Читать книгу Thank You, Anarchy - Nathan Schneider - Страница 12
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#BrooklynBridge #LibertySquare #NeedsOfTheOccupiers #NYPD #Occupied #OccupyDC #OccupyTogether #Oct6 #OWS #S17 #TakeWallStreet #TonyBaloney #WeAreThe99 #winning
When night fell on September 17, the Financial District had that feeling of loneliness about it again, of lifeless towers, of quiet. This night, though, it was at least somewhat less unoccupied.
One or two hundred people were huddled in circles, scattered around Zuccotti Park’s stone floor. A little before 10 p.m., more than twenty empty police vans passed by them on Broadway in a solemn line, their flashing lights lighting up the empty buildings above. Soon, on that narrow end of the park, there formed two rows of officers with clubs drawn and plastic white handcuffs dangling from their trousers. Two more rows lined the park’s longer northern and southern sidewalks. A trio of officers on horses stood in wait by a scaffold across Broadway. When a pack of boys on BMX bikes cruised past, officers mobbed them and told them to leave the area immediately. The boys tried to argue and tried to linger and witness what was or wasn’t about to happen, but eventually they complied.
The day had begun around noon, when the NYC General Assembly’s Arts & Culture Committee convened its “New York FUN Exchange” at Bowling Green. An anticlimactic crowd of a few hundred people marched for a while around the Charging Bull, which was still surrounded by barricades and a few police officers. “Protect us, not the bull!” the marchers chanted at them. There was yoga, and there was waiting. I talked with a hedge fund guy from New Jersey and a whole new crop of anarchists. Some planners from the October 2011 Coalition came to see how this attempt would go, hoping to learn from it for their own. Soon, the wandering crowd coalesced into a mass on the south end of Bowling Green to hear the performance artist Reverend Billy, who was preaching through a bullhorn on the steps of the Museum of the American Indian.
Adbusters had initially called for twenty thousand people, but this was looking more like two thousand. A lot of them, too, were reporters, though it wasn’t especially easy to tell the reporters apart from the protesters. “There are more cameras here than signs,” I heard someone mutter. The Global Revolution channel, at least, had five thousand viewers online.
“What is this?” went a chant. “This is just practice!” They seemed to be saying it to console themselves.
Others gave short speeches after Reverend Billy finished—whoever wanted to give one. Meanwhile, the Tactics Committee huddled, trying to decide what to do next. Some were saying it was better to have the big assembly where they already were, while others said they should move. Maps were being passed through the crowd with several locations identified and numbered. Chase Manhattan Plaza, which the planners had agreed on for the three o’clock assembly, was obviously out of the running; it was gated shut, so Tactics had decided on Zuccotti Park as the first backup that morning. Gary Roland, who helped pick Zuccotti as the target for OpESR months before, was scouting there. He called another organizer down at Bowling Green to say that it was clear of cops. There were a few drops of rain, adding to the urgency.
And so Tactics made the announcement from the steps of the museum. Location number two: Zuccotti Park. Everyone should walk there, together—in pairs, like the Sand People in Star Wars, so they could go legally on the sidewalk. There was an argument about the wisdom of this choice among those gathered there around the steps, and there were speeches to the contrary, but by then it was too late. The crowd had already started to move.
Moving up Broadway felt slow and maddening, but it was only a few minutes before we were at Zuccotti, filling the space between the granite and the treetop canopy. There were no police blocking it. Actually, it was beautiful. As we poured in, the hard, gray, corporate plaza looked like a promised land.
There, a semblance of an assembly began. Before most people knew what hit them, the General Assembly from Tompkins Square Park had been reconstituted, and it promptly broke into smaller groups so that people could discuss with one another why they’d come. Many had shown up to what they thought was a protest, but what they got was a giant meeting. They took it in stride. Some people talked, while others started to work. Those so equipped pulled out their laptops to upload video, to check in on Internet relay chat channels, or to monitor police scanners.
I heard reporters complaining about how the energy was gone from the earlier chanting and marching. They were disappointed. This wasn’t just a protest, but something subtler and longer, and it would take patience.
But it was still a protest, too. A group of people got restless and decided to go on a march to Wall Street, just a few blocks down Broadway. Led by socialist signs and Anonymous’s signature Guy Fawkes masks, they set off, already crying the chants that would soon be stuck in so many people’s heads around the country: “We! Are! The 99 percent!” and “All day! All week! Occupy Wall Street!” Those who stayed behind were busy trying to figure out just exactly where they were and whether it made sense to stay.
With a smartphone’s glance at Wikipedia, I noticed something interesting. Before 2006, when Brookfield Office Properties named the place after its chairman, Zuccotti Park had another name, which was still on the side of the building to the north: “Liberty Plaza.” Kind of like Tahrir—“Liberation”—Square in Cairo. This fit. Some people said “Liberty Park,” others said “Liberty Square,” and others said “Liberty Plaza.” Neither name would ever quite become standard. But when I told the Egyptian woman in the food cart on the corner that the place had been renamed “Liberty,” she grinned.
I stood by while Lucas Vazquez called Brookfield on his cell phone. There were rumors that maybe the company had decided to allow the encampment to remain there. He asked if that was true.
“So,” Lucas said, after hanging up, “he said they have not allowed us to sleep over. And he said that we’d be arrested for trespassing if we sleep over—his words.”
Lucas was a high school senior from Long Island, which was hard to believe, except for the fact that he’d have to leave at night to catch the Long Island Rail Road for home. He’d already helped organize the May 12 march on Wall Street and Bloombergville, and then was part of the planning GAs for this. He was serious and smart, and game for anything—but stuck in educational servitude.
“I’d rather come here than school, but I wanna graduate,” he said.
Across the park, the actress-turned-political-candidate Rosanne Barr was giving a speech through a megaphone demanding “the blessed and holy guillotine” for “guilty leaders” and “priests.” The marchers returned, victorious. The Food Committee’s peanut butter sandwiches were there to greet them.
As the sun set, just after seven o’clock, a facilitator from the planning meetings opened the evening session of the General Assembly. “You know what general assemblies are,” he cried. “You’ve seen it in Tunisia. You’ve seen it in Egypt. You’ve seen it in Spain. And now you see it on Wall Street!”
The police presence was growing, with horses and plastic cuffs. This was foremost on people’s minds, but it didn’t stop a few from taking the opportunity of assembly to grandstand about whatever. A woman who’d called for a general strike earlier did so again, and another demanded the end of corporate personhood. “Buy physical silver!” someone advised—not the only one to do so that day. Across the plaza, a drum circle nearly drowned out their voices anyway.
The real substance of the discussion was simply about what to do. Some felt that they’d come to occupy Wall Street, and they wouldn’t be satisfied except there. But Wall Street was completely barricaded off and surrounded by police. “I propose that we march to Wall Street and sleep on the people’s sidewalk,” said Lucas. A man in a suit and tie volunteered to “repair to Wall Street for repose,” set up a tent, and see what would happen. It was a tough call.
“I love this space,” another voice said. “It’s very comfortable. But revolution is not about comfort!”
Finally, the assembly arrived at the decision to stay in Liberty Square indefinitely and to take good care of it. People split up into working and thematic groups to begin the business of doing so. One of the most tempting of these to join, given the circumstances, was the meditation and massage circle; already, the crowd had thinned from a couple thousand to a couple hundred, and it was thinning more, while the number of police grew. Some were saying that there had been an undercover cop in the Media Committee, and theories were circulating about others. A group returned with dumpster-dived cardboard for sleeping.
Looking around at who was there, I noticed also who was not. Nobody from Adbusters; Micah White, in Berkeley, had taken a vow against flying on planes for the year, and Kalle Lasn had an elderly mother-in-law to attend to in Canada. Georgia Sagri wasn’t there either; “I wasn’t and am still not interested in the metaphorics of the occupation,” she would later tell me. Alexa O’Brien was “running the back end” for this and actions around the country that day. She brought supplies but would hardly be seen on the plaza thereafter.
I walked along the sidewalk to see what the police were doing. They seemed ready to move in and clear the park. A black Suburban drove up and stopped on the corner. Its window was rolled halfway down, and a small, older man with a bald head peered out and spoke to the commanders in white shirts. Not long after he pulled away, the second row of police disappeared, as well as the horses. The drumming quieted, and the newfound Occupiers started going to sleep.
There would be no raid that night. A dilemma had been posed to the powerful, and for the moment the powerful capitulated.
I saw Marisa Holmes. She was ecstatic, with the caveat of course that there were no guarantees. Along with some other organizers from the city, she left for the night. I prepared to go to a colleague’s apartment to help edit the video he’d shot that day. As I left, I wrote to myself that I didn’t think it would last. I didn’t think it would change anything. I was tired, and all I could feel was the precariousness.
“They’re so young, they think they know everything,” one police officer said to another. I heard other cops talk about how much they take home after taxes.
Neither they nor anyone else seemed to grasp what was happening in front of them. How could they? It had taken the organizers long enough to begin to realize what they were organizing, and they still didn’t really know. There would be time to start figuring it out, though, because the occupation was staying.
Sunday, day two, the Occupiers kept busy. There was such a barrage of details between them and what this could be. They were making signs, eating donated pizza, collecting trash, laying down sleeping bags and cardboard to sleep on, and running a media center on a few uncomfortable tables with a generator and a wifi hotspot. They conducted a large, loud march around the Financial District. But, mostly, they assembled. There were several hours of General Assembly meetings in the morning, and then an extended debate—from midafternoon until late at night—about what the plan of action would be for Monday, when the neighborhood’s population would turn from tourists grazing for photogenic prey to those coming to do the very business that this occupation was there to oppose.
Early in the afternoon, it seemed that the chilly first night had taken a toll. Numbers in Liberty Square were lower than they had been the evening before. Those still around sang redemption songs a little behind the beat, or intently read texts of significance, or simply sat and waited. Others tried to confirm more rumors of police agents in their midst. But as evening fell, some of the previous day’s energy returned, as did an influx of new people who’d heard about the occupation on the Internet or from friends—still only two or three hundred in all. Pizza kept arriving through the night, and through its little crisis.
At about 9:15 p.m., by way of Occupiers reporting to the General Assembly, the police demanded that all the signs that were beginning to proliferate on the park’s walls and trees be taken down. There was a fractious reaction at first. Some thought it a reasonable request and wanted to comply. Others refused on principle, not wanting to be taking orders from the police. People on either side made speeches and tried to start chants. Some took it upon themselves to remove signs, and others moved to stop them. There were whispers that undercover cops were sowing divisions, though it hardly seemed like the Occupiers required any help with that. Just when unity was needed, it wasn’t there. Officers started taking down signs themselves while Occupiers chanted, “Shame! Shame!”
The focal point of it all became a spot on the eastern edge of the park, along Broadway. Several protesters—women and men, young and older—decided to sit down there in front of a Socialist Workers Party poster (whose affiliation would later be stripped from it) that said, “a job is a right! capitalism doesn’t work.” Others tried to get them to move, but they wouldn’t. The police didn’t move them either. There were no gory arrests. The sign remained as long as they did. Police and fellow protesters withdrew, and the meeting continued.
Moments like these were messy and far from flattering, and there would be many more to come.
I slept my first night in Liberty Square without a sleeping bag, curled up on a few sheets of cardboard. There were people playing music quietly with guitars and drums in far corners of the park. Near me the medics were planning for the next day’s action. A couple dozen Occupiers had just held a candlelight vigil by the barricades that were still surrounding the blocks around the Stock Exchange, mourning the death of capitalism. The barricades proved to them that they were winning. “Wall Street is already occupied,” one person had said earlier. “We’ve already achieved our objective.”
On Monday morning, I woke up just after sunrise with the shivers. My eyes opened to see polished shoes and suit pants and skirts passing all around me, walking from the subway to work. There were TV news trucks on the north edge of the park. A groggy woman near me cried, “Look at the news, guys!”
After overnighters groggily packed up their bedding and lined up for dumpster-dived bagels, an unplanned-for 7 a.m. General Assembly session began. Its purpose was a rundown of the day’s events. Committees that met the night before had decided to have marches to Wall Street at 9:00, 11:30, and 3:30. But then somebody came to the front of the assembly and announced through the people’s mic that he was going to march right then. Wall Street bankers were walking to work, and we were just sitting there. The commuters would already be at their desks by nine. He ran off and, promptly, more than a hundred others followed. They marched around the plaza first, chant wasing, “All Day! All Week! Occupy Wall Street!” and then set off heading south on Broadway. The occupation was starting the workweek early.
Upon arriving at Wall Street, the marchers found that the blocks around the New York Stock Exchange, which had been barricaded completely throughout the weekend, now had open sidewalks. After briefly massing at Wall and Broadway, they proceeded down the sidewalk on Wall Street, chanting and banging on the barricades that were still blocking off the street, making a mighty noise. They flooded the commuters trying to get to work in that area and clogged the way—which was the point. “We! Are! The 99 percent!” they chanted. To the large detachment of police alongside them, they’d sometimes replace “We” with “You.”
For almost two hours the march went on, continually evading attempts by police to pin it into an enclosed space or guide it out of the area. When the barricades on Broad Street were opened in order to let the marchers out (and keep them out), they used hand signals to turn around and head back up toward Wall Street. The march morphed into a long, two-directional picket line along Wall Street itself, going back and forth and back and forth as the Stock Exchange’s opening bell rang. “Ring! The! Bell!” they cried. With so many Occupiers out in the streets, scouts went back to make sure that there were still enough people in Liberty Square to hold it.
Most bystanders and commuters in the midst of the march weren’t amused. (The goal wasn’t to amuse them.) “Shit” was something I heard a lot. A bitter dog walker said to a security guard, “They say it’s their street”—the chant was “Whose street? Our street!”—“but they don’t even pay taxes.” Along those lines, also, I heard the soon-to-be-ubiquitous “Get a job!” And then there was ambivalence: “I hope the police protect the financial . . . bullshit.”
A middle-aged woman from El Salvador with painted eyebrows and a coffee in her hand said, “We used to do this in my country in the ’70s and ’80s. They’d arrest all of us.” She was on her way to work but took pictures of the police officers in charge and made sure I did too, just to have them on record.
When the “Let’s! Go! Home!” chant finally came at around quarter after nine, the march returned victoriously to Liberty Square and took stock. There were four arrests over the course of it—for crimes such as stepping off the sidewalk and touching a barricade—followed by several more as the day went on. A meeting convened to talk about how to do it better next time. These people were not just there to march; they were there to occupy, to discuss, and to build a blessed community.
Over the course of the day, more and more reporters turned up. It was one thing to hang around a private park for the weekend, but it was another to stay into the workweek and disrupt the business of the Financial District with the intention of doing so for longer—all day, all week. The afternoon General Assembly meeting was full of new faces, and sign holders stood against a substantial line of police on the sidewalk along Broadway. People passing by snapped pictures of the vast spread of messages painted on cardboard that was becoming Zuccotti Park’s new floor.
In the rupture of the ordinary that characterized those early days, everything felt in some sense religious, charged with a secret extremity and transcendence—secret, because the rest of the world hadn’t yet become aware of what was happening down at Liberty Square. Whenever I came back to Liberty after some time away, there was a feeling of entering sacred ground. Yet the moment I arrived, I was suddenly in a whirl of frantic conversations about worldly things: squabbles, crises, food mishaps, small victories, marches, and so on. All those things were sacred too. Once enmeshed in this kind of talk, you couldn’t escape the plaza if you tried, because someone else, and then someone else, would come up to you with some other fantastic question or need. It was a place especially conducive to those of us with obsessive tendencies, who like to be consumed in a given interest or project to the exclusion of all else. There, the god of ordinary life was dead, resurrected in the business of self-reliance.
Notwithstanding what Liberty Square would later devolve into, it had a Puritanical single-mindedness early on. One night, in the middle of a group cozying up to go to sleep, somebody slipped out a bottle of vodka. “What are you doing with that?” another whispered. Why bother with that when there’s this? Chain-smoked, hand-rolled cigarettes were ubiquitous, but at first that was it. Some would confess to me that they were desperate for a joint, it had been so long. They hadn’t been tending to their addictions.
I remember watching, one morning, a guy in glasses as he greeted the sunrise by putting out a small rug, alone, and beginning the morning salat, which Muslims pray five times daily. Just as he started, one of the food vendors on the plaza came out from his stand and interrupted him. He pointed eastward, correcting the Occupier’s guess as to the direction of Mecca.
On Tuesday the sun rose—behind clouds—on a tent city. Although police had made clear they wouldn’t tolerate any structures, the prospect of overnight rain made a group of Occupiers decide around midnight the night before to set up tarps over media and food supplies, as well as to erect some of the tents that had been donated by Lupe Fiasco to sleep in themselves. This would make for their roughest confrontation yet with those sworn to serve and protect them.
While few were yet awake, I got up out of the deluxe-sized tent where I slept with almost a dozen others and wandered around the plaza. I heard a motorcycle cop saying on his cell phone, “That’s my plan—to have them down as soon as possible.” On the north side of the park, where the morning before there had been three TV news trucks to serve as witnesses, there was now only an NYPD Communications Division Command Post truck. Inside I saw an officer with “COUNTERTERRORISM” on the back of his uniform.
At 6:58, a cop wearing a suit and tie began walking through the plaza, peering through the mesh into tents where Occupiers were sleeping, demanding, “The tents have to come down.”
Those who spent the night woke up and sprang into various sorts of action. Some immediately began complying by pulling out tent poles—“for the good of the movement”—while others insisted that they should stop. Still more suggested a middle path: to hold up the tents and tarps by hand, rather than with poles. An ad hoc meeting started in the center of the plaza to discuss the matter, but in the course of it nearly all the tents and tarps were taken down by self-appointed volunteers. A lot of people were frantic. A lot of people were terrified.
The scattered arguments and confusion coalesced at the plaza’s northern wall, where General Assembly meetings were being held. At around 7:20, Justin Wedes—a twenty-five-year-old, Twitter-savvy schoolteacher with close-cropped hair and thick black glasses—takes hold of the megaphone to speak. His words are echoed fervently but unnecessarily by the people’s mic, and like many others he has nearly lost his voice from all the chanting.
“We derive strength from each other,” he says, as the soon-to-be-notorious Captain Edward Winski walks up to him, followed by a posse of officers. Winski whispers something in Justin’s ear, presumably an order to put down the megaphone. But Justin continues: “More important than that, though”—until Winski grabs him, throws him to the ground, folds his arms expertly around his back, and takes him away.
“Shame! Shame!” shout Occupiers, and, “The whole world is watching!” That was the last time I saw any of them with a megaphone on Liberty Square.
Ten minutes later, the police were back. A group of them approached an Occupier near the rear of the meeting. As he was accosted and cuffed, officers shoved others aside, who started chanting the NYPD’s motto, “Courtesy, professionalism, respect!” In the scuffle, a guy who had been making peace signs with both hands high above his head was pushed to the ground and arrested as well.
The incursions seemed timed to prevent a repeat of the big march and picket at the Stock Exchange that had begun around that time the day before. But if that was the case, the police needn’t have bothered; Tuesday’s march was planned for 9:00, and I looked at my cell phone as it started and saw that the time was 9:00 on the dot. I don’t recall, before or since, Occupiers ever doing anything quite so punctually.
As if in retaliation for the march, cops were back on the plaza again an hour later. This time the excuse was the tarp that had been laid over sensitive media equipment. By then it was raining, and nearly all the Occupiers’ possessions had been collected under tarps, plastic bags, and unassembled tents. But the media area was what interested the police. A group of officers approached the tarp, and the officer in charge gave orders through a megaphone that it should be removed. An Occupier climbed on top of it, banging a drumstick against a pan lid. He was grabbed, but slipped away, and began drumming again. Then, several officers took him to the ground. While he was being cuffed and beaten, he cried out, “I can’t breathe!” and called for his inhaler.
Another, Jason Ahmadi, then stepped up to hold the tarp in his place. Jason had already been arrested the day before for writing “Love” on the sidewalk, just after a woman had been arrested for sidewalk chalking as well. This time, going limp, he was pulled off the tarp by police officers, dragged, cuffed, and then dragged more across the plaza and the sidewalk on his back, with his hands trapped in plastic cuffs between the sidewalk and his back. By the end of it, they were discolored and bloody.
One other guy close to me was grabbed too, and the cops pushed his face into a flower bed while he was cuffed. As a woman was taken away to a police van, a man ran after her shouting that he loved her. She, like several other female protesters that week, was taken not just to jail but to a psychiatric evaluation, as if on suspicion of hysteria.
Officers finally removed the tarp from the media equipment, exposing it to the rain, and left the plaza with other tarps, tents, and trash bags still in place. There was a standoff on the edge of the sidewalk as protesters chanted, shouted, and stood silently before the police, who at last received the order to withdraw.
There were seven arrests that morning, in three incursions. Each of them, for the Occupiers, was a new trial. They warned each other of the next incursion with steady tom-tom beats and other loud noises. Some offered acts of dignified resistance, while others yelled angrily, or sang chants, or simply watched. At the end of the last incident, a group convened to discuss deescalation techniques.
By late morning in Liberty Square, under a light drizzle, there was a feeling of drifting, of lost cohesion. The holdouts tried to find things to do, like hold signs, or play music in their underwear for the police, or defiantly recline on tarps, or arrange for the next meal. There was serious talk about abandoning the plaza, about other places to go in the area: south to Battery Park or west to the Irish Hunger Memorial. Maybe that was the fear talking, or maybe it was undercover cops, or maybe it was sensible. But once again inertia carried the day. The occupation did what it did best: it stayed.
The Command Post truck pulled away at 11:42 and was replaced by vans full of officers on each of the four sides of the plaza. People whispered about whether a dispersal was imminent but then changed the subject and carried on with their business.
When a group of Danish students stopped to watch the underwear musicians, a bearded Occupier from Massachusetts took the opportunity to tell them about what was happening in the plaza. He did so while teaching them the people’s mic—slowly, one phrase at a time, in rhythmic call-and-response, like he was reciting a fairy tale. “We are out here.” (Repeat.) “Because we’ve had enough.” (Repeat.) He talked about the bailouts, and the banks, and the General Assembly. After the morning the occupation had had, he told me, he had to remind himself of why his friends had been hurt and arrested and why he was still there.
The police vans drove away at 12:03, leaving the usual handful of officers and cars and the mobile observation tower on the northwest side. An hour later, in time for the General Assembly meeting, the whole place felt different. The rain had stopped, and there were perhaps three times as many people, with new faces as well as familiar ones. The sidewalk along Broadway was full of Occupiers holding signs again, and the GA process was gearing up. Videos of the morning’s action were spreading on YouTube. I talked with a man from Washington Heights—on the far north end of Manhattan—who had come for the first time after learning about the occupation on the Internet. People seemed happy, and eager, and curious. The next morning, this little secret of a place was the cover story of the tabloid newspaper Metro, with pictures of the arrests.
Getting arrested, on purpose or otherwise, was new to a lot of these people, but not to Jason Ahmadi. Just days before the occupation he’d arrived in New York from a homeless, vagabonding life in the Bay Area, where over the years he was involved in tree sits, banner drops, Food Not Bombs groups, and hunger strikes—that is, after he got over playing lots of video games in college at Berkeley. He came to New York for a War Resisters League meeting and decided to stick around for the occupation. The city made him crazy, though, and he could take it for only so long at a time before he had to get out to swim in a lake somewhere.
He once authored a typewriter-and-handwriting zine, Arlo’s Cooking Corner, a practical, scientific, and philosophical guide to wrapping heated pots in blankets for long periods of time. “i love experimenting,” it says in type at the outset of the section on baking. “it is how i grow as an individual.” Hand-written on the back cover: “figure it out yourself.”
Jason had wild, dark hair and wore colorful secondhand sweaters. In ordinary conversation he was all over the place with his moods and convictions, but when talking to the press or facilitating a meeting, there was hardly anyone more sure with words. His skill as a slow cooker expressed itself in a contentious room, which he could let simmer as the hidden consensus slowly started to express itself, but then pluck out whatever nonsense might fall in and mess up the process.
While Jason was in police custody, I felt a special urge to keep an eye on his white poster-board sign to keep it from falling into a puddle or getting thrown out. This became my mission. “The world has enough for everyone’s NEED but not for everyone’s GREED,” it said, in the words of Gandhi. NEED was in blue, GREED was in pink, and the rest was in black. A couple of times, when I felt tired of reporting or talking to people or worrying about the cops, I held that sign myself on Broadway, in a row with all the other sign holders, watching the reactions of the people passing by with a dull expression on my face. Doing so would send me into a kind of trance, a bliss, although tinged by journalistic guilt. Yet what was not objective about holding a message so damning and elegant and true, which nobody can really deny? Maybe reporters should do this more often.
In the center of Liberty Square at any given time, a dozen or so people were huddled around computers in the media area, pushing out tweets, blog posts, and the (theoretically) twenty-four-hour streaming video—soon to sprout into many copycat channels. They could edit and post clips of arrests in no time flat, then bombard Twitter until the clips went viral. The Internet, in its own way, was becoming occupied by this movement. But for outsiders looking to understand even the basic facts about what was actually going on—before September 17 and after—the Internet was as much a source of confusion as anything else. Reporters would come looking for Adbusters staff, or US Day of Rage members, or Obama supporters, or hackers from Anonymous. The everpresent WikiLeaks truck—marked “Mobile Information Collection Unit,” and with a bed inside for the artist who drove it—led some to wonder whether Julian Assange himself might miraculously appear. Reporters were briefly disappointed to find none of the above.
Because of the General Assembly’s early hiccups in setting up a website during the planning process, the occupation’s online presence was left to the whims of improvisation. A transgender Internet security expert, Justine Tunney, registered the OccupyWallSt.org web domain anonymously on July 14 and started assembling a team to populate it. The site became the main clearinghouse for information about the occupation’s progress, and soon it was getting as many as fifty thousand visitors per day. That first week at Liberty Square, as I looked over Justine’s shoulder at a laptop screen with an open Internet relay chat channel and a usage graph for the Iceland-based server (which needed monitoring in case of distributed-denial-of-service attacks), she explained:
OccupyWallSt.org is all open source. It’s under full revision control, so you can see every change I make, except to the articles. Go through this history, it’s all up here. Right now I’m trying to get more developers to help me out with this. So far I’m the only person developing it, and that’s bad. I’m a firm believer in collective responsibility, because if I get hit by a bus, people are screwed.
In Nebraska, a pair of web designers who couldn’t make it to New York set up OccupyTogether.org to coordinate the occupations beginning to appear around the country. Less happily, a document called “Occupy Wall Street—Official Demands,” eerily dated September 20, 2013, was being circulated and discussed online. It included detailed proposals for reforming the financial system, none of which had been approved by the GA. Speculation abounded on the Internet, too, about the occupation’s institutional sponsors—big labor, the Democrats, and so forth—but five minutes at a GA meeting would have easily disabused one of such associations. The Occupiers had hardly any organizational friends yet. Besides the thousands upon thousands of dollars that were pouring into the food fund but were stuck in an inaccessible WePay account, the movement had almost no money. There were a handful of Occupiers with Guy Fawkes masks backward on their heads, suggesting to some that Anonymous might somehow be in charge, but they were just one cadre among many.
I was spending every minute I could moving from happening to happening in the park, an endless parade of encounters. I’d go on most marches and sleep little at night. But there were also people I knew who were stuck in offices all day, watching on Twitter and Livestream. We’d compare what we knew and what we’d seen. They, by the light of the Internet, had seen much that I had missed, which often had little to do with what had filled my days on the ground. They could follow news from the other occupations cropping up in other cities, for instance, but not always the latest drama at Liberty. There could be no one all-seeing eye—not in the news, not on the plaza, not over the Internet. There was so, so much that I missed.
What was actually under way at Liberty Square was both simpler and more complicated than anyone not there could imagine: talking, making, organizing, eating, marching, dancing, sparring with police, and (not enough) sleeping. Cops and Occupiers alike used the bathrooms at the nearby McDonald’s. Nobody was exactly sure yet who was doing what, but it was more or less working, and they were learning. Everyone was doing something. Some, both women and men, were doing so topless.
In all sorts of subtle ways the occupation was riding the momentum that came from the GA meetings that had been going on for a month and a half before it began. Those meetings built a community of people who trusted one another, who had a sense of one another’s skills, and who were in some basic agreement about ends and means. To survive, however, this community would have to grow. Whole swaths of Americans—from immigrants to day workers to children—were largely missing among the Occupiers. There was a lot of talk about doing real outreach—door to door, subway car to subway car—but the overeducated young radical set that was dominant tended to stick with clever tweets and viral videos for the time being. And at least they could march.
On Thursday evening, a vigil gathered at Union Square to mourn the execution of Troy Davis, a black man in Georgia, and Occupiers went up there to stir the vigil into a march toward Liberty. Police tried to stop them with barricades and clubs and arrests, but they couldn’t; when the marchers arrived, the numbers in the plaza swelled like they never had before. There were a lot of new faces and new kinds of faces. It paid off to quit the Internet, to go where people actually were and bring them back.
At the GA that night, Ted Actie, a producer for a black-owned TV production company in Brooklyn, called on the protesters to speak more directly to the communities around them. “You do so much social networking,” he said, “you forget how to socialize.”
Overheard at a miscellaneous meeting:
Occupier 1: “I hate and love the Internet.”
Occupier 2: “It’s complicated with the Internet.”
Some people muttered about whether all the outrage about Troy Davis’s death, even if he was falsely convicted, really had anything to do with occupying Wall Street. Did JPMorgan Chase kill Troy Davis? Did Bank of America? One old socialist said they did. Really, though, the crowd that poured into the park from that march was answer enough. Those faces seemed to make clear that if these Occupiers were going to talk about inequality and corruption in the United States of America, and in New York, they couldn’t just talk about high finance. They would have to talk about race and about inequality’s ugliest consequences. The task of occupying Wall Street was starting to reveal itself as more bewildering a project than most people might have thought.
Maybe that’s why, one afternoon, an Occupier with long blond hair and multicolored spandex leggings got up on a table in the middle of the park during a moment of despair, announcing that he was going to drive a nail through his hand “in solidarity with Jesus Christ,” “in solidarity with Troy Davis.” He was, however, dissuaded.
Marking the one-week anniversary of the beginning of the occupation, a large march was planned for noon on Saturday. It was September 24. Several hundred marchers paraded around the plaza to their favorite chant, “All Day! All Week! Occupy Wall Street!” and headed down to the Wall Street area, where police arrested several of them. The march kept going and continued up to Union Square. Upon arriving, there was some debate about what to do next, until finally most people turned south again for the two-and-a-half-mile journey back to Liberty Square. That was when the police attacked.
At around 3 P.M., near Fifth Avenue and Twelfth Street, officers began unrolling plastic orange barriers, isolating a crowd of marchers—along with reporters and onlookers—and began arresting everyone inside for blocking traffic. Caught on cameras were scenes of one protester being dragged by her hair, and others being slammed into the pavement. The most notorious scene of the day, though, was the video of a group of women, already trapped by the net, who were writhing and screaming as Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna doused them in pepper spray.
In total, police arrested eighty people. With not enough room for them in vans, many were taken away in city buses. The march thereafter dispersed, and those who weren’t arrested made their way back to the Financial District.
No one, afterward, felt safe. It seemed certain that a full-on police dispersal would come that night. Contingency plans were being discussed in the General Assembly. Those who would drop by days or weeks later never felt how uncertain everything was the first nights, when the village being built on the plaza seemed so fragile, so liable to be destroyed at any moment in a surprise police sweep, like a thief in the night.
A bit after ten, though, there was a celebration around the media tables. Photocopied facsimiles of Sunday’s New York Daily News were being passed around and photographed. After having held the plaza with hundreds of protesters at any given time for a week and having kept the blocks surrounding the Stock Exchange barricaded by police all the while, the protest had finally caught a major paper’s attention.
“The Daily News!” I heard someone say. “We’ve already won!”
In an article that recounts as many gory details as would fit, the Daily News devoted only two short paragraphs to what the occupation was actually about and what protesters had been doing all this time: “attempting to draw attention to what they believe is a dysfunctional economic system that unfairly benefits corporations and the mega-rich.” The real story, rather, was not this unusual kind of protest, or how it functioned, or exactly what conditions provoked it, but the excuse to have the word busted on the cover next to the cleavage of a woman crying out in pain under a cop’s knee.
The Occupiers didn’t care. The Daily News and the presence of TV vans all around seemed like guardian angels, ensuring that the occupation would survive until morning.
Thanks to the activist habit of ressentiment, acquired by seeing protest after protest fail to make headlines, the Occupiers had planned for creating their own media much more than serving anyone else’s. There was no place in the encampment more seemingly sophisticated and elite than the jumble of glowing laptops and indiscernible wires around the media center; visitors passed by it with awe for this physical manifestation of the age of the hashtag. To Occupiers it was the source of such precious commodities as wifi and outlets, which were available only to those who could appear to be doing official movement-media business. As time passed, the right to be inside its bounds—marked, at first, by a ring of parked bikes—was ever more jealously guarded. This was an important place.
The level of preparation was almost zero, however, for co-opting traditional news outlets. At the outset no official working group had the job of doing the press releases, the hand-holding, and the modicum of homage that the modern reporter expects. It was mainly just Patrick Bruner who was doling out interviews, posting “communiqués” at OccupyWallSt.org, keeping reporters informed, and, unintentionally, spreading false rumors. Many others at Liberty weren’t even aware he was doing it.
