> A couple examples below. The key thing is that they won: The occupy movement was effectively neutered.

That's just what was documented, I did a project with one of the more active and vocal members of Occupy LA, he pulled a few of the major occupations that got him in quite a bit of trouble. And on TV in one of the spectacles, but ultimately left him disillusioned in the end.

Anyhow, he had stories about how they had a few 'squats' throughout where they would stay to plan things out, both for LA as well as NY, and they had to stop letting people in because so many were turning out to be CI for the police. The survailence economy was also starting to become widespread as Wifi enabled phones were also starting to become common, but here is another article detailing the FBI's tactics [1] in dragnet surveillance as well as brazen overt tactics. Hell, the damn Federal Reserve even had a hand in the surveillance program against Occupy at one point!

When confronted what some accepted in return for it many said the police would give them drugs or alcohol, or cash which if you're a severally depressed millennial with 10-100ks of student debt and no job prospects, and recently evicted out of your home, living on the street/car (with now deep psychological trauma) the why/hows become pretty obvious. On a Human level, that's just incredibly sad and exploitative behaviour of people in vulnerable positions.

Personally, I never liked the Occupy movement; initially it seemed to show promise (coordinated bank runs) but then it severally stagnated in the demonstration phase and squandered its resources until it became irrelevant--while many of its supporters mistook it for an extended Spring Break and livecasting was in its infancy and becoming quite popular around that period too--JustinTV was starting to get the attention of Google to become Twitch around that time, too. In retrospect I wonder how much of that contributed to the 'influencer' model we see now.

The Occupy movement could have done so much good if they took those motivated people into places like Detroit and bought up sky scrapers or entire neighborhood blocks to renovate and house them, and then participated in the Urban gardening revolution and local economic resurgence and commerce that took place with all the funds they had. I know this because I suggested it to them as I hung out in their chat rooms back then and saw what was happening as food deserts were becoming even more ubiquitous and saw the writing on the wall. My personal transition into Environmentalism and Activism was occurring at that time, too, so I recall it quite vividly.

My conclusions was that they simply had no plan and wanted to vent their anger, which was well intended, but then it became a reason to just have fun at night partying and not really mobilize for actual change.

Also, they were totally against my staunch (especially back then) An-Cap/Crypto-Anarchist position, and I was probably seen as just another 'capitalist shill' so I'm not an apologist for them at all.

I was just highlighting the State's MO and how Tom's work details how some of it was done in relation in his 20 years researching the Manson case and how it related to a 'political' movement in recent History.

1: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fbi-occupy-wall-street_n_2410...