Over time, the movement has necessarily gained some structure — I read the above description of its goals at a seemingly official Web site, and there are designated representatives to communicate with the news media.
At Pastebin.com, however, you can still see the anarchic nature of the early protests.
There, you can search for the personal information of the police officials who have used force against the Wall Street protesters; or what purports to be e-mail addresses of bank executives; or guides on how to spot an agent provocateur or undercover officer in your midst; or lists of other Occupy movements around the country and the world.
On first blush, Occupy Wall Street and Pastebin would seem an unlikely match. Pastebin was created for programmers nearly a decade ago as a way to save, and perhaps share, snippets of programming code. The service could not be simpler — there is a “bin” (an empty input box) into which text is pasted. No registration is required.
Perhaps because of that simplicity, and its origins as a programmers’ site, Pastebin has become the de facto open-source bible of the protests. In a fashion, it is offering direct, anonymous “publishing” that does not even require the efforts or inspection of a group like WikiLeaks.
If a blog is akin to an online diary, and Twitter offers repeated telegraph-style status updates, Pastebin is something like the empty space on a phone-booth wall or at a community center, where you can anonymously tack up an announcement, or write someone else’s phone number along with a crude description, or offer your first try at a manifesto.
The bulk of what appears on the site is still code, says Jeroen Vader, a 27-year-old Dutch entrepreneur who bought Pastebin two years ago after coming to rely on it as a programmer. But the site slowly gained notoriety as a way to place information — often anonymously — into the public information stream.
“The future is looking pretty bright as more and more people start using the site every day,” Mr. Vader wrote in an e-mail, which also said he preferred to communicate via e-mail since he has 10 other businesses to run. “Traffic has gone up about 400 percent since I bought the site.”
He said the site made its money from banner ads — a search for Occupy Wall Street, for example, comes with Google ads for various affiliated groups — and by selling “pro accounts” that offer special features.
Mr. Vader described himself as an entrepreneur who loved to create and improve Web sites. He has a very tolerant view of what can appear on Pastebin. He is quick to say that with thousands of news “pastes” in a day, he cannot be expected to check what goes up, but he says he responds if people ask for personal information about themselves — d0x, tech-speak for “documents” — to be taken down.
Mr. Vader says his instinct is to be inclusionary. “Usually we always remove DOX items, but this one got a lot of exposure and we usually don’t remove very popular items unless we get a direct removal request from the authorities, which hasn’t happened with the item in question,” he wrote in an e-mail.
He said that the site tracked the Internet Protocol addresses of posters, mainly to foil spammers. A few times the authorities have asked for I.P. addresses, and he has complied, he wrote, though he agreed that masking an I.P. address was very easy and could make the Pastebin experience completely anonymous.
With its resemblance to an unbounded corkboard, and its contributors’ penchant for anonymity, Pastebin is hard to sum up. There is a search button and a Latest Posts list that changes by the second, which can lead a visitor to random material on virtually anything — alfalfa sprouts or the name of a Turkish singer.
But it is through the list of Trending Posts that a visitor can see how others are using the site in a public way. There are hackers’ boasts about their successes; there are descriptions of favorite anime characters; and, periodically, lists of what purport to be compromised e-mail accounts. Lately, Occupy Wall Street is generating many of the most-viewed posts, as the Arab Spring protests did before.
The site is still used mainly by programmers, Mr. Vader wrote, but he said he was glad to be making a bigger impression in the world. “We like the fact that people start sharing their political beliefs on Pastebin, this is yet another way of using Pastebin,” he wrote. “It seems our users keep finding new things to share on our platform.”
This flexibility is celebrated by Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law professor, as the “procrastination principle” in his book “The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It.” It is the notion, he wrote, “that the network should not be designed to do anything that can be taken care of by its users.”
Twitter is a classic example of an innovation that was willing to delay, with much of its utility — whether organizing around topics through hash tags or forwarding someone else’s posts as retweets — coming from its users.
Pastebin, too, will bend almost completely to its users’ ideas: a protest movement may have found its perfect complement.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=5b23f10ef6406a4e5459e75b08672c25