by Jared Cohen
Every society in the future, including those that adopted Internet technology early on, will experience different forms of protest in which communication technologies are used to organize, mobilize and engage the international community. The platforms protesters use today—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others—will morph into even more constructive vehicles, as developers around the world find new ways to utilize the videos, images and messages related to their particular missions. The world will be introduced to more digital activists, branded heroes by the international community, as they work to become ambassadors for their cause. Countries that have not yet had their first big protest in the new digital age will experience it on a global scale, with the world watching and potentially exaggerating its significance. Democratic societies will see more protests related to perceived social injustice and economic inequality, while people in repressive countries will demonstrate against issues like fraudulent elections, corruption and police brutality. There will be few truly new causes, merely better forms of mobilization and many more participants.
Staging a revolt used to be exclusive to the subset of individuals with the right weapons, international backing and training. Much of this exclusivity has been shattered as communication technologies break down age, gender, socioeconomic and circumstantial barriers that previously prevented individuals from taking part. Citizens will no longer experience injustice in isolation or solitude, and this globalized feedback loop where people all around the world can comment and react will inspire many populations to stand up and make their feelings known. As the revolutions of the Arab Spring demonstrated, once the so-called fear barrier has been broken down and a government appears newly vulnerable, many otherwise obedient or quiet citizens don’t hesitate to join in. One of the positive consequences of social media in the Arab revolutions, for example, was that women were able to play a much greater role, given the choice of expressing themselves on social networks when going to the streets was too risky (although many women did take the physical risk). In some countries, people will occasionally organize protests online or in the streets every day, simply because they can. We saw this when we visited Libya in 2012. As we met with ministers in the transitional government in Tripoli, they mentioned casually that there were small groups of protesters nearly every morning. Were they worried?, we asked. Some were, but others shook their heads, almost chuckling, and said it was a natural reaction after more than forty years of oppression.
Virtual space offers new avenues for dissent and participation, as well as new protections for potential revolutionaries. For the most part, dissidents will find their world safer due to the mass adoption of communication technologies, despite the fact that the physical risks they face will not change. (Nor will connectivity shield all activists equally; in countries where the government is very technically capable, dissidents may feel as vulnerable online as they do on the streets.) Arrests, harassment, torture and extrajudicial killings will not disappear, but overall, the anonymity of the Internet and the networked power of communication technologies will provide activists and would-be participants with a new layer of protective insulation that encourages them to continue on.
Certain technological developments will assist activists and dissidents significantly. Accurate real-time translation software enables information-sharing beyond borders. Reliable electronic access to outside information and to diaspora communities helps counter intentionally misleading state narratives and amplifies the size of the support base in a demonstrable way. And secure electronic platforms that facilitate money transfers or information exchange further connect protesters to outside sources of support without compromising their current position.
In these new revolutionary movements, there will be more part-time and anonymous activists than today, simply because citizens will have greater agency over when and how they rebel. Once, being a revolutionary entailed total personal commitment, but today, and even more so in the future, multifaceted technological platforms will allow some to participate full time while others contribute on their lunch breaks. Activists in the future will benefit from the collective knowledge of other activists and people around the world, particularly when it comes to protecting themselves—secure protocols, encryption tools and other forms of electronic security will be more widely available and understood. Most of the people who will come online in the next decade live under autocratic or semi-autocratic governments, and history suggests that theocracies, personality cults and dictatorships are much harder to maintain in an era of expanding information dissemination; one only need recall the contributory role of the glasnost (“openness”) policy to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the end, we’ll see a pattern emerge across the world in which populations with access to virtual space and new information will continually protest against their repressive or non-transparent governments online, in effect making the state of revolutionary gestures permanent.
Connectivity will change how we view opposition groups in the future. Tangible organizations and parties will still operate inside countries, but the profusion of new participants in the virtual town square will dramatically reshape the activists’ landscape. Most people will not identify themselves with a single cause but instead will join multiple issue-based movements spread over many countries. This trend will both help and frustrate campaign organizers, for it will be easier to estimate and visualize their support network but it will be less clear how interested and committed each participant is. In countries where freedom of assembly is limited or denied, the opportunity to communicate and plan in virtual space will be a godsend, irrespective of who joins in. But generally, it will be up to those in leadership positions to make the strategic decision as to whether their movements actually have the support of the masses, rather than being a very large echo chamber.
For opposition groups, the online world offers new possibilities for critical tasks like fund-raising and branding. Organizations may choose to present themselves differently in different corners of the Internet to reach different demographics. A Central Asian resistance group might downplay its religious overtones and champion its liberal positions while on English-language platforms dominated by Western users, and then do the opposite on the networks within its own region. This is not unlike what the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties do today, or how Al Jazeera’s autonomous English- and Arabic-language operations differ in tone and coverage. (For one example: On a designated day of protest in the early stage of the Syrian uprising in 2011, Al Jazeera English was quick to report on the number of protester deaths but, oddly, the Al Jazeera Arabic website did not, focusing instead on a minor overture by Bashar al-Assad to the country’s Kurdish minority. Some analysts suggested that the disparity was due to the Arabic station’s political deference to Iran, Syria’s ally and a neighbor of Qatar, the home of Al Jazeera.)
While the branding possibilities for these groups grow, the old model of an opposition organization is shifting: Groups today have websites instead of offices; followers and members instead of staff; and they use free and publicly available platforms that liberate them from many fixed costs. There will be so many of these digital fronts in the future that competition for attention between groups around the world will grow fierce.
The profusion of new voices online and the noise they’ll generate will require all of us to adjust our definition of a dissident. After all, not everyone who speaks his or her mind online—which to some degree is almost everyone with an Internet connection—can be branded a dissident. The people who surface in the next wave of dissident leaders will be the ones who can command a following and crowd-source their online support, who have demonstrable skill with digital marketing tools, and, critically, who are willing to put themselves physically in harm’s way. Digital activism, especially when done remotely or with anonymity, lowers the stakes for would-be protesters, so true leaders will distinguish themselves by taking on physical risks that their virtual supporters cannot or will not. An
d it’s more likely than not that those who have deep knowledge of constitutional reform, institution building and governance issues but lack the tech savvy of other activists will run the risk of being left behind, finding it difficult to stand out in a virtual crowd and to prove their value to new, young leaders (who may fail to understand the true relevance of their experience).
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.
Future revolutions will produce many celebritie
s, but this aspect of movement-making will retard the leadership development necessary to finish the job. Technology can help find the people with leadership skills—thinkers, intellectuals and others—but it cannot create them. Popular uprisings can overthrow dictators, but they’re successful afterward only if opposition forces have a good plan and can execute it. Otherwise the result is either a reconstitution of the old regime or a transition from a functioning regime to a failed state. Building a Facebook page does not constitute a plan; actual operational skills are what will carry a revolution to a successful conclusion.
The term “leaderless” has been used to describe the Arab Spring, by both observers and participants, but this is not quite accurate. True, in the day-to-day process of demonstrating it’s certainly possible to retain a decentralized command structure—safer too, since the regime cannot kill the movement by simply capturing the leaders. But over time, some sort of centralized authority must emerge if the movement is to have any direction. The rebel fighters who faced down Muammar Gadhafi for months were not a coherent army, but by February 27, 2011, within two weeks of the first public protests in Libya, they had formed the National Transitional Council (NTC) in Benghazi. Comprising prominent opposition figures, regime defectors, a former army official, academics, attorneys, politicians and business leaders, the NTC’s executive board functioned as an opposition government, negotiating with foreign countries and NATO officials in the fight against Gadhafi. The NTC’s chairman, Mahmoud Jibril, served as the country’s interim prime minister until late October 2011, shortly after Gadhafi was captured and killed.
