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So, Why Did It Kick Off? The Social Roots of the New Unrest

If the Arab Spring had happened in isolation, it might have been categorized as a belated aftershock of 1989; if the student unrest had been part of the normal cycle of youth revolt, it could have been quickly forgotten. But as the momentum gathered, from Iran to Santa Cruz, to London, Athens and Cairo, the events carried too much that was new in them to ignore.

The media began a frantic search for parallels. Nigel Inkster, former director of operations for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, told me: ‘It’s a revolutionary wave, like 1848.’ Others found analogies with 1968 or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In late January 2011 I sat with veteran reporters in the newsroom of a major TV network and discussed whether this was Egypt’s 1905 or its 1917.

As I will argue, there are strong parallels—above all with 1848, and with the wave of discontent that preceded 1914. But there is something in the air that defies historical parallels: something new to do with technology, behaviour and popular culture. As well as a flowering of collective action in defence of democracy, and a resurgence of the struggles of the poor and oppressed, what’s going on is also about the expanded power of the individual.

For the first time in decades, people are using methods of protest that do not seem archaic or at odds with the modern contemporary world; the protesters seem more in tune with modernity than the methods of their rulers. Sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris calls what we’re seeing the ‘movement without a name’:

A trend, a direction, an idea-virus, a meme, a source of energy that can be traced through a large number of spaces and projects. It is also a way of thinking and acting: an agility, an adaptability, a refusal to accept the world as it is, a refusal to get stuck into fixed patterns of thought.¹

Why is it happening now? Ultimately, the explanation lies in three big social changes: in the demographics of revolt, in technology and in human behaviour itself. And without ignoring the specifics of Europe, North Africa or the global south, I will attempt here to summarize (as in the original ‘Twenty Reasons’ blog) what is common to these situations.

The graduate with no future

At the centre of all the protest movements is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future.

In North Africa there is a demographic bulge of young people, including graduates and students, who are unable to get a decent job—or indeed any job. By 2011 there was 20 per cent youth unemployment across the region, where two-thirds of the population is under the age of thirty. In Libya, despite high GDP growth, youth unemployment stood at 30 per cent.

But youth unemployment is not a factor confined to North Africa. In Spain, in 2011 youth unemployment was running at 46 per cent, a figure partially ameliorated by the tendency for young Spaniards to live off their extended families. In Britain, on the eve of the student riots of 2010, youth unemployment stood at 20 per cent.

The financial crisis of 2008—which would bankrupt states as well as banks—created a generation of twenty-somethings whose projected life-arc had switched, quite suddenly, from an upward curve to a downward one. The promise was: ‘Get a degree, get a job in the corporate system and eventually you’ll achieve a better living standard than your parents.’ This abruptly turned into: ‘Tough, you’ll be poorer than your parents.’

All across the developed world, the generation that leaves university in the 2010s will have to work longer because the guarantee of a comfortable income in retirement can no longer be met, either by private investment or the welfare state. Their disposable income will fall, because the financialization of public services demands a clutch of new debt repayments that eat into salaries: student loan repayments will be higher, private health insurance costs will rise, pension top-up payments will be demanded. They will face higher interest rates on home loans for decades, due to the financial crash. They will be burdened with the social costs of looking after the ageing baby boomers, plus the economic costs of energy depletion and climate change.

For the older generation it’s easy to misunderstand the word ‘student’ or ‘graduate’: to my contemporaries, at college in the 1980s, it meant somebody engaged in a liberal, academic education, often with hours of free time to dream, protest, play in a rock band or do research. Today’s undergraduates have been tested every month of their lives, from kindergarten to high school. They are the measured inputs and outputs of a commercialized global higher education market worth $1.2 trillion a year—excluding the USA. Their free time is minimal: precarious part-time jobs are essential to their existence, so that they are a key part of the modern workforce. Plus they have become a vital asset for the financial system. In 2006, Citigroup alone made $220 million clear profit from its student loan book.²

When in 2010 I attended Warwick University’s prestigious Economics Conference, it was populated by young men and women dressed in box-fresh versions of ‘business attire’—hypersexual retakes on the cocktail dress, Mormon-sharp suits, neutral ties—worn amid the routine squalor of a university campus. They were trying to live the dream—but a glance at their Facebook pages told you it was just for show. This was the lifestyle they’d been sold.

These students were aspiring to be the ‘ideal workers’ of the global age. The sociologist Richard Sennett describes how, starting in high-tech industries, a particular type of employee has become valued by corporations: ‘Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary social conditions … a self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability [rather than actual skill], willing to abandon past experience.’³

For employers, Sennett writes, the ideal product of school and university is a person with weak institutional loyalty, low levels of informal trust and high levels of anxiety about their own competence, leading to a constant willingness to reinvent themselves in a changing labour market. To survive in this world of zero loyalty, people need high self-reliance, which comes with a considerable sense of individual entitlement and little aptitude for permanent bonding. Flexibility being more important than knowledge, they are valued for the ability to discard acquired skills and learn new ones.

However, Sennett observes, such workers also need ‘a thick network of social contacts’: their ideal habitat is the global city, at whose bars, coffee shops, Apple stores, dance clubs and speed-dating events they can meet lots of equally rootless people.

The revolts of 2010–11 have shown, quite simply, what this work-force looks like when it becomes collectively disillusioned, when it realizes that the whole offer of self-betterment has been withdrawn. In revolts sparked or led by educated youth—whether in Cairo or Madrid—a number of common traits can be observed.

First, that the quintessential venue for unrest is the global city, a megatropolis in which reside the three tribes of discontent—the youth, the slum-dwellers and the working class. The estates, the gated communities, the informal meeting spaces, the dead spaces between tower blocks just big enough to be blocked by a burning car, the pheromone- laden nightclubs—all combine to form a theatrical backdrop for the kind of revolts we’ve seen.

Second, members of this generation of ‘graduates with no future’ recognize one another as part of an international sub-class, with behaviours and aspirations that easily cross borders.

I saw the Egyptian revolutionary socialist Gigi Ibrahim (@GSquare86), an iconic figure in the 25 January revolution, speak to London students a few weeks after Mubarak fell. There was no noticeable difference between her clothes, language and culture and theirs. She didn’t mind that the meeting was small, that people came and went at random, depending on their other social commitments; she was not put off by their texting and tweeting during her speech.

The boom years of globalization created a mass, transnational culture of being young and educated; now there is a mass transnational culture of disillusionment. And it transmits easily. When activists like Ibrahim began to appear on TV in vox pops from Tahrir Square, youth all over the world—above all in America, where the ‘image’ of the Arab world has been about Islam, terrorism and the veil—simply said to themselves: ‘Heck, that kid is just like me.’

Soon the activists were making physical links across borders. I had interviewed British student protester Simon Hardy during the wave of college occupations in London and had seen him carrying a red flag emblazoned with the word ‘Revolution’ on the 9 December demo; I was astonished to find him tweeting from Tahrir Square on 2 February. He reported:

We’re quite near the front line where the pro-Mubarak forces are throwing sticks and stones at us. Around us people are breaking up paving stones with metal sticks to get ammunition. This is wrapped in carpet and taken to the front line to defend the square against the pro-Mubarak militias. Everyone here comes up to us as we walk past. They say how much they love freedom and hate Mubarak.⁴

In the twentieth century, revolutionaries would ride hanging from the undersides of railway carriages to make cross-border links like this. Today, information technology and cheap air travel makes them routine; shared global culture makes the message easy to convey.

But there is a third social impact of the ‘graduate with no future’: the sheer size of the student population means that it is a transmitter of unrest to a much wider section of the population than before. This applies both in the developed world and in the global south. Since 2000, the global participation rate in higher education has grown from 19 per cent to 26 per cent; in Europe and North America, a staggering 70 per cent now complete post-secondary education.⁵

In Britain, the Blair government’s policy of getting half of all school-leavers into higher education meant that, when it broke out, student discontent would penetrate into hundreds of thousands of family homes. While the middle-class student activists of 1968 thought of themselves as external ‘detonators’ of the working class, the students of 2010 were thoroughly embedded both in the workforce and in low-income communities.

At the same time, in the developed world at least, the ‘graduates with no future’ often live in close proximity to the urban poor. Many dwell in the hidden modern slum—a.k.a. the ‘student house’—where every room contains a bed, or in flats rented in the terraced streets and inner-city neighbourhoods where the unemployed and the ethnic minorities live. Once the housing and jobs markets collapsed, the student house became the young accountant house, the young lawyer, teacher and other struggling professional’s house.

At the dance clubs students frequent there’s always some urban poor youth: this is true even in smart American college towns. But in the mega-cities of youth culture—London, Paris, Los Angeles, New York—the cultural proximity is more organic. And in no-hope towns where the college is the only modern thing in the landscape, everyone rubs shoulders in the laundromat, the fast-food joint, the cramped carriages of late-night trains.

In North Africa, though many of the college students who led the revolutions were drawn from the elite, you find this same blurring of the edges between the educated youth and the poor.

The story of Mohamed Bouazizi, the street trader whose self-immolation on the morning of 17 January 2011 sparked the revolution in Tunisia, illustrates this well. He can’t get a job because, in a corrupt dictatorship, he lacks the right connections. He’s a street vendor earning $140 a month, but he’s using the money to put his sister through college.⁶

The 2008 uprising in Mahalla, Egypt, saw this same overlap of worker, student and urban poor. Although a strike initially caused the rising, when the strike was banned the revolt was led by the urban poor: jobless youths, street traders and women. As the blogger and activist Hossam el-Hamalawy told me:

In the poor neighbourhoods of Egypt you will usually find one son unemployed, another working in a factory, another at university. The issues of poverty and repression overlap; in each poor neighbourhood the police station is basically a torture centre.

The organized labour movement itself is wedged between the discontented middle class and the urban poor. In the developed world, organized labour has been weakened by anti-union legislation and is in numerical decline; in the developing world, labour organization is increasing, but the size of the formal workforce can be, as in Egypt, small compared to the other plebeian classes. For all these reasons, we’ve seen, in a variety of locations, a growing tendency for workers to take action outside the workplace and against targets that are not their direct employers.

Indeed, in the developed world the whole concept of ‘working class’ has come to describe two distinct sets of people. There is the skilled workforce, which is no longer dominated by blue-collar male workers with manufacturing skills, but by a different demographic: more ethnically diverse, more clerical and admin, sometimes predominantly female. And then there are those that in British popular culture have come to be labelled ‘chavs’ (much like those President Obama inadvisedly called ‘rednecks’): the lowest-skilled, poorest-educated white workers, whose lifestyle has been dissolved by globalization and inward migration. This second group is often prey to right-wing ideologies dressed up with ‘class’ rhetoric, which repulse the more educated salariat. Among such workers, levels of resentment were already high, even during the boom of the mid-2000s.

Though it differs from country to country, this division within the developed-world workforce—which is largely a function of someone’s exposure or otherwise to modern, globalized work—poses a strategic problem for the left. It makes it hard for social-democratic and left-liberal parties to create a unified narrative or programme around ‘class’ or ‘class interest’. And it poses an acute challenge for any resistance movement trying to base itself on a common ‘working-class’ culture.

In Egypt and Tunisia—where the organized workforce still maintained elements of a ‘pre-globalized’ lifestyle such as state-owned factories, or communist traditions in the case of Tunisia—the problems were posed differently. Here the organized workforce is small in relation to other classes: socially powerful, but culturally distinct both from the urban poor and from the frappé-sipping graduates in the city-centre cafés.

Both the urban poor and the organized working class have—as we will see—crucial parts to play in shaping the course of the global unrest. But it was to the ‘graduates without a future’ that it fell to kick things off. From the rich world to the poor world, it is educated young people whose life chances and illusions are now being shattered. Though their general conditions are still better than those of slum-dwellers and some workers, they have experienced far greater disappointment.

This new sociology of revolt calls to mind conditions prior to the Paris Commune of 1871: a large and radicalized intelligentsia, a slum-dwelling class finding its voice through popular culture, and a weakened proletariat, still wedded to the organizations and traditions of twenty years before. This has major implications for the kind of revolution people make, once they take to the streets. And it makes the social order of the modern city highly fragile under economic stress.

The Athens uprising of December 2008 was a case study in how the three parts of the plebeian mass interact. A group of participants wrote that the rioters

ranged from high school students and university students to young, mostly precarious, workers from sectors like education, construction, tourism and entertainment, transport and even media. [Older workers] were a minority … very sympathetic towards the burning down of banks and state buildings, but were mostly passive.⁷

The French historian Hippolyte Taine understood the essential danger of this social mix. When it comes to revolution, he warned, forget the poor and worry about poor lawyers:

Now, as formerly, students live in garrets, bohemians in lodgings, physicians without patients and lawyers without clients in lonely offices … so many Brissots, Marats, Dantons, Robespierres, and St Justs in embryo. Only for lack of air and sunshine they never come to maturity.⁸

Taine put his finger on what, in 1789, had turned the normal rebelliousness of impoverished graduates into a force that would reshape the world. He saw that the ‘worm-eaten barriers [had] cracked all at once’. Technology, social change, institutional decay had unleashed something bigger than teenage angst.

If this sounds like an eighteenth-century version of the ‘death of deference’ complaint, well, it was. A deep social crisis was under way, then as now. But with one big difference: today, in every garret there is a laptop.

The Jacobin with a laptop

There has been high prominence given to technology and social media in explanations of the global unrest—and for good reason. Social media and new technology were crucial in shaping the revolutions of 2011, just as they shaped industry, finance and mass culture in the preceding decade. What’s important is not that the Egyptian youth used Facebook, or that the British students used Twitter and the Greek rioters organized via Indymedia, but what they used these media for—and what such technology does to hierarchies, ideas and actions.

Here, the crucial concept is the network—whose impact on politics has been a long time coming. The network’s basic law was explained by Bell Telephone boss Theodore Vail as early as 1908: the more people who use the network, the more useful it becomes to each user. This is known as the ‘network effect’: what it describes is the creation, out of two people’s interaction, of a ‘third thing’ which comes for free. Because network theory originated in the boardroom, this ‘third thing’ has tended to be identified in terms of economic value. But, in recent years, it has become clear it can provide much more than that.

There’s another difference: when it was first theorized by Vail’s technologists, the ‘network effect’ seemed like a by-product, a happy accident. Today we are conscious users and promoters of the network effect. Everyone who uses information technology understands that they are—whether at work, on Facebook, on eBay or in a multiplayer game—a ‘node’ on a network: not a foot-soldier, not a bystander, not a leader, but a multitasking version of all three.

Vail’s customers probably had no idea that, by buying and using telephones, they were enhancing the technology’s value for others and creating spin-off effects for Bell’s other businesses (what are now termed ‘network externalities’). Nowadays, many of us have a very clear understanding of all this. The result is that, in the past ten years, the ‘network effect’ has blasted its way out of corporate economics and into sociology.

The most obvious impact has been on the media and ideology. Long before people started using Twitter to foment social unrest, mainstream journalists noticed—to their dismay—that the size of one’s public persona or pay cheque carried no guarantee of popularity online. People’s status rises and falls with the reliability and truthfulness of what they contribute. This is a classic network effect—but it is not measurable as profit and loss.

If you look at the full suite of information tools that were employed to spread the revolutions of 2009–11, it goes like this: Facebook is used to form groups, covert and overt—in order to establish those strong but flexible connections. Twitter is used for real-time organization and news dissemination, bypassing the cumbersome ‘newsgathering’ operations of the mainstream media. YouTube and the Twitter-linked photographic sites—Yfrog, Flickr and Twitpic—are used to provide instant evidence of the claims being made. Link-shorteners like bit.ly are used to disseminate key articles via Twitter.

And the democracy of retweeting (or sharing on Facebook) filters out the trash. In this way, key contributions to the dialogue that’s going on around the action get promoted as if by acclaim, as happened to the original ‘Twenty Reasons’ blog post. Activists describe this process as ‘memetic’, drawing on Richard Dawkins’ proposal of information ‘memes’: ideas that behave like genes, fighting for survival and mutating in the process.

Underpinning the social media is mobile telephony: in the crush of every crowd we see arms holding cellphones in the air, like small flocks of ostriches, snapping scenes of repression or revolt, offering instant and indelible image-capture to a global audience. Cellphones provide the basic white sliced bread of insurrectionary communications: SMS. SMS allows you to post to Twitter, or to microblogs, even if you don’t have Internet access and can’t read the results. Texting is traceable, of course. But as all fans of The Wire understand, you can thwart surveillance if you use a cheap, pay-as-you-go handset, which you can throw away if you’re in a tight corner. What’s more, for many of the impoverished youth and slum dwellers, pay-as-you-go is all they can afford.

Finally, there is blogging. Though blogging was an early form of social media and has been heavily colonized by the mainstream press, 2011 saw a revival of what was essential about the format: the ability to express your own agenda through montaging stills, movies, words and links to create indelible statements of attitude and contempt. In some countries, residually, bulletin boards have played a role: the Athenian revolt of December 2008 was initially organized through newsflashes on the Indymedia bulletin board.

Blogs have been most influential in the Arab world, where the mainstream press has been subject to various degrees of censorship and self-censorship. But in all the theatres of revolution, blogs have offered that vital resource: somewhere to link to. They have become, like the newspapers of the nineteenth century, journals of record. Their impact can be measured by the fact that, in 2011, 7 per cent of Middle Eastern bloggers surveyed reported they’d been arrested by their respective security forces.⁹

The ability to deploy, without expert knowledge, a whole suite of information tools has allowed protesters across the world to outwit the police, to beam their message into the newsrooms of global media, and above all to assert a cool, cutting-edge identity in the face of what Auden once called ‘the elderly rubbish dictators talk’. It has given today’s protest movements a massive psychological advantage, one that no revolt has enjoyed since 1968.

Suddenly, the form of today’s protests seems entirely congruent with the way people live their lives. It is modern; it is immune to charges of ‘resisting progress’. Indeed, it utilizes technology that is so essential to modern work and leisure, governments cannot turn it off without harming their national economies. And, as Mubarak, Gaddafi and the Bahraini royals discovered, even turning it off does not work.

Because—and here is the technological fact that underpins the social and political aspects of what’s happened—a network can usually defeat a hierarchy.

The pioneer of network theory, Walter Powell, summed up the reasons for this as follows: the network is better at adapting to a situation where the quality of information is crucial to success, but where information itself is fluid; a hierarchy is best if you are only transmitting orders and responses, and the surrounding situation is predictable. Above all, ‘as information passes through a network, it is both freer and richer [than in a hierarchy]; new connections, new meanings are generated, debated and evaluated.’¹⁰

However, the early network theorists were only studying the advantages of, say, collaborative workshops in the textile industry versus big factories. Now we are studying networks with many millions of individual nodes, and they are in conflict with states. Once information networks become ‘social’, the implications are massive: truth can now travel faster than lies, and all propaganda becomes instantly flammable.

Sure, you can try and insert spin or propaganda, but the instantly networked consciousness of millions of people will set it right: they act like white blood cells against infection so that ultimately the truth, or something close to it, persists much longer than disinformation.

In fact, this quality of Twitter means, according to the South Korean authors of the first data-based study of it, that it is not really a ‘social network’ but more like a news service. Services like Flickr, MSN and Yahoo involve a high level of ‘reciprocity’, since about 70 per cent of relationships are two-way. Facebook is constructed in such a way that this reciprocity is 100 per cent: I ‘friend’ you, you ‘friend’ me. On Twitter, by contrast, only about 22 per cent of relationships are two-way—there is a much higher ratio of ‘followers’ to those being followed.¹¹

A second implication is that forms of protest can change rapidly. Whereas the basic form of, say, a Leninist party, a guerrilla army or even a ghetto riot has not changed in a century, once you use social networks the organizational format of revolt goes into constant flux. Even in the period between the Iranian uprisings of July 2009 and the time of writing (autumn 2011), changes have taken place in the way protesters use social media, in the way rioting is directed (as with the ‘Blackberry riots’ in England in 2011), in the way people evade Internet shutdowns and in the tools used for ‘denial of service’ attacks by hackers.

Indeed, during the actual course of the Iranian uprising of 2009, the ways of using social media visibly evolved. Protesters called the process ‘wave creation’, using email, blogs and SMS to evolve the protests in real time. Looking at this phenomenon, Stanford scholar Saeid Golkar concludes:

The Internet enables users to suggest new mechanisms to expand protests and gather feedback on these suggestions. On one hand, this makes the movement more flat and democratic, and on the other hand, it makes its activities more rational, with lower costs of action.¹²

As the real-world revolt was suppressed, activists took to the digital rooftops: launching ‘Googlebombs’ against Ahmadinejad and cyber-attacks on government websites, while putting psychological pressure on members of the repressive forces by naming them and disseminating their details. In response—in what remains the best-documented example outside China of cyber-repression—the regime trawled Facebook for the identities of activists, unleashed cyber-attacks against their networks and instructed 10,000 members of the Basij militia to set up their own, rival, blogosphere.¹³

The new technology, then, makes possible a new relationship among protesters themselves and between protesters and the mainstream media, and gives protest movements increased leverage over NGOs, multilateral bodies and guarantors of international law. It provides instant evidence of truth and can facilitate swift neutralization of lies, including those of state propaganda. All this, however, is only a side- effect of the much bigger change this technology has brought about: the change in human behaviour.