Lasn’s mother—and “BRING TENT.” The image appeared as a centerfold in an issue titled “Post Anarchism,” which also included an article by David Graeber. With that, more or less, the magazine’s logistical guidance ended.
“What we want to play is a more philosophical role,” Adbusters’ twenty-nine-year-old senior editor, Micah White, told me in August. Not dirtying its hands with organizing became just part of the aesthetic, part of the mystique.
Almost at once, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, and Internet Relay Chat channels started appearing and connecting. “#OCCUPYWALLSTREET goes viral,” Adbusters announced in a “Tactical Briefing” e-mail on July 26. The following day, Alexa O’Brien’s US Day of Rage declared its support for the occupation. O’Brien and the colleagues she’d found online were organizing actions on September 17 in Los Angeles, Portland, Austin, Seattle, and San Francisco, in addition to Wall Street. Her press releases and tweets became so ubiquitous that people started referring to #OCCUPYWALLSTREET and US Day of Rage interchangeably.
I first heard about the idea of occupying Wall Street while attending the planning meetings of yet another group that, since April, had been planning another indefinitely long occupation of a symbolic public space. In late July I attended one of its meetings, around a conference table in an office above Broadway shared by a handful of New York activist organizations. Those present, both in person and over video-chat, included some of the hardiest survivors of Bush-era dissent. They were mostly middle-aged, frustrated, and ready for a breakthrough. This October 2011 Coalition intended to set up camp at Freedom Plaza in Washington DC starting on October 6, in time for the tenth anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. “Stop the machine!” went their slogan, “Create a new world!”
In early August, Al Gore told TV commentator Keith Olbermann, “We need to have an American Spring.” But people all over the country were already fumbling toward an American Autumn.
What, if anything, the hubbub online actually amounted to remained opaque. “We are not a political party,” Alexa O’Brien told me when I asked her about the nature of US Day of Rage in mid-August. “We are an idea.” Here’s how she described its genesis, out of the inspiration of the Arab Spring:
I felt that something needed to be done to help people have a space where they could discuss these issues and their self-interest without ideological talking points. I asked them to list their grievances on a hashtag—US Day of Rage asked people to list their grievances. Originally we were going to put them into columns. But what ended up happening is we realized that most of the grievances, whether on the left or the right, could be linked to corrupt elections. So we decided to keep it really simple. We need to reform our elections.
The idea that emerged out of these discussions on social media was an especially drastic kind of campaign finance reform: “One citizen. One dollar. One vote.”
She went on:
I wouldn’t even call myself an activist. I’m a normal nobody. I’m a nobody. I always say that. For me, this is an avocation. It’s an idea of service to my country, to my community, and to other people. In the beginning it was me, but I have to say “we,” because there was the hashtag as well. And it’s not me. In the beginning we had the hashtag, and we had a Facebook page. And what we did was we built a platform.
The platform also had a theme song, which appeared on the website in the form of an embedded YouTube video: the theme from the 1970s show Free to Be . . . You and Me.
On August 23, an Adbusters e-mail featured a video of Anonymous’s headless-man logo and a computerized voice declaring support for #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. Soon there were rumors that the Department of Homeland Security had issued a warning about September 17 and Anonymous; Anonymous bombarded mainstream news outlets with tweets demanding that they cover the story.
Micah White:
I see stuff on Twitter from people saying that we had interaction and then we cut off communication, but we never had any. I never communicated with Anonymous.
Alexa O’Brien:
They [Homeland Security] believe that we are high-level Anonymous members, which is really a joke. . . . We have had no contact with Anonymous. And that’s the honest truth.
An occupation, by definition, has to start with people physically present. Social media, even with whatever aid and cachet Anonymous might lend, isn’t enough—witness the failure of OpESR. Until August 2, when the NYC General Assembly began to meet near the Charging Bull statue at Bowling Green, #OCCUPYWALLSTREET was still just a hashtag.
That first meeting was hosted by the coalition behind Bloombergville, New Yorkers against Budget Cuts, which had exchanged e-mails with Adbusters. Others learned about the assembly at a report-back from anti-austerity movements around the world at the nearby 16 Beaver Street art space on July 31. What was advertised as an open assembly began like a rally, with Workers World Party members and those of other groups making speeches over a portable PA system to the hundred or so people there. But the anarchists started to heckle the socialists, and the socialists heckled back. The meeting melted down. Here’s how one participant, Jeremy Bold, described what took place in an e-mail the next day:
[A] few participants were adamantly opposed to the initial speak-out sessions being voiced through the loudspeaker, proclaiming that it was “not a general assembly” and demanding that a more open GA be created. Though organizers quickly shifted to the general assembly structure for the meeting, maintaining use of the loudspeaker caused the opposed participants to organize their own assembly, causing a brief bifurcation in the group: one group utilizing the GA structure of an open floor but maintaining the loudspeaker to contend with the traffic noise, the other group seating themselves in a circle closer to Bowling Green park. The breakaway faction had objected to the format because it appeared to function more like a rally than a GA and expressed concerns about being forced to speak under a particular political party or viewpoint [, and the breakaway faction] voiced this criticism; as they broke off to begin the GA, participants were stuck between the two groups. As the power began to die from the loudspeaker, the group voted by simple majority to move to the traditional GA and joined the circle, in which the GA was already under way.
Those who stuck around got what the anarchists wanted, and perhaps more: a leaderless assembly, microphone-free and in a circle, that dragged the 4:30 P.M. event on until 8:30, with some people staying around to talk until eleven o’clock. They started using the language of the 1 percent versus the other 99—independently, it seems, of David DeGraw and A99. Working groups formed to do outreach, to produce media, to provide food.
Despite the presence of people from various contingents of the sectarian left who made their affiliations known with T-shirts and specialized rhetoric, none of these groups could dominate the NYC General Assembly. New York’s activists at that point were splintered and frustrated, and no one group could do much of anything on its own. One of them with a considerable role, the invitation-only Organization for a Free Society, was not the kind to announce its presence, and its members seemed to operate as individuals, not as representatives of a bloc. Even the anarchists, who set the format of the GA and furnished some of its more influential interventions, were in no position to run the show entirely. David Graeber told me,
The anarchist scene in New York had been very fragmented. The insurrectionists versus the SDS people—there’d been all these splits. It had become a little dysfunctional. The New York scene was fucked up, to be perfectly honest.
Describing the makeup of the GA, Graeber continued:
There was one fairly small crew—capital-A insurrectionary anarchists, they were there. But there was mainly what I like to call the small-a anarchists, people like
