What new power looks like

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.