Rules For Radicals: Strategic Interventions vs. New Media

[...] And what appeals to me about Barack Obama is that, his background notwithstanding, he has little of the temperament of an organizer: It's not in his character to radicalize people, to create or stage a confrontation, the way Palin types in the "movement" like to do. Haven't we had enough of politicians who are organizers? Organizers have their place, but not even the greatest ones, Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., much less Saul Alinsky, should have been (or even thought they should have been) holders of public office. Part of what public officials do is bind up the wounds that organizers (who serve causes great and squalid) necessarily create. [...]

That's from Thomas Geoghegan's Slate.com essay "Hey, Sarah - Organize This!"

"A lot of hip-hoppers are saying things that Obama can't exactly endorse. So we wanted to make sure the video reached beyond Black America and could be something everyone could appreciate."

That's Trevor Parham, quoted in "New Obama music video puts Oakland in the spotlight," last week's Kamika Dunlap story for the Oakland Tribune.

Aside: I had the good fortune to meet Trevor, who just came back to Oakland from visiting the Democratic National Convention in Denver, two years ago at BlogHer in San Jose.

"We've had a few bloggers support us in the past week or so and it has really done a lot to increase our YouTube views," he said in an e-mail to me. "We're hoping that this song becomes an anthem for all Barack supporters over the next 65 days."

[...] This Obama campaign, which I have probably cursed by saying this out loud, looks from the outside like a well-run, contemporary business: seemingly the right mix of enthusiasm and discipline, encouragement and focus. I view organisations like that as a sort of minor miracle, because the working environment has changed so radically in the last decade that I despair of anyone getting it right. You're safer using the old disciplines, but at a cost: that's what makes your company or image appear distant and inhuman compared to the bumbling, chaotic but adventurous alternatives. Bush's skill was appearing human despite that kind of frozen discipline, and you only had to see how badly Gore and Kerry were at imitating the same relaxation to see the challenge of covering up all that machinery.

I suspect that if Obama gets in, they'll be an awful lot of Fast Company-style books written about this campaign, and how to build your business the same way.

That's how Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka post "the business of barack" (via an instant message from Cecily) ends.

SAJAforum: What have been the most significant ways in which you have seen community-based journalism evolve and change over the course of your career?

As media, technology and politics merge, it's become possible for people with few resources to create their own media outlets and disseminate widely. Communities of color are still struggling to get themselves into the mix, but there's far more video, blogging, writing and reporting than there was ten years ago. Activists of color know we're getting killed on cable news and in the blogosphere, so there's an urgency that I didn't feel from the field ten years ago. Giving enough focus to the storytelling remains a challenge -- getting specific, proving every point with reporting, finding people to tell the story through, carving up our journalistic projects into digestible pieces in the age of youtube, and just making sure that our production is high-quality enough to attract the unconverted.

Go read the rest of Anil Kalhan's SAJAforum post "Five Questions for Rinku Sen, Author of 'The Accidental American'"

[...] i end by saying, yes, let us protest, yes let us wear skinny jeans, but do not let this be the symbol of our activism. let the symbol of our activism be our activism. in other words, REMOVE THE SYMBOL! especially when symbols rely on the beholder anyway. [...]

Also: G.M.R.'s Dynamic Street Art post "Today's Street Art: The Stencil as Means of Social Protest," Colby Sledge's "College kids in Tennessee help to spread the green gospel" for The Tennesseean, Nikolas Kozloff's "Danny Glover, Haiti, and the Politics of Revolutionary Cinema in Venezuela" for The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Justine's "Sneaker Activism Pays Off...Well Almost" for Brains On Fire Blog.

So we're back to the question in this post's title. My answer? It'd be nice if it were mine, but I can't labor under any illusions of ownership. After all, Alinsky thought of half the title already, didn't he?

[...] In Chicago, Obama worked for the Developing Communities Project, a church-based group following the grass-roots organizing principles laid out by Saul Alinsky. Alinksy, a Chicago native, famously organized the impoverished Back of the Yards neighborhood in the 1930s and trained several generations of organizers, including César Chávez, before publishing "Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals" in 1971. (He died the following year.) [...]

One night a little over five weeks ago, Samhita pops up on Google Talk. She asks if I've put in an idea for a panel for next March's South by Southwest Interactive Festival.