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Just a few clips from a lengthy, extraordinary piece on a journalist who lived inside the Occupy movement
Quinn Norton, Wired - ... It’s the job of a media to tell the truth to its society, but Occupy’s homegrown media refused to tell itself the truth about what was going wrong in the camps. That let the arbiters of truth become a few young men who figured out how to stream video from their cellphones. The live streamers got drunk off their modicum of fame, behaving as tiny entitled prophets to the movement. Their ethics were incoherent, what they filmed was arbitrary, but they mistook randomness for truth. They had just discovered documenting events, and thousands of people flocked to see them do it. But without any traditions of narrative, they didn’t see their own commentary enter the story, how every shot and angle and word overlaid was editorial.
There was no critique in Occupy, no accountability. At first it didn’t matter, but as life grew messy and complicated, its absence became terrible. There wasn’t even a way to conceive of critique, as if the language had no words to describe the movement’s faults to itself. There was at times explicit gagging of Occupy’s media teams by the camp [general assembly], to prevent anything that could be used to damage the movement from reaching the wider media.
Self-censorship plagued those who weren’t gagged, because everyone was afraid of retaliation. No one talked about the systemic and growing abuses in the camps, or the increasingly poisonous GAs.
.... The policing of protest in America makes it clear that protest has become mere ritual, a farce, and that, by definition, it becomes illegal if it threatens to change anything or inconvenience anyone. In time, all the police announcements came to say the same thing to me. “You may go through your constitutional ritual,” they intoned, “but it must stop before anything of consequence happens.” We must, above all, preserve everything as it is.
....Walking on the stones of Zuccotti at 1 a.m. on a February night, surrounded by police and private guards and the bronze man at the sacred tree who, in his non-sentient way, sat through it all, I began to feel the spirit of the place welling up through my soles. These stones were infused with something that the police and the powerwashing hadn’t driven away. They’d been soaked with the tears and sweat and sometimes blood of the children of present and future who lived here. It still poured out of the stones, like the ghost of an unrestful place.
The police stepped lightly on the stones of Zuccotti, and for the first time I could see that their steps had the quality of fear, fear of something too big and close to be seen, this thing that frightened the NYPD. Amongst the great edifices of lower Manhattan and the power of our nation, was the realization that it couldn’t last. The constructions of the great and good society were fated to fall.
On the night of Nov. 15, they hadn’t merely shot the messenger. They’d done that too, but they’d beat the people that had come back from the future with lifeboats. Like Anonymous and PiratbyrÃ¥n before them, OWS was a messenger from the future, not so much fighting the system as explaining to the old way of doing things that it had already lost. That future, still nebulous, soaked into the nondescript stones of Zuccotti. But the old world around us had rejected the message from the new world, never understanding that theirs was a mission of mercy to the lost.
The future was still coming and Bloomberg’s army had only guns to fight time.
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