11

NEW DEMOCRACY RISING

The World of the Network Generation

We will not bend beneath their blows,

we know that a pen is heavier than a stone,

that a fist is worth less than a head

and know to respond to those who sow the wind

that we are the storm.

The storm of a youth that thirsts for spring,

and that is but assuming the weighty responsibility

incumbent to our age;

that of remaking the world, in our image.1

— Sébastien Moses, “De ventôse à germinal” (my translation)

In 2012, the entrenched powers of neoliberal capitalism met Québec’s student revolt — a simple student strike in any other time — with an unprecedented wall of autocracy and sparked its mutation into a collective awakening that rocked the foundations of the political establishment. Indeed, the virulence with which the élites sought to crush the youth’s rise reverberated through a generation as the mark of our leaders’ essential authoritarianism and laid bare the cancerous anachronisms against which the carrés rouges sought to define their democratic ambitions. Try as the establishment may to force this genie back into the bottle, only unexamined complacency allows us to file away the movement’s legacy in the past or to turn away from the signs that point our way to a changing future. For if the spring of 2012 taught us one thing, it is that slowly but unstoppably, a new world is rising up from society’s soil and stubbornly pushing its way through the widening cracks of the establishment’s rotting foundations.

This was Québec’s first mass movement of the twenty-first century, with its form holding up a map of the democratic culture of the generation that launched it. From the charged monikers “Printemps érable” and the lesser used “Printemps québécois,” to the spectacular eruptions of red throughout the province, the #GGI’s infinite array of creative and symbolic protests, the nightly #manifencours and of course, the #casseroles, most of the student movement’s defining innovations and acts originated not from the top, but rather organically, from below and online: from networked individuals, collectives and local associations. They are the ones who propelled the movement’s mushrooming ever outwards and who cast its language, its iconography and ultimately, its dreams. The architecture of its expansion mirrored the decentralized “networked brains” that animated the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street. And in its triumph, the CLASSE/ASSÉ, their cultural and ideological cousin, had proven its prescience, and its pertinence.2

These social media-era movements are fast discrediting the twentieth-century presumption that hierarchical authority structures are a requisite for effective collective action and in doing so, may be laying the seeds of a new democratic future. For Catalan sociologist Manuel Castells, who has devoted twenty years to exploring the rise of the “network society,” the reasons are evident.3 Everything that networked movements lose in efficiency by relinquishing top-down control, he says, they more than make up for in the added energies of the grassroots, who are re-engaged, motivated and mobilized into action. It all boils down to trust. Hierarchical and delegative structures keep information and decisional authority out of the hands of the “unqualified masses,” which breeds suspicion, weakens their ability to make a difference and ultimately repels their engagement. Yet open and horizontal networks replace that relationship of mistrust and exploitation with transparency, cooperation and solidarity, and thereby “undermine the need for formal leadership.”4 In short, the rise of networks, facilitated and accelerated by the social media revolution, is changing everything.

On s’en câlisse:
The democracy generation and the decline of deference

The Printemps érable was the site of an intractable and even inevitable clash that exposed a fundamental cognitive dissonance at the root of the generational divide. Beyond the diffficulty of reconciling each side’s views of society, the very possibility of a dialogue was consistently undermined by their opposing languages of democracy and authority that proved essentially incompatible. We were speaking in different tongues.

Democracy, for the Liberals and their supporters, was to be expressed at the ballot box, and while people had a right to express opposition in the interval through protest, that right, their actions and arguments suggested, should be circumscribed by the need to avoid disturbing the normalcy of economic life.5 In an article entitled “Clash of the centuries,” the Trudeau Foundation’s Pierre-Gerlier Forest remarked that the “tightly controlled declarations, carefully crafted press releases and formal press conferences” of the government bespoke an “obsession with titles and status” that was “typical of twentieth-century governments.”6 And indeed, Charest’s belief in the absolute authority of his office seemed beyond any shred of mitigation: not by the absence of a mandate, for unlike Bourassa in 1989, the tuition increase was not in the party’s last electoral platform; nor even, it seemed, by the lack of a democratic majority, with his party securing just under 25 percent support from eligible voters (42 percent of votes cast) in the election held four years prior — more than his PQ opposition, that is, but a far cry from a majority.

In such an idea of democracy that places order and authority above the popular will, education minister and deputy premier Line Beauchamp could feel justified in asserting, as she did during the crisis, that “the people’s elected representatives are never wrong” and that “the most important thing is to respect them.”7 Engaging with and involving the one social group impacted the most by her decision was not the priority; neither was safeguarding the long-term and broad-based common good, as decided through open and collaborative deliberation. For Beauchamp, the most important thing was to “respect” — that is, obey — the will of the representatives, in place only because a plurality (usually a minority) of voters in their ridings made a mark by their name some years ago. In such a context, Beauchamp’s comments, which sanctify the rules of the game at the expense of their spirit and fundamental end, are hard to reconcile with even the most anemic conception of the democratic ideal. But they did at least reveal an essential underlying truth: that for Beauchamp, Charest and others of their school, the supreme values of order and authority are simply so deeply rooted, culturally, as to have become ends in their own right.

The government’s insistence on deference became the source of ridicule for students and members of the press, who joined Martine Desjardins in chastising Beauchamp for frequently behaving like a school headmistress.8 Indeed the Liberals’ near-caricatural channelling of the father-knows-best defence could not have been more maladroit in the circumstances, nor better calculated to reaffirm the students in their cause. For within the student movement, the rejection of hierarchical authority models was surging, as growing numbers of the rising generation turned to embrace the deeper democracy of a new age. Membership crises hit both establishment student federations during the strike, as the CLASSE, grown from 40,000 to 105,000 members to land close on the heels of the FEUQ, was propelled into the pilot’s seat of the mobilization.9 By May 28, a third of the FECQ’s member associations had launched consultations on disaffiliation, representing what its most vocal critics deemed “the greatest disaffiliation consultation wave in such a short period of time in the entire history of the federation.”10 In a virulently styled open letter entitled “A corrupted federation” (“Une fédération gangrenée”), thirty former student association executives lambasted the organization for “a profound lack of transparency, a severe undervaluing of democracy and a flagrant lack of respect for the decisions adopted democratically by the congress or by member associations.”11 Most especially, FECQ president Léo Bureau-Blouin stood accused of refusing to endorse the abolition of tuition fees during the strike despite a clear mandate from the assemblies to do so.12

While numerous FECQ affiliates were voting to leave the federation, a growing chorus of critics within the FEUQ was voicing an identical vein of discontent.13 In tendering his resignation as a member of the national executive in April 2013, Thomas Briand-Gionest decried a severe lack of transparency and accountability and cited a controlling and top-down approach by the offices of the president and vice-president — and specifically, by Martine Desjardins. “Over the course of recent years,” he wrote, “the member associations have too often been brushed aside in the decisional processes and in the diffusion of information.”14 Briand-Gionest was not alone in his views. In October 2013, Desjardin’s successor as president of the FEUQ, Antoine Genest-Grégoire, resigned his post after a third association voted to disaffiliate, cutting its membership down by fourteen thousand students since before the 2012 strike. Most ironic, perhaps, was that the FEUQ’s national executive, much like their counterparts at the FECQ, refused to acknowledge the results of the democratic exercises.15 Yet accepted or not, the FECQ and FEUQ were bleeding members as a direct result of an internal crisis of representation that directly echoed the CLASSE’s wider democratic critique.16 By contrast, the provisional Coalition large de l’ASSÉ was disbanded after the strike to return to its core existence as the ASSÉ. But it now counted thirty thousand new members who had permanently joined, which means there are another thirty thousand who, whether unaffiliated anew or remaining with one of the old federations, will carry with them new expectations gained from their momentary immersion in the CLASSE’s practices of direct democracy. The democratic pressures will only continue to build.

A new era, a new world:
The birth and rise of the network society

The culture of youth is changing, everywhere pulled along by the same currents of the global pond. Every day, we dive into it online. Importantly, Castells links the “culture of autonomy” shared by Twitter and the Internet back to the seeds sown by the New Left movements of the 1970s, whose libertarian and participative democratic cultures laid the grounds for the creation of the Internet on American campuses.17 The Internet was never ideologically innocent, as those who today fight to undermine Net neutrality know well: Embedded within its architecture is a radical democratic culture that threatens the world’s traditional hierarchies of power. In the decades that followed its creation, the budding network society then took root with escalating intensity, reaching a tipping point in the twenty-first century as online practices and conceptions fell in line with the Internet’s essential character. It was around this time that individual modes of online interaction (like email), which simply transferred old modes wholly intact over to the new medium, made way for new “autonomous forms of social networks controlled and guided by their users.”18 The Internet had come of age, and with it a “new social morphology” that has been gradually seeping through the sands of society to change our mental maps of human interaction and organization.19

A glimpse at the contrasting experiences of generations is therefore incredibly revealing. While their parents were born at the slow-burning dawn of the network transformation, Québec’s youth are of a generation that has grown up immersed in its most potent expressions yet. Our link to the political world, and thus our political education and socialization, is also primarily through the Internet.20 The cumulative difference with our parents is fundamental: While the mass media sources that prior generations depended on for their political information (television, radio, print) were “predominantly linear,” in political scientist Henry Milner’s phrase, we in the Internet generation are accustomed to selecting and sorting our own information, to ordering it and to creating it. The impact on political culture has been nothing short of revolutionary. “Power” in this world, says Milner, “shifts from institutions to networks and from bordered territories to cyberspace, transcending geographical and hierarchical restrictions. Linearity is a thing of the past.”21 The paradigm shift has borne real implications for the way youth conceptualize democracy and authority. This fact was on sharp display during the student conflict, as Québec’s students, says Milner, gave voice to something that is “implicit in social media politics”: namely, “the rejection of representative democracy.”22

This is no case of technological determinism, but the recent and exponential acceleration of a long and steady social mutation. Madeleine Gauthier is a sociologist at the Centre Urbanisation Culture Société of the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) who has specialized in youth issues for over thirty years. Gauthier aptly remarks that our generation has been raised since childhood to speak equal to equal with adults, rather than to defer to their authority for its own sake. “For them,” she says, “authority comes more from competence and trust than from hierarchy. My professor colleagues will tell you, once you take the time to discuss with them and arrive at an agreement, they can become extraordinary collaborators.”23 In such a world, the very meaning of authority begins to change from a unidirectional relationship to a reciprocal one: Like puzzle pieces lying flat on a table, they aim to slot together to achieve a shared vision. The only superiority granted is confined to each person’s acknowledged areas of expertise.

Gauthier’s comments confirm a larger social trend that has unfolded in parallel — and is intimately linked — to the network transformation. Examined most famously by Canadian political scientist Neil Nevitt in 1996 and again in 2011, this shift has seen values of deference declining across society, propelled largely by more egalitarian and anti-authoritarian parental practices.24 A recent Australian case study that examined self-perceived parenting styles of 550 parents echoes Nevitt’s seminal work, The Decline of Deference, and found a pronounced “socio-cultural shift from conformist, authoritarian parenting, to more […] democratic approaches.”25 In short, more than ever before, Western youth today expect a conversation rather than a decree.26 In such light, our appropriation of the Internet as our primary medium seems perfectly natural and both confirms and fuels the wider cultural shift toward values of horizontalism and networked autonomy.

Prominent Canadian progressive Judy Rebick early noted the phenomenon too when she founded the alternative media website Rabble in 2001. From the beginning, she recounts, the majority of the site’s visitors entered through the discussion board known as Babble. Yet Babble was not always a part of the project, as Rebick herself admits to not initially grasping its appeal. “Young people we consulted across the country told us ‘if it’s not interactive, we’re not interested,’” she recalls. “But the basic desire of young people to listen to others like themselves before forming their opinions rather than to experts, politicians or columnists told me something new was happening with this younger generation — something profoundly democratic.”27 A study by Pew Research corroborates her experience. According to an American study performed in 2007, 80 percent of so-called “Net Geners” under the age of twenty-eight visit blogs regularly, while 40 percent of American teens and young adults operate their own. In 2007 alone, 64 percent of this generation in the U.S. said they engaged in some form of content creation online, though this number may be far higher today, as this already marked a jump of 10 percent over the previous year.28

The return of society: The bottom-up communitarianism
of the twenty-first century

The interactive, horizontal and decentralized world of the network generation is the image of a new social vision whose values were everywhere in the air through the six months of the student crisis. Critics on the right often painted the student movement with the laughably anachronistic brush of Marxism and its variants — intellectually lazy referents that only answered their preexisting need to swiftly dismiss and suppress all criticisms of holy capitalism. Yet the communitarianism channelled by the carrés rouges was born not of nostalgia. On the contrary: Solidarity, that ideal traditionally carried by the left, and personal liberty, that ideal traditionally carried by the right, are melding into a contemporary paradigm that’s now finding its voice within the forums of the social media generation.

This new communitarianism shares the right’s disdain for bureaucracies and top-down modes of control, replacing them with the diffuse autonomy of networks where citizens, no longer bound by physical space or political borders, seek out the online hands to hold as they pool talents and energies toward a collective cause. Society is indeed undergoing a profound metamorphosis, and “The Internet,” writes the Collectif de débrayage, “is the order of the anthropological mutation.”29 This is the global communitarian resurgence to which we bear witness, forced by the winter that our anti-biological, anti-social and anti-environmental economic model has bestowed to a generation suffocating in its grip. In this rapidly decaying landscape, the incapacity of arbitrary and élite-governed nation-states to address the dire crises threatening our future is daily laying bare the catastrophic failures of our power structures — and spurring grassroots and globalized movements that seek to reclaim control over our collective destiny.

In these societies grown increasingly atomized and anonymized under the cultural, economic and social systems of the capitalist class, online networks are arising to rescue the faded ideal of a common good based on timeless human and social needs. Castells has written that “the legacy of networked social movements will have been to raise the possibility of re-learning how to live together.”30 In the wake of the casseroles movement, his words ring out with an eerie prescience and hint that the sources of this metamorphosis may run even deeper. Paolo Gerbaudo, author of Tweets and the Streets, has similarly remarked that “In front of a crisis of public space, social media have become emotional conduits for reconstructing a sense of togetherness among a spatially dispersed constituency, so as to facilitate its physical coming together.”31 And British author George Monbiot has poignantly dubbed the post-Thatcher (“there is no such thing as society”) era, unprecedented in our species’ history, as “The Age of Loneliness.”32 So I believe what they are all saying is this: We are thirsty. And that this emotional need may well be the voices of instinct and evolution speaking to us. For where we evolved within extended families, tribes, villages and later neighbourhoods, we have become individual consumers and taxpayers dependent only upon the market and competing amongst ourselves to maximize our personal gains. Where once public spaces were inherently social and political, those that remain too often serve as supporting infrastructure for the marketized city-space, rest stops along the way from commercial hub A to B, when not transformed wholesale into commercial malls themselves. Chased from its physical realm, the human community has sought shelter in the safe spaces found online — just long enough, that is, for the collective to reconstitute itself and to organize to take back its physical domain. But before any of this can begin to happen, we must first re-learn all that we’ve forgotten.

This is where we can begin if we aim to grasp the overwhelming dominance of the pro-carrés rouges within Québec’s youth population and the intense social polarization that forced us into a bitter face-off with our elders. In the symmetrical markers of the strike’s peak at 304,242 students on March 22 and the similar number that (despite not all being on strike anymore) voted to reject the entente in May, we hear a consistent and resounding majority of Québec’s roughly 423,000 post-secondary students who swam ardently against the tide of the prevailing commercialist culture.33 All public opinion polling performed during the strike showed that the resonance of the students’ discourse and goals extended to the wider youth population as well. In separate polls conducted by Léger Marketing, CROP and Forum Research all between February and May 2012, youth aged eighteen to twenty-four (and with slightly lesser margins, eighteen to thirty-four) consistently backed the carrés rouges by margins that fluctuated between 58–74 percent, while those aged fifty-five and older opposed it by equally strong margins.34 These polls, moreover, likely understate the dominance of the anti-hike side among youth, for they included only those aged eighteen or over and thus omitted much of the CEGEP population, which played an absolutely central and frontline role in the mobilization.

Place Jacques-Cartier in Vieux-Montréal appears deserted after the national march held on March 22, 2012.

Critics of the students often answered that opposition to the tuition increase signified nothing more than the selfish collective’s “we won’t pay.” Yet by every string of available evidence, this knee-jerk and defensive attack must reflect the individualist values and worldviews of its sources more than its targets. Le combat est avenir, youth retorted. And for that future, a massive number of Québec’s students were ready to, and nearly did, sacrifice an entire semester — and for university students, an average of over $1,100 in tuition fees — so that later generations of students might benefit from an accessible and humanist public education.35 They were ready to, and often did, sacrifice hundreds and even thousands of dollars in fines for defying police repression, as well as their future opportunities in exposing themselves to the threat of criminal accusations.36 And they were ready to, as too many did, sacrifice their “mental and physical health in investing body and soul in practices of insubmission”37 and in going toe to toe, almost always unarmed, against the cold and faceless machine of state brutality. If the obvious question that imposes itself next is “why?”, the answer can only come in the form of another question: If not the very ones who stand to inherit the destruction, then who will speak up on behalf of the future?

Already in October of 2010 — before both the student revolt and the consciousness-changing moment of Occupy Wall Street — an online Léger Marketing survey of 3,060 Quebecers provided strong hints of a backlash brewing among youth. Among those aged eighteen to twenty-four, 43 percent sought a Québec further to the left, “more communitarian and with greater solidarity,” as well as with fewer divisions between social classes. Another 41 percent sought a Québec with a certain balance between state intervention and private enterprise, yet they envisaged that endpoint as “more social-democratic” than the status quo. Loud and clear, this rising generation is saying that the pendulum has swung too far away from collective stewardship and that the unprecedented capture of wealth and power by the rich must be reversed: On the opposite end of the spectrum, a paltry 8 percent argued for less regulation and a larger space for private enterprise, while only 9 percent of this anti-authoritarian youth favoured a stronger emphasis on law and order.38

There is nothing in these results to surprise, and other polls have also shown strong youth support for new leftist parties like Québec Solidaire, which is itself a child of the twenty-first century alter-globalization movement, with its focuses on communitarianism and direct democracy aligned closely with the ASSÉ’s.39 Indeed, if the mobilization lasted for as long as it did, it was precisely because Québec’s students possessed a sense of history and knew what they were fighting for. We saw the youth’s struggles reverberate in the cogent arguments of the student leaders who never shied from a reasoned riposte to the basest attacks; it was read in the opinion pages, blogs and social media sphere where the carrés rouges often distinguished themselves in deploying substance against slander; and it was seen in the hand-drawn slogans held high in the streets, which spoke in favour of a world in which we might find a safe future. This was a movement with both heart and intellectual heft, and its fateful eruption from within the youth population ought not to inspire defensive retrenchment from our elders. If anything, in fact, it ought to inspire hope, along with an earnest introspection — and an offer of aid. For within the very fabric of the Printemps érable lived a renewed faith in the promise of a fuller democracy, in the urgency of a collective dream and in the necessity, but more, the possibility, of reknitting society’s torn and lonesome threads for a more human age.

For our generation, it’s clear that the world the neoliberals built holds little hope. Yet faced with an establishment that’s closed to our ideals and a demographic reality that drowns us out, those who will most fully bear the brunt of today’s actions are left with little to do but band together and take to the streets. Our critics often fumed at the inconveniences caused; one hand-drawn placard launched our frustrated retort: “Sorry to disturb you, we’re just trying to change the world.”40 Indeed, if Québec had never before known a protest movement of this magnitude, it may well be that the stakes had never seemed so high. Beneath the surface of the students’ daily disturbances lay a cri du coeur, an impassioned plea from those who will soon assume historic burdens. While youth may not have the strength of a democratic majority, we, as the citizens of tomorrow, do have a moral right. It’s time the future was lent an attentive ear.