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
in terms of the ability to get a message to lots of people.
And so, I went on to discover some better tools.
I co-founded Avaz that uses the internet to mobilize people
and now has almost 40 million members,
and I now run Purpose, which is a home for these kind of
technology-powered movements.
So what's the moral of this story?
Is the moral of this story,
"you know what, the fax is kind of eclipsed by the mobile phone?"
This is another story of tech-determinism?
Well, I would argue that there's actually more to it than that.
I'd argue that in the last 20 years,
something more fundamental has changed
than just new tech.
I would argue that there has been a fundamental shift
in the balance of power
in the world.
You ask any activist how to understand the world,
and they'll say,
"look at where the power is,
who has it,
how it's shifting?"
I think we all sense that something big is happening.
So Henry Tims and I,
Henry's a fellow movement builder,
got talking one day and we started to think,
"how can we make sense of this new world?
how can we describe it and give
it a framework that makes it more useful?"
Because we realize that many
of the lessons that we were discovering in movements
actually applied all over the world
in many sectors of our society.
So I want to introduce you to this framework:
Old power, meet new power.
And I want to talk to you about what new power is today.
New power is the deployment
of mass participation and peer coordination,
these are the two key elements,
to create change and shift outcomes.
And we see new power all around us.
This is bile grio
he was a populist Italian blogger
who with a minimal apparatus and only some online tools,
won more than 25 percent of the vote
in recent Italian elections.
This is air b&b,
which, in just a few years,
radically disrupted the hotel industry
without owning a single square-foot of real estate.
This is Kickstarter,
which we know has raised over a billion dollars
from more than 5 million people.
Now, we're familiar with all of these models.
But what's striking is the commonalities,
the structural features of these new models
and how they differ from old power.
Let's look a little bit at this.
Old power is held like a currency.
New power works like a current.
Old power is held by a few.
New power isn't held by a few, it's made by many.
Old power is all about download,
and new power uploads.
And you see a whole set of characteristics
that you can trace,
whether it's in media or politics,
or in education.
So we've talked a little bit about
what new power is,
let's talk for a second about what new power isn't.
New power is not your Facebook page.
I assure you that having a social media strategy
can enable you to do
just as much download
as you used to do when you had the radio.
Just as Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Asad,
I assure you that his Facebook page
has not embraced the power of participation.
New power is not inherently positive.
In fact, this isn't an normative argument that we're making,
there are many good things about new power,
but it can produce bad outcomes.
More participation, more peer coordination
sometimes distorts outcomes
and there are some things,
like things, for example, in the medical profession
that we want new power to get no where near.
And thirdly, new power is not the inevitable victor.
In fact, unsurprisingly,
as many of these new power models get to scale,
what you see is this massive push-back
from the forces of old power.
Let's look at this really interesting epic struggle
going on right now between Edward Snowden and the NSA.
You'll note that only that
only one of the two people on this slide
is currently in exile.
And so, it's not at all clear
that new power will be the inevitable victor.
That said, keep one thing in mind:
We're at the beginning of a very steep curve.
So you think about some of these new power models, right?
These were just like someone's
garage idea a few years ago,
now they're disrupting entire industries.
And so, what's interesting about new power,
is the way it feeds on itself.