The Middle of the Year

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

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — July 3, 2026 — 12:35 p.m. PHST

Halfway Through

Welcome to the middle of 2026.

That is not poetry. That is the calendar talking.

July 2 is the hinge in the year, and 12:35 p.m. in the Philippines is close enough to the middle of the day that I am going to plant this essay here and let it stand.

Half a year behind us. Half a year ahead.

That is a useful place to stop and say what this project is really about.

Posterity Is a Dangerous Word

I do not usually like talking about legacy or posterity.

My first publisher loved that kind of talk. He could not seem to get my books properly distributed, but he was very good at assuring me that posterity would remember me.

Sure. Right. Wonderful. Put that on the invoice.

The problem with posterity is that it sounds noble while the practical work is still sitting there unpaid.

Domain names do not renew themselves. Hosting does not survive on hope. Archives do not remain online because somebody once had good intentions.

The most I can secure a domain name for is about ten years. That puts the current practical edge of the project somewhere around 2034. That is not eternity. That is a runway.

The MIT Lesson

I had remembered a story about the founder of MIT dying after exhausting himself for the institution. The exact record is a little different, and maybe even sharper.

William Barton Rogers, MIT’s founder and first president, spent years pushing the idea of a school built around science, industry, and useful knowledge. Massachusetts Institute of Technology was incorporated in 1861, opened to students in 1865, and Rogers remained tied to it even after illness forced him back from daily leadership. He died in 1882 while giving MIT’s commencement address.

I understand that better now than I used to.

At 68, you start thinking differently about institutions, memory, and unfinished work.

What Is Already Built

If I were to drop dead tomorrow, and let’s not be dramatic about it because I am in decent shape, WPS News would not simply vanish.

Roughly 2,000 essays are already scheduled to drop.

The total projected output for this project alone is somewhere around 5,000 essays. That does not include Occupy 2.5 or Occupy25.com, which I expect to consolidate into WPS News over time so one archive can carry the work forward.

This is not just a blog.

This is a record.

It is being written for you, your children, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren. If I wanted simple self-glorification, I would have picked a louder racket.

The Ask

I am trying to build a small foundation, a microfoundation, something practical enough to help secure the archive beyond my own direct labor.

I know this is a hard time.

The United States is under pressure. The world is under pressure. Prices are up. People are tired. Many are scared. Forces that shall remain nameless, because I am being polite for once, have helped make ordinary life harder than it needed to be.

So yes, I know this is a terrible time to ask for support.

I am asking anyway.

Because archives do not survive on perfect timing. They survive because somebody decides they matter before they disappear.

Service, Not Applause

This work has always been about service.

Not applause.
Not fame.
Not some golden statue of Cliff Potts standing in the future with pigeons judging my haircut.

Service.

I have spent years building WPS News into an independent news knowledge base because somebody needs to preserve what happened, what people said, what systems failed, and what ordinary people were forced to live through.

That work matters even if it does not pay.

But it still has costs.

If this work helps you understand what’s happening, help me keep it going: https://www.patreon.com/cw/WPSNews

For more from Cliff Potts, see https://cliffpotts.org