#MustFall has become nothing more than glib shorthand for lazy campaigners and even lazier journalists, writes Mike Wills.
Enough already with the MustFall stuff. The only thing from now on which must fall is the further use of #MustFall for anything which catches anyone’s ire – #PatriarchyMustFall is the latest variation at UCT.
#MustFall has become nothing more than glib shorthand for lazy campaigners and even lazier journalists. (Older readers will remember being similarly fed up with the suffix “-gate” being attached by the media to every whiff of scandal anywhere in the decades after Watergate.)
And while we are at this, maybe we can reflect on just how useful hashtags and social media in general have actually proven to be in terms of activism.
A quick scan of the global horizon shows that “the Twitter revolutions” have been highly effective at collectivising emotion but almost universally counter-productive in their outcomes.
The much-trumpeted Arab Spring provides the low-hanging fruit for this argument. Across the Middle East, crowds gathered, shared, tweeted and “liked” their way into global consciousness. They filled squares and toppled governments but in their place has come chaos and, in many cases, regression.
Turkey is the most fascinating example. Remember Gezi Park in 2012, the mobilised masses and “a turning point” in the country’s politics and the long-term rule of President Tayyip Erdogan? Well, a couple of weeks ago, the patient, ruthless Erdogan swept back into power with a greatly enhanced majority.
Bulgarian political scientist, Ivan Krastev, recently wrote perceptively in the New York Times about the failure of these movements and the exaggerated assessment of their potential by commentators.
I do Krastev a disservice by summarising a layered argument, but he points out that we were seduced by “the utopian possibilities of the world of technology”, noting that “you can tweet a revolution, but you cannot tweet a government”. I might add you can tweet a statue down but you cannot tweet what goes in its place.
Krastev believes that these protest movements are “paying a high price for their anti-institutional ethos”, saying they fell victim to the fashionable notion that “organisations are a thing of the past (and networks representative of the future), that states no longer matter, and that spontaneity is the real source for legitimacy”.
Societies are not made up of disrupters and protesters alone. The vast majority are intimidated by what Krastev calls “the demand for constant change and the hosannas for creative destruction” and will support the conservative option when it really matters. Hashtaggers forget that tweets do not equal election votes.
Cape Town’s student activists have achieved much in the protesting and the tearing down. But building something new involves a lot more. It demands working within a system through compromise and discipline. It also requires that there are people in recognised authority who are allowed the authority to make things happen rather than being the targets of spite. There’s no place for hashtags in that tough slog.
* Mike Wills’ column Open Mike appears in the Cape Argus every Wednesday.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Argus
*** Use IOL’s Facebook and Twitter pages to comment on our stories. See links below..