Image borrowed from Triple Canopy.

The enigmatic Internet-driven collective Anonymous, thank goodness, has an anthropologist in its midst. For a few years now, Gabriella Coleman has been arduously participant-observing in IRC chat rooms, watching Anonymous turn from a prankster moniker to a herd of vigilantes for global justice. In an extraordinary new essay at Triple Canopy, “Our Weirdness Is Free,” she summarizes what Anonymous is all about this way:

Beyond a foundational commitment to anonymity and the free flow of information, Anonymous has no consistent philosophy or political program. Though Anonymous has increasingly devoted its energies to (and become known for) digital dissent and direct action around various “ops,” it has no definite trajectory. Sometimes coy and playful, sometimes macabre and sinister, often all at once, Anonymous is still animated by a collective will toward mischief—toward “lulz,” a plural bastardization of the portmanteau LOL (laugh out loud). Lulz represent an ethos as much as an objective.

The more I learn about Anonymous, especially in light of the offline, on-the-ground praxis of the Occupy movement, the more I’ve been wondering whether we’re seeing a glimpse of the future for all of us.

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The photo from Occupy Oakland used to advertise "Solidarity Sunday" on OccupyWallSt.org.

Occupy Oakland got rough on Saturday night, when an attempt to occupy a vacant convention center resulted in police using tear gas and other weapons, as well as, reportedly, protesters throwing rocks back at them. Some of the most widely-circulated photos depicted the burning of an American flag that had been removed from Oakland’s City Hall. On Sunday, other Occupy groups around the country took to the streets in solidarity marches. In New York, there were reports of potentially dangerous actions, including a bottle being thrown. Entrepreneurial live streamer Tim Pool, as The New York Observer anxiously reports, noted that there was more of a black bloc presence than usual. The night before, an OWS-er allegedly used pepper spray on a police officer.

Those who had been at the afternoon’s Occupy Town Square beforehand might have seen this coming. Members of OWS’s Direct Action Working Group—which oversees the planning of most marches and other actions—gave an impromptu teach-in about the idea of “diversity of tactics,” which was in many respects insightful, but ultimately became an apologia for undertaking, or at least tolerating, what might be construed as violent actions. The villains of the presentation, perhaps even more so than police, were those within the movement who denounce or try to stop others who want to do such things. They were described as likely to be sexist and racist for trying to insist on nonviolent discipline.

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As we approach the first anniversary of the Egyptian revolution on January 25, a lot of us could stand to refresh our memories of just what happened. Maybe, while being under our various rocks, we even missed some of it the first time around. That’s why I was grateful to come across Ashraf Khalil’s Liberation Square, hot off of St. Martin’s Press. The book makes the revolution about as exciting as one would think a revolution should be, and perhaps almost as much as this one actually was. Pick it up, and you’ll find yourself engrossed in “movement time”—which is to say, regular time seems to go on hold until you’re done. But the book also inadvertently serves as a reminder that, in such “movement time” euphoria, even a person apparently right in the middle of it all might not quite understand what’s going on.

The initial chapters acquaint the outsiders among us with a gist of what it’s like to be an urban, educated and hopeless young Egyptian in the early 21st century. It doesn’t sound very appealing. Indeed, Khalil’s chief explanation for what drove so many young males over the edge was the pent-up anxiety that they’d never get to have sex; low job prospects meant low prospects of leaving their parents’ houses and low prospects of getting married. Fair enough. To an ignorant reader like myself, Khalil gives the impression that he has spent enough time haunting Cairo’s cafes to have quite fully plumbed the souls of this restive demographic. Which is illuminating. But sexual frustration alone does not make a revolution.

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The Occupy movement celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in force. There was a worldwide candlelight vigil on Sunday night, and then, on Monday, nationwide protests in front of Federal Reserve locations under the banner of “Occupy the Dream.” With the moniker “Occupy 4 Jobs,” protests in four East Coast cities called for a new initiative to counter unemployment. In New York, the vigil was a celebrity-studded success; the next day, Occupy the Dream attracted a lackluster showing in the morning cold. The several hundred who turned out at Union Square to Occupy 4 Jobs made their point by way of a maddening, roving sparring match with the NYPD, by the end of which protesters had distracted themselves from the banks and stores they were targeting with vicious verbal assaults on their police escort. What force they mustered, really, became diluted by fury.

This kind of behavior is not an exception carried out by an errant Occupy copycat, but the rule for the movement as a whole; we at Waging Nonviolence have contended with it again and again. Eventually this movement needs to grow out of its debilitating reactiveness, to grow up, to learn discipline, and to realize that its real power begins where this kind of mayhem ends. I think King would say so too.

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Occupy Wall Street organizer Austin Guest carrying a police barricade during the New Year's Eve action at Zuccotti Park. AP photo.

WNV contributor Jeremy Kessler has a new essay at The New Republic, an Occupy Wall Street-inspired reflection on the relationship between protest movements and the crafting of the First Amendment’s right to assembly in American legal history:

Only as massive labor unrest roiled the country during the Great Depression did the federal judiciary begin to put meat on the bones of the First Amendment’s “right to peaceably assemble.” In 1939, in Hague v. CIO, the Supreme Court invalidated the mayor of Jersey City’s attempt to bar labor organizers from meeting on public property. Public spaces such as streets and parks, the Court wrote, “have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly.” In vindicating the right of the CIO to assemble, the Court described a new legal space—the public forum—in which certain kinds of expression could not be restricted. Ironically, in later years, the public forum concept, and the equation of a particular act of assembly with the more general category of “expression,” would become ways of limiting rather than liberating assembly.

In the 1960s and early ’70s, however, civil rights activists pushed the boundaries of the Haguedecision, assembling out of doors and sitting where they didn’t belong, often in violation of public safety and trespass laws. The Supreme Court responded positively to these efforts, reversing dozens of local convictions, including that of five African-American men who staged a silent protest in the “whites-only” public library and eighty-five demonstrators who protested school segregation outside the home of the mayor of Chicago. The simple fact that local officials found the use of public land by civil rights activists to be a threat to public safety did not give them the authority to disperse the assembled protesters.

For more, read the rest of the essay, and see the video of Jeremy and me on a panel together at Columbia Law School.

A recent Occupy Wall Street Spokes Council meeting.

It’s bizarre how often nowadays one hears Occupy Wall Street talked about in the past tense—bizarre, especially, if one was at the strategy meeting of OWS’s Direct Action group on January 8. Around 150 of the movement’s most restless radicals sat on the hardwood floor and in folding chairs at 16 Beaver Street, a block from the Charging Bull in downtown Manhattan. The purpose was a big-picture strategic discussion about where the movement’s tactics had taken it so far and where to go next in the coming months. As if to match the scale of the conversation, huge sheets of paper were spread across the center of the room, which scribes markered up with the gist of what was being said.

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The Occupy movement is busy. Far from being dormant for the winter, occupiers are finding themselves with all sorts of new actions, challenges and plans. Though most of the 24-hour encampments have ended, the movement is beginning to focus much more on actions directed toward concrete demands. Last night I attended Occupy Wall Street’s Spokes Council—now finally active after weeks of turmoil—and caught the above video of documentarian Michael Moore’s unplanned speech. In it, he reminded the 100 or so people present that the fight ahead is a long one, and that they’re only just getting started. Here’s a glimpse at how the fight will be unfolding in the coming months:

• On New Year’s Day, President Obama signed into law the latest National Defense Authorization Act, which includes new powers for detaining US citizens and further entrenches the prison at Guantanamo Bay in American policy. Occupiers, some of whom see the new powers as likely to be directed at them, mounted a roving protest in New York on January 3. NDAA will also be a focus of the Occupy Congress action in Washington on January 17, which has reportedly just secured permission from the Park Police to hold a protest.

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As it moves into a new year, and an election year no less, the Occupy movement will likely be claimed by more and more hopefuls in the mainstream trying to benefit from it, and to sanitize it in the process. I guess that’s why I’ve found myself writing a lot lately about the movement’s radical roots, radical ambitions, and radical tactics—to remind us that if it had played by the rules some now want it to play by, it wouldn’t have gotten where it is in the first place.

For the occasion of a recent panel discussion at Columbia Law School on Occupy Wall Street and the First Amendment, I wrote this essay, subsequently published on the website of Harper’s Magazine. It argues that one should not take the movement’s appeals to the Bill of Rights too literally in legal terms, and that its tactics and aims have always been infused with an impulse more revolutionary than the law could ever accommodate. The whole discussion at Columbia, which also included WNV contributor and legal scholar Jeremy Kessler, can now be watched here:

Following that, The Nation published my essay “Thank You, Anarchists,” which explores some of what anarchist thought has contributed to the movement and why it deserves to be taken more seriously than it often is by those on the outside:

As assemblies enter our own politics through the Occupy movement, we should take care to recognize what they’re not and will never be. Even more important, though, is what they’ve already done. They’ve reminded us that politics is not a matter of choosing among what we’re offered but of fighting for what we and others actually need, not to mention what we hope for. For this, in large part, we have the anarchists to thank.

Co-opt that.

As Occupy Wall Street’s birthday party got going at midday today, the mood was mixed—not unlike the mood with which, in a series of improvisations, the movement began three months earlier on September 17. I talked with organizers I’d known from the movement’s first planning meetings, who were milling around Duarte Square, an open space a mile north of the old encampment at Zuccotti Park. Cars were rushing by along Canal Street toward the Holland Tunnel, spewing exhaust. The square was full; lots of music, planning, anticipating, sign-making, puppeteering, the works. Usual protest stuff. But uncertain.

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It’s that TIME of the year again—ha!—when TIME magazine announces the Person of the Year, a tradition generally meant to remind us which depressing white men in suits happen to rule the world. (U.S. presidents tend to receive it when elected. George W. Bush, for instance, won the distinction in both 2000 and 2004.) TIME’s editors made a slightly more whimsical choice this year, following in the pattern of non-election years like 2006 (“You”), 2003 (“The American Soldier”), 1998 (“The Endangered Earth”). While those might seem pretty depressing too, this year’s choice represents something that, for millions of people around the world, is a source of enormous hope. That’s because it is them—though not so much in the narcissistic style of 2006. It’s official, at least according to this particular dinosaur-like, mega-corporate newsmagazine: the 2011 Person of the Year is “The Protester.”

As I first saw this announcement percolating on Twitter, being spread around proudly every which way by Occupy Wall Street-allied accounts, all I could think was: what took you so long? Where were you?

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