Twenty reasons why revolutions are everywhere

Paul Mason | 19:07 UK time, Saturday, 5 February 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/correspondents/paulmason/

We've had revolution in Tunisia, Egypt's Mubarak is teetering; in Yemen, Jordan and Syria suddenly protests have appeared. In Ireland young techno-savvy professionals are agitating for a "Second Republic"; in France the youth from banlieues battled police on the streets to defend the retirement rights of 60-year olds; in Greece striking and rioting have become a national pastime. And in Britain we've had riots and student occupations that changed the political mood.

What's going on? What's the wider social dynamic?

My editors yesterday asked me put some bullet points down for a discussion on the programme that then didn't happen but I am throwing them into the mix here, on the basis of various conversations with academics who study this and also the participants themselves.

At the heart of it all are young people, obviously; students; westernised; secularised. They use social media - as the mainstream media has now woken up to - but this obsession with reporting "they use twitter" is missing the point of what they use it for.

In so far as there are common threads to be found in these different situation, here's 20 things I have spotted:

1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future

2. ...with access to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and eg Yfrog so they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from parliamentary democracy to tyrrany.

3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes flammable.

4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies: Labourism, Islamism, Fianna Fail Catholicism etc... in fact hermetic ideologies of all forms are rejected.

5. Women very numerous as the backbone of movements. After twenty years of modernised labour markets and higher-education access the "archetypal" protest leader, organizer, facilitator, spokesperson now is an educated young woman.

6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy: it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before - and the quintessential experience of the 20th century - was the killing of dissent within movements, the channeling of movements and their bureaucratisaton.

7. Memes: "A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures." (Wikipedia) - so what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly "market tested" and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.

8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy - but the ad-hoc network has become easier to form. So if you "follow" somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt, or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these.

9. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to university-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher education will be not enough. In most of the world this is being funded by personal indebtedess - so people are making a rational judgement to go into debt so they will be better paid later. However the prospect of ten years of fiscal retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be poorer than their parents. And the effect has been like throwing a light switch; the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story, even if for individuals reality will be more complex, and not as bad as they expect.

10.This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive societies and emerging markets because - even where you get rapid economic growth - it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them.

11.To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection.

12.The weakness of organised labour means there's a changed relationship between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the organised workforce. The world looks more like 19th century Paris - heavy predomination of the "progressive" intelligentsia, intermixing with the slum-dwellers at numerous social interfaces (cabarets in the 19C, raves now); huge social fear of the excluded poor but also many rags to riches stories celebrated in the media (Fifty Cent etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture and respectability of organized labour is still there but, as in Egypt, they find themselves a "stage army" to be marched on and off the scene of history.

13.This leads to a loss of fear among the young radicals of any movement: they can pick and choose; there is no confrontation they can't retreat from. They can "have a day off" from protesting, occupying: whereas twith he old working-class based movements, their place in the ranks of battle was determined and they couldn't retreat once things started. You couldn't "have a day off" from the miners' strike if you lived in a pit village.

14.In addition to a day off, you can "mix and match": I have met people who do community organizing one day, and the next are on a flotilla to Gaza; then they pop up working for a think tank on sustainable energy; then they're writing a book about something completely different. I was astonished to find people I had interviewed inside the UCL occupation blogging from Tahrir Square this week.

15. People just know more than they used to. Dictatorships rely not just on the suppression of news but on the suppression of narratives and truth. More or less everything you need to know to make sense of the world is available as freely downloadable content on the internet: and it's not pre-digested for you by your teachers, parents, priests, imams. For example there are huge numbers of facts available to me now about the subjects I studied at university that were not known when I was there in the 1980s. Then whole academic terms would be spent disputing basic facts, or trying to research them. Now that is still true but the plane of reasoning can be more complex because people have an instant reference source for the undisputed premises of arguments. It's as if physics has been replaced by quantum physics, but in every discipline.

16.There is no Cold War, and the War on Terror is not as effective as the Cold War was in solidifying elites against change. Egypt is proving to be a worked example of this: though it is highly likely things will spiral out of control, post Mubarak - as in all the colour revolutons - the dire warnings of the US right that this will lead to Islamism are a "meme" that has not taken off. In fact you could make an interesting study of how the meme starts, blossoms and fades away over the space of 12 days. To be clear: I am not saying they are wrong - only that the fear of an Islamist takeover in Egypt has not been strong enough to swing the US presidency or the media behind Mubarak.

17. It is - with international pressure and some powerful NGOs - possible to bring down a repressive government without having to spend years in the jungle as a guerilla, or years in the urban underground: instead the oppositional youth - both in the west in repressive regimes like Tunisia/Egypt, and above all in China - live in a virtual undergrowth online and through digital comms networks. The internet is not key here - it is for example the things people swap by text message, the music they swap with each other etc: the hidden meanings in graffiti, street art etc which those in authority fail to spot.

18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various "revolutions" in their own lives as part of an "exodus" from oppression, not - as previous generations did - as a "diversion into the personal". While Foucault could tell Gilles Deleuze: "We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power",- that's probably changed.

19. As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the protest "meme" that is sweeping the world - if that premise is indeed true - is profoundly less radical on economics than the one that swept the world in the 1910s and 1920s; they don't seek a total overturn: they seek a moderation of excesses. However on politics the common theme is the dissolution of centralized power and the demand for "autonomy" and personal freedom in addition to formal democracy and an end to corrupt, family based power-elites.

20. Technology has - in many ways, from the contraceptive pill to the iPod, the blog and the CCTV camera - expanded the space and power of the individual.

Some complications....

a) all of the above are generalisations: and have to be read as such.

b) are these methods replicable by their opponents? Clearly up to a point they are. So the assumption in the global progressive movement that their values are aligned with that of the networked world may be wrong. Also we have yet to see what happens to all this social networking if a state ever seriously pulls the plug on the technology: switches the mobile network off, censors the internet, cyber-attacks the protesters.

c) China is the laboratory here, where the Internet Police are paid to go online and foment pro-government "memes" to counteract the oppositional ones. The Egyptian leftist blogger Arabawy.org says on his website that : "in a dictatorship, independent journalism by default becomes a form of activism, and the spread of information is essentially an act of agitation." But independent journalism is suppressed in many parts of the world.

d) what happens to this new, fluffy global zeitgeist when it runs up against the old-style hierarchical dictatorship in a death match, where the latter has about 300 Abrams tanks? We may be about to find out.

e) - and this one is troubling for mainstream politics: are we creating a complete disconnect between the values and language of the state and those of the educated young? Egypt is a classic example - if you hear the NDP officials there is a time-warped aspect to their language compared to that of young doctors and lawyers on the Square. But there are also examples in the UK: much of the political discourse - on both sides of the House of Commons - is treated by many young people as a barely intelligible "noise" - and this goes wider than just the protesters.

(For example: I'm finding it common among non-politicos these days that whenever you mention the "Big Society" there's a shrug and a suppressed laugh - yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks around Westminster, it's treated deadly seriously. Dissing the Big Society has quickly become a "meme" that crosses political tribal boundaries under the Coalition, yet most professional politicians are deaf to "memes" as the youth are to the contents of Hansard.)

That's it - as I say, these are just my thoughts on it all and not researched other than through experience: there are probably whole PhD theses about some of this so feel free to hit the comments.

Likewise if you think it is all balderdash, and if you are over 40 you may, vent your analog-era spleen below.

Shared symbolism of global youth unrest

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22976409?print=true

The language and the time zone changes but, from Turkey and Bulgaria to Brazil, the symbolism of protest is increasingly the same.

The Guy Fawkes masks, the erection of tent camps, the gas masks and helmets improvised in response to the use of tear gas as a means of collective punishment. The handwritten signs - scrawled in defiance of the state's power and the uniformity of the old, collective protests of yesteryear.

And the youthfulness of the core protesters.

In Gezi Park, Istanbul, before it was cleared by police, I saw school-age teenagers turn up regularly, each afternoon in small groups, colonise what was left of the lawn and start their homework.

The pictures coming out of Sao Paulo tell a similar story.

Bypassing the state

In both cities, people born in a post-ideological era are using what symbols they can to tell a story of being modern, urban and discontented: the national flag and the shirt of the local football team are memes common to both Istanbul and Sao Paulo.

But what is driving the discontent?

When I covered the unrest in Britain and southern Europe in 2011, the answer was clear. A whole generation of young people has seen economic promises cancelled: they will work probably until their late sixties, come out of university with lifetime-crippling debts.

And, as American students famously complained in 2009, the jobs they get when they leave university are often the same jobs they did, part-time, when they were at university. I've met qualified civil engineers in Greece whose job was waiting table; the fact that I met them on a riot tells you all you need to know.

With the Arab Spring, it seemed different - from the outside: these were fast-growing economies - in Libya's case spectacularly fast. But here you hit something that makes this wave of unrest unique: this is the first generation whose lives, and psychology, have been shaped by ready access to information technology and social media.

We know what this does: it makes state propaganda, censorship and a government-aligned mainstream media very easy to bypass. Egyptian state TV totally lost credibility during the first days of the uprisings against President Hosni Mubarak. This month, when Turkish TV stations tried to pull the same kind of non-reporting of unrest, they were bombarded with complaints.

"But," one politics professor told me, "most of the complaints were from people aged over 35. The youth don't watch TV, and in any case they have never believed what's on the news."

Social media makes it possible to organise protests fast, to react to repression fast, and to wage a quite successful propaganda war that makes the mainstream media and the spin machines of governments look foolish.

At the same time, it encourages a relatively "horizontal" structure to the protests themselves. Taksim Square in Istanbul was rare for having a 60-strong organising group; the protests in Sao Paulo have followed the more general pattern of several organising groups and an amorphous network of people who simply choose themselves where to turn up, what to write on their banners, and what to do.

As I arrived in Istanbul, some of my contacts in financial markets were mystified: why are they protesting when it is one of the fastest growing places on earth?

Get down to street level and the answer was clear. In the first place, many of the young educated people I spoke to complained that "the wealth is going to the corrupt elite"; many pointed out that despite being doctors, civil engineers, dotcom types etc, they could not afford a place to live.

'Perfectly ordinary people'

But then there was the bigger grievance: they felt the religious conservative government of the AK Party was impinging on their freedom. One Turkish fashion writer- no natural revolutionary - complained of "a growing, insidious hostility to the modern".

And they saw the heavy police action against the original tent camp in Gezi Park - an environmental protest - as a symbol of this unfreedom.

In Sao Paulo, the grievances are more clearly social: "Fewer stadiums, more hospitals", reads one banner. The rising price of transport, combined with the government's determination to prioritise infrastructure and sports stadia, are what this has come to be about.

But again, last week, it was an allegedly disproportionate police action - the arrest of a journalist for carrying vinegar (to dull the sting of tear gas), the shooting of four journalists with rubber bullets - which led to escalation.

In each case, the effects of police action are magnified by the ability of protesters to send images of brutality around the world immediately. And as a veteran of reporting more than 30 years' worth of "non-lethal" law enforcement, my impression is that the use of CS, baton rounds, water cannon is pushing police procedures all over the world towards "near lethal" levels that are increasingly unacceptable to protesters who go on the streets with no violent intent.

Though smaller by comparison, the Bulgarian protests that on Wednesday removed a controversial head of state security speak to the issues that unite those taking to the streets in many countries: it is not about poverty, say protesters, it is about corruption, the sham nature of democracy, clique politics and an elite prepared to grab the lion's share of the wealth generated by economic development.

In short, just as in 1989, when we found that people in East Europe preferred individual freedom to communism, today capitalism is becoming identified with the rule of unaccountable elites, lack of effective democratic accountability, and repressive policing.

And what the events of the last three years have shown is that perfectly ordinary people, with no ideological axe to grind, have found the means to resist it.

The trouble with trying to control the Internet

By Jeremy Au Yong, Deputy Editor, Singapolitics

 On Jan 18 last year, anyone who tried to do a search on Google would have found the company's multi-coloured logo blacked out. At the same time, over at Wikipedia, none of the millions of articles was accessible.

The pattern was repeated across some of the Web's biggest brands. Amazon, Imgur, Flickr, Pinterest, WordPress, Craigslist and many others had parts or all of their sites blacked out.

That was not an attack by hackers. It was a protest, the largest coordinated online protest to date.

The sites themselves were protesting against two pieces of proposed legislation in the United States - the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Protect IP Act (Pipa) - aimed at making it harder for websites to sell or distribute pirated material.

How Washington intended to do that, though, was to empower the authorities to get a court order requiring an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to take "technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site". The Bills would prevent sites from linking to any websites that are "dedicated to the theft of US property".

While many could agree with the desired intent, the problem was that it effectively amounted to trying to censor the Internet. Asking an ISP to block access to a site deemed rogue felt to many like the government exerting complete authority on the hitherto free-wheeling World Wide Web.

And while Sopa and Pipa remain outside the law books, the battle was neither the first nor the last time netizens and governments would face off over Internet regulation.

Recent years have seen a push by governments everywhere to try and rein in cyberspace.

In July last year, the Russian Parliament adopted a Bill that created an Internet blacklist, forcing site owners and ISPs to shut down those on the list. At the same time, the British Parliament debated a communications Bill that would give the police and intelligence services the power to compel ISPs to collect and retain information about users.

Last month, the US House of Representatives passed a Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (Cispa) which would allow security agencies to obtain information like e-mail addresses and Internet browser histories without first having to get a search warrant or a court subpoena.

Last week, Singapore had its own controversial Internet legislation.

On Tuesday, the Media Development Authority (MDA) announced a new online licensing scheme that would apply to news websites that fulfil two criteria: If they report an average of at least one article per week on Singapore's news and current affairs over a period of two months, and have at least 50,000 unique visitors from Singapore each month over a period of two months.

The individual licences have to be renewed every year and those required to apply for a licence would have to put up a performance bond of $50,000. The licence makes it clear that online news sites are expected to remove content that is in breach of MDA standards within 24 hours, once told to do so.

The new regulations are, said MDA, to ensure greater parity between the regulations that apply to the mainstream media and online media.

While the stated intention is reasonable, implementation will prove problematic. Despite attempts at such laws all around the world, there hasn't been one yet that properly balances sensible regulation with the Internet's organic nature.

At the heart of the issue is the seemingly limitless diversity found on the Internet. In the MDA's case, it will not always be easy to draw a line around what it considers "news websites", and many have issued calls online for clarity on the rules.

It is simple enough to say that a website carrying news that is run by a news organisation should be a "news website". MDA has also said views published on personal blogs do not amount to news reporting. But what about the rest? What about aggregators, forums, social networks, online classifieds and everything in between?

A site like Propertyguru, which serves primarily to sell real estate, could conceivably cross the thres-hold of having one news story about Singapore a week and more than 50,000 visitors a month. Should it be forced to get a licence? If not, why not?

How will MDA deal with platforms like Facebook and Twitter which do enable individuals or organisations to send regular updates about Singapore to an audience in excess of 50,000 a month?

The inability to predict every possible test case tends to leave lawmakers with the singular option of defining the laws as broadly as possible, while choosing to enforce it only on a small minority.

Because it cannot properly define all types of sites it wants to capture under Internet regulations, the Government ends up covering a whole bunch of sites it should otherwise have no interest in regulating.

And that is a sure-fire way to trigger a pushback from netizens. This was the case with Sopa, Pipa and the Russian Internet blacklist and certainly seems to apply to MDA as well.

Reactions to the new licence have been overwhelmingly negative so far, with many viewing it as an attempt to curtail expression online, even if the MDA has stressed it is not clamping down and content standards have not changed.

The doomsday scenarios that many online are discussing include forcing small-time operators who cannot put up $50,000 to shut down or simply blacking out sites that do not comply. It is not yet clear what would happen to sites that have their licences revoked. Will telcos be asked to block them?

Ultimately, it may very well be that MDA never had any intention to use the new licensing scheme to stifle free expression online, but because of the broad nature of Internet regulation, no one can tell for sure.

And that makes the regulations troubling.

Using Semicolons

Semicolons help you connect closely related ideas when a style mark stronger than a comma is needed. By using semicolons effectively, you can make your writing sound more sophisticated.

Connect closely related ideas

1.      Link two independent clauses to connect closely related ideas

• ·       Some people write with a word processor; others write with a pen or pencil.

2.      Link clauses connected by conjunctive adverbs or transitional phrases to connect closely related ideas

• ·       But however they choose to write, people are allowed to make their own decisions; as a result, many people swear by their writing methods.

3.      Link lists where the items contain commas to avoid confusion between list items

• ·       There are basically two ways to write: with a pen or pencil, which is inexpensive and easily accessible; or by computer and printer, which is more expensive but quick and neat.

4.      Link lengthy clauses or clauses with commas to avoid confusion between clauses

• ·       Some people write with a word processor, typewriter, or a computer; but others, for different reasons, choose to write with a pen or pencil.

Rules for Using Semicolons

A semicolon is most commonly used to link (in a single sentence) two independent clauses that are closely related in thought.

1.      When a semicolon is used to join two or more ideas (parts) in a sentence, those ideas are then given equal position or rank.

• ·       Some people write with a word processor; others write with a pen or pencil.

2.      Use a semicolon between two independent clauses that are connected by conjunctive adverbs or transitional phrases.

• ·       But however they choose to write, people are allowed to make their own decisions; as a result, many people swear by their writing methods.

3.      Use a semicolon between items in a list or series if any of the items contain commas.

• ·       There are basically two ways to write: with a pen or pencil, which is inexpensive and easily accessible; or by computer and printer, which is more expensive but quick and neat.

4.      Use a semicolon between independent clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction if the clauses are already punctuated with commas or if the clauses are lengthy.

• ·       Some people write with a word processor, typewriter, or a computer; but others, for different reasons, choose to write with a pen or pencil.

http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/Semicolons.html