The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [110]
The unthinking glorification of digital activism makes its practitioners confuse priorities with capabilities. Getting people onto the streets, which may indeed become easier with modern communication tools, is usually the last stage of a protest movement, in both democracies and autocracies. One cannot start with protests and think of political demands and further steps later on. There are real dangers to substituting strategic and long-term action with spontaneous street marches. Angela Davis, a controversial activist in the civil rights movement, knows a thing or two about organizing. Davis, who used to associate with the Black Panthers in the early 1970s, gradually emerged as one of the most talented organizers on the left, having played an important role in the struggle for civil rights. Today she is concerned with the long-term effects of the growing ease of mobilization on the effectiveness of social movements. “It seems to me that mobilization has displaced organization, so that in the contemporary moment, when we think about organizing movements, we think about bringing masses of people into the streets,” writes Davis in her 2005 book Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture.
The dangers of this development are obvious. The newly gained ability to mobilize may distract us from developing a more effective capacity to organize. As Davis remarks, “it is difficult to encourage people to think about protracted struggles, protracted movements that require very careful organizing interventions that don’t always depend on our capacity to mobilize demonstrations.” Just because you can mobilize a hundred million people on Twitter, in other words, does not mean you should; it may only make it harder to accomplish more strategic objectives at some point in the future. Or as Davies herself puts it: “The Internet is an incredible tool, but it may also encourage us to think that we can produce instantaneous movements, movements modeled after fast food delivery.”
It seems that Iran’s Green Movement may have been much more successful in 2009 had they heeded Davis’s advice. While the unique decentralized nature of Internet communications allowed the protesting Iranians to effectively bypass censorship and broadcast information outside of Iran, it also prevented the movement from acting in a strategic thought-out fashion or, at least, speaking with one voice. When the time came to act in unison, thousands of Facebook groups couldn’t collect themselves into a coherent whole. Iran’s Twitter Revolution may have drowned in its own tweets: There was just too much digital cacophony for anyone to take decisive action and lead the crowds. As one Iranian commentator bitterly remarked on his blog: “A protest movement without a proper relationship with its own leaders is not a movement. It is no more than a blind rebellion in the streets which will vanish sooner than you can imagine.” Social media only further added to the confusion, for, while information seemed to be coming from everywhere, it was not obvious that anyone was in control. “Cell phone cameras, Facebook, Twitter ... seem ... to be making everything happen much faster. There