The family history of Facebook: how social media will change the world

I’m fascinated by social media. My Gen X friends can’t understand it. Most of them are too busy struggling with families and careers to spend time glued to Facebook and Twitter. For them, social media is a time suck, at best, at worst a gross invasion of privacy. When I tell my friends that I’m teaching on social media, I get one of two reactions. Either they leer conspiratorially, as if to say: ‘Lucrative. Smart!’, or they smile sympathetically, as if say: ‘It must be tough being a philosopher, having to root around for trendy topics to keep people interested’.

Love them as I do, my Gen X friends don’t understand social media at all. They don’t understand social media, so they don’t understand what social media is doing to us in this moment in history. They don’t understand what social media is doing to us, so they don’t understand the historical importance of social media. They don’t understand the historical importance of social media, so they don’t understand why I am obsessed with the medium itself.

It is time that I laid my cards on the table. I am a social philosopher. I am interested in social and cultural change. I believe that social media is the catalyst for cultural change in the world today. As such, it is probably more important than anything else you could care to mention.

Swarm Wall Street: why an anti-political movement is the most important political force on the planet

This was originally posted on the Coalition blog on 10 October, 2011.

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Why are people occupying Wall Street? The US political elite and mainstream media don’t know what to make of it. ‘Anti-capitalist and unAmerican’, says Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, echoing the sentiments of the conservative left and political right. The mainstream commentariat, when it dares to peer closer, paints an unflattering picture of disaffected, disorganized youth, milling about Liberty Square without a shower or a set of policy demands to level at the administration.

Meanwhile the occupation grows day by day.

If camp in Manhattan makes the doyens of the status quo feel nervous, the explosion of Occupy Together events across the US last weekend will have sent anxiety levels through the roof. There were ‘Occupy’ camps in 70 cities across the nation last weekend. More events are planned for the coming days and weeks in the US and other countries.

Political leaders must be wondering what is going on. (‘Who are these kids? Would they vote for me?’) To be fair, it is difficult to say exactly what the the protesters want. They have no single message or identity. They represent, they say, the 99% who are excluded by the standing political and economic system. They say that the top 1% of the US population owns 40% of the wealth. The way the movement has accelerated seems to follow the pattern set in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world earlier this year: a contingent of dissidents occupy public space; footage of their mistreatment by police is spread via Facebook and Twitter; this consolidates the sense of injustice and inequality that inspired their actions in the first place.

Last week, the movement crossed a threshold. A localized set of swarm events evolved into a distributed swarm network.

Foucault and social media: the call of the crowd

This is the final instalment in a three-part series on social media and ‘subjectivation’ (Michel Foucault’s term for the self-construction of identity). Part one discusses how the open commons ideal of social media creates a ‘virtual Panopticon’ effect that impacts on the psychology of users. I argue that the awareness of being watched and implicitly judged by the material we post online (including likes, shares, and comments) leads us to unconsciously aspire to please and/or impress a certain crowd, and to select content accordingly.

Part two deepens the analysis by reflecting on author Peggy Orenstein’s experience of Twitter. Orenstein’s awareness of the crowd spurred her to work even harder to craft a positive identity. This reflects a common response on the part of social media prosumers. Users who are able to channel and utilize the anxiety produced by the virtual Panopticon seize on the positive aspects of their identity and amplify them to the nth degree. This is what I call ‘creative self-affirmation’.

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Forget Farmville and World of Warcraft. Creative self-affirmation is the most popular game online. We play this game whenever we select material to share with friends or craft messages to frame our posts. The name of the game is to present oneself, via one’s tweets, posts, likes, comments, and shares, in the light in which one aspires to be viewed. This essentially amounts to affirming the things that one loves in such a way that the love one brings to the world is reflected in one’s online activity. The rules of the game are simple: [1] share only what you love or what resonates with you; [2] pay attention to the feedback you receive from the crowd and modify your posts accordingly; [3] don’t stray too far from the truth. Be creative but don’t be phoney.

This last point is crucial. It is easy to fabricate an identity online. We do this when we create avatars on SecondLife or player characters in World of Warcraft. We create fictional personas drawn from our dreams and imaginings – personas that may have little or no connection with our real world self. Creative self-affirmation is different. Instead of fabricating an identity, it involves creatively affirming key aspects of your person – those aspects that you consider valuable, virtuous and beautiful – while editing out your weaknesses and deficiencies.

Creative self-affirmation is an artistic activity, it is true. But like all great art, it has as much to do with truth as with fiction. It starts with your sense of who you really are. If your posts, tweets, comments, shares, and likes do not reflect who you really are (or who you believe yourself to be, at least), you are playing the game incorrectly. The point is to affirm your singular potential. You need to seize on your inner awesome and put it before the crowd.

Commoning is making common

How do we make a commons?

One answer is: through law. King Henry III granted commoners rights to use the English forests in the Charter of the Forests. When people have a common right to use some good, and a law that defends this right, we have a commons. As historian Peter Linebaugh argues, there is a cultural process presupposed in this – a process by which a group of people agree that such and such a set of goods and resources should be held in common, and act together in a way that preserves the commons. Affirming the plenitude of their shared stock, and inspired by the goodwill that they receive from others and feel eager to return, they contest the limits of public and private ownership and demand a law that secures their common rights to sustain themselves, to live with dignity, and to assemble with their peers.

Web 2.0 and climate change: an interview with Lucie Crise

On April 1, 2010, Lucie Crise, a journalist for the French magazine Rue 89, wrote to me with the following questions about Coalition of the Willing. Answers were provided in writing. Francophones can read the published interview at Rue89.

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– What do you see as the problem with the current politics of global warming?

Global warming not only presents us with a major ecological crisis but a global political crisis as well. It is clear from the failure of the Copenhagen talks that the international system of states is inadequate to enable a response to the challenge of global warming. Many people blame political leaders for the failure of the talks. But the problem is not the leaders (many of whom seem to be genuinely concerned to respond to global warming). The problem is the system of competing states, the inter-national system, which was born with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and which has come the define “the political” generally. The global capitalist system that we know today has grown up through competition and negotiation between states, facilitated by international law. But because the international system in premised on competition, it makes it difficult for coalitions of states to band together to address common problems. And that’s how things stand today.

Global warming calls for a new political ecology. This problem is like nothing the human race has faced before: it is global in scope and potentially cataclysmic in its effects. And the political system of competing states that we have at the moment prevents us from even responding to the problem. Our only hope is to transform the political. Fortunately, this is not as difficult as it sounds: the infrastructure that will enable this transformation is already in place and the process is underway. “Coalition of the Willing” is not so much a new idea for tackling global warming as it is an attempt to focus attention on how new internet technologies are already transforming the way that people all over the world understand themselves as empowered political agents. I think that in the next few years we will see global climate action networks start to play an increasingly powerful role in world affairs, as people come to appreciate the impotence of the international state system for tackling global warming. The way ahead lies in global grassroots action, coordinated through online platforms for participation. If we continue with politics as usual, there is no future.

Grassroots democracy: a political and philosophical analysis

Canadian political philosopher James Tully distinguishes two forms of democratic activity: ‘restrictive’ and ‘extensive’ democracy (‘Democracy and Globalisation: A Defeasible Sketch’ (2001)). ‘Restrictive democracy’ refers to ‘the mature and predominant practices of government and democracy typical of representative democratic nation-states’ (Tully, 2001, 38). ‘Extensive democracy’ refers to non- or differently representative practices of collective resistance that, according to Tully, ‘cannot be understood adequately in terms of the theories and traditions of representative government’ (Tully, 2001, 39). Modern political philosophy, in its focus on reasons, norms and abstract principles, mostly overlooks extensive democracy, which takes place ‘beneath the threshold of the formal features of law and democracy’ (Tully, 2001, 53). This enables philosophers to preserve a clear distinction between political and social philosophy, yet at the expense of obscuring the social processes at the basis of the political as such.