Origins of the Opt Out movement

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Apropos of this, my "product rollout" of the Opt Out movement is behind schedule. That is OK with me, and it also serves as a demonstration of opting out. In this case, I have opted out of rushing myself. Opting out of self-imposed, imaginary urgency generally has been my first major success with applying the concept. I believe the contagion of phony urgency is a blight on the life of most people; the quality of my own life has greatly improved in direct relation to my success of opting out of this unasked-for, nonconstructive stress.

See? Opting out is easy. Here's how it works: you identify a condition imposed on your life that thwarts the authentic aims of human life---your own in particular---and opt out of it. Opting out is just a simple, elemental exercise of free will. It's one of the two acts of will an individual can exercise: the deliberate choice not to do something. (Since visitors to this blog are all in the fast reading group, they can infer the other way to exercise will.)

The origins of the Opt Out movement, for me, go back to an undated entry in an electronic notebook file midway through the Stupor Mundi phase of this blog during the Bush Junior administration. In thinking about Republican demolition of New Deal institutions and demonization of its ideals, I came upon the Wikipedia article about Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms:

1. Freedom of speech 
2. Freedom of worship 
3. Freedom from want 
4. Freedom from fear

My intent was to promulgate a set of post-Reagan freedoms that could be exercised beneath the radar of the surveillance state. (Let's ignore the unwarranted arrogance that would allow Stupor Mundi to express such a conceit.) My problem with the Four Freedoms (4F---just like FDR!) was that they're really not freedoms, and two of them are different than the other two.

The first two are constitutional rights in the United States, and they're understood by all except the most reactionary to be universal human rights. By definition, a right is inalienable, but the freedom to exercise the right can be abridged by any actor that has coercive power.

The third and fourth are aspirational sentiments, one dealing with material sustenance and the other with psychological wellbeing. Whether they are rights is debatable. Whether they're universally achievable by the will of every human under the sky is not debatable: they aren't.

Beyond the general woolliness of FDR's Four Freedoms is that use of the term freedoms (versus rights) carries the unstated assumption that these laudable aspirations are something to be dispensed by governments instead of asserted by regular people. Stupor Mundi's Four Freedoms would have to be liberties that can be exercised without the permission of any government or corporate authority. As a personal historical footnote of trivial significance, I present an early draft of the SM 4F:

1. Freedom to spend your discretionary income wherever you want to, or to save it.
2. Freedom to change the TV or radio station, or to turn it off.
3. Freedom to not answer your telephone, or not to own one.
4. Freedom to vote for or against whomever you wish.

I do feel these are useful, liberating ideas that everyone should keep in mind. And in fact, they're behind a lot of the opting out that a person can do. But they're obviously not universal or encompassing enough to form the basis of a philosophy or social movement. So the SM 4F lay fallow in my notebook, but not forgotten. Then, later, the following things happened:

• People who call themselves liberal and moderate took nominal control of the executive and legislative branches and yet permitted a neo-Confederate federal nullification clique to push the nation further into authoritarianism than it was under Bush.
• The Occupy Movement scared the living cocoa wheats out of everyone from Glenn Beck to Hillary Rodham Clinton. 
• I read Havel's Power of the Powerless, which introduced me to the concept of parallel structures.
• It finally dawned on me that the concept of opting out of various terms and conditions of web-based services was the only meaningful way to push back against forces that want to fully monetize every human transaction.

So, about a year ago, I realized that an inherent property unifying the SM 4F might be the negative half of each expression. The liberty not to spend money, for example, or the freedom to deny access to intrusive communications media. These are acts of opting out.

Opting out is inseparable from individual responsibility, and it implies the intentional acceptance of consequences. But so does opting in. In the world that has grown up around us, I think opting out has much more potential as a tool of self-actualization, mutual support, and greater personal tranquility.

Fifty50 fall product rollout!

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As Andrew Card once said (i.e., unintentionally confessed) about the timing of the Bush administration's public push for (an unprovoked) war (of aggression) on Iraq:

From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.

And right he was. So here's mine:

The Opt Out movement.

There---it's now "a thing." After rolling around the canyons of my mind for at least a year.

You don't get to learn much about it tonight because I'm tired and have already written my quota of text for the day. But it's a real thing, at least to me. Here are a few basic points.

First: it can only be a movement with a lower-case em. In my view, the era of the Upper-case Em movement has been over for over 40 years, except as an adjunct to a sales campaign or a political swindle.

Second: I am not the leader of it, nor is anyone else. I don't even qualify as the discoverer of it, although I do qualify as a discoverer of it. Maybe the first discoverer with an internationally renowned blog, though.

Third: "opt out" doesn't mean "drop out."

Fourth: anyone can participate at no cost and, as far as I can tell, at no personal risk. All you have to do is... nothing.

Fifth: the basis of the Opt Out movement is a set of concrete freedoms that cannot be denied. These are not to be confused with abstract rights that, while inalienable, can be denied by anyone who owns a gun or a bank or a company you may wish to work for.

I'll throw in two other un-numbered points to close: the Opt Out movement is related to my occasional recent references to the late Vaclav Havel and his magnum essay, The Power of the Powerless. And it's arguably beyond the comprehension of the people who felt it was acceptable to wage chemical warfare on participants in The Occupy Movement.

Sound interesting?

No? Then buzz off and go watch the complete second season of Sanford's Got Talent.

Your right to peacefully assemble

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I am perversely thankful to the Bush/Cheney administration for pulling the friendly mask off the authoritarian homunculus living at the core of Movement Conservatism. I assume they dropped the pretense of neighborly Reaganism because they felt they were dealing from a position of unassailable strength---strength that can be reinforced when ordinary people "dummy up" due to a gnawing fear of government reprisals. Still, the illusion of certain democratic customs such as the freedom to peacefully assemble must be maintained in order to support the traditional story line that America is the greatest nation in the 6,000-year history of Earth, because at least we know we're free.

From my vantage point it seems that we are now seeing historic new limitations on the right to peacefully assemble. It appears that those limitations are triggered when nonviolent protests start to seriously interfere with The Spectacle that is the establishment media narrative about political economy. So as a result, we wake up to an image of "The World's Policeman" (so to speak) waging chemical warfare on University of California - Davis students sitting peacefully as part of an Occupy protest. Even when the state has a legitimate law enforcement interest in removing nonviolent protestors from a site, no manner of intentional (i.e., premeditated) brutality is justifiable. The world may note that the victims don't appear to be rowdy, body-painted, bongo-playing dopers, not that such an appearance would justify brutality anyway. My point is that the people being sprayed are probably pretty much like you and your neighbors (or their kids).

The risk that establishment interests take when deploying this kind of force is that ordinary Americans---the Silent Majority of the 21st century---may actually both note and remember with revulsion images like the one above (shot by one Louise Macabitas and found in an online photostream). With that thought in mind, watch this YouTube clip:



I suggest that you watch the whole thing, but especially around 6:15 in the video. These brave kids, as well behaved as anyone could possibly expect under the circumstances, pull off something amazing with nothing but words and The People's Microphone. And, to the establishment, it is much more threatening than bongos, throwing bricks, or setting fires.

In coming weeks I'm afraid we'll see more incidents involving movement infiltrators and provocateurs for the purpose of marginalizing the protestors. Even worse, I also feel that the despicable SOPA legislation now before Congress is aimed not at "online pirates," but online protestors. This legislation, which I've intended to write about and will try to get to, will give both government and industry powerful tools for suppressing online political dissent under cover of "protecting creator's rights." YouTube is dead in the SOPA crosshairs. And, finally, look for a huge push to formally outlaw the recording or photographing of police activity occurring in the public domain.

Also, look for Officer Pepper Spray to become America's next Joe The Plumber.

I should note that I found the media embedded above at Balloon Juice.

Occupy Indian Summer

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While running an errand to Lowe's this afternoon I beheld this crew occupying the northeast corner of Prospect Avenue and Market View Drive in Champaign. The afternoon was crystal clear, warm, and bathed in that special gold sunlight that we get in these latitudes during the first month of autumn. I decided to visit them to get a sense of how my conservative university/corn-cob town may or may not have plugged into the national zeitgeist. Two things surprised me about the event.

First, the group's motliness impressed me as an asset, not a liability. This aggregation of 20 souls was pretty much the same demographic cross-section I'd expect to see at the Target two blocks to the north on any given weekend. The oddest guy in the crowd was the one wearing a "World's Greatest Dad" t-shirt and a home-made comparative US income bar chart drawn on poster board. Several demonstrators appeared to have participated in previous Occupy meetings, but most seemed to be first-timers judging from the chats I had. The crowd had a sort of tentative mood, not knowing exactly what they should be doing other than holding their signs and waving at cars. So they pretty much just did that, and in doing so they gave the clear appearance of unified purpose. It struck me as an organic aggregation, not one of those prefab demonstrations of lame, (usually) liberal political theater where people half-heartedly chant trite, pre-rehearsed rhymes. This group did use the "human microphone" technique to read the 29 September 20111 "Declaration of the Occupation of New York City." Their effort in this also seemed tentative---not self-consciously uptight, but sort of iffy... possibly because there was no one to hear the words except themselves (everyone else was in cars) and the Declaration is damn long to read out loud using such an approach. Nevertheless, all of this added up to an oddly touching experience for me: a not-quite-random meetup of individuals with an impulse to connect, getting to know each other on the spot, voting on whether and where to get together again.

The second, and even more interesting surprise, was how many car horns I heard honking in support while standing at that corner---possibly averaging 6 - 8 a minute at one point. The participants I talked with said it had been pretty much like that for the hour-plus they had been standing there, with only two or three rude remarks having been shouted from passing vehicles. (I heard none while I was visiting the scene.)

Is it possible that there really is some sort of self-organizing grassroots phenomenon in its early stages of nationwide formation? As long as the Occupy movement remains positive, cooperative, nonviolent, non-hierarchical, and noncommercial, maybe it has the potential to address a deep need in a society that is becoming exhausted by its alienation from itself and sick of the depravity that corporations have infected it with.