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

[Michel Bauwens]

thanks Amaia, yes, makes a lot of sense, to go to the deeper convergence
rather than who said what with 'legitimate' authority ...

Michel

On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Amaia Arcos <amaia.arcos at googlemail.com>wrote:

> Super accurate (about the intricacies of all the groups involved), super
> true.
>
> My only comment is that the whole confusion and people either attributing
> ownership or trying to take it are the new dynamics we have to learn how to
> deal with in this new nascent age of horizontalism.
>
> I am involved in (one of) the 15M international organisation groups and you
> get the whole "who has said this/done that", "is this official" etc, the
> answer is always "if it is in line with what we are doing of course it is
> *official". *There is no official anymore, that is the beauty of it, it is
> also the problem, the masses "police" stuff, it's like anonymous decision
> making, if it catches on, it is "officially supported", if it does not, try
> again and more in line with general consensus.. :)
>
> No?
>
>
> On 24 September 2011 10:01, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>wrote:
>
>> 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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>>
>
>
> --
> “We would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if
> we moved continuously on foot across the surface of the earth” Bruce Chatwin
>



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