How did Micah White co-create Occupy Wall Street?
I was sitting in the Adbusters office, a cluttered loft above a noodle shop, when the insight struck: the Arab Spring had revealed that squares, not petitions, are the true parliament of our age. I drafted a tactical briefing, splashed it across Adbusters’ July 13, 2011 email and magazine spread: “Occupy Wall Street. Bring tent.” The image was a ballerina poised atop the Wall Street bull, a deliberate juxtaposition of grace and capitalism’s brute force. Kalle Lasn and I seeded the hashtag #OccupyWallStreet, passed it through our 90 000-strong email list, then watched as affinity groups from Madrid to Madison remixed the meme. We offered no formal demands because the demandless square—guided by horizontal assemblies—was itself the demand: a living critique of representative politics. By October the meme had jumped continents, yet it all began as a poetic prompt embedded in an email blast.
Which single sentence would you dare to broadcast today that might rip open comparable space for collective imagination?