Which forms of protest have historically had the most significant impact on a presidency like Donald Trump's?

It's easy, dangerously easy, to think of protests like familiar theater: chants rising rhythmically, signs waving gently as if pulled by invisible tides. But lately, so many of us sense it differently, we sense that old scripts fall flat. The signs look faded, the chants muffled, less a wave than a ripple dispersing. Donald Trump understood instinctively how to swallow conventional protest whole, absorb its predictable anger, and turn it right back, amplified, reflected, bright as a television screen. To protest his tweets, his antics, his latest statements was to fall precisely into a trap he set, his politics built upon spectacle, sustained by our exhaustible outrage.

Protest, your reflections remind us, is something else entirely—a sudden clearing in the forest, a gap between trees alive with unfamiliar possibilities. The bolt of lightning moment when a collective vision blooms, reckless and untethered from the neat narratives we've been given. Occupy Wall Street was exactly this: a sudden opening, as if a quantum event had split open the air, arcing with strange and beautiful chaos. Occupy offered no simple demands to pin on a bulletin board, no curated list of grievances begging conventional redress. Instead, it blossomed wildly, a living suggestion that another world was not only needed but already emerging, buried just below the everyday surface. And yet we confess: Occupy, too, was short-lived. Eventually, that vivid clearing filled again, the extraordinary clarity softened back into fog. But still, we remember it, because it hinted so fiercely at another way of being.

Today, confronting the spectacle politics Trump embodied—a politics spun from media spectacle, crypto-economies, and the relentless hum of artificial intelligence—we find ourselves in unfamiliar terrain, unlike any historical predicament, a situation for which protest was not originally made. The tools of previous eras seem hopelessly quaint when matched against this digital funhouse mirror. If Occupy pushed us toward something new, the next iteration of resistant imagination must leap even further into unknown ground. What might come next must be radically strange, inexplicable even, to the eyes trained in yesterday’s tactics. It must live within its spontaneity, steeped in invention rather than habit, driven by curiosity instead of fear.

You spoke of protest as laying open imaginative space, "temporary clearings," a revolutionary act of breaking humanity loose from socially imposed boundaries. Perhaps action today requires this kind of willing imaginative courage more than ever: spaces built not just to oppose Trump—or any single figure—but to unseat the very logic that gives figures like Trump their power.

This might mean embracing symbols that unsettle, disorient, sabotage the government's carefully maintained narratives. Culture jamming, as Adbusters once did, could puncture political identities built on slick spectacle, stealing the polished sheen of authoritarian bravado. The powerful have always feared laughter more than fists.

And perhaps too we return, carefully, to the clarity and openness of Occupy-inspired autonomous zones. Small-scale worlds-within-worlds emerging, seemingly fragile but suddenly strong because they live entirely otherwise—alternate rhythms of direct democracy and mutual care quietly unraveling the logic of domination. Autonomous spaces hidden in plain sight—a park reclaimed here, a visible corporate space momentarily transformed there—sending a quiet shockwave, a signal, another quantum opening.

The new protest might also find unpredictable forms, quantum leaps from decentralized networks quickly assembled through encrypted channels. Not planned in detail, but erupting suddenly, organically. Movements animated by the unpredictability of collective feeling, ungoverned by traditional leadership structures, elusive to established means of suppression. Protest as contagion, as tectonic shift beneath authoritarian certainty.

Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and AI open unexpected avenues, too, now. Untraceable tokens financing dissent outside traditional funding structures—strange new cracks in a formerly seamless surface of control. AI turned into an activist partner, swiftly parsing global protest actions, sketching new patterns of resistance invisible to slower, plotting minds.

But perhaps the most essential, most revolutionary dimension of protest lives beyond mere method, beyond digital tools or autonomous spaces or even street performance. It may lie, finally, in protest as revelation: a moment of breaking free from outward-imposed limits entirely. It might come when we take our protest not as just opposition to Trump or any figure but as a conscious act to reinvigorate the human imagination itself, a leap into radical curiosity, experimentation, wonder—an artistic joy utterly beyond the grasp of governing words or systems.

This is precisely why we hesitate to offer instructions, neat formulas. The best protests resist instructions precisely because they remain acts not merely of resistance, but of visionary creation. A danger and a joy in equal measure. That is why those who rule fear it most: protest not merely upsetting the status quo, but doing something infinitely riskier—creating a world we do not yet know.

We must gather, then, and think together, yes—but not only to march or chant or wave signs (although we’ll still need those, at times, of course). We gather primarily to cultivate vision amid darkness, driven further into the realm of imagination because our circumstance demands it. Protest not just against, but toward. Humanity's oldest, bravest, most beautiful impulse: seeking new worlds when the old ones crumble.

• • •

A compelling historical example of unconventional and imaginative protest, illustrating how to elude established expectations of activism, is the Reclaim the Streets (RTS) movement in the United Kingdom. First emerging as an inventive resistance against road-building programs championed by Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal regime, RTS synthesized radical environmentalism with countercultural rave elements. A particularly striking episode occurred around Claremont Road, known as the "Festival of Resistance," which protesters occupied and transformed into a traffic-free space with barricades creatively designed from flower-filled car carcasses and massive scaffolding towers. These imaginative tactics proved not only costly to authorities—prompting one of the longest and most expensive evictions in British history—but also became emblematic of the movement’s ethos: repurposing public spaces into vibrant demonstrations of collective creativity and temporary autonomy. Following legislative assaults, such as the Criminal Justice Act of 1994, which specifically targeted subcultures and protest forms, RTS adapted by consciously shifting from reactive to proactive tactics, launching theatrical street parties that subverted British cultural traditions of public celebration. Their actions, which included sudden, spontaneous occupation of high streets for carnivalesque enjoyment, emphasized the ability of protest to restructure public perception of communal space, infuse dissidence with celebration, and manifest prefigurative politics aimed not merely at opposing but envisioning alternative social realities.