Arab Spring, Anna Hazare, and now Occupy Wall Street.
Even as we gloat over the new iPhone 4S, it can be easy to forget that right now, as you read this, there are hundreds of protesters marching on Wall Street. In the post-Age of Excess, their targets are big banks that flourished through Government bailouts even as the rest of America struggled with unemployment.
The Occupy Wall Street, or the 99% movement as many have called it, follows the largely successful Anna Hazare movement in India. While the targets were different – the government rather than big banks – the issues raised by Team Anna were remarkably pertinent to those of the 99 percenters. Both were protesting against corruption and government excesses. Team Anna was galvanized into action after a series of multi-billion dollar scams and scandals erupted in the past six months that cost the country more than $50 billion over the the last few years. Public outrage, already at a boiling point, found in Anna Hazare a channel that could articulate and amplify it. Team Anna’s demands were simple: a regulatory body to check corruption with the powers to indict ministers and members of parliament.
At the peak of the Anna Hazare movement, I witnessed scenes I never thought I’d see in Independent India: busloads of people from all over the country congregating in New Delhi as the man of the hour, Anna Hazare, fasted. I thought such protests, vehemence and passion died out with Gandhi in 1948, that India could never be united enough for a cause to participate en masse. I’m glad that I was wrong; it restored a little faith in the idea of India as a nation.
Head over to Wall Street and the issues are quite similar. While the movement is still very, very small and scattered, and there is no charismatic leader as with the Anna Hazare movement, the public anger is palpable and has the power to snowball into a major movement if the protesters can narrow in on a set of demands rather than bellowing out gibberish against an enemy that, until recently, seemed invulnerable.
Whatever happens with the Wall Street movement, the 2011 will go down as a historic year when one part of the world struggled for democracy, while another questioned its democratically elected leaders. The revolution in Egypt was the inflection point that unfurled the series of events that rocked the globe. While it would be terribly complacent to compare the Arab Spring with what’s happening in Greece, Wall Street or India, it would suffice to say that 2011 is the year when the global political trajectory definitely swerved (to the right or left, only time can tell).
Social Media and the Revolution(s)
But where does technology stand amid all the tumultuousness?
The role of social media in the Arab Spring was greatly exaggerated. If tech publications were to be believe, Twitter single handedly tweeted Hosni Mubarak out of the office in Egypt, and that the fighters in Libya were hurling tweets rather than bombs at each other. The ground reality is that the Twitterati and the Facebookers represented a very small but vocal minority, of which, few were involved in the actual groundwork of the revolution.
In India, again, the media was more than happy to pump up the role of social media in the Anna Hazare movement. But I was there, I saw it with my very own eyes. When buses loaded with farmers from the Haryana hinterland arrived at the congregation, there was no doubt that Twitter and Facebook had little role to play in their participation. The majority of protesters who joined in the Team Anna campaign had little access to computers, let alone Twitter or Facebook.
In the US, the situation, predictably, has been remarkably different. The Arab world and India are still technologically backward locations. The average Indian is 100 times more likely to encounter daily power failures than have an active account on Twitter. The few who do have access – like yours truly, for instance – are far too cynical, despondent, and pure lazy to jump out of the the chair and hit the streets waving the flags of protest (again, I’ll take myself as an example).
Of course, as a first world nation, the US has a much greater proportion of its population on social networking sites. It’s been more than a few years since Twitter hit the mainstream. The average Wall Street protester is much more likely to be an educated 20 or 30 something with an extensive digital footprint. Consequently, the role of social media in this little revolution has, and will be, much greater. In fact, I’d venture that if it weren’t for social media, the number of protesters on Wall Street would have numbered in the dozens rather than thousands.
All said, these are exciting (an extremely bad choice of word, I know) times to live in. Perhaps 20 years down the line, I’ll tell my kids that I was there when the world changed. That I witnessed a historic year.
