23 Nov OWS as API

Even as Occupy protests comes under increasing pressure from local governments, the movement’s ability to gain traction remains both remarkable and largely unexplained. In a tweet last weekend, author James Glick, a pioneer of literate tech reporting, suggested an off-the-wall metaphor:

I think #OWS was working better as an API than a destination site anyway.

The Atlantic’s tech editor Alexis Madrigal expands on this idea in a fascinating way, including a lucid explanation of how APIs — Application Programming Interfaces — work (for the 97 percent of us who have no idea).

The most fascinating thing about Occupy Wall Street is the way that the protests have spread from Zuccotti Park to real and virtual spaces across the globe. Metastatic, the protests have an organizational coherence that’s surprising for a movement with few actual leaders and almost no official institutions. Much of that can be traced to how Occupy Wall Street has functioned in catalyzing other protests. Local organizers can choose from the menu of options modeled in Zuccotti, and adapt them for local use. Occupy Wall Street was designed to be mined and recombined, not simply copied.

This idea crystallized for me yesterday when Jonathan Glick, a long-time digital journalist, tweeted, “I think #OWS was working better as an API than a destination site anyway.” If you get the idea, go ahead and skip ahead to the documentation below. If you don’t get, let me explain why it might be the most useful way of thinking about #Occupy.