A Eulogy for #Occupy
- 6:30 am |
A Vacancy of Voice
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 livestreamers 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 GA, 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.
Journalist Adam Rothstein showed up on the day of the first march in Portland and was there every day until their eviction, two days before Zuccotti’s. He started off with sanitation and doing the dishes, moved to media, and eventually started their paper, the Portland Occupier, independent from the GA.
“One of the main reasons I wanted to have the PO separate from the GA, is I wanted, from the very beginning, a means within the process for booting people out. The GA had no such process,” he said.
His original idea was to tell positive stories from the camp. He worked with media teams from Boston, LA, Chicago, and New York, and traveled to other camps to get the stories out. In time, Rothstein came to see that Occupy’s media needed to tell all the stories of what was going on: the wonderful and the terrible. By then it was too late.
I asked him if the movement’s media had failed it. “Yeah,” he replied:
Not failed for lack of trying, per se. Failed for inexperience, and failed for lack of seeing just how important that role was. Failed for tactical missteps, in not making a big enough impact as media, and failed for strategic missteps, of not taking a critical enough approach.
What we really needed was someone to speak with compassion, as occupiers, about what occupiers were doing wrong. That small blade edge was so fine, given the criticism we were getting from the corporate media, given the criticism we were getting from supposed allies on the left, and given the few tools, resources, and talent we had to work with.
There was always more we could have done. But I don’t think anyone was really aware of how dire the situation was, and how slim our chances were of making it past what the larger media environment wanted us to be.
“We needed Homage to Catalonia,” he told me later, referring to George Orwell’s book on being part of the failed coalition of anarchists, liberals and Communists who fought fascism in Spain in the 1930s. Instead of Orwell’s eloquent honesty, Occupy got egomaniacal live streamers.