Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (20 page)

The general intellect has expanded

Economists and business gurus have for two decades been grappling with the concept of ‘information capitalism': what it means if the most valuable commodities in the market are ideas, rather than physical objects.

One fact is clear:
people know more than they used to.
That's to say, they have greater and more instant access to knowledge, and reliable ways of counteracting disinformation.

Though academia has become obsessed with firewalling and commercializing the products of research, the info-revolution has massively expanded the primary sources of knowledge. Since 1665, when the first two scientific journals were started, researchers estimate that about 50 million scholarly papers have been published. Of these, 10 million were published in the last ten years, and 20 million in the last twenty-five years.
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But even here, the open-access revolution is corroding commerce: a 2006 study found that useable copies of 11 per cent of all papers published that year could be found for free, through self-archiving on academics' personal websites.
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It's now possible to conceive of a situation where the great bulk of academic research will be free, open to all, and transparently cross-referenced. This will destroy the business models of media empires like Reed Elsevier but, arguably, they have already been destroyed.

Meanwhile the nature of learning has been transformed. There are huge numbers of facts available to me now about the subjects I studied at university which were not known when I was there in the 1980s. Back then, whole academic terms would be spent disputing basic facts, or trying to research them. Today the plane of reasoning can be more complex, because people have an instant reference source for the undisputed premises of arguments. I am not referring here to Wikipedia, which can be unreliable, but to sources like instantly searchable documents, scanned books, census data and digitized historic photographs and manuscripts. It's as if physics had been replaced by quantum physics, but in every discipline. Or, as Clay Shirky has argued, it's as if the impact of the calculator on school mathematics were now being replicated in every field.

And as the nature of learning changes, the nature of the individuals produced by it evolves. We are prepared to consult secondary sources less, primary sources more, and each other always. We are prepared to follow our search results across academic boundaries; we are prepared to ‘load' complex information into our minds—just as a computer loads software—and then ‘unload' it, once the task is complete, making room for a new upload of expertise to do something else. High-level knowledge work becomes less about ‘information conquest' than ‘information management', and the latter is the valued corporate skill.

It is as if, in response to the creation of digital networks, we are changing our behaviour to become not just networked individuals but ‘network animals'.

This should come as no surprise: observers of the early factory system described how, within a generation, it had wrought a total change in the behaviour, thinking, body shape and life expectancy of those imprisoned within it. People grew smaller, their limbs became bent; physical movements became more regimented. Family units broke down.

Why should a revolution in knowledge and technology not be producing an equally dramatic—albeit diametrically opposite—change in human behaviour?

The challenge to info-hierarchies

The impact of social networks on knowledge, community and individuals constitutes a challenge to three kinds of hierarchies that stood at the heart of twentieth-century reality: repressive states, corporations and hermetically sealed ideologies.

Repressive states rely not just on the manipulation of news, but on the suppression of truth and the control of narratives. Today, in the face of totalitarianism, more or less everything you need to know to make sense of the world—and explode a false narrative—is available as freely downloadable content on the Internet; and this content has not been pre-digested by teachers, parents, priests, imams or commissars.

For example, if there was a narrative that really finished off Mubarak's regime, it was not the April 6
^th
movement but the ‘We are all Khalid Said' Facebook page: again and again you find that those who became detonators of the 25 January uprising acted through the links made over Said's murder. Though Mubarak shut down Twitter on 27 January 2011, to stop the revolution he would have had to close down the Khalid Said page, hunt down its members and round up the protest networks that sent people like @sarrahsworld, @Hennawy89 and @3arabawy into the slums of Cairo on 25 January.

But you cannot run a modern economy that way. The only defence against information-driven revolt is to de-network your society and institute Nazi or East German Communist levels of surveillance and control.

Likewise, info-capitalism makes it increasingly difficult for corporations to control their own narratives. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation empire was plunged into crisis not just because
Guardian
journalist Nick Davies discovered it had hacked the phone of a teenage murder victim. It was also because, by day three of the furore, one in every four tweets mentioning the
News of the World
hashtag (#notw) also mentioned the brand name of a company advertising in the paper. The marketing agency We Are Social, which produced these metrics, reported:

Every brand involved was dealing with its own social-media crisis last week. The sheer volume of this protest will have been a shock for many brands and drowned out any normal marketing activity. This cannot have failed to influence their decisions about whether to pull advertising from the
News of the World.
It was a mass outpouring of public opinion which hit at the right time and had its desired effect.
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Manuel Castells had put his finger on the source of Rupert Murdoch's power: News Corp acted as a ‘switch' within the political elite systems of the world. It created valuable niche groups of right-wing voters around particular media outlets, and then traded influence over those voters for political influence pursuant to the growth of News Corp. Backing up this unspoken deal was always the hidden sanction of scandal or opprobrium, ready to be unleashed on anyone who did not cooperate.
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But News Corp's position as a ‘switch' within the system was overwhelmed by these decentralized attacks. Faced with a massive pull-out of brand advertising, and in an attempt to stop the crisis spreading through the whole corporation, Murdoch pulled the plug on the
News of
the World,
a massively profitable Sunday newspaper. In other words, social media killed it, once more demonstrating the truism that the network defeats the hierarchy.

As for hermetically sealed ideologies—Christian fundamentalism, fascism, clunking Leninist orthodoxy—the info-revolution simply reinforces the choice globalization had already forced on them: isolate yourself from reality inside a closed community, or unseal the ideology, exposing it to critical dialogue and difference.

For the traditional left, the info-revolution presents an additional problem: it loses its monopoly on critical narratives about capitalism. From the 1960s, the left and progressive liberalism were jointly engaged in a struggle against the censorship of news and the suppression of information about the past. It was from radical journalists that we learned the truth about Vietnam, or the miscarriages of justice in Northern Ireland, or the hidden secrets of the Cold War ‘Gladio' network that ran Italian politics. And it was the left that dug through history to discover the hidden and forgotten struggles of workers, women, racial minorities, lesbians and gays.

For activists, the moment of political commitment often coincided with a moment of revelation. Anybody, in theory, could have rediscovered the story of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the slave who led the Haitian revolution in 1789; but in practice, only the Trinidadian Marxist historian C. L. R. James took the trouble to do so. James's book
The Black Jacobins,
produced in 1938, shaped the outlook of black activists in the 1960s and 1980s because—even forty years after publication—it was the definitive account, influencing two generations of anti-racists.

Today the left is no longer the gatekeeper to subversive knowledge (although it can aspire to remain a ‘preferred provider'). Those seeking a narrative critical of the world order, and evidence of corporate or state wrongdoing, are free to cut out the middleman.

It is worth here exploring the role played by ‘memes'. Richard Dawkins invented the concept in 1976, speculating the existence of core ideas within human societies that had survived, and mutated, like genes:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.
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Before the Internet, the ‘meme' idea would have been useful as a speculative tool for understanding the prevalence of certain themes and patterns in human culture. Dawkins himself was quite negative about memes, tending to see them as autonomous entities, as selfish as genes, replicating themselves in their own interest. Meanwhile the study of memes got sidetracked into an academic debate between anthropologists and neuroscientists who purported to describe their laws of motion.

With the Internet, however, and above all with the advent of social media, it's become possible to observe the development of memes at an accelerated pace (much as fruit flies, with their short life cycles, help geneticists study mutation).

What happens is that ideas arise, are immediately ‘market tested', and then are seen to either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves into the mainstream, or, if they are deemed no good, disappear. While this process is observable in mass culture generally, activists in the horizontalist and hacker movements believe memes are tools for creating direct democracy. Ideas replicate, or do not replicate, through social media according to whether they hit the right buttons within the collective consciousness.

Examples are legion: the ‘Uninstalling dictator: 99% complete' tweets that spun across the world as Ben Ali and Mubarak fell; the decision by thousands of activists worldwide to change their Twitter location to ‘Tehran' in June 2009, in a bid to mask the location of the real Iranian activists. Above all, the occupation of physical space with tents: begun in Tahrir, spreading to Madrid and then Athens, and bursting out again in the autumn of 2011 in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which on 15 October inspired space-occupations in 962 cities, in 85 countries.

For activists, memes create a kind of rough alternative to representative democracy. Methods of protests, slogans, beliefs—like the repeated insistence that ‘Black Bloc is a tactic, not a lifestyle' among British students after the debacle of 26 March 2011—spread in a seemingly autonomous way.

I am not certain whether memes are anything more than small cultural portions of the Zeitgeist. That they move and replicate faster than they used to seems pretty obvious. Yet it is important to understand that, for the activists themselves, memes are seen as facilitating decentralized action. One of those critiquing my original ‘Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere' blog post, an activist aligned with the hacker group LulzSec, wrote:

We don't see this decentralisation of power and authority in determining the direction of actions to be a negative impact of technology. Memetics offer an opportunity for the instigation of autonomous actions, delivering death by a thousand cuts to our enemy.
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Ultimately, whether real or illusory, memes are felt to be real by the participants. If the idea reflects anything fundamental it is that networked individuals are free to choose, rank and reject ideas or forms of expression. At the height of the collectivist century such options were not available: modes of resistance were dictated, and usually hierarchical. Type into YouTube the words ‘Ernst Busch' (German Communism's star singer of agitprop anthems) to see just how hierarchical.

The meaning of 2011

If the economic situation turns strategically bad, and if—as in the 1930s—globalization gets replaced by competing economic blocs, much of what I've described here could be reversed. It might seem inconceivable but so, to the Zweig and Delius generation, did book-burning ceremonies or the outlawing of scientific theories as politically unacceptable (as the USSR did with Einstein's theory).

Another caveat, of course, is that to the deprived half of humanity the ‘Internet way of life' is out of reach. People struggling to live on $2 a day cannot get worked up about memes. However, what I've observed is that wherever the technology penetrates, so do the social and psychological changes.

A third caveat is, of course, that ‘teleology is bunk': there is no predestined outcome to human development, whether we see it as the development of ‘world spirit', class struggle or individual freedom.

Despite all this, I cannot help believing that in the revolutions of 2011 we've begun to see the human archetypes that will shape the twenty-first century. They effortlessly multitask, they are ironic, androgynous sometimes, seemingly engrossed in their bubble of music—but they are sometimes prepared to sacrifice their lives and freedom for the future. By the middle of the second decade of this century it will be clear whether that is enough: whether hope, solidarity and ironic slogans can prevail against austerity, nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Right now the future hangs in the balance.