(13) Thu Nov 3
Politics and the web
BEFORE CLASS:
1. Write
2. Watch
Watch Evgeny Morozov on Vialogues and share a one-sentence critical response.
3. Link
4. Read
1
On the night of February 26, 2012, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was walking back from the grocery store to a house that his family was visiting when he was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, the gated community’s neighborhood watch coordinator. Remarkably, Zimmerman wasn’t charged. This angered the Martin family and observers, who believed the shooting was racially motivated. But local media paid scant attention to the case — a brief report ran the next day, and a slightly longer story the day after that in the Orlando Sentinel — so the police faced little pressure to act. That pressure grew online. Eleven days after the shooting, Kevin Cunningham, a thirty-one-year-old in Washington, DC, heard about Trayvon Martin via his fraternity’s e-mail list. Inspired by the Arab Spring a year earlier, he went to Change.org — a Web site for setting up petitions — and crafted one calling on the police to charge Zimmerman. He shared it with his fraternity, and it was posted to their e-mail list. Within a few days, it garnered fifteen thousand signatures. In New York, a young digital-media strategist named Daniel Maree posted a YouTube video asking people to wear hoodies on a designated day to call attention to Martin’s case, since the teenager had been wearing one when killed; the action became known as the Million Hoodie March. It was a catchy and potent meme, one that neatly highlighted the racial double standards in clothing: hoodies are ubiquitous, yet young black men who wear them are regarded as suspicious by police. The wear-a-hoodie meme exploded on Twitter when several celebrities tweeted about it. They also linked to the Change.org petition, which soon amassed two million signatures — making it the biggest in Change.org’s history. The tsunami of online discussion caught the mainstream media’s eye, and soon Trayvon Martin was a national story. Within weeks, the police arrested and charged Zimmerman. Because the goal was specific — the police must investigate this teenager’s death — the online conversation produced clear, focused action. Source: Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better (2014)
2
Days after the first protest in Tahrir Square, Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times, “The Facebook-armed youth of Tunisia and Egypt rise to demonstrate the liberating power of social media.” One Egyptian newspaper reported that a man named his firstborn daughter Facebook. On February 11, 2011 — the day the regime folded — Ghonim told a CNN interviewer, “I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him. . . . This revolution started on Facebook . . . in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I’ve always said that if you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.” Source: Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (2015)
3
Mass uprisings that are organized online tend to be leaderless and decentralized. They often have neither a plan nor unity of vision. This can be key to a revolution’s success, as it makes it much more difficult for governments to target the leaders of a protest movement. But leaderless revolutions can yield a great deal of chaos if a revolution succeeds. Source: Emily Parker, Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground (2014)
4
After the 2009 Iranian election protests, the proregime Raja News printed thirty-eight photos on its Web site with sixty-five faces circled in red and another batch of forty-seven photos with roughly one hundred faces similarly circled, inviting supporters to crowdsource identification of dissidents. Iranian police claim that tips they received in response to this invitation helped them arrest “at least forty people.” Source: Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better (2014)
5
In 2014, the government of Ukraine sent this positively Orwellian text message to people in Kiev whose phones were at a certain place during a certain time period: “Dear subscriber, you have been registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” Source: Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (2015)
6
The objective of countries like China isn’t so much to blot out unsavory information as to alter the physics around it — to create friction for problematic information and to route public attention to progovernment forums. While it can’t block all of the people from all of the news all of the time, it doesn’t need to. “What the government cares about,” Atlantic journalist James Fallows writes, “is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother.” The strategy, says Xiao Qiang of the University of California at Berkeley, is “about social control, human surveillance, peer pressure, and self-censorship.” Source: Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You (2011)
7
As the price of storing data drops, John Villasenor of the Brookings Institute writes, there’s a troubling side effect to sousveillance: The state can simply store everything it can get its hands on — phone calls, texts, microblog posts, status updates, GPS coordinates of phones — and when it identifies a dissident, scour the trove for evidence. “Pervasive monitoring will provide what amounts to a time machine allowing authoritarian governments to perform retrospective surveillance,” Villasenor notes. This is precisely what is so alarming about the dragnet-style surveillance of the U.S. spy agencies, particularly the NSA. By casting such a wide net — and gathering up so many everyday utterances — they garner tidbits of everyday speech that, though innocuous when spoken, can be made to look incriminating by agents desperate to make a case. The whole point behind indiscriminate collection of data about citizens is to scare them into self-censoring. Source: Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better (2014)
9
Surveillance puts us at risk of abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance. The definition of “wrong” is often arbitrary, and can quickly change. For example, in the US in the 1930s, being a Communist or Socialist was a bit of an intellectual fad, and not considered wrong among the educated classes. In the 1950s, that changed dramatically with the witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy, when many intelligent, principled American citizens found their careers destroyed once their political history was publicly disclosed. Is someone’s reading of Occupy, Tea Party, animal rights, or gun rights websites going to become evidence of subversion in five to ten years? Source: Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (2015)
10
Everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life. — John Dewey
11
Let me now disclose a central inspiration for this book, one that might seem far afield: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. Among many other things, Jacobs offers an elaborate tribute to the sheer diversity of cities — to public spaces in which visitors encounter a range of people and practices that they could have barely imagined and that they could not possibly have chosen in advance. As Jacobs describes great cities, they teem and pulsate with life. “It is possible to be on excellent sidewalk terms with people who are very different from oneself and even, as time passes, on familiar public terms with them. Such relationships can, and do, endure for many years, for decades…. The tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbors — differences that often go far deeper than differences in color — which are possible and normal in intensely urban life…are possible and normal only when streets of great cities have built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace together…. Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow.”
Jacobs’s book is about architecture, not communications. But with extraordinary vividness, Jacobs helps show, through an examination of city architecture, why we should be concerned about a situation in which people are able to create communications universes of their own liking. Jacobs’s “sidewalk contacts” need not occur only on sidewalks. The idea of “architecture” should be taken broadly, not narrowly. And acknowledging the benefits that Jacobs finds on sidewalks, we might seek to find those benefits in many other places. At its best, I believe, a system of communications can be, for many of us, a close cousin or counterpart to a great urban center. For a healthy democracy, shared public spaces, virtual or not, are a lot better than echo chambers. Source: Cass Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (2008)
12
What is actually happening was predicted by MIT professors Marshall Alstale and Erik Brynjolfsson as early as 1996 — two years before Google and eight years before Facebook. “Internet users,” they wrote, “can seek out interactions with like-minded individuals who have similar values. while minimizing interactions with those whose values differ. They called this phenomenon “cyberbalkanization”; psychologists call it “selective exposure.’” Online, you can find self-reinforcing groups of white supremacists on the one hand, and free-loving hippies on the other. The dangerof cyberbalkankation is that people become radicalized, intolerant, and “less likely to trust important decisions to people whose values differ from their own.”
DURING CLASS:
1. Current events
- Discussion leader: Robert
2. Lesson work
- Assigned reading/video discussion leader: A
- Online discussion leader: B
- Links library discussion leader: C
3. Digerati: Evgeny Morozov
- Activity leader: D
Evgeny Morozov writes about the political and social implications of technology. He has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, a fellow at the New America Foundation and a contributing editor for Foreign Policy magazine.
In-class reading (click here for a copy) excerpted from: The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
In-class video: Does the internet actually inhibit, not encourage democracy? Evgeny Morozov presents an alternative take on ‘cyber-utopianism’ — the seductive idea that the internet plays a largely emancipatory role in global politics. RSA London. (2011, 10:59) — pre-class assigned video
4. Preview
Preview Sunday Story #8
- Questions for Bruce Schneier
Preview homework for class 14: Thu Nov 10
- Homework
- Classroom leadership assignments
