Flash mobs
Similarly, SMS messages are little different than e-mail. "Flash mobs were the flag pole sitting fashion of 2003. Most of them were organized by a guy who called himself 'bill from ny' in the message. He was Bill Vlasic of Harper's Magazine. He imagined flash mobs as a critique of the brain deadness of hipster culture. People would do anything you wrote down in an e-mail. It created zombie walks in San Francisco and pillow fights in Toronto."

Change the geography, and you change the meaning.

"Then, in 2006, it shows up in Belarus. People walk around October Square and eat ice cream."

But, unusually for flash mob, this ended with the pranksters handcuffed by black clad secret police.

It had to do with Belarus' dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. "It was illegal to be a group in October Square. In order to forestall public protest, he banned group behavior. The difference between 'bill from ny' and what the kids from Belarus were doing shows that the political context of the tool is important."

"For example, Twitter seemed stupid last year. But now there's a group of pro-democracy activists in Cairo who use it to track whether or not they're in police custody. If people know you're in custody, you may be there longer but you're less likely to be tortured, which is a net win from their point of view."

Defying the mafia
"The third story is one I wish I had managed to put in the book. A group of people in Palermo put up stickers that said, 'a population that pays the pizo is a population without dignity.' The 'pizo' is the payment to the mob. They realized that was not enough, so they put up a website, addiopizo, which means 'goodbye, pizo' and made it possible for businesses to stand up together to coordinate opposition to the mafia. In the past, if you stood up to the mafia, sometimes your business was destroyed and sometimes people were killed. So far, nobody's been killed."

When businesses misbehave, they act like organized crime. "It's a different problem for the mafia. The relationship between the mafia and those businesses is the same as that between Lukashenko and the protesters and between HSBC and the students."

Now, addiopizo helps customers find businesses that aren't paying off the mob. They also allow anonymous donations and tax free donations.

Back in Belarus, the students, in their next action, decided to just walk around smiling. The police cannot arrest everyone who smiles.

This modern world
In the modern world, media behavior is constrained by the big players and the institutions that can threaten them. "Imagine you lived in a society that wanted freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and wanted to carve out a category of bad speech acts (libel, hate, etc.) and wanted no prior restraint or chilling effects. How can we have all three. We have, until recently, lived in a world like this. The media was done by professionals, and all speech regulation operated, in effect, like the prisoner's dilemma. A newspaper would think twice about publishing something that the government didn't want published because it wants to continue to have a license to publish."

People who grew up only in the internet age don't know what this old regime was like. "The average age of my students at NYU remains the same, but my age is increasing at the alarming rate of one year every year," Shirky said. "I now have to teach the late 1990s as ancient history. The concept of three white men reading the news each night is easy to explain, but there's something I have to tell them and I can see they don't feel it. Prior to the 1990s, if you had something to say in public, you couldn't. You had to get permission, and our regulatory mechanisms depended on that."

This is about you, the ISP. "So now, regulators are looking for a new class of professionals to export self-censorship to. Regulators tell ISPs, 'we want you to start watching the content that comes through your pipes' and try to rope you into the bargin they had with the old publishing companies. Or, now it's a domain name agency being asked to shut down a Cuban travel agency. Or a webhost being asked to shut down ratemycop."

"The model is that we'll sue you until you behave like the bus commuters we're used to."

"The extreme example to me is the LA high school students. 40,000 of them organized a walkout to protest an anti-immigration bill in California and none of the school adminsitrators saw it coming. The administrators' response was to lock the doors after the students had entered the school the next day. Some schools even locked the classroom doors. When you move from an iterated relationship to a non-iterated relationship, from many interactions with a business to a one-off interaction with an individual, the punishments get that much more draconian."

Question and answer session
In the question and answer session, one person asked for insights on Tibet. Shirky said that dictators had learned from the fall of East Germany in 1991. It started, he said, with four dozen people banging pans in a square in Leipzig on a Monday night. It didn't seem worth cracking down on. By September, there were thousands, then 10,000.

The lesson learned by autocrats around the world is that you must crack down on any and every protest, no matter how small. But the media is watching. If there's a significant protest on opening day of the Beijing Olympics, the authorities will have to choose between cracking down in front of the cameras, or not cracking down at all.

Tibet is not a new problem. It's a secret that everyone new about. "When everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows, it's a public fact. That's shared awareness, the precursor to public action."

Expect more action, at least outside China. And inside China? Perhaps pre-emptive crackdowns.

Another person asked about how to protect free speech within our domain name system. Shirky said that if there were more Top Level Domains (tlds) as Postel had desired in the 1990s, it would be harder to prevent free speech. "Postel, I think, understood that abundance is the natural state of the internet. Any scarcity is at least a failure of the model. If only we could go back in time to 1984 and prevent root name servers from being written into the protocol. But the time in which they were built was so different from the time we're living in now."

— End

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