Occupy Internet

Launch banner from FAT Lab's Occupy The Internet post on fffff.at.

occupyinter.net (2011) - animated GIF protestors for your website. Join the global revolution from the comfort of your own home.

Made with FAT Lab in October 2011, about a month into Occupy Wall Street.

The idea: paste one line of JavaScript into your site and an army of animated GIF protestors would occupy the page. Digital solidarity. Evan Roth made a lot of the soldiers, and anyone could enlist more by leaving transparent GIFs in the comments.

Animated GIF protester: a Stormtrooper dancing with a Wall Street Is Our Street sign

Protester GIF by Evan Roth, from occupyinter.net.

Animated GIF protester: a moonwalking dancer holding a Debt is Slavery sign

Moonwalk protester by Evan Roth, from occupyinter.net.

Animated GIF protester: two dancers holding Bailout the People and We Are the Nyan Nyan Per Cent signs

A community-submitted protester from occupyinter.net, artist unknown.

How it went

October 19, 2011: Occupy The Internet launches on fffff.at. Concept by Theo, Geraldine Juárez, me, Greg, Evan and Aram; code by me and Greg Leuch.
October 20: Phase 2 from Tobias Leingruber and COLO, a service that force-occupies any URL you give it. I dropped a batch of big-bank URLs in the comments.
October 21: Phase 3, browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari by Greg and Theo Watson, for the “other 99% of netizens” who can’t edit a website.
October 24: We launched a stats page, which I built along with the site and the embed script. Over 500 sites and more than 5 million GIFs served. Tokyo F.A.T.’s occupation of TEPCO’s Wikipedia page was #1, with 150k unique visitors in 72 hours.

The occupyinter.net stats page: a table of the top occupied sites by visits and uniques, led by boards.4chan.org and tepco.researchlab.jp, with GIF protesters marching across the bottom

The stats page in the occupyinter.net archive, rebuilt from a November 2013 Wayback copy.

November 1–4: Occupy the Internet, the Exhibition, curated by Evan. Occupied sites showed new GIFs by Aram Bartholl, Brad Downey, Constant Dullaart, Olia Lialina, Dragan Espenschied, Mark Jenkins, Jonah and Chelsea Peretti, Ryder Ripps, Rafael Rozendaal, Telecomix, Charlie Todd, UBERMORGEN and more. It ran on 866+ websites.

Exhibition banner from Evan Roth's announcement post on fffff.at.

Animated GIF protester: a dancing woman holding a Russian-language protest sign

By Olia Lialina, for the Occupy the Internet exhibition.

Animated GIF protester: Karl Marx holding a neon OPEN INTERNET sign

By Aram Bartholl, for the Occupy the Internet exhibition.

November 4: the closing action, The Occupied /b/, on 4chan.

Occupied sites ranged from artist portfolios to etoy, Molleindustria and a BuzzFeed page. It’s Nice That asked whether it was “watered-down activism, or an expedient outlet well-suited to the modern day protester with a hectic schedule.” Fair question.

The site still runs as an archive, so the GIF army is still available for duty.

From March to October 2012, the Jeu de Paume in Paris presented Occupy the Internet online.