History
The Origin of this Group
You may be wondering, who the hell are all these people and where did this damn website come from?
Well, it’s a long story. If you care to read, here it is.
It all started in September 2006. College students woke up one day and suddenly found strange things were a happenin’ on Facebook. I’m referring to the newsfeed/minifeed incident, and the ensuing riot. As a student activist, I had two thoughts. First, holy shit, this is amazing… look at all these people! But second, damn, it sucks all we’re doing is protesting Facebook.
If only we could channel some of this energy into something more worthwhile. I mean, maybe we could stop poverty or war or something, I dunno. Worth a shot at least, right?
So that’s how Lose the Label was born. I created a group called “Students for Changing the Post-Minifeed World” and me and a few friends started spamming the wall of the giant anti-Newsfeed group asking people who wanted to use Facebook to organize to stop things more important than Newsfeed to join our group. We didn’t know what exactly we wanted to do, just that we wanted to do something.
Hundreds of students joined over the first few days before we leveled out. We had some discussions and held some meetings over AIM and tried to decide what we wanted to do. Stop the war? Put an end to poverty? Lower tuition costs? Defend net neutrality? Register more young voters? Fight for privacy and civil liberties?
We couldn’t decide.
There were just too many good causes to choose from.
So we came up with a solution. What if we picked all of them?
What if we made a Facebook for students who care about the world? A place to communicate and organize around whatever issues, away from the Brody Ruckuses and I'm-gonna-blow-up-my-car dumbasses, a community devoted to young people driving social change.
So all the people who want to stop the war, can. So all the people who want to defend net neutrality, can. So all the people who want to fight poverty, can.
Social networking for social justice.
Five months later, the website is ready. It’s a work in progress, to be sure, but it’s open ended, just like the group has always been. This whole project is one big experiment in activism and technology. Failure or success is in the hands of the people who use this site.
Ahem.
That's YOU.