Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

Future revolutionary movements, as we’ve said, will be more transnational and inclusive than many (but not all) previous revolutions, extending well beyond traditional boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, language, gender and religion. During a trip to Tunisia in 2011, we met with activists from the Jasmine Revolution near the first anniversary of their successful uprising, and when we asked why their revolution set off a chain of others in rapid succession, they acknowledged similar grievances and then pointed to their regional networks. They could build relationships easily with strangers who spoke Arabic and lived in the Middle East, they said, not just because of shared language and culture, but because they often had friends in common. Extensive social connections that already existed were activated and accelerated as revolutionary spirit swept the region, resulting in the exchange of strategies, tools, money and moral support.

But even these large networks had their limit, which was roughly the perimeter of the Arab world. In the future, this won’t be true. Sophisticated translation software, which can handle regional accents and is done simultaneously, will enable an Arabic-speaking activist in Morocco to coordinate in real time with an activist in Bangkok who speaks only Thai. Innovative voice translation, streaming gestural interfaces and, eventually, holographic projections will open the floodgates to the formation of much broader virtual networks than anyone has today. There are an untold number of cultural similarities that have never been fully explored because of the difficulty of communication; in a future revolutionary setting, seemingly random connections between distant populations or people will entail knowledge transfer, outsourcing certain types of duties and amplifying the movement’s message in a new and unexpected way.

For some, communication technologies will allow them to engage without risk, and to feel the rewards of activism without putting in much effort. It’s fairly easy to re-tweet an antigovernment slogan or share a video of violent police brutality from a safe distance, especially when compared with the risks taken by whoever shot the video. People not directly involved in the movement can feel a genuine sense of empowerment by doing something, anything, and online platforms offer them a way to chip in and feel valuable, even if what they’re doing has little effect on the ground. For people inside a country where there is some risk of being caught by their tech-savvy regime, however, virtual courage does carry risks.

It’s certainly possible for a teenager in Chicago or Tokyo to contribute in some significant way to a campaign across the world. After Egypt’s external communications capabilities were cut by the Mubarak regime, many observers turned to a Twitter account started by a twenty-something graduate student in Los Angeles for what they perceived to be credible information; the student, John Scott-Railton, posted updates about the protests gleaned from Egyptian sources limited to landline phones. For a time, his @Jan25voices Twitter handle was a major conduit of information about the uprising—this despite his not being a journalist or a fluent Arabic speaker. But while Scott-Railton was able to garner some popular attention for his tweets, there are limits to what someone with his profile could achieve in terms of influencing policy-makers.

Perhaps a more important example is Andy Carvin, who curated one of the most important streams of information in both the Egyptian and Libyan revolutions, with tens of thousands of followers and countless journalists globally who knew that Carvin himself (a senior NPR strategist) had the journalistic standards of a professional reporter and so would tweet or re-tweet only things he could verify. He became a one-man filter of enormous influence, cultivating and vetting sources.

Ultimately, though, however talented the Andy Carvins or John Scott-Railtons of the world are, the hard work of revolutionary movements is done on the ground, by the people inside a country willing to take to the streets. You cannot storm an interior ministry by mobile phone.

The opportunity for virtual courage will shape how protesters themselves operate. Global social-media platforms will give potential activists and dissidents confidence in the belief that they have an audience, whether or not this is true. An organization might overestimate the value of online support, and in doing so neglect its other, more difficult priorities that would actually give it an edge, like persuading regime administrators to defect. The presence of a large virtual network will encourage some groups to take more risks, even if escalation isn’t warranted. Full of confidence and courage from the virtual world, a given opposition force will launch campaigns that are immature or ill-advised, the inevitable end result of the breaking down of traditional control mechanisms around revolutionary movements. These trends in virtual courage, for both outsiders and organizers, will have to play out for some time before opposition groups learn how to utilize them effectively.

In all, increased public awareness of revolutions and campaigns around the world will give rise to a culture of revolutionary helpers. There will be a wide range of them: some useful, some distracting and some even dangerous. We’ll see smart engineers developing applications and security tools to share with dissidents, and vocal Internet aggregators will use the volume of the crowd to apply pressure and demand attention. No doubt some people will create specialized devices to smuggle into countries with protest movements, handsets that come loaded with encrypted apps that allow users to publish information (texts, photos, videos) without leaving any record on the phone—without a record, a phone contains no evidence of a crime and is thus useless and anonymous to any security thug who finds it.

We’ll also see a wave of revolution tourists, people who spend all day crawling the web for online protests to join and help amplify just for the thrill of it. Such actors might help sustain momentum by disseminating content, but they’ll be uncontrollable, without filter or oversight, and their narratives might skew expectations for people on the ground taking risks. Finding ways to utilize new participants while exerting quality control and effectively managing expectations will be the key task for effective opposition leaders, who will understand how much else is required for a successful revolution.

… But Harder to

Finish

The rapid proliferation of revolutionary movements across newly connected societies ultimately will not be as threatening to established governments as some observers predict, because for all that communication technologies can do to transform revolutions in ways that tip the balance in favor of the people, there are critical elements of change that these tools cannot effect. Principal among them is the creation of first-rate leaders, individuals who can keep the opposition intact during tough times, negotiate with a government if it opts for reform, or run for office, win and deliver on what the people want if a dictator flees. Technology has nothing to do with whether an individual has the attributes to fill the role of statesman.

In recent years, we’ve seen how large numbers of young people, armed with little more than mobile phones, can fuel revolutions that challenge decades of authority and control, hastening a process that has historically taken years. It’s now clear how technology platforms can play a prominent role in toppling dictators when used resourcefully. Given the range of outcomes possible—brutal crackdown, regime change, civil war, transition to democracy—it’s also clear that it’s the people who make or break revolutions, not the tools they use. Traditional components of civil society will become even more important as online crowds swarm the virtual public square, because while some of the newly involved participants (like activist engineers) will be highly relevant and influential, many more, as we’ve said, will be little more than amplifiers and noise-generators along for the ride.