This interview was published in the last issue of Reset (Number 124, March-April 2011)

What is happening now in the Arab world seems suddenly to sanction the end of this balance. Something revolutionary has happened, a critical threshold has a some point been passed.

Yes, this is the case, although if we would have followed closely what is happening in societies around the world, and particularly among people under 30, the signs were all there. As you mention, in my book, published in August 2009, the analysis presented, supported by a number of case studies in different contexts, was clearly indicating that the horizontal networks of communication bases on Internet and wireless communication were offering much broader possibilities of self-mobilization and self-organization to social movements because communication is the key for human activity and Internet and wireless communication (ultimately converging technologies) break through the monopoly of filtered communication by governments and corporations. Power is at the tip of your mobile device because it is the one that connects people’s minds.

I’m looking here at the cover story from “Foreign Affairs” about the political power of social media. Communication Technologies, it says on the front page of this issue (Jan/Feb 2011), “will help promote freedom, but this might take a while…” This analysis (by Clay Shirky) says that, in the end, more than sophisticated software for social networks and computers, what will have been essential will be the use of mobiles phones with cameras, within a context of a strong reaction to higher food prices, poverty and unemployment. But… it did not take very long, it is already happening. When people protest, one can no longer hide the violence inflicted by the police, one can no longer leave a massacre unpunished.

Absolutely right. It WAS already happening. The issue is that traditional cultural elites downplay the importance of what they do not know because the rapidity of social changes makes them intellectually obsolete. So, they defend their turf, and end up in supposedly realistic arguments, rather than having an open mind to the new avenues of social change.

Are we now in the realm of transparency? Between the top and the bottom of society and political power, the asymmetries of power that characterise all history, do we now have change that seems to be irreversible?

It is irreversible because this communication technology disintermediates mass communication and because the digital revolution is just unfolding. Two students, Martin Hilbert at the University of Southern California and Priscila Lopez at the Open University of Catalonia have published this month an article in “Science”, perhaps the most prestigious scientific journal, calculating for the first time the format and distribution of all existing information in the planet. So, we know that 94% of all information is digitized, and this has been accelerating in the past decade. If information is digital it can be transmitted and recombined electronically, and because networks can hardly be controlled (Egypt tried and failed by and large), we live in a world of a largely free flow of communication.
Yes, the messengers can be identified and punished, but the message goes on. And so, if the powers that be cannot control people’s mind, people, at last, are free in their minds. How this translates in social autonomy and political freedom depends on specific processes and specific societies, but there is a new era of social and political change opening up in front of us.

Let us imagine how different 20th Century history might have been if some of these devices now in the hands of everyone, had been available in the Fascist, Nazi, or Communist regimes. I know that this could be a blasphemy offending millions of victims.

Well, here I do not follow you entirely. True, if the world would have known the holocaust, there could have been a stronger reaction. But we had still would have to reckon with Hitler’s panzer divisions. And the world knew about Franco’s atrocities, yet the democracies did not help the Spanish republic and Eisenhower saved Franco from his isolation in 1953, out of realpolitik. The beneficiaries of communication revolutions are the people, not states. In fact, governments fundamentally do not like it, it takes the control of communication out of their hands, so their degrees of free manipulation are substantially diminished.

No one will ever be able to deny what is happening in a public square, no one will be able to cover embarrassing events behind the label of a state secret. How could a dictator like Gaddafi deny that people have been killed under his orders? How could he think of being able to challenge the popular evidence provided by so many mobile phones, text messages and pictures?

He does not deny it, he counts on his connections with Exxon, BP, and Berlusconi. I think that ultimately he will go down, it is useless now for his allies, but he will take thousands of people down with him because of the cowardice and hypocrisy of Western powers, particularly Italy, Britain, and multinational oil corporations.

In the Arab, or rather the pan-Arab theater of recent events, an important role was played by Al-Jazeera, the satellite TV network reporting on events even when local powers tried to portray events in a different way. Finally even the American administration seems to realize the real function of this Qatar-based TV-channel for the Arab world, given the fact that this network has been supporting the opposition in many countries (with the exception of Qatar itself, of course). How could the Americans not see that role before?

They did, they just could not take Al Jazzeera down, even if they shot and killed its journalists and Iraq and bomb its installations. The Emir of Qatar is so smart that he offers military bases to the US, money to American universities, and relatively free, excellent professional information (except when it comes to Qatar itself) to the Arab world and to the world at large. So, it is a win-win for him and Americans have to accept it, just hoping that CNN will do better.

The horizontal technologies of self-mass communication, which have developed so fast aimed at our entertainment, intimate talking, chatting, playing, listening to music, exchanging pictures of our children, seem to have very different consequences in different contexts, in rich or poor countries. In our societies we are dealing with the “going to extremes” described by Cass Sunstein. These consists of auto referential circles of people, becoming increasingly partisan. In America and even in Europe, they do not seem to be able to help politics to keep populism under control. On the contrary, they are contributing to a deterioration of the political discourse. At the same time, in dramatic situations, in poor societies such as Arab ones, they appear to be have really become a weapon for freedom, a safety device, a revolutionary device.

I disagree. In all cases Internet is helping grassroots movements, and freer expression of society, independent of the political establishment. What happens is that the uses of freedom are not guaranteed by freedom. In the US, Obama would not have been elected without the uses of Internet in an extraordinary grassroots campaign that mobilized youth and minorities. I demonstrated this in my book. But the Tea Party movement is also a grassroots movement, in fact a quasi-fascist, populist movement, and the Internet is also crucial for its expansion and influence because Obama has lost the battle for the minds of the people and his left is completely demobilized, although the Wisconsin battle (good old labour movement) may signal a counter-attack. But we cannot be technologically deterministic. Internet provides free communication, but the content of this freedom depends on social actors and the dynamics of social mobilization in a given context.

Our reflection on unexpected consequences in social life never ends. We will soon no doubt discover that it was not all so unexpected, just as not everything was in the end unexpected in 1989, because we are “ex post-rationalizer” animals. However, allow me to ask you, as a European from the Mediterranean Coast of Europe, about your reaction to this change that could mean so much for our future.

I think Europe is in a deep crisis of political legitimacy. The political institutions, and the parties, and the leaders, all of them without exception, are trapped in their own history, in their personal and bureaucratic interests, and in some cases in their corruption. They are completely cut off from society, and particularly from the future society, meaning the younger generations, and women specially. Italy is paradigmatic in this case. That a corrupt, disgraceful figure like Berlusconi can be elected repeatedly is linked to the despair of Italians in the entire political class.
And so, the reconstruction of political autonomy at the grassroots level is essential, and this depends by and large of the establishment of horizontal communications among people, bypassing the hold of traditional media. And so, the Arab world, in its secular, democratic version, may show the way to Europe, centuries after the Arab culture enlightened the, by then, barbarian Christian societies.

Manuel Castells is one of the world’s most important contemporary sociologists. Of Catalan origin, he taught for years at University of California Berkeley and now teaches at the Annenberg Center in Los Angeles, at the University of Southern California. His books include “The Rise of the Network Society”, the monumental trilogy entitled “The Information Age” and “Communication Power”.