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Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2017 00:25:08 -0500
Bruce Schneier, CTO, IBM Resilient https://www.schneier.com
CRYPTO-GRAM, July 15, 2017 [PGN-excerpted]
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Book Review: "Twitter and Tear Gas," by Zeynep Tufekci
There are two opposing models of how the Internet has changed protest
movements. The first is that the Internet has made protesters mightier than
ever. This comes from the successful revolutions in Tunisia (2010-11), Egypt
(2011), and Ukraine (2013). The second is that it has made them more
ineffectual. Derided as "slacktivism" or "clicktivism," the ease of action
without commitment can result in movements like Occupy petering out in the
US without any obvious effects. Of course, the reality is more nuanced, and
Zeynep Tufekci teases that out in her new book "Twitter and Tear Gas."
Tufekci is a rare interdisciplinary figure. As a sociologist, programmer,
and ethnographer, she studies how technology shapes society and drives
social change. She has a dual appointment in both the School of Information
Science and the Department of Sociology at University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, and is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for
Internet and Society at Harvard University. Her regular "New York Times"
column on the social impacts of technology is a must-read.
Modern Internet-fueled protest movements are the subjects of "Twitter and
Tear Gas." As an observer, writer, and participant, Tufekci examines how
modern protest movements have been changed by the Internet -- and what that
means for protests going forward. Her book combines her own ethnographic
research and her usual deft analysis, with the research of others and some
big data analysis from social media outlets. The result is a book that is
both insightful and entertaining, and whose lessons are much broader than
the book's central topic.
"The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest" is the book's subtitle. The
power of the Internet as a tool for protest is obvious: it gives people
newfound abilities to quickly organize and scale. But, according to Tufekci,
it's a mistake to judge modern protests using the same criteria we used to
judge pre-Internet protests. The 1963 March on Washington might have
culminated in hundreds of thousands of people listening to Martin Luther
King Jr. deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech, but it was the culmination of
a multi-year protest effort and the result of six months of careful planning
made possible by that sustained effort. The 2011 protests in Cairo came
together in mere days because they could be loosely coordinated on Facebook
and Twitter.
That's the power. Tufekci describes the fragility by analogy. Nepalese
Sherpas assist Mt. Everest climbers by carrying supplies, laying out ropes
and ladders, and so on. This means that people with limited training and
experience can make the ascent, which is no less dangerous -- to sometimes
disastrous results. Says Tufekci: "The Internet similarly allows networked
movements to grow dramatically and rapidly, but without prior building of
formal or informal organizational and other collective capacities that could
prepare them for the inevitable challenges they will face and give them the
ability to respond to what comes next." That makes them less able to respond
to government counters, change their tactics -- a phenomenon Tufekci calls
"tactical freeze" -- make movement-wide decisions, and survive over the long
haul.
Tufekci isn't arguing that modern protests are necessarily less effective, but that they're different. Effective movements need to understand these differences, and leverage these new advantages while minimizing the disadvantages.
To that end, she develops a taxonomy for talking about social movements.
Protests are an example of a "signal" that corresponds to one of several
underlying "capacities." There's narrative capacity: The ability to change
the conversation, as Black Lives Matter did with police violence and Occupy
did with wealth inequality. There's disruptive capacity: The ability to stop
business as usual. An early Internet example is the 1999 WTO protests in
Seattle. And finally, there's electoral or institutional capacity: The
ability to vote, lobby, fund raise, and so on. Because of various
"affordances" of modern Internet technologies, particularly social media,
the same signal -- a protest of a given size -- reflects different
underlying capacities.
This taxonomy also informs government reactions to protest movements. Smart responses target attention as a resource. The Chinese government responded to 2015 protesters in Hong Kong by not engaging with them at all, denying them camera-phone videos that would go viral and attract the world's attention. Instead, they pulled their police back and waited for the movement to die from lack of attention.
If this all sounds dry and academic, it's not. "Twitter and Tear Gas" is
infused with a richness of detail stemming from her personal participation
in the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey, as well as personal on-the-ground
interviews with protesters throughout the Middle East -- particularly Egypt
and her native Turkey -- Zapatistas in Mexico, WTO protesters in Seattle,
Occupy participants worldwide, and others. Tufekci writes with a warmth and
respect for the humans that are part of these powerful social movements,
gently intertwining her own story with the stories of others, big data, and
theory. She is adept at writing for a general audience, and -- despite being
published by the intimidating Yale University Press -- her book is more
mass-market than academic. What rigor is there is presented in a way that
carries readers along rather than distracting.
The synthesist in me wishes Tufekci would take some additional steps, taking
the trends she describes outside of the narrow world of political protest
and applying them more broadly to social change. Her taxonomy is an
important contribution to the more-general discussion of how the Internet
affects society. Furthermore, her insights on the networked public sphere
has applications for understanding technology-driven social change in
general. These are hard conversations for society to have. We largely prefer
to allow technology to blindly steer society or -- in some ways worse --
leave it to unfettered for-profit corporations. When you're reading
"Twitter and Tear Gas," keep current and near-term future technological
issues such as ubiquitous surveillance, algorithmic discrimination, and
automation and employment in mind. You'll come away with new insights.
Tufekci twice quotes historian Melvin Kranzberg from 1985: "Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral." This foreshadows her central message. For better or worse, the technologies that power the networked public sphere have changed the nature of political protest as well as government reactions to and suppressions of such protest.
I have long characterized our technological future as a battle between the quick and the strong. The quick -- dissidents, hackers, criminals, marginalized groups -- are the first to make use of a new technology to magnify their power. The strong are slower, but have more raw power to magnify. So while protesters are the first to use Facebook to organize, the governments eventually figure out how to use Facebook to track protesters. It's still an open question who will gain the upper hand in the long term, but Tufekci's book helps us understand the dynamics at work.
This essay originally appeared on Vice Motherboard. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43dx3j/twitter-and-tear-gas-review
The book: https://www.twitterandteargas.org/ https://www.amazon.com/Twitter-Tear-Gas-Fragility-Networked/dp/0300215126/
Tufekci: https://twitter.com/zeynep https://www.nytimes.com/column/zeynep-tufekci