If Occupy Wall Street was about the "1%" who rigged the price of capital, Occupy AI is going to be about the "∞" that rigged the price of labor My take on why #OccupyAI will be more existential than we think, and what that means for the resurgence of the crypto manifesto👇

For the mobile readers: Inequality is no longer just about wages. It’s everywhere–it’s in societal access, in opportunity cost, and even in the stock market. Today the top ten companies in the S&P 500 control nearly 40% of the index’s total value–a level of concentration unprecedented in modern history. It mirrors the dislocation we see in everyday life, where power, wealth, and opportunity are increasingly centralized while the rest of us are left scrambling. And the labor market is collapsing under the same weight. October 2025 saw the highest layoffs in 22 years, a 183% surge from September and 175% higher than twelve months ago. Tech alone cut 33,000 jobs, nearly six times the prior month. Yet companies post record profits while doing more with fewer humans. The social contract–the promise that education and hard work secure a stable life–has frayed. Populism’s appeal among young people is no longer a debatable question. Just look at Mamdani’s unbelievable rise. Amidst this, consider the spectacle of OpenAI. What began as a public good to democratize AI is now seeking federal backstops while preparing for a $1 trillion IPO. It is a “nonprofit” that socializes risk while privatizing recently uncapped upside (because 100x wasn’t enough), with no accountability to the public whose data fuels its growth engine, the very engine that is replacing the majority of people who make society function. The audacity is almost comical if it weren’t so familiar already–something I can sense because I came of generation amidst the angst of Occupy Wall Street. But unlike the prior revolt, this outrage will metastasize differently. Enter OccupyAI. It will arrive sooner than we think, hit harder than we imagine, and confront existential challenges unlike any societal upheaval in recent memory. While it will look different from Occupy Wall Street, the core energy is the same: anger at privatized gains with socialized losses. The difference this time, however, is the scale and the target. And it will be much worse, because: The new enemy has no face. Unlike bankers in suits, AI is faceless, incapable of shame or empathy, and immune to accountability. “We are the 99%” no longer finds cohesion when you can’t definitively point at the 1%. The real issue is a decentralized network of computational authority, optimizing for efficiency at the expense of humanity under the guise of capitalism, dismantling the concept of social mobility entirely while the very tech companies avoid any liability (as “platforms” never do) at all cost. This will be a labor-value crisis. Unlike 2008, this is not a liquidity crisis. That means the Fed cannot “save the economy” with rate cuts or endless liquidity. The displacement happening in the knowledge economy is disconnected from the cost of capital. In fact, cheaper money accelerates automation, further eroding the link between the cost and benefits of human capital. The promise that “working hard and investing in yourself will pay off” is broken if industrial policy overwhelms monetary policy. If Occupy Wall Street was a moral awakening, a collective outcry against corruption, greed, and unfairness, OccupyAI will be about free will itself, the right to self-determination. It is no longer enough to demand accountability from the system. When decisions are made by models we cannot audit, optimized by incentives we cannot see, and deployed at speeds we cannot comprehend, the fight shifts from justice to agency. It is about preserving what makes us human. Once this sets in, it becomes clear that only an equally faceless, decentralized machine can stand against the next frontier of inequality. And if the post-trust movement that crypto represents is to stand as a true counterforce, it must aspire to something greater than Wall Street’s financialization or State co-option. In the highest of ideals, the broader crypto movement codifies agency–AI centralizes cognition; crypto decentralizes it. AI extracts value; crypto redistributes it. AI erases authorship; crypto preserves it. It is a different kind of digital labor altogether, away from the data determinism that the AI industry misrepresents as a “public utility.” The challenge ahead then is not just monetary debasement, but the debasement of human value itself. The young will face a choice: accept a world where human ingenuity is systematically devalued, or reclaim agency through constructivist systems that defend free will. Occupy Wall Street turned a generation of Millennials into hardcore Bitcoiners. Fifteen years later as we are now facing an even greater upheaval, OccupyAI will be the catalyst that turns Gen Z and Gen Alpha into cypherpunks. And this is how Bitcoin will rise again, not solely on wealth redistribution, but on self-determination–not only as a store of value, but as a store of values.