Why its hard to organize online

A Lesson from 4chan vs AT&T.

So if you have been anywhere near the internet(Digg, Reddit, Twitter, and even some news sites) in the past 24 hours you might have heard that a war has been going on.

As Fox News puts it:

On one side: the mighty corporate colossus AT&T. On the other: the innumerable geeks of 4chan

A quick breakdown of what happened:

Yesterday AT&T blocked it's users from the img.4chan.org domain (which hosts 4chan's most popular board)

(One thing that you must understand about 4chan is that it is completely random and it allows users to post anything while being anonymous. This has created a community which is greatly opposed of internet censorship of any kind.)

Back to what happened. Within hours 4chan users had created an external forum to plan actions against AT&T to get the ban removed.

Many pictures were created to show the true evil of AT&T, code was created so that website owners could ban AT&T users from their sites as retaliation, and personal information of top executives in AT&T was being publicly posted.

By the end of the night 4chan was unblocked (for a full breakdown click here).

So why is internet organizing so hard when 4chan was able to mobilize hundreds (including hackers, photoshop artists and many anons) in mere hours?

It is because of the community being organized is an internet community, and their struggle was strictly online.

When we try and do internet organizing it can fail because our victories will have to be won outside, in the real world. We need to show the real faces of people undergoing the current struggles, we need their voices heard rather than plain text.

We need to personally empower others to take up the fight for (insert campaign here). And no amount of emails, text messages, facebook events will do that for those who are not actively engaged.

The worldwide culture is greatly shifting towards instant worldwide communication for everyone through the internet, and the beginning steps are being taken so that soon everyone's voices will be heard through online organizing.

But until then the face to face conversations cannot stop, we need to continue pushing forward on the campaigns we believe in. And as long as we can push together we will be able to accomplish great things.