An interview with Paul Mason in Avgi newspaper, Greece, 19 Jan 2014 English version

- Is there a red line connecting all the movements described in your book? Are there any shared characteristics? Yes - but its not red. Its white - in every one of these movements you see people with white wire coming from their ears. This is a connected generation of young people who have turned the very thing that was supposed to enslave them into a weapon: not just technology but specifically network technology. What was supposed to keep them trapped in a bubble of individuality actually freed them to break out of it. What links Sol, Gezi and Tahrir is not Facebook - although they did use these things - it is their common experience of being a generation that cannot live with the conditions presented to them: by the breakdown of neoliberalism, by the corrupt, conservative and repressive state, by the development model which from New York to Cairo always favours the 1%. When the Arab Spring inevitably went into a period of reaction, a lot of people said - you book is wrong: then Gezi happened, then 1m people on the streets of Brazil. Recently the Economist magazine discovered that these movements were linked by inequality, corruption, economic crisis and a collapse in trust. I still think this misses something - where it;s really kicking off is in peoples heads. There is a Human Spring that you cant make go away with tear gas and batons.

- How do you define the subjects of the movement? Is it young people and their problems, is it class struggle, is it religion, is it conservatism, is it the left, and who sets the tone? I dont buy the whole analysis of the autonomists - that the working class has become replaced by a collective worker who can be the precariat, a housewife, a docker, a graffiti artist. For me thats a form of declamatory thinking. However when the autonomists say - theres not one mole undermining capitalism but a tribe of moles - they are describing reality.

Look at every demo in Syntagma; labour movement splits going back 70 years mean theres always two or three different official demos; then the black bloc arrive - of course there are some plainclothes cops but if you look at the demographic: young, skinny, male, alienated, probably from outside traditional labour movement families. Then - at the height of 2011 you got a whole mass of more amorphous ordinary people. I was in the streets near Ermou when I saw all kinds of guys - kebab stall owners, pensioners, people with no face covering, women with gold bracelets and Fendi handbags - all going crazy over the memorandum. At the centre of the movements, driving forward and keeping them going, has generally been what sociologists call networked individuals people who live a connected lifestyle, whether theyre a coffee bar worker or a lawyer: that doesnt mean there is no place for the proletariat just look at the scale of Greek and Turkish union mobilisations during their respective struggles. But all movements have a kind of symbolic type and the networked young people are that - in the book I call them Jacobins with a laptop.

- In the preface of the greek edition of your book, you are suggesting that the Greek Gezi Park is yet to follow. If Gezi is yet to follow, what happened in December 2008? Some people believe that it was the "ground zero. I actually say in the book December was the first of the modern struggles the precariat, the youth, the scale of hopelessness, right after Lehman went bust. All I am saying is in Gezi, I saw a level of social mobilisation I have not seen in Greece. I saw it in Spain too, and Egypt. The best way to describe it is when you get guys with good haircuts, gym-toned arms, probably owning a decent car, coming up to you in balaclavas and saying theyre going to not defend the barricade but actually attack riot cops armed much heavier than the Greek ones. The level of anger in Turkey - albeit from a defined half of the population that is secular - was so great that it blasted away all the existing divisions: Stalinism, Kemalism, the anarchists. I have never seen such a big cross section of society stand facing tear gas for hours, singing songs, giving

away free food. Maybe Greece wont have anything that big. Maybe the time for it has passed. My most likely scenario with Greece is a political crisis if ND lose power. As you know I interviewed Tsipras and I put to him: what do you do to avoid becoming the Greek Allende - I think its a question people in Syriza are not so comfortable with. I think its a reasonable question though.

- If Snowden's revelations are valid, NSA knows potentially pretty much everything about everyone. So, are we doomed? Actually whats not properly recognised about the way the NSA/GCHQ works is - as far as I know - that the mass collection of data came out of their strategy for dealing with the Iraq insurgency: collect all phone calls, email addresses, metadata so that when an attack happens, you can data crunch and find out who did it. The left is not in that business. The left is in the business of a legal, transparent, democratic struggle against austerity. So I am not sure how much use the data is for the old, cold-war style anti left surveillance and disruption operations. I also think the level of legal oversight on the western military - Geneva convention, convention on human rights etc - is likely to get imposed on the intelligence guys now. The British drone pilots operate their aircraft with a lawyer on hand 24/7 - so if the signals intelligence people do not, they will probably have to. I think any attempt to use mass surveillance against legitimate protest movements or parties: i.e. ones that do not openly espouse and organise violence, is going to be a hard sell even for the intelligence agencies in Europe and the USA.

- Say that in Britain Tories and Labor form a coalition government and impose 30% of GDP austerity over 3 years and abolish every labor right, cripple the NHS and so on. How would the people react?

I can guarantee you there is not going to be a Labour/Conservative coalition in Britain unless zombies attack the planet. Actually I expect the next year to start seeing a discussion about a Liberal-Labour coalition, and also a fairly clear difference emerging over the scale of austerity. The Conservatives have openly said now, that their aim is to shrink the state, not just balance the books - so if growth revives and keeps going, there will be a clear opportunity for Labour and even the Libdems to say: we will soften the austerity. The real problem in Britain is the total alienation of people from the political class. And if you were expecting me to say it will explode no country explodes where theyve just printed 12% of GDP in money and started to filter it into peoples pockets.