The “people’s mic” was a tactic used in which the crowd at a general assembly would repeat what the speaker was saying in short phrases so everyone could hear. Initially created as a workaround because the police had cracked down on the use of megaphones, it came to represent Occupy’s ethos of participation and collective action. As social movement theorist Craig Calhoun put it, “The human megaphone evoked the decentralized, popular nature of the occupation; it made the group a demonstration of participatory democracy.”
