Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (10 page)

In the poor neighbourhoods of Egypt you will usually find one son unemployed, another working in a factory, another at university. The issues of poverty and repression overlap; in each poor neighbourhood the police station is basically a torture centre.

The organized labour movement itself is wedged between the discontented middle class and the urban poor. In the developed world, organized labour has been weakened by anti-union legislation and is in numerical decline; in the developing world, labour organization is increasing, but the size of the formal workforce can be, as in Egypt, small compared to the other plebeian classes. For all these reasons, we've seen, in a variety of locations, a growing tendency for workers to take action outside the workplace and against targets that are not their direct employers.

Indeed, in the developed world the whole concept of ‘working class' has come to describe two distinct sets of people. There is the skilled workforce, which is no longer dominated by blue-collar male workers with manufacturing skills, but by a different demographic: more ethnically diverse, more clerical and admin, sometimes predominantly female. And then there are those that in British popular culture have come to be labelled ‘chavs' (much like those President Obama inadvisedly called ‘rednecks'): the lowest-skilled, poorest-educated white workers, whose lifestyle has been dissolved by globalization and inward migration. This second group is often prey to right-wing ideologies dressed up with ‘class' rhetoric, which repulse the more educated salariat. Among such workers, levels of resentment were already high, even during the boom of the mid-2000s.

Though it differs from country to country, this division within the developed-world workforce—which is largely a function of someone's exposure or otherwise to modern, globalized work—poses a strategic problem for the left. It makes it hard for social-democratic and left-liberal parties to create a unified narrative or programme around ‘class' or ‘class interest'. And it poses an acute challenge for any resistance movement trying to base itself on a common ‘working-class' culture.

In Egypt and Tunisia—where the organized workforce still maintained elements of a ‘pre-globalized' lifestyle such as state-owned factories, or communist traditions in the case of Tunisia—the problems were posed differently. Here the organized workforce is small in relation to other classes: socially powerful, but culturally distinct both from the urban poor and from the frappé-sipping graduates in the city-centre cafés.

Both the urban poor and the organized working class have—as we will see—crucial parts to play in shaping the course of the global unrest. But it was to the ‘graduates without a future' that it fell to kick things off. From the rich world to the poor world, it is educated young people whose life chances and illusions are now being shattered. Though their general conditions are still better than those of slum-dwellers and some workers, they have experienced far greater disappointment.

This new sociology of revolt calls to mind conditions prior to the Paris Commune of 1871: a large and radicalized intelligentsia, a slum-dwelling class finding its voice through popular culture, and a weakened proletariat, still wedded to the organizations and traditions of twenty years before. This has major implications for the kind of revolution people make, once they take to the streets. And it makes the social order of the modern city highly fragile under economic stress.

The Athens uprising of December 2008 was a case study in how the three parts of the plebeian mass interact. A group of participants wrote that the rioters

ranged from high school students and university students to young, mostly precarious, workers from sectors like education, construction, tourism and entertainment, transport and even media. [Older workers] were a minority … very sympathetic towards the burning down of banks and state buildings, but were mostly passive.
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The French historian Hippolyte Taine understood the essential danger of this social mix. When it comes to revolution, he warned, forget the poor and worry about poor lawyers:

Now, as formerly, students live in garrets, bohemians in lodgings, physicians without patients and lawyers without clients in lonely offices … so many Brissots, Marats, Dantons, Robespierres, and St Justs in embryo. Only for lack of air and sunshine they never come to maturity.
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Taine put his finger on what, in 1789, had turned the normal rebelliousness of impoverished graduates into a force that would reshape the world. He saw that the ‘worm-eaten barriers [had] cracked all at once'. Technology, social change, institutional decay had unleashed something bigger than teenage angst.

If this sounds like an eighteenth-century version of the ‘death of deference' complaint, well, it was. A deep social crisis was under way, then as now. But with one big difference: today, in every garret there is a laptop.

The Jacobin with a laptop

There has been high prominence given to technology and social media in explanations of the global unrest—and for good reason. Social media and new technology were crucial in shaping the revolutions of 2011, just as they shaped industry, finance and mass culture in the preceding decade. What's important is not that the Egyptian youth used Facebook, or that the British students used Twitter and the Greek rioters organized via Indymedia, but what they used these media for—and what such technology does to hierarchies, ideas and actions.

Here, the crucial concept is the network—whose impact on politics has been a long time coming. The network's basic law was explained by Bell Telephone boss Theodore Vail as early as 1908: the more people who use the network, the more useful it becomes to each user. This is known as the ‘network effect': what it describes is the creation, out of two people's interaction, of a ‘third thing' which comes for free. Because network theory originated in the boardroom, this ‘third thing' has tended to be identified in terms of economic value. But, in recent years, it has become clear it can provide much more than that.

There's another difference: when it was first theorized by Vail's technologists, the ‘network effect' seemed like a by-product, a happy accident. Today we are conscious users and promoters of the network effect. Everyone who uses information technology understands that they are—whether at work, on Facebook, on eBay or in a multiplayer game—a ‘node' on a network: not a foot-soldier, not a bystander, not a leader, but a multitasking version of all three.

Vail's customers probably had no idea that, by buying and using telephones, they were enhancing the technology's value for others and creating spin-off effects for Bell's other businesses (what are now termed ‘network externalities'). Nowadays, many of us have a very clear understanding of all this. The result is that, in the past ten years, the ‘network effect' has blasted its way out of corporate economics and into sociology.

The most obvious impact has been on the media and ideology. Long before people started using Twitter to foment social unrest, mainstream journalists noticed—to their dismay—that the size of one's public persona or pay cheque carried no guarantee of popularity online. People's status rises and falls with the reliability and truthfulness of what they contribute. This is a classic network effect—but it is not measurable as profit and loss.

If you look at the full suite of information tools that were employed to spread the revolutions of 2009–11, it goes like this: Facebook is used to form groups, covert and overt—in order to establish those strong but flexible connections. Twitter is used for real-time organization and news dissemination, bypassing the cumbersome ‘newsgathering' operations of the mainstream media. YouTube and the Twitter-linked photographic sites—Yfrog, Flickr and Twitpic—are used to provide instant evidence of the claims being made. Link-shorteners like bit.ly are used to disseminate key articles via Twitter.

And the democracy of retweeting (or sharing on Facebook) filters out the trash. In this way, key contributions to the dialogue that's going on around the action get promoted as if by acclaim, as happened to the original ‘Twenty Reasons' blog post. Activists describe this process as ‘memetic', drawing on Richard Dawkins' proposal of information ‘memes': ideas that behave like genes, fighting for survival and mutating in the process.

Underpinning the social media is mobile telephony: in the crush of every crowd we see arms holding cellphones in the air, like small flocks of ostriches, snapping scenes of repression or revolt, offering instant and indelible image-capture to a global audience. Cellphones provide the basic white sliced bread of insurrectionary communications: SMS. SMS allows you to post to Twitter, or to microblogs, even if you don't have Internet access and can't read the results. Texting is traceable, of course. But as all fans of
The Wire
understand, you can thwart surveillance if you use a cheap, pay-as-you-go handset, which you can throw away if you're in a tight corner. What's more, for many of the impoverished youth and slum dwellers, pay-as-you-go is all they can afford.

Finally, there is blogging. Though blogging was an early form of social media and has been heavily colonized by the mainstream press, 2011 saw a revival of what was essential about the format: the ability to express your own agenda through montaging stills, movies, words and links to create indelible statements of attitude and contempt. In some countries, residually, bulletin boards have played a role: the Athenian revolt of December 2008 was initially organized through newsflashes on the Indymedia bulletin board.

Blogs have been most influential in the Arab world, where the mainstream press has been subject to various degrees of censorship and self-censorship. But in all the theatres of revolution, blogs have offered that vital resource: somewhere to link to. They have become, like the newspapers of the nineteenth century, journals of record. Their impact can be measured by the fact that, in 2011, 7 per cent of Middle Eastern bloggers surveyed reported they'd been arrested by their respective security forces.
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The ability to deploy, without expert knowledge, a whole suite of information tools has allowed protesters across the world to outwit the police, to beam their message into the newsrooms of global media, and above all to assert a cool, cutting-edge identity in the face of what Auden once called ‘the elderly rubbish dictators talk'. It has given today's protest movements a massive psychological advantage, one that no revolt has enjoyed since 1968.

Suddenly, the form of today's protests seems entirely congruent with the way people live their lives. It is modern; it is immune to charges of ‘resisting progress'. Indeed, it utilizes technology that is so essential to modern work and leisure, governments cannot turn it off without harming their national economies. And, as Mubarak, Gaddafi and the Bahraini royals discovered, even turning it off does not work.

Because—and here is the technological fact that underpins the social and political aspects of what's happened—a network can usually defeat a hierarchy.

The pioneer of network theory, Walter Powell, summed up the reasons for this as follows: the network is better at adapting to a situation where the quality of information is crucial to success, but where information itself is fluid; a hierarchy is best if you are only transmitting orders and responses, and the surrounding situation is predictable. Above all, ‘as information passes through a network, it is both freer and richer [than in a hierarchy]; new connections, new meanings are generated, debated and evaluated.'
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However, the early network theorists were only studying the advantages of, say, collaborative workshops in the textile industry versus big factories. Now we are studying networks with many millions of individual nodes, and they are in conflict with states. Once information networks become ‘social', the implications are massive: truth can now travel faster than lies, and all propaganda becomes instantly flammable.

Sure, you can try and insert spin or propaganda, but the instantly networked consciousness of millions of people will set it right: they act like white blood cells against infection so that ultimately the truth, or something close to it, persists much longer than disinformation.

In fact, this quality of Twitter means, according to the South Korean authors of the first data-based study of it, that it is not really a ‘social network' but more like a news service. Services like Flickr, MSN and Yahoo involve a high level of ‘reciprocity', since about 70 per cent of relationships are two-way. Facebook is constructed in such a way that this reciprocity is 100 per cent: I ‘friend' you, you ‘friend' me. On Twitter, by contrast, only about 22 per cent of relationships are two-way—there is a much higher ratio of ‘followers' to those being followed.
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A second implication is that forms of protest can change rapidly. Whereas the basic form of, say, a Leninist party, a guerrilla army or even a ghetto riot has not changed in a century, once you use social networks the organizational format of revolt goes into constant flux. Even in the period between the Iranian uprisings of July 2009 and the time of writing (autumn 2011), changes have taken place in the way protesters use social media, in the way rioting is directed (as with the ‘Blackberry riots' in England in 2011), in the way people evade Internet shutdowns and in the tools used for ‘denial of service' attacks by hackers.

Indeed, during the actual course of the Iranian uprising of 2009, the ways of using social media visibly evolved. Protesters called the process ‘wave creation', using email, blogs and SMS to evolve the protests in real time. Looking at this phenomenon, Stanford scholar Saeid Golkar concludes:

The Internet enables users to suggest new mechanisms to expand protests and gather feedback on these suggestions. On one hand, this makes the movement more flat and democratic, and on the other hand, it makes its activities more rational, with lower costs of action.
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