Globalising the Narrative of Peoples Uprisings on the Web

Abstract

A populist political myth was created about the internet and a series of revolts from the Zapatista movement to the Arab Spring. They were formed into a single narrative of global insurrection from below. However, this was political myth-making related to the historic tendency to weave local events into an evolving universal story of liberation beginning with the American revolution. Mostly American knowledge elites adapted ideas of the internet and lifted the events out of their contexts using narratives of villains and victims, powerful and powerless, and US imperialism and the global justice movement. The result is a more complicated form of representative democracy involving competition between knowledge elites using anti-politics rhetoric and elected political elites who make justifiable claims on behalf of “the people”.