No Pants and Dictators (not nearly as bad as it sounds) (wk 11)

Imagine this. You get on the train on a cold winters day when you notice something strange about the people in your cabin. Although they are donned in the usual winter attire of gloves, scarves and the like…almost half of them aren’t wearing pants. As you wait for your stop, you watch curiously as more and more people get on the train in their boxer shorts and underwear. Some are listening to headphones or reading the paper. One man is carrying a baby. None of them seem concerned about their uncovered legs. When asked, they each say the same thing ‘I don’t know about the others, but I just forgot my pants’. Eventually a man comes on selling pants for $1. Your cabin mates purchase them and go about their business as if nothing strange has occurred.

To you, this incident seems to have come from nowhere. But for the people of the internet group, Improv Everywhere, this was their annual ‘No Pants Subway Ride’, and was the result of weeks of planning and years of building notoriety on the internet. While it may have seemed a random incident to you, this is actually an event that has happened since 2002, and has grown from a measly 7 participants to 3500 people riding the subway pantless in New York, plus thousands more in other cities across the globe.

And believe it or not, this crazy event has parallels to the Tunisian and Egypt revolutions. To outsiders, these events seem to have happened with no warning. It seemed as if, all of a sudden, Twitter just flew in and destroyed a couple of dictators. But the truth is, as Morozov argues, these things don’t just happen; as they require a context and a history. For Improv Everywhere, this meant the long term build-up of a community committed to ‘causing scenes of chaos and joy in public places’. For Egypt and Tunisia, this meant thousands of angry people who were tired of living under a dictatorial thumb.

It is certainly true that the internet provided an extremely powerful and effective communication tool, but it is naivety to think that Twitter or Facebook led the revolutions.  This is to ignore not only the history of these countries, but also the fact that ‘revolution’ is not a new term… that for many thousands of years, people having been organising revolutions without the aid of the internet. It is time we recognised the most powerful aspect of a revolution- people.