Getting to the bottom of protests

The movement offers a new vocabulary for a new age, an assortment of odd terms not only geared to sound irresistibly hip to the wannabe, but which serve as a useful in-group marker and to some extent helps consolidate groupthink, if not a common ideology.

Take free speech and democracy. Anyone who shows up for a "general assembly" at a protest site, is, in theory, offered 60 seconds to express themselves. The mass deliberations are supposed to be proof of how democratic the movement is, though not much more than a sound-bite or introduction can be accomplished in the allotted time.

But the general assembly is also a control mechanism, complete with a low-key bureaucracy at work, starting with volunteer security personnel, including US vets from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, authentication of visitors, facilitation working groups, a "stack keeper" who decides who gets to talk and in what order (with white males automatically sent to the bottom of the stack because they are presumably confident and like to talk), a "time keeper", a "note-taker" and "mods" (moderators) for Internet live streams. The evil genius of this form of free expression is that the conversation is hemmed in, subject to being steered and controlled, and anything less than glowing positive approval of what the facilitators are facilitating for can result in uncomfortable shunning or silence.

An eerie silent applause technique, said to be adopted from protests in Spain, is another crowd control technique, where an upward flutter of hands is construed as support, a downward flutter not so good.

There is the "mic check", a resourceful response to a police prohibition on microphones, in which listeners repeat in unison what a speaker is trying to say. "Taking stack" is the job of the free speech dispatchers, "agenda items" steer discussion, a "report-back" sums it up. A "unity clap" concludes a session. If you don't make it into the "stack", there is the "soapbox" afterwards where one is free to ramble. There are "meditation flash mobs", "rev fit" is health for revolutionaries a "walk-out" is students cutting classes, "comfort" deals with showers, etc, and the "vibes-person" presumably monitors the mellowness of the mood.

There are calls to establish a "Liberty Plaza Anarchist College". While American-style anarchy co-mingles with the movement and gives it much of its flavor, there is a hidden hierarchy that is not anarchist at all.

If and when the first blood is drawn - a tragic inevitability in a movement that has goals of toppling the capitalist order and no intention to withdraw - the self-serving strategy of the low-profile, hard-to-pinpoint crowd leadership will be vindicated.

Those advocating revolt and issuing marching orders from a laptop in the warmth and safety of a heated apartment in Berkeley, Vancouver or wherever, while the masses confront the blue line of the police on the cold streets of Manhattan will have a lot to answer for.

For now, the behind-the-scenes deciders and influencers are biding their time, exerting influence in subtle ways while justifiably angry Americans take to the streets and the feckless American mainstream media, which has flip-flopped between dismissively ignoring the protests, adoring the protests and trying to co-opt them, falls into its prescribed role of useful tool.

The author is a visiting fellow in the East Asia Program, Cornell University, New York.

(China Daily 10/13/2011 page9)

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