Published Date 5/31/11 11:42 AM
A look at ideas around Ukuncut, which grew from the winding down of the climatecamp movement.
The ecology of hash-tag organising
A group of driven people get together in a pub and come up with a strategy and a hash-tag – they then build a aggregating website to display the hash-tag and self organise around it. This facilitates exciting, dramatic and dynamic actions, which draw in more dynamic and active crew, the aggregating website allows fast feedback.
Mainstream media pick this up, a group of media savey crew start to feed this media. The mainstream media coverage brings in a flood of more “liberal” activists and normal people, this swells the actions and makes them much more affective. This swerles round for a while.
The targets start to recognise the damage that is being done to them and the threat that they might have to change – and start a two prong strategy
* PR offensive to show how they are changing
* Use of private corpurtae spy’s, the courts and the police to repress the demonstration strategy
The problems of hash-tag organising start here, as the mainstream media outreach has seceded in bring in many more less experienced (and more liberal) people there attitudes start to dominate the hash-tag organising space. And the more experienced activist voices are submerged in this flow. The effects of this are 3 fold:
1) Actions start to follow a narrow predictable pattern which quickly becomes stale
2) The forces of repression create strategy’s for dealing with these static ideas/actions
3) The voices of change are submerged under the voices of flow, and the flow cercals to 1)
This leads to the inflexible liberal elements wilting under the focused repression and the movement stagnating and often turning on it self. It seams to me that hash-tag organising has no way out of this cyclical.