Could social movement be leaderless and yet be effective?

Our work (with Bonnie Nardi, and Christine Cheng) on the Hong Kong Anti-ELAB movement in 2019 showed that this is in fact possible, and the social-technical formation to achieve this is mind-blowing.

In a nutshell, social movements consist tens of thousands of participants, each with a different notion of what the movement should do. Leaders were indispensable in decision-making, as movements like Occupy Wallstreet showed us without a decision-maker, a movement often get torn apart by its own internal forces (see Roberts, 2012). But if technologies could mediate effective decision-making, leaderless movements could succeed.

In Anti-ELAB, we indeed observed limited success by the Hong Kong participants, who leveraged ubiquitous and continuous electronic polling (several times a day leading up to a protest activity) across social media platforms, predominantly though an online forum and an instant messenger. This serves to direct individual groups to consider – based on polling results – the next action they would take. Thus the networked polls mimic the decision-making role of “leaders” where none existed. Thus the leadership is networked.

BUT, what if bad actors distort the polling results? Without leaders, how do we ensure that the participants acted in unison? I will leave the detail to readers of our paper, published in CHI’2020, titled “Be Water: Technologies in the Leaderless Anti-ELAB Movement in Hong Kong.” I am thrill to receive a Honorable Mention Award from CHI’2020 Conference for this work.