2011 is officially the year of global protest: The Arab Spring, Occupy Wallstreet, the rise of Slavoj Žižek in popularity, Greece’s burgeoning ‘Don’t Pay‘ movement. What about in Indonesia?

Watching Jakarta Ketuk Pintu (Knock, knock Jakarta – Youtube videos below), a documentary about legal environmental activisms in metro Jakarta area—touching cases on KRL and Pulau Seribu, but really puts its focus on residents’ suit against Antasari flyover—I partly found the answer. I am hopeful. Not exactly because of the specific cases being discussed or how they unraveled, but more about how far we have developed our strategies and tactics. And, more importantly, what lies beyond.

Entering undergrad education in the year of 2000, I have always felt that I missed the boat of reformation euphoria that had reached its peak on 1998. Student protest movement has been dying since then. Most of us disapproved, and maybe still are dissing, street demonstrations as unnecessary nuisance in our everyday life, as a source of constant displeasure. The strategy no longer works. The system has been successful in their attempt to appropriate the exact same strategy for its own benefit. How often do we see a demonstration against the present government with senseless and dated arguments, it is so clear that the operation was conceived by hungry mediocre minds, and being funded by similarly evil power-hungry opposition?

In the movie, it’s no longer students who take the steering wheel. It’s the middle-class, quarter to middle-aged residents, driven by honest discontent of everyday life, who decide to take the fight. More levelheaded and willing to invest more energy in the form of reasoning and planning, they are less testosterone-disguised-as-ideology driven. They have more resource and aptitude to come with convincing arguments. They know where to go and understand the way the system works a little bit better, making it possible to build better networks. Maybe in the middle we should trust.

If the medium is massaging at all, the awareness to concentrate on workable scale, to document well (Ucu Agustin, the director, is not a newbie in the documentary film scene), and to source appropriate funding, therefore making it possible to undermine the possibilities offered by the digital realm by releasing it as Youtube movie series, serves as proof on how savvy our contemporary activism can be. Again, for me the best thing about the movie is not the cause, but more the lesson it offers. Since personally, I found the things they are fighting for in the movie to be tainted and, in their best sense, boring. And according to another classic insurrectionary maxim: “Boredom is counterrevolutionary”.

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Just A Thought: On Today’s Activism is written by guest writer Farid Rakun