OpenOrg Q&A for Activists

Notes from MeeTing03:

Traditional judicial system: -10 -10 = 0

Jesus: -10 -10 = -20

Tolstoy's book -> Gandhi

Secrecy:

Q: If actions not secret, people in danger, and not able to do those actions. Or the authorities will simply stop us from doing them.

A: Either you don't do them, or you accept the consequences. And being imprisoned can be an action in itself.

Q: But what about limited disclosure?

A: Can't fully recognise interdepencies which might undermine the success of your action, or provide a compelling reason for not doing it. Communities possibly affected by your action can't know about it. The more pairs of eyes looking at your plan, the lesser the chance of you making a horrible mistake, which might be taken as malicious. When an area is hidden, you can't tell how big or important it is from the outside; it could hide any amount of nefarious activity. This is precisly the strategy used by the establishement to do nasty things in secret in the name of protecting national security.

Q: But then our actions will end up being innocuous for the establishment, and won't be productive of change, and could even be seen as complicitous with the establishment.

A: So your choice: either do it anyway and get arrested. Or do something entirely different. What you gain by doing something entirely different: because you've consulted all the local people who might be affected, you have their solidarity, which isn't currently the case (currently they hate you). If your activism consists of building open organisations, then you are filling the world with open-orgs, and thus creating the better world you want. This is an end in itself. And you can carry on with anti-establishment actions, if you do them in large enough numbers acting consensually, they can't arrest everyone. (Like Gandhi's march to the sea to make salt.)

Final argument against secrecy: it's technically very hard to do it well enough not to get caught. The state is probably much better at that game than you are. And, the result is an escalation, a secrecy race, in which it will be very hard for you to keep up, and which can only lead to a more and more repressive police state. You are reinforcing the secrecy paradigm, i.e. something you are against. And in any case, the state's best weapons against you are legal ones (e.g. normal searches and seizures), not technical ones.

Q: Why can this form of resistance work now, when it didn't work before?

A: Because of networked communications, which allow (a) total disclosure with wide access (which means we need non-Internet access too, by the way), and (b) the possibility for wide participation, very quickly.

-- BenjaminGeer - 25 Oct 2002
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