Protesters across continents shared identical experiential language despite different causes

Evidence

Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish sociologist who had been a part of digitally coordinated activist networks since the alter-globalization moment, noticed that the language employed was nearly identical to that which had been produced in New York and Egypt. “If I squinted and ignored that the language was Turkish,” she reported, “I felt that it could have been in almost any twenty-first-century protest square: organized through Twitter, filled with tear gas, leaderless, networked, euphoric, and fragile.” She also clocked the dual nature of the revolt—it was somewhere between a music festival and the Paris Commune, she wrote. Like Graeber, she rejected the idea that contention is a means to an end. But her interpretation was not based on a prefigurative ideal, but rather on the empirical observation that people were deriving real meaning from these experiences. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 350

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s running thread that protest events hew to a template learned from prior occupations rather than local conditions. — connects to: Sacralized territorial rhetoric travels across unrelated national conflicts; Language is socially constructed and speaks through individuals; Transnational protest movements traded strategies and replaced pity with solidarity (+7 more)
• SEED: Angle: the globalization of protest itself as a genre with its own stock phrases, props (tear gas, tents), and emotional arc.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Sacralized territorial rhetoric travels across unrelated national conflicts #exemplifies (0.92)
• Language is socially constructed and speaks through individuals #qualifies (0.72)