“A year ago, the FCC had sold out. Now it’s pushing real net neutrality. What happened in between proves that people power works.” Zephyr Teachout & Donny Shaw
This could give us all hope.
What does it take for the people’s voices to overpower the forces of lobbyists representing mega corporations like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T? The Wireless Association spent $75 million dollars last year. That’s how much winning the reclassification was worth to them.
Reading this story on Daily Beast, by Teachout and Shaw, we learn about strategic steps taken over the past year that led to a reversal of FCC’s proposal for net neutrality–aka equal access.
What has been different with this story than what we are seeing with other struggles with education, the environment, single payer health care…? In some ways this is a more discrete issue around which different groups united, each bringing their own skills. Perhaps it was harder for the other side to figure out propaganda to blur reality with fears about net neutrality. Perhaps it is a different story when you are influencing the FCC rather than Congress.
Still, I would argue that much of the strategy behind their achievement can be replicated for other causes. For instance,
The tactics of the net neutrality organizers mimicked the Internet that they believe in. It turns out, as disaffected as Americans are supposed to be, they respond to organizing that gives them real power.
In education, we can take what we know about reaching people’s thinking and understanding to organize and mobilize. We can draw on what we know about motivation, engagement, building of knowledge. This idea suggests that we look at what we know bout sharing information so people make sense of it and make it their own. Where are we doing that and where are we just hammering our arguments where there is already agreement or where they aren’t heard?
The analysis of this success is worth careful reading for essential clues, nearly a roadmap, about how to mobilize an “explosion” of people’s power to speak up effectively for our true goals on every issue.
Underneath the strategic brilliance, a moral vision, the core beliefs, the dream gave ongoing life and inspiration to those involved at every level.
The organizers who led the fight employed a basic but rarely used strategy: fighting for what they believed was important without pre-compromising to comply with what Washington thought was politically possible.