The Connected Society_
In China, they’re known as the “post-’90s,” and they don’t have a very good reputation.
They’re youth who were born in the 1990s, and in the eyes of Chinese liberals and intellectuals, they’re regarded as quintessential slackers. They grew up in a world shaped by Deng Xiaoping’s go-go capitalism, in which the Communist Party had erased the 1989 Tiananmen Square revolt from history books and the local Internet. Politically ignorant and coddled by their parents—they are all “only children,” courtesy of China’s one-child-per-family policy—these post-’90s kids were regarded as feckless and materialist, interested only in video games, wasting time online, and fashion (such as their “exploded head” hairstyles). If you were a liberal in China who longed for democracy, you looked at this feckless generation and sighed: the death of politics.
Until the summer of 2012, when that myth came crashing down—as the post-’90s youth of Shifang staged one of the most successful environmental protests ever.
Shifang is a city in southwestern China. In late June 2012, local party officials announced they would begin building a $1.6 billion plant to process molybdenum-copper alloy. The plan was slated to create thousands of construction jobs in an area that was in distress, because of both the country’s economic slowdown and an earthquake that hit four years earlier. But many locals worried about toxic side effects. Copper plants often produce slag filled with noxious chemicals, including arsenic; many such areas have seen cancer rates soar. Chinese citizens are painfully aware of how rampant development is ruining the countryside. In some industrial cities the air is so foul that people wear surgical masks outside and rivers run in different colors each day of the week. Still, the plant looked inevitable; a kickoff ceremony was set for June 29. Locals might grumble, but it was rare for party officials to back down—particularly since those officials usually grew wealthy from kickbacks.
This time, though, Shifang’s students struck back.
In the days leading up to June 29, the students began networking online. They met on QQ, a popular instant-messaging service, as well as discussion boards hosted by Baidu, the country’s main search engine. Meanwhile, they began seeding Sina Weibo—China’s enormous social network, roughly comparable to Twitter—with doubts about the copper plant. “Overdose of molybdenum may cause gout, arthritis, malformation, and kidney problems,” one user noted. Another argued, “Without doubt, Shifang will become the biggest cancer town in years,” and pleaded for others to rise up: “Who can help people like me who don’t want their hometown to become hell?”
The students decided they would hold a protest in Shifang’s streets on July 1, since, in a nice bit of irony, this was the birthday of the Chinese Communist Party. They’d meet in front of the Shifang municipal government offices. As the online criticism about their plant grew, the students carefully spread the word offline, too—handing out flyers and printing T-shirts to broadcast their cause.
When the day arrived, the protest started small, with the early crowd of students in the dozens. Toting colorful umbrellas against the rain, they sported banners and T-shirts saying “Protect the environment at Shifang. Give my beautiful hometown back,” and “No More Pollution! We’d Like A New Shifang.” But while the protest started small, it soon ballooned. Students and interested locals posted pictures on Weibo, where they were quickly recirculated. Meanwhile, the students began mass texting other townspeople: “People of Shifang, be united and together protect our home!” they wrote. “Many students and residents gathered in front of the government building, many of which skipped classes or acted against their teachers’ persuasions. . . . It seems that the influence of these students are not strong enough! I ask all of you and your relatives to drive out your cars, block the traffic and make it big to pressure the government. This is a choice out of no choices!”
By the end of the first day, the crowd had grown to five thousand. The next day it was even larger—some reports had it doubling—and it wasn’t just students anymore, but citizens from across Shifang, including shopkeepers and businesspeople. Via Weibo, the entire country was learning of the protest; “Shifang” was the top searched-for term.
Local officials panicked. The protest had come out of nowhere, catching them off guard. They ordered riot police to break it up, firing tear gas canisters and striking demonstrators.
This action backfired badly. Not only did it fail to break up the protest, but students and Shifang citizens instantly uploaded pictures and video of the crackdown, flooding the country with ghastly images. One showed a man with a huge open gash on his left shoulder; in another, a woman’s mouth was covered in blood; a third showed an infant who’d gotten blood, probably his parents’, smeared across his forehead. Then came stirring images of bravery: a young woman in a blue dress, arms outstretched, confronting an officer; another woman kneeling before a cluster of riot police. “There are too many ‘first times’ today,” posted one young female protester: “Except during menstruation, it’s my first time to bleed so profusely. First time to see my own bone. . . . We simply hope that our hometown is free from pollution. That’s all. Is that too much to ask?!”
Normally, the government carefully blocks this sort of dissent, ordering Chinese social networks to sniff out illicit keywords and delete postings. And indeed, some Shifang postings were deleted. But many more got through, possibly because the sheer volume was too overwhelming for the autocensoring software, and images can’t easily be autodetected. It’s also possible the central government worried that fully banning the chatter would cause yet more controversy. Either way, a study by the China Media Project found that in the four days there were a stunning 5.25 million postings about the protest on Weibo. Most of these were rebroadcasts of fifteen thousand original bits of on-the-scene reporting by the protesters themselves. In a fruitless local attempt to stop the flood, Shifang’s police issued a warning: “The use of the Internet, cell phone SMS messages or other means to organize or instigate illegal assemblies, protests or demonstrations of any kind is strictly prohibited.”
It was too late. On the third day, local officials admitted defeat. They publicly announced they were canceling the copper plant.
It’s hard to know why the officials decided to back down; the Communist Party doesn’t discuss its meetings openly. But observers suspect the sheer weight of public attention was too intense, even for a party that has no opposition and routinely throws dissidents in jail. Plus, while democracy advocates can be marginalized, environmental issues are harder to brush off. “The information and pictures shared through Weibo aroused national attention,” Ma Jun, founder of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, told Businessweek. Or as one Weibo user noted: “Before, no one knew what the real situation was, or the people’s discontent couldn’t make it onto the nightly news. But now, it’s different. With the Internet, the government’s job just gets harder and harder.”
The students were exultant. “It is the 4th of July—236 years ago America achieved independence, and 236 years later, the Shifang people are fighting for their own rights and confronting the government,” a microblogger wrote. A female student from Sichuan Engineering Technical College posted, “Joining this protest is the most meaningful thing I’ve done in my 19 years of life.”
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The idea that technology can help liberate the oppressed has long been a seductive one. As Elizabeth Eisenstein argued in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, the printing press allowed economies of scale that spread liberating ideas far more broadly than was before possible. (Indeed, Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses were so rapidly reprinted—across various countries—that Luther himself was stunned. “It is a mystery to me,” he admitted to the pope, “how my theses, more so than my other writings, indeed, those of other professors, were spread to so many places.”) Anticommunist politicians and intellectuals in the West have long credited samizdat publishing for helping erode the Soviet Union.
But the Internet and modern digital tools have been particularly romanticized. Our ability to communicate instantly across vast distances, to speak to the world and to each other, seems uniquely freedomish. In the West, in particular, we tend to regard speech as both a proxy for emancipation and its inevitable catalyst; and if the Internet has done anything, it’s produced a global flood of speech. Prophecies of liberation have come fast and furious. “The Goliath of totalitarian control will be rapidly brought down by the David of the microchip,” Ronald Reagan intoned in 1989. And as Hillary Clinton more recently proclaimed, the United States was willing to “bet that an open Internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries.”
Alas, this isn’t true. Or at very least, it isn’t simply true. Communications tools may be a necessary condition for broad-based social change, but they aren’t a sufficient condition. If the advance of human rights was simply a matter of sprinkling around microchips and bandwidth, several of the world’s most despotic regimes ought to look like Canada. In reality, results have been erratic. In some countries where use of the Internet and mobile phones has boomed, there have been significant shifts toward freedom and rights, notably in Arab Spring states such as Egypt and Tunisia. In others, such as Azerbaijan and Belarus, the growth of the Internet has been accompanied by brutal crackdowns. And some countries, such as China, tread a middle path. The Communist Party filters activity online, running a Great Firewall that blocks citizens from seeing foreign news the party deems seditious, while threatening Chinese Internet executives if they don’t self-police their users. But because China also needs the Internet and mobile phones for economic growth, the party has tolerated and even encouraged their spread. (Indeed, in some areas of China you can get broadband wireless data more reliably than in my gentrified corner of Brooklyn.) These digital tools haven’t toppled the party, but the sea of online chatter has accompanied a striking increase in traditional offline protest. Twenty years ago, the number of demonstrations in China was 8,709 per year. By 2012 it had ballooned to about 90,000. While these protests are driven by primal, real-world needs—cleaner air, better pay, less corruption—the increasingly networked nature of Chinese society is likely a big part of the shift, as the protests by the students of Shifang show.
To understand how technology affects social change, you have to look at how it affects the way we think, learn, and cooperate with others, and how local cultures come into play. All the enhancements of our cognition—bigger memory, public thinking, new literacies, and ambient awareness—play critical roles in how political change unfolds and how it’s thwarted.
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Actually, one of the best ways to grasp how political change happens is to study how it doesn’t.
Think of a situation where there’s a major social injustice staring everyone in the face, yet nobody protests. Take the example of racial segregation in the United States in the late 1960s. On paper and legally, the country by then had made most forms of segregation illegal. The Fair Housing Act of 1968, for example, made it illegal for landlords to discriminate on the basis of race. Polls of American whites showed that they generally agreed with these changes—indeed, clear majorities believed official segregation was wrong. Yet in everyday life, segregation was common: White employers routinely wouldn’t hire blacks, and white neighbors often opposed blacks moving into their neighborhoods. The private views of whites—that segregation was bad—wasn’t affecting everyday behavior. Why?
Back then, sociologist Hubert O’Gorman got interested in this puzzle, and he did some clever research to untangle it. First, he examined a national survey that asked white Americans across the country to state whether or not they supported segregation. Sure enough, the large majority didn’t. Only a small minority of whites—18 percent of the total—still believed in segregation.
Then O’Gorman considered a second question: How many whites believed most other whites supported segregation? In other words, maybe you weren’t racist . . . but did you think most of your neighbors were? Sure enough, many did. Nearly half of all whites—47 percent—believed that the majority of white people were segregationists. In essence, lots of American whites held an amazingly inaccurate mental picture of what other whites believed.
This, O’Gorman reasoned, helped explain why racist behavior and discrimination were still so widely tolerated. Because most whites inaccurately believed they were surrounded by tons of other white racists, they were less willing to speak out and oppose racism. This was particularly true in areas like housing. When O’Gorman looked into whether whites supported segregated neighborhoods, he discovered that only a very small minority of hard-core racists favored it—and an equally small minority heatedly opposed it (the social-justice folks, as it were). But the large swath of middle-of-the-roaders? They weren’t particularly racist, but because they incorrectly believed that most white Americans supported segregated housing, they supported it, too. (Now, there’s an obvious objection to O’Gorman’s analysis here. Isn’t it possible that lots of people were simply lying about their racist beliefs to the survey takers, trying to appear more tolerant? Sure, but O’Gorman didn’t think the data supported that. The people most likely to lie—those living in liberal northern areas—also had the lowest rates of false beliefs.)
This same dynamic, O’Gorman argued, helped explain why blacks couldn’t get hired: Even when white employers did not think of themselves as racist, they believed their customers were—so they went along with the crowd, or at least the crowd they imagined existed. O’Gorman quoted the economist Gunnar Myrdal’s interviews with white employers: “I have been told time and time again that they have nothing against employing Negroes, and I believe they are telling the truth. What holds them back are the considerations they have to take about the attitudes of customers and co-workers.” The same dynamic even appeared to govern playdates of children. In a 1969 survey, fully 76 percent of whites polled in Detroit said a white mother should let her daughter bring a black friend home from school. But only a third believed other whites would agree, so few such playdates took place.
Sociologists have a name for this problem: pluralistic ignorance. It occurs whenever a group of people underestimate how much others around them share their attitudes and beliefs. It’s a huge impediment to social change. It happens for psychologically understandable reasons, of course. The social norms of the past can loom large in our memory, even as they’re actually dying off person by person.
Pluralistic ignorance isn’t just a problem with racism. It affects nearly every domain of human activity. For example, a 1980 survey found that even though a majority of people wanted more laws to limit pollution and nuclear power, they believed others were less supportive. In corporations, board members might all privately notice the lousy performance of the CEO, but none speak out because they don’t think the others agree. And university campuses are hotbeds of pluralistic ignorance, particularly with regard to sex. Research shows both both male and female students overestimate how willing other students are to have sex.
Pluralistic ignorance is an information problem, as Andrew K. Woods, a legal scholar who introduced me to the concept, points out. It happens because we don’t know what’s going on in other people’s minds. Whenever we’re faced with a socially dicey, delicate subject—Do other people notice that this company is in trouble? How much sex are other students having?—we’re too squeamish to talk openly. Without correct information, we get it wrong.
But the converse is also true. It turns out that you can fight pluralistic ignorance by actively improving the flow of information—and letting people know the previously invisible views and thoughts of others.
This is how U.S. campus officials started fighting binge drinking among students in the 1990s. Studies found that binge drinking was a product of pluralistic ignorance: Students assumed their peers drank more than they actually did. In Montana, for example, men thought the average number of drinks a male consumed in a single occasion was seven; in actuality, it was three. Women estimated five drinks for women, when it was really two. So some students would ramp their drinking upward to try to match this mistaken norm, with dangerous results. To fight the problem, officials at Northern Illinois University set up an awareness campaign. They plastered the campus and its widely read newspaper with notices showing the real averages, not the mythical ones, and offered small rewards for students who could produce the right numbers. Sure enough, students adjusted their behavior. Over the next decade, the proportion of students who engaged in high-risk drinking plunged from 43 percent—above the national average of 40 percent—down to 25 percent.
To make social change begin to snowball, we need to make our thoughts visible. When members of society think in public and keep in ambient contact with one another, it creates a new environment—where we’re increasingly aware of what changes might be possible.
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You can see this dynamic in some of the more dramatic events of the Arab Spring, like the Egyptian uprising.
It wasn’t a mystery why Egyptians wanted to revolt. They had plenty of reasons. During Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year presidency, the quality of life had plummeted as the price of food rose, minimum wages went down, and corruption ran rampant, with Mubarak’s regime privatizing government agencies and pocketing kickbacks. Those who challenged the regime were dealt with ruthlessly. But behind the scenes, pro-democracy activists and workers patiently toiled to foment dissent. Many groups formed, such as the Egyptian Movement for Change—dubbed Kefaya, meaning “enough”—that arose in 2004, explicitly demanding that Mubarak step down. Incensed by low wages and privatization, workers staged strikes that brought up to twenty-seven thousand people into the streets in 2006. Inspired by this worker discontent, young tech-savvy activists like Ahmed Salah, Ahmed Maher, and Walid Rachid began using online tools to organize protests, in what was known as the April 6 Youth Movement. Meanwhile, the journalist Wael Abbas collected videos of police beatings and torture and posted them online. These activists were plugged into the larger wired world of young Arab dissidents, from Tunisia to Bahrain. Talking on blogs and meeting at conferences, they swapped ideas on how to get their message out while staying safe. They were willing to put their bodies on the line for the cause, getting arrested and beaten for their efforts.
Still, all this activism never ignited the Egyptian mainstream. In fact, most people didn’t know it was going on, because Mubarak controlled the state press. “Most of their marches and protests attracted only a few hundred, which made it easy for the police to crack down on them,” as the academics Sahar Khamis and Katherine Vaughn noted. As a result, many everyday Egyptians became convinced change was impossible and dangerous to discuss, as Wael Ghonim, an Egyptian who played a role in the uprising (and worked for Google at the time), has written: “Fear was embodied in local proverbs, such as ‘Walk quietly by the wall (where you cannot be noticed),’ ‘Mind your own business and focus on your livelihood,’ and ‘Whosoever is afraid stays unharmed.’”
Through violence and fear, despots actively create pluralistic ignorance. They work hard to engender a lack of trust and knowledge between fellow citizens. This helps derail protest before it can begin: Nobody wants to show up for a demonstration if only a few other people show up, because you’ll be jailed—and worse, nobody will ever hear about it. A huge protest is a different story; if you can get hundreds of thousands of people and massive public awareness, you have more power and safety. But for a public uprising to become huge, people have to believe many, many other fellow citizens will conquer their fear and show up. It’s a collective action problem. How do you get the snowball rolling?
In Egypt, an event in June 2010 helped break that collective action problem: A young man named Khaled Said was viciously beaten and killed by state police. Egyptian political blogs were alight with graphic photos of Said’s brutalized body; Ghonim, the Google executive, was living in Dubai when he saw them. Incensed, he set up a commemoration page on Facebook called “We Are All Khaled Said.” A year earlier, Facebook had released an Arabic version whose membership had grown to 3.5 million users, clustered mostly in the major cities. Ghonim’s first post read: “Today they killed Khaled. If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me.” Within two minutes three hundred people had joined the page, and in an hour, three thousand. By the end of the day, it rose to thirty-six thousand people, who’d posted an astonishing eighteen hundred comments, decrying Said’s death and venting anger at the government. Ghonim began posting nearly twenty-four hours a day, seeding the page with reports of corruption and torture, as well as rebutting the regime’s claims that Said was a drug user. Within four days, one hundred thousand people had joined the page.
What Ghonim noticed was that the crowd wasn’t just reading and “liking” his posts. They were talking among themselves, sharing stories of their discontent. This was new behavior. There had been online forums in Egypt, but never one that reached so widely beyond the activist community. In Egypt back then, a very popular Facebook page would have only about one hundred comments, as Rasha Abdulla, an Egyptian professor of communications, said at a New York conference months later. This forum, in contrast, was the first to gain real traction. It was also personal: because Facebook required real names, the posters could see that average Egyptians, friends and colleagues, were equally up in arms.
Ghonim and the other administrators of the page began nudging the community toward collective action. He asked them to post pictures of themselves holding up signs that said “Kullena Khaled Said” (“We Are All Khaled Said”), to give a visceral sense of who they were. Then one member suggested they assemble in a silent protest along the sea in Alexandria. Thousands of page members showed up there and in other cities. Ghonim used Facebook’s polling tools to see if members wanted to stage more vigils; they voted yes.
Soon, they had another powerful spur to action. In Tunisia in December 2010, a street vendor died after setting himself on fire to protest police corruption; it sparked antigovernment protests that, in mid-January 2011, drove the president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, to step down after twenty-three years in power. The spectacle electrified Egyptians. To capture the energy, Ghonim, working with other activists, suggested a massive protest for January 25. Quickly, twenty-seven thousand members of the page RSVP’d to say they would come out; discussion exploded to fifteen thousand comments a day, and the page ballooned to five hundred thousand members, making it the largest online protest group the country had ever seen.
In other words, the collective action problem was dissolving. The members of Ghonim’s enormous group showed up because they knew they weren’t alone. And other activist groups were amassing similar gatherings. January 25 became history, the beginning of a mass uprising that drove Mubarak from power only two and a half weeks later.
“People who would only post comments in cyberspace became willing to stand in public; then those protesters, among many others, made the great leap to become marchers and chanters, and grew into a critical mass that toppled a brutal and tyrannical regime,” as Ghonim later wrote.
Egypt was a perfect example of how deeply online communications have become embedded in social change. It is silly to call the uprising, as some pundits did, a “Facebook revolution.” Revolutions happen when people put their bodies on the line, not merely fingers on a keyboard. (Indeed, about 850 civilians died in the conflict.) And the power of offline, real-world social connections was crucial. For example, an element in the revolution’s success was the participation of Egypt’s soccer fans, the Ultras—because after years of rioting during games, the Ultras were expert in fighting police and staging public spectacles.
Yet ordinary Egyptians wouldn’t have been prepared to show up in the first place until they’d burned off their pluralistic ignorance by communicatng with one another. “Once you know other people agree with you, it just cascades from there,” as Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish-American academic who carefully studied the Egyptian uprising (and who appeared in the previous chapter, aiding Mona Eltahawy), tells me. Two weeks after Mubarak stepped down, Tufekci and her research team polled 1,050 Egyptians, some of whom had shown up on the first day of protest. She wanted to know how precisely they’d first heard about the event. Tufekci found that person-to-person contact was key—offline and online. Forty-eight percent had heard about it directly from someone they knew, which is what you’d expect. But the next biggest chunk, 28 percent, first heard about it from Facebook. Almost none heard about it from traditional broadcast media.
In a sense, activism has always been about fighting pluralistic ignorance. A key job of the public organizer—in a community, at a workplace—is to catalyze existing discontent, to persuade people that others share their visions and desires. Nor is the idea of a public talking to itself anything new. “Speaking, writing, and thinking involve us—actively and immediately—in a public,” as social theorist Michael Warner notes. What is different is the scale and speed at which publics can form and reach awareness.
You can see these effects of scale and speed in the earliest days of electronic communication. When the electric telegraph emerged in the nineteenth century, one of the first things businesspeople sent from town to town were reports of local weather; for corn speculators, this information was crucial. But these weather reports had a curious secondary effect. As people became conscious of weather around the country, they began to see it as a system with patterns, as the author James Gleick writes in The Information. “The telegraph enabled people to think of weather as a widespread and interconnected affair, rather than an assortment of local surprises,” he adds. This is precisely what happens now with politics: Citizens can see patterns of common grievance emerge locally, nationally, and internationally.
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One of the dangers of online conversation is if it remains conversation, never turning into action. Complaining is easy—much easier than getting out of your chair. Many critics have worried about the rise of so-called slacktivism, a generation of people who think clicking “like” on a Facebook page is enough to foment change. Dissent becomes a social pose.
Indeed, Egyptian activists fretted about this. A week before the January 25 rally, Asmaa Mahfouz—one of the young leaders of the April 6 movement—posted a stern YouTube warning. “Sitting at home and just following us on news or Facebook leads to our humiliation . . . If you stay home, you deserve what will happen to you,” she said sternly. Commenters on the “We Are All Khaled Said” page echoed her fears. Even they didn’t think anyone would step away from the screen. “No one will do anything and you’ll see,” one fretted. “All we do is post on Facebook. We are the Facebook generation. Period.”
These fears weren’t borne out. It’s true that people can be lazy and that motivating people to do real-world work—attending protests, donating money, making phone calls—is hard. But it was always this way. Long before the Internet, when I was in college in the 1980s, older activists worried that young people were substituting T-shirts and political buttons for serious activism. (T-shirts were the pre-Internet hashtag.) Mere conversation and sloganeering have always seemed like a potentially dangerous sap to the energy of real protest.
The difference now is that online conversation blurs into action, in a fashion that sometimes surprises even the conversationalists. One of the curious features of online dissent is how it can emerge from discussion boards that weren’t designed for political talk at all. Once you get enough people talking together online for any reason, they discover shared areas of social concern. As Clay Shirky documents in Cognitive Surplus, South Korean girls who loved the boy band Dong Bang Shin Ki would flock to the fan board Cassiopeia—about a million of them. In 2008, when the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, decided to allow American beef back into the country—it had been banned for years because of the mad-cow-disease scare—the girls started talking about it and decided they didn’t like the idea. Thousands of people, half of whom were teenagers, joined candlelight protests in Cheonggyecheon Park in Seoul. The government tried to crack down, but this backfired when images of teenage girls getting beaten by police went public. Eventually the president partially apologized, imposed new beef import restrictions, and demanded the resignation of his entire cabinet.
Online talk may be cheap, but because it’s public and linkable, it catalyzes multiples. As the British media critic Charlie Beckett writes, “It strikes me that social media embodies the connection between action and expression. For example, you can Tweet that you are going to a demonstration. The hashtag connects you to others, acts as an expression of your opinion and a call to action, and builds solidarity. It is democratic, efficient and endlessly variable. It is personal but it increases social capital for the movement.”
In fact, evidence suggests that the more socially active people are online, the more civically active they are offline, too. A survey released in 2011 by the Pew Research Center found that 80 percent of people who use the Internet participated in an offline group or volunteer organization, compared to only 56 percent of those who weren’t Internet users. People who were active in social networking were even more engaged offline—for example, 85 percent of those who used Twitter were involved in an offline organization. Even internationally, this seems to hold true. Emily Jacobi, head of Digital Democracy—an organization devoted to empowering human-rights activists—polled one hundred Burmese youth activists, dissidents, and refugees living on the Thai border. She found that the ones with Internet access were most likely to feel optimistic about their political action. “And we’re talking about people who have to walk for miles to get to an Internet café just to get online,” Jacobi tells me. “It isn’t easy for them, but when they can connect to other people, they feel less alone, more committed.”
Another concern about political speech online is the problem we saw in ambient contact—homophily. We’re most comfortable around those similar to us politically, and the Internet makes it easy to find those people. That’s what multiples are all about, after all. Logically, this could produce a terrible echo chamber effect: Political partisans reinforce one another’s prejudices, increasing political partisanship. As Farhad Manjoo documented in his book True Enough, it isn’t just about opinions—like-minded groups reinforce each other’s lousy, half-true, or even patently wrong facts. This is called selective exposure: we seek out and pay close attention to facts that suit what we believe, ignoring the ones that don’t.
If you visit any avowedly partisan political blog and look at the comments, you’ll see this in action. You’d be tempted to go, Well, no wonder the United States is so divided: The online echo chamber has utterly deformed public debate.
Except as evidence rolls in, the picture doesn’t look so simple. Indeed, the behavior at those hyperpartisan political blogs may be more an exception than the rule online, when it comes to political talk. As scholars examine online discourse, they often find that the average person isn’t locked into an echo chamber at all. For example, another Pew survey found very little political agreement even among friends. You’d expect, given what we know about homophily, that friends would mostly reinforce one another’s views. But in reality, Pew found, barely 25 percent “always agree or mostly agree with their friends’ political postings” on social networks, and amazingly, 73 percent “only sometimes” agree or never agree. And 38 percent of folks on social networks “have discovered through a friend’s posts that his/her political beliefs were different than the user thought they were.” Public thinking and ambient contact give us a richer sense of what’s on our friends’ minds—and what we find surprises us.
The news-sharing abilities of tools like Twitter may expand, rather than shrink, the political exposure of users—even among the most ideological folks. One study homed in on Twitter users who displayed “clear political preference,” as with right-wing Twitter users following Fox News, or left-wing Twitter users following The New York Times. It turns out these users inadvertently got a more diverse set of news delivered via other people they followed, because their friends would tweet tidbits from the other side of the political spectrum. Indeed, 17.8 percent of the left-wing Twitter users were seeing right-wing media via retweets from people they followed, and the right-wing Twitter users saw even more—57.2 percent of them were seeing left-wing media. Even when they picked their online friends homophilically, it still appeared to broaden their exposure. “Indirect media exposure,” the researchers concluded, “expanded the political diversity of news users obtained by a significant amount.”
Things are probably even less cloistered when you step away from the big social networks like Facebook and Twitter—and dive into the teeming world of discussion boards for hobbies and cultural passions. Joseph Kahne, a professor at Mills College, ran several studies on young people’s online discussions. He found two striking things: Those who participated in communities devoted to everyday interests were exposed equally to views they did and didn’t agree with. There was little echo chamber at all. More important, kids involved in hobby-based online forums had higher civic involvement than peers who weren’t active: They volunteered more often, raised money, and collaborated to solve social problems. Kahne tells me he suspects this is because interest-based online groups expose kids to a wider range of people than they’d normally meet: more diverse ages, politics, and literacy. If you’re interested in sailing or guitars or cross-stitching, you’re probably going to run into people from all walks of life. So these forums broadened the teenagers’ worlds and got them comfortable dealing with strangers, a crucial skill of maturity. (Interestingly, this wasn’t true for kids on Facebook, because Facebook doesn’t encourage you to interact with strangers.)
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that online interactions are going to magically reduce the partisanship of modern politics. It’s amazingly hard to change someone’s mind on a big, important issue. But this evidence contradicts the notion that online communications are singularly responsible for the increased toxicity we often perceive in today’s politics. Indeed, one could quite easily argue that political divisiveness (in the United States, anyway) is still mostly a product of forces in the offline world—such as deep structural problems in how Congress works, gerrymandering, the behavior of traditional one-way media, and the billions of dollars spent on think tanks and electioneering that deform political discourse.
Why are so many political pundits so convinced that the digital world is corroding public life? Possibly—and ironically—because of selective exposure. If you’re on a hunt for rancorous partisanship, it’s easy to find. Screaming political blogs abound, and that’s where journalists go. But these sites are, for all their prominence in the media, likely a relatively small chunk of Internet conversation as a whole. Indeed, political speech of all forms is probably a surprisingly small fraction of what we discuss online, if it’s similar to our offline lives: Robin Dunbar’s analysis of everyday conversation revealed that people talked about politics a mere 2.9 percent of the time.
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It’s become fashionable to talk about online dissent as “leaderless.” But as with collective thinking, the truth is more complicated. Political movements that don’t have a clear leader still often rely on individuals fluent in the behavior of digital crowds. Like tummelers, these individuals know how to create environments where people feel excited about participating. They know how to sense the emergent activity of online groups; they create networks, then learn from them about where to go. They know that online movements work best—arguably they only work at all—when they’re focused on specific goals.
Like seeking justice for a black teenager—as in the case of Trayvon Martin. On the night of February 26, 2012, the seventeen-year-old was walking back from the grocery store to a house that his family was visiting when he was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, the gated community’s neighborhood watch coordinator. Remarkably, Zimmerman wasn’t charged. This angered the Martin family and observers, who believed the shooting was racially motivated. But local media paid scant attention to the case—a brief report ran the next day, and a slightly longer story the day after that in the Orlando Sentinel—so the police faced little pressure to act.
That pressure grew online. Eleven days after the shooting, Kevin Cunningham, a thirty-one-year-old in Washington, DC, heard about Trayvon Martin via his fraternity’s e-mail list. Inspired by the Arab Spring a year earlier, he went to Change.org—a Web site for setting up petitions—and crafted one calling on the police to charge Zimmerman. He shared it with his fraternity, and it was posted to their e-mail list. Within a few days, it garnered fifteen thousand signatures. In New York, a young digital-media strategist named Daniel Maree posted a YouTube video asking people to wear hoodies on a designated day to call attention to Martin’s case, since the teenager had been wearing one when killed; the action became known as the Million Hoodie March. It was a catchy and potent meme, one that neatly highlighted the racial double standards in clothing: hoodies are ubiquitous, yet young black men who wear them are regarded as suspicious by police. The wear-a-hoodie meme exploded on Twitter when several celebrities tweeted about it. They also linked to the Change.org petition, which soon amassed two million signatures—making it the biggest in Change.org’s history. The tsunami of online discussion caught the mainstream media’s eye, and soon Trayvon Martin was a national story. Within weeks, the police arrested and charged Zimmerman. Because the goal was specific—the police must investigate this teenager’s death—the online conversation produced clear, focused action.
And as with all collective thinking online, the architecture of participation matters. What makes Ushahidi maps so powerful is that they easily allow for civic microcontribution. Since it’s easy for almost anyone to contribute a tiny bit of information, almost anyone does. The Haitian earthquake of 2010 was one dramatic example. When the disaster occurred, Ushahidi’s developer instantly set up a Haiti map so a team of volunteers could scour blogs, social sites, and regular media looking for information useful to rescue crews—like locations of people in trouble or stations with fuel or medicine. But the lid really blew off when they set up a mobile phone number where Haitians (or anyone anywhere, really) could text in news. Citizens began texting up to two thousand reports a day; messages in Creole were farmed out to Creole-English speakers online, who’d translate them within minutes, another form of microcontribution. The map’s accuracy was astounding. When a Haitian woman in labor texted that she was bleeding out, the translators pinpointed her location within 5 decimal degrees of latitude and longitude, as the U.S. Coast Guard discovered. “When compared side by side, Ushahidi reporting and other open sources vastly outperformed ‘traditional intel,’” as Craig Clarke, an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Marine Corps, has said. And these microcontributions work not just in sudden crises but even with slower-moving civic issues: Colombians have used it to collect reports of child labor, and European skiers to amass reports on potential avalanche conditions.
Collaborative mapping is, in the world of civics, a new literacy. “Having a real-time map is almost as good as having your own helicopter. A live map provides immediate situational awareness, a third dimension, and additional perspective on events unfolding in time and space,” writes Patrick Meier, Ushahidi’s former head of crisis mapping. And Meier notes that the maps create a sphere for public thinking, with locals posting comments in the margins.
There’s also a power shift here in the nature of this citizen information gathering. Traditionally, the state kept tabs on its citizens. But this rarely worked in reverse. Journalists provided a watchdog role, but individual citizens had few ways to participate. As everyday citizens become equipped with documentary tools, this is changing.
Steve Mann calls it “sousveillance.” Surveillance is when authorities observe the population from above (in French, sur). Sousveillance is when the population turns its cameras on the powerful—watching from below (sous). It’s deeply unsettling to authority figures, as Mann, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto, discovered. He’d pioneered a wearable computer in the 1980s that included a camera system that took pictures and video of what he was looking at. He intended it as a personal memory aid, but as Mann tells me, police and security guards hated it—demanding he turn it off, and if he refused, escorting him away or even tackling him.
Mann’s head-mounted camera seemed crazy back then. But now that there’s a camera in every phone, sousveillance has become a mass culture, with serious implications for the powerful. The sheer explosion of cameras dramatically increases the likelihood that abuses of power will be recorded. Tufekci’s survey of the Tahrir Square protesters found that about 50 percent documented the protests online—so, she writes, “it becomes apparent that at least tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people were documenting the protests,” producing a torrent of evidence. “There is now a constant ‘price tag’ on violent responses from oppressors: Somebody will catch those moments with a simple camera and upload it on YouTube,” as Srdja Popovic, a leader of the Serbian youth group Otpor! (which agitated for the overthrow of Slobodan Miloševic in the late 1990s) told The European.
Do sousveillance and citizen journalism supplant traditional journalism? Not really—even the most committed citizen documentarians don’t have the time or resources to do the legwork that journalists, at their best, do. Instead, it’s become clear that citizens and traditional media have a symbiotic relationship. Because citizen journalists are more widespread, they capture things traditional media cannot. But their voices become amplified when they attract the attention of old media, with its audiences in traditional corridors of power. In the Iranian uprising of 2009 and Syrian uprising of 2011, the governments banned (or severely limited) international media, so citizen reports became the only path to foreign coverage; but those reports were given additional force when disseminated in the mainstream.
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Tools for thinking help make people smarter. But they don’t necessarily make them morally better. So what happens when you take brutal rulers and give them technology that makes them smarter and more efficient? They become better at doing evil.
This is what happened during the “donkey blogger” protest in Azerbaijan. In 2009, a group of young tech-savvy activists decided to embarrass their perennially corrupt and autocratic government. Flush with oil money, state officials had been caught paying eighty-two thousand euros for two donkeys imported from abroad. For the activists, this waste of money was a perfect metaphor for the government’s decrepitude. So they held a funny mock press conference where one dressed in a donkey suit and the others pretended to be journalists. (“Mr. Donkey, we heard that you are much more expensive than local donkeys. What is the reason for that?” asked one young woman. “I’m better than them,” the donkey replied. “I know three languages . . . and I can play on violin,” he added, standing up and performing a frenetic violin solo.) The activists posted the “strangely adorable protest” (as the Atlantic described it) online to YouTube and other sites.
A week later, the government struck back. Police dragged two protestors, Adnan Hajizada and Emin Milli, off to prison, and sentenced them to two and two and a half years, respectively, on trumped-up charges of hooliganism. (Indeed, the government never admitted it was reacting to the video.) News of the young men’s jailing traveled quickly online. While traditional media aren’t very free in Azerbaijan, the government leaves the Internet relatively unfettered, at least for the well-educated, younger, and urban folks who can afford it. Since the Internet isn’t very censored, the activists openly keep blogs, and they quickly relayed news of the donkey bloggers’ plight. Soon, those who used social networking like Facebook and Russia’s Odnoklassniki were chatting about it, too.
Now, if you believe that citizens talking to each other can erode pluralistic ignorance and catalyze dissent, then the Internet of Azerbaijan ought to have been bad for the government. It would have made people more angry, more likely to rise up.
But it appears the opposite happened. Katy Pearce, an assistant professor in the communications department at the University of Washington, who has worked and traveled extensively in the Caucasus region, decided to measure the effect of the donkey bloggers’ conviction. She polled 1,795 Azerbaijanis in the fall of 2009, just after the trial, and a similar number a year later. She found that the online discussion actually repressed people’s political urges. The more wired her respondents were, the less they believed political change would take place. It was precisely the reverse of what happened in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. “Unlike many of the countries in North Africa and the Middle East that experienced an Arab Spring, where the documentation of state crimes on social media mobilized the population, the arrest of Azerbaijani bloggers only demoralized frequent Internet users,” Pearce wrote. Why?
Because, she tells me, the Azerbaijani government had done a clever judo move online. By aggressively targeting a few key activists but leaving conversation relatively open, it could ensure that all interested observers would quickly learn the grim fate of anyone who stepped out of line. Plus, state officials released their own online propaganda claiming the activists were trying to destabilize society. In Azerbaijan, which had suffered from years of economic and political chaos after the USSR’s collapse, the public worries deeply about maintaining stability, and the propaganda tapped into those fears.
The end result was just what the Azerbaijan government wanted: the demoralization of the elite, well-educated, wired youth most likely to support protest. “This is the way they function,” as Milli told Pearce. “They punish some people and let everyone else watch. To say, ‘This is what can happen to you.’” Hajizada, the other jailed donkey blogger, counters that the news isn’t all bad. He tells me that the truly committed activists became even more committed. “I saw much more blogging, much more video blogging, much more people on Facebook. They became braver,” he says. He suspects things bifurcated: “The larger public became afraid,” but the diehards “became even more stubborn and even more die-hard.”
Despots, it turns out, are learning to practice what journalist Rebecca MacKinnon calls “networked authoritarianism”—the use of the Internet to consolidate power. Rather than simply ban all digital communications, they realize, why not leave it partially open? Then dissidents will engage in public thinking and networking, which is a great way to keep tabs on them. “Before the advent of social media, it took a lot of effort for repressive governments to learn about the people dissidents are associated with,” as the writer Evgeny Morozov notes in The Net Delusion.
Despots also love the permanence of digital memory. The KGB stamped “
” (“to be preserved forever”) on the files it kept on activists. Even sousveillance can become a double-edged sword, with videos and photos of protests—shot by activists themselves—offering governments tidy documentation of precisely whom to arrest. After the 2009 Iranian election protests, the proregime Raja News printed thirty-eight photos on its Web site with sixty-five faces circled in red and another batch of forty-seven photos with roughly one hundred faces similarly circled, inviting supporters to crowdsource identification of dissidents. (As Morozov notes, Iranian police claim that tips they received in response to this invitation helped them arrest “at least forty people.”) As the price of storing data drops, John Villasenor of the Brookings Institute writes, there’s a troubling side effect to sousveillance: The state can simply store everything it can get its hands on—phone calls, texts, microblog posts, status updates, GPS coordinates of phones—and when it identifies a dissident, scour the trove for evidence. “Pervasive monitoring will provide what amounts to a time machine allowing authoritarian governments to perform retrospective surveillance,” Villasenor notes.
The use of digital tools to consolidate power has arguably been raised to an art form by the Chinese government, which runs an Internet that is somewhat open yet precisely tuned to the ruling party’s needs. China’s Great Firewall keeps citizens from accessing foreign media; meanwhile, old-fashioned threats of jail time ensure that local Internet executives carefully self-censor the chatter on their services. The end result is a local cyberspace where it’s fine to talk about pop culture and current events, or even vent about local corruption and the environment. But serious discussions of democracy are crushed. Indeed, the Tiananmen Square rebellion has been so thoroughly memory-holed that when a documentary crew in 2005 showed Beijing university students the iconic photo of a Chinese man facing down a tank, the youth had never seen it before.
There are subtler dangers in online politics, too. As I said, I suspect that concerns about echo chambers are overstated in countries that protect free speech and minority rights. But in countries with deep ethnic or ideological rivalry, homophilic sorting can be quite dangerous, as groups form online to egg each other on to violence. This is why it rarely makes sense to declare a particular form of media inherently “good” or “bad” for human rights. Tools may have inherent and even universal biases, but these are also influenced by the country in which they operate.
One could also argue the power of online action to foment change has limits, which are becoming obvious in the case of Egypt. The digital wave might have helped topple Mubarak, but that task had a relatively clear, singular purpose. Constructing a new government is much more complex, particularly in the face of a military intent on retaining power. Two years after the uprising, the country was still enmeshed in a struggle, occasionally bloody, between secular and religious parts of the population. Digital tools may help in dispelling pluralistic ignorance, but it’s not yet clear how they can help when the problem has moved on to a new phase: creating trust and cooperation between groups with very different visions of how the country should be ruled.
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In many ways, the biggest conundrum for politics in the digital age is how it moves speech into the private sector.
When civic conversation takes place on Facebook, Facebook’s rules govern how civil society operates. This has already caused plenty of problems. For example, Facebook’s rules don’t allow for anonymous accounts or even pseudonymous ones. This cuts against the needs of many activists, who often wish to conceal their identities, for reasons both tactical (keeping themselves and their families safe) and existential: as pamphleteers throughout history have shown, anonymous voices have a lot of power. They encourage the audience to focus on the message instead of the messenger. In the Egyptian uprising, Wael Ghonim exploited both these levers by running his page pseudonymously. But when Facebook officials discovered what he was doing, they delisted the page—and poof, one of the important forums for organizing in Egypt vanished overnight. Facebook wouldn’t put it back online until Ghonim arranged to transfer administrator rights to a friend in the United States and one in Egypt, who operated under their real names. The collision here is between commerce and civics. Facebook’s finances rely on the company selling ads targeted to one’s real-life self.
What’s more, corporations obey the laws of the states in which they work. This has produced some egregious examples of digital-age firms bending to the whims of despots. In 2004, Yahoo! handed over to the Communist Party the identity of Shi Tao, a journalist who’d used Yahoo! e-mail to send a write-up of party directives to a U.S.-based democracy site. Shi Tao was jailed for a decade and subjected to brutal factory labor. Even Apple, the darling of the tech world, has censored material for the Chinese government: “On Apple’s special store for the Chinese market, apps related to the Dalai Lama are censored, as is one containing information about the exiled Uighur dissident leader Rebiya Kadeer,” MacKinnon writes. Perhaps worst of all are the many Western firms that sell to despotic regimes the very tools that are used to track dissidents and block content. The U.S. firm Blue Coat sold filtering technology to the autocrats of Tunisia and Syria, and Nokia Siemens sold tools that Iran used to track dissidents’ mobile phones; Cisco’s tech helps power the Great Firewall. Nor is this behavior limited to despotic regimes. Democratic countries are hardly immune to the temptations of tracking citizens illicitly; a study by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found, for example, that the FBI violated the law thousands of times while requesting digital information on citizens. Though the U.S. government loves to talk about the free flow of information, when the Web site Wikileaks released internal diplomatic documents and footage of the military killing civilians, politicians and pundits fulminated so ferociously that major U.S. firms like Amazon and Paypal cut off Wikileaks, probably worried about being on the wrong side of a political fight.
In 1996, writer and electronic activist John Perry Barlow proclaimed “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Addressing old-school governments—“you weary giants of flesh and steel”—he proclaimed, “You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” As it turns out, nothing of the sort was true.
So is there any way to conduct civic speech in the corporate digital sphere without running afoul of corporate rules or putting activists in danger?
It’s certainly possible to make speech safer from prying eyes. Electronic free-speech groups worldwide for years have designed clever tools for encrypting communications. If citizens use them diligently, it’s harder for state powers—or even corporate powers—to listen in. The free, open-source Tor software lets users surf with high levels of anonymity; encrypted e-mail and chat tools let citizens talk with less chance of corporations or governments listening in. Even sousveillance can be made safer. For example, ObscuraCam, software created by the human rights and high-tech nonprofits WITNESS and the Guardian Project, automatically obscures the face of anyone in a video so protesters can document their work while removing the identities of anyone who needs protection. (In 2012, YouTube released its own face-blurring tool.) Others have created DIY social networks that can be run by citizens themselves, like Crabgrass or Diaspora, so that no corporation is sitting in the center and observing what’s going on.
Yet the truth is, if you want to talk to society at large, you need to work openly in the huge, for-profit spaces—because the whole point of large-scale public change is to reach as many people as possible. This cedes a lot of ground to the Facebooks of the world. But then again, activists in repressive regimes historically have always courted danger, because they always worked at some point in the open. When you live in a serious police state, the police already know who you are. This is what the donkey blogger Hajizada wrote when the crowds on Reddit asked him why he he hadn’t carefully used crypto to hide his online activities. “Nothing can be hidden in Azerbaijan,” Hajizada replied. “KGB is everywhere. You might as well go open.” And working under your real name is often crucial to catalyzing support, “because if you go anonymously, no one will know you and if you get arrested no one will be there for you.”
And there are some paradoxical upsides to working in corporate spaces. Sure, they’re filled mostly with fluffy pop culture; Justin Bieber was a trending topic for ages on Twitter, and music videos bestride YouTube like a colossus. Yet this is exactly what can make these venues so useful for public agitation. Since they have such huge, varied crowds, they’re the fastest route to accessing an enormous public. While politics rarely pierces the mass attention in those sites, when it does there are hundreds of millions watching. Better yet, because these corporate services are used so heavily for entertainment and silly reasons, authorities are loath to shut them down. This is what’s known as the Cute Cat Theory of online services, as formulated by Ethan Zuckerman, the head of the MIT Center for Civic Media. Shut down a small Web site where only activists blog, and the mass public will neither notice nor care. Shut down YouTube for political reasons? Then you take away people’s cat videos—which enrages and radicalizes the masses. And autocrats can’t risk that.
We saw this dynamic at work in India in 2012, when an artist named Aseem Trivedi began posting “Cartoons Against Corruption” on his Web site. Incensed, politicians accused Trivedi of seditious activities and insulting the national emblem. (One cartoon depicted Parliament as a toilet.) So they pressured BigRock, an Indian provider of the country’s DNS listings, to block the site. BigRock caved, and Trivedi’s site was “disappeared” from the Internet. Trivedi responded cleverly, by moving his cartoons over to Blogger, Google’s publishing platform. This put the Indian politicians in a quandary. They couldn’t block Trivedi’s blog without blocking all of the Blogger domain—and that would knock offline tons of legitimate Indian businesses and cultural sites that also use Blogger. Google’s service may be filled with silly, trivial sites, but shutting it down would pit the government against millions of citizens. By moving over to Google, Trivedi was able to keep publishing. Even after the government jailed him in the fall of 2012, the cartoons stayed up.
It’s probably possible to make these corporate spaces safer for civic discourse, if the political will exists. The “real” world, after all, took centuries of reform to make modern civic life possible. Before the Magna Carta, individuals had very few rights. The U.S. civil rights movement was fought in part over the rights of blacks to access private-sector spaces, like restaurants. And when corporations become so large that they effectively dominate their sphere, the United States (like many other countries) uses antitrust law to establish the rules of conduct. “Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated,” as danah boyd puts it.
What we need now, as MacKinnon and other thinkers have argued, is a new Magna Carta for the digital age—one that requires corporate providers of online speech to respect the rights of those who speak on their platforms. “No person or organization shall be deprived of the ability to connect to others without due process of law and the presumption of innocence,” is the prime rule suggested by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web. More countries worldwide (the United States included) could follow European Union officials and push for regulations requiring high-tech services to give users more control over their data—or deleting it upon request.
It might seem utopian to imagine this sort of regulation stitched together across nations. (In autocratic ones, it would be impossible.) But in democratic countries it’s not inconceivable. Indeed, in addition to regulation, it’s possible high-tech firms might agree to some voluntary standards. As MacKinnon points out, firms in democratic, open societies have responded to public pressure in the past. When student activists pressured apparel companies to reform their sweatshop practices in the 1990s, it produced the Fair Labor Association—a very imperfect solution, but one that improved conditions at some overseas factories. After Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! were humiliated in Congress for their cooperation with the Chinese government, they joined the Global Network Initiative, adopting voluntary rules to address the human rights implications of their work. (It’s had concrete, positive effects: When Yahoo! later rolled out services in Vietnam, it assessed the country’s rights record and opted to locate its servers in Singapore, where they’d be out of reach of the dissent-crushing Vietnamese government.) The challenge, then, is to get people to care about their digital rights enough for governments, and companies, to respond to them. Here, too, there are glimmers of hope, in the way that citizens in Europe and the United States, aided by high-tech firms, have successfully fought ham-fisted legislation designed to let copyright holders knock Web sites and users they don’t like offline.
As Cory Doctorow points out, the great gift of the Internet is in rebalancing the stakes. States have long been able to track citizens and organize armies. Today’s high tech lets them do this with much greater efficiency. But for citizens, the change has been far greater. “Every human endeavour that requires more than one person’s effort has to devote a certain amount of resources to the problem of coordination: The Internet has greatly simplified this problem (think again of the hours activists used to spend simply addressing postcards with information about an upcoming demonstration),” Doctorow writes. “In so doing, it has provided a disproportionate benefit to dissidents and outsiders (who, by definition, have fewer resources to start with) than it has to the incumbent and powerful (who, by definition, have amassed enough power to squander some of it on coordination and still have enough left over to rule).”
There’s a lot we don’t know about the civic impact of our digital lives. Ambient awareness of our fellow citizens can help marshal protest to respond to crises. It can help us change what’s wrong. Can it also help build what’s right?