Why did Occupy spread so far and wide? Unemployment in the U.S. was hovering around 9 percent that summer, a tad better than at the peak of the Great Recession, but the recovery was painfully slow. The labor-led occupation of the Wisconsin state legislature the previous winter was a domestic harbinger. So were the youth-led, internet-powered protests against economic inequality and political oligarchy that had spread earlier that year across Tunisia, Egypt, England, Chile, Israel, Greece, and Spain.
But in the wake of the recession, other progressive organizations and would-be leaders in the U.S. had tried to convert private pain into public action with little success. On Tax Day 2010, a group of activists launched “The Other 98%” with a pitch-perfect web page, a viral video of a flash mob taking over a Target store, and lots of “likes” and “shares.” They had no visible impact. (And they were only off by 1 percent from Occupy’s signature slogan, “We are the 99%”!) Neither did US Uncut, which, in early 2011, tried to rally people to hold sit-ins in front of tax-avoiding corporations, a tactic that had buoyed the much more popular UK Uncut movement. It was heavily touted by The Nation magazine, which likened it to a “progressive Tea Party” and published a 10-step guide on how to get a local Uncut group going. It, too, fizzled. And Rebuild the Dream, a putative movement-slash-vehicle for a new book of the same name by celebrity activist Van Jones, which was heavily backed by organized labor and groups like MoveOn, along with a blue-chip list of progressive notables, also went nowhere interesting after its launch that summer.
So why did Occupy succeed in capturing public attention? Because it wasn’t slick. Other than an initial push from Adbusters magazine, which offered September 17 as the start date and created an iconic poster for the movement of a ballerina atop the Wall Street bull, it wasn’t organized by professional activists. To be sure, people with experience in movements like the Indignados of Spain, along with anarchist academics like David Graeber and documentarians like Marisa Holmes, brought what they had gleaned from those efforts to the planning that led to Zuccotti. But Occupy took off because it was authentically filled with desperate, hopeful ordinary people, many of them students burdened by extraordinary college debt. After mainstream journalists got over their initial skepticism, many were impressed by the Occupiers’ authenticity and shared that in their coverage.