Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (18 page)

What's important is not that there are a few isolated rebels determined to live a full, untrammelled human life. What's important is whether technology, and the social structures we use to manage it, can make individual freedom possible for the masses of people who do ordinary jobs at the heart of the industrial machine.

Up to the late nineteenth century, it clearly could not. If you worked in a factory you barely had time to sleep, let alone socialize or create art. Your only hope was in solidarity and structure. In fact, attacks on the self-organized world of the nineteenth-century labour movement were often condemned as promoting ‘egoism'.

It was only during revolutions—1830,1848 and above all 1871—that the poor got an accidental glimpse of human freedom. In the Paris Commune, working-class women rushed to the pulpits of churches converted into ‘revolution clubs' to proclaim marriage illegal, confession immoral, freedom to love essential. A sixteen-year-old gay youth hiked 150 miles from Alsace to see it all. It blew his mind: he declared himself a new type of human being, and wrote some of the greatest poetry of the century. But the world was not ready for Arthur Rimbaud's idea of freedom. After a few chaotic ‘seasons in hell', he moved to Ethiopia to become a coffee trader and wrote nothing more until death.
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Not till the Edwardian period—known in France as the belle époque, in America as the ‘Progressive Era—did experiments with individual freedom become widespread among the middle and lower classes. Women's liberation and even gay rights came onto the agenda of mainstream politics; and the general health, education and leisure time of the workers began to rise to the level where they could participate in mass consumption and sport.

This is the atmosphere that Zweig describes, that Picasso and Klimt luxuriated in, that Delius brings to life in the score of
Fennimore:
and it's no accident that this surge of individualism coincided with the high point of the first era of globalization. The pre-1914 era was, like our own, one in which the most innovative technologies were those that produced greater freedom of action and thought: the motor car, the cinema, the phonogram and the telephone.

Zweig summed up how it felt to be young before 1914, and what was lost when war, revolution and the swing towards totalitarianism ended it all: ‘Before those wars,' he recalled, ‘I saw individual freedom at its zenith and after them I saw liberty at its lowest point in hundreds of years.'
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Looked at this way, the real precedent for the past twenty years of ecstasy-fuelled, iPod-engrossed, latte-sipping individualism is not the 1960s but the years before 1914. The radicals of the Sixties were able to conceive the possibility of a new mode of human existence, but technology and the balance of global forces—class, race, inter-state rivalry—militated against achieving it. In the pre-1914 period, the freedom zeitgeist, technological progress and globalization were aligned. Now they are aligned again.

The past ten years have seen disruptions in the pattern of social life that mirror what happened in that era. But this time, it's happening at high velocity and across the canvas of all humanity.

What the new Zeitgeist clashes with are the power relations of the old hierarchical world. And this is the materialist explanation for 2011: it is as much about individuals versus hierarchies as it is about rich against poor.

The Masai with a mobile

The driver of behavioural change has been technology. There's been a revolution in the recording, storing and searchability of information; in the networked availability of information; in the digitization and globalization of commercial transactions; and finally, through social networking, in the ability to form connections away from the old hierarchical channels of the past. In each technology, the ‘node'—or individual—has been empowered at the expense of the hierarchical central core, which is the state or corporation—or even the tribe.

When I travelled across Kenya in 2007, following the cellphone signal from Mombasa into the Rift Valley, it was clear that mobile telephony was causing a micro-level social upheaval. I met minibus drivers suddenly able to contact their bosses when pulled over by corrupt police in search of bribes; hairdressers who, by simply collecting the cellphone numbers of their clients, had freed themselves from the decades-old tyranny of the ‘madam' who owns the parlour; slum dwellers mobilizing by text message to fight evictions; villagers able to receive cash remittances at the touch of a button through a cellphone money-transfer system.

Even in the red dust of Masai country, tribespeople living in mud and grass huts had been able to procure cheap Chinese cellphones, which they charged using solar power. One woman explained how life had changed:

You can phone up your cowhand to see how your cattle are doing. If somebody is sick you can phone an ambulance. But the biggest change is that the husbands have learned how to use that button which tells you who has called. Now they get jealous: they go through the list and say: ‘Who is that person, and who is that?'

The ‘Masai with a mobile' has become one of the iconic marketing cliché of the early twenty-first century, but the change it describes is real: a revolution in property relations, sexual relations and even language itself. After I'd finished the report, I met a Masai lawyer and asked him whether I might make a documentary about the effect of mobile telecoms on the Masai language. ‘Be quick,' he said; ‘some dialects will be gone within three years.'

Technology—through the web browser, the cellphone, the GPS device, the iPod, the instant messaging service, the digital camera and above all the smartphone, which contains each of these things—has accelerated what the contraceptive pill and divorce laws started: it has expanded the power and space of the individual.

At the same time, it has allowed the creation of virtual ‘societies' just as real as the cramped analog social networks we created for ourselves in the pre-digital era.

If this had happened at any time in history, it would have felt like a cultural revolution. But coming as it did amid the collapse of what sociologist Robert Putnam called ‘social capital'—the atrophy of voluntary organizations, from village fetes to trade unions
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—it has felt like a handbrake turn for humanity.

And it has happened fast. In fact, the real rush forward took place in the years of imminent crisis. Launching in 2004, Facebook achieved its 100 millionth user in 2008, and at the time of writing has 750 million users. In other words, Facebook has put on six-sevenths of its user base in the three years after Lehman Brothers went bust.
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Twitter was launched in 2006; it took until 2008 for its users to send one billion tweets; by 2011 there were 250 million users, sending one billion tweets a week.
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The rush was particularly acute in the Arab world. In the three years before the crisis, Internet access in the region mushroomed, from 33 to 48 per cent of the population. Facebook opened an Arabic-language facility in mid-2009; within a year it had 3.5 million Arabic-language users, and at time of writing has 9 million. The English-language usage of Facebook in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region is even more startling: there are 56 million Facebook members, totaling 16 per cent of the region's population. Nineteen million of them joined in 2010.
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How has it affected the lives of ordinary people? Listen to @sarrahsworld, the twenty-two-year-old Egyptian drama student whose video blog became a cult after the fall of Mubarak:

I think my morale, my general mood is so connected and parallel to how Egypt is doing. I wake up to check Twitter. In fact this is how I get myself to wake up. Before 25 January I had 200 followers on Twitter; now, I have 13,000. It took off because of my video blog on YouTube. Most of the viewers are male, aged 18–23 and from Egypt, but you'd be surprised at the people that see this: some people just get it on their phone. A doorman ran up to me and said, I recognize you from YouTube. But he's illiterate and I'm going: how? He said, someone sent it to my cellphone via Bluetooth.

And listen to @littlemisswilde, aged twenty-one, who ran the occupation Twitter feed at University College London. She could write the story of her life through social media, she tells me: Bebo as a kid, MySpace as a teenager. Her sisters know nothing else but Facebook, and move around it frighteningly unconscious that it's new: ‘For me it's second nature—I tweet in my dreams. I can't imagine where it's going next, but it's completely inseparable from my personality. In the future, when a child is born it will just be given a Twitter account.'

A social laboratory of the self

The power of social networks to alter consciousness was noticed first among those who took part in, and studied, computer games in the 1980s. Gamers, together with hackers, were the first cohort of people who used information technology to form ‘affinity groups'. And the most perceptive among them were able to capture early on the changes in behaviour and thought-patterns that we now see as mass phenomena. Psychoanalyst Sherry Turkle used the metaphor of ‘windows' and the experience of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs—the early text-based online games) to propose that the Internet had become a ‘social laboratory of the self, allowing users to live parallel and multiple lives:

The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times … [There is] a de-centred self that exists in many worlds and plays many roles at the same time … The experience of this parallelism encourages treating on-screen and off-screen lives with a surprising degree of equality.
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Science writer Margaret Wertheim proposed that this parallel self could be just as ‘real' as the physical self, arguing that in the creation of online communities, humanity has begun to create ‘a collective mental arena':

We are witnessing here the birth of a new domain, a space that simply did not exist before … If the self ‘continues' into cyberspace … it becomes almost like a fluid, leaking out around us all the time and joining each of us into a vast ocean, or web, of relationships with other leaky selves.
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In the 1990s, these early sociologists of Internet consciousness documented nearly every behaviour pattern we now see in social networks: multiple personalities, masquerading, stalking, community formation, intense personal relationships, seeing the online world as real, or hyper-real, and the prevalence of utopian schemes. But theirs was a niche world inhabited by the techno-elite; it seems prehistoric now.

For social media has moved the ‘collective mental arena', with its intense interpersonal bonds, from the realm of gaming and fantasy into the world of everyday interaction.

The woman tweeting at work or from the front line of a demonstration is experiencing the same shared consciousness, role-play, multifaceted personality and intense bonding that you get in
World of
Warcraft
—only now it's from within real life. Though the old multiuser games still hold their attraction for millions of geeky people, the newest, most satisfying and most immersive user experience is reality.

As I write this, for example, at 23:00 BST on 20 August 2011, my own Twitter feed is exploding with accounts, from people on the ground, of the final offensive of the insurgents against Gaddafi in Tripoli:

‘Never forget Mohamed Bouazizi'

‘Do you guys realize
#Libya
is right on the verge of being the FIRST, REAL DEMOCRACY in the MiddleEast!!!'

‘Its about time
#Eygp
t recognizes the NTC as a representative of the Libyan people !
#Libya
…'

‘Late night celebrations in
#zawiya
at the news of uprisings in
#tripoli
. huge booms from poss. NATO strikes audible from the east …' ‘
#AlJazeera
and
#PressTV
report
#Gaddafi
en route to Italy by air.
#NATO
“lying” about Tripoli fall to gain extension to military attacks'

‘Dear world: This is REAL for us, no war game, our families/neighbors r getting shot while we tweet their stories!' ‘AJA reporter: Nato is bombing some areas in
#Tripoli
…' ‘BREAKING: Israeli gunboats shooting at Al Sudaniya area to the north of
#Gaza
'

‘I have to take a short break, and a cup of coffee. God bless
#Libya
and the Freedom Fighters.'

I would say that the above—pinging onto TweetDeck in the space of ten minutes, and about twelve hours in advance of the mainstream media reporting of any of it—beats any ten minutes of Counter-Strike ever played.

The power of social networks, then, is not only that they alter consciousness. They bring this altered and networked consciousness into real life in a way that the old hacker/gamer, stuck to their PCs, never experienced. As London student @littlemisswilde describes it: ‘I can be hanging out in the same room as another activist, tweeting, and other people will see us and say: you're being antisocial. But in fact we're being ultra-social.'

The impact on activism

The rise of online social networks has happened so fast that there is almost no quantitative research into their impact on politics and political campaigns. However, two social theorists—Clay Shirky and Manuel Castells—have helped to predict what the impact could be.

Shirky's seminal 2009 book,
Here Comes Everybody,
describes the basic dynamic of activism in socially networked societies. It becomes, Shirky says, ‘ridiculously easy' to form groups with shared beliefs who can coordinate action and choose targets much faster than hierarchical states or corporations can react: ‘Most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.'