An Occupation

The Occupy Wall Street is going on its first month and is still grow­ing. I’ve been read­ing about it, both on sites favor­able and opposed to the move­ment, made a cou­ple of trips to Zuc­cotti Park, where the pro­test­ers are head­quar­tered and am still try­ing to make sense about it. Along the way, I think I’ve devel­oped a bet­ter under­stand­ing of where they stand and where this could be heading.

The Demands

At its core, it seems the mes­sage of Occupy Wall Street is one grounded in change. Much has been made about the lack of demands and the sec­ond issue of the “Occu­pied Wall Street Jour­nal” seems to answer some of the ques­tions: one arti­cle high­lighted that they would not make a list of demands because

We are speak­ing to each other, and lis­ten­ing.
This occu­pa­tion is first about participation.

This is an inter­est­ing devel­op­ment in that the focus here is on the net­work more than the lead­er­ship and, in that sense, Occupy Wall Street (or #OWS) is prob­a­bly one of the first protest move­ment for our era, based on a lead­er­ship model that relies on net­works instead of top down infra­struc­tures, on par­tic­i­pa­tion instead of inac­tion, on shar­ing instead of agreeing.

Because of that model, #OWS is a rejec­tion of the cur­rent insti­tu­tions, with Wall Street prob­a­bly serv­ing as a stand-in for a lot of the top down hier­ar­chies that have been con­trol­ling much of the polit­i­cal dia­logue for decades. I had ini­tially thought of them as being the left-wing equiv­a­lent to the right-wing led Tea Party but #OWS is sub­stan­tially more impor­tant as a move­ment because it rede­fines engagement.

The move­ment is increas­ingly based on a sim­ple mes­sage: “we are the 99 per­cent,” which high­lights the movement’s right to exist and its will­ing­ness to find a way to help most. It ties, to a large extent to the Amer­i­can ideal of a coun­try where we can always do bet­ter and, in that sense, seems to be polit­i­cally aligned with every move­ment that has helped the coun­try move for­ward in the past.

The Net­work

#OWS also reminds me a lot of the Inter­net and while most peo­ple focus on how the move­ment is using Inter­net tools to spread its mes­sage, what’s been inter­est­ing to me is how inter­net phi­los­o­phy seems to be at the cen­ter of a lot of the movement’s approach to spread­ing its message.

Whether it is by design or not, the move­ment has taken an approach that is steeped into some of the core beliefs of the inter­net founders. For exam­ple, in 1993, John Gilmore was quoted by Time mag­a­zine as fol­lows:

The Net inter­prets cen­sor­ship as dam­age and routes around it

As the protest grows, it appears it has increas­ingly seen some of the laws as dam­ag­ing and has man­aged to route around them.

For exam­ple, the protest was ini­tially plan­ning to set up camp near the JP Mor­gan Chase Tower but when it was turned back, it set­tled only a few blocks away, on a public/private park that hap­pens to be open 24 hours a day (the sta­tus of pub­lic pri­vate open spaces has worked to the movement’s advan­tage as its usu­ally hazy legal sta­tus, which is tra­di­tion­ally lever­aged by cor­po­ra­tions to jus­tify lock­ing things up is now one of the main rea­son for which the city can­not shut the protest down at this time).

Another exam­ple came ear­lier this week, when the own­ers of the park attempted to evict the pro­test­ers because it needed to clean the park, the pro­test­ers routed around the chal­lenge by clean­ing the park them­selves.

And a third exam­ple is the prac­tice of the human micro­phone, which allows the group to make announce­ments with­out the per­mits needed to oper­ate ampli­fy­ing equip­ment in a park. This ensures the group is able to make wide­spread announce­ments with­out break­ing the law nor cre­at­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of hav­ing a per­mit denied, which may cre­ate a sit­u­a­tion allow­ing the law to dis­band it.

Another way in which one can find sim­i­lar­i­ties to the orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ples of the inter­net, is the lack of lead­er­ship to define the move­ment. On the inter­net, no site has any prece­dence over any other, and no traf­fic is con­sid­ered more impor­tant, thanks to a prin­ci­ple called net neu­tral­ity. This fea­ture means that any point on the inter­net is as impor­tant as any other point on the inter­net in terms of mov­ing traf­fic around. This has been dubbed the rise of stu­pid net­works by David Isen­berg, in com­par­i­son to the con­trolled envi­ron­ments of tra­di­tional telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion com­pa­nies. Isenberg’s prin­ci­ples were derided by tra­di­tional net­work exec­u­tives as sim­plis­tic and naïve when they were first pub­lished but have come to become the way in which most telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion is hap­pen­ing today.

In the same way, the lack of lead­er­ship in the #OWS move­ment has been derided by the tra­di­tional pow­ers that be, who have claimed that the group lacks orga­ni­za­tion because it fails to have the kind of command-control struc­ture that has been the way things have been run over the last few cen­turies. The appro­pri­ate answer to that chal­lenge is sim­ply to ask about how a dis­or­ga­nized group could be accom­plish­ing as much as this one is and extend­ing as much as it has in as lit­tle an amount of time as it has.

Vis­it­ing Zucotti Park was a fas­ci­nat­ing eye opener when it comes to self-organized sys­tems. The park has com­mu­nal plan­ning with clearly delin­eated areas for liv­ing quar­ters, eat­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, art, etc. There is also some level of orga­ni­za­tion around how the group man­ages its dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties, from direct actions to the inter­net. The lead­er­less fea­ture seems to actu­ally be an advan­tage for the envi­ron­ment as the chaos that exists con­sis­tently enables any­one to make logis­ti­cal deci­sions quickly while mat­ters of plan­ning and speak­ing on behalf of the group require a sub­stan­tial level of communication.

The lack of lead­ers seems to rep­re­sent a sub­stan­tial part of the clash between the police and the pro­test­ers. On one side, the police has a highly struc­tured model and is try­ing to pro­voke the pro­test­ers into con­fronta­tion. A defin­ing traits of the protests is how few peo­ple have taken the bait (it seems Gandhi’s prin­ci­ple of non-violent protest runs deep within the move­ment) and how many assaults and arrests the police seem to have pushed. It will be inter­est­ing to see if any charges will actu­ally stick once they go through the legal system.

The protest

Where #OWS seems to have failed in lever­ag­ing inter­net tech­nol­ogy is in the way it has spread its protests out. In the Tahir square con­fronta­tions ear­lier this year, the orga­niz­ers decided to break their protests out in smaller protests all over the place. The goal there was to deal with the fact that each protest would get bro­ken out and peo­ple would spread out from each of the small protests. What was not broad­cast was that a smaller protest was designed com­pletely offline to be fed by the break­out of all the other protests. The Tahir move­ment used Google Maps to then fig­ure out the opti­mal path for that smaller protest so it could grow as each of the smaller ones was bro­ken out, feed­ing into the main one.

#OWS has ger­mi­nated into an occupy every­where move­ment and con­tin­ues to grow, with new protests aris­ing daily. There appears to be some level of coör­di­na­tion glob­ally, when it comes to dates and times but lit­tle is being done in terms of focused mes­sag­ing for each effort.

The lack of cen­tral mes­sage has been the most frus­trat­ing part to tra­di­tional media. Media thrives on con­flict and the lack of con­flict has led most tra­di­tional out­lets scratch­ing their col­lec­tive heads as to how to cover this. A few have focused on the police bru­tal­ity but so far the pro­tes­tors have done two things that are mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for tra­di­tional media to cover them:

• They have refused to engage the police and have attempted to fol­low the let­ter of the law
• The have refused to take direct actions against any spe­cific tar­get other than “the sys­tem” as a whole.

Imag­ine what would hap­pen if they decided to orga­nize boy­cotts, as Bernie Sanders sug­gested. Imag­ine what would hap­pen if, on a par­tic­u­lar day, they were to announce that occupy wall street would “occupy” Wall Street by keep­ing them busy, due to a run on the banks, with hun­dreds or thou­sands of pro­test­ers pulling their money out of the largest banks and putting them into smaller com­mu­nity banks. Such a “run on the banks” would get wide cov­er­age and prob­a­bly pro­voke sub­stan­tial con­fronta­tion, giv­ing media a chance to deride the move as desta­bi­liz­ing. But the #OWS move­ment has been either smart enough or dis­or­ga­nized enough to avoid cre­at­ing that kind of con­fronta­tion, which would prob­a­bly lead it to either con­dem­na­tion or failure.

If there seems to be a mes­sage behind the protest, it may that peo­ple still have the right to protest. A ques­tion I may have on this is how long this mes­sage can go on. It’s clear that peo­ple are unhappy (you don’t need to fol­low the antics of #OWS to under­stand that as poll num­bers after poll num­bers show dis­con­tent across the board) but what will come next?

To #OWS, it seems what is to come next is some­thing bet­ter than what we have today. How one defines that is the secret to what this move­ment is about.