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

Mon Sep 26 10:28:23 CEST 2011

feel free to write a report yourself .. from the horse's mouth ..

On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Devin Balkind
<devin at sarapisfoundation.org>wrote:

> 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/>
>>>>> .
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  -
>>>>> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>>>>
>>>>> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
>>>>> http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
>>>>>
>>>>> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
>>>>> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> “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
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  -
>>> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>>
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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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>>
>
>
> --
> Devin Balkind
> Director, Sarapis Foundation
> devin at sarapisfoundation.org
> @devinbalkind
>
>

-- 
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