This is a very reasonable and careful essay that reflects a lot of the organizational issues I've also been thinking about as a result of my work with Occupy. I can say with a bit of confidence that many of these thoughts are shared (if not always explicitly) by many of the protesters I've worked with as well. It is an excellent case study for looking at how the organizers are approaching the #attentioneconomy .

"The second important instrumental limitation of protest is also pretty obvious, and has to do with the scarcity of the most important resource that voice requires to be effective: time (or, more specifically, coordinated time). Protest works to focus attention; it concentrates the diffuse and uncoordinated dissatisfaction of many into a unified chorus, and amplifies this dissatisfaction in ways that attract the attention of publics that might share some of these dissatisfactions, and of political coalitions that can act to change the circumstances giving rise to them. But in the short run, the attention budget for all issues of interest is limited; attention can be shifted, but not created, since we are a finite number of human beings who live only a finite amount of time. So protesting X means not protesting Y; and protesting X means not doing A, B, and C, at least for the duration of the protest. There is always some other pressing issue that loses out in the competition for attention, some other problem that could be plausibly argued to be more important: to protest is to make a claim about the proper priorities of an institution. (But how could we know?)."

Xavier Marquez originally shared this post:

I was invited by a student club here at VUW to talk about protest. Not entirely satisfied with these thoughts I jotted down, but if you are interested in a riot of mixed metaphors and the usual combination of the obvious and the obscure, well, here they are.

Abandoned Footnotes: The Limits of Protest in Complex Societies

Dissatisfaction with the social and political world can take many forms – everything from resignation and escape to covert resistance and sabotage to full-blown collective action. It is only sometimes…