Yesterday I was given a list of Occupy sites on Daily Kos, about 200 of them. Most were Facebook sites; there were a handful of blogs with feeds.
Of course without feeds they can’t be part of occupyweb.org. But that’s okay, because occupying Facebook is every bit as good as occupying Wall Street. Seriously. And because of what’s happening on Facebook, the show is going to move out to the web.
Read this article about where Facebook thinks they’re heading. And then try to imagine the conversations they’re having with advertisers. How long before there’s an Occupy for individual brands? And do they really want to compete with the occupiers on Facebook?
Who are they kidding? People are going to find what the brands have to say very easy to ridicule. Basically, I can’t imagine they will do anything but cede the space to protestors.
There you have the coming faceoff. And it’s going to be a good one. Whatever plays out won’t be in Cairo or Tunisia; it’ll be in New York and Silicon Valley. It’ll look a lot like the faceoff on the Brooklyn Bridge. But visible to everyone in the world. This is what American democracy looks like. It’s always been class warfare, but now the formerly disarmed class has a way of organizing.
But everybody, be sure you have a good backup plan. Where will you congregate on the web if you lose your Facebook presence? Really, seriously be thinking about that.
At the DNC in Chicago in 1968, the protesters chanted, “The whole world’s watching.” This time in a whole new way.
This post first appeared on Scripting News.