Paper presented at
NEPCA Conference
November 3, 2000
DV & CD in DC: Organizing for Direct Action with New Media
This paper is a consideration of how emerging communication technologies enabled the organizing of the protests against the World Bank and the World Trade Organization in Washington DC on April 16 of this year. I look specifically at how organizers utilized a variety of tools to pull off the demonstrations. The DV in the title refers to digital video, and I will examine how digital technologies are creating opportunities for organizing that weren't possible even five years ago. The CD in the title refers to civil disobedience, not the compact disc, and the other theme of this paper is how civil disobedience and direct action are empowered by new technology. More than four hundred different organizations took part in the DC action, and DC was the second in a string of protests that have made headlines and more importantly given rise to a new left momentum not seen since the 1960's. Beginning in Seattle in November of 1999, protests took place in DC, rocked both the Democratic and Republican conventions as well as the debates, saw hundreds arrested in Prague on September 26, and erupted into violence in both Korea and Montreal two weeks ago. This is obviously not a regional phenomenon, nor the work of a single organization. Rather, the recent wave of protests reflects a growing recognition of a common foe, global capitalism, and the power of new technologies to organize resistance. I will be focusing on the DC protests, but the flexible nature of these tools is empowering a new wave of activism that can be both local and global..
Organizing for April 16 began almost immediately after the November protests in Seattle. The most obvious contributor to this kind of organizing has been the personal computer. Four hundred different activist groups were able to coordinate their efforts at this event, and that would have been impossible without the aid of the Internet and email and listservs. Developed by the Department of Defense in the late 1960's, and designed to withstand a nuclear war and still function, it is ironic that the Internet has proven such a potent tool in the hands of grassroots activists. The networked nature of the internet, its ability to disseminate information and link organizations and individuals, and the utility of search engines, allowed thousands of people to come together for mass direct action.
Most activist groups now offer some kind of webpage as a platform for their activity, and this provides not just propaganda, but also a history and an agenda and photos and streaming video and a two-way flow of communication through email and listservs. McLuhan (1964:21) wrote that "The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology." While vast inequality and environmental destruction has only been exacerbated as the west has become wired, electric technology is also playing a central role in the organized resistance to this same inequality. People can learn about things that they care about changing, and then link to the groups acting out this change. Solidarity between these issue oriented activist groups then comes through link pages and email exchanges, and an amazing flexibility is demonstrated when an activist can use a search engine to visit all of the groups working on a single issue, broaden that to include dozens of related issues, and then contact those in a geographical region, receive updates and action alerts in real time, and then mobilize for mass action. The activist can visit the corporate homepage or the government site most accountable for that issue, and send the officials and executives a personal email demanding change. When 10,000 people do this, the corporate or government server is spammed into submission and crashes.
The April 16 event was organized by a coalition called the Direct Action Network and centered on the site www.A16.org, but was linked to hundreds of activist groups through their web sites and to those of the enemy: the WTO and the WorldBank, politicians, and corporations. For years, sites like the Institute for Global Communication (www.igc.org) and burn.ucsd.edu have hosted activist pages. The IGC hosts hundreds of groups through PeaceNet, EcoNet, WomansNet, and the Anti-RacismNet. Groups linked through these types of servers fall into several broad categories: single-issue advocacy groups like freeMumia!.org and anti-nuclear groups like Nukebusters, environmental groups like EarthFirst!, Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network, community and regionally based groups, social justice groups like Jobs with Justice, the War Resister's League and Amnesty International, labor coalitions from the AFL-CIO to the Wobblies, and a host of others. The Internet has allowed for the organization of broad-based coalitions that use the anti-hierarchical nature of the medium to permit leaderless decision-making and action.
The Ruckus Society (www.ruckus.org) was founded by EarthFirst! Organizer Mike Roselle in 1995 as a means of training and educating people for direct action and civil disobedience. Along with other groups like the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute, Ruckus Society organizers have trained thousands of activists, and currently offer workshops in various parts of the counry from their base in Berkeley. Their website offers training manuals in how to climb structures to hang banners, occupy trees, and hang yourself from billboards, as well as more down-to-earth topics like jail solidarity and preparing for civil disobedience. They are only the most prominent of dozens of groups training for direct action. The Ruckus Society is also adept at using the media and video as a tool for getting out their message. They offer tips on how to capture media attention and what to do with it once your fifteen minutes of fame comes up. The framing of protests by the mainstream media plagued social movements, as Gitlin noted in his analysis of the Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960's. One way around this is for groups to create their own press and video, and Ruckus Society offers video camera tips on how to tape events. The low cost of high quality video equipment now enables these groups to capture the event on their own terms, and video has been described as a tool, a weapon, and a witness, and so it serves several functions. Documenting the event provides the protesters with evidence of what occurred, and can be used as evidence of police brutality and in defense of the non-violent nature of the civil disobedience. In DC, the Independent Media Center provided the means of producing live webcasts, so the video can also be broadcast from the demonstration while the events are occurring. After the event is over, the video can be edited into programs which can then be distributed widely, helping to disseminate the goal of the protests and the issues at hand.In DC, a network of organizers was faced with the daunting challenge of how to avoid total chaos as four hundred activist groups and thousands of individuals converged on the city. They were able to coordinate transportation, food and lodging, and a network of cellular phones and walkie talkies and a democratic and informal organizational strategy allowed for a semblance of order. Regional participants and existing groups formed affinity groups. Each affinity group, from two to fifty people, appointed roles for its members: one person acted as a liaison with the "spokes council" which allowed a smaller group of these spokespersons to meet and make decisions and then report back to their affinity groups. Training for these affinity groups leading up to the April 16 event stressed the need for legal observers and medical training in the wake of Seattle's police brutality in the form of pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets and heavy truncheons. Each group decided for itself which members were willing to risk arrest by committing acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. A legal observer was to write notes and take photos and videotape for later use in court, and jail solidarity training stressed the need for the individuals to bargain collectively to gain their freedom, refusing to allow the police to divide and conquer by selectively releasing people. The affinity group has proven itself as an amazing and effective way to organize thousands of people quickly.
Organizers developed a strategy in D.C., with the goal of shutting down the World Bank/IMF meetings. The nationwide publicity was the real coup of the event, while activists aimed at blocking entrance to the meetings by physically invading every intersection around the buildings. Weeks of training at many locations had prepared thousands of people to perform this civil disobedience, and at 6a.m. affinity groups took to the streets. The IMF/World Bank buildings are between the White House and George Washington University, and police had barricaded themselves in a broad perimeter, manning steel barricades. The activists had reconnoitered the area in the days leading up to the 16th, and there had been a series of protests beginning with the Jubilee 2000 debt relief protest on the previous Sunday. The area around the police perimeter, which included the White House and the World Bank buildings, was divided into fourteen slices, A thru N, and regional groups each received a sector. Western Massachusetts people congregated in the C section, massing perhaps a thousand chanting protesters in four main intersections. By 7 a.m., protesters had blocked every intersection around the entire police perimeter. Organizers on bicycles with walkie talkies and cell phones were able to provide the central convergence center with information on police reaction and coordinate blocking traffic in an attempt to keep out the delegates. "Flying squads" wandered the area, identifying weak links in the perimeter. The cell phone played an important role in this action, allowing reinforcements to arrive within minutes at scenes of confrontation. A pirate radio station was set up at 97.5 FM and was broadcasting live information, which was then sent out over the Internet. The Feminist International Radio Endeavor (FIRE) netcast the event as well. Activists "weaving justice" entangled the streets with yarn and string, giant colorful puppets wandered the streets, and black-clad anarchists waving black and red flags dragged construction materials into the streets to serve as blockades. The puppets and music provided a carnival-like atmosphere, and by mid-afternoon, tourists were touring the barricades with their children in strollers.
While the operation was deemed a failure because the delegates were able to hold their meeting by entering the building at four in the morning, the real success of the action should be measured in the publicity it received and how well its message was conveyed. In this, the action was a success.
The DV in the title of this essay is a nod to the omnipresence of the digital video camera at this event. The police filmed the protesters, legal observers filmed the police, the major networks filmed it all, and thousands of video activists taped it too. The networks and their major D.C. affiliates were everywhere, although activists denied the press admittance to many of their training and strategy meetings. The independent media, coming from all sorts of groups, outnumbered the mainstream press, and the umbrella group www.indymedia.org provided late-breaking news. Time and Newsweek would give the protests one page each, but the actions caught headlines across the nation that Sunday morning. Photographers battled to see who could get the most violent shots, and the pages of many papers reflected this need for action, displaying cops beating protesters, although this was not a very common occurrence. The beauty of digital video is that all the cameras recording the event got the same quality of video. Network footage now had little significant quality difference from the activist with a camcorder.
Surveillance by police cameras was constant. Police were able to use video to identify organizers, and activists have been singled out for arrest at other protests: for instance, a ruckus society organizer was arrested at the Philadelphia convention and received vague charges and a $1 million dollar bail.
In November, 1999, the Seattle protests captured headlines around the world with images of police violence and vandalism. Leading up to April 16, the D.C. police force, working with the Secret Service and the FBI, were able to prepare for this action by watching videos of Seattle and analyzing the tactics employed there. Some $1 million in new equipment outfitted the police, and while their strategy on the ground was to keep the protests from erupting into violence, their means to this end became a profligate show of force. Reporters were invited to training demonstrations, and pepper spray and tear gas and rubber bullets were flaunted. The fashionable D.C. cop came out in black fatigues, wearing the obligatory steel-toed jackboots overlaid with catcher-style shinguards and chest protectors. Black gauntlet-style gloves protected fists, and black, visored helmets accompanied by gasmasks hid the faces of the officers, and badges were removed, adding to the anonymity of the state. Plexiglass shields and three-foot batons, along with 9mm sidearms and pepper spray armed the defenders, and each unit of ten officers carried its own teargas shotgun and "industrial-size" pepper-spray. The overall effect of the officers' appearances was Orwellian, faceless authority operating with crushing power. Observers on rooftops and low-flying helicopters added to the surveillance factor. Unmarked tinted vans, fleets of roaring motorcycles, and armored personnel carriers moved police around the city, while rumors of a stadium rented to hold arrestees discouraged many from risking arrest. The show of force was intended to intimidate and terrorize potential participants and to set a tone of fear that would be fodder for the press and act to define how the events were covered.
When activists began to converge on D.C., they were welcomed to the city with several preemptive strikes by the police. Activists reported being stopped by plainclothes Secret Service officers, and a truck loaded with chicken wire and pvc tubing for making giant puppets was confiscated and the activists arrested on charges of transporting illegal paraphernalia (The Valley Advocate, May 4-10, 2000: 14). On Saturday, April 15th, the day before the main protest a fire marshall ordered the main activist convergence center closed on account of a supposed fire code violation, and dozens of plain-clothed police enforced the eviction. In the process, giant puppets and banners, literature and medical equipment were all confiscated.
Later on Saturday, a protest to free Mumia Abu-Jamal was held, and without notice police surrounded the demonstrators and arrested some six hundred of them, effectively removing a core group of activists from the next day's events. They were held in buses for many hours. While the mainstream press celebrated the peaceful restraint of the police, tactics like these suggest a well-planned strategy of crowd control interspersed with brief tactical moments of police brutality. A group of Wesleyan students suffered blows and broken noses, others were pepper-sprayed, and isolated incidents of police violence marred the non-violent nature of the protests. By using preemptive strikes and then carefully manipulating the days' events, police were able to contain the protesters but not the message. As activists pushed down many streets, the police backed off, diffusing the energy of the crowds, and for the most part the protests were non-violent.
The crisis that stirred up the events of April 16 wasn't a crisis at the individual level. The average activist wasn't suffering from the acts of the World Bank, or the austerity programs of the IMF. The key to igniting this protest was the dissemination of information and the education of thousands of people. More and more people are realizing what environmentalists and activists have been voicing for years: the system of late capitalism is chronically bankrupt and ethically obsolete. While the protesters that turned out were predominantly young white kids, the potential to unite a broad international base of labor, environmental, anti-war, civil rights and other groups is only beginning to be realized. The Internet has played a vital role in educating people about the dozens of issues that formed the broad agenda of the challenge to the status quo. While the control of corporations over media content grows, the Internet has provided an amazing tool to subvert this. Video activists and the alternative press create their own news, and it reaches a mass audience across the Internet. The commercialization of the public sphere continues, but the wave of protests since Seattle suggests that there is a chance to realize an alternative vision.
