Activism / Micah White
Better ways to protest

Micah White, PhD ... DEMOSCOIN ... revolution on blockchain ... thinking about making change

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Peter Burgess

activist cryptocurrency Micah White, PhD Unsubscribe 6:10 AM (6 hours ago) to me DEMOSCOIN ... revolution on blockchain

Around two hundred Demos activists gathered under the venerable trees at Gezi Park.



Each carried a small device, a cryptocurrency wallet no bigger than lipstick.

Their individual attendance at the gathering was recorded on the blockchain and they received an equal share of Demoscoin.

•

At first, of course, Demoscoin was worthless.

The executive presidency was in ascendancy and few thought the Demos democracy movement would go anywhere significant.

The movement’s founders, the true believers who kept on attending the Demos gatherings, doggedly accumulated large hordes of Demoscoin in exchange for their active presence.

Demos gatherings were vital spaces of revolutionary debate. What form of government should replace the current regime? What rights should be guaranteed in the new constitution? And how can we increase the efficacy of our movement? It was all discussed despite the most repressive domestic political situation.

••

Then one day authorities grew tired of the Demos gatherings and forcefully removed us from Gezi..

And that is when the flippening happened.

Activists abroad had been watching the livestream and when they saw our movement getting suppressed they started buying Demoscoins on decentralized exchanges as a way to support the movement's early adopters.

The more intense the repression, the more revolutionary their actions, the more valuable Demoscoin became. Early founders now had a warchest: just by selling a few hundred coins on anonymous exchanges they raised millions of dollars to fund the revolution.

And because activists acquired Demoscoin by participating in Demos gatherings, the movement grew faster than imaginable.

(Shadowy foundations and quasi-state organizations started pouring money into accumulating Demoscoin as well.)

Demos had financialized global revolution with the blockchain. A new people struggled for sovereignty.

•••

Make this story real by funding the development of Demoscoin, an ethereum smart contract that rewards activists for participating in early-stage revolutionary movements.

Demoscoin is a project of Micah White.


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https://www.micahmwhite.com/

MICAH WHITE, PhD is the lifelong activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement that spread to 82 countries, while an editor of Adbusters magazine. He has a twenty year record of innovative activism, including conceiving the debt forgiveness tactic used by the Rolling Jubilee and RIP Medical Debt, popularizing the critique of clicktivism and identifying the emerging trend of 'social movement warfare.'

Credit: Eugênio Goulart Credit: Eugênio Goulart

White's first book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, was published in 2016 by Knopf Canada. The End of Protest has been translated into German and Greek. White's essays and interviews on the future of protest have been published internationally in periodicals including The New York Times, The Guardian, Folha de São Paulo, The Washington Post, Poder (Brazil) and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He has been a featured guest on major network television shows such as Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect, the BBC's Newsnight and The National, Canada’s flagship nightly current affairs broadcast.

The End of Protest White is a sought after global public speaker. He has delivered more than thirty lectures at prestigious universities, cultural festivals and private events in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Indonesia, the Netherlands and the United States. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation, White has been profiled by NPR's Morning Edition, The New Yorker and The Guardian. In recognition of his contributions, Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today.

As a teenage activist he was awarded Americans United's Religious Liberty Award, the ACLU of Michigan’s Wendy Joyrich Award, the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Ruth Jokinen Student Activist Memorial Award, and the ACLU of Greater Flint Michigan's Civil Libertarian of The Year Award. In college he sparked the nationwide Diebold Electronic Civil Disobedience.

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White received his MA and PhD (summa cum laude) in Media and Communications from the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland where he studied with leading philosophers Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek and Avital Ronell. He holds a BA in Philosophy with a minor in Film and Media Studies and a minor in Interpretation Theory from Swarthmore College.

Micah White lives with his wife, Chiara Ricciardone, and son near New York City where he directs Boutique Activist Consultancy—a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns.

In 2016, he ran for Mayor of Nehalem, a rural city on the Oregon coast, an effort that was covered by Fusion, The Guardian and NPR.

In 2017, Micah was a Fulani Fellow at the All Stars Project in New York City where he worked with Dr. Lenora Fulani, the first woman to run for president of the United States and get on the ballot in all 50 states. As a Fulani Fellow he studied the revolutionary potential of electoral social movements.

In 2018, Micah was awarded the Roddenberry Fellowship and Voqal Fellowship to create Activist Graduate School. He was also named the National Endowment for the Humanities / Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Bard College where he is co-teaching a seminar on social activism.
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Recent Talks

Ground Festival The Hague, Netherlands March 2018 World Affairs Conference Upper Canada College February 2018 'Making Protest Work' Princeton University November 2017 Middlebury College Middlebury, Vermont November 2017 'Is Protest Political?' Bard College's Hannah Arendt Center October 2017 Antidote Festival Sydney, Australia August 2017 Melbourne Writer's Festival Melbourne, Australia August 2017 Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH Public Lecture 'The Beginning of Protest' October 22-23, 2014 Miami University, Oxford, OH Grayson Kirk Distinguished Lecture 'The End of Protest' October 20-21, 2014 University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA Guest of Religion and Library Science faculty “What is a protest?” April 8-10, 2014 Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, OH Guest of the Philosophy department “The Future of Protest is Slow” Feb. 15-18, 2014 5 Star Movement’s V3DAY Rally, Victory Square, Genoa, Italy Guest of Beppe Grillo 'Three Catastrophes and Three Solutions' 40,000+ activists in attendance Dec. 1, 2013 'What Creates Social Change?' Health Sciences Association of Alberta Convention June 2017 'Activism at a Crossroads' Berkeley, California June 2017 Q Ideas Nashville, Tennesse June 2017 'Why Protests Fail' Swarthmore College March 2017 'Power of the People' University of Chicago May 2017 University of Colorado Colorado Springs, CO April 2017 Smoke Farm Symposium, Arlington, WA “The Role of Cascadia in the Leaderless Revolution” Gathering of scientists, visionaries and philosophers Aug. 3, 2013 Get Up! Stand Up!, Convocation Hall, Toronto, ON “The Future of Social Change” Other speakers included John Ralston Saul, Chris Hedges and Margaret Atwood. Micah’s lecture and on-stage interview was selected for national broadcast by CBC radio. May 4, 2013 St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St Mary’s, MD Guest of the Political Science department “Political Theory of Horizontalism” Lecture and seminar on the political theory of Occupy Wall Street Nov. 3 – 6, 2012 'Will Democracy Win?' Aarhus, Denmark February 2017 EARCOS Global Issues Network 'How to Create Social Change' Bali, Indonesia March 2016 David Brower Center 'Is Climate Change Protest Broken?' Berkeley, CA April 2016 Culture and Political Subjectivities Conference, Columbia University, NY Discussant May 29, 2015 Ideas City Festival, New York City, NY Panel Discussion 'Hope and Unrest in the Invisible City' May 28, 2015 GUME, São Paulo, Brazil On-stage Interview May 26, 2015 Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, Denver, CO Visiting Artist, Scholar and Designer “The Future of Protest is Fast/The Future of Protest is Slow” Lecture, classroom visit and student workshop on art and activism Nov. 5 - 7, 2013 Internazionale a Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy “Vices and Virtues of Online Activism” and “Print and Finance in Times of Crisis” Two panel discussions at Italy’s largest public literary event