I'm gonna start off by telling you a little story from the spring that I wrote about in my book, "Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking." It comes out in June 2010.

It's a Saturday afternoon, Easter weekend, Passover is going on, things are pretty quiet in the world online and off. A lotta digitally-oriented people, when they're bored, will do things like Google themselves and check website stats and whatnot. Authors tend to go to Amazon and check their sales ranks. Now, the sales rank is not just about how many books they've sold, it's also the key to the whole Amazon system. If you don't have a sales rank for your book or product, you don't turn up in search results on the site, for example.

Well, that Saturday afternoon, some authors were surprised to find that they no longer had sales ranks on their books, and that suddenly their books weren't appearing in search results. Murmurs began on Twitter as authors posted their findings here and there, and consumers started posting about failed searches. Someone started using a hashtag to express their extreme dissatisfaction. Who knows what a hashtag is? [If you want to learn more about the power -- and fun -- of hashtags, go watch Baratunde Thurston's video, "There's A #Hashtag For That."]

That hashtag was #AmazonFAIL. ("fail" is a really fun snarky catchall word for "this sucks" events.) Because of that, people participating were able to track all of the related posts about Amazon. Within a few hours, enough information had been gathered to show the types of books that were being flagged: LGBT, feminist, and disability themed sex-positive books. They mysteriously received an "adult" flag while heteronormative sexual books, like Playboy calendars, and anti-gay screeds, remained untouched.

The flames fanned higher, and soon various "web celebrities" took up the cause, using their social capital and influence to share stories about books that were being, in effect, digitally banned. Not long after, several newspapers caught wind of the firestorm… the LA Times blogged the de-ranking Sunday.

The mob stormed the castle all day Sunday. By later that night — Easter Sunday, no less — Amazon was forced to make a statement in response. A spokesperson told Publisher's Weekly that the de-ranking problem was a "glitch," and that Amazon was looking into it.

Now, imagine the same scenario just 10 years ago. Amazon, even then, was a popular online retailer with a good amount of credibility. If a huge swath of books had been removed from the site in 1999, how would people have protested? It would have been through angry emails to the corporate offices. Perhaps op-eds might have been pitched to various newspapers, and over several days and weeks various civil rights groups might have gotten involved somehow. In short, everyday people would have had to rely on a slow-moving hierarchical system with lots of gatekeepers along the way deciding if this was a worthwhile issue.

Instead, in 2009, these voices slipped into the consciousness of the web, created a campaign without any organization or funding, and forced Amazon to respond within 12 hours. And to ice that cake, the mainstream media played catch-up in the following days, hoping to catch the scraps of the story. [Postscript was that Amazon said it was Amazon France's fault; they were updating the catalog over the weekend and accidentally flagged all these books. Which to me sounds a lot like "oh you guys, I totally have a girlfriend, she just lives in FRANCE." But whatever. I digress.]

You've learned about a ton of new tactics and strategies today. But one of the biggest things to understand is that something very fundamental has not changed at all about organizing. Before any organizing happens, online or offline, before you get your phonebanking, your petitions, your door-knocking, your lobby days, your email campaigns, your anything– change starts with stories. Our stories. Storytelling has been the most powerful building block for social change since the beginning of time… think about how long we've been sitting around the campfire! What these tools that you've spent all day hashing out do is give us unprecedented power to share our stories to many more people than we could have imagined.

What happens when you tell stories? Two very magical things: you build trust with other people in your network, and from there you build empathy. It's very important to note that I'm not talking about sympathy. Sympathy is where you feel bad for someone who's had something bad happen to them. Empathy is where you actually share in the emotions that other people have and express. It's a powerful, deeply primal experience.

The trust we create with one another on social networks is what fuels the empathetic response we have to one another, even if we don't know each other that well. That trust-created empathy is what will lead us away from the isolation, and thus apathy, that we've experienced as a culture in the last century's focus on mass communications and market demographics… siloing people and separating them. These technologies are all about connecting, engaging, sharing.

Your presence is required in this work: we need you here in the online social space. Desperately. We are confronting a tremendous opportunity to bring in voices previously marginalized or dismissed when it comes to shaping public conversations. But change won't happen on its own… it requires you to show up, and to participate. Tech will not solve our problems. We will solve our problems, using technology.

If you choose to sit this one out, though, there's a ripple effect caused by your void. Because you're not contributing to the larger, very public conversations about what's happening in the world and how problems should be solved, the conversation will go on without you. Others will be defining and directing the conversation without the benefit of your experiences and knowledge. Y'know, like what's been going on for most of us for the last few thousand years.

Here's the thing: Creating a just society is sort of like the evolution of species. If you have a bunch of the same DNA mixing together, the species mutates poorly and eventually dies off. But bring in variety — new strains of DNA — and you create a stronger species.  It's no different in idea generation. You get a bunch of the same people talking to each other and making the rules for a few millennia, and eventually you're going to end up with a lack of meaningful advancement.

It's time to bring fresh life into the conversations that we're having about social change, and sharing our stories are our strongest bets for doing so.

I think we can change the traditional power dynamics. In fact, I think you will change the traditional power dynamics. But it's not all shiny happy rainbows and butterflies, though.

We're living like fish in the water on the Internet right now: we don't know, or we're not willing to recognize, that we're soaking the social structures we've been living with for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. We're porting our understanding of the offline world… with all our prejudices, biases and hierarchies… onto the blank canvas of the Internet. Especially in spaces that are focused on relationships and social features, we have to be aware of this. Research like that of noted tech rockstar danah boyd shows that people self-segregate online–white people hang out with white people online, even tho, for example a Pew study showed that an African-American online is more likely to use Twitter than a white person online. A Harvard study showed us that men are twice as more likely to follow another man on Twitter, etc., even tho women make up more than have of all social networks' memberships. We've got to interrupt this pattern now, with conscious effort and action.

This is where the storytelling comes in. Lemme tell you another.

In the summer of 2009, a private country club in Philadelphia banned a group of African-American children from swimming in its pool, despite the fact that the kids' camp had paid for their swimming privileges. Capturing the public’s tremendous shock and outrage, comedian Elon James White, host of the popular web series “This Week in Blackness,” opened an episode with the words: "Hi, I'm broadcasting live from 1952…"

When I heard about the incident, I signed petitions, I passed the info along on Twitter and Facebook, and I talked about it with my friends, both online and off. As the dialogue continued, people started to share stories on social networks about the first time they had been discriminated against. I read story after unfiltered, unedited story, written by friends and people I barely knew. Each time, the stories were devastating; so was the fact that I hadn't heard them before.

I realized that without social media, I probably never would have heard those stories. Or, I might have heard one of them, isolated from others. Being white, I have never been the victim of racism, and since many of my friends are white, they haven't either. Prior to social media, I mostly likely wouldn't have ended up in the company of a group of people of color sharing their childhood discrimination stories so openly and honestly.

Social networks offer a huge potential for overlap between groups of people. Even though humans will always be drawn to others that they think are like them in one way or another, sharing powerful stories with one other has the potential to reach across social boundaries and create new kinds of safe spaces.

So yeah, we'll always look for people who are like us, but we'll never be able to isolate ourselves completely from those who are different from us. Social media tools make it easier than ever to dip in and out of social circles. In that space of relatively pressure-free exploration is where the overlap can start to occur.

In the case of sharing stories of childhood discrimination, there was an assumed level of safety through the trust and empathy we had established with one another. I trusted the people I follow on Twitter, and in turn, they trusted me to listen.

I received an education that day. It's one thing to read stories in the newspaper and get upset; it's an entirely different, deeper experience to read friends and colleagues sharing intimate, painful, raw moments in real time. Those shared moments left me feeling not just more passionate about addressing racism, but also more willing to hear what’s being said when I need to listen.

Change does not, and will not, happen in isolation or on an individual basis… we need each other to produce results. As we start to explore with social media, we have the potential to deepen our understanding of one another's life experiences, and in turn, ourselves. Telling our stories in real, authentic ways becomes critical to moving others toward progress and change.

So! To sum up some takeaways for you all:

1. Organizers: you are not reaching everyone if you are just going to the most popular social network of the moment.
2. Don't forget that you bring bias to the table. When you enter a space that doesn't have formal structure, like a lot of the Internet, our own biases will take over.
3. Your stories matter. The stories of your community members matter even more. I hereby knight you with an ambassadorship to a more democratic future. Do you choose to accept this mission?

Thank you!

As the day has worn on, more parts of the story are unfolding, and all these little tidbits at the intersection of tech, culture, media and commerce are more than fascinating. This is the kind of story that sends me down the rabbit hole of musing for days.

Let’s start with the tech side of things

According to Jessica Valenti (and her publisher, Seal Press), Amazon reps are claiming that this is a purely internal issue caused by the mysterious “glitch” spoken of last night. I don’t think the reps know what they’re talking about, frankly. What I think is going on: there is a severe vulnerability in the Amazon flagging-for-inappropriate system, and it’s been found and exploited by one or more nerds with too much time on their hands. Amazon’s mistake, vis a vis the brave new world of social media, is two-fold:

• Refusing to acknowledge a vulnerability. People are reaching the point not just that they like transparency in dealing with people who hold lots of important info on their behalf, but they are coming to demand it. Amazon’s “nothing more to see here” approach is damaging to the relationship they have with those outraged by the exploit.
• Refusing to acknowledge the pain of affected people. If you have an entire relationship built on trust (with personal info, with commitments to move products, with referrals and wishlists, etc), you have the obligation to have that uncomfortable sit-down when a betrayal is introduced to the relationship. Amazon hasn’t done that yet. Yikes.

There’s a livejournal blogger out there now claiming responsibility for the exploit. I won’t link over, because I actually think he’s full of crap, as do those who’ve attempted to reproduce his exploitative code. It’s a well known practice for those with no skillz to take responsibility for things they have no part of to build up their hacker cred. Please. You know what tipped me off, for the record? The references to wanting to have anonymous sex with women and heroin from Craigslist. Fetishy-objectifying of women is common in the hacker community, for sure, but this guy is just… silly.

This doesn’t mean that someone didn’t come up with something similar– I’m almost positive they did. Which means that Amazon has a serious problem, and they better have a better explanation than the “glitch.”

There’s a bigger picture here: cultural implications

From a tech point of view, recommendation systems and flag-as-inappropriate tools that aren’t built to handle gaming the system are just no good. It’s unacceptable that a masterminding giant such as Amazon wasn’t prepared for this kind of attack. Especially considering how much it affects Amazon’s contract and relationship with the people that provide them with the goods its users demand, and how much users trust Amazon to do the Right Thing.

On a wider cultural scale, as I’d mentioned in the article in the WMC, the cultural implications of these attacks — especially when it’s big enough to get this kind of attention — are huge. Geek culture is one of the last vestiges of an overtly sexist and toxic environment for anyone who’s not a straight guy, most likely white and middle-class. (Not limited to the nerds of computer love, either– check out this post on misogyny and comic books from Amptoons.) When these attacks occur, it reveals not just the hatred that the hackers themselves have for women and LGBT folk, but the wider cultural intolerance we still have running rampant.

Decades of victories in civil rights for women and people of color, and more recently, LGBT folk seeking rights to get married, cannot correct the thousands of years of damage on which our culture is built. When a system of rapid information distribution (oh, like say, The Internet!) provides anonymity, free(-ish) speech and very little accountability, it makes it easy for people’s True Feelings to come out. It’s my feeling that what we see online is a mirror showing us the dark underbelly of what exists.

Some would react by clamping on the anonymity, the level of free speech and the accountability, often all at once. Sure, keeping trolls off your comments section is probably a good idea. Enacting laws making it impossible to operate independently and anonymously online? Bad idea. Very bad. We need to be addressing the root causes of our misogyny, our racism, our homophobia — not piling on bandaids, duct tape and bailing twine to keep people’s mouths shut. Only when it came to the threat of physical danger would I advocate for restriction. I have witnessed friends and colleagues being attacked viciously, and there is no one on this planet that deserves that level of fear stuffed down their throats.

It’s time to get real, folks. These attacks are proof that feminism and its partners in other social justice work still have a long, long way to go. Long way. I’m on board… are you?

Updates on theories, conspiracy and otherwise, are welcome in the comments.