Occupy, the Movie

Here's the first episode of Fault Lines, a documentary from Al-Jazeera about the rise of the Occupy movement and its evolution. "In just two months, Occupy Wall Street had transformed the popular discourse in Amercia, challenging people not only to demand change but to live it," the opening narration says.

To see the movie, here's Episode One. What do you think?

(Screenshot from Episode One of Faultines)

Occupy Us!

It is said that good advertising anticipates -- and acknowledges -- social trends. [Apple's "Think Different" campaign comes to mind.] But bad advertising? Clueless. Consider Bank of America's new "Together, we are the 100%" campaign, which tries to monetize Occupy Wall Street's anti-greed movement, if not simply "re-image" the bank, which is under fire for improper foreclosures and hiking debit card fees.

The bank kicked off the new campaign earlier this month and promoted it on Thursday -- Occupy Wall Street's nationwide Day of Action, which successfully orchestrated protest marches across the country to celebrate the movement's two-month annniversary. BofA's ads are part of the bank's new image campaign that began in September across 12 of the bank's larger U.S. markets, including New York City. Says Bank spokesman T.J. Crawford: "The campaign aims to deliver the facts about Bank of America's local impact. Sharing the work we do and the critical role we play is more important than ever."

But many Occupy supporters are not impressed. Influential BoingBoing co-editor Zeni Jardin yesterday shared some Twitpics of the bilingual ads (including those above), and the images went viral. "I find BofA's new 100% ads positively revolting," she tweeted to a chorus of hundreds of RTs and thousands of thumbs-ups in the Twittersphere.

BOA isn't the only company trying to leverage the "Occupy US" theme locally. Major World, one of the nation's largest used car dealerships, launched a series of 60-second radio spots last week that invite listeners to "occupy us" for the "best deals on used cars in the nation." A spokesman for the Queens-based dealership said today the company has received "dozens of calls" from potential customers since the ads were placed but declined to characterize the feedback.

Okay, it's a used car dealership. But it is unlikely Major's and BofA's ads will be the last Occupy-themed campaigns to launch. Marketing sources across the financial sector have told Cause Global that OWS isn't just changing the political conversation; it's also re-shaping the focus of many ad campaigns being planned for 2012.

Let's hope marketers trying to exploit the Occupy meme will do a better job of it going forward. In today's social media world, smart marketing isn't about the brand so much as it is about making customers the heroes. It's about conveying shared values by supporting customers in authentic, sustainable ways -- not on-the-spot sloganeering. Occupy? Sure --it, too, is a brand. But part of its appeal is that it's the "anti-brand" -- not business-as-usual.

"We want more than slogans," says Occupy protester Nancy Popp, one of some 200 demonstrators arrested Thursday in Manhattan's financial district. "Don't give us slogans and fine print. Deal with us. Hear us. I mean, do they really think an ad campaign is going to make us open bank accounts at Bank of America? Maybe it's true that there's a sucker born every minute, but with social media, the suckers aren't the customers anymore. The message of Occupy? No more bullshit. Are these brands even listening?"

Seen any further examples of Occupy-in-advertising? Let us know. We'll publish them when we see them.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photos by BoingBoing.com]

Counter-swarms

Occupy Wall Street organizers -- to further protest their eviction earlier today from Manhattan's Zuccotti Park by New York City riot police -- are stepping up their scheduled global "Day of Action" rally set for Thursday throughout New York City and in other cities where Occupy encampments have been shuttered in recent hours and days.

In a flash rally today attended by hundreds of Occupy protesters along 7th Avenue in midtown Manhattan near the failed Lehman Brothers' former world headquarters building, the movement's organizers asked passersby to "join the Global Movement for Economic and Social Equality and the 99 Percent" for a Day of Action on November 17th. Events that day will include a 7 a.m. "Resist Austerity" rally at Zuccotti Park just before the opening of the New York Stock Exchange "to confront Wall Street with the stories of people on the front lines of economic injustice." Then, at 3 p.m., organizers have scheduled simultaneous rallies at 16 central subway stops in all five NYC boroughs "to listen to a singular story from one of our hardest-hit and most inspirational neighbors." At 5 p.m., Occupy supporters will move to Foley Square near Wall Street to "listen to stories, a gospel choir, a marching band" and "march to our city's bridges to demand that we get back to work rebuilding our country's infrastructure." The flier urges participants to "make it a musical march. ...Bring your songs, your voice, your spirit." [For more information, search N17Event on Facebook.]

Today's flash rally came hours after New York City police, acting on the orders of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, arrested 200 Occupy Wall Street protesters in the wee hours as part of a long-planned eviction strategy aimed to clear Zuccotti Park -- the symbolic epicenter of the global Occupy movement. The 1 a.m. eviction was part of a coordinated crackdown by authorities in multiple cities, from Zurich to Portland to London and Calgary after two months of demonstrations in city parks and squares across the country and in cities around the world. In a morning news conference hours after police moved in overnight, NYC's Mayor Bloomberg said the city wanted to clear Zuccotti Park for cleaning but that it had intended to let protesters back in later -- provided they wouldn't live there and re-occupy the space with tents and tarps. But the city decided to keep the park closed when its attorneys were served with a Temporary Restraining Order mid-morning against the evictions. Zuccotti Park remained empty and closed for most of the rest of the day, pending the outcome of a court hearing on the TRO and the legality of the city's actions against the protesters. [ At about 5:30 p.m., the judge upheld the city's ban on tents and tarps, and protesters moved back into Zuccotti Park, without camping gear.]

The raid against Occupy Wall Street came just days after similar actions to break up Occupy Portland and Occupy Oakland-- and a half-day before Occupy Toronto, Occupy Calgary, Occupy Zurich and Occupy London were similarly confronted by authorities. Occupy Los Angeles spokesperson PJ Davenport told The Huffington Post that: "The timing of the evictions of occupiers in Portland, Oakland and New York City are no coincidence. Sources at Occupy LA have received notice from our information networks that the proverbial hammer is coming down and that a nationwide effort is underway to close all occupations. Here at Occupy LA, despite our friendly relationship with City Council and the LAPD, we believe that it is a short matter of time before we are asked to leave."

Occupy press spokeswoman Dana Balicki told WNYC Radio Host Brian Lehrer on his daily radio call-in show today that Occupy organizers would not be deterred by the evictions. "The messaging here is that we are undeterred, our spirits are high and our resolve is unbeatable. ...We are letting the City of New York, Mayor Bloomberg and the world know that we are not going anywhere and that you can't simply throw an idea in a dumpster." Gideon Oliver, one of the lead attorneys representing the Occupy protesters, told Lehrer the crackdowns represent "a new form of represssive conduct. Unlike temporary, stationary rallies of the past, Occupy has created a 24/7 component and taken on messaging and communicative tactics that are unique, so to attack" the movement by clearing the parks they occupy for health and safety reasons "is clearly a pretext."

Meanwhile, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan told the BBC that leaders of 18 cities in which Occupy protesters had set up encampments coordinated their raids across the county. "I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation," Quan said.

On Monday, the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which conceived of the movement -- and apparently aware of the multi-city crackdowns yet to come -- said the protesters should “declare victory” and head indoors to strategize. "OWS isn't a geographical place so much as it is an idea and an attitude," spokewoman Balicki said.

Watch this space for updates.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Illustration, top: Day of Action poster by Occupy Wall Street.]

[Photos of Tuesday's Occupy Wall Street eviction, top, by Don Emmert of AFP-Getty Images, and below, by The Associated Press - both with permission.]

Re:volution Notebook

New takes on the political impact of social media:

* Vlad Teichberg, a 39-year-old former derivatives trader, is in charge of Occupy Wall Street's livestream video feed of GlobalRevolution.tv. He says in this week's New Yorker that he has been working for months to help build, from New York, what he calls "camera Kalashnikovs" to help seed and sustain the movement, which he characterizes as having its roots not on Wall Street, but in the rise of the Arab Spring. Teichberg had been operating from under a tarp in Zuccotti Square but now manages the movement's livestream feed from a small, second-floor space in Manhattan's NoHo neighborhood donated by the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, a pacifist organization that bought the building in 1974. He told New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz that live video, distributed via social media, can limit police brutality. "If everyone is watching, the state can't just crush people," he told Marantz. "That's what kept Tahrir Square from turning into Tiananmen -- they knew people were paying attention."

* Iceland President Olafur Regnar Grimsson (photo, above) speaking at the annual PopTech thought festival in Camden, Maine, noted the increasingly important role of social media in empowering people to challenge institutions. Grimsson said those now in political power around the world have a choice: use this moment in history to force citizens to bear responsibility for the actions of private institutions, or implement comprehensive political and social reforms. [Grimsson, himself, chose the latter following his nation's 2008 economic collapse. Fighting immense global political pressure, he refused to force Icelanders to bear responsibility for the actions of private banks in the meltdown.] He told PopTech conferees Thursday that Occupy Wall Street protesters have global resonance because "social media is people power in its purest form." Grimsson also sat down with PopTech's Emily Spivack to talk about how social media are destabilizing traditional institutions. Here's an excerpt from that interview:

"I have concluded, which is a strange conclusion for me to make because I have spent most of my life within the traditional institutions of a democratic political system, that the democratic power of this movement that technology has enabled and brought about, is now so strong and so fast that the operations of the traditional institutions have almost become a sideshow.

You see it happening in my country in the last three years, you saw it happening in Cairo, you've seen it happen in Athens, and you've seen it last week, in over a thousand cities, where you've got coordinated demonstrations initiated by Occupy Wall Street. Before, in history, it would have been impossible to coordinate these demonstrations at a relatively short notice.

Secondly, we are seeing a shift from the predominance of the financial and the market institution, over to the re-emergence of democracy, and what we have classically called the "public will," to use a philosophical term. But we are in the middle of that shift; we don't know where it will take us, or what will be the implications.

But the third shift, which is implied in all of this, is the shift in time. These changes are now so fast, helped by social media, that they are of historic proportions. We have nothing comparable in world history as a guideline."

* Kambiz Hosseini and Saman Arbabi, Iranian expatriates living in Washington, D.C., are the cofounders of Parazit [meaning "static" in Arabic]. It is a weekly half-hour TV satire show that pokes fun at Iranian politics and culture, and which grew out of Iran's so-called "Green Revolution" in 2009. "When they kicked foreign journalists out of Iran, citizen journalism because huge, and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook became the platform for communication," Hossesini says. "Seventy percent of Iranians are under 30 years of age, they live in media oppression and we set a new tone for them and a new voice with our show." When authorities jammed the show's satellite signals, Arbabi said last week, "we went guerilla-style, posting the show in online forums everywhere." Parazit is broadcast on Voice of America's Persian service. It also has been featured by John Stewart on The Daily Show and still lives broadly on YouTube. Speaking at PopTech's annual thought-fest Friday, Arbabi said of social media:

"It has changed the world and that's why dictators are afraid of it. It's the only source of information that some people have. ...Trying to stop social media is like trying to stop car theft. You can't. Thieves are always two steps ahead. Except that these protesters [in Iran and around the world] are not thieves. They're fighting for their freedom."

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photo, top, of "calligraffiti" by eL Seed, a Tunisian graffiti artist featured at this year's PopTech conference, who uses Arabic script to convey messages of peace and justice, online and off. Photo of Iceland President Olafur Regnar Grimsson by Kris Krug.]

Wirearchy

Today is the official one-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and supporters are congratulating themselves, with birthday cakes and marathon choruses of "Happy Occupy to You" from Manhattan's Zuccotti Park. But the movement's staying power should come as no surprise. What has been unexpected? Since the Tweet that started it all went viral July 15 -- "Sept. 17. Wall St. Bring Tent." -- the movement it catalyzed has appeared to kindle more heat globally than nationally. The New York Times journalist Nick Kristof, in a column Sunday titled America's Primal Scream, wrote how "it's fascinating that many Americans intuitively understood the outrage and frustration that drove Egyptians to protest at Tahrir Square, but don't seem to comprehend similar resentments that drive disgruntled fellow citizens to 'occupy' Wall Street."

Indeed, the #OWS movement had its largest single day of protests Saturday not in New York but far from Wall Street. Writes blogger Nate Silver: "In Europe, crowds in cities like Rome, Barcelona, and Madrid were estimated at 200,000 to 500,000 per city -- more, probably, than the protests in the U.S. combined." [See Cause Global's coverage of the rally in Times Square here.] Silver, who analyzed crowd turnout numbers and the distribution of the October 15th protests worldwide, also found that "despite Occupy Wall Street's name, its energy in the U.S. seems to be coming from the left coast" -- and apparently from people who didn't vote in the 2010 mid-term elections.

But it would be foolish to underestimate the movement's ideological diversity, its staying power, or its organizational savvy. This is not, as protester Justin Strekal told The Associated Press over the weekend, simply "a participatory democracy in a little park" near Wall Street. On the contrary, Occupy Wall Street has become a global franchise, backed by an impressively horizontal "wire-archy" of digitally connected strategy, media, and community organizing professionals, volunteers, sympathetic tech startups and consultants, online petition groups and other pro bono-minded social enterprises and innovators -- all of whom say they are working to redefine for the digital age what is meant by economic sustainability and participatory leadership (not to mention strategic planning).

For its part, the Zuccotti Park "branch" of the movement is continuing to meet daily in a general assembly and has aggregated nearly $300,000 of hundreds of individual donations into an Amalgamated Bank account. It has a local finance committee -- which, according to The New York Observer, just voted to turn down a donation from music mogul Russell Simmons because he wanted to help the group shape specific demands. (Victoria Sobel, 21, Occupy Wall Street's CFO, told The Observer Sunday that organizers are almost "obsessively sensitive" to any one individual or organization trying to exert leadership over Occupy; she said finance committee members are taking crash courses in money management to make sure the movement's books remain transparent and unfettered by New Age lobbyists.)

The Zuccotti Park installation also has its own newspaper, published in two languages, and a library, an infirmary, a rotating set of showers and rooms-for-no-rent in the area, and a waste disposal system set up by a social enterprise called Mobile Design Lab. And more widely, it has media savvy by the boatload, thanks to a real-time line-up of global PR volunteers and liasons who have, so far, managed the message cross-culture. People in London, Madrid, South Korea, Japan, Sydney and Stockholm, for example, were carrying similar signs and wearing similar t-shirts on October 15, all claiming membership in the "99 Per Cent." Meanwhile, multiple networks of crowdsourced "hackathon" techies are working to better connect sympathizers near and far, and more than 100 lawyers are donating their services to aid the arrested. Most protesters and their supporters, of course, don't live outside in parks, but rather in houses and apartments in multiple cities and countries. [Like the Arab Spring protests, this movement depends on people aggregating both geographically and online to continuously catalyze multiple communities while also populating a geographical "center" for public reference.]

And politically, at least for now, Occupy Wall Street is trending in the mainstream, if not on Twitter, among some of the movement's most unlikely supporters. The GOP-appointed Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told a recent hearing of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that "at some level, I can't blame them (the protesters)" for "blaming, with some justification, the financial sector for getting us into this mess."

In the words of New Yorker Senior Editor Amy Davidson, "this is a global conversation going on now, and it would be foolish not to listen. ...Wall Street has long been a multinational brand name; now Occupy is, too. ...For an anti-corporate movement, OWS has a good sense of franchising -- and more importantly, it has something to say about enfranchisement."

No doubt. Occupy, perhaps most significantly, offers yet another example of how the Internet is profoundly enabling people to reshape the status quo at multiple levels of society. Occupy's loose-knit, distributed networks of hyper-agile, group-led "adhocracies" are -- thanks to our growing addiction to social media -- both inevitable and impossible to ignore. Can such digital organizations and movements topple governments as we know them? If you count the Arab Spring demonstrations, they already have. What's not so obvious is what comes next.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photo of Occupy demonstrator by Reuters, with permission. Illustration: Cover of the October 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker]

Times Squared

Just before the official 5 p.m. start time of today's Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Manhattan's Times Square, a small throng of formally-attired theatergoers standing near the discount TKTS booth began complaining loudly about the crowds clogging the sidewalks, apparently unaware that the biggest Broadway show in town was about to begin right in front of them -- no tickets required. ["Don't they know they're in the way?" theatergoer Rose Aberdeen, 67, asked no one in particular, pointing to a protester dressed up as the Statue of Liberty.]

But this was not just another day in self-expressive Gotham. Some 6,000 demonstrators took to the streets today in Times Square as part of Occupy Wall Street's official October 15th Global Day of Action, prompting the NYPD to close off Broadway for eight blocks in Midtown and erect steel barricades, mount horses and drive motorcycles in formation to break up the crowds. [After 4-plus hours of chanting slogans and texting at a rate of some 500 tweets per minute (according to Twitter), demonstrators headed south to Washington Square Park on the NYU campus, dispersing after police arrived through the Arch and warned they would be enforcing a midnight curfew. Fourteen were arrested for remaining in the park.]

Among today's Times Square protesters were 87-year-old Irwin Nack and Pat Alessandrini, 72, both in from New Jersey for the day. Nack, a retired American history professor from William Patterson University, recalled his first protest rally in 1946 in Manhattan, when he was organizing city teachers for higher wages. He praised social media. "We would have had so much more clout if we'd had those tools back then," he said. " With social media, you can simultaneously protest in multiple locations." Closer to where counter-terrorism police were rushing the intersection of 46th and Broadway, Annie Dawson, 26, from Ann Arbor and Jeffrey Demesch from Brooklyn called the protests "America's Spring" -- referring to the Arab Spring protests earlier this year that used similar tactics in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Meanwhile, chants of "This is our Street" and "This is what democracy looks like" erupted each time a new squad of police marched into the intersection at 46th and Broadway to separate protesters coming into the Square from the east from those pouring in from the west. "I think most people don't realize how neglected their democracy has become until they try to exercise their rights to free speech and assembly," Dawson said.

But for all the chanting and shouting -- and despite some pepper-spray incidents and minor skirmishes with police -- this crowd remained peaceful. And it was impressively self-policed: at various times, some protesters would advise others to stop shouting and sit down. [As one demonstrator passed out Fourth of July sparklers, others urged people to throw them away. "Fireworks are illegal in New York and you don't want to get arrested for that," someone said.]

The ironies conveyed by Time Square's famous neon signs also didn't go entirely unnoticed. Just above a placard that read "Beat the Banks" was a billboard advertising Bonnie & Clyde -- the musical. Beneath a billboard advertising GenX darling Zooey Deschanel in her new sitcom, The New Girl, sat NYU student Jennifer Bell, 22, wearing an AlterNation cap and sharing her opposition to "the status quo" with a fellow demonstrator. Later, beneath Bank of America's enormous red-and-white electric marquee sign on the southwest corner of 46th and Broadway, an Australian couple asked a passer-by to direct them to the nearest ATM -- but first, please, show them the fastest route through the crowd to the Winter Garden Theater. (It was in sight but blocked by mounted police.) They had show tickets for 8 p.m., they told Cause Global, and they "didn't want to miss the show."

When all was said and done, 78 people were arrested in New York, according to The New York Times, including 24 accused of trespassing in a Greenwich Village branch of Citibank during a mid-day rally encouraging people to close their bank accounts at various Citibank, Wells Fargo and Bank of America branches across the city.

The day's events from New York, while generally not televised, were livestreamed, tweeted, facebooked, foursquared and liveblogged, making cable news networks' lack of in-depth local coverage this evening all the more obvious and frustrating to the crowds, underscoring the rapid pace and wider reach of new and social media. "Where's the press? Where's the press?" was the chant at 10 p.m. when the Square's neon news tickers failed to flash much about the day's local demonstrations.

"The press is us now," protester Ann Dawson shouted back. "Shut up and keep tweeting."

-- Marcia Stepanek

[For more on the #OWS swarms, watch this space for continuing highlights, follow the Global Revolution channel on Livestream and jump into the Twitterstreams at #occupywallst and #ows, among others.]

[All photos, top, of Occupy Wall Street's October 15th demonstration at the intersection of Broadway and 46th Street in Times Square, by Marcia Stepanek for CauseGlobal]

Swarms Global

Occupy Wall Street's October 15th Global Day of Action catalyzed coordinated street demonstrations in dozens of cities today, including Taiwan, London, Rome, Belgrade, and Berlin. In Rome, demonstrations turned violent between ralliers and police, while other European and global demonstrations remained comparatively peaceful.

Meanwhile, in New York City, Occupy Wall Street organizers staged weekend hackathons to further advance the movement's ability to digitally coordinate simultaneous actions worldwide and nationally. At 3 p.m. EST today, marchers set off from Washington Square Park on the NYU campus and began making their way north to Times Square, where a large rally was scheduled to start at 5 p.m EST to cap off the global day of protest -- called United for #Globalchange. Protest actions are additionally being coordinated via Foursquare and Meetup.

A video calling for October 15th participation globally, below, sought actions in 951 cities in 82 countries.

To follow the day's events as they continue, watch this space for hilites. Additionally, go to the Occupy Together web site and watch the livestream of the protest marches in NYC today. Jump into the Twitter coverage from the front lines [#OWS, #Oct15, #globalrevolution, #99percent, #occupynyc, among others] and check out the liveblogging by Reuters and The New York Daily News.

[Photos, top to bottom: demonstrator ducking teargas in Rome by The Associated Press; a protester today in Taiwan and the demonstration near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, both by Reuters; all with permission]

Wiki-leadership

Occupy Wall Street entered its fourth week of protests yesterday in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, and despite claims of at least 800 arrests so far nationwide, the movement is showing no signs of winding down. Undeterred by rain, hundreds of demonstrators packed the 33,000-square-foot park of sparse trees and blue tarps again this afternoon -- standing, singing, sitting huddled under blankets, sharing donated food and texting from the ground.

The protest swarm that emerged there via Facebook on September 17 has now spread to many cities: Wikipedia counts more than 70, from Salt Lake City and Seattle to Providence, Rhode Island. About 130 people were arrested at Occupy Boston early Tuesday; the Occupy groups in Atlanta and Seattle, among others, were reported on Slate to be digging in at their sites for the long haul. Politicans and the media, meanwhile, have been forced to take notice and to take sides. On Tuesday, a group of demonstrators from Occupy Wall Street took to the road and marched from lower Manhattan to NYC's uber-wealthy Upper East Side, in what they called the Millionaire's March. The group walked and chanted past the homes of people like Rupert Murdoch, Tea Party financial backer David Koch and JP Morgan Chase Chairman Jamie Dimon. [Mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself a billionaire, was spared; his East Side townhouse was not on the visitation list.]

More marching is planned for this weekend: Occupy Wall Street is organizing a series of flash mobs at Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Chase bank locations across the country. Though Facebook, YouTube, livestreaming and Twitter have been key in organizing and perpetuating the movement, organizers also have been distributing "old media" -- paper fliers and a broadsheet newspaper called Occupied Wall Street Journal, published in English and Spanish.

"We're taking what worked in Cairo during the Arab Spring," says Jonathan Hull, 26, a protester who arrived in Zuccotti Park last week from Portland, Ore. A freelance graphic designer, Hull says the movement is less about the future of capitalism and much more about the need to create new models of leadership for a digital world. "These protests are kind of like a first effort by members of my generation to use social media to help create a new, consensus-driven model of self-governance," Hull told Cause Global. "We call ourselves leaderless but we're really fighting to create a shared kind of leadership, kind of like how Wikipedia works. It's a group effort. It's consensus-based. We're working to create a new way to give everyone a voice and apply those voices to solving what's not working" in society. (As Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in this week's New Yorker, observed: "The process, not the platform, is the point.")

Hull isn't the only protester to speak passionately about the need for new forms of leadership -- both to organize digital groups and then to grow and sustain them. Justin Wedes, 24, an Occupy Wall Street founder/organizer, spoke Wednesday with WNYC Radio host Brian Lehrer on his live, call-in talk show about the group's goal to create "a new form of direct democracy" enabled by social media.

What follows is an edited transcript of that interview:

LEHRER: Who are you and why are you involved?

WEDES: I'm an organizer with the New York City General Assembly, one of the organizing bodies behind the Occupy Wall Street movement. We started three months ago, when Adbusters and Anonymous put out the call to flood lower Manhattan in protest of Wall Street. We have been organizing in parks and local spaces, holding horizontal open, public meetings for anyone interested in joining the thousands of people we have in New York now and across the country. I trained as a high school science teacher and do part-time work designing Web sites and community activism.

LEHRER: Are you the person behind #OccupyWallStNYC on Twitter?

WEDES: Yes, I'm the captain of that tweetstream but not the only one.

LEHRER: Will you soon need to put out a list of demands to keep the movement from fizzling?

WEDES: I don't believe so. I think it's a goal of the movement to enunciate some serious demands, but organizing people is a process in and of itself. It's taken us now over three weeks just to get where we are, and we're still growing -- now at our fastest rate ever. If you look at the immense amount of solidarity and support and growth of our movement, it's not because we're enunciating any particular demands but rather because we are reaching out to people who are frustrated, who are really saying 'enough is enough.' Meanwhile, every night, we are meeting and talking about what our [specific] demands should be and building solidarity.

LEHRER: Enough is enough of what?

WEDES: Corporate greed. The political influence of monied interests on Wall Street in Washington and in our local and state governments. People are just fed up. It's not fixing our economy. It's destroying our country and people have had enough.

CALLER: Are you using Gandhi's ideals to influence your movement?

WEDES: Yes, absolutely. This is in the vein of Gandhi's nonviolent work of peaceful protest. The world we're trying to create in these general assemblies [Occupy groups] across the country is all about nonviolence and consensus. These general assemblies we're creating are now being built spontaneously in up to 100 cities. It's a mirror of what we're trying to get to in the end.

CALLER: Is this anti-capitalist?

WEDES: There is a broad spectrum of perspectives and agendas. We claim to be the 99 percent [of the population] and if we are, that represents a very wide spectrum of beliefs, so I don't want to narrow it down to one or another ideology.

CALLER: What is the process by which you all arrived at the organizational roles you play? How does the election process take place to form these general assemblies that choose you and others as leaders of this movement?

WEDES: I can't stake a claim to be a leader any more than anyone else. I call myself an organizer, as I've been there since Day One, helping to bring spirit and organization to this movement. We are a leaderless, horizontal movement, in the sense that there are no hierarchies of roles in this group. We are constantly rotating through facilitators in our general assembly [a daily mass meeting], so there's no ability of any individual or organization to co-opt us.

I think the magic that I believe is happening right now in Zuccotti Park (and really, across the country) is that the general assembly is a consensus-based process. It's not an elected or representative democracy. It is an attempt to bring consensus -- agreement to a group of people. And it works in a really amazing, magical way. Everybody has a voice in the general assembly. Every voice is heard. It's a slow process and at time, laborious, but people are patient because they know their voices will be heard and valued.

LEHRER: Consensus is a high standard. You can't always get a consensus in a marriage, much less among thousands of people in Zuccotti Park.

WEDES: No, that's right, and when there isn't consensus -- when there are blocks, for example, in proposals -- we move to what we call 'modified consensus.' But even before that, we try to modify our proposals with friendly amendments. The problem with representative democracy is that it has up-and-down votes. You know, 51 percent of the people may be in support of an idea but then the other 49 percent are then immediately marginalized. That doesn't work. Politics isn't working because it has become so confrontational. So our approach is rather than try to find the 51 percent agreement and leave the other 49 percent in the dust, let's do the extra work it takes to build consensus and unity.

CALLER: But if there is no one leader, this movement won't go anywhere. Every group needs a leader.

WEDES: The idea of a leaderless, horizontal movement is really difficult for a lot of people to grasp because it's only in the last few years that we've started to harness technology and social media and the possibilities that it all brings in order to facilitate communication and flatten communication hierarchies. I like to rather call [our movement] leader-ful -- a leaderful movement rather than a leaderless one -- because what it means is that everyone is empowered to take a role of leadership. Everybody is empowered to step forward and lead a cause or an initiative. And the way that we're able to do that is we're harnessing technology to open up streams of information --to keep from having information bottlenecks, for example, where too few people know too much and they are able to have access to resources that other people in the group don't.

LEHRER: If you're a tight little group of protesters in each city, you can do that. But if you want to become a major political party, or if you want to have a major mass influence on America, then you can't do it like a tight-knit little family, can you?

WEDES: I'm not sure whether we can or cannot. I think that's a little bit unpredictable. What I DO know is that what will grow out of this is being supported by the work of some very, very smart people on the software development end and the hardware development end, who are working on tools to be able to coordinate these movements all over the country -- and really all over the world -- so that we can collaborate in real time and hold things like simultaneous polling. We live in a world where technology has long surpassed the political realities of this country. We have a representative democracy that is so unparticipative right now, that everybody's democracy muscle is not being flexed. So let's find creative solutions to that.

LEHRER: How long will this movement keep going? It started September 17.

WEDES: There was never a deadline for when we go home. We always said we'll be here until our voices are heard and our demands are met. Those demands are being created right now. We will release them soon.

LEHRER: Will there be something like a news conference?

WEDES: I'm not sure, as that would be pretty old school and I think we're a bit beyond that now with our social media. [To follow Occupy Wall Street NYC, go to the livestream, search the calls to action on YouTube or go to Occupy's YouTube page. Or, go to Occupy Together to check out actions across the country and jump into the Twitterstreams at #occupywallstnyc, #ows, and #sep17 -- among others.]

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photo, top, by Lukas Johnson/Reuters]

[Poster, above, by B.L. Singelton for Occupy Together]