The Barcelona riots leave 23 shops damaged and 128 arrested

The call circulated on TikTok and WhatsApp as questions about its causes grew

The call had been circulating on TikTok for a week before around 600 young people headed to the centre of Barcelona on Saturday night. By the next day, 23 shops had been vandalised or looted and 128 people were arrested.

Among those detained, 72 were minors. Only two had previous records for public disorder. The Mossos reported 14 injured officers and the Bombers carried out 33 interventions.

A call that jumped from TikTok to the chats

The call spread with the tag Blocus, a French word associated with school blockades led by lycée students. It was aimed at young people in Barcelona, Madrid, València and Bilbao; later, it moved to WhatsApp and Telegram groups.

In those chats, some participants called for calm while others openly discussed looting shops. The Barna Centre traders’ association had warned its members before the unrest.

With the 29 November elections five weeks away, the episode broke into a campaign that, according to the article’s analysis, could revolve around housing and wages. The electricity bill was also part of that debate. For the far right, images of burning bins and smashed shopfronts fit better with their narrative about insecurity and disorder.

Several digital and right-wing media outlets focused on the fact that many of the young people were foreigners or appeared to be, before the Mossos had finished counting those detained.

Digital suspicions do not identify those responsible

It remains to be seen who amplified the videos during the previous week and whether there were new accounts posting at the same pace. The analysis even raises the possibility of actors in Moscow, Tel Aviv or any other capital interested in fuelling fear in European democracies.

Some TikTok profiles used for the call closely resembled accounts that far-right groups had used to promote lynchings against the immigrant population in Ceuta. This is a clue that fuels suspicion, not proof that a foreign government organised the unrest.

Digital coordination, anonymity, and the speed with which the call spread may justify an investigation. On their own, these elements do not indicate who was responsible.

Looting as a symptom of inequality

In The Wire, detective Lester Freamon suggests following the money to understand where a crime comes from. The analysis applies this idea to the digital sphere: it is also necessary to observe how algorithms are organised and what behaviours they help circulate.

Attributing the unrest to a destabilisation operation may offer the left a convenient explanation: young people would be acting under the influence of far-right narratives. But that hypothesis should not be used to avoid confronting the contradictions of the society one seeks to change.

Writing about the riots that set London’s suburbs ablaze for four nights in August 2011, Slavoj Žižek noted that what was disturbing was the lack of programme or slogan. There were young people entering shops to get the trainers that advertising promised them but their parents’ wages could not buy. For Lacan, the symptom is a truth that returns in distorted form: reading the unrest this way does not reveal what each participant wanted, but it does invite us to examine the world that made such behaviour possible.

The minors detained live in a city where rent absorbs a disproportionate share of income and moving out before thirty is increasingly difficult. Much of social life takes place on a six-inch screen, from which they see cars they may never own and flats they may never live in.

When talking about young people born in Catalunya to families of foreign origin, it must also be recognised that Catalunya is their home. The analysis calls for more institutional support to combat the racist and dispossessing logics operating on the margins, rather than fuelling the stigmatisation promoted by the right.

Explaining the conditions behind a behaviour does not justify it, just as demanding individual responsibility does not remove the need to examine structures. Of the 128 detained, only two had previous records for public disorder.