land China for prosecution. Hong Kong is
a “special administrative region” of China,
with an independent judiciary and much
wider freedoms than those found on the
mainland. Fearing that the extradition law
would lead to the further erosion of those
freedoms, large numbers of protesters took
to the streets starting in early June.
Now, nearly three months later, the bill
had been suspended but not yet with-
drawn. (That would come, but later.) And
At the same time, this stream of young
people carrying umbrellas and traveling
on foot were anything but Luddites (at
least as people usually use the term). They
were quite attached to their tech. Like other
decentralized movements before them—the
protesters who amassed in the Arab Spring,
under the banner of Occupy, in Istanbul’s
Gezi Park, and under the name Indignados
in Spain—the demonstrators in Hong Kong
were forever on their phones. They pulledthe protesters were feeling their strength,
demanding an independent inquiry into
police misconduct and universal suffrage.
But on that Saturday, as we all ended up
walking in the blazing sun, the protesters
had a new target in their sights: “smart”
lampposts equipped with sensors, cam-
eras, and internet connections. Fifty had
been installed in the city, a first batch of
an expected 400, and the protesters were
determined to take one down.
The government had said the smart
lampposts would be used only for benign
purposes—that they’d take air quality mea-
surements and assist with traffic control,
and would not collect facial or other per-
sonal data. The protesters feared other-
wise. When I spoke to them, many brought
up what was happening to the Uyghurs
in the Xinjiang region of China. Trapped
in a massive surveillance net that hacks
their phones and collects biometric data
(including DNA samples from practically
the whole population), the Uyghurs live
under constant scrutiny and worse—Big
Data along with traditional surveillance
techniques have sent as many as a million
people off to internment camps.
Citizens of Hong Kong feared simi-
lar technologies would be used against
them. Many wore face masks. They carried
umbrellas, not just to shelter from the sun
but also to block the view of CCTV cameras
or the helicopters that flew overhead—or to
huddle under as they assembled barricades.
them out to learn where the movement was
making its next stand; they pulled them out
to learn where to retreat after being tear-
gassed; then they pulled them out to learn
where everyone was regrouping for the next
advance. They scrolled through Telegram,
beaming with myriad protest groups—big
ones conveying information about the
whole movement and small ones that orga-
nized one neighborhood or another. They
voted on LIHKG (a homegrown Reddit) to
decide their next steps.
I watched it all happen: The protesters
would amass and the police would meet
them in force. Then, in a blink, the demon-
strators would move somewhere else, using
the subway—when they could—to outrun
the authorities. They would decide where
to go next through online discussions and
polls. It felt like magic.
One day, inspired by a single post on
LIHKG, the protesters decided to form a
human chain. They would do it on the anni-
versary of the historic 1989 chain across
the three Baltic states that demanded free-
dom from the Soviet Union. The Hong Kong
protesters ran with the idea and managed
to form a human barricade 30 miles long,
surprising even themselves. They used apps
to coordinate in real time, getting people
to move from overly populated sections of
the chain to ones that were more sparse.
They held hands and sang in unison. In the
middle of the event, someone had the idea
that they should end with everyone clos-ing one eye, in honor of a medic who had
been shot in the eye just a few days earlier.
At precisely 9 pm, I watched them all close
one eye, perfectly coordinated.
Move, countermove. The next day,
authorities shut down the subway. And all
throughout my time in Hong Kong, it was
painfully clear how ubiquitous the surveil-
lance was. Telegram includes a feature that
allows you to see if a contact is a member of
a group; that feature may well have exposed
everyone’s phone number to the authori-
ties. (Telegram says it’s fixing this.) Phones
constantly pinged nearby cell phone towers,
revealing locations. At one point, LIHKG was
down due to a denial of service attack. It’s
unknown whether Beijing was behind the
attack, but China’s state-sponsored hack-
ers certainly have the motive and the means
(and then some) for such an exploit.
This techno-evolutionary arms race
between authorities and protesters isn’t
new—and it’s not just playing out in authori-
tarian countries. Those smart lampposts are
already sprouting up in many democracies
or are being planned as part of smart-city
initiatives. Those governments, too, prom-
ise they will be put to benign use. But once
a surveillance infrastructure exists, govern-
ments and corporations will certainly be
tempted to run with it.
Facial recognition is being deployed all
over the world. Biometric databases are
expanding. Personal, financial, health,
social, and other data is being collected by
entities ranging from social media giants
and apps to websites and retailers—anyone
and everyone, it appears. And this data is
being churned through to identify and tar-
get people individually—to sell things, yes,
but also to spread misinformation.
Later that Saturday, the protesters used a
couple of basic technologies, a handheld
saw and a rope, to set upon a smart lamp-
post. As the post fell, cheers rose from the
crowd. A jubilant moment isn’t decisive,
though. There will be more smart lampposts
and more abuse. But the pessimism that
abounds these days—as authoritarians have
turned new technologies to their advan-
tage—is likewise not decisive. It’s still early.
We can’t predict who will win and how. That
story is still to be written, by us.The Hong Kong protesters managed
to form a human barricade 30 miles long,
surprising even themselves.
ZEYNEP TUFEKCI (@zeynep) is a wired
contributor and a professor at the Univer-
sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.