What the whole world wants
This week marked the 10th anniversary of the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, and many publications have published remembrances and retrospectives and speculations on what it meant and what its legacy has been. Reading through this material, one gets a sense of the embalming process of historicization.
Even at the time, the occupations often seemed at odds with themselves in how self-consciously they were making history, wavering between the belief that it was becoming a 1968 for the millennial generation, exemplifying how prefigurative politics could be carried out in practice by the "multitude," and the alternate possibility that most of the people showing up were cosplay communards in a revolution recast in the image of a music festival parking lot. Part of the excitement of those months seemed to be the idea that it didn't really matter one way or the other, that momentum exceeded the motives of anyone pulled into the coalescing movement's orbit.
When Occupy was happening, the word selfie was not yet much in use. (It would explode into the zeitgeist in 2013.) But in retrospect I always associate it with how I felt when I visited the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park, and my overriding sense that I should be documenting my own "participation" in the moment, for whose behalf I wasn't even sure. I didn't do this. I didn't even have a smartphone then. But I was blinded by the idea of self-mediating, which shaped how I interpreted everything as operating at the level of spectacle. It seemed like the most surprising thing about Occupy was how it "achieved scale," as though it were proof of concept for how to savvily launch new niche products or get a startup off the ground. It was producing highly meme-able content, which made it seem as though "going viral" were the 21st century equivalent of seizing the radio and television stations. It seemed almost more than a tactic but a politics in itself, as if "the 99%" memes were the apotheosis of the form and all viral content would eventually be liberatory.
I basically didn't get it. My myopic view at the time — that Occupy was trapped within spectacularization — leads to false equivalences that would, for example, rate the January 6 Capitol raid as the Trumpist right's version of Occupy. It seems closer to the truth to see Occupy's relevance in the internal resistance it generated to its mediatization, in its recurring efforts to reground itself in rituals of presence, in the significance of being there, not leaving, working through the cumbersome protocols of the "people's mic" and the ad hoc committees of direct democracy. It may have started as this flash-mob-like novelty but ended by inculcating many of its participants with the necessity of patient organizing.
At the time, the Occupy movement was assimilated in mainstream press accounts to revolutionary uprisings around the world, which were frequently characterized as having been galvanized and sustained by social media. The fact that Occupy camps were live-streaming themselves was seen as significant proof of something. Mediatized connection was taken as a powerful force that intrinsically generated social justice out of its own logic. Tech companies basked in their role as putative liberators, even as they accommodated the crackdown and their "connecting the world" steadily modulated into putting everybody under multiple overlapping forms of persistent surveillance. Occupy is significant not least in that it was one of the last moments when it was still possible and not altogether disqualifying to be credulous about the effects of social media.