George Floyd and #BlackLivesMatter: the revolution starts here

What other social justice issues might be triggered by an uploaded video that exposes an ugly truth about us?

A group walks along an art installation in Minneapolis, which notes the names of people killed by police.

A cultural revolution came to fruition in America in 1967 when young baby boomers descended on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district during the so-called Summer of Love. Here was a movement that ushered in drug culture, a more liberal attitude towards sex (facilitated by the pill), radical new fashions including long hair for men, and demands for social change. It also had a political edge with its opposition to the war in Vietnam.

In due course both the counter-culture and protests against the Vietnam war arrived in Australia. The US had Woodstock in 1969; we followed with the first Sunbury music festival in 1972. We withdrew from Vietnam shortly afterwards, followed by the US.

These were tumultuous times that changed the Western world. But social change never has a single cause; a series of events, injustices and new technologies coalesce to bring about changed behaviours. The difference between then and now is the pace of change, and its global nature. Today, smouldering social and political issues can be amplified from a local to a global stage within weeks, if not days. Some recent examples include the rise of the #metoo movement from 2017 onwards and this year’s #blacklivesmatter.

It took years for counter-cultural thinking to influence mainstream Australia via television and the print media. But it took just 12 days for the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May to manifest in demonstrations across Australian cities. The difference comes down to today’s widespread access to smartphone technology. A video clip uploaded to social media can be devastatingly incriminating.

The recording of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in 1963 on a home movie camera operated by Abraham Zapruder had a powerful and lasting impact on Americans. The same is true of the beating of African-American Rodney King by Los Angeles police in 1991, an incident captured on film by a civilian and shown on the TV news. But these were flukes, chance captures. Whereas today, most people have a video camera – a smartphone – in their pocket and a ready-made publishing platform via social media. That’s a gamechanger for social justice, and it raises powerful questions.

It makes me wonder, for instance, what other social justice issues might be triggered in the future by an uploaded video that exposes an ugly truth about society. By the latter years of the 2020s, during our recovery from the great pandemic, perhaps there will be a mass questioning of our free-market economy that creates winners and losers, especially in an era in which digitisation favours the educated and the well-resourced. Or perhaps, fanned by social media, there’ll be an uprising by those condemned to live in the underworld of our grand cities – the homeless, the drug-addicted and the long-term unemployed. Juxtaposed against the lives and lifestyles of “knowledge workers” who are assured of their value and place in the world, such an uprising may lead to demands for a universal basic income.

And then there is the lingering issue of intergenerational fairness. Self-funded retirees have benefited from decades of a mightily flawed system that must now be righted via a corrective taxation regime.

We, the residents of the 21st century, need to adjust our thinking and our lifestyles. Not only must we develop protocols to manage the risk of exacerbating global pandemics; we also need to develop political and social systems of fairness that deliver opportunity for all.