country right now where we have more deaths by drug overdose then we do car accidents and this book lays out the foundation for how we got there and i'm not finished with it yet but i do think that it should be required reading if we move toward creating policy to deal with this opioid epidemic in our country. >> book tv wants to know what you are reading. and this is your summer reading list via twitter at book tv or instagram at bookótv or posted to our facebook page, facebook.com/book tv. book tv on c-span2: television for serious readers. >>

and commerce where solutions to hard problems lie. we are recording tonight's event both by c-span and for radio, so take a moment to silence your cell phones and we would like to thank jane.

your question cards on your seats, so please make use of them and write your questions down and given we will be talking about social media and tonight's program we invite you to get involved in our online conversation using the #world affairs alive, if you'd like to engage in online discussion. i would now like to introduce our moderator this evening who is an adjunct professor at the school of information at uc berkeley where he teaches a course on digital activism. he's also the founder and editor in chief of china digital times. we are delighted to have him here this evening and if you could all join me in welcoming him who introduced tonight's speaker. [applause]. >> good evening. pleasure.

i will try my best. zeynep tufekci, a contributing up in your and writer of the "new york times". what i am most amazed is that she has been published wildly about the technology, society, politics, culture. this new book-- do we have a book? "twitter and tear gas: the power and fragility of networked protest". of course, she is also a fellow academic research person, assistant professor at a school of information and it library science university: and she's

also faculty associate at center for internet and society at harvard. please join me to welcome zeynep tufekci. [applause]. >> our topic is really social media and the political mobilization, a topic that is close to my own heart. can you share with us a bit about yourself, how you came to write this book because not only because you are scholar, but also you have been in gauging and you are from turkey. >> yes, i'm from turkey and actually started out as a technology person. i started out as a programmer. i grew up in turkey, istanbul mostly, following the 1982 i was

a child in the military coup had very heady-- heavy censorship. we had one tv channel and it even before we had one tv channel and all you could watch was mostly american shows. we watched little house on the prairie. i have to tell you, it makes no sense if you are from istanbul because it's about the frontier in the middle of nowhere and where i am from there is no middle of nowhere like you dig there's empire in needed more and there's another empire and i'm like where are these people and we would watch things like that and it made no sense to me, but what made sense for the people who controlled the tv was to show that instead of any kind of news because there was a major conflict in the southeast part of turkey with the kurdish minority. there were all these other things going on, the jails are

full, so the military coup had instituted this heavy censorship so for-- i was a kid that was interested in math, science and that i would be a physicist and what happened to me is what happens to a lot of kids who grow up thinking they will be since assist is that you learn about the atom bomb and you have this at a bomb question like because you are kidding it seems like this-- and it is this horrible annihilator of technology and i thought i want a job that i can do quickly. i wanted to work quickly and i thought i wanted a profession that i would enjoy connected to math and science and not have ethical implications, so i accidentally picked computer and computer programming. >> by the way, i studied physics as well. >> there you go.

it started with me becoming a computer person. when i started working as a programmer one of my early jobs, i think my second or third job as a programmer, but i'm still very young and i was working for ibm and i was supposed to have this project where they had a mainframe that was made before i was born that was used to localize a machine that ibm had come as i couldn't figure out what to do with it and ibm back then had like a little internal intranet. there's no internet in turkey. >> 80s? >> 90s or early '90s and all of a sudden i could just get on ibm's internet and i would be like this mainframe is this thing i need to figure out. i don't know what to do and someone from the japan would here is i do it i wrote that, so

a couple things happen to. i still had like one tv channel and heavy center syrup, but all of a sudden i had a glimpse of a global communication would be like and also because i was still a teenager and like working at the company. >> is temporal? >> istanbul, yes. there was this who is this girl working here because back then things were more formal, but i experience the promise of internet, a place where people didn't know who you were you could talk. it's not like that anymore at all, but it was so liberating and i thought this is going to change everything and then the internet came to turkey and i was like sign me up, so i signed up and i got really interested in how this could be used to break censorship and how to-- i wanted to study the social sites

i switch my major. i studied sociology. i use my programmer skills mostly to pay for college and then i wanted to really come to the us partly because i wanted to study this and it would be interesting. i got accepted to grad school without even knowing what to grad school was because i just kind of-- i started trying to understand how this could change it, you know, for possible change. my journey started with the first movement i encountered with my online contact-- >> early. >> yes. i didn't get the beginning of it. i got the tail end of it, i was so curious because i want to see things for myself. i was like i'm going to those mountains and i'm going to find out how these people are using the internet. >> in mexico?

>> in mexico. one of the first things i realized is what people think is happening and what is happening is so different and because there is all of this discussion and hype about the internet and i went to these mountain villages. didn't have electricity let alone the internet. what was happening was the anti- nasty networks that had formed and had started using internet and had grabbed new places like this revolution and kind of had sort of taken it as a solidarity movement, but they were the ones using the internet. i found something really different and it was my first glance into okay this is really important and changes everything afforded them a level of protection because of the publicity. you had contemporaneous

movements crushed by the mexican military while focusing much attention on it. wasn't really happening the way the popular accounts were portraying what was happening. i found a traditional uprising, so that sort of got me started thinking about all the things that the public's changing to and then i chronicle in the book -- >> i read the book. there is so much vivid stories and cases you put in in addition to the excellent theoretical framework, so that means your book really stands out. let's fast-forward. early internet, globalization movement and in erebus spring. >> and then turkey. what happens is when the arab spring, arab uprising started i

thought this is such a historic thing because i'm a programmer and i can do data and study online, but i'd like to study surveys and just being there, so i started following the arab spring and as a sort of kind of blossomed and collapsing by both the repression and what happened -- so i was following it in my own country and there is a major movement. in fact, they happened at like three blocks from where i was born. if i was made to study a thing in the world, this is it. i jumped on a plane and went there and that's where i started sort of figuring out the analytic framework that you find in the book because until then with every movement i was telling myself a case-by-case story.

you know, occupy it is in new york and a lot of us characters. spain has in our curses. tahir is very leaderless, so i was explaining the characters country by country and then when i started the protests in a country i know very well in a city that is my city and i saw something that i had never seen in turkey before, leaderless, euphoric, very occupation, no prior organization, come from nowhere and i thought this doesn't happen in turkey and this looks like the other movements i'm following like-- of course every country has specific things, so i started thinking about how the political culture and part of this globalization from below, but i started thinking about there is

a framework to how technology is afforded this, meaning things like it enables and allowing movements to do certain things in certain ways and impacting their trajectory, so that is kind of-- that got me thinking and of course there have been other movements. >> pretty wonderful that you have technology by ground. you came from a country with a sensor set and activism is part of your growing up experience and then you studied in america and follow the movement not only intellectually, but also physically. then you actively participated and then came this book, but share with us what are the main things that in the book especially you call it so much example and arabic spring, turkey and we are all empowered

by technology here. everyone in the bay area notes technology was a good thing. what did you learn? >> here's the framework. technology is empowering because right now if you want to censor something it's hard. you can get an twitter, facebook you can get the word out. look at the post election united states. the women's march which was large was organized starting with a facebook post to a million people in the streets in a couple months. of course the organizers did a lot of work. here's the butt, there's a misleading sense of this empowerment. it's not that it doesn't empower in some ways. change the conversation. get around censorship. technology can really help do this. to understand that's why my book

also introduces some weaknesses. there are weaknesses to doing things this fast, i mean, think about climbing mount everest. a lot of people want to climb out everest because it's in their list of things they would like to do and there's an industry to help you mount everest. for local mountaineer people they know how to climb out at first and they will carry your stuff for you. they will care your backpack, extraction. about 8000 feet, thin areas dangerous, so they will are oxygen. so you are empowered to climb mount everest, but the problem is you haven't really had the time to learn how to be a mountaineer. if you have sherpas carrying all your stuff and you get above 8000 feet and if nothing goes wrong, great, but oxygen tanks

malfunction. the weather turns. so may people are climbing and you kind of have temperature issues. if you have not climbed 10 the mountains before and if you haven't learned how to be a mountaineer you find yourself above 8000 feet with the help of sherpas you are in trouble and in fact i started using this metaphor right after there were a lot of deaths on everest and i thought maybe i should stop using this metaphor, but that i found a lot of friends are in jail in egypt and elsewhere, so maybe it's a metaphor. the problem is when you scale up from zero to 100 miles from a facebook post to a big march, women's march, william-- million people maybe more what you don't have it looks like the kind of protest on the past.

the march on washington in 1963 to 10 years to get there, so when you march like that you're not just marching. you build this infrastructure. if you are in power you are looking at these people thinking if they can pull off this march because it was not easy to pull off. if they can pull off this march the power they built they can do other things like being a real mountaineer. if you can climb a big mountain you can do other things. it's the capacity you built over time. where as if use digital technology to scale up fast it's a great thing if you recognize that the first moment, but if you think it prepares you the same way years and years of building capacity and infrastructure prepares you you are misled and that's what i found with a lot of movements today including in the us right now is that they see this huge march and they are thinking we can pull this off and of course people work hard like i march

and i'm not belittling. i watch. i saw how people had put so much work in it, but three months of work will only build so much capacity and what you also don't have when you do this leaderless big thing is you don't have a means of a collective decision-making. you cannot change tactics. you go from the march. what's next? there's always a what's next. a lot of these sort of network leaderless movements start with a #. having a big march, great. what's next is the big question and how you decide this. you cannot decide this on facebook or twitter because the commercial platforms are not designed for decision-making. i mean, facebook has been set up an algorithm and is designed to keep you on the site. have you ever been on facebook just but i spent more time than i thought i would. it's designed to do that.

the whole structure is like that. if you are in a meeting, what you want and? you want it to end. the thing you want most from meetings is for them to conclude where the thing facebook is designed for is to keep you there forever. that's not a platform you can just use to make decisions. a lot of these movements i feel -- the internet is like spring in your feet. you are jumping very high in the problem is you don't have the muscles necessary to run fast. great if jumping is all you are going to do. big marches, you can do that, but the kind of infrastructure building as tactical turns, movement and collective decision-making, not only does internet not like scaling up fast does not allow you to do that easily, it may hinder you because now everyone has a twitter account and everyone has a facebook account and you have everyone speaking how do we make

collective decisions at scale. those are things i think these movements are we. it's interesting, nation. i can't say it hasn't empowered movements because it has, but i also can't say it hasn't weakened movements because in some ways if you didn't have all of this tech you would have to do things this longer wait and by the time he pulled off the march you would have time to build that capacity, so that's kind of why the title is the title. >> that's why this book to me is it's addressing both strength and weakness of those technology empowered movements today. lets go further. i have so many questions. we were talking about the instantly-- and you have it everywhere america, turkey, middle east, hong kong, taiwan, you name it.

does technology only empower protesters? >> no. >> it also empowers the states? >> it empowers the state in it so many, so for example when i grew up and wind down the internet i thought censorship will never really be a thing. this is great. we can circumvent the censorship blocks. even to this day with all the censorship technology circumvention is widely practiced and people get around the censorship. what i didn't anticipate with the early internet, which i see today's that you can't break the link between information and people. what you can do is break the link between information and credibility. you can break the link between information and figuring out what is important. so, you basically the government

isn't terribly interested in keeping you from information. it's interested in keeping you from doing certain things and they can confuse you, pledge you with information, use misinformation as a deliverance tactic. use card ability challenges and claims of fraud so that people are confused or distracted or misinformed to the point that they don't know what to do. now, this is empowering for governments because if you are social movement anyone social change you need to convince people of certain things whereas if you are a government you just need to confuse them. if you want to stop a change and everyone is like i don't know what is true and someone says this and there's all these claims and misinformation and fake news and all of that i don't know is going on. that's a very effective way to curtail and distract and curtail

the power of social movements, so in many ways the filter bill year, information overload that there is so much going on that we couldn't really figure out what's going on adult dosage in many ways just as empowering, it also i think strengthening the new form of authoritarianism that can use social media to listen to the population without letting them use power and also to confuse them and missing for them. >> misguide them. >> misguide them. >> coming back to your insights over those new technology doesn't really help at least so far for collective decision-making etc., but let's observe think about those movements. we see another thing, which is emotion playing a huge role in

those protests. it brings people together, but it's hard to make a decision. >> one of the things-- it comes more from economist and political science about why does anyone protest i mean why don't you let other people protest and win and you get sort of a part of it also. it's called the free rider question and animating a lot of these discussions and my answer is, it's a very positive experience i mean protesting is joyous, i mean, it's not joyous if you are being shot at. that's not fun anymore, but if you just say tear gas, annoying to say the least.

the first time you are teargas to you think you will die. >> have you been tear gassed? >> oh, yeah. i'm a pro at this point. you think you're going to die because you can't breathe. not being able to breathe is why waterboarding is a form of torture. you think-- of course you don't unless you have a severe condition it doesn't kill you. teargas can maybe shot at you, but teargas itself-- you get over it and then you get really annoyed in your eyes are hurting what you find is all these people will pick you up. they will wash your face if you just went through all of this together and that kind of a feeling of the people you don't know like they will come and make sure you are okay and you

are with people who kind of believe in something. you are part of something bigger than yourself. it's a form of-- this is why i think protests are empowering partly because you find people like that and you through a somewhat stressful, but very rewarding. people protest because of the joys of protest, but if you said that his cell doesn't itself with not any structure to how do you decide? >> a writer once a said i revoke therefore we are turkey went from me to we process. >> if you read the french revolution it's like the role of emotion. you can read that poland-- poland's. the motion sort of the fraternity, sisterhood things and it's very powerful, a positive thing.

martin luther king called it the love of the community. >> we remember the moment because revolutionists tactical and changes history and also the issue here is how do you get there is one thing. also, the movement is either or nothing. everything or nothing. it's hard to negotiate tactics and to compromise these necessary capacity in a political struggle. those movements are lacking. please elaborate more. >> this is partly more about movements on the left side of the spectrum. they are very ambivalent about power. is corrupting, it will be corrective all of which is true. if you sort of get near power it is corrupting. on the other hand, if you don't get near power, power can crush

you. it's not like you are safe either way. a lot of movements especially on the left side of the spectrum or even in the us like occupied they are ambivalent to engaging institutions of power to change them because they usually want to sort of crete these alternative prefiguration's and live a part of the future they wish was here except it doesn't really sustain. you can only do so much because the powers encompassing you. will give you a different example. there are paths like it's not studied as much. it's a mistake in one of the most successful movement the last 20, 30 years. i think if you look at the united states last 20 years youth civic a rights movement and the tea party movement in their own way are probably the two most successful movements.

the tea party movement starts with a protest. it starts as a protest on april 2009 and there's a really nice paper looking at is a national protest all of the us looking at where they were able to hold the protest because the weather was sunny and where they got rained out. it's a prayerful-- perfect natural experience because rain is random, so when you look at that, the places that are able to hold the protest years later have all these downstream effects, incumbents more likely to retire, tea party candidate more likely to be elected. if you have the same congress person they are more likely to vote in accordance with tea party priorities and they are afraid of primary. you don't see the same effect in places that got rained out. it's clearly the protest one of the: a few for this movement,

also. here's the difference. after they get together the tea party protesters turn into-- two things happen, they got external funding and we will talk about that. one of the things in the tea party movements that stands out is they were very much oriented towards how do we take power. how do we intervene in legislation, so they were misinformed, but they were so informed about the political process that the researchers were like these people are like social scientists. they know how do you block something and how you stop eight law from happening. they are good at that part of the thing and they also got external funding from interested rich donors that were like let's build infrastructure, so you have these two things.

primary people they don't like. they pulled the whole republican party because they are afraid of being primary. they got about 50 people elected to congress. pretty effectively blocked the second term on barack obama and if you look at the tea party research, their base is not like republican paul ryan base, but more like trump and political views. academic research is clear that the direct line from the tea party movement to trump election if you look at the politics of what the base believes in, so they arguably elected a president, so you have a movement that has succeeded by any measure. it was both the movement that was more strategic in some ways. let's look at occupied and we will go to the questions. occupied, more widespread. the thing they talked about, and equality absolutely resonance.

did they change the conversation completely. inequality came to be part of the conversation. what are the things that movement did not do? was their congressional people they elected? did they scare the democrats into adopting some of their things? no. you see them kind of show up by 2016 election and the kind of have a candidate with sanders, but by then they didn't have all of those things. also, if you want to look at the imbalance between the movement capacity building on left and right side you look at the koch brothers, which people talk about. they are on the republican side. in 2016, they spent about a billion dollars on down ballot races alone. that's infrastructure and capacity building.

it doesn't matter if you win. you are building a of the structure. there's this huge movement in the united states and have been marches and one of it offshoot is the invisibles which is try to organize congressional district by congressional district and kind of what happened with the tea party. their current funding is 1.6 million dollars and a million of it is from grassroots , so you literally have to similar movements and one of them gets together and it's like how do we change power , how do we get to it and you see this path from the presidency. the other one kind of springs up after the election and it looks very powerful. there's a lot of people in the streets and stuff going on, but if you look at capacity building they are not even at 1% of 2006

spending of 1 dollar on the other side of the political spectrum. i have not saying money does everything. that great grassroots energy, so money isn't everything, capacity building is not something independent out of the resources you put in it, so grassroots can do a lot, but it also has to be oriented. see what i'm saying? they both use technology. they're both organizing and using online things, but different trajectories and where things are going. >> thank you and we have more questions from the floor. i will start with the first one. what are some examples you have seen that successfully integrate both traditional and digital message of campaign organization and what can be taken from them? >> i kind of answer, but the thing is in 2017 of course you

you will use digital technology like the point is it street protest versus online. there's no magic to street protest either. there's no magic to anything movement does besides capacity building. that capacity can be narrative, which is it change the conversation, you change the framework. about capacity can be disruptive, civil disobedience. you refuse to go along and it can be powerful. or the capacity building in engaging institutional settings. those are the three big pillars and what successful movements do is you don't focus on i mean if you need to hold a march you do a march. you want to use facebook groups, great. you can do lots of things, but you have to sort of not think of them are treasure girl. you have to think as a successful movement what is the

capacity and signaling. a good example is think if you are in power and he saw this. what would scare you? i think that's a good way. for example, constituents scare congresspeople because they think they might be primary door voted out. they care about their job. phone calls used to scare them a lot because it signaled some capacity. now you have that kind of automated and you put in your zip code and automatically next to you. you are not us-- they are not as scared anymore. they dismiss them as robo calls, so here once again the problem isn't doing phone calls is wrong your legislator, by all means. the problem is if something is made easier it no longer signals the same threat, so if you are a movement strategist you had to think what is this sort of not

whether can we hold a march it is when we do this, what are we telling them what else we can do it's kind of like if you can climb k2 a tough mountain it is a sign you are a good mountaineer. if someone has climbed k2 unlike you are more likely to climb mount everest. if it's something that's difficult and goes to whatever the weaknesses of what you're protesting our and it depends on sort of if you try to change congress its congressional district. you have to figure out your movement repertoire so you basically building up capacity to tell the person that the thing i'm doing has teeth and you should be afraid of this and that's when you get social change. they either respond to it or give into it or you get new people in.

>> i would like to follow a bit of-- when you say signaling capacity. we sometimes mix everything together in the digital era. we are tagamet revolution, government or not necessarily talking about change of policy, making a new law or change a law or we can even talk about before that changing a story or conversation, changing people's mind. these are different levels of political communication. >> absolutely. >> can you give example of one of those different lateral-- levels? >> for example a lot of times the internet gets-- i don't like the terminal because digital technology is great or changing the narrative and it's great for changing people's minds and

that's the bedrock of social change. if you want to look at the example of the gay rights movement in the us, they have any good at using cultural tools to make a save-- case for itself for equality and when you see-- there is a trend on facebook a couple years ago, people would change their profile picture to rainbow colors to signal their support for marriage equality for gay people. that is a powerful thing because it's not just like a click, you are also signaling to your friends that this is where you stand. you are making a political statement and in some cases like in china it may just be a click, but it's a really great thing, so there's nothing about using digital tools that sometimes it's not easy and a lot of times it's really powerful. the reason i emphasize what are the weaknesses part is that i think we have heard so much

about the empowerment side that we are missing some of this, but it's not at all like i'm not encouraging or saying don't use them, not at all. they are very empowering and the other thing is if you want to organize the logistics of a march, 1963 that index cards in six months to do a lot of things right now your google spreadsheets that has real-- that is a kind of empowerment. it just doesn't come as an anna lloyd good. it comes with these side effects and downsides. >> probably even more than side effects. >> integrated. >> import and that you mention this looking at weakness of technology powered political landscape because, it's sort of the theological discussion. authoritarianism arising

everywhere. out of the happen? >> basically i think what happened is a lot of movements that were really-- let me give a example. instagram was a little company that got they quickly. i think it got like 100 million users quickly and only 11 engineers. you just scaled up very fast, just 11 engineers. something similar happened, very small number, i i don't remember the exact number for them. instagram got snapped up by facebook for a billion. those are large numbers. when use gail up that quickly-- when you scale up that quickly and if you are startup there is venture capitalists or facebook coming to get you.

when you scale up that quickly as a movement, what you're actually doing is you are scaling up, but you are facing your biggest challenge because you just burst onto the scene and there you are is this big thing with a target painted on you. facebook is not coming to buy you. a government is coming to crush you, so a lot of these movements by scaling up so fast, in fact, are making themselves those-- both known and very vulnerable at a very early stage. now, there is probably no way around this. if this is the way it is you have a movements bring up, but part of the thing is that i tried to explain to my book is that understanding this, this probably passed for a movement to say had i protect myself against it he cousin one of their big weaknesses and this will sound minor, but it's not. one of their big weaknesses is

that when they scale up so fast and so quickly and then the government is coming for them they need to switch tactics quickly because you did something and now you are facing either repression or pressure expectation and since they went from zero to 100 miles without decision-making they have a leadership that's the fact zero and starts feeling-- they are like a deer in headlights because they need a decision. what's next? where you go? have not been elected as leaders , but they are de facto and have a lot of followers on twitter, so you have these people emerge, but if you are someone in that movement and you don't like the movement you have no formal way or internal way of challenging them, so you go on twitter and start arguing with

them and this kind of internal tension at the first three months, first year post date march i have seen this in pretty much every movement i have studied is that they get big very quickly and then there is this sort of pressure on them either repression or what's next you have de facto leaders. turns out they have neither the capacity because no one is listening to them that much, but they get challenged a lot in the movement starts to splinter into these little bickering pieces and they start trying to replicate the same thing again and again and again. last i checked i think there was like a call for 15 or 20 marches on my facebook feed. are not against marches. it's fine, but there's a way in which that's reflective, not of what a considered decision that

another march is a thing, but more like we don't have a way to figure out what else to do, so we are going to repeat the cycle what happens is you do your eighth march in its solid because at some point it's not the same thing and also tactics kind of wear out. it doesn't get the same attention and if you are a person in power you are thinking led to them march. they are not in a district and then boom what happens in the case of this country for example is that 2008 election as a major turning point. is there some strategic thinking that connect this movement to say that point, so it's a tactical freeze and partly because you are doing all of this conversation and trying to make decisions on social media and as i say it's not suited to it. facebook is a platform designed

to capture your attention and sell it to advertisers. it's there to sort of grab your attention. it's good for outrage or cut elite things like these things it's good for and can be full of info-- misinformation times. it can be great. it could be empowering, but not a decision making platform, so the movement and the rest of the trajectory is that that tactics, internal tensions and in some cases like in egypt there was a coup and a huge amount of repression and probably never had a chance, so given the stakes here in some other country kind of fizzles out. occupy kind of did and we will see what happens in the us. that's kind of-- >> yeah, but regardless it is a fact that today the political

movement, social movement appear this way, leaderless. here's a question from the floor. in what way is a leaderless social movement better than a more structured movement? >> like these movements are leaderless for no reason. if you went to say 1960s and read the poster on statement put out by the people who form the democratic society and pretty much the backbone of the student movement it sounds like today people are-- they went forth. they want participation. they do not want the membership saying where all you are asked give me money. if you sign up for movements today you start getting e-mails for more money and this is not what people sign up for. they wanted to change things and they are afraid, pretty correctly that if they sort of have a rigid leadership

structure their force won't be heard and they are afraid the leader will be corrected, co-opted. in some cases, killed. it happens. the leadership has all of these genuine issues and part of the thing we talked about is the reason you want a movement is to be empowered, so when in the first uprising in january, february, 2011, the creator of the facebook page that helped organize the protest in egypt january 25, 1st he was arrested. then they realized it was him and there's a place in which it gets like taking to the palace with another student leader who had organized a lot of things. you can see they are trying to

see what would it take for you to call these people back. they don't say it like that and it's pretty clear there is nothing he can do because he's not the leader. a leaderless movement is resilient in many ways. there is no one later you can co-opt and stop the movement. a leaderless movement can be creative because you have all this energy coming-- a lot of times innovative tactics don't come from the top. they come from the bottom, so this challenge is a conduit-- the challenge is it how do we stop people and i try to be clear the book work that's not what i'm saying. the challenge is how you take this participatory energy, this more network participatory joys expressive thing, but how do you match that with decision making capacity in a new form? a form that respects the participatory sensibility so people aren't feeling like there

will is it being stolen from them so that the movement can move from step to step because if you try to say we will listen people wouldn't do it. they are in a movement to be empowered him and not to be taken away, so my argument is not at all the leaderless thing is horrible. it is that it has all these positive things and there's a reason it exists and even if you didn't like it it's not going to wait because there is a solid cultural political reason, but the way it's been practiced has meant that it's like a three legged stool and you have a couple of like to really strong ones, but one is missing, so how do you think about that one. >> also, i would add many of the movements are leaderless, but doesn't mean they don't have a spokesperson. >> they do. >> often you will have a human face. >> the problem is that person is

not necessarily empowered to speak for the movement, but they end up. there was the sort of founder of the page and he found himself in that very position as a spokesperson, but people started challenging him so much i mind that he went off social media for two years, i mean, that pension was so hard on him. if he had been more formally empowered-- >> here's probably-- we are near to the end. your two examples meaning tea party and gay rights of social mobilization movement that successfully employed social media, do you see prospects for success among any movement in authoritarian regime and if so why connect this is interesting question. authoritarian regime tend to fall quickly and out of nowhere

because very often they don't have buy-in from the population like elections might not be great for everything, but they are good for signaling what people really don't like and there are some course correction where they tend to get blindsided. for example in 1978, you see people saying iran, stabilize iraq and in 1979, boom, so that's a common pattern with authoritarian regime who fall quickly, so i don't-- it's a fool's game to predict exactly when and which one. the problem of lack of knowledge is true for the observer, also. i will say one thing, it's plausible to me that especially china is more stable as authoritarian regime because of social media. you might think they are-- i mean, you wouldn't, but the

ordinary person thinks of the great chinese firewall and thinks censoring everything, but as you know there is a lively internal social media and with hundreds of millions of people, so it's possible to me that it's a way for them to understand how much discontent there is using sentiment analysis and all the things facebook uses to understand you they may be using that to understand, so maybe the one thing that keeps locking authoritarian regimes down which is being blindsided by popular discontent, this might be a way out for them to figure out exactly how bad things are and they may become more stable. on the other hand, there is censorship they do have to implement in the amount of effort to contain collective action being organized in their tells you that it could start

and they know it could just sort of crumble quickly. i'm not going to make a prediction, but i think that is a fascinating aspect of both empowering. these can happen. >> of course, i am from china and i am personally interested in questions such as how the technology and movement transformed political structure the authoritarian regime. that's why i asked the question. this technology also empower the states particularly in a authoritarian estate and that's why i'm asking why the authoritarianism on the right in the world. >> you have social movements clearly empowered, but on the other hand authoritarianism is clear the on the rise and i

think that is partly because our old ways of ruling and our old institutions are under great fire. those are crucial things, but we do not have new institutions yet. we don't have like movements and new ways of decision-making, new ways of fighting this information, so there's all these transitions where the challengers haven't really figured out building new things whereas old-- old methods are really working and as you just said it does empower the people in power. there are all these tools available to them now. fascinating historic trends. >> there is also another aspect that in a democratic society at least more incremental political aims can be achieved such as changing a law or elect a candidate, but in authoritarian regimes very often it is all or

nothing. it's either revolution or you don't get anywhere and you will be crushed. then, even the technology empowerment movement doesn't have this process of capacity building over time and that we may always see those two peanut points. before that it could be years, dozens of years. >> that arab spring took everyone by surprise. the iranian revolution took everyone by surprise and i think that is in the nature of things is that you have this thing with this delicate balance. is going to tip, but it's kind of a fool's game to predict exactly when, but when it does it tends to be a cascade. >> the cascade only happens when the environment is ready, but

how the environment is ready is a question of economic-- not just that technology itself. >> absolutely. >> thank you. >> thank you. [applause]. >> i just want to make sure that the books are here and that zeynep can find them. >> thank you so much. that was a great conversation. thank you. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> but tv visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they are reading this summer.