{"id":28283,"date":"2011-11-29T17:03:07","date_gmt":"2011-11-29T22:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=28283"},"modified":"2011-11-29T17:03:07","modified_gmt":"2011-11-29T22:03:07","slug":"pre-occupied","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2011\/11\/29\/pre-occupied\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Pre-Occupied&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Founder of Adbusters on CNN\" width=\"625\" height=\"469\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1oPfVmkFgko?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters, interviewed on CNN five years ago. The smug, eye-rolling awfulness of the expendable, interchangeable, assembly-line interviewer is reason enough to watch it.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Mattathias Schwartz has an article on &#8220;the origins and future of Occupy Wall Street&#8221; in the <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/reporting\/2011\/11\/28\/111128fa_fact_schwartz\" target=\"_blank\">New Yorker<\/a><\/em>. I knew about its Canadian roots at <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Adbusters\" target=\"_blank\">Adbusters<\/a>, based in Vancouver, but didn&#8217;t realize the extent to which it got the movement going in very short order, demonstrating the generational leap in the use of real-time social media, which sidesteps altogether the mindlessness of corporate &#8220;old media,&#8221; evident in the clip above. Schwartz&#8217; article also has a good look at the on-the-ground reality of &#8220;horizontal&#8221; rather than &#8220;vertical&#8221; organizing principles, and introduces a number of people who are crucial &#8220;facilitators&#8221; of the movement, but are otherwise unknown, as they&#8217;d want it to be. It therefore also provides a surprisingly moving account of the difficult effort to maintain anarchist principles without collapsing into anarchy.<\/p>\n<p>An excerpt:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This is how Occupy Wall Street began: as one of many half-formed plans circulating through conversations between [Kalle] Lasn and [<em>Adbusters <\/em>editor Micah ]White, who lives in Berkeley and has not seen Lasn in person for more than four years. Neither can recall who first had the idea of trying to take over lower Manhattan. In early June,\u00a0<em>Adbusters<\/em>\u00a0sent an e-mail to subscribers stating that \u201cAmerica needs its own Tahrir.\u201d The next day, White wrote to Lasn that he was \u201cvery excited about the Occupy Wall Street meme. . . . I think we should make this happen.\u201d He proposed three possible Web sites: OccupyWallStreet.org, AcampadaWallStreet.org, and TakeWallStreet.org.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNo. 1 is best,\u201d Lasn replied, on June 9th. That evening, he registered OccupyWallStreet.org.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">\u00a0*<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-28284\" src=\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2011\/11\/occupy-wall-street-poster.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"453\" srcset=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2011\/11\/occupy-wall-street-poster.jpg 300w, https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2011\/11\/occupy-wall-street-poster-198x300.jpg 198w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">*<\/p>\n<p>This spring, the magazine was pushing boycotts of Starbucks (for driving out local businesses) and the Huffington Post (for exploiting citizen journalists). Then, in early June, the art department designed a poster showing a ballerina poised on the \u201cCharging Bull\u201d sculpture, near Wall Street. Lasn had thought of the image late at night while walking his German shepherd, Taka: \u201cthe juxtaposition of the capitalist dynamism of the bull,\u201d he remembers, \u201cwith the Zen stillness of the ballerina.\u201d In the background, protesters were emerging from a cloud of tear gas. The violence had a highly aestheticized, dreamlike quality\u2014<em>Adbusters<\/em>\u2019 signature. \u201cWhat is our one demand?\u201d the poster asked. \u201cOccupy Wall Street. Bring tent.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">\u00a0*<\/p>\n<p>White watched as the e-mail\u2019s proposal raced around Twitter and Reddit. \u201cNormal campaigns are lots of drudgery and not much payoff, like rolling a snowball up a hill,\u201d he said. \u201cThis was the reverse.\u201d Fifteen minutes after Lasn sent the e-mail, Justine Tunney, a twenty-six-year-old in Philadelphia, read it on her RSS feed. The next day, she registered OccupyWallSt.org, which soon became the movement\u2019s online headquarters. She began operating the site with a small team, most of whose members were, like her, transgender anarchists. (They jokingly call themselves Trans World Order.)<\/p>\n<p>Encouraged by the quick online response, White connected with New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, which had previously organized an occupation-style action, called Bloombergville, and was already planning an August 2nd rally at the \u201cCharging Bull\u201d to protest cuts that would likely result from the federal debt crisis. They agreed to join forces, and N.Y.A.B.C. said that it would devote part of its upcoming rally to planning for the September 17th occupation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters, interviewed on CNN five years ago. The smug, eye-rolling awfulness of the expendable, interchangeable, assembly-line interviewer is reason enough to watch it.\u00a0 Mattathias Schwartz has an article on &#8220;the origins and future of Occupy Wall Street&#8221; in the New Yorker. I knew about its Canadian roots at Adbusters, based in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>&quot;Pre-Occupied&quot; - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2011\/11\/29\/pre-occupied\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&quot;Pre-Occupied&quot; - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters, interviewed on CNN five years ago. 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