The true demonstration was happening on screens through which others would view pictures of the demo, in real time or later. I was ready to accept that, in a media-drunk post-industrial society such as the U.S., the virtual event would most likely be more effective than the flesh-and-blood one in New York's Zuccotti Park. Four trucks stuffed with news cameras trained on the demonstration underscored that likelihood.

But something cool was happening at the flesh-and-blood level in ways that could not be picked up by digital media of whatever nature. The protest's organizers were consciously rejecting hierarchy and power relationships in making decisions, and relying instead on open meeting and consensus. The meetings were so open that I, who had just showed up, could have stood in the front row and voiced my opinion and been heard, had I so chosen.

When the authorities forbade the use of megaphones to coordinate the crowd a spontaneous alternative emerged, whereby those needing to broadcast a message called it out, and the message was shouted in unison by everyone around, in steadily widening circles, until suddenly half the crowd was chanting it together; the medium becoming the message in a way Marshall McLuhan never imagined.

I left Zuccotti Park only an hour or so after I got there, but OWS is still going on, in the face of systematic harassment, and I still support it, even if only in the abstract. I support the general message of indignation at the business-government cabal that screwed up our economic and political life. I applaud far more this alternative method of decision-making, which is the only surefire way to fight, however nominally, the grip of huge, institutionalized, mutually self-supporting power structures.

The flexibility and openness of the OWS meetings; their ability to consistently come up with original and effective actions, such as the Occupy Broadway initiative, or the idea of "occupying" a fake OWS site set up by a "Law & Order" film crew; are potentially of great importance, as alternative mechanisms not only for protest, but for political and social renewal.

Apart from decision-making styles and generalized anger, however, I think OWS is barking up the wrong tree.

It is wrongheaded because every other aspect of the OWS message is not aimed at contesting or replacing to the extent possible the power structures of big economic, political and military organizations that run our lives. Instead, on the whole, it demands only compensation for the "99 percent" who don't have the riches by the "1 percent" who do. It implies the middle class should get the same bail-out that big banks got.

In a way, this is a traditional American demand. Our streets were paved with gold and we thought we all had access to it because the American dream told us we did. Now we find that others got there before us, tore up the pavement, ripped off the gold.

So we're pissed off. We want our share of the loot, damn it! We want the system to take some of it from the one percent and redistribute it to the ninety-nine.

But what OWS does not do is ask the question: Should a system this corrupt and biased exist at all? What it doesn't address is this: A political and economic axis based on large institutions will always and inevitably create giant inequalities because it is built on conserving the power of such institutions and those who work within, at the expense of those outside the system. This is true of American capitalism, Asian communism, and everything in between.

Nobody in Zuccotti Park takes issue with the massive power of agencies like the Treasury Dept., or of corporations such as GE and Citibank. The best result that can be expected from protests like OWS is some conciliatory lip service, on the part of Congress or Wall Street, to economic democracy and redistribution of wealth. But the guiding principle of this system, the rigid conservation of power within large organizations, is never addressed, is not even recognized.

The vehicle of such conservation: the pathology that arises from the very scope and scale of structures like Bank of America, the Chinese People's Liberation Army, or Goldman Sachs; is not understood let alone criticized.

(I should point out, of course, that we have gone too far as a society to live without massive organizations, which after all do things that smaller, more democratic groups cannot: highways, supersonic attack-fighters, and MRI scanners, for example. But this doesn't mean we should accept the power of such structures without contesting it, or seeking to quell its diseconomies.)

And here's another problem: the focus of demonstrators on recording and transmitting images. It's a problem in two ways. First, it detracts from focus, on the part of protestors, on the genuinely interesting mechanisms of autodetermination happening among the organizers, working groups and individual demonstrators.

The fact that the electronic webs transmitting and supporting such images are owned and controlled, lock, stock and smoking barrel by the powers OWS is criticizing cannot be incidental. Digital organizing is useful in the short term-witness the way many demonstrators were summoned to Cairo's Tahrir Square by electronic messages, applaud how a free-form, independent kind of journalism can happen in places like China where normal news channels are censored-but in the long run such specialized techniques separate people from each other and make them dependent on systems they don't control. The cellphone networks of Tahrir Square, for example, ended up being jammed by the army. The Chinese internet, already viciously censored, is becoming the vehicle of choice for Beijing-sanctioned nationalist sites.

Only small, consensus-based groups can truly challenge the power and wisdom of the vast organizations that brought us the Iraq war, the sub-prime mortgage debacle, Tienanmen Square, the eurozone crisis. And such groups rely on human contact: on being able to hear each other when the electronic tools are taken away; on being close enough to repeat and amplify the message for others close enough to hear.