Interview with me on TV Ontario on the role of social media in the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. (Original video here.)

In his latest missive about the role of social media in political movements, Malcolm Gladwell makes two points: one so trivial to be barely worth dismissing and another one which is important, utterly wrong, and worth engaging with.

First, he correctly points out that the French Revolution occurred without Twitter or Facebook. Good to know.

Counterfactuals can be useful when deployed with care but this one is surely not meant seriously. In fact, it is so unserious that Twitter’s 140 character limit is more than enough and I have nothing beyond my first tweet on the subject: Humans also lived through the Pleistocene — is everything since then irrelevant?

The second point he makes is that the “why” of social movements is a lot more important then the “how”:

“But surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.”

Not only is this wrong, it is the opposite of the thesis of his earlier, substantive New Yorker piece where he argued for how overreliance on social media made modern forms of organizing less effective. Gladwell was for the importance of the “how” before he was against it. I understand the appeal of being a contrarian. But one needs a little more substance to explain this kind of u-turn against oneself within a few months.

The “how” of social organizing matter because means of connectivity impact the nature of a movement, the chance for its success, the tactics it can adopt–which in turn, impact its character–, the roles in can play, and the measures the state can deploy against it. All of these shape the nature, outlook and the reach of the movement.

For example, in his earlier piece, Gladwell argued that social media does not support the kind of strong ties which he claimed formed the basis of high-risk tactics such as the lunch-counter sit-ins. Again, leaving aside my disagreements with this claim, it is certainly true that the composition of a movement impacts its nature, and the means of connectivity used in its formation impact its composition. (Let me note the disagreement briefly: my and others’ extensive research on this topic find that while social media do support weaker ties more effectively compared to some earlier forms of communication, this does not appear come at the expense of strong ties. On the contrary, most people use social media to keep strengthen their bonds with strong as well as weak ties and the relationship between the two is not one of opposition but of complementarity and continuum. That is not to say that the rise of social media has not been disruptive at a societal level–rather, the effect is complicated and not the simple one way dilution of strong ties some critics claim. I wrote more about this here.)

Let’s take a specific look at how the “how” or organizing appears to have had an impact in the latest events in Tunisia and Egypt.

1- Both of these movements have arisen without being directed by a well-defined political party and are not expressed through a well-defined programme. This is both their strength and their weakness. This trend of “non-political” politics precedes the spread of the Internet but has clearly accelerated along with the spread of the Internet and is in direct contrast with social movements of early 20^th century.

2- These protests were first kindled through Facebook and other social media which are  integrated into rhythms of mundane sociality. This means that rather than being directed at first by a well-defined group of activists who were able to reach only other politically-motivated compatriots, the dissent and the protests propagated through ordinary social networks which, in turn, ensures that the movement is broad-based. Consequently, both the Tunisian and the Egyptian protests have so far been able to avoid balkanization that plagues opposition movements in similar situations.

3- Both movements have so far only been able to express straightforward demands. “Out with the dictator, in with the elections.” (Similarly, other movements of this kind have sprung up in reaction to stolen elections). This is partly because there is no political leadership with whom there could be negotiations, no programme which outlines a list of demands, no spokespeople who can clarify and expand upon issues. While this seems utopian, and certainly has positive sides, it introduces weaknesses–especially by constricting the demands to the absolute minimum common denominator.

Lack of leadership and definition also opens up movements to cooptation and confusion. If Mubarak says he is leaving in July is that good enough? What kind of elections? What kind of freedoms? What if he is replaced by a strongman who is not a relative? It remains to be seen if the newfound dynamism in Egyptian and Tunisian societies can grow beyond “dictator out.”

4- The specific kind of social-media assisted movements are most likely to erupt in situations where there is already widespread dissent and a fairly-clear problem, i.e. a dictatorship, stolen elections or an authoritarian, corrupt regime like those of Egypt and Tunisia. In other words, social media is best at solving a societal-level prisoner’s dilemma in which there is lack of knowledge about the depth and breadth of the dissent due to censorship and repression and a collective-action barrier due to suppression of political organization. (I wrote more about this here)

5- Thus, social media probably has so far been best at triggering a “empire has no clothes” moment. The role such tools play in situations where there is polarization and strong vested-interests on multiple sides remains unclear. In polarized situations, this dynamic might increase polarization through the facilitation of the “dailyme” in which people filter out dissent from their exposure stream and retreat into epistemic enclosures of the like-minded.

6- To highlight the importance of “how” let’s take Gladwell’s favorite tool, the counterfactual, and imagine a movement that was organized in Tunisia the old-fashioned way, i.e. through building of a political opposition party in a repressive regimes. First, the movement would likely only spread through the most-committed dissidents whose numbers are never large and are easy-pickings for police states. Evgeny Morozov repeatedly highlights how social media increases state capacity for state to surveillance. That is certainly worth considering. However, as I argued here, surveillance is not that useful when the opposition activity is completely entangled with everyday sociality of millions of people and when dissent is widespread.

Thus, our word-of-mouth movement would struggle to grow person-by-person and would be easily outmatched by the state security apparatus. It might be able to put together brave and small demonstrations here and there—the news of which would likely never travel beyond the lonely corner in which they were staged. Even if they managed to get some critical traction in a locality, the state could more easily counter, encircle and repress because unlike the current protests in Egypt and Tunisia, which started rapidly and emerged through a broad-base all at once, authoritarian regimes have a pretty advanced-arsenal against old-fashioned political organizing.

The “how” of organizing often turns into “how” of governance. Our word-of-mouth movement would likely have to remain secretive and suspicious. Does anyone think that it is completely coincidence that successful revolutions by secretive movements often turn into paranoid governments? If for no other reason, this is why the “how” is crucially important.

But, it is true counterfactuals are always a little shaky. But we do have a test case. In 2008, protests led by the local trade-union broke out in the Tunisian mining-town of Gafsa over corruption, unemployment and nepotism. Did you know about them? Neither did I, until recently. However, the story is familiar. Tunisian government forces encircled the town, brought in the army when the police proved unable to contain the unrest, kicked out and jailed the journalists trying to cover the story. Isolated and censored, the protests dissipated. (See here, here and here).

Is the spread and integration of social media into everyday rhythms of Tunisian (and global) populace between 2008 and 2011 a factor in why the world has barely heard of Gafsa while Sidi Bouzid is nearly a household name around the globe? Obviously, there cannot be a definitive answer.  However, this is surely worth exploring and a striking example of the “how” of social movements has such profound consequences beyond being fodder for contrarian missives about their irrelevance.

P.S. Edited because there were two points marked as number four. Doh!
PPS I recommend two more excellent pieces with further thoughts on this topic. Here‘s the one by Dave Parry who makes some some similar arguments and extends the discussion with his usual intellectual firepower. And here‘s a great post David Weinberger who’s just had enough!

Egypt’s apparent move to shut off Internet has called for revisiting the so-called “dictator’s dilemma,” i.e. the idea that authoritarian governments cannot have their Internet cake and eat it, too. The dilemma is often framed as this: “If they allow Internet to spread within the country, it poses a threat to their regime. If they don’t, they are cut off from the world–economically and socially.”

China’s successful and widespread filtering of the Internet has caused many people to revaluate whether it was possible to allow the non-politically threatening parts of the Internet through while filtering out material that a regime finds objectionable. Notable, Evgeny Morozov argues that many people underestimate ability of dictatorships to impose a complex regime of filters and censors to keep the Internet from becoming a potential counter-force.

I would like to argue that the dictator’s dilemma is alive and well but, as with many other aspects of this debate, the reality does not lend itself well to simplistic analysis.

1- The capacities of the Internet that are most threatening to authoritarian regimes are not necessarily those pertaining to spreading of censored information but rather its ability to support the formation of a counter-public that is outside the control of the state. In other words, it is not that people are waiting for that key piece of information to start their revolt–and that information just happens to be behind the wall of censorship–but that they are isolated, unsure of the power of the regime, unsure of their position and potential.

2- Dissent is not just about knowing what you think but about the formation of a public. A public is not just about what you know. Publics form through knowing that other people know what you know–and also knowing that you know what they know. (This point was developed through a Twitter discussion with Dave Parry). Yes, all those parts of the Web that are ridiculed by some of the critics of Internet’s potential–the LOLcats, Facebook, the three million baby pictures, the slapstick, talking about the weather, the food and the trials and tribulations of life–are exactly the backbone of community, and ultimately the creation of public(s).

3- Thus, social media can be the most threatening part of the Internet to an authoritarian regime through its capacity to create a public(ish) sphere that is integrated into everyday life of millions of people and is outside the direct control of the state partly because it is so widespread and partly because it is not solely focused on politics. How do you censor five million Facebook accounts in real time except to shut them all down?

4- The capacity to selectively filter the Internet is inversely proportional to the scale and strength of the dissent. In other words, regimes which employ widespread legitimacy may be able to continue to selectively filter the Internet. However, this is going to break down as dissent and unhappiness spreads. As anyone who has been to a country with selective filtering knows, most everyone (who is motivated enough) knows how to get around the censors. For example, in Turkey, YouTube occasionally gets blocked because of material that some courts have deemed as offensive to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of Turkey. I have yet to meet anyone in Turkey who did not know how to get to YouTube through proxies.

5- Thus, the effect of selective filtering is not to keep out information out of the hands of a determined public, but to allow the majority of ordinary people to continue to be able to operate without confronting information that might create cognitive dissonance between their existing support for the regime and the fact that they, along with many others, also have issues. Meanwhile, the elites go about business as if there was no censorship as they all know how to use work-arounds. This creates a safety-valve as it is quite likely that it is portions of the elite groups that would be most hindered by the censorship and most unhappy with it. (In fact, I have not seen any evidence that China is trying to actively and strongly shut down the work-arounds.)

6- Social media is not going to create dissent where there is none. The apparent strength of the regime in China should not be understood solely through its success in censorship. (And this is the kind of Net-centrism Morozov warns against but that I think he sometimes falls into himself). China has undergone one of the most amazing transformations in human history. Whatever else you may say about the brutality of the regime, there is a reason for its continuing legitimacy in the eyes of most of its people. I believe that the Chinese people are no less interested in freedom and autonomy than any other people on the planet but I can also understand why they have, for the most part, appear to have support for the status-quo even as they continue to have further aspirations and desires.

7- Finally, during times of strong upheaval, as in Egypt, dictator’s dilemma roars. The ability to ensure that their struggle and their efforts are not buried in a deep pit of censorship, the ability to continue to have an honest conversation, the ability to know that others know what one knows all combine to create a cycle furthering dissent and upheaval. Citizen-journalism matters most in these scenarios as there cannot be reporters everywhere something is happening; however, wherever something is happening there are people with cell phone cameras. Combined with Al-Jazeera re-broadcasting the fruits of people-powered journalism, it all comes down to how much force the authoritarian state is willing and able to deploy – which in turn, depends on the willingness of the security apparatus. Here, too, social media matters because, like everyone else, they too are watching the footage on Al-Jazeera. Their choice is made more stark by the fact that they know that history will judge them by their actions–actions which will likely be recorded, broadcast and be viewed by their citizens, their neighbors and their children and grandchildren.

P.S. Slightly edited, mostly for typos.

A debate has been raging on the role social media—especially Facebook and Twitter— played in the apparently successful uprising in Tunisia. Most of the discussion seems to be centered around the use of the term “Twitter Revolution.”

Ethan Zuckerman responds that “the Internet can take some credit for toppling Tunisia’s government, but not all of it.” When you read Ethan Zuckerman’s great piece –and he is, along with Jillian C. York—among the few people participating in this debate who were in touch with Tunisian dissidents on the ground not just through this crisis but over the years, it becomes clear that being able to disseminate information using social media was key in multiple respects:

“[In spite of lack of attention compared to the Iranian protests] … the irony is that social media likely played a significant role in the events … Ben Ali’s government tightly controlled all forms of media, on and offline. Reporters were prevented from traveling to cover protests in Sidi Bouzid, and the reports from official media characterized events as either vandalism or terrorism. Tunisians got an alternative picture from Facebook, which remained uncensored through the protests, and they communicated events to the rest of the world by posting videos to YouTube and Dailymotion.” …

His colleague, Jillian C. York wrote a post titled “Not a Twitter, Not a Wikileaks: Human Revolution” argues that the revolution would have happened without the Internet:

Evgeny Morozov’s question–”Would this revolution have happened if there were no Facebook and Twitter?”–says it all. And in this case, yes, I–like most Tunisians to whom I’ve posed this question–believe that this would have happened without the Internet.

Evgeny Morozov is the most die-hard opponent of the idea that social media can bring about positive social change poses another counterfactual: what if it had failed? Then what would be the contribution of social media?:

So let’s assume that the protests in Tunisia had eventually gone the way of the Green Revolution in Iran: the government stayed in power, regrouped, and began a massive crackdown on its opponents. This brings me to a somewhat depressing conclusion: if the dictator doesn’t fall in the end, the benefits of social mobilization afforded by the Internet are probably outweighed by its costs (i.e. the ease of tracking down dissidents – let alone organizers of the protests).

And even while Morozov agrees that social media was important in feeding information to key conduits to the world, Al Jazeera and France 24, he doesn’t think social media was used to organize protests:

I don’t deny that the Internet may have played a role in publicizing the protests in Tunisia; it’s just that the conditions in which the protests took place do not strike me as those where the leaders of the protest movement had to post updates on where to meet and when. Maybe I am wrong, but it all seemed to be somewhat chaotic and decentralized.

So what to make of all of this? I say, let’s bring in Aristotle! Aristotle distinguished between four types of causation: material, formal, efficient and final. I want to specifically bring the notions of material, efficient and final causation into this debate. Here’s Aristotle –from that other Wiki, Wikipedia, which has turned 10 years old this week–:

“Cause” means: (a) in one sense, that as the result of whose presence something comes into being—e.g. the bronze of a statue and the silver of a cup, and the classes which contain these [i.e., the material cause]; … (c) The source of the first beginning of change or rest; e.g. the man who plans is a cause, and the father is the cause of the child, and in general that which produces is the cause of that which is produced, and that which changes of that which is changed [i.e., the efficient cause]. (d) The same as “end”; i.e. the final cause; e.g., as the “end” of walking is health. For why does a man walk? “To be healthy,” we say, and by saying this we consider that we have supplied the cause [the final cause]. (Full text is here )

In this schema, material causes are the substrate of things. Does metal cause cars? In some sense, cars as we know them wouldn’t exist without metals so it meets a “but for” definition of causality. So, in some sense cars are caused by metals in that no metals, on cars–at least in their current form.  However, in everyday usage, most of us tend to use the other two definitions, the efficient cause, i.e. cars are there because someone manufactured them; or the final cause, i.e. cares are there to take us from place A to place B in a speedy (but polluting!) manner.

So, I think most of the people using the term “social media revolution” are using it in the sense of a material cause. As I asked on Twitter during the debate, would we call the French Revolution a printing press revolution? Surely, the invention of the press is a strong antecedent of that revolution. But also surely, that revolution was made by people, through political action. So, the printing press just defines the milieu in which the revolution took place; it is an inseparable part of the French revolution even though it is not the efficient (political uprising) or the final (establishing a republic) cause of the French revolution. But you cannot really imagine a French Revolution, of the kind that happened, without the printing press.

You can see this distinction by looking at Ethan’s objection to the term “Social Media/Twitter/Facebook revolution” as stated by Ethan:

Tunisians took to the streets due to decades of frustration, not in reaction to a WikiLeaks cable, a denial-of-service attack, or a Facebook update.

What Ethan is saying in his piece is that social media facilitated the events in ways that were crucial (material cause), but the revolution was made by the people of Tunisia at great human cost (the efficient cause) and it was aimed at overthrowing to corruption, unemployment and tyranny (the final cause).

And I think this is more and more what we will see; people will be using social media tools as an integral part of politics during those times that politics takes to the frontstage like uprisings and elections. Evgeny Morozov’s argument is that these tools are not the best suited for promoting democracy, especially in authoritarian regimes, because they also strengthen the surveillance, propaganda and censorship. As I argued in many places, however, they also strengthen capacity for political action through multiple means:

1- Social media lower barriers to collective action by providing channels of organization that are intermeshed with mundane social interaction and thus are harder to censor.

2- Social media can help create a public(ish) sphere in authoritarian regimes, thereby lowering the problem of society-level prisoner’s dilemma in which everyone knows that many people are unhappy but the extent to which this is the case remains hidden as official media is completely censored.

3- Social media helps strengthen communities as it is the antidote to isolating technologies (like suburbs and like televison) and community strength is key to political action.

4- Social media seems to have been key allowing the expatriate and exiled community to mobilize and act as key links between rest of the Arab sphere as well as Francophone parts of Europe and ultimately the rest of the world

5- Social media can be a key tool for disseminating information during a crisis. As we saw in the case of Iran, Burma, Moldova, Tunisia and others, the world had a strong sense of what was happening not because there were many reporters on the ground covering the events but because thousands of citizens armed with basic cell phones could record and transmit in real-time the situation on the ground. Yes, such reports are inevitably chaotic, and yes, the ability to disseminate information is not a sufficient cause for success, but it is surely a necessary one.

In that sense, I respect Jillian’s sensitivity to any wording that seems to take the credit away from the accomplishment of the Tunisian people that came at a great human cost. However, as a material cause, as a key part of the media and information substrate in which the events took place, it seems clear to me that social media was crucial. About 20 percent of Tunisians have Facebook accounts which remained uncensored throughout the crisis.

I find it hard to believe that the ability to disseminate news, videos, tidbits, information, links, outside messages that easily, transparently and without censorship reached one in five persons (and thus their immediate social networks) within a country that otherwise suffered from heavy censorship was without a significant impact. (More background here on the particulars of the general political situation in Tunisia). To say that social-media was a key part of the revolution does not necessarily mean that people used GPS-enabled phones to coordinate demonstrations; that is simplistic and misses the point in which social media shapes the environment in general. What it means is that the people acted in a world where they had more means of expressing themselves to each other and the world, being more assured that their plight would not be buried by the deep pit of censorship, and a little more confidence that their extended families, their neighbors, their fellow citizens were similarly fed up, as poignantly expressed by the slogan taken up by the protestors: “Yezzi Fock! Enough!”

My last two pieces were published over at the Atlantic, mostly because Alexis Madrigal has been doing a spectacular job covering some of the recent events, especially those regarding Wikileaks, and I wanted to be part of that conversation.

I reviewed Evgeny Morozov’s new book, The Net Delusion. Excerpt below, the whole review here.

“But I disagree that the reason online protests do not work is that they are online, or they are easy. The reality, at this juncture in history, is that nothing really works. The Internet is not the problem; global citizen disempowerement is. It’s not the technology that is failing politics but it is our politics that has failed. …

Political activism is not failing because people are too busy watching cat videos online, but because of a fundamental collapse of citizen leverage on institutions of power like governments and corporations. I find it ironic that, after correctly warning about the dangers of an Internet-centric worldview in which everything is perceived through the prism of the Net, Morozov himself is caught in a net-centric analysis of political activism’s decline.

If surveillance, censorship and propaganda are the three pillars of authoritarianism, information, organization and leverage are the counter-pillars of citizen power. And the Internet provides the best and most appropriate infrastructure for strengthening all three. Morozov correctly claims that it does not do so in an unmitigated manner but unmitigated is not the same as ineffective or irrelevant.

In this regard, the Internet is the greatest antidote to anti-communitarian forces. Frankly, I find even the most mindless lolcat sites on the Internet to be an improvement over canned-laughter-filled sitcoms. The point of lolcats is not the lolcats themselves, but to share them with friends, comment on them, make more of them, and enter the community via the joke. It’s the community, not the cat, that matters. (If you doubt this, try selling a book of lolcats and see how well it does.) I write this review in the aftermath of an atrocity; the assassination attempt in Arizona on a Congresswoman that claimed the lives of six others including a child. Every Internet community I am part of is roiled and there is widespread discussion on most of them about the event. Fifteen years ago, we’d all be watching TV, not communicating with each other.”

I also responded to Jaron Lanier’s piece about Wikileaks, where he claimed that Wikileaks revealed nerd supremacy. You can read the whole thing here; excerpt below:

“During these past weeks, rather than a nerd takeover, I saw the crumbling of the facade of a flat, equal, open Internet and the revelation of an Internet which has corporate power occupying its key crossroads, ever-so-sensitive to any whiff of displeasure by the state. I saw an Internet in danger of becoming merely an interactive version of the television in terms of effective freedom of speech. Remember, the Internet did not create freedom of speech; in theory, we always had freedom of speech–it’s just that it often went along with the freedom to be ignored. People had no access to the infrastructure to be heard. Until the Internet, the right to be heard was in most cases reserved to the governments, deep pockets, and corporate media. Before the Internet, trees fell in lonely forests.

The Wikileaks furor shows us that these institutions of power are slowly and surely taking control of the key junctures of the Internet. As a mere “quasi-public sphere,” the Internet is somewhat akin to shopping malls, which seem like public spaces but in which the rights of citizens are restricted, as they are in fact private. If you think the freedom of the Internet could never be taken back, I implore you to read the history of radio. Technologies that start out as peer-to-peer and citizen-driven can be and have been taken over by corporate and state power.”

I will be speaking at the Symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom organized by the Personal Democracy Forum in New York on December 11, 2010. More info here.

There is a great line-up speakers and the event (sold out) will include audience participation. I will post the crib of my talk here soon. In the meantime, you can follow the event on twitter (#pdfleaks) or through my twitter account, @techsoc

UPDATE: Here’s a first draft of some of the points I plan to make. Please note that my draft is evolving as I listen to the great discussion in the room:

DRAFT OF TALK (Subject to change):

First, let me start by pointing out something that often lost in the commotion over Wikileaks: these cables, available to about three million people, have not exposed well-guarded secrets as much as they have exposed the gap between the day-to-day reality of modern statecraft and its civic front. Thus, this uproar is more about accountability and norms of governance than about national security and grave secrets (more on this here).

Second, the question of the fate of Wikileaks and other attempts to hold states and corporations accountable through exposing of internal documents is primarily a question of legitimacy, rather than one of infrastructure. You’ve all seen the commentary about Wikileaks’ 1000 mirror sites, the fact that encrypted unredacted files have been put up on BitTorrent, etc. The idea some people have is that the government is fighting to keep Wikileaks’ information from “getting out,” and that, because of the architecture of the Internet, this is impossible and that Wikileaks wins.

This badly mistakes the point. As some ancient Greek philosopher might have asked, if a tree falls and the MP3 is only available on BitTorrent, does it make a sound? This kind of information only matters if it gets out to a wider public and even then only if it is presented within a particular context. If newspapers don’t print stories based on leaked information, if the very act of obtaining the information is can be portrayed to be criminal and treasonous, then the mere fact that the information is technically available to anyone who wants it will have no discernible consequence.

In this light, the seemingly comic-opera reaction of Joe Lieberman, getting Amazon and EveryDNS to boot Wikileaks, or getting Paypal, MasterCard, and Visa not to process donations to Wikileaks, can be seen as of profound significance. While Wikileaks can always get itself hosted (and mirrored) and while the dedicated can find a way to send it money (the attacks on it may even boost donations), all of these actions are part of an incremental process of delegitimizing the notion of exposing of inner workings of power. In this sense, this treatment of Wikileaks by major corporations is important not because it will succeed in bottling up any information, but because it places the information within a penumbra of unacceptability and illegitimacy.

Having said that, I want to emphasize for my third point that infrastructure does matter. Two of the most important kinds of social organizations, namely states and corporations, have become largely extraterritorial. Extraterritoriality refers to the notion that a given actor is not subject to the laws of the jurisdiction they are physically present in. Extraterritoriality was most commonly seen during colonialism and was one of its most-hated aspects. We are now living in a world where citizenship more and more resembles colonial subjecthood. Corporations flee to places wherever restrictions on them are fewest or wrestle concessions with the threat to flee. In Europe, they are cutting education and social welfare and bailing out giant banks. Governments everywhere tell us that they cannot do anything about the economy because they cannot anger global finance, our unelected lords, apparently. Citizens everywhere have become increasingly powerless and ineffective against these institutions that operate at the global scale in order to restrict us in the national one. Any effective response will similarly need to be on a global scale and keeping the Internet infrastructure open is crucial to all efforts to reassert our prerogatives as citizens, globally.

My fourth point is that recent events have demonstrated that key intersections of the Internet are now at the mercy of corporate power (more on the corporatization of our commons here). Some had argued that privatization of parts of the Internet backbone or the domain-name system was, might a good thing because, unlike states which may censor for political reasons, corporations don’t care what you say, they just care about money. Latest developments have shown this argument to be hollow. Corporations, especially those that deal with backbone and identity-type issues like telecom and credit card companies, are now heavily implicated in cooperation with the state; day to day, they are less able and less willing to be a counterweight, even by accident. So, my first appeal to technical people and their supporters. We need collaborative, open and alternative infrastructure.

For those who want to keep this avenue of accountability open and even see it grow (and you don’t have to agree with the full-on anti-secrecy ethic to be in this camp), the most effective actions do not necessarily involve low-orbit ion cannons, denial-of-service attacks, or any other breaking of Internet windows or virtual sit-ins, acts which often serve to derail the conversation more than they register protest. (Please note that I am not arguing whether DDoS is legitimate or not; rather, I am making a point about effectiveness, which must enter all tactical discussions). Rather, it requires ethical arguments, analysis of social forces, and coordinated political action. My second appeal is thus to everyone. Democracy needs you.

This brings me to my final point about the other key actor in this drama, the media. Journalists draw on a long and storied tradition of independence from the state. When the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers in 1970, this was an act that had been hitherto unimaginable, at least in the American context. They did it, and they won a Supreme Court case establishing their right to do, incidentally, precisely what they are doing now.

I do not support a thoughtless or knee-jerk appeal to all-transparency all-the-time. However, given the realities of information technology, there will be more leaks. While powerful actors may succeed in delegitimizing the leaks, it will not be possible to disappear the information the way dictatorships disappear dissidents. The only sane way forward is if these exposures can be directed to credible intermediaries which can balance the public’s right to know with other legitimate considerations which will sometimes include those of national security.

Respected journalists are the best candidates to serve this crucial function of vetting, contextualizing and presenting such information. But first, they must re-establish themselves as outsiders to power. So, my third appeal is to journalists. This is not just an appeal for media altruism. Old style-journalism is dying and this is the way forward. I promise you, if you step up to this role, with real reportage and genuine investigation, the world will embrace you. The democracy you save could be your own.

Many commentators have noted that the confidential U.S. embassy cables published by Wikileaks contain nothing that would surprise an “informed observer.” I agree and have said so as much myself. However, I think this actually is the real scandal exposed by Wikileaks: there is a fairly large circle of “insiders,” which include much of punditry and journalists, who have a fairly accurate picture of most issues, who nonetheless cooperate with, and in fact, make possible, the efforts of modern states to portray themselves as making decisions dictated by pure motives and high-minded principles rather than by power and interests. In my view, the potential impact of Wikileaks and similar efforts is not necessarily about leaking well-guarded secrets, which these were not; rather, it is about changing the audience for a particular discourse from insiders to outsiders. Rather than expose unknowns, I think it is more accurate to say that Wikileaks has collapsed the distinction between the “front” and “back stages” of the modern state, and exposed the gap between the day-to-day reality of modern statecraft and its civic front.

Let’s start with dispelling the notions that these cables were well-guarded secrets. On the contrary, they had already been available to about three million U.S. citizens from all walks of life including relatively low-level members of the military and hundreds of thousands of contractors––indeed, the leaker is believed to be PFC Bradley Manning, who was 19 years old at the time he leaked these materials. It is hard for me to believe that all motivated players in the world scene have not already had access to these cables through cajoling, bribing, seducing, misguiding, blackmailing, threatening, hacking, forcing or otherwise convincing someone to do what Manning did as a teenager––burn a CD with the whole bunch. (The widespread availability of this data was a somewhat deliberate policy after 9/11 to encourage sharing of information.) I also doubt that we will see too many names of, say, dissidents or informants, as I hope that U.S. diplomats had the sense not to put names in cables that were available to millions of people. The diplomats know they are writing for a fairly large audience; this shows in the care in their rhetoric and writing style, as in the already infamous account of the Wedding in Dagestan, which might become the Balinese Cockfight of Diplomacy.  Besides, since China and Russia know what deals they have made with U.S. diplomats, this is a bit like the British classifying the reports of the weather in Germany during World War II––as Walter Cronkite famously pointed out, the Germans presumably knew the weather in Germany. Thus, the latest uproar is not about secrets but about intended audiences.

Legal scholars have a term for information that is essentially accessible but not necessarily easily available: “practical obscurity.” For example, court records have long been public in the United States but in the past you had to haul yourself to the courtroom to do a search––something you would likely only do if you were truly motivated. Now, a few clicks will deliver all the information about anyone’s criminal record. That is indeed a game-changer. It is not that the information was secret and now it became public; rather, it was “practically obscure” but now it is easily available. A shift in audiences is always of major consequence—indeed, that is at the heart of the commotion caused by Facebook and Google Buzz in its first inception

The concept of the “front” and “back” stages has been most famously applied to the construction of personhood by sociologist Erving Goffman. Noting, for example, that a waiter presents himself a certain way in the front of a restaurant, when serving customers, and acts a very different way back in the kitchen (and might even spit in your food), he analogized this to a play, where an actor plays a role for the audience in the “front stage” and is “himself” in the “back stage.” As he notes, in a sense, there is no real back stage, only a series of different front stages where we construct ourselves for different audiences. Goffman also points out that a crucial part of your self-presentation in a given “front stage” is the active participation and affirmation of the relevant audience, all of whom are simultaneously presenting themselves and likewise expecting your affirmation. All of you are, in a sense, and at least in part for instrumental reasons, agreeing to treat a certain constructed presentation of self as genuine.

This does not mean that our  “performances” of who we are are mere cynical pretense; our different social roles are simply attached to different norms and habits. And who we are, in turn, is not something we can affirm by fiat. It is only through the active participation of relevant audiences who act towards us as if we are who we say and perform we are, do we actually become who we are in the social sense.

A claim for identity is also a moral claim in that our front stages (which vary according to audiences) and back stage (where we have no audiences) can only differ so much before others withdraw their recognition and participation. In other words, we all recognize that people do not behave the same way with their moms as they do with their peers, but, say, the claim to be an honest and upright elected official while embezzling taxpayer funds and breaking major laws will cause one audience to withdraw their affirmation of your identity as a respectable, honest person. The presentation of oneself as a particular person is a moral claim because it demands that one be treated –and honored– in a particular manner; hence there is an inevitable tension between performance and authenticity which can only stretch so far before breaking.

Thus, my public self as a professor in front of a classroom requires that all my students in the classroom not only acquiesce to this but that they participate by performing their own role as students which in turn affirms mine. States (and journalists and pundits) are also making moral claims upon us every time they assert in public what they are about, and, crucially, every time they keep a fact from the public. I don’t disagree that certain types of diplomacy are best done away from the public eye: putting a lid on otherwise inflammatory material that might cause violence or civil strife or hammering out the details of a disarmament deal away from warmongering eyes sound like good ideas to me. I do not think “all transparency all the time” is a good idea. However, in the end, the right to keep secrets is bestowed upon states with the understanding that it will only be done so as necessary and in a justifiable manner. Unlike a person, the state does not have an inherent right to a “back stage” beyond that which is directly justifiable and accountable. Modern practice, however, has been to keep things hidden from the public to protect the state from scrutiny and debate – and this has happened with the participation and acquiescence of much of modern punditry who have become used to the insider/outsider game. The latest batch of releases is a direct challenge to this corrupted separation.

So the multiple pronouncements by many pundits that there is nothing shocking here actually expose the heart of the issue: the jaded insider game of hypocrisy and cynicism involves much of the established media and punditry. Most diplomats and journalists already know, for example, that the U.S. has been spying on United Nations officials––this had actually been exposed but received fairly little media attention, certainly less than Dancing with the Stars. Most “insiders” know how the game is played. That nations go to war for interests and resources. That, around the world, the U.S. is not seen as a pure purveyor of democracy. That lobbyists dominate policy-making. That there is a scientific consensus around global warming and that almost all the dissent is financed through the oil-coal interests. That big nations often try to use multinational institutions to advance their own narrow agendas under the cloak of high ideals.  That many politicians are corrupt, ignorant and self-interested. But most of this is rarely discussed in an open and serious manner.

There are many other issues that Wikileaks raises (such as the consequences of the corporatization of our social commons, which I had previously written about) and the relationship between the relatively open and distributed nature of Internet’s infrastructure and its ability to support a dissident public sphere (DDoS attacks cut both ways and I believe that they are counterproductive as they derail the conversation away from the real topic, transparency and accountability of the modern state, into trivial questions). However, I believe that Wikileaks also points to the way forward for civic journalism to survive as a relevant force — by first becoming an outsider to power. Without major newspapers’ role in acting as active intermediaries in focusing public attention to the revelations in these cables, these would likely get lost in a sea of confusion and clutter.

Indeed, given that there are legitimate reasons not to publish certain kinds of information, and given that a lot of information does not make sense without relevant context, and given that it would be impossible for an ordinary person to sift through hundreds of thousands of documents to find or understand the important ones, it is obviously important that the public sphere retain an intermediary between “leaks” and “publication.” If the fourth estate can stop being a semi-voluntary hostage to powerful interests, it may find that that it can not only survive, but thrive, in a world where information may be free but attention and understanding remain scarce.

I will be giving a colloquium talk at the department of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering at UMBC titled “Negotiating Privacy, Boundaries and Visibility in a Networked World: Why We Need to Move Beyond Opt-in vs. Opt-Out.”

Date          :  Friday 3 December 2010
Time         :  11:00a
Location :  325b, ITE Building at UMBC

Abstract:

It seems that not a week goes by without a new eruption of privacy troubles. Most people are clearly disoriented and confused by this onslaught – the fallout from the introduction of Google Buzz, the confusion caused by changing of Facebook defaults, or the vulnerabilities that Firesheep exposed. Unfortunately, too often, the debate does not proceed beyond the particulars of each crisis – and, at best, concludes a call for opt-in rather than an opt-out mechanism for rolling out new changes. While I also agree that establishing opt-in as a standard would be an important step forward, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the broad discussion we need to be having about the impact of the profound transformation in the infrastructure of our society that has come about as a result of the rapid incorporation of the digital world into our commons. Crucially, the architecture of the digital world, as it stands, differs in significantly from the architecture of the offline world. This new setting brings about new structures of visibility, connectivity and boundaries – and some of these affordances and allowances clash violently with our previously-established expectations and norms of visibility and boundaries that are based mostly on the architecture of the non-digital world. It is very important for people who design and build this infrastructure to be fully-immersed in the debate about the world they are helping create. Design is never neutral and always involves choices about power, structure and possibility.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the need for much better communication between designers of digital architecture and social scientists.  I hope to talk about how design and coding considerations have strong ethical and social implications.  I also want to sketch out the particulars ways in which prevalent architectural configurations  in online spaces clash with our socio-mental configurations of presence and boundaries. While most people are aware that online places have different characteristics compared with offline spaces, it is hard to carry out everyday interactions under the shadow of this knowledge. For example, most college students interact online mostly with people they also interact with offline.  So, the online conversation space socio-mentally feels like hanging out with friends which tends to happen in enclosed spaces bounded by walls, entered through doors, scannable visibly, etc. It is hard to have a conversation with one’s close friends while constantly thinking: “Maybe this will end up in the news tommorow; maybe my boss will see this; maybe my professor will see this.” After awhile the online place becomes normalized into the intuitions we have from offline places because of the nature of the interaction in them.

In other words, the activities we are undertaking structure our perceptions of the place that we are undertaking those activities. We are talking with close friends? We must be in an intimate space. It’s the reverse sense of interviewing for television through a camera in a small room when the host is located at the other end of the country. Even though one is often sitting in a small room with a light shining in one’s face with nobody but the cameraperson in the room, one has a distinct sense of being in a big place talking to a lot of people even though, in reality, you’re sitting in a room talking to yourself while  staring at at a round glass attached to a large, black apparatus. It would be hard to keep up the interview unless one lets the socio-mental image dominate — i.e.  one is talking to a large audience. That is how it naturally works.

So when people act on the Internet primarily concerned with the audience in their socio-mental image of the place, it does not mean that people are stupid or that they are unaware of the actual digital architecture — that their posts might end up visible to unwanted audiences, that they are talking on the Internet.  It just means that it is unrealistic to assume that people can effortlessly carry the cognitive burden of this activity/architecture mismatch that is imposed by design.  Since most of our interactions are in physical spaces from birth (and since we are embodied creatures and not brains in vats!), it is perfectly understandable for the intuitions from “meatspace” –where our meat is, after all– to dominate our socio-mental sense of the place.

And, then, of course, something happens to burst that bubble — unwelcome audiences, unwanted exposure — and people are upset.  I see a lot of “tsk, tsk, they should have known better,” especially among people who are among the technological elite. I think that’s unfair. I also think we would have much better systems if there was more thought that went into understanding the socio-mental perceptions of people and doing a better job matching the digital architecture to those perceptions. And that calls for a better dialogue between designers and coders of the digital world and social scientists.

Count me among the billions of people who followed the saga of the Chilean miners with intense interest. The story captured me in so many ways. Following the 1999 earthquake in Izmit, Turkey, I’ve worked in the quake disaster zone (20K dead, thousands of collapsed buildings) with rescue teams from Fairfax County – and there are very few moments in my life which can compare to those precious minutes when a person is successfully pulled out alive from under the rubble. Just the thought of a rescue anywhere brings up an enormous well of emotions. Plus, I’ve done recreational cave explorations in the past (yes, spelunking) so I have an intimate sense of the darkness and other-worldiness that the underground holds. (And unlike mines which tend to be dreary, natural caves are hauntingly beautiful). Add fascinating questions of social dynamics in a largish group in forced confinement (students in my introductory to sociology class this semester have repeatedly heard me talk about the miners as examples to key concepts we’ve been exploring), sprinkle some discussions of NASA helping design capsules, mix in the issue of mine safety and resource depletion, and you’ve got me, hooked before we even get to the miners whose wife now learns of his mistress (he must not have been on Facebook as they likely would have discovered each other long ago).

But the spectacle is wrong. The message is wrong. The feeling it’s generating is wrong. Not because it’s not great to celebrate such these almost literal rebirths (it is wonderful), nor because it’s wrong to marvel at the technology or the drama (how can you help but marvel?). What’s wrong is the message that whatever our high-stakes technology messes up, our highly-advanced technology can solve.

My unease with the portrayal of this story isn’t just about the fact that this mine, like many others around the world, had an appalling safety record and the miners would have been out by themselves in 48 hours had the mine owners installed the safety ladders in the ventilation shafts as they were, by law, required to and warned about. And I do realize, as others have noted, that we copiously consume many mined metals and minerals as if they do not come at a huge human and environmental cost – costs which have been increasing as the easy pickings have long been picked over and we are now drilling deeper and deeper to extort the earth to give up these precious elements. Miners around the world are treated as discarded lives (thousands were dead just in China just last year) and suffer from a wide-range debilitating diseases.

The problem is that this rescue was a spectacle of technological confidence. The message was that with enough money, determination, technological savvy, gadgets, NASA, experts, smarts, we can solve these problems which are of our making. Yes, we can, for small problems (and we should) like one collapsed mine. However, our bigger problems, climate change, resource depletion can’t be solved by just-the-right-amount-of-tech-wizardry. There are hard choices and inevitable compromises ahead and we should get ready for a (global) discussion on how to finally start ameliorating the unavoidable upheaval that is headed our way.

There is one part of the message, however, I believe is crucial. The spirit of solidarity and camaraderie that the miners held onto under very difficult circumstances will be key. Paradoxically, such a spirit is often easier to hold on to under grave conditions that threaten survival and require sacrifice from all. Metaphorically speaking, we as humanity are already trapped in mine, a big blue and pretty one but still one that confines us and is under threat, and our technology is not going to provide us with a magical phoenix capsule that will solve everything without much sacrifice or pain and there will be no extraterrestrials who send us glucose drinks and video-feeds through ingenious tubes.

It’s just us. We need to gawking at gadgets and capsules and start talking.

This morning, out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Liu Xiaobo was a trending topic on Twitter.  Next thing I knew, I was crying, but half in puzzlement as my brain hadn’t had a chance to process the information. Reflecting for a second, I muttered, “He won.” The only other option was that he had died – and if he had, he would have died in relative global obscurity as the world has too many heroes and too little heart for them. Dead, he would not be on Twitter’s global trending list.

This lag-time between my heart and my brain occurred because I hadn’t been tracking the day of the Nobel announcement. While deeply aware of its global significance, I will be first to say that the Nobel Peace Prize is a hit-and-miss affair and one often riddled in hypocrisy. (Prizes for sitting presidents conducting ongoing wars? Really?)  The brilliant satirist Tom Lehrer is rumored to have declared political satire dead after Henry Kissinger won the prize in 1973. However, this year’s award is right on as Liu Xiaobo is a courageous moral leader and deserves this prize as much as anyone who has ever been awarded or considered for it.

Although I had lost track of the Nobel calendar, I am pretty sure that most Chinese dissidents were acutely aware of the day. And, hopefully, many had either gone into hiding or had taken care of their immediate affairs, as this will surely be followed by a crackdown. Chinese Foreign Ministry huffed that “The Nobel Committee giving the Peace Prize to such a person runs completely contrary to the aims of the prize” – you can be sure this means more repression, soon. We already know that all news of the prize beaming into China via CNN, BBC, etc. has been censored. Mark MacKinnon of the Globe and Mail tweeted that the text message system blocks all spellings of Liu Xiaobo’s name.

So, why do I think this is a good thing for global democracy and for freedom in China – even though the Nobel process is very undemocratic (who is on this committee anyway and who appointed them?),  can be hypocritical, and will unleash a torrent of repression? Especially since we can also be sure that the very tool, information and communication technologies, ones that Liu famously celebrated in an essay titled “The internet is God’s present to China”  will be used in that crackdown as the government hunts down the bloggers, the tweeters, the texters who dare breath his name.

Because I think the power of Internet to concentrate international condemnation is stronger, over the long-run, than the power of the repressive regimes to use these technologies to suppress their citizenry.

The debate over the Internet’s role in political movements has falsely concentrated on whether they ease organizing by dissidents (as Liu Xiaobo himself, Clay Shirky, and others argue) more than they ease suppression by the government (as Evgeny Morozov and others point out). Yes, thanks to the Internet, organizing collective action by ordinary people is easier than ever before, and yes, state censorship and repression is more able to track and target dissidents. But that’s not the key issue.

The Internet is not a game-changer in the sense of a cat-and-mouse game because, yes, it empowers both the cat and the mouse. It is a game-changer because we are not cats or mouse but people, and people care deeply about what other people think of them and how they conduct their lives. In the 21st century, it is not sustainable for a governing elite to be both repressive at home and welcome in the world — and most elites deeply desire the latter as much as they may still cling to the former. One can point to apparent exceptions like the Burmese Junta but I think the formulation holds for most.

People almost never win over a repressive regime because they are better organized or better equipped or better able to get things done. All the examples one can point to are going to be rare remaining weak states or regimes from the past: the modern repressive state is just too powerful.  People win over repressive regimes because the elites in those regimes are also people, and as people, they also crave the sense of belonging and legitimacy that people everywhere, even the most powerful, crave.  People can win not because they can beat back force with force (they rarely can), but because they can withdraw their consent and undermine the standing the rulers have to repress, as the repressive apparatus itself consists of people. I think the collapse of the Soviet blocs is an amazing example of how the seemingly strongest state can wither away after being hollowed out through lack of legitimacy. (Pick your example: Apartheid South Africa, East Timor, etc.)

And the Internet is bringing about nascent forms of organizing collective, global expression of consent (and lack thereof) and that is a very welcome development.  I am sure there is a small sliver among the topmost echelons of the Chinese power structure who are merely (but deeply) annoyed by this development and can click on the “censor and repress” button without a second thought except how to get through the storm. However, I’m equally sure that there are many, many, probably younger, members of the Chinese elite who are embarrassed that BBC news went blank for six minutes shortly after the words “an imprisoned Chinese dissident wins the Nobel Peace Pri…” were uttered. I am sure many Chinese academics and businessman and students –the kind who travel abroad—are dreading the inquisitive questions they may face from well-meaning colleagues and friends the next time they have lunch. I am sure that many members of the elite in China want their country to be a respected member of the global community rather than a country that is known for censorship and repression. And I am sure many ordinary Chinese people will now learn of both the prize and the attempt to censor it.  And all that, surely, will bring about change; not in weeks or months, but in our lifetimes.

The trending global topic list in Twitter is a simple example of capacity of the Internet to focus and express the world’s attention. Yes, Twitter is mostly full of trivia, as it should be as mundanity is the stuff of life. On  the other hand, that’s also where one can see how we, as a world, are talking about topics of global importance: the heartbreak of the earthquake in Haiti (and how to help), the death of Miep Gies (the protector of Anne Frank), and Liu Xiaobo (who will learn of his prize after billions of people already know of it).

This brings me back to the sit-ins during the Civil Rights movement and the debate that has been broiling over the Internet over what kinds of social ties produce social movements. Whatever the nuances of the dynamics that start social movements, it is clear that social movements succeed when they win such strong legitimacy that they otherwise threaten the legitimacy of the rulers. Lyndon Johnson and others before him were deeply embarrassed by the (well-deserved) international condemnation that the U.S. faced as the images from the brutality inflicted upon the protesters were beamed around the world.  Many ordinary white people who might not have given the status of African-Americans in the nation much thought before were horrified by what they were seeing. Without that component, the civil rights movement might have been remembered as a brave but futile effort.

The undermining of legitimacy is not the kind of development that causes overnight change but that, over the long run, ensures that the moral arc of the universe does indeed bend towards justice, but only over the long term.  And Internet, through its capacity to express, concentrate and develop the boundaries of what the world citizenry considers morally unacceptable, can help make that happen. The questions on the table are how to develop the tools, the understanding, and infrastructure required so that the convening power of global consent, legitimacy and attention is not at the mercy of the good sense of a few people in Norway.