{"id":717,"date":"2014-12-06T17:24:11","date_gmt":"2014-12-06T22:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/?p=717"},"modified":"2014-12-06T17:24:11","modified_gmt":"2014-12-06T22:54:11","slug":"moon-over-decentralized-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/moon-over-decentralized-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Moon over decentralized system"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"moon<\/a>I\u2019m posting this photo mainly because I like it. Visually it\u2019s one of my better efforts, but I also see in it a certain irony: above the sweet full moon caught in the branches is a sparkly light that belongs to a police helicopter surveilling the demonstration at Foley Square in Manhattan the other night, protesting a grand jury\u2019s failure to indict the policeman who killed Eric Garner.<\/p>\n

Four thousand people (according to one report<\/a>) showed up in the square (thousands more elsewhere in the city). Overall the action was peaceful; no die-ins blocking traffic that I could see. Lots of chanting about racist police murderers, but to me it didn\u2019t seem nearly as provocative as \u201coff the pigs\u201d was back in the day.<\/p>\n

Best sign I saw:<\/p>\n

The system isn\u2019t broken\u2014it\u2019s fixed. <\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Really interesting: <\/span>This was a demo without a head: no speakers, no focal point. Instead separate groups across the park chanted and performed a kind of street theatre (like the marchers bearing coffins inscribed with the names of people killed by police\u2014there were quite a few coffins). It worked; nobody got in anyone else\u2019s way.<\/p>\n

Apparently this decentralized structure\u2014totally unlike last September\u2019s climate march<\/a>\u2014was a direct result of grassroots organizing via social media. According to Mashable<\/a>, \u201cSome organizers believe that social media has given a new scale to the protests\u201d (especially Twitter; scroll down for the hashtag map). I learned of it by email, but as I stood in the square I began to regret that I hadn\u2019t yet put Twitter on my phone, so I couldn\u2019t find out what was going on even on the other side of the park, where I couldn\u2019t see. I had to ask the woman next to me, who didn\u2019t know either. So last century.<\/p>\n

The Times <\/em>noted<\/a> that the protests were \u201corganized in one way\u201d but also \u201cunpredictable.\u201d As one protester explained, though the gathering location was chosen, the rest \u201chappens organically.\u201d This fluidity is new. And I realized that I liked the absence of the usual long parade of speakers, carefully divvied up among the groups sponsoring the event. It\u2019s a new form of protest, like Occupy, so we\u2019ll see whether this new practice produces a more organic result.<\/p>\n

In any case it was heartening to see such numbers, and such a wide range of ages, races, genders, and backgrounds\u2014and especially so many young people.<\/p>\n

\"crowd<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m posting this photo mainly because I like it. Visually it\u2019s one of my better efforts, but I also see in it a certain irony: above the sweet full moon caught in the branches is a sparkly light that belongs to a police helicopter surveilling the demonstration at Foley Square in Manhattan the other night, protesting a grand jury\u2019s failure to indict the policeman who killed Eric Garner. Four thousand people (according to one report) showed up in the square (thousands more elsewhere in the city). Overall the action was peaceful; no die-ins blocking traffic that I could see. Lots[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[112,111,114,113],"class_list":["post-717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-issues","tag-ericgarner","tag-icantbreathe","tag-demonstration","tag-foley-square"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=717"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":728,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717\/revisions\/728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}