By current model, I mean the style of protest that characterized the anti-nuclear, civil rights, and anti-war movements in the 1960s. Organized in a top-down manner, lots of people showing up to march with signs and chants, generally culminating in a rally with speeches by representatives of the organizing groups and maybe some musical performances.
For a time, those marches made an impact. Television news was eager to cover them. And the cops didn't set out to bust heads or box them in. But they've become less and less effective -- in part because they all look the same from the vantage of the TV cameras, in part because it's very easy for the media to just ignore them. And in a country the size of the US, with many major cities, they're just not that visible, even when they're not being deliberately marginalized.
The more flashmob-like tactics of the S17 anniversary protests were interesting. They were non-hierarchical, fluid, and improvisational. But they were equally invisible unless you were following the livestreamers.
And as I've seen pointed out, any tactic that reduces a fight against Wall Street into a series of running battles with the NYPD risks losing the narrative. The civil rights sit-ins of the 60s were effective because people were deliberately violating an unjust law. Blocking traffic to protest financial greed doesn't have the same one-for-one correspondence.
There was a sign I saw in a photo last week saying something like, "All our solutions are one solution." That's provocative because it says something that seems intuitively true but then forces you to think about precisely what that one solution might be how you could get there. And in the same way, Occupy 2.0 needs to come up with a model of protest that's about the solution and not just about the grievances.
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