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Lots of computer problems this week. Mostly offline while I get everything squared away and do some long-neglected backing up and clearing out. Good stuff coming this weekend, I promise.
As I write this, it’s about two hours since the AP reported the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs. Jobs is receiving an overwhelming amount of attention on Twitter — according to the Trendistic site, the words “Steve Jobs” appeared in 15.85% of all tweets posted in the last hour. Yes, you read that right. Nearly one in every six tweets on the entire Twitter site included the words “Steve Jobs.” That’s more than used the words “of” or “you” or “and.”
And yet “Steve Jobs” isn’t trending on Twitter.
“#ThankYouSteve” is, with far less traffic. “iSad” is, with one percent of the traffic. Hell, “Apple II” is, with 0.02% of all tweets. But “Steve Jobs” isn’t.
Why? Because Twitter’s trending algorithm, for better or worse, values novelty over volume, and people tweet about Steve Jobs all the time. But they don’t usually tweet “RIP STEVE JOBS,” and so that phrase, with just a fifth of the traffic of the man’s name on its own, is currently leading the worldwide trending topics list.
So next time you get upset that your favorite cause isn’t trending, do two things before you accuse Twitter of censorship. First, check to see whether the phrase in question is really getting the volume of traffic you think it is. (Right now #OccupyWallStreet, my own current favorite cause, is running about a sixtieth of the traffic of Steve Jobs’ name, and about a twelfth of the traffic of RIP STEVE JOBS.)
And second, if the topic is getting a lot of traffic, check to see whether associated phrases are trending. If #OccupyWallStreet isn’t trending, is Zuccotti Square? Or NYPD? Or “pepper spray”? If so, then Twitter’s algorithm is doing what it’s intended to do — finding the unusual terms that are associated with a novel development, and shining a spotlight on them for a few short hours.
October 11 Update | Interesting new datapoint in the wake of the arrest of a hundred Occupy Boston demonstrators late last night. “Occupy Boston” trended, but #OccupyBoston didn’t. Here’s my best guess as to why.
As I mentioned on Monday, the idea of a national student walkout in concert with the Occupy Wall Street movement has been gaining traction recently. Late last night a list of 75 campuses that have expressed plans to participate was posted on the Occupy Colleges Facebook page, and though not all of these walkouts may come together, experience shows that this sort of national action tends to bring campuses out of the woodwork who haven’t publicly stated their plans in advance. (And in fact, looking again at the list, I know there are some colleges planning walkouts who aren’t yet listed there.)
It remains to be seen how big today’s action is going to be — I don’t think anyone can predict that at this point — but a few things are worth bearing in mind as the day unfolds:
First, it’s October. Early October. The 2009-10 school year, the biggest year for co-ordinated student protest in the US since the seventies, started with a bang with September actions throughout California, and whatever the magnitude of today’s events turns out to be, they promise to be a beginning, not an end.
Second, this “walkout” is growing out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, not the Walkout of Wall Street movement. I haven’t yet seen any OWS-inspired campus occupations, but it’s hard to imagine that there aren’t some plans for that in the works. Will today be the day we see them born?
More to come…
9:50 am | The Occupy Colleges facebook page is here. Their twitter feed is here. Also be sure to check out the Twitter hashtags #OccupyColleges and #NYWalkout. I’ll update these resources as the day goes on — if you know of any I’ve missed, post in comments.
10:00 am | Students at Humboldt State University in California have been staging an occupation on their quad since Sunday.
12:15 pm | Reports of walkouts beginning to trickle in on Twitter and elsewhere. I’ve got a class for the next hour or so (my students didn’t walk out), but after that I’ll be back with full coverage all afternoon.
1:45 pm | Confirmed reports of walkouts in New York, Massachusetts, Washington, California, North Carolina, Texas. More coming in all the time, many states with multiple walkouts.
2:30 pm | New York and Massachusetts seem to be shaking out as the big players today, with New York the more dominant of the two. Historically, NY has been a center of student activism and protest (from the 30s to the 60s to the 80s and 90s), but that hasn’t been the case as much recently. That may be changing. Also significant — today’s actions seem to have brought the CUNY, SUNY, and NY State private colleges together in a way that hasn’t been seen in quite a while.
2:50 pm | Today has the feel of a kickoff rather than a culmination. As I noted earlier, it’s the beginning of a new academic year, and a lot of campuses seem to be using this walkout as a recruiting/organizing/planning tool. Word is also coming in of various campuses planning OWS-inspired occupations in the coming weeks — some of them may not have heard about today in time to coordinate.
3:15 pm | It’s now after noon on the West Coast. We should be hearing reports from a number of new actions soon.
3:40 pm | A Wisconsin student activist tweeted not long ago that he hadn’t heard much from that state’s campuses today, and wondered about my thoughts. I haven’t seen much from WI either, but it makes sense to me. To expand on what I said in my 2:30 update, today seems to be a day dominated by campuses and states that have not played a huge role in student protest in the last few years — folks in California and Wisconsin have their own schedules, own timelines, own agendas. Today is — I suspect — about the emergence of new movements more than a step forward for established ones. Haven’t seen a huge amount of California data yet, so I may have to rethink this later, but that’s my sense right now.
3:55 pm | Clearly a lot of very small walkouts and protests happening in addition to the big ones, many of them flying under the media/internet radar. It’s going to be hard to accurately document the scope of this, but the echoes are going to be felt for a while.
4:30 pm | I’m going to start putting out a full list of actions later this afternoon, but as of now I’ve seen events in something like fifteen states, with many of them seeing multiple campuses acting. As I noted above, many students seem to be acting without a lot of emphasis on getting the word out nationally, so the tally is harder to compile for that reason.
6:45 pm | I’ve been trying to get a full tally, and so far I’ve got thirteen states: California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, and Washington. I’m pretty sure there are at least a few more to come, quite possibly more than a few.
6:55 pm | About a third of the campuses confirmed to have hosted walkouts today were privates. That’s very high. Startlingly high. Since the sixties, private-campus student activism in the United States has declined precipitously.
Running around doing a million things today so only have time for a quick hit right now, but…
There’s been a call out for a while for a CUNY walkout in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and that call seems to be going national. Occupy Colleges has a Facebook page and a Twitter feed, and they’re banging the drum pretty hard.
Wednesday Update | I’m liveblogging the day’s events here.
So I’ve been tweeting up a storm today on the question of whether #OccupyWallStreet needs to compile a formal list of demands. (Spoiler alert: Nope.) I’m not going to rehash my whole argument here right now, but someone just tweeted something at me that gives me an opportunity to explore a piece of it.
Here’s the tweet, posted in response to me saying that “When people say #OccupyWallStreet needs to articulate demands, they usually mean they want it to embrace their demands.”
@dc_dsa: @studentactivism Partially agree. As Frederick Douglass said, “power concedes nothing without a demand.”
That was pretty well played, I must say. Apt, pithy, and deploying one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite activists. But let’s look at all of what Douglass said there:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”
This is Douglass is at his very best, but when he talks about making a demand he’s talking about planting your feet in the struggle, not drafting a bill of particulars.
The Montgomery bus boycott started out demanding a line separating the whites in the front of the bus from the blacks in the rear, so that black patrons wouldn’t have to give up their seats when the white section filled up. (Rosa Parks was obeying the law when she sat down that day.) Mario Savio made no demands at all in the most famous speech in the history of the American student movement. Malcolm X’s demands shifted weekly, sometimes hourly, and the suffragist and abolitionist movements both encompassed vast, unwieldy coalitions.
Now, I’m not anti-demands in principle. If you happen to be fighting a narrow, single-issue, clearly-defined campaign, then by all means articulate what you’re looking to get. But if you’re not — and Occupy Wall Street isn’t — then any demands you put forward should serve a tactical purpose, and the question of what to demand has to be preceded by a discussion of whether it serves your interests to make any demands at all.
Some folks at Occupy Wall Street want to see Congress overturn the Citizens United decision. Some want to see an end to US military adventurism. Some want to see Nick Kristof’s head on a pike. Would endorsing any one of these demands bring the group together, or would it peel people off from the coalition? If you want OWS to make demands, you’ve gotta have a solid answer to that question.
Some demands are certainly more innocuous than others. I imagine that demanding a financial transaction tax, for instance, wouldn’t in and of itself alienate many people currently in Liberty Plaza, and it might bring a few more on board.
But even if that demand could be approved smoothly and easily and without dissent, would its articulation bring the implementation of such a tax any nearer? I honestly don’t see how it would. A Google search on “transaction tax” and “occupy wall street” already returns more than twenty thousand hits, so the idea is already a big part of the conversation. And it’s not like a formal statement from next Tuesday’s GA is going to upend the legislative dynamic that currently pertains in Washington DC.
No. What’s going to change the dynamic in Washington DC, if anything will, is the continued growth of this movement. If you want to see Occupy Wall Street lead to a transaction tax, you want the movement to grow. If you want it to compel the demise of the legal concept of corporate personhood, you want the movement to grow. If you want it to overthrow global capitalism, you want the movement to grow.
It won’t grow if it’s completely contentless, of course. But it’s not contentless now. The General Assembly passed a “declaration of occupation” a few nights ago, and there’s some real meat there. I said in a recent blogpost that it was my sense that pretty much everyone in Liberty Plaza thought “that something was seriously broken in the American economy, that something was seriously broken in American politics, and that an accelerating concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small minority was at the root of most of of that brokenness,” and none of the many people who’ve read or linked to that post have yet disagreed.
If you think OWS has no message, you’re just not paying attention.
The OWS critique of our current national (and global) crisis will continue to unfold. Those discussions are ongoing, in a zillion venues. And I’m not convinced that this movement is any less coherent right now than the suffragists at the turn of the century or the lunch-counter sit-in crowd in the spring of 1960 or the London demonstrators over the last few months.
And at any rate the crucial task for Occupy Wall Street right now isn’t coherence, any more than it’s the articulation of specific demands. It’s resonance as an idea, as a movement.
You don’t win by making demands. You win by taking power or by forcing power to bend. Either way your stated demands are peripheral to the outcome — what you demand has only the vaguest relationship to what you win.
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