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Tech-Powered Politics, Part 3: Iran's Youth Twitter and the World Watches

Moldova, Guatemala, Fiji, Madagascar... Iran. 

If ever there was a year that crystallized the power of technology in the hands of average people to disseminate news and force transparency in the face of political suppression, corruption and violence, this is it.

It has been one week since 40 million people in the Islamic Republic of Iran went to the polls to cast ballots in Iran's controversial 10th Presidential election.

Last week, as the early results of the Iranian elections were reported, I emailed two old and distant acquaintances, young Iranian students I had blogged about over two years ago after meeting at a rooftop party in New Delhi.  During our conversation in India, the students had suggested to me that there was continued frustration with the limits on political freedom in Iran, and, in their words, "that the current regime [would] have to open up the political process or face very serious popular unrest within the next five to ten years."

Last Friday night, one of those students, a computer scientist now back in Iran, quickly responded to my email with the following:

"Now it's 2:42 AM here in Tehran when I'm writing these lines for you. As per the state television's live broadcasting from 19 million counted votes Ahmadinejad is leading by 67% and Mousavi is second after him by 30%...Nobody knows if there is a conspiracy going on, but this result (if continued) is not going to be accepted by majority of people.

Stay in touch."

Over the last seven days I have watched from my computer and on my blackberry, videos of hundreds of thousands of young enthusiastic Iranians, marching through the streets of Tehran and risking their reputations and safety in order to demand that their voices be heard and that their votes be counted. 

As a student of middle east politics, and an uncompromising believer in the power of democracy, freedom of speech, and technology, this is one of the most inspirational things I have ever witnessed.  It may not be Tienanmen, but in the middle east, it is indeed something altogether different, and potentially more powerful. 

Just as important as the protesters' actions themselves, however, has been the ability of people around the world to witness these events despite extensive limits on the traditional media by Iranian government officials and violent attempts by government-backed forces to prevent any reporting at all.

In spite of this, or maybe, because of it, we have been privy to a rugged street view of the events in Iran via Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.  And while the past 12 months have shown us flashes of social media journalism from the globe's political hot spots, the last 7 days in Persia have provided the most poignant example.  Young Iranians armed with digital cameras and cell phones have given us unvarnished, if imperfect, images of the most important political struggle inside their country in a generation, all without editorial control, satellite hookup or commercial interruption.

This is citizen journalism, Iranian-style.  And it is my hope that this week's events not only bear political fruit for the masses of frustrated and disenfranchised Iranians, but that other reclusive and suppressive regimes around the world see this and recognize that information wants to be free, and that in the age of the smart phone, the days of centralized media control are over.

20 Years Later, Have We Forgotten Tiananmen?

Today, June 4th, marks the twentieth anniversary of the violent clearing of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators from Beijing's Tiananmen Square by the army of the Peoples' Republic of China.

So much has changed in China since those tense seven weeks between April and June, 1989, when hundreds of thousands of students, disillusioned communists, and free market reformers gathered in the World's largest urban square to plead for economic reform and democratic rights, that the importance of that experience seems hard to remember.

China's economy has become the fastest growing in the world, with GDP expanding by an average of 9% a year, every year, since 1979 and touching double-digit growth in 2006 and 2007.  This steady march has been heavily driven by a constant Western demand for cheap Chinese-manufactured goods, and more recently, significant foreign investment.  Government reform over the last decade removed much of what actually remains of the communist economic system.  Oddly, the world's largest and last big "Communist" country today boasts some some of the lowest corporate tax rates in the world, (25% for large companies, 20% for smaller enterprises).

As a result, tremendous domestic opportunities have opened up, enticing foreign and domestic firms to deploy billions of dollars of capital in China in hopes of selling products and services to the more than 1.3 billion consumers with increasing disposable income. 

The current economic crisis and subsequent Chinese unemployed unrest notwithstanding, so much has changed for the better for China's people in the last 20 years that a casual observer might assume the June 4 protesters had in fact succeeded in their mission.  Younger generations' first impressions of Beijing were likely cast while watching the Olympics Opening Ceremonies last summer.  With such an impressive show it might seem easy to forget that the 1989 protests had ever taken place.

If only it were so. 

Despite the economic miracle of the Middle Kingdom, state suppression of political and religious dissent remains rigid. 

Elements of the Catholic church, the Falun Gong, the Buddhist population in Tibet and Muslim minority groups in the Western provinces are sometimes arrested, beaten or jailed without open trial or formal charge.  And reports of Chinese political activists who have been arrested or tortured for acts of subversion against the state are a common part of the international news cycle.

The government, whose obsession with managing foreign impressions is well-known, is clearly still concerned over the wounds left 20 years ago by Tiananmen.

Beginning on Tuesday, bloggers on TechCrunch reported that major web applications including search engines, photo & information sites and social networks like Hotmail, Flicker, Live.com, Twitter, Bing, had been shut down or restricted.  Plain clothes police officers with umbrellas to block cameras are in place this morning in Tiananmen looking out for embarrassing protests that might taint China's new, post-Olympics, shining image.

However, most ironic aspect of the current state of political freedom in China is that today, 20 years after Tienanmen, the US has become much more dependent on China than ever before, ultimately weakening any diplomatic hand we might have to play in supporting continued political reform and speaking out against human rights abuses in the country.

More critical to our current precarious economic state than the U.S. trade relationship with China (our second largest partner after Canada), is the debt relationship we now have with the Chinese government.  The U.S. Treasury's ability to continue printing money to support our deficit spending on Iraq, corporate bailouts and a potential new set of health care entitlements, is limited by China's willingness to continue buying our U.S. Treasury bonds. 

Just as the U.S. has built an unhealthy dependency on the drug pushers of the middle east, OPEC, who fuel both our economy at home and our enemies' supply chains in the caves of Afghanistan and valleys of  Pakistan, 20 years of debt-financed consumption has left us with a similar dependency on the government in Beijing, now our reluctant ally against hyperinflation and further global economic destabilization.

--

There are no memorials in mainland China to the estimated 2,000-3,000 people who were killed for their political beliefs and the thousands more who were wounded on June 4, 1989.  Only in Hong Kong is open public discussion of the subject tolerated by Beijing.  And as a frustrating corollary to the half-success of economic reform without political freedom, China's youth today, high on the Internet and their new found wealth, have much more to lose than their 1980's predecessors. 

As told to a CNN reporter by two young Chinese, "Our safety, our wealth are all controlled by the authority," spoke "John," a 27-year-old restaurant owner in Beijing. "The only thing that common people can do is to work hard and earn more money."

Added Holly, a young Chinese woman: "An old Chinese saying is that 'self-preservation is the first law of nature.' Politics doesn't pay. We must go to wherever that pays."

--

Below is a video documenting several events in modern Chinese history following the founding of the Peoples' Republic on October 1, 1949 and culminating in the demonstrations of 1989 which began after the death of pro-democracy and anti-corruption advocate Hu Yaobang.  I believe the music in the background is a song called Elegant Bearing of the Blood Stain, a piece of popular music written in 1987, originally as a memorial of the war between China and Vietnam at the southern border in 1979, and subsequently used to commemorate those who died in the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989.

The Silver in India's Anti-Climactic Election

Above, Asia's oldest stock market, the Bombay Stock Exchange. Photo from Wikipedia.

Over 700 million registered voters went to the polls in India over the last four weeks, in what was the world's latest, largest display of democracy.

While the results didn't offer any major surprises (e.g. there was no real emergence of the Third Front), they generally looked like a strong affirmation of the public's support for the ruling Congress-led United Progress Alliance, and the economic policies of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.  So at the risk of pontificating from 7,000 miles away, here's my take on why this year's general election for the lower house of Parliament in India (or Lok Sabha) was an important one.

While neither Congress or the BJP and their respective alliances have ever fully shown themselves to be free and clear of the cloud of corruption that seems to hang over every Indian government, this Congress party has shown itself to be a consistent, if lumbering, supporter of free market policies both regarding business activities in India and for the rules governing foreign investment.

As I write this, trading on the BSE has been temporary halted following an 11% opening surge on Monday morning in Bombay.  The markets perceive these election results as an indication that the economic liberalization of the past 15 years will continue and that the government will remain stable, despite the specter of terrorism and the albatross of overwhelming poverty.

Almost exactly five years years ago the Congress party re-took power from the BJP on the cry from India's masses that economic growth was only benefitting the wealthy and urban dwellers, but not trickling down to the village.  With five years of GDP growth at 6-9%, those days seem to be forgotten.  Whether these results reflect the continued migration of workers to cities or the beginnings of a true economic virtuous cycle that's reaching more of India, it seems like many Indians are feeling optimistic about the future, India's place in the world and their long-term economic fortunes.  And despite the global slowdown, India's economy is still growing at over 5% a year.

But the real reason I think this election is important, is that in many places there seemed to be a repudiation of some of the traditional old dogs of Indian politics:  Elderly, ideological, caste-oriented politicians who in the past have bought and paid for votes with handouts and color tvs and bankrupted public treasuries with needless monuments and debt forgiveness.  The question for these leaders always seemed "how do we get our share of the pie (or uttapam?)," rather than "how do we cook a bigger one?"

In Bihar, India's poorest state, 21 new politicians will take office following this election.  And in Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state by population, the Congress party apparently took votes from both the upper caste Hindu parties and the Muslim parties, two groups with constituents that are often at very different ends of the economic spectrum.

I'll caveat all this Jai Ho talk with links to a group of bloggers I greatly respect (desicritics).
First, one blogger's responses to several "consensus views" on what the election results tell us.
And second, an essay by Vivek Sharma, PhD, suggesting that this election demonstrated the Indian electorate's growing "maturity."

Here's a little more music to leave you with, my favorite music video, and movie, of the last year.

Twitter's Real Impact in Moldova and Beyond

I have withheld comment on the events in Moldova two weeks ago as I waited to learn more information about what really happened on the ground and online, who was involved, and what the outcome was.

There is still debate over what role Twitter and other social media networks like Facebook and LiveJournal played in the organizing of the events.

What is clear though is that over 10,000 young people unexpectedly gathered in front of the Parliament building in Chisinau in a matter of hours, without the use of traditional media (TV, Radio, or newsprint).

While I understand the skepticism of those who say technology was not the cause or even the primary factor in spurring this protest, (rather it was long-standing local grievances and skepticism over the validity of pro-communist election results), I think there is enough evidence to show that Twitter and other mediums, (SMS, blog posts) did in fact play a significant role in spreading word about the protests, both to locals as well as international (and Moldovan expat) observers. 

Moldova is by most standards a small and poor country.  Nearly 1/4 of its 4 million people are migrant workers, living overseas in other European countries.  Its regime has been labeled by many as the last Communist Government in Europe, and since the eve of WWII it has served as a proxy for competing spheres of influence, originally the USSR and Nazi Germany, today, Russia and Romania (its lingual brethren).

I won't re-"hash" the argument over whether Twitter was a significant contributor in organizing this protest, I don't think that's the point.  While there is a good argument why Twitter was not a major organizing tool, Evgeny Morozov's response illustrates another viewpoint, how revolutions are in fact not organized, but are instead executed, reported and spread.

I quote him extensively here, because he does a great job of explaining the actual use-case for Twitter in this situation, which I think the mainstream media has overlooked. Twitter's true impact was more as one point of origin for the ripple effect, rather than the wave itself.

"I think we won't get far in our analysis of Twitter's role in this week's events without making a distinction between "planning" and "executing" a revolution. I have never argued or believed that social media -- and Twitter in particular -- is good for planning revolutions; if you plan to overthrow the Castro regime and are discussing those plans on Twitter, well, perhaps, you shouldn't bother.

When a new posts appears on Twitter, it usually has a life cycle that is invisible to most of us: somebody posts it to a Romanian-language blog, somebody posts it to a Russian blog on LiveJournal, etc -- and suddenly, these re-posts allow for initial updates to be discovered by local media -- who may not know about Twitter at all -- who then pass on the news to even greater and more diverse audiences. In the case of Moldova, it's possible that Twitter has made much bigger impact on the new media environment outside of (rather than inside) the Twittersphere by simply feeding a stream of blogs, social networks, and text messages with content. In my view, people who point to the low number of Twitter users in Moldova as proof of the mythical nature of the subject have conceptual difficulties understanding how networks work; on a good network, you don't need to have the maximum number of connections to be powerful -- you just need to be connected to enough nodes with connections of their own."

Moreover, real quantitative evidence of what was happening on Twitter during the protests can be found in blogger and entrepreneur Ethan Zuckerman's awesome analysis. 

Zuckerman ran a spider to scrape every tweet on Twitter from the six days during and following the protests marked with the #PMAN hash (the tag used to identify Moldova protest-related tweets).  What he saw was a declining number of Tweeters following the initial event, but a sustained volume of daily tweets with the tag, which implies not viral outward growth but rather increased intensity of posting from a small but dedicated community of posters. 

	Tweets	Authors	Mean
Tuesday	3,820	651	5.9
Wednesday	6,684	1,050	6.4
Thursday	7,300	643	11.4
Friday	7,003	529	13.2
Saturday	4,012	275	14.6
Sunday	3,288	223	14.7

A final point.  That much of the "Tweeting" was actually being done in Romanian/Moldovan by those with vested interests in the country and the outcome is apparent from the excel data that Zuckerman links to in his post.  Of the 32,000 posts from that 6 day period, the vast majority of posts were in fact in Moldovan/Romanian. This was not just English language news junkies in the West congratulating themselves for supporting a tech product with social implications.  Rather, Twitter demonstrated itself as an important new tool (out of several) for people to promote, discuss, and spread word of local political protests, and to help them quickly gain international attention.

Photograph of protests in Moldova: Denis Graur

The Twitter Post: A Platform, Not a Product

Image from Stef Landowski.

I have been meaning to write a post on Twitter for months now.  Not because it doesn't get enough press, it gets plenty, but because I wanted a way to explain to some of my friends and family why Twitter is so interesting to me and what it means for the web (PC & mobile).

Sometimes people are able to look back at history and see with a clear eye when they finally knew an idea was going to be big, when it became clear that a product or company or candidate was going to take the cake.

For me, that process with Twitter happened in November of last year, with the events of 26/11, as Indians refer to the Mumbai attacks. CNN, Fox and even local Indian news stations were offering very limited, sometimes conflicting, reports of what was happening on the ground in India's financial capital.  Meanwhile, people witnessing the events first hand were twittering.  This was a news feed not even the Drudge Report could scoop.

By January, we had the Miracle on the Hudson, where one of the first photos was captured by a Twitter user and shared via Twitpic, and subsequently picked up by numerous media outlets. 

On February 24, during President Obama's Address to the Nation, Congressmen, Senators and their staff were tweeting away their critiques of the President, each other and Nancy Pelosi, as well as musing about what else was on TV.

I have been a registered user of Twitter since August of 2007 but like my initial experience with Facebook, I didn't initially grasp all of the applications of a platform like this until a critical mass of friends and bloggers I followed began to use it.

That has happened at a rapidly increasing rate over the last six months, culminating in massive media attention following the capital raise Twitter completed in February.

So, for the uninitiated, here's what Twitter does, and why it is a revolutionary platform, not just another social network.

1. Twitter breaks news stories before anyone else - (Mumbai, the Hudson landing, the Amsterdam Plane Crash last week)

2. Twitter allows celebrities and companies to reach their fans and customers in new and intimate ways - (I have re-engaged as a fan of Dave Matthews, following tweets from his travels around Louisiana, after having stopped buying his records years ago).

3. Twitter enables people to share and comment on content in an opt-in, progressive disclosure format, you can get a taste or description of the content without having to read the whole story (I have tweets pushed to me via Digsby and just click through on the links that I am interested in reading or responding to).

4. Twitter enables instant crowd-sourcing of ideas, opinions and recommendations - (in San Francisco's marina? Need a restaurant recommendation? Just ask your followers.)

5. Twitter is a low-friction, low-intensity social network for people to communicate with their existing friends or find new friends that share the same interests in an non-intrusive, non-threatening way.

6. Twitter removes technology barriers to using the Internet and joining the global digital conversation by equally enabling users of both PCs and those with just mobile phones at their disposal.

This to me is one of the most interesting aspects.  Twitter removes as much friction as possible from the process of using social media.  It's easy to join, easy to post on, and easy to consume.  It's asynchronous, and doesn't require a lot of time or effort to maintain or monitor.  And It doesn't involve the social hassles of Myspace and Facebook where friending and tagging can turn your personal life into an online school yard of exposed relationships and unwanted photos.  You can follow or be followed without knowing or caring who's following you, and without any stigma attached to connecting with people you don't already know.

Anyone can use Twitter, and use it very easily, whether you're a techie, a grandmother or a blogger in Madagascar.

And now your moment of Zen: Jon Stewart explains Twitter.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Tech-Powered Politics, Part 2: Ice Cream Eating As Guerilla Protest

My friend and I were discussing yesterday how antiquated bumper stickers, yard signs and other 20th Century tactics will seem in twenty years to a professional campaigner..."wait, you used to just wear buttons and make TV commercials with no way of measuring effectiveness, and expect to win?  How quaint."

If advertisers are figuring out the power of measured media and audience targeting, you can bet the tech-savvy political leaders of the future will soon follow, in this country and abroad.

There are examples from London to Minsk of how social media is enabling people to physically organize below the nose of the authorities like never before, as in last Friday's Dance Flash Mob in the London Tube organized via Facebook, or Belarus's Ice Cream Eating Flash Mob guerrilla protest in 2006 organized via LiveJournal and sms.

These examples give me me hope that the direction of technological innovation is driving us towards a world where power is increasingly distributed rather than Orwell's 1984 where it is centralized.  It is the young and restless who always adopt technology and mold it faster than their old and complacent counterparts, be they parents, corporates, or governments.

Dare I say it, like the AK-47 before, social media spread via the Web and, by extension, the Mobile Web, is technology that won't just strengthen incumbents, but rather will increasingly empower rebels and protesters anew, to disrupt and challenge anachronistic, and sometimes authoritarian governments around the world.

I've often heard people joke around Sand Hill Road that some of the most revolutionary entrepreneurs are young, angry men in their twenties who want to change the world.  The fact that they share these traits with many of history's political revolutionaries is no coincidence.

Tech-Powered Politics, Part 1: Prop 8 Maps and Pink Chaddis

There are two on-going net-roots political movements I just came across that continue to demonstrate how technology in young and nimble hands can quickly overwhelm non-technical, traditionalist hold-outs.

On Sunday there was a story in India about a few Sri Ram Sena supporters (violent Hindu nationalists) who attacked several young women and their friends who were drinking at a bar in Mangalore, South India.  The group and its allies (who don't believe women belong in bars) also came out and criticized Valentine's Day as immoral and stated that any women in Karnataka found out on a Valentine's date would be forcibly married. Less than a week after the incident a blog-based response emerged asking people to send the Ram Sena leaders pairs of pink panties for Valentine's Day to embarrass them. And since the organizers launched a Facebook group over the weekend, they have had 17,130 members join and their blog has jumped from an Alexa rank of 150,000 down to 90,000 (Yahoo & Google have ranks of 1 & 2 respectively).

Today I found Eight Maps for the first time, a Google Maps interface with a red balloon on the address of every person that made political donations in favor of California's Proposition 8, the law that amended the state's Constitution making it illegal for homosexual couples to marry.  Information on political donations has always been a matter of public record but never before has it been so easily aggregated and search-able. This is powerful stuff, whether it used by politicians for vote mapping or activists for public shaming.

Journalists like to talk about Obama's web strategy, and Read/Write Web had a good summary Monday on how Obama's campaign made masterful use of social media.  But I think these things are all just the beginning.

More on this topic tomorrow.

The Next 3 Billion Internet Users

I haven't talked much about emerging markets recently but I have increasingly become convinced that the Internet for the next 3 billion, that is, the 3 billion people in the world today who have mobile devices but not PCs (mobile global ph. users will be 4 billion soon), is just around the corner, 3-5 years at most, and it will represent the most massive global expansion of content generation and consumption since the late 1990s, far more than what we have seen so far in terms of the shear number of users involved, though probably less in terms of rich data.

Gartner reports from late last year talked about the volume of smart phones as a % of total new phone shipments approaching 40-45% this year in many markets around the world.

Everyday I talk to another mobile content aggregation or VAS (value-added services) company in Israel or Brazil or India that is growing rapidly and generating millions of dollars of ad rev or even better, service and download fees, on the back of what are relatively easy simple technology services like sms news feeds, wap page creation, ringtones, song downloads, casual games, and mobile social networks.

The stuff that's really hard in this arena so far, and still an opaque shade of charcoal gray, are user analytics: Knowing who is consuming what and where, but companies like AdMob are already hard at work at that problem and making great progress.

But not only are people consuming more, tools like Twitter and mobile social networks like Mig33 and Mocospace (and even Facebook and MySpace apps) give them the ability to speak up and join the global digital conversation in ways never possible before.  The real digital divide between the Global South (places like Africa, Asia and Latin America) and the Developed World won't be bridged by broadband lines and cheap PCs, they'll be crossed by Wimax or LTE towers serving $20 smart phones that can download mobile apps, surf mobile wap pages, and pay for it all with carrier-independent pre-paid charge cards.

And when 3 billion people in the developing world who have never spoken a bit(e) before all start talking in 140 character microblogs or mobile chat rooms or jump into MMO"M"Gs (massively multi-player online "mobile" games), the party gets much bigger.

It's going to be a whole new world.

Of course, I'm not the only one who knows this.

Smart Grid gets some Light

Two new GE ads in the Super Bowl, a move by Obama to include Grid modernization in the Stimulus and some recent mainstream press have given companies toiling away in the (until recently relatively unsexy) electricity grid some fresh public light.

Obama's stimulus package includes $32B for grid-specific spending and incentives, and the spending structure ranges from matching funds for private investment to typical R&D grants.  Some industry analysts estimate that modernizing the US grid might take between $50-65B, so half-way there is a pretty good start, assuming the money is spent in a way that fosters an open, standards-based ecosystem of upstarts rather than forming just a major handout to industry incumbents. 

Here's the If I Only Had a Brain commercial. 

What's old is new again.

The Power of Youth? Or the Tools of Youth.

Beyond all the stories of Barack Obama retaking the oath today, the second half of the electronic fold seemed to be shots of the various Inaugural Balls, and what they represented.  Clearly of unique, and deserved, prominence this year was the Neighborhood Ball, open to public (for the first time since Andy Jackson apparently??) and made up of "ordinary folks" from around the country, but in particular, from the District of Columbia. 

But the Ball getting the most page space seems to be the Youth Ball, which many journalists are casting as a symbol of the forces that brought Obama to victory.  While I agree that younger people were instrumental in enabling Obama's success, I think that there are three parts to that suggestion, only two of which can geniunely be credited to the power of "young Americans" and the last of which has more to do with technology.  The first two are easier to isolate.

First, Obama had a disproportianate number of young people volunteer for his campaign.  Whether it was his words or his policies, he was able to amass an army of footsoldiers, phone-dialers and dollar donors that augmented his campaign staff and traditional fundraising methods substantially. 

Second, Obama's "only-in-America" personal story made him distinctly representative of younger generations of Americans, who, increasingly, are growing up in mobile, multi-cultural, cross-border, single-parent households.

But the real trick of Obama's campaign, that represented innovation in my mind, was his, and his supporters extensive use of connected social media and social networks for recruitment, organizing, fundraising, and crowd-sourcing, that is to say, use of engaged, connected populations for idea generation and consensus building.

Obama's election had as much to do with YouTube, Will.I.AM, and SNL as it did young volunteers and multicultural families.

In justice to the NYTimes, who commented on the 'Youth' phenonemon, here's a cool clip with some video from the Youth Balls of 2009 and 1993.