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Role of social media in idealistic management.
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amit.sharma@mygyanvihar.com
amit.sharma@mygyanvihar.com
The debate about social media and autocratic regimes can be (roughly) divided into two camps: idealists and realists. Idealists — my camp — believe social media will, on average, improve leverage for citizens seeking representative government; realists believe it won’t.
Because the events in North Africa and the Middle East are so important, both in themselves and in what they will lead us to expect about the future, I have been reading realist arguments especially closely in this period, and it was in this spirit that I came across Kremlin’s Plan to Prevent a Facebook Revolution, by Andrei Soldatov, an intelligence analyst at Agentura.ru.
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I’ll quote its opening two paragraphs:
What interests me about Kremlin’s Plan is that, although it makes a nod to Tunisia and Egypt, it doesn’t seem to internalize anything from those events. It could have been written last year, and then simply updated to acknowledge those revolutions, without changing another word of the text.
As a result, the piece illustrates two anachronisms that have appeared in some realist arguments after Ben Ali and Mubarak’s departures: continued faith in the apolitical nature of internet use, and incompatible views on the response of autocrats to social media.
Meanwhile, Russia’s 40 million Internet users in the country’s middle class and most active segment of the population have shown remarkably little interest in this political struggle. This means that the Kremlin’s battle to prevent an imminent Facebook revolution will remain largely virtual.
The unpoliticized nature of Russian internet use is presented as evidence of its political inertness. The underlying observation is correct, of course; young people the world over typically don’t use the internet for political activism, but to seek employment or distraction. This is then assumed to be evidence that these same young people are inherently apolitical. The second assumption doesn’t follow from the first, however, as illustrated by the events in Tunisia.
As mass unrest continues to shake authoritarian states in North Africa and the Middle East, the siloviki [politicians tied to Russian military or security forces] are pushing for the registration of social network users and waiting to pounce on anyone posting an extremist message and the Kremlin is funding pro-government bloggers. This will inevitably be interpreted by analysts as a new political battle between the government against the opposition.
The realist position is clearly correct in some cases — autocracies do adapt to new threats, and even an idea whose time has come doesn’t arrive everywhere all at once. In the short term, most of the world’s autocratic regimes will survive the current wave of protest, and in the long term we don’t yet know whether digital tools will help create a deep shift towards representative government, as the printing press did, or if they will prove to be relatively shallow and easily domesticated, as terrestrial television was.
I’d call myself a cynic, then, because I think that ultimately the political effect of computers will be bad for freedom. I get depressed just thinking about what a clever tyrant could do with the internet. Ankle bracelets for everyone, for a start.
All sorts of activities that involve people gathering together, talking together, signalling subversive beliefs, or travelling from place to place to meet each other get banned under repressive regimes, especially in uncertain times. I think what this tells us is that gathering and free expression can, under the right circumstances, be a threat to a weak regime, which is not the same as “social media will, on average, improve leverage for citizens seeking representative governmentâ€.
I do agree that “social media isn’t a threat and that smart autocrats are working ever harder to combat it†is contradictory, up to a point. But that leaves a spectrum of possibilities from an autocrat’s point of view:
1. social media is not a threat under any circumstances (ruled out)
2. social media, possibly along with many other things, can be used to create trouble under some circumstances. And it’s easy to shut down, so we’ll do it.
3. social media is particularly well suited to create trouble, so we’ll scramble to do what we can to stop it.
The debate about social media and autocratic regimes can be (roughly) divided into two camps: idealists and realists. Idealists — my camp — believe social media will, on average, improve leverage for citizens seeking representative government; realists believe it won’t.
Because the events in North Africa and the Middle East are so important, both in themselves and in what they will lead us to expect about the future, I have been reading realist arguments especially closely in this period, and it was in this spirit that I came across Kremlin’s Plan to Prevent a Facebook Revolution, by Andrei Soldatov, an intelligence analyst at Agentura.ru.
I’ll quote its opening two paragraphs:
What interests me about Kremlin’s Plan is that, although it makes a nod to Tunisia and Egypt, it doesn’t seem to internalize anything from those events. It could have been written last year, and then simply updated to acknowledge those revolutions, without changing another word of the text.
As a result, the piece illustrates two anachronisms that have appeared in some realist arguments after Ben Ali and Mubarak’s departures: continued faith in the apolitical nature of internet use, and incompatible views on the response of autocrats to social media.
The lesser of these appears at the end of the piece:
The unpoliticized nature of Russian internet use is presented as evidence of its political inertness. The underlying observation is correct, of course; young people the world over typically don’t use the internet for political activism, but to seek employment or distraction. This is then assumed to be evidence that these same young people are inherently apolitical. The second assumption doesn’t follow from the first, however, as illustrated by the events in Tunisia.
Prior to December 18th, Tunisia’s 2.8 million internet users — the country’s middle class and most active segment of the population — had shown remarkably little interest in political struggle there either, and that country subsequently underwent as thorough a
revolution as has been seen in the region since 1979, one in which the organizers both used and credited social media (principally camera phones and social networks) as effective in aiding Ben Ali’s overthrow.
I blame academia for planting the notion that people either are or are not political, and that we can read that aspect of their identity from their daily practice. Because universities put the PoliSci department down the street from Economics and all the way across the quad from Media Studies, we encourage people to think these are actually separate things. Meanwhile, out in the real world, they are all mixed up; you could ask whether an unemployed protester joining her friends to march on Parliament is making an economic, social, or political choice, but the answer would be “Yes.â€
The North African revolutions and remind us that citizens aren’t so much political or apolitical as they are politicized or unpoliticized at any given moment; even people who don’t like discussing politics in their spare time can turn out in the Tahrir Square when the serious business starts.
The second tension in Kremlin’s Plan is more far reaching:
If many in the West wrongly believe that communications tools affect political action, then what are we to make of Medvedev’s taking the threat “very seriously� That he too is an idiot? Alternatively, if Medvedev is the model of a successful autocrat, shouldn’t we trust him to know a threat when he sees one? And isn’t his reaction therefore evidence that social media _is_ a threat?
This tension — “Social media is unimportant, and the autocrats are responding ferociously†— appears throughout:
Speaking as one of those analysts, I can confirm that yes, it is indeed inevitable that when Russian authorities push to curtail political use of the internet, we will interpret this as a battle between the government and the opposition. This, I would offer, is because such a move obviously _is_ part of such a battle.
The realist position is clearly correct in some cases — autocracies do adapt to new threats, and even an idea whose time has come doesn’t arrive everywhere all at once. In the short term, most of the world’s autocratic regimes will survive the current wave of protest, and in
the long term we don’t yet know whether digital tools will help create a deep shift towards representative government, as the printing press did, or if they will prove to be relatively shallow and easily domesticated, as terrestrial television was.
What I think we can now set aside, though, are the anachronistic parts of Kremlin’s Plan. There were never good theoretical reasons to believe that unpolitical use of the internet means apolitical users; now we have practical reminders that people can become
politicized when the times call for it. The causes of this shift will be debated for decades: maybe it came from people revealing hidden preferences, or from collective action being aided by information cascades, or the invention of new narratives incompatible with current
realities. The fact of the shift, however, won’t be debated.
Similarly, the self-contradicting assertion that social media isn’t a threat and that smart autocrats are working ever harder to combat it, can, I think, be laid to rest. However much Medvedev’s response to the threat changes outcomes in Russia, he is at least correct to be
worried. The best reason to believe that social media can help synchronize and coordinate insurgent action against autocrats is that both the insurgents and autocrats believe that, beliefs that seem to be strengthening on both sides as real-world evidence mounts.
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{ 88 comments }
Jay 03.07.11 at 5:06 pm
I’d call myself a cynic, then, because I think that ultimately the political effect of computers will be bad for freedom. I get depressed just thinking about what a clever tyrant could do with the internet. Ankle bracelets for everyone, for a start.
Pete 03.07.11 at 5:34 pm
Jay: never overestimate the reliability of technology, especially when people have a vested interest in breaking it.
geo 03.07.11 at 5:37 pm
Slightly off-topic: Clay, you are quoted in the current London Review of Books as saying: “No one reads War and Peace . The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it.†How, after learning this, have you avoided becoming suicidal? Or have you?
Hidari 03.07.11 at 5:51 pm
‘What interests me about Kremlin’s Plan is that, although it makes a nod to Tunisia and Egypt, it doesn’t seem to internalize anything from those events. It could have been written last year, and then simply updated to acknowledge those revolutions, without changing another word of the text.’
And quite right too. The situation in the Middle East is completely different from that in Russia: indeed, the two situations could not be more
different.
The reason why is given in this quote from the article linked to:
‘This project was organized by the Foundation for Effective Policy, a think tank run by Kremlin-friendly political analyst Gleb Pavlovsky. Judging by the courses it offers  such as “Velvet Revolutions: A Warning† the group is charged with a single overriding task: to resist the “subversive activity†of the West.’ (emphasis added).
‘
tomslee 03.07.11 at 6:14 pm
Well, western music is banned in Iran, but I don’t think that Elton John “on average, improve[s] leverage for citizens seeking representative governmentâ€.
All sorts of activities that involve people gathering together, talking together, signalling subversive beliefs, or travelling from place to place to meet each other get banned under repressive regimes, especially in uncertain times. I think what this tells us is that gathering and free expression can, under the right circumstances, be a threat to a weak regime, which is not the same as “social media will, on average, improve leverage for citizens seeking representative governmentâ€.
I do agree that “social media isn’t a threat and that smart autocrats are working ever harder to combat it†is contradictory, up to a point. But that leaves a spectrum of possibilities from an autocrat’s point of view:
1. social media is not a threat under any circumstances (ruled out)
2. social media, possibly along with many other things, can be used to create trouble under some circumstances. And it’s easy to shut down, so we’ll do it.
3. social media is particularly well suited to create trouble, so we’ll scramble to do what we can to stop it.
I think you’ve shown (2), but are claiming (3).
Plus, I believe Andrew Marr reads War and Peace every year, so there’s that.
hartal 03.07.11 at 6:14 pm
There was a sympathetic review in the Nation of the Net Delusion; the review was presented as a a criticism of your (Clay Shirky’s) work. New to the debate. Any comments on the Net Delusion?
chris 03.07.11 at 6:33 pm
Pete: never overestimate human beings’ objection to tyranny, especially when sufficiently many of them have vested interests in serving it.
The technology will work about as well as the humans responsible for making it work make it work. But what will the motivations of the relevant humans be? Internet libertarian fantasies of hacker-genius-rebels notwithstanding, there’s no reason the same person can’t be both a competent technician and a supporter of a police state. In which case they may very well tell the jackbooted thugs, accurately, what the hacker-genius-rebel has done lately and where to find him.
Clay Shirky 03.07.11 at 9:00 pm
@TomSlee (#5), that’s a fair cop; I don’t mean, in this piece, to be claiming #3, but rather to be noting that much of the debate so far has involved whether #1 can be ruled out or not, and it was interesting to me to read a “realist†view (now in quotes, for the obvious reason) that did not seem to rule out #1, despite what looks like pretty good evidence.
The argument about whether this is #2 or #3 (or #2.5a, “especially pernicious/easy to stop†or #2.5b, “ordinary threat, but hard to stopâ€) could be pursued in a couple of ways.
One would be to show that a) the kinds of synchronization and coordination required in the face of contemporary modes of repression are uniquely well supported by mobile phones, social networks, and low-cost publishing platforms, b) that these tools are better suited to those tasks than other communications tools (printing presses, terrestrial TV, the post office, etc), and that c) the State’s tools of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, and shutdown (essentially the limit case of censorship) are, on average, ineffective in the long term.
Another way would be to show that in these revolutions and uprisings, the battle between insurgents and regimes centered on access to these tools, and that the outcomes mattered for the conduct of the uprising, in mode, tempo, and outcome.
Here I’m just concerned with how the realist argument has or hasn’t changed in light of the events of Dec. 17 and after, but in the larger scheme of things, I believe…
– #1a provisionally. (I think in particular that the information cascade model, joined with your observation about cultural narrative, is an approximation of The Right Answer).
– #1b absolutely. The synchronization and coordination offered by these tools is more significant than that offered by either land-line phones, mobile phones without group communications infrastructure linking them, and anything having to do with (usually state controlled) TV, radio or the presses.
– #1c can’t yet be examined. These fights are always arms races — Solidarity would have been doomed against the Polish Government if all the strikers had were the tools of 1848. So we don’t yet know of the two successful revolutions were anomalies or precursors.
Argument #2, of course, will have to wait until the current wave of unrest has settled to see how the world’s autocrats fared.
Clay Shirky 03.07.11 at 9:25 pm
@Hartal, the Shorter Shirky on Net Delusion is one of the closing paragraphs in the piece here:
“The realist position is clearly correct in some casesâ€â€autocracies do adapt to new threats, and even an idea whose time has come doesn’t arrive everywhere all at once. In the short term, most of the world’s autocratic regimes will survive the current wave of protest, and in the long term we don’t yet know whether digital tools will help create a deep shift towards representative government, as the printing press did, or if they will prove to be relatively shallow and easily domesticated, as terrestrial television was.â€
As @TomSlee noted, above, the question of whether these tools have at least some political utility can be ruled out; even Morosov has now said that the utility of these tools is “a settled issue. I also think the “young people watching porn and playing games never become protesters†idea is settled.
The longer term question is whether we will see only Tunisia and Egypt use these tools before autocracies adapt, so in the Autocracy column, we get Status Quo Minus Two (that’s the television analogy), or if there is some reason to think that these kinds of tools make it permanently costly for autocracies either to either embrace and control, or to simply forgo, their use, thus changing the equilibrium state in ways that are adverse for many autocracies (the printing press analogy.)
And as for Morosov’s work being a reply to mine, it is in a way, as is the Nation review, but whenever I read about the scourge of cyberutopianism, of which I am evidently the #1 perpetrator, I wonder what these authors think a merely optimistic account of the internet’s effect on society would be like?
If there is no way to argue that the internet will, on balance, have positive effects for society, then “cyberutopian†just becomes a judgmental synonym for someone who thinks the internet may be a good thing, making that label a strategy not for hashing out differences in opinion but for ending the conversation altogether (similar to ahistorical uses of the word Luddite, in the opposite direction.)
(And @geo, we got used to no one reading Ovid, Chaucer, and Marvel, so we’ll pull through this as well.)
geo 03.07.11 at 9:45 pm
Dear Clay,
Have you gotten used to it?
geo
Dan 03.07.11 at 9:49 pm
Whether autocracies can get the upper hand is going to be determined partly by the technical means at their disposal.
China’s exports of surveillance equipment have already been getting intermittent attention, including from Naomi Klein.
I’m sure we’ll see much more of this in the next couple of years. If you were an oil-rich despot, wouldn’t you be splashing out on the best filters money can buy?
Dan 03.07.11 at 10:05 pm
and specifically to Russia…
Political blogging has been very big in Russia for a very long time. It’s a much more significant force than in any Western European country I know of. Granted, that’s partly a case of critical writers, unable to find positions in government or the mainstream media, turning to the internet instead.
Still, the sheer size of the ecosystem (and the fact that the political blends into the general-interest blogging) means that, should an issue ever come up that resonates widely enough, it really has potential to go somewhere.
I wouldn’t bet which direction it’d send things, though. The spark could equally come from a (Soros-funded) liberal or from an out-and-out racist. Both those poles (and many others) have serious networks behind them.
Global Voices is, of course, the place to look if you’re interested in what’s happening day by day.
Clay Shirky 03.07.11 at 10:43 pm
@Dan, Berkman had an excellent study of the Russian blogosphere, here:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/6427
@Geo, I’ve been used to people not reading Tolstoy all my life, as I grew up in the Midwest.
Andrei Soldatov 03.07.11 at 11:03 pm
Dear Clay, I wish to be equally optimistic about the notion that “people who don’t like discussing politics in their spare time can turn out in the Tahrir Square when the serious business starts.†However, the recent Russian experience shows no evidence of that – when people deprived of their apartments started to protest it never lead to anything political – they carefully avoided political demands. The same happened with environmental activists concerned over the Khimki forest – so far they are not ready to turn to more abstract agenda.
But what I think the most important point in your criticism is your notion that “the self-contradicting assertion that social media isn’t a threat and that smart autocrats are working ever harder to combat it, can, I think, be laid to rest. â€
In my opinion, the weakest point here is the assumption that Medvedev is the “smart autocrat†and particularly good in correctly assessing threats to political stability. There is no evidence to support it – so far there are no proofs Medvedev succeeded to deal with the crises (political, economic or in security) he faced during his presidential term.
geo 03.07.11 at 11:21 pm
Not many people read Tolstoy, Ovid, Chaucer, or Marvell in East Boston (the working-class neighborhood where I grew up), either. But if I thought those writers, and the rest of the great literature for which their names are standing in here, were no longer read by a lot of people in our culture, and recognized by most of the rest as something infinitely precious, supremely valuable, even if beyond their own reach — something like, say, understanding higher mathematics or attaining enlightenment or being deliriously happy in love one’s whole life or saving thousands of other people’s lives through many acts of sustained heroism — then no, I don’t think I could get over it — not as easily as you seem to have, at any rate. I suspect most people reading Crooked Timber couldn’t, either.
Do, I beseech you, think a little more about the matter, off-thread.
Clay Shirky 03.07.11 at 11:53 pm
@Andrei, the assessment that Medvedev is well-positioned to deal with the threat that social media poses is in the original piece — the point I’m making is that ‘inert media, furious reaction, smart autocrat’ is a “Pick Two†situation, and the author didn’t pick.
As for “No evidenceâ€, there wasn’t any evidence in Tunisia either, until there was. The state can make it very expensive to reveal preferences in all kinds of ways — this is not to say that an autocracy can’t keep those costs so high that political will for change _never_ synchronizes (for timeframes long enough to count as “never†in international politics — decades, say). It is to say that any given failure of the protestors to force change is evidence that the State has succeeded in seeing off the threat, but not that the population will always be quiescent.
Clay Shirky 03.08.11 at 12:05 am
@geo(rge), responding in a different comment, because of the length.
I think it is _precisely_ the case that Tolstoy, as the avatar of the class of creators you identify generally, is increasingly less “recognized by most of the rest as something infinitely precious, supremely valuable, even if beyond their own reach…†The broader thesis of the argument LRB is quoting from is that much of the current cultural anxiety about the internet is that, although the actual number of people reading Tolstoy is probably not falling much (as documented elsewhere on CT, Humanities majors, as a precent of college graduates, fell to something like 8% some time ago, and is now actually pretty steady), it is increasingly less the case that the people not reading Tolstoy can be convinced that they should feel bad about not reading Tolstoy et al., or that they should be impressed with people who do.
Put another way, appreciation of High European culture is becoming something like Civil War re-enactment — it’s enjoyable for the people who do it, but does not seem to be creating much curiosity or envy in the people who prefer doing other things with their free time.
This doesn’t much bother me (and I’m a card-carrying member of the affected group, in a “My beach reading is Richard Rorty†kind of way), and if it bothers you, I’ve got a feeling you’re going to be in for a pretty big disappointment as the actual behaviors of American citizens becomes increasingly visible online.
Brendan Taylor 03.08.11 at 1:20 am
I think the question of how social media will affect politics (in the future, on average) is silly. A bit like asking (in the early 20th) whether telephones will be good for representative government on average. Worse, because “social media†is such a broad term.
The way to ensure that social media will have positive effects is not to assert that it will (as so many social media theorists are wont to do), but to learn how to effectively use it in positive ways.
tomslee 03.08.11 at 1:32 am
Going back to Clay at #8. My own “realist†position has changed somewhat in the light of Egypt, and others with more clout (Evgeny Morozov) have, as you note, also acknowledged the role that social networking played. But to some extent the realist position has been as distorted as the “utopian†position, in that it’s not all “Internets? Oh Noes!†From what I can see the realist adjustment is not so dissimilar to the utopian adjustment following the crackdown in Iran.
On 1b: “that [digital/social media] tools are better suited to those tasks [coordination required in the face of repression] than other communications toolsâ€. We’ll have to see, of course, but it looks to me that Egypt was a special case in that it was open enough for Facebook to be very widely used among a young and rebellious demographic (and still very new, so not yet regulated).
The fact that all the major social networking platforms have become centralized and commercialized over the last three years makes them much easier for states to control, and yet (speculation) their architecture seems inevitable for a truly mainstream service. So either tools will be decentralized and not mainstream, or mainstream and not decentralized, and neither path looks very promising for large scale dissent (although both have their uses).
But then, I didn’t think the Irish cricket team had a chance against England, either.
Brendan Taylor 03.08.11 at 1:43 am
I think the question of how social media will affect politics (in the future, on average) is silly. A bit like asking (in the early 20th) whether telephones will be good for representative government on average. Worse, because “social media†is such a broad term.
The way to ensure that social media will have positive effects is not to assert that it will (which is all I ever hear of from social media theorists), but to learn how to effectively use it in positive ways.
geo 03.08.11 at 2:23 am
This doesn’t much bother me
That’s what I can’t get over.
gmoke 03.08.11 at 3:26 am
Well, I’ve read Ovid, Chaucer, Marvell, and Tolstoy – including the later political/religi
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