Until very recently, in the field I work in – social media – there was an orthodoxy. It went like this: If somebody follows you on Twitter, follow them back. Leading the charge were social media luminaries like Chris Brogan and Darren Rowse (better known as ProBlogger). Even veteran tech bloggers like Robert Scoble were you-follow-me-I follow-you-back kinda guys.

Now, many of these social media gurus don’t themselves know where this orthodoxy comes from. Many unto this day confuse it with some form of politeness. Odd though, if you think about it. It’s true that Twitter is not a strong-tie social network where Dunbar’s number – which claims that most people average about 150 strong relationships – would typically apply.

Even in Twitter’s more promiscuous interest graph (where you follow people because of what they have to say, rather than because you know them), no person can seriously pay full attention to more than a couple of hundred people. Let alone can we when we’re following 70,000 or more. People that study and immerse themselves in media should surely know that human attention is finite?

Recently Darren Rowse, who blogs about blogging, tried to articulate – just before he unfollowed everybody to start afresh –  why he was following nearly 80,000 people.

“1. to reciprocate – I’ve always felt strange about having people follow me and not following them back. Perhaps this is my ‘people pleaser’ trait in action on the web.

2. to open up DM conversations – I used to use Direct Messaging as much (if not more than) as ‘Replies’ on Twitter. Following people in large numbers opened up the opportunity for this.”

Not very convincing reasons, I have to say, but not uncommon either. To quote Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Žižek, I suspect Rowse and many others had, when deciding to follow so many people, fallen prey to not knowing what they know. Which is to Žižek exactly what ideology is: The inability to realise that we have a belief and that what we believe in, shapes our actions.

Is there a ideology at work even when deciding who to follow on Twitter? Very much so.

So what exactly is this ideology? The Word Wide Web was barely two years old when Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron recognised it and gave it a name. The Californian Ideology was coined by them in the summer of 1995. An ideology which Barbrook and Cameron claimed was a heady and odd mix of 60’s inspired libertarianism and counter-culture on the one hand and a dogmatic belief it hitched from the Reaginite 80’s on the other. The latter being the pervasive belief of the last two decades that government should not interfere in markets or business.

“This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley… This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich.”

The part of the ideology that made people follow thousands and which we will interrogate here was rather commendable. It was the belief that through the Internet we would make for a more egalitarian world.

So this little essay is about lots of things. But primarily it’s an essay on how some of the great hopes placed on the shoulders of our new media are becoming unstuck. And in particular it’s about the credo that digital media will remake our societies to be hierarchy free. That dream may not be as default a setting as we thought it was.

So where does this belief system come from? Barbrook and Cameron points out that the roots of this ideology can be found also in the writing of the sage of modern media, Marshall McLuhan.

McLuhan claimed that new technologies would empower individuals at the expense of established hierarchies like big business and big government. We were moving into the age of the cosy global village:

‘By electricity, we everywhere resume person-to-person relations as if on the smallest village scale. It is a relation in depth, and without delegation of functions or powers… Dialogue supersedes the lecture.’

Already in McLuhan’s writing can we see some of today’s recurring themes in digital and social media take shape, ideas such as:

1. 1. Person-to-person vs One-to-many (broadcast)
   2. Small scale (think village or community) vs Big
   3. Dialogue (conversation, anyone?) vs Lecture

Many of the generation of theorists after McLuhan were, if not singing from the same sheet, at least remixing his thoughts explicitly and combining it with elements of others’ theories.

The hippie ethos of freedom, independence, respect and connectedness that rested on a foundation of a profound dislike of straight regimented society and its large and cold ossified hierarchies, these were also the values of the Internet’s first theorists and ideologues. It’s no coincidence. These pioneering thinkers of the Internet were a tight-knit community themselves who knew each other well. Often not only from their shared interest and work in computing and media, but also from the first counter-cultural hippie happenings.

One of these institutions were The WELL, a pioneering online community and arguably one of the most influential online communities in shaping ideas about what the Internet should be. The founder of The WELL was one Stewart Brand, a fascinating man who managed to combine a love for mind-altering substances with sharp business instincts. Brand was fascinated by do-it-yourself culture, and published counter-cultural magazines which were read widely by people that mattered. The best known, The Whole Earth Catalogue, tried to provide people with all the information and tools they needed to live life outside of the mainstream. Steve Jobs was later to describe it as:

“…one of the bibles of my generation…. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”

Kevin Kelly, a contributor to Brand’s Catalogue, member of The WELL and friend of Brand, said in 2008 that the Catalogue had been an Internet prototype. Media made by people for themselves. It was a precursor of social media:

“The Whole Earth Catalogue was a great example of user-generated content, without advertising, before the Internet…. No topic was too esoteric, no degree of enthusiasm too ardent, no amateur expertise too uncertified to be included… This I am sure about: it is no coincidence that the Whole Earth Catalogues disappeared as soon as the web and blogs arrived. Everything the Whole Earth Catalogues did, the web does better.”

But already there were indications of inherent tension in Brand’s ideas. On the one hand Brand was writing that “a realm of intimate, personal power” was developing. That was obvious. But increasingly through his environmental activism it became clear that he thought environmental solutions would have had to be communal. Neither Brand nor his fellow travellers ever explicitly addressed the fact that there might be a tension between the personal freedom he espoused and the we-are-all-in this-together solutions he sought.

Be that as it may, cherished establishment concepts, like copyright, were not safe any longer. Brand’s writing became a rally cry of the open-source software movement and beyond – “information wants to be free…”.

Other denizens of Brand’s The WELL included John Perry Barlow, lyricist of the psychedelic band The Grateful Dead, but also libertarian, anarchist and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

In 1996 Barlow wrote a dramatic document titled A Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace, modelled in the assertive style of the United States’ own Independence Declaration. It remains today a very good snapshot of the world view of the Californian ideologues: Technologically determinist, anti-government and Utopian.

Where McLuhan had talked about “dialogue”, a word that would later become social media jargon like few others – “conversations” – was now in evidence when he warned governments to butt out of Cyberspace:

“You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces.”

The use of  “conversation” was no gimmick; for Barlow, like McLuhan, this term was used in opposition to one-way, top-down broadcast media (or ‘lectures’ as McLuhan called them).

The Internet was not only different, said Barlow, it was a better, more egalitarian world. A world where everybody would be heard regardless of our status in meat space:

“We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.”

Brand’s Catalogue contributor Keven Kelly, who was also the first editor of Wired Magazine and a futurist who has had a more profound influence than most, deserves a closer look.

His book Out of Control: The new biology of machines has not only shaped many techies’ ideas on software development, but also the thoughts of those in business and even brand management.

An end to hierarchy was clear to Kelly. He railies against governments’ and corporations’ large mainframe computers, and believes the coming personal computing age would herald unprecedented freedom from these old authorities.

Echoing the thoughts of others like McLuhan, Kelly believes every medium had intrinsic features with wider social consequences.

“A blackboard encourages repeated modification, erasure, casual thinking, spontaneity. A quill pen on writing paper demands care, attention to grammar, tidiness, controlled thinking. A printed page solicits rewritten drafts, proofing, introspection, editing.”

The new intrinsic features of hypertext, where one text links to another, he thought, was that of cooperation. But this was not the harbinger of a intimate global village. The vision was way more radical than that.

You see, the other key metaphor for Kelly was the network. We came from a world where we were atomised individuals, but through the network, ‘the icon of the 21st century’, we were changing and literally coming together to become one being. Just like a swarm of bees acting together as if they are one organism in a collective intelligence or ‘hive mind’.

Under Kelly’s auspices Wired Magazine published many articles pushing ideas such as how the Internet advances and James’s Lovelock’s Gaia theories of the earth as an organism. And that the Internet is in fact the Earth clothing itself with a brain.

If we are constituent parts of one being, one organism, where does that leave “me”? Kelly intimated that in the post-industrial age even egos would be put on the back burner:

‘The industrial icon of a grand central or a hidden “I am” becomes hollow. Distributed, headless, emergent wholeness becomes the social ideal.’

We were a networked organism, and egos along with hierarchy and authority were things of the past.

We can now add a few more familiar concepts to the canon of digital dogma:

1. Out of control vs Control
2. Networks (leaderless) vs Hierarchy
3. Everybody vs Central Authority
4. The Whole vs Me, me, me

Openess, equality, freedom in its architecture

This wasn’t just idle talk. These Utopian ideas had already found its way into the very fabric of the Internet, into the technical architecture of how the Internet transferred information (the protocols TCP/IP) and even its user-interface design (UX).

As many readers of this essay will already know, the absence of a central control system was the very raison d’etre of the Internet. It was built in such a way that it would not have to rely on a command-and-control hierarchy. Unlike the old telecommunications network, it was supposed to withstand parts of it taken out or going down in the event of a nuclear war.

Other tools and services built on top of the Internet protocols would follow the open, interactive, peer-to-peer, non-hierarchical design.

Email, the first Internet communications tool to become ubiquitous, was always designed to allow two-way communication. Once you sent somebody a message, they had the means to send a message back.

For those not lucky enough to be part of The WELL, the first sense of Internet community most early adopters experienced was on the service called Usenet. Usenet was a distributed discussion system, a hybrid between email and a web forum. Once you subscribed and posted, everybody else in that group would see your message. Many communities were established and nourished on this architecture.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a group chat tool still popular with hacker groups like Anonymous, to this day does not require users to register, thus making it open to all and hard to identify users.

Early instant messaging systems (the precursor to AOL’s AIM, Microsoft’s MSN Messenger and Skype), almost always required reciprocal agreement between users to become each other’s ‘contacts’ or ‘buddies’, allowing ‘contacts’ to be able to exchange instant two-way messages. This symmetrical mechanism was the forefather of the now familiar ‘friending’, widely adopted by early social networking sites, from Friends Reunited and MySpace to Orkut and later, of course, the behemoth that is Facebook.

These are profoundly trusting and open technologies, where everybody had access to everybody. These services were designed for our better selves. ‘Real’ identities were not required, and where it did go wrong exclusion of anti-social users was difficult. As such trolls were tolerated as a necessary evil and good norms of behaviour – ‘Nettiquette’ – reigned supreme.

But the open and non hierarchical tools and services were not inevitable outcomes based on the inherent nature of technologies. No. They were result of the often benign design decisions by techies beholden to the Utopian Californian Ideology.

But nobody noticed when things started to change. One important new communications service, did not have this mutual peer-to-peer feature: web-logs. With their relatively understated start as mere online diaries, few realised the power of blogs until the turn of the last century.

Blogs were different to what had gone before, in an important way. They were primarily designed for one person to share their thoughts with an audience of unlimited potential. This and complementary technologies, like RSS which allowed people to subscribe to a feed of blog updates, set in motion a chain of events. Broadcasting possibilities were now built into the functionality and UX of web services. All that was needed was talent and graft to build a following. Because of this, the Internet was set to take a different course.

Funny, because in the year 1999 when blogs started to get noticed, early bloggers like Doc Searls, supported by the likes of Dave Winer (the inventor of RSS), came up with The Cluetrain Manifesto. If blogs were to herald a change in the way we saw the net, Cluetrain was the apogee of the original way we viewed the Net. Here was the evidence of a clear link between earlier digital thinkers and today’s social media marketers. The Manifesto starts with the phrase:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter – and getting smarter faster than most companies.

It continued…

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

Much of the buzzwords and articles of faith we recognise in social media can be found in Cluetrain: Authenticity, openness, conversations, community, trust (and loss of control), markets and, of course, one new one – sharing. Line number seven simply proclaims:

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

One of the first and most visible hierarchies to be subverted was the mainstream professional media. But until quite recently it seemed like mainstream media was oblivious to Cluetrain and the massive changes it claimed was occurring online.

Exasperated by the ignorance, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor that got the import of social media, published a bolshie essay on his blog in 2006. The People formerly known as the Audience proclaimed the arrival of everybody as media, hailed people connecting directly with each other bypassing professional gatekeepers, and asserted that the many new voices were not a problem:

“The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak – to the world, as it were.

Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that?

The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem – too many speakers! – is our problem.

The essay was an instant hit, and was shared widely on other blogs. Dave Winer enthused:

The brains are in what we used to call the audience. No more looking up to the ivory tower for all fulfillment. Thank god we don’t all have to be as beautiful as Farah Fawcett and Christopher Reeve. Everyone gets to sing. Users and developers party together.

Forward to (parts of) the past

More than 10 years after Cluetrain, from the glamorous Rumi Neely of Fashion Toast to pugnacious Michael Arrington (founder of TechCrunch), it’s obvious that some bloggers have become megastars.

It’s important at this juncture to point out that the very point of breaking the hierarchy was not a nihilistic hatred of authority. The very promise of the Internet was exactly that: That talented people and meritorious businesses would stand out and shine regardless of whether they were operating out of garages or did not have multimillion dollar advertising budgets.

So when Google claims its PageRank algorithm is a democratic system where hyperlinks from one page to another is taken as a vote for that page’s quality, the underlying idea is that the best content and services will float to the top of search rankings. A meritocracy par excellence. The same goes for services like Twitter. It has liberated the meritorious. Twittering writer Mat Johnson says it levels the playing field:

“I’ve never had a single ad for any of my novels, had a movie made or been given a big budget push by a publisher… Usually, they just throw my book out to reviewers and hope it floats. Twitter lets me hijack the promotion plane, sidestep the literary establishment and connect directly to my current and potential audience… It’s a meritocracy; if you’re interesting, you get followed.”

So a talented blogger like Arrington was bound to make a name for himself and beat mainstream publishers at their own game.

So far, so good.

But what many have been slow to realise is that this meritocracy is not only subverting the old hierarchies. The digital utopia is in fact borrowing some traits from the world the pioneering thinkers wanted us to leave behind. Is it really still true that too many speakers are not a problem as Jay Rosen said?

@wildebees A very interesting essay. Thanks. But I didn’t say too many speakers could never be a problem. It’s just not TPFKATA’s problem.

— Jay Rosen(@jayrosen_nyu) January 15, 2012

Note I added this response from Jay Rosen.

Blogs were the first symptom. But it was only with the appearance of Twitter with its affordance to have people follow you without you having to follow back, that the fact that social status had gained a bridgehead online was thrown in sharp relief.

The following/follower counts sit prominently in Twitter user interfaces, impossible to ignore. And they are often the first thing people look at. In a flash, celebrities and bloggers outside the tech and social media bubble had amassed audiences of thousands while following almost no-one. These relationships weren’t peer to peer. They looked more like audiences than communities.

It was only the true believers of Cluetrain that held out.

Until 2010, when the dam wall cracked, and then middle 2011, when it burst. Ever smart and genuinely media savvy Robert Scoble was one of the first believers to realise he had been drinking the cool aid and using Twitter wrongly. He had been following over 100,000 people but had a Damascus road like conversion. Scoble realised his experience of Twitter was awful, with more spam, and many more messages in which he was simply not interested.

So he developed a new exclusive following philosophy: Only follow better people to get more (and better quality) followers.

It’s a big job to unfollow that many people on Twitter and Scoble had a script written to do it for him. So impressed was he with the result and his new experience of Twitter that he told Chris Brogan in a blog post that he was doing Twitter wrong.

Brogan famously spent 80% of his time replying to every Tweet he got because it was, he said – with reference to the Zulu greeting Sawubona (literally: I see you) – “a way of recognising or seeing” another person. Brogan countered Scoble with the standard social media dogma: in this “seeing” of a person, social media was magically different to one-way top-down mainstream media and very different from traditional advertising (See video below). But Scoble did not let up; the “conversations” where getting in the way:

“I can’t find his [Brogan´s] good blogs and videos. Why? Because he does so many conversations. Look at his Twitter home page. All you see is @replies. This is what makes Brogan Brogan, because he’s going to answer you no matter how popular he gets.”

Not for long, though. After a couple of months, Brogan shocked many when he announced Operation Unfollow. Many of those following him reacted emotionally. Others like the Sales Lion – who had been dumped by Brogan himself – blogged a half-hearted defence:

“Excuse me? At what point does a blogger/social media icon lose his/her rights to be normal, experiment, and possibly be wrong on occasion? If ‘John the Farmer’ unfollows 20 people to shake up his stream, does anyone say anything? Nope, nada. But let an ‘A-lister’ hurt a few feelings and then everyone wants to make a judgement.”

As the storm raged, Brogan, seemingly oblivious to his previous pronouncements on “seeing” people, tried to make sense of the furore:

“I think it’s because they somehow see me following them as some kind of endorsement. I don’t know. Maybe a validation? “If @chrisbrogan thinks my tweets are worth following…” but that’s just it. When you follow 131,000 people, you don’t see any tweets.”

Too many voices had become a problem.

After Brogan’s Operation Unfollow, Darren Rowse and many more social media big shots followed suit and mass-unfollowed people on their networks. Interestingly though, none of them suffered a significant drop in their follower numbers. What was obvious for some time was now reflected in the follow/follower numbers. There was a new hierarchy in town.

So is this the end of the story? A merely amusing tale of how our beliefs blind even smart people to obvious truths?

No, it goes deeper than that. Digital media is genuinely disruptive. It is different from media that has gone before. It has lowered barriers to entry, and it is incontrovertible that everybody can now be a publisher.

Leaderless revolutions and hierarchies of the future

Much have been made about the leaderless nature of 2011’s uprisings across the world. Intellectuals and pundits from the BBC’s Paul Mason to former diplomats like Carne Ross, to John Perry Barlow himself, have commented on how this success was partly due to the networked non-hierarchical nature of social media. This made it harder to combat protestors by taking out their leaders.

Famously and fiercely leaderless, from Tunisia to San Francisco the hacker group Anonymous was in on the action all over the globe.

Even the mighty News Corp was bought to heel when people used social media to vent and to agitate against it’s advertisers. Something politicians on their own had been unable to do. Said Paul Mason:

“Six months ago, in the context of Tunisia and Egypt, I wrote that the social media networks had made “all propaganda instantly flammable”. It was an understatement: complex and multifaceted media empires that do much more than propaganda, and which command the respect and loyalty of millions of readers, are now also flammable…

But the most important fact is: not for the first time in 2011, the network has defeated the hierarchy.”

So is this not proof that McLuhan, Brand,  Barlow and Kelly were right? Partly I think the answer is yes. But it’s more complicated than that.

Earlier this year in response to the Egyptian revolt, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci had written a piece where she warned against over-optimism and simplistic Utopian wishful thinking. It does not follow that because of the use of digital media in the revolt, hierarchy is a thing of the past for the Egyptian revolutionaries.

“A fact little understood but pertinent to this discussion, however, is that relatively flat networks can quickly generate hierarchical structures even without any attempt at a power grab by emergent leaders or by any organizational, coordinated action. In fact, this often occurs through a perfectly natural process, known as preferential attachment, which is very common to social and other kinds of networks...”

Tufekci goes on to explain with reference to Twitter how the meritocratic nature of social media is actually the basis of new hierarchies:

“Meritorious growth: In this model, the better, the more relevant, the more informative your tweets, the more followers you get. Surely, there is a lot of this going on. While this sounds good, it brings us to the next question: how will people know your tweets are so good? One mechanism, of course, is retweets. The number of retweets, however, may depend on how many followers you have to catch and retweet your posts in the first place. This means that those who have a large number of followers end up with an advantage even in terms of being recognized as meritorious.”

In other words it is possible that even those without merit could get higher follower numbers if they already have an installed base.

“In almost all human processes, already having a high status makes it easier to claim and re-entrench that high status. Thus, not only will more people see your tweets, they will see you as having the mark of approval of the community as expressed in your follower count.”

The Egyptian Influence Network just after the February uprising. Notice that the larger dots, users with more followers, even then were generally grouped closer together. A new elite.

Interestingly, Robert Scoble recently complained of preferential attachment framed in a different way – the Unearned Follow. Since the rise of Twitter, a plethora of services (Soundcloud, Instagram, Quora) has sprung up allowing users to publish media easily to an audience who follows them without having to follow back.

Importantly, these services are also using existing networks like Twitter as a basis to recommend whom a user should follow, often based on popularity on Twitter and, in some cases, even do it for you, building preferential attachment into the very fabric of our new user experiences. And Scoble laments the passing of meritocracy with it.

“Did I really earn your follow on these new services like I did on the older services like Twitter or Facebook? Yeah, you could say that I didn’t earn them there, either, since I had hundreds of thousands of readers on my blog before I started tweeting, but on Twitter you needed to manually “follow” me and other people on the system. On the newer systems they automatically follow people based on their Twitter popularity.

This presents a distorted picture of who is putting the most effort into the system.

Do you see the problems this causes?”

Do you?

The future is what we make it

Hierarchy was not part of the original vision for the Net. If there is a new hierarchy forming, then how many of the other dearly held beliefs of the digital set are on less sure ground? So to conclude a few thoughts from me on shibboleths that are now on less firmer ground:

Person to person

Broadcasting is not going away. In fact stats show that social media is boosting in particular live TV viewing. Services like Klout that purport to measure influence in media are flourishing. It makes sense. If some people are more equal than others, knowing who they are is a valuable resource. This week social media thought leader Brian Solis wrote in a post titled - 2012: The Year for Digital Darwinism:

Digital influence is becoming prominent in social networks, turning everyday consumers into new influentials. As a result, a new customer hierarchy is developing forcing businesses to identify and engage to those who rank higher than others.

Small is limited. Brands have realised they still need massive reach (a large audience) to flog their products. So in social media new techniques are developing in the marketing playbook that are not person to person. Techniques like getting celebrities to market your wares: So called marketing to an audience with an audience.

And some old techniques are migrating to social networks. Facebook advertising is widely popular and successful.

Openness and Out of Control

Not only is the wildly popular iOS a closed platform, Google negotiated a particularly pernicious deal killing off mobile Net Neutrality in the US – whereby mobile networks can exclude services, usually competitors traffic across their networks. Similarly mobile users in Europe cant access services like Skype. As mobile networks strain to cope with the increase in data watch these networks increasingly campaign against Net Neutrality as a way to protect profit margins.

People like Cory Doctorow cry that there’s a war on general purpose computing coming – without which he thinks we loose the DIY freedom and power Brand spoke of. And Cloud based services are contributing to the shift in power from us to service providers, making it easier for central authorities to control the Net. And let’s not even mention China.

Copyright

The entertainment industry are doing their utmost to introduce laws that will make Internet companies liable to police the Internet for any copyright infringement. Clay Shirkey warns that this requirement to police will push up the price for providing user generating content services to the extent that they will become uneconomical.

Community and Conversation

While it would be an oversimplification to call what businesses are doing in social media to be just broadcasting, it’s not for the most part, community either. Some are spotting trends where brands and bloggers are switching off the comments on websites due to the volume and quality of what they have to deal with. Big is in fact the death of community, even for individuals. As Gina Trapini points out in an excellent post. A large following creates all kinds of problems not least of which is remembering to share with the people you care about. For brands selling fast moving consumer goods (like toothpaste), and business to business brands, creating real communities using social media is very hard. Repeated studies show that most people Like brands on Facebook in order to get discounts.

Authenticity and Meritocracy

Once some people and brands have huge audiences, the pressure not only to promote good stuff will fade. Watch for people to promote things not because they are best, but because they are close to them, or worse, have received money for it. Watch for social media services promoting mediocre celebrities to follow in order to attract users. With the development of Personalised Search Results preferential attachment could migrate even into Google Search results. There are already signs of this.

And how’s this for a thought experiment. Should you employ a SEO expert or a person – who might be clueless about SEO – but is followed by thousands on Google Plus? Bear in mind that every page this person Plus Ones, will feature higher in Google search rankings for their thousands of followers.

Identity

In John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace he assertively claims that online we choose our own identities and implies that they are probably different to our ‘real’ identity. The idea that who we are in the nooks and crannies of the Net is not tied to our ‘real world’ identity and that we may have a few of them is indeed yet another article of faith of the Californian Ideologues.  Yet more and more services are turning to Facebook as an identity service provider. That’s because Facebook’s insistence on the use of real identities combat anti-social behaviour. Not only that but Zeynep Tufekci has argued convincingly that people using their everyday identities on Facebook was a powerful force in helping revolutions against autocrats last year. And that it would not be so if they stayed anonymous. The idea of a bunch of ordinary people together, in the open, being more effective than the lone anonymous hacker is not only a bitter pill to swallow, but should make us rethink many assumptions.

The wisdom of markets

Our Californian Ideologues always seemed to forget one simple fact. The Internet was founded on tax payers money. The explosion of information technology and deregulation of the 80’s has not lead to massive improvements in productivity in the US or high quality jobs. In fact the US has experienced relative decline. And inequality is at unprecedented levels.

In a startling post just this week Rick Bookstaber points out why the middle-classes are disappearing and inequality increasing, not because their are no jobs. The jobs are being outsourced – to us! But we are not being paid for them:

“The jobs are moving from the producer to the consumer side of the ledger. And some of that work comes as the guise of entertainment. How much of your work is being done as you do your e-mails and surf the web, keep yourselves busy with your apps as you commute to work? So it is not only that computers are replacing workers, they are turning consumers into unpaid workers.”

We sure are not all hip and rich in the digital Utopia.

So all of these digital credos have to be more critically re-examined. They don’t all currently apply, or apply evenly in all circumstances. So what to do?

We need to realise that these ideals and norms won’t necessarily result from technology by themselves. If we indeed think some of these are preferable to how our industrial age worked, we will need to argue, design, program and perhaps even fight for them.

No related posts.

I don’t mind profanity. I love Wat kyk Jy, Rich Bitch, and the kinky trip that is Beat Boy. But this track is darker, aggressive in the extreme, and it has a section at the end which is rehash of a Mike Tyson derogatory outburst, which unlike previous tracks offer no cool counter points: the tongue in cheeck irony and pop catchiness.

Ninja has made a video to explain themselves. Hilarious. In case you don’t get it, the Simunye bit is a joke. South Africa has huge issues with race. And white blokes don’t call black ones nigger. Not unless they are looking for kak.

Anyway, here is video that Kameraad Penzhorn forwarded to me. It’s in yer face. In a liberating kind of way. It’s by Azealia Banks. And it bangs.

And this new collaboration between Adam Tempsta and South Africa’s Spoek is pretty cathy too.

Take note Die Antwoord, In the shock, dark and play with creepy crawly category we have this – but the music is – you guessed it…

Lastly I include this vid. The music is not quite my cup of tea, but I like the Ladies’s style. And the video was shot in my hood, picturesque Hackney.

Related deployments:

1. I’m a Ninja – Die Antwoord

Much of Adriaan’s argument turns on one point. Afrikaners might be a numerical minority, but they are not minority in the sense that they are potential victims that need protecting or special treatment from the state. That is because they are well to do Adriaan argues. Lets for the moment forget about the fact that a significant number of Afrikaners live in poverty. Is Adriaan’s a good point?

No. Adriaan’s argument is too simplistic. It does not take into account the things that make most people truly happy in life. At its essence his is a right wing argument. One I am sure he does not intend.

One line of argument is easily dispatched for six. Adriaan quotes the UN in support, “In most instances, a minority group will be a numerical minority, but in others, a numerical majority may also find itself in a minority-like or non-dominant position, such as blacks under the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

But apartheid is no more. Many progressives like John Pilger like to claim that apartheid is still alive, but Ferial Haffagee, Adriaan’s own editor, does a grand job of dismantling this argument herself: ‘Its only harvest is to keep us from the honest answers and the hardest analyses. It is sound-bite activism, good to raise a “Viva!”.

She continues to list many of the problems the country faces but says:

Awful, all of it. The reasons for this are more complex than a simple
pretence that the change of power did not happen in 1994. ‘

That many Afrikaners are relatively wealthy vis-a-vis the majority of South Africans is true. In fact the new South African government (not intentionally, but by way of non government) has provided them with ample opportunity to become more wealthy. And many of them have.

But are we to judge the sense of happiness and well-being of a group of people in terms of the money they are making? A growing body of evidence suggest that what people want in life is not only money, but a sense of fulfillment, recognition and belonging. A sense of inclusion in a society, a sense that your skills are put to good use and valued and a sense of security (which I will deal with later). There comes a point in life where more wealth does not make people more happy. And happy societies are not societies where inequality is the norm.

Adriaan argues that events like the Klein Karoo Kunste Fees is a sign of the vitality of Afrikaans. But the reverse is true, the strength of Afrikaans festivals in the country is precisely because of its demotion in public life. It’s the privatisation of a previous public identity. In the words of sociologist and lead singer of the Brixton Moor en Roof Orkes, Andries Bezuidenhout, we are giving the language “a beautiful funeral”.

The impact of the loss of Afrikaans in the public sphere can not have but been and is no less than an experience of collective existential trauma for Afrikaners. One could argue that this process was unavoidable in a country with so many competing languages. One could argue that the ascendancy of English as the language of the public sphere is not only normal, it is desirable.

However one can not argue that it has not been at the cost of Afrikaner’s sense of being or belonging. Arguing that Afrikaans still plays a massive roll outside the public sphere is to discount the importance of identity to you and me. Identity must have a public component.

It also completely ignores the nature of Afrikaner identity in particular: Unfortunately the history of Afrikaans and Afrikanerdom is tied to the language, and its acceptance as a language in the public sphere is tied to Afrikaners sense of self, and self worth. Professor Melissa Steyn points out with respect to Afrikaners and their responsibility for apartheid:

…ironically, it would be a mistake to read the racial domination thus entrenched as emanating from a group that felt secure in their power. Afrikaners contended with the more powerful forces of the British empire throughout a history that was experienced as a long and bitter struggle for freedom from white-on-white overlordship. The self- esteem, indeed the very self-image, of Afrikaner nationhood was forged within a mythology that celebrated the courage of a people who refused to be subordinated to the British empire on more than one occasion in their history.

This is not an argument on my part for the recognition of Afrikaans alongside English. This is me pointing out that there is severe collective pain being felt that is not recognized by the South African community at large. Steyn analised letters to the editor at the Rapport newspaper, she concludes:

“Deep-seated anxieties about identity and loss of self are discemable in the letters. Unlike English South Africans, however, whose in-group has an international ideological center which gives the “we/us” a stable continuity, Afrikaners are contending with a profound existential crisis (De Klerk, 2000; De Lange, 2001; Louw, 2001; Slabbert, 1999), grappling with the question “Who are we?”… The answer would have to reassure the deep fear that activates the soul searching: “Will we—our language, our religion, our identity—disappear?”"

In a fantastic article that I recommend every south African read, Rustum Kozain makes the point even better. Kozain surfed many an Afrikaner right wing website and his conclusion will surprise:

…if one looks past the racist language and past the sensationalism, the emotional tones of many of the posts and comments of white dissatisfaction are hard to ignore. There is rage, yes, but also heartbreak. In a culture that has in its history a strong agricultural connection with the land and a strong literary celebration of landscape and belonging, it is not difficult to see and understand this rage as a product of heartbreak, among other things. An easy, cynical and unsympathetic analysis would be that this heartbreak and rage is simply the product of a loss of power; that all of this are the hysterical fulminations of a segment of South Africa struggling to come to terms with a loss of political power. It certainly is this, but it is also more than this. And it is heartbreaking.

The argument that the well to do can’t be an opressed minority is bogus. The jews in Germany suffered a terrible fate largely because of their perceived superiority and wealth and in Africa similar thing happened to the the Tutsi’s in Rwanda.

Each time I visit South Africa I am surprised by the levels of fear and anxiety amongst South Africans of all races and cultures. Amongst whites however this fear is often irrational and qualitatively different. It is however not even remotely without basis. I would like to use two examples to explain how violence against whites are not only perceived as a threat, but driving them from public spaces.

A few years ago, on a crowded day in the town of Zeerust, Constand Viljoen and his wife, who was deep in his seventies was attacked as they went shopping. He managed to fight off his attackers after a struggle, but what is important is that none of the many onlookers came to his rescue. That an elderly couple can be attacked in a busy town without anybody helping is very odd and not normal societal behaviour I’m sure you would agree.

A similar thing happened to my dad, who used to be a doctor in Krugersdorp and was attacked when he was in his 70′s. He always went to that bank machine, but when he was mugged in front of many people, yet nobody helped. The community just looked on.

I know this is odd even in the South African context because I have spent many hours in South African townships and in predominantly black places like Yeoville. I know the crooks and skabangas dont ply their trade in broad daylight or where many people are. The community won’t allow them. Their revenge can be swift.

The reason is I suspect it happened here was because the community see Viljoen and my dad as “other”. They see them as being part of a privileged group, and the attackers part of a group that are the real victims, just like Adriaan describes. So why intervene? The result is that white South African faces are disappearing behind walls.

So what bothers most is not actual violence against whites, but what it means. The fact that whites by and large can not move in public spaces in South Africa’s cities any longer, without becoming a target of crime is delegitimizing them as citizens. Their whiteness marks them as wealthy targets and removes the protection one would normally find in a society at large. The result is that they are confined to a life spent behind high walls, shopping malls, and cars.

To the Afrikaner identity this loss of being able to move around in public, to go to the park, to walk in the city center, to become non citizens, but getting in turn an ever bigger fancy house, is a grand Faustian bargain. And my anecdotal experience says that they hate it.

Recently, as part of an exhibition of South African photographers in London, Roelof van Wyk explained why he thought his pictures of Afrikaners were a more up to date and sympathetic take on them than earlier, often non sympathetic pictures taken by non Afrikaners of Afrikaners, like that of Rodger Ballen and David Goldblatt.

Van Wyk’s pictures show their subjects without any context, even without clothes, he wanted to play with the idea of the oppressive hand of the colonial ethnography. Afrikaners being objectified, analyzed like natives of yore. But he claims, they are natives, and whats more, Afrikaners are now free to do what they want, they can for exmaple sleep with who they choose he said.

What he achieved is something entirely different. And the contrast with what Goldblatt did is instructive. Goldblatt says of his work on Afrikaners:

“Travelling through vast, sparsely populated parts of the country with my camera became a major part of my life at that time. I think that our landscape is an essential ingredient in any attempt at understanding not just the Afrikaner but all of us here. We have shaped the land and the land has shaped us. Often the land was unforgivingly harsh. Yet, the harsher the landscape the stronger the Afrikaners’ sense of belonging seemed to be.”

Van Wyk’s pictures are completely devoid of any link to place, or to any attachments of culture. If he had chosen to show context, he would have had to show Afrikaners in their big houses behind their big walls, or their 4 by 4′s, or in a shopping malls and perhaps one or two in a squatter camps.

Afrikaners don’t belong anywhere except in a glitzy anglo world that could be anywhere, but considering who they are, it is hell.

Related deployments:

1. So what’s the relationship between the Dutch & Afrikaners?
2. Making sense of South African corruption

Four years later and we don’t have a half bad team. In fact, in some respects its even better. But four years ago the agressive racial and purposefully unreflective debate – that the team were too white – even included threats of withholding visas by the minister of sport. Depressing stuff.

But its not on the rugby pitch that I see progress. It is the political climate that gives me glimmers of hope. Yes the country has huge problems with an incapacitated state, a corrupt government and huge inequality.

But South African politics is maturing. In a country like South Africa a populist like Julius Malema can wreak havoc. He has not. In fact institutions are prevailing just when we need them to. Crime figures are slowly improving year on year. Business is starting to wake up and realise that inequality is a time bomb and that they cant wait for government to fix the problem. Small victories have been made against a secrecy bill the government was hell bent on passing with its huge majority in parliament.

And then you find black South Africans Retweeting Tweets like this on Twitter.

No related posts.

Related deployments:

1. South Africans want to discuss race
2. No regulation please – we’re Netizens

If we are a problem, we should perhaps concentrate on recovering and rehabilitating our selves. I shall suggest that because of peculiarities of the South African situation, this personal, inward-directed project should be cultivated with humility and in (a certain kind of) silence.

I can hear Thabo Mbeki shouting “Halleluja sister!”.

Over the next couple of weeks I hope to return to this piece, to try and make sense of it, to critique it. It is rather dense and I simply don’t have the time and the capability to do it quickly.

But I would like to make a few initial observations. Vice acknowledges and I completely agree that this is a piece of philosophy within the western tradition. Firstly, that is because she is not so much concerned with what whites do, but rather how they be:

For despite our context, no life and no self is only political; no one can think of herself as only a citizen or as only and essentially constituted by factors external to her. The concern with the quality of the self that is so central in the origins of the western philosophical tradition seems even more important in a land that has denied the privacy and nonpolitical reality of individual lives.

The author does not seem to think it is ironic that she uses western philosophical positions considering the subject matter. Whether other cultures in similar positions, like the Malaysians vis-a-vis the Malaysian Indian population, the Chinese vis-a-vis the Tibetans, or even the Kikuyu in Kenya versus other Kenyan ethic groups would see themselves in their position of dominance in a similar fashion is unlikely. This is a western pre-occupation. She further ties her position on whiteness to the well know rhetoric of western white dominance. Whites are special, because they are so dominant they don’t even realise how dominant they are. She calls this whitleyness.

One of the key ways of theorizing whiteness is as a global norm that is invisible, working in the background as a standard, not of one particular way of being in the world, but as normalcy, as universalizibility, of just being “the way things are.”

Before I get to the nub of the matter I’d like to touch on something Vice just mentions in passing, which I think illuminates her whole piece a great deal. She says:

I talk from a personal, but what I hope is still a fairly representative position. While I am not an Afrikaner and so have escaped the taint that identity brings with it, I am a white South African, undeniably a product of the Apartheid system and undeniably still benefiting from it.

It suggests the author has a simplistic understanding of South Africa’s history. It also rather ironically suggests she suffers from a version of whitelyness, which I will suggest is common under English speaking white South Africans. It is the topic of a blog post in itself but suffice to say that Anglo white South Africa, is the only group of South Africans that don’t have a name. They are not English South Africans, in the sense that you can be an Zulu, or Afrikaner South African. Their identity has always been strongly tied to the western Anglo community but recently not expressly so. They are so universal that they are only South Africans. This seems to be Vice’s point of reference.

This is important because I don’t think Afrikaners experience whiteness in the way she describes. Does Vice know that there was a time in South Africa’s history that Afrikaans speaking whites were expected to doth their hats when English speaking whites went by? A time when English newspapers in the Cape compared the ‘Dutch’ to slaves? A time barely 100 years ago when respected British writers compared Afrikaners to black South Africans in reference to their lack of civility? That a third of them lived below the poverty line in the 1930′s. And that the destitution and fear of gelyksteling – equalizing with blacks – were one of the main concerns of the Afrikaner Nationalists?

She may or may not, but Afrikaners had and many still have a deep sense of inferiority vis-a-vis English speaking South Africans. Being an Afrikaner is not the standard or the way things are. It is an identity based partly on deep insecurity. It is not a normal way of getting around the world. The impact of this is still around today. Just one recent example. Keo is the website of South African Rugby – traditionally the Afrikaner (and Coloured) male’s religion. While you might see many comments on blog posts written in Afrikaans, not a single one of Keo’s staff writers are Afrikaners or Coloured. This is seen as quite normal. In fact Keo feels quite free to write on his blog like this:

Vodacom, as the primary sponsor of rugby in South Africa, is celebrating the year of the fan. His name is Jan, he is player 23 in the team and he is a clone of the 1970s white Springbok rugby supporter – a walking caricature of what has always repulsed. Only they’ve given Jan a personality of being a jovial and hugely popular bloke, but perception is stronger than fact and the physical appearance of Jan and what he represents in the stands adds to the perception that rugby in South Africa is still a game supported only by grossly overweight brandy and coke potbellied types.

My argument is this. There is not one white experience in South Africa, and much of the white experience that is often maligned or tainted is not the white experience the author claims to be universal.

My last comment today will focus on the problem. We are the problem Vice says with reference to Alcoff:

“What is it to acknowledge one’s whiteness? Is it to acknowledge that one is inherently tied to structures of domination and oppression, that one is irrevocably on the wrong side?” I think the answer to Alcoff’s question in South Africa is fairly obviously “yes.” Whites in South Africa ought to see themselves as a problem.

She continues that there are habits of white privilege -

Because of the brute facts of birth, few white people, however well-meaning and morally conscientious, will escape the habits of white privilege; their characters and modes of interaction with the world just will be constituted in ways that are morally damaging…

…in South Africa, the working and effects of privilege are starkly apparent; one cannot in good faith pretend they do not exist.

This I would argue is the nub of the matter. It is unquestionably true that the effects of white privilege are visible. It might be unevenly spread, but it is there. Whether whites are only a problem, whether they are still oppressing, and who should be held responsible for this if this oppressive situation does not get rectified is another matter altogether.

When I read pieces like Vice’s I yearn for a philosophical look at the colonial / apartheid crime. It is of course a mammoth task. But we need to know what is the nature and extent of the colonial and apartheid crime. The TRC failed spectacularly in this task. But it is perhaps naive to have expected them to be able to do so. It was too soon.

Now however years have passed . We must ask ourselves how can one have this discussion without a proper look a the root cause? We need to know who did what when and why. Only then can we start to know how to be, or not.

For another, and better argued take on Vice’s paper, go here.

Related deployments:

1. The unbearable whiteness of being

The DA has run a thoughtful multi-racial campaign that should make every South African feel proud.

Yes, the DA has a legacy. Some of which, as a progressive you might find objectionable. Some of which, if you are an Afrikaner might bring memories of a painful past, and the hints of the relegation of Afrikaans. But we need to move forward. There are bigger things at stake.

Furthermore, the fact that the party has not one but three principled and strong female leaders are – excuse the pun – the cherry on the cake. Patricia de Lille is the politician that exposed THE cancer of the arms deal. the sharp Lindiwe Mazibuko might just become South Africa’s first female president in a decade from now.

The goal today is to try and wrest control from the ANC of one of the big cities, and then to govern it well for all South Africans. There’s no better way to give the ANC the kick up its arse it deserves. Zille has made a deep impression on us. It’s time we showed it. Alutta continua!

Zille write up in Wikipedia:

Zille began her career as a political correspondent for the Rand Daily Mail in 1974.^[13] During September 1977, Minister of Justice and the Police J.T. Kruger announced that anti-apartheid activistSteve Biko had died in prison as the result of an extended hunger strike. Zille and her editor Allister Sparks were convinced Kruger’s story was a cover-up, and Zille obtained concrete proof of this after tracking down and interviewing various doctors involved in the case.^[6]

The Rand Daily Mail’s lead story, headlined “No sign of hunger strike – Biko doctors”, sent shockwaves through South Africa, and Kruger immediately threatened to ban the paper, while Zille received death threats.^[6] Zille and Sparks were represented at the subsequent quasi-judicial Press Council by leading defence lawyer Sydney Kentridge, but the two were nonetheless found guilty of “tendentious reporting”, and the paper was forced to issue a “correction”. Kentridge later helped confirm the accuracy of Zille’s account when he represented the Biko family at the inquest into his death. That inquest found Biko’s death had been the result of a serious head injury, but failed to find any individual responsible.^[14]

Zille resigned from the Rand Daily Mail along with editor Allister Sparks, after the paper’s owner, Anglo American, demanded that Sparks tone down the paper’s equal rights rhetoric.^[15]

Anti-apartheid movement

Zille was heavily involved in the Black Sash movement during the 1980s. She served on the regional and national executives of the organisation, and was also vice-chair of the End Conscription Campaign in the Western Cape. During this time she was arrested for being in a “group area” without a permit, and received a suspended prison sentence. Zille and her husband later offered their home as a safe house for political activists during the 1986 State of Emergency, and she was temporarily forced into hiding with their two-year-old son.^[7] She knew and was mentored by anti-apartheid figurehead Harry Schwarz since she was a child.^[16]

Zille was also actively involved in the South Africa Beyond Apartheid Project and the Cape Town Peace Committee. She later gathered evidence for the Goldstone Commission which investigated attempts to destabilise the Western Cape before the elections in 1994.

The Rand Daily Mail story, authored by Zille, that exposed the cover-up of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko‘s death in police custody.

No related posts.

For those of you unfamilar with South Africa, Umshini Wam is a song dating back from the struggle against apartheid, a favourite of the current president Jacob Zuma. Roughly translatable as bring me my machine gun.

The short features Yolandi even singing a rendition of Die Stem, the old anthem of South Africa.

Both Yolandi and Ninja turn out excellent performances.

Working with Harmony Korine is an excellent choice. Next I hope they work with David Lynch. Now there’s one director that can capture the weirdness of South Africa.

No related posts.

…a news agency for stuff nobody wants to know. “Dave is playing on Facebook. Dave is a bit annoyed. Dave is going for a drink. Dave has found a toothsome bit of cheese under the nail on his big toe.”

What readers might find odd is that this is perhaps simultaneously a fitting description, and at the same time could point to why Facebook is so useful as a tool for organising dissent.

In case you don’t know, last week Malcolm Gladwell once again entered the fray about the role of social media in fundamental and high stakes social activism. The much shorter piece titled, Does Egypt need Twitter is much weaker than his original piece.

A protestor on Tahrir square, Cairo

As sociology prof Zeynep Tufekci (remember that name, you will still hear allot about her) points out, shamelessly contradictory.

The case of Gafsa

Prof Tufeckci makes many salient points about how a movement organising through a tool like Facebook would operate and what impact it could have – which I would highly recommend you read – but for the purpose of this post I would just like to focus on her synthesis – a what if, what if the revolutionaries did not organize using social media?

Thus, our word-of-mouth movement would struggle to grow person-by-person and would be easily outmatched by the state security apparatus. It might be able to put together brave and small demonstrations here and there—the news of which would likely never travel beyond the lonely corner in which they were staged. Even if they managed to get some critical traction in a locality, the state could more easily counter, encircle and repress because unlike the current protests in Egypt and Tunisia, which started rapidly and emerged through a broad-base all at once, authoritarian regimes have a pretty advanced-arsenal against old-fashioned political organizing.

She proposes to compare what has happened now to what happened before – the riots in the Gafsa region from April to June 2008. If you do a Google search, you will find very little information on these riots. Here is one of the few reports in the English:

Tunisian police opened fire against rioters on Friday (June 6th) in Redeyef, 350km from Tunis, leaving a 22-year-old man dead and some 22 wounded, local press reported. Unrest in the phosphate mining region of Gafsa has continued for two months, with hundreds of youths rioting over unemployment and rising living costs in the region.

Note the lone desperate comment underneath it.

Tufeckci asks the key question -

In 2008, protests led by the local trade-union broke out in the Tunisian mining-town of Gafsa over corruption, unemployment and nepotism. Did you know about them? Neither did I, until recently. However, the story is familiar. Tunisian government forces encircled the town, brought in the army when the police proved unable to contain the unrest, kicked out and jailed the journalists trying to cover the story. Isolated and censored, the protests dissipated.

Is the spread and integration of social media into everyday rhythms of Tunisian (and global) populace between 2008 and 2011 a factor in why the world has barely heard of Gafsa while Sidi Bouzid is nearly a household name around the globe? Obviously, there cannot be a definitive answer. However, this is surely worth exploring and a striking example of the “how” of social movements has such profound consequences beyond being fodder for contrarian missives about their irrelevance.

We can answer her. Thanks to the founder of RWW France Fabrice Epelboin who sent me this link on Quora, we know that although Tunisia had almost two million internet users in September 2008, it only had 28,000 Facebook users.

Wow. So Tunisia went from 28 thousand to nearly two million Facebook users in two years (December 2010) adding more than 2000 users per day for two years. Since Ben Ali has been ousted three weeks ago the number of Facebook users have risen by more than 100,000.

Backstory – during and after the Gafsa protests many Tunisian blogs were blocked, and so was Facebook on the 18th of August 2008. Ben Ali himself intervened to unban Facebook on the 3rd of September, precipitating a rise in the spread of the technology that would be called, in the advertising world – viral – or perhaps – off the charts. In other words it would appear to have been a big mistake. It laid the foundation from where information age gorillas could hide in the digital undergrowth (Unfortunately not my metaphor), inserting their messages into newsfeeds for the population at large.

Unlike Tufeckci’s cautious academic approach – I’d say the role of social media and Facebook in particular as a tool for insurrection has been under-egged.

The fog of insurrection is only now starting to lift over the situation in Egypt, but there too the case for role of Facebook as a tool for activism seems to be becoming more compelling, the more information sees the light of day.

A few more thoughts then.

• Publicness matters – many digital activists are fixated with privacy. But taking risks in public was key. It’s the equivalent of a public protest.
• Language matters – As this blog points out, language translation was key to an adoption spike in Facebook use around 2008. Facebook was translated into French (Tunisia’s colonial language) on the 10th of March 2008. Just before the period of massive growth.
• You need everybody – or at least not just the usual suspects. Blogs and Twitter are important – they are for Thought Leaders – but they wont light a fire by themselves. They need the distribution mechanism into people’s ordinary lives. Tufeckci:
  “These protests were first kindled through Facebook and other social media which are integrated into rhythms of mundane sociality. This means that rather than being directed at first by a well-defined group of activists who were able to reach only other politically-motivated compatriots, the dissent and the protests propagated through ordinary social networks which, in turn, ensures that the movement is broad-based.”
  …
  “Evgeny Morozov repeatedly highlights how social media increases state capacity for state to surveillance. That is certainly worth considering. However, as I argued here, surveillance is not that useful when the opposition activity is completely entangled with everyday sociality of millions of people and when dissent is widespread.”
• With digital tools small design decisions are crucial. UX and functionality decisions by Zuckerburg that has proven to be fundamental. As has been pointed out by many people including Jeff Jarvis, Facebook made two key decisions. The first was that users would use their own names – a real identity. This allowed for Facebook to be more integrated in people’s lives in general. The second was the later innovation of the personal newsfeed, the news of your crowd, or what Sam Leith has dubbed the Reuters of Inanity.

  Never before has the mundane and the everyday been such a ticket for utopian dreams.

  Related deployments:

  1. Tunisia & the technologies of freedom
  2. Wael Ghonim was admin of Khaled Said Facebook page
  ]]> http://mhambi.com/2011/02/tunisia-was-hit-by-a-tsunami-of-the-mundane/feed/ 3 http://mhambi.com/2010/10/die-antwoord-is-maaifoedies/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=die-antwoord-is-maaifoedies http://mhambi.com/2010/10/die-antwoord-is-maaifoedies/#comments Tue, 26 Oct 2010 09:44:59 +0000 Kameraad Mhambi http://mhambi.com/?p=1363
• I’m a Ninja – Die Antwoord
• America discovers Die Antwoord
]]> What’s up with Die Antwoord?

Are they authentic? And more specifically. Do they rip off other people’s work?

We are all familiar with the first set of anti-Antwoord complaints. That they were disparaging Afrikaner culture. That they were appropriating and exploiting coloured culture. Snot, I said. They were a wonderful fusion of the two.

So just this week South African writer Gus Silber Tweeted about the powerful pics of South African poor whites, taken between the first and second world war. He also Tweeted

@RoyBlumenthal Sign of the times! Seems SA’s Poor Whites have always fascinated sociologists & documentary photographers.

To which I replied.

@gussilber it’s part of what fascinates the overseas about Die Antwoord. It speaks to the possibility an authentic African whiteness.

Yes Gus agreed:

@wildebees True, & they’ve played on it very smartly, by working with the photographer Roger Ballen as well.


Roger Ballen’s pics – did he exploit poor whites?

But there’s a new worry about Die Antwoord. The other day a pêl from New York asked me whether Die Antwoord worked with photograper Roger Ballen. She was involved in a lively debate about this on the Africa is Country Blog (well worth a read).

Yes I told her. As far as I know he worked with them on the Wat pomp julle video and much besides. I had wrote so myself long before – just when they were blowing up – I had it from a source close to them.

So I was a bit surprised when my New York friend sent me this follow up comment to the Roger Ballen claims.

I live in Norway far away from SA. In present time Roger Ballen exhibit in Oslo. After his artist talk I asked him a few questions about his relationship to Die Antwoord. He answered:”Intersting question, because I got an E-mail yesterday from this rap group, where they say that they appreciate my work. I don`t know Die Antwoord. I have never talked to these people. I hear that they are going to earn millions because of inspiration from my photos.” He didn`t know how to react! On one hand it`s nice that someone likes your work, on the other hand it feels a bit dirty not to ask for permission.

The commentor continued:

“Now, I was a bit confused about this answer, so I asked Die Antwoord on the FB fan page. Are you working together with Roger Ballen or are you just inspired by his work? The answer from Die Antwoord: They deleted my post!”

This week I also saw The social network flick. And it set me thinking about ideas, truth and ownership.

Now if above is true – that’s not cool.

On the other hand. Which artist does not use other artists as inspiration? In this cut and paste culture, in digital media but also everywhere else, people have mixed and matched styles they liked and increasingly so.

The author of the comment pointed at another facinating article she allegedly referred the angry Ballen to:

From Weird Al Yankovic to Chromeo, parody is not a new device in pop music. But what makes Die Antwoord so interesting is their ability to blur the distinctions between what’s real and what’s actually satire. The tension here between aspects novelty and what’s contemporary becomes quite fertile as a mode of production.

As a metaphor, Die Antwoord embodies the post-modern attitude by attacking the notion of a static or fixed symbol. Wether in literature, film, art, music, product design, etc, etc, the product in question is never completely original. Instead, it is always built from those cultural forms that preceded it. While this notion was most famously illustrated by Roland Barthes in Death of the Author, it was made truly tangible to my generation by Nicolas Bourriaud in Post Production. In it, he states “with music derived from sampling, the sample no longer represents anything more than a salient point in a shifting cartography. It is caught in a chain, and it’s meaning depends in part on its position in this chain.”

Nod, nod, nod.

I have a little secret. A lot of the hardcore Die Antwoord fans are aware of this mind. Mr. Ballen has to fall into the back of queue when it comes to major influences and even diewery.

Check this video. The Matrix SA style by Ne0 SA.

It contains by my reckoning, lyricks and passages that form part of at least five Die Antwoord songs – (not all of which made it onto $0$ Like my new best friend).

It’s not as if there is no hat tips. Die Antwoord actually name checks Ne0 SA in the orginal tracks that were free to download (not sure if $O$ maintains these refenrences.) UPDATE: Grif informs me that Die Antwoord also hat tips them in the sleeve of $O$. See comments below.

The video is itself a mix of the original Matrix movies and a Justin Timberlake parody of the Matrix movies and strictly speaking itself illegal. It features Ne0′s incredibly odd and hilarious potty-mouthed dialog. This is the fountain of what Rustum Kozain calls Die Antwoord’s ability to kak-praat:

“The one thing that is certain is that Die Antwoord opens up the space of double-speak, characteristic especially of slave society and known, from my ‘coloured’ background, as ‘kak-praat’ or ‘gat-krap’. The latter especially points to mischievous lying, something that anthropologists don’t get: the informant cannot be trusted because you don’t know, can never know, whether the informant is talking the truth or whether they’re krapping gat (scratching hole/arse/behind). “

And here is some more Die Antwoord influences. Zef sketse was a number of shows put on in and around Pretoria from 2002 to 2004. Often in collaboration with and attended by an enthusiastic Watkykjy ( Die Antwoord’s spiritual home – or buitekammertjie ) – crowd.

So are they bad ass for doing this?

In The Social Network the genius that is Mark Zuckerberg ends up paying $60mil to three student entrepeneurs who he kept on a leash for a month – pretending he is building them a social network – while he built Facebook.

The issue here is not whether Zuckerburg was inspired by them to build Facebook. He clearly was. The devil with developing good web tools are always in the details. The idea is one thing, the execution is another.

For me it’s obvious that Zuckerburg had the particular talent and understanding of user behaviour to build Facebook in the way he did to make it a global powerhouse. He did not need them. They needed him.

But he should have told them from the beginning that he was going to do it himself. Not nice Mark. Sies Ninja!?

So the borrowing with Ballen and Ne0 does not diminish the genius and drive of the creative cultural mash up that is Die Antwoord. Another two comments on The Africa is a Country blog reads:

Siener: last night I spent some time doing exactly that, Googling to find out more about Die Antwoord, having realised (for example with Ballen link) that I was misunderstanding a whole lot of stuff here. And I’m rather inclined to agree with you regarding the idea that Die Antwoord can somehow be seen in any way as a representation of the way white South Africans per se think. Clearly there is a whole lot more going on with Die Antwoord than at first may appear, and certainly from this blog post. I’ve been completely absorbed by what I have read about this group on the internet, and what it once again (for me, as an outsider) throws up about the complexity of South Africa (which I think I have often missed).

and this quote from Pam Sykes.

Very little in pop culture in the past five or ten years has made me think quite as hard as Die Antwoord has (and thanks Lara Pawson for the Roger Ballen lead, there is more for me to follow up). They deserve better than the reading that they “convey pretty superficial stereotypes about blackness that already over saturate global popular culture”. Because frankly, as someone who lives not too very far away from the streets they depicted in Zef Side, I find myself utterly unable to pin down what they’re doing. They’re playing way out on the fringes where whiteness and blackness and colouredness and watookal blur together and cease to have meaning. They’re rude and anarchic and gleeful — it makes my head hurt, and I love them for that.

Wow. It’s true.

To be able to have that impact. To make sense of and mash together the phenomenal complexities of South African culture, in word, visually and in music requires phenomenal talent, genius even. That while navigating treacherous political ground, and humungous stereo-types.

And what everybody seems to forget in these rather academic discussions is that in rap and in rave and a whole slew of other urban genres they sample and mash they do so with utmost street intelligence and musical nous. It’s not only tight, it’s slick, and it’s on the button musically. That is Die Antwoord.

If true it does cast some aspersions over the their ethics. But in line with his now more arrogant and aggressive persona, I’m sure Ninja will just shrug, and tune us we’re jaloers. You can’t beat them. Just join them.

Oh irony. The Watkykjy blog has been moaning about polish TV ripping off Die Antwoord. See the vid below:

The Africa is a Country commentator ends her comment on the following:

What would Roger Ballen be without the The Boardinghouse, and what would Die Antwoord be without Roger Ballen? Maybe the idea of a pure work is false?

UPDATE: The comment in question on Africa is a Country has not been confirmed as true – as I say in the post above as well. To reflect the uncertainty and the protest of the commentators I added a question mark to the heading of this post and the Sies Ninja. Be that as it may, it is besides the point I’m making. True or not true it does not reflect for me on their authorship or the greatness of their work.

Related deployments:

1. I’m a Ninja – Die Antwoord
2. America discovers Die Antwoord
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