Harel B
Read Harel B's Post Carbon Institute Blog
After a background in online activism dating back to the late 80s, Harel was chosen to be a faculty of Z magazine's Left Online University (LOLU) and taught "Electronic Activism on the Internet" alongside a small group of about a half-dozen other inaugural faculty. These included Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.
As this history suggests, Harel has been exploring ways to use the internet for social justice, media democratization, and as a "lever" towards attaining more power for the grassroots, long before the internet became "sexy," indeed, long before the web in its modern form even existed.
At the same time, he has never looked at technology uncritically, or as an end in itself. In his tactical essay in the months leading to Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq, he proposed the most low-tech of imaginable strategies, calculating that the number of person-hours put into transportation to and from the mass demonstrations, and being at the protests, were sufficient for pairs to go door to door and reach easily 15-30 million U.S. households for face to face outreach, per weekend and suggested a program including training for "reach out to your neighbors" events.
To those tempted to bestow him with knee-jerk labels, he gently points out that does not personally own a fax machine, a cellphone, an MP3 player, a TV (gasp!), nor a DVD player, so is amused by questions about "technophilia." He does however believe in the need to be radically honest with ourselves about effectiveness, and to be as uncompromising about using all existing and emerging tools to our maximum benefit, as the corporate world certainly already is -- ruthlessly using them to its own maximum benefit.
After an activism pause during 1995-2000 needed to finish his dissertation and get started in academe, more recently he has focused his time available outside of professional obligations, towards work that would have the greatest impact for the time invested. EconomicDemocracy.org is a think tank which disseminates Strategic Vision pieces that go beyond "here is what's wrong with the current system" and even beyond the also important "here is a picture of what to aim for" theory, to the third logical (but still rare) step of "how to we get from here to there?" The strategic vision articles are designed so a collection of specific, concrete, and evolving projects come out of each piece.
The first such piece, an "Electronic Activism, Revisited" is The Revolution Will be Webcast, billed as the first major followup to Harel's two part (1992/1993) Electronic Activism pieces.
Harel asserts that existing and rapidly emerging technologies allow for the possibility -- if we seize the opportunity and work together -- to truly reshape the media landscape and to build Democratic Mass Media. In other words, an "alternative media" which is democratic (hence non-corporate), is financially self-sustaining, and which is, also crucially, able to reach a multi-million sized audience.
"Just as an archer needs to aim her arrow above the target in order to hit the intended mark, so too today's planning, outreach, organizing, and coalition building for activist projects that realistically will require not less than 5 years to fully realize, need to be informed by an understanding of the media landscape of 2005-2010 in order to win the fullest victories possible in the struggle for media democracy and empowerment. -Harel B in one of the EconomicDemocracy.org strategic pieces
1. "A Workable Transition to Democratic Retirement Systems"
2. "A Plan to Put the Movement on Solid Financial Ground"
(With applications to voting, democracy, draft-resistance, and more)"
is at: http://economicdemocracy.org/funding.html
3. A (Relatively) Brief Synopsis of The Revolution Will Be Webcast:
Democratizing the Media Landscape'" with a link at the end to the full piece, is at: http://economicdemocracy.org/synopsis.webcast.html
4. Overview of main EconomicDemocracy.org projects: http://economicdemocracy.org/projs-overview.html
This links and gives a summary of the main half dozen "activist strategic vision" articles
5. One other thing might be worth including, not a strategic vision
piece but a two part set of cute back-of-the-envelope calculations
showing the absurdity of any "perpetual growth forever"
Wall Street's Days Are Numbered: Just Do The Math
http://economicdemocracy.org/wall-st.html
and "Wall Street's Days are Numbered: Part II" at
http://economicdemocracy.org/wall-st-ii.html
Harel B has been an online or "electronic" activist since the 1980s. In response to the 1989 murder of six Jesuits, their cook, and her daughter in El Salvador by death squads linked to the Washington-backed government, he organized a nation-wide project to co-sign a letter to the U.S. senate and to send each senator a copy of Amnesty International's milestone 50 page report, El Salvador: 'Death Squads' -- A Government Strategy exposing that the death squads, far from being "uncontrollable extremist groups" as portrayed in U.S. media, were in fact very closely linked to and trained by the government. Co-organizers of the El Salvador project were John Lamperti in NH and Mary Pugh in IL.
Signers were found from 25 states, including Archbishop Gumbleton of Detroit and veteran South African activist and poet Dennis Brutus. Fund-raising, along with signature collection was done mostly over the internet, which was very novel for 1989/1990. Not to speak of the bombshell revelation from Amnesty that our tax-dollars were funding death squads. The response, however, from the nearly fifty media outlets to which the Statement and press release were sent, was a deafening silence.
Harel started the Activists Mailing List (AML, spring 1990) as a place for discussion and followup to the El Salvador Project; it grew to over 100 members. With the critical help of Rich Winkel, the ACTIV-L automated (listserv-based) mailing list was created in fall 1990, and grew to over 1,000 readers.
In March 1991, the long exhausting process of proposing the creation of a new Usenet newsgroup -- misc.activism.progressive, the first ever moderated, progressive group on Usenet -- and its passing a vote, were completed. Misc.activism.progressive (MAP) was established as a source for news, analysis, activism, and resources. Usenet statistics are no longer kept, but usenet official statistics in the '90s confirmed that MAP had an audience of some 60,000 readers.
A few years later, Harel wrote Electronic Activism (1992) and a part II followup (1993). The subheading was "Media is Information. Information is Power. Power to the People" The article was a Call To Action and "how-to" reference manual that quickly circulated around the world over the internet. It showed activists how to use the tools of the internet -- from basic email to listservs; from Usenet to advanced tools like automated scheduled postings. Without being prompted, internet readers chose to translate it into Spanish, and parts in to Dutch. Emails came in from people such as the Senior Researcher for the Worldwatch organization, indicating his appreciation for part I of Electronic Activism and expressing to Harel an interest in a copy of part II.
