New Yorker Magazine: The origins and future of Occupy Wall Street

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Excerpts from The Origins and Future of Occupy Wall Street by Mattathias Schwartz

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 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. 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.

and

At times, horizontalism can feel like utopian theatre. Its greatest invention is the “people’s mike,” which starts when someone shouts, “Mike check!” Then the crowd shouts, “Mike check!,” and then phrases (phrases!) are transmitted (are transmitted!) through mass chanting (through mass chanting!). In the same way that poker ritualizes capitalism and North Korea’s mass games ritualize totalitarianism, the people’s mike ritualizes horizontalism. The problem, though, comes when multiple people try to summon the mike simultaneously. Then it can feel a lot like anarchy.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/28/111128fa_fact_schwartz?pri...