Twitter and tear gas
A firsthand account and incisive analysis of modern protest, revealing internet-fueled social movements' greatest strengths and frequent challenges. To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti-Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. Tufekci explains the nuanced trajectories of modern protests--how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change. Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul's Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and culture--and offer essential insights into the future of governance.
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7recommend
12mentions
9people
2017–2025years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Far Out! Thanks.
We could use some Complex Adaptive System architecture to create galaxies. Or we could call them Gestalts instead of CAS.
In gestalts entities, use rules to interact with a read/write message bus.
Ants. Pheromone trails. Write when you find food, not if you don't.
We have the pieces for this. Entities - people. We have a r/w bus - the internet. What we don't have are rules. We can think of rules - the kind Wolfram talks about in NKofS - instead as a language. A language in the sense of Sapir-Whorf. "Twitter and Tear Gas" (Zeynep Tufecki) is a good illustration of Sapir-Whorf in internet languages. (Available as a pdf I think)
That language is the missing link. In Real Life there is a language for collaboration. Perhaps the task is to understand the elements of IRL collaboration and then transpose it.
One could make some guesses about fundamentals. As we have all discovered, one fundamental is trust. IRL Trust is identity and reputation based. With many caveats. Perhaps we could start by considering A New Kind of Identity. ?
- If you're interested in the effects social media has on political and civic life, these are two great books to read. One is recent, the other is a foundational classic of social psychology:
- Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (2017).
- Erwin Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956)
Goffman uses a theatrical metaphor to talk about how our behavior and social life is affected by our perceptions of who the audience is for our actions. Zeynep writes about how the magnifying and flattening effects of social media have been both a help and hindrance to large-scale organizing. Both are wonderful books.
- FWIW Mandie, here's my list of modern pop tech critique, all topics that DV touches at least tangentially. Far more than 40 days and nights worth of reading
Shoshana Zuboff Big Other (surveillance capitalism)
Virginia Eubanks Automating Inequality
Sophie Brickman Baby Unplugged
Cory Doctorow Radicalized
Mike Monteiro Ruined by Design
Nick Srnicek Platform Capitalism
Paul Kingsnorth Life versus the machine
Heather Burns Understanding Privacy
Roger McNamee Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
Siva Vaidhyanathan Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us
Catherine Price How to Break Up With Your Phone
Thomas Kersting Disconnected: Protect Your Kids Against Device Dependency
Nicholas Kardaras Glow Kids
Zeynep Tufekci Twitter and Tear Gas
Lelia Green Technoculture
Douglas Rushkoff Team Human
Jaron Lanier Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media
Carissa Véliz Privacy is Power: Why You Should Take Back Control
Xiaowei Wang Blockchain Chicken Farm
Jenny Oddell How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Wendy Liu Abolish SIlicon Valley
Jonathan Taplin Move Fast and Break Things
Andrew L. Shapiro The Control Revolution
Lawrence Lessig Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
David Shenk Data Smog
Douglas Rushkoff Cyberia
Paulina Borsook Cyberselfish.
- Zeynep Tufekci (the author of the piece) also wrote an excellent book, Twitter and Tear Gas, about modern protests and social movements in the age of social media. It’s available online under a CC license: https://www.twitterandteargas.org
- The problem with privacy in our age is that it's a collective harm issue (like public health, or environmental protection) so there really isn't much individuals can do, other than petition for regulatory change.
There are lots and lots of people working in this space worth following. One person in particular working on the California privacy law is Ashkan Soltani, and his twitter account (@ashk4n) is worth a follow. And I think no one thinks more deeply or incisively about these issues than Zeynep Tufekci. If you haven't read her book (Twitter and Tear Gas) it's fantastic.
I know it seems otherwise because of my fundraising work last year, but I really don't have strong connections to D.C. or any inside knowledge on what is on the regulatory agenda. Everyone I know in this space is kind of just winging it.
- I agree. I've always been in the camp favoring freedom of speech and the marketplace of ideas. My thinking became more nuanced when I read the book Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci [0].
Changes in technology alter the playing field for culture—and we've seen this in practice as the Internet and social networking have caused a fundamental shift in what it means to censor information. Censorship used to mean putting the newspaper under state control or blockading the radio station to prevent the message getting out.
Today it's much harder to censor a message by completely suppressing it. But it's also much easier to swamp the signal in noise, by flooding the communication channel with disinformation and distractions [1]. A group doesn't need to be large or powerful to muddle the truth of an issue, especially after accounting for the effects of filter bubbles and confirmation bias.
So to preserve the marketplace of ideas, we need more nuanced approaches in thinking about what communication is permitted. One approach that has been gaining support is in making a distinction between "freedom of speech" and "freedom and reach" [2].
[0] https://www.twitterandteargas.org/
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-n...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-f... .
