Tonight I attended what I consider to be an historic meeting of minds: several rockstars in the long, strange and entangled common history of 60s counterculture and commune life, mind-expanding chemicals, personal computing, virtual communities and Web 2.0.
Stewart Brand: founder of the Whole Earth Catalog — a series of books that single-handedly educated a generation of countercultural do-it-yerselfers — and the WELL — arguably the first virtual community.
Howard Rheingold: the great tech-culture journalist and “freelance instigator”, educator on participatory media in journalism and learning, author of Smart Mobs: the next social revolution, the Virtual Community, and several other works. Howard is also lately becoming my collaborator around the idea of using participatory media in the classroom.
U.S. President George W. Bush intended to visit the Stanford University campus yesterday to meet with members of the Hoover Institution, a neo-con think tank in Hoover Tower. But Mr. Bush never made it to Hoover Tower. Why? I was there and I’ll tell you why.
The mainstream press is reporting that Stanford protesters blocked the only road leading to Bush’s meeting so that it had to be re-located, and that three Stanford students were arrested. This is simply not true. Grassroots journalism by people who were actually there is giving a different and much more revealing account of what really happened. I’ll give you my own summary of what occurred based on being there myself, interviewing others who were there, knowing the protest organizers and being acquainted with the students who were arrested.
The “real” story
The presence of one thousand and more protesters, accompanied by the Stanford Band, caused Bush to relocate his private meeting at Hoover Tower to former Secretary of State Shultz’s house on Delores Street (about a block from where I live). However, contrary to what the press is reporting (see “How the secret was spread“, below), the road to Hoover Tower was not blocked by protesters. Law enforcement had set up barriers to ensure clear passage long before the protest began, and these barriers were respected by the crowd. However, around 4pm, police in riot gear appeared and attempted to move the crowd by force from its position on Serra Street, East of Hoover Tower. Strangely, they did not attempt to inform the crowd of the reason why.
Students resisted this move and sat down in the street. That’s when law enforcement pulled a very strange maneuver of questionable legality. They brought in a fire truck with sirens wailing and claimed (falsely) that there was a medical emergency at Hoover. After a lot of verbal abuse from police and firemen, only three protesters remained blocking the truck and these were dragged off (as shown prominently in the photo coverage), arrested, and taken away in a paddy wagon. They’ve since been released on misdemeanor charges. Absurdly, the fire truck then turned around and drove unhurriedly away, sirens off, and the protesters were allowed to fill the street again. Presumably, it had been during this confrontation that Bush’s meeting was re-located.
In summary: One of the top three universities in the United States spurned President Bush from coming on to campus; three Stanford students were arrested for disobeying a lie and obstructing a misappropriation of emergency services personnel. That part of the story has yet to ripple out to the mainstream press. You read it hear first.
Now let’s back up to see how this all unfolded and how the news is now being spread by mass media and digitally-mediated grassroots journalists.
How the secret was spilled
Until a few days ago, Bush’s visit was totally unexpected here at Stanford. That’s true even for the University administration, who had scheduled many important events for next-year’s freshmen visiting for Stanford Admit weekend. The single biggest event was scheduled to happen on the same day as Bush’s visit, in Memorial Auditorium across the street from Hoover Tower, but this was suddenly scrapped due to Bush’s sudden imposition.
In the couple of days leading up to Bush’s arrival, it was fascinating to witness how rapidly this potent local news meme spread through the student population over social and digital networks. On a college campus, these networks are so closely intermingled that a meme moves seamlessly through and between each. Someone reads an email who tells a friend who tells another friend who emails a group list, etc. I received five emails in three hours from different sources. All were forwards that already had a long lineage.
The earliest signs I heard of came over the Stanford Band’s email list two days before the visit. The Band immediately started preparing a musical protest, choosing tunes that reflected political sentiments, like “American Idiot” by Greenday and “Hey, Big Brother” by Rare Earth. I overheard the news in class the next day (one day before the visit). That night, campus email lists were abuzz with info about the president’s schedule and plans for a large-scale protest: meet in White Plaza at 1:30 to rally and make signs; march to Hoover Tower at 2:00. The campus newspaper didn’t carry the story till the day of Bush’s visit, but had some interesting details about snipers being posted in Hoover Tower.
On the big day, I just happened to be tabling in White Plaza from 12 – 1:30, promoting the campus Cooperative Community with flyers and musical instruments. I also set up a sound system there to be used by student groups for a sustainability event from 12 -1. After that, I “accidentally” left the equipment set up so that when the protest rally started at 1:30, there happened to be a sound system turned on and turned up, with a microphone plugged in and ready to go. I’m no activist, but I do understand the power of technology to shape collective action.
Rachelle Marshall, a senior citizen member of the Raging Grannies protest group, said “It’s the greatest thing since I’ve been at Stanford. I’ve been here 50 years.” Perhaps with the rise of densely connected online communities at college campuses everywhere, digital tools for communication and coordination are going to be figuring more and more prominently in student activism efforts. Similarly, while the power of protest has seemed to dwindle in recent times due to lack of mass media attention, the rise into legitimacy of grassroots online journalism may be giving the punch back to protest. Interesting times, indeed.
Nova Spivack and I have been dreaming the same dream: of an online system that uses bottom-up idea generation to self-organize mass collective action. He calls his fictional system “ThePeople.net”.
Members of ThePeople.net agree to give 15 minutes of their time each week to do whatever ThePeople.net as a whole decides to do that week. So, for example, if the community decides that this week everyone will give $5 to a homeless person, that’s what you do. If the community decides that this week on wednesday at 12 noon everyone will stop what they are doing, stand up and announce “ThePeople.net” and then continue what they were doing as if nothing happened, then that’s what you do. It’s a new kind of social contract.
Now how does the community decide what the members of ThePeople.net will do each week? For this to be truly emergent democracy, we don’t want anyone to have control, we want the decision-making process to be truly bottom-up. So here’s what I propose: Any member can suggest an action to the community. The community members then vote on the actions that are most interesting.
I have my own opinions on how decision-making could improve on simple voting in this system, but I am absolutely enamored with the overall bottom-up idea. I really like the possibility of playful or humorous flashmob-type acts in addition to the usual do-gooding. But it makes me think that just one site is not enough. The greatest participation would come with those collective actions that most closely fit the values and desires of the community. I would rather see this system as a general purpose tool utilized by all sorts of communities for co-creating, choosing and enacting their collective will: church groups, war-protesters, elementary school classrooms, corporations, communes, et al. Just as a Wiki is a general-purpose tool for coauthoring documents, I’m talking about a tool for coauthoring collective action.
The wonderful thing I always bring up in regard to this hypothetical system is its inherent capacity for self-reflection and autocatalysis. Assume you have such a system. The team of people involved in building it plus anyone else interested in its development can use the system itself to generate ideas on how to improve it. Open source thought. In other words, use version 1.0 to design version 1.1. You have yourself a snowball.
Lacking nothing better at the moment, all I can do is make my own little snow-pebble and pitch it down the slope: let’s build this thing.
