“Those who make peaceful revolt impossible will make violent revolt inevitable” –John F. Kennedy.
There is no beauty in real, angry protest. In the worst of situations, tear gas will be released onto crowds, and policemen with hard plastic shields will press against angry bodies. The building blocks of civilizations, brick and stone and cement, become weapons in the hands of the desperate. Smoke inevitably rises from somewhere in the back, from trashcans, and windows, and empty pepper spray bottles. When it’s your issue, it’s no different. If the water cannon goes off in your face, you will stumble backwards, and hope that one of the hands of the nearly 300 people there, angry for the cause, are also willing to catch you. When it’s your issue, each movement must, for the sake of a better world, choose the thing no weak man could—to try and make change despite the abuses, despite the obstacles, in a nonviolent way. But weak men exist within movements, and even for the strongest, choices like these often don’t feel like choices at all; violence is coercive, oppression is consuming. This is the line, old as human interaction, between violence and peace.
Uprisings are nothing but numbers. People are nothing but numbers. A Social Security number. A student ID number. You log onto a website, any website, with an IP address, a number that signifies you. The website records that you, +1, visited the site. The website has the power to remember your number, the binary code that makes up your letters and numbers, to log you back in with your human identifiers once you come back, but because it is a large system, it can only see you as your number. The action is swift. You do not notice.
Your number is not important, not alone anyway. Governments understand the importance of you as a collective actor only. One man, quietly killed in Tiananmen Square wouldn’t have made the news. The government probably would have ignored him. He is a manageable threat, finite. The people of Egypt are accessing Twitter. The youth of Taiwan are screaming. They hardly know what kinds of numbers they want, just not the immediate and dreaded numbers that some might call progress. Our ability to quantify humanity is expanding, and while bare numbers have never been a symbol of humanity in the past, reality is showing that, as the world changes, there is nothing more human than being a number.
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Governments understand the importance of you as a collective actor only.
They use our numbers to their advantage. Your voter ID number is a very important one to politicians. Not having enough numbers is devastating. Vote for me! I’ve done it all! I’ve got the numbers to back it up! Voters, campaign funds, connections. That’s democracy. Our power as citizens is only in our numbers. The person’s email is easily ignored, but the People’s is not. Work in a politician’s office, you’ll see. Every correspondence with constituents is kept, but the actual email, the letter, the death threat are deleted. They live on only in the databases filled out by interns who check, “Texting while driving law—positive” as the point of the message.
Furthermore, our individual, national numbers are then crunched, beaten, prodded and pushed back at us. That’s politics. A number can have devastating strength in the hands of a politician. Raising the minimum wage is mostly controversial because we can’t decide whether or not increased wages will make the working class save or spend— somewhere out there are the numbers to support either side. The movement is large, or it isn’t. It’s all relative.
Democracy definitionally requires the so-called strength in numbers of the common person. Common man, communal strength, collective action. Theoretically, that meant that the more people you have, the more power you have. But the numbers show, it’s not true.
Collective action was first used for economics by a man named Mancur Olsen in 1965. Olsen was trying to describe a phenomenon he saw in the world; how government policies were passed when the majority of the people didn’t benefit from them at all. The classic example is sugar; there are more people that benefit from having a lower price of sugar than from a quota, but the quota remains. The reason, he says, is that strength lies in organization of numbers, not numbers alone. It’s the way you present the numbers, crunch them, poke them, prod them into angry human form; that’s when they become effective. Sugar producers are easy to organize, their goal is very clear. Sugar consumers are much more difficult—there are very few people willing to fight for a low price of sugar because the increase in price is spread out over everyone in small amounts. Everybody hurts, but not enough to do anything about it.
A problem then starts to form with collective action. If not the majority, whose numbers, whose voices are we listening to? Why on Earth is our example sugar and not protest, not conflict, not violence? The real problem with the increase in the price of sugar is that, to most, it has become benign. We are complacent. For the same crimes, the government of England had a war on their hands. Where is our war?
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The war is in the protests—in the people who have the mass and the motivation to organize. Here is your collective action. The most public of the movements gather in squares outside government buildings, defying the world powers like Russia, China, and the US. The most desperate make the news—self-immolation was not a word in our vocabulary until monks started setting themselves on fire in Tibet. The smallest happen quickly, and are over just as fast. You do not notice.
Taiwan, a country we are legally obligated to protect should China ever attempt to annex it, is a large spot of American ignorance—of those who have sworn to protect it. As communism rose in the mainland, democracy was forced to the little island; the tiny antithesis to what is now the world’s second largest economy. Taiwan still bravely asserts that it is the true Republic of China, and the people are fiercely protective of it, even as their status in the UN is slowly being chipped away by the economic and political might of the mainland. If the students feel the recent economic treaty with China is a threat to their democracy, then they are going to make their voices heard. They are peaceful for now, but while their President speaks only of the importance of the rule of law, they are growing desperate. Taiwan is sitting on the ancient line.
Through it all, the people are saying that secret trade agreements are not for Taiwan. “This isn’t the democracy we want,” they say, and they are willing to fight for that distinction. Right now, the democracy Taiwan wants is being blasted with water cannons and beaten with batons in Taipei. Taiwan’s democracy is in the students far from home, making Facebook pages for support, and searching the Korean and Japanese press for news of home. These people want to be more than numbers, within their home or far away, stacked up against Chinese influence, they want to be recognized. Their democracy is a sunflower painted on hundreds of signs held outside the government building in Taipei. There is no beauty in angry protest, but in peaceful activism, for now, there can be sunflowers and there can be hope.
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But who will see the sunflowers?
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram are the tools of your sister, your besties, and that aunt who doesn’t understand that, “no means no” applies to Candy Crush, too. They are bright, clean forums that have become strange necessities, running in the background for many. Log-ins are as automatic as checking your phone; automatic text, notification and email updates are available on request. These cool-colored, clean-lined websites were only ever designed as thoughtless communicators, meant for staying in touch with those you already know.
But then, a strange contrast began to appear on the clean webpages, designed originally to be void of chaotic lines. Protesters, beaten bloody by their government put up pictures of blackened eyes and tear gas. People paid attention, and as the numbers grew, so did the allure of what social media can do for movements all around the world.
Hey, you! Yeah, you! Like my Facebook page! Fight for my cause!
This is not your father’s revolution. In 2011, Egyptian protesters used Twitter to live-tweet events for the Western world to see, and the Western World responded. People came from across the world to lend their voices, lend their number to the movement, because of what they saw online; this revolution can organize itself like no other. It wasn’t the news of the uprisings in the Ukraine and Turkey and Russia that brought the events to the attention of the international community. It was the pictures of lights exploding in the background, of bricks in midair, and of bleeding men propped up by buildings after being beaten for advocating gay rights. It was pictures that were spread to millions in a virtual heartbeat, pictures with captions like “This is happening right now” with the subtle undertone: What are you going to do about it?
People are understanding the power of numbers in new and important ways. More specifically, groups are learning. Businesses, activist groups, the rich and poor alike are begging for our digital attention, our retweets and our Facebook likes. The mothers of over 200 kidnapped, Nigerian schoolgirls began tweeting #BringBackOurGirls, and the world responded. The most retweeted hashtag on Twitter—that’s a pretty big number. To win in the 21st century means to fight a war on two fronts. One battle takes place on the steps of the capital building. It’s mothers with signs, women who have no option to be violent on a planet whose violence has disrupted their world, yelling at politicians. Another is a struggle for attention in the international media. You cannot win, if there ever was a victory, without both anymore. Social media can tip the balance; the walk away from the ancient line and firmly into the ground of nonviolence is easier. Violence requires the immediate knowledge of wrongdoing, and the subsequent passion that is created. Gathering supporters from all ends of the globe means that your movement has power, and perhaps even passion, but not the kind of passion that can incite a movement to arm itself. It’s not a solution, but it’s a start.
There is power in digital sympathy. It would seem futile to have a man 6,000 miles away supporting you from his couch, an armchair warrior. With enough couches, they say, even China will listen. It would seem futile, but there is no futility in peace.
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You are a number but your interests are numerous. Your interests are now your power. Your images are a new, unmeasurable, kind of power. Not only do the sunflowers of Taiwan exist, they are accessible to the world. Your power can be used to make “inevitable” violence preventable. The armchair warriors are stirring. As parts of movements, of protests, of uprisings, we will never cease to want to be individuals, but the system allows us only to be part of a group, a number. The natural series of events in social activism is changing, because the rules are changing, because sites like Facebook and Twitter, the things that represent you, can ensure us of something primal—that we matter somehow. You have two choices—the next time you see something like Boko Haram, or like the Egyptian or Taiwanese revolutions on your Twitter feed, you can ignore it, or you can do something about it.