Transcripts For CSPAN2 Twitter And Tear Gas 20170716

And she is also the author of twitter and tear gas, which is for sale after tonights program. And for those of you who are not familiar with World Affairs, we are an organization that seeks to explore problems and expand opportunities at the intersection of international policy, philanthropy and commerce where solutions to hard problems lie. We are recording tonights event with both via cspan, as well as more radio. So please do take a moment to silence your cell phones. Ask is we would like to thank kqeds audio engineer who is joining us this evening. Youll notice that we have blue question cards on your seats, so please do make use of them and write your questions down, and i will bring your questions up to the moderator. And given that we will be talking about social media in tonights program, we invite you all to get involved in our online conversation. You can use the hashtag World Affairs live if youd like to engage in online discussion. And id now like to introduce our moderator this evening. He is an adjunct professor at the school of information at ucberkeley where he teaches a course on digital activism. He is also the founder and editorinchief of China Digital times. We are delighted to have him here this evening, and so if you can all join me now in welcoming him, and he will introduce tonights speaker. [applause] thank you very much. Good evening. Its a pleasure to introduce our guest. Ill try my best, zeynep tufekci. [laughter] its a contributing opinion writer at new york times, we heard from anna. And what im most amazed is that she has been published widely on interactions about new technology, society, politics, culture. And new book and this new book, do we have a book . Twitter and tear gas the power and fragility of networked protests. Yeah. Of course, she is also a fellow Academic Research person, assistant professor at the school of information and library science, university of north carolina. And she is also faculty associate at Berkman Center for internet and the society at harvard. Okay. Please join me to welcome zeynep tufekci. [applause] so our topic is really social media and the political mobilization, a topic thats very close to my own heart. Zeynep, could you just share with us a little bit about yourself and how you came to write this book . Because not only because you are a scholar, but also you have been engaging with the movement. So, and you are from turkey. Yes. Im from turkey, and im actually startedded out as a technology person. I started out as a programmer. Of so what happened is i grew up in turkey, istanbul mostly, in the period following the 1980 military coup. I was a child, and the military coup, the postcoup era had very heavy seven veryship censorship. We had one tv channel. And it was also like even before, we had one tv channel, and all you could watch was mostly american shows. We watched little house on the prairie. I have to tell you, it makes no sense if youre from istanbul. [laughter] its about the frontier, its supposed to be middle of no where, and where im from, theres no middle of nowhere. Im, like, where are these people . [laughter] and we would watch things like that. And it made no sense to me. But what made sense to, for the people who controlled the tv was to show that instead of any kind of news, because there was a major conflict in the southeast part of turkey with the kurdish minority, there were all these other things going on, you know . The jails were full. So the military coup had instituted this heavy censorship regime. So for i was always a kid that was interested in math, science, i thought i was going to be a physicist. And then i, what happened to me was what happens to lots of kids who grow up thinking theyre going to be physicists, is that you learn about the atom bomb. And you have this atom bomb question like, whoa. Because youre a kid, and it seems like this and it is this horrible, annihilative technology. And i thought, you know what . I want a job that i can do, i can do quickly, i wanted to work very quickly, and i thought i wanted a profession that i would enjoy, that i would be connected to math and science and that wouldnt have ethical implications. So i accidentally picked computers and computer programming. It turns out they have ethical by the way, i studied physics as well. So there you go. How did you become interested in the movement . Yes. So it starts with me becoming a computer person, right . So when i started working as a programmer, one of my early jobs, i think my second or third job as a programmer, i was very young. Im still a teenager. It was working for ibm, okay . And i was supposed to have project where they had a mainframe that was made before i was born that was being used to localize a midilevel machine which ibm had. I couldnt figure out what to do with it, and ibm had an intranet. There is no internet in turkey, right . 80s . 90s, right . Were early 90s. And all of a sudden i could just get on ibms intranet, and i would be, like, this mainframe, theres this thing i need to figure to out. I dont know what i need to do. And somebody from japan would say, oh, look. I wrote that. Heres how you do it. So a couple of things happened. I the still had one tv channel in heavy censorship, but i had glimpsed that. And also because i was the still a teenager and working at big company, and there was a lot of who is this girl working here . Back then things were more formal even among programmers. But i had experiences the promise of internet as this place where people didnt know who you were, and you could just talk. Its not like that anymore at all. Right . It was just so liberating. And i thought this is going to change everything. And then the internet came to turkey, and i was, like, sign me up, right . So i signed up. And i got really interested in how this could be used to break censorship and how to and i wanted to study the social science. So i switched my major. I studied sociology, i used my programming skills mostly to pay for college, and then i wanted the really come to the United States partly because i thought thats where its happening. Im going to study all this. Its going to be so interesting. And i got accepted to grad School Without even knowing what grad school was really, because i, you know, just kind of and i started trying to understand how this could change, you know, for positive social change. So thats kind of my journey. And it started with the First Movement i encountered with my online contacts was that early . Yes, its early. But i caught the tail end of it, so i wasnt i didnt get the beginning of it, i caught the tail end of it. I was so curious, because i wanted to see things for myself. I went to [inaudible] i was, like, im going to go to those mountains, and im going to find out how these people are using the internet in mexico. Right. And one of the first things i realized was what people think is happening and whats happening are so different, because theres all this discussion and hype about on the internet. And i went to these mountain villages. They didnt have electricity, let alone the internet, right . So they what was happening was the antinafta networks that had formed and had just started using the internet had grabbed this new, like, this peasant revolution, indigenous peasant revolution, and kind of sort of had taken it. So instead of these indigenous peasants using the internet story that we were hearing, i found something really different. And it was my first glimpse into, okay, this is really important. This changes everything. Because it was very important that they were afforded a level of protection because of the publicity. Youd had contemporaneous movements that were crush by the mexican military while there was so much attention on it. But it wasnt really happening the way the popular accounts were portraying what was happening. I found a very traditional indigenous peasant uprising. So that sort of got me started thinking about all the things that the public sphere changing too, and then i followed that i chronicle in the book i read the book, right. Yeah. There is so much vivid stories and cases that you put in in addition to the excellent theoretical framework. So that, to me, is your book is really stands out. Lets fast forward. Yes, the early internet, you know, the antiglobalization movement, and then arab spring. Then turkey. Right, then turkey. So heres what happened is when the arab spring, arab uprising started, i saw, wow, this is such a historic thing. And i went, right . You know, because im a programmer, so i can study big data, i can study online, but i also really like to study both surveys and observations just being there. So i started following the arab spring as it sort of blossomed and then started collapsing by both the repression and what happened with the movement. So as i was following it in my home country, in istanbul, there was a major movement. And, in fact, they happened, like, three blocks from where i born. Like, if i was made to study a thing in the world, this is it, right . I jumped on a plane, i went there. And this, thats where i started sort of figuring out the analytic framework that you find in the book. Because until then with every movement i was telling myself a casebycase story. I was saying, you know, occupy p, its in new york, a lot of u. S. Characteristics. Barcelona, spain has a tradition of an around kim, so a anarchism. Civil society was crushed in e egypt, so then when i saw the protest in a country that i know very well im obviously from there in a city thats my city, and i saw something that i had never seen in turkey before, this leaderless, euphoric, very occupation, to no prior organization, comes from nowhere, and i thought this doesnt happen in turkey. And this looks like the other movements im following. Like, this looks so much of course, every country has specific things. So i started thinking about how the political culture, and part of it is globalization from below. But i started also thinking about there is a framework to how technology afford meaning things that it enables, kind of allows movements to do certain things in certain ways, and its impacting their trajectories. So thats kind of, that started got me thinking about the book. And since then, of course, this is been other movements dub. Yes, thats really wonderful that you have this technology background, you came from a country with a censorship, and activism is part of, you know, your, how growing up experiences. And then you studied in america and followed the movement not only intellectually, but also physically. Then you actively participated. Then you came this book. But share with us what are the main things that in the book, especially you quoted so much examples, cases in arabic spring and politically in turkey. We all know, we are all being empowered by technology here. Everybody here in the bay area Knows Technology was ad good thing. Just a good thing . What you learn . So heres the framework. Technologys absolutely empowering, right . You know, because right now if you want to censor something, its really hard. You can get on twitter, you can get on facebook, you can get your, get the word out. You can, look at the postelection United States, right . The womens march, which wases a really large march, was organized starting with a Facebook Post. You know, it went from Facebook Post to a Million People in the streets, a couple months. Of course, the organizers did a lot of work. But, and heres the but, theres a misleading sense to this empowerment. Its not that it doesnt empower in some ways. Change the conversation, get around censorship, organize a large march, right . Technology can really help, social media can really help do this. But to understand what it, that thats why my book title is also the fragilities, it introduces some weaknesses. Let me put it this way, there are weaknesses to doing things this fast. And, i mean, think about climbing Mount Everest, right . A lot of people want to climb Mount Everest because its in their list of things they would like to do. And theres an industry that helps you climb Mount Everest. There are sherpas who are local mountaineer people. They know how to climb Mount Everest, and they will carry your stuff for you. They will carry your backpack, extra oxygen. Because if youre above 8,000 feet, thin air is very dangerous, so they will carry oxygen, you dont experience that. So it all sounds great. Youre empowered to climb Mount Everest. But the problem is you havent really had the time to learn how to be a mountaineer. If youve got the sherpas carrying all your stuff, right, and you get above 8,000 feet, and if nothing goes wrong, great. But oxygen tanks malfunction, the weather turns, theres some queuing because so many people are climbing, and you get, you know, you kind of have temperature issues. If you havent climbed ten mountains before and if you havent learned how to be a mountaineer and you find yourself above 8,000 feet with the help of sherpas, youre in trouble. And in fact, i started using this metaphor, and right after i started using the metaphor, there were a lot of deaths on everest, and i thought maybe i should stop using this metaphor. But then i thought, you know what . A lot of my friends are in jail in egypt and elsewhere, so maybe its an apt metaphor today. The problem is when you scale up from zero to hundred miles from a Facebook Post to big march, womens march, a Million People maybe, maybe more, what you dont have, it looks like kind of street protests in the past, say, march on washington 1963. But the march on washington in 1963 took ten years to get there. Right . Is when you march like that, youre not just marching. You built this infrastructure. So if youre in power, youre looking at these people and youre thinking, huh, if they can pull off this march because it wasnt easy to pull off, right . If they can pull off this march, the power they built, they can do other things. Its like being a real mountaineer. If you can climb k2, another big mountain, you can do other things. Its a capacity you built over time. If youre using Digital Technology to scale up really fast, its a great thing if you recognize its the very first moment. But if you think it prepared you the same way years and years of bidding capacity infrastructure prepared you, youre misled. And thats what i found with a lot of movements today, including in the u. S. Right now. They see this huge march and theyre thinking, wow, we can pull this off. And, of course, people have worked hard. I march. Im not belittling i watched, i saw how people had put so much work in it. But three months of work will only build so much capacity. And what you also dont have when you do this leaderless, big thing is you dont have a means to do collective decision making, right . You cannot change tactics. You. Go from, like, the march. Whats next . Theres always a whats next. Successful movements go from one thing to another as the time changes. A lot of these sort of networked, Leaderless Movements starts with a hashtag, have the big march. Great. Whats next, is the big question. How are you going to decide the . You cannot decide this on facebook. You cannot decide this on twitter. Because the commercial platforms are not designed for decision making. I mean, facebook has the setup and algorithms, and its designed to keep you on the site. Have you ever been on facebook and thought, whoa, i just spent more time than i thought i would . Its designed to do that for you, right . The whole structure is like that. Now, if youre in a meeting, what do you want to happen . You want it to end. [laughter] right . A meeting, the thing you want most from meetings is for them to conclude. Whereas the thing facebook is design for is to keep you there forever. Like, that is not a platform you can just use to make decisions. So a lot of these movements, i feel, sometimes i say they have the internet is like springs in your feet. Youre jumping very high. The problem is you dont have the muscles necessarily to run fast. Its great if jumping is all youre going to do. Big marches, we can do that. But the kind of infrastructure building and tactical turns, movements need in collective decision making, not only does the internet not, like, scaling up very fast with digital tech not allow you to do that easily, it may even hinder you. Because now everybodys got a twitter account, and everybodys got a facebook account, and then you have everybody speaking how do we make collective decisions at scale. Those are things that i think these movements are really weak at. So its a very interesting combination. I cant say it hasnt empowered movements, because its empowered movements. But i also cant say it hasnt weakened movements because in some ways if you didnt have all this tech, youd have to do things sort of this longer way. And by the time you pulled off the march, youd have had to build that capacity. So thats kind of why the, why the title is this yes. And thats what this book has, to me, the value. Its also addressing both the strength and the weakness of those technologyempowered movement today. But lets even go a little further. I have so many questions to ask. For example, were talking about those instantaneously Leaderless Movement. You have them everywhere. America, turkey, middle east, hong kong, taiwan, name it. Does technology only empower protesters . No. No, no, no. It empowers the state. It empowers the state this so many ways. So, for example, when i grew up and when i found the internet, i thought, wow, censorship will never really be a thing, right . This is great. We can circumvent the censorship blogs. We have these networks. Which is not false. Even to this day even with all the censorship technologies, circumvention is widely practiced, and people get around censorship. What i didnt anticipate with the early internet which i see today is that if you cant break the link between information and people, what you can do is break the link between information and credibility. You can break the link between information and figuring out whats important. So you basically, government isnt terribly interested in keeping you from information, its interested this keeping you from doing certain things. And they can confuse you, flood you with information, use misinformation as a deliberate tactic, use credibility challenges and claims of hoaxes and fraud so that people are confused or distracted or misinformed to the point that they dont know what to do. Now, this is really empowering for governments, because if youre a social movement, if you want social change, you need to convince people of certain things. Youre a government, you just need to confuse them. Or if youre sort of if you want to stop change, if everybodys like i dont really know whats true, and somebody says this, and theres 50 things, and theres all these claims and misinformation and fake news and all of that, i dont know whats going on, thats a very effective way to concern. Yeah, you can curtail and to distract and to curtail the power of social movements. Right. So if anything, in many ways the filter failure, the information overload that theres so much going on that we couldnt really figure out whats going on that newspapers have weakened and all those things are, in many ways, disempowering not just movements, theyre also, i think, strengthening a new form of authoritarianism that can use social media both to listen to the population without letting them have power and also to confuse them and or each misguide them. And misguide them, thats right. Yeah. They, but on this note now coming back to your insight of those kind of new technology doesnt really help at least so far the collective, capacity of collective decision making, right, etc. But lets observe, think about those movements. We see another thing which is emotion playing a huge role. Absolutely. In those protests. Emotions contentious, its spread fast, its bring people together, but its hard to make a decision yeah, right. So theres one of the things that so theres a question in, taha comes more from that comes more from the economists and political scientists about why does anybody protest. I mean, why dont you just let other people protest, let them win, and whatever they win, you get a part of it too, right . Its called the free rider question. It sort of animate as lot of these discussions. And my answer is its a very positive experience. I mean, protesting is, its joyous. I mean, im not its not joyous if theres such severe repression that youre being shot at, is thats not fun anymore. But if youre just, you know, why tear gas is part of the title, if youre just being, say, tear gassed, very annoying, to say the least. The first time youre tear gassed, you think youre going to die have you been tear gassed . Oh, yeah. [laughter] im a pro at this point. You think youre going to die because you cant breathe. Its very existential. Not being able to breathe, its, this is why waterboardings a form of torture. You think its but, of course, you dont, right . Unless you have a severe condition. It doesnt kill you. Tear gas canisters shot at you may, but the tear gas itself, very few such incidents. So you get over it. And then you get really annoyed, and your eyes are hurting. And what you find is all these people who are with you and people will pick you up, they will wash your face, and you just went new all of this together through all of this together. And that kind of feeling of, like, people you dont know will, like, they will come make sure youre okay, and youre with people who kind of believe in something, youre part of something bigger than yourself, it is a form of this is why i think protests are empowering, partly because you find people like that yes. And you go through somewhat stressful, but its existentially very rewarding. People protest because its joyous to protest. But as you say, that itself doesnt lend itself without any structure to how do you decide what yeah. A writer once said i revoke, therefore, we are. This is from me to we process. Yes, absolutely. Its one of the i think this is sort of, you find if you read the french revolution, like the role of emotion, you can read, you know, the poems, the role of emotion in sort of the fraternities, sisterhood, all of those things in protests and movements, its very powerful. Its a positive thing. Martin luther king called it the beloved community. We all remember historical moment because revolution is spectacular, right . And it changes history. And also that the eshoo is here the issue is here is how do you get there, is one thing. Also those movement is either over nothing, yeah. Or absolutely everything. Everything or nothing. Its hard to negotiate, to be tactical, to be strategic and to compromise all these necessary capacity in a political struggle. Right. Those movement are lacking. Please elaborate more. Well, so let me give an example. This is partly about the movements on the left side of the spectrum. Theyre very ambivalent about power. No, its corrupting, youll be coopted. All of which is true, right . If you sort of get in your power, it is corrupting and coto on thing. On the other hand, if you dont get near power, power can crush you. So its not like youre saved either way. But what happens a lot of movements especially on the left side of the spectrum or even in the u. S. Like occupy, theyre very ambivalent and engaging institutions of power to change them. Because they want, they usually want to sort of create these alternative prefigurations. They want to sort of live a part of the future they wish was here except it doesnt really sustain. You can only do so much because the power is encompassing you. Ill give you a different example to explain that there are different paths. The Tea Party Movement, its not studied as much. Its a mistake. Its one of the most successful movements in the last 20, 30 years. I think if you looked at the United States last 20 years, you would say the Gay Rights Movement and the Tea Party Movement in their own way are probably the two most successful movements. So the Tea Party Movement, too, starts with a protest. It starts as a protest on april 2009 on tax day, and theres a really nice paper looking at its a National Protest all over the u. S looking at where they were able to hold the protest because weather was sunny and where they got rained out. Its a perfect natural experiment because rain is random. So when you look at that, the places that were able to hold the protests, years later, they have all these downstream effects. Incumbents more likely to retire. A Tea Party Candidate more likely to be elected. If you have same congressperson, theyre more likely to vote in accordance with tea party priorities. Obviously, theyre afraid of being primaried. So you see and you dont see the same effect in places that got rained out. Its clearly the protest was one of the the coalescing moments more this movement. For this movement. But heres the difference. After they get together, the Tea Party Protesters turned into two things happened. They did get external funding. Well talk about that. One of the things in the Tea Party Movement that stands out whenever you study them is they were very much oriented towards how do we take power. How do we intervene in legislation. So they were misinformed about this or that, but they were so informed about the political process that the researchers were like these people are like political scientists, you know . They know how to you block something, how to you stop, you know, a law from passing, how would you primary someone. Theyre really good at that part of the thing. And they also got external funding from interested rich donors that were like are, all right, lets build infrastructure, right . So you have these two things. Is they primary people they dont like, they pull the whole Republican Party because theyre afraid of being primaried. They got about 50 people elected to congress, created their caucus. Pretty effectively blocked the second term of barack obama. And you look at the tea party research, their base is not like republican paul ryan base. Theyre a lot more like trump in their political views. Academic research is pretty clear theres a direct line from the Tea Party Movement to trumps election if you look at the politics of what the base believed in. So they arguably elected a president. So you have a movement that has succeed by any measure, and they did so it was both the movement was a hot more strategic in some ways and a lot more political, plus it got funded. Now, lets look at occupy, and well go to the questions. Yeah. Occupy may be more widespread, right . The thing they talked about, inequality, absolutely resonant. Did they change the conversation or . Completely, right . Inequality came to be part of the conversation. What are the things that movement did not do . Did they primary anyone . No. Was there congressional people that they elected . Did they scare the democrats into sort of adopting some of their things . No. You see them kind of show up by the time 2016 election comes up, they kind of have a candidate with sanders, but by then its 2016 were talking. So they didnt have all of those things. Also, if you want to look at theres this imbalance between the Movement Capacity building on the left side and the right side. If you look at the koch brothers, which people talk about, right . These, theyre on the republican side, and they find infrastructure. In 2016 they spent about a billion with a b, right . They spent about a billion dollars on downballot races alone. Thats infrastructure. Thats Capacity Building. It doesnt matter if you win. Youre building the infrastructure. Thats a billion. So post2017 theres this Huge Movement in the United States, it calls itself the resistance sometimes. They have big marches. And one of its sort of offshoots is the indivisibles which is sort of trying to organize Congressional District by Congressional District. Its kind of the equivalent, if you will, in the political spectrum of what happened with the tea party. Their current funding is 1. 6 million. And a million of this is from grassroots. So you literally have two similar movements, and one of them gets together and is like how to we change power, how do we get to it. And you see this path from that to presidency. The other one kind of springs up after a surprise election are, and it looks very powerful. Theres a lot of people in the streets, les a lot of stuff going on. Theres a lot of stuff going on. But you look at the Capacity Building, they are not even at 1 of 2006 spending of one donor on the other side of the political spectrum. And at some point im not saying that money does everything for you, right . They have great Grassroots Energy, and theres all these people working, so money isnt everything. But Capacity Building is not something that is independent out of the resources you put into it. So the Grassroots Energy can do a lot, but it also has to be oriented and resourced. So you see what im saying . Theyre both using technology, theyre both organizing, theyre both using online things but very different trajectories in where things are going. So thank you. We have more questions from the floor, and ill start reading the the first one. What are some examples you have seen that successfully integrate both traditional and the digital message of Campaign Organization . Right. And what lessons can can be taken from them . I kind of answeredded, but the thing is if youre in 2017, of course youre going to use Digital Technologies for what theyre good for, right . The idea isnt like, the point isnt street protests versus online, because theres no magic to street protests either, right . Theres no magic to anything a movement done besides the Capacity Building. And that capacity can be narrative which is you change the conversation, you change the framework. The capacity can be disruptive. Civil disto obedience, you refuse to go along. It can be powerful. Or the Capacity Building in engaging electoral or institutional settings, right . So those are the three big pill arounds of Capacity Building pill arounds of Capacity Building. And what or if you need to hold a march, you hold a march. Its good for many things. You want to use facebook groups . Great. You can do lots of things with it. But you have the sort of not think of the march as your goal, you have to think of a successful movement. What is the capacity im signaling. I think a good example is think if you were in power and you saw this, what would scare you . Right . I think thats a very good way. For example, constituents scare congress people. Because they think they might be primaried or they might be voted out. They really care about hair job. Now about their job. Now, phone calls used to scare them a lot because it signaledded some capacity. Now you have all these things that kind of automate it. You just go and put in your zip code, and it automatically connects you. Theyre not convinced that its constituents anymore. So here once again the problem isnt doing phone calls is wrong. Call your, you know, legislator, by all means. The problem is if something is made easier, its no longer signaling the same threat. So if youre a movement strategist, you have to think what is the sort of not whether can we hold a march, it is when we do this, what are we telling them what else we can do, right . So its kind of like if you can climb k2, a really tough mountain, its kind of a sign youre a good mountaineverything er. If im going to bet whos climbed Mount Everest, the if somebodys climbed k2, im like, you know, thats a lot more likely. If you do something kind of difficult and goes to whatever the weaknesses of what youre protesting are and it depends on, you know, if youre trying to change congress, its Congressional District. If youre trying to do something else, it could be something. You have to figure out your movement repertory so you basically build enough capacity to tell the person, institution that, you know what . The thing im doing has teeth, and you should be afraid of this. And and thats when you get social change. People either respond to it or they give in to it or you get new people in with your i would like to follow a little bit this to elaborate, because the, when you say signal and capacity, now im thinking now were talking about communication, political communication. And then we sometimes mix everything together in the digital era. Were talking about revolution, were talking about yes. Or, not necessarily, were also talking about changing a policy, making agnew law or changing a law a new law. Or we could talk about even before that, changing a story, changing conversation, changing peoples mind absolutely. These are Different Levels of political communication. Absolutely. So can you give example of one of those Different Levels, how does the capacity sure. Okay, so, for example, a lot of times the internet gets dismissed, and i dont the like the term at all. Because Digital Technologys great for changing the narrative. Narrative. And its great for changing peoples minds. And thats the bedrock of social change. And if you want to look for an example, the Gay Rights Movement in the United States has been very good at using cultural tools to make a case for itself, for equality, right . And when you see sort of people change their there was a trend on facebook couple years ago, people would change their profile picture to rainbow colors to signal their support for Marriage Equality for gay people. Thats a powerful thing because its not just like a clique. Youre also signaling to all your friends, this is where you stand. Youre making a political statement. And in some cases like, say, tweet anything china, it may just be a clique, but its a really brave thing. Theres nothing about using Digital Tools thats either sometimes its not easy, and a lot of times its really powerful. The reason i kind of emphasized the what are the weaknesses part is that i think weve heard so much about the empowerment side right. That were missing all of this. But it is not at all, like, im not a curmudgeon saying dont use them. Not at all. They are very empowering. And the other thing is if you want to organize the logistics of a march, you know, for 1963 they had index cards and had six months to do a lot of things. Right now you have google spread sheets. That has real, you know, that is a kind of empowerment. It just doesnt come as an unalloyed good. It comes with these side effects and some downsides and some other its probably even more than side effects. Its integrated. Yeah. Its very, very important that you mentioned this looking at weakness of technologyempowered political landscape. Because its not just a theoretical, sort of logical discussion can. Look todays world. Including this country. Yes. Yes, we got empowered by communication and information technology, but, yes, authoritarianism are rising everywhere. Yes, absolutely. Howd that happen . Yeah. So, basically, i think what happened is a lot of movements that were really so let me give a San Francisco example since were in San Francisco. Right . Instagram was a Little Company that got really big very quickly. It got, i think, like 100 million users very quickly and had only 11 engineers. Youre just scaled up very fast, right . You went, and youre just 11 engineers. Something similar happened to whats app. They had, like, maybe a dozen people, some very small number. I dont remember the exact number for them. And instagram got snapped up by facebook for a billion and whats app for about 16 billion. Those are large numbers. When you scale up that quickly by, when you scale up that quickly and if youre a startup, theres venture capitalists or facebook coming to get with you. A very early stage. Now there is probably no way around this if this is the way it is. But part of this thing i try splitting in my book is that understanding this is really for how to protect myself against this . This will sound like a minor thing but it is not. What of the big weaknesses is that when they scale up so fast and quickly and then the government is coming for them. They need to switch pretty quickly because you did something they are either facing repression or pressure expectations. And in three months without decisionmaking. They have leadership that is to start feeling like the deer in the headlights. Because there needs to be decisions. Whats next . Where do we go . But they have not been elected as leaders. They are not formal or informal leaders but they have a lot of followers on twitter. So you have these people emerge as if you dont like that Movement Leaders saying then you have no formal way or internal way of challenging them. So you go on twitter and start arguing with them. And this kind of internal tension at the first three months, postmarked i seen this premuch in every movement i studied that they get there very quickly and then there is this sort of pressure on them. There repression or whats next. You have leaders at turns out, they have neither the capacity to say all right you do this because no one is listening to them that much. But they get challenged a lot. Anna starts splintering into these little flickering pieces and they start trying to replicate the same thing again and again and again. Last i checked there was a think a coffer for 20 more markers on my Facebook Pages. Im not against marches. Fine. But there is a way in which that is reflective, not every considered decision that another march is a good thing but more like we dont have a way to figure out what to do because we are going to repeat the cycle. Tactics were out it doesnt get the same attention, it doesnt have the same thing. You are a person of power your thinking okay let them march. They are not in my district. And then what happens in the case of this country for example is that it is a 2008 election that is a major turning point. Is there some Strategic Thinking that connects this movement to say a turning point grace of the tactical freeze creates and probably because redoing all of this conversation and trying to make decisions on social media. As i said, it is not suited to it. Facebook is a platform that is designed to capture your attention and sell it to advertisers. It is there to sort of grab your attention. It is very good for outreach there are things that it is good for. It can be great and empowering but it is not a collective decisionmaking platform. So the movement, the rest of the trajectory is that they do this and repetition of all tactics, and in some cases like in egypt, there is a coup and a huge amount of repression. And so given the stakes here, in some of the countries it kind of fizzles out and will see what happens in the United States. That is kind of regardless, it is a fact. The most of the political movements they appear this way, leaderless. So heres a question from the floor. A leaderless social movement, is it better than more structured movement . These movements are not leaderless for no reason. If you went to say 1960s and read the statement put out by the people who formed the student for Democrats Society and pretty much the backbone of the student movement, it sounds like today people are, they want boys. They want participation. They do not want the membership thing where all of your apps only give me money, give me money. If you sign up for any movement you keep getting emails for more money and that is not what people want they want to change things. They are pretty correct that if they sort of have a very rigid Leadership Structure their voice will not be heard and they are afraid that the leader will be corrected. In some cases killed. It happens to movements. So the leadership has all of these genuine issues and part of the thing we talked about is part of this movement is to be empowered. And this is the first uprising in january 2011. The creator of the Facebook Page and helped organize the protest in egypt, january 25, first he was arrested. They didnt know they had him and they realize it was him and there was a place where he gets taken to the palace with another student leader. I believe the organizer. And you can see that they are trying to see what would it take for you to call these people back . They dont say it like that. And it is pretty clear there is nothing he can do because he is not the leader. A Leaderless Movement is resilient. In many ways. There is no one leader that you can coopt and stop the movement. A Leaderless Movement can be creative because you have all of this energy coming from. Because a lot of times innovative tactics dont come from the top. They come from the bottom. So the challenge here isnt how do we stuff people into these structures and attractively clear in the book. That is not what i am saying. The challenge is how do you take this energy, this new model, this network participatory joyous expressive thing. But how do you match that with decisionmaking capacity in a new form . A form that respects the participatory sensibility so that people are not feeling like their will is being stolen from them so that the movement can move from step to step. Because if you try to say all right were going to point some leaders and youre going to listen. People will not do it. They want to be empowered not to be taken away. So my argument is not at all horrible it has all of this positive thing and there is a reason it exists. Even if you didnt like it, its not going away because there is a very solid political reason but the way its been practiced has meant that is like a three legged stool and you have a couple of, you have two strong ones lets say. One of them is missing. So how do you think about that one . I would also add that many movements are leaderless but it does mean that they dont have an iconic spokesperson. Often you have a human face doing that work to request the problem is that person is not necessarily empowered to speak for the movement. But they end up. So i talked about the founder of the page. He found himself in that very position. He found himself as a spokesperson. But people started challenging him so much of mind that he went off of social media for two years. The tension was so hard on him. And youre more empowered to know. Here is probably your two examples meaning tea party and gayrights that successfully employ social media. Do you see prospects for success among any movement and authoritarian regime and if so, what traffic. Authoritarian regimes tend to fall very quickly and out of nowhere. Because they dont have buyin from the election. Elections may not be good for everything but theyre good for signaling what people really dont like and there is some course correction. And they tend to get blindsided. For example in 1978, we see sons trip were tons of people sing a rock, stable as a rock and then boom and then they fall quickly. So it is a fools game to predict when and which one because this problem of lack of knowledge is true for the observer but also, it is plausible to me that especially china is more stable as an authoritarian regime because of social media. They might think that they are sensing everything. I mean you wouldnt but the ordinary person thinks of the great chinese and as you know, it is a very lively internal social media and millions of people, it is plausible to me that it is a way for them to understand how much discontent there is. Sentiment analysis you know all of the things, they may well be using that to understand. Maybe the one thing that keeps regimes down, this might be a way out for them to figure out exactly how bad things are and they may become more stable. On the other hand, the amount of censorship that you have to implement, the amount of effort to contain action being organized they are tells you that it could start. They know it could just sort of crumble quickly. So not going to make a prediction but i think thats a fascinating aspect of those empowering those in power. And these things can happen. This is very combustible mixture. I am from china and personally interested in questions such as how the technology empowered movement transformed political structures in those regimes. That is why i asked question, does technology also empower particularly authoritarian states. That is why im asking why authoritarians exactly right. You have this as being clearly empowered but authoritarianism is clearly on the rise. I think that is partly because our old ways of ruling in the old institutions are under great fire, these are crucial things. We do not have decisionmaking, we dont have ways of fighting the information. So there is all of these sort of transitions where the challengers havent really figured out building the new things or the old methods arent really working and as you just said, it does empower the people empowered with all of these tools available to them now. The fascinating historic transition. There is also another aspect that in a Democratic Society at least those more incremental political aims can be achieved. An elected candidate. But in the regime very often it is all or nothing. It is either resolution or you dont get anywhere. You will be crushed. And even the technology and power movement. Particularly doesnt have this process of the capacity over the time. So we may see the turning point, the Tipping Point but before that it could be years, can be dozens of years. Yes they took everybody surprised. Iranian revolution took everyone by surprise. I think it is just in the nature of things. You have this thing, this delicate balance. It is going to tip. But it is, baseballs game to predict exactly when. But when it does it tends to be a cascade. The casket only happens when the environment is ready. But how the environment is ready is you know not just about technology itself. So, thank you. Thank you [applause] i just want to make sure that the book here, people can have them signed. Look into this wonderful book. Thank you so much. Booktv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they are reading the summer. Congressman, what you read in the summer . The life and times of robert kennedy. First he was in your extender and i am a representative from new york. This is an incredible book about Bobby Kennedys life. The political life, history of this family and it is certainly an enjoyable read. Booktv want to know what you are reading. Sinister Summer Reading list via twitter twitter. Com booktv or on instagram at book o t. V. Booktv on cspan2. Television for serious readers. [inaudible conversations] alright folks thank you for joining us today. We are excited to have peter doran here. We are we stand everywhere from russia to london to broadway at one point. And it is an interesting read. I do not want to give too much away. Please welcome peter. Thank you very much. This is actually a really big