The Website's Potential

A scenario to illustrate what I want the website to be capable of:

On Monday, President Bush nominates Judge Erwin Jiggledurmer for the Supreme Court. He has a track record of opposing civil liberties, abortion, and GLBT rights. He has hinted that he favors overturning Roe v Wade.

University of Oklahoma student Jenny Wonglejonk doesn’t like the nomination. She is part of the campus ACLU chapter and wants to do everything in her power to stop the nomination from going through. But what can she do as just one student at just one campus? People in Washington DC don’t care about what happens at the University of Oklahoma. What to do then?

On Tuesday, Jenny posts a blog on LosetheLabel.org criticizing the nomination and asks if people are interested in organizing protests at their campuses to resist the nomination. Over 100 people leave comments on the blog pledging to get involved and a movement is born. They create the LosetheLabel group “Students Against Justice Jiggledurmer,” which they use to communicate with each other and and work out event details.

Wednesday night, they hold a meeting in an AIM chatroom. They set the protest date for the following Thursday. They also create committees to manage fundraising (they plan to ask for donations through ActBlue.org, a website Jake Thorn told them about) and media issues (if they’re going to protest at 100 campuses, it makes sense to have a press release and contact some major media outlets beforehand).

They organize protests at their schools (or contact other activists at their schools to organize protests… Amnesty International chapters, Democratic clubs, women’s rights groups, etc). The next Thursday, only ten days after Jenny’s blog, protests go off at 100 campuses (the participants call their Senators, too, and write letters), gaining national media attention (Jenny’s interviewed on Anderson Cooper 360 that night) that provides critical muscle to Democratic Party opposition to Jiggledurmer, whose nomination is defeated.

What the website needs for something like this to happen:
*a messaging feature
*a profile feature (to strengthen the culture, bring people closely together)
*a blog feature that allows anyone to post diaries, and anyone to post comments
*a groups feature that enables smooth distribution of information
*a large, diverse, engaged community from which to draw volunteers
*a blog culture that centers on action, not just opinion
*Jenny Wonglejonk

We already have the people. And even through Facebook’s crappy technology, we have the technology to accomplish feats like this… it’s just a lot harder than it needs to be, since the community isn’t focused on facilitating activism and the culture is so resistant to it (lotta apathetic people on Facebook). Still, groups, discussion threads, notes, and messaging make it at least hypothetically possible to pull it off. The culture isn’t there yet, but the tools are there.

We’ll need a lot more, but we have enough to start moving in this direction.

This is what I see the group evolving into. For ANY issue. We need to be respectful of each other. In the example, it’s entirely possible that someone else at LosetheLabel will organize events at 100 other campuses in FAVOR of the nomination. I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this, no matter what, the end result is young people engaging in politics and becoming empowered.

Empowering young people is about the best thing we can possibly do for this country.