Radical texts

This piece originally appeared in Time Out London in August 2011.

By Monday evening, London had descended into anarchy. Fires raged across the city, looters cleaned out entire shops with impunity and riot police were pelted with missiles. The Metropolitan Police, no stranger to dealing with civil disorder, had lost control. In the midst of the chaos, flames and flying debris there were calls for the police to employ more draconian tactics to quell the violence – but this carnage was unlike anything a panicked Met had seen before. The rioters were everywhere.

Riots are unpredictable by their nature, but there’s usually some kind of geographical focus – whether it’s sustained battles around an estate or a small set of streets, the targets of vandals (banks, corporations or political institutions) or the route of a protest march. But here, although there were fierce skirmishes, the rioters didn’t seem interested in holding turf. Their tactics were hit and run: loots shops until the police turn up (even if this did sometimes take hours), or set fires and run. Countering these kind of guerrilla tactics with conventional, organised force has in war situations been likened to trying to smash a floating cork with a sledgehammer. Cordons, police lines, baton charges or kettling don’t work on people who are willing to duck away and pop up elsewhere.

In the aftermath of the riots, blame has been levelled at BlackBerry phones, and particular BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) – the seemingly benign feature that allows smartphone owners to send free messages to multiple contacts at the same time. The link between the rioters and this brand of smartphone was so specific that on Thursday Research in Motion, the Canadian manufacturer of the BlackBerry, publicly vowed to cooperate with the authorities – which could mean handing over users’ personal data and contacts to the police to help track down ringleaders. Despite this, there were calls for the BBM service to be shut down entirely, including from David Lammy, MP for Tottenham; David Cameron announced in Parliament that the government would look into curtailing access to social media for convicted rioters.

So what exactly makes BBM so different from other social networking tools, and can it really be blamed for accelerating or enabling the mass rioting?

First, some figures. Anyone who assumes that smartphones are still the preserve of wealthier grown-ups – or, in the case of the BlackBerry, high-paced business folk – hasn’t recently been in a secondary school classroom. Research published by Ofcom at the start of August found that 47% of UK teenagers own a smartphone, compared with 27% of British adults. 60% of those teens defined themselves as ‘addicted’ to the device, and 71% had their device switched on all the time. 37% of smartphone-owning teens are carrying a BlackBerry, compared with 17% for the iPhone. As far as market penetration goes, those figures are frankly astonishing.

BBM is an instant messaging application that comes pre-installed on many Blackberry handsets. It allows the owner to rapidly send and receive messages to other BlackBerry devices using the mobile phone network, or WiFi. Messages can be exchanged with multiple recipients at once, and are encrypted and thus only visible to the contacts involved – invited contacts who also have BlackBerrys. Each person on BBM becomes a node – a connection point on the network linked to many others.

Networked communications can be hugely advantageous in violent and fast-moving environments. When the Nazis launched the initial assaults that become World War 2, the speed and aggression of their tactics – particularly using tanks – led to them being dubbed blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) by Western journalists. This has led to a misconception that the German tanks were somehow quicker, or otherwise superior. In fact, as social media commentator Clay Shirky points out in his 2008 book ‘Here Comes Everybody’, the Allied tanks were superior to the Nazi machines in almost every respect – apart from one. The German tanks were fitting with radios, which allowed them not only to communicate with their commanders, but also each other. The speed of the German attacks wasn’t about physical pace – it was down to the efficiency of their communication network.

On a purely tactical level, rioters using BBM would have same advantages. There was no centralised control. Instructions or calls to action could be sent out, and the most compelling would be passed on and be more likely to be followed. Since there is no hierarchy through which orders are passed down, the network is robust – the loss of one node (if a rioter was arrested) will not cause it to collapse.

By contrast, the Met operate with a centralised leadership and top-down control. Police on the ground can and do make tactical decisions according to what they’re encountering, but significant orders must be filtered down from above (particularly about where to deploy officers), by a command structure that’s in turn relying on information about what’s happening at street level to filter back up. It’s a system that makes for orderly, accountable decisions – but compared to the headless network, it’s slow.

But just because BBM could have given the rioters and advantage over the police, it doesn’t mean it did. Young Londoners don’t need complicated communications strategies to see or hear Met riot police coming (sirens and helicopters are more than sufficient), and the rolling Sky News and BBC coverage provided plenty of information on where the latest flashpoints were. Indeed it was the dramatic TV images that demonstrated how easy it was to loot shops, and how hideously spectacular arson can be.

Also, BBM certainly wasn’t the only type of communication used by the rioters to choose their next targets – and if the BlackBerry network was shut down, they certainly would have found another way to distribute messages. Any decision to close the BBM network would be highly controversial among civil liberties campaigners, who point out that social networking sites have provided a way for protestors in the Middle East to fight and overthrow dictatorial governments. In cases where the distinction between ‘riot’ and ‘protest’ are less clear cut than recent events, it becomes worrying to imagine the authorities over here shutting down communication networks to try and maintain the status quo.

Communications technology may have increased the efficiency and co-ordination of some of last week’s rioters – but to blame it for the violence itself is to evade the bigger issues. BBM and social media are neither inherently good nor inherently bad – they are what people use them for. The technology employed by the participants in the riots will tell us nothing about the motives of the rioters, or the complex factors that led to destruction on such a mass scale.

And maybe it’s just easier for us to accept the idea that such mass carnage was organised and directed, through BBM or anything else, than it is to countenance the alternative: that huge numbers of disaffected youths, in London and across the UK, spontaneously joined in with a spree of looting and arson because they simply have no vested interest in society.

That’s an uncomfortable message to receive.

Image above by Connor Danylenko.