An extraordinary timeline and interview about the Zuccotti Park occupation and its afterlives with some of the Grupo Affect folks has just been published at stress FM and at the affect site.  I find its insights into the composition, politics, and conflicts of the past year and a half to be invaluable ones.  Here's an excerpt, but go read the whole thing.

For some who showed up to these assemblies what was at stake was simply developing a broad and functioning New York City General Assembly, which at the time seemed a little more ambitious and potentially more radical than simply a failed “day of action,” or demonstration, which many of us expected September 17th to be. These early general assemblies were often pretty small, around 30-65 people each week, which in a city of over 8 million, is not much to speak of. Even in the week before, there wasn’t much optimism that people would actually show up. But of course people did. Some of the initial discussions in the assemblies before the occupation spun around tactics—like whether or not violence was proper, what violence was, etc. Some of us of course pushed for tactical diversity and for communications media that would not be centralized. And some of us did not like the “We are the 99%” slogan which would later become so popular.
Here you can already see, before the occupation even began, a number of contradictions and divergent perspectives. There were those treating the weekly assemblies as autonomous actions in their own right, which should be developed and expanded, and thought of as independent from any calls or dates which did not themselves originate from the assembly itself, or even from New York. And there were others who thought the call and projected date should be taken seriously, that they gave us something specific and material to organize around, which made the assemblies often feel more like planning meetings than an assembly, as such. This split, if you will, would continue during the occupation of Zuccotti Park, as the general assembly quickly became a forum to manage the specific details of daily life in the park, rather than a body to work towards an ongoing revolutionary movement in New York.
Another of the contradictions was that, as mentioned, the general assemblies were not very big, and thus could hardly be said to speak for the population of New York City, never mind the United States. In the end, the online organizing initiated by Adbusters perhaps did more to capture popular imagination, and inspire participation, than did these rather modest and often dysfunctional early assemblies ostensibly meant to organize the city. What this led to was that many of those who would come to occupy Zuccotti Park were not New Yorkers, they didn’t live here, didn’t work here, didn’t grow up here, and as such didn’t have many social or political connections outside of the park. They arrived in New York for Occupy Wall Street, the online campaign, without much awareness of past struggles in New York, experience organizing in the city, or the knowledge or capacity to really spread the movement to different areas of the city, or involve more of its population.
So, the different approaches to the function of the general assembly within the Occupy movement, as well as its participants’ relationship to its online and virtual mythology versus the material struggles and spaces of potential intervention in the city: these might be seen as some unresolved contradictions.
Adbusters’ call seemed to be inspired by the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, and to a lesser extent the occupation of the kasbah in Tunis earlier that winter. These indefinite occupations in Egypt and Tunisia were the urban communes that came to signal the ongoing commitment to the insurrections which took place in these countries. The call to Occupy Wall Street was not seriously committed to attempting the kinds of insurrections we saw in Tunisia or Egypt, but rather it was like those occupations which took place earlier that spring across the Mediterranean in Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Athens—more symbolic, populist expressions of “direct democracy,” as a response to austerity and crisis.
The occupation that began in New York on September 17th, as well as those that spread throughout the United States that fall, though they weren’t explicitly insurrectionary in intent, or in result, did come to represent a rupture in American politics. The experimentation that took place in the occupied parks and plazas—as well as around them at the actions, marches, protests, and rallies which emanated out of the parks, often spontaneously and uncontrollably—went far beyond what could be accomplished at a demonstration, mass mobilization, or even a riot. The occupations experimented with the participants’ social relationships, social reproduction, subjectivity, the temporality of protest, the distribution of food, clothes, sleeping bags, blankets, and other supplies, decision-making, self-organization, etc. For many this living in public space, collectively, became a kind of prefigurative politics, an enacting of the commune to be created in a revolutionary process.
Zuccotti Park is four blocks from Wall Street, and is across the street from the site of the World Trade Center. It wasn’t the first location chosen to occupy, as those were already gated off by police and private security the night before the occupation was to take place. Zuccotti Park remained open as a technicality, as New York’s public parks have gates and strongly enforced curfews, something which dates back to the late 1980s when the city was preparing for the gentrification to come. Public parks in New York often close at nighttime, 10 o’clock or midnight, but Zuccotti Park was privately owned by the building across the street. New York often makes deals with the developers of large skyscraper buildings where, in exchange for constructing so tall a building, they’re required to create some public space nearby. Zuccotti Park was one of these “privately-owned public spaces,” or POPS, which meant it was required to be open 24 hours a day, and that it was up to the private owner, and not the city or its police department, when it was closed. This was the legal loophole that led to the first few days of arrival for occupiers.