Just because people ON social media said the “No Kings” protests were cringe doesn’t mean they weren’t cringe, that the perception is an EFFECT of social media. On Salon.com, Andi Zeisler tries to cope by making comparisons with WTO 99 and comparing them favorably. Even though she’s apparently 10 years older than me, and I was in high school at the time, her account reads like someone who didn’t experience it and the aftermath as current events. Already in the first paragraph, a major difference should be obvious: the cops lost.
The demonstration achieved its first goal quickly, tying up Seattle’s downtown and making it impossible for WTO delegates to get into the conference. The police got outnumbered and then overwhelmed. Ultimately, the conference’s opening ceremony was canceled.
She emphasizes turtles and Teamsters cliche, how it was a diverse coalition and blah blah blah. But the 1990s had a leftist anti-globalization movement, with a strong anarchist influence and talk of “direct action.” There was ELF/ALF setting stuff on fire in that era. David Graeber’s “Direct Action: An Ethnography” is a detailed account of what protest culture was like at the time.
It’s very important that WTO 99 was before 9/11 and the Bush administration. The people setting stuff on fire went to federal prison and GW Bush did NOT tolerate protests of any kind anywhere near him. You had to go in little caged areas called “free speech zones” far away from anything. Anything else would be met with merciless Robocops.
Things were NEVER the same after 2001. The balance of power fundamentally shifted. In the Bush administration, Naomi Wolf was correctly predicting the fascist decline of America, before going MAGA eventually herself.
All of that context is missing:
The internet was still taking shape in 1999, and social media as we know it now didn’t exist. If it had, there’s no question that people watching the coverage on TV would have been arguing about choices and tactics, and debating what the protesters could have and should have done. There would have been people dismayed that protesters failed to prevent property damage, and people who were rooting for Molotov cocktails to fly. Monday-morning protest quarterbacks would insist that the anarchists who began smashing windows were chaos agents planted by the city or possibly the Feds. Everyone would have opinions about the environmentalists who turned out in sea-turtle costumes.
Indymedia.org, down the memory hole. Activists had their own communications infrastructure. Everyone argued about property destruction and Ralph Nader and how to achieve anarchist utopia or whatever. It’s crazy how she’s describing the obvious conversations that happened as hypothetical events involving hypothetical TV viewers.
Because the WTO protests did occur before the advent of social media, they’re almost never mentioned in the aftermath of events like last weekend’s nationwide No Kings protests, when inevitable hot takes like “Ugh, why are people even bothering with this bulls**t” light up Twitter, Bluesky, and beyond. Nor are other modern movements that have moved needles and forced hands: the fierce focus of the ACT-UP protests that gave a recalcitrant government no chance to look away from the AIDS crisis, the Occupy encampments that galvanized a new generation of politicians determined to confront the status quo. Instead, what’s increasingly invoked is a single word: cringe.
Occupy is not like the others. She’s leaving out that there was continuity of organizers between WTO 99 and Occupy, where David Graeber was treating it like a social experiment in how to hold meetings and they refused to make any concrete demands. Clearly, that “new generation of politicians determined to confront the status quo” wasn’t very large or very effective in the meantime.
Protests have been more cosplay than strategy for as long as younger people have been alive at this point. I remember when it was different, but my hair is greying.
Cringe, in other words, is a subjective metric. It’s also one that currently belongs to young people. Right off the bat, one thing that is unavoidably cringe about protests is that people who aren’t young are uniformly uncool. Old people aren’t just uncool; they also alienate young people because their mere existence is a terrible reminder that young people might someday also be old and uncool. When pragmatism and coalition-building are shoved to the side and aesthetics take center stage, the spotlight is harsh. You might be a seasoned protest veteran fluent in mutual aid and leftist history, but to young people, you are simply a middle-aged normie being way too dramatic about encroaching fascism. Maybe you worked with Food Not Bombs and made a clip-art anarchist zine back when you lived in a punk house, but a moderately popular Bluesky user has never heard any of those words before and is filing you under “wine moms 4 Kamala.”
I mean…isn’t that how people turned out? The young people raised the objection that the protests are tactically useless and self-indulgent, and Zeisler’s response is that they just hate her because she’s old?
I drove past one of the protests in a small town. It’s true that the cringiest sign I remember was held by an old person. It was an old white guy, and all I remember is that it involved the word “taco”. Like, why are you here? Is it that Trump is a tyrant or is it that he’s not ruling with iron resolve? My local paper’s coverage is like, “Gee, the guy who owns a local business dressed up in a king costume!”
The foreshortened timeline and romanticization of recent, ineffective movements distorts everything:
Then there’s the question of whether protests are cringe because they rarely succeed, and the attendant question of why people continue to think that the existence of a protest is a promise that the protest will make everyone happy and solve all the problems and make it so no one ever needs to attend another protest. Feminist media critic Jenn Pozner theorizes that young people who learned everything they know about politics via the internet saw Donald Trump re-elected and concluded that protest can’t possibly work, because if it did, how did this happen a second time? What they’ve learned, Pozner says, contrasts with a pre-cringe era “when social media was earnest” and people watched Occupy and the Arab Spring unfold on Twitter.
She acknowledges the issue, but responds with a dismissive straw man that critics won’t accept any protest that doesn’t produce utopia the next day.
George Bush was reelected long before Trump was reelected. Barack Obama governed much like George Bush.
It’s so bad that the reference point is the already-dystopian point at which “social media was earnest” and not any kind of resistance that predated the complete triumph of surveillance.
“You would think [social media] would accelerate and catalyze community, but it can, and often does, accelerate and catalyze atomization and a sort of detached cynicism,” says Kevin Gannon, director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence (CAFE) at Queens University of Charlotte and the author of “Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto.” “Social media makes it possible to cultivate an air of ironic detachment.”
People also used to think the victory of internet resistance was assured because talking about “rhizomes” made them sound cool. People used to think cryptography would keep us one step ahead of the government.
There’s a MUCH deeper issue of the cult of technology in general.
People were already talking about ironic detachment and blah blah blah, and then it was declared that 9/11 killed postmodernist irony.
Its rebirth on 4chan was a right-wing phenomenon. It’s fun to say nigger.
Both ironic detachment and detached cynicism, in turn, are incompatible with the gestures toward hope that are inherent in protest. Hope requires people to make themselves vulnerable to the prospect of disappointment, and vulnerable to those who can see the act of hoping.
But actual revolutionaries say things like “The revolutionary is a doomed man” and write books called “Revolutionary Suicide.” These were collectivist solidarity movements, understood to be multigenerational struggles. You do the right thing JUST BECAUSE, even if the state will come after you. You hope for a revolution, and the left has had near-successes, but the goal is to create a form of society that has yet to be achieved. It’s a long-shot.
Emotional dependence on “hope” is never going to cut it, especially given the apocalyptic condition of most things.
The revolution is being stopped dead in its tracks by “people might laugh at me for retaining my core moral commitments.”
Effort is caring in action. Effort is also an outcome of earnestness; most of us learn very early in life that we don’t get to dictate how earnest we’re allowed to be about the things we value — that parents, peers, teachers and even strangers will let us know when we’ve crossed the line.
And then there’s knowing when to let some of the earnestness go and care a little less — not because of cynicism, but because you actually want to push forward, and that requires working with others. “Both the right and the left have really diverse arrays of either coalitions or potential coalition members,” says Gannon. “But it seems to be much more of a hurdle for those of us on the left than it is on the right. To really think deeply about what kind of society we want is a complex endeavor, and it gets into a lot of really important questions. And I think there’s a flattening [of that] on the right that’s like, ‘Nope, f**k it, we’re in the streets to support Trump.’ Nuance is great, but it gets in the way when you’re talking about broad-scale, nationwide movement building.”
Except that “Trump” represents a recognizable direction that people want to go in. There’s no shared vision of a stateless communist society at the end, with anarchists and tankies arguing about how to get there. The Democrats have no vision of future beyond more technocracy.
The concluding paragraph:
Protest movements have always been collisions of personalities and styles, which means that they have always been someone’s idea of cringe. But there’s a reclamation on the horizon. We’re seeing cringe re-framed in TikToks and embodied by Protest Labubus. Embrace it or let it go. And then stay free and stay the course.
Reinforcing your self-esteem against mean Twitter comments is the answer, not anything to do with goals, strategies, and tactics.