The Unwinding

by George Packer

  Everyone who wasn’t holding a sign was taking pictures. The crowd was dense, the talk overlapping: “… part of the effort to destroy the middle class all over the world…” “The goal is to have everyone help decide what the goal is…” “When was Glass-Steagall enacted?”

  Two friends were standing on the sidewalk, Shira Moss and Mazal Ben-Moshe, thirty and twenty-seven. Shira had a degree in midwifery but no job, Mazal was studying social work. Shira had gotten to the park at 5:30 in the morning—she had been waiting for this her whole life. Mazal had volunteered for Obama in 2008 and was thrilled when he was elected, but after that she disappeared, didn’t even bother voting in 2010, and now she felt ashamed and wanted to step forward. A few guys in hard hats, on their lunch break from construction work on 4 World Trade Center, walked by and checked out the signs. One of them, Mike, saluted the protesters. “There’s no work for us anymore—we’re out of work a year at a time,” he said. “It’s because of them”—he waved toward the narrow canyons of the financial district. “The people who are holding us back. The banks, the government, anyone who controls the money.”

  Two middle-aged men stopped in front of Shira and began to argue with her in heavy Russian accents. “Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela is ultimate destination of what you’re doing,” the first Russian said.

  “My wife is midwife—she has job,” the second man said.

  “Congratulations, that’s great,” Shira said.

  “You can get job, too.”

  “I’d love one. Can’t find one.”

  “This is waste of your time. Go look for job—put your time into that.”

  “Bottom line: go to North Korea,” the first Russian said. “This is your final destination.”

  A fortyish man in a baseball cap who had been listening said to the first Russian, “There are oligarchs in Russia. Do you see any connection between that and what she’s saying?”

  “This is government problem, this is not banks’ problem.”

  The second Russian began to complain about the people in Zuccotti. “They smoke in park! This is illegal. They think they are superior.”

  “True or false,” Shira said: “things are absolutely fair for everyone in this country.”

  “True,” the second Russian said.

  A chorus of voices: “False!”

  * * *

  Ray Kachel lived all of his first fifty-three years within a couple of miles of his birthplace, in Seattle. He was a self-taught jack-of-all-trades in the computer industry. In 1984 he bought his first Mac, a 512K, dropped out of Seattle Central Community College, and was hired by a company that converted printed material into digital records. At night he was into the club scene, DJing at Tugs Belltown Tavern, spinning Eurobeat, Men Without Hats, Prince. On Monday nights he also played synthesizer and drum machine in a band called 5 Sides Collide, which broke up when the singer decided she was into women. Celebrities would go there for coke—Elton John was spotted at least once—and Ray used for several months, selling to support his habit, then decided he hated the way it felt and stopped doing drugs.

  The scene fell apart in the mid- to late eighties, and Ray lost his day job, too. But for the next couple of decades he made a decent living on the margins of the Seattle technology world, keeping up with advances in audio and video production, picking up freelance work editing online content. Between tech jobs he worked in his parents’ janitorial business. He spent his money on a few pleasures, like microbrewery beer and his vast DVD library. His favorite movie was Stalker, the 1979 sci-fi film by Andrei Tarkovsky. “Three guys traipsing through the woods—it’s visually and aurally very, very strange,” Ray said. “Tarkovsky is famous for painfully long takes, creating an environment that’s uncomfortable without it being clear why.”

  Ray lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment. He was an inconspicuous person—small of stature, with short-cropped hair, drab clothes, and a mild manner. After his parents died, he became something of a hermit, with few friends. On the other hand, a lot of tech workers were antisocial. The information economy employed millions of skilled, culturally literate, freelance oddballs. As long as the new economy made room for him, Ray lived the life he wanted.

  When the recession hit, tech jobs in Seattle started drying up. After the death of the owner of his main client, a company that hired him to do DVD customization, Ray found that he no longer had contacts for other work. He cut back on expenses and quit drinking beer. At the end of 2010, he ordered from Amazon a green, apple-shaped USB stick containing the entire Beatles collection; just before it was due to ship, he canceled the order. “Around that time, I started realizing spending two hundred fifty dollars on something wasn’t such a good idea,” he said. “I’m glad I made that decision, because I wouldn’t have enjoyed the stereo mix anyway.”

  In March 2011, Ray’s mouth went dry. He felt sick with anxiety and could barely eat. He realized that he was coming to the end of his savings. He could survive as a barista or a delivery driver, but he didn’t think he was capable of chatting with customers all day, and he had stopped driving years before. He applied for every tech opening he could find, but only one offer came, from Leapforce, a company that evaluated Web search results. Ray signed on as an “At Home independent agent,” doing work on his iMac for thirteen dollars an hour, but almost immediately the hours dwindled to twenty or thirty minutes a day. That was his last job.

  Over the summer, Ray went on eBay to sell off his computer equipment, like a drought-stricken farmer eating his seed corn: first his MacBook Air, then his iPad, then his iMac. He found buyers for his DVD collection, which had a thousand titles, after first ripping digitized copies of everything. The last thing Ray sold was his copy of Final Cut Pro, Apple’s state-of-the-art editing suite. “I was hoping, by holding on to that, if I found another project, I could work on somebody else’s machine. But it just wasn’t happening.” The sales brought in about twenty-five hundred dollars. In September, he fell behind on his rent. The only thing worse than being homeless, he thought, was being homeless in his hometown.

  Ray had started tweeting in 2009, as a way to become more social. On Twitter, he met many people who were in similarly desperate circumstances, unemployed and facing destitution. And on Twitter he learned, in the last days of September, as he was getting ready to vacate the apartment, about a rash that had broken out in lower Manhattan.

  The protesters at Occupy Wall Street were angry about things that Ray recognized from his own life: the injustice of a system in which the rich and the powerful sucked the life out of the middle class. He had long felt critical of the banks, the oil companies, the huge corporations that didn’t pay taxes. Fracking was a particular concern of Ray’s. He was also an obsessive follower of Rachel Maddow—he loved her wit, her agreeableness—and she was beginning to talk about Occupy Wall Street on her cable news program.

  Ray had four hundred fifty dollars from the sale of his copy of Final Cut Pro. For two hundred fifty, you could travel anywhere in America on Greyhound. He had never been farther east than Dallas, but New York City was so dense and diverse, so full of ideas and ways to make money, that if he could learn to exist there he could surely find a place to exist. On the last night of September he went to bed telling himself, “Oh, this is just absolutely nuts, you can’t do that.” He woke up in the morning with a clear thought: “This is exactly what I’m going to do.”

  Ray didn’t tell his few friends about the plan. But on the night of October 3, he wrote on his Wordpress blog, for anyone who might be reading: “About to board a bus to NYC. Not sure if I’ll ever come back to Seattle … I have had some moments of panic, asking myself if I’ve completely lost my mind. That’s entirely possible. But those moments pass quickly and my sense of adventure takes over and I’m ready to hit the road all the more.” He had abandoned most of his remaining possessions; he was traveling with a small duffel and a daypack, and they contained not much more than a few changes of clothes, a portable hard drive wit
h some of his movies, and a relatively stupid cell phone with enough memory to send and download tweets. The bus left at midnight. At five in the morning on October 6, Ray arrived at the Port Authority bus terminal in midtown Manhattan. By ten, he had made his way downtown to the occupation.

  The leaves on the honey locust trees were still green. The park was swarming with clusters of sign holders, drummers, kitchen workers, groups holding meetings, barkers shouting about this or that issue. Sleep-deprived and hungry, Ray was beset by a feeling of déjà vu—everything around him seemed oddly familiar. He sat on the wall along Liberty Street and listened to a conversation among a few people nearby, and his head was going to explode—he seemed to have physically been in this space, talking to these people, knowing exactly what they were going to say. At one point, someone told him that a shower could be arranged if he went down to the comfort station in the middle of the park. In the déjà vu timeline, he had gotten the shower and his life continued in a normal, contented way, leading him back to his warm bed, for he had decided not to occupy Wall Street; but in reality, there was no shower to be had, and suddenly Ray was confronted with the fact of being homeless and broke in a strange city. He withdrew into himself, speaking to no one, curling up to sleep in his fleece and waterproof shell on the steps near the east side of the park.

  One day, Ray overheard a group of young occupiers who were sitting on the steps just a few feet away talking about him as if he weren’t there. “He’s not going to make it here doing that,” one of them said. “He isn’t taking care of himself.” They were right—his socks and shoes, drenched in a rainstorm, had been wet for several days. Ray saw that he couldn’t survive here as his own independent, satellite self. He had to become part of the collective in an unreserved way—something that he’d never done in his life.

  He volunteered for the newly formed Sanitation Working Group. To keep warm after dark, he spent part of each night scrubbing the paths and the sidewalks. Another occupier, seeing Ray working, gave him a sleeping bag and a tarp. He began making friends: Sean, an Irish immigrant from the Bronx who worked the graveyard shift spraying fire retardant on steel, then came downtown to spend his days at Zuccotti; a homeless substitute teacher with a degree in physics; Chris, a drifter from Tarpon Springs, Florida, who had been so outraged by the pepper-spraying video on YouTube that he had ridden the rails to Manhattan in order to defend female honor.

  Ray found a sign that said BAN FRACKING NOW, and, after working on his delivery, he spent a few days talking to strangers on the sidewalk along the south side of the park. It was a little like acting, and he discovered a voice inside himself that could speak out. He tweeted regularly, and his account, which had had a few dozen followers in Seattle, suddenly grew to well over a thousand.

  October 8: There are elements of communal living. it’s a really amazing experience tho totally out of my comfort level.

  October 22: It surprises me i have a guardian angel. it doesn’t surprise me he’s a soft-spoken, hard working Irish guy from the bronx.

  October 23: Dear mr. ferguson. i have lived in new york for over two weeks now. it does not smell of wee.

  October 27: Keep seeing references to “horrendous police abuse” re: ows. i’ve been here 2+ weeks and have seen none and heard of little.

  November 13: I lived in my old apartment in Seattle for nearly a decade and barely knew 2 other tenants … i’ve lived in liberty square for just over a month and regularly talk with many of my neighbors and have made many new friends.

  So he didn’t panic when, one rain-swept night, his duffel was stolen as he slept, and water entered the tarp in which he was rolled up, soaking his sleeping bag; and he stayed calm the next morning when his daypack—including the portable hard drive—was taken away by zealous members of the Sanitation Working Group who were clearing out waterlogged objects, leaving Ray with nothing but the clothes he had on. He turned to his new friends for help and was given a dry sleeping bag. By then, he belonged to the occupation. Liberty Square was his home.

  * * *

  On Wednesday, October 12, Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD announced that the park would be cleared that Friday for cleaning. Neighbors were complaining about the nonstop drumming at the western end, the trashy look of the place, the reported incidents of public urinating and defecating. Nelini had been spending a lot of her time trying to get the drum circle to cool it. She attended meetings of the local community board, heard the complaints, and tried to work out an agreement under which the drumming would be limited to two hours a day. But when the city’s announcement came, she and other occupiers took it as a disguised plan to shut them down.

  They raised the alarm through social media, and around the city supporters bombarded elected officials with phone calls and Facebook posts. By Thursday night, thousands of people had descended on the park to prevent the police from clearing it. Zuccotti had never been so crowded—even people who had been skeptical of the occupation, who found the drum circle annoying and disliked the activists’ clichés, were there in the belief that something important, something that belonged to all of them, was under threat.

  No one from Occupy would talk to the mayor’s office on principle (though the principle remained obscure). So Nelini’s boss, Bill, was negotiating feverishly with the deputy mayor behind the scenes to keep the park open. Nelini went home late that night for an hour’s sleep because Zuccotti was too crowded. When she came back at 5:00 a.m., the occupiers were already awake. Over the next hour Zuccotti filled up again, and by six, people were squeezed into every foot of granite from Broadway to Trinity Place. It was still dark when Nelini’s phone rang.

  “We won,” her boss said.

  “What?”

  “We’re not getting kicked out. Get to Becca right now.”

  Nelini’s friend Becca was standing at the top of the Broadway steps. There was a message from Bill in her phone, and Nelini began reading it to the huge crowd.

  “Late last night!” She waited as the human microphone carried her words from east to west in three receding waves. “We received notice from the owners of Zuccotti Park! Brookfield Properties! That they are postponing their cleaning!” The roar began before the first wave could carry the message across the park and continued for almost a full minute. Thousands of hands raised tens of thousands of fingers and wiggled them in the nonverbal anarchist language of approval. Nelini started again: “The reason why! Is because! They believe they could work out an arrangement with us! But also! Because we have a lot of people here!”

  Afterward, she could hardly remember what happened during the single most dramatic moment of her life, it was so surreal. Her friend Max said, “This is going to make an excellent moment in the movie.”

  “You’re ruining it,” Nelini said.

  “I wonder who’s going to play you.”

  * * *

  When Occupy started, Kevin Moore’s colleagues at the bank were dismissive. One guy in the office said, “They should just take out the fucking billy clubs and get in there.” But after ending his workday in midtown (most of Wall Street was no longer on Wall Street), Kevin made a point of going down to check it out, and then he kept going back. He liked the free flow of conversations on Broadway, the spectacle of the park. The scene in Zuccotti reminded him of the city back in the eighties, when he attended private school, listened to Run-D.M.C., and went down to Times Square to watch the games of three-card monte and the police raids—when New York was wilder and more ragged. The occupation of the park was a big strain on the police force and the neighborhood, and just sitting there was going to get old pretty fast. They’d have to figure out another way to keep the issues in focus. But he was glad that someone was calling attention to those issues. He knew some of them firsthand.

  There were things Kevin didn’t like about Occupy. The protesters needed a marketing director, and he thought they should be talking about the 0.1 percent, since he was part of the 1 percent and he had no control over politicians. He a
lso didn’t like the way some protesters demonized everyone who worked in finance, just the way his colleague at the bank demonized everyone in the park. It was like the Democrats and Republicans, talking past each other. Once, on a trip to London, Kevin saw some Occupy types storming what they thought was an investment house, but they had the wrong building—it was just a regular bank branch, and the snowballs were hitting back office workers. Kevin knew about the sins of Wall Street, but the level of the protesters’ vitriol surprised him. If they wanted change, they’d have to appeal to the better angels of a banker’s nature.

  From lower Manhattan, the protean flame spread around the country and the world. Within weeks there were twenty-five, fifty, a hundred occupations. The movement’s slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” was simple and capacious enough to cover a multitude of discontents and desires. It became the name of a blog on Tumblr that collected a gallery of hundreds of faces in snapshots sent by readers, some obscured or half hidden by the anonymous autobiographical statement that each person wrote down on a piece of paper and held up for the camera. A face in darkness:

  I did everything they told me to, in order to be successful.

  I got straight A’s and a scholarship.

  I went to University and got a degree.

  Now I’m sinking in student debt, unable to get a job.

  I have an eviction notice on my door, and nowhere to go.

  I have only $42 in the bank.

  I AM THE 99%!

  A woman’s blurry features peering out from behind the sheet: