OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.
The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days, will have to expand in several strategic ways. Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power. The whole range of other actions — shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates — will not happen in the park.
The new movement also needs to build a public policy platform. The American people have it absolutely right on the three main points of a new agenda. To put it simply: tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all.
Finally, the new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption. And the candidates that turn down large campaign checks, political action committees, Super PACs and bundlers will be well positioned to call out their opponents who are on the corporate take.
Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.
Although Swartz is not a sociologist, this analysis is very similar to the one that sociologist and social-media researcher Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina has come up with. As I described in an earlier post, Tufekci argues that social tools — and particularly Facebook, since it is much more widespread in Egypt and other Arab countries than Twitter is — have played a crucial role in creating what she calls an “collective action/information cascade” that helped transform groups of dissidents acting on their own into a widespread revolution.
What helped dictatorships like those in Egypt and Tunisia survive for so long, Tufekci says, is that before the Internet and the social web came along, people had no way of knowing whether their own dissatisfaction or revolutionary fervor was shared by others, apart from a small group that they might know personally. That’s enough to create small pockets of resistance, but in order for a movement to break out and become a significant force, the members of that movement have to know that others are also willing to fight — and possibly die — for that cause. Social media, Tufekci says, makes it possible to see this happening in real-time, and that helps create momentum.
In other words, as Swartz put it in his post, social tools like Facebook (and Twitter, and blogs and text messaging) allow the core group of crazy people to publicize what they are doing — and thereby connect with and inspire less crazy, but still committed people, to join them, and, at some point, this momentum tips over into outright revolution. As I’ve argued before, this is a fundamental aspect of the network effects that come from Facebook and Twitter, and it plays out not only in Arab revolutions, but in similar events in Britain during the London riots, and even in the current “Occupy Wall Street” protest movement.
We don’t trust institutions anymore. Name a bank or financial institution you can trust today. That industry was built entirely on trust — we entrusted our money to their cloud — and they failed us. Government? The other day, I heard a cabinet member from a prior administration call Washington “paralyzed and poisonous” — and he’s an insider. Media? Pew released a study last week saying that three-quarters of Americans don’t believe journalists get their facts straight (which is their only job). Education? Built for a prior, institutional era. Religion? Various of its outlets are abusing children or espousing bigotry or encouraging violence. The #OccupyWallStreet troops are demonizing practically all of corporate America and with it, capitalism. What institutions are left? I can’t name one.
Inveterate crank, John C. Dvorak explains why he does not use Facebook:
Facebook is retro because, like AOL, it’s retro by its nature. It’s a closed system. Some people like a closed comfy system and others don’t. I, for one, don’t. If I want a personal webpage with all sorts of information about myself, I’ll go to WordPress.com and make one. By doing this, I don’t turn over any data, control, or information to an onerous third party to sell, use, or exploit. I can close down the site when I want. I can say what I want. I can pretty much do whatever.
Which begs the question as to why anyone would use Facebook when it is essentially AOL done right? The fastest growing group on Facebook are people in their 70′s. Oldsters are flocking to Facebook the way they once did with AOL. Facebook is a simple system for the masses that do not really care about technology and do not want to learn anything new except something easy like Facebook.
Rachel Botsman makes the case for collective consumption, correctly identifying and presenting many of the factors that now define our changing way of life. Listen, process, contemplate and incorporate.
Technology is enabling trust between strangers.
We can mimic the ties that used to happen face to face, but on a scale and in ways that have never been possible before. Social networks and real-time technologies are taking us back.
We are moving from passive consumers, to creators, to highly-enabled collaborators.
From Matthew Ingram’s coverage of today’s Facebook announcement:
It was clear from Zuckerberg’s comments at the launch that Facebook sees the new social inbox as way of appealing to younger users (as I described in my post about the rumored email launch). The Facebook CEO described how he was talking to high-school students while visiting his girlfriend’s family, and they said that none of them used email because it was “too slow.”
“I said ‘what do you mean, it’s instantaneous!’ Zuckerberg recalled. “I was kind of boggled by this.” But the Facebook founder said that he realized for many users, particularly younger users, email as it exists now is “too formal” and adds a lot of weight and social friction because “you have to think of the email address, think of a subject line, write ‘love Mark at the end’” and so on. The high-school students he spoke to preferred chat because it was easier and faster, he said — in other words, it had less “cognitive load.”
Less “cognitive load”? LESS COGNITIVE LOAD??!!! Are you fu@king kidding me? If having to think of a subject line and pay attention to little things like grammar and syntax are too much for the younger generations, I would like to officially turn in my semi-young badge and join the wizened ranks of the crotchety, cantankerous, old man. Senescence, here I come!!!
One problem Reznor has with Facebook is the “falseness” that accompanies it. He notes that if as many people listened to Joy Division and “liked” them on their Facebook page, they’d be bigger than U2. What he’s suggesting, of course, is that people don’t put their actual selves forward on the network and instead portray themselves as they want to be seen for whatever reason. Certainly, there’s a lot of that going on. “I’ve seen that with people I know in real life, and I check them out online, it’s not always the same person,” he notes.
Reznor also doesn’t like the disconnect of social networking in general. “I guess I’m just coming from an older school of: when you met people you met them. Whether you spoke to them in person or talked on the phone, when you interact with them it would be a real person and not some avatar of themselves,” he says.
The character of Mark bears some resemblance to the real-life Mark Zuckerberg, but it’s clear that Sorkin is more interested in him as an allegorical figure. Mark stands in for a whole generation whose social lives take place online. The question The Social Network asks is whether this makes them bigger assholes than the previous generations. Is there something more horrific about people who rate each other’s hotness and friend/defriend each other out in the open, versus those who carried on their sharkish popularity games behind the closed doors of final club houses? The answer is more complicated than you might think, which is what makes this such a delicious script.
The Cold War spawned a spate of Russian movie villains, and then we had Arabic stereotypes post 9-11, and now The Social Network marks an entry point in a new era, where the Internet is the enemy and people who understand how to code and build websites have power; We are scared of those who inexplicably understand the mechanics of our social lives and are almost inhumanely driven by the formidable pain of never fitting in.
