The Hashtag Heard Round the World

we'll work on that. No, but this we we're talking about today, I'm pretty sure we get to own that hashtag. We don't know. I don't think anybody. It's not gonna be like when I tried to retake blow blew my mind. Yeah,

from from from the rest of the twitter verse. But but yeah, we're talking in this podcast specifically about Occupy Wall Street and some of these other um social media enhanced protest movements that have taken hold in late two thousand ten and then throughout two thousand and eleven, ranging from um, you know, from the Arab Spring to uh to London to back in the US with the occupied stuff, and of course the occupied stuff is has led over into other countries as well. But we're talking about what

is a modern protest? What is it really is the modern protests shaping up? I mean, uh, protests have always utilized advanced technology to whatever degree it's available. I mean, it's just the way we work, um. And so it's no surprise that people are going to use modern technology, modern social media to to to fuel the movement. Um. But let's back up before we we get into two,

into the technology things. Just talking about numbers because yeah, because when we're talking about hashtabs being heard around the world to a certain extent, we're talking about the number of people involved in that protest, because I mean, the the people of serving a protest are arguably as important as the individuals that are partaking in it, because it has to be seen to really take that effect. That's the whole point is to convey the importance of a

topic and to put a little context behind that. Two. And we're talking about the hashtag occupy Wall Street, which showed up on July. Right, It is just this sort of idea linking to a blog about hey, we should occupy Wall Street there. Obviously there was uh no formal movement at that time or even intention. So the earth we live on is currently home to what seven billion people? Now, we just had the seven billion birth yea, like the last couple. Can you imagine being like, hey, I'm baby

seven billion? Well my parents? Um, these billions and billions of people, uh, roughly spread across two hundred and forty countries, close to seven thousand languages around like documented documented languages, Yes, somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty and twelve uh, and more branches of religion, personal belief, ideology than you can shake a stick at. Yeah, twenty major. But you're right, there's there's uh quite a bit more than that. Yeah, And we continue to grow, we continue to in some

cases of splinter uh and and reorganize amid those groups. Um, So how are you going to get these people together? Because I was I was talking with my life the other day about a recent episode of This American Life where they're talking about junior high and how junior high is horrible, and how one of the things going on in junior high is that when you're young, you get

along with everybody, but then as you get older. Uh, just within school you begin you become more judgmental, you become more perceptive to Uh, you know, who you want to be associated with and who you want to to identify with. You created this blueprint of reality. And you're right, and so by junior high it's already pretty complicated. So how do we ever agree on anything? How do we ever, how do we get out of high school mentality? Right?

And Uh, Historically, wars are generally a pretty good way to do it. Um. I mean, wars have long brought together millions of individuals and pitched battles. It's thankfully, hopefully it seems to be going out of style in recent years and doing part well again because technology. Technology changed the way that we wage war. Uh. And then maybe there's something going on in the in our collective psyches as well. But the better angels of ourselves, we can hope.

I've seen some interesting arguments of that that we you know, we live in a time where there's there's less war now than than ever before. So let's hope that keeps up until the big machine human war. But singularity, Yeah, but that's gonna bring us all together even more so, Like it's hard to put stats on some of these ancient battles, but for a DBC, the Persian army marched into the Battle of Thermipoly with between two hundred thousand

and five hundred thousand men. More than two thousand years later and three the Soviet Union's Red Army suffered more than a million casualties of the Battle of Stalingrad. UH. And then we have other examples where we can see people converging UH for a cause that is not bloodthirsty and drenched in hardship. UH. January two thousand seven, an estimated sixty million Hindu pilgrims gathered at the convergence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in northern India for the

um Are Kombla Mella Festival, huge festival. You've probably seen clips to this individual's bathing UH in the rivers and sort of an active purity, right, Yeah, in active purity. Sixty million people coming together for that, which is amazing, amazing. So protests also bring people together. And this is the and we just recorded a podcast about this, so it should already be in your iTunes folder or hanging out

on the web for you to listen to. If you want a lettle more information about why we get into into the protest mentality. But once we are there, we can gather in in rather large numbers sometimes. And the reason why Occupy on All Street has I think some legs or has had legs at least over the past four months. We don't again know what its fate is now. Um. It has a classic earmarks of a protest. So we're talking about disenfranchised people, right check. Crappy economy check uh huh,

and stagnating politics double check. Right. So pretty much this is pretty much a global situation right now. Right. So it's not just in the United States. Uh, you know a group of people in New York starting this. Uh, that's why it has, you know, such resonation all over the world. Um. And of course we've seen this before. We've seen it with Vietnam, right, Uh, a little bit different circumstances. But we have people who are saying that there are wrongs that need to be righted. We've seen

it with the Arab Spring. Um. But the Arab Spring being just the the string of of protests and in many in some cases actual rebellion revolution situations that has just spread throughout various countries in the Middle East, ranging from we've seen for the protest and I ran Tunisia

Egypt Um. I mean really, it points of the fact that people will put up with a lot of crap until it gets to the point where you know, it's it's a it's making them powerless in their day to day decisions on whether or not to buy groceries or you know, buy new shoes, or you know, it's hamstringing them. So yeah, we can put it with a lot of corruption,

a lot of political who until that happens. All right, we're gonna take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors, and then we're gonna really break down the question what is the largest protest of all time and what factor has made it that way? Yeah. This podcast is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow and the Discovery Channel. At Intel, we believe curiosity is the spark which drives innovation. Join us at curiosity

dot com and explore the answers to life's questions. All right,

we're back largest protests. Uh. This is something that is sometimes very difficult to gauge because not every protest consists of individuals gathering in a in a square, and then it's hard to count sizes and and and you're gonna get into the wars of information and politics of information to where the protesters are may in some cases want to inflate the number because it sounds better, and then the people cracking down on the protests are likely to

lower that number for obvious reasons. You know what I just occurred to me, Why don't they use the same technology that NASA does to count the constellations that they then applied to tracking dolphins. Well, true, that's that's true. You can do some sort of sophisticated data. But then if you're the people who has that in that technology, it's gonna tend to be the governmental forces, So they're not gonna necessarily want an accurate count anyway, not for

public consumption. And then the other thing think back to in the other podcast we mentioned Mohamma Gandhi and the whole u uh. Some of the civil disobedience was going on there, with individuals protesting by showing up for work

or by resigning from their positions. You get into protests of that nature and it becomes even more difficult to to gauge what the turnout is because they're protesting in ways and ruch, they're not visible when you're getting down into actual numbers though, and you can say like, well, this is the number of individuals that we know of the participated in this, and therefore this is a very

large or the biggest protests. One of the big ones, according to Guinness Folk of World Records was it was the Iraq protest in Rome UH February two thousand three. The event drew a crowd of estimated three million people, and on the same day, protesters gathered in nearly six hundred cities in a coordinated global effort to express moral outrage against the US invasion of Iraq. So you had like one point three million protesters in Barcelona, Spain, between

seven fifty thousand and two million in London, um. All told, according to BBC, between six and ten million people participating in a global protest, which is amazing because think about you know, when we talked about the civil rights movement, and we talked about Rosa Parks and how her refusal to give up a seat to a white person than uh spurred a one day boycott of the bus system, right um, And this was something that was in the

works forever. I mean that this there were a lot of people working on this specific plan in other ones um for months and months and months, and then you have something like this, between six and ten million people protesting. And I'm going to wager a bit that it didn't take that long given the data that we know about when the Iraq War broke out and when the protests happened,

um that people were mobilized. And so you can obviously point to when really one key factor in mobilizing all those people, which is the technology we have available today, which really does change the landscape of protesting. It's it's worth noting real quick before we get even more into the technological stuff that that's sometimes the protest is just as simple as a naked lady with a fur and some fake blood splider on her, you know, or a naked man or a naked man probably both, I guess.

So you get all your demographics covered. But that's the shock tactic, that's like, hey, we want to we want to the media to cover this. Yeah, and then that's the thing like like Peter, no matter what you think about Peter, and and certainly there's some very some very contrary positions on on what Peter stands for and or how they carry out their protests, but their protests tend to uh to get attention, they do. And I will say, you know, I've I've certainly walked through a Peter protest.

I was walking through one in Boston with my mom h when when we all lived there, um a number of years ago, and my mom had a fake fur colored line jacket on, and of course she was the target. The thing that stood out is that they said, I hope that you get cancer and die. Yeah, so I mean obviously fake blood. Uh no, they didn't, but that was in itself really very jarring. Obviously my mom um, she was actually kind of oblivious, just kind of like, what did I just say? And I was like nothing, um.

But you know, there are effective ways to to really get at um at the psyche, right, and that's that's what protests are trying to do. So you can do it in numbers, or you can do it in an awful things that you say to pastors by yeah. And then of course there's there's art. There's music protests, songs protests.

In our art episode that we did recently about your brain and are we mentioned, um, like the words of public Picasso talking about the Spanish Civil War and expressing that through art, prep expressing his outrage and varied emotions about this political situation through the expression of art, you know. And I'm thinking to um about the protests of the Iraq War. And obviously this is before Twitter and Facebook, and this isn't a question that we can answer today

or anytime soon. But uh, you know, I do wonder how it would impact or would have impacted that protest. Do you think more people would have participated? Do you think that it would have attenuated it in some way because it might have taken focus away? Um, And we certainly know that the protests of late have been really effective because of these technologies. Yeah, it's it's real effective for a number of reasons. But I mean, I mean

because a it's instant networking and social networking. It's it's the ability to throw something out with that hashtag occupy Wall Street and then everybody following that hashtag can instantly see what's up, real time information in all of it's effective and in some cases perplexing manner, you know. I mean, it's the real time aspect of it. I think is really key because you can you could be like somebody suddenly somebody's tweeting, Hey, the police are cracking down. Uh,

they're moving into this area and everybody knows. And it's also allowed certain groups to even It allows you this huge voice without necessarily having any huge investment in the megaphone,

in the metaphorical megaphone or the real megaphone. You know. Um, like not quite a protest, but just consider with all the crack downs that have occurred on Wiki leaks, a lot of their continued momentum has taken place on Twitter, where they have continued to be able to speak out to all of these followers despite bank accounts and websites going down around the world. Yeah, I just I can't help but think about the protests in Iraq or the protests of the Iraq War and ten million people mobilized

by via email. Right, that's a huge coordinated global effort. Just what it might have looked like with these different technologies that we used today. UM, where's people people were have been studying the the impact of social media on protests, UM and movements prior to all of this. I actually spoke to uh, this guy by the name of Dr Michael Best, who had Technologies and inter National Development the

lab at the Georgie Institute of Technology. I thought. I spoke to him early two thousand eleven UM for an article on Discovery News called our Smartphones Worth It, and it ended up being a lot more interesting of an article then it sounds, because I got to discuss like how does it affect our daily lives? And and then by talking to Best, learned a little bit about how it was specifically being used by UM Nigerians leading into the two thousand eleven Nigerian election, and they were doing

a lot of political organism organizing. They were planning activist meetings and flash mobs all leading up to the election that I was at least at that time slated to take place in April, and and at the time I thought it was really interesting. But then of course this turns out to be a major theme of two thousand and eleven UM as individuals are are tweeting about the various protests that they're involved in uh and and coordinating

their movements. And in all of this, I also can't help but think another advantage of social media, and specifically Twitter, has to do with the people observing because I feel like with Twitter, one of the things people like about celebrities being on Twitter is that you're kind of as close to that celebrity as you are to the friend, the real life friend that you know on Twitter, Like

there's there's this um, there's this closeness. Well, there's this idea that you're getting insights to how they're living in and you're all a part of the same information stream. So when you're observing like a real time protest taking place on Twitter and you're seeing updates about Occupy Wall Street or or the protests in Iran, well whatever it may be, I feel like the people observing it on Twitter end up feeling closer and a little more personally invested.

It probably gives people a little bit more empathy, right movement, So if someone is sprayed with tear gas, right, and let's say that this was a uh the use was was just an indiscriminate response by police and that or that was how it was tweeted, right, then people are going to say, oh my, you know, the depth of injustice here is unbearable. Yeah, because you're getting real time

data about this, right. I think it's like if you it's as if you were standing on the edges of a protesting crowd in real life, and even if you're not actively participating in it, you're gonna feel a little more like a protests, You're gonna feel more sympathetic to that cause just by virtue of being in close proximity to it, and the social media world of Twitter puts you on the edges of that crowd in a virtual sense. So I think that the same thing ends up happening. Well,

it's real. It's such a game changer too for the government because now that you do have these so much information to share, it's very easy to document the missteps that the government might take or that a police force might take against protesters. So you know, obviously that sort of stuff came out before, but now it's it's pretty verifiable, particularly if you've got, you know, a cell phone video

of it. Now. Of course, it's it's worth noting that that throughout these these various protests and on Twitter hasn't necessarily been the motivating force. It's not like Twitter was the like the real power of the movement necessarily. It certainly helped, and it was certainly a game changer, but

take the Egyptian Revolution UM January through February two eleven. UM. So you know, Twitter and the various social media outlets are made a lot of headlines, but the television newspapers and telephone UM specifically like Al Jazeera UH continued to to be a major informer for the people even as the Egyptians the Egyptian government blocked internet connections in January. So UH, you know, it's worth noting that there are other media outlets and employ here uh. And then in

some cases, UM, this was pretty interesting. This is from February two th eleven, following the uprisings in the Middle East, some individuals in China were arguing for a quote Jasmine revolution, and they were talking about on this overseas Chinese community news site boxing bo x u n. The Chinese government ended up blocking searches for Jasmine for the term jasmine, and they also the the website was hacked by a

denial of service attack. So right, so that you see a little bit of this sort of digital virtual social media warfare. It ends up taking place like the basically the protest testing UH situation of the crowd of protesters and the riot control taking place in a vertu. Yeah, seeing it play out there. But and actually that's it's worth noting to the Jasmine Revolution really didn't have legs,

right for that very reason that it was shut down. So, you know, looking to the future a bit, it would be very interesting to see how China and protesting uh take place in the future, giving technologies and also given the fact that you know, if you can shut down a protest that way, you can obviously have people go in and hack the other way. Uh. So, I don't know, just just interesting thought. With that many people in in

one country, surely something will come out of it. Yeah, But I guess one of the things too, is that even even as as we've been increasingly digital, it seems like the idea of individuals gathering together to support a cause is just is going to remain a vital part

of protests. Like I can't see I can't see protests going completely digital, you know, because it's kind of like on Facebook, for instance, for while, there there were a string of these things where it's like, uh, speak out against I don't know, something like child abuse by changing your your profile picture to a cartoon or something like. There was there was a there were stringy and and then finally people started saying, you know, this is this

is kind of dumb because we're not doing anything. You're not actually doing anything for these causes. You're just it's not like you quit paying your taxes, right, right, right, It's not like you went out in the street and made yourself known. And we're I mean, there's something about people gathering in a space generally a space they're not really supposed to be in, um and speaking out as as as a group and saying, look at these individuals

all piled here together, look at them, uh, look at us. Yeah, but it's not to sound too or well in again, looking for the future and thinking about facial recognition software, it could be really problematic for people in the near future to congregate and um, I was just thinking about the app that came out for the Chicago bar scene using facial recognition software, which you can you know, go buy a bar and it basically is going to tell you, um, the age range of the people in there and the

relative income, which, by the way, if you've ever just by looking at faces, yeah, from the facial recognition software, like you take a picture of people at the bar and then it yeah, because it's because it's indexing some sort of database that's basically saying, okay, well, I mean, I don't know if someone's wearing pearls, maybe it's looking at that. I don't you know. But anyway, the point is that this is a software that could be used for crowds and you could start, you know, I ding

certain people UM. You could tag them as a known protester. You could begin tracking them, and this is fascinating. I could see then a situation where say a protest movement begins to um gel together in a public space. They send a guy out with one of these devices. All he has to do is take a picture of analyze it, just a quick scan of the crowd, and then it

will it will compare faces with the database. It will sort of judge, you know, the various socio economic status, any possible criminal histories, and then give them a readout with advice. On the next step. They could be like, oh, this has nothing to worry about. This is going to break down in a couple of hours, versus go ahead and shut this down now because this is going to

get bad. Right so, right now, we think about protesters facing UM officers who might be armored with kevlar vests and plastic shields, and um, you know, instead of bullets, they might be hit by rubber bullets, which we've seen before. Um, you know you've got snatched squads that will come and snatch people. Um and sound cannon. We've talked about this to you in our Future of Pain podcast about how you can basically just scatter a bunch of people with

an incredibly loud noises. Okay, so you have all of that, but maybe in the future, you know, you don't have of uh as much of a police presence, but you do have people in the crowd who are trying to shut it down by getting the data on the people and preventing them for future, you know, and from participating in future protests. It's very likely. Uh, this is yeah, this is kind of a tangent, but I can't help

ever be reminded. I think it's a So it's like a DJ shadow track UM from an older album where he ended up sampling this this bit from a sermon who was taking place in the Woodstock era, and uh, the preacher giving this sermon was talking like he was describing outlandish lee like a situation where you had like hippies in uh in kind of a protest environment, and the police could not enter, they could not even like enter in to like control them, because the marijuana smoke

was too thick that that it was just there was just this crowd of just out of control, sinful hippies and they were just just layed in drug smoke so that the police couldn't go in. And so the way to combat facial recognition software is just to have a big thick uh ganja cloud. Well, and according to this guy, according to that guy, yeah, I'm not suggesting that you're you're you're saying people should do that, but it is well but but no, I'm not suggesting people do that.

But but you know, it just brought it to mind. But here's the thing about the facial recognition software. Um, everybody could just end up wearing masks, right, I mean that's the whole, the whole vif for Vendetta guy fox Man, that's true. That become increasingly a symbol really more of a symbol of these various movements in various groups like anonymous h etcetera, rather than just this movie based on

this Alan More graphic novel. Yeah, yeah, you could you could dial down the protester profiling profiling by doing that. For so, in some cases it's illegal to wear a mask in public officially, so I can understand why. I was on Marto one day and someone had a mask on um, but I can't remember. It was maybe like Tigger or something. It was so disconcerting I thought, for sure, you know, no good will come with this. You know this? Yeah, Well, when uh, for the Olympics it took place in China,

Mexico sent a couple of Lucadors. They masked wrestlers, not to actually compete, but to just sort of I think they were doing the show. There's goodwill kind of thing. But they had to get special permission for them to wear their masks because they can't take their masks off. I mean, that's their identity, right, I mean right, And I mean there's no point in them going over there if they can't wear their mass they are their masks. So they had to get special permission from the Chinese

government to to wear these things. Well. Oh, by the way, when I speak of MARTA, I'm talking about the train system we have here in Atlanta. Yes, okay, Anybody's like, what do you mean you are in Marta. Who's Marta? Yeah, that's the train system. Alright. So just just a little bit of food for thought. Um, the number one indicator civil unrest lack of money, right, yes, and then of

course resources and political corruption. Now keep in mind that by thinking about two and a half billion more people, Well, I don't know, what do you think is gonna happen? Well, I think, as with any age in the past, there will continue to be protests, There will continue to be situations that are worth protesting about. Uh, and hopefully, like I said at the start of the podcast, will continue to engage in these type of group activities rather than

open warfare. Yeah, absolutely, I mean, but it's it's a much better prospect for sure. So there you go. What do we have in our magic mailbox? I don't know where's the robot that's always taken breaks? Here you go, bring us some of that sweet listener mail. All right, here we go. We have one from a listener by the name of Jen. Jen writes in UH and says, Hello, Robert and Julie. I hope this finds you Well. I've been listening to your podcast for about half a year,

and I've loved every single one. That's that's great. I even I haven't loved every single one. UM, I know I love every single one. I have loved all of them, from one I want to talk about. Okay, UM. I now look forward to my long commutes because I get to listen to your entertaining and insightful conversations. I think that's why your podcast really stands out for me. You're not just delivering information UH to your listeners, but you are actively engaging with it and picking apart of some

quite complimented topics for us. Thank you for hours of entertainment. It takes my mind up of how much I'm standing on GAS as a graduate student researching medieval gender in women's history, which is pretty exciting. I particularly appreciated your October eleventh podcast on evolution of and the Orgasm war UM. I apologize for this being late. My pod broke and I only just replaced it, so I was listening to

two months worth of podcast last week. Ideas about the nature of the female orgasm, especially in regard to its UH necessity or lack thereof, for conception, was a topic of interest for doctors, church officials, and court officials. Alike in the Middle Ages. In fact, it had rather tragic consequences for a number of women throughout the period. Um galenic medicine, The dominant theory throughout the Middle Ages held

the female orgasm wasn't necessary requisite for conception. It was widely believed that women also produced sperm during intercourse, and it could only be released if the woman had enjoyed herself. Consequently, a woman in the Middle Ages who was the victim of a rape resulting in pregnancy had no legal recourses in many areas of Europe. Her pregnancy belied her enjoyment

of the encounter, which inherently singled her consent to the act. Well, that was a bummer anyway, thank you once again for your wonderful podcast, and I'm sorry that my gratitude prompt need to tell you some really sad history. You guys rule best gen Well, that's awesome. That yeah, very interesting and certainly kind of sad, rather insight but I mean

that's that's exploring anything about the Middle Ages. What's true true, But it is uplifting in the sense that if you think that the female orgasm is still a mystery, just look back down and say, ah, the understanding is is a little bit better there. Yeah, you gotta love the middle Age. So I'm excited that we have a listener who is steeped in medieval lore. Yeah, well, especially in gender issues. All right, Robot, hand me another one. Here we go, Um Jim right then and says, hi, guys,

your mind. Slash Art show reminded me of an exhibit I saw a few years ago. I took my then eight year old son to the Moment in New York City on a school holiday. They had a really cool temporary exhibit. It contained something like sixty four small works of art in sequential order. The concept of this exhibit was that each work related to the to the next one,

uh the one next to it. For example, a Rubik's cube was next to a drawing of a Rubik's cube, which was next to a drawing of a cube shaped building, which was next to a round building, et cetera. At one place, we came across a photo of rocks. Then there were rocks displayed as a sculpture. Then the rocks were on paper, Then there was paper, then shredded paper, then some scissors, ah, rock paper scissors. The exhibit came with a brochure which identified the works and artists, but

there were no details about how the pieces related. This was up to the viewer. The last several items were a dangling bear light bulb that talked a set of phrases out of out of any meaningful context, a film projector a vintage photo from the balcony of a nine era movie theater, a sign that said the end. And finally you had to check the brochure for this one, but the rooms built in exit sign was the final piece. It was a really cool and fun to walk through

the exhibit with my son and figure out the connections. Well, that's that's interesting. I've gotten to to look at some art with Nissan nephews and uh and it is interesting too to sort of prod young minds on and see them inspired by kind of figure out what art is about. And then, as we discussed in the podcast, it's one of the amazing things about art how it engages in

their brain on both conscious and subconscious levels. Yeah, it was that quote from Picasso, something like he you know, he could draw like Rembrandt, but it took him, but you know, his whole lifetime to draw like a child or think like a child. I guess that's what he was saying. Um, so, yeah, that's really cool And I love the idea that it's this cumulative work that you content like, your your perception is forced to reevaluate each

piece that you're seeing as a whole. Pretty trippy. Yeah. Well, hey, if you have anything trip you would like to share with us, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter. We are blow the Mind on both of those and uh, we we find update both of those fees with all sorts of cool links, uh, both the stuff that we're working on and stuff we've done and you know, podcast stop, but also just cool things we find around the net. And certainly you guys are invited to share that kind

of stuff as well. On more than one occasion, something you guys have shared with us has turned around and ended up being a podcast episode all and you can always send us your thoughts via email at blow the Mind at how supports dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House to work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.