1 Year 2.0? Thomas Swann Review of Paolo Gerbaudo (2012) Tweets and the Streets.

Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto. After the Battle of Seattle in 1999, many proclaimed a Year One in radical politics, as organisations like the Direct Action Network and the Black Block came to represent for many the new form of political organisation: decentralised, nonhierarchical, temporary and ultimately inspired by anarchist thought. Not only, however, did the alter-globalisation movement appear to embody the principles and aims long-neglected by the radical left (with the exception of autonomist Marxist-inspired movements) but that the most advanced and commonly available technology of the day actually supported this vision. The prevalence of laptops and mobile phones, and the ability to communicate strategically through listservs and sites like Indymedia and tactically using SMS texting, gave credence to the Marxist notion of communism being made possible only by appropriating the tools developed by capitalism. If Seattle was Year One, then the uprisings of 2011, with their use of social media, seem to be portrayed as something equally revolutionary in terms of radical organisation; perhaps a general release of Seattles beta version, or better yet, a Year 2.0. Tweets and the Streets, by Paolo Gerbaudo, comes then as one among many recent publications dealing with the use of social media (Facebook and Twitter being the most prominent examples) by contemporary activist movements. What separates Gerbaudos analysis from its peers is that his is an extremely sober one. While clearly positioning himself as a sympathiser with the various uprisings of 2011, of which he focuses on the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados and Occupy Wall Street, Gerbaudo makes a deliberate break with other writers who

2 have presented, he would argue, a nave picture of these social movements and revolutions. Paul Mason, for example, comes under criticism for the view that the availability of information and advanced technologies determined not just the form but the very existence of the events of 2011. Similarly, the technopessimistic approach of the likes of Evgenyi Morozov is also eschewed for a middle ground that recognises the importance of communications technologies but succumbs neither to the fetishism of social technology whereby such media are endowed with mystical qualities that only obscure the work of the groups and organisers using them, (p. 8) nor to the opposite error, assuming that a certain technology is inherently unsuited for becoming a channel of mobilisation. (p. 9) From this point of departure, Gerbaudo goes on to discuss the uprisings of 2011 through three frames or filters: the importance of physical space, the role of emotional narrative and populist community and, finally, the notion of choreographical leadership. Each of these he contrasts with prevailing trends in scholarship around the recent, and ongoing, events. The importance of space is set against the assertions of the likes of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt that give pride of place to the virtual spatiality of communications networks. Emotional narrative and populist community oppose the claims that

contemporary social movements are anti-representationalist. The notion of choreographical leadership, in its turn, is contrasted with the assumed horizontalism of the Arab Spring, the Indignados and Occupy. These three themes are backed-up by, or, rather, emerge from, 80 qualitative interviews with members and sympathisers of these movements as well as Gerbaudos ethnographic work across his three examples.

3 Gerbaudo early on contrasts the notion of assembly that came to typify the uprisings of 2011 with that of networking, so ubiquitous in political theory, especially Hardt and Negris brand of autonomist Marxism, over the last decade (p.21). While, in contrast to Manuel Castells, Hardt and Negri do have some appreciation of physicality, Gerbaudo argues that they fail to take into account the emplaced character of collective action, that fact that it requires physical locations as the stages for its performances. (p. 28) In a nice turn of phrase, he draws on Hardt and Negris, according to him, inadequate concept of the swarm to introduce the notion of swarms without hives, using this to describe their approach to political action. We know from biology, he writes, that while honey-bees fly across great distances they also need a fixed place to return to, and some comrade bees to remain there to keep the hive in place. (ibid.) Gerbaudo doesnt rely solely on extrapolating from the analogy of the swarm, but bases his assertions on his empirical work, showing that online networks, while crucial in many ways, only became truly significant when they morphed into physical manifestations in squares in Egypt, Spain and the US. Of the Indignados, Gerbaudo writes, It was as though the indignation which had previously been geographically dispersed and held together only symbolically on the web was now being physically harvested, stored in one place and given not only a collective name but also a physical centre, an anchoring point in public space. (p. 95) He locates squares, in this sense, in the same category as the Bastille in 1789, the Winter Palace in 1917 and the Sorborne in 1968. (p. 156) The second key point Gerbaudos study highlights is the importance of community and, in particular, the creation of a populist collective, which draws on the work of Ernesto Laclau. While his discussion of space underlines the importance of moving beyond social media, Gerbaudos assessment of the role

4 of collective identity shows one of the ways in which social media were most effective during the 2011 uprisings. Against the popular claims that

contemporary social movements aim not to represent any particular people and that such a unity is unnecessary, Gerbaudos findings indicate the extent to which such a populist imagination was central to success, with notions of the Egyptian people, normal, common people and, of course, the 99% used respectively. (e.g. p. 120) His argument is that social media are used for much more than simply sharing information. Indeed, he writes that (t)he choreography of assembly of contemporary movements has its own cultural narrative, and it chiefly requires the construction of common collective identifications among participants, without which such practical information would fall on deaf ears. (p. 41) This collective identity was nurtured through facilitating online participation (for example, Gerbaudo recounts how the admins on the Khaled Said Facebook page, which acted as a beacon during the Egyptian revolution, spent a lot of their time engaging with comments from page members in order to create a virtual community (p. 88)) and, crucially, building the emotional attraction of the movements in question. This point is highlighted in the chapter discussing Occupy Wall Street, as the organisers began by posting messages on Twitter that completely lacked that emotional content common to both the Arab Spring and the Indignados. (p. 114) This resulted in relatively little online attention until well into the actual occupation of Zuccotti Park. In fact, Gerbaudos research suggests that it was only after emotions began creeping into Occupy tweets and status updates that the community around the protests came anywhere near that of his other two examples in size. Crucially, the importance of this emotional build-up to mass protests refutes the claim that these events occur spontaneously. (p. 54)

5 Perhaps the most challenging claim Gerbaudo makes in his book, admittedly less so for organisational scholars than for those involved in the 2011 uprisings themselves, is that the apparent horizontalism of these movements in fact masks a central leadership role. Indeed, he criticises fellow social media activism scholar Jeffrey Juris on the grounds that his reliance on almost metaphysical concepts such as openness and horizontality constitutes an ideological obstacle for understanding the dynamics of the contemporary space of participation. (p. 25) Horizontalism is attacked as an ideology () which dominates contemporary activism. (p. 134) However, rather than simply reasserting the role of leaders in popular protest, Gerbaudo develops the notion of choreography and applies it to how the examples of social movements he discusses are managed. He defines choreographical leadership as the mediated scene-setting and scripting of peoples physical assembling in public space. (p. 40, italics in original) This, it is argued, involves propositions as opposed to orders, and relies on consensus and agreement rather than obedience. (p. 43, p. 139) Like emotional narrative and community, Gerbaudo uses his fieldwork and interviews to show that the seemingly spontaneous nature of the 2011 uprisings was in fact due to a hidden network of scene-setting conducted by a nucleus of core organisers. (p. 163-4, italics in original) As examples of this choreographical leadership, he cites the Egyptian Twitter and Facebook users, the shabab-alFacebook, who became famous in the West, the founders of Democracia Real Ya is Spain and the select group of social media admins holed up in the Tactical HQ of Occupy Wall Street. Interestingly, Gerbaudo claims that this emergent leadership does nothing to lessen the anarchist character of these protest movements. Indeed, he argues that historical anarchists like Errico Malatesta, Mikhail Bakunin and Nestor Makhno were also precisely that: leaders. They were

6 people who led by initiating social movements, inspiring actions and acting as focal points or symbolic centres for anarchists scattered across geographical space to look towards. (p. 143) Gerbaudos position with respect to leadership, then, is not that its existence can be used to critique the uprisings of 2011, but rather that denying its role leads one to obscure the reality of the situation and make impossible an understanding of how and why these movements worked effectively in the ways that they did. He puts this well when he writes, I do not think that leaders () are betraying their movements ideals. On the contrary, I think that it is the ideals, and in particular the ideology of horizontalism, that is betraying activists by being incapable of capturing empirically the gist of the actual practices taking place on the ground. (p. 165) One of the most interesting features of Gerbaudos study as a whole is the distinction he draws between strategic and tactical uses of social media. His is one of the few sources to elaborate on the distinction in such a way as to put it to work in aiding our understandings of social movements and their use of technology. Twitter stands out in the book as the means through which tactical organisation is achieved (p.72, p.104, pp. 128-9). As opposed to strategy, which involves mobilisation and assembly, tactical organisation is focused instead on the immediate coordination of participants towards certain goals (e.g.

reoccupation of parks and squares following evictions and avoiding police attempts to kettle protests). Von Clausweitz, whom Gerbaudo cites when defining mobilisation, writes (2008: 128, italics in original) that tactics teaches the use of armed forces in the engagement; strategy the use of engagements for the object of the war. This distinction and the analogy with military combat (not the only analogy used when discussing social media (e.g. p. 128, p. 151)) is

7 important as it helps refine our understanding of different stages of political action and different uses of social media. The one thing lacking in Gerbaudos analysis as I see it is that he overlooks what is, perhaps, one of the most interesting, from an organisational and political theoretical perspective, uprisings of 2011: the English riots that took place in August of that year. While the political content of the riots was not as on show as in the cases Gerbaudo discusses (and this is not to say that it wasnt there at all), the way rioters made use of social media is, I would suggest, just as crucial for our understanding of contemporary forms of radical organisation. While much of the organisational structure of the riots can be understood through Gerbaudos lenses (the importance of occupying space, in this case the streets; the emotional content of much of the call-outs that were sent through BlackBerry Messenger networks), it is questionable whether any formal or informal leadership existed to coordinate and/or motivate the rioters. Obviously, empirical research of the type Gerbaudo has done would be required to support this assertion, but based on much of the evidence on hand, the riots (understood as an organisation) seem to represent the cybernetic idea of a self-organised system. By relaying information about safe areas and police movements through BBM networks, which didnt involve the same kind of privileged access Facebook and Twitter did, rioters were able to operate effectively for several nights without any apparent central leadership, choreographical or otherwise. So while Gerbaudo argues that contemporary movements cannot do without the capacity of (social) media to become instruments of an emotional narration (p. 162, italics in original), the example of the riots of 2011 may suggest that the tactical affordances of social media, to the extent that they made the riots so effective and difficult to contain, are equally indispensable.

8 What Paolo Gerbaudo has done with Tweets and the Streets is provide one of the most nuanced and sophisticated accounts of the use of social media by contemporary protest movements. He has not only undertaken a detailed analysis of the events of 2011 themselves but has also potentially provided a solid framework for helping us understand social media-backed uprisings and movements in general. His is a book that has much to offer the debates around social media activism and organisational theory in general. References Clausewitz, C. Von (2008) On War, translated and Edited by M. Howard and P. Paret. Princeton: Princeton University Press.