
Free the Network: Hackers Take Back the Web
Occupy Wall Street starts, in this account, less as a protest movement than as a communications problem. AdBusters calls for a physical occupation of Lower Manhattan on September 17th, but the film follows the hackers, live streamers, and open-source advocates who show up soon after and start treating the encampment as infrastructure to be built rather than a rally to be attended. The hacktivist collective Anonymous backs the movement early, and its involvement pulls in a wider crowd of programmers who want the occupation to run on tools nobody can shut off: mesh networks, streaming rigs, and communication channels that don't depend on a phone company or a permit. Motherboard's cameras follow these organizers through the park and the planning sessions, watching them debate what a genuinely distributed movement would need technically, not just politically. The film's real subject is that overlap between street protest and network engineering, and whether the tools built for Zuccotti Park could outlast it.