But why can’t Occupiers meet up in a church basement, or check out a room at the public library like everybody else? This sort of meet-up to chat about heady things, to solve all the world’s problems in a comfortably multi-purpose institutional setting, maybe with danishes and bad coffee, is the bread and butter of the authentic pre-electoral democratic process. If building a little model society, a little pocket of utopia, is really the way to go, then why can’t the Occupiers practice participatory democracy on a friendly farmer’s plot and make a documentary about how awesome it is? Their reason why not, I freely speculate, is that none of these options puts the Occupiers’ favorite ideological conception of democracy and citizen participation (or of agency and societal power imbalance) right in folks’ faces in a way they can’t easily avoid. […] Camping and deliberating and participating democratically together on somebody’s back forty, rather than in peoples’ way, is a less empowering experience. It’s too clearly LARPing.

But why can’t Occupiers meet up in a church basement, or check out a room at the public library like everybody else? This sort of meet-up to chat about heady things, to solve all the world’s problems in a comfortably multi-purpose institutional setting, maybe with danishes and bad coffee, is the bread and butter of the authentic pre-electoral democratic process. If building a little model society, a little pocket of utopia, is really the way to go, then why can’t the Occupiers practice participatory democracy on a friendly farmer’s plot and make a documentary about how awesome it is? Their reason why not, I freely speculate, is that none of these options puts the Occupiers’ favorite ideological conception of democracy and citizen participation (or of agency and societal power imbalance) right in folks’ faces in a way they can’t easily avoid.

[…]

Camping and deliberating and participating democratically together on somebody’s back forty, rather than in peoples’ way, is a less empowering experience. It’s too clearly LARPing.

—[The Occupy Movement’s Enthusiasm and Contempt for Democracy

The Moral Sciences Club

Big Think](http://bigthink.com/ideas/41309?page=all)