From Gezi Park to Black Lives Matter, with Zeynep Tufekci

Social media-fueled protests are a force to be reckoned with in politics today. Movements like Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and Black Lives Matter have drawn millions into the streets in protest of central authorities. But can these movements be effective in the long term? Alex sits down with the field's leading writer and researcher, Zeynep Tufekci, to talk it through. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast. This is Alex Kantrowitz, and we're going to kick off in style today because this is our first-ever episode, and joining us is Zainab Tufekci. She's a writer and researcher that's covered the social media-driven network protests. And if you've been paying attention to politics, or our society, or technology at all over the past 10 years, you've probably seen these things all over the place. They are fueled by social media, so conversations on social media turn into action in the street, and they encompass everything from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring and to today's Black Lives Matter protests. And I think if you start digging into these protests, you can learn a lot about our society today, where we're going in our politics, and how technology influences it all.

• 2:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  So as it happens, Zainab and I happened to separately be at one of these same protests at the same time in 2013 in Gezi Park. In Istanbul, Turkey, which is close to where Zeynep grew up, where Turkish society poured out into the streets in protests of what they saw as the Turkish government's overreaches. And it was a pretty intense movement. Thousands and thousands of people showed up there. And I think by studying what happened in Gezi Park, you can learn a lot about what we're going through in the US and all over the world today as we look at the Black Lives Matter protests and how social media is influencing everything that we're seeing in our politics. So I couldn't be more excited to start this podcast with Zeynep.

• 2:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's been a long time in the works and I'm thrilled to have Zeynep on the show. Welcome, Zeynep.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Thank you for inviting me and congratulations on your new show.

• 2:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thank you. I really, this is like when I thought about starting the podcast, I couldn't imagine a better guest to kick off with. You know, one of the ideas is just to be able to bring the story behind the story, talk a little bit about the systems behind what we see in everyday life. And I think that your work has illuminated that for me. I mean, we've been talking for how long? I know probably around a decade at this point. So I'm excited to have you on.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Well, I'm honored and excited too.

• 3:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  So let's start with Gezi Park. You know, you and I were both in Gezi Park and it was a social fuel protest in Turkey. And I think we can learn a lot about our place, the place our country is in today by studying, you know, what happened in Gezi Park, which I think is emblematic of some of the network social protests that we've seen over the past, you know, decade or so, starting with the Arab Spring, moving into the Black Lives Matter movement. And I think it would be great to trace their evolution and would love to hear your perspective of, you know, what happened in Gezi Park in Istanbul and, you know, what it says about the way that protest happens today.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Sure. So for me, of course, it was a turning point in my analysis. I, as you said, I already had been working on understanding. The social media field protest wave that had started with Occupy arguably and included the ones we call the Arab Spring. And at first, I did a lot of primary research. I went to Cairo. I attended protests in Tahrir Square. I was in Tunisia, talking to people. So I had been cautiously watching the wave. On the one hand, it was definitely true that the tools played a role in how they unfolded.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  At the time, there was a really unproductive discussion on is it technology? Is it the people? And I just find those questions, the question isn't even coherent to answer. Of course, it's the people, but the technology changes how things play out. And having these tools available had been very useful to the dissidents in Egypt, in Tunisia, around North Africa, to try to get attention, to organize, to try to mobilize. And there's a lot of hopeful analysis of their long-term potential. And it's not that I didn't share those analyses, but these things are very complicated. You can have a lot of things happening at once.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  And after a couple of years of sort of trying to understand what was happening, when 2003, the Gesip Park protests happened, I was already seeing the authoritarian wave successfully push back already in the original countries. The initial success of these movements, where the people in power really did not understand social media, did not understand how the public sphere had changed. They kind of acted like it was this little irrelevant thing and tried to ignore it and dismiss it rather than actively fight on that front. That era had ended and they had really moved

• 6:06Speaker 01

  to aggressively control through a variety of means and pushback and also, of course, massive repression because those things go hand in hand. So when it started, the Gesip Park movement started, in fact, in, you know, end of May, beginning of June.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  For me, it was personal. In twenty thirteen. Yes, twenty thirteen. For me personally, it was a big turning point because not only had I moved to, I believe, a lot more realistic analysis of the different dynamics. It was now happening in a place that was like a couple of blocks from where I was born, right? It was personally like, oh, wow, this is literally happening in my home country, a couple of blocks from where I was born. So I jumped on a plane and went there to, um, and carried out a lot of, you know, systematic interviews, uh, participant observation, just on the ground ethnography and all of that. And by then,

• 7:11Speaker 01

  the way I had been starting to think about it is, uh, imagine, it's like startups, right? Uh, you go from, if you're doing it right, you go from zero to hundred miles as fast as you can, right? Because you wanna sort of get to a viable place and you wanna, uh, use what people call network effects. You get big enough that other people are using it and finding it useful. But that kind of speed leaves you in debt. So in the coding world, we would call that technical debt, right? You're just coding as fast as you can. You're not commenting. You're taking a lot of shortcuts. You're doing, um, things that

• 7:52Speaker 01

  aren't really stable infrastructure, but they work for the moment and you're duct taping a lot of things. And modern tools, modern social media allows movements to do just that in that they can go from basically no organizational infrastructure to massive street movements within days or weeks, uh, because you can create a Facebook page and say, you know, in the Egyptian, um, revolution, there was a Facebook, uh, page inviting people to the January twenty fifth, saying, are you gonna attend the revolution? And you could just, you know, click and say, yes, and that demonstrated to your. Friends and neighbors and acquaintances that you too were on board.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  So people felt more comfortable because it revealed people's preferences. Uh, very quickly started a cascade and you knew that you were, it wasn't just going to be you. Maybe, uh, the way it had been for so many years, you know, just a couple hundred people. So that part was already there and that's the powerful part we were seeing, right? This power of social media to scale up something very quickly.

• 8:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just to give people some context, and this was in the context of, you know, we're talking about Gezi Park in Istanbul, where it seemed like all walks of Turkish society converged on this park, uh, next, next to Taxim Square to protest. Um, sort of the overreaches of what was happening with the central government there.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it was very quick.

• 9:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Doing so, being organized with social media.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 9:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and it happened lightning fast after someone got tear gassed in the park.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Right, and I mean.

• 9:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Or pepper sprayed.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Yes, and it was so fast that I was, um, I was in a conference in, um, Philly about, uh, big data and elections. In fact, you know, 2013, I had been arguing that this really isn't good for democracy. Facebook has a lot of potential for misinformation. I was just saying the things that have now become fairly commonplace and I was getting a lot of pushback. I have a very distinct memory of trying to argue about the downsides of, um, this kind of targeted advertising. That wasn't public, there was no transparency. So I was like, it was a very optimistic mood, which is what I'm, uh, sort of trying to contextualize. Whenever I try to point out the downsides in that conference, I was getting enormous amount of pushback there.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  And on the social.

• 10:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Totally, because during the Arab Spring, people were painting things Facebook on the walls.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Which wasn't false. It's what's important to realize is that is, yeah, it is not false to say these tools are also very useful to dissidents. What's important to realize is that there are multiple dynamics at the same time, which make is this good or bad kind of analysis really shallow? Because it's not like a math problem where you add three plus two and then get a number. It's more like a physics problem with a bunch of vectors pushing in different directions. Of course, you get a. Consequent result, right? You do get good or bad in the sense that you get one particular result, but it's not because it's simple additive or subtractive. It's because there's

• 10:56Speaker 01

  a lot of things pushing in different directions and it's not clear at the time which one might or might not win. So I, and then I was in, you know, Philly, I'm just sort of scrolling a little bit on sitting in the back. Um, and I started seeing these protests sort of uh inklings on social media on Turkish Twitter. I'm like, oh, what's going on? And before I know it, like, you know, there's hundreds of thousands in the street. It was literally that fast. It was, and like, if it had been some other country, I might have been tempted to say maybe there's some dynamic organization, something I'm missing that I'm not seeing. And uh, if it had been some-

• 11:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  But you knew Turkey.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Of course. And if it had been, not only did I know Turkey, Turkey has no like Turkish dissidents and Turkish left, and this was a movement more on the left, although it was complicated, those things don't really work uh either. There is no tradition of spontaneous mass movements like that. So for example, if this had been in, say, um, Barcelona, uh, I was, I remember being in Barcelona as a programmer back when I was doing technical work one year, uh, and one day everything was like normal. I went and was working on my um coding project. The next day, the streets erupted into this apparent chaos.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  I'm like, what's going on? And I was told, oh, it's Catalan Independence Day. I was like, whoa, it's such a big deal because I come from Turkey, right? To me, if there's that big a thing, it's a big deal. And the day after it just went back to normal. They, almost, like they do this apparently every year, right? So Turkey had no such tradition either. Like you had either top-down, very heavily organized uh infrastructure uh kind of movements, or you didn't really have big spontaneous movements. So I knew this wasn't the tradition either, but all of a sudden I'm seeing this big spontaneous looking, you know, scaling up very fast, just sort of-

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Accelerating zero to hundred miles through social media movement. Yeah, I jumped on a plane. I went there. It was a very important moment. And I had this really dual, um, sort of dual mindset there. It was also the week Snowden revelations were coming out about the surveillance and all of those things, which were like, okay, so we, I kind, we had kind of guessed something like this was happening, but we were getting confirmation now that it was happening. Uh, we were trying to understand that. So I was in the middle of the park, which you might remember was this exuberant place. People were thrilled. Uh, such, uh, places like these occupation camps.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it's hard to describe. They're life-changing. They're existentially different than anything people have lived through. The collective experience, the way people band together, the sort of, it's a very utopian place. So everybody sees the tear gas and all the sort of the negative stuff and doesn't realize how exhilarating they are for the participants.

• 14:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, because it was both a protest camp, but also, like you mentioned, a collective experience where there was group kitchens that were being organized and free haircuts being given out. And it seemed like, it's funny, in this world devoid of community, really, where the community structures have been crumbling. It seemed like a real community inside the middle of that park.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  And it's always like that. Yeah, it is a common feature. Tahrir Square was like that too. It, they had seventeen days of that occupation. And I, I, I know there was a lot of suffering. Like, I'm not downplaying the suffering, especially in Tahrir. There were, um, like during that period, there were hundreds of people who died. This is not some minor thing. Yeah, yeah, lots of people were killed. Uh, in the Gezi Park, um, there's lots of people who got very seriously injured. And in the protests around the country during that time, uh, people died. Uh, various, uh, things happened. Everything from getting hit with a tear gas canister to being beaten to death, to just falling from a bridge during the chaos.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  So it's not like there's no suffering, but on the other hand, that collective experience really is life-changing. And I was interviewing people who were telling me, who were waving their phone at me and saying, this is everything, because they thought of it as bringing them together, allowing them to bypass the censorship, allowing them to unite. And even when they went home, if they went home, like if they didn't camp, they would get on the phone and try to organize things. Like, there were so much organizational stuff that, logistics, that happened through the phone, that probably, the way I think about it is like, like, if you know any history, you know, the military people, that they just pay so much attention to logistics.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Because it seems like an afterthought and a minor thing, but it's also why Napoleon did not manage to conquer Moscow, besides the winter, right? That's right. It's like, that's what an army runs on. If you don't have your logistics straight, you cannot pull off big things. And until social media, the police and the government forces, with their radio, with their training, with their existing infrastructure, always could do out logistics, right? Could out logistics the movement. It was very, very hard for the movement to sort of have that kind of infrastructure. But all of a sudden, you know, they could, just in, you wanna organize food,

• 16:39Speaker 01

  created Excel spreadsheets, you wanna organize field hospitals, you know, Google spreadsheets very often, just it was online, you know, some channels on whatever social media you're working, texting, all those things, they could organize the camp in a way. That just would have been unthinkable without social media. People were exhilarated, they were thrilled. But on the other hand, just, I remember just sitting there interviewing people, and I'm a social scientist, I'm neutrally listening to them, and they would always ask me, how do you think this is gonna go? Because they would hear, I would say, you know, blah, blah, blah. I was at Princeton at the time, I'm, you know, researcher, Princeton University.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  This is what I'm working on, and this is what I worked on before. They would ask me, how do you think it's gonna go? And I would kind of say, well, I can't predict the future. I would just pass on the question because one, it's not my place. And two, I felt like if I had to take a guess, I would have said, well, this is you scaled up very fast and you're going hundred miles an hour in this car that's just gotten so big so quickly. But you don't have a steering wheel or infrastructure. You do not have the tactical capacity to try to make quick decisions because of the way it's come together. I mean, and we've seen this since, right?

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Social media is not a place where we come to consensus. Yeah.

• 18:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. And I think you're getting towards, and I definitely want you to continue along the story, but you're getting towards the definition of like what a, because this seems like a like an essential network protest, uh, network protest that comes together through social media. So can you just quickly define like what a network protest is?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  So what I've been saying, network protest, because we need a name for what's going on, is the social media field protest protest that happens uh without necessarily one or two, maybe like or a coalition of organizations with longstanding infrastructure, calling it and saying this is what we're gonna do and kind of acting as their strategic or tactical leadership. Right? Instead of that.

• 18:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. It just sort of explodes out of social media.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Hashtag. We're angry, Facebook page, let's all meet here. A million protests everywhere. We've seen this a lot, like we kind of know this now and for uh your younger listeners, they might be like, is there any other way to do this? Because this is all they've known, but this is not how we used to do this, right? This is really.

• 19:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  This was pretty novel.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  At the time, pretty novel, and you cannot do this if you do not have these distributed communication tools, the social media of the world. Um, in one form or another, it doesn't have to be the Facebook Twitter form. It could have been some other form, but it has to be some form of this.

• 19:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's something that just gets all these people out.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Very quickly with somewhat loose infrastructure. And I think that like, we can go back to what you're saying, or if you want to continue on. But like, one thing I remember asking when I was there is asking people, where do you? I was asking them, where do you think this is going to go? And they said, we're never going to stop and this will be forever. And obviously, that's, that's not what ended up happening. So one of the things that, you know, I think we can talk about, you know, as we sort of can finish up this GESI thread. But it's why do these movements have so much trouble being effective? Like, it seems like they can sort of explode onto the scene, show a force that you haven't seen before these things. But then when it comes to actually pushing a policy agenda, and I know you might dispute this, but I like to hear like your thought.

• 20:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  It seems, at least from the outside, that they, they struggle to, to see their goals through.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  They do, but I wouldn't also say they're not effective. What I would say is that because they go from zero to a hundred miles in like just a day or week or month. Uh, when they hit a tactical moment where they have to change tactics. Or where the government kind of wakes up and says, okay, and starts pushing back and realizes like, especially a government. That's not something archaic like the, um, Egyptian dictator or Husna Mubarak, the autocrat. He didn't understand a thing about what was going on, right? So the next generation wasn't going to be like this. Governments learn and catch up. So when the pushback comes, you're going very fast, but you don't have decision-making tools. You do not have tactical infrastructure.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  You do not have that kind of flexibility. All you have is a shared grievance that brought a lot of people together. And you're trying to hash out your differences. On Twitter and in 2020, I don't think I need to explain to people anymore that Twitter is not a good place for building consensus.

• 21:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's not a great forum for that.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, or Facebook, it's not. But in 2013, we had to explain to people saying, you know, you can build the consensus.

• 21:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's impossible.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not built for it. If anything, it's built for tribalization, which is part of the problem. Then that's a long discussion to have had. So what happens is, in the past, if you had such a big protest, like say the March on Washington, it took 10 years to just get it from idea to reality, and it took six months just to organize the logistics. So by the time you had the march, it was a strong infrastructure that was flexing a muscle. Whereas in 2020, or 2013 even, when you have the march, it's not a strong infrastructure flexing its muscle.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  It is of something that is springing with the aid of social media. So I, the way I sort of have a biology metaphor for this is that, like in biology, some like gazelles will just jump up very high in the presence of predators. And what they're doing is, look how high I can jump. I can really run, right? You're signaling your muscles. And if you're like a predator and you look at it and say, ah, yeah, that one's jumping really high. Because otherwise, like, why on earth are they jumping? It looks like a stupid move, but it's signaling strength. So that's your old era protest. It's jumping up and saying, look at me, look at what I can do. Whereas in 2013, 2020, if you just came together in a week using social media,

• 23:05Speaker 01

  it's kind of like the gazelle has springs under its feet. It's jumping up very high, but it's not necessarily because it built up those muscles. It's because it's got this artificial aid. And the question is, will it then build the muscles before the predator eats it? And the predator being the government trying to push back. And so it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be ineffective. But it's like, if you're gonna go back to your startup, it's gonna be like, can you pay your technical debt in time to keep the, sort of, you scaled up very fast, you know, coating duct tape? Can you fix your infrastructure so when you do get big, you can have a sustainable?

• 23:49Speaker 01

  A product, right? It's the same question. So are they ineffective? No, they change minds. They change culture. They change everything, but they don't necessarily manage to push through with the kind of power you might have expected them to have if you were comparing them.

• 24:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Given the size.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  If you were comparing it to the past. You just have to understand, it looks the same. It looks like a protest like nineteen sixty-five, sixty-three. It's not the same creature.

• 24:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's right. The police eventually cleared the park and a lot of these protesters, if you asked them, did it accomplish what you were looking for? I think many of them would have said no. Okay, I want to learn how this applies to the Black Lives Matter protest today. So we're going to take a break, a quick break, and then we'll be back on the other side to discuss how the lessons from Gezi Park might apply to today's Black Lives Matter protest and maybe help us have a more informed discussion about those protests. Overall, we'll be back after this. Okay, we're back here with Zainab Dufekci. She's a writer and researcher who studied This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about.

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• 25:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. social movements for years. We've been talking a little bit about the network protest, which you've seen in places like the Arab Spring, places like Gezi Park in Istanbul, which we spent a good chunk of the first segment talking about. And obviously, that network protest has become a prominent feature in our politics today. You've seen it right after Trump's inauguration with the Women's March and then, of course, after George Floyd was killed. In the middle of this pandemic, we've seen what I believe is a massive network protest with

• 26:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  the Black Lives Matter movement. And there has been this tension between the infrastructure that you have, because they have had it, because they have been around since Trayvon Martin's killing, you know, years ago. And there has been that infrastructure, but they also have these elements of of network protest where people are coming out just by seeing the social media momentum and agreeing with the term Black Lives Matter. So, Zainab, I'd like to ask you, just to kick off, how have these protests, the Black Lives Matter protests around George Floyd, been different from the network protests we've seen in the past, if at all?

• 27:02Speaker 01

  So, I think one thing that's important to emphasize is that it was never that they were ineffective. It's just, again, it's a different creature. So it's starting, and that, you know, the big protests are the start. So the Ferguson protests in 2014 were arguably the start of the movement. It had been building up with the Trayvon Martin's murder. It had been kind of, people had been talking about it on social media and getting national attention to it. But Ferguson, it kind of broke through as a nationwide movement. And here we are,

• 27:38Speaker 01

  like, six years later, and we had George Floyd's killing, breakthrough in a way that the previous ones had not, but it's building on that. And so we talked about the weaknesses of these movements. Here's one big strength. They can change people's minds, because you have social media, plus you have the protests. And so many Americans have, because of social media and because of the phones everywhere, right, because of phones everywhere, have witnessed what black people had been telling us for years, but we're not getting, not, sometimes

• 28:21Speaker 01

  they weren't getting believed, of course, but even if we believe the particular person's testimony, there was this idea that these things were just... Isolate it, a few bad apples. But I mean, when you see that George Floyd, that.

• 28:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now we know.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you see that horrific video, the sort of. I mean, it's not just that they're torturing a man to death, the casualness with which. They're doing it while being filmed. And while being sort of pleaded with to stop. I mean, it's it's blood chill. It's just shocking. That kind of sort of, it just tells you that everything that we've been seeing, talking about since the Ferguson protest, it just, I think, sort of tipped over. And it's not right to just look at it as one moment, but look at more like a tipping over moment. If you look at the polls in the United States, for the first time,

• 29:18Speaker 01

  you have a plurality of white people who want the considerate monuments removed. They want. They want something. They want, you know, whether you can, you know, there's a variety of sort of slogans, you know, everything from reform to abolish to defund. Like you can have, it doesn't terribly matter exactly which slogan calls it. It just means that there's a large number of even plurality of white people who have come around to the idea that, yeah, there's something wrong here. There's something deeply wrong here. Yeah, and it took like all this time and all the sort of both social media and protest movement and all these things. And this is really important because changing minds is

• 30:02Speaker 01

  how you change politics in the long run. So in places like, you know, when we talk about, say, you know, the Arab Spring countries or talk about the Gesa Park movement. Uh, like, you know, Egypt has never had a solid democracy. So you can change people's minds, but the repression is always going to win out. Whereas in a country like Turk, uh, sorry, where a country like the United States, we're seeing, no doubt, increased repression. I mean, my social media feed was people losing eyes, tear gas canisters hitting people. Um, I think I've counted at least eight people who lost an eye in the last round of George Floyd protests, which is, I mean, this is the United States. This is where we are.

• 30:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  There's been a lot.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot of repression that feels like, you know, all these other places in the world that we just sort of looked at as far away. Uh, but on the other hand. Presumably, we still have elections. So there's a way in which changing minds.

• 31:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, fingers crossed.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, fingers crossed. And yeah, it's not a perfect system. You have the electoral college, you have a lot of, you know, and it's also the government is set up as a minority government in some ways, just the Senate. Historically, it's a big country and it's been set up like that from the beginning. But putting all that aside, there's really no solid way for a completely unpopular government to lose elections by too much and remain in power. They can, as we saw with the popular vote issue and we see with the Senate, they can lose the plurality a little bit, but at some point that tips over. And so they've changed, like these movements, this Black Lives Matter movement

• 31:47Speaker 01

  has really convinced Americans, a large number of them. And it's at a point where I'm just looking at it in the National Review, which is a very leading sort of conservative

• 31:59Speaker 01

  outlet, is publishing articles saying, no, no, reform the police, not defund it. And if that's your, you know, sort of concern.

• 32:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  And the fact that they're at reform.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  If you're right wing, that's an Overton window shifting. That is like what Trump did in 2016 too. And that's what social media does. You can change the acceptable parameters of the conversations. If you got the conservatives arguing, yes, let's reform it, not just defund it. Defund is too radical. Oh yeah, that's a movement that's made a lot of progress and it's gonna, depending on, you know, fingers crossed, we have elections. Who knows how it will go because these things are multifactorial. I just think it's showing you that network movements aren't necessarily effective or ineffective, but they're really different than how they play out.

• 32:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  They have an influence.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  In the long run, they can have an enormous influence.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  If they're not pushed back by massive repression or all those other things we talk about.

• 32:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and so here's a question because they so we see the influence that the protests have had. But then unlike most of these network protests, there is an infrastructure. There is leadership that's been in place for years of the Black Lives Matter organization. So who leads the change? Is it the protests influencing the mainstream? Or is it the organizers at the core?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  So without commenting on what I like that organization, I'm not saying good or bad. I don't think they're very influential in shaping the movement, to be honest. I mean, they

• 33:34Speaker 01

  because if you just sort of speak to regular protesters, they've barely heard that there's an organization. They're not getting their information from the organization. They're not getting their talking points from the organization. I'm not saying the organization is great or it's terrible. Like, I think largely speaking, they if the organization's leaders tomorrow said, we're now all gonna do this or that. They don't have that much more influence than some other person with a lot of social media following. I mean, you see what I'm saying? If it was a good idea and it came from so it's not like we lost John Lewis recently. And it's something I've written about in my book in nineteen in the nineteen sixty three, the March on Washington.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  He was supposed to give a speech and he did give a speech. And some parts of it were deemed as too radical by the movement establishment. Which of course, when I say establishment, I don't mean privileged people, right? We're talking about the black people's movement in the sixties. But people who'd been working with and they thought they were close to getting the civil rights legislation. And some of the things they thought was like too sharp. And then there was a sit down and John Lewis changed a few of his sentences. And he had great respect, like this is like he had also great respect for these people who had worked their whole lives on their great difficulty and threat, you know? So there was this.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Way in which the message was hashed out between the young, you know, more sort of radical, if you want to say, faction and the older, kind of the ones that were, they thought were close to a deal with the administration. There is no such process right now. The Black Lives Matter organization, quote unquote, could decide that from now on, we're gonna say, Black Lives Matter, and we're gonna add a two for clarification, and that would have no more weight than some prominent social media person in the movement saying that. It would catch on or not based on that. So it's still not, it's still a network movement. It still doesn't have a spokesperson, yeah.

• 35:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  The thing is, like, yeah, that people coming out because they see the message, Black Lives Matter, and they agree with it. But, you know, the people that are attacking the movement, because they are out there, have labeled it a Marxist movement. I'm talking largely about Fox News, although, you know, you can see it across the conservative spectrum. And, you know, they are the leadership. You look at the leadership of the organization, and, you know, a few of them have said, or at least one has said, you know, "We are trained Marxists."

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really weird, because the thing is, like, I, what I'm saying is that it almost doesn't matter if they say they're Marxist, or they're Maoist, or they're, I don't know, like, because the thing is, like, I'm just imagining going out to-

• 36:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's what I'm trying to get at, yeah.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  I'm trying to go, imagine, like, interviewing a regular protester here and say, "What do you think about the labor theory of value?" And them having even heard of it. That organ, I'm serious, that organization has a name that they registered legally, and I say this without, like, I'm not commenting on what I think about their views. They are not-

• 37:04Speaker 01

  They couldn't, if they decided they were going to take the movement this way or that way, they literally have no more influence on the movement than their social media follower numbers. And as far as I can tell, that's not even large. There's lots of people with a much larger following. I mean, I, I'm not sure they have more influence on what Black Lives Matter as a network movement will do than a TikTok persona that has, you know, some established space on TikTok and is doing well. So sometimes people, because they don't understand network movements, they could get focused on an organization like that. And when you look at the, what's actually happening on the ground, that organization

• 37:48Speaker 01

  is not, it's not the NAACP of the

• 37:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Marxist.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's not, it's not the NAACP of the civil rights movement. Let me put it this way. It does not have that kind of

• 38:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Yeah.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  leadership role. And I, that's why, are they trained Marxist or not, to me is as a social movement researcher,

• 38:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  It doesn't matter.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  It's irrelevant. Yeah.

• 38:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's that, this is sort of the main point that I was trying to, that I was hoping to get at, and I wanted to build up towards, you know, through this conversation, which is that, well, I mean, I guess one of the main points, right? Which is that you look at Black Lives Matter today, and people will, the detractors will be like, I don't want to get involved with it because it has been painted in this light as being a Marxist movement. But the thing is, in this day and age, when you have a protest movement that's sparked by social media, the core beliefs of what's going on inside the organization matter a lot less than the fact that everybody's showing up in support of one simple message, which is Black Lives Matter. And it's interesting to see some of the critics harp onto this whole Marxist ideology at, inside the organization, where if they really understood what was

• 38:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  going on, they would know that the people inside that organization aren't going to be the ones that are pushing the policy change. But rather, it's going to be, as you mentioned, the people who show up and, you know, show up with the influence. Yeah.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  I'm not even sure what it means for them. I mean, Marxism is not A political theory that has had a lot of things to say about race, if anything. So I'm just kind of like, it's

• 39:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Totally.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  It's almost weird.

• 39:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  It's kind of like

• 39:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's a strange attack.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  It's not only is it a strange attack, it's kind of a strange thing for the organizers to say, we're trained Marxists. Because I'm like thinking, because I mean, Marxism means something. It's a political ideology and it is almost silent on questions of race. It's about capitalism and class structure and labor serial value and all those things.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  It's almost like, let me put it this way, if somebody had come and said, the Trump movement, which I've called ethno-nationalist, right? I think, or heron fault to Marcus, which I think is the correct term for what he's done is ethno-nationalism. And if somebody had said, I'm trump.org and my, um, my, I'm trained as a chef. It would almost be as relevant. It's kind of like, what is the point of this? Like, I'm like, you can have the name and you can have the trademark, you can say this. But it is orthogonal to any actual dynamic on the ground.

• 40:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, okay. And then like, let's just talk before we end here, let's talk about like the possible influence these mass protests can have. So we've definitely seen, you know, a lot of brands rethinking the way that they operate. We've seen, I guess, the Woodrow Wilson School is going to rename itself. But what, what do you think in terms of concrete political action? Policy from a policy level, from a electoral level, do you think we'll see beyond the symbolism?

• 40:58Speaker 01

  So here's the thing, a lot of people sometimes will say these like brands, you know, kind of changing, uh, make, giving these statements and all of that, it's performative. And of course it's performative, but you know what? It's a better world if brands feel like they have to be performative and make statements committing to anti racism. Because it doesn't solve like a million problems at once, just the fact that they feel that pressure. To me is a symptom of something important. So I'm like, yes, sometimes it's kind of like, really, you know, does everybody have to? Yes, it's a good thing because um.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  It signals.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  It signals something and it is much better than them not signaling something which was kind of saying, yeah. The way things are okay is not, that's what you're signaling when you're silent. So I li- I like that even though I don't think um it by itself, I I like that as a symptom, right? So that's one important thing.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Uh, in terms of what change would mean. Uh, as someone who studies authoritarian governments, one of the things that uh we always look at when we say with authoritarian governments. The most important thing is not what they say about what they do. Uh, you know that I did a lot of work on the pandemic recently and the day.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  I got on high alert about it was when China shut down uh Wuhan. Uh, the eleven million people, I thought this is serious because, I mean, they may be authoritarian, but not, they're not stupid. Like if they're not, if they're going to shut down that major a city, that signals there is something major going on here, like they will not like you all, because I don't care, the at the time, the World Health Organization was saying, you know, we can get this under control, China was making all this, yeah, there was a lot of sort of um optimistic messaging, but when Wuhan was shut down, I remember just going whoa, and I started immediately changing all my plans for the rest of the year. Like I literally sat down.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  It was the first time I started publicly, I've been watching it, but I started publicly tweeting. And I just went and I told everybody, this is just like, everybody change your plans, this is it, like where it's it's for real, it's not like it's showtime. Alright, so that was kind of um the same. Thing for my theory of change was very important things like the um you know the sort of racism in this country. Racism in the US. Yeah, is that um real change in this is going to come when we see changes in budgets. When we see changes and um in investment, when we see changes in accountability, when we see changes and

• 43:43Speaker 01

  um you know, how law enforcement is done and what the accountability structures look like. Uh, all those things, right? So that's kind of, but the things that people consider performative are not blocked to it. Like, a lot of people think, you know, the performative stuff displaced real action. They do not. You know, performative stuff creates the condition under which you can push for more. It changes the conversation. It changes when you're in the workplace or the boardroom. You can, it changes what the accountability you can build. So it's not a bad thing by itself, and there's no reason to think that is going to block actual change if people keep pushing for it. So the actual change part in terms of people's day to day lives.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Uh, well, let me also put it this way, like that's sometimes an argument against political correctness is that people think it anyway. And they don't say it. I'm kind of like, yeah, let him think it and not say it. That's better than them saying it. Like, I realize, like, making people not use offensive terms does not necessarily change their mind. But you know what? It's actually good for black people not to have to hear that, even if they know it hasn't changed that other person's heart necessarily. Like, it has, just the fact of not letting that kind of language be okay is important. The environment. And in the long run. The environment matters. The environment matters, and in the long run, children not hearing that kind of language or a generation thinking this is not okay.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  That's how you get changed. So I feel like it's an important step. Now, where will this go? Uh, with history, with so many things, like pushing in so many directions, I think prediction is a fool's game. But what you can do correctly is identify the dynamics. So I, the fact that prediction is a fool's game does not mean that you just treat it like completely stochastic and you have no idea to analyze. What you do is you can analyze like what are the things that are pushing in different directions.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  And have some idea of what is actually going on. So will this leak tomorrow? You know, there's an election coming up. It's a turning point. The pandemic, the election, all of that for the United States. Um, 2020 will have a huge chapter in history books. There's no question about it, but it hasn't played out. So, um.

• 46:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep, we got a couple of months left and they're going to be important months. No question about it.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 46:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, we'll take one more short break and then I don't want to let Zainab off the line without asking her about masks. She was sounding the alarm on why we need to wear masks as early as March. When a lot of authority figures were saying, you know, you shouldn't be wearing them. Zainab was saying, wear them. Uh, now it's pretty much conventional wisdom. So let's talk a little bit more about that after the break.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked 350,000 Virginians healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPact.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 47:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, last question before we go. Are people going to start wearing masks? I know you've been writing a lot about the need to wear masks since March and I think people might be coming around. What, what's happening with it? And why do you think people are still so against it?

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Well, um, it's actually interesting because when I wrote about masks, um, in mid-March, uh, I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times and it was really like the CDC wasn't advising masks. The World Health Organization wasn't advising masks. Not only that, they were saying masks might be harmful. There's all this messaging that was wrong and partially driven by trying to preserve masks for healthcare workers, which again, still was wrong. If that's the idea, you have to tell people, you have to treat the public as a.

• 47:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just be honest.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Just treat the public as a partner. So that was all that. And when I wrote that, I thought. One, it would get a lot more pushback from people, which it did not. It was kind of time for it. Second, I thought that this was likely a more favorable message for the Republican ideology in some ways. Because it pushes, because there's a lot more to do besides masks, right? Like the sort of the testing, the ventilation, um, the sort of closing the indoor gatherings for a while. So there's all these other things that are very important and some of which are in the government's purview. And masks is like an individual responsibility, telling people, you have to step up and do your part.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  And I think both of those true and historically speaking, that is more of a Republican ideology thing in that like pushing the responsibility for public health on people's individual behavior. It's not wrong, but it's very compatible with that side of the political spectrum. And at first, it was, I think, the first sort of senator to like put a video on masks. It was a Republican senator and um, it was kind of like it got take up somewhat quickly. And then, of course, Trump came in, which kind of tells you, which goes back to what we were talking about, the political realignment. Uh, the Republican Party is no longer the traditional Republican Party. It was Trump's party.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  And that is not the traditional conservative ideology that the Republican establishment thought was the ideology of the party. This is the ideology of the party. It's a different ideology and it's based on tribalism and hostility. And he didn't, for whatever psychological reasons, he did not um, like the message. He did not want to wear masks himself. And after that, you saw it become completely polarized.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Which you've seen with school question too, like people had lots of different views on it and then Trump waited in and then you saw it polarized by political party, right? He comes and almost like shakes. I don't know, like there's a sort of a jar full of marbles. It's kind of floating around mix and he comes and shakes it. And then everybody separates to each side, right? That's his effect on the political discussion. So after he shook the mass marble, all of a sudden we started having this sort of pushback, which if you look at the early polls, people were wanting to do something and mass was like, yes, there's something we can do. It's pretty easy.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  It's pretty easy and um it turns out they're probably a lot more effective than we even thought at first uh because they don't just um protect source control. There's increasing evidence that they're somewhat protective for the wearer as well. So they might be, I'm speculating, but there's really suggestive evidence that it might help why we're seeing so much uh more less severe cases is that because the dose matters. So even if they they don't completely eliminate uh the virus from the air, they stop people from uh spreading it and they protect people somewhat from inhaling more. So you're just lowering the dose, which is acting more to sort of limit the severity and the so that might like they might be helping

• 51:09Speaker 01

  all sorts of ways and people were roaring to go and then Trump came in. So I do also want to say one thing. Uh while there's still some resistance, this is a thing in which social media is playing a bad role because every time some person throws a stupid tantrum somewhere, it goes viral, right? And it's not the same thing, but I kind of liken it to social contagion in the mass shooting world in which um amplifying the killer's manifesto in social media actually um.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Helps create copycats rather than make an example of it and dampen it because you just need a few people to sort of say, oh, this is terrible, but you know, look at all the attention. So I think what we're doing with the mask shaming is absolutely backfiring because

• 52:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it's ridiculous. Yeah, it's like the mask shaming. If mask shaming worked, then people would be wearing masks.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Not only that, when we sort of amplify the tantrum and we all point at that person. And I'm not saying the tantrums are terrible. The tantrums are stupid and terrible, but they're super rare.

• 52:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  But there is something about moralizing that really the getting being moralized to on social media, a segment of the population will never accept that and indeed do the opposite.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  And also, it makes people think that tantrums are a lot more common than they are. They happen, but they're they're getting a zillion views, like one random person in one supermarket and millions of people are thinking, looking at it and saying, this is the country, whereas this is not the country. The country is begging almost, if it could, to be led by competent public officials and to be given the proper, consistent message and to to show up and do something, right? People want to. And then we're kind of pushing this, uh, the irresponsible crazies message, almost making them stronger than they are by making it look a lot more common than it actually is because the way social media

• 53:16Speaker 01

  kind of loves those, uh, tantrum videos.

• 53:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and I understand that, like, filming people doing the wrong thing is deterrent to people doing the wrong thing. I get it. But I also am starting, I mean, not even starting.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Depends.

• 53:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  I feel uncomfortable with like our, uh, how it's become part of the status game on social media to find somebody doing the wrong thing and then broadcast it out, you know, to build your own status. Uh, it's troubling. Yeah.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it depends on if the wrong thing being, if the wrong thing being filmed is institutional wrongdoing, I think the, um, like

• 53:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's good.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, police misconduct. If it's like individual misbehavior, I think it's

• 53:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Our own citizens. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's tough stuff. I mean, you definitely, there should be consequences for people who are doing the wrong thing, especially being racist. But I also think that we're gonna pay the cost for this at some point, and we are, you know, potentially turning ourselves against each other. And, you know, there are definitely videos I've seen out there where people are just like, you know, yelling Karen in order to get retweets, which, which don't make me, yeah, they make me uncomfortable. Because, you know, I guess that one situation is what it is. But over the long term, what does that do to society? We have a couple of really important few months coming up in this country and in the world. And I hope this conversation

• 54:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  has helped you all understand it a little bit better. I just want to say thank you to you, Zainab, for being our kickoff guest. We've been talking about this for a long time. And again, I couldn't think of anybody better to come on to talk a little bit about the state of the country and the world and how technology plays into all of that. So, thank you, Zainab. And where can people find you if they're looking to follow your work?

• 54:58Speaker 01

  So, well, I'm on social media. I am on, you know, the usual Twitter. And I, this year, I'm writing more, I'm a writer at The Atlantic and The New York Times this year. I'm writing more at The Atlantic. I have my work more there. I have a newsletter I should be writing more there. And I'm hoping to sort of get to that. But I've been writing a lot anywhere. Usually not hard to find. Talks too much, writes too much.

• 55:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, no, just the right amount. I mean, honestly, like, your work has definitely shifted the conversation around masks and now hopefully on ventilation. And, you know, personally, as a reporter, the work on these network protests and distributed protests have helped me understand what happens when stuff explodes from social media, like Gezi Park, which we were both at, like the Black Lives Matter protests. And I think that your book, Twitter, Twitter and Tear Gas, is a must read for anybody out there who's interested in this stuff as well.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 55:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thanks so much, Zainab. Really appreciate you having, taking the time to join us. And to everybody out there, you know, please give the podcast a subscribe if you feel so inclined. And we will be back weekly after this. And we would love to see you in future episodes. So thanks again. And everybody out there, take care.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

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