Micah Sifry notes that there will be lingering questions about what happens with their ballot slots.  Centrist author and longtime AE supporter John Avlon holds out hope that Americans Elect will drum up a “credible, balanced ticket”  from somewhere.  We’ll know more by the end of the week about what the next step for Americans Elect is.  This likely isn’t the last we’ll hear from the organization.

I want to focus on the explanations Avlon gives for Americans Elect, then offer up one key point that continues to get under my skin.  Avlon entertains three explanations for Americans Elect’s basic lack of turnout:

-Third-party candidacies tend to do best when there is not an incumbent on the ballot.

-The Republican primary dragged on.  Mitt Romney is less of an extremist than Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum.

-Ballot security protocols on the AE website were a real chore, creating a genuine challenge to delegate voting.  Avlon writes “In an era of slacktivists used to ‘liking’ something and quickly moving on, this was a serious hurdle.”

There is a little truth to each of the explanations.  Perot and Nader were both more effective when running in elections that lacked an incumbent (though John Anderson in 1980 did better than Nader, while running against incumbent Jimmy Carter).  The bigger issue, which he appears loathe to admit, is that Barack Obama has governed as a centrist.  It’s probably true that if, say, Gingrich had locked up the nomination, there would have been more force behind potential third-party candidacies.  But that’s the reason why Republican party elites mobilized so heavily to prevent that from happening.  And indeed, if you make voting in an online caucus practically as difficult as voting in a real primary, you shouldn’t expect higher turnout  The slacktivism comment is a lazy cheap shot, though.

Avlon goes on to claim “the decision to at least consider a path forward with a bipartisan ticket in 2012 reflects the enthusiasms of the delegates and volunteers.”  This is nothing but wishful thinking. If Americans Elect had delegate or volunteer enthusiasm, it wouldn’t be in this mess.  There is no radical center.  You can buy ballot access in 26 states (you just pay people to gather petition signatures).  But you can’t buy volunteer enthusiasm.

The frustrating thing about Avlon shows up in his conclusion: “Americans Elect may be an idea ahead of its time, but…”  What evidence, if any, would convince writers like Avlon and Thomas Friedman that their faith in the radical center is misplaced?  As I’ve written previously, AE is not an idea ahead of its time; it is a gimmick based on magical thinking about technology!

The problem with all of this isn’t Avlon himself.  He’s welcome to write theoretically-misguided centrist pieces for the Daily Beast.  Our current media environment isn’t exactly plagued by an overabundance of centrists.  The problem shows up when well-meaning big donors spend a ton of money repeatedly tilting at windmills like AE.

Americans Elect had a budget of between $35 and $40 million dollars over the past two years.  Much of that was donated by centrists interested in reforming the two party system.  That’s 30 or 40 times larger than the annual budget of FairVote.org/The Center for Voting and Democracy (<$500,000 per year).  FairVote is the leading electoral reform organization in America.  It has been running a promising state-based campaign for the National Popular Vote for years, and is well-respected among researchers who conduct electoral systems research.  I imagine that FairVote with a 40-fold increase in their budget could probably find a better use for the money than building a third-party candidacy for a yet-to-be-named candidate.

And there’s the danger.  Observers have the opportunity to learn a lesson from the AE debacle.  We could learn something about how electoral processes operate (*cough* Duverger’s Law *cough*).  We could learn something about where and when the Internet is useful to communities-of-interest.  We could learn something about online political organizing.  Or we could chalk it up to “an idea ahead of its time” and make the same bland mistakes in the next electoral cycle.  In the meantime, more worthwhile ideas and organizations go underfunded.  That renders meaningful social/political change ever more elusive as a result.

The next time someone suggests that the Internet has paved the way for the overthrow of the two-party system, hopefully you’ll remember American’s Elect and cast them a withering glare.

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be joining the faculty of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs this fall.  SMPA is one of the strongest political communication departments in the country, and also will give me a chance to more directly observe the political advocacy organizations that I study.

I’ll be moving to DC in the beginning of August.  ShoutingLoudly readers in the New York area, I hope to see you before then.  ShoutingLoudly readers in the DC area, looking forward to many interesting conversations once I’ve gotten settled.

(…On the bright side, I suppose I’ll be more productive next year when there’s nothing interesting to watch on television.)

As a media consumer, I was shocked.  Everyone who watches Community knew the show was in ratings trouble.  But the other two shows have been a Thursday night tentpole and didn’t seem to be in danger.  Considering the hit-or-miss quality of most NBC programming, does anyone believe that they’ll find three replacements that are better?

As a media analyst, this strikes me as evidence that NBC just doesn’t understand (or accept) how the tv game has fundamentally changed.  The network has the attention of a valuable niche audience, but insists upon wasting it.  NBC was once the most popular television network in America.  But that was during the era of broadcast television, when limited consumer choice meant that three or four networks enjoyed the luxury of competing over an entire national audience.  NBC was home to The Cosby Show and Cheers in the 1980s, Friends and Seinfeld in the 1990s.  Those hit shows brought in a whole national audience.  Today’s NBC shows attract an appealing niche audience rather than the whole nation.

The difference is cable tv and the Internet.  Cable television existed in the 1980s and 1990s, but had a different texture.  Cable stations offered niche programming, while the networks offered staples.  Many households did not have cable back then.  While HBO started developing its own programming relatively early, we were still a long away from AMC competing for “best drama” Emmys with Mad Men.  Lacking the social web, audiences were passive.  Lacking the rich online data environment, advertisers settled for coarse metrics of audience interest.

Today, NBC fills a pretty sweet niche with its programming.  Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, The Office*, and Community anchor a lineup of generally pretty-smart comedies.  They attract devoted fans who riff on the shows constantly online.  My students at Rutgers frequently mention that they watch 30 Rock or Community.  They never mention Two and a Half Men.  My friends and colleagues are the same.  Amongst the social clusters who watch Mad Men and The Wire, NBC is the broadcast network that we most often tune in to.  NBC could choose to be happy with that audience.  It’s a tech-savvy crowd, with enough spending power and cultural capital to keep advertisers happy.  But that would mean relinquishing the dream of recapturing 1980s audience-share.  Apparently the network decided to go another direction.

If some upstart competitor is smart, they’ll view this as an opportunity. Cult favorite  Arrested Development is already heading to Netflix.  Netflix or another outlet (Current TV 2.0, anyone?) ought to round up these shows and corner the market on creative-class cultural favorites.

Arrested Development is a great example of the broader trend: how can a show that is so intensely popular not be worth airing?  In the era of broadcast, when there were limited timeslots, I can understand that logic.  You cancel it because the “real estate” of prime time television is too scarce and too valuable.  But can anyone honestly argue that Arrested Development wouldn’t attract a solid niche audience on a weekly basis?  Now that we have hundreds of channels, plus hulu, plus netflix, plus youtube for remixes, plus tumblr for memes, plus twitter for riffs, no channel is going to attract Seinfeld-sized audiences.  But that also means there’s expanded opportunity for quality programming.

If you can’t make money off of Arrested Development or 3o Rock, Parks and Rec or Community, it’s time to get out of the money-making business.

*The Office is sticking around for another full season.  I will pay cold, hard cash if someone can explain the logic of that move.

Short version: it turns out that AmericansElect has fallen prey to the Field of Dreams Fallacy (page 338).

I had taken that year off from college to serve as National Director of the Sierra Student Coalition (SSC).  I wasn’t at the #A16 protests myself, but many of our top activists were.  I watched the closely as the event unfolded through the lens of the mainstream media.  Seattle had caught our opponents by surprise.  DC was Act Two of the movement in the media narrative.  The results were… disappointing.

#A16 was a big protest.  It was evidence of a growing movement.  But there were two big problems.  First: they didn’t achieve their goal.  In Seattle, movement participants shut down the WTO meetings.  In DC, the WB/IMF meetings proceeded on schedule.  Second: they lost the message war.  What’s more, losing the message war was an unforced error.

Our opponents offered a simple frame: “this is misguided activism.  The World Bank and IMF are a force for good in the world.”  Our simple counterframe was “Shut It Down!”  Given those two messages, which one do you find persuasive?  Which one do you think the media and the mass public are likely to accept?*

For years after that, when I would run messaging workshops at Sierra Club/SSC trainings, I would use #A16 as a guiding example.  ”Sometimes we lose because the other side has more money and more power.  I can accept that.  But sometimes we lose because the other side outsmarted us.  If you believe your cause is just, you should never allow the other side to be outsmart you.”

Fast-forward to the present.  Last week, I was meeting up with an old organizing buddy in Manhattan.  Pasted to a streetlamp was the poster for Occupy Wall Street’s next major action:

Shut. It. Down.

May 1st might end up being a massive mobilization.  But it won’t succeed as a general strike.  And opponents of #OWS are no longer going to be caught unaware.  They will have counter-messages.  They will try to frame Occupy as a rump anarchist crowd, hardly representative of the 99%.

#OWS has made it easier for them to succeed.  Just like last time.  And,  well, that’s just a real shame to see.

*They also had lengthy teach-ins where they explained in detail why the World Bank and IMF don’t live up to their stated mission.  Those teach-ins were great.  Listen to movement activists for an hour and you quite possibly would have walked away convinced.  But listen to them in television, radio, and newspaper quotes and the opposition comes out ahead every time.

Three things about this chart:

1. Notice that mentions of “blog” haven’t declined much.  People are still blogging.  People are still talking about blogging.  But people are also finding new uses for tumblr sites, and many of those uses are absurdly shareable.

2. We saw a similar process a few years ago with social network sites.  Several public commenters looked at the rise of facebook and suggested it meant a decline of blogging.  Chris Bowers (I think, can’t find the post) responded that instead we were seeing finer-grained niches.  Blogs used to be the only self-publishing game in town (’01-’04ish).  So early adopters used blogs for all sorts of communicative purposes… even ones which a medium designed for instantaneous default-public, default-permanent writing is poorly-suited.  As the social web has developed, new platforms have been created with different affordances.  The more sophisticated users have started to select the right tool for their communications purpose.

3. Tumblr sites are particularly good for fun viral stuff.  Last week’s phenomenon, Texts From Hillary Clinton, is a great example.  Two netroots politic0-types came up with the lolcats-style idea over beers.  A few years ago, they would’ve launched it as a blog.  That would’ve worked alright, but blogs are a little clunky if you just want to post images and short commentary.  So today they use a tumblr site instead.  To the extent that images-and-captions are more viral-friendly (or “upworthy“) than their text-heavy equivalent, we ought to expect a spike in tumblr’s google rankings.

Last Friday at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting, I gave a presentation of my latest paper, Social Science Research Methods in Internet Time.  It’s essentially an extended rumination on the phenomenon associated with this graph.  New features of the social web emerge fast.  It creates a novel research problem — our most robust social science methods are based in the ceteris paribus assumption that the communications network we sample at time X will be basically the same as the network in existence at time Y**.  I argue that, in the face of the ongoing adoption and adaptation practices, our best research options often involve embracing the messiness, being transparent about our data limitations, and hacking together kludgy research designs that provide some analytic leverage on how the system is evolving, and how it all fits together.  …In light of this week’s comic, maybe I should have added “keep a sense of humor” to that list.

*Please tell me you’re already regularly visiting XKCD.  New comics come out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  There is no such thing as a person who would enjoy shoutingloudly.com but dislike xkcd.

*Where X = the time when you conduct the research and Y = the time when your research is published.  It’s a reasonable assumption most of the time, and hellishly problematic when it proves unreasonable.

I don’t teach in the UC system.  I have some friends who do, and I’ve never heard them talk about waves of activist professors, but maybe that’s because their attention has been diverted to the furloughs and salary cuts that they have faced for the past several years.  The UC system has plenty of problems, but those problems stem from the defunding of  higher ed.

Still, what really caught my eye with this report was the organization behind it.  I am a scholar.  What’s this national association all about, and how come I’ve never heard from them before.  Did I miss the signup date?  What gives?  It’s not as though I’m that hard to track down.  I go to a TON of conferences.  Where’s their booth at the APSA annual meeting?

A few minutes of snooping around their website answered that question.  NAS is a conservative front-group concerned with issues like “Broad imposition of the “sustainability” agenda on university activity and campus life” and “neglect of character education.”*  Their membership includes “all who share a commitment” to their core principles, be they “undergraduate students, teachers, college administrators, independent scholars, [or] non-academic citizens.”  They also have their very own journal, “Academic Questions.”  There’s probably a very good reason why I’ve never heard of this journal before.

…So, by “National Association of Scholars,” they actually mean “DC lobby of conservative opinioneers.”  That’s some fiiiiiine corporate double-speak.  What’s interesting to me is that they have never even tried to interact with an actual professor like myself.  If their goal is to improve the quality of rational debate on college campuses, they might consider participating in one from time to time.

Falsely-labeled conservative front-groups are nothing new, of course.  The environmental movement has had to face up to groups like this for decades.  ”Concerned Citizens for Responsible Energy Policy” (a name that I just made up, then googled to make sure it isn’t a thing), which turns out upon deeper inspection to be a shell title for Shell Oil’s lobbying efforts.  It’s a solid investment on their part — journalists will turn to them when looking quotes from “both sides” of a debate.  Those same journalists are unlikely to devote a whole paragraph of their article to explaining that the group is pure astroturf (that would be godawful prose).  Then readers are left believing that the debate is between serious-sounding citizens groups and think tanks, rather than between citizens groups and Big Oil.

Still, I’d like to make one modest proposal: when we engage in debates about university research, how about if we hold ourselves to the standards of university research?

Apply a dollop of academic integrity and call your organization what it is.  You are not a National Association of Scholars if you do not even make an attempt to engage, associate with, or provide representation of professional scholars.  The name demonstrates equal parts media-savvy and intellectual hackery.  Do better than that.

In their mission statement, the NAS states that “The NAS advocates for excellence by encouraging commitment to high intellectual standards, individual merit, institutional integrity, good governance, and sound public policy.”

…High intellectual standards, institutional integrity, and good governance.  This organization does not even live up to its own mission statement.

What an embarrassment.

*I’ll be working on some new course designs for the fall.  I’m curious where on the syllabus I ought to include “character education.”  Are they envisioning Socratic method or lecture?  Scantrons or essay questions?

#OWS, on the other hand, could be doing a lot better these days.

In the past few weeks, there have been a number of troubling signs.  The first was the announcement of their May 1st “general strike.”  Laura Clawson, at DailyKos, posted a critique.  Her point was simple enough: what they’re planning is a day-of-action, not a General Strike.  Days-of-Action are judged differently than General Strikes.  A General Strike is judged on the scale of the national workforce.  A day-of-action is judged on the size of your rally, creativity of your tactics, etc.  Laura Clawson is an ally.  She’s someone who would like to be on the side of #OWS, and has been in the past.  But the General Assembly decided instead that they would be better off without the netroots, and without organized labor, on this one.

The second troubling sign came from the #MillionHoodies march last week in NYC, in response to the Trayvon Martin tragedy.  Elon James White wrote a post afterward, titled “How Occupy Wall Street Co-opted the Million Hoodie March.”  The article begins “I now have an issue with Occupy Wall Street.”  Here’s the key section:

With chants of “We are the 99%” and signage to that effect as well, I was a little thrown off. I thought the purpose of this march was to bring awareness to the death of a young boy. Soon after the march started confusion was all around. Which way were we marching? Who was leading the charge? After we walked a few blocks members of the Occupy section of the march started running down the street knocking down trash cans. I was told later that some attempted to knock down police barricades and police scooters used to guide the marchers. I immediately became uncomfortable because that’s not what I signed up for. I wanted to speak out against injustice—just causing general destruction wasn’t on my agenda. Soon some Occupiers started chanting “F**k the POLICE,” one young white male wearing skinny jeans and a Justin Bieber haircut started yelling “THIS IS WAR, WE WANT WAR!” To which a hoodie-clad young black adult said “Hey, uh we don’t really want war, why don’t you tone that down. I’m about to graduate college in a few months.” The white male kind of laughed and kept moving forward yelling something else.

Elon James White is an ally.  He’s one of the most insightful progressive commentators around today.  (He’s also one of my favorite comedians.)  He’d like to be on the side of #OWS, and he has been in the past.  But just as netroots progressives needed to take care in playing well with others when supporting OWS, #OWS activists need to take the same care when supporting Trayvon Martin activists.

Finally, there’s a Gawker article by #OWS activist Mobutu Sese Seko, “Occupy Wall Street and MoveOn Go Together Like MoveOn and 1999.” This one takes the cake.  MoveOn is part of a massive progressive coalition that is planning The 99% Spring, an audacious effort to train 100,000 people in non-violent direct action.  That’s huge.  Charles Lenchner attended the training for trainers last weekend and offers a compelling response to #occupy critiques of the event.  Seko doesn’t like 99% Spring, because it didn’t originate in General Assembly meetings.  So he labels it “astroturf:”

It’s Occupy Wall Street brought to you by MoveOn.org, the people who send you 17 emails per week asking you to sign milquetoast petitions or read unctuous defenses of whatever castrated legislation Harry Reid has limply waved at the opposition.

Seko doesn’t actually know anything about MoveOn.  They don’t just send milquetoast petitions.  Really, there’s this even a whole book about how MoveOn isn’t clicktivism (forthcoming! May 30!  Preorder it!).  They’re hardly astroturf, unless we’ve decided to define astroturf as “anything that I personally don’t happen to like.”

MoveOn is an allied organization.  The coordinators of The 99% Spring — people like Liz Butler, an outstanding organizer who I’ve known for over a decade — aren’t astroturfing.  They’re seeking to advance many of the values held by #OWS.  They’ve been careful not to coopt.  But they’re also going to seize this moment.  Telling your allies “help is only welcome if you’ll submit to our endless series of meetings” isn’t a particularly effective way to grow your movement.

Activists like Mobutu Sese Seko are caught in a classic bind.  They would like their movement to grow.  They would like to achieve substantial social progress. But they don’t want to deal with the difficulties and complications that come with growth and success.

Instead, they have wrongly concluded that “our process is our politics.”  The General Assembly isn’t a unicorn.  Its an unwieldy experiment in radical, consensus-based democracy.  Such experiments are not new.  They tend to work a lot better at small-scale than at large-scale.  It is hard not to read Seko as the activist equivalent of an obnoxious bureaucrat: “This massive action is not permitted!  99% Spring didn’t fill out their TPS form!”

I won’t pretend to know what the future of #OWS is.  But I’m sure that Occupy activists have a lot of agency in determining that future.  If they want Occupy to maintain relevant now that the encampments have been broken down and the national spotlight has moved elsewhere, they’re going to need to accept the reality of allies.  Laura Clawson, Elon James White, and MoveOn aren’t going to drop all of their good work and wait for General Assemblies to work out their internal disputes.  Occupy activists are not immune to the need for “playing well with others.”

…If you can’t convince your allies to stand with you, what chance do you have against powerful opponents?

1. AmericansElect.org won a People’s Choice Award from South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), the annual Austin-based tech conference where everything cool seems to happen (read Micah Sifry’s writeup of this year’s conference.  Someday maybe I’ll get to attend…).  It seems that the digirati have bought into AmericansElect’s sales pitch — that the Internet can finally unleash the “radical center” and make the 2012 election a “three-way race” between the two parties and AmericansElect’s online nominee.

2. I became the owner of a lovely new hat, pictured below.

The relationship between the two?  If the former actually achieve their stated goals, I will happily eat the latter.

American’s Elect is a flawed idea, conceived by hedge fund-types (some of them anonymous) who’ve convinced themselves they don’t already have disproportionate influence over government. It proposes to use the freeing power of the internet to nominate  a centrist candidate (not beholden to either of our unpopular, partisan operations) who can then wash away all the gridlock in DC.

The two biggest problems  with this idea are that it violates Duverger’s Law (electoral systems where you elect a single candidate through plurality voting yield two stable parties) and it wishes away the role of checks-and-balances in gridlock.  Presidents don’t enact legislation alone.  First they need to navigate their way through a broken Congress.  Putting an Independent president in office won’t fix the Senate filibuster, it will just give them zero congressional allies to begin with.

A third problem, which bugs me even more, is that there is no radical center.  Most Americans are, indeed, centrists.  But by “centrist,” what we actually mean is “not particularly interested in/paying attention to politics.”  Efforts to build centrist political blogs and centrist advocacy groups routinely fail.  There’s a simple reason why: the engaged segment of the public is a partisan segment of the public.

We hear calls for a centrist third-party challenge almost every Presidential cycle.  Sometimes a challenge even happens.  It has never worked particularly well before.  But this time, we are told (and AmericansElect spends a lot of money on public outreach, so we are told this A LOT), the Internet will change everything.  The Internet has empowered citizens like never before, and old institutions will crumble in its path.

My book, The MoveOn Effect, is pretty optimistic about the Internet’s impact on citizen engagement.  But the AmericansElect folks are exhibiting a basic internet-as-magic-unicorn style flaw in their thinking.  The internet changes some of the constraints on citizen political engagement.  Other fundamental constraints remain completely unchanged.  Blogs and YouTube do not alter our electoral rules.  Twitter doesn’t undo the filibuster.  We have political parties for a reason.  Changes to our communication system (even radical changes) don’t change those institutional structures.  As a result, the big internet-related political changes happen around these fundamental rules, not through them.  The big Internet-driven changes are second-order impacts: changes in communications system yield changes in the structure and tactics of political organizations.

AmericansElect claims that this time will be different because they’re gaining ballot access in every state.  Whoever is elected through their online primary this summer (current declared frontrunner: Buddy Roemer. Most popular draft candidate: Ron Paul) will appear on the ballot in November.  Hence, they tell us, it’s a “three way race.”  That’s a great soundbyte (it even works as a #hashtag) but there’s one small problem:

Remember the 2000 election?  There were three big-name candidates in that race (Gore, Bush, Nader).  The famous “butterfly ballot” in Florida lists 10 options though.  Did anyone think that the 2000 election was a “10-way race?”

Getting national ballot access is one hurdle to national viability.  It’s a big one, but it’s one of many.  You also need a candidate.  And a ton of money for advertising and field organizing.  And a turnout operation.  And a platform that goes beyond simple gimmicks.  Getting into the October debates wouldn’t hurt either.

AmericansElect has none of this.  AmericansElect is a gimmick.  It’s the type of gimmick that leads people to misunderstand politics and misunderstand the Internet.  It’s a shame the SXSWi crowd couldn’t see through that.  When the whole thing dissipates in a cloud of smoke, I hope the “tech gurus” pause to understand why.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy wearing my new hat and AmericansElect will keep cranking out internet-as-unicorn pablum.  I’m as confident that AmericansElect will fizzle as I am that my fedora looks really, really cool.

This first image is a screenshot of the Adbusters.com blog post which first proposed the occupation in July 2011.  You may recall that I was not originally a fan.  They were calling for 20,000 people to descend on Wall Street and set up a festival of resistance.  The author, Micah White, was already saying that if it failed, he’d blame MoveOn-style clicktivism.

Here we see a couple of competing internet-related phenomena.  (1) online self-publishing means leads to a democratization (small “d”) of information production.  #Occupy began as a blog post.  That said, there’s also (2) not all blogs are equal.  Adbusters.com is the website of a longstanding ink-and-pulp publication, with significant cache amongst culture-jammers.  As Matt Hindman points out in The Myth of Digital Democracy, web traffic follows a power law/”rich get richer” distribution.  If #occupy had began as a blog post on some random independent blog, the odds of it gaining attention would have been much much worse.

This is the iconic ballerina poster that Adbusters and company developed during the leadup to the September 17th protest.  The slogan “what is our one demand?” presages the ongoing debates that would appear in later media critiques and leftwing criticism.  Unlike most rallies and protest events, which have a clear message and a clear target, #OWS was meant to tap into a wider vein of public antipathy to wealth disparity issues.  It made for powerful artwork, but unclear organizing.

This third image was included in ABC’s initial #occupy article.  Protest organizers had missed their stated goal of 20,000 long-term protesters.  A few thousand had showed up instead.  Denied access to Wall Street itself (and planned on a Saturday, when the NYSE was empty anyway), a few hundred of the protesters decided to set down roots in nearby Zuccotti Park.  I labeled it a failure (nice one, Karpf).  Coverage of the protest was sparse, even amongst left-learning media.  The lack of a clear target or demand, coupled with the lower-than-expected turnout, meant that the initial protest action simply didn’t appear very newsworthy.

Simultaneously, a tumblr site called We Are the 99 Percent was gaining attention.  The site invited visitors to write their story, Sorry Everybody-style, on a piece of paper, snap a photo, and submit it.  This provided a means of participation with movement-sympathizers who were not themselves part of the encampment.  It also created a valuable trove of images and stories.  While opponents of the protest wanted to dismiss it as a small group of radicals gathered in a park, the tumblr site provided a compelling counter-narrative.

None of those images or stories would have amounted to much if not for the police overreaction one week after the protests had begun.  Mainstream media attention remained slim until two peaceful female protestors were cordoned off and pepper-sprayed by an overzealous policeman.  The action was caught on film and uploaded to YouTube.  As has historically been the case, the abuse of state power led to mass awareness of the protest events.  The actions of this one police officer propelled #occupy into the national headlines.

Scale-shift occurred a month later, with a massive rally in New York.  This scale-shift featured important allies — traditional labor organizations and netroots advocacy groups, in particular — who mobilized their member/supporters.  The tens of thousands who attended did not then join the encampments or participate in a General Assembly meeting, but they did legitimize the actions and further expand the reach of the message.

The participation of these allies created a new dynamic for the occupiers, though.  With the success of the movement in grabbing public attention came a set of challenging dynamics surrounding cooperation and cooptation.  The problem for a popular movement lacking “one demand,” employing consensus-based deliberation is that suddenly all sorts of people want to claim the mantle of  ”we are #occupy.”  Size, longevity and success require process and procedure.

This final image best defines #occupy today.  Occupy Wall Street hasn’t ended.  It has morphed.  While Zuccotti park is no longer physically occupied, #OWS has become a fixture of the national conversation.  Members of the community engage in an ongoing series of conference calls and in-person meetings.  They plan actions, discuss new memes, and struggle with the same organizational issues that have traditionally faced successful social movements.

—

I take two lessons away from these images.  First, the #Occupy movement is internet-mediated in important ways.  Without the web, key moments in this process simply can’t occur.  Its a lot harder to gather people for a protest event in the older media environment.  Its also a lot easier to ignore left-wing protestors gathering in a park.

But, second, being “internet-mediated” is not the same as “organizing without organizations.”  The new media environment changes some important features of social movement organizing.  But plenty of traditional constraints remain the same.  Conflict attracts news attention.  Mass protest participation requires the engagement of allies.  That engagement in turn breeds difficult coalition dynamics. And in the end, Occupy itself becomes an organization – not the standard bureaucratized organization we’re used to, but an organization nonetheless.

Those are the big lessons that I draw, and the images that I think best tell the story of occupy.  What alternate lessons do you take away?  What images have I left out?