I’m teaching a course at the University of Southern California called Multimedia for Social Change (mm4sc). There are 6 students in the class, which is a project-based, service learning class designed to partner undergraduates with community based organizations in Los Angeles. The idea is that each student (or team of students) will develop a multimedia project that fits both their interests and skillset and the needs of the community partner. The course is about a third of the way through, and I’m excited by the partnerships that have shaped up. Students will be working with KIWA, LACAN, Youth Radio, and KEEN. If you’re interested check out the class blog, or view the syllabus.

presente.org has launched a campaign against Lou Dobbs, the hate-mongering CNN commentator. It’s about time. However, here are some suggestions to make it more effective:

1. The action

Currently the action the user is asked to take is to send a form email, with an optional personal comment, to CNN president Jon Klein. But:

• emails to CNN president don’t generate pressure on the network. A lot of research shows that the only effective way to pressure the network is through advertisers.
• The action here should be to select some key companies that advertise on CNN and may be sympathetic, then have the user pledge to boycott and/or contact those companies asking them to pull ads from lou dobbs’ show.
• For example see http://www.colorofchange.org/beck/
• No matter what the target, form emails are the least effective. They’ll get caught in an email filter on the other end. Instead of allowing the user to add an additional comment, autofill the form with your prewritten comment and ask the user to edit / change it to be their own.

2. The mobile interface

Kudos for setting up a shortcode and allowing people to connect that way. But a couple things:

• People who text in don’t get any action item! They just get asked for their email and zip code. This is a big missed opportunity. If I text in it’s because I’m ready to do an action that moment. Ask them to DO something, for example: send them the number of a targeted company to call and ask to pull advertising from Dobbs. Ask them to text or email (from their phone) to a target.
• Send them a message that is DESIGNED for them to forward to their contacts, with the key info points about the campaign!

OK, gotta run.

Wow. I’m speechless. Richard Greelis, an undercover cop who infiltrated organizing around the 2008 Republican National Convention, has written a memoir in which he tells bald faced lies about independent videographers supposedly turning their cameras off to hide protesters’ attacks on police, then documenting the police ‘response.’ I was there, shooting video for iWitness video, and this is complete BS. Dangerous BS. You kind of just have to laugh at it.

Just posted up on TC Indymedia:
http://tc.indymedia.org/2009/sep/ex-bloomington-cop-richard-greelis-book-reveals-rnc-undercover-work-pdf

Here’s a lol: Cop Book

One chapter of Greelis’ memoir - titled simply “Cop Book” - details his undercover work around the 2008 Republican National Convention, including attending a Northfield peace group’s forum, placing a short-lived informant in the RNC Welcoming Committee, participating in Critical Mass and protests throughout the convention.

The Welcoming Committee sponsored training through various affinity groups, such as the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and Citizens Against Police Brutality.  These groups trained volunteers to be legal observers and videographers.  Police sent informants to these, and other open classes, to learn what the training amounted to.  Once trained, NLG volunteers were expected to wear the lime-green baseball caps that made them stand out in a crowd of protesters while they awaited the inevitable confrontations.  When these confrontations arose, the observers’ instructions were to make notes on actions taken by police and record the names and badge numbers of officers involved.  Videographers typically left their video cameras in the “off” position during confrontations with police, while protesters surreptitiously pelted the officers with rocks, garbage, excrement, and urine squirted from Super Soakers.  When the police finally had enough, and brought out the tear gas and hickory sticks, the cameras started rolling and continued to roll until the last mope was piled into the last police transport.  The videographers then turned their cameras off and offered up their video to any of countless sympathetic media outlets covering the event.  (A movie, Terrorizing Dissent, released by Glass Bead Collective, et al., was made after the RNC using a compilation of these types of clips.)

To see what actually happened (massive police brutality that the Twin Cities doesn’t even have to pay for since the RNC allocated millions to cover the lawsuits beforehand) at the RNC 2008 I recommend viewing Ground Noise and Static or Terrorizing Dissent.

A couple of years ago I wrote something about the explosion of web video and the political economy of web 2.0. I’m getting ready to revisit this and thought it might be worth posting here for some feedback before I get into it again.

Background: online video
[from https://lists.aktivix.org/pipermail/alt-media-res/2007-July/000282.html]

Online video sharing has been around since the early days of the net,
but the community of people involved was at first limited to those with
fast connections (until fairly recently, this meant universities) and
folks with net skills more advanced than those of the typical user. By
1999, the first dot com boom brought a flurry of activity around web
video, but low rates of broadband penetration, relatively small
distribution of digital video cameras, and relatively poor user
interface design of web video sites limited its successful
mainstreaming. The Indymedia network had early success with video
coverage of major anticorporate globalization events beginning in 1999,
but in fact the number of active video producers remained a relative
handful (compared to much more widespread text, photo, and audio
contributions). By 2003 more bloggers were incorporating their own video
content, but it wasn’t until 2006 that web video exploded into popular
consciousness (read: sustained coverage in both print, broadcast, cable,
and online mass media outlets) with the massive popularity of YouTube.
Online video’s status as a major arena for Web 2.0 investment was of
course cemented by Google’s 1.6 billion dollar acquisition of YouTube,
and the browser-based video upload and sharing space quickly became
crowded with entrants. Some are simply YouTube clones; others are
integrated into existing social network platforms (MySpace video); some
offer additional functionality such as browser-based editing
(jumpcut.com and EyeSpot.com); still others try to attract
higher-quality material by sharing a cut of advertising revenues with
the producers (revver.com, blip.tv).

For the community of videomakers focused on human rights documentation
and social movement mediamaking (the community I work with most
closely), as well as for other public interest, educational, and
nonprofit organizations, the rise of corporate videosharing sites
presents both major opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, such
communities of videomakers are now able to quickly find vast audiences
that were previously inaccessible. On the other hand, almost all of the
corporate video application service providers have the following problems:

1) Exploitation. Content producers in effect do free labor for corporate
video sites by producing original content and uploading it under terms
that allow these sites to exploit and profit from their work,
perpetually, across both old and new media distribution channels,
without ever paying a cent. ‘Volunteer’ content producers also do the
work of promoting their videos across the net, thus generating the
eyeballs key to video sites’ advertising revenue. (For example, see
YouTube’s Terms of Service: “…by submitting User Submissions to
YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive,
royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce,
distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User
Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and
its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation
for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and
derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media
channels…” [http://youtube.com/t/terms]).

2) Free Speech. YouTube, and most corporate sites, in general take
material down as soon as they are asked to do so by either media firms
(for example, see the recent Businessweek article “The YouTube
Police.”[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070307/125734.shtml]).

3) Privacy. All corporate videosharing sites track users’ IP addresses,
which means that information about users is readily available via
subpoenas by competing companies or law enforcement agents. This
presents a problem most clearly in places where state censorship of the
net is broad and penalties are severe (for example, woe to the Chinese
video blogger who uploads a video clip of government repression to a
corporate videosharing site, even using a pseudonym), but also raises
real concerns for activist communities targeted by the ‘War on Terror’
(for example see the Electronic Frontier Foundation case against the USG
in the 2004 Indymedia server subpoena and seizure
[http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Indymedia/]).

4) Access. All of the corporate videosharing sites operate on
proprietary source code, which means that users are unable to
participate in development of new functionality, and most only allow
video viewing in low-quality flash format, making it impossible for
other users to sample from, quote, or otherwise creatively reuse the
source material.

For these and other reasons, while YouTube and its clones may be a good
way to get material seen, it is not a safe or long term solution for
human rights videomakers, or for that matter for anyone concerned with
exploitation, free speech, privacy, or access rights. This critique is
elaborated further in a recent article published by Mute magazine
[http://www.metamute.org/en/InfoEnclosure-2.0]. Yet, moving beyond
critique, what other options do nonprofit, educational, public interest,
and activist organizations have?

The Alternatives

Happily, the number, quality, and reach of nonprofit, open source,
videosharing tools, hosts, and networks are all steadily growing. Andy
Lowenthal has recently documented this in his excellent article “Free
Media vs Free Beer”
[http://engagemedia.org/Members/andrewl/news/freebeer/view].
Alternatives to for-profit, proprietary video sharing sites include
videosharing spaces like archive.org, ourmedia.org, and
video.indymedia.org. These sites don’t exploit producers’ content for
money, vigorously defend their users’ free speech and privacy rights
(some of them, like Indymedia, don’t even track user IP addresses), and
are all built on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), making them open
to modification by the broader FOSS community.

In 2005-2007, recognition spread throughout the nonprofit and video
activist communities that some software developers were duplicating work
in this area, and a network called transmission
[http://wiki.transmission.cc/index.php/Metadata_working_group],
subtitles, screenings database, and codecs. Outcomes of the transmission
network include a draft metadata standard and report
[http://www.shiftspace.cc/j/meta/tx_report_0.2.pdf], and a? fully
functional, customized video version of the FOSS CMS Plone called Plumi
[http://www.engagemedia.org].

FilmForge

Another outcome of the transmission network is a recent surge of effort
around developing a version of the FOSS CMS Drupal [http://filmforge.koumbit.net]. In essence, FilmForge (like Plumi)
will replicate all of the functionality of existing sites like YouTube,
add additional functionality key to nonprofit, activist, and educational
videomakers (such as alternative licensing systems, source material
download, peer to peer seeding, browser based subtitling, and more), all
while avoiding the problems and pitfalls outlined above. Most
importantly, it is Free and Open Source Software, meaning that
communities of videomakers who choose to use it will be able to choose
between uploading their content to an existing shared FilmForge based
site, or downloading and installing FilmForge on their own server. If
they choose the latter option, of course, they will be free to make
modifications, additions, and updates to the code, provided they return
these modifications to the Drupal community.

For more information about the current and future functionality of
FilmForge, check http://filmforge.koumbit.net/en/about.

For more on Plumi, check out http://plumi.org

Sasha Costanza-Chock, July 2007
schock AT riseup.net

During my qualifying exams one of my questions was the following:

Each successive generation of “new” technologies brings with it new potentials for collective action as well as mechanisms for reaffirming the existing social order. What structural factors suggest that contemporary new media represent a tactical advantage for social movements today? How may we frame an understanding of activist media that avoids the pitfalls of technological determinism while also accounting for the undeniable impact of shifts in technology on the deployment of these technologies within social movements? How would you theorize the relationship between the specific affordances of networked media and activist networks as a social phenomenon?

I’m uploading my response to the question here, in order to more easily share it and get feedback from students in my Multimedia for Social Change class. Enjoy!

Link to document: New Media Activism: beyond the last 5 minutes (pdf)

Somehow the fall semester has already rolled around. I’m trying to focus most of my energy on writing my dissertation, which deals with the use of the internet by the low wage immigrant worker’s movement in Los Angeles. At the same time, lots is going on with VozMob, and I’m also preparing to co-teach a course on multimedia for social change together with Holly Willis. Here’s from the course description:

This course is for students who want to use participatory multimedia as a tool for real social change. From the birth of Indymedia during the Battle of Seattle, to the growth of MoveOn as a significant player in Presidential politics, to the visibility of Twitter in the Iranian election crisis, to LA-based community media projects like Mobile Voices, the appropriation of new media tools and skills by community based organizations and social movements is a key aspect of our rapidly changing times. In this innovative service-learning course and workshop, students will work with community based organizations in Los Angeles to help develop participatory media projects for social change. Course instructors will help participants find a community partner, either individually or in teams. Participants will work with the community partner to develop and implement a plan for a participatory media project, and will meet in a weekly seminar to share, reflect upon, and workshop their project together with other students.

Ambitious, I know, and with potential for great chaos, since the students aren’t all working with one partner but will be organized in several teams. We’re hoping it will really push them to think about how their skillset and interests can connect to some of the amazing organizing that folks like IDEPSCA, KIWA, and the Southern California Library are doing here in Los Angeles.

Radio Tijera

I’ve been volunteering at the garment worker center for over a year and half now, helping with a workshop where garment workers learn how to use audio recorders, conduct interviews, record sounds, mix live, recorded, and musical elements, and other community radio skills. You can listen to some of this material here: http://garmentworkercenter.org/audio. I’ll write more about the project later but for the moment I’m just making this post because I need to upload a 10 minute segment of material produced by this project, so that folks at Nuestra Voz over at KPFK can download and burn it for tonight’s broadcast! If you’re in LA, tune in to 90.7 tonight at 9 to hear the show. Our segment will go on around 9:30. Thanks Freya!

Audio links:

• Radio Tijera (web qual, mp3, 10meg)
• Radio Tijera (hi qual - aiff, 110meg)
• Radio Tijera (hi qual - wav, 110meg)

Last year I spent some time with friends brainstorming an ‘advertising service’ that would be focused around providing simple tools to help people replace all those web ads with ‘ads’ or announcements / art / news / other content from socially and environmentally responsible small businesses, left printing collectives, worker-run cooperatives, or whatever you’d like to imagine. We even put in a draft proposal to the Knight News Challenge, and called it SOCRATES (SOCially Responsible AdverTisemEnt Service) as a code word. Made it past the first round, but then rejected. Anyway, the other day I came across this potentially interesting project to break open the online advertising model:

I signed up for a beta tester account, but haven’t received anything from them yet. Is it just vaporware? I hope not. It would be pretty amazing if this kind of thing blew up, and suddenly the whole model of monetizing user eyeballs collapsed in a whirl of participatory ad making, selling, and buying. Especially if the mindshare gets captured by someone who uses it to push green, labor friendly, sustainable production and consumption…

I can dream, can’t I?

Anyway what follows is our SOCRATES idea from last year. Enjoy.

Socially Responsible Advertising Service (SOCRATES) “Don’t Just Don’t be Evil. Be Good.”

WHAT IS IT?

SOCRATES is a web based advertising service designed to connect socially and environmentally responsible, local, and small to medium enterprises (SMEs) with web administrators and web audiences that care about supporting such firms. In the process, a portion of the advertising revenue is used to support monitoring those firms that want to be listed as socially or environmentally responsible.

In the long run, SOCRATES will help web users avoid ads they don’t want and receive information they do want, help web administrators monetize their content by supporting socially responsible and local firms, help socially responsible firms reach customers, and help support the monitoring of firms for compliance with labor standards, environmental impact, and other criteria of social responsibility.

In the initial demo stage, SOCRATES will focus on developing a working model that lets socially conscious web administrators easily monetize their content by placing ads for socially responsible, local SMEs. Next, SOCRATES will release a Firefox plugin that allows web users to participate directly via ad replacement, as well as through publishing shared whitelists and blacklists. In the future, SOCRATES can expand to place ads across media platforms. Of course, SOCRATES will be built on Free/Open Source Software, and all software development for the project will be released back into the FOSS community.

WHY WOULD I USE IT?

• Website manager: With SOCRATES, you no longer have to choose between running ads from any old climate destroyer, sweatshop manufacturer, or corrupt contractor, or running no ads at all. You can easily limit the ads on your site to those from socially responsible firms, or to local small and medium enterprises, and you get to select the criteria.

• Socially responsible firm or Small to Medium Enterprise: With SOCRATES, you gain trusted access to customers who care that you’re a socially responsible firm or a local business - and as awareness of the impacts that non socially responsible business models have had on our world grows, this group of people is rapidly growing.

• Web surfer: With SOCRATES Firefox plugin, you will only have to look at ads from socially responsible firms, or local, small to medium businesses. Plus, you get to choose your own criteria for social responsibility. Select between ‘whitelist’ or ‘blacklist’ mode, and choose from lists provided by Socially Responsible Investment firms, trusted monitoring organizations, or user-generated lists. Feel strongly about a particular issue? Participate in making and maintaining shared lists with others. Plus, if lots of people subscribe to your list, you get a share of the ad revenue.

• Socially responsible investment firm: The companies you invest in get more visibility and do better. You might become a partner or participate by actively contributing to the lists of firms that do/don’t meet your investment criteria.

• Corporate monitoring organization: The work you do gets put to use in a new way, and if you are interested, a mass base of SOCRATES users can help be your eyes and ears. You participate by contributing to lists of firms that do/don’t meet your criteria, and if you become a partner you will get a cut of the ad revenue to help you do the valuable monitoring work that you do.

• Advertising agency: If you work with a client that wants to reach people who care about social responsibility, or with a small to medium, local enterprise, then you want their ads placed by SOCRATES. Your ad, and your client, will gain trusted access to customers who care. What’s more, this customer base has shown that they are willing to pay a premium for goods and services that are produced and distributed in local and/or socially responsible ways.

HOW DOES IT WORK? Basically, there are two approaches that the users can select between:

• Whitelist approach (”Do Good”): A whitelist is used to to serve ads only from firms that meet user-specified criteria. There is a default SOCRATES whitelist, or users can select whitelists maintained by trusted organizations in different fields (environment, labor, militarism, gender equality, etc). Users can also select user-generated lists, or create their own list. User interaction is via a SOCRATES browser plugin. The whitelist is used to replace all the ads that the user sees. For web admins, the interface is via a website where they set up an account, choose ad criteria, and receive code to place on their site. Example: “I only want ads from firms that meet the environmental and labor standards that allow them to be included in Parnassus [a socially responsible investment firm] holdings,” or, “I only want ads from Fair Trade firms, as verified by [some monitoring organization]“, or, “I only want ads from worker-owned cooperatives.”

• Blacklist approach (”Do No Evil”): A blacklist is used to block/replace ads from specific firms. There is a default SOCRATES blacklist, or users can select blacklists maintained by trusted organizations in different fields (environment, labor, militarism, gender equality, etc). Users can also select user-generated lists, or create their own list. Example: Web admin: “I don’t want any ads from Blackwater on my site.” User: “I don’t want to see ads from Blackwater when I’m browsing.” Admin/User selects a blacklist maintained by a monitoring organization that they trust, and/or develop their own or shared blacklist. Ideally, user-generated blacklists are produced simply by turning on a SOCRATES browser plugin, then simply clicking on ads that should be removed (with an option to enter tags to add metadata to the ad). Depending on user preferences, ads can either be blocked, or (more interesting), replaced with ads for an organization or firm that works counter to the blocked firm. Example: replace military contractor banners with avaaz.org banners. Or replace Exploitative Shoe Company A ads with ads for a sweat-free shoe label.

Can this be done? I don’t believe it’s possible!

It’s not rocket science, technically. The easy part is setting up the banner ad service for socially responsible firms to place ads on sites with socially conscious admins. It’s more difficult to do context-sensitive
placement a la AdSense, but in the long run this will be possible by using some of the ad revenues to support an open-source contextual algorithm. As for the ad replacement part, there are already working, open source models, for example check out http://www.addart.eyebeam.org and greasemonkey: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748. For an existing experiment in matching advertisers with bloggers who choose to run their ads, check out Ad Butterfly: http://www.adbutterfly.com.

HOW TO MAKE IT HAPPEN

This is a very ambitious project, but it can be done by breaking its development down into simpler steps.

The first stage is to develop a workplan, assemble the team, and do demo design that focuses on web administrators and socially responsible SMEs. In this first stage, we will develop a system that allows web admins to easily sign up, and paste code into their site that will place ads from an initial group of ‘whitelist’ firms. We should be able to develop a working demo within the first year, and this is the stage that we are asking Knight to fund.

In the second stage, once we have a working system, we begin to roll out SOCRATES, reaching out to likely firms and web administrators, and adding functionality that lets admins select between whitelists maintained by different organizations.

In the third stage, we will release the Firefox plugin that will allow web audiences to use the ad replacement function, and if they desire, to participate in whitelist or blacklist maintenance.

This December I was fortunate to be invited to Seoul for a conference organized by the public media center MediAct about community media in the digital age. Here’s a pdf of my presentation: the future of public media in the US context.

I’d been there once before, in 2004, to attend a similar workshop and also to screen the Miami Model (an Indymedia documentary about the mobilization against the Free Trade Area of the Americas that I participated in making) at the Seoul Human Rights Film Festival (SHURIFF). At the time, I went with Dorothy Kidd, and after the conference we got an amazing tour of the social movement media organizations around Seoul.

In addition to seeing the production and training facilities that the social movements had secured in the form of MediAct and visiting another community media center in another part of the city, we learned about the history of workers’ video collectives during the time of the dictatorship from folks at Labor News Production; we heard from Sarangbang about how during the first years of the Human Rights Film Festival the government tried to shut down the screenings with police and the social movements successfully fought for their right to screen films; we went to the offices of JinboNet, who provide IT infrastructure and support for Korean social movements as well as policy proposals against Net censorship and for access to knowledge and information; we met with IT staff from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU); we attended a migrant workers’ video training that was part of the epic migrant workers’ Sit-In Struggle at Myoung Dong Cathedral; and we met with a group that was trying to start up a Korea Indymedia. We learned about the richness, depth, and history of South Korean media activism, and heard from local activists about the near total disconnect between OhMyNews and Korean social movements, even while the English blogosphere was holding OhMyNews up as a shining example of media democracy.

So what changed between 2004 and 2008? A hell of a lot, of course, and I can’t even try here to do justice to the small amount that I do understand, but I can mention a couple of elements I found interesting.

First of all, in 2004 the centrist Roh Moo-Hyun administration had recently come to power on promises to seek reconciliation with North Korea, deepen democracy in South Korea, open government and corporate contracts to public scrutiny, and renegotiate S. Korea’s relationship with the US Military. Roh came to office with support from the left, labor, and students, riding the wave of mass mobilization against the US Military that came after they killed two middle school students in a vehicle accident. Once in power, Roh pedalled steadily to the right, pushing the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement and sending Korean troops to Iraq, and he completely lost the confidence of Korean people across the political spectrum. Despite all that, his administration provided some openings for Korean media activists to push for more democratic media policy. Media activists managed to secure funds to create a number of new community media centers around the country. They also were able to build up RTV, Korea’s first public access TV channel; for example, over the last few years the Migrant Worker video workshop that we saw in 2004 grew into a regular show on RTV that produced around 200 episodes of multilingual migrant worker news: Migrant Worker TV.

In 2007, conservative candidate Lee Myung Bak came to power with a large margin of the vote, but the lowest voter turnout ever. LMB was CEO of Hyundai, then Mayor of Seoul, and came in promising to run the country like a successful multinational company. He’s a neoliberal ideologue who is intent on pushing forward the USKORFTA, wants to “get rid of” militant trade unions, has been rolling back free speech and freedom of assembly, repeatedly deployed police force against peaceful protesters, and has just eliminated funding for RTV. His administration is also taking additional steps to monitor and control the Net. So media activists are now on the defensive, trying to protect the gains they’ve won over the last couple of decades.

However, in a long conversation over rice wine with Sejin, who used to work providing IT services for KCTU, during this visit to Seoul we heard a really interesting analysis of the current shift in the Korean social movement media situation that could be summed up like this: participatory media is taking center stage.

The trigger was the recent round of mass mobilizations and candlelight vigils that began as a “No Mad Cow Disease” protest by a handful of middle school girls against US Beef imports, but grew over the next two months into a nightly vigil of hundreds of thousands of people opposed to LMB’s neoliberal privatisation plans. George Katsiafacis’ summary of the mobilization wave is a good read and makes a similar point to Sejin: despite the claims of the government and police, the mobilizations weren’t organized by the labor unions or the existing social movement organizations. It was organized mostly online and via mobile phones, and as it grew and grew, the State was increasingly bewildered and frustrated by its inability to ‘decapitate’ the movement by arresting the people they thought were the ‘leaders.’ For example, they thought that KCTU was behind the protests, so they tried to arrest KCTU leadership, but KCTU was just as surprised as police at the growing turnout. Violent repression by police ended up radicalizing people and swelling the ranks of the protesters. People converted popular commercial sites like Agora at Daum.net into forums for debate and mobilization, and documented their own participation in the protests using the tools they use everyday anyway. For a longer blow-by-blow check out this article on Newscham.net.

This is not to say that the existing media activism infrastructure didn’t play a role - of course it did. In a similar way, the labor unions soon entered the mobilizations, and young students and middle class people who had never protested before learned some tactics from them - for example, how to confront riot police. But these organizations were not the initiators or drivers of the mobilization wave, nor of the popular communication that blossomed inside of it. Sejin, who also happens to be translating leftist scifi into Korean as part of a larger project that looks at ideological battles inside science fiction narratives, has been thinking about writing something on the meaning of the Multitude in the South Korean context. I hope he writes it soon

In any case, as I write this post, the public broadcaster KBS is also under attack, but this time from the left and below, most recently for censoring their New Years’ coverage to eliminate images of candlelight protesters. To follow the ongoing situation in S. Korea, check out the various links above as well as some others like Newscham, Global Voices South Korea, Anarclan, Two Koreas, and Seoulidarity.net. Oh yeah, and it looks like there’s going to be another (3rd? 4th?) attempt to start up an Indymedia Korea. Good luck!

While many of us across the country and around the world have been celebrating the Obama victory, despite the fact that he seems to be scuttling towards the center as fast as his lanky legs can carry him, here in California we’ve also been getting angry and mobilized in the wake of the voters’ approval of Proposition 8. Prop 8 (or Prop H8, as many a sign will tell you) is the bigoted ballot initiative to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry. It passed by a small margin (52%); you can check out the breakdown county by county using one of many interactive maps, for example this one from the LA Times. Without going into a long and detailed discussion of why the No on 8 campaign failed, let’s just say this: white middle class leadership ran a weak and disorganized campaign based almost entirely around TV ad buys, tried to take a ‘moderate’ stance which meant no calling out the bigotry and hatred behind the support for 8, and managed to put almost no resources into street level organizing in working class communities and communities of color. Meanwhile, the Mormon Church and other religious fanatics poured millions into vicious attack ads that played on fears of queers taking over the schools and teaching their evil ways. Then the out of touch No on 8 campaign was surprised when they lost.

In the wake of this mess, tens of thousands of angry LGBTQ folks and their friends, parents, and supporters started seizing the streets in what has turned into the largest queer mobilization wave in decades. Lots of this mobilization has been organized online via facebook and blogs, as well as with mobile phones via SMS between friends and on Twitter. While the ‘official’ No on 8 website was still displaying a lame-ass written message about how we lost but someday we’ll be back, literally overnight people were organizing mass protests, street actions, breakaway marches, and other forms of protest that spread up and down the state of California. Within a week and a half there was a national day of action with tens of thousands of people marching in front of city halls across the country.

I went out to several of these actions with friends here in LA. I think it was on Saturday night a week after the election that I went to a protest at Sunset Junction with Anna from Engage Media who was in town for a few days. ANSWER had somehow opportunistically positioned themselves as the organizers of the protest so we had to stand around with 10,000 other people and listen to an hour of speakers talking through a sound system that was too small to really hear (yawn), then the march began and we were stuck with the ‘approved’ chants over megaphones (the deadly “hey hey, ho ho, prop 8 has got to go,” and the only slightly more creative “black, latino, asian and white, marriage is a civil right!”) We tried out some of our own chants with mild success:

“Prop 8! That’s Hate! Separation of Church and State!”

“Prop 8! That’s wack! Stand up! Fight Back!”

“Latter Day Saints, Kiss Our Taints!”

Things got a lot more interesting once we made it over to around Vermont and Sunset, when about a thousand of us tried to break away from the ANSWER route to head west on Sunset. In fact, everyone was chanting “West on Sunset! West on Sunset!” and pushing up against a line of riot cops. They didn’t budge, so eventually we dispersed… but a scraggly haired young guy came running by telling everyone “Hollywood and Highland, 10pm! Text everyone you know! We’ve done this before, and we know it’ll work, just text everyone in your contacts!” Sure enough, by 10pm there were at least a few hundred people assembled at Hollywood and Highland, even though LAPD had shut down the metro and stopped traffic for blocks. In fact, there were more police assembled along Hollywood Boulevard than I’d seen since the RNC in St. Paul. There were dozens of riot cops in lines, mounted riot cops on horseback, and two long rows of squad cars, side by side, stretching a couple of blocks west from Hollywood and Highland, plus a block long line of motorbikes, assorted vans, and other vehicles. Oddly, all those cops did was hold down the intersection, ignoring three breakaway unpermitted marches of a couple hundred people each that tied up traffic in the area for the next several hours.

Overall what’s been great is that this protest wave is showing a new generation of young GLBTQ and ally activists that they really don’t need the top-down, out of touch mass media messaging of the big gay rights organizations. In fact, that approach has now been exposed as a losing  strategy. Also, the new tools of social networking sites and mobile phones do really make a difference in rapid coordination of street mobilizations - as Larry Gross said to me during another protest in downtown LA, pulling together a statewide or nationwide action in the days before widespread use of the Net and mobile phones would have taken several months to a year. We should add the Prop 8 protests to the ever-growing list of mobile-enabled mass actions that includes txtpower in the Phillipines, the rise of the Left to power in the Spanish elections following the subway bombing that the right wing government tried to delink from Spanish military participation in the Iraq invasion, and so many others (check out Mobile Active for more).

So the mobilization result is that lots more people have gained organizing and protest skills and capacities, and hopefully we’ll see fruit from this in a resurgent LGBTQ movement over the next decade. The immediate political outcome? Great pressure on the State and the courts to overturn Prop 8, and the California Supreme Court has in fact agreed to take it on.

Oh yeah, one last note: I Still Think Marriage is the Wrong Goal