For those wondering what might become of the Occupy movement over time, it might be useful to consider the path of UK Uncut, an activist group in Britain that recently enjoyed its first birthday. And it's still going strong: On Wednesday, UK Uncut activists infiltrated a business conference in suits and harangued the government's top tax official during his scheduled speech.
In each of the ways that Occupy is amorphous -- the leaderlessness, the consensus-driven organizing process, the lack of specific policy goals -- UK Uncut is a shade less so.
[bug id="crowd-control"]UK Uncut's focus is on protesting government spending cuts, and on pointing out the ways that certain individuals and corporations exploit loopholes or special deals to reduce their tax bills. But that turns out to be a large enough umbrella to let UK Uncut support all sorts of causes -- so in addition to organizing its own actions, the group opportunistically supports others it sees as advancing its broadly defined agenda.
In the process, UK Uncut has become a very successful example of a protest organization powered by social media. Largely through its Facebook and Twitter accounts, each of which have around 30,000 followers, the group has carried out a series of paralyzing demonstrations in chain businesses around Britain, protesting the tax deals that their management had cut with the government. In October, the group organized a mammoth 2,000-person sit-in on Westminster Bridge [http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/09/anti-nhs-reforms-protest-block-bridge] in early August, after the government threatened to reduce the budget of the National Health Service.
Not long ago, at a coffee shop just off London's Oxford Street, I met up with "Tim Matthews" -- the first name is real, he claims, but not the last -- one of the group's organizers. We met near one of the group's recent targets: the Oxford Street flagship store of clothing retailer Topshop, whose owner, Sir Philip Green, lives in Britain but registers his businesses in his family's name at a Monaco address.
Matthews is a trim, soft-spoken young man, prematurely carrying the gravity of a professor emeritus, and as we approached the storefront he laid out how the gathering came together.
"Sometimes it can be really exciting, like in a film," he said with a laugh.
The action had happened in December, during the early days of the Christmas shopping season; the meeting point, announced over social media, had been in Soho Square, half a mile east of the store. But only a small fraction of the crowd knew the eventual destination -- a necessary precaution, because plainclothes police were tracking them.
"At the end, we had to run to get in the doors," Matthews says.
In his impeccable quarter-length overcoat, Matthews looked laughably out of place inside Topshop, a teen-girl hellscape peopled with technicolor-haired mannequins. He gamely gestured with his long umbrella when I asked him to describe the path of the occupation.
It started in the back, he pointed out, by the bicast-leather handbags, as the group attempted to chant over the store's blaring rock music. But when they had gathered enough force, the throng rushed to the front, plunking itself down in front, blocking the entrance with a giant, hand-painted banner reading TAX THIEF. Eventually, the police muscled the group out of the store -- at which point it moved around the corner to the department store BHS, also owned by Green, and shut that down, too.
All in all, December protests by UK Uncut activists shut down Green's businesses across Britain, including in nearby Brighton, where two activists superglued themselves to a Topshop window.
In its relationship with social media, UK Uncut fits what is becoming a familiar pattern. The group uses Facebook and Twitter to grow its numbers, and to spread its message to the news media.
But it began with a core group of committed activists -- in their case, a 10-person group of friends from Islington -- and links up whenever possible with unions and other left-wing groups in scheduling its demonstrations. Two thousand people would never have come to Westminster Bridge in October without the organized support of health-care workers, who turned out en masse.
A similar dynamic has played out in protest movements around the world.
As David Wolman observed when he covered Egypt's "April 6" movement for Wired, the original protest on April 6, 2008, was a pre-planned workers’ strike that online activists amplified and multiplied. (When these activists tried to organize their own protests a month later, it was, as Wolman puts it, "a flop.")
In San Francisco, the anti-BART protests had Anonymous to thank for their numbers and their media attention, but the seed of those protests was a pre-existing group. As Sean Captain recently pointed out at Fast Company, Anonymous was great at building buzz for the Occupy Wall Street movement -- but its own, independent actions as part of the movement have largely fizzled.
Flash-mob-style protests do happen, and sometimes they take off: The "tent cities" set up in Tel Aviv to protest Israel's housing policy last summer began with one 25-year-old woman, Daphni Leef, who put out a call on Facebook and gathered a crowd. But almost always these mass demonstrations are tapping not just into widespread interest or outrage but also some sort of pre-existing organization.
Technology is not the seed of these protests, nor is it even the sunlight. Instead, it serves as a particularly powerful fertilizer.
Photo: DulcieLee/Flickr
