0:11So this is Anna Hazare, 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-yearold 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. So as part of this campaign, he was using all of the traditional tactics that a good
Gandhian organizer would use. So he was on a hunger strike, and Hazare realized through
his hunger that actually maybe this time, in the 21st century, a hunger strike wouldn't be
enough.
0:53So 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, and about 80,000 people do
it. Okay, that's pretty respectable. 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. I see people nodding. People leave missed calls all the time: 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.So a note for a dating tip here, in some cultures, if you want to please your
lover, you call them and hang up. (Laughter) So why do people leave missed calls? Well,
the reason of course is that they're trying to avoid charges associated with making calls and
sending texts.
2:01So when Hazare asked people to leave him a missed call, let's have a little guess how
many people actually did this? Thirty-five million. So this is one of the largest coordinated
actions in human history. It's remarkable. 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.It's a really
striking story.
2:47So this is me when I was 12 years old. I hope you see the resemblance. 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 worldmeeting world leaders and Noble prize winners, talking about
Third World debt, as it was then called, and demilitarization. I was a very, very serious child.
(Laughter) And back then, in the early '90s, I had a very cutting-edge tech tool of my
own: the fax. And the fax was the tool of my activism. And at that time, it was the best
way to get a message to a lot of people all at once. 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.
3:45Well, unsurprisingly, that campaign was wholly unsuccessful. 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, I
went on to discover some better tools. I cofounded Avaaz, which uses the Internet to
mobilize people and now has almost 40 million members,and I now run Purpose, which is a
home for these kinds of technology-powered movements. So what's the moral of this
story? 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.
4:42You 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.
4:52So Henry Timms and I Henry's a fellow movement builder got talking one day
and we started to think, how can we make sense of this new world? 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: Old power, meet new
power. And I want to talk to you about what new power is today.New power is the
deployment of mass participation and peer coordination these are the two key elements
to create change and shift outcomes. And we see new power all around us.
5:32This 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.
6:08Let's look a little bit at this. Old power is held like a currency. New power works like a
current. Old power is held by a few. New power isn't held by a few, it's made by many. Old
power is all about download, and new power uploads. And you see a whole set of
characteristics that you can trace, whether it's in media or politics or education.
6:31So we've talked a little bit about what new power is. Let's, for a second, talk about what
new power isn't.New power is not your Facebook page. I assure you that having a social

media strategy can enable you to do just as much download as you used to do when you
had the radio. Just ask Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, I assure you that his Facebook
page has not embraced the power of participation. New power is not inherently positive. In
fact, this isn't an normative argument that we're making, there are many good things about
new power, but it can produce bad outcomes. More participation, more peer
coordination,sometimes distorts outcomes and there are some things, like things, for
example, in the medical profession that we want new power to get nowhere near. And
thirdly, new power is not the inevitable victor. In fact, unsurprisingly, as many of these new
power models get to scale, what you see is this massive pushback from the forces of old
power. Just look at this really interesting epic struggle going on right now between Edward
Snowden and the NSA. You'll note that only one of the two people on this slide is currently
in exile. And so, it's not at all clear that new power will be the inevitable victor.
7:43That said, keep one thing in mind: We're at the beginning of a very steep curve. So you
think about some of these new power models, right? These were just like
someone's garage idea a few years ago, and now they're disrupting entire industries. And
so, what's interesting about new power, is the way it feeds on itself. Once you have an
experience of new power, you tend to expect and want more of it. So let's say you've used a
peer-to-peer lending platform like Lending Tree or Prosper, then you've figured out that you
don't need the bank, and who wants the bank, right? And so, that experience tends to
embolden youit tends to make you want more participation across more aspects of your
life. And what this gives rise to is a set of values. We talked about the models that new
power has engendered the Airbnbs, the Kickstarters. What about the values? And this is
an early sketch at what new power values look like.
8:38New power values prize transparency above all else. It's almost a religious belief in
transparency, a belief that if you shine a light on something, it will be better. And remember
that in the 20th century, this was not at all true. People thought that gentlemen should sit
behind closed doors and make comfortable agreements. New power values of informal,
networked governance. New power folks would never have invented the U.N. today, for
better or worse. New power values participation, and new power is all about do-ityourself. In fact, what's interesting about new power is that it eschews some of the
professionalization and specialization that was all the rage in the 20th century.
9:17So what's interesting about these new power values and these new power models is
what they mean for organizations. So we've spent a bit of time thinking, how can we plot
organizations on a two-by-two where, essentially, we look at new power values and new
power models and see where different people sit? We started with a U.S. analysis, and let
me show you some interesting findings. So the first is Apple.In this framework, we actually
described Apple as an old power company. That's because the ideology,the governing
ideology of Apple is the ideology of the perfectionist product designer in Cupertino. It's
absolutely about that beautiful, perfect thing descending upon us in perfection. And it does
not value, as a company, transparency. In fact, it's very secretive. Now, Apple is one of the

most succesful companies in the world. So this shows that you can still pursue a successful
old power strategy. But one can argue that there's real vulnerabilites in that model. I think
another interesting comparison is that of the Obama campaign versus the Obama
presidency. (Applause) Now, I like President Obama, but he ran with new power at his
back, right? And he said to people, we are the ones we've been waiting for. And he used
crowdfunding to power a campaign. But when he got into office, he governed like more or
less all the other presidents did. And this is a really interesting trend, is when new power
gets powerful, what happens? So this is a framework you should look at and think about
where your own organization sits on it. And think about where it should be in five or 10
years. So what do you do if you're old power? Well, if you're there thinking, in old
power, this won't happen to us. Then just look at the Wikipedia entry for Encyclopdia
Britannica. Let me tell you, it's a very sad read.
11:14But if you are old power, the most important thing you can do is to occupy
yourself before others occupy you, before you are occupied. Imagine that a group of your
biggest skeptics are camped in the heart of your organization asking the toughest
questions and they can see everything inside of your organization.And ask them, would
they like what they see and should our model change? What about if you're new power? Is
new power kind of just riding the wave to glory? I would argue no. I would argue that there
are some very real challenges to new power in this nascent phase. Let's stick with the
Occupy Wall Street example for a moment. Occupy was this incredible example of new
power, the purest example of new power. And yet, it failed to consolidate. So the energy
that it created was great for the meme phase, but they were so committed to
participation, that they never got anything done. And in fact that model means that the
challenge for new power is: how do you use institutional power without being
institutionalized?
12:16One the other end of the spectra is Uber. Uber is an amazing, highly scalable new
power model. That network is getting denser and denser by the day. But what's really
interesting about Uber is it hasn't really adopted new power values. This is a real quote
from the Uber CEO recently: He says, "Once we get rid of the dude in the car" he means
drivers "Uber will be cheaper." Now, new power models live and die by the strength of
their networks. By whether the drivers and the consumers who use the service actually
believe in it. Because they're not an exercise of top-down perfectionism, they are about the
network. And so, the challenge, and this is why it's in no way surprising, is that Uber's
drivers are now unionizing. It's extraordinary. Uber's drivers are turning on Uber. And the
challenge for Uber this isn't an easy situation for them is that they are locked into a
broader superstrcuture that is really old power.They've raised more than a billion dollars in
the capital markets. Those markets expect a financial return,and they way you get a
financial return is by squeezing and squeezing your users and your drivers for more and
more value and giving that value to your investors.

13:34So the big question about the future of new power, in my view, is: Will that old power
just emerge? So will new power elites just become old power and squeeze? Or will that
new power base bite back? Will the next big Uber be co-owned by Uber drivers? And I think
this going to be a very interesting structural question.
13:56Finally, think about new power being more than just an entity that scales things that
make us have slightly better consumer experiences. My call to action for new power is to
not be an island. We have major structural problems in the world today that could benefit
enormously from the kinds of mass participationand peer coordination that these new
power players know so well how to generate. And we badly need them to turn their energies
and their power to big, what economists might call public goods problems,that are often
beyond markets where investors can easily be found. And I think if we can do that, we
might be able to fundamentally change not only human beings' sense of their own agency
and power because I think that's the most wonderful thing about new power, is that
people feel more powerful but we might also be able to change the way we relate to each
other and the way we relate to authority and institutions. And to me, that's absolutely worth
trying for. Thank you very much. (Applause)