I saw the Gezi protests in 2013. They lasted for days. What stayed with me was not a single image of a square or a confrontation. It was the feeling that people were trying, in many different voices, to say something larger than the incident that had first brought them outside.
That memory does not give me a licence to declare that Paris or Milan is “another Gezi”. Places have their own histories. Crowds are not interchangeable. Nor does anyone know tonight where these protests will go. The honest thing is to resist prophecy and pay attention.
Across France and Italy, people have marched over the cost of living and the future available to young people. Some demonstrations were followed by fires, looting and clashes. The damage is real. So is the mistake of allowing those images to erase everyone who marched peacefully, or every question that took them there.
What sits beneath the footage
A protest is never a perfect opinion poll. It can contain a student, a parent, a worker who cannot keep up with rent and somebody who came looking for a fight. Journalism owes the public enough care to tell those people apart.
I do not excuse a smashed shop window. I also do not believe a government has understood a crisis simply because it has counted arrests. Order matters. Listening matters too. If the cost of an ordinary life keeps rising while the prospect of stability moves further away, the problem will still be there after the streets are cleaned.
The question waiting beyond the march
There is another anxiety behind this moment. We are building AI systems that may make remarkable things possible. I use them myself. But if technology changes the value of labour and even of human judgement, who receives the benefit? What place will an economy make for the people it no longer needs in the same way?
That question is not an argument against invention. It is an argument against sleepwalking. I have seen what happens when people feel they are not being heard. I cannot tell you what Europe’s streets will look like next month. I can tell you that the future being offered to the people on them deserves more than a police briefing.
This column represents the author's view. It is separate from News Beast's automated, source-backed news reports.