The Slacktivism Card

I was invited to weigh in this morning on WNYC's The Takeaway about the ongoing backlash against KONY2012, the cause video from San Diego-based Invisible Children that went crazy-viral this past week. The 30-minute video, about African warlord Joseph Kony and his crimes against children, has been watched and shared by more than 100 million people worldwide in just six days and set a Web record for speed-sharing. Directed and narrated by IC cofounder Jason Russell, the video is many things, but chiefly a call to arms for a new generation of would-be activists, and an experiment in social media strategy aimed at raising global awareness of Kony and bringing him to justice.

As a cause marketing video, KONY2012 is really, really good. (There. I said it.) It has been deeply engaging for the viewers it targets. And it's an emotionally captivating piece of personalized storytelling, well-written and clear in focus. Its effort to bring a global story home and make it personal, for its donors, is laudable. (We don't see enough of that in the aid sector.) And the KONY2012 campaign makes it easy for anyone, anywhere to participate.

Yet unlike most other cause videos being shared on the Web these days, the KONY2012 campaign has deeply riled the nation's aid sector establishment, which is both envious of IC's global reach, and, among other things, is alarmed by its chutzpah. Critics also have serious problems with the content. Included on the aid establishment's elongating list of Kony2012 criticisms are assertions that the video oversimplifies the story of its central figure, Joseph Kony (it does, but it is a cause primer for teens, not foreign policy journalism); that its young-white-San-Diego-filmmaker-pursues-black-bad-guy-in-Africa conceit smacks of American paternalism (among other things), and that the nonprofit funding the film, Invisible Children, has spent too much money on social media and technology (including high-quality video production) to track Kony's movements -- and not nearly enough to help the victims of Kony's terrorist army. There are more criticisms --some valid, and others not so much.

And now, as the blowback against this media-savvy, cutting-edge cause campaign enters its second week, critics have leveled their biggest salvo yet. They're calling KONY2012 an example of slacktivism -- suggesting that the KONY2012 video, the public protest of Kony's movements inside and outside Uganda planned for April 20th in cities around the globe, the fundraising "action" kits and celebrity-policymaker "influencer" networks curated to help galvanize the viral campaign are not important and ultimately, won't likely lead to much. The assertion is that the people supporting and leading KONY2012 are uncommitted actors who won't do much, ultimately, beyond frenzied video-sharing, to help IC achieve its mission.

Slacktivism? Really? It sounds oh-so-2008. Our world's communication landscape in 2012 has become denser, more complex and more participatory, with more opportunities to engage in public speech and undertake collective action. Isn't it time the establishment aid sector stop crying "slacktivism" each time a tech-savvy nonprofit starts making waves across the Internet? Might it be wiser to ask, instead, how our maturing social networks -- serving us, increasingly, as forums for collective action -- are providing new actors an important way to participate in civic action and politics, and, in many ways, are forcing a much-needed reshaping of the advocacy sector at large?

Here are some other points about slacktivism, from WNYC's Is Slacktivism the New Activism? segment this morning. (Disclosure: I teach social media strategy at NYU and am the author of a forthcoming book, Swarms: The Rise of the Digital Anti-Establishment, about the increasing use of social networks as tools of civic engagement):

* The concept of slacktivism is outdated, misinformed and condescending. It is a term that many in the establishment aid sector have started to use to dismiss the importance of new actors in the sector -- people not previously allowed in before the Internet and before social media lowered the barriers to participation. The youth targeted in the KONY2012 campaign are new actors. They are not slacking, nor are they philanthropy's traditional target group of High Net Worth individuals looking for a meaningful tax writeoff. Invisible Children's stakeholders are mostly young people, born digital. Like most of us, they don't want simply to watch videos about awful things. They want a world in which there is a way to engage, and social media give them that opportunity to get involved, signal disagreement, and advocate for behavioral and social norms.

* The concept of slacktivism dismisses the role of social networks as important signals of public preference and intent. People who are barely committed to a cause will never be able to click their way to a better world. But that does not mean that committed people cannot use social media effectively. As we've seen with recent, ad-hoc groups forming quickly on line to protest the Komen Foundation's attempt to cut off funds to Planned Parenthood, or to speak out against Rush Limbaugh's incendiary comments about a Georgetown University student, or to support the Stop SOPA movement to preserve Internet freedom, committed actors -- everyday people with access to influential social networks -- can use social media effectively, not as a replacement for real-world action but as a way to coordinate it.

* Online groups that use social media to achieve a goal can be effective. An Internet firestorm, in just three days, was able to force Limbaugh to apologize -- twice -- to the woman he'd called "a slut" during his incendiary broadcast and he has lost nearly 100 advertisers. The anti-Komen protest swarm that was organized online to protest the breast cancer charity's decision to cut off funds to Planned Parenthood forced a reversal of that decision and led the woman behind the brouhaha to resign. The Stop SOPA campaign was able to delay a vote on legislation to diminish Internet freedom, at least for now. This isn't Slacktivism. This is new form of activism that has used social media to coordinate swift action around a specific goal.

* Organized social networks don't need permission to act. Invisible Children has been launching videos and mass demonstrations around its mission to stop Kony since 2006. Russell and cofounders Laren Poole and Bobby Bailey made Invisible Children, a 2004 documentary film about Kony and his child soldiers that first screened in June 2004 in San Diego. The following year, the trio founded Invisible Children as a nonprofit and on April 28, 2006, it staged a massive demonstration called Global Night Commute across 126 U.S. cities, in which more than 80,000 people walked to their city centers and slept in the streets to make a visual call to end night commuting in northern Uganda. The following year, in April 2007, IC hosted its second nationwide event, during which more than 68,000 people gathered in 15 U.S. cities to experience, for one night, what it was like to be displaced. Last April, 91,355 supporters went silent for 24 hours and in doing so raised close to $2 million to help Invisible Children build radio towers to help protect remote villages inside and outside Uganda from Kony-led violence. There is little to suggest that KONY2012 will fail to again mobilize young people in April and raise more funds for the African victims of Kony's army. With KONY2012, IC is seeking to globally scale its social media strategy for organizing public demonstrations and broad-scale fundraising drives.

The bottom line here? Thanks to social media, the aid sector establishment is no longer able to control the conversation, nor say who gets to be at the table. What really makes KONY2012 so provocative and, frankly, so unsettling to so many, has less to do with Invisible Children and its latest video and much more to do with the ability of new players in the advocacy sector to work collectively -- and successfully -- outside the sector's long-established structures to identify alternative goals.

The Internet is rebalancing power and reshaping the status quo throughout society, and the transformation within the cause sector is just getting started. That is the big story to watch. KONY2012 is just another wake-up call.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration, above: Invisible Children's Facebook page)

Generation Go

This week's Social Media Week gatherings in 11 cities around the world -- from Hamburg and Hong Kong to Singapore and Sao Paulo -- are focusing on the role of Twitter, Facebook and other social networks as a catalyst for cultural, political, economic and social change. The theme is "Empowering Change through Collaboration." But the big takeaway so far? Social media innovation in 2012 won't be about Playing Nice with Others so much as creating new ways to battle the status quo.

Madison Avenue is ready and waiting. Tonight, at a special Valentine's Day panel on "connectedness" at J. Walter Thompson's Midtown headquarters, JWT's Worldwide Digital Director David Eastman shared research by his agency's trendspotters on what they're calling "Generation Go" -- an emerging cohort of cause-wired citizens who will use social media to support ever-higher levels of self-organizing across society. "We're becoming hyper-documentarians, chronicling everying -- the big, the small and everything in between -- in words, pictures, video and emoticons as it happens," says Eastman. "Generation Go is finding opportunity in economic advertisty, with many using social media as a platform for their entrepreneurial energies." [See his Top 2012 Trends in Social.] The moniker struck a chord among many #SMWNYC attendees, including Noni Cavaliere, who counted herself a member and tweeted this definition: "We go, not wait for someone to tell us to go." Fellow attendee Valerie Morini tweeted that "Generation Go is more of a mindset" favoring "entrepreneurship" and "change without invitation."

Reflecting back on a year of social media-driven uprisings in the Middle East and on Wall Street, Meetup Founder and CEO Scott Heiferman took it all a little further, saying social media have unleashed widespread energy among citizens seeking to build a new society of parallel political and economic systems. "The future is going to be defined around the idea that people are going to render the old economy somewhat pointless," Heiferman told the #SMW12 crowd. "We're at the very early stage of a true revolution, in that people are turning away from big media and big business and big finance, big pharma, big food. What we're doing on Facebook and Twitter and other social platforms is inventing new kinds of transactions. We're turning to each other now and increasingly for what we need." Heiferman cited the emerging group of networked services like airbnb and Parker from Streetline. "Thanks to social media," he said, "people in social networks are starting to sell or rent or buy from each other. They're renting their excess parking spaces to each other and insuring each other. That might not sound like a lot, but it is no small thing when people have in these tools the power to start creating an economy outside the prevailing system."

Heiferman called this new economy a "do-it-ourselves" economy -- "something between our everyday social interactions on Facebook and our activism in movements like Occupy" that is enabling people to "turn to each other to get what they need" outside the traditional system.

Andrew Rasiej, the founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, followed Heiferman, saying the market trends are reflective of broader changes across society. "...We live in an era of a new currency" of friends and family and relationships we can trust, he said tonight. Government, for example, "will not get fixed. It is going to get redesigned and rebuilt" by wired citizens demanding faster, more responsive and transparent institutions and social systems.

"...We should not wait to fix the 20th century political system or wait for the 21st century democracy to get built," Rasiej said. "The 21st century democracy and economy will be built by us, by activists, by engineers who understand that the power of technology is not based in the hallways of Congress but in the streets all over the world."

For more on this week's Social Media Week panels, see the schedule and collection of livestreams.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photograph of torn poster of deposed Tunisian President Ben Ali by Murat Sarica-2011)

When Communities Revolt

There are two kinds of digital swarms in today's nonprofit world -- groups of people who self-organize rapidly on the Web to achieve an urgent, common goal (to help Haiti quake victims, change a law or oust a politician, for starters.) And now, as this week's Komen for the Cure controversy has made clear, there are also the kinds of swarms that can form when an organization's most influential fans and followers on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking platforms start feeling that the organizations they support are ignoring them -- or betraying their trust by doing something controversial without their input or prior knowledge.

This week's Komen swarm acted swiftly -- "with head-snapping speed," according to Jennifer Preston of The New York Times. It began forming on Twitter and Facebook minutes after The Associated Press Tuesday broke a news "exclusive" exposing a decision by the Komen board to stop funding Planned Parenthood's breast cancer screening programs because of its support for abortion. Within hours, criticism of the action on the organization's social sites had turned into an angry buzz. According to blogger Kivi Leroux Miller, who was closely monitoring the reaction on Komen's social sites at the time of the decision, "anti-Komen posts were outnumbering pro-Komen posts at the rate of 80-1."

The swarm intensified throughout the day into Wednesday, fueled by a decision Komen made to remain silent, even as the size of the swarm had become nearly overwhelming in its speed and ferocity. "It was as if they were trying to ignore us," one #komen supporter tweeted Wednesday. But the uproar didn't reach critical mass until cause-wired fans caught Komen starting to remove from its social media sites some of their most passionate criticisms. [Komen supporter Mary Anne Van Develde wrote on Komen's Facebook page Wednesday that"...the post I made here yesterday knocking your decision is now gone. Please, no matter how you try to spin it, you have to know this is just wrong."] The swarm ended when its target, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, said tonight that it would reverse its Planned Parenthood decision, three days after the uproar began.

But for Komen, is it too little, too late? It hasn't been only abortion rights activists denouncing Komen but also some of Komen's long-time supporters, furious that the fight against breast cancer has been pulled into partisan battles over the abortion issue. As of this post, ardent protest continues online, with some activists eyeing Sunday's Superbowl for possible further action. Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, says it was able to raise some $3 million from the new fundraising drive it began right after the AP story broke, to compensate for the cutbacks Komen now says won't be necessary. That's money soliticited from many of Komen's old donors that won't ever be going back. Bloomberg, who pledged $250,000 to Planned Parenthood yesterday, lauded the Komen reversal but says he will not withdraw his gift to Planned Parenthood. "Politics have no place in health care," Bloomberg said, echoing the complaints of protesters. "Breast cancer screening saves lives, and hundreds of thousands of women rely on Planned Parenthood for access to care."

Some take-aways:

1. Don't underestimate the power of your fan networks. They are following your activities closely. They are likely to be more engaged with you than you realize and the most influential of them are always ready to engage further. Ignoring them or removing their posts from your media streams and walls signals censorship. Chastising them for expressing their opinions, even if you don't agree, "is one of the worst things you can do to your community," says care2 blogger Allyson Kapin. "It also riles them up even more."

2. Don't underestimate the power of social media to harness rapid protest. Angry fans have the power to hold even your most headstrong, high-profile leaders accountable, especially when they attempt to shift course abruptly or act controversially. Your fans on social networks also don't like surprises. Give them a head's up before announcing a big decision. [According to the Times, Twitter users have so far sent more than 1 million posts mentioning Planned Parenthood, Komen and related terms and hashtags. On Thursday alone, the Times says, there were more than 460,000 Tweets.]

3. Social media can help people to create a broad, shared awareness of a problem and accelerate the speed at which those problems get resolved. The 2011 Arab spring protests, the citizen's campaign to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the Occupy movement and dozens of other protests all have used social media successfully to create full-blown assaults on the status quo -- and, at least for a short while, to exhibit widespread support for mass action.

4. Nonprofits, governments and other establishment organizations tend to overestimate people's access to informaton and underestimate their access to each other. Komen's decision to end Planned Parenthood grants may have been just as unpopular if announced last December but at least supporters would have heard the news first from Komen -- not from a news organization breaking "a scoop" based on an inside tip.

5. Don't wait to communicate. Komen waited more than 48 hours after the AP story ran to post a video of Komen Founder and CEO Nancy G. Brinker defending the organization on Web site and on YouTube. According to The New York Times, the video drew more than 2,800 comments and was been viewed more than 39,000 times but did little to reverse the sentiments of the swarm. According to Bloomberg News, meanwhile, Planned Parenthood was able to raise $3 million from people in reaction to Komen's decision, reversed earlier today, to end its grants. "Women feel betrayed," says Anika Rahman, president of the feminist group Ms. Foundation for Women. She told San Francisco Chronicle reporter Victoria Colliver on Friday the flap -- and the way it was handled by Komen -- "will be something that will have long-term implications."

6. And finally, social networks decentralize leadership. Networks do not need permission to act and they want a head's up on the big decisions. The Komen case serves as a reminder of what nonprofit marketing coach Kivi Leroux Miller called earlier this week the power of social media to "accidentally rebrand" any organization that fails to create new communications strategies aimed at transparently and authentically engaging its digital communities. Sure, Komen has its own Facebook page and Twitter stream. But using them to build ongoing and transparent engagement with fans is a challenge few organizations do well. The Komen brouhaha, Miller wrote this past week, "is what can happen when a leading organization with thousands of fans decides to jump into a highly controversial area of public policy without a communications strategy, stays silent and lets others take over the public dialogue." Ironically, the very same Komen marketing juggernaut that brought the world the ubiquitous pink-ribbon campaign to fight breast cancer ended up portraying itself as being clueless about social media.

Bottom line? Don't mess with your Facebook fans and social media followers. As Wendy Harman, the Director of Social Media Strategy at the American Red Cross told my social media strategy students at New York University last Wednesday: "Transparency is not about vulnerability so much as it is about having the institutional ability to hear what people are saying and to respond in a really human, honest and compassionate way -- in real time."

Just weeks after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was forced from power last spring, friend and former PopTech /NYU colleague Kristin Taylor suggested that many institutions today risk "getting Mubaraked." The definition? Said Taylor: "Failing to engage on social media with your stakeholders to such a degree that they eventually render you irrelevant."

Don't let it happen to you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Christoph Kadur for istock.com)

Counter-swarms

Occupy Wall Street organizers -- to further protest their eviction earlier today from Manhattan's Zuccotti Park by New York City riot police -- are stepping up their scheduled global "Day of Action" rally set for Thursday throughout New York City and in other cities where Occupy encampments have been shuttered in recent hours and days.

In a flash rally today attended by hundreds of Occupy protesters along 7th Avenue in midtown Manhattan near the failed Lehman Brothers' former world headquarters building, the movement's organizers asked passersby to "join the Global Movement for Economic and Social Equality and the 99 Percent" for a Day of Action on November 17th. Events that day will include a 7 a.m. "Resist Austerity" rally at Zuccotti Park just before the opening of the New York Stock Exchange "to confront Wall Street with the stories of people on the front lines of economic injustice." Then, at 3 p.m., organizers have scheduled simultaneous rallies at 16 central subway stops in all five NYC boroughs "to listen to a singular story from one of our hardest-hit and most inspirational neighbors." At 5 p.m., Occupy supporters will move to Foley Square near Wall Street to "listen to stories, a gospel choir, a marching band" and "march to our city's bridges to demand that we get back to work rebuilding our country's infrastructure." The flier urges participants to "make it a musical march. ...Bring your songs, your voice, your spirit." [For more information, search N17Event on Facebook.]

Today's flash rally came hours after New York City police, acting on the orders of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, arrested 200 Occupy Wall Street protesters in the wee hours as part of a long-planned eviction strategy aimed to clear Zuccotti Park -- the symbolic epicenter of the global Occupy movement. The 1 a.m. eviction was part of a coordinated crackdown by authorities in multiple cities, from Zurich to Portland to London and Calgary after two months of demonstrations in city parks and squares across the country and in cities around the world. In a morning news conference hours after police moved in overnight, NYC's Mayor Bloomberg said the city wanted to clear Zuccotti Park for cleaning but that it had intended to let protesters back in later -- provided they wouldn't live there and re-occupy the space with tents and tarps. But the city decided to keep the park closed when its attorneys were served with a Temporary Restraining Order mid-morning against the evictions. Zuccotti Park remained empty and closed for most of the rest of the day, pending the outcome of a court hearing on the TRO and the legality of the city's actions against the protesters. [ At about 5:30 p.m., the judge upheld the city's ban on tents and tarps, and protesters moved back into Zuccotti Park, without camping gear.]

The raid against Occupy Wall Street came just days after similar actions to break up Occupy Portland and Occupy Oakland-- and a half-day before Occupy Toronto, Occupy Calgary, Occupy Zurich and Occupy London were similarly confronted by authorities. Occupy Los Angeles spokesperson PJ Davenport told The Huffington Post that: "The timing of the evictions of occupiers in Portland, Oakland and New York City are no coincidence. Sources at Occupy LA have received notice from our information networks that the proverbial hammer is coming down and that a nationwide effort is underway to close all occupations. Here at Occupy LA, despite our friendly relationship with City Council and the LAPD, we believe that it is a short matter of time before we are asked to leave."

Occupy press spokeswoman Dana Balicki told WNYC Radio Host Brian Lehrer on his daily radio call-in show today that Occupy organizers would not be deterred by the evictions. "The messaging here is that we are undeterred, our spirits are high and our resolve is unbeatable. ...We are letting the City of New York, Mayor Bloomberg and the world know that we are not going anywhere and that you can't simply throw an idea in a dumpster." Gideon Oliver, one of the lead attorneys representing the Occupy protesters, told Lehrer the crackdowns represent "a new form of represssive conduct. Unlike temporary, stationary rallies of the past, Occupy has created a 24/7 component and taken on messaging and communicative tactics that are unique, so to attack" the movement by clearing the parks they occupy for health and safety reasons "is clearly a pretext."

Meanwhile, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan told the BBC that leaders of 18 cities in which Occupy protesters had set up encampments coordinated their raids across the county. "I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation," Quan said.

On Monday, the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which conceived of the movement -- and apparently aware of the multi-city crackdowns yet to come -- said the protesters should “declare victory” and head indoors to strategize. "OWS isn't a geographical place so much as it is an idea and an attitude," spokewoman Balicki said.

Watch this space for updates.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Illustration, top: Day of Action poster by Occupy Wall Street.]

[Photos of Tuesday's Occupy Wall Street eviction, top, by Don Emmert of AFP-Getty Images, and below, by The Associated Press - both with permission.]

Wirearchy

Today is the official one-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and supporters are congratulating themselves, with birthday cakes and marathon choruses of "Happy Occupy to You" from Manhattan's Zuccotti Park. But the movement's staying power should come as no surprise. What has been unexpected? Since the Tweet that started it all went viral July 15 -- "Sept. 17. Wall St. Bring Tent." -- the movement it catalyzed has appeared to kindle more heat globally than nationally. The New York Times journalist Nick Kristof, in a column Sunday titled America's Primal Scream, wrote how "it's fascinating that many Americans intuitively understood the outrage and frustration that drove Egyptians to protest at Tahrir Square, but don't seem to comprehend similar resentments that drive disgruntled fellow citizens to 'occupy' Wall Street."

Indeed, the #OWS movement had its largest single day of protests Saturday not in New York but far from Wall Street. Writes blogger Nate Silver: "In Europe, crowds in cities like Rome, Barcelona, and Madrid were estimated at 200,000 to 500,000 per city -- more, probably, than the protests in the U.S. combined." [See Cause Global's coverage of the rally in Times Square here.] Silver, who analyzed crowd turnout numbers and the distribution of the October 15th protests worldwide, also found that "despite Occupy Wall Street's name, its energy in the U.S. seems to be coming from the left coast" -- and apparently from people who didn't vote in the 2010 mid-term elections.

But it would be foolish to underestimate the movement's ideological diversity, its staying power, or its organizational savvy. This is not, as protester Justin Strekal told The Associated Press over the weekend, simply "a participatory democracy in a little park" near Wall Street. On the contrary, Occupy Wall Street has become a global franchise, backed by an impressively horizontal "wire-archy" of digitally connected strategy, media, and community organizing professionals, volunteers, sympathetic tech startups and consultants, online petition groups and other pro bono-minded social enterprises and innovators -- all of whom say they are working to redefine for the digital age what is meant by economic sustainability and participatory leadership (not to mention strategic planning).

For its part, the Zuccotti Park "branch" of the movement is continuing to meet daily in a general assembly and has aggregated nearly $300,000 of hundreds of individual donations into an Amalgamated Bank account. It has a local finance committee -- which, according to The New York Observer, just voted to turn down a donation from music mogul Russell Simmons because he wanted to help the group shape specific demands. (Victoria Sobel, 21, Occupy Wall Street's CFO, told The Observer Sunday that organizers are almost "obsessively sensitive" to any one individual or organization trying to exert leadership over Occupy; she said finance committee members are taking crash courses in money management to make sure the movement's books remain transparent and unfettered by New Age lobbyists.)

The Zuccotti Park installation also has its own newspaper, published in two languages, and a library, an infirmary, a rotating set of showers and rooms-for-no-rent in the area, and a waste disposal system set up by a social enterprise called Mobile Design Lab. And more widely, it has media savvy by the boatload, thanks to a real-time line-up of global PR volunteers and liasons who have, so far, managed the message cross-culture. People in London, Madrid, South Korea, Japan, Sydney and Stockholm, for example, were carrying similar signs and wearing similar t-shirts on October 15, all claiming membership in the "99 Per Cent." Meanwhile, multiple networks of crowdsourced "hackathon" techies are working to better connect sympathizers near and far, and more than 100 lawyers are donating their services to aid the arrested. Most protesters and their supporters, of course, don't live outside in parks, but rather in houses and apartments in multiple cities and countries. [Like the Arab Spring protests, this movement depends on people aggregating both geographically and online to continuously catalyze multiple communities while also populating a geographical "center" for public reference.]

And politically, at least for now, Occupy Wall Street is trending in the mainstream, if not on Twitter, among some of the movement's most unlikely supporters. The GOP-appointed Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told a recent hearing of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that "at some level, I can't blame them (the protesters)" for "blaming, with some justification, the financial sector for getting us into this mess."

In the words of New Yorker Senior Editor Amy Davidson, "this is a global conversation going on now, and it would be foolish not to listen. ...Wall Street has long been a multinational brand name; now Occupy is, too. ...For an anti-corporate movement, OWS has a good sense of franchising -- and more importantly, it has something to say about enfranchisement."

No doubt. Occupy, perhaps most significantly, offers yet another example of how the Internet is profoundly enabling people to reshape the status quo at multiple levels of society. Occupy's loose-knit, distributed networks of hyper-agile, group-led "adhocracies" are -- thanks to our growing addiction to social media -- both inevitable and impossible to ignore. Can such digital organizations and movements topple governments as we know them? If you count the Arab Spring demonstrations, they already have. What's not so obvious is what comes next.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photo of Occupy demonstrator by Reuters, with permission. Illustration: Cover of the October 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker]

Times Squared

Just before the official 5 p.m. start time of today's Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Manhattan's Times Square, a small throng of formally-attired theatergoers standing near the discount TKTS booth began complaining loudly about the crowds clogging the sidewalks, apparently unaware that the biggest Broadway show in town was about to begin right in front of them -- no tickets required. ["Don't they know they're in the way?" theatergoer Rose Aberdeen, 67, asked no one in particular, pointing to a protester dressed up as the Statue of Liberty.]

But this was not just another day in self-expressive Gotham. Some 6,000 demonstrators took to the streets today in Times Square as part of Occupy Wall Street's official October 15th Global Day of Action, prompting the NYPD to close off Broadway for eight blocks in Midtown and erect steel barricades, mount horses and drive motorcycles in formation to break up the crowds. [After 4-plus hours of chanting slogans and texting at a rate of some 500 tweets per minute (according to Twitter), demonstrators headed south to Washington Square Park on the NYU campus, dispersing after police arrived through the Arch and warned they would be enforcing a midnight curfew. Fourteen were arrested for remaining in the park.]

Among today's Times Square protesters were 87-year-old Irwin Nack and Pat Alessandrini, 72, both in from New Jersey for the day. Nack, a retired American history professor from William Patterson University, recalled his first protest rally in 1946 in Manhattan, when he was organizing city teachers for higher wages. He praised social media. "We would have had so much more clout if we'd had those tools back then," he said. " With social media, you can simultaneously protest in multiple locations." Closer to where counter-terrorism police were rushing the intersection of 46th and Broadway, Annie Dawson, 26, from Ann Arbor and Jeffrey Demesch from Brooklyn called the protests "America's Spring" -- referring to the Arab Spring protests earlier this year that used similar tactics in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Meanwhile, chants of "This is our Street" and "This is what democracy looks like" erupted each time a new squad of police marched into the intersection at 46th and Broadway to separate protesters coming into the Square from the east from those pouring in from the west. "I think most people don't realize how neglected their democracy has become until they try to exercise their rights to free speech and assembly," Dawson said.

But for all the chanting and shouting -- and despite some pepper-spray incidents and minor skirmishes with police -- this crowd remained peaceful. And it was impressively self-policed: at various times, some protesters would advise others to stop shouting and sit down. [As one demonstrator passed out Fourth of July sparklers, others urged people to throw them away. "Fireworks are illegal in New York and you don't want to get arrested for that," someone said.]

The ironies conveyed by Time Square's famous neon signs also didn't go entirely unnoticed. Just above a placard that read "Beat the Banks" was a billboard advertising Bonnie & Clyde -- the musical. Beneath a billboard advertising GenX darling Zooey Deschanel in her new sitcom, The New Girl, sat NYU student Jennifer Bell, 22, wearing an AlterNation cap and sharing her opposition to "the status quo" with a fellow demonstrator. Later, beneath Bank of America's enormous red-and-white electric marquee sign on the southwest corner of 46th and Broadway, an Australian couple asked a passer-by to direct them to the nearest ATM -- but first, please, show them the fastest route through the crowd to the Winter Garden Theater. (It was in sight but blocked by mounted police.) They had show tickets for 8 p.m., they told Cause Global, and they "didn't want to miss the show."

When all was said and done, 78 people were arrested in New York, according to The New York Times, including 24 accused of trespassing in a Greenwich Village branch of Citibank during a mid-day rally encouraging people to close their bank accounts at various Citibank, Wells Fargo and Bank of America branches across the city.

The day's events from New York, while generally not televised, were livestreamed, tweeted, facebooked, foursquared and liveblogged, making cable news networks' lack of in-depth local coverage this evening all the more obvious and frustrating to the crowds, underscoring the rapid pace and wider reach of new and social media. "Where's the press? Where's the press?" was the chant at 10 p.m. when the Square's neon news tickers failed to flash much about the day's local demonstrations.

"The press is us now," protester Ann Dawson shouted back. "Shut up and keep tweeting."

-- Marcia Stepanek

[For more on the #OWS swarms, watch this space for continuing highlights, follow the Global Revolution channel on Livestream and jump into the Twitterstreams at #occupywallst and #ows, among others.]

[All photos, top, of Occupy Wall Street's October 15th demonstration at the intersection of Broadway and 46th Street in Times Square, by Marcia Stepanek for CauseGlobal]

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]

Wiki-leadership

Occupy Wall Street entered its fourth week of protests yesterday in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, and despite claims of at least 800 arrests so far nationwide, the movement is showing no signs of winding down. Undeterred by rain, hundreds of demonstrators packed the 33,000-square-foot park of sparse trees and blue tarps again this afternoon -- standing, singing, sitting huddled under blankets, sharing donated food and texting from the ground.

The protest swarm that emerged there via Facebook on September 17 has now spread to many cities: Wikipedia counts more than 70, from Salt Lake City and Seattle to Providence, Rhode Island. About 130 people were arrested at Occupy Boston early Tuesday; the Occupy groups in Atlanta and Seattle, among others, were reported on Slate to be digging in at their sites for the long haul. Politicans and the media, meanwhile, have been forced to take notice and to take sides. On Tuesday, a group of demonstrators from Occupy Wall Street took to the road and marched from lower Manhattan to NYC's uber-wealthy Upper East Side, in what they called the Millionaire's March. The group walked and chanted past the homes of people like Rupert Murdoch, Tea Party financial backer David Koch and JP Morgan Chase Chairman Jamie Dimon. [Mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself a billionaire, was spared; his East Side townhouse was not on the visitation list.]

More marching is planned for this weekend: Occupy Wall Street is organizing a series of flash mobs at Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Chase bank locations across the country. Though Facebook, YouTube, livestreaming and Twitter have been key in organizing and perpetuating the movement, organizers also have been distributing "old media" -- paper fliers and a broadsheet newspaper called Occupied Wall Street Journal, published in English and Spanish.

"We're taking what worked in Cairo during the Arab Spring," says Jonathan Hull, 26, a protester who arrived in Zuccotti Park last week from Portland, Ore. A freelance graphic designer, Hull says the movement is less about the future of capitalism and much more about the need to create new models of leadership for a digital world. "These protests are kind of like a first effort by members of my generation to use social media to help create a new, consensus-driven model of self-governance," Hull told Cause Global. "We call ourselves leaderless but we're really fighting to create a shared kind of leadership, kind of like how Wikipedia works. It's a group effort. It's consensus-based. We're working to create a new way to give everyone a voice and apply those voices to solving what's not working" in society. (As Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in this week's New Yorker, observed: "The process, not the platform, is the point.")

Hull isn't the only protester to speak passionately about the need for new forms of leadership -- both to organize digital groups and then to grow and sustain them. Justin Wedes, 24, an Occupy Wall Street founder/organizer, spoke Wednesday with WNYC Radio host Brian Lehrer on his live, call-in talk show about the group's goal to create "a new form of direct democracy" enabled by social media.

What follows is an edited transcript of that interview:

LEHRER: Who are you and why are you involved?

WEDES: I'm an organizer with the New York City General Assembly, one of the organizing bodies behind the Occupy Wall Street movement. We started three months ago, when Adbusters and Anonymous put out the call to flood lower Manhattan in protest of Wall Street. We have been organizing in parks and local spaces, holding horizontal open, public meetings for anyone interested in joining the thousands of people we have in New York now and across the country. I trained as a high school science teacher and do part-time work designing Web sites and community activism.

LEHRER: Are you the person behind #OccupyWallStNYC on Twitter?

WEDES: Yes, I'm the captain of that tweetstream but not the only one.

LEHRER: Will you soon need to put out a list of demands to keep the movement from fizzling?

WEDES: I don't believe so. I think it's a goal of the movement to enunciate some serious demands, but organizing people is a process in and of itself. It's taken us now over three weeks just to get where we are, and we're still growing -- now at our fastest rate ever. If you look at the immense amount of solidarity and support and growth of our movement, it's not because we're enunciating any particular demands but rather because we are reaching out to people who are frustrated, who are really saying 'enough is enough.' Meanwhile, every night, we are meeting and talking about what our [specific] demands should be and building solidarity.

LEHRER: Enough is enough of what?

WEDES: Corporate greed. The political influence of monied interests on Wall Street in Washington and in our local and state governments. People are just fed up. It's not fixing our economy. It's destroying our country and people have had enough.

CALLER: Are you using Gandhi's ideals to influence your movement?

WEDES: Yes, absolutely. This is in the vein of Gandhi's nonviolent work of peaceful protest. The world we're trying to create in these general assemblies [Occupy groups] across the country is all about nonviolence and consensus. These general assemblies we're creating are now being built spontaneously in up to 100 cities. It's a mirror of what we're trying to get to in the end.

CALLER: Is this anti-capitalist?

WEDES: There is a broad spectrum of perspectives and agendas. We claim to be the 99 percent [of the population] and if we are, that represents a very wide spectrum of beliefs, so I don't want to narrow it down to one or another ideology.

CALLER: What is the process by which you all arrived at the organizational roles you play? How does the election process take place to form these general assemblies that choose you and others as leaders of this movement?

WEDES: I can't stake a claim to be a leader any more than anyone else. I call myself an organizer, as I've been there since Day One, helping to bring spirit and organization to this movement. We are a leaderless, horizontal movement, in the sense that there are no hierarchies of roles in this group. We are constantly rotating through facilitators in our general assembly [a daily mass meeting], so there's no ability of any individual or organization to co-opt us.

I think the magic that I believe is happening right now in Zuccotti Park (and really, across the country) is that the general assembly is a consensus-based process. It's not an elected or representative democracy. It is an attempt to bring consensus -- agreement to a group of people. And it works in a really amazing, magical way. Everybody has a voice in the general assembly. Every voice is heard. It's a slow process and at time, laborious, but people are patient because they know their voices will be heard and valued.

LEHRER: Consensus is a high standard. You can't always get a consensus in a marriage, much less among thousands of people in Zuccotti Park.

WEDES: No, that's right, and when there isn't consensus -- when there are blocks, for example, in proposals -- we move to what we call 'modified consensus.' But even before that, we try to modify our proposals with friendly amendments. The problem with representative democracy is that it has up-and-down votes. You know, 51 percent of the people may be in support of an idea but then the other 49 percent are then immediately marginalized. That doesn't work. Politics isn't working because it has become so confrontational. So our approach is rather than try to find the 51 percent agreement and leave the other 49 percent in the dust, let's do the extra work it takes to build consensus and unity.

CALLER: But if there is no one leader, this movement won't go anywhere. Every group needs a leader.

WEDES: The idea of a leaderless, horizontal movement is really difficult for a lot of people to grasp because it's only in the last few years that we've started to harness technology and social media and the possibilities that it all brings in order to facilitate communication and flatten communication hierarchies. I like to rather call [our movement] leader-ful -- a leaderful movement rather than a leaderless one -- because what it means is that everyone is empowered to take a role of leadership. Everybody is empowered to step forward and lead a cause or an initiative. And the way that we're able to do that is we're harnessing technology to open up streams of information --to keep from having information bottlenecks, for example, where too few people know too much and they are able to have access to resources that other people in the group don't.

LEHRER: If you're a tight little group of protesters in each city, you can do that. But if you want to become a major political party, or if you want to have a major mass influence on America, then you can't do it like a tight-knit little family, can you?

WEDES: I'm not sure whether we can or cannot. I think that's a little bit unpredictable. What I DO know is that what will grow out of this is being supported by the work of some very, very smart people on the software development end and the hardware development end, who are working on tools to be able to coordinate these movements all over the country -- and really all over the world -- so that we can collaborate in real time and hold things like simultaneous polling. We live in a world where technology has long surpassed the political realities of this country. We have a representative democracy that is so unparticipative right now, that everybody's democracy muscle is not being flexed. So let's find creative solutions to that.

LEHRER: How long will this movement keep going? It started September 17.

WEDES: There was never a deadline for when we go home. We always said we'll be here until our voices are heard and our demands are met. Those demands are being created right now. We will release them soon.

LEHRER: Will there be something like a news conference?

WEDES: I'm not sure, as that would be pretty old school and I think we're a bit beyond that now with our social media. [To follow Occupy Wall Street NYC, go to the livestream, search the calls to action on YouTube or go to Occupy's YouTube page. Or, go to Occupy Together to check out actions across the country and jump into the Twitterstreams at #occupywallstnyc, #ows, and #sep17 -- among others.]

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photo, top, by Lukas Johnson/Reuters]

[Poster, above, by B.L. Singelton for Occupy Together]

Al-Jazeera's Wadah Khanfar

Al-Jazeera Chief Wadah Khanfar addressed this year's TED conference about the civic uprisings sweeping the Arab world and gave his take on where the unrest might be leading. He said he believes that social media are helping to make the Middle East and northern Africa more democratic.

"The future we were dreaming for has arrived," Khanfar told conferees (see the video of Khanfar's talk, below, made public yesterday). "A new generation, well-connected and inspired by universal values and global understanding, has created a new reality for us. We've found a new way for us to express our feelings and dreams. ...The regimes who invested billions of dollars in security systems collapsed and disappeared because of the voices of the people. They (the regime) tried to kill (the people), but the young people found something called Facebook and Twitter...and we found that all of these people in the streets are our reporters now."

Here's Khanfar:

(Photo of Khanfar, top, courtesy TED Conferences)

Anatomy of a Facebook Revolution

Tonight, Frontline airs Revolution in Cairo, a behind-the-scenes look at Egypt's April 6 Youth Movement as it plots strategy and then heads out into Cairo's Tahrir Square, hoping to bring down President Hosni Mubarak. "The film traces these young Egyptian activists' long road to revolution, as they made increasingly bold use of the Internet in their underground resistance over the last few years," Frontline's Executive Producer David Fanning recounts. "Through sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the members of April 6 and related groups helped organize a political movement that the secret police did not understand and could not stop, despite the arrest and torture of some of the movement's key members."

The piece includes soundbites from David Wolman, the WIRED writer who has been reporting inside the April 6 movement and Mona Eltahawy, a popular blogger on Arab issues.

Here's the PBS promotion trailer:

Here's the fuller video; the story begins after a 30-second advertisement:

What do you think of this story? Let us hear from you.

(Photo, top, is of April 6 Youth Movement headquarters in Cairo.)

TweetMobs

Next month marks the fifth anniversary of the first Tweet -- which Twitter creator Jack Dorsey sent at 9:50 p.m. PST on March 21, 2006. The tweet? Nothing special, actually. "Just setting up my twttr," Dorsey wrote.

The microblogging service has since wracked up an estimated 200 million users sending some 65 million tweets per day worldwide -- and, says NPR's Terry Gross, "it has been used by heads of state, astronauts in outer space and protesters in Iran, Egypt and Tunisia trying to disseminate information after news media crackdowns in their respective countries."

Earlier this week, Gross interviewed Twitter co-founder Biz Stone about the rapid growth of the social network, the short history of Twitter in activism and efforts by some governments to censor usage. "Twitter has managed to find its way into almost every political uprising around the world," Stone told Gross. "...The Internet and social media are making the world a smaller place," he added, helping to synchronize thought and action globally.

Here's an excerpt of that February 16th interview; the full podcast is below:

TERRY GROSS: What were the first indications you saw that Twitter was being used as an organizing tool in Egypt?

BIZ STONE: Well, actually, Twitter's use in Egypt goes back to something that happened in 2008 that we heard about after the fact and we were just sort of chilled by -- and that was this photojournalism student named James Buck, who had traveled from U.C.-Berkeley to Egypt specifically to photograph protests. And he wanted to get great photos in Egypt.

And so he went out there on his own, and he kept missing all of the protests that were organized. And so he asked some of his Egyptian friends that he met there: How is that you guys are, you know, suddenly organizing these protests so quickly and so efficiently? And they said: Oh, we're using this tool called Twitter.

And, you know, James was from the Bay Area, hadn't even heard of it, and he's hearing about it in Egypt. And so he gets on Twitter, and he's suddenly plugged into this network. And so he's able to make it to these protests, and there he is, taking these great photos.

And suddenly, he notices something is up. He told us later, a lot of Egyptian police have mustaches, and the mustache quotient in the crowd went up significantly, which got him worried. And he suddenly said something doesn't seem quite right.

And he was grabbed, arrested by Egyptian police, thrown in the back of a car, really starting to freak out. He's this young guy, realized they hadn't taken his mobile phone from him yet and that he was on Twitter.

And so he sent out a tweet, and it was a one-word tweet, and the word was "arrested." Within about three hours, what happened was his friends back home in California knew the situation that he was in, they had been following his other tweets. They knew it wasn't - that it was serious, that it wasn't a joke.

His friends called the dean. The dean called a lawyer. The lawyer called the consulate, and within a few hours, James sent out another tweet that was also one word, and that was simply "freed."

And when we heard about this story and that Twitter was being used in Egypt in 2008 to organize these protests, that was one of the early, eye-opening experiences for us, that made us realize this was not just something in the Bay Area for, you know, technical geeks to fool around with and to find out what each other's up to, but a global communications system that could be used for almost anything and everything.

(Photograph of Biz Stone, top, by Joi Ito)

Swarms, Redux

In the past few weeks, a number of friends and colleagues have been sending me notes on the uprisings in the Middle East, knowing that I'm writing a book called Swarms, on social media and their ability to rapidly expand the coordination and power of self-organized groups.

As new protests spread across the Middle East [ the result, in part, of coordinated action via social media], here are some quick observations:

* The Internet, mobile phones and online social networks are tools for rapid coordination that can help people to synchronize their beliefs and coordinate their actions -- faster, easier and on a much larger scale than ever before;

* Establishment institutions aren't afraid of big ideas so much as synchronized action -- and social media tools in the hands of the voiceless, disaffected or disenfranchised (those with an ax to grind or a cause to promote) can effectively re-calibrate the balance of power;

* Social media can be an accelerant, enabling social movements to crop up in weeks and days rather than taking years to mobilize, as before;

* Social media can make weak social ties stronger, making it easier for people with similar ideas and sentiments to find each other and create communities of coordinated action;

* The Internet can help to distribute leadership and decentralize it; movements no longer need a single charismatic leader calling all the shots;

* Net-coordinated dissent is going regional. Social networks are now influencing other social networks;

* There is an arms race of technology between the governed and those governing. Egyptian authorities were clueless; China's are not. NYU colleague Kristen Taylor, on a social media panel last week in New York during Social Media Week, coined the term, "The Mubarak Effect." Said Taylor: "It's this tone deaf thing that's happening that can happen, really, in any sector. You have someone in there who's not listening (via social media), who's unable to listen and it ends up really bad."]

* A nation that disconnects its Internet and mobile phones opts out of the world economy -- insuring that no nation challenged by synchronized action via social media can afford to disconnect citizens completely for very long;

* The combination of online and offline activism is powerful, as is an independent press. Al-Jazeera's balanced coverage and livestreams of the protests added to the momentum and credibility of the youth movements in Cairo and Tunisia and elsewhere, spawned via social media;

* The ability of social media to bear unfiltered witness to events -- and distribute videos of them as are happening -- makes it harder for information "to go away" but easier for people in failed uprisings to be identified by regimes later -- and "disappeared."

For more on digital swarms, see Mary Joyce's blog post on the tech that powers activists on the Meta-Activism Project blog, and Clay Shirky's piece on social media and political dissent in Foreign Policy Magazine. See also Hillary Clinton's recent speech on Internet freedom, and this NPR interview, below, with Alec Ross -- the State Department's social media advisor. The State Department, Ross says, is now monitoring the tweets of influential people around the world, and chiefly those in the Middle East. "It's fascinating...the degree to which information can be made available in real-time from sources who wouldn't have been historically elevated," he says.

Here's Ross, below:

What do you think? Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photo: Street protest in Yemen: Reuters)