Rebuild the Dream (22 page)

Into the vacuum, the Tea Party swooped. But rather than trying to restore hope, the Tea Partiers were promoting a different
emotion in the Heart Space: fear. They hit the panic button:
How the hell did we lose control of everything, and let this Negro, socialist, atheist, Muslim become the president of the United States? Is he even an American citizen? Where is his birth certificate? Our liberties are under attack!

The Tea Party broadcast its extreme emotions—think of the shouting and weeping of certain TV pundits—twenty-four hours a day via
Fox News
and the right-wing blogosphere. Video pranksters started using their craft—not to inspire people, as Will.i.am and “Obama Girl” did for Obama—but to destroy people. ACORN paid the price, as did Shirley Sherrod. So did I.

These are the messages that Tea Partiers wrote on their signs and placards—and took into the streets of America.

And as for their mastery of the Outside Game: the Tea Party was the only force in American doing big rallies, essentially, for two years. This unilateral dominance of street protest by right-wingers was unprecedented. On August 28, 2010, Glenn Beck called people to gather in Washington, DC, for the Restoring Honor rally. He stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had stood forty-seven years prior, and greeted the 87,000 people—overwhelmingly white, middle-aged folks—who came out (although Beck claimed there were 300,000 to 500,000 supporters). Beck welcomed the attendees by saying, “This day is a day we can start the heart of America again. And it has nothing to do with politics.” Nor did it have anything to do with facts. But Beck understood that the first step to power is to claim the Heart Space.

The Tea Partiers were powerful communicators and mobilizers in 2009–2010. Based on their occupation of the lower half of the grid, they were able to mount a ferocious assault that let them claim a piece of the upper half, too—electing the likes of Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, Marco Rubio in Florida, and Rand Paul in Kentucky.

By helping the GOP take over the U.S. House of Representatives and multiple statehouses in 2010, the Tea Party movement won the chance to impact the Inside Game. Since then, they've
been filling the Head Space with proposals such as FreedomWorks' Tea Party Budget, “a comprehensive ten-year plan to stop the debt, shrink the government, and save our country.” In practice, Tea Party obstinacy about these ideas led to the debt-ceiling debacle, which resulted in America's first-ever credit downgrade.

Since the midterm elections of 2010, the Tea Party's ability to mobilize street demonstrations seems to have waned; leaders may have redeployed those assets to less visible but more electorally impactful uses (lobbying decision makers, registering voters, and building GOTV capacity). But whatever its limitations or weaknesses, one must respect a force like the Tea Party, which has been able to show skill and achieve success in all four quadrants of the grid.

The American people continued to suffer and hunger for answers. Neither the waning Obama brand nor the vitriolic Tea Party brand held much appeal for many in the rising generation. So on September 17, 2011, a bunch of young people in sleeping bags appeared on the scene.

Occupy Wall Street brought to the Heart Space its predominant emotions: righteous indignation and occasional outrage. Occupiers magnetized every imaginable form of media. A search on YouTube for the “99%” turned up 241,000 videos, while a search for “Tea Party,” a movement that's been going
ten times longer
(about thirty-four months, at the time of writing, versus less than three months of Occupy), yields 237,000. YouTube has been occupied, as has every form of social media.

Notably, the Twitter-for-photos blogging platform, Tumblr, emerged as a potent way to collect and share stories from the Occupiers and the people who shared their outrage. The “We Are the
99 Percent” Tumblr invites people to write on paper their experiences of how the economic crises are impacting their lives, take a photo of themselves holding it, and post it. “Allow us to introduce ourselves,” reads the site. “We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.” It quickly went viral. By October there were nearly one hundred posts a day.

Spin-offs included a Dave Chappelle–style satire that featured pictures of America's best-off rubbing their riches in our faces: “We Are the 1%, Bitches.” There's one featuring uber-cute lolcats complaining about how they, too are suffering as their human companions scrimp: “We Are the 99 Purrcent.” A progressive group called Resource Generation that works with young people with high net worth launched “We Stand with the 99 Percent.” It features 1%-ers who believe in redistributing wealth.

There is even—and linguist George Lakoff must love this one—a conservative “backlash” Tumblr called “We are the 53%.” That number is based on the percentage of Americans that pay federal taxes, with the implication that supporters of Occupy Wall Street comprise the 47% who do not because of poverty or tax credits. What Lakoff would admire is that the 99% brand is still being reinforced here, even as it is rebutted. Score!

Elsewhere, poet and national treasure Drew Dellinger brought the following words: “See, the one percent done spent all the rent. / And now the rent's due, so we're coming to a tent near you. / We're the like-minded ninety-nine percent / standing up to corruption with loving dissent.” Music blogger and culture hacker Wyatt Closs
created something called Occupy Sound, which offers music to inspire and inform the movement. Volume One included Noam Chomsky, Pharrell, and Public Enemy. Occupy Design creates freely available visual tools around a common graphic language to unite the 99%. Their emphasis is on infographics and icons that improve the communication of the movement's messages and pertinent data.

One of the catchiest, graphic messages to go viral depicts Speaker of the House John Boehner in coveralls emblazoned with twenty corporate logos—his top-twenty supporters—with the header “Should politicians wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers to identify their corporate sponsors?” (The overwhelming response—from people across the political spectrum—is yes.)

And the award for most stunning use of spectacle in service to the movement probably goes to the “bat signal” projection, the celebratory message projected onto the monolithic Verizon building in Manhattan on the occasion of Occupy Wall Street's two-month birthday, November 17, 2011.

And in all of these spaces, Occupy has entertained us. The messages on the cardboard signs made by individual protestors go beyond the anguish portrayed in the We Are the 99% Tumblr, providing unexpected sources of humor:

When tents were banned on the quad at UC Berkeley, students attached dozens of helium balloons to tents to float them in the sky above the quad instead. This was unexpected, surprising, and hilarious. It's exactly the right tone to counter the sober plight of the 99% and the darkness of the police responses they've faced. The movement needs to keep it up.

I could go on. Occupy Wall Street has inundated the Heart Space with visceral hurt and authentic anger. They leveraged massive creative talent in service to their message, and used social networks for distribution.

In all of this, they've played a strong Outside Game as well. The actions felt different than normal lefty protests; they were not the usual suspects. And their action was edgy—it provoked police response and demanded a response by the broader establishment. Even no response constituted a response, especially after the paramilitary police actions against defenseless women, veterans, eighty-year-olds, and a row of cowed university students.

The big question is whether the broader 99% movement—which Occupy Wall Street has inspired—can evolve to embrace messaging and the tactics beyond outrage, protests, and encampments. If it can, this movement might be able to achieve full-spectrum dominance—becoming a powerful force in all four quadrants.

THE GRID HELPS US VISUALIZE
the strengths and weakness of each movement. The next two chapters will delve more deeply into lessons from the Outside Game, using the lens of swarm theory. The final chapter of this section will explore the Heart Space and expose the surprising narrative pattern that Obama 2008, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street all share.

T
HE
O
UTSIDE
G
AME IS THE HOME
of mass action and is fueled by passion. In this domain, I was surprised to discover that the same underlying mechanisms functioned within all three of the movements we are studying. The Obama phenomenon, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street—although coming from varying, and even opposing ideological backgrounds—share many parallels and overlaps. The more we can demystify these movements and understand their mechanics, the better we can apply the knowledge and experience as we move forward.

The first approach, then, is to consider all three movements in light of a kind of network theory known as swarm theory. All three of these movements can be understood as different kinds of “swarms.”

Biologists who have studied the collective intelligence of insect colonies, flocks of birds, and schools of fish provided the inspiration for describing the human social phenomenon as we know it: swarms are groups in which no one individual is in charge and each individual is free to take action on her own, following certain simple guidelines. As it turns out, staggeringly complex situations can be mastered and benefit the collective when individual members are empowered in this way.

In 2008, technology writer Clay Shirky inspired many with his analysis of the power of crowd-sourcing, also known as collaborative production, in
Here Comes Everybody
. Online social tools, he argued, now enable individuals to join forces and achieve things together without needing an institution to organize them. The creation of Wikipedia is one such example.

Decentralized, self-organized groups can be trickier to start, but they are less resource-intensive to maintain than old-fashioned bureaucracies. The traditional, top-down structures suffer from what Shirky calls the “institutional dilemma”: the “institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort . . . because an institution expends resources to manage resources, there is a gap between what those institutions are capable of in theory and in practice, and the larger the institution, the greater those costs.”

But, as we shall see, institutions themselves can also be subsumed into a swarm superstructure, functioning as mere nodes in the network.

Despite appearing chaotic at first glance, the swarm structure has multiple benefits. Because intelligence and decision-making power is spread throughout the system, swarms are highly adaptive and resilient. With no leader or headquarters to target, a swarm is
very difficult to destroy. And the fact that each node has decision-making power means that the swarm can react and pivot quickly and nimbly as new situations arise.