Improving protests

[gfish]

A problem I've been thinking over for many years is how to improve protests. It seems to me that the standard models are largely broken at this point, in that they don't motivate political change very well. If you read sources from the 60s, protests were scary back then. They were seen as a collapse of hierarchy, of basic social order. But we've

Comments

[eub]

I don't know if this is protest in the way you're looking, but I would look towards non-march, non-physical-gathering chain reactions. Take the "ice bucket challenge" as a point. Or posting about your abortion.

Part of what happens when you commit to any action is it tends to shift you towards more activity, more practical commitment even if your intellectual commitment is unchanged. Clicking a "reshare" button doesn't work, but some online actions have real emotional weight.

Another part of protesting is that it's visible, to itself and to people on the margin of participating -- it's a quorum-sensing mechanism. Again a "reshare" is negligible noise, but some online actions are noticeable, distinctive, and visibly coordinated.

Despite my talking it up, this virtual activity doesn't match the personal participation of physically being there, but can you think of ways to take it further?

[eub]

Also, think about grafting a loosely-protest-type activity out of pieces that have one of these 'elements of protest' but not both? To try to make an example, volunteering is strong as a personal action, but it doesn't have the quorum-sensing aspect. So attach a communicative element, like posting about "how I volunteered this week, and you can next week" -- fuse this more gracefully into a thing.

(For mass protesting you want to keep a third element, that for someone to participate doesn't have prerequisites. You can decide to show up, and do it. I would define this thing we're doing as requiring the place have an orientation class with online signup.)