Inside Occupy Wall Street

It started with a Tweet – "Dear Americans, this July 4th, dream of insurrection against corporate rule" – and a hashtag: #occupywallstreet. It showed up again as a headline posted online on July 13th by Adbusters, a sleek, satirical Canadian magazine known for its mockery of consumer culture. Beneath it was a date, September 17th, along with a hard-to-say slogan that never took off, "Democracy, not corporatocracy," and some advice that did: "Bring tent."

On August 2nd, the New York City General Assembly convened for the first time in Lower Manhattan, right by the market's bronze icon, "Charging Bull," snorting in perpetuity. It wasn't the usual protest crowd. "The traditional left – the unions, the progressive academics, the community organizations – wanted nothing to do with this in the beginning," says Marisa Holmes, a 25-year-old filmmaker from Columbus, Ohio, who was working on a BBC documentary called Creating Freedom, about why people rebel. "I think it's telling that, of the early participants, so many were artists and media makers."

Even the instigators and architects present at the creation marvel at how things just happened. "It was a magic moment," says Kalle Lasn, Adbusters' 69-year-old co-founder. "After that, things took on a life of their own, and then it was out of our hands."

Six weeks in, when Marina Sitrin sat down to collect her thoughts about the movement she had helped start, words failed. So she began with a slogan – "my favorite chant, preferably sung: This is what democracy looks like." The kind of thing you'd hear shouted at every rally against a war or a law or a reactor for the past 20 years. But it wasn't true anymore. This isn't just what democracy looks like, say the occupiers, it's what it feels like. [+]