By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — April 16, 2031 — 21:05 PHST

The Circle

If LaSalle and Jackson was where Occupy Chicago stood, the General Assembly was how it spoke.

There was no stage.

No podium.

No microphone most of the time.

Just a circle.

People gathered, facing inward, trying to make something work that didn’t rely on a single voice controlling the rest.

How It Worked

The idea was simple.

Anyone could speak.

Anyone could bring an idea forward.

The group would listen, respond, and try to reach consensus.

Not majority rule.

Consensus.

That meant discussion. Clarification. Sometimes repetition. Sometimes frustration.

It was slower than most people were used to.

But it was intentional.

The Human Microphone

The “human mic” didn’t start as a philosophical choice. It started as a workaround. In New York, protesters were restricted from using amplified sound without permits, so they created a system where the crowd became the speaker. Short phrases, repeated outward in waves, carried a single voice across a space that otherwise would have silenced it. What began as necessity became identity.

When amplification wasn’t available, the group used what became known as the “human mic.”

A speaker would say a short phrase.

The people closest would repeat it.

Then the next ring would repeat it.

The words moved outward in waves until everyone heard them.

It wasn’t efficient.

But it forced attention.

If you wanted to be heard, you had to be clear.

What It Felt Like

From the outside, it could look disorganized.

From the inside, it felt like people trying—sometimes awkwardly—to figure out how to govern themselves without defaulting to hierarchy.

Some people were good at it.

Some weren’t.

Some had patience.

Some didn’t.

That was the assembly.

Where I Stood

I wasn’t there to lead it.

I wasn’t there to shape it.

I was there to record it.

Camera in hand, staying on the edge of the circle, capturing what I could without interfering with what was happening.

That was my role.

When It Worked

When it worked, it was something rare.

A group of people, most of whom had never met before, trying to reach agreement without someone taking control.

You could see ideas take shape in real time.

You could see people adjust, reconsider, refine.

It wasn’t perfect.

But it was real.

When It Didn’t

Consensus takes time.

And time isn’t always available.

Disagreements stretched. Personalities clashed. Patience wore thin.

What started as an attempt at shared voice could turn into repetition without resolution.

That tension never fully went away.

The Scale Problem

The larger the crowd, the harder it became.

What worked with a few dozen people became difficult with hundreds.

Voices got lost. Processes slowed. Energy shifted.

The assembly was strongest when it was small enough to function and large enough to matter.

That balance didn’t always hold.

What It Was

The General Assembly wasn’t just a meeting.

It was an attempt to answer a bigger question:

What does decision-making look like if you remove the usual structures?

Occupy Chicago didn’t solve that question.

But it tried to live inside it.

What Stayed

Even when everything else shifted—locations, numbers, conditions—the idea of the assembly remained.

A circle.

A voice.

An attempt.

That was enough to define it.

For more from Cliff Potts, see https://cliffpotts.org
If this work helps you understand what’s happening, help me keep it going: https://www.patreon.com/cw/WPSNews

References

Potts, C. (2011–2014). Occupy archive. WPS News. https://wps.news/category/cliff-potts/occupy-archive/

Gitlin, T. (2012). Occupy nation: The roots, the spirit, and the promise of Occupy Wall Street. HarperCollins.

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