Slacktivism and the rise of protests that change nothing.
The Age of Useless Activism
The Age of Useless Activism.
Everyone “stands with” something these days, usually while sitting on their phone. The bar for being an “activist” has never been lower: a repost, a flag in your profile picture, maybe a day at a march.
Protest once carried weight because it carried risk. Suffragettes chained themselves to railings to win the vote. Civil rights marchers faced batons, dogs, and water cannons to end segregation. They weren’t staging moral theatrics for likes online. They had clear goals and a plan. That’s why they won.
In much of the world, to protest is still a matter of life and death. In Iran, women burn hijabs knowing they could be beaten, jailed, or killed. In China, a single post can make a dissident disappear. In Saudi Arabia, people have been handed decades-long sentences or executed for tweeting.
In the West, the danger runs in the opposite direction. We do not risk prison for speaking out, we risk social exile for staying silent. For not posting the black square, not joining the march. The courage activism once demanded has been replaced by the performance of it.
Here, enjoying freedoms others can only dream of, we squander them by rallying behind causes we no longer understand. We spread ourselves thin, declaring strong opinions on everything while knowing less than ever about the issues we claim to support. And sometimes, almost without noticing, we end up cheering for the very regimes that jail, torture, and silence their own people. When the Ayatollah…