Temple Law School/ICAS Joint Lecture: #vivalarevolucíon: New Millennium Political Protests Slides for John Russell Speakers: David H. Slater, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Japanese Studies and Director of the Institute of Comparative Culture, Sophia University John Russell, Professor of Anthropology, Gifu University William Andrews, writer and translator. Sarajean Rossitto, Nonprofit NGO Consultant Moderator: Tina Saunders, Director and Associate Professor of Instruction in Law, Temple University School of Law, Japan Campus ICAS public lecture series videos are posted on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAA67B040B82B8AEF

1. #vivalarevolucion: New Millennium Political Protests
Temple University, Japan Campus
April 5, 2017
John G. Russell
Faculty of Regional Studies, Gifu University
Persons of Interest/Citizens 4 Change: Mass Movements, Focused Distraction, and
Elusive Accountability in the Panopticonic State

2. Revolutionary Nostalgia?

3. SEALDs Disbands (August 15, 2016)

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEWtsSffvQg

8. Groups Targeted by the FBI’S COINTELPRO (COUNTER INTELLIGENCE PROGRAM, 1956-1971)
Source: Zinn Ed Project, https:// zinnedproject.org/2016/03/fbi-war-civil-rights-movement

10. The revolution will be trivialized. . .

11. …and commercialized
http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/pepsi-pulling-widely-mocked-kendall-jenner-ad/308575

13. Panopticon-inspired prison design

18. I thought, ‘If they are surveilling me. . .would they
try to target me again to try to permanently deter
me?’ Knowing they constantly have cameras on us,
it created a sense of fear.
Elsa Waithe, BLM activist
The Verge, March 22, 2017

19. What happens to you guys with fingerprints, retina scans
and photographs, that is what is going to happen to
people in the future when they resist policy changes and
try to protest in a totally constitutionally protected way.
Jacob Applebaum, security trainer
Occupy Wall Street movement
Citizenfour (2014)

23. 1
Persons of Interest/Citizens 4 Change: Mass Movements, Focused Distraction, and
Elusive Accountability in the Panopticonic State (SLIDE 1)
John G. Russell
Faculty of Regional Studies, Gifu University
#vivalarevolucion: New Millennium Political Protests
Temple University, Japan Campus
April 5, 2017
Almost seven years have passed since the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. Roughly
two, since the birth of SEALDs and almost four since Black Lives Matter. Each of these
movements has seen the mobilization of tens of thousands of individuals. Yet, despite raising
public awareness and drawing the attention – albeit often fleeting – of traditional media
toward their causes, these movements (SLIDES 2 and 3) have either disappeared, disbanded,
or failed to achieve many of their goals.
The circumstances surrounding the formation of each of these movements and the political
social and cultural contexts in which they operate naturally differ. But what they share, I
think, has been the problem of sustainability, a problem that is the product of three
interrelated phenomena: 1) the emergence of social media, 2) the truncated attention span of
an easily distracted traditional media, and 3) the growth of mass surveillance both as a tool
for mobilizing social actors and as a weapon for controlling them.
In a world inundated with information and misinformation, a major issue is how to sustain
social protests and awareness of them when they must vie with a 24-hour cycle of media-
generated distractions. Politically mobilized social media networks still need traditional
media coverage to disseminate their message beyond their base. BLM began its life as a
hashtag in response to the killing of Travon Martin. By mobilizing bodies and raising
awareness of police brutality, BLM – particularly in the wake of the killing of Michael
Brown – secured media coverage of its activities and compelled public discussion of the issue
among those who otherwise would have remained oblivious to an injustice that has plagued
black communities for generations.
And yet mass movements have also proven vulnerable to exploitation by both social and
corporate media, for what an energized social media giveth with one hand, an attention-

24. 2
deficit plagued corporate media – in its bottom line quest for larger ratings, readership and
profits – taketh away with the other. Today, the problem is less one of who controls the
narrative so much as the uncertainties and confusions that muddle multiple, competing, and
conflicting narratives and the threat they pose to the effectiveness of collective social praxis.
Recently, much has been made of the platform social media provides for the dissemination
of fake news. Although the current occupant of the Oval Office casts himself as its perpetual
victim, it is mass movements like BLM that continue to be the real target of fake news,
“alternative facts,” and downright lies. (SLIDE 4) For example, in 2016, traditional and
social media outlets spread fake reports that Anonymous would be joining forces with BLM
on July 15 to launch what was variously described as “Day of Action,” “Day of Rage,” and
“Friday of Solidarity” demonstrations against police injustice. (SLIDE 5)1
For their part,
conservative and white supremacist “news” sites circulated false reports that supremacist
BLM leaders had attacked Anonymous as “the New KKK.” (SLIDE 6).2
These spurious
reports may have been an attempt by critics of both groups to sow dissention between them
and to portray them to the public as squabbling would-be revolutionaries underserving of
public support. On the other hand, there were other substantiated reports that Anonymous-
affiliated groups, upset by what they saw as the organization’s “anti-white” rhetoric,
launched over 100 cyberattacks against BLM. (SLIDE 7)3
The effect of these reports has
been to generate confusion and uncertainty about the relationship between these
organizations.
To be sure, there is nothing new about this. However, in the past, covert state-sponsored
intelligence programs such as the FBI’s RACON (1942-1943) 4
and COINTELPRO (1956-
1971) 5
were responsible for the creation and mass dissemination of misinformation designed
to smear, discredit, and neutralize mass social movements. (SLIDE 8) And while it would be
naïve to think that similar forces are not at work today, the means of sowing confusion and
disseminating misinformation are now available to any individual or group on either side of
the political spectrum with Internet access.
The veracity of these reports aside, BLM’s impact in securing social justice has been
limited. While its protests have raised national and international awareness of American
police brutality, improved reporting of such incidents, and led to the creation in 2014 of the
Death in Custody Reporting Act, and prompted media outlets such as the Washington Post
and The Guardian to establish online national databases to track the number of police
shootings, these developments have had little impact on policing and have not reduced the
number of police killings. Indeed, according to the Washington Post database, the first three

25. 3
months of 2017 alone has already seen 263 fatal shootings by police, 19 involving unarmed
victims, of which 6 (32%) were black. Another online databases, Killed By Police, whose
body count is not confined to firearm victims, sets the number of fatal police killings at 300,
of which it identifies 71 (24%) as black.6, 7
Still, none of these incidents, including the death
of Darren Rainey, who was “boiled” to death in a prison shower in 2012 although it was
reported in mid-March, almost five years after his death, that prosecutors had concluded his
death was an “accident,” one for which his guards bore no criminal responsibility,8
(SLIDE
9) and other blacks whose deaths in police custody were reported during this period, has
received significant, sustained national attention. In fact, this period, which overlaps with the
first three months of the Trump presidency, witnessed a decline not only in mainstream
media coverage of BLM activities and follow-up reporting on the outcomes of previously
reported incidents of police abuse, but also of the reporting of new incidents, as corporate
media devoted itself to daily coverage of the delusional distractions of The Donald and his
entourage of fact-denying surrogates and cabinet of Russian nesting dolls.
I might point out, however, that The Donald Distraction is not confined to America. The
Japanese media has used the terrific if perversely entertaining spectacle of the Trump
presidency to divert attention from far less entertaining domestic issues, including the
“extreme” radiation levels reported at Tepco’s Number One reactor, the so–called anti-
conspiracy bill, the deployment of Self Defense Forces to South Sudan, and the growth of
Internet-fueled ultra-nationalist movements, although the Moritomo Gakuen scandal has
begun to see a siphoning of attention away from Trump.
Early social and mainstream media images of social movements such as Arab Spring,
SEALDs, and BLM seemed to testify to the power of social media as a tool in mobilizing
people as agents of social change. However, these initially celebratory images concealed
certain problems that continue to plague mass protests in the social media age, namely, 1) the
distractive, fractional, and meme-generating nature of social media, 2) the apparent inability
of these movements to sustain themselves – or their “brand” – over long periods, either by
design or circumstance, and 3) the transitory nature of the changes, if any, to which they give
rise during their tenure.
In time, social movements themselves run the risk being co-opted by the segments of the
same media they depend on to enable change. That is, they run the risk of becoming the
target not only of demeaning memes but also “well-meaning” documentaries and television
shows that romanticize, trivialize, commercialize, and, even worse, normalize, revolution,
replacing fictionalized versions for the prospect of the real thing: Revolution as entertainment.

26. 4
Anonymous meets Mr. Robot. (SLIDE 10) Law and Order: BLM.9
Already two films
inspired by Black Lives Matter are reportedly in the works. Maybe the revolution will be
televised after all, or a facile facsimile of it. Why get involved in a real movement – and face
uncertain consequences – when you can binge the HBO series and experience the human
drama from the security of home, Pepsi in hand? (SLIDE 11)10
Why make history, when the
documentary is already in the can? Documentaries are the obituaries of social movements,
since they invite us to look back on them with wistful nostalgia – revolutionary nostalgia, a
clear signal that the revolution has failed. Instead, each social movement gets its 15 minutes
of fame, only to flame out afterwards and be consigned to the hashtag of history.
The question remains whether mass mobilization constitutes a real challenge to systems of
power and whether their model of and for social change, a model that has been followed
since the 1960s and 1970s, is still an effective one. It is sobering to recall that at the incipient
of Gulf War II in 2003, over a million British citizens turned out publically to protest British
involvement, but to no avail. In Japan, despite numerous, largely underreported protests in
the wake of the Fukushima disaster, as a March 13, 2015 commentary in the Japan Times
asked, “In the 15 days since Tepco finally confessed, have investigators raided its Tokyo
headquarters? Have regulators demanded that heads roll? Has Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
used his bully pulpit to demand accountability from the company that gave the world the
worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl?”11
Two years later, those questions remain relevant.
Even leaked images of American war crimes, such as the 2009 U.S. air crew attack12
on Iraqi
civilians, including two Reuters journalists and the subsequent attack on the first responders
who rushed to attend to the dead and wounded, have not resulted in the punishment of those
involved, although the whistleblower who leaked them, Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley
Manning), has endured torture and years of imprisonment, including several months in
solitary confinement, at the hands of U.S. authorities.13
Ultimately the question is: What is the next stage of mass protests when the powerful do
not heed the peaceful voices of dissent (SLIDE 12) Will such protests then escalate from
peaceful confrontations with authority into acts of more disruptive civil disobedience, mass
defiance and outright revolt similar to those that erupted during the civil rights movement and
anti-war protests of the Vietnam era? It might be recalled that the non-violent mass
movements of 1960s and 70s required violence – the spectacular display of violent,
benighted bigotry, of furiously gushing water hoses, of bloody, skull-cracking batons, and
snarling, flesh-ripping German Shepherds – be directed at protesters to arouse the national
conscience. And it was another visual medium – television – that functioned as catalyst by

27. 5
presenting images that have since come to constitute the indelible iconography of American
oppression.
The twenty-first century is an even more visual culture, one sustained by mass
surveillance of both those who challenge systems of oppression as well as those who seek to
maintain them. By mass surveillance, I refer not only to state surveillance of the mass
communities but also, thanks to modern technology, to the ability of those communities to
surveil their oppressors. To the Juvenal’s two millennia-old question, “Who watches the
watchers,” our century answers: a modern state that one-ups Jeremy Bentham’s Pantopicon,
(SLIDE 13) since now both the inmates and their jailers are under constant, mutual
surveillance.
The question, however, is this: Whose recordings will prevail and how will they be used?
Unfortunately, the availability of surveillance technologies does not necessarily guarantee a
balanced playing field, particularly in incarceral politico-corporate oligarchies such as
America. Police still have the option of turning off their body cameras – either to conceal
systemic professional misconduct or, as police in Washington D.C. recently did during the
Inauguration and Women’s March to “protect” the civil rights of protestors. However, such
concern for the civil liberties of protesters is apparently if not a disingenuous afterthought, a
regional quirk. It certainly was not been a concern of the New York Police Department from
2002 to 2015, since the targets of its surveillance program were not individuals engaged in
public protests but Muslims from all walks of life, including university students and school
principals, whose daily movements the NYPD monitored not only in New York but
throughout the northeast. (SLIDE 14) Nor did concern over protecting the civil liberties of
protesters dissuade the NYPD from pointing its video cameras at BLM and Occupy Wall
Street demonstrators over 400 times without legal authorization from 2011-2016. (SLIDE
15)14
The issue here is not merely one of who controls the narrative, but of who controls the
instrumentalities of surveillance and the purposes to which they are deployed, an issue played
out in social media in the debate over a technology that allows the unrestricted livestreaming
of both fatal police shootings15
as well as civilian rapes.16
More recently, it was iterated at
Standing Rock, whose airspace the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) declared a no-fly
zone after Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protesters uploaded images from their camera-
equipped drones to social media that showed police and private security forces using
excessive force against them, including gushing water cannons and snarling German
Shepherds. (SLIDES 16 and 17) Déjà-vu all over again.

28. 6
While body and dashboard cameras and smart phones have produced an expanding digital
archive of recorded incidents of police violence, they have not led to a measurable decrease
in such incidents, nor has their video evidence resulted in the punishment of miscreant police
officers. For better or worse, mass surveillance has not provided, to cite Bentham, a
voyeuristic “mill for grinding rogues honest.”17
To achieve these goals requires more than
either technological intervention or the reform of police training program, but something far
more ambitious: a Socratic training of the watchers’ souls and that hold them accountable
when they fail to recognize the humanity of those whom they are entrusted to protect and
serve. It remains to be seen whether mass movements can achieve this outcome.
Unfortunately, whatever potential of surveillance tools wielded by the people may hold
for bringing power to the powerless and accountability to the powerful, it is unable to
compete against that wielded by the state, whose control of the instrumentalities of
surveillance, including the gathering of metadata, has already chilled present and future mass
protests – as it is doubtlessly designed to. Consider, for example, the case of Elsa Waithe, a
BLM activist who was injured during a demonstration when police pushed her to the ground
for trying to film an arrest and who is now reluctant to continue her protests: “I thought, ‘if
they are surveilling me, and knew I was recently hurt, would they try to target me again to try
to permanently deter me’ Knowing they constantly have cameras on us, it created a sense of
fear.”18
(SLIDE 18)
Indeed, Jacob Applebaum, journalist, hacker and security trainer for the Occupy Wall
Street movement warns, “What happens to you guys with fingerprints, retina scans and
photographs, that is what is going to happen to people in the future when they resist policy
changes and try to protest in a totally constitutionally protected way.”19
(SLIDE 19)
Again, these issues are not limited to America (SLIDE 20), as witness Japanese police use
of GPS tracking and the latest incarnation of the “anti-conspiracy bill,” Japan’s answer to
America’s Patriot Act, now camouflaged as an “counter-terrorist” bill, though the only
“terrorists” it seems potentially designed to counter are those who peacefully oppose
constitutional reform, nuclear power, government-funded university military research, and
the deployment of armed Self Defense Forces to volatile areas overseas.
The ubiquity of surveillance cameras, smart phones, livestreaming, and political
hacktavism has meant that traditional media can no longer ignore incidents of police violence.
But there is also danger that this new attention will be sustained by the complaisance-
shattering intensity of the brutality it captures, a brutality whose power to rouse moral
consciousness may ironically be attenuated by the next public spectacle of even more brutal

29. 7
imagery, and that one will become inured to the steady parade of such images, as Americans
have become to mass shootings in general. (SLIDE 21) Finally, there is the reality that the
most powerful of these images – those with the potential to foment lasting social change –
will be made to disappear, that those who disclose them will be discredited or silenced, and
that social and mainstream media will divert the attention of scandal- and controversy-
addicted audiences toward the latest manufactured celebrity scandal and internet-breaking
spectacle. (SLIDE 22)
NOTES
1
TheAnonMessage, “Emergency Response July 15 –Day of Action (#Friday of Solidarity),”
YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEWtsSffvQg, accessed Mar. 18, 2017.
2
Virgil Vaduva, “Anonymous is the New KKK Say Black Live Matter Leaders,” Truth Voice,
Aug. 6, 2015, http://truthvoice.com/2015/08/anonymous-is-the-new-kkk-say-black-lives-
matter-leaders/ accessed Mar. 20 2017; Blaze, “Anonymous is the New KKK Say Black Live
Matter Leaders,” American’s Freedom Fighters, Aug. 3, 2015, http://www.americasfreedom
fighters.com, /2015/08/03/anonymous-new-kkk-say-black-lives-matter-leaders, accessed Mar.
20, 2017.
3
Elizabeth Preza, “Anonymous-affiliated Group Launched at Least 127 Attacks Against
Black Lives Matter Websites,” RawStory, Dec.14, 2016,
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/anonymous-affiliated-group-launched-at-least-127-
attacks-against-black-lives-matter-websites, accessed Mar. 3, 2017; Corin Faife “The DDoS
Vigilantes Trying to Silence Black Lives Matter,” ArsTechnica, Sept. 15, 2016
(https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/12/hack_attacks_on_black_lives_matter) accessed
Mar. 21, 2017.
4
RACON is an acronym for “Racial Conditions.” For a discussion of the surveillance
program and documentation, see Robert A. Hill (ed.), The FBI’s RACON Racial Conditions
in the United States During WWII, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995.
5
Acronym for “Counter Intelligence Program,” that sought to disrupt several mass social
movements, including the Civil Rights movement, Black Panthers, American Indian
Movement, and Peace and Women’s movements.
6
Killed By Police, database, http://killedbypolice.net, accessed Apr. 1, 2017.
7
The situation is even worse for Native Americans, whose killings by police,
disproportionately higher than any other group, and protests against such killings are even
more underreported. See Mike Males, “Who Are Police Killing?” Center on Juvenile and
Criminal Justice, Aug. 26, 2014, http://www.cjcj.org/news/8113, accessed Mar. 1, 2017,
Sheena Louise Roetman, “Number of Native Americans Killed by Police Could Double by
End of 2016,” Indian Country Today, Aug. 4, 2016, https://indiancountrymedianetwork.
com/news/native-news/number-of-native-americans-killed-by-police-could-double-by-end-
of-2016, accessed Feb. 28, 2017 and Rachel Revesz, “Native Americans Most Likely Group
to Be Killed by Police,” The Independent, October 20, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/
news/world/americas/native-americans-police-death-murder-investigation-jacqueline-salyers-
a7371861.html, accessed Feb. 28, 2017.

30. 8
8
See Julie K. Brown, “Prosecutors Find No Wrongdoing in the Shower Death at Dade
Correctional Mental Health Unit,” Miami Herald, Mar. 17, 2017, www.miamiherald.com/
news/local/community/miami-dade/article139206653.html, accessed Mar. 28, 2017. Richard
Luscombe, “Inmate Locked in Scalding Shower Died ‘by Accident,’ Medical Examiner Says.”
the Guardian, Jan. 26, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/26/
miami-dade-prisoner-shower-death-ruled-accident-darren-rainey, accessed Mar. 28, 2017,
and Derek Hawkins, “An Inmate Died After Being Locked in Scalding shower for Two
Hours. His Guards Won’t Be Charged,” the Washington Post, Mar. 20, 2017,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/20/an-inmate-died-after-
being-locked-in-a-scalding-shower-for-two-hours-his-guards-won’t-be-charged/?utm_term
=.78458e8fa731, accessed Mar. 21, 2017.
9
See, for example, the Law and Order SUV episode “Community Policing,” which aired on
NBC on Oct. 14, 2015.
10
E.J. Schultz and Ann-Christine Diaz, “Pepsi Is Pulling Its Widely Mocked Kendall Jenner
Ad,” Advertising Age, April 5, 2017, adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/pepsi-pulling-widely-
mocked-kendall-jenner-ad/308575, accessed Apr. 5, 2017.
11
William Pesek, “It’s Time to Punish Tepco,” the Japan Times, Mar. 13, 2015, http://
www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/03/13/commentary/japan-commentary/its-time-to-
punish-tepco/#.WOjFzDaQHsE, accessed February 2, 2017.
12
“Collateral Murder,” WikiLeaks, Apr. 5, 2010, https//collateralmurder.wikileaks.org,
accessed Mar. 28, 2017.
13
Stephen Lendman, “Torturing Chelsea Manning in Prison,” Counterpunch, Aug. 14, 2015,
www.counterpunch,org/2015/08/14/torturing-chelsea-manning-in-prison, accessed Mar. 28,
2017.
14
For details on these surveillance programs, see George Joseph, “NYPD Sent Video Teams
to Record Occupy and BLM Protest Over 400 Times, Documents Reveal,” The Verge, Mar.
22, 2017, http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/22/15016984/nypd-video-surveillance-occupy-
black-lives-matter, accessed Mar. 23, 2017; and NYPD sent undercover officers to Black
Lives Matter protest, records reveal,” The Guardian.com, Sept. 23, 2016, https://www.the
guardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/29/nypd-black-lives-matter-undercover-protests, accessed
Mar. 23, 2017, and the Intercept, “Undercover Police Have Regularly Spied on Black Lives
Matter Activists,” Aug. 19, 2015, https://theintercept.com/2015/08/18/undercover-police-
spied-on-ny-black-lives-matter, accessed Mar. 26, 2017.
15
Right Now News, “Raw Footage: Philandro Castile Shot: Full Video,” YouTube, July 7,
2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_J3sYIgvUE, accessed Mar. 19, 2017.
16
See “Facebook Live ‘Broadcasts Gang Rape’ of Woman in Sweden,” BBC News.com, Jan.
23, 2017, www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38717186, accessed Mar. 18, 2017. Christine
W., “Historic Case: Dane Charged with Hundreds of Instances of Child Abuse,” Copenhagen
Post Online, cphpost.dk/news/historic-case-dane-charged-with-hundreds-of-instances-of-
child-abuse.html, accessed Mar. 30, 2017, and Breanna Edwards, “15-Year-Old Chicago Girl
Sexually Assaulted in Facebook Live Broadcast That Went Unreported: Police,” The Root,
Mar. 21 2017, www.the root/15-year-old-chicago-girl-sexually-assaulted-in-Facebook-
1793484680, accessed Mar. 30, 2017.
17
Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 10, Correspondence,
Edinburgh: William Tait, Prince Street, 1842, p. 226.
18
George Joseph, interview with Elsa Waithe, “NYPD Sent Video Teams.”
19
Jacob Applebaum, Citizenfour, documentary, directed by Laura Poitras, Praxis, 2014