Saturday, October 15, 2011

Swarms Global




Occupy Wall Street's October 15th Global Day of Action catalyzed coordinated street demonstrations in dozens of cities today, including Taiwan, London, Rome, Belgrade, and Berlin. In Rome, demonstrations turned violent between ralliers and police, while other European and global demonstrations remained comparatively peaceful.

Meanwhile, in New York City, Occupy Wall Street organizers staged weekend hackathons to further advance the movement's ability to digitally coordinate simultaneous actions worldwide and nationally. At 3 p.m. EST today, marchers set off from Washington Square Park on the NYU campus and began making their way north to Times Square, where a large rally was scheduled to start at 5 p.m EST to cap off the global day of protest -- called United for #Globalchange. Protest actions are additionally being coordinated via Foursquare and Meetup.

A video calling for October 15th participation globally, below, sought actions in 951 cities in 82 countries.


To follow the day's events as they continue, watch this space for hilites. Additionally, go to the Occupy Together web site and watch the livestream of the protest marches in NYC today. Jump into the Twitter coverage from the front lines [#OWS, #Oct15, #globalrevolution, #99percent, #occupynyc, among others] and check out the liveblogging by Reuters and The New York Daily News.

[Photos, top to bottom: demonstrator ducking teargas in Rome by The Associated Press; a protester today in Taiwan and the demonstration near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, both by Reuters; all with permission]

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4 Comments:

Blogger David Ronfeldt said...


this old post by you just reappeared in my blog roll and reminded me that you have done an illuminating series of posts about swarming. also, i see you are doing a book.

i would like to hope that you are aware of our past work on the topic. i believe we were the first to identify it as an emerging mode of conflict, in the late 1990s. most of our work was done for rand, all of whose reports are available as free .pdf downloads at rand’s website.

john arquilla's and my fullest statement is Swarming and the Future of Conflict (2000), available at

http://www.rand.org/publications/DB/DB311/

we expanded, esp on non-military social swarming, in our volume on Networks & Netwars (2001), esp. in the last chapter, available at

http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1382/

if interested, our first writing to make passing reference to swarming was The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexico (1998), available at

http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR994

since retiring, i have occasionally discussed aspects of swarming at my experiment with blogging, mostly in the following posts (the first of which contains a quote from you):

http://twotheories.blogspot.com/2011/12/what-occupy-protests-mean-timn.html

http://twotheories.blogspot.com/2010/03/incidentals-3rd-of-5-apropos-future-of.html

http://twotheories.blogspot.com/2009/04/zapatista-social-netwar-revisited-more.html

onward.

February 6, 2013 at 10:22 PM  
Blogger David Ronfeldt said...

this old post by you just reappeared in my blog roll and reminded me that you have done an illuminating series of posts about swarming. also, i see you are doing a book.

i would like to hope that you are aware of our past work on the topic. i believe we were the first to identify it as an emerging mode of conflict, in the late 1990s. most of our work was done for rand, all of whose reports are available as free .pdf downloads at rand’s website.

john arquilla's and my fullest statement is Swarming and the Future of Conflict (2000), available at

http://www.rand.org/publications/DB/DB311/

we expanded, esp on non-military social swarming, in our volume on Networks & Netwars (2001), esp. in the last chapter, available at

http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1382/

if interested, our first writing to make passing reference to swarming was The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexico (1998), available at

http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR994

since retiring, i have occasionally discussed aspects of swarming at my experiment with blogging, mostly in the following posts (the first of which contains a quote from you):

http://twotheories.blogspot.com/2011/12/what-occupy-protests-mean-timn.html

http://twotheories.blogspot.com/2010/03/incidentals-3rd-of-5-apropos-future-of.html

http://twotheories.blogspot.com/2009/04/zapatista-social-netwar-revisited-more.html

onward.

February 6, 2013 at 10:24 PM  
Blogger Marcia Stepanek said...

David -- Thanks for your comments and for pointing me to your good work. I'm not sure why this old post appeared in your blog roll yesterday, but we're relaunching Cause Global an an expanded form as a group blog in March, and perhaps some of the format tinkering nudged the feed in some unintentional way. Sorry about that. But thank you, very much, for writing. In the final stretches of my book and in my next writings about Swarms, I will be sure to both familiarize myself more acutely with your work and definitely find you for a chance to speak again, sometime very soon. All best!

February 7, 2013 at 10:39 AM  
Blogger David Ronfeldt said...

hello again -- the following new post might interest you:

http://twotheories.blogspot.com/2013/04/past-writings-about-swarming-and-future.html

onward.

April 24, 2013 at 8:08 PM  

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