 It's a great pleasure to introduce to you Seneb Tufecci, who's a Berkman faculty associate. She's kind of a rock star in our universe. We're delighted. Well, that happens to the best. We're delighted to have you here today. Seneb is a professor at the University of North Carolina, where she teaches at the School of Information and Library Science, but also at the sociology department. She's combining many different disciplines in one person. She's a computer programmer. She's a technology expert. She's an emographer. She's a sociologist and brings that all together in her amazing work. She studies how technology is actually shaping society and drives social change. She's a wonderful writer. I encourage you, if you don't already do, to follow her opeds in the New York Times, which are a must read. Today she's here to present her new book, which is just out. Twitter and tear gas, the power and fragility of network protest. Unfortunately, we don't have enough copy here. It's the only one, but please order it. It's available. I highly recommend it. It's a wonderful book. Seneb, we're so delighted to have you here and to host this first Cambridge book talk, right? Thank you. It is. This is my very first book talk. I am so thrilled. Now, I really apologize. I went to the other building. I'm like, I guess nobody wants to hear. I'll just sit here. Maybe somebody will show up. And then I was rescued by Seneb. I was saying, what are you doing here? I said, proving that having a PhD means nothing. It comes to practical stuff. So how should we allocate the question and answer time? So I timed myself correctly now that I'm a little late. Okay. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a brief, I guess, overview. I will go over everything, but I'll try to explain and then I'll try to draw it out in the question and answer part, because I think that will be much more productive. And what I'm trying to puzzle through here is, what is this new network public sphere that we're all talking about evolving into? And I'm getting at this from the point of view of social movements. But to get from the point of view of social movements, you have to sort of discuss all the other dynamics that are emergent and that are becoming more and more solidified. So just very briefly to situate myself, I'm originally from Turkey. I grew up there. I grew up without the internet. I grew up without access to enough books. I used to have practically every single translated encyclopedia in Turkish because that was a very finite amount. And my grandmother would buy them for me. So I had every one of them. I would just reread them. So I grew up in a situation where you'd run out of things to read and there's heavy censorship. You had one TV channel and they'd show us a little house on the prairie. It makes so little sense in the Middle East. I can't even explain how little sense. We don't have a frontier. Like you dig and there's like four civilizations and 10 empires. What is this middle of nowhere they're allegedly in? But the reason we got that channel and that TV show was because it was after a military coup which had established very strict controls over the public sphere, which lasted in some ways reverberating to this day. And there was a big conflict in the Kurdish Southeast that of course we didn't hear about. And then because I was a programmer by profession, I ended up working at IBM early on and they had a global intranet before anybody in Turkey had intranet. So I got a sense of oh wait, it was a bizarre project. We were localizing a MIDI system that was programmed on big mainframes that were built before I was born and I was supposed to work on all the levels. And sometimes I'd have a question and I'd be asking an IBM's intranet and it would be someone in Japan would say oh boy, yeah, I wrote that. Here's how you do it. I thought this is amazing. I can't figure out what's going on in my own country but I can talk to someone in Japan who's going to help me. IBM's virtual network. So that kind of made me really, that experience and thinking about computers made me really interested in how this was going to change everything. And then in the night I came to Turkey and I just jumped on it. And at the time it was sort of the tailor end of the Zapatista movement that had captured so much global attention. And they were allegedly using the internet a lot. I was really curious. I emailed people and I showed up at their Inquentros. They were holding these Inquentros bringing together activists together from around the world. And then I've been sort of following, participating, observing, thinking about these movements since then. Which I traced from like, I would trace from the Zapatistas to the Seattle 99, the WTO protests to the anti-corporate globalization protests of the 90s kind of. And then 9-11 happened which changed a lot of things and there was the anti-war movement. And then we had the latest way, which is the Occupy, the whole Arab uprising. And then it's still kind of, you have these different countries. Turkey is a part protest of Hong Kong. So there's been a lot. If you look numerically too, the number of protests has tripled or quadrupled, depending on how you measure. I bet if after you put 2007 it's going to be even more. But so here's one of the motivating puzzles of the book that we'll get to, that I'm trying to sort of get to with this book is, if digital technologies are indeed so empowering in so many ways, right? Why are we also seeing authoritarianism on the rise around the world? How does that square with that? And if, especially since the tech world tends to be on the progressive liberal libertarian spectrum. So the makers and a lot of the early adopters of these technologies and the creators tend to be on one side of the political spectrum. But the movements, they end up sympathizing around the world. If you look at, you know, you go to Tahrir, lots of open source people there. You know, it's kind of this global thing. So technology confidence isn't a problem. But the movements have the cycle of getting very big and then not having the proportional impact you would expect from a movement with that level of energy showing. So I was trying to figure all of this out. So just, this is the book. And it's not out yet. So sorry, I don't have copies either. I guess it'll be out. So one of the things, and very quickly, I never use the term virtual because digital technologies are pervasive in everything we do. Like online, offline, I didn't find that useful anymore. They're part of social movements because they're part of life. And I think finally that debate may well be over. But of course, the fact that they're part of life, they're not a separate world. They're part of this world. But they do have major impacts on this world. I look at them as one more set of technologies that's altering the space and time as we experience it. And this goes back to Telegraph. It sort of allows you to talk across distance or writing. It allows you to preserve ephemeral thought over time. So time and space altering technology tools are very integral to our human culture. This is the latest iteration. It's changing the geography of our world in lots of ways. And computation is also bringing, introducing a new kind of intelligence, which isn't really in this book. So that's sort of just this big raw thing. I don't talk virtual or not. This is, my data is very multi-level. This is me and Gizzy Park protest. I have a helmet on because tear gas canisters aim that your head are not good for someone in my profession or anyone else. But I also look at big data sets. I also look at other people's scholarship, right? So my book isn't based just on, here are my, like I did a lot of systematic interviews. I've been to, you know, protests in Tahir and I've been to all the Arab countries that were occupied here. But my book isn't just about my own primary research because I wanted to synthesize. I mean a lot of my research obviously is there, but I wanted to synthesize. And this thing I'm studying, this is, I call this globalization from below the movements because you've always had the powerful globalization. This is a picture I took in Gizzy Park protest in, I don't know, day two, day three. This lady, she's a Roma lady and they sell flowers to tourists around Toxin. If you've ever been to Toxin Square, which is sort of the central square, they're selling flowers to tourists and they're selling souvenirs and knickknacks. So the protest set and the whole place, of course, is now like, you know, that building, it's not supposed to have all those banners. Like people just took over and occupied the whole place and their clashes. So what happened in two days? They have manufactured, gave the Guy Fawkes masks somehow. And there's, instead of selling flowers, they're selling goggles to protect your eyes from tear gas. In case you're into graffiti, here's your spray paint. And like, they have sort of anti-tear gas stuff and you see these masks. I'm like, this is the leanest production, just in time thing I've seen. In two days they've completely shifted inventory. And then I picked these things up and everybody knew what to do, right? The masks, the symbols, they're so globally recognized, even in Turkey. And I'm like, where'd you get these masks? And the masks are a little weird. If you've seen them elsewhere, they're like a little off. Then I realized they somehow downloaded a 2D picture from the internet and then somehow tinkered and figured out a 3D model from it. But of course, it's not easy to get the 3D depth exactly right from the 2D picture. So they're a little off. They just somehow, you know, in one day this is what they could do. So this is amazing to me that there's this global protest culture that is very recognizable with the tear gas and the Guy Fawkes and everybody. It was just for, you go a lot of places, of course every country is different, right? Every country is different. But as I traveled around, right, when I first saw, and I went to, you know, Egypt and I'm in Tahrir Square, I'm talking to people. And I'm like, well, okay, so maybe this is Egypt and Egypt has all these sort of peculiarities. And then you see the Indignatus movement in Spain and it's very horizontalist participatory. And it's Spain, you know, you have a tradition of that. Occupy and you're like, okay, it's New York. And you sort of see these similarities and you keep trying to add to the reasons why each one just converges there. And then I went to Turkey, which never had a leaderless movement of size, right? Never had occupations like this. Doesn't have any of the cultural elements you see in Spain or something, a history of anarchist movements, participatory anything. And I found a movement that was really similar. And that's when I started thinking, you know what, it's really a global convergence. I keep explaining each one of them away. But there is a global pattern here. It doesn't mean there aren't peculiar specific things to each movement. Of course there are, but there's a lot of globalization from below. So, all right, let's get to the boring parts, the analysis. Pictures over from here on, all text. I'm kidding. There'll be someone. So when I look at a movement, right, this is what first, the first thing I'm trying to disentangle is the wrong way, I think, to analyze what's happening is to look at the movement repertoire's marches, calling a carousel person, demonstrations, occupations, even direct action, right, and compare them to their past counterparts. Why? I think it's misleading because as I'm going to argue, I think digital technologies have brought really different dynamics. So when you see a march, you're not really looking at the same underlying capacity as before. So if you just compare marches to marches and you say this is a big march, this was a big march, a big march in 1970 or 60 is not the same creature as a big march in 2017. So to sort of distangle what's what, I try to develop this idea that movements have capacities and I'll go through quickly at electoral narrative institutional capacity and they also have internal capacities, this will hopefully make sense, and they have these movement repertoires marching that are actually signals of those capacities. So I'm kind of making this, there's a surface epiphenomenon that you're seeing and it never reflects something different than the past because the process generating it has shifted and a lot of the analysis tends to look at the surface manifestation and compare them apples to apples kind of situation because the process generating them has significant changes. I am going to argue you can't do this and let's not do that and also I want to, I want to take a few minutes later to theorize attention as its own resource. Now I am greatly helped by the fact that Tim Wu has just come out with a book called attention merchants but until that basically attention has rarely been theorized especially in the context of social movements as a resource itself. Usually it gets conflated into media analysis in the past that made sense because mass media and public attention were broadly conflatable. Whereas right now it's not, so you need to look at attention as its own resource and that helps explain and understand a lot of things. There, okay so let's look at the narrative capacity. I'm going to talk about a turkey example with people who know anything about the Gezi Park protests are snickering because I will explain. So this is CNN international at the height of Turkey's Gezi protests. I mean I don't need to explain right this is Taksim Square this is this is like Times Square right this is a lot of stuff happening. CNN is live. This is CNN Turkey at that exact moment showing the very very important documentary on penguins because it must right the thing now nothing against penguins what was happening here is that the CNN Turkey which these Turkish media companies are owned by large conglomerates who are not interested in media they're interested in government contracts it's a way of government pressure they weren't going to displace the government by showing what might be happening in the biggest square of the biggest city right so they show this sort of and they need to fill air time so they show the penguin documentary now as this was happening though of course everybody had not everybody but tons of people had their phones and because of a couple of incidents previously in Turkey bombing of a Kurdish village that was first censored and then came out through social media basically twitter and instagram that got a lot of people thinking wait I get news not from tv but from my phone this was completely ineffective right when I had little house on the prairie I did all I had was my little house on the prairie now you could go to your phone and get them right so this was this the narrative capacity to censor the old way doesn't really anymore and I I'm going to spend at least a lot of time in the narrative capacity but just say every movement you see they really help change the conversation you see that power right occupy brought inequality into the conversation uh black lives matter if you look at the statistics the number of um shootings of black people by police isn't actually up it's just we're talking about it now thanks to a movement right if you look at the statistics this has been this chronic problem and there's not a spike there is a movement that has been that has told us look at this right and you know so there's more conversation so the narrative capacity component like the social media really allows movements to um intervene in the public sphere and change the conversation so it got so bad that whenever there's a picture Turkish twitter users who put penguins in the middle trying to attract cnn this is called cnn bait right you're like here maybe you'll cover it so they would know where there's something going on there'd be a bunch of them huddling uh but you know it was really great if you weren't it was so this kind of humor was so ingrained I mean when I'm when people talk about online offline I'm like what are we talking about because in gives a part people would literally go and then you get tear gas right and it's horrible but tear gas is one of those things that just it's not deterrent enough if you get used to it but it really annoying you feel like you feel horrible you the first time you feel like you're going to die and then you're like wait I'm not dead and then you get really upset because you feel like you can't breathe it's a very existential terror right anyway so people would get tear gas and they would go to the back and now they're kind of experienced and they know they're not gonna die and they'd be like really coughing and they immediately pull out their phone and then you'd see the sort of laughing coughing kind of trying to breathe mixed with laughing because the online humor the online virality and the offline stuff there is really completely ingrated and I talked to so many people there who were super thrilled that they could connect with their phone they could tell people who were elsewhere was going on they could when they were away they would check what was going on and there was a lot of coordination lots of things we'll talk about a little bit of course tear gas in Turkey a smoking country it's a mixed thing I literally could only breathe well in the park in the minute six to twenty of the post tear gas because that's only one time the people literally smoke a lot so there was a tear gas and then five minutes of horrible tear gas and then a little bit of clearing and I was like oxygen this is great and then by minute 20 people smoke so much that in open air I couldn't breathe so I was joking that I was going to provoke the cops to get tear gas so that I could breathe for 10 minutes before they took up smoking but so the narrative capacity of the penguin became the symbol of giz apart process in lots of ways more like the censorship and the people were like the Twitter bird was very crucial to people's imagination of how you communicate and the people were the tear gas mass became also very thick so let's talk about the disruptive capacity a little bit when I say disruptive capacity I mean the capacity to stop business as usual civil disobedience is a form of disruptive capacity blocking a road non-cooperation Indian independence movement so there are a lot of these occupations are disruptive now in the past when you try to pull off something disruptive like that like Seattle 99 kind of situations there was already cell phones they are used to coordinate and it was the first time the police were like holy crap they can also talk to each other because they go someplace and they you know surround people and then people were like all right they're here and blah blah blah and all the sort of not that kind of phone yet and I read sort of a comment by the police that were like okay they can coordinate too because until then the police could coordinate armies could coordinate and logistics you know the sort of the government have the resources to bring that kind of logistics whereas disruptive capacity is really difficult because you're often going to have government forces come at you to remove the disruption and if they're you know much more resource than you especially with logistics then that is a pretty unequal game so I'm going to talk about an example of how digital technologies have altered some of these capacities from Egypt this one and this is Tahir supplies this is literally their first week Tahir supplies was both youngsters in their 20s and what happened is in November of 2011 and so Tahir is this very large square it has tons of big streets coming into it which is why it's kind of hard for them to control it completely it's a very big square and it's got lots of entrances and one of them Mahmood Street leads directly into the Ministry of Interior it's the sort of big imposing building and I mean it's a Ministry of Interior in an autocracy followed by a military dictatorship regime it's as bad a building in terms of what happens as you imagine right that it's a symbol of lots of horrible things so there are clashes leading up to the Ministry of Interior in November of 2011 the story why that is is I kind of explained that in my book why there were clashes going on it's part of the story of the movement I let me not go into that let's just sort of say big clashes it's a I'll explain why the clash is important to disrupt the capacity a lot of the participants are the young people who are frustrated with where the post revolution post uprising whatever you want to call it processes going and these are not okay this is easier so they're not minor clashes during this period 30 to 40 people I believe it's 37 people died so we're talking about I mean this is a large number right we are talking about tens of thousands of people we're talking lots of people being injured if you have a situation where thousands of people are there if you have a number like 37 dead it means there are thousands injured right to get you know you can sort of extrapolate from them now the way Tahir protesters deal with these sort of injuries is they have field hospitals in fact they had about 10 field hospitals that were set up and the field hospitals first sprung up during the initial january 25 february uprising and in fact they have names like there's the kfc field hospital it's in front of the kfc right by Tahir square got so about the propaganda was like that americans were behind the protest and they were distributing free kfc which is not very like you know get shot at free kfc I don't think so but it's the kfc there's another one in a mosque there's like they're in particular places where there's no yeah if you have thousands of injured people and you have this sort of triage situation people are coming in from minor injuries to major injuries how do you organize the supplies like this might seem like a minor thing but if there's any military buffs out there this is not a minor thing organizing supplies in the chaotic conflict situation with a lot of tear gas and live bullets and rubber bullets flying around with lots of injured people and you are not a state you are not a government you know you're just creating you're using half of a mosque as a hospital so people were using twitter to ask and sort of recommend supplies but it was getting really confusing because you've seen it right there's a re-tweet and then somebody says like that was two years ago and or somebody says you know we need more betadine in kfc and turns out 30 people bring the betadine now there's too much betadine right it's kind of that kind of coordination of resources is not automatic and twitter and our facebook nothing is really suited to doing this on the fly so we're going to come to this so a pharmacy student who was i think all of 21 or 22 at the time who was not even in cairo is going through and saying this is so confusing and he's like let me organize this now i have a lot of stories like this i have a lot of stories of 20 something people who are like okay here's a problem let me do this uh luckily they don't know it's a hard problem ordinarily they're just do it uh i have like citizen journalism then one of the biggest citizen journalism networks in turkey came out like that bunch of you know 20 something saw censorship and they got up one day and said let's create a citizen journalism network five minutes later they started well uh my uh this this person gets up says let me organize this five minutes later twitter feed test okay so here's what happened he quickly found three more people only one of them in cairo one in london actually which helped right you know golf cairo london different time zones so four people none of them are twitter stars you know they're just a couple hundred followers of their friends and they follow people and they quickly put up google sheets you know spreadsheets they started pinging people saying look we're going to organize it and this is adhocracy right people are used to this now you just go all right here you do it on the fly and they started pinging some high-profile people on twitter saying let us do this let us do this at first you're like who are you and then people were like all right let's see you do it you have no idea who these people are right this is in the middle of this and then they started finding the phone numbers of the people on the ground so they started calling them and saying look we're going to do this if you need something we're either going to call you're going to tweet at us you're going to dms you're going to you know message us so slowly by which i mean very fast by historical standards basically one day they took over the whole supply chain right and not only do they take over the whole supply chain they have a real time inventory up on the web down to like how many needles for you know suturing are where and why everybody's completely supplied i mean as these things go very quickly and all of a sudden of course they have the sort of all the retweets about bringing liena can you bring more beta dying they all stopped everybody immediately adapted like you don't even know who these people are and just one of them is in kaira they're not on the ground um and then they were able to crowd source right because they all of a sudden they have this attention and because of the the the way they use tear gas canisters is uh we sell to these countries they're all made in the US in my little bug is that they shoot at you right they're supposed to be shot with a 45 degree you know sort of a parabola they should write at you salon eye injuries and there was apparently something machine you needed to immediately intervene forty thousand dollars they raised it right they're like let's get something so he did all of this um i have like a slide of a field hospital i believe yeah like these are field hospitals um like they're just they are doctors and nurses but you know so after this thing calmed down i interview him and and i kind of got to know them because they're tweeting too fast and they got in twitter jail because twitter's not made for this right i mean twitter's set to talk up south by southwest and you're organizing so supplied so we try to help him get out of there um as i'm interviewing him and i said what was your model for you know what made you think you could organize all the logistics in the middle of all these clashes you know 10 field hospitals what did you what was your model where'd you get your inspiration you're like i'm cupcakes i am like all right okay you haven't slept in many days it's okay we'll talk later it's like no no no there's a cupcake store in Cairo uh that was using sort of viral promotions to sell whatever cupcakes it had more off so he was inspired by the social media success of a cupcake store in Cairo and i'm like did you hear anything about napoleon muskow you know logistics is like what said hitler muskow he's like no i'm like do you have any military history interest background logistics supply he's like no i'm like that's great because we would not have tried if you had he's like oh maybe i'll get to reading it that's my talking to you and i said great and this is like a lot of my experiences like i talked to these young people and i'm really amazed at what they pulled off and sometimes i say well there was this historical thing that i have no idea and i'm like all right shut up shut up just don't tell them because why bring them to the ground in terms of what they can't because they can do this this is uh this is this isn't this empowering at all okay so this one is very straightforward i'm not going to explain this is we're going to come back to this the third kind of capacity i kind of discussed in my book is the electoral institutional capacity do you scare politicians that's not only down through voting but voting is one way in this country primaries is one way raising money is another way her you know calling them is another way do you force institutions to change so these kinds of like in social movement literature the insider outsider strategies we will come back to this but this is kind of self-explanatory and we'll explain why we're going to come back to this now let's add one more thing to the technology thing is that these protests have a very particular political culture i don't just i mostly talk about these left anti-authoritarian tech field ones in my book obviously they are not the only kind of protest movements in the world they're just kind of that it's a kind that i follow then it's a kind that has a large global presence and these movements have globalization from below and political culture kind of converged to a participatory horizontalist model and to explain this this is a gezi park protest library um so many of them have libraries okay like Hong Kong they set up a library occupied they set up a library now i love libraries okay i i mean i i could just sort of sort of extend from the library and happily live there um a question to me like it's not the first thing you think of right it's not a practical need they all have clinics they need them they all have just food soup kitchen while somebody needs to feed the people so there's a lot of practice that they do but they will set up libraries over so this is a sort of a interesting question and they all have these colorful things this is very soon after gezi park protest a pride march near the area and you see that this person's on stones so this person's wearing the it's a bunny with a tear gas mask why not like they're kind of these very irreverent protests and they're very colorful so the library question what what's so attractive about libraries to understand is you also sort of think about the political culture uh that goes back well you can find other antecedents but you can sort of see this in the 68 movement too like the port here on statement that was the 1960s early 1960s statement by a lot of people signed by a lot of people that became very prominent in the 68 movement if you read it and change a few things they talk about men make it human that kind of stuff because we're not in the 1960s anymore it reads very similar it talks about participation it talks about voice it talks about feeling disempowered it's very recognizable to a 2011 protester with one difference that kind of protest culture that comes from feeling alienated and disempowered by electoral democracies by what liberal democracies has turned into the sort of co-optation and corruption of power by governments corporations all of those things alienation existential questions uh wanting to be in that participatory moment where you have a voice it's all there in the culture but one difference is if you have that culture and you want to hold big protests it's harder without the digital technology right what i think i observe which i argue that i observe is that we see this convergence of a very participatory adhocratic voice participation horizontalism with merging with digital tech that allowed you to do things in a new way but the desire to do things in that new way had been there and bubbling through 60s 70s 80s people wanted to have leaderless movement it's just as harder like if you can't use hashtags to pull a movement together it's harder to have a leaderless movement because who's going to organize and get the permits and do the things and all of this stuff right so the thing the leaderlessness adhocracy participation it found its enactment through the affordances of digital technologies this is part of the thing i argue and that's so here we're getting to sort of finally pulling it all together is that this is what i've been kind of saying about movement is that digital technology internet has kind of started acting like the sherpa in climbing Everest and a few other big mouths but mostly Everest in that it allows muslims that have grievances as all movements do legitimacy desire for participation it allows them to skip over certain infrastructure organizational capacity building steps to go straight to the street protest big march some demonstration some signal of displeasure but the technology is actually sort of doing what chirpas do for all the people climbing Everest or not mountaineers is that it's carrying your stuff for you right so in the past in the past if you want to hold a large march and this is an example i give let me sort of show you like i'm gonna come back to this if you wanted to if you sort of go back to like we look at all three i'll come back to this right this is 1963 march on washington and these are like gizzy park made on patria like ukraine so this they look the same but this one takes you about 10 years to get even to the place where you can try to hold that big march 10 years of moon building and it took them six months to organize it and it wasn't an easy thing right because 1963 dc is not a safe place for a large anti march walk anti racist march they can't even stay in town because it's too dangerous people are afraid they're going to get attacked right so you have to bring all these people in and get them out this is not a straightforward thing if you don't have google spreadsheets and twitter hashtags and all the things that you could do with this and they had to organize it to the level like they can't trust the hospitals of course you don't want anything they can't trust anything in the city so they had to make sure like the sandwiches they distributed didn't have mayonnaise which could spill right you had to micromanage the process took them six months of intense work uh to organize this so when you look at this like this is this is where i'm like this is where getting into my theory again is that if you look at movements as capacities when you look at this one when you're in the from the point of your power when you look at a movement you think if they could use this what else can they do otherwise the march doesn't have some magic to it right i mean you march great i march my whole life but if you're in power and you're looking at it what you're thinking is if they can march with these numbers what else can they do it is not the same with this versus this i'm not saying march is our bad thing i'm just saying it's a different thing this is a culmination of 10 years of work to just get to be able to do this whereas these are maybe the beginning of something which is a problem for movements because you get the most attention without having built um network internalities sorry blah blah slide again but this is basically if you have to do things the old way and i'm not going to argue let's go back to the old way i'm just saying like this is what happens when you do things the new way is that you don't build these network internalities which is a word i made up because i didn't have a word for it which is like if you're taking care of some level of tasks you gain collective decision-making capacity delegation uh you learn how to work together and it doesn't matter if the task is trying to figure out how to mimeograph leaflets or create a world parliament it doesn't really matter right when you do something together you build collective decision-making capacity current movements because they're participatory because they go from zero to 100 miles an hour using the internet as their sherpa they do not have the collective decision-making capacity as their process and that brings us to why my theory of why they kind of stumble is that they turn run into a tactical freeze right after their first big protest and this may happen in the us too we shall see probably not because lots of learning going on but this happened in one way or another in lots of moments you watch is what happens is your don't have sort of this ten years of collective decision-making you're already got a participatory horizontalist culture that values voice for very understandable reasons the reason people protest is because they're feeling alienated right so you're not going to expect them to be cogs in a machine in such a situation so i am i'm not saying any of this in a judgmental way so you come to this participation participatory impulse and then you go from zero to million people in the street in three days in women's march facebook posts million people in the street month or two right very little infrastructure and since voice is so valid and you're the you're operating on platforms like facebook and twitter which don't really allow decision-making they're good for capturing attention and they're good for uh outreach they're good for a bunch of things but they're not good for decision-making at all so you come to your you went from zero to hundred miles an hour you haven't really built your car like your steering wheel is kind of not even there and then you have a government come at you this is almost like the startups you can be instagram you can have like from zero to hundred million users in i don't know a year and you have only 11 engineers why you get bought by facebook if you're a fake if you're a social movement you don't have any venture capitalists trying to come to rescue you have a government coming at you and that requires a tactical shift and if you look at sort of successful movements uh i'm a civilized movement it's not the only movement in the world it's more more familiar so i'll give that example you see this in the indian independence movement too they shift tactics and each phase has a particular target and policy and strengths and weaknesses and then it kind of stops working sometimes so they shift again these movements have no decision making capacity to shift and because they're on these attention maximizing capturing uh platforms what i see them turning into is this massive internal bickering that is played out publicly and i don't think it's the coincidence that you see this in almost every country you see this again and again you see the sort of phases this is a gezi part post gezi part protest where they're trying to decide what to do they're holding assembly style decision making where everybody's supposed to speak in a you know park it but obviously you can't make a decision that way right because they they couldn't right what do you do next occupy couldn't do it either after it was evicted it couldn't find the next tactical move uh and you see this freeze the people keep wanting to go back to the first thing they keep wanting to have a taher square occupation they keep wanting to have this park situation and i think this is a sort of this function of collective decision making capacity like they're on so uh i'm not going to do the thing but i i said that i'm going to i because i want to have time for a thing so what i'm talking about is if you know the biological signaling theory right so um gazelle sometimes do this thing where they jump up in the middle of like even if they're just sort of grazing and then they just jump up it's actually kind of silly right you're wasting energy why are you jumping up it's actually a honest signal of their muscular capacity you're basically telling i don't know whatever eats the tigers lions whatever's eating them look i can jump really high i got good muscles i'm going to run past it right so it's signaling something even though it's kind of costly the same thing with the antlers it's like it takes energy to build them that big they're kind of silly like your head is always like then why do they have well they're basically saying i got lots of nutrition okay so this is where i'm going to uh argue that one of the things that we've done in the past like berkman Klein has studied the sofo people type of things i don't think they're going to work anymore because i think they weren't signaling an enormous amount of capacity they were like google changes homepage and you could call your carnous people very quickly it was actually fairly easy to do uh but lawmakers weren't prepared so they couldn't read the signal and they freaked out and i think in the past two years they have learned that the digital technology makes some things easier so you know big marches they annoy you know who right he's really annoyed by them but it's not really a rational annoyance he's just very annoyed so fine with me uh but the legislatures aren't even that scared of your phone calls anymore because there's so many tools that have automated it i come across it all the time people are like here you know click here and we'll connect you well i mean where is the signal if you do that right so the question for social i'm not saying don't call i'm just saying it's easier for them to ignore the same volume of calls that would have scared the living lives out of them 10 years ago because 10 years ago it would have signaled some other kind of capacity whereas right now it might be some national email list of people who are not they're constituents who don't we're not a primary threat to them we're not an electoral threat to them you're just jamming up their switchboard and i i mean seeing congress people tweak like saying all right my switchboard is jammed again people don't use that because they're not changing the way they vote based on volume of phone calls the same way they would anymore and i think this is also true for marches they look at it and they assess in hong kong the chinese communist party absolutely did not freak out lots of people on the street patiently waited out and tried to ignore it rather than sort of fuel it and that was kind of a strategy that worked so this is where it all you know this is the sort of signaling theory and i already explained so uh like almost final slide this is my proposal is like let's not analyze movements by looking at their outputs let's look at the capacity building side and this is also a part that i didn't talk about at all which is the government response misinformation um censorship through denial of attention information overload they're all going at movement capacities movements have acquired narrative capacity and governments have now figured out how to mess with that right how to do counter attention counter protest um so i i just really want to do away with online protest because all you still hear these people say go don't do it online go do it in the real world i'm like you know it's all real the question is what are you doing online and how and what are you doing because there's no magic to the offline thing you can march big marches and it may not really get what you think and focus on the underlying resource um attention than the path is so i'm not going to do the government's part because i this is my um like the government part is something that i think deserves a lot of attention that is not suitable for one talk uh but what you see governments and counter movements doing right now is increasingly looking at like there was this initial way where they couldn't figure it out and there's a lot of these early sort of disruptive moments what i think they've really figured out increasingly egypt turkey china maybe us i don't know i probably not yet right but i mean there's sort of this evolution of looking at movements as do they signal some other capacity and threat to us and then governments have now actively learn how to disrupt some of the capabilities that social movements have acquired and i think the most important one here also counter movements uh the most or other movements most important one has been um if you think of censorship as the way it was in the 90s 80s in turkey little house on the prayer that obviously doesn't work anymore but if you think of censorship not as a speaker focused theory but a listener focused theory and see it as a denial of attention so that you or denial of credibility which is where misinformation uh comes in and you know it's not all tech technique but it really works well in the digital age so you see the moving going for the capacities and i kind of wrote the book to try to say let's see if we can analyze the capacities focus on them and understand them not as a plea to do anything the old kind of way but as a plea to say if this is what you're missing in your capacity building what is the 21st century network version of collective decision-making capability right we're not going to go to the old way we're not going to just give up our technology why because it empowers you in so many ways but what are the weaknesses that are introduced by using digital tech to carry your you know backpack and you haven't really figured out how to deal with the thin atmosphere and all of a sudden you're above 8 000 feet and it's serious right this is what happens to social movements well that's kind of um a synopsis of bunch of things and now you don't have to read the book here i'm kidding there are a few things in the book that are not there uh who's going are we gonna moderate are you gonna have oh hi thanks um i'm judy parole i live next door where's this is on i live next door uh and i used to teach about this stuff and i found your book i'm looking forward to reading the book well i'm looking forward to reading your book but in the meantime i think you overestimate the organizational capacities of the anti-war movement and the march on washington i was involved in both of those things and it was a chaotic mess of different groups doing their own things and what really counted was communications we used to use phones and phone chains it was slower but i mean back to the federalist papers being able to communicate it's where those libraries come in we all always had libraries of pamphlets that the newspapers wouldn't publish the stuff so it's a transformation that i think you're really got a good angle on hi i'm ian i'm a student here um it seems like most of your analysis is based on sort of a transnational left-wing movements broadly construed but one of the interesting things we've seen over the past couple years is a sort of transnational right-wing reactionary movement how do you think that this do you think this analysis applies in the same way to the alt-right and so that's a great great question um so the book i wrote the book mostly well obviously you know my own research and what i know of uh colors this i have a little bit i especially about the tea party movement which is one of the most successful movements in us past 20 30 years gets overlooked because people everybody knows the co-brothers funded them so people tend to think of it as just astrotrip it's not it's a real movement with very different tendencies um so that's one thing in terms of the right-wing movements the argument i do kind of make but i don't sort of analyze them in depth the same way is that they too so the internet's not like your pony it only works for you right one of the things it does is uh allow people to find like-minded people right i have a lot of stories of you know you're in egyptian dissidents and your family doesn't want to talk politics and where do you go to find people you go on twitter you find people so this initial movement formation homophobic if there's anything you're interested in the world there's an internet group for and you can find it um that has been great for the initial stages of movement formation especially when you the public sphere was somewhat close to you and this is true for many left-wing this was also true for uh in europe i think the sort of more than the right the european white sort of nationalist right-wing movement is more it's both more powerful and more interesting in some ways they the public sphere was mostly close to them well because you know they had world war two and nazis all of that so there's a lot of strong hate speech laws there's a lot of ways that outlaws nazis so what you start seeing them do is that they start using the same techniques and a left-wing movement does uh uses to push the public sphere is that they organize online they get enough numbers they start propagating they start finding like-minded people and you start seeing like their numbers rise um in all sorts of countries where they were basically negligent and uh you can argue this was a form of closed ignorance where a lot of people kind of harbored some sympathy but you didn't know if other people's private information was the same as yours in this revelation of preferences which is something that's been studied heavily for movement formation i think internet is a big deal in that and i talk about that a big in the book so that happened to them too with one difference so there's a sort of small information pushing the public sphere creating a counter-public you got the same unlike the left push movements there uh they are not ambivalent about power right their whole political culture doesn't come from this analysis of power as a bad thing that we do not want to touch which is sort of the left kind of inherently is now there's a book by my friend johnson smucker who goes into how the lesson was so much on that and you see this a bit with the tea party too since they don't have that kind of analysis of power what you see them do in the european sphere is they're like all right what's the election where we have a shot and you start seeing them run in the european parliament which is sort of easier to get to because it doesn't have the same natural structure so i would argue that a good chunk of some of the mechanisms i identify in my book that apply to left-wing movements of like homophily preference revelation for sick ignorance um attention they apply to them except since their political culture is different they use it in some ways they use it to wield more power than by almost by definition you see their rise globally and you see also in the tea party moon which i do talk about in my book the one thing that when people talk to them they're like political scientists they know the legislature arcane things in a way like a left-wing movement would see us corrupt and not knowing so there's an instrumental side to them and i think that's part of their disproportionate impact in especially united states would be their caucus they blocked president obama's second term basically arguably they have a president uh elected so that's kind of like the political call i this is also why i don't think you can organize tech aside from the culture in which it's embedded right you have mechanisms that feel similar things but the culture and the tech interact to create sort of it starts hi i'll be that question murthy so i teach in cyborg clinic here so i'm i'm really interested in your diagnosis of technology and the comparison between civil rights and modern movements and on the dimension of governance right so do you think there is something inherent about attention grabbing technology or digital technology to make it more pointed that prevents effective governance from emerging or is there a technological solution to that problem that's a great question part of it is clearly the culture the culture that i mean you didn't need to have i have long passages in my book about the assembly structure of the offline thing and what it meant to and that wasn't a technological problem that was something that uh merged with movement culture but that's it um so these these movements use the platforms they use because social movement people they're going to go where the people are right they're on twitter they're on facebook because they're going to go where the people are but they've also started using them to organize right because they're already there and uh you don't have really too many alternative schools the problem with the sort of um i'll give two examples like with both with facebook facebook algorithm is non-partisan in the left right spectrum but it's partisan for pushing things that are either outrageous or very cute and cuddly right we can go into long story why it's clearly picking up on human tendencies to be cognizant of threat and we like cute cuddly things uh because that's how we you know put up with kids right so basically there's these human tendencies and facebook's algorithm feeds them because it's meant to the whole thing is optimized to get you to spend more time on this like that means for a social movement that those are your options and if you look at the post election sort of left social media it's pushing to the edge and edge edge it's sort of you started this rise of conspiracy getting bigger and bigger there's a lot of the stuff that are non-factual all the things that you know we're talking about you're seeing it because it's it goes viral very easily for also a way to make money so you it's pushing the movement in a particular way twitter because it has retweets and likes as the only two mechanism right what gets retweets a lot of time it's very public so what happens there is that if there's an argument between people let me merge the culture thing because the culture is leaderless right you have the emergence of de facto spokespeople there's no formal leadership but the people with high social media following become de facto spokespeople because that's where the media goes so they have them mega fun so the other people in the movement get frustrated they're like who made you the leader and they want or they want to argue with this person say let's do this let's not do that because there's no formal mechanism the only way you can do it is to go you know bicker with them and that is an attention grabbing thing because it's kind of like watching a wreck like everybody turns and looks and because the retweet mechanism is the only mechanism you have you have no mechanism that is trying to say how do we bring this to a conclusion right all you have is lots of people retweeting arguments and the burns and all the thing and worse for the movement it's publicly available in screenshots and all of this for a long long time this may seem like a minor problem but internal strife has been incredibly destructive to pretty much all the moments I discuss I mean it is not this minor annoyance it is something that is paralyzed movements just as the government's coming for them so the fact that why does twitter do this why does facebook do this it makes perfect sense for their business model it makes no sense for a movement to do its decision making this way so could you have there's couple of tools there's Lumio that tries to do that it's running out of funding people use reddit because even though reddit is reddit it's better it doesn't have these algorithmic attention structures that so I think there's a great need to bring it together for collective decision making tools that respect the movement cultural sensibilities you're not going to get people just to vote up and down these are participatory movements you're not going to tell people get in line it's not none of that is going to work so if there were a way that collective decision making could take place so the participatory sensibilities were recognized and respected but also brought to a conclusion through a transparent and legitimate way so that the only way to argue for a different path wasn't the bigger among yourselves on twitter I think that would be an enormous positive thing to many many social movements because that's their big weakness the culture would have to come along too and I think after all these defeats I think the sort of movements have kind of been like okay we do need to do this a little bit this is our last question oh hi um so there are a couple of things that I was thinking about one was the emergence of leadership as with the medical supplies and how this kind of arises in a way that is totally unexpected so you know that that to me is a very strong kind of upside in terms of you know there are possibilities the other thing I was thinking about was the moments of change right and this just ties in with your concept of attention and the one that always springs to mind with what we have at the moment in the US is the Anita Hill hearings and the way that galvanize the women to run for office I mean after watching the hearings so you know though that concept of attention I think is absolutely perfect because if you can get if you can get a large community focused on where it is you're looking to go you know what the next steps are I think that that that can really make it happen I'll give you an example to explain how significant how this moves and it's an example from China based on a paper that was published by Gary King and Jennifer Penn and Gary King is actually here it's an amazing it's an amazing series of papers so everybody knows China has a 50 cent army kind of thing if you haven't heard of it it call it what you want they're they people call them trolls Russia has them like their people the government allegedly pays 50 cents per post and for a long time there was this question what do these people do right like what does the 50 there there these apparently hundreds of thousands of people who are paid to post online but what the heck do they post and what do they do so they do this really ingenious study download the tons of things they looked at what got censored so they kept taking snapshots because the Chinese government censors a lot of things but it's not this closed public sphere right there's hundreds of millions of people on their own version of twitter their own it's not really like you can't censor everything so you're choosing what the censor and you've got the very lively public so what do they censor what do these 50 cent people do so here's the finding unlike you think they decent sensing all government criticism they don't in fact if anything my senses they use it like a petition to the emperor you kind of get a read of where things are government criticism is not really censored they do sense it calls the collective action because that's what's right to them so they want to get participation and feedback from the population just as long as don't touch our power because otherwise you're blind to wear your problems are right because authoritarian regimes they fall because they can't measure the population and the weaknesses so that's kind of okay that's interesting they don't censor criticism here's something that I found really fascinating and I swear I gave a talk at Buzzfeed the other day and I was like Chinese government party Buzzfeed two institutions that really understand the tension they now explain you know because you think of them as the sort of Chinese government party must be crusty boring no no no here's what they do these people do not go and argue with government critics you think they go and you know when you say something they don't they don't go and post per government stuff I mean they don't turn it into Pravda right you know a pro government sort of parroting doesn't work you see it people roll their eyes right they don't do that here's what they do when there's an event here of some importance some anniversary something that is of politically fraught the 50 cent people go over here and they go oh look there's some other totally different thing and they just create this huge distraction they create a huge distraction whatever it may be you know a scandal and blah and here like they find something because the thing the current mode of censorship isn't blocking attention it's blocking the connection between I'm blocking information it's it's blocking the attention to the information that's very effective and I thought this is just mind-blowingly I'm not happy about it but it's kind of really impressive how good they are in understanding in the Hong Kong protests they pulled back the police in the tear gas and pepper spray because that gets you Anita Hill right that gets you the visuals that gets you these pictures that are so grabbing instead they're like we are going to wait as quietly as possible till they get kind of they hit that third tactical freeze and it worked so that's kind of the last question thank you fascinating thank you so much thank you thank you and have a good afternoon