A Twitter revolution? No, but revolutionaries tweet

The Labour movement column, by @anthonypainter

After speaking at the Writing on the Wall festival in Liverpool a few weeks ago I ended up in conversation with one of the festival organisers. He had been very active in politics in the 1980s and 1990s, protesting at the miners’ strike and the Liverpool dockers’ strike. Our attention turned to the G20 protests and the death of Ian Tomlinson.

His observation was that he thought we were entering a police state at the time of the miners’ strike with technology enabling violent suppression. However, the death of Ian Tomlinson and its aftermath had convinced him otherwise. Protesters had used new tools of protest to photograph and video the attack – despite the fact that it is now illegal to photograph a policeman.

Some laws are so clumsy as to be unenforceable. Everyone has the tools of subversion. Technology is now a tool of resistance not suppression, observed the activist. Technology that could have enabled a police state instead prevents it. A protester on the scene is just as likely to make the news as the global news networks with huge resources at their disposal. Without mobile videos the discussion about the death of Ian Tomlinson could have been very different.

The ban on photographing police officers shows how the state can be clumsy and ineffective in its response to new freedoms. ID cards, now rightly subjected to a forensic first principles review by the new Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, have the same feel to them. The benefits are opaque, the costs to liberty and public purse clearer and considerable. How can you control in a world where a new identity can be acquired within a few clicks of the mouse? What use is state technological muscle where individuals – or gangs or cells – with knowledge can be just as technologically endowed? ID cards are a twentieth century response in a world tearing its way through the twenty-first century. From protests in the City of London to a mass uprising in Tehran is only a short digital hop. Andrew Sullivan has written that “the revolution will be twittered“. His point is that the ‘millennial’ generation love freedom and, what’s more, technology – wired and wireless – enables this freedom.

Maybe, but the key issue is that 70 percent of Iran’s population is under 30 and shifting decisively away from theocracy. This is fundamentally why we are seeing hundreds of thousands of protesters on the streets. Twitter no more led to the uprising than German TV led to the collapse of communism. The abject failure of the communist system to meet the material needs of its people was the root cause. However, it didn’t help the Czech and East German regimes that people could receive TV showing the material riches being enjoyed just a few miles across the border in West Germany.

Technology interplays with huge underlying social forces. Though it is often the text version of listening to static on a radio that is not tuned in, Twitter is revolutionary technology in its immediacy, mobility, and global reach. It will not be in and of itself a cause of revolutions, but sudden cacophonous symphonies can emerge out of the static. This is what happened over the weekend in Iran and it has people glued, as the tweets somehow find their way despite the internet being strangled by President Ahmadinejad’s security state.

Within a couple of days of 140 character communication over mobile networks – along with the more traditional word of mouth modes of communication – huge numbers congregated in favour of democracy and reform. Culture, politics and technology fuse and swarm in resistance. Voting failed to achieve change; protest is more often a sign of weakness than strength. Nonetheless, the rope is taut in this tug-of-war between new and theocratic Iran. Technology has put an extra man or two at the end of the rope of democracy and pluralism.

The people want mobile phones and the internet. The regime has to give it to them to maintain its legitimacy. In so doing, it begins to sow the seeds of its own downfall. Water always finds a way of escaping. Ownership of broadcasting, control of the press, curtailment of free association, and the purge of dissidence are still powerful tools of oppression. It’s just that they are not quite as powerful as they once were. Technology doesn’t achieve change. It does, however, make it faster and more likely.

Obama ’08 was effectively a new political party. It was a charismatically driven, movement based organisation. It could have been done without new technologies – the civil rights movement never had Facebook and that still managed to fundamentally change America – but whether it could have done it in such a short time frame is a moot point. Interestingly, these technologies facilitate old style politics: door-to-door contact, mass rallies, front-room meetings. The biggest misapprehension is that there is a new technological politics to replace traditional personal politics. Obama’s campaign demonstrated the opposite: new technologies re-energise old forms of personal politics.

Between the G20 protests to the Iranian ‘green revolution’ to Obama ’08 a thread emerges. Power is shifting from traditional institutions to individuals in social movements. That shift may end up being decisive. Fundamentally, the left has to understand this turbulence in terms of its consequences for how we listen, how we engage, how we mobilise and, ultimately, how we govern.

No-one has come near to nailing this yet. There is no necessary reason why it must be the mainstream left – the BNP’s website is the most visited party site in the UK after all. But there is something about the tang of freedom and idealism which is the cultural bedfellow of this power shift that should provide the left with a golden opportunity. It is not the forces of reaction that are tweeting and protesting on the streets of Tehran.

How these forces – state v individual, surveillance v liberty, authority v resistance, machine v movement politics – will play out remains to be seen. Technological determinism is just silly. It is equally silly to ignore the power of mobilisation, resistance, social and political change that new technologies can contribute to. To coin a phrase, they help to shift power to the many from the few.

Will there be a Twitter revolution? No, but revolutionaries will tweet.