The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

President Obama represented the sectarian temper in power. The protests allowed him to frame a critique of the country’s ruling institutions, and to voice, without equivocation, his own doubts about their legitimacy.

LONDON IN AUGUST, OR THE RECURRING QUESTION OF NIHILISM

At 6:15 p.m. on Thursday, August 4, 2011, Mark Duggan was shot dead in a confrontation with police in the London neighborhood of Tottenham. Because of the impenetrable bureaucracy surrounding police shootings in Britain, the details of this episode remain uncertain to this day. Duggan, 29, was apparently armed, and was said to be involved in criminal activity.

In the afternoon of Saturday, August 6, a crowd of around 120 protesters gathered in front of the Tottenham police station. A government-commissioned report on the London riots said the group was composed of Duggan’s “family and supporters,” but I wonder whether the dead man’s personal connections really stretched that far. Some may have been drawn by the joys of accusation. Most shared an honest loathing of the police. The protest was initially peaceful, but by 8:30 p.m. serious disorders had broken out, with police cars being attacked and set on fire.

So began four days of riots and looting which blighted dozens of neighborhoods in London and spread to other British cities. In the bloodshed and destruction, the Duggan shooting was soon forgotten. It had been the spark, but it was not a cause in any sense of the word. Before the end, five people had died, dozens had been hospitalized and left homeless, and half a billion pounds’ worth of damage had been inflicted.

There were no Facebook invitations to the London riots, as there had been to Tahrir Square and Puerta del Sol. But there was active use by the participants of BlackBerry Messaging Service, or BMS, a private texting channel favored by the young in the affected communities. The Economist christened the disturbances “The BlackBerry Riots.” ³⁵ The global information sphere was at work in London in August 2011.

Also unlike the other events of 2011, criminal behavior was the salient feature of the riots. Many of those arrested had experienced previous brushes with the law, and one in four had committed more than 10 past offenses. ³⁶But the episode was not, as some imagined, a crime wave on fast forward. It was a breakdown in the authority of the law and its enforcers: not at all the same thing. In a sense, the role of criminals in London paralleled that of the anarchists in Zuccotti Park. They demonstrated by their actions a new set of rules of the game, in which all could play.

Identifying the “causes” of the riots became a growth industry for months after. Two cosmic narratives eventually crystallized and confronted one another. The first told a story of social oppression and deprivation: it blamed the riots on government cutbacks and the ensuing loss of services, and on unemployment, inequality, racism. The second narrative condemned the moral collapse of the British: the rioters, on this account, had been the product of an entitlement culture which tolerated misbehavior while demanding nothing in the way of responsibility or self-restraint.

The 2011 London riots were in truth a massively complex set of human interactions. I have no idea how to go about proving that a single reason or a few were responsible for the event. The search for such cosmic causes, I suspect, has been driven more by political and ideological enthusiasm than by analytic curiosity.

I don’t have to explain the riots, so I won’t. What I will do is frame the event in the context of the global conflict between the public and authority. I will also show that it adds to the evidence of a phase change in 2011: that is, of a great strategic reversal favoring the public, which now commanded the heights of information and communication.

None of this appears especially challenging.

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A public is a public even when engaged in criminal behavior. Around 15,000 people participated in the riots across Britain. They shared an interest in a particular affair: stealing and smashing things with impunity. To achieve this objective required the effective nullification of established authority—the government, protectors of property, the hated police. The rioters accomplished this early on in the game. Images disseminated by the news media and on the web showed young people breaking into stores and looting while the police stood by, looking bewildered. At the onset of the riots, the authorities in Britain were as helpless and slow to respond as the US government had been on 9/11.

Participants in the riots compounded their advantage in numbers with tactical command of communications. They rampaged in the less affluent areas of London, where, presumably, they lived, but they also used BMS to organize assaults on the cathedrals of consumption in the city’s shopping district.

Everyone from all sides of London meet up at the heart of London (central) OXFORD CIRCUS!! Bare SHOPS are gonna get smashed up so come get some (free stuff!!!) fuck the feds we will send them back with OUR riot! >:O . . . ³⁷

Oxford Circus in fact became the location of a disturbance.

The tactical advantage BMS provided to the rioters became a strategic nightmare for the police, which could eavesdrop on the messages but were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of available information. London’s Metropolitan Police Service report on the riots makes interesting reading on the subject of social media.

The events of August demonstrated how social media is now widely used as a planning and communication medium by people intent on causing disruption.

[ . . . ] The MPS could not comprehensively monitor social media in real-time and was therefore not in a position to be moving ahead of events.

Specifically, there was insufficient resilience in both trained staff and technology, to review, capture, and download the vast volume of open source data which needed to be processed. ³⁸

The words could have been written by a mandarin in the ruling hierarchies of Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, or Israel. They seethed with repressed outrage. That someone “intent on causing disruption” should out-communicate and outsmart the authorities was a violation of the natural order: a trampling of the sanctities. The information tsunami had swept away the power of the British government and the London police.

The perpetrators belonged to the same age group as the political rebels of 2011. They were not, however, a golden youth, though their mastery of BMS showed they could afford the same type of electronic devices. Hatred of the police was one of the shared points of reference which fused the rabble in the street into a true public. The police stood for a structure of authority they wished would vanish from the earth. Otherwise, they were empty of politics or ideology. When asked why they looted, the most frequent response was: because they could. One participant flipped the question around: “Why are you going to waste the opportunity to get new stuff?” ³⁹

Violence and criminality were not indiscriminate. They focused on specific objects: the police, stores specializing in digital products. By the magic of YouTube, you can still witness the young looters of 2011 walking out of shattered London shops with plasma screen TVs and armloads of video games. They wanted the prestigious gadgets and entertainment which attended great affluence. But like rebels in other democratic countries, they effected a strange mental separation between the life they wished for and the structures which made that life possible. This indirect method of self-destruction again raises the question of nihilism, about which I’ll have more to say momentarily.

The authorities in Britain, as should be clear by now, not only failed in their responsibilities during the 2011 riots but failed out in the open, where all could see. The head of the government, home secretary, mayor of London, and leaders of opposition parties all were vacationing abroad, and had to scramble back to the country. Official statements of reassurance and control seemed disconnected from the images pouring out of TV screens and laptops. The police, detested by the rioters, now earned the hostility of property owners. Self-protection civilian groups formed spontaneously, which the media, somewhat pejoratively, labeled “vigilantes,” but which could be said to represent sensible behavior in a situation bordering on the state of nature. In multiple places, during those four days of August, the legitimate functions of government lost their grip.

In the shocked aftermath of the riots, the British government considered the matter of its disadvantage in information and communication. The explanations it came up with would have made Hosni Mubarak laugh out loud. Control of image and perception—of demonstration effects—was paramount, as had been typically the case with the hierarchies of the Center in 2011. The governmentappointed panel took note that

The Home Affairs Select Committee has said that the single most important reason for the spread of the disorder was the perception, relayed by television as well as social media, that in some areas the police had lost control of the streets. ⁴⁰

But loss of control wasn’t a perception. It was the reality on the ground. So here was the implicit idea: if television portrayed a different reality, real reality would cease to exist. The panel recommended that “broadcast media” should “continue to work” to improve its accuracy and clarity, and maintain the “highest journalistic standards.” While this fell short of suggesting that happy Britons in shopping malls be televised during public disorders, the spirit of the thing was the same.

The government’s take on social media was also predictable. The Member of Parliament for Tottenham proposed that the BlackBerry Messaging Service be shut down. Prime Minister David Cameron agreed that rightful authority needed to impose limits on the public’s capacity to express itself digitally. “When people are using social media for violence,” he said, “we need to stop them.” ⁴¹ He didn’t say how, and nothing much came from the brave talk. The mindset, however, was revealing. Belief that political power could switch off the information sphere was shown to be more than an aging dictator’s hallucination. It was a persistent delusion of the Center.

The British riots differed from the other events of 2011, though not in the obvious way. The difference lay less in the criminality than in the consistency between the public’s views and desires and its actions. The young disturbers of the peace in Tottenham and Oxford Circus loathed authority and behaved accordingly. Properly considered, their actions were also in harmony with the worldview of the political protesters—more so, in fact, than the actions of the protesters had been. Disorders turned violent only in Britain because the rioters alone, in their actions, pushed the negations of 2011 to their logical conclusion.

I can illustrate what I mean with a thought experiment. It goes like this.

Assume that the Occupiers’ long roster of negations accurately described social and political reality in liberal democracies. Elected government isn’t accountable to the people, but is, in effect, a dictatorship of the corporations. While banks and businesses exploit workers and poison nature, the government they control represses freedom of expression, and murders and tortures innocents overseas. The rules of the democratic game are a trick, a ruse to conceal the oppression of women by men, of people of color by whites, of the bottom 99 by the top one percent.

If that truly described life under capitalistic representative democracy, what would be a rational response?

The political rebels of 2011 waffled on the question. Most were the children of the comfortable middle class, too interested in the drama of the moment to accept the implications of their own rhetoric. So they occupied a public space and they protested against the status quo, hoping that some external force— presumably, the government they so despised—would bring about change.

The British rioters acted as if the government, the police, and the law lacked legitimacy. I freely grant that they didn’t think this through. They didn’t write manifestos or shout clever political slogans. But neither was theirs a silent scream: they stole, and burned, and sometimes killed, because they could. They embodied the change the political protesters kept calling for. While the latter rejected the political and economic system under which they lived, the rioters acted out the consequences.

The rioters existed in a world of effects without causes. However dimly, they envisioned a desirable mode of living—one weighed down with mobile phones, video games, plasma TVs—but they vandalized the processes which made that life possible. They behaved as if desirable things were part of the natural order, like the grass under their feet. Detestable systems of authority only stood in the way.

I compared the British government’s stumbling response to the riots with that of the Mubarak regime in a parallel circumstance. At a certain point, the mandates of Center and hierarchy appear to matter more than democracy or authoritarianism: that was the complaint of the protesters in democratic countries. But, equally, there is a point at which negation and repudiation by the public must pose the question of nihilism. The criminal public in Britain most closely resembled the political public elsewhere in its blindness to that boundary.

WHAT GUY FAWKES’S MASK CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE TURMOIL IN 2011

The 2011 protesters connected with political violence only in a Hollywood version, through their fantasy lives. At virtually every protest described in this book, you found people wearing the Guy Fawkes mask popularized by the 2006 movie, V for Vendetta. This was unique for would-be revolutionaries. I can’t imagine Lenin or Mao or Castro allowing their comrades to impersonate a fictional character.

Fascination with a revenge melodrama offered a hint about how the young transgressors of 2011 viewed themselves—and what they imagined they were doing.

Guy Fawkes was executed in 1606 for his part in the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament. The mask is traditionally worn on “Guy Fawkes Night,” which celebrates with bonfires the discovery of the plot. Hollywood turned this story on its head. The film depicted a future Britain ruled by a fanatically religious authoritarian government, whose persecutions sounded like a catalogue of victims from Occupy Wall Street: “Immigrants, Muslims, homosexuals, terrorists, disease-ridden degenerates . . . ” “V,” a mysterious figure in a Fawkes mask, perpetrates an orgy of violence to bring down the government. The movie ends with an immense crowd in V masks overwhelming the security forces, while the Parliament building and Big Ben explode musically in the background.

In his disgust with his place and time, V sometimes sounded like an indignado. “The truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country,” he brooded. But mostly he was an action hero who, in the 132 minutes of the film, personally slaughtered a significant portion of the ruling class. The lust for righteous mayhem, in good movie fashion, was untroubled by doubt.

While this was hardly the political model in 2011, there can be no denying the influence of V for Vendetta on the participants. Wael Ghonim turned to the Guy Fawkes mask to underline his anonymity as administrator of the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page:

In 2006 I had seen the movie V for Vendetta and fallen in love with the idea of the mysterious warrior fighting against evil. I was still influenced by this idea when I created the Facebook page: the notion of an anonymous sentinel who tries to wake up the people around him and spur them to revolt against the government’s injustice. For my article “Who Are You, Mr. Admin?” I used the distinctive mask worn by the movie’s protagonist as the main image. ⁴⁴

“I identified with V’s desire for change,” explained the mild-mannered Ghonim, “although in no way did I approve of his violent means.” To anyone who has watched the film, this was an extraordinary statement.

The mask was originally introduced to protest politics by the hacker group “Anonymous,” which claimed for itself prodigious powers not unlike those of the protagonist in V for Vendetta. Anonymous can only be described as a mutant offspring of the Fifth Wave, spawned from the most nihilistic elements of the web, and it has played an uncertain part in the struggle between the public and authority. Its members sometimes talked like revolutionaries but often behaved like the London rioters, stealing data and vandalizing sites just because they could. None of them, when finally identified, turned out to be engaged in radical politics of any kind. They had meant it when they boasted, “We do it for the lulz.” ⁴⁵

Anonymous’ endorsement of the Occupy Wall Street movement generated a great deal of buzz. In a series of bombastic YouTube videos featuring the mask, the hackers made many threats—for example, to “flood into lower Manhattan” with their supporters, declare “war on the NYPD,” and “erase” the New York Stock Exchange using their hacking prowess. This proved to be more drama than reality. One video disseminated the name and personal data of the cop who had pepper-sprayed protesters. Denial of service attacks slowed down the NYSE, and pushed it offline for a few minutes. Other than that, the one lasting contribution of the hacker community to the turmoil of 2011 was to re-connect it with the V mask. ⁴⁶

I don’t want to make too much of this. Like dueling naming conventions, the infatuation with V for Vendetta was a symptom, not a cause, of the larger conflict. It revealed an emotional orientation among the protesters: they were self-dramatizers to an extreme degree. The disconnection between their words and their actions, between their understanding of effects and their indifference to causes, can be explained by this trait.

As with V, their self-dramatizing was manifested in gestures of negation—of repudiation, accusation, destruction, erasing history and leaving the future blank. The movie ended with the demolition of the old regime. The rest would take care of itself. “With enough people, blowing up a building can change the world,” V had proclaimed. But that was true only in fiction.

Wael Ghonim got the chance to play the role of V almost to perfection. As an anonymous political force, he tormented the Mubarak regime, assembled its opponents, and helped engineer its overthrow. At the moment of victory, however, more than negation was needed. The movie had ended, but the drama in Egypt moved on. Ghonim, the real-life V, lacked a script to follow once the oppositional gesture lost its potency.