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.
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.
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.
Perhaps none that we can see today, but I can imagine why there's such a push to archive absolutely everything that happened with these protests.
Maybe I'm being a bit too hopeful, but some time decades in the future, perhaps these protests will be seen as 'what got the ball rolling' to vast, sweeping changes.
You never know what the future holds, but I for one hope that these protest started something bigger than they could ever have imagined. It just takes a while for that snowball to grow at first.
And IF those protests were indeed the start of eventual mass changes... would it not be beneficial to have documented as much as we can on them?
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 –
Any surprise that the troll posts are mostly AC? Nope.
they really out-did themselves here, though; usually you can tell the difference between the fox news audience and the slashdot audience.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
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.
"In the future they wont even be a foot note, just a bunch of spoiled brats with no goals or directions running around creating havoc and tearing stuff up."
sounds like our current government.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Even if you are right, the Occupy protests will only represent the follow on to the Tea Party protests. Personally, I believe that the purpose of the Occupy protests is to drain some of the anger and frustration so that it does not become harnessed by the Tea Party movement to accomplish actual change.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Proving that you can crap on cop cars and make the paper's front page.
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
You're trolling, but there is truth to the point that many of the people at the protests didn't even know why they were there. Literally, when asked on camera, they couldn't give an answer. They just wanted to be part of an anti-authority movement. It ended up becoming another generic anti-capitalism movement, like what the Iraq War protests became after a few days. A certain element was defecating on police cars, committing sexual assault, and littering parks with tons of garbage.
It's so much easier to blend into a crowd and yell with them at the top of your lungs to make yourself feel better about a general anger you have toward society. It's so much harder to actually effect change by contacting politicians, convincing the public, studying the law, and generally having an impact on the legislative process so that something actually comes out of any of it.
It's one of the reasons I'm irritated by anyone with a bullhorn, even when they say things I would normally agree with. It comes off like a pushy way for them to vent. They're aware of the image of themselves as a protestor with a bullhorn, and they get hooked on that image. Then it's over, and they go back to the office job they were trying to get away from in the first place.
Actually change something--then I'll be impressed!
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.
True, but the administration is doing it at a much larger scale, and will be part of future history books.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
Can there ever be a better illustration of how Slashdot is populated by moron leftists than the fact that any comment even mildly critical of the OWS "movement" is modded into oblivion?
OWS served as an illustration to tens of millions of America children of what not to do and how not to behave. I drove by the Austin OWS camp. My son looked at it and without any prompting said, "we read about these people in school today. They look as dumb as they sounded."
Look man, they were the 0.0001%. They were trying to get in another 98.9999% in order to gain legitimacy, but most of those either had jobs or were out trying to find a job. It's no wonder tried to get everybody in on the non-action.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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
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
You're trolling, but there is truth to the point that many of the people at the protests didn't even know why they were there.
Does that make their concerns any less valid?
It's so much harder to actually effect change by contacting politicians, convincing the public, studying the law, and generally having an impact on the legislative process so that something actually comes out of any of it.
Exactly. Especially when you don't even know exactly why you're so pissed off at society. Maybe you don't realize it's because you didn't like that cop's thuggish attitude the other day when he pulled you over for "weaving across lanes" and then pressured you into a drug search. Maybe subconsciously your mind is still pissed off from when the TSA hassled you at the airport. Maybe those taxes, and the 10x as many hidden taxes disguised as fees, charges, and a hundred other words are really fucking dragging you down. Maybe you don't appreciate the child services people harassing your neighbors because the dad got put in jail for possessing three marijuana plants.
Maybe it's all that and more. Not all of us are fucking scholars enough to understand exactly why we're pissed. Doesn't mean the anger isn't real, and doesn't mean it's just going to magically go away if we wish hard enough. If the same tyranny and oppressive bullshit remains in place, then the anger will continue to build, until it can't build any more. It's that simple. You don't want to be there when it explodes.
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..
When the women were raped in the occupy camps, Occupy denied it.
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!"
It's so much harder to actually effect change by contacting politicians, convincing the public, studying the law, and generally having an impact on the legislative process so that something actually comes out of any of it.
Except that nothing would come of that either. You can't change an inherently corrupt system by playing within the rules it has established and currently controls.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
My movement (Ron Paul Revolution) has elected officials to actual elected offices where they can actually change some things. My movement has actually proposed concrete plans of how to change our country for the better and is working to bring them to fruition. Members of my movement have still gone to work and directly contributed to society and the welfare of others instead of selfishly sitting in a park waving signs and smoking pot. I don't really see anything in your list worthy of historic note. Sure, feeding hungry and needy people is a good thing and I applaud that but that happens every day in pretty much every city in this country. People squatting, destroying property, and littering then refusing to leave and forcing police action is also nothing worth writing down. My movement has done plenty. Your movement has just been a drain on our society.
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.
What concerns? They didn't know why they were there!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I think in the long run historians will see the Occupy movement as the last (unfortunately unsuccessful) attempt to create a grassroots movement to resist the changes being brought to our society by the amalgamation of big business and the governments they support. It was flashy, it got some newsbites when protestors got stomped on by bullying police, but nothing much was accomplished and media preferred to show the Occupy members as potentially violent troublemakers. The average person saw them not as disadvantaged in any way, but merely lazy and drug addled.
After this, our personal rights and freedoms, specifically any hope of a right to privacy, will continue to be eroded until we live in the nicest police state ever devised. All those people who might eject the current conservative government (both parties are conservative these days they just differ in degree) will have been marginalized, objectified, or arrested and imprisoned (and thus unable to vote) for minor offenses - often invented of course - and we will become good consumers who buy what we are told and make the rich people into ultra-rich people. Meanwhile those who have benefited from the abusive economic system will continue to suck up to the rich in hopes of joining them, walking all the way on the backs of the poor as they climb up the hill to "heaven" (being in the 1% who can more or less do whatever the fuck they want to whomever they want). The unions will continue to be eroded, the workplace will continue to descend in quality, and the corporations will continue to either ship jobs overseas, or hire experts from overseas to come work here. The cost of education will continue to rise, the benefits of getting it will continue to cease to matter while the debt incurred will continue to ruin more lives. People will spend more time mesmerized by their smartphones than they do talking to other people around them.
Above all, the population will get increasing ignorant as they listen to their political and religious leaders who tell them to ignore the science and believe only whats in the bible (whichever version). Stupidity and Ignorance (as concepts) will be the new "cool".
Eventually, since no one has done anything about climate change - having trusted their corporate and elected leaders who told them it didn't matter - millions will die and civilization will collapse, or at least the economy will. Mostly they will die "over there" though so no one will give a fuck.
I see little or no hope for humanity with politicians that don't give a shit about anything except retaining power, political systems that let corporate citizens have inordinate power and rights to do whatever the fuck they want, and a mass of the public content to just be consumers and not bother with that voting thing - and if they do bother to just vote for the same damn party no matter what they say.
Yeah I just got off a 12 hour shift and I am really tired and kind of pissed off at the world, why do you ask? :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
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
Preserving and defending the right to peaceably assemble, all by itself is a good enough justification for doing it from time to time. I bet a lot of protestors initially who initially had no, or no good reason, to protest eventually found one when the cops teargassed them or otherwise used excessive force. They also probably learned a lot about our democracy.
And yes, every protest is going to have some bad apples. Welcome to reality. If this is unacceptable to you, maybe we should abandon our constitutional right to do it in the first place.
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.
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?
Wow, the Kochsuckers are out in force today. Which bank do you work for, son?
Free Martian Whores!
What's worse, they have mod points. Look at the next comment down, lists of things a tiny, teeny, eensy minority of Occupiers are accused of, and the AC is modded "informative".
Did Murdoch buy slashdot, or did they sell mod points to Koch Industries? WTF, sometimes comments piss me off but today the moderations are worse than the trolls.
Free Martian Whores!
Seriously.
Hah. I was not commenting on the reasons behind the movement. I was commenting on what the movement actually accomplished. Those are two entirely separate issues. Much of the anger behind the movement is justified, they just didn't direct it in any productive or useful way. Sitting around in a park, talking, and smoking pot has never changed anything that I'm aware of. I doubt it ever will. Since they didn't accomplish anything, I don't see what historians would write down.
"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.
I'm a joke? You're a moron who thinks his conscious mind represents everything his mind is capable of.
They didn't know why they were there!
Right. But does that mean they were there for no reason?
Could we please have JUST ONE DISCUSSION on slashdot that doesn't devolve into potheads clamoring for their sacred weed?
As soon as it's legalized, sure. You can have as many discussions as you like without us potheads clamoring for our sacred weed.
We get it, you are addicted to drugs and have to get high to escape your mundane or painful reality. Great. Stop talking about it. Nobody else cares.
You're a moron
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.
"Jusitification" is for morons. Were the peasants in France "jusitified" when they executed thousands of aristocrats via guillotine? Doesn't matter--it happened regardless. When a gang of revoking youth identifies you as "one of them" and throws you up against the wall with the others, all the "justifications" and "explanations" and "reasoning" in the world won't save you.
How do you expect a population that has been lied to for literally their entire lives to consciously know all the wrong things the government is doing? They don't know. All they know is things are fucked up and they start drawing conclusions about who is responsible, and getting angrier and more violent all the time. Intentions are worthless and if wishes were horses.....all that matters is what happens. Either the government takes radical steps to address the people's needs, or mother fuckers start getting thrown up against walls and shot.
Do you see now why people's feelings do matter, regardless of whether not those people actually know the logical and rational reasons why they feel the way they do?
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......