October 5, 2011

In 2010 Andy Carvin became a hero of mine because of his curation of foreign Tweets during the Arab Spring. In the fall of 2011 I remember folks tweeting at him, excoriating him for not covering a small protest happening near Wall Street at Zuccotti Park. At the time I, like most of the NY media, took it to be just another in a line of small protests going on all the time in the city that never amounted to much. This small protest, however, grew to become Occupy Wall Street. For quite a few weeks as the numbers of campers at the park increased, I wasn't sure of what to make of the group. They released a messy, directionless, unfocused manifesto of sorts that was high on rhetoric and short on concrete plans of action. It did not seem like they were organized enough to achieve anything, and yet they persisted. On October 5 I decided that since I was lucky enough to live and work so close to the action that I should go down and see for myself instead of relying on media accounts, so I attended a march from Foley Square to Zuccotti. I've written elsewhere about how my mind changed, and what it changed to, but my views before and after attending are pretty well encapsulated in this image.