Figure 3.1 Map of Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park), September 17–November 15, 2011. Credit: Aaron Carretti.
September 17–October 1, 2011
On the morning of September 17, 2011, I awake to an alarm from halfway around the world. The alarm is sounded by a string of excited tweets from some of the indignados I met in Spain during the long, hot summer of 2011: “Today Wall Street is occupied, as are many other stock exchanges around the world. #TomaLaBolsa. #OccupyWallStreet.”
I pick up my phone, pad, pen, and camera, and walk out the door in the direction of the J train, bound for downtown Manhattan. As the subway shuttles me across the East River, I survey the scene before me: a picture postcard of my city, but with the Twin Towers excised, the “Freedom Tower” rising in their stead. I do not know it at the time, but in a matter of hours I will be encamped at the foot of that tower, where, just ten years before, the autumn day had turned to darkness, and thousands had turned to dust.
Like many others that day, I will spend the rest of the morning searching for the elusive occupation, following a chain of cues and clues from one site to the next, from one end of the Financial District to the other: “Meet at Chase Manhattan Plaza.” “Chase Plaza’s closed.” “We’re at the Charging Bull.” “We’re at Bowling Green.” Here and there, among the morning rush of stock traders and tourists, I see clusters of ragged youth, visibly out of place with their knapsacks and patched-up jackets, looking dazed, disoriented, in desperate need of directions.
“Which way to Wall Street?” asks a hirsute man with a large pack on his back, a bandana in his back pocket, and a weather-beaten look about him. I point the way, just down Broadway.
After checking in with some friends, I follow the route marked out on the map I’ve been given, only to find every one of the convergence points—Chase Plaza, the Charging Bull, and Wall Street itself—fenced off from one end to the other with barricades known as “cattle pens.” Undaunted, I approach the barricade at Broadway and Wall, which is manned by a dozen officers from the First Precinct, plastic handcuffs dangling from their belts. Two additional officers stand guard at each end of the fence, checking the IDs of local workers, bankers, and brokers.
“We want to see Wall Street,” insists an intrepid tourist, waving his wallet in the air.
“Sorry,” answers an officer in a white shirt (the distinctive mark of a police captain). “Street’s closed today.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Protesters,” replies the officer, with a smirk and a shrug of the shoulders.
“What are they protesting?” inquires the intrepid tourist.
“Everything.”
It seems the New York City Police Department hopes to preempt the “day of rage,” or at least to contain it to an officially designated free speech zone. An NYPD spokesman claims it has offered the occupiers a “protest area” within sight and sound of the Stock Exchange: “A protest area was established on Broad Street at Exchange Street . . . but protesters elected not to use it. None associated with the demonstrations sought permits.”1 Indeed, as I confirm with OWS organizers, no permits had been sought.
After a further exchange of texts and tweets, I proceed to Bowling Green. Fenced out of the Financial District, their plans seemingly foiled (again) by law enforcement, the would-be occupiers have finally begun to find one another, affinity group by affinity group, with the help of smart phones, social media networks, and the Tactical Committee of the nascent New York City General Assembly (NYCGA).2 Here, at last, they are allowed to assemble at the foot of the old U.S. Customs House—now the Museum of the American Indian—under the watchful gaze of a squad of motorcycle policemen.3
As self-appointed speakers take turns soapboxing atop the steps of the museum, affinity groups of would-be occupiers—formed in the days leading up to “S17”—scatter about the open space below. Most keep to themselves. A group of Oberlin students is sitting in a circle on the pavement, formulating their plans and signaling with their hands.
The “day 1 occupiers,” as they would later come to be called, appear to be predominantly—though not overwhelmingly—young, white, and wired. Some of them are bearing large sacks and sleeping bags, but most have come with little more than their smartphones, a few days’ worth of supplies, and the skin on their backs.
I strike up casual conversations here and there with those who are willing to talk to me. Few of them are veteran activists; for many, this will be their first “action.” Few participants, the author included, know what the day holds in store.
“This is it?” asks a young white woman, despairing, after riding a bus all the way from Ohio.
“This is just the beginning,” insists an older white man, appearing, it seems, out of nowhere.
I turn to find another hoisting this sign: “WE ARE TOO BIG TO FAIL.”
All told, those who assemble to march on September 17 number less than 2,000, a far cry from the “flood” of 20,000 promised by Adbusters in its call to action. While there is an audible crescendo of anticipation in the air, there is also a palpable sense of disappointment among many. Others are unfazed, continuing to entertain great expectations of the “day of rage.” There is rage aplenty, to be sure, as sign after sign testifies in cardboard and permanent ink: “Stop Trading Our Future.” “Wall Street Is Destroying America.” “Make the Banks Pay.”4
“We’re going to make our own Tahrir Square here,” intones one of the speakers, before another takes the stage and leads the crowd in a thunderous chant soon to be heard echoing up and down the urban canyons of Lower Manhattan:
“All day, all week! Occupy Wall Street!”
The cry goes up to “march, march, march,” and off we go, northward on Broadway—past the Bull in its bullpen, past the Bank of New York and the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and, to the chagrin of many, past Wall Street itself, its police blockade redoubled. Our final destination is as yet unknown to all but the savviest activists.
Meanwhile, the crowd erupts in a familiar refrain: “Yes we can! Yes we can!” Some interject with a play on the words: “Yes, we camp! Yes, we camp!” These variations on the slogan of the Obama campaign are followed by other classics of yesteryear, from the Clinton-era “This is what democracy looks like!” to the George W. Bush-era “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!”
We are pressed close together, wedged between the buildings to our left and the NYPD motorcade to our right. This physical closeness serves to heighten the sense of community and camaraderie among the marchers.
Spectators snap photos on their smartphones; visitors point and stare from their perches on passing tour buses; local workers look on warily through shop windows; and investment bankers peer down from their castles in the sky, high above the fray.
Still, to many onlookers, it looks like any other day on “the Street” in the age of austerity. The Financial District, after all, is not unfamiliar with the periodic presence of angry protesters. Another day, another holler. Yet this time, they say, will be different.
This time, they say, they are not leaving.
As it turned out, the destination of the occupiers that day was a place called Zuccotti Park (see Figure 3.1), which they soon took to calling “Liberty Square,” “Liberty Plaza,” or “Liberty Park” (as it had been known in the days and months following September 11, 2001).
On ordinary days, the park is an immaculate expanse of granite and greenery, with a scattering of flower planters, built-in lights, benches and tables, and row upon row of hearty honey-locust trees, along with a bronze sculpture of a businessman peering into a briefcase and a soaring red Mark di Suvero sculpture entitled Joie de Vivre (which occupiers would later dub “the Red Thing”). Bounded by Broadway, Trinity Place, Cedar Street, and Liberty Street, the park is uniquely situated between “Ground Zero” one block to the west; City Hall four blocks to the north; and the gates of Wall Street itself, which lie but two blocks to the southeast.5
Figure 3.1 Map of Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park), September 17–November 15, 2011. Credit: Aaron Carretti.
Zuccotti is what is known, in legal terms, as a “privately owned public space.” Its owner is real estate behemoth Brookfield Office Properties, which also owns the World Financial Center and has its headquarters in the adjacent One Liberty Plaza.
Inaugurated in 1968 by U.S. Steel, the park’s creation involved a contract between the city and the company, which agreed to build a “bonus plaza” in return for “incentive zoning.” The agreement featured a stipulation that the park would remain open to the public twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In this respect, it differed from Manhattan’s municipal parks, all of which had early curfews. The deal would remain in place when Liberty was sold to the firm under the chairmanship of John E. Zuccotti.6
Yet the executives of Brookfield Office Properties could not have fathomed what was to become of their pristine property on that Saturday in September. For this emblem of the “private–public partnership”—born of the intimate relationship between business and the state—was about to become synonymous with a grassroots insurgency aimed at this very nexus.7
A little after 3 p.m. on the 17th, the crowd converged on Zuccotti Park, to repeated refrains of “Power to the people,” “People, not profits,” and the rallying cry that was soon to be heard around the world: “We! Are! The 99 Percent! (And so are you!)” Accompanying the voices of the occupiers were drums, guitars, gongs, and vuvuzuelas, and in the background, the hum of conversation, the click of camera shutters, the snap and crackle of police dispatches.
The crowd poured into the park from the southeast corner at Broadway and Cedar Street, following the lead of a handful of organizers from the Tactical Committee, who stood along the edges of the park and waved the crowd west. This time, the NYPD opted not to bar their way; instead, officers established what was to become a permanent presence along the eastern and northern perimeter of the park.
One by one, two by two, men and women got up on the granite benches and, in an accidental dress rehearsal for the “People’s Microphone” (see below), began to chant in call-and-response with the people around them. Elsewhere in the square, I could hear animated debates and heated discussions erupting concerning the aims and principles, the strategies and tactics of the emerging occupation. Some sought to keep marching and “shut down Wall Street,” while a greater share wanted to stay put, sit down, and “hold the space.” A handful voted with their bodies, as they unrolled their sleeping bags and planted themselves on the cold, hard pavement.
Other occupiers were taking up positions all along Broadway, their cardboard signs forming a kind of pop-up gallery of grievances for passersby, photographers, and videographers: “Debt is slavery.” “They think we’re disposable.” “25, college degree, no health care, unemployed + struggling.” “I can’t afford a lobbyist.” “Bailouts = No bonuses. Pay back our money.” Others proclaimed solidarity and declared a collective identity: “We Are the 99 percent.” “We, the People.” “New Yorkers Say Enough.” “If not U.S., who? If not now, when?”
On Broadway, a balding white man and a bespectacled black woman held aloft the Stars and Stripes, while two young white men in kaffiyehs waved a parody of Old Glory, with fifty corporate logos in place of fifty white stars. A grizzled veteran of the Vietnam War stood guard on the corner, waving a flag of peace. Elsewhere, the more militant occupiers raised high the black flag of anarchism, or the red flag of revolutionary socialism. Here and there, Anonymous aficionados flaunted Guy Fawkes masks, alluding to the anarchic anti-hero of V for Vendetta.8
Here were the three faces of OWS, encapsulated in these three clusters of “day 1 occupiers”: The first was faced inward, oriented toward the construction of a model democratic community, toward dialogue and deliberation and consensus. The second was faced outward, aimed at “we, the people” and at the structural transformation of the economy, society, and polity. The third was turned backward, toward the memory of movements past, and aimed at their revival in the present.
Here, then, on the first day, appeared a polarization that would persist and deepen throughout the occupation of Zuccotti Park—not merely along lines of political ideology, strategy, and tactics, but also along lines of underlying motivations, dispositions, interests, and orientations.
For all the differences among the occupiers, the experience of taking Liberty Square—and of holding it, making a home of it, and constructing an experiment in collective living in the midst of the Financial District—was something of a revelation for many. The words of four key organizers evoke some of the emotions stirred by those heady first days of the occupation:
For Priscilla Grim, co-editor of The Occupied Wall Street Journal: “I showed up with my daughter. . . . It was this whole awesome petri dish of political engagement, and trying to figure out what was going to happen next. . . . Because it’s a movement that happened both in spite of itself and by surprise. . . . People were like, ‘So how long exactly are you gonna be there?’ And I said, ‘Til there’s systemic change.’”
For Justine Tunney, founding editor of OccupyWallSt.org: “There was a really strong sense of community with the people who were there . . . and the sense that we were doing something really, really new and unprecedented. We were sort of floating on the euphoria of having the action actually work. We were just experimenting with all these possibilities. And it was like, ‘Wow, where do we go from here?’”
For Georgia Sagri, the performance artist from Athens: “You would go to the park, and it would be this place where you could just hang out and start talking to any kind of person. . . . Creating this environment where you were feeling that, out of this craziness of the city, there was a place where you could feel a part of your dreams . . . of how we want a society to be. You would go there and you would feel okay.”
For Atchu, a student of public health from Rio de Janeiro: “We were all kind of lost in a way . . . and we found each other. And suddenly, almost like a magnet, we were drawn to each other. . . . And when that collision happened, we had a supernova . . . this whole explosion of ideas, of stories, of unforgettable stories . . . and of recognition. People fell in love, people fought. People just recognized each other.”
After the taking of Liberty Square, the question arose on the lips of many, “What do we do now?” “Are we going to occupy, or are we not going to occupy?” Two young activists, a man and a woman, got up on a granite bench in the very center of the park and addressed the crowd, passing a megaphone back and forth and calling the occupiers to order amid the chaos. The crowd was asked to “break out” into small groups to discuss “why we are frustrated,” “what inspires us,” and “what we would like to see in the world”—and to deliberate what it was the occupiers were going to do next. They would then reassemble, report back, and strive to come to a consensus. It was here, in the general assembly (GA), that the Occupy universe would find its symbolic center of gravity. The GA represented the point at which the occupiers came together to forge a common agenda, to address concerns, to debate proposals, and ultimately—if they were lucky—to reach a democratic decision on a collective course of action.9
Neither the general assembly nor the occupation itself were original inventions, but improvisations on already existing repertoires with long lineages in local, national, and international movements. Yet the occupiers were not lacking in innovations of their own. One of the most important of these innovations was the particular use of the “People’s Microphone” (or “People’s Mic”).10 The technique would prove an indispensable tool in the Occupy toolkit, both in New York City and beyond, helping to amplify, to unify, and to popularize the 99 Percent movement.
The “microphone” represented a people-powered amplification device for the words of the occupiers, whereby each echoed the voice of the other until everyone in the vicinity could hear what was being said. This invention, too, was mothered by necessity, having its genesis in the refusal of the NYPD to permit the use of traditional microphones, megaphones, or any other form of electronic amplification in the square.
Initially, the technique was an adaptation of a longstanding practice in American direct action movements, from civil rights to global justice, in which participants would chant, sing, or communicate information by way of call-and-response. The innovation lay in the everyday use of call-and-response, not only as a means of communication, but also as a mode of decision-making and community organizing.11
There was a simple modus operandi to the People’s Mic: An occupier would announce that s/he had something to say with the words, “mic check!” Upon hearing a “mic check,” those within earshot would respond with a “mic check” of their own, until the entire crowd was listening and, in unison or in waves, echoing the words of the original speaker. The speaker would go on to deliver his or her message through this mass medium, but would be obliged to do so in intervals, pausing every few words to allow the “microphone” to work its magic.
As the occupation grew in size and scope, it became necessary to conduct the People’s Mic in three to four waves, with each wave echoing the last from the center of the assembly to the periphery, and carrying the words of the speakers from one end of the square to the other. Ultimately, the amplification device could then be extended even further into space and cyberspace (e.g., by way of links, “likes,” and “retweets”).
The People’s Mic presented certain advantages over more conventional forms of amplification. First, it worked—easily and organically—allowing people to communicate their emotions, cognitions, and decisions without recourse to sound permits or high-tech gadgets. Second, the method served as a mnemonic device and a reflexive mechanism, encouraging speakers to think through what it was they were saying and enabling audiences to remember what it was that had been said. Third, the technique was a source of solidarity, wrought by the experience of speaking the words of others and of hearing one’s own words spoken through hundreds of other mouths. Fourth, the mic check made space for a multiplicity of voices and visions, inviting participants to reflect on the words of those they disagreed with, and rendering the occupiers more inclusive and more sensitive to the differences among them. In this way, the medium became the message, as the “mic check” came to embody just the sort of participatory politics and horizontal sociality that the occupiers sought to engender.
The People’s Mic came to occupy pride of place in the life of the movement. Anyone could participate in the practice, and nearly everybody did. Within days, the technique had been taken up by other occupiers in other squares. Entire general assemblies were conducted via “mic checks,” as were soapbox speakouts, poetry readings, storytelling circles, street performances, and even religious services (such as the Jewish High Holidays). The practice gave the occupiers a distinctive, and distinctly democratic, means of communication, and quite literally gave voice to individuals who had long felt themselves unheard in political life. As important as online social media were to prove to the growth of the occupations, I would suggest that the People’s Mic was equally instrumental as a mode of interactivity, insofar as it offered a way for people on the ground to understand one another, to speak and to be heard by one another.
That first week of the occupation, the author became one of the occupiers. I was a regular participant in, as well as a partisan observer of, everyday life in and around the camp. I made daily visits to Liberty Square, where I spent several hours at a time; documented assemblies, direct actions, and interpersonal interactions; and, from time to time, camped out overnight. In the process, I was introduced to the inner workings of the occupation, the infrastructure that sustained it, and the people who made it possible. I also took note of the emerging divisions among the occupiers, and the contradictions between occupation in theory and occupation in practice.
At first, in the absence of an infrastructure, everyday life in the camp was a continual improvisation. Few had expected the occupation to last overnight, and fewer still had anticipated it would last past Monday. Occupiers dined on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and scavenged bunches of fruit. They made use of the “privately owned public spaces” in the area, such as Trinity Church properties and the Deutsche Bank atrium at 60 Wall Street. They lined up for public bathrooms and power outlets in local eating and drinking places. And they hoped for the best as they tweeted the “#needsoftheoccupiers” to friends and strangers across the country. By day, they scrawled their protest signs on the backs of cardboard boxes, and by night, in imitation of the city’s homeless, those who didn’t have sleeping bags lay down to sleep on these very cardboard boxes.
Out of this improvised and largely unplanned experiment in collective living arose a set of counterinstitutions to meet the needs, desires, and demands of the occupiers of Liberty Square. For the organizers knew that the occupation could not stand on its symbolic strength alone; the occupiers needed to be fed, sheltered, kept clean, kept safe, and taken care of, if the occupation was to survive its first week. Some of these counterinstitutions—among them the Food, Medic, and Internet working groups—grew out of preexisting committees established by the NYCGA prior to September 17. Others—such as those organized around the provision of “comfort,” “sanitation,” “security,” and “sustainability”—came into being only after day 1, as unmet needs were identified, and as the GA agreed to delegate tasks to working groups.
Amid the seemingly anarchic ethos of the camp, each of the counterinstitutions claimed its own time and place (see Figure 3.1), lending the days and nights at Liberty Square a degree of organization and structure that was often invisible to outsiders.
In the center of the park stood the People’s Kitchen, which the Food Working Group was able to keep well-stocked, after the first few days, with contributions from local eateries, along with $1,800 in purchases called in from around the world. To the west was a site for medical care, manned by a team of “street medics,” and to the east, a “sacred space” and an area for “arts in action.” At the northeast corner was a center for legal assistance and an independent media center, which featured members of the Media Working Group broadcasting the latest news by way of laptops and smartphones. At the southeast corner stood a welcome table and information booth, which served as a point of entry for newcomers and a point of contact for passersby.
The physical infrastructure of the camp was accompanied by a sophisticated digital infrastructure—from open-source websites like NYCGA.net and OccupyWallSt.org to commercial social media sites like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook—which helped to connect the nodes of the growing Occupy network.
The institutional infrastructure that emerged in and around Liberty Square over the course of that first week served to meet the needs of the occupiers and to sustain the camp itself from one day to the next. Yet, as many of the occupiers told me at the time, the operations of these counterinstitutions also served as a way in to the movement, a source of solidarity, a method of practical pedagogy, and a counterpoint to the age of austerity and the state’s retrenchment of social services.
“We built structures for people,” says Justin Wedes, a young, white schoolteacher and a member of the Food and Media working groups. “We built a kitchen, we built a comfort center, we build a media center, we built a library . . . every little thing we could do to make life in that park hospitable, and to make it just the opposite of [everything that surrounded it]. It was a classroom . . . and people didn’t want to leave.”
There was not a single day in the square that could be taken as typical, for the dynamics of the occupation were ever in flux. There was, however, a set of daily rituals and routines of reproduction that gave the occupation a distinctive rhythm to live by.
On day 5 of the occupation, after a night spent in the park—marked by little sleep and much excitement—I awoke to the sound of a “mic check” announcing the agenda for the day and the meeting point for the morning march on Wall Street. I surveyed the scene about the square, with its patchwork of sleeping bags, travelers’ packs, camping supplies, kitchen provisions, and hand-printed signs all strewn about the pavement.
By 9 a.m., Liberty Square was abuzz with activity. The drummers, flag-wavers, and sign-bearers had arrayed themselves along Broadway—“Take Back America,” “Bring Back Glass-Steagall,” “Wall Street Took My Money and Madoff,” “JOIN US”—alongside a growing swarm of spectators, commuters, reporters, and police officers. Beneath the honey-locust trees in the center of the park, volunteers were serving a modest breakfast of fruit and cereal from granite benches, which were marked off with stained cardboard signs reading, “Kitchen: Keep Clear.”
Here and there, affinity groups had formed to plan the day’s direct actions, starting with the daily march on Wall Street, while the organic intellectuals had already launched into their diatribes and debates: on financial reform and electoral reform, the capitalist system and the two-party system, the homeland security state and the state of the unions, the possibility and desirability of revolution in the United States, and so on.
While hundreds circled the park in preparation for the first of the two daily marches—insisting that, “walking speaks louder than talking,” and exhorting us all to “march! march! march!”—others opted to remain in and around the park, whether holding court on Broadway, taking to their laptops along Liberty Street, meditating beneath the “Tree of Life” on Trinity Street, or joining one of the many working group meetings already in progress all about the plaza.
Here, on the northeast corner, was the National Lawyers’ Guild and the Activist Legal Team, who were sharing strategies for the legal defense of the latest arrestees. There, to the south, were the street medics, with their black-and-red crosses, already preparing for the next pepper-spraying. Here, to the north, was the OWS Media Working Group, with its laptop live streamers broadcasting the latest from Liberty Square. And there, again, was the Food Working Group, already on to its second shift of the day.
Madeline Nelson, a middle-aged white woman and longtime local activist who says she devoted seventy hours a week to the occupation, fondly recalls “the energy around the kitchen” and “the deeply satisfying manual work of feeding anyone who wanted food with the huge flow of donated supplies that were pouring into the park . . . loading food donations, serving them, turning them into meals right there in the park, walking the park with pizza . . . plugging in eager volunteers.”
The working groups functioned by means of voluntary association, delegation, and an organic division of labor. There were no formal barriers to entry. Anyone could volunteer for any working group they wished, for as many hours a day and as many days a week as they could afford. Yet from the outset, there were clear distinctions based on the unequal distribution of time and tasks. For one, there were distinctions between groups—above all, between those who did the cooking, cleaning, and caring and those who did the planning, typing, and talking. There were also distinctions within groups—between insiders and outsiders, self-appointed coordinators and volunteer laborers.
There was no monetary compensation for the work to be carried out by the working groups, and the tasks to be done were often thankless and arduous. For most of the occupiers who participated, theirs was a labor of love. But there were alternative (and generally unspoken) incentives also in evidence among them. For coordinators, there was prestige to be had, public recognition to be garnered, and a degree of power to be gained within the larger organization of the camp. For the laborers, there was “mutual aid” to be exchanged, practical knowledge to be acquired, and, at the very least, the respect and recognition of one’s fellow occupiers to be won.
That day, the general assembly got off to an early start, following a generous lunch, a raucous drum circle, and a series of unprovoked arrests on the corner of Broadway and Liberty Street. Against the backdrop of a sign proclaiming, “Today Is Day Five,” and another reading, “Welcome to Liberty Square,” the assembly was called to order by a duet of first-time facilitators known as Ketchup and Emery. They urged, “People need to be patient with the process and each other,” and called for “two people to act as human mics.” In response to popular demand, they went on to ask for a moment of silence for Troy Davis, a death row inmate who was to be executed that night by the state of Georgia. After the moment of silence, the “mic checks” commenced in earnest, with the words of each speaker rippling out in waves through the throng.
At this point, the working groups lined up to present what they were about, why it was important, and how others could help them in their work. First, the Direct Action and Legal teams presented the group with new “guidelines”: “If you’re arrested . . . don’t resist.” “Don’t instigate conflict with cops or pedestrians.” “Stay together and keep moving.” “Respect how your actions can affect the larger group.” Second, representatives of the People’s Kitchen pleaded with the assembly to “be mindful, try to keep the area clean, save your water bottles.” Third, members of the Media Working Group pointed out that, “Most of what we’re doing here has to do with media. . . . These videos [of actions and arrests] are our biggest opportunity to spread the message.” They also warned of “people who are on the fringe,” and those who “say things that supposedly represent our views, but in reality, do not.” “Stay far away from them,” they urged.
To project a more cohesive, more coherent message, the assembly then settled on an initial statement of purpose: “We are a collection of people with diverse beliefs, using a direct democratic process . . . open to the public . . . to discuss, find solutions, and mobilize ourselves. To create a better tomorrow. To invite people of all beliefs and backgrounds to join the struggle.”12
The discussion was punctuated by periodic “points of process,” “points of information,” and other matters communicated by way of the customary hand signals (see Chapter 2). The agenda was also punctuated, now and again, by reports of arrests; “vibe checks” (“How’s everybody feeling? Is there anybody not feeling good?”); and the practice of “progressive stack” (“We want to check in with the ladies”).
Yet in spite of the elaborate mechanisms in place to empower the disempowered and ensure the equal participation of all, it was becoming clear that the college-educated and more affluent occupiers—above all, the bearded white men among them—had already assumed (or been ceded) positions of power, influence, and informal leadership as the “coordinators.” They had done so by way of an unspoken division of labor that ran throughout the working groups and, increasingly, through the general assembly itself.13
From the first, the occupiers had organized their efforts around a strategy of nonviolent direct action, aimed at peaceably but forcefully confronting, disrupting, and delegitimizing the workings of “business as usual” throughout Lower Manhattan. Now, with Liberty Square as a base camp, the more action-oriented among the occupiers moved to extend the scope of the occupation to the institutions they held responsible for the economic crisis—and, they hoped, to turn it into a political crisis for the “1 Percent.”
Their primary target, of course, was Wall Street itself, while their principal audience was a public to whom the movement remained, by and large, an unknown quantity. Yet, by the end of week 1, through the combined efforts of the Direct Action and Media working groups—and with the unwitting collaboration of the NYPD—the occupiers would manage not only to disrupt the flow of business as usual, but to seize the media megaphone and use it to speak to “99 Percent” audiences across America.14
To strike at their primary target, and to reach out directly to the local public, the occupiers initiated a series of twice-daily “marches on Wall Street,” timed to coincide with the opening and closing bells of the NY Stock Exchange. The marches started on the morning of day 2 of the occupation, to the tune of “All day, all week! Occupy Wall Street!” They followed a predictable route, first circling the park, then spilling out the eastern side, snaking down Broadway, looping around Bowling Green, and getting as close as they possibly could to Wall Street and the Stock Exchange before being turned back. That first Sunday, to the surprise of many observers, the police stood down, allowing the marchers to march that morning, and permitting the occupiers to occupy in peace that night. On Monday morning, however, the department’s tactics shifted, as workers, bankers, and brokers returned to their offices to the sight of a budding occupation and a growing police presence throughout the Financial District.
The arrests began on day 3, allegedly for the use of children’s chalk on public sidewalks surrounding the park. Other arrests were for the unpermitted operation of amplified sound, as megaphones were seized and speakers led away in handcuffs. On day 4, the situation escalated dramatically. At 7 a.m., occupiers awoke to the first of many raids on the park, and the first of many battles over what constituted appropriate use of its private–public space. Some of the occupiers had deployed a couple of tarps overnight to protect themselves and their laptops from the rain; the tarps were soon deemed illegal “structures” and confiscated by the police. Thanks to the online and offline efforts of the Media Working Group, tens of thousands watched as the officers drew first blood, dragging occupiers along the pavement, along with their illicit tarps, and denying medical care to one young man, who was targeted for arrest in the midst of an asthma attack.15
“Occupy wasn’t particularly doing anything that was wrong, or breaking any laws,” says Bill Dobbs, an outspoken, gay white man from New York City and a veteran of the ACT UP and anti-war movements. “The NYPD, with guns and nightsticks . . . would say, ‘We’ve had enough of you’ and arbitrarily shut down actions, actively blocking the constitutionally protected right to protest [and] to assemble.”
That week saw three “direct actions,” in particular, that marked decisive moments in the growth of the occupation beyond Zuccotti Park, both in its demography and in its geography (see Figure 3.2). The first was in protest of the Sotheby’s auction house and its lockout of forty-two unionized art handlers, who process its Picassos, its Rembrandts, its Bacons, and its Munchs, and who were now facing replacement by temporary nonunion workers. The second of the actions was in protest of the execution of Troy Davis by the state of Georgia, in spite of the recantation of key witnesses and a growing body of evidence attesting to a miscarriage of justice. While an execution on Georgia’s death row and an art auction on Manhattan’s Upper East Side may have struck some observers as unnecessary diversions from the point of the protests downtown, they appeared to many as exhibits A and B of the workings of unequal justice in America.16
Figure 3.2 Sites of contention in and around Manhattan, September 17–October 1, 2011. Credit: Aaron Carretti.
The first of these actions occurred at 10 a.m. on the morning of Thursday, September 22, in the midst of a fine art auction held at the well-appointed headquarters of Sotheby’s, at 72nd Street and York, in the heart of one of the wealthiest congressional districts in the country. It began as hundreds picketed outside, forming a sort of gauntlet for the buyers in business suits. On the inside, nine occupiers stood up one by one over the course of the two-hour action, disrupting the sales of De Koonings, Calders, and Thiebauds: “Sotheby’s made $680 million last year, then kicked their art handlers out on the street!” “Sotheby’s is fighting a class war . . . and it is unacceptable!” “The greed in this building is a direct example of the greed that has ruined our economy!” “Sotheby’s is auctioning off the American dream!” The disrupters were then manhandled by company’s private security force and maneuvered off the premises.17
According to Jackie DiSalvo, an older, white, working-class intellectual active in the Labor Outreach Committee, the Sotheby’s auction action “changed the impression of what Occupy was. It made it begin to seem that we did represent the interests of the 99 Percent.” Whereas, before the action, the press “acted as though Occupy was a bunch of hippie slackers . . . once labor got involved, they couldn’t portray us that way.”
The second such action occurred that very night, as several thousand converged on Manhattan’s Union Square for a “speakout” and “day of outrage,” called by the Coalition to End the Death Penalty, against the execution of Troy Davis the preceding night. Many I met in the crowd hailed from some of the communities hardest hit by the crisis in New York City, including many from Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. These largely African American and Latino constituencies were joined, for the first time, by the predominantly white middle and working class youth of Liberty Square.
Chanting, in unison, “The system is racist, we are all Troy Davis,” the newfound allies spilled out of the square and into the streets in an impromptu memorial march for Mr. Davis. The mood was indignant and defiant as the marchers repeatedly surged past police lines and shut down traffic, first along Fifth Avenue, then south on Broadway all the way to Wall Street, where the march concluded with seven arrests.
Michelle Crentsil, a young African American woman from Louisville, Kentucky and an organizer with a local labor union, recounts a conversation she had that night in the perimeter of the park. She asked her friends, “Why’d you come to Zuccotti?” “Makes sense, right?” was their reply. “And I was just thinking about it, you know?” Michelle continues. “And I was wondering in my head, does it? Maybe it does. I don’t know. But if that’s what people are saying, I think I have to get involved.”
After the day’s events, Liberty Square became a gathering place for first-time protesters alongside hard-core occupiers, and for local youth alongside veteran organizers, who had been quietly leading campaigns for economic justice for many years. Here, in the square, I saw long missing links being forged between community-based organizations, civil rights groups, insurgent labor unions, single-issue movements, and multitudes of angry, alienated, and unaffiliated youth looking for new avenues of political action.
Above all, the events of September 22 significantly broadened and deepened the local base of support of the occupation, lending it something of the look and feel of a genuinely popular movement, a multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational coalition.
It was a smaller demonstration that Saturday, September 24 that incited the most violent police crackdown to date, and it was this action that produced the “viral” images that would capture the media spotlight and captivate audiences far beyond New York City. That morning, the occupiers again gathered in their hundreds and prepared to take the occupation to the streets. Their ranks swelled with an influx of college students, in town for the weekend from places like Boston, Massachusetts, and Middletown, Connecticut. After circling the square, the mobile occupation proceeded along the regular route. It was here, along the narrow, heavily surveilled sidewalks of Wall Street itself, that the police made their first “collars.” The arrest count would climb throughout the day to a total of eighty detainees, including independent journalists and onlookers.
Among the first arrestees was an African American law student, Robert Stephens, of Saint Paul, Minnesota, who dropped to his knees in the middle of the street, just a few paces away from a Chase bank branch, and gave the following testimony:
Right there. That’s the bank. That’s the bank that took my parents’ home. . . . They played by the rules. . . . And what did they [Chase] do? They took their home. I will go to jail tonight, because it’s not right. . . . I will not stand by and just watch. I will not do it . . . after all that my parents gave me . . . I would rather die than be quiet, and watch everything that they worked for go away. I’m not going to be quiet. I’m going to look at them, right there, and I’m going to say, ‘You took it!’ And we’re gonna take it back . . .
His speech threw the issues at stake into stark relief. Here was one of the millions of Americans who had suffered or seen their families suffer as a consequence of the actions of banks like JPMorgan Chase, and who had come to testify against them on their own terrain. As Stephens was cuffed and dragged along the sidewalk, he could be heard repeating, over and over, “Take me! I submit!” before being dispatched to Central Booking. Mr. Stephens’s act of disobedience invited anything but submission from his fellow marchers. After the requisite chants of “Arrest the bankers!” and “Who are you protecting?” the crowd moved on, but with greater fervor and more audible anger.
To the staccato beat of the bucket drums and the brassy improvisations of a radical marching band, one line of marchers linked arms and surged into the streets, followed at first by dozens, then by hundreds of demonstrators (including a handful who joined in from the sidewalks). A police motorcade pulled up, revved its engines, and attempted to push the protesters back onto the sidewalks, but to no avail. Emboldened, the marchers held the streets, bringing traffic to a standstill from Canal Street to 14th Street. Their effervescence was met with honks and shouts of support from many New Yorkers, and with honks and shouts of rage from a lesser number.
The unpermitted demonstration also met with visible frustration from the small detail of NYPD officers who had been assigned to escort and contain the march. Outnumbered and outmaneuvered, the police called for backup, and when the marchers finally reached Union Square, they found themselves surrounded by “snatch squads” with neon orange nets of mesh in hand. Many of the marchers, in desperation, took off running to the south down University Place. As “blue-collar” officers encircled and entrapped them by the dozens within the neon nets, a contingent of “whiteshirts” moved in with batons drawn and pepper spray at the ready, backed by a number of undercover officers. Within seconds, they were swinging at, tackling, and clubbing the occupiers, more or less indiscriminately, and in full view of hundreds of spectators and nearly as many cameras.
Messiah Rhodes, whom we met in Chapter 2, caught it all on tape. “Everything was, you know, peaceful,” Messiah insists. “We took the streets. . . . Then, when we were leaving Union Square, this is when the police started violently clamping down and randomly arresting people for no reason. . . . The NYPD had no limits.”
Meanwhile, three young women, caught in a mesh trap on East 12th Street, were holding up peace signs, asking of the officers, “What are you doing?” At this point, Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna set upon the women and, at point blank range, proceeded to empty a canister of pepper spray in their eyes.18
It was, as one occupier would put it, “the scream heard ’round the world.”19
The Occupy phenomenon was at once made and unmade by the media industry, by way of platforms physical and virtual, vertical and horizontal, corporate and anti-corporate. The battle of the story was joined over the course of the first week of October, as giant news corporations, movement media collectives, and the users of newly minted social media struggled vigorously over the form and content of the coverage.20
The growth and development of OWS was enabled, but also inhibited, by each of these media networks, each in its own way. Social media gave the occupiers the means to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate at a pace and a scale that would have been unthinkable in its absence—even as the self-selecting nature of these networks set outer limits to the scope of such communication. The commercial news networks, for their part, brought the sights and sound bites of OWS beyond the choir, making its actions visible and its messages intelligible to millions. At the same time, the profit motive and the political selectivity of the leading news networks, along with the twenty-four-hour news cycle, imposed restrictions on what the occupiers could reasonably say and do in public.
Within a thirty-block radius of Liberty Square, one could find the studios of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News (owned by Disney, National Amusements, Comcast, and News Corp., respectively), along with the offices of the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times, and The New York Post. Under increasing competitive pressures in a troubled media market, and ever hungry for higher ratings and higher revenues, the corporate media now saw a target of opportunity in the Occupy phenomenon.21
Together, with a little help from the police, the occupiers were able to produce such a striking spectacle, accompanied by such a compelling narrative, that Occupy became newsworthy in the eyes of editors and producers. “The spectacle was the thing that fed the engine,” says Amin Husain, a Palestinian American artist from Indiana who had played a formative role in the NYCGA. “[It was] a performance of great magnitude. Because it got around. You created the spectacle of all spectacles.”
This “spectacle of spectacles” was heavily mediated from beginning to end, passing through a complex chain of media production and consumption.22 Each story would be filtered, first, through the lenses of live streamers, filmmakers, and photographers (this author among them), who would generate the raw content of the coverage, upload it onto the mobile Web, and send it out into the ether. The raw content would then be refined and reposted, mixed and remixed by networks of social media users, spreading across space and time by way of “likes,” “retweets,” “links,” and “shares.” Subsequently, the stories and the imagery would be selectively picked up and published by reporters, bloggers, and editors on behalf of their employers at local, national, and multinational news corporations. Finally, the coverage would be aggregated, ranked, and archived according to the algorithms of digital search engines.
Yet OWS might well have amounted to little more than a blip on Americans’ radar had it not been for the work of its own media makers. These were organized into two distinct nodes of the Occupy network. The filmmakers, photographers, and live streamers formed the core of the Media Working Group and the affiliated GlobalRevolution.tv team, which sought to “be the media” that the commercial networks were not. The occupation’s unofficial spokespeople formed the Public Relations Working Group, which worked to shape the corporate coverage to the occupiers’ advantage.23
It was the Media Working Group that would come to be known, in the words of the occupiers, as the “central nervous system” of OWS, as well as the greater Occupy network. The collective had first come together in Tompkins Square Park in the days and weeks leading up to September 17. It had been anchored, at first, by the power couple that had founded GlobalRevolution.tv in the squares of Spain that spring.
The working group had then grown to incorporate hundreds of volunteer producers, editors, streamers, and other activist media makers, who were eventually organized into four distinct teams within the larger collective: live stream, video, photography, and social media. The live stream crew had the GlobalRevolution.tv channel, which was constantly streaming events in and around the park on Livestream.com; the video-editorial crew had its own “Liberty Square” feed on YouTube; the photo crew had a pool of freelance photographers on Flickr; and the social media crew had the Occupy Wall Street Facebook page and the @OccupyWallSt Twitter handle, bestowed upon it by the editors at Adbusters, and soon possessed of tens of thousands of “followers.”
“We . . . were working on many fronts,” says filmmaker Marisa Holmes (first introduced in Chapter 1). “We decided that we would stream it, we would make viral concepts and make a counternarrative. We said we would infiltrate all the mainstream narratives through Twitter, and also through collaborating with the networks, to shape as much as possible the message that was getting out—so that even this small group of people in a park could really mean something. It wasn’t an event until we made it one.”
Many of the core members of the Media Working Group were committed anarchists with years of prior experience. They approached the tasks at hand with a “tactical media framework”; made decisions at daily meetings via direct democracy and consensus; and placed the content they produced under a “creative commons, noncommercial” license, making it freely available and shareable on the Web. The notable exception to this rule was in the collective’s dealings with the corporate media networks, in which case they bargained collectively. When anyone else sought Occupy media content, they were welcome to download it for free.
In the aftermath of every confrontation, the collective would leap into action, offering simultaneous counternarratives to the official story. The Inspector Bologna affair was an early case in point. While many media makers were among those targeted for arrest that day, they managed to pass off their cameras to others in the collective, who promptly set to work logging the footage, uploading it onto the Web, and using every social networking tool at their disposal to make it visible to the world.
Within twenty-four hours, the video had gone “viral,” drawing a surge of traffic by way of the #OccupyWallSt hashtag and the Other 98 Percent channel. The story was soon snapped up by sympathetic blogs, then by newswires, networks, and papers of record. When NYPD spokesman Paul J. Browne told the Times that Bologna had acted “appropriately,” and suggested that important facts had been “edited out or otherwise not captured,” the working group released five more videos from a variety of angles, as well as one in slow motion, which further vindicated their claims of police misconduct.24
Following the Inspector Bologna affair, corporate media coverage grew exponentially. In the course of a single week, from September 26–October 2, Occupy surged from an infinitesimal percentage of the “newshole” to 2 percent of all stories covered by fifty-two leading outlets. By the week of October 3–9, that figure would nearly quadruple to seven percent, representing the single largest thread in economic coverage and nearly half the level of coverage dedicated to the 2012 presidential campaign.25
“The corporate media were some of the biggest boosters of Occupy,” says Arun Gupta, founder of The Occupied Wall Street Journal. “Once [OWS] started to take off, its coverage by corporate media really helped it to grow.” Yet the coverage also painted the occupiers into a familiar corner. “Once things started to become this protester-versus-police narrative, that’s what they focused on, because that’s what they always focus on.”
As the news media spotlight cast its glare over Liberty Square, the occupiers found a screen onto which they could project their message to millions. Just what that message was would remain a persistent point of contention and confusion throughout the occupation. The news media itself would often miss the forest for the trees, forsaking the content of the social movement for the spectacular clip and the unsavory sound bite. And yet, from the front pages of the dailies to the lead stories on the nightly news, participants were deftly translating the anti-politics and anti-capitalism of OWS into a new language, one that could be comprehended, copied, and ultimately co-opted by almost anyone.
The second Saturday “solidarity march” falls on the first of October: day 15 of the occupation of Liberty Square. Storm clouds mass over the East River as I make my commute from North Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan. I arrive at Zuccotti Park just in time to catch the kickoff of the march, which is already advancing along the sidewalk, on the west side of Broadway, behind hand-painted banners inscribed with the injunctions, “OCCUPY TOGETHER” and “OCCUPY EVERYTHING.”
The march has been in the works since Monday, originally planned by the Direct Action Working Group with the purpose of “showing solidarity” with the “99 Percent” of Brooklyn—New York’s most populous (and perhaps its most populist) borough—thereby extending the occupation beyond its Manhattan base camp. The plan of action is to cross the Brooklyn Bridge (New York’s second busiest) by way of the pedestrian walkway. Upon reaching Brooklyn Bridge Park, we would conclude with a rousing general assembly, followed by “a gathering and some eating.”
In spite of its modest aims, the call for the march has a ring of defiance:
“We the 99 percent will not be silent and we will not be intimidated. This Saturday thousands more of us will march together as one to show that it is time that the 99 percent are heard. Join us on the 2nd week anniversary of your new movement. . . . We are the majority. We are the 99 percent.”26
By the afternoon of October 1, it has already been a banner day for the occupation. The first issue of The Occupied Wall Street Journal is hot off the presses; the first batch of 50,000 was delivered to the square at 9 o’clock this morning. Over the past twenty-four hours, the unions have joined the fray, while the numbers in the park have swelled (as they have a way of doing on Fridays and Saturdays) from the low hundreds to well over a thousand. But more than the numbers, it is the very character and composition of the crowd that has morphed, once more, as it had in the days and nights following the Troy Davis march.
Of course, there are the familiar faces of New York City street protest: bandana-clad militants who have seen it all before, banner-waving boomers who have found their second wind, backpack-toting students who have hitched rides and hopped trains from across the country to join the occupation for a day. But today, these “usual suspects” are outnumbered by an unexpected influx of those the activists like to call “ordinary people.”
As we set off from the square, bound for the bridge, I ask some of these “ordinary people” to explain their signs to me, along with their own reasons for joining the march. The first is a loud-mouthed, middle-aged white man, who says he is a “union member here to reclaim the future for my children.” The man has a living-wage job with benefits, but fears that his kids will fare far worse than he has.
The second is a clean-cut Black man in reading glasses and a Navy cap, pushing his baby girl in a stroller with one hand and clutching The Occupied Wall Street Journal in the other. “I walk for income and against poverty,” he tells me.
The third is a young white woman with sad eyes and close-cropped hair, whose hand-written sign reads, “college educated, bankrupt at 28. I make $8.50 an hour—too much to qualify for food stamps.”
Figure 3.3 Live from Liberty Square, September 17, 2011. Credit: Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky.
Here, too, is a big-chested, battle-hardened veteran of the war in Iraq, marching in the uniform of the U.S. Marine Corps. With pride, he shows off a sign scrawled on two sides of a cardboard box, taped together: “Second time I’ve fought for my country. First time I’ve known my enemy.”
These are no professional protesters, “protesting till whenever,” as some commentators have claimed in recent days.27 Rather, they are increasingly drawn from the ranks of those at the front lines of the economic crisis. For once, it seems that Occupy Wall Street has brought them out of their solitude and into relations of solidarity with one another.
Senia Barragan is one of their number. A Latina student of history, from a working-class town in northern New Jersey, she will leave her graduate studies behind to join her first Occupy march today. “Two years before Occupy, my parents had their house almost foreclosed upon,” she will later tell me. “It was Chase, and then it was Sallie Mae. . . . I was excited about people being angry about that . . . in a meaningful, militant kind of way. And just at a base level, Occupy made me feel not alone.”
Many occupiers I will speak to today will echo Senia’s sentiments. Among them are union workers and the out-of-work, war veterans and first responders, teachers without benefits and youth without futures. For many of those new to protest, these streets are their last resort. They tell me they have no alternative left to them: no lobbyists at their disposal, no representatives at their beck and call. And so they find themselves here, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, where, though they do not know it yet, they are about to put their bodies and their freedom on the line together with a thousand strangers.