On Saturday I was enraptured by Tim Pool‘s USTREAM live cast of Occupy Wall Street’s recent action.* As Occupiers played Red Rover and Frogger with police across Manhattan, all was captured live and uploaded into the planetary Net. Like the live cast of the Occupiers getting kettled and arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge a few months ago, it was a riveting reprieve from the old, predigested form of media we grew up with.

As I watched I couldn’t help but feel that this is a collective, emergent version of Martin Luther’s protest in 1517. Like the 95 theses he posted on the church door that later was reprinted and widely disseminated with the new media technology of that period, likewise we are now seeing an unprecedented diffusion of an alternative paradigm that challenges the power structure. But this time it’s the 99% thesis. Whereas Luther challenged the corrupt authority and abuse of power by the Roman Catholic Church, we are now doing the same against domination and colonization of the planetary commons by corporations.

The fact is, since the 1980s I’ve seen these kinds of actions over and over again, but they never gained traction like they are now. The difference is probably that so many people have been pushed off a cliff that the propaganda system in place can no longer shield people from the truth at hand: that the corporate takeover of the commons can no longer be sustained. We have reached the limit and end of the old system and we are currently in a transition into a liminal state in which all the old thought forms that were codified during the past 500 years are becoming destabilized.

This is made visible in the above clip, which is an archived stream from the Saturday protests. It’s the moment when the protestors, after dodging the NYPD throughout Manhattan, spontaneously organized a General Assembly in Times Square. Using the “people mic,” they “testified” as to why they are part of the Occupation movement, all the while bathed in the surreal glow of corporate propaganda.

Times Square is the quintessential spiritual center of the corporate project. Once the seedy underbelly of New York’s deviant unconsciousness, since Giuliani’s reign as mayor the open space of 42nd St. has been transformed into a kind of dystopic hydra of capitalist enclosure (privatization/fencing off). A mix of surveillance and marketing uber alas, Times Square has become an open air television studio that invites anyone to enter and be mediated by the planetary corporate rulers. This, I would argue, is part of its lure. A hybrid of advertising and reality TV, I know of no other place on Earth where Disneyland, advertising and mass media cohere into a pulsating hum of mediated insanity. Not even Las Vegas can achieve such a distinction. And like moths to a flame, people are attracted by the very thing that could ultimately destroy them. To paraphrase Benjamin, not since the Nazis has our own alienation and self-destruction been made to look so beautiful.**

Yet as police stand by to protect holiday shoppers and business as usual, a handful of Occupiers bear witness to this insanity (thereby labeled by the system as lunatics). Here, as the embodiment of Earth’s spirit, these brave souls momentarily disrupt the pulsating spectacle. Whilst in the past numerous crazies have attempted such sacrilege against this colonizing machine, something has changed.

We are being heard. And it’s resonating.

It’s happening despite the luminous power of Times Square and its tentacled financiers in Wall Street. A people’s mic, which is a spontaneous form of direct democracy and speech, utterly contradicts the communication forms of advertising in which psychologically tested and honed messages are pushed into people’s mindspace. The occupiers wage guerrilla war against that mechanism through the deployment of prefigurative politics that pull people together with a shared senses of responsibility and reciprocity. Their collectivity, community and ritual becomes an alternate form of mediation that deprives the corporate powers of their ability to colonize human energy.

For the moment the system seems invincible, its vast architecture of light and information permeating public space. It can only succeed when no other world can be visualized or imagined beyond it. What you see here is a new kind of collective imagination taking shape. Behold, participate, smile and look around. Raised consciousness is coming to a live stream near you.

* Here is an insightful interview with Tim from Current’s USTREAM channel.

** If you think I’m stretching the analogy too far, I consider the rapid rise of Co2 emissions changing the very chemistry of our atmosphere as a far worse crime against humanity than anything achieved by the worse totalitarians of the 20th century.

Need we say more? Link to related article: An Ethic of the Earth, by The Blue River Quorum

I love this graphic, which sums up quite visually the intent behind the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The trade agreement, which has been negotiated in secret, represents how corporations are trying to enclosed and privatize the planetary cultural commons. You can read more about it here, or you can watch the video below (if you can’t see it, go here):

Say no to ACTA di QuadratureDuNet

Saturday Oct. 15 was an internationally coordinated event meant to extend the momentum of Occupy Wall St. In Rome, when we first arrived at the launch point (Piazza della Repubblica), the energy was fantastic. Lots of excitement. People felt energized, but the mood was bit dour as well. The day before Berlusconi had survived another no-confidence vote. The demo was massive–I heard that it was as high as 700,00 people, though that figure seems a bit exaggerated. All I can say is that from where it started it took over three hours for all the people to enter into the march.

After about 45 minutes of moving slowly while serenaded by all kinds of sound systems blasting the protest classics, once we began seeing the hooded black block infiltrate the crowd, we decided it was time to leave. One of them even threatened to punch me when I tried to take their picture.

Trying to leave proved difficult, however. The police had cordoned off the side streets, making it impossible for anyone to exit the march. We ended up having to backpedal upstream to get out of the demonstration. I took that as a very bad sign because it seemed to me that the police were forcing everyone into a pressure point. Sure enough, fifteen minutes after we exited all the burning and smashing started.

Local articles have pieced together a confusing picture. A theory among many is that the massive riot that quickly exploded was a highly coordinated and well-planed urban warfare strategy. Various kinds of projectiles were strategically placed and hidden at different points along the streets. There was a very large group (at least 100) that cut the demonstration in half at the precise point that the front group had arrived at march’s final destination. The police did not do very much at the beginning and let the rioters go about as they wished. Some claim police inaction was out of fear of being libel, as was the case in the aftermath of Genoa (indeed, the hashtag for the militants to coordinate each other was #genoareloaded). The police officially say they held back out of concern for people’s safety. This, I find dubious, since when I tried to leave the police wouldn’t let me. There were also reports of “ultras” (soccer hooligans) entering into the fray (apparently this is par for the course–they are professional rioters, after all).

Many of the black block kids were quite young (minors) and from all over Italy. It was clear that they were well prepared and had tactics. Rumor has it that they were trained in Greece. What their goals were remain a mystery to me, because at the end of the day, the government and police are the victors: an opportunity to initiate a peaceful occupation was sabotaged and now the fascist mayor of Rome is calling for a suspension for all marches during the next month. This means that Fiat auto workers who were planning a big demo are now prohibited. Jasmina Tesanovic asks the right question, a chi giova–who bennefits? My impression is that police and the black block need each other the same way that Christians and Satanists are co-dependentent. They define each other’s actions and reality. I suggest they go have it out in the Colosseum and let the rest of us participate in something productive.

I admit that I have been hard on AdBusters. In particularly I have objected to founder Kalle Lassen’s overly mechanistic concept of memes. In his book, Culture Jam, he claimed that media “inject” ideology, a view long discredited by cultural studies. I also find the magazine’s focus on anti-advertising–though a good exercise for learning media literacy skills–a bit ineffectual. Is the solution to compete with marketers by playing their own game? The branding and selling of AdBusters has been equally disturbing.

But I’m happy to admit that some of the AdBusters crew got it right by initiating the Occupy Wall St. meme. It was their initial call to action that brought people down to Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. It has now spread across the country to urban areas everywhere, and is also linked with movements around the world. The simple slogan, “we are the 99%,” has far more resonance than Coca-Cola’s “It’s the real thing.”

Though the typical media backlash is evidenced by the usual haters–Fox news featured Ann Coulter who invoked the dreaded specter of beheadings and mob rule from the French Revolution–I’m finding unusually sympathetic coverage coming from unanticipated places, such as AdAge and Forbes.

A meme works when it taps into a zeitgeist. It’s a flame that ignites, but doesn’t necessarily replicate exactly in the same form every time. It’s like an utterance that echoes and reverberates through resonance. It doesn’t exist as a thing but as part of an ongoing conversation. Few need a college degree to apprehend the depth of catastrophe the current economic model has become. By establishing contact zones with the awareness that something needs to be done, these occupations become apertures for an emergent reality that contests the delusional dreamworld propagated by the corporate media.

The handful of corporate media that dominate the telecommunications environment represent the interests of the One-Percenters. The One-Percenter media will have difficulty commodifying the reality that people are experiencing on the ground. After all, how long can you get away with calling the opposition Nazis and remain credible? This was Kracauer‘s insight when he studied why Nazi propaganda ultimately failed: it couldn’t sustain the contradictions of its own messaging (such as the Nazi’s were simultaneously invincible yet vulnerable). How is it possible that we can simultaneously grow and prosper while real economic and ecological systems collapse? Capitalism can no longer sustain itself by externalizing the crisis, because ultimately there is no such thing as externalization in a planetary community. The financiers might think they can survive by boarding some kind superliner arks like we saw in the film 2012, but ultimately food, energy and labor has to come from somewhere.

I think the #occupywallstreet meme works because it is backed by feet on the ground. It’s not just an immaterial commodity whose symbolic value can be drained of meaning by the culture industries. Nike and Levis may try to brand it, but most are savvy enough to see through this kind of cynical manipulation. Part of its resilience comes from the movement’s ability to self mediate. It doesn’t depend on mainstream media (though it appreciates sympathetic coverage) . It has made a lateral move around it, expanding through social networks on the Web and smart phones. Fox will scare the pants off of retired Republicans with its visions of mob rule, but even Fox viewers must be feeling the pinch as their pensions get sucked into the financial black hole.

Like in the Arab Spring, youth have sparked the movement. They are technically connected and media savvy, but their concerns are not theirs alone. Nonetheless, it’s too premature to call this a revolution. Revolutions don’t happen this easily. Just look at Egypt and Libya. Winter is coming, so it remains to be seen if an outdoor occupation can withstand the harsh reality of climate change (then again, the weather is so weird right now that we could have an American Spring in December). What is clear is that the energy is finally shifting. People sense the endgame is upon us and have finally decided to do something. About time.

Ken finds some hard truths about Barbie from Greenpeace on Vimeo.

(I’m a little behind with this one–it has been sitting in my draft pile for a month. Better late than never!)

Well,it’s about time Ken took a stand against Barbie’s deforesting ways. This, at least, is Greenpeace’s humorous approach to pressuring Mattel to stop their partnership with Asia Pulp and Paper. Not that we need another reason to be pissed at Barbie for being a shopaholic, but at least this time we can do something more than just whine about it.

Bill McKibben at Power Shift 2011 rallies the movement to take on the US Chamber of Commerce.

I wish I could be in DC for the big action aimed at jumpstarting the climate change movement in the US. But, things are happening all over the world. Go to 350.org for more info.

For more info about the US Chamber of Commerce, check out the Big Infographic poster:

Image source

The following are notes from a presentation I recently gave during a panel discussion entitled, “Twittering the Revolution: Causes and Prospects of the North African Upheaval” at John Cabot University. These thoughts are largely sketches to fit into a ten-minute frame.

The problem is that everything I have to say comes from the media: media have become very self-referential and often reports on themselves. The important point is that what I say comes from inside a very complex media ecology that combines twitter, Facebook, blogs, Al Jazeera, hybrid print media, live blogs and email. As an indication, most of what follows came from following various discussions via Twitter.

Competing narratives:

1) Digital Utopians with implicit ethnocentrism that it’s West’s technological tools that enabled revolution and a hint of technological determinism, i.e. Tim Conner (writing in incomplete sentences like ad copy):

“Facebook and Twitter are great apps for inciting a riot to start a revolution. We need the next app. The app that lets the People gather together to quickly establish government of the people, by the people, for the people. The app that prevents extremists from taking advantage of a power vacuum. The app that enables quick restoration of the rule of law. And allows folks to quickly get back to work.”

In response David Smith writes:

“If the digital punters out there are to be believed, it is the power of some corporates in California that is setting the Arab world free. It is the venture capitalists, the CEOs, the boardroom visionaries of Palo Alto that are to be thanked for the groundswell we are seeing in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Jordan. According to the social-media posse, we must bow our heads and give praise to Mr Mark Zuckerberg and Mr Jack Dorsey for sponsoring the Middle-East revolution.

Yup, Twitter and Facebook. They have both been pronounced as the cornerstones that one builds a revolution on. Got a regime you need to overthrow? Hashtag it, bag it, and throw it on the scrapheap, job done.”

Then there’s the tempered but optimistic view:

Jeff Jarvis (author of What Would Google Do?): “Today, it occurs to me that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube may be the Gutenberg press of the Middle East, tools like his that enable people to speak, share, and gather. Without those tools, could revolutions occur? Of course, curmudgeons, they could. Without people and their passion, could revolutions occur? Of course not, curmudgeons. But why are these revolutions occurring now? No, curmudgeons, we’ll never be able to answer that question.”

On the other hand, from those who were there:

Wael Ghonim, a Google executive, calls it Revolution 2.0 and likens it to Wikipedia where you have no clear structure or leaders and it is done collectively.

2) Digital dystopians and the “debunking cycle” (Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom) who argue a) revolutions happened without Twitter and Facebook, so we can’t attribute social networks as causes (Gladwell: “People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.”); b) clicktivism is false sense of empowerment with weak ties, and is without deep organizing that builds strong ties; c) social networks are also tools of repression that help authorities crackdown and find who the rebells are (as was the case in Iran).

Reinforcing this view:

* Remember how quickly Wikleaks was shut down by corporations on the Internet.

* Facebook deactivated an Egypt group because it used pseudonyms. Gawker’s Adrian Chen argued that Facebook was timid and cowardly by not actively helping Egyptians protestors.

3) The Third Way. This sees the situation as a “media ecology” that has all these elements. Missing is the role of Al Jazeera, which has spurned a pan-Arab neo-nationalism, and its English version which has inspired those in the West to solidarity. You can’t argue “what if” because it is impossible to speculate what would happen without the current media ecology. For example, Jay Rosen’s “Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators” polemic argues, “factors are not causes.”

I’m interested in the reversal of roles of the traditional media model. For us in Europe and the US, Africa is normally the “periphery” and we depend on our own technicians and experts to report back to us. During these events, we became the periphery. News was “crowd sourced”— Al Jazeera depended upon people on the ground with cell phones and Twitter. Live news blogging, like the Guardian UK mixed its reporting with sources from all over the world. Twitter was an amazing way to track what was happening on the ground. Al Jazeera does not exist in isolation of social media. It is a hybrid.

Israel and the neocons could not control the narrative on the ground. This is the biggest change. 85% of Americans said they sympathized with Egyptian revolution. Now there is increased transparency, and those who did biz with dictators are being discredited. Artists like Boyance, Usher and 50 Cent who performed for the Gaddafi clan were called out and embarrassed by their actions. You can be sure people will think twice about enabling dictators.

There is a far more heightened morality in the global public sphere.

Other thoughts:

* Can you believe this slight against US media from the US State Dept.? This is a pole shift. Sec. State Hillary Clinton: “Like it or hate it, it is really effective. In fact, viewership of Al-Jazeera is going up in the United States because it is real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news that is not providing information to us, let alone foreigners.”

* Did American media fail because of its celebrity/parachute journalism, so we have the spectacle of Anderson Cooper’s attack or the unfortunate assault on Lara Logan?

* Was Wikileaks the catalyst that the started the whole process? Impossible to answer, but it seemed to have had the effect of the Emperor’s New Clothes fable.

Again, there is too much complexity for simple answers. Fear factor broken. The field of action changed.

This is the latest project from Story of Stuff, tackling what is perhaps the biggest issue of our time: curbing the corporate juggernaut’s assault on democracy. For the seriousness of this matter, look no further than the current Republican controlled congress which is cutting back regulations left and right. Or in Wisconsin and Ohio where union rights are being gutted. Seriously. If we are going to get a grip on the challenges of our age, we need to take action right now.

If the video inspired you, please go to the “what you can do” page.”

Oh, and please share and spread as far and wide as possible.