Several weeks ago, as part of their IPO filing, Mark Zuckerberg released a letter to Facebook’s shareholders elucidating his vision for the company’s role in shaping the world. What follows is an excerpt:
By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date.
We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring. We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.
A more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services, because as people share their opinions, it makes it easier to improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.
By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.
Take a moment to let this sink in. When the digerati go to sleep at night, this is what they dream about, this is where their minds wander. The line between the virtual world and the real world is blurring. Now, they are inextricably linked in a reciprocal relationship of influence.
Initially, the physical shaped the virtual, but now, the converse is occuring. Technology is providing a viable alternative to how global society has been classically organized, and the gatekeepers of the traditional power structures are starting to recognize the threat to the status quo.
Peer-To-Peer, Openness, Transparency, Disruption
Know these words, for they will continually reappear in substantive debates to come. They belong to the lexicon of those that shape the future. They belong to the New World.
If we stay the course, including accepting death as a possibility at the end of the line, then you have exercised the most potent aspects of non-violence. The willingness to die for what you believe in is the best measure as to the power of the tools that you’re using to strike a blow for freedom.
Harry Belafonte on, among other things, the importance of maintaining a policy of non-violence and the willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice in the struggle for social change.
OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.
The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days, will have to expand in several strategic ways. Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power. The whole range of other actions — shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates — will not happen in the park.
The new movement also needs to build a public policy platform. The American people have it absolutely right on the three main points of a new agenda. To put it simply: tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all.
Finally, the new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption. And the candidates that turn down large campaign checks, political action committees, Super PACs and bundlers will be well positioned to call out their opponents who are on the corporate take.
Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.
Thomas L. Day, a 31-year-old Iraq War veteran, on his final loss of faith:
I’m 31, an Iraq war veteran, a Penn State graduate, a Catholic, a native of State College, acquaintance of Jerry Sandusky’s, and a product of his Second Mile foundation.
And I have fully lost faith in the leadership of my parents’ generation.
One thing I know for certain: A leader must emerge from Happy Valley to tie our community together again, and it won’t come from our parents’ generation.
They have failed us, over and over and over again.
I speak not specifically of our parents — I have two loving ones — but of the public leaders our parents’ generation has produced. With the demise of my own community’s two most revered leaders, Sandusky and Joe Paterno, I have decided to continue to respect my elders, but to politely tell them, “Out of my way.”
They have had their time to lead. Time’s up. I’m tired of waiting for them to live up to obligations.
Think of the world our parents’ generation inherited. They inherited a country of boundless economic prosperity and the highest admiration overseas, produced by the hands of their mothers and fathers. They were safe. For most, they were endowed opportunities to succeed, to prosper, and build on their parents’ work.
For those of us in our 20s and early 30s, this is not the world we are inheriting.
We looked to Washington to lead us after September 11th. I remember telling my college roommates, in a spate of emotion, that I was thinking of enlisting in the military in the days after the attacks. I expected legions of us — at the orders of our leader — to do the same. But nobody asked us. Instead we were told to go shopping.
The times following September 11th called for leadership, not reckless, gluttonous tax cuts. But our leaders then, as now, seemed more concerned with flattery. Then -House Majority Leader and now-convicted felon Tom Delay told us, “nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes.” Not exactly Churchillian stuff.
We looked for leadership from our churches, and were told to fight not poverty or injustice, but gay marriage. In the Catholic Church, we were told to blame the media, not the abusive priests, not the bishops, not the Vatican, for making us feel that our church has failed us in its sex abuse scandal and cover-up.
Our parents’ generation has balked at the tough decisions required to preserve our country’s sacred entitlements, leaving us to clean up the mess. They let the infrastructure built with their fathers’ hands crumble like a stale cookie. They downgraded our nation’s credit rating. They seem content to hand us a debt exceeding the size of our entire economy, rather than brave a fight against the fortunate and entrenched interests on K Street and Wall Street.
Now we are asking for jobs and are being told we aren’t good enough, to the tune of 3.3 million unemployed workers between the ages of 25 and 34.
And an insightful response via Micah Sifry:
While he may be right about the failures of the current generation in power, he’s wrong in calling for “a leader” who will fix things. But it’s understandable why he might see the world this way–having grown up in institutions that are all run as hierarchies–the Catholic church, the Army, the Penn State system–why expect anything different?
Why this insistence on finding the supposed leaders of Occupy Wall Street? The reason goes beyond a desire to understand the movement’s goals, I think, into something more existential. For many traditional political observers like Brisbane and his colleagues, the notion that a political movement might arise without charismatic leaders is inconceivable. Every previous movement, after all, has had its figureheads. Think of Gandhi, King, Mandela. Or, at the less exalted level of recent times, think of Ralph Nader, Al Sharpton, or Michael Moore on the progressive left, or Sarah Palin, Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin on the Tea Party right. The same question was raised, if you recall, around the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, which were often described as “leaderless.” A movement can’t be leaderless, right? Who would we feature on the front-page? Who would we put on the Sunday talk shows? Who would we negotiate with? Who is the saviour that will rise from these streets?
No, political movements can’t be leaderless. The Occupy Wall Street movement is, in fact, leader-full. That is, the insistent avoidance of traditional top-down leadership and the reliance on face-to-face and peer-to-peer networks and working groups creates space for lots of leaders to emerge, but only ones that work as network weavers rather than charismatic bosses.
Most of us come from a world and a generation that only knows one kind of leadership, the one whose organizational structure looks like this. The decider is on top; the worker bees are below. Everything about our industrial age institutions, from schools and churches to corporations and government, trains us to think of leadership as top-down, command-and-control. Give the right answer, get into the right school, get a good job, work your way up the chain of command, win the good life. But today, more and more of us live in a sea of lateral social connections, enabled by personal technology that is allowing everyone to connect and share, in real-time, what matters most to them.
Many of us have been inculcated with the idea that we are incompetent sheep that require a messianic leader to guide us through turbulent times. Undoubtedly, there have been influential individuals throughout history that have shaped major events, but it is wise to remember that such figures did not exist in a vacuum. Most certainly, they had networks of support that enabled them to accomplish their critical tasks.
We glorify a few individuals, while cutting ourselves and the masses short. The Internet has provided an alternative paradigm. We no longer need to place our faith in an ostensible messiah. We have the power to lift ourselves up, to communicate, organize and connect with diverse groups of people over vast distances in real-time.
Hundreds of millions of people have gotten a taste of true democracy, true freedom. No matter how many times they try to intimidate us, to silence us, to beat us into submission, we will persist. The seeds of dissent have already been planted and now it is time to reap. The dream of a new kind of society is nascent, but its shape and design will become clear as time goes by.
If you’ve been reading accounts of the financial crisis, or watching film treatments like the excellent “Inside Job,” you know that Iceland was supposed to be the ultimate economic disaster story: its runaway bankers saddled the country with huge debts and seemed to leave the nation in a hopeless position.
But a funny thing happened on the way to economic Armageddon: Iceland’s very desperation made conventional behavior impossible, freeing the nation to break the rules. Where everyone else bailed out the bankers and made the public pay the price, Iceland let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net. Where everyone else was fixated on trying to placate international investors, Iceland imposed temporary controls on the movement of capital to give itself room to maneuver.
So how’s it going? Iceland hasn’t avoided major economic damage or a significant drop in living standards. But it has managed to limit both the rise in unemployment and the suffering of the most vulnerable; the social safety net has survived intact, as has the basic decency of its society. “Things could have been a lot worse” may not be the most stirring of slogans, but when everyone expected utter disaster, it amounts to a policy triumph.
And there’s a lesson here for the rest of us: The suffering that so many of our citizens are facing is unnecessary. If this is a time of incredible pain and a much harsher society, that was a choice. It didn’t and doesn’t have to be this way.
But the occupiers are not from all walks of life, just from those walks that slope downwards—from debt, joblessness and foreclosure—leading eventually to pauperism and the streets. Some of the present occupiers were homeless to start with, attracted to the occupation encampments by the prospect of free food and at least temporary shelter from police harassment. Many others are drawn from the borderline-homeless “nouveau poor,” and normally encamp on friends’ couches or parents’ folding beds.
In Portland, Austin and Philadelphia, the Occupy Wall Street movement is taking up the cause of the homeless as its own, which of course it is. Homelessness is not a side issue unconnected to plutocracy and greed. It’s where we’re all eventually headed—the 99 percent, or at least the 70 percent, of us, every debt-loaded college grad, out-of-work school teacher and impoverished senior—unless this revolution succeeds.
