OWS cannot succeed because OWS cannot budget.

How the Internet has made social change easy to organize, hard to win by Zeynep Tufekci. A TED talk.

Dry but interesting talk. The speaker, Zeynep Tufekci, contrasts the efficiency and speed with which protests are organized via twitter and the internet versus their long term effectiveness. Some protests lead to some sort of catalytic change - a law is reversed, a government is toppled. But that is rare and usually what happens is much initial noise, dwindling to a whisper until nothing more is heard. Think of the protests against global trade or Occupy Wall Street (OWS) or more recently the Ferguson protests. NOISE, NOISE, Noise, noise, silence.

Tufekci's point is that the strengths of social media, immediacy, pervasiveness, speed are also its weakness when dealing with complex endemic issues. You can topple a government more easily than you can change inequality, for example.

Tufekci argues that the older, face-to-face organizing is low on efficiency but much higher on effectiveness. Tufekci does not say it but meeting face-to-face requires making trade-off decisions, compromises, prioritizations and agreement on a balance of goals. These are hard things to do. But in doing so, you bring strength, focus, sustainability and robustness that is missing when people are simply responding to a tweet calling for a protest.

I think she is right. It is not an either-or situation. Social media is perfectly useful for simple, binary issues. Real world organizing is necessary for issues that are complex and deeply rooted. Both can, and do, serve a purpose.

One thing that Tufekci doesn't directly address, but which I think is an integral part of her critique, is that social media protests are unidimensional and fragile and that is why they are useful only for short, simple, binary issues. It is easy to be upset about low public defender budgets, inadequate investment in schools, bad street lighting, too high taxes, dangerous police tactics, pot-holed streets, poor health care access, etc. All are real issues of some moment and it is relatively easy to show support by protesting any one of those issues. But what is hard is to acknowledge that all those worthwhile issues have to be addressed with limited time and limited money. Some of those issues are going to have to be lower priorities than others. Some will be dealt with later rather than currently. To become effective, you have to budget those scarce resources against a clear set of priorities.

OWS (or any protest movement dependent on direct calls to action around some singular issue) cannot succeed because OWS cannot budget. Once it budgets, it is no longer a protest movement. It is an advocacy group and therefore part of the system.

Tufekci focuses on face-to-face organizing without accentuating what I think is the most important activity that comes with real interaction - definitions, root causes discussion, goal setting, goal prioritization and trade-off decision making. With those activities, you evolve from inchoate rage and spontaneous protests, to becoming a community with a common purpose and strategies. They are two different beasts.