Very interesting article. ... This was largely my takeaway regarding the inefficiency of OWS. I agree with the author that OWS did serve to change the narrative, and that still resonates. However, IMO a perceived failure of OWS still resonates as well, and very likely emboldens those that it sought to target. Personally speaking, I am wary of what I see as a shift to collectivism that blunts the impact (or at the very least must validate the impact) of individual movers. In fact, I believe that here on the web, validation is often celebrated more than the act that has been validated. This 'fetishizing of the process' is dangerous in the sense that by making every effort to give everyone a voice, no one has a voice. A beautiful thing about people is that their talents are varied. Any system that doesn't take full advantage of that is fatally flawed.Of course those of us who were self-consciously political in our orientation toward OWS were clearly not the only tendency. OWS's public performances were not always designed for politically instrumental purposes; they were often much more expressive than instrumental. Zuccotti Park was a bastion of expressiveness, wherein participants could collectively (or individually) express emotions, creativity, values, opinions, and visions in countless ways without every participant having, necessarily, to grasp whether or how these expressions fit together into a strategic framework to achieve instrumental goals.
The challenge is that OWS processes and rituals came to stand in for a strategy for many participants. Particular forms of process—from mic checks to sparkle fingers5 to making space where everyone who wants to can speak—are often confused with political content (i.e., goals or a platform). Leach (2013) describes activists fetishizing the process. The prefigurative world can become a kind of game, in Rushkoff's (2013, p. 167) words, “played for the sake of play.