8 ms·

The Metamovement

58 points by phreeza 15y ago

sp332 15y ago
I think a mass of disappointed people with no particular goals is very easy to manipulate. They're very vulnerable to someone hijacking their movement, telling them what they want, and then giving it to them.
- monkeynut 15y ago
  This is certainly true of mainstream politics. When it suits, the men on the hill champion causes such as 'family values', climate change, employment. If only they would deliver...
- Jach 15y ago
  You mean like the tea party? (Not meaning to flame, but it looks that way to me from the outside.) Though I think masses of people in general are easy to manipulate; disappointed people just provide a certain attack vector instead of others that are just as effective. On the article: I thought the article was annoying to read in the pop-out slideshow style usually reserved for picture galleries. It's also an interesting idea to suppose that all the protests are inter-related however loosely. To me that just sounds a lot like people fearing the end of the world "because we have more natural disasters now than ever" when in fact they're just being informed about them more.
  - zdw 15y ago
    Not to Godwin the conversation, but I'm guessing that the OP was referring to Hitler's pre WWII rise to power.
    - sp332 15y ago
      Nope :)
pdelgallego 15y ago
> The Arab Spring is part of the Metamovement; the London Riots were part of the Metamovement; The Arab Spring, or the Madrid rallies are not the same thing that the London riots. The last one was mainly looting and arson attacks, while the other were pacific demonstrations demanding more democracy.
- dy 15y ago
  I lean on the side that these are related events. These events seem to be catalyzed/centered around youth that are disengaged from any sense of traditional growth norms in their society and when given an opportunity, lash out against that system. In the Arab uprisings, that system was represented by repressive governments, in the UK it was the upward-mobile consumerist culture. I was also under the impression that the UK looting was opportunistic until I saw the press around OccupyWallSt. The way these things sound from inside versus how they are portrayed by the media are worlds apart. "A riot is the language of the unheard." MLK
- yters 15y ago
  The London riots are mostly generated by a bunch of self satisfied, violent youth, who believe they can do whatever they want to get whatever they want without any regard to the repercussions or destruction of others' lives.
Volpe 15y ago
I'd like to believe this article. That there is some kind of movement occuring. But more likely people just get upset when they run out of money, and everyone is running out of money...
- yuvadam 15y ago
  Hold on. You really should read up on the recent uprisings in Spain, Greece, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Israel, London and more recently, Wall Street. This is not about 'people running out of money'. This is about an entire generation coming to the understanding that current political dogma is absolutely against their future. Looking at this issue through the narrow perspective you describe is the same old-school thinking that misses the whole point.
  - Volpe 15y ago
    What are they about then? Is there more democracy? No. Are there more freedoms? No. Is there less money? Yes. What's this movement about? People are losing jobs, the lower-socio economic groups are the first to feel this. Students are among them, and they are also the most 'active' (in activist sense), and thus we hear about it. If the world was flush with cash and countries were all in massive surplus, would we still have these protests? I don't think we would.
- gee_totes 15y ago
  But there is a movement occurring. Everyone is running out of money. What happens next?
chipsy 15y ago
My observation of this movement(in the OWS iteration) is that it is more about discussion than about action. Although there is a form of rebellion against broken systems, spurred by economic conditions, acts of protest come secondary to the debate of "what next." In the same way that we embark upon exploratory or research projects, this movement casts a broad net to educate people and find consensus, rather than seeking hotbutton issues and partisan politics. In that light, the idealistic, open-ended messages are actually extremely powerful, as they are invitations to join and learn means of accomplishing the goals. I see it as Endless September, version 2.0.
GnarfGnarf 15y ago
Funny, it wouldn't load in Firefox 3.6.18. Had to go to IE. (Why am I not on FF 7? Aardvark and RoboForm not compatible yet).
pnathan 15y ago
The US 'Tea Party' initialized as a populist dissent against the concept of a government, disconnected from the people, imposing arbitrary regulations on the people. I don't know if I'd want to draw a deep connection between the Tea Party and the Arab Spring. I think, in general, the swing is towards populism right now. Obama's big wave came from his populist appeal. pre-flame-shield Yes, I know that there was astroturfing. But I know a number of people who genuinely adhere to those ideas.
- nickpinkston 15y ago
  I think we can say that the Tea Party traces its lineage to Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty - which was totally NOT AstroTurf. Then Republicans warped everything, and we got the Tea Party - my dad is a firm believer in them. I know that...
  - pnathan 15y ago
    At the time when the Tea Party wave first hit here, it was very much not a mainstream Republican Party idea. The people that I knew who it drew in were typically Libertarian or Republicans dissatisfied with the Republican Party leadership.
    - nickpinkston 15y ago
      Yes, this is exactly what happened. Tea Party both drives and get driven in the national conversation. Unfortunately, all the best stuff about them: social liberal policies, banking reform, and non-interventionist foreign policy got driven out. Now it's all: "No taxes!", "Let 'em starve!", etc.
phreeza 15y ago
I'm feeling a twinge of regret for posting this. I was hoping for more meta-discussion but it seems most comments are making more of a political point about a particular movement. Which, in retrospect, I suppose was to be expected. Our HN etiquette is preventing any full scale flames, but I feel my post wasn't very constructive anyway. I'll think twice before posting things like this next time.
- Cushman 15y ago
  I for one would like to thank you for posting it-- I've been thinking about these things a lot lately, and it's good to see I'm not the only one. From my perspective, the underlying point -- which it seems the IMF is starting to realize -- is that there exists a fundamental tendency for things to even out over time, and this tendency is as valid in economics and social policy as it is in thermodynamics, and for the same reason: any extreme action necessitates an extreme reaction. One can't exist without the other. Wealth sitting in a bank account accomplishes no more than gas sitting in a tank; to get work done requires movement of energy from high-energy (wealthy) states to low-energy (poor) states. Equalizing inequalities. What that means is that actions you take that affect other people in turn affect you; helping someone else will come back to help you, and screwing someone else will come back to bite you in the ass. Maybe a hundred years ago, a tycoon could rip somebody off and be reasonably confident he would be dead before the social consequences of that action caught up with him. We don't live in that world anymore; thanks to the Internet, if I screw somebody today, or do something nice for somebody, I might find myself getting screwed or helped -- in a completely unrelated but causally connected way -- next year. I think this is something that hackers get intuitively. For example: Say I invent a new programming language. If I'm Sun in the 90s, I'm thinking about my profits. Developing a language costs time, and time is money. I want to lock down the IP tight, not to control it, just to make sure people pay me my fair share for the development. This works, for a while, and I earn back my investment; but the programming community explodes, my proprietary system can't keep up, and I get left behind. I eventually relicense the technology as FOSS, but it's too little, too late. I get bought. If I'm an unemployed hacker in 2009, I don't have any illusions about making money from the project. I release everything for free. Three months later, a hundred people are contributing to the project. Six months later, it's a thousand. In two years, the first commercial projects using my language launch, and I'm using them. I've directly benefitted my own life-- all without seeing a cent from it. Five years later, I'm employed as a consultant advising on my own platform. I still contribute to a dozen other FOSS projects and help people online; what I'm selling I'll gladly give away for free. According to the fundamentals of economics, my time should be worthless. But people who can afford to pay me for it, not out of altruism, but because they understand it's an investment in our community that will definitely pay back tenfold, whether or not that value winds up in their ledger books or someone else's. This isn't speculation; we're watching it happen. Companies in the tech industry who are always willing to spend a little more on an interesting idea that probably won't pay off-- well, it usually doesn't. Sometimes they go out of business. But the ones that do pay off pay off big, creating whole industries, and carrying the rest of us along for the ride. The people who went out of business have no trouble finding investment capital for their next crazy idea. Meanwhile, the industrial powers who only got big by eating each other, the old giants of manufacturing and finance^, companies who have been so obsessed with cutting costs to boost quarterly profits have been quietly (and not-so-quietly) running themselves into the ground, taking their entire industry and economy down with them. ^And, yes, I'll say it... Government.
draggnar 15y ago
This is the coolest blog design I have ever seen
cwp 15y ago
Wow. Regardless of the merits of his political thesis, that is some excellent writing.
pasbesoin 15y ago
Another Blogspot blog that pulls s/a resource/resources/ from blogblog.com and is completely invisible with NoScript enabled. (Google's own LatLong blog, in its current format, is another.) I suppose I should look, myself, but is anyone familiar with this situation? Having Blogspot "disappear" for us paranoid types would be annoying. EDIT: Took a glance. Ugh. Wall of scripting and apparent (in my biased opinion) obfuscation. Off to better things...

58 points by phreeza 15y ago

sp332 15y ago

I think a mass of disappointed people with no particular goals is very easy to manipulate. They're very vulnerable to someone hijacking their movement, telling them what they want, and then giving it to them.

monkeynut 15y ago
This is certainly true of mainstream politics. When it suits, the men on the hill champion causes such as 'family values', climate change, employment. If only they would deliver...
Jach 15y ago
You mean like the tea party? (Not meaning to flame, but it looks that way to me from the outside.) Though I think masses of people in general are easy to manipulate; disappointed people just provide a certain attack vector instead of others that are just as effective. On the article: I thought the article was annoying to read in the pop-out slideshow style usually reserved for picture galleries. It's also an interesting idea to suppose that all the protests are inter-related however loosely. To me that just sounds a lot like people fearing the end of the world "because we have more natural disasters now than ever" when in fact they're just being informed about them more.
- zdw 15y ago
  Not to Godwin the conversation, but I'm guessing that the OP was referring to Hitler's pre WWII rise to power.
  - sp332 15y ago
    Nope :)

pdelgallego 15y ago

> The Arab Spring is part of the Metamovement; the London Riots were part of the Metamovement; The Arab Spring, or the Madrid rallies are not the same thing that the London riots. The last one was mainly looting and arson attacks, while the other were pacific demonstrations demanding more democracy.

dy 15y ago
I lean on the side that these are related events. These events seem to be catalyzed/centered around youth that are disengaged from any sense of traditional growth norms in their society and when given an opportunity, lash out against that system. In the Arab uprisings, that system was represented by repressive governments, in the UK it was the upward-mobile consumerist culture. I was also under the impression that the UK looting was opportunistic until I saw the press around OccupyWallSt. The way these things sound from inside versus how they are portrayed by the media are worlds apart. "A riot is the language of the unheard." MLK
yters 15y ago
The London riots are mostly generated by a bunch of self satisfied, violent youth, who believe they can do whatever they want to get whatever they want without any regard to the repercussions or destruction of others' lives.

Volpe 15y ago

I'd like to believe this article. That there is some kind of movement occuring. But more likely people just get upset when they run out of money, and everyone is running out of money...

yuvadam 15y ago
Hold on. You really should read up on the recent uprisings in Spain, Greece, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Israel, London and more recently, Wall Street. This is not about 'people running out of money'. This is about an entire generation coming to the understanding that current political dogma is absolutely against their future. Looking at this issue through the narrow perspective you describe is the same old-school thinking that misses the whole point.
- Volpe 15y ago
  What are they about then? Is there more democracy? No. Are there more freedoms? No. Is there less money? Yes. What's this movement about? People are losing jobs, the lower-socio economic groups are the first to feel this. Students are among them, and they are also the most 'active' (in activist sense), and thus we hear about it. If the world was flush with cash and countries were all in massive surplus, would we still have these protests? I don't think we would.
gee_totes 15y ago
But there is a movement occurring. Everyone is running out of money. What happens next?

chipsy 15y ago

My observation of this movement(in the OWS iteration) is that it is more about discussion than about action. Although there is a form of rebellion against broken systems, spurred by economic conditions, acts of protest come secondary to the debate of "what next." In the same way that we embark upon exploratory or research projects, this movement casts a broad net to educate people and find consensus, rather than seeking hotbutton issues and partisan politics. In that light, the idealistic, open-ended messages are actually extremely powerful, as they are invitations to join and learn means of accomplishing the goals. I see it as Endless September, version 2.0.

GnarfGnarf 15y ago

Funny, it wouldn't load in Firefox 3.6.18. Had to go to IE. (Why am I not on FF 7? Aardvark and RoboForm not compatible yet).

pnathan 15y ago

The US 'Tea Party' initialized as a populist dissent against the concept of a government, disconnected from the people, imposing arbitrary regulations on the people. I don't know if I'd want to draw a deep connection between the Tea Party and the Arab Spring. I think, in general, the swing is towards populism right now. Obama's big wave came from his populist appeal. pre-flame-shield Yes, I know that there was astroturfing. But I know a number of people who genuinely adhere to those ideas.

nickpinkston 15y ago
I think we can say that the Tea Party traces its lineage to Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty - which was totally NOT AstroTurf. Then Republicans warped everything, and we got the Tea Party - my dad is a firm believer in them. I know that...
- pnathan 15y ago
  At the time when the Tea Party wave first hit here, it was very much not a mainstream Republican Party idea. The people that I knew who it drew in were typically Libertarian or Republicans dissatisfied with the Republican Party leadership.
  - nickpinkston 15y ago
    Yes, this is exactly what happened. Tea Party both drives and get driven in the national conversation. Unfortunately, all the best stuff about them: social liberal policies, banking reform, and non-interventionist foreign policy got driven out. Now it's all: "No taxes!", "Let 'em starve!", etc.

phreeza 15y ago

I'm feeling a twinge of regret for posting this. I was hoping for more meta-discussion but it seems most comments are making more of a political point about a particular movement. Which, in retrospect, I suppose was to be expected. Our HN etiquette is preventing any full scale flames, but I feel my post wasn't very constructive anyway. I'll think twice before posting things like this next time.

Cushman 15y ago
I for one would like to thank you for posting it-- I've been thinking about these things a lot lately, and it's good to see I'm not the only one. From my perspective, the underlying point -- which it seems the IMF is starting to realize -- is that there exists a fundamental tendency for things to even out over time, and this tendency is as valid in economics and social policy as it is in thermodynamics, and for the same reason: any extreme action necessitates an extreme reaction. One can't exist without the other. Wealth sitting in a bank account accomplishes no more than gas sitting in a tank; to get work done requires movement of energy from high-energy (wealthy) states to low-energy (poor) states. Equalizing inequalities. What that means is that actions you take that affect other people in turn affect you; helping someone else will come back to help you, and screwing someone else will come back to bite you in the ass. Maybe a hundred years ago, a tycoon could rip somebody off and be reasonably confident he would be dead before the social consequences of that action caught up with him. We don't live in that world anymore; thanks to the Internet, if I screw somebody today, or do something nice for somebody, I might find myself getting screwed or helped -- in a completely unrelated but causally connected way -- next year. I think this is something that hackers get intuitively. For example: Say I invent a new programming language. If I'm Sun in the 90s, I'm thinking about my profits. Developing a language costs time, and time is money. I want to lock down the IP tight, not to control it, just to make sure people pay me my fair share for the development. This works, for a while, and I earn back my investment; but the programming community explodes, my proprietary system can't keep up, and I get left behind. I eventually relicense the technology as FOSS, but it's too little, too late. I get bought. If I'm an unemployed hacker in 2009, I don't have any illusions about making money from the project. I release everything for free. Three months later, a hundred people are contributing to the project. Six months later, it's a thousand. In two years, the first commercial projects using my language launch, and I'm using them. I've directly benefitted my own life-- all without seeing a cent from it. Five years later, I'm employed as a consultant advising on my own platform. I still contribute to a dozen other FOSS projects and help people online; what I'm selling I'll gladly give away for free. According to the fundamentals of economics, my time should be worthless. But people who can afford to pay me for it, not out of altruism, but because they understand it's an investment in our community that will definitely pay back tenfold, whether or not that value winds up in their ledger books or someone else's. This isn't speculation; we're watching it happen. Companies in the tech industry who are always willing to spend a little more on an interesting idea that probably won't pay off-- well, it usually doesn't. Sometimes they go out of business. But the ones that do pay off pay off big, creating whole industries, and carrying the rest of us along for the ride. The people who went out of business have no trouble finding investment capital for their next crazy idea. Meanwhile, the industrial powers who only got big by eating each other, the old giants of manufacturing and finance^, companies who have been so obsessed with cutting costs to boost quarterly profits have been quietly (and not-so-quietly) running themselves into the ground, taking their entire industry and economy down with them. ^And, yes, I'll say it... Government.

draggnar 15y ago

This is the coolest blog design I have ever seen

cwp 15y ago

Wow. Regardless of the merits of his political thesis, that is some excellent writing.

pasbesoin 15y ago

Another Blogspot blog that pulls s/a resource/resources/ from blogblog.com and is completely invisible with NoScript enabled. (Google's own LatLong blog, in its current format, is another.) I suppose I should look, myself, but is anyone familiar with this situation? Having Blogspot "disappear" for us paranoid types would be annoying. EDIT: Took a glance. Ugh. Wall of scripting and apparent (in my biased opinion) obfuscation. Off to better things...