Re:Occupied

It’s been two months since about 100 peo­ple started occu­py­ing a small park near Wall Street and from there, the seeds of what appears to be a grow­ing move­ment has hatched. I’ve writ­ten in the past about the Occupy Wall Street move­ment but have con­tin­ued fol­low­ing it since. Strip out the polit­i­cal con­tent and what you have here is one of the fastest grow­ing star­tups in Amer­ica and one that could rede­fine how busi­ness is run.

The active class

As many peo­ple have men­tioned, the move­ment was ini­tially made up of younger peo­ple, pri­mar­ily recent col­lege grad­u­ates who could not find jobs. But what none of the com­men­tary appre­ci­ated (and some­thing I was also not fully aware of) was that this was the first mas­sive move­ment led by a gen­er­a­tion that had not known a time when the inter­net did not exist. In my pre­vi­ous note on the sub­ject, I had high­lighted how much of that move­ment had the feel of inter­net phi­los­o­phy brought into the real world but it wasn’t until more recently that I real­ize that #OWS is a break­down of the bound­ary between vir­tual and real world.

As a whole gen­er­a­tion has learned to chat, exchange ideas, cre­ate con­tent, and spread mes­sages over the online medium, they have been affected in a way that many had prog­nos­ti­cated but few had seen: one of the fas­ci­nat­ing thing about the internet’s lack of own­er­ship is the fact that it leaves all of us as own­ers of the internet.

Whereas some activists, myself included, once wor­ried that it was only left up to a few to pro­tect this won­der­ful pub­lic sphere that had been cre­ated, the truth is that sup­port for an open inter­net, and by exten­sion a more open soci­ety, is strong. Wit­ness, for exam­ple, what hap­pened last week when SOPA threat­ened this open­nesss: not only did net peo­ple rise up and con­fronted their law­mak­ers on this but users of those ser­vices also did, gen­er­at­ing thou­sands of calls to Congress.

Two things hap­pen when some­one makes that first call to Con­gress: first, they feel a sense of kin­ship with the other peo­ple who are fight­ing for the same cause, and sec­ondly they feel they have a say and can have an impact in chang­ing the sys­tem, mak­ing them more likely to be socially and polit­i­cally active in the future.

For over a decade now, many have talked of inter­net activism but we also need to think about the longer impact that such thing has. I’d ven­ture that the activism cre­ated by the abil­ity of quickly shar­ing polit­i­cal sto­ries or quickly reach­ing out to politi­cians is cre­at­ing a more active polit­i­cal class on all sides of the spec­trum: on the right, we’ve seen the rise of the Tea Party, and on the other side, we’re see­ing the rise of #OWS.

What has tra­di­tion­ally been known as the left (the side that wants a more active gov­ern­ment instead of a less active one) is also more in line with the model set in place by the early founders of the inter­net. Remem­ber that the net has largely been admin­is­tered as a com­mon, with all par­ties involved being given more or less equal rights. There has been ten­sions when some par­ties have tried to reach for more rights, as can be wit­nessed in the recent fight over SOPA.

The people’s microphone

So what does this all have to do with #OWS? Well, let me get to that. In order to do so, we must look at the people’s micro­phone. What started as a way to get around laws requir­ing a per­mit to use ampli­fi­ca­tion equip­ment has become a key com­po­nent of this new movement.

A few days ago, I tweeted that “Mic Check is the RT of #OWS”. What I meant by that is that it’s becom­ing clearer to me is that through those words, #OWS are ask­ing the rest of the crowd to spread a message.

From a mes­sag­ing stand­point, there are a few com­po­nents at play here. First, there is the use of sim­ple words to trig­ger atten­tion. To para­phrase Will Rogers, belong­ing to the left is not belong­ing to any orga­nized move­ment. But the “mic check” changes that: it opens up a request for the crowd to lower their mes­sage and agree to amplify some­one else’s. A basic assump­tion here is that while there may not be agree­ment as to what is being talked about, there is an agree­ment that the mes­sage will be relayed forward.

This is in line with the cur­rent prin­ci­ple of “net neu­tral­ity” many fights have arisen about online: there is a gen­eral agree­ment between all par­ties on the inter­net that no mat­ter what the traf­fic is, every inter­net ser­vice provider agrees to carry it with­out dis­crim­i­na­tion. So “Mic Check” can be seen as a request to open a web page or appli­ca­tion on the inter­net, with the assump­tion that com­mu­ni­ca­tion will con­tinue until the mes­sage has been communicated.

Psy­cho­log­i­cally, this type of agree­ment already primes the brain to be more recep­tive to an idea. The next step in what hap­pens with the people’s micro­phone is the ampli­fi­ca­tion, or the repeat­ing of that other mes­sage one has agreed to carry. Here again, some inter­est­ing com­po­nents hap­pen: Because the mes­sage is to be repeat­ing by a large crowd, who repeats it to the peo­ple behind them, it enforces an ora­tory style that requires some­thing in line with the type of pithy state­ment that would fit in the 140 char­ac­ters allowed for a tweet.

By repeat­ing the idea, how­ever, some­thing else might hap­pen in people’s brain (and this is based on the kind of psy­cho­log­i­cal primers that are used in many videogames): hav­ing opened up to a mike check (and thus agreed to carry the mes­sage), the brain is more recep­tive to the mes­sage being ampli­fied. When the mes­sage is repeated, a cer­tain sense of own­er­ship of the mes­sage is con­ferred on the per­son ampli­fy­ing the message.

That sense of own­er­ship is some­thing that prob­a­bly trans­lates into a sense of belong­ing and lasts longer than the meet­ing the per­son has attended. I sus­pect that, through the use of the people’s micro­phone, #OWS is increas­ing the over­all num­ber of con­verts to its movement.

Large orgs and #OWS

Hav­ing built a rel­a­tively lead­er­less move­ment and man­aged to get a large amount of sup­port­ers, #OWS has attracted the atten­tion of many estab­lished play­ers in the polit­i­cal world. And on this part Thursday’s anniver­sary events at Foley Square, many orga­nized labor mem­bers could be seen with plac­ards for their own causes.

How­ever, what is becom­ing increas­ingly clear is that while #OWS is a very inclu­sive move­ment, it is not a move­ment that will be eas­ily hijacked. The unions may be allowed to voice their mes­sage but they will not be allowed to lead the lead­er­less move­ment, nor will any­one else. Part­ner­ships and inclu­sive behav­ior is some­thing that has been more com­mon in the tech­nol­ogy indus­try (though that is, unfor­tu­nately, start­ing to change among some of the big­ger play­ers) and there may be a les­son here for all orga­ni­za­tions as to how to bal­ance their own inter­est while work­ing together with other groups (Yes, Wall Street, even you can learn from #OWS!)

Foley square may have been an orga­nized event for the sec­ond anniver­sary of #OWS but the use of ampli­fied equip­ment seemed to have given it less fer­vor, with more peo­ple milling about and hav­ing dif­fer­ent dis­cus­sions about dif­fer­ent top­ics. The cohe­sion that arose out of gath­er­ings of thou­sands at Zuc­cotti Park did not appear to be there at Foley Square and seemed more in line with what tra­di­tional polit­i­cal ral­lies look like than the kind of effort seen around #OWS.

How­ever, polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion of all stripes have a lot to learn from #OWS. For exam­ple, look­ing at the people’s micro­phone I men­tioned above, there may be value in con­sid­er­ing how to drop ampli­fied equip­ment from smaller gath­er­ings (sub-10,000 peo­ple). In an age of retweet­ing and shar­ing, polit­i­cal images and hash­tags are also extremely impor­tant. The hash­tag, that weird # sym­bol before a spe­cific term is a uni­fy­ing force between dif­fer­ent efforts. It has been widely adopted across most con­tent shar­ing ser­vices and can serve as a way to aggre­gate and inte­grate con­tent from many dif­fer­ent ser­vices into a sin­gle place (or allow users to search for said con­tent in a con­sis­tent fash­ion). Here, #OWS did some of its own learn­ing: in its early days, they were gath­er­ing around the tag #occu­py­wall­street, which is fairly lengthy and thus steals away from the rest of the mes­sage when deal­ing with a ser­vice with lim­ited char­ac­ter avail­abil­ity, the shorter #OWS has allowed the move­ment to recap­ture pre­cious char­ac­ters. How that learn­ing was incor­po­rated into their ongo­ing efforts could be seen with the selec­tion of #N17 as the date of Novem­ber 17 to cel­e­brate their anniversary.

The tents may be gone from Zuc­cotti Park and many other #OWS encamp­ments but I sus­pect that the move­ment will con­tinue grow­ing because, at the end of the day, what made it strong was not a set of tents and tarps but a sense of own­er­ship of the future by all its mem­bers and that, as a soci­ety, is some­thing we all need more of.