chapter 16 Reflections on # Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation1

Jeffrey S. Juris

Introduction

October 15, 2011. When I exited the T-station in downtown on the day of global actions in support of # and the burgeoning #Occupy Everywhere movements,2 I immediately opened my Twitter account. The latest tweets displayed on my android phone indicated a large group of protesters was on its way from the #Occupy Boston camp at Dewey Square, and would soon turn a nearby corner. Minutes later hundreds of mostly young energetic marchers appeared in an array of styles ranging from jeans and brightly colored tees to black and khaki army surplus attire to various shades of plaid. I eagerly jumped in and joined in chanting, “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!” followed by the emblematic, “We are the 99%! We are the 99%!” We soon turned to onlookers and began interpellating them, “You are the 99%! You are the 99%!” After a few minutes I moved to the sidewalk to take photos and observe the signs, which ranged in tone from the populist “End the Wars and Tax the Rich!” to the inspirational “1000 cities, 80 countries Today!” to what could be interpreted as a slightly defensive “Our message is clear, read the fine print!” Today’s would be the second mass march of the week. The previous Tuesday thousands of workers and students joined #Occupy Boston for one of the largest marches the city had seen in years, culminating in the arrest of

1 Parts of this chapter have been published before in an article by the author under the same title in the American Ethnologist, Volume 39, Issue 2, pp. 259–279, May 2012. Reproduced with kind permission of the American Anthropological Association. Not for sale or further reproduction. 2 My use of the Twitter hashtag sign (#) to refer to the # mirrors activist practice, reflecting the importance of the social networking platform to the ongoing organ­ ization and development of the occupations (see also Postill 2014). Hashtags are used to highlight particular key words, making them more likely to appear in Twitter searches and to “trend,” increasing their viral diffusion. I use the “#Occupy Everywhere” hashtag, which was common during the October 15 global day actions, to emphasize the global dimension of the movement.

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140 people that evening when the Boston Police forcefully evicted occupiers from a second patch of grass along the Rose Kennedy Greenway across from Dewey Square. Like the viral images of New York City police pepper spray- ing two women from #Occupy Wall Street,3 videos of the eviction and the aggressive police response, including wrestling to the ground several clearly non-violent members of Veterans for Peace, circulated widely via social and mainstream media platforms, generating widespread sympathy for the move- ment. This afternoon’s march to mark the ten-year anniversary of the hostili- ties in Afghanistan and to challenge the escalating costs of wars in that country and Iraq would again draw several thousand protesters. It would also be one of more than a thousand #Occupy around the world that day, a testa- ment to the viral circulation of protest in an era of social media (see also Rasza and Kurnik, 2012).

Networks of Resistance

When a new mass wave of global activism breaks out, casual observers and reporters often wax eloquent about the ways in which new media technologies are transforming social protest. During the actions against the World Trade Organization Summit Meeting in Seattle in 1999, for example, news reports fixated on the innovative use of Internet-based listservs, websites, and cell phones, which were said to provide unparalleled opportunities for mobilizing large numbers of protesters in globally linked, yet decentralized and largely leaderless networks of resistance. More recently the focus has shifted to how social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook transform how move- ments organize, whether we are talking about the so-called Twitter Revolu- tions in Egypt and Tunisia,4 or the overwhelming attention afforded to social

3 According to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, “viral” refers to something “quickly and widely spread or popularized especially by person-to-person electronic communication” (www.merriam-webster.com, accessed January 2, 2012). See Postill 2014 for an analysis of digi- tal media virals in the context of social movements, and the Spanish Indignados movement, in particular. 4 See Peter Beaumont’s piece in the Guardian entitled, “The truth about Twitter, Facebook and the uprisings in the Arab world,” www.guardian.co.uk (accessed November 11, 2011). For scholarly analyses of how activists in the Middle East actually used social media during the , see the special edition of International Journal of Communication (Vol. 5), http:// ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc (accessed January 4, 2012).