Dinosaurs, Dodos and Protestors

The Occupy *Your home town here* movement seems to be winding down. It started as a potentially massive movement to protest bailouts for banks that screwed up while Joe Blow Average struggles to find work. At first a lot of people, possibly 99% of people, were curious. But soon the protesters went from curiosities to pains in the ass. They were unable to draw in the all-important teeming masses and the movement became largely represented by students and hippies who claimed to represent 99% of the people. People started to express concern about how much money these protests were costing and why they needed tent cities to protest. Here in Vancouver, a young woman died of a drug over dose in one of the tents.

In Toronto, the G20 meeting that took place in 2010 was controversial because of its cost, but also because of the police handling of protesters. 1000’s showed up to protest all kinds of things, the police at times over reacted and the press in Canada had a field day. There was quite a bit of support for the G20 protesters but there was also a lot of support for the police and government efforts to get their jobs done and not be heckled by protesters ‘whining’ about everything.

I remember living in London, England when the Iraq war was just getting started. There were massive protests there against the UK’s involvement. I attended one such protest, it was huge. Some organizers say that up to 2 million people flooded the streets of central London. It wasn’t hard to believe, square miles of the streets were crammed. There were passionate speakers in Hyde Park delivering speeches that made my arm hairs stand up at times. There was a lot of energy and power in that crowd I thought. But of course, the UK went into Iraq anyways.

If you go to the capital of any major western country, the iconic main political buildings always have some sort of constant protest going on. So constant and small that no one really even pays attention.

All these protests failed in shaping government policy in any meaningful way. Protesting just doesn’t work anymore (did it ever?). Political organizations are always polling the voters to gauge where public opinion is on a given issue. That’s typically where you see governments reacting. When politicians see 50% of voters disagree with their position, politicians change their tune or risk not getting re-elected.

If you care about something so passionately that you show up to protest somewhere, it doesn’t really matter. You only have one vote no matter how much you care. It’s the vote of everyone that matters, that’s how democracy works. Governments now safely ignore protests of almost any size without risking re-election because they will have pollsters telling them that there are a few people who care deeply, but they only represent 10% of the population.

With our society and technology changing so fast, it’s surprising sometimes to see how some things change very little. Protesting is one of those things, but not all the time. Openmedia.ca launched a very successful, coordinate online campaign to get the government to change the way telecom companies in Canada bill customers. Barack Obama won the presidency with an unprecedented online campaign that reached out to new supporters and constantly tried to engage existing supporters. Campaigns that have a clear purpose, are able to target certain demographics and have someone managing public perception will always do better than a bunch of people camping at city hall.

People are inundated with information every day. Most of it is cast aside as noise. Like junk mail, if you are constantly casting it aside, you’ll soon just get annoyed that it’s there at all. A lot of protesters fail to grasp this, and it’s these protesters that are going the way of the dinosaurs.