viz. - Occupy Wall Street

Everyone's an Activist, All 99% of Us. Right?

Calliope — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 23:34:59 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot capture of photograph by Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

The photograph above was featured this week in The L.A. Times' coverage of the Occupy Wall Steet movement's one-year anniversary. The caption provided beneath the photo states, "A man wanting to join the Occupy protesters on Monday is told to leave Wall Street." The image gives pause, not because a policeman is pictured confronting a protester, but because the man's ethos seems incongruous with that of the anarchist-inspired OWS movement. My recollection of the "Occupied" zone in downtown Austin last winter calls to mind the image of a different kind of a protester, one who looks as committed to battling the elements as he is to changing the status quo. This unidentified man, however, does not look prepared for the scene of mayhem he is allegedly trying to enter. With a cigarette balanced precariously atop his coffee cup, he looks like he's just popped down from the 20th floor to grab some more uppers. It's amusing (or disheartening, depending on your outlook) to imagine him scrawling "99%>1%" on a scrap of paper before venturing into the mob that separates him from the nearest Starbucks. But this is pure speculation. It's equally likely that the man in the photograph is an overworked reporter, or an analyst who has thousands of dollars of debt from student loans. Perhaps he was walking by the OWS demonstration, got inspired, and decided to join on a whim. Either way, the photographer caught him looking weary, unimpassioned, and in a moment of half-hearted negotiation with the police, which is why this photo provides a useful illustration of the phenomenon known as slacktivism.

Slacktivism (slacker activism) describes a distinctly inactive method of supporting a cause. The steps slacktivists take to achieve their supposed ideals require little effort, cost, or forethought (many are easily performed through social networks' approval systems and news/media sharing functions). Despite this, some have argued that the proper channeling of slactivism can lead to positive social change.

I want to suggest, in a very rough and cursory way, that the OWS man's paper-bag appeal to the 99% is similar to slacktivists' tags and tweets. The encompassing nature of Occupy's slogan--"We are the 99%"--has diluted the definition of an activist, and extended it to include anyone with a sign who wishes (temporarily? disingenuously?) to harness the power of an enormous group. Social media platforms can have the same effect. With the right virtual signage anyone can pose as an activist; anyone can reap the social and commercial benefits of participating in far-reaching online campaigns; and finally, anyone can avoid accountability for actions and purported views by maintaining distance between real and digital identities. (I might be accused of doing that in this very blog post.)

Yet on the other hand, the makeshift, handmade quality of the OWS man's sign marks it as an analog, not a digital, production. It has the appearance of a homeless person's battered highway sign--a text that demands attention because of the dissonance between its sensitive message and crude medium (i.e. cardboard). Thus, the OWS protester can claim a certain ethical connection to his sign that is unavailable to wielders of pre-made placards, like the attendees of the recent Democratic National Convention (below). Visuals from the DNC got me thinking about what it means, and what is argued, when one waves around a sign that is identical to hundreds of others nearby, and that was designed, manufactured and supplied to you by a political organization. In the landscape of a highly visible crowd such as the DNC's, one's voice is essentially reduced to one's sign. A crowd that enthusiastically agrees to broadcast a unified and pre-determined message is one that values a brand of solidarity over the opportunity to air personal sentiments or opinions. Or perhaps it is simply made up of individuals who are used to re-posting and re-tweeting ready-made internet memes and allowing those rhetorical texts to speak for them online.

Image Credit: occupyilluminati.com

In light of the eruption this month of violent demonstrations all over the Arab world, the question of how activism can and should evolve seems all important. I won't outline directions for that evolution here. But I will say that the kind of conviction that has mobilized thousands to take to the streets of Muslim countries, recasts the Occupy Wall Street photo (above), along with the possibility that progressive U.S. activism is becoming more dispersed and mainstream, in a sober light.

Coffee Cups and Acronyms...'Tis the Season

Jay Voss — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 15:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: nomnomclub.com

The Starbucks Christmas cups have been out in full force for what seems like several weeks, although I’ve delayed writing about them until after Thanksgiving. If last year is any measure, I should be writing about these cups at exactly the right moment. Last year, at the Starbucks in and around UT’s campus, their coffees reverted to the boring white cups nearly a full week before Christmas. Whereas the area’s students had gotten in the mood for Christmas well in advance of Thanksgiving, at the exact moment they were turning in the last of their final papers, at the exact moment when responsible students might let their thoughts drift towards dreams of sugar plum ferries, Yuletide cheer vanished from the cups of their gingerbread lattes. This strange vanishing has made me suspicious of Starbucks’ holiday cups.

Image Credit: www.neontommy.com

My cynical conclusion is that these cups come out at a very calculated moment in order to someway enhance Black Friday sales. American holiday consumers have long been known to energize their excessive shopping experiences with massive amounts of caffeine. What better way to shop for an event that’s just about a month away than to do so ingesting holiday-themed caffeine with images of people sledding and partridges flying in the periphery? I do enjoy Starbucks’ Christmas cups, and so I hope that none of this sounds too condescending. Is it irreverent to comment that the cup’s artwork looks a little bit like a computer generated depiction of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker? To be honest, I’m not sure what other images one could use for such a project. A blogger over at neontommy.com has suggested that the Starbucks nutcracker looks a lot like Guy Fawkes, mascot of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Image Credit: www.neontommy.com

Speaking of Occupy Wall Street, all reports suggest that Occupy UT Austin will be gearing up after the holidays. Tents should be propping up on campus sometime around Martin Luther King Day. Whatever you think about the Occupy movement, I can’t help but point something out. All the cool kids on facebook and elsewhere have started referring to the Occupy movement as “OWS.” This acronym is five syllables. “Occupy Wall Street” is also five syllables. So, essentially, it takes the same amount of time to say “OWS” as it does to say “Occupy Wall Street.” What is it about acronyms in the twenty-first century? Does making “Occupy Wall Street” an acronym somehow enhance the movement’s credibility? Maybe, like Starbucks’ red Christmas cups, it’s the visual appearance that counts.

Okay, okay…folks started referring to “Occupy Wall Street” as “OWS” because the acronym is the movement’s Twitter hash tag. A friend sitting next to me just corrected my post. But, you know, it sure is ironic.

Imagining the 99%: Occupy Austin's (Visual) Self-Representation

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image: Screenshot from occupyaustin.org

If you couldn't tell from the past few days of viz.'s coverage, the Occupy Austin protests continue, if attendance has mildly abated from this weekend's high. This blog is not an appropriate venue for the discussion of the movement’s goals (you can find more intelligent discussion about Austin’s own version of the movement here and here). However, I am interested in the ways in which the Occupy Austin movement represents its constituents. The Occupy Wall Street / Austin brief—which aspires to represent 99% of the American (some Austin material intransigently claims “world”) populace—faces a particularly clear set of representational challenges even as social networking allows its images to proliferate in ways unimaginable even five years ago. For the rest of this post, I’ll highlight some images from Occupy Austin’s affiliated website.

One of the ways—particularly prominent on the Occupy Austin website—is to simply erase personal identity and to focus on a paramount tool of protest: the megaphone.

Images: occupyaustin.org

The megaphone, of course, literalizes the protest’s desire to make voice audible: “Come and make your voice heard” is a central talking point in various posters and placards the local movement has authorized. At their best, these kinds of images have an extraordinary symbolic power in the clean graphic design. The ideologically potent red star manages to be central to the design without being the eye’s resting point, slipping in without emphasis an inherent socialist claim (it’s worth noting that the red star doesn’t appear on any direct content on the Occupy Wall Street page that I had a chance to view).

Less successful may be the image this post leads with, which is also the main graphic on the Occupy Austin homepage. While replacing the protester’s head with a megaphone conveys the desire to be heard that’s at the center of these protests, I wonder if the substitution of a bullhorn for a brain is necessarily desirable (of course, subbing in a megaphone also allows the designers to sidestep questions of identity politics).

Image: occupyaustin.org

And then there's this image, which cleverly transforms the megaphone into what appears to be an appendage being crushed in a handshake. Graphically the poster is relatively impeccable in the way it quotes the visual motif of the other posters while subjecting it to a transformation. Symbolically, though? While it's hardly an act of despicable violence, it seems at odds with the general tone of peaceful civil disobedience cultivated by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I always feel the end of a post is a good time to come clean, ideologically. I stand in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Its idealism, and even its pluralistic free-form ideological naivete, are really refreshing to me in a time when being a liberal and a leftist has seemed to be all talk and not much action. The academic in me wants to praise the movement's embrace, whether conscious or not, of a flowing, Deleuzian rhizomatics. But the praxis-oriented person in me wonders how long the movement will be able to avoid significant political and social splits and fissures. Two final examples to illustrate that:

Screenshots from occupyaustin.org

As these images make clear, for the moment that fist of solidarity can find a rapport between the stark brutality of the right hand images color-inverted fist and the eco-aware, pastoral, post-hippie consciousness of the left hand poster. But how long can these positions hang in together? The one poster is pre-dirtied, smudged with toner ink, and hand-markered. It's a callout to political propaganda the world over, as well as invested in a specific hardcore aesthetics. It's definitively urban, and it seems invested in overthrow. The other image is twilight-blue, with a heartbeat center of consciousness in the clenched fist. The Texas cornflowers have peace signs within the petals. It's expansivist, and it wants you to belong: "We are the ones," it proclaims. Fair enough. But for how long can these "ones" be the same?

Occupy Austin: Love-in, Left-Wing Tea Party, or What?

Marjorie Foley — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:00:14 +0000

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley

Last Thursday afternoon, I borrowed a video camera from the Digital Writing and Research Lab and headed down to Occupy Austin, a gathering intended to stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. If you've been following the media coverage of Occupy Wall Street, then you know that people are confused about what exactly it is the protesters in New York want, and in Austin it doesn't seem to be much different.

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley

There were certainly people at Occupy Austin who fit some of the stereotypes coming out of conservative media outlets: there's a hippie playing a flute, people in suits doing yoga, and a bunch of kids who looked like they could start a drum circle at the drop of a hat. And there were plenty of signs proclaiming non-political messages of love and solidarity with others in the movement. Some aspects of Occupy Austin seemed more like a love-in than anything else.

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley

But, as Jon Stewart touched upon in an episode of The Daily Show, there were also many parallels between this and Tea Party protests. Many of the protestors despise the Fed, are angered by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and think Barack Obama is evil.

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley

During the General Assembly portion of the first day of Occupy Austin, tensions were obvious between those who wanted their occupation to be about community solidarity and those who wanted the group to move to political action. The General Assembly is the portion of the day in which anyone can raise issues for discussion in the group. Organizers depend heavily upon Robert's Rules of Order, voting on who can speak and limiting how long they can speak.

I recorded a lengthy portion of the General Assembly in which speakers raised issues--solar energy, forming political action committees, even forming cheerleading groups--and then voted upon how many minutes each speaker could have. What I found most interesting was the reliance on Robert's Rules of Order, a system of rules intended for deliberative assemblies, in an atmosphere in which political deliberation seemed unacceptable.

I edited the following video down in order to show just how many times the organizers took the floor back (or forceably took the microphone back) from people proposing issues. While the proposers are breaking the rules of order by going beyond thirty seconds to raise their issues, it also seems like the man in charge of the microphone (the guy in the brown shirt), likes to take the microphone back whenever someone proposes political action. Note that at 1:13, he tries to take the microphone back from the older gentleman, and he throws up his arms to show that he has a "block" to what is being said. In Robert's Rules of Order, and as explained earlier in the general assembly, blocks are used only when one thinks that whatever is happening will be disastrous to the group as a whole. What you can't hear the man in the brown shirt say because of sound quality is that "This movement is not about partisan politics."

Video Credit: Marjorie Foley

It's pretty clear that there are some people at Occupy Austin who do think that the movement is about "partisan politics," especially if partisan politics means issue politics. But it seems like the "leaders" (here, brown-shirt guy and white-shirt lady) of this non-hierarchical organization want to prevent the movement from moving in that direction.

There are two readings, at least, of this situation. The first is that, as Jason Fitzgerald argues, while there's no "message" coming out of the movement, there's certainly a reason behind the protests: people are protesting or occupying in order to bring attention to income inequality and corporate influence in government. Instead of debating "issues," these protesters want to express solidarity with other in the community without moving to political action because they believe that the political system is broken. Some people at Occupy Austin certainly fit into that category. The second reading, I think, is something more like what happened with the Tea Party. In order to build a populist movement, groups shy away from being overly ideological, focusing too narrowly on social issues, or focusing too narrowly on identity politics. They build a following first, build solidarity with their communities, and use the General Assembly to hash out what the message is, whatever it is.

Branding Occupy Wall Street

Steven J LeMieux — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 16:11:06 +0000

(Image Credit: Michael Nagle, Getty Images via In Focus)

During the past week Occupy Wall Street has gained increasing media attention. The movement, initially called for by the group Adbusters, began in earnest on September 17th when protesters first began to occupy Zuccotti Park. This initial act seems to have largely been met with bemused ambivalence, and while there was originally a single demand articulated by Adbusters in their July call to action—that “Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington” (Adbusters) –things were quite murky by the time the occupation took shape. Much of the media attention that the movement has gained, especially during this surge in participation, has focused on the apparent lack of concrete demands set forth by OWS. This confusion is misplaced. While the list of hopeful outcomes is amorphous a clear sense of oppositional branding has been developed from the wealth of signs and images created through the movement. OWS demands that we put a hold on our love affair with notions of prosperity that put us in a double bind.

(Image Credit: Adbusters)

This early poster by Adbusters does a nice job of simultaneously crystallizing and confusing the movement. By asking about a single demand it offers the possibility of a unified, concrete protest while leaving that single demand open to interpretation. And while the question broadens possibility the image suggests a possible outcome. Raising above clouds of teargas and crowds of appropriately gasmasked protesters a dancer postures serenely on the Wall Street Bull. She rides the bull when most visitors pose for pictures as they fondle the bull’s balls. The bull can be more than a system by which the 1% (to use the popular 1/99% split that the movement has espoused) cows the other 99%.

(Image Credit: David Shankbone via In Focus)

The Charging Bull, a sculpture created by Arturo Di Modica in the late 80s, has become an icon for Wall Street. Originally created to represent the “strength and power of the American people” the bull has come to stand in for the strength and power of a particular system. What Occupy Wall Street is demanding is that we stop worshiping that system. That all this symbolism has been poured into a bull makes a certain amount of sense. Bulls are domestic animals that never feel quite domestic, yet even with all their power (and perhaps because of it) they are kept under strict control by the humans that own them. Bulls have largely been turned into a tool of reproduction.

The movement has, in some ways, twice enacted a barrier around the bull. Fearful of any particular harm that could befall the icon it was quickly fenced in. The fence and the guards prevented both protestors from nearing the bull and tourists who flock to the bull daily for lucky rubs and pictures. And by enforcing the cordoning off of the bull the OWS protests have perfectly created a visualization of their message. By enforcing this barrier the bull (and, more importantly, what it has come to represent) is show to be something that we cannot access. The above video by BLUCHEEZ accurately portrays some of the frustrations inherent in this sudden distance between the bull and its followers.

(Image Credit: Erin M via Fast Company)

Gaps have value. And creating distance can be a goal in and of itself. Through this distance we can begin to recognize the multitude of relationships that are manifest between the economic and political systems in this country and the people that inhabit them.