Mark Bray

Decisions ran through a general assembly using consensus rather than a vote, built explicitly to avoid handing authority to any single spokesperson the press or the police could isolate.

Historian Mark Bray, who was one of the organizers, later interviewed nearly two hundred participants for a book on the movement’s roots and found that Occupy’s structure was not improvised from nothing.

It was anarchist organizing theory, direct action, and horizontal decision-making both, applied to a park two blocks from the stock exchange ACT UP had disrupted twenty-two years earlier.

None of this settles the harder question this episode opened with, and it should not pretend to.