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 developed cultural antibodies since then. We've learned to see the chaos of protests not as a threat, but as a humorous weakness. You've got the old hippies, you've got the same, tired old chants, you've got the people with the giant puppets, you've got hangers-on with signs for completely unrelated issues, you've got the wannabe anarchists breaking windows. All just a big, easily-ignored joke.

I've spent a lot of time trying to think of ways this could be fixed, how to break protests out of old ruts. There is a fine line to be walked: how do you convey power of the kind that politicians pay attention to, without it tipping over into bad kinds of power. The kinds that make you look like violent fascists, for instance. They used all the really obvious options, unfortunately.

The Occupy movement was interesting for this reason -- it was so weird and different, it managed to get a lot of attention at first. But camping doesn't convey power in the long run. It conveys homelessness, which is more or less the complete opposite in our society. So it fizzled. Maybe if they had standardized on some unique, homemade tent structures, like hexayurts? Getting people to make things to even a rough spec beforehand shows dedication and power. And hexayurts look so alien, it would have been very striking. And well insulated!

The pink "pussyhats" at the Women's Marches this weekend surprised me by being so effective. I admit I had dismissed the idea, in part because I didn't think they'd be so common. They provided strong visual cohesion, and they demonstrated many hours of effort beforehand. Being homemade clothing, they tied into some very deep American traditions of protest, providing a particularly nice contrast with mass-produced, foreign-made MAGA hats. They were uniform without being too uniform. They even worked to spread the protest out across the city after the march, as people made their way home. I was seeing them for the rest of the day around Seattle, providing a really interesting temporal echo to the protest.

Less well structured ideas follow:

I have long wondered about choreographed dance routines. Getting that many people to move in unity shows coordination and dedication, without necessarily being as bad-scary as marching in lockstep. It has the advantage of being able to dial in the exact amount of scariness, depending on how goofy the dance number is. But then I realized that this is exactly what the North Korean "Mass Games" are, and those actually trace back to Russian Revolution era practices. So, promising, but maybe not.

Brainstorming with someone (sorry, I forget who), we came up with the idea of radical construction as a protest activity. Imagine a swarm of people coming from every direction, each person carrying a custom, numbered strut. Working together in a way that could only come from practicing many times, they quickly erect a dome or tower. This could be in a park, or it could be in the middle of a busy intersection. Maybe they climb it and chain themselves to it, maybe not. But just the act of creation like that, showing literal coordinated industry, would be really striking in a new way.

Protest signs could use some innovation. How about a night march, protesters dressed in dark clothing, with signs lit up using LED strands and el-wire? 2017 is going hard cyberpunk, after all, so let's protest in style!

Who else has ideas? What is new/weird/different enough to break through cultural apathy, strongly visual, shows coordination and dedication and power, all without being the wrong kind of scary?

Comments

[tylik.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

It's a leverage thing, maybe? I mean for some people, it can have a pretty huge return.

But for other people, playing at art is safe. (Mind you, I'm interested in effectiveness, not in who is taking the biggest risks. Just, some folks are doing neither.) And showing up at protests becomes something of a social activity, and there doesn't even seem to be a lot of discussion about "what is really being accomplished here?" (This is some pent up frustration with a lot of the protest stuff that goes back decades now. And I'll *still* occasionally march, but it's mostly a desperation measure.)

[gfish.livejournal.com]

That's more or less exactly the situation I was reacting to in the first place.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

I did get that, I just wanted to apologize for what might be too much grumpiness. I am moody. Dissertation isn't helping. (Stupid chronic cough isn't either.)

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

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

[eub.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.)