Posted on by porlando

Pandemic Protests

As with other sudden, widespread changes, there are many second-order effects from coronavirus. I’ve been slowly chronicling them on this blog. Today, let’s look at the impact on protest movements and tactics.

Over the past few months people around the world lost their ability to protest. Or, they lost the type of protest that had worked for them — the mass gatherings to show dissatisfaction and force government response.

In locations including Algeria, Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Haiti, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Russia, Spain, Netherlands, Peru, Syria, and the US, protests have declined or have taken a different turn — due to COVID-19. What systems are changing and what is likely to remain changed after a vaccine?

Counting

In many instances, top-down social distancing orders and bottom-up unwillingness of people to gather in large groups had similar effects. The large protests that we saw so much of in 2019 dwindled not because protesters won their demands or because governments cracked down hard, but because people didn’t go out as much.

Protesters’ strength came from gathering in numbers. What to do now?

The social distancing protest is another way. While the common visual of a successful protest used to be a mass of people crowded together, this is no longer be the case, at least for a while. Some movements have instead organized social distancing protests.

I believe this format will prove more beneficial to the protesters than their government targets. Protest leaders will be able to produce the “scalable snapshot” needed to put an image behind a movement. Also, there were already disadvantages of large gatherings. People in previous crowded mass protests faced the problems of getting out of the protest if they needed, overheating or needing medical care, getting to a bathroom… If the social distancing protest in the quoted Tweet’s image is 20% of the people that the square used to hold, I’d say it looks more than 20% as powerful.

The large Hong Kong protests numbering in the hundreds of thousands or even millions are now much smaller, and often taking place where smaller numbers of people can still have an effect, like a shopping mall.

Protesters can also convey their collective mass in drips and drops. A quote from the song Alice’s Restaurant gives the idea: “And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said Fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and Walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement.”

Suspicion

Coincidentally, something that worked in protesters’ favor is that COVID-19 made mask wearing mainstream. While mask wearing in Hong Kong has been commonplace since the days of SARS, this habit never gained much popularity outside of East Asia until now.

Contrast what I wrote about protest symbolism in The Owl’s Right Eye to today. This quote is about Hong Kong protests before the 1997 Handover:

“No one wore a mask, because there wasn’t any need to do so. The protest leaders were already known. The crowd was safe in numbers. I never heard anyone fear identification, even post-Handover.”

And more recently, during Hong Kong’s 2019 anti-elab (extradition law) protests:

“That protesters hide their faces and cut down smart lampposts makes sense. Like the eyes in the advertisements above, the lampposts may not have any intent to use facial recognition to identify protesters, but there is no trust. Anything can look suspicious.”

While we may have gone into the coronavirus environment without the ability to identify people by eyes and facial structure alone, tech can change fast. It’s assured that we will come out of the coronavirus times with greater ability for masked identification. Companies are already creating the datasets to support this.

The stated purpose to develop masked face recognition is that airports need to identify people without mask removal. Individuals need the tech to unlock their devices and to enter secure buildings without removing masks. You see the problem. The same tech that provides individual convenience and travel and health safety also powers the ability to monitor undesirable protest behavior.

Researchers have already been working on this problem for months, as described in this paper and associated masked face datasets.

In the US, there has been a historical concern about people wearing masks while protesting. On the one hand, people protesting should not hide their identity. The roots of this are in racist groups going in public without identifying themselves. The US already had mask bans in public spaces, but renewed public support for this after masked Antifa members beat up a reporter.

On the other hand, the US overturned mask bans for some foreign protesters protesting their foreign government (as with Iranian exiles protesting in California).

Masks give protesters a temporary advantage. In the future they may no longer matter.

Dismantling

In other posts, I’ve discussed the change that happens when something grows fast (Anything at Scale). It’s partly the change itself but also the speed of the change the causes the disruption.

The most enduring changes from COVID-19 may be related to infrastructure. While governments initiated processes to identify and track the sick at scale, they have built more infrastructure that can be used against protesters in the future. This need not be intentional for it to be true.

Take some of the new techniques for health surveillance that can be applied for other ends. Contract tracing apps are probably the most obvious here. There are many contact tracing apps and they each work a bit differently, including those with security flaws — whether or not they are unintentional.

At what point do you stop the contact tracing? Does it ever make sense to stop? Wouldn’t continued contact tracing help identify super spreaders of other diseases in the future? Choosing to tear down contact tracing means acknowledging that society leaves some future illness and death preventable. There will be an argument to continue these protocols even after a coronavirus vaccine is widely deployed.

Learning

Still, many successful protest movements have been learning organizations and could maneuver their way past COVID-19. In the case of Hong Kong, over mere weeks, protesters showed their ability to learn new techniques to neutralize tear gas and avoid personal identification and communications monitoring. Apart from their numbers, protesters’ strength also came from their ability to learn quickly and distribute that learning to others.

The changes from COVID-19 present another challenge in their suddenness, but probably not an insurmountable one.

When identity can be known even with masks, what other tactics will protests adopt? Will we see more blank paper protests — where people hold up blank pieces of paper and do not shout slogans — as made famous by an individual in Kazakhstan.

“When he asked why he was being detained, the police said ‘we’ll sort that out later.'”

Consider

  • Will future lockdowns be preemptive to prevent protests?
  • Will future lockdowns be issued as punishment for protests?
  • Will online trolls lose some of their ability to manage protests?
  • Look for the use of full face masks and masks that completely obscure facial shape.
  • Distraction: The best time for high-profile arrests? While the rest of the world is focused on COVID-19. In the last month, Hong Kong police rounded up a group of high-profile (and older) protesters, including Martin Lee, Jimmy Lai, and others.