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I got done chatting with a colleague this morning, who went on a bit of a rant about the failures of the Occupy movement. Their comments were similar to ones I’ve seen in the media – lack of apparent leadership, lack of specific demands.
Of course, I’ve also seen several cogent arguments that this is something ‘different,’ and the people are well aware what they’re angry about, and are figuring out how to level the playing field. (see Wall Street Isn’t Winning – It’s Cheating, by Matt Taibbi; Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don’t get it by Douglas Rushkoff, and his followup Occupy Wall Street beta tests a new way of living; the youtube video of Mark Ruffalo, or for some cold hard stats – Here Are Four Charts That Explain What The Protestors Are Angry About or The Shocking, Graphic Data That Shows Exactly What Motivates the Occupy Movement.)
I personally am rather inspired by many potentialities in the movement. I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few years about emergent organizational structures, systems mapping and analysis of value flows, coordination of human activity across distributed environments, more robust understanding of self and group identity, roles, strengths, and the deeper drives and motivations that guide and influence behavior.
While many of us are having conversations about these topics, we have few functional examples to reference. (well, maybe Nature.) We are still on the cusp of it, but as many are well aware, the components to actualize it are already in the ether, just waiting for their moment to coalesce.
A traditional organization or corporation is going to have a real challenge in trying to incrementally “innovate” towards this kind of structure, which is fundamentally different in its core DNA and operating system, and I don’t see anyone jumping to be the first to take that leap of faith or risk.
But, what we DO have in the Occupy movement is a petri dish.
At the moment, it seems to be a chaotic ecosystem of individual agents working towards seemingly disparate goals, but it’s also exhibiting some characteristics of a complex adaptive system.
I’m extremely curious to watch what develops here, as it could be the use case that many have been waiting for.
If you map the concept of living systems on top of global movement of human beings who are fed up with the current operating model of society, there is a very interesting possibility for a self-organized, ‘lead by example’ model for a different way of doing things, that actually functions in harmony with people and environment, and demonstrates what resilience, sustainability, and abundance might look like.
I’ll be exploring this further if/as the occupy movement continues to unfold, and taking more regular trips down to NYC to see firsthand if this moment will be embraced for some larger evolutional potential, or if it will lose steam and fizzle out for the reasons mentioned below.
Here’s the transcript from the text chat this morning. I’m very curious to hear the perspectives of others on this matter.
—
>>>other:
this whole Occupy movement is embarassing
degenerating into a useless hippie love in
>>>venessa miemis:
i disagree
there is a lot of interesting stuff happening below the surface
>>>other:
what exactly is it supposed to accomplish?
what they are doing is just entirely ineffective
fighting with the police is useless
they are antagonizing the cops, but that is pointless
and there is NO coherent demand… nothing remotely actionable… it’s useless… and actually is a laughingstock for the conservatives… they are totally discrediting themselves with fucking drum circles…
it’s pathetic
they should be calling for something concrete.
This Occupy Movement has a massive lack of leadership, no clear platform, nothing actionable, and they are simply pantomiming the civil disobedience of the 60’s
They are actually hurting the cause
they are taking a lot of potential energy and participation from people and burning it
uselessly
It’s a total waste
With a strong, clear, actionable platform they could get something done. But they lack that entirely and that is irresponsible.
Furthermore, they have been infiltrated by professional agitators and gov agents and extremists who have subverted the whole thing and now they look like maniacs, sex offenders, druggies, and bums.
They are totally discredited in the media.
It’s a travesty.
The problem is they are total amateurs and are making the classic liberal mistake of being far too open to everyone’s opinions and ideas.
So every fucking idiot gets to somehow shape the agenda.
No
that is not how it should work
They need some leaders, and those leaders need power, so they can shape this into something effective
>>>venessa miemis:
if you think there is potential in the movement, then inject yourself and be a leader.
>>>other:
I don’t think there is potential
You cannot make an army out of this crowd
They will resist agreeing on anything
they will resist leadership
And so they will not succeed
this is what has to happen
There has to be a catalyzing event that creates a leader
for example, a group of potential leaders emerge. One of them is martyred. The others get moral authority from that. Then they can lead.
the problem is that nobody from the outside can lead it, nor would they likely want to, and nobody on the inside seems to be qualified or able
They need a Rosa Parks and then a Martin Luther King
anyway perhaps if the cops kill a bunch of them, or the national guard, then maybe there will be enough outrage for a leader to emerge
I dunno
but this headless, platformless blob is not going to make it through the winter
it would have to be like 10 or 20 people
then the movement could succeed
otherwise it’s going to deflate
they may have killed one person in oakland yesterday
but he’s not an icon
the problem is these people are just angry at life. That’s not going to work.
There is no way that by banging on drums in Wall Street they will change the global financial system.
That’s why concrete proposals are needed. They need to get behind 1 – 5 core ideas that are actionable and can be branded and pushed for.
Politicians can’t help them if there are no concrete proposals that can become bills ultimately
>>>venessa miemis:
many many people have posted demands
thousands of them
>>> other:
that’s the problem
there cannot be more than 5!!!!
everyone has to agree on 1 to 5 demands.
>>>venessa miemis:
but this is an ecosystem of many different groups with their own agendas
>>>other:
that’s the problem
the reason why liberals always lose
too many agendas
conservatives all agree on a few basic ideas:
no new taxes
no abortion
no gun control
the death penalty
God
minimal government regulation of big biz
That’s it.
emergent by design 
Ideologically, the lack of any concrete demands is really interesting, because it indicates a creeping realisation that capitalist society would be incapable of responding to any demands they might have. capitalism itself is a series of fragmented entities, it doesn’t have a leader or any stated goals, yet the capitalist class or the 1% is still capable of exercising collective force; it’s a model that’s been shown to be effective. the ows movement does have a lot of potential, but it’s yet to be seen if it can be realised.
right. many have stated that the power is that there are no specific demands, though at some point, it would need to get political in order to impact change, no?
The real significance of Occupy may not be its effectiveness in pressuring either the 1% or the 1%’s state to enact any changes, so much as its effectiveness in letting the 99% see their own strength and realize that they’re an entire society in themselves, they’re the producers, and they don’t need the 1% — the 1% would starve without them.
This will be true especially if those who are involved in developing the techniques of self-organized, low-cost production — the desktop revolution in digital production, the micromanufacturing and permaculture movements, etc. — do some educational effort on just how many aspects of subsistence can be provided with tools affordable to the average person, or through trade with other working people.
In a way, it reminds me of the recurring Secession of the Plebes in the Roman Republic.
Your conversation partner sounds white, male, over 45, and has reasonable knowledge about what worked and didn’t work in the past. Likely is fluent in Lakoff. Has been an activist, probably on the left but not certainly. I would even guess they have dark hair for some odd reason I can’t articulate. From the North East Coast. They care a lot about how this all works out, so it is heart-wrenching to them to see it go in a direction they don’t understand as feasible or potent.
One of the crucial shifts I would like to invite the older generations to consider is that while some things have not worked in the past, that doesn’t mean they can’t work now. Consciousness has evolved, technology has evolved, and awareness has shifted.
I think it is a useful strategy for the occupy movement to continue resisting specific demands (which can fracture the coherence they are generating into internal bickering). This part of the effort is about gaining the shared ground of naming what doesn’t work. It is about being against something. That needs to simmer a bit before there is enough momentum and resonance to work through the long hard discussions of changing systems. Right now, they are changing culture. The policy work will follow.
Also, my advice to someone in one of the working groups was to start very small activities that go viral rather than trying to get agreement on action. The wiki way – if you see something needing to be done do something…maybe it is a small something, but it can spread. We didn’t get together to agree to use hashtags…we adopted practices we saw working.
interesting insights about my conversation partner, jean. 😉
your comment about small moves, rightly made, resonates.
Hi Vanessa,
I’m going to chew the ear off you here for a moment…excuse the slang, I’m Irish and we generally formulate our playful introductions as threats, something I learned a sharp lesson from recently but anyway, to chew the ear off you just means I’m going to ramble on this topic for a bit…so, on with it…
Firstly it interesting that you cite ‘nature’ as an example of the ‘talked of’ system that exhibits those qualities of “emergent organizational structures, systems mapping and analysis of value flows, coordination of human activity across distributed environments, more robust understanding of self and group identity, roles, strengths, and the deeper drives and motivations that guide and influence behaviour”. Looking at equilibrium in nature we can see that the systems of other species are generally self-organisational, bottom-up, versus our human modus of top-down systematization which is well suited to inter-special-manipulation and what I generally refer to as ‘cannibalistic opportunivorism’.
I remember a couple of the characteristics of the self-organisational approach from Steven Johnsons book Emergence, encourage random encounters was one, observe the actions of your neighbours was another…it would seem that the OWS movement and its transnational dominoid counterparts all share a lack of formal demands. There is a lack of leadership and that is perhaps best viewed as a form of shared leadership. We are at a threshold in human history, of this there is no doubt. To frame it in classical terms we can look at the printing press and how it brought about the renaissance, Descartes’s introduction of the z axis and self-referential consciousness, and the development of the individuating modus of ‘homo-specialis’ as it gave rise to the scientific method of analysis and experiment (the individuated experience of the actuality of tested outcomes) which brought about the industrial revolution and the technological evolution and information age.
During this period we also saw, as information reached a wider audience, the increase in the empathic relationships which people permitted themselves. People realised that all people suffer and are much the same as themselves in this respect. Jeremy Rifkin’s lecture on this issue is very enlightening, he shows the empathic development of the human from family, to tribe, to religious grouping, to nation-state, to the global human family and gives example of these in their manifestations.
In the OWS movement we see something very special. It is the basis for collective action because it is the evidence of a global manifestation of a new form of consciousness. (Bare with me, I’m not veering into the drum circle here)
‘Specialis’ is latin for individual. Mother’s know their children are special, and they are right, they just don’t know why. ‘Homo-specialis’ was born in the years following the printing press, formalised by Descartes, and grew to adulthood in the half millennium hence. The forms through which the human mind grew gave their expression in and through the material world and thus those ‘fittest’ to that model of the human were accumulatory. Things are now changing rapidly, we have the informationalization of all things; our tools are not tangible, that which has the greatest effect on the world, that in which exists the higher ranges of dissipation, is not the formal or the material, we cannot see or taste or touch it, it is rather informational.
Our human identity is undergoing the same process. Today I read somewhere, “You don’t Have a soul, you Are a soul, you Have a body”. Identity is less and less attributed to the formal, we are not our bodies, we have bodies, what we are is just like the tools we use and the informational world we don’t quite understand but that world which nevertheless we have created.
Why is the Occupy movement so important? It doesn’t matter whether or not there are demands, this movement is important because of what it is, not what it does or wants. It is important because it provides a basis for action in what it is. Take for example the scenario in which you and I are entering a café for a coffee, we met someplace known to us and didn’t know exactly where to go for our coffee and conversation, so there is a moment in which a certain café is suggested and we are heading there even though we both know the coffee there sucks…we are being polite, you know the coffee sucks there, and so do I, but I don’t know that you know and you don’t know that I know and so we have no shared basis on which to enact our decision.
Looking at the Occupy movement we can see something internationally. At this point it is not only obvious that ‘everybody knows’ but it is coming about that ‘everybody knows that everybody knows’ and this is the basis for collective action.
‘By their fruits ye shall know them’. Look closer at what is happening, then step back, way back, and look again…you will surprise yourselves and each other. I, for one globalised human being, welcome to the world stage ‘homo-globalis’. Collaboration IS the new competition.
“People realised that all people suffer and are much the same as themselves in this respect”
–> rising self awareness and collective awareness
“our tools are not tangible”
–> digital abundant resources
“we are not our bodies, we have bodies”
–> fluid identity and affinity of minds in hyperconnectivity
‘By their fruits ye shall know them’
–> self-identified values, principles and purpose; trust frameworks, reputation mechanisms, and social vouching
yes, i see the ingredients for something amazing just aching to be born.
– v
How this rhymes… or does not with the 60’s Summer of Love and its eventual path to Altamont remains to be seen.
THEN… despite all the panic by the Establishment… it was really fairly easily defused.
End the draft… focus the phony drug war on minorities and bring in the candyman (Ronald Reagan) to build a temporary “Morning in America” by bleeding and abusing the nation’s true accumulated capital (its labor, resources and civic virtues) …
And the baby-boomers happily became ‘consumers’ and ‘exceptionalists’… (it was really always about feeling ‘special’ anyway…)
There are differences here…
For one there will be no financial rescue available… we’ve benefited more than is commonly realized by the Dollar’s reserve status which will end…. and upon which so much of the phony prosperity depended. Hard times are here for a while one way or another.
Meanwhile the rest of the world is waking up to the price they’ve paid and aren’t especially thrilled about it… while the working class in this country have been abandoned over the last several decades by a ‘liberal’ elite who’ve claimed to represent them but have no idea of the values they hold or the lives they lead.
(I’ve been across this country by train 3 times in the last few years in connection with enabling simple political micro-contribution, and talked to many, many who’ve always had to work hard for a living… and the poor seem to ‘get it’ much more than others in more privileged positions and with more access to the levers of political power of whatever persuasion. But amongst the intellectuals… can’t even get the Personal democracy Forum to discuss it.)
Occupiers Have to Convince the Other 99 Percent (by Chris Hedges in Truthout)
http://www.truth-out.org/occupiers-have-convince-other-99-percent/1319466407
Keep it up, Vanessa! I use Facebook to express my views and relate to my tribe so I won’t repeat myself here. You are clearly on a course which I can support. But please don’t debate too much; it’ll drag you down.
thanks mark,
i’m not too interested in debate. trying to frame the issue well, ask the right questions, engage in generative dialogue, and move forward.
Hey Venessa, it has been a while. Great to see you are still prolific and “changing mindsets”. Keep up the amazing work!
I agree with a lot of what “other” said, especially the lack of coherence, and a possible faulty genesis in being angry at life. It feels as though this ought to galvanize sentiment towards a radical change, but something is lacking. I look forward to your analysis.
Cheers,
thanks, i’m eagerly awaiting what will or will not come of it
I think the emergence we are witnessing with “Occupy” is the uncapitalized creativity that is emerging in abundance and it is not a flow of emergence but an ooze. That ooze might be a 360 degree diversity of truth, crushed by a system that has not explained or been accountable for serious political, economic and social mistakes, who knows, I don’t. If what emerges is so diverse that we are watching for something to self-organize from it, IMHO I think we may have already missed the emergence.
We are so hot for the trot for a conclusion, the result or the ending, that we might still be mistaking emergence for daily drama or that outcome that we think is another story in the making rather than a life in the making. This ooze of humanity might be the most patient of citizenry freeing themselves as the object holders of news. The media watcher might just be awakening or realizing that they are the ones becoming a product of a corrupting and demoralizing drama. What if this emergence is oozing out the human voice, which is the same voice no matter who, what group or how it is said – that this maybe far more than a systems failure, it may be a human failure or the grand failure to be human.
This is certainly not an emergence of Howard Beals stating that individuals are as mad as hell and who are not going to take it anymore, it is emergence of voice. It seems to be what the cluetrain manifesto was prescient about well over a decade ago, that markets are conversations – and the ooze is not just pouring out of Wall Street now, but every place where the human voice replaces the mediated voice – the one that failed to explain what was going on, when it is was going on, that included every head that got turned by the machinery of greed and fear.
It might well be appropriate to use an adaptive lens here, because the raw machine is being exposed which seems to think that there is only one form of human capital – humans that become capital, rather than capital that becomes more human. The ooze could be a humanity pouring forth and I am sure that even institutions recognize that change isn’t a media sticker that says “yes we can”, but “yes we are”.
If the capitalist or “systemite” no longer has the imagination to tap into an ocean of unused human creativity, then the surely this must be an emergent diversity oozing a humanity acting as change, one that it must find a way, because this way has presented itself in a diverse protest about a present way that has been one of great loss.
IMHO the only emergence I hope I see here is the human; and that ooze, is the want and need to build a human centered world, not a machine centered one. This ooze is not a lubricant, it is blood, sweat and tears – it’s the first and last sensibility, that people still matter and that they want to matter and that people in this the most amazing of times, should gather in diversity as a voice of change, that is talking both to the heartless heads and the headless hearts.
What do I possibly now of this change. Nothing. That is why it is emergent – I don’t know and have no clue what-so-ever it’s emerging but something is emerging and all I have managed to say above is that this something appears to be human, or at least that is my hope.
[Em]
i have nothing to add to that, only that i see the same thing happening. shifting out of the machine/industrial paradigm into something more holistic, interconnected and fundamentally human.
I’m glad I’m not the only one having the similar discussions as you with work colleagues!
The lack of demands is an important and key point in this movement. In my opinion creating demands provides those against the movement an opportunity to pick each demand apart and undermine their credibility. It provides them with the opportunity to market, campaign and create myths using mainstream media to ridicule and discredit. I think it’s important for the movement to remain focussed but it should not ‘give in’ to pressure about demands.
It’s particularly interesting to watch what’s happening in Australia (where I’m from). We have a free health care system, a good social security system (but far from perfect!!) and have not suffered as badly as other nations in the global economic downturn. As a result, gaining mainstream support and sympathy has been extremely challenging because most Australians simply do not feel (or think they are feeling) the strain….yet.
I saw a comment in a blog by a local comedian a couple of days ago where she was criticising the occupy movement in Australia. She wrote:
“What one is actually doing is making a mockery of people who really do have something to demonstrate against. Yemen. Syria. Libya. Egypt”.
What she and others against the movement fail to see is that this is a global issue and isn’t about Australia as a nation but about the inequitable global and corporate systems it adheres to and operates under (and therefore inadvertently or willingly condones). If we (wealthy nations) don’t change the systems we dominate and operate in then the movements in Yemen, Syria, Libya and Egypt will fail. Changing the leadership of these nations will only work if you also change the institutional infrastructure that supported the corruption in the first place. There is no point in cutting the head off the body if the body simply ends up growing a new head. Places like the Ukraine and Georgia are a good example of this. The Occupy movement needs to stick with its adaptive, innovative and chameleon nature so it can ensure that Yemen, Syria, Libya and Egypt don’t find themselves with a new head in 5 years time.
I think it’s a core strength that OWS is a distributed occupation rather than a coordinated protest. There is incredible power in publicly expressing that the traditional pathways towards representation are no longer available. OWS is effectively saying that many feel their voice has been removed from the conversation of justice and equity, so the only option is to stand in the face of power and be seen. Wether or not they articulate their platform effectively, this simple expression is drawing tremendous awareness to the unconscionable disparity that has resulted from vested elites gaming financial markets and the halls of power.
As loose ad hoc components, they represent exceptional sophistication born on the backs of mobile comm and social networks. Camps & their sympathizers are surveilling police movements, coordinating actions across remote groups, sharing information with distributed stakeholders, leveraging the support of key influencers, and seeding one-off protest events.
Last night there were less tha 1000 people in Justin Herman Plaza (SF) at midnight. By 3am there were 2500 including several city Supervisors and labor leaders. The SFcamp swelled as sympathizers and political opportunists left their homes in the middle of the night to help defend them (the latter group is very interesting, suggesting that support of occupy will help get more votes).
Regardless of how well they articulate their motivations within the accepted frameworks of representation & dissent, the occupation will continue to anchor protest events, create a physical & virtual context for busy sympathizers to contribute, grow a new normative culture around protest, and drive the conversation about disparity, inequity, and justice.
think they’ll last through the harsh east coast winter?
I didn’t know the people in Occupy *were* “liberals.” “Liberals” and “conservatives” agree on about 80% of the stuff (that’s why the really important stuff is never an issue), so if it’s all about liberals beating conservatives everyone might as well stay home. It ain’t the Coffee Party.
BTW, Venessa’s interlocutor reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of Saul Alinski in her thesis; or her saying in the Demo debates that the sit-ins and boycotts were fine and all, but what the Civil Rights movement really needed was a fine fellow like LBJ. Liberalism is very much a white-collar, managerialist ideology, and some people can’t bear the idea of a radical movement that isn’t run by Properly Qualified Professionals.
What is going on is pretty obvious to those on the inside… There are no specific demands because we could make a million demands…
The whole ****ing system is messed up… Where would you like us to start.?
We are doing no more that just saying STOP and WAKE UP. We are just refusing to leave the front seat of the bus… period. That is all that is happening.
To say that the movement is leaderless is also silly. There just aren’t those that are declared leaders that align themselves with particular policy positions. The leaders in the current movement are simply focused on operations… locking down the Occupations… making sure we can hold our ground as long as is possible… with contingency plans.
We realize that if we do this we will accomplish several things:
1. Raise the consciousness of/disseminate the meme related to the 1/%/99% divide
2. Buy enough time to build working relationships, not just ‘solidarity at a distance’
3. Buy enough time for certain aspects of the,.at this time pretty heterogeneous, movement to converge on certain policies or strategies.
3. Buy enough time to allow leaders to emerge
3. Buy enough time to connect the global occupations: infrastructure and processes
In short, we are essentially calling attention to the fact that what is necessary is for the 99% to INTEND a radical overhaul of the entire capitalist machine… the details, by necessity, will simply have to emerge…
You are correct… but make no mistake… it’s in the details where the final battles are fought.. and its always been in the details where these movements have squandered the victories they so long sought. (at least over the last several thousand years… and every time… every new movement proclaims that the millennium is at hand and “this time its different”.
Well, it may be… I hope for the best.
Competent governance requires meaningful oversight and accountability by an engaged citizenry engaged over the long term. This requires careful thought and meaningful tools offering that capability.
Our political campaigns… like corporate commercial campaigns… are NOT designed to make you think… and especially not to think independently. There are quite literally billions of dollars dedicated to keeping us as poor decision makers reliant on emotional buttons.
Capability ENABLES Responsibility
http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2008/10/capability-enables-responsibility.html
OWS is tapping into strong and very valid concerns… but beware the exhaustion of emotion if it leaves little energy for the necessary details.
Frankly, that’s a much tougher… and a much more lonely fight.
What do you think of the occupations requesting local top level domains?
http://bollier.org/occupy-protesters-lay-claim-new-top-level-domains-cities
i think it’s a good idea. i remember one of our interviewees for the future of facebook project (futureoffacebook.com) said he thought it would be cool if all cities had their own facebook page, and could express needs and exchange resources with each other and create more efficient local economies.
of course, as bollier points out in the article you shared, this leads to being at the mercy of corporate data-mining and general unnecessary 3rd party intermediation.
Thanks for opening this discussion with such a thoughtful, balanced post, Venessa.
Although I’ve always thought it ill mannered to post an outward link in the comments section of someone’s blog, today I ask your indulgence to share the thoughts of a truly awesome philosopher and theorist (political and cultural) on Occupy.
Slavoj Žižek, writing in The Guardian, said this: “…any debate here and now necessarily remains a debate on enemy’s turf; time is needed to deploy the new content. All we say now can be taken from us – everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our ‘terror’, ominous and threatening as it should be.
If you see, as I do, a beautiful potential for global #Occupy to be a catalyst and a model for a new way of doing things in our societies, I trust Žižek views will resonate. http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/slavojzizek [Occupy first. Demands come later.]
In somewhat similar circumstances, my antagonist takes the stance that I’m a neoliberal apologist because he wants to ‘smash capitalism’ and I’m talking about an alternative form of it
I saw, the Spanish “Indignant Ones” as a far more focussed protest than OWS because it seems to have some kind of alternative which was seen as dismissive..
Interesting, now I think back to our own beginning as an organisation in the UK, it was our founder’s tent based fast in Chapel Hill that brought us together in 2003.
He was fasting for the US to sign the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights which was to become a guiding principle for our organisation.
http://socialbusiness.socialgo.com/magazine/read/occupy-chapel-hill-the-center-on-poverty-work-and-opportunity-_155.html
On the matter of that alternative, I read an article by the director of USAID today on ‘Embracing Enlightened Capitalism’ to which I just had to respond.
http://lnkd.in/dQZJz5
The Lack of a leader is a strength not a weakness. Leaders are vulnerable to co-option and are easily picked off when they step into the light. The lack of demands is a strength not a weakness, demands can be refused and picked apart. It is the process that is important. It is time to leave the old world behind. Set sail.
Hi again from the other side of the Pacific. Leaderless organizations have been gaining ground over hierarchies. Reasons are beautifully illustrated in The Starfish and The Spider. Why do the starfish orgs win? In one word or two: Diversity. Resilience.
I agree with Jean.
Re: naming what does not work, the next edge is already emerging, Occupy Earth.
And to round out the references, here a co-created e-book about tribal dynamics in Q&A format. (Caution, comes with its own video trailer.) In compiling it among 156 co-authors we seemed to agree it is easier and faster to join forces against than to build momentum for something. Agreeing on what exactly to be for and how to go get it takes more time. Today I feel it will likely be emergent by design – of human relations, building trust against all odds, and the self-determined will to collaborate.
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The folks who are getting the free stuff, don’t like the folks who are paying for the free stuff, because the folks who are paying for the free stuff can no longer afford to pay for both the free stuff and their own stuff.
The folks who are paying for the free stuff want the free stuff to stop, and the folks who are getting the free stuff want even more free stuff on top of the free stuff they are already getting!
Now… The people who are forcing the people who pay for the free stuff have told the people who are RECEIVING the free stuff, that the people who are PAYING for the free stuff, are being mean, prejudiced, and racist.
So… The people who are GETTING the free stuff have been convinced they need to hate the people who are paying for the free stuff by the people who are forcing some people to pay for their free stuff, and giving them the free stuff in the first place.
We have let the free stuff giving go on for so long that there are now more people getting free stuff than paying for the free stuff.
Now understand this. All great democracies have committed financial suicide somewhere between 200 and 250 years after being founded. The reason? The voters figured out they could vote themselves money from the treasury by electing people who promised to give them money from the treasury in exchange for electing them.
The United States officially became a Republic in 1776, 235 years ago. The number of people now getting free stuff outnumbers the people paying for the free stuff. We have one chance to change that. In 2012. Failure to change that spells the end of the United States as we know it.
If people really want to make a set of demands then they might do well to demand the move forward with the times and formulate the world’s first networked state as a transparent distributed democracy rather than a representative one. Though asking for this is hardly an option as who would grant their way out of economic security?
Hey Venessa,
Love this thread!
Yes Occupy is an emergent self-organizing eco-system of many parts. Whats the key to allowing something beautiful to emerge out of this anarchy? Its facilitation! Facilitation is what allows the many parts to listen to each other, and emerge something that integrates the multiple worldviews. I came up with a quote a while back. “The revolution will be facilitated”
I lay out a lot of these ideas in my essay “Occupy as a new societal model and ways to improve it” that was just publised on Shareable.net
http://shareable.net/blog/occupy-as-new-societal-model-ways-to-improve-it
al.pha
al.pha,
Yes. The more I follow the Occupy developments the more it looks as if the facilitation model (General Assembly protocol) is the disruptive technology behind the revolution. This Businessweek profile on David Graeber: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/david-graeber-the-antileader-of-occupy-wall-street-10262011.html sheds more light on this.
Best,
Clive
Hi Clive,
Thanks for the article on David Graeber. My friend just told me he was her thesis advisor.
Facilitation is the control parameter that causes a complex adaptive system to move into different phases.
The reason for this is that facilitation leads to different interactions between the people in a system. Heres a great article on phase transitions in social systems. http://www.chaoticripple.com/2011/understanding-phase-transitions/
One can also say empathy is the control parameter in a complex adaptive system. As it goes up the system will shift to a different mode of behavior. And facilitation and empathy are linked, as better facilitation methods can lead to more empathy.
Here is a great talk on empathy as the control parameter in social phase transitions http://www.mediafire.com/?9r94fs3j6e6e5tp
I feel like the use of more participatory facilitation techniques like Open Space Technology (OST) will actually cause a deep shift in outcome of the Occupy movement. OST allows more people to have a say ( a large circle doesnt allow enough people to talk). The smaller circles within the larger circles gives people a chance to connect and empathise more. Out of that something will arise. OST is also more of a self-organzing adaptive faciltation techique than general assembly. http://shareable.net/blog/occupy-as-new-societal-model-ways-to-improve-it
Michel Bauwens’ forthcoming “teach-in” on p2p at OWS is another example of the “building a counter-society” approach. If OWS becomes a vehicle for educating people on ways they can undermine the system by withdrawing their participation and sapping it of the resources it needs to survive, it will be revolutionary.
Prediction: No political movement will succeed in “giving” these people what they demand. The Occupiers will discover the hard way that they will have to become producers. Everything we humans are is utterly dependent on the means of production and what is being produced. Only accelerating technology will (in about a decade) permit people to produce everything they want and need with their own machines. BTW, I LIKE machines. And I do believe that the Singularity is near.
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I also am deeply interested in complex systems, and I respectfully suggest you may be projecting. The OWS movement is not a complex system, nor does it appear to be evolving into one.
On the contrary, its demands are for a more socialist society to develop out of the ashes of this one; socialism is anything but complex since it denies self-organization. And there is a deep and structural difference between anarchy and complexity, and in that regard trashing private property gets them nowhere.
Let us begin with power laws and naturally occurring nodal concentration, which in a true free market, a perfect complex system, would naturally occur. This is the opposite of income equality which seems to so upset the OWS crowd.
Where we can agree is the OWS seems also concerned with power concentration, which as a product of political corruption is of deep concern to both free market innovation and complexity adherents alike.
Complexity teaches us that innovation is stymied and productivity, and therefore living standards and opportunity are crushed when we develop top-down hierarchies and institute invasive regulation which impedes self-organization and autonomy and success and failure.
In this sense, TARP may have been the worst legislation ever enacted; a highly regulated industry was trying to fail and morph into something more sustainable, clearing markets as it did so. Tragically, it was not allowed and economic stagnation is the result. The economy, ever decreasingly a complex system, can not recover until those frozen assets and liabilities are repriced by the millions of autonomous price discoveries that allow complex systems to function.
As to another OWS concern, the price of education will not find a suitable level until government stops subsidizing it and regulating it, and it is allowed to self-organize, like any healthy complex system will do. Asking the government to regulate it even further is the opposite of the correct answer, if one believes complexity can be helpful.
Which brings us back to the seemingly inherent paradox of the OWS movement, beautifully explained by complexity; they decry control by the 1%, but ask government to fix it, when it is government that is ensuring what control there is. Complexity demands there is no control. OWS should be occupying government more than it is occupying Wall St. Without government, Wall St. would self-destruct, as it has tried to do a number of times since its idiotic inception.
In fact it is the government that has instituted regulation at behest of special interest that has rendered much of the professional class useless; an inherent transactional tax on ordinary folks trying to make a living. They are destroying complexity, and therefore adaptability, upward mobility, innovation and robustness; all the things that make a healthy economy and living worthwhile. IOW, it is top-down hierarchy of any sort that makes us serfs. And that is the fundamental lesson of complexity.
You’re bang on the money (;) there Jim. Through and through though OWS is a self-organising system that i arising out of the complex pot of the geo-political spectrum and it can be bolstered to a self-organisational process if a sufficiently sophisticated method is used. In my thinking I see that what differentiates humans from other forms of consciousness is the self-awareness, the ‘consciousness conscious’ -ness. It would appear that the bar has been a longtime raised and we have not been allowed to develop sufficiently due to the bad old top-downers. In thermodynamical terms: if a system doesn’t develop sufficient gradients when energy flow into that system is increased, it will break down. The mess we are in currently shows this to be true in exactly the way that it is true, that is- every way. ‘Closed-system’-Earth(I know there is only really one actual closed system) is having problems because we don’t take our place in the holarchic gradient of self-interest, that pyramid needs an opposing force in juxtaposition…make a nice star, c’mon lets make it happen 😉
Jim: There are socialist traditions that are very much into self-organization, as opposed to state control. In fact there’s an Oekonux listserv that sees open-source software as the kernel of a post-scarcity socialist society organized around commons-based peer production. I suspect you’d get considerably less concentration of wealth and power through the operation of power laws in a networked society, than you presently get from rents on artificial property rights held by the privileged classes. And market competition tends to destroy rents. If some nodes are much larger than others in a networked society, it will be entirely a result of self-organization and convenience for those who route through those nodes — not, as at present, because they’re hubs that derive their authority from entry barriers.
I agree with everything you say. I am deeply concerned with the way critical nodes are regulated into their pivotal role, instead of developing through natural self-organization.
I would suggest that your listserv example is to some respects a matter of semantics. What you call a socialist solution, I view as a form of free markets. Open source is a pure example of free market voluntary partnership in perhaps the oldest tradition of the term. It is much more akin to a group of settlers with acreage and a mule and their resultant communal effort to survive than it is the traditional view of the commons mandated and parsed by government control of land resources.
That is, our definitions of competition and cooperation have been skewered by ideology; there is no competition without cooperation. There again complexity teaches us that. But so does Main St., where your basic entrepreneur can not function without the voluntary cooperation of vendors, employees, and customers alike; her viability and reputation depends on it every day. She ceases to exist if any of those participants chooses to withdraw.
OTH, consider the world we live in now. An unemployed person is effectively prevented from creating these partnerships without significant access to capital. They can not open their own taxi service, or style hair, or provide patrons the benefits of their extra rooms or cooking skills. Governments have effectively cut off all available entrepreneurial activity for the poor. They are not allowed to take care of themselves without heavy investment in ‘schooling’ and payments to government constructed entities which will regulate their ‘quality’ and suitability. There is hardly a vocation that a jobless person can undertake to earn a living without government barrier, including the zoning laws.
And even if she were to pass these barriers, she needs a lawyer and an accountant to draw up her arrangements given the over-built regulation involved in these entities.
I fear we are all arguing the smaller points when we agree on the larger pressing ones; our economy is entirely too top heavy. If we are to survive and reach the stars and continue our own search for actualization, then we must return to autonomy, which is not only nature’s method of evolution and innovation, but especially because we are self-conscious, the eternal quest of humanity and its meaning.
That means our governments must significantly down-size; everything else will take care of itself almost immediately. In nature and free markets, over-building eventually is toppled in continual iterations for progress and renewal. Only in coerced situations are these regulated entities prevented from doing so. We are drastically over-built in almost everything.
I believe the watchword of the 21st century is SIMPLIFY.
Likewise, Jim, I think I agree with everything you say here. The ultimate in the free market IMO is the ultimate of socialism: it washes out all rents accruing to artificial property rights and monopolies and socializes the benefits of land, capital and innovation.
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This article and thread helped spark my blog post http://opencollaboration.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/occupy-as-a-new-societal-model-ways-to-improve-it/
Its about the tweaks you can make to a complex system to make it function a lot better.
The problem with OWS is not that it is a panarchy, but that it is directing it’s energy towards a system that is not worth the attention. When you have a new mode of doing something, you just go do it. The old system will crumble by itself.
Unless the old system is already behaving like a foreign occupation, in which case YOU are the occupied, like the United States before the War of Independence. In that case, you have to throw out the occupiers, and that means THEM, not you.
paul,
can you tell us a bit more about the characteristics of a panarchy?
🙂
v
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