Occupy's Internet Tower Will Live On, For Now

Despite turning up empty handed on a first pass through heaps of personal belongings confiscated last week from Occupy Wall Street's epicenter at Zuccotti Park, Isaac Wilder returned this past Friday to a reclamation booth at a Department of Sanitation facility on the far West Side of Manhattan.

Wilder, the head of the Free Network Foundation, just really wanted his stuff back – backpack, laptop, FNF Freedom Tower (this beamed out Wi-Fi Internet to Zuccotti occupiers), and cash. These are his earthly possessions.

And so he returned to the stark, wind-tunnel underpass entrance around the backside of Sanitation’s 650 W. 57th St. complex, this time combing the piles of effects for several hours. But again, nothing. "Wherever my things ended up," Wilder wrote Saturday on the FNF’s blog, "it wasn't at the Garage. Trust me – a nine-foot radio tower is pretty hard to miss."

That’s not to say he’s giving up search for what he says are but his share of all “the important 1s and 0s” – critical evidence and large swaths of the historical record on OWS – which to him and others among the New York General Assembly’s Signal Corps seem to be mysteriously missing post-raid. (We’ve reached out to DSNY about this and what, if any, sort of cataloguing of mishandled or misplaced property has gone on. They’ve not returned our call, though the The Wall Street Journal did report Saturday that 201 people had thus far shown up looking to recoup property, and that 67 people successfully reclaimed their items.) "Because as good a story as it makes for that stuff to be gone," Wilder, now reclined in the front room of a third-floor apartment in Bushwick, tells us, "it would probably be better if it weren't."

When Wilder went to the DSNY’s new space last week, he captured iPhone images of what no press were permitted access to see: dimpled, mangled laptops that looked like they had been willfully damaged.

Wilder’s now holding out for a donated laptop. But here in the dimly-lit Bushwick space, an offsite encampment and home to Tyrone Greenfield, 23, the FNF’s communications director, quite a few computers are laying about. Records and underwear pile up in its two bedrooms. Wires snake across the floors. A cashed bowl, riot goggles. In the kitchen, beneath a mutilcolored Feliz Cumpleaños banner draped overhead, a painting on the wall reads: I Hate You Bedbugs. On a small, cluttered kitchen table, a bottle of moonshine stands next a red wool scarf.

This is the same wrapping given Wilder by a member of Zuccotti’s Comfort Committee on his way out of the heap last Thursday. After his arrest during the raid, the older woman’s gesture was a moment of “absolute clarity” for Wilder. Suddenly, as he wrote in Saturday’s post, he realized that “stuff is just stuff.” That only when you let go do you get things. Maybe OWS doesn’t need the Freedom Tower, or even a park.

But this stuff does matter, Wilder acknowledges, and says the FNF plans to push forward on its build of a larger Freedom Tower than it had before. Wilder, seemingly reinvigorated, says the FNF has to build now, that they have no choice. He’s sure to distinguish between mere material – “lucre, stuff for the sake of stuff” – and community property and tools. And the very essence of our humanity, he continues, is in our ability to use these tools, particularly information technologies. “The tower is a tool that’s very useful,” he says. Wilder and Greenfield and others in the FNF and OWS Signal Corps, which Wilder admits share blurred lines, are set to build tomorrow. This will be the FNF’s fifth Freedom Tower.

Now that protesters are disallowed from entering Zuccotti with so much as a backpack, where will the tower go? Wilder’s planning for it to sit in either the atrium of 60 Wall Street, American home of the Deutsche Bank, or in any of the foreclosed buildings the movement potentially plans to occupy. Participants throwing full weight behind this sort of squatter tactic would only mean more towers being upped and live, we’re told. And not just regionally. Ideally, the FNF wants to see towers across the country.

For now, Wilder is still holding out for legal aid, and says he intends to file a suit against the City over his lost and damaged property. With additional reporting by Erin Lee Carr and Chris Gill.