It used to appear affordable to counsel that the digital age would usher in a brand new period of social and political progress, and maybe even revolution.
Say one thing like that at the moment and also you’ll be laughed out of the room.
The idea that mass entry to info at our fingertips would democratize energy has collapsed beneath the burden of a much more dystopian actuality. Over a decade in the past, the crushing of the Arab Spring proved how the instruments of the digital age, from smartphones to social media, could possibly be weaponized towards the very folks many hoped they might uplift. As we speak, Israel’s means to livestream genocide for the world to see with out going through any critical repercussions is displaying us how straightforward it’s for us to be collectively lulled into complacency, deterred by disinformation, and neutralized by surveillance. A lot for “by no means once more.”
By revolution, I don’t imply navy coups, fleeting uprisings, or particular person coverage reforms. I’m speaking concerning the uncommon and seismic ruptures that see mass actions overturn and exchange current orders with enduring alternate options—from the storming of the Bastille to the lengthy battle towards French rule in Algeria.
For greater than a century, liberal, democratic societies have believed within the transformative, revolutionary guarantees of mass politics. We have now lengthy assumed that in moments of rupture—when the contradictions of capitalism inevitably push folks to the breaking level or when repressive regimes chunk off greater than they’ll chew—revolution of some type turns into doable. However at the moment, our capability to realize revolutionary change is quickly eroding, as hyper-individualism, elite-controlled media, and more and more refined repressive applied sciences and ways undermine our means to maintain organized, collective motion.
This isn’t to say that revolution is lifeless. Quite the opposite, we see revolutionary actions rising in all places—from rising opposition to Israel’s genocide, occupation, and apartheid to the ongoing uprising that simply overthrew Nepal’s authorities. The true query is whether or not these actions can translate their power into the sustained group, resilience, and energy required to overturn the established order—whether or not our conventional notions of revolution stay doable in a quickly altering world.
This isn’t a very new problem. Social actions have all the time needed to adapt to repressive threats and altering instances. However the challenges they have to overcome are extra formidable and entrenched than ever earlier than. And, given the dimensions of threats we face—from widening international inequality, to ever-more-devastating local weather emergencies, to unrelenting navy occupations and genocide—the duty of renewal is extra necessary, and pressing, than ever.
Fifteen or 20 years in the past, many believed the Web held the potential to rework humanity’s revolutionary capability. Hundreds of thousands throughout the globe have been having access to info lengthy stored out of attain—info that would gas the requisite political consciousness to think about different futures. And as social media grew to become woven into day by day life, it upended how mass politics might set up. It’s exhausting to think about uprisings from the Arab Spring or the protests to avoid wasting Istanbul’s Gezi Park unfolding as they did with out the catalytic energy of Twitter, Fb, and WhatsApp.
However whereas social media platforms and digital instruments supercharged our means to lift consciousness and enabled actions to blow up in a single day, they finally undermined our means to arrange successfully, have interaction in materials motion, and maintain transformative momentum.
None of this implies digital instruments can’t catalyze actual energy. In Nepal, Gen-Z organizers used sprawling Discord servers to coordinate mass protests that toppled the prime minister and his authorities in days. That digital instruments can permit these moments of rupture to spill out into the streets was by no means in query. However whether or not that fast mobilization consolidates into sturdy establishments continues to be doubtful. The take a look at isn’t virality; it’s whether or not actions can translate flash mobilization into the enduring infrastructure that survives the fleeting information cycles and repressive blowback, and whether or not the instruments of the digital age assist or hinder that course of.
What we see time and again is that know-how has enabled actions to scale up and leapfrog the vital steps of building organizational depth, figuring out management, and creating methods wanted to articulate motion calls for, deal with challenges from inside, and preserve extended political strain within the face of repression. Influenced by social media’s “recognition contest” dynamics and a common opposition to hierarchical management, many actions adopted horizontalist methods that prioritized inclusivity and peer-to-peer participation. Whereas this made them extra accessible and democratic, it usually got here on the expense of clear management or inner cohesion, leaving actions ill-equipped to reply collectively to threats or preserve momentum. This has repeatedly led to “tactical freeze”—when actions can’t agree upon a unified path ahead.
And relatively than its fostering long-term motion dedication and inspiring cultures of sacrifice, we’ve watched social media—which, regardless of its identify, guarantees affect not by collective motion however by particular person expression—incentivize fleeting shows of performative engagement: the viral submit, the trending hashtag, the aestheticized protest. What’s extra, the alienation that the digital age produces has left many individuals extra remoted from each other than ever. On this surroundings, the notion of “activism” has turn into much less about participating in mass disruptive battle and extra about private visibility. In its extra unscrupulous varieties, the strains between consciousness and motion, between solidarity and self-promotion, blur to the purpose of collapse.
If there’s one instance that encapsulates the dissonance between digital enthusiasm and real political consequence, it’s Kony 2012.
For just a few heady months in 2012, it appeared, a minimum of to naïve, indefatigable high-schoolers like myself on the time, that the world can be moved to collective motion due to a viral video calling for the arrest of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. The Kony 2012 campaign launched a easy, but tantalizing premise. If by elevating sufficient consciousness we might “Make Kony Well-known,” governments can be compelled to hunt him down.
Kony 2012 was a masterclass in branding. From the eye-catching posters to the bumping marketing campaign soundtrack, all of it was formulated to make folks really feel highly effective. And with the assistance of YouTube and Fb, the motion did make Kony well-known, virtually in a single day. However that’s nearly all of the marketing campaign really achieved. With no long-term technique or clear management construction, there was virtually nowhere for the motion, such because it was, to go, and it shortly disintegrated.
Kony 2012 was designed round a society composed of particular person actors, inherently pushed by self-interest, not one which inspired collective sacrifice for the better good. Due to the commodification of the marketing campaign itself, supporting the trigger—and combating for wider political change—grew to become synonymous with shopping for merch, sharing movies, and updating your Fb standing. In different phrases, Kony 2012 created a mass cadre of activists in identify solely.
Kony 2012 ought to have completely killed the concept “consciousness” is highly effective in and of itself. However we see its legacy in all places. In 2020, “Blackout Tuesday” noticed thousands and thousands submit black squares in solidarity with racial justice protests—a gesture that was visibly highly effective, however ended up reaching little greater than drowning out vital organizer communication. Equally, in 2024, the viral, AI-generated “All Eyes on Rafah” graphic dominated social media, however did nothing to cease Israel from leveling the town as a result of all folks dedicated themselves to was resharing a photograph.
What hyperlinks all of those failed actions isn’t just the position social media performed in encouraging the performative activism that drowned out actual organizing, however one thing far deeper: the isolating logic of capitalism—one which commodifies dissent and corrodes the circumstances needed for revolutionary politics.
Hyper-Individualism and the Dulling of Dissent
Along with distracting us from the strategic requirements of long-term organizing, the luxuries of the digital age have additionally performed a serious position in reshaping our very sense of self, fueling an epidemic of isolation that’s eroding our means to behave collectively.
Human progress has all the time trusted our means to construct communities and work towards shared targets. Solidarity, cooperation, and mutual duty make life value dwelling and assist us survive a harmful world. And with out them, we are able to by no means construct and maintain mass actions.
But at the moment, capitalism, by embedding competitors, consumption, privatized danger, and the primacy of the self into not solely our day by day life however our very psyches, has gnawed away at our collectivist instincts. Hyper-individualism now permeates all the things, from our politics and economics to our sense of identification. In some ways, it marks one among capitalism’s most profound triumphs: not simply in concentrating wealth or privatizing the general public sphere however in reshaping human nature itself, from collective to particular person. And it’s this atomization that social media each thrives on and perpetuates.
Recent studies present that Gen Z is the loneliest era on document, marked by declining civic engagement and rising nervousness and alienation. Solely about 34 percent of Americans assume they’ll reliably belief each other, whereas 16 p.c really feel strongly attached to their area people. In 2023, then–Surgeon Common Vivek Murthy even known as loneliness an “epidemic.”
Why does this matter? As a result of mass politics is constructed round exactly the instincts capitalism discourages. We’ve been skilled to see ourselves not as interdependent actors in a joint battle however as remoted rivals in a social market. Instead of collectivism, our new actuality presents the phantasm of safety by the pursuit of self-interest and consumption. And at the same time as we turn into extra conscious of the systemic contradictions and crises capitalism breeds, we’re more and more unable to conceptualize alternate options to our establishment. As Mark Fisher famously wrote, “It’s simpler to think about the tip of the world than the tip of capitalism.” It’s not simply that we worry shedding materials consolation; it’s that we’ve been conditioned to understand the prevailing order—as inevitable, even everlasting.
Individuals know issues aren’t proper. However with out an inspiring imaginative and prescient to cling on to, what would incentivize atomized people to behave and make inevitably painful sacrifices within the numbers wanted to confront the more and more repressive techniques aligned towards them?
From Manufacturing Consent to Elite-Guided Pacification
Simply as hyper-individualism has eroded our capability to assume and act collectively, the more and more elite-managed nature of our media, each social and conventional, has made it more durable to understand, not to mention problem, the constructions that oppress us.
Even earlier than the Web, management over info was more and more consolidating into the fingers of a narrowing elite. A couple of highly effective companies decided what a lot of the general public noticed, heard, and skim. Optimists as soon as believed that digital platforms would radically democratize entry to info and public discourse.
And for a time, it appeared like they did. Fb and Twitter enabled real-time info sharing and grassroots mobilization, amplifying uprisings from Tahrir Sq. to Gezi Park. However that window was temporary. Each governments and social media conglomerates have been fast to develop novel types of management—each overt and algorithmic—which have since come to outline the boundaries of the digital public sq..
Contemplate who governs our most-used platforms. Elon Musk owns X. Mark Zuckerberg controls Fb, Instagram, and Threads. Whereas these platforms serve very important public features, they’re neither democratic nor public. Actions that don’t have any alternative however to depend on them for visibility accomplish that on the mercy of two largely unaccountable and more and more reactionary billionaires.
Dystopian forecasts in widespread tradition have lengthy envisioned a way forward for complete, crushing censorship—societies dwelling in abject worry of an all-seeing Massive Brother, phrases and subjects deemed too taboo to the touch. However the actuality of mass censorship within the modern digital age appears very completely different. After all, “conventional” censorship persists. Professional-Palestinian content material, as an example, is routinely suppressed beneath the pretense of combating antisemitism; Meta has reportedly complied with 94 p.c of the Israeli authorities’s censorship requests. Within the days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, main officers and allied media figures pressed for punitive speech crackdowns and leaned on employers to fireplace staff who criticized or ridiculed Kirk, illustrating how successfully state energy and personal leverage can leverage social media to relax dissent.
However extra delicate—and arguably simpler—in reaching the broader goals of social management is the algorithmic gatekeeping, the infinite scroll of distraction that now defines the digital panorama.
As we speak, narrative management might be achieved by merely ushering customers away from the discomfort brought on by political consciousness and in direction of the solace of mesmerizing spectacle. Social media algorithms, designed to maximise engagement and revenue, ship movies of cats, dance tendencies, and way of life hacks floating to the highest, whereas exhausting information sinks into an abyss. This algorithmic pacification triggers what Zeynep Tufekci calls the eye financial system “entice,” the place actions are compelled to compete in a market of distraction, combating for slivers of consideration beneath guidelines they don’t management.
With the general public primed to keep away from discomfort and nuance outright, the pure end result is detachment. Israel’s info warfare technique in Gaza illustrates how these dynamics play out at scale.
Israel has lengthy understood that controlling Palestinian land and our bodies is just not sufficient; it should additionally management the narrative in an effort to maintain Western assist. However over current years, Israel’s PR efforts have come up brief, unable to elucidate away the nation’s limitless tide of atrocities. Whilst Israel continues to wield the blunt bludgeon of conventional censorship—from pressuring social media firms to erase pro-Palestinian content material to detaining and killing Palestinian dissidents and journalists—it has turn into more and more troublesome to disclaim the pictures of Palestinian youngsters mutilated by Israeli bombs and starved by Israeli blockade that make it by the algorithms. So Israel deploys a unique tactic: a cascade of lies and half-truths, the so-called “firehose of falsehood.”
When Israel bombs a hospital, all it has to do is insist that Hamas constructed a command middle beneath it. When Palestinians share footage of infants torn to shreds by Israeli bombs, we get unfounded claims that the infants aren’t really actual infants however dolls. It issues little that Israel hardly ever supplies independently verifiable proof to again its claims, or that upon additional investigation, the proof it does present is commonly totally fabricated. Each hospital bombed, each child massacred, each Palestinian phrase is shrouded in that artificially manufactured fog of battle. If folks might be satisfied that they merely don’t know sufficient about what’s taking place in Gaza, how can they be anticipated to intervene?
Relentless grassroots organizing and the undeniably grotesque photos of Israel’s atrocities have damaged by these filters to shift public opinion additional than many thought doable. However whereas hearts and minds are being gained, coverage stays inert. After all, entrenched political and monetary pursuits, mixed with the facility of the pro-Israel foyer, are the first obstacles to progress, however the motion has but to safe the vital mass of assist required to interrupt these strangleholds. This collective reticence is just not a failure of conviction, however the product of the identical forces that form our wider political paralysis: individualism, algorithmic distraction, and elite media management. Simply think about what might need been doable if the anti-genocide motion weren’t compelled to combat uphill towards these structural constraints.
And whereas many are taking motion to carry Israel accountable, many extra—the mainstream lots—proceed to avert their gaze. A recent study discovered that 53 p.c of Individuals now say Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. However what share of that majority is taking concrete steps to cease their tax {dollars} from funding it? If it isn’t outright apathy, it’s inertia, knowledgeable by a reluctance to make sacrifices, disinformation-induced paralysis, and worry of punishment—from employers, the state, and even one’s personal social circle. No matter it’s, it reveals us an anesthetized era—one that may livestream a genocide after which instantly swipe away the horrors. Now apply this equation extra broadly and also you’ll start to see the contours of a much wider phenomenon: mass incapacitation.
It’s not that folks don’t acknowledge that one thing is significantly damaged. However once you mix the results of manufactured ambiguity with the temptations of ignoring the horrors fully and as an alternative basking within the consolation of a lifetime of leisure and consumption, the result’s revolutionary paralysis. Gaza will be the most searing case, however the paradigm is just not distinctive.
Repressive Tech and Rising Energy Asymmetries
Even when actions do handle to outmaneuver these techniques and construct actual challenges to the established order, they’re then met with a closing line of protection: the more and more repressive applied sciences and ways of the state. It’s only getting simpler for authorities to crush us.
Whereas we have now grown extra fragmented, distracted, and strategically disoriented, governments and repressive regimes have solely grown extra built-in, coordinated, and technologically superior. The result’s a historic growth of the facility asymmetry between the lots and the forces they search to problem—one more and more enforced not simply by instruments of brute repression however with superior surveillance capabilities, spy ware, and transnational policing practices which have infiltrated the very digital platforms we as soon as hoped would function instruments for liberation.
Within the late 18th century, the English thinker Jeremy Bentham envisioned the “panopticon”—a jail designed so {that a} single watchman stationed in a central remark node might observe all inmates housed in a circle round him with out them understanding whether or not they have been really being watched. This state of fixed surveillance created an surroundings of perpetual uncertainty amongst inmates, making them really feel they needed to incessantly police their very own habits for worry that they have been being watched at any given second. The consequence was an outsourcing of order enforcement to the prisoners themselves.
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Almost two centuries later, in 1975, the French thinker Michel Foucault argued that the panopticon Bentham envisioned symbolizes the broader energy dynamics of recent society. Surveillance, Foucault maintained, allowed regimes of management to shift their consideration from participating in specific, usually bodily threats and coercion towards invisible and ubiquitous manipulation.
Our present actuality surpasses even Foucault’s most prescient warnings. Digital applied sciences—from CCTV networks and facial recognition to classy spy ware and algorithmic monitoring—have constructed a recent surveillance panopticon that not solely pushes us in direction of ever-more adherent norms of self-policing but in addition the capability of these in energy to subdue us.
The surveillance of activist areas has successfully moved from the streets to the feeds and chat rooms of social media platforms, giving authorities easy accessibility to trace motion organizers and decapitate actions by arrests and even assassinations. And spy ware know-how permits for intrusion that reaches far deeper than social media monitoring.
Maybe probably the most superior spy ware know-how accessible at the moment is Israel’s Pegasus. Developed by the NSO Group, Pegasus surreptitiously infects smartphones with out consumer interplay—granting full entry to messages, e-mails, photographs, location information—and might even remotely activate microphones and cameras. Pegasus was reportedly discovered on the telephones of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s associates, including his wife, previous to his brutal homicide in 2018. It was deployed in Mexico towards journalists, activists, and human rights defenders investigating state corruption and cartel violence. And it has repeatedly been found on gadgets belonging to Palestinian activists and NGO staff.
If all that wasn’t sufficient, the previous few years have seen a bonanza in AI-driven legislation enforcement entrepreneurship, fueled by partnerships between state authorities and personal firms like Palantir. Facial recognition and biometric monitoring have reworked bodily public areas into zones of state remark. In Hong Kong, the use of facial recognition technology throughout protests has enabled mass arrests, making a chilling impact that sapped power from the streets and compelled organizers underground. In the USA, facial recognition is being utilized by each police and private groups to establish and arrest activists who protest towards Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which, mixed with efforts to criminalize assist for Palestinian rights and criticism of Israel, is deterring folks from getting concerned in protest exercise in anyway. These technological developments don’t simply crush resistance—they basically reshape the terrain on which actions are conceived.
Traditionally, when authorities shut areas for peaceable resistance, actions shift alongside the repertoire of competition from petitions and protests to armed battle. However the identical structure that strangles potential for peaceable meeting additionally constricts each the clandestine and direct avenues by which resistance actions can confront the state. The anticolonial struggles that proceed to encourage resistance actions of at the moment, starting from the Algerian Conflict of Independence to the profitable defeat of the USA in Vietnam, trusted guerrilla ways—the power to cover, disperse, and wage asymmetrical warfare towards occupying forces. However at the moment’s navy know-how, marked by drones able to precision strikes from stand-off vary, AI-assisted focusing on, autonomous weapons techniques, and extra has dramatically decreased the house for conventional guerrilla warfare. The final word result’s that the price of armed resistance, whether or not it’s one among many ways in a wider motion or the dominant strategy, turns into insurmountable, thus additional decreasing the supply of viable avenues to contest oppressive forces.
The deepening energy asymmetries we at the moment face should be acknowledged and appreciated by these searching for to construct resistance actions at the moment. The place at one level, many years in the past, resistance fighters might rely on participating in sustained guerrilla warfare and widespread mobilization aimed toward progressively eroding the need of extra highly effective colonial or state forces, that paradigm has modified, maybe irrevocably. Every repressive technological development deepens and entrenches these current energy asymmetries. The failure to acknowledge this new and consistently shifting menace surroundings solely continues to consequence within the devastation of resistance actions at the moment.
What Now?—Salvaging a Future for Revolution
Recognizing the dimensions of the threats arrayed towards us and our capability to withstand is just not a name for resignation, however relatively a plea to rethink our methods and ways within the face of a altering panorama. As a result of if we’re to reclaim the potential for revolution, we should first perceive the world that has been so meticulously constructed to preclude it.
“There will likely be instances when the battle appears inconceivable. I do know this already. Alone, uncertain, dwarfed by the dimensions of the enemy.…
“Do not forget that the frontier of the Riot is in all places. And even the smallest act of riot pushes our strains ahead. After which keep in mind this: the Imperial want for management is so determined as a result of it’s so unnatural. Tyranny requires fixed effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the masks of worry.
“Do not forget that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance could have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority after which there will likely be one too many. One single factor will break the siege.
“Keep in mind this: Attempt.”
These phrases weren’t uttered by any actual revolutionary or resistance fighter. They have been written by Karik Nemik, a fictional character in Disney’s Andor, a Star Wars spin-off that follows the story of how thief turned insurgent spy Cassian Andor turns into radicalized towards the Galactic Empire and joins the Insurgent Alliance. As such, Nemik’s manifesto is a company product designed primarily to entertain and delivered by way of Disney, one of many largest leisure monopolies on the planet. It’s, in different phrases, yet one more instance of the way in which revolutionary beliefs have been aestheticized, repackaged, and commodified by these they’re meant to problem.
However to its credit score, Andor provided a strong meditation on the false promise of neutrality within the face of oppression—the futility of attempting to maintain your head down and dwell a standard life beneath navy occupation. The collection even communicated the inevitability of resistance and the readability with which it may well erupt, usually spontaneously. And no matter their company origin, Nemik’s phrases may nonetheless handle to ship shivers down your backbone. As a result of not solely do they echo what numerous real-world revolutionaries have fought and died for—they diagnose the pivotal crossroads we’re confronted with at the moment.
The reality is, we do discover ourselves at a second by which “the battle appears inconceivable,” dwarfed by the dimensions of oppressive techniques we discover ourselves up towards, from vulture capitalism to the ever-tightening grip of Israeli occupation and all the things in between. But, as Nemik writes, “the Imperial want for management is so determined as a result of it’s so unnatural.” Due to that, resistance has all the time been each inevitable and reliably unpredictable. We have now by no means been good at predicting the purpose of no return, or what it’ll appear to be when it lastly boils over. As historical past teaches us, revolutionary moments of rupture have a behavior of bursting onto the scene unexpectedly. However at the moment these moments are being born into a brand new world and it looks like all the things we’re doing merely isn’t working.
If revolution is to outlive, whether it is to imply something in any respect, we can’t merely replicate the previous. The revolutions of the long run gained’t look precisely like Algeria in 1962 or South Africa in 1994. And we want to verify they don’t appear to be the failed mass actions of the previous 20 years both. As a result of our oppressors have tailored. The place we might as soon as deliberate in non-public whispers, they now break into our telephones and computer systems and skim our messages; when just a few rusty carbines might as soon as take out closely armed troopers in a well-planned ambush, they now function unmanned drones from the security of their bases, killing resistance from above.
However greater than that, our oppressors have managed to reshape us into atomized creatures averse to collective motion, pushed primarily by particular person self-interest, and conditioned to worry loss greater than we want liberation. They’ve infiltrated not solely our gadgets, however our very sense of creativeness, changing our capability to ascertain emancipation with algorithms of distraction and conflating collective battle with performative posturing.
Students and organizers at the moment are already exploring alternate options, emphasizing hybrid online-offline organizing to foster stronger native solidarity networks designed to face up to surveillance and fragmentation. Activists more and more stress the worth of “prefigurative politics,” constructing tangible different establishments that exhibit prospects past the established order. There’s additionally rising acknowledgment that absolutely horizontal constructions can stymie efficient decision-making, resulting in advocacy for clear management constructions. In the meantime, digital literacy and security training is turning into as foundational to activist coaching as conventional organizing strategies. Transnational solidarity networks, as exemplified by international actions like BDS, illustrate how coordinated international activism can problem repression and amplify effectiveness.
However the second we’ve discovered ourselves in is one among disaster, and it calls for much more than tactical creativity. There will likely be no strolling again the trimmings of the digital age—the great or the dangerous. However our outlooks, our imaginations, our capability to conceive different futures, will all the time be reclaimable. The true genius of recent energy is just not merely its mastery of brute power however its success in deputizing us as self-enforcers of the established order—in convincing us that there isn’t any different. That is what should first be contested and shattered. It doesn’t imply ready round for the celebrities to align within the excellent second. As Nemik mentioned: “Attempt.” Attempt, as a result of apathy will destroy us earlier than our oppressors do.
And whereas these revolutionary moments of rupture will all the time seem spontaneously, they don’t come out of nowhere. Though they might really feel like tidal waves once they strike, they emerge from numerous, cumulative currents. And in that accumulating tide, even the smallest acts of dissent, resistance, and organizing can shift the window of what can understand to be doable.
Right here, we as soon as once more return to Gaza—will or not it’s a laboratory of our future or a line within the sand? As a result of what Israel and its Western benefactors are doing in what, to many, could look like an inconsequential, faraway strip of barren land is much more than a genocide. As Tahseen Elayyan told New York journal just lately, “The peoples of the world have to know that the difficulty at the moment is just not solely concerning the rights of the Palestinians. They should know that the Palestinians are defending human values and attempting to free the world.”
Gaza has turn into a portal connecting the previous, current, and way forward for humanity, the place all of the modes of latest energy and management are converging in a single grotesque experiment to see what might be gotten away with. It’s each a laboratory for the AI-fueled weapons of the long run and an incubator for the algorithmic hypnosis and data warfare campaigns which are conditioning us to simply accept and internalize such hideous acts because the erasure of a complete folks as the brand new regular. In the event that they get away with numbing us to genocide in Gaza for good, then they’ll have efficiently laid to relaxation the promise of “by no means once more” and perfected a blueprint for crushing resistance wherever it arises.
The reality is, moments of rupture aren’t predestined, and oppressive techniques aren’t inherently unsustainable. In actual fact, they’ve withstood their inner contradictions longer than many anticipated by each coercion and power. And at the moment, elite-managed digital algorithms, hyper-individualism, and superior repressive know-how make them extra sturdy than ever earlier than. The way forward for revolution hinges on whether or not we are able to redefine it for this terrain and collectively confront the sacrifices it’ll inevitably entail.
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