“Indignados”
On May 15th, 2011, demonstrations against high unemployment, the way that the government copes with the financial crisis, and the current political establishment in Spain gathered nearly 60,000 people in more than sixty Spanish cities (Hernández, 2011). In Madrid, protesters decided to stay overnight on the city’s landmark, Puerta del Sol square, ignoring the demonstration ban. Early in the next morning, they were
forcefully driven away by the police, but this marked only the start of the
demonstrations. A mass call for protest generated by the social media took thousands of people all over Spain out to the public squares for many consecutive days. “More than seventy public squares were occupied, #spanishrevolution3 became a trending topic [on Twitter] and before the sobering election results, some appeared to believe in the possibility of overturning the system by conquering Twitter” (Hernández, 2011). In the squares, public discussions and happenings were organised, the atmosphere was
“festival-like” (Hernández, 2011), or maybe, Flash mob-like. The so-called “los indignados” [Spanish phrase for “the indignants”] used the social media to exchange information and ideas and to communicate their purposes and their images to the world (fig.3). They declared proud to have organised a different, peaceful, “happy”, yet anti-government and anti-capitalist demonstration. Then on May 24th, 2011 something interesting happened. The Greek Twitter network got overwhelmed by the message that amongst the Spanish protests there was a sign saying: “Ssshh... the Greeks are
3 “Hashtag”, prefixing a word with a hash symbol (#) is a popular practice on Twitter for opening a public conversation within the platform in real time, in which anyone can participate.
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sleeping”. Challenged by the Spaniards, the Greek “indignants” came up through social media with similar demonstrations on Syntagma square in Athens and in other big Greek cities against the government’s austerity measures and the political system. The Spanish message that motivated the Greek protesters soon proved to be a fake rumour, however this seemed to be of no importance for those who kept peacefully
demonstrating in the squares for more than a month.
Figure 3: The “Indignados” in Madrid.
In a context like this, the question arises at to what makes a public space. Is there one single place where people meet, interact, form opinions and decide actions? Is this place Puerta del Sol square alone, or Syntagma square, or maybe the Twitter platform?
In Hernández’s article the fact that “seventy public squares were occupied” is equally presented with the fact that “#spanishrevolution became a trending topic”, both
signifying public approval and action. Public space here could be Puerta del Sol square and the relevant Twitter posts and Syntagma square together due to their cooperation, rather than each one of them separately. For Mark Poster in his article Cyberdemocracy (1995), it is the media that constitute the public sphere: “the age of the public sphere as face-to-face talk is clearly over: the question of democracy must henceforth take into account new forms of electronically mediated discourse” (p.265). For Poster the
meaning of “talk”, of “face-to-face meeting”, or that of “public discourse” need to be re-examined as these may also happen among individuals who may never physically meet due to new technologies. People can have a public discourse via Twitter, and then they can decide whether they prefer to keep it in the digital sphere, or they can make a movement, an action, and an event in the city out of it. By regarding “the Internet as a political domain” (1995, p.265), Poster rejects the Habermasian concept of the public
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sphere as an embodied homogenous space, in which arguments are to be criticised and validity claims are to be presented.
The indignants movement that occupied the Spanish and Greek public squares did not resemble a traditional political demonstration. It did not have any particular political direction and it consisted of a heterogeneous and diverse crowd. Their ideological background appears complicated: these people did not have a common political
ideology to unite them, nor did they aim at rejecting any particular political decision or party. Instead they were against the political establishment in general, asking for radical changes and justice. They also sprung from various communities formed via electronic communication, mostly blogs and Facebook groups of like-minded people. By rejecting representative democracy, they run an experiment of a participatory democracy, based on public assemblies that are clear and open to anyone who would like to enter. In their
“Manifesto for Real Democracy”, found in the “Real Democracy NOW!” website (Manifesto), they ask the direct participation of all the citizens to the decisions for the benefit of the society (Manifesto) and they celebrate the power of the many. Similar attempts towards a direct version of democracy mere made at the several “Occupy”
movements in the United States. Indeed the “festival-like” atmosphere featuring such actions reflects more of a “happy” rather than a protesting crowd. The indignants specifically insisted on the peacefulness of their demonstrations (trying to create a counter-movement to the emergence of riots in European cities) and despite their anger they decided to seize the opportunity and transform it into something creative.
Therefore they held public discussions and also artistic performances and they gave space to anybody who would have something to say. The squares staged all sorts of public events and these events were broadcast in real-time all over the world, allowing people to participate and support via the Internet. It also enabled the indignants in different cities of the country to communicate and coordinate their actions. In her article Hernández argues: “after the 15M [15th of May] another side of the story has been told, on the squares and on the Internet, people are reading avidly and coming to terms with a ‘system’ that had until then appeared inscrutable” (Hernández, 2011). Again, for Hernández here, the public assembly is of equal importance to the appeal that the events have on the Internet. In the simple language of social media, the more people “retweet”4
4 A “retweet” is the reproduction of a tweet (post on Twitter) published by someone else before. The more “retweets” a post gets, the more popular it becomes.
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or “like”5 these events, the greater their support, and therefore the stronger they get. But is “Real Democracy” described here a romantic and nostalgic approach to the ancient Greek system of direct democracy reconfigured in digital terms, or is it instead an ambitious attempt to create a new, just “Cyberdemocracy”? The indignants are similar to the Smart Mobs in their creation, as they are organised and coordinated via
telecommunication networks in real-time, and they are not Flash Mobs, as they have one clear common cause to unite them. However, like Flash Mobs, they seem to be more of a physical enactment of a virtual movement than anything else. By setting up a space of expression open to anyone they create a public stage and an audience that will listen, approve or reject [“like” or not in the social media language] any idea presented;
however no decisions are made and no action is taken by the collectivity thereafter.
Such practices seem to satisfy the everyday tensions, but then they do not seem to achieve anything more than that. Cyberspace gives space for expression to anyone who has the technical means, but it is a question whether these actions constitute expressions of freedom of speech and democracy, or they create yet another spectacle in their place.
In his article “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm” (2001) Paul Virilio argues that when everything functions within the perspective of real time “the
dictatorship of speed at the limit will increasingly clash with representative democracy”
(p.24). Virilio writes that viewer counts and opinion polls, the “retweets” and the
“likes” of his time, do not suggest a “cyber-democracy”, or a “virtual democracy”, or an
“opinion democracy” capable of replacing the old-fashioned “political parties
democracy”, but instead they are to create a “loss of orientation” and a “non-situation”
that will affect society and hence, democracy. In this perspective, the “Real Democracy” promoted by the indignants does not suggest an improved – or even updated – version of democracy, but rather a “virtual”, and as such, ineffective version of it. Are we then extending “cyber-freedom” into the real world or are we rendering real world onto a virtual one?
It would be interesting to approach the concept of “cyber-freedom” at this point.
Given that we only refer to states of democratic regime – the Internet functions
5 "’Like’ is a way to give positive feedback or to connect with things you care about on Facebook. You can like content that your friends post to give them feedback or like a Page that you want to connect with on Facebook. You can also connect to content and Pages through social plugins or advertisements on and off Facebook.”
(Facebook)
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differently within conditions of censorship and control – cyberspace promises to be this [representational] place of absolute freedom, without geographical borders or other limitations of real space. Although understood as an extension of the physical world, or even as a reconfiguration of it, cyberspace clearly constitutes a new sort of public
platform that offers new freedoms as well as new restrictions. Organised as a network of networks without any sort of hierarchy, allowing anyone to participate as long as he complies with the programming protocols, it gives space to everybody to publish and share information, exchange ideas and communicate with others. Everything comes to the hands of all participants equally: public speech and also artistic and cultural production. Moreover, through networks and virtual communities it allows collective actions to develop in ways that were not possible in the past. If anyone can express his position freely on the Internet, regardless of his class, age, ethnicity or gender, then the Internet does not only suggest a democratic medium, but also an expression of direct democracy. As long as there are no representatives, anyone can express his opinion on anything. In support of this promised freedom Lawrence Lessig argued in 1998 that
“cyberspace is a less regulable space than real space” (Lessig, 1998, p.6) since due to its current structure, there was not much that authorities or governments can do about it.
Moreover, everything in cyberspace is measurable, so that we can always know exactly how many people agree or disagree with something. However actions such as the “Real Democracy” movement do not seem to extend this online action into the real world, but rather “enact” the exact same actions physically. In these public gatherings, everybody is given space and time to express their ideas [just like they do on their blogs or
Facebook profiles] and at the end the audience is free to express their approval or disapproval [similarly to the “like” or the “retweet” button]. Although anyone is thus free to share their views and also their anger, disappointment, anxieties, and fears, no decisions are made and no action is taken, therefore it seems ineffective. Similarly to what happens in the digital realm, at the end of the day people feel relief simply for having shared their ideas.
As described in chapter 3, during the saturnalia of the Middle Ages people hid behind a mask and temporarily transformed into carnivalesque figures in order to release the pressure and the anxiety of the times. Following from that, chapter 4 illustrated how the “industrial saturnalia” helped people escape for a short while from the metropolis and its burdens to illusory leisure parks. Are these modern public
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assemblies then some sort of a “digital saturnalia”, where everyone, hidden in the anonymity of their digital personae, express their views either in the digital or in the physical realm, only to take the pressure out of their system, without changing anything? Is cyberspace – and by extension the movements that derive from it – the space of “social relief” and society’s safety valve that allows everything to exist and expand, yet without affecting the established order?
“The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted:
it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-) destructive violence?” (Zizek, 2011)
In his article “Shoplifters of the World Unite”, Slavoj Zizek discusses the UK riots of August 2011 and the Spanish and Greek Indignant movements in terms of social space and public expression of the times. Zizek sees the riots as irrational violent actions that have no message to transmit and nothing to demand. Opposition to the social oppression and a deeper unease have nothing to say and no alternative to suggest and therefore are here transformed and realised into meaningless violent Flash Crowd-like outbursts in the city. Similarly, the Indignants reject any established order and express their anger to the system but propose nothing that may affect the current socio-political order. Rioters and protesters establish a public space of expression in the city, a space where everybody is given the same amount of time to speak and is free to do so;
however they fail to transform into anything dynamic and therefore they have no impact on social life. Then we live at a time where everybody has the absolute freedom of choice, but any choice is ineffective.
If we regard Virtual Reality as a simulation of real life, the opposite effect is also a fact: the virtualisation of the physical world. The examples discussed here suggest that real space becomes yet another platform – almost another window – of expression and performance. Real life powers can be applied to cyberspace, virtuality can envelope reality, and telepresence allows anyone to simultaneously be here and there, in reality
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and in virtuality. And the networked body can be anywhere, as long as it possesses the appropriate passwords and the adequate technology. For Gilles Deleuze in the
“Postscripts on the Societies of Control” (1992) Foucault’s disciplinary societies give their place to the societies of control: “the code is the password... The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become
‘dividuals’, and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” (p. 5). Then control becomes the regime for the electronic age, and the “man of control”, the networked body is no longer defined by geometry or architecture, but only by code. In this new realm we have all become “dividuals”, always shared and in common with others, so that publicness and privacy in space take new meanings.
5.5 The “Googlization” of the Everyday Life: Growing Publicness and People’s