Today, I offer you a somewhat different format from the last few weeks. For this post, I write about a video of the Fouloscopy channel that deals with the mechanisms behind the crowd movements.
The French historian Ernest Labrousse considered that "economies have the crises of their structure." A crisis is a situation of profound disturbance in which society or a social group finds itself and leaves fear or hope for profound change.
To justify these words, he argued that the society of the Ancien Régime in France was suffering from so-called frugal crises, that is, they found foundations in the poor harvests and other economic difficulties observed by the agricultural world, the basis of the society of the time.
Thus, the French Revolution, a multiform and complex crisis, finds one of its foundations in a frumentary crisis. In July 1788, France was hit by a series of violent storms that destroyed crops.
But, "in reality, the storm of 1788 is a symbol of the climate chaos that preceded the French Revolution. Because the weather of the 1780s was disastrous. It all began perhaps on June 8, 1783. On that day, the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland begins, which lasted eight months. In Europe, the next three winters are terrible. In 1785, an unusual drought arose in the summer. [...] The summer of 1787, on the other hand, was catastrophic after miraculous harvests the previous year. Frequent rains prevent harvesting."1.
In short, the succession of these extreme weather changes, which are echoing today, partly explains the formation of a tense climate in the countryside on the eve of the events of the Revolution.
However, even if we understand that these weather episodes marked the 1980s, how can we explain that the Revolution finally broke out as early as July 1789? Can we find an event that, in addition to the tense situation from a political-economic point of view, can mark a tipping point? Finally, how many people does it take to launch a revolution?
How many people does it take to launch a revolution?
Last Friday, I saw on my Youtube feed the latest video of the Fouloscopie channel where Mehdi Moussaid, a cognitive science researcher at the Max Planck Institute, is interested in the science of crowd behaviour.
In this video, the researcher focusses on the adoption of the same behaviour by a crowd and what are the triggers. Entitled "how many people does it take to launch a revolution", the video begins with a return to epidemiology.
Indeed, following the work of Karl Lazarsfeld, the massive dissemination of an idea, product or social change is due to a central and charismatic person who succeeds in convincing the entire population: he is an opinion leader, our influencer today.
Like a virus that is transmitted more easily when it reaches the central person of its network, a video goes viral as soon as it is relayed by Internet users who have the most relationships.
Therefore, one might rightly think that the same would be true for crowd movements. The beginning of the 2010s was marked in the Middle East and in some Maghreb countries by what was a posteriori called the "Arab Spring". In less than 3 months, a dozen countries have managed to bring down their government.
Would this meteoric spread have been fuelled by an opinion leader? This was precisely not the case!
Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, sociologist and computer scientist at the University of Los Angeles, retrospectively studied the birth of this revolution on Twitter by analysing thousands of tweets to conclude that the first tweets appeared on the periphery and not in the centre of the network. Influencers arrive once the movement is already launched.
It's this counterintuitive example that made me want to talk to you about this today. There are therefore two types of contagion within a network:
Simple contagion is that of the virus, viral video or information: it only takes a simple contact for the channel to be launched.
Complex contagion concerns behaviours that are more difficult to adopt and it requires a certain critical mass2 to take shape.
Complex contagions need social strengthening: a certain percentage of its contacts must adopt a new behaviour for us to finally decide to adopt it.
This mechanism appeals here to the threshold model theorised by Mark Gravovetter in the 1950s. The threshold here is the level at which an individual begins to adopt a new behaviour based on the percentage of his contacts who have already adopted it.
But, each person has a different threshold according to the behaviours or events involved and it varies according to the political-economic reality of the individual. Thus, from a certain critical mass, there is a runaway effect: there can be a level from which a large number of people suddenly begin to adopt a new behaviour.3
Moreover, a complex contagion spreads more easily from the periphery to the centre and not the other way around as in the case of a simple contagion. To illustrate this, Mehdi uses simulation phases.
By setting a threshold of 25%, that is, that an individual adopts a behaviour from the moment 1/4 of his contacts adopt it, we observe that the complex contagion does not take as soon as it leaves the centre, here since the influencer that the researcher has chosen to arbitrarily call "Squeezie."
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To observe a complex contagion, you need a region with a very dense network. This means that people have friends who are themselves friends with each other: the network must be dense.
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This is what seems to have partly fuelled the revolutionary process of the end of the 18th century and which reached a tipping point from July 1789.
First, the state coffers were empty and the state was in debt. Every year, the kingdom's income repaid only part of the interest... The taxes borne by the members of the Third Estate were too heavy and they could no longer tolerate the tyranny of the lords.
In 1788, King Louis XVI decided to convene the General Estate, an extraordinary assembly composed of representatives of the three orders (Clergy, Nobility and Third Estate), in order to find new measures to repay this debt.
The functioning of this assembly systematically disadvantages the Third Estate because the vote is done in order: everyone has one vote which means that, as the Clergy and the Nobility have common interests, we most often find ourselves with 2 votes to 1.
Then, in addition to the difficulties observed by the agricultural sector in the 1780s mentioned above and the economic tensions, the subjects of Louis XVI consider the absolute monarchy and the society of the Ancien Régime as obsolete. The 70,000 register of grievances written for the holding of these States General are a striking proof of this.
The complex contagion process is already underway in the countryside and has not finished scolding... Between the 20th of July and the 7th of August 1789, it is the Great Fear. At the news of a so-called "aristocratic plot" helped by brigands and foreign powers, the peasants rise up in the countryside and destroy the coat of arms of the nobles or burn all tax documents.
In the capital, the situation is just as tense. On the 20 of June 1789, the General Estate promised to give a constitution to France: this is the Jeu de Paume oath. On the 9th of July, they proclaimed themselves a constituent national assembly: it was the end of the absolute monarchy and King Louis XVI asked his troops to get closer to Versailles.
In Paris, rumours raise fears of an intervention by troops against the capital. On the 14th of July, rioters stormed the Bastille, an old fortress of the Hundred Years' War that symbolises royal arbitrariness in the eyes of Parisians. 600 people lost their lives in the clashes. Revolutionary ideas then also spread in the capital.
In addition, other networks are active in the dissemination of revolutionary ideas.
Elites find themselves in various places of sociability such as cafes, salons but also secret societies to exchange ideas regardless of the order. For example, Masonic lodges are associated in networks throughout Europe and are places of sociability in the 18th century.
In short, this complex contagion mechanism that seems to have been at work during the French Revolution, is typical of crowd movements and the adoption of new social norms. How does it relate today to the rise of online social networks?
Understand behaviours in political life through epidemiology
On January 6, 2021, in the early afternoon, a crowd headed towards the Capitol, a symbol of American democracy, with a single intention: to "walk on it" and "restore justice" as urged by outgoing President Donald Trump, defeated two months earlier in the presidential elections.
This event has deeply marked people's minds with the highly symbolic act of these demonstrators.
But what is the form of contagion in this specific case?
First, we could see the mechanisms of simple contagion insofar as we have an opinion leader. Indeed, Donald Trump, a few hours earlier in a speech, invited "his supporters to take the Capitol by storm."
Feeling victim of a theft and conspiracy by the democratic camp and the country's institutions, he announced chilling words worthy of the propaganda speeches of the mid-twentieth century: "We are going to the Capitol... We will try to give our Republicans - the weakest because the strongest do not need our help - we will try to give them the kind of pride and audacity they need to take back our country. ”
Moreover, his lyrics are relayed from his Tweeter account. The spark is gone, the straw ignites and the author watches all this burn without flinching! It was apparently enough for an influencer to instigate this insurrection.
“When the idea of innocence disappears in the innocent himself, the value of power definitively reigns over a desperate world.” — Albert Camus, The Rebel
However, other factors also lead to talk of a complex contagion. Indeed, another approach could consider that Donald Trump would only be the identity that would centre around the resentment and contempt of peripheral networks and a certain part of the American population that feels lost in its bearings.
Since the end of the Cold War and the fall of the USSR, "the end of history"4, the United States seems to be suffering a profound identity crisis: its hegemony seems to be called into question by new powers embodied in particular by China.
In this context, the ideas carried by far-right groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers find an echo in the population, which gradually participates in the dissemination of these ideas until reaching a tipping point: Donald Trump's speech of January 6, 2021.
“The conquest directed towards the interior of the country is called propaganda. [...] The morale of the gang is triumph and revenge, defeat and resentment, inexhaustibly.” — Albert Camus, The Rebel
In the name of what opportunism or if not of a horrible pride, can we rely on such groups to achieve its ends? Donald Trump, in a totally irresponsible act, almost brought down democracy and for the worse...
Dismayed by the situation, his White House teams and some members of his family demanded that he condemn the event and call for calm. He fulfils himself and advocates the call for calm to finally tweet: "These are things and events that happen when an electoral victory is so shamefully stolen from great patriots. ”
Blinded by the speech of an opportunistic businessman or in deep despair, how can we explain that thousands of people suddenly sank into an excess of hubris? How could they let themselves be guided by a crazy puppeteer who is about to run for a new term in 2024?
Assaulted by multiple trials and just the victim of an attack, how is it that Donald Trump can still count on so many supporters ready to follow him until the end of his delusions?
And if this example highlighted the appearance of a new form of contagion, symptomatic of a society marked by "contemporary individualism" in the words of Gilles Lipovetsky.
In his essay, L'ère du vide, un essai sur l’individualisme contemporain (1983), Lipovetsky puts forward a central hypothesis:
"As democratic societies develop, they find their intelligibility in the light of a new logic that we call processes of personalisation, which constantly reshapes all sectors of social life."
"Contemporary individualism" is a socio-historical and disruptive process culminating in post-industrial society that ends up extending the individual's link to the "socius" and generally to any transcendence carrying meaning and social link.
If in the past, individuals gathered around transcendent ideas and values, within the framework of a religious belief in particular, which testifies to a form of "mechanical solidarity" according to the analyses of sociologist Emile Durkheim in the De la division du travail social (1893), the current "organic solidarity" extends relations and limits to the professional sphere.
The individual therefore appears today as withdrawn in the private sphere but who allows himself a form of associativity "à la carte" for a time, for an age.
Superficial links are created and social platforms are the most beautiful example:
"The more it is expressed, the more there is nothing to say, the more subjectivity is solicited, the more anonymous and empty the effect."
Melted into the mass, the individual seems to have found his cocoon.
But he suffers a paradox: he who seeks to live quietly in his comfort, he also wants to be the one who shouts the loudest and who claims his ideas loud and clear.
Being an actor therefore exposing oneself to risk but also being a spectator therefore being in comfort and criticism, this is the desire of the modern individual in loss of reference.
"The individual, locked in his ghetto of messages, now faces his mortal condition without any transcendent support." — Gilles Lipovetsky, Ibid
So, given what is currently happening in France and several EU countries, could it be that an unexpected spark will tip everything up?
Experience has shown us that all this is possible and that only common sense is sometimes not enough.
Our critical thinking is so precious.
Antoine
All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people — Ursula K. Le Guin
What I have discovered this week:
Podcast: La Grande traversée of France Culture about Federico Fellini
Book: The Rebel, Albert Camus
You can follow me and my new platform Herro:
“Le grand orage de la Révolution française, Les Échos, 8/08/22: https://www.lesechos.fr/idees-debats/sciences-prospective/le-grand-orage-de-la-revolution-francaise-1780518
The number of people needed to trigger a collective movement by imitation effect.
Example: If out of a sample of 100 people, there are 4 people with a threshold of 0% to demonstrate, that is, they have decided to demonstrate and the other people have thresholds ranging from 4% to 100% (not necessarily a linear progression, there may be gaps between the percentages) then the 4% people will in turn join the movement and trigger a chain reaction.
The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama, 1992