Last week, we introduced Kenyon Farrow of Queers for Economic Justice, Calvin Williams of the Generational Alliance, and Althea Erickson of the Freelancers Union. They shared with us a brief summary of how their organizations had adopted some online tools.
This week, they delve into some of the challenges they faced along the way, and some insight into how they overcame them:
This week, we have something new for our Training Tuesday series. We still have plenty of videos left to come from Democracy for America's Campaign Academy, but a couple weekends back, we attended the Organizing 2.0 conference in New York. This conference was a unique opportunity for activists to learn about new media and online organizing from some of the greatest online organizers around.
The awkward embrace by which the established media figures are halfheartedly wrapping their arms around their heir apparent reminds me of the uncomfortable John McCain/George W. Bush man hug used so effectively by Barack Obama's campaign. That any mainstream outlet would seek to collar the internet and with it the multitude of online-based means of information exchange, forcing them to march to its own tune in the process surprises me not really all that much. Power plays like these are why the blogsophere has often been contemptuous of the big names. A drowning person reaching desperately for a way to stay afloat would have to be awfully sadistic if he or she, out of pure spite, sought to drag down the very means by which he or she might survive. But then again, no one ever confused the media as being strictly and patently rational. A crisis mentality permeates the thought process of many in these trying times and catastrophe is rarely graced by sensible or conscionable decision making.
The Washington Post, also known as the walking dead, pulled a fast one on just about everybody quite recently. Its Next Great Pundit Contest™ started out with a stated desire to lift some obscure member of the Proletariat blogging class into a temporary, but nonetheless visible role as a Beltway heavy hitter, but was shiftily transformed from beginning to end to showcase an "average" member of society who happened to have a substantial publication history and at least one book in print. The winner was highly competent but also the safest choice the company could have ever made. And not only that,
...in this contest, as in much of new media, though over 50% of bloggers are women, the opinion sections at some of America's most respected online publications continue to be dominated by men. Between August and October of this year, only 20% of the Huffington Post's front page opinion columns were written by women, a proportion that dwarfs the corresponding number at Salon, which was a mere 12%.* The primary consumers of new media are young people, a Twitter-crazed generation raised in the post-feminist era, many of us too young to remember Katie Couric as anything other than a serious prime time anchor. So why, when it comes to pundits, does new media look so much like old media?
My response, in part, is this. Any industry in turmoil is going to aim for the lowest common denominator, because it is averse to take a risk. In better days, struggling companies might have taken the opportunity to invest into something off the beaten path that conventional wisdom might question or that didn't have a history of a guaranteed rate of return. Those days, lamentably, no longer exist. One sees this in the newspaper business and one sees this also in the music industry. One of the more gaping flaws with capitalism is that there is always a temptation to view everything, no matter of its quality, in terms of a commodity or in terms of turning a guaranteed profit; I also know that social progress will always be impeded by the pursuit of the bottom line.
Any historically marginalized group, provided they speak with enough of a unified voice and demand their right to be heard is often thrown a cheap concession in the form of a specific platform upon which to be heard as a way to get activists and reformers to stop applying pressure and in effect, to shut up. Traditionally the addition of a token member promoted to a high level from within has been an easy way to satisfy protesters, and so also has been the creation of a specific publication to best serve the interests of those who have historically been denied a voice. As a noted intellectual put it, what has been set in motion up to this point could well be described as The Triumph of Tokenism. This could never be confused as true equality, but it is often embraced as "at least a start."
In 1966, the scholar whom I reference above, historian C. Vann Woodward, wrote a provocative essay entitled "What Happened to the Civil Rights Movement?" The opening two paragraphs have an eerie resonance to the present day. Woodward was specifically writing about the struggle for African-American rights, but they fit this context neatly.
As if adopting the techniques of the cinema director, history has obligingly thrown in a few flashbacks or replays of hauntingly familiar lines, encounters, whole episodes from the past. It would seem at times, in fact, that contemporary history has been plagiarizing an old scenario and helping with the script.
With all due resistance to superficial parallels, we have been unable to to avoid comparisons between past history and lived experience. For we have witnessed in our own time a rising tide of indignation against an ancient wrong, the slow crumbling of stubborn resistance, the sudden rush and elation of victory, and then the onset of reaction and fading of high hopes.
So it would seem then that demands for equality must be measured against the course of events as established by some sort of equilibrium we can sense but have a difficult time observing viscerally. But neither, of course, does this mean that revolutions of all sorts are unnecessary or need not even be attempted. Even if the ultimate end is that of discouragement and disillusion, this does not mean we ought not to start the process over again. Perhaps we should assume that the life cycle of movements and issue activism is beholden to ebbs and flows by its very intrinsic nature and thus we ought to prepare ourselves for the nascent battle charge in the same breath as we acknowledge our retreats and the re-entrenchments of our opponents.
Woodward continues,
Historians have their arm chair consolations, of course, their after-dinner ironies with brandy. We knew all along, or so we inform the young and ill-tutored, that all revolutionary upheavals have their life cycle: rise, climax, decline, reaction...We knew all too well--and the knowledge always embarrassed encounters with true believers--that high fevers of idealism and soaring moods of self-sacrifice cannot be sustained indefinitely, that they lag and burn themselves out, that disenchantment and self-doubt inevitably set in. And one could expect from past experience that extremists from both ends would take over and make common cause against the rational means.
This passage has parallels to our day that go well beyond gender inequality. I think what is most crucial is the understanding that revolution as strictly defined doesn't necessarily mean armed revolt and establishment of a brand new way of conducting one's affairs. Sometimes the most subtle revolutions are the most influential and the revolutionary power of the internet is one of these. The internet reveals both the best and the worst of humanity and I choose to observe the best while taking care not to be dragged down by the latter.
I prefaced this piece by quoting the Huffington Post article written by Chloe Angyal, who concedes that even though the deck may be stacked against female contributors to media, a certain amount of persistence is necessary to overcome it.
...[W]e -- young people, and especially young women -- can do better. New media, despite its distinctly old-fashioned start, still represents an enormous opportunity to shape for ourselves the kind of public discourse we want to have. It is from our ranks that America's next great pundits should come, and it is our responsibility to support them when they do. Furthermore, new media represents our chance to genuinely participate in changing the face of our nation's public discourse. The men to women ratio of submissions to the Washington Post contest was eighty-twenty, a distinctly old media proportion. Young women can and must do better than eighty-twenty. It's time for us to change the conversation. It's time for us to sit down, log on and be the change we so desperately need to see in the world.
Reform of any kind is a two-way street upon which seeking a scapegoat isn't nearly as effective or necessary as positive action. Far too often our cynicism gives way to a self-fulfilling prophecy of ultimate defeat. Ultimately we will have hard times, but we will also have times of inspiration and great success as well. One of my favorite sayings is that life never promises us that it will be fair, but it does promise us that it will often be good. Finding that which is uplifting and satisfying is our role and ultimately our decision. Businesses rarely make decisions based on faith or on intangibles. In the cold, hard world of numbers, graphs, charts, and raw data, nothing is left to chance and nothing exists without some undeniable proof to back it up. Yet, some of the most innovative reforms and products required leaps of faith to set into place, even when the safety net below might not have been several reassuring glances downward. Irrationality in any form is foolish, but rationality and trusting in the unknown and even the unknowable are not mutually exclusive concepts. If none of us were willing to risk potential loss and relied exclusively on the status quo, slavery would still be legal in at least half the country, women would not be welcomed into the workplace, LGBTs would be treated with scorn and contempt by most Americans, and we would dwell in a world exclusively of the white males, by the white males, and for the white males.
Last weekend, I attended the Organizing 2.0 conference in New York, put together by Charles Lenchner of the Working Families Party. This conference brought people together to hear from some of the greatest minds in the online organizing world. I came out of it with lots of great footage, and today we are previewing some of it. The majority of the footage, however, will be featured in our Training Tuesday series. So check back Tuesday at 6:00pm for more Organizing 2.0 footage. We are also collecting all our Organizing 2.0 footage onto one page here. But if you are reading this, then you really should find the time to watch these videos.
Now, on the occasion of the first small victory of the "Teaspoon Model" over PirateCorp (aka NewsCorp), I'm catching my breath and looking back at this process. Note that if you have tuned in just for the victories, you should scroll down to the section with "Victory" in the title.
Over the past month, its become clear that one of the biggest bases of support - not active support, but tacit complicity - lies within the NewsCorp media empire itself, on the MySpaceCDN servers owned by 20th Century Fox's "Intellectual Properties" division.
There's irony there, because the whole point is that these are by and large neither creations, productions, nor licensed works of any NewsCorp enterprise. They are, rather, bootlegs being illegally copied by uploaders, and then repeatedly extra-legally copied by NewsCorp when they stream the files on request.
Act on Friday, 4pm and 10pm Eastern, 1pm and 7pm Pacific.
The diary this week is to throw the floor open. I have listed the various reasons why I am happy to impose a Direct Action Citizen's Tax on Rupert "The Pirate" Murdoch. The focus this week is on you. What do you have against Rupert "The Pirate" Murdoch?
His Hypocrisy?
His War-Mongering?
His Vicious Union-Busting Politics?
The further destruction of our political discourse, also known as "Fox News"?
His ongoing fight in support of monopoly power in the media?
...or whatever - share it in the comments.
The ongoing story of the "Teaspoon Model" is below the fold, and after that, instructions on how to impose the Direct Action Citizen's Tax, and The List.
Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage
This is week 3 of the Hours of Action against bootleg streaming by servers from inside Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp media empire.
Act on Friday, 4pm and 10pm Eastern, 1pm and 7pm Pacific.
Part of the point here is to Call Out Rupert and NewsCorp on their institutionalized Hypocrisy, as Rupert goes around lecturing countries on Copyright Piracy while various crevices of his media empire are passively streaming bootlegs in competition against serious and audience-friendly efforts to adapt to the New Media economy.
Part of the point is just to attack Rupert and and the senior executive management of Newscorp for being a bunch of dirtbags.
Part of the point is an experiment in whether the blogosphere can be of use for more than a talkshop and campaign season ATM machine for politicians claiming to be "progressive".
And part of it is curiosity - I am, after all, one of the minority of economists with an interest in how the real world economy works and evolves, beyond the blinkered confines of calculus-based models of non-evolving mechanical systems.
If you want to know more, there's a remote chance I've already said it, so check out the "story so far" links below.
Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage
Two weeks ago, I speculated on applying the "Teaspoon Model" to the problem of protecting small, niche, video streaming markets faced:
on the one hand with Copyright Protection laws focused on protecting the cash flows of large media distribution middlemen; and,
on the other hand, with a plague of bloodsucking bootleg streaming sites, surviving on miniscule revenue flows because they leech off of everyone - not just the creators of the work themselves, but also fansub and video-rip groups that make the content availbale for download, and free stream hosting sites for the streaming itself
So this is what I was thinking. Perhaps a small, struggling company that wanted to reduce the density of the cloud of bloodsucking flies draining the work of the artists who create this material of market value could gain leverage not by trying to find the Super-Teaspoon - but by recruiting a supporting group, each armed with ordinary teaspoons.
There'd have to be at least one person at the company actually sending out the letters to the sites streaming the bootlegs - but they would be far more effective if backed up by ten or twenty people contributing a couple of hours a week tracking down where the material is located. Indeed, the "white hats" could drop in info on where to get the material legally while at the bootleg bloodsucker streaming sites, including the proliferating opportunities for legal free streams.
The objection has already been raised, "but everybody does it". But the experiment reported here shows, no, everybody does not sit around passively waiting to get a legal order to Cease and Desist. There are companies that do check out tips and clean out the trash and even YouTube does a far better job than MySpaceCDN.
Note: most graphics are samples from extant Photobucket and Flikr albums, but the "Storm in the Teacup" is an entry from a Photoshop contest, and "You're Both Idiots" is by ~ZeKarmaMisama who can be found at Deviant Art, and the teaspoon is by Western Australia artist Pearl Rogers
... or is NewsCorp just an Old Media Dinosaur that cannot keep up?
Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage Also available in Orange
Breaking the Silicon Cage is for breaking down those barriers that prevent us from leveraging the full potential of the netroots for progressive populist action - whether that involves using the internet for collaboration on works to be delivered live on the street, or breaking down barriers between different social networks on the internet itself.
The latter is what we have here. The progressive blogosphere, if people are to believe our words (though not always our actions) is an enemy of Rupert Murdoch and his Iraq-Invasion-supporting, Conservative-Politician-electing multinational media empire. We in the US know him primarily for the Faux News Channel, but in the UK and Australia they know him for his grossly biased newspaper oligopolies.
If Progressives were indeed intent on taking power (something Cassiodorus questions), we would be eager to take any shots at Rupert Murdch's Media Empire that we could.
Now, I'm game, and a few others have expressed their interest, but for the most part the reaction of the blogosphere is a big, "why should I become outraged by that in particular". If the thousands of US service members and hundreds of thousands of lives disrupted - hundreds of thousands of Iraqis kills and millions of Iraqi lives disrupted - is too big a reason to grasp for being outraged at Rupert Murdoch and his media empire ... then be outraged for the mother (above right) of Cpl. Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, killed in action in a War of Choice that Rupert Murdoch loudly banged the drum in favor of choosing.
This direct action involves those of us with flat-rate broadband connections right-clicking on a bunch of links and downloading a bunch of bootleg files into a temporary directory - then erasing the files. Since Rupert Murdoch's MySpace servers host hundreds of bootleg anime streams, from one anime streaming site alone, if enough of us download enough files at the same time - it will increase the amount of money that Rupert's media empire has to pay to host bootleg anime.
In short, it hits Rupert in his wallet, where it hurts him the most. More, after the fold.
Act on Friday, 6pm Eastern, 3pm Pacific, and 10pm Eastern, 7pm Pacific.
Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage crossposted from My Left Wing
Rupert Murdoch operates and profits from a big pirate support base, and we - I and anyone who joins with me - are going to go after him, in an ongoing "name and shame" operation, until he agrees to close down the pirate support operations at his base.
Act on Friday, 4pm Eastern, 1pm Pacific, and 10pm Eastern, 7pm Pacific.
Or, to make a different analogy, Rupert Murdoch owns own of those pawn shops that "just happen" to end up with stolen goods in their possession. That is, some pawn shops in run-down areas of town are just fence. Some are legalized loan sharks that work hard at avoiding being fences. And some respect the letter of the law but, well, if they somehow end up with stolen goods anyway, well, waddyagonnado? "Dese people are here, no respect for private property".
Few bootleg anime streaming sites would be able to keep operating if they had to pay the cost of streaming the media themselves. Fortunately for them, Rupert is happy to host their bootleg anime on MySpace servers. As long as its not NewsCorp copyright rights, NewsCorp is happy to do the minimum required by the law (I am sure it is just a coincidence that the when ordinary users link to the bootleg media at MySpace, that draws traffic and brings revenue to MySpace).
Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage Crossposted from My Left Wing, also available in Orange
When I wrote Can the Teaspoon Model stand up to Bloodsucker Streaming Sites?, it was clear that one reason the bloodsucker leech anime streaming sites are able to offer their "free anime" because they don't pay streaming costs either. They rely on pointing their users to places that host the streams.
They are, in other words, an aggregator. People that know how to look and where to look collect the information, and they put a shell around it to make it convenient to the user. They live off a trickle of net advertisements and donations - and of course, nothing ever gets back to the animators, voice actors and actresses, producers, directors who actually create the work.
And if the anime was unavailable in this country, they could argue they are "growing the market". But of course, an increasing amount of this media is available for legitimate free streaming, supported by a range of internet ads, streaming ads, and subscription models - which does feed income back to the industry that creates these collaborate works.
But the real problem is the hosts for the streams. Without the free hosting of bootleg streams, these leech bloodsucker sites could never afford to offer, as one of these sites boasts, "503 series, 7,657 anime episodes". Its the ability to point to free streams of bootleg copies provided by someone else that allows the bloodsucker leech sites to spoil the market for legitimate streaming sites.
Now, Rupert Murdoch, NewsCorp, and Fox are real big advocates of respect for copyright:
Fox sued Warner Bros. in 2008, alleging that the studio and the movie's producer, Larry Gordon, failed to obtain the rights from Fox, where the project had been in development.
The studios did not announce details of the settlement. But under the terms of an agreement hammered out over recent days, Warner Bros. agreed to pay Fox as much as 8.5% of the film's gross receipts plus about $1.5 million to cover the movie's development costs, according to a person familiar with the situation. The agreement extends to sequels or spinoffs, the person said.
So when Japanese anime is streamed by bootleg video streaming sites - why is Rupert Murdoch's MySpace happy to continue host the videos, even after they have been informed that the material is bootleg material? Indeed, in some of the videos you can see the logo of the site that is providing legal free streams - since the bootleg was made by a "premium" subscriber to the legal streaming service.
Is Rupert Murdoch's MySpace and Twentieth Century Fox breaking the law? Well, no - that is, they have the legal right to wait until the copyright owner notifies them of the violation.
Which is the point of the system that the Big Corporations have set up. A big firm with lucrative media can set up a unit to regularly sweep through internet for bootleg copies, and issue a legal Cease and Desist letter. But a smaller New Media company, in a smaller niche market - a smaller niche market that has seen four distribution companies shut down, restructure or go bankrupt in the last four years - does not necessarily have the resources for that operation.
And Murdoch's MySpace will continue streaming videos for bootleg "free anime" - until made to stop.
A little while back I saw a Tweet about one of these bloodsucker bootleg anime sites from debaoki, manga blogger at About.Com:Manga. So I want to check it out, and a little conversation ensued ... (NB: skip to the last section if you've heard all of this before)
The post that Deb Aoki pointed to was a whining complaint about getting a "Cease and Desist" letter from the American anime distribution house Funimation to take down links to bootleg copies of the works that Funimation licenses. The list (shown an item per line at AnimesFree.com) was:
Afro Samurai, Air, Air Gear, Baccano!, Baki the Grappler, Basilisk, Beck, Black Blood Brothers, Black Cat, Black Lagoon, Blassreiter, Burst Angel, Claymore, D.Gray-Man, Darker than Black, Desert Punk, Devil May Cry, Elemental Gelade, Ergo Proxy, Fate Stay Night, Fruits Basket, Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Ghost Hunt, Great Teacher Onizuka, Gunslinger Girl, Hellsing Ultimate, Jyu-Oh-Sei, Love Hina, Lovely Complex, Magikano, One Piece, Ouran High School Host Club, Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom~, Samurai 7, Samurai Champloo , Shuffle!, Strike Witches, Trinity Blood, Welcome to the NHK, Xenosaga, xxxHOLiC, Casshern Sins and Eden of the East
Christian Avard works on a Web posting Monday for www.docudharma.com inside "The Big Tent," where Web writers ply their trade near the Democratic National Conven-tion. "This is a long way from the gold lame of the Riv," says a Democratic strategist, referring to the Riviera, which hosted a convention two years ago for liberal bloggers.
Our intrepid reporter Christian Avard and Docudharma are featured prominently above a nice article about New Media/blogging by J. Patrick Coolican. I like his first paragraph!
DENVER - This is the headquarters of the vast left-wing conspiracy. They're all here: MoveOn.org, Media Matters and Markos Moulitsas, and if a bomb went off, Bill O'Reilly wouldn't be disappointed.
There is also a nice comment from John Podesta, President Clinton's ex chief of staff on how blogging has changed the relationships in politics and journalism. Go read the article, though of course, the picture is worth a thousand words!
More blogging on blogging below the fold, as we bloggers say!
Reform Immigration -
March on Washington
About a month ago, I asked, "
Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage
Two weeks ago, 
... or is NewsCorp just an Old Media Dinosaur that cannot keep up?
Over the last little while, I have been essaying about the New Media Economy, from 
A little while back I saw a Tweet about one of these bloodsucker bootleg anime sites from 
The post that Deb Aoki pointed to was a whining complaint about getting a "Cease and Desist" letter from the American anime distribution house Funimation to take down links to bootleg copies of the works that Funimation licenses. The list (shown an item per line at AnimesFree.com) was:
