Breem’s office was in Albany, but the chants and stomps coming from Zuccotti Park were intended to reach him. A FOX News anchor had deemed the scene an “unsightly display of Marxist manpower,” and I’d wanted to see it for myself. “Whose streets? Our streets!” sang the protesters, reminding the swarms of surveillance drones that these roads had been built with human hands. The Freedom Tower stood gaunt in the distance, a fragile monument to the dying era of the American construction worker.
If #Occupy’s previous incarnation fizzled under its supporters’ inability to agree on a set of demands, the new regime was unified by consensus on this single urgent issue. These weren’t pod people, but podcast people, the restless jobless who filled long afternoons listening to pundits preach the gospel of #Occupy. Groups as disparate as BDS, Black Lives Matter, and The Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association joined arms beneath the #Occupy banner. The previous administration had segmented the country into factions narrowly focused on their own safety and survival, but that administration’s end, combined with the employment crisis and subsequent crash, had heralded the integration of these financially progressive factions, now bonded in harmony against the fiscally conservative Republican moderates and Democratic centrists eager to reinstate the neoliberal status quo.
Once again, there was a 99%. I saw cabbies of every ethnically stereotypical stripe, from old neighborhood wise guys to club-ready Russians with slicked hair and Bluetooth attachments. I saw adjunct professors with bulging triceps because their only job perk was gym access; MTA maintenance workers wearing tool belts filled with possible weaponry; mail carriers raring to go postal. There were even people in Augmented Reality helmets, who saw, I assumed, a terrifically enhanced version of the protest. I pictured the US Steel building in laser-beam crisscross and lit from within, a radium hearthstone transmitting light waves the color of electrified money.
It was amazing how many industries automation had so quickly thrown into disrepair. Service, retail, and factory jobs were hit hardest, but white-collar industries were also affected, from IT to sales to customer service. Even former blue-shirts were out in force, ex-cops who’d cuffed dozens in 2011, now linked in solidarity against the tear gas–equipped drones that had stolen their street beats. A workers’ strike meant nothing in this automated city, or if not nothing then the opposite of its intent: it reminded the masters what little need they had for a human workforce. For now, the tear gas stayed unsprayed, but as the sound of the human mic increased in volume, and drumbeats quickened to amphetamine tempo, and protesters pounded fists against palms, one couldn’t help but wonder if, this time, true violence might ensue.
A few blocks away, outside Goldman Sachs, a smaller demonstration was at hand. A group of young people gathered around a card table, holding signs with anti-Goldman slogans. Seated at its center, I was surprised to see, was Jay Devor, founder of a social network and new-media empire called Nøøse. Begun as an app for finding protest events in the tristate area, Nøøse had grown into a large-scale nonprofit with offices on both coasts, two hundred full-time employees, print and online publishing arms, and a user base nearing the two million mark.
Nøøse had been instrumental in spearheading #Occupy’s organizational upgrade, in part by creating a manageable infrastructure for earmarking donations, and by implementing an online voting system that pushed the movement closer to its vision of a true direct democracy. Devor—a baby-faced elder statesman among his Gen Z cohorts—had become the de facto face of the movement after his public arrest during a reading of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. The reading stopped traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, and Devor appeared handcuffed on Page Six, smiling for the cameras: part Robin Hood, part Zuckerberg, part Jewish JFK.
Devor and I were classmates at Columbia, and had crossed paths at Brooklyn bars and mutual friends’ birthday parties in the years since. Beyond his disgust at what I did for a living, I sensed a begrudging respect. I’d recently emailed Devor with an article pitch for Nøøse’s eponymous webzine of culture and politics. The piece was an unwritten excerpt from the book I was writing—or planning on writing—called Eminem: American American in America. I had yet to receive a reply.
“Devor,” I said, and he looked up with the same soft eyes that had conjured the removal of so much women’s wear, the sparkling tube tops and chic retro Umbros of fangirls from Greenpoint to Red Hook and as far north as Washington Heights. There were probably even coeds who commuted from Bronxville, Young Trotskyites of Sarah Lawrence. He looked me over before responding, unsure about fraternizing with the enemy, or else gauging the health risks of shaking my hand.
“Mixner,” he said with a nod. We’d never made the transition to first names, which spoke to either a lack of intimacy, or a deeper intimacy built of nostalgia.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I come in peace.”
“If that’s the case,” Devor said, and handed me a flyer. I had to remove the reading glasses from my bag to read it, and in doing so grabbed a tube of moisturizer and passed it to Devor. The sun had emerged from behind the clouds, and I figured Devor, a pale guy like myself, might benefit from the product’s SPF-15
