| Recorded at | October 13, 2014 |
|---|---|
| Event | TEDGlobal 2014 |
| Duration (min:sec) | 16:01 |
| Video Type | TED Stage Talk |
| Words per minute | 167.01 slow |
| Readability (FK) | 44.5 difficult |
| Speaker | Zeynep Tufekci |
Official TED page for this talk
Synopsis
Today, a single email can launch a worldwide movement. But as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci suggests, even though online activism is easy to grow, it often doesn't last. Why? She compares modern movements -- Gezi, Ukraine, Hong Kong -- to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and uncovers a surprising benefit of organizing protest movements the way it happened before Twitter.
| 1 | 00:12 | So recently, we heard a lot about how social media helps empower protest, | ||
| 2 | 00:17 | and that's true, | ||
| 3 | 00:19 | but after more than a decade | ||
| 4 | 00:20 | of studying and participating in multiple social movements, | ||
| 5 | 00:24 | I've come to realize | ||
| 6 | 00:26 | that the way technology empowers social movements | ||
| 7 | 00:29 | can also paradoxically help weaken them. | ||
| 8 | 00:32 | This is not inevitable, but overcoming it requires diving deep | ||
| 9 | 00:36 | into what makes success possible over the long term. | ||
| 10 | 00:40 | And the lessons apply in multiple domains. | ||
| 11 | 00:43 | Now, take Turkey's Gezi Park protests, July 2013, | ||
| 12 | 00:47 | which I went back to study in the field. | ||
| 13 | 00:50 | Twitter was key to its organizing. | ||
| 14 | 00:52 | It was everywhere in the park -- well, along with a lot of tear gas. | ||
| 15 | 00:56 | It wasn't all high tech. | ||
| 16 | 00:58 | But the people in Turkey had already gotten used to the power of Twitter | ||
| 17 | 01:02 | because of an unfortunate incident about a year before | ||
| 18 | 01:05 | when military jets had bombed and killed | ||
| 19 | 01:09 | 34 Kurdish smugglers near the border region, | ||
| 20 | 01:13 | and Turkish media completely censored this news. | ||
| 21 | 01:18 | Editors sat in their newsrooms | ||
| 22 | 01:20 | and waited for the government to tell them what to do. | ||
| 23 | 01:23 | One frustrated journalist could not take this anymore. | ||
| 24 | 01:25 | He purchased his own plane ticket, | ||
| 25 | 01:27 | and went to the village where this had occurred. | ||
| 26 | 01:29 | And he was confronted by this scene: | ||
| 27 | 01:32 | a line of coffins coming down a hill, relatives wailing. | ||
| 28 | 01:38 | He later he told me how overwhelmed he felt, | ||
| 29 | 01:40 | and didn't know what to do, | ||
| 30 | 01:42 | so he took out his phone, | ||
| 31 | 01:44 | like any one of us might, | ||
| 32 | 01:45 | and snapped that picture and tweeted it out. | ||
| 33 | 01:49 | And voila, that picture went viral | ||
| 34 | 01:52 | and broke the censorship and forced mass media to cover it. | ||
| 35 | 01:57 | So when, a year later, Turkey's Gezi protests happened, | ||
| 36 | 02:00 | it started as a protest about a park being razed, | ||
| 37 | 02:03 | but became an anti-authoritarian protest. | ||
| 38 | 02:05 | It wasn't surprising that media also censored it, | ||
| 39 | 02:09 | but it got a little ridiculous at times. | ||
| 40 | 02:12 | When things were so intense, | ||
| 41 | 02:14 | when CNN International was broadcasting live from Istanbul, | ||
| 42 | 02:18 | CNN Turkey instead was broadcasting a documentary on penguins. | ||
| 43 | 02:25 | Now, I love penguin documentaries, but that wasn't the news of the day. | ||
| 44 | 02:29 | An angry viewer put his two screens together and snapped that picture, | ||
| 45 | 02:34 | and that one too went viral, | ||
| 46 | 02:36 | and since then, people call Turkish media the penguin media. (Laughter) | ||
| 47 | 02:40 | But this time, people knew what to do. | ||
| 48 | 02:42 | They just took out their phones and looked for actual news. | ||
| 49 | 02:45 | Better, they knew to go to the park and take pictures and participate | ||
| 50 | 02:50 | and share it more on social media. | ||
| 51 | 02:52 | Digital connectivity was used for everything from food to donations. | ||
| 52 | 02:58 | Everything was organized partially with the help of these new technologies. | ||
| 53 | 03:03 | And using Internet to mobilize and publicize protests | ||
| 54 | 03:08 | actually goes back a long way. | ||
| 55 | 03:10 | Remember the Zapatistas, | ||
| 56 | 03:12 | the peasant uprising in the southern Chiapas region of Mexico | ||
| 57 | 03:17 | led by the masked, pipe-smoking, charismatic Subcomandante Marcos? | ||
| 58 | 03:22 | That was probably the first movement | ||
| 59 | 03:24 | that got global attention thanks to the Internet. | ||
| 60 | 03:27 | Or consider Seattle '99, | ||
| 61 | 03:29 | when a multinational grassroots effort brought global attention | ||
| 62 | 03:34 | to what was then an obscure organization, the World Trade Organization, | ||
| 63 | 03:38 | by also utilizing these digital technologies to help them organize. | ||
| 64 | 03:43 | And more recently, movement after movement | ||
| 65 | 03:45 | has shaken country after country: | ||
| 66 | 03:48 | the Arab uprisings from Bahrain to Tunisia to Egypt and more; | ||
| 67 | 03:53 | indignados in Spain, Italy, Greece; the Gezi Park protests; | ||
| 68 | 03:58 | Taiwan; Euromaidan in Ukraine; Hong Kong. | ||
| 69 | 04:02 | And think of more recent initiatives, like the #BringBackOurGirls hashtags. | ||
| 70 | 04:07 | Nowadays, a network of tweets can unleash a global awareness campaign. | ||
| 71 | 04:14 | A Facebook page can become the hub of a massive mobilization. | ||
| 72 | 04:18 | Amazing. | ||
| 73 | 04:20 | But think of the moments I just mentioned. | ||
| 74 | 04:24 | The achievements they were able to have, their outcomes, | ||
| 75 | 04:29 | are not really proportional to the size and energy they inspired. | ||
| 76 | 04:34 | The hopes they rightfully raised are not really matched | ||
| 77 | 04:38 | by what they were able to have as a result in the end. | ||
| 78 | 04:42 | And this raises a question: | ||
| 79 | 04:46 | As digital technology makes things easier for movements, | ||
| 80 | 04:50 | why haven't successful outcomes become more likely as well? | ||
| 81 | 04:54 | In embracing digital platforms for activism and politics, | ||
| 82 | 05:00 | are we overlooking some of the benefits of doing things the hard way? | ||
| 83 | 05:04 | Now, I believe so. | ||
| 84 | 05:05 | I believe that the rule of thumb is: | ||
| 85 | 05:07 | Easier to mobilize does not always mean easier to achieve gains. | ||
| 86 | 05:12 | Now, to be clear, | ||
| 87 | 05:15 | technology does empower in multiple ways. | ||
| 88 | 05:18 | It's very powerful. | ||
| 89 | 05:19 | In Turkey, I watched four young college students | ||
| 90 | 05:23 | organize a countrywide citizen journalism network called 140Journos | ||
| 91 | 05:28 | that became the central hub for uncensored news in the country. | ||
| 92 | 05:32 | In Egypt, I saw another four young people use digital connectivity | ||
| 93 | 05:37 | to organize the supplies and logistics for 10 field hospitals, | ||
| 94 | 05:41 | very large operations, | ||
| 95 | 05:43 | during massive clashes near Tahrir Square in 2011. | ||
| 96 | 05:49 | And I asked the founder of this effort, called Tahrir Supplies, | ||
| 97 | 05:53 | how long it took him to go from when he had the idea to when he got started. | ||
| 98 | 05:59 | "Five minutes," he said. Five minutes. | ||
| 99 | 06:01 | And he had no training or background in logistics. | ||
| 100 | 06:04 | Or think of the Occupy movement which rocked the world in 2011. | ||
| 101 | 06:07 | It started with a single email | ||
| 102 | 06:09 | from a magazine, Adbusters, to 90,000 subscribers in its list. | ||
| 103 | 06:15 | About two months after that first email, | ||
| 104 | 06:18 | there were in the United States 600 ongoing occupations and protests. | ||
| 105 | 06:24 | Less than one month after the first physical occupation in Zuccotti Park, | ||
| 106 | 06:30 | a global protest was held in about 82 countries, 950 cities. | ||
| 107 | 06:37 | It was one of the largest global protests ever organized. | ||
| 108 | 06:39 | Now, compare that to what the Civil Rights Movement had to do in 1955 Alabama | ||
| 109 | 06:46 | to protest the racially segregated bus system, which they wanted to boycott. | ||
| 110 | 06:52 | They'd been preparing for many years | ||
| 111 | 06:54 | and decided it was time to swing into action | ||
| 112 | 06:56 | after Rosa Parks was arrested. | ||
| 113 | 06:58 | But how do you get the word out -- | ||
| 114 | 07:00 | tomorrow we're going to start the boycott -- | ||
| 115 | 07:02 | when you don't have Facebook, texting, Twitter, none of that? | ||
| 116 | 07:08 | So they had to mimeograph 52,000 leaflets | ||
| 117 | 07:13 | by sneaking into a university duplicating room | ||
| 118 | 07:16 | and working all night, secretly. | ||
| 119 | 07:18 | They then used the 68 African-American organizations | ||
| 120 | 07:22 | that criss-crossed the city to distribute those leaflets by hand. | ||
| 121 | 07:26 | And the logistical tasks were daunting, because these were poor people. | ||
| 122 | 07:31 | They had to get to work, boycott or no, | ||
| 123 | 07:33 | so a massive carpool was organized, | ||
| 124 | 07:36 | again by meeting. | ||
| 125 | 07:38 | No texting, no Twitter, no Facebook. | ||
| 126 | 07:40 | They had to meet almost all the time to keep this carpool going. | ||
| 127 | 07:44 | Today, it would be so much easier. | ||
| 128 | 07:46 | We could create a database, available rides and what rides you need, | ||
| 129 | 07:51 | have the database coordinate, and use texting. | ||
| 130 | 07:54 | We wouldn't have to meet all that much. | ||
| 131 | 07:57 | But again, consider this: | ||
| 132 | 07:59 | the Civil Rights Movement in the United States | ||
| 133 | 08:02 | navigated a minefield of political dangers, | ||
| 134 | 08:07 | faced repression and overcame, won major policy concessions, | ||
| 135 | 08:12 | navigated and innovated through risks. | ||
| 136 | 08:16 | In contrast, three years after Occupy sparked | ||
| 137 | 08:19 | that global conversation about inequality, | ||
| 138 | 08:22 | the policies that fueled it are still in place. | ||
| 139 | 08:25 | Europe was also rocked by anti-austerity protests, | ||
| 140 | 08:29 | but the continent didn't shift its direction. | ||
| 141 | 08:33 | In embracing these technologies, | ||
| 142 | 08:36 | are we overlooking some of the benefits of slow and sustained? | ||
| 143 | 08:42 | To understand this, | ||
| 144 | 08:44 | I went back to Turkey about a year after the Gezi protests | ||
| 145 | 08:47 | and I interviewed a range of people, | ||
| 146 | 08:49 | from activists to politicians, | ||
| 147 | 08:53 | from both the ruling party and the opposition party and movements. | ||
| 148 | 08:58 | I found that the Gezi protesters were despairing. | ||
| 149 | 09:01 | They were frustrated, | ||
| 150 | 09:03 | and they had achieved much less than what they had hoped for. | ||
| 151 | 09:06 | This echoed what I'd been hearing around the world | ||
| 152 | 09:09 | from many other protesters that I'm in touch with. | ||
| 153 | 09:12 | And I've come to realize that part of the problem | ||
| 154 | 09:15 | is that today's protests have become a bit like climbing Mt. Everest | ||
| 155 | 09:21 | with the help of 60 Sherpas, | ||
| 156 | 09:23 | and the Internet is our Sherpa. | ||
| 157 | 09:26 | What we're doing is taking the fast routes | ||
| 158 | 09:30 | and not replacing the benefits of the slower work. | ||
| 159 | 09:34 | Because, you see, | ||
| 160 | 09:35 | the kind of work that went into organizing | ||
| 161 | 09:38 | all those daunting, tedious logistical tasks | ||
| 162 | 09:41 | did not just take care of those tasks, | ||
| 163 | 09:44 | they also created the kind of organization that could think together collectively | ||
| 164 | 09:48 | and make hard decisions together, | ||
| 165 | 09:51 | create consensus and innovate, and maybe even more crucially, | ||
| 166 | 09:55 | keep going together through differences. | ||
| 167 | 09:58 | So when you see this March on Washington in 1963, | ||
| 168 | 10:03 | when you look at that picture, | ||
| 169 | 10:05 | where this is the march where Martin Luther King gave his famous | ||
| 170 | 10:08 | "I have a dream" speech, 1963, | ||
| 171 | 10:11 | you don't just see a march and you don't just hear a powerful speech, | ||
| 172 | 10:15 | you also see the painstaking, long-term work that can put on that march. | ||
| 173 | 10:21 | And if you're in power, | ||
| 174 | 10:22 | you realize you have to take the capacity signaled by that march, | ||
| 175 | 10:27 | not just the march, but the capacity signaled by that march, seriously. | ||
| 176 | 10:31 | In contrast, when you look at Occupy's global marches | ||
| 177 | 10:35 | that were organized in two weeks, | ||
| 178 | 10:37 | you see a lot of discontent, | ||
| 179 | 10:38 | but you don't necessarily see teeth that can bite over the long term. | ||
| 180 | 10:43 | And crucially, the Civil Rights Movement innovated tactically | ||
| 181 | 10:47 | from boycotts to lunch counter sit-ins to pickets to marches to freedom rides. | ||
| 182 | 10:54 | Today's movements scale up very quickly without the organizational base | ||
| 183 | 10:58 | that can see them through the challenges. | ||
| 184 | 11:00 | They feel a little like startups that got very big | ||
| 185 | 11:04 | without knowing what to do next, | ||
| 186 | 11:06 | and they rarely manage to shift tactically | ||
| 187 | 11:09 | because they don't have the depth of capacity | ||
| 188 | 11:11 | to weather such transitions. | ||
| 189 | 11:14 | Now, I want to be clear: The magic is not in the mimeograph. | ||
| 190 | 11:19 | It's in that capacity to work together, think together collectively, | ||
| 191 | 11:25 | which can only be built over time with a lot of work. | ||
| 192 | 11:28 | To understand all this, | ||
| 193 | 11:30 | I interviewed a top official from the ruling party in Turkey, | ||
| 194 | 11:34 | and I ask him, "How do you do it?" | ||
| 195 | 11:36 | They too use digital technology extensively, so that's not it. | ||
| 196 | 11:40 | So what's the secret? | ||
| 197 | 11:42 | Well, he told me. | ||
| 198 | 11:43 | He said the key is he never took sugar with his tea. | ||
| 199 | 11:50 | I said, what has that got to do with anything? | ||
| 200 | 11:53 | Well, he said, his party starts getting ready for the next election | ||
| 201 | 11:56 | the day after the last one, | ||
| 202 | 11:58 | and he spends all day every day meeting with voters in their homes, | ||
| 203 | 12:02 | in their wedding parties, circumcision ceremonies, | ||
| 204 | 12:04 | and then he meets with his colleagues to compare notes. | ||
| 205 | 12:07 | With that many meetings every day, with tea offered at every one of them, | ||
| 206 | 12:12 | which he could not refuse, because that would be rude, | ||
| 207 | 12:15 | he could not take even one cube of sugar per cup of tea, | ||
| 208 | 12:20 | because that would be many kilos of sugar, he can't even calculate how many kilos, | ||
| 209 | 12:24 | and at that point I realized why he was speaking so fast. | ||
| 210 | 12:27 | We had met in the afternoon, and he was already way over-caffeinated. | ||
| 211 | 12:32 | But his party won two major elections | ||
| 212 | 12:37 | within a year of the Gezi protests with comfortable margins. | ||
| 213 | 12:40 | To be sure, governments have different resources to bring to the table. | ||
| 214 | 12:43 | It's not the same game, but the differences are instructive. | ||
| 215 | 12:47 | And like all such stories, this is not a story just of technology. | ||
| 216 | 12:51 | It's what technology allows us to do converging with what we want to do. | ||
| 217 | 12:56 | Today's social movements want to operate informally. | ||
| 218 | 12:59 | They do not want institutional leadership. | ||
| 219 | 13:02 | They want to stay out of politics because they fear corruption and cooptation. | ||
| 220 | 13:07 | They have a point. | ||
| 221 | 13:08 | Modern representative democracies are being strangled in many countries | ||
| 222 | 13:11 | by powerful interests. | ||
| 223 | 13:14 | But operating this way makes it hard for them | ||
| 224 | 13:17 | to sustain over the long term and exert leverage over the system, | ||
| 225 | 13:21 | which leads to frustrated protesters dropping out, | ||
| 226 | 13:24 | and even more corrupt politics. | ||
| 227 | 13:27 | And politics and democracy without an effective challenge hobbles, | ||
| 228 | 13:32 | because the causes that have inspired the modern recent movements are crucial. | ||
| 229 | 13:39 | Climate change is barreling towards us. | ||
| 230 | 13:42 | Inequality is stifling human growth and potential and economies. | ||
| 231 | 13:47 | Authoritarianism is choking many countries. | ||
| 232 | 13:49 | We need movements to be more effective. | ||
| 233 | 13:52 | Now, some people have argued that the problem is | ||
| 234 | 13:55 | today's movements are not formed of people who take as many risks as before, | ||
| 235 | 14:01 | and that is not true. | ||
| 236 | 14:03 | From Gezi to Tahrir to elsewhere, | ||
| 237 | 14:06 | I've seen people put their lives and livelihoods on the line. | ||
| 238 | 14:09 | It's also not true, as Malcolm Gladwell claimed, | ||
| 239 | 14:12 | that today's protesters form weaker virtual ties. | ||
| 240 | 14:14 | No, they come to these protests, just like before, | ||
| 241 | 14:18 | with their friends, existing networks, | ||
| 242 | 14:21 | and sometimes they do make new friends for life. | ||
| 243 | 14:23 | I still see the friends that I made | ||
| 244 | 14:26 | in those Zapatista-convened global protests more than a decade ago, | ||
| 245 | 14:29 | and the bonds between strangers are not worthless. | ||
| 246 | 14:32 | When I got tear-gassed in Gezi, | ||
| 247 | 14:34 | people I didn't know helped me and one another instead of running away. | ||
| 248 | 14:40 | In Tahrir, I saw people, protesters, | ||
| 249 | 14:43 | working really hard to keep each other safe and protected. | ||
| 250 | 14:46 | And digital awareness-raising is great, | ||
| 251 | 14:48 | because changing minds is the bedrock of changing politics. | ||
| 252 | 14:51 | But movements today have to move beyond participation at great scale very fast | ||
| 253 | 14:59 | and figure out how to think together collectively, | ||
| 254 | 15:02 | develop strong policy proposals, create consensus, | ||
| 255 | 15:06 | figure out the political steps and relate them to leverage, | ||
| 256 | 15:10 | because all these good intentions and bravery and sacrifice by itself | ||
| 257 | 15:13 | are not going to be enough. | ||
| 258 | 15:15 | And there are many efforts. | ||
| 259 | 15:17 | In New Zealand, a group of young people are developing a platform called Loomio | ||
| 260 | 15:21 | for participatory decision making at scale. | ||
| 261 | 15:24 | In Turkey, 140Journos are holding hack-a-thons | ||
| 262 | 15:28 | so that they support communities as well as citizen journalism. | ||
| 263 | 15:32 | In Argentina, an open-source platform called DemocracyOS | ||
| 264 | 15:35 | is bringing participation to parliaments and political parties. | ||
| 265 | 15:39 | These are all great, and we need more, | ||
| 266 | 15:42 | but the answer won't just be better online decision-making, | ||
| 267 | 15:46 | because to update democracy, we are going to need to innovate at every level, | ||
| 268 | 15:52 | from the organizational to the political to the social. | ||
| 269 | 15:56 | Because to succeed over the long term, | ||
| 270 | 16:00 | sometimes you do need tea without sugar | ||
| 271 | 16:03 | along with your Twitter. | ||
| 272 | 16:04 | Thank you. | ||
| 273 | 16:06 | (Applause) |