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

[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.

[randomdreams]

Man, you and thewronghands should be sitting down in a cafe somewhere talking about this.

[randomdreams]

btw I am a pessimist on this, I know: I feel like anything you come up with will almost immediately be coopted by the other side to poison it, like the safety pin movement.

[gfish]

Well, yeah, it will always be an arms race. That's why brainstorming is critical.

The safety pin thing shows how important it is for a protest element to show dedication in a minimally-fakable way. Like an antelope pronking when it sees a lion, it *can't* be something cheap and easy. Those "I will fuck up any bigot that tries to fuck with you" pins are far more powerful, exactly because wearing one exacts a real social price.

[randomdreams]

I think that's one reason mass protests have remained at the vanguard: you can't fake 3,000,000 people marching. About the best you can do is agents provocateur.
oh hey turns out that's the name of a lingerie distributor.

[hsifyppah]

There are still scary protests, they're just not the ones white people attend in quantity. Standing Rock. Black Lives Matter. Protests still attract tear gas and public outcry. Massive peaceful picnic protests attended largely by middle-class white people are protected by a lot of privilege and a lot of commonality between the social position of the protesters and the establishment, or at least the police. I think the boring answer is to shut up and throw money at and use privilege in a humble way to direct attention to the marginalized groups at the forefront of whatever the police are showing up to with tanks.

Aesthetics are powerful and your protest art ideas are cool, but I don't think they address the core of the problem you describe.

[gfish]

I don't see those actually changing public policy, though. I wish they were! Being scary enough to receive a militarized response obviously isn't enough. (Thanks to the deep racism of my country, that's in fact an depressingly low bar.) If anything, those are the exact situations in which the power of weird could be particularly effective, to try to break out of terrible media narrative feedback loops.

[tylik]

Have you read Pat Murphy's "The City, Not Long After"? It's a pretty well done artists protesting an oppressive regime SF book from the eighties. (And then Starhawk came and wrote a book that was similar on so many plot points...)

I am all in favor of art and weirdness. Just in the sense of those being great tools when those are the tools that come to hand... but I wouldn't want to get so comfortable with them that we just stop there. (Which is kind of what I feel has happened with the ritualized pageantry of most protests.)

[gfish]

It has literally been on my list for ages, and has never been in stock when I'm at Powell's (just about the only time I remember to check that list!).

And, sure. I'm an artist and a toolmaker. That's what I'm going to burn my cognitive surplus on ...rather or not I even want to... but I'd never claim that was ALL that was needed. It's just something I can do in my spare time, in addition to all the other stuff.

[sistawendy]

I invite you to look at recent (successful!) protests against the president of South Korea. They were choreographed, and they were massive.