It took me a while to pick up on this whole Facebook business, but when I finally did... WOO what a blast! While it lasted anyway.
See, not so long after I logged on for the first time, Facebook shut down my account.
But I don't hold it against them. I wasn't playing by their rules -- it's fair, and it's square.
So I got some explaining to do.
Now, I was virtually dragged into Facebook--and when I finally joined it, it wasn't just to post silly pictures and update my status. I joined to organize.
I was organizing a group of people who have been institutionally exploited for years, but who have not previously had any viable way to speak up for themselves. This group is comprised of young, progressive activists--fellow veterans of the Fund for Public Interest Research, Public Interest Research Groups, and Grassroots Campaigns Incorporated.
SOME BACKGROUND!
The Fund, PIRGs, and GCI are interconnected organizations that run fundraising canvasses for a huge chunk of the progressive world. Veterans of these organizations have taken to the internet before to call for change to their notorious labor conditions, and there were a number of groups on Facebook that had already been started in protest of their policies. But these were just scattered outbursts of frutration leading nowhere. The organizers needed organizing.
If I may say so myself, I was good at organizing my fellow veterans. I have many years of experience as an "organizer" for the Fund and GCI; I'd worked in every town, I'd worked on every campaign. I'd trained hundreds of people and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, lied to my staff about how our campaigns worked, fired people for any old reason just to get rid of them, and taught young idealists to think about grassroots activism in terms of cold, inhuman numbers. And when the situations arose, I busted up the early formations of what could have become a...shhh...union. Eventually it all reached a certain point when I stopped to think about it all and decided that no, this isn't how a progressive movement is built, and yes, I was finally pissed off.
Yes, I announced on my new Facebook profile, I am still pissed off. There's a lot to be pissed off about.
See, over the course of the second half of 2006, I'd watched with budding interest as some of these GCI and Fund veterans turned to the blogosphere to expose these practices and explain how they are harmful to the progressive movement. I'd watched with even more interest as they were dismissed, derided, and demeaned by defenders of the Fund and GCI. But the defenders always lost the argument. Many of them even ended up agreeing with the protesters in the end. I did as well. The point was very much made: these organizations, the ones I'd sacrificed years of my life for, were hurting the progressive grassroots. Not because they were staffed by bad people; but because they were being led by a handful of prideful, fearful, haughty leaders who retain power under the dangerous condition of being simultaneously out of touch and wholly unaccountable.
Almost every single person I knew, inside the organization and out, had been personally burned by this crisis of leadership - whether they were willing to admit to it or not. Now that it was all being blogged about in public, people openly wondered whether anything could ever be done to fix the system.
Eventually, the blog posts died down. My friends in PIRG and GCI pretended they didn't exist any more. If the posts were ever brought up, they were quickly dismissed as the delusional rantings of a rabid few losers in pajamas.
And yet, the unrest continued to brew. People kept reading the blog posts and spreading the word among themselves. This year, a group of canvassers from the Fund filed a class action lawsuit seeking to recover unpaid wages. A group from GCI sought to do the same thing. They needed to spread the word and recruit others.
And so I was selected to go to the place where the people were: Facebook.
