Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Contemporary Political Struggle Highlights Complicated Relationship Between Technology and Social Movements
On Wednesday, February 24, 2021, the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Contemporary Political Struggle, co-sponsored by the Davis Humanities Institute, welcomed Dr. Zeynep Tufekci and Cory Doctorow for a discussion titled Social Movements, Social Surveillance, Social Media.
Tufekci is Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology. Working on intersections of technology and society, her first book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (Yale University Press, 2017) asks: “Could the ability to organize massive protests quickly on Facebook and Twitter be making those protests vulnerable in the long term? If new technologies are so empowering, why are so many movements failing to curb authoritarianism’s rise? Is a glut of misinformation more effective censorship than directly forbidding speech? Why are so many of today’s movements leaderless?” Tufekci also regularly writes for The Atlantic, The New York Times, WIRED, and Scientific American. Doctorow is a prolific author, journalist, and technology activist. He is special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and has written science fiction novels—most recently, Attack Surface—and nonfiction, most recently, How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, which asks, “What if the trauma of living through real conspiracies all around us — conspiracies among wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury inconvenient facts and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies are commonly known as ‘corruption’) — is making people vulnerable to conspiracy theories?” The two public scholars held a rich conversation facilitated by University of California, Davis Professor of English Joshua Clover.
During her talk, Tufekci gave reminders to situate acts of protest historically. She also explained the not-intrinsically connected relationship between numbers of protestors and outcomes of protest. While she has been conditioned “to think of really big marches as turning points,” she observed that while we have been having the largest protests ever since the Iraq War, things are fundamentally, in large part, not changing. Tufekci interrogated what kind of change people power might be able to effect, considering that the powers that be have denied the legitimacy of movements including but not limited to the Iraq War protests, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street. George W. Bush, she noted, “called protests a focus group that he could ignore.” While social media has been a crucial tool for organizing protests with enormous amounts of participants, Tufekci’s research shows that “in many circumstances, numbers are not some indicator” of the strength of a movement. At the same time Tufekci explained, the numbers of people who have been protesting represent a potential—of cultural power, of electoral consequences, of disruption. After all, she reminded us, the social media platforms that these movements are being organized on are optimized for engagement, not organizing.
Doctorow continued with the theme of big technology from a surveillance angle. “I don’t think they’re geniuses,” he said, referring to Big Tech, “and I don’t think they have a mind control ray.” But, he asked, “if Big Tech doesn’t have a mind control ray, what do they have?” His answer? A monopoly and predatory finance practices. Calling today’s technology companies “vertical monopolies that cornered whole markets and then cheated with impunity,” he argued that “monopolies don’t need mind control rays to control our behavior and they don’t need mind control rays to control policy.” A monopoly windfall, Doctorow explained, can be used to lobby governments, and can spy on the general population because they can. “Monopolists aren’t geniuses,” he contended. They “are sociopaths.” And they’re not limited to the field of technology: Doctorow explained how there are five (soon to be four) publishers, one eyewear company, two beer companies, and so on and so forth. Until the Reagan era, he explained, the United States dealt with monopolies by prohibiting them — “and we have to do it again.” No one, Doctorow maintained, “is qualified to be the czar of 2.6 billion people’s social lives!” Technology itself is not the problem: it is useful but ought to be regulated. Doctorow insisted that “we have every reason to believe that getting rid of our monopolies” will open up demand for American innovation and democracy.
In the concluding Q&A, Tufekci spoke to how “most people do want things to change, and that’s what’s bringing them together.” She noted that the friends we made along the way trying to effect this change might be all that comes out of this work, but the idea that doing this work is useless is not helpful! After all, “You can’t just quit [social media] because it’s embedded in civic life in ways that don’t have an alternative.” Nevertheless, it does function as a means for people to “try to bring about a world that they dream of,” and what people do on social media does show what they value. This is part of why, as Doctorow noted, restoring technological sovereignty is imperative. How else would we keep working with the friends we made along the way?
Please visit the DHI website to view the video of this event, and to stay informed about upcoming Sawyer Seminar events. The video of this event is up on our YouTube channel.