[Tehran rally for Mousavi, 6/15/09 from infamous tweeter mousavi1388]
Seriously? Is it possible that the world-wide-wired generation can "tweet its way towards revolution"? Even the usually skeptical NYTimes' heart is now atwitter about "twitter on the barricades." My pre-Iranian election riff on Foucault and "a revolt by intertubes" -- which had more than a little sarcasm in it -- needs some clarification, so I felt a follow up was necessary.
[Ahmadinejad (who looks shockingly like George W. Bush) at Khameni's speech yesterday: NYTimes]The dominant story would go something like this: first, Barack Obama captured the attention of the millennial generation by owning the US presidential campaign on the Internet, leading Arianna Huffington to declare the Internet the real winner of the 2008 election. Then, the Internet stirred, like some Spinozist universal intellect, the "tsunami bianco" in Guatemala to take to the streets against President Álvaro Colom for his possible involvement in the assassination of attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg, whose whistle-blowing video made its way onto YouTube after he was found dead. And now, the State Department requests that Twitter schedule maintenance on Tehran time rather than Silicone Valley time, because of the social networking site had become "an important form of communication" for the green tsunami challenging Ahmadinejad's victory in the recent election.
[Tehran rally for Mousavi, 6/15/09 from mousavi1388]This predominant narrative assumes that a network like Twitter -- or indeed, the network form in general -- is inherently democratic, and "leads to freedom" and transparency or that it can "spark a revolt." This assumption stakes its political hopes upon a kind of virtual incarnation of the revolutionary multitude, which, because of its de-centered, nodal framework, becomes difficult for centralized party or state infrastructures to reckon with. I would characterize this paradigm as liberal techno-functionalism: it is the idea that a technocratic network, whether party-controlled or run by corporations out to make a profit, has an inherent capacity for liberation.
In this post, I'm less interested in what information is being tweeted out of Iran, or how Iranians are using it to organize protest (as we have reason to be suspicious both claims are hyped). Rather: what does this dominant narrative, and the conclusions people are drawing tell us about us, and what has happened to our own concepts of political action and revolution?
The Danger of Magic Mirrors
Many have noted the danger of bad content on Twitter crowding out the good, the unverifiability, mob mentality, echo chambers etc. Obviously, a few notable people in Iran have used this technology to broadcast events to the world (and the pictures have been amazing) in the absence of very much media coverage. And it's great that citizen journalism is going on. But how did a broadcast tool, which is essentially playing the role of a decentralized newswire, come to be (even casually) conflated with the will and organizational structure of the hundreds of thousands who have turned out to the streets to get clubbed by armed thugs for their right to vote???!
Facts: 20 million people (a little under 30%) are online in Iran which has a population of 70 million. All social networking sites (including blogger.com!) have been officially blocked since before the election with SmartFilter, a software product produced in Silicone Valley. Of course, extremely web savvy people in Iran could set up or take advantage of web proxy servers abroad or figure out other ways to get around Iranian state filters.
We can reasonably assume that the people with this technical know-how in Iran are probably similar to the people with that knowledge here, so it's a little difficult to imagine an army full of "hackers" turning out to get pummeled by police on the street (Remember Anonymous' ridiculous war on Scientology?) Given the sheer numbers of people turning out at these protests, there is no way any of this could have been "organized" or even "facilitated" by a network like Twitter or any other website. It's utterly impossible, fantastical even!
All this tells us more about ourselves and our political fantasy structure, than the actual events in Iran. The idea of a "twitter revolution" is actually the mirror reflection of an impotent, dessicated, American socio-political reality that mistakes facebook status updates about an Israel strike on Gaza, and 140 word texts about Iran for politics. "Social Networks Spread Defiance Online". What hubris!
But we're told by a helpless media, with no foreign correspondents and little way of constructing "verified" and "objective" narrative account of events, that we are getting valuable information out of this magic mirror, that "the Iranian people have been given a voice".
An interesting Op-Ed for the Times by an anonymous student in Iran, points out some of the flights of imagination this distorted mirror has produced about Iran: "This false geography imagines South Tehran and the countryside as home only to the poor, those natural allies of political Islam, while North Tehran embodies unbridled gharbzadegi (translated as "Weststruckness" or "Westernitis") and is populated by people addicted to the Internet and vacations in Paris. It is as if political Islam withers north of Vanak Square and the only residents to be found are "liberals" who voted for the opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi."
All we seem to be getting is an image of our own inability to relate or identify with a popular revolt in an Islamic country, or concretely understand what real commitment to a political idea would involve. What we are witnessing in this mirror in the form of a revolutionary cyber-multitude is our own failure of thought. Maybe this imaginary structure is the result of wish fulfillment: Have we reduced the organizational structure and will of this movement to tweets because we have a growing sense of anxiety about the impossibility of political action in our technocratic information-driven "new economy"? Because we see a pithy message as the only "radical" political act within our power?
If any technology has changed the ability of people to organize mass protests it is something very humble and spreading quicker to much farther reaches of the world than the Internet: the cell phone, and more specifically, the SMS text message. It was used by the youth who burned cars in Paris suburbs in 2005. It is so significant that Tehran's cell network crashed (or was shut down) on the election day.
