Algorithms of Fear

Each week, it seems, brings some new incendiary rhetoric in our presidential election cycle or some new global political disruption emerging from the overlapping social, economic, technological, and environmental systems that govern our lives. Each disruption seems to shock us; and the most severe of them become political milestones, referred to across our digital networks in a kind of digital shorthand: Zika, Trump's wall, Ferguson, Flint. And now, of course, there's Orlando.

Yet despite all of the displays of solidarity and outrage that digitally trail each new disruption or debate, civic technologists are becoming convinced they need to do much more, much faster, to help make the Internet a greater force for civility, resiliency, and broader civic engagement.

One big reason for that, say many civic technologists, is Donald Trump and his high-boil candidacy for the White House. Another reason is that we now live in a world run by algorithms—computer programs that make decisions or solve problems for us. They decide our credit scores; they determine stock prices and even the movies we watch. And especially in this Trump-driven presidential election cycle, say civic technologists, media companies are using content algorithms to drive readers to a lot of highly emotional content that is triggering human behaviors meant to accentuate our differences and stoke our fears—in part, to better hold our attention; people tend to share more content if it makes them afraid or angry, they say.

The trouble is, fear is the most powerful enemy of reason in a democratic society, says Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF), an annual conference that follows how the Internet is influencing politics, governance, and advocacy. "We should be helping those online learn how to navigate their differences other than driving them into daily or hourly flame wars," he said at the annual PDF gathering in New York over the weekend. Sifry believes it's time to create new algorithms and data tools to help find new ways "to ease polarization when there are differences" online.

"The issue of how technology is now affecting our awareness and our responses to triggers in the news, or our personal triggers, and what that is doing to our politics, is a really critical issue right now," Sifry said in an interview. "Digital media that we were all celebrating a few years ago as being better, more social, more personal, and more decentralized than the old broadcast media are now being re-centralized through channels designed by giant companies like Facebook and Google." Bots that have the effect of accentuating our differences online might be good for the media business, Sifry says, "but they're not so great for democracy."

Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian activist and former Google executive who helped to catalyze the 2011 Tahrir Square pro-democracy demonstrations in Egypt, says US social media companies are using what he calls "mobocratic algorithms" that give us a "missing middle" between the extremes of "likes" and "comments"—which Ghonim says tend to quickly devolve into flame wars on social and digital media platforms. In an interview, Ghonim said, "We who use the Internet now 'like' or we flame—but there's [very little] now happening [algorithmically] to drive people into the more consensus-based, productive discussion we need to have, to help us make civic progress. Productive discussions aren't getting the [media] distribution they deserve. We're not driving people to content that could help us, as a society ... come together without a flame war."

danah boyd, another PDF speaker and social media scholar, said another problem with today's content algorithms supports concerns about fear-mongering. Many content algorithms, she said, also carry data sets "rife with racial bias, and if you're not fixing that, you are building racist systems."

Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger imprisoned in Tehran from November 2008 to November 2014 and the author of the essay, "The Web We Have to Save," says Internet technologists need to "re-imagine new algorithms with new kinds of social values, such as diversity and equality." Can it happen? Derakhshan says yes. "DJs do this all the time," he said. "Their selections are not based on what's new and what's popular. They play old tracks we all loved in the past, and they surprise us with great stuff we would never have listened to otherwise. Maybe it's time for states to intervene and push big social networks to open up their algorithms, and to allow third-party developers to create different kinds of algorithms as plug-ins. What we need now, more than ever, is ... to be surprised."

One of the biggest challenges facing civic technologists today, Sifry says, is a lack of enough funding to build someof the tools needed to "feed us into consensus and conflict resolution," rather than "merely feed our own echo chamber of somebody's flame war." There is also a kind of "disruption fatigue" setting in among some civic activists, Sifry says. "The danger is that we're not building new systems and tools fast enough." The danger, he says, is that "people might eventually give up the notion of having a democratic debate (online) and ... will start saying they've had enough: 'Give me a strongman who will solve it for me' or ...'I'm tired of this disruption for social good.'" To help civil society create better tools faster, Sifry and his PDF co-founder, Andrew Rasiej, used their conference to launch Civic Hall Labs, a new nonprofit that aims to build technology for the public good through a collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach.

Ghonim is optimistic and happy for the wake-up call issued at the conference—to build the tools we need to promote a more respectful public discourse. He agrees that building a more democratic, civil space online won't be easy, but believes it's technically doable. "You can build algorithms and experiences that are designed to get the best out of people, and you can build algorithms and experiences that drive out the worst. It's our job as civic technologists to build experiences that drive th ebest. We can do that. We must do that now."

—By Marcia Stepanek

(This article originally ran in the Stanford Social Innovation Review and is being reprinted here with permission.)

Build With, Not For

For more than a decade, the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF)—one of the nation's most influential and close-knit communities of social good activists, digital strategists, policy wonks, and social entrepreneurs—has been meeting annually in New York to capture and create the zeitgeist of civic activism in the age of social networks.

While e-government has not yet become "We-government" and the full force of the Internet in politics has yet to emerge, PDF organizers meeting last week express new pragmatism, citing rising civic tensions around the world over inequality and waning public trust in government's capacity to fix it. "We have a trust problem and an engagement problem," PDF Co-founder Micah Sifry told those gathered. He was talkin gas much about the emerging civic tech movement as he was about traditional governments that many PDF members are trying to reinvigorate and repair.

PDFers, many of whom have been building prototypes and platforms, new online enterprises, and organizations designed to re-energize civic life and create a more responsive and effective government need to “start building with and not for” more people, Sifry said, and “to better the lives of the many and not just the few.” He was referring, especially, to the 48.9 percent of US citizens who Google’s politics team, in a survey unveiled at PDF Thursday, calls “interested bystanders”—American adults who say they long for deeper civic engagement but stay on the sidelines, because they abhor political conflict and believe their vote no longer matters.

Many conference speakers echoed Sifry’s call for stepped-up inclusivity. In a “Dear PDF” letter she wrote and read from the stage, civic researcher and Harvard Berkman Fellow Kate Krontiris, who worked with Google’s Civic Innovation team on the survey project, said “we need to be designing civic interventions that flow from everyday Americans’ real motivations” for personal, professional, and emotional benefits—“not just our own aspirations for them. … We also need to stop assuming some sort of a priori willingness by those we’re trying to engage … to let us intervene.”

Eric Liu, founder and CEO of Citizen University in Seattle, put it more bluntly, urging attendees to get over what he called their “sense of tools imperialism” and work harder to “democratize” the civic tech community by including more grassroots innovators who don’t yet have “access to the prudence of the civil tech revolution.” Catherine Bracy, who led Obama for America’s field office in San Francisco in 2012 and now serves as the director of community organizing for Code for America, called on her tech colleagues to stop neglecting the government they already have in their push to reinvent civic life. “Like many of you,” Bracy said, “I have been in rooms for the last six months having very long, hand-wringing conversations about how we turn these numbers around and get more people engaged civically.” The problem, she said, isn’t a lack of tech tools designed to “hear more people speak.” It is, rather, that “we’re not doing enough work to allow more people to be heard” by those elected to serve. … If you’re out there thinking about how to activate citizens and you’re not considering government’s role, then you’re doing it wrong and you are part of the problem,” Bracy said. “None of this works if all of it doesn’t work.”

For its part, PDF co-founders Sifry and Andrew Rasiej recently launched Civic Hall, a new PDF project and community center in Manhattan co-sponsored by Google, the Omidyar Network, Microsoft, and progressive nonprofits and foundations to promote more collaborative networking and social problem-solving among the world’s civic innovators—social entrepreneurs, government employees, academics, hackers, journalists, and artists comprising the new civic tech community. “‘Building ‘with and not for’ is a critical principal of what we think of when we’re trying now to define civic technology,” Sifry said, announcing the initiative. “We are not just consumers of government. We need to be co-creators, and we have to be including more citizens in our work.”

The good news is that some of that co-creation has already begun. Jess Kutch, co-founder and co-director of the new labor-rights startup, CoWorker.org, talked about its recent work to support a Seattle Starbuck’s employees’ recent decision to speak out against her employer's “no tattoos” dress-code policy, which evolved into a global movement supporting her efforts to overturn the policy. It also prompted others to speak out against violations and unfair policies at other corporations across the country. Emily Jacobi, founder and executive director of Digital Democracy, shared how her organization trained a small community of individuals in Guyana to build their own drone to document and map their ancestral lands, and protect them from poachers and illegal logging.

Among other highlights:

* Haley Van Dyck, co-founder of the US Digital Service (USDS), said the failure of Healthcare.gov was the “best thing that could have happened” to the nation’s emerging civic technology movement because “there wasn’t time” for bureaucratic delays to defeat the fix. “We had to deliver,” she said, “and we did.” She said the six-person tech team brought in to fix Healthcare.gov were able, “by applying common Silicon Valley and corporate best practices already perfected,” to reduce the number of clicks to complete an application from 72 to16, and processing time from an average 20 minutes to 9. “This still isn’t ideal, but we need to work hard now to give our citizens the government UX they expect.” USDS now has more than 150 of some of the country’s “best minds” engaged in fixing user service problems at the Veterans Administration, the Social Security Administration, and reforming the Department of Education’s student loan portal. Next up for the new agency? Immigration. USDS just soft-launched a new agency interface that will enable processing of green card applications fully online.

* DoSomething.org CEO Nancy Lublin described how Crisis Text Line (CTL), the DoSomething start-up she founded two years ago, is using text-messaging tech and big data to enable teens to text for help in the real-time moment they might be contemplating suicide, struggling with bulimia, cutting, or seeking advice on how to battle bullying in school. CTL, created in response to rising numbers of texts from teens that had nothing to do with DoSometing.org’s monthly cause-text campaigns, relies on state-of-the-art servers, micro-tagging, and big data to help save lives. “Thirty percent of the text messages we get are about suicide and depression, and we’re triggering active rescues, on average, 2.41 times per day,” she said. Over the past two years, CTL has received 6.7 million text messages, and it is just getting started. The project is one of the nation’s first examples of data-driven service innovation in the nonprofit sector, and is providing actionable insights for parents, school administrators, and all nonprofits working with teens across the country. Among some of the first data points to emerge? Monday is the worst day for eating disorders and Montana teens report having suicidal thoughts more than others using the service (see more data here). Says Lublin: “We are sharing this data, making it open, so that people can use it to build better policies and programs to intervene in new ways.”

* Dave Troy, one of the web’s leading Twitter cartographers and chief of a new project called Peoplemaps.org, which uses social network data to map cities, shared a Twitter map he made of St. Louis, Missouri, to show how racial divides play out online, as well as off. Troy has been creating data visualizations of residents’ Twitter traffic to discover who is connecting—and who isn’t. His Twitter map of St. Louis, which includes suburban Ferguson, “shows that the city’s black and white people have, with just few exceptions, sorted themselves into two distinct communities, with little, if any, communication between them,” Troy said. “We can use these maps of our online networks to understand how to cross boundaries in our work and get more people activated around causes that matter,” he said. Tech innovators need to use social data more strategically, to “get to know communities and how they behave in the real world.”

-- Marcia Stepanek

Feminism 3.0

Feminism—with a small but strident f—is having a cultural moment. From Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg to Beyonce, it is becoming part of the mainstream. And this week, it marched onto center stage in Manhattan, at two of the nation's biggest annual social good gatherings of world leaders, CEOs, cause-wired Millennials, celebrities, and philanthropists: Bill Clinton's invitation-only, 10th annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), and the Social Good Summit, the open-door, Gen Y celebration of grassroots activism sponsored by Mashable, the United Nations Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

CGI's stepped-up focus on women's empowerment this year was not simply a reflection of Hillary Clinton's highly-buzzed consideration of another run for the White House. [The comedian, Seth Meyers, speaking at a pre-CGI awards dinner early in the week, told CGI delegates, "I am so excited to be here with the President—and Bill."]

Feminism for social good programming also loomed large outside the Clintons' orbit. Social Good Summit organizers boasted repeatedly that the conference this year had scheduled as many Main Stage female speakers as men. SGS organizers also took the unusual step of devoting nearly half of its programming this year to gender equity and female empowerment issues.

Across both forums, the push for data-driven activism was strong, and the case for broader, more vigorous and results-oriented feminism was made all the more credible by speakers' frequent references to statistics—some supplied by the UN and some pulled from a year-old Big Data project called No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project, led by Hillary Clinton. "Data will help us transform talk into action as never before, and give these issues (of women's empowerment) more credibility going forward," Clinton told a room full of mostly female CEOs, nonprofit executives, NGO leaders and social change activists during a limited-access "women's strategy session" held at CGI early in the week. Similarly, at the Social Good Summit, UN Foundation CEO Kathy Calvin urged Millennial men and women to help start a "gender data revolution." Calvin told Summit attendees that "stronger data will lead to strong opportunities for girls and women everywhere."

[One of the Gen Y activists on the roster was former Apple senior executive Jeff Martin, the Cofounder and CEO of Tribal Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based company that uses big data to predict consumer behavior and interaction. Martin urged gender activists to step up their use of mobile media, to enable more real-time collaboration and coordination of efforts locally and globally. "Often, when you go into village in Africa, or a small town in the United States, health care initiatives often don't connect with education initiatives and female empowerment initiatives," Martin said. "One thing I love about mobile analytics is that it's not only a way to cut out the middlemen and get faster data and more successful results by charities, but it's also a way to thread the needle between health care, education, and causes for women and girls."]

But becoming more data-fluent and data-driven is only part of what is needed, Clinton added. At the women's strategy session, she said, "We also need to put these issues on the political agenda. Sometimes, people in the NGO world and the corporate world are reluctant to engage in politics—and believe me, I know why politics is not for the faint-of-heart. But if you don't move into the political arena with these ideas, it is unlikely you will ever get to scale. I am passionate about the cause for women and have been, my whole life. And I know how important it is to make moral arguments and demands, but it's also important to have a mix of strategies that can get results for women and girls."

Across town, Asha Curran, director of the Center for Innovation and Social Impact at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y, the site of the Social Good Summit, issued a similar call to action. "I feel this year has been a big one for conversations about women—a profound, huge, emotionally confessional conversation and sometimes a conversation that has been very contentious," Curran said. "These very personal conversations are happening now across a huge, huge span and across online networks, and we haven't seen this kind of conversation happening in quite this way before. ...It is time to convert that talk into new strategies and real results."

Among other Cause Week highlights on the topic:

* Hillary Clinton announced CHARGE, a $600 million CGI-No Ceilings collaboration between more than 30 pubic and private partners — including CARE, Facebook, Google, Gucci, Intel, Save the Children, and government leaders from Nepal, Norway, Malawi, and the UK — to insure that 14 million girls over the next five years will receive a quality secondary-school education. While the number of girls attending primary school globally has soared over the past 20 years, Clinton said secondary-school enrollments for girls still lag far behind. The reason: Female students are vulnerable to kidnapping and violence on their way to school and often are can face extreme sexual harassment and inadequate sanitation. Institutions like UNICEF are working with CGI to improve safety in schools and train girls in self-defense, Clinton said, but "it will take governments, civil society leaders, the private sector, multilateral organizations, and the entire international community, all working together, to make sustainable change." In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, there are 1.5 million fewer girls than boys attending secondary school, Clinton said. The hope for CHARGE — an acronym for "Collaborative Harnessing Ambition and Resources for Global Education"— is multi-generational change. "When girls get a quality secondary education," Clinton said, "they are twice as likely to make education a priority for their daughters ... and the glass ceiling gets cracked."

* Melinda Gates said her Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is partnering with CGI on its No Ceilings project, and has begun collecting 1.8 million data points from more than 190 countries, which will be used to track the progress of women and girls globally. Gates said there is a need to identify, in measureable data, which policy and philanthropic initiatives to help women and girls have worked over the past 20 years, and which haven't, and why. "We need to replicate the successes and end the failures," she told conference delegates. "...When I was at Microsoft, you didn't do anything without data. Data instructs where you go and how you work. That's why, in this development work or any of this work relative to gender, you have to have data to know where you are making progress or even where you're having unintended consequences." Gates said the data initiative will help guide the gender empowerment movement's priorities locally, nationally, and internationally going forward, and be able to show how gender issues are universal, and how they impact men's lives, as well.

* Public Radio International (PRI) CEO Alisa Miller announced a groundbreaking new multimedia initiative to increase the coverage of gender issues in 2015 and beyond. Called Across Women's Lives, the project will "dramatically increase the level of coverage in the news cycle on global women's health, development and education issues," Miller said. "These issues are very newsworthy," she added, yet they receive little coverage now across the global news cycle. "What we find, on average, is that around 1.5 percent of coverage (by all news institutions) in the broad global news cycle is dedicated to this coverage area, and it's shocking," Miller told CauseGlobal in an interview. She also said that at PRI, only about 35 percent of the people used as sources for stories are female. "This isn't simply about raise the numbers," she said. "It's about ensuring we get all the perspectives we need more fully to cover what is happening in our world." For its part, Miller said, PRI will do 10 times the amount of existing reporting on issues relating to women and girls, focusing on five stages of women's lives: infancy, childhood, adolescence, middle age and old age. "I'm hoping to be imitated, copied, and outdone by other news institutions," she said. "It's important that we reach new levels of understanding. ...We need to change the conversation."

* At the United Nations earlier in the week, UN Women Goodwill Ambassador and British actress Emma Watson (Harry Potter series) launched the organization's HeForShe campaign, which urges men and boys to advocate for gender equality. Watson described the the initiative as one that is tring to "end the us vs. them" mentality of traditional feminist movements, and disassociate feminism from "man-hating" stereotypes. "This is the first campaign of its kind at the UN," Watson said. "We want to try to galvanize as many men and boys as possible to be advocates. ...We don't just want to talk about it, but make sure (gender equality) is tangible." The full text of her speech can be found on the UN Women website.

* Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein took the CGI stage to share the results so far of the Wall Street firm's 10,000 Women Initiative, launched in 2008 to provide 10,000 women around the world with access to business and managmeent education, mentoring, and networking. According to an independent assessment by Babson College, the majority of women who have gone through the program have dramatically increased the size of their businesses, with 70 percent growing their revenue and 60 percent adding jobs. "On average," Blankfein said, "graduates of the program grew their revenue by nearly five-fold ... and doubled the size of their workforce." In March, Goldman launched a new $600 million global partnership with the International Finance Corporation to create the first-ever global finance facility dedicated exclusively to women-owned small and medium enterprises, and enable 100,000 women entrepreneurs to access capital. "This is the next chapter of this initiative," Blankfein said. "Our hope is to demonstrate to banks around the world the potential to investing in women-owned businesses."

* Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee, who led the women's peace movement in her country that helped to bring an end to Liberia's civil war in 2003, urged global leaders to understand that women's empowerment cannot take root in Africa and in other parts of the world unless local communities are engaged fully in cultural change and learn to value women differently. "Around the world, where resistance to women's empowerment in the strongest," the Nobel laureate to CGI delegates in a panel discussion moderated by Yahoo News Anchor Katie Couric, "there are traditions and cultures that are entrenched in the communities and that make it very difficult for women to excel." She said that when she talks with Liberian men, "many of them say that they think their wives sit at home all day, eating and gossiping. So then I ask them to tell me when their wives get up in the morning. They say 6 a.m. Then I ask them what their wives do next, and they tell me that they feed and take care of the children. I then ask them how much they would have to pay someone to get up early to feed and take care of the children, and they start giving me a monetary figure, and soon, when everything starts to add up against their salaries, they start looking differently at the unpaid work their wives do every day. ... And then I ask the men to see who they know who is enjoying a better lifestyle than they are, and they begin to see that this happens in families where both boys and girls go to school. ...Without full participation of women, we have a world that has one eye covered. It can't see the full picture. Unless we make men see things from new perspectives in very personal ways, then ... Chelsea (Clinton's) soon-to-be born child will be on this stage talking about women's empowerment 20 years from now."

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photograph, second from top, captures a part of the audience at Day One of the Social Good Summit; Melinda Gates, third from top, poses with Summit attendees at Manhattan's 92nd Streeet Y; Hillary, Chelsea, and Bill Clinton, fourth from top, pose at CGI with the widow of Nelson Mandela, Graca Machel; and at bottom, Hillary Clinton addresses CGI with daughter, Chelsea, looking on. Photographs reprinted here by permission.)

The Ice Bucket Challenge

Unless you've been living under a rock this summer, you've probably heard about the Ice Bucket Challenge by now—and how thousands of celebrities and ordinary people across the country are challenging each other via social media to make a video of themselves dumping ice water on their heads to raise money for research into ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

You've probably also heard the criticism of this novel fundraising campaign—that it's silly, that it's narcissistic, and that it's slacktivism. Not suprisingly, perhaps, many social good sector veterans worry that big, viral social media campaigns like this one, which require the participation of others online, are a terrible substitute for real, long-term involvement in a cause. But that's not all. Some drought-weary residents of California have been especially critical of the campaign, blasting organizers for wasting good water.

Vice News reporter Arielle Pardes put it this way: "There are a lot of things wrong with the Ice Bucket Challenge, but most annoying is that it's basically narcissism masked as altruism."

Whoa! Before you think that everyone is throwing cold water on this blockbuster social media campaign (sorry)—or should—listen up.

1. The campaign is working. More than a million challenge videos have been posted on Facebook, the challenge has raised well over $6 million and counting to fight the disease, according to the ALS Association. Last year, says the association, they were happy to get a fraction of those donations.

2. This is philanthropy by the 99%.  Before social media, philanthropy was mostly played offline and by the 1 percent, the high net-worth crowd. Now? Social media have brought everyone to the donor table, and online campaigns that can raise $5, $10, or $20 each from thousands (if not millions) of cause-wired do-gooders should be applauded. Five dollars here, 10 dollars there—pretty soon, it's enough money to make an impact.

3. Narcissistic? Maybe. But have you ever been to a philanthropy charity gala? Showing off for charity is hardly new—and not only online. Making a video selfie of yourself participating in a good cause, and having fun doing it, is not much different than elbowing your way into a charity gala and getting your photo taken for the society pages (or, for most of us, the nonprofit's Flickr pages). When people give money for good, they want a pat on the back for it. Showing off is something that big-money philanthropists have done for decades, and selfies are hard for anyone to resist. Why wouldn't Millennials do the same thing? Look at it this way: Bill Gates put his name on the Stanford University computer school building that his philanthropy enabled. My friend Lisa Sennis? Like thousands of Millennials over the past few days, she made a YouTube "selfie" of her getting ice-water poured over her head. She put her name on it, and shared it digitally. She also donated $100 to the ALS Association online and noted that, too—on her tweets and on Facebook. Granted, a YouTube video isn't the same as having your name on a building somewhere. But it's very definitely the same idea—a digital twist on philanthropy's centuries-old naming traditions. Give, get. Showing off is universal. [And Bill Gates also had a video made of himself getting soaked, which was viewed on YouTube more than 10 million times.]

4. And one more thing? The Ice Bucket Challenge is fun. It's been a long, dicey summer, pepper-sprayed with racial tension in Ferguson, Mo., a new terrorist group called ISIS, the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, more creepy data security leaks, and a weird-and-getting-weirder climate. Nothing wrong with chilling out for charity on a summer afternoon, right? Since the early 2000s, Millennials have been staging experience-based, group giving activities—from grow-a-beard contests for charity to shopping cart races that spectators place bets on for social good. Being surprised that something like the Ice Bucket Challenge can go viral means you haven't been paying attention. Young people, and all other socially-networked 99 percenters, are reshaping philanthropy and advocacy. They've been doing that for a while now. Embrace it. Be thrilled more people want to do something.

But just in case you're still wondering where we stand on this social media phenomenon, here's what we told NPR-Los Angeles earlier today, when they asked. Have a listen, and tell us what you think.

--Marcia Stepanek

[Photograph: From the Bill Gates's YouTube video for the Ice Bucket Challenge]

#LikeAGirl

Like many women I know, I was told repeatedly by my older brother growing up that I threw a softball "like a girl"— despite turning in an impressive season many years later as shortstop for a co-ed softball team I organized at the University of Hawaii, while there on an international reporting fellowship.

That phrase continues to catch my attention, and I heard it again the other night, after leaving a movie at NYC's Film Forum. There, on the street near the subway, I overheard two men accusing a third of "acting like a girl" during an argument that would soon turn into a fistfight. I stopped myself from shouting, to anyone in particular, "What's so bad about acting like a girl?"

Filmmaker Lauren Greenfield and her new three-minute cause video out this month, called #LikeAGirl, has saved me the trouble. Greenfield, who directed the 2012 documentary, Queen of Versailles, was commissioned by feminine hygiene brand, Always, to make the video as part of the company's CSR initiatives. Watched by more than 40 million people on YouTube since it launched last month, the video has sparked a new national conversation on female empowerment and self-esteem.

"Always was interested in looking into how girls deal with the confidence crisis that happens around puberty," Greenfield told CauseGlobal. "Everyone knows that 'crying like a girl' or 'running like a girl' isn't a compliment, but no one takes the off-the-cuff remark too seriously or considers its damage."  Greenfield said she came up with the idea of asking a handful of adults, for her camera, to imitate running, throwing and fighting "like a girl." The results are predictable, but the surprising part comes when Greenfield later asks young girls the same questions.

Have a look. When was the last time you used or heard the phrase? How did you feel when you said or heard it?



-- Marcia Stepanek

Speed as Strategy

Social media scholar Clay Shirky likes to tell the story of Russia's Voina street-art activists and the June night in 2010, when some of its members painted a drawbridge leading to the Bolshoy Dom, the former headquarters of the KGB and Soviet secret police in St. Petersburg, where Russian President Vladimir Putin would be arriving the next morning. To passersby, what they had painted wasn't immediately clear —until the drawbridge was raised slowly the next morning, revealing a giant phallus rising skyward in full glory at precisely the time Putin pulled up in his motorcade.

Fast forward almost six years, to this past Thursday, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation released an article detailing 65 things the public did not know about NSA surveillance at this same time last year. EFF had been working on the analysis for weeks, based on a year of reporting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations of mass NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens. The EFF's article was released to mark the first anniversary of the Snowden leaks—as well as EFF's 25th anniversary.

Both Voina's overnight street provocations and EFF's months of reporting are examples of cause activism—but occurring at two vastly different speeds. "Voina's drawbridge stunt occurred in the Internet's native time signature of right now," Shirky said, in remarks at this week's meeting of the annual Personal Democracy Forum in New York. "EFF's occurred in the institutional time signature of a quarter of a century."

Causes need activism at both speeds to thrive and survive, Shirky says. "As online cause communities grow and mature, it's tempting to think we should move the time signatures we operate at from the short-term to the long term, away from quick actions to longer ones. But I think that's wrong. I think what we should do is expand the window of the time signatures in which we can operate because things work better when (the two speeds) can be made to work in tandem."

Just don't underestimate the strategic power of short-term actions, Shirky cautioned. Slacktivism works, he said.

"We've been hearing for some time now that slacktivism is ridiculous, stupid and, 'How can you think that would work, right?'" Shirky said. "But if (slacktivism) never worked, Brendan Eich would still have a job," Shirky added, referring to the former CEO of Mozilla who was pressured into resigning earlier this year following an online protest of his support earlier this year for taking away the right of same sex couples to marry in California. The online campaign to oust Eich, Shirky said, "was a pure slacktivist movement. It was an entirely virtual uprising and it was about public humiliation, and yet it worked."

Slacktivism also works, Shirky said—even when short-term defeat is absolutely assured. "Putin is still very much in control of Russia," Shirky said. "But Voina's action and a thousand other public manifestations of one sort or another robbed incumbents there of their ability to insist that the seeming consensus of the Russian public is real. That (short-term) activity, even if it doesn't lead to revolution, is incrementally achieved."

The takeaway here? If you're a cause organization, don't ask which speed is best, but rather consider how the organization can operate better at both speeds.  "If you're an institution, ask yourself what would happen if something on your issue forced you to react overnight, what could you do? Could you only issue a press release or could you also paint a bridge if you had to?" Shirky asked PDFers. "Or, if you're part of a ragtag group fighting for net neutrality and you know you're up against a September 10th deadline, ask yourself what you might do differently if you knew you'd be having that same fight over and over and over again over the next five years."

"And if you're going to pull a stunt, ask yourselves what residue of human connection and trust will it leave," Shirky added. "When people turned out in Tahrir Square, the social media that turned out to matter the most was that which fed the physical occupation of the Square. It wasn't Facebook or Twitter. Those were good for broadcasting things internationally and nationally. The social media that mattered most was SMS. The biggest social media predictor of physical presence in Tahrir Square was whether your name was in the address book of the phone of someone already in the Square."

"Stunts don't leave that residue of trust. They don't introduce people to each other.  If you're building an institution, ask yourself of all long-term thinking: 'What if we had to surprise the world tomorrow? What would we do?' Because you might have to, "Shirky said.

"I think we cannot forget the lessons of complex movements like the Arab Spring and like Occupy Wall Street, which is that the various time signatures work better together," Shirky said. "Shorter-term is good for surprises but it is lousy for continuity and capacity-building. Long-term is great for continuity but lousy for surprises.  ...We need to start thinking of time itself as a strategic weapon."

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photography: Bowie15]

Slacktivism Works

Go ahead. Call online activism slacktivism. Just stop underestimating the impact of small actions such as Facebook likes, status updates or re-tweets for social change. New social research shows this micro-messaging can have a powerful emotional and psychological impact on the recipients of these messages—and, over time, can be key to the success and staying power of social movements.

"We know that these small actions online—anything that takes a few minutes to complete, like a status update or a comment to share, or a re-tweet—are things that many people do just to get attention," says social scholar An Xiao Mina. "But what we're just beginning to understand is how important these small actions are to individuals on the receiving end of these messages." Micro-actions and affirmations can tell people, "We see you, we love you, we care that you are there," An told the annual gathering of the Personal Democracy Forum (#PDF14) meeting today in New York. "Over time, these micro-affirmations can have a cumulative effect. They can create visibility. They can provide emotional uplift for people facing trauma. Creating a cycle of these micro-affirmations," she said, can create the "emotional fuel" that social movements need to launch and to survive.

Consider Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who "was just getting his feet wet with Twitter" in 2010, An said. Ai, who expresses himself and organizes people through art and social media, would start tweeting each day by saying 'Good morning' to his followers. "This would happen dozens of times," An said, "perhaps even hundreds of times, every day, when people would say "Good morning" back to him. And then he would re-tweet all of the 'Good mornings' he got from his followers. In the evenings, he would also say 'Good night' and with that, he might also give a weather update. And again, he'd re-tweet the replies, and his followers would re-tweet his replies each other, across the community. It was a way for Ai to make sure that the conversation was not just between him and his 60,000 followers, but that his 60,000 followers saw each other."

In this way, An said, Ai made the Chinese Twitter community visible—to itself and to others. Before, it had been in hiding. "This visibility," An said, "jumped geographic boundaries. People could now participate at any time of day throughout China and throughout the Chinese diaspora. He showed people they were not alone in their interest in Ai Weiwei and his work."

And that's not all. About a year later, An said, when Ai was disappeared by the Chinese government, many of these same people from this same community spoke out for him and helped to keep him visible.  [See Free Ai Weiwei, an information hub that continues to serve as a source for news about the artist and his work.]

In Uganda, micro-actions via social media also have proven to be powerful. An cited that country's Kuchu movement, a fledgling gay-rights movement which has found organizing strength and sustainability in Twitter hashtag communities, where Kuchu members share the struggles of Uganda's LGBT community—and recruit new followers. Members, An said, have come to rely on Twitter and texting to stave off isolation and to provide the emotional uplift they need to endure media and government harassment. "Twitter is not tangential to the work of human rights in Uganda," An said. "It is essential to it, especially in the face of major human rights violations."

"...Hashtag memes make people feel better about who they are and give them strength and a voice as they continue their work," An said.

Emily Parker, author of the new book, Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground, says the emotional strength and connection that activists can find online continues to make social media "a serious threat" to authoritarian regimes—despite some governments' efforts to quash the use of social media or use it as a tool for surveillance and oppression.

Parker, also a speaker at #PDF14, said the Internet provides ordinary people with an alternative to isolation, fear, or apathy—the very things authoritarian regimes depend upon to stay in power. "Now, in large part because of the Internet, ordinary people are overcoming their paralysis, and discovering they're not alone," Parker said. "For a dissident in China, or Cuba, or Russia, this can be a life-changing experience."

And perhaps most importantly, Parker says, social media can make activism convenient for apathetic people who might otherwise do nothing.

Consider Russia, she said. As recently as a few years ago, there was no serious Internet censorship in Russia. "The Kremlin didn't need to censor the Web because the Web wasn't a serious threat to its power," Parker said "Russia was plagued by its apathy. Most Russians believed they had no power at all to change or to influence their political process." People were afraid of being arrested in protests and figured the protests wouldn't change anything, so they stayed home.

Then along came a Russian commercial lawyer who began blogging against corporate and government corruption and started using his blog to launch campaigns against specific corporations he suspected of corruption. "He understood early on that he was trying to get a weary, cynical population to rally for change," Parker said. "He told me in 2010, 'You have to propose to people the comfortable way to struggle.' In other words, this was not the time to haul Russians into the streets. It would be far more practical, he said, to just say please, just fill out this online form. And so that's what he did. Encouraging lazy, non-committal Internet activism—which many of us derisively refer to as 'slacktivism'—was all part of his master plan. He wanted to show Russians that they can fight corruption from the convenience of their living rooms, and that they could win."

Parker said this lone blogger's repeated calls to readers to write to authorities and demand they investigate alleged corruption eventually led to the annulment of suspicious government contracts worth millions of dollars. "He waged years of these online campaigns," Parker said, "and sometimes he got results. Maybe an official would resign, maybe just a pothole would be fixed. But most importantly, he showed ordinary Russians that they can make a difference and in the process, took a powerful swipe at the apathy that had become the Kremlin's best protection."

Says Parker: "Of course, a Facebook 'like' is not the same thing as on-the-ground participation. But seeing tens of thousands of people expressing virtual protest can have a powerful psychological and emotional effect."

"I'm not going to downplay governments' oppression of the Web," she added, "but what's important to see is that the Internet is helping to create a new kind of citizen. They're networked, unafraid and ready for action. Social media is helping them to overcome the isolation, fear and apathy that are the lifeblood of authoritarian regimes."

PDF14 runs through today. Watch this space for further highlights.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Online Harassment Rises

Online harassment is on the rise, affecting 25 percent of all Americans, and especially women under the age of 35, according to a new national poll discussed today by a panel of women at the annual Personal Democracy Forum convening in New York. Across social media platforms, the harassment occurs most frequently on Facebook, and according to Allyson Kapin, who co-organized the poll, victims of online harassment aren't doing enough to fight back.

During a PDF panel this afternoon called Sex, Lies, and the Internet, Kapin said respondents indicated the harassment may be especially occurring against women, with 57 percent of women surveyed saying they've been a victim of online harassment versus 43 percent men. The harassment also spans the issues spectrum, Kapin said, occurring as hate speech and threats of physical violence against women, men, LGBT individuals, people of color, people of different faiths and political persuasions. According to the poll, many American adults who have been bullied, harassed or threatened online knew the person harassing them. Segmented for race, the largest percentage of adult victims are Asians (35 percent) and hispanics (32 percent), with blacks at 28 percent and whites at 23 percent.

"People working in the advocacy space are also being harassed, for example, and often just for expressing strong opinions," Kapin told PDFers, "or for talking about climate change and its consequences, or other issues. It can get scary, from demeaning speech to threats of rape or murder."

One panelist, Slate.com journalist Amanda Hess, (left), talked about some of the harassment she has experienced in the past year, which included a ghost Twitter account that was set up last summer while she was vacationing in Palm Springs, just to harass her. Hess, who writes about gender issues for Slate, said the harassment began predictably enough. "At first, it was messaging that was, 'you suck at your job, you're an ugly fat pig and a stupid woman,'" she said, but then it escalated from name-calling to threats of physical violence. "It became 'I know where you live, I live in your state and I will rape you and cut off your head.' I saw it as a form of social violence that was meant to scare me from writing about what I write."

Kapin said she thinks the lack of face-to-face communication online makes it easier for some people to lash out and threaten others. "It's easier for some people to hide behind their screens," said Kapin, the founding partner of Rad Campaign and founder of Women Who Tech.

Hess said she reported her harassment to ISPs, law enforcement authorities and site administrators, and even to the FBI, but most people who are victims of online harassment—50 percent—simply ignore it, Kapin said. Only 20 percent of those polled said they respond to harassers online, 25 percent reported their harassment to site operators, and 12 percent told law enforcement authorities.

Still, for those who did report the harassment, there is some relief. According to the survey, 61 percent said their social network shut down the account of the offender, 44 percent said law enforcement at least tried to track down the offender, and 35 percent said the Internet service provider shut down the offender's email account.

"But this isn't enough," said Emily May, the founder of HollaBack!, a site created to protest street harassment. May, also a victim of online harassment, told PDFers: "I think it's not enough to report harassers and get accounts shut down. A rape threat is not a form of free speech. We don't need Band-Aids, we need a social movement where we, as a society, say this is not acceptable."

For more on the survey, click here.

PDF continues through Friday. Watch this space for updates.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Stealth-wear

Suddenly, privacy is becoming fashionable again—literally.

Adam Harvey, a Brooklyn photographer and computer software and hardware specialist—whose most recent work explores the impact of surveillance technologies on society—unveiled samples of his new Stealthwear clothing line at today's annual Personal Democracy Forum in New York. The centerpiece of the collection is an anti-drone Burka that uses metallized fabric to reduce one's thermal signature from aerial heat-seeking probes.

"People are more aware today of how they can be tracked and so are interested in learning how they can protect their privacy," said Harvey, who last year opened the Privacy Gift Shop, a pop up store and collaboration with New York's New Museum. Harvey also is working to build a community of artists, designers and hackers and connect them into an online marketplace for counter-surveillance art and privacy products. "People who understand the strategies and technologies being used to track them have a better chance of doing something about it," he says.

Harvey's ultimate goal? "To inspire people to engage with privacy," he told PDF attendees today. One of Harvey's most recent products is the Off Pocket, a phone pouch that uses special metal fabric to shield mobile phones from cellular, wireless and GPS signals.

But that's not all. Since 2010, Harvey has been exploring how fashion can be used as camouflage against facial recognition technology, which the NSA is using as part of its post 9/11 surveillance net. According to 2011 documents obtained from whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA intercepts "millions of facial images per day." Harvey says that "once computer vision programs detect a face, they can extract data about your emotions, age, and identity."

Harvey has formed a research project called CV Dazzle, which grew out of his 2010 master's thesis at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Harvey says he derived the name, Dazzle, from a type of naval camouflage used by the United States Navy in World War I. It  used cubist-inspired designs to break apart the visual continuity of a battleship in order to conceal its orientation and size. Harvey says his Stealthwear is based on the same principle, with the goal of interrupting the visual continuity of one's appearance for the sake of "jumbling" what spyware is intended to see.

"Fashion is about staying one season ahead of the latest trends, and counter-surveillance is about staying one season ahead of the latest surveillance algorithms," Harvey told PDF attendees. "Both rely on models of deception, but surveillance thrives on conformity and fashion thrives on the unique, which can make surveillance difficult."

For more information about Harvey, check out his "Style Tips for Reclaiming Privacy, on his site, here.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photography, top: Courtesy CVDazzle, part of Adam Harvey's anti-surveillance facial recognition line, developed to reduce what is scannable by surveillance machines. Photo, bottom: Twitter photo by @climatebrad of Harvey with some visuals of his anti-surveillance wearables.] 

Snowden Urges Privacy Fight

The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden today—on the one-year anniversary of the first published surveillance leak from his revelations—urged those attending the annual Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan to "take back their privacy with technology."

Appearing via Google Hangouts from Russia in a conversation moderated from the PDF stage by Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow, Snowden said "we're seeing a growing appetite for surveillance control among government institutions and it is something we're not just seeing locally, but around the world." A year ago, Snowden said, "none of us really had the full picture" about how far the government had gone to track citizen cellphone calls as well as facial images across the social sphere. Today? "Public interest in privacy has grown," Snowden says. People are worried about their privacy again. "Our government has created programs that are watching not just everybody in America, but also everybody in the world."

The good news? Snowden says Netizens don't have to rely on governments to protect their privacy rights anymore. "We're past the point where citizens are entirely dependent on governments to defend our rights," he said. "We don't have to ask. We can take back our privacy with technology."

Snowden endorsed the Reset the Net campaign, officially launched from the PDF stage earlier today, which calls on tech companies and citizens to work harder to strengthen privacy rights online and "shut off the lights to government surveillance" by popularizing anti-snooping technology. The campaign, backed by a nonprofit called Fight for the Future—the group behind last year's successful Stop SOPA initiative—urges major websites like Google, Tumblr, Wordpress, Twitter, Dropbox, Tumblr and others to promote consumer encryption tools that would make it harder and more expensive for the NSA to snoop indiscriminately on American citizens. The campaign also is working to drive more Web traffic to a coalition of personal encryption companies like Text Secure, ChatSecure, RedPhone and others. "Today, we can begin the work of effectively shutting down the collection of our online communications, even if the U.S. Congress fails to do the same," Snowden said. "The first effective step that everyone can take to end mass surveillance is to adopt encryption."

One of the nation's top encryption experts, Bruce Schneier, addressing PDFers just before Snowden, said fighting back also will require legal firepower and a more strident, pro-privacy mindset among public advocates of greater privacy. "Fighting back is going to be, primarily, a legal battle and we (who oppose government spying) are not going to win this unless we also win the social battle"—meaning the fight for more citizens' hearts and minds, Schneier said.

"The drivers of all of this surveillance and control," said Schneier, "are fear and convenience—if you're the U.S., it's the fear of terrorism, and if you're China, it's fear of citizens rebelling—and convenience, of all of these products and services we consumers have at our fingertips. As long as people on the street are scared [about security threats] and want free stuff," Snowden added, "we are not going to do better here. We've got to fix these things."

Both Schneier and Snowden called on netizens to get more political, and Barlow suggested people also need to exhibit more courage. [Barlow used the PDF stage to announce the launch of the Courage Foundation, a fund amassed to support Snowden's legal defense.] But Snowden insisted he didn't do anything that anyone in the audience wouldn't have done themselves, were they in his position, knowing what he knew at the time. "I'm no hero," he said. "...We all have the ability as citizens to act."

"When I look over the last year," Snowden added, "I had to give up a lot to do what I did, and my biggest fear was that nobody would care or talk about this. But people in this room today show me how wrong I was. The fact that we are talking about this here, today, means we will get a better, more accountable government. All I did was return information to public hands that should have never been turned over in the first place."

PDF14 continues through Friday afternoon. Watch this space for updates.

— Marcia Stepanek

[Twitter photo, top, by CauseGlobal]

Feminism 2.0

Hashtag activism — Twitter campaigns to affect fast change or raise public awareness in a heartbeat — is gaining frequency, and is becoming an especially potent tool for networked feminists to shed new light on everyday misogyny.

Consider the trending hashtag #YesAllWomen, created just after Memorial Day Weekend, when details began emerging that Isla Vista mass-shooter Elliot Rodger  was driven by sexual hatred and misogyny to take the lives of six people in Santa Barbara. First to Twitter was the hashtag conversation, #NotAllMen, started by some to convey that not all men feel similar anger and resentment towards women. Then, #YesAllWomen emerged as a counter-narrative, asserting that while not all men are predators, most women are culturally conditioned to fear male violence. When that conversation began to trend internationally, amassing more than 2.5 million participants at its peak, some feminist activists were inspired to create the Tumblr, "When Women Refuse." Its intent, says co-creator Deanna Zandt, is to collect news stories from around the world about violence committed against women who refuse male advances. "I'm hoping to use this site as a tapestry that we can weave together to demonstrate what's happening in our culture, (to show) that these are not isolated incidents," Zandt says.

In an NPR interview that aired today, Zandt—a media technologist and author of "Share This! How You Will Change the World With Social Networking"—talked with On The Media Host Brooke Gladstone about the power of Twitter and other forms of social media to amplify issues.  "Hashtags are digital consciousness-raising," Zandt said. "...These conversations are a mirror of what's actually happening in our culture, when we have free and open spaces in which to have these conversations. ...The power of digital tools to shift the cultural consciousness is incredible at this moment, if we use these tools wisely."

The #YesAllWomen outcry on Twitter underscores the growing power of loosely organized feminist networks that are gaining influence across social media platforms.

What follows is an abridged transcript of the NPR interview. [The full segment can be heard here.]

NPR: Does it take a hashtag to start this kind of conversation? And then, what do you expect it to achieve?

ZANDT: A hashtag is not required but it is often super useful, often in the same way that "Yes We Can" and "Si se puede" became rallying cries for a movement. Hashtags are doing the same thing in the digital space. And what I see is that this is happening whenever we have these extremely emotional moments that are very traumatic for a lot of people. Most people, before they come to a conversation, they feel isolated.  They feel like they're the only ones that this happened to.  So when they start sharing their stories with one another, they realize, 'I'm not crazy for feeling this way. I'm not crazy for feeling scared in this situation.' It's very much like digital consciousness-raising. Consciousness-raising of the second wave of feminism was such a huge part of the movement, and connecting women together and people together to share their stories of systemic problems and make systemic change.

NPR: Someday, this hashtag #YesAllWomen will stop trending. And so what happens then?

ZANDT: There's a lot of discussion right now around the lifespan and the lifecycle of a hashtag. I find them very useful as in-the-moment tools. These hashtags will live on until someone deletes them. They will become an archive and a reference point, a point for journalists to dig into stories, as other related stories come up. It doesn't have to be a platform at any given moment.

NPR: After Sandy Hook, there was such a strong movement and a strong possibility that there would be some substantive gun control. It never happened. I know it's a rich lobby, the NRA, but it would seem that it would take decades for a change in the culture that you're pointing out in the Tumblr.  

ZANDT: I don't actually think that it has to take decades. You know, we look at something like street harassment. Emily May started HollaBack!, to stop street harassment, 10 years ago. And many people said, what? Cat-calling? Why is that dangerous? Why is that bad? And some people still, obviously, say that. But the headway that they've been able to make as a movement around the world has been incredible for people to stand up and say, 'Wait a minute. No. That does feel bad and dangerous when that happens to me on the street.' And that's only been less than a decade. So again, the power of digital tools to really shift a cultural consciousness is incredible at this moment—if we use the tools wisely.

NPR: What's the biggest impediment?

ZANDT: Apathy. People feeling apathetic because they've never felt like they've been able to move a needle before. And I think these are some of the differences that we're seeing when people are contributing to these social media moments. This is, often times, their first experience with contributing to some sort of social change. And they see what happens when it goes from their Twitter stream to their local news station or to a mainstream cable news station, or something on the radio."

-- Marcia Stepanek

(PHOTO, top: A selfie of the participants in an April 28th panel talk about networked feminism, a part of NYU's #WOMENIMPACT conference organized by CauseGlobal. Panelists included, from left to right: Jamil Smith, a producer of The Melissa Harris-Perry Show on msnbc; Penny Abeywardena, head of women and girls issues at the Clinton Global Initiative; Tom Watson, a Forbes contributor and co-faculty at NYU; Deanna Zandt, and author Allison Fine in the foreground.) 

SxSW Bound

My workshop on Cause Video, to be co-presented with Jefferson Graham of USA Today, has been accepted on the program roster for the 2014 SxSW. The workshop, "Viteracy Now! Cause Video and the Proof Imperative," is slotted to run on March 11th. Modeled after my NYU Cause Video Lab (which I teach as part of my graduate class, The Wired Nonprofit: Social Media Strategy and Practice with Howard Greenstein and Tom Watson), this SxSW workshop will explore the latest trends and practices in the emergence of short-form video as a critical tool for conveying urgency, proof and relevancy in the social good sector.

Jeff and I also will discuss ways to measure video impact and build cross-sector, group-to-group support for specific causes that can endure from one campaign to the next. Attendees will gain working knowledge of the 10 types of cause videos being used successfully in the social commons and advocacy sector today, and discover which types are best for creating specific outcomes. Attendees also will learn how short-form video is better made in-house, with the best campaigns employing smart social/mobile strategies for maximum impact and continuous engagement.

Hope you'll be able to join us!

--Marcia Stepanek

Turning the Outside In

The continuing disclosures about National Security Agency (NSA) leaks are either totally unsurprising, or the stuff of shock and outrage. Spying on friendly governments and their citizens? Tell us something new, right? Still, many ordinary people around the world are genuinely alarmed. Each new Snowden leak—mostly recently, that the NSA has broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world to collect data from hundreds of millions of user accounts—is either earth-shattering news, or simply confirms what many already knew or suspected.

Wikileaks triggered similar debates: What did we already know? What should we have known? Who should have known it?

It's true that spying by governments—including spying on their own citizens, enemies, allies, and frenemies—is not new. It’s even expected, post 9/11, and comes as no surprise to government insiders. But the vast scale of NSA spying, enabled by our nation’s shift to a high-velocity digital infrastructure, is novel. Millions of ordinary people suddenly have detailed knowledge that only insiders previously had. Their shock at the extent of the spying is real and consequential.

But focusing on who-knew-what-when misses the real significance of the ongoing Snowden leaks. Civil libertarians and digital freedom activists assert that the issue is less about whether governments spy on each other and their citizens, and far more about how our massive, digital infrastructure is rapidly eroding our long-standing and accepted boundaries between society’s insiders (those “in the know”) and those who know far less—insider-outsider boundaries that diplomacy, good governance, and politics have relied on for centuries.

Suddenly, those who were once exclusively privy to the inner-most secrets of our government are not the only insiders anymore. “Our digital tools have empowered dissenting insiders and are emboldening them to shine a light on all sorts of shadows previously left uninvestigated,” says sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, “ensuring there will always be dissenting insiders if an action is controversial or if oversight is weak.” There will be more Edward Snowdens, she asserts, because leaking is not only getting easier, it’s becoming more expected, if not more respectable. Public polling data continues to reflect rising support for Snowden’s whistle-blowing.

And the blurring of lines between who’s inside and out is happening everywhere. According to digital researcher danah boyd, it’s why teens are leaving Facebook in droves; they’re spooked by their parents’ ability to interrupt their insider postings with embarrassingly jarring, off-topic commentary or “reminders to bring a sweater.” It’s why institutions are finding that the internal communications they meant for a few insiders are suddenly exposed to the world. Consider last year’s high-profile leak by a dissenting insider at the Komen Foundation, disclosing the breast cancer nonprofit’s plans to defund Planned Parenthood under political pressure from GOP opponents. The leak, which Komen’s leaders refused to address for days amid supporter uproar, spread like wildfire through social media networks, and cost the organization thousands of supporters and millions of dollars in lost or cancelled contributions—the organization has never fully recovered.

The eroding insider-outsider boundaries fostered by our expanding digital infrastructure are also upsetting political strategists. This past weekend’s progressive Stop Watching Us rally against NSA spying began as a progressive anti-NSA rally, but Libertarian groups insisting that they should be included just days prior to the event crashed it. The resulting “joined-hands” dissent against government excess triggered a controversial, pre-rally blog post by writer Tom Watson, who urged some of the biggest names in civil liberties and digital freedom of information to stay home rather than march with political outsiders: “[Progressive] organizers trade their own good names and reputations to stand alongside—and convey legitimacy to—a [Libertarian Party] that opposes communitarian participation in liberal society and rejects the very role of government itself.” Critics of Watson’s column accused him of working against political compromise. Supporters, though, suggested that the Libertarians were intentionally crashing a political party not meant for them but unavoidably open, thanks to the digital political infrastructure that makes insider strategy secrets—and organized surprise—ever-harder to handle on all levels. (An informal data survey of marchers revealed that crashers mixed in with political compromisers from all sides of the political spectrum.)

Information will always be power, but now more people have it—and increasingly, they’re not always the “right” people, depending on who is drawing the lines. Our 21st-century governance and leadership can no longer depend on old, established norms about what constitutes “proper” levels of public knowledge and who gets to know more. Security clearances? No longer are those at the top of the leadership pyramid that can control access—nor the conversation.

What really makes the Snowden leaks so provocative—and, frankly, so unsettling to so many—has less to do with Edward Snowden and much more to do with the power of our digital tools to flip who’s out and who’s in—across society.

“The outsiders are peeking in and moving in, and they are here to stay,” says Tufekci. That is the big story to watch. Each new Snowden leak is just another wake-up call about how profoundly our digital tools are redefining the balance of power, big and small.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Elisabetta Stoinich; reprinted with permission from the Stanford Social Innovation Review)