Our final day at Davos found the Mashable team standing feet away from black-clad riot police, a row of armored vans blocking our path and the chanting of slogans all around. We'd stumbled into the middle of a protest by Occupy WEF, a movement co-ordinated on social networks that took its inspiration from other "Occupy" movements around the globe. Their message: The world needs to listen to the 99%, not just the 1%.
Although the standoff soon diffused, it seemed -- ironically, perhaps -- to echo some of the issues being discussed inside the Davos Congress Center where the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting was being held.
Technology was the common thread running through many of the conversations at Davos -- from whether technological advances create or destroy jobs, to why U.S. tech firms outsource their manufacturing to China.
And yet it was this issue of changing power structures -- from the Arab Spring, to the Occupy Wall Street movement, to the SOPA backlash the previous week -- that stuck out in my mind. The invite-only conference in which world leaders supposedly gather to discuss solutions to global problems was increasingly paying heed to groups that seem to thrive without hierarchies: Distributed movements coordinated through social media, cellphones and text messaging.
Was Davos nearing death, or simply being disrupted?
"Power Finally Belongs to the People"
Mashable had chosen as its home base the Molkerei Davos, a creamery and tourist attraction where we hosted video interviews in partnership with the document-hosting service Scribd.
In an early interview on our stage, best-selling author Paulo Coelho set the tone for many of our subsequent discussions. "We, normal people, are empowered much more than governments", Coelho told New York Times writer Nick Bilton. "Governments, they can control a few things," he continued, "but today the power finally belongs to the people."
Coelho cited the 2009 Iranian election protests as the catalyst for subsequent online movements. "It starts with Iran, back to the Green Revolution," he told Bilton, "I saw a friend of mine in this video that you see on YouTube, when a girl is killed. And there's someone that approaches the girl, and it was a friend of mine. That video was the symbol. Neda is her name ... And I start tweeting, and at the end of the day I managed to get my friend out of Iran using Twitter and Facebook."
Beyond SOPA: "Some of These Issues Are Actually Incredibly Boring"
While these social movements are echoed in the U.S. by Occupy Wall Street, they appear to have reached a new level of visibility in recent weeks due to a successful web-based uprising against the Stop Online Piracy Act. The Wikipedia community saw the bill as a threat to Internet freedoms and agreed to "black out" the online encyclopedia for a day, following in the footsteps of Reddit. Multiple website shutdowns, in combination with an unprecedented scale of protests on social networks, effectively killed the bill.
