So this is Ana Hazareh.
Ana Hazareh may well be the most cutting-edge
digital activist in the world today.
And you wouldn't know it by looking at him.
Hazareh is a 77-year-old Indian anti-corruption and social justice activist.
And in 2011, he was running a big campaign
to address everyday corruption in India,
a topic that Indian elites love to ignore.
So as part of this campaign,
he was using all of the traditional tactics
that a good Ghandian organizer would use.
So he was on a hunger strike,
and Hazareh realized through his hunger
that actually maybe this time,
in the 21st-century,
a hunger strike wouldn't be enough.
So he started playing around with mobile-activism.
So the first thing he did, he said to people,
"okay, why don't you send me
a text message if you support
my campaign against corruption?"
So he does this, he gives people a short code,
and about 80,000 people do it.
Okay, that's pretty respectable.
But then he decides,
"let me tweak my tactics a little bit."
He says, "why don't you leave me a missed call?"
Now, for those of you who have lived in the global south,
you'll know that missed calls
are a really critical part of global mobile culture.
I see people nodding.
People leave missed calls all the time:
If you're running late for a meeting
and you want to let them know that you're on the way,
you leave them a missed call.
If you're dating someone and you just want to say "I miss you"
you leave them a missed call.
So a note for a dating tip here,
in some cultures,
if you want to please your lover,
you call them and hang up.
So why do people leave missed calls?
Well, the reason of course is that
they're trying to avoid charges
associated with making calls and sending texts.
So when Hazareh asked people to leave him a missed call,
Let's have a little guess how many people actually do this?
35 million.
So this is one of the largest coordinated actions in human history.
It's remarkable.
And this reflects the extraordinary strength of the emerging Indian middle class,
And the power that their mobile phones bring.
But he used that,
Hazareh needed up with this massive v-file of mobile phone numbers,
and he used that to deploy
real people-power on the ground
to get hundreds of thousands of people on the streets in Dehli
to make a national point on everyday corruption in India.
It's a really striking story.
So this is me when I was 12-years-old,
I hope you see the resemblance,
and I was also an activist,
I've been an activist all my life.
I had this really funny childhood
where I [tropsed?] around the world
meeting world leaders and Noble Prize winners
talking about third-world debt,
as it was then called,
and demilitarization,
I was a very, very serious child.
And back then,
in the early 90s,
I had very cutting-edge tech-tool of my own:
the fax.
And the fax was the tool of my activism.
And at that time, it was the best way
to get a message to a lot of people
all at once.
I'll give you one example of a fax campaign that I ran.
It was the eve of the Gulf War
and I organized a global campaign to flood the hotel,
the Intercontinental in Geneva,
where James Vacar and [name]
were meeting on the eve of the war,
and I thought that if I could flood them with faxes,
we'll stop the war.
Well, unsurprisingly,
that campaign was wholly unsuccessful.
There are lots of reasons for that,
but there's no doubt that one sputtering fax machine
in Geneva was a little bit of a bandwidth constraint.