Social Revolutions in the Digital Age
We're in a period of global social change. Not all revolutions are violent or even global. So what does revolution look like in the Digital Age?
Revolutions are slow and quiet. Until they aren’t. Nor do they have to be violent. There are social and cultural revolutions, political and economic. Technologies have long played a role in societal revolutions. But what about now? It’s different.
I’m pulling together, and summarizing a whole lot of ideas, theories and hypotheses into a rather short essay here.
We’re in a period of significant societal change right now. Shifting geopolitical alignments based on values systems, rising economic inequality, increasing conflicts and regional wars, political systems and the means of social governance. Social revolutions are bubbling beneath the surface, occasionally flaring up. what does this mean in the opening phases of the Digital Age we are entering?
It’s important to look at because it helps us to understand some of the issues happening in our changing world. And while our world is constantly changing, there are some periods that see more change happening at once than at others. Such as now.
One might think that weapons are the primary technology of revolutions. Sometimes, but not very often. The most important technologies that enable, support and influence revolutions are information technologies.
If you want to create a revolution and change the way a society works, or make significant enough cultural change, you need to create and distribute a narrative. Then you need to be able to coordinate and organise your followers and get them to distribute the messages that form the narrative. To recruit and grow the movement. Be that a new way of making clothing to changing a government.
Weapons technologies come into play when a revolution is political and goes kinetic. But even then, for an armed opposition to be effective, it must communicate and be able to organise quickly. There’s a reason banana republic coups go for the TV and radio stations right away.
The faster, easier and broader reach you can have into a society, the more chance you have to be effective. The printing press enabled Luther to create a treatise that criticized the Catholic church. He ended up driving the Christian Reformation. A revolution in religion. It just took a while.
The arrival of broadcast television meant the Vietnam War could be broadcast much faster and media could be more critical. It enabled the public at home to see a war in near real-time. That contributed to the massive social unrest in America at the time. Coupled with the drive for racial equality and other social issues. Influencing hippies, the peace movement and the best result, significant improvements in women’s and racial minority rights.
The arrival of the internet has completely revolutionized the way humans can communicate, coordinate and collaborate. At a global scale. While the internet and its spin-off technologies like social media, enabled this, they also caused the collapse of time and space.
This can be both good and bad if you want to start some sort of a revolution. It turns out, quite a few people do want to cause revolutions these days. From social change to political revolutions. The assumption might be that this means, faster, easier and thus, more impactful revolutions. Maybe not.
Because anyone, most anywhere, at anytime, can start a social revolution means more have. As a result, we have more types of social revolutions being started at the same time. This also makes it harder to rally enough people to a cause to make it grow, sustain it and result in any sort of meaningful change. This has become more so for social justice movements.
The first truly national and widespread international social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter and MeToo were very powerful. They combined both real-world actions and digital world engagement. They lead to some change, but not enough. In the current phase of the Digital Age, social justice movements have a lot of competition.
Information technologies when they were more singular in nature, may have been of more value to some revolutionary causes, but less effective today. Radio, print and television meant a social issue that was trying to create revolutions in society needed to first build grassroots movements to scale, but once it did and it made national and international news, more might rally behind the cause. It was a fairly symmetrical information environment.
Today, it is an asymmetrical environment and neither the legitimate revolutionary narrative or counter-revolutionary narrative can be controlled. The information technologies that enabled mass communication, such as the telephone, radio, television are now surrounded by the internet, data everywhere and social media tools. Toss in a side salad of Generative Artificial Intelligence and it all gets a whole lot messier. Countering mis/disinformation has become a whole lot easier to create and disseminate. Now, multiple narratives can be quickly formed and broadcast.
The Arab Spring was going to lead to the overthrow of tyrannical and quasi-autocratic regimes. Democracy was on the way. That was derailed. Only Tunisia ended up having some degree of democratic forms, which, just over a decade later, were failing.
It’s also become easier for governments to surveil their citizens and for some governments to do the same to foreign citizens.
Starting a social revolution has never been easier, actually driving change as a result, may be harder than ever. This has lead to the formation of non-profits and other organisations trying to change privacy laws. To a limited, but improving degree of effect.
The Future of Social Revolutions
Today, we live in an information saturated environment. It’s like we’re all covered by a soggy digital blanket on a humid day in summer. The tech companies can’t create filters to make it better. All attempts, whether using humans or technologies, have largely failed. The daily data deluge keeps that soggy blanket well soaked.
That may sound depressing and lead one to conclude that seeking to drive social change through revolutions or just social movements, is impossible now. Not entirely.
What it does mean is that real-world actions then become more important and more valuable. Which is also risky because to some, they need to escalate real-world activities to cut through the noise. We see this in the Just Stop Oil movement taking physical actions by slopping soup on famous paintings and spraying Stonehenge with orange stuff. Rather than gain public support however, they’ve done the opposite. Ending up helping the oil industry more than hurt it.
Online myths, stories and propaganda is still effective, but to drive any meaningful change, must become more entwined with the real world. Memes, articles, videos, are all part of shaping the ideology. The more simplified and binary the message you can create, cutting out nuance and facts, the better.
Both the far-right and far-left in geopolitics have excelled in creating simplified digital messaging, this/that statements that then whip people up enough to protest in the street. The most effective filter isn’t a filter at all, it is simplification of a narrative.
The most effective COVID protest in China was the use of a blank white poster held up in various public spaces and then shared across social media. The most effective protest against the communist regime in East Germany was using ice cream cones.
The internet and thus social media, may become the subtext of the conversation, much as it has been for hundreds of years. All cultures have some form of sub-contextual narrative that rumbled below the surface. It’s the more subtle, and complex to understand element of a culture.
For a while in social media, this was largely public. But consumers as citizens, are now moving over to less public networks; telegram, WhatsApp, iMessenger etc. These are more difficult to surveil by governments and brands. It is easier to build a narrative and coordinate real-life protests.
During the mass protests in Hong Kong in 2014, citizens use mesh networks when the government blocks the internet or used it surveil and counteract protests. It was effective, but no change a decade later. In fact society got worse.
Humans are finding workarounds using information technologies. We always have. When one thing doesn’t work, we try another. This is where society is today with current information technologies. As we are in a period of global unrest, we can expect more social movements, not less and thus, more innovations in the use of information technologies. And real-world forms of action, both violent and non-violent.