Zeynep Tufekci: How the Internet has made social change easy to organize, hard to win

138,463 views

2015-02-02 ・ TED


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Zeynep Tufekci: How the Internet has made social change easy to organize, hard to win

138,463 views ・ 2015-02-02

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:12
So recently, we heard a lot about how social media helps empower protest,
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and that's true,
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but after more than a decade
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of studying and participating in multiple social movements,
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I've come to realize
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that the way technology empowers social movements
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can also paradoxically help weaken them.
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This is not inevitable, but overcoming it requires diving deep
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into what makes success possible over the long term.
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And the lessons apply in multiple domains.
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Now, take Turkey's Gezi Park protests, July 2013,
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which I went back to study in the field.
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Twitter was key to its organizing.
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It was everywhere in the park -- well, along with a lot of tear gas.
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It wasn't all high tech.
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But the people in Turkey had already gotten used to the power of Twitter
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because of an unfortunate incident about a year before
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when military jets had bombed and killed
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34 Kurdish smugglers near the border region,
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and Turkish media completely censored this news.
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Editors sat in their newsrooms
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and waited for the government to tell them what to do.
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One frustrated journalist could not take this anymore.
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He purchased his own plane ticket,
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and went to the village where this had occurred.
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And he was confronted by this scene:
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a line of coffins coming down a hill, relatives wailing.
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He later he told me how overwhelmed he felt,
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and didn't know what to do,
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so he took out his phone,
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like any one of us might,
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and snapped that picture and tweeted it out.
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And voila, that picture went viral
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and broke the censorship and forced mass media to cover it.
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So when, a year later, Turkey's Gezi protests happened,
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it started as a protest about a park being razed,
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but became an anti-authoritarian protest.
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It wasn't surprising that media also censored it,
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but it got a little ridiculous at times.
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When things were so intense,
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when CNN International was broadcasting live from Istanbul,
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CNN Turkey instead was broadcasting a documentary on penguins.
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Now, I love penguin documentaries, but that wasn't the news of the day.
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An angry viewer put his two screens together and snapped that picture,
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and that one too went viral,
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and since then, people call Turkish media the penguin media. (Laughter)
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But this time, people knew what to do.
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They just took out their phones and looked for actual news.
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Better, they knew to go to the park and take pictures and participate
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and share it more on social media.
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Digital connectivity was used for everything from food to donations.
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Everything was organized partially with the help of these new technologies.
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And using Internet to mobilize and publicize protests
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actually goes back a long way.
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Remember the Zapatistas,
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the peasant uprising in the southern Chiapas region of Mexico
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led by the masked, pipe-smoking, charismatic Subcomandante Marcos?
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That was probably the first movement
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that got global attention thanks to the Internet.
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Or consider Seattle '99,
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when a multinational grassroots effort brought global attention
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to what was then an obscure organization, the World Trade Organization,
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by also utilizing these digital technologies to help them organize.
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And more recently, movement after movement
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has shaken country after country:
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the Arab uprisings from Bahrain to Tunisia to Egypt and more;
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indignados in Spain, Italy, Greece; the Gezi Park protests;
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Taiwan; Euromaidan in Ukraine; Hong Kong.
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And think of more recent initiatives, like the #BringBackOurGirls hashtags.
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Nowadays, a network of tweets can unleash a global awareness campaign.
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A Facebook page can become the hub of a massive mobilization.
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Amazing.
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But think of the moments I just mentioned.
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The achievements they were able to have, their outcomes,
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are not really proportional to the size and energy they inspired.
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The hopes they rightfully raised are not really matched
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by what they were able to have as a result in the end.
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And this raises a question:
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As digital technology makes things easier for movements,
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why haven't successful outcomes become more likely as well?
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In embracing digital platforms for activism and politics,
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are we overlooking some of the benefits of doing things the hard way?
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Now, I believe so.
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I believe that the rule of thumb is:
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Easier to mobilize does not always mean easier to achieve gains.
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Now, to be clear,
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technology does empower in multiple ways.
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It's very powerful.
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In Turkey, I watched four young college students
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organize a countrywide citizen journalism network called 140Journos
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that became the central hub for uncensored news in the country.
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In Egypt, I saw another four young people use digital connectivity
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to organize the supplies and logistics for 10 field hospitals,
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very large operations,
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during massive clashes near Tahrir Square in 2011.
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And I asked the founder of this effort, called Tahrir Supplies,
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how long it took him to go from when he had the idea to when he got started.
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"Five minutes," he said. Five minutes.
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And he had no training or background in logistics.
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Or think of the Occupy movement which rocked the world in 2011.
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It started with a single email
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from a magazine, Adbusters, to 90,000 subscribers in its list.
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About two months after that first email,
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there were in the United States 600 ongoing occupations and protests.
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Less than one month after the first physical occupation in Zuccotti Park,
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a global protest was held in about 82 countries, 950 cities.
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It was one of the largest global protests ever organized.
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Now, compare that to what the Civil Rights Movement had to do in 1955 Alabama
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to protest the racially segregated bus system, which they wanted to boycott.
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They'd been preparing for many years
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and decided it was time to swing into action
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after Rosa Parks was arrested.
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But how do you get the word out --
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tomorrow we're going to start the boycott --
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when you don't have Facebook, texting, Twitter, none of that?
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So they had to mimeograph 52,000 leaflets
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by sneaking into a university duplicating room
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and working all night, secretly.
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They then used the 68 African-American organizations
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that criss-crossed the city to distribute those leaflets by hand.
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And the logistical tasks were daunting, because these were poor people.
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They had to get to work, boycott or no,
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so a massive carpool was organized,
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again by meeting.
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No texting, no Twitter, no Facebook.
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They had to meet almost all the time to keep this carpool going.
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Today, it would be so much easier.
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We could create a database, available rides and what rides you need,
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have the database coordinate, and use texting.
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We wouldn't have to meet all that much.
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But again, consider this:
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the Civil Rights Movement in the United States
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navigated a minefield of political dangers,
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faced repression and overcame, won major policy concessions,
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navigated and innovated through risks.
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In contrast, three years after Occupy sparked
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that global conversation about inequality,
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the policies that fueled it are still in place.
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Europe was also rocked by anti-austerity protests,
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but the continent didn't shift its direction.
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In embracing these technologies,
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are we overlooking some of the benefits of slow and sustained?
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To understand this,
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I went back to Turkey about a year after the Gezi protests
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and I interviewed a range of people,
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from activists to politicians,
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from both the ruling party and the opposition party and movements.
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I found that the Gezi protesters were despairing.
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They were frustrated,
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and they had achieved much less than what they had hoped for.
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This echoed what I'd been hearing around the world
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from many other protesters that I'm in touch with.
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And I've come to realize that part of the problem
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is that today's protests have become a bit like climbing Mt. Everest
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with the help of 60 Sherpas,
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and the Internet is our Sherpa.
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What we're doing is taking the fast routes
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and not replacing the benefits of the slower work.
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Because, you see,
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the kind of work that went into organizing
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all those daunting, tedious logistical tasks
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did not just take care of those tasks,
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they also created the kind of organization that could think together collectively
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and make hard decisions together,
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create consensus and innovate, and maybe even more crucially,
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keep going together through differences.
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So when you see this March on Washington in 1963,
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when you look at that picture,
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where this is the march where Martin Luther King gave his famous
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"I have a dream" speech, 1963,
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you don't just see a march and you don't just hear a powerful speech,
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you also see the painstaking, long-term work that can put on that march.
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And if you're in power,
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you realize you have to take the capacity signaled by that march,
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not just the march, but the capacity signaled by that march, seriously.
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In contrast, when you look at Occupy's global marches
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that were organized in two weeks,
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you see a lot of discontent,
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but you don't necessarily see teeth that can bite over the long term.
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And crucially, the Civil Rights Movement innovated tactically
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from boycotts to lunch counter sit-ins to pickets to marches to freedom rides.
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Today's movements scale up very quickly without the organizational base
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that can see them through the challenges.
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They feel a little like startups that got very big
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without knowing what to do next,
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and they rarely manage to shift tactically
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because they don't have the depth of capacity
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to weather such transitions.
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Now, I want to be clear: The magic is not in the mimeograph.
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It's in that capacity to work together, think together collectively,
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which can only be built over time with a lot of work.
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To understand all this,
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I interviewed a top official from the ruling party in Turkey,
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and I ask him, "How do you do it?"
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They too use digital technology extensively, so that's not it.
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So what's the secret?
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Well, he told me.
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He said the key is he never took sugar with his tea.
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I said, what has that got to do with anything?
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Well, he said, his party starts getting ready for the next election
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the day after the last one,
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and he spends all day every day meeting with voters in their homes,
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in their wedding parties, circumcision ceremonies,
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and then he meets with his colleagues to compare notes.
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With that many meetings every day, with tea offered at every one of them,
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which he could not refuse, because that would be rude,
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he could not take even one cube of sugar per cup of tea,
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because that would be many kilos of sugar, he can't even calculate how many kilos,
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and at that point I realized why he was speaking so fast.
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We had met in the afternoon, and he was already way over-caffeinated.
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But his party won two major elections
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within a year of the Gezi protests with comfortable margins.
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To be sure, governments have different resources to bring to the table.
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It's not the same game, but the differences are instructive.
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And like all such stories, this is not a story just of technology.
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It's what technology allows us to do converging with what we want to do.
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Today's social movements want to operate informally.
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They do not want institutional leadership.
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They want to stay out of politics because they fear corruption and cooptation.
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They have a point.
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Modern representative democracies are being strangled in many countries
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by powerful interests.
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But operating this way makes it hard for them
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to sustain over the long term and exert leverage over the system,
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which leads to frustrated protesters dropping out,
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and even more corrupt politics.
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And politics and democracy without an effective challenge hobbles,
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because the causes that have inspired the modern recent movements are crucial.
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Climate change is barreling towards us.
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Inequality is stifling human growth and potential and economies.
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Authoritarianism is choking many countries.
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We need movements to be more effective.
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Now, some people have argued that the problem is
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today's movements are not formed of people who take as many risks as before,
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and that is not true.
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From Gezi to Tahrir to elsewhere,
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I've seen people put their lives and livelihoods on the line.
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It's also not true, as Malcolm Gladwell claimed,
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that today's protesters form weaker virtual ties.
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No, they come to these protests, just like before,
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with their friends, existing networks,
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and sometimes they do make new friends for life.
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I still see the friends that I made
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in those Zapatista-convened global protests more than a decade ago,
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and the bonds between strangers are not worthless.
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When I got tear-gassed in Gezi,
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people I didn't know helped me and one another instead of running away.
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In Tahrir, I saw people, protesters,
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working really hard to keep each other safe and protected.
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And digital awareness-raising is great,
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because changing minds is the bedrock of changing politics.
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But movements today have to move beyond participation at great scale very fast
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and figure out how to think together collectively,
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develop strong policy proposals, create consensus,
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figure out the political steps and relate them to leverage,
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because all these good intentions and bravery and sacrifice by itself
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are not going to be enough.
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And there are many efforts.
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In New Zealand, a group of young people are developing a platform called Loomio
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for participatory decision making at scale.
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In Turkey, 140Journos are holding hack-a-thons
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so that they support communities as well as citizen journalism.
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In Argentina, an open-source platform called DemocracyOS
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is bringing participation to parliaments and political parties.
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These are all great, and we need more,
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but the answer won't just be better online decision-making,
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because to update democracy, we are going to need to innovate at every level,
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from the organizational to the political to the social.
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Because to succeed over the long term,
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sometimes you do need tea without sugar
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along with your Twitter.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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