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So recently, we heard a lot about
how social media helps empower protest,
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and that's true,
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but after more than a decade
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of studying and participating
in multiple social movements,
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I've come to realize
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that the way technology
empowers social movements
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can also paradoxically help weaken them.
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This is not inevitable,
but overcoming it requires diving deep
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into what makes success possible
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over the long term.
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And the lessons apply in multiple domains.
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Now, take Turkey's Gezi Park protests,
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July 2013,
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which I went back to study in the field.
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Twitter was key to its organizing.
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It was everywhere in the park,
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well, along with a lot of tear gas.
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It wasn't all high tech.
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But the people in Turkey had already
gotten used to the power of Twitter
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because of an unfortunate incident
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about a year before
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when military jets had bombed and killed
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34 Kurdish smugglers
near the border region,
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and Turkish media completely
censored this news.
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Editors sat in their newsrooms
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and waited for the government
to tell them what to do.
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One frustrated journalist
could not take this anymore.
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He purchased his own plane ticket,
and went to the village
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where this had occurred,
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and he was confronted by this scene:
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a line of coffins coming down a hill,
relatives wailing.
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He later he told me
how overwhelmed he felt,
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and didn't know what to do,
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so he took out his phone,
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like any one of us might,
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and snapped that picture
and Tweeted it out.
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And voila, that picture went viral
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and broke the censorship
and forced mass media to cover it.
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So when, a year later,
Turkey's Gezi protests happened,
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it started as a protest
about a park being razed,
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but became an anti-authoritarian protest.
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It wasn't surprising
that media also censored it,
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but it got a little ridiculous at times.
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When things were so intense,
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when CNN International
was broadcasting live from Istanbul,
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CNN Turkey instead was broadcasting
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a documentary on penguins.
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Now, I love penguin documentaries,
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but that wasn't the news of the day.
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An angry viewer
put his two screens together
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and snapped that picture,
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and that one too went viral,
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and since then, people call Turkish media
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the penguin media.
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But this time, people knew what to do.
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They just took out their phones
and looked for actual news.
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Better, they knew to go to the park
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and take pictures and participate
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and share it more on social media.
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Digital connectivity, that was used
for everything from food to donations.
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Everything was organized partially
with the help of these new technologies.
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And using Internet to mobilize
and publicize protests
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actually goes back a long way.
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Remember the Zapatistas,
the peasant uprising
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in the southern Chiapas region of Mexico
led by the masked, pipe-smoking,
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charismatic Subcomandante Marcos?
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That was probably the first movement
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that got global attention
thanks to the Internet.
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Or consider Seattle '99,
when a multinational grassroots effort
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brought global attention
to what was then an obscure organization,
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the World Trade Organization,
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by also utilizing these digital technologies
to help them organize.
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And more recently, movement after movement
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has shaken country after country:
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the Arab uprisings from Bahrain
to Tunisia to Egypt and more;
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indignados in Spain, Italy, Greece:
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the Gezi Park protests;
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Taiwan; Euro Maidan in Ukraine; Hong Kong.
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And think of more recent initiatives,
like the "Bring Back Our Girls" hashtags.
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Nowadays, a network of tweets
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can unleash a global awareness campaign.
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A Facebook page can become the hub
of a massive mobilization.
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Amazing.
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But think of the moments I just mentioned.
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The achievements they were able to have,
their outcomes,
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are not really proportional
to the size and energy they inspired.
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The hopes they rightfully raised
are not really matched
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by what they were able to have
as a result in the end.
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And this raises a question:
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as digital technology makes things
easier for movements,
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why haven't successful outcomes
become more likely as well?
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In embracing digital platforms
for activism and politics,
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are we overlooking some of the benefits
of doing things the hard way?
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Now, I believe so.
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I believe that the rule of thumb is
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easier to mobilize does not always mean
easier to achieve gains.
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Now, to be clear,
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technology does empower in multiple ways.
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It's very powerful.
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In Turkey, I watched
four young college students
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organize a countrywide citizen journalist
network called "140 Journals"
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that became the central hub
for uncensored news in the country.
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In Egypt, I saw another four young people
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use digital connectivity to organize
the supplies and logistics
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for 10 field hospitals,
very large operations,
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during massive clashes near Tahrir Square
in 2011,
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and I asked the founder of this effort,
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called "Tahrir Supplies,"
how long it took him
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to go from when he had the idea
to when he got started.
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"Five minutes," he said. Five minutes.
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And he had no training
or background in logistics.
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Or think of the Occupy movement
which rocked the world in 2011.
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It started with a single email
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from a magazine, Adbusters,
to 90,000 subscribers in its list.
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About two months after that first email,
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there were in the United States
600 ongoing occupations and protests.
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Less than one month,
less than one month
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after the first physical
occupation in Zuccotti Park,
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a global protest was held
in about 82 countries, 950 cities.
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It was one of the largest global protests
ever organized.
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Now, compare that to what
the Civil Rights Movement had to do
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in 1955 Alabama to protest
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the racially segregated bus system
which they wanted to boycott.
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They'd been preparing for many years
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and decided it was time
to swing into action
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after Rosa Parks was arrested.
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But how do you get the word out
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-- You know, tomorrow
we're going to start to boycott --
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when you don't have Facebook,
texting, Twitter, none of that?
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So they had to mimeograph
52,000 leaflets
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by sneaking into a university
duplicating room
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and working all night, secretly.
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They then used the 68
African-American organizations
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that criss-crossed the city
to distribute those leaflets by hand.
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And the logistical tasks were daunting,
because these were poor people.
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They had to get to work, boycott or no,
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so a massive carpool was organized,
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again by meeting.
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No texting, no Twitter, no Facebook.
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They had to meet almost all the time
to keep this carpool going.
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Today, it would be so much easier.
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We could create a database,
available rides and what rides you need,
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have the database coordinate,
and use texting.
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We wouldn't have to need all that much.
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But again, consider this:
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the Civil Rights Movement
in the United States
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navigated a minefield
of political dangers,
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faced repression, and overcame,
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won major policy concessions,
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navigated and innovated through risks.
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In contrast, three years
after Occupy sparked
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that global conversation about inequality,
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the policies that fuel it
are still in place.
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Europe was also rocked
by anti-austerity protests,
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but the continent
didn't shift its direction.
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In embracing these technologies,
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are we overlooking some of the benefits
of slow and sustained?
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To understand this,
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I went back to Turkey
about a year after the Gezi protests
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and I interviewed a range of people,
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from activists to politicians,
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from both the ruling party
and the opposition party and movements.
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I found that the Gezi protesters
were despairing.
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They were frustrated,
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and they had achieved much less
than what they had hoped for.
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This echoed what I'd been hearing
around the world
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from many of the protesters
that I'm in touch with,
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and I've come to realize
that part of the problem
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is that today's protests
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have become a bit
like climbing Mt. Everest
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with the help of 60 sherpas,
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and the Internet is our sherpa.
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What we're doing is taking the fast routes
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and not replacing the benefits
of the slower work,
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because you see,
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the kind of work that went
into organizing all those daunting,
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tedious logistical tasks
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did not just take care of those tasks,
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they also created the kind of organization
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that could think together collectively
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and make hard decisions together,
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create consensus and innovate,
and maybe even more crucially,
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keep going together through differences.
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So when you see
this March on Washington in 1963,
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when you look at that picture,
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where this is the march
where Martin Luther King
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gave his famous "I have a dream" speech,
1963,
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you don't just see a march
and you don't just hear a powerful speech,
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you also see the painstaking,
long-term work that can put on that march,
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and if you're in power,
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you realize you have to take
the capacity signaled by that march,
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not just the march,
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but the capacity signaled
by that march, seriously.
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In contrast, when you look
at the Occupy's global marches
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that were organized in two weeks,
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you see a lot of discontent,
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but you don't necessarily see teeth that
can bite over the long term.
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And crucially, the Civil Rights Movement
innovated tactically
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from boycotts to lunch counter sit-ins
to pickets to marches to freedom rides.
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Today's movements scale up very quickly
without the organizational base
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that can see them through the challenges.
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They feel a little like start-ups
that got very big
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without knowing what to do next,
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and they rarely manage to shift tactically
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because they don't have
the depth of capacity
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to weather such transitions.
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Now, I want to be clear:
the magic is not in the mimeograph.
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It's in that capacity to work together,
think together collectively,
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which can only be built
over time with a lot of work.
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To understand all this,
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I interviewed a top official
from the ruling party in Turkey,
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and I ask him, "How do you do it?"
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They too use digital technology
extensively, so that's not it.
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So what's the secret?
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Well, he told me.
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He said the keys is
he never took sugar with his tea.
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I said, what does that
got to do with anything?
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Well, he said, his party starts
getting ready for the next election
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the day after the last one,
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and he spends all day every day
meeting with voters in their homes,
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in their wedding parties,
circumcision ceremonies,
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and then he meets with his colleagues
to compare notes.
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With that many meetings every day,
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with tea offered at every one of them
which he could not refuse,
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because that would be rude,
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he could not take even one cube of sugar
per cup of tea,
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because that would be many kilos of sugar,
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and he couldn't calculate exactly how many kilos
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and at that point I realized
why he was speaking so fast.
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He had met in the afternoon,
and he was already way over-caffeinated.
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But his party won two major elections
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within a year of the Gezi protests
with comfortable margins.
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Now, to be sure, governments have
different resources to bring to the table.
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It's not the same game.
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But the differences are instructive,
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and like all such stories, this is not
a story just of technology.
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It's what technology allows us to do
converging with what we want to do.
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Today's social movements
want to operate informally.
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They do not want institutional leadership.
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They want to stay out of politics,
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because they fear
corruption and cooptation.
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They have a point:
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modern representative democracies
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are being strangled in many countries
by powerful interests.
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But by operating this way
makes it hard for them
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to sustain over the long term
and exert leverage over the system,
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which leads to frustrated
protesters dropping out,
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and even more corrupt politics.
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And politics and democracy
without an effective challenge hobbles,
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because the causes that have inspired
the modern recent movements
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are crucial. Right?
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Climate change is barreling towards us.
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Inequality is stifling human growth
and potential and economies.
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Authoritarianism is choking
many countries.
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We need movements to be more effective.
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Now some people have argued
that the problem is
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today's movements are not formed of people
who take as many risks as before,
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and that is not true.
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From Gezi to Tahrir to elsewhere,
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I've seen people put their lives
and livelihoods on the line.
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It's also not true,
as Malcolm Gladwell claimed,
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that today's protesters
form weaker virtual ties.
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No, they come to these protests
just like before with their friends,
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existing networks,
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and sometimes they do
make new friends for life.
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I still see the friends that I made
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in those Zapatista-convened
global protests more than a decade ago,
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and the bonds between strangers
are not worthless.
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When I got tear-gassed in Gezi,
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people I didn't know helped me
and one another instead of running away.
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In Tahrir, I saw people, protesters,
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working really hard to keep
each other safe and protected.
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And digital awareness-raising is great,
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because changing minds
is the bedrock of changing politics.
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But movements today
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have to move beyond
participation at great scale very fast
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and figure out how
to think together collectively,
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develop strong policy proposals,
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create consensus,
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figure out the political steps
and relate them to leverage,
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because all these good intentions
and bravery and sacrifice by itself
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are not going to be enough.
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And there are many efforts.
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In New Zealand, a group of young people
are developing a platform called Lumio
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for participatory
decision-making at scale.
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In Turkey, 140 Journals
are holding hack-a-thons
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so that they support communities
as well as citizen journalism.
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In Argentina, an open-source platform
called Democracy OS
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is bringing participation
to parliaments and political parties.
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These are all great, and we need more,
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but the answer won't just be
better online decision-making,
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because, to update democracy we are going
to need to innovate at every level,
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from the organizational
to the political to the social.
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Because to succeed over the long term,
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sometimes you do need tea without sugar
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along with your Twitter.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)