Controlled anger is a sign that the people are serious. A street-smart cop can tell you that a pale, angry face is potentially a lot more dangerous than a flushed, angry face. The flushed face may be looking to lash out in some general violent way, but the pale face is edging towards intent — specific intent.
Mainstream media is having fun photographing dancing and music at the protests, but if you look over the sea of faces, relatively few are there for fun. They have fun to break the monotony, but it’s not a party. Even the protesters’ smiles tend to be ironic, as media try to get them to show excitement.
The temper of the times seems similar outside the protests themselves. Two weeks ago, I posted a Huffington Post article that mentioned “There is a huge sense across America that the rich are increasing their cruelty far beyond the point necessary to live lives of obscene privilege.”
Before posting, I asked several readers if I was going overboard with the word “cruelty.” All said “No.” The reaction was so uniform I became curious, and showed the article to over 20 people. Every one said “cruelty” was the right word — and every face had the same expression: a cold, hard anger. It was faintly eerie. These are minds that have come to their own conclusions; they can no longer be cozened with false statistics about how unemployment is falling, or not rising, or “rising more slowly.” They do not buy stories about the dangers of a “double-dip recession,” because they know that on Main Street, the first dip is still going strong.
In the Occupy Wall Street movement there are demands for a return to financial controls, and a return to reasonable executive salaries — but these are the tip of the iceberg. The protesters are under no illusion that the factory whistle will blow and call them back to work, or that the rich will stop the financial floggings on their own initiative.
In fact, they know there is no return to the American dream world of the 1950s and early 1960s. They don’t believe that a few tepid, anti-lobbying laws will clean up Capitol Hill’s corrupt relationship with big banking, or that the Fortune 500 will start hiring Americans again.
So we will see specific demands for the new, rather than a return to the old.
Although Swartz is not a sociologist, this analysis is very similar to the one that sociologist and social-media researcher Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina has come up with. As I described in an earlier post, Tufekci argues that social tools — and particularly Facebook, since it is much more widespread in Egypt and other Arab countries than Twitter is — have played a crucial role in creating what she calls an “collective action/information cascade” that helped transform groups of dissidents acting on their own into a widespread revolution.
What helped dictatorships like those in Egypt and Tunisia survive for so long, Tufekci says, is that before the Internet and the social web came along, people had no way of knowing whether their own dissatisfaction or revolutionary fervor was shared by others, apart from a small group that they might know personally. That’s enough to create small pockets of resistance, but in order for a movement to break out and become a significant force, the members of that movement have to know that others are also willing to fight — and possibly die — for that cause. Social media, Tufekci says, makes it possible to see this happening in real-time, and that helps create momentum.
In other words, as Swartz put it in his post, social tools like Facebook (and Twitter, and blogs and text messaging) allow the core group of crazy people to publicize what they are doing — and thereby connect with and inspire less crazy, but still committed people, to join them, and, at some point, this momentum tips over into outright revolution. As I’ve argued before, this is a fundamental aspect of the network effects that come from Facebook and Twitter, and it plays out not only in Arab revolutions, but in similar events in Britain during the London riots, and even in the current “Occupy Wall Street” protest movement.
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.
“We will go under you, we will go around you, we will go over you, and we will go beyond you. You no longer control the floodgates. The era of the Internet has arrived and it will consume you.”
Real change is here, and we are not alone. You are not alone.
We stand at a unique time in our history. The rise of the Internet and computing technology have contributed to an unparalleled rate of prosperity for the First World.
We have created for ourselves an empire unlike any other, a global network of constant trade and communication, a new age of technological advancement. We have come a long way from our humble roots in the Industrial Revolution and the days of Manifest Destiny. We are now pioneers on new digital frontiers expanding our domain from the quantum world to the far reaches of space.
And yet, the empire faces a crisis, a global recession, growing poverty, rampant violence, corruption in politics, and threats to personal freedom. As it was before in other times of crisis, the old stories have begun to repeat themselves. The half truths, this time repeated nightly on cable news and echoed through a series of tubes onto the Internet: the empire is strong, change is unwise, business as usual is the answer. In times of uncertainty there are those who seek to add to the confusion, to prey on our insecurities and fears. Those who would seek to keep us divided for their own gain. The pervasive strategy takes many very convincing forms: Liberals and Conservatives, Christians and Muslims, Black and White, Saved and Sinner.
But something unexpected is happening. We have begun telling each other our own stories. Sharing our lives, our hopes, our dreams, our demons. Every second, day in day out, into all hours of the night the gritty details of life on this earth are streaming around the world. As we see the lives of others played out in our living rooms we are beginning to understand the consequences of our actions and the error of the old ways. We are questioning the old assumptions that we are made to consume not to create, that the world was made for our taking, that wars are inevitable, that poverty is unavoidable. As we learn more about our global community a fundamental truth has been rediscovered: We are not so different as we may seem. Every human has strengths, weaknesses, and deep emotions. We crave love, love laughter, fear being alone and dream for a better life.
You must create a better life.
You cannot sit on the couch watching television or playing video games, waiting for revolution. You are the revolution. Every time you decide not to exercise your rights, every time you refuse to hear another point of view, every time you ignore the world around you, every time you spend a dollar at a business that doesn’t pay a fair wage you are contributing to the oppression of the human body and the repression of the human mind. You have a choice, a choice to take the easy path, the familiar path, to walk willingly into your own submission. Or a choice get up, to go outside and talk to your neighbor, to come together in new forums to create lasting, meaningful change for the human race.
This is our challenge:
A peaceful revolution, a revolution of ideas, a revolution of creation. The twenty-first century enlightenment. A global movement to create a new age of tolerance and understanding, empathy and respect. An age of unfettered technological development. An age of sharing ideas and cooperation. An age of artistic and personal expression. We can choose to use new technology for radical positive change or let it be used against us. We can choose to keep the Internet free, keep channels of communication open and dig new tunnels into those places where information is still guarded. Or we can let it all close in around us. As we move in to new digital worlds, we must acknowledge the need for honest information and free expression. We must fight to keep the Internet open as a marketplace of ideas where all are seated as equals. We must defend our freedoms from those who would seek to control us. We must fight for those who do not yet have a voice. Keep telling your story. All must be heard.
For In The Choice Between Continued Slavery And Freedom There Simply Can Be No Choice.
We Are Anonymous.
We Are Legion.
We Do Not Forgive.
We Do Not Forget.
Expect Us.
Hyperbolic prognostication or trenchant analysis? File away for future clam chowder:
In short, we’re headed into a perfect storm rivaling the disastrous political insanity of the 1930s that prolonged the depression, driving the economy into far reaching global problems that added fuel to an irrational zeitgeist and world war.
Over the past decade we predicted the 2000 crash, the 2008 meltdown and the short-lived 2009 rally, and now it seems quite clear that future historians will indeed look back on the 2011-20 decade as the “Worst Decade in American History.” Worse than the “Great Depression” of the 1930s. Totally predictable, totally denied.
The recent debt-ceiling deal is a wild red flag, warning that it’ll be much worse for a long time. Dead ahead, a protracted new civil war between special interests and the super-rich versus the middle class and disadvantaged, a wasteful internecine war that will further downgrade America as the world’s superpower, while enemies cheer loudly. So buckle your seat belts folks, it will get uglier and uglier for years.
