Panel *Fail*

Unfortunately the panel touted in my previous post was cancelled at the last minute: only about 20 people signed up (although I blame the heavy rains). I can understand no one wanting to hear me: But Michael Geist and James Topham . . . two smart guys with some controversial views?

Since I had prepared some notes, that frankly read like a manifesto, I thought I would post them here just to show those who didn't want to attend what they missed. They are just notes, so forgive any faults in syntax. :)

1. I would rather be an activist today than when I was a radical because there is immense political power possible through well-planned use of the social web. In fact, a meta review of studies on the impact of web campaigns on real–life decisions concluded that there is a demonstrable positive impact of such campaigns on off–line mobilization. (Henrik Serup Christensen).
2. The fact that people are more networked today than at any other point in history means that even under repressive regimes they have access to more information, many more avenues to engage in public discourse, a unique facility to form a nexus for action, and a rich new toolbox for protest.
3. Web-based activism can do four things extremely well . . . It can help Educate | Organize | Create the Courage to Act | Provide Direction to Action and for that, as an apostate radical campaigner, I am grateful
4. To express doubts about 'slacktivism', to find fault when the social web fails to deliver (as it does for politicians in Canada), to dwell on its shortcomings of which there are many not least of which is that it can reinforce shallow and dogmatic thinking, is simply ahistorical, short-sighted and cynical.
5. Even the weak ties that a Gladwell or others talk about as a fault of social web activism can become strong ties . . . Strong enough to create a revolution. Following Greenpeace on Twitter, or liking it on Facebook might be a “weak tie” , but it’s a tie nonetheless, and every little bit helps. Weak ties can become stronger in the hands of the right organizers.
6. Of course there are limitations as Tom Slater warns in a piece called " It takes more than online PR campaigns to change the world" in The Independent online: ". . . activism itself has been consumed by the processes of popular culture, and sterilised by the politics of narcissism. The Occupy Movement epitomises this degradation . . .  just as Facebook users name their musical and literary likes, many aspiring revolutionaries will often list the ideologies and campaigns they subscribe to. In this fashion, activism has been subordinated to the culture of cool, and the new bourgeois radical is nothing more than a hollow composite of revolutionary imagery. As one writer has put it, they are more of a fashion show masquerading as a political movement."
7. Re: #6, of course, I have to say that this is precisely what we revolutionaries said of peace-and-love hippies in the 60s and 70s
8. And, yes, there are dangerous trends, as professor Geist, Lawrence Lessig, Ron Deibert from Citizen Lab, Steve Anderson from Openmedia.ca and others point out . . . governments in general don't like things they can't control . . . our own government's 'lawful access' online spying bill or the US's Stop Online Piracy Act are simply Orwellian both in terms of how they describe the purpose of the legislation, and what it will do to web freedom.
9. And, yes, authoritarian regimes can turn the web to its own repressive uses (tracking activists|hacking opposition sites)
10. But whether or not the social web can facilitate repression, be compromised in the short-run, or allow some to avoid civic responsibility and engagement in mainstream politics (through not voting),  its ability to facilitate better coordinated engagement by activists, gadflies, campaigners, professors and critics, its ability to allow all of us to speak more openly will constrain the ability of governments and politicians, the greedy and the corrupt, the dishonest and the cynical to act without consequence and without public oversight.

Panel: Political Advocacy on the Internet

I am part of a panel session on November 29, 2011 at 7 p.m. at the Royal Ontario Museum with James Topham from War Child and Michael Geist who is Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. Mark Farmer (@Markus64) will moderate.

The theme is "the role that new media and the internet play in political advocacy (and) the strategies, implications and effects of this growing platform."

I'll have to work hard to hold my own with James and Michael.

SXSW PanelPicker - Pick Me

I hope you will vote here to support a reprise of my NXNE presentation on slacktivism at next year's SXSW in Austin, Texas.

I posted the NXNE deck on Slideshare in three parts here, here and here. Although my idea for SXSW has the same theme, I promise the presentation will be completed updated.

Would Goebbels Have liked the Web?

You bet.

In a review of Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion and A. Ross Johnson's Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, James Murphy in the Times Literay Supplement (July 8, 2011) writes:

Tools of mass connectivity may empower the multitude, but Goebbels, who knew a lot about crowds, would have welcomed them.

He's right. Goebbels the master propagandist would have loved to twist the world, and the word, in the image of his warped mind using social networks.

There is also no question authoritarian regimes don't hesitate to outlaw, spy on, block or otherwise interfere with troublesome civic discourse especially today on the internet.

The disquieting trend, though, is that Western democracies are now grumbling more loudly about needing greater control over how the social web is used as mechanism for social organization.

During the summer riots in the U.K. prime minister David Cameron, according to the Guardian, speculated (in one of the silliest and most troublesome declarations coming out of the riots in the U.K.),

(T)hat Facebook, Twitter and Research in Motion (Rim), the maker of BlackBerry devices, should take more responsibility for content posted on their networks, warning the government would look to ban people from major social networks if they were suspected of inciting violence online.

Shortly afterwards, Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan received stiff (too stiff?) four-year sentences for using Facebook to organize riots. And a week later the British government summoned the heads of three companies to a meeting with home secretary Theresa May "to discuss ways to prevent social media from being used to coordinate criminal activity".

We're in dangerous territory here. The problem comes with defining "inciting violence" and "criminal activity" on the social web. The same words have been used again and again by authoritarian regimes, police forces,  and otherwise democratic governments facing social dissent to justify unlawful repression of legitimate opposition whether in the streets or more recently on the social web. This includes even the most socially stable of countries, Canada, which went a bit overboard in its arrests of protestors during the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto. Certainly, the same words were used by governments in Tunisia and Egypt to clamp down on web-based protests, and the demonstrations that followed.

Finding the right balance between preventing and prosecuting irresponsible juvenile destruction and allowing political and social dissidence - and free association to act on it as civil disobedience - is tough.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reminds us that:

The term ‘civil disobedience’ was coined by Henry David Thoreau in his 1848 essay to describe his refusal to pay the state poll tax implemented by the American government to prosecute a war in Mexico and to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. In his essay, Thoreau observes that only a very few people – heroes, martyrs, patriots, reformers in the best sense – serve their society with their consciences, and so necessarily resist society for the most part, and are commonly treated by it as enemies. Thoreau, for his part, spent time in jail for his protest. Many after him have proudly identified their protests as acts of civil disobedience and have been treated by their societies – sometimes temporarily, sometimes indefinitely – as its enemies.

IMHO . . . governments should ask anyone - like Britain's home secretary - charged with reviewing the social web's role in dissent and "violence" or with defining "responsibility for content posted on their networks" to mistrust their own propensity to control.

The value the social web brings as a platform for civic discourse and valid and tolerable dissent is greater than the danger of its use for criminal activity. The danger of governments going too far - either wilfully or inadvertently - and tipping towards smothering those who "serve society with their conscience" is far greater (and with ample historic precedents) than the cost of occasional juvenile misuse.

R.I.P. Jack Layton

I never met the man, and only occasionally voted for his party, but with the death of the Honourable Jack Layton, who only recently led his party in an historic campaign to become the official opposition in the House, we Canadians have lost a man who epitomized honour, passion, grace and determination.

How many politicians can you say that about?

His own letter to Canadians released today after his death captures what he was all about. It ends with this:

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.