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What will happen at #OCCUPYCHICAGO?

Micah White — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:23:02 +0000

Autonomous action and the fracturing of consensus.

Three days after Adbusters put out a call to #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month during the May G8/NATO summits, spectacular clashes erupted between #OCCUPYOAKLAND militants and armored police. Attempts to occupy an abandoned building were put down with tear gas, less-lethal munitions and baton charges. What was new, and surprising, this time around was that some Oakland occupiers came equipped as altermodern Hoplites with plastic and tin shields. And to everyone’s amazement they performed an eerie quasi-military discipline and phalanx formation that had clearly been worked out beforehand. They came ready and willing to confront police. On a symbolic level, the Oakland street battle struck a chord in the movement because its theatrical staging functioned as an inverted repetition of the Brooklyn Bridge arrests that electrified the first phase of Occupy.

In both cases, a group of protesters engaged in the ostensibly illegal behavior (blocking traffic, occupying space) courageously faced down police while spectators, journalists, photographers recorded the scene from the left flank on higher ground. Both events are watershed moments that define phases of the movement. #OCCUPYOAKLAND’s phalanx and #OCCUPYWALLSTREET’s mass arrest represent different, at times compatible and sometimes conflicting, futures of #OCCUPY. That is why #OCCUPYOAKLAND’s public performance of a West Coast anarchist ethos has sent a chill down the international spine of #OCCUPY, sparking raging debates on many movement email lists.

At stake is not who will determine the future of #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. At stake is who will determine the future of #OCCUPY… which is to say what vision of the movement will emerge during the next big showdown, #OCCUPYCHICAGO in May?

Until now many people have believed that #OCCUPYWALLSTREET is synonymous with #OCCUPY and that the beautiful spirit of Zuccotti will forever dictate how the movement unfolds. But this assumption is fracturing as it becomes clear that the movement is actually comprised of dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of autonomous forces acting in concert. The perfect example is OccupyWallSt.org, the flagship website of the movement which is not itself of, or beholden to, the movement. Coding for the site began weeks before any on-the-ground meetings were held in NYC. OccupyWallSt.org explains that they are an autonomous “affinity group” that is not “a subcommittee of the NYCGA nor affiliated with Adbusters, Anonymous or any other organization” which means that they do not receive orders from nor accept the authority of any of these organizations, including the General Assembly of NYC. They are allies but nonetheless autonomous. Of course, this is the same position that Adbusters, Anonymous and the NYCGA take in regards to each other as well. And, when you think about it, it is also the same position that your local #OCCUPY might take towards the dictates of #OCCUPYOAKLAND, #OCCUPYCHICAGO or even #OCCUPYWALLSTREET.

With today’s hindsight it is obvious that what have been called the core principles of the #OCCUPY movement have been overdetermined by an East Coast vibe inherited from the pre-September 17 meetings of the NYC General Assembly, another organization that predates #OCCUPY but has been considered synonymous with it. It was in these meetings that consensus-based general assemblies were agreed upon as the model. It is interesting to read the various declarations of the NYC General Assembly in light of the waning influence that New York occupiers over #OCCUPY as a whole. In these declarations, for example, one detects a frequent slippage between the NYCGA speaking for itself and speaking for the movement as a whole. This used to make sense but it no longer does as murmurs on the West Coast suggest a growing sentiment that the folks on the East Coast have gotten a bit too comfortable with the NGOs, unions and behind-the-scenes power-brokers in DC that the movement explicitly rejected before September 17. #OCCUPYOAKLAND’s powerful emergence is a symptom of the fracturing of the movement as various autonomous forces push-and-pull the movement in new, surprising directions.

The consensus of the movement over itself has been lost. It will take weeks, perhaps months, for these debates to simmer into discussions and then be settled within the movement. Ultimately, the matter will not be decided until we see what plays out in Chicago when the world’s supposed leaders meet and 2,500 journalists are watching. The situation is made all the more difficult because consensus decisions in New York City cannot dictate the consensus in Oakland, Los Angeles, Portland or Chicago. Inter-occupy conference calls are now happening to address this reality. And perhaps even more significant is the looming possibility of multiple #OCCUPYs in the same city. If there are two #OCCUPYOAKLAND general assemblies, one which embraces militant street battles and one which does not, who is to say which has greater authority over the name? Or, what if there is a defunct #OCCUPYX and a new crop of people move in and claim to speak for #OCCUPYX? What is the relationship between a preexisting #OCCUPY and an autonomous group who comes in later, acts autonomously and claims the right to also speak in the name of that city’s #OCCUPY? The old answer would have been that all #OCCUPYs must abide by the declarations of the NYC General Assembly… but this no longer seems tenable.

Behind this soul searching is the unresolved question of whether a movement that fractures into smaller autonomous groups can still build and maintain a consensus larger than its individual parts. The answer is probably yes… after all, we’ve been doing it unconsciously up until now. What is different is that we’re being forced to acknowledge that autonomy is a core principle of the movement, for better or worse.

—Micah White

After the Encampments

Micah White — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:09:10 +0000

#OCCUPYMIGRATION and #OCCUPYHOMES

From Blackspot Blog

The history of activism is a cat-and-mouse game of surprising tactical innovations that spark an insurrectionary situation and the counterstrategies developed to put down the revolt. In 1848, the invention of the barricade toppled the King of France and sparked a Europe-wide people's uprising. In 1999, the unique mixture of a carnivalesque mood with human lockboxes disrupted the World Trade Organization's Seattle meeting and launched the alterglobalization movement. In 2003, the speed of the Internet empowered the world's first worldwide, synchronized antiwar protest. In each of these cases, the power structures were taken by surprise, were slow to respond but eventually, through trial-and-error, discovered a successful counterstrategy. If there is one law of activism it is that every tactic which works initially will eventually be defeated if too often repeated.

From the perspective of the status quo putting down a revolution is a matter of buttressing oneself against unforeseen assaults and waiting out the initial storm while continually experimenting with responses. Once an effective response is hit upon it is replicated across society and used to suppress the revolt everywhere. In 1848, for example, the barricade was practically invulnerable because the military was unprepared for street fighting (they approached the barricades head-on, at its strongest point) and were constrained by the ethical code that cannons cannot be used against one's own people. Once this spell was broken, once the government grew desperate enough to use cannons to destroy citizen houses so that barricades could be attacked from their flank, the revolution of 1848 fizzled out. And yet, even after a tactic is neutralized it lingers on within the insurgent imagination. It wasn't until the 1871 Paris Commune that the barricade was finally shown to be utterly useless, perhaps even a detriment. Our task as revolutionary activists is thus quite difficult: we must continually innovate; we must perceive immediately when one tactic begins to fail; we must be ready to deploy another stratagem.

#OCCUPY was birthed when the Tahrir Uprising was combined with the Spanish acampadas and transposed onto an unexpected place: the most potent symbol of casino capitalism: Wall Street. From a strictly tactical perspective, the first phase of #OCCUPY was comprised of a permanent encampment and a general assembly. The encampment claimed symbolic territory and the general assembly enabled organic, bottom-up self-governance. It was the quantity and autonomy of these encampments – that they grew despite an early media blackout, that locals showered them with financial and material support, that they functioned as a viable alternative to the corporate-State – which presented the greatest threat to the status quo. Thus, what happened next is not surprising: after several failed attempts nationally to foreclose the encampments, the corporate-State finally discovered this counterstrategy: first, announce an eviction deadline; then, amass a large show of force which provokes a corresponding mobilization of the encampment's local supporters, exhausting their resources; next, pretend as if you have decided not to enforce the eviction and let it seem like the encampment has won; finally, come back suddenly a day, week or month later and carry out a military-style raid when the encampment is sparsely populated and unable to "cry wolf." We can safely say that this successful technique will be used against every encampment from on.

Attacked on one front, our natural inclination is often to concentrate our energy on winning back lost ground. This may not be the wisest option. In this particular case, we could very easily get stuck in a game of diminishing returns by expending our resources to set up encampments once they've been taken down knowing they will be taken down once again. If we were not able to defend our encampment from eviction when we were strongest, why would we be able to defend it when we are weakest?

This is not to say that we should abandon the encampments but rather that now might be the perfect moment to embrace the innovation that is already happening. Encampments are the site of new ways of being and new forms of revolutionary social organization. At a purely practical level, they provide the food, shelter and resources that are absolutely necessary to many of us. However, the creative re-imagining of the encampment model has already begun … we should encourage it.

We can accelerate the #OCCUPYHOMES meme by making a concerted push on December 6 and beyond to set up squats in bank-owned, foreclosed homes. In addition, we can facilitate the #OCCUPYMIGRATION of occupiers from hostile to friendly cities. There are, for example, over ninety tents at #OCCUPYBERKELEY even though #OCCUPYOAKLAND's encampment a few miles away has been shut down.

While the corporate-State chases symbolic tents, we can start consolidating and fortifying our outdoor encampments in friendly territory until we are strong enough to resist foreclosure. Meanwhile in cities everywhere, let's quietly set up local indoor Occupy Homes in every neighborhood. Both of these spaces just might become the bases for our Spring Offensive.

—Micah White

Imitating #OCCUPY To Death

Micah White — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:21:32 +0000

Signs of decline at #OCCUPYCAL

From Blackspot Blog

In the four months since the launch of #OCCUPY, the movement has infected the body politic with uncanny viral speed. Encampments have sprouted in every state, hundreds of cities and dozens of countries. Twinkling fingers, temperature checks, general assemblies, working groups, consensus... the left's model of revolutionary activism has undergone a paradigm shift for the better towards leaderless, anti-authoritarian horizontalism. Now the danger we face is that we will stop innovating and start imitating.

After saturating politics at the city scale, #OCCUPY is splintering downward, becoming corpuscular. Encampments are emerging that target niche communities and causes, a welcome development. There is, for example, Occupy The Boiler Room, an encampment to block gentrification in Harlem. And perhaps the most significant new development is the move onto university campuses with Wednesday's launch of both #OCCUPYHARVARD and UC Berkeley's #OCCUPYCAL.

Sadly, the seven hours I spent at #OCCUPYCAL left me dismayed, cold and concerned about the future of the movement. The excitement I first felt, the intoxication of being in a crowd of passionate youth, quickly dissipated as I saw the tactics of #OCCUPY being debased through ritualization. Participants were imitating what they'd seen our comrades in Zuccotti do without an understanding of why. In one particularly telling moment, the Vice Chancellor made an announcement to the crowd through the "people's mic." His words were repeated twice, mimicking the layered people's mic used in NYC to communicate to large crowds, not because our crowd was too large to hear but because it felt special to do so. The day abounded in these minor examples of the growing trend towards memorializing, ritualizing and imitating the tactics of #OCCUPYWALLSTREET blindly, unthinkingly and to our detriment.

When we no longer understand the tactical reasons behind our actions then we open our movement to being hijacked by those who choose intentionally to imitate poorly. At #OCCUPYCAL, it was obvious that a core vanguard of student activists, the same activists whose antics had largely squandered and alienated campus sympathy in the prior two years of anti-cuts protests, had simply "rebranded" themselves as part of the #OCCUPY movement in order to attract fresh blood and revive their moribund efforts. Thus, as soon as the first general assembly was commenced we were being urged to vote on two proposals that had been drafted privately prior to the assembly and not disclosed until then. Many of us quickly understood that the second proposal gave immense power to these activists.

The power grab was buried in a clause near the end of a page long document. "We will hold General Assemblies everyday at 6pm," it said, "unless rescheduled or cancelled by the facilitation committee." Sounds reasonable until you realize that granting such power to an autonomous facilitation committee violates the core principle of the general assembly model. It isn't hard to guess who is on this facilitation committee that wishes to stand above the general assembly and cancel or reschedule at their whim.

Objections were raised, but ultimately dismissed. "Make an amendment tomorrow," one committee member said. "There are a lot of people here today, but they'll go home and we'll have to do it all like in the past," another was overheard to say. The persons who wrote this clause and tried to push it through the general assembly were absolutely aware of what they were doing: cynical imitation that preyed on the ignorance of the crowd. Although the proposal was ultimately tabled, less than three hours later, members of this self-appointed facilitation committee were already exercising their power by calling for an impromptu, unscheduled general assembly hours before the 6pm GA.

The irony is that #OCCUPYCAL could be a powerful addition to the movement. Because it is a niche cause-oriented encampment, it is uniquely suited to begin the long process of putting forward specific, credible demands. A nationwide campus #OCCUPY movement could achieve forgiveness of student loans, for example. This opportunity is being squandered. Instead #OCCUPYCAL looks like it will become the model for how to take over the #OCCUPY movement from the inside: rebrand, call your clique the facilitation committee, grant yourselves immense power, alienate everyone, speak for them anyway. I have no doubt that MoveOn, the democratic party, and every reformist NGO in America is keenly watching.

If #OCCUPY is to be a revolution, it cannot become a ritual. We must innovate and never imitate. #OCCUPYCAL may stumble onward but unless the general assembly acts swiftly to remove the would-be leaders, it will never succeed.

—Micah White

Note:#OCCUPYCAL has since corrected many of the problems cited in this article. Their general assembly on November 15 was wonderful. We wish them the best. In solidarity, Micah

Imitating #OCCUPY To Death

Micah White — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:21:32 +0000

Signs of decline at #OCCUPYCAL

From Blackspot Blog

—Micah White

Note:#OCCUPYCAL has since corrected many of the problems cited in this article. Their general assembly on November 15 was wonderful. We wish them the best. In solidarity, Micah

#OCCUPYHOMES

Micah White — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:26:01 +0000

We reclaim our property.

From Blackspot Blog

This article is available in:

Last week, tens of thousands of protesters at #OCCUPYOAKLAND shut down the nation's fifth largest port in a tremendous show of strength for the movement. It was a rare victory. Less well known is that a few hours later, a bit after midnight, a small number of occupiers may have stumbled across the movement's next great tactical breakthrough.

Walking amongst the crowd on its way to the port, a certain strident militancy was obvious in the way that people, some carrying shields, marched proudly forward. The tense mood quickly turned to joyousness once it became clear that the Oakland Police were not going to stand in the way. Multiple layers of human barricades were spontaneously formed within the port by roving musicians, some amplified by bike-powered speakers, whose indie music magically congregated people at tactically key intersections. A line of thirty vets in uniform protected the flank while elsewhere civilians set up fencing to secure the roads. Free water was brought in on #OCCUPYOAKLAND trucks and everywhere food was being shared with new friends. Most remarkable about this revolutionary moment is that it felt so easy.

Throughout the day, there had been talk of escalating #OCCUPY from being a movement to take the squares into a movement to reclaim foreclosed space. The tantalizing idea of turning bank-owned, dormant buildings into radical housing, squats and community spaces floated amongst the encampment. That night, a small group of occupiers took the initiative and reclaimed a nearby building that was once the Traveler's Aid Society, a non-profit that aided the homeless but had closed after cuts to government funding. "We had plans to start using this space as a library, a place for classes and workshops, as well as a dormitory for those with health conditions," they explained in a communique.

The state response was swift and ferocious: "hundreds of police officers, armed to the hilt with bean bag guns, tear gas and flashbang grenades" quickly suppressed the expansion of the movement while the corporate media ensured that the nation would awake to context-less stories of violence. But, as the protesters pointed out, this over-reaction betrays that they may have stumbled across our greatest strength. Isn't it strange that "the city spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to protect one landlord's right to earn a few thousand every month... whereas the blockade of the port – an action which caused millions of dollars of losses – met with no resistance"? Why did "the attempt to take one single building, a building that was unused, meet with the most brutal and swift response"?

While #OCCUPYWALLSTREET digs in for the winter at Zuccotti, with twenty military-grade tents costing upwards of $20,000, the rest of the movement is looking with trepidation towards the cold nights ahead. Let's learn from the people of Oakland for they have found a very simple and elegant solution: we move indoors, we reclaim foreclosed space.

Every city in America, even the richest areas, have empty storefronts and houses whose tenants have been evicted while their bank owners keep the spaces unused. Each of these empty buildings is a potential #OCCUPY, a future squat inviting us, waiting for us to come.

In a speech at #OCCUPYWALLSTREET, the philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak urged the movement to not let mere "survival count as enough of a victory." Her point was simple and profound: we do not win by hanging on. We win by continuing to innovate and escalate our myriad attacks until the beast of consumer-capitalism falls to its knees.

—Micah White

Post-Search Society

Micah White — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:20:17 +0000

What happens when the library is deserted?

From Blackspot Blog

Last week, Google celebrated Jorge Luis Borges's posthumous birthday by morphing their front-page logo into a Borges-inspired doodle. This attempt to associate the Google brand with Borges, the Argentine master of magical realism who was also a librarian, is not new nor particularly surprising. In fact, practically every book about search engines inevitably includes an allusion to, or epigraph from, Borges’ short story The Library of Babel. What is surprising, however, is that this particular story has been so thoroughly misunderstood that the very forces Borges meant to warn us about are the same ones who now champion the writer.

"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries," begins The Library of Babel. In these perhaps infinite hexagonal galleries, the narrator explains, there are shelves upon shelves of books. The physical structure of each book is identical but the content of each is unique. Some books are gibberish, others contain only a line of sense, while still others are lucid biographies of people not-yet-born. Taken together the books in the Library represent the sum total of all knowledge in all languages for all time.

It isn't difficult to imagine why this description of the Library was quickly associated with the internet. One is reminded of the adage that monkeys typing for infinity would by chance alone create the complete works of Shakespeare. And we can imagine that there is, right now, a machine in the depths of the deep web that is spewing line after line of randomly assorted characters in the hopes of stumbling across the meaning of life. (Is this perhaps the noble philosophical purpose behind the spam bots that plague the search engines?) Which is to say that today when we think of the infinite storehouse of knowledge we do not, as Borges did, imagine a physical library but instead a virtual one, accessible through computer terminals and indexed by Google.

Borges, however, was not writing an ode to the internet nor to search engines. On the contrary, notice how the emphasis of Borges's story is placed upon the slow decline of the searchers who scour the Library. The primary concern of Borges's narrator is that the human searchers who live in the Library are disappearing, dying off, and going extinct. Some are slipping into madness overwhelmed by information, others distraught that they will never find the Truth are committing suicide and the narrator warns that "I suspect that the human species – the unique species – is about to be extinguished, but the Library shall endure ..." Borges glimpsed a terrible future where the Library is fully stocked with every book imaginable and yet the Library is deserted. He saw a future without searchers.

Neal Gabler, in a recent editorial in the New York Times, asserted that we are entering a "post-idea" era where big ideas are in short supply but information is abundant. "We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media, which have learned to service our narcissism," Gabler writes. "What the future portends is more and more information — Everests of it. There won't be anything we won't know. But there will be no one thinking about it," he warns. Implicit in Gabler’s argument is the realization that we've moved away from being seekers of knowledge and have now become nodes in the relay of information.

Gabler's argument hits home when we consider Twitter. It seems clear now that all of the early critiques of Twitter – that it was for twits with little to say and for whom 140 characters is sufficient – missed a fundamental point. The significant feature of Twitter is not the size of information transmitted. (Consider that a large portion of Twitter traffic is the sending of links to content, a single tweet can therefore send someone to gigabytes of information.) What is far more significant is that to use Twitter is to surround oneself in the constant flow of information. In Twitter, rather than seeking out information, we hook ourselves up to various hashtags and users and watch the waves of links and tweets stream past us. If something piques our interest, we retweet it and send it on downstream. This emphasis on finding and sharing information through social networks – encouraged by Google, Twitter, Facebook et al – is the death of search because it de-emphasizes active seeking.

What may not be obvious at first is that the Twitter stream is not simply an information flow, it is also a way of organizing and sorting the Library. (In this respect, Twitter is a challenge to Google and it is no wonder that Google+ mimics elements of Twitter.) Hence, the popularity of using hashtags to categorize tweets so that others may find them. To organize information in this way is to leave the vast majority of the Library untouched... it is to only care for what is freshest because one has no time for seeking out what is rarest... it is to live in a world without seekers.

What Borges, a librarian writing in 1941, foresaw was that the art of searching was in decline and might one day disappear entirely. Today, we live in a post-search world and are finding out what happens to culture when the Library is deserted.

—Micah White, micah (at) adbusters.org

Is Rioting Revolutionary?

Micah White — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:52:52 +0000

The London Riots as a political act.

From Blackspot Blog

Watching the left's reaction to the London Riots, I am reminded of a discussion between philosopher Michel Foucault and French Maoist militants in 1971. The Maoists argued in favor of setting up a "people's court" to pass judgement on the police whereas Foucault took the contrary position and insisted instead on uncoordinated, unconstrained brutal "popular justice."

Foucault theorized that any attempt to create a judicial system, even a judicial system purportedly run by the people, would simply replicate the power structure that we intended to oppose. Nor did he shy away from taking this argument to its logical conclusion. Foucault went as far as embracing historic examples of disturbing mob behavior, explicitly recalling, and implicitly endorsing, the rash of extrajudicial executions carried out during the French Revolution's September Massacres of 1792 when over a thousand people were murdered by revolutionaries. This, for Foucault, was what "popular justice" looks like and even the "moral ideology" that finds these illegal outbursts repellant "must be submitted to the scrutiny of the most rigorous criticism." The Maoists, on the other hand, insisted that the people's fury ought to be channeled into appropriate (albeit revolutionary) party structures.

What Foucault and the Maoists were debating goes to the heart of how we imagine revolutionary change will take place. Will the revolution be an uncontrolled insurrection – whose symptoms include looting in the streets of London, for example – where the people's rage against consumerism is fully released and their judgements implicitly trusted? Or, will we fear the mob and act, more or less explicitly on the side of power and the status quo, to quell and control the released flows – grabbing a broom to keep the streets clean for the next day's ecocidal shopping?

This is, for me, the fundamental point: at what point does a riot become a revolution? Must the London youth don Black Bloc attire and shout utopian anarchist slogans while burning cop cars before their acts are recognized as a kind of political rebellion? Must they be able to articulate themselves in a way that is intelligible to readers of Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri before their riotous flashmobs are acknowledged as the highest form of networked insurrection yet achieved? I suspect that when revolution comes, the ones who have been too long waiting for it will be the very ones who miss it. For they will be too accustomed to looking in the wrong direction, waiting for the wrong words, the wrong actors, the wrong kinds of political deeds.

We are in a revolutionary moment. Prepare yourself: this global insurrection will unfold in ways we lefties may not like. There might be violence, although we desire nonviolence, and there might be pillaging, although we desire the peaceful transfer of wealth. But, let us pause to consider before passing knee-jerk judgement on the forces unleashed even if they do not act as we would prefer. Before we rush to set up approved structures of dissent, we should ask ourselves why we are so invested in denying that rioting is a legitimate political act. Rather than trying to channel, control or dissipate these forces, we must learn to play off of the chaos of the released flows.

"It is from the point of view of property that there are thieves and stealing," Foucault insisted at the end of his discussion. When we always see looting as nothing but thieving and refuse to grant to it the status of a conscious political act, an outburst of "popular justice" against a corrupt and corrupting capitalist system, we are assuming the point of view of the very forces we are trying to overthrow. The same goes for when we condemn any insurrectionary act that is not accompanied by an insurrectionary tract.

The London Riots may not be pretty but as the old-lefty adage goes: "Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly. A revolution is an insurrection…" And the London Riots are, whether we like it or not, what an insurrection might look like if the forces of capitalism do not peacefully, voluntarily relinquish their stranglehold.

—Micah White, micah (at) adbusters.org

A Vision of Post-Clicktivist Activism

Micah White — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 18:04:19 +0000

Get innovative for #OCCUPYWALLSTREET

From Blackspot Blog

Clicktivism is a Trojan horse, a tactical malware, deployed by a dying American empire. What better way to cripple the revolutionary potential of a whole generation than to embed the logic of the marketplace within the very tools that would-be revolutionaries use? Forget infiltrator "Anna" and the plague of agent provocateurs. The cop we need to worry about is residing in the computer code.

If #OCCUPYWALLSTREET fails, it will be because we've blindly adopted "best practices" put forth by wealthy Californian techies turned reformist campaigners. Their methods now dominate the way many organizers believe activism should be done, privileging a data-obsessed, metrics-oriented, technocratic approach which is closer to advertising than resistance.

Most clicktivist organizations today can be traced back to the $13.8m (£8.8m) sale in 1997 of a software company located in Berkeley, fifty miles from the heart of Silicon Valley, whose claim to fame was an iconic flying toaster screensaver. The husband-and-wife team behind the company, Wes Boyd, a computer programmer, and his wife, Joan Blades, a vice-president of marketing, became overnight millionaires. With an excess of leisure time, they founded MoveOn, the ur-polluter of activism with a combination of computer science and techniques of advertising such as focus grouping, market testing and banal copywriting.

Clicktivism uses invasive databases to meticulously track which members are opening emails, signing petitions or donating money. Instead of sending the same email to every person, digital activists tweak response rates by A/B testing subject lines and messages to determine which email will be most frequently opened. Goodbye passionate prose, the focus here is simply on the clicks. The effectiveness of these methods is declining each year but that hasn’t stopped them from becoming the basis for digital activism around the world.

Former and current MoveOn employees have colonized activism internationally with behemoth second-generation clicktivist organizations, like Joan Blades’s MomsRising, Eli Pariser’s Avaaz, and Ben Brandzel’s GetUp and 38 Degrees. It is worth noting that past MoveOn employees communicate via a private email list and thereby accomplish one of their greatest deceits of all: using their organizations as mouthpieces to celebrate each other publicly without disclosing their back-room personal ties. Even those without direct connections to MoveOn often share the common feature of being wealthy technocrats whose startups were bought by a mega-corporation. Into this category fall individuals like Aaron Swartz, early developer of Reddit (now owned by Condé Nast) and founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. And some, like James Rucker, are both former MoveOn employees and rich technologists. Rucker co-founded, with Ian Inaba, the Citizen Engagement Laboratory, also in Berkeley, the umbrella organization that has adopted the ethically dubious approach of using a shared technology platform and overlapping staff to target niches while maintaining the illusion that there is no connection between the subsidiary organizations: ColorOfChange for African-Americans, Presente for Latinos, GetEQUAL for LGBT people and Food Democracy Now! for the organics movement. Many brand names, same company. Clicktivists leverage market segmentation and economies of scale to neutralize real dissent.

Clicktivist organizations grow like the capitalist cancer we are fighting. They choke out the less technically adept organizations and suck up substantial mainstream praise, typically by celebrating each other without disclosing their personal ties. Budgets bloated by philanthropic grants... "asks" watered down... emails written like bus stop marketing... uninspiring, mundane and frankly counter-revolutionary political agendas. Worse still, clicktivists export internationally the de-politicization malware that has decimated the radical left in the United States, transforming countless millions from activists into screen-addicts who want their political change to be as easy as signing an online petition.

The difficulty for rebels today, especially American radicals, is to disambiguate clicktivism from innovative digitally-inflected activism that brings us closer to sparking a global cultural insurrection against consumer-capitalism. And that is precisely the challenge we face as we gear up for #OCCUPYWALLSTREET, an event that many of us believe could be the political spark that finally releases the democratic fury of the people.

On the 17th of September, 20,000 nonviolent civilians will swarm Wall Street and set up an indefinite occupation -- complete with free kitchens and doctors, tents and communal childcare -- until their demand for real democracy is met. Imagine the revolutionary beauty of Tahrir mixed with the radical democracy of the Spanish acampadas. If we can pull it off, then this just might be the breakout moment that saves our democracy from the combined threats of plutocracy, oligarchy and corporatocracy. And with global climate change accelerating, there isn't a moment to lose.

How are we going to make #OCCUPYWALLSTREET happen? Not with clicktivism... not with fancy eye candy websites... not with waiting for others to organize for us... and not by following the tired tactical script that hasn't worked in a decade. Instead, it is time we risked being totally creative.

Look at #OCCUPYWALLSTREET upside down. What if it was a real world game, played by thousands, whose sole objective was to slip past the police lines (double points for parachuters) to touch the Wall Street charging bull on September 17? What if it was the largest synchronized flashmob ever organized? Or if #OCCUPYWALLSTREET was an aesthetic experience in the heart of the financial district -- a masked ball, a zombie walk, or a costume party in 18th century attire? No one can say in advance what will make the occupation last. So, may it be all these tactics and more.

Calling all culture jammers, augmented reality game designers, live action roleplayers, revolutionary flashmobbers, clandestine street artists and activists from the future: on the 17th of September, we need you to show us that what comes after clicktivism is a people's revolution.

—Micah White, micah (at) adbusters.org, is a senior editor at Adbusters. He gained an insider perspective on the folly of clicktivism after a brief stint with the Citizen Engagement Laboratory. He resigned in disgust.