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.

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).]

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.

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.

—

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.

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.

—

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

They’ve decided to label it “Our Tahrir Moment,” because they’re, y’know, not very classy. (Egyptian activists spent years risking their lives in organizing protests that set the groundwork for Tahrir.  Adbusters has written a few blog posts, created an independent website, and pre-announced that if they fail,” it’s MoveOn’s fault!”  The analogy offends my sensibilities, I’ll admit it.)

One new addition is that Anonymous has apparently  decided to participate in this thing.  My official academic stance on Anonymous is “I don’t understand this and it is analytically fascinating.”  So who knows, they could make it interesting.  Anonymous tends to pull off big collective actions that I assume won’t/can’t go anywhere.  Color me curious.

Nonetheless, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Micah White et al’s more-radical-than-though event will be an utter flop.  They’re claiming 20,000 people will show up and stay there for multiple days.  I really, really doubt it.  And in advance of his public announcement that it’s because of “Clicktivism,” I’d like to once again point out that (1) organizing is hard and (2) there is no evidence that this crowd is any good at organizing.

I plan on stopping by the event tomorrow.  Not to participate, but to watch.  Follow me on Twitter at @davekarpf if you want to read my livetweets (which will likely be quasi-heckling).  And I’ll also post some sort of a writeup or reflection to shoutingloudly next week.

Micah White just came out with another “assault on clicktivism” article.  This one is even more absurd than the last.  (My previous response to White is here.)

I’ve never met Micah White.  But he strikes me as the worst type of leftwing activist.  He’s like one of those fifth-year-senior college socialists who *still* think the workers of the world are going to unite any day now.  They choose tactics because they’re exhilarating and fun.  They don’t listen to criticisms from allies.  And then they announce that the lack of revolutionary fervor among fellow progressives is the true problem.

In this case, his theory of why the workers of the world haven’t thrown off their shackles is, literally, “it’s MoveOn’s fault!”

White is a senior editor at Adbusters.  He has become convinced that digital activism, as practiced by MoveOn, PCCC, GetUp, DFA, Avaaz, and pretty much every other prominent netroots advocacy organization is “degrading” leftwing activism.

(…Yeah, I know what you’re think right now.  ”Wait, Adbusters is still being published?!?”)

In his latest missive, White complains that clicktivism has been “deployed by a dying American empire … to cripple the revolutionary potential of a whole generation.”

His problem with MoveOn isn’t that  e-petition are too easy.  His problem is that MoveOn makes use of “marketing culture.”  Netroots groups like MoveOn use A/B testing to gather passive democratic feedback from the membership.  Your decision to open a message and take an action tells a netroots organization something about the will of the membership. It also informs decisions about what actions to request and what message frames to employ.

Call me a sellout if you’d like, but that kinda sounds like a good thing.  During my time on the Sierra Club Board, we often wished for that sort of membership feedback (hell, any sort of membership feedback).  We designed processes – online and offline – for gathering such feedback.  But they could be tremendously slow and sometimes costly.  A/B testing isn’t perfect, but I just can’t muster a lot of anger at organizations that develop new tools for listening to their membership.

White also rails against MoveOn’s use of backchannel e-mail lists, writing:

“It is worth noting that past MoveOn employees communicate via a private email list and thereby accomplish one of their greatest deceits of all: using their organizations as mouthpieces to celebrate each other publicly without disclosing their back-room personal ties.”

Um…

No.  It is not “worth noting” that past MoveOn employees have a listserv.  That’s neither surprising nor controversial.  Past Sierra Club Board members also have a listserv.  So do a bunch of friends I made at a conference one time.  There’s even a listserv for everyone who participated in a high school training I ran for the Sierra Student Coalition in 1998. Listservs are simple and easy.  Networked professionals use listservs to maintain connections, particularly once formal work-ties have dissolved.  EVERYONE knows that.  It’s the opposite of “worth noting.”  It’s common knowledge, and not the least bit deceitful.

The deepest pathology in White’s article comes in its second paragraph, where he writes, “If #OCCUPYWALLSTREET fails, it will be because we’ve blindly adopted “best practices” put forth by wealthy Californian techies turned reformist campaigners.”

#occupywallstreet is an action that Adbusters is planning for the fall.  They’ve decided that 20,000 activists will descend on Wall Street and stay there until “their demand for real democracy is met.”  (Seriously, what kind of theory-of-change is that?  Sign this guy up for a New Organizing Institute training.  The most basic one available.)  White is already announcing, 6 weeks beforehand, that when this utterly fails, it’ll be the fault of MoveOn, Avaaz, Color of Change, and the PCCC.

Here’s the thing: just yesterday, 15,000 Rebuild the Dream supporters attended district meetings at congressional offices.  The PCCC and DFA meanwhile are working round-the-clock on the Wisconsin recall elections.  They’ve developed excellent campaign ads, fielded 3 dozen organizers, and have nationwide volunteers making GOTV calls through calloutthevote.com.  That’s real organizing.  It’s powerful, and time-consuming, and substantive, and not-at-all-just-signing-epetitions.  The “clicktivism” that White bemoans is being used to mobilize serious, sustained collective action, both online and offline.

Micah White should stop blaming the netroots for his organization’s irrelevance.  His organization is irrelevant because it is apparently run by people who lack a single ounce of critical self-reflection.  Frankly, I don’t think White has the organizing chops to get 20,000 to engage in mass civil disobedience.  That’s tough work, and he appears to be more interested in writing flowery prose, bitching about actual organizing.  That always bugged me when I was a full-time organizer.  It bugs me even more now.

There are plenty of thoughtful critiques to be made of the political netroots.  But this just isn’t one of them.

Jeff Jarvis had some fun on twitter this weekend.  After a day spent reading news about the debt limit, and a nice  pinot noir with dinner, he tweeted, ”Hey, Washington assholes, it’s our country, our economy, our money. Stop fucking with it.”  Encouraged by some of his replies and retweets, he turned it into a hashtag, #fuckyouwashington.  It didn’t *technically* reach the trending topics list — twitter management censors for language a bit — but it did pick up steam, with 10,000 or so people writing their own #fuckyouwashington message.

So far, so good.  I scanned the tweets while standing in line at Trader Joe’s Saturday night.  It was pretty entertaining.  The debt ceiling negotiations are patently absurd.  A routine congressional vote has been converted into a mighty standoff that might bring down the global economy, all because Republican legislators are more beholden to the most conservative elements of their base than they are to managing the damn country.  Sure, blow off some steam on twitter.  Riff on the theme a bit.

But, predictably, the next day Jarvis and others took to calling their little exercise a “movement.”  That’s where I board the cranky-train. [important context: I've been in nonstop editing mode on my book manuscript.   My snark-meter could probably use recalibration.]

If we label everything a social movement, then the term ceases to have any meaning.

The size of this “movement” bears some scrutiny.  In a country of 300,000,000+, only a few million pay regular attention to politics.  Let’s say (for some back-of-the-envelope math) that the politically-attentive class is approximately the same size as the audience of Bill O’Reilly, Rachel Maddow, and other political talk shows.  That would be around 10 million, or ~3% of the population.  Not very big.  Many of those people are on twitter, of course.    Let’s pretend they all are.  And they’re mostly going to be linked to people with similar interests — other members of the politically-attentive class.

On Saturday, a member of the techno-journalistic elite with a strong following, offers up an engaging hashtag, linked to the news that has politically-attentive Americans concerned.  About 10,000 use the hashtag, echoing his concern.  That’s 0.1% of the politically-engaged class, and 0.003% of the national population. We’re supposed to call this big?

Importantly, their tweets don’t aggregate to much of anything.  It’s over by Sunday.  The “movement” received coverage on CBSOnline’s “What’s trending,” a blog devoted to… trending topics on twitter.  That same blog has a story up right now about George Takei and planking.  Which is also pretty entertaining.  And also isn’t a social movement.  Dave Weigel also mentioned it in a blog post for Slate, but he was writing about the debt ceiling anyway.  I’m all for giving Weigel entertaining hooks, but how about some #realtalk while we’re at it?

Jarvis sees “cause for hope” in all of this.  He writes that it demonstrates “the potential of a public armed with a Gutenberg press in every pocket, with its tools of publicness.”

Meh.

What Jeff Jarvis did Saturday night was a meme.  It rippled and went viral a bit.  It was kinda cool.  But not every meme is a social movement.

Social movements are about building and exercising power.  The end goal is to force powerful individuals to take some action that they wouldn’t take otherwise.  Or the end goal is to replace recalcitrant individuals in power with people who are more in touch with the will of the people.  In the process, social movements affect the balance of power, give people a sense of their own power, and result in concrete improvements in people’s lives.  Social movements knit communities together and reinvigorate democracies.  They inspire people to enter public life.  They ain’t easy.

Since social movements are so attractive, and since its pretty much impossible to distinguish the early stages of a social movement from the early stages of an ephemeral and passing fad, there’s a strong tendency to label everything a social movement.  And that degrades their meaning.  (It’s like grade inflation.  If everyone gets an A, then an A isn’t anything special.  The difference is that it’s difficult to care much about grade inflation.  Social movements can actually, y’know, change the world.)  We should fight against that trend.

So I’m thankful to Jeff Jarvis for the meme this past Saturday.  It was entertaining, and fun to read.  It’s nice to hear that there are thousands of people out in twitterland who also find the debt ceiling negotiations absurd.

But don’t call it a movement.  Please.  There isn’t a second or third act to this particular play.  It was a meme, it went briefly viral among people who already care about this sort of thing, and it left few traces behind.  The debt ceiling fight continued, oblivious to the twittering masses.  Social movements are something greater than that.  They’re extended, and collective, and costly, and sadly still far too rare.  If social media tools are influencing social movements (Hint: they are.), we’ll need to be clearer in our language before we can make much headway in figuring out how.

Cranky session over.  Back to my edits.

I’m cautiously optimistic about Rebuild The Dream, for three reasons: the stakes, the players, and Van himself.  For it to be successful, however, they’re going to have to overcome one traditional dilemma which I’ll call “the college progressive alliance problem.”

—

At one point or another, every student activist has been invited to join a “progressive alliance.”  College campuses are full of activist groups, all of which have overlapping values and none of which have enough members.  This naturally gives rise to the suggestion that “we should all work together!”  A meeting is called, group leaders show up, enthusiastic conversations about power-building and support happen, and everyone genuinely agrees that they’re going to work together more.  Depending on the decade, a listserv or website might be established.  Somebody offers to publish a calendar of events.

Depending on the quality of the organizers, this alliance lasts anywhere from one to six months before the inevitable happens.  People get busy.  Competing challenges and priorities set in.  Each group leader has to prune some worthwhile ideas from their to-do list.  The progressive alliance simply isn’t urgent enough, or immediately salient enough, to make the cut.  Note that these alliances rarely fall to infighting between competing groups.  There isn’t much infighting, because the alliance doesn’t make resource allocation decisions.  It’s just there to be supportive.  But that lightweight support is also what makes it so easy to discard.

Back in my Sierra Student Coalition days, I took part in a half-dozen of these alliances before realizing that they were all plagued by the same systematic problem.  At that point, I started focusing more resolutely on campaigns.  Campaigns are designed to “challenge the balance of power, give people a sense of their own power, and make real, concrete improvements in people’s lives” (According to the Midwest Academy and Saul Alinsky.  And they’re dead-on about this one).  They are comprised of tough, grueling, meaningful work.  And they require constant attention — they’re the item that stays on your to-do list, even as you start cutting out items like “homework,” “friends,” and “sleep.”

—

Rebuild The Dream is not a campaign (nor should it be).  It’s also not a coalition.  Van calls it a “meta-brand.”  It’s one part social movement, two parts meme, and one part enabling technology. But what will that mean in practice?  How, when organizations get busy, will it avoid the College Progressive Alliance Problem?

For starters, they have three things working in their favor.

1. The Stakes.  Rebuild The Dream is forming in response to an ongoing assault on the middle and working class.  Authors like Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have effectively outlined just how serious the stakes are.  Between Citizens United, “the other 98%” campaign, the Ryan budget plan/assault on social security, and the Wisconsin labor fight, there is a lot more interest among progressives in uniting under a single banner than would usually be the case.  I’m primarily an environmentalist, but I’d be happy to work on tax reform these days, because the system is so profoundly broken and that breakage so clearly affects the issues I care about.  In that sense, I’d say that the time is ripe for something like this.  Timing isn’t everything in politics, but it sure does help.

2. The Team.  Natalie, Billy, and Van are held in the highest regard within the broader progressive movement.  These are savvy, veteran organizers.  From top to bottom, the other staff that they’ve recruited are solid players, with experience in the netroots and experience in older, legacy organizations.

The list of organizations that have agreed to put muscle behind this project is also pretty damn impressive.  SEIU and AFL-CIO, Change.org and Move, Center for Community Change and Campaign for America’s Future.  Let me say that again: SEIU and AFL-CIO.  Those are two labor giants who don’t always see eye-to-eye.  Having all those groups at the table means that Rebuild The Dream doesn’t need to worry about building its list or creating a drumbeat among the activist base.  They’re already provided.

3. Van.  This is the x-factor.  Most people know Van Jones as “that guy who Glen Beck got booted from the White House because of a truther petition.”  Long before he joined the White House as Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones was being hailed as a singular voice among environmentalists and labor activists.  He has a once-in-a-generation oratorical gift.  Frankly, without Van Jones, I would dismiss this meta-brand without a second thought.  But so many progressive activists have been deeply and personally inspired by the man (myself among them), that it deserves a much longer look.

Those are the reasons why it might work.  Now here’s my $.02 on how it needs to work.

First, to avoid the college progressive alliance problem, Rebuild the Dream has to give people regular, meaningful activities to engage in.  The infrastructure is there already, so Natalie and company should focus on highlighting shared activities that all of the supporter base can engage in.  They’re off to a good start, with a July 5th event and an October conference.  I’d suggest having one nationwide, distributed activity per month.  This can be activism or service-oriented, reflective practice or mobilization.  But it has to be regular.  Otherwise Rebuild The Dream becomes “that great speech that Van gave that one time.”  And this movement needs to be something more.

These events should mostly be proactive, rather than reactive.  The Netroots are optimally built for reactive politics (I call this “headline chasing” in my book).  The day-to-day work of fighting the Ryan plan, pursuing the Wisconsin recalls, and battling the next crazy idea that our opponents roll out should be left to the existing organizations.  Don’t try to play in that sandbox, that isn’t the movement’s niche.  Instead, focus on proactive — building the vision, demonstrating its mass appeal, creating a shared narrative of what the American Dream means to populist progressives.

Second, put Van out there as much as possible.  There is no such thing as “overexposure” where he’s concerned.  He is your greatest asset, use him accordingly.  I mention this because Van has tried to make clear that “this is not about one charismatic individual.  It’s about all of us.”  …Well, yes and no.  He has to say that, and I know he believes it to be true.  But strategically, it kind of is about a charismatic individual.  Van Jones has a gift like no other for giving voice to deeply held progressive patriotism.  If Rebuild The Dream is going to overcome the college progressive alliance problem, it will be in no small part because of that gift.

Here’s hoping it succeeds.  God knows we need something like this, now more than ever.

I’ve also been tracking an equivalent conservative group, Liberty.com, since its inception.  That group is essentially a stand-in for Eric Odom’s e-mail list — when he migrated to the Patriot Action Network, Liberty.com did so as well (to be clear, I’m not suggesting that’s a bad thing.  It seems like a reasonable application of the “post-bureaucratic” trends that Bruce Bimber has been forecasting for years…).  One major difference immediately jumped out at me: the left uses e-mail to mobilize.  The right uses e-mail to persuade.  As an example, take a look at three e-mails I received today:

The first e-mail comes from “Jim Dean, Democracy for America,” and is titled “Scott Walker vs Planned Parenthood.”

“This is it, folks. DFA’s campaign to recall six anti-union, anti-middle class Wisconsin Republican Senators is almost ready to go and it’s the biggest campaign we’ve ever run.

We’re going to be on the air with new hard-hitting television, radio and web ads against these six Republicans for their votes to destroy unions and middle-class families.

(…)

Please contribute $10 now to fuel our biggest campaign ever and fight back in the war on working families.”

There’s more text to the e-mail, of course, but those short segments give you the feel for it.  This is about Wisconsin, they’ve got a commercial on the air, and they want supporters to help fund it.  The link goes to an ActBlue fundraising page, through which they’ve raised over $100,000 already for their Wisconsin campaign.

The second e-mail comes from the “Stephanie Taylor, BoldProgressives.org” and is titled “Dave, Meet Eric.”

“David,

“The last thing we need to send to Washington is a Democrat who is a kinder, gentler version of the Republicans.”

New Mexico state senator Eric Griego said these words when announcing his candidacy for Congress.

And today, Eric Griego is the first House challenger of 2012 that we’re officially endorsing!

Click here to see Eric Greigo’s announcement — and chip in $3 to his campaign before the closely-watched June 30 fundraising deadline.”

Again, there’s more text to the e-mail, and that text includes an explanation of why Greigo is a Bold Progressive, and several reasons why it’s particularly important for supporters to donate to him now.

The third e-mail comes from “Eric Odom” and is titled “Obama Weak, but Could Still Win.”

Friends,

During the past few weeks I’ve gotten a lot of email with lines such as “we’ve got him on the ropes and he’s going down,” and “He’s toast, he can never win now,” in reference to Obama’s chances in 2012. While I agree he is at his weakest point right now, I in no way believe he’s going to be easy to beat. In fact I still think he holds the upper hand.

This week’s report provides a quick glance at Obama’s current standing, his weakness and his strengths going into 2012. Please read the full report and leave comments!”

Odom’s e-mail includes a few links to other articles on the web, but there’s no more text in the message.

…

Notice the difference?  DFA and the PCCC are using e-mail to persuade and then mobilize action.  Odom is using e-mail to offer his perspective on the days events, and then drive readership to his blog.

This is a remarkably consistent trend.  I’ve catalogued over 100 e-mails from Liberty.com.  That includes less than 5 e-petitions or calls-to-action.  It includes about 20 fundraising requests, but almost all of those are concentrated around the Nevada Senate election last fall, when Odom and company were raising money to run issue advertisements.  Since the end of election season, Liberty.com has pretty much solely been an information dissemination list.

Now, it’s possible that this is just a sample skew.  Sketching the ecology of the rightwing advocacy system is a tough gig, they don’t leave the same digital traces that progressive groups do.  But it’s also very similar to what Jessica Baldwin-Phillipi has been finding in her comparative analysis of rightwing and leftwing microsites: the left uses microsites to drive action, the right uses microsites for persuasion (Jesse is great, by the way.  She should blog more, and you should read her stuff).

What we’re seeing here is a dramatic partisan split in technology usage.  Everybody is accessing the same internet, but they are using it to very different ends.  What makes this particularly interesting is that we’re talking about e-mail – the granddaddy of online communications tools.  If there’s any single online medium where one would expect all actors to converge towards the same “best practices,” it would be e-mail.  That simply hasn’t happened.

I’m not going to argue that one use of e-mail is inherently better than the other.  Rather, I’d say there are two take-home points: (1) e-mail is maleable communications medium, which gets used for a variety of ends. (2) “best practices” among advocacy groups will very depending on the political network and organizing opportunities that the groups are built around.