My name is Jay Emerson and I live in New York.
I dropped out of High School at the age of 17 in order to join the anti-globalization movement. On September 12th 2002, I went to my first protest in NYC against the World Economic Forum that was meeting in the Waldorf-Astoria with only world powers present, not regular people. After that I was hooked. The people, the movement, what we stood for, it was inspiring.
I decided to join a group that was traveling up and down the East Coast to resist the Bush Administration. I went from being a person asking people to sign petitions to being on the front lines of a growing movement that would become the thoughts that mainstream society has today.
In November of 2002 I got involved with International A.N.S.W.E.R. and quickly left that organization due to “differences”. I captained a bus for them later in January 2002 but that was a favor for a friend. At that point I became a part of UFPJ (United for Peace and Justice) in early December 2002. I was tasked with organizing by city the buses needed to bring the people to the sites they needed to be for a “huge” rally planned for February 15th 2003. Due to the amount of phone calls coming in internationally, I found myself talking to people not knowing how “important” they were when I was on the phone with them. It came about that most of who had been calling were organizers that participated in the World Social Forum that had planned a worldwide demonstration to the lead up to the March to War with Iraq. I didn’t know it at the time, but this allowed me to be part of history seeing that on that day in February around 10 million people worldwide participated in the largest coordinated demonstration in world history. Which I participated in on that day as well:
(I’m in the middle)
As we can all recall, Bush went ahead and started the War in Iraq anyway in March of 2003, but a few days after he did that we gathered the troops for a march around NYC:
It was during the events leading up to the Summer of 2003 that I began networking with people and groups, expanding my reach to be able to call on “favors” that I had yet to cash with a number of organizations. This proved valuable when going down to Miami,Florida in November 2003 to protest the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas). This meeting was to try and lock the entire Western Hemisphere into a “free trade” agreement and we had planned to stop it from getting any traction. Using my contacts, I got a free ride down to the protest as well as shelter, food, and drink.
At the Convergence Space for this event (which was on North Miami Avenue) I spoke for my Affinity Group at “Spokes” or a Spokesman Council. The general consensus among the protesters was to march from the Convergence Space on North Miami Ave. to the protest area which was on Biscayne Blvd. That’s upwards to around 20 something blocks and I immediately disrupted the meeting by calling that “insane” because they wouldn’t get more than 5 blocks before Police Chief Timmony’s goons (Chief Timmony lost his lips during an RNC in Philadelphia when a protester stuck a flagpole in the spokes of his motorcycle wheel) kicked the crap out of them. They disagreed with me, but a good number of the people found me to be a voice of reason so I grabbed the ones with the equipment and strategized with the representatives of the Affinity Groups wanting to go with us. We had decided to link up the Indymedia News Feeds about police movements with mass SMS applications available to us on the internet. That way we could know where they were and what they were doing. This was both successful and the reason for me being targeted for arrest later after the protest.
The day of the protest though, we were successful in breaching security:
And to show I wasn’t a leader that “fled” at the first sight of police force, I stayed with those trapped by the “Wall of Death” and got up close and personal with those telling us to disperse but with no way out of their surrounding blockade to disperse:
After this I laid low until the U.S. Government’s T.A.L.O.N. Program (that spied on activists) was exposed, then I started up again:
(I’m in the Lower Right-Hand Corner)
Currently I have involved myself in small local movements. In 2007, I was made Vice President after helping to start-up a non-profit organization called “BecuzWEcan” (www.becuzwecan.org). They put me in charge of the “Common Belief” project that I just recently put up: www.commonbelief.org
I volunteered time at the Hempstead Boys and Girls Club to diagnose and fix their computer lab. The director there, Tom Bregartner, is on the Common Belief site and one of the first of many I hope.
I also attend Hofstra University and I am in my Senior year currently. I was pre-law, but when I started to get involved with various political blogs and the file-sharing community, I switched to Sociology in order to cover the area of technology and its effect on society as a whole (Sociology of Technology and Society). Seeing the potential for technology to educate and liberate the world if made a fundamental Human Right to have access to a computer and the internet I felt I only trusted myself to cover things like file-sharing and information access academically in order to give it justice. My greatest fear is an academic covering the file-sharing community with an “The Internet is Neat-o!” approach.
Now, I have dedicated my career to this cause and through my research and application of technologies in the real world. I hope to make the many possibilities I believe can be done a reality for the betterment of our society.
