Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (11 page)

As the real-world revolt was suppressed, activists took to the digital rooftops: launching ‘Googlebombs' against Ahmadinejad and cyber-attacks on government websites, while putting psychological pressure on members of the repressive forces by naming them and disseminating their details. In response—in what remains the best-documented example outside China of cyber-repression—the regime trawled Facebook for the identities of activists, unleashed cyber-attacks against their networks and instructed 10,000 members of the Basij militia to set up their own, rival, blogosphere.
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The new technology, then, makes possible a new relationship among protesters themselves and between protesters and the mainstream media, and gives protest movements increased leverage over NGOs, multilateral bodies and guarantors of international law. It provides instant evidence of truth and can facilitate swift neutralization of lies, including those of state propaganda. All this, however, is only a side- effect of the much bigger change this technology has brought about: the change in human behaviour.

The iconic image of this decade is a young person sitting in Starbucks, her face blue from the screenlight of a MacBook. She could be hanging out, composing chart-busting electro-pop, creating more value than the whole Starbucks branch with some high-tech research project; or planning a revolution.

To an older generation, steeped in the culture of collectivism, these Starbucks Kids were the epitome of egotistic isolation. But it turns out these young people were not wasting their time: they were pioneering a major expansion in the power of the individual human being.

The networked revolution

In the middle of the biggest upsurge in labour protests for a decade, it seems impolite to mention the name of André Gorz. Gorz was a French Marxist who for twenty years was spat on by left commentators for writing a book entitled
Farewell to the Working Class
(1980).

Gorz asserted that the old proletariat had been dissolved by modern technology and that the class struggle would be replaced by individual personal politics. He was wrong: the world economy has created 1.5 billion extra workers since his book was written. He was also wrong to claim that capitalism was destroying skilled work. And yet parts of the book now bear rereading, in particular Gorz's definition of revolution:

Taking power implies taking it away from its holders, not by occupying their posts but by making it permanently impossible for them to keep their machinery of domination running. Revolution is first and foremost the irreversible destruction of this machinery. It implies a form of collective practice capable of bypassing and superseding it through the development of an alternative network of relations.
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By this definition we are in the middle of a revolution: something wider than a pure political overthrow and narrower than the classic social revolutions of the twentieth century. Out of the very values and practices of free-market capitalism—individualism, choice, respect for human rights, the network, the flattened hierarchy—the masses have developed a new collective practice. They can bypass and supersede the machinery of power via, as Gorz predicted, an ‘alternative network of relations'.

In the space often years a whole new form of behaviour, consumption, culture and even human consciousness has sprung up which has changed our attitudes to hierarchies and to property. It is already possible to find, on any demonstration, self-described ‘communists' for whom the idea of a Leninist party is alien. Every nightclub contains people—maybe even a majority of people—who are happy to pay the entrance fee, and for their drugs, but who find the idea of paying to own the music itself as, again, incomprehensible.

The network, in short, has begun to erode power relationships we had come to believe were permanent features of capitalism: the helplessness of the consumer, the military-style hierarchy of boss and underlings at work, the power of mainstream media empires to shape ideology, the repressive capabilities of the state and the inevitability of monopolization by large corporations.

Richard Sennett, writing in 2004, believed the destruction of hierarchical work and its replacement by consumption as the main source of self-esteem had been wholly negative:

The insurgents of my youth believed that by dismantling institutions they could produce communities: face-to-face relations of truth and solidarity … This certainly has not happened. The fragmenting of big institutions has left many people's lives in a fragmented state. Taking institutions apart has not produced more community.
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But what we've seen since then, above all in the events of 2009–11, are revolts led by fragmented and precarious people. They have used the very technologies that produced the atomized lifestyle in the first place to produce communities of resistance.

And here's where it becomes essential to understand what that ‘third thing' is, that gift arising from network relationships. To the business gurus, it was only ever profit: but to individuals it is something else. It's been described as a ‘free dose of personal well-being'.

Technically, when we participate in e-commerce, we're just nodes in a consumer network—bidding for bargains on eBay, buying stuff on iTunes or Amazon. In return we are contributing not only money but our own intellectual property for free, in the form of reviews or star ratings (or even just our behaviour, surreptitiously logged by the company's CRM systems). The raw trade-off is that if I contribute a truthful review of an item I have bought, I might find an equally truthful one of something I would like to buy. But, as everyone involved intuitively understands, you are not just in it for the raw trade-off. There is a third ‘party' in the transaction and that is the network, or community, itself. The transaction leaves a residue of collaboration.

Now, this understanding of the intangible, hidden value inside the network relationship has begun to permeate not just commerce and work, but protest. When doomed graduates, precarious workers and the poor use social networks to coordinate protests, they are waging a human fight-back against the atomizing effects of the modern marketplace.

However, there is a problem. Networked protests—as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his famous
New Yorker
diatribe against them—have the same downside as modern work and culture: they promote only ‘weak ties'.
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That is, they reduce the level of commitment needed to be involved in anything. They allow users to adopt multiple identities, a pick-and-mix attitude to commitment, a kind of learned mercuriality. They allow instant concentration upon a target (as with Tahrir Square, or the Manet painting at London's National Gallery), but equally instant fragmentation and dispersal. They make every action the subject of negotiation between the participants: unlike with an infantry battalion or a trade union, you cannot assume the support of the same group of people who acted together before.

Gladwell's attack on social networks is an attempt to defend the old, hierarchical forms of organizing in the face of this new reality. He writes:

The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn't interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn't need to think strategically. But if you're taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy.
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However, some military theorists have concluded the opposite. They have noticed that even where ties are weak, individuals can come together in ways more effective than the old hierarchical models allowed. They have noted that ‘swarm' tactics often defeat hierarchical structures—even where the hierarchy has greater strength and a better information system.

In Millennium Challenge 2002, a military exercise conducted by the USA, an opposing force modelled on Iran's Revolutionary Guard controversially ‘defeated' the US Navy by using swarm tactics. It ‘sank' an aircraft carrier and half of the American fleet by concentrating every single cruise missile onto a single target. It broadcast commands verbally from minarets, instead of using radios; it dispatched motorcycle couriers; it mounted Silkworm missiles on pleasure boats and launched suicide attacks with propeller planes. Defeat prompted the US general staff to halt the exercise, ‘refloat' the fleet and change the rules. The elderly genius who'd designed the swarm attack—Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper—resigned, warning the Bush administration that it had no clue about how to deal with the modern world.
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If you want to defeat one hierarchy and replace it with another, Gladwell is probably right; but the revolts under discussion did not aim to do that. The 25 January revolt in Egypt used networks to paralyze the authorities and create a fluid, unstable situation; at the same time they used networks to place pressure on unreliable potential allies like the US State Department and the SCAF.

Besides networks, they used informal hierarchies. Ahmed Maher, one of the founders of the April 6
^th
Youth Movement, describes their way of working:

I established this ‘operations room' around fifteen days before the beginning of the protests, and we would meet daily to discuss routine details. … Two days prior to the demonstrations we implemented a new mode of operation which saw activists being split into separate groups, with each group being made up of between thirty and fifty activists who would be posted to central areas and public squares to incite protests, whilst only the leader of each group would be informed of the precise location of where the protests were scheduled to begin.
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And their strategy evolved on contact with the enemy. Much has been made of the reliance of Egyptian revolutionaries on Gene Sharp's
Strat
egy Guide
for non-violent revolutions. While certainly some had read it, many leftists believe its relevance has been overstated. What happened is that social media allowed loose coalitions of activists to make collective decisions that looked to their opponents like they were strategic: for example, understanding the precise nature of the crowd in Tahrir Square on certain days, or gauging the precise level of incredulity among the masses at the rubbish being shown on state TV.

The network is stronger than its critics think. It has proved it can, at the very least, achieve the first phase of a democratic revolution by getting inside the decision cycle of those in power. It is altering the balance between worker, student and urban poor groups within protest movements. And it is changing the balance of power between the leaders and the led.

Whatever the limitations of networked action, and however it will be forced to morph as the revolts run up against tanks, torture, cyber-repression, etc., by 2011 it had already changed the face of protest. For Gladwell's critique overlooks a third dimension: the dimension of control.

The network's usefulness is not limited to half-hearted reform struggles that aim only to shock or disturb. It can achieve those elements of instant community, solidarity, shared space and control that were at the heart of social revolutions in the early industrial age. It can be, as cooperatives were for the workers who launched the Paris Commune of 1871, a space to form the bonds that would take them through an insurrection. It can be, as German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle described co-operatives in the 1860s, ‘a means absolutely imbued with the nature of the ends'.

Time and again the impulse to create areas of self-control has led, in the past two years, to an almost mystical determination by protesters to occupy a symbolic physical space and create within it an experimental, shared community. From Tahrir and Syntagma to the student ‘kissing protest' in Santiago's central plaza and Occupy Wall Street, these attempts at creating instant ‘liberated spaces' have become the single most important theme in the global revolt.

The reasons for this are not palatable for many trained in the structured politics of the late twentieth century. It demonstrates that, as I observed in the British student occupations, this generation has a better understanding of power. The hardcore activists have read their Chomsky, Guy Debord, Hardt-Negri and Gene Sharp, and understood the principles; but more importantly the ideas therein have become ‘common-sense' to a much wider layer of people who have never read any of it. They see the various ‘revolutions' in their own personal lives as central to the change they're trying to make; not—as their liberal and social-democratic parents did—as some kind of ‘retreat into personal polities'.

In a famous conversation in 1972, Michel Foucault could tell the psychologist Gilles Deleuze: ‘We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power.'
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But Foucault and Deleuze have been on the mainstream social science curriculum for twenty years now; we comprehend power more fully as a result.

The crunch

The revolts, then, are the result of a technological revolution driven by the deployment of digital communications at work, in social life, and now in the forms of protest. It is not necessary to be a techno-determinist to see this.

The new technology underpins our ability to be at the same time more individualistic and more collective; it shapes our consciousness and magnifies the crucial driver of all revolutions—the perceived difference between what could be and what is.

In turn, the networked protest has a better chance of achieving its basic goals because it is congruent with the economic and technological conditions of modern society—it mirrors social life, financial structures and production patterns. It speaks to the mental conceptions that flow from the networked life we live. And to an extent, as we will see, it is satisfied with the conquest of space
within
the system rather than seeking to smash the system.