The Occupy movement has emerged in a historical crisis of global capitalism. It struggles for the reappropriation of the commodified commons. Communications are part of the commons of society. Yet contemporary social media are ridden by an antagonism between private corporate control (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and self-managed, commons-based activist media. In this work, Christian Fuchs analyses the contradictory dialectic of social media in the Occupy movement. Drawing on a political economy framework and interpretation of the results of the OccupyMedia! Survey, in which more than 400 Occupy activists reported on their social media use, OccupyMedia! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism shows how activists confront the contradictions of capitalism and communication in the age of crisis and social media. The book discusses the contradiction between commercial and alternative social media and argues that the existence of a surveillance-industrial complex expressed in the PRISM system shows the urgent necessity to create social media beyond Facebook and Google.

Since its appearance in Zuccotti Park, New York, in September 2011, the Occupy movement has spread to hundreds of towns and cities across the world. Through talks and conversations with movement supporters, 'Occupy' presents Chomsky's latest thinking on the central issues, questions, and demands that are driving people to protest.

On 15th October 2011, hundreds of anti-capitalist protestors assembled into a spectacular carnivalesque procession towards Paternoster Square; the heartland of Londonâ (TM)s banking district. Beginning with Althusserâ (TM)s concept of â ~interpellationâ (TM), this book examines Occupy LSX St Paulâ (TM)s Cathedral in relation to media spectacle. Initially focusing on arrival narratives, it asks the question: were the 15th October 2011 anti-capitalist protestors â ~hailedâ (TM) into becoming the subjects of Occupy LSX St Paulâ (TM)s Cathedral? Based on extensive ethnographic interviews and photographic data, this book demonstrates the complex ways in which Occupy LSX St Paulâ (TM)s Cathedral â ~interpolatedâ (TM) (Ashcroft 2001) and subverted media spectacle. Kairos exemplifies the longue durÃ(c)e of the art and ethics of Occupy. The bifarious dimensions of kairos emphasise an ethics of care and devotion alongside the indeterminate possibilities of the aleatory encounter. Formulated within Marxist aleatory materialism, this book explores the momentous reality of Occupy LSX St Paulâ (TM)s Cathedral. Instantiated within an extraordinary conjuncture of conflict between capital and labour, Occupy LSX St Paulâ (TM)s Cathedral manifested formidable expressions of resistance to the disembodied â ~space of flowsâ (TM); â ~timeless timesâ (TM); and the â ~real virtualitiesâ (TM) of transnational capitalist accumulation. Empirical case studies are used to engage with the extraordinary strategies that Occupy LSX St Paulâ (TM)s Cathedral politically cultivated to address: (i) the future of print news media, The Occupied Times of London; (ii) disjunctures and disruptions within the locality of the â ~space of placeâ (TM) amidst the harsh reality of neoliberal austerity measures; (iii) the harnessing of multi-modal information communication technologies as part of an imperative to unite the â ~space of placeâ (TM) with an international environmental citizenship; (iv) critically mobilising market analogues and promotional media integral to the neoliberal market reform of public sector healthcare provision and, in so doing, occupying a radical riposte to the entrepreneurial self and marketized morals of neoliberalismâ (TM)s homo economicus consumer citizen. In these and many other examples, this book argues that Occupy LSX St Paulâ (TM)s Cathedral exemplifies the possibilities of kairos as a condition and consequence of the politics, visual media and culture of new social movements.

From prominent economist Richard Wolff and David Barsamian, a hot-button primer on the taboo subject impacting most Americans today: the failure of capitalism to deliver public good.

Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In Occupy, W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors’ lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide. “You break through the screen like Alice in Wonderland,” Taussig writes in the opening essay, “and now you can’t leave or do without it.” Following Taussig’s artful blend of participatory ethnography and poetic meditation on Zuccotti Park, political and legal scholar Harcourt examines the crucial difference between civil and political disobedience. He shows how by effecting the latter—by rejecting the very discourse and strategy of politics—Occupy Wall Street protestors enacted a radical new form of protest. Finally, media critic and theorist Mitchell surveys the global circulation of Occupy images across mass and social media and looks at contemporary works by artists such as Antony Gormley and how they engage the body politic, ultimately examining the use of empty space itself as a revolutionary monument. Occupy stands not as a primer on or an authoritative account of 2011’s revolutions, but as a snapshot, a second draft of history, beyond journalism and the polemics of the moment—an occupation itself.

How the Occupy movement has challenged the gap between American principles and American practice—and how we can realize our most cherished ideals. The Occupy Wall Street movement has ignited new questions about the relationship between democracy and equality in the United States. Are we also entering a moment in history in which the disjuncture between our principles and our institutions is cast into especially sharp relief? Do new developments—most notably the rise of extreme inequality—offer new threats to the realization of our most cherished principles? Can we build an open, democratic, and successful movement to realize our ideals? Occupy the Future offers informed and opinionated essays that address these questions. The writers—including Nobel Laureate in Economics Kenneth Arrow and bestselling authors Paul and Anne Ehrlich—lay out what our country's principles are, whether we're living up to them, and what can be done to bring our institutions into better alignment with them. Contributers: David Grusky, Doug McAdam, Rob Reich, Erin Cumberworth, Debra Satz, Kenneth J. Arrow, Kim A. Weeden, Sean F. Reardon, Prudence L. Carter, Shelley J. Correll, Gary Segura, David D. Laitin, Cristobal Young, Charles Varner, Doug McAdam, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, Donald A. Barr, Michele Elam, Jennifer DeVere Brody, H. Samy Alim and David Palumbo-Liu.

With urgency and clarity, Noam Chomsky speaks with the movement as it transitions from occupying tent camps to occupying the national conscience

Danny Schechter the "News Dissector," a veteran journalist, filmmaker, and participant in many social movements, began covering Occupy Wall Street for Al Jazeera and other leading websites, international TV News programs, and Progressive Radio Network shows. Occupy collects his essays, blog reports, and movement documents. As the filmmaker behind "In Debt We Trust" (2006) and "Plunder: The Crime of Our Time" (2010), Danny Schechter has specialized in exposing Wall Street crime in three books and many reports. He says, "This is the movement we have been waiting for to 'fight the power.' Even as debt strangled millions, and unemployment rose alongside foreclosures, economic issues only remained fodder for boring pundits and self-styled experts. There was no activist response. Until now." Schechter explains, "Occupy Wall Street has a way of touching you personally with its gutsy honesty and democratic spirit. Yet, I was not always uncritical. I want it to succeed, but I'm also aware of its many contradictions and internal conflicts." *Occupy* provides the News Dissector's in-depth assessment of a global revolt in the making. DANNY SCHECHTER is a writer, television producer, and independent filmmaker who also speaks about media and financial issues. He is the editor of Mediachannel1.org and blogs daily as the News Dissector at NewsDissector.net. Schechter is the author of fourteen books and has produced and directed more than thirty documentaries and television specials. His blog was named the 2009 "Blog of the Year" by the Hunter College Media Department of the City University of New York.

Since September 2011, the Occupy movement has captured the world's imagination. The media has been flooded with accounts of demonstrations, descriptions of the encampments, interviews with Occupiers, and discussions of Occupy's merits, political and otherwise. But what do its participants have to say? Dreaming in Public gathers together dispatches, essays, blog posts, and images from within the movement aimed at influencing its development and addressing those not yet in the streets and plazas. Produced by participant journalists, political analysts, writers, polemicists, photographers, organizers, and activists, these documents capture the vibrant, contentious, illuminating, and inventive exchange of Occupy. Work from contributors such as Naomi Klein and Harsha Walia complement public declarations from the movement, images, and graphics. Some pieces explore the rites and rituals of the movement, others its aims and overall structure. Yet others take up the role differences of race and gender play in a movement that claims to represent the 99%, and the complicated business of maintaining urban encampments. Many consider the challenge participatory democracy poses to conventional ideas of what politics is or should be. The materials in this collection attest not only to the extraordinary political energy that has already come out of Occupy, but to the implications of the movement for the future. Amy Schrager Lang is professor of English and humanities at Syracuse University and author of a number of books. Daniel Lang/Levitsky is an artist, theater producer, writer, and founding member of the Direct Action Network and Jews Against the Occupation.

Far from being neutral, social media platforms – such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and WeChat – possess their own material characteristics, which shape how people engage, protest, resist, and struggle. This innovative collection advances the notion of social media materialities to draw attention to the ways in which the wires and silicon, data streams and algorithms, user and programming interfaces, business models and terms of service steer contentious practices and, inversely, how technologies and economic models are handled and performed by users. The key question is how the tension between social media’s techno-commercial infrastructures and activist agency plays out in protest. Addressing this, the volume goes beyond singular empirical examples and focuses on the characteristics of protest and social media materialities, offering further conceptualizations and guidance for this emerging field of research. The various contributions explore a wide variety of activist projects, protests, and regions, ranging from Occupy in the USA to environmental protests in China, and from the Mexican Barrio Nómada to the Copenhagen-based activist television channel TV Stop (1987–2005).