Thing is, once the people notice opportunity, it isn't long until money and power follow suit. And even then it's hard to determine what was genuine feeling or subversive influence, or complex forces of history we can't even recognize. The dead are a presence among the living
But gaining momentum and power requires money and leadership. Unless a grassroots movement can create those things themselves - which would be quite rare - inevitably a true grassroots movement is going to be co-opted by someone seeking to use their popularity. Thus the origins of the movement are always likely to be questioned by the opponents, because plenty of evidence of funding and leadership are going to appear. Placing them in a chronological order to determine the 'grassrootedness' of the movement is going to be tricky, unless someone kept very careful notes. Which is also very unlikely.
(Note that this is not necessarily a good thing -- Occupy's leaderless, grassroots-über-alles nature is a big part of why it eventually tore itself apart.)
Besides, it's somewhat fundamentally the same group of people from what I can tell. A few scruffy leftists at the core, a few victims of the issue du jour, and a bunch of irritated but fleeting "moderates" (apoliticals) orbiting from time to time.
At the time, I even tought about how closely it looked to the "Stand Alone Complex" discussed in the anime series of same name, when people create a social movement, and they believe they are being copy-cats, but there is no "original" to copy.
When Occupy happened, it was the same time as occupy-style protests in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, the Spanish and Portuguese called themselves "Indignados", and if you saw live feeds of the Greece movement, you could see people carrying "Indignados" banners too.
Also Arab spring happened at the same time, one thing interesting was that Anonymous (the 4chan Anonymous "group") was present in all of those, sometimes doing important things, for example in the same IRC channel they organized live feeds of spanish protests, medical help in Tunisia (a couple of "Anons" with actual medical training in Tunisia roamed around in makeshift ambulances helping injured protesters) and internet infrastructure in Egypt (in Egypt after the government shutdown the internet, "Anons" drove around in vans with satellite and various forms of local connections to provide data links so people could upload photos and videos of the protests).
Occupy Wall Street was a sort of natural consequence, lots of US people got involved in the overseas protests, and it does not surprise me they decided to try the same in US.
The thing is, that in US the cause they could fight for was completely unrelated, in Europe the problem was the stupid austerity programs and the debt problems, in the muslim world it started as protests against corruption (the first protester, a Tunisian that set fire to himself, was upset that the Tunisian police could stroll on the market and take whatever they wanted without paying, that Tunisian was a shopkeeper).
US has much less obvious corruption than Tunisia (ie: no cops stealing food from food trucks), and although US has crazy debts, the dollar being reserve currency allow the US to pretend the debt problem does not exist, so Occupy had to protest confusing stuff.
I agree that a lot of the details of the financial system fly over society's collective heads, but I think the impunity of white-collar bad actors was a very concrete non-confusing source of outrage.
I would hope that this would be an easy question to answer, simply by identifying some minor thing you have done that would qualify as - even as the germ of - grassroots action.
I can think of one or two things I have done myself that would fall into that category, and I would hope that would be the case for everyone. Even if it's minor (as mine have been) if it welled up from within you it is ipso facto the start of a grassroots movement.
At the very least they seem quite rare.
I'm also suspicious about the whole organic movement and companies like Whole Foods. See also: the concept of 'food gentrification.'
https://bitchmedia.org/post/foodgentrification-and-culinary-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3g8l2h/an_antibiot...
Anti-GMO group that’s harassing university scientists is the real tool of corporate America
LSD and Tor were developed by the US government, but took on a life of their own, quite the opposite of what is described in the article.
As for LSD, it was discovered by Albert Hofmann, a Swiss and while the US government helped the movement along a lot (mostly unintentionally), they didn't start it or control it.
Is there actually any such thing as a "grassroots" movement?
Over the years I've seen so many unmasked as the product of someone or something with deep pockets: corporations, think tanks, governments. At the very least it's hard for me to think of any movement where major institutions didn't play some role.
Intelligence agencies seem to figure prominently too, and not necessarily in the areas you would think. The 60s counterculture was in part seeded by CIA LSD research, and Tor was funded by the US Department of Naval Intelligence (to provide two random examples).