Digital Culture and Documentary Media After 9/11

3 Networked Audiences MoveOn.org and Brave New Films Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technology, it happens when society adopts new behaviors. —Clay Shirky, “Here Comes Everybody” On December 4, 2016, a man carrying an AR-15 stormed into Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., and demanded to see evidence of the child sex- trafficking operation that he believed was headquartered in the basement. Over the preceding months, stories had been circulating on InfoWars and various other right-wing news websites about the alleged conspiracy and its connections deep within the Democratic Party. Several mainstream news organizations including the New York Times and the BBC had covered and debunked the story, but promi- nent Republicans in the Trump transition team continued to fuel speculation on Twitter, and the man had the impression that “something nefarious was happen- ing.”1 Though no one was injured, “Pizzagate” set off an immediate series of alarm bells about the power of fake news to mislead people, and the role of social media in accelerating its spread. Alongside the growing awareness that similar “news” sources might have helped Trump win the election (a topic addressed more fully in chapter 6), the incident seemed symptomatic of a much wider ailment within the media and the public. But long before the 2016 election, before Hillary Clinton was a candidate for office or Facebook a website, independent sources on the left were decrying what they described as right-wing media manipulation. The culprit was the cable network Fox News, and its accusers were MoveOn.org and Brave New Films, a pair of progressive grassroots media organizations working to con- nect and galvanize members of the left. Independent media production has a deep history of both working to effect political change and critiquing more-established media in the process. In the title of the introduction to his influential study of radical political documentary on the left, Show Us Life, Tom Waugh cleverly poses the inversion “Why Documentary 51 52 Networked Audiences Filmmakers Keep Trying to Change the World, or Why People Changing the World Keep Making Documentaries.”2 Like the book it is drawn from, the title hits directly on a theme that has run throughout the last eighty years of documentary filmmaking—namely, its connection with the people and organizations that hope to produce social change. Waugh’s title also uncovers two possible routes to the production of a social-issue documentary: the first stems from the desire to “change the world” and settles upon documentary as a means, while the second originates in the ability to make a film and alights on a particular issue as an ap- plication of the medium. Either way, Waugh’s playful rearticulation firmly binds political activism and social change with documentary film. But it alsoinadvertently describes the paths of two progressive activist units—the husband-and-wife team of Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, and the filmmaker Robert Greenwald—whose respective organizations, MoveOn.org and Brave New Films, would take dramatically different routes toward the level of hybridity that Waugh implies. What Waugh couldn’t have foreseen in the pre-Internet era in which he was writing, however, was the importance of newly available digital technology for both approaches. The political polarization that intensified after 9/11 radicalized a new generation of political activists who already possessed lives and livelihoods outside of organized party politics but who nonetheless felt called upon by the events they saw unfolding to do something about newly perceived injustices. A figure like Jon Stewart, for example, combined a career in comedy and entertainment with an im- pulse to speak out politically into a new form of political entertainment, The Daily Show. This found an audience among a generation of like-minded and similarly politicized viewers.3 For Blades and Boyd, and for Greenwald, this metamorphosis took the form of blending careers in technology and in filmmaking, respectively, with large-scale political organizing to create two of the most influential independent political organizations to emerge during the decade after 9/11. As of the 2016 presidential election, MoveOn.org boasted over eight million members and participated daily in organizing campaigns across the country on targeted issues from civil rights to health care to budget reform.4 For its part, Brave New Films was responsible for some of the decade’s most successful and influential political documentaries, from Walmart: The High Cost of Low Prices (2005) and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (2004) to several of the most overt attacks on the Bush administration and its war policies, including the so-called “Un” Trilogy—Unprecedented (2002), Unconstitutional (2004), and Uncovered (2004)— and Iraq for Sale (2006), among others. After several years of collaboration, the two organizations evolved into surpris- ingly similar operations. In spite of the early (and in many cases pioneering) social media that enabled it to become an archetype of netroots organizing, MoveOn.org regularly turned to the decades-old technology of documentary media as a means to mobilize members. Likewise, Brave New Films began to rely heavily on social media in order to fund, publicize, and even produce its film projects. Both ended Networked Audiences 53 Figure 3.1. Robert Greenwald’s “Un” Trilogy marked his move into political documentary and brought him into collaboration with MoveOn. the decade as hybrids of documentary film and political activism of the sort that Waugh alluded to twenty years earlier. For both, however, the glue that enabled this synthesis was the technology that had emerged in the two decades since. Their parallel evolution, moreover, is not simply a coincidence. At several points around 54 Networked Audiences key political events during the Bush years—notably, the 2004 elections—the two organizations collaborated on projects that convinced each of the efficacy of the other’s tactics. Both organizations started the decade with the conviction that their respective media forms (filmmaking and the Internet) could, as Waugh put it, “change the world,” but both left the decade with the conviction that it would take some combination of both to do so. This chapter looks at these organizations and considers the way both utilized differing measures of documentary film and digital media to change the world. While scholars and historians look to the role of YouTube videos in the Iranian Green Movement in 2009–10 or the part played by social media technology like Facebook and Twitter in the Arab Spring or the rise of the alt-right over the last several years, Greenwald and MoveOn were pioneering similar practices years before these eventual mainstays of Web 2.0 even existed.5 Despite their disconnected roots in technology and filmmaking, during the period of 2000– 2008 the two organizations collaborated with one another, and both evolved into hybrid organizations that challenge easy distinctions between documentary film, political activism, and social media. The heated, gloves-off environment of political debate surrounding the series of close political contests from 2002 through 2008 emboldened both groups to engage in radical media experimentation to advance their political agendas. Their individual and shared histories during this period provide an ideal illustration of the natural synergy between these forms. In MoveOn and Greenwald, we find a praxis-driven example from early in the era of social media that reflects many of the broader theoretical debates that would eventually emerge. As Greenwald and MoveOn both demonstrate, people trying to change the world were still making documentary films, but they were also doing other things as documentary images became one part of a widespread strategy aimed at social change. MOVING IN THE SAME DIRECTION The MoveOn–Brave New Films collaboration begins with the enormous popular- ity of two unrelated pop-culture relics of the past: singer, songwriter, and some- times actress Olivia Newton-John; and the iconic Flying Toasters screen saver of the pre-Internet computer. Both were the forerunners, and in a sense the angel investors, of what would later become Brave New Films and MoveOn.org. Before his engagement with political documentary, Robert Greenwald worked for several decades producing and directing what the New York Times described as “a number of commercially respectable B-list movies,”6 including 1984’s The Burning Bed, starring Farrah Fawcett, and 1980’s Xanadu, starring Olivia Newton-John. While several of these early films evince a clear interest in social issues, nothing foreshad- ows the dramatic transition Greenwald made in the wake of the 2000 presidential Networked Audiences 55 election to producing and directing some of the most critically and commercially successful political documentaries of the post-9/11 period. Joan Blades and Wes Boyd got their start founding Berkeley Systems, a San Francisco Bay Area software company that created a number of different appli- cations for the Mac including the early text-to-speech program Outspoken and the virtual-desktop program Stepping Out. Mainstream success arrived for the company with its popular screen-saver program After Dark, which featured the signature Flying Toasters, and the later trivia game You Don’t Know Jack. After selling the company in 1997, Blades and Boyd began circulating an online petition via e-mail in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal that directed Congress to “censure President Clinton and move on.” The petition eventually generated over a half a million signatures and established an issue-oriented, technology-driven campaign model that the political action group has followed ever since. Since its founding, MoveOn has experimented with and adopted various social media tech- nologies like Meetup, Facebook, and Twitter to expand and extend its network of political activists.

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