One of the hardest things to hold in activism is that people are not fixed. Scratch a fluffy person enough and they go spiky. Bring a spiky person into real trust and shared purpose and they can soften. Repression, fear, insecurity, ego, trauma – these are universal. The point isn’t pretending the tensions don’t exist. The point is mediating them socially before they become destructive.
Without that mediation, movements collapse. Not because people are bad, but because unmediated conflict always drifts the same way – fluffy becomes avoidance, passive aggression and endless process; spiky becomes domination, ego battles and fragmentation. Both become dysfunctional when they lose connection to trust and collective accountability. We need to consciously compost this mess rather than just cycling through it.
On the practical side – I still think the “use and abuse the platforms” approach is right. Walking away from mainstream spaces entirely just means retreating into circles where nobody outside the already-convinced ever hears you. Caves are romantic but they’re not effective. The goal is using the existing platforms to seed alternatives and push counter-narratives, not surrendering to their logic, but not pretending we can ignore them either. Strategic infiltration while building something better underneath.
The bigger picture matters here too. A lot of political thinking still assumes liberal democratic stability will just continue. That assumption is increasingly detached from reality. The paths ahead are likely to diverge sharply – authoritarian nationalism, corporate techno-feudalism, fragmented collapse, or something genuinely commons-based and cooperative. The liberal centre doesn’t have the tools to respond meaningfully because it’s still inside the same logic that created the crisis.
So simply defending the status quo isn’t enough. We need alternative social infrastructure, built now, before things get harder.
And the biggest trap – reactive politics. When the mainstream agenda sets the emotional weather and we just respond to outrage cycles, media narratives and algorithmic churn, we end up trapped inside the logic of the system we’re opposing. Reaction reproduces the problem. The alternative is slower but stronger – building our own paths, trust networks, media, relationships, culture. Not isolation. Strategic autonomy.
The commons path is worth saying plainly too. The “tragedy of the commons” framing is ideologically loaded and largely wrong — humans have managed commons well throughout history. But inside the social conditions neoliberalism creates, the tragedy often does happen, because the trust, relationships and shared accountability needed to sustain commons get systematically destroyed. The answer isn’t abandoning commons thinking. It’s rebuilding the social fabric capable of holding it.
Being the change isn’t individual morality. It’s collective transformation. Learning to cooperate, share power, mediate conflict, build trust. Almost everything in current society trains the opposite habits. So yes, people become difficult under pressure – that’s human. The question is whether we build processes capable of working with that reality rather than being destroyed by it.
I think we can. But it takes the work.
