#occupymovement — Public Fediverse posts

Naomi, We Were Doing It Wrong

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — September 27, 2026

Naomi Klein was not the enemy of Occupy.

She was one of the people trying to help.

That matters, and it needs to be said up front, because too much of what followed Occupy turned into people picking sides instead of trying to understand what actually happened. Naomi was not attacking the movement. She was trying to make sense of it, to guide it, to help it become something more durable and effective.

And she was not wrong about everything.

Occupy did a lot of things wrong.

We struggled with structure. We struggled with decision-making. We struggled with scale. Consensus processes could drag on, be manipulated, or simply exhaust the people trying to participate in them. Informal leadership emerged anyway, often without accountability. Personal conflicts became political conflicts. Ego showed up. Confusion showed up. Fatigue showed up.

I saw all of that.

I lived inside all of that.

And at the end of it, I was on the receiving end of some of it too. I was labeled, dismissed, and pushed aside in ways that had less to do with reality and more to do with how unstable the environment had become. That is part of the record as well.

So yes, Naomi, we were doing it wrong.

But that is only half the story.

The other half is that the “right way” was not available to us.

By 2011, the established systems had already failed. The political system was not representing people. The economic system was extracting from them. The so-called established left, at least in places like Chicago, was largely absent from what we were building on the ground. There were exceptions. Some lawyers showed up. Jerry Boyle, whatever his limits, was there with us on the street. That counts. Being present counts.

But the broader structure that was supposed to guide movements like this had already lost credibility.

We were not rejecting structure because we were naive. We were rejecting it because the structures we had inherited were part of the problem.

That does not mean what we built in its place worked.

It means we were trying to build something new in real time, under pressure, without a blueprint.

And that is the part that outside observers, even sympathetic ones, did not fully grasp.

Naomi Klein saw the movement. She understood its importance. She recognized the shift in language, the emergence of the 99 percent, the breaking open of a conversation that had been buried for years. But she was still observing it from outside the day-to-day reality of what it meant to keep that space alive.

Occupy was not a theory.

It was a situation.

It was cold nights and long days. It was police lines and shifting rules. It was people trying to feed each other, organize each other, argue with each other, and figure out what came next without any guarantee that there would be a next. It was documentation. It was conversation. It was conflict. It was presence.

I was there in Chicago collecting as much of that as I could. Recording it. Trying to understand what people actually wanted, not what anyone said they were supposed to want. That material still exists. It is primary-source material. It is the voice from the ground that too many people ignored then and continue to ignore now.

And that voice does not fit neatly into theory.

It tells you that yes, the process was flawed.

It also tells you why.

When you build something horizontally, without formal leadership, power does not disappear. It shifts. It becomes informal, sometimes invisible, sometimes unaccountable. That is a real problem. I saw that firsthand. I experienced it firsthand. Anyone who was there long enough saw it.

But the alternative was to fall back into structures that had already proven themselves untrustworthy.

That was the dilemma.

Not theory versus chaos.

Failure versus failure.

And we chose the version that at least felt honest at the time.

So when Naomi Klein and others pointed out what Occupy was not doing, they were not entirely wrong. But they were only seeing one side of the equation. They were measuring a movement against standards that came from a system the movement itself was rejecting.

That is a mismatch.

Occupy was not a finished model. It was an attempt. It was discovery. It was people trying to find each other and build something under conditions that were not designed to allow that to happen.

It did not hold together.

But it was not meaningless.

Occupy was the first big jolt in the American unraveling since the 1960s. It was messy, unstable, contradictory, and often unfair to its own people. But it was the real response to being sold out by our own government. And real things are rarely tidy.

Naomi, We Were Doing It Wrong

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — September 27, 2026

Naomi Klein was not the enemy of Occupy.

She was one of the people trying to help.

That matters, and it needs to be said up front, because too much of what followed Occupy turned into people picking sides instead of trying to understand what actually happened. Naomi was not attacking the movement. She was trying to make sense of it, to guide it, to help it become something more durable and effective.

And she was not wrong about everything.

Occupy did a lot of things wrong.

We struggled with structure. We struggled with decision-making. We struggled with scale. Consensus processes could drag on, be manipulated, or simply exhaust the people trying to participate in them. Informal leadership emerged anyway, often without accountability. Personal conflicts became political conflicts. Ego showed up. Confusion showed up. Fatigue showed up.

I saw all of that.

I lived inside all of that.

And at the end of it, I was on the receiving end of some of it too. I was labeled, dismissed, and pushed aside in ways that had less to do with reality and more to do with how unstable the environment had become. That is part of the record as well.

So yes, Naomi, we were doing it wrong.

But that is only half the story.

The other half is that the “right way” was not available to us.

By 2011, the established systems had already failed. The political system was not representing people. The economic system was extracting from them. The so-called established left, at least in places like Chicago, was largely absent from what we were building on the ground. There were exceptions. Some lawyers showed up. Jerry Boyle, whatever his limits, was there with us on the street. That counts. Being present counts.

But the broader structure that was supposed to guide movements like this had already lost credibility.

We were not rejecting structure because we were naive. We were rejecting it because the structures we had inherited were part of the problem.

That does not mean what we built in its place worked.

It means we were trying to build something new in real time, under pressure, without a blueprint.

And that is the part that outside observers, even sympathetic ones, did not fully grasp.

Naomi Klein saw the movement. She understood its importance. She recognized the shift in language, the emergence of the 99 percent, the breaking open of a conversation that had been buried for years. But she was still observing it from outside the day-to-day reality of what it meant to keep that space alive.

Occupy was not a theory.

It was a situation.

It was cold nights and long days. It was police lines and shifting rules. It was people trying to feed each other, organize each other, argue with each other, and figure out what came next without any guarantee that there would be a next. It was documentation. It was conversation. It was conflict. It was presence.

I was there in Chicago collecting as much of that as I could. Recording it. Trying to understand what people actually wanted, not what anyone said they were supposed to want. That material still exists. It is primary-source material. It is the voice from the ground that too many people ignored then and continue to ignore now.

And that voice does not fit neatly into theory.

It tells you that yes, the process was flawed.

It also tells you why.

When you build something horizontally, without formal leadership, power does not disappear. It shifts. It becomes informal, sometimes invisible, sometimes unaccountable. That is a real problem. I saw that firsthand. I experienced it firsthand. Anyone who was there long enough saw it.

But the alternative was to fall back into structures that had already proven themselves untrustworthy.

That was the dilemma.

Not theory versus chaos.

Failure versus failure.

And we chose the version that at least felt honest at the time.

So when Naomi Klein and others pointed out what Occupy was not doing, they were not entirely wrong. But they were only seeing one side of the equation. They were measuring a movement against standards that came from a system the movement itself was rejecting.

That is a mismatch.

Occupy was not a finished model. It was an attempt. It was discovery. It was people trying to find each other and build something under conditions that were not designed to allow that to happen.

It did not hold together.

But it was not meaningless.

Occupy was the first big jolt in the American unraveling since the 1960s. It was messy, unstable, contradictory, and often unfair to its own people. But it was the real response to being sold out by our own government. And real things are rarely tidy.

Naomi, We Were Doing It Wrong

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — September 27, 2026

Naomi Klein was not the enemy of Occupy.

She was one of the people trying to help.

That matters, and it needs to be said up front, because too much of what followed Occupy turned into people picking sides instead of trying to understand what actually happened. Naomi was not attacking the movement. She was trying to make sense of it, to guide it, to help it become something more durable and effective.

And she was not wrong about everything.

Occupy did a lot of things wrong.

We struggled with structure. We struggled with decision-making. We struggled with scale. Consensus processes could drag on, be manipulated, or simply exhaust the people trying to participate in them. Informal leadership emerged anyway, often without accountability. Personal conflicts became political conflicts. Ego showed up. Confusion showed up. Fatigue showed up.

I saw all of that.

I lived inside all of that.

And at the end of it, I was on the receiving end of some of it too. I was labeled, dismissed, and pushed aside in ways that had less to do with reality and more to do with how unstable the environment had become. That is part of the record as well.

So yes, Naomi, we were doing it wrong.

But that is only half the story.

The other half is that the “right way” was not available to us.

By 2011, the established systems had already failed. The political system was not representing people. The economic system was extracting from them. The so-called established left, at least in places like Chicago, was largely absent from what we were building on the ground. There were exceptions. Some lawyers showed up. Jerry Boyle, whatever his limits, was there with us on the street. That counts. Being present counts.

But the broader structure that was supposed to guide movements like this had already lost credibility.

We were not rejecting structure because we were naive. We were rejecting it because the structures we had inherited were part of the problem.

That does not mean what we built in its place worked.

It means we were trying to build something new in real time, under pressure, without a blueprint.

And that is the part that outside observers, even sympathetic ones, did not fully grasp.

Naomi Klein saw the movement. She understood its importance. She recognized the shift in language, the emergence of the 99 percent, the breaking open of a conversation that had been buried for years. But she was still observing it from outside the day-to-day reality of what it meant to keep that space alive.

Occupy was not a theory.

It was a situation.

It was cold nights and long days. It was police lines and shifting rules. It was people trying to feed each other, organize each other, argue with each other, and figure out what came next without any guarantee that there would be a next. It was documentation. It was conversation. It was conflict. It was presence.

I was there in Chicago collecting as much of that as I could. Recording it. Trying to understand what people actually wanted, not what anyone said they were supposed to want. That material still exists. It is primary-source material. It is the voice from the ground that too many people ignored then and continue to ignore now.

And that voice does not fit neatly into theory.

It tells you that yes, the process was flawed.

It also tells you why.

When you build something horizontally, without formal leadership, power does not disappear. It shifts. It becomes informal, sometimes invisible, sometimes unaccountable. That is a real problem. I saw that firsthand. I experienced it firsthand. Anyone who was there long enough saw it.

But the alternative was to fall back into structures that had already proven themselves untrustworthy.

That was the dilemma.

Not theory versus chaos.

Failure versus failure.

And we chose the version that at least felt honest at the time.

So when Naomi Klein and others pointed out what Occupy was not doing, they were not entirely wrong. But they were only seeing one side of the equation. They were measuring a movement against standards that came from a system the movement itself was rejecting.

That is a mismatch.

Occupy was not a finished model. It was an attempt. It was discovery. It was people trying to find each other and build something under conditions that were not designed to allow that to happen.

It did not hold together.

But it was not meaningless.

Occupy was the first big jolt in the American unraveling since the 1960s. It was messy, unstable, contradictory, and often unfair to its own people. But it was the real response to being sold out by our own government. And real things are rarely tidy.

Naomi, We Were Doing It Wrong

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — September 27, 2026

Naomi Klein was not the enemy of Occupy.

She was one of the people trying to help.

That matters, and it needs to be said up front, because too much of what followed Occupy turned into people picking sides instead of trying to understand what actually happened. Naomi was not attacking the movement. She was trying to make sense of it, to guide it, to help it become something more durable and effective.

And she was not wrong about everything.

Occupy did a lot of things wrong.

We struggled with structure. We struggled with decision-making. We struggled with scale. Consensus processes could drag on, be manipulated, or simply exhaust the people trying to participate in them. Informal leadership emerged anyway, often without accountability. Personal conflicts became political conflicts. Ego showed up. Confusion showed up. Fatigue showed up.

I saw all of that.

I lived inside all of that.

And at the end of it, I was on the receiving end of some of it too. I was labeled, dismissed, and pushed aside in ways that had less to do with reality and more to do with how unstable the environment had become. That is part of the record as well.

So yes, Naomi, we were doing it wrong.

But that is only half the story.

The other half is that the “right way” was not available to us.

By 2011, the established systems had already failed. The political system was not representing people. The economic system was extracting from them. The so-called established left, at least in places like Chicago, was largely absent from what we were building on the ground. There were exceptions. Some lawyers showed up. Jerry Boyle, whatever his limits, was there with us on the street. That counts. Being present counts.

But the broader structure that was supposed to guide movements like this had already lost credibility.

We were not rejecting structure because we were naive. We were rejecting it because the structures we had inherited were part of the problem.

That does not mean what we built in its place worked.

It means we were trying to build something new in real time, under pressure, without a blueprint.

And that is the part that outside observers, even sympathetic ones, did not fully grasp.

Naomi Klein saw the movement. She understood its importance. She recognized the shift in language, the emergence of the 99 percent, the breaking open of a conversation that had been buried for years. But she was still observing it from outside the day-to-day reality of what it meant to keep that space alive.

Occupy was not a theory.

It was a situation.

It was cold nights and long days. It was police lines and shifting rules. It was people trying to feed each other, organize each other, argue with each other, and figure out what came next without any guarantee that there would be a next. It was documentation. It was conversation. It was conflict. It was presence.

I was there in Chicago collecting as much of that as I could. Recording it. Trying to understand what people actually wanted, not what anyone said they were supposed to want. That material still exists. It is primary-source material. It is the voice from the ground that too many people ignored then and continue to ignore now.

And that voice does not fit neatly into theory.

It tells you that yes, the process was flawed.

It also tells you why.

When you build something horizontally, without formal leadership, power does not disappear. It shifts. It becomes informal, sometimes invisible, sometimes unaccountable. That is a real problem. I saw that firsthand. I experienced it firsthand. Anyone who was there long enough saw it.

But the alternative was to fall back into structures that had already proven themselves untrustworthy.

That was the dilemma.

Not theory versus chaos.

Failure versus failure.

And we chose the version that at least felt honest at the time.

So when Naomi Klein and others pointed out what Occupy was not doing, they were not entirely wrong. But they were only seeing one side of the equation. They were measuring a movement against standards that came from a system the movement itself was rejecting.

That is a mismatch.

Occupy was not a finished model. It was an attempt. It was discovery. It was people trying to find each other and build something under conditions that were not designed to allow that to happen.

It did not hold together.

But it was not meaningless.

Occupy was the first big jolt in the American unraveling since the 1960s. It was messy, unstable, contradictory, and often unfair to its own people. But it was the real response to being sold out by our own government. And real things are rarely tidy.

Hey Chris, You Missed Something

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — September 25, 2026

During Occupy, a lot of people with names, credentials, and platforms explained the movement back to the people who were actually living inside it. Some of them were smart. Some of them were sincere. Some of them were both. But too many of them were talking from above the weather instead of inside it.

Chris, you were one of those people.

This is not a question of whether you understood history. It is not a question of whether you meant well. It is a question of distance. A man can know a great deal and still miss what is right in front of him if he is standing too far away.

From where you stood, the arguments made sense. The state owns violence. The state is better at violence. A movement that tries to beat the state on that ground is walking into a trap. Fine. That is a real argument. It has history behind it.

But Occupy was not just an argument.

Occupy was people on the ground trying to build something in real time under pressure. It was cold nights, police presence, shifting rules, infiltration, exhaustion, ego clashes, confusion, hunger, hope, and a hundred practical problems that never make it into the essays later. It was not a laboratory. It was not a clean moral exercise. It was not a panel discussion. It was a living situation.

And that is what you missed.

You were arguing over tactics as if the movement existed mainly in theory. For those of us who were there, the movement existed in bodies, time, risk, and strain. It existed in the simple act of staying present when the system wanted us gone. It existed in the fact that people who had been isolated from one another suddenly found each other and began naming the same broken structure. That mattered more than many of the people talking about Occupy seemed willing to admit.

You also missed something else. Occupy was not just Zuccotti Park.

That is one of the most irritating habits of the commentary class, then and now. New York happens, and suddenly New York becomes the whole country. It was never the whole country. It was not the whole movement either. Occupy happened in Chicago. It happened in cities and towns all over the United States. It happened internationally. It took different forms in different places, because people were dealing with different pressures, different police departments, different local cultures, and different internal dynamics.

If you thought Occupy was just a New York tactical argument, then you were looking at the wrong piece of the elephant.

And yes, there is source material for that. There is primary-source material from the ground. WPS News still has some of it. The Occupy Chicago footage is on YouTube in a four-part playlist. There is more in the archive going back to 2011. It is not polished theory. It is not after-the-fact interpretation. It is source material from people who were living it while the experts were still deciding what it meant.

That matters.

Because one of the enduring problems of Occupy was that too many people with public authority talked over the people doing the actual work. There was always someone ready to define the movement, discipline the movement, clean up the movement, or scold the movement from a safer distance. Meanwhile, the people on the ground were trying to hold together something fragile enough to break under its own contradictions even without outside commentary helping the process along.

That was the real tension.

Occupy did not fail because one side won an elegant argument about tactics. It came under pressure from every direction at once. Police pressure. Media pressure. logistical pressure. internal pressure. personality pressure. exhaustion. drift. confusion. opportunists. genuine believers. people who wanted process. people who wanted action. people who wanted attention. people who wanted a home for a while because the rest of the country had failed them. That was the mix.

It was human, which is to say it was unstable.

That does not mean it was meaningless. Quite the opposite. It means it was alive.

And that is why voices like yours frustrated so many of us. Not because you were always wrong in the abstract, but because you were too sure that the abstract was the whole story. It wasn’t. You saw pattern. We lived texture. You saw principle. We lived consequence. You saw the movement from the height of commentary. We saw it from the sidewalk, where the weather, the police, the cold, the confusion, and the actual people all had votes.

So yes, Chris, you missed something.

You missed the fact that the ground is not theory.

You missed the fact that movements are not neat.

You missed the fact that people doing the actual work do not experience history as a clean argument.

And if you ever want to understand what Occupy really was, start with the source material. Start with the voices from the ground. Start with the people who were there before you explain it to them again.

Hey Chris, You Missed Something

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — September 25, 2026

During Occupy, a lot of people with names, credentials, and platforms explained the movement back to the people who were actually living inside it. Some of them were smart. Some of them were sincere. Some of them were both. But too many of them were talking from above the weather instead of inside it.

Chris, you were one of those people.

This is not a question of whether you understood history. It is not a question of whether you meant well. It is a question of distance. A man can know a great deal and still miss what is right in front of him if he is standing too far away.

From where you stood, the arguments made sense. The state owns violence. The state is better at violence. A movement that tries to beat the state on that ground is walking into a trap. Fine. That is a real argument. It has history behind it.

But Occupy was not just an argument.

Occupy was people on the ground trying to build something in real time under pressure. It was cold nights, police presence, shifting rules, infiltration, exhaustion, ego clashes, confusion, hunger, hope, and a hundred practical problems that never make it into the essays later. It was not a laboratory. It was not a clean moral exercise. It was not a panel discussion. It was a living situation.

And that is what you missed.

You were arguing over tactics as if the movement existed mainly in theory. For those of us who were there, the movement existed in bodies, time, risk, and strain. It existed in the simple act of staying present when the system wanted us gone. It existed in the fact that people who had been isolated from one another suddenly found each other and began naming the same broken structure. That mattered more than many of the people talking about Occupy seemed willing to admit.

You also missed something else. Occupy was not just Zuccotti Park.

That is one of the most irritating habits of the commentary class, then and now. New York happens, and suddenly New York becomes the whole country. It was never the whole country. It was not the whole movement either. Occupy happened in Chicago. It happened in cities and towns all over the United States. It happened internationally. It took different forms in different places, because people were dealing with different pressures, different police departments, different local cultures, and different internal dynamics.

If you thought Occupy was just a New York tactical argument, then you were looking at the wrong piece of the elephant.

And yes, there is source material for that. There is primary-source material from the ground. WPS News still has some of it. The Occupy Chicago footage is on YouTube in a four-part playlist. There is more in the archive going back to 2011. It is not polished theory. It is not after-the-fact interpretation. It is source material from people who were living it while the experts were still deciding what it meant.

That matters.

Because one of the enduring problems of Occupy was that too many people with public authority talked over the people doing the actual work. There was always someone ready to define the movement, discipline the movement, clean up the movement, or scold the movement from a safer distance. Meanwhile, the people on the ground were trying to hold together something fragile enough to break under its own contradictions even without outside commentary helping the process along.

That was the real tension.

Occupy did not fail because one side won an elegant argument about tactics. It came under pressure from every direction at once. Police pressure. Media pressure. logistical pressure. internal pressure. personality pressure. exhaustion. drift. confusion. opportunists. genuine believers. people who wanted process. people who wanted action. people who wanted attention. people who wanted a home for a while because the rest of the country had failed them. That was the mix.

It was human, which is to say it was unstable.

That does not mean it was meaningless. Quite the opposite. It means it was alive.

And that is why voices like yours frustrated so many of us. Not because you were always wrong in the abstract, but because you were too sure that the abstract was the whole story. It wasn’t. You saw pattern. We lived texture. You saw principle. We lived consequence. You saw the movement from the height of commentary. We saw it from the sidewalk, where the weather, the police, the cold, the confusion, and the actual people all had votes.

So yes, Chris, you missed something.

You missed the fact that the ground is not theory.

You missed the fact that movements are not neat.

You missed the fact that people doing the actual work do not experience history as a clean argument.

And if you ever want to understand what Occupy really was, start with the source material. Start with the voices from the ground. Start with the people who were there before you explain it to them again.

Hey Chris, You Missed Something

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — September 25, 2026

During Occupy, a lot of people with names, credentials, and platforms explained the movement back to the people who were actually living inside it. Some of them were smart. Some of them were sincere. Some of them were both. But too many of them were talking from above the weather instead of inside it.

Chris, you were one of those people.

This is not a question of whether you understood history. It is not a question of whether you meant well. It is a question of distance. A man can know a great deal and still miss what is right in front of him if he is standing too far away.

From where you stood, the arguments made sense. The state owns violence. The state is better at violence. A movement that tries to beat the state on that ground is walking into a trap. Fine. That is a real argument. It has history behind it.

But Occupy was not just an argument.

Occupy was people on the ground trying to build something in real time under pressure. It was cold nights, police presence, shifting rules, infiltration, exhaustion, ego clashes, confusion, hunger, hope, and a hundred practical problems that never make it into the essays later. It was not a laboratory. It was not a clean moral exercise. It was not a panel discussion. It was a living situation.

And that is what you missed.

You were arguing over tactics as if the movement existed mainly in theory. For those of us who were there, the movement existed in bodies, time, risk, and strain. It existed in the simple act of staying present when the system wanted us gone. It existed in the fact that people who had been isolated from one another suddenly found each other and began naming the same broken structure. That mattered more than many of the people talking about Occupy seemed willing to admit.

You also missed something else. Occupy was not just Zuccotti Park.

That is one of the most irritating habits of the commentary class, then and now. New York happens, and suddenly New York becomes the whole country. It was never the whole country. It was not the whole movement either. Occupy happened in Chicago. It happened in cities and towns all over the United States. It happened internationally. It took different forms in different places, because people were dealing with different pressures, different police departments, different local cultures, and different internal dynamics.

If you thought Occupy was just a New York tactical argument, then you were looking at the wrong piece of the elephant.

And yes, there is source material for that. There is primary-source material from the ground. WPS News still has some of it. The Occupy Chicago footage is on YouTube in a four-part playlist. There is more in the archive going back to 2011. It is not polished theory. It is not after-the-fact interpretation. It is source material from people who were living it while the experts were still deciding what it meant.

That matters.

Because one of the enduring problems of Occupy was that too many people with public authority talked over the people doing the actual work. There was always someone ready to define the movement, discipline the movement, clean up the movement, or scold the movement from a safer distance. Meanwhile, the people on the ground were trying to hold together something fragile enough to break under its own contradictions even without outside commentary helping the process along.

That was the real tension.

Occupy did not fail because one side won an elegant argument about tactics. It came under pressure from every direction at once. Police pressure. Media pressure. logistical pressure. internal pressure. personality pressure. exhaustion. drift. confusion. opportunists. genuine believers. people who wanted process. people who wanted action. people who wanted attention. people who wanted a home for a while because the rest of the country had failed them. That was the mix.

It was human, which is to say it was unstable.

That does not mean it was meaningless. Quite the opposite. It means it was alive.

And that is why voices like yours frustrated so many of us. Not because you were always wrong in the abstract, but because you were too sure that the abstract was the whole story. It wasn’t. You saw pattern. We lived texture. You saw principle. We lived consequence. You saw the movement from the height of commentary. We saw it from the sidewalk, where the weather, the police, the cold, the confusion, and the actual people all had votes.

So yes, Chris, you missed something.

You missed the fact that the ground is not theory.

You missed the fact that movements are not neat.

You missed the fact that people doing the actual work do not experience history as a clean argument.

And if you ever want to understand what Occupy really was, start with the source material. Start with the voices from the ground. Start with the people who were there before you explain it to them again.

Hey Chris, You Missed Something

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — September 25, 2026

During Occupy, a lot of people with names, credentials, and platforms explained the movement back to the people who were actually living inside it. Some of them were smart. Some of them were sincere. Some of them were both. But too many of them were talking from above the weather instead of inside it.

Chris, you were one of those people.

This is not a question of whether you understood history. It is not a question of whether you meant well. It is a question of distance. A man can know a great deal and still miss what is right in front of him if he is standing too far away.

From where you stood, the arguments made sense. The state owns violence. The state is better at violence. A movement that tries to beat the state on that ground is walking into a trap. Fine. That is a real argument. It has history behind it.

But Occupy was not just an argument.

Occupy was people on the ground trying to build something in real time under pressure. It was cold nights, police presence, shifting rules, infiltration, exhaustion, ego clashes, confusion, hunger, hope, and a hundred practical problems that never make it into the essays later. It was not a laboratory. It was not a clean moral exercise. It was not a panel discussion. It was a living situation.

And that is what you missed.

You were arguing over tactics as if the movement existed mainly in theory. For those of us who were there, the movement existed in bodies, time, risk, and strain. It existed in the simple act of staying present when the system wanted us gone. It existed in the fact that people who had been isolated from one another suddenly found each other and began naming the same broken structure. That mattered more than many of the people talking about Occupy seemed willing to admit.

You also missed something else. Occupy was not just Zuccotti Park.

That is one of the most irritating habits of the commentary class, then and now. New York happens, and suddenly New York becomes the whole country. It was never the whole country. It was not the whole movement either. Occupy happened in Chicago. It happened in cities and towns all over the United States. It happened internationally. It took different forms in different places, because people were dealing with different pressures, different police departments, different local cultures, and different internal dynamics.

If you thought Occupy was just a New York tactical argument, then you were looking at the wrong piece of the elephant.

And yes, there is source material for that. There is primary-source material from the ground. WPS News still has some of it. The Occupy Chicago footage is on YouTube in a four-part playlist. There is more in the archive going back to 2011. It is not polished theory. It is not after-the-fact interpretation. It is source material from people who were living it while the experts were still deciding what it meant.

That matters.

Because one of the enduring problems of Occupy was that too many people with public authority talked over the people doing the actual work. There was always someone ready to define the movement, discipline the movement, clean up the movement, or scold the movement from a safer distance. Meanwhile, the people on the ground were trying to hold together something fragile enough to break under its own contradictions even without outside commentary helping the process along.

That was the real tension.

Occupy did not fail because one side won an elegant argument about tactics. It came under pressure from every direction at once. Police pressure. Media pressure. logistical pressure. internal pressure. personality pressure. exhaustion. drift. confusion. opportunists. genuine believers. people who wanted process. people who wanted action. people who wanted attention. people who wanted a home for a while because the rest of the country had failed them. That was the mix.

It was human, which is to say it was unstable.

That does not mean it was meaningless. Quite the opposite. It means it was alive.

And that is why voices like yours frustrated so many of us. Not because you were always wrong in the abstract, but because you were too sure that the abstract was the whole story. It wasn’t. You saw pattern. We lived texture. You saw principle. We lived consequence. You saw the movement from the height of commentary. We saw it from the sidewalk, where the weather, the police, the cold, the confusion, and the actual people all had votes.

So yes, Chris, you missed something.

You missed the fact that the ground is not theory.

You missed the fact that movements are not neat.

You missed the fact that people doing the actual work do not experience history as a clean argument.

And if you ever want to understand what Occupy really was, start with the source material. Start with the voices from the ground. Start with the people who were there before you explain it to them again.

The Bleeding Edge

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 5, 2026

When I was studying telecommunications at DeVry Institute of Technology in the late 1980s, the head of the program, Al Payette, used to tell us something we all understood perfectly well.

“The cutting edge is also the bleeding edge.”

Nobody misunderstood him. Nobody was confused about what he meant. We knew that working in a rapidly changing technical field meant risk. Technology moves fast. Industries shift. Companies rise and fall.

What we did not understand — what none of us understood — was how quickly most of us would feel that first cut.

The bleeding started almost immediately.

For many of us, it started the day we walked across the stage and received our diplomas.

Building the Networks

My degree was in telecommunications — voice and data systems — but my professional work was in data communications.

In the mid-1990s, that meant something very specific. Businesses were beginning to connect computers together in ways that are completely taken for granted today.

Local area networks. Wide area networks. Ethernet cabling. Early routers and gateways. Offices that once ran isolated machines were being transformed into connected systems.

From roughly 1994 until about 1998, that was my work. I helped bring the first LAN and WAN networks into businesses. We wired buildings. We connected offices. We turned disconnected computers into networks.

Today those systems form the basic infrastructure of modern commerce. At the time, they were still new enough that someone had to physically install them, configure them, and make them work.

For a few years, it felt like standing inside the future.

Then the work began to disappear.

By 1998 the number of contracts was shrinking. By the time the telecom contraction and the collapse of the dot-com bubble hit around 2000, many of those positions had simply vanished.

The expansion of data communications had stopped.

And the people who had built it were suddenly expendable.

The Contradiction

What made that moment even stranger was what was happening in the public conversation about technology jobs.

Experienced engineers and networking specialists were being laid off. Telecommunications companies were collapsing or consolidating. Entire segments of the industry were shrinking.

At the same time, corporate leaders were appearing before Congress arguing that the United States faced a shortage of trained engineers.

Bill Gates testified that American companies needed more high-skill visas because they supposedly could not find enough qualified technical workers.

But thousands of qualified workers already existed.

Many of them were unemployed.

Alan Greenspan acknowledged that the data communications expansion had contracted, yet the policy conversation quickly shifted toward importing additional technical labor rather than stabilizing the careers that had already been built.

Whether those decisions were wise or not is something economists will debate for decades.

But if you were living through that moment, the contradiction was impossible to miss.

You were told your skills were desperately needed at the exact moment you were discovering they were not.

The Slow Start

I graduated in October of 1990, entering the workforce during the recession that followed the end of the Cold War and the so-called peace dividend period.

Economists have documented that graduating during an economic downturn can affect a person’s earnings and opportunities for years, sometimes for decades. A slow start can echo through an entire career.

That reality shaped my life more than I understood at the time.

In 1998 I was earning $28.50 an hour in the technical field.

By the 2000s, after the industry contraction, the most I ever made in technical work again was about $17 an hour — for positions that had once paid far more.

Eventually, like many people whose technical careers collapsed during that period, I spent much of my working life in other fields simply because those were the jobs that remained available.

The official story of the technology revolution rarely includes that part.

But it happened.

Occupy

By 2011 the economic consequences of those structural changes had become impossible to ignore.

That was the year Occupy Wall Street began.

I became involved in July of 2011, before the first tents went up in Zuccotti Park. Like many others, I believed the country needed to confront the economic system that had produced the financial crisis and the bailouts that followed.

When the movement spread to Chicago, I participated there as well.

But movements, like institutions, are not immune to hierarchy or internal politics. Solidarity is often more complicated than people imagine.

Instead of finding common ground, I found myself publicly ridiculed and pushed aside by activists who decided I was not one of the people they wanted representing their cause.

After the economy had already knocked me down, even the people claiming to challenge that system found ways to exclude me.

That experience taught me something important.

Power dynamics exist everywhere.

Leaving the United States

On September 5, 2023, I arrived in the Philippines to live with my wife.

Her name was Luz.

We hoped to build a life together here.

She died of cancer on September 3, 2025, at 5:15 in the morning. We buried her on September 11. She is entombed above her parents in a small family structure here in Leyte.

We never reached our second wedding anniversary.

After she died, I stayed.

The Archive

Today I live in Baybay City continuing the work that has defined the last several years of my life.

I write.

Thousands of essays now exist in what has become the WPS News archive — or perhaps more accurately, the WPS News knowledge base.

It is a record of events, policies, and power structures as I have witnessed and analyzed them.

The audience is not large. The work is not profitable.

But documentation matters.

History is not written only by institutions. It is also written by individuals who decide that the truth of their experience deserves to be recorded.

Extraction

Looking back across the decades, a pattern becomes difficult to ignore.

Modern systems extract value from people.

Technical workers build the networks that power the digital economy. Activists lend their time and energy to movements. Writers produce analysis that circulates widely.

But the people performing that labor often receive little in return.

Structural extraction without compensation is theft.

That sentence may sound blunt, but if you spend enough years watching the same pattern repeat, it becomes difficult to describe it any other way.

The Bleeding Edge

Al Payette warned us that the cutting edge was also the bleeding edge.

He was right.

Most of us understood there would be risks in working at the edge of a rapidly changing industry. What we did not understand was how quickly the system would turn on us.

Decades later, I understand.

And I am still here.

So I write.

Because whether anyone wants to hear it or not, the story of what happened to us deserves to be told — without extraction.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

References

Greenspan, A. (2004). The Economic Outlook. Federal Reserve Board remarks.

Gates, B. (2008). Testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology regarding high-skill immigration.

The Bleeding Edge

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 5, 2026

When I was studying telecommunications at DeVry Institute of Technology in the late 1980s, the head of the program, Al Payette, used to tell us something we all understood perfectly well.

“The cutting edge is also the bleeding edge.”

Nobody misunderstood him. Nobody was confused about what he meant. We knew that working in a rapidly changing technical field meant risk. Technology moves fast. Industries shift. Companies rise and fall.

What we did not understand — what none of us understood — was how quickly most of us would feel that first cut.

The bleeding started almost immediately.

For many of us, it started the day we walked across the stage and received our diplomas.

Building the Networks

My degree was in telecommunications — voice and data systems — but my professional work was in data communications.

In the mid-1990s, that meant something very specific. Businesses were beginning to connect computers together in ways that are completely taken for granted today.

Local area networks. Wide area networks. Ethernet cabling. Early routers and gateways. Offices that once ran isolated machines were being transformed into connected systems.

From roughly 1994 until about 1998, that was my work. I helped bring the first LAN and WAN networks into businesses. We wired buildings. We connected offices. We turned disconnected computers into networks.

Today those systems form the basic infrastructure of modern commerce. At the time, they were still new enough that someone had to physically install them, configure them, and make them work.

For a few years, it felt like standing inside the future.

Then the work began to disappear.

By 1998 the number of contracts was shrinking. By the time the telecom contraction and the collapse of the dot-com bubble hit around 2000, many of those positions had simply vanished.

The expansion of data communications had stopped.

And the people who had built it were suddenly expendable.

The Contradiction

What made that moment even stranger was what was happening in the public conversation about technology jobs.

Experienced engineers and networking specialists were being laid off. Telecommunications companies were collapsing or consolidating. Entire segments of the industry were shrinking.

At the same time, corporate leaders were appearing before Congress arguing that the United States faced a shortage of trained engineers.

Bill Gates testified that American companies needed more high-skill visas because they supposedly could not find enough qualified technical workers.

But thousands of qualified workers already existed.

Many of them were unemployed.

Alan Greenspan acknowledged that the data communications expansion had contracted, yet the policy conversation quickly shifted toward importing additional technical labor rather than stabilizing the careers that had already been built.

Whether those decisions were wise or not is something economists will debate for decades.

But if you were living through that moment, the contradiction was impossible to miss.

You were told your skills were desperately needed at the exact moment you were discovering they were not.

The Slow Start

I graduated in October of 1990, entering the workforce during the recession that followed the end of the Cold War and the so-called peace dividend period.

Economists have documented that graduating during an economic downturn can affect a person’s earnings and opportunities for years, sometimes for decades. A slow start can echo through an entire career.

That reality shaped my life more than I understood at the time.

In 1998 I was earning $28.50 an hour in the technical field.

By the 2000s, after the industry contraction, the most I ever made in technical work again was about $17 an hour — for positions that had once paid far more.

Eventually, like many people whose technical careers collapsed during that period, I spent much of my working life in other fields simply because those were the jobs that remained available.

The official story of the technology revolution rarely includes that part.

But it happened.

Occupy

By 2011 the economic consequences of those structural changes had become impossible to ignore.

That was the year Occupy Wall Street began.

I became involved in July of 2011, before the first tents went up in Zuccotti Park. Like many others, I believed the country needed to confront the economic system that had produced the financial crisis and the bailouts that followed.

When the movement spread to Chicago, I participated there as well.

But movements, like institutions, are not immune to hierarchy or internal politics. Solidarity is often more complicated than people imagine.

Instead of finding common ground, I found myself publicly ridiculed and pushed aside by activists who decided I was not one of the people they wanted representing their cause.

After the economy had already knocked me down, even the people claiming to challenge that system found ways to exclude me.

That experience taught me something important.

Power dynamics exist everywhere.

Leaving the United States

On September 5, 2023, I arrived in the Philippines to live with my wife.

Her name was Luz.

We hoped to build a life together here.

She died of cancer on September 3, 2025, at 5:15 in the morning. We buried her on September 11. She is entombed above her parents in a small family structure here in Leyte.

We never reached our second wedding anniversary.

After she died, I stayed.

The Archive

Today I live in Baybay City continuing the work that has defined the last several years of my life.

I write.

Thousands of essays now exist in what has become the WPS News archive — or perhaps more accurately, the WPS News knowledge base.

It is a record of events, policies, and power structures as I have witnessed and analyzed them.

The audience is not large. The work is not profitable.

But documentation matters.

History is not written only by institutions. It is also written by individuals who decide that the truth of their experience deserves to be recorded.

Extraction

Looking back across the decades, a pattern becomes difficult to ignore.

Modern systems extract value from people.

Technical workers build the networks that power the digital economy. Activists lend their time and energy to movements. Writers produce analysis that circulates widely.

But the people performing that labor often receive little in return.

Structural extraction without compensation is theft.

That sentence may sound blunt, but if you spend enough years watching the same pattern repeat, it becomes difficult to describe it any other way.

The Bleeding Edge

Al Payette warned us that the cutting edge was also the bleeding edge.

He was right.

Most of us understood there would be risks in working at the edge of a rapidly changing industry. What we did not understand was how quickly the system would turn on us.

Decades later, I understand.

And I am still here.

So I write.

Because whether anyone wants to hear it or not, the story of what happened to us deserves to be told — without extraction.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

References

Greenspan, A. (2004). The Economic Outlook. Federal Reserve Board remarks.

Gates, B. (2008). Testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology regarding high-skill immigration.

The Bleeding Edge

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 5, 2026

When I was studying telecommunications at DeVry Institute of Technology in the late 1980s, the head of the program, Al Payette, used to tell us something we all understood perfectly well.

“The cutting edge is also the bleeding edge.”

Nobody misunderstood him. Nobody was confused about what he meant. We knew that working in a rapidly changing technical field meant risk. Technology moves fast. Industries shift. Companies rise and fall.

What we did not understand — what none of us understood — was how quickly most of us would feel that first cut.

The bleeding started almost immediately.

For many of us, it started the day we walked across the stage and received our diplomas.

Building the Networks

My degree was in telecommunications — voice and data systems — but my professional work was in data communications.

In the mid-1990s, that meant something very specific. Businesses were beginning to connect computers together in ways that are completely taken for granted today.

Local area networks. Wide area networks. Ethernet cabling. Early routers and gateways. Offices that once ran isolated machines were being transformed into connected systems.

From roughly 1994 until about 1998, that was my work. I helped bring the first LAN and WAN networks into businesses. We wired buildings. We connected offices. We turned disconnected computers into networks.

Today those systems form the basic infrastructure of modern commerce. At the time, they were still new enough that someone had to physically install them, configure them, and make them work.

For a few years, it felt like standing inside the future.

Then the work began to disappear.

By 1998 the number of contracts was shrinking. By the time the telecom contraction and the collapse of the dot-com bubble hit around 2000, many of those positions had simply vanished.

The expansion of data communications had stopped.

And the people who had built it were suddenly expendable.

The Contradiction

What made that moment even stranger was what was happening in the public conversation about technology jobs.

Experienced engineers and networking specialists were being laid off. Telecommunications companies were collapsing or consolidating. Entire segments of the industry were shrinking.

At the same time, corporate leaders were appearing before Congress arguing that the United States faced a shortage of trained engineers.

Bill Gates testified that American companies needed more high-skill visas because they supposedly could not find enough qualified technical workers.

But thousands of qualified workers already existed.

Many of them were unemployed.

Alan Greenspan acknowledged that the data communications expansion had contracted, yet the policy conversation quickly shifted toward importing additional technical labor rather than stabilizing the careers that had already been built.

Whether those decisions were wise or not is something economists will debate for decades.

But if you were living through that moment, the contradiction was impossible to miss.

You were told your skills were desperately needed at the exact moment you were discovering they were not.

The Slow Start

I graduated in October of 1990, entering the workforce during the recession that followed the end of the Cold War and the so-called peace dividend period.

Economists have documented that graduating during an economic downturn can affect a person’s earnings and opportunities for years, sometimes for decades. A slow start can echo through an entire career.

That reality shaped my life more than I understood at the time.

In 1998 I was earning $28.50 an hour in the technical field.

By the 2000s, after the industry contraction, the most I ever made in technical work again was about $17 an hour — for positions that had once paid far more.

Eventually, like many people whose technical careers collapsed during that period, I spent much of my working life in other fields simply because those were the jobs that remained available.

The official story of the technology revolution rarely includes that part.

But it happened.

Occupy

By 2011 the economic consequences of those structural changes had become impossible to ignore.

That was the year Occupy Wall Street began.

I became involved in July of 2011, before the first tents went up in Zuccotti Park. Like many others, I believed the country needed to confront the economic system that had produced the financial crisis and the bailouts that followed.

When the movement spread to Chicago, I participated there as well.

But movements, like institutions, are not immune to hierarchy or internal politics. Solidarity is often more complicated than people imagine.

Instead of finding common ground, I found myself publicly ridiculed and pushed aside by activists who decided I was not one of the people they wanted representing their cause.

After the economy had already knocked me down, even the people claiming to challenge that system found ways to exclude me.

That experience taught me something important.

Power dynamics exist everywhere.

Leaving the United States

On September 5, 2023, I arrived in the Philippines to live with my wife.

Her name was Luz.

We hoped to build a life together here.

She died of cancer on September 3, 2025, at 5:15 in the morning. We buried her on September 11. She is entombed above her parents in a small family structure here in Leyte.

We never reached our second wedding anniversary.

After she died, I stayed.

The Archive

Today I live in Baybay City continuing the work that has defined the last several years of my life.

I write.

Thousands of essays now exist in what has become the WPS News archive — or perhaps more accurately, the WPS News knowledge base.

It is a record of events, policies, and power structures as I have witnessed and analyzed them.

The audience is not large. The work is not profitable.

But documentation matters.

History is not written only by institutions. It is also written by individuals who decide that the truth of their experience deserves to be recorded.

Extraction

Looking back across the decades, a pattern becomes difficult to ignore.

Modern systems extract value from people.

Technical workers build the networks that power the digital economy. Activists lend their time and energy to movements. Writers produce analysis that circulates widely.

But the people performing that labor often receive little in return.

Structural extraction without compensation is theft.

That sentence may sound blunt, but if you spend enough years watching the same pattern repeat, it becomes difficult to describe it any other way.

The Bleeding Edge

Al Payette warned us that the cutting edge was also the bleeding edge.

He was right.

Most of us understood there would be risks in working at the edge of a rapidly changing industry. What we did not understand was how quickly the system would turn on us.

Decades later, I understand.

And I am still here.

So I write.

Because whether anyone wants to hear it or not, the story of what happened to us deserves to be told — without extraction.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

References

Greenspan, A. (2004). The Economic Outlook. Federal Reserve Board remarks.

Gates, B. (2008). Testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology regarding high-skill immigration.

The Bleeding Edge

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 5, 2026

When I was studying telecommunications at DeVry Institute of Technology in the late 1980s, the head of the program, Al Payette, used to tell us something we all understood perfectly well.

“The cutting edge is also the bleeding edge.”

Nobody misunderstood him. Nobody was confused about what he meant. We knew that working in a rapidly changing technical field meant risk. Technology moves fast. Industries shift. Companies rise and fall.

What we did not understand — what none of us understood — was how quickly most of us would feel that first cut.

The bleeding started almost immediately.

For many of us, it started the day we walked across the stage and received our diplomas.

Building the Networks

My degree was in telecommunications — voice and data systems — but my professional work was in data communications.

In the mid-1990s, that meant something very specific. Businesses were beginning to connect computers together in ways that are completely taken for granted today.

Local area networks. Wide area networks. Ethernet cabling. Early routers and gateways. Offices that once ran isolated machines were being transformed into connected systems.

From roughly 1994 until about 1998, that was my work. I helped bring the first LAN and WAN networks into businesses. We wired buildings. We connected offices. We turned disconnected computers into networks.

Today those systems form the basic infrastructure of modern commerce. At the time, they were still new enough that someone had to physically install them, configure them, and make them work.

For a few years, it felt like standing inside the future.

Then the work began to disappear.

By 1998 the number of contracts was shrinking. By the time the telecom contraction and the collapse of the dot-com bubble hit around 2000, many of those positions had simply vanished.

The expansion of data communications had stopped.

And the people who had built it were suddenly expendable.

The Contradiction

What made that moment even stranger was what was happening in the public conversation about technology jobs.

Experienced engineers and networking specialists were being laid off. Telecommunications companies were collapsing or consolidating. Entire segments of the industry were shrinking.

At the same time, corporate leaders were appearing before Congress arguing that the United States faced a shortage of trained engineers.

Bill Gates testified that American companies needed more high-skill visas because they supposedly could not find enough qualified technical workers.

But thousands of qualified workers already existed.

Many of them were unemployed.

Alan Greenspan acknowledged that the data communications expansion had contracted, yet the policy conversation quickly shifted toward importing additional technical labor rather than stabilizing the careers that had already been built.

Whether those decisions were wise or not is something economists will debate for decades.

But if you were living through that moment, the contradiction was impossible to miss.

You were told your skills were desperately needed at the exact moment you were discovering they were not.

The Slow Start

I graduated in October of 1990, entering the workforce during the recession that followed the end of the Cold War and the so-called peace dividend period.

Economists have documented that graduating during an economic downturn can affect a person’s earnings and opportunities for years, sometimes for decades. A slow start can echo through an entire career.

That reality shaped my life more than I understood at the time.

In 1998 I was earning $28.50 an hour in the technical field.

By the 2000s, after the industry contraction, the most I ever made in technical work again was about $17 an hour — for positions that had once paid far more.

Eventually, like many people whose technical careers collapsed during that period, I spent much of my working life in other fields simply because those were the jobs that remained available.

The official story of the technology revolution rarely includes that part.

But it happened.

Occupy

By 2011 the economic consequences of those structural changes had become impossible to ignore.

That was the year Occupy Wall Street began.

I became involved in July of 2011, before the first tents went up in Zuccotti Park. Like many others, I believed the country needed to confront the economic system that had produced the financial crisis and the bailouts that followed.

When the movement spread to Chicago, I participated there as well.

But movements, like institutions, are not immune to hierarchy or internal politics. Solidarity is often more complicated than people imagine.

Instead of finding common ground, I found myself publicly ridiculed and pushed aside by activists who decided I was not one of the people they wanted representing their cause.

After the economy had already knocked me down, even the people claiming to challenge that system found ways to exclude me.

That experience taught me something important.

Power dynamics exist everywhere.

Leaving the United States

On September 5, 2023, I arrived in the Philippines to live with my wife.

Her name was Luz.

We hoped to build a life together here.

She died of cancer on September 3, 2025, at 5:15 in the morning. We buried her on September 11. She is entombed above her parents in a small family structure here in Leyte.

We never reached our second wedding anniversary.

After she died, I stayed.

The Archive

Today I live in Baybay City continuing the work that has defined the last several years of my life.

I write.

Thousands of essays now exist in what has become the WPS News archive — or perhaps more accurately, the WPS News knowledge base.

It is a record of events, policies, and power structures as I have witnessed and analyzed them.

The audience is not large. The work is not profitable.

But documentation matters.

History is not written only by institutions. It is also written by individuals who decide that the truth of their experience deserves to be recorded.

Extraction

Looking back across the decades, a pattern becomes difficult to ignore.

Modern systems extract value from people.

Technical workers build the networks that power the digital economy. Activists lend their time and energy to movements. Writers produce analysis that circulates widely.

But the people performing that labor often receive little in return.

Structural extraction without compensation is theft.

That sentence may sound blunt, but if you spend enough years watching the same pattern repeat, it becomes difficult to describe it any other way.

The Bleeding Edge

Al Payette warned us that the cutting edge was also the bleeding edge.

He was right.

Most of us understood there would be risks in working at the edge of a rapidly changing industry. What we did not understand was how quickly the system would turn on us.

Decades later, I understand.

And I am still here.

So I write.

Because whether anyone wants to hear it or not, the story of what happened to us deserves to be told — without extraction.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

References

Greenspan, A. (2004). The Economic Outlook. Federal Reserve Board remarks.

Gates, B. (2008). Testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology regarding high-skill immigration.

The Bleeding Edge

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 5, 2026

When I was studying telecommunications at DeVry Institute of Technology in the late 1980s, the head of the program, Al Payette, used to tell us something we all understood perfectly well.

“The cutting edge is also the bleeding edge.”

Nobody misunderstood him. Nobody was confused about what he meant. We knew that working in a rapidly changing technical field meant risk. Technology moves fast. Industries shift. Companies rise and fall.

What we did not understand — what none of us understood — was how quickly most of us would feel that first cut.

The bleeding started almost immediately.

For many of us, it started the day we walked across the stage and received our diplomas.

Building the Networks

My degree was in telecommunications — voice and data systems — but my professional work was in data communications.

In the mid-1990s, that meant something very specific. Businesses were beginning to connect computers together in ways that are completely taken for granted today.

Local area networks. Wide area networks. Ethernet cabling. Early routers and gateways. Offices that once ran isolated machines were being transformed into connected systems.

From roughly 1994 until about 1998, that was my work. I helped bring the first LAN and WAN networks into businesses. We wired buildings. We connected offices. We turned disconnected computers into networks.

Today those systems form the basic infrastructure of modern commerce. At the time, they were still new enough that someone had to physically install them, configure them, and make them work.

For a few years, it felt like standing inside the future.

Then the work began to disappear.

By 1998 the number of contracts was shrinking. By the time the telecom contraction and the collapse of the dot-com bubble hit around 2000, many of those positions had simply vanished.

The expansion of data communications had stopped.

And the people who had built it were suddenly expendable.

The Contradiction

What made that moment even stranger was what was happening in the public conversation about technology jobs.

Experienced engineers and networking specialists were being laid off. Telecommunications companies were collapsing or consolidating. Entire segments of the industry were shrinking.

At the same time, corporate leaders were appearing before Congress arguing that the United States faced a shortage of trained engineers.

Bill Gates testified that American companies needed more high-skill visas because they supposedly could not find enough qualified technical workers.

But thousands of qualified workers already existed.

Many of them were unemployed.

Alan Greenspan acknowledged that the data communications expansion had contracted, yet the policy conversation quickly shifted toward importing additional technical labor rather than stabilizing the careers that had already been built.

Whether those decisions were wise or not is something economists will debate for decades.

But if you were living through that moment, the contradiction was impossible to miss.

You were told your skills were desperately needed at the exact moment you were discovering they were not.

The Slow Start

I graduated in October of 1990, entering the workforce during the recession that followed the end of the Cold War and the so-called peace dividend period.

Economists have documented that graduating during an economic downturn can affect a person’s earnings and opportunities for years, sometimes for decades. A slow start can echo through an entire career.

That reality shaped my life more than I understood at the time.

In 1998 I was earning $28.50 an hour in the technical field.

By the 2000s, after the industry contraction, the most I ever made in technical work again was about $17 an hour — for positions that had once paid far more.

Eventually, like many people whose technical careers collapsed during that period, I spent much of my working life in other fields simply because those were the jobs that remained available.

The official story of the technology revolution rarely includes that part.

But it happened.

Occupy

By 2011 the economic consequences of those structural changes had become impossible to ignore.

That was the year Occupy Wall Street began.

I became involved in July of 2011, before the first tents went up in Zuccotti Park. Like many others, I believed the country needed to confront the economic system that had produced the financial crisis and the bailouts that followed.

When the movement spread to Chicago, I participated there as well.

But movements, like institutions, are not immune to hierarchy or internal politics. Solidarity is often more complicated than people imagine.

Instead of finding common ground, I found myself publicly ridiculed and pushed aside by activists who decided I was not one of the people they wanted representing their cause.

After the economy had already knocked me down, even the people claiming to challenge that system found ways to exclude me.

That experience taught me something important.

Power dynamics exist everywhere.

Leaving the United States

On September 5, 2023, I arrived in the Philippines to live with my wife.

Her name was Luz.

We hoped to build a life together here.

She died of cancer on September 3, 2025, at 5:15 in the morning. We buried her on September 11. She is entombed above her parents in a small family structure here in Leyte.

We never reached our second wedding anniversary.

After she died, I stayed.

The Archive

Today I live in Baybay City continuing the work that has defined the last several years of my life.

I write.

Thousands of essays now exist in what has become the WPS News archive — or perhaps more accurately, the WPS News knowledge base.

It is a record of events, policies, and power structures as I have witnessed and analyzed them.

The audience is not large. The work is not profitable.

But documentation matters.

History is not written only by institutions. It is also written by individuals who decide that the truth of their experience deserves to be recorded.

Extraction

Looking back across the decades, a pattern becomes difficult to ignore.

Modern systems extract value from people.

Technical workers build the networks that power the digital economy. Activists lend their time and energy to movements. Writers produce analysis that circulates widely.

But the people performing that labor often receive little in return.

Structural extraction without compensation is theft.

That sentence may sound blunt, but if you spend enough years watching the same pattern repeat, it becomes difficult to describe it any other way.

The Bleeding Edge

Al Payette warned us that the cutting edge was also the bleeding edge.

He was right.

Most of us understood there would be risks in working at the edge of a rapidly changing industry. What we did not understand was how quickly the system would turn on us.

Decades later, I understand.

And I am still here.

So I write.

Because whether anyone wants to hear it or not, the story of what happened to us deserves to be told — without extraction.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

References

Greenspan, A. (2004). The Economic Outlook. Federal Reserve Board remarks.

Gates, B. (2008). Testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology regarding high-skill immigration.

ROCK FOR PALESTINE
Yusuf Cat Stevens
Roger Waters (Pink Floyd)
Low Key

Life on YouTube
Friday 21 June 2024
@6.30PM - 18.30 GMT
https://www.patreon.com/posts/106501579

@doubledownnews
#concert #music #Palestine #genocide #resillience #resistance #bandaid #inspirational #solidarity #lowkey #pinkfloyd #cat #catstevens #occupymovement #israel #telaviv #occupation #colonialism #freeconcert #bds

ROCK FOR PALESTINE
Yusuf Cat Stevens
Roger Waters (Pink Floyd)
Low Key

Life on YouTube
Friday 21 June 2024
@6.30PM - 18.30 GMT
https://www.patreon.com/posts/106501579

@doubledownnews
#concert #music #Palestine #genocide #resillience #resistance #bandaid #inspirational #solidarity #lowkey #pinkfloyd #cat #catstevens #occupymovement #israel #telaviv #occupation #colonialism #freeconcert #bds

ROCK FOR PALESTINE
Yusuf Cat Stevens
Roger Waters (Pink Floyd)
Low Key

Life on YouTube
Friday 21 June 2024
@6.30PM - 18.30 GMT
https://www.patreon.com/posts/106501579

@doubledownnews
#concert #music #Palestine #genocide #resillience #resistance #bandaid #inspirational #solidarity #lowkey #pinkfloyd #cat #catstevens #occupymovement #israel #telaviv #occupation #colonialism #freeconcert #bds

Stunning police brutality will ignite a student anti-war movement in America | Joan Donovan https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/29/police-brutality-university-protest #USuniversities #Occupymovement #USpolicing #Protest #USnews

Stunning police brutality will ignite a student anti-war movement in America | Joan Donovan https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/29/police-brutality-university-protest #USuniversities #Occupymovement #USpolicing #Protest #USnews

Stunning police brutality will ignite a student anti-war movement in America | Joan Donovan https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/29/police-brutality-university-protest #USuniversities #Occupymovement #USpolicing #Protest #USnews

@soc_i_ety @AmishSuperModel exactly. It’s too bad the #OccupyMovement didnt come together as I hoped it would.
It was the right time to fill the streets. Now the streets of every city are filled with homeless people, many doing hard drugs right out in the open.

@soc_i_ety @AmishSuperModel exactly. It’s too bad the #OccupyMovement didnt come together as I hoped it would.
It was the right time to fill the streets. Now the streets of every city are filled with homeless people, many doing hard drugs right out in the open.

@soc_i_ety @AmishSuperModel exactly. It’s too bad the #OccupyMovement didnt come together as I hoped it would.
It was the right time to fill the streets. Now the streets of every city are filled with homeless people, many doing hard drugs right out in the open.

@soc_i_ety @AmishSuperModel exactly. It’s too bad the #OccupyMovement didnt come together as I hoped it would.
It was the right time to fill the streets. Now the streets of every city are filled with homeless people, many doing hard drugs right out in the open.

@soc_i_ety @AmishSuperModel exactly. It’s too bad the #OccupyMovement didnt come together as I hoped it would.
It was the right time to fill the streets. Now the streets of every city are filled with homeless people, many doing hard drugs right out in the open.

An introduction and collection of #s

I work on how the #urban can be a source of #political #transformation

My methods/tools are #ActionResearch #psychogeography #PervasiveGames #mapping #UrbanDesign

I use concepts from #SituationistInternational #henrilefebvre #hannaharendt #walterbenjamin #chantalmouffe #davidgraeber #bellhooks #paulofreire

Research into #municipalism #ArabSpring #OccupyMovement #SituatedLearning #affect #intersectionality #echolocation #SoundArt

😅

An introduction and collection of #s

I work on how the #urban can be a source of #political #transformation

My methods/tools are #ActionResearch #psychogeography #PervasiveGames #mapping #UrbanDesign

I use concepts from #SituationistInternational #henrilefebvre #hannaharendt #walterbenjamin #chantalmouffe #davidgraeber #bellhooks #paulofreire

Research into #municipalism #ArabSpring #OccupyMovement #SituatedLearning #affect #intersectionality #echolocation #SoundArt

😅

An introduction and collection of #s

I work on how the #urban can be a source of #political #transformation

My methods/tools are #ActionResearch #psychogeography #PervasiveGames #mapping #UrbanDesign

I use concepts from #SituationistInternational #henrilefebvre #hannaharendt #walterbenjamin #chantalmouffe #davidgraeber #bellhooks #paulofreire

Research into #municipalism #ArabSpring #OccupyMovement #SituatedLearning #affect #intersectionality #echolocation #SoundArt

😅

An introduction and collection of #s

I work on how the #urban can be a source of #political #transformation

My methods/tools are #ActionResearch #psychogeography #PervasiveGames #mapping #UrbanDesign

I use concepts from #SituationistInternational #henrilefebvre #hannaharendt #walterbenjamin #chantalmouffe #davidgraeber #bellhooks #paulofreire

Research into #municipalism #ArabSpring #OccupyMovement #SituatedLearning #affect #intersectionality #echolocation #SoundArt

😅

An introduction and collection of #s

I work on how the #urban can be a source of #political #transformation

My methods/tools are #ActionResearch #psychogeography #PervasiveGames #mapping #UrbanDesign

I use concepts from #SituationistInternational #henrilefebvre #hannaharendt #walterbenjamin #chantalmouffe #davidgraeber #bellhooks #paulofreire

Research into #municipalism #ArabSpring #OccupyMovement #SituatedLearning #affect #intersectionality #echolocation #SoundArt

😅