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