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.