The Gadgets of #Occupy

The raid on the Occupy stronghold of Zucotti Park left laptops smashed and wifi towers missing. Questions about the NYPD’s aggression may come down to lawsuits over property damage.

While “stuff” or “property” isn’t everything to the Occupy movement, neither is technology. Even thinking about the movement as an app or an API, as Alexis Madrigal recently did, doesn’t require an emphasis on the technology as much as it requires being able to recognize OWS as not only a physical occupation, but one that existed in meta space as well.

Still, there’s no denying that hacking the national political dialogue wouldn’t be quite the same without the clever real-life hacks of the movement’s tinkerers. Hackspace may be something that exists in dialogue but what, specifically, does that mean? Below, I looked at some of the cutting-edge hacks and clever grassroots technologies that have helped Occupy Wall Street, or #Occupy, transform the art and science of revolution.

This nine-foot behemoth is comprised of two modems and six radio antenna. Built by the Free Network Foundation, the tower is no doubt what will come to mind when people think about open-source and the art of technology in protest.

Motherboard saw FNF founder and OWS Signal Corps member, Isaac Wilder, search for a confiscated tower last week at the Department of Sanitation. But regardless of its fate, this open source, ad-hocked tower (and let’s not forget the countless laptops, and generators that came with it) gave Occupy the ability to live-stream and provide constant updates to a greater public, offering what newscasts cannot: a constant sense of immediacy and direct communication with a group whose perspective would have otherwise been delivered through a third-person source.

Standing in Foley Square on November 17, as projections were lit onto Gotham-like buildings with messages rallying “the 99%,” there was chatter that the infamous hack group Anonymous was behind the stunt. Turns out the projections were the brainchild of

Mark Read

, and designed by New York based art collective, Dawn of Man. In a brief interview, Max Nova & JR Skola of Dawn had this to say about the guerilla campaign and the use of projections in public discourse:

Projections have been around for a while, but are one on a long list of the many new technologies out there that have become more and more available to the public, and that can be used as a tool to connect people, and to help facilitate public discourse, information sharing and the exchange of ideas. Projection is also great because its immediacy and mobility, as well as its ability to reach a large number of people with a relatively small amount of resources and production footprint. We can get a message out in a way that is relatively non-intrusive, and certainly does not promote vandalism, which is a sort of positive statement in
itself. The messages we projected near the Brooklyn Bridge last night were intended to inspire and uplift the people who saw it – and also serve as a way to celebrate all of the hard work thats been done so far. We also hope it inspires people to continue to create new channels for communication and even more ways of carrying the movement forward.

The pervasive use of mobile mapping, made possible through advances in mobile technology networks and interfaces, has been one of the largest technological breakthroughs in public protest . #OccupyMap, set up by the occupants themselves, allowed participants to locamotively track the movement as well as react to situations in real time while events were unfolding.

Breakthroughs in hacked mapping include work done by members of Grassroots Mapping and Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) to develop and prototype a low-cost, large scale, remote sensing system targeting the visible and near-infrared band combination. This is essentially a hacked-into camera and balloon used to provide better live mapping data for protest movements. The members have stated that there would be possible applications to movements such as Occupy.

Similarly, Celly is a mass text alert system implemented by occupiers to alert those involved in protests. BetaBeat stated earlier this week:

Celly/TextOccupy has been embraced by Occupy movements coast to coast, particularly #OWS and #OPDX," cofounder Russell Okamoto wrote in an email. "In the last week, we've sent a quarter million messages on behalf of the Occupy movements. It's as if the Occupy Wall Street movement is building a technological infrastructure for all the mass protest movements of the future. "#OWS directly engaged us to integrate voice alerts into Celly," Mr. Okamoto wrote. "We designed, built, tested, and deployed that feature last week for them."

Of course, none of these real time computations would happen without power sources to generate enough energy to allow these technologies to run outside and in public space without complicated negotiations from energy companies. This is where hacked energy sources come into play, possibly one of the most important breakthroughs Occupy has made. In the middle of Zucotti Park, generating power to the countless machines and wifi hubs and mobile devices, were a complex mix of generators and bicycle-powered generators that supposedly generated enough energy to power OWS beyond 2025.

Grassroots generated energy gave Occupy the ability to independently act – something Dawn of Man also felt strongly about. When asked, they stated,

In terms of other kind of “culture jamming” technologies we’ve seen, there is a great group of people at OWS who are promoting alternative means of
energy production, including DIY stationary bicycles that are used to charge deep cycle batteries by way of an alternator, which can be used where grid energy is not available. Its something we’ve also been exploring lately, these kinds of alternative modes of energy that are actually pretty readily available, and a lot easier to implement than one might think, but are not often used as public knowledge about them is not yet readily available. Its cool that these people are out there in
Zuccotti Park educating others about it, while at he same time providing practical, useable energy for the movement! Its all pretty exciting stuff when you think about it.

The fallout of Occupy has ignited a social dialogue over “what’s what” and “whose is whose.” After all, where all of Occupy’s “stuff” goes will set important precedents for future movements. But the hacks of Occupy, and the infrastructure that made them possible, will be relevant long after Zuccotti Park changes hands, or after upcoming elections, or even after the actual technology and stuff of Occupy has been packed, parceled out or disappeared altogether.

In many ways, the gadgets of #Occupy are more than simply artifacts of an occupation. They created a space where the distribution of information was able to be taken into the hands of those dispersing it, thus creating a meta space for public discourse that at least attempted to extend beyond the framework of the society that #Occupy was protesting in the first place. The hacks of #Occupy were more than just a protest – they changed the way people protest.

• Occupy’s Internet Tower Will Live On, For Now
• No Place to Truly #Occupy