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On March 6, 2014, Micah White, who appends “cocreator of Occupy Wall Street” to his name like a royal title, invited me to join his “Boutique Activist Consultancy.” It was a few years after Occupy had disintegrated. White emailed me that “Other Zuccottis have already joined the BAC Speaker’s Bureau on the same terms that we are offering you.” He said I should negotiate a minimum of $2,500 honorarium for speaking engagements — 2,500 Euros for international ones. “Flight and hotel will be paid by [my] host.” I would have access to a “remote logistical coordinator” and “high-end workshops . . . on how to increase honorariums and speaking skills.” White said his speakers bureau was a “prestige service” committed to “preferential treatment” and “travel in a comfortable way” for “professional movement speakers.” The icing on the gilded cake was that my coordinator, “equipped with an iPhone 5c,” would arrange “proper airport pickup, fruit in the hotel room, etc.” White had landed a few self-promoters he called “Zuccottis,” a term neither I nor other reporters who chronicled Occupy had ever heard. I laughed that he seemed so impressed with the entry-level trappings of the 1 percent — comfortable travel and hotel-room fruit — that he apparently believed others would be enticed as well. I had no interest in joining the consultancy, which Grist later described as an “unabashedly for-profit” venture. I was fishing for information. Days earlier, White had announced that Google was offering “our movement two Glasses,” a wearable computer that could record audio and video.

Many Davoses Are Possible White continues to wrap himself in the mantle of Occupy, despite having declared it a failure for years. Having headlined articles like “I started Occupy Wall Street,” White claims he is singularly important for his history-making role and that whatever follows is all about him, most of all when he is the heroic loner persecuted by a Left that he is selflessly trying to advance. Kit O’Connell, an independent journalist who reported for months on Occupy and was active in the movement in Austin, Texas, says, “A lot of us who started in Occupy are still out there trying to make the world a better place, and very few of us are promoting our relationship with Occupy.” Not White. To kick off the new decade, which reeks of grift from the previous one, White begins his apologia in the Guardian as to why he planned to attend Davos with, “I co-founded Occupy.” He doesn’t say how he landed the invitation, but in 2019, he publicly sidled up to elite bodies like the World Economic Forum and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development by praising them as Kumbaya spaces where “elites and movements collaborate.” White tells us his admission to Davos is “coveted by elites who pay exorbitant fees to attend,” but as “a lifelong social activist,” he will be in the even more rarefied company of “a handful of civil society representatives, and far fewer activists, [who] have ever been offered the opportunity to go.” Those who think no good will come out of White hobnobbing with the three-comma club in a land “where the champagne flows freely” are gripped by “deep cynicism,” afflicted by “implicit prejudices of contemporary activist culture,” and are Mean Girls who find “rejecting Davos is easy when one has not been invited to attend.” If they could have attended, they would have found “many Davoses at Davos,” putting an oily spin on the global justice movement slogan “other worlds are possible.” White hoped to join “private, off-the-record events” and “secretive invite-only meetings” where activists and elites “can put their egos and personas aside to speak freely and find common cause for joint action on the global crises that impact us all — from income inequality to climate change.” White will ignite revolution in the inner sanctum of the upmost echelons. In “decadent Davos,” talking to “elites reveling in luxury” is where he — sorry, we — will “achieve great changes.” In fact, it is “the only place on earth” where this is possible. It’s a stellar example of the huckster’s creed in that they have found the one true secret to limitless love, wealth, life, or now revolution, and you need to trust, follow, and pay them for their unique wisdom.