A lot of people have wondered how Occupy Wall Street started. To most of us it seems like it’s just a spontaneous movement – when in fact it’s been in the works since early summer. But who planned this whole thing? An anti-consumerism Canadian magazine called Adbusters has been the driving force behind the movement, but who are they and how did they get this whole thing going?
A Brief Occupy Wall Street Timeline
According to Wikipedia, the first signs of the Occupy Wall Street movement started in early June with the registration of the domain occupywallstreet.org. A little over a month later, the initial plans for the protests started to take shape. Early August saw the OWS planners getting together with another group of New York protestors during the debt ceiling crisis in Washington, planning for September 17th as the first day of protests. On that day, roughly 1000 people showed up and walked up and down Wall Street in protest, and since then other Occupy groups have formed in cities all over the country and world.
Who Are Adbusters?
Founded in 1989 by Bill Schmalz and Kalle Lasn in Vancouver, Canada, the Adbusters Media Foundation describes themselves as “a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age.” Their message is decidedly anti-consumerist: their primary form of protest is called “culture jamming.” Wikipedia describes culture jamming as a type of dissent that “aims to challenge the large, influential corporations that control mainstream media and the flow of information.” By changing around logos and symbols, their aim is to remake the messages sent out by the mass media and challenge people’s perceptions of what the media is sending them by not letting advertising define who they are.
Postconsumers founder Carol Holst was happy to fly Kalle Lasn to Los Angeles to be a major speaker at the No Purchase Necessary Conference in 1998 at the University of Southern California. So for all these many years, finding ways to mitigate consumerism’s damage to people and the planet has been the continuous overall goal, whether through postconsumerism’s gradual moving beyond it or anticonsumerism’s huge protest model.
So you can see, the Occupy Wall Street movement is indeed a very large culture jam: folks around the country are filling the streets in protest over the big banks, corporations and greed. Are the protestors going to make a difference? They already are.
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