Rebuild the Dream

by Van Jones

  THE 2ND AMENDMENT DEFENDS ALL THE REST!

  HAVE YOU EVER BEEN EMPLOYED BY A POOR PERSON?

  And as for their mastery of the Outside Game: the Tea Party was the only force in American doing big rallies, essentially, for two years. This unilateral dominance of street protest by right-wingers was unprecedented. On August 28, 2010, Glenn Beck called people to gather in Washington, DC, for the Restoring Honor rally. He stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had stood forty-seven years prior, and greeted the 87,000 people—overwhelmingly white, middle-aged folks—who came out (although Beck claimed there were 300,000 to 500,000 supporters). Beck welcomed the attendees by saying, “This day is a day we can start the heart of America again. And it has nothing to do with politics.” Nor did it have anything to do with facts. But Beck understood that the first step to power is to claim the Heart Space.

  The Tea Partiers were powerful communicators and mobilizers in 2009–2010. Based on their occupation of the lower half of the grid, they were able to mount a ferocious assault that let them claim a piece of the upper half, too—electing the likes of Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, Marco Rubio in Florida, and Rand Paul in Kentucky.

  By helping the GOP take over the U.S. House of Representatives and multiple statehouses in 2010, the Tea Party movement won the chance to impact the Inside Game. Since then, they’ve been filling the Head Space with proposals such as FreedomWorks’ Tea Party Budget, “a comprehensive ten-year plan to stop the debt, shrink the government, and save our country.” In practice, Tea Party obstinacy about these ideas led to the debt-ceiling debacle, which resulted in America’s first-ever credit downgrade.

  Since the midterm elections of 2010, the Tea Party’s ability to mobilize street demonstrations seems to have waned; leaders may have redeployed those assets to less visible but more electorally impactful uses (lobbying decision makers, registering voters, and building GOTV capacity). But whatever its limitations or weaknesses, one must respect a force like the Tea Party, which has been able to show skill and achieve success in all four quadrants of the grid.

  OCCUPY WALL STREET

  The American people continued to suffer and hunger for answers. Neither the waning Obama brand nor the vitriolic Tea Party brand held much appeal for many in the rising generation. So on September 17, 2011, a bunch of young people in sleeping bags appeared on the scene.

  Occupy Wall Street brought to the Heart Space its predominant emotions: righteous indignation and occasional outrage. Occupiers magnetized every imaginable form of media. A search on YouTube for the “99%” turned up 241,000 videos, while a search for “Tea Party,” a movement that’s been going ten times longer (about thirty-four months, at the time of writing, versus less than three months of Occupy), yields 237,000. YouTube has been occupied, as has every form of social media.

  Notably, the Twitter-for-photos blogging platform, Tumblr, emerged as a potent way to collect and share stories from the Occupiers and the people who shared their outrage. The “We Are the 99 Percent” Tumblr invites people to write on paper their experiences of how the economic crises are impacting their lives, take a photo of themselves holding it, and post it. “Allow us to introduce ourselves,” reads the site. “We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we’re working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.” It quickly went viral. By October there were nearly one hundred posts a day.

  Spin-offs included a Dave Chappelle–style satire that featured pictures of America’s best-off rubbing their riches in our faces: “We Are the 1%, Bitches.” There’s one featuring uber-cute lolcats complaining about how they, too are suffering as their human companions scrimp: “We Are the 99 Purrcent.” A progressive group called Resource Generation that works with young people with high net worth launched “We Stand with the 99 Percent.” It features 1%-ers who believe in redistributing wealth.

  There is even—and linguist George Lakoff must love this one—a conservative “backlash” Tumblr called “We are the 53%.” That number is based on the percentage of Americans that pay federal taxes, with the implication that supporters of Occupy Wall Street comprise the 47% who do not because of poverty or tax credits. What Lakoff would admire is that the 99% brand is still being reinforced here, even as it is rebutted. Score!

  Elsewhere, poet and national treasure Drew Dellinger brought the following words: “See, the one percent done spent all the rent. / And now the rent’s due, so we’re coming to a tent near you. / We’re the like-minded ninety-nine percent / standing up to corruption with loving dissent.” Music blogger and culture hacker Wyatt Closs created something called Occupy Sound, which offers music to inspire and inform the movement. Volume One included Noam Chomsky, Pharrell, and Public Enemy. Occupy Design creates freely available visual tools around a common graphic language to unite the 99%. Their emphasis is on infographics and icons that improve the communication of the movement’s messages and pertinent data.

  One of the catchiest, graphic messages to go viral depicts Speaker of the House John Boehner in coveralls emblazoned with twenty corporate logos—his top-twenty supporters—with the header “Should politicians wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers to identify their corporate sponsors?” (The overwhelming response—from people across the political spectrum—is yes.)

  And the award for most stunning use of spectacle in service to the movement probably goes to the “bat signal” projection, the celebratory message projected onto the monolithic Verizon building in Manhattan on the occasion of Occupy Wall Street’s two-month birthday, November 17, 2011.

  And in all of these spaces, Occupy has entertained us. The messages on the cardboard signs made by individual protestors go beyond the anguish portrayed in the We Are the 99% Tumblr, providing unexpected sources of humor:

  I CAN’T AFFORD MY OWN LOBBYIST

  SO I MADE THIS SIGN.

  DON’T WORRY, FOX NEWS,

  I DON’T TAKE YOU SERIOUSLY EITHER.

  IF ONLY THE WAR ON POVERTY WAS A REAL WAR,

  THEN WE WOULD ACTUALLY BE PUTTING MONEY INTO IT.

  (Cornel West’s sign)

  MY CARDBOARD CAN BEAT YOUR BILLBOARD.

  I’M LIKELY TO GET A HUGE CRUSH ON

  ANY POLICE OFFICER WHO JOINS OUR MOVEMENT.

  DUE TO RECENT BUDGET CUTS, THE LIGHT AT

  THE END OF THE TUNNEL HAS BEEN TURNED OFF.

  When tents were banned on the quad at UC Berkeley, students attached dozens of helium balloons to tents to float them in the sky above the quad instead. This was unexpected, surprising, and hilarious. It’s exactly the right tone to counter the sober plight of the 99% and the darkness of the police responses they’ve faced. The movement needs to keep it up.

  I could go on. Occupy Wall Street has inundated the Heart Space with visceral hurt and authentic anger. They leveraged massive creative talent in service to their message, and used social networks for distribution.

  In all of this, they’ve played a strong Outside Game as well. The actions felt different than normal lefty protests; they were not the usual suspects. And their action was edgy—it provoked police response and demanded a response by the broader establishment. Even no response constituted a response, especially after the paramilitary police actions against defenseless women, veterans, eighty-year-olds, and a row of cowed university students.

  The big question is whether the broader 99% movement—which Occupy Wall Street has inspired—can evolve to embrace messaging and the tactics beyond outrage, protests, and encampments. If it can, this movement might be able to achieve full-spectrum dominance—becoming a powerful force in all four quadrants.

  THE GRID HELPS US VISUALIZE the strengths and weakness of each movement. The next two chapters will delve more deeply into lessons from the
Outside Game, using the lens of swarm theory. The final chapter of this section will explore the Heart Space and expose the surprising narrative pattern that Obama 2008, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street all share.

  The big question is whether the broader 99% movement can evolve to embrace messaging and the tactics beyond outrage, protests, and encampments.

  5

  SWARMS

  The Outside Game Revisited

  THE OUTSIDE GAME IS THE HOME of mass action and is fueled by passion. In this domain, I was surprised to discover that the same underlying mechanisms functioned within all three of the movements we are studying. The Obama phenomenon, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street—although coming from varying, and even opposing ideological backgrounds—share many parallels and overlaps. The more we can demystify these movements and understand their mechanics, the better we can apply the knowledge and experience as we move forward.

  The first approach, then, is to consider all three movements in light of a kind of network theory known as swarm theory. All three of these movements can be understood as different kinds of “swarms.”

  Biologists who have studied the collective intelligence of insect colonies, flocks of birds, and schools of fish provided the inspiration for describing the human social phenomenon as we know it: swarms are groups in which no one individual is in charge and each individual is free to take action on her own, following certain simple guidelines. As it turns out, staggeringly complex situations can be mastered and benefit the collective when individual members are empowered in this way.

  In 2008, technology writer Clay Shirky inspired many with his analysis of the power of crowd-sourcing, also known as collaborative production, in Here Comes Everybody. Online social tools, he argued, now enable individuals to join forces and achieve things together without needing an institution to organize them. The creation of Wikipedia is one such example.

  Decentralized, self-organized groups can be trickier to start, but they are less resource-intensive to maintain than old-fashioned bureaucracies. The traditional, top-down structures suffer from what Shirky calls the “institutional dilemma”: the “institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort . . . because an institution expends resources to manage resources, there is a gap between what those institutions are capable of in theory and in practice, and the larger the institution, the greater those costs.”

  But, as we shall see, institutions themselves can also be subsumed into a swarm superstructure, functioning as mere nodes in the network.

  Despite appearing chaotic at first glance, the swarm structure has multiple benefits. Because intelligence and decision-making power is spread throughout the system, swarms are highly adaptive and resilient. With no leader or headquarters to target, a swarm is very difficult to destroy. And the fact that each node has decision-making power means that the swarm can react and pivot quickly and nimbly as new situations arise.

  Because intelligence and decision-making power is spread out, swarms are resilient. With no leader to target, a swarm is very difficult to destroy.

  By way of example, swarm mechanics are evident in this description by Johann Hari, writing in the Nation magazine about UK Uncut:

  The old protest movements were modeled like businesses, with a CEO and a managing board. This protest movement, however, is shaped like a hive of bees, or like Twitter itself. There is no center. There is no leadership. There is just a shared determination not to be bilked, connected by tweets. Every decision made by UK Uncut is open and driven by the will of its participants.

  Swarms reproduce and mutate as well. In The Starfish and the Spider, another important book on network theory, authors Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom point to the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve-step model. It has been adapted in countless settings beyond alcohol treatment, not just without resistance from people in the original network, but with their blessing. Spinoffs are seen as a sign of a healthy entity, rather than competition to be squashed.

  A new era is being defined by the emergence of technology-enhanced swarms that aim to impact or change the political system. Political swarms are special. They are a subset of the larger phenomenon of swarms, but they face particular challenges to becoming relevant and effective. For one thing, they must exist in relationship to the reigning political structures, which are top-down, highly bureaucratic, and generally resistant to non-elite inputs or influence. At a national level, political swarms must attract significant popular support and unleash tremendous energy to even register inside the Teflon dome over Washington, DC, which deflects virtually anything thrown its way. Yet, while the goal is to impact the political system, political swarms do not originate from within the normal political process. A political swarm succeeds only when it comes from the outside and exists independently.

  My analysis of the mechanics of recent political swarms uncovered three key components that were crucial to the success of each: (1) open source brand, (2) support center(s), and (3) media attention.

  Open Source Brands

  Open source brands do not function like ordinary “proprietary brands.” Most regular organizations use a proprietary brand—one that is trademarked and can be used exclusively by that single organization. Such organizations then attempt to build up their brand by soliciting members, attracting donors, and gaining name recognition through the press. This process is laborious, expensive, and time consuming. It also throws the organization into de facto competition with every other group with a similar mission. As result, much of the professional “do-gooder” space functions as a warzone, with rival organizations in the same field duking it out over turf, funding, and air time in the media. This “battle of the brands” consumes a great deal of time and energy in the field of social change advocacy, both on the right and on the left.

  On the other hand, nobody owns an open source brand. It can be used by anyone who likes what the name stands for, without that person having to seek prior permission from anybody. Anyone who likes the brand, anybody who identifies with the brand, can use the brand. On the front end, the exact properties that will make an open source brand successful are hard to describe or make predictions about. But when an open source brand “catches on,” millions of people rush toward it. Its creators do not have to chase people down and beg them to join in the fun.

  Even existing organizations that already have their own proprietary brands may also want to affiliate with the new, open source brand, declaring themselves a part of the growing phenomenon. As we shall see in the following examples, this affiliate branding model lets the open source brand spread even more rapidly—and it saves resources by creating an umbrella that allows the existing groups to connect and echo each other in new ways. Numerous individuals and institutions can then affiliate under a unifying banner without having to give up their own identities. It is the ideal way (and probably the only way) to label a true swarm.

  Nobody owns an open source brand. Anyone who likes the brand, anybody who identifies with the brand, can use the brand.

  In some ways, in 2008, the word “Obama” actually functioned as an open source brand. First of all, those three syllables did not mean “the surname of a black guy from Chicago who wants to be president.” His name itself became a brand, invoking a whole series of lofty and aspirational values. More importantly, the Obama brand took on an “open source” quality, through MyBarackObama.com. Anyone who wanted to support Obama could sign up and affiliate himself or herself with the Obama brand, create special Obama sub-groups, and publicly badge himself or herself with the “Hope” logo. We saw people proudly walk the streets, wearing shirts and buttons that identified them as a lesbian for Obama, or a steelworker for Obama. They could be whatever they wanted to be, keep their own identity, and yet affiliate with the Obama brand. I sometimes refer to “Obama” in 2008 as a meta-brand because it pulled in so many brands.

  The name “Tea Pa
rty” also functions as a brand. Today that term represents more than a distant, historical event; it means more than a pleasant outing for little girls or senior citizens. It is a political brand that invokes a right-wing, tax-cutting, anti-Obama sensibility. At a deeper level, it invokes the patriotic principle of liberty (more on that in the next chapter). It also has an open-source quality. Nobody owns it. And it is more resilient than the Obama brand because it does not hinge on a personality, a politician, or even an actual political party. Its equity rests on the principles and values it invokes. Anyone who agrees with the basic principles in the Contract from America is entitled to call herself a Tea Partier and affiliate with the brand. Thousands of organizations—most of which already operate under proprietary brands—also fly the Tea Party flag to proclaim membership with the swarm.

  Occupy Wall Street has gone beyond both of its predecessor swarms in creating an open source brand. It has generated the most decentralized, widely applicable brand yet. The Tea Party may not have a director sitting in headquarters, but most everyone can point to key spokespeople. This is not the case with Occupy. Anyone anywhere in the world who shared the frustration and outrage of the original Occupy Wall Street group has been empowered to take action in Occupy’s name. There are no tenets and no contract that must first be embraced. So we now see Occupy Student Debt, Occupy Congress, Occupy Colleges, Occupy the Media, Occupy Marines, and Occupy Design, among countless other invocations.

  It may also be worth noting that brevity is a shared feature: Obama, Tea Party, and Occupy are all only three syllables long. All three movements utilized brands that are short, memorable, and open source.

  Brevity is a shared feature: Obama, Tea Party, and Occupy are all only three syllables long.