The revolution will not be tweeted

[Toedancer]

Interesting article. MLK - what would he have done sitting in jail with a BB?

Why the revolution will not be tweeted.

[Boom Boom]

Interesting article. MLK - what would he have done sitting in jail with a BB?

Why the revolution will not be tweeted.

Interesting article. I've never used digital media in my life, only analog - thus no cell phones, Blackberries, Twitter, Tweeter, or whatever. I'm fine with that.

[skdadl]

The thing about Gladwell is that he is glib. There are some useful insights there, but there's also a lot of apples-and-oranges, which is Gladwell's glib specialty -- boy prodigy who does free association and never has to prove a point.

He specializes in inventing trendy memes, so now he's doing strong-tie/weak-tie. No question that the civil-rights movement in the U.S. south in the fifties and sixties took guts and a willingness to have your head broken or worse, and when that point comes in any social movement, you know you're going somewhere.

Given that we saw people like that at the G20 in Toronto but supported by far too few, do we think we have reached such a point anywhere in North America in 2010? I don't think so.

Meanwhile, while he rides on the back of an authentic and successful movement (well, somewhat successful) in the past, Gladwell cites conveniently few examples of online activism that have actually had practical effects, and there are at least some in the U.S. The White House wouldn't be swearing at them if they weren't having an impact.

And Gladwell is writing for the New Yorker, famously always in financial difficulty, and he is probably feeling the heat.

[Mandos]

I kind of take his point and have felt similarly in the past.  To me the greatest successes of online activism have been mass document-munging (of various sorts; from emptywheel to WikiLeaks) and the forumverse which was successful in building cohesive communities (and by that I include megablogs that act like forums).   

Twitter is really good at information dissemination, but the social networks that *I*, at least, have built there, mostly consist of people with whom I developed an affinity outside of the Twitter, including on online forums.

[skdadl]

The thing that Jane (and presumably some others) can do is unelect people -- some, anyway. As I say, I don't follow this closely because it's usually too local and wonky for me; they (FDL) can fundraise and sometimes help to elect, but it is much more threatening to establishment Dems, I think, that they can defeat people, either in primaries or in elections. That's what the establishment rilly don't like (and a lot of other bloggers don't like it either).

That's the thing about Twitter, though: if you're following a story, you get to know the other people who are, which leads you to other forums and blogs, where there's a different mix of people. There is a ping-pong effect, or there can be. Is this likely to be strictly educational? I don't know -- probably most of the time. But I'm watching something right now that I think may be having an effect in the right places -- enough people make disturbing noises about money, and other people pay attention.

[Toedancer]

But I'm watching something right now that I think may be having an effect in the right places -- enough people make disturbing noises about money, and other people pay attention.

That would be in the U.S. I presume.  Tell us about it skdadl, I'm interested in knowing. I am twitterless and shall remain that way, as well as FB unless I see something worth pursuing (just too harried to keep up). For instance the FB group Canadians Against ProRoguing, that was entirely successful, and the large mass rally that started @ Dundas Square was immensely successful. BUT Harper would do it again, in a heartbeat, if he had to. Why was that rally successful? Where were the rubber bullets and tasers? True the people for CAP were everyone, young/old/retired/students/workers, no masks, just good placards. Was that why? Because that's a great hint in successful protests for the future, a mix, a diversity of Canadians.

You mentioned Gladwell being glib, I don't find that controversial in any way, it simply opens up the debate to tackling the root issues. Hitchens rant on March to Nowhere sums up (no matter what one thinks of Hitchens) what I'm thinking/feeling about the present regarding a massive Erosion of Democracy. So not just about twitter obviously, but digital social media.

Giraldi tells us what we're up against/CampaignForLiberty The conclusion -

The only answer to the National  Security State a demand on the part of US citizens to return to  constitutionalism and a rule of law. The government should not be  empowered to kill citizens extrajudicially, start wars of choice,  detain suspects indefinitely and without charges, use state secrets  claims to avoid scrutiny, and obtain private information without a  warrant. It is difficult to imagine a return to normalcy under the best  of circumstances, but congress is complicit in the process and will do  nothing. Genuine change will only come about when we the people insist  on it.

How do we insist on it when the apparatus has all the tools and we have none. Getting a permit is now even a barrier to protest. And if we rise up demanding to stop the erosion of democracy, we're called crazy. The media says we're well fed, we sleep safely in our beds, well yeah for now we do. Gladwell spoke to me about the physical dissension, but that requires risk of pain, rubber bullets and tasers and sound cannons, violent sweeps of non-violent citizens. That is what must stop. Digital activism supports the short attention span. And we have been neutered with so many legal barriers and in the end it changes nothing for the people in tent cities or facing foreclosure because they don't have a paycheque. The majority is now living paycheque to paycheque, so they can't show up, that leaves students and the retired. It's complicated and I'm all over the place, ha!

Take the Mulclair/Coyne issue, total hubris to take attention away from the core issue, corruption between corporate contractors and close ties to our politicians. In every province, not just Quebec. That was brilliant wasn't it? Ministers not showing up to Committees so they can't commit perjury.

Unelecting people is too slow, campaigning to our poli's to tell the cops to stop being militarized, to stop hurting citizens, too slow. It feels too late already.  What I'm trying to says is we need a new kind of debate,  one that is not limited to isolated issues (PG ad nauseum) but is broad-based and fundamental, about our power, the inequality and money constricting everything from education to political conditions. How do we Demand our Democracy back? This Parliament does not represent us, but will a dif party represent us? I don't think so.   There   must never again be another election under our current broken system. We don't even have some form of PR ready for the next election; thousands won't even vote because of that.  What a loss. It won't get better, because there will always be another isolated issue to distract, too big to table and on and on it goes.

If the state is too violent to keep the safety of the retired protesters intact, then perhaps the silent majority should simply not show up at the ballot box. What is the percentage of the vote that must be kept in order to be qualified as legitimate? A powerful social media event to just stay home. The Cons would see that as a capitulation, a sure win for them, but it could be turned around, it could be devastating when you consider the numbers, because even the homeless, the addicted could get behind that. Isn't that one of the reasons Poverty is never tackled, they are not a voter base for any party.  It could turn Canada upside down. And no one gets hurt.

For those who think it hasn't come to that yet, I say it has.

[jrootham]

Boycotting elections does not work.  Turnout in the Jim Crow South got below 20% sometimes.  Nobody made the argument that it was therefor illegitimate.

[Toedancer]

Boycotting elections does not work.  Turnout in the Jim Crow South got below 20% sometimes.  Nobody made the argument that it was therefor illegitimate.

Right. So if it was law and then nobody showed up, the state would have to carry out the penalties. Wow.

What   do we do when we (no longer) have “government for the people” as well as no longer one   that is “of the people, by the people?” We have reached this   point.

Sorry that was mangled. As well if it was Broadcasted by FB/Twitter and all other manner of digital media, what do you think the state would do? They saw the CAP coming and 'allowed' it without violence.

[skdadl]

I hear you, Toe, and I share your frustration, but ...

One of the first lessons I learned on the left was about "voluntarism" (see also "adventurism"). Voluntarism doesn't have to do with volunteers; it has to do with that chant from the New Left in the 60s, "Revolution if you want it." Nice thought, but no. A revolution takes a critical mass of people, and if they're not there (and in North America they patently obviously are not), you're not going to have a revolution.

Gladwell misses that, I think. He seems to think that if those already radicalized will just go out and get their heads broken more often, then we'll be getting somewhere. Well, I think he's wrong. What will start to move large numbers of people will be a crisis of some kind, these days probably economic. Things are getting bad enough in the U.S. that that may be starting to happen, except in the wrong direction (right-wing populism). I agree with you: the situation is dire.

It is true that mass demos -- where you have the middle-class peeps pushing babies in strollers joining in -- are a sign of something that will be noted by tptb, and the cops will back off. That happened in the anti-Viet Nam war marches, and it happened with anti-prorogue. But it didn't happen at the G20.

What I'm watching now: No, it's in Germany, via an English blog and other places, including Twitter.  A couple -- several? we can't tell -- of the CCC peeps started turning up in the WL discussion after Daniel's adventures with the press began, doing apologies for him. I won't tell whole story, but I mean, what do you do when a group of young twerps who have leaked to Newsweek and Wired (and are married to Microsoft) start talking about taking over the servers and absconding with the money? It came to a number of us at the same time, Jane's lesson: you state publicly that the money flow stops as long as there's any threat that Daniel and friends have anything to do with it, and until JA signals that the games have stopped and normal operations resume. The Wau Holland Foundation, which controls WL accounts, has already felt it had to issue a reassuring statement about the money, although it's vague and not reassuring enough. So we just keep saying that. It is making them anxious. (I have actually come to like a few of these guys -- they are VERY young geeks.)

I know this is amateur hour, but in one small crisis, it could make a difference to an important organization. And you know me -- detective stories all the way.

[lagatta]

No, Gladwell was talking about a time when there was a great wellspring of resentment about injustice and oppression waiting to boil over, and the fact that it did take a critical "volontarist" group to spark them on to action and get them over paralysing fear - not rational fear, as they were risking life and limb and knew it - but a fear and assentment that led to silence.

I've seen some echo of this in Québec in the early 1970s (no doubt earlier still) with the striking emergence of an intertwined national and radical workers' movement, and many other social movements (obviously influenced by social movements elsewhere in North America and Europe as well, but with a specific cast and tone here).

There was a distant echo of that in our huge antiwar demonstrations way back in 2003, where we did get pensioners, people pushing babies in strollers, suburbanites and rural people (I have no idea whom the "middle class" refers to, as it is mostly a bourgeois ideological term; often they are simply referring to salaried workers who are not utterly destitute, it is a deliberate attack on the development of class consciousness).

skdadl, when you mentioned Germany, I thought you were going to talk about the huge protests against the extremely violent (and disproportional, even by mainstream press views) clampdown on the demonstrators against the Stuttgart 21 railway and real-estate megaproject.

Although the internet and its applications, like all other news media past and present, is an important organising tool, it does have severe dangers for activists, the main one people thinking that they are "activists" if they just sit on their tushies sending tweets. Activism requires information and propaganda, but it also requires people who are willing to get people in streets and bums in seats, and sometimes lives on the line.

[skdadl]

lagatta, Toe asked what I was doing, and I answered.

I do not consider MLK to have been a voluntarist. No good Marxist would. That was a movement that had built critical mass for at least a decade, and had huge numbers of supporters from elsewhere -- including the president and his brother, the attorney general -- onside. That's not voluntarism. That's the signal to move.

It also was not exactly a revolution. Racism in the U.S., as here, has hardly been defeated. It was a step forward.

[skdadl]

Let me try this from another direction.

Black people in the U.S. south got fed up with what was being done to them all on their own. There are many reasons that happened in the 1950s, including general postwar prosperity, rising numbers of well-educated black people, an increasingly "liberal" political constituency in the country as a whole.

Black people in the U.S. south did not suddenly have a light-bulb moment because white activists from Manhattan who'd read Marx came down and gave them lectures on how to be activists. Those people became very valuable in the later crunch, and some of them paid a huge price (the three dead in Mississippi), but that's not why most black people in the U.S. south were finally willing to risk everything.

People liberate themselves.

[lagatta]

Huh??? I wasn't talking about the "New York Jews" among the Freedom Riders (who included many Blacks as well, and more Blacks were murdered, of course), I was talking about the Black students and other activists mentioned in Gladwell's article.

People liberate themselves, but not on a strictly spontaneous basis. Militants have planned and plotted from the days of the ancient slave revolts.

[skdadl]

"not on a strictly spontaneous basis" -- I couldn't agree more, and that has pretty much been my point.

I didn't mention "New York Jews," I don't think. The Manhattan activists were all Jews? Not as I knew them.

[lagatta]

No, you didn't mention that. No, they weren't all Jewish (the Klan thought they were, of course, and had no more use for Jews than they did for Blacks) but there was a radical NYC milieu, with a strong non-Jewish Jewish element. Not all the young whites from the North were form NYC either, for that matter.

Your "people liberate themselves" is not the point I was making, unless you add a coda about it not being a spontaneous event. If not, it is as much a caricature of the dynamics of social movements as a Blanquist "propaganda of the deed". I do have some modicum of knowledge of social history, hmm?

I also think that just like the Blanquist or adventurist errors, it can have harmful effects in the real world - quietism, or thinking that e-activism is any substitute from the meat-world variety.

Edited to add: I made a very funny Freudian slip: "social mystery" as a portemanteau of social movement and social history!