In what ways can someone engage politically to influence public opinion against President Trump?
Once, we felt certain that protest was an action, sharp and swift, something that gathered and thundered beneath city windows, disrupting complacency, breaking habits of power. But now those storms seem to pass without changing much of anything, as if there's a new architecture to all this—structures too invisible and too vast to topple with the old tools. Micah White called activism "humanity breaking free," but lately it feels like we're pushing against glass, smooth, unyielding, hardly breaking anything at all.
Still, perhaps resistance has always rested on the uneasy borderland between fatigue and hope. Nowhere has this felt clearer than in these long years shadowed by Trump—less a single man, really, than a figure riding restless currents none quite imagined: digital algorithms, decentralized power, unseen ideological tectonics shifting beneath our feet. Maybe, then, we’ve chosen the wrong target, taking aim at one man's noise instead of addressing the silence that holds him up. There are deeper landscapes—blockchain chains binding hidden economies, artificial intelligences shaping whispers, the shifting scales of crypto-driven imaginations—that must be faced. It's not enough anymore to shout slogans, to march, or to sign petitions. Occupy taught us that numbers alone won’t unseat the kind of power that's dispersed now, intangible as fog, and somehow everywhere at once.
A friend of mine says protest now reminds him of rituals we continue without quite remembering why—the candle we burn at nightfall, the gesture we make automatically. Maybe activists, rather than repeating old gestures, must invent the language for a new kind of politics. True resistance, he theorizes, means rewriting the hidden contracts we live within and fashioning realities that confound the powers we oppose. If we began by altering our narratives, refashioned our shared fantasies against the ones Trump and his cohort spun—maybe then protests might cut, sharp again.
In small corners, some have begun this rewriting. They're experimenting with building what are called hybrid social movement-parties, combining grassroots fervor with electoral calculation—like the Five Star Movement, carefully constructed of participative digital spaces, open nominations through videos, vetting processes transparent as glass. Elsewhere, some are reclaiming the rural towns, crafting spaces of direct democracy, where governance means ensuring basic dignity, food, shelter, voices heard without bureaucratic drones muffling their humanity. Quiet revolutions, hardly noticed perhaps; yet islands have a way of inspiring continents.
Others are weaving themselves globally, calling the gesture “mundialization,” coordinating movements across nations, creating cross-border ripples that build into waves powerful enough for distant shores. Meanwhile, activists, wary now of the systems that remain hidden beneath the old surfaces, are studying blockchain, cryptocurrencies, the baffling emergence of DAOs and cryptographic ethics. They gather in small groups—over black coffee, leaning close—as if decoding instructions from maps newly uncovered. Cultural jammers launch sly interventions, disrupting narratives on billboards, subverting street signs with biting wit. They generate memes and visions—small memes rising unexpectedly to viral contagion, puncturing manufactured consensus.
Still, I recognize in myself the familiar mix of impatience and yearning. The window feels narrow, narrowing further every day. But quietly, strategically, activists everywhere are learning these new grammars of resistance, stepping forward into unfamiliar shadows, reshaping how we speak, how we imagine, how we govern ourselves. It feels so slowly incremental, and yet there is a whisper deep inside each action—that perhaps a shift is quietly unsettling underneath, that we might just glimpse, finally, possibilities too hopeful, too unexpected not to pursue.