Paul Mason
Verso
2012
237 pages
Back in the years of 1994, 1995, and 1996, when the Internet was just emerging as a mainstream media service, a large number of books with titles like 'Cyberia' were published about the new frontier of digital freedoms to be found in cyberspace. These books made grandiose predictions about the utopia that lay beyond the horizon now that the internet's mass availability had just come into view. The predictions about increased democracy and global intelligence and everything else now seems incredibly naive to the critical observer, but now the gushing cheerleaders of 1990s internet freedoms and consciousness, like Timothy Leary, Douglas Rushkoff, Bruce Sterling, Mark Dery are replaced by critics such as Sherry Turkle, Jaron Lanier, Jodi Dean, and Robert McChesney; critics who discuss the adverse effects digital and networked technologies have on society, literacy, politics, commerce, etc.
One of the early adopters of these networked technologies as they appeared in the 90s, were the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, EZLN, popularly known as the Zapatistas, a group of indigenous revolutionaries struggling for greater autonomy in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Beginning their revolution on January 1, 1994, the EZLN disseminated their communiques via the internet, in Spanish and English, to the world, marking the very beginnings of what was popularly known as the anti-globalization movement and what is referred to by anarchist anthropologist (a title he refuses on his twitter page) David Graeber as the global justice movement (a name for the movement which I haven't seen in print in any source other than his work). The Zapatistas use of the internet to get their message out was notable for two reasons, first was the novelty of the internet at the time, and the novelty of its use by political radicals, and the second was that it was being used by revolutionaries in a remote and impoverished section of Mexico by indigenous people. That radicals of the fourth world were using the latest in communications technologies garnered the EZLN the label of the first post-modern revolutionaries. In the year 2000, with the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, the anti-globalization movement became a global phenomenon with the full attention of the mainstream media, and one of the aspects of this movement the mainstream media fixated on was the protesters use of technology. At the time, it was of interest to observers that activists were using things like laptops and websites to any extent.
The interesting thing about Paul Mason's book, Why its Kicking Off Everywhere, is not that it has anything interesting to say about the uprisings seen around the globe in 2011. Mason's is far from the only book to examine those events, and what it has to say about them is typical of sympathetic journalists. Of course, Mason gets that the human element of these movements, but personal testimonies of movement participation have been a major feature of these uprisings, and there are entire books from the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement written by the people. Its that it's a book-length emanation of this continued amazement over that activists are using digital technologies that makes it interesting. History is filled with examples of radicals using their contemporary communication technologies to disseminate their ideas at the same time that they engage in direct action. Consider the mass of writings produced by radical groups, such as the Diggers during 17th century England because of their access to printing presses, or the Yippies studies of television formats and media theories so they could appear effectively on the medium. That activists use current communication technologies in their struggle is to be expected, but because so much hope has been invested in the internet's potential to direct change, it is still possible, in 2012, for an individual to write a book with nothing more profound to say about activists than that they're using blackberries and facebook to communicate with one another. That's what Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere is, a lengthy assertion that technologies are at the forefront of political change rather than people and their ideas. A return to the hope felt in the mid-90s that the internet has produced new kinds of spaces where all our hopes for mankind will be realized. That recent communication technologies permit activists with rapid-fire abilities to evade systems of control and authority, a point of view that's obviously incorrect. When Paul Mason writes that new activists using smartphones and social media are "pioneering a major expansion in the power of the individual human being", he's echoing the never-realized transhumanist pronouncements of 80s and early/mid-90s tech gurus like Timothy Leary. When Paul Mason makes analogies between the current situation and the French Revolution and says "A deep social crisis was under way, then as now. But with one big difference: today, in every garret there is a laptop." He's repeating the same amazement shown in 2000-2001 over activists using computers. I think it is possible that a reader could dive into the literature of the anti-globalization movement and come up with similar statements, and the major difference between then and now, is that now the brandnames for each communication format are noted.
Taken at a broader level, there is an intense delirium for digital technologies in all fields and social areas, and similar books are being written discussing how incredibly epoch making tablet computers and social media are in everything, including political activism. While its undeniable that these technologies are having major effects across society, I don't see how people can look at the internet and its related technologies, and also look at how they're actually used by people on a daily basis, and see their effects only as positive steps taken towards a more perfect world. One of the effects of the internet as a communications technology is that it occupies our fields of vision and sets limits on what we can see in ways that always refers back to itself. In this way, of course, digital and networked technologies appear to us as problem solving in an of themselves if they're all we can see in the world. In Mason's book, he quotes an activist who refuses to read radical texts of the past, instead favoring new ideas, especially if they're spread on twitter. While Mason offers these statements as examples of new kinds of activists who are resistant to ideologies, a ludicrous position as ideology is always at play, this activist actually reveals herself to be vulnerable to manipulation due to her preference in consumer communication products. These new consumer technologies commodify communication, friendship, emotion, and possibly even revolution. What's being described here is designer communication, and it is inserting itself into the revolutionary spirit in ways that are actually insidious. Mason is writing in 2012, now in 2014 it might be interesting to think about how an obsessive fetishizing of these communication tools contributed to the dissolution of the movements they apparently pushed forward a couple of years ago. They are, fundamentally, consumer products and provide consumer experiences, and a book can just as easily be written about these media companies like facebook doing things like deleting the Anarchist Memes page. Activists can hold discussions on facebook, activists can also lose their job for revealing their political attitudes on their facebook page. As communication tools, social media networks should not be taken as inherently revolutionary or the primary means through which revolution is won.
