Chicago is in the bones of this project.
Not the postcard version — the real one. The city where the Haymarket martyrs ignited the labor movement, where May Day was born, where working people learned that power only shifts when ordinary citizens stop asking nicely.
Occupy 2.5 carries that lineage forward. It’s the unruly child of Occupy Chicago — the movement that didn’t have a park, didn’t have a kitchen, didn’t have a neat PR narrative, and didn’t have permission. What it had were bodies, cameras, willpower, and a city whose political machine didn’t know what to do with a protest it couldn’t pigeonhole.
In 2011, Occupy Chicago organized without a home base. While other cities built encampments, Chicago built a moving target. Protesters rallied first at the Sears Tower (and no Chicagoan calls it anything else), then repositioned to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago — right across from the Board of Trade, where traders tossed McDonald’s job applications out the windows and waved “We Are the 1%” signs like taunts from a balcony.
The police response began polite. Then management got involved. Federal Reserve security didn’t want protesters leaning against their building, so activists shifted to city-owned flowerpots — legally permissible ground. When numbers grew, they spilled across the street into the Lane Bryant frontage, forming a corridor of noise and witness between two engines of American financial power.
Cliff Potts, one of the earliest Chicago occupiers, filmed the movement from day one — including the three-second clip now immortalized in the Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film. His footage documented not just crowds but the escalating tensions: detectives in suits sizing up the protest, tactical teams testing boundaries, and finally the late-night mass arrests at “Take the Horse.” Every single one of those arrests was thrown out. Selective enforcement doesn’t survive a courtroom, even in Chicago.
Occupy Chicago survived because it did what Chicagoans always do: adapt under fire. When police seized and destroyed the movement’s supply cart — illegally — the activists improvised. When winter came, some rode the L all night to stay warm. When the media ignored them, they livestreamed. When corporations mocked them, they multiplied.
Occupy 2.5 is the continuation of that instinct.
Militant in spirit. Peaceful in practice. Zero tolerance for bullshit.
We document corruption. We expose authoritarian creep. We refuse to let the powerful rewrite what the public has witnessed. And we do it from the perspective of people who lived through the last slow-motion collapse and refuse to let the next one go unrecorded.
Occupy 2.5 isn’t nostalgia.
It’s unfinished business. And Chicago taught us how to finish what we start.
Occupy 2.5 