The next revolution will certainly be
televised, but when it is, it will already be old news. Long before
the cameras and the reporters arrive in the midst of the action, it
will have been Facebook-ed and tweeted and Instagram-ed around the
entire planet, probably even before any one has any idea what's
really going on. It will enter the incessant global data-dump
alongside pictures of cats, status updates about "goin out wit
da girlz", and news-feed sports statistics, where it will be
left for the sifting by ordinary people, journalists and governments
alike.
In a way, this makes it all sounds
cheap: the story of people in some distant country facing armed
police repression being prioritized just below those comforts and
mindless indulgences of privileged youth. But in another way, what
could possibly be more authentic, more free? What has the capacity to
generate more potential social-energy, and around the entire world,
not just in some urban square or on a single university campus?
What would Trotsky think?
Speaking as a member of this young
generation, a thoroughbred child of the technology age, it seems
almost unimaginable to try and conceive of a world without such
limitless capabilities. And yet, social media are simply the newest
manifestations of the already explosive monster that is the internet.
We've become used to having our news, whether merited or inane, in
less than an instant and are enraged when it is not.
How quickly the
world owes us something that didn't even exist 5 years ago.
However,
this is more than just a technological surrogate for social
interaction or another source of inexhaustible entertainment; or at
least it can be. While yes, most of us are still preoccupied with the
innocuous details of our everyday life, and while yes, most of the
internet is pornography (perhaps the truest and most blatant
representation of human priorities), there is a whole other facet to
this phenomenon and that is how social media is being harnessed by
youth as a weapon against oppression and injustice.
The world is shrinking through
globalization and commodification and neo-liberalism, but if we ever
had any delusions that such comprehensive and unbalanced economic and
social changes would spread across the world without a stir, let
these past few years be our evidence to the contrary. We have felt
such a backlash before, in any number of countries and theaters, and
the mighty US military has responded in kind (with variable support
form the UN, NATO and our allies). But the game is changing and there
are not enough bullets or bombs in the world for what is coming.
The internet is the Trojan horse of the
new-age revolution, but instead of Troy, it is the household and the
consciousness of any and every person with internet access that is
being infiltrated. These are the new unexplored frontiers, the wild
and uncharted depths of human democracy with no one holding the
reins. There are no more gatekeepers.
But don't get me wrong, it is not for lack of trying. The laundry-list of scandals, from Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, the work of Anonymous and now the latest with Edward Snowden, show just how easy it is for any person with basic knowledge of a computer and a legitimate bone to pick to severely disrupt the government's attempts to command and manipulate the flow of information. There is just so much information out there, being multiplied exponentially on a daily basis, that the only way to try and control it all is by adopting increasingly authoritarian and invasive measures.
In the old days, a government's
propaganda department printed and disseminated just the information
it wanted, subtly silencing those dissenting voices (union workers,
communists, anarchists, etc.) by other means. Today, such a feat is
absolutely impossible despite the best efforts of the Obama
administration or anyone else. The number of "dissenting voices"
has grown beyond the limits of activists handing out pamphlets in the
streets. Dissent itself has been re-born in the modern age, baptized
into the secular cult of the internet along with WikiLeaks and
Facebook. Amen.
The internet has opened a new arena, an Emma Goldman-type anarchist space in both structure and function, and, in that sense at least, perhaps the purest democracy in the world. It is building bridges across continents, connecting causes, creating relationships, and raising consciousness to the point that the traditional role of the state in this area and many others is being slowly renegotiated and not on its terms. On ours.
For the powers that be, in the absence
of effective top-down approaches to information control, the best
alternative is a flanking maneuver that strikes at cultural and human
weaknesses. It's a let-them-eat-cake sort of philosophy, and, in at
least some cases, it does well to take up the slack that autocratic
measures inevitably leave behind. By indulging our inclination for
entertainment over self-awareness, our love of concise answers that
don't challenge too radically our well-constructed and fragile
world-view, this other method has proven quite potent. The idea is
that instead of controlling the information-flow, any particular
government, regime, or administration will simply add to it, but with
a louder, more appealing, and well-funded voice of its own.
In the US, it seems the major news
agencies have been co-opted (hijacked and violated is more like it)
by corporate interests, which by happy coincidence happen to mirror
the government's own interests. They provide their castrated,
doctored versions of news, call it thorough and impartial, and sell
it like they would a cup of Starbucks coffee (and at as equally an
absurd a price). The false controversy they present as "unbiased
reporting" mimics the perverted and catty nature of our own
bipolar political system, but like any reality television show where
the caricatured participants fight over scraps of cheap, momentary
fame, it adequately satisfies the needs for entertainment and so we
go seeking no further.
It is a coordinated effort between
governments, corporations, and our own complacent dispositions, and
it is very effective. Still, it is impossible (or at least imprudent)
to ignore the fact that there are many corners of this world where
such an inflated message is drowned out in the light of bigger
forces. Take the recent protests in Brazil and Turkey, for instance.
As opposed to the protests and civil
disobedience that characterized the US during the civil rights
movement and Vietnam war, and the independence movements of former
colonies following World War II, this new age of protests seems to be
less centralized on a specific issue, less organized and more
spontaneous. These characteristics can be good or bad, depending on a
number of factors, but regardless of their merit, this seems to be
the reality of modern social upheaval.
The protests in Brazil and Turkey were
both set off by relatively minor issues (rising bus fares and the
bulldozing of a park, respectively). These seemingly insignificant
problems mushroomed into mob protests against government corruption,
authoritarianism, globalization, poverty, inequality, racism, and
oppression, literally overnight. It took a small crack in the
government armor to open the flood-gates to enormous nationwide
explosions of pent-up popular discontent. There was no planning,
little warning, and hardly any preparation on the part of either
governments or demonstrators. These protests, in both their
spontaneity and comprehensiveness, would likely not have been
possible without the communicative capabilities of social media and
the internet.
This is the power that an ordinary
person now has at hand: a high school kid in the West Bank can video
tape Israeli brutality against Palestinians on his cell phone and
upload it to Facebook in an instant. Before that offending soldier
even gets back to base there is an international scandal with human
rights groups and a couple hundred thousand views. This is
unprecedented individual power, unimaginable social potential, and we
are all still learning, governments and citizens alike, how to
capitalize on this largely untapped vein of energy.
Here is another example, one a little
closer to home for me. I am a Peace Corps volunteer serving in a
remote and isolated community in the relatively unheard of South
American country of Paraguay. In my community electricity is
sporadic, running water unreliable, poverty ubiquitous, and education
nominal at best. And yet, thanks to modern cell phones and cell phone
towers, I can access the entirety of human history and culture
without leaving my little brick hovel. Any one of my neighbors can do
the same with a cheap Korean-made laptop and a jury-rigged internet
modem. In the backwaters of underdeveloped and impoverished
countries, people are coming online in huge numbers. The internet is
no longer just a luxury of the privileged elite, it is increasingly
becoming the forum of disenfranchised people as well, the very
marginal populations onto which this world has externalized its most
egregious costs.
I am not trying to say that all the
information being put out there on the internet is somehow inviolably
valuable or true or inspired. But somewhere in that massive chaos of
information sharing exist nuggets of clarity, of reality, of truth.
It might be buried or obfuscated or overshadowed by an amazing amount
of disinformation, but that is the case with any truth anywhere.
History textbooks go out of date as fast as Science textbooks, and
that is saying something.
What we can say about this new
information age is that never before has the truth existed with such
abundance and variety and possibility; and at the same time, never
has there been so much untruth heaped on top of it to cover it up.
But combine that truth with the human-energy that social media has
released, and the result is bound to be real Truth.
What the Arab Spring showed us, what
perhaps these new protests in Egypt are showing us (led by the
fearlessness and defiance of art), is that while success is not a
guaranteed outcome of these new-age, internet-sparked revolutions, it
is a definite and undeniable possibility. The unstoppable reality is
that the world is getting younger, smarter, and more connected; the
future doesn't look bright for the dictators, autocrats, and
entrenched powers of this world.
The vanguard of political control has
always been education, information indoctrination from the earliest
age. As the US continually de-funds and destroys its educational
system and as education in many countries remains locked in a
traditional "pedagogies of oppression", the shackles are
being circumvented in other ways thanks to the internet. It is
fomenting a social-geology that thrusts up from the core a million
little active volcanoes that aren't definitively going to erupt, that
might not even be that dangerous if they do, but just as well they
may lay waste to our political order like a modern day Pompeii.
Whether this internet-phenomenon
becomes complacent like Huxley's Brave New World or authentic and
revolutionary is yet to be seen. One thing is for certain: it will
not be contained. It will writhe against the bars of any Orwellian
dystopia that might try to control it.