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About Annual Meeting
During the evolution of Occupy Wall Street from a distributed group of disconnected agitators to a networked social movement, many technologies linked disparate groups. Critically, the Occupy movement fused information and communication platforms together to form a rhizomatic and flexible assemblage of networks that curated and disseminated ideas. One technology in particular, the conference call, became a central mechanism for building national projects and synchronizing protests globally. InterOccupy began organizing and managing conference calls in October 2011 and since then has operated over 2000 conference calls involving over fifty thousand Occupy activists. This genealogy explores the information labor of those volunteering with InterOccupy and the history of the telephone to illustrate how activists harness the tools of early telephone operators, who routed information and people through telephone party lines, with the ethics of phone phreakers, who hacked the telephone networks in order to open lines of communication across the globe. This research shows that technology is not neutral, but crucial for networked social movements to flourish, while also illustrating how conference calls center communities in time as well as provide a critical space for developing, questioning, and evaluating the values and actions of the movement. Exploring various communities that formed through the use of conference calls illustrates how power and information are circulated across communication infrastructure as well as how group identity is formed. Especially in the case of activists, the turn to conference calls is particularly telling of a desire to form strong bonds in an age of ubiquitous computing.