Micah White
Award-Winning Activist, Author, Speaker—The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution and Co-Creator of Occupy Wall Street
Micah White, PhD is a public intellectual and lifelong activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement that spread to 82 countries, while an editor of Adbusters magazine. His essays and interviews on the future of protest have been published internationally in periodicals including The New York Times, The Guardian, Folha de São…
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Full Bio
Micah White, PhD is a public intellectual and lifelong activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement that spread to 82 countries, while an editor of Adbusters magazine.
His essays and interviews on the future of protest have been published internationally in periodicals including The New York Times, The Guardian, Folha de São Paulo, The Washington Post, Poder (Brazil) and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He has been a featured guest on major network television shows such as Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect, the BBC’s Newsnight and The National, Canada’s flagship nightly current affairs broadcast.
Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation, White has been profiled by NPR’s Morning Edition, The New Yorker, The Guardian and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today.
White has a twenty year record of innovative activism, including conceiving the debt-activism tactic used by the Rolling Jubilee and popularizing the critique of clicktivism. As a teenage activist he was awarded Americans United’s Religious Liberty Award, the ACLU of Michigan’s Wendy Joyrich Award, the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Ruth Jokinen Student Activist Memorial Award, and the ACLU of Greater Flint Michigan’s Civil Libertarian of The Year Award. In college he sparked the nationwide Diebold Electronic Civil Disobedience.
White received his MA and PhD (summa cum laude) in Media and Communications from the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland where he studied with leading philosophers Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek and Avital Ronell. He holds a BA in Philosophy with a minor in Film and Media Studies and a minor in Interpretation Theory from Swarthmore College.
Micah lives with his wife, Chiara Ricciardone, and son in Nehalem, a rural town on the coast of Oregon where he directs Boutique Activist Consultancy—a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns.
In 2016, he ran for Mayor of Nehalem, an effort that was covered by Fusion, The Guardian and NPR.
He is an international public speaker. He has delivered numerous lectures at universities, cultural festivals and private events in the USA, Canada, Italy, Brazil, Indonesia and Denmark.
Micah’s first book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, was published in 2016 by Knopf Canada.
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Topics
A Conversation With Micah White
Is protest broken? Micah White, the co-creator of Occupy Wall Street, former AdBusters editor, and the author of The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, thinks so. Recent years have witnessed the largest protests in human history, yet these mass mobilizations no longer change society. Activism is at a crossroads: innovation or irrelevance. A lifelong social activist with a twenty-year record of innovative approaches to creating social change, White takes audiences through his theories of mass movements that are destined to inspire—and catalyze—the next generation of global actions.
Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation, White has been profiled by The New Yorker, and Esquire magazine named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. White’s essays and interviews on the future of protest have also been published internationally in outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian Weekly, and Folha de São Paulo. Currently the director of Boutique Activist Consultancy—an activist think-tank specializing in impossible campaigns—White is also a frequent guest lecturer at universities and cultural festivals.
Protest, Social Change and Social Movements
The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution
The Future of Protest
Videos
The Future of Protests - Micah White
Micah White Speaker - PDA Speakers
News
Testimonials
Listening to Micah White is dizzying. He presents his radical ideas with a winning smile and a lighthearted tone that belies the gravity of his claims. White argues that we need to fundamentally change the way we protest. Going out on the street is valid and important, but it’s not enough. As a co-founder of Occupy Wall Street he knows his concept has failed. But it has taught him democracy is in a deep crisis. So what’s left? White asks for nothing less than a revolution, but one without a leader and instead delegates acting for a movement more powerful than its representative. When asked how he can stay optimistic in the face of such a monumental task, his cheerful reply is that revolution always happens when it seems most unlikely. His talk and the discussion that follows is a great advertisement for what the Antidote Festival can be at its best. It’s radical and intoxicating.
The Guardian
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