Protests are everywhere. The world is rising up. So can humanity
It’s happening again: Revolutionary fever is infecting the social body. The people of Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, Iran, Iraq and beyond are mobbing the streets in massive numbers. These movements are achieving a level of militancy not seen in a decade.
Spectacular street violence has toppled Bolivia’s former president, Evo Morales, while elsewhere governments hang on, deploying riot police in Iraq, closing the border in Colombia, disabling the internet in Iran. The frenzy of protest appears contagious. Elites and activists in stable countries are rightly wondering if the virus might infect their neighbours, too.
At first glance, today’s unrest is remarkably reminiscent of the events of 2010 and 2011, when the Arab Spring initiated a wave of global protest culminating in Occupy encampments in 82 countries.
History, however, never repeats itself in exactly the same way and it would be naive to assume that this new wave of protest will play out like the one before it, which ended with the paramilitary eviction of Occupy’s encampments and a deeper entrenchment of autocracy in the Arab world.
Activists learned a tremendous amount from successes and failures of the previous cycle of protest movements. As did governments.
So, what should we expect in the months ahead? Will the protests morph into something bigger or will police countertactics – for example, an escalation of force leading to live ammunition – prevail? Will activists get it right this time? And what would success for the people in the streets look like, and mean, for the rest of society?
The only thing that is certain in these moments of contagious social protest is that no one knows with certainty what will happen next.
When the status quo is faced with vehement demands for change, many previously dormant (or restrained) forces actively vie to influence the course of events. The outcome is always unpredictable.
We can, however, increase our odds of correctly anticipating how the protests will unfold by being attuned to the ways in which society has changed, and what activists have learned, in nearly a decade since the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street.
I’ve been keenly following the various protests around the globe for several weeks. My interest was initially piqued in July by footage of activists in Hong Kong storming the government headquarters using a sophisticated protest tactic that combined hand gestures with a human chain to rapidly deliver supplies from a depot to activists at the front lines. The ingenuity of the tactic, which required a high level of crowd participation, suggested we were entering a new era of protest. Since then, monitoring the unrest spread to other countries, I’ve thought a lot about what’s shifted since the start of the decade, when I, along with my collaborator at Adbusters, publisher Kalle Lasn, called for Occupy Wall Street, the spark that launched the Occupy movement.
Let’s focus on just three of the shifts that have the greatest bearing on what will come from the contemporary wave of protest: the evolution of social movements, the changing nature of power and the shifting role of activism in society.
The rise and fall of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and subsequent social protests ranging from Idle No More to Black Lives Matter and March for Our Lives has had a tremendous effect on our understanding of social movements as a social phenomena.
In the years leading up to 2011, social movements were typically understood to be the manifestation of popular discontent around a specific political issue. In a sense, protesters were taken at their word: If the masses were in the streets protesting against pre-emptive war on Iraq in 2003, for example, it was accepted that the root cause of unrest was an unpopular war. Governments had a simple choice of complying with, or disobeying, the explicit demands of the movement. Advances in riot control technologies, from sound canons to armoured vehicles, meant that governments less often complied.
This naive understanding of movements proved to be untenable when faced with the first wave of social-media-driven protests, such as Occupy Wall Street, that were oriented around abstract concepts – the influence of money on democracy – or, Brazil in 2013, where massive marches against a public-transport fare hike were obviously about so much more than that. Later, we saw it with Brexit, where information was so distorted that people protested in favour of policies that resulted in changes some now oppose. Obviously, these movements were motivated by something deeper. The old joke that activists don’t really know what they are protesting against turned out to be true because the reasons given were never the real reason everyday people felt drawn to unite with the collective in the square.
There is ample historical evidence that protests have been happening since the dawn of civilization. The earliest record of unrest leading to the overthrow of a government can be found in the Ipuwer Papyrus from ancient Egypt, roughly 3,000 years ago. And waves of protests have been happening steadily since – and seemingly with increasing frequency since the end of the Second World War.
The new understanding of protest movements is that they are a complex social phenomenon whose cause remains mysterious, not the simple manifestation of a political demand. They are a recurring phenomenon that is intrinsically human. And yet, mass protests cannot be conjured at will. Waves of protest such as we’re seeing today come as a surprise both to their instigators and the rest of society because the emergence of a movement requires a favourable historical moment, such as high food prices or a sharp economic downturn.
The eternal recurrence of mass protest serves a useful social function: Protests initiate a period in which old truths are challenged and great social transformations can occur. Without unrest our societies would not progress. Protests play a social evolutionary role and the grievance that unexpectedly triggers unrest is the symptom, not the cause, of why people join social movements.
China’s insistence that the Hong Kong protests are actually caused by unaffordable housing, and not the five demands of the movement – which are, “full withdrawal of the extradition bill, an independent commission of inquiry into alleged police brutality, retracting the classification of protesters as ‘rioters', amnesty for arrested protesters [and] dual universal suffrage, meaning for both the Legislative Council and the Chief Executive” – demonstrates this evolution in the understanding of social movements by governments and gestures toward the future of how social protests will be dealt with in the future.
By using the momentum of the Hong Kong protests – which, let’s remember, started as a protest against the extradition bill – to instead advocate for aggressively solving the housing crisis by seizing idle land from developers, China is cannily harnessing the unique capacity of protest to usher in social changes.
Likewise, from an activist perspective, if periods of unrest are a recurring, inevitable and unpredictable social phenomena, then the challenge is not how to create social movements – or which injustices to organize around – but rather what to do when those moments arise.
In other words, the question for both activists and elites is now the same: How can we use the momentum of social protest to achieve grand social transformations that would have otherwise been impossible?
The evolving understanding of social movements coincides with a dramatic shift in the nature of power. In today’s increasingly fragmented world it is no longer sufficient to be the most materially, or militarily, powerful. It is now necessary to augment one’s power by demonstrating the capacity to rally the citizenry, a quintessentially activist task.
The United States National Intelligence Council anticipated this paradigm shift in power in its most recent Global Trends Report (2017):
“The most powerful actors of the future will be states, groups, and individuals who […] demonstrate ‘power in outcome’ […] by mobilizing large-scale constituencies of support, using information to persuade or manipulate societies and states to their causes.”
The awareness that the powerful need to mobilize common people in order to achieve their strategic objectives has had the effect of altering the dynamic between activists and elites, movements and states.
The art of social-movement creation, once the exclusive domain of activists, is being weaponized. It is commonplace now to see governments experiment with deploying social protest to influence geopolitics. The United States accuses Russia of creating fake activist groups in a bid to influence the 2016 election and China accuses the United States of doing the same in Hong Kong. Not every protest is an authentic, grassroots expression of discontent.
The upside for activism is that street protest is no longer perceived as an unequivocally negative force, a symptom of social disintegration that ought to be quashed, but instead as one of the key sources of power, an unruly and vital phenomenon that ought to be harnessed.
Ultimately, power needs protest because many of the problems we face – climate change, in particular – are existential, not political, and are unsolvable without a large-scale global mobilization. Consider, for example, that some scientists believe planting one trillion trees would erase a decade of carbon emissions. Imagine the mobilization that would be necessary to get that done. From this perspective, the insufficiency of global climate agreements alone is clear. Only a collaboration between the creative energy unleashed by mass protest and the resources of sovereign power has any chance of planting a trillion trees, or pulling off any of the other dramatic public works efforts that are necessary to avert climate change induced mass extinction.
Activists and elites are thus thrust into an uneasy alliance. Hong Kong protesters have a choice: Collaborate with China on pivoting the movement toward a radical solution to the housing crisis or risk being defeated and getting nothing at all. This is a difficult choice between social and political priorities. After all, Hong Kong is the world’s least affordable housing market and last year, there were protests in the country demanding affordable housing. But collaborating with China would mean giving up on the political demand for autonomy. Activists can’t have what we want but we might get what we need.
Governments hit by unrest are presented with a similar dilemma: Use the opportunity of mass protest to accelerate social transformation to solve the underlying cause of unrest, or violently repress the people and suffer a decline in the new form of power. Occupy’s repression under former U.S. president Barack Obama arguably contributed to disillusionment, and the weakening of the progressive establishment, that fuelled Donald Trump’s victory. Mr. Obama failed to understand Occupy’s emergence as a symptom of the millennial generation’s existential anxiety about the future. What we craved was dramatic change, in any direction.
The new wave of protest is an opportunity to chart a new course for humanity. Let’s not squander it.
The above article was originally published in The Globe and Mail
Activism cannot be taught. Activism must be taught.
We must develop a better way to teach, train and create the kinds of social activists that the world needs.
How will Crypto transform protest?
We are in the early stages of activism’s migration to the blockchain. With more and more activists now beginning to explore the potential for tokens and smart contracts to be an effective form of protest, it is useful to take a step back to survey the main approaches being pursued.
I will focus on activist smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.
The general principles outlined below may be applicable to other programmable blockchains.
THE FOUR TYPES OF ACTIVISM ON ETHEREUM
There are, generally speaking, four types of activism currently existing in Ethereum:
New Economic Logics
New Funding Mechanisms
New Social Contracts (Governance)
Adversarial Contracts
NEW ECONOMIC LOGICS
Lately we’ve seen many different experiments in new economic logics as activists seek to encode smart contracts that embody liberatory tokenomics.
One beauty of Solidity is the ease at which new economic logics can be created, deployed, and tested out. Ethereum makes it possible, for the first time in human history, for non-state actors to create viable currencies whose logic of circulation not only defies the status quo but is also inherently in opposition to the capitalist norm.
In simple terms, activist smart contracts can be programmed to enact practically any economic system imaginable: from currencies of excess where everyone is given a bottomless wallet to currencies where one’s balance is influenced by activist policies.
A few notable examples include Bomb by Zachary Dash, a deflationary token, Shuffle Monster, a sortition token, and my own creation Sparkle, a redistributive money.
Activists face three significant difficulties when experimenting with new economic logics:
Activists are not writing smart contracts to a blank slate. The base currency of every contract — or, at a minimum, the gas that powers computation — is ultimately ether, which itself has an economic logic. Activism on the blockchain is always already in interaction with the existing ether economy and the (unfair?) distribution of wealth in that economy. The effects of activist smart contracts are often too dependent on the price at which the user’s ether was acquired and whether that price is substantially lower or higher than the price at the time of interacting with the smart contract.
It is difficult to enact progressive policies if those policies depend on knowing who is poor and who is rich. If two different addresses have .01 ether, it is impossible to know if these addresses are owned by the same person and if that person owns other addresses with a greater balance too. In other words, anyone can appear to be poor but only the rich can prove they are rich. This renders simple leftist ideas of taking from the rich to give to the poor very difficult.
The most popular economic logics (measured by transaction volume) have turned out to be various forms of pyramid schemes and ponzi games. This has left some people in the Ethereum community jaded on economic experiments.
NEW FUNDING MECHANISMS
Activism and protest is not typically an activity that generates revenue. This means that social movements are often dependent on donations in order to get off the ground and grow. At the same time, many activists are wary of the existing funding landscape that is largely controlled by risk-averse foundations — ”twice stolen wealth” — and wealthy donors.
Smart contracts offer a tantalizing alternative as they can be programmed to receive eth and tokens and then redistribute these funds in unique ways.
Consider, for example, rDai (redeemable DAI) — a token that allows you to deposit money into an interest generating pool and then automatically send the interest generated to a beneficiary. The user can withdraw their money at any time and the beneficiary gets to keep the interest earned.
Or there is quadratic funding, a “liberal radical” model pioneered by Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig and Glen Weyl in their paper “Liberal Radicalism: A Flexible Design For Philanthropic Matching Funds.” In a quadratic funding scheme “the funding received by a provider is the square of the sum of the square roots of the contributions made by the funders.” According to Buterin Vitalik Buterin, Hitzig and Weyl, quadratic funding is more fair as “the mechanism provides much greater funding to many small contributions than to a few large ones.”
Regardless of whether these particular examples are the ideal funding mechanism, it is clear that we’ll begin to see movements deploy smart contracts that receive funds directly from users and redistribute those funds to activists in previously unimagined ways.
NEW SOCIAL CONTRACTS
Activists have long sought new ways of making collective decisions and Ethereum is uniquely suited to the development of these new social contracts of governance.
There have been many experiments in creating a “decentralized autonomous organization” (DAO) on the blockchain. See, for example, YangDAO, MolochDAO, and MetacartelDAO. Perhaps the most prominent player in this space is Aragon which promises that it “empowers you to freely organize and collaborate without borders or intermediaries.”
Here’s a detailed description of MolochDAO to get you up to speed on how these new governance models function.
The DAO model is not without problems and it does not immediately eradicate power imbalances. Decentralized governance does not necessarily mean that decision-making power is equally distributed. At the same time, recent experiments such as SelloutDAO have demonstrated the ease at which a DAO can be corrupted. In this case, a smart contract was developed that allows users to sell their votes.
Personally, although I find the DAO model interesting, I am most looking forward to a sortition model whereby decisions are made by randomly selected members of a community. This can only be achieved with verifiable identities on the blockchain, an effort that is being spearheaded by Rich McAteer at the HumanityDAO — the humanity registry.
ADVERSARIAL CONTRACTS
Adversarial smart contracts are the cutting-edge of activism on the blockchain.
I mean adversarial in two senses.
First, the most common meaning of adversarial: a smart contract that is in its essential nature a form of protest. Thus far, we have been discussing smart contracts that facilitate or empower activists. Now we will talk about smart contracts that are activism.
And second, I am also referring to the developing field of adversarial machine learning where AI is tricked by researchers. Three examples from Wikipedia are worth considering:
In 2017, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 3-D printed a toy turtle with a texture engineered to make Google’s object detection AI classify it as a rifle regardless of the angle from which the turtle was viewed.Creating the turtle required only low-cost commercially available 3-D printing technology. In 2018, Google Brain published a machine-tweaked image of a dog that looked like a cat both to computers and to humans.[8] Researchers have also discovered methods for slightly, but precisely, perturbing the appearance of a stop sign such that an autonomous vehicle will classify it as a merge or speed limit sign.
An adversarial smart contract would be, in this second sense, a smart contract that interacts with existing smart contracts or the Ethereum Virtual Machine to produce political consequences.
I have developed an adversarial smart contract and I will release it soon. Until then, this is all that I will say about adversarial smart contracts.
CONCLUSION
In this article, I sketched out a general schema of activism on the Ethereum blockchain. It is my hope that more smart contract developers will begin to identify as activists and that more activists will become proficient in smart contract programming.
I protested outside the World Economic Forum meeting in 2002. Here’s why activists should work with them today
It is of special significance to be writing for the World Economic Forum's Agenda because I was nearly arrested during an anarchist protest against the Forum’s 2002 gathering in New York City.
Running from the police that day was not my first act of protest. In fact, I have been an activist my entire life. I started creating activist campaigns when I was 13. Despite the many punishments that I received for being an activist, I persisted and one day, in 2011, I co-created Occupy Wall Street.
Occupy was a social movement against the moneyed elite. The movement’s protest encampments spread to 82 countries and nearly 1,000 cities. Back then, I was an editor at Adbusters, a radical anti-consumerist, anti-corporate magazine that was beloved on the activist edges of society. Occupy’s dissipation kicked off a wave of protest that continues in many different forms – including Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives and Extinction Rebellion.
In other words, I’m an activist to the core and yet, here I am writing for the World Economic Forum. What ought an activist write in this situation?
Lately, I have been reflecting on why I am increasingly being approached on neutral, if not outright friendly terms by corporations, intergovernmental organizations and powerful elites that I once protested against.
My younger activist self would have said “no” outright, and without hesitation, to any conversation. I would have believed that nothing good could come from speaking to, or working with, elites.
Today, I’m more aware than ever that this kind of interaction is always a risk. Not only a reputational risk but also a risk that collaboration will lead to neutralization. So I tread lightly. Activists rightly fear being co-opted: the elite’s dinner table is the graveyard of passion for revolution.
It often doesn’t take long to discover that elites who approach activists are searching for the same thing: the mystery of social movement creation. As I wrote in a recent article for the OECD, powerful actors will need to demonstrate the capacity to create social movements if they wish to sustain their power and achieve their geopolitical agendas in the years ahead. That’s because, as the United States National Intelligence Council argues in its most recent Global Trends Report, the paradigm of power is changing:
“The most powerful actors of the future will be states, groups, and individuals who can leverage material capabilities, relationships, and information… [to] demonstrate power in outcome... by mobilizing large-scale constituencies of support, using information to persuade or manipulate societies and states to their causes.”
Activists, and their knowledge of how to mobilize everyday people into action from the bottom-up, are vital to elites. Do activists also need elites?
Elites need activists. Activists need elites
My younger activist self was right to never work with elites. That’s because, back when I was protesting outside the World Economic Forum’s meeting in 2002, the problems we faced as a human species were political. Activists, rightly so, believed that what was harming the world were a set of identifiable political decisions being made by specific organizations, heads of state and individuals. It made sense to adopt an adversarial posture towards the meetings we believed were creating those wrongful policies. Our protests demonstrated the conviction that, if this organization, or gathering of elites, were forced by activists to make different decisions, then the world would be a better place. And we were probably right.
Today, the landscape of power has shifted substantially and both activists and elites are being forced to adapt.
The most pressing problems facing humanity now are existential, not political. The climate emergency, and the globalization of crises, from killer AI to migration, impacts everyone -and the solution cannot come from one country, one president, one legislature or one movement.
Even if all the activists in the world worked together, we would still need the help of people we previously protested against. At the same time, even if all of the heads of state worked together, they would still need the help of activists in order to succeed.
Existential threats require a scale of mobilization that can only be achieved through the active collaboration of the people with the powerful.
Activists who want to achieve their revolutionary agenda now need elites just as much as elites need activists. The adversarial relationship between activists and elites is no longer tenable – for now, at least – and a new relationship is called for. But what should that new relationship look like? How should elites and movements collaborate in a way that amplifies their ability to mobilize the world?
Above all, the risks of co-optation remain real. So what are the ways for activists to collaborate with elites? Is there anything elites can do to diminish the anti-revolutionary effect of their company, such that their spaces do not defang the social movements they wish to support?
The challenge
When activists and elites gather together it is not just the meeting of two forces previously in opposition. Above all, it is also the coming together of two distinct ways of wielding power.
The hope is that if these two different ways of mobilizing were to complement each other – one from the bottom-up and the other from the top-down – then great collective leaps could be accomplished.
Bringing these two types of power together is more difficult than simply hosting a plenary session. Social movements cannot be conjured at will, nor can they be bought or sold. Power and money cannot unlock the secret to social movement creation just as they cannot create a great piece of art. The people who join movements cannot be coerced into protesting or mobilizing – they are in the streets because the movement has awakened their spirit.
The power of elites is knowable, quantifiable and material. Activist power, on the contrary, is intuitive, unpredictable and subjective or spiritual more than material. It cannot be instrumentalized: even successful revolutionaries have been largely unable to “export” revolutions. To succeed in creating a collaborative social movement, elites must not treat activists as tools or resources.
The solution: co-creation not co-optation
I’m convinced that the solutions to the world’s biggest problems can only be solved through a collaboration between elites and activists. At the same time, I recognize that activists suffer from a reputational risk in their association with elites and that activism as a discipline is often unintelligible to elites because it is more of an art than a science.
A new relationship is needed if these two forces are going to work together effectively.
I believe the basis of that new relationship starts with reconceiving the role of plenaries, gatherings and meetings as a time for co-creating a movement. What if, when activists and elites got together, it was more like a hackathon than a summit?
Let’s use the resources of the World Economic Forum, along with the authenticity of activists, to bring together an interdisciplinary group of creative people who are tasked with inventing new global protest tactics - and launching a shared planetary movement towards solving the greatest challenges facing humanity.
If space is unfree then earth will be unfree, too.
Space Activism is one of the most important directions for protest to go.
Activist orthodoxy is harmful to activism.
The difficulties faced by recent social movements in achieving positive change, despite their tremendous speed and overwhelming size, is a sign that activism as a discipline must embark on a period of paradigmatic reevaluation. Breaking with the enforced consensus that our movements are winning even when it looks like we’re losing — that Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, Charlottesville and the countless protests happening worldwide every day are victories despite never achieving their avowed objectives — is not easy. Challenging the activist orthodoxy as an activist is far more difficult than marching in the streets or sharing rebellious tweets. But the risk of staying silent is too great. Activists must act up to save protest from irrelevance.