Name: 【TED】Jeremy Heimans: What new power looks like (Jeremy Heimans: What new power looks like)
Uploaded: 2014-12-10T14:01:08.000Z
Duration: 15 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - B1

and Anna Hazare may well be the most cutting-edge digital activist in the world today.

And you wouldn’t know it by looking at him.

Hazare is a 77-year-old Indian anticorruption and social justice activist.

And in 2011, he was running a big campaign to address everyday corruption in India,

a topic that Indian elites love to ignore.

he was using all of the traditional tactics that a good Gandhian organizer would use.

and Hazare realized through his hunger that actually maybe this time,

in the 21st century, a hunger strike wouldn’t be enough.

So he started playing around with mobile activism.

So the first thing he did is he said to people,

“Okay, why don’t you send me a text message

if you support my campaign against corruption?”

So he does this, he gives people a short code,

But then he decides, “Let me tweak my tactics a little bit.”

He says, “Why don’t you leave me a missed call?”

Now, for those of you who have lived in the global South,

you’ll know that missed calls are a really critical part of global mobile culture.

If you’re running late for a meeting and you just want to let them know

that you’re on the way, you leave them a missed call.

If you’re dating someone and you just want to say “I miss you” you leave them a missed call.

in some cultures, if you want to please your lover,

they’re trying to avoid charges associated with making calls and sending texts.

So when Hazare asked people to leave him a missed call,

um you know, let’s have a little guess how many people actually did this?

So this is one of the largest coordinated actions in human history.

And this reflects the extraordinary strength of the emerging Indian middle class

and the power that their mobile phones bring.

But he used that, Hazare ended up with this massive CSV file of mobile phone numbers,

and he used that to deploy real people power on the ground

to get hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets in Delhi

to make a national point of everyday corruption in India.

And I was also an activist, and I have been an activist all my life.

I had this really funny childhood where I traipsed around the world meeting world leaders and Nobel prize winners,

talking about Third World debt, as it was then called, and demilitarization.

I had a very cutting-edge tech tool of my own, the fax.

And at that time, it was the best way to get a message to a lot of people all at once.

And so I’ll give you one example of a fax campaign that I ran.

It was the eve of the Gulf War and I organized a global campaign to flood the hotel, the Intercontinental in Geneva,

where James Baker and Tariq Aziz were meeting on the eve of the war,

and I thought if I could flood them with faxes, we’ll stop the war.

Well, unsurprisingly, that campaign was wholly unsuccessful.

You know and  there are lots of reasons for that,

but there’s no doubt that one sputtering fax machine in Geneva was a little bit of a bandwidth constraint

in terms of the ability to get a message to lots of people.

And so, you know, I went on to discover some better tools.

I cofounded Avaaz, which uses the internet to mobilize people

which is a home for these kinds of technology-powered movements.

Is the moral of this story, you know what, the fax is kind of eclipsed by the mobile phone?

This is another story of tech-determinism?

Well, I would argue that there’s actually more to it than that.

I’d argue that in the last 20 years, something more fundamental has changed than just new tech.

I would argue that there has been a fundamental shift in the balance of power in the world.

You ask any activist how to understand the world, and they’ll say,

“Look at where the power is, who has it, how it’s shifting.”

And I think we all sense that something big is happening.

got talking one day and we started to think,

How can we describe it and give it a framework that makes it more useful,

because we realized that many of the lessons that we were discovering in movements

actually applied all over the world in many sectors of our society.

So I want to introduce you to this framework:

And I want to talk to you about what new power is today.

New power is the deployment of mass participation and peer coordination,

This is Beppe Grillo. He was a populist Italian blogger who,

with a minimal political apparatus and only some online tools,

won more than 25 percent of the vote in recent Italian elections.

This is Airbnb, which in just a few years has radically disrupted the hotel industry

without owning a single square foot of real estate.

This is Kickstarter, which we know has raised over a billion dollars from more than five million people.

Now, we’re familiar with all of these models.

But what’s striking is the commonalities,

the structural features of these new models and how they differ from old power.