Great stuff. One thing I keep thinking about is what protests might look like if they fully took advantage of the internet. The article mentions the 3.5% threshold, but even the largest nonviolent mass movements in American history haven't cleared 2%. Think about all the people out there who have the will and the anger to join a movement but not the means. The parent who can't leave their kids. The person with a lung condition for whom a single canister of tear gas could be fatal. Someone immunocompromised who can't afford to be in a crowd of thousands. People in small towns where showing up at a protest could cost them their job or their safety. And then there are the people who've watched footage of rubber bullets and mass arrests and made a perfectly rational calculation that they can't afford the risk — which, even when government crackdowns backfire and generate more sympathy, still works as a deterrent on plenty of individuals who have too much to lose. There's an enormous amount of people that never makes it to the streets, and I wonder what it would look like to build a form of protest that actually included them.
The instinct is to say that online activism is the answer, but I'm not sure pure digital protest carries enough weight; people don't have enough skin in the game for it to feel real. At the same time, the whole power of a physical protest is that people are visibly sacrificing their comfort and safety to show up, but one of the biggest risks described here is backlash: the way opponents seize on any hint of violence or disruption to discredit an entire movement. When protesters are blocking traffic or occupying public spaces, it's easy for opponents to frame them as radical agitators, even when the vast majority are peaceful. But what if the visible face of a movement was overwhelmingly parents at kitchen tables, elderly folks on their porches, kids holding signs in their living rooms? It's a lot harder to paint that as a threatening mob. You lose some of the disruptive power, sure, but you might also lose the single biggest weapon opponents have: the ability to make ordinary people afraid of a movement instead of sympathetic to it. An answer might be something that lives between the street and the screen.
There have been successful online movements before, but I'm not sure the old playbook would work today. Our attention is so fractured across so many platforms and feeds that any single channel is easy to tune out or algorithmically bury. A movement would need to somehow pierce everywhere at once. The Mamdani campaign for New York City mayor might be the best recent example of what breaking through looks like. It didn't dominate any one platform so much as create an environment people genuinely wanted to be part of, which meant it showed up organically everywhere because real people kept sharing it. Maybe the next evolution of protest captures that same energy of joyful participation and channels it into something with a concrete plan for meaningful action, so it doesn't dissolve into feel-good slacktivism.
I've been thinking about what that might actually look like in practice. A friend I recently invited to a gathering told me she'd be cheering us on from the sidelines because her immune system just can't handle crowds. I know several people like this, full of motivation but feeling permanently left out of the conversation. What if we took spaces that already exist in every community (maybe public libraries, schools, recreation centers) and gave them a new function? Imagine someone could make an appointment, walk into their local library, sit down in a designated room, and spend an hour on camera talking about what's making them angry and what they want changed. They could read something out loud that resonated with them. They could choose to put their name and face on it or go anonymous with their likeness digitally obscured. The videos would upload to a centralized site showing a running feed of people doing the same thing all over the country, and no video could be posted unless it came from one of these verified locations, so every entry represents a real person who made the real effort to show up somewhere. When they're done recording, they could assign their time to whatever causes and demands matter to them, weighted however they want — maybe 75% of their hour goes toward demanding accountability for today's outrage and 25% goes toward an ongoing but unrelated demand for an assault weapons ban in all 50 states. Off camera, there's a space where a dad can let his kids play on an iPad and use the restroom without having to cut his session short. The data accumulates: how many more people showed up this week than last? What drove the spike? What are those people demanding? Which causes persist week after week regardless of the news cycle? The data can also give lawmakers a real-time window into what their constituents actually care about, organized and quantified in a way that's hard to dismiss.
Using existing public spaces would keep costs manageable and solve most of the logistical problem of building something like this from scratch. And also: it would give people a reason to walk into their local library or rec center again. In 2026, so many of us live increasingly isolated lives, and these community spaces have been neglected as a result. If protest brought people through those doors, some of them might stick around and discover what else is there — a reading group, a basketball league, a neighbor they didn't know they had.
None of this that I'm saying is meant to replace or dismiss street protests, which serve purposes that no recording booth ever could. As Andrea points out, there's immense value in the collective experience of showing up together, in the solidarity and sense of political efficacy that comes from physically being there. And street protests could actually benefit from this kind of data, since organizers would have a much better sense of whether the broader public has their back or whether they're out ahead of where most people are. But as an additional layer on top of existing movements, something like this could change the math. A government's willingness to use force against demonstrators loses some of its power when even the people it succeeds in scaring away from the streets can still walk into their public library and be counted. You can tear-gas a crowd, but you can't easily tear-gas a retired teacher calmly explaining on camera why she thinks her grandchildren deserve better. Or I guess you could, but it wouldn't be a good look!
I absolutely love this idea! I don't know if you are familiar with Women Building Peace or MWEG, but both have been using quilting as protest. Members make quilt squares containing messages of protest for the abandonment of the Constitution. Then they have gatherings to assemble the quilts. Once they have their goal of completed quilts, some of the group's leadership travels to Washington and delivers the quilts to lawmakers so they have something tangible with their constituents messages of protest for the current administration's unlawful and unconstitutional acts.
This article confirmed one of my observations - protests can both raise awareness and also cause people who disagree with your position to become more entrenched when they see a large protest. Kind of a Catch-22.
Do all the things. Call/mail your reps, march in the streets, fundraise, boycott…it all adds up.
Yes! Do all the things.
Great stuff. One thing I keep thinking about is what protests might look like if they fully took advantage of the internet. The article mentions the 3.5% threshold, but even the largest nonviolent mass movements in American history haven't cleared 2%. Think about all the people out there who have the will and the anger to join a movement but not the means. The parent who can't leave their kids. The person with a lung condition for whom a single canister of tear gas could be fatal. Someone immunocompromised who can't afford to be in a crowd of thousands. People in small towns where showing up at a protest could cost them their job or their safety. And then there are the people who've watched footage of rubber bullets and mass arrests and made a perfectly rational calculation that they can't afford the risk — which, even when government crackdowns backfire and generate more sympathy, still works as a deterrent on plenty of individuals who have too much to lose. There's an enormous amount of people that never makes it to the streets, and I wonder what it would look like to build a form of protest that actually included them.
The instinct is to say that online activism is the answer, but I'm not sure pure digital protest carries enough weight; people don't have enough skin in the game for it to feel real. At the same time, the whole power of a physical protest is that people are visibly sacrificing their comfort and safety to show up, but one of the biggest risks described here is backlash: the way opponents seize on any hint of violence or disruption to discredit an entire movement. When protesters are blocking traffic or occupying public spaces, it's easy for opponents to frame them as radical agitators, even when the vast majority are peaceful. But what if the visible face of a movement was overwhelmingly parents at kitchen tables, elderly folks on their porches, kids holding signs in their living rooms? It's a lot harder to paint that as a threatening mob. You lose some of the disruptive power, sure, but you might also lose the single biggest weapon opponents have: the ability to make ordinary people afraid of a movement instead of sympathetic to it. An answer might be something that lives between the street and the screen.
There have been successful online movements before, but I'm not sure the old playbook would work today. Our attention is so fractured across so many platforms and feeds that any single channel is easy to tune out or algorithmically bury. A movement would need to somehow pierce everywhere at once. The Mamdani campaign for New York City mayor might be the best recent example of what breaking through looks like. It didn't dominate any one platform so much as create an environment people genuinely wanted to be part of, which meant it showed up organically everywhere because real people kept sharing it. Maybe the next evolution of protest captures that same energy of joyful participation and channels it into something with a concrete plan for meaningful action, so it doesn't dissolve into feel-good slacktivism.
I've been thinking about what that might actually look like in practice. A friend I recently invited to a gathering told me she'd be cheering us on from the sidelines because her immune system just can't handle crowds. I know several people like this, full of motivation but feeling permanently left out of the conversation. What if we took spaces that already exist in every community (maybe public libraries, schools, recreation centers) and gave them a new function? Imagine someone could make an appointment, walk into their local library, sit down in a designated room, and spend an hour on camera talking about what's making them angry and what they want changed. They could read something out loud that resonated with them. They could choose to put their name and face on it or go anonymous with their likeness digitally obscured. The videos would upload to a centralized site showing a running feed of people doing the same thing all over the country, and no video could be posted unless it came from one of these verified locations, so every entry represents a real person who made the real effort to show up somewhere. When they're done recording, they could assign their time to whatever causes and demands matter to them, weighted however they want — maybe 75% of their hour goes toward demanding accountability for today's outrage and 25% goes toward an ongoing but unrelated demand for an assault weapons ban in all 50 states. Off camera, there's a space where a dad can let his kids play on an iPad and use the restroom without having to cut his session short. The data accumulates: how many more people showed up this week than last? What drove the spike? What are those people demanding? Which causes persist week after week regardless of the news cycle? The data can also give lawmakers a real-time window into what their constituents actually care about, organized and quantified in a way that's hard to dismiss.
Using existing public spaces would keep costs manageable and solve most of the logistical problem of building something like this from scratch. And also: it would give people a reason to walk into their local library or rec center again. In 2026, so many of us live increasingly isolated lives, and these community spaces have been neglected as a result. If protest brought people through those doors, some of them might stick around and discover what else is there — a reading group, a basketball league, a neighbor they didn't know they had.
None of this that I'm saying is meant to replace or dismiss street protests, which serve purposes that no recording booth ever could. As Andrea points out, there's immense value in the collective experience of showing up together, in the solidarity and sense of political efficacy that comes from physically being there. And street protests could actually benefit from this kind of data, since organizers would have a much better sense of whether the broader public has their back or whether they're out ahead of where most people are. But as an additional layer on top of existing movements, something like this could change the math. A government's willingness to use force against demonstrators loses some of its power when even the people it succeeds in scaring away from the streets can still walk into their public library and be counted. You can tear-gas a crowd, but you can't easily tear-gas a retired teacher calmly explaining on camera why she thinks her grandchildren deserve better. Or I guess you could, but it wouldn't be a good look!
I absolutely love this idea! I don't know if you are familiar with Women Building Peace or MWEG, but both have been using quilting as protest. Members make quilt squares containing messages of protest for the abandonment of the Constitution. Then they have gatherings to assemble the quilts. Once they have their goal of completed quilts, some of the group's leadership travels to Washington and delivers the quilts to lawmakers so they have something tangible with their constituents messages of protest for the current administration's unlawful and unconstitutional acts.
That's beautiful! I'm looking this up right now, thank you Amy!
This article confirmed one of my observations - protests can both raise awareness and also cause people who disagree with your position to become more entrenched when they see a large protest. Kind of a Catch-22.
Fascinating! Thank you!