Here Comes Everybody

by Clay Shirky

  Contrary to its image as involving an overwhelming German force, blitzkrieg was in fact a strategy for using a smaller but more nimble force against a well-provisioned opponent. It used the same advantage that the Belarusian protesters are taking advantage of—a social tool that allowed them to act collectively. Though the flash mob is a relatively new addition to the repertoire, the ability of weak groups to coordinate their actions against strong ones is the hallmark of much political action. In 1999 the Falun Gong, a Chinese religious organization, astonished and terrified the Chinese government by assembling ten thousand people in Zhongnanhai, a secure complex in Beijing where many of China’s leaders reside. The gathering was peaceful, but its execution stunned the Chinese government, as it had had no idea it was coming, having been organized by text messages via mobile phones. Howard Rheingold, in Smart Mobs, documented an event in the Philippines in which thousands of outraged citizens quickly coordinated a protest in Manila after President Joseph Estrada’s government voted to weaken his corruption trial. The rapid assembly of thousands of Filipinos in the streets, who had forwarded text messages advising people where to go and exhorting them to “Wear Blck,” convinced the government to let the trial go forward, thereby dooming Estrada. In Spain, after the ruling Partido Popular (PP) wrongly blamed Basque terrorists for the horrific bombing of the Madrid transit system, the opposition rallied to turn it out of office, forwarding the text-message-friendly phrase “Who did it” from phone to phone.

  Most of us have seen this kind of shift away from advance planning with the adoption of mobile phones. As mobile phones have spread, people have shifted to making less definite plans. We no longer say, “I’ll meet you at six at Thirty-third and Third,” we say, “Give me a ring when you get off work,” or, “I’ll call when I get to the neighborhood.” Text messaging allows whole groups to experience that shift as well. The previous political examples demonstrate the growing ease of that kind of coordination. Falun Gong, as a membership organization, still had some of the advantages of central coordination. The Filipinos lacked that degree of cohesion, but they had been witnessing the months-long spectacle of Estrada fighting corruption charges. In Spain only four days passed between the bombings and the election, which the PP had been widely tipped to win. The more ubiquitous and familiar a communications method is, the more real-time coordination can come to replace planning, and the less predictable group reactions become.

  Angry Passengers, Faster Action

  On January 3, 1999, Northwest Airlines flight 1829 took off from Miami on its way to Detroit. Flight 1829 ordinarily flies from the Caribbean vacation spot of St. Martin, but the day before, because of a snowstorm in Detroit, it had been diverted to Miami. The flight left Miami a little after noon and landed in Detroit at 2:45 p.m. The passengers’ trip that day was less than a third over.

  Though the snow had stopped falling, the Detroit airport had been unprepared for the storm. The additional flights from the previous day’s closure, the snow still to be cleared, and insufficient staff all meant that not enough gates were open. After Flight 1829 landed, the pilot was directed to pull over to a side runway, and the passengers were told to expect a two-hour delay, which had the predictable effect on their mood. Two hours came and went with no gate clearance; the flight attendants struggled to keep the passengers mollified with limited supplies. They had not stocked up on food or drinks in Miami (it was to have been a short flight) and were running out of liquor as passengers continued drinking to dull their annoyance. Three hours passed, then four. The lavatories began to smell, then clog, then leak. Lawyers on board were signing up potential plaintiffs. Passengers with babies, heart conditions, and nicotine habits all pleaded with the flight crew to get them off the plane. These pleas were forwarded to the flight deck, who in turn called the ground crew, who offered little more than assurances that they knew things were bad and were working on it.

  Five hours passed. Flight attendants began encouraging passengers to write letters of complaint to the CEO. Someone suggested calling him instead. They found his name, John Dasburg, in the in-flight magazine, and his home phone number via directory assistance. They called his house. He wasn’t home, but his wife answered and got an earful from the passengers. The captain, learning that a passenger had called Dasburg, summoned the caller to the cockpit and asked for the number. The captain himself then called Dasburg to demand that a gate be opened.That—finally—got results. The plane pulled out of the line (to the understandable frustration of the other waiting pilots) and headed to the newly opened gate. At 9:42 p.m., the passengers finally disembarked, seven hours after they’d landed.

  This tale resulted in incredibly bad press for Northwest and for the airline industry generally. The net result, though, was negligible. If any letters of complaint were delivered to Dasburg, they produced no apparent change. The lawsuit, for “false imprisonment and breach of contract,” was settled out of court, and the airlines adopted a toothless and voluntary Customer Service Initiative (which should have been redundant, given the business they are in). People had been subjected to quite incredible torment from a company nominally in the business of providing a service, but in the end the power in that particular situation lay with the airline, not with its customers.

  Precisely this imbalance of power made what happened next time so remarkable.

  The flight numbers, cities, and dates were different, but the basic story was the same. On December 29, 2006, several American Airlines flights were diverted to Austin because of heavy storms in Dallas. Once the planes were on the ground, they waited for hours, with cockpits powerless to obtain gates, increasingly agitated passengers, insufficient food and water, and overflowing toilets. It was a replay of Detroit, minus the wind chill but with additional delays—after landing some flights sat on the ground for more than eight hours before the passengers were let off.

  Kate Hanni, a real estate agent from California and a passenger on American flight 1348, got angry. In the days after the delay she formed a group to represent the rights of passengers. They proposed an Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights (sample item: “Provide for the essential needs of passengers during air- or ground-based delays of longer than 3 hours”), they lobbied Congress (adoption of the passengers’ bill was proposed in the House and Senate as a result), and they invited the general public to sign their petition; they garnered thousands of signatures within weeks. Partly as a result, every new airline horror story—like the epic tarmac delays suffered by JetBlue passengers on Valentine’s Day 2007, or the eight-hour delay of another American Airlines flight in April—are now covered by the press as part of a larger issue, rather than just a single event, spreading awareness even further. After the JetBlue meltdown, the CEO stepped down, and the company adopted its own Passenger Bill of Rights.

  The results of the ground delays in Detroit and Austin could hardly have been more different. In Detroit the cumulative fury of the passengers, despite their mistreatment, dissipated quickly. In Austin, the fury drove the creation of an organization within days that quickly went national and had an almost immediate impact, changing the legislative agenda, press coverage, and public expectations of the airline industry. The Detroit passengers were as badly treated, and as angry about it, as the Dallas passengers. Why did one infuriating delay lead nowhere, while the other led to a real increase in pressure on the airlines?

  The key change was that Kate Hanni had in her hands the tools to encourage and sustain participation. She had the desire to do something, and in 2007 she was able to communicate that desire in a way that created a public movement, using tools that have become commonplace.

  It started with a simple conversation. While she was searching the Web for details about the flight, Hanni found a short story about the delays in an Austin newspaper, the American-Statesman. She posted two separate comments on the article, spelling out in great detail what had happened to the passengers that day. (The combined length of these comments was over four times the
length of the original story.) At the end of her second comment she wrote, “Anyone from this flight please contact me.”

  Another passenger on the flight responded directly to Hanni and offered contact details for additional passengers. Once the American-Statesman allowed comments by readers, what had previously been a one-way platform (journalist talks to readers) became first a shared platform (Hanni offers her observations to the world) and then a cooperative platform (Hanni uses the article as a means to communicate with other passengers). Within days she had contacted enough people to put together a group with a mission and a name—Coalition for an Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights. She created an online petition; more than two thousand people signed it in the first month, a number far in excess of the number of passengers who had been directly affected. Hanni and other coalition members were interviewed by the New York Times, CNN, and CBS, and a variety of travel websites linked to the coalition weblog. All of this attention created not just awareness but the possibility for new action—new signatures, new calls to Congress, new donations.

  Just as social tools are creating members of the former audience, they are creating legions of former consumers, if by “consumer” we mean an atomized and voiceless purchaser of goods and services. Consumers now talk back to businesses and speak out to the general public, and they can do so en masse and in coordinated ways. The U.K. division of the bank HSBC had been recruiting students and recent graduates with the promise of checking accounts that carried no penalty for overdrafts. In August 2007, HSBC decided to revoke this policy, giving the students only a few weeks’ notice of the impending change. The move obviously made corporate sense; interest-free borrowing was costing HSBC money, and the so-called switching costs for the students—the costs of finding another bank and transferring accounts—would decrease the likelihood of mass defections. Having used the interest-free overdrafts to attract customers, HSBC reasoned that it could cancel the program with little penalty.

  HSBC hadn’t reckoned on Facebook, the social networking service that started its life specifically targeted to college students. A Cambridge University student and vice president of the student union named Wes Streeting set up a place on Facebook to complain about the policy, calling it “Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip-Off!” Similar to the Flyers Rights story, thousands of students signed up in a matter of days. Critically, Facebook was the one place where both current students and recent graduates could all be reached together; in years past, the dispersal of the graduates made it hard to communicate with them, but now they remain part of the social fabric of a college even after dispersing physically. Facebook also helped lower the switching costs, as current and former students began researching and recommending other U.K. banks that still offered interest-free overdrafts. As a result of better information about the alternatives, and because individual actions could be part of a larger movement, far more students began publicly threatening to move accounts than HSBC had anticipated.

  Seeing the large and growing response, the Facebook group then announced it would stage a public protest at HSBC’s offices in London in early September. That protest never happened, for the simple reason that HSBC caved in long before the appointed date; seeing the online protest and threatened with a real-world one, and having underestimated what pooled information would do to switching costs, HSBC reversed the policy. Andy Ripley, the head of product development, explained the reversal by saying, “Like any service business, we are not too big to listen to the needs of our customers.” Though face-saving, this is a curious statement, since HSBC could have predicted the students’ unhappiness with the change long before implementing it. The reversal didn’t come about because the students were unhappy; it came about because they were unhappy and coordinated.

  The enormous effect of motivation is obvious—the Flyers Rights and the HSBC protests relied on Hanni and Streeting to get them started. Less obvious but equally important is the limited motivation of most of the participants in the protests. Many people care a little about the treatment they get from airlines or banks, but not many care enough to do anything about it on their own, both because that kind of effort is hard and because individual actions have so little effect on big corporations. The old model for coordinating group action required convincing people who care a little to care more, so that they would be roused to act. What Hanni and Streeting did instead was to lower the hurdles to doing something in the first place, so that people who cared a little could participate a little, while being effective in aggregate. Having a handful of highly motivated people and a mass of barely motivated ones used to be a recipe for frustration. The people who were on fire wondered why the general population didn’t care more, and the general population wondered why those obsessed people didn’t just shut up. Now the highly motivated people can create a context more easily in which the barely motivated people can be effective without having to become activists themselves.

  Banal Tools in Remarkable Contexts

  Evan Williams is a natural inventor of social tools. In the 1990s his company, Pyra, was working on a complex project-management tool that they could sell to businesses, but while doing so, they needed a project-management tool for themselves. Instead of simply adopting their own tool (which wasn’t ready and was in any case too complex for a little company), they wrote just about the simplest application one could imagine. It was a website that would take text that a user entered into a form, and post it onto a webpage, with the most recent additions at the top of the page. The tool, simple as it was, turned out to be far more compelling than the software they were supposed to be creating, and they ended up working more on the in-house tool than on their nominal product. They named their product Blogger and launched it to the world. It spread like wildfire—hundreds of thousands of users adopted it within a few months. (Blogger was ultimately acquired by Google.)

  Evan’s next idea was audio blogging, where users would post short recorded bits of sound to a website, to be listened to by others. This idea didn’t take off in the same way, but it did get him focused on mobile phones. His next idea relied on text messaging, the short written messages many people can send from their mobile phones. His service, called Twitter, was simplicity itself. To use Twitter, you create an account for yourself, and then you send Twitter a message, via the Web, by instant message, or from your phone. A message on Twitter, called a tweet, is a short snippet of text, usually an update about what you are doing; sending a tweet is “twittering.” The message goes to your friends who are also on Twitter and, if you like, gets posted to the Twitter “public timeline,” a webpage with the most recent public twitters.

  Much of the content on the public timeline is inane. On a random Saturday afternoon, here’s a random sample of twittering:

  jmckible says “Just had to blow out my DS slot NES style”

  truejerseygirl says “Hosting a CD Exchange party tonight. Made the jello shots, bought the booze and chips, but havent burned all the cd’s yet. Eek Im a slacker”

  laurence says “At Maker Faire”

  Josh Lawrence In friggin’ heaven because I’m eating Trader Joe’s gourmet chocolate fudge.

  Mike Barrett mrmanager07 WOOO summer courses are FUUUUN

  Many of the public posts have this sort of quality—video games, pop music, and Jell-O shots—where the publicly available content is not likely to interest most users. Like weblogs that are written for small clusters of friends, most twittering is for the benefit of friends rather than for the general public. These twitters are interesting not so much because the messages themselves are informative, but because the receiver cares about the sender. You probably don’t care that laurence is at the Maker Faire (a Silicon Valley event for the DIY movement), but if you knew laurence, or were at the Maker Faire yourself, you might. As always, socially embedded messages are more valuable than random public broadcasts. Even accepting that Twitter creates a kind of peripheral vision for what someone’s friends are doing, though, it can seem awfu
lly banal. Until you see Alaa’s feed.

  Going to doky prosecutor judge murad accused me and manal of libel 10:11 AM April 04

  Waiting for prosecutors decision might actually spend the night in custody 01:57 PM April 04

  We are going to dokky police station 03:31 PM April 04

  In police station no senior officers present so we are in limbo 04:29 PM April 04

  We will not be released from giza security will have to go back to dokki station 07:59 PM April 04

  On our way back to police station 10:25 PM April 04 We are free 11:22 PM April 04

  Alaa Abd El Fattah is an Egyptian programmer, democracy activist, and blogger living in Cairo. Here he is documenting his arrest, with his wife Manal, in El Dokky, a Cairo neighborhood, an episode that ended twelve hours later with their release. His arrest was ordered by Abdel Fatah Murad, an Egyptian judge who was attempting to have dozens of websites blocked in Egypt, on the grounds that the sites “insult the Quran, God, The President and the country.” When Egyptian prodemocracy bloggers started covering the proposed censorship, Murad added their sites to the list he was attempting to ban.

  What does a service like Twitter, whose public face is so banal, offer Abd El Fattah and the other Egyptian activists? Some of the value is fairly prosaic—free speech activists are harassed or detained in several countries in the Middle East, so they use Twitter to alert one another as to whether they’ve passed through various security checkpoints (often at airports); the absence of a message may mean they’ve been detained. On other occasions, though, it provides a way to spread real news. Here is how Alaa reported the news of the arrest and continuing detention of Abdel Monem Mahmoud, another Cairo blogger.