Occupy lobby allows bird's eye view of technology

WIRED:The speed and transparency of online experimenters' rude education is riveting and educational

I’VE BEEN fascinated over the last few years about how quickly groups have been using the internet to learn about new ways to organise.

Almost always, these new methods begin as inferior to those that we’ve used for the last 300 years. They’re clunky, ignore human nature, and have subtle failure points that only emerge after people have placed significant resources into them.

Even when they fail, the speed and transparency of the online experimenters’ rude education is riveting, and educational. The ruins hang around on the net, in forums and on websites. Frequently the communities grow and collapse at enormous speed.

It’s like watching a time-lapse animation. But from each group’s mistakes, others learn. And, occasionally, all that learning leads to forward movement. For all the litany of failures of collective editing, for instance, there’s one or two Wikipedias.

Recently, I’ve been spending perhaps a little too much time watching the Occupy movement.

Almost all of this has been done in the same way that a substantial minority of people in the world have been watching: by following tweets, live videostreams and direct internet reports from those at the encampments.

It's a proximity that few of us have had an opportunity to see before. David Graeber is an anarchist anthropologist who has observed and participated in the leaderless movements such as the World Trade Organisation demonstrations of the last decade – the forefathers of the current protests. In his book Direct Action: An Ethnography, he claims "absolutely nothing radicalises ordinary citizens so much as seeing what it's like to be in the middle of an action".

Occupy’s very immediate coverage has certainly been a testament to that.

Even the most cynical will be prompted into some sort of reaction to the visceral, close-up pictures of US riot police, or the results of tear gassing.

When viewed online, passive spectators may experience a radicalisation that the Occupy protesters would want. Some will find the images so dissonant as to prompt them to turn off any sympathy whatever.

If you see an officer of the law gassing an 84-year-old woman, it’s possible to assume the police must have an excellent reason to regretfully take such extreme measures. Tea Partiers pluck the tales of Marxism, poor hygiene and iPad-wielding sloths from the medley of stories. Liberals seek out an image of fine upstanding – and voting – citizens.

Given all the disparate views on display, and the hardwired desire of the Occupy movement not to make demands or create leaders, there are multiple ways to find and tell the stories.

That’s the first effect of the net on this new protest. But there’s something deeper going on too. Very early on, the Occupy movement adopted a relatively complex, notoriously challenging decision-making process called consensus.

Consensus decision-making has been around progressive and anarchistic movements since the ecology and radical feminist movements of the 1970s, and has a history among groups such as the Quakers for far longer. Put overly simplistically, it does not use voting, and requires near unanimity from its attendees.

Many an old radical has stories to tell of struggling with this apparently idealistic and inefficient strategy. But after 40 years of iteration within these communities, there are many people who know how to do consensus well.

And in the last few weeks, I’ve watched tricks and tips about how to do that spread via the net to hundreds of Occupy communities. It’s like seeing a new site or a nifty computer trick spreading, and feels like one of those experiments, like Linux, or Wikipedia, or Slashdot, that is undergoing rapid iteration. And, chaotically and at some cost, seeking out novel solutions.

Last week, after seeing disturbing scenes of police violence on the Berkeley campus just a few miles from me, I went down to see what I could.

The riot police arrived just a few minutes after I did. They formed a line and swiftly took down the fledgling campus Occupy encampment. In response, the students started using techniques they’d seen from Occupy in New York – they used “the human megaphone”, a trick to amplify voices when there is no electric amplification.

They formed ad hoc general assemblies to develop strategies and plan new protests. One former marine used the human megaphone to explain the police’s tactics to the entire crowd.

Out in that crowd, I videoed the scene, broadcasting live to a site called UStream, as I’d seen protesters do online. Others did the same. One of them, I noticed, was the local NBC news affiliate, who had hired a helicopter.

I picked up their view on my smartphone, and showed it around. Suddenly, the small circle around me had what any ragtag strategician would never have had: a bird’s eye view of their own demonstration.

The size of the crowd, and the shape of the police lines were clear – as were the gaps in both arrangements. I exchanged a look with a protester. This was a random new innovation. “That could be very useful,” she said.

I wonder how far and fast those useful ideas, and the technology enabling them, will spread now.