shadows-streets-book

6 IntroductionThe Revolution Will Be Tweeted, but Tweets Alone Do Not theRevolution MakeIn 2010, writing against the idea that specific media technologies automaticallyproduce movement outcomes, Malcolm Gladwell argued in awidely debated article that social media fail to produce the strong tiesand vertical organizational forms that he considered crucial to the successof the civil rights movement. 18 Gladwell did provide useful pushbackagainst technological determinism, and he reminded us that the keyforce in social movements has always been strong personal connections.However, he failed to acknowledge that social media are often used toextend and maintain existing face-to-face relationships, including the“ strong ties ” he values so much, over time and space. There ’ s actuallyno contradiction between the position that strong personal relationshipsare the key to social movements and the observation that social mediaare now important tools for movement activity. More problematic isGladwell ’ s conflation of strong ties with vertical organizational structure,which led him to argue that powerful social movements require a strong,military-style hierarchy. The idea that only vertically structured movementsare effective is both dangerous and wrong. It ignores the theory,practices, processes, and tools of social transformation that have emergedfrom the last fifty years (at least) of horizontalist organizing and theanti-authoritarian left. Feminists, ecologists, queer organizers, indigenousactivists, and anarchists of various stripes have long rejected top-downinstitutional structures and patriarchal and hierarchical styles of organizing.The turn toward power-sharing, consensus process, horizontalism,and networked movement forms has certainly been aided and enabledby networked information and communication technologies (ICTs).However, there is a much deeper history that underlies this shift. Horizontalism(or horizontalidad in the Latin American context, as describedso beautifully in Marina Sitrin ’ s book of the same name) 19 surged inpopularity from the late 1960s through the 1970s, spread by way ofunderground cultural scenes during the resurgence of the right in the1980s, and burst onto the forefront of globalized social movement activityin the mid-1990s with the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. Ittook off again following the 1999 World Trade Organization protests,dubbed the “ Battle of Seattle, ” when horizontally organized, networked