Crisis and Critique: A Brief History of Media Participation in Times of Crisis 9781350219434, 9781783607365

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PREFACE

The material for this book was mainly collected while I spent one and a half years in Philadelphia as a visiting research fellow at the Center for Global Communication Studies of the University of Pennsylvania. For some, my origin from the former German Democratic Republic (DDR) was the most exotic and outstanding feature of my personality, leading to interesting but also somewhat strange remarks in Q&A sessions when I presented my work. Once, for example, I was asked how my East German heritage and now being based in (‘socialist’) Sweden was influencing my analysis of American protest movements. Initially I dismissed the question, as I was certainly too young to be turned into a full-believer and follower of the real-existing socialism. Over time, however, I came to appreciate these kinds of comments and questions about how my background was potentially steering ways of seeing and analysing certain phenomena. The interest in specific topics, groups and questions is certainly closely linked to personal histories, but the object of study can also change the analyst, which is definitely what happened to me. This project is not only about economic crises as critical junctures for media practices, it also marks a personal critical juncture and threshold into a new episode of my political engagement and personal life. Not only the opportunity to engage with political direct action in a country that seems so familiar, but is still so strange, but also an attempt to reconstruct media practices historically, questioned and changed my way of seeing the contemporary world. vii

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This book was mainly written in between: between continents and civic cultures, between new lives and old ones. The position of being in between was an inspiring experience for me. Instead of feeling completely at home and belonging – an insider – or being completely disconnected – an outsider – in my position as the inbetweener I fused aspects of both. I became part of a different cultural and political milieu, but did not fully identify with the order of things. I also belonged elsewhere. Being in between related not only to the institutional and cultural settings I was moving within, but also emerged in the context of discourses and mobilizations that were actualized during the last months of my stay in Philadelphia. I felt in between the #blacklivesmatter movement and the growing success of both the right-wing Sweden Democrats party and a group called Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) in Germany – a movement that claims to originate in mainstream society and that mobilizes around anti-refugee sentiments and antiIslamic rhetoric. In that context, being the in-betweener felt utterly frustrating. I wanted to be fully part of the struggles and support different anti-racist groups and activities pushing back against the backlash in Europe and the USA. Knowing that I would be leaving Philadelphia, engaging in #blacklivesmatter by participating in protest marches for only a couple of weeks seemed unfair to the hardworking local organizers. The same sentiment goes for protests and mobilizations against fascist groups in Europe. I am not there, and online activism is only partly helping. Being an in-betweener also meant that I saw the troubling connections between the mobilizations in Europe and in the USA. For example, how growing inequality in Europe enhances the divides along ethnic lines and how it feeds the fear of cultural alienation (Überfremdung), while in the USA social and economic inequality is deeply rooted in racial divides. This book gave me the opportunity to study the connections between technology and critique put forward viii

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Preface

by progressive movements over time. It also helped me to make sense of connections across civic and protest cultures. Giving talks of various length on this material helped me to develop early analytical steps into more solid arguments. In particular, two research seminars, one in November 2014 at Södertörn University and one in January 2015 at Annenberg, need to be mentioned here. The feedback from my colleagues at both departments was not only valuable, but crucial for the whole project. I am grateful for inspiring meetings, lectures and seminar discussions at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Particularly I would like to thank faculty members Guobin Yang, Sandra Gonzales Bailon and Victor Pickard as well as the visiting professors José van Dijck and Lisa Parks who took the time to discuss my project. I want to also extend a big thanks to inspiring friends – both new and old – that joined my journey as an in-betweener: Lee McGuigan, Aaron Shapiro, Maria Repnikova and Katerina Girginova as well as Dan Mercea, Eleftheria Lekakis, Christian Schwarzenegger, Maria Kyriakidou and Julie Uldam, who read parts of this text and helped to improve it considerably while helping me to stay sane. Smaller parts have been previously developed in book chapters and journal articles: • Chapter 3: Anne Kaun (2015) ‘Regimes of Time: Media Practices of the Dispossessed.’ Time & Society, 24(2), 221– 243. doi: 10.1177/0961463X15577276. • Chapter 4: Anne Kaun (2015) ‘“This Space Belongs to Us!” Protest Spaces in Times of Accelerating Capitalism.’ In: Lina Dencik and Oliver Leistert (eds), Critical Approaches to Social Media Protest: Contentions and Debates. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

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INTRODUCTION

Protest and the media

Do crisis situations require and enable new forms of critique? What role do media technologies play in activism as a form of critique during these critical junctures? These are some of the questions that this book explores through three case studies of protest movements of the dispossessed. Connecting crisis and critique is done here with reference to Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, who collaborated on a joint journal project in the context of the 1930s Great Depression. The planned journal – to be called Krise und Kritik – never actually materialized, despite the fact that Brecht and Benjamin had several editorial meetings and the Rowohlt publishing house expressed an interest in the project. In the journal project, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht approached the concrete expressions of crises in different areas of society (political, economic and intellectual), as signs of a bigger, all-encompassing, social crisis, which marked a critical and risky transition point (Wizisla 2004), a transition that requires and potentially enables new and in-depth forms of critique. In line with that, Benjamin argued in the 1930s: ‘there is a crisis today in all spheres of ideology and the role of the journal is it to identify the crisis and to induce it with the means of critique’ (quoted in Wizisla 2004, 130). Brecht and Benjamin saw intellectuals and artists as the driving forces in this process of critique as they had an aesthetic responsibility to speed up the critical juncture. Through their engagement, critique would lead to a fundamental social change. Taking this argument as a starting point, I am investigating 1

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other kinds of avant-garde movements, namely political movements, which take over the critiquing role in crisis situations. Economic crises as critical junctures are not only considered in terms of the economic system as such, but also for the study of media and communications in general. Protest movements employing different media technologies aim to fill the crisis-induced void with new meaning, giving social change a specific direction discursively (Koselleck 1973/1959). Hence, media play a crucial role during periods of transitions such as economic crises. At the same time, media are parts of the broader cultural domain and face similar problems as other social areas that, for example, Brecht and Benjamin discussed. They most often experience deep crisis, too. While I am mainly interested in media as platforms for critique, the second aspect provides the necessary background to fully develop an understanding of media technologies as part of the economic system. In discussions of media and protest, there is often a strong emphasis on the newness and innovative character of media technologies for swift organizing and mobilizing. Elizabeth Day (2015), for example, introduces her article on mobilizations against racism and white supremacy in the USA with: ‘#BlackLivesMatter: the birth of a new civil rights movement. How a new generation of tech-savvy activists made violence against African Americans into global headline news.’ For her, the movement started with a Facebook update and a hashtag, which spread to mainstream legacy media. A movement not without, but with many leaders who coordinated protests across the whole nation with the help of social media. In her writing and line of argument, she joins a long list of technological enthusiasts who are often sympathetic with the movements they discuss, such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street or BlackLivesMatter. They share, however, the emphasis on tech-savviness of the activists. They describe social media as a resource- and time-saving way of organizing, coordinating and, particularly, narrating the movements. At the same time, social 2

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media are considered as the component in political activism that lead to and fit new forms of flat organization with many or no leaders instead of centralized political organization. The enthusiasm of the commentators for the causes of the movements often blends into an uncritical technological enthusiasm or digital exceptionalism – as Alice Marwick (2013) has termed it – that potentially precludes an analysis of problematic aspects of media technologies’ role for protest movements and to an overemphasis of the new. Consequently, continuities of organizing are often overlooked in this kind of commentary. In their attempts to understand current protest and social movements, commentators join a longer history of overemphasizing technology in movements that were already visible in the era of the Zapatista and the Alter-Globalization movement. Technological enthusiasm is in research furthermore often paired with one medium analysis as Alice Mattoni and Emilian Treré (2014) point out. Instead of considering the whole, complex set of transmedia practices and organizing (Constanza-Chock 2014), mediations and mediatization processes, studies often focus exclusively on listservs, fax machines or one specific social media platform. Commentaries and analyses that follow this typical pattern miss the utterly complex media ecology that activists are navigating. Out of dissatisfaction with these dominant commentaries and in connection with a growing strand of critical engagements with protest and media technologies (Mattoni and Treré 2014; ConstanzaChock 2014; Dencik and Leistert 2015), this book considers historical changes in protest and protest practices that are related to media technologies. It discusses how the mediated possibilities of expressing critique through and by political activism have changed since the 1930s and what these changes mean for the potential of sustainable social change. The book’s explicit goal is to debunk current discourse on the crucial role of media technologies for social, political critique and change in general by looking back. The reason for doing so is 3

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the rather obvious suspicion about the emphasis on social media in current uprisings, crystallizing in notions such as Facebook and Twitter revolutions. Instead, I qualify and contextualize discussions on the role of media for social critique by progressive movements historically. In this endeavour, Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin’s reflections on crisis and critique serve as a valuable starting point. Protest movements and their media practices are one form of social critique that need to be studied comparatively over time to uncover the media-related conditions for expressing social and political critique in times of large-scale economic crises. It is hence not so much about tracing the history of one specific protest movement over time, but discussing the historical changes and conditions of how protest is expressed with the help of media technologies. Media technologies crucially impact the time, space and speed of protest, but not always only positively. Digital media, for example, accelerate the exchange of messages and allow for rapid mobilization of large numbers of supporters. At the same time, they preclude sustainable, long-term organizing and stand in stark contrast to the inner logics of political organizing within the movements. Political practices of participatory democracy within progressive movements often do not fit the tight framework of social media’s immediacy. There is hence a problematic disconnect between regimes of time established by media technologies such as social media and time of political practices, which can be characterized as de-synchronization between machine time – temporality produced by a certain tech­ nology – and political time – time inherent to political processes. This point is fundamental to the argument of this book.

ECONOMIC CRISES AND PROTEST MOVEMENTS As Brecht and Benjamin argued, economic crises are indicators of a larger crisis of society as a whole. They provide glimpses into growing 4

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inequalities and contradictions. With a starting point in the USA, there have been three major economic crises in recent history that connect to major shifts in the economic system of Western industrial capitalism: the Great Depression in the early 1930s; the fiscal and oil crisis in the 1970s; and the Great Recession in 2007/2008. Not only do these historical points in time mark major economic hardships in the USA that spread globally, but they also represent distinct periods of capitalism: moving from the implementation of a social relief system with the New Deal in the 1930/40s to the beginning of neoliberal deregulation and expanding globalization in the 1970s to accelerated financial capitalism in the 2010s. During these periods, there were major changes in the organization of the production process and labour market, which of course is related to the technologies – including media technologies.

Unemployed workers’ movement in the 1930s In the 1930s the unemployed workers’ movements emerged in the context of the 1930s Great Depression in the United States. Following the crash of the stock exchange in 1929, the number of unemployed exploded from half a million in October 1929 to more than 4 million in January 1930 (1932: 24 per cent) and the numbers kept growing to 9 million in October 1931 (1933: 25 per cent) (Piven and Cloward 1977). Unemployment and shrinking salaries of those still in employment, combined with growing malnutrition and diseases such as tuberculosis, had devastating effects on people’s daily lives. Although the number of people in need of financial and social support grew, there was no coherent social relief system in place. Piven and Cloward (1977) argue that in the beginning of the Great Depression unemployed workers mainly suffered alone, lived from their savings and borrowed money, lined up for every job, but in general suffered in silence. This changed with the depression worsening and whole neighbourhoods being out of work. At the same time political 5

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actors started to organize the unemployed, aiming to redefine their hardships not as individual misfortune but as collective experiences that are consequences of the political and economic system. There were numerous organizations and political groups that aimed to organize the unemployed and mobilize them for direct action, such as marches, demonstrations, occupations of relief offices. The main aims and approaches of the organizations were very diverse. While the Labor Research Association, for example, focused mainly on gathering information on unemployment and its conditions, the Socialist and Communist Parties aimed to establish organizational structures and advocated for improved relief programmes. Smaller local organizations such as the Greenwich House in New York City focused specifically on the local conditions, housed meetings of the unemployed from Greenwich Village as well as the National Unemployment League. The League for Industrial Democracy (out of which the SDS – Students for a Democratic Society emerged in the 1960s) organized nationwide lectures, lecture circuits and chapter meetings that were partly broadcast since the radio was considered one of the most important channels. In order to organize and mobilize the unemployed workers these organizations used a sophisticated set of different media, ranging from shop papers written by unemployed workers and distributed in the factories to radio talks, as Harold Lasswell and Dorothy Blumenstock (1939) show in their comprehensive study of communist media in Chicago. Although the radio gained importance, the main way to inform members and non-members remained, however, printed outlets. From 1932, for example, clip sheets containing major news were introduced. They had the major purpose of being reprinted by approximately 500 farmers and workers papers (TAM 49). Cheap mimeographs allowed for the speedy reproduction of leaflets, brochures and flyers, while the radio was still only emerging as a popular medium. Also the spreading of information was speeding 6

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Introduction

up with these technologies, although it was still a collective effort to produce content, reproduce the outlets and distribute the papers among potential supporters. Rather than driving the activists further apart, media technologies brought them closer together, as will be shown in the chapters that follow.

Tenants’ movement in the 1970s Following some economically quite prosperous years, the early 1970s were characterized by economic crisis – specifically the oil crisis that started in 1973. New York, in particular, was faced with a fiscal crisis that resulted in austerity measures and strict budget cuts that left many unemployed. Manuel Castells discusses in his book, Economic crisis and the American society, why there were no mass protests comparably big as in the 1930s despite the economic situation being similarly severe. He argued that growing police violence with new special units, an ideological de-legitimization of political protest post-1968/69 radicalization and the absence of an immediate political alternative led to a shift from mass mobilization to individual violence visible in increasing crime rates. However, he had hopes for what he called new urban movements, one of which I consider here – the tenants’ movement in New York that aimed to advocate for tenants’ rights against increasingly hostile housing conditions. The scarcity of low-cost housing resulted from a combination of austerity measures and deregulation of the housing market. A paradox housing situation emerged with empty units that were abandoned by the owners, while large numbers of people were desperately in search of affordable housing. After considerable decay of the facilities, owners often turned the vacant units instead into high-end housing or office spaces. Founded in 1959, the Metropolitan Council on Housing was the central organization for tenants in New York. Bringing together smaller local tenant organizations and individual members, its 7

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aim was to achieve ‘decent, integrated housing at rents people can afford’ (Letterhead Metropolitan Council on Housing). Over the years the Met Council continuously professionalized their work and support of local tenants’ organizations, particularly in terms of media practices. They arranged workshops on publicity, press releases and television training, held lists of press and television contacts as well as documented the appearance of tenants’ related questions in mainstream media. Especially after 1973 numerous new activists and organizations aimed to organize aggrieved tenants, which led to the emergence of multiple federations that constituted an increasing diversification of strategies mirroring the diversifying socio-economic backgrounds of participants in the tenants’ movement. Furthermore, the harshening economic context and disillusionment about traditional repertoires of action of the Met Council led to a contested radicalization of the biggest tenants’ organization. This radicalization culminated in the later discussed Housing Crimes Trial that was arranged together with the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, Move In (organized squatters) and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), among others. In the 1970s, media technologies and channels for disseminating information had multiplied in comparison to the 1930s. Activists were faced with a complex media ecology that needed particular strategies in order to attract attention and intercept in the constant flow of television images, radio broadcasts and newspaper articles. Professionalization and adaptation to the temporalities of media was the main strategy applied by many tenant activists.

Occupy Wall Street in 2011/2012 The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement emerged in the aftermath of the so-called Great Recession; starting in the USA, it then spread globally (Foster and McChesney 2012). Although OWS has been a 8

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Introduction

platform for multiple voices and there exists a variety of narratives concerning the movement, there are a number of major formative events of the movement that partly establish a dominant narrative in discussions about OWS. In July 2011, Adbusters, the notorious facilitator of anticonsumerism campaigns, launched a call to occupy Wall Street by introducing the hashtag #occupywallstreet on Twitter. After online mobilization, a few dozen people followed the call on 17 September 2011. Since Wall Street was strongly secured by police force, the occupiers turned to the nearby Zuccotti Park. The small, privately owned square became the location for camping, campaigning and deliberating for the upcoming weeks until the first eviction in November 2011 (Graeber 2013). The number of activists in the camp grew surprisingly quickly and developed into a diverse group of occupiers, based on what has been characterized as leaderlessness and non-violence (Bolton et al. 2013); however, even these two notions were contested. Hence the movement was – and is – characterized by a non-consensus about ethics and advocated for a diversity of tactics, while particularly stressing the importance of space through linking the movement to the long tradition of occupation and reclaiming of public spaces.1 At the same time, there was a ‘division over conventional politics, over reform and revolution’ (Gitlin 2012: XV). The group of diverse activists with different political visions and ideas about how to organize the movement adopted elaborate ways for deliberation that had proved helpful in earlier protests and mobilization by, for example, the Indignados in Spain. These included the human microphone, amplifying the individual speaker’s voice through a repeating choir; 1 Michael Gould-Wartofsky (2015) links the occupation of Zuccotti Park, for example, to the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil that emerged in the 1980s and the squatters’ movement of the 1970s reclaiming affordable housing through occupation. 9

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the hand sign system to organize discussions in large groups; as well as a system of working groups and breakout sessions that all gathered at the general assembly to reach consensus (Graeber 2013). Although describing themselves as representative of a variety of demands or maybe no demands at all, the Occupy Wall Street movement could in general be characterized as a critique of accelerated financial capitalism and the growing inequalities in the US society. OWS activists were often characterized as media-savvy in terms of launching the movement in and through social media. Commen­ tators and pundits often refer to the tens of thousands of tweets, Facebook likes and shares, as well as YouTube clips, in order to describe the movement and its proportion. Rather than discussing the political practices and infrastructures established in the camp, the representation and media practices came to represent the movement. At the same time, OWS activists described a growing divide between the logics of immediacy that social media establish and the everyday life in the encampment. The constant need to produce content that has the potential to attract external attention was set against the lengthy general assembly and meetings of the Spokes Council. The book does not attempt to compare the movements in terms of their organizational forms per se, but asks what has changed in their media work and what the political consequences of these changing media practices are. Three major tropes emerged as crucial to answering these questions and for providing the diachronic analysis: time, space and speed. These come very close to what Michel Foucault once considered as the big three, namely territory, speed and communication (Reeves and Packer 2013). The analysis follows my big three also in its chapter structure. After providing a more thorough background on crisis and critique and the relationship to media practices in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 is dedicated to protest times, Chapter 3 considers protest spaces and Chapter 4 investigates protest speeds. 10

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Introduction

PROTEST TIMES In the context of protest, time or timing play a crucial role. Often media technologies are considered to allow for time-saving forms of organization, but media technologies are much more than timesavers. They also allow for what Paddy Scannell has called common public time, namely the experience of a shared timeframe and way of moving in the world. Considering the increased importance of time already in the 1980s, Paul Virilio (1986), for example, argues that politics becomes less about physical space, but more about the time regimes of technologies, which marks what he calls a shift from geoto chrono-politics. Harold Innis, considering both time and space as central configurations of civilizations, suggests that pre-modern societies are characterized by a time bias, while modern societies are obsessed with space, i.e. the expansion over large territories (Innis 2007/1950). Innis argues that ideally different media technologies supported by social policies would be present simultaneously and consequently balance these biases. In that sense, social policy should serve both space and time and prevent the excess of one over the other. According to Innis, media technologies alter ‘the structure of interest (the things thought about) by changing the character of symbols (the things thought with), and by changing the nature of community (the arena in which thought developed)’ (Carey 1989, p. 180). While assuming the multi-layeredness of temporal experience as proposed by, for example, Henri Bergson and his notion of duration (durée), I am interested in regimes of time that are suggested by (media) technologies allowing for specific experiences of time to emerge (for a distinction between time and temporality, see Connerton 2009). Recently, the idea of the annihilation of duration or the end of temporality as proposed by, for example, Fredric Jamesons (2003) and Jonathan Crary (2013) has gained more attention. This argument is, however, not new. Harvey (1990) has, for example, discussed 11

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the consequences of contradictions of capitalism for the time and space configurations. He argued that inherent crises of capitalism find expression in temporal or spatial displacement. In terms of temporal displacement, he referred to the acceleration of turnover time. Similarly, other scholars have suggested that technologies that are of importance for structuring time and experiencing temporality are connected to the general mode of production in society (Fuchs 2014; Manzerolle 2014). As John Durham Peters (2013) pointed out, calendars and clocks are central media technologies for creating and maintaining the temporal regimes of modern society. Hence, media technologies also establish particular time regimes by the way they structure the usage. Currently, commentators speak of culture of (digital) immediacy within which particularly social media are built on the principle of newness and permanent updating creating dynamic media environments. For protest movements and their organization, this means potentially acceleration and adaption to the temporal logic, while other practices such as political decision making can only be sped up to a certain degree. Chapter 2 investigates changing time regimes of media technologies that have relevance for the protest movements considered here.

PROTEST SPACES In conjuncture with time, space is central for protest movements. Their protest marches disrupt the routines in the cityscape, for example, and protest camps established spatial infrastructure serving both daily life and protest organization. With the emergence of a globalized media environment, the question of space – or rather the disappearance of space, as some have argued – gained extensive interested by academics and intellectuals. In this discussion change is often foregrounded and emphasized; change that encompasses the annihilation of spatial distances through media technologies 12

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and improved means of transportation. Others, such as Doreen Massey (2005), have been critical of the idea that the importance of space is diminished by way of technology and through overcoming distances ever quicker. She emphasized the continued importance of the gendered and class-based character of space. Movements such as Occupy Wall Street showed the importance of spatial practices producing a space for critique that is not only discursively needed (for example, through representations and dissemination of content), but also in a very material and physical sense. The camp infrastructure, the being together and the common marches throughout the city, were crucial as political practices of the movement. These spatial practices intersected with media practices. Activists composed tweets, fanzines, films and images in the camp or live-streamed from smaller protest events extending the presence of Occupy Wall Street over the boundaries of Liberty Square. In that context it is helpful to be reminded of Levebvre’s work on the production of space that is linked to technology and knowledge. In his understanding, the production of space is but one mode of production that establishes a specific set of relationships. The protest movements considered here established among others media practices as critique of the dominant mode of production, namely the capitalist, exploitative spatiality. At the same time the activists are most often relying on technologies that were developed according to the current capitalist mode of production, including its particular shaping of the production of space. Chapter 3 explores this contradiction and discusses the political consequences of the divide.

PROTEST SPEEDS The notion of speed is bringing together time and space as it describes the movement through space in a certain amount of time. The assumption here is that the velocity of internal logics of media 13

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technologies has consequences for the users and their intentions, for example political mobilization and organization. Speed as a theoretical category allows us to capture the increasing desynch­ ronization with political practices. As Tomlinson (2007) suggests, I am linking the discussion of speed to the temporality of (media) technologies. During the industrial era, speed was mainly associated with social progress. With the post-industrial era, speeding up is increasingly dictated by global capital and culture that is facilitated by means of communication. Tomlinson argues further that we are witnessing a development from effortful speed to effortless, immediate delivery. Vincent Manzerolle (2014) suggests, building on Tomlinson, that ubiquitous computing ‘tending towards realtime, networked communication and a collapsing of spatial distance, tendency of contemporary media to accelerate the circulation of information’ (Manzerolle, 2014: 211), which leads to the condition of immediacy. Based on this analysis one could argue that there are diverging timelines of media practices and other social practices such as protest. While media practices have been speeding up since the 1930s, political practices have only done so to a certain degree. In that context, immediacy, real-time and high-speed are current descriptors of a speeding up media ecology. Chapter 4 explores the ways in which activists have navigated an increasingly faster media environment both through resistance and adaptation.

PROTEST TECHNOLOGIES The final chapter presents the general conclusions on the relationship between crisis and critique and how protest movements are employ­ ing media technologies in an effort to express fundamental critique during these critical junctures. In this chapter, I review the notion of temporal and spatial media regimes based on the previous analysis and propose them as helpful theoretical entry points to develop an 14

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understanding of how protest media technologies shape activism. Consequently, the chapter suggests that the usage of protest technologies is deeply intertwined with power relationships that need to be addressed and acknowledged by the activists. Furthermore, it points to an analytical divide between inward protest technologies that provide the necessary infrastructures for organizing and outward protest technologies that are focused on attention and gaining external support. Activists need to further develop an understanding of the divide and employ protest technologies that serve both purposes while unveiling the sets of power relations connected with the protest technologies used.

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CHAPTER 1

Crisis and critique

What role do crisis situations play for critique and how can critique further crises towards progressive social change? Before exploring protest time, protest space and protest speed, it is necessary to define crisis and its relationship to critique more extensively to develop an understanding for the backdrop of the protest movements and their relation to media technologies more broadly. Economic crises are critical junctures and potentially mark a state of exception and potentially enhance crucial change. Robert McChesney discusses critical junctures as ‘rare, brief periods in which dramatic changes are debated and enacted drawing from a broad palette of options, followed by long periods in which structural or institutional change is slow and difficult’ (McChesney 2007, 56). He argues further that critical junctures in media and communications occur under the following conditions: • There is a revolutionary new communication technology that undermines the existing system. • The content of the media system, especially the journalism, is increasingly discredited or seen as illegitimate. • There is a major political crisis – severe social disequilibrium – in which the existing order is no longer working, dominant institutions are increasingly challenged, and there are major movements for social reform.

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Critical junctures could hence be considered as a period of opportunity for directing social change through different actors. Crises such as the Great Depression, the economic crisis of the 1970s (often labelled the oil crisis1) and the Great Recession are examples of critical junctures. At the same time, capitalism confines infinite critical junctures in different sectors of society that are related to each other but might appear in slightly different periods (Foster and McChesney 2012). Identifying critical junctures as such becomes an ontological and epistemological question. Economic crises that appear in conjunction with social, cultural and intellectual crises are important points of crystallization in the analysis of change in media and communications, too. They potentially fill a discursive void enhanced by the crisis through new media practices (Koselleck 1973/1959). Consequently, media become arenas as well as objects in the struggle of directing social change during critical junctures (McChesney 1993). Following Raymond Williams, means of communication are also means of production, which is particularly true in so-called information-based societies nowadays. Williams argues: (…) the means of communication have a specific productive history, which is always more or less directly related to the general productive historical phases of productive and technical activity. It is so, second, because the historically changing means of communication have historically variable relations to the general complex of productive forces and to the general social relationships which are produced by them and which the general productive forces both produce and reproduce. These historical variations include both relative homologies between the means of communication and more general social productive 1 For a critical discussion of the origin of the 1970s economic crisis and whether it should be known as the oil crisis see Castells (1980). 18

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forces and relationships, and, most marked in certain periods, contradictions of both general and particular kinds. (Williams 2005/1980, 50)

Taking major economic crises as a starting point for the analysis rather than defining distinct conditions of critical junctures in media and communications also suggests a non-media centric approach that puts the social and economic circumstances rather than technological changes into focus (Couldry 2003, 2012; Toynbee 2009) and follows the approach of Graham Murdock and Peter Golding (1973) in conducting an historical analysis of the general industrialization in order to understand changes in the media landscape. At the same time, major developments of capitalism from organized, industrial capitalism in the 1930s to the beginning of neoliberalism in the early 1970s and current, full-bloom neoliberalism of fast finance capitalism are linked to the transitional points of crises, namely a development from the New Deal of the 1930s and the OPEC crisis of the 1970s marking the development from Fordist to post-Fordist organization of the economy (including principles of outsourcing and deindustrialization of the capitalist centres in the West) (McGuigan 2014). The three crises are three distinct stages of change towards the neoliberal capitalism in its current form. Media technologies are both influenced and drivers of this economic system.

CRISIS: CAPITALISM IN A PERMANENT STATE OF EXCEPTION? Reinhart Koselleck and Michaela Richter (2006) trace the meaning of crisis from its Greek origin in legal, theological and medical discourses until the present. They conclude that the term has always had very specific, discipline-bound meanings. However, the diverse ways of using crisis share the understanding of a period of 19

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life-changing alternatives ‘meant to answer questions about what is just or unjust, what contributes to salvation or damnation, what furthers health or brings death’ (Koselleck and Richter 2006, 361). In this decisive moment, judgement, reason, decision and reflection is needed to resolve the crisis. The authors show the different ways to understand crisis, which range from a unique, historical moment to a recurring experience, especially in the case of chronic illness, and illustrate the flexibility of the term. ‘In this way, the concept of crisis can generalize the modern experience to such an extent that “crisis” becomes a permanent concept of “history”’ (Koselleck and Richter 2006, 371). Koselleck and Richter find the roots of the term mainly outside the economic field. Only starting in the mid-1800s and after the revolution in 1848 and the global economic crisis of 1857, there was a broad application of crisis for the economy. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels describe crisis as the time period when economic cycles are turning. Crisis theory has – based on Marx – discussed crises as an integrated part of capitalism. Christian Fuchs (2015), as well as John Foster and Robert McChesney (2012), argue that capitalism constitutes itself as a constant, never-ending crisis, while there are outstanding moments of deep crisis. Even free market supporters have suggested crises as integral to capitalism and redefined them as periods of renewal and so-called creative destruction (Florida 2005). In the Marxist tradition crises are often linked to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which is explained with changes in productivity based on technological innovation. Accordingly, machines would replace workers and increase productivity. However, additional value can only be produced through labour. Consequently, the increased output based on automation has less value and the profit rate tends to fall, according to Marx. Discussing the crises of the 1970s in the USA, Castells proposes that the tendency of the profit rate to fall potentially explains why crisis is an integral part of capitalism. Throughout capitalist production, the profit rate necessarily falls as 20

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there is a tendency for monopolies to emerge and the composition of capital becomes less diverse based on less competition. Competition leads to increased exploitation of workers in terms of working hours, payment and working conditions. With falling salaries, consumers have less opportunity to participate in the market. Less consumption leads to overproduction of commodities as demand is massively restricted. At the same time investments decline, which results in an over-accumulation of capital (Castells 1980). This description of the tendency of the profit-rate to fall explains the economic reasons that Marx and Engels identified why crises are necessarily part of capitalism. The constantly worsening of the economic and therewith social conditions would lead to a proletarian revolution, which is linked to the critical potential that is set free in times of extreme crisis. Instead the Western world has experienced a transition from marketoriented to market-manipulated society (Castells 1980). Although Marxian theories and the like seem to imply that crises are single or a series of events, they are also discursive and material complex formations that are constantly under negotiation. Social actors are, hence, constantly in an interpretative struggle about the meaning of crisis and its consequences. I consider capitalism as being constantly in crisis, but producing accelerated moments of deep crises that are frequently discussed as economic crises or crises in the economic cycle. Consequently, I ask for the role of media technologies for protest movements to use these transitional moments for potential social change.

The 1930s Great Depression The first transitional moment considered here is the Great Depression, whose narrative predominantly starts with the 1929 crash of the stock market that had extensive consequences for broad layers of the American society. Naturally this story starts much earlier with the economic growth during the progressive era and the roaring 21

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1920s, which rested on shaky grounds (Smith 2014). The 1920s were characterized by a fundamental economic change in spending shifting from traditional sectors, including textile and steel, to new sectors including mass-produced automobiles, household appliances, processed foods, tobacco and the expansion of the service sector. However, the process of change was still in full swing and the newer production areas were not big enough yet to compensate for the extreme losses in the traditional ones. At the same time, speculation took over at the stock market and increased buying of stock on margins pushed up stock prices rapidly, creating a financial bubble. This speculation was supported by the ‘small’ government installed during the progressive era with almost no regulation of the banking sector. During the era of the roaring twenties inequalities increased dramatically. John Scott Smith (2014) points out that the income of the wealthiest 1 per cent grew by 53 per cent between 1920 and 1929. The rest of the population did not experience such a growth in income, which constrained the purchasing power. With over 100,000 businesses closing between 1929 and 1930, the GNP dropping by 31 per cent, 30 per cent of unemployment of the nonfarm workforce and between 400,000 to 2 million people becoming transient travellers, the Great Depression lasted between 1929 and 1941 and became the longest and most severe recession of the twentieth century. This, of course, had crucial consequences for the everyday life of the American population. Many became homeless, malnutrition led to illnesses and suicide rates increased exponentially. The suffering materialized in the daily picture of bread and soup lines where the unemployed were queuing for food from charity organizations, while social relief and government support was non-existent. Hooversvilles – named after the president Herbert Hoover – in the outskirts of many larger cities symbolized the economic downturn and daily suffering of the people gathering the homeless and unemployed in small camps (Feigenbaum, Frenzel and 22

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McCurdy 2013). The politics of ‘small’ government only changed after Hoover left office and Franklin D. Roosevelt instigated the New Deal, including certain measures for social relief.

The 1970s Oil and Fiscal Crisis Similar to the Great Depression, the Oil Crisis of the 1970s is considered to have a clear starting point, namely the increased energy demand caused by exponential industrial growth in Europe, Japan and the USA. This growing oil demand was met with pressure from the OPEC countries delaying and completely stopping oil delivery, which caused serve delays in the production process of the industrial nations leading to decreasing profit rates. Of course the story of the crisis goes much further back and is discussed extensively by Manuel Castells (1980). He sets out to demystify the narrative of the oil crisis by pointing to a crisis in the mode of production that is deeply rooted in class relationships. Castells relies on Marxist crisis theory of the law of the profit rate to fall in order to explain the economic crisis of the 1970s. The main factor in his eyes was the changing composition of capital and the relationship between dead labour of machines, buildings and raw materials and living labour, namely workers. When living labour is increasingly replaced by dead labour the profit rate has to necessarily fall as living labour is the only source for value production. These deeply unequal class relationships have been fundamentally questioned by the social movements of the 1960s. Castells argues that the economic crisis did not cause massive social disruption, but that the social disruption of the 1960s fundamentally questioned the structure of social relationships in capitalist societies. Either way, the economic crisis became a crucial point of transition, enhancing forms of social critique that were already put forward by the 1960s social movements such as the civil rights movement, student revolts, anti-war activities, public workers’ struggle, women’s liberation etc. 23

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Besides the oil crisis, the local communities of New York were faced with a fiscal crisis that led to tremendous budget cuts including lay-offs in the public sector, particularly of police officers, teachers and fire fighters. This caused a precarious situation for vulnerable groups in the city having to live with less income and social welfare in an increasingly polarized cityscape that allowed housing speculation through market deregulation. Especially low-income housing became a scarcity, with landlords abandoning around 38,000 units per year with the argument that low rents would make the maintenance of the buildings as well as water and electricity supply impossible. In that context, more and more tenants were organizing in order counter the developments that were further supported by the relaxation of rent control policies in 1970/71.

The 2010s Great Recession The narrative of the Great Recession generally starts with the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Besides Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and later the Citigroup, Bank of America, Northern Rock, UBS and many more international financial institutions went bankrupt in 2008. Christian Marazzi (2011) points out that the collapse of Lehman Brothers was not a single episode, but marked the crisis of the whole global banking sector and had its roots in the earlier subprime market crisis. The Great Recession has often been described as the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression when it comes to intensity, length and breadth (Reinhart and Rogoff 2009), with an unemployment rate rising by 7 per cent in four years. Obama’s stimulus programme of 789.5 billion USD was not even remotely enough to fill the gap between outputs of goods and the rapidly diminishing consumer spending as well as business investments. Michael Gould-Wartofsky (2015) complicates the picture further and identifies three interlinked crises: the immediate financial 24

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crisis at Wall Street that became obvious with the bankruptcy of Lehman brothers; the social crisis that went hand in hand with the financial crisis including unemployment, underemployment and foreclosures; and the crisis of representative democracy. To illustrate the consequences of these crises, he states that ‘over 17 trillion of household wealth was wiped out during the Great Recession, much of it in the form of home equity and savings. As a consequence, Americans’ median net worth fell by 39 per cent from 2007 to 2010, with the greatest pain felt by “younger, less-educated and historically disadvantaged minority families”. Between 2007 and 2010 more than 9 million homes went into foreclosure, 2.8 million of them in 2010 alone’ (Gould-Wartofsky 2015, 19). This identification of a threefold crisis situation resonates with Castells’ (1980) analysis of the 1970s, when he argues that the crisis is not only economic but also linked to political and ideological crises. This multiplicity of crises is, however, characteristic for the expansion of advanced capitalism. The explanations for long-term causes for the crisis are varied. John Foster and Robert McChesney (2012) argue that the main issues were structural problems of market capitalism, namely overaccumulation on the global scale that is based on the monopolization of multinational corporations and the financialization of the accumulation process that is largely based on speculation and fictitious capital. Similarly, Christian Marazzi (2011) suggests that the economic crisis of 2008 should be understood as a consequence of financialization that is a vital form of capital accumulation rather than a malfunction of the economic system; it is the outcome of the dominantly cognitive production of value nowadays.

CRITIQUE: FILLING THE VOID? If crisis marks a critical juncture also in terms of critique, it is important to ask what kind of critique is made possible and is required. The term 25

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critique – according to Raymond Williams – has been broadly used since the sixteenth and seventeenth century and is connected to the notion of fault-finding. He argues that it is mostly used to connote taste and therewith is often linked to class-based judgement. Most often the history of ideas of critique is traced to the enlightenment and Kant’s urge for critical faculties of man that really make him free. In that sense, Kant captured the general structure of feelings of the enlightenment expressed by the emerging bourgeois class that criticized the absolutist state and God-given power of the king. The emergence of mass media such as the first periodicals and pamphlets went hand in hand with the strengthening of the bourgeoisie and a growing social critique. Later on – specifically in the twentieth century – particular forms of critique were institutionalized through the educational system as well as the support of specific critical faculties as expressed in research, arts and literature. However, the critique fostered by state institutions remains within certain boundaries that are already pre-defined. Although there was – and still is – a growing interest and investment in the critical subject, it is rarely a radical critique questioning the society as such that is encouraged. It is hence critical judgement that assumes pre-given categories that is reinforced rather than the ‘questioning of our most sure ways of knowing’, as Judith Butler argues in her seminal essay on the question What is critique? (Butler 2001). Koselleck (1973/1959) reasons similarly that critique in its radical sense of questioning fundamental ways of knowing and understanding the world, as well as basic categories of society, shakes the grounds of society and potentially causes crisis in the first place. Consequently, he establishes a slightly different relationship between crisis and critique than initially suggested here. However, he points to the different forms and degrees of critique in its consequentiality. Steven Maras conceptualizes critique more broadly as a space of possibility, which is based on ‘discursive, rhetorical, conceptual and political work that supports different kinds of action’ (Maras 2007, 26

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169). In that sense, media practices of protest movements can be understood as carving out this space of possibilities negotiating preestablished categories. Activists not only employ different media and communication technologies as vehicles to spread their critique, but their media practices can and should be understood as critique as such. In the context of media installations, Jussi Parikka similarly states that ‘media critique is not only about saying things, it is about design and materiality – doing critique in an alternative fashion, against the grain’ (Parikka 2012, 43).

PROTEST MOVEMENTS’ MEDIA PRACTICES Analysing media practices as a form of critique links up to a growing field of inquiry, namely media practice research. Nick Couldry’s (2004, 2012) attempt to rethink the research agenda of the media and communications as a field in 2004 and his more recent reflections on media as practice have been repeatedly suggested as a starting point for research also within the field of protest and social movement research (e.g. Mattoni 2012; Barassi and Treré 2012). Although the relationship between structure and agency implicit in the notion has been contested (Hobart 2010), several scholars suggest media practices are a fruitful entry point to analyse negotiations of structure and agency that are irrevocably intertwined, as for example put forward by Giddens’ (1984) in his notion of structuration (Bird 2010; Postill 2010). Couldry suggests Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty as philosophical roots and defines media practices, while relying strongly on Schatzki (1996), as an ‘open set of practices relating to, or oriented around, media’ (Couldry 2004, 117). Couldry argues that media practices are concerned with specific regularities in actions that relate to media, and regularities of context and resources that enable media-related actions. Ultimately media practices stand in for ‘what people are doing in relation to media in the contexts in which 27

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they act’ (Couldry 2012, 35). Following Couldry’s understanding, this encompasses practices that are firstly directed to media (for example, a letter to the editor), secondly actions that involve media, but do not necessarily have them as the object or major aim (for example, everyday talk that takes media content as a starting point) and thirdly actions that depend on the prior existence, presence or functioning of media (for example, hacktivism). Alice Mattoni (2012) mapped activist media practices enc­ ompassing media knowledge practices and relational media practices of precarious workers in Italy. Media knowledge practices refer to how individual activists and activist groups interact with ubiquitous media messages that are circulating in the media environment. These practices furthermore encompass the production of media literacy and self-reflexive perception of interactions with and expectations from the media. This reflects the idea that activists have different roles: they act as news audiences, news producers and news sources before, during and after specific mobilizations. In contrast, relational media practices refer to the construction and sustenance of network relations by individual activist and activist collectives with media professionals, technological support infrastructures and the creation of their own mediated communicative spaces. Activist media practices in general are based on the dialectical relationship between practices and knowledge. Mattoni (2012) argues that knowledge provides a set of norms and rules, here more concretely about the media sphere. Knowledge, in turn, rests on experiences related to the media sphere. Hence, knowledge becomes a dynamic concept, where a change of rules and norms is possible. In that context media practices are shaped by the double articulation of technology. From a double articulation perspective, online publics and issues result from linking, assembling, connecting, and thus hybri­dizing diverse code and politics elements and actors. As 28

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such, there is a need to pay attention to how politics mobilize code at the same time as code formalizes politics according to specific informal logics. (Langlois et al. 2009, 417)

Juris (2012) refers to cultural logics where discursive practices and their semiotic framework are produced and reproduced through concrete interpretational practices. These interpretations are shaped by technological, social and economic context. Drawing on this under­standing of cultural logics, he suggests that 1990s and 2000s social movements were characterized by the cultural logic of net­ working (Juris 2012). The cultural logic of the network refers to the framework of how to understand the actions and practices of others. This understanding is shaped by the interactions with networking technologies and gives rise to particular forms of political networking practices. In that sense, the cultural logic of the net­ work puts horizontal rather than vertical connections forward and helps other political actors to understand and interpret such net­working practices. Mattoni and others that engaged with media practices of a different kind aimed mainly at mapping out what activist groups or individuals are actually doing with or directed towards the media. Couldry argues, for example, that ‘behind the recent turn to “practice” in social theory lies an interest in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of language. This involved a key move to understanding language as action in the world, by contrast with an older view of language as the expression of meanings that must somehow “correspond” to the world’ (Couldry 2012, 34). In that sense ‘language is an open-ended set of practices embedded in convention’ (Couldry 2012, 35). While Couldry asks for the place of media practices in relation to other practices, i.e. if they have gained more importance over time (Couldry and Hepp 2013; Hepp and Hartmann 2010; Hepp and Krotz 2014), it is rather the role of media practices as forms of critique that is of interest here. 29

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Media practices potentially open up new spaces of critique while activists have to navigate specific properties of media technologies in terms of temporality and spatiality that do not necessarily support criticality. Especially the temporal and spatial properties of media technologies lead me to develop a media archaeological approach to media practices.

AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL APPROACH TO MEDIA PRACTICES Media technologies crucially structure activism in terms of time and space, which links to media archaeology’s aim to provide a ‘rediscovery of cultural and technical layers of previous media’ (Ernst 2011). Rather than analysing media as discourse or narratives, media archaeology considers the material properties that constitute media technologies as well as their temporal and spatial consequences. Wolfgang Ernst gives the following example to illustrate the media archaeological approach: While a Greek vase can be interpreted by simply being looked at, a radio or a computer does not reveal its essence by monumentally being there but only when being processed by electromagnetic waves or calculating processes. (Ernst 2011, 241)

According to Jussi Parikka, media archaeology is interested in ‘materialities of cultural practice, of human activity as embedded in both cognitive and affective appreciations and investments, but also embodied, phenomenological accounts of what we do when we invent, use and adapt media technologies’ (Parikka 2012, 163). The ‘techno-epistemological configurations underlying the discur­sive surface of mass media’ (Ernst 2011, 239) in connection with questions of adaptation and resistance against hegemonic media regimes through activist practices are therefore at the heart of 30

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analysis. Conside­r­ing what Ernst has called the Eigenzeit of media technologies vis-à-vis temporalities of political, organizational and spatial practices of activists that are engaged in the movements contributes a fresh perspective on protest. The combination of media archaeology and media practice theory is fruitful as it allows for a combination of a materialist perspective on media with experiential aspects of media as practice. According to Raymond Williams it is the concrete practice that gives meaning to media technology and its particular properties as ‘(…), the new technology is itself a product of a particular social system, and will be developed as an apparently autonomous process of innovation only to the extent that we fail to identify and challenge its real agencies’ (Williams 1974, 135). Media archaeology has often been accused of being mediacentric and apolitical with its sometimes mathematical approach to understanding media (Galloway 2012). Combining an archaeological analysis with protest activism allows us to develop a media-specific analysis that is at the same time media-centred, but not mediacentric. The media practices and their changes over time since the 1930s follow and confirm specific regimes of time that are inherent in media technologies. At the same time, specific practices of resistance question the hegemonic spatial and temporal structuration of certain media technologies. In Chapter 5, for example, I point to different practices attacking the current regime of digital immediacy by Occupy Wall Street activists. Hence the technological infrastructures that have often been described as neutral tools are re-politicized. The archaeological approach is, however, not concerned here with one specific media form that is traced in its different permutations over time. Historical events of economic crises that lead to largescale protest are the main entry point to investigate dominant media technologies and their implied regimes in comparison. Sewell (2005) engages in eventful history; his writing stresses specific events that 31

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transformed or have the potential to transform social structures significantly. Large-scale economic crises and their consequences have this potential for structural changes. Hence, history is a dialectical process oscillating between the agencies of subjects in relation to given conditions (Kumar 2006). The protest movements become empirical entry points to trace these structural changes and the diachronic comparative approach allows us to disentangle connections between media-related conditions to express critique and large-scale economic crises for social change.

ARCHIVING CRITIQUE: ARCHIVING PROTEST MOVEMENTS? Following the definition of critique as establishing a space of possibilities, the question emerges on how to study this form of critique historically. Archives as institutions and discursive formations allow for specific investigations based on their organization. The archive in relation to media history, as well as histories of communities and oppressed voices, has had a prominent place in discussions for some time. However, the debates regarding the potential of and for the archive gained renewed attention with digital media seemingly making the archiving of everything possible as ‘We are all [digital] archivists now!’ (Owens 2014). In the context of a rejuvenated archiving movement embodying a certain form of social critique that finds expression in growing numbers of community archives, I engaged with different forms of the archive. While personal accounts of archival experience are often entrenched with nostalgia and a particular aura of engaging with the physicality of ‘voices from the past’, archives are always also an institution, an apparatus encompassing a specific governance (Packer 2010). Packer further defines the archive as a ‘wide-ranging set of discursive and non-discursive utterances, statements and grammars, 32

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of architectures, diagrams and back-up plans’ (Packer 2010, 90). The archive represents a physical repository of discourses pre-selected according to what seems important enough to be preserved for the future and they are structured according to a specific code of the archival organization. Consequently, it is often organized in collections gathering materials on institutions, central figures or events. Furthermore, an archive is organized from the standpoint of the present as is the research within the existing collections. As Harriet Bradley (1999) argues, the archive refers to pre-existing documentary collections, research archives and personal collections. All three are touched upon in the project at hand. Community archives, for example, put access to documents as their first priority and in that way express a critique of dominant history writing. These archives ‘from below’ are critically challenging the dominant way of telling history from official, mainstream archives. Often these spaces are self-organized and are working with ephemera, posters, books, pins, fanzines and other material expressions from the communities they represent. In that sense, self-archiving practices of social movements recreate what William Urrichio has called a simultaneity through the ‘extension of vision in real time’ (Uricchio 2005). The modern statesponsored archive emerges out of an only slowly evolving discourse of archival rules and codes; community archives are more loosely organized to allow for openness of the organization, inflowing materials, fluctuating volunteers who might not have completely internalized the order of things. At the same time, community archives can be considered as counter spaces or protest space against these current technological logics in different ways. Firstly, through their practices of doing things slow in terms of decision-making processes, secondly through their main purpose of preserving the past and in that sense countering the dominant focus on presentness and nowness that Canadian media scholar Harold Innis diagnosed for 33

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societies dominated by space-based media, i.e. media that enhance connection over space, but are less durable in their materiality. Part of the political work within the OWS encampment were self-archiving practices that included mining of born-digital mater­ ials. The motivation for mining digital data by the activists was very much in line with arguments for community archives, i.e. to counter misrepresentation of the movement and gain power over the construction of a historical narrative. Additionally John Erde (2014) showed, there were different institutions and actors interested in archiving OWS. As institutional actors, representatives of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and the New York Historical Society went to the encampment to collect flyers and posters for their own collections. However, the activists themselves were critical towards the archiving activities of these institutional actors and established more lasting connections with alternative archives such as the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, which is now housing one of the OWS hard drives. In a mission statement the OWS archiving working group formulates its goals as follows: The OWS Archives working group is committed to preserving materials created as part of or in reaction to Occupy Wall Street. The group is comprised of citizen and professional archivists who currently focus on collection and cataloguing of analogue and digital archives. While nearly anything is arguably an archive, the group focuses on posters, publications, signs, unique ephemera, art and fliers, as well as digital archives including digital video, live streams, audio files, oral histories, images, electronic documents, websites and social media content. The reasons to save these materials are beyond simply collecting for posterity: Occupiers actions are represented through these archives. The archives the OWS Archives working group is 34

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gathering and protecting carry powerful messages to those who access them in the immediate or distant future (from working document on the OWS hard drive).

In terms of the digital materials, there were several attempts to develop own analyses and construct movement-based narratives. During at least three hackathons and data share days activists tried to find ways of analysing large amounts of digital data such as tweets, pictures and video streams in order to develop own narratives of the movement. In general, this book draws on a variety of materials, ranging from extensive archival papers and files to in-depth interviews with activists concerned with media practices. The material could be distinguished into three general categories, namely central figures, organizations and media productions. These categories also reflect the way in which modern, institutional archives are organized. This is of course constraining and potentially eliminates important practices of actors with less strong institutional affiliation. However, I have read between the lines to find cross-references and contextualize the archival materials with fictional accounts of the particular era (for example, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, John Dos Passos’ U.S.A., John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath).

OVERVIEW MATERIALS Central figures • Personal paper collections (Carl Winter, Sam Winn, Sam Adams Darcy). • Autobiographies of activists (William Z. Foster, Sadie van Veen Amter, Israel Amter). • FBI records of central organizers. • In-depth interview (with OWS activists mainly from Press and Media WG). 35

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Organizations • Records of central organizations (Communist party, socialist party, Labour movement organizations, metro­ politan council on housing). • Research collections (Ronald Lawson Papers including mainly materials of research project on tenants’ movement). • Minutes (Press WG, Media WG).

Media productions • Reports in mainstream news media. • Self-produced media materials (pamphlets, recordings from housing crimes trial, Occupied Wall Street Journal). • Hard drive with born digital materials (live stream clips from events, tweets and Facebook feeds, survey among the activists).

CONCLUSION: CRITICAL JUNCTURES AS HISTORIES OF MEDIA PARTICIPATION In what follows, the book presents an in-depth engagement with media practices of protest movements as expressions of social critique in times of crisis. In contrast to many current investigations of media technology allowing for these mediated protest practices, I am carving out the specific temporal, spatial and organizational properties that have changed over time and ask for their political consequences. The book is hence not so much a history of protest movements, but a history of media practices and participation in and through media in transitional times of economic crises. Following economic crises as critical junctures allows for an analysis of media technologies that have already become banal in practice rather than overemphasizing their newness and reinforcing technological enthusiasm and digital exceptionalism. This in turn allows for a critical assessment of their potential for becoming spaces of possibility for social change. 36

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CHAPTER 2

Protest times: the temporality of protest media practices

The temporality of media practices as well as the time regimes that activists are navigating is essential not only for the possibility of protest, but also for the possibility of critique that is put forward by the protesters. Protest marks an accelerated temporality that is preceded by tedious preparations and organization for the activists. At the same time, protest in the form of marches or protest camps establishes a new kind of temporality for those directly involved and those affected in their daily routines and flows. In that sense, protesters are acting within a protest time that is related to a more general regime of temporality, or as Veronica Barassi (2015) calls it, hegemonic perception of time. In recent years, media technologies – especially social media – have been depicted as time and resource savers that amplify the possibility to organize, mobilize and spread protest narratives (Tufekci 2014; Papacharissi 2015). However, the temporality of specific media technologies is not always only helpful for protest movements in terms of organization. Joan Donavan (2013, Terranova and Donovan 2013) has argued that social media such as Facebook might mobilize high numbers of supporters for a short while, but do not engage peripheral activists in the long run. There are still organizers needed who maintain strong ties over time. In Donavan’s own experience as an activist involved with Occupy LA, there is a difference between 37

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the temporal regime or hegemony of social media and protest organ­ ization discernable. Donavan describes a gap between social media time and the time of political organization that is crucial for the long-term rational of a movement. While short-term mobilization is helpful in terms of attracting high numbers filling squares, in order to reach long-term goals of social change, sustainable forms of activism are necessary. In this context, it is interesting to ask for the changes over time when it comes to media technologies’ temporality and political activism. Is the increasing gap something that has only emerged with the appearance of corporate social media or have there been clashing temporalities between media time and time of political practices before? Or, as Siegfried Zielinski has put it, it is about: [w]ho owns time? (…). Between the beginning of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was a marked shift in the quality of political and economic power relations that both involved the media and drove their development: away from rights of disposal over territories and toward rights of disposal over time; less with regard to quantity, and more in connection with refining its structure, rhythm, and the design of its intensity. This shift is not immediately apparent in global relationships, but if one scrutinizes the microstructures of the most technologically advanced nations and their corporations, it is quite apparent. (Zielinski 2006, 29)

This chapter investigates media technologies’ temporalities and asks for the consequences for the different times of activism. Time regimes that emerge in the context of media technologies stand in a dialectical relation to media practices of, for example, activists. This interrelationship is explored on three levels, namely media production, content distribution and media consumption.

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Protest times

MECHANICAL SPEED: UNEMPLOYED WORKERS’ MOVEMENTS Production time The production time of media content is closely related to forms of organizing the unemployed workers in the 1930s. In the peek years of the crisis, many different organizations aimed to establish a collective experience of unemployment and the precarious everyday lives of the unemployed in order to allow for structural changes. The organizations called for political solutions in addition to, or instead of, philanthropic charity providing food and other essentials or conservative self-help initiatives that targeted the individual and established short-term relief. Besides the Socialist Party, the Labor Movement and the Musteites, a central organization was the Communist Party of the USA, which aimed to organize the unemployed. The party was not only crucial in terms of the protests that were organized, but also when it comes to building long-lasting support infrastructures for the unemployed, including a network of national and local organizing committees. One of the vital features of the organizations and sub-branches established by the Communist Party was a tight network of different media channels (Lasswell and Blumenstock 1939). Bulletins like the Jobless Worker in Minneapolis, the Detroit Unemployed Worker, or in New York, The Lower Manhattan Unemployed Worker, Slops Flops & Cops and Voices from the Waterfront. In New York, activists established a longer-lasting paper – The Hunger-Fighter. The HungerFighter in particular enjoyed a core group of contributors, but always also included calls to submit materials and contribute with stories of extreme need or eviction struggles. Most other, less professional bulletins were completely filled with contributions by the workers that were organized in the unemployed councils and the local committees. Contributions from the local workers were essential for 39

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the papers. The Lower Manhattan Unemployed Worker issued this call for contributions, for example: This bulletin is the voice of the unemployed workers in our neighbourhood. Let us write for it, contribute articles, finances to support it. Read it yourself and distribute them to other workers in our neighbourhood. Send in a letter to us let us know what you think of our bulletin. Trey to make it better for it is your bulletin as well. The Lower Manhattan Unemployed Worker (October Issue 1931)

And The New York Unemployed demanded similarly: The mighty voice of a million unemployed ‘New York Unemployed’. The New York unemployed must be supported by every workers organization, by every worker, irrespective of nationality race or colour. Over one million jobless in New York City, and we need this organizer and agitator, to fight for immediate relief and unemployment insurance. Send your contributions to the New York Unemployed (…).’ The Lower Manhattan Unemployed Worker (October Issue 1931)

At the same time, the production and distribution of the finished issues was crucial for building a strong identification with the local organizing committee as workers spend time together writing up contributions, but also producing the physical copies. In that sense, shop papers and bulletins were collective efforts aiming to gather shared experiences of the unemployed and information on how to organize collectively. These, with the help of mimeographs – cheaply reproduced publications – were central to the organizing strategies, especially of the Communist Party which included paragraphs on the importance of shop papers in handbooks for organizing the unemployed: 40

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Unemployment Papers and Bulletins The issuance of neighbourhood bulletins on the basis of infor­mation secured thru (sic) canvassing; on the general conditions in the particular neighbourhood, dealing with the most immediate demands of the workers both employed and unemployed. Such bulletins have already been proven to be a real means of mobilizing the workers for our support. Printing of City Unemployed News Paper (sic) within 2 months by the City organization. To immediately initiate a drive for such a paper. Organization of a hunger march or demonstration to the Board of estimates meeting in October. To prepare this so that we do not merely issue thousands of leaflets calling the workers for a demonstration at City Hall, but establish neighbourhood organization and prepare marches for several sections of the city upon City Hall with a demonstration there. Holding of preparatory neighbourhood meetings. Delegation to be elected at the various meetings, Unions, mass organizations, branches, etc. (Fighting Methods and Organization Forms of the Unemployed Councils, Communist Party of the United States of America Records TAM.132, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives)

All of these bulletins, leaflets and shop papers were irreplaceable in terms of gathering information for the unemployed as well as sharing stories of the precarious life of the unemployed in the cities of the US. Their content could be categorized in four major subjects: reports from direct actions, e.g. marches, eviction protests and petitions; reports about the specific work of the branches and unemployed councils, e.g. the handling of eviction cases, relief work, how the work of the unemployed council is structured; reports about 41

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unemployment/social insurance and social relief in other countries (mainly Soviet Union) and lastly the description of severe grievances and individual stories, as for example, the following: Victor Gleitzman an unemployed leather goods worker was evicted from his home (…) for non payment (sic) of rent. This worker with his pregnant wife and their two children were forced to sleep through-out a rainy night in Tompkins Square Park. The children were sick from exposure and starvation. The downtown unemployed council put this worker and his family back into his home. The relief committee took this worker to several merchants in the neighbourhood and force them to give relief for this worker. (Lower Manhattan Unemployed Worker October, Leaflet 1931, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives)

The shop papers and bulletins were sold at a price between 1 and 3 cents. They often appeared monthly, but most of them for no longer than seven months, as Lasswell and Blumenstock (1939) found for the Chicago area. Besides mimeographed news outlets, media practices of organizers of the unemployed workers included creative expressions such as poetry. Sadie van Veen Amster, a founding member of the Communist Party in the USA, wrote numerous poems that were partly published in the Daily Worker, the nationwide daily news outlet of the Communist Party (see Lasswell and Blumenstock 1939). Furthermore, the radio – much discussed as a medium having renewed participatory potential by, for example, Brecht (1932) – served as an important channel for the organized workers’ movements.1 It was considered particularly helpful 1 Some radio scripts of Sam Darcy are preserved in the Tamiment collection (Sam Darcy Papers TAM.124, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives). 42

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in the mobilization and agitation work of the activists, particularly because of its temporality. Many workers’ organizers gave radio speeches on a regular basis and the League for Industrial Democracy broadcasted some of their seminar tours live on radio. Sam Darcy was one of the most active Communist leaders appearing on air. The attraction of the radio lay not only in its reach and immediacy, but also in the fact that it was still evolving in terms of organization. Activists, politicians and reformers were still struggling with the character of the radio as a commercial or public entity (Pickard 2015), which had crucial consequences in terms of access to airtime (McChesney 1992, 1993). Consequently, printed materials remained the main focus of the organization as well as source of information for the workers. For the reproduction of the bulletins and shop papers, the workers relied mainly on mimeographs, namely early forms of copy machines, making fast reproduction and a wide spread possible. The mimeograph supported the workers organized in the unemployed councils in their production of materials. However, the speed with which the bulletins were produced can still be considered as effortful, requiring at least three workers handling the mimeograph at the same time in order to print the materials. Hence, the workers had to spend a considerable amount of time together to produce and reproduce the materials, which contributed to sustaining their relationships and identification with the organization. In that sense, producing unemployed papers became a form of organization as Lenin (1969/1902) envisioned it for an all-Russian newspaper.

Distribution time During the peak time of organizing, there were hundreds of shop papers and bulletins all over the country that were produced collectively and distributed in and in front of the factories. The workers distributing the papers in the factories were often under threat of losing their jobs, while the distribution of leaflets or bulletins in the streets could 43

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lead to arrests. The New York Times reported, for example, several arrests of young people handing out leaflets that called for marches or pamphlets as in the case reported below: Girl Communists Jailed. Nell Amter one of three held for giving out pamphlets. Three girls who say were proud to be called Communists were in trouble with the police today. Betty Shean, 16, and Ida Ornofsky, 19, went to jail on ten-day sentences rather than pay 25 cents for distributing Communist literature. Nell Amter, who said she was the daughter of Israel Amter, was in north side jail in default of bail, having been arrested for similar offense today. (New York Times, 1 August 1930, in Special to New York Times)

As in the case of production, in most cases the workers and unemployed were not acting alone while distributing the materials, but spent a considerable amount of time together in order to do so.

Consumption time Similarly, the shop papers were often read together in the family homes or meeting places of the unemployed and then handed over to the next reader. Branch meetings were another place of exchanges and engagement with the materials. In 1931, the New York downtown unemployment council held meetings on a daily basis and open forums on Sundays as well as open-air meetings often at Tompkins Square (between 7th Street and Ave A). Carl Winter described the shared consumption of the papers in an article about the work of the unemployed councils as follows: As a result of these activities, literally millions of people in the United States came to seek the message of the Unemployed Councils. Leaflets were distributed in endless quantities and 44

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were to be seen among crowds of unemployed as the subject of careful reading and discussion. (Building the Unemployed Councils: How we did it, Alfred and Hortense Wagenknecht and Helen and Carl Winter Family Papers TAM.583, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives)

All of the media practices related to production, distribution and consumption point to the necessity of the workers spending time together in order to organize the publication process.

PERPETUAL FLOW: TENANTS’ MOVEMENT Production time The tenants’ activists worked both towards mainstream media as well as produced alternative content in order to mobilize and organize beyond the single block connecting the struggle over the whole cityscape. This way of organizing was again related to the very specific structure of tenants’ mobilization with the Metropolitan Council on Housing being at the heart of city-wide mobilization. The Met Council coordinated the work of local tenant associations, blog committees and political activist groups engaging in housing questions as part of their political work, such as the Squatters Organization Move-In, the Black Panthers, Wor Kuen, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Young Lords. The Met Council gave legal and practical advice for local associations and supported them in direct actions, such as marches, picket lines and rent strikes. In 1970 it organized a large event highlighting the precarious housing situation at that time in New York City. During that event the Met Council was collaborating with different organizations such as the Black Panthers, Wor Kuen and the Young Lords. Previous supporters – such as Gerry Nadel of WINS Radio 1010 – considered this collaboration a 45

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questionable radicalization of the Met Council and its work. Besides the legal advice and suggestion for how to organize neighbourhood associations, the Met Council offered publicity workshops on a regular basis. During these workshops, tenants were advised on how and particularly when to address mainstream media (television, radio, newspapers), how to write press releases and prepare for TV inter­ views. These workshops were mainly geared at adopting temporal modalities of mainstream media. However, during the workshops activists and organizers also discussed the need for alternative means of communication. In that context, Jane Benedict’s own long-running, weekly radio show Rent and Housing in the City on WBAI radio was mentioned as crucial for both internal and external mobilization. The production of the radio show not only required technical skills of handling the recording in the studio, but also permanent struggle for getting the show aired. Several times Jane Benedict exchanged letters with the producers at WBAI about the show not being aired for technical reasons, which were made up in her eyes. Hence, it was with difficulty that the tenant organizers could intercept in the flow of the radio programming successfully. Besides the radio show, the Met Council also issued the monthly newspaper Tenant including the latest information about rent strikes and other direct actions as well as the legal advocacy work and lobbying that the Council attempted. In their handbook for tenant associations, the Met Council collected suggestions in terms of organizing tenants concretely. One important part of the publication is several sections on publicity work for both external and internal purposes. The council particularly recommends newsletters, leaflets and canvassing to win supporters in the housing complex and the neighbourhood. An important part of these activities is the time spent together among the tenants painting banners, writing newsletters and canvassing 46

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in the neighbourhood etc. This time spent together would increase the bonds and identification with the association, the handbook implicitly argued. In general, tenants spent time together in order to produce content for the different outlets, to canvass, draw posters and banners. At the same time, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the activists to intercept in the perpetual flow of images and messages in the complex mass media ecology including radio, newspapers and especially television with the just evolving cable television that the Met Council considered as giving new possibilities for getting the voices of tenants heard. In the organizing handbook, they argue: [Cable television] is the newest of the media, and the one that promises eventually to give and me the opportunity to communicate by television with our neighbours all over the city. The magic word in cable-TV is ‘access’, which ideally will be plentiful and free – anyone with something to say will be able to request free cable-time to say it. (Draft handbook for organizing of tenants, p. 20; Metropolitan Council on Housing Records TAM 173, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives)

However, the production costs were considered still too high and the subscription numbers too low to make a valuable resource for housing activism. However ‘(…) the Met Council probably will become active in producing videotapes for use at building meetings, workshops etc.’ (Draft handbook for organizing of tenants, p. 20; Metropolitan Council on Housing Records TAM 173, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives).

Distribution time In terms of distribution, the activists of the 1970s were navigating a media landscape at the threshold of the 24-hour news cycle, which was much faster than in the 1930s. While the tenant activists tried 47

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to disrupt the perpetual flow of news reporting with their alternative media practices discussed above, their media practices geared towards mainstream media were based mainly on professionalization and adopting the modalities of mass media. The publicity workshops focused not only on how to construct professional and interesting content for newspapers, radio and television channels, but also discussed excessively the necessity of timing for distributing information. According to an observation report of Robert Lawson’s team2 from one of the publicity workshops at the Lenox Hill Neighbourhood Association, activists get the recommendation to ‘mail it [the press release] out only three days before the event and follow it up with a phone call. It is good to make it for immediate release’ and ‘the best time to hold a demonstration is Saturday morning 11 am. It is in time for the 6 pm news and for the Sunday edition of the newspapers’ (Minutes publicity workshop Metropolitan Council on Housing; Ronald Lawson Research Files for the Tenant Movement in New York City TAM 214, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives). Similarly the leaflet From Techniques and devices to get your press release into print by William Worthy details: I believe that most of the Times staff comes to work in the midmorning (10 to 11 am) and that only a skeleton staff is on until then. Therefore, there are few reporters to be sent out on early morning assignments – a factor to be kept in mind in planning any event or press conference that could be set at a later hour. The staff of an afternoon paper such as the Post begins arriving 2 Robert Lawson directed several research projects dedicated several larger research projects on housing activism in New York City. The Tamiment Library houses his research files include observation minutes, Master theses and interview protocols (Lawson 1984). 48

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at work about 1.00 am. So their desk people and reporters are usually available in full numbers in the post-sunrise hours. Thus an 11 am press conference or event may be a good hour for the Times, Post, News and the evening TV newscasts. If aiming to make the early evening TV newscasts with pictoral coverage, try to give the camera crews an hour to return to their studios with their film and 3-4-5 additional hours for developing, editing and fitting into any news show. (Metropolitan Council on Housing Records TAM 173, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives)

Through these recommendations in terms of media tactics, the Met Council reinforced the importance of being right in time with distributing information to mainstream media in order to become part of their news flow. The importance of timing was reiterated in several leaflets, handbooks and publicity workshops and puts an emphasis on the temporal aspects of interacting and adopting modalities of mainstream news media by tenants’ activists.

Consumption time In contrast to the 1930s, the consumption time of media content produced by activists was much more individualized. Not only television, but also newspapers and leaflets were mainly consumed within the family cycle and not within a larger group as, was broadly practiced in the 1930s. Leaflets, for example, were to be kept by the individual tenants in their apartments with current updates on the struggle with the landlord, but were not necessarily shared with other tenants or neighbours. Hence, activists and organizers might have spent time together producing content, but not consuming it.

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PERPETUAL FLOW OF THE 1970S TELEVISION In the 1970s, there was a further acceleration of speed in the (re) production process of media content that intersects with the increased commercialization and globalization of the media technologies employed. In analysing television as the dominant media technology of the 1970s, Raymond Williams (1974) was especially concerned with a change of sequence as programming to sequence as flow. Referring to flow, he aimed to capture the integration of previously separate segments, e.g. a theatre play or musical piece, through commercial breaks and trailers: This phenomenon, of planned flow, is then perhaps the defining characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form. In all communications systems before broadcasting the essential items were discrete. A book or a pamphlet was taken and read as specific item. A meeting occurred at a particular date and place. A play was performed in a particular theatre at a set hour. The difference in broadcasting is not only that these events, or events resembling them, are available inside the home, by the operation of a switch. It is that the real programme that is offered is a sequence or set of alternative sequences of these or other similar events, which are then available in a single dimension and a single operation. (Williams 1974, 86–87)

Television diminishes the distinction between discrete sequences, he argues. At the same time the perpetual flow is available in one easy operation at home, while earlier forms of cultural production would have required a change of place and context. Furthermore, commercial breaks and trailers for future programmes create a constant flow of parallel narratives capturing the viewer for the whole evening. Writing at the threshold of the 24-hour news cycle, Raymond 50

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Williams already captures the experience of a constant stream of new experiences that television offered, while diminishing real beginnings and endings of the presented items that also structured the media practices of tenants’ activists both in terms of producing own content and distributing information to mainstream news media. Firstly, they had to professionalize their tactics in order to intercept in the perpetual flow of competing television channels. Secondly, if they made it into the broadcast media, they became part of a flow of series that negated discrete sequences and hence, their voice potentially disappeared in the flow of news and entertainment items without getting any attention from the viewers.

DIGITAL IMMEDIACY: THE OCCUPY WALL STREET MOVEMENT The numerous working groups in the OWS encampment produced a plethora of media content. The two main groups dedicated to coordinating the activities were the Media Working Group and the Public Relations Working Group. While the Media Working Group was much more focused on content production and organized in four subgroups dedicated to video, live streaming, photography and social media, the Public Relations Working Group focused on the interaction with the mainstream media and coordinated the Twitter activities of the @occupywallstpr account including guidelines for tweeting from this account. The TweetBoat Group (part of the Media Working Group) coordinated the handling of several Twitter accounts with the help of Hootsuit, which allows the coordination of several social media accounts across platforms and applications, to add members and provides social media monitoring. It wasn’t just the activists themselves that considered social media as crucial in their media work, but also many commentators started to tell the story of Occupy Wall Street 51

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with the Adbusters launch of the call to occupy Wall Street, although roots of the movement can be traced back to earlier mobilizations, such as Bloomsbergville,3 as illustrated in Occupying Wall Street a collectively written book by a group of occupiers (Writers for the 99% 2011) and by Michael Gould-Wartofsky (2015). However, starting with the hashtag and mobilization on Twitter is a powerful illustration of how the movement has been described and how it described itself, namely as a social media supported phenomenon, similar to its predecessors of the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Indignados Europe. The focus here is, however, not so much on the techno-deterministic underlying tone of these descriptions, but rather the question of what the consequences of a connective media ecology (van Dijck 2013) are for a movement in terms of temporality. DeLuca and his co-authors (2012) suggest that the first eight days of the occupation were accompanied by a total news black-out in the mainstream outlets (biggest dailies and TV channels). However, social media were quickly filling up with news about Occupy Wall Street: On the first day of occupation more than 4,300 mentions of OWS on Twitter were counted, exploding to 25,148 until 2 October 2011. After three months 91,400 OWS-related videos had been uploaded onto YouTube (DeLuca 2012). DeLuca et al. argue that not mainstream, but social media provided visibility of the occupiers, which resonates with reflections by one of my informants, who was involved with the Media Working Group and was, for example, responsible for streaming live from many OWS events. He recalls that the importance of social media was reflected in how the media tent looked: So you entered the park and turned left and then there was the media tent. And there the people were sitting with their laptops 3 Bloombergville was a smaller occupation against the budget cuts proposed by then major Michael Bloomberg that was arranged in June 2011 (Writers for the 99% 2011). 52

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and not talking or discussing that much. Just were just glued to their laptops (Josh).

Early on, the Media Working Group contributed to a constant stream of tweets, blogs and Facebook posts. They also set up a 24-hour live stream from the camp, with programming elements including scheduled interviews with occupiers and passers-by, talks, music sessions etc. The group and affiliates produced a constant flow of images, memes and texts to be circulated. Although activists within the media group were very critical of the constraints set, especially by Facebook in terms of being able to reach beyond people who are already interested in the cause, Josh reflected: Well there are no other options besides Facebook and Twitter to use. And at the same time, I mean first when it all happened Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were the only ones you could use. (…) Now Facebook has changed their algorithm to make it very echo chambery. It is almost impossible doing outreach on Facebook. People who do that don’t realize the nature of Facebook anymore. Twitter is not so much like that but people are not doing it that much. (Josh)

These social media practices are strongly characterized by individual activities that might be discussed and pre-structured in working group discussion through guidelines and distribution of access to different accounts. However, the production as such, the composing and sharing of tweets and posts, is very much linked to the individual him or herself. This became especially apparent since individual accounts got boosted and numbers of followers increased through the affiliation with Occupy accounts. Even though the working groups tried to plan, prepare and evaluate the media work somewhat systematically, many activists were witnessing the activism in the camp as being ad hoc and anchored in the very moment that made planning difficult. 53

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Distribution/circulation time As Josh describes it, out of necessity the activists appropriated the logic of social media from the very beginning. Characteristics of the social media logic, as suggested by van Dijck and Poell (2013), are programmability, popularity, connectivity and datafication. Aiming for visibility of the movement and its discussions, the occupiers contributed to the production of digital media content being partly constitutive of current capitalism, or what Jodi Dean (2012, 2008) calls communicative capitalism. Communicative capitalism predominantly builds on the logic that the ‘exchange value of the messages’ dominates, rather than the ‘use value’. Dean suggests that network communication technologies, which are based on ideals of discussion and participation, intertwine capitalism and democracy. Communicative capitalism expanding with the growth of global telecommunications becomes hence the single ideological formation (Dean 2012). Content or the use value of the exchanged messages becomes secondary or even irrelevant. Hence, any response to them becomes irrelevant as well, and any political potential disperses into the perpetual flow of communication (Dean 2009, 2010). One of the major principles of communicative capitalism is furthermore to accelerate the speed of circulation in order to minimize turnover time and increase the production of surplus value (Manzerolle and Kjøsen 2012). As digital media enhance personalization, they enable new trajectories and pathways between production, exchange and consumer. In that sense, personalization as an organizational principle of digital media enhances the already accelerated speed of exchanges, which is taken to its extreme, namely the suspension of circulation. Manzerolle and Kjøsen identify ‘as new is how the logic of acceleration is being taken to its logical end in the conditions of ubiquity and immediacy engendered through digital media’ (Manzerolle and Kjøsen 2012, 217). 54

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Consumption time The visibility of OWS in social media connected the temporality of the camp with a global audience that moved potentially on quite different temporal trajectories. Similar to the production and distribution of the content produced by OWS, the consumption is individualized with remote supporters following live streams and Twitter feeds from home. Especially the We are the 99% campaign that became a strong meme and central to the self-understanding of OWS and reflects an individualized form of consumption and activism. Although the single supporter connects with a plethora of other supporters they do not become part of a larger collective. Bennett and Segerberg (2013) have described this phenomenon as a development from collective to connective action that is strongly linked to the emergence of social media. However, this might be true for the broader OWS audiences, in the camp and during direct actions the feeling of collectivity was much stronger as Josh described: Well the thing I enjoyed most of it was the fact that I was with a group, with people that actually seem to give a shit about the world around them. (…) We are doing as best as we can anyway. And they were relying on their ability to work with one another. (Josh)

CONCLUSION: DIGITAL IMMEDIACY IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA Besides the increased individualization of production, distribution and consumption, since the 1930s, the boundaries between the three categories have been increasingly blurred. Especially with social media, content production and consumption lost their temporal and spatial distinctiveness and delivery is accelerated towards real55

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time. The experienced dynamic and vividness of social media is furthermore based on principles of newness and immediacy that previous media formats have not shared in the same way. This has of course implications for activists as content producers, distributors and consumers, who have to deliver content ever faster. However, political projects such as OWS need time as they are also micro experiments of social and political organization in a shared space. This need for time is reflected in the numerous stories of endless meetings of the General Assembly to develop group consensus. Accelerated capitalism, however, does not allow for these timeconsuming procedures, which is reflected in the constant request for clear demands and goals of the movement in public discourse. In that sense, the dominant logic of current accelerated capitalism and the time-consuming practices of participatory democracy came to stand in stark contrast to each other, although the movement adopted parts of communicative capitalism so successfully. The outcomes or impact of OWS as a micro-experiment in democracy have been questioned by different commentators (Roberts 2012). However, its consequences and impact is still under negotiation while the current structure of feeling requests outcomes immediately and constantly. In its way of organizing the everyday life in the park, OWS hence formed a counter-picture to the dominant culture of speed. In its media practices, however, the movement had to adopt fairly quickly the logics of communicative capitalism. Following Innis’s (2004) idea of biases, digital media that were crucial for OWS could be considered as space-biased media as they connect localities over vast distances. This spatial excess results in an annihilation of time leading to presentness and immediacy. This chapter has shown that media practices have played major roles for the unemployed workers’ movements in the 1930s, the tenants’ movement in the 1970s as for the Occupy movement in 2011/2012. What, however, has changed is the kind of temporality 56

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that the media technologies employed suggest; shifting from effortful, mechanical speed to perpetual flow and effortless, digital immediacy. This development is closely linked to changes in the capitalist production process in general, which since the 1930s has experienced an acceleration and intensification involving and depending on media technologies in so-called information-based societies and communicative capitalism. These changes in media technologies have consequences for democracy and the political process and constitute a disjunction of temporal regimes suggested by accelerated information-based capitalism and the temporalities of participatory democracy (Adams 2014). Protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street can therefore be seen as both a form of resistance against market ideology and the temporal regime it dictates as Occupiers claimed time for meetings to realize an experiment in participatory democratic organization (Polletta 2002). However, the movement also had to comply with the rules of communicative capitalism in its media tactics. In the 1930s, capitalism did not yet permeate all spheres of life, only with the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s the idea of the free market came to dominate more and more spheres of society (Hassan 2010), leading to the acceleration of circulation towards immediacy. Shifts in the production process and acceleration of turnover time are, thus, mirrored by the media practices protest movements engage in. Reflecting and incorporating temporal regimes, media practices are expressions of and contribute to a general structure of feeling.

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CHAPTER 3

Protest spaces: the production of space in events of contention

The three – like many other – protest movements share their disruptive, contentious character in terms of their spatial practices; they are stopping traffic and pedestrians, catching attention in the daily stream of the city. In comparison to big political players such as state institutions, protest movements are considerably less well resourced. Consequently, they have to act within the given physical environments. Their spatial practices and production of space is often based on changing the meaning of a given spatial infrastructure and making strategic use of the symbolic capital of the particular places (Sewell 2001). This is reflected in the protest actions that are the focus of this chapter, namely the symbolic march towards the capital for the opening of Congress in the 1930s; situating the Housing Crimes Trial at Columbia University one of the most important opponents in the struggles of the 1970s tenants’ movement and March on Brooklyn Bridge aiming to symbolically take back the city in 2011. However, the symbolic production of space through protest has arguably transformed since the 1930s, especially with the emergence of connecting media technologies allowing for mobilization and identification with the movements on a much larger, global scale, even though the spatial protest work on the ground has not changed quite that much. This chapter investigates changes and continuities in the spatial practices or, 59

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as Charles Tilly (1993) has called it, the repertoire of contentious action of the protest movements. When it comes to theoretical engagements with the notion of space, the understanding has shifted from questions of the production of objects in space to the production of space itself. Lefebvre could be considered a key figure for this shift of perspective. Lefebvre distinguishes between three forms of producing space: the representation of space (space as conceived); the representational space (space as perceived); and spatial practices (space as lived and experienced). The representation of space is concerned with the physical form of space that is built and used. Representational space considers practices of ‘knowing’ space, such as maps and mathematics, producing space as a mental construct. Spatial practices, in contrast, are concerned with space as it is produced and changed over time through its specific use at the intersection of the physical appearance of space and its imagined form (Elden 2007). In his seminal work The Production of Space, Lefebvre dwells on a clear link between the production of space and technology as well as knowledge. Technology and knowledge have a particular relevance for the mode of production and every mode of production is linked to its own kind of space (Lefebvre 1991, 31). What constitutes the forces of production, according to Marx and Engels? Nature, first of all, plays a part, then labour, hence the organization (or division) of labour, and hence also the instruments of labour, including technology, and, ultimately, knowledge. (Lefebvre 1991, 69)

In Lefebvre’s sense technologies are essential to understanding any kind of production process, including the production of space. As the current capitalist mode of production is increasingly – though not exclusively – based on communication and information (Fuchs 60

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2010; Castells 2000), technologies such as social media that assist in the production, resources, forms of labour and commodities are of particular importance. In the following, I consider particular events of contention – the National Hunger March, the Housing Crimes Trial and the March on Brooklyn Bridge – and aim to carve out the specific spatial practices within the protest movements in connection to media practices. The analysed events constitute crucial turning points and points of organizational condensation for all three movements. The events are, hence, moments that were speeding up and potentially transforming the development of the movement in relation to the larger societal structures that activists are navigating. Following McAdams and Sewell (2001), I suggest that the re-tracing of protest actions taking place over the course of a few hours or days might shed light on structuring effects for long-term processes, such as economic crises. In that sense, not only the economic crises that might require new forms of critique form these crucial moments in history, but they encompass and are constituted by specific events themselves on the micro level.

THE NATIONAL HUNGER MARCH OF 1931 As part of the tedious work of organizing the unemployed in different local councils, as well as other organizations outlined in the previous chapter, activists arranged direct, contentious actions both on the local as well as the national level. On the local level, New York Unemployed Councils engaged in picketing and counteracting evictions of families that were not able to pay their rents. They organized immediate help with food and basic supplies for those without any savings or the possibility of borrowing any further money from friends and family. For national mobilization, large-scale marches and activities were crucial. During these actions new supporters were mobilized 61

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for the cause of the unemployed. At the same time, political leaders were pressured to find sustainable solutions for the consequences of the Great Depression and to end the previous laissez-fair politics, particularly of financial regulation. On a national and international scale days of action were installed to mobilize. The International Day of Unemployment, first declared in 1930, saw the largest demonstrations in New York City as well as other larger cities around the country. The marchers in New York convened on Union Square and planned to march towards City Hall. The police, however, kept the activists from marching down Broadway with extreme violent force. The march of around 35,000 unemployed workers ended with two demonstrators dead and several hundred injured after the police tried to disperse ‘the violent mob’ as the protesters were described by the New York Times the following day (New York Times 1930). As a follow-up to the International Day of Unemployment, the National Unemployed Council with its local divisions organized a national hunger march to Washington DC for November and December 1931. Starting in different parts of the country around 2,000 representatives of the unemployed marched towards the capital city in order to present their demands to the seventy-second Congress that opened on 7 December 1931. The first column started on 23 November 1931 at the West Coast and was joined by three major columns, which started marching on 30 November from Chicago, St. Louis and Buffalo. A fourth column left Boston on 1 December. The marchers reached Washington on time on 6 December from the different directions. The marching delegates were supported by organized (in unemployed councils) and unorganized workers, unemployed and poor farmers along the way ‘who rallied behind the Marchers as they passed through hundreds of cities, towns and villages, (…)’ (Pictoral The National Hunger March in Pictures, 1933; Printed Ephemera 040; box 3; folder 3; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives). The supporters not only cheered from the 62

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side-lines, but also fed and housed the representatives. An extensive pictoral describes the Hunger March organization in terms of an intensive expression of solidarity and unity among workers and unemployed all over the country: The Hunger Marchers were transported between towns in trucks and other motor conveyances secured by the local United Front Conferences organized by the Unemployed Councils. They were fed and housed by local workers’ organizations (…).

Along the way the marchers and their supporters were met with police violence starting in Hammond Indiana and escalating in Wilmington, just a few miles from the final destination. Observers, however, noted the strong support by the local population that led to the successful conclusion of the march in Washington. Reaching the capital did not mean that the marchers also reached their goal of presenting their demands to Congress. They were strictly denied access to the building and were confronted with police force trying to break up the group. The activists, however, convened for a larger conference discussing the next steps of workers’ mobilization. The march had, in that sense, two major functions. Firstly to present the demands of the marchers: immediate federal cash relief and unemployment insurance. Secondly to prepare and mobilize for the National Unemployment Insurance Day that was planned for February 1932. Israel Amter – a leading Communist – recalls in a pamphlet: ‘[the unemployed] are setting up committees in all blocks, neighbourhoods, bread-lines, unions, lodges, and factories, wherever workers gather, to carry forward and lead the struggle’ (Amter 1933). Israel Amter also makes clear that the preparations for the march were based on local struggles and organizations mainly dealing with evictions and immediate food supplies for unemployed workers. The organization of the Hunger March hence happened mainly in the 63

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flop-houses and lodging houses; in the blocks where the unemployed were living; in the relief bureaus; and the breadlines where they spend their days, but also in city-wide marches, mass meetings and open hearings, where the workers exposed the daily and lived experience of unemployment. Hence, national marches such as the Hunger March that mobilized organizations all over the country had internal and external functions. Externally, the hunger marchers aimed to expose the growing pre­ carity and attract the attention from politicians and government officials to focus on structural changes. Internally, the marches tied the workers to the local organizations beyond the micro direct actions. First and foremost, the mobilization of workers happened – as Amter describes – in the immediate physical surroundings and material spaces of the workers. However, they also connected them symbolically to a national and international movement. On the national level the marchers passed through larger cities and smaller villages contributing to an identification with the movement. On the international level, pamphlets and shop papers featured reports about the relief system in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, activist leaders within the Communist Party frequently travelled to Europe and the Soviet Union, connecting the local and national struggles to the international workers’ movement. Consequently, the protest practices of the unemployed can be understood as spatial practices in Lefebvre’s sense in two ways. Firstly the mobilization evolved around the workers’ daily, very close spatial reference points, namely the neighbourhoods. With the help of mechanically reproduced printed outlets, organizers and activists aimed to transform the individuals sharing the physical infrastructure of their houses into community-sharing experiences of unemployment and precariousness. Secondly, gathered for marches the protesters were often considered as mobs having the potential to disrupt the everyday stream of practices in the city, e.g. traffic, 64

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production and consumption. Thirdly, there was an ideological link to the international communist movement provided through activist media. Hence, the spatial practice of the protesters claiming the streets of the city was identified as dangerous and was met by the extensive police force. In the 1930s, the main media for organizing the unemployed – as discussed in the previous chapter – were printed outlets such as leaflets and shop papers. These crucial brochures and pamphlets were mainly reproduced with the help of low-cost printing machines, and included not just information about the protest activities but also about relief programmes, the structure and contact details of unemployed councils as well as block committees. Besides sharing information as resource, the outlets also gathered experiences of unemployment, poverty and precarity contributing to a collective experience rather than leaving the unemployed to suffer alone. The production of bulletins and shop papers was self-organized by workers and contributed to an extension of the immediate network and relations.

HOUSING CRIMES TRIAL, 6 DECEMBER 1970 While the tenants’ movement in the 1970s followed, similar to the unemployed workers’ movement, very local organizing principles, they operated in a very different media ecology. A media ecology that was far more complex including not only (mainstream) newspapers and the radio, but also a growing number of television channels (especially the growing importance of cable television). In that context, central organizations such as the Metropolitan Council on Housing orchestrated larger and creative events such as the housing crimes trial in 1970. The Met Council often prepared and staged these events together with numerous community organizations, emphasizing the spectacle and performance aspects of protest in 65

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order to attract media coverage and intercept in the perpetual flow of television programming (Williams 1974). At the same time, these events created a platform to exchange shared experiences among activists, organizers and tenants. In order to extend the sense of shared experiences media coverage by mainstream media was of utmost importance. As part of the preparations of direct actions, the organizers reached out to newspapers, radio and television channels and invited journalists to participate. The Met Council also advised local tenants’ groups on possible forms of direction in handbooks, as well as supporting their activities with supplying material and ideas for leaflets and flyers as well as the possibility of printing and copying free of charge. Recommended actions for blocks on rent strike or in the middle of negotiations with their landlords included picketing, demonstrations in front of the offices and homes of landlords and protest marches in the area and to prominent places in the city. Canvassing was mainly done with the help of leaflets that were distributed in the neighbourhood. The tenants’ movement was less internationally oriented than the unemployed workers’ movement (especially the Communist Party), however the Met Council upheld close relations with collectives and community organizers such as the Young Lords (organizing Puerto Ricans), Black Panthers and the I Wor Kuen (organizing Asian Americans), extending the struggle for decent housing to struggles of subaltern and oppressed groups on a national scale. One of the biggest concerted, direct actions coordinated by the Met Council was the Housing Crimes Trial; a mock trial set up by a Peoples Court indicting Major Lindsay, city housing officials and bank executives in their absence. The trial was held between 1pm and 10pm on 6 December 1970 at Columbia University, vividly criticizing and singling out the University for enjoying tax exemptions and contributing to the destruction of affordable housing in Upper Manhattan. Already in 1968 Columbia students had initiated a large 66

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protest march against the University’s building plans in Morning Heights that were considered to further push low-income Black communities outwards from the neighbouring Harlem. Besides the symbolic importance of holding the trial at Columbia, some of the collaborating groups originating from student groups based at the University – particularly I Wor Kuen – might have contributed to the choice of the trial place. The organizing coalition consisting of the Met Council, I Wor Kuen, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, the City Wide Coordinating Committee of Welfare Rights, Social Service Employees and community organizations attracted between 1,000 and 2,000 spectators. The nine-hour trial was headed by seven peoples’ judges, including representatives from the Young Lords, the Black Panthers and the Metropolitan Council on Housing, who invited tenants, squatters and community organizers to share their experiences of outrageous housing conditions, landlords and the ignorance of city officials. A mother of two living in a three-room apartment with another family of three contributed the following story: I stay up practically half the night because rats have been caught in bed with the children. We share a bathroom that’s in the hallway. About three months ago we found a drug addict in the hallway. From now on, I let my kids use the pail in the apartment. The only thing I am asking right now is that Mrs Moore and all the other squatters can have a little support from the people down here so that we may be able to move into 36 Attorney Str. Thank you! (Minutes From the Trial; Metropolitan Council on Housing Records; TAM 173; Tamiment Library/ Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives)

Other witnesses focused on the conditions of overcrowding, harass­ ment by landlords and the perils of qualifying for public housing in 67

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their statements, which were often met by a supportive ‘Right on’ by the judges and audience. The spatial agenda of affordable housing in the City of New York (particularly in Manhattan) was, however, also extended symbolically by some of the witnesses. One activist in a peace group suggested including President Nixon among the accused for spending federal money in South-East Asia on the Vietnam War instead of solving the housing crisis in New York City. The trial ended with a 13-count indictment of the accused. In order to organize the event, to include witnesses and to find collaborators, organizers of tenants with sometimes quite different political agendas came together and shared organizing efforts. This opened up the otherwise very small-scale and local activities in the blocks, streets and boroughs for broader spatial coalitions and solidarity. The political differences between the groups were overcome in the shared struggle for decent housing and fair rents. At that time, somewhat uniquely, the Housing Crimes Trial was completely audio-recorded and transcribed afterwards and a student team was working on an extensive documentary. These materials were later employed for internal mobilization, training and the purpose of documentation. Furthermore, the event was particularly successful not only in attracting between 1,000 and 2,000 attendees, but also in generating press coverage in bigger and smaller outlets.1 The major objective of the housing crimes trial was a negotiation of the right to space and to challenge those having the power over urban housing and public spaces. As part of the attempt, the organizers on the one hand approached and frequented the media and forums that are of concern for the power-holders, for example mainstream news media such as the New York Times. On the other hand, community media 1 Articles about the trial appeared for example in The Daily Worker, Village Voice, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Columbia Spectator, Columbia Owl and The Unionist. 68

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– Jane Benedict’s monthly radio show on a local radio channel and the Tenant paper – became a locus for internal identification and solidarity among diverse minority groups all being affected by the housing crisis. Around the same time, Raymond Williams (1974) discussed the mobile privatization in the USA in the 1970s critically. He argued that private life was stretched out further spatially to the suburbs, which was, in particular, made possible by technologies including the automobile. This spatial stretching resulted in a demassing of the population as the mass was still perceived as potentially dangerous (Packer 2010). The tenants’ movement mobilized the remaining feared masses of the city centres populating public housing and public transport counter to the general privatizing tendencies in spatial production.

THE OWS MARCH ON BROOKLYN BRIDGE, 1 OCTOBER 2011 Although initial mobilization happened online, the OWS as such constituted a strong counter force to the dominant and ephemeral digital culture. Many of my interviewees nostalgically recall the shared space and the emotions connected with it. Josh, for example, says: That was one of the things that was kind of magical about everything. Because it just worked out somehow. It worked somehow because it was needed and everybody just knew is, but then it got evicted. There was no central place to go and we couldn’t decide about a central place to go because there was already so much, once there was so much internal fighting, it is hard to decide on a central place to go. (Josh)

For him, the ‘magic’ of OWS was directly connected to the colla­ borative way of being together in the square. Even though several affinity and working groups continue their work even until today, 69

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once the square was lost, the main feature and connecting element for the movement was lost as well. One of the successful extensions of the Occupy mobilization was, for example, the wage struggles of lowwage workers, especially food workers, in New York that adopted large parts of the aesthetics and organizing principles of OWS (Dencik and Wilkin 2015). Besides building up an infrastructure that accommodated the everyday needs of the occupiers such as a kitchen tent, a donation tent, a library tent, a medic tent etc.; the activists organized numerous direct actions moving out of the encampment into the streets of New York. One of these events was the March on Brooklyn Bridge on 1 October. Together with a previous incident of three female protesters being maced by the police, it marked a turning point for Occupy Wall Street in terms of support and the growing number of people joining the camp and protests organized by OWS (GouldWartofsky 2015). The march itself remained comparably calm until the activists reached the entrance of Brooklyn Bridge. While some marchers took the pedestrian part others streamed onto the roadway heading towards Brooklyn, seemingly with the consent of the police. Initially some of the more experienced activists tried to guide the crowd towards the pedestrian walkway, but lost control of the marchers shouting ‘Whose bridge? Our Bridge! Whose city? Our city!’. Michael Gould-Wartofsky (2015) describes this crucial moment as a slow and methodological march among the cars. ‘Some are sounded in support, others in dismay or defiance. Above us, spectators and sympathizers peer down from the promenade, tweeting updates, shooting video, and snapping dramatic photos with their smart phones. One hundred feet below, laborers are laying fresh asphalt on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive; They pump their fists in the air in a gesture of solidarity’ (Gould-Wartofsky 2015, 88). After a few metres however, police officers stopped the marching group on the 70

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roadway and blocked their way back. Around 700 protesters were trapped on the lower part of Brooklyn Bridge, while their co-protesters live-streamed their arrests with their mobile phones from the upper pedestrian part. During the first arrests on the bridge the protesters repeatedly shouted that this is peaceful march and that the whole world is watching. Indeed, around 22,000 viewers followed the live streaming from the bridge on GlobalRevolution – a live-streaming platform – while activists on other platforms were updating distant followers in real time. The arrests on Brooklyn Bridge’s roadway continued for the next two hours, amounting to 700 arrests. Live streaming was not only a central feature during protest actions. Early on, the Media Working Group set up a 24-hour live stream from the camp, with programming elements including scheduled interviews with occupiers and passers-by, talks, music sessions etc. The day after the march, the New York Times referred to the unscripted nature of Occupy Wall Street that led to the mass arrests: ‘Marchers make on-the-spot alterations in their routes, and Saturday was a prime example: The march across the Brooklyn Bridge seemed as though it would be confined to the pedestrian walkway until a smaller group of protesters decided to march across the roadway, leading to hundreds of arrests’ (Baker, Moynihan, and Maslin Nir 2011). The combination of immediate spreading of information and images from the bridge paired with police brutality were, for Ady – one of my informants, the reason why the support for OWS grew exponentially after the incidence. The media team or whoever it was got the word out and I have no idea why that protest at that moment, but that story made it. It was after a normal protest, smaller one. And it was different because it was growing, normally protests start big and then get smaller, but this one was growing. And after that it went from huge to mega huge. That was a changing point. Because 71

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the cops were doing that and then there was the response. My friends still, they wanted to thank the police, one of my buddies was involved in it. And he was like, we organize shit, but if it wasn’t for the cops, it probably wasn’t as good as it was. (Ady)

Ady and other activists I have interviewed repeatedly referred to the media savviness of the Media and PR Working Group, as well as their central role in increasing support and growth of the movement as mainstream media first blacked-out and later often mitigated the movement as uncoordinated and ineffective. The lacking and biased reporting might have its root in the free-press zones in which journalists were placed by the police as Gillham, Edwards and Noakes (2013) argue not being able to move and report freely from different places of direct action. Although through the spatial practices of taking Zuccotti Park and claiming Brooklyn Bridge, the activists also aimed to carve out discursive spaces for the movement. As part of this aim occupiers were able to reveal police tactics and brutality that were constitutive for the struggle about space. The immediate and real-time reporting from events – such as the Brooklyn Bridge March – allowed for the recruitment of supporters over vast distances.

FROM SPACE BIAS TO HYPER-SPACE BIAS Social media are crucial for OWS in this context, making it possible to connect over vast distances. At the same time the very local occupation of a physical room seemed to have been the most effective protest strategy of activists. Occupy Wall Street was characterized by the need to express resistance against the current ideology of hyperspatial bias and the end of geography fostered by, among others, social media. This need to occupy a physical space as resistance is reflected in the difficulties of sustaining the movement after the eviction in 72

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November 2011. The spatial or hyper-spatial bias is closely linked to the temporal organization of the movement. Media technologies such as mimeographs and the television helped, in the first case, the unemployed workers’ movement and in the second the tenants’ movement to speed up the production, distribution and consumption process of information. However, the activists engaging with diverse media practices still faced a time lag in the circulation of messages from production to consumption. In contrast, social media – successfully employed by OWS – are collapsing production and consumption into one immediate experience. Without any circulation time, activists and supporters potentially engage with messages in real time. Connected to temporal changes through media technologies, spatial practices are altered. While modern media were connecting different places over vast distances and in Innis’s terms embraced a space bias, social media contribute to what Jansson has called hyper-space bias, in which space loses its character as a reliable variable. The hyper-space biased ideology is closely connected to the ideology of globalization and reflects a changing emphasis, moving from limitless progress of modernity to limitless communication of post- or late modernity (Mattelart 2000/1996). In their spatial practices, Occupy activists clearly established the encampment and direct actions as protest spaces against the everyday, speedy flow of the neoliberal city. Out of necessity their media practices are, however, relying on communication technologies following a hyper-spatial bias potentially questioning the constitution of space as such. The social media infrastructures employed are based on the acceleration of message exchanges towards immediacy, while the participatory practices of decision making by Occupy Wall Street require time for deliberation and critique. Consequently their media practices came to stand in a stark contrast to the attempt of challenging the hegemonic order by ‘making it slow’, namely relying on decision73

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making processes following the principles of participatory democracy that need time (Polletta 2002). The OWS General Assembly and the Spokes council became emblematic for the slowness of participatory practices, giving all attendees the right to speak, but also block decisions. Break-out sessions figured as a way to reach consensus in case suggestions were not supported by all or blocked. The character of the GA changed over time with new participants arriving all the time. Consequently, not only organizing the everyday life in the camp, but also and in particular developing a structure for decision making was an effortful and time-consuming process. Mark Bray describes the shifting roles of the GA and Spokes council as follows: The hope was that the GA could return to being an outwardfacing tool for recruitment and larger political decisions and discussions while the more tedious issues that bored new people could be moved to the Spokes council. (Bray 2013, 89)

Reaching decisions through the slow process of participatory practices, namely tedious discussions and planning, has been a central feature of OWS, even though the organizing was never completely nonhierarchical and all-inclusive (Bray 2013). Social media that are based on principles of immediacy, presentness and newness contribute potentially to a desynchronization between time of media practices and political time of participatory practices (Rosa 2013; Kaun and Stiernstedt 2014). Consequently, technological infrastructures such as social media that are so vividly used by activists need to be repoliticized – not just in terms of the content exchanged, but also in terms of the principles that steer the platforms, which will be the main focus of Chapter 4.

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CONCLUSION This chapter traces the changes of how protest movements are producing space in relation to their media practices. In that context, deterritorialization, the dispossession of urban space and shifts in the location of power are current dominant developments. Citizens – individually and collectively – are increasingly dispossessed in terms of time and space: Common public spaces in a physical sense are disappearing, since they are increasingly turned into commercial, corporate spaces dedicated to consumption or production. Media technologies are an important part of these changes as they are constitutive of a particular mode of production in capitalist societies that are based on knowledge and information. The change towards a hyper-space bias captures a shift from the dominance of aggregation and getting together to mobilize towards networking for mobilization. In the 1930s collective and largely face-to-face encounters remained the most important motivation for workers to join the movement. The symbolic connection over distance with the international workers’ movement remained secondary as a source for mobilization. In the 1970s a hybrid mobilization of supporters of the tenants’ movement is dominating, which was based on both mobilizations in local spaces and a strong presence in mass media. While in the case of OWS a wider circle of supporters not directly linked to the experienced core group of activists was mobilized largely online. These online encounters are largely individualized; they take place in private and emphasize media technologies that are commercial and that are broadly surveyed by power holders. Paolo Gerbaudo, tackling similar questions, quotes Mark Poster, who describes this shift in the production of space by social movements:

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Contemporary social relations seem to be devoid of a basic level of interactive practices that, in the past, was the matrix of democratising politics: loci such as the agora, the New England Town Hall, the village church, the coffee house, the tavern, the public square, a convenient barn, a union hall, a park, a factory lunchroom, and even a street corner. Many of these places remain but no longer serve as organising centres for political discussion and action. It appears that the media and especially television have become the animating source for political discussion and action. (Poster, 2001 in Gerbaudo 2012, 33)

Both Poster and Gerbaudo (2012) aim to critically analyse the tendency to spatial dispersion that the internet and social media allow for. Instead of celebrating the network logic of social media, Gerbaudo considers them as possibilities to choreograph public assembly and aggregation accelerating the outreach. However, protest and particularly the movements of the squares – as Gerbaudo calls them – are fundamentally built on the physical presence in the square to counter temporal and spatial dispossession. Spaces with a symbolically strong meaning and heritage that become strategic targets for protesters acquire the role of leaders choreographing the activists, while social media allow for a reinvigorating feeling of being together of activists who do not share the same location. Protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street are actively challenging the dominant logic of spatial and temporal dispossession, while operating in the very regime of capitalist production. Hence, they partly adopt logics of communicative capitalism particularly visible in their media practices (Dean 2008). This leads to unresolvable tensions between the time-consuming practices of participatory democracy and media practices that are immediate and ephemeral that will be addressed more extensively in the subsequent chapter. Besides specific continuities in the protest practices, there are major 76

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shifts related to the production of space by protest movements, namely a shift from space bias to a hyper-space bias. The ideological impetus that space is annihilated as a category by social media is questioned through the spatial practices of occupying Wall Street as the most radical form of resistance. Hence being in the square 24/7 provides a powerful counter picture to the flow of social media that was often characterized as spaceless. The ideology of annihilation of space is based on new temporalities and acceleration in the production, distribution and consumption of content through social media (Virilio 1986). These changes constitute a second shift since the 1930s, from mechanical speed to digital immediacy addressed in the previous chapter. Negotiating the relationship between resistance and adaptation, protest movements face challenges beyond the discussion of reform versus revolution in highly mediatized societies. Beyond decisions on media tactics protest movements need to develop long-term strategies about how to relate to social media that are constitutive of communicative capitalism.

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CHAPTER 4

Protest speeds: resynchronizing fast capitalism

Protest movements share a sense of urgency in their demands. The workers’ movement in the 1930s demanded ‘immediate relief ’ during the Hunger Marches. The Black Panthers started their ten points programme of the party with ‘what we want NOW’ in the late 1960s and the Black Lives Matter mobilizations of 2014/2015 shared the chant of asking ‘What do we want? We want justice! When do we want it? Now!’. Change is demanded in high speed as political and social life has become unbearable. Besides this urgency protest movements encompass, however, different temporalities that have until recently mainly been analysed in terms of emergence, development and decline of political contention. The focus has been mainly on long-term processes of change on the one hand or protest cycles on the other. Consider­ing long-term change has been particularly linked to the political process model situating the roots of protest movements in long-term changes such as industrialization, urbanization and globalization. Following the argument of the political process model, these changes lead to a destabilization and enabling of new forms of organization. In contrast, protest cycles follow different movements in terms of emergence, development and decline over time and on the micro level. McAdams and Sewell (2001) suggest a third layer of protest temporalities, namely the temporality of 79

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protest events that encompass a very different speed than long-term change or protest cycles. Events are punctual and discontinuous and constitute moments of accelerated temporality with concentrated transformation and potentially dramatic confrontation, McAdams and Sewell argue. These different speeds of protest have to be considered in their specific temporal context, here with a focus on particularly important events for the unemployed workers, the tenants’ and the OWS movement.

THE SPEED OF FAST CAPITALISM The urgency of social change is quite different from the hegemonic logic of speed in fast capitalism. Fast capitalism is based on speeding up production and minimizing circulation time through flexible accumulation. It is an economic system that is based on diminishing the temporal differences, for example between different seasons and times of the day for maximum productivity, but also the multi-layered experience of time in general. The hegemonic logic of speed and speeding up is increasingly constraining the different temporalities of lived experience that Henri Bergson (1960) aimed to capture in his notion of durée. While Bergson was distinguishing the multilayeredness of experienced time from time that is measured, fast capitalism produces a contradiction between ‘lived durée’ and the ‘dictatorship of speed’ (Virilio 1995), leading to the dominant feeling of ‘not having enough time’. In the context of protest, an increased speeding up of society in general means that protest organization also needs to speed up. Especially when it comes to ‘getting the message out’, activists experience an enhanced need to be fast (Barassi 2015). It is not only the experience of alienation in relation to fast capitalism that results from the increased speed, but the temporal dominance of speed is becoming increasingly problematic for practices that follow different temporalities, particularly political decision making 80

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and deliberation that often require time. It is hence necessary to ask, what role resistance against the hegemony of speed plays for protest movements and if this form of resistance is becoming a more pressing question in recent years. In contrast to Chapters 2 and 3 exploring the general changes of temporality and spatiality, in this chapter, I focus on the hegemonic time regime of speed in fast capitalism and explore forms of resistance by protest movements against a speeding up that was already experienced in the 1930s. The main argument is that there is a growing disconnect between regimes of time dictated by dominant media technologies and time of political practices; a desynchronization between machine time and political time.

DESYNCHRONIZATION Although the main inquiry here is concerned with the desynchro­ nization between the political system and technological development, it is important to consider the diverse temporalities of both the political sphere and technology. The political system is asynchronous and characterized by a multiplicity of temporal layers as is technology. Sheldon Wolin (2005) argues, for example, that politics encompasses both time of slow developments, such as the formal legislative process, but also includes agitated times of protest and revolution that have a different velocity. Similarly, media technologies possess different temporalities as Weltevre and co-authors (2014) show. The authors propose a more complex understanding of real-time in the context of different internet platforms. Even though there is a multiplicity of ‘machine times’ and times of politics, there seems to be an increasing gap or disconnect between both lines of temporalities. The principles of high-speed and 24/7 availability neglect a plethora of temporalities that constitute our experience collapsing them into the one dominant temporality of speed (Agger 1989, 2004). 81

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Even if current fast capitalism also encompasses work experiences of waiting time and empty time, as Sarah Sharma (2014) shows in her ethnography of temporality, these labourers work towards the needs of fast capitalism making speed possible in the first place. Virilio, for example, differentiates between high-speed classes of bankers and managers (fast classes) and classes that make high speed possible, including Sharma’s examples of service workers, taxi drivers and yoga instructors (slow classes). Similarly, Jeremy Rifkin (1995) suggests a distinction between the time rich and the time poor. The understanding of speed by these commentators is based on Marx’s formulation of the quantification of work and the production of value that depends on socially necessary time. In Marx’s understanding and many of his followers, rationalization for increased productivity leads to the annihilation of space by time made possible by speeding up and resulting in time-space compression (Harvey 1990). Media technologies are here one of the means to speed up production, circulation and consumption and are hence central for the understanding of fast capitalism, since ‘all techniques for reproducing existing worlds and artificially creating new ones are, in specific sense, time media’ (Zielinski 2006, 31). Consequently media technologies’ affordances and properties should be a central focus in the analysis of fast capitalism. At the same time they provide spaces of resistance against the principles of fast capitalism by, for example, protest movements. Hartmut Rosa (2003, 2013) theorizes social acceleration by distinguishing between technological acceleration, acceleration of social change and acceleration of the pace of life. Societies are – according to him – speeding up not only in terms of individual experiences, but also social change itself is happening quicker and ever more often. Both developments are linked to technological change, Rosa argues. Hence, he ascribes media technologies specific properties that have consequences for social acceleration. He argues, 82

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for example, that digital media have contributed particularly to social acceleration making real-time experiences possible connecting us over vast distances. This is not to argue in a deterministic way that social acceleration is merely based on media technologies and their temporalities. The regimes of time that media technologies suggest are embedded in and consequences of specific social settings. They are ‘form(s) of social organization’ (Williams 1977, 159) that have technical properties, but are deeply shaped by the cultural and societal context within which they are developed and used. In that sense, media technologies as machines might possess a temporal agency or specific machine time as Wolfgang Ernst (2011) argues, but this agency is informed by societal context within which machines are imagined. However, if media technologies establish specific temporal logics, there might be considerable consequences for other social spheres. In that context, Rosa argues it has traditionally been assumed that: Institutionalized temporal structures of political will-formation, decision-making and decision-implementation in representativedemocratic systems are compatible with the rhythm, tempo, duration and sequence of social developments: in other words, that they are essentially synchronized with the path of social development such that the political system has time to make fundamental decisions and to organize the deliberative, democratic process for this purpose. (Rosa 2013, 252)

This synchronized temporal structure of the democratic system, based on collective interests, is characterized by ‘sensitive temporal interdependency between political structures of decision and implementation and intrinsic temporalities of other social spheres’ (Rosa 2013, 253). In the context of increasing social acceleration, however, a desynchronization emerges. The political system of 83

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democracy, which is based on the aggregation and articulation of collective interests, remains time intensive and can only be accelerated to a certain degree. Other societal spheres such as the economy are increasingly sped up with the help of diverse technologies. Consequently, Rosa identifies an increasing desynchronization between politics and the time structures of other social fields, especially economics and technology as well as between forms of political organization and the cultural context. Similarly, Bernard Stiegler considers disorientation as a consequence of social acceleration since the industrial revolution, which has led to ‘dramatically widening the distance between technical systems and social organizations as if, negotiation between them appearing to be impossible, their final divorce seems inevitable’ (Stiegler 2009/1996, 3). Speeding up the political process has meant in the past mainly to limit the process of deliberation and participation in order to overcome particularly the desynchronization between politics and the economic system. Consequently, power has moved from the ‘slow’ deliberative process of the legislative to the faster and more flexible executive; and from government to governance. Rosa insists that politics has lost its outstanding role to set the pace for social developments more generally. Current social acceleration remains, hence, without political or collective goals and unfolds as a frenetic standstill.

PROTEST MOVEMENTS’ RE-SYNCHRONIZATION: ADAPTATION, ABSTENTION, ATTACK AND ALTERNATIVES The analysis in Chapter 2 identified a change in temporal regimes from mechanical speed and perpetual flow to digital immediacy – a landscape which the respective protest activists are navigating. However, in all three movements there have also been attempts to ‘re-synchronize’ media practices with political practices and in that way resist the dominant temporal regime of media technologies. 84

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Hence, specific media practices could be considered as forms of resistance and protest practices in their own right. These media practices of resistance by the activists can be understood in terms of Dieter Rucht’s Quadruple A-model, namely as adaptation, abstention, attach or alternatives in relation to the dominant temporal regime (Rucht 2004). According to Rucht adaptation refers to the acceptance and exploitation of the logic of mass media, while the focus is on influencing the coverage of activities and organizations in a positive way. This includes professionalization of practices and might include the hiring of media professionals or the development of separate public relations units. In terms of speed and temporality, activists adopt the temporal mode of mainstream media to certain extents. Abstention refers to the neglect of mass media often as a sign of resignation based on negative experiences. Consequently, communication efforts and media practices are rather focused inwardly on internal communication. Attack includes an explicit critique of mass media and their reporting about, for example, direct actions, specific aims or organizational structures. Alternative practices include the setting up of own publication channels, for example newspapers or blogs. According to Rucht, these practices are not mutually exclusive and can exist parallel to each other within one and the same group or mobilization. Rucht refers in his typology to the engagement of social movement activists with mainstream media. This model of resistance and adaptation could also be fruitfully employed to consider the resistance against or adaptation of dominant temporal regimes by social movements. While Rucht understood mass media as gatekeepers providing news on a strict selection that is based on news values, ideological leaning and professional standards, it is here rather the question of how the activists resist a dominant discursive formation such as speed that is of interest.

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Workers movement: immediate relief The general organizing work and particularly the media practices of activists within the unemployed workers’ movement took place in the aftermath of red-baiting that was particularly strong in the 1920s. The US government persecuted workers’ organizers, anarchists, labour movement supporters and especially communists. Only with the New Deal these tactics slowly softened. In that context, it is no wonder that the relationship with mainstream news media was particularly difficult for the activists. Hence, abstention and attack were the most common strategies in dealing with mainstream media. In the introduction to their unpublished autobiography Sadie van Veen and Israel Amter attack the economic principles of mass media supporting the official politics of the government. Why do we write this book? The reason is simple. A torrent of lies and misrepresentations about the Communists fills the press, movies, schools and colleges, pulpit and radio these days. The people are being deliberately misled by those who stand to gain by these lies – if they have effect. (…) What methods do they use? They use every method possible in putting across their propaganda. They use Government departments and committees, reactionary and right-wing trade union leaders, professionals and what-not, as well as pro-fascist terrorists. They use the newspapers, pamphlets, lecture platforms, radio, movies, schools colleges and even the churches. This costs them millions of dollars every year but they have plenty of money. Who are their victims? The tens of millions of workers, men and women who work for a living, but are ‘headline readers’ as Roosevelt called them. Readers of the Hearst press, Daily News, Scripps-Howard press, and other reactionary newspapers and magazines, who read the headlines, scan the stories, funnies and sports news, but gain no real knowledge or education 86

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because they contain none. (Sadie van Veen Amter and Israel Amter, unpublished autobiography undated; Israel and Sadie Amter Autobiographical Typescript TAM.079; box 1; folder 1; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives)

However, the critique was mainly attacking mainstream media on an ideological level and not explicitly criticizing their temporality or the time regime they establish. In that sense, they neither attacked nor abstained from the temporal logic of dominant media, particularly printed news. Rather, the movement activists adapted the temporality by capitalizing on the speeding up of the production process through mimeographs. Although the attempts of capitalists to speed up the industrial production process through automation and rationalization was already criticized vividly earlier, Upton Sinclair strikingly describes the experiences of workers with the speeding up of the production process in his novel The Jungle. The story is set prior to the Great Recession, but captures the speed of industrial capitalism impressively. (…) the speeding-up seemed to be growing more savage all the time; they were continually inventing new devices to crowd the work on – it was for all the world like the thumb-screw of the medieval torture chamber. They would get new pacemakers and pay them more and; they would drive the men on with new machinery – it was said that in the hog-killing rooms the speed at which the hogs moved was determined by clockwork, and that it was increased little every day. In piecework they would reduce the time requiring the same work in a shorter time, and paying the same wages; and then, after the workers had accustomed themselves to this new speed, they would reduce the rate of payment to correspond with the reduction in time. (Sinclair 2001/1906, 91) 87

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Tenants’ movement: what we want now In contrast, the Metropolitan Council on Housing organized publicity workshops for local tenants’ organization on a regular basis. These workshops included instructions on how and when to target journalists in order to get the word out about specific direct actions and mobilizations. A transcript from one of the workshops that was compiled as part of a larger research project directed by Robert Lawson documents the urgency of professionalization of the media work. During the meeting Bill Price – former reporter for the City Star and an underground newspaper – spoke about the importance of the press release (Metropolitan Council on Housing 1974). Furthermore, the leaflet Techniques and Devices to Get Your Press Release into Print advised: One basic rule: Assume nothing. Without follow-up phone calls don’t assume that U.S. Post Office has delivered your releases. Don’t assume that the desk person is aware of such issues as hospital expansion etc. (Some are amazingly uninformed). Watch your calendar carefully, and don’t assume that a particular Sunday is just like any other when you’re planning an event or press conference. Sunday morning, April it, can turn out to be Easter, and all the TV crews may be covering the parade on Fifth Avenue. (Leaflet Techniques and Devices to Get Your Press Release into Print Metropolitan Council on Housing ca. 1970; Metropolitan Council on Housing Records; TAM 173; box 6; folder 10; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives)

Part of the very detailed instructions on how to deal with the press and television was the role of speedy delivery of content and information (see also Chapter 2). One of the Met Council Handbooks for Tenant Organization advice was to ‘make up two or three sets of mailing envelops in advance, to avoid delay when a release goes out, 88

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since speed is important’ and ‘learn about the press and broadcast deadlines, and use them to your advantage: don’t invite TV film crews, for instance, to a 5.30 pm news conference – they won’t show up – their deadline is more like 2.00 pm, and they prefer ten in the morning’ (Draft handbook for organizing of tenants; Metropolitan Council on Housing Records TAM 173, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives). Besides advice in terms of timing and speed, the handbook also suggested: ‘don’t say anything to one if you don’t want to see it in print. Naturally the things you want to be “off the record” are the most interesting titbits and reporters have a nasty habit of quoting anything that drops from their mouth. Be careful!’ (Draft handbook for organizing of tenants; Metropolitan Council on Housing Records TAM 173, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives). The Met Council furthermore kept detailed record of their media work and its success in form of an annual publicity report. Besides keeping track of publications about the Met Council and questions related to tenants’ interests, involved activists expressed explicit critique of mainstream media’s misrepresentation, provided additional information and contextualized specific activities in numerous letters to editors of, for example, the New York Post, Village Voice and The New York Times. The Met Council criticized inflammatory news casts, mitigation of protest, but also approached journalists to investigate specific stories on, for example, particular slumlords. In that sense, their critique was mixed with friendly approaches of press and television channels. However, the two own media – the members paper The Tenant and Rent and Housing in the City, a weekly radio show – remained of major importance for organizing the tenants’ and its different smaller organization. In terms of temporality especially the Met Council adopted the flow of the increasing complex media landscape. They considered particularly professionalization as an important asset in their media 89

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but also general advocacy work. The more professional the media work of the tenants’ organization, the more afraid the landlord would be. This included an adaptation to the temporality of news flows. Since the tenants’ were competing for attention by mainstream news, major events such as the Housing Crimes Trial became crucial ways of intercepting the perpetual news flow (as detailed in Chapter 2).

Occupy Wall Street: the whole world is watching From the beginning, commentators and observers considered OWS as a media-savvy movement successfully employing the possibilities of social media during the news black-out at the beginning of the occupation and later orchestrating even mainstream sources professionally. The successful media work was grounded in the organization of the OWS including a Public Relations Working Group that consisted mainly of trained media and PR professionals addressing mainstream media. The Media Working Group was mainly concerned with producing own content in the form of videos and OccupyTVNY. A sub-group coordinated the Twitter feeds and parallel postings in different social media platforms. Both in the perception of outsiders and the occupiers themselves – such as Michael Gould-Wartofsky (2015) – the media work made heavy use of the temporality of social media, including live streaming: they were constantly updating their feeds with new material1 and streamed live from direct actions registering police brutality and misconduct that brought even more supporters to the encampment and mobilized donations. For high-speed and real-time live streaming most activists relied on Global.Revolution.tv. The group around the co-founder Vlad Teichberg recruited and trained streamers in the encampment and continued their work after the eviction. They also build the 1 The dictum ‘If you tweet, I buy you lunch’ was circulating in the park (Gould-Wartofsky 2015). 90

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technical infrastructure for live streaming at the park. Josh, one of my interviewees, remembers how he was recruited and trained for the streaming team: A lot of it was like free form, you would just do, what you wanna do. There wasn’t much restriction in a lot of ways. I remember getting trained on how to use live stream. They said, just download the app, I found the app and like downloaded it, import it on your phone. And just go there, we will give you a hot spot and you just film from the hot spot the action. The first thing I filmed was the Occupy Homes action in East New York on December 6. (Josh)

At the same time, the activists were often reduced to their media savviness, the number of clicks, likes and shares rather than the actual work of deliberation and organizing their media work in the camp. A clash of different temporalities related to the media work also became apparent in the video and filming practices. The group tried to establish routines for reaching consensus about what kind of pieces are shot, edited and circulated through the official OWS channels. However, the necessity of being quick and providing new angles on the activities often precluded the deliberation of the whole group. The following excerpt from the Media Working Group minutes captures these temporal conflicts between group politics and dynamics of the media ecology including an audience that has a short attention span and requests new content constantly (OccupyTVNY minutes, 21 February 2012, available at nycga.net). Josh feels that the short or long is more about speed vs. a piece that doesn’t need to be posted ASAP. The proposal is a way to get the group to work together within small groups and collaborate on finding consensus. He thinks that it needs to 91

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be clearly articulated and consented on that the group will or will not create pieces in a certain way. He is passionate about the collaborative process and feels there are many outlets where work can be posted. (Minutes from Media Working Group meeting, 11 November 2011, available at nycga.net)

During one of the next meetings the discussion continued and the group passed the decision that ‘proposals that affect the larger group need to be posted on the global.revolution for 24hr review’ (Minutes from Media Working Group meeting, 26 November 2011, available at nycga.net). In any case OWS was a very multi-faceted movement that not only included aspects of adaption to the temporality of digital culture, but also attempts to establish alternatives and launch attacks. For many in the camp an important activity at OWS was the drawing of placards and posters as well as developing chants together that were later on partly preserved by the Occupy Wall Street Archive Working Group (Erde 2014). These media practices could be considered as slow media productions (Rauch 2011) that draw on a specific materiality that is different from digital immediacy in terms of its distinct temporality. Marc, one of the occupiers in New York, described zine production in the following way: We would make our own zines of different political issues and a lot of political prisoners’ zines. And tried to get the information out. And it worked great cause everybody, all the communists, would come to the park and get something that they can actually take home with them. (Marc, OWS)

The materiality and slowness of the zines was an important aspect that Marc stressed throughout the interview with me. The eviction was therefore particularly painful as his group lost all the zines that 92

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they had produced shortly before. The practices of making the zines and reproducing older zines structured their days that were otherwise dedicated to finding food for the kitchen tent and themselves. Besides establishing these alternative temporalities, OWS activists repeatedly voiced critique of mainstream media, which for them are part of the system that needs to be changed. This critique was, however, rarely expressed on a temporal level as, for example, a critique of social media’s immediate character. This critique was expressed during a discussion of the Media Working Group about obsolete and forgotten content on their YouTube channel that is hardly watched by anybody (minutes from the meeting, 31 January 2012). Instead media critique often focused on content and selectivity. However, the activists of OWS also attacked the time regime of dominant media technologies in other ways. One important attacking tactic was the archiving and preservation of stories of OWS activists beyond the immediate purpose of mobilization, organization and information. Archiving practices that are directed by activists themselves could in that context be considered as forms of resistance against dominant ways of history writing and established archiving institutions. At the same time, they are forms of resistance against the dominant time regime of constant news flow emerging in the 1970s and particularly digital immediacy nowadays as they stretch beyond the present (Erde 2014; Thorson et al. 2013). The archiving working group at OWS described their approach as follows: While collecting can be done with and by institutions, we have an OWS working group for archives because we want to represent what is going on with Occupy from inside the move­ ment. There are a lot of other people recording the movement and telling its story, but we want to empower occupiers to help preserve what is being made while their story is unfolding. While some archivists aim to be dispassionate and ‘objective,’ 93

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our intent was to be more involved in the movement and open about the inherent influence of our actions. (Evans, Perrici and Roberts 2014)

CONCLUSION: THE SPEED OF QUADRUPLE A In terms of their media practices, none of the movements showed clear signs of abstention from the temporal regimes of dominant media technologies. The unemployed workers’ movement in the 1930s relied heavily on mimeographs to reproduce their leaflets and pamphlets. The tenants’ movement in the 1970s aimed at television coverage of their events and the OWS in 2011/2012 was vividly using social media to spread information. Along with these changes activists spend less and less time together when it comes to the increasingly individualized production, distribution and consumption of media. At the same time, one could question whether abstention from a hegemonic and dominant time regime that characterizes society is possible in the first place. The savvy usage of social media by OWS activists is an expression of the general dominance of social media in political and social organizing. Their extensive usage reflects the fact that OWS activists were acting within the system of (communicative) capitalism. Although some activists and commentators are pointing towards problematic consequences of the exclusive usage of social media for the organizing work, the dominant perception is that there is no alternative (Terranova and Donovan 2013). Joan Donovan, for example, stresses that in the case of the Occupy movement the usage of corporate social media substituted the tedious work of member and supporter lists including contact details. She argues: One of the significant effects of social media is the capacity to broadcast and amplify numerous voices across many platforms. But, a less-often-considered consequence is that activists 94

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have become less willing to do the messy work of collecting members’ information and maintaining a durable infrastructure. (Donovan 2013)

A complete abstention from the temporal regime of a society seems impossible for social movements and, as Todd Wolfson points out, ‘(…) a particular logic of resistance emerges in response to the social systems and social world of which it is a part’ (Wolfson 2014, 3). Speed in general bears both a potential and constraint for social movements and their demands. However, speed as it is dictated and normalized in fast capitalism reinforces fundamental contradictions and impedes long-term social change. However, rather than focusing on the fact that there is less time at our disposal, Zielinski (2006) suggests instead considering the question of who has the power over our time and consequently reappropriate this power of time disposal. Ben Agger (2007) likewise calls for a resistance against the all-encompassing administration of our time. In a similar way, activists and their supporters need to re-politicize media technologies including social media, particularly in terms of their temporalities. Although the experience of acceleration has been part of modernity from the beginning, digital media have added new qualities to the process of speeding-up that needs to be addressed critically within protest movements. This reinforces the need for repoliticizing media technologies and infrastructures as an integral part of a critical approach to current communicative and informationbased capitalism (see also Gehl 2011). Media technologies are not neutral platforms, but expression, manifestations but also drivers of the economic and social system in which they emerge. Hence, the media technologies employed by the activists that were analysed here, reflect the logics of capitalism in the US context. One of the main aims should be to overcome the often depoliticized analysis of technology by highlighting temporality and the consequences 95

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of desynchronization between media technologies and political decision-making processes. In the analysis, I pointed out that activists and movements that are critical of the current societal organization are navigating in a contested space of resistance and adaptation as they are always also part of the societies they aim to change. This is especially apparent when it comes to the employment of dominant media technologies, as Frederica Frabetti argues ‘technology is always both (…) an instrument and a threat, a risk and a promise. The unexpected is always implicit in technology, and the potential of technology for generating the unexpected needs to be unleashed in order for technology to function as technology’ (Frabetti 2015, 169).

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Protest technologies: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will

As the previous analyses have shown, media technologies play a crucial role for protest movements; back in the 1930s and 1970s as well as today. The diachronic comparison of protest movements related to economic crises has brought to light the media technologies employed by the activists constitute temporal and spatial regimes. In terms of temporality activism has experienced a change from mechanical speed in the 1930s to perpetual flow in the 1970s towards digital immediacy nowadays, as argued in Chapter 2. This has meant a speeding up of protest organization and mobilization that went hand in hand with an increasing individualization of content production, distribution and consumption. Connected with the increasing individualization, ties between individual activists have become weaker and more ephemeral. Besides the acceleration in protest organizing related to media technologies, activism experienced a change in spatial terms. Broadcasting and digital media contributed to overcoming greater distances connecting activists apart from each other and allowing movements to quickly reach a global scale. This is particularly true for the OWS movement as argued in Chapter 3. While media technologies contribute to the emergence of new temporalities and question spatial constraints, political practices of decision making might not have changed that much. Therefore Chapter 4 engaged with the phenomenon of desynchronization between media and political time that emerged 97

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particularly in the post-political situation of neoliberalism. While media technologies allow organization and participation in remote mobilizations on a global scale at high speed, the democratic and participatory decision making employed by progressive movements can only be sped up to a certain degree. Chapter 4 has discussed this speeding up on the one hand and the disconnection from political decision on the other with reference to Hartmut Rosa as frenetic standstill. In conclusion I argued, while media technologies have made mobilization potentially easier, there is a need to develop strategies to organize long term and in a sustainable manner in order to overcome the emerging desynchronization. Central for this goal is to understand media technologies and the regimes of time and space they establish.

HISTORICAL TRAJECTORIES: MEDIA REGIMES OF TIME AND SPACE The previous chapters established media regimes as a central notion in a temporal and spatial sense. Veronica Barassi (2015) has developed a similar line of argument through referring to immediacy as a current hegemonic construction of social time that produces potential conflicts with other layers of temporality in everyday life and particularly protest practices. The notion of regime emphasizes the hegemonic character of a dominant temporality or spatiality that is established through media technologies and discursive practices. Regimes can be defined and understood in many different ways, but the general definition of The Merriam Webster suggests that regimes have not only been described in their political meaning referring to a form of government or period of rule, but also as a regular pattern of occurrence or action and as characteristic behaviour and orderly procedure.1 In that sense, media regimes establish particular regularities and orders of processes 1 www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/regime 98

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that are most often taken for granted. In this book, I have investigated the taken-for-granted media regimes specifically in terms of time and space with which protest movements are grabbling. In a certain sense, media regimes describe a discursive closure that stand in contrast to struggles about the meaning and purpose media technologies, for example in a regulatory sense (Jakobsson and Stiernstedt 2010; Pickard 2015). Similarly, the Frankfurt School considered cultural industries as expressions of a discursive closure making a dialectial and critical exchange impossible while creating pseudo choices and precluding substantially alternative views. Mainstream media technologies become one site of dominant political and economic regimes such as capitalism as means of production. New products are constantly developed and innovations – even those that are partly aiming at establishing valuable alter­ natives – become incorporated into the capitalist mode of production through dispossession (Jakobsson 2012). A current example in terms of media technologies is the principle of sharing proposed as one of the most successful business models, for example by Tapscott and Williams (2008), that provided the grounds for the now striving sharing economy. The Great Recession functioned as an accelerator for new business models incorporating alternative and not-for profit ideas such as sharing. This led to a commercialization of new areas of social life and in the aftermath of the crisis sharing emerged as new social ideal pushing back against overconsumption and the connected debt accumulation that seemingly caused the crisis in the first place. Most of the currently successful apps were launched around 2008/2009. Rather than owning a specific object, people increasingly value experiences that go hand in hand with the often discussed ephemerality of objects in the digital age and a focus on practices such as sharing. The Great Recession provided a form of creative destruction that allowed for the development of new business models and successfully linked techno-optimism of Silicon 99

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Valley ideology with mainstream capitalism (Marwick 2013). At the same time, companies such as Uber, Airbnb and Lyft have discovered protest mobilization as efficient helpers for their commercial causes primarily to work against regulation. Their apps, online petitions and free services rewarding support are copying forms of mobilization known from grassroots movements, but often are not more than astroturfing for commercial purposes (Walker 2015). Large-scale crises of the economic system also open up for new forms of critique not only of the system as such, but also in terms of questioning the dominant media regimes. At the same time, these fundamental forms of critique require media technologies as ways of expression and prefigurations of the expressed critique. Even if there are certain media regimes discernable, there is a continued struggle about the development of media technologies, their organization and political potential that crystallize during crises times. As Raymond Williams discussed in the context of television: At the same time we are in a very contentious and confused situation about the institutions and social processes of all com­ munications. There is still an unfinished struggle and argument over the institutions and control of sound and vision broad­ casting: the conflict that has been clear for two generations between public service and commercial institutions and policies. (Williams 1974, 135)

Crises, such as the Great Recession, give new meaning and visibility to these ongoing struggles about media technologies and potentially unlock the established discursive closure of media regimes. In connection with protest practices, they hence become an entry point and empirical lens to analyse and make sense of social change. In terms of the historical foundations of the struggles addressed in this book, I have identified both continuities and shared features 100

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of protest movements in moments of economic crisis, especially when it comes to the hope connected with media innovations for furthering social change. In the 1930s, organic intellectuals such as Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin had high hopes for the radio to give new voice to the struggles of the working class. In the 1970s, the Met Council considered engaging with cable television in order to attract broader attention and support. In both cases the media innovation was considered as a harbinger for more democratization of the public sphere and discourse. However, the three movements are also characterized by fundamental changes when it comes to their media practices and the structuring of time and space. As I have showed in the previous chapters, there is a fundamental change from mechanical speed and perpetual flow towards digital immediacy. While digital immediacy emerges as such a hegemonic force, it makes accounting for the different temporalities of political protest difficult. Similarly, the construction of space has changed with media technologies that connect activists over vast distances. However, OWS seemed to symbolize a rediscovery of the importance of physical spaces and presence for protest practices. Media regimes emerge not only in terms of time and space, but also in terms of representation. Previous research of protest has discussed representational media regimes as protest paradigm, namely a typical way of framing and narrating of protest (Weaver and Scacco 2013). The protest paradigm refers to the discrediting and marginalizing of protest while focusing on tactics, spectacle, dramatic action rather than the more fundamental reasons for mobilization. Recent studies on protest often suggest that social media or the internet in general provide an alternative space for activists, allowing them to circumvent traditional framing and gatekeeping processes that are linked to mainstream news media. Social media are often seen as easy at hand channels to voice opinions that do not find room in other mainstream media. In the light of my analysis, I question 101

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this optimism and suggest that social media establish a new kind of protest paradigm. In order to gain visibility in social media activists have to adopt logics of social media particularly in terms of speed and permanent updating (van Dijck and Poell 2013). Corporate social media with business models based on continuous updating in order to acquire new data hence establish a different kind of protest paradigm. This paradigm or regime – as I would call it – is characterized by immediacy promoting weak ties and potentially impedes lasting organizational structures.

NOTES ON TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM Although the identified temporal and spatial media regimes have a strong impact on political activism and might preclude certain practices, there is room for navigation as I have intended to show in Chapter 4. Different forms of resistance establish new temporalities and spaces that are crucial for activists. Hence, I do not see an alternative in neglecting technology or exclusive focus on slow media as Ben Agger argues in his suggestion to become time rebels. I rather follow Sara Sharma (2014) in her argument that the slow media/slow spaces movement is an integral part of fast capitalism carving out spaces for recreation that essentially serve the speedy mode of production and do not establish a substantial alternative. Activism and change encompasses different temporalities ranging from hectic and speedy, revolutionary episodes to tedious organizing and preparation in order to keep the movement alive. Hence, it is the savviness of media activists in building infrastructures that accommodate their different temporal and spatial needs instead of relying on proprietary, commercial platforms that is necessary for promoting long-term social change. This need became particularly apparent in frictions between the TechOp and Public Relations/Media Working Group within Occupy 102

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Wall Street. While the TechOps group provided the necessary and absolutely crucial infrastructure of email services, listservs, wikis, sites for the individual working groups to post minutes and even a house-matching service for visiting protestors during larger marches, they remained invisible and in the background. The TechOps group coordinated not only nycga.net, but also interoccupy linking camps across the country and globally with each other. Activists within the PR and Media Working Group relying excessively on commercial social media on the contrary represented the movement outwards. At the same time, social media came to represent the major technology in general comments and research of the movement. Operational uses of technology provided by free software and open source activists remained overlooked. However, it was communication infra­ structures like nycga.net that allowed OWS to hold and organize General Assemblies and the working group structure in the first place. One of the TechOp activists – Aaron – confirmed that there was a clear distinction between operational infrastructures and social media. While the first was inward oriented and allowed for the administration of the movement, the use of social media in contrast was mainly outward oriented and gained much more intense attention from mainstream media and activists engaging in the working groups, including a number of emerging celebrity activists. Aaron suggested that the role of social media was a successful narrative with mainstream media because they could focus very strongly on the extensive usage of commercial platforms that might be a threat to traditional journalism, but that are not establishing a fundamental alternative to corporate media. In a certain sense, the extensive reporting about the social media savviness of OWS activists contributed to what Nick Couldry (2015) describes as the myth of the (networked) us as an extension of the myth of the mediated centre established by mainstream media. Hence, there are new distinctions emerging between alternative technological infrastructures that allow 103

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for diverse protest temporalities and corporate infrastructures that follow general tendencies of fast capitalism. These new distinctions are much more relevant than the divide between legacy and new media, at least in the context of protest technologies.

FUTURES OF PROTEST MEDIA In contrasting Occupy Wall Street to two previous important protest events in the context of crisis, it becomes apparent that the reper­ toires of spatial practices, contentious action and media practices are integrated with each other. All three movement activists are employing rather taken for granted, established media technologies to externally and internally communicate and further their causes. Taking OWS as an example, I argue that the major media technologies employed were well-established infrastructures such as Facebook and Twitter. OWS activists had no major interest in establishing alternative channels. There were attempts for OWS social networking platforms – global square and occupii – which however never really took off (Fuchs 2014). Instead activists worked predominantly with banal media technology for organizational and mobilization purposes. At the same time they were demystifying taken-for-granted media channels providing workshops and best-practice advice. The Press and Media working group of OWS was staffed with well-trained, media-savvy personnel that aimed to carve out space within established media. Media activism and Tech movements such as open source and free software or creative commons are gaining traction, especially during and after the SOPA and PIPA mobilizations of 2012. However in the broader protest landscape, they remain still marginal and rather isolated, often requiring very specific skills and knowledge that alienates outsiders. Future protests against social, political and economic injustices – such as the growing movement against austerity in Europe – need to link their struggles to global media activism that 104

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Conclusion

focuses on technological infrastructures. At the same time, media activists need to rearticulate their struggles for free software and creative commons in relation to broader causes of social inequality. In the information age, social inequalities are based on inequalities in terms of the ownership of the means of production including communication technologies and put information at the heart of diverse political struggles. This has to be acknowledged by both media and social justice activists working together and joining forces as it was envisioned by OWS in the beginning and Indymedia earlier (Wolfson 2014; Marwick 2013). What is needed is a democratic media activism, ‘which comprises efforts to change media messages, practices, insti­ tutions and contexts (including state communication policies) in a direction that enhances democratic values and subjectivity, as well as equal participation in public discourse and societal decisionmaking’ (Carroll and Hackett 2006, 84). Democratic media activism addresses institutional architectures, the production process, content, media audiences and most importantly the cultural and structural environment of communication institutions that are clearly linked to broader political struggles.

105

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COLLECTIONS AND MATERIALS

Unemployed workers’ movement Alfred and Hortense Wagenknecht and Helen and Carl Winter Family Papers TAM.583 American Federation of Labor Printed Ephemera Collection PE.014 Communist Party of the United States of America Records TAM.132 Greenwich House Records TAM.139 J.B.S. (Jacob Benjamin Salutsky) Hardman Papers TAM.050 Israel and Sadie Amter Autobiographical Typescript TAM.079 Labor Research Association Records TAM.129 League for Industrial Democracy Records TAM.049 Local 1930 Records WAG 040 Sam Adams Darcy Papers TAM.124 Sam Winn Papers WAG.203

Tenants’ movement Metropolitan Council on Housing Records TAM.173 Ronald Lawson Research Files for the Tenant Movement in New York City TAM.214

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CRISIS AND CRITIQUE

Occupy Wall Street Interview with Josh* (live streamer) Interview with Adi* (podcaster, activist New York) Interview with VK* (OWS activist producing fanzines) Interview with Mary* (OWS activist with the Media and Public Relations Working Group) Interview with David* (Occupy Philadelphia) Interview with Jenn (Interference Archive, Brooklyn) Interview with Aaron (TechOps, OWS) Occupy Wall Street Archiving Working Group Hard Drive Minutes Media Working Group (available at nycga.net) Minutes TweetBoat (available at nycga.net) Minutes Public Relations Working Group (available at nycga.net) *Pseudonyms

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122

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INDEX

Bank of America, 24 Barassi, Veronica, 37, 98 Benedict, Jane, 46; radio show, 69 Benjamin, Walter, 1-2, 4, 101 Bennett, Lance, 55 Bergson, Henri, durée notion, 11, 80 Black Lives Matter, 2, 79 Black Panthers, 8, 45, 66-7, 79 Bloomsbergville mobilization, 52 Blumenstock, Dorothy, 6, 42 Boston, 62 Bradley, Harriet, 33 Bray, Mark, 74 Brecht, Bertolt, 1-2, 4, 42, 101 broadcasting, planned flow, 50 brochures, low cost printing machines, 65 Brooklyn Bridge 2011 march on, 59, 61, 70; police brutality, 71 Buffalo, 62

Aaron, 103 abstention, 85 activism: critique through, 3; media technologies shaping, 15, 30; OWS ad hoc, 53; tech-savviness, 2 Adbusters, 9, 52 Ady, 71-2 affordable housing, spatial agenda, 68; New York lack, 24 Agger, Ben, 95, 102 AIG, 24 Airbnb, 100 Alter-Globalization, 3 Amter, Israel, 35, 44, 63-4, 86 Amter, Nell, 44 Amter, Sadie van Veen, 35, 42, 86 annihilation of space, ideology of, 77 Arab Spring, 2, 52 archiving: community, 33; movement, 32; organization of, 33; OWS stories, 93 123

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CRISIS AND CRITIQUE

Communist Party USA, 6, 39, 41-2, 64; organizing strategy, 40 community media, 68 constant news flow, dominant model, 93 Couldry, Nick, 27-8, 103 Crary, Jonathan, 11 crisis(es), situations of, 1, 17; capitalist, 12; -critique relationship, 14; Marxist theory of, 20, 23 opportunity period, 18 critique: -class-based judgment, 26; -crisis relation, 14; institutionalized forms, 26; space of possibilities, 30, 32

bulletins, unemployed workers use of, 39, 41, 43, use of, 41 Butler, Judith, 26 cable television, 65 capitalism: accelerated, 56; communicative, 54, 57, 94; fast, 19, 80, 82, 95 Castells, Manuel, 7, 20, 23, 25 chants, 92 Chicago, 62; communist media in, 6 circulation time, minimizing, 80 Citigroup, 24 City Star, 88 City Unemployed News Paper, 41 City Wide Coordinating Committee of Welfare Rights, 67 clip sheets, 6 collective experience, making of, 65 Columbia University, 59; Morning Heights building plan, 67; unaffordable housing role, 66 common public spaces, disappearing, 75 common public time, 11

Daily Worker, 42 Darcy, Sam Adams, 35, 43 data share days, OWS, 35 Day, Elizabeth, 2 Dean, Jodi, 54 DeLuca, Kevin M., 52 demassing, population, 69 democracy: OWS microexperiment, 56; participatory, 57; political system of, 84 deregulation, neoliberal, 5 desynchronization, 83-4 ‘dictatorship of speed’, 80 digital data, mining 34 124

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INDEX

Foucault, Michel, 10 Frabetti, Frederica, 96 Frankfurt School, 99 Freddie Mac, 24 frenetic standstill, 84, 98 From Techniques leaflet, 48 Fuchs, Christian, 20

digital exceptionalism, 3 digital media: immediacy regime, 31; personalization, 54; rapid mobilization, 4; social acceleration, 83, 95 dominant media regimes: crises questioning, 100; resistance against, 30; temporal logic of, 87 Donovan, Joan, 37-8, 94 Dos Passos, John, U.S.A., 35

Gerbaudo, Paolo, 75-6 Giddens, Anthony, structuration notion, 27 Gillham, P., 72 Gleitzman, Victor, 42 Global Revolution, live streaming platform, 71 Global square, failed networking platform, 104 Global.Revolution.tv, 90 Golding, Peter, 19 Gould-Wartofsky, Michael, 24, 52, 70, 90 Great Depression, the, 5, 18, 21 Great Recession, the 2007-8, 5, 18, 24, 87, 99-100; household wealth wiped out, 25 Greenwich House, New York, 6 group consenus, time needed for, 56

economic crises, 4, 17; critical junctures, 2; 1857, 20 Edwards, B., 72 1848 revolution, 20 Engels, Friedrich, 20-1, 60 Erde, John, 34 Ernst, Wolfgang, 30-1, 83 evictions: foreclosures, 25;; individual stories of, 42 ‘extension of vision in real time’, 33 Facebook, 2, 4, 10, 37, 53, 104 Fannie Mae, 24 financialization, 25 flat organization, new forms, 3 food workers, wage struggle, 70 foreclosures, 25 Foster, John, 20, 25 Foster, William Z., 35

Hammond Indiana, police violence, 63 hand sign system, process, 10 125

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International Day of Unemployment, 62 Italy, precarious workers, 28

Harlem, 67 Harvey, David, 11 hegemony of speed, resistance against, 81 Hootsuit, 51 Hoover, Herbert, 22 housing, New York low income scarcity, 24 Housing Crimes Trial, New York/Columbia University, 8, 59, 61, 66-7, 90; press coverage, 68 human microphone, process, 9 hunger march, national USA 1930, 59, 61-2, 64; ’immediate relief ’ demand, 79; ‘mob’ characterization of, 64; police violence against, 62-3 Hunger-Fighter, 39 hyper-spatial ideology, 72-3, 75

Jameson, Fredric, 11 Jansson, André, 73 Josh, 53-5, 69, 91 journalism, discredited period, 17 Kant Immanual, 26 Kjosen, Atle Mikkola, 54 Koselleck, Reinhart, 19-20, 26 Krise und Kritik, 1 labor Movement, USA, 39 Labor Research Association, 6 landlords, picketing of, 66 Lasswell, Harold, 6, 42 Lawson, Robert: 88; Papers, 36; team2, 48 leaflets, distrubution arrests, 44 League for Industrial Democracy, 6, 43 Lefebvre, Henri, 13, 64; The Production of Space, 60 Lehman Brothers: bankruptcy, 25; collapse of, 24 Lenin, V.I., 43 Lenox Hill Neighbourhood Association, 48 Lindsay, Mayor, 66

I Wor Kuen, 45, 66-7 immediacy, 55, 73, 98; digital, 56-7, 77, 84, 93, 101; lasting organisation impediment, 102 Indignados, Spain, 9, 52 individualization, media, 97 information, distribution timing, 48 Innis, Harold, 11, 33, 56, 73 international communist movement 1930s, 65 126

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INDEX

practice theory, 31; practices temporality, 37; production process acceleration, 39, 50; professionalization, 85, 88; technologies, see below; time-political time desynchronization, 74, 91, 97 media technologies, 82; mode of production, 75; politicizing need, 95-6; structuration, 31; temporality(ies), 12, 38, 57, 81, 83 Merleau-Ponty, 27 Merriam Webster, 98 Metropolitan Council on Housing, 7-8, 45, 47, 49, 65, 67, 101; handbooks, 66 media work record, 89; publicity workshops, 46, 88 mimeographs, 43, 94 mobilization, local for national, 64 Move In, 8 Murdock, Graham, 19 Musteites, 39

live streaming, 90-1 Lyft, 100 machine-time, 83; -political time difference, 4 mainstream media: content critique, 87; gatekeeping processes, 85, 101 Manzerolle, Vincent, 14, 54 Maras, Steven, 26 Marazzi, Christian, 24-5 Marc, 92 Marwick, Alice, 3 Marx, 20, 21 Marx, Karl, 20-1,60; value theory, 82 Massey, Doreen, 13 Mattoni, Alice, 3, 28 McAdams, Doug, 61, 79-80 McChesney, Robert, 17, 20, 25 means of communication, as means of production, 18 media: archaeology, 301; channels network, 39; consumption time, 49; ecology of speed-up, 14; literacy production, 28; individualization of, 55; innovations capitalist incorporating, 99; 1970s activists landscape,47;

NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 8, 45 Nadel, Gerry, 46 National Hunger March 1930, see hunger march 61 127

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Occupy mobilization extensions, 70 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) 2, 8, 9, 10, 13, 31, 57, 71, 72, 76, 91, 97, 104; Archive Working Group, 92; General Assembly, 56, 74; hackathons, 35; mainstream media critique, 93; Media and PR Working Group, 51-3, 55, 71-2, 104; media-savvy movement, 90; official channels, 91; physical spaces importance, 101; selfarchiving practices, 34; social media use, 94; square loss consequences, 70; TechOps working group, 102-3 Occupy TVNY, 90 oil and fiscal crises, 1970s, 5, 7, 18-19, 23-4 on line encounters, individualized, 75 OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries), 18-19, 23 Ornofsky, Ida, 44 OWS, see Occupy Wall Street

National Unemployed Council, 62 National Unemployment Insurance Day 1932, 63 National Unemployment League, 6 neighbourhood bulletins, 41 New Deal, the, 5, 23, 86 news flow, 49 New York Unemployed Councils, 61 New York City: affordable housing lack, 68; budget cuts 1970s, 7, 24; protesters deaths 1930, 62 New York Historical Society, 34 New York Times, 44, 68 Nixon, Richard M., 68 Noakes, J., 72 Northern Rock, 24 ‘nowness’, dominant focus on, 33 nycga.net, 103 Obama, Barak, stimulus programme, 24 Occupied Wall Street Journal, 36 occupii, failed networking platform, 104 Occupy LA, 37

Packer, Jeremy, 32 papers, production organization, 43 Parikka, Jussi, 27, 30 128

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INDEX

publicity: OWS working group, 51; timing and speed, 89; workshops, 48 Publicity

participatory political practices, temporalities of, 57, 73 Peters, John Durham, 12 PIPA mobilization, 104 placards, making of, 92 Poell, Thomas, 54 police violence, 7; Brooklyn Bridge, 71; extreme 1930s, 62; showing of, 72 political system, asynchronous, 81 Poster, Mark, 75-6 PR and media Working Group, OWS, 103 precarious workers, media practices, 28 Price, Bill, 88 professionalization, Met Council, 89 protest: cycles, 79; inwardoutward technologies, 15; mobilization commercial uses, 100; spectacle and performance, 65; speeds, 1013; traditional framing of, 101 protest movements: demands urgency, 79 media practices, 27, 47; media technologies, 2; space, 12 public spaces, reclaiming, 9 publication processes, workers, 45

radio, use of, 6, 42, 101 rate of profit, tendency to fall, 20-1, 23 real-time, 81 Red-baiting USA 1920s, 86 Rent and Housing in the City, radio show, 46, rent strike, New York, 66 resistance: different forms of, 102; physical space occupation, 72 Richter, Michaela, 19-20 Rifkin, Jeremy, 82 Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, 34 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 23 Rosa, Hartmut, 82-4, 98 Rowohlt publishing house, 1 Rucht, Dieter, Quadruple A-model, 85 Scannell, Paddy, 11 Schatzki, Theodore, 27 Segerberg, Alexandra, 55 Sewell, William, 31, 61, 79-80 sharing, business model, 99 Sharma, Sarah, 82, 102 129

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Squatters Organization Move-In, 45 St Louis, 62 Steinbeck, John, Grapes of Wrath, 35 Stiegler, Bernard, 84 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 6 suicide rates, Great Depression, 22

Shean, Betty, 44 shop papers, unemployed movement, 41 Sinclair, Upton, 87; The Jungle, 35 slow media productions, 92 Smith, John Scott, 22 Smithsonian National Museum of American History, 34 social change, urgency of, 80, 82 social media, 55, 61, 73, 94, 103; logic of, 54; overemphasis on, 4; temporality of, 37-8 social movements, 1960s, 23 social relief system, 1930s 5; USSR, 42 Social Service Employees, New York, 67 social time, construction of, 98 Socialist Party, USA, 6, 39 SOPA mobilization, 104 space: class-gender based, 13; production of, 60, 69; spatial coalitions New York, 68; spatial practices, 60 speculation, 1920s, 22 speed, 14; acceleration of, 82; industrial production speed-up, 87; resistance to hegemony of, 81 Spokes Council, 10 Spokes Council, OWS, 10, 74

Tamiment Library, 34 Tapscott, Don, 99 Teichberg, Vlad, 90 television: competing channels flow, 51; discrete sequences diminished, 50 temporality, ethnography of, 82 tenants: activists, 45; associations handbook, 46; 1970s movement New York, 7, 65, 94; organizations, 8; victims resistance, 61 The Lower Manhattan Unemployed Worker, 39-40 The Tenant, 69, 89 Tilly, Charles, 59 time: hegemonic perceptions of, 37; rebels, 102; - regimes of disconnect, 81; space compression, 82; -temporality distinction, 11; timing, 49 130

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INDEX

Wachovia, 24 Washington Mutual, 24 WBAI radio, 46 We are the 99%, campaign, 55 Weltevdre, E. 81 Williams, Anthony D., 99 Williams, Raymond, 18, 26, 31, 50-1, 69, 100 Wilmington, police violence against, 63 Winn, Sam, 35 WINSA Radio 1010, 46 Winter, Carl, 35, 44 Wittgenstein, L., 27 Wolfson, Todd, 95 Wolin, Sheldon, 81 workers’ organizations, radio speeches, 43 Worthy, William, 48

Tomlinson, J., 14 Tompkins Square, open-air meetings, 44 Treré, Emilian, 3 Twitter, 4, 9, 51-2, 55, 90, 104 Uber, 100 UBS, 24 unemployed councils, contact details, 65 unemployed workers’ movement, 1930s, 5, 39, 86, 94; mobilizing, 6 unemployment council New York 1931, 44; unemployed councils contact details, 65 Unemployment, Great Depression, 22 Urrichio, William, 33 USSR, relief system propagandized, 64

Young Lords, 8, 45, 66-7 YouTube, 10, 52, 93 Zapatistas, 3 Zielinski, Siegfried, 38, 95 zine production, 92 Zuccotti Park occupation, 9, 72

Van Dijck, José, 54 Vietnam War, federal money spending on, 68 Virilio, Paul, 11, 82

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