The social industry monopolies have duly been evolving ways to cooperate with the security state, suggesting lines for a potential fusion. This calls into question the cyber-futurist notion of ‘cloud’ logic displacing sovereign power, breaking up sovereignty into the politics of data packets, dissipating it in networks criss-crossing borders and territories. Rather than networked flows of information bypassing centralized bureaucracies, the flows are bureaucratically regimented and organized in such a way as to augment the traditional power of governments and corporations, at least in the short term. It also suggests that the emancipatory hopes of the era of Occupy, Anonymous and Pirate Parties pinned to such claims were at best wildly premature. Networks, which were expected to outflank the old sovereigns, have also extended their power.
And yet, as the philosopher Gilbert Simondon pointed out, we learn most from a technology when it breaks down.31 It is breakdown that stimulates scientific research and new knowledge. And the platforms have induced a crisis in an older machinery of governance and control. The Washington establishment, in its globalizing zeal and technological modernization drive, didn’t quite anticipate what it was embracing. Whether it is Facebook’s notorious motto ‘Move Fast and Break Things’, or Google’s practice of never asking for permission, this was a force that could and would disturb the old, embedded alliances of state and media. That meant it could and would disrupt Washington’s power.
VI.
Did Twitter make the ‘Twitter revolutions’, or did they make Twitter? From the Iranian Green Movement in 2009 to the Gezi Park protests in Turkey in 2013, the social industry was reported on as if it was a primary driver of unrest. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were not just the digital media of the story. They were the story, the technological vanguard of dramatic, world-changing events. They were associated, by connotation, with progress, youth, the new, the next big thing.
It would be impossible to quantify the commercial value of the ‘Twitter revolutions’ for the social industry. It is in the nature of the medium to massively complicate causality. The bare data shows that from the inception of the Green Movement to the end of the Gezi Park protests, Twitter’s active user base had increased sevenfold from 30 million to over 220 million. Facebook’s already much larger user base had increased from almost a quarter of a million to 1.2 billion users.32 How much this was due to these earth-shaking events and how much to other commercial strategies and ‘network effects’, is not clear. But the growth was conditioned, and probably very strongly conditioned, by the insertion of the platform brands into a captivating story of a global youth uprising.
The term ‘Twitter revolutions’ had, of course, always glossed over salient realities. Whether in Iran or Tunisia, the numbers of users connected to social media were a small and disproportionately middle-class share of the total population. In Tunisia, there were just two hundred active Twitter users. Most social industry users, still a minority of the population, were on Facebook.33 In Egypt, where the social industry had much deeper penetration, with 60 per cent of under-thirties using it, the April 6 Youth Movement was able to use Facebook as a communications hub. Other activists, however, found that mobile texting was far more important for organizing. Nonetheless, when the desperate Tunisian market seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire after being harassed by police, it became known only because the images were shared on Facebook and resonated with an existing mood of fury with the regime. When the Tahrir Square protesters flooded timelines with the riveting detail of their audacious actions, they not only increased the costs of repression for the regime and weakened the position of its overseas backers, but gave confidence to others to join in.
Whatever the political purposes to which users put them, however, the most successful users are those who understand the informational politics of the platform. The infamous Facebook experiment, published in 2014, on ‘emotional contagion’, built on the well-known fact that sentiment is catching. By manipulating users’ moods, it found that this contagion can now be orchestrated on a massive scale by networks.34 The virality and celerity of the information economy piggybacks on this tendency, aggregating and herding sentiment, assembling makeshift alliances around a mood, building towards a euphoric climax and then dissipating. The experiment also showed that it is possible for the medium to fabricate and manipulate the mood of users, which of course Facebook already does on a molecular level through its management of feeds. But it doesn’t necessarily need to mass-produce emotional hype: opportune sentiments will arise as a matter of course.
In 2011, what went viral was a model of protest. In Tahrir Square, a coalition of Islamists, liberals and Nasserists had built a city-within-a-city, a mini-metropolis managing lighting, accommodation, waste disposal, medicine, food, water, security checkpoints to guard against frequent government attacks, and inter-communal protection for Christians and Muslims at prayer.35 It would be tempting to say that, with opportunity came competence in the techniques of self-government, cooperation and mutuality. But the organizers of Tahrir Square were veterans of past struggles, from anti-war protests to the 2008 general strike. They had built coalitions and acquired their repertoires of protest and social media publicity over the course of almost a decade. What is more, the symbolically central revolt in Tahrir Square had to spread to other parts of the country, including to armed sectors of the population, in order for the dictatorship to be overthrown. In retrospect, even then it bypassed huge swathes of the population which later became the popular constituency for General Sisi’s armed coup.
Nonetheless, Egypt’s revolutionaries were giving other people ideas. They suggested a format of protest that could be taken up by anti-austerity and pro-democracy activists from New York to Nepal. It was not even just a protest. Tahrir Square was also an organizing hub at which other actions could be discussed and the diverse components of the movement tentatively federated. More importantly, it prefigured the self-rule that protesters wanted to achieve. It was, in embryo, an alternative way of organizing legitimate power. This gave rise to #Occupy, not so much a movement as a brand, a hashtagged franchise, a repertoire of symbols and tactics available to Indignados in Spain, labour activists in Nigeria, democracy protesters in Malaysia.
The digital swarms descended, from Puerta del Sol, Madrid to Oakland. The global core of this movement was Occupy Wall Street. There, heteroclite alliances of anarchists, Anonymous trolls, communists and libertarians shot a populist arrow across the bow at the One percent. They attempted new model communes, prefiguring a more democratic and egalitarian social order – although with little agreement as to what that might actually mean. Indeed, the absence of agreement was regarded as a virtue. They emphasized consensus over ideology, in the spirit of 1990s anti-capitalism and the Zapatista ethos: ‘Many Yeses, One No’.
Organizationally, these protests looked very little like Tahrir Square. In some cases, the #Occupy brand and repertoire was worked into an existing social movement with its own tactics and traditions, as in Spain and Greece. But most of the time, #Occupy involved small groups of experienced activists setting up camp and relying on digital connections to attract otherwise scattered, disconnected participants. In New York, for example, the organizers of Occupy Wall Street were veterans of another recent alliance, New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts. In London, they were activists from the environmentalist movement Climate Camp. These were the handfuls of activists with the skills, resources and free time to organize. To their momentary advantage, they were tech-savvy and could exploit ubiquitous smartphone and platform use. And for a period of time in 2010 to 2011, it seemed as if all that was needed was to set up an event on Facebook, share it across the platforms, hashtag it, meme it and wait: build it, and they will come. Activists were flush with apparent success, surfing the crest of a viral wave.
#Occupy adopted the abstract schema of Tahrir Square’s insurgency, without being able to emulate its substantial organized base, while tailoring it to fit with cyber-libertarian ideolog
ies about the emancipatory possibilities of the ‘network’ and horizontal organization. They were emboldened in this approach by a flurry of academic and journalistic clichés celebrating the networked individual, the swarm and the reduced costs of collective organizing entailed by digital democracy. Such boosterism recognized real tendencies but underestimated the fragility of any organization so cheaply had.
The reduced costs of organizing also reduced the costs of quitting – as well as the costs of infiltration and disruption.36 Moreover, the proprietary algorithms were designed to advance individual networking, not collective organization. At most, because of their surging towards hype, they could generate a quick, expedient aggregation of individual sentiments. And, as Paolo Gerbaudo’s analysis in his book The Digital Party recognizes, far from encouraging horizontal organization, digital networking tends to promote charismatic leaders and shallow forms of ‘participation’ and ‘feedback’ from within a largely passive layer of supporters.37 Insofar as these structures do translate into more sustained organization, as is arguably the case with Italy’s populist Five Star Movement, they lend themselves less to democratic empowerment than to a business model. The digital euphoria generally passed and was replaced by demoralization. Occupy, emanating from a political mood that was suspicious of parties, was, organizationally, the meatspace equivalent of the shitstorm. It attracted giant bursts of feeling, energy and confidence, galvanized moments of unity and conviction and generated some impressive actions – most of which turned rapidly into passive despair.
The state didn’t wither away; Occupy did. Beyond a few places where #Occupy was linked to already powerful social movements, the protests proved impossible to sustain, being more steam than piston, and not much steam at that. The enthusiasm for the network vanished like a trending topic. The ‘movements of the squares’ either dissipated into parties aimed at taking electoral power, as in Greece and Spain, or melted away and empowered authoritarian states, as in Turkey after the Gezi Park protests. The fate of the ‘Arab Spring’ would soon demonstrate just how exceedingly difficult it is to achieve lasting social and political change, even with much more sustained organization behind it.
And by 2014, a malevolent twist on the political mobilization of hip young digital natives was about to appear. Benefiting from civil war in Iraq, and outright carnage escalating to a state-orchestrated Götterdämmerung in Syria, it would add an obscene irony to every wholesome net-utopian cliché.
VII.
‘Put down the chicken wings and come to jihad, bro.’ This was the wry, savvy voice of an ISIS recruiter on Twitter. On Ask.fm, another recruiter answered questions about his favourite desert, his beard, life in the battle. Images circulated of jihadists cuddling kittens, eating Snickers, playing video games, beheading their enemies.38
Five years after the Iranian Green Movement and three years after the ‘Arab Spring’ birthed such a brief reprise of cyber-utopianism, here was a ‘Twitter revolution’ that was actually in the middle of taking power. Here was a makeshift theocratic state, of all things, assembled with the logic of the swarm, occupying and keeping public space. Here was a right-wing, networked social movement, a reactionary guerrilla campaign, a band of mercenary adventurers, a brand, a hashtag, which had fully mastered the idiom of the platforms.
The Islamic State had emerged from a hard core of jihadist combatants affiliated to the ‘Al-Qaeda’ franchise during the occupation of Iraq and the ensuing civil war. At first dominated by ‘foreign fighters’, in the years since 2006 they had developed social roots in parts of Iraq’s Sunni population. It had become a far-right social movement, armed and intent on challenging the territorial authority of the state bequeathed by the occupation. By 2012, as Syria descended into civil war, and jihadists, released from prison by Assad to sow chaos amid the opposition, opened a new front in the civil war, it gained its first territorial footprint, rebranding itself as the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’ (ISIS). By 2014, as the Iraqi government suppressed Sunni protests against their political exclusion with the use of death squads, ISIS was gaining political support even from hard-core secular Ba’athists.39 Indeed, many ISIS recruits were former Ba’athist soldiers. Moreover, the Iraqi army would not have disintegrated so rapidly in the face of ISIS assault were it not ushered in by a civilian uprising against the troops regarded as agents of a sectarian regime.
In the summer of 2014, as they began their invasion of Mosul, ISIS deployed a sophisticated social industry strategy. Far from trying to leverage surprise, they sought to inspire dread, broadcasting and live-tweeting their coming with the hashtag #AllEyesOnISIS. Through the Twitter-linked app, Dawn of Glad Tidings, they used supporters’ smartphones to disseminate messages, carefully tailored to avoid triggering spam filters. The app was downloaded ten thousand times, permitting sophisticated Twitter-storming operations. As their forces marched towards Baghdad, the number one search result for ‘Baghdad’ on Twitter was an image of a jihadist contemplating an ISIS flag flying over the city. They successfully hijacked World Cup-related hashtags to spread links to their propaganda video. By February 2015, it was estimated that there were anything from 90,000 to 200,000 pro-ISIS tweets on Twitter every day.40 By mid-2015, Twitter had come under pressure from the US government to delete pro-ISIS accounts, and had to take down some 125,000 of them. They shared slick videos aimed at Western millennials, some most likely produced by the former German rapper turned jihadist, Denis Cuspert.41 Jihad was being marketed, very efficiently, as the epitome of masculine cool.
Sedimented into this barrage of self-publicity was a stream of snuff videos, as members braggingly broadcast images of the beheadings and war atrocities they had been party to. Although this initially alarmed the ISIS leadership, worried about its effects on Muslim support and the criticisms it was drawing from the Al-Qaeda leadership, it didn’t slow down or reduce the flow of recruits. If anything, ISIS became known for the extravagance of its displays of violence and its pointed refusal to acknowledge limitations.42 It is even possible that these irruptions of obscenity demonstrated for some supporters the authentic commitment of these ‘lions’: their #nofilter reality, as opposed to the pervasive fakery of online celebrity.
In the first six months of the US-led bombing campaign to oust ISIS, the Pentagon reported 19,000 new recruits to the organization, most of them from outside the Middle East, 3,000 from Europe, North America and Australia, and a surprisingly large number of them religious novices – including at least one recruit whose entire training in the religion came from a copy of Islam for Dummies.43 International combat tourists filtered into training camps, ostensibly to avenge the humiliations of empire by enslaving Yazidi women and beheading infidels, perhaps just as attracted by the prospect of survivalist nirvana. The morbid fascination with the group, sanctioned by lurid news coverage of the ISIS ‘way of life’, was akin to the Nazi or satanic fixations of ostracized American teenagers contemplating a school shooting. It self-consciously incarnated the antithesis of everything liberal modernity stood for.
Twitter did not create the sumps of misery from which recruits could be found in small Welsh towns, among Swedish teenagers or from put-upon Muslim minorities in the suburbs of the Île-de-France. No more than it had created the injustices giving rise to Occupy. Far less did it create the sorts of feelings that would lead to surprisingly widespread passive support for the group. At the height of the group’s notoriety, it was more popular in Europe than in the Middle East. Polling controversially suggested that 7 per cent of British citizens and 16 per cent of French citizens responded favourably to ISIS, a share much larger than the entire Muslim population in each society.44 Nor did Twitter create the patterns of state breakdown allowing ISIS to gain territorial footholds, or induce the Iraqi government to unleash death squads to quell a restive Sunni population, thus making them briefly receptive to ISIS rule. Nor did it build the torture chambers during the anti-occupation insurgency in Iraq, or the television shows modelled on twenti
eth-century show trials in which terrified and beaten ‘guests’ were interrogated for supposed terrorism offences, all of which had helped mint these hard-boiled jihadists.45
Nonetheless, it is hard to see ISIS spreading terror among its opponents, and excitement among its members, so efficiently without the social industry. The tens of thousands of demoralized Iraqi government troops who fled Mosul without a fight were prompted in part by the belief that an overwhelming armed force was coming. In fact, the invasion forces consisted of just two thousand jihadists, compared to thirty thousand government troops. And it afforded ISIS a new means of ideological dissemination, quite different from the hierarchical, vanguard model of Al-Qaeda communications.46 ISIS instead made short propaganda clips modelled on Hollywood fare, and games like its own ripped version of Grand Theft Auto exploited the volatility of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, deploying crowdsourcing, apps, bots and hashtag-hacking. It used the logic of the Twitterstorm to insinuate its short, digestible bites of propaganda into popular culture.
ISIS did not propose anything like the global, millenarian political philosophy of Al-Qaeda, but it disseminated a ready-to-hand narrative about emancipation from the ‘oppressive Tawaghit’ – the system of regimes bequeathed by the colonial partition of the Middle East. It leveraged the free labour of users of its app, in the congealed form of smartphone data, the better to orchestrate its tweetstorms. It asked users to participate in its propaganda by sharing hashtags, articles and videos. At one stage, ISIS accounts asked followers to video themselves waving the ISIS flag in a public place and share it on social media. It created a sense of identity and belonging.47 Its promise – as the chicken wings tweet showed – was that users would find greater meaning and value in life by migrating to the sunny Wilaya of Raqqah and building the Islamic State. It focused, to that end, on recruiting not just for military purposes, but potential citizens for what they claimed was a flourishing earthly utopia living as God intended.
The Twittering Machine Page 19
