One basic premise of Movement Netlab is that we can accomplish great things when we organize ourselves into groups, or clusters, based around what we are most passionate about. Sometimes these clusters last for years. Sometimes only for months. But we learn something with every experiment, and this knowledge then gets shared with the larger movement network. Movement Netlab began with this spirit of decentralized experimentation. Here’s how it started.
Gan Golan: A couple years back, I ended up in this really bizarre, but revealing situation. After 25 years of street-level activism from Seattle WTO to Occupy, from housing rights in Oakland, to police accountability work in Boston, I found myself standing in front of a room of very wealthy funders who wanted to support social movements, and these guys were totally baffled. They didn’t understand what these movements actually were.
These progressive funders, although almost universally fawning over movements like Occupy Wall Street in their brochures and materials, when it came down to it were very hesitant to support anything actually connected to it. To them, these decentralized social movements, despite their huge successes in shifting the national conversation, were not really organized. They were ‘spontaneous’, ‘random’, ‘chaotic’ and when successful, ‘lucky’. What they were unable to see was there was a consistent, elegant architecture to these movements, and that the reason they were winning was because of the way they were organized.
That was, in part, our own fault. What we lacked was a clear, comprehensive language that explained how we organized, either to ourselves – in order to do it better – or to our allies, who often just sat on the sidelines unable to comprehend what they were seeing.
This wasn’t just a problem for funders, either, but also for labor unions, community-based organizations, non-profit organizations, and basically, the entire rest of the traditional left. At that moment, I understood there was a bridge that needed to be built, and that I needed to reach out to the smartest people I knew to help build it.
Basically, I called Sam Corbin.
Occupy Sandy Relief Effort at St. Matthew St. Luke at 520 Clinton Ave.
Sam Corbin: Gan called me up while I was out of town. I was right in the middle of building the training curriculum for the Keystone pledge of resistance, a mass, distributed direct action campaign to stop Obama from approving the pipeline. But he wanted to talk about Occupy Sandy. I had helped set up and manage the systems at 520 Clinton, a church which was one of the major hubs that helped intake and distribute tons of relief supplies for Occupy Sandy. OS turned out to be one of the most successful citizen-lead Humanitarian relief efforts in US history. We ended up in a long conversation about the power of decentralized network organizing. I talked about how Occupy Sandy not only mobilized hundreds of different networks of peoples into one giant network, but it innovated, evolved rapidly, and did really unexpected things like integrating a fleet of volunteer UPS drivers into our delivery operation, or setting up an Amazon wedding registry to receive crucial survival goods paid for by people from all over the world. We realized we were seeing a lot of consistent patterns across the movements that we didn’t have theories and words for. But I told Gan if he really wanted to geek out about networks, he had to meet my roommate, Tammy Shapiro.
Occupy Sand relief effort at St. Jacobi Church Sunset Park Brooklyn
Tammy Shapiro: Sam and I were roommates during Occupy Sandy. While she was supporting 520 Clinton I was helping set up the other major hub at St. Jacobi Church. Before Occupy I had organized a national network of student activists. Or so I had thought. But after establishing Interoccupy, the national networking and communication system for the Occupy movement, and working with Occupy Sandy, I started to understand the power of massively scalable networks.
The three of us met up for coffee one night and kept talking until we closed down three different coffee shops. By the end our five-hour marathon conversation, Gan proposed we create a new theory of network organizing for practitioners, and by practitioners.
In truth, I was skeptical. Another project? And how could the three of us really know more than others? But as we kept reading articles and books that had already been written on the subject, we found that none of them really described the way so many activists were working. We holed ourselves up for week at the Blue Mountain Retreat center reading, debating and outlining our initial theories, based upon our direct personal experiences.
And through our digging we discovered June Holley, who had written this incredible work, The Network Weaver’s Handbook. Her work was the closest to what we had been discussing to date. We called her up, and suddenly, June become the fourth member of the Movement Netlab team.
After being a part of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy, we knew it was important to start figuring out not only how to describe networked movements, but also how to build systems of support through resource distribution, technological tools and training. Decentralized, self-organized networks have always existed and were the backbone of many early social movements, but now, with the technology for instant, mass communication, these networks were capable of something new. We had a hunch networked movements would keep emerging and we knew that they could be even bigger, better and more effective. The past few years have proven us right as the Black Lives Matter emerged in a very similar fashion.
Now we can trace the same patterns emerging throughout an entire spectrum of movements, both here in the US, and globally. Meanwhile, our group has grown to include amazing folks who are organizing in these new movements as well.
It’s become clear that decentralized, network social movement are anything but random, and are here to stay. The question is: do we really understand them, and if so, can we make them an even more powerful force in shaping our world towards more humane, just direction?
