Slashdot Mirror
Tensions Between Archivists and 'Occupy' Protesters Over Preserving the Movement
An anonymous reader writes "At one point an NYU librarian literally got into a shouting match with a protester at an Occupy protest, trying to make the case for why a digital record should be kept of photos, videos, audio recordings, posters, and other materials, so future scholars and activists can recount what happened. Academics are taking unusual steps to preserve the protesters' stuff, including 'distributing postcards promoting archiving at protests, developing automated systems to download photos posted online, and asking participants to vote on which images are most important for the historic record.'"
Maybe the protesters were right.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
A bunch of leftists create a movement using the tried and tested method of saying "whatever your cause, you are in some way part of our movement" (unless you are Ron Paul).
They deserve to be inundated with every boring and irrelevant group that wants their turn in the spotlight.
How about they save a few used condoms, boxes of human excrement, used needles, and unemployment check stubs so that future generations can view in awe and wonder how so many lowlife slackers ever found the ambition to gather in one place at one time...
I thought people were afraid of being recognized by police using the archives.
Turns out they're arguing over whether to call themselves the Judean People's Front or the People's Front of Judea.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
How much future scholarship can you get out of a bunch of whiny losers looking for handouts?
A bunch of poor people protest the fact that the rich have too much by trespassing, loitering, and basically just sitting on their asses for days on end.
Yes, there is terrible injustice in the world. No, this is not an effective way of doing something about it.
What was achieved by the Occupy protests?
What historical significance do they have?
With the media coverage the protests will hardly get forgotten. Let's leave history to the historians of the future, they will be the ones to know what events were important to worth mentioning.
Wow. Buncha assholes here.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Yes, let's record everything about the Occupy movement so the future can judge it:
Arson
Occupy Fort Collins – Member arrested, $10 million in damage
Occupy Portland - Member arrested for throwing Molotov Cocktail
Occupy Seattle – Suspicious fire at Bank of America 2.7 miles from camp
Occupy Portland – Three men arrested with homemade grenades
Assault/Threats
Occupy SF – 12 assaults in 24 hours
Occupy LA – 4 assaults including two with knives
Occupy Philly – Man punches woman in the face
Occupy LA – Two assaults including setting someone on fire
Occupy Berkeley – Police respond to three assault calls per night
Occupy Wall Street – Three men threaten the life of a sexual assault victim
Occupy Lawrence – Punch thrown
Occupy Orlando – Knife fight sends man to hospital
Occupy Portland – Multiple assaults within a 24 hr. period
Occupy Toledo – Man assaults police officer after arrest
Occupy San Diego – Woman assaults cameraman
Occupy Victoria – Man dumps urine on city worker
Occupy Vancouver – Two police officers bitten during near riot
Occupy Oakland – Death threats
Occupy Austin – Man in Joker make-up arrested for brandishing knife
Occupy Oakland – Man sets his dog on reporter
Occupy Oakland – Man pulls a knife in camp
Occupy Wall Street – Photographer assaulted
Drugs/Dealing
Occupy Boston – Two drug busts in a week
Occupy Boston – Another drug arrest
Occupy Boston – Heroin dealers busted were living with 6 year old boy directly behind welcome tent
Occupy Portland – First hand account “Drugs. SellingHeroin. Meth.”
Occupy Portland – Video of open drug use in the camp
Occupy Portland – “I get high“
Fraud
National Lawyer’s Guild member Ari Douglas pretends to be run over by a police scooter
Illness/Death
Occupy Santa Cruz – Ringworm outbreak
Occupy Atlanta – TB outbreak
Occupy Wall Street – Zuccotti lung outbreak
Occupy New Orleans – Man discovered in tent had been dead 2 days
Occupy Portland – Body lice outbreak
Murder
Occupy Oakland – Fatal shooting
Public disturbance
Occupy Dallas – Protesters block bank entrance, 23 arrested
Occupy Vancouver – Mob with bullhorn enters bank
Occupy Wall Street – Protesters block bank entrance, four arrested
Occupier takes a bathroom break in the street
Occupy Vancouver – Occupiers disrupt debate, threaten riot when asked to leave
Occupy Long Beach – Group disrupts city council meeting
Occupy Boston –
Organizing that stuff is hard work. Work continues getting 1960s protest info cataloged. Stanford had a group trying to organize Martin Luther King's stuff. That took years. Then they got the archives of the Black Panther Party, and are now grinding through that. The archives of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) are at Kent State.
Much of the plder stuff is too variable for fast scanning. Somebody has to put posters, handouts, and brochures through a flatbed, slowly. The fast book scanners need more structure.
what actually did happen? I mean, besides hippies smoking pot in a public park instead of...wherever hippies normally smoke pot. I guess some people with iPhones and iPads got to sit in a public park with hippies instead of a coffee shop...protesting people with money...I still don't know if I would consider that worth noting...
but some time decades in the future, perhaps these protests will be seen as 'what got the ball rolling' to vast, sweeping changes.
What you are thinking of there is called the "Tea Party".
The funny thing is that mostly the two groups had the same complaints (the Tea Party dislikes big banks just as much as Occupy folk). Only instead of camping illegally The Tea Party stayed outside for just a few days each month to show people they existed, and then went back inside - to occupy the only thing that REALLY can have an impact.
The primary system.
The Tea Party has been going through and cleaning out (to the degree they can) the Republican system, starting at the lowest levels. It will take time but over time the Republican party will become much more libertarian and less big government as a result. The Tea Party already had substantial impact in the last elections, especially in primaries, and frames the debate even today.
All of that, without people getting arrested, or breaking laws.
That's why the occupy movement doesn't really matter, it's all a stage show at this point to prop up what already exists, not to really change anything. It's not directing any energy at anything that can actually make change occur.
They could have done the same things for the Democrats that the Tea Party has done for the Republicans but with no real goals defined and a basically crazy unwillingness to accept that leaders can make things happen, Occupy just drifts along now to be used by whomever wishes to do so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Occupy events were held on public property where there's no reasonable expectation of privacy. They uploaded information about the events to public websites. They handed out materials to the general public. There was far too much media coverage. Why should they get ANY say in what's retained in a permanent record? They already made it themselves.
As someone who's tried to locate data before, I wish them all the luck in the world.
I know this is the internet, so UFOs carry aliens, we never actually landed on the moon, and I'll be trolled for saying this...But, we've never had the modern day's archival abilities before. I'm glad to hear someone's attempting to put it to good use.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
I call AC sock puppet on you.
Wikipedia definition of Agent Provacateur
I think Slashdot needs a new tag, something to demarcate probable sock puppet post. Extra points for the name and address of the real poster.
Just a quick observation - why even bother asking what to archive and what to discard?
If there is any real interest in maintaining a true historic record then by all means archive everything - including not just the wonder photo-op stuff but also the pooping-on-cop-cars stuff as well. Asking people to vote on how they want to be remembered by future generations will only wind up preserving images that the "protestors" find self-serving and paint a picture of complete harmony. That is, assuming that this whole OWS thing isn't completely forgotten as anything more than a joke in a few years - sorry, but they're not in the same league as their '60s foregenderneutralpersons and the SEIU can't afford to fill up these protests with on-the-clock people forever you know.
For every picture of a spoiled suburban art-major college student with $5000 worth of telecommunications and computing gear holding up a sign in solidarity with their brethren, they should include photos of the mounds of garbage left behind or maybe the school children in NYC who were verbally assaulted and scared to go into their own playground.
For every video of an aged hippie wearing native garb and organizing a chant, there should be a video of an addle-pated social organizer trying to explain to the NYC city council why they are owed $5000 for drum-circle upgrades.
For every soundclip of inspiring songs about soy cakes, harmony and "sticking it to the man" there should be equal amounts of the outright sedition, calls to violence, and general vulgarity.
If these "historians", librarians, and archivists are worth anything even remotely approaching their titles, then *all* data should be preserved and not put to a vote for popularity. Fair is fair after all.
Hahaha oh wow. The occutards show their true colours.
Wikipedia definition of Agent Provacateur
and raise you one Wikipedia definition of jackass.
Most are unaware of it, but the social tension evidenced in this conversation comes from changing living conditions. The world is full. Further economic growth is neither possible nor desirable.
A growing economic pie allowed large disparity in income. A shrinking economic pie directs people's attention back to large income disparities.
Most OWS and Tea Party (they may distrust and fear each other, but they have more in common than either will admit) real grassroots sympathizers & supporters know there's something going on that they don't like, but they're not sure what to do about it. Last year a wave of popular revolutions swept the Arab world, driven by the same feeling. Liberals and Conservatives use different words to describe seemingly different things, but the origin of their discontent comes from the end of growth. This impending paradigm shift is at the origin of the social conflict played out on this page.
It is foolish of people to focus on redistributing wealth, scapegoat, bicker, or wage war, when the entire edifice is in peril. Yet it is in our nature to behave so in the face of a bottleneck predicament. Know Thyself
Just buy lots of Che Guevera T-shirts and posters from the protesters. They can use the extra money to get high and stuff. Whatever you do though, I mean really, never do this--never expose the irony of them engaging in free market capitalism to support communism. It'll totally piss them off. You'll get a combined buzzkill/revolutionary rage look that's really rather unique. Denial so thick you can cut it with a knife. Really, it's the same denial you get when you explain that Marxism is fundamentally incompatible with liberty. Anyway, keep them stoned and film whatever you like.
I call Trollfat on this article.
~Just as a thing fails if it lacks a kernel, so too it fails if it lacks a skin. ~ Rumi, Discourses
A bunch of people started a protest, thousands more aimlessly followed and diluted the effect, branding the movement as a bunch of unemployed hippys who have no idea what they're protesting..
Looks pretty peaceful when you consider the size and how many people are involved. I am happy they have kept it going so long, successfully!
Rapes and assaults are much more common in the Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan/Iran war, despite the fact no one is able to archive it. All we have there is a bunch of bodies on ice, with toe tags to try and understand what happened. Your outlook depends on what you focus on. If you want to spread domestic fear, you create posts like this list of protest problems. However, that makes the poster a domestic terrorist, guilty of psychological warfare... a common occurrence.
By and large, the big civil rights movements and protests, like those in the 60s, had defined goals and real, reasonable demands.
Like, say, the civil rights movement of Dr. King. They could clearly articulate their grievance: Blacks are treated differently than whites because of the colour of their skin. They also could say what they wanted: Equal protection under the law.
Same shit with Vietnam war protests. They wanted the war to stop. Some may not have had good reasons for it (though most did) but they could articulate what they wanted.
That is what makes the Occupy crowd such a bunch of wankers. They can't even say what the fuck the problem is or what they want. They just whine about "the 1%," or corporations, and so on. They can't say what problem they want solved and what the solution is they want. All I've ever been able to dig up is an "unofficial" list on their site which includes a whole shit ton of stuff that spans the gamut and will never happen (like banning private gun ownership, stopping all foreclosures, eliminating the federal reserve, and so on). The other was a Mad Magazine looking chart of all sorts of random words and connections that told you absolutely nothing, mostly on account of it being incomprehensible.
THAT is the difference. If you ever hope to sway people, you have to have a message, a goal, an ideal. You can't just come out and say "We are mad about shit and we don't know what!"
FYI, many OWS folks do have jobs and drop by after work.
Sure, technology might "win". so put a fake nose on, or wear a helmet. buy a voice alteration device. but archives are ALWAYS good. If you want to be an anonymous participant, the events should still be archived. Police brutality, physical or sexual assaults, etc need to be captured. Shy away from cameras, but do not impose their banning. If you see someone as camera shy as you doing anything immoral, but are wearing a mask, do your part. A cop covering their badge while macing pregnant women? take the beatdown. expose his badge. But if you get violent, or do anything immoral, welcome to your own "anarchism". be prepared to be unmasked and recorded.
The world is full
Citation?
Certain parts of the world are overpopulated. But just as many are underpopulated. The inside of America is both fairly empty, and fairly habitable. The interior of my own country (Australia) is far less habitable, but there are still many, many areas that aren't. We produce more than enough food to feed the world - it's the distribution that's problematic, not the production. Malthus has been proved wrong again and again.
Further economic growth is neither possible
Citation?
Since when is economic growth dependant on population growth? America's economic boom-time wasn't caused by a sudden increase of population (although it led to it, as migration to America became popular). Economic growth can either come from an increasing supply of raw material (which are finite, yes), but also from coming up with new ways to process those raw materials to increase their value (ie: make useful stuff out of them).
nor desirable
Citation?
What's one good reason we wouldn't want economic growth? Yeah, the richer always benefit the most when there's growth, but the poor benefit too, if not in the same proportion.
the origin of their discontent comes from the end of growth
Citation?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
The article didn't discuss why there's controversy. The best writeup I've seen on why there's tension was an essay by Michael Siegal from the National Lawyer's Guild. He lives in the Bay Area so he's focused largely on Occupy Oakland and Occupy SF.
"Not all of us are fucking scholars enough to understand exactly why we're pissed"
You're human flotsam and jetsam. You're like an animal who does things by instinct, never even questioning the rationality of what you're doing. You just have feelings and do something random based on those feelings.
"Doesn't mean the anger isn't real"
It just means you lack rationality. That doesn't even qualify you as being human.
The KKK marched with Occupy, not with the Tea Party.
All of the other things you mentioned are fringe outliers, not core to the Tea Party - otherwise for Occupy you'd have to count people firing guns at the white house (not even extreme elements at a tea party have ever fired a gun) or the rapists.
I don't really count them against Occupy, but you have to if you insist on including all fringe elements of any movement.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What you are missing is that while SOME Tea Party members are indeed religious, not all of them are. That's the price of REAL diversity, not all of them share the same opinions on everything.
The core of the Tea Party however is very simple - reduce spending, reduce the size of government. That is all they are working towards. People have different motivations for doing so but that is the shared goal.
It doesn't matter what positions "tend to" have, what matters is what they DO!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You don't know anything about the Tea Party obviously. Being opposed to large government most Tea Party activists dislike both Santorum and Romney, but Romney would still be preferred between the two (Ron Paul of course being far better but face it, he's not the candidate).
You continue to incorrectly view the Tea Party as religious, when it was not founded on a religious basis and the goals of the tea party are in no way religious. They are simply to reduce spending and reduce the size of government. While religious people are part of the movement and share those goals for different reasons (real diversity of thought - you should try it sometime) the Tea Party is not at all a religious group and many deep in the movement are not religious.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Note that I agree with everything the GP poster said, but his comments do have an inkling of truth. We are experiencing an economic change in the United States, and may have been experiencing it for 20 years -- masked only by the 90s stock boom and real-estate bubbles. The change is characterized by lower-than-expected growth, and a difference in the way that growth has been distributed. Much of the growth is occurring overseas, and while Americans are profiting off of it, the profits aren't being equally distributed.
This may or may not have something to do with increasing world population, but in the longer term, we do face real population pressures. Not the Stand-on-Zanzibar strawman, where the country literally gets too crowded. Rather, we're facing huge resource pressures. There's reason to believe that our economy is already being constrained by energy resource limitations (read: oil), and not so much because the world population is increasing (though it is) but because large swaths of it have decided not to live in poverty anymore. There are 2.5 billion people expected to come out of poverty in the next few decades, and nobody has a clue how that's going to work. You could live in the middle of the Mojave desert and still be affected by that. And it's not just oil -- look up 'peak potassium' if you want another reason to be concerned. And of course, there's nuclear proliferation and climate change, which appears likely to happen whether or not you believe that humans are involved.
Many of these concerns can probably be addressed, but not by the economic system we're currently operating. So while I don't think that the Occupy protestors are explicitly looking three to four decades into the future, I hope that they're successful because the only way I see our way of life lasting 50 years is if we all make some dramatic changes to the way our government and economic elites behave. It's going to be a bumpy ride, and our current arrangement is like locking 90% of the population into steerage and driving the ship with abandon through a field of icebergs.
Attention: Occupy Wall Street losers,
GO FUCKING HOME
And librarians ... NO ONE wants this shit. NO ONE. There is no reason to take up valuable shelf space on keeping a history of these losers. Period.
Looks like Occupy still hits a nerve, so many asshole and troll posts on this board, occupy must be doing something right to get such a response - I wonder what all the asshole posters on this board are paid - is it per word? or per post and how much?
Seriously.
"The world is full."
Carrying capacity is a function of technology and lifestyle (which are in turn functions of imagination and ethics):
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
The carrying capacity of the local solar system with known or easily forseeable technology is probably on the order of quadrillions of humans living in many millions of Earth's worth of space habitats.
See, to complement "Know Thyself", see also "A Newer Way Of Thinking":
http://www.anwot.org/
The big issue is we are trying to apply scarcity-based economic thinking to the technologies of abundance. So we demand that people work for the right to consume, but then we make them compete against firms introducing robots. This was a problem seen as far back as 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
A basic income, improved gift economy, better technologies for local subsistence, and internet-empowered planning at all levels could help increase our collective carrying capacity and quality of life.
See also:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Thanks for chiming in bro. Your story is exactly what I was talking about. Ask the Occupy protestors why they're there, and you get a hundred different reasons. That does not equal no reason. There's far too many goddamn good reasons today to even keep track; pick one.
Forgot to say this in my last reply: if you read this, don't give up man. Big changes are coming, and we have wild times ahead. The old corrupt system will be swept away and replaced with a new, freer one. Things will get worse in the interim, but it's coming. Don't do anything dumb or violent. We need every good and able man on board for the times ahead. Just lay low.....stock up....be prepared. Make friends. Smoke some good pot and chill as much as possible. Keep an eye on the news, and laugh at the comic tragedy that is mankind......