But movements change, as does technology. “Twitter and Tear Gas” remains trenchant about how social media can and cannot enact reform. Tufekci is clear-eyed about these pitfalls, even as she rejects the broader criticisms of “slacktivism” laid out, for example, by Evgeny Morozov’s “The Net Delusion,” from 2011. At a more fundamental level, social media’s corporate infrastructure makes such movements vulnerable to coöptation and censorship. After a swift expansion, spontaneous movements are often prone to what Tufekci calls “tactical freezes.” Because they are often leaderless, and can lack “both the culture and the infrastructure for making collective decisions,” they are left with little room to adjust strategies or negotiate demands. The speed afforded by such protest is, however, as much its peril as its promise. Whereas “older movements had to build their organizing capacity first,” Tufekci argued, “modern networked movements can scale up quickly and take care of all sorts of logistical tasks without building any substantial organizational capacity before the first protest or march.” For Tufekci, the use of the Internet linked these various, decentralized uprisings and distinguished them from predecessors such as the nineteen-sixties civil-rights movement. Tufekci drew on her own experience of the 2011 Arab uprisings, whose early mobilization of social media set the stage for the protests at Gezi Park, in Istanbul, the Occupy action, in New York City, and the Black Lives Matter movement, in Ferguson. In “ Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest,” from 2017, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci examined how a “digitally networked public sphere” had come to shape social movements. (Well-timed appeals for the police department to “suck my dick,” it turns out, can be as effective online as off.) As some of June’s uprisings evolve into today’s encampments, the long revolutionary summer of 2020-made all the longer by quarantine-continues apace online. And city-council meetings, which had already migrated to Zoom because of the pandemic, have come to host the hallowed activist tradition of town-hall agitation. Webinars about police abolition now constitute their own subgenre. There are e-mail and phone-call templates, pre-scripted and mass-circulated. Protest guides, generated from years of on-the-ground activist experience, are readily shared over Twitter and Instagram, telling readers how to blur faces in photographs or aid in de-arrests. Screenshots of bail-fund donations urging others to match continue to proliferate. Amid cell-phone footage of protests and toppling statues, the Internet has been further inundated with what we might call activist media. Indeed, the struggle in the public square has unfolded alongside a takeover of the virtual one. Every historic event has its ideal medium of documentation-the novel, the photograph, the television-and what we’re witnessing feels like an exceptionally “online” moment of social unrest. In the course of June, uprisings expanded at unprecedented speed and scale-growing nationally and then internationally, leaving a series of now iconic images, videos, and exhortations in their wake. Three nights later, our feeds streamed with live images of protesters burning Minneapolis’s Third Police Precinct. On May 25th, the circulation of video footage capturing George Floyd’s murder by four Minneapolis police officers quickly incited local protests. Three months of quarantine taught us to live online, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that it was what we saw online that sent us back onto the streets.
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