Slashdot Mirror
The Message from Seattle
Much of America was surprised by the disturbances in Seattle this week, especially the sometimes violent street protests and confrontations over what seemed to be a mixed bag of environmental, technological, economic and social issues.
What were these protests really about?
It was widely suggested in the mainstream media that many of the demonstrators had no idea what they were protesting, that they were just acting out, or mimicking other protest movements. Three "anarchists" in ski masks named Spider, DangerZone and Nimo gave interviews all week to reporters, usually in shadowy light from secret locations.
Is there anything more endearing than watching reporters interview menacing Net-based anarchists with Web sites? Why does one get the sense these kids will be chuckling all the way back to their dorms? Finally, we know why Dr. Evil had his headquarters in a Starbucks in Seattle's famous needle.
All week, "analysts" have been zeroing on this alleged anarchism, hinting darkly of nihilistic conspiracists, union thugs and a wanna-be-like-the-60's generation that has no real knowledge of global politics or indigenous social issues to call its own.
But it seems more accurate to say that many journalists missed the point. They seemed to have no idea what they were seeing and covering in the streets. The protestors weren't aping the battles of the 60s, but raising new, in many ways much more complex ones. They relate to corporatism, humanism, Net regulation, the environment, globalization and technology.
Street brawling aside - the birth of political movements is usually neither pretty nor coherent - this new kind of leaderless, bottom-up movement could best be described as Techno-Idealism. Defined on the Net, this new movement has already launched its first red-hot idea - that corporatism has run amok.
There was, perhaps inevitably, the notion, not the first or last time this will be suggested in coming weeks, that all of this poorly-articulated, diffuse and anarchic anger could only have come from the Internet.
"The confusion about the protestors' political goals is understandable," wrote a New York Times columnist Thursday, "this is the first movement born of the anarchic pathways of the Internet. There is no top-down hierarchy, no universally recognized leaders, and nobody knows what is going to happen next."
The writer had a point. Perhaps one reason politicians and journalists have been so viscerally hostile to the Internet is that many of them foresaw this techno-driven political response to the rise of very big business: an era of absolutely unbridled, unprincipled and rapacious bigness, immorality, inhumanity and greed. The era of the mega-merger, takeover and acquisition without regard to consequence has created companies of unprecedented size and reach. Their rise has raised a host of social and moral issues, few of which have been seriously addressed - until Seattle.
Perhaps this political movement was inevitable coming from the children of the Boomers, who talked a lot about revolution but ended up doing a lot more business.
Protestors at the WTO conference were hardly vague. They were vocal and specific in citing the damage and suffering corporatism has caused all over the world - to human rights, working conditions, the environment and notions of security, privacy and personal and creative freedom.
Sorting through a wave of e-mail from Seattle and watching and reading shocked, increasingly angry accounts of the WTO protests, the message from Seattle is striking, especially when it gets past the media screen.
Apart from its physical targets - there were efforts to trash Starbucks, Nike, Gap and McDonald's stores and franchises in several days of near-rioting in Seattle - the most striking thing about the protestors was their diversity - all ages, all types, a lot of different causes.
But the causes weren't unrelated: they were nearly all connected, in one form or another, to perceptions of threats to freedom and to corporate greed and immorality, and to the failure of domestic or international governmental authorities to curb or respond to either.
If the protestors were lacking a single coherent 60's style political theme, (stop the War, racism is bad) the 90's version was impressive: a visceral, intensely political - and yes, increasingly Net-centered - response to Corporate Bigness is underway.
It's dangerous to generalize about all big corporations. And many of the Seattle protesters are enthusiastic free-marketeers. What they're opposed to is out-of-control business with no morality - the motto of our times. Some big businesses have advanced research, helped the environment, supported human rights, generated good jobs and economic opportunity, created valuable new products. But spontaneous social movements don't always draw fine distinctions.
In the past generation, corporatism - for which the WTO has become a metaphor - has been blamed for a daunting list of social wrongs, even crimes.
The institutions and entities that are supposed to be monitoring and regulating powerful corporations in America - government and journalism come to mind - have been, in different ways, muted and corrupted. They have failed to do their jobs or meet their historic obligations. Corporatism has invaded the workplace and transformed business with relatively little serious public discussion or oversight.
Small wonder the protesters were furious.
The Techno-Idealists can't look to Congress to monitor corporatism. Big business is now the dominant contributor to the political process. Journalism isn't about to do it. Most major national American media outlets have been corporatized and acquired by the very institutions they're supposed to be monitoring. Book publishing, now almost wholly owned by multi-national media conglomerates, isn't about to pick up the slack.
The protestors in Seattle seemed to articulate these issues with considerable clarity, even if many people in authority didn't want to hear it, preferring instead to huff about violence and irresponsibility.
Oppressive corporatism - foreseen and warned about by great writers from Orwell to Huxley to Sir Arthur Clarke to John Raulston Saul - has grown beyond even their imagination. Corporations have staggering resources and power to shape the modern world, despite the fact that they have no political agenda or ideology apart from dominating markets and maximizing profits.
But that's what makes these mega-entities so venal, even dangerous. By necessity, they exist in a moral vacuum in which almost everything is morally acceptable except making less money, and human and moral concerns are subordinate to profit. As corporations have become more global, and more and more of what they do occurs out of sight of democratic processes and scrutiny, they have become even less accountable, thus less moral.
"The WTO is Satan," e-mailed a Seattle protestor yesterday. "Not only because it threatens freedom by trying to help corporations damage human and labor rights, control property, tax the Net, corporatize technology, control intellectual content and ruin the environment, but because it's a stand in."
For what?
"Bigness. Indifference. Greed. Crummy jobs. Arrogance. Child labor. Being put on hold for hours when you call. Loss of freedom. The freedom of technology and commerce to grow unfettered. The WTO isn't responsible for all these things, but it's a pretty good focal point to start the fight. It's the tool of these companies, the mouthpiece."
"For the last 20 years," e-mailed a middle-aged Boomer, "ordinary Americans have been treated like toilet tissue by the 20 per cent that owns the whole damn country and its government."
And not just "ordinary" workers.
Middle-class and affluent workers have been down-sized, re-engineered, terminated, re-located and threatened by global corporations practicing new "flexible" (a/k/a: everyone is insecure, vulnerable and dispensable, everyone's role and mission is continously subject to change) personnel policies.
"It's not an issue of left or right," e-mailed Mark, a college student arrested during the first day of the protests. "It's an issue of top to bottom."
This idea is, of course, instantly familiar to anyone who's spent any time on the Internet, perhaps the most radically lateral, that is to say, many-to-many rather than top-to-bottom, social and economic system in the world.
The protestors in Seattle made some telling, nearly irrefutable arguments. Corporatism has, in fact, damaged the environment by creating incalculable amounts of products that pollute and trash the earth. Corporations have increasingly acquired and sought to monopolize whole elements of culture, from movies to books to the press. This has sparked an epidemic homogenization of popular culture - not a dumbing down, but a dulling down - as controversial, profane, sexual or other "controversial" cultural offerings from books to movies to music are eliminated or pushed to the margins so that safer products can be mass-marketed.
In the United States, corporatism is celebrated for generating a booming economy in which profits are greater than ever, but work for most people is much worse: transient, poorly paid, unrewarding.
Younger workers are forced into dead-end and poorly paid positions with little chance of advancement or meaningful work, while older workers are down-sized, re-engineered, laid off in droves. Countless millions of workers - from kids to the elderly - have been victimized and brutalized worldwide by modern corporatism and the ruthless way it competes.
The protest movement that popped up in Seattle isn't anti-globalism.
It's distinctly and specifically anti-corporate.
The roots of the demonstrations lie in the notion that companies are behaving immorally: Nike, which has been accused of making products in sweatshops, the human rights campaign that targets Royal Dutch/Shell in Nigeria. Or Microsoft, which has been accused of monopolizing software and information markets for years, but which is only now facing tepid government regulation. Ironically, some of Microsoft's employees joined in the demonstrations in Seattle.
There have also been protests against Monsanto's genetically engineered foods in Europe; individualistic (mostly geek-generated) struggles against the recording industry's cabalistic efforts to control music.
Other issues cited by the protestors: individual liberty, economic dignity, patent control, the freedom of intellectual property, higher wages, job security, labor rights, environmental protection, and some check on the rise of corporate power and influence.
Does this protest movement have its roots in the "anarchic pathways of the Internet?"
Sure.
The political potential of the Net has always been pushed aside by obsessive preoccupations with pornography and business. On top of everything else, the eruption in Seattle demonstrates the ability of activists and ideologues to form their own grass-roots communications networks out of the sight of traditional institutions. The WTO protests didn't come out of nowhere, it was just that nobody in authority was in a position to see them coming.
Many of the protestors in Seattle are - using new technologies like the Net - beginning to do the work of politicians, regulatory agencies, legislators and journalists. Perhaps that's the real message to the WTO and the rest of the world.
But if you listen to many of the messages and e-mails, they aren't all that scattered. They do have a lot in common. They are challenging Bigness and asking whether or not increasingly powerful corporations shouldn't be held to a higher standard of moral behavior; whether government shouldn't act to preserve freedom and elevate human rights rather than conspire to suppress them.
These questions are not foolish. They're powerful and timely. Public discussion of them is long overdue. Corporatism is a civic menace. It pushes the individual aside. It spawns greed, passivity and conformity.
The demonstrators aren't raising old issues, but very new ones. The real question isn't why protestors exploded in anger, but what took them - and us - so long?
Despite all the media hype around the violence, I've been really excioted by the events in Seattle. Finally, it seems a large segment of the population has realized that fundamental issues, such as freedom of speech, freedom or assembly and the right to control their own government are what matter, not our own views on individual issues. The left and the right (outside of the mainstream) are both realizing that the ideas expressed in the Constitution should come before personal, moral and economic ideas.
Perhaps one of the most enlightening things I heard (on tuesday) was that a local militia was considering entering the protest are to defend the protesters' rights to assemble and to free speech.
I was in and out of downtown all day on tuesday. In the morning there was minimal activity downtown, a few intersections blocked but everything was pretty tame, so I headed to memorial stadium. The stadium was PACKED. Very impressive. I waited for the AFL-CIO march to start, and then followed it into downtown. Downtown was complete chaos. There was no organization whatsoever. The objective was simply to surround the places of meeting and the hotels to prevent entry and exit. All remained relatively peaceful. MANY MANY of the retail core shops were in bad shape. Anything on the ground floor was shattered. The insides of the shops were not looted, but there was glass and spraypaint everywhere. I saw this in the morning, and when I returned downtown with the protesters, it looked like no further damage had been caused, so it would appear that the violent demonstrations took place the day before. There were several people putting dumpsters in the middle of the road to form blockades, and anything loose (like the times/PI paper dispensers) was torn for the sidewalks. It wasn't clear if that had happened earlier or recently.
As you know there was a large dispensal of tear gas and pepper spray. For me, this came later. All day the police were trying to section of the crowd. They eventually contained most people to the pike pine corridor, and then to pine. I can't say this for sure because there was so much confusion, but I found no exit from pine street twords the end. The police then cut through the middle of pine street (don't know where), and then pushed half of the crowd twords the market and belltown, and the other half up the pine street overpass. The crowd (myself included) was sitting peacefully with some istance from the police when they decided to move us back. They wanted us out of downtown obviously from the looting (none of which I saw firsthand), but also because they initiated a 7PM curfew on downtown. NOBODY ever announced this to the crowds. I didn't find out about it until the 11 o'clock news. They never said "please withdraw" or leave or anything. Very suddenly the cops began to lob teargas into the crowds. They didn't aim twords the front to try to push the crowd ahead, they were simply filling the streets with it. I brought a gasmask, and promptly put it on. The crowd of course retreated up pine.
The teargas flowed, and the crowd retreated until we got to the I-5/Pine overpass. The crowd began to stop along with the gas. There was a 100 foot space in between the police and the crowd. There was a standoff for several minutes, until people started to throw bottles and empty tear gas cannisters at the police. Several people were also launching fireworks at them (smart move). In return the police started firing rubber bullets tipped with pepper spray. They also started firing MASSIVE rounds of CS gas (possibly pepper spray, I felt a burning on my skin, whereas what they used downtown only seemed to affect my lungs, minimally at that), again into the center of the crowd, not the front line. There was an all out stampede up pine street at this point. The police continued to fire until the crowd had (semi)dispersed. In the confusion I was hit with several of the rubber bullets, so if any media source has said they weren't firing them, they're LYING.
I went home and later went down to broadway (near seattle community college) where there was a scene of mindless desctruction FAR different from the almost entirely peaceful protests downtown. People were lighting dumpsters on fire, smashing up bus stops, throwing things, etc. The cops arrived, and not looking to get another whiff of tear gas, I decided to go home.
For the most part the crowd remained peaceful all day. There were a VERY SMALL minority of people throwing fireworks or bottles (mabey 10 out of 10,000). When the bottles were thrown, myself and others yelled out for them to stop (and they did). We as a whole remained peaceful, and our only crime was sitting. The fact that a few people decided to launch fireworks into the police probably set off the entire thing. I'm still trying to make sense of it all, as most of the night was filled with an air of complete chaos. -Ryan
I've been on Slashdot and seen the following two positions come out on the same day. I know that there's no reason to believe that anyone individual made them, but it strikes me as entirely within the 90's geek gestalt to hold both these views at once:
1. Regarding the independent ISP whose business is endangered by flames and letters to customers - defensive "that's too bad - the Internet is a rough place" and "that's one ISP who well never buckle under to the Feds again" remarks. And lots of "that's just a small minority - Slashdot shouldn't be judged by the actions of a few" remarks. That line is very often repeated whenever stories about flame-avalanches directed at writers and journalists is brought up.
2. Regarding the attacks on Starbucks and McDonalds - "those punks have no respect for property;" "the protestors are just acting up without knowing what they're talking about." Little discrimination is made between the "flaming" few and the nonviolent thousands. Tears are shed for the insured, corporate-buck backed mega-franchises that have to replace their windows and lose a couple days of business.
I think this betrays a deep bias in geek thinking: non-physical "violence" is ok in a way that physical or direct confrontation is not, even if the former is more destructive to peoples' lives. Maybe because a lot of geeks are body-loathing recluses who posture themselves as pure intellect. (Hell, I used to be that way.)
Maybe the fact is that people in the high-tech field are a little incriminated by these protests has something to do with it. People who are getting what they want often tend to promote the ideology that people get what they deserve, and any reference to large-scale economic inequities compromises that stance.
Anyway, quite UNLIKE Columbine, I do see the WTO event as a sea-change of sorts. An interesting way to end a millenium.
... to watch Katz continue to shoehorn whatever's in the news today into his standard schema of "geeks" and "tech" and whatnot, no matter how well the topics fit together.
"Techno-idealism"? How on Earth does what's been happening in Seattle have anything to do with technology? It has more to do with social science than computer science -- people feel threatened because a faceless Other is making rules that affect their lives, and they have no recourse if they don't like the world the Other is building for them. So they go to protest -- peacefully -- and then people on both sides overreact (as is common when crowds face police) and things get out of hand. Where in this description do the words "Internet" and "technology" fit? They don't. The growth of technology is one big story in the modern era, but it's not the only story, and we don't need to pretend somehow that all events in our lives spring from a Prime Mover called Mother Internet -- or that the only way to invest significance in an event is to somehow associate it with the tech world. To do so cheapens both the important changes that tech has wrought on the world, and the other movements and ideas that affect our lives and times.
Seattle is an important moment. It could very well mark the end of the political era we think of as the "90s", which began with the Gulf War and George Bush's New World Order, and the start of the next era, the backlash to the globalization, corporatization, and McDonaldization of the planet. That's the story that'll come out of the Battle of Seattle, not that some rioters had Web sites or carried PalmPilots or whatever. Of course some of them have Web sites. A percentage of any random sample of people these days will turn up some with Web sites -- but correlation does not imply causation, and those Web sites did not spark the flames in Seattle, Jon. Those flames were sparked by the anger and fear of people who feel themselves being stripped of their freedom and dignity by tiny elites and the social forces those elites command. Let's keep our eye on the ball.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Read my blog.