No Future To Risk: Why Social Unrest Is Inevitable

Nicholas Kulish digs into the rise of civil unrest in recent months, and finds decentralized, bottom-up, and spontaneous resistance to established order, even those parts of the establishment that theoretically represent the interests of ‘the people’, like political parties and unions:

Nicholas Kulish, As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe

Increasingly, citizens of all ages, but particularly the young, are rejecting conventional structures like parties and trade unions in favor of a less hierarchical, more participatory system modeled in many ways on the culture of the Web.

In that sense, the protest movements in democracies are not altogether unlike those that have rocked authoritarian governments this year, toppling longtime leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Protesters have created their own political space online that is chilly, sometimes openly hostile, toward traditional institutions of the elite.

The critical mass of wiki and mapping tools, video and social networking sites, the communal news wire of Twitter and the ease of donations afforded by sites like PayPal makes coalitions of like-minded individuals instantly viable.

“You’re looking at a generation of 20- and 30-year-olds who are used to self-organizing,” said Yochai Benkler, a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “They believe life can be more participatory, more decentralized, less dependent on the traditional models of organization, either in the state or the big company. Those were the dominant ways of doing things in the industrial economy, and they aren’t anymore.”

Yonatan Levi, 26, called the tent cities that sprang up in Israel “a beautiful anarchy.” There were leaderless discussion circles like Internet chat rooms, governed, he said, by “emoticon” hand gestures like crossed forearms to signal disagreement with the latest speaker, hands held up and wiggling in the air for agreement — the same hand signs used in public assemblies in Spain. There were free lessons and food, based on the Internet conviction that everything should be available without charge.

Someone had to step in, Mr. Levi said, because “the political system has abandoned its citizens.”

The rising disillusionment comes 20 years after what was celebrated as democratic capitalism’s final victory over communism and dictatorship.

In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, a consensus emerged that liberal economics combined with democratic institutions represented the only path forward. That consensus, championed by scholars like Francis Fukuyama in his book “The End of History and the Last Man,” has been shaken if not broken by a seemingly endless succession of crises — the Asian financial collapse of 1997, the Internet bubble that burst in 2000, the subprime crisis of 2007-8 and the continuing European and American debt crisis — and the seeming inability of policy makers to deal with them or cushion their people from the shocks.

Frustrated voters are not agitating for a dictator to take over. But they say they do not know where to turn at a time when political choices of the cold war era seem hollow. “Even when capitalism fell into its worst crisis since the 1920s there was no viable alternative vision,” said the British left-wing author Owen Jones.

Protests in Britain exploded into lawlessness last month. Rampaging youths smashed store windows and set fires in London and beyond, using communication systems like BlackBerry Messenger to evade the police. They had savvy and technology, Mr. Jones said, but lacked a belief that the political system represented their interests. They also lacked hope.

“The young people who took part in the riots didn’t feel they had a future to risk,” he said.

I will leave aside the political and economic motivations of the folks involved in these anti-establishment movements worldwide (if you’d like my views on that side of things, take a look at Underpaid Genius). However, as a student of social tools it is obvious to me that liquid media are so low-cost, ubiquitous, and social, that resistance movements will take on the shape of the tools that inform them.

And it also seems likely that the organizations that these activists oppose won’t adopt social tools to rally their supporters. They will use conventional media and communications. The establishment organizations are massively solid, and threatened by the apparently anarchic resistance that is popping up. But it will be like a bear trying to fight a swarm of bees.

Again, leaving aside my feelings of whether the resistance is justified, and simply accepting the premise that these protesters will continue their actions until dramatic changes take place, it seems obvious to me that this unrest will continue and it will grow.

Why? Liquid media provides a matrix in which the disaffected can easily come together around short-term and unmanaged activities. These activists don’t have to share long-term goals, pull together a complete platform, grow a large base of financial supporters, or even collate a list of all the participants of the action. There is no control, there is no organizing committee, there is no leader. This is loose alignment: cooperation.

These are the same reasons that business is moving toward a rōnin economy, based around short-term projects, leveraging freelancers and outsourced work groups. The efficiencies that arise when business politics are put aside and people simply focus on contributing to the immediate and clear-cut goals of a near-term project. I don’t have to agree with the long-term strategic goals of AOL, for example, if I come aboard for a short-term engagement. We just have to agree on highly constrained tasks for the project, and then go our own ways a few weeks or months later. I’m simply cooperating, while full-time employees of AOL have to get into line on the long-term strategy there: they have to join the collective, and collaborate consistently and over time.

So, we can expect that both sorts of pressures will impact our society. On one hand, organizations see the benefits arising using the rōnin workforce in short term projects. And on the other, the realm of social discourse is moving past talking toward outright civil unrest, leveraging the same sorts of efficiencies latent in loose cooperation.

Expect to see civil unrest increasing, directly in parallel with the adoption of these open social tools, and as the world slides into a more liquid configuration.

Five Best Wednesday Columns - National - The Atlantic Wire

Eric Randall via The Atlantic Wire

Floyd Abrams on flash mobs and First Amendment rights  

Flash mobs—large groups that assemble by means of text message—sometimes act dangerously or lawlessly. “In doing so, they have raised difficult policy and legal issues, including questions relating to the role of the First Amendment,” writes lawyer and author Floyd Abrams in The Wall Street Journal. Recently, mobs have beaten passersby and robbed stores. Official responses to the trend vary. In Cleveland, the city council passed a law banning “improper use of social media to violate ordinances on disorderly conduct, public intoxication and unlawful congregation by promoting illegal flash mob activity.” During the British riots, David Cameron considered censoring social network sites. “But by focusing on the newer technological means of communication and not on the illegal conduct and its causes, they miss the point that it is not criminal to meet, let alone to plan to do so—but to engage in criminal conduct.” The Cleveland mayor realized this and vetoed the proposed law. But the legality can become ambiguous. In San Francisco, the BART public transit system heard of a planned disruption to their service by groups organizing themselves by cell phone, so they disabled the underground fiber optic network. The plan worked, but the ACLU and others criticized the group for violating the liberties of all BART passengers. “As the proposed Cleveland statute illustrates, barring all people from engaging in constitutionally protected speech, even for a limited time in a limited space, raises troubling First Amendment issues,” writes Abrams. “There will be more.”

(Source: underpaidgenius)

Waidi Ren and Hukuo: The Two-Tiered Society in China

Waidi ren, or ‘outsiders’, are the rural unskilled who migrate to China’s booming cities illegally, and are forming a permanent underclass:

Andrew Jacobs, China Takes Aim at Rural Influx

According to the Beijing Bureau of Statistics, more than one-third of the capital’s 19.6 million residents are migrants from China’s rural hinterland, a figure that has grown by about 6 million just since 2000.

Numbers like these worry the governing Communist Party, which has a particular aversion to the specter of urban slums and their potential as cauldrons for social instability.

[…]

Known derisively as “waidi ren,” or outsiders, the migrants are the cut-rate muscle that makes it eminently affordable for better-off Chinese to dine out, hire full-time nannies and ride new subway lines in places like Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

“The middle class hates to see that kind of poverty, but they can’t live without their cheap labor,” said Kam Wing Chan, a professor at the University of Washington who studies China’s rural-migrant policies.

To manage the huge population flows — and its own fears — the government relies on an internal passport and registration system dating from the Mao years that ties access to education, health care and pensions to the birthplace of a person’s parent. The hukou system, as it is called, has created a two-tiered population in many Chinese cities: those with legal residency and those without.

Though urbanization is a central tenet of the party’s latest five-year economic plan for the country, Mr. Chan says, the 250 million rural migrants who are expected to move to cities in the next 15 years could become a source of social unrest unless the hukou system is reformed. “Having that many second-class citizens in Chinese cities is dangerous,” he said.

Obtaining an urban residence permit, called a hukou, is possible only for those with deep pockets or top-notch connections, so struggling migrants live in a gray zone of pay-as-you-go medical care, dingy rented rooms and unregistered schools where the education is middling at best. Byzantine property ownership and bank-loan rules mean that most rural hukou holders are frozen out of the housing market even if they can afford a down payment on an apartment.

[…]

In a rare act of coordinated defiance, more than a dozen newspapers across the country jointly published an editorial last year calling on the government to take on the nettlesome process of reform. “We believe in people born to be free and people possessing the right to migrate freely,” the editorial declared. Within hours, however, the editorial was pulled from the papers’ Web sites and several editors were punished.

Since then, some Chinese scholars have been reluctant to speak out on the issue — indeed, a half-dozen experts on the subject each declined to comment for this article. Others, who were willing to discuss the matter, warned that the status quo was producing the very situation China’s leaders want to avoid.

As income gaps widen and inflation takes its toll on the paltry incomes of big-city migrants, many workers are becoming increasingly bitter. “The system as it stands now is only feeding instability,” said Jia Xijin, a public policy expert at Tsinghua University. “Rural and urban residents contribute to our nation, and they both pay taxes. But they don’t equally benefit. The injustice is glaring.”

One of the problems inherent in China’s urbanization arising from the desire to slow the migration of rural citizens to the cities, but factory owners need low-cost workers. The Chinese leadership is caught in a dilemma of growth. If migration is unfettered, the rural countrysides would be hollowed out even faster that they are now, with 25% of Beijings inhabitants are waidi ren. Inevitably, these outsiders will demand higher pay, and the cost of Chinese products will climb. 

In terms of urbanization, Beijing has two sides: the legal districts, with middle class and upper class Beijingers, and the illegal zones, where waidi ren live in substandard housing, with their kids denied access to subsidized schools, and no access to health care. But these have to be relatively close together, since the waidi ren work as nannies, cooks, and factory workers, coming into daily contact with legal citizens, their bosses and customers.

This is a frail system, and will fail, especially when the kids come of age. They won’t tolerate being shut out.

UK PM Advocates Censorship And The Cessation Of Free Speech… Of Course

So it has been widely reported that UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, has considered a crack down on social network tools, like Twitter and Facebook, when being used by those involved in unrest:

[W]e are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.

A great number of people have expressed outrage or surprise. Jeff Jarvis gave well reasoned arguments that Cameron was about to cross a line onto a slippery slope:

Jeff Jarvis, A social media crackdown is the wrong response to riots

Beware, sir. If you take these steps, what separates you from the Saudi government demanding the ability to listen to and restrict its BBM networks? What separates you from Arab tyrannies cutting off social communication via Twitter or from China banning it?

This regulatory reflex further exposes the danger of British government thinking it can and should regulate media. Beware, my friends. When anyone’s speech is not free, no one’s speech is free. I refer the honourable gentleman to this . Censorship is not the path to civility. Only speech is.

It’s not that I disagree with Jarvis: far from it.

However, I don’t think that a justifiable and well-reasoned argument will work here. In the end, the forces that have conspired to create the terrible situation we find ourselves in economically, and the undue levels of austerity they have proposed, will inevitably lead to social unrest, and that social unrest will lead to escalating repression by the state.

As Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth recently reported, austerity too long or too harsh always leads to social unrest. And social unrest, as we have seen across the Arab world this year, and in France, Greece, and other European countries in recent years, leads to an escalating response by the authorities.

I lived through the Law and Order Nixon and Reagan years, where white urbanites turned against the Democrats for being soft on US rioters and demonstrators against the war. [This ultimately led to a giant rift in the Democratic party, which led to Reagan winning the White House, and the slow but inexorable shift of many formerly Democratic southern states to GOP bastions.]

Cameron will be riding the same two-headed beast, and slowly those espousing hardening the response to the rioters will gain control of the party, and those taking other viewpoints will be ruled illegitimate and soft on crime.

And if the social tools of the day are instrumental to the ability of the rioters to elude capture and plan their activities, the authorities will seek to turn them off, or to otherwise control them.