Un essai de Zeynep Tufekci qui constitue un réel rebond sur son livre Twitter & les gaz lacrymogènes, en reprenant ses travaux à la lueur des manifestations actuelles aux Etats-Unis (mais on croirait y reconnaître également ce qui se passe en Europe, dans tous les pays que l’on considère pourtout comme « démocratiques »).
Zeynep Tufekci
By Zeynep Tufekci
Opinion Columnist
Sept. 21, 2024
The year 2024 started out looking as if it would be a momentous one for political protests. All winter and spring, college campuses were aflame in anger and conflict and as summer approached, the Democratic National Convention threatened to be engulfed by street demonstrations in a potential repeat of the tumultuous 1968 party convention.
The year was momentous, all right, but not for the reasons it seemed. Mass protests had already been showing diminishing returns, sometimes drawing big crowds but rarely getting proportionally big results. Now, 2024 looks like the end of the road, at least for the kind of power that such mass protests once had, a power that has defined political action in America and in democracies around the world for decades.
Look at the campuses that seized so much attention last winter and spring. Over the summer, while protesters scattered to pursue internships or wait tables or help out at home, many institutions quietly changed the rules regarding political action. Mother Jones reported that dozens of institutions of higher education, in charge of nearly 100 campuses, were “effectively banning many forms of protest” with new regulations going far beyond the “time, space and manner” restrictions that were already in place.
Students will still raise their voices, of course, but don’t count on seeing many big encampments, nor administrators paralyzed for months on end, unsure how to deal. The balance of power has tilted sharply back in their favor, where it is likely to stay for a while.
The Democratic convention, meanwhile, saw sizable, energetic marches most days opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza — a stance that Democrats overwhelmingly support. But when the dust settled, there was no sign of any shift in policy from the Kamala Harris camp. It wouldn’t even let a single Palestinian American, a Georgia state legislator, give a brief speech mentioning the plight of Palestinians while wholeheartedly endorsing Harris.
If anything, the antiwar movement departed Chicago in a weaker position, with less leverage than it had when it arrived.
Thousands of people surging into the street or taking over college campuses, cheering on fiery speeches, presenting demands, chanting slogans — that familiar model won’t go away entirely. Especially not if a certain former president wins re-election, an event that could prompt millions to march. But as much as it pains me to say it, protesting just doesn’t get results anymore. Not the way it used to. Not in that form. It can’t.
Those in power have figured out how to outmaneuver protesters: by keeping peaceful demonstrators far out of sight, organizing an overwhelming police response that brings the threat of long prison sentences, and circulating images of the most disruptive outliers that makes the whole movement look bad.
It works. And the organizers have failed to keep up.
The digital platforms they rely on make it difficult to impose any discipline on the message being communicated. Crackpot agitators and off-the-wall causes attach themselves more easily than ever. Conflict erupts. Fueled by the drama-loving algorithms of social media platforms, the movements descend into ugly public bickering.
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Hell, no, we won’t go! The whole world is watching! No justice, no peace! R.I.P. the era when big protest marches, civil disobedience and campus encampments so often changed the course of history. It was a good run, wasn’t it?
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The irony is that the very tool that has undermined the power of the protests — the internet — initially contributed to some of the most spectacular protests in history, starting with the convention of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999.
I had gotten word about the Seattle demonstrations the same way most of the protesters did: through email lists, a major novelty at the time.
It was magical. Tens of thousands of demonstrators assembled from seemingly out of nowhere. They took everyone — elected officials, the news media, the delegates in the convention center — by surprise, in a way that would previously have been impossible. The police were bewildered by the protesters’ ability to communicate among themselves at scale, in real time, to take over intersections and deftly circumvent obstacles and keep everyone else several steps behind. The whole thing brought the W.T.O. proceedings practically to a halt and gave the world a new way to think about globalization: Whom does it actually benefit?
In 2011, that model expanded to include occupations. Protesters camped out in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, inspired similar occupations around the world, with the same spirit of anarchic fun also playing out online. That movement gave the world a new way to think about inequality: the 1 percent versus the 99 percent.
But considering the popularity and energy of these movements, they didn’t change the world that much. Two decades later, globalization still favors corporations. Wealth is as inequitably distributed as ever. Other large protest movements — the Iraq antiwar movement, which I participated in, and the Arab Spring, which I studied and observed — were ground down or ignored.
By 2024, the authorities had the response down pat. In Chicago last month, protesters were assigned a circular marching route at least half a mile away from the convention site. The area was secured by two concentric fences and several more barriers. Protesters could be as loud as they wanted to be and they still wouldn’t even be heard anywhere near the arena.
It was quite a decent crowd — not as many as some had expected, but I counted thousands of people energetically marching on multiple days.
But big numbers alone can’t have the impact they once did because they no longer signal the same threat. The 1963 March on Washington took several months of extensive effort and planning, a show of immense strength and organizational ability that could keep the pressure on long after the protest ended. By comparison the Occupy movement came together much more easily, in just a few weeks. It produced one of the largest ever days of global protest, but what does that even mean when the internet juices so much of the prep work? “Biggest ever” protests keep occurring to little avail. The Women’s March in 2017 was considered the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, but Donald Trump is once again back as the Republican nominee in a toss-up race.
The factors that have defanged big marches have made direct action and confrontational tactics lose their bite, too. With police officers responding in overwhelming numbers and courts doling out lengthy sentences, today’s disrupters often lack the discipline and preparation required to pull off effective civil disobedience.
In Chicago, the few protesters who tried to defy the barricades were arrested immediately. Police officers vastly outnumbered them.
With the news media swarming them, those protesters got some publicity but it was a double-edged sword: In addition to news outlets, right-wing media personalities and streamers flocked to the scene to try to use it to portray Chicago as a city in chaos.
As a scholar of social movements and an alumna of more protests than I can count, I know that to distance itself from discordant voices, a movement needs designated spokespeople who make clear what it stands for and what it denounces. That kind of message discipline is always hard, but it’s an even bigger challenge when participants all have their own social media accounts and people are quick to say they are being silenced. In 2024 it became almost impossible.
In the few weeks before the convention, a lot of drama erupted — especially on TikTok — between some Black activists and those with Palestinian or Arab heritage. These groups had previously worked in tandem, but now recriminations and ugly accusations spread virally as pro-Palestinian voices decried Harris as a warmonger and Black voices accused them of undermining a candidate of color — all fueled by ever more strident comments.
Who were these commenters inflaming the conflict? Why did so many appear not even to live in the United States? Did TikTok’s Chinese corporate overlords pick the winners? Whatever the answers, the venom was online but the results were felt on the streets: Black Lives Matter protests, so visible in Chicago in 2020, seemed almost completely absent during the Democratic convention.
The internal tensions that social movements have always faced become especially paralyzing when they play out in public, amplified by the algorithms that favor conflict. Without a counterbalancing organizational structure, there’s no way to bridge those differences and build consensus.
All of this might help explain why, during the Republican convention in Milwaukee, there were no big protests at all, despite the provocations of Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Maybe the odds were stacked so high against protesters that they didn’t even bother.
That’s not necessarily how it will play out on college campuses. Students have already begun making their voices heard. But many campus administrations (no doubt at the fervent behest of trustees) have spent the summer carefully preparing. They intend to return student protests to the status they occupied before this last extraordinary year: a common occurrence with little impact beyond the campus gates.
History, of course, is full of innovation and counter-innovation. Protests will reinvent themselves eventually. So what form does the future of political protest take? If the past is any indication, the answers will surprise us all.
After a tumultuous century of uprisings and conflict, in the mid-19th century, Paris imposed a new street plan that turned narrow roads into majestic boulevards — not merely for the aesthetics but also to make them harder for protesters to barricade. A century later, however, those boulevards were where the 1968 movement exploded with flair, creativity and impact.
For activists, finding a way forward will mean figuring out new ways to leverage the power of social media without surrendering to its destructive effects. It will mean a new understanding of impact that goes beyond virality and self-expression. It will mea — ah, what do I know?
I don’t have an easy answer, and I know that the protesters probably wouldn’t listen to me even if I did, just as I wouldn’t have listened to some scholar of protest movements when I was in their shoes. Each generation needs to creatively, purposefully find its own way.
All I know is that protests and mass demonstrations of dissent are a necessary part of a healthy democracy. I can’t wait to see what this generation comes up with.