you who has called. Now they get jealous: they go through the list and say: ‘Who is that person, and who is that?’

  The ‘Masai with a mobile’ has become one of the iconic marketing cliché of the early twenty-first century, but the change it describes is real: a revolution in property relations, sexual relations and even language itself. After I’d finished the report, I met a Masai lawyer and asked him whether I might make a documentary about the effect of mobile telecoms on the Masai language. ‘Be quick,’ he said; ‘some dialects will be gone within three years.’

  Technology—through the web browser, the cellphone, the GPS device, the iPod, the instant messaging service, the digital camera and above all the smartphone, which contains each of these things—has accelerated what the contraceptive pill and divorce laws started: it has expanded the power and space of the individual.

  At the same time, it has allowed the creation of virtual ‘societies’ just as real as the cramped analog social networks we created for ourselves in the pre-digital era.

  If this had happened at any time in history, it would have felt like a cultural revolution. But coming as it did amid the collapse of what sociologist Robert Putnam called ‘social capital’—the atrophy of voluntary organizations, from village fetes to trade unions8—it has felt like a handbrake turn for humanity.

  And it has happened fast. In fact, the real rush forward took place in the years of imminent crisis. Launching in 2004, Facebook achieved its 100 millionth user in 2008, and at the time of writing has 750 million users. In other words, Facebook has put on six-sevenths of its user base in the three years after Lehman Brothers went bust.9 Twitter was launched in 2006; it took until 2008 for its users to send one billion tweets; by 2011 there were 250 million users, sending one billion tweets a week.10

  The rush was particularly acute in the Arab world. In the three years before the crisis, Internet access in the region mushroomed, from 33 to 48 per cent of the population. Facebook opened an Arabic-language facility in mid-2009; within a year it had 3.5 million Arabic-language users, and at time of writing has 9 million. The English-language usage of Facebook in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region is even more startling: there are 56 million Facebook members, totaling 16 per cent of the region’s population. Nineteen million of them joined in 2010.11

  How has it affected the lives of ordinary people? Listen to @sarrahsworld, the twenty-two-year-old Egyptian drama student whose video blog became a cult after the fall of Mubarak:

  I think my morale, my general mood is so connected and parallel to how Egypt is doing. I wake up to check Twitter. In fact this is how I get myself to wake up. Before 25 January I had 200 followers on Twitter; now, I have 13,000. It took off because of my video blog on YouTube. Most of the viewers are male, aged 18–23 and from Egypt, but you’d be surprised at the people that see this: some people just get it on their phone. A doorman ran up to me and said, I recognize you from YouTube. But he’s illiterate and I’m going: how? He said, someone sent it to my cellphone via Bluetooth.

  And listen to @littlemisswilde, aged twenty-one, who ran the occupation Twitter feed at University College London. She could write the story of her life through social media, she tells me: Bebo as a kid, MySpace as a teenager. Her sisters know nothing else but Facebook, and move around it frighteningly unconscious that it’s new: ‘For me it’s second nature—I tweet in my dreams. I can’t imagine where it’s going next, but it’s completely inseparable from my personality. In the future, when a child is born it will just be given a Twitter account.’

  A social laboratory of the self

  The power of social networks to alter consciousness was noticed first among those who took part in, and studied, computer games in the 1980s. Gamers, together with hackers, were the first cohort of people who used information technology to form ‘affinity groups’. And the most perceptive among them were able to capture early on the changes in behaviour and thought-patterns that we now see as mass phenomena. Psychoanalyst Sherry Turkle used the metaphor of ‘windows’ and the experience of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs—the early text-based online games) to propose that the Internet had become a ‘social laboratory of the self, allowing users to live parallel and multiple lives:

  The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times … [There is] a de-centred self that exists in many worlds and plays many roles at the same time … The experience of this parallelism encourages treating on-screen and off-screen lives with a surprising degree of equality.12

  Science writer Margaret Wertheim proposed that this parallel self could be just as ‘real’ as the physical self, arguing that in the creation of online communities, humanity has begun to create ‘a collective mental arena’:

  We are witnessing here the birth of a new domain, a space that simply did not exist before … If the self ‘continues’ into cyberspace … it becomes almost like a fluid, leaking out around us all the time and joining each of us into a vast ocean, or web, of relationships with other leaky selves.13

  In the 1990s, these early sociologists of Internet consciousness documented nearly every behaviour pattern we now see in social networks: multiple personalities, masquerading, stalking, community formation, intense personal relationships, seeing the online world as real, or hyper-real, and the prevalence of utopian schemes. But theirs was a niche world inhabited by the techno-elite; it seems prehistoric now.

  For social media has moved the ‘collective mental arena’, with its intense interpersonal bonds, from the realm of gaming and fantasy into the world of everyday interaction.

  The woman tweeting at work or from the front line of a demonstration is experiencing the same shared consciousness, role-play, multifaceted personality and intense bonding that you get in World of Warcraft—only now it’s from within real life. Though the old multiuser games still hold their attraction for millions of geeky people, the newest, most satisfying and most immersive user experience is reality.

  As I write this, for example, at 23:00 BST on 20 August 2011, my own
Twitter feed is exploding with accounts, from people on the ground, of the final offensive of the insurgents against Gaddafi in Tripoli:

  ‘Never forget Mohamed Bouazizi’

  ‘Do you guys realize #Libya is right on the verge of being the FIRST, REAL DEMOCRACY in the MiddleEast!!!’

  ‘Its about time #Eygpt recognizes the NTC as a representative of the Libyan people ! #Libya …’

  ‘Late night celebrations in #zawiya at the news of uprisings in #tripoli. huge booms from poss. NATO strikes audible from the east …’ ‘#AlJazeera and #PressTV report #Gaddafi en route to Italy by air. #NATO “lying” about Tripoli fall to gain extension to military attacks’

  ‘Dear world: This is REAL for us, no war game, our families/neighbors r getting shot while we tweet their stories!’ ‘AJA reporter: Nato is bombing some areas in #Tripoli …’ ‘BREAKING: Israeli gunboats shooting at Al Sudaniya area to the north of #Gaza’

  ‘I have to take a short break, and a cup of coffee. God bless #Libya and the Freedom Fighters.’

  I would say that the above—pinging onto TweetDeck in the space of ten minutes, and about twelve hours in advance of the mainstream media reporting of any of it—beats any ten minutes of Counter-Strike ever played.

  The power of social networks, then, is not only that they alter consciousness. They bring this altered and networked consciousness into real life in a way that the old hacker/gamer, stuck to their PCs, never experienced. As London student @littlemisswilde describes it: ‘I can be hanging out in the same room as another activist, tweeting, and other people will see us and say: you’re being antisocial. But in fact we’re being ultra-social.’

  The impact on activism

  The rise of online social networks has happened so fast that there is almost no quantitative research into their impact on politics and political campaigns. However, two social theorists—Clay Shirky and Manuel Castells—have helped to predict what the impact could be.

  Shirky’s seminal 2009 book, Here Comes Everybody, describes the basic dynamic of activism in socially networked societies. It becomes, Shirky says, ‘ridiculously easy’ to form groups with shared beliefs who can coordinate action and choose targets much faster than hierarchical states or corporations can react: ‘Most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.’

  USC professor Manuel Castells foresaw that the combined impact of the social network and the individualistic self would facilitate a clear break with the old forms of organization, including parties, unions and permanent campaigns: ‘The emergence of mass self-communication offers an extraordinary medium for social movements and rebellious individuals to build their autonomy and confront the institutions of society in their own terms and around their own projects.’14

  Castells realized that the new technology has changed the relationship between the collective and the individual within protest movements. It allows activists to assemble fast and zap the enemy, without any greater commitment to each other than doing this.

  But it also propels people into long-term occupations of physical spaces—from Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout to Tahrir, Syntagma and the Occupy Wall Street protests. And it focuses their struggle on the creation of new meanings and narratives, beyond the head-to-head confrontations with the old order on its own terrain.

  However, changing the method of struggle is only one impact of network technology. Equally important are the new modes of economic activity it has thrown up—methods that were born amid the altruistic hacking and eco-communities that grew out of the 1960s, but which have now become deployed into the mainstream economy.

  The key concept here, says Shirky, is ‘collaborative production’: people working together on a shared project, with no managers, and sometimes no direct intent to produce profit. It was pioneered in the Open Source software and hacking movements.

  At one level, this is just the same as what keeps a Sunday league soccer team going—the voluntary contribution of skill and time to something bigger than the participants. But what open-source programmers did was to move this kind of collaboration into space formerly occupied by profit-seeking corporations. In 1994, when version 1.0 of Linux was released, the most successful company on earth was Microsoft. Microsoft’s business model was based on providing—at an eye-watering markup—what the Linux community was to provide for free: an operating system to run your computer. Now, Linux runs every computer in the Google empire and half of all Internet servers. And although people make money out of it, they do not do so in the same way as Microsoft did.

  Linux, and other open-source software projects such as the Perl programming language, were created using ‘distributed collaboration’—hundreds of people correcting, improving and documenting other people’s work, voluntarily, for the greater good of mankind (and, of course, to annoy Bill Gates). Linux’s only condition was that nobody was allowed to commercialize the product.

  Out of the Open Source movement came the ‘wiki’: a user-editable website which leaves an audit trail of changes, designed to facilitate collaborative work among groups without any prior role-designation or command hierarchy. As a tool it looks like nothing special. But its first two global uses were to prove revolutionary: Wikipedia and WikiLeaks. Wikipedia was not only a commercial challenge to the encyclopaedia business: it expanded the supply of in-depth and dependable knowledge, and reduced the price to zero.

  And not just knowledge of stable and finished episodes. Shirky points out—and I have personal experience of this—that the Wikipedia page devoted to the London bombings of 7 July 2005 was at all times during the first twenty-four hours more reliable and comprehensive than reports from the mainstream media. I can attest to the fact that the mainstream media noticed this immediately: it was a talking point among my colleagues in press and broadcasting that the “new” version of news was the dispassionate assembly of the facts, easily eclipsing confused rewrites of online “articles” as the detailed events filtered out.

  The second big wiki—WikiLeaks—has yet to finish exploding in the faces of dictators, spies, torturers, crooks and politicians. But leaving aside its political impact, what’s important here is the creation process itself: what Shirky calls the ‘unmanaged division of labour’.

  This process did not appear out of the blue; it can trace a direct lineage to the liberation movements of the hippy Sixties. In her brilliant cyber-memoir, technology writer Becky Hogge describes how survivors of the LSD fraternity in California ‘quit drugs for software’, seeding a techno-revolution that would create the mouse, the pixel, the Apple Mac, the Internet, hacking and free software.15 Their goals were made explicit in two famous statements by Stewart Brand, the visionary founder of the Whole Earth Catalog: ‘Like it or not, computers are coming to the masses’; and ‘Information wants to be free’. This would open up a forty-year battle, still ongoing, between those trying to monopolize, censor and commercialize information technology and those who want it to be open, uncensored and free.

  And it’s a battle over fundamentals. The rise of the profitless enterprise, of unmanaged collective labour, of free information and the massive scalability of collaborative work: each of these issues challenges a core belief in management theory. Likewise the rise of the networked individual, the multiple self, the ‘leaky self and the collective consciousness may challenge some basic assumptions of liberalism, which has assumed the self to be singular and self-contained.

  However—and this is the crucial point—none of this should be challenging for those who dream of creating a more equal and just society.

  But it seems that it is. First, because networked activism challenges the old methods—parties, trade unions, leaders, hierarchies. Second, because open-source technologies and collaborative production raise an even more fundamental question: what type of economy is to be the starting point for the transition to sustainable and equitable growth, and on what timetable?
/>   Marx, technology and freedom

  Karl Marx dominated the radical agenda of the late nineteenth century for good reason: he was the most modern and most pro-capitalist of the revolutionaries of the age.

  His polemics with rival nineteenth-century leftists don’t get so much attention these days—but they have become relevant. Both on the issue of networked individualism, and the role of stored knowledge might play in human freedom, Marx had already asked the pertinent questions.

  On individual freedom, Marx’s argument amounts to this: any project to deliver a classless society, with wealth distributed according to need, must be based on the most advanced technologies and organizational forms created by capitalism itself. It can’t be based on schemes originating in the heads of philanthropic bosses or philosophers. And you can’t return to the past.

  So in the 1840s, as the workers’ movement became obsessed with model factory settlements set up by utopian visionaries like Robert Owen, Marx laid into the utopians. In the 1860s, when workers all over the world tried to set up cooperative shops and factories, Marx became a robust critic of cooperation. And he never ceased to pour scorn on the back-to-the-land socialists who wanted to return to rural communes and low growth.

  Capitalism, Marx argued, was headed in the direction of big enterprises, which the capitalists would own collectively via the stock markets. Co-ops and utopian villages were a distraction. You had to find a way to take control of this big stuff—finance, industry and agribusiness—and create enough wealth so that, when you redistributed it, it would eliminate human need. Only then, said Marx, could you begin to address the alienation and unfreedom at the heart of human existence.