After the financial crash of 2008,
the politicians saved the banks. But they did practically nothing
about the massive corruption that was revealed in its wake. And the
reason they gave was that it might destabilise the system. Public
anger burst out. The Occupy movement took over Wall Street and then
the Senate in Washington.
What drove the Occupy movement was
the original dream of the internet that people like John Perry Barlow
had outlined in the early 1990s. In his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,
Barlow had described a new world free of politics and the old
hierarchies of power. A space where people connected together as
equals in a network and built a new society without leaders.
Now, the Occupy movement set out
to build that kind of society in the real world. The camps were to be
the models. All the meetings used the idea of the human microphone.
People throughout the crowd repeated a speaker’s words so everyone
could hear them. But, if someone wanted to challenge the speaker, the
human amplifiers also had to repeat their words so their voice had
equal power.
Each person was an autonomous
individual who expressed what they believed. But together they became
components in a network that organised itself through the feedback of
information around the system. You could organise people without the
exercise of power.
Then, almost immediately, the Arab
Spring began. The first revolution started in Tunisia, but it quickly
spread to Egypt. On January the 25th 2011, thousands of Egyptians
came out in groups across Cairo and then started moving towards
Tahrir Square. It seemed like a spontaneous uprising but the internet
had played a key role in organising the groups.
One of the main activists was an
Egyptian computer engineer called Wael Ghonim. He worked for Google
in Egypt, but he had also set up the Facebook site that played the
key role in organizing the first protests.
Many liberals in the West saw this
as proof of the revolutionary power of the internet. Again, it seemed
to be able to organise a revolution without leaders. A revolution
powerful enough to topple a brutal dictator who had been backed by
America and the West for 30 years. But the internet radicals were not
the only ones who saw their dreams being fulfilled in the Arab
Spring. Many of the political leaders of the West also
enthusiastically supported the revolutions because it seemed to fit
with their simple idea of regime change. It might have failed in Iraq
but now the people, everywhere, were rising up to rid themselves of
the evil tyrants. And democracy would flourish.
So when an uprising began in
Libya, Britain, France and America supported it. And suddenly,
Colonel Gaddafi stopped being a hero of the West. All the
politicians, and the public relations people, and the academics who
had all promoted him as a global thinker suddenly disappeared. And
Gaddafi became yet again an evil dictator who had to be overthrown.
But instead of becoming a
democracy, Libya began to descend into chaos. And the other
revolutions were also failing. The Occupy camps had become trapped in
endless meetings. And it became clear that there was a terrible
confusion at the heart of the movement. The radicals had believed
that if they could create a new way of organising people then a new
society would emerge. But what they did not have was a picture of
what that society would be like, a vision of the future. The truth
was that their revolution was not about an idea. It was about how you
manage things. And those who had started the revolution in Egypt came
face-to-face with the same terrible fact.
From
the documentary
HyperNormalisation
by
Adam
Curtis
Read
also:
Maybe there were endless meetings, but don't forget that Occupy was brutally crushed by the police across multiple cities in the Winter of 2011
ReplyDeleteThe fault may lie with endless debate rather than mass, truly representative democracy. So it may be a procedural thing rather than a conceptual problem.
ReplyDeleteThe sad part of their movement was they were right. If we could raise our stake to 5% racism and poverty in America would diminish.
ReplyDelete