History as Twitter feed

Submitted by Matthew on 18 January, 2012 - 12:48

Paul Mason is fascinated by the Facebooking, tweeting, text-messaging young activists he has met across the world in the revolts of the last two years.

He goes so far as to say that they are “the human archetypes that will shape the twenty-first century. They effortlessly multitask, they are ironic, androgynous sometimes, seemingly engrossed in their bubble of music — but they are sometimes prepared to sacrifice their lives and freedom for the future”.

He speculates that with these young people it may be “possible to conceive of living [an] ‘emancipated life’ as a fully-connected ‘species-being’ on the terrain of capitalism itself... albeit in conflict with it”.

He takes issue with Malcolm Gladwell’s polemic, “Why the revolution will not be tweeted”, arguing that “Gladwell’s critique overlooks... the dimension of control”. “The network... can achieve those elements of instant community, solidarity, shared space and control that were at the heart of social revolutions in the early industrial age”, but achieved there only by face-to-face cooperation.

He recognises, though, that “youthful, socially networked, horizontalist movements” run into a problem “everywhere once things get serious: the absence of a strategy, the absence of a line of communication through which to speak to the union-organised workers”.

“There’s no coherent ideology driving this movement and no coherent vision of an alternative society”.

He sees the organised left as still decisive for converting social ferment into social change. The current weakness of the left, he thinks, “removes the danger [for the well-off] of social revolution — or even systematic social reform”.

“The weakness of the left has allowed the radical middle classes to maintain their radicalism — for now”; but it also makes him fear that the ferment of the last few years could lurch into crises where the right wing can take the initiative, and drag us into “austerity, nationalism, and religious fundamentalism” or into new wars.

As Mason notes, the book is written to “reflect the zeitgeist”, as a series of snippets, “reportage, essay, tweet, anecdote, and cyber-psychology”. “Don’t file it under ‘social science’ — it’s journalism”.

Good, interesting journalism, though. Mason does not pretend to offer any answers as to how to revitalise the left and connect it with the “networked” young activists, but he can help prompt us to think about it.

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