In that pre-social media era, activists had to spend years mobilizing through community outreach and organization-building. Activists met near daily to drill, strategize and hash out disagreements. But those tasks made the movement more durable, ensuring it was built on real-world grass-roots networks. And it meant that the movement had the internal organization both to persevere when things got hard and to translate street victories into carefully planned political outcomes.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
This is one of the explanations for the declining success rate of mass protests, which is the topic of the article. Martin Gurri would say that today’s public is ready to say what it is against but unable to articulate what it is for.
Yuval Levin, in A Time to Build (alas, not available until next year), says that social media accentuate the decline of formative institutions and the rise of performative behavior. Think of the demonstrations of yesteryear as organized by people who knew what they wanted. Think of today’s demonstrations as drawing people who want to be seen demonstrating. Note that the Hong Kong protest does not have to be old school to have my sympathies.
It is not a ‘one off ‘ effect’, but a recurring theme.
Going backwards, it was also broadcast radio, telephone exchanges, telegram, rotary steam press, Gutenberg press. I call it Morse’s Law, data rates double about every five years. It should be analyzed in the larger context of information networks advancing the terms of trade over an older system and causing disruption. Suddenly the older trader always losing out to the newcomer with the new tech. Markets go through sudden adaption.
Rather than “Morse Law” it might come down to attention (maybe interchangeable). Modern protest has long been about reaching an audience via mass media. You could analyze the protest sign or a chanted slogan as a weird way of getting 40 characters max. across to a very large audience. The number of protesters in the image background or crowd noise is an extra signal, like a laugh-track for a sitcom.
I’d argue that most protest has simply run out of important issues since the civil rights and anti-war movements. If you were in advertising, you would say that the marketing message is no longer aligned with an underlying value. Social Justice activists have always struggled with the need to sensationalize their message, for instance, Greenpeace struggled to get back in the news after the Rainbow Warrior was sunk.
For us conservatives/libertarians that don’t like social justice protests, revisit or learn about the Polish Solidarity movement and I think you come to realize how visceral mass protests can be when you believe in the cause.
It’s also possible that the protests (eg Hong Kong) are not emergent phenomena, but are seeded and sustained by specific foreign or domestic actors as part of hybrid warfare. They fizzle as soon as the lifeline is cut. USSR had been doing it in Latin America and Africa last century, the CIA this century (“the Arab spring”). One soft test of this hypothesis is whether HK protests fizzle after the China-US trade deal is signed.
I am with you that Hong Kong protest is not really global but dealing with a specific economic-political reality of their city relations to China. And there is generational gap is I believe a lot of Hong Kong residents don’t trust the Chinese government but still think of themselves as Chinese culture. This contradiction is the center of China & HK relations for my entire life. (I seriously doubt the US-China is the center of the HK protest.)
I feel like I’m missing a core piece of information with the Hong Kong protests. When I initially tried to figure out “why now?” the main issue seemed to be a new extradition policy for both the mainland and Taiwan. Although extradition is a potential vector for abuse by authoritarian regimes, it is also a normal part of political relationships.
The thing is, when the UK agreed to hand Hong Kong over to Chinese in the late 90’s, the idea was that China would extend its control slowly, over a 50 year period, allowing Hong Kong a great deal of self governance. In that context, the extradition treaty China wants is not a small thing, it’s a sudden large and overt step towards direct rule from Peking.
” the rise of performative behavior. ”
Yep. This is a great metaphor. “Performative behavior” is empty signalling behavior. It’s Kabuki theater. Institutions had the possibility of developing substantive change, however remote that possibility.
I can’t say for sure but it seems to have most quickly infected technology development itself. We’ll see how long “wokeness” lasts once a nice deep tech recession emerges.
That’s an insult to Kabuki.
Populists want peace, prosperity, and autonomous private lives. There. That wasn’t hard. Keep all your stinking isms and in your little intellectual sand boxes and build all the pretty sand castles that you want but tax revenues had better be going towards something more than maintaining elites in the opulence to which they have become accustomed (“rebuilding institutions”). Nobody but legacy elites wants to return to the squalor of the Obama years in which our lords and ladies so convincingly demonstrated they are incapable of so much as tying shoe laces. Until the rot and corruption in government, academia, and business is torn down and stripped out, there is nothing to build.
Or most of the Guirri Revolt of the Public is still internet based and actually more focused on the ballot box today. So the conservative WWC voting for Trump after reading Breitbart is probably more effective than marching. And I noticed gay marriage was successful with minimal marches and marijuana legalization is passing in some states. The blogger movement were probably better at moving opinion against Iraq than the marchers for Vietnam.
1) Honestly I don’t really don’t want to return to mass protest. Sure they were ‘community based’ but most protest marches in the US are Americans at their stupidest. The chances of violence and riots is higher which often hurts the cause. Nixon in 1968 was elected to show up Vietnam marchers!
2) When wasn’t a protest march “wanting to be seen?” Isn’t this signaling? My parents about as middle class as they still fondly remember being weekend hippies and be seen at Vietnam protests. I always heard guys would would only join Vietnam marches for the girls. When isn’t protesting a form of signaling?
And considering there are 195 different nations with varying cultures, politics and history we will see variation in protest on the globe.
I think the issue of “not really knowing what they are for” jumble and confusion of people who want to act out the implanted Hollywood images of Boomer-era protests goes much deeper than, and predates, Social Media. It’s part of The Great Annealment of progressive / leftist ideology in the post Cold War era, and the fact that this coincided with these important developments in communications technologies confuses the attempt to infer a mechanism and proper order of causation.
Consider: Occupy Wall Street. Yeah, twitter on smartphones was already A Thing, though eight years ago it had something like only a quarter of its current user base, and, in my own experience, the general tenor of OWS matched my experiences from a decade or more prior. Tahrir Square was earlier in the same year, and most of the crowd in Egypt was orders of magnitude more clear and unified regarding what they thought they wanted (a new regime to replace the Mubarak-dynasty-led Junta, though one can quibble whether this was fundamental an instrumental or terminal goal).
But with OWS, remember how the original Adbusters thread fell apart almost immediately and no one could agree on any manifesto or list of demands or, well, express what they were upset about in a coherent manner logically tied by implication to concrete proposals for reforms? It’was an incompatible melange of low brow grievances and cause-signalling, brain-dead eat-the-rich Socialism, anti-corporate and anti-market sentiment in general, student loan anxiety, “legalize it” stoners, social justice compulsion-of-the-minute, environmentalist compulsion-of-the-minute (with hilarious arguments between the litterers and holy recyclers) and in terms of physical presence attracted a bunch of semi-criminal or mentally ill riffraff and bums and hippie circle drummers.
Now, I think that the interested observation related to feedbacks with Social Media was the total failure of previous tactics previously used by the main media outlets being able to use their dominance of public influence to define or redefine the real meaning and purpose and goals of such an event, and run public relationss interference for it while harnessing the chaotic and undirected energies of the mob and making it about some specific thing that elite intellectual progressives had kept in mothballs until the right moment. The troops were in disarray and the soi-disant or aspirational “leadership” couldn’t form them back into lines on one front in unison, because on one was listening to the same voices or responding to a single coordinating factor. It was just a matter of time before all the energy was disippated via destructive interference of random signals, and that, when clearly not useful to any paritcular progressive cause anymore, the camp was associated with low status rabble and seen as a pesky nuisance.
Now, you mentioned just four days that you didn’t mean for oppression to define progressivism, but such a n evolutionary reduction and distillation to the simplest possible set of ideas to provide the glue to keep a political coalition together was inevitable, and occurred simultaneously with the rise of new social media.
The simpler the better, for any complexity whatsoever introduces additional sources of internal conflict and disagreement and conflicting judgments regarding priorities and values, etc. Unfortunately, the ideological reduction we have now, the settlement of that annealing process that purports to bring all the progressive causes under one conceptual roof, is completely poisonous and toxic and, in the long run, incompatible with a pleasant and functional society.
I blame technology. In the good old days when order was maintained by men with staves and swords, assemblies of people accomplished things! You could smash up and rape to your heart’s content in a ghetto, lynch some vagrant hiding from real justice in a jail cell, break the windows and pour out the bottles in a saloon, provoke a military expedition into heathen lands, maybe show your approval of guillotining a king and queen.
But then guns came along and ruined things. That and modern notions of crowd control. So demonstrators have to settle for smaller things, like just showing off their numbers. Such a disappointment!
OTOH, it’s sort of amazing to think we can have synchronized demonstrations, with hundreds of thousands of marchers acting simultaneously in cities all across large nations, almost all behaving peacefully and orderly despite the urgency of their concerns. It’s almost like — dare we say this? — civilization is spreading.
“Performative behavior” is a good description of most protests.
The yearly March for Life, a constant pro-life anti-abortion is becoming more performative most years, but also is succeeding in changing the culture. See the growth of heartbeat anti-abortion laws.
Growth of tech scanners using ultra-sound has been partly a cause, as more pregnant women can see a developing baby, not merely disposable tissue, inside of them.
Funny sad that in Chile the protesters seem to want to follow the mistakes of early Chavez supporters from Venezuela.
Growth of median after tax income should be greater than growth of top 10% or top 1% of after tax income. I doubt if any OECD countries have been following this guideline, or even looking at this metric. But the rich should not be getting richer faster than the workers.
Rather than demonstrate, resist. The census is coming up. The gerrymandering process can be sabotaged if we all acknowledge the science that says our ancestors all came out of Africa and fill the form out accordingly, that might be more effective. And it might help to prep for Warren’s inauguration by studying the Democrats attacks on the Trump inauguration. Burning limos, gassing attendees, blocking gates. I always wondered why they didn’t burn tires. It would be horrible and illegal and definitely shouldn’t dump burning tires on metro tracks. Definitely better more creative ways to resist can be developed. The current resisters have had their turn, the other side should get to enjoy their turn thoroughly.
Coercive acts against people or their property are immoral when viewed through a libertarian lens and it is hypocritical to promote Christian values using unchristian eye-for-an-eye tactics. Your suggestions amounts to conservative Black Bloc cosplay.
Analogies to politics as religion are commonplace, but to make one more, it might that “demonstration” here is becoming more like “religious procession” (at a time in history when there are uncommonly few religious processions).
From a religious standpoint, the point of the procession is to join in worship. It if happened that your procession changed something or other, that would be completely accidental.
Put another way:
Protest: Rather than having to protest, I’d rather whatever I am protesting were corrected. Maybe this will fix it.
Religious Procession: Being here is precisely the point.
Excellent mag article on how “social justice” is, very much, an alt-religion.
https://areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-the-faith-of-social-justice/
Many protests are also another form of very cheap virtue signaling — being SEEN to be here is the point. The “effectiveness” of protests, as measured in the number of pictures taken and publicly available, is still increasing.
Increasingly, protests are becoming more like mass participation parades. Rather than watch & celebrate others – ‘be the celebration we’ve been waiting for’.
Take a holiday – one day of your life. Be virtuous. Be against the Bad Things.
None of the anti-war protesters of the 60s was really in favor of the warned against commie Killing Fields that their protests were successful in helping to create.
Be against the Bad Parts of the overall Net Good Things that have good parts and bad parts. Magic thinking — if all the bad parts are excluded, there will only be good parts left.