Transcript of “Online Social Change: East to Organize, Hard to Win“ | Zeynep Tufekci
So recently, we heard a lot about how social media helps empower protest, and that's true, but
after more than a decade of studying and participating in multiple social movements, I've come
to realize that the way technology empowers social movements can also paradoxically help
weaken them. This is not inevitable, but overcoming it requires diving deep into what makes
success possible over the long term. And the lessons apply in multiple domains.
00:31
Now, take Turkey's Gezi Park protests, July 2013, which I went back to study in the field. Twitter
was key to its organizing. It was everywhere in the park -- well, along with a lot of tear gas. It
wasn't all high tech. But the people in Turkey had already gotten used to the power of
Twitter because of an unfortunate incident about a year before when military jets had bombed
and killed 34 Kurdish smugglers near the border region, and Turkish media completely censored
this news. Editors sat in their newsrooms and waited for the government to tell them what to
do. One frustrated journalist could not take this anymore. He purchased his own plane
ticket, and went to the village where this had occurred. And he was confronted by this scene: a
line of coffins coming down a hill, relatives wailing. He later he told me how overwhelmed he
felt, and didn't know what to do, so he took out his phone, like any one of us might, and
snapped that picture and tweeted it out. And voila, that picture went viral and broke the
censorship and forced mass media to cover it.
01:45
So when, a year later, Turkey's Gezi protests happened, it started as a protest about a park
being razed, but became an anti-authoritarian protest. It wasn't surprising that media also
censored it, but it got a little ridiculous at times. When things were so intense, when CNN
International was broadcasting live from Istanbul, CNN Turkey instead was broadcasting a
documentary on penguins. Now, I love penguin documentaries, but that wasn't the news of the
day. An angry viewer put his two screens together and snapped that picture, and that one too
went viral, and since then, people call Turkish media the penguin media. (Laughter)
02:28
But this time, people knew what to do. They just took out their phones and looked for actual
news. Better, they knew to go to the park and take pictures and participate and share it more
on social media. Digital connectivity was used for everything from food to
donations. Everything was organized partially with the help of these new technologies.
02:51
And using Internet to mobilize and publicize protests actually goes back a long way. Remember
the Zapatistas, the peasant uprising in the southern Chiapas region of Mexico led by the
masked, pipe-smoking, charismatic Subcomandante Marcos? That was probably the first
movement that got global attention thanks to the Internet. Or consider Seattle '99, when a
multinational grassroots effort brought global attention to what was then an obscure
organization, the World Trade Organization, by also utilizing these digital technologies to help
them organize. And more recently, movement after movement has shaken country after
country: the Arab uprisings from Bahrain to Tunisia to Egypt and more; indignados in Spain,
Italy, Greece; the Gezi Park protests; Taiwan; Euromaidan in Ukraine; Hong Kong. And think of
more recent initiatives, like the #BringBackOurGirls hashtags. Nowadays, a network of tweets
can unleash a global awareness campaign. A Facebook page can become the hub of a massive
mobilization. Amazing.
04:08
But think of the moments I just mentioned. The achievements they were able to have, their
outcomes, are not really proportional to the size and energy they inspired. The hopes they
rightfully raised are not really matched by what they were able to have as a result in the
end. And this raises a question: As digital technology makes things easier for movements, why
haven't successful outcomes become more likely as well? In embracing digital platforms for
activism and politics, are we overlooking some of the benefits of doing things the hard
way? Now, I believe so. I believe that the rule of thumb is: Easier to mobilize does not always
mean easier to achieve gains.
05:00
Now, to be clear, technology does empower in multiple ways. It's very powerful. In Turkey, I
watched four young college students organize a countrywide citizen journalism network called
140Journos that became the central hub for uncensored news in the country. In Egypt, I saw
another four young people use digital connectivity to organize the supplies and logistics for 10
field hospitals, very large operations, during massive clashes near Tahrir Square in 2011. And I
asked the founder of this effort, called Tahrir Supplies, how long it took him to go from when he
had the idea to when he got started. "Five minutes," he said. Five minutes. And he had no
training or background in logistics. Or think of the Occupy movement which rocked the world in
2011. It started with a single email from a magazine, Adbusters, to 90,000 subscribers in its
list. About two months after that first email, there were in the United States 600 ongoing
occupations and protests. Less than one month after the first physical occupation in Zuccotti
Park, a global protest was held in about 82 countries, 950 cities. It was one of the largest global
protests ever organized.
06:27
Now, compare that to what the Civil Rights Movement had to do in 1955 Alabama to protest
the racially segregated bus system, which they wanted to boycott. They'd been preparing for
many years and decided it was time to swing into action after Rosa Parks was arrested. But how
do you get the word out -- tomorrow we're going to start the boycott -- when you don't have
Facebook, texting, Twitter, none of that? So they had to mimeograph 52,000 leaflets by
sneaking into a university duplicating room and working all night, secretly. They then used the
68 African-American organizations that criss-crossed the city to distribute those leaflets by
hand. And the logistical tasks were daunting, because these were poor people. They had to get
to work, boycott or no, so a massive carpool was organized, again by meeting. No texting, no
Twitter, no Facebook. They had to meet almost all the time to keep this carpool going.
07:32
Today, it would be so much easier. We could create a database, available rides and what rides
you need, have the database coordinate, and use texting. We wouldn't have to meet all that
much. But again, consider this: the Civil Rights Movement in the United States navigated a
minefield of political dangers, faced repression and overcame, won major policy
concessions, navigated and innovated through risks. In contrast, three years after Occupy
sparked that global conversation about inequality, the policies that fueled it are still in
place. Europe was also rocked by anti-austerity protests, but the continent didn't shift its
direction. In embracing these technologies, are we overlooking some of the benefits of slow
and sustained? To understand this, I went back to Turkey about a year after the Gezi
protests and I interviewed a range of people, from activists to politicians, from both the ruling
party and the opposition party and movements. I found that the Gezi protesters were
despairing. They were frustrated, and they had achieved much less than what they had hoped
for. This echoed what I'd been hearing around the world from many other protesters that I'm in
touch with. And I've come to realize that part of the problem is that today's protests have
become a bit like climbing Mt. Everest with the help of 60 Sherpas, and the Internet is our
Sherpa. What we're doing is taking the fast routes and not replacing the benefits of the slower
work. Because, you see, the kind of work that went into organizing all those daunting, tedious
logistical tasks did not just take care of those tasks, they also created the kind of organization
that could think together collectively and make hard decisions together, create consensus and
innovate, and maybe even more crucially, keep going together through differences. So when
you see this March on Washington in 1963, when you look at that picture, where this is the
march where Martin Luther King gave his famous "I have a dream" speech, 1963, you don't just
see a march and you don't just hear a powerful speech, you also see the painstaking, long-term
work that can put on that march. And if you're in power, you realize you have to take the
capacity signaled by that march, not just the march, but the capacity signaled by that march,
seriously. In contrast, when you look at Occupy's global marches that were organized in two
weeks, you see a lot of discontent, but you don't necessarily see teeth that can bite over the
long term. And crucially, the Civil Rights Movement innovated tactically from boycotts to lunch
counter sit-ins to pickets to marches to freedom rides. Today's movements scale up very quickly
without the organizational base that can see them through the challenges. They feel a little like
startups that got very big without knowing what to do next, and they rarely manage to shift
tactically because they don't have the depth of capacity to weather such transitions.
11:02
Now, I want to be clear: The magic is not in the mimeograph. It's in that capacity to work
together, think together collectively, which can only be built over time with a lot of work. To
understand all this, I interviewed a top official from the ruling party in Turkey, and I ask him,
"How do you do it?" They too use digital technology extensively, so that's not it. So what's the
secret? Well, he told me. He said the key is he never took sugar with his tea. I said, what has
that got to do with anything? Well, he said, his party starts getting ready for the next
election the day after the last one, and he spends all day every day meeting with voters in their
homes, in their wedding parties, circumcision ceremonies, and then he meets with his
colleagues to compare notes. With that many meetings every day, with tea offered at every one
of them, which he could not refuse, because that would be rude, he could not take even one
cube of sugar per cup of tea, because that would be many kilos of sugar, he can't even calculate
how many kilos, and at that point I realized why he was speaking so fast. We had met in the
afternoon, and he was already way over-caffeinated. But his party won two major
elections within a year of the Gezi protests with comfortable margins. To be sure, governments
have different resources to bring to the table. It's not the same game, but the differences are
instructive. And like all such stories, this is not a story just of technology. It's what technology
allows us to do converging with what we want to do. Today's social movements want to
operate informally. They do not want institutional leadership. They want to stay out of politics
because they fear corruption and cooptation. They have a point. Modern representative
democracies are being strangled in many countries by powerful interests. But operating this
way makes it hard for them to sustain over the long term and exert leverage over the
system, which leads to frustrated protesters dropping out, and even more corrupt politics. And
politics and democracy without an effective challenge hobbles, because the causes that have
inspired the modern recent movements are crucial. Climate change is barreling towards
us. Inequality is stifling human growth and potential and economies. Authoritarianism is
choking many countries. We need movements to be more effective.
13:40
Now, some people have argued that the problem is today's movements are not formed of
people who take as many risks as before, and that is not true. From Gezi to Tahrir to
elsewhere, I've seen people put their lives and livelihoods on the line. It's also not true, as
Malcolm Gladwell claimed, that today's protesters form weaker virtual ties. No, they come to
these protests, just like before, with their friends, existing networks, and sometimes they do
make new friends for life. I still see the friends that I made in those Zapatista-convened global
protests more than a decade ago, and the bonds between strangers are not worthless. When I
got tear-gassed in Gezi, people I didn't know helped me and one another instead of running
away. In Tahrir, I saw people, protesters, working really hard to keep each other safe and
protected. And digital awareness-raising is great, because changing minds is the bedrock of
changing politics. But movements today have to move beyond participation at great scale very
fast and figure out how to think together collectively, develop strong policy proposals, create
consensus, figure out the political steps and relate them to leverage, because all these good
intentions and bravery and sacrifice by itself are not going to be enough.
15:03
And there are many efforts. In New Zealand, a group of young people are developing a platform
called Loomio for participatory decision making at scale. In Turkey, 140Journos are holding
hack-a-thons so that they support communities as well as citizen journalism. In Argentina, an
open-source platform called DemocracyOS is bringing participation to parliaments and political
parties. These are all great, and we need more, but the answer won't just be better online
decision-making, because to update democracy, we are going to need to innovate at every
level, from the organizational to the political to the social. Because to succeed over the long
term, sometimes you do need tea without sugar along with your Twitter. Thank
you. (Applause)
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