the most important lesson i learned from the arab spring is… “power to the people” just got an operating system upgrade.

- Jim Moriarty (CEO, Surfrider Foundation + MAP Network)

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of #Jan25, the first day of the Egyptian Revolution, the day regime change in Tunisia blossomed into an unprecedented regional movement. We asked MAP’s community members and advisors to reflect on what the Arab Spring taught them about digital activism.  Kate Brodock and David Faris wrote their own posts on the question. Here’s what others had to say:

Networks Can Topple Old Regimes, But Can They Form New Ones?

One of the more interesting lessons learned is whether and how decentralized and networked activists can come to power within centralized and hierarchical institutions (governments).

This is actually a historic collective action paradox.  In his recent book, The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama notes that historically loose tribal networks were successful at mobilizing but not ruling.  In a discussion of military strategy in the first millennium AD, Fukuyama notes, “rulers found they could not rely on tribally organized forces to hold onto their empire.  Tribal levies could be quickly mobilized and scaled up for rapid conquest…. But… could not achieve sustained collective action. ”

Will networked activists be able to “sustain collective action,” to lead (or sustainably influence) government? Or was their success only in their ability to “quickly mobilize”?  Clay Shirky notes that networked actors have not been able to control the levers of government in countries where they staged successful revolutions.

I think the biggest lesson is that autocratic governments have become so successful at preventing alternate organizations to take root in society, organizations that might challenge the government’s control, that successful opposition strategies tend to be loosely connected collaborations, rather than alternate power centers. This is a good strategy for taking on the autocrats, but it also means that the answer to the question “Who will run the new government” is no longer “The people who toppled the old one.”

This division of labor between the destroyers of an existing regime and the creators of a new one creates this odd interregnum, which we’ve now seen in Tunisia and Egypt, and, to a lesser extent, Libya, where far more is up for grabs than in the usual historical pattern of revolution.

- Clay Shirky (Distinguished Writer in Residence, NYU + MAP Advisory Board)

David Faris, a scholar of Egyptian digital activism, is more optimistic. Though he acknowledges that traditional political parties have been the immediate beneficiaries of the revolution, he believes that networked groups like We are All Khaled Said and the April 6th movement have the staying power to influence Egyptian politics in the long term.  Although they are loose networks, they have become stable mobilizing structures with the ability to, in Fukuyama’s terms, “achieve sustained collective action.”

Social media activists have not inherited the political empowerment of the revolutions. In both Egypt and Tunisia, the immediate political beneficiaries of the revolutions have been political Islamists, the long-banned Nahda in Tunisia, and the Freedom and Justice Party in Egypt, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood…. [But is it networked] activists [who are] still putting out their calls to demonstrate on Twitter and Facebook, who succeeded in pushing presidential elections forward to June, altering the electoral system, and instigating the first, albeit tiny, steps toward reforming recalcitrant security behemoths.

- David Faris (Assistant Professor of Political Science, Roosevelt University + MAP Strategy Group)

Tactical Insights on Effective Digital Activism

Other network members gleaned specific tactical insights from the Arab Spring: the value of a martyr to frame complex injustice in human terms, the power of humor.

Most important/surprising lesson=The profound amplifying impact of a martyr/catalyst when combined with the viral force of technology.

-Eric Tyler (New America Foundation + MAP Network Weaver/Outreach Director)

The understated importance of humor amidst violence and repression.

- Solana Larsen (Managing Editor, Global Voices + MAP Network)

Amy Sample Ward of NTEN reflected on the surprisingly small Internet and mobile penetration rates needed to mount a successful digital campaign.  In 2011 Egypt’s Internet penetration rate was 24.5% and Tunisia’s was 33.9% (source).

The biggest lesson, in my opinion, is that you do not need to have every member of your community using social technologies for massive impact to occur. So long as the community is connected, [one] can use the tools to network and organize, and then take the actions needed, massive change can happen.

- Amy Sample Ward (Membership Director, Nonprofit Technology Network + MAP Network)

Beyond Digital: Reflections on the Broader Context

Other network members looked beyond the use of digital tactics to the context in which those tactics were used.  History was important in both framing and mobilization and old media and simple word of mouth were used alongside social media to get the message out.

For me, as a media historian, seeing how history and the past still have a profound impact on how a society uses tech to tell its story.

- Will Mari (PhD Candidate, University of Washington + MAP Global Digital Activism Data Set coder)

I found it interesting that the protesters made use of social media and micro blogging tools along with the traditional word-of-mouth and telephone to organize themselves. This number of communication avenues available to the protester made it difficult to suppress. By the time regimes were ready to cut off access to the Internet, the movements had already gained significant momentum and were able to effectively move forward without it.

- Brian Riley (Master’s Candidate, Trinity College + MAP Technical Project Manager)

Another important trend to highlight, and one that isn’t going away, is that this type of digital communication is being used heavily for various purposes aside from the mobilization and communication of direct political or social actors.  For instance, journalists and media outlets have turned heavily to these tools to get information for reporting purposes….

- Kate Brodock (Executive Director of Digital and Social Media, Syracuse University + Strategy & Communications Advisor

Thanks to all our community members for contributing to this post!

Digital technology usage has become more sophisticated.

• Digital technologies offered a way for people to connect, communicate, and in many cases mobilize.  This isn’t new per se, but the speed and proliferation that it occurred this time around was. Not only did the connections happen, but they led to mobilization quickly and perhaps more effectively than in the past, and instances of mobilization became very wide-spread throughout the region as well (so not just quicker and more effective in one instance, but more prolific).

It’s not just to the benefit of the activists anymore.

We started to see this in Iran in 2009, when governments or anti-freedom groups started “fighting back” using digital technology.  It happened slowly, and was not very effective or organized.  We saw it more organized in the London Riots and other movements since.

The real notability of this shift came when I was speaking with a friend in Syria, asking him how things were, that it sounded rough from where I was standing (note: this was before it actually GOT rough), and he said point blank, “you can’t trust any of your media (by the way, he’s mostly American), or Twitter. They aren’t accurate, and we’re safe.” It turns out that people had hijacked the hashtags to report fake bomb attacks and hyperbolize what was happening on the ground.  Something we’d seen before, but to minimal degrees. (See below point).

Ok, who to trust….. Joe (that would be my first inclination, but…)? Twitter (this would be my second outlet, and first in the cases where I didn’t have a friend on the ground)? The press (but everyone tells you not to go there)?

And this leads me to the next high-level insight….one I’ve spoken about before…

Verification is super important!

In case you didn’t know…. but what’s happened now if that because these tools are in the hands of several different actors, there will be these hashtag hijackings and manipulation of information that we all need to be very careful of.  Combine that with the fact that this digital information is being used for multiple purposes, this really muddies the waters.  When getting fast information becomes the name of the game, it becomes more difficult to practice discipline when we’re consuming and especially sharing that information.

This is so important, because if it isn’t streamlined or worked out, it has the potential to ruin whatever systems are put into place moving forward.  If we’re presented with a pile of information, no way to sift through it, and no way to verify it, I ask you how useful that pile of information is at that point – to activists or others.

It depends on who’s being challenged and how receptive they are to public outcry.

Mary recently described the Arab Spring within the context of a Constructive/Destructive framework of network affects on nation states:

“In this example, networked actors used social media like Twitter to broadcast elite anti-regime narratives. This mechanism of international agenda-setting made it difficult for other heads of state to oppose the movement publicly, giving the activists a conducive international environment in which to push for regime change.  Activists also used social media to mobilize the actual street protests which forced the Tunisian and Egyptians dictators from power.

In this example we see networked technology being used to challenge state power at the highest level by challenging the legitimacy of state institutions and the authority of rulers.  We can say that its overall effect was positive since the political orders emerging in Egypt and (moreso) Tunisia are likely to be more democratic and concerned with public welfare than those that preceded them.“

We should watch out for Eastern Europe/Central Asia as a possible next hot spot for outbreaks.

Anyone who’s been following this region know 1) it’s highly volatile at the moment and 2) they’ve already used digital technologies to mobilize and communicate in the past, so they’re ahead of the curve.

Ok, do you have anything else for us?  Also make sure to check out David’s thoughts on the matter.

Tahrir Square, January 25th, 2012

As hundreds of thousands throng Cairo’s Tahrir Square today in celebration, remembrance and continued vigilance, it is worth thinking through the implications of these remarkable events for our understanding of digital activism. My book on the Egyptian revolution is forthcoming, but if I could distill 5 important takeaways, they would be this:

1. If this wasn’t a social media revolution, then there is no such thing.

The role of online organizations (or organizations that began online) such as We Are All Khaled Said and the April 6th Youth Movement is well-documented. In discussions with activists in Cairo this past summer, individuals were quick to point out that “this wasn’t a social media revolution.” This line was so default that it was almost like activists had gotten together and agreed on the spin. It is certainly true that most Egyptians took to the streets because their friends and neighbors had done so, and probably never saw the clarion calls on WAKS. But all agreed that it was social media that issued the call, and in the words of the activist Amr Gharbeia, “We created the crisis.” The idea for January 25th originated with organizers who met and did much of their important work online. Of course that work had to be paired with street organizing and innovating tactics, but the reality remains: there would have been no revolution on January 25th without Khaled Said and April 6th and the dedicated efforts of their members. It might be better to call this, as I do in a forthcoming Politique étrangère article, a “networked revolt” than a social media revolution, since it avoids loading all causal responsibility on the technologies and allows us instead to take true stock of how those technologies contributed to the mobilization.

2. Social media activists have not inherited the political empowerment of the revolutions.

In both Egypt and Tunisia, the immediate political beneficiaries of the revolutions have been political Islamists, the long-banned Nahda in Tunisia, and the Freedom and Justice Party in Egypt, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Pessimists have been taking to the media and declaring the revolution a failure, or more pointedly, “doomed.” This is as predictable a narrative as one can imagine in the modern world, since observers on the global right have been suspicious of the revolutions from the very beginning as detrimental to U.S. security interests. This discourse overwrites the broad consensus in places like Egypt – from liberals to reactionaries like the Salafist Nour Party – against actually existing U.S. foreign policy and the complicity of local governments in the repression and dispossession of the Palestinians. In fact, anger about local and American foreign policies was one among many long-held grievances in these body politics, and the digital activists who failed to see their achievements embodied in parliamentary seats in fact share the broad antipathy toward American policy that is expressed by Islamist groups. Many of these activists are quite young, and WAKS and the April 6th activists are in fact more emboldened than ever, and are embarking on a political transformation they themselves know to be futile in the short run but critical in the long-term.

3. Digital activism remains a critical tool for those seeking to push long-term change.

In spite of having been written off by observers and lambasted for their year-long presence in Tahrir Square, digital activists have been at the forefront of all the major challenges to Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, as the activists seek to build a broad-based movement meant to challenge remaining elements of authoritarianism. Thus it was activists, still putting out their calls to demonstrate on Twitter and Facebook, who succeeded in pushing presidential elections forward to June, altering the electoral system, and instigating the first, albeit tiny, steps toward reforming recalcitrant security behemoths. Many of these activists are quite young, just out of college or in their mid-to-late 20s. It was simply unrealistic to expect these groups to suddenly descend like some deus ex-machina and snatch power away from groups like the Brotherhood, who have been organizing in Egypt for over 80 years and maintain strong public support through their social service networks. “We Know the Way to Tahrir” is still the rallying cry of activists who, while dispirited about the Islamist wave and angry at the obstructionism of the SCAF, still believe in the spirit of the revolution, and plan to use their whole toolkit – from digital organizing to street politics – to press whatever authority replaces the SCAF on issues ranging from military trials to the state of emergency.

4. An open Internet remains the world’s most potent macro-tool to challenge authoritarian regimes.

We all know the many ways that authoritarian regimes have adapted to, co-opted and rolled up digital dissent from Russia to China and Iran. But we should not confuse these short-term set-backs and authoritarian victories with the bigger picture – with an open Internet and an evolving toolkit of circumvention devices, digital activism remains the only real choice for many activists toiling under tyranny and hoping to build long-term movements to challenge authoritarianism. From Russia to Tunisia, the networked revolt has become the de facto choice of publics fed up with authoritarian excess and seeking to capture the spirit of Tahrir at home and internationally. Companies that supply authoritarian regimes with surveillance and blocking software should be called to the carpet in the global public sphere, as campaigns like Access Now add to the pressure on Internet-filterers and their apologists. No one can say that these campaigns will be successful in places like Syria, where authoritarian rulers maintain an edge in arms and resources, but digital tools are still one of the primary weapons of the weak even where service is cut off and disrupted, web sites filtered and attacked and activists are murdered in the streets. Without the open Internet, we would not know what was happening in the streets of Homs like we do, and the documentation of these brave activists will continue to provide an unfolding record of the cruelty and savagery of their tormentors.

5. Arab digital activists have increased the sum total of freedom in the world.

Again reactionaries lament the results of free elections, as do some activists, but the truth is that we now have real politics in parts of the Arab world, with more on the way, and those victories can be traced to the efforts of the digital activists. There will be temptations in policy circles to tamp down on our efforts to promote digital freedom and activism, simply because these revolutions brought to power groups whose interests clash with Washington. In the long run, however, the activists took a crowbar and wrenched open the door to democracy in this region, and their efforts should be applauded and appreciated. Policymakers, academics and international organizations should always side with freedom against tyranny, and furthermore, understand that digital tools will be one of the primary paths of resistance to any renewed authoritarian politics in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. The tsunami of dignity and courage unleashed by April 6th, We Are All Khaled Said, and Tunisia bloggers like the administrators of Nawaat cannot be reversed permanently, and in fact, activists all over the region now know that the formula for success includes a role for digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter. We must not confuse short-term policy disagreements with the long-term benefits of global democratic politics. Digital activism is the only way forward.

A year ago today Egyptians inspired the whole world, from the Occupy Wall Street protests to the Wisconsin occupations, and reminded us of the power that ordinary individuals can harness through the ordinary digital tools they carry around in their pockets. Yes there will always be corporate and authoritarian threats to those tools, and no they will not always or even usually succeed. But the networked revolt is here to stay, as are the activists of the digital world. And don’t be surprised if in a decade or two, they do indeed belatedly inherit the beautiful revolution they authored.

- – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – -

So… this happened yesterday.  It’s too early to pronounce SOPA firmly dead, but clearly the blackout proved to be an epic tactical win.

The blackout worked on three levels.  First we have the immediate stated goal: educate site visitors about SOPA/PIPA and encourage them to contact their Member of Congress.  This is basically a souped-up version of the standard action alerts that MoveOn, Demand Progress, Organizing for America and other advocacy groups send daily to their members.  I haven’t seen any numbers, but I’ll bet that the Congressional phone lines were lighting up yesterday.

That said, heavy phone and e-mail traffic is nothing new for Congressional offices.  The side that generates heavier constituent outrage doesn’t always win.  Constituent outrage is one signal that Congress considers.  They also consider expert testimony (firmly opposed to the bill) and the will of wealthy donors/affected industries (often expressed through lobbyists – an excess of Hollywood money and lobbying influence is what got us the awful legislation in the first place).

It worked on a second level though: as news.  Wikipedia going dark drew wide coverage.  Even if you didn’t happen to visit Wikipedia yesterday, if you visited a news site or tuned in to Colbert, you found out it was happening.  This forces politicians who were ignoring the issue to take a stand.  Reporters don’t call and ask for positions on every issue, every day.  Yesterday, they were calling about this one.  And news coverage also serves as an approximation of public opinion for members of congress [h/t Susan Herbst].

Notice, however, that the blackout was news specific because it was original.  This has never happened before*.  Wikipedia doesn’t take political stances.  Google doesn’t call on web-searchers to contact congress.  The freshness of the tactic is what makes it newsworthy.  If Wikipedia did this once a month, it would quickly cease to be newsworthy.  This is the “advocacy inflation” problem that I’ve written about before [h/t Daniel Mintz, who suggested the term].

There’s a third channel of influence at work here as well: direct exposure.  Congressional offices are busy places.  In the course of the day yesterday, at least one staffer in every office probably Googled something or looked something up on Wikipedia.  Many Members of Congress did so themselves as well.  The blackout cut through the din of constituent calls and emails, lobby visits, and policy briefings.  They saw it themselves, and it grabbed attention in a way that everyday persuasion and influence tactics never can.

Notice that this third channel works because of the sites involved.  I thought it was great that DailyKos and BoingBoing took part in the action, but if it was just those sites the tactic would have been much weaker.  Those sites draw tech-savvy and politics-savvy audiences.  Even with the support of conservative sites like RedState, the average American is unlikely to see the content, and the only Congressional staffers who will see it are the ones charged with monitoring the blogs.

Overall, we should feel good about this one.  It was a remarkable tactic, and demonstrates that the big companies in the digital environment are beginning to recognize that they have to push back against the big companies from the traditional entertainment environment.  That’s no revolution – Google is still a corporation, after all  – but it provides a bit more pluralistic balance in a policy arena that has been where the MPAA has gone unchallenged and unchecked for far too long.

*There was a sort-of precursor in the 1990s, when early “netizens” protested a managerial decision at geocities by turning their geocities pages dark.

In the past few years networks have had dramatic effects on nation states, both positive and negative.  As always, these effects are complex and contradictory.  Networks can threaten the power of states, but they can also support them.  Likewise, these effects can be both constructive and destructive to civic “happiness” (in the utilitarian sense) in that networks can be mechanisms of greater civic accountability and civic well-being or of civic chaos and victimization.

The matrix below shows the range of effects that networked actors can have on the institutions nation states, along with some examples:

Figure 1: How Networks Affect Nation States

Constructive and Destructive Challenges to the State

I am a cyber-optimist, so when I think of the effects of networks on nation states, I first think of the progressive and hopeful examples, like the use of social media during the Arab Spring (⑦). In this example, loosely networked actors used social media like Twitter to broadcast elite anti-regime narratives. This mechanism of international agenda-setting made it difficult for other heads of state to oppose the movement publicly, giving the activists a conducive international environment in which to push for regime change.  Activists also used social media to mobilize the actual street protests which forced the Tunisian and Egyptians dictators from power.

In this example we see networked technology being used to challenge state power at the highest level by challenging the legitimacy of state institutions and the authority of rulers.  We can say that its overall effect was positive since the political orders emerging in Egypt and (moreso) Tunisia are likely to be more democratic and concerned with public welfare than those that preceded them.

On the other extreme (Quadrant 3) there is the use of digital technology, particularly the encrypted Blackberry Messenger (BBM) service, to facilitate rioting in London (⑤).  Though not an effort at regime change, this was also a significant challenge to the British state as the state was unable to prevent or halt the riots until they have burned themselves out.  Here it is hard to argue that the state or even the networked actors themselves (the rioters) benefited for the action, which can safely be categorized as destructive.

This is the darker vision of the clash of networks and states: networked non-state actors who wish harm to both the state and the civilian population (terrorists, cyber-criminal, vandals), use networked technology to mount their attacks.  Because of the ease and low cost of launching a virtual attack it is both harder for state entities like law enforcement to track and apprehend these agents and easier for these agents to group and attack.  It’s a medium that makes banditry easier to carry out and harder to stop.

Yet even these optimistic and pessimistic visions fail to capture the full complexity of the effect of networks on states.  Some examples have both constructive and destructive effects, or their value is assessed very differently by different actors.  One example of this phenomenon is Cablegate, Wikileaks’ massive leak of US diplomatic cables (⑥) in 2010.  To some it was a constructive, if radical, effort at forced mass transparency upon the world’s most powerful state.  To others it threatened the legitimate diplomatic work of the US and the benefits, in terms of new information of public value, did not offset the damage done to US credibility and to the reputation of individual diplomats.

Constructive and Destructive Support of the State

Networks don’t always challenge the state. Sometimes networked actors support state power by furthering the goals of the state, thus helping to maintain the status quo (Quadrant 2).  The most dramatic examples of this kind of behavior are patriotic hackers. For example, in 2008 Chinese hackers attacked the email system of Save Darfur Coalition (③) because the organization was criticizing Chinese government support of the murderous Sudanese regime.  Though it appears that sometimes the government hires hackers to do its dirty work, many times these hackers are acting independently of the government, due to intrinsic feelings of patriotism.  This was  also the case for the Syrian Electronic Army, which states on its website that they are “not an ‘official entity’ but rather a group of young people who love Syria and want to serve the country by ‘attacking back those who have attacked Syria.”

Yet even these patriotic hackers have a contradictory effect on state power when they attack other states.  The most dramatic example of this phenomenon is the 2007 cyberattack on Estonian public and private institutions by pro-Russia hackers to protest the relocation of a Soviet-era statue in the Estonian capital, Talinn (④). The websites of the Estonian parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters were hit with denial of service attacks and though Estonian officials charged the Kremlin with ordering the attack neither Estonian nor international officials were able to prove the connection.   Though the attack likely strengthened the perception of Russia’s (bullying) strength in the region, it showed the weakness of the Estonian state to protect its online infrastructure.  In this way, the networked hackers both supported and challenged state power by taking sides in a conflict between states.

This is not to say that network support of states only enhances unjust power.  In democratic countries, when the state is perceived as legitimate and is willing to cooperate, networked actors can help the state be more efficient.   Sites like FixMyStreet crowdsource maintenance requests, making it easier for local governments to maintain public infrastructure in the UK (①).  In 2008 the MyBarackObama (MyBO) social platform was created by the campaign to help Obama supporters self-organize around campaign goals (②).  Though the platform empowered volunteers to get involved, those volunteers were engaged in a formal institution, the election, and were thus attempting to change the nation’s politics in a manner fully sanctioned by the state.

Networks Work Through Soft Power… So Must States

One common trend we have seen in these interactions is that network actors act of their own volition, not out of compulsion.  When they see the state as legitimate they can support it passionately and productively.  When they see the state as illegitimate they can effectively undermine its authority.

States that wish to bring networked actors to their side must use soft power, the ability to shape behaviors using perception of common interest, legitimacy, and attraction.  Hard power tactics like threats, violence, and payments, have far less effect as networked actors can easily disappear back into the network or act outside of the jurisdictions of the countries they target (this goes for both activists and criminals).

While we associate authoritarian states more with hard power than soft power, they can use both, as the examples of the patriotic hackers in Syria, Russia, and China makes clear.  Though some hackers may be paid for their work, they are also influenced by a desire to be illicit warriors of the state.  They hack for their countries because it is cool.  In the networked world, states that use hard power will see diminishing returns and soft power – the perception of legitimacy at home and abroad – will become ever more important to achieving state goals.

A crowd that’s always connected can never be dispersed.  It’s always still out there.

Today's crowds never diserse, they just disappear back into the network.

So I am back from holiday break and finally read the Wired digital activism article with the vaguely sinister title: #Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You by Bill Wasik.

Wasik invented the flash mob by organizing strange and spontaneous crowds in New York in 2003.  Most of the article presents new case study information (how the London rioters moved, how the police responded, the case of Ryan Raddon’s concert riot in LA) without offering many new insights.  However, one idea did grab me:

A crowd that’s always connected can never be dispersed.  It’s always still out there.

I am always looking for evidence of model change in digital activism, ways that digital media changes the ways that power, politics, and culture work at a fundamental level.  Yes, I seek “paradigm shifts.”   Let me allow Bill to expand on his point:

In Among the Thugs, Bill Buford’s [1993] first-person account of soccer hooliganism, he describes the remarkable discipline that even these drunken, anarchic yobs had to maintain to carry out violence against opposing fans… Step out of the phalanx to grab a pint or take a piss and you might never find your fellows again…. Today, by contrast, a crowd’s power is amplified by the fact that its members can never really get separated.

A crowd that can never be dispersed, which is always connected by dense linkages over multiple platforms (SMS, Blackberry Messenger, Facebook, Twitter, blogs), that flows through multiple personal connections, is a threat to authoritarian states.  Even if Facebook is down you can keep in touch via Twitter.  If the Internet is down you can get the info from a friend via SMS.  If phone and Internet are shut down you can go out into the street… and we saw what that meant in Egypt. The networked communications sphere has so many back-ups that it cannot be completely shut down without total shut-down of the network and intensive use of human resources (police, military) to prevent people from meeting offline.

The cost of stopping all communication now exacts an inescapably high cost on states.   In order to stop the communication of all activists, governments must stop the communication of all citizens, exacting an undeserved penalty on apolitical citizens which cannot help but decrease the government’s legitimacy.

Certainly governments prefer targeted repression: detain only the activist, shut down communication only in Xinjiang.  But sometimes you don’t know who the activists are.  Sometimes it seems that every citizen is a potential threat.  As scholars like Zeynep Tufekci have pointed out, the Internet is a great place to reveal hidden preferences that are not safe to reveal offline.  The Internet is also a good place to stay in touch with people who share your preferences while keeping those preferences hidden.  A group of friends may not be committed activists, they may mostly talk about soccer or video games, they may seem apolitical, but the network remains as a mobilizing structure, ready to be re-activated and brought from invisible in the digital space to visibility in the street.

This is where the threat of the eternal and undispersable crowd comes into play.  If the crowd is still invisibly connected and present online, even when it is not visible in the street, how do you attack it?  This is a challenge for repressive states.  The SCAF (post-Mubarak military council ruling Egypt) probably thought that the revolutionary crowd had dispersed when Mubarak stepped down.  Only a few die-hards remained in Tahrir.  Yet, as the SCAF consolidated their power, the crowds came back into the streets.    They had not dispersed, only disappeared.  In their online connection remained the constant capacity to reconstitute the crowd.

1. Will Facebook Delete Sarah Lou’s Account? What happens when activists using pseudonyms are asked (or forced?) to use their real names on social networks?
2. Complex and Contradictory: A new way to look at Digital Activism The effect of digital technology on political contention is neither good nor bad, it is both. Here are a few reasons why.
3. Cacophony: Why Digital Activism isn’t Helping America In the wake of the Arab Spring and the use of digital technology in the Middle East, why has digital activism had such a lackluster effect in a democracy like the US?
4. Malcolm Gladwell’s Still Got it Wrong Reaction to Malcolm Gladwell’s views on the use and effectiveness of digital technology in activism.
5. The 7 Ways Digital Tech Helps Activists (Self-explanatory)

What Makes a Liberation (or Repression) Technology?

An application is not fundamentally a liberation or repression technology, it depends on how it is used.

Using observations from the social movement theory, this post spells out four requirements to classify a technology as a liberation technology – it must transmit political information; be accessible to a large segment of the population; allow for effective utilization and protection of privacy.

Induction and Deduction in Digital Activism Research

This post showcased author Mary Joyce’s very interesting observation about the nature of induction and deduction in the current digital activism scenario and whether the application of theories built from a much earlier context would now be relevant. The author concludes in favor of inductive reasoning, a path that many commentators in the field don’t yet prefer.

Ethan Zuckerman on the Big Picture of Digital Activism

Focusing on a fantastic talk by Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and co-founder of Global Voices, this post spoke of the tunnel vision that digital activism is often plagued by. Individual case studies don’t constitute an entire field. The existence of false dichotomies results in missing the big picture.

Overall, this was a great year for digital activism and reading literature that provides more clarity about its core meaning gives hope for a far better 2012!

@nikisrinivasan

The evil Darth Vader stands amid the broken and twisted bodies of his foes. He grabs a wounded Rebel Officer by the neck as an Imperial Officer rushes up to the Dark Lord.

IMPERIAL OFFICER: The Death Star plans are not in the main computer.

Vader squeezes the neck of the Rebel Officer, who struggles in vain.

VADER: Where are those transmissions you intercepted?

Vader lifts the Rebel off his feet by his throat.

VADER: What have you done with those plans?

REBEL OFFICER: We intercepted no transmissions. Aaah….This is a
consular ship. Were on a diplomatic mission.
[source]

George Lucas' Cold War vision saw computers primarily as tools of battle.

Star Wars: A New Hope is one of the greatest movies of all time and one of my personal favorites. So, in a departure from the usual content of this blog – and as an early Christmas present to MAP readers – here is an analysis of the digital vision of Star Wars.

Not only is Star Wars a great work of science fiction, it is a great work of computer science fiction.  (The word “computer” appears 48 times in the screenplay, “Jedi” only 19).  The digital world of Star War is deeply shaped by the computer science of the early 70′s.  This is not surprising,  since George Lucas wrote his screenplay at that time in California, a part of the world buzzing with early computer research.  In the 1970′s, computers were expensive Cold War command-and-control devices funded by the military, not the personal and social tools we know today.  This 1970′s vision of the computer is what we see in Star Wars.

This command-and-control conception of computing is necessary to Lucas’s plot and the difficulty of digital content transmission forms the dramatic tension of the film.  The plot revolves around a set of stolen digital plans for the Imperial Death Star, which are ferried across the galaxy to the Rebels by Luke Skywalker in the hard-drive of a robot called Artoo.  Darth Vader and the forces of the Empire are hot on their trail, trying to apprehend them and retrieve the plans. 

If email existed, the movie’s plot would evaporate.  Imagine the scene above, if email existed in the world of Star Wars:

IMPERIAL OFFICER: The Death Star plans are not in the main computer.

VADER: Where are those transmissions you intercepted? What have you done with those plans?

REBEL OFFICER: The moment we received the plans we emailed them immediately to the top Rebel commanders.  They are already reviewing them to launch an attack on the Death Star. It’s already too late!

VADER: Well, crap!

The absence of email in the world of Star Wars is an artistic choice by Lucas.  If the digital plans could be “transmitted” to Princess Leia’s ship (where the above scene occurs), then why couldn’t they be transmitted by the same means directly to the rebel leaders?  They could, of course, but the film’s audience did not know that computers could do that.  Though email did exist, the Internet at the time was a military-owned research network, and ordinary Americans did not know email or a computer-based communication networks existed.  So the idea that plans could be transmitted one time and then needed to by carried across the galaxy on a physical disk inside a robot was a credible proposition.

Computers have a role in Star Wars beyond the central drama of the plot.  Computers enter the action in ways large and small.  In the world of Star Wars, however, they are command-and-control devices used in the operation of complex industrial and military machinery.  Lucas has a Cold War vision of computing.

A computer runs the complex agricultural machines on Luke’s home planet of Tatooine:

Uncle Owen: What I really need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.

A computer helps Han Solo navigate his ship, the Millennium Falcon:

Obi Wan Kenobi: How long before you can make the jump to light speed?

Han: It’ll take a few moments to get the coordinates from the navi-computer.

The ship begins to rock violently as lasers hit it.

Luke: Are you kidding? At the rate they’re gaining…

Han: Traveling through hyperspace isn’t like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?

Computers also help Luke and Han fight spaceship-to-spaceship through a neat 3D targeting interface on their laser cannons (this would be a Cold Warrior’s wet dream).  A targeting computer is also used by the pilots when they attack the Death Star at the end of the movie (though Luke ultimately relies on the intuitive power of the Force over the computer).

Again, this is a fairly old-fashioned vision of the future of computing.  Targeting was the technology that first got the American military into the business of funding computer research during WWII, when the military realized computers could be useful in calculating trajectories for firing missiles at fast-moving aircraft.

A single computer system also runs the Death Star itself.  This computer is a little different, because it is part of a network – yes, like the Internet!  In the middle of the movie, Luke and his friends are captured on the Death Star and one of the robots accesses its computer:

THREEPIO: We found the computer outlet, sir.

Ben feeds some information into the computer and a map of the city appears on the monitor. He begins to inspect it carefully. Threepio and Artoo look over the control panel. Artoo finds something that makes him whistle wildly.

BEN: Plug in. He should be able to interpret the entire Imperial computer network.

Artoo punches his claw arm into the computer socket and the vast Imperial brain network comes to life, feeding information to the little robot. After a few moments, he beeps something.

THREEPIO: He says he’s found the main computer to power the tractor beam that’s holding the ship here. He’ll try to make the precise location appear on the monitor.

Again this is a classic Cold War view of the Internet. In the 1970′s Vint Cerf, the Father of the Internet, was a scientist at DARPA, the Pentagon-funded research center that built the Internet.  In a 2010 talk, Cerf described DARPA’s vision in building the Internet: “DARPA was looking for ways to build command-and-control systems that had no central structure, and were highly distributed, and that could be readily reconstituted.” A computer network that could run a huge military facility like the Death Star was very much what the Pentagon had in mind when they funded research on computer networking.

George Lucas and the Pentagon shared the same vision of the value of computing: better war machines. Today computers are certainly used by the military, but the most transformative use of computers is not targeting technology, but the Internet, another Pentagon-funded computer research project that received relatively little attention during its development in the 1960′s, 70′s, and 80′s.

Targeting systems, military aircraft navigation, a command-and-control network for a military facility: this was the Cold War vision of computing in the 1970′s, but it wasn’t the only vision.  At the same time counter-culture technologists envisioned computers in the way they act today: as personal devices for individual expression and creativity.   In his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, philosopher of technology Ted Nelson wrote:

Somehow the idea is abroad that computer activities are uncreative….  This is categorically false.  Computers involve imagination and creation at the highest level.  Computers are an involvement you can really get into, regardless of your trip or your karma….  COMPUTERS BELONG TO ALL HUMAN KIND.

This touchy-feely personal vision of computers is diametrically opposed to Lucas’ military vision, but it was a more accurate prediction of what computers became.  (Ironically, Lucas embraced the intuitive and metaphysical worldview of the counterculture in the idea of the “Force,” created by all living things and used by the Jedi.  Yet in his conception the Force and the computer are in opposition to one another.  This is why Luke turns off his targeting computer and instead relies on the Force to guide him during the film’s climax.)

In the end, George Lucas got it wrong.  The Cold War vision of computing was more a function of the prejudices and priorities of than period than the actual capacities of the computer.  He would never guess that one day the Force would run through the Internet.