KONY 2012 to Paper the City

Get ready to see a whole lot of these things.

Tomorrow is the night. Kony 2012, the Internet warlord bloodlust meme, has its largest day of international action tomorrow, calling on its legion of supporters to hang posters and fliers all over the city to further whip up enough frenzy and attention to bring serial bad guy Joseph Kony to justice.

If you don’t account for one of the video‘s 89 million views, here’s a little recap: Joseph Kony is an at-large warlord who’s accused of genocide, using child soldiers, and basically being the worst human imaginable. He’s been hiding out in the Democratic Republic of Congo for a few years, and now, lots and lots of people want to see him captured. (Seem like they’d probably be OK if he were killed, too.)

But first awareness, and that’s where the fliers come in. Invisible Children, the San Diego-based nonprofit behind the video, has called upon whoever wants to help to purchase a round of fliers and put them up wherever. A check today confirms the website has sold out of its “action kits,” but is offering a free kit (including door hangers, spray paint stencils, and templates for murals) for free download.

Already, groups are organizing in Boston to make that happen.

Just before midnight tomorrow night, some 3,000 people will muster at 99 Tremont at the corner of the Boston Common to coordinate (or at least meet up), according to an listing organized by a Suffolk University student on wherevent.com. Seems noteworthy that the female-to-male ratio is 3-to-1. The local (unofficial) Twitter voice of the movement, StopKonyBoston, has also started putting out the world.

There’s no way to tell how this will turn out, especially given recent protests and police/protester clashes here, but this will be a test of KONY 2012’s staying power. Social media drove the video, but this is the first time we’ll see if this new generation of activists can bring this out of social media (where it’s easy to lend one’s support) and get their message into the real world. I’m pretty sure indiscriminate postering qualifies as graffiti, also, so they might be risking arrest to carry out the Cover the Night campaign.

Changing the world is about to get a lot more real. We’ll know how they did when we wake up on Saturday morning.