Ever since I wrote a book about Occupy Wall Street, I’ve often found myself being asked, “What happened to Occupy, anyway?” Now, more than two years since the movement faded from the headlines and in the wake of French economist?Thomas Piketty’s best-selling diagnosis of economic inequality, the urgency of the question is mounting, not diminishing. The answer is also becoming clearer: The networks of activists that formed in the midst of 2011’s worldwide wave of protest are developing into efforts to create durable economic and political experiments. Rather than focusing on opposing an unjust system, they’re testing ways to replace it with something new.

More at Al Jazeera America.

My latest at Al Jazeera, on Bitcoin’s most ambitious successor, Ethereum. This may or may not be the future, but for now it’s the hype:

Even the most flexible platform comes with certain built-in tendencies. Ethereum, for example, makes it easier to build organizations that are less centralized and less dependent on geography than traditional ones and certainly more automated. But it also creates a means for corporate ownership and abuse to creep ever deeper into people’s lives through new and more invasive kinds of contracts. To perceive the world through a filter like Ethereum is to think of society as primarily contractual and algorithmic, rather than ethical, ambiguous and made up of flesh-and-blood human beings.

How this new ecosystem will take shape depends disproportionately on its early adopters and on those with the savvy to write its code — who may also make a lot of money from it. But tools like Ethereum are not just a business opportunity. They’re a testing ground for whatever virtual utopias people are able to translate into code, and the tests will have non-virtual effects. Idealists have as much to gain as entrepreneurs.?As for any utopia, though, the power struggles of the real world are sure to find their way in as well.

Thanks to this meticulous and elegant book, we know what one witness-participant was thinking all through the first year of Occupy, and what many of the sparks and some of the tinder were thinking, and what it was like to be warmed by that beautiful conflagration that spread across the world.

One way or another, the news about Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse is getting out!

Get your copy

Thank You, Anarchy is available as an affordable paperback, extravagant hardcover, or ephemeral ebook. To support fine non-profit publishing, you can buy it directly from University of California Press using the discount code 13W4710. That should bring the price to just about where Amazon has it (and I guess you also can get it there if you have to).

Also, between now and Occupy’s second anniversary on September 17, you can get a signed copy of the book by becoming a member (at $5/month or more) of Waging Nonviolence, the publication where the Thank You, Anarchy got its start.

Once you’ve read the book, I hope you’ll consider writing a review at Goodreads or Amazon, or anywhere really, to tell the world what you think.

Attend an event

There are lots of opportunities coming up:

• 9/15, New York, NY: OWS Participatory Walking Tour and Cartography Party
• 9/22, Brooklyn, NY: Panel with David Graeber, Astra Taylor, and Moustafa Bayoumi at the Brooklyn Book Festival
• 9/24, Arlington, VA: Reading at Busboys & Poets
• 10/2, New York, NY: “The Occupy Apocalypse” at the Catholic Worker
• 10/9, Hempstead, NY: Lecture on proofs at Hofstra University
• 10/24, Brooklyn, NY: “An Evening of Song and Abstraction” at the Oratory Church of St.?Boniface
• 10/26, New London, CT: Discussion with Frida Berrigan at Monte Cristo Bookshop
• 10/30, Brooklyn, NY: “Was Jesus a Zealot?” at St.?Joseph’s College
• 11/8, Providence, RI: Beckett Lecture for the Brown-RISD Catholic Community
• 11/18, Cambridge, MA: Celebrating On Anarchism with Noam Chomsky and the Boston Review
• 11/23, Baltimore, MD: Panel at the American Academy of Religion
• 3/9, Washington, DC: Center for Inquiry lecture

Keep up with more events to come on my speaking page. If you’re interested in helping organize an event in your hometown, don’t hesitate to contact me.

There’s more

Can’t get enough anarchy? Here’s what else to look out for this fall:

• “Where are they now”-style features on Occupy Wall Street in The Nation and the website of the new Al Jazeera America network.
• A new collection of Noam Chomsky’s writings published by the New Press, On Anarchism, includes an introduction of mine: “Anarcho-Curious or, Anarchist Amnesia.”
• Don’t miss a pair of fantastic new Occu-books by friends hot off the presses, including my Waging Nonviolence co-editor Laura Gottesdiener’s acclaimed A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home and Mark Bray’s Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.

Those words seemed to capture what any revolution must be, especially when it remains just an idea: “Some great cause, God’s new Messiah.” It’s unimaginably gigantic, impossibly messianic. Yet somehow, there comes “the moment to decide,” despite “the bloom or blight” that might arise in the course of a movement, and its inevitable, incarnate shortcomings. One has no choice but to choose, for inaction also is a choice.

These were the lines I kept in my head while I attended the early planning meetings of what would become Occupy Wall Street—“Some great cause, God’s new Messiah” if there ever was one. What I experienced in those meetings is now the subject of my article in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine, “Some Assembly Required” (subscription necessary, or get it at your local newsstand). It follows the incipient movement from the third planning meeting until September 16, the night before the occupation began. Where it leaves off, my articles at Waging Nonviolence and?The Nation?pick up. (There was also one snippet about the planning at Killing the Buddha.)?The chance to do this Harper’s?story, though, was the opportunity I was really hoping for; something with the space and support to delve more deeply than I elsewhere could into “that darkness and that light” of a movement that has changed and is changing the world.

In the middle of the second millennium B.C., a dark cloud of noxious falling ash and a tsunami wave spread across the Mediterranean. It was enough to leave Minoan civilization—that of the Minotaur, of the bare-breasted snake goddess, of the palace at Knossos—in ruins. Some say the event might also have had some connection with the ten plagues Pharaoh endured in the book of Exodus. It now seems pretty clear that the epicenter of this cataclysm was none other than the Greek island of Santorini—the land mass of which, as I learned this past week during a sojourn there, looks like and is the rim of the crater around a gigantic sunken volcano.

The excuse for my trip was the Caldera (=“crater”) Arts & Literature Festival?hosted by Atlantis Books, one of the best bookshops in the world. (Atlantis’s name refers to the rather dubious theory that Santorini is also the legendary island nation mentioned by Plato. The size of Libya and Asia combined? Beyond the Strait of Gibraltar? Yeah, right.) The couple dozen of us in attendance enjoyed readings, musical improvisations, a lesson in taking non-sappy photos on a picturesque Greek island, and hors d’oeuvres prepared before our eyes by?Vefa Alexiadou, the kinder and more law-abiding Martha Stewart of Greece. The festival’s climax was the launch of another magnificent issue of?Five Dials?magazine.?Five Dials?editor Craig Taylor (who meanwhile released?a new book of his own) wrote to his readers about all this private revelry at the little bookshop collective the only way he could: “I know; I’m sorry.”

A short flight up and over the crater brought me back to Athens, the epicenter of another great Greek volcano of sorts, which I write about in a new post at Waging Nonviolence:

From a glance at a recent front page of The New York Times, you might guess that a political meeting in Athens this week would be full of talk about the resigning prime minister, bailout deals, and the Euro. The land that gave birth to European civilization now seems on the brink of sinking the whole continent’s economy. But, among those gathered on Monday in a basement in the neighborhood of Exarcheia—a kind of Haight-Ashbury for Greek anarchists—the agenda was completely different. They talked instead about parks, public kitchens, and barter bazaars. They even seemed pretty hopeful.

The lack of concern for political figureheads, in retrospect, was to be expected. Greek anarchists see no more reason to care about whether George Papandreou goes or stays than those at Occupy Wall Street are agonizing over Herman Cain’s sexual foibles. They have another kind of politics in mind.

The artistic collectivity of Atlantis Books turned, for me, into the political collectivity of Exarcheia. Despite all the signs past and present that the end is near, that week in Greece made it seem like everything is going to be fine.

I recently had the chance to speak with Talal Asad, one of the leading anthropologists alive today, about the experience of being in Cairo earlier this year as the revolution unfolded around him. Our conversation appears this week at The Immanent Frame. What stuck out for him, and which he was still trying to find the words for, was a subtle but utterly pervasive kind of suspicion, one that often ran in direct contradiction to the facts on the ground.

NS: What was it like to be there in the midst of a revolution?

TA: Even before my wife and I went, people kept saying to us, “Are you sure it’s safe?” Our Air France plane was actually cancelled. We were due to go on the 29th of January. We eventually left on the 12th of February, via Paris. We weren’t even able to go directly to Cairo, either. We had to go through Beirut. Then, all sorts of people starting ringing, again asking, “Is it safe? Are you sure you’ll be safe? We’ve heard all sorts of frightening things.” Remember the stories circulating early in the uprising about the prisons that had been opened and the police being withdrawn from the streets? That was what the fear was about. People wouldn’t believe me, but I was there for four months, almost, and I went all over town and never encountered any violence. I didn’t have any friends who could attribute violence to the uprisings—which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. Cairo contains eighteen million people, so it has always had its fair share of criminality. But ordinary life, actually, continued. Cafes were open, and shops, restaurants, and so on. You’d often hear that foreigners were in danger, or that ordinary life was impossible, but that is really not true.

NS: Impossible, that is, without the control of the state and the police?

TA: Exactly. There are elements in Egypt that were quite happy to circulate stories of unrest. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces talked again and again about the fact that we must have stability, which is then linked ominously to questions about the state of the economy. Since the economy suffers from the political instability in the country, they say, we shouldn’t have more demonstrations or strikes. But one of the things that emerged for me there, and which I’m trying to make sense of, was the constant flow of speculation, of suspicion, about who’s saying and who’s doing what.?Why are they doing this? Are they really doing it for good reasons? Is it the army? The Muslim Brothers?Is their presence or absence significant? Do they mean what they say?—You know, that sort of thing. I can’t claim to have made good sense of it yet, but, to me, this seems very important.

We also discussed the transition from violent to nonviolent resistance, blasphemy laws, and even the end of the world. Particularly choice, too, is this passage, where he describes a conversation about colonialism with the great literary theorist Edward Said, whose successor Asad arguably has become:

I remember talking once a long time ago with Edward Said about empire and how it might be defeated. We were just sitting and having coffee, and at one point I responded to some of his suggestions by saying, “No, no, this won’t work. You can’t resist these forces.” So he demanded a little irritably: “What should one do? What would you do?” So I said, “Well, all one can do is to try and make them uncomfortable.” Which was really a very feeble reply, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

As I read the book, I kept coming across lots of parallels with my own work-in-progress about proofs for the existence of God. One thing about both that certainly sticks out: it’s all dudes.

I’m the questioner in bold, Brook is the answerer:

You note that most of the searchers you write about, maybe “not surprisingly,” are men. Why is that not surprising? Not surprisingly, too, I’ve found something similar in my work on the search for proofs of the existence of God, which has turned itself by virtue of the fact into a study of masculinity, at least implicitly. I’ve had to think a lot myself about what thinking about proofs has to do with being male. How about you, though? What does all this thinking about Eden-searchers have to do with being a woman?

The “not surprisingly” is just my little bitter feminist joke. It actually was sort of surprising, or certainly disappointing to me as a woman writer working on this book, not to find any full-fledged Eden-seeking women. I kept running into historical women on the edge of the search, who were always sort of “tsk-tsking” dreamier male Eden-seekers. The feminist Victoria Woodhull gave an entire lecture in 1871 refuting the idea; she said that any “schoolboy over the age of 12” who would read Genesis 2 and think it describes a literal place “ought to be reprimanded for his stupidity.” Others were more diplomatic. Gertrude Bell, who lived in Iraq for much of her adult life, only mentioned Eden once in her diaries: her friend William Willcocks had come to town, to discuss “Eden and other reasonable things.” She called him “dear old thing.”

I feel like this kind of biblical musing was a creative canvas for men, but it brought out a certain practical streak in women. Then of course there’s the stereotypical demonization of Eve—if Eden is the origin of women’s villainy and/or victimization, why would we want to go back there?

Also, keep an eye out for the review of Paradise Lust in the New York Times Book Review this weekend.

About a decade ago, during a period of late-adolescent, almost apocalyptic urgency, with a sudden conversion to Roman Catholicism only a short time away, I discovered an unusual way to relax. At home, in my basement bedroom, I’d play Quake, a violent computer game. It was fairly typical teenage-boy stuff. But instead of listening to some kind of death metal while I played, I turned to an unlikely soundtrack: the Bible call-in show “Open Forum” — specifically, the soupy baritone of Harold Camping, the octogenarian radio evangelist.

At the time, I had no idea why this combination worked so well. But thinking back on it now, the shoot-’em-up video game actually dramatized the condition of total depravity at the center of Camping’s theology. He kept reminding me that we’re really, really bad — just like the demons (or whatever they were) I was battling on the screen — and only saved by God’s supercharging grace. I could sense that a change was just around the corner, and maybe this odd activity helped free me from my old world and shepherd me into a new one.

Now, Camping is the man behind the predicted Rapture on May 21st—this coming Saturday. For the rest of the essay, I reflect on that, and on what The Daily‘s DEK describes as “what end-timers can teach the rest of us.”

I am in no position to end with prognostication, to predict how all this business will turn out, or to recommend particular policy directives and consumer rules-of-thumb. The companies will have their way, of course; as the filmmaker Chris Marker once put it, I bow to the economic miracle. But I can end with a vision, and it can point to a posture.

Picture a library, in flames, overlooking the city in ruins below—the Library of Alexandria under Caesar’s assault all over again. Books by the thousands audibly crinkle as they incinerate, disappearing for all time, never to be read again and, in a generation or two, never to be remembered. They are all irreplaceable; their loss is exactly incalculable. They are now good only to fuel the fire. As bystanders, we’re consumed by horror. We imagine ourselves as the books, the books as ourselves. Everything is lost with them. Right?

Or, on the other hand, might we instead laugh and cheer? It wouldn’t be the first time at a book-burning. Why not? Isn’t there also comedy—a divine comedy—in what freedom would follow the immolation of civilization’s material memory? We have only ourselves again, ourselves and our God. Perhaps these flames might go by the name of progress.

Thank you so much to all of you who took the time to comment and encourage. Fleshing this piece out, in particular, and putting it before readers means a lot to me.

It is time to defend, tooth and nail, the spirit of our precious bookshelves. I think of the work of historian Frances Yates (which now sits on my shelf), who chronicled the the great “memory theaters” of ancient orators and Renaissance humanists—spaces they would conjure in their minds in order to help them memorize all the precious accoutrements of civilized knowledge. In the age of the book, our memory theaters have become externalized; we have entrusted them to our bookshelves. As I look over my own shelf, I see my life pass before my eyes. The memories grafted onto each volume become stirred and awakened, presenting themselves to ready access. Such libraries are particular to their possessors, the manifest remainder from years of thinking. Without the bookshelf’s landscape to turn to, I don’t know how I would think or write.

Believe me, I’ve tried alternatives. I’ve attempted in several ways to digitize my memory theater, through painstaking and searchable notes on my computer, through blogs, and through online outlets like Google Books and Amazon previews. We will have to find new forms. Technologies are changing, rendering my memory theater obsolete, and I can feel it slipping out of my control. So far, the digital alternatives to a bookshelf fail to serve the necessary needs—the freedom and the eclecticism that make possible an authentic intellectual life. As far as I’m concerned, the Amazon Kindle is demonic: an interface to what amounts to a proprietary library managed by a distant and profit-motivated company that wants to own and monetize my theater. It, and products like it, are an utterly noxious ruse that must be staunchly resisted—not simply because they are electronic but because they are owned. The space of thinking must not be an essentially corporate, homogenous one.

There is, I can recognize, a bit of a tragic character to this dependence on my shelf. Socrates, in fact, warned against trading memory for writing and books, the devotees of which “are not wise, but only appear wise.” What would happen, after all, if my library were destroyed in a fire? Or, for that matter, if all our digital memory-banks were wiped away in a cataclysmic solar storm, as the 2012 enthusiasts warn may await us? For all this worrying, I’m actually quite hopeful about the capacity of human creativity to come up with the means to outsmart homogeneity and all other enemies of imagination. In the meantime, let us be mindful of the little miracles that we have in our bookshelves, the theaters whose inevitable changing will—for some, drastically—change us.