Geek Heresy (8 page)

The goal of these and other Web-based appeals was a physical protest, a “Day of Rage” on March 11, 2011. But, as Al-Rasheed wrote, “things were quiet” on the day itself: “Security forces spread through every corner and street. An unannounced curfew loomed over Riyadh and Jeddah.” No protests worthy of international attention materialized.

Al-Rasheed argued that the Saudi monarchy has starved civil society in the kingdom for decades. There are no trade unions, no political parties, no youth associations, and no women’s organizations. Demonstrations themselves are forbidden outright. As a result, grassroots organizational capacity is stunted. This is in direct contrast to Egypt, for example, where trade unions, nongovernmental organizations, and the Muslim Brotherhood all simmered as potent political forces despite Mubarak’s oppression.
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The absence of protest is a non-event, so it goes unreported by mainstream news organizations. But an accurate understanding of social media’s role in revolution must account for the stillborn protests
of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia as much as for the successful uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

Did America Have a Lantern Revolution?

Combining the lessons of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, we come to an undeniable conclusion: Social media is neither necessary nor sufficient for revolution. Claims of social media revolutions commit the classic conflation of correlation and cause. To say that the Arab Spring was a Facebook revolution is like calling the events of 1775 in America a lantern revolution thanks to Paul Revere: “One, if by land, and two, if by sea.”

Actually, the tale of Revere’s lanterns is itself the stuff of myth. In reality, the lantern signal was just a backup plan in case Revere was arrested and unable to sound the alarm.
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What this story actually illustrates is that revolutionaries are contingency planners who exploit every tool at their disposal. In a telling interview about his involvement in Egypt, Ghonim noted, “They shut down Facebook. But, I had a backup plan. I used Google Groups to send a mass-mail campaign.”
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Presumably, had email also been blocked, he’d have resorted to phone calls, paper notes, and word of mouth – using the same communication tools as the 80 percent of Egyptians who have never been online. Of course, for Ghonim, “technology played a great role” – it would have been much harder for him to organize door to door. But it seems unlikely that the absence of Facebook would have prevented his activism altogether, or could have kept the rest of the country mute. Taking the broader view, Facebook was a tool of convenience for angry activists spreading the word by every available channel.

A few people tried to debunk social media’s revolutionary powers. For example, just as Mubarak’s regime was crumbling, Morozov’s book
The Net Delusion
was released.
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Though Morozov couldn’t have known of Egypt’s fate while he was writing the book, he provided some of the most insightful commentary on technology’s role in Middle Eastern uprisings. His first chapter mocks the breathless hype around a supposed Twitter revolution in 2009 Iran – hype that led Hillary Clinton’s State
Department to ask Twitter to postpone routine maintenance during the height of protests. (Twitter complied, and Clay Shirky wrote, “This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.”
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) Morozov, however, cites low numbers of actual Twitter users in Iran at the time (perhaps all of sixty) and Iranian denials that Twitter had much of a role in organizing protests. He argued that Twitter was less an effective tool of protest and more a way for the outside world to eavesdrop on the events. For him, the social media narrative recalled Cold War ideas that capitalist technology would triumph over communist inefficiency, as if people in the Middle East couldn’t have rebelled on their own without the gifts of American entrepreneurs. In the end, whatever was tweeted, there was no Twitter revolution in Iran.

Also among the skeptics was Malcolm Gladwell, who had previously picked a fight with Shirky over the latter’s rhapsodies about social media. Gladwell pointed out that in the 1980s, East Germans barely had access to phones, much less the Internet, and they still organized, protested, and brought down the Berlin Wall. Of the Arab Spring revolutions, Gladwell wrote, “Surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.”
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As the critics gained momentum, social media proponents fought back. Most were chastened but insisted that social media still mattered in some important way. One reporter writing for CNN hedged, “Yes, of course, technology alone doesn’t make revolutions. . . . But that doesn’t mean social media cannot provide wavering revolutionaries with vital aid and comfort.”
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Amplification’s Eternal Recurrence

What none of the commentators were providing, though, was a good framework for understanding technology’s role, and that’s where the Law of Amplification comes in. It explains how social media
contributed to successful revolutions in some countries but not others, and how it can simultaneously be a supporting factor without being a primary cause.

In Tunisia and Egypt, citizen frustration and organized groups existed long before social media. Mubarak was in power for nearly thirty years, overseeing a stagnant economy under a “democracy” that had no one fooled. That frustration coalesced within existing civil society organizations and found amplified expression on Facebook. Leaders of the rebellion saw their organizing power extended by social media. Overall, technology probably accelerated the pace of revolution.

In Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, civil society was crippled, so no amount of Facebook organizing made a difference. Technology doesn’t amplify human forces that aren’t there.

Even Ghonim later acknowledged, “I am no hero. . . . The heroes were the ones who were in the streets, those who got beaten up, those who got arrested and put their lives in danger.”
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There is no protest without citizen frustration. There is no rebellion without a sacrifice of personal safety.

Amplification as an idea is hardly novel. My colleague Jonathan Donner, an expert on mobile phones in the developing world, pointed me to a 1970 paper on the “knowledge gap hypothesis,” in which the authors reported that public-service messaging delivered through mass media was better absorbed by wealthier, more educated households.
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Lewis Mumford, a prominent twentieth-century technology critic who was part skeptic and part contextualist, wrote a two-volume work called
The Myth of the Machine
, in which he mentions in passing that technology “supported and enlarged the capacities for human expression.”
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And Philip Agre, another computer-scientist-turned-technology-analyst, wrote prescient articles about the Internet in politics. “The Internet changes nothing on its own,” he told us, “but it can amplify existing forces.”
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But if amplification isn’t new, it is completely underappreciated.

CHAPTER 3

Geek Myths Debunked

Dispelling Misguided Beliefs About Technology

I
n 1981 when I turned twelve, my parents gave me a Sony Walkman as a birthday present. The casing, made of brushed aluminum and a deep maroon hard plastic, glimmered as I took it out of the packaging. It was a second-generation model – light, sleek, and not much bigger than the cassette tapes it played. The headphone earbuds fit snugly in my ears, and the grooved teeth on the volume control massaged my fingertips.

That day, like hundreds of thousands of other Walkman owners, I discovered that I couldn’t be without music. My biggest life concern became rationing a stash of batteries. I wanted nothing more than to spend every minute of every waking hour listening to Journey and Olivia Newton John – I still blame that Walkman for my unrehabilitated love of 1980s top-40 hits.

The Walkman poses a potential challenge to the Law of Amplification. It seems at first to be a technology that gave birth to a new human desire. Few people imagined before 1979 that they would want to live in their very own cocoons of music. Today, personal music seems to be a permanent feature of civilization. Cassette tapes have become obsolete, but headphones – and the devices they plug into – have proliferated. Didn’t the Walkman change global culture? Didn’t it create
something fundamentally new that wasn’t there before? Didn’t the technology transform us in a way that we didn’t previously imagine?

There’s no denying that people act differently when new technologies appear. We certainly didn’t walk around with tiny speakers in our ears prior to the 1980s. But that doesn’t mean these new behaviors were out-of-the-blue creations of the technology, per se.

For reasons that are still not fully understood, human beings are fascinated by music. Weddings have wedding marches. Funerals have dirges. Virtuosity has been celebrated as far back as Orpheus and his lyre, and ethnomusicologists have found music in every culture, including those that ostensibly forbid it. Some traditions of Islam ban recreational music, but the Muslim call to prayer is undeniably musical. So, give people an easy way to listen to tunes – especially those of their own choosing – and it’s no wonder that thirty years after the Walkman, iPods and MP3 players are still going strong. In other words, the Walkman and its descendants have allowed people to do more of something they’ve always wanted to do, even if that desire was never before expressed. You could call it a latent desire.

Alternative explanations hold that the Walkman caused new human behaviors. The business world uses the Walkman as a case study of a shrewd business. They say it created a new market.
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Some sociologists argue that the Walkman changes our environment. It reorganizes space and time, what is private and what is public.
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And as the new owner of a Walkman, I certainly felt the device beckon to me, compelling me to listen.

But statements such as “the Walkman increased sales of cassette tapes,” and “the Walkman caused a portable music revolution,” are shorthand for a more complex process: People have always enjoyed music, and they have personal preferences for when to listen and what to listen to. Sony leaders recognized this desire and built a low-cost, portable device to meet it. Consumers bought hundreds of thousands of units and adapted their listening habits. Other companies entered the market, expanding usage further. Throughout, it’s people taking action. The device is inanimate.

It’s important to keep the real explanation straight even as we use the shorthand. If we don’t, we could mistakenly believe that arbitrary
behaviors can be created with the right technology. We’d be tempted by the promise of some new gadget, to, say, try to solve the problem of substandard education in America.

But technologies don’t cause arbitrary behaviors. It would be easy, for example, to design high-tech clothes that make us itchy. Imagine the “Itchman” shirt made of abrasive nano-synthetic textiles and embedded with electronics that heighten static cling. If clever businesses could really create demand at will, or if technologies could cause any desired change in behavior, we could expect a smart entrepreneur to open up a worldwide market for the Itchman.
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With today’s comfort-focused materialism, though, the Itchman won’t catch on anytime soon. Perhaps if we returned to a culture of penance like that of medieval times, when hairshirts were worn for repentance and mourning, we might see the rise of sackcloth fashion.

When technologies go mainstream, it’s because they help scratch itches that people already have, not because they create new itches that people don’t want.

FOMO and Other Four-Letter Words

Latent desires also play a role in how we use technology to connect with other people. In the age of the smartphone, many of us go out with friends and ignore each other while we tap on our gadgets. Sherry Turkle, an MIT sociologist who has studied the relationship between people and their devices for three decades, calls this being “alone together.”
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But, again, if we all seek companionship, and technology amplifies our desires, how could we be growing more apart with technology?

Some people lay the blame on imperfect technologies. Today’s gizmos, they argue, provide only an impoverished form of communication.
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You can’t say much with a 140-character text message, and FaceTime is not as good as real time face-to-face. But technology doesn’t necessarily block meaningful connection, either. Plenty of grandparents spend precious moments on a weekly, even daily, basis with their families over webcams. Since 2009, as many as one in five romantic
relationships has started online.
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And Facebook has done much to reconnect long-lost friends.