Let’s start with April, which should afford most Latin American diplomats enough rewards points to buy their own private jets by May. On April 14th and 15th the 34 heads of state of the Americas will be in Cartagena for the Sixth Summit of the Americas. Most of the mainstream media coverage will focus on whether or not Chavez and Dilma give each other a hug, but for those interested substance, the themes of the conference are: security, access to and use of technologies, natural disasters, poverty reduction, supportive cooperation, and regional integration. Most of the panels and workshops related to “access to and use of technologies” will focus on access to public services like education and healthcare. Colombia, the host of this year’s summit, has been making significant strides toward open government. Last year the ICT Ministry published three related reports: an evaluation of eGovernment for the private sector, a 12-step road map toward constructing an open government, and an Online Government assessment for 2010 – 2011.

Just as the Summit of the Americas ends, the finance wonks will head to Puerto Vallarta for the 2012 World Economic Forum on Latin America while the good governance wonks will fly to Brasília for the annual Open Government Partnership (OGP), this year hosted by Brazil. At the OGP, Mexico and Brazil will be joined by ten of their neighbors: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay.

While there are some basic eligibility requirements (that seem to be quite flexible), the fundamental idea of the Open Government Partnership is that, while each member country is at a distinct point along the long journey toward open government ideal, what is most important is that they all continue progressing. (Hence the concern over South Africa’s recently passed secrecy bill.) I have written more about the Open Government Partnership here; hopefully the April meeting will stimulate more healthy competition among new member governments to become more open.

The OGP will convene representatives from government, veteran transparency NGOs, and civic startup entrepreneurs. Shortly thereafter, many from the latter category will head to Washington DC for Sunlight Foundation’s Transparency Camp, an annual “unconference” for open government. Traditionally Transparency Camp has been a mostly domestic affair with some international participation sponsored by my former and current employers, OSF and ON. This year it seems that Transparency Camp is making considerable strides toward becoming a truly international event.

May affords the #opengovjetset a slight respite to, you know, get some work done. But come June and it’s back to the airport. First there is Personal Democracy Forum 2012 in New York City. Then, sometime in June (strangely, the specific dates have still not been announced), Mexico will host the G20 in Los Cabos. As in previous years, the G20 will focus on the global governance of finance (good luck there), but it will also bring together academics, transparency NGOs, the private sector, and youth.

By the third week of June it’s time to fly to Rio de Janeiro for “Rio+20,” the UN Conference on Sustainable Development. The “7 Critical Issues at Rio+20” (and what isn’t critical when you’re pitching to the media?) are: jobs, energy, cities, food, water, oceans, and disasters. Groups like the Ethos Institute, the Global Reporting Initiative, and the Access Initiative have long been campaigning to conceptualize transparency as an overlapping theme across all seven “critical issues.”

Finally, in September it’s back to Brazil for this year’s Global Forum for Media Development, which will convene 500 participants to discuss the changing nature of media development in a post-broadcast world. (In 2009 I wrote a three-part essay on the “new era of media development:” parts one, two and three.)

Update: Georg Neumann pointed out that I missed yet one more international anti-corruption event in Brazil, Transparency International’s 15th annual International Anti-Corruption Conference, which takes place in Brasília from November 7-10.

All of the above conferences treat open government in the most general sense possible, but as the movement scales up, sub-communities are beginning to coalesce around particular topics:

Electoral Transparency: In February Fundar will convene an international seminar on electoral transparency in the lead up to Mexico’s July election. In April the Voter Information Program in the US will hold a hackathon. Surely many more similar events will take place across the globe in a year heavy on elections.

Budget Transparency: A global movement for budget transparency has coalesced around GIFT, the Global Initiative on Fiscal Transparency, Engagement, and Accountability which launched in Washington DC last July and will convene again this spring in Brazil. Meanwhile the Open Knowledge Foundation is building an international network of civil society organizations and civic hackers who want to make budgetary data more accessible via the Open Spending platform. (Follow their new blog, a great resource.) On a related note, this year’s Int’l Conference for Participatory Budgeting will take place in New York city on March 30 & 31.

Legislative Transparency: It’s also a big year for legislative transparency. A regional declaration was already signed at a major event in Chile last month. Another event at the end of April in Washington DC will bring together parliamentary monitoring organizations to build greater momentum for global norms of what kind of information we should expect from our congresses. And Regards Citoyens will host the Open Legislative Data Conference in Paris on July 6th & 7th.

Natural Resource Governance: Last November the Transparency and Accountability Initiative brought together technologists and civil society organizations to establish a community of practice around innovative solutions to natural resource governance. The Transparency Policy Project produced a handy “ecosystem report.” The release of Google Earth Engine at COP 15, a series of “Water Hackathons,” and the focus on technology at this year’s Rio+20 all point to growing momentum around the use of technology to more intelligently govern and benefit from our natural resources.

At the very least, 2012 will be a great year to accumulate frequent flyer miles. But who knows, maybe some hard work and consensus-building will even help further the increasingly international movement for open government.

It all started back in late October within the walled, corporate confines of Facebook. 2011 was already coming to a close. I was in the midst of switching jobs, switching homes, and was ready to set some goals for myself. Either you make a map for your life or your life makes a map for you.

I wanted to run a marathon. A full fuckin’ marathon. 26.2 miles. I’d already told myself the same damn thing at least five times in my life, but I always wimped out and went for the half instead. This time no more wimping out. I just needed to find the right marathon and the right people to train with me.

One Facebook post and 15 comments later, and it was set in stone: On January 22 I would run the Carlsbad Marathon with a group of people who knew me better than just about anyone else in this world; only we had barely ever met. (Elenamary, she’s written all about it.)

Not that I was 100% confident that we would all come together. We had tried a few times before (eg. 2005, 2006), but for some reason or another, it always fell through.

This time it happened.

5 a.m. We’re all silently shuffling around in the morning, pinning our running bibs to our shirts, rubbing in the sunscreen, putting down the first cup or two of coffee. And I’m contemplating whether or not I’m gonna put Vaseline in my butt crack.

Tumbleweed and I left the house first; each of us sufficiently delusional to sign up for the full marathon. (“26.2 miles,” read one sign we passed, “because 26.3 miles is insane.” Damn straight.) We got to the course at 5:55 a.m., just enough time to pee out the morning cup of coffee and walk to the finish line. We agreed to keep each other company for the first six or seven miles and then we’d each run at our own pace. (“Don’t shoot out too early” was the unintentional double-entendre of the previous night.) We crossed the starting line surrounded by a sea of running shoes lightly shuffling along the dewy, predawn pavement. I had forgotten just how serene and idyllic North San Diego County is, especially on Sunday mornings.

The soft oranges and grays of the sunrise made their first, unhurried flirtations as I threw my fleece on the sidewalk like so many others. “Don’t worry, it’ll be donated,” Tumbleweed assured me. We mostly made smalltalk during the first five miles, steadily picking up the pace from our first 11-minute mile, to 10-minute miles, to 9-and-a-half. We high-fived each other goodbye halfway up the major climb, somewhere around mile 8 or 9. I had told everyone who asked that I merely wanted to finish the race, that I wasn’t running for any particular time. But secretly I wanted to cross the finish line under four hours.

Somewhere around mile 14 we merged with the half marathon runners right at the coastline. I was listening to Revaz’s 2011 Sedatives podcast; “John Taylor’s Month Away” by King Creosote & Jon Hopkins came on just as I arrived to the coastline. Something magical happened, some kind of endorphin-stimulated rhapsody. I felt so at peace, so strong, like I could have run 300 miles without ever tiring. I had forgotten how much I missed the coastline, the waves crashing against the gray, sandy shoreline after their weeks’ of journey across the Pacific.

At mile 19 I was still feeling good, too good. Back in Mexico City, after 18 miles of running my body and spirit were ravaged, but at oxygenated sea level I was full of life. Sadly, it was lodged into my misconceiving brain that a marathon was 23 miles, that I had just four miles to go. I switched the iPod to De La Soul and started to pick up the pace. At mile 20 I was probably running a 7-minute mile pace, flying by just about everyone. I figured, hell, I just needed to hold on for three more miles and it was all over. I thought I would make a 3:30 total time. It was a couple hundred yards before mile 23 when I realized my great blunder. I still had another three miles to go. And my legs were about to give out on me. All of a sudden my calves felt like concrete. I slowed from a 7-minute pace to a 12-minute pace, humbled by every runner that I had sprinted by who now caught up and passed me by as I was hunched over in pain and embarrassment.

By mile 24 I knew I had to pick up the pace if I wanted to cross the finish line under 4 hours. I knew my body would cooperate if my brain could trick it.

Mario was there to cheer me on for the last .2 miles which gave me just enough of a boost to cross the finish line with style. I crossed officially at 3:57, just under four hours, and then my body shut down as I was told that it would.

By 3 p.m. we were all back at the house, mostly awake, mostly stumbling around in a stupor. Thanks to HP’s impeccable taste in water, we were drinking Bud Light, grilling up hamburgers, talking shit … essentially, being Americans. Too tired to say anything of significance, I sat back and observed.

I realized that we all grew up as black sheep. For varying reasons, none of us quite fit into our surroundings. We all had something to say, but somehow didn’t know how to say it until we found one another. It’s not like any of us were loners. We all had friends, but for whatever reason those friends weren’t able to grasp something about us as well as a group of complete strangers that came together in some small slice of that thing formerly known as “the blogosphere.”

As I and countless others have already written countless times, the golden age of blogging is over. It’s been replaced by content farms that know how to neatly pack byte-size info-snacks under sexy headlines and algorithm-driven social networks that get to know us better than we get to know ourselves. But few understand just how golden, just how formative, those early years of blogging were.

These people surrounding me, they were my mentors. They helped me grow into who I am today.

I realized something else that evening as we hugged goodbye. It’s ok that we’re not bloggers anymore; now we’re friends … even if it does take a marathon to get us together.

The phrase is used with little to no merit at least 18 times throughout the book:

• “It turns out that sitting for long periods of time isn’t particularly good for you.”
• “It turns out that foods that are bad for us have analogues in the world of information.”
• “While our collective sweet tooth used to serve us well, in the land of abundance it’s killing us. As it turns out, the same thing has happened with information.”
• “It turns out that if I look back at the times in my life when I have had a recognizably bad information diet, they’re the times when I’ve been knee-deep in politics.”
• “It turns out our brains are remarkable energy consumers.”
• “Through the tests of trial and error, our media companies have figured out what we want, and are giving it to us. It turns out, the more they give it to us, the more we want.”
• “Even if you exercise regularly, it turns out that sitting for long periods of time can be deadly.”
• “But now we’re living in a world of abundance, and as it turns out, information obesity has some pretty serious consequences for our productivity, our health, and our society.”
• “It turns out that dopamine not only puts us into a seeking frenzy, but it also distorts our sense of time.”
• “It turns out that as energy makes its way up the food chain, its transfer gets less efficient.”
• “It turns out that constant focus isn’t all that great, and that allowing a bit of distractibility into our lifestyles can have some benefit.”
• “It turns out laughter increases our heart rate in a good way, increases our cardiovascular health, and burns calories.”
• “It turns out that a sense of humor might just be a vital part of our brain’s ability to rewire itself.”
• “Physical obesity, it turns out, may be a social contagion.”
• “… it turns out that our poorest counties are also our most obese.”
• “It turns out that electing people—the skills of people like David Axelrod and Karl Rove—are advanced, learned skills that require years of experience to get right.”
• “It turns out the more local your sports diet, the more rewarding it can be too.”

Now try reading those same sentences without the ‘it turns out.’

It turns out that ‘it turns out’ isn’t necessary at all.

He begins and ends the essay with references to Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 The End of History, which argues that the “third wave of democracy” (from the late 1960′s on) represents the final wave of democratization.

Then Anderson compares the wave of 2011 global protests to 1848:

It was, in other words, unlike anything in any of our lifetimes, probably unlike any year since 1848, when one street protest in Paris blossomed into a three-day revolution that turned a monarchy into a republican democracy and then — within weeks, thanks in part to new technologies (telegraphy, railroads, rotary printing presses) — inspired an unstoppable cascade of protest and insurrection in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Venice and dozens of other places across Europe

He is seemingly suggesting that the 2011 protests represent more than the “countercultural pageant” of 1968; that they are actually the beginning of the fourth wave of democratization. The continuation, as it were, of history.

All year the media (new and old) have obsessed over protest, prancing from one social media-fueled wave of anger to the next. As soon as a new angry mob emerges, all former protests are left in the abyss of the forgotten. In his essay for Time magazine, Anderson had the opportunity to look back over the dozens of major protest movements around the globe this year and ask the one crucial question that no one else seems interested in: Where are they now?

But he doesn’t and few have. So I offer this essay, which first appeared in Digital AlterNatives, as an attempt to both complicate and clarify how we understand the roles of technology, social networks, and social activism in democratization.

I do believe that, after twenty years of “democratic slumber,” we are indeed entering a “4th wave of democratization.” But the 2011 protests are merely a symptom of the disease; not a diagnosis and certainly not the cure. To improve democracy we need the smartest young activists to be working in government, not out on the streets protesting against it. We need more of the types of projects described by Micah Sifry in WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. We need more citizens educating Congress, not just criticizing it.

2011 was the year of protest. But I will be working all year to make 2012 the year of open government.

Armed with cell phones and Facebook accounts, the digital natives of today are fomenting revolution and redefining citizenship. Or at least so go the breathless declarations found on Twitter, magazine covers, and the nightly news. But such proclamations lack a contextual analysis that considers the social, environmental, economic, political, and technological factors that have recently incited youth and opposition groups to mobilize around the world. Opinion makers depend on buzz words like “digital natives” without explaining which characteristics distinguish today’s youth from their parents’ generation. Academics and public intellectuals, meanwhile, have focused on the influence of social media in so-called “Facebook revolutions,” but have largely ignored the role of technology in post-revolutionary politics.

This essay questions several popular notions around the use of technology by young activists. First it challenges the terminology of “digital natives,” arguing that such neologisms contribute to a psychological barrier which impedes wider adoption of digital literacy. In order to contrast and better understand the significance of today’s protest movements, it then documents the multiple factors behind the youth-led protests of 1968. A brief account of my own personal appropriation of new technologies throughout my youth aspires to offer older readers a clearer understanding of the impact of growing up connected by computers. The essay concludes by zeroing in on the social media-fueled protest movements of 2011, which have prioritized the removal of the current political class without offering a concrete vision of what ought to come next. Ultimately I argue that, while it is easier to build large coalitions around movements that seek to overthrow the establishment, such “anti-power” activism must be accompanied by a clear vision of how to construct a networked democracy that features transparency, accountability, and civic participation.

Will future historians treat 2011 as the Internet generation’s 1968?

Deconstructing Digital Nativism

New technologies give new meanings to established words; and those words, in turn, influence how we understand the social significance of each new technology. “Current,” for example, which previously described the flow of water, was later applied to the discovery of electricity. The telegraph gave new meanings to familiar terms like “send” and “message.” An 1873 issue of Harper’s Magazine recounts the frustrations of an angry customer who paid good money to “send” a telegram only to see the operator later hang his handwritten note on a hook. An entire generation had to learn to detach the concept of message from the physical object of paper.

Today it has become standard to speak about the comprehension and appropriation of Internet tools and technologies in terms of digital natives and digital immigrants. We have recycled a vocabulary rooted in the exclusionary nature of nationalism to describe a perceived generational divide in how individuals respond to and appropriate new technologies. I suggest that rather than viewing technological appropriation in terms of nativism and immigration, we think in terms of literacy. From the Latin littera, or “letter of the alphabet,” literacy speaks of our ability to understand and communicate effectively, to transmit knowledge and culture. The all-encompassing term “digital native” is often a lazy shorthand that represents distinct and diverse types of digital literacies.

Our ability to communicate – Unlike our parents, who recall sitting down at a desk to deliberately draft a letter with paper, pen, envelope and stamp, today’s youth have radically expanded options in how we communicate our observations, reflections and emotions. Oral and written communication have merged into a constant flow of commentary that tends to incentivize wit, irony and novelty. Of greatest significance, online communication is often many-to-many rather than one-to-one, an adjustment that has proven difficult for older generations.

Our ability to search for information – A woman in her mid-fifties once told me of a recurring childhood fantasy while she grew up in rural Venezuela. She frequently walked through the countryside, imagining supernatural glasses that provided her with extra information about anything she set her eyes on. Today, a self-described iPhone addict, she says the Internet has become those magical glasses. Modern youth take for granted our ability to search for any type of information — song lyrics, actors, politicians, Facebook profiles — at any time. But we should be careful to not conflate potential with reality; a 2010 study by Eszter Hargitttai and her colleagues at Northwestern University in Chicago found important limitations in how youth seek and evaluate online information.

Our ability to network – “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” goes the only business school cliché. Today’s youth are intuitively, if not explicitly, aware of the importance of social capital to open up economic and social opportunities. Whereas our parents may have joined a social club, cooking class, or sports league to increase their social capital, today we are often more likely to search out similar interactions through the use of online spaces geared toward particular lifestyles, sub-cultures and interests. As social interactions with strangers begin online rather than offline, they become more numerous, more fleeting, and yet, paradoxically, more persistent as each person from our past remains just a search away.

Our ability to absorb knowledge – Information anxiety has become part of the human experience. As the amount of information made accessible grows exponentially, the percentage of available information we are able to process necessarily declines. I believe that all generations are struggling as we move from a world of relative “information scarcity” to “information abundance.” But youth are especially aware of the need to develop strategies and coping mechanisms to survive in a world with more information than any one person could come close to comprehending.

Our ability to create social change – For the purposes of this book, I am particularly interested in a final digital literacy: our ability to shape meaning out of information, and social change out of meaning. To better understand the evolution of how we change the world around us, we must look more closely at the social movements of our parents, and of today.

The Youth of 1968

On New Year’s Eve, 1967 French President Charles De Gaulle announced to the nation, “‘I greet the year 1968 with serenity. It is impossible to see how France today could be paralyzed by crisis as she has been in the past.” Little did he know what was yet to come. “There has never been a year like 1968, and it is unlikely there will ever be again,” writes Mark Kurlansky in his comprehensive book, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World.

Less than 25 years earlier, World War II concluded with over 50 million dead, including an unprecedented number of civilians. Those who survived returned to their countries, cities and towns to experience the greatest period of economic growth since the peak of the Industrial Revolution. After World War II, much of the world experienced a surge in births and housing. In the West, liberal theories of childrearing gained currency. Public and higher education expanded like never before, as did corporations, chain stores, and mass marketing. Most importantly, this was the first generation to grow up with television, which had two profound, paradoxical effects: alienation and solidarity.

Alienation, Solidarity and Protest

In 1967 Guy Debord published his influential book Society of the Spectacle, which became one of many catalysts for the student-led protests in Paris the following year. For Debord, increasing corporatization combined with the alluring power of mass media and slick marketing engendered a consumer culture in which our social interactions are mediated by the products we buy. “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” he wrote. Mexican intellectual Octavio Paz argued that reality was beginning to imitate television more than television imitated reality. Alienation, the estrangement from a sense of community and meaning, was the key word that kept appearing in essays and on the walls. A 1968 poster hanging outside of Paris’ Sorbonne University warned:

The revolution which is beginning will call into question not only capitalist society but industrial society. The consumer society is bound for a violent death. Social alienation must vanish from history. We are inventing a new and original world. Imagination is seizing power.

While broadcast television was largely responsible for the “mere representation” of “all that was once directly lived,” it was also the medium through which youth would learn to attract attention to their causes and inform themselves about the latest protests by like-minded peers around the world. Television, it can be argued, created a generation that was more self-aware and more globally united than ever before.

TV screens flashed images of major protests in communist, capitalist, and non-aligned countries throughout 1968. In the United States, the Civil Rights, Women’s Liberation, Black Power, and anti-war movements were all at their peak. In Spain, students at the University of Madrid protested against the Franco regime and the presence of police on their campus. In Poland, 300 student protesters at the University of Warsaw were beaten by state-sponsored thugs and over a thousand were later jailed. Massive protests erupted in then-Yugoslavia on July 2, 1968 where Belgrade University students participated in a week-long hunger strike and handed out copies of the banned magazine, Student. In Brazil, Military Police killed a protesting teenager, which led to the country’s first major protests against the military dictatorship. The University of Rome was shut down for two weeks following student protests against police violence. Over 10,000 students protested the Vietnam War in West Berlin. The Prague Spring brought Martin Luther King-inspired non-violence to Czechoslovakia, as tens of thousands protested against the impending invasion of Soviet forces. A 21-year-old Czech student, Jan Palach, set himself on fire in Prague’s Wenceslas Square to protest against the suppression of free speech. In South Africa, protests erupted at Cape Town University when administrators withdrew an employment offer to a black professor. Japanese students protested against the presence of US troops in their country. In New York, Columbia University students took three school officials hostage in protest of allegedly racist school policies, while in Chicago thousands of anti-war protesters disrupted the Democratic National Convention. In Mexico City, an escalating series of conflicts between the police and student demonstrators eventually led to a violent crackdown in Tlatelolco Plaza, which killed up to one hundred protesters and observers just weeks before the 1968 Summer Olympics. The following month Pakistani students launched a nation-wide campaign against an ordinance which empowered the military dictatorship to withdraw the degree of any student.

But the protest movement that is most emblematic of 1968 began in January at Paris’ Nanterre University, a recent suburban extension of the Sorbonne that was based on the American model of an enclosed campus, rather than the traditional French universities, which were smaller and integrated into the city layout. In many ways, the corporate efficiency of the university campus and the suburban isolation of the students was representative of the social alienation documented by Debord the previous year. On January 26 administration officials called in the French riot police to quell a small demonstration against the lack of student facilities. Soon the student protest joined the anti-war movement, and by May 6 the French government unsuccessfully attempted to ban all public demonstrations. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a German exchange student who was one of the original leaders of the small protest at Nanterre, was christened ‘Danny the Red’ by the media (as much for the color of his hair as his politics), and became the unofficial, charismatic leader of the movement. “The catalyst for his fame,” writes journalist Sean O’Hagen, “was television.”

In 1968 two technological innovations transformed the nightly news reports: the use of videotape, which was cheap and reusable, instead of film, and the same-day broadcast, which meant that often unedited images of rebellion were disseminated across continents almost as they happened. Student protesters in Berkeley and Columbia cheered their TV sets as footage from the Paris barricades made the American news in May, while French students took heart from images of the huge anti-war demonstrations now occurring across Europe and America.

‘We met through television,’ Cohn-Bendit later said of his counterparts in other countries. ‘We were the first television generation.’ Indeed, the radicals had a much better grasp of the galvanizing power of television than the politicians they were trying to overthrow. ‘A modern revolutionary group headed for the television, not for the factory,’ quipped the late Abbie Hoffman, one of the great political pranksters of 1968, who helped provoke a bloody battle between anti-war protesters and the Chicago police force at the Chicago Democratic convention. As the police attacked them, the protesters chanted: ‘The whole world is watching!’ And, for the first time, it was.

While the causes and context behind each protest were unique, a shared spirit of revolution was communicated across television. “Be realistic, demand the impossible,” ran one slogan in Paris that was later echoed by youth in other countries. Psychologists like Eric Erikson argued that youth were merely searching for a unique identity, which caused them to rebel against the values and mores of their parents. But the youth themselves decried social alienation, the sense that they were purposefully isolated from the forces that would determine their individual and collective futures.

1968 in Hindsight

In hindsight, and in balance, the protest movements of 1968 were largely failures. Significant civil rights advances were made in the United States, but the Franco regime continued in Spain, as did Brazil’s military dictatorship. The demands of Mexican students were never met and justice was never brought to those responsible for the massacre. The Mexican student movement would later dissolve in fear of the increasingly oppressive government. By August, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and remained until 1989. The temporary, weak alliance between the French labor and youth movements fell apart before the onset of winter. The Vietnam war continued, Apartheid in South Africa continued, Charles De Gaulle remained in power, and neither the capitalist, industrialist, nor consumer societies were overthrown. If anything, they expanded enormously over the following decades as most of the 1968 protesters eventually settled down with office jobs, families of four, and homes in the suburbs. Richard Nixon won the 1968 US presidential election, a wave of violent military dictatorships took over Latin America, and by 1982 conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher claimed, “We are reaping what was sown in the sixties… fashionable theories and permissive clap-trap set the scene for a society in which the old virtues of discipline and restraint were denigrated.”

On the other hand, the Women’s Liberation movement turned out to be one of the most influential and enduring. The global environmental movement was also born out of the late sixties. Cohn-Bendit is now a Green Party leader in the European parliament, and is referred to by the media as “Danny the Green” rather than “Danny the Red.” Tom Hayden, who was charged with conspiracy to cause violence in Chicago for his role in the protest against the National Democratic Convention, later became a California state congressman for 18 years, advocating for progressive environmental, labor, and foreign policies.

1968 was a collective catharsis, not a social revolution. But in the decades that followed, civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, and sovereign rights all expanded thanks to the enormous growth of higher education, and the sustained advocacy of civil society.

Growing Up With a Gameboy

I was born in 1980, two years before Margaret Thatcher claimed that we were reaping what was sown in the Sixties. I was nine years old when crowds of East and West Germans chipped away at the Berlin wall, greeting each other with celebratory hugs. My parents let me stay up late into the night with a bowl of ice cream to witness the historic moment. The same year my father brought home our first computer, a Macintosh SE. Apple’s first attempt at a fully enclosed, appliance-like desktop computer, the SE had a 20 megabyte hard drive, one megabyte of RAM, and an 8 megahertz processor. In comparison, the cell phone in my pocket has a 32,000 megabyte hard drive, 512 megabytes of RAM, and a 1,000 megahertz processor.

As a child I would turn on the magical, new machine, head to the kitchen to make toast, and then return before the operating system was fully booted. Mostly I used it to play games, but the computer came bundled with a program called HyperCard, which was based on Ted Nelson’s theories of hypertext and hypermedia — forms of inter-linked, multimedia content that could not be represented on paper; to print it out was to lose its meaning. The most famous and lasting version of hypertext is the HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, which was developed in 1989, the same year that witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the violent suppression of pro-democracy activists in China. Even as a nine-year-old boy, my early experience with the HyperCard program opened my eyes to the fact that the future of communication would be interactive, linked, and always evolving.

In 1989 the desktop computer was still not a reference source. Having already spent so much money on the Macintosh SE, my parents could not afford the illustrious Encyclopædia Britannica, despite the traveling salesmen’s best efforts. Instead we opted for the more affordable 1988 edition of World Book Encyclopedia. In total, I read around 100 of its nearly 14,000 pages. By the early 1990s most new computers included CD-ROM drives. Unlike traditional floppy disks that stored less than a megabyte of information, compact discs stored nearly 700 megabytes. In 1993 Microsoft took advantage of this expansion of portable memory and released its Encarta digital encyclopedia with nearly 50,000 unique entries, hundreds of images, a world atlas, and a comprehensive dictionary. Never before had so much knowledge taken up so little physical space. Throughout high school Microsoft Encarta became the go-to reference source for nearly every homework assignment. I quickly became accustomed to a startling new reality; the answer to my every question was just a quick search away. (In 2009 Microsoft discontinued Encarta; Wikipedia now receives 98% of all visits made to online encyclopedias.)

In the fall of 1996 I signed up for my first Hotmail email account. That same year I signed up for an ICQ instant messaging account, and spent many nights chatting with the same friends I saw every day at school, but also occasionally with complete strangers. Throughout college (1998 – 2002) the Internet was still something of a Wild West. On the one hand, it became more commercial with the launch of eBay, PayPal, Amazon, and thousands of other ventures that eventually burned out during the dot-com bust. On the other hand, many of the laid-off employees began contributing to open source programming languages, software programs, and platforms like PHP, the Firefox browser, and Wikipedia. Programmers began to focus on the development of websites that provide social value rather than sell products.

In 2002 I created my first social networking profile on Friendster. The next year I followed most of my friends to MySpace. By 2005 a regular day would include five or six updates to several different blogs, even more updates to profiles on MySpace and Facebook, a number of Skype voice calls with contacts around the world, and dozens of emails and IM conversations. As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt frequently points out, every two years the human species now creates as much information as we did from the dawn of humankind up until 2003. Likewise, a study by researchers at the University of California at San Diego found that in 2008 the average American consumed 34 gigabytes of information per day, an increase of about 350 percent since 1980.

I offer this personal account to demonstrate how I — and millions like me — grew up with new technologies that inevitably affected how I saw the world, and how I would try to change it.

The Arab Spring and Beyond

In December 2009 I was in Beirut with some of the most active and activist bloggers from across the Middle East and North Africa. The meeting, organized by Tunisian dissident Sami Ben Gharbia — who would later play an instrumental role in the spring 2011 Tunisian uprising — brought influential Arabic-speaking bloggers and activists together to build a regional knowledge and support network. At some point during the discussions I grew restless. For years I had observed hundreds of well-intentioned online projects that strove to consolidate democracy, but I could point to few results. Just two months earlier I was in Kiev, Ukraine where hundreds of thousands of tech savvy youth brought about the so-called Orange Revolution of 2005 only to see it slowly dissipate into the same corruption and political clientelism as before. Back at the meeting in Beirut, I turned to some of my new Egyptian friends and asked them just what they were hoping to accomplish. “Get Mubarak out of power,” they replied in unison. That was their one goal, and they claimed that until it became a reality, it made no sense to focus on any others.

The Year in Protests, So Far

The worldwide protests of 2011 go far beyond what the media have dubbed the ‘Arab Spring.’ In November 2010 students rallied in central London against the government’s increase of school fees. Though the hike in tuition narrowly passed, the protests were seen as largely successful in holding politicians to a far greater level of scrutiny and accountability than they were accustomed to. As the media emphasized, the protests were organized almost completely using online tools.

Just as the UK student protests began to wind down, a new movement was building in Tunisia, where well-organized opposition groups took advantage of escalating protests against youth unemployment and high food prices to ouster long time authoritarian leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Once again, commentators cited social media as instrumental tools in organizing the protests. Andrew Sullivan and others quickly dubbed it a “Wikileaks Revolution,” ignoring years of on-the-ground constituency-building by groups like Nawaat. The successful movement to ouster Ben Ali inspired similar opposition groups throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Egyptian protesters were able to force out President Hosni Mubarak in just three weeks — after nearly 30 years of dictatorial rule. Major protest movements also took place — and continue to take place — in Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Oman.

Meanwhile, in Europe, austerity measures provoked the so-called “Desperate Youth” of Portugal and the “May of Facebook” movement in Greece. In nearby Spain tens of thousands of mostly youth protesters camped out in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Plaza, demanding their very own “Spanish Revolution.” The movement was rooted in the “Real Democracy Now” online platform, which called for the evolution of political representation to catch up with the pace of technological innovation. The acampadas, or “camps,” of protesters throughout Spain then inspired similar youth protests in Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, and El Salvador — all of which were organized on Twitter and Facebook.

The protest fever also spread to Sub-Saharan Africa. Gabonese activists both inside the country and abroad used social media to draw attention to the human rights abuses of President Ali Bongo Ondimba, son of long-time strongman Omar Bongo. In Senegal the Twitter hashtag #ticketwade was used to organize successful protests against a proposed constitutional amendment that would change electoral rules. In Uganda, the government went so far as to request that internet service providers block access to Facebook and Twitter as anti-government protests built-up amid rising food and gas prices.

In Latin America social media have been instrumental in organizing protests against: violence in Mexico, a university tuition hike in Puerto Rico, and a proposed hydro-electric dam in Chile. Even in the United States, long free of traditional protest movements, social media have helped bring together students and unions in opposition to proposed legislation that takes rights away from workers. Tens of thousands of Malaysians organized a “Bersih 2.0” rally to push through electoral reforms. As I write, a streaming video of student protests against the privatization of education in Chile hangs in the background on my desktop. Tech savvy activists taped an iPhone to a balloon and live-streamed the day’s protests to thousands of viewers across the world.

Out of Work, Losing Hope

Just halfway into 2011, the protests of 1968 (“the year that rocked the world”) look minor in comparison. It would be wrong, however, to view today’s protest movements only through the prism of technology. We must also consider social, environmental, political, and economic factors.

A few months before British students began organizing their protest movement on social networks, the United Nations’ International Labor Organization released an extensive report on youth unemployment which warned of a “lost generation” of young people that have given up their search for meaningful work. According to the report, “of some 620 million economically active youth aged 15 to 24 years, 81 million were unemployed at the end of 2009 — the highest number ever.” Not only were they under-employed, but many were “over-educated,” having taken out massive school loans while trusting the advice of their parents and politicians that a university degree was the fast track certificate to financial stability.

In 1968, Western youth reacted to social alienation, a by-product of years of economic and middle class growth. Rapid industrialization created factory and office jobs with decent salaries but often numbing work routines. The suburbanization of residential areas stifled self-expression and induced uniformity. Unlike their grandparents who grew up during the depression, or their parents who grew up during times of war, the youth of 1968 had all of their basic needs (food, shelter, safety) met. But their higher needs (a sense of belonging, esteem, self-actualization) were still wanting. Similarly, the youth of today are also products of extreme, global economic growth. Even taking the 2008 financial crisis into account, the entire global economy still doubled in size from 2000 – 2010. In 2009 The Economist magazine declared that “for the first time in history more than half the world is middle-class.” Furthermore, according to World Bank data, all levels of school enrollment have skyrocketed over the past ten years.

In other words, depending on your definitions and methodologies, a majority of youth across the world are now growing up in middle class homes and attending secondary education. They enter adulthood with greater schooling, skills, and expectations than their parents, but rarely with secure employment. The invention of the automobile created millions of jobs in the 20th century, whereas one of today’s most talked-about companies, Facebook, has just over 1,000 employees. Today’s youth grew up ready to take on the world, but too many are left working in coffee shops and supermarkets. Around the world this phenomenon was quickly adapted by local politicians and pundits. Writing for Bloomberg Businessweek, Peter Coy offers an assortment of buzzwords:

In Tunisia, the young people who helped bring down a dictator are called hittistes—French-Arabic slang for those who lean against the wall. Their counterparts in Egypt, who on Feb. 1 forced President Hosni Mubarak to say he won’t seek reelection, are the shabab atileen, unemployed youths. The hittistes and shabab have brothers and sisters across the globe. In Britain, they are NEETs—”not in education, employment, or training.” In Japan, they are freeters: an amalgam of the English word freelance and the German word Arbeiter, or worker. Spaniards call them mileuristas, meaning they earn no more than 1,000 euros a month. In the U.S., they’re “boomerang” kids who move back home after college because they can’t find work. Even fast-growing China, where labor shortages are more common than surpluses, has its “ant tribe”—recent college graduates who crowd together in cheap flats on the fringes of big cities because they can’t find well-paying work.

In Mexico they are called “ninis” — shorthand for “neither studies nor works” — and they have been blamed by pundits for the increase in the country’s violence. One governor even went so far as to propose mandatory military service for all Mexican youth who are not enrolled in school or employed.

They Let Us Down

It is all too easy to assume that unemployed youth are taking to the streets because they have nothing else to do, but such a conclusion ignores some crucial factors. Young people in the United States who “grew up green” were dismayed by Obama’s bailout of the automobile industry, a 20th century technology that will continue to cause environmental harm, but offers few new jobs for young people. Why not invest the $25 billion in research and development to create employment in the renewable energy sector?

Then came the bailout of the financial sector in the United States and Europe. Banks propped up with over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money in 2008 and 2009 went on to reward their irresponsible executives with obscenely large bonuses. The US and EU bailed out private banks with taxpayer money, and then went on to make major cuts in the public sector, including education and social security.

The price of commodities has soared. World food prices have more than doubled since 1990 and Oxfam predicts that the trend will only accelerate over the next 20 years. Higher gas prices raise the cost of daily commutes, winter heating, and summer vacation. But the oil companies are not only taking in record profits; they also receive $4 billion a year in taxpayer subsidies in the United States.

Privatization trends are also igniting protests. The ongoing privatization of education, for example, was behind the major protests in the UK and Chile, as were successive increases in tuition for higher education. Once seen as a right for all, higher education is increasingly a privilege for the wealthy.

Finally, over the past 20 years, the implementation of electoral democracy has expanded significantly from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia to Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. But the symbolic right to vote (think of all those Newsweek covers with a raised purple finger) has expanded at a faster pace than the institutions and characteristics on which real representative democracy depends, such as freedom of press, civic participation, and accountability.

In short, the youth of today have plenty to be fed up about, but, like the youth of 1968, they have mostly been excluded from the powers and policies that will decide their future. Instead, they have taken their activism to the Internet and, increasingly, to the streets.

Anti-Power and Counter-Power

Long before the protests of 2011 began to take shape, an entire pseudo-academic industry emerged in the publishing houses and conference auditoriums of major cities to repeatedly dissect a seemingly simple question: do social media cause social revolutions? On one end of the spectrum, Evgeny Morozov, the very person who popularized the term “Twitter Revolution” in the spring of 2009, went on to publish The Net Delusion, a stinging critique of the use of online tools to foment protest and revolution. On the other end of the spectrum was Andrew Sullivan who seemed to proclaim “the revolution will be Twittered” every time more than 50 people gathered in a public place. Then New Yorker contributor Malcolm Gladwell jumped in the fray to have a go at explaining “why the revolution will not be tweeted.” A week later Turkish professor Zeynep Tufekci penned an extensive takedown of Gladwell’s poorly received article, which one commentator referred to as his “tripping point.” Somewhere in the middle of all this back and forth were Clay Shirky and Ethan Zuckerman who argue that social media are powerful new instruments in the toolbox of activists, but that the success of any movement depends on how those tools — and others — are used by the activists themselves.

Strangely, there was one question that all the pundits seemed equally willing to ignore: what happens after all the protests and revolutions? University of Texas professor Dave Parry eventually declared on his blog that social media have indeed proven effective at stirring up revolution, but then he asked, “are they bad for democracy?” What if social media tools incentivize incessant protest rather than the new forms of civic participation and transparency necessary for a functioning 21st century democracy?

The Egyptian activists I met in Beirut were successful at forcing Mubarak out of power, but what will come next? There are still no signs of a functioning government, or plans for new democratic institutions, and yet many of the same protesters continue to raise their fists in Tahrir Square, though their motivations are murky. A 62-year-old homemaker, passing by the broken bottles and stones from yet another clash between police and youth, asked: “What’s this all for? Commodities are expensive; life isn’t any better. What have these youth and protests done for us?” Writing for Al Jazeera, Esther Dyson expressed her concern that Egyptian youth are not yet aware that running a government is not as easy as “running a Facebook group.”

Again, Dave Parry:

While generally I am a cautious optimist when it comes to the question of does social media enable people to resist and coordinate against oppressive regimes, I am far more skeptical on the question of whether or not social media-powered revolutions yield stability. They might be really good in the short term, but the attributes which make social media powerful in the short term, might also be a hindrance in the long term.

To frame the problem, Parry borrows two concepts from sociologist John Holloway: counter-power and anti-power. Counter-power is an attempt to replace one power structure with another. Most traditional revolutionary conflicts have begun this way, with an opposition movement that attempts to replace the group currently in power. For example, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution sought to replace the government of Viktor Yanukovych with that of Viktor Yushchenko, who was seen by the youth as less corrupt and more modern. Or, reaching back even further, Mao Zedong inspired Chinese peasants to overthrow Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist Party. Anti-power, on the other hand, aims not to substitute power structures, but rather to undo the current power structure without any notion of what ought to come next. It is easier to build a coalition around anti-power because the framing of resistance rests solely on what’s wrong, not on what ought to be done. “In the case of Egypt, the movement seems to me more constituted by anti-power — get rid of the current regime; and less around any other institution replacing the existing one,” writes Parry. “The protestors were clearly saying no to Mubarak but what kind of power they were saying yes to was less than clear.”

No protest movement of 2011 is more representative of anti-power than the so-called “Spanish Revolution.” “This isn’t a protest against any particular politician or political party,” remarked one protester, “this is a rejection of the entire political class.” In fact, the most commonly cited success of the protest movement is a lack of voter turnout in the May elections.

Spanish discontentment consolidated in 2008 when then-President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero approved a government bailout of the financial sector similar to the bailout approved by his American counterpart, Barack Obama. Soon Spain’s public debt skyrocketed. As journalist Bernardo Gutiérrez recounts, “while unemployment reached record highs in 2010, the 35 largest companies at Madrid’s stock market announced profits of 50 billion euros, 24.5% more than in 2009. Telefónica caused an outcry when the company fired 6,000 workers in Spain while announcing EUR 450 million in bonuses to its executives and 6.9 billion in dividends to its shareholders.” Resentment among Spain’s mostly unemployed youth then turned into outrage when the government passed the highly controversial Internet regulatory legislation known as “Ley Sinde,” which allows for the shutdown of any website without due process. Significantly, Gutiérrez notes that while 92% of Spanish youth are regular Internet users, only 10% of Spanish MPs use Twitter. Networks of activists converged around the online platform “Real Democracy Now!” which called for a massive demonstration against the political class, and for … well, it’s not exactly certain.

If Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle was the intellectual fountainhead of 1968, then it is another Frenchman, the 93-year-old Stéphane Hessel, whose book Time of Outrage is to be found in the backpacks and iPads of European protesters today. The thin booklet, which calls on readers to get angry about the state of modern society, even topped the Christmas bestseller list in France. Hessel, who was tortured by the Nazis for his resistance during World War II, says that it is time to resist the “international dictatorship of the financial markets” by defending the “values of modern democracy.” But that is essentially where he leaves readers. The French philosopher, Luc Ferry, responded with an open letter in Le Figaro, which admonished Hessel for inciting outrage without offering any constructive suggestions. Indignation, writes Ferry, is a sentiment “that is applied only to others, never to oneself, and real morality starts with demands one makes on oneself.” Prime Minister François Fillon added that “nothing would be less French than apathy and indifference, but indignation for indignation’s sake is not a way of thinking.” In other words, Ferry and Fillon criticize Hessel for encouraging anti-power resistance without offering any constructive proposal.

Some critics say that the rhetoric of Stéphane Hessel and the Spanish Revolution smack of 1968 utopianism, but for Michel Bauwens “the relative indeterminacy of the Spanish movement is not a bug, but a feature.” He even declares that the protest movement in Spain is the “Ground Zero for the start of a process towards deep transformation of our civilization and political economy.” It has been said that the protests in Spain were in part inspired by similar protests in Iceland and neighboring Portugal. Buoying Bauwens thesis, the Spanish protesters then inspired peers in Greece, and now across the world with the “Take the Square!” campaign, which has registered over 800 protests on its map so far. It calls on readers to keep organizing such protest campouts far into the future until global revolution is achieved.

The Future of Youth Activism

The majority of people in the world are under the age of 30, and more than a quarter of the world’s population is under 15. As they enter adulthood they will take for granted their ability to connect to the Internet at any time. In fact, the dichotomy between “connected” and “disconnected” will likely fade into history.

It should not surprise us that today’s youth activists are using Internet tools to provoke social change. The mutually dependent relationship between technology and activism has a long, complicated history. Anti-slave trade activists took advantage of the invention of the printing press. E.D Morel and his supporters in Congo Free State depended on the newly released one-click Kodak Brownie camera to expose the gruesome violence of Belgian forced labor in Africa. The Women’s Suffrage movement made use of the newly invented international postage stamp to create the world’s first global rights movement, which also led to international support against foot-binding in China and widow-burning in India. In other words, young activists have always adopted new technologies to push for social progress. The youth of 1968 grew up with television; we grew up with the Internet, and we have incorporated it into our daily lives for better and worse. A far more difficult question, then, is, what do the youth want? How do they envision their future and the future of their governments?

An informal survey of Internet-assisted activism over the past few years suggests a rudimentary taxonomy of approaches:

Anti-power: First and foremost, we can expect to see the continuation of anti-power protests that demand for the resignation of the political class without offering any concrete proposals for what should replace it. Young activists are not yet willing to suggest a return to the socialist forms of governance that have slowed growth in countries like Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, and Nepal. But they also realize that current forms of democratic governance tend to favor the already wealthy and powerful. Recent data from the World Bank suggests that global economic inequality is higher than had been previously estimated, and that inequality continues to grow along with youth unemployment. Until these trends begin to reverse, we can expect global youth to demand the resignation of those responsible for the policies that disadvantage them. As we have seen in the cases of Egypt and Spain, however, such movements could lead to an endless cycle of protest, rather than the implementation of real social change.

Hacktivism: When MasterCard, Visa, Amazon, Paypal, Swiss Postal Finance, and others refused to process donations to Wikileaks following the release of secret US diplomatic cables, a loose network of activists calling themselves “Anonymous” launched “Operation Payback,” an attack on the companies’ servers which rendered them inaccessible for up to an entire day. Wikileaks itself exemplifies the spirit of hacktivism, using technology to threaten the privileged position of the powerful through the use of radical transparency. In the past month alone the hacktivist groups “Anonymous” and “Lulzsec” have attacked several government websites in Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela. In Peru a group calling itself “Piratas de la Red” hacked into a Peruvian police database and published the names of special force police officers. The Mexican chapter of Anonymous even gained access to the database of the Federal Elections Institute just one day before crucial elections in Mexico State. Some commentators, like Evgeny Morozov, claim that DDoS attacks are a legit form of civil disobedience while others, like Benjamin Greenberg, say such attacks are an affront to free speech. While most media coverage of hacktivism focuses on attacks against the servers of governments and major corporations, human rights organizations are also frequently affected.

Public Policy Advocacy: Many, perhaps most youth activists are drawn to anti-power forms of protest, but others focus their time on reforming public policy. In Mexico, for example, activists were able to repeal a federal tax increase on Internet access by launching the #InternetNecesario campaign, which drew massive online participation, led to a debate with members of congress, and the tax’s eventual repeal. Such campaigns can also target the policies of corporations. In 2010 Greenpeace launched an effective campaign to pressure Nestlé to stop using palm oil from plantations that are linked to deforestation. Over the past few years “new media advocacy” has transformed from its grassroots beginnings to become an entire industry of consultants who explain to NGOs how to use social media to increase donations, build up mailing lists, and influence politicians. As such activism formalizes into institutions, however, it also tends to drive young people away.

Open Data: Another movement that aims for reform rather than overthrow is the Open Data community, which calls on governments to provide its citizens with access to raw data that can be analyzed, visualized and re-used in applications. For years groups like Sunlight Foundation and Open Knowledge Foundation have promoted the use of Open Data in the US and UK respectively, but they are now joined by the likes of Garage Lab in Argentina, Open Data Mexico, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente in Chile, the World Wide Web Foundation in Ghana, Janaagraha in India, Afrographique in South Africa, and SODNET in Kenya. These organizations are young and tech savvy. They believe that greater access and use of government information will lead to greater accountability and more civic participation.

Public Constituency: A common criticism of Internet-assisted activism is that it only empowers groups that have access to computers, smart phones, and internet connections; in other words, the middle and upper classes. It is for this reason that we should not be surprised that Internet users in Mexico carried out a successful campaign against a federal tax on Internet access. But, unsurprisingly, we have yet to observe any online campaigns for access to potable water in rural villages. A truly representative democracy requires a representative public constituency, where the voices of all citizens are heard; not just the urban elites. Groups like Rising Voices and Digital Democracy work with under-represented communities to educate them on the use of online tools to increase civic presence and engagement. Similar projects work around the world at the local level – including in many public libraries – but they tend to attract a smaller share of participation from youth activists.

Autonomy: Finally, we see a segment of youth activists that seem to care little about either reforming or overthrowing the government. They use social networks and technology to improve their own communities without any government involvement at all. Residents of Guadalajara and Mexico City grew tired of city governments that ignored their pleas for bike lanes and pedestrian crosswalks. They formed an online community that meets offline once a week to paint a new bike lane or crosswalk in a zone identified as dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists. They have even printed out “wiki-tickets” to place on vehicles parked on sidewalks and crosswalks. In China the 1KG project (short for “one more kilogram in your backpack”) encourages urban youth to take school books with them on their travels to rural China. They have distributed textbooks to over 1,000 rural schools without any government involvement. The “guerilla gardening” movement aims to make effective use of municipal land that has been ignored by the government and absentee property owners. Activists in Taiwan, for example, regularly reclaim neglected areas of Taipei to create community gardens with a strong focus on herbal medicine and acupuncture. It is doubtful that we will see a return to the kind of “turn on, tune in, drop out” activism of the 1960′s, which led to experiments in communal, off-the-grid living, but it would not be surprising to see a reactionary movement that emphasizes autonomy and local community.

These six approaches to Internet-assisted activism should not be seen as exclusive and contradictory, but rather overlapping and complementary. Many of the same young activists who paint guerilla crosswalks on Saturday afternoon are also lobbying congress on Tuesday and visualizing government data on Thursday. In 1968 images of youth raising their fists in angry defiance splashed across television screens and created the world’s first global social catharsis. The protests of that year now seem minor compared to what has taken place so far in 2011, led by the first generation of youth to grow up with computers. Still, it remains to be seen what, if anything, we will achieve with our growing networks of activists as we face economic inequality, youth unemployment, food shortages, and climate change.

Some, like Michel Bauwens, see “the start of a process towards deep transformation of our civilization and political economy” while others predict much more of the same political infighting and government secrecy. What young activists have already shown, is that there is agency in their activities. They have already overthrown dictators, repealed unjust laws, and called the world’s attention to stories that the mainstream media were too willing to ignore. As George Landow once remarked, “technology always confers power to someone. It gives power to those who possess it, those who can use it, those who have access to it.” A slightly simplistic interpretation is that technology confers power to young people. What we will do with that power will be for future historians to contemplate.

This essay is not a blanket criticism against anti-power activism. Indeed, in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, the old political class must be removed in order to create spaces for new forms of accountability and participation to blossom. Too often, however, anti-power mobilizations lose their strength and unity once the old political class is forced out. Though “good governance” is not nearly as sexy as revolutionary slogans, anti-power activism must go hand in hand with movements for transparency, constituency building, and smart policy to bring about a truly progressive future.

Latin America has long been the most unequal region in the world; whereas the modern notion of the “middle class” — an intermediary between the nobility and peasantry — is tied to the independence of the United States. But now, argues Castañeda, we are beginning to see initial hints of a role reversal. There is intense debate about what it means to be middle class in America today, but researchers unanimously agree that income segregation has been steadily rising since 1970. Meanwhile, in many Latin American countries like Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay and Chile, the middle class has been steadily growing over the past couple decades, leading to consistent economic growth and the consolidation of democracy in all four countries. (None of the four countries were true democracies in the 1980′s.)

Now the US government is set to run out of money (yes, again) in a couple days and the IMF’s Christine Lagarde is asking Latin American countries to bail out Europe.

How did Europe become so steeped in debt in the first place? The map below shows those European countries — the same ones at risk of defaulting today — with the highest income inequality:

It is important, however, to not give too much hype to “the new global middle class.” Castañeda is cautious to note that even the fastest growing Latin American countries are still much more unequal than the United States:

In Brazil, Chile and Mexico, which together account for nearly 70 percent of the region’s G.D.P. and population, the wealthiest 10 percent held an average of 42 percent of national income in 2008-9; the equivalent figure for the United States was 29 percent.

And, in fact, Castañeda himself wrote an entire book which argues that Mexico’s new middle class won’t bring about true democratization and modernization unless it is accompanied by substantial cultural changes. Classism in Mexico is startling. Two recent examples: a few months ago a video was uploaded to YouTube of two upperclass young women who were stopped at an alcohol checkpoint in one of Mexico City’s most luxurious neighborhoods. The hysterical, and clearly intoxicated, women screamed at the police officer calling him a “naco asalariado,” which is nearly impossible to translate, but along the lines of “redneck hourly wage earner.” (Yes, that is apparently considered an insult among Mexico’s wealthy.) Another recent example: after Mexico’s leading presidential candidate failed to name the title of a single book other than the bible, his daughter retweeted the following: “Greetings to the bag of proletarian shitheads that can only criticize what they envy.”

Mexico’s inequality may be diminishing, but its cultural classism is as strong as ever. Similarly, Greg Michener reminds Brazilians taking delight in their newfound role of lender to the IMF that there are still plenty of problems at home.

All of this is of great personal consequence to me. One of the most difficult challenges for me to adapt to Mexico has been its relative lack of a middle class. Sadly, I have a difficult time relating to both the wealthy and the poor, which leaves me with a fairly thin slice of the social pie, even if it is growing. It is also what I miss most about the United States; a well-educated middle class that actively participates in civic life. It pains me to see middle class disappearing in the United States, though it gives me hope to see it emerge in parts of Latin America. Could it be time for both regions to launch pro-middle class campaigns?

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s latest book charts the movement for moral rights — from the conception of natural rights within religion to secular human rights with the birth of democracy to legal civil rights in the last century. Earlier this year, in a fascinating interview with Appiah, Christopher Lydon pondered when the next great movement for the right to equality will finally gain steam. A couple months later and protesters brought their tents to Wall Street.

Despite its many failings, the Occupy Movement has put economic equality back on the agenda in the United States and much of Europe. In Mexico, however, the greatest advocate of economic equality, presidential candidate Lopez Obrador, has been branded a dangerous Chavez-like populist by the mainstream media. Unlike Brazil, where Lula and Dilma have confronted inequality without scaring away the private sector, Mexico has yet to find a political leader who can frankly discuss the issue without being labeled a populist. Brazil’s success has been rooted in pragmatism not politics, writes Anand Giridharadas, but here in Mexico it seems to be all politics all the time.

I was hardly the only person to examine the geopolitical context behind the OGP. A few days later Greg Michener — who helped me develop some of my initial reflections — published his own analysis of the OGP and US foreign policy. TechPresident picked up the meme too. A couple months later David Eaves extended the argument, describing the OGP as the “beginning of open vs. closed.” (Much of the world view of my former employer, Open Society Foundations, is rooted in the analysis of Karl Popper who described “the beginning of open vs. closed” in 1945.) Even The Economist ventured to answer whether the OGP is a “transparency conspiracy,” ultimately dismissing it as “really nothing new or major.”

There was never any reaction from the organizers of the OGP to this geopolitical analysis. In fact, they often seem downright allergic to the discussion of geopolitics.

In hindsight, my initial analysis was off the mark. I pondered whether the partnership would be a “game changer or symbolic slogan” when, in fact, its aspirations and potential achievements are far more humble. The best analysis of what the OGP has achieved to date comes not from the OGP, which is severely limited in its staff and communication capacity, but from transparency analyst Owen Barder and his colleague Stephanie Majerowicz.

I believe that Barder and Majerowicz rightly diagnose OGP’s humble ambitions, despite its rather grandiose rhetoric. Essentially, it seems to me, the architects of the OGP want to create a club for pro-open government reformers to compete with one another in order to make the most significant and meaningful commitments toward transparency. So far it seems to have made some early wins. Last week the US joined the International Aid Transparency Initiative to bring it in line with the other OGP steering committee members (and giving Hillary Clinton ammunition to criticize China). Now, write Barder and Majerowicz, the UK is feeling pressure to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative after the US joined in September. Representatives from the Brazilian government, meanwhile, have claimed that its membership in the OGP was a significant factor in finally getting a decent access to information law approved.

This sorta “my transparency is better than your transparency” friendly competition is precisely what the OGP hopes to encourage, but with much broader participation.

That gets to the crux of the community architecture: Where do you draw the line in that fuzzy space between governments that are truly interested in becoming more open and those who merely want the badge of open government without doing the reform work? At this week’s OGP meeting in Brasília I saw both. Meanwhile there was much murmuring, but little frank discussion, about a recently passed “secrecy bill” in South Africa and a similar proposed bill in Indonesia — both members of the OGP steering committee. According to several observers on the FOIAnet mailing list, if member countries of the OGP are able to pass such anti-transparency legislation without losing status in this pro-transparency club, it will signal to other prospective countries that they too can wear the open government badge while backsliding on their transparency commitments, ultimately damaging both the reputation and catalytic potential of the initiative.

Finally, the OGP is described as a partnership between civil society and governments rather than a government-led initiative. That is a lofty and important ideal, but it is clear that, so far, governments are in the driver’s seat — even in those rare cases of very active civil society participation such as Indonesia and Tanzania. In fact, at this week’s meeting few national civil society organizations were present at all. One government representative said that civil society organizations in her country are free to give input, but that it is the government that is directing her country’s participation. While we could place blame for the lack of civil society decision-making on the organizers of the OGP, or on the governments, it must also be recognized that it is up to civil society to participate more actively and forcefully in these discussions. US-based OpenTheGovernment.org, which is hiring a consultant specifically to boost civil society participation in the crafting and monitoring of US OGP commitments is one example of constructive efforts to strengthen the participation of civil society.

Several of my friends criticize the OGP for being yet another initiative that preaches openness and transparency without being open and transparent itself. I believe their diagnosis is mostly correct, but the OGP’s exclusiveness and opacity is an inherent paradox that might make it more effective in stimulating pro-transparency competition among member countries. After all, it seems that the US joined the IATI not to please civil society, but to put it in a position to criticize China’s overseas development (good ol’ geopolitics). Similarly, civil society in Brazil has been advocating for a strong access to information law for over a decade now. But analysts say that President Rousseff made its passage a priority because she was embarrassed that Brazil was a co-chair of the OGP’s Steering Committee and yet didn’t have an FOI law, one of the main criteria to join.

The OGP is just the latest of many international and regional transparency initiatives, including the United Nations Convention Against Corruption and the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention. What distinguishes the OGP in theory is the active participation of civil society, but what seems to distinguish it in practice is the friendly competition between governments to each make more impressive commitments that they can highlight at international fora. We will see how this dynamic evolves at the next OGP annual conference in April in Brazil, which will add a few dozen new countries to the mix.

But wait, there are worthy excuses as well, dear internet. Since we have last spoken, Iris and I are now living together, in the same city, for the first time. Not only that, we moved from a small-but-furnished apartment to a larger and very much unfurnished house. Renting a house in Mexico, we quickly discovered, is no simple matter. There are tomes of paperwork to be filled out, and then they must be filled out once again, but this time all with the same color of ink. There are appliances, which have features and price tags that make no sense to your humble author. There are well-intentioned, young men who flood the living room with leaking water when they try to install the internet.

Finding a half-decent couch proved even more difficult. With nowhere to actually sit in the living room, for three weeks we were left with either the office or the bedroom. Work and sleep and very little else … other than the four sets of visitors over the past four weeks. (Delightful, understanding, loving family and friends.)

I am only getting started … though I should clarify that this is all good news that I am “complaining” about. If I were a better person, this would be a blog post about how fortunate I am, and all the amazing people who have helped me along the way, and how I hope to use my fortunate position to do good. But instead I am me. So before I continue with my litany of complaints about my fortunate circumstance, let me first share a photo of this cute lil’ guy:

That’s Coco, our new puppy. He’s wearing a Pacific Northwest hipster-before-it-was-hipster sweater because I gave the poor little guy a winter cold before I abandoned him for the tropical environs of Brazil. Coco means coconut in Spanish, and he does look like a bit of an inside-out coconut, but coco also refers to your brain, as in usa el coco (“use your head”). El Coco (sometimes cuco) is also the hispanic equivalent of the boogeyman, a mythical monster that noiselessly takes away misbehaving children deep in the night. Finally, “rompecoco” is something like “headache,” and coco has already proved adept at causing plenty of rompecocos. Take all of that together and it seems to sum up our new pup pretty well. (Much love to Juan Manuel & Melissa for introducing us to our new housemate.)

But let me not get distracted from my unwarranted ranting. In the midst of all of this change, I wrapped up my previous amazing job in order to start an even more amazing job. I am now a “principal” at Omidyar Network, working on expanding our government transparency work in Latin America. After months of ongoing discussions, all of a sudden it was time to wrap up multiple projects at Open Society Foundations within a few weeks, take two days off to move into a new house, and then ship off to San Francisco to meet my dauntingly cerebral team of colleagues from the US, India, and the UK. My impression is that they all graduated from either Stanford Business School or Harvard’s Kennedy School. Me, I worked in a coffee shop until I was 26.

Just one month in to my new job and I could probably write an entire book about the differences between Open Society Foundations and Omidyar Network, but I’ll shoot for three lines. Open Society Foundations was founded by a billionaire speculator who grew up fleeing the Nazis and dedicating much of his life promoting liberal capitalist democracy as a replacement of communism. Omidyar Network was founded by a young entrepreneur who programmed a website over a three-day weekend that eventually became one of the world’s most profitable Internet companies. The vast differences in their philanthropic approaches are rooted in the vast differences of their formative experiences. If you’re a philanthropy geek and want to know more, I recommend Soros’ LRB essay, “My Philanthropy,” and Omidyar’s essay, “How I Did It,” from Harvard Business Review.

I’m not the only busy body in our new, half-furnished household. Coco, already a neo-luddite, is busy biting into ethernet cables. Iris, in the meantime, has started a company from scratch. With custom designs and (mostly) locally sourced materials, she has created a whole collection of women’s purses and laptop sleeves. If you live in Mexico you can purchase them on Facebook or at the hippest boutiques — like Guru and Conejo Blanco. If you live in the US you can purchase them on Etsy (the laptop sleeves are coming). Lest you think that I only complain about my own fortunate state of affairs, let me also inform you, on Iris’ behalf, that starting a successful business is no easy matter.

I write all this, my patient reader, to say that I am back. That I want to be back. There are those of you who will raise a skeptical eyebrow. Part of my new job is to distribute a significant amount of money. In other words, I am now a “donor,” and becoming a donor usually goes hand-in-hand with becoming a half-human. Of not expressing one’s opinion. Of limiting one’s interactions to exclusive clubs and one-on-one meetings with unfair power dynamics. This is my symbolic effort to say that I am still me and that I will continue to be so. If there is any evidence to the contrary, call me out on it. You’ve always made me a better person, dear Internet, and I’m still counting on you.

This is my second-to-last day in Brazil. Last weekend I finally met a new friend, Greg and his lovely wife, Carolina. In fact, Greg was instrumental in encouraging me to continue to write, to continue to be open. And tomorrow I will be with an old friend, Jose Murilo. Both are intellectual co-conspirators and inspirational conversationalists.

I could use a couple weeks of uninterrupted sleep, but despite all my complaining, life, it must be said, is good. I leave you with a photo of Murilo and me from 2009:

News

Global Open Government Partnership launches in New York City

Alex Howard interviews Maria Otero, US Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, about the official launch of the Open Government Partnership in New York City. The all-encompassing post also documents the partnership’s progress and setbacks, and embeds a copy of the US national action plan.

Study: patent trolls have cost innovators half a trillion dollars

A new study by three Boston University researchers, which looks at market valuation before and after patent lawsuits, has found that “patent trolls” (third parties who litigate aggressively on behalf of patent holders) have cost US publicly traded companies $500 billion in market capitalization since 1990, more than a quarter of US industrial research and development spending during those years.

India, Brazil and South Africa call for creation of “new global body” to control the Internet

India, Brazil and South Africa have called for the creation of a new United Nations body that would integrate and oversee the ITU, IETF and ICANN. Internet governance expert Milton Mueller says that, while the proposal has no chance of adoption, it reveals the failure of the Internet Governance Forum to internationalize Internet governance.

F.T.C. wants to update rules on children’s online privacy

Marc Rotenberg of EPIC calls proposed updates to US regulation on child online privacy “forward-looking,” but industry and legal analysts wonder how the regulations will be enforced when most online websites ostensibly prohibit children under 13 from using their services. Research by Consumer Reports this year found that 7.5 million American children under the age of 13 were using Facebook despite such prohibitions.

Venezuela to deploy 3 million free laptops

The Venezuelan government has announced that it plans to deploy 3 million “Canaima” laptops to schoolchildren by 2012. Critics say the initiative is merely meant to woo votes of poor families before next year’s presidential election. Robert Hacker, the CFO of One Laptop Per Child, says his organization has come to realize that teacher training is key for a successful deployment.

Internet ruffles pricey scholarly journals

With the rise in costs of academic journal subscriptions and the constraints of university budgets, an increasing number of universities are refusing to renew their expensive subscriptions, turning instead to open access publishing.

OnStar to begin monitoring customers’ GPS location for profit

After reading through pages of OnStar’s latest update to its terms and conditions, Jonathan Zdziarski found that the automobile emergency service, used in the US, Canada and China, has inserted the right to sell user information – such as GPS location, vehicle speed, and seat belt status – to third parties, including law enforcement. The author concludes that legislators should investigate companies like OnStar, Google, and Apple to better understand how they use consumer data.

EFF builds system to warn of certificate breaches

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has updated its ‘HTTPS Everywhere’ Firefox extension to crowd-source reports of rogue SSL certificates in order to detect potential compromises such as the recent DigiNotar certificate hack, which left as many as 300,000 unsuspecting Iranians vulnerable to surveillance of their personal communication.

Omidyar Network to invest $3 million in government transparency initiatives

At this week’s “Power of Information: New Technologies for Philanthropy and Development” conference, Omidyar Network announced $3 million of investments in government transparency initiatives. Recipients include Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, Mid-East Youth, and the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Digital Media and Learning Competition

The MacArthur and Mozilla foundations have issued a call for proposals for the research and design of certification and recognition schemes to promote lifelong learning. Grants range from $5,000 to $200,000.

Features and Analysis

Cameras Everywhere Report 2011

Based on discussions with over 40 analysts and practitioners in technology and human rights, WITNESS’ Cameras Everywhere reports looks at the development of trends in policy and practice at the intersection of human rights, technology, social media, and business. It also lists specific recommendations on how to strengthen the use of video for human rights.

Book: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

Hivos (The Hague) and The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore) have published a four-part book which consolidates three years of research and inquiry into field of youth, technology and social change. The book, which draws on dozens of contributions from diverse actors, tries to address is the lack of digital natives’ voices in the discourse around them.

Freedom of the press applies to everyone — yes, even bloggers

Mathew Ingram of GigaOm argues that bloggers and citizens should be afforded the same right to document the work of police officers in public places as any other journalist. The article also points out that state and local police forces need more legal training to understand the rights of citizens who are eager to point their cell phone cameras and law enforcement.

The second revolution of open science

In a talk at the UK Royal Society, Michael Nielsen describes what he calls the “second revolution in open science,” a proliferation of data, models, and software in scientific research that “require scientists to rethink how they share their work.”

Account deactivation and content removal: guiding principles and practices for companies and users

The Center for Democracy & Technology and the Berkman Center have published a new report which explores the dilemmas and recommends principles, strategies, and tools that companies and users alike can adopt to mitigate the negative effects of account deactivation and content removal.

The Netizen Report: inaugural edition

Global Voices Advocacy publishes its inaugural (and sweeping) Netizen Report, an overview compiled by Rebecca MacKinnon of recent global developments related to the power dynamics between citizens, companies and governments on the Internet.

The forces that led to the DigiNotar hack

Privacy expert Christopher Soghoian analyzes some of the structural conditions which allowed for the DigiNotar certificate authority hacks.

Online ID Verification Plan Carries Risks

Natasha Singer looks at efforts by the Open Identity Exchange and others to develop online identity authentication that can be used by both commercial and government websites. The article cites several privacy advocates including Kaliya Hamlin, Lillie Coney of EPIC, and Lee Tien of EFF.

Diary

ICEGOV2011

September 26-28, 2011
Tallinn, Estonia
The 5th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic
Governance (ICEGOV) will bring together practitioners, developers and
researchers from government, local municipalities, academia, industry
and civil society from across the world.

Sixth Annual Internet Governance Forum

September 27-30, 2011
Nairobi, Kenya
The Sixth Annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting will be held
at the United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON). The main theme of the
meeting is: ‘Internet as a catalyst for change: access, development,
freedoms and innovation’.

Open Aid Data Conference and Hackday

September 28-29, 2011
Berlin, Germany
The Open Aid Data conference will bring together practitioners from
various organisations to discuss how technology, the internet, and
particularly open data can help make international development aid
more transparent. A hack day will take place the day before.

Mobility Shifts: International Future of Learning Summit

October 10-16, 2011
New York, NY, USA
An international summit bringing together bring together artists, web
developers, scholars, technologists, teachers, radical librarians,
policy makers, critical legal scholars and learning activists to
discuss digital fluencies for a mobile world and explore learning
outside the bounds of schools and universities.

Contact Summit 2011: The evolution will be social

October 20, 2011
New York, NY, USA
A day-long unconference conceived and facilitated by Douglas Rushkoff
to explore how to realise the promise of social media to promote new
forms of culture, commerce, collective action and creativity.

Open Government Data Camp

October 20-21, 2011
Warsaw, Poland
Open Government Data Camp is the world’s biggest open data event. It
brings together civil servants, developers, NGOs and others for two
days of talks, workshops and project sprints.

Open Access Week

October 24-30, 2011
Open Access Week is a global event, now in its 5th year, which aims to
promote Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research.

Open Access Africa

October 25-26, 2011
Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania
Event organised by open access publisher BioMed Central bringing
together researchers, librarians and funding bodies to discuss the
benefits of open access publishing in an African context.

Open Education 2011 Conference

October 25-27, 2011
Park City, UT, US
The Open Education 2011 conference brings together this broad
diversity of people to discuss the state of the art in open education
and facilitate creative conversations across a wide variety of
perspectives. Keynote speakers will address topics ranging from major
government initiatives to efforts directed toward replacing
traditional institutions.

McLuhan’s Philosophy of Media Centennial Conference

October 26-28, 2011
Brussels, Belgium
This conference celebrating 100 years since the birth of media
theorist and cultural critic Marshall McLuhan will host discussions
about McLuhan’s ideas from different perspectives and traditions.
Keynote Speakers include Robert K. Logan, Derrick de Kerckhove, Paul
Levinson, Graham Harman and Peter-Paul Verbeek.

Mozilla Festival on Media, Freedom and the Web

November 4-6, 2011
London, UK
“A gathering of passionate, creative people using the web to bend,
hack and reinvent media.”

Berlin 9

November 9-10, 2011
Washington DC, US
The Berlin Open Access Conference Series convenes leaders in the
science, humanities, research, funding, and policy communities around
The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and
Humanities. Berlin 9 is the first of the annual meetings to take place
in North America.

2nd Annual European Data Protection and Privacy Conference

December 6, 2011
Brussels, Belgium
The conference will bring together European policymakers and
stakeholders for a “full and frank discussion” on issues in Data
Protection and Privacy.

The Digital Media and Learning Conference

March 1-3, 2012
The third-annual The Digital Media and Learning Conference is organized around the theme “Beyond Educational Technology: Learning Innovations in a Connected World.”

Leading up to the symposium I sent some interview questions out to the morning’s speakers in order to set some basic context. Interviews with Tunisian activist Lina Ben Mhenni and Spanish-Syrian activist Leila Nachawati are both available on the Ars Electronica website. What follows is my interview with Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish professor of information and sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society where she will soon be speaking about her findings from field research in Egypt. You can see a video of her presentation at Ars Electronica on YouTube.

DS: I first discovered your writing earlier this year when you published a critique of Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion at The Atlantic’s technology blog. Evgeny was with us at Ars Electronica two years ago where he discussed the concept of “slacktivism” and Max Ringelmann’s research into social loafing. But in your critique you write that Morozov’s “dismissiveness of the ways in which the Internet can be part of a challenge to authoritarianism and promote citizen empowerment” leaves his analysis unbalanced. A lot has happened since January. Over the past seven months, what have we seen as examples of how the Internet has played a role challenging authoritarianism and promoting citizen empowerment?

ZT: I would consider the Tunisian and Egypt uprisings to be key such examples — obviously social media is only one part of a complex picture of events which culminated in the ousting of dictators in these regimes but it’s also clear that these new tools have helped the break regime’s attempts at censorship, help support the public sphere as well as helping activists organize. Often, the last part gets the most attention, i.e. whether activists organized using these new tools. However, it is more than that–the key transformation is the creation of a new media ecology composed of satellite television channels which circumvent monopoly of state’s on the broadcast arena, and, in the case of the Middle East and North Africa Region, help focus the attention of the region to a particular event; cell phones with video capabilities which turn ordinary citizens and activists into potential journalists and create eyes and ears pretty much everywhere and, of course, social media tools which allow of a radically different infrastructure of connectivity. The fact that the state can use these tools to create surveillance is true but represents a continuity with the past as surveillance has been a major part of these regimes for decades. Even surveillance, however, can become less effective if these tools can help support large numbers of people express their opposition as no regime can effectively arrest and jail millions of people for long periods of time. Thus, for small dissident groups and minorities, the dangers of surveillance and selective punishment remain high with or without social media; for countries like Egypt where there was widespread but repressed opposition, mass expression of dissent on social media may make it harder for the regime to prosecute everyone.

DS: Lately I have been thinking a lot about 1968, the “year that rocked the world,” according to Mark Kurlansky. In his book he reminds us that the youth of 1968 were the first generation to grow up with television at home. Sean O’Hagan, writing at the Guardian, writes that the same-day newscast didn’t exist until the previous year. He quotes the political prankster Abbie Hoffman, who helped organize the violent protests at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention: “a modern revolutionary group headed for the television, not for the factory.” It seems like there was this sense of optimism that television was a liberating technology, and that it would help the protesters achieve meaningful social change. But, in fact, other than attracting media coverage, the youth had very few channels for meaningful policy engagement. In hindsight, the protests of 1968 drew a lot of attention, but achieved very little concrete change. Are we seeing the same dynamic play out today with the first generation to grow up with home computers?

ZT: I am going to disagree here. The 1968 era should be evaluated not just as one year but the period around those years with student activism only part of the story. Television was a crucial part of the story of the civil rights movement and research demonstrates this as well. Television showed millions of Americans the brutality required to keep African-Americans subjugated and made it politically impossible for legal segregation to continue as is. Television also helped spread the civil rights movement especially among Black college students who saw the protests occurring elsewhere and decided to start their own lunch-counter sit-ins, for example. So, it helped extend the reach of the institutional structure of the civil rights movement. As for calling the 1968 protests as having achieved very little “concrete change”, I beg to differ. Yes, we are far short of utopia here but without that era, my life as a female academic would be profoundly different and maybe not even possible–and I wouldn’t call the end of legal segregation small change. For many people who are not wealthy, white or male, a life in the pre-1960s era would be far more impoverished and limited compared to today. Does this mean I don’t recognize the deep problems we continue to face? Of course, not. However, social change is almost always like that. Two steps forward, one step back, some gains, some losses — the key is to look at whether progress is being made and I would find it very hard to argue that the 1968 era was not a crucial turning point for individual rights, for women, for non-white people and even for men who wanted to step outside the limited boundaries of 1950s masculinity. Television has been very reactionary and a force against positive social change as well –and continues to be so– but I believe that it was a factor in the success of a non-violent civil rights movement.

DS: Along with the excitement and jubilation surrounding the revolution in Egypt, there has also been a fair amount of skepticism about its chances of bringing about true democratic consolidation. University of Texas professor Dave Perry called the Egyptian revolution a typical “anti-power” movement. In his words, “the protestors were clearly saying no to Mubarak but what kind of power they were saying yes to was less than clear.” Writing for Al Jazeera, Esther Dyson expressed her concern that Egyptian youth are not yet aware that running a government is not as easy as “running a Facebook group.” And on your own blog, you wrote that so-called “leaderless revolutions “often quickly evolve into very hierarchical and ossified networks not in spite of, but because of, their initial open nature.” Then in May you traveled to Egypt. What did you find?

ZT: In Egypt, I found the youth movement struggling to define their role in the new revolutionary process. The military council remains in power and there are existing institutional opposition movements like the Muslim Brotherhood which are better prepared for electoral politics. The youth movement is debating how to organize, how to proceed, how to be effective in shaping the future of their country. These issues will likely not be resolved in the near future and we will see a significant evolution. However, it’s important to recognize that just a year ago, the youth movement struggled to hold protests of more than a few hundred people and freedom of expression was severely limited. In Egypt, the most profound change I saw was that you could turn any street corner and find people vigorously debating politics and the future of their country. This did not used to happen. People did not openly opine and debate about the future of their country. In that sense, this is not a reversible change and is sign of a profound transformation. It won’t however, culminate in a neat democracy that everyone around the world will like in just a few years. It will be messy, there will be set-backs and I may not personally like all the ideas that end up with political support. All democratic transitions are messy, non-linear and complicated and no reason to assume Egypt would be an exception.

But what is information?

Only now do I appreciate the exceeding difficulty of answering what seems like such a straightforward question. You don’t know it when you see it; you don’t see it at all. Even my usually authoritative-soundng Oxford English Dictionary comes up pathetically short: “what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.”¹

In interviews James Gleick has said that this is a book he has wanted to write nearly his entire life. The sweeping bibliography and index justify the delay. It took me three months to read — albeit with many other books and pauses interspersed. A deep analysis of something as abstract as ‘information’ leaves the reader staring often at the ceiling, trying to make sense of the perpetually perplexing.² Can information exist without communication? Is there such a thing as knowledge, or is some information merely more useful in particular contexts? Is genetic information really information — based on bits, communicated by computers? Can we eventually capture all of the genetic information of the entire biosphere on a single hard drive? And, if so, is that all we are, a humble collection of bits and algorithms? If those algorithms are pre-decided, then is our destiny as well?

The book begins with a quote from Zadie Smith, and it is quite possibly the most unremarkable paragraph she has ever written; except that, when placed in this new context, it speaks directly to an inquietude that now overwhelms us all:

Anyway, those tickets, the old ones, they didn’t tell you where you were going, much less where you came from. He couldn’t remember seeing any dates on them, either, and there was certainly no mention of time. It was all different now, of course. All this information. Archie wondered why that was.

Give that information (sometimes referred to as ‘culture’, ‘facts’, ‘intelligence’, ‘data’, ‘meaning’, ‘dogma’ and ‘knowledge’) is what distinguishes humans from our primate predecessors, it is incredible that there was no technical definition at all until 1949 when Claude Shannon published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” giving rise to the theoretical fields of information theory and Information Science, but also to practical engineering approaches to storing information on magnetic tape and communicating it across networks.

As the subtitle discloses from the get-go, this is a book that treats its topic from three different angles. First we are given an overview of the history of information before we knew how to define it. Here there are African drums that talk, optical telegraph towers constructed across France at the height of the revolution, and Samuel Morse’s electric telegraph and famous code.

Next we delve into theory, specifically information theory and its various applications in communication, biology, physics, chemistry and quantum mechanics. At times Gleick seems to exuberantly make the case for information theory as a Theory of Everything.³ This was most economically and mystically expressed in 1989 by John Wheller: “It from bit.” Information is physical, it must be stored on tangible objects, and must therefore obey the laws of physics. “To do anything requires energy. To specify what is done requires information.”

If all of this sounds increasingly abstract, it only becomes more so, until the theory eventually reaches an apex of abstraction: quantum computing, the fundamentals of which remain beyond my cerebral grasp. For me, the most startling and intriguing ramification of information theory is that information is a measure of probability. 1010101010 contains less information than 1010100011, despite their same quantity of digits, as the former can be expressed by “repeat 10 five times” whereas the latter is seemingly random. The significance is that information, randomness, complexity, and computability are four different ways to express the same principle; namely, that ‘information’ refers to that which we cannot predict.

And then I stare at the ceiling.

There are increasing accusations against information theory. It has overstepped its application, some say, limiting our understanding of natural processes by viewing everything through a metaphor of bits. As early as 2000 Paul E Griffiths called genetic information “a metaphor in search of a theory.” Gleick devotes an entire chapter to exploring the math behind claims that information theory is reductionist, beginning with Gödel’s notorious incompleteness theorems and ending with Laplace’s Demon. It is a frustrating chapter; just when the concept of information seems to make so much sense, it turns out not to.

And then I stare at the ceiling.

Finally, we enter the third section of the book, the flood. As information becomes exponentially cheaper to store, it becomes exponentially cheaper to “create.” Hence, as Google’s Eric Schmidt is eager to remind audiences, “every two days we now create as much information as we did up to 2003.” In Claude Shannon’s groundbreaking paper he estimated the size of the greatest store of information known to humanity at the time, the Library of Congress. Shannon estimated that it was probably around a terabyte. He was very close. Today CERN generates 1 petabyte of data per second — that’s 1,000 terabytes per second.

Gleick writes with sympathetic compassion toward those of us who are overwhelmed by the flood. Citing a beautiful essay by David Foster Wallace, he reminds us that making decisions depends on eliminating options, and that we now have more information, more options, to eliminate than ever. He cites psycho-neurological research that shows we often make worse decisions when confronted with more information, even if it is entirely relevant.

But in his review of The Information for the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson is decidedly less sympathetic toward the info-overwhelmed. Wikipedia, he reminds us, is a product of the flood, as is 21st century science.

Ultimately, we are reminded, information is a part of evolution, and it is now up to us to adapt or drown in the flood.

I only have one bone to pick with Gleick’s nearly masterful overview of information, and that is his silent transition from bits to meaning. On one page he is summarizing the difficulties of incorporating classical information theory into quantum computing, and the very next page he describes the birth of Wikipedia.

Wikipedians like to claim that they are organizing all of the world’s knowledge, but ‘knowledge’ turns out to be even more difficult to define than information. We know how to measure economic capital, but intellectual capital is a guessing game. Einstein’s theory of relativity probably contains more ‘knowledge’ than whoever came up with the idea to make a sandwich with peanut butter, honey, and banana — but only in certain circumstances. In other words, “meaning” refers to relevance, which is inherently subjective.

Gleick emphasizes from the very beginning — and throughout the book — that Shannon’s paper and the birth of information theory was only made possible by divorcing information from meaning. But he doesn’t even attempt to draw the fuzziest of lines between the two, though he does seem disposed to the human-centric view of Heinz von Foerster who argued at an early cybernetics conference that it was fundament able to distinguish between the “beep beeps” of information theory and the “process of understanding,” the decoding, that takes place in the human brain. To put it another way, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and information is in the head of the receiver.”

1 ☞ Apparently I don’t have the latest version of the OED; in a blog post for the New York Review of Books, Gleick notes that the latest entry for ‘information’ now runs 9,400 words and prompted an essay-length meditation by OED managing editor Michael Proffitt. After all, Gleick reminds us, OED is in the information business, like so many of us.

2 ☞ My intellectual insecurity was somewhat soothed when I saw that Cory Doctorow — voracious reader and perversely prolific writer — frequently “stopped reading it a lot … stopped to stare into space and go ‘huh’ and ‘wow’ and ‘huh’ again.”

3 ☞ “Why does nature appear quantized?” Gleick rhetorically asks before answering himself: “Because information is quantized. The bit is the ultimate, unsplittable particle.”