In the 2010s, more people took part in political protests than at any other time in history. As the multi-faceted intertwined polycrisis of our time (climate change, pandemics, the return of fascism, planetary ecosystem collapse, increased armed conflicts, mass migration...) continues tragically unfolding, we should take some very real comfort in knowing that the world population is in fact ready to mobilize. But that thin thread of hope is contingent on acknowledging that mass mobilization is not, in and of itself, the goal, nor does it guarantee success. Now that the 2010s are over, it's time to ask what those mass mobilizations accomplished, and, perhaps more importantly, what it is that we should do differently.
Vincent Bevins's 1 new book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, attempts to do just that. It starts with a very similar question to one that we ask in our own "about" page (at least, as of this writing)
In the last decade, from 2010 to 2020 [...] humanity witnessed the explosion of mass protests that heralded profound changes. [...] In far too many cases, things got much worse, according to the standards articulated by the streets themselves.
Indeed, it might even be possible to tell the story of that decade as the story of mass protests and their unexpected consequences. At the risk of appearing over-ambitious, this book will attempt to do just that. What happens if we try to write the story of the world, from 2010 to 2020, guided by one puzzling question—how is it possible that so many mass protests apparently led to the opposite of what they asked for?
Speaking broadly, the protests that he outlines tended to have a similar shape. They often began with smaller, dedicated activists, then there was some sort of catalyzing event, often police brutality. People, motivated by seeing said event on social media, took to the streets. Participants overwhelmed any sort of government response, experiencing this spontaneous outpouring as a euphoric triumph of the people, but many of these protests, even when they successfully achieved extraordinary pressure on governments, including revolutionary conditions, failed to deliver what the protesters wanted, insomuch as such a thing can be understood. Too often, like in Egypt, a counterrevolutionary took power, claiming to be the rightful heir to the movement.
In the anglosphere, we called the outbreak of this decade the "Arab Spring," which we interpreted as the inevitable demand for Freedom™ due to all peoples here at the end of history. As protests kicked off in other places, we reused the "X Spring" monikers, as well as the interpretative template that came with it. Still, Bevins notes that, though that framing was obviously reductive of the actual demands, conditions, and complex political coalitions of these protests, the protesters themselves did identify with one another. Brazilians might be heard chanting "Brazil and Turkey are one," for example.
Beyond these superficial but still frankly moving displays of international solidarity, the protests had structural and cultural similarities. They tended to use Hollywood imagery, like the Guy Fawkes masks. They often valued being "leaderless," or "horizontal." Even the act of a mass protest itself, something that we take for granted, is a relatively new form of political action. While, historically, people upset with the powers that be might, say, run an official out of town, mass media fundamentally changed protesting. Here's Bevins again:
In the second half of the twentieth century, it came to be widely believed that the natural way to respond to social injustice was to take to the streets and protest—the more people the better. This historical development can only be understood in the context of the emergence of mass media.
In several of the world’s most advanced capitalist countries, movements seeking political change found themselves overwhelmed by the power of radio, television, and newspaper coverage. Even when explicitly seeking to avoid mass demonstrations as their preferred tactic, they were swept up by the attention granted to them. Media coverage multiplied the effects of their actions in ways the activists had never imagined; moreover, it transformed the very structure of the movements themselves.
[..] It made little sense to “demonstrate” to the entire country with a protest march if only a tiny percentage of the population was going to see it, and rulers could simply choose to ignore it.
This new repertoire of mass demonstration, when combined with the spontaneity of social media, creates a tension. If the mass protest is a communicative act, but the protesters haven't come together to decide what exactly it is that they're trying to say, then what the hell is it saying? What is the victory condition? How do they negotiate with power? More frightening still, how do they fill the power vacuum left when they successfully topple a government? Bevins gives us several anecdotes that perfectly encapsulate this problem. Here's one:
President Dilma Rousseff developed her own technique for trying to read the streets. She would sit in the presidential palace, watching television feeds of the protests—GloboNews, specifically—with the sound off. If she removed the mediation provided by the channel’s commentators, she could stare intently at the people themselves and make note of the signs they were holding. She could try to let them speak to her directly. Of course, this method was limited to the images the Globo conglomerate chose to record and transmit, but it’s not like she could wander among the crowd, as I had done—and even if that were possible, demonstrations took place in a hundred cities at the same time. So she sat, and she studied the screen.
Which brings us to Bevins's own conclusions about these protests.
After looking at events like this across the world, I have come to the conclusion that the horizontally structured, digitally coordinated, leaderless mass protest is fundamentally illegible. You cannot gaze upon it or ask it questions and come up with a coherent interpretation based on evidence. You can assemble facts, absolutely—millions of them. You are just not going to be able to use them to construct an authoritative reading. This means that the significance of these events will be imposed upon them from the outside. In order to understand what might happen after any given protest explosion, you must not only pay attention to who is waiting in the wings to fill a power vacuum. You have to pay attention to who has the power to define the uprising itself.
When analyzing the June 2013 coup in Egypt, Cihan Tuğal helpfully summarized Marx, saying, “Those who cannot represent themselves will be represented.” I think we must take this one level further when explaining the mass protest decade, and say movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for.
I fully endorse this conclusion, with a tiny, friendly amendment: While these protest movements are completely illegible to state power, making them unable to effect the change that the rank-and-file protesters demand, they're actually quite legible to the social media companies, a very different kind of power.
President Dilma Rousseff had to spend hours trying to squeeze out the message that she needed, but social media companies had a detailed and extensive map of all the protesters, their connections to each other, their locations, what subset of issues they cared about (which protesters conveniently label with hashtags), and even extensive logs of their conversations, both public and "private." Governments found the protests were impossible to interpret, but to those who wish to increase engagement to sell ads, there has probably never been a more easily understood and well-mapped social movement in all of history.
I argue that this marks an important departure from previous mass protests. Before, they were communicative acts mediated by traditional media, but this new generation of protests were organized on — or maybe even organized by — social media. That might seem hyperbolic, but I intend it literally. Consider the demands of the protests in Brazil, the "five causes," supposedly laid out in a viral video from Anonymous. Bevins tracked down the person who uploaded the video:
In 2013, I tracked down the man who had uploaded the “Five Causes” video. He wanted to be identified only as “Mario,” but he proved to me that he controlled the YouTube channel that hosted the clip. We talked for a while on Facebook Messenger about how he got into politics, and how he heard about Anonymous. He never joined that group, he said—it doesn’t work like that. He just liked the stuff he saw, so he got a mask and made a video in the trademark style.
What about the five causes, I asked? How did the group decide on those? “Oh, no one decided,” he responded. He had simply made them up. He pieced the "causes" together from stuff he had read on Facebook and came up with a list. Five seemed like a good number.
These protests were proudly leaderless, but perhaps it's easier to understand them if we consider social media itself as their leader. How else can you describe anyone (or anything) who can set the movement's goals, appoint its representatives, coordinate all its actions, read all its communication, and decide its tactics? Through this lens, the protests of the 2010s were an unmitigated success. Just look at how many protests have been dubbed the "Twitter Revolution," a literal PR coup for Twitter. On scales big and small, we now purposefully tailor all our political action to suit social media companies.
As I write this, there is a small protest rally about to happen not far from me to demand an end to the slaughter in Palestine, presumably one of many, all over the US and the world. Protesters will make signs, go to the park, do some chants2 (probably at no one in particular), take pictures, and post them on social media, maybe with a write-up from a local paper. For the participants, what are the victory conditions of this protest? Are we really demanding anything if no one in power will feel any sort of political pressure from this rally? There is no theory of change to this action. The only plausible success here is that the protest gets attention. In other words, the goal here is engagement, which just coincidentally happens to be the goal of the social media companies themselves. As Bevins put it:
Too often, it seemed that the approach employed in the 2010s could be summed up, fittingly, in a tweet:
- Protests and crackdowns lead to favorable media (social and traditional) coverage
- Media coverage leads more people to protest
- Repeat, until almost everyone is protesting
- ????
- A better society
This is not to say that these kinds of communicative protests are somehow wrong, or even that they have no value. They are a valid and, at times, powerful tactic that movements can and should deploy as a part of a greater strategy, thoughtfully and when appropriate. But these kinds of demonstrations have become our default, a decision that we never explicitly made, but that we seemingly drifted into, guided more by the rollout of consumer digital technology than any purposeful strategic vision.
I also don't want to pretend that I'm somehow above the fray, laughing at all these fools duped by social media. I include myself here. I was very active at Occupy Boston. Since then, I've made more signs and marched more miles than I can count. I want the US-backed Israeli mass-slaughter to stop, as do those people in that protest. I'm not here to doubt sincerity or motives, but tactics. Everyone who showed up to that protest is righteous and awesome. A sincere discussion of our tactics doesn't take away from that. In fact, the opposite is true: It's only through these frank discussions that we honor our collective commitments to these causes, as well as the causes themselves.
In my last post, I argued that, through the discourse on the TikTok ban, we see how the left has grown accustomed to, and maybe even comfortable with, being outside power, such that we no longer agitate for change. There's precious little militancy. Instead, we analyze, dissect, debunk, and discuss, but almost exclusively from a neutral or defensive posture, not from one calculated to inspire action. We've so succumbed to a liberal "marketplace of ideas" theory of change, that, like in the TikTok ban, when there was a rhetorical opening for a genuine left, all that we could think to do was defend our already-limited access to that marketplace, as mediated through ByteDance.
Only a reinvigorated left can successfully navigate the minefield of corporate power blanketing our new digital world. Many in our society truly believe that power exclusively comes from raising awareness; that the only avenue for change is competing in the marketplace of ideas, a convenient theory of political change for those wealthy enough to amplify their voices, or simply buy the public square outright.3 In this environment, without a robust anticapitalism, social media will continue to be a siren song for activists, singing sweetly of radical free speech while allowing Big Tech to restructure our movements at best, or, as in Egypt, converting progressive energy into reactionary power, in an automated counterrevolution of sorts.
As for how to actually effect change, this is a technology blog, not one on revolutionary theory, but I will say this: There is probably an organization of like-minded people near you, be it an Extinction Rebellion chapter, a socialist party, an abolitionist book club, a tenants' right organization, or an anti-police activist group, that meets regularly and would love to have you. If we all spent a fraction of the amount of time that we spend on social media instead working with these groups, I posit that the world would be a very different place.
1. I also recommend his previous book, The Jakarta Method, especially if you're American. Most Americans don't even know about the absolutely horrific US-backed mass-killings in Indonesia. In fact, our last president left the single largest majority-Muslim country off his infamous "Muslim ban," seemingly forgetting that it even exists.
2. I have this vivid recollection of one march during Occupy, when thousands of people filled the street in front of Bank of America on a Sunday, yelling at an empty building, save for a single janitor wearing headphones and trying to mop the lobby, who we can only assume relayed our message of the CEO. In retrospect, this seems a fitting personal start to the 2010s.
3. This applies for "legacy" media, too. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, probably the second-most influential newspaper in the United States. The paper claims to be "editorially independent," a delusion that could only be cooked via collaboration between cynical capitalists, who understand the power of ownership and to which they have dedicated their lives, and the most naive liberals, who are completely blind to that same power. Newspapers owned by capitalists is how you get James Bennet in charge of the NYT editorial board saying things like "The New York Times is in favor of capitalism because it has been the greatest engine of, it’s been the greatest anti-poverty program and engine of progress that we’ve seen." For further reading on this topic, I suggest Herman and Chomsky's Manufaturing Consent, or, for a more theoretical treatment, Antonio Gramsci's Selections from the Prison Notebooks.