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,
