JEFFREY S. JURIS Northeastern University Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation ABSTRACT ctober 15, 2011. When I exited the T-station in downtown Boston This article explores the links between social media on the day of global actions in support of #Occupy Wall Street and public space within the #Occupy Everywhere and the burgeoning #Occupy Everywhere movements,1 I imme- movements. Whereas listservs and websites helped diately accessed my Twitter account. The latest tweets displayed give rise to a widespread logic of networking within on my Android phone indicated a large group of protesters was the movements for global justice of the O on its way from the #Occupy Boston camp at Dewey Square and would 1990s–2000s, I argue that social media have soon turn a nearby corner. Minutes later, hundreds of mostly young, en- contributed to an emerging logic of aggregation in ergetic marchers appeared, decked out in an array of styles ranging from the more recent #Occupy movements—one that jeans and brightly colored tees to black and khaki army surplus attire and involves the assembling of masses of individuals various shades of plaid. I eagerly jumped into the crowd and joined in from diverse backgrounds within physical spaces. chanting, “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!” followed by the emblem- However, the recent shift toward more decentralized atic “We are the 99%! We are the 99%!” We soon turned to onlookers and forms of organizing and networking may help to began interpellating them,2 “You are the 99%! You are the 99%!”3 After a ensure the sustainability of the #Occupy movements few minutes, I moved to the sidewalk to take photos and observe the signs in a posteviction phase. [social movements, on display, which ranged in tone from the populist “End the Wars and Tax globalization, political protest, public space, social the Rich!” to the inspirational “1000 cities, 80 countries Today!” and what media, new technologies, inequality] could be interpreted as a slightly defensive “Our message is clear, read the fine print!” Today’s protest would be the second mass march of the week. The previ- ous Monday, Columbus Day (Indigenous People’s Day), thousands of work- ers and students had joined #Occupy Boston for one of the largest demon- strations the city had seen in years, culminating in the arrest of 140 people past midnight when the Boston Police forcefully evicted occupiers from a second grassy protest site taken after the march along the Rose Kennedy Greenway across from Dewey Square. Like the “viral” images of New York City police pepper spraying two women at #Occupy Wall Street,4 videos of the eviction and the aggressive police response, including their wrestling to the ground of several clearly nonviolent members of Veterans for Peace, circulated widely via social and mainstream media platforms, generating widespread sympathy for #Occupy Boston. This afternoon’s march, to mark the ten-year anniversary of the hostilities in Afghanistan and challenge the escalating costs of wars in that country and in Iraq, would again draw sev- eral thousand protesters. It would also be one of more than a thousand Oc- tober 15 #Occupy protests around the world, a testament to the viral circu- lation of protest in an era of social media (see also Razsa and Kurnik this issue). AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 259–279, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01362.x American Ethnologist Volume 39 Number 2 May 2012 When a new mass wave of global activism breaks out, activists to more effectively communicate and coordinate casual observers and reporters often wax eloquent about across geographic spaces without the need for vertical hier- the ways new media technologies are transforming social archies.6 Moreover, networking technologies did more than protest. During the actions against the WTO summit meet- facilitate the expansion of network forms; they shaped new ing in Seattle in 1999, for example, news reports fixated on political subjectivities based on the network as an emerg- the innovative use of Internet-based listservs, websites, and ing political and cultural ideal—that is to say, there was a cell phones, which were said to provide unparalleled op- confluence between network norms, forms, and technolo- portunities for mobilizing large numbers of protesters in gies. The point was not that everyone used new media or globally linked yet decentralized and largely leaderless net- that digital technologies completely transformed how so- works of resistance. More recently, the focus has shifted cial movements operate but that, as new media were in- to how social networking tools such as Twitter and Face- corporated into the ongoing practices of core groups of ac- book completely transform the way movements organize, tivists, they helped diffuse new dynamics of activism. Net- whether the so-called Twitter Revolutions in Egypt and working logics were shaped by particular cultural-political Tunisia or the outburst of protests around the globe in- histories in concrete locales, they were always contested by spired by and modeled after #Occupy Wall Street (see, e.g., competing verticalist practices and ideas, and they were in- Waldram 2011).5 scribed into physical spaces during mass actions. Nonethe- In opposition to such techno-optimistic narratives, less, the use of listservs, websites, and collaborative net- skeptical accounts inevitably remind us of the importance working tools helped to facilitate new patterns of protest of deeply sedimented histories and politics of place for that resonated with and enhanced certain existing organi- understanding the dynamics of protest in concrete lo- zational forms and cultural ideals and that were widespread cales or of the tendency for social movements to organize but differentially inflected across geographic contexts. The through decentralized, diffuse, and leaderless networks question that now arises is whether the increasing use of so- since at least the 1960s, if not long before (cf. Calhoun 1993; cial media such as Facebook or Twitter has led to new pat- Gerlach and Hine 1970). Skeptics also remind us that many terns of protest that shape movement dynamics beyond the protesters in places like Tahrir Square did not have Internet realm of technological practice and to what extent these are access and were mobilized as much through face-to-face similar to or different from the networking logics character- networks as through social media (see Gladwell 2011). Sim- istic of global justice activism. ilarly, even though many #Occupy Everywhere participants This initial reflection on the #Occupy Everywhere are certainly avid users of Facebook and Twitter—hence, movements is based on my observations and participation the widespread use of the hashtag sign as a diacritic—not in #Occupy Boston since late September 2011, including the every occupier and supporter uses social networking period after the dismantling of the camp on December 10. tools and smartphones. Indeed, #Occupy has also spread I especially focus on how social media have shaped the through the occupation of physical spaces as well as the forms and practices of #Occupy, comparing and contrasting diffusion of evocative images through traditional mass the #Occupy movements to a previous wave of global jus- media platforms. tice activism that was also significantly influenced by dig- However, debates between techno-optimists and skep- ital media (Juris 2008a). How are the #Occupy movements tics are rather beside the point. It is clear that new media using new technologies? What difference does employing influence how movements organize and that places, bodies, social as opposed to other forms of new media make? How face-to-face networks, social histories, and the messiness of do virtual and physical forms of protest intersect? What are offline politics continue to matter, as exemplified by the res- the strategic and political implications of emerging dynam- onance of the physical occupations themselves. The impor- ics of organization and protest within #Occupy, particularly tant questions, then, are precisely how new media matter; in terms of issues such as sustainability, racial diversity, po- how particular new media tools affect emerging forms, pat- litical demands, and movement impact?7 terns, and structures of organization; and how virtual and In this article, I propose a distinction between a “logic physical forms of protest and communication are mutually of networking” (Juris 2008a), a cultural framework that constitutive. helps give rise to practices of communication and coordi- In my previous ethnographic work on the movements nation across diversity and difference on the part of col- for global justice (Juris 2004, 2005, 2008a), I pointed out lective actors, and a “logic of aggregation,” which involves that network-based forms of social movement organiza- the assembling of masses of individuals from diverse back- tion are not new—networks, for example, also character- grounds within physical spaces. I argue that, whereas the ized the so-called New Social Movements of the 1970s (cf. use of listservs and websites in the movements for global Melucci 1989; Offe 1985), but digital tools such as listservs justice during the late 1990s and 2000s helped to gener- and websites facilitated the diffusion of global justice move- ate and diffuse distributed networking logics, in the #Oc- ments and enhanced their scale of operation by allowing cupy movements social media have contributed to powerful 260 Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere American Ethnologist logics of aggregation, which have continued to exist along- social media and the #Occupy movements, comparing the side rather than entirely displacing logics of networking. emerging logics of aggregation within the latter to the net- Social media such as Facebook, YouTube, and espe- working logics characteristic of a previous wave of global cially Twitter were particularly important during #Occupy’s justice activism.