Tech Won't Save Us - What Social Media Meant for the Mass Protest Decade w/ Vincent Bevins

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Vincent Bevins to discuss the mass protests of the 2010s, the role that social and traditional media played in them, and why the horizontalism of those movements ultimately didn’t work.Vincent Bevins is a longtime foreign correspondent who has worked for the Washington Post, Financial Times, and LA Times. He’s the author of The Jakarta Method and If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation and produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Read excerpts from If We Burn in The Guardian and In These Times.Vincent mentioned the work of Charles Tilley, Cihan Tuğal, Evgeny Morozov, and Andrey Mir.Support the show

Sometimes the people that impose this narrative from the outside on the fundamentally illegible uprising in the streets are kind of on the same side as the people in the streets. And in other cases, it's their enemies. I mean, if you ask Sisi now in Egypt, he'll tell you that he is the product of the 2011 revolution. He acts as if he is the inheritor of the Egyptian uprising of 2011, whereas everyone that actually did it sees him as the counter-revolution reaction that crushed what they were trying to do. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and I have some exciting news

to share with you this week. Tech Won't Save Us is partnering with The Nation, the US progressive magazine founded in 1865 that has a very long history of holding power to account. Now, this isn't a traditional tech publication, and that's part of the reason why I'm excited about this, because it will allow these perspectives on technology that are essential for people to hear to reach an even wider audience. And that's not to say that the nation hasn't been doing great coverage of technology and the issues that we talk about on this podcast. Contributors to the nation have also appeared on the podcast, people like Kate Wagner to talk about architecture and its relationship to technology, Jacob Silverman and his coverage of the crypto industry,

Tim Schwab and his writing on Bill Gates and the Bill Gates Foundation, and Edward Ongwezo Jr. and the work that he did for the nation on venture capital. So I'm sure that you'll be hearing more about this in future episodes, but I think that this is a really exciting step forward for the show and a really exciting partnership with the nation. Now, with that said, this week's guest is Vincent Bevins. Vincent is a longtime foreign correspondent who's formerly worked for the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and the LA Times. He's also the author of The Jakarta Method, and most recently, If We Burn, The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. I'm sure you'll remember the narratives that we had around social

media in the early 2010s and how it was spreading kind of freedom and democracy to the world and how much that shifted, you know, later in that decade as we saw the Trump presidency take power, but also how there was talk about the Arab Spring and these protests and revolutions that were happening in the early 2010s being pushed by and inspired by social media and how those reassessments have also changed. So I wanted to talk to Vincent to learn more about what happened in these protest movements through the 2010s, how the structurelessness and the horizontalism that was kind of held up as something that was important to these things ultimately didn't work out to change power, and how our understanding of social media and its relationship to these protest movements

has evolved over that period, and what we should really make of the role that it plays in our society and in our politics. I think that this is a great complement to some conversations that we've been having recently with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, touching on broader political issues around technology and the way that it has interacted with many aspects of our society and how the privatization of these platforms and of these technologies has had a real impact on the way that we live and the way that our political systems work. So I was very excited to have Vincent on the show, and I hope you'll enjoy our conversation. If you did, make sure to leave a five-star review on the podcast platform of your choice. You can also share the show on

social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week, so we can keep having these critical and essential conversations about technology and the world around us, you can join supporters like Andrew from Dorchester, Tim from Wellington, Daniel from Germany, and Mercutio by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Vincent, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to chat.

I recently finished your book, If We Burn, which, you know, is just fantastic and I highly recommend it. I recommend your other book as well, The Jakarta Method. But, you know, I think that this touches on something that has been kind of in the discourse around technology for a long time, right? We've seen these kind of mass protests spring up over the past decade or so. And there was a lot of discussion around what their relationship to technology and social media were. And so I want to dive into all that with you. But first, could you talk to us a bit about what this mass protest decade actually was? You know, what kicked it off and what kept driving these outbursts of protest through the 2010s? Those are good questions because the answer varies. And often the fact that the answer varied was elided or ignored or misunderstood by media

that wanted to attribute everything at the beginning of the decade to the heroism of the technology. And then at the end of the decade, wanted to attribute everything at the beginning of the decade to the heroism of the technology. And then at the end of the decade, wanted to attribute everything to the problems of technology. But the 2010s are a decade in which, as far as we know, because these numbers are hard to put together, but as far as we know, more people took part in protests than any other point in human history. And what's strange about this decade is not that they didn't work out, because usually mass protest doesn't work out. Historically, protests are ignored.

You know, I protested the Iraq War in 2003. George Bush saw us protesting. He got the message and he just ignored it. What was strange about the 2010s is that a lot of these mass protests were initially successful. They put far more people on the streets than the organizers of these demonstrations had expected or planned for. But then things, as I trace in the book, not only didn't work out the way that they wanted, but often went the opposite direction of the desires of the streets to the the answer is always going to be varied. And there's always going to be multiple causality when we talk about the phenomenon that I analyze, which is mass protests that get so big that they either overthrow existing governments or fundamentally destabilize

existing governments. But I think that in many, many cases, social media is one of the things that gets you over the line. It's one of the things that makes it possible to scale up to such an extent that you meet that criterion that you actually overthrow or destabilize an existing government. Can you talk a bit about the kind of relationship to mass media that these protests have? One of the things I found really interesting reading the book that never really occurred to me before was how, you know, this kind of type of mass protest where everyone kind of goes out into the streets was not really, you know, a way of demonstration necessarily, or something that you did to kind of show your power before that could actually be shown through mass media. So can you

talk a bit about that kind of relationship? Yeah, absolutely. And so what I try to do with this book, which was the strategy that I employed for the first book as well, is to try to take the widest possible lens that is useful for analyzing these phenomena. I try to step as far back as possible to understand what is happening. And what becomes clear, at least to me, employing that method is that, of course, social media is technology. Twitter is technological. Facebook is technological. But really, photography is technology, and it's a relatively new one for humanity. The epoch in which we're able to see

images of things that aren't happening anymore is a tiny fraction of human political history. And mass media is also a technology. Newspapers themselves have a few hundred years, but that's still relatively new. And what becomes apparent in the sociological literature, Charles Stilley is the most famous name for this particular scholarly tradition, is that the mass protest, the mass demonstration as we understand it today, didn't exist before mass media. It didn't make sense to go into the center of the capital of a nation before there were newspapers, photography, the types of technological tools that could reproduce your message. Indeed, nations didn't exist themselves. I mean, if you go back to the idea, you know, Benedict Anderson's idea that the nation itself

is a product of technology, that becomes, you know, the lesson becomes even more clear. So the type of mass protest, the type of repertoire that we see as really natural, that became really hegemonic in the 2010s, starts to come together in the middle of the 20th century. And as I point out, a lot of the people that stumbled upon the effectiveness of this tactic weren't planning on it. And then they were sort of really shocked at how effective media reproduction could make this particular form of response to injustice. So I come down believing or operating with the assumption that protest is fundamentally a communicative action and is always mediated. It is always happening in dialogue or refracted through the mass media. In this book, in the 2010s, this becomes incredibly clear and often has tragic consequences. The decisions or failures of the mass media not only change the

way that the rest of the world understands what's happening on the streets, but often reconfigures the events on the streets themselves, changes the concrete configuration of forces in squares or public spaces around the world. I wonder if you can talk a bit more about that and if there's kind of really clear examples of how that works out. Because one of the things you also talk about in the book that I feel like kind of relates to this kind of mediation through the media, especially when you think about the Western media, is kind of the liberal teleology that is often kind of presented when it comes to these protests that, you know, they're fighting for liberal democracy, for freedom, blah, blah, blah, the types of things that we in the West would expect, you know, everyone else to want

to kind of achieve. So how did that shape the way that the media was presenting these things? And how did that differ to what was happening on the ground necessarily? Yeah, that's a really good question. There's like several parts to my answer, I think. A lot of this decade is really about 2011, the really inspiring scenes that we see in Tahrir Square in Egypt, but it's also really about 1989 and specifically the ways that we misunderstood the fall of the Soviet Union or the stories that we told ourselves about what happened in 1989. And that story often led us to believe, especially those in the professional media class in the Western world, that people came to the streets in Berlin and throughout Russia and so demanding Western

freedom and liberal democracy. So then things collapsed, and that's what they got. Whereas what really happened is that failures at the top of the Soviet Union put in motion the collapse of the USSR before the street uprisings occurred. And then a tiny fraction of people in the former second world got the liberal democracy, got the prosperity and the freedom that they were promised. I mean, Branko Milanovic runs the numbers on this and it's like 10% of the population. Often what happens actually is that the mid-level bureaucrats that are in control of the assets that were produced by the blood, sweat and tears of the Soviet people over decades, just use that power vacuum to grab

them. The mid-level nomenklatura just took the factories and the assets that they were not supposed to be owners of. They made themselves owners. But we didn't tell ourselves that story. We told ourselves a story about David Hasselhoff singing in the streets of Berlin, and then everybody is happily ever after. Why wouldn't we want to know that story? You know, that is a good story. And it's an important story for understanding Germany. But again, West Germany or the, you know, the FRG had to invest huge amounts of money to integrate East Germany into what is now a unified Germany.

And I don't want to get too far off track because you asked more direct questions. But the more I think about this book, a big part of this story is that something similar kind of happened in the 90s in the United States as well. We had a similar process in the 90s, but it took longer for it to become clear. It took longer for the consequences of that process to become clear. Starting in the 90s in the West, we also took the products of decades of collective labor and handed them over to oligarchs. And these are the people that now run Silicon Valley. And these are the people whose particular capitalist firms became so important in the 2010s. We also had our sort of seizure of public assets by ruthless entrepreneurs, but it took us, I think, 20, 30 years to realize how destructive this had been, whereas they got their destruction right away because, of course, they experienced a more severe collapse. They experienced the collapse of their state as well.

And so when 2011 happens, even though the people that put together the mass protest on January 25th that led to an even bigger uprising on January 28th, even though they came together through pro-Palestine solidarity organizing, through opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq, even though they believed that democracy in Egypt would necessarily mean opposition to U.S. imperialism and to the allies of Washington and the region, specifically Israel and Saudi Arabia, once they created this power vacuum, once they went to battle with the police, beat the police, take Tahrir Square, they were shocked and horrified to see the Anderson Coopers of the world showing up and acting as if they were doing 1989. They were shocked to see Western media show

up and act as if what they understood to be an anti-imperialist movement was actually an attempt to join America as like, you know, America minor leagues, right? Like the little brother to the US empire. And by the end of the decade, quite a lot of the interviewees, because I built this book through some like 225 interviews done in 12 countries over four years, a lot of people came to the conclusion that the particular style of protest that was employed in the 2010s was especially vulnerable to the imposition of narrative from the outside, was especially vulnerable to Western media showing up and saying this is what it's about, rather than being able to speak for itself and being able to say

clearly what it's all about. And the third part of this answer to your good question is the concrete example of Brazil, which is a long and strange and weird story. But what I can tell you very quickly is that the beginning of June 2013 was organized by leftists and anarchists, but then the police crackdown led the country, but also the media to change their idea of whether or not this was a bad or a good thing. The media starts to come out in support of a protest that they had previously opposed. But by doing this, they tell their readers, their viewers on television, that the protest is about a different thing than the original organizers understand it to be about. And so when the new people, the rush of sympathy comes into

the streets, the original organizers greet this initially with euphoria until they realize quickly, horrified, oh, these people have an entirely different idea of what the future of Brazil should be. Oh, actually, now they're fighting us. Oh, actually, now one week later, they're throwing us off of the streets. And you could never imagine this different type of person showing up with a different idea without the protest being mediated to them. But also, you could never imagine anyone finding out a protest without it being mediated to them unless they happen to live across the street from it. Again, this is fundamental to the protest itself. Unless you're standing right there across from Tahrir Square, you're going to find out about

it through media of some kind, whether social media or traditional media. And so Brazil is the strangest example of how just from one week to the next, the change in media narrative changes actually who's on the streets and who wins ultimately the battle over the streets. It's such a fascinating story. And I feel like you see versions of that in so many of kind of the protest stories that you tell over that decade where the media is telling one story, and then people hear that story. And that changes how people kind of relate to it and changes the nature of the protest itself, right? Yeah, I mean, this and then often, this gets elided again by people like me. I mean, this book has me in it a little even though I don't really want to be in any of my books. But

I think that by putting myself in it allows me to launch a more coherent critique of my own class of the foreign correspondence in the major mainstream media. And this kind of nuance gets elided by those of us that do a very bad job. And a lot of us do a very bad job in the 2010s. But the shape of the thing changes from one day to the next because there's different people that show up. People change their ideas. And often you get an evolution of the street movement, which is not understood by the media, which want to present just one clean narrative. Often, you know, maybe they start from the beginning, maybe they work backwards from the end, but they can't see that there is this strange

chaos that is this huge ball of energy unleashed onto the streets. And then there's fights over it. There's fights over which way to push it and how to define it. And we did quite a bad job to the extent that at the beginning of the decade, we just kind of said, oh, it's all everyone's doing Berlin Wall, but Egypt style. And then by the end of the decade, like, of course, the narrative is totally flipped. It's like, ah, social media just leads to Trumpism and QAnon. And our benevolent tech overlords need to make sure that the bad people aren't allowed to use social media so that it can become, that it can stay good. But yeah, like these explosions are often really, really difficult to understand without paying close attention to the chronology. That's why I chose to write this book as a history

book rather than sort of an analytical, this is what happened. These are the protests that are good. These are the ones that are fake. I just try to let each one unfold as they really did in real time. Yeah. And I think it works really well, right? Like I think that going through that allows you to see how these things have evolved over that span of time. And, you know, you've talked a lot about the role of mass media and kind of major kind of traditional media in this. And I want to come back to that again a bit later. But obviously, social media is also, as you've been saying, a really integral part of these protests, of how they're defined, of how we talk about them. In particular, you know, the media,

you know, if we think back to the Arab Spring presents these things as revolutions that are caused by social media, you know, talks about them as Twitter revolutions. But how do you see the actual role of social media in some of these protests? And, you know, I know it's probably different with some of them. So maybe, I guess, at least in the early stages of how it's actually being used versus how it's being portrayed. Yeah, I think that you can oversimplify here, and it still kind of works, to say that Western media in 2011 said, this is all about social media and that's a good thing. Whereas I come to the conclusion that these uprisings were partially about social media, and to the extent that they were partially about social media was mostly a bad thing. So as I said, in any given of these uprisings, it has to be five, six, seven things that are coming together to make this happen.

But in most of them, social media, I think, is one of the things that gets you over the line. And I think I'm forgetting the numbers here, but I think in more than half, what you have is a viral image of police repression. And the police repression matters because the who is repressed matters, right? Often the police end up repressing somebody that is deemed innocent or that mainstream society sees as somebody that should not be repressed. You know, like in the case of Brazil, it was a white woman at the most prestigious newspaper in the country. In Egypt, Khaled Sa Said is portrayed as sort of like a regular good kid. The image of something very shocking spurs people to the streets. Now, that part I don't think is negative, but I think that is new technologically because,

as one of the interviewees points out at the end of the book, all cops in every state everywhere employ, in the final instance, brutality to enforce a given social order. That's their job. They're supposed to. In any given state that exists in the global system right now, under the right circumstances, a cop will beat you up or hurt you. That's what they're supposed to do. But until recently, because of two technologies, first photography, and then later social media, which selects content for its affective power. Most people were not going to see cops doing what they really do, the really horrifying things that they do to reproduce the social order. So that spurred people onto the streets. media did is it made it easy for mass protests to scale up quantitatively very, very quickly, which was very useful for putting pressure on existing elites and very useful for

creating a destabilizing force. But often when that destabilizing force was successful, and often when there was an opportunity to take advantage of an opportunity generated by the numbers on the streets, the fact that the demonstrations often consisted of individuals that didn't know each other and had nothing in common other than the fact that they saw the same social media post made it very difficult for protests of this type to take advantage of the power vacuum. A group of individuals in the square that all have different ideas as to what should happen in a country cannot form like a revolutionary committee or revolutionary government. All of the people cannot immediately step into that power vacuum, especially if they disagree

on what is supposed to be happening. And often in other cases, in less pronounced cases, you had situations where the government or existing elites were so terrified of the streets or were so convinced that they had a point that they wanted to concede something to the streets. They said, okay, fine, you win. What do you want? I'm willing to give you a few things in order to hold on to power and to prove that I'm responding to the people. And so that you'll go home and we can all claim that we had a win and we can all walk away from this as victors, or at least I'm desperate to hold on to power. So like, what can I give you? The ways that this plays out are very strange in multiple countries and throughout the decade. The streets cannot even

elaborate that set of demands because they've moved past the very small initial demand, the one that, you know, stopped being important a long time ago. And there's no way for this, what is concretely just a few million individuals with different ideas about what should be happening to come up with a coherent answer as to what the government can give them. So the government either tries to come up with some kind of a plan, which is rejected, or they just come to the conclusion that, well, I could either just crush this or I could just wait them out because they're going to get tired and go home. And often they do get tired and go home if they don't convince sort of like security forces to defect or if they can't stop capitalist reproduction or the accumulation of capital

from proceeding. So that is something which was this weird double-edged sword where the scaling up happened in a way which was very powerful in the numbers generated, but made it less capable of taking advantage of the opportunities that those numbers generated. Yeah. And we'll talk a bit more about that kind of structure and that kind of form of organization. But one thing that kind of stood out to me in the book, and I believe this happened in a couple of the different cases that you talked about, was that the street couldn't necessarily come to demand. So they were often placed on them. In one of the examples, you know, the street couldn't necessarily come to demand. So they were often placed on them. You know, in one of the examples, you talk about someone who pretended to

be anonymous and put on the mask and made a video and made these demands. And then they became like the demands of the movement. And you talk to him later and he was like, yeah, I just kind of made them up based on what people were saying. And like, I feel like he's not stuff like that in multiple cases, right? Yeah. I mean, three of the uprisings came up with five demands that were essentially crowdsourced and crowdsourced in misleading ways. Some, you know, in Gezi Park, there was maybe more of an association that kind of came up with what they were asking for, sort of. But there was no one they could send to negotiate with Erdogan.

There was no one that could actually credibly say, if you give us this, the square will disperse and we can all go home as, you know, the way that the civil rights movement would have done that, you know, the civil rights movement didn't disband after extracting concessions from the state. They went to build back stronger, but that was something that could not be done in Turkey. But then in the case of Brazil, as you point to, it was just a guy that made a video and he put on a mask from be from vendetta and his video went viral. And a lot of people that it was, quote unquote, anonymous, that had put together these demands. And to some extent, people thought

that anonymous was playing a big role in this somehow. They weren't at all. And yeah, I tracked him down six months later. And he's like, oh, yeah, there's no, what do you mean anonymous? I just put the mask on. Anonymous is whoever says it's anonymous. That's the whole point. The Turkish sociologist at Berkeley who wrote a great book about not only Gezi, but the Arab Spring, he summarizes Marx here saying, you know, in the 18th premier, those that cannot represent themselves will be represented. And often what happens in the decade when I'm now paraphrasing him, paraphrasing Marx, is that a movement that cannot speak for itself will be spoken for. Sometimes the people that impose this narrative from the outside on the fundamentally illegible

uprising in the streets are kind of on the same side as the people on the streets. And in other cases, it's their enemies. I mean, if you ask Sisi now in Egypt, he'll tell you that he is the product of the 2011 revolution. He acts as if he is the inheritor of the Egyptian uprising of 2011, whereas everyone that actually did it sees him as the counter-revolution reaction that crushed what they were trying to do. This is something that does happen again and again. And often social media is where either leaders are de facto leaders are chosen for what are supposed to be leaderless movements, because the people that go viral end up

being the ones that speak for the entire thing, even if they have nothing to do with the people who've done 10 years of organizing. In the case of Egypt, again, some people did 10 years of organizing in factories in the Nile Delta and among student activists in the capital. And then they were just shocked to see like, oh, this person who doesn't even live here is going viral on social media. Now they're a leader of this thing that doesn't have any leaders. Or in other cases, it's like the YouTube clip that the algorithm like shows to the most Brazilians that ends up leading like tens of thousands of people to go into the streets with a sign that says the five demands where it's, it's just one guy that like, you know, was not especially politically sophisticated. If I can be polite, that had just made a video that YouTube showed

to a lot of people. It's so interesting to hear you describe it. I was going to ask you about that as well, right? Because this is one of the things, again, that stood out because you have this essentially leaderless movement, as many of them kind of claim to be. But then, of course, because they can't come to some agreement amongst themselves as to who should represent them, it's just whoever becomes viral, whoever has the most followers on social media, who then becomes the representative. And, you know, again, you talked about this in multiple cases, like in Hong Kong and, and other, you know, parts of the

world where, you know, these people emerged from the movement who kind of took the microphone and claimed to be the representatives, but it wasn't at all clear that these people actually represented what was happening on the streets. They were just, you know, the kind of people who were picked out from social media or picked out by the traditional media to represent what this was supposed to be, right? Yeah, these things happen. I think this is the thing that I try not to treat social media as like a really distinct category. I think that because on every case that I analyze, social media interacts in a really important way with traditional media. Right. Like so like, yes, it is a Facebook group that calls for the January 25th uprising in Egypt.

But it's also Al Jazeera that most people actually watch. And in Brazil, it is. Yeah. People see on on Twitter and Facebook the viral images of the police repression on June 13th, but it's also the center-right mainstream media owned by the Brazilian version of the oligarchical class that also gets regular people excited about or believing that this is a good thing. So yeah, there's this interaction where leaders are chosen. I mean, this is something that historically becomes clear in the second half of the 20th century. And I talk about it briefly in the book, but there's this great essay called The Tyranny of Structuralistness by Jo Freeman, who was a feminist activist in the 1970s in the United States. And what she says essentially is that if you insist that you have no leaders and you insist that you have no structure, leaders will appear somehow or another. The leaders that appear may not be the ones that

the people would choose, and they will appear in a way that they do not have to answer to the group in any way. Because since you pretend that aren't the leaders, there's no mechanism for saying you're doing a bad job as the leader and we can remove you. So what she says is that if you insist on structurelessness, some kind of structure will appear, and it's often the structure you wouldn't have chose, and one that you can't change once it appears. So to go back to the idea of leaderlessness in the 2010s, in some cases, like in Brazil, the group that started the June 2013 uprising believed very deeply, and they will now say some of them dogmatically in horizontalism, they believed that they should not lead. They believed in a social formation within their movement in which

there was no hierarchies whatsoever. No one could represent anybody else. Everyone was equal, not only equal as a human being, but had the same function in the group. But in other cases, like in Egypt, for example, very few people, especially of the original organizers, wanted this. What they would have wanted, many of them, is a revolutionary party or strong labor unions or strong civil society groups, the types of real organizations that have been proven to be very successful in revolutions of the kind they wanted to put together. They just didn't have them because of the concrete decimation of these groups under neoliberal economics and under the Mubarak dictatorship.

So what they got was a kind of concrete horizontality rather than an explicit and self-conscious horizontalism. But to the extent that that may have its weaknesses, that was often read by global media, which, as we say, plays such an important role as a positive thing. Because if they could look upon the square and see whatever they want, and that's what journalists love to do is to be the ones that actually tell the story, rather than seeing, for example, let's say a proudly leftist and anti-Zionist Egyptian revolutionary movement that made its goals very clear. Then in the first case, Anderson Cooper can show up and say, oh, they're joining. They want to join America's minor league.

Whereas if you imagine that hypothetical scenario that a lot of the Egyptian revolutionaries would have liked to have, which is, you know, a strong labor unions and a real revolutionary program, then global media would have probably acted very differently. So often I think this horizontality, whether it was intentional or it was the result of material impediments, was read as a positive thing when sometimes it's very much the opposite. I want to talk a bit about kind of the state's relationship or kind of government's relationship to social media, right? Because one of the things that we've talked about is, you know, as these protests, especially in the early part of the decade, were kicking off, you know, Western governments, the US were happy to say, you know, social media is promoting democracy, it's promoting freedom, they were very positive about it. And then kind of as the decade

went on, there was this shift, especially And then kind of as the decade went on, there was this shift, especially when it kind of came home, I guess, to a certain degree, or kind of they felt that there was this this kind of impact on their own politics, that all of a sudden social media was the evil. But you also describe how, you know, other governments in states where these kind of protests were happening, also had a shift on social media where, you know, at first, it seemed like this thing that protesters were kind of protests were happening also had a shift on social media where, you know, at first, it seemed like this thing that protesters were kind of using in order to organize these protests. But as the decade went on, they also learned how to use social media effectively, you know,

for their own power. So can you talk about those shifts on kind of both sides of that? Yeah, this is something that, you know, Gennady Morozov wrote about back in, I think, 2011 with the next illusion. He's like, you guys have a Walt Disney idea of autocracy. You know, like autocrats, like they're not just passively waiting to be overthrown. Like if a new technology comes out, they're going to be like, oh, how can I use this? They're not just going to wait for, you know, the quote unquote progressive democratic forces of freedom to use it against them. Right.

And so this is what we saw throughout the 2010s. We saw not only every different kind of state finding ways to use these technological tools, because, right, technologies, you know, they can be used by anyone and they are developed by particular social forces. So not only did we see all types of states employing social media for their own purposes and manipulating social media for their own purposes, we saw that, oh, every different type of person can do a mass protest. Like it's not just progressive young people that can get excited on social media and pour into the streets. And like, again, he kind of overstates this, but I like this schematic that Andre Meir puts forward in this book, Post-Journalism, where he's like,

in the early 2010s, urban millennials got on social media. And so everyone thought that social media stuff was progressive and democratic. And then in the second half of the 2010s, boomers and reactionaries got on social media. And so people just read social media as having taken the exact opposite course of the early 2010s. But it was really just different people on there, different people doing the same thing. Because, you know, January 6th was people, because of stuff they saw on the internet, storming the capital of a country, which is exactly what January 2011 was. If you strip all of the historic and social context, if you have a reading where you just view a tactic as necessarily good or bad, then these are the same tactics. So what becomes clear by the end of the 2010s is that tactics can be used by anyone and their relationship to a larger strategy and to

a real configuration of forces really matters. And it really matters who's using them and for what purpose. Something else that becomes clear at the end of the decade, which is related to the same phenomenon is that we remembered that, for example, in Latin America, the 2019 coup in Bolivia was preceded by mass protests. Mass protests helped make this coup possible. I think in the era of techno-utopianism, the era in which we thought that the internet was going to change everything, that, oh, the 1964 US-backed coup in Brazil was made possible in part by mass protests preceded by mass middle class protests. And, you know, they were also backed by the CIA. But you know, this is a part of the story. So I think we realized by the end of the decade, that tactics and tools, whether they be protests, or social media can be used by everyone. And it depends who's using them and for what purpose. Can you talk a bit about how this played out in Indonesia, where you were a foreign correspondent for a while? Because I found that story particularly

striking. Yeah. So this is a case that I include, even though it's not exactly, it doesn't, it doesn't meet the criteria on that I create for myself. It doesn't actually overthrow it. It forces a change in the government, but not a really fundamental one. But back in 2011, it seemed as if when people came to the streets and performed this kind of, and I don't say performance in a derogatory way, I think it's a performance in a way which is essential to its power, performed this mass protest in a public square, this was seen as necessarily progressive. Well, at the end of 2016, the governorship of Jakarta, by far the largest region in the country, is held by a Chinese Christian, a man named Ahok. His rise to this position was kind of accidental because Jokowi, who's now the president, moved from that position to the presidency. So he

moved from vice governor to governor, but he's very popular. And what happens in Jakarta is what you might imagine happening is if there is a very popular Muslim Arab as the mayor of New York City or Los Angeles. Even though he's very popular, powerful forces in society, conservative religious forces, have a big problem with this. And so what they do is that when he's on the campaign trail, he says something about the Quran, which is not really offensive or controversial, but it is edited on social media, edited on Facebook to make it look like he's committing blasphemy. And so then what is the tactic? What is the repertoire that these Islamists, these conservatives that want to overthrow, that have a problem with the democratically chosen leader of Jakarta, they reach for the thing that everyone else has been doing throughout the

decade. They call a mass protest, digitally coordinated. Everyone assembles in the square. There's a hashtag. Everyone wears the same color. They perform the exact same type of demonstration that people five, six years ago would have thought was necessarily progressive. And it works, right? So Ahok ends up in jail. The courts end up deciding to convict him of blasphemy, even though this has all been, would have been called at the time and perhaps now semi-ironically fake news. And this is, you know, it's part of that same story. Everyone can do a mass protest. And this kind of naive belief that we had in 2011 that the internet is democratizing just because everyone

can use it was totally off. And the idea that the streets always belong to quote unquote, the people was off to because the people is always a concrete configuration of people and it matters who comes and what they want. There's another aspect of this, another story that you tell in the book that I found really fascinating and trying to kind of parse what actually happened over the past decade. And, you know, what was really behind these mass protests at different moments through the decade and in different countries. And you describe in particular in the case of Brazil, where Dilma Rousseff, who, you know, was this president elected by the Workers' Party or,

you know, representing the Workers' Party, you know, following from the Lula presidency, who, of course, he's now the president again, was faced with these kind of mass digitally coordinated protests and received calls from Turkish President Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin warning her that, you know, these kind of protests were, you know, these digitally organized protests were being kind of pushed to destabilize the government. And at the time, she said, like, no, she didn't believe that. But later in a later interview, she said her mind had changed on that. Can you talk about this view of these protests and how it played out in that case? So Erdogan and Putin have slightly different narratives back in 2013. But they both believe

that this kind of thing can be used by meddling imperialist powers to destabilize countries that they don't like, and that this can often help the meddling imperialist powers if they are positioned best to take advantage of the subsequent power vacuum or have a plan to sort of manipulate the outcome. And at the time, Dilma Rousseff, who going into this mass protest in 2013, was on pretty good terms with the United States. They had some disagreements on pretty good terms with the United States. Very popular, had been elected in a landslide, had very, very strong approval ratings, and was somebody that had come up as a dissident, had come up as a guerrilla fighting the dictatorship. She never wanted to view protests this way, and she wanted to give the protesters what

they wanted. She wanted to give them something. She couldn't figure out what they wanted. So there's this, what I found to be a really powerful scene of her just sitting in the presidential palace and watching TV, but turning off the sound so that she wouldn't be mediated by the journalists that were interpreting the images for her. But still, she was only seeing the images that oligarch-owned television channels were showing to her. So she was like, no, no, come on. The people want more. We've given them more consumer power. They want better social services. And this was an entirely coherent reading at the time. And it was more or less my reading at the time too, because I think probably

because I'd been there since the very beginning. So I viewed them in terms of their relationship to the original group. But by 2017, 2018, she comes to the conclusion like, oh, no, this was the beginning of a – I think she's referring to the literature about hybrid wars that was translated in Brazil by the MST, the Landless Workers Movement's publishing house, Espressão Popular. And so she doesn't come to the exact same conclusion, but she does believe that this was the beginning of a process that led to a coup, which is, she doesn't say exactly how she thinks this happens, whether or not there's some kind of manipulation of 2013 happening by someone from outside. But another version of that same statement is one, basically the same one that I hold, that in this strange ball of energy that was created in June 2013, it was right-wing forces that had been funded by the Atlas Network, that had been funded by groups in the United States that did quite a good job taking advantage

of the opportunities. And they put together a protest movement, which ended up having a leadership role in the call for her impeachment in 2016, which I think could be called the parliamentary coup. But the ways in which, in my view now, now I'm speaking of the way of the conclusions that I think arise by the end of my book, the ways in which, in my view now, now I'm speaking of the way of the conclusions that I think arise by the end of my book, the ways in which these power vacuums can be taken advantage of varies by country, but they can be taken advantage of, I think, by imperialist powers. And this also varies by country. So in Libya in 2011, the imperialist counterattack is quite obvious.

Like NATO uses legitimate demands about the Gaddafi government or uses legitimate complaints about the Gaddafi government as an excuse to launch a regime change operation, bomb the country, ultimately destroying it. In Bahrain, it's quite obvious how the imperialist counterattack comes. Saudi Arabia marches over the bridge and puts down the uprising against a monarchy, which serves the interests of a minority. Whereas in Brazil, the ways in which this kind of thing turned out well for the enemies of the left and turned out well for US-backed or US-supported actors, takes a long time. It happens slowly and it happens in a subtle way, right? So there is the Lava Jata campaign, which starts indirectly, very indirectly as a result of June 2013,

but then gets a lot of support from media and then ultimately succeeds in its very corrupt anti-corruption campaign while secretly in collaboration with the FBI and the Justice Department the entire time. And so what I think becomes clear to many of the interviewees in my book is that this particular type of explosion is something that, again, can be taken advantage of if you are organized and ready to take advantage of it. But if you are not, it may be someone else that takes advantage of that. And depending on your place in the global system, it might be a really powerful neighbor, or it might be the hegemon, the most powerful country in the global system, which is the United States. Yeah, it's really fascinating. And it really kind of diverges from the narrative that we've had, or, you know, kind of, I think the dominant narrative that many people have long

accepted around, you know, these protests around the way that social media kind of works in fueling them or kind of, you know, helping them grow. And the idea that, you know, there are kind of state forces intervening in that or potentially using them for their own benefit or for their own gain, I feel like has largely been excluded from that conversation. Yeah. I mean, depending on where we're talking about. So what I see is that the reality of the imperialist global system sometimes becomes clear later in the story, often to the shock and surprise of the people on the streets, or sometimes it shapes the initial movement itself, right? So often the role of sort of Western funded NGOs matters at the very beginning, because they're not, even if there's not that many of them, they are really good at using the

internet. They're really good at getting their message out and they know how to put on a good protest. And then after the explosion comes, many different types of people rush into the square, but that's how sometimes international forces can matter at the beginning. And then there's the ways in which I just described that there can be the imperialist counterattack or a kind of revolution that comes at the end. Or there's ways I think which will become only clear after declassification and better and more rigorous histories are written of this decade down the road, the ways in which there's probably manipulation of the actual internet during the thing, which is not something that I have so much data on just because I'm so close to what's happening.

And I base the book primarily on interviews. But I mean, this is something historically that happens. I mean, even the most successful revolutions in history withstand a counter-revolutionary attack, right? Even the ones that are the most classic reference points have a counterrevolutionary attack. And then again, going back to 1989, if you look what really happened, you look at who rushed into the vacuum, who took advantage of the power vacuum to seize what was up for grabs. Now, again, in the case of East Germany, it was West Germany, which a lot of people in East

Germany have complaints about the way that they were integrated, but at least they were integrated into a very rich Western state. And that was done because it was West Germany that rushed into the power vacuum. Whereas if you look at much of the rest of the post-Soviet world, it's mid-level bureaucrats that just take the assets and become oligarchs, and then they have neither democracy nor economic power. So a conclusion that I come to in the academic version of a book talk that I've been giving is that this particular form of revolutionary practice, even though it was often not actually intended as a revolutionary practice, often it generated revolutionary conditions because it got much bigger than it expected.

But this particular form of contention, the apparently spontaneous, leaderless, digitally coordinated, horizontally organized mass protest is best suited for movements that are pro-systemic rather than counter-systemic. So in the sense of a world systems theory, if you really are saying to the global system, hey, come here, rush into this power vacuum with what is already existing, then that can work out for you. And that's kind of more or less the case of East Germany. But if you want to change the configurations of power in your region, if you want to actually challenge the global system or change it in some way, and this was the case of many of the uprisings in North Africa, you're going to experience an imperialist

counterattack. You're going to experience counter-revolution. Often, the part of the world system that's going to rush into your power vacuum in North Africa might be NATO bombing you or the UAE organizing a astroturfed petition campaign that will help to make a coup possible in 2013 and install Sisi. I'm happy you brought that up because I wanted to discuss this a bit further because, you know, kind of one of your big reflections at the end of this book is on kind of horizontalism, structuralistness, you know, kind of these anarchist techniques, but not fully that really defined what was happening during this decade. And I feel like, you know, in the same way that technology and social media played an important role in at least kind of the discourses

around these protests, these are also kind of ideas that are very closely linked to, I think, like technological politics and techno libertarian politics, right? This idea that, you know, we're going to have these technologies, the internet's going to take off, all of a sudden, we're going to challenge state power, and corporate power. And, you know, we're going to have all this freedom and liberty as a result. And that hasn't really played out in the technological world. And it's been interesting then to read the book and see how these tactics when taken to kind of the square or to where these protests are happening also aren't tending to challenge these power structures that, you know, the narrative would have us believe is kind of the goal of these things. So how do you reflect broadly on this idea that

by decentralizing power, we're going to change power based on your observations in the work that you've been doing? Yeah, I mean, so if I can make a really rough analogy, what happens to the squares is kind of what happened to the internet, right? The dream was that if the internet was entirely horizontal, if the internet was not owned by anybody, then it would be owned by everybody and it would be democratic. But what actually happened in that case of structurelessness was a set of people came and grabbed it. And those are those oligarchs that I spoke about at the beginning. You got what you actually got was power being imposed upon that system by the cynical, well-connected actors that essentially stole huge amounts of publicly

accumulated resources or publicly generated resources. And what you got in the square is this kind of, again, the tyranny of structurelessness, where when there wasn't supposed to be any leader, the people that were willing to just do it against the will of many other people often ended up achieving leadership in a way which was entirely democratic and would never have been chosen by the people if there was an actual mechanism for choosing them. And so, yeah, like, as I say in the book, there's an elective affinity, I think, between a certain set of ideas and a certain types of protest practices that were made possible in the 2010s. Because not that many people, if you think about it, like how many people actually were the type of anti-authoritarian leftists that knew about and understood and

espoused horizontalism? It was some people. It was people that had some ideological importance that had some connection to media or academic power, perhaps. But it was people that were, had some ideological importance that had some connection to media or academic power, perhaps, but it wasn't that many people around the world that actually really believed this. But then what you had that was made possible was something that seemed to gel with their preexisting beliefs. And then people like me that sort of knew about the ideas, we'll look at the square and say, oh, they're doing decentralized, horizontally structured mass protest. And decentralization is also good. And this is something, this idea that like, I'm trying to sort of grapple with where this

kind of like, I don't know what to call it, whether or not it's like geometric supremacy or like the fetishization of shape came from. Like, why is a decentered system better than a system with a center? What's wrong with having a center? Like, you can imagine many, many centralized systems that are authoritarian, of course. Historically, you know, this is perhaps easy to understand, but you can imagine decentralization, meaning domination by oligarchs very quickly, right? I mean, a country that got concrete decentralization in the mass protest decade was Libya. And what did that actually mean? It didn't mean libertarian communism. It meant warlords and competing in

civil war, right? It meant local elites grabbing power and then fighting each other over national power. The same sort of question I have can be applied to automatic a priori privileging of anything that appears horizontal. Of course, you can think of vertically integrated systems or vertically structured systems, hierarchically organized systems and states, which are profoundly authoritarian and profoundly destructive. But you can also think of horizontal configurations of power. You can also think of horizontal structures, which are no more democratic or more liberatory. It really just depends on the context and what you're actually doing. And this is something that I see coming up again. I think this is not died, I think. I'm from California and the techno-futurist,

techno-libertarian idea that like, oh, if you just like decentralize maximally, well, that means democracy. Well, no, democracy is something you have to build and you have to constantly test and retest and be vigilant about preserving. You don't just get it automatically because things don't have a center. I've come away from this decade at least with like a deep suspicion of anyone that likes certain shapes better than other shapes, because it's not about the shape. It's about the relationships between people and structures of power. I wonder if you think that is shifting at all. Like, obviously, I don't have the kind of broad global perspective that you have on how these things are playing out. But just looking

at kind of North America or the United States, you know, the early 2010s was the Occupy movement and this kind of, you know, horizontalism, structuralistness, this kind of idea of this is how we do politics. And I feel like through the later part of the decade, there was the Bernie campaign and kind of, you know, the movement around that. More recently, kind of the increased energy into the union movement and seeing what kind of the UAW is doing lately. Do you feel like this has shifted? I don't know, just in the United States, but do you see broader shifts and kind of re thinking of what happened in that moment? Yeah, so that broad sketch that you just offered of shifts that happen as a response to real failures and real processes of learning

is one more or less that I saw around the world. In the case of my book, I look at 10 to 13 cases, depending on how you count them, and none of them are in the United States. And so all of my interviews were with people that either lived through or responded to or had to govern during those mass uprisings. And so none of those people, none of them were in the United States. But the movement that I saw ideologically is similar to the one that you just outlined. More people believe in the importance of collective action, organization, and the ability to be flexible and democratic in the face of changing circumstances, rather than just assuming that everything will work out as long as there's enough people with goodwill. And while I didn't

write this about the United States or with US readers in mind, I have found that some people that have lived through the same shift in the US have been gratified to have North American readers come to me and say, oh, this really reminded me of this thing that I lived through. Or I kind of went through a similar situation. But yeah, to be perhaps unnecessarily clear, I didn't actually look carefully at any US or North American movements. But that doesn't mean that I didn't hear a lot of similar things to what you just described. Yeah, that's completely fair. And that's why I wanted to ask, you know, for your broader perspective on it than just what was happening, you know, kind of closer to home. You know, to end our conversation, I wanted to ask about journalism, right? Because we talked about

the role that mass media played in representing all of this. And I think, you know, it's very fair to say that journalism and traditional media is in a real crisis at the moment. You know, we talked about the failures in covering these mass protests, but, you know, obviously there's issues with the business model. There's issues with the degree of resources that can go into journalism, the way that technology has affected this, but also kind of broader kind of political structures and whatnot. After kind of living through this, after being a long time foreign correspondent, working for some of these major media outlets, what's your reflection on kind of where the media goes from here, I guess. Yeah. So early in the book, there's a Brazilian politician who runs for office on the campaign slogan that things can't get any worse. It can't get any worse. Very tragically, it turns out,

yes, things can get worse. And when I started journalism, maybe 15 years ago, it was already true that US corporate media had a tendency to reproduce narratives favored by powerful states and the interests of capital. It was already true that we were struggling to do our jobs capably because we did not have the material resources. It was already true that the selection of individuals was deeply shaped by that lack of resources, which meant that it was largely like rich kids that didn't need to make any money that could take a risk and start to try out the activity of journalism, hoping to make a living from it. So while it appeared 15 years ago that things couldn't get any worse, well, they could and they did get a lot worse. I think we are facing the possibility of the extinction

of journalism as a profession, as a human activity. Like I said, newspapers are relatively recent in human history. Journalism newspapers are relatively recent in human history. Journalism is also relatively recent in human history. It had a beginning. I think it could have an end. I think it would be catastrophic for democracy if it ended as deeply as imperfect as it is. And like a lot of my book is about how horribly imperfect it is. As bad as journalism is right now in 2024, I think if it went away fully, that would be catastrophic for democracy and for the project of human liberation. And so again, you know, going back to, you know, maybe perhaps spent too much time on the lessons of the 2010s, but going back to one of the lessons

that emerges in the 2010s, I think it would be a mistake just to blow up the thing and assume something better is going to grow out of the rubble. I think we have to do the best that we can to find democratic ways, preserving and improving the practice of journalism because it's a mess right now. And the mess is getting even messier. And again, I think what happens in the wake of the decimation of journalism is not the flowering of automatic flowering of democratic journalistic practice. It's oligarchs seizing control, which has already happened to some extent, right? I mean, Jeff Bezos would be called an oligarch by the US media if he were not American. He's not right at the moment running the Washington Post, it seems like, purely as a

self-interested enterprise, but he could. He could sell it if it was against his interests, you know. Elon Musk is for sure an oligarch and he's used oligarchical power to take control of a social media platform that he cares about quite a lot. So the prospects are not good. My outlook is pessimistic, but it's precisely for that reason that we have to get involved in finding solutions and coming up with democratic approaches to preserving and improving journalism rather than just like gleefully dancing on the rubble. Because that might be really fun for all of the people that like my class of people has harmed in the last few hundred years and we have been harmful in many occasions it would i don't think lead to what we need in the long term i think we have to do the really hard work just like we have to do the hard work of putting together the organizations that can carry out

real revolutions we have to do the really hard work of figuring out how we can make journalism actually good after we figure out how to stop it from being killed. Yeah, it's a grim prospect, but that means there are also opportunities if we can seize them and kind of build the power. Vincent, it's been fantastic to speak with you, to dig into the book and to learn about, you know, the work that you've been doing over this past decade. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Vincent Bevins is a longtime foreign correspondent and the author of If We Burn, The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.

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