“‘Freedom from’ happens quickly, violently, and dramatically,” notes Seidman. “‘Freedom to’ takes time. After the Jews got their freedom from Pharaoh in Egypt, they had to wander in the desert for forty years before they developed the laws and moral codes that gave them their freedom to.”
It turns out that social networks, cheap cell phones, and messaging apps are really good at both enabling and impeding collective action. They enable people to get connected horizontally much more easily and efficiently, but they also enable individuals at the bottom to pull down those at the top more easily and efficiently—whether they are allies or enemies. Military strategists will tell you that the network is the most empowered organizational form in this period of technological change; classical hierarchies do not optimize in the flat world, but the network does. Networks undermine command-and-control systems—no matter who is on top—while strengthening the voices of whoever is on the bottom to talk back. Social media is good for collective sharing, but not always so great for collective building; good for collective destruction, but maybe not so good for collective construction; fantastic for generating a flash mob, but not so good at generating a flash consensus on a party platform or a constitution.
One need only listen to some of the key players in some of the “Square Revolutions” of the last decade to learn how they have learned the hard way about the limits of the Internet as a political tool. On a visit to Hong Kong in 2014, I interviewed Alex Yong-Kang Chow, twenty-four, a senior studying literature at Hong Kong University and at the time a leader of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, which spearheaded the pro-democracy “Occupy Central” civil disobedience movement, which began in Hong Kong on September 28, 2014. It aimed to curb Beijing’s influence over Hong Kong’s more democratic politics and to partially shut down the center of that city-state. It was not a total failure, but hardly an unmitigated success, either.
“What was missing in the [Occupy Central] movement was a mechanism to allow different points of view to debate and settle differences,” Chow told me. “If those disputes could not be settled within the movement, afterward there would be a lot of discord and bitterness. Every time when these ideas were brought out, people would veto them. There was no way to settle disputes—no single organization could gain enough trust from all the participants. And the Hong Kong people lack the political culture of resolving disputes through debates.”
What about Facebook and other social networks? I asked him.
“Technology is useful in communicating,” he responded. “People would divide into different teams [and occupy different parts of Central Hong Kong]. Some would observe the police and alert others about their movements; others would monitor online discussions and update people on the front lines. This gave us a rapid way of circulating information and for people to react instantly and in a rapid way. Activists would go online to Facebook and observe new information from Facebook … [These technologies] are very useful tools to propel the progressive movement or to counter government propaganda.”
But was there a downside?
“The government was also observing and decoding the messages when we were using these apps and social media—people sent by the Chinese government,” said Chow. “Smartphones were being monitored.”
In the end, Chow asked himself the most analog question of all: “How can an organization gain trust and legitimacy and connect with the people? The Hong Kong Federation of Students was accountable to students. But it also had to be accountable to the one million people of Hong Kong who were mobilized in the umbrella movement. So how does a single student organization balance the need to channel the aspirations of one million people and serve the students at the same time?” It needs, he answered, “trust and connections,” and those take time to build face-to-face. “That is what was missing to have the strategy be sustainable. With trust and connections [you can have] a great alliance to counter your opponents. Without trust and connections, it is very hard to sway the authorities and easy for the government to topple you.”
What distinguished Tunisia from all the other Facebook-driven Arab Awakenings, and made it so far the most successful, were some very analog attributes, most notably the deep roots of Tunisian civil society—trade unions, lawyers’ associations, women’s groups, business associations, human rights organizations. It was collective, face-to-face efforts to bridge the differences between Islamists and secularists after the fall of the Tunisian dictatorship that won several of these organizations the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize.
Elsewhere, the difficulty of achieving genuine political order has led to growing numbers of “un-free” people in the world. Income inequality is destabilizing, “but so is freedom inequality,” said Seidman. When “freedom from” outstrips “freedom to,” amplified actors in the grip of destructive ideas “will cause more harm and destruction, unless they become inspired and enlisted in constructive human endeavors,” he argued. “They will be like inmates on the loose.”
No one has given better testimony to the difference between securing freedom from and freedom to than Wael Ghonim, aka “the Google guy,” who helped launch the revolution against the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in 2011. I was in Cairo at the time, and the day before Mubarak resigned I followed Ghonim on the Friday noon broadcast from Cairo on Al Arabiya satellite TV. He had just gotten released from jail and was full of anger against the regime and passion for the democratic revolution and the role that social media had played stoking it. But that revolution in the end got derailed by the failure of the progressive forces to unite, the desire by the Muslim Brotherhood to divert it into a religious movement, and the Egyptian Army’s ability to exploit the weakness of all these civil groups in order to maintain its grip on both the Egyptian deep state and its economy.
In December 2015, Ghonim, who has since moved to Silicon Valley, posted a TED talk that I wrote about in a column. In the talk, he asked what went wrong—squarely addressing this question: Is the Internet better for creating freedom from than freedom to? This is the essence of what he concluded: “I once said, ‘If you want to liberate a society, all you need is the Internet.’ I was wrong. I said those words back in 2011, when a Facebook page I anonymously created helped spark the Egyptian revolution. The Arab Spring revealed social media’s greatest potential, but it also exposed its greatest shortcomings. The same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart.”
In the early 2000s, Arabs were flocking to the Web, Ghonim explained: “Thirsty for knowledge, for opportunities, for connecting with the rest of the people around the globe, we escaped our frustrating political realities and lived a virtual, alternative life.” This included him personally. Then, in June 2010, he noted, the “Internet changed my life forever. While browsing Facebook, I saw a photo … of a tortured, dead body of a young Egyptian guy. His name was Khaled Said. Khaled was a twenty-nine-year-old Alexandrian who was killed by police. I saw myself in his picture … I anonymously created a Facebook page and called it ‘We Are All Khaled Said.’ In just three days, the page had over a hundred thousand people, fellow Egyptians who shared the same concern.”
Soon Ghonim and his friends used Facebook to crowdsource ideas, and “the page became the most followed page in the Arab world,” he said. “Social media was crucial for this campaign. It helped a decentralized movement arise. It made people realize that they were not alone. And it made it impossible for the regime to stop it.” Ghonim was eventually tracked down in Cairo by Egyptian security services, beaten, and then held incommunicado for eleven days. But three days after he was freed, the millions of protesters his Facebook posts helped to galvanize brought down Mubarak’s regime.
Alas, the euphoria soon faded, said Ghonim, because “we failed to build consensus, and the political struggle led to intense polarization.” Social media, he noted, “only amplified” the polarization “by facilitating the spread of misinformation, rumors, echo chambers, and hate speech. The environment was purely to
xic. My online world became a battleground filled with trolls, lies, hate speech.” Supporters of the army and the Islamists used social media to smear each other, while the democratic center, which Ghonim and so many others occupied, got marginalized. Their revolution was stolen by the Muslim Brotherhood and, when it failed, by the army, which then arrested many of the secular youths who first powered the revolution. The army now has its own Facebook page to defend itself.
Having had time to reflect, said Ghonim, “it became clear to me that while it’s true that polarization is primarily driven by our human behavior, social media shapes this behavior and magnifies its impact. Say you want to say something that is not based on a fact, pick a fight, or ignore someone that you don’t like. These are all natural human impulses, but because of technology, acting on these impulses is only one click away.”
Ghonim sees five critical challenges facing today’s social media in the political arena:
First, we don’t know how to deal with rumors. Rumors that confirm people’s biases are now believed and spread among millions of people. Second, we create our own echo chambers. We tend to only communicate with people that we agree with, and thanks to social media, we can mute, unfollow, and block everybody else. Third, online discussions quickly descend into angry mobs. All of us probably know that. It’s as if we forget that the people behind screens are actually real people and not just avatars. And fourth, it became really hard to change our opinions. Because of the speed and brevity of social media, we are forced to jump to conclusions and write sharp opinions in one hundred forty characters about complex world affairs. And once we do that, it lives forever on the Internet, and we are less motivated to change these views, even when new evidence arises. Fifth—and in my point of view, this is the most critical—today, our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations. It’s as if we agreed that we are here to talk at each other instead of talking with each other.
There’s a lot of debate today on how to combat online harassment and fight trolls. This is so important. No one could argue against that. But we need to also think about how to design social media experiences that promote civility and reward thoughtfulness. I know for a fact if I write a post that is more sensational, more one-sided, sometimes angry and aggressive, I get to have more people see that post. I will get more attention. But what if we put more focus on quality?… We also need to think about effective crowdsourcing mechanisms, to fact-check widely spread online information, and reward people who take part in that. In essence, we need to rethink today’s social media ecosystem and redesign its experiences to reward thoughtfulness, civility and mutual understanding.
Five years ago, I said, “If you want to liberate society, all you need is the Internet.” Today, I believe if we want to liberate society, we first need to liberate the Internet.
The stories of Ghonim and Chow are vivid reminders, observes the veteran international pollster Craig Charney, that while the Internet “improves the ability to connect, it is no substitute for political organizations, culture, or leadership—and spontaneous movements tend to be weakest in all of these.” Many Arab Awakening efforts ultimately failed because they could not build an organization and politics that could translate their progressive ideas into a governing majority. Writing in the Financial Times, on February 28, 2014, Mark Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia and the author of Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present, pointed out:
The fundamental Leninist insight still holds: nothing can be done without organisation. If Solidarity was able to transform itself into a long-term force in Polish politics, it was because its leaders understood the need to organise themselves, and because its roots in union activism gave it an inherent structure to begin with …
Removing tyrants sometimes does indeed lead to freedom. At other times it merely leads to new kinds of tyranny. Happy the revolution where the revolutionaries are both freedom-loving and effectively organized for the long haul of political struggle.
Sometimes you have to go through the analog steps of knocking on doors, printing out leaflets, and persuading neighbors face-to-face, one at a time, to build the institutional muscles and civic habits that are needed most the morning after the revolution. Until that old lesson is relearned, we well could see the World of Disorder enlarging as more and more people find it easier to secure their freedom from but not their freedom to.
The Breakers
In November 2004, I went to Iraq, accompanying the visiting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers. Of all the images I saw on that trip, none stayed with me longer than a display that the Twenty-Fourth Marine Expeditionary Unit, in the Sunni Triangle, near Ramadi, prepared for the visiting chairman. It was a table covered with defused roadside bombs made from cell phones wired to explosives. You just call the phone’s number when a U.S. vehicle goes by and the whole thing explodes. The table was full of every color and variety of cell phone bomb you could imagine.
I thought to myself: “If there is a duty-free electronics store at the gates of hell, this is what the display counter looks like.”
The three accelerations have reshaped geopolitics not only by making us so much more interdependent and by blowing up weak states and stressing strong states, but also by super-empowering individuals to create even more disorder.
The supernova “serves as a kind of amplifier of human behavior,” observed Richard K. Miller, president of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. “In each successive generation, a smaller and smaller number of people is enabled to affect the lives of larger and larger numbers of other people through the application of technology. The effects may be intentional or unintentional, and they may be beneficial or they may not. The relentless development of new technology raises the stakes on social, economic, and political consequences in each generation.”
We have referred to the super-empowered individuals and groups who use these powers constructively as “the makers.” But, as noted earlier, the same technologies also spawn super-empowered angry men and women—“the breakers.” When it is a great time for makers, it is, unfortunately, also a great time for breakers. If you want to break something now at scale, this is your era. In the old days, “technological advances of importance were not part of a system that [immediately enabled] their global distribution, so they did not immediately show up in the hands of malevolent types at the same rate and leverage that you see today,” explained Craig Mundie. “When these technologies were only available to states, you could talk about nonproliferation as an enforceable goal.” No more. Today many of these tools, or instructions for how to build them, are easily downloadable from the cloud by anyone with a Visa card. So breakers can tap this energy source to amplify their power of one—and to connect, communicate, and collaborate with those of like mind—just as easily as any maker.
If today’s breakers are much more empowered, they are also less easily deterred. There is no mutual assured destruction—MAD—doctrine keeping Al Qaeda or ISIS from going to extremes. Just the opposite: for the jihadist suicide bombers, mutual assured destruction is like an invitation to a party and a date with ninety-nine virgins. As the Harvard University strategist Graham Allison summed it up: “Historically, there has always been a gap between people’s individual anger and what they could do with their anger. But thanks to modern technology, and the willingness of people to commit suicide, really angry individuals can now kill millions of people if they can get the right materials.” And that is becoming steadily easier with the globalization of flows and the rise of 3-D printing, by which you can build almost anything in your basement, if it can fit.
In writing this book I could not decide which frightening examples to include of how much and how easily super-empowered angry people can now spread disorder. Here are the stories that made the cut:
• “Somewhere between more than half to
two-thirds of Americans killed or wounded in combat in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been victims of IEDs planted in the ground, in vehicles or buildings, or worn as suicide vests, or loaded into suicide vehicles, according to data from the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization or JIEDDO,” USA Today reported on December 19, 2013. “That’s more than 3,100 dead and 33,000 wounded. Among the worst of the casualties are nearly 1,800 U.S. troops who have lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan, the vast majority from blasts, according to Army data … The bombs radically affected how the American military could move around the war zone, creating a heavy reliance on helicopters and other aircraft in order to avoid roads, says Army Lt. Gen. John Johnson, JIEDDO director. ‘They’ve caused us a lot of pain … a lot of effort and a lot of treasure,’ Johnson says … The IED has given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry in vehicle and body armor, robots, ground-penetrating radar, surveillance, electrical jamming, counterintelligence, computer analysis and computerized prostheses. The Government Accountability Office says it’s impossible to estimate the total U.S. cost of fighting the bombs over two wars. But the Pentagon has spent at least $75 billion on armored vehicles and tools for defeating the weapons.” You can make an IED for one hundred dollars.
• On January 26, 2015, The New York Times reported that a “White House radar system designed to detect flying objects like planes, missiles and large drones failed to pick up a small drone that crashed into a tree on the South Lawn early Monday morning” and that “the crash raised questions about whether the Secret Service could bring down a similar object if it endangered President Obama.” It turned out that a government employee who was reportedly drunk at the time had been operating the device. The Times further reported that “a Secret Service officer who was posted on the south grounds of the White House ‘heard and observed’ the drone, the agency said, but the officer and others stationed at the residence were unable to bring it down before it passed over the White House fence and struck a tree. The drone was too small and flying too low to be detected by radar, officials said, adding that because of its size, it could easily have been confused for a large bird.” Though the president and his wife were in India at the time on a government visit, their two daughters, Sasha and Malia, were at home.
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