and months, it would become obvious that we were experiencing something transformative.
Unlike the perpetrators of previous terrorist acts in the United States, the Tsarnaev brothers never received in-person training—neither at a camp nor through a network. This is where the threads of our story converge in an interesting way. Could it be that in order to fully understand what happened in Boston—and, for that matter, what happened at the Berkeley Milo Yiannopoulos protests—we need to look at the world through a McVegan lens?
Exactly two years after the Boston Marathon bombings, Ori convened a meeting at Harvard Business School where he invited senior White House officials, entrepreneurs, members of the Islamic community, media strategists, and policy experts to discuss how we might prevent an attack like the one in Boston from happening again.
The group began by trying to understand how the Tsarnaev brothers were recruited to commit the terror acts in the first place. They weren’t part of a formal organization that gave them commands, nor were they even members of an underground network that hatched a September 11–style attack.
In fact, the successful war against such terror networks had parallels, in a weird way, to what happened with Berkeley Students for Animal Liberation.
Like BSAL, starved for members, the terror networks had turned to technology and to narratives to stay alive. Just as Ori created McVegan shirts and stickers, terror group members were posting their content online and hoping for the best.
In the past several years, more and more videos had been posted. And remember: top-ranked videos are by definition compelling and easy to mutate or, more specifically, regenerate. The narrative continued to mutate until the Tsarnaev brothers learned from that content and committed their act of terror.
In a very real way, the narrative had become the organization.
The Harvard group recognized that you couldn’t contain the narratives through conventional means. Eliminating them from one social media site was like playing Whack-a-Mole, as videos would pop up on another site almost instantaneously. Trying to debunk the message (and win the debate) only gave the videos more attention.
That same year, a Palestinian stabbed a bus driver in Tel Aviv and posted the act of terror online. The terrorist had no organizational affiliation, and the video wasn’t promoted by a group of people. Still, viewers were inspired to commit their own stabbings and post these new derivative videos online.
Of course, positive content can spread in the same way; think of the “It Gets Better” campaign. But just as after 9/11 we had to get our heads around the fact that a distributed network—lacking a leader and without infrastructure—was a force to be reckoned with, we now needed to start considering videos and other narrative-building content as their own entities.
This brings us back to UC Berkeley. What if the protesters were actually organized neither by centralized command-and-control organizations nor by distributed networks, but instead were led, actually led, by online videos?
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