Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason

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Authors: Paul Mason
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all at once’. Technology, social change, institutional decay had unleashed something bigger than teenage angst.
    If this sounds like an eighteenth-century version of the ‘death of deference’ complaint, well, it was. A deep social crisis was under way, then as now. But with one big difference: today, in every garret there is a laptop.
    The Jacobin with a laptop
    There has been high prominence given to technology and social media in explanations of the global unrest—and for good reason. Social media and new technology were crucial in shaping the revolutions of 2011, just as they shaped industry, finance and mass culture in the preceding decade. What’s important is not that the Egyptian youth used Facebook, or that the British students used Twitter and the Greek rioters organized via Indymedia, but what they used these media for—and what such technology does to hierarchies, ideas and actions.
    Here, the crucial concept is the network—whose impact on politics has been a long time coming. The network’s basic law was explained by Bell Telephone boss Theodore Vail as early as 1908: the more people who use the network, the more useful it becomes to each user. This is known as the ‘network effect’: what it describes is the creation, out of two people’s interaction, of a ‘third thing’ which comes for free. Because network theory originated in the boardroom, this ‘third thing’ has tended to be identified in terms of economic value. But, in recent years, it has become clear it can provide much more than that.
    There’s another difference: when it was first theorized by Vail’s technologists, the ‘network effect’ seemed like a by-product, a happy accident. Today we are conscious users and promoters of the network effect. Everyone who uses information technology understands that they are—whether at work, on Facebook, on eBay or in a multiplayer game—a ‘node’ on a network: not a foot-soldier, not a bystander, not a leader, but a multitasking version of all three.
    Vail’s customers probably had no idea that, by buying and using telephones, they were enhancing the technology’s value for others and creating spin-off effects for Bell’s other businesses (what are now termed ‘network externalities’). Nowadays, many of us have a very clear understanding of all this. The result is that, in the past ten years, the ‘network effect’ has blasted its way out of corporate economics and into sociology.
    The most obvious impact has been on the media and ideology. Long before people started using Twitter to foment social unrest, mainstream journalists noticed—to their dismay—that the size of one’s public persona or pay cheque carried no guarantee of popularity online. People’s status rises and falls with the reliability and truthfulness of what they contribute. This is a classic network effect—but it is not measurable as profit and loss.
    If you look at the full suite of information tools that were employed to spread the revolutions of 2009–11, it goes like this: Facebook is used to form groups, covert and overt—in order to establish those strong but flexible connections. Twitter is used for real-time organization and news dissemination, bypassing the cumbersome ‘newsgathering’ operations of the mainstream media. YouTube and the Twitter-linked photographic sites—Yfrog, Flickr and Twitpic—are used to provide instant evidence of the claims being made. Link-shorteners like bit.ly are used to disseminate key articles via Twitter.
    And the democracy of retweeting (or sharing on Facebook) filters out the trash. In this way, key contributions to the dialogue that’s going on around the action get promoted as if by acclaim, as happened to the original ‘Twenty Reasons’ blog post. Activists describe this process as ‘memetic’, drawing on Richard

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