[P2P-F] Fwd: Truth-out : #OccupyWallStreet Is More Than a Hashtag

Sat Sep 24 10:01:12 CEST 2011

hi Amia, any comments?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 3:41 AM
Subject: Truth-out : #OccupyWallStreet Is More Than a Hashtag
To: econowmix at googlegroups.com

http://www.truth-out.org/occupywallstreet-more-hashtag-its-revolution-formation/1316784846

http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

#OccupyWallStreet Is More Than a Hashtag - It's Revolution in Formation
Friday 23 September 2011
 by: Nathan Schneider, Truthout | Report

#OccupyWallStreet protesters gathering in New York's financial district on
September 17, 2011. (Photo: David Shankbone /
Flickr<http://www.flickr.com/photos/shankbone/6157852302/>
)

A lot of what you've probably seen or read about the #occupywallstreet
action is wrong, especially if you're getting it on the Internet. The action
started as an idea posted online and word about it then spread and is still
spreading, online. But what makes it really matter now is precisely that it
is happening offline, in a physical, public space, live and in person.
That's where the occupiers are assembling the rudiments of a movement.

At the center of occupied Liberty Plaza, a dozen or so huddle around
computers in the media area, managing a makeshift Internet hotspot, a
humming generator and the (theoretically) 24-hour
livestream<http://livestream.com/globalrevolution>.
They can edit and post videos of arrests in no time flat, then bombard
Twitter until they're viral. But for those looking to understand even the
basic facts about what is actually going on - before September 17 and since
- the Internet has been as much a source of confusion as it is anything
else.

For someone who has been following this movement in gestation as well as
implementation, it's painfully easy to see which news articles take their
bearing entirely from a few Google searches. Some reporters come to Liberty
Plaza looking for Adbusters staff, or US Day of Rage members, or
conspiratorial Obama supporters, or hackers from Anonymous. They're briefly
disappointed to find none of the above. Instead, it's a bunch of people -
from round-the-clock revolutionaries, to curious tourists, to retirees, to
zealous students - spending most of their time in long meetings about
supplying food, conducting marches, dividing up the plaza's limited space
and what exactly they're there to do and why. And that's the point. More
than demanding any particular policy proposal, the occupation is reminding
Wall Street what real democracy looks
like<http://wagingnonviolence.org/2011/09/the-demand-is-a-process/>:
a discussion among people, not a contest of money.

As is now well known, the anti-consumerist group Adbusters made a call on
July 13<http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/occupywallstreet.html>
for
an occupation of Wall Street. That and a bit of poster art were the extent
of its involvement. Adbusters floated the meme and left the rest to others.
The trouble was, though, that most of the others were meme floaters, too.

The occupywallst.org web domain was registered anonymously on July 14, and
it soon became the main clearinghouse for information about the movement’s
progress. It remains so now and is getting, on average, about 50,000 unique
visitors per day. It’s maintained mainly by a man and woman who met through
the Anarchism section on the web site Reddit.

Soon came US Day of Rage, the project of Alexa O'Brien, an IT content
management strategist. Since March, she has been trying to build a
nationwide movement for radical campaign-finance reform - "One citizen. One
dollar. One vote." - and decided to peg her efforts to the September 17
action. While she has around 20 organizers working with her in cities around
the country, as far as one leading #occupywallstreet organizer in New York
could tell, it seems like her only colleagues might be coffee and
cigarettes.

Then, of course, there's Anonymous. The most-wanted hacker-activist
collective indicated that it would join #occupywallstreet in late August.
Within days, the Anons' presence in the movement was being felt through
Anonymous-branded viral videos, the bombardment of the movement's Twitter
hashtags (of which there is an ever-growing number) and rumors of scrutiny
from Homeland Security.

Meanwhile, quietly, a group of several hundred mainly young activists,
artists and students started gathering as a "General Assembly" (GA) - a
leaderless, consensus-based decision-making process. They met weekly in
public parks, starting on August 2 and continuing until the occupation
began, with the intention of building an  organizational and tactical
framework for the action. It grew out of New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts,
which had recently held a three-week occupation near City Hall called
"Bloombergville" to protest against austerity measures. They had learned a
lot from that and were ready to try something bigger.

The GA formed an Internet Committee, which quickly became fraught with
infighting about process, security concerns and editorial control. These
problems consumed hours and hours of the whole Assembly's time. Their site
went up, then down and then finally up again just days before the occupation
began. It is now online at nycga.cc, but it receives only a small fraction
of the traffic of occupywallst.org. Only on Thursday afternoon did the two
sites figure out how to formally coordinate their activities.

As a result of these hiccups, in the lead-up and early days of the
occupation, media coverage almost always associated it with meme floaters
like Adbusters, US Day of Rage and Anonymous. But none of them were
especially responsible for what would be happening on the ground starting on
September 17. That was the GA's doing.

Others, it seems, have taken it upon themselves to fill the GA's media
vacuum of their own accord. One document beingcirculated and
discussed<http://openletters2you.blogspot.com/2011/09/open-letter-to-occupywallstreet.html>
online
is "Occupy Wall Street - Official Demands," dated September 20 of *2013*,
which includes detailed proposals for reforming the financial system, none
of which has been approved by the GA.

"This is definitely not ours," says Marisa Holmes, a facilitator of the GA
since the first planning meetings. "All decisions made by the GA are made in
this space."

Worse, thanks to some imaginative theorizing by Aaron Kein of the right-wing
online publication WorldNetDaily, the idea began circulating that the
movement was "closely tied" with ACORN, SEIU and that it took its
inspiration from the Weather Underground; George Soros; and, ultimately,
President Obama himself. Five minutes at a GA meeting would easily disabuse
one of such associations. The GA had no official organizational ties and,
besides a food fund that has been stuck in an inaccessible WePay account,
almost no money. Many wish that they had the support of unions, but so far
they still don't.

What's actually underway at Liberty Plaza is both simpler and more
complicated: music making, sign drawing, talking, organizing, eating,
marching, standoffs with police and (not enough) sleeping. It's a movement
in formation. As protesters sometimes like to chant, "This Is Just
Practice." There are a handful of guys with Anonymous Guy Fawkes masks
backward on their heads, but they're just one affinity group among many.
O'Brien didn't appear on the plaza for a couple of days - she was "running
the back-end," she says - and there has been almost no talk of "One citizen.
One dollar. One vote." Adbusters sends the occasional package of posters in
the mail and offers confusing advice to organizers on the ground. Nobody's
exactly sure yet who is doing what, but they're learning.

For the most part, the occupation is riding the momentum started in the GA
meetings that were going on for a month and a half beforehand. They built a
community of people who trust each other, who have a sense for each other's
skills and who are in some basic agreement about ends and means.

In the revolutions and uprisings and occupations that have been taking place
around the world since the beginning of this year, there has been a lot of
talk about the mobilizing power of social media - of the Twitters and
Facebooks and cell phones. But when the Egyptian government shut down the
Internet and the cellular signals in January, the movement there carried on.
One of the deciding factors that brought down Mubarak, in the end, was not
some new Twitter hashtag, but a general strike organized by traditional
labor unions. The Internet can help (as well as hurt) a movement, but it's
no replacement for actual relationships among actual people, building actual
trust through actually working together over a period of time.

"I could have a political discussion just on the Internet," says web
developer Drew Hornbein, who is on the GA's Internet Committee, "But it's
nice to get out like this." When he started attending GA meetings in August,
he got excited, thinking, "This is something really real. This could really
be something."

So it has become. But everyone at Liberty Plaza knows the movement has to be
bigger for it to have the effect they want to see. Whole swaths of Americans
- from racial minorities to disgruntled Wall Streeters - are
underrepresented among the occupiers. Not everyone, it seems, is quite so
glued to Twitter as the young radical set. They've had to start scrambling
to relearn how to make fliers, reach out to membership organizations and
find people where they are to make the movement's numbers grow.

On Thursday evening, a surprise march of hundreds mourning the execution of
Troy Davis in Georgia set out for Liberty Plaza from Union Square, led by
occupiers. Police made attempts to stop it with barricades and clubs and
arrests, but they couldn't; and when the marchers arrived, the numbers in
the plaza swelled. There were a lot of new faces and new kinds of faces. It
paid off to quit the Internet, go to where people actually are and bring
them back.

In the GA that night, Ted Actie, who lives in Brooklyn and works for On the
Spot, a minority-owned talk-show production company, called on the
protesters to speak more directly to the communities around them. "You do so
much social networking," he said, "you forget how to socialize."
[image: Creative Commons
License]<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/>

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States
License<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/>
.

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