Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse
Nathan Schneider
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: 0520276809
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A compelling study of the spirit that drove this watershed movement, Thank You, Anarchy vividly documents how the Occupy experience opened new social and political possibilities and registered a chilling indictment of the status quo. It was the movement’s most radical impulses, this account shows, that shook millions out of a failed tedium and into imagining, and fighting for, a better kind of future.
After Words: The Post-Prime Ministerial Speeches
5 Days in May: The Coalition and Beyond
Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective
Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex
Reporters’ attention shifted. The “girls” were no longer around, and maybe the pepper-spraying was already old news. For whatever reason, the questions they asked started getting more interesting. Instead of gory details, they finally became curious about just what exactly all these people were doing in Zuccotti Park. And, after getting bored with asking sign holders, “Why are you here?” and ogling the generator-powered media center, they even asked about the General Assembly. It, however, was.
Discrete action that Adbusters had recommended, Occupy Wall Street was swelling into an organism with many tendrils, each with its own means of being a nuisance. Every day, crowds of bystanders would gather around the collage of hundreds of cardboard signs that lined the northern edge of the plaza, between the ceaseless drum circle and the media center. Each sign made its own separate demand, but together they had a certain coherence: “Peaceful Revolution.” “Bail Out the People.” “Wall Street Is.
Protest stuff. But uncertain. The imperative for the day was to “Reoccupy”—specifically, to occupy the empty lot next to Duarte, the one owned by Trinity Wall Street. After a fifteen-day hunger strike, failed negotiations with Trinity, and even a letter from Desmond Tutu calling on the church to let the Occupiers use the lot (and another one that stated his opposition to trespassing), they were back. They wanted a place to build a new encampment, a new headquarters for the movement. Trinity, for.
Mission to hand out fliers at high schools calling for “no skule”—along with a terrifically funny Tumblr website. He told me that bad words helped get the kids’ attention. My favorite picture on the site was of a tyrannosaurus rex with dynamite and an Uzi riding on the back of a great white shark. I didn’t last for more than twenty minutes at my first and only Strike Everywhere meeting. It was in late March, at an activist space often used by Occupiers on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. There were.
A more open GA be created. Though organizers quickly shifted to the general assembly structure for the meeting, maintaining use of the loudspeaker caused the opposed participants to organize their own assembly, causing a brief bifurcation in the group: one group utilizing the GA structure of an open floor but maintaining the loudspeaker to contend with the traffic noise, the other group seating themselves in a circle closer to Bowling Green park. The breakaway faction had objected to the format.