Were you on OWS?
What's life like now? How have your views changed? Has it been long enough for you to grow bitter and disillusioned yet?
Were you on OWS?
Cooper Thompson
Jeremiah Peterson
I wasn't politically astute enough to know what was going on back then. I always thought it was retarded because, hey, why should greedy stock traders give a fuck that you're standing out in in the streets below them? They just walk past you, laugh, and get on with their day. Seemed to me that the place protests should have been is right in front of government meeting places.
Brandon Wilson
It was.
Benjamin Miller
At the end of the day politicians are nothing but representatives of a bunch of different organized interests, so addressing those interests specifically seems on point, particularly given the context
Noah Bell
I was involved a bit. My politics are mostly still the same since then. I'm not bitter or disillusioned at all. Most people here are new to activism and don't remember watching the anti-war movement die or how fucking dead the left used to be in the US. Things have only been getting better and better for us the past few years. I was far more disillusioned in 2011 than I am now.
Evan Jones
At the time of OWS I was a liberal leaning libertarian, but I sympathized a lot with the movement. It's also worth mentioning I was in high school and the most I knew about politics was from reading Orwell. What I learned from OWS is that it's easy to get people out on the streets protesting whatever, but a movement with no coherent goals, functioning leadership or reasonable PR can just as easily break up or be co-opted, both of which happened to OWS near its end. I also 'participated' in GG until the split and noticed a similar trend, as GG was initially fairly apolitical until Milo Gang absorbed it with the help of Zig Forums.
As a result, I gave up on (most of) my ideals and became nihilistic. Over time I decided to adopt some concrete views, initially as a succdem, but now I'm trying to read Marx whenever I have the time. However, like the above user I feel less disillusioned than before.
What I think some people don't realize about OWS is that the sentiment that caused such an outburst of anger is still here, and arguably stronger than before. All it took to make OWS reality was a weak campaign by some canucks (Adbusters) and a few activists with sticks up their asses actually getting out there and doing stuff. But there won't be an 'Occupy Wall Street 2' without someone or something there to push a clear and concise message. There also has to be an OWS 'spokesperson' who will handle PR and a full plan to expand the movement to its ends and prevent it from being co-opted.
Ethan Martinez
What do you mean? I helped write that big "dossier" document on past video game scandals. It's a damn shame that charlatan Milo was sent to Airplay instead of someone like William Usher.
Colton Foster
B-b-b-b-but "muh PR".
Cameron Jones
What I meant was I was with GG up until the point that GGRevolt became a thing, though even before then I was starting to get annoyed.
Also, could you possibly link me to that document?
Amen, brother.
Aaron Morales
I don't know where the heck it's supposed to be hosted properly now (which is really sad because I took the responsibility of maintaining it on myself for quite a while), but here's an archive.
Dominic Miller
Grayson Anderson
Damn. If there's all this secrecy, conspiracy and peer pressure for fucking videogames coverage, imagine what there is for the segments of the population that cover and talk politics or economics.
Isaiah Flores
Nolan Perry
There won't be an OWS 2 because martial law will be declared if it even looks like it's going to happen. OWS led to a massive upsurge in anti-capitalist sentiment that survived and grew despite every effort the elites made to co-opt and false flag it to death. They're not going to take that chance again. If the kinds of protests that happened with OWS start happening again, they're going to drop any pretense of free speech or democracy (neither of which ever really existed in the US), mow down the protesters with machine guns and not give a fuck. At this point almost all of the people who are going to see that capitalism is shit have been awakened to that fact, so there's not much point in holding additional protests anyway.
The only thing Milo ever did wrong was not denounce capitalism. He's right about literally everything else.
Leo Cruz
I remember there being a small Occupy Houston, but it didn't go far and the dyke mayor kicked them out a few times. I think some FBI files showed a group was going to shoot some people there. I was a massive poorfag who couldn't afford the rent in New York so I didn't get to go to OWS.
breddy gud, all things considered.
I've gotten more radical, most of it happened for reasons unrelated but hearing about the planned attack on Occupy made me realize that reactionaries will try to kill you and have to be attacked.
Brayden Smith
That might have been true 200 years ago. American politicians, whether in office or not in office, are now an entrenched ruling class.
Ian Thompson
That's what he's saying. The state is inherently a bourgeois entity. The American government (and almost all governments) is just "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie". It's always been like that
Adam Bailey
Politicians by themselves have no power, the material means of government aren't in their hands, even though they're relatively wealthy. The very, very wealthy people that finance their respective parties (and factions/individuals within it) are what count. Besides that, political power without economic power is nothing. A lot of governments around the globe can declare a bunch of policies that go directly against the wishes and designs of global finance today, the blowback on them will be a lot heavier than on those institutions itself. There are built-in limitations to the powers of government, and nowadays in particular these count a lot more than governments per se. And specifically in the US, not even political dynasties like the Bush are shit without their respective networks of businessmen and media figures.
Adrian Lee
Exactly the reverse. The politicians, in the rare moments that they're not just actors in a meaningless spectacle, are only a distant secondary tool of the system. And even then they are mostly used only as a scapegoat. Whereas most of power is nowadays on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley.
Just ask yourself this: what does shape your daily life the most? I'm not an American but for people around me it's a combination of economists and technologists while politics (in the narrows sense) is the best reality show on TV right now - and the only that is a comedy instead of a drama.
Sebastian James
no, I was a Paleoconservative then, opposed it for reasons I'd rather not specifiy.
Jayden Adams
On the off chance you were involved in that, what's your take on the Tea Party's shift from pure astroturf, to somewhat uncontrollable grassroots economic suicide cult, back to dying astroturf?
Bentley Roberts
I was close to the people who were developing OWS actions in my city but I was also fresh into college and had no concrete idea of what was really happening in politics. The signs of decay were all around me. I'd recently lost my best friend to poverty. I'd used a good chunk of my college money to dodge the housing crisis. But I didn't have a way of conceptualizing things as I do now. I guess I was a liberal college kid who was being exposed to tangible political upheaval for the first time.
At first I just showed face at demos and chanted bullshit; even held a sign with a cute slogan on it! Then I took to learning how to be a street medic and was kinda moving between factions without real direction. I absolutely saw the claws of "non-violence" dig themselves into anyone that actually wanted to engage in any direct action though. The whole idea of a stack and virtually every instance of "consensus" based action was imposed on the movement by do nothing liberals from the very first day. Got something to say? Add yourself to the stack (or the related comment sub-stack! cus that was actually a fucking thing here) and hope we get to you! Oh we got to you but you're not towing the line? Oh no we're suddenly out of time for today's public forum! Now go break into groups so you can spend hours in a tent debating who may or may not be a plant that's abusing the consensus system. By the way, we decided yesterday at a meeting you didn't attend that we're going to only extend material support to the factions we agree with. Don't like it? Well stop being so divisive!
Shit was jokes.
Even with all of the homeless people being fed and the restoration of some of their humanity, kids skipping school to get involved in politics, general feeling that we might be on the same page as the various other revolts happening around the world at the same time, it was almost immediately apparent that the movement itself wouldn't produce meaningful change so long as there were so many points of friction within it. I know why it's important to decentralize dissient now but OWS was chaos.
Where am I now? Much further radicalized. I'd love to pull up to a OWS like situation now; but we're all aware of how difficult that would be. The cat is out of the bag so far as organizing something that large goes. Even instances like BLM, who have grafted chunks of OWS ideas onto their tactics, have shown how much more prepared the state is now. OWS was possibly the last chance we had to galvanize the masses into lefist action. Virtually everyone was being effected by the recession in one form or another so everyone had a stake in the success of OWS. No matter how many times it was repeated in the news that "nobody knows what OWS wants. not even themselves!", people felt the violence against them and it didn't matter how well they could articulate it. There will always be detractors who will point to that lack of articulation as reasoning for the failure of OWS but the energy that brought high schoolers, doctors, bus drivers, janitors, and all kinds of others who are routinely missing from demonstrations to chain themselves together in iron dragons for hours should never be discredited simply cus they didn't precisely explain how the banks were fucking them over. Straightforward messages may be easier to spread but they're just as easy to discredit. Feelings are much harder to destroy and can be channeled into meaningful action if directed effectively. Articulations of that which fueled the anger and frustration people were being motivated by would help and often did help people to frame themselves within the greater scope of the movement but the media/liberals/porky did everything they could to attack any moment of clarity that came out of OWS; so what does it matter really?
I hesitate to call this disillusionment but that might just be self preservation speaking. I am bitter tho. Life is still arduous but I appreciate the pragmatism OWS has given me. I do feel somewhat cheated out of a chance to shake things up in ways that people generally agreed needed to happen. It should have gone further. People should have held ground where we would be clearly visible to those doing the damage instead of smoking weed in tent cities. People should have been holding public lectures on socialist topics instead of calling the cops on each other cus someone spray painted a window. I know that kind of behaviour is just another factor to consider now. I still believed in electoral politics then too so a lot of my own energy went into useless things. There won't really be another chance. Now it's all too complicated for much of anyone to articulate. The capacity for direct action has been neutered almost entirely. The mechanisms are in place for COINTELPROs to practically run themselves on whatever is chosen. Etc etc etc
This is getting to be a lot of words and yall already know what the fuck is up so I'll stop now
Bentley Phillips
Occupy ICE PDX is fucking radical. I'm glad to be a part of it. Ask me about it if anyone's curious.
Lincoln Sanchez
i am curious. size/situation?
Landon Parker
ranges between 30 - 1000, growing.
Local police are being cool. We are, funnily enough, next door to Tesla as well. It's growing every day.
Michael Scott
how organised is it, like are there specific groups involved in starting it or did it just happen organically