• 1 Time to Stop Talking About Social Media?
• 2 Giving Up "New Technology" Gerrymandering
• 3 Computer Networks and Hierarchies
• 4 Inherent Openness
• 5 So What Instead?
• 6 Footnotes

² You are confusing, he/she is a fence-sitter, I am nuanced.

³ W. Lance Bennett, Communicating Global Activism: Strengths and Vulnerabilities of Networked Politics, in Wim van de Donk, Brian D. Loader, Paul G. Nixon, and Dieter Rucht, eds. Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens and Social Movements London: Routledge, 2003. (>>)

⁴ Can we just use YouTwitFace as a shorthand? Please?

• 1 Yes, they used Facebook
• 2 Facebook As Generational Space
• 3 Not Since the Sixties…
• 4 Is Egypt a Velvet Revolution?
• 5 Does it Matter?
• 6 Social Movements: Loving and Hating the Media
• 7 Reinstating the Dysfunctional Relationship with Media
• 8 In Conclusion

I continue to think that the role of digital technologies in the Egyptian rebellion has been overplayed for the reasons I gave a few days ago, but it does look like there is an element of truth to the "Facebook Revolution" story.

Digital technologies get used for many things, but the key job they played in Egypt, at least, seems to be social media. Facebook was clearly the big story;

• Facebook owned "Fully 42% of the country's Web surfing on January 27, the day before Egypt's main ISPs abruptly severed ties to the Internet." - Threatpost.
• Facebook was explicitly singled out by leading activist Wael Ghonim:
  • On 60 Minutes: "If there was no social networks, it would have never been sparked. Because the whole thing before the revolution was the most critical thing. Without Facebook, without Twitter, without Google, without YouTube, this would have never happened."
  • And: "I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him… This revolution started on Facebook."
• Facebook was where Tunisian and Egyptian activists collaborated (New York Times article).
• Facebook was where the April 6 Movement and the We Are Khaled Said groups formed, (English language versions here and here) which both built and publicised the presence of mass dissent among the urban youth (dissent was already there in some of the labour unions – see Anand Ghopal in Foreign Policy for a survey of the many labour actions over the last few years, including the Mahalla strike that led to the April 6 Movement, and gave it its name).

(thanks to Steve Radman for many of these links)

Why Facebook? In some countries digital activists are looking for special tools to help them communicate in covert ways, but in Egypt there was enough democratic elbow room for activists in the student and labour movements to organize in public – although not without risks. Perhaps because of this slight openness, online activity seems to have crystallized around the relatively public forum of Facebook. Facebook was permitted, and the educated, urban members of the younger generation adopted it and used it to push up against the limits of acceptable dialog.

Another reason might be that Facebook is still a generational phenomenon (60% of Egypt's Facebook users are under 25 (>>)). It is an environment where youth feel more at home than the older generation and the authorities, at least for now. And like other generational phenomena, it seems that Facebook plays into a sense of identity for students and youth. Ghonim's comments show that some, at least, feel a sense of ownership of this space: it is theirs, not the older generations.

Generational spaces can be both public and private at the same time. The schoolyard is one such space, where (as Iona and Peter Opie documented half a century ago in The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren) a separate culture can persist, out in the open, under the noses of the rest of society.

Other such generational spaces are less physical. Popular music may qualify at various times. The concerts, gatherings, dress, and attitudes built around it are passed from one teenager to another, while (for the most part) adults are clueless as to what is going on.

Like popular music and the schoolyard, Facebook is urban, social, and generational and its inhabitants have a strong sense of ownership of "their" space. Could Facebook's role be similar to that of popular music in earlier protests?

It pains me to say it, really it does. The "reminiscent of the 1960's" cliche has been used to describe every significant protest in the last 40 years that involves more than five people and a street. But the parallels are too many to ignore, and they emphasize the fact that, despite the technology, Egypt is not a fundamentally different "Revolution 2.0".

Here are some quotations from just one short source: Sean O'Hagan's essay "Everyone to the Barricades", published two years ago in The Guardian.

1968 was "a year in which mass protest erupted across the globe, from Paris to Prague, Mexico City to Madrid, Chicago to London."

O'Hagan quotes Jon Savage on the role that popular music had in amplifying the feelings of a generation:

"Pop music is always incredibly prescient and you can hear an increasing ambition and invention in the pop music made in those years, a sense of limitless possibility, but also of immense frustration and edginess. And then, in 1968, it all exploded into something totally unforeseen. In the five years from the emergence of the Beatles in 1963 to the upheaval of 1968 the economic enfranchisement of a generation turned into mass political action, if not fantasy."

And also this:

"I was completely surprised by 1968,' recalls Francois Cerutti, an old-school Marxist and radical bookstore owner quoted in Kurlansky's book. 'I had an idea of the revolutionary process and it was nothing like this. I saw students building barricades, but these were people who knew nothing of revolution. They were not even political. There was no organisation, no planning.'"

Here is the sudden outbreak, the viral spread from country to country, the rapid politicization of a generation, the seeming spontaneity of protest, that has been so much discussed in Egypt. Here also is the spread of attitudes through a medium that is public, yet generational – popular music in this case, instead of Facebook. These phenomena have been widely credited to the network nature of the Internet and social media, but the parallels are so clear that it seems unlikely that it's the technological features of the Internet that are making the difference – it's a cultural phenomenon that, in this particular incarnation, is revealed in social media.

The same goes for the much-trumpeted leaderless character of the rebellion: in which leaders emerge from the protests, rather than the protests being incited and led by experienced politicians. Here is Paris 1968:

"In just a few weeks, (Daniel) Cohn-Bendit, who was soon to receive a deportation order from the French government for his role in the ferment, had gone from local student activist to an international figurehead for revolution. 'There I was,' he said, 'the leader of a little university, and in three weeks I was famous all over the world as Danny the Red.'"

And the similarities continue. Here is O'Hagan on the international importance of that generation's new technology, television, in spreading ideas and attitudes from country to country.

"We met through television,' Cohn-Bendit later said of his counterparts in other countries. 'We were the first television generation.' Indeed, the radicals had a much better grasp of the galvanising power of television than the politicians they were trying to overthrow. 'A modern revolutionary group headed for the television, not for the factory,' quipped the late Abbie Hoffman, one of the great political pranksters of 1968 who helped provoke a bloody battle between anti-war protesters and the Chicago police force at the Chicago Democratic convention. As the police attacked them, the protesters chanted: 'The whole world is watching!' And, for the first time, it was."

Here is Pierre Bourdieu on the importance of television to protesters:

"Successful demonstrations are not necessarily those which mobilize the greatest number of people, but those which attract the greatest interest among journalists. Exaggerating only slightly, one might say that fifty clever folk who can make a successful 'happening' get five minutes on TV, can have as much political effect as half a million demonstrators."

Egypt's rebellion, while of course it is unique, is not a new type of rebellion. There are parallels to other rebellions, including the use of cultural space where the ideas and dreams of a generation could be shared in a semi-public fashion, and the use of new media technology to spread the word to a wider public.

So the Egyptian uprising is not that unique after all. (It's obvious, I hope, that this does nothing to detract from the heroism, creativity, and bravery of those involved). It's not just the student-led riots of 1968; there are similarities to other recent uprisings too, such as the series of "Velvet Revolutions" that spread through Eastern Europe in 1989. Again, let's just look at one source to see what the parallels are. How about Timothy Garton Ash in the New York Review of Books, December 3, 2009? His essay is titled Velvet Revolution: The Prospects.

Garton Ash highlights the differences between the "velvet revolutions" (VR) and earlier revolutions:

an ideal type of 1989-style revolution, VR, might be contrasted with an ideal type of 1789-style revolution, as further developed in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Mao’s Chinese revolution. The 1789 ideal type is violent, utopian, professedly class-based, and characterized by a progressive radicalization, culminating in terror. A revolution is not a dinner party, Mao Zedong famously observed…

The 1989 ideal type, by contrast, is nonviolent, anti-utopian, based not on a single class but on broad social coalitions, and characterized by the application of mass social pressure—”people power”—to bring the current powerholders to negotiate. It culminates not in terror but in compromise. If the totem of 1789-type revolution is the guillotine, that of 1989 is the round table.

Egypt is clearly in the tradition of the velvet revolutions. The social coalition covers labour, student, and religious groups, and the current uneasy phase of negotiation with the armed forces (as opposed to installing a new leader) is characteristic of the type. Like all the "velvet revolutions", the Egypt uprising is more of a stand against something (Mubarak; corruption; the unfairness of widespread unemployment and high food prices) than for something. Garton Ash writes that

"François Furet, the historiographer of the French Revolution, doubted if the velvet revolutions of 1989 should properly be called 'revolutions' at all, since they produced 'not a single new idea.'"

What is happening in Egypt seems more of a rebellion than a revolution (A rebel, as Camus said, is "someone who says no" (pronoun updated), and this seems to describe the Egyptian protesters.) It has no program beyond the removal of the present system and leadership.

The ending of a protest in compromise is also in the tradition of velvet revolutions. Here is Garton Ash again:

"Exit prospects for the ruling elites are critical. Instead of losing their heads on the guillotine, or ending up hanging from lampposts, transition-ready members of an ancien régime, from a president such as F.W. de Klerk all the way down to local apparatchiks and secret policemen, see a bearable, even a rosier future for themselves under a new dispensation."

And the Eastern European uprisings were not the first of this type:

"Semantically, the Czechoslovak revolution may have been the first to be called “velvet,” but Central Europe in 1989 did not spirit this model out of the ether. Relevant earlier history includes not just Central Europe’s own learning process through the failed emancipation attempts of 1953 (East Germany), 1956 (Hungary), 1968 (Czechoslovakia), 1970–1971 and 1980–1981 (Poland), but also the mobilization to unseat General Pinochet in Chile, where the 1988 plebiscite preceded Central Europe’s 1989; the toppling of the Marcoses in the Philippines in 1983–1986, which gave us the wonderful Filipino-English term “people power”; and the “revolution of the carnations” in Portugal in 1974–1975, arguably the first “velvet revolution” in postwar Europe; and all the way back to the seminal example of Gandhi in India."

So the nature, dynamics and course of the Egyptian uprising has clear precendents. Yes, the activists used Facebook and other tools, because that's where the people are and because that is the medium characteristic of the time and place. But the Internet has not leant a new character to the uprising.

Does it matter whether Facebook is a cultural event (like pop music) or a technology? Yes it does.

Popular music and youth culture has always existed in a state of tension between a mainstream, corporate, profit-oriented industry and a more independent avant garde culture. The tension, and the music, needs to be continually renewed, as each generation rejects the mainstream music of its forebears to create new sounds and events of its own.

If Facebook is a technology that delivers democracy, then we can trust it: more of it can only lead to more democracy. But if Facebook is a cultural phenomenon, then its meaning and role will change as it becomes mainstream – we need to treat it like we treat the record companies, the mainstream media, and our phone companies. Necessary, but not to be trusted.

A difference in the case of Egypt is that while major record companies may have been large commercial organizations, there were at least several of them. The tendency of information technologies to lead to monopoly (see Tim Wu's latest book) means that there's only one Facebook, so there is more confusion between Facebook (the place where people meet) and Facebook (the corporation that owns it). But Facebook The Company is a record label, not a musician. It is not surprising to see the poor response of Facebook to the needs of Egyptian protesters:

"Simon Axten, of Facebook's public policy team, said today that the 'real name culture' was an essential element of the social networking platform. However, the policy has also been blamed for making it easy for oppressive regimes to roll up networks of dissidents who use Facebook to communicate." – Joe Fay, The Register, Feb 8, 2011. (>>)

Or Alexis Madrigal, "The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks", Jan 24, 2011 in The Atlantic (>>):

"We get requests all the time in a few different contexts where people would like to impersonate someone else. Police wanting to go undercover or human rights activists, say," [Facebook's Chief Security Officer Joe] Sullivan said. "And we, just based on our core mission and core product, don't want to allow that. That's just not what Facebook is. Facebook is a place where people connect with real people in their lives using their real identities."

If your needs don't match Facebook's "core product", you're out of luck.

The media has always been of central importance for social movements, and activists have always strived to exploit the media of their day in whatever ways they can. At the same time, social movements have never really trusted the media, particularly mainstream media. No one wants to think the mainstream media is on their side. No one trusts it; but everyone looks to it. The relationship between movements and media – particularly mainstream media – has always been fractious and dysfunctional: they need each other, but can't get along together.

Identifying with the creative artist while deploring the actions of the major record labels has been a balancing act for music fans and musicions for decades. Popular music is an exploitative, crass and commercialized industry – but it is also an authentic reflection of young people's artistry. Youth love it and are cynical about it, simultaneously.

So too television. The one-way, broadcast, non-participatory, corporate medium that digital types love to hate, and yet one that can be actively employed by savvy youth and one that is of obvious importance to social movements.

Political protests are, as Bourdieu argues, almost always symbolic acts. Some few are directly aimed at damaging infrastructure, but most often the intended damage is to the credibility of the opponent. Gandhi's Salt March, Martin Luther King's rallies, the Aldermaston marches, Buddhist monk self-immolation, Provisional IRA hunger strikes, and so on are all symbolic. Even confrontational acts such as the Paris 1968 barricades or the Sandinista raid on the Nicaraguan parliament are more aimed at provoking the public than at crippling the state. And a successful symbolic protest is designed with the medium of the day in mind. It is easy to think "without Facebook, how would they publicise their actions?" but there are many ways.

Consider Gandhi (as seen through the lens of a mainstream film, relayed by a friend to me over the phone, and written up on a blog): "A defining moment in the movie "Gandhi" was when Martin Sheen, in the role of an American journalist reports over phone the moral high ground Indians captured in a spectacular display of non-violent resistance at Dharasana Salt Works, May 21, 1930. He yells over phone "Whatever moral ascendancy the West held was lost today. India is free – for she has taken all that steel and cruelty can give, and she has neither cringed or retreated." (Link, Wikipedia article about Dharasana Satyagraha)

Skilled activists design their actions to exploit the media they have at hand, and adapt to new circumstances. A trivial or uninteresting act will attract little attention, no matter what medium conveys it. A dramatic, costly act (see Abbie Hoffmann, above) will provoke interest even through a corporate-controlled, broadcast medium. Demonstrations take place in public squares, not sidestreets. Gandhi's Salt March progressed from town to town so that word of mouth could build support, day by day.

The attitude of many activists to the Internet seems to be different. Some not only work with what they have, but also see the medium itself as an inherently progressive tool. Many identify as much with the medium as with the cause, describing themselves as "digital activists" rather than activists with a particular end in mind. But the Internet is mainstream now, and Facebook is part owned by Goldman Sachs and has an estimated market value twice as big as Monsanto. It is mainstream. It is commercial. It is not on anyone's side but its own, and activists need to remember that. It is time to recover the dysfunctional relationship that activists had always have with the media, including social media.

Fortunately, the sound of discontent is becoming more widespread among digital citizens. Here are a few examples that typify the kind of relationship we need to re-establish.

Adrian Chen, Gawker, "Why Facebook Should Do More to Help Egypt’s Protesters", Feb 5, 2011 (>>):

Everybody's talking about the massive Facebook groups that helped spark the uprising, but few remember the headaches Facebook has given these groups. Just four months ago, for example, one of the most popular Egyptian Facebook protest groups, We Are All Khaled Said, was deactivated abruptly because its administrators had registered their accounts under pseudonyms to protect themselves from the Mubarak regime. After much (virtual) protest, the 300,000-member group was reinstated, and its young members helped form the vanguard of the current uprising.

In many ways, Facebook has made itself actively hostile to those who would organize against a repressive regime or advance an unpopular idea. Most problematic is the policy that bans pseudonyms. Facebook defends the policy by saying their service is about "real people making real-world connections." But what if the real world is full of secret police looking to crack down on dissent, or snooping bosses who might be supportive of a regime? Harvard Internet freedom expert Jillian C York calls the real identity policy "ludicrously out of touch."

And Facebook's notoriously wonky account deactivation system means that activists can find themselves deleted from the site at crucial moments, with little recourse. In 2007, Facebook permanently deactivated the account of the administrator of another important protest group, The April 6 Youth Movement, because its automatic filter thought he was a spammer; he was actually just furiously organizing protests with other members. Many other activists have been muzzled by Facebook's deactivation system, simply for voicing controversial opinions.

Jillian York, "Facebook and Identification: Caught in a Lie?", Blog Post Jan 19, 2011. >>

Jillian York, "Policing Content in the Quasi-Public Sphere", >>

Jillian York, "Facebook for Activists". >>

Zeynep Tufecki, "Facebook: The Privatization of our Privates and Life in the Company Town", May 14, 2010, Technosociology blog. >>

The correct analogy to the current situation would be if tenants had no rights to privacy in their homes because they happen to be renting the walls and doors. This week, you are allowed to close the door but, oops, we changed the terms-of-service. No more closed doors! You had locks last week but we don’t allow them as of this week. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Every society has “commons” – shared infrastructure that makes it possible for the society as a whole to function. Internet is now a part of that commons in general and many social applications such as Facebook are part of the “social commons.” That is why Facebook, the corporation, is so valuable and people who own it are very rich. It would not be wise of them to ignore that fact.

danah boyd, "Facebook is a Utility; Utilities Get Regulated":

Yesterday, I ranted about Facebook and “radical transparency." Lots of people wrote to thank me for saying what I said. And so I looked many of them up. Most were on Facebook. I wrote back to some, asking why they were still on Facebook if they disagreed with where the company was going. The narrative was consistent: they felt as though the needed to be there. For work, for personal reasons, because they got to connect with someone there that they couldn’t connect with elsewhere. Nancy Baym did a phenomenal job of explaining this dynamic in her post on Thursday: “Why, despite myself, I am not leaving Facebook. Yet.”

Tunisian activist Sami Ben Gharbia: samibengharbia.com blog post, Sept 17, 2010

"This piece stems thus from a major assumption that the U.S. official and corporate involvement in the Internet Freedom movement is harmful for that same freedom."

These are healthy attitudes to have. Activists have always needed to be both in and against the media. Artists have always had a dysfunctional relationship with the industry that manages them. It's time digital activists took on the same dysfunctional relationship with commercial social media companies, and it's good to see that some of them are.

Facebook, the social networking site, has clearly played an important part in Egypt's protests. But it's played a role as a cultural space for a generation, not as a distinctive technology. If Facebook wasn't there, some other medium may well have played the same cultural role, as has happened in the past (the global rash of student protests in 1968, the velvet revolutions).

In the same way that protesters of previous generations used whatever media they had at hand to carry their message, acting both alongside and against the media in many cases, so today's social movements need to both use their advantage with new media, while retaining a healthy scepticism about the commercial nature of the medium itself.

It's fine for a generation to feel ownership of their cultural space, in the same way that other generations have felt ownership of popular music. But they need to keep a clear distinction between what it is they like and the corporation that provides it. Just as youth culture has always had a love-hate role with the music industry, so today's youth need to develop a healthy scepticism – make that cynicism – about the owners of their generational space.

Most compellingly, here is high profile Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim:

I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him… I'm talking on behalf of Egypt. This revolution started online. This revolution started on Facebook. This revolution started in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I always said that if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet. If you want to have a free society just give them the Internet." (>>)

and also: "This is the revolution of the youth of the internet, and now the revolution of all Egyptians."

Narratives matter. We use them to make sense of the world, and we use that understanding to make decisions. Narrative is "the simple order that consists in being able to say: 'When that had happened, then this happened.' We like the illusions of this sequence, its acceptable appearance of causality: it has the look of necessity." (Frank Kermode, "The Sense of an Ending", p127.)

So is the Egyptian rebellion a "Facebook Revolution"? There are reasons to think the narrative is exaggerated…

Most obviously, it is much easier to talk to English speaking participants than non-English speakers. English speakers are far more likely to be part of the one-fifth or so of the country that has access to the Internet. (World Bank Development Indicators). And it is easy to contact people over the Internet, so we hear from people who are on the Internet. It is easy to follow Twitter feeds, so we hear Egyptian tweets.

It isn't just the sources, though. The Facebook Revolution narrative is an interesting story to tell to a contemporary Western audience. For us, a story built around the familiar yet novel world of Facebook and social media is an easy way into the Egyptian rebellion. How many of us know much about the specifics of Egypt's history, its recent past, or the economic sources of discontent? It is a much quicker and lighter story to say "look at the Facebook page." We can even go and look at it ourselves (>>). Talking about strikes is more likely to lose an audience.

So every time prominent activist Wael Ghonim is mentioned, he is described as a "Google executive Wael Ghonim" even though he has explicitly said that "Google has nothing to do with this" (>>). Do we hear the employer of any of the other leaders? April 6 Movement founders Asmaa Mahfouz, Ahmed Maher and Ahmed Salah are commonly described as "activists". It is possible to track down Maher's occupation as a "civil engineer", but with no employer. The discrepancy is glaring, and so Google gets to be associated with the uprising, adding to the digital tone of the story.

As people look back for the roots of the rebellion, the April 6 Movement and the We Are Khaled Said Facebook page have received much of the attention. But there are other strands that fed into the protests. The April 6 Movement was created to commemorate an industrial strike, after all, at a textile factory. There have been more than 3,000 separate labour protests in Egypt since 2004 according to a report by the AFL-CIO. The Kefaya movement is considered by some experts to be a central organizer of the January 25 protests, along with Mohamed ElBaradei's organization (two-minute video with Samer Shehata).

The technological narrative has also been used to describe the rebellion as "leaderless" and "self-organizing" (see a claim for this by Wikinomics' Don Tapscott here, and an illuminating analysis of the question by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci here). Tapscott takes a strong form of the argument: "Just as people can self-organize to contribute to Wikipedia, the computer operating system Linux, or the world’s biggest library of video content, they can participate in social change and coalesce into revolutionary movements as never before."

(Aside: Does anyone else find the language of "self-organization" insulting to the protesters? It slides too easily into this kind of thing: "much in the same way that slime mould coalesces in a forest and moves towards an emergent common 'goal,' so too do simple-message-connected crowds of people coalesce to move towards a common, emergent goal without the overt direction of an explicit leader." So brave protesters are like slime mould? Really?)

But of course coordination and leadership is not necessarily going to be obvious to Western eyes. As David Kirkpatrick writes in the New York Times: "They are the young professionals, mostly doctors and lawyers, who touched off and then guided the revolt shaking Egypt, members of the Facebook generation who have remained mostly faceless — very deliberately so, given the threat of arrest or abduction by the secret police."

Some organizing was kept off Facebook on purpose, and so received little attention – like these flyers that Jodi Dean points to. As she says, even Lenin – not exactly known as a networky kind of bloke – agreed that "mass movement and 'professional revolutionaries' are not alternative organizational forms. Each is necessary".

Another counterpoint to this "leaderless protest" story is a fascinating Wall-Street Journal article by Charles Levinson and Margaret Croker, who tell a story (The Secret Rally that Sparked an Uprising) about clandestine meetings of small groups of organizers outwitting the efforts of the police to follow what's going on. Of course, getting such a story requires a lot of interviewing and building of confidence.

But there is a kernel…

So yes, I do think the Facebook Revolution narrative is overstated, and that the Egyptian rebellion marks much less of a break from previous revolts than the language of "Revolution 2.0" suggests. I agree with this article in TechCrunch (of all places) that "People, not Things, are the Tools of Revolution". But there is a kernel of truth there, I do admit. Ghosim's quotation at the top of the page is a clear indicator that some young Egyptians feel a sense of identity with Facebook and the Internet: that it is their generation's culture, not their parents and not the authorities. But that's for another time.

Let's get a couple of things out of the way. First, I've not gone all mystical. I'm as strict a materialist as anyone. I think I am anyway. But materialism is not the same as reductionism.

And second, I have no problem with reductionism in the physical sciences. I'll happily put my hand on my heart and recite after Dirac that, with the discovery of quantum mechanics "the underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of … the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble.”

But when it comes to social and even biological sciences things are different, and they are different because of evolution and because of people. So I can't agree with psychologists who think the key to understanding human behaviour lies in the neurochemistry of our brains – because where else could it be? – or with reductionist economists believe that "in the end" the behaviour of society can be explained in terms of the behaviour of the human individuals that comprise it, because what else is society, fundamentally, but a collection of individuals?

Are evolutionary explanations reductionist? Cosma says yes, but Jon Elster (in Explaining Social Behavior), says no. They provide explanations, but whereas reductionist explanations are also causal ("we explain an event by citing its cause. Causes precede their effects in time." [p271]), evolutionary explanations work in terms of consequences. Sure, mutation happens at the microscopic level, but selection is determined by how the mutated organism fits into the bigger world.

How to explain the stripes of a zebra? They help their bearer to survive by making it difficult for a predator to pick him or her out from a herd of similarly striped animals. As Richard Dawkins explains beautifully in The Extended Phenotype, we can explain the dam of a beaver as a genetic adaptation to its surroundings. So if a reductionist would say "Obviously, animal behaviour (macroscopic) is the consequence of its genetic and cellular makeup (microscopic). What else could it be?" you could say "it's the consequence of its environment too." No forests and lakes, no beaver dams.

Now forests are composed of trees are composed of cells are composed of molecules, so there is a microscopic aspect to the environment too, of course. That's materialism. But which came first, the dam-building genetic mutation or the logs to build with? To privilege one over the other is to miss the whole melody of the explanation. The closer we look, the more we want to know about the genes, but the more we want to know about the environment too: its history, its fluctuations, its other inhabitants. Evolutionary explanations lead outwards as well as inwards, and to me that makes them not reductionist.

There's more to social science explanations than evolution.

Many non-scientists have a reaction against reductionist explanations of human behaviour, as if they somehow diminish us, reducing us to nothing more than a pile of cells. As an ex-scientist myself I have had little sympathy with this attitude, but recently I've found myself thinking that there is something to it. Not the diminishment part–there's nothing wrong with being a pile of cells–but that it does miss an equally essential part of the puzzle. It may be old hat to you, but for me it's been novel.

Earlier this year, photons from a star that exploded when the universe was young finally reached NASA's orbiting "Swift" telescope after an uninterrupted journey of 13.1 billion years, according to the New Scientist. The exploding star was the most distant and hence most ancient object that humans have so far detected.

When the photons collided with the telescope, Swift's signal processing equipment transmitted a record of the event to earth, and "within an hour, astronomers began training ground-based telescopes on the same patch of sky to study the burst's infrared afterglow". Soon after, Neil Gehrels of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center was giving a press conference, and a few days later Rachel Courtland of the New Scientist spent her day writing up an account of the event, dubbed GRB 090423 (Gamma Ray Burst on April 23, 2009).

To say this another way, an explosion that took place 13 billion years ago produced, through a cascade of intermediaries, a change in the movement of certain particles belonging to the 21st century bodies and clothes of astronomers and journalists. To understand, even in principle, the motion of Mr. Gehrel's particles in April 2009 we must take account of photons from an explosion that took place near the beginning of time.

But that's not all.

It was only because 21st century astronomers and cosmologists understand the laws of physics that the photon impact was understood to be important and the press conference was held. If 21st-century mathematics and physics (the subjects themselves) did not "exist" then the motion of Mr. Gehrel's particles would have been different. 21st century mathematics is an abstract thing: it is not made of particles. If the photons had come from a nearer source the results would have been quite different because the implications of those particles' frequencies at that time and angle would not have been interesting enough for a press conference.

The same goes for the Ms. Courtland's particles. Without the language we use, without a commercial media, an audience for the story, and countless other institutions of society, the neurons in Ms. Courtland's brain would have been firing in quite a different set of patterns on April 27. The motion of the particles that comprise Ms. Courtland and Mr. Gehrel was the result of physics and also the result of culture.

The reductionist program seeks to explain personality in terms of neurons, and neurons in terms of molecules, but here the tables are turned. To explain the motion of these atoms, we need to involve the neurons of the Courtland and Gehrel brains, and to explain the activity of those neurons we need to include language, society, and an ancient event from the beginning of time. And there is nothing to say that one of these sequences of causation is more basic or more fundamental than the other.

Yes, we can say that "in the end" our behaviour is explained by our cells and our cells are explained by our atoms. But that is one perspective among many, and not a privileged one. "In the end", the motions of atoms are determined by the properties of our culture and the "existence" of non-material structures such as mathematics, physics (the body of knowledge), and language.

Let me get a bit more romantic. The theoretical physicists, in their search for a theory of everything, claim to be making progress. But every step they take moves us further and further from any notion of a deterministic universe. How? Again, nothing profound or mysterious. If we demand of a deterministic worldview a weak notion of convergence – that the closer we get to the theory, the closer we get to an understanding, even "in principle", of the problems it purports to explain. Maybe fundamental physics fails this test.

How much of the universe do we need to include in our description to "explain" a particular event? Hundreds of years ago one could have said that if Ms. Courtland's ancestor had spent her day one way rather than another, we would only have to look in the circumstances of her immediate environment to understand why. But as we humans have discovered more about the universe and our place in it, so our understanding couples us to events that are more and more distant in space and in time, and we need to include more of the universe in any explanation of events. To explain Galileo's actions we needed to include the motion of the solar system. To explain Edmund Halley's actions we need to understand the motion of a distant comet. And so on. And the more of physics we understand, the more of the universe we need to explain the movements of our particles. There are events that took place even earlier than GRB 090423 that have not yet affected the motion of particles on earth, but which will do in the future as we develop ways to detect them.

There is no convergence here, and any argument that "in the end" we are just made up of nuclei and electrons has nothing more fundamental to it that the reverse claim, that the motions of nuclei and electrons are "in the end" determined by the remainder of the universe, by the properties of abstract cultural constructs such as language and media.

Individuality

You can make the same reversal for claims that society must be understood in terms of individuals (or macro-economics in terms of micro). There's probably nothing new here for many in the social sciences and humanities, but it's new for me.

It is tempting to think that society is composed of individuals because we feel ourselves to be such an individual, with a separate and independent existence. We have stood, each of us, outside on a frost-covered night and looked up at the universe and felt the sense of insignificance in the face of that emptiness. But along with that rush of insight we feel an affirmation of our existence. However small we are, however indifferent the universe may be, we exist. Even if we agree with Samuel Beckett that "they give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more", at least it seems, at such moments, that our light does gleam for that instant.

A reductionist worldview gives credence to the idea of an isolated, self-contained individual because it sees individuals as the sum of their smaller parts. But this sense of individual, isolated, self-contained wholeness is illusion.

What is a person without language? If we had no language we would not be "individuals" in the same sense we feel on those nights. A two-year old who stares at the universe feels no awe because they have little sense of self and little understanding of what they are seeing, and our own individuality, our own consciousness, only emerges from that understanding and the culture that produces it. Daniel Dennett quotes Helen Keller on her life before the learned to communicate: "Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness… Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another". If consciousness is, as Dennett claims, the "centre of narrative gravity" – the insubstantial eye in the middle of our storm of experiences and stories, then without language – without culture – there can be no such thing as an individual person. Society may be made of individuals, but individuals are equally made of society.

Adopting an evolutionary worldview, as opposed to a reductionist one, makes us as individuals simultaneously more and less significant. More significant because our cultural constructs become shapers of the universe no less than the laws of physics that we seek to uncover; less significant because our very individuality is an illusion, contingent on the culture from which we spring.

Update

Cosma Shalizi has updated his post with a response to this one (here), and some interesting links. Unfortunately today has been too busy for me to re-respond.