I took a road trip to Rochester for the last two days, where I gave a talk about my work and how it has led me into militant research practice. What’s really useful to me about giving such presentations is watching the way that people respond to different aspects of the talk. In this case, it consolidated the sense that I have had for some time that while digital networks are vital to organizing, the actual activism remains necessarily analog.

There would not be a global social movement without digital network tools, that much is obvious. To take a very trivial example, sending out a tweet about my talk brought a group of different people over from Syracuse to the event, who otherwise would not have come. In the next few weeks, Strike Debt will initiate the first Rolling Jubilee project, which will buy debt on the defaulted debt market, sold at 5% of face value: and abolish it. The action will be centered on upstate New York, so it was great to make contact with people from across the area.

More importantly, the globalNoise people launched a Europe-wide Twitter campaign today to get the #globalNoise or #GN tags trending and managed to register it at the national level in Spain, which is impressive and a sign of what’s to come on October 13. Now that Facebook is trying to monetize your friends list by charging you to reach all your friends with a post, Twitter is all the more useful and relevant as the activist communication network.

In reporting back on the various projects I’m involved with from this writing project to the Scalar multi-media project and the book from which it was derived, there was no doubt that the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual attracted the most interest. In part that was because I was talking to a group that contained a lot of people with student debt. But it was also because it was a real material object that has a certain heft and displays care in its production values. The digital versions of the DROM are vital too: there have been 19,000 reads and over 65,000 embedded reads of the text, far more than we can possibly print. But if it was only a PDF file, I feel that it might not have the same resonance.

So far all the wired revolution talk, it seems to me that an activist movement that centers around putting our bodies in space where they are not supposed to be can’t but be an analog movement. As media theorist Brian Massumi has put it

The processing may be digital but the analog is the process

And Occupy is nothing if not a process, as is direct democracy, as indeed should be all forms of democracy.

Democratic voters have had to learn this the hard way. While the Obama campaign said to them, “move on, we’ve got this,” there was nothing for people outside the handful of swing states to do but watch the mediatic representation of a “campaign.” In such a campaign, as Romney apparently realized, holding rallies and ground-game are totally secondary to a media event that draws 70 million viewers. We have to confront the real possibility that unless he shows up to the other debates in game-changing mode, Obama’s virtual campaign has undone itself. It’s no good having banks of paid tweeters and Facebook posters if you have nothing good for them to tweet or post.