I've been thinking a lot about the Occupy Wall Street protests. Specifically about the lack of leadership and how much that seems to be confusing and frustrating the mainstream. I've been thinking about it and I've come to the conclusion that while everyone is trying to figure out what's going on the answer is right in front of us, and has been foretold by our history.
It isn't that the situation is different, or that there is some special magic about what the specific crisis is right now. What is different is . . . us. How are we different you ask? We are different because of Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus. Now lots of people have talked about these tools in terms of what they allow us to do, and how they facilitate organization, but I don't want to talk about that. I argue that they have in fact changed who we are as individuals and as a people.
I am going to go back in time a bit and talk about previous movements in history that have lead me to this conclusion. Now I haven't done exhaustive research, so I'm not really going to talk about details, but more the general knowledge we all have about those moments in time.
First I want to travel back to the civil rights movement. We all know there were huge names in that movement, or at least names that people associated with the events of the time politically. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and as much as people thought about it even if he isn't deserving of the same pedestal John F. Kennedy. We can look at the situation and ask what was different about that struggle from the struggles of today and the answer is . . . well nothing really that would explain why leaders would or would not be relevant. If we fast forward to the beat generation and the hippie movement that came a bit later we see a brand of leadership that is a bit less centralized, but at the end of the day still centered around certain personalities. Ginsburg, Lennon, any number of other bands, and of course let none of us forget Jack Kerouac. Now these weren't leaders in the same sense necessarily, but they were still centralized figures that were necessary for the movement to catalyze at all.
When we turn around and look at Occupy Wall Street there is no sign of this phenomenon. Social networking has been around for a while. If it was just that social networking provided the tools to allow for this phenomenon then wouldn't the Tea Party have been as decentralized and resistant to organized structure as OWS? Wouldn't we have seen something else like this before? We really haven't seen anything like this, and I think it's because it's not what social networking provides as a tool set, but how it's changed how we are empowered and think about the world over time.
What I mean by this is in the past most people didn't think they could do anything. If you were in the middle of no where you only heard about movements from what the media was willing to tell you. Publishing and distributing a "zine" could be a huge undertaking and a huge deal. Someone who could get the word out was powerful, someone who wasn't able to figure out how to get the word out wasn't powerful. Accomplishing any kind of meaningful communication took huge collaboration between people, which inherently meant that the people who ended up leading these movements had to be incredibly charismatic, and really required a bit of cult of personality because they needed the direct help of others to get anything major done. People who grow up with this type of charisma know by the time they are old enough to be motivated to a cause that people will follow them. High school and college cement these individuals with that empowerment. They are taught that they can act and the world will move with them. What about the rest of us? Well before social networking the rest of us did not have this empowerment. What difference did it make what a random person thought or if they had a great idea? If one wasn't good at motivating others to realize that idea nothing would come of it.
Now I want to fast forward again, not quite to the current day, but to 1991. Something small and strange happened in this age that immediately preceded social networking as we know it today. A Finish programming student posted an operating system he wrote to the newsgroup comp.os.minix. That student was Linus Torvalds, and the operating system was Linux. He wasn't a hugely charismatic individual, and in all honesty he still isn't. I've watched interviews with Linus and he has none of the conniving of Bill Gates' early career or the pure motivating charisma of Steve Jobs. This phenomenon was pretty much unheard of before this event. Now because we had not yet "been reprogrammed" this still developed into a structure where one monolithic person was in charge of the program that became Linux. That said it didn't start because of Linus' charisma, but rather just on the merits of the little piece of software he posted to an internet newsgroup. In the long run that little kernel of software ended up fueling Tivo, and a healthy swath of the netbooks in the world, more of the internet's servers than anyone could have imagined in 1991, and every Android handset on the market. The phenomenon hadn't reached the level that we see it today, but the first signs of what was coming certainly revealed themselves.
Now we'll fast forward again this time to June of 1999. Another very interesting phenomenon happened. This one was called Napster. I'm sure everyone remembers good ole' Napster. It was born out of a technological desire to innovate past all the private under cover FTP servers that were floating around the internet in those days providing MP3 sharing functionality. This was all terribly illegal. Napster tried to systematize this in a corporate structure that would protect the individual. Ultimately what they were doing was declared illegal and shut down in July of 2001. Several attempts to fix this came afterwards. Networks that didn't emphasize music, so the centralized company thought they were safe declared illegal. Networks based on an open protocol that unfortunately still required some sort of centralized maintenance service declared illegal and then . . . bit torrent. Bit Torrent did something very different from everything that had come before it. It took the centralized server out of the equation altogether and did not incorporate initially. The software, and service were both open source software. There really was no one who could be prosecuted. The creator of the software made sure that the first implementation of their software was legal. It was used to serve distributions of Linux, which are very large and very expensive to host. Suddenly almost every community distribution of Linux was using Bit Torrent to lower their oppressive server bills. Now plenty of illegal content is also distributed with bit torrent, but the creator has no part in that process. An individual has to setup their own tracker, and host the individual files. So there is no centralized person to sue. The entertainment industry has spent enormous amounts of funding trying to find a way to prosecute this new beast. They have failed to make any progress on that front. Bit Torrent did eventually develop into a business to help develop the software, once it was quite clear there were no grounds to prosecute them with their development structure. What is significant about this is the lack of a figure head to attack, this is incredibly important.
Now we jump forward to the future, past all the silly discussions about Web 2.0 as a buzzword and it's "business potential". We now live in a world of Facebook and Twitter, and Google Plus. All of these communication protocols are very much like Bit Torrent in that they themselves have some centralization, but they are completely insulated from what happens on them. I honestly don't think they are quite as decentralized as Bit Torrent, but they have done something that makes that unimportant. They have turned us into Bit Torrent. It's taken years, but we have seen the rise of web comic artists fueled by internet social connections, and collaborative movies facilitated by social networking. We have seen Pompalmoose, and the random but often brilliance of viral videos, Strong Bad, and then we have Iran. Watching the protests in Iran you begin to see how the different way of approaching organization and creativity plays out in extreme political circumstances. Now because of the authoritarian culture those protests happened in regime change was not in the cards, but then we see Egypt and Lybia, and now the U.S.
When we look at the occupy movement, and the way it's organizing, the way it moves with no head it is like a creature with no centralized nervous system. Where ideas evolve through group collaboration instead of through power of charisma. It is easy enough to see where we have learned to function in this way. When you go onto facebook and make friends, and take part in conversations you never would have been able to before. Concerts improvised in meetups on Google plus barely a week or two after it went live, focusing on feedback and participation instead of just performance demonstrate the kind of shift in how we work and organize compared to our past.
We have been reprogrammed as a species by this shift. By knowing that information is always at our fingertips, we only need to decide we want to access it, by knowing that our contribution is just as valid as someone else's, by knowing that seeing inspiration and sharing it is a worthwhile act in and of it's own right we have changed. If someone sees something and is inspired by it, what are the million little neural and interpersonal connections that led to that inspiration, and is any one firing that was required to reach the true inspiration any less meaningful than any other firing, no matter which person's head it was in? This is the power that can be seen in the Occupy Wall Street protests, in perfect display for anyone who wishes to look.
This is no less than a change to the foundation of who we are and how we create as a species. If we can create and move and act in non violent moral ways with no leadership whatsoever than what is the purpose of leaders? Why do we need government or corporation, or centralization at all? Are we ready to give them all up, probably not, but what will another century of this development look like? What will happen when those who are now 18 and 22 and even 30 are the ones running whatever government we have at that point? What will happen when every person in a political position cannot remember a time when one voice was considered more important than another? When no person in power remembers a time when one year wasn't profoundly different technologically and socially than the year before? What does that mean about fear of change, and how much less of it there will be? What do decisions made in the absence of that fear of change look like?
Any one of these questions has revolutionary implications about the innovation of the functioning of the human species. Taken together they are . . . almost more than one person can think about. Maybe they aren't more than we all can think about though.
Ditching credit cards and debit cards removes a major revenue stream from the banks. They take a slice out of every transaction, even if you never carry a balance and have to pay interest. It can be incredibly difficult to keep up the organization and planning necessary to give up cards altogether though. You can take smaller, but still useful steps though, like keeping a small stash of cash in your house and making a point of taking it with you one day a week. So commit to making every Friday, or Saturday, or whatever day works for you card free.
