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

[tylik]

I think there's a lot of room for thinking about what you're trying to do. I mean, it kind of sounds like you're interested in the more symbolic aspects of protests - a bunch of people show up somewhere - whacky! maybe scary! Street theatre! Things like that!

(As an aside, I think there's a lot to be done on the more artistic and symbolic protest side when dealing with Trump in particular, as those seem particularly well aimed at getting him to lose his shit and have absurd public meltdowns. There were some interesting articles on the women's movement's against silvio berlusconi, and particularly what was done in the symbolic sphere.)

... I worry a bit when people equate protests with symbolic action, just because I feel like that's stepping aside from a huge part of the history. Even a lot of the protests in the sixties were actively disruptive (my parents were tear gassed while taking over I-5 back in their courting days...) But if you think back into a lot of the history of protests, a lot of them were linked to much more specific actions - strikes and boycotts come to mind, but I don't mean that in a way to say that we need to be wedded to the past. More, in their time, there were things that society depended on people doing, and people decided to harness their power by refusing to do those things.

[eub]

Yes to multiple things here. Street theater has a lot of room to grow, for message-sending protest. But a lot of effective protests have not been message-sending, they have been action or lack-of-action.

Protests as chanting-to-the-choir, they serve some purposes (group cohesion, a signal of size), but they don't serve some other purposes very much.