All through the COVID19 pandemic, Zeynep Tufekci was one of the smartest voices in the various places she was published in. Her article in the Atlantic was one of the first to recognize that unlike conventional wisdom, COVID19 was spread through aerosols. Despite her book, Twitter and Tear Gas, being only available in legacy format as a hardcover at the library, I placed a hold on it, checked it out, and read it.
I've long had a low opinion of Twitter (even before Elon Musk bought it), and I maintain that having one social network is all anyone ever really needs. I've tried and bounced off instagram, threads, and various others, and my BlueSky account is sadly neglected.
Tufekci explicates the reason that Twitter was used during the Arab Spring and had the ability to topple dictators. Unlike Facebook, which required consent on both sides before one person could read posts by the other, the default on Twitter was world readable. This allowed activists to @mention people who could reshare their point of view. She describes in great detail how 4 remote activists (who weren't activists before the event) worked on logistics to supply a field hospital during one of the Arab Spring protests that occupied a city square. The logistics were conducted using Google Sheets, while they managed to get everyone to tweet at them what they needed or what they could supply. It was amazing to watch.
I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion of how social media like Twitter and Facebook enabled information cascades that made people willing to go to a protest. There's a great exploration of why people join in person protest --- it's an entrance into the kind of world that people dream about. She describes a world in which kindness is the norm, where transactional relationships don't happen. One woman describes falling asleep at a park bench, and waking up to discover not only was her phone sitting next to her not stolen, someone had wrapped a blanket around her.
There's the dark side of social organization over the internet through Twitter, etc. Tufekci contrasts the civil rights movement with the Arab Spring or the Occupy Wall Street movements. By the time the bus boycotts in Montgomery or the Civil Rights Marches had happened, the organizations involved had spent years building up their organizations, negotiating on directions, agreeing on leaders, and setting up trust between the rank and file and the representatives. That gave them the ability to pivot and make decisions quickly when things were going their way, and also gave them obvious representatives for the establishment to work with in order to get what they wanted, both politically and socially.
By contrast, the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements were essentially flash mobs organized through consensus. Their marches and occupations were huge, but they entered what Tufekci calls Tactical Freeze, where they had nowhere to go when the establishment tried to negotiate and try to give them what they want, because they didn't know what they wanted, and they couldn't agree on a process to come to any agreement. In fact, the Occupy Wall Street movement explicitly didn't want any leaders or representation. Tufekci points out that this isn't completely irrational. Not having leaders meant that the government/opposition couldn't just murder somebody and stop the movement cold. Nor could the leaders be bought off or corrupted if there wasn't any leadership. But in the case of the Arab Spring many of those movements succeeded in toppling a regime only to find them replaced by an equally brutal one because there was no organization in place to put in a better regime. In the case of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Tufekci descibes an incident in which John Lewis (of the Civil Rights Movement) wanted to come and give a speech to support them, and mendacious facilitator manipulated the crowd into disallowing him, even though only one person objected to Lewis giving a speech. That kind of behavior led to the Occupy Wall Street movement not having any friends.
The modern successful movement that organized via social media turned out to be the Tea Party. Following the protests, they had an organization (probably funded by the rich people who stand to benefit from this) that worked within the political system to get lower taxes.
The book ends with the modern reaction to social media generated protest movements. The status quo establishment learned that attempting to censor the internet (unless you're China) doesn't work. Instead, however, you can (in Steve Bannon's words) "flood the zone with shit." Misinformation, distraction, and cries of "Fake News", it turns out is a very effective way to dilute the credibility of activists or people working against a dictator or corrupt regime. Tufekci points out that even China doesn't censor criticism of the government. Instead, their army of propagandists simply flood the internet with unrelated stories to drown out the criticism.
I'm usually proud of myself for saving money by checking a book out of the library instead of paying for it. In this case I feel like a dummy lamb. I should have bought it for the kindle because I would have highlighted so much of this book and been able to quote it on this review. Next time I want to read this book I won't be so dumb. I'll just go out and buy it.
No comments:
Post a Comment