Setting down some partially developed ideas here. Others are welcome to play with them. (Boosts are okay!)

Last night I listened to this interview with criminal justice scholar Emily Brissette, about Occupy Oakland: <https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-june-9-2021/>

The focus of the conversation is on the use of Stay-Away orders by the city, to keep specific Occupy activists away from certain public spaces, in an effort to dismantle the movement, but there's also some really interesting discussion of alternative viewpoints on what Occupy Oakland was trying to do.

As I understand it, Emily Brissette takes issue with the view put forward by the ACLU and others (in an effort to defend Occupy), that what Occupy was engaged in, through actions such as provision of free meals and first aid in public space, was a case of free speech. She particularly objects to the idea that Occupy Oakland's goal was to change state policy.

In discussing the problems with framing Occupy actions as being about speech, Brissette refers frequently to the idea of reimagining the structure of society, outside of existing state structures. Many of the primary goals of the Occupy movement have nothing to do with changing state policies, but with providing alternatives.

The idea I'm turning over in my mind is that despite the immediate focus on people's immediate needs, which as Brissette notes is *itself* political (in the same sense that the personal is always political), perhaps there's a conventionally political (as in state policy) piece to this too.

Is part of the message of Occupy (and Food not Bombs, as well as similar activities The Black Panther Party and others) that the state should allow spaces for exploring alternative ways of allocating resources and providing care?

Brissette and host Sasha Lilley talk some about the idea that in mainstream society, provision of basic services outside of domain of the state is seen as a private activity (think charity), not a public one, and that movements like Occupy challenge this perspective.

I feel like there's a kind of tension between radical movements that propose variations on the theme of "the state doesn't provide ____, so we will do that for ourselves" and the mainstream response of "that's great, here's how you set up a tax-deductible charity to do exactly those things, and now that we've got you on board, here are all of the permits you need to apply for to do the things you want to do, and there will of course be government oversight to ensure that you don't do anything that might be harmful / unsafe / etc."

Whether or not the state's claims about potential harm, public safety, etc. are well-founded (I take it as given that in at least some cases the real motivation is to avoid making rich people feel uncomfortable), there's something that feels... disappointing?... about the idea that something that started as a radical reimagining could end up as a fairly mainstream charity embedded within state structures.

One of the things I've started to think more about in the aftermath of Occupy has been the role of public space in cities.

Public space is for people. It is a valuable resource, one that many (if not most) cities do not have enough of. But not everyone has the same answer to the question of what public spaces are and should be.

I *hate* the efforts that are made to make public spaces uncomfortable for people who don't have houses to live in. But it's also not particularly unreasonable for people who do have houses to live in to have open spaces available to them to sit down for a picnic and allow their children to run around, and then go home in the evening. A lot of people with good intentions would argue that a natural role for government is to strike a balance between these kinds of competing needs. It's especially easy to think this way if you live a life of safety and don't pay close attention to what goes on outside your own bubble.

Occupy put an experiment in alternative ways to live directly into urban centers. This defied expectations. The classic commune, ecovillage, or intentional community exists in a rural area, on private land. Urban experiments in collectivism do also exist, at a range of scales, but tend not to be highly visible, and generally on private land as well.

Occupy was a highly visible collective experiment on public land.

In a lot of ways, cities are a good location for experimenting with alternative society structures. Society is made of people, and cities contain a lot of people in a small area. If you want to try living in an ecovillage, you need to be able to find out that ecovillages exist, learn where ecovillages are, to apply to live there, and to have the means to get out there at all. Ecovillages are also pretty easy to ignore for people who aren't interested in them.

Occupy camps were something you could find out about just by walking by, and were not so easy to ignore.

I've been attracted for a long time to the idea that people should have the option of walking away from societies that don't serve their needs, or even that they (we?) just disagree with.

From my early teens, I imagined eutopian communities, built on different rules from our current society, but that (I imagined) would not be coercive because people would always have the freedom to walk away.

Looking back, I realize that my simplified idea of being able to walk away from a society you don't agree with is problematic, because it is tangled up with the neoliberal concept of individual choice. It also ignores the fact that you need somewhere to walk *to*: people aren't built to strike out on our own. We are a social species.

But also, in my eutopian dreams, I imagined buying up land (neoliberalism again) on which to pursue alternative ways of doing things.

What I only very recently (like, within the past 10 years) realized is that our own society is not at all set up to enable people to walk away. Property taxes force participation in our society's moneyed economy. Ordinances prevent people from living off of municipal grids. Even in the (apparent) libertarian's paradise of New Hampshire, it is illegal to set up long term residence in a tent, even on your own land.

For a long time I thought it was just kind of sad and unfortunate that property taxes and similar create massive barriers to subsistence living. What I'm starting to learn is that a lot of the policies that make it harder to create alternative societies were intentionally designed to dismantle the alternative societies that existed in North America before Europeans arrived with their own ideas about land ownership, labor, and virtue.

Meanwhile, so many aspects of cities government and law enforcement were intentionally designed to prevent labor unrest.

I guess where I'm going with all of this is that I think it would be good if it were easy to experiment with new ways to structure society. And I'm wondering about what that would look like, in concrete terms, in both urban and less-urban areas.

A lot of radicals are dismissive of the idea of policy reform as watered-down and/or married to an intrinsically oppressive system. I get that, but, I also want to explore the possibility that certain kinds of reforms could help to support radical movements, not by restructuring existing society to meet human needs, but by reducing the barriers to people working outside of existing structures.

What would that look like?

@dynamic A pandemic? ;-) Seriously, one thing that
the pandemic removed was the illusion of a centralized office as necessary for many jobs. Many businesses are planning to go back to a centralized office, because workers in such jobs experience freedoms that make it easier to leave the job.