Mickey Z. is a veteran activist and author of several punchy books about politics, revolution, environmentalism and life in New York City, including Self-Defense for Radicals: A to Z Guide for Subversive Struggle, 50 American Revolutions That You're Not Supposed to Know, Darker Shade of Green and Personal Trainer Diaries: Making the Affluent Sweat Since the 1980s Vertical Club. He's been covering the Occupy Wall Street movement at Fair Share of the Common Heritage as well as his own blog. After several failed attempts to run into Mickey at Zuccotti Park (he and I never seemed to be there at the same time, and there's kind of a big crowd), I gave up and invited him to converse with me online about the protest movement, where it's going, what hazards it faces, and how it has inspired us both.

Levi: Mickey, I know you've participated in a lot of protests and actions in your life. These are always difficult, high-intensity, high-danger events, and they often run into conflict or trouble. Yet Occupy Wall Street seems to be growing at a steady rate, and remains peaceful, focused, well organized and internally harmonious after more than a month in the tents and on the streets. Are we getting better at running protests? It seems that way to me.

Mickey: I'd disagree with your characterization that OWS has "remained peaceful." It is surrounded by armed enemies - filming everything and everyone and willing to strike without warning. Thus, I'd clarify, protests don't just "run into conflict or trouble." They run into State repression.

That said, I do feel that OWS has learned from so many false starts and, as a result, the occupants don't view this as a finite protest, per se. They are cultivating an alternate model of human culture and it's fascinating to witness how quickly skeptics are won over once they take time to visit the site and interact.

It's a strange and delightful fact that the Occupy movement which began last month on Wall Street was not born on Twitter or Facebook or a blog. Rather, the idea emerged from a dusty print-based medium that almost nobody cares about anymore (or so we thought), a format that dates back to the days of Husker Du and Pagan Kennedy. Occupy Wall Street was born in a zine.

Adbusters was founded in Vancouver, Canada in 1989 by Kalle Lasn, an Estonian-born filmmaker outraged by the insidious and deceptively "warm" television commercials the timber industry was running in the Pacific Northwest to cover its destruction of vast areas of forest. Adbusters began using humor and parody to highlight and combat corporate and consumerist groupthink, and over the past two decades has staged many events and campaigns: TV commercials that mock other commercials, "open source" sneakers resembling existing sneaker brands, a "Buy Nothing Day" to combat holiday shopping mania, fake tickets to place on the windshields of SUVs. The zine became a staple of bookstore magazine shelves in the 1990s, sharing space with other worthy indie publications like Bitch, Giant Robot, Bust, Maximum Rock 'N' Roll, Craphound and Factsheet Five.

Like many other media jammers such as Julian Assange, Kalle Lasn is stronger on vision than on charisma, and likes to keep a low public profile. He occasionally appears on TV, and wrote a book, Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America, in 1999. Unlike other media organizations with less political conviction, Adbusters appears to be truly opposed to mainstream success, and has resisted the temptaion to dilute its message in search of greater popularity. But the organization's intrinsic hostility to media respectability has sometimes left curious newcomers confused about its program, and has given its opponents an easy opportunity to dismiss the (clearly honest) organization as extremist, Marxist, sympathetic to foreign influences.

People complain that the Occupy Wall Street movement has no goals, even though the General Assembly has posted a clear statement of principles. I consider myself a part of this movement, and I'd like to state what I think this important protest needs to achieve.

I know a little bit about finance. No, actually, I know a whole lot about finance. I worked two years directly on Wall Street, and another two years before that for a banking research boutique, Loan Pricing Corporation (now known as Thompson Reuters LPC). In 1999 I made a personal profit of over $100,000 on a dot-com IPO (as I wrote about in my memoir of the Silicon Alley boom). I have gained and lost money on other stock market investments as well, and I've read many books about high finance, from The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow to Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin.

The American banking industry crashed in 2007 and 2008. Unfortunately, the dishonest practices that led to this crash have not been changed. Neither, largely, has the cast of characters siphoning money from the financial marketplace. Some people think we need a revolution, and they may be right -- but before that, we need five concrete changes to take place before the American people can believe in the integrity of the banking industry again. Here are the five changes:

I hung around the Occupy Wall Street protests in downtown Manhattan last week for a couple of days. Here are a few things I saw that I liked:

• a quiet meditation circle, just a few steps from noisy Broadway, where about 60 people sat in peaceful contemplation
• a great march that proceeded west on Wall Street, north on Broad Street, up to the Federal Reserve Bank, and back to Wall
• cops that were mostly friendly
• cheerful rapport between protesters and Wall Streeters at work ("join us!" "yeah, whatever")
• well-organized free food for those living in Zuccotti Park
• a vast do-it-yourself protest sign-painting operation
• a few highly active drum/dance circles and horn jams
• various informal information stations where tourists could ask questions
• an open performance spot, where a young girl sang a song and a poet read a poem
• a small group earnestly discussing techniques of non-violent resistance

The best moment for me came Friday night just after dusk, when I began hearing that a general assembly was about to take place somewhere nearby. Curious as to what exactly an #occupywallstreet general assembly would consist of, I asked around and got pointed to a spot in the middle of Zuccotti Park. There seemed to be nothing going on at this exact place, so I hopped up to sit on a wall and wait. A few minutes later a group of people who turned out to be the regular facilitators of each evening's general assembly began to gather around me. I had picked the right place to sit, and was now in the center of the action.

Soon somebody right next to me yelled "Mic check!", and a group of people milling around us yelled back "Mic check!". At this call, others began to melt into the group, and people began to sit down on the park's paved floor. Soon there were about 250 people gathered around. Four of the facilitators sitting next to me stood up and introduced themselves, and one of them explained how the communication in this large group was going to work.

Watching protesters occupy Wall Street for the past several days, I've been thinking back to the two years in the early 1990s when I worked at the headquarters of the JP Morgan Bank at 60 Wall.

I did not find myself on Wall Street by accident; I had graduated from a state university with a computer science degree six years earlier, and had taken a series of jobs that each brought me closer to the top of my field. I wasn't particularly interested in high finance, but I was ambitious for an exciting career, and the financial industry was considered the most prestigious place for a techie to work in New York City at this time. I did not find what I hoped for there. My two year adventure at JP Morgan left me deeply disappointed on many levels, and I consider myself lucky that I was able to leave the financial software marketplace for better work elsewhere (I never looked back, except sometimes in anger).

Like the blessed protesters who are causing trouble there today, I always felt like an outsider on Wall Street, even though I knew what I was there to do. I was part of a consulting team managed by a brilliant Oxford-educated Nigerian named Tayo Ibigundi, a boss I respected very much. We were both employees of Sybase Professional Services, the consulting arm of an innovative database software firm with a big presence on Wall Street, along with two other members of our project team: Carmela Balasso, an Italian-Israeli who lived with her parents in Brooklyn, who was about six years my senior and never stopped mentioning how sorry she was that a nice Jewish boy like me was already married, and Mike Toole, a taciturn database administrator with the brawny physique of a Staten Island brawler (because that's what he was). My team worked together very well, but we didn't really fit in with the regular employees at JP Morgan.

Many consultants from many different companies worked at JP Morgan, and it was always easy to tell the consultants from the employees. We wore $300 suits and had accents from England, China, Pakistan, India, Egypt, Cote D'Ivorie, Nigeria, Ghana, France, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Belgium, Brooklyn or Queens. They wore $800 suits and usually came from either uptown Manhattan or small-town America, by way of colleges with one-word names. The consultants and employees worked together on various trading system projects, but we didn't often mix much. It would be an unfair generalization to say that we consultants had made it to Wall Street because we were highly skilled and they were there because they had an uncle in Global Markets. Well, I don't know how some of my employee co-workers had gotten there ... but I don't think they got there because of their tech skills.