Ian Bicking: a blog

Background

I’m taking these lessons primarily from the experiences of my sister, who along with 7 others is currently facing felony conspiracy charges in Minnesota (felony conspiracy to riot with a dangerous weapon and to commit property damage). These charges are specifically for organizing protests in the lead up to the 2008 RNC convention in St. Paul. It’s only one data point, but in these matters there’s only a handful of cases that inform the discussion.

The city of St. Paul and other local governments received over $50 million for security for the RNC, and some of that money was quickly put into hiring informants to infiltrate organizations, anarchist organizations in particular. My sister among others were part of an organization known as the RNC Welcoming Committee. In total three informants were highly involved in the organization, each of them attending literally hundreds of hours of meetings. The Committee primarily worked on things like promoting the protests against the RNC, acquiring meeting space and internet access for people, finding housing and food for people visiting for the protests, and distributing logistical information like where protests would occur.

"Anarchism" means "without rulers": in line with their anarchist principles they didn’t try to prescribe how people would protest, they felt people should make their own choices about how to protest. The choices people made were widespread, ranging from staying in a "free speech zone" to a few permitted marches, some unpermitted marches, some civil disobedience, some blockading, and in a very small number of cases some people committed property damage. The Welcoming Committee did not advocate any particular kind of protest, they would not be their brother’s keeper, nor did they want to disparage any kind of protest as too timid. Each person should act on their own conscience.

Immediately before the RNC started the 8 were arrested and held for the duration of the convention before being charged and released on bail. Their houses and cars were searched. Nothing interesting was found, though at the time the Sheriff misrepresented things like bike inner tubes as possible slingshot material, or that having paint thinner in the basement, rags in the laundry, and empty bottles in the pantry constituted Molotov cocktail ingredients.

The Evidence

The case has progressed very slowly, but with recent hearings more of the prosecution’s case has been coming out. It’s been over a year and a half and only now are we getting any indication of what the real claims are against the defendants, though the prosecution continues to avoid presenting any real case or plausible complaint.

From the hearings we’re also learning something about the form of the investigation. The FBI was closely involved with the case and recruited the most active informant, and the primary investigator was previously with the Secret Service (which somewhat oddly has a computer-related duties), and at the time there was a great deal of national attention on the convention. So presumably they had the resources to investigate seriously if they wished to do so.

From the perspective of online security the case is very boring. The defendants have been given all the evidence collected during the investigation (including benign or even helpful evidence). It’s a huge amount of evidence, and hard for them to understand or sort through, but some kinds of investigation aren’t there. No email accounts were subpoenaed. Their computers were all confiscated, and will no doubt be kept until after the trial, but there’s nothing high-tech about that. Some of them had whole-disk encryption, and there is no indication it was broken nor were they even asked to provide passwords. There’s also no evidence of sniffing internet connections, tapping phones, breaking into email… nothing fancy was done.

From what we can tell the evidence against them will be primarily from informants’ testimony about open meetings, widely distributed literature, a video posted on YouTube, a password-protected but essentially open wiki (the wiki provider was not subpoenaed, despite things like edit history being potentially interesting).

If they had been any more security-conscious it would have worked against them — it would have been out of line with their ideals and would have made them less effective and transparent in their organizing efforts. The biggest danger now is that they’ll be demonized, that they’ll be judged based on caricatures of their actual beliefs, privacy only makes this worse.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Perhaps one reason the surveillance was low-tech and subpoenaed evidence is not playing a large part in the case is that it’s just too hard. They used Riseup for many services, which is a set of online services for activists, who take privacy very seriously, log as little as possible, and try to host everything outside of the country so regardless of an activists locality it will be a bureaucratic challenge to get access to the servers.

Outside of the core group most people acted anonymously, so the prosecution would not be able to follow up on most of what they found anyway. Even if they got all the logs and email from everything the Welcoming Committee touched, I’m not sure they could make use of it. If they could somehow relate all that anonymous information, they’d still have to explain those techniques and convince a jury. Data mining and other data-driven techniques could be useful if they were trying to attach people who had done anything wrong. You can use surveillance to find the smoking gun, and once you’ve found it you don’t have to justify the techniques you used in the process. But only if there’s a smoking gun. It’s a peculiar situation where the prosecution doesn’t appear to actually believe they did anything demonstrably wrong; I fear they plan a case where they redefine "wrong".

Privacy

Besides the security issue there’s the privacy issue, and privacy is big on the internet these last few months. One of the oft-claimed benefits of privacy is to allow political dissent. And maybe that makes sense in China, but I don’t know how it relates to the things in the U.S. or Europe.

Political beliefs held in private don’t much matter. Complaining about politics in private situations is fine, because it just doesn’t matter. So sure, you are safe from political persecution if your privacy is maintained… but it’s because you are impotent not because privacy is some part of a political struggle.

This reminds me of a playground sense of privacy. On the playground you might say you like They Might Be Giants and the playground bully says that’s so gay, and you think I shouldn’t have said anything. But it doesn’t really matter how much you reveal in that situation, it doesn’t matter what you say you like — the bully isn’t making a pointed critique on your preferences, they are just trying to hurt you. The only way privacy will help you is if you are so quiet that the bully doesn’t notice you at all and picks on someone else instead. That’s a pathetic stance.

Ramsey County (where the RNC 8 are being charged) is a bully. They decided before the Welcoming Committee even existed that people were going to be arrested, charges were going to be made. The Welcoming Committee stuck their necks out further than anyone else. The problem isn’t that they made themselves vulnerable, the problem is that the Sheriff Fletcher is a bully and County Attorney Gaertner is some kind of automaton who doesn’t give a shit about justice.

And Lastly A Personal Plea

So… while there are general lessons, this case also specifically really sucks for my sister Monica, her significant other Eryn (another member of the Welcoming Committee) and the other six, all of whom I know and are really nice people who don’t deserve any of this shit. They have to spend their evenings reading through evidence or listening to the tapes of their meetings (which were boring enough to listen to the first time around). There’s a certain stigma to having pending felony charges, I know at least my sister has lost a job because of it. And they each have to have their own lawyer, and even though the lawyers aren’t charging them what would be the full rate it’s still a lot of money (like a quarter of a million dollars). Depressingly, in some sense this is all the government has to do; the trial is punishment enough to deter people from being activist organizers.

So I wish a donation was equivalent to Sticking It To The Man, but really it’s just adding some balance because The Man Is Already Sticking It To Them On Your Behalf.

Still, your support would be really helpful.

If it gives you any satisfaction County Attorney Susan Gaertner’s run for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination never went anywhere, I suspect in large part because she wasn’t brave enough to show her face at public events in the Twin Cities because she was consistently protested over this case. I doubt this has influenced the prosecution (at least in any positive way), but it’s satisfying.

GNU Manifesto

I’d like to read a couple quotes from the GNU Manifesto. There are more modern descriptions of GNU, but this is one of the first documents describing the project and its mission, written by Richard Stallman. Let me quote the section "Why I Must Write GNU":

"I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. [it continues...]

"So that I can continue to use computers without dishonor, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free."

[later it goes on...]

"The fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the sharing of programs; marketing arrangements now typically used essentially forbid programmers to treat others as friends. The purchaser of software must choose between friendship and obeying the law. Naturally, many decide that friendship is more important. But those who believe in law often do not feel at ease with either choice. They become cynical and think that programming is just a way of making money."

When I read this statement I was immediate head-over-heels in love with this concept. As a teenager, thinking about programming, thinking about the world, having a statement that was so intellectually aggressive was exciting. It didn’t ask: "how wrong is piracy really", or "why are our kids doing this", but it asked "is piracy a moral imperative" — that’s the kind of aggressive question that feels revolutionary and passionate.

Let me go over one of the lines that I think exemplifies this:

"I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it."

It wasn’t saying: what are we not allowed to do, nor did it talk about some kind of societal injustice. It didn’t talk about the meaning of actions or their long-term effects. Instead it asked: what must we do, not as a society, not in service of some end, but what are we called upon to do as an individual, right now, in service of the people we call friends. It didn’t allude to any sociological explanation, natural selection, economics; there is just the golden rule, the most basic tenant of moral thought.

Free Software vs. Open Source

When I first encountered free software, I suppose about 15 years ago, this was during one of the more difficult periods of its evolution. It was past the initial excitement, the initial optimism that the project would take only a couple years to reach parity with closed-source Unix, it was before it was clear how the project would move forward. Linux was young and seemed to be largely off the radar of Richard Stallman and other GNU advocates, and they were struggling to fill in final key pieces, things like a kernel, widgets, and they hadn’t even thought about entirely new things like browsers.

The message that came through from that period is not the message I wish came through. The message I wish came through was that message from the GNU Manifesto, that spirit of a new sense of duty and ability. When people talk about Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project, they’ll often point to the GNU General Public License as the most important contribution — the GPL. I’m sure you all know something about it. Of course the core concept there is the idea of copyleft. Not only will the software be open, but it’s takes the implied perspective that the principles of freedom are rights — that unfortunately the world is not wise enough to see that use, distribution, and modification are rights; but the GPL still asserts that these are your rights. When you become one of us, when you participate in the freedoms this license grants you, when you use the GPL, there is encoded in the license a support for this sense of the natural right of free software. We, GNU, can’t encode that for the world, but for the software that we write these rights are inalienable.

But as I said those were difficult times. There was a great deal of pressure. People were trying to understand what open source meant. People still struggle with questions: how would an economy function, how would a programmer get a job, if this is as successful as people hoped will we all just be out of jobs? Other questions were: who will write the software that no one wants to write? How can I, embedded in a situation where I can’t actually use only free software — remember at this time there was no way to use completely free software — how can I assert a duty to do something that is not possible? How can I be useful unless I interface with all these proprietary things? If I deal with companies which aren’t comfortable with open source software, then what? After all, open source seemed only barely plausible at this time. It was not an easy argument to make.

And all this was before the term "open source" really took hold as a distinct idea. That itself is an interesting story. There was a time during this marketing period when there arose a kind of terminology divide — free software vs. open source software. The terminology divide was that the "free" in free software implied you couldn’t charge anything, that made people think about price, might even imply cheapness. Open source directly refers to programming, uses the feel-good term "open", and doesn’t sound too revolutionary. But besides that there was also a substantial philosophical difference about the value of the software itself.

So there was a difference in how things were going to be pitched, but also a difference in what people thought the general value of this project was. From GNU and Richard Stallman there was the notion that this was right because it was right; it was a moral imperative. The virtue of what we build is in its freedom; if it is also technically superior then that’s great, but it is not how we should judge our success. We were giving people self-determination: programmer self-determination, user self-determination… on the open source side the argument was that this is a good way to create software. Programmers working together can do better work. With many eyes all bugs are shallow. All working together, we’ll work faster, you get the benefit of free contributions from all sorts of people. People were clamouring to get all these proprietary companies with failing software products to open source their software; miracles will occur! What you thought was useless will regain value! You’ll reattain relevance!

The open source and free software philosophical divide: on one side practical concerns, on the other moral. And this is what I want to talk about later: can we find a moral argument for these practical concerns?

The basic free/open disagreement continues in debates over licenses: the GPL vs. the BSD and other permissive licenses. If you read the GPL it talks a great deal about philosophy; if you read the BSD license it’s really just some disclaimers and basic instructions, and the one line: "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted." It doesn’t say why you’ve received this software, or any philosophy about rights and freedoms, or even encourage you to use the same license on your own software. An engineer’s license.

So these two licenses in many ways became a focus and definition of free and open source software. If you look at the Open Source Initiative, which has served to define what "open source" means, it is basically just a list of approved licenses. If you use one of those licenses, the software is open source, if not then it is closed.

I think this is disappointing, because licenses are just law, and law is not very interesting. A law tells you what you shouldn’t do, it doesn’t tell you what you should do. When both sides are talking about freedom, the licenses just define freedom as the lack of certain restrictions. Take away those restrictions and voila, you are free… as though we are all just bundles of freedom waiting to be released.

Self-Definitions

With licenses we have a negative definition of our community. Either license you choose, the license feels like a reaction against closed source software. If you can imagine a world in which there was no copyright, where our platforms were all setup to distribute source code in modifiable forms, where everything was open and everything was free, then none of these licenses would matter. No one would be compelled to create the GPL in such a world; we wouldn’t advocate for copyright just so we can secure people’s freedoms. In that kind of world all this licensing disappears. And this isn’t even so weird a world. You can pretend there’s no copyright now. Maybe you have to reverse-engineer some stuff. There’s lots of places in the world where no one really gives a damn about copyright. But those places don’t feel open source to me, they don’t feel that more free. We aren’t made unfree just by legal restrictions; freedom is something we have to actively grasp.

I don’t think what we do is predicated on copyright. Indeed, many projects are comfortable with an entirely confused copyright ownership. This causes very few problems. A focus on licensing makes us into a reaction against proprietary software, where we allow proprietary software and its makers to define what it means to be us.

This concerns me because it isn’t just about formal definitions and terminology. When I say what do I do, I say I am an open source programmer. That’s not just an attribute, like saying that my hair is brown. Open source is a way in which I see myself, a way I think about my craft, my profession, and a way I justify the work I put out to the world: that it aligns with these values. So it’s very important to me what these values are. And it’s frustrating to see open source defined in reaction to closed source software, because personally I don’t care about closed source software that much.

I never really cared much about fighting Microsoft, and I certainly don’t care now. I see myself as a builder; this is what always drew me towards programming. The desire to build new things. This is our privilege as programmers, that we always have the opportunity to build new things. If we’re asked to do something again and again and again, you always have the power to do it in a more abstract way, to generalize it away, until you can start to ignore the requests and move on to another problem. This is something unique thing to computer programming. These are the kind of unique attributes that make us different as a profession and as a craft than just about anything I can think of.

So I’m frustrated. Here we are stuck in this notion of a license as a self-definition. I want to find a new self-definition, a new idea of what makes us us.

What Makes Us Us

So… what makes us us?

I was saying about Django, the community is not particularly enthusiastic about philosophy. Or maybe I should say, Django’s philosophy is: the value of the code is the thing you do with it. These abstract discussions about architecture, reuse, big plans… instead, Django as a community encourages you to keep your head in the code, think about what you want to do, and then do it. Don’t shave yaks.

But I’m not here to tell you to get philosophical about freedom, or to berate you for a functional definition of value. I’d like to look at this community for what it is, and ask: what is the value system here? Maybe it isn’t described, but I also don’t think it is therefore absent.

So… when I say I identify as an open source programmer, what is it that I am identifying as?

I don’t believe licensing makes something truly open source. There was this clamour in the past to get companies to open source their products. This has stopped, because all the software that got open source sucked. It’s just not very interesting to have a closed source program get open sourced. It doesn’t help anyone, because the way closed source software is created in a very different way than open source software. The result is a software base that just does not engage people in a way to make it a valid piece of software for further development. At least not unless you have something peculiar going on… an economic force like you had behind Mozilla that could push things forward even in the midst of all the problems that project had. One might even ask, is Mozilla still suffering from that proprietary background, when something like KHTML or WebKit which came from a truly open source background, and has been a more successful basis for collaboration and new work.

So whatever it is that makes something open source, it’s not just licensing. Given a codebase, we can’t necessarily expect that someone going to care about it and love it and make it successful. A lot of people have described what makes a successful open source codebase; I’d like to talk some about what the communities look like.

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Open source works as a fairly loose federation of people together. Everyone involved is involved as an individual. Companies seldom participate directly in open source. Companies might use open source, they might sponsor people to work on open source projects, they might ask an employee to act as a liason. But it’s not cool to submit a bug as a company. You submit it as yourself. If someone asks a question, you answer as yourself. You don’t join a mailing list under the company’s name. And even when you put a company name on a product, it’s hard to relate to the product as a project without some sense of authorship, of the underlying individual.

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There’s also very little money being moved about. There’s not a lot of commercial contracts. You might get software, you might get bug fixes, you might get reputation, but there’s seldom any formal way setup to introduce commerce into the community. How many projects let you pay to escalate a bug? Even if everyone involved might like that, it’s just not there.

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But I want to get back to individuals. How things are created is not that someone determines a set of priorities, lays them out, then people work on implementation based on those priorities. That of course is how things typically work at a company, as an employee. But open source software and open source projects are created because an individual looks at the world and sees an opportunity to create something they think should exist. Maybe it resolves a tension they’ve felt in their work, maybe it allows that person to respond to the priorities from above better, but the decision to implement lies primarily with the implementor. When someone makes a decision to move a product from simply private code — regardless of the license — to being a real open source project, that decision is almost always driven by the programmer.

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Underneath most open source work there is a passion for the craft itself. This is what leads to a certain kind of quality that is not the norm in closed source software. It’s not necessarily less bugs or more features, but a pride in the expression itself. A sense of aesthetic that applies to even the individual lines of software, not just to the functionality produced. This kind of aesthetic defies scheduling and relies on personal motivation.

As open source programmers we are not first concerned with how a task fits into institutions, how a task can be directed by a hierarchy or an authority, or even how the task can be directed by economics. The tasks that we take on are motivated by aesthetic, by personal excitement and drive.

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We are also in a profession where there is little stasis. If you can create something once, you can create it a thousand times, through iteration or abstraction. You can constantly make your own effort obsolete. A good programmer is always trying to work themselves out of a job.

Djangocon didn’t exist a couple years ago. Django didn’t exist only a few years ago. And I don’t think there’s anyone here who thinks that, having found Django, they’ve reached some terminal point. It’s hardly even a point to pause. There’s a constant churn, a constant push forward that we’re all participating in.

As a result it’s demanded of us that we have a tight feedback cycle, that education is not a formal affair but a constant process in our own work. There’s a constant churn, and a professional sense we’re kind of like fruit flies. A generation of knowledge and practice is short enough that the evolution is rapid and visible. You don’t have to be particularly old or even thoughtful to see the changes. You can look back even on your own work and on communities to see changes over the course of a couple years, to see changes and shifts and a maturing of the work and the community.

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Another attribute of open source: our communities are ad hoc and temporary. We do not overvalue these communities and institutions; we regularly migrate, split, recombine, and we constantly rewrite. There is both an arrogance and a humility to this. We are arrogant to think This Time Will Be Different. But we are humble enough to know that last time wasn’t different either. There will always be a next thing, another technique, another vision.

Because of the ad hoc nature of the communities, we don’t have long collective plans. The ad hoc community may be the intersection of different personal long range plans, a time when different visions somehow coincide in a similar implementation. Or perhaps it’s just serendipity, or leadership. But we make each decision anew. I believe this protects us from being misled by sunk costs. The idea of a sunk cost is that when you make an investment, you’ve put in effort, that effort is gone. Just because you’ve put in effort doesn’t mean you’ve received value, or that the path of investment remains valid. But as humans we are highly reluctant to let go of a plan that we’ve invested in. We have a hard time recognizing sunk costs.

I believe in our developer community we approach our work with sufficient humility that we can see our work as simply a sunk cost. Our effort does not entitle us to any particular success, so we can choose new directions with more rationality than an institution. Though it can also be argued that we are too quick to dismiss past investments; there is a youthfulness even to our oldest members.

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We do not have hierachies with decision makers above implementors. Some people have veto power (a BDFL), but no one has executive power. A decision only is valid paired with an implementation. You cannot decide something based on information you wish was true; you cannot decide on something then blame the implementors for getting it wrong. We are in this sense vertically integrated, decision and implementation are combined. The result may be success or failure, commitment or abandonment, but the hierarchy is flat and the feedback loop is very tight. And if an individual feels stymied, there is always another community to join or create.

Though this is only a start, it’s these attributes that I would prefer define us, not licenses.

I also would like that this could be a model for how other work should be done.

Why Us?

Why would we, as programmers, be unique or worthy of emulation? I mentioned before that we constantly work ourselves out of our job. We also create the tools we use to do the work. We define the structure of our communities. We’re consistently finding novel ways to use the internet build those communities. It’s not that we as a group are somehow uniquely wise, or some Greatest Generation, but we have become distinctly self-empowered. There is a uniqueness to us. It might be a coincidence of history, but it is there.

A question I might then ask: is there a political meaning to this? This is the form our craft takes, but does that mean anything? We work with computers, someone else might work with their hands, an artist considers color, a salesperson learns how to put on a good smile.

I haven’t quite figured this out yet, but I think there’s something in this. Over the years I’ve found myself looking at politics in a increasingly technocratic lens; more so than as a liberal, conservative, or radical. That is, instead of looking at the world and seeing what’s wrong about it, and explaining it in terms of a class struggle, a cultural conflict, in terms of advocacy or invented enemies or allies, I see a system that just works how it works. It’s more like gears than like a war. The gears turn and sometimes we don’t like what results, but it’s not malice.

But I also don’t think we are slaves to the technical functioning of the system. None of us are inevitably caught up in some statistical outcome of markets, or condemned by money in politics or advertising. At any time we can say Here Is What I Believe, and it is as powerful as any of those other things; we’re too quick to look at the people who aren’t asserting a belief, who aren’t asserting their own potential for self-empowerment and direction, and we ignore everyone who is aware and concerned and attempting self-determination. We are at danger of ignoring the great potential around us.

It is in this sense that I wonder not just how we can spread the idea of freedom through licensing, which has inspired the free culture movement, but also how we can spread this idea and practice of individual action, of combining decision and implementation, and of constant ad hoc collaboration.

I’m not just thinking of politics directly, but of professional lives as well. Right now we’re talking about healthcare. It’s a very political issue, and yet healthcare is ultimately a profession, a job, an action. How we work on that, collaboratively or not, is as political as any aspect of the system.

One anecdote that made me think about this, is a task I had that involved putting authentication in front of a mailing list. The mailing list happened to be for wound, ostomy, and continence nurses, and in the process of the job I read a bunch of their emails from the archives. As wound nurses they spent a lot of time asking about specific questions — maybe a wound that wouldn’t heal, they kept draining the puss and it discharge kept reappearing, and did anyone have ideas of the next technique to try?

Reading a few of these I could tell this was a profession where you needed a strong stomach. But the whole interaction, the way they described problems, the way people came back with answers, it felt very familiar to me. It was the same kind of discussions I could imagine having about Linux administration or debugging. And the goals were similar. No one was making money, there wasn’t really reputation on the line, it was just people who wanted to help their patients and who wanted to help each other.

So that mailing list was great, but it’s unfortunately not that common. And if nurses were open to that kind of collaboration, doctors don’t seem nearly as ready. And there’s a lot of professions where there’s not even that thoughtfulness. I believe in any profession there’s the ability to do it well or not; there’s nothing so rote or well understood that there’s no room for improvement. It doesn’t have to be fancy technology, it can just be a technique, a way of managing work; all things worth doing have some way of improving, by bringing in this same sense of collaboration and individual action and thoughtfulness, all things can be implemented better than they are now. What I’m describing isn’t a fancy new website for professionals, but about people look at their own work differently; the technology is not the hard part.

The Political

Changing how people look at their work I think is political. It involves individual empowerment. It can mean economic change. I also think it deemphasizes competition. When I think about Pylons, or Django, or TurboGears, or WSGI, there’s competition, but it’s also collegial. There’s not really that much of a sense of survival. We aren’t carving out territories, we’re just finding paths to some unknown end. If something else wins out, well, we’re all just along for the ride. In the end it is inevitable that something else other than what any of us are working on will win out over what any of us are doing. Just like everyone eventually loses their job at least to death or retirement. There’s no permanency. But if we can be individually more productive, it doesn’t have to mean we’ve put someone else out. It could mean we all, all of society, all of humanity, just do more. Why do we have to set ourselves against the Chinese, or Europe against the U.S.? Why do we have to set ourselves one economy against another?

Or consider government itself: we’re obsessed with our elected officials, but of course government is far larger than just the elected officials. The U.S. Federal Government alone has 1.8 million employees. We constantly threaten to institute accountability, meaning that we’ll poke and prod government workers from the outside and expect better outcomes. That we expect anything to come of this is absurd, but somehow accountability has become an easy alternative to constructive suggestions for improvement.

But why shouldn’t we expect that government workers want to do better? I believe in fact those people doing the work are especially well equiped to figure out how to do better. But it’s not automatic. They aren’t empowered in a system that is so exceptionally hierarchical. Lately we’ve seen lots of efforts to ask the public how to do government work better, but we’ve seen nothing asking government how to do government work better.

These are the kinds of things I’d like to see us all think about more: open source has done incredible things, has inspired new ideas, about more than just software and engineering, but I think we have yet more things to give.

Thank you for your time.

The Role Of Protest

It’s challenging to explain and justify protest, at least in this country and at this moment. Probably the biggest blow for protest as a useful form of political expression was the February 15, 2003 protests against the Iraq War. I say this because those were the largest protests the world has ever seen, estimated around 10 million people, and yet they did so little to stop the war.

That war is still with us, and is still the most significant motivation for the RNC protests. The war has gone through many phases since then — purported success, then clear failure by just about anyone’s definition, then ongoing failure labelled as success because of dramatically lowered expectations (the surge). Public opinion has moved several times, but is constrained by what is considered the reasonable options. These "reasonable" options are defined by the Democratic and Republican elite. Balance in news means inviting participation from partisans from those two parties. In this context the Democratic party had a practical landslide in 2006, driven primarily by anti-war sentiments, and then proceeded to do almost nothing to stop the war. If protest has failed, then so has electoral politics.

I don’t have any third path to offer, but I just want to make it clear: none of us know what is best to do, none of us have figured out the way to effect change. People complain protest doesn’t work. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but frankly most things don’t work. Doing nothing definitely doesn’t work, and frankly that’s what most of us are doing. It’s hard to take criticisms seriously when they are made from a stance of inaction.

What might the RNC protests accomplish?

First, it is an attempt to break out of a politics restricted to two perspectives. I believe, quite firmly, that "radical left" opinions are actually quite mainstream. This was also the goal of the DNC protests. This goal has become quite difficult to achieve. News stations generally ignore protest, and when they do cover protest they seldom talk about the actual issues.

Second, protests can attempt to disrupt normal activity. To be fair, this is probably better termed "civil disobedience", and I’m sure there will be civil disobedience in response to the RNC. One possible goal of civil disobedience is to make news — to be so disruptive that you simply can’t be ignored. And even if the news won’t say why you won’t be ignored, at least one message that can be made clear: everything is not okay. Another goals is simply to disrupt the RNC. This is a bringing together of many of the architects and profiteers of war. This is a convention that includes many people advocating torture.

It’s also a convention of people who buy the lines about the Republican party being "conservative" and supporting "family values" and whatever other bullshit. One argument goes: oh, these poor dullards and simpletons! Do not interrupt their harmless partying! Do not interrupt their absurd views! They deserve their delusions as much as anyone! I say: this stuff is too important to defer to the bullshit of this political grandstanding.

Are We In A Time Of War?

It is all too easy to fall into "protesting for the right to protest". Lest I fall into this, I want to make it clear: protest itself is not the goal. 600,000 Iraqis dead. And to what ends? No ends at all? Unlikely! There is a purpose. It is a purpose architected by people who would throw away hundreds of thousands of lives. People may argue about whether war is valid. I don’t believe it is, nor do Monica or Eryn, but whatever your feelings: this is not an abstract war. This is a specific war. And this specific war is a war made by liars, by people who treat human life lightly, by people whose primary ambition seems focused on power itself.

600,000 dead, and what’s so different in America? Do you feel this war? If you didn’t turn on the TV or listen to the news, what would remind you that we are at war? What would remind you of all that’s happened? We are a nation at war, and yet there is nothing to show us this, it has no presence. Our nation is so large, our institutions so abstracted, our military so partitioned from most of society… we are numb to war. Moving around while numbed is dangerous. You can’t feel what you are doing. A cut doesn’t hurt, a bruise is just a faint sensation. We are a numbed nation and this is dangerous.

If I was to give one reason for civil disobedience, it would be this: to acknowledge this war is real. This isn’t just a difference of opinion, this isn’t just a debate. This is about how we exercise our collective power, the power that is exercised in the form of the state. This is our war, whether we feel it or not.

One of the criticisms of civil disobedience is to say it deprives the Republicans of their free speech. First, this is absurd. No form of civil disobedience deprives them of free speech. No one is taping their mouths shut. No journalists are being detained by activists. No debate is stifled. The RNC’s request: we want to speak our lies without interruption, without distraction. The Republicans have through decades of whining managed to frame the debate, to redefine "common sense" and "conventional thinking", to move the Overton Window far to the right. Free speech does not mean they should not be challenged. Protest challenges the content of their speech, it doesn’t deny them of the ability to speak.

This is an aside, but for all the effort put into limiting the bounds of debate I don’t think the Republicans, or Bush, have really changed the country as much as they are given credit for. I don’t think people are as easily manipulated as that. I think our core values are not so easily affected. If we were not so numb I think it would all come rushing back.

On "Anarchism"

If you read the articles you will see Monica and Eryn called "self-described anarchists". This is true, they are anarchists. I will attempt, briefly and probably inaccurately, to describe what anarchism is.

Anarchism is, at its core, a belief in the individual, and a belief that good flows uniquely from the individual. Conversely, it believes that bad comes from institutions, from the abstractions we build between people. Anarchism is a belief in the power of empathy instead of laws. Instead of leading our lives according to principles that are passed down to us, anarchism says we should live our lives based on our personal reflections and decisions. We should be deliberate, we should not be obedient.

The RNC Welcoming Committee (the name is ironic) is a "anarchist/anti-authoritarian" organization. Ha ha you say, isn’t an anarchist organization an oxymoron? If you meet an anarchist this is the most tedious joke you could possibly make. Anarchism is, of course, a somewhat chaotic philosophy. And any anarchist should be a human first, and an anarchist second — anything else would be contrary to the very principles of anarchism! More practically, they form groups based on shared understandings and motivations, and there is nothing at all inconsistent about individuals working together — indeed it is interpersonal cooperation that is at the heart of anarchist traditions.

Do anarchists want to tear down all institutions? I guess some flavors of anarchist rhetoric make this claim. Looking in from the outside, it feels like some kind of phase adolescent male anarchists go through. There is an underlying lack of respect for institutions and authority, and this is genuine. But though they see nothing wrong with disrupting institutions, violence against people is not considered acceptable. Some would like to categorize property damage as violence, but I find this rather disrespectful of genuine violence. Things don’t feel pain or fear.

Discussions of anarchism tend to degrade very quickly because people are overly obsessed with self-consistency. For instance: how could an entire society run without laws, governments, police, taxes? There are answers and speculations, but we would all do better to make the world we want now and here. This is what actual anarchists do — running whole societies might be fun to theorize about, but building a community is actually attainable, and among progressive groups anarchists are probably the most enthusiastic community builders.

Lastly: why the term "anarchism"? It’s a scary term, though it’s derivation is simply from the term "without rulers". It’s been a term used to scare people for so long that it’s hard to separate the idea from the myth. People at time suggest alternative terms. But anarchism isn’t just a philosophy, it’s a tradition and culture and shared understanding, one that goes back over a hundred years. And anarchists don’t want to disassociate themselves from that tradition. And usually, what does it matter what other people think of the name? It is however awkward when the police are trying to label you as a dangerous extremist.

Violence?

Reports have come out about violent protest. Update: There were reports of "violent protesters". Now police report that "one or two windows were broken" during the entire RNC. In other words, there was almost no violence at all by protesters, and almost no property damage. Frankly I feel stupid for ever believing there were even small groups of "violent protesters". There was simply no violence (under any definition of "violence") of any note by the protesters. (I’m actually surprised there weren’t more windows broken by stray police munitions.) Again police lack basic credibility in their statements. end update

Actual incidents are often exaggerated or fabricated. For instance, in the case of the home raids things like paint, bottles, and rags were labeled as "the ingredients for making Molotov cocktails". I’m sure every reader of this post has sufficient ingredients to make a Molotov cocktail. Also, many people have hatchets, bricks, and other materials. Buckets of urine were particularly attention-grabbing, but the only reason for these was that one of the houses had a broken toilet. The police interpretation of the confiscated material is not credible.

There have also been reports of violence at the protests themselves. First it should be noted that there are no reports of police or bystanders being injured. I personally find it is hard to classify property damage as "violence". If you don’t include property damage then there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of violence.

Protest is confrontational. Some will suggest that protesters should obey police in all situations. They suggest that protesters should obey all laws and only protest where permitted. They suggest protesters should not be disruptive of anyone else. The result would not be protest. In cases like the RNC, where extensive planning was in place to counter protest, non-confrontational protest means protesting according to someone else’s plans, someone who has no desire for the protest to succeed in any way. Once you confront the police, there will be violence — usually by the police. And sure, you can stand with a flower in your hand and get a face full of pepper spray, and of course many people choose that course. It’s a noble choice, but I can’t fault people for making other tactical decisions.

Another protesting tactic is the "black bloq", typically a group of people who try to attract the attention of the police, often through property damage. If the police have nothing better to do, then why not pin down the peaceful protesters and direct them where they can make the least impact? People in the black bloq will try to keep this from happening. It’s unlikely they were at all successful at the RNC as it was so thoroughly militarized. You could debate whether this is a good strategy (and there is lots of debate about this), but probably few people outside activists have any idea that there even is any underlying strategy.

Also, if you wonder why protesters, especially the anarchists, dress the way they do, it is primarily defensive. If you are going to get teargassed and peppersprayed does wearing a handkerchief seem so odd? And if they are tracking people to preemptively arrest, all the more reason to be as anonymous as possible.

Monica and Eryn

I’d like to speak specifically of Monica and Eryn. Talking to Monica about the RNC protests, she was never actually that excited. The RNC isn’t what she wanted to focus on. Why focus on the thing you dislike? Why focus on a political process you don’t believe in? Why focus on the workings of institutions you wish didn’t exist? She would have preferred to work on the scale she felt was valid — to build a community of individuals. But of course events are larger than us, and by whatever coincidence the RNC was coming to the Twin Cities. This is not the sort of thing you can just ignore. And of course it wasn’t up to her whether there would be protests.

Monica and Eryn are competent and diligent, so of course they would become important to the organizing process. It seems that there were infiltrators in many of the organizations, so it’s unsurprising that the police knew who to find when they were getting ready to suppress the protests. The two of them had expected informants from early on. Monica herself worked for a year for the American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker charity and peace advocacy organization) at a time when they were being spied on because of purported fears of violent protest. If you are not aware of Quakerism, it is a quite strictly passivist faith, and the pretense for the spying was exceptionally absurd. So Monica was not particularly shocked that there would be spying in the lead up to the RNC.

The RNC Welcoming Committee is itself a coordinating organization. It was inevitable that many, many groups would want to protest at the RNC. There’s no lack of people who are angry. The Welcoming Committee served as a local resource for all those people — so visitors could find a place to stay in the city, so people could coordinate with each other, so people could perform their chosen form of protest in as well-informed a manner as possible. That it is being painted as an organization with criminal intent is a complete misrepresentation; the Welcoming Committee specifically has no intention of direct action.

The preemptive arrest was surprising to everyone. It is normal in the course of civil disobedience that some people expect to be arrested. Civil disobedience is confrontational. You have to go into it knowing that there will be certain consequences. Those are the consequences of the confrontation. They are not the consequences of the possibility of future confrontation. As organizers I know Monica and Eryn weren’t planning on being arrested.

But I haven’t written this essay in anger over their arrest. Protest is conflict. The lines of conflict move, and I find this move to preemptive arrest quite troubling, but I’m also optimistic that they won’t ultimately be charged with anything. I also don’t want to slip into the protest-to-protest mode, more obsessed with the form of protest than the function of this protest. This is a frustrating turn of events, and I’m sure no one is more frustrated than the two of them — one sequestered in a jail, the other in legal limbo, at the culmination of all their work over the last year. But I didn’t write this essay out of anger but because I wanted to recognize what they’ve been doing and do my best to explain it to other people, because I’m proud of them. They are exactly the model of an engaged, ethically driven citizenry.

I see lots of comments like "this country is a fascist state!" and "this is just like Nazi Germany!" But of course this country is not those things. That’s what happens when the citizenry of a country stands down, when they look away from what’s happening right in front of them, when they ignore justice and discard empathy. This country is not those things because of Monica and Eryn and the thousands of people who will be present and paying attention when the RNC lands from on high.

To support Monica, Eryn, and the other charged members of the RNC Welcoming Committee, and also to get updates on the case and news coverage of the case, please visit rnc8.org