1. The most important thing we learned from the constructive failure of Occupy Wall Street is that social movements are born when two things happen. One, when there is a new tactic that arises that unlocks the people’s collective hope and imagination. And two, when a new kind of mood spreads throughout society. For example, during the Arab Spring, a Tunisian fruit seller set himself on fire, triggering a mood of fearlessness that spread all over the world. People were no longer afraid of the authorities or of losing their jobs and rushed into the streets to protest. And at the same time, with Occupy Wall Street, we gave the people a new tactic which was the combination of the acampadas with the Tahrir Uprising: let’s go into the financial districts and set up consensus-based assemblies. The combination of these two ingredients is the formula for social movement creation.
Alanna from Loomio met Vica Rogers in London, to learn more about her world of citizen education and activism. Vica was involved in the Occupy movement in the UK, and has continued working on related issues ever since.
Douglas Rushkoff (born 18 February 1961) is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, and documentarian. He is best known for ...
The Occupy movement has emerged in a historical crisis of global capitalism. It struggles for the reappropriation of the commodified commons. Communications are part of the commons of society. Yet contemporary social media are ridden by an antagonism between private corporate control (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and self-managed, commons-based activist media. In this work, Christian Fuchs analyses the contradictory dialectic of social media in the Occupy movement. Drawing on a political economy framework and interpretation of the results of the OccupyMedia! Survey, in which more than 400 Occupy activists reported on their social media use, OccupyMedia! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism shows how activists confront the contradictions of capitalism and communication in the age of crisis and social media. The book discusses the contradiction between commercial and alternative social media and argues that the existence of a surveillance-industrial complex expressed in the PRISM system shows the urgent necessity to create social media beyond Facebook and Google.
Occupying Political Science: The Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the World, edited by Emily Welty, Matthew Bolton, Meghana Nayak, and Christopher Malone. New York: Palgrave 2013.
This spring, inaugural Assemblies for Democracy in London, Manchester and Glasgow will identify the major issues with our clearly inadequate democracy and then start work thinking on how we could solve them.
Use of the internet has not led to a predominance of virtual actions and movements over mobilizations in ‘physical space’. On the contrary, since 2011 the occupation of urban public spaces - and more particularly symbolic spaces - has been a major feature of these movements.
Mostly, the work of social change is a slow process. It involves patiently building movement institutions, cultivating leadership, organizing campaigns and leveraging power to secure small gains. If you want to see your efforts produce results, it helps to have a long-term commitment.
How do you communicate a protest movement? And how do communication practices shape its character and power relations? Based on a view of communication as constitutive of protest movements, this presentation considers these questions as two sides of the same coin. The focus lies on the Occupy movement and particularly on its use of digital media. Characterized by a belief in direct participation and a rejection of central leadership, Occupy emerged through a bottom-up process of organizing that spanned different platforms and physical places, from Facebook pages to public squares.
“Occupy the Farm,” directed by Todd Darling, looks at a 2012 grass-roots standoff over plans to sell a section of farmland owned by the University of California.
Some protest networks have emerged rather spontaneously using social media. We saw this in Tahrir Square, the Spanish indignados and Occupy in 2011, and in the flash mobs of Chinese environmental and corruption protests.
Other large networks are enabled by the growth of issue-advocacy NGOs, along with hybrid organisations like Avaaz, Getup! and Moveon. Such groupings use online organisation to mobilise people around issues they care about personally.
Eight months ago, Charles Wilson, a researcher from John Oliver's HBO show, Last Week Tonight, contacted us to ask about our project of buying and cancelling debt. We kicked off the Rolling Jubilee in 2012 with a widely publicized telethon (featuring comedians David Rees, Lizz Winstead, and Hari Kondabolu and members of TV On the Radio, Sonic Youth, Fugazi, among others). The project went viral and has been regularly covered in the press over the years, including the New York Times, the Guardian and NPR.
Historical amnesia is not only deeply embedded in American life; it is a fundamental function of the corporate media. Overlooking the continuities from the past, whether in the persistence of insti...
This series of videos captures a lecture Bernard Lietaer provided to Occupy Boulder. This video was recorded during the last currency crisis in Greece and
Power is still power, and a lot of the techniques for building it and challenging it from the past aren't going away—unless we let ourselves forget them.
I would probably be hesitant if not resistant to describing Occupy-style movements as a ‘success’, because I fear that this would imply or be read in line with a sort of instrumental conception, which is actually a position I argue against. So many theorists and academics on the left, moreover, seem content to charge Occupy as being a complete ‘failure’ precisely according to instrumental standards of judgement or criticism. But I argue, along with Richard Gunn and Adrian Wilding (who, it should be said, have also made significant and notable contributions to Heathwood’s series on Occupy), that this is fundamentally misguided. What distinguishes Occupy-style movements from others is not only their refusal of the existing socioeconomic-political order. I think what a lot of people miss is that there are much broader, fundamental processes at play behind Occupy-style events and politics which, in many respects, cannot be judged accurately in terms of their instrumental effect. Gunn and Wilding put it nicely when they reflect that ‘Occupy-style movements are conscious experiments in alternative forms of social organization, interaction, and self-determination’. Occupy’s radical alternative politics, which is open, inclusive, tolerant, non-dominant, non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian, not only challenges traditional ideas of power, politics, and social organisation; so too does it challenge our instrumental conception of revolutionary social change and the very foundations of modern society – or, I argue, that this is at least the revolutionary horizon in which these movements suggest.
Occupy the Bookstore "overlays competitive market prices for textbooks directly on the college bookstore website," much to the chagrin of bookstore giant Follett.
Inspired by the Occupy movement, a group of collectives has begun leasing a former Italian-American social hall and transforming it into a public space where artists, techies and lefty progressives can commingle and collaborate.
Does the term ‘occupation’ delegitimize movements by casting participants as short-term guests, instead of representatives communicating grievances held by a wider society within a public forum that is theirs?
Lately I have been preoccupied with the question of European answers to the techno-libertarian onslaught of Silicon Valley. Why are so many Europeans blind to the monopoly strategy of the new intermediates such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, but also Microsoft, and embrace their online services without any second thoughts? Where is our digital intelligentsia, the public intellectuals who grew up with the Internet? There is plenty of use, the stats for Europe look bright. And there is just as much concern about privacy: the stream of hacker and whistleblower scandals is not drying up. But for an informed view that goes beyond journalistic reportage we need something else. What is lacking are not the geeks or business journalists who comment on the latest apps and gadgets but informed philosophers, thinkers who not only have the technical expertise but also enough knowledge about the political economy of the net to display self-confidence in debates. Where is the conceptual supremacy, the passion and rage of a German Jonathan Franzen, a Swedish dana boyd, a Romanian Andrew Keen? How can we surpass the ressentiments a la Roland Reuss and come up with a more imaginative, subversive attack on Amazon? The European cultural elite is still in a stage of denial, hoping and praying that the digital storms will blow over so that we can return to the normality of the good old newspaper and the Tagesschau at eight.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Your new post is loading...
