Just after Proposition 8 passed in California in 2008, a
couple of people on Facebook got the idea that they wanted to protest that
particular piece of ugly shit in the rest of the country, and not having put
together a protest before, and being young with all the insane confidence of
youth, they just kind of suggested that some people might want to get together
with some signs and banners that weekend at their local city halls, wherever
those might be. Others picked it up and in about five days, something above
100,000 people—possibly as many as a quarter million—nearly all without parade
permits or any formal organization to speak of—converged on around a hundred
city halls in the United States.
I became aware that this was going on about two days after
it started, i.e. with four days to go till the demo. Now, back in my younger
days, I had worked at a large number of demonstrations, mainly anti‑nuclear‑weapons
as I have always been opposed to being blown up for other people's causes, but
also civil liberties, various civil rights/racial issues, pro‑union, economic
justice and a number of other usually left causes as well, plus a couple
rallies for gun rights and one against turning productive forest into a playpen
for rich kids, which I guess you could either regard as balancing my personal
budget or just having really liked a parade when I was younger. I knew some
things about what goes into a successful demonstration—or thought I did.
For many demonstrations, I'd been on security because I'm
large, scowl and glower well, and generally look like I am not to be fucked
with, and was therefore suitably intimidating to counter demonstrators, but can
manage to say Don't be an asshole in a
pleasantly indirect way to our own side.
So when I looked over the plans for the anti‑8 rally in
Denver and saw that it looked utterly, totally, completely like the biggest
mess of an amateur hour I'd ever seen, I went looking for the organizers to
volunteer for security. The cause was certainly worthy, I was deeply pissed off
about Prop 8 for a lot of reasons, but the whole thing looked so inept to my
experienced eyes that I had visions of all kinds of crap breaking loose, and I
thought they needed help.
I finally found a very pleasant guy who was putting together
security, contacted him, and discovered, on the day of the rally, that we had
nineteen people to keep some kind of order in a demonstration and march that
had about 1100 people by my rough statistician's count‑noses‑and‑multiply
methods. As a security detail, that's maybe a third of the number I'd think
were optimal for a well‑organized regulated
political parade and rally, and this wasn't meaningfully organized at all.
It was an interesting afternoon. The protest went well,
making appropriate noises where and when it was supposed to. The counter
demonstrators were sparse and not terribly noisy, but that was where I got my
first inkling that today was going to be different from many similar days in my
past. A self‑identified gay filmmaker was there to take advantage of the
presence of the counter demonstrators—apparently she was working on some
project about anti‑gay hatred—and simply pushed through the little group of us
separating them from the demonstration, creating a platform and a speaking
space for them (local TV followed her in and filmed some of that over her
shoulder).
Naturally we asked her not do that. Her response was to
shrug and tell us not to interfere with her work.
And there was absolutely nobody for either her or us to
refer to about it. We'd have felt absurd trying to shut out a lesbian filmmaker
at a gay rights rally, and anyway we had a lot of other crap to attend to. As
far as she was concerned, she'd rarely have such a good collection of Christish
cuckoo birds to collect interviews from again. Like it or not, it was do your
own thing day.
In fact, a couple of blocks into the march it was becoming
clear that with nobody in charge, nobody was going to pay much attention to the
arm banded security people, not even for such things as our trying to keep
street crossings safe and keep the group together. One guy who might have been
off his meds, had brought a bullhorn and attempted to lead the crowd in
incomprehensible cheers; another buttonholed everybody who looked like a
reporter to explain that this event was just the beginning of a movement
against oppression that began with his expulsion from a Madonna concert.
And yet it really didn't matter. I have seldom felt quite so
irrelevant (and as a science fiction writer and a theatre historian, I can compare that afternoon with many other experiences of feeling irrelevant). The crowd
was big enough that it just forced its way across streets, traffic or no, and
would mill around in the street while stragglers ran to catch up, an invitation to get busted, but the police chose not to—maybe because there was no predicting how that crowd might react, and no one around who could effectively say "be cool". The lunatic
chanter wandered away somewhere in the middle of the march, once everyone had
seen him and decided to ignore him. The Martyr of Madonna eventually was
trailing along with the stragglers, chatting pleasantly, having found an
approximation to sympathetic friends.
We finished up at the same park which was more recently the
site of an Occupy Denver encampment, and as we few pathetic security
folks—nearly all of us veterans of demonstrations going back decades—gathered ,
our sort‑of leader shrugged. "It looks like it's turning into a big party;
I don't think we could clear them out if we wanted to, and anyway since we
never had a permit in the first place, there's no deadline to disperse
by." We just took off the armbands and disbanded. As we were doing that an
older cop came by and said, "Well, that was scary, but I guess it came out
okay." Apparently he'd seen enough demonstrations to think he knew, like
we thought we knew, what too many people , too few security, no authority
anywhere, might mean.
We thought we knew, the cop and us, but the more I have
thought back to this, we didn't know crap. We were there at the birth of
something new, which is probably going to matter a great deal, and we missed it
all because we were old hands and we were looking to see what we'd seen before.
That night, nationwide, the center‑right news media (what
the righties call the liberal or mainstream media) reported that a bunch of
overdramatic gay lovers of street theatre, excitable teenagers with a thing for
the '60s, and some mildly photogenic regular people had acted up a bit but the
show was now over. Fox News, as is their wont, insisted it was the work of a
sinister cabal trying to push the homosexual agenda—the idea that there was any
leadership with any agenda made me laugh. And in the couple weeks that followed
some minor lefty papers printed stories claiming that this marked some kind of
turning point in historical something or other. (Including a couple that said
it wouldn't matter in the long run because it was all so badly organized, and
urged us all to get back to the vital function of building a mass movement).
Commentators on all sides both deplored the absence of a program, the to‑them
random wish list comments of the randomly interviewed participants, and the
failure to bring forth a leadership to "consolidate the gains" and
"strategize to pursue the goals" that they had just finished saying
we didn't have.
They missed it too, but unlike my companions and that cop,
they missed it willfully and aggressively.
What we all missed was the new world that had already
arrived: not only leaderless resistance that self‑organized (the world has seen
that since, probably, the first food riots in the first Neolithic settlements)
but resistance that resisted having a leader. And in the new interwebz world, that's not just a slogan or an ideal;
it's a practical option for popular resistance.
A few months later the Tea Party erupted; more recently
Occupy Wall Street and its many offspring have burst onto the scene. And as
much as possible, the political class and the journalists who cover it have
gone on missing the point.
This new way of non‑organizing popular resistance—whether
it's a right or left leaning population that's doing the resisting—is a techne. (Tech knee, if you're a in‑your‑head pronouncer.
The plural is technai, tech nigh).
Techne is the Greek
word from which we get both technique and technology, a craft or way of doing
or method. It was the center of a big argument between Platonists and
Aristotelians, about whether rhetoric was an art (i.e. a path to the truth
itself, like geometry or astronomy), or just a techne like weaving or military
strategy—a way to achieve an effect that worked equally well for any purposes,
good or bad, truthful or deceitful, cruel or kind.
There are many technai for conflict. T.E. Lawrence, a right
winger if ever there was one, figured out that you could bleed a great power by
forcing it to expend resources keeping basic services functioning, and invented
the modern resistance movement; that techne was applied by everyone from Ho Chi
Minh to the Nicaraguan contras, against every power big enough to bleed, ever
after. In the 1930s, Charles De Gaulle published a book describing the techne
we now call blitzkrieg, which was read assiduously in Russia and Germany; the
war began and ended in a series of blitzkriegs from all sides, which worked
equally well for any side that applied them, however good or bad its purpose.
The technai of nonviolent civil disobedience were used to liberate India,
interfere with Western development of nuclear weapons, desegregate the American
South, and overthrow Communism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and are being used
today by the Occupy movement and the pro‑lifers. No techne belongs to one side
or another, at least not permanently.
But technai have consequences and implications, regardless of
who uses them.
Let's look at this self‑organizing anti‑organizational
internet‑driven techne of resistance a little farther. Try this analogy:
traditional power and traditional freedom have somewhat resembled living in the
same meadow with a large, dangerous bull. If you come to his attention in an
unfavorable way, the bull will fixate on you and try to trample or gore you,
and it's very difficult to stay out of his way once he's decided you need
trampling or goring. But most of the time you get your freedom from the fact
that the bull mostly ignores you; he just wants to have the sunniest spot in
the meadow to himself, receive gestures of respect, never be startled or
inconvenienced, and of course leave piles of bullshit everywhere. (That being
his freedom).
I presume the analogy to traditional leadership—known to the
Tea Party as "the elites," the Occupiers as "the 1%" and to
most of us as "they" (as in "they would never let people do that", "it would make sense but they won't ever
do it," etc.) is reasonably clear. Power derives from the ability to rip
any one thing apart and then squish it absolutely flat, but that power requires
not having to deal with too many things at a time; freedom comes from not
annoying the bull, or being the bull.
Now consider these new movements, which are more like hornet
swarms. If a hornet walked up to a bull on the ground and said, "hey,
bull, this is bullshit, get it out of my meadow"—squish. In a hooking,
goring, trampling contest, I think we can fairly say the bull would win. Over
any distance he runs faster than the hornets fly, too.
But if you have ever seen what happens when a bull
accidentally knocks down a hornets' nest, you know who wins anywhere near the
nest. Notice that there are no hornet generals, admirals, CEOs, facilitators,
nest organizers, or hornet resource directors. (No hornets in armbands keeping
order, either). Every hornet is just flying out to find her way to something
that seems to be responsible for the unpleasantness to hornet‑kind, and do what
harm she can to the nearest apparent culprit.
Frankly, bulls don't know what to do about hornets. They
know what to do about rival bulls (usually ritual combat, but if necessary, a
real fight to the death). They know what to do about disagreeable little
creatures with whom they share the meadow (either ignore if they're not too
annoying or gore, trample, etc. if they are). But these hornet things hurt and there are a lot of them and some of them are clever and go up your nose or
sting you in the balls, and they keep coming even after you make an example out
of one of them by squashing her into hornet goo.
So, getting even more anthropomorphic about this, the bulls
do what any authority does when it can't do anything: they call names. These
are not real hornets, these are astroturf hornets, who are being financed by a
rival bull. The hornets have no program and if they ever want to run the
meadow, they are going to have to learn how to charge, hook, and trample. The
hornets are just irresponsibly saying that we can't do ordinary things that
everyone needs for the good of the whole meadow, like rubbing our backs on
trees and knocking down hornets' nests. Anyway the hornets are of no importance
because it's just a temporary fad thing, you know how hornets are, they like
getting upset for a short period of time. They'll disappear in the winter and
never come back. Why is everyone so interested in hornets anyway when the bull
has a job to do?
In fact let's just knock down another nest and squish a
few hornets to teach those bastards a—ouch. Ouch. My nose. My balls. Now that's
just irresponsible. I really, really hate hornets.
Now here's where it gets interesting. Yes, you read all this
way before it got interesting. Might as well finish now ….
Hornet swarms form and fight near their nests, i.e. their
vital interests. OWS was recently extremely active because it looked like the
inside‑the‑Beltway bulls (the best meadow there is) were cutting a deal about
the deficit, which is a classic insider issue that actually doesn't matter very
much in the lives of ordinary people most of the time, mostly concerned with
being nice to big banks, and that deal would almost certainly involve cutting
the living hell out of programs that many people depend on; it would make life
on the economic fringes and margins much worse in order to win the moral
approval of the people who brought you the bailout. Their nest was kicked over,
in other words. The Tea Party got its knickers in a knot almost entirely over
the health care proposal, because one sharp and deep status division in the
United States is the one between people who have health care coverage and
people who don't , and it was going to spoil the club, both by somewhat
reducing the absolute privileges of the people already in, and by allowing all
sorts of riff‑raff in.
At the moment OWS is noisy and the Tea Party quiet because
one nest is being disturbed and the other is not. But we're coming up on an
election year. One of the traditional ways for the two bulls to fight it out is
seeing who can spread the most bullshit on the meadow, and in our polarized
team‑spirit polity of today, that means promising to take away the unjust
privileges of the other bulls' followers.
In other words, both bulls are going to kick over a lot of
nests next year, whether they want to or not. For the first time since the
phenomenon appeared, the meadow is going to be full of swarming hornets.
Maybe that means nothing; bulls will just develop thicker
hides, learn to wear facemasks and cups, and so on. Maybe it will just be a
distraction: bulls will spend a lot of time chasing hornets instead of
battering each other, the ground will get torn up more and there will be more
motion, but nothing that really matters will change.
But maybe … hornet swarms in conflict might well devolve
into millions of individual hornet‑versus‑hornet struggles. What might that
look like? Arguments on the street and in bars (also known as democracy)?
Or Beirut or Belfast?
Once two bulls lock horns, it usually goes on till one realizes
he can't win and gives up in some dignity‑saving (if possible) way. There's a
way out of a bull‑to‑bull conflict.
When bulls fight hornets, the bull eventually gets out of it
by moving far enough away from the nest and staying there.
And when hornets fight hornets …. does the newly developed
techne even apply? What new ones might be about to be invented? Will it look like some hapless
old-style demonstrators trying to get cooperation from a filmmaker … or like
the Johnson County War or the Hatfield-McCoy feud?
I guess we'll find out.
