A couple weeks ago I wrote that the Occupy Wall Street protests would never go anywhere if it remained the province of a bunch of college kids. Now there's talk of several of the big New York labor unions showing up in solidarity. Other "Occupy" groups are forming in Chicago, Los Angeles, and places as far afield as Manchester, England. Events across the world are coordinated via a website called Occupy Together. An anonymous group started a twitter feed to occupy the Johannesburg stock exchange. A group in Florida wants to occupy several states in the city on November 5 with a Guy Fawkes Day protest. Radiohead is supposed to play Wall Street today. (update: no, they're not playing.)
Hacktivists are organizing people around social media, connecting disparate groups, creating new rules of interaction as they go. Nobody is quite sure what this movement stands for, but that's all right. An emotional energy is coalescing on new lines. There is no manifesto. It has a life of its own.
I don't know if the Occupy Movement will amount to any real change, or if it is just the flavor of the month for a frustrated people. Nobody does. But for the first time since this made the news, it seems newsworthy. Right now it's just a little beyond the "dog bites man" story of college kids protesting. It's still far from the critical mass that a mass movement must achieve, but there's something to it. Something coherent but still unknown, something timely and long overdue.
College kids: you have my attention now.
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