shouting loudly

There’s a fun anti-Citizens United video that made the rounds last week (see below).  It features big thinkers explaining problems with the campaign finance system, while goofing around with Internet memes –  keyboard cat, geyser videos, kids being cute, etc.

I like the video.  It’s not going to get a million views or radically change American jurisprudence or anything, but it’s a well-executed communications tactic – fun and informative, appealing to the audiences who are likely to engage in further collective action on this topic.

The video got me thinking about the nature of online virality.  For the video’s producers, “going viral” is a premise for a joke.  Specifically, “cat videos go viral, serious commentary doesn’t.”  There’s truth there, but it’s inexact.  The lion’s share (har, har) of cat videos don’t go viral.  Last month, video of an Iowa man giving testimony about being raised in a loving family by two women did go viral.  So one perspective on virality can be described as common wisdom.  As is usually the case, common wisdom has a nugget of truth behind it.  But it’s also very limited and approximate.

The academic research on virality tells us a couple of things.  Kevin Wallsten’s study of the Will.I.Am “Yes We Can” video found that there’s significant interplay between blogs and traditional news media in driving viewership.  Karine Nahon’s research on viral videos in the 2008 election specifically zeroed in on the influential role of a few megablogs (DailyKos and Huffington Post, in particular) in driving viral views.  Put another way, most viral videos don’t trace the path of “David After Dentist.”   When hub sites with a large viewership highlight a video, attention is magnified. The Iowa testimony video was driven by MoveOn promoting it to the frontpage, posting it to Facebook and Twitter, and emailing their 5 million+ list.

But what content can or should a hub site emphasize?  If the choices of a MoveOn or a Huffington Post drive virality, then what influences those choices?  I would call that a third perspective on viral content – the organizational perspective.  Daniel Mintz, a MoveOn staffer and Rutgers alum, kindly agreed to speak to my students last month.  At one point in the discussion, he explained that MoveOn has a simple equation that they use to determine what goes viral.  He drew it on the chalkboard: Virality = (see) x (share) x (come back).  With any piece of content, the organization monitors how many people are clicking on the item to begin with, how many then share it with others, and how many of those others then click as well.  This is data that they can gather, manipulate, test, and act upon.  It informs their decisions, which in turn affect what goes viral, which in turn impacts common wisdom.

None of these perspectives is holistic.  Each has limitations.  And each deals with a different form of virality.  Jokes about the Wallsten/Nahon concept of online virality wouldn’t be very funny.  Studies of mass viewership trends cannot also dig into organizational choice.  The equation that MoveOn relies upon is probably different than the one used by Huffington Post, and necessarily sacrifices sophistication for usability.

Any complete answer to questions about viral content online would have to start with “it depends on what sort of virality we’re talking about…”

So… this happened yesterday.  It’s too early to pronounce SOPA firmly dead, but clearly the blackout proved to be an epic tactical win.

The blackout worked on three levels.  First we have the immediate stated goal: educate site visitors about SOPA/PIPA and encourage them to contact their Member of Congress.  This is basically a souped-up version of the standard action alerts that MoveOn, Demand Progress, Organizing for America and other advocacy groups send daily to their members.  I haven’t seen any numbers, but I’ll bet that the Congressional phone lines were lighting up yesterday. Update: see Bowers at DailyKos for the numbers.  They’re HUGE!

That said, heavy phone and e-mail traffic is nothing new for Congressional offices.  The side that generates heavier constituent outrage doesn’t always win.  Constituent outrage is one signal that Congress considers.  They also consider expert testimony (firmly opposed to the bill) and the will of wealthy donors/affected industries (often expressed through lobbyists – an excess of Hollywood money and lobbying influence is what got us the awful legislation in the first place).

It worked on a second level though: as news.  Wikipedia going dark drew wide coverage.  Even if you didn’t happen to visit Wikipedia yesterday, if you visited a news site or tuned in to Colbert, you found out it was happening.  This forces politicians who were ignoring the issue to take a stand.  Reporters don’t call and ask for positions on every issue, every day.  Yesterday, they were calling about this one.  And news coverage also serves as an approximation of public opinion for members of congress [h/t Susan Herbst].

Notice, however, that the blackout was news specific because it was original.  This has never happened before*.  Wikipedia doesn’t take political stances.  Google doesn’t call on web-searchers to contact congress.  The freshness of the tactic is what makes it newsworthy.  If Wikipedia did this once a month, it would quickly cease to be newsworthy.  This is the “advocacy inflation” problem that I’ve written about before [h/t Daniel Mintz, who suggested the term].

There’s a third channel of influence at work here as well: direct exposure.  Congressional offices are busy places.  In the course of the day yesterday, at least one staffer in every office probably Googled something or looked something up on Wikipedia.  Many Members of Congress did so themselves as well.  The blackout cut through the din of constituent calls and emails, lobby visits, and policy briefings.  They saw it themselves, and it grabbed attention in a way that everyday persuasion and influence tactics never can.

Notice that this third channel works because of the sites involved.  I thought it was great that DailyKos and BoingBoing took part in the action, but if it was just those sites the tactic would have been much weaker.  Those sites draw tech-savvy and politics-savvy audiences.  Even with the support of conservative sites like RedState, the average American is unlikely to see the content, and the only Congressional staffers who will see it are the ones charged with monitoring the blogs.

Overall, we should feel good about this one.  It was a remarkable tactic, and demonstrates that the big companies in the digital environment are beginning to recognize that they have to push back against the big companies from the traditional entertainment environment.  That’s no revolution – Google is still a corporation, after all  – but it provides a bit more pluralistic balance in a policy arena that has been where the MPAA has gone unchallenged and unchecked for far too long.

*There was a sort-of precursor in the 1990s, when early “netizens” protested a managerial decision at geocities by turning their geocities pages dark.

I’ve just started reading David Weinberger’s newest book, Too Big To Know.*  For those who don’t know his work, Weinberger is one of the big thinkers at the Berkman Center.  I’m a longtime fan… his first couple books provided an influential push toward my current field of research.

In the prologue, he raises the following question:

“…should a professor who is shaping the discipline’s discussion through her mighty participation in online and social media get tenure even if she hasn’t published sufficiently in peer-reviewed journals?”

This gets talked about a lot in the circles I inhabit.  Speaking as a professor-who-blogs, my answer might surprise you:

No.  Or at least, Not Yet.

I do believe that more academics should blog.  Blogging offers both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards to academic researchers. It pushes us to write clearly for an audience, sharpening our writing and thinking.  It provides immediate gratification, sorely absent from the peer-review process.  It raises your profile within the field, which can yield additional research opportunities.  It lets you speak to wider audiences, which can help allay bouts of existential angst and answer difficult questions during holiday visits with relatives.

My own blogging experience has been positive in all these ways.  Most of my peer-reviewed articles have begun as blog posts (“Understanding Blogspace,” “Macaca Moments Revisited,” “Online Political Mobilization from the Advocacy Group’s Perspective,” and “Implications of the Mobile Web for Online/Offline Reputation Management” all got their start at shoutingloudly).  I’ve also enjoyed the experience of attending conferences and being told “oh, I read your blog post last week.”  As a young scholar in a nascent field, it still comes as a shock to learn that someone other than my mother reads this thing!

I generally try to write out an idea when it is fresh.  Sometimes it gets helpful feedback from readers in the comment section.  More often it just forces me to clearly explain what my point is.  After months of losing myself in the research, this provides a lodestone of sorts.  Being able to go back to the initial impetus sharpens the mind and helps you dig an argument out the mess of data.

Perhaps more importantly, blogging helps to shape my research agenda.  The process of writing for an audience leads me to flesh out lines of thought that otherwise would stay murky.  Those, in turn, drive the course of my research.  Being an active blogger makes me a more active scholar.**

That said, we should acknowledge two limitations on academic blogging: it is bite-sized and it is not (yet) a central forum in academia.

1,000 words is long for a blog post.  Most posts are more like 500-750 words.  An academic article, by contrast, will run between 6,000-10,000 words.  Hyperlinks mediate the difference somewhat — instead of devoting column-inches to describing competing arguments, you can link to them online.  Still, peer-reviewed research represents a level of detail that blogs don’t reach.  A good research article delves into complexity in ways that a good blog post cannot and should not.

I have had plenty of ideas that appeared ironclad in 600 words.  It was only when I attempted to write them in 6,000 words that I saw problems crop up.  This is a good thing — nothing sharpens the mind like realizing “huh, I guess I was wrong about that.”  But for this reason, peer-reviewed articles ought to remain the “coin of the realm,” where tenure and promotion are concerned.

Likewise, academia is a slow-moving professional field.  As my friend C.W. Anderson remarked to me, “ours is the only profession that is paid to think slowly.” That is also a good thing, but it means that the discipline is institutionally conservative and tends to adopt new communications media reluctantly.  As a result, while there are some great academic blogs out there, none meet Weinberger’s standard of “shaping the discipline’s discussion.”

Peer-reviewed articles enjoy a privileged position in tenure, promotion, and hiring decisions.  That’s because peer-reviewed articles are where the various disciplines’ discussions occur.  We assign one another’s articles in the classroom.  We cite one another’s articles in our research.  We attend conferences centered around early versions of these long-form research articles.  This may very well change in my lifetime, but it isn’t going to change anytime soon.

So no, I don’t believe an academic who excels through blogging and social media ought to receive tenure on that basis.  Academics ought to blog and tweet, and they can benefit from doing so.  But those benefits ought to translate into improved long-form research output.  If those benefits fail to translate into research articles, I would consider that reason for serious concern.  We are supposed to think deeply and rigorously.  Blogs and twitter can aid such thinking, but they provide a tricky venue if not augmented by lengthier articles that have gone through the (sometimes brutal) process of anonymous peer-review.

—-

*This is a great season to be an internet politics geek… new books Weinberger, Clay Johnson, Rebecca MacKinnon, and Joseph Turow are all hitting the shelves.  I’ll post some reviews to the blog as I make my way through them.

**Within limits.  I blog 2-3 times per week at most.  If I was blogging 2-3 times per day, I can’t imagine finding time for much else.

We’re in trouble. The future of the internet is in danger, and if that danger comes to pass, it’s both unhealthy for and a very bad indicator of the health of our democracy.

Congress is already very close to passing companion bills to censor the internet, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, H.R. 3261) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA, S. 968). This is in addition to the domain name seizures already underway by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

All of these efforts are terrible ideas. Their supporters don’t understand or care about the internet and are happily willing to break the internet to appease the content industry. It is among the very worst contemporary examples of a government that is of, by, and for special interests, and if it passes, it will be a slap in the face of democracy, free expression, due process, and technological innovation. To top it all? It won’t even do much to stop online infringement.

Fortunately, there may be signs that things are turning our way. I’ll get to that further below.

EFF has a great summary of the several ways SOPA can lead to a site getting shut down. Section 102 deals with foreign sites and is the most all-encompassing, but 103 and 104 are actually easier for rights holders to (mis)use, and they apply to domestic as well as foreign sites, so I’ll start there.

Section 103 allows IP rights holders to go directly to a website’s payment processors and advertisers—and to demand that these third parties cease all business with the website operator. These payment processors and advertisers then have just five days to act. The website operator has the right to file a counter-notice that they are not substantially dedicated to infringement, but (a) they may not get the chance until after the payment processors and advertisers have already cut off payments, and (b) the third parties have no obligation to take the counter-notice as final and re-establish a business relationship.

Section 104 takes this “default=censorship” strategy even further. Everyone in the internet ecosystem—registrars, web hosts, advertisers, financial processors, search engines, etc. etc.—gets near-categorical federal and state immunity for any decision to terminate a business relationship with a site (or even to shutter a site) “in the reasonable belief” that the site is dedicated to infringement. Under Section 103, a rights holder must at least file a claim. Under Section 104, even the intimation that a site is infringing might be enough to get it shut down—and the site would have no legal recourse.

The Administration also gets in on the fun in Section 102, which gives the Attorney General the power to use government-mandated Domain Name System (DNS) filtering to stop Americans from accessing “foreign infringing sites.” A domain name, such as Google.com, is an easy-to-remember way to tell one’s computer to go to a specific numeric address (e.g., 74.125.39.147). It is this number (the IP address) that identifies that site’s server (the computer that hosts the website). Everyone enters the domain name into their browser’s internet address bar, but the numbers would take one to the same site. Click on the numbers above or paste them into your browser to see for yourself.

Under Section 102, if a site were found to be primarily dedicated to infringement, the government could “seize” the site’s domain name. More precisely, the domain name registrar—a company that keeps track of which domain names are attached to which servers—would, if US-based, be compelled to stop sending users to the correct server. All domestic ISPs would also be forbidden to take you to the right server (the number behind the name), and advertisers and banks would be forbidden from doing business with these companies.

If the government found a foreign site to be infringing under these bills, the government would try to make it disappear for US audiences.

If this bill becomes law, we will see the shuttering and/or financial starvation of thousands of websites—which are, of course, a form of speech and/or press. They would be silenced and/or starved based on either an affidavit by a rights holder, a mere suspicion by a business partner, or (at best!) a one-sided court hearing with a low burden of proof. Little wonder then that legal scholars from (my friend and) rising star Marvin Amorri to the legendary constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe (pdf) have concluded that the bills are unconstitutional threats to the First Amendment.

By now it should be clear that, if passed into law, SOPA or PIPA would have devastating consequences for innocent actors who are mistakenly identified. The web seizures undertaken by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), beginning in 2010, illustrate this peril all too well. Several websites have been taken down for posting media files that were authorized and even actively shared by the copyright holders or their representatives. Others have apparently been seized merely for linking to allegedly infringing content.

One in particular, DaJaz1.com, has become the cause célèbre of the anti-domain-seizures movement. It was one of a cluster of hip hop websites seized last year. Major voices from Vibe to Kanye to P. Diddy were actively promoting the sites, hardly a sign that they are dedicated to copyright infringement.

Last week, the feds finally gave up on DaJaz1. TechDirt (which has nearly gone all-SOPA, all-the-time) had the headline:

Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details…

Their opening clarifies exactly how unconstitutional this is:

Imagine if the US government, with no notice or warning, raided a small but popular magazine’s offices over a Thanksgiving weekend, seized the company’s printing presses, and told the world that the magazine was a criminal enterprise with a giant banner on their building. Then imagine that it never arrested anyone, never let a trial happen, and filed everything about the case under seal, not even letting the magazine’s lawyers talk to the judge presiding over the case. And it continued to deny any due process at all for over a year, before finally just handing everything back to the magazine and pretending nothing happened. I expect most people would be outraged. I expect that nearly all of you would say that’s a classic case of prior restraint, a massive First Amendment violation, and exactly the kind of thing that does not, or should not, happen in the United States.

They go on to detail how DaJaz1’s owners were stonewalled, blockaded, and never allowed their day in court by the feds—for over a year—while the feds managed to arrange a court process during which all court proceedings (including several granting extensions that DaJaz1’s owners should have been able to contest) were secret and all the filings were sealed and not open to the site owners.

Once the details of the accusations came out, it turned out that the allegedly infringing songs were given directly to the blog by copyright holders’ agents in the hopes of promoting the music. The RIAA was the source of the original complaint, and one of the songs in question was not even released by an RIAA label.

Another operation using similar methods but for a different goal—seizing sites with child pornography—mistakenly took down 84,000 sites in one shot, resulting in each of those thousands of sites being down for 3 days. Even worse, each domain was redirected to an ICE notice that the website had been seized for trafficking in child pornography. Nearly all of those sites were not dedicated to child pornography, and to my knowledge, ICE never even apologized to them for the error.

Further, it takes little imagination to picture a devastating chill on legitimate sites that make fair uses of copyrighted content. If I run a news and commentary site, I may be less likely to include portions of copyrighted works, even if such inclusion is very likely fair use and crucially relevant to my discussion of the matters at hand.

In particular, media criticism sites would be in grave peril; how long after the bill’s passage would it be before partisan news outlets started using the new law to silence their critics? How long before FoxNews goes after Media Matters for America? Think that’s far fetched? Witness Righthaven’s efforts to sue bloggers for using even brief quotations. And what was on the list of threats they used to scare people into paying licensing fees? Domain seizure. Among other things, these bills would give a hunting license for those who would like to shutter the sites of upstarts, competitors, and critics.

At least these bills will stop piracy, right? Hardly.

Dedicated infringers will still find infringing sites—especially foreign sites that host infringing files with impunity. Remember, the feds are seizing the site name (e.g., Google.com) but not the number behind it (74.125.39.147). All you need is a small program to tell your computer to go to the right number—and, because the bill will forbid your ISP from getting you there, a proxy server in the middle. The same strategies have already proven successful for dissidents behind government firewalls, who still manage to upload and download forbidden information—despite far more active, on-the-fly, and resource-intensive censorship schemes.

Programmers have already developed tools to work around these restrictions. The law hasn’t even passed yet, and already there is a Firefox plugin that would help users work around SOPA-like restrictions.

You might think that at least payment processors and advertiser networks would be scared off of dealing with these sites. If it were that easy—if we could target the banks and advertisers that support internet scofflaws—then spam and other internet evils would have long since been wiped out.

The internet breeds decentralized innovation, and innovators will spring into action to help users circumvent ISP and search engine filters as well. This software will also be considered grounds for legal action—with the goal being to ban the tools, as the 1998 DMCA bans DRM-hacking devices. That’s worked so poorly that multiple free circumvention tools are available for most major DRM systems. There are so many DVD rippers that LifeHacker has a post comparing rippers to help you choose the best.

As if all of the above failures and offenses were not enough, these bills would harm our economy and reduce our competitiveness in the internet age. If SOPA were law when YouTube was getting started, the site probably would have been shuttered. The next YouTube will be much less likely to be born in the US if it can be kicked out of the legitimate portion of the web before it has really grown up. The EFF warns that sites like Etsy, Flickr, and Vimeo would be in danger.

Internet innovation is one of the few bright spots in the economy, and major internet firms have warned that this will increase the cost of regulatory compliance and decrease our competitiveness. Venture capitalists have also warned that SOPA would substantially decrease their willingness to invest in US technology start-ups. Union Square Ventures, just down the street here in NYC, even put this link saying the same thing on their homepage.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has placed a hold on PROTECT-IP, and he has even vowed to filibuster the bill should it come to the Senate floor. Because of this principled opposition and his long record of standing up for internet freedom, I made a donation to Sen. Wyden’s re-election campaign—even though my wife and I are watching every dollar as we save to buy our first home.

So these bills are terrrrrible, but they enjoy a lot of support in the House and Senate—30 cosponsors in the House, and a whopping 40 in the Senate. This post is derived from an email I sent to my Senators and Representative, and all three wrote back with disappointing notes to the effect of, “Yeah, but we gotta stop internet infringement.” Surely this is unrelated to the content industries having spent far, far more money on lobbying and campaign donations than their opponents on this issue.

Which brings us back to democracy.

In response to these bills, we have seen the swelling of a major internet movement—nearly the groundswell we saw around network neutrality in 2006. Opponents created a campaign declaring November 16—the day of a hearing in the House that was heavily stacked in favor of SOPA—as “American Censorship Day,” a campaign that went viral in a major way. Over 6,000 sites including Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Mozilla (including the default start page in Firefox), Reddit, TechDirt, and BoingBoing, directed traffic to a single action site, AmericanCensorship.org. At the time, the site said that it had generated over 1,000,000 emails and four calls per second to Congress. To date, AmericanCensorship.org has earned over 650,000 Facebook likes and 63,000 tweets.

This is democracy in action. After all, most people don’t support draconian copyright enforcement, and a solid majority of people oppose government attempts to block access to infringing materials. (40% support, 56% oppose; this skews to 33% for, 64% against when framed as censorship.)

If Wyden’s hold and the opposition can stop this fast-moving train(wreck), then perhaps democratic values and majority opinion can actually shape the future of the internet. Just maybe, a public outcry can stop a terrible idea backed by special interests.

If not, we may be in big trouble—and not just because the internet will be broken.

Justin Elliott has an interesting post up at Salon today.  It concerns “The Freedom Community,” a secret e-mail list made up of conservative journalists and policy-types.  I can’t say much more about the list itself, because it’s secret.  Its very existence has been scrubbed from Google-Groups since he contacted one of its participants with questions.

I’ve written about these Google-Group listservs* before, particularly surrounding the 2010 JournoList/Weigelgate controversy.  These e-mail lists make up a hidden network architecture for the progressive netroots.  There are (probably) thousands of them.  They can be set up (and taken down) within minutes, and Google’s architecture makes them technically impossible to taxonomize.  They’re useful for promoting discussion and debate amongst clusters of networked individuals — people who work on the same thing or have similar interests, but aren’t working for the same organization or based in the same location.  Think of them as watering hole conversations, but digital and more diffuse.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with network backchannels.  They’re a useful and utterly sensible tool.  But one of the interesting things in the JournoList controversy was that conservative activists elevated them to full-fledged Boogeyman status.  The claim was repeatedly asserted that (1) this was proof of a “liberal media conspiracy” and (2) that no such lists exist on the Right.

I took on the first assertion in a paper for the 2010 APSA Annual Meeting, “Beyond Citizen Journalism: Weigelgate, Journolist, and America’s Shifting Media Ecology.”  It’s a silly and outlandlish argument (it persists on Tucker Carlson’s site, the Daily Caller.  That says more about Carlson than it does about the assertion, though).

The second assertion always struck me as unlikely.  ”Really, there are no conservative Google-Groups?”  Why the hell wouldn’t there be?  They’re easy-to-create, pretty useful, and occasionally fun, after all.  But since they’re technically impossible to find (you don’t know about them unless they’re “leaked” or you’re invited to join), it wasn’t an assertion I could directly disprove through research.

Well, here’s the proof.  The Freedom Community is a network backchannel.  Apparently its a pretty secretive one (not surprising, given how conservative activists demonized Journolist).  That’s their choice, and I’ll go on record saying that its unlikely its being used for any genuine conspiracies.  But anyone keeping score ought to take note: the Right uses these same Network Backchannels.  They just stay quieter about them.

*Interesting lesson from my copy-editor: Google-Groups apparently aren’t listservs.  In fact, listservs aren’t listservs.  LISTSERV is a registered trademark, and has been since 1986.  I’m baffled by this little factoid.  It’s on a level with “Happy Birthday” being litigiously copyright-protected.

…Seriously, there is no excuse for frequent visitors of Shouting Loudly to not also be reading David Meyer’s commentary at Politics Outdoors.  He just negated two posts that I was planning to write, because he went ahead and wrote them better.

The second post, “Occupy Wall Street Needs an Exit Strategy” is particularly important.  The occupations are currently working phenomenally well, but we should keep in mind that they are symbolic actions.  Zuccotti Park isn’t actually Wall Street.  The occupiers aren’t shutting anything down; they’re shining a spotlight.  And that spotlight, for the moment, is bright.

Eventually, however, the poetry of this symbolic action will fade.  On month 6, day 4 of the occupation, there won’t be much media coverage – not because of a “blackout,” but because just about every newsworthy angle will have been explored in exhaustive detail.  At that point (well before it, actually), the protests will need to morph into some other form in order to maintain their symbolic resonance.  I’m not sure what that form needs to be, and the change doesn’t have to happen particularly soon, but a change surely needs to come eventually if these protests are to continue seizing the national imagination and influencing the national conversation.

Likewise, Jack Goldstone makes a number of smart points in a post at New Population Bomb.  He says that, particularly if the institutional left (donors, in particular) lines up behind #OWS and adds resources, then it could be the Tea Party of the left.  That left-right symmetry is an interesting puzzle.  I certainly think that #OWS is the nearest equivalent available to the tea party.  But the network structure of the left and the right is different enough (particularly within donor alliances — the Democracy Alliance has nowhere near the resource coordination of the Kochs and Coorses), and the relationship to major media operations (*cough* Newscorp *cough*) mean that we’re unlikely to see a parallel trajectory.

Finally, Sid Tarrow takes the counter-perspective in a piece at Foreign Affairs, “Why Occupy Wall Street is not the Tea Party of the Left.” I’d offer a variation on Tarrow’s remarks.  I think he’s right that #OWS is something new, and that previous social movements are only a weak guide for understanding it.  But, as I’ve written before, the same seems to be the case for the Tea Party.  The Tea Party is not united around one specific demand.  It is (to quote Van Jones) a “meta-brand.”  I’ve felt for quite awhile that the Tea Party is an ill-fit for our traditional conceptions of social movements.  #OWS is an ill-fit in largely the same ways.

[h/t to Jennifer Hadden for pointing several of these links out to me.  You should read her work.  And she should start a blog (or join this one).]

Okay, let’s be clear #OccupyWallStreet has gotten awesome.  There are now solidarity occupations in 250+ locations nationwide.  Labor Unions and the Netroots are fully onboard, and yesterday afternoon’s march in NYC had somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 participants.  As Jon Stewart put it last night, the media attention has gone “from blackout to frenzy.”  Impressive stuff, on every count.

Two of the best pieces I’ve read recently on the topic come from Ezra Klein’s Wonkbook.  The first is a guest post by Rick Yeselson, “The four habits of highly successful social movements.”  The second, by Ezra himself, is titled ‘A tipping point for Occupy Wall Street.”

We’re now at the point where the two “ontologies” I’ve been talking about (organizing-as-public-art and organizing-as-public-process) come together.  Credit to Adbusters and the rest of that community — they’ve accomplished something that Alinsky-style organizing almost never does.  #OWS taps into a vein of broad public discontent.  The lack of a clear target, the lack of clear goals, has become a virtue rather than a vice.  As Ezra puts it “Occupy Wall Street has created a space for some type of populist movement to emerge.”  Community organizing is great for putting specific pressure on specific targets.  Broad cultural gestalts are outside of the organizing-as-public-process toolbox, though.

One thing that we’re going to begin to see now is a tension between these two styles, and the networks and organizations associated with them.  I was at the Rebuild the American Dream/Take Back America conference (#takeback11) earlier this week, and every single speaker made reference to the occupiers.  They then drew connections between the protest events and their specific issue agendas.  #OWS is a reason to oppose Bank of America.  It’s a reason to pass the American Jobs Act.  It’s a reason to support Net Neutrality (Demand Progress sent out an e-mail urging supporters to #occupytheinternet).  It’s a reason to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline.

The influx of these new organizations can occur artfully or poorly.  They need to know that this protest did not originate with them, and treat the original activists who have been camping out for weeks with respect.  I want to highlight two positive examples here, that I hope to see many organizations emulate:

The first comes from Chris Bowers, of DailyKos.  Chris was on a panel at #takeback11, and was asked what advice he had for the occupiers.  His response (I’m paraphrasing) was, “I don’t have any advice for them, I think they’re doing great on their own.  I just want to find ways I can help.”  He then gave a concrete example — the flood of interest in #occupy events was causing occupytogether.org, so he was setting up mirror sites through DailyKos to help out.  That’s pitch perfect: this isn’t a case where “the pro’s have no arrived.”  It’s a case where one style of activism has achieved something that another style couldn’t.  Now both are needed, and face the difficult task of coexisting.  Respect goes a long way, in that regard.

The second comes from Democracy for America.  DFA, like all the other netroots and labor groups, sent out e-mails yesterday urging people to attend the rally.  Then they also sent out an additional action request:

“Dave,

The Occupy Wall Street protest is a watershed moment.

For weeks, protesters have been camped out in Liberty Square near Wall Street.

They are marching during the day and sleeping on the street at night, facing arrest and police violence. They are gaining media attention, inspiring thousands more to join them every day in New York and in cities across the country — and they are giving a voice to the American working class that has been attacked by big corporations and their allies in Congress.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters are standing up for us — because of that, thousands of people across the country have joined together to send them food to keep them going.

These donations have worked. They’ve kept the occupation strong. But it’s October in New York City and getting colder each day.

 Protesters are now in immediate need of 200 sleeping bags to keep warm and keep the occupation going.

Donate $20 here to buy a sleeping bag to keep the occupation going in the cold.“

The donation link goes to the NYC General Assembly donation page.

I can’t stress enough how important solidarity acts like this are.  Don’t use #OWS as an opportunity to fundraise for yourselves.  Offer direct support.  Then also add that the occupation is connected to the concrete policy proposals that your organization has been organizing around.

We’re in an exceedingly rare moment right now with #ows.  I don’t know what comes next, exactly.  There is no clear endgame.  It’s an exciting time, though – one in which terms like “cultural zeitgeist” seem not-so-overwrought.  Progressive organizers, activists, and organizations should all draw upon and participate with the #ows crowd.  In so doing, it’s going to be especially important that they “play well with others.”  Chris Bowers and DFA are two positive examples.  Hopefully I won’t need to write a follow-up post that lists and shames organizations that provide bad examples.

The #occupywallstreet protests are entering their third week, and have started to attract some real attention.  After a police brutality incident last weekend, mainstream media sources have begun paying attention.  Major unions and netroots groups have voted to support the protests, and the core of a few hundred “occupiers” show no sign of leaving Zuccotti Park anytime soon.  A particularly poignant Tumblr site, “We are the 99%,” has been aggregating stories of the genuine carnage left by our current economic mess.  Solidarity “occupations” are cropping up in dozens of cities as well.

I’ve read a couple of interesting takes on this development recently — Micah Sifry and Mark Engler are both worth a read.  Credit where credit is due, the protests are proving to have a lot more staying power than I had expected when I wrote my original post.  Mea culpa, I spoke a bit too soon.  That said, the successes of the event are of a very particular type.  They’re succeeding in spreading a meme, even while lacking a clear demand or clear target.  I think that helps further highlight the competing “ontologies of organizing” that I was discussing last time.  What I wrote then was:

“There are (at least) two ontologies of organizing.  Folks from the Micah White/culture jammer tradition believe that activism is about offering a radical critique of modern society and shining a light on corporate power.  Folks from the Marshall Ganz/community organizing tradition believe that activism is about winning tangible victories that improve people’s lives, change the balance of power, and give people a sense of their own power.”

#OccupyWallStreet has been a success in the activism-as-public-art sense.  The meme has drawn attention, spread, and become something of a touchstone for people wanting to talk about the utter collapse of the American Dream.  The images and language resonate.  The hashtag has gone viral.  That’s a meaningful achievement, one that community organizing can rarely achieve.

The ongoing problems with the action lie in the activism-as-public-process domain.  Two weeks in, they still have no specific demand.  They aren’t applying and escalating pressure on specific targets who can eventually give them what they want.  What would a tangible victory for the #occupiers look like, exactly?  It has been easy for journalists to dismiss and conservatives to caricature, because there is no clear message to maintain discipline around.

What’s more, the action itself isn’t all that large.  I stopped by yesterday in an effort to figure out what I was missing.  From a block and a half away, you’d have no idea that there’s a protest going on.  The park isn’t all that large, and ambient traffic noise means that any coordinated chants are impossible to hear.  Wall Street isn’t being occupied.  The NYSE is neither being shut down nor even inconvenienced.  In the Alinskyite mode of campaign organizing, there’s still plenty to cringe at.  Measured by their own initial benchmarks – 20,000 people, in an ongoing encampment – the action hasn’t performed well.

But that’s the point: activism-as-public-art is tremendously valuable, but ontologically distinct from activism-as-public-process.  It’s a different beast than the strategic mobilization of citizen power that we generally practice in community organizing and political advocacy campaigns.  Its success is measured in different ways.  It has a different social utility.  As such, it doesn’t really matter whether 200, 2,000, or 20,000 people are physically present in Zuccotti Park – either way, they’re not going to actually shut down the NYSE .  The purpose is to inject culturally resonant imagery into the public discourse.  The notion that “young people are rising up, occupying Wall Street itself,” is powerful, regardless of numbers.

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The nice thing about cultural touchstones like this is that they can become a rallying point to organize around.  We’re already seeing it a bit, with Van Jones (from Rebuild the Dream) invoking the occupation and relating it to the organization’s mission and goals.  We’ll see more of it soon.  Groups will use the hashtag to argue for the American Jobs Act, or in campaigns to pressure Bank of America.  Yesterday the Progressive Change Campaign Committee tweeted, “BREAKING: CA Attorney General Kamala Harris rejects bank immunity! Join 75,000 @BoldProgressives: http://pccc.me/qxTvbk #occupywallstreet.” The lack of any clear demands by the occupiers makes #occupywallstreet a meta-brand of sorts.  And that’s a good thing.  The original occupiers won’t like it, and they’re sure to complain that more traditional, reformist organizations are diluting the message.  But it could prove to be a powerful mixture, particularly if everyone “plays nice” with one another.

#occupyWallStreet is succeeding as activism-as-public-art.  It isn’t putting specific pressure on specific, powerful targets, though.  Ontologically, that’s not what that sort of activism is attempting to do.  Now the other types of activists (the community organizers/activism-as-public-process types) will start building off of that success, using it to advance specific goals and leverage pressure on specific targets.  And that’s when things might get particularly interesting.

Here’s a letter I’ve just sent to my city councilmember, Stephen Levin, and Mayor Bloomberg:

Dear Councilmember Levin,

I am a voter in your district and I am writing to express my deep and utter outrage at the NYPD’s documented mistreatment of peaceful protesters. This is already a long-established and shameful part of NYPD’s legacy, but I am writing in particular to address incidents surrounding the protests during the past week.

The first and most egregious appeared on the Times’ City Room blog, at:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/video-appears-to-show-protesters-being-pepper-sprayed/

I assume this is already on your radar and that, in light of it, you were already intending on demanding an investigation, including the public naming and criminal prosecution of the officer who pepper-sprayed these already-detained women in the face. If this officer is not indicted and tried for this action, I will not be alone in deciding that the NYPD is officially above the law.

As a professor of media studies, I am also particularly disturbed by the apparent willingness of police to treat journalists as protesters and to harass and even arrest them. See photographs showing as much here:

http://davidscameracraft.blogspot.com/2011/09/occupy-wall-street-march-violence.html

In at least two of the photos, the photographer identifies people who were arrested for reporting on the protests—including one who is a reporter for PBS.

We live in a country where the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, of the press, and to assemble peaceably are supposed to be inviolable. These actions leave me deeply concerned that the city is willing to allow (or even, dare I suggest as much, encourage–at least in some quarters) the NYPD to trample on these sacred constitutional rights. No protest of any size could do as much to bring shame upon this city as the NYPD have done in the last week.

If the Constitution means anything to you, sir, I urge you to demand a systemic investigation and, where appropriate, criminal prosecutions–especially when an officer will sadistically injure helpless citizens.

Sincerely,
Bill D. Herman
Assistant Professor
Department of Film & Media Studies
Hunter College, City University of New York

This weekend was the #occupywallst protest in New York.  Micah White has another post up at The Guardian’s blog, labeling it a grand success.  Others (including myself) are not so sure.  The stated public expectation was that 20,000 protesters would arrive, form a tent city, and hold Wall St for several weeks.  Instead, a few thousand showed up, and most of those left within a day.  The police put up barricades in preparation for the coming anarchy.  Instead, they aren’t even bothering to arrest the remaining protesters (who didn’t bother to get a permit).

I spent the weekend monitoring the #occupywallst twitter stream.  There wasn’t much traffic, particularly for an action drawing support from Anonymous.  It mostly fell into two groups: (1) participants complaining about the “media blackout,” and (2) conservatives making fun of leftist caricatures.  I have a bit to say about each of these.

Regarding the “media blackout,” I’ll come right out and say it: the media didn’t cover this because it wasn’t newsworthy.  The planning and execution for this event were lackluster.  The Theory of Change was nonexistent.

Sometimes, the media actively ignores large-scale collective action.  The protesters in Wisconsin last winter had good reason to be upset — that was the largest sustained labor protest in a generation, and editorial staff decided to focus on Charlie Sheen instead.  But #occupywallst was no #wiunion.  And there’s a lesson in that.

Anarchists and radical organizers have a bit of collective amnesia with regards to the “Battle of Seattle.”  The kids in black bandanas were only a very small part of the coalition that shut down the city in October, 1999.  Their acts of childish violence against a Starbucks may have become the lasting public image of the event, but they were hardly representative.  The bulk of that anti-globalization protest was composed of labor unions, environmentalists, and other organized progressives.  All of those groups have deep traditions based in the community organizing traditions of Saul Alinsky and Cesar Chavez.  The real work of organizing bears little resemblance to the attention-grabbing “culture jammers.”  The real work involves “talking to one person, then talking to another person, then talking to another.”  Organizing is slow, difficult, often thankless, but deeply meaningful work.  There are “rules,” you see, even for radicals.

#Occupywallst got no coverage on MSNBC.  It got basically no coverage on DailyKos.  MoveOn, the PCCC, Rebuild the Dream, and Democracy for America all had better things to do with their time.  Adbusters’s “Our Tahrir Square” analogies quickly moved from offensive to pathetic.  The netroots and the rest of the progressive movement completely ignored this non-event.

At the end of the day, the failure of this protest animates a deep, longstanding ontological divide within the activist community.  There are (at least) two ontologies of organizing.  Folks from the Micah White/culture jammer tradition believe that activism is about offering a radical critique of modern society and shining a light on corporate power.  Folks from the Marshall Ganz/community organizing tradition believe that activism is about winning tangible victories that improve people’s lives, change the balance of power, and give people a sense of their own power.*

The culture jammers are practicing activism-as-public-art.  The community organizers are practicing activism-as-public-process.  Both have their place, but we rarely spell out the differences.  And they’ll lead you in very different directions.  When culture jammers pretend to be organizers, it turns out poorly.  That’s what happened this weekend, in a nutshell.

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As for the conservative hecklers… well, that was to be expected.  Conservative activists spend a lot of time obsessing over radical leftism.  They think that everyone from Paul Krugman to Barack Obama to the Sierra Club is a socialist/communist.  In truth, there are hardly any socialists left within the Left.  When actual socialists and actual communists start screaming for attention, its a bit like spotting a leprechaun.

But I’ve got one thing to say to Michelle Malkin, who referred to the protesters as “Alinskyites:”

You know nothing of [Alinsky's] work.

#occupywallst was not in the tradition of Alinsky.  It lacked a clear target.  It did not leverage power towards a realizable goal.  It did not fit together into a broader strategic campaign aimed at forcing powerful actors to behave in keeping with the goals and interests of a community.

You want to see Alinskyites?  Go to Rebuild the Dream’s Take Back the American Dream Conference, October 3-5 in DC.  That’s where the community organizers will be.  And you’ll find both their goals, their tactics, and their rhetoric a lot harder to caricature.

*Those are the “three principles of organizing” as outlined by The Midwest Academy in Organizing for Social Change