Surviving the atemporality of internet technology by becoming multi-temporal. Becoming ‘multi-temporal’, rather than multi-cultural: it used to be a very big problem for historians that they supposedly could not divide themselves from the outlooks and interests of their own age. I think we are approaching a situation where the outlooks and interests of our own age make very little sense.
They just don’t bind us to anything in particular. We don’t have a coherent outlook or interest that can enslave us. This means we are closer to a potentially objective history than anybody has ever been. Excerpted from Bruce Sterling: ” There are new asynchronous communication forms that are globalized and offshored, and there is the loss of a canon and a record. This really changes the narrative, and the organized presentations of history in a way that history cannot recover from. It means the end of post-modernism. The idea that history ended, and that the market sorts that out, and that the Pentagon bombs it if that doesn’t work – it’s gone. The question is: now what? The Implicit Critique of Technology in the #OccupyWallStreet movement (1): combining hi and low tech. The low-tech vibe, partly born out of a structural necessity, has come to be symbolic of the movement itself. If Occupy is a thought experiment in questioning society and envisioning new possibilities, then the story of technology and Occupy is also about questioning the role modern technology has in our lives.
Excerpted from Nathan Jurgenson: “The prevalence of smartphones, social media, videostreams and the like may be the dominant technological narrative told about Occupy Wall Street, but to focus only on high-tech is to tell a very incomplete story. The reality is that Occupy has also embraced non-electronic low-tech; not just out of necessity but politically and symbolically.
Examples are most obvious at the various occupation encampments. More conceptually, space and time are important technologies because the name “occupy” specifically refers to occupying physical space for an extended period of time. Other examples of this implosion are easy to find. It’s not simply necessity. Occupy Everywhere: Michael Moore, Naomi Klein on Next Steps for the #OccupyWallStreet Movement. Occupy Everywhere: Michael Moore, Naomi Klein on Next Steps for the #OccupyWallStreet Movement Michel Bauwens 26th November 2011 I strongly recommend watching the whole program, it’s an excellent discussion: “How does the Occupy Wall Street movement move from “the outrage phase” to the “hope phase,” and imagine a new economic model? Peter Marcuse: The Purpose of the Occupation Movement and the Danger of Fetishizing Space. By Peter Marcuse The Occupation movement that is spreading across the country has a number of purposes, plays a number of different roles, in the struggle for justice and a better life in our world.
A confrontation function, taking the struggle to the enemy’s territory, confronting, potentially disrupting, the operations at the center of the problem. It has the potential to disrupt Wall Street, by occupying space Wall Street needs to function; symbolically, hyperbolically, it waves a pointed knife over the heart of the economic beast. But it must be admitted that there is little push to actualize the potential; only in Oakland, thus far, has there been significant interference with the normal conduct of mainstream business. An educational function, provoking questioning, exploration, juxtaposition of differing viewpoints and issues, seeking clarification and sources of commonality within difference.
Except – the confrontation is being provoked as this is written. With one exception. Five Principles - Occupy Cincinnati. Occupiers by OCThe Occupy Revolution is clearly a force to be reckoned with in our culture. Even at this early stage the battle lines are being drawn. Many cities are resisting this new people-powered movement, as it feels threatening to status quo politicians and the 1%, so influential in the current political climate. This in spite of the glaring corruption and inequality of the old system. Disorganized and still finding our footing, we nonetheless have already proven our value. The political discourse is being framed differently, big banks and huge financial entities are beginning to understand that their power may not be limitless.
Corporations are learning that their grip on global culture may not be as firm as imagined. 1 Through 30 – The Coming U.S. Financial Crisis By The Numbers. The United States is drowning in a sea of red ink from coast to coast and most Americans have absolutely no idea what is about to happen. Hopefully you have started to prepare for the coming U.S. financial crisis. If not, hopefully this article will be a wake up call for you. Right now, governments all over Europe are on the verge of financial implosion. Most Americans aren’t paying much attention to that, but they should be, because what is happening to Greece and Italy right now will eventually be happening here.
Just recently, the U.S. national debt passed the 15 trillion dollar mark. State and local government debt is also at record levels. Tens of millions of American families are in debt up to their eyeballs, and millions more Americans fell into poverty last year. Below you will find a list of numbers – 1 through 30. A lot of politicians are claiming that they can stop the coming financial crisis from happening. That is going to prove to be a gigantic mistake. 5 – The U.S.
#OccupyWallStreet as the start of a new Progressive era, or is it a Revolution? (also read the inspiring editorial by Chris Hedges below: This Is What Revolution Looks Like) 1. Excerpted from JEFFREY D. SACHS: “OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. The first age of inequality was the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, an era quite like today, when both political parties served the interests of the corporate robber barons.
The second gilded age was the Roaring Twenties. Following our recent financial calamity, a third progressive era is likely to be in the making. None of this will be easy. The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media.
Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. . @. “Welcome to the revolution. Discussing the Assemblies and Consensus of #OccupyWallStreet (3): Visioning Emergent Leadership. “One of the constant mantras of the “Occupy Together” (OT) phenomenon is its “leaderless” nature. I support and applaud this… to a point. Anyone who has come to my workshops over the past ten years knows I’ve been an advocate of “Emergence” – defined as “leaderless distributed networks of information and power”. In an Emergence, it is the system that learns, grows and adapts… without any kind of “authority” telling the various agents what to do.When it happens, it is startling, it is beautiful, and it is POWERFUL. So, the question of whether OT needs “leadership” is tied to the question: “Is OT an Emergence?”
The answer to that question is a firm “NOT YET”. First: upon what do I base my “not yet” assessment? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. OT clearly has #2 and #4.They clearly do NOT have #3 and #5. We know the role of old-style leadership: tell the sheeple what to do. Here’s a quote from Stephen Johnson, author of the book “Emergence”: So, what are the five key elements of Emergent Leadership?
1. 2. 3. The Second Axial Age: Beginning to recognize our roles as global beings. (background: the first axial age occurred the 6th B.C. and gave birth to the major world religions and Greek philosophy, as identified by Karl Jaspers) * Article: Another Turn on the Axis: Religious and Spiritual Evolution in the 21st Century. by Jim Kenney.
Kosmos, Fall | Winter 2011 Excerpted from Jim Kenney, in Kosmos magazine: “In Crosscurrent, I argued that we are living in an age of dramatically accelerated cultural evolution. Such transitions— I call them ‘sea changes’—are powerful and progressive unfoldings, marked by the movement of humankind’s dominant values toward a closer fit with reality. The Second is giving rise to a new global consciousness. The great theologian Ewert Cousins, one of the first to explore the idea of a Second Axial turning, emphasized its global character. The flowering of a Second Axial Age could mean the most remarkable evolutionary advance in the human search for meaning since the birth of the great religions in the first millennium BCE.
John Michael Greer, The Trouble with Binary Thinking | Interactivist Info Exchange. Discussing the Assemblies and Consensus of #OccupyWallStreet (4): benefits of slow speech. Of the countless intersubjective graces unfolding in Zuccotti Park and around the Occupy world, the “human microphone” is recapturing something as old as human learning. This is something sacred: a repurposing of voice, ear, and content that may serve no less than the remembering of a more coherent human consciousness. Watch Slavoj Zizek to see how it works. Every Occupy Wall Street orator, prohibited by permit laws from amplification (and lights when night falls), stands on a box and delivers his sentences one at a time, each followed by a pause, during which the surrounding ring of listeners, perhaps 20 deep, repeats the sentence verbatim. The repeaters, unburdened by the anxiety of creation, actually improve the clarity of the orator’s rhythm and intonation as they fall into a shared pulse.
Some orators attract so many listeners that multiple relay rings form spontaneously. NVC. . * Seeing our bodies together. No manifesto will contain the embodied energy of a paradigm change. P2P history (3): Rick Falkvinge on the three historical origins of the Pirate Party. “The Pirate Party has its origins in three separate developments. These developments all take place in 2005. The first development was the fight against software patents in the European Parliament, where corporations tried to buy themselves monopoly laws to the ability to destroy innovative startups that threatened the status quo. In a vote early July 2005, the software patent monopoly lobby lost, but by a very, very narrow margin from a game point of view. This had consumed all activist resources for some considerable time in Europe, and set me thinking that this was simply too close. There must be a better way to do this, a better way to ensure innovation can continue unhampered by colossi who prefer lawyers over engineers to win a market.
(Our Member of European Parliament was an activist in Brussels during this fight. How fitting that he has now returned to parliament with voting privileges.) That set me thinking; the math for a new political party checked out. Discussing the Assemblies and Consensus of #OccupyWallStreet (2): Consensus is not Self-Management. “In Greece and Spain, a single message predominated. It had nothing to do with analyses of capitalism or other analytic focuses.
Instead, Greek and Spanish activists reported that they had massive assemblies in widespread cities and their occupations grew, grew, grew, so that assemblies were up to 12,000, 15,000 – and then they shrunk, shrunk, shrunk, so that assemblies are now not meeting, or are meeting in the hundreds, or less. Yet I heard, time after time, that nothing had diminished regarding the population’s rejection of unfolding injustices. The people remain fed up in huge numbers and still turn out massively for demonstrations, marches, and strikes. So why were most people who were rallying and marching no longer assembling? The reply I heard at every stop was that the decline of the assemblies wasn’t due to repression, or to people being co-opted, or to people being tricked or saddened by media distortion or dismissal. Occupy but better yet, self manage, I was told. The New Progressive Movement. Kent Porter/The Press Democrat, via Associated Press Protesters severely disrupted operations at the Port of Oakland, Calif., earlier this month.
Thirty years ago, a newly elected Ronald Reagan made a fateful judgment: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Taxes for the rich were slashed, as were outlays on public services and investments as a share of national income. Only the military and a few big transfer programs like , , and veterans’ benefits were exempted from the squeeze. Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis. Washington still channels Reaganomics. Both parties have joined in crippling the government in response to the demands of their wealthy campaign contributors, who above all else insist on keeping low tax rates on capital gains, top incomes, estates and corporate profits.
The second gilded age was the Roaring Twenties. Following our recent financial calamity, a third progressive era is likely to be in the making. Occupy as a New Societal Model. Excerpted from Alpha Lo: “One of the compelling attractions of Occupy is that it is modeling a possible socio-economic-political paradigm for how society can run. It is a model the whole world is beginning to watch. For those who come and participate in it, its a learning experience, a training in this new paradigm. Occupy’s general assemblies model a participatory democratic method.
This method has been crucial in allowing people joining the movement to feel they have an integral part in it, and it has been key to not allowing one voice or agenda to take over the show. Without it, Occupy would probably be a much smaller movement. Occupy also uses a gift economy model as people share goods and services, and all sorts of donations flow into Occupy nodes.
The socio-economic-political processes Occupy uses could also be improved, though, as we are sure most of the participants would agree. There are also ways that distribution of goods and services at Occupy nodes could be improved. Deadly Monopolies: Harriet Washington on the Corporate Control of Life Itself. The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon. Occupy Obama. President Barack Obama is no longer running unchallenged in all the major primary states, thanks to activists in Iowa who are focusing their Occupy Wall Street activism onto the headquarters of the Obama for President campaign office this Saturday, October 22, in Des Moines. The “Occupy Obama” event is being organized in part by veteran rabble rouser Hugh Espey and his highly effective Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a grassroots force that has been fighting for economic and social justice since the 1970s.
CCI members are already participating in Occupy Wall Street actions in nine Iowa towns. Occupy Obama seems a logical next step to escalate the movement further into national view and create the potential for debate and organizing within the Iowa presidential caucuses in January. Espey criticized Obama by name in a Des Moines Register guest editorial of October 6, 2011 announcing CCI’s support for Occupy Wall Street actions in Iowa. Federico Campagna: For an Emancipatory State of Exception. Occupy Wall Street Catalyzing a Cooperatively Owned Communications Infrastructure. Why America is embracing protest. The #OWS Occupations and their Spatialities. Jérôme E. Roos: The year 2011 marks the end of the End of History.
Occupy Wall Street Explained To A 5 Year Old. An account of conflict (resolution) at the #OccupyWallStreet New York camp. Building Counterpower: are there lessons for #OccupyWallStreet? Civic Media Lunch: Telling stories about Occupy Wall Street. Why does #OccupyWallStreet succeed and endure where previous movements failed? Intellectual heritage and foundation to #OccupyWallStreet: the Madagascar connection. Global Revolution Underway. Withdraw Consent and Starve the System. The Archdruid Report. Why Occupy Wall Street Was Right in Not Focusing on Washington: The Challenge to Moderate and Liberal Local Leaders. Gonnegtions, the Occupy Movement, and the Future of Decision Making. Capitalism can’t just be about money. The Globalization of Protest - Joseph E. Stiglitz. OccupyWallStreet re-introduces “The Political” where none existed before. OccupyWallStreet as the first mass movement of global consciousness.
Privatization of the public sphere criminalizes/encloses the #OccupyWallStreet protest commons. Economics 101 for #OccupyWallStreet. Importance of the Public Commons. Noam Chomsky on the Need to #Occupy the Future. WSJ on Occupy: Up Is Down. Charles Eisenstein talks Re-Envisioning Money to #OccupyWallStreet. Changing power through incapacitation. Moving from Understanding and Protest to Direct Action.
The Audacity of Occupy Wall Street. McKenzie Wark: #OccupyWallStreet as an Occupation, not a Movement. The “one demand”: Robert Steele’s powerful proposal to the #OccupyWallStreet Electoral Reform Committee. Erin Brockovich: It’s Time for Occupy Wall Street to Get Organized | Daily Ticker. Citywatch: Occupy Movement Identifies Food Movement Common Inspiration and Options. How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests | Politics News. The Metacurrency Project at #OccupyWallStreet.
Protest Planet: How a Neoliberal Shell Game Created an Age of Activism | Truthout. Is Power Always Bad? | New Compass. How Virtual Private Networks keep Occupy Wall Street communicating. Neoliberalism and OWS. Up from Facebook: #Occupy—(Re)Building and Empowering Communities. Riots and revolutions in the digital age. Chris Hedges on #OccupyWallStreet: tinkering with the corporate state is no longer sufficient. Why Self-Organized Networks Will Destroy Hierarchies. OWS Second Generation Marxist Class Struggle. Jazz Hands and Waggling Fingers: How Occupy Wall Street Makes Decisions.
The big questions raised by anti-capitalist protests. Don Tapscott: Three Principles for a New Wall Street. P2P Foundation. Back When Occupiers Were <i>For</i> Bonuses. The Failure of the Occupy Movement or the Emergence of a Living Systems Organization. 'Occupy' is a response to economic permafrost. The Protests and the Metamovement - Umair Haque. Occupying America: Sowing the Seeds of a Second American Revolution.