by Clay Shirky
Early on the marches were too small for the government to stop without looking hysterical, and every week they grew only a little. From the government’s point of view, a small march was too little to crack down on, and the following week, a slightly larger march was also too little to crack down on. Not until September did Erich Honecker instruct local governments to “nip these enemy activities in the bud” and “not allow a mass basis for them.” By then it was too late; the protests had long since passed from bud to full flower. What Honecker could not have known was that the “mass basis” was measured not by the number of participants but by the number of people who understood that protest was not being punished. The historian Susanne Lohmann calls the Leipzig protests an “information cascade.” Each of the citizens of Leipzig had some threshold at which they might join a protest. Every week the march happened without a crackdown offered additional evidence that the marches provided an outlet for their disaffection; each successful march diminished the fear felt by some additional part of the populace.
The military often talks about “shared awareness,” which is the ability of many different people and groups to understand a situation, and to understand who else has the same understanding. If I see a fire break out, and I see that you see it as well, we may more easily coordinate our actions—you call 911, I grab a fire extinguisher—than if I have to call your attention to the fire, or if I am in some confusion about how you will react to a fire. Shared awareness allows otherwise uncoordinated groups to begin to work together more quickly and effectively.
This kind of social awareness has three levels: when everybody knows something, when everybody knows that everybody knows, and when everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows. Many people in the GDR figured out for themselves that the government was corrupt, and that life under that government was bad; this is the “everyone knows” condition. Over time many of those same people figured out that most of their friends, neighbors, and colleagues knew that as well—“everyone knows that everyone knows.” At this point the sentiment was widespread but because no one was talking about what everyone knew, the state never had to respond in any formal way. Finally people in Leipzig could see others acting on the knowledge that the GDR was rotten—“everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows.” This shared awareness is the step necessary for real public action: when the people in the streets of Leipzig knew the same thing as did the people watching from their windows.
By September 1989 this information had cascaded from a small group to a large one, and the marches had grown to tens of thousands of people. In October the number grew to better than a hundred thousand. On the first Monday in November 400,000 people turned out in the streets of Leipzig. By the time the government realized its bluff was being called, no one in the army was willing to turn on so many citizens, and without a credible threat of deadly force to back it up, the East German government simply collapsed. The day after that first November protest the entire East German government resigned. Two days later the dismantling of the Berlin Wall began. The GDR had vanished.
The lesson for protesters after Leipzig was that they should protest in ways that the state was unlikely to interfere with, and to distribute evidence of their actions widely. If the state didn’t react, the documentation would serve as evidence that the protesting was safe. If the state did react, then the documentation of the crackdown could be used to spur an international outcry. The lesson for repressive states was the opposite: don’t let even small protests get started, as they can grow, and don’t let any documentation get out. These two lessons set up a cat-and-mouse game between protesters and the protested institutions that continues to this day. As in everything that involves coordinated action, social tools have changed the balance of power in this game.
Flash Mobs
Early one June evening in 2003, more than a hundred people arrived on the ninth floor of Macy’s department store, where they proceeded to look at one particular large and very expensive rug. When the puzzled sales assistant asked if they needed help, the members of the group explained that they lived together in a commune, were shopping for a “love rug,” and made all their decisions in a group. Then, ten minutes later, the crowd suddenly dispersed, heading in different directions with no obvious coordination.
The event was the first successful flash mob, a group that engages in seemingly spontaneous but actually synchronized behavior. The form was invented by Bill Wasik, an editor at Harper’s magazine, as a kind of street performance, as well as an ironic commentary on the conformism of hipster culture. Wasik, working as the anonymous “Bill from New York,” would e-mail instructions to a group of people, spelling out when and where they were to converge and describing the activity they were to engage in once there. Later flash crowds involved getting dozens of people to perch on a stone ledge in Central Park all making bird noises, a “Zombie walk” in San Francisco, and a silent dance party at London’s Victoria Station. These mobs had some of the flavor of flagpole sitting—harmless but attention-getting fun. But as the novelist William Gibson noted about technology, the street finds its own uses for things, and after their flagpole-sitting phase, flash mobs entered the political sphere.
The first use of a flash mob for political expression appeared soon after the “love rug” mob. Howard Dean’s U.S. presidential campaign proposed a flash mob in Seattle in September. (The invitation was published in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoon.) The next year protesters staged a flash mob against Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin in his home city of St. Petersburg, two weeks before the Russian presidential elections. About sixty youths turned up in Putin masks, wearing shirts with anti-Putin messages like “Vova go home!” (Vova is a nickname for Vladimir.) The use of flash mobs as a tool of political protest, though, has reached its zenith in Belarus.
Belarus is one of Europe’s most repressive countries. A former member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, it was cut loose after the collapse of European Communism during the 1990s. In the main, the former Soviet states embraced free markets and democratic process, but Belarus retained a state-run economy and acquired an autocratic president, Alexander Lukashenko, who was first elected in 1994 on a platform of eradicating corruption. In the intervening years Lukashenko has ruled over the country with increasingly unchecked power. When he ran for reelection to a third term in March 2006, he won nearly 85 percent of the vote, a result that European election observers said was rigged. In protest, more than ten thousand people turned out in Minsk’s Oktyabrskaya Square. The Lukashenko government, which had vowed to crush any opposition in advance of the election, arrested hundreds of protesters and jailed the leading opposition candidate after the election. Lukashenko had learned the lesson from the Leipzig protests. The problem for the opposition was how to decide to protest in an environment where the state exerted that much control.
In May someone posting under the name by_mob used LiveJournal, a piece of blogging software, to propose a flash mob for the fifteenth of that month. The Minsk flash mob had little of Wasik’s intentionally confounding feeling—the idea was simply that people would show up in Oktyabrskaya Square and eat ice cream. The results were one part ridiculous and three parts depressing; police were waiting in the square and hauled away several of the ice cream eaters, all while being documented in the now-standard pattern as other participants took digital pictures and uploaded them to Flickr, LiveJournal, and other online outlets. These pictures were in turn recirculated by bloggers like Andy Carvin and Ethan Zuckerman, political bloggers who cover the use of technology as a tool for social change. Images of a repressive Belarus thus spread far beyond the borders of Minsk. Nothing says “police state” like detaining kids for eating ice cream.
The ice cream mob was not an isolated incident. Flash mobs were held to protest the banning of the Belarusian Writers Union (“Show up at the Supreme Court, read books by the writers in the organization”) and the closing of the newspaper Nasha Niva on th
e day it was to be shut down (“Gather in Oktyabrskaya, reading copies of Nasha Niva”). In the fall perhaps the simplest flash mob ever proposed took place: “Walk around Oktyabrskaya smiling at one another.” This action produced the same reaction from the state; attendees reported that the police were using the presence of a pocketknife to try one of the smilers with weapons possession.
The police weren’t reacting to the ice cream eating, reading, or smiling itself. The chosen behavior was intentionally innocuous, because the real message lay not in the behavior but in the collective action. After the postelection protests in March, any coordinated public gathering, especially in Oktyabrskaya Square, had a political dimension; mere evidence that Belarusian youth were operating in any organized way was both a threat and a rebuke to the state. The government has reason to worry: the historical lesson from Leipzig suggests that any forum for public expression is dangerous, because no matter how innocuous the original form of organization is, if the state is seen to tolerate it, it can become a forum for more focused discontent. The threat from a group eating ice cream isn’t the ice cream but the group. The Lukashenko government is thus worried about coordinated ice cream eating—but if they have learned the lesson of Leipzig, why don’t they just stop the mobs before they even gather? What good is having secret police if you can’t spy on dissidents and disrupt their activities? With that strategy, after all, photographs of the police dragging people out of the main square are far less likely to show up all over the world.
Here is where the change in social tools since 1989 manifests itself. In Leipzig the early organization of the protests was fairly visible, and the protests themselves were fairly invisible. In June 1989, for example, the GDR canceled the entire Leipzig Street Music Festival, organized by independent citizen groups, and arrested all the participating musicians. The degree of advance planning required made the festival an easy target. Meanwhile the protests themselves were visible only to other Leipzigers, because the government had such tight control over media. The problem Lukashenko faces is that in the intervening years our social tools have made it possible for protesters to reverse the formula. Now the organization of group effort can be invisible, but the results can be immediately visible. Because the cost of sharing and coordinating has collapsed, new methods of organization are available to ordinary citizens, methods that allow events to be arranged without much advance planning. Because the mobs were proposed via weblog, the state had no way of keeping track of who had seen the plan. They could not break up the plot, since there was no plot; the event was proposed in public, so there was no secret information to uncover. Even if the government had the surveillance apparatus to know the identity of all the blog readers, it had no way of knowing which of them were planning to attend.
Using the state’s reaction against itself is a kind of jujitsu. The protesters in Belarus believe that the government will be less willing to use force if it knows it is being observed by the outside world, particularly by Western Europe and the United States. As a result, the opposition wants to create widely observable protests, while the government wants to prevent such events from taking place or, failing that, to prevent documentation of those protests from being distributed widely. But with flash mobs the government can’t intercept the group members in advance, because there is no group in advance: like the Mermaid Parade photographers, the group is latent until the event itself occurs, then is formed on the spot, as a result of the actions of the individual participants. (Also like the Mermaid Parade photographers, the by_mob proposer did not and could not know in advance who might show up.) By using public tools, the original proposers of the flash mob forced the state to react after the fact, but that’s only half the battle. A protest isn’t a protest unless it’s public, and this is the second half of the change. Once the state does react, the flash mob attendees can document and publicize the proceedings, using camera-phones and photo-sharing websites that are much harder to control than traditional media. Even though there were only a few days between the announcement that Nasha Niva would be closed and its final day of publication, the opposition was able to get a few hundred people to turn out on that day. This speed of organization is accompanied by relative permanence of documentation. In late April 2006 someone going by the name freejul created a LiveJournal account. On the twenty-eighth, he or she posted pictures of the Nasha Niva flash mob, then another set of photos from a May 1 event in solidarity with political prisoners in Belarus. The last post from the account was on May 5, a little over a week after the first post, but the pictures are still there for all to see. Another advantage of blogs over traditional media outlets is that no one can found a newspaper on a moment’s notice, run it for two issues, and then fold it, while incurring no cost but leaving a permanent record.
Because so many people have access to the Web, the Belarusian government can’t stem the formation of flash mobs in advance, and because the attendees have cameras, it can’t break up the mobs without inviting the very attention it wants to avoid. In this situation, the Belarusian government is limited to either gross overreactions (a curfew in Oktyabrskaya, a ban on ice cream or the internet) or to waiting for the mob to form, then disrupting it.
Such protests may not succeed in toppling the government. The Leipzig protests were driven by forty years of discontent, the Lukashenko government is not as all-controlling as the GDR was, and the West was considerably more committed to the fall of the USSR and its clients than it is to the democratization of Belarus. And all sorts of groups may use this technique. John Robb, author of Brave New War, calls the current generation of terrorists “Open Source Guerrillas” and notes all the ways they are adopting social tools and patterns to coordinate their efforts. Like the Belarusian protesters, the terrorist networks are less tightly integrated with one another and thus are harder to detect or intercept before they act. But whoever is using these tools, political action has changed when a group of previously uncoordinated actors can create a public protest that the government can neither interdict in advance nor suppress without triggering public documentation.
One might choose to bemoan the triviality of the culture of the developed world for using flash mobs for amusement and distraction (the love rug) rather than for political engagement. This judgment is accurate enough, but only because it is a restatement of the original observation, that people with more at stake are making more of these tools. Why? Social tools create what economists would call a positive supply-side shock to the amount of freedom in the world. The old dictum that freedom of the press exists only for those who own a press points to the significance of the change. To speak online is to publish, and to publish online is to connect with others. With the arrival of globally accessible publishing, freedom of speech is now freedom of the press, and freedom of the press is freedom of assembly. Naturally, the changes occasioned by new sources of freedom are most significant in less free environments. Whenever you improve a group’s ability to communicate internally, you change the things it is capable of. What the group does with that power is a separate question.
Replacing Planning with Coordination
Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” is one of the few military strategies that nonhistorians know by name. The vision of the German Panzer tanks bearing down on hapless French defenses in May 1940 is etched in communal memory; from the initial German victory it took only six weeks for France to surrender. As pervasive as the image of German strength and French weakness is, however, much about it is misleading. In the 1930s the German army was smaller than France’s (a condition forced on it at the end of World War I), and by 1940 Germany was bankrupt in all but name; its fearsome Panzer III and IVs, the key to blitzkrieg, were in many ways inferior to the French Char Bs that they would encounter. To allow the Germans to carry the day so decisively, something other than guns and armor was in play.
Although the Panzers had smaller guns and less armor, they came equipped with one thing the French tanks didn’t have: radios. We don
’t often think of a radio as a weapon of war, but the radios allowed the Panzer commanders to share information and make decisions in the heat of battle, while the French, limited in their communications with their tank commanders, were hampered in their information gathering. This disadvantage sharply curtailed their ability to react to changes in the battlefield. The radios transformed the Panzers from stand-alone pieces of military hardware into a kind of coordinated group weapon.
One reason the French tanks, with their superior weapons and armor, didn’t carry the day, not even with the natural advantage of a defensive position, is that they couldn’t process information as fast as the Germans. Would the course of the twentieth century have been radically different if the French tanks had had radios? It’s always dangerous to imagine alternative histories because of the number of variables involved, but radios were being installed in the French tanks in the spring of 1940, as the Germans struck. If the French had installed the radios a month earlier or if the Germans had attacked a month later, would the French have prevailed?
It’s unlikely, because the Germans brought a second advantage to the battlefield; they understood what radios were good for. The French regarded the tank as a mobile platform for accompanying foot soldiers. The Germans, on the other hand, understood that the tank allowed for a new kind of fighting, a rapid style of attack that required a much higher degree of autonomy among the commanders and a much higher level of coordination in the field.
The ability to turn a collection of tanks into a coordinated force rested on two very different kinds of things, in other words. First, it required the media with which to coordinate the tanks. No radios, no blitzkrieg. Second, it required a strategy that took the new possibilities into account. No new strategy, no blitzkrieg either. Neither the technological change nor the strategy alone was sufficient to ensure German victory, but together they changed the way the world worked.
