Comment by smacktoward
11 years ago
Occupy.
(Note that this is not necessarily a good thing -- Occupy's leaderless, grassroots-über-alles nature is a big part of why it eventually tore itself apart.)
11 years ago
Occupy.
(Note that this is not necessarily a good thing -- Occupy's leaderless, grassroots-über-alles nature is a big part of why it eventually tore itself apart.)
Indeed. Occupy ran into the inevitable growing pains of any organization acquiring a measure of power or prestige. It attracted people who like power and prestige. They immediately proceeded to do what such people do best - fight over power and prestige while insisting loudly they do nothing of the sort.
Very suspicious that anti-war protests vanished from the headlines as Occupy Wall Street took hold.
The anti war movement was dead before Occupy, IMO. Of course, it's still dead after Occupy, which is a problem. There may only be carrying capacity among the left wing for one (strong at first, then weakly sustained) protest group at a time-- right now it's Black Lives Matter.
Besides, it's somewhat fundamentally the same group of people from what I can tell. A few scruffy leftists at the core, a few victims of the issue du jour, and a bunch of irritated but fleeting "moderates" (apoliticals) orbiting from time to time.
I am from Brazil, from my point of view Occupy was a sort of copy-cat of the spanish occupy (that spawned from the financial crisis), also vaguely related to Arab Spring.
At the time, I even tought about how closely it looked to the "Stand Alone Complex" discussed in the anime series of same name, when people create a social movement, and they believe they are being copy-cats, but there is no "original" to copy.
When Occupy happened, it was the same time as occupy-style protests in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, the Spanish and Portuguese called themselves "Indignados", and if you saw live feeds of the Greece movement, you could see people carrying "Indignados" banners too.
Also Arab spring happened at the same time, one thing interesting was that Anonymous (the 4chan Anonymous "group") was present in all of those, sometimes doing important things, for example in the same IRC channel they organized live feeds of spanish protests, medical help in Tunisia (a couple of "Anons" with actual medical training in Tunisia roamed around in makeshift ambulances helping injured protesters) and internet infrastructure in Egypt (in Egypt after the government shutdown the internet, "Anons" drove around in vans with satellite and various forms of local connections to provide data links so people could upload photos and videos of the protests).
Occupy Wall Street was a sort of natural consequence, lots of US people got involved in the overseas protests, and it does not surprise me they decided to try the same in US.
The thing is, that in US the cause they could fight for was completely unrelated, in Europe the problem was the stupid austerity programs and the debt problems, in the muslim world it started as protests against corruption (the first protester, a Tunisian that set fire to himself, was upset that the Tunisian police could stroll on the market and take whatever they wanted without paying, that Tunisian was a shopkeeper).
US has much less obvious corruption than Tunisia (ie: no cops stealing food from food trucks), and although US has crazy debts, the dollar being reserve currency allow the US to pretend the debt problem does not exist, so Occupy had to protest confusing stuff.
>Occupy had to protest confusing stuff.
I agree that a lot of the details of the financial system fly over society's collective heads, but I think the impunity of white-collar bad actors was a very concrete non-confusing source of outrage.
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No. Occupy was generated by Adbusters, a non-profit group. The campaign went viral, and then launched into the thing it became.
"Somebody had an idea and it grew naturally from there" is very different than "somebody conjured it up out of whole cloth by dumping money on people." Adbusters planted the seed, but Occupy was hardly a Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Adbusters Inc., especially by the time it became something significant.
I've been fascinated to read some comparisons between Occupy and I think it was second-wave feminist groups. Basically, the feminists ran into many of the same problems as Occupy, a few decades ago.