ICTlogy

Guadalupe Martínez (Universidad de Granada. Expert in the Tunisian electoral process)
The Tamarod (rebellion) movement. Expression in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Bahrain, Palestine, Iraq.

The Tamarod phenomenon takes place in a specific geographical area — the one that was part of the Arab Spring in 2011-2012 — but an area that is expanding — now towards Syria. But we have to take into account that not all Arabic countries are experiencing this movement, and not all countries are from the Arabic world (e.g. Turkey).

The Tamarod movement stands for rebellion and is liked with the Arab Spring, but it is not exactly its extension. It begins circa Spring 2013, a major visibility during Summer 2013 and a later phase of active action during Fall 2013. The name Tamarod is used in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Bahrain, Palestine an Iraq. In Libya it takes the name of Rafd (rejection) and in Palestine as Qawen (resistance). The focus of reference is Egypt 30 June 2013 and it is an interconnected movement with the Net as a main node (especially Facebook and Twitter).

Common characteristics

There is a sociological mimesis: young, urban and educated citizens with experience in activism.

None of the movements questions the legitimacy of the governments, or how they did get to the government, but they do question how they use power once in office. This does not mean that there are no specific characteristics in each case/country: indeed, the focus of pressure is different as there is a defective illiberal democracy in Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya; a pluralist quasi-comptetitive authoritarianism in Morocco; or an restrictive hegemonic authoritarianism in Bahrain. And the distribution of power is also different: presidential republics (Egypt, maybe Palestine), parliamentarian republics (Tunisia, Iraq, Libya), absolutist monarchy (Bahrain), and constitutional (though authoritarian) monarchy (Morocco).

So, in general, the movement(s) aim at dissolving the ruling institutions, but they do put the accent or focus in different and specific aspects of their respective institutions. Tamarod is a movement for democracy, and in no case is a movement against a specific group (e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood or the islamists). Thus, the relationship of Tamarod with the parties of each country depends on the context, the inner institutional structure of the country, the very same nature of the parties, etc.

The role of the security forces has also been slightly different in each country, ranging from frontal opposition (and fight), no implication at all, or even a positive implication — most of the cases, though, feature a negative implication of the security forces.

Lali Sandiumenge (Journalist. Author of the blog: guerrerosdelteclado.wordpress.com)

The Kifaya platform is born in Egypt in 2004, made up by experienced activists (“from the previous generation”) to ask for dire reforms in Mubarak’s government. Kifaya gathers, thus, people that have taken part in many other protests. The new thing is that the young wing of Kifaya trains other activists on how to use the new tools of technopolitics.

In 2006 there’s the blossoming of the islamist blogosphere. Youngsters belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood thus demand through the Net the freeing of imprisoned activists and, on the other hand, claim having a voice on their own without the mediation of media.

In Mahalla, during 2006 and especially in 2008, there are worker protests, which in 2008 becomes a complete riot, not only about labour rights but about basic needs like food (e.g. rice, which had seen its prices sky-rocketing).

The 6th of April Youth Movement is created in Spring 2008 to support the riots in Mahalla and it becomes the first hybrid movement which is born online but supports an offline movement and vice-versa: to try and spread an offline movement making strong an online movement.

After the murder of Khaled Mohamed Saeed (May-June 2010), a page is created on Facebook and quickly becomes a central forum of political debate around democracy (and the lack of it) in Egypt.

Little by little, the riots in Tunisia spread towards Egypt where activism escalates. The protests then quickly become an international unrest and evolve in parallel in both countries. Besides blog pages, Facebook pages, etc. in Arabic, increasingly lots of activists publish in English to escalate the conflict and place it outside of the region’s boundaries. At last, a general call is made to take Tahrir Square. Mubarak blocks the Internet, causing a Streisand effect and making the movement even more visible and gathering more international support.

Javier Toret (Investigador. Trabaja entre filosofía, política, psicología y tecnología, Datanalysis15M)

There are several factors that made the 15M movement blast, that generated a movement that became unrest and evolved into a huge movement.

There is a process of learning, specially in the field of technopolitics. “Hacking + activism + netstrike = hacktivism”. Added to this process, there is a context of an economic crisis, which is one of the determinants, but not the determinant of the 15M movement. Indeed, it is more important the political crisis around the legitimacy of democracy and a need to regenerate it: #nolesvotes, Generación NiNi against the bipartidism, Juventud Sin Futuro, etc.

Technopolitics is way beyond cyberactivism and is not at all slacktivism. Technopolitics is an idea of intervention, is feeding back the physical and the digital layers to improve political activism.

The 15M movement started in social networking sites: 82% of the initial participants new about the movement online — especially Facebook. 1.5M were very active and circa 8.5 participated in any way. 76% of the participants came not from traditional political activism: it was initiated by a brand new generation of activists.

The different movements were interconnected: 31% of the participants of the #nolesvotes movement then came to participate in the 15M. In other words, the 15M movement was slowly born in many other movements that evolved, merged and exploded into a new one.

There is a multilayer activism, which begins in the physical layer (i.e. the streets and squares), then up to the digital layer to try and impact the mass media and political layers.

What the 15M does is to gather all the energy spread across different social networking sites and digital platforms, and to make it go out of the Internet and onto the “plazas” or camps.

After that, the movement boosts. Searches on the internet about the movement, or even keywords as “democracy” peak after the camps, the network dramatically increases its size, a network of camps and replicating nodes is created, nodes are empowered, etc.

Israel Solorio (Researcher. YoSoy132 Movement, Mexico)

In Mexico is difficult to think about any social movement without taking into account the Zapatist movement and how they used technological tools for their own political actions. Other movements that affected were, of course, the Spanish Indignados movemement of the 15M, and also the killings of Tlatelolco during the student mobilizations in 1968. Among many others.

A difference from the YoSoy132 movement and the 15M movement and Democracia Real Ya is that the Mexican case was totally unintended. It all starts with a boycott to candidate Peña Nieto at the Universidad Iberoamericana.

The movement achieved major visibility through individual spokesmen that made it to the headlines and mainstream media, especially TV channels — though a specific individual ended up being hired by the main corporation, Televisa, which was a blow to the credibility of the movement.

Differently from the Spanish 15M movement, which was against political parties in general, YoSoy132 was definitively against the candidate Peña Nieto. Then, when Peña Nieto won the elections and came to office, the movement went into a sort of stand by state, with some action, but mainly remaining latent.

Discussion

Q: how are these movements being populist (or not)? Martínez: it is difficult to state. Many times they are just asking for a genuine regeneration of democracy, but it is also true that, in the Arab region, they often use populist messages and iconography to raise awareness and wake up people by the feelings.

Q: do you think mainstream mass media are censoring the news they do not like, or is it just that they do not understand or do not how to explain the movements? Martínez: it is interesting to state that many media — especially those that are against the government — in the Arab region, media are actually reinforcing and amplifying the movements. Toret: it really depends on the place. In any case, it is true that it is a common characteristic that these movements try to break the circle of power made up by governments and mass media and that determine the public agenda. Solorio: the role of media has been evolving along time. Initially they amplified the movement, as they wanted to foster political debate (or fight the candidate), but now they are more against it and aim at its destruction.

More information

• Collective notes taken on Titanpad.
• Aggregator at RebelMouse.

During the year 2012, the research programme on Communication and Civil Society of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute carried on a series of research seminars on Internet, net neutrality, hacker ethics and digital culture and on Internet, institutional crisis and new institutionalism — the later, coordinated by myself.

The result of that work is the recently issued working paper La reinvención de la democracia en la sociedad-red [The reinvention of democracy in the network society], coordinated by Arnau Monterde Mateo, Adrià Rodríguez and myself, and which has been published in Spanish.

I want to very sincerely thank Arnau Monterde for the opportunity he gave to me to take part and coordinate one of the seminars, and acknowledge the huge amount of work that Arnau Rodríguez devoted in putting all the pieces together. On the other hand, the final paper would not have been possible without the contributions of the participants that attended the seminars. In no particular order, and besides Arnau, Adrià and I, those were Pablo Aragón, Cristina Cullell, Débora Lanzeni, Carlos Sánchez Almeida, Javier Toret, Gala Pin, Carlos Tomás Moro, Joan Coscubiela, Gemma Galdón, Tomás Herreros, Rommy Morales, Pedro Miguel Da Palma Santos, Joan Subirats and Alicia Domínguez. A warm thank you to all of them.

Abstract

From the Arab Spring, through movement occupywallstreet or 15M it has been opened a new cycle of political network movements which propose many new elements regarding the political use of new technologies and the Internet to collective action. These new movements see the network not only as a tool or battlefield, but also as an organizational form, establishing a relationship that commonly has been linked to ethics and ways to do of hacker communities.

Moreover, the financial crisis in Europe is deepening blocking political institutions that have been building since the beginning of modernity. This crisis is expressed not only in the inability of these institutions to tackle the current economic, social and political, but also in its complicity with the mechanisms of financial dispossession. Such institutional crisis determines the need to exercise both a critical and process of invention and construction work that starts from the new technological possibilities and lessons of network movements, hacker culture and free software, which enable reinventing institutional and constitutional forms, and therefore also of democracy itself.

Download

Monterde, A., Rodríguez de Alòs-Moner, A. & Peña-López, I. (Coords.) (2013). La Reinvención de la democracia en la sociedad red. Neutralidad de la Red, ética hacker, cultura digital, crisis institucional y nueva institucionalidad. IN3 Working Paper Series, WP13-004. Barcelona: UOC-IN3.

David Fernàndez. Parliaments. The CUP: one foot on the street, one foot in the Parliament.

We are living the complete exhaustion of the current regime, including a deep defeat of the ideologies of the left.

One of the main factors of this exhaustion and defeat is the privatization of politics: the statement that politics have nothing to do with the citizenry. This paved the path of the total privatization not only of politics but of everything that was the common interest, ending up in the privatization of the welfare state.

Should we recover the institutions as we knew them? Should social movements enter these institutions?

Indeed, there already are many institutions working within the system but with different mindsets such as Coop57, SomEnergia. Xarxa d’Economia Solidària or La Directa.

The CUP benefits from all the social movements that are initiated just after the death of the Dictator Franco and the recovery of the Democracy in Spain. Of course, all the anti-globalization movements of the late XXth century and beginnings of the XXIst century. Deeply rooted in municipalism, the CUP begins to create local assemblies to concur to the municipal elections all over Catalonia, being part of the Parliament out of the question.

But the changes in the way of doing politics and the change in the sensibility of Catalonia regarding nationalism and independentism, the CUP decide to concur to the national elections and win three seats in the Parliament.

The three main courses of action are popular activation, civil disobedience and building of alternatives.

It is a crucial strategy to recover the commons and the common good for the citizenry. In material or infrastructural terms — recovering the assets and the strategic resources of a territory/community — but also in terms of superstructure — recovering the governance of the several institutions that have exert power over the citizenry or can influence public decision-making.

Power is not a space, but a relationship. Thus, if one aims at changing power, one has to change a relationship of power, a relationship usually between two parts: a third party and oneself. Changing relationships of power, thus, begins with changing one’s own practices.

Ways the whole thing can change: feudalist capitalism , democratic fascism or any other form of subtle authoritarianisms, or an egalitarian solution.

Discussion

Arnau Monterde: how is made compatible being in the Parliament and being an assembly-based party on the outside? David Fernàndez: “It’s complicated”. The way it is done is creating 15 work groups within the organization which translate their diagnosis and decisions to the MPs so that they can use the information and decisions in the Parliament. There are also geographic groupings that help to vertebrate the territory.

Ismael Peña-López: technically speaking, the commons is a privatization of the public goods. Is privatization the way to (re)build the common sphere? David Fernàndez: we should separate the goals from the ownership of the commons. If the commons are headed towards providing a public good, this is what is most important, more important than technical ownership. There is no much difference between common and public. In this scenario, private/common ownership is only a second best when one cannot dispute the design of the State and how power is distributed.

Ada Colau. Citizenry. The PAH: from the ILP to the ‘escraches’

We are living the end of a regime, kidnapped by corrupt political en economic leaders. And the regime needs a renovation. How?

How do we rethink social organizations? There is no regeneration of democracy without a strong and well organized civil society. The solution, if any, is not expected from the institutions that corrupted democracy from within. Only a watching and alert civil society will enforce the correct government, as power naturally tends towards corruption.

This social organization, besides its role to watch the power, needs also new forms. Because most organizations nowadays have not aged very well. This includes political parties but also labour unions and NGOs: organizations that were very useful when they were created but that have become useless to provide answers for today’s problems.

The problem is that we [Spaniards] have not been educated into Democracy. We have always been told not to participate in politics. We need to be critical against corrupt institutions, but also self-critical with ourselves and our not-being involved with politics.

And empowerment is the word, the way to do politics (again), to win back for the citizenry the agoras, the squares, the collective discourse, etc.

Back in 2008, before the government and the population in general realized the problem of the housing speculation in Spain, the Plataforma d’Afectats de la Hipoteca (PAH, Platform for people affected by their mortgage) was created to weave a network of people with a common interest. The worst error then was staying in “maximalism”: remaning on the theoretical approach, on the macro approach, on raising awareness on the issue of evictions and personal debt… but not going into action, addressing specific issues, very concrete problems.

The new initiatives of the PAH then attacked several issues in the short, medium and long run, with plural strategies that would address both the macro and the micro levels, the economic crisis and the individual drama of a given citizen, etc.

The Platform succeeded in mobilizing people that had no experience in being mobilized and that did not even had the will to do it: instead of angry people aiming to fight for their rights, the Platform found devastated people being stigmatized by the society. The Platform provided a new mindset, a new context, and a new strategy to overcome the problem: instead of lamenting oneself, fighting for one’s legitimate rights.

Another success was empowering people: it is you that will solve your problems, not anyone else, not the Platform. But the PAH will empower you so that you are able to solve your own problems: no one will defend your case better than yourself. But by oneself does not mean alone, but, on the contrary, collectively and, above all, in a shared way.

All this activity has been done with almost no resources. The person that becomes empowered is reborn and helps others to go through the same process. High level politics can be done with almost no money.

A last resource for activism is civil disobedience. If a law is unjust, it is not only fair but a duty to fight the law back by disobeying it.

Besides civil disobedience, and in parallel, the mainstream way was also taken, by means of a popular legislative initiative. Of course no practical success came out of it, but two major successes came out of it: raising huge awareness on the topic and de-legitimizing the ones in the Parliament that were proven to be useless to citizen problems even if those were channelled within the system itself.

The main challenge is how to substitute the old mechanisms and institutions with new ones. There is a need for some form of organization: participative, non-hierarchical, democratic… but a form of organization in any case.

Discussion

Q: changes, but towards which way? what scenario can be envisioned? Ada Colau: the horizon is not clear and, above all, we should not rush it. What is clear is that we have to open processes of debate and processes to design this new scenarios. And do not delegate these processes but, instead, be ourselves the main actors. Some urgent initiatives or issues to be addressed is fighting corruption, sanitizing institutions by changing their design (by changing the regulatory framework that shape them), etc.

Q: how do we design the communication strategy? what kind? Ada Colau: this is very difficult because mainstream media react depending on many factors. On the other hand, media tend to identify the movement with one spokesman or visible head. Thus, even if the movement plans a decentralized strategy based on a collective message, while the identification with a specific spokesman works for the movement, ok with it.

Arnau Monterde: how does the movement replicate? Ada Colau: empowerment is without any doubt the most important part of it. Notwithstanding, replication has been an issue from the very beginning: the movement should be able to be replicated, de-localized, decentralized, so that it became sustainable and could grow. Information, procedures, etc. have always been shared and socialized. The movement has taught not only the end users or the members, but also the professionals have been retaught in new ways of sharing their expertise and provide advice openly.

Ismael Peña-López: what is the legitimacy of a Platform such as the PAH to speak with other institutions? Ada Colau: first of all, elections have been proved not to legitimate parties, especially when they do not carry out their own political programmes. On the other hand, anyone can represent the defence of human rights: what the PAH does is to remember that human rights cannot be violated, and asking for respect for the human rights is a duty for everyone.

Roger Palà. Media. Mediacat and the Yearbook of the media silences.

Media are suffering a crisis of legitimacy as important as parties’. Indeed, media are reproducing all the bad practices that other powers are. How can we re-legitimze media? How can we return media to their role as watchdogs and not as part of the power? This crisis of legitimacy has been running for at least 15 years. If they have emerged now is due to two main reasons: (1) the financial and economic crisis that have deepened the crisis of journalism, as they lack more now resources and (2) the emergence of social networking sites.

There has been an important devaluation of contents due to lack of resources but also due to accommodation of the professional. This has ended up with bad practices like do not checking the sources, lack of self-criticism, etc. But changing the system from within (i.e. Association of Journalists) is very difficult, so the Grup Barnils opted for initiating some activities “in the margins”. With Media.cat a project was created to point at bad practices in journalism, creating reports on the state of the question of media, etc. The flagship project is the Yearbook of the media silences.

But the point (of the yearbook and in general) is not a general criticism against media, but raising awareness on the crisis of the sector, the reasons for the crisis and the ways to try to fix it. The approach, in fact, is rather constructive and awards the good practitioners more than condemning the bad practitioners.

The Yearbook has had increasing success and one of the reasons is twofold. On the one hand, because it has raised a lot of awareness on the issue and, on the other hand, because it has relied on the citizens to back the project, through crowdfunding initiatives but not only, as citizens have spread the word about the whole process and not only about the final outcome.

The con side of the initiative is that it is a one-time-a-year thing, not very fairly paid and with difficulties of sustainability.

The good thing is that despite being a very small collective, an impact has been made, especially in the field of media.

Discussion

Q: is it true that social networking sites make it more difficult to hide things? Roger Palà: absolutely. A good thing of social networking sites is that they break the monopoly of the agenda-setting.

Arnau Monterde: what is the future of media? is it possible a network-based model? will we see for long the traditional model of mass-media? linking the economic crisis with the crisis of media, is it legitimate? Roger Palà: it is absolutely true that money enables professionalism and professionalism usually enables quality content. This does not mean that media have to be big: we are witnessing the emergence of small initiatives that, despite being small, they are 100% professional and are looking for new niches and new ways of working. We will surely see a new cosmos of few big media and a constellation of small media living together.

Q: isn’t there room for citizen journalism? Roger Palà: yes, sure, but the problem is sustainability in the long run. Is it possible to sustain quality and engagement and professionalism without a comfortable economic position? Maybe, but stability helps a lot in sustainability.

Lourdes Muñoz Santamaría. Parties. PSC BCN: network party, open party

Political parties do have to change, but they have to keep their ideology and the focus on the common interest.

But it is true that we are in a change of paradigm and a change of era. And thus institutions have to change, especially to be able to understand the needs of people and provide valid answers. To do so, politics have to be much more participated. And social-democracy is speciallly fit to lead this transformation, as they believe in serving people from the power of institutions.

There is a problem when people, as individuals, have taken up web 2.0 and social networking sites as multi-purpose tools, but institutions have not. Partly because the paradigm of sharing is not in the ADN of most institutions.

Indeed, sharing relies heavily on access to information and access to knowledge.

The idea behind the open party is to apply to a party the concept of open governance that applies to governments. That is, openness in decision-making, access to information, participation, engagement, etc.

The main reasons to carry on this project is, above all, conviction. The necessary reformation of the PSC-Barcelona was not only about content, but also about forms.

And this change is especially about changing all the processes. Smoothly, so that no-one is left behind, and everyone can have a chance to learn the new ways.

One of the debates just before the project was whether the party needed a “cyberpartisan” or a “web 2.0” initiative. But the party decided that people were not “normal” vs. “digital”, but a single one: so, the idea of the open party is that it will cut across all sections and initiatives.

Principles of the network and open party:

• Transparency: all decisions, all debates are open. All the information required for participation is openly available.
• Virtual participation is an effective right. Deliberative democracy, e-voting. There is too much distance between “liking” a status in the party’s Facebook page and participating in a local meeting of the party. These two worlds have to be bridged.
• Project-based work, instead of department-based work. This enables people to participate in whatever their interests are, without having to participate on a binary basis: all or nothing.

Goals:

• Adequate the party to the society.
• The conviction that the public space has changed, and thus have changed the roles of political intermediaries, media, the way the public opinion is made up and shaped.
• Increase the possibilities to commit with a party, with a specific initiative.
• Combine openness in deliberation with spaces of privacy that enable consensus and negotiation, without entering into opacity.
• Build a deliberative democracy.
• Stablish more ways of direct relationship with the elected representatives.

Discussion

Roger Vilalta: are big traditional parties still on time to retune with the citizenry? Or is everything already lost? Lourdes Muñoz: this is certainly the question. What is clear is that things will never be the same. An obligation for the party is to do this reform well and quick. And just hope that the new procedure will attract if not new people, at least the ones that left.

Marta Berenguer: does openness represent a chance to break the discipline of the party? Lourdes Muñoz: a debate has to be as open as possible, but the final position has to be unique. Thus, party discipline is good not to mislead the voter and to have a higher negotiating power [note the Spanish context to frame this answer]. What fails, thus, is not party discipline, but the internal dialogue and debate.

Joan Carles Torres: is it to believe initiatives as such, or is it just make up and marketing? The problem is that transparency has become a cool trend that everyone seems to be embracing. So, can politics be transformed with initiatives like this? Lourdes Muñoz: it is true, it is difficult. But we have to begin somewhere and this is one way to do it. Let us just hope that it works, that it can spark a change from within.

Q: what can guarantee that transparency and participation will actually be enabled? Lourdes Muñoz: there are no guarantees. This is just a beginning, a new way to try to transform how the party works on its inside (especially) and towards the outside (in more general terms). There are three problems to be addressed: learn how to facilitate; how to identify the relevant stakeholders; how to put the decisions made into practice.

More information

Post democràcia, partit obert, by Lourdes Muñoz Santamaría.