Police Brutality

The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy: The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality (Guardian, by Naomi Wolf)

For part 2 (what happened) or part 3, comparing to the older movements? READ

Rhizome and things to catch up on

"It is common for contemporary critics to describe the Internet as an unpredictable
mass of data, rhizomatic and lacking central organization. This position goes roughly
like this: since new communication technologies are based on the elimination of
centralized command and hierarchical control, it follows that we are witnessing a
general disappearance of control as such. This could not be further from the truth.
Empire does much to dispel this myth in the social and political arenas. Whereas
Empire is how political control exists under decentralization, protocol is how technological control exists under decentralization."

Although Hardt and Negri flirt with this gee-whiz position on new technologies,
writing that, within the Internet, “[a]n indeterminate and potentially unlimited number of interconnected nodes communicate with no central point of control,” and that
this decentralized architecture is “what makes control of the network so difficult”
(299), the attentive reader will notice that here they actually mean modern control
and not imperial control. What they say elsewhere about Empire should also be true
of new media. A decentralized architecture is precisely that which makes protocological/imperial control of the network so easy. In fact, the various Internet protocols mandate that control may only be derived from such a distributed architecture.
Hardt and Negri confirm this position by writing elsewhere that “the passage to the
society of control does not in any way mean the end of discipline. In fact, the immanent exercise of discipline . . . is extended even more generally in the society of control” (330).


The network contains nothing
but “intelligent end-point systems that are self-deterministic, allowing each end-point
system to communicate with any host it chooses” (Hall 2000, 6). Like the rhizome,
each node in a distributed network may establish direct communication with another86 Galloway
node without having to appeal to a hierarchical intermediary.






occupy wall street tactical committee
Utopia
The New Yorker's Origins of OWS
Timeline (wiki, for sources)

Part 4 Comparable Protests

To many in the park, vagueness was a virtue. It also had a history. In 1962, student radicals gathered in Michigan to complete the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society. One student argued that an early working draft was too utopian and impractical. But Tom Hayden, the main author, wrote that the movement should “remain ambiguous in direction for a while: don’t kill it by immediately imposing formulas. . . . When consciousness is at its proper stage, we might talk seriously and in an action-oriented way about solutions.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/28/111128fa_fact_schwartz#ixzz2Ka7EU7GE

People's Assembly

Soon after finishing the declaration, the early organizers started to have a problem: their solutions were to be accessible to everyone, but so was their protest. The crowds at those early meetings came in response to messages broadcast over a narrow channel, the Adbusters list. They were committed to a tangible goal, with an immediate deadline. But in early October, as the national media seized on the Zuccotti Park story, the rest of the ninety-nine per cent started showing up. The G.A. had to tackle three new challenges simultaneously: holding ground; managing a semi-permanent village; and guiding a much larger and more cacophonous political conversation. All this had to be done with almost no heat, running water, or electricity.

Consensus—the agreed-upon method of decision-making—wasn’t easy among hundreds of self-identified ninety-nine-per-centers, whose politics ranged from “Daily Show” liberalism to insurrectionary anarchism. Because of the ground rules determined by the people sitting on the cobblestones in August, no decision could be made without giving everyone in attendance the chance to cross his or her arms and bring the meeting to a halt. According to the G.A.’s rules, a nine-tenths vote could override a block, but only after each block had explained his or her objections and the facilitators had responded. The least reasonable people often got the most time to speak.

Other people approached the facilitators. A group of herbalists wanted fifteen hundred dollars to make medicines. Someone wanted to present “Native American peace principles” derived from the Iroquois Confederacy. Someone else had a facilitation accountability model, a spreadsheet for evaluating the facilitators. A representative from an N.Y.U. student group asked the G.A. to formally endorse Occupy Oakland’s Day of Action. He was informed that such an endorsement had already been made. A few minutes later, everyone began speaking at once. “Whoa!” a facilitator cried. “Let’s take a breath and get centered. This is a valid conversation, but this is not the right venue to have it.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/28/111128fa_fact_schwartz#ixzz2Ka7yXe4p

Breakthrough - straight from my journal

It is difficult to sense any "progress" from the outside, of from above, which is how our government and mainstream media work. Someone has to stick their head out to be noticed.  [In Aaron Swartz' case, the DOJ pounded it back into the ground with a sledgehammer weighing $1 million and decades in prison.]
What Occupy has realized is a fundamental flaw in that system. The people at the top stand on top of the rest, profit from their hard work, and abide by an alternate justice system. However, technology has outmoded the hierarchical design that bestows so much power on so few. The design of the Internet, of a network – of the rhizome – gives users the means to share all with all. It no longer makes sense for so few people to control such a disproportionate amount of the country's wealth and political influence.
That is why, in Occupy, there are no leaders. The fact that they have endured for so long as a people's assembly speaks to the efficacy and potential this structure has.

Occupy is trying to prove that they can make the differences they seek at a horizontal pace – everyone in a layer (in Occupy's case, one could call this layer the middle class, or simply the 99%) moves upward and progresses as a team – a rhizome. They will not simply send a captain to do all the hard work and welcome him back to catch everyone else back up. They all must collaborate with ideas, then hold one another accountable to keep up. No matter how slow.

Occupy changes/progress will of course be difficult to measure because it is slowly taking place in individuals. No longer do the 99% need the 1% to decide everything for them. Most people can hep themselves, and that knowledge is being been practiced so far that it has permeated the mindset of Americans.

Paradigm Shift

Paradigm shift: term and concept coined by Thomas Kuhn.


Zeitgeist: the spirit of the age/spirit of the time

"no man can surpass his own time, for the spirit of his time is also his own spirit."

The concept counters the Great Man theory popularized by Thomas Carlyle which sees history as the result of the actions of heroes and geniuses. The Great Man theory fell out of favor after WW2

In Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche writes that: "...the goal of humanity lies in its highest specimens" (cite)

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard writes that: "...to be able to fall down in such a way that the same second it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime and the pedestrian -- that only these knights of faith can do -- this is the one and only prodigy."(cite)

VS: People's history/social history

"The Medium is the Message" from Media and Architecture

"It is this apparently leveling nature of the Internet that has been hyperbolised by some theorists to promote a kind of ‘Cyber-utopianism’ (Evgeny Morozov, 2011) which believes that Internet is an intrinsically liberating tool for the Individual. The logic seems clear. However, it might be the case that with the greater ability to involve ourselves with the Internet, allows for the greater ability of the Internet (and chiefly those who dominate it) to involve itself with us. This topic will be the subject of further posts."