The Revolution That Wasn't

How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives

Jen Schradie

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780674240445
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

This surprising study of online political mobilization shows that money and organizational sophistication influence politics online as much as off, and casts doubt on the democratizing power of digital activism. The internet has been hailed as a leveling force that is reshaping activism. From the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, digital activism seemed cheap, fast, and open to all. Now this celebratory narrative finds itself competing with an increasingly sinister story as platforms like Facebook and Twitter—once the darlings of digital democracy—are on the defensive for their role in promoting fake news. While hashtag activism captures headlines, conservative digital activism is proving more effective on the ground.In this sharp-eyed and counterintuitive study, Jen Schradie shows how the web has become another weapon in the arsenal of the powerful. She zeroes in on workers' rights advocacy in North Carolina and finds a case study with broad implications. North Carolina's hard-right turn in the early 2010s should have alerted political analysts to the web's antidemocratic potential: amid booming online organizing, one of the country's most closely contested states elected the most conservative government in North Carolina's history. The Revolution That Wasn't identifies the reasons behind this previously undiagnosed digital-activism gap. Large hierarchical political organizations with professional staff can amplify their digital impact, while horizontally organized volunteer groups tend to be less effective at translating online goodwill into meaningful action. Not only does technology fail to level the playing field, it tilts it further, so that only the most sophisticated and well-funded players can compete.

Chapter One

The Great Class Wedge and the Internet’s Hidden Costs

IT TOOK ME ALMOST TWO HOURS to drive from Raleigh, the state capital, to Larsene’s house in Goldsboro, a town of 36,000 people in eastern North Carolina known equally for its world-class barbecue and strong legacy of racial strife. Goldsboro is part of the Black Belt region, the area of the South where slavery was most common and which still has a higher percentage of African Americans than other areas. Larsene lived in one of the many mid-century small homes in this neighborhood with simple, yet well-trimmed, lawns.

I visited Larsene in 2011, early in my research, because a number of activists suggested that she was the most digitally savvy in their membership. Larsene was a member of Black Workers for Justice (BWFJ), a community-based workers’ center, and UE 150, a union local of public employees. Both groups were working class. At the time, she was a nursing assistant making poverty wages at a state hospital.

Larsene, 62 years old and African American, wore her satin union jacket with her local’s logo. Her hair was just starting to gray and her smile was broad. The front door opened right into her living room, where she invited me to sit down. We chatted for about an hour, and then she asked if I wanted to see what she did online. She guided me into her kitchen where she had a five-year-old desktop PC set up on a table. Larsene turned it on, but her dial-up connection was in no mood to cooperate. After a half hour of fruitless tinkering, she picked up the PC and moved it into another room, hoping the connection might be better if she used a different phone jack. Finally, the screech of the dial-up modem signaled victory, and Larsene was on the internet. From there, she moved awkwardly around to various websites, inadvertently clicking on ads, which further slowed down her computer, as well as her browsing.

She arrived after a time at the website for her hospital’s union chapter, which in theory was her responsibility to maintain. In reality, the task was something she was not able to undertake. “I just don’t have the knowledge, the skills to do it,” said Larsene apologetically as she looked up from the screen. She tried to show me another site that an activist from her chapter had created five years before our interview, but she couldn’t find it. “We haven’t done a thing with it since 2007. And that reason being was, when we started, one of our members had the computer skills.… He set it up, he gave me the information,” she said. “But since 2007, it’s been dormant, it’s just lying there.”

UE 150 did not have a Twitter feed or a functioning website and only occasionally made use of its Facebook page. Larsene was not aware of Facebook features like group pages. Twitter was an even bigger mystery. “I don’t know that much about that Twitter,” she said. “But I think if we had it, it would be an asset for the local if we had somebody that was real good with that kind of stuff.”

Even though she lived in the United States, Larsene was about as far geographically and spiritually as one could get from Silicon Valley and its utopian belief in the internet’s magic to transform the balance of political power and create a new democratic dynamic. The tech community was in a self-congratulatory mood that year as their tools seemed to have given rise to Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and a variety of other seemingly spontaneous uprisings around the globe. Yet Larsene was a prime example that even if “The Protester” was to be Time’s Person of the Year, the narrative surrounding digital activism was far more complicated and nuanced than what was being popularly acknowledged.

Larsene’s digital struggles were not unusual for the working-class people and organizations I interviewed and observed, both online and offline. The internet had not erased the stark inequalities between working-class and middle / upper-class groups, as I found a deep digital activism gap. Instead, the internet was actually making those inequalities wider, threatening to throw a wet blanket on this digital triumphalism. And of the several factors that explain the digital activism gap, social class reigns above them as the foremost and strongest.

In this case, when I talk about social class, I’m using a definition that extends beyond the usual barometers of income and education. Social class, in my analysis, also takes into account how much power and control someone does—or does not—have at work. Using this definition allowed me to plunge deeper into the way class shaped internet use. Applying the filter of social class to the 34 groups in this study, both those who supported public sector collective bargaining rights in North Carolina and those who opposed them, I categorized five groups as working-class, 13 as mixed-class, and 16 as middle / upper-class.¹

The story the data tell about these groups’ relative internet use is unmistakably clear. The overall digital activism scores were often two to three times lower for working-class groups compared to the middle / upper-class groups. The working-class category included one organization that had no digital presence; not a single trace of any website, Facebook page, or Twitter account could be found online. Even for those working-class groups that managed to get a foothold on the internet, the engagement with their members or community was woefully small. Working-class groups had far fewer people liking, commenting, retweeting and following them online, as compared to middle / upper-class groups.²

The new era of digital activism being hailed around the world was somehow bypassing this little corner of the United States. I not only wanted to know why, but whether it even mattered.

Organizations That Can’t Control the Means of Digital Production

Following my visit with Larsene, I traveled to Raleigh where I stopped at her UE 150 union headquarters to better understand the digital challenges at the broader organizational level. Because I was studying social movement groups, and not just individual activists, I first wanted to take a look at any organizational dynamics that could shed light on the digital activism gap.

The union’s offices were located in the back of an old brick building just a few blocks from both the General Assembly and the Occupy Raleigh encampment. The union’s one-room windowless office was packed with three old wooden desks, metal file cabinets, various bookshelves, and a meeting table a few feet from the door. The walls were plastered with union posters and clippings from newspaper articles about the union’s activities. Next to the table was an easel with butcher block paper filled with meeting notes, including plans for “Occupy the Hood” events.

Inside, I met with Steve, a white union organizer in his late 40s. Dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, he had been a community and labor activist for over 25 years. He walked with me around the office, showing me the organization’s communications equipment, which consisted of a number of broken computers and a fax machine that no longer worked. “You’re gonna be writing UE 150 has shitty technology?” he said, laughing. “Are you gonna write that? Okay, our technology is so bad here …” doing an imitation of the comedian Rodney Dangerfield. “This is our main computer,” he continued, looking at a decade-old dusty desktop. Then he pointed out an even older computer that had been donated to them in 2005 by a staff member’s sister. He sighed.

I said to him that it looked like he had Wi-Fi. “Uh-huh, we did finally get [Wi-Fi],” he replied. “And so it will print off of that little printer, copier kind of thing—that took years. However, we almost never have toner for that, so it’s just a museum piece.” He then walked over to another piece of equipment, put his hand on it and said, “This, now this is called a business server. I really don’t know what that means.”

With the digital activism gap, class was not simply a question of which group had the latest digital equipment. All of the working-class groups lacked a dedicated person, either staff or volunteer, who knew how to maintain and update their online presence. They simply did not have the capacity—either organizationally or by an individual volunteer—to do it. Steve may have been the go-to person for the office’s tech and communications questions. But even he was frustrated by the state of their online presence, particularly their website, which simply said “work-in-progress.”³

“It’s just such a weakness and frustration.… It’s one of those learning curve things—it’s like [sighs] what a big thing to learn how to do.” He went on to talk about how people have repeatedly shown him and other leaders how to update their site, but they did not do it often enough to be able to remember. Other websites, like that of their national union, sometimes posted information for them. UE 150 was one of the most active groups leading the statewide efforts for collective bargaining for public employees yet had one of the lowest digital activism scores.⁴

Lack of a working website was common among the five working-class groups I studied. Two of them did not even have a website registered. This shortage of resources and knowledge extended to social media. Steve confided to me that he was not on Facebook and said, “I don’t know anybody who even knows how to do Twitter, or even kinda really what it is you do to get on somebody’s Twitter list or something.” Even with seemingly more “basic” social media tools, like Facebook, working-class activists often mirrored this sentiment of not being able to afford or find someone to create and sustain them. UE 150 had a Facebook page but posted less than once per week, receiving few comments. Many of their posts consisted of photos about an event that had already happened.

Working-class groups were far less likely than mixed and middle / upper-class groups to develop a Facebook presence. Only three of the five working-class groups were on Facebook, and they used it only sporadically. During one month, for example, none of the working-class organizations posted on Facebook, even though some had held public events, which would presumably be an ideal time to promote or share on social media. On average, mixed and middle / upper-class groups posted 17 times as much as working-class groups. Participation was also weaker, with working-class Facebook pages getting about .02 comments per day on Facebook, while middle / upper-class groups averaged 1.08. The number of “likes” per day had a similar gap with 0.16 versus 3.10, respectively. On average, middle / upper-class groups had ten times as many members or “likers” on Facebook, and these differences persisted, even when accounting for group size.⁵

As I walked around the office with Steve, I stopped at the bookshelves and picked up some of their printed newsletters that they had stacked in piles. The photos in the newsletters were mostly posed group shots from meetings or protests. This was also the case in any Facebook posts they happened to make. Still, Steve explained that at the time such photos were exceedingly difficult to arrange and obtain because not many people attending their events, meetings, pickets, or protests had a digital camera or smartphone.

“People taking pictures—that’s huge in terms of a lot of people don’t have a digital camera or don’t know how to use one,” Steve said as he showed me an older model that he said he’d had for three years. “I use this freaking thing which sucks because I lost the battery and then the cord.… When I had a little point-and-click, I was the picture person for the movement, you know what I mean? I would go to the pharmacy all the time and get them developed.” He noted that it was more difficult to find places to develop photos, a disincentive for using analog technology. But making the leap to digital remained challenging. “A lot of times we’re at rallies and stuff, and it’s like, who’s got a camera?” Steve said. “No one, so alright, we’ll use these [old analog cameras], and then they end up so crappy you don’t even wanna use them.”

Texting was another underutilized part of the UE 150 arsenal. Steve said that sometimes they would text more than one person by manually entering multiple phone numbers. But he was not familiar with functions that would let members sign up for text blasts that would be potentially useful for constituents, including those who only had basic or feature phones.

These limitations with mobile technology were particularly surprising because there was and still is both a popular and scholarly view that smartphones and feature phones offer a new hope for marginalized groups. The belief is that mobile technology is cheaper and easier to master, and therefore populations that fell behind the initial PC and internet revolution could just “leapfrog” ahead and achieve near parity with more advanced and sophisticated users.

In fact, the reality I found was quite different. As with desktop computers and the internet, the differences in the use of mobile technologies were stratified along class lines for organizations. None of the working-class groups were using mobile technology as a replacement for more sophisticated and expensive gadgets. While adoption of new technology seems to move quickly, it is not the case for everyone. And, as I will show later in the chapter, many individual activists were not able to overcome these organizational limitations, either. That inequality limited the speed and effectiveness of their communication. The means to revolutionize their outreach existed, but because of a lack of resources, staff, and skills, those tools remained frustratingly beyond their capacity. As such, the digital era of democracy didn’t seem all that different, from their vantage point, than the analog era. The mountain of obstacles they needed to overcome in order to realize their goals seemed not to have been flattened one bit by the internet.

HOPE in North Carolina

In February 2011, two years before the Moral Monday movement for social and racial justice erupted, a broad coalition of labor groups came together for a rally. They dubbed the Raleigh event “Labor, Faith and Civil Rights Coalition in Defense of the Public Sector.” Gathered in front of the state legislature, the crowd included activists from UE 150, the North Carolina State American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (NC-AFL-CIO), and a number of...