The Demand-less nature of the occupy movement

Perhaps the most defining feature of the occupy movement in relation to other social movements is its lack of formal demands. This is something that has been both attacked and lauded. Critics say that formal demands provide a unified goal for action, and a way to measure the progress of the movement. Others claim that the lack of demands is a strength of the movement. They say that whatever demands would have to be made by the Occupy movement cannot be formulated given the current discourse. Therefore, the discourse must be changed (which they imply can be done with the demand-less movement). Some of the most articulate support for the lack of formal demands ironically came from The Onion, which, in a satirical piece, issued a call for demands to give the rest of the country a basis for rationalizing reasons to ignore the movement.

Yet, to really assess the lack of demands it is important to go beyond questions of what demands in general can or cannot do. These questions treat the movement as a scientific experiment by exploring the unique role that formal demands might play if they were present in the movement and everything else were precisely the same. The problem with this approach is that it treats the movement and its potential as somehow independent of the lack of formal demands. A more useful approach is to explore how the lack of demands has contributed to making the movement what it is.

I would like to consider the possibility that the lack of demands is uniquely well suited to the current state of the world, specifically the highly interconnected world of Occupy protesters who have virtually unlimited access to vast amounts of information. Just a generation ago, access to information was comparatively limited (to say the least). Information was available through televisions, radios, as well as books and information centers like libraries, but this availability was drawn out over time. Information was not "at our fingertips" but rather available to those who were willing to go out of their way, using a good deal of time to get it.

When we first consider the difference between now and then (a generation ago), the state of affairs concerning information then seems vastly inferior to now. The limited availability of information seems prison-like, preventing full awareness of the collective knowledge of human society. Yet, things are never this simple. The availability of information in a "print" society provided a context in which human action developed. By this I don't just mean learning how to use books or learn about the world from other people. I mean ways of consolidating one's thinking and turning knowledge into social action. There are norms for doing this. The process of learning about something and then reacting to what has been learned occurs in certain ways. We decide to act at a certain point in the learning process.

These norms are adapted to contexts with a certain availability of information. When that context changes, the norms must change with it. At this point in time, those of us who regularly use the internet are at the intersection of habits designed for a very different "information landscape" than the one that we live in. Information is ubiquituously available, yet we continue to act in ways that reflect a world of limited information.

The connection to the Occupy movement is not at all obvious from this, so I will spell it out. The lack of demands in the Occupy movement is the first indicator of the emergence of a new standard for social action. The lack of demands allows for participants in various discourses to join the movement and develop its meaning on their own terms, while simultaneously (through their participation) negotiating a collective meaning for the movement on a scale previously never seen.

This is not all. The ubiquity of information makes it more difficult to form a definite opinion on a particular topic. Previously, this had been facilitated by the difficulty of obtaining information, and the resulting tendency to make do with what one had and to synthesize it into a coherent body of thought. Now, with more information available than ever before, such a synthesis is continuously put off by the emergence of new information that challenges (often completely) one's previous assumptions. This makes a single, unified position difficult to reach, especially in matters of economics and politics which are massively complicated. The beauty of the lack of demands in the occupy movement is that it is impervious to these threats because of its vagueness. Members of the movement are not unified by specific principles that may have questionable lasting power. Instead, they are unified by an ever-shifting, malleable sense of purpose which allows for adaptation and development.