In 2011, Occupy Wall Street shocked the world by camping out in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan for two months. Meanwhile, activists protested economic inequality and corporate greed in the wake of the Great Recession. But the ongoing global movement (intentionally leaderless) is not without its internal struggles, which sometimes spill over onto social media channels critical to the cause.
On Wednesday, new developments emerged in a long-running dispute between apparently disgruntled former organizers and the Occupy group, which continues to support protests calling for organized labor, racial justice and anti-fascist principles. There was a gunshot. The X (formerly Twitter) account, which has the handle @OccupyWallSt and around 160,000 followers, posted for the first time since early 2020 in a rather surprising way: “We will become the first interplanetary social movement. “Maybe,” the post reads. “Thank you @SpaceX and @elonmusk for taking our legacy to the stars.” The post includes a photo of a woman wearing an “Occupy Mars” shirt from SpaceX’s Wikipedia page. and a photo of Musk wearing a shirt with the same slogan.
The admiration for the world’s richest man, who just spent $250 million to gain influence in Washington, D.C., to support Donald Trump’s re-election and line his own pockets, is completely in keeping with the Occupy spirit. It’s not that they match. Replies to the reinstated account ranged from bemused to furious. Some users speculated that Musk himself took the handle as a troll joke.
But activists who run the X account @OccupyWallStNYC, Facebook’s Occupy Wall St., and Bluesky’s Occupy Wall St. say this sycophantic pro-Mask comment was made by Justin, a software engineer who has made significant technical contributions. -It is said to have been written by Tanney. He participated in the original Occupy campaign, which involved major websites, and later worked at Google. Tunney publicly split from the group in 2014, when she took over the @OccupyWallSt handle on Twitter and used it to criticize other prominent figures in the movement. That same year, she made headlines when she filed a petition asking President Barack Obama to resign and appoint then-Google Chairman Eric Schmidt as “CEO of America.”
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Tunney insists Musk’s support was sincere. “Although our profession was ultimately destroyed, its spirit lives on in all who share our dream of gaining freedom by building autonomous spaces. ” she told Rolling Stone. “That’s why Occupy Wall Street fully supports Elon Musk’s vision of establishing a sovereign, self-governing colony on Mars. We also believe that the world’s most successful person will go to another planet. It is also sad that we believe that success is possible only by doing so. (Mika Bornfree, whose real name is White and is best known as Occupy’s co-founder, told Rolling Stone that she used to have access to the @OccupyWallSt account, but hasn’t used it in years and doesn’t know her current password.) (Said via email.)
The current administrator of the Occupy page, which has been active in recent years, said on condition of anonymity that Tunney was one of his “close friends” at the encampment. “She’s a technological genius, just like any real genius,” the activist says. “And one of the reasons why Occupy has spread around the world is because of some of the work that she did.” She said Tunney set up numbers from 1 to 800 and gave information to various participants. I remember offering it and allowing reporters to put someone on the record at any time. As a result, Occupy continued to receive media attention.
But the activist said Tunney, who is transgender and worked on the Occupy project with a team of other trans women, faced bullying from “regular white suburbanites” who flocked to downtown New York to protest. He also said that he received it. That led to Tanney’s gradual feeling of alienation, she said. By 2013, Tunney was quoted in a Nation article about people turning away from the cause, saying Occupy had been reduced to “mailing list bickering.” The article notes that she sometimes jumps into these debates with “provocative trolling and articles denouncing the folly of the agreement.”
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Tunney’s friends believe Musk’s posts are also a form of trolling. “She’s a programmer, so she understands that tweets that tag her on Twitter automatically rank higher in the algorithm because he owns the company, and that’s what he did. “It’s a terrible thing,” she surmises. It may have been an act of frustration, she added, explaining that Tunney “believes the left is not progressing anywhere, but that’s not true.”
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Administrators at @OccupyWallStNYC disavowed the post and slammed a Newsweek article about it. The headline reads, “Occupy Wall Street is back, now backing Elon Musk,” which it calls “fake news” and attributes Musk’s comments solely to Tunney. They also tried to contact Tunney.
Whether or not the feud progresses further, this is evidence of the sustained intensity and passion that arose from the Occupy uprising nearly 15 years ago. And equating the wave of populist protests with Musk’s ambitions to colonize neighboring planets is certainly one way to stir the pot. But the intended message seems to be lost in 99% of cases.
