You in particular are my main criticism of Occupy as a movement. They lacked any sort of structure, shunned it in fact, that would have ripped control of these resources away from you once it became clear that you disagreed politically with the vast majority of the people involved. That you were allowed to keep control of those resources is emblematic of how Occupy could let all that energy dissipate into nothing.
Co-opting potentially effective political movements is how the people in control stay in control. Once you start noticing it, you see it time and time again.
What resources? OccupyWallSt.org only accepted enough donations to keep the 1-800 number and website online. I was smart enough to understand back then that an unemployed 26 year old activist living in a park wasn't qualified to manage the capital that was being offered to us. So what did I do? I gave you about twenty different links for various projects on the donation page to choose from.
Thank you for another example of why Occupy was doomed to fail, I had not considered that you had control over the donation flow. Instead of working together as a group and finding somebody more responsible than yourself to manage the incoming capital, you diverted it away from the movement and dispersed it to the winds. Was that decision made collectively by the group? Or did you take it upon yourself to do so? Control over the domains and twitter account, along with the incoming flow of donations are the resources that you had and Occupy let you squander.
Every group that showed up in the park and was working on a project, they could come to me and ask that their donation link be posted on the OccupyWallSt.org donate page. I'm a tech person. I registered a domain. I play it neutral. I included everything from basket weaving to aspiring governments. One of these groups called itself NYCGA or the NYC General Assembly. They were the political organization that claimed dominion over Occupy Wall Street and the public elected to give them the lion's share of donations. The guy who ended up with most of their money, if memory serves me right, is a tattoo artist named Pete Dutro. So these days I'm a lot more opinionated. The Pete Dutros of the financial community took out trillions of dollars of loans from Japan and the economy is crashing right now because of them. We should be focusing on reallocating that capital.
What a fall from grace, trying to fashion buying calls on FXY as a revolution! Put this on your own personal website and redirect that page, let the domain maintain some dignity.
This was posted on OccupyWallSt.com. The OccupyWallSt.org website is still exactly as it was in its full 2011 looking glory. I've been dragging my heels on renewing the SSL certificate however everything's still there. It's even been cataloged and archived by the Library of Congress for posterity. So the dignity of the movement has been secured and is continuing to be respected. Your voices are now a permanent artifact in America's historical record.
I was in 8th grade in 2011 and new to web2.0. Saw much about Occupy Wall St and was inspired. Just thought I'd let you know, so thanks for the work.
Thank you for saying this.
Part of the reason why I come to HN is that conversations like these still happen.
> Your voices are now a permanent artifact in America's historical record.
I like how the wording here (Your voices) is giving off that sarcastic and patronizing "you're welcome" tone.
Like a religious person saying "I'll pray for you" to someone non-religious, where the undertone is an obvious middle finger.
It's pretty fun.
I was quoting Coriolanus by William Shakespeare.
Can you say where that (in its original form) appears? Closest I can find are "I will make much of your voices" and "Your voices: for your voices I have fought", but neither of these relate to any type of permanence.
> This was posted on OccupyWallSt.com. The OccupyWallSt.org website is still exactly as it was in its full 2011 looking glory.
Why keep posting on the dotcom when it obviously causes confusion rather than a personal domain name?
Because I'm speaking for the millions of people who lost homes, who lost jobs, and lost hope in a society where the only answers they're being given are distractions. Folks deserve to hear a more plausible explanation of why Wall Street has crashed the economy yet again than Trump going to war in Greenland. I'm also speaking for the millions of tech workers whose RSUs are going to be worth a whole lot less because of the yen traders being liquidated, even though those workers have done nothing wrong and have been marvelous at their jobs. Worst of all, the media will pin the blame on them for the crash. The rest of the working class has already been whipped to the brink of death, so tech is the new whipping boy for everything that goes wrong these days.
Thank you for sharing your perspective and engaging on hackernews!
> Occupy was doomed to fail,
I am curious, what would you consider success?
I do not think it failed, far from it. I can give my reasons, you first
Yep, occupy may have had the moral high ground but they squandered it because they were the modern day hippy idealists with no boots-on-the-ground (or feet touching grass) know-how to actually effect change in a protracted way.
Well, and now you use it for this so what was all that for?
I’d love to talk with you because I’ve tried to do anarchist organization in the past and it’s super fucking hard
one (started here) was successful but one failed hard
I’d just be curious to trade stories to see if we can learn from each other
My handle@iCloud if you want to reach out
The 'Occupy' energy didn't dissipate into nothing. It fueled extremism and populism, both on the left and on the right.
> It fueled extremism and populism, both on the left and on the right.
I think you're confusing the Occupy Movement with the housing crisis itself.
Any anti-establishment/libertarian right-wingers would have already gotten energized years before by the Tea Party movement. Even Ron Paul's million dollar "money bomb" in donations happened a few months before Occupy. And what's the path from Occupy to right-wing extremism? Even on Fox News Occupy was a short-term blip.
The "one percent" slogan made its way directly into Bernie's campaign, so that tracks with what I assume you're calling left-wing populism. But what do you mean by "extremism" here? If it's violent extremism I don't see the connection. And if it's left-wing anarchist movements, have those grown in any significant way since the 2010s?
I understand my comment might give one the impression that I am confusing the chicken (the financial crisis) and the egg (the Occupy movement).
Since Occupy could not have existed without the Crisis, certainly some blame goes to the Crisis.
That said, Occupy shaped perception of the Crisis. Occupy trained the public to view the Crisis in terms of bad people, instead of systemic problems like incentives.
The Occupy movement, with its permanent smoke-pit adolescents like Tim Pool, Matt Taibbi, Max Keiser, and so on, has influenced public discourse ever since.
I cannot prove that Occupy, rather than the Financial Crisis alone, made possible our current dysfunctional politics (with its focus on scapegoating, conspiracy theories, magical thinking), but I notice echos of its 'memes' (in the original sense of the word), and its attitudes - not to mention I notice some of the actual participants.
I wish I could edit this, because now that I reread it, 'chicken and egg' doesn't make sense. It's more a question of root cause. So a better metaphor might be whether to assign blame to a misbehaving child or to the abusive father who raised him.