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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.'"
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.
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.
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 ----
The Tea party does not give a shit about republicans.
They want small government, constitutional, conservatives.
Of course the lefties in the group will call small government "anarchy" and constitutional "weird idea people" and conservative "Clinging to God and Guns out of fear".
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
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
They want small government, constitutional, conservatives.
Except for the ones that want government controlled marriage, government controlled internet, government controlled drugs, etc. etc. etc. And don't forget: Keep government out of my Medicare!
I'd be all for it, except that all they want is for everyone else to be free to do what they approve of.
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
I have to call bullshit here... but I'm not saying that as a defense of the current movement, but rather I'm objecting to your idealization of the 60's. All too many baby boomers seem to have a fuzzy, romanticized version of what happened in the 60's.
There was no shortage of bad actors mixed in with more idealistic folks then, just as is the case today. We have, with varying degrees of success, already sugar coated a lot of 60's history. All of the negative aspects you point out in the current movement have analogous issues in the 60's movement.
Of course, there were a lot of good things that happened as a result of the counterculture movements of the 60's. If we pretend there were no such negative aspects to these movements, and then use this optimistic but false dream of the past to condemn modern movements via a flawed comparison to an idealized version of the 60s that never actually existed... then it seems we have missed the entire point of these counterculture movements.
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.
Well when we have feds go after librarians for lists of who checked out books, we have constitution free zones that cover 30% of Americans and NDAA which states they can lock you away with ZERO trial if they stick the right label on you? I'm sorry but this librarian is hopelessly naive if she thinks all this wouldn't end up on someone's list somewhere. Remember it is NOT paranoia if they really are out to get you and everything we have seen from PATRIOT on up would bear out the assumption that if you don't get in line and wave the flag like a good drone you can end up on somebody's list.
I'm just glad my grandfather and his brothers who fought the Nazis in WWII aren't here to see this crap, hell you could probably power the entire southern USA by wrapping them in copper as i'm sure they are spinning like tops in their graves.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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
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.
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
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.
"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.