Voice of Subjectivity: You Can Do More Than Riot With A Blackberrry

Voice of Subjectivity is an occasional companion column to Voice of Objectivity, for when I can’t quite agree with my calmer perspective. The opinions presented here do not necessarily represent the views of Techcitement, but they’re all mine. Let’s face it, I get as Techcited as anyone.

Like the various uprisings of the Arab Spring, the London riots have led to a surprising amount of talk about the technology people use when operating en mass against the government. Text messages, Facebook, Twitter, and now Blackberry Messenger have all been targeted by governments as the sources of uprising.

Obviously, there are huge differences between something like the uprising in Egypt and the London riots. The Egyptian people were generally using peaceful methods to protest massive injustices in their entire society. The British rioters took a single incident of police violence, blew it way out of proportion, and responded with a massive wave of violence of their own.

The key element shared by both incidents, as well as events in successful revolutions and failed uprisings throughout the world over the last few years, is that governments seek to block communications out of fear that a threat to the existing power base will arise from these new mediums. This methodology was widely criticized by the West during the Arab Spring, with cries of freedom of speech becoming the call to arms of many of the supporters of these revolutions, and Western governments were no less inclined to criticize than their citizens.

Now a Western nation faces a threat that takes a similar form, and the first reaction is to follow in the footsteps of nations like Libya and Syria: shutting down Blackberry Messenger and blocking people from accessing social networks. One man was actually arrested for planning a water-gun fight using Facebook. These aren’t the responses of a modern democracy; they’re what we expect from third-world autocrats.

The U.S. is not immune to this trend in blocking communications to quiet challenges to power either. San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit shut down cellphone communications out of fear that protesters would use the devices to coordinate attempts to disrupt service. We’re not even talking about major governments here. BART is a local authority that was trying to prevent inconvenience to its passengers, and as a result, it shut off the communications link that all of those passengers rely on for things far more urgent than a few delays.

I’m not going to take the extreme stances of groups like Anonymous, that feel there’s never a reason to censor communications and retaliate against groups (and innocent individuals who happen to be in some way associated with those groups) that do so. However, we need to remind our governments that they are “of the people, by the people, for the people”, and that when the people wish to communicate with one another in defiance of the government, the government doesn’t suddenly get broad authority to limit communications. This is the very essence of the concept of freedom of speech that our societies prize so highly.

Whatever fears the British government may feel in facing these riots, whatever trepidation BART has about these protests emulating the London riots, Blackberries are tools. Nothing more, nothing less. True, you can use them to coordinate a riot, but you can also use them to clean up after one. That’s exactly what’s happening in England now, as citizens who want their lives back to normal coordinate on Twitter and other parts of the web. London can stop burning via BBM just as easily as it started that way.

For the more objective look at this issue that inspired this response to myself, check out my weekly column, Voice of Objectivity.