Posted 2 years ago on Aug. 27, 2016, 10:58 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt 
 
 Tags: Micah White, The End of Protest, Innovation 
 
 “Micah White argues convincingly that established modes of protest are outdated and sketches the outlines for how activists can and must innovate. His book is a love letter to activists of the future.” — Michael Hardt 
 
 Is protest broken? Micah White, co-creator of Occupy Wall Street, thinks so. Recent years have witnessed the largest protests in human history. Yet these mass mobilizations no longer change society. Now activism is at a crossroads: innovation or irrelevance. 
 
 In The End of Protest White declares the end of protest as we know it and heralds the future of activism. Drawing on his unique experience with Occupy Wall Street, a contagious protest that spread to eighty-two countries, White articulates a unified theory of revolution and eight principles of tactical innovation that are destined to catalyze the next generation of social movements. Sweeping from contemporary uprisings to spiritual and pre-modern revolutions, The End of Protest is a far-reaching inquiry into the miraculous power of collective epiphanies. 
 
 Despite global challenges—catastrophic climate change, economic collapse and the decline of democracy—White finds reason for optimism: the end of protest inaugurates a new era of social change. He argues that Occupy Wall Street was a constructive failure that exposed the limits of protest at the same time as it revealed a practical way forward. On the horizon are increasingly sophisticated movements that will emerge in a bid to dominate elections, govern cities and reorient the way we live. 
 
 In this provocative playbook, White offers three bold revolutionary scenarios for harnessing the creativity of people from across the political spectrum. 
 
 White also shows: 
 
 How social movements are created and how they spread 
 
 How materialism limits contemporary activism 
 
 Why we must re-conceive protest in timescales of centuries, not days 
 
 Ultimately, the end of protest is the beginning of the spiritual revolution within ourselves, the political revolution in our communities and the social revolution on Earth. 
 
 Rigorous, original and compelling, The End of Protest is an exhilarating vision of an all-encompassing revolution of revolution. 
 
 About the Author 
 
 MICAH WHITE, PhD is the influential social activist who co-created the Occupy Wall Street movement while an editor of Adbusters magazine. White has a twenty-year record of innovative activism, including conceiving the debt-forgiveness tactic used by the Rolling Jubilee and popularizing the critique of clicktivism. His essays and interviews on the future of activism have been published internationally in periodicals including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de São Paulo. He has been profiled by The New Yorker, and Esquire recently named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. White directs Boutique Activist Consultancy—an activist think tank specializing in impossible campaigns. Dr. Micah White lives with his wife and son in Nehalem, a rural town on the coast of Oregon. ||||| For a few moments on Saturday, the confrontations between the police and the protesters just south of Union Square in Manhattan seemed fairly typical. People pushed, the police shoved and arrests were made, and in the many videos recording the protest, it was not always clear which of the three had come first. 
 
 As the police arrested a protester in the street, an officer wearing a white shirt — indicating a rank of lieutenant or above — walked toward a group of demonstrators nearby and sent a blast of pepper spray that hit four women, the videos show. 
 
 Numerous videos and photos captured the aftermath: two women crumpled on the sidewalk in pain, one of them screaming. They were temporarily blinded, one of the women, Chelsea Elliott, said. 
 
 Ms. Elliott, 25, who was not arrested, acknowledged that “there were some rough people out there” at the protests. She and the other women were penned in behind police netting meant for crowd control. But, she said, neither she nor the women around her did anything to warrant having pepper spray used on them. 
 
 “Out of all the people they chose to spray, it was just me and three other girls,” she said Sunday in a telephone interview. “I’m not pushing against anybody, or trying to escape.” 
 
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 The Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said the police had used the pepper spray “appropriately.” 
 
 “Pepper spray was used once,” he added, “after individuals confronted officers and tried to prevent them from deploying a mesh barrier — something that was edited out or otherwise not captured in the video.” 
 
 Since Sept. 17, a few hundred protesters have occupied Zuccotti Park on Liberty Street and Broadway, seeking attention for what they say is a financial system that is unjust and flawed. They have embarked on a series of daily marches near Wall Street, but their march to Union Square on Saturday was their largest and most ambitious. 
 
 Photo 
 
 Returning to the financial district from Union Square, many protesters used University Place, and the demonstration spilled into the street with protesters walking against traffic. The police put up mesh nets to prevent them from going any farther down University Place, and many of the demonstrators ended up on East 12th Street. 
 
 Ms. Elliott was one of several protesters on East 12th Street who had been corralled behind the plastic netting, which was being held by a line of police officers. 
 
 Ms. Elliott said she spent part of the time trying to engage the police officer nearest her in a conversation about pensions. 
 
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 “I’m just trying to converse with them in a civilized manner, and tell them I’m a civilized human being,” Ms. Elliott said. She remembered saying, “Stop! Why are you doing this?” in response to an arrest not far away, but doing nothing else to attract attention. 
 
 “A cop in a white shirt — I think he’s a superior officer — just comes along and does these quick little spritzes of pepper spray in my and these three other girls’ eyes,” she added. The officer’s identity was not provided by the police. 
 
 The scene around Ms. Elliott verged on the unruly on Saturday. The police made arrests in the area on charges not only of disorderly conduct and impeding traffic, but also of inciting to riot and assaulting a police officer. About 80 people were arrested; some spent the night in jail and were arraigned on Sunday. 
 
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 Patrick Bruner, a spokesman for the protesters, said he believed that pepper spray was used several times on Saturday. “I think it is very fair to call it police brutality,” he said. 
 
 The Police Department rarely uses pepper spray as a means of crowd control. Although the police used it during a large-scale antiwar protest in 2003, it was not used with much frequency during the protests associated with the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004, although they were some of the largest demonstrations in the city in years. 
 
 “We don’t use it indiscriminately like other cities do,” said Thomas Graham, a retired deputy chief who until last year commanded the department’s Disorder Control Unit. “You’re not just spraying indiscriminately into a crowd.” 
 
 Police officers, he said, “have the choice between spraying the guy or struggling with the guy with the night stick,” he said, adding, “Get poked with a nightstick good and hard and you might have a cracked rib from that.” ||||| Wall Street protesters cuffed, pepper-sprayed during 'inequality' march 
 
 Jefferson Siegel for News Women screamed in pain after police rounded them up and sprayed them with pepper spray. 
 
 Scores of protesters were arrested in Manhattan Saturday as a march against social inequality turned violent. 
 
 Hundreds of people carrying banners and chanting "shame, shame" walked between Zuccotti Park, near Wall St., and Union Square calling for changes to a financial system they say unjustly benefits the rich and harms the poor. 
 
 At least 80 people were carted away in police vehicles and up to five were hit with pepper spray near 12th St. and Fifth Ave., where tensions became especially high, police and organizers said. 
 
 The National Lawyer's Guild, which is providing legal assistance to the protesters, put the number of arrests at 100. 
 
 Witnesses said they saw three stunned women collapse on the ground screaming after they were sprayed in the face. 
 
 A video posted on YouTube and NYDailyNews.com shows uniformed officers had corralled the women using orange nets when two supervisors made a beeline for the women, and at least one suddenly sprayed the women before turning and quickly walking away. 
 
 Footage of other police altercations also circulated online, but it was unclear what caused the dramatic mood shift in an otherwise peaceful demonstration. 
 
 "I saw a girl get slammed on the ground. I turned around and started screaming," said Chelsea Elliott, 25, from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, who said she was sprayed. "I turned around and a cop was coming ... we were on the sidewalk and we weren't doing anything illegal." 
 
 Police said 80 protesters were arrested or ticketed at multiple locations for disorderly conduct, blocking traffic and failure to obey a lawful order but the number could rise. 
 
 Officials said protesters did not have a permit for the march and one demonstrator was charged with assaulting a police officer, causing a shoulder injury. The NYPD was investigating the use of pepper spray. 
 
 "I was shocked because it seemed like one person after another was being brutally tackled, and it wasn't clear why," said Meaghan Linick, 23, from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, who attended the rally. "I was deeply disturbed to see them throw a man [down] and immediately they were pounding on him. Their arms were going back in the air. I couldn't believe how violent five people needed to be against one unarmed man." 
 
 The protesters, joined together under the banner of an organization called Occupy Wall Street, have been stationed in Zuccotti Park since last weekend, attempting to draw attention to what they believe is a dysfunctional economic system that unfairly benefits corporations and the mega-rich. 
 
 "The central message is that in this country, there needs to be more conversation about wealth and power," said 23-year-old student Patrick Bruner. 
 
 As night fell, those detained were hauled out of vans and buses and into police precincts to be processed. 
 
 Hundreds more protesters congregated in Zuccotti Park where for a while another clash with police seemed imminent, but as midnight approached tension eased as die-hards prepared to camp out for the night.With Ashley N. Fleming, 
 
 cboyle@nydailynews.com
– You just can't Mace people discreetly these days, given the ever-ready video cams and cells phones everywhere. Now Wall Street protesters are screaming pepper-spray abuse by New York cops, and emerging videos and photos of the weekend's confrontation between police and demonstrators appear to be backing them up. A number of women corralled in an orange net by cops seem to be doing nothing more than arguing, loudly, with police as other cops tackle a protester nearby. As the women chant "shame" at least one cop in a white shirt, indicating a higher rank, sprays them in the face. They crumple to the ground, screaming. “Out of all the people they chose to spray, it was just me and three other girls,” protester Chelsea Elliot, 25, tells the New York Times. “I’m not pushing against anybody, or trying to escape.” She was not arrested, but a police spokesman said the pepper spray was used "appropriately" after "individuals tried to prevent" officers "from deploying a mesh barrier— something that was edited out or otherwise not captured in the video." Other protesters complained about the level of force police used. "It seemed like one person after another was being brutally tackled, and it wasn't clear why," said Meaghan Linick, 23. Members of Occupy Wall Street took to the streets Saturday after camping out for a week to protest "greed and financial corruption."