All the good activism in recent years has come from spontaneous gatherings of people through cell phone texting.

This makes a point that should resonate with most living in the USA. The online petitions and such are good for those of us in far flung places who don't have a local community to connect to for issues back home. We are also constrained in many different ways from taking a more hands-on approach towards the issues relevant to where we are.

Why can we not have both? As long as the passionate critique is not compromised by the mass marketing.

What is a catchy slogan or chant other than mass marketing?

In fighting such a powerful beast we need all available weapons used most proficiently.

And the problem as one environmentalist stated, is not that we create waste ( read consume) but rather that the "waste" does not stay in the energy stream as it does everywhere in nature.

Of course consumption has to be sustainable and ecologically sound.

Power to the People !!!!!!

Online activism doesn't work, we all know that. But going to the streets, protesting, marching, voting and even striking don't work either.

To achieve anything substantial only 3 things work: stop paying taxes, withdraw your savings from the American banking system and consume only the bare daily necessities. Stop feeding the beast, everything else is a waste of time.

For the most part, all good and relevant points.

I am wondering about that last paragraph, though: what does the author mean by 'emancipatory project of the left' and by 'social revolution'?

As these notions presuppose industrial society, and as industrial society and its accompanying ideology of industrialism are obviously in a state of severe crisis and are moving towards a tipping point of more widespread collapse, one wonders how the author can still appeal to these notions, as if their meaning still went without saying in our deeply troubled new context.

I loved this article. The author, Mr. White, touches on exactly what is lacking in our political arena. Adding one's name to a list and belonging to a political newsletter aren't the same as warm bodies showing up in solidarity to support a movement or idea. America will be stronger once we, it's people, have learned to use digital communications to enhance and grow local gatherings. Organizing and staying in touch is easier with technology, now we have to remember how to assemble.

Am so glad to have seen this ... to a large degree because I have been guilty of falling for too much of the "marketing" strategy. I hope the article gets spread widely.

This article has so many problems it's hard to know where to begin. This "award winning author and activist" seems to have spent no time in the real world organizing. Certainly if he has spent a few years door canvassing or collecting cards for a union, it does not show up on his bio.

It is my experience that a good organizer recognizes that there is a spectrum in the level of action that people are willing to participate in to change our society--many people are willing to click a button fewer will hold a house party to educate their neighbors and fewer still will participate in a non-violent direct action. The job of the organizer is to identify and qualify those people in the spectrum and then give them the opportunity to take their activism to the next level. Electronic viral outreach is a vital tool that allows cash strapped social movements to reach far more people in a far wider geographical area than they could possibly ever interact with otherwise.

Further, much as our well intentioned award winning author and activist would like to pretend otherwise, we live in a culture that has been conditioned to respond to messages and delivery of those messages through electronic means. So, as much as we would all like to go nail our thesis to the church door ala Martin Luther and change the world, that is not how people communicate big ideas anymore. We must organize the world we live in and change it from within not say that the world should change and demand people follow us... especially if they can't hear us.

There is, at best, insufficient data here to convince me of the premise.

OK, sure some of the people some of the time click their guilt away and say "I've done my bit." How many of these people would have been more seriously involved otherwise, and how many have passed with a "Not today, thanks"?

Of course we should understand that an email message does not weigh as heavily on the Congressional Consciousness as a signed corporate check with lovely fat zeros and visions of cascading Ben Franklins in revue.

But I would not have produced that check either way. As is, I have donated to several organizations that I would not otherwise have discovered. The amount was small, more pitiably small than ever, I guess, given recent Supreme Court decision to make American election a closed-door auction. Still, I was not the only one contacted.

I have no doubt that people get fooled by false activism. But I also have no idea what I am to take as new in this.

Finally, while Moving On may be at least a model if not the model for these marketing campaigns, that does not mean that their particular political POV is somehow inherent in the process. Moving On's credibility has fallen with Barry 0'b's betrayal, but other organizations with different politics are online, and even Moving On has the option of looking their horse in the teeth next time, though old mistakes seem to die hard.

I'm all for dealing critically with the marketing of social change, and in these days of astroturfing, such ruses advance online as elsewhere.

But lying has been fundamental to politics for a long time.

The following is a very loose translation of "Admonitions of a Prophet," from the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt:

"No, but the face is pale, as the fathers have told.

"No, but the land is full of plotters,
and a man takes his shield to plow.

"No, but the face is pale, the bowman is ready.
The wrongdoer is everywhere.

"No, but the Nile is in flood
and no one plows.

"The great take no part in rejoicings
of their people.

"No, but the heart is violent.
Plague stalks the land and blood abounds.

"The river has become a graveyard,
for the graveyard flows blood.

"No, the South is cut adrift
the towns destroyed, and the North an empty waste.

"No, but the crocodiles are glutted
and can eat no more priests."

I like the article,but a strange thing happened to me last week.The chief of staff at my Democratic Congressman's office in Washington asked me about Julian Assange.My representative was in Vegas at an Internet convention and did not know anything about wiki-leaks.org.This left him at a loss and his Blackberry(tm) must have beeen overheating.
So this unprofessional left wing thorn had to "school" the guy.(I am not even a Democrat)
peace

I have to disagree here. Online petitions don't necessarily reduce activism. It's people who refuse to take up on it. Look at the difference between Democratic Party activists using Netroots to get in touch and reach out with face to face meetups and progressives on the blogs just preaching to the choir and playing exclusion and elitism to feel strong. Conservatives use Internet too but they also get together and enjoy having friendly social exchanges. I have to go from Fargo to NYC or SF just to attend a progressive organization but conservatives can be anywhere and still have their meetings down the block. I know this as a recovering conservative.

The Brits/Scots do so love irony. This was in the comments section in the original Guardian piece:

londonscot

12 Aug 2010, 4:02PM

i followed your blog to your website and to the 'missions' where i was asked to sign up like 86,607 others...

"jammers who are committed to ending corporate-rule. Together we will become a global political and cultural force to be reckoned with."

i gave my email address. so i need to do anything else?

Awwww, somebody don't like us clicktivistas. Apparently we lack passion, drive, and effectiveness. Would someone puleeeeease give that message to Robert Gibbs.

MoveOn is a major center-leftist pro-Democrat force in the US.

1) There is no "political center" in the United States. No such thing exists.

2) MoveOn loves Obama. So how can it truly be considered to be "left"?

What organizing needs is sufficient public awareness. This has been lacking for the last 30 years.

There were some factors in the '60s that sparked the awakening of that age: the draft rapidly politicized young people, who were a majority of the population; America was at the peak of its prosperity and so people had more time and opportunity to protest; black people were obviously discriminated against.

Nowadays there is no draft. Young people are politically blind. The economy is in the bends and people are stressed about making ends meet - they have no time and energy to be politically active. Blacks and other minorities are discriminated against in subtler ways - through the 'war on drugs', for example.

That's the real problem. The solution is real education. For that, the Internet is invaluable. The establishment right dominates the conventional media. The Internet, however, is contested territory.
Before people come out to march on the street, they have to have an idea what they're supposed to be marching for.

If MoveOn is center left then FoxNews must be center. Lefties like to incorporate that they are center without informing that what they believe is Far Left. MoveOn is Pro Democrat, pro big government, pro-abortion, pro gay marriage, and antiChristian. Then of course is their lying about money they have to defeat a republican stance without having the money (just iou's that memebers 'might' spend).

What is Center then?

Also, clicktivism is good because that is where the new audience is. His frustration is probably that most don't march to the white house anymore...in which America would be much stronger and have much less jerks in congress stealing. Lynching would eliminate them :)

These are excerpts from a longer article in the Nation. It is a superior critique of the subject and worth reading the entire piece. Go to: www.chrishayes.org/articles/moveon-ten/

MoveOn.Org Is Not as Radical as Conservatives Think

by CHRISTOPHER HAYES

This article appeared in the August 4, 2008 edition of The Nation.

Marshall Ganz--who organized with the farm workers, recently ran training workshops for Obama's field staff and now studies and teaches organizing at Harvard's Kennedy School--says much of what MoveOn does is marketing, not organizing. "The genius of the Internet is more the way it can create a marketplace than create organization," he says. "It's important to distinguish between sharing information and forming relationships. Forming a relationship, we make a commitment to work together. Participation in democratic organizations is not just an individual act. It's an act of affiliation with others." If you were to map the arrows of relationship between MoveOn's staff and its members, Ganz points out, nearly all the arrows would run between the members and the staff: you receive an e-mail, you respond, you give money, etc.--but relatively few go from member to member.

Ganz's criticism is mild compared with that of John Stauber, who founded the Center for Media and Democracy and has written scathingly of MoveOn. According to Stauber, MoveOn has become "primarily a money-raising and marketing arm of the Pelosi wing of the Democratic Party. They clearly haven't shown any interest in building an organization that would empower the millions of people whose e-mail addresses they have.... The so-called MoveOn membership is really just a group of people who are used for fundraising purposes."

Stauber is among a small handful of people on the left willing to express such harsh criticisms on the record. Privately, more progressive activists will make familiar complaints about grievances and frictions that have developed from working together. "In the early days they were great partners and had an interest in building up other progressive organizations," one prominent progressive who's worked with MoveOn told me. "That seems to have changed."

Perhaps the most damning criticism leveled at MoveOn is that by creating a clear and easy outlet for people's frustration and angst, the organization delivers people a false sense of accomplishment. In other words, MoveOn can be tremendously successful without being effective. Consider the vaunted petition, MoveOn's bread and butter. In 1998 a petition with 100,000 signatures would make any politician sit up and take notice, but over time the value has been degraded as more organizations have learned how to leverage the Internet. Clay Shirky calls this the "cost/value paradox" and says it can spell big trouble for MoveOn. As the transaction cost for a specific piece of activism declines, so does its value, since politicians know it doesn't require much effort. One former Democratic Senate staffer told me that when her boss was presented the weekly mail summary, the staff made sure that if an issue had landed on the top of the list as a result of a MoveOn mass e-mailing, it was marked with an asterisk. "They've been selling: Millions of E-mails Sold, the old McDonald's line," says Shirky. "They're now realizing that in a way they're empty calories."

The subtext here is the larger issue of MoveOn's relationship to a Democratic Party that many feel has co-opted it. "They built up a huge membership because of the war," says CodePink founder Medea Benjamin, "and the press looked at them as the voice of the antiwar movement, and then they betrayed the movement.... They were more concerned with being on the same page with the Democratic leadership than with the rest of the antiwar leadership."

Particularly egregious to Benjamin and others was the failure of Americans Against Escalation in Iraq. Co-founded in January 2007 by MoveOn and run by its then-Washington director, Tom Matzzie, the coalition spent $12 million attempting to force Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. Its efforts helped push Congressional Democrats to pass a supplemental bill that tied funding to a withdrawal timeline. But after the President vetoed the bill, AAEI focused on running ads against Republicans who'd backed the White House rather than trying to force the Democratic Congressional leadership to cut off funds. "MoveOn went all out to get a Democratic Congress elected," says Benjamin. "We now have more troops in Iraq, more funding than the Bush Administration even asked for and a guarantee that the war will continue into the next administration."

To MoveOn's critics in the antiwar movement, the tactical choice to focus most of its energy on defeating Republicans confirmed a nagging sense that, for all its talk about being led by its members, the organization is really run by its staff. Dave Swanson of Democrats.com recalls that in March 2007, "a lot of the real peace organizations were pushing the Barbara Lee amendment" (which would have provided funding only for a withdrawal of forces) "to the point where MoveOn was feeling the pressure. So do they send out a survey, Do you favor the Barbara Lee or the [Democratic] leadership's bill?" (which would have attached timelines but continued funding). "No. Instead, they offered a choice of the leadership's bill or the President's agenda. It was essentially a Stalinist poll. They know damn well what their membership would have said if offered an honest survey."

Well the MASS PROTESTS, don't get reported by the media.

The hands across the sand, and other 350.org protests didn't get coverage.

The WTO in Seattle did, but that was in the 90's.

We need bus boycotts, grape boycotts, strawberry boycotts, IPHONE BOYCOTTS. People need to actually stop using things, not clicking, or taking to the streets.

But what boycott has worked in the last 20 years? None of the "Don't buy any gas days" worked. What should we boycott?

I don't agree with the false dichotomy raised by the author. It's not an either/or: digital activism as everything, or more traditional forms. Certainly it is foolish to think we can have a social revolution solely through clicktivism; and I don't think most people believe clicking on a petition is going to bring about a democratic socialist revolution.

If there is something causing people to do real, in person activism less, I don't think it is clicktivism, but working longer hours for less pay, unemployment, depression, and other outcomes of a severe economic downturn. As someone else said here, we need all the methods of social change we can imagine, including clicktivism. Not all the petition sites are the same, either. Some, like MoveOn, are your Democratic party supporters; others seem more leftist, like The Pen.

Is there anything inherent in technology that stops it from being used for a more radical agenda than petitions to end this or that abuse of corporate power?

Imagine getting an email petition calling you to participate in widespread tax resistance. Imagine getting an email petition inviting you to join a General Strike demanding significant cuts in Pentagon spending be redirected to helping poor people and developing alternative energies.

I am sympathetic to the author's overall message, but it seems a reiteration of the old liberal vs. radical debate. Clicktivism didn't start that and it won't be the end of it.

The mindset that petitions (online or not) and open letters reinforce is that meaningful change can somehow come about through persuading those in power.

Trust me, those days are over.

The only way change is going to happen is by thoroughly defeating those in power.

So for liberals, progressives and the rest of the fake left, online petitions and letters are just some of the tools at their disposal to avoid just that.

The following article was posted in March 2006. Here are a few excerpts:

"The Limits of the Internet or The Silence Of the Streets"

While we're all sitting comfortably at some desk looking at our computer screens, reading articles by people whose opinion we cherish, celebrating the feeling that we might be able to change whatever we want to change by just writing the kind of highly opinionated piece I am about to write, I have lately been giving this complacent feeling of mine a thorough cleansing which led to the following musings:

What if the world, this world of TV images we know, still was pretty archaic at heart and what if it still primarily reacted to centuries-old images and trigger patterns after all? In other words: What do political campaigns and articles via the internet really manage to accomplish? And: Does this mean that I still ought to brave icy winds or pouring rain instead and hold up some banners in demonstrations in order to really achieve anything, and does this mean that all these thoughful articles on the net don't have as much influence as all of us couch revolutionaries would like to believe?

Let me lead you through a little time machine experiment. All I'd ask you to do is imagine that there was an internet around when any of the following occurred (there are thousands of cases to choose from; I just randomly picked a few):

The British are occupying India. Instead of rallying hundreds of thousands of Indians in peaceful marches, Mahatma Ghandi launches an internet campaign against the Raj (=British rule of India). Your best bet: Do you think that the British would still be ruling India?

...

At some stage the pent-up wrath of many Americans against their government would have to be expressed in long-lasting mass (we're talking millions) protests in American cities if people really want to make a difference. They have to be prepared to stand up and be counted.

Or how else could one of Europe's most famous philosophers, Bernard-Henri Levy, come up with the diagnosis "semi-comatose state of the American Left" on CommonDreams nearly a month ago after having traveled in the US? Well, if you leave your computer, that's definitely the impression.

Ironically, in times of an overkill of electronic communication, it is still the physical protest which to this day seems to be the only action capable of moving mountains, not its (admittedly more comfortable) cyber ersatz.

Deep down, human perception hasn't changed that much.

So you better get out your raingear...

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0305-29.htm

Excellent, excellent article. Bravo!

This should go viral NOW before our country self destructs due to a lack of "REAL" activism.

From article: "Gone is faith in the power of ideas, or the poetry of deeds, to enact social change."

Then when people have signed the 100th petition and it is ignored for the 100th time by our political representatives, they stop participating. This is actually what most of our corporate politicians from the Democratic and Republican parties want. Fewer voters, with those remaining, easier to "control".

It is time to be active beyond the digital petition.