Understanding Civil Unrest. Egyptian protesters wave their hands and hold national flags during anti-President Mohammed Morsi demonstration in Tahrir Square, the focal point of Egyptian uprising in Cairo, Egypt.
Photo: AP From New York to Istanbul, and Rio to Tunis, waves of social unrest have been sweeping across the world. Whatever they are called – Occupy Wall Street in New York, the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia or the Arab Spring beyond, and the Salad Uprising in Brazil – the mass mobilisations share several common features. Espousing public discontent over a range of sometimes unrelated, even conflicting issues, they were driven largely by new communication technologies coupled with an abiding distrust of government policies.
Unlike the formal, planned protests of earlier times, the latest ones are, for the most part, informal and relatively spontaneous. Advertisement Any system that incorporates nodes connected by links can be described as a network, Professor Braha says. Real life Civil unrest Stress. A Guide to the Occupy Wall Street API, Or Why the Nerdiest Way to Think About OWS Is So Useful - Alexis Madrigal - Technology. The most fascinating thing about Occupy Wall Street is the way that the protests have spread from Zuccotti Park to real and virtual spaces across the globe.
Metastatic, the protests have an organizational coherence that's surprising for a movement with few actual leaders and almost no official institutions. Much of that can be traced to how Occupy Wall Street has functioned in catalyzing other protests. Local organizers can choose from the menu of options modeled in Zuccotti, and adapt them for local use. Occupy Wall Street was designed to be mined and recombined, not simply copied. This idea crystallized for me yesterday when Jonathan Glick, a long-time digital journalist, tweeted, "I think #OWS was working better as an API than a destination site anyway. " API is an acronym for Application Programming Interface.
What an API does, in essence, is make it easy for the information a service contains to be integrated with the wider Internet. *General* An open source protest/insurgency- The Occupy Snake. Edited on Fri Dec-16-11 07:58 PM by Huey P. Long Thursday, 15 December 2011Occupy Portland's "Snake" #ows Share thisAs always, you can find me on Twitter for more discussion of this. BEYOND ZUCCOTTI. Ok.
Let's recap. Occupy Wall Street wasn't able to actually occupy Wall Street. Why? A phalanx of legal and physical barriers as well as paramilitary police prevented it. What did they do? Question: Has Occupy been defeated by the NYPD's raid on Zuccotti? Answer: Probably not. What is a TAZ? The modern equivalent of a nomadic village (a mobile, temporary community)community that is self-governed (typically democratically)a counter cultural hot spot (from music to visual arts to deep discussion)a media hub and wireless communications networka source of limited amounts of shelter/power/prepared food/etc.simple security and a means of defense (this will get more elaborate)a launching point for protest. El Oso » Archive » Revolutions, Memes and Networks.
What follows is a rough approximation of my brief introductory talk at this year’s Ars Electronica Symposium which I co-curated with Isaac Mao.
The presentation is at Slideshare. Videos of all the talks are available on the website. Global Guerrillas. GLOBAL GUERRILLAS AND TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONES. Occupy Portland Outsmarts Police, Creating Blueprint for Other Occupations. Photo by Paul by Lester Macgurdy The Portland Occupation stumbled upon a tactical innovation regarding occupying public spaces.
This evolution in tactics was spontaneous, and went unreported in the media. On December 3rd, we took a park and were driven out of it by riot police; that much made the news. What the media didn’t report is that we re-took the park later that same evening, and the police realized that it would be senseless to attempt to clear it again, so they packed up their military weaponry and left. The tactical evolution that evolved relies on two military tactics that are thousands of years old- the tactical superiority of light infantry over heavy infantry, and the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance. Heavy infantry is a group of soldiers marching in a column or a phalanx that are armed with weaponry for hand to hand, close quarters combat. Light infantry are armed with ranged weapons for assault from a distance.
Photo by Lauriel. OCCUPY WALL STREET (the theory) Really simple: Occupy Wall Street is an open source protest.
This type of protest has been very effective over the last year in toppling regimes in north Africa. It's proving relatively successful in the US too. Open source protest is an organizational technique. The Occupy API (Alexis Madrigal) - Miiu.org. From Miiu.org This API (application program interface) was first published in the Atlantic Magazine blog of Alexis Madrigal .
GET Occupation: Occupying physical space stands in for a greater metaphorical occupation of the commons. Actions to permanently occupy or reoccupy a park focus and energize a larger group of temporary protesters and armchair supporters at home. The physical location provides an anchor for virtual activities. The Occupy API and Open Source Protest #ows #openprotest.