Lose the Label
A Student Activist Community

posted by jakethorn on March 27, 2007 - 9:30pm

I was 15 when Bush stole the election. All I really remember was a bunch of drama, slick lawyers slapping each other, and gradually concluding that George W. Bush was a sleazyass mofo.

But until today, when I came across this article, I had no idea that people had used the Internet to organize exactly how I hope we're able to use Lose the Label someday.

What happened was, online organizer Zack Exley (famous for working with MoveOn and later the Kerry campaign) created a simple website called countercoup.org about a month before the election, the purpose of which was to propose locations for possible protests if Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral college.

We all know what happened Election Day.

Pissed-off liberals started flocking to the website and Zack was bombarded with emails asking where their city's protest was, who was coordinating it. He emailed them all back saying, "these are spontaneous protests, no one is organizing them -- just show up! people will be there!" According to his article, he tried to "make a list of people willing to be local contacts, but it turned out to be too much to coordinate". By Thursday, he'd gotten over 1000 emails and the site had gotten nearly 100,000 visitors.

So...

To get out from under the avalanche of e-mail, I used a free, Web-based service to create an Internet group to allow people to connect with each other directly. I linked the Web site to the group and sent an e-mail out telling everyone who was already involved to join. Within an hour, there were more than a hundred messages posted to the message board.

HE PUT THEM IN TOUCH WITH EACH OTHER. They organized everything themselves, through a damn message board (...stone age technology compared to what we're running on Lose the Label). Bottom-up organizing, peer to peer, open source, whatever term you want to use.

I prefer to call it DIY.

So what happened?

The protests were set for 1 p.m., local times. My friend Michael, who had been bringing me take-out for the two days that I was pinned to my computer, came with me to the Boston rally at the Statehouse.

"How many people do you think will show?" I asked.

"Maybe 50," he said.

"Fifty? Not a chance!" I responded. An iron law of organizing is that most of the people who say they're coming never do. Only a handful of people from each city had said they were coming; everyone else had only asked if the protests were really happening. I predicted a turnout of 10.

But when we got to the Statehouse at 1 p.m., there were already hundreds of people there. People were holding blown up versions of the signs the graphic designers had made, and homemade signs with the slogans that I had posted. I asked someone how they had heard about the protest.

"I got an e-mail ... Somebody named Countercoup."

"Ah ..." I said, and crept out the back of the crowd.

By the time I got home, reports had already come in from the other protests sites. New York: 500; Philadelphia: 200; DC: 300. Two friends in Los Angeles called in to say there were a couple of thousand people out at their site.

It worked! Well, to a degree. The tactic was successful, the online organizing created protests, but we all know how their objective turned out. But after 7 years of Chimp, here WE are running a website designed to do EXACTLY what THEY set out to do in November 2000, except on a much larger scale with a great many issues, using much stronger tools, to serve a traditionally voiceless segment of the population: young people.

Here's the excerpt from the article that gave me goosebumps:

It was natural for people to be angry and want to protest after the election, but without the Internet there would have been no way for a single person to propose a day of protests, and for word of it to spread to so many people. The Internet allowed me to post the proposal where tens of millions of others could see it. E-mail allowed people who were angry to spread the word very quickly. Before the Internet, this would have required an organization (like the Democratic party) with a huge list of potentially interested people and a phone-banking effort involving acres of rented telemarketing space, thousands of volunteers and countless phone lines.

He hits a point that I've been trying and failing to articulate for about 6 months now, that if we just create a location for people to organize, they'll do it on their own. This replaces the need for big, centralized organizations with huge email lists and bureaucracies and blah blah blah...

WE--everyday people--can CREATE our OWN organizations from the GROUND UP.

We're naturally eliminating the need for bureaucracy. We as citizens can supplant large, pre-existing organizations. Because of the Internet, WE can stand toe to toe with entrenched institutions.

THIS is what I want to do. THIS is why I've worked my assssssss off getting this site moving. THIS is what we're capable of. Like I said, THEY did it with 2000 technology, when cave men roamed the Internet... with email, a simple website, and a message board. We have FAR better tools, a more knowledgeable user base, passionate people, expert student activists, and easy access to natural protest locations---college campuses.

We can move mountains of change.