Cloud vs pyramid

When oil prices plummeted in 2014, some experts predicted that the next protest scenario would be “refrigerator versus TV.” But the oil held out, the refrigerator was only a little empty, and the protests happened anyway. And they occurred due to the fault of the smartphone, not the refrigerator. Nothing foreshadowed people taking to the streets, except for events taking place exclusively in the media space.

Social networks have again done something to young people that has brought them to the streets. Of course, calling the past protests teenage protests would probably be an exaggeration, but the noticeable role of youth in the crowd was indeed unexpected. In their place there could be, for example, radical patriots (and perhaps there will be), but for now Navalny and the “schoolchildren” have disrupted the natural course of one global process.

First wave: “angry”

The later in history a new media technology emerges, the faster it spreads around the world. It took newspapers three centuries, radio and television took 40 years, and the Internet about 20 years. Social networks spread everywhere instantly. And immediately after that, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, a wave of protests swept across the world.

When talking about Twitter revolutions, people usually remember the Arab Spring. But similar uprisings of progressive youth against governments occurred in 2010–2011 in Greece, Portugal and Israel. In Spain, the protest movement was described by the same characteristics as the Bolotnaya protests in Russia: i ndignados - “angry.” The “angry” protested in New York during Occupy Wall Street , faced batons and even bullets on the Kiev Maidan or Taksim Square in Turkey.

Of course, everywhere had its own political specifics. Three factors were common.

Firstly, the “cobblestone - a tool of the proletariat” was the smartphone everywhere.

Secondly, the demographics of the protest were absolutely similar everywhere: urban, educated youth, who had nothing to do with the political class, suddenly warmed up to street protest.

Thirdly, the simultaneity of protest in such different political systems coincided with the first wave of the spread of social networks.

All three factors are explained by the fact that it was urban educated youth who became the vanguard of digitization and, as a consequence, the agent of new social processes. Social networks in these countries have made youth protest not only possible, but inevitable.

Anatomy of protests

Samizdat in the USSR destroyed the party monopoly on content simply by replicating an alternative picture of the world. Social networks don’t just spread an alternative agenda; they provide an opportunity to participate in its formation. They liberated the private authorship of the masses.

There is an inevitable conflict between two methods of agenda formation: broadcast, vertical “top-down”, controlled by the establishment, in which a special caste is responsible for the content, and involving, horizontal, with wandering clots of authority, where the public itself is the author and everyone is responsible for the content. This collision is not political, but morphological in nature: the pyramid collides with the cloud.

Already on the “floor” below, at the level of national-cultural characteristics, political meanings stick to this morphological conflict. This is almost always a complaint of inadequate representation made to elites: “You don’t even represent us!” People suddenly not only realize that the establishment has its own concerns and its own agenda, but now they are not hearing from rumors as before, but are already seeing with their own eyes that an agenda alien to their interests is also shamelessly imposed through traditional media. If the social network’s reports diverge from the TV reports, but are not inferior in coverage, expect an explosion.

Continuous referendum

Social networks are a continuous referendum on all issues, which is impossible offline due to too many participants. After all, it was the growth of the participants that led the agora, circle, and veche to be replaced by representative democracy. Social media has reversed the process—they have made direct democracy possible again. And at historically unprecedented and physically impossible arrays and speeds. Social media relates to traditional media in the same way that direct democracy relates to representative democracy.

Not only is the way it is formed, the alternative agenda of social networks is simply doomed to differ from the official agenda of the establishment, it is also further galvanized if the mainstream does not notice it and political institutions suppress it. In the end, a social explosion occurs, often not at all connected with the socio-economic state of the protesters. That is why such protests are always a “revolution of dignity.”

In addition to the inevitable political heating, social networks offer social coherence - coherence and coherence, which, in turn, provide additional heating through solidary and epidemic bursts of interest in any topic, be it election fraud or the Dimona investigation. A social network is not only a collective agitator and collective propagandist, but also a collective organizer.

But to attribute the credit for organizing the protest to social media alone would be unfair. Both the mainstream media and the establishment that controls them make a significant contribution. The role of the latter is to create a “difference in potential”, to create an official agenda that would be as sharply different as possible from the agenda formed by participants and activists in social networks.

From Occupy Wall Street to Trump . From Bolotnaya to ...?

The initial wave of social network protests was carried on the shoulders of advanced youth, who were the first to taste the sweet poison of liberated authorship. Since then, however, social media has spread wider and deeper. New infiltration demographics brought a new explosion of the "angry" and "unrepresented": surprise Brexit , Trump's shock victory.

The Trump phenomenon comes down not to his personal characteristics, as the Western mainstream media continues to harp on, but to the willingness of millions of “unrepresented” people to vote against the establishment and its agenda. This is the same morphological revolt of the cloud against the pyramid that lay at the heart of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street or Swamp. Only the demographics have changed.

In this logic of the socio-demographic spread of social networks, looking at Brexit and Trump, one could predict the next wave of protests in Russia. It could be connected, for example, with those who were promised, but not provided, the greatness of the Russian world. The revolt of the passionate guardians against the lethargy and corruption of the guarded is also quite a “revolution of dignity.” The developed ideas, the insufficient “representation” of these people and, conversely, the “sufficient” demographics of social networks - all this could one day lead to the fact that Novorossiya would ricochet in Russia.

One of the possible scenarios could be “ Ferguson ,” which also reflects the logic of the development of the protest potential of social networks as they spread socio-demographically. Protests of this type occur after some kind of police brutality, fictional or real. Social networks have already penetrated enough into small towns and large suburbs for the youth there to convert their “lack of representation” into protests as soon as a sufficiently energetic occasion presents itself (“Dimona” will not be enough here).

Strictly speaking, the Blackberry riot, the riot of the London suburbs in 2011, already bore the signs of Ferguson, just like the events of 2014 in this American town, which were spread far beyond its borders by social networks.

The riots on Manezhnaya Square in 2010, associated with the murder of a football fan and the incomprehensible behavior of the police (the same discrepancy between the official and alternative agendas), now, with a denser coverage of this category of youth on social networks, would develop much more radically.

It’s not that such radical scenarios are completely cancelled: “Russia of Chanson” may well still follow the protest path of “Russia of the iPhone.” But then Navalny intervened in the natural course of events.

Energy is more important than ideas

Navalny kept the protest of the “angry” in virtually the same social niche - inquisitive youth, “not represented” in the mainstream, but received a different picture on social networks and equipped with good viral memes. But as the “political demographics” of social networks expand, these young people have changed - they have become even younger. As a result, the protest did not become radicalized, but also became younger, which may have saved the country from many troubles for now.

“Unrepresentation” and the rebellion of youth against the system is a common thing and even useful, if without excesses. But in the conditions of digital society and social networks, we have not yet gone through this. Obviously, political activity will now become a teenage fashion. This will be facilitated not so much by Navalny as by teachers and parents, who will begin to actively discourage and prohibit. They will convey there what Navalny has not yet conveyed. Youth has a new meaning and a new test that can cause envy and pride, which is condemned and prohibited. The traditional teenage initiation, built on shaking the foundations, testing inhibitions and demonstrably overcoming fear, will receive new symbols - a flock to a rally, a photo in the arms of an “astronaut”, a selfie in a paddy wagon. In this case, we are right now witnessing the emergence of a new teenage subculture - political activism. It is possible that Navalny will draw some of the bored teenagers away from “blue whales” and suicidal fashion, as well as from passion for various types of extremism.

It is unlikely that Navalny was specifically targeting teenagers. It's quite difficult to sort out the memes that would appeal to, say, high school students separately from freshmen. Schoolchildren caught up because the age of their socialization coincided with the penetration of the politicizing influence of social networks into their environment. Well, the school helped with its political education. On the Internet, they are offered a suitable language of rebellion, a suitable subculture of protest, apparently better and more interestingly designed than the subculture of radical movements.

Given that this is also a future electorate, Navalny's team will probably start throwing out more attractive memes for this audience to build on the unexpected demographic success. However, Navalny is unlikely to be able to maintain total substantive control over this fashion. Teenage rebellion is meaningless - energy is more important than ideas. Navalny’s methods and ideas may soon turn out to be “velvet,” especially if Navalny himself becomes “institutionalized” in the eyes of teenagers. And then the primary political involvement of high school students may become for some of them a transit to something more radical.

Today, the winner is not the one who controls the vertical broadcast, as it was in the industrial era, but the one who creates a platform for mass self-expression. Young people are especially susceptible to this. While the government is taking control of more and more new broadcasting channels in the “media pyramid,” Navalny is creating more and more new trends.

The next demographic layer is drawn into the inevitable morphological conflict between the pyramid and the cloud. These are still youth, and not already marginalized, but someday social networks will reach them too.