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

Mon Sep 26 08:21:44 CEST 2011

Good article.  I've been in Liberty Square off and on for a week.  It's
pretty amazing.  We've got a library and are beginning to organize open
source technology demos.  Planning to reach out to the
hacker/maker/coworking spaces this week - get a 3d printer and book scanner
and have folks give workshops.

Feel free to ask me question, comments, etc.

#OccupyEverywhere :)

On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 4:27 AM, Amaia Arcos <amaia.arcos at googlemail.com>wrote:

> Well said!
>
>
> On 24 September 2011 10:23, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>wrote:
>
>> 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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>
>
> --
> “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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-- 
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Director, Sarapis Foundation
devin at sarapisfoundation.org
@devinbalkind
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