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Pre-Occupied
The origins and future of Occupy Wall Street
by Mattathias Schwartz
The New Yorker
11/28/11
Kalle Lasn spends most nights shuffling clippings into a binder of plastic sleeves, each of which represents one page of an issue of Adbusters, a bimonthly magazine that he founded and edits. It is a tactile process, like making a collage, and occasionally Lasn will run a page with his own looped cursive scrawl on it. From this absorbing work, Lasn acquired the habit of avoiding the news after dark. So it was not until the morning of Tuesday, November 15th, that he learned that hundreds of police officers had massed in lower Manhattan at 1 A.M. and cleared the camp at Zuccotti Park. If anyone could claim responsibility for the Zuccotti situation, it was Lasn: Adbusters had come up with the idea of an encampment, the date the initial occupation would start, and the name of the protest—Occupy Wall Street. Now the epicenter of the movement had been raided. Lasn began thinking of reasons that this might be a good thing.
Lasn is sixty-nine years old and lives with his wife on a five-acre farm outside Vancouver. He has thinning white hair and the small eyes of a bulldog. In a lilting voice, he speaks of "a dark age coming for humanity" and of "killing capitalism," alternating gusts of passion with gentle laughter. He has learned not to let premonitions of apocalypse spoil his good mood.
The magazine, which he founded twenty-two years ago, depicts the developed world as a nightmare of environmental collapse and spiritual hollowness, driven to the brink of destruction by its consumer appetites.
Adbusters' images—a breastfeeding baby tattooed with corporate logos; a smiling Barack Obama with a clown's ball on his nose—are combined with equally provocative texts and turned into a paginated montage. Adbusters is not the only radical magazine calling for the end of life as we know it, but it is by far the best-looking.
Lasn was interrupted by a phone call about the Zuccotti eviction while in bed, reading Julian Barnes's "The Sense of an Ending." He rose and checked his e-mail. There was a message from Micah White, Adbusters' senior editor and Lasn's closest collaborator.
"Eerie timing!" White wrote. Earlier that night, Adbusters had sent out its most recent "tactical briefing"—a mass e-mail to ninety thousand friends of the magazine—proposing that the nation's Occupy protesters throw a party in mid-December, declare victory, and withdraw from their encampments. A few hours later, officers from the New York Police Department began handing out notices stating that the park had become dangerous and unsanitary, and ordering the protesters to leave, so that it could be cleaned. Those who refused to go were arrested, and whatever they left behind was carried off by the Department of Sanitation, to a depot on West Fifty-seventh Street. After a long night of angry marches and meetings, the protesters were allowed back into Zuccotti, with newly enforced prohibitions on tents and on lying down. The protest continued, but the fifty-nine days of rude, anarchic freedom on a patch of granite in lower Manhattan were over.
White reached Lasn by telephone shortly before nine. Lasn was in the bathtub, and White told him details that he had learned online about the eviction. The police had established a strict media cordon, blocking access from nearby streets. "It was a military-style operation," he said. These words made Lasn think of the bloody uprising in Syria. He quickly decided that the apparent end of Zuccotti was not a tragedy but the latest in a series of crisis-driven opportunities, what he calls "revolutionary moments," akin to the slapping of a Tunisian fruit vender. "I just can't believe how stupid Bloomberg can be!" he said to me later that day. "This means escalation. A raising of the stakes. It's one step closer to, you know, a revolution."
Lasn and White quickly hammered out a post-Zuccotti plan. White would draft a new memorandum, suggesting that Phase I—signs, meetings, camps, marches—was now over. Phase II would involve a swarming strategy of "surprise attacks against business as usual," with the potential to be "more intense and visceral, depending on how the Bloombergs of the world react." White could hear the excitement in Lasn's voice. Even as Lasn vented about the morning's counterrevolution, he was doing what he could not to splash.
This is how Occupy Wall Street began: as one of many half-formed plans circulating through conversations between Lasn and White, who lives in Berkeley and has not seen Lasn in person for more than four years. Neither can recall who first had the idea of trying to take over lower Manhattan. In early June, Adbusters sent an e-mail to subscribers stating that "America needs its own Tahrir." The next day, White wrote to Lasn that he was "very excited about the Occupy Wall Street meme. . . . I think we should make this happen." He proposed three possible Web sites: OccupyWallStreet.org, AcampadaWallStreet.org, and TakeWallStreet.org.
"No. 1 is best," Lasn replied, on June 9th. That evening, he registered OccupyWallStreet.org.
White, who is twenty-nine years old, was born to a Caucasian mother and an African-American father. "I don't really fit in with either group," he told me. He attended suburban public schools, where he began a series of one-man campaigns against authority. In middle school, with his parents' blessing, he refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. In high school, he founded an atheists' club, over the objections of the principal. This led to an appearance on "Politically Incorrect," and atheist organizations flew White to their conferences to give talks. "It all went to my head," he said. "I became a little ego child. Ego destroys. I was too young to understand that."
Though he describes himself as a "mystical anarchist," White has three strict rules that govern his day: No naps. No snacks. Get dressed. "By dressed," he told me, "I mean pants and a shirt. Enough so that if someone came to the door and knocked on it you wouldn't be totally embarrassed." After earning a B.A. at Swarthmore, he wrote a letter to Lasn, whom he had never met, saying that he would be arriving in Vancouver in a matter of weeks and wanted to be put to work.
Lasn was born in Estonia, but his earliest memories are of German refugee camps, where his family ended up after fleeing the Russian Army during the Second World War. He remembers falling asleep on a cot as his uncles talked about politics with his father, a tennis champion who buried his trophies in the back yard before rushing the family onto one of the last boats to Germany. "World wars, revolutions—from time to time, big things actually happen," he told me. "When the moment is right, all it takes is a spark."
Lasn's family left the refugee camp for Australia, where he grew up. He has a degree in applied mathematics, and he began his career designing computer war games for the Australian military. Using this expertise, he started a market-research company in Tokyo during Japan's postwar boom, where, by feeding punch cards into an I.B.M. mainframe, he created reports for consumer brands, many of them alcohol and tobacco products. "It's easy to generate cool if you have the bucks, the celebrities, the right ideas, the right slogans," he says. "You can throw ideas into the culture that then have a life of their own." He made a lot of money, travelled around the world, moved to Canada, and devoted himself to experimental filmmaking and environmental protection. In 1989, when the CBC refused to sell him airtime for a thirty-second "mind bomb" aimed at the forestry industry, Lasn realized that his politics would never have a place within the mass media. With Bill Schmalz, an outdoorsman who had worked with him as a cameraman, Lasn founded Adbusters.
Lasn says that Adbusters has a circulation worldwide of roughly seventy thousand. The magazine accepts no advertising, and relies on newsstand sales and donations. Adbusters was an early supporter of Buy Nothing Day, a protest holiday, in late November, during which people abstain from shopping. In 2003, Lasn started producing the Blackspot, a sneaker made partially of hemp, which he still sells online. Lasn has long used the magazine as a platform for stridently criticizing Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and his most controversial moment came in 2004, when he wrote an essay on how Jews influence U.S. foreign policy. Alongside the essay was a list of powerful neoconservatives, with asterisks next to the names of those who Lasn believed were Jewish.
This spring, the magazine was pushing boycotts of Starbucks (for driving out local businesses) and the Huffington Post (for exploiting citizen journalists). Then, in early June, the art department designed a poster showing a ballerina poised on the "Charging Bull" sculpture, near Wall Street. Lasn had thought of the image late at night while walking his German shepherd, Taka: "the juxtaposition of the capitalist dynamism of the bull," he remembers, "with the Zen stillness of the ballerina." In the background, protesters were emerging from a cloud of tear gas. The violence had a highly aestheticized, dreamlike quality—Adbusters' signature. "What is our one demand?" the poster asked. "Occupy Wall Street. Bring tent."
White and Lasn spent a few days in early July debating when the occupation should start. At first, White argued that it should begin on July 4, 2012, so that protesters would have time to prepare. Lasn believed that the political climate could have shifted entirely by then. He proposed late September of this year; then he settled on the seventeenth, his mother's birthday. White agreed. Lasn instructed the art department to insert "September 17th" beneath the bull and the ballerina, and Adbusters devoted a tactical-briefing e-mail on July 13th exclusively to the proposed occupation.
White watched as the e-mail's proposal raced around Twitter and Reddit. "Normal campaigns are lots of drudgery and not much payoff, like rolling a snowball up a hill," he said. "This was the reverse." Fifteen minutes after Lasn sent the e-mail, Justine Tunney, a twenty-six-year-old in Philadelphia, read it on her RSS feed. The next day, she registered OccupyWallSt.org, which soon became the movement's online headquarters. She began operating the site with a small team, most of whose members were, like her, transgender anarchists. (They jokingly call themselves Trans World Order.)
Encouraged by the quick online response, White connected with New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, which had previously organized an occupation-style action, called Bloombergville, and was already planning an August 2nd rally at the "Charging Bull" to protest cuts that would likely result from the federal debt crisis. They agreed to join forces, and N.Y.A.B.C. said that it would devote part of its upcoming rally to planning for the September 17th occupation.
This resulted in some confusion on August 2nd, when scores of graduate students and labor activists showed up, expecting a rally for New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts. They erected a small stage and began giving amplified speeches, which alienated the roughly fifty Adbusters supporters, mostly anarchists, who came expecting a planning session. There was some angry shouting before a group of anarchists broke off, sat down in a circle on the cobblestones, and held their own meeting.
The anarchists immediately agreed to use "horizontal" organizing methods, according to which meetings are known as general assemblies and participants make decisions by consensus and give continuous feedback through hand gestures. Moving one's fingers in an undulating motion, palm out, pointing up, means approval of what's being said. Palm in, pointing down, means disapproval. Crossed arms signals a "block," a serious objection that must be heard. Some participants knew this style of meeting from left-wing traditions stretching back to the civil-rights movement and earlier.
Late that night, David Graeber, a fifty-year-old professor at the University of London and an anarchist theorist who helped facilitate the first meeting, sent an e-mail to White, in Berkeley, asking him for guidance. "How did it all start?" Graeber asked. White told him, saying that the goal was "getting the meme out there, getting the people on the streets." He added, "We are not trying to control what happens."
Early on, Lasn and White said that the Wall Street occupiers needed a clear message. The revolutionaries in Cairo, they wrote, presented "a straight-forward ultimatum": they wouldn't leave the square until President Hosni Mubarak left office. Adbusters invited readers to "zero in on what our one demand will be." The suggested ideas included a Presidential commission charged with ending the influence of money in politics, and a one-per-cent "Robin Hood tax" on all financial transactions.
After the August 2nd gathering, the movement's center of gravity shifted from Vancouver to New York. The protesters planning the September occupation met again, on August 9th, at the Irish Hunger Memorial, near Battery Park; all subsequent meetings were held on the south side of Tompkins Square Park. Early on, they decided to call the organization the New York City General Assembly.
In theory, the job of facilitating the meetings rotated among the eighty or so attendees. In practice, facilitation fell to a much smaller set of people who had experience with the general-assembly process. The leaderless movement was developing leaders. Graeber was among this first rank of equals, as was Marisa Holmes, a twenty-five-year-old anarchist and filmmaker. Holmes is dark-haired and eloquent; she has the parliamentarian's trick of making harsh ultimatums sound palatable, even breezy. When she wants to emphasize a point, she doesn't raise her voice; she turns her palms up and shrugs. Earlier this year, she flew to Cairo and filmed the Tahrir demonstrations. "It was the same as here," she says. "They had speakers, banners, direct actions. I spent ninety per cent of my time in cafés, drinking Turkish coffee and talking."
At 11 A.M. on Saturday, September 17th, an elementary-school teacher I'll call P. left his Brooklyn apartment and got on a subway heading to Manhattan. (He requested that he be identified by the first letter of his last name, because he was concerned that he would be fired from his job.) He wore a red sweater and brown pants. Earlier that morning, he had sent a vague e-mail informing a co-worker that he might not show up Monday morning. He was part of the Tactical Committee, a subgroup of the General Assembly whose responsibility was to figure out where, exactly, the occupation would take place.
P. took the subway to Bowling Green. On his way to the exit, he passed a line of police officers accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs. Outside, police had surrounded the "Charging Bull" with barricades and, a few blocks north, sealed off a stretch of Wall Street around the Stock Exchange. P. tried to look nonchalant as he carried a black messenger bag that contained a first-aid kit, a bottled solution of liquid antacid and water (to remedy the effects of tear gas and pepper spray), fifteen Clif bars (carrot cake), and several hundred photocopied maps, showing seven possible locations. "We decided that low-tech communication methods would be best," P. told me. "If we'd used a mass text message, or Twitter, it would have been easy for the police to track down who was doing this."
P. majored in math at a small liberal-arts college and plays in two bands, "some punk, some noise." Like most of Occupy Wall Street's core organizers, P. is an anarchist, meaning that he is "dedicated to the eradication of any unjust or illegitimate system. At the very least, that means the eradication of capitalism and the state." He does not smash bank windows, though he said that he does not necessarily disapprove of people who do.
At Bowling Green, several hundred protesters had gathered near the Museum of the American Indian. The previous week, members of the General Assembly had stocked up on food, made bail arrangements, and circulated flyers. Still, most of them had doubts that much would come of the occupation. "I, along with many others, expected that it would fizzle out in a couple of days," Marisa Holmes says.
P. quickly found the two other members of the Tactical Committee, both white men in their twenties. All three were "extremely nervous," P. says. They left to scout Location Two, three-quarters of an acre of honey-locust trees and granite benches, a few blocks to the north, called Zuccotti Park. It was almost empty, and there were few police nearby. As the Tactical Committee had learned in its research, Location Two was a privately owned public space. While the city can close public parks at dusk, or impose other curfews, zoning laws require Zuccotti's owner to keep the park open for "passive recreation" twenty-four hours a day.
Soon, maps were distributed and people began to murmur, "Go to Location Two in thirty minutes." The first arrivals took seats beneath the trees on the eastern side, arranged themselves in small groups, and ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. By that afternoon, nearly a thousand people had gathered for a general-assembly meeting. Late that night, P. went home; nearly three hundred of his comrades settled in to
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