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Inevitably, Castells became curious about how such a change was affecting politics. Speaking to an audience at Harvard in the spring of 2014, he reviewed what he had learned in the past decade - and particularly in the years since 2008, much of which he had spent dropping into the ground-zero sites where network protest and dissatisfaction were exploding. “We are witnessing,” he told the audience, “the birth of a new form of social movement.”®? Information technology was breeding massive, rapidly moving social waves. These movements went from invisible to irresistible in instants. They pressed for political change or for economic justice or even for - and this was odd for such wired up efforts, but anyhow - a return to a pre-technological age. In most of these countries, the older organizations had little appeal to anew generation of protesters. The political parties smelled of rot. The media was state- owned or controlled by billionaires. For a generation used to instant empowerment, the time to work inside these broken structures seemed impossibly long. And, anyhow, another option existed. Twitter or Facebook or YouTube had taught them. So riots in those dozens of cities, unplanned and uncontrolled, emerged.** The “Collective Action,” of popular movements for hundreds of years from Bastille- raiders to labor actions, was replaced - upgraded? - into “Connective Action.” People who'd never met and who shared very different histories and desires, were connected, fused together by lightspeed bits in hope or fury or vengeful rage.®> This was, perhaps, predictable. It mirrored the linked, fast-spreading dynamism of the 2008 crisis itself. As the British central banker and economist Andy Haldane observed, the world had never before suffered a genuinely global financial crisis, with every county on the planet, tied together as they were by finance and technology (and fear), tumbling off a cliff at the same, nano-second instant. ®¢ In one three month period, the entire global economy shrunk by five percent. As fast as shocks like that economic one spread, these linked network social reactions seemed to move faster still, echoing each other, with ever louder and more complex results. The technology itself became as important to the emergence of new groups as their ideas. The terror phenomenon of ISIS, for instance, emerged almost entirely along skeins of digital connection, and was itself a reaction to the network- led disruption of the Arab Spring - and the earlier fracturing of older order in Iraq. When President Obama dismissively called ISIS the junior-varsity squad of terror and said there was nothing much for the West to worry about, he was reflecting the 83 “We are witnessing”: Manuel Castells "The Space of Autonomy: Cyberspace and Urban Space in Networked Social Movements", Speech at Harvard GSD, February 2014, available online 84 And, anyhow: Raquel Alvarez, David Garcia, Yamir Moreno, and Frank Schweitzer. "Sentiment Cascades in the 15M Movement." EP] Data Sci. EP] Data Science, 4:6 2015 85 People who'd never met: W. Lance Bennett & Alexandra Segerberg “The Logic of Connective Action”, Information, Communication & Society, 15:5 (2012) 86 As the British central banker: Andrew Haldane “On Microscopes and Telescopes”, Speech at Lorenz Center Workshop on Socio-Economic Complexity, March 2015, p.20 63 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018295