vive la révolution: a vibe
Well, the first month of 2021 is nearly over and never in my lifetime has a new year felt like less of a “fresh start.” We’re all still restless as hell, emotionally drained from a pandemic that feels endless and tired of being forced to merely survive instead of live.
It’s exactly the uplifting vibe one wants to start a year with, right?
But, despite waiting for vaccines to distribute at a faster pace and our collective mental anguish from the previous president to pass, there has been a sea change of sorts in 2021 thus far. As our feeds populate with selfies of people happily being vaccinated and not a single Trump tweet is in sight, there’s a modicum of hope — and mental space to focus on other things.
I mean, it’s obviously possible Redditors could’ve taken down hedge funders by driving up the stock of defunct video gaming store GameStop in 2020, but we likely would’ve had some wild White House press conference pop up and make it old news in a few hours. Instead, it dominated the news cycle for the better part of this week and has been an absolute ride to read about.
More than just a wacky story about David taking on Goliath, this is — as many, many people have said today — Occupy Wall Street 2.0.
In recalling Occupy in 2011 — when I was a college student in New York City not even three miles from its epicenter in Zuccotti Park — I wonder: What would Occupy have been like if it happened now?
September 2021 marks the ten year anniversary of Occupy, which simultaneously feels like no time at all as well as eons. It feels like no time in the respect that income inequality has only gotten worse, but it feels like eons when you consider the advancement of the internet in that time. In 2011, many major news organizations reporting on Occupy had abysmal online presences — if one at all (A side note: I interned at Vanity Fair that fall and their entire website seemed to be run by only one or two people). And the social media landscape did not look anything like it does now. Facebook was the second-most accessed website in the U.S. behind Google, Twitter had only just begun allowing users to share photos in tweets, and Tumblr was still widely used as one of the most popular sites among teens and college students. Instagram, not even a year old when Occupy happened, was still dominated by photos washed out by the Walden filter.
So, let’s take a second and think about how quickly we can share information now, how global movements can start with just a tweet: How big could an Occupy 2.0 get in 2021?
To be clear, I’m not naive enough to think that social media wasn’t a factor back in 2011 in some way (I do remember images of Zuccotti Park circulating on my feeds). But the culture has drastically shifted in the last ten years. There are far more people on and connected via these platforms than ever before.
By my estimates, Occupy 2.0 could attract unprecedented numbers. At its largest gathering, Occupy brought between 50,000 and 100,000 people to a protest in May 2012. Using one of Occupy’s goals — forgiving student debt — as the basis for a future gathering, consider first how national student debt grew from .96 trillion dollars in 2011 to a whopping 1.68 trillion in 2021. That growth impacts 44.7 million student borrowers, who are currently in debt by an average of $37,584 each.
I’m not great at math, but something tells me that if Occupy 2.0 were to hold a protest to demand student debt be forgiven now, and plaster it all over Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, and beyond as one would in 2021, they’d likely attract far more than those 50,000 to 100,000 people. Whether those numbers have the ability to affect change remains to be seen, but perhaps we’ll see.
Which is to say: It’s about to be a hell of a year, folks. Anyway, I have some TikToks about stock trading to watch. Catch you later and stay healthy out there.
So sosh is a newsletter written by @ohheyjenna. Support the newsletter by sharing it and telling your friends, both online and IRL.