By Mattathias Schwartz, The New Yorker, November 28, 2011
Kalle Lasn spends
most nights shuffling clippings into a binder of plastic sleeves, each of which
represents one page of an issue of Adbusters, a bimonthly magazine that he founded and edits.
It is a tactile process, like making a collage, and occasionally Lasn will run
a page with his own looped cursive scrawl on it. From this absorbing work, Lasn
acquired the habit of avoiding the news after dark. So it was not until the
morning of Tuesday, November 15th, that he learned that hundreds of police
officers had massed in lower Manhattan at 1 A.M. and cleared the camp at
Zuccotti Park. If anyone could claim responsibility for the Zuccotti situation,
it was Lasn: Adbusters had come
up with the idea of an encampment, the date the initial occupation would start,
and the name of the protest—Occupy Wall Street. Now the epicenter of the
movement had been raided. Lasn began thinking of reasons that this might be a
good thing.
Lasn is sixty-nine
years old and lives with his wife on a five-acre farm outside Vancouver. He has
thinning white hair and the small eyes of a bulldog. In a lilting voice, he
speaks of “a dark age coming for humanity” and of “killing capitalism,”
alternating gusts of passion with gentle laughter. He has learned not to let
premonitions of apocalypse spoil his good mood.
The magazine, which
he founded twenty-two years ago, depicts the developed world as a nightmare of
environmental collapse and spiritual hollowness, driven to the brink of
destruction by its consumer appetites. Adbusters’ images—a breastfeeding baby tattooed with
corporate logos; a smiling Barack Obama with a clown’s ball on his nose—are
combined with equally provocative texts and turned into a paginated montage. Adbusters is not the only radical magazine calling for the
end of life as we know it, but it is by far the best-looking.
Lasn was
interrupted by a phone call about the Zuccotti eviction while in bed, reading
Julian Barnes’s “The Sense of an Ending.” He rose and checked his e-mail. There
was a message from Micah White, Adbusters’ senior editor and Lasn’s closest collaborator.
“Eerie timing!”
White wrote. Earlier that night, Adbusters had sent out its most recent “tactical briefing”—a mass e-mail to
ninety thousand friends of the magazine—proposing that the nation’s Occupy
protesters throw a party in mid-December, declare victory, and withdraw from
their encampments. A few hours later, officers from the New York Police
Department began handing out notices stating that the park had become dangerous
and unsanitary, and ordering the protesters to leave, so that it could be
cleaned. Those who refused to go were arrested, and whatever they left behind
was carried off by the Department of Sanitation, to a depot on West
Fifty-seventh Street. After a long night of angry marches and meetings, the
protesters were allowed back into Zuccotti, with newly enforced prohibitions on
tents and on lying down. The protest continued, but the fifty-nine days of
rude, anarchic freedom on a patch of granite in lower Manhattan were over.
White reached Lasn
by telephone shortly before nine. Lasn was in the bathtub, and White told him
details that he had learned online about the eviction. The police had
established a strict media cordon, blocking access from nearby streets. “It was
a military-style operation,” he said. These words made Lasn think of the bloody
uprising in Syria. He quickly decided that the apparent end of Zuccotti was not
a tragedy but the latest in a series of crisis-driven opportunities, what he
calls “revolutionary moments,” akin to the slapping of a Tunisian fruit vender.
“I just can’t believe how stupid Bloomberg can be!” he said to me later that
day. “This means escalation. A raising of the stakes. It’s one step closer to,
you know, a revolution.”
Lasn and White
quickly hammered out a post-Zuccotti plan. White would draft a new memorandum,
suggesting that Phase I—signs, meetings, camps, marches—was now over. Phase II
would involve a swarming strategy of “surprise attacks against business as
usual,” with the potential to be “more intense and visceral, depending on how
the Bloombergs of the world react.” White could hear the excitement in Lasn’s
voice. Even as Lasn vented about the morning’s counterrevolution, he was doing
what he could not to splash.
This is how Occupy
Wall Street began: as one of many half-formed plans circulating through
conversations between Lasn and White, who lives in Berkeley and has not seen
Lasn in person for more than four years. Neither can recall who first had the
idea of trying to take over lower Manhattan. In early June, Adbusters sent an e-mail to subscribers stating that
“America needs its own Tahrir.” The next day, White wrote to Lasn that he was
“very excited about the Occupy Wall Street meme. . . . I think we should make
this happen.” He proposed three possible Web sites: OccupyWallStreet.org,
AcampadaWallStreet.org, and TakeWallStreet.org.
“No. 1 is best,”
Lasn replied, on June 9th. That evening, he registered OccupyWallStreet.org.
White, who is
twenty-nine years old, was born to a Caucasian mother and an African-American
father. “I don’t really fit in with either group,” he told me. He attended
suburban public schools, where he began a series of one-man campaigns against
authority. In middle school, with his parents’ blessing, he refused to stand
for the Pledge of Allegiance. In high school, he founded an atheists’ club,
over the objections of the principal. This led to an appearance on “Politically
Incorrect,” and atheist organizations flew White to their conferences to give
talks. “It all went to my head,” he said. “I became a little ego child. Ego
destroys. I was too young to understand that.”
Though he describes
himself as a “mystical anarchist,” White has three strict rules that govern his
day: No naps. No snacks. Get dressed. “By dressed,” he told me, “I mean pants
and a shirt. Enough so that if someone came to the door and knocked on it you
wouldn’t be totally embarrassed.” After earning a B.A. at Swarthmore, he wrote
a letter to Lasn, whom he had never met, saying that he would be arriving in
Vancouver in a matter of weeks and wanted to be put to work.
Lasn was born in
Estonia, but his earliest memories are of German refugee camps, where his
family ended up after fleeing the Russian Army during the Second World War. He
remembers falling asleep on a cot as his uncles talked about politics with his
father, a tennis champion who buried his trophies in the back yard before
rushing the family onto one of the last boats to Germany. “World wars,
revolutions—from time to time, big things actually happen,” he told me. “When
the moment is right, all it takes is a spark.”
Lasn’s family left
the refugee camp for Australia, where he grew up. He has a degree in applied
mathematics, and he began his career designing computer war games for the
Australian military. Using this expertise, he started a market-research company
in Tokyo during Japan’s postwar boom, where, by feeding punch cards into an
I.B.M. mainframe, he created reports for consumer brands, many of them alcohol
and tobacco products. “It’s easy to generate cool if you have the bucks, the
celebrities, the right ideas, the right slogans,” he says. “You can throw ideas
into the culture that then have a life of their own.” He made a lot of money,
travelled around the world, moved to Canada, and devoted himself to
experimental filmmaking and environmental protection. In 1989, when the CBC
refused to sell him airtime for a thirty-second “mind bomb” aimed at the
forestry industry, Lasn realized that his politics would never have a place
within the mass media. With Bill Schmalz, an outdoorsman who had worked with
him as a cameraman, Lasn founded Adbusters.
Lasn says that
Adbusters has a circulation
worldwide of roughly seventy thousand. The magazine accepts no advertising, and
relies on newsstand sales and donations. Adbusters was an early supporter of Buy Nothing Day, a
protest holiday, in late November, during which people abstain from shopping.
In 2003, Lasn started producing the Blackspot, a sneaker made partially of
hemp, which he still sells online. Lasn has long used the magazine as a
platform for stridently criticizing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and
his most controversial moment came in 2004, when he wrote an essay on how Jews
influence U.S. foreign policy. Alongside the essay was a list of powerful
neoconservatives, with asterisks next to the names of those who Lasn believed
were Jewish.
This spring, the
magazine was pushing boycotts of Starbucks (for driving out local businesses)
and the Huffington Post (for exploiting citizen journalists). Then, in early
June, the art department designed a poster showing a ballerina poised on the
“Charging Bull” sculpture, near Wall Street. Lasn had thought of the image late
at night while walking his German shepherd, Taka: “the juxtaposition of the
capitalist dynamism of the bull,” he remembers, “with the Zen stillness of the
ballerina.” In the background, protesters were emerging from a cloud of tear
gas. The violence had a highly aestheticized, dreamlike quality—Adbusters’ signature. “What is our one demand?” the poster
asked. “Occupy Wall Street. Bring tent.”
White and Lasn
spent a few days in early July debating when the occupation should start. At
first, White argued that it should begin on July 4, 2012, so that protesters
would have time to prepare. Lasn believed that the political climate could have
shifted entirely by then. He proposed late September of this year; then he
settled on the seventeenth, his mother’s birthday. White agreed. Lasn
instructed the art department to insert “September 17th” beneath the bull and
the ballerina, and Adbusters
devoted a tactical-briefing e-mail on July 13th exclusively to the proposed
occupation.
White watched as
the e-mail’s proposal raced around Twitter and Reddit. “Normal campaigns are
lots of drudgery and not much payoff, like rolling a snowball up a hill,” he
said. “This was the reverse.” Fifteen minutes after Lasn sent the e-mail,
Justine Tunney, a twenty-six-year-old in Philadelphia, read it on her RSS feed.
The next day, she registered OccupyWallSt.org, which soon became the movement’s
online headquarters. She began operating the site with a small team, most of
whose members were, like her, transgender anarchists. (They jokingly call
themselves Trans World Order.)
Encouraged by the
quick online response, White connected with New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts,
which had previously organized an occupation-style action, called
Bloombergville, and was already planning an August 2nd rally at the “Charging
Bull” to protest cuts that would likely result from the federal debt crisis.
They agreed to join forces, and N.Y.A.B.C. said that it would devote part of
its upcoming rally to planning for the September 17th occupation.
This resulted in
some confusion on August 2nd, when scores of graduate students and labor
activists showed up, expecting a rally for New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts.
They erected a small stage and began giving amplified speeches, which alienated
the roughly fifty Adbusters
supporters, mostly anarchists, who came expecting a planning session. There was
some angry shouting before a group of anarchists broke off, sat down in a
circle on the cobblestones, and held their own meeting.
The anarchists
immediately agreed to use “horizontal” organizing methods, according to which
meetings are known as general assemblies and participants make decisions by
consensus and give continuous feedback through hand gestures. Moving one’s
fingers in an undulating motion, palm out, pointing up, means approval of
what’s being said. Palm in, pointing down, means disapproval. Crossed arms
signals a “block,” a serious objection that must be heard. Some participants
knew this style of meeting from left-wing traditions stretching back to the
civil-rights movement and earlier.
Late that night,
David Graeber, a fifty-year-old professor at the University of London and an
anarchist theorist who helped facilitate the first meeting, sent an e-mail to
White, in Berkeley, asking him for guidance. “How did it all start?” Graeber
asked. White told him, saying that the goal was “getting the meme out there,
getting the people on the streets.” He added, “We are not trying to control
what happens.”
Early on, Lasn and
White said that the Wall Street occupiers needed a clear message. The
revolutionaries in Cairo, they wrote, presented “a straight-forward ultimatum”:
they wouldn’t leave the square until President Hosni Mubarak left office. Adbusters
invited readers to “zero in on
what our one demand will be.” The suggested ideas included a Presidential
commission charged with ending the influence of money in politics, and a
one-per-cent “Robin Hood tax” on all financial transactions.
After the August
2nd gathering, the movement’s center of gravity shifted from Vancouver to New
York. The protesters planning the September occupation met again, on August
9th, at the Irish Hunger Memorial, near Battery Park; all subsequent meetings
were held on the south side of Tompkins Square Park. Early on, they decided to
call the organization the New York City General Assembly.
In theory, the job
of facilitating the meetings rotated among the eighty or so attendees. In
practice, facilitation fell to a much smaller set of people who had experience
with the general-assembly process. The leaderless movement was developing
leaders. Graeber was among this first rank of equals, as was Marisa Holmes, a
twenty-five-year-old anarchist and filmmaker. Holmes is dark-haired and
eloquent; she has the parliamentarian’s trick of making harsh ultimatums sound
palatable, even breezy. When she wants to emphasize a point, she doesn’t raise
her voice; she turns her palms up and shrugs. Earlier this year, she flew to
Cairo and filmed the Tahrir demonstrations. “It was the same as here,” she
says. “They had speakers, banners, direct actions. I spent ninety per cent of
my time in cafés, drinking Turkish coffee and talking.”
At 11 A.M. on
Saturday, September 17th, an elementary-school teacher I’ll call P. left his
Brooklyn apartment and got on a subway heading to Manhattan. (He requested that
he be identified by the first letter of his last name, because he was concerned
that he would be fired from his job.) He wore a red sweater and brown pants.
Earlier that morning, he had sent a vague e-mail informing a co-worker that he
might not show up Monday morning. He was part of the Tactical Committee, a
subgroup of the General Assembly whose responsibility was to figure out where,
exactly, the occupation would take place.
P. took the subway
to Bowling Green. On his way to the exit, he passed a line of police officers
accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs. Outside, police had surrounded the “Charging
Bull” with barricades and, a few blocks north, sealed off a stretch of Wall
Street around the Stock Exchange. P. tried to look nonchalant as he carried a
black messenger bag that contained a first-aid kit, a bottled solution of
liquid antacid and water (to remedy the effects of tear gas and pepper spray),
fifteen Clif bars (carrot cake), and several hundred photocopied maps, showing
seven possible locations. “We decided that low-tech communication methods would
be best,” P. told me. “If we’d used a mass text message, or Twitter, it would
have been easy for the police to track down who was doing this.”
P. majored in math
at a small liberal-arts college and plays in two bands, “some punk, some
noise.” Like most of Occupy Wall Street’s core organizers, P. is an anarchist,
meaning that he is “dedicated to the eradication of any unjust or illegitimate
system. At the very least, that means the eradication of capitalism and the
state.” He does not smash bank windows, though he said that he does not
necessarily disapprove of people who do.
At Bowling Green,
several hundred protesters had gathered near the Museum of the American Indian.
The previous week, members of the General Assembly had stocked up on food, made
bail arrangements, and circulated flyers. Still, most of them had doubts that
much would come of the occupation. “I, along with many others, expected that it
would fizzle out in a couple of days,” Marisa Holmes says.
P. quickly found
the two other members of the Tactical Committee, both white men in their
twenties. All three were “extremely nervous,” P. says. They left to scout
Location Two, three-quarters of an acre of honey-locust trees and granite
benches, a few blocks to the north, called Zuccotti Park. It was almost empty,
and there were few police nearby. As the Tactical Committee had learned in its
research, Location Two was a privately owned public space. While the city can
close public parks at dusk, or impose other curfews, zoning laws require Zuccotti’s
owner to keep the park open for “passive recreation” twenty-four hours a day.
Soon, maps were
distributed and people began to murmur, “Go to Location Two in thirty minutes.”
The first arrivals took seats beneath the trees on the eastern side, arranged
themselves in small groups, and ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. By that
afternoon, nearly a thousand people had gathered for a general-assembly
meeting. Late that night, P. went home; nearly three hundred of his comrades
settled in to sleep there.
In the next few
weeks, the encampment became more established, with tents, desks, walkways,
wireless Internet, a kitchen, and an extensive lending library. A sort of
organization took shape, with people forming a seemingly endless array of
working groups: Structure, Facilitation, Sanitation, Food, Direct Action, Safe
Spaces. A mid-October balance sheet from the occupation’s Finance Working Group
reported that it had received four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in
donations, which it was keeping in two accounts at Amalgamated Bank. Almost
every afternoon for two months, depending on the weather, hundreds of people
gathered in the park. Some were drawn to the cameras and the spectacle; some
came for the free food, shelter, and medical care; and some showed up for the
earnest political conversation and because they believed that this might be the
beginning of a revolution.
What did the
movement want? On September 20th, three thousand miles away from Zuccotti Park,
White and Lasn tried to write a manifesto in the form of a letter to President
Obama. They sought to have banking-industry regulations tightened,
high-frequency trading banned, all the “financial fraudsters” responsible for
the 2008 crash arrested, and a Presidential commission formed to investigate
corruption in politics. “We will stay here in our encampment in Liberty
Plaza”—Zuccotti Park’s post-occupation name—“until you respond to our demands,”
the letter concluded.
“Micah, this is a
wonderful draft,” Holmes replied on September 22nd, when White e-mailed her Adbusters’ proposed letter. “However, the General Assembly
is going through this very process of drafting a statement. It should be ready
this afternoon.” A week later, the General Assembly adopted a “Declaration of
the Occupation,” which is more a world view than a list of demands. “We write
so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can
know that we are your allies. . . . No true democracy is attainable when the
process is determined by economic power.” The rest of the six-hundred-word
declaration is taken up mainly by “grievances,” which place the blame for
everything from poison in the food supply to cruelty to animals on these
corporate forces, also known as “they.” What should be done to remedy these grievances?
“Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a
process to address the problems we face; and generate solutions accessible to
everyone.”
To many in the
park, vagueness was a virtue. It also had a history. In 1962, student radicals
gathered in Michigan to complete the Port Huron Statement, the founding
document of Students for a Democratic Society. One student argued that an early
working draft was too utopian and impractical. But Tom Hayden, the main author,
wrote that the movement should “remain ambiguous in direction for a while:
don’t kill it by immediately imposing formulas. . . . When consciousness is at
its proper stage, we might talk seriously and in an action-oriented way about
solutions.”
Soon after
finishing the declaration, the early organizers started to have a problem:
their solutions were to be accessible to everyone, but so was their protest.
The crowds at those early meetings came in response to messages broadcast over
a narrow channel, the Adbusters
list. They were committed to a tangible goal, with an immediate deadline. But
in early October, as the national media seized on the Zuccotti Park story, the
rest of the ninety-nine per cent started showing up. The G.A. had to tackle
three new challenges simultaneously: holding ground; managing a semi-permanent
village; and guiding a much larger and more cacophonous political conversation.
All this had to be done with almost no heat, running water, or electricity.
Consensus—the
agreed-upon method of decision-making—wasn’t easy among hundreds of
self-identified ninety-nine-per-centers, whose politics ranged from “Daily
Show” liberalism to insurrectionary anarchism. Because of the ground rules
determined by the people sitting on the cobblestones in August, no decision
could be made without giving everyone in attendance the chance to cross his or
her arms and bring the meeting to a halt. According to the G.A.’s rules, a
nine-tenths vote could override a block, but only after each block had
explained his or her objections and the facilitators had responded. The least
reasonable people often got the most time to speak.
“The G.A. is beautiful, but it’s not an
effective decision-making body,” Holmes told me in mid-October. She wanted
things to be slightly more hierarchical, with a Spokes Council that would have
limited day-to-day authority over the camp.
On October 28th,
three dozen members of the Facilitation Working Group gathered around metal
tables in a public atrium at 60 Wall Street to set that night’s agenda. They
were going to discuss Holmes’s proposal again, but what else? An older man with
bushy eyebrows was videotaping the proceedings. He said that he represented the
Demands Working Group, and he wanted the G.A. to demand jobs for all. “The G.A. already said this is a
movement without demands,” another man said. “So how can there be a working
group on demands?”
Other people
approached the facilitators. A group of herbalists wanted fifteen hundred
dollars to make medicines. Someone wanted to present “Native American peace
principles” derived from the Iroquois Confederacy. Someone else had a
facilitation accountability model, a spreadsheet for evaluating the
facilitators. A representative from an N.Y.U. student group asked the G.A. to
formally endorse Occupy Oakland’s Day of Action. He was informed that such an
endorsement had already been made. A few minutes later, everyone began speaking
at once. “Whoa!” a facilitator cried. “Let’s take a breath and get centered.
This is a valid conversation, but this is not the right venue to have it.”
As the facilitation
meeting was wrapping up, Marisa Holmes, wearing a dark-green trenchcoat,
arrived; soon she was conferring with two other organizers over cold noodles
about how they would present the proposal for the Spokes Council that evening.
She had arrived with the team that was to conduct the general assembly, and the
atrium quickly reorganized itself around them. Despite the movement’s taboo on
leaders, many in this group had accrued a sort of power. “Marisa is a quiet leader,”
Marina Sitrin, an occasional facilitator and the author of a book about
horizontalism in Argentina, says. “She’s not a young Tom Hayden, the white-male
type who by force of personality and speech wins an argument.”
When it was time
for the general assembly, a crowd of four or five hundred had gathered around
the steps on the park’s eastern side. Most spent the next three hours packed
in, knee to knee, on the cold stone. “I hope everyone’s doing well!” Nelini
Stamp, one of the facilitators, cried. “High hopes! High energy!”
“High hopes! High
energy!” the crowd repeated.
“This is going to
take forever,” someone in front muttered.
Stamp ignored him.
She began leading the general assembly in the song “Solidarity Forever.”
“Not everyone here
is into your narrow union politics,” the voice in front said.
“It’s not a union
song,” Stamp said. “It’s union like ‘unity.’ ”
The voice came from
a man in his mid-twenties wearing a camouflage jacket. He was sitting on a
concrete bench in front of the facilitation team, one boot resting on his knee,
eating sweet-potato chips and drinking from a Starbucks cup. He had the haggard
look of someone who had spent a few weeks sleeping outside in a city. Known to
other occupiers as Sage, he had written “SAGE’S” on the brim of his baseball
cap in marker. Sage continued speaking as Holmes presented the proposal. “These
are all tourists,” he said. “You do not live here.” Every time he spoke, the
people sitting next to him stiffened and frowned. Sage did not seem to notice.
During a
twenty-minute breakout session to discuss the proposal, Lisa Fithian, a
fifty-year-old organizer who works with Holmes, made her way to the bench in
front and told Sage about her success with the Spokes Council model. She said
that she had worked on the nineteen-seventies anti-nuclear campaign and the
W.T.O. protests in Seattle, in 1999.
“This is not a
fucking college dorm,” Sage said. “Until you can speak honestly with me, I’m
not having a conversation.”
“Shut the fuck up,”
Fithian said. “I don’t need this shit in my face.”
“Look, I was at
Tompkins Square Park,” Sage said. “This whole thing has been hijacked by
socialist students who have insinuated themselves into the square. These people
don’t see me. They don’t think I comprehend. So I see everything.”
“I hear you,”
Fithian said.
“Why should someone
who lives here have to conform to a bunch of tourists?” Sage asked.
“Your energy is
hurting my system,” Fithian replied.
“Look, sometimes
you have to put your body on the machine,” Sage said.
“This is not the
machine!” Fithian said, her voice rising.
A tall man with a
stubbled face tried to calm Sage down. His name was Evan Wagner and he was
wearing a red North Face jacket. Like Sage, he was one of the few people
sleeping in the park who bothered with general assemblies. Unlike Sage, he
seemed like someone who could find a job if he wanted one.
Sage waved Wagner
off. “Dude, you are playing a
homeless person,” he said. Soon Sage was quiet. It was as though Fithian had
absorbed Sage’s rage so the rest of the meeting would not have to.
When everyone
returned, each smaller group described its concerns about the Spokes Council
proposal. There was a question about exactly how blocks would work, and worries
about a “Spokes Council-ocracy.” The tall office buildings were funnelling a
cold breeze in from the Hudson River. Around ten, a facilitator called for a
vote. “Three people are frustrated,” she said. “Hundreds are getting
frustrated. All those in favor, please raise one hand.” Sage raised his hand.
The facilitation
team counted the votes and added them up on a cell phone. The proposal passed,
two hundred and eighty-four to seventeen. Stamp jumped up and down. Her voice
was hoarse from three hours of yelling. “Everyone is beautiful!” she shouted.
“Everyone is awesome!”
Those who were
around at the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement talk about the old
“vertical” left versus the new “horizontal” one. By “vertical,” they mean
hierarchy and its trappings—leaders, demands, and issue-specific rallies. They
mean social change as laid out by Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” and
Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” where outside organizers spur
communities to action. “Horizontal” means leaderless—like the 1999 W.T.O.
protests in Seattle, the Arab Spring, and even the Tea Party. Anyone can show
up at a general assembly and claim a piece of the movement. This lets people
feel important immediately, and gives them implicit permission to take action.
It also gives a disproportionate amount of power to people like Sage.
One influence that
is often cited by the movement is open-source software, such as Linux, an
operating system that competes with Microsoft Windows and Apple’s OS but
doesn’t have an owner or a chief engineer. A programmer named Linus Torvalds
came up with the idea. Thousands of unpaid amateurs joined him and then
eventually organized into work groups. Some coders have more influence than
others, but anyone can modify the software and no one can sell it. According to
Justine Tunney, who continues to help run OccupyWallSt.org, “There is
leadership in the sense of deference, just as people defer to Linus Torvalds.
But the moment people stop respecting Torvalds, they can fork it”—meaning copy
what’s been built and use it to build something else.
In mid-October,
supporters in Tokyo, Sydney, Madrid, and London held rallies; encampments
sprang up in almost every major American city. Nearly all of them modelled
themselves on the New York City General Assembly: with no official leaders,
rotating facilitators, and no fixed set of demands. Today, endorsements of the
Occupy movement can be found everywhere, from anarchist graffiti on bank walls
to Al Gore’s Twitter feed. On a rain-smeared cardboard sign near the shattered
window of an Oakland coffee shop that had been destroyed by a cadre of
anarchists during a nighttime clash with police, someone wrote, “We’re sorry,
this does not represent us.” Below that, someone else wrote, “Speak for
yourself.”
At times,
horizontalism can feel like utopian theatre. Its greatest invention is the
“people’s mike,” which starts when someone shouts, “Mike check!” Then the crowd
shouts, “Mike check!,” and then phrases (phrases!) are transmitted (are
transmitted!) through mass chanting (through mass chanting!). In the same way
that poker ritualizes capitalism and North Korea’s mass games ritualize
totalitarianism, the people’s mike ritualizes horizontalism. The problem,
though, comes when multiple people try to summon the mike simultaneously. Then
it can feel a lot like anarchy.
The politics of the
occupation run parallel to the mainstream left—the people’s mike was used to
shout down Michele Bachmann and Governor Scott Walker, of Wisconsin, in early
November. But, in the end, the point of Occupy Wall Street is not its platform
so much as its form: people sit down and hash things out instead of passing
their complaints on to Washington. “We are our demands,” as the slogan goes.
And horizontalism seems made for this moment. It relies on people forming loose
connections quickly—something that modern technology excels at.
Events in New York
seemed to bear out Lasn’s hunch that the temporary eviction of the protesters
from Zuccotti Park was an opportunity rather than a defeat. The organizers were
quickly able to regroup and agree that they should return to the park, despite
the newly enforced ban on tents. Last Thursday, the movement mounted one of its
largest protests to date. Demonstrators tried to shut down the New York Stock
Exchange (they failed), organized a sit-in at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge,
and tussled with police in Zuccotti Park. More than two hundred people were
arrested. Similar Day of Action protests temporarily blocked bridges in
Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Houston, Milwaukee, Portland, and Philadelphia.
No matter what
happens next, the movement’s center is likely to shift from the N.Y.C.G.A.,
just as it shifted from Adbusters,
and form somewhere else, around some other circle of people, ideas, and plans.
“This could be the greatest thing that I work on in my life,” Justine Tunney,
of OccupyWallSt.org, said. “But the movement will have other Web sites. Over the
coming weeks and months, as other occupations become more prominent, ours will
slowly become irrelevant.” She sounded as though the irrelevance of her project
were both inevitable and desirable. “We can’t hold on to any of that
authority,” she continued. “We don’t want to.”
After the phone
call with White, on the morning the New York police cleared Zuccotti Park, Lasn
drove to Vancouver, to a hundred-year-old house that serves as Adbusters’ headquarters. Lasn rents the top two floors, which
look down on Granville Island and False Creek; he runs the magazine out of the
basement.
Lasn flung down his
battered briefcase in the cramped conference room that he uses as an office.
There is a phone, but no computer, and Lasn spent most of the day sitting at a
table and brainstorming with his employees, the oldest of whom was thirty-two.
After conferring with an Adbusters
writer and the office manager, he modified that morning’s bathtub plan. The
next tactical briefing would be split up into a series of e-mails sent out over
time. “The chessboard has been overturned, and now a new game begins!” Lasn
reasoned, shortly after noon. “The stakes are so much higher this time. First,
we need to let the dust settle.”
Lasn called White
to talk about this new plan, but White had already left for the University of
California’s Doe Library, where he spends his afternoons looking for snippets
of radical thought for Lasn’s plastic sleeves. It’s the point in his day when
he leaves behind all electronic devices to seek what he calls “a burst of
clarity.”
White is not on
Facebook, which he calls “the commercialization of friendship.” He uses e-mail
and Twitter only because he feels compelled to. His position has softened since
the time when he believed in what he calls “the Heideggerian critique of
technology—that it turns us into empty matter for the exportation of capitalism.”
Lasn welcomes the international media attention that Adbusters has received. “I’m surfing,” he said, when I asked
if he ever felt swamped by the flood of incoming messages. White feels
differently: “All these e-mails—it feels like a denial-of-service attack
against my brain.”
Every day, as White
walks from his home to the library, he is confronted by traces of what he
helped create: posters in store windows supporting a general strike in Oakland;
posters supporting the occupation wheat-pasted onto a football statue;
“We Are the 99
Percent!” slogans written on walls in chalk.
“I almost feel like
I’m a ghost, or like I’m living in a dream, where my conversations with Kalle
have manifested in reality,” he said. In mid-November, sixteen hours after someone
created a short “Micah M. White” entry on Wikipedia, White nominated it for
deletion. “Person is non-notable,” he wrote.
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