This week’s readings were particularly relevant to my project research, so it was exciting to read these having just returned from the [extremely chilly pre-snow] OccupyBoston site. I only got two interviews in before I had to head out (I’ll be returning for more soon), but I think I gained some important insight into the relationship between the “I” and the “We” at Occupy. Mostly, though, the interviews I conducted at Dewey Square got me thinking about the role professionalism and locality play in the success of an anti-establishment movement, and also what a move from fringe to mainstream does to that movement.
When I asked Alex, a member of the OccupyBoston media team, why consensus was necessary, he noted that it was a public-relations problem: no one would listen to the movement if every member had something different to say. He made sure to point out that reaching consensus, however, was “a total cluster-fuck…a serious pain.” I bet it is.
I think Jennifer Whitney’s piece covers both of these points effectively. She begins by noting how frustrating an experience IndyMedia is when there is no central control (leaving the posts complete with blurry photos and misspellings that quickly discredit the contributor in the eyes of an outside observer). But she also calls out the hectic and debilitating nature of an organization policed by “anonymous blocks.” These were frustrations voiced by Alex today, and also contain shades of Jo Freeman’s assertion that a movement must find a place between being dominated by a leader and being ineffectively unstructured.
I also spoke with John & Jim, two gentlemen who believe that it is time for a “revolution” to remove those in power, in order to shift from a plutocracy to a “real democracy.” They were not speaking about a one-person-one-vote movement, rather a nation built around the needs of your community: both political and economic. Later in the day, I read Dorothy Kidd’s lamentations on IndyMedia Center’s growing pains: a move from initial cohesion in Seattle in 1999 to “dissension between various parties” like women and men, techies and non-techies, and southern and northern hemisphere based groups.
Much like IndyMedia’s eventual distribution throughout the world via small, loosely tied organizations, John & Jim suggest the United States do the same thing. They think local communities could sustain themselves more fairly than a larger federal system. To spread their message, however, they hang out at places like OccupyBoston. How do you spread a small, local, independent based movement to a national scale? It’s almost paradoxical. How does this apply to the Occupy movement? Can Occupy learn from IndyMedia? Are the Occupy movements suffering from the same problems that Jennifer Whitney sees in IndyMedia? Would Dorothy Kidd say they are on the right track in the way they work to build consensus? Or would she say they aren’t doing enough?
I realize these questions go beyond the scope of my project, so I won’t look to answer them (at least not during this semester).