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

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.