Samuel Adams started the Revolution because he didn’t have Twitter

Summary: We don’t eat kippers for breakfast because Samuel Adams didn’t have the temptation of running the Revolution by Twitter instead by snail mail. Social media are a powerful tool for organizations, but no substitute for them. The delusion of a self-organizing crowd appeals to people seeking easy low-commitment ways to reform America. Perhaps repeated failures will eventually teach us this. This is the 3rd in this series.  {1st of 2 posts today.}

Contents

1. High-tech failed revolutions.
2. Why social media isn’t a magic bullet for politics.
3. Organizations: a key to successful reform.
4. Other posts in this series.
5. For More Information.

(1)  High-tech failed revolutions

Contrast this with the color revolutions which began with such promise — easy, fast revolts using Twitter! — but most of which ended with such disappointment. Techies hoped that social media facilitated self-organizing networks that would reach critical mass, somehow producing complex political change.

Consider the Orange Revolution in Ukraine: protestors overthrew an elected government (the vote certified as fair by domestic and foreign observers) with the aid of western intelligence agencies (working through various NGOs), resulting in a rise of neo-Nazi groups and civil war. It’s a story as common as dirt.

Social media can effectively mobilize public support, but that’s a snare. Not only do movements created by social media lack a leadership structure, their flat communications networks tend to suppress the rise of leaders. Social media networks center on nodes: people with connections to many other people. The skills needed to become a node are not those of leaders. Most of all a node is an individual, a leader is one who assumes some personal responsibility for the movement (that is the sine qua non of leadership).

Except when used by an organization, social media excels at creating mobs (especially flash mobs). As we saw with Occupy, mobs are easily misled into folly. As we saw with the Tea Party, they’re easily led to aims quite different to those they intended (born in opposition to bank bailouts, they helped elect the most bank-friendly Congress since 1932 (as Chairman Bachus explained).

What have we to show for the movements of the past decade? How many of the “Twitter revolutions” on the the following map accomplished much?

(2)  Why social media doesn’t provide a magic bullet for reform

Sam Adams made personal connections to small numbers of like minded people, building a web of committed revolutionaries. Today’s social media allows our Sam Adams to contact millions (Katy Perry has almost 70 million followers on Twitter). He could generate a tidal wave of chatter and some fantastic flash mobs — but be forgotten next year.

For an excellent analysis of this see “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted” by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, 4 October 2010 — Red emphasis added. Excerpt:

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns.

When 10,000 protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

… In a new book called The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. … Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than 400 of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly 25,000 new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.

But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. … it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation — by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.

His analysis and conclusions should be blindingly obvious to everyone. But they were widely criticized, mostly in a remarkably woolly-headed way. For example, read Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter) at The Atlantic inadvertently explaining why we lose to the 1%:

“Small Change” dismisses leaderless, self-organizing systems as viable agents of change. A flock of birds flying around an object in flight has no leader yet this beautiful, seemingly choreographed movement is the very embodiment of change.

He compares revolutions, among the most difficult, risky, and complex of social activities, to the instinctual behavior of birds. This is daft, no matter how many millions Stone has in the bank. But his message is what we want to hear. He and others like him are Sirens for the 1%, luring us onto the rocks with sweet tunes.

(3) Organizations: a key to successful reform

Successful protests usually result from organizations that choose the time and place, plus careful preparation. Spontaneity is usually an illusion. Reaching for broad support without an organization risks burning resources and leaving nothing behind. A skilled and effective organization usually develops from years or decades of effort. Look to our own history of successful reform movements. Ideas and people won without high-tech machinery.

Samuel Adams and his fellow activists in 1764 Boston reacted to local problems by taking collective action: organizing the first of the Committees of Correspondence. Later these reached out to like-minded people in other colonies. Eleven colonies had Committees by February 1774. These groups steadily gained experience acting on a local and then national scale. They formed the nucleus of shadow governments, which later formed the basis of revolutionary governments.

Benjamin Franklin helped organize America’s first Abolitionist Society at Pennsylvania in 1785. These spread across the nation. Victory came in 1865.  (In 1787 William Wilberforce began his crusade in Parliament against slavery in the UK, he drew upon support from groups such as the Quakers’ antislavery societies and the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, plus informal groups like the Testonites. Full victory came in 1833.)

The first women’s rights convention was held at Seneca Falls NY in 1848. The first National Women’s Rights Conventions was held in Worcester, MA in October 1850. The 19th Amendment became law in August 1920 when ratified by the 36th State.

Flash forward to our civil rights movement. Rosa Parks’ act of civil disobedience in 1955 was a staged event, brilliantly developed into the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Greensboro sit-in in 1960 was unorganized, but used a technique developed during the previous 20 years by civil rights groups. The movement was an intelligently run loose alliance of groups such as the NAACP, Congress of Racial Equality, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference — plus others formed from the energy released by these early protests, such as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

This is the path to follow for those interested in reforming America. Left or Right does not matter; find others interested in working to make a better nation. Plan and organize. Link with others sharing your goals, in broad terms. Expect a long difficult struggle.

(4) Other posts in this series

1. What if Samuel Adams tried to start the Revolution by blogging?
2. What if the Founders’ generation read the news as we do?
3. Samuel Adams started the Revolution because he didn’t have Twitter.

(5)  For More Information

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about the decay of the Second Republic (built on the Constitution), and those about ways to reform America — paths to a new politics. Especially these:

1. Why the 1% is winning, and we are not — They’re organizing and planning.
2. How can we arouse a passion to reform America in the hearts of our neighbors?
3. How to recruit people to the cause of reforming America.
4. Is grassroots organizing a snare or magic bullet for the reform of America?,
5. Why don’t political protests work? What are the larger lessons from our repeated failures?
6. How to stage effective protests in the 21st century.
7. How do protests like the TP and OWS differ from effective political action?
8. The Million Vet March, a typical peasants’ protest. Does it portend more serious protests in our future?
9. The protests in NYC repeat those in Ferguson, and probably will end the same – as wins for the 1%.

Always remember: revitalization is an inherent capacity of the human soul, the Founders’ machinery remains idle but still powerful, and we are powerful when we act together.