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”?

Blockades Are Better in the Morning

Monday afternoon, I came out of work and saw a couple hundred people standing outside of BART.  I knew they weren’t a demonstration.  Must have been the fact that they were all on cellphones and had briefcases that clued me in.

“BART’s closed?” I asked someone.  He looked up from his iPhone.

“Yeah, those stupid protesters shut it down,” he said.  Up above, helicopters whirred.  It sounded like a war zone.

“Do you know where they are?” I asked someone.  From the number of helicopters circling over our heads, they couldn’t be far. I figured if I couldn’t get home anyway, I might as well join them.

“They went that way about ten minutes ago,” a woman said.  I walked a block in the direction she pointed but didn’t see or hear anyone except one lone guy in a Guy Fawkes mask with a megaphone.  I couldn’t make out anything he was saying.

I texted a friend I thought might be on the demo, but she wasn’t.  She didn’t know where they were.  I figured it was probably near over anyway – it was called for 5:00 and it was now past 6:30.  I walked four blocks to the temporary Transbay Terminal, where the NL bus, which goes near my house, was just pulling up.  I climbed on and got a seat, one of those four-tops with two rows facing each other.  There was a guy next to me and two women across from us.  They were all African American.  Two of them were trying to go to West Oakland Station, and someone apparently recommended that bus, which doesn’t go that close.  I’d like to believe there is one that actually goes to West Oakland, which is probably the most popular station in the East Bay, but I can’t be sure there is.  West Oakland, after all, is a poor, mostly African American part of town, and there have been big cuts in bus service in Oakland and Berkeley, another casualty of Proposition 13 and Schwarzenegger.

The guy next to me was in a big hurry and fuming about how long it was taking for the long line of passengers unfamiliar with the routine to pay their fares and get on the bus.  The two women were talking about how the protesters were.

“I hope they’re not doing this just because BART shut down cell phone service,” one said.  “I mean, how dumb can you get?”

“Well,” I said, “they did kill that guy for no reason.”  Two months ago, BART police killed Charles Hill, a drunk, homeless man who had been reported as acting unruly on the platform. The cops said Hill threatened them with a broken bottle. Witnesses said the bottle he was carrying didn’t break until he fell after being shot.  They also said he was moving slowly, and the cops shouldn’t have had any trouble subduing him without using their guns.

Every article in the mainstream press refers to Hill as “knife-wielding” but my understanding is that they found the knife in his pocket after he was dead; it wasn’t in his hand.

And of course, this is the third passenger killed by BART police in two and a half years.  21-year-old Oscar Grant was killed on the platform at Fruitvale Station on New Year’s Eve, 2009, and in a much-less publicized incident, Fred Collins was shot in the back at Fruitvale Station in July 2010.

BART’s reaction, rather than any expression of contrition or maybe a reorganization of their obviously troubled police force, has been to take drastic actions to quell protests of these killings.  The first protest at Fruitvale Station, where Oscar Grant was killed, was noisy but peaceful until the police shut down the station, not allowing passengers to exit there.  That prompted the march which turned into a mini-riot and ended in hundreds of arrests.

The occasion for Monday’s action was that the week before BART shut down cell phone service in four stations to foil “flash mob” organizing.  They claimed they did it because the protest threatened to become “chaotic,” a nebulous code word suggesting violence and disruption, where in fact the protesters were, from what eyewitnesses told me, only holding banners and leafleting.

The cell phone shutdown caught national attention in a way that neither the killing of Hill nor the light sentence given to the officer who executed Oscar Grant in cold blood did.  (Johannes Mehserle, the white cop who shot the African American Grant, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to two years.  He actually spent 12 months in jail.)

The ACLU was on every national talk show last week, proclaiming this the first time that the “U.S. government” has interfered with cellphone service in order to prevent protest.  They compared it to thegovernments of China and Syria shutting down internet access to quell dissent.  The hacktivist group Anonymous chose to punish BART by, along with taking down the website for several hours last Sunday, publishing names and phone numbers of people who did nothing more than buy a parking permit from BART.  BART responded to the hack by calling in the FBI, and Anonymous upped the ante by publishing the personal information of BART cops.

Meanwhile, the passengers on my bus could not be convinced that any of it was worth the disruption to their lives.

“There are other ways to do it,” said the guy who was so late.  “Call your congressman.”

“That never works,” I argued.  “Nothing has ever been won without protest.  Think of the civil rights movement, the labor movement, Social Security, all of it.”

One of the women across from me looked semi-impressed.  Her friend shook her head.  “It’s not worth it,” she said.

I mollified them by saying, “Well, back when I was organizing this kind of thing” (not that I’m done with my activist career, but they didn’t need to know that) “we always had a rule that we didn’t disrupt the evening commute.  Blockades and traffic disruptions should always be first thing in the morning.  Most people won’t mind if you make them late to work.”