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So this is Ana Hazareh.

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Ana Hazareh may well be the
most cutting-edge

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digital activist in the world today.

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And you wouldn't know it by looking at him.

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Hazareh is a 77-year-old Indian anti-corruption
and social justice activist.

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And in 2011, he was running a big campaign

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to address everyday corruption in India,

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a topic that Indian elites love to ignore.

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So as part of this campaign,

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he was using all of the traditional tactics

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that a good Ghandian organizer would use.

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So he was on a hunger strike,

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and Hazareh realized through his hunger

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that actually maybe this time,

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in the 21st-century,

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a hunger strike wouldn't be enough.

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So he started playing around 
with mobile-activism.

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So the first thing he did, he said to people,

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"okay, why don't you send me

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a text message if you support

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my campaign against corruption?"

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So he does this, he 
gives people a short code,

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and about 80,000 people do it.

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Okay, that's pretty respectable.

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But then he decides,

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"let me tweak my tactics a little bit."


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He says, "why don't you leave
me a missed call?"

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Now, for those of you who have
lived in the global south,

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you'll know that missed calls

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are a really critical part
of global mobile culture.

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I see people nodding.

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People leave missed calls all the time:

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If you're running late for a meeting

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and you want to let them know 
that you're on the way,

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you leave them a missed call.

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If you're dating someone and 
you just want to say "I miss you"

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you leave them a missed call.

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So a note for a dating tip here,

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in some cultures,

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if you want to please your lover,

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you call them and hang up.

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So why do people leave missed calls?

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Well, the reason of course is that

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they're trying to avoid charges

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associated with making calls
and sending texts.

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So when Hazareh asked people 
to leave him a missed call,

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Let's have a little guess how 
many people actually do this?

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35 million.

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So this is one of the largest coordinated
actions in human history.

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It's remarkable.

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And this reflects the extraordinary strength 
of the emerging Indian middle class,

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And the power that their
mobile phones bring.

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But he used that,

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Hazareh needed up with this massive 
v-file of mobile phone numbers,

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and he used that to deploy

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real people-power on the ground

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to get hundreds of thousands of
people on the streets in Dehli

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to make a national point on 
everyday corruption in India.

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It's a really striking story.

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So this is me when I was 12-years-old,

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I hope you see the resemblance,

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and I was also an activist,

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I've been an activist all my life.

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I had this really funny childhood

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where I [tropsed?] around the world

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meeting world leaders and 
Noble Prize winners

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talking about third-world debt,

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as it was then called,

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and demilitarization,

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I was a very, very serious child.

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And back then,

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in the early 90s,

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I had very cutting-edge
tech-tool of my own:

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the fax.

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And the fax was the 
tool of my activism.

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And at that time, it was the best way

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to get a message to a lot of people

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all at once.

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I'll give you one example of a fax
campaign that I ran.

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It was the eve of the Gulf War

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and I organized a global campaign 
to flood the hotel,

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the Intercontinental in Geneva,

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where James Vacar and [name]

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were meeting on the eve of the war,

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and I thought that if I could 
flood them with faxes,

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we'll stop the war.

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Well, unsurprisingly,

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that campaign was wholly unsuccessful.

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There are lots of reasons for that,

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but there's no doubt that 
one sputtering fax machine

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in Geneva was a little bit
of a bandwidth constraint

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in terms of the ability to 
get a message to lots of people.

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And so, I went on to 
discover some better tools.

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I co-founded Avaz that uses the 
internet to mobilize people

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and now has almost 
40 million members,

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and I now run Purpose, which 
is a home for these kind of

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technology-powered movements.

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So what's the moral of this story?

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Is the moral of this story,


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"you know what, the fax is kind of
eclipsed by the mobile phone?"

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This is another story of 
tech-determinism?

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Well, I would argue that there's 
actually more to it than that.

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I'd argue that in the last 20 years,

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something more fundamental has changed


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than just new tech.

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I would argue that there has
been a fundamental shift

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in the balance of power

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in the world.

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You ask any activist how to understand the world,

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and they'll say,

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"look at where the power is,


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who has it,

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how it's shifting?"


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I think we all sense that something
big is happening.

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So Henry Tims and I,

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Henry's a fellow movement builder,

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got talking one day and 
we started to think,

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"how can we make sense of this new world?

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how can we describe it and give

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it a framework that makes it more useful?"


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Because we realize that many

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of the lessons that we were
discovering in movements

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actually applied all over the world

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in many sectors of our society.

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So I want to introduce you to
this framework:

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Old power, meet new power.

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And I want to talk to you about
what new power is today.

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New power is the deployment

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of mass participation and peer coordination,

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these are the two key elements,

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to create change and shift outcomes.

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And we see new power all around us.

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This is bile grio

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he was a populist Italian blogger

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who with a minimal apparatus
and only some online tools,

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won more than 25 percent of the vote

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in recent Italian elections.

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This is air b&b,

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which, in just a few years,

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radically disrupted the hotel industry

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without owning a single
square-foot of real estate.

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This is Kickstarter,

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which we know has raised over a billion dollars

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from more than 5 million people.

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Now, we're familiar with all of these models.

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But what's striking is the commonalities,

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the structural features of 
these new models

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and how they differ from old power.

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Let's look a little bit at this.

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Old power is held like a currency.

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New power works like a current.

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Old power is held by a few.

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New power isn't held by a few,
it's made by many.

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Old power is all about download,

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and new power uploads.

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And you see a whole set of characteristics

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that you can trace,

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whether it's in media or politics,

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or in education.

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So we've talked a little bit about

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what new power is,

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let's talk for a second about what
new power isn't.

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New power is not your Facebook page.

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I assure you that having a 
social media strategy

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can enable you to do

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just as much download

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as you used to do when you had the radio.

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Just as Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Asad,

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I assure you that his Facebook page

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has not embraced the power
of participation.

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New power is not inherently positive.

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In fact, this isn't an normative
argument that we're making,

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there are many good things 
about new power,

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but it can produce bad outcomes.

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More participation, more peer coordination

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sometimes distorts outcomes

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and there are some things,

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like things, for example, in the medical profession

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that we want new power to get 
no where near.

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And thirdly, new power is not
the inevitable victor.

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In fact, unsurprisingly,

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as many of these new power
models get to scale,

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what you see is this massive push-back

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from the forces of old power.

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Let's look at this really 
interesting epic struggle

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going on right now between 
Edward Snowden and the NSA.

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You'll note that only that


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only one of the two people on this slide

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is currently in exile.

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And so, it's not at all clear

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that new power will be 
the inevitable victor.

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That said, keep one thing in mind:


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We're at the beginning of a
very steep curve.

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So you think about some of 
these new power models, right?

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These were just like someone's

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garage idea a few years ago,

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now they're disrupting 
entire industries.

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And so, what's interesting
about new power,

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is the way it feeds
on itself.