An extraordinary thing has happened. In Egypt, a million-strong movement forced the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s government, even though the state had pulled the plug on the internet. After over a week without reliable access to their Facebook profiles, the people of Egypt did not abandon their revolution. They have forced concessions from the government and sent shock waves through the region – without firm help from Twitter. What on earth is going on?
Despite what you might hear on the news, there’s a lot more to the recent uprisings than just the knock-on effects of social media. As the world’s press has struggled to retain control of the narrative, it has seized on how many of the dissidents are – gasp – organising online.
In what appears to be dogged unwillingness to recognise the economic brutality of governments as the root cause of popular unrest, news people everywhere have boggled exhaustively over the way in which protesters in Cairo, Tunis, Paris and London are using the internet to communicate. What did they think we were going to use – smoke signals?
Of course, technology has been a shaping force in these uprisings. The internet is a fascinating and useful tool, the best we have for organising and sharing information.
The low cost of participation in digital networks allows protesters to circumvent the sometimes arthritic hierarchies of the old far left and to organise horizontally, while the instant dissemination of camera and video footage and reportage from citizen journalists means that the truth can travel around the world before government propaganda gets its boots on. This has allowed the protests to grow and evolve faster than anyone expected.
At times of crisis, human beings have a reassuring tendency to use the best tools at their disposal to steal a march on the enemy, especially if native fluency with those tools gives us an edge over our oppressors. In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that young protesters and their allies are organising on Twitter and Facebook.
Capital punishment
The internet is a useful tool, but it is just a tool. HTML does not cause mass uprisings any more than a handgun causes mass murder – although, for people of a certain mindset, the mere proximity of the tool is enough to set dangerous thoughts in motion. The internet isn’t the reason people are getting desperate and it isn’t the reason things are kicking off. Things are kicking off for one reason and one reason alone: there is a global crisis of capital.
The writing is on the wall, with or without the web. Across the world, ordinary people – including a huge, seething pool of surplus graduates without employment – are finding their lives measurably less tolerable than they had anticipated. They are realising that they are not suffering alone, or by accident, but because the capitalist classes have consistently put their own interests first.
The writing is on the wall, and it would still be there if we had to paint it on with mud and sticks. Technology is defining the parameters of global protest in 2011 but it is a crisis of capital that has set the wheels of revolt in motion.
Laurie will be speaking on the politics and new media panel at the Progressive London conference this Saturday.
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