The Revolution Will Not Be Hacked

It used to be that every time I went to a meeting to figure out some action we could take to raise awareness about something or other, there would come what I called the “helicopter moment.”  That was the moment when someone said, “It would be really great if we could charter a helicopter and” … parachute onto the field of the Super Bowl – land in front of City Hall during the mayoral inauguration – drop the ashes of people dead from AIDS …. 

It was a flight of fancy, an expression of the wish we all shared that we could somehow break out of the mold of ritualistic protest people have gotten so good at ignoring.  But I would always get irritated because people would spent more than a minute talking as if we could actually get a helicopter, and if we could, that we could actually do what we imagined with it.  I was irritated because it distracted people from the discussion at hand, but also because it pointed up how difficult it is to interrupt the dominant conversation.

I was also irritated because you can get three, maybe four people in a helicopter, and there were generally at least ten of us in the meeting.  The helicopter idea is that a few people with a grand gesture can make change, the modern version of Deus ex Machina, the ancient Greek method of quickly wrapping up a play by having the gods come in and fix everything.  What we needed was not the helicopter ex machina, but the Movement ex machina, and that’s even harder to accomplish.  If we could have gotten everyone on Market Street to form a helicopter with their bodies, that might have been something worth doing.

About fifteen years ago, the helicopter moment morphed into the hacker moment.  Brainstorm long enough, and someone will say, “We should change their [the Corporation, the FBI, the Army, …] website so it says …”  Or we dream of changing those electronic signs that run across the screen in BART stations (oh, how thrilled I am that I’ll be seeing those signs again, now that the BART strike is temporarily over) so the people looking up to see when their train is coming see “Support the Guantanamo Hunger Strikers” or whatever.

I still roll my eyes when those conversations start because one, we don’t know any hackers.  The conversation will go on and on about what we’re going to do with their websites, and ultimately we are going to have to come back to the discussion of what we can really do and it’s not going to look as glamorous. 

And two, if we did know hackers, we would go to them and say, “We want you to do this,” and then what?  It wouldn’t be our action, it would be theirs.  We would be replacing the joy of collective power with the smugness of being in the know.  The goal would obviously not be to get the people who saw the message to join us – how could they? but simply to admire our (or actually our hacker friends’) skill and boldness.  It’s the ultimate transformation of political action into a spectator sport.

That’s why Anonymous, which started out hacking BART’s website to protest a killing by BART police a few years ago, started calling demonstrations.  And in fact, the demonstrations – which were not attended by that many people, actually – had a much bigger impact than the hacks.  BART overreacted by shutting down train service and – gasp – even shut down cell phone access during the protests, which sparked more international outrage than the killing did.

We’re currently in a prolonged national hacker moment.  It started with Wikileaks and Bradley Manning, now it’s Edward Snowden.  These are brave and smart guys, and for sure, they have provoked discussion about issues like secrecy, surveillance and the legitimacy of whistleblowing, maybe even about targeting civilians and mistreatment of prisoners, though I haven’t heard nearly as much of that.  Manning has certainly inspired activism here – the Bradley Manning contingent in the San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade was the biggest queer antimilitarist action we’ve had in decades.  Julian Assange has rallied support in Europe, and no doubt Snowden will too wherever he lands.

The problem is not these guys and what they’ve done but the mythic stature being accorded to people who are in a very rarified position.  The fascination with Edward Snowden’s mad dash across the world is understandable, but ultimately feeds the idea that only a few people with inside information have the ability to change anything, and the role of the rest of us is to cheer for them and wait for their next revelations.  Young men like Snowden and Manning, whose quest for heroism led them to join the military and the security apparatus in the first place, now find heroism in bold acts of martyrdom.  They become celebrities in a society already obsessed with celebrities.

I have been re-reading Emma Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life.  After spending a year in prison for “inciting to riot,” in 1893-94, Goldman found on her release that she had become a celebrity.  She writes, “I knew of the American craze for celebrities, especially the American woman’s hunt for anyone in the limelight, be it prize-fighter, baseball-player, matinee idol, wife-killer, or decrepit European aristocrat….Every day brought stacks of invitations to luncheons and dinners.”

Movements have always used celebrities, but they are not built by celebrities.  What these young people, sadly, are missing is the experience of the movement AS THE CELEBRITY, of seeing that we, who have no unique skills or information, can make a splash simply by combining all of our ordinary talents and information. Look at the Egyptian people, out in the streets again.  Most of us don't know one of their names, but we sure know the name Tahrir Square.

Snowden himself said, “the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.”

That’s a lovely sentiment, and it’s probably more or less true.  Yet it casually combines two words that do not, in our era, go together.  An “informed” public is not necessarily an “angry” public.  Today, in fact, the more “informed” people are the more resigned they become.  I've heard outrage in the press over the revelation about "PRISM" and the NSA's commandeering of phone records, but I haven't seen any expressions of public anger.  In the wake of Snowden’s revelations, the pundits pun, the bloggers blog, but where are the activists?

Waiting for the next installment of “Where in the world is Edward Snowden”?

The Bad Sexual Politics of Julian Assange

When I heard that Julian Assange, founder/principal publisher of Wikileaks, was wanted for sexual assault, it was a “where is the nearest hole for me to crawl into” moment. It didn’t get better.

The debate between feminists Jaclyn Friedman and Naomi Wolf on Democracy Now! did not make me feel better; it made me feel worse. For those who missed it, Friedman, the author of Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, argued that the case would “raise the bar for the women of Sweden and the women internationally for what we can expect from our justice systems.” I can’t see this case raising any bar except the ones in whatever prison they decide to send Julian Assange to.

Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth and the lesser known but more relevant Fire With Fire, countered that when Assange started having sex with someone while she was asleep after repeatedly refusing to use a condom, “it seems to me that when you say, ‘OK, you better not have HIV,’ he said, ‘Of course not.’ Quote, ‘She couldn’t be bothered to tell him one more time because she had been going on about the condom all night.’ To me, that—I mean, if I was making love with a woman, if I was—you know, if I was a lesbian making love with a woman and we had that conversation, I would keep making love with her, because we had had a discussion about it and reached a conclusion.”

If that is Naomi Wolf’s idea of a positive sexual encounter, I’m just glad she’s not a lesbian.

I have little doubt that whatever else did or did not happen, these women did not get the idea to make criminal complaints against Assange by themselves. But the problem I have is that the women in this situation are props. Depending on your world view, either Assange is a persecuted hero or he is a sexual predator. The likelihood that he is both a persecuted hero and a sexual abuser doesn’t seem to come up. Both of these young women were supporters of Wikileaks and probably had a liberal amount of hero worship for Assange. If he took advantage of that admiration to coerce them to do what he wanted in bed, that doesn’t make him much different from Mike Tyson or Ben Roethlisberger.

When do we get to talk about the tendency of men in progressive movements (just like those in every other kind of movement) to treat the women they work with as lesser beings and sex objects?

In the few weeks before the Assange arrest thrust this issue into our national conversations, I happened to read about two incidents that occurred some years earlier.

The first concerned an allegation of domestic violence against the best known member of the revolutionary “youth” group STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement), which was active in the Bay Area in the mid 1990s. This was an incident I knew about at the time, because a couple women I knew from Women Against Rape were asked by STORM to help investigate it. My recollection is that they left the group in the aftermath, feeling that they were being used as window-dressing to give legitimacy to the group and its process. Last month, I happened to run across something that STORM had written about this incident, which I had never read before. The conclusion of their investigation was that the incident had not happened, that the woman involved had made up the accusation as part of some kind of COINTELPRO – CounterIntelligence Program to discredit a revolutionary man of color. Again, I don’t know what happened. What struck me about the reflection, written some years after the incident was resolved (in STORM’s mind), was that they never considered the possibility of multiple truths, that the woman involved actually experienced violence at the same time that the man had no awareness of having committed it. I personally witnessed that man being physically aggressive and threatening toward women I knew, when they disagreed with him during an action, and he refused to be held accountable after that incident, so I am predisposed to believe that he was capable of similar aggression toward a woman he was involved with and would be unlikely to cop to it.

The other piece I was reading had to do with our local Pacifica radio station, KPFA in Berkeley. KPFA, the oldest listener-sponsored radio station in the country, has a long history of bad gender dynamics and accusations of violence against men who are revered by portions of the left. We are currently mired in a terrible political crisis brought on by a huge financial deficit, and in that context a lot of old muck is getting raked up, including some related to two men accused of sexual harassment. One is an on-air personality with whom I personally am usually on the same side politically. This man, who is white, has been accused of harassment by a string of women. Most recently, a friend of mine won an enormous settlement of her claim against him and the station, which is one of the many reasons KPFA and Pacifica are in such financial trouble. The other was a former station manager who was accused of sexually harassing a stream of women. Other men jumped to his defense, saying that he was being targeted because of racism (he was African American), notwithstanding that nearly all of the women who accused him were women of color. The word “COINTELPRO” was again invoked.

A close friend of mine is an incredible organizer and has been instrumental in forming or sustaining a number of progressive organizations over the years. Like most of us whose lives center around movement work, he usually gets involved with women he meets doing political work. And for some reason (guess), when he stops being involved with them, they always end up feeling like they have to leave the organization. At one point, an ex-girlfriend accused him of sexual harassment. The organization was bitterly divided over the question of whether he was guilty or the woman was just an embittered reject. I don’t remember how that situation was resolved, but I do remember what a mutual friend said about it: “It probably wasn’t legally harassment, but he definitely has bad sexual politics.”

I suspect that every movement woman who ever dated men has had an experience like the ones described in the Assange police reports. When I was younger I had two encounters with male friends in the movement who wanted to have sex with me. I wanted to be close and cuddle with them, but not to have sex. They knew I was a lesbian. I kept saying I didn’t want to have sex and they kept insisting, and eventually I gave in. I would not say that I was raped. I didn’t feel afraid of them. If they still lived in this area, I would probably still be friendly with them. Even if I were the kind of person who thought of calling the police as an option, I would not have considered calling the police on them. Nevertheless, I know that what they did was coercive sex and was not okay.

A long time ago, a friend of mine was date raped by someone she had been going out with, who was in the same political group she was in. Some of the women in the group were dismissive of her accusation, saying, "If she was raped, I've been raped 100 times." One of the woman's male friends said that he felt uncomfortable judging this man because he had committed rapes when he was in a fraternity in college. It was very hard for this woman to remain in that organization, which was pretty much the only radical direct action group in town at that time. Fortunately, the group as a whole came together and forced the man to take responsibility for his action. They kicked him out of their full meetings, but the men's group continued to work with him and discuss what had happened. I don't know if he ever got it, and the group didn't last that much longer after that, but that was an example of a system for community justice that other progressive groups could emulate.

The women involved in the Assange case should not be letting themselves be used by the forces that want to put him away for creating a place for people to leak information. They should not be looking to the criminal “justice” system to remedy bad treatment by a man they believed in and trusted. But progressive people, especially people who call themselves feminists, should not be defending his behavior. We need to defend the rights of whistleblowers, the rights of journalists and the public’s right to know. We also need to defend the right of women to say no to sex, even with people they have had sex with before and plan to have it with again. Refusing to use a condom is a serious violation of a person’s right to safety, and if a man doesn’t want to have sex with a condom and a woman wants him to wear one, then he has no right to nag at her or coerce her to change her mind. He certainly has no right to initiate unprotected sex with her while she is sleeping, in the hope, presumably, that she’ll be too out of it to protest.

We must figure out how to hold all our political heroes, male and female, accountable for their bad sexual politics. When do we get started on that?