the act of being there. Riot police with shields run after them as they flee, beating their legs and backs, and on the soundtrack, again, we hear women screaming.
Next the cameraman spins round; the visored face of a policeman looms into shot as he hits the cameraman on the leg and tells him to get lost. Off-camera you hear the repeated thud of truncheons on flesh and more screaming. Then the shot becomes of running feet.
By nightfall, that video was zipping around the global Farsi networks via blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. If it had been taken by a TV cameraman, that fifty-eight-second single shot would have won awards. It captures reality in a way you rarely see on TV news: terror, chaos, innocence, the sudden tremor in the policeman’s face as he bottles out of hitting the cameraman again. But the point about the video is that it was not shot by a news crew, nor was it shown in full on any TV network.
Social media’s power to present unmediated reality has never been better demonstrated. And the Iranian demonstrations produced hundreds of similar videos, both of the protests and the crackdown that confronted them. Thanks to Twitter, these images exploded like a virus onto the screens of young people all over the world. The Washington Times called it ‘Iran’s Twitter Revolution’:
Hackers in particular were active in helping keep channels open as the regime blocked them, and they spread the word about functioning proxy portals. Eventually the regime started taking down these sources, and the e-dissidents shifted to e-mail. The only way to completely block the flow of Internet information would have been to take the entire country offline, a move the regime apparently has resisted thus far.18
Though the Ahmadinejad regime now took down Twitter, Facebook and SMS, it could not prevent the imagery circulating. No revolution in history had been recorded so comprehensively, and in such minute detail. In one video, police pick on a bystander at a bus stop; as they baton him a woman in a headscarf, about five feet tall, karate-kicks the police, two of whom then turn on her. One batons a car bonnet, randomly, in frustration. Then they stop and the woman merges again into the queue at the bus stop.19
Future social historians will gorge themselves on evidence like this, the micro-detail of social responses to unrest: but for now, its importance lies in the way it enables participants to judge what kind of history is being made in real time. Banned from reporting in Iran, the mainstream media quickly began to realize the value of this user-generated content, and to run it. The momentum of the protests fed off this cycle of guerrilla newsgathering, media amplification, censorship and renewed protest.
By the time the death of protester Neda Agha-Soltan was shown on YouTube, on 20 June 2009, the once-forlorn slogan of the anti-globalization movement had become a reality: the whole world actually was watching.
Bystanders posted three separate videos of Neda’s shooting by a member of the regime’s Basij militia: Time magazine called it ‘probably the most widely witnessed death in human history’.20 Blood trickles over her face. Her eyes roll sideways. She says, ‘I’m burning.’ Her grey-haired singing teacher vainly tries to staunch the flow of blood. Later, the crowd detains the alleged perpetrator and his security pass is photographed: this too gets uploaded to YouTube.
Another image resonated across the world that summer from Tehran: the so-called ‘rooftop poems’. As demonstrations were repressed, student dorms invaded and young men handed over to the Basij rape-gangs and torture squads, protesters retreated to the rooftops by night to call out Allah-o-Akbar. On 16 June an anonymous young woman, whose YouTube username is Oldouz84, began improvising poems as she filmed the rooftop cries. In the last clip, taken the day after Neda’s death, she whispers:
Allah-o-Akbar is no longer about being a Muslim. It’s become a call for unity, whether Muslim, Jew, Zoroastrian, faithless or faithful. The voices are coming from far away: they leave you shaken … Too many children will not hold their parents tonight. It could have been you or me.21
It’s delivered in the style of an art-house movie narration: Wim Wenders in Farsi, with Tehran instead of West Berlin. But it is real— just as Neda’s death, the karate-kicking woman, the surging crowds and baton charges are all real. The reality of protest, self-sacrifice and solidarity surged through the songlines of the Internet. Not everybody saw them: only the netizens sitting up late at night in Santa Cruz, in Marrakech, in Beijing, in Cairo, dipping beneath the barriers of Internet censorship in search of a better world. And it turned out there were more of these netizens than anybody thought.
The Iranian uprising was defeated: in part because the youth and the professional classes overestimated the break the poor were prepared to make with the hardliners; in part because the workers—having created strong, semi-legal organizations in defiance of repression, and having staged a wave of strikes which would continue into 2011—were not prepared to stake everything on an alliance with Mousavi.
But all the ingredients were present of the uprisings that would, eighteen months later, galvanize the Middle East and beyond: radicalized, secular-leaning youth; a repressed workers’ movement with considerable social power; uncontrollable social media; the restive urban poor. And there was an élan, a poetry about it, an absence of postmodern cynicism. If you had met Neda Soltan or Oldouz84 in a Starbucks in New York, they would be just like you.
But still the media and the politicians failed to see it coming. Most reports placed Gaza and Iran in the category ‘Islam versus the rest of the world’, and heard Greece as merely sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Communiqué from an absent future
last night around midnight, there was an out of control electrocommunist dance party with maybe 300 people dancing to justice in quarry plaza with glow sticks chanting STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! i’m not kidding, i don’t drink but i think it’s pretty awesome that we violated every single party regulation the university has for 4 or 5 hours and there was no police action.22
On 24 September 2009, students at University of California Santa Cruz occupied their own common rooms and held a dance party. By November, student occupations had spread to Los Angeles, California, Fresno, Davis, Irvine and Berkeley. While students have always sporadically protested over politics, this was an economic movement, and its targets were spelled out on the banners they had hung at the rave in Santa Cruz: ‘Take over the city, Take over campus, End capital’. The occupation movement continued to gather momentum throughout the winter of 2009, culminating in a coordinated walk-out on campuses across America on 4 March 2010.
Something new was happening. Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, students had been told they were society’s new archetype. Their knowledge work would ensure a prosperous future; their passion for personal electronics would keep China’s factories in business; and their debt repayments would fuel Wall Street for half a century.
But by 2010, students all over the developed world were coming under economic attack, through a combination of fee increases, hikes in the cost of student credit and a jobs downturn that had seen casual work dry up. If the students who led the struggles at Berkeley in the 1960s had been a prosperous, nerdy elite fighting for the rights of African Americans, their successors were now themselves victims, on an economic front line. ‘The arriving freshman’, they complained, ‘is treated as a mortgage, and the fees are climbing. She is a future revenue stream, and the bills are growing. She is security for a debt she never chose, and the cost is staggering.’23
Among students and graduates, this sudden loss of confidence in the future was tangible. One of its most eloquent expressions was penned by the Research and Destroy group of activists at UC Santa Cruz. Entitled Communiqué from an Absent Future, it became required reading among student radicals everywhere. It perfectly captures the impact of ‘capitalist realism’
