I find, in general that ‘protest’, while I would not recommend we abandon it entirely… too often serves as a distraction, or even a misdirection… that covertly replaces the intelligent, active establishment and maintenance of meaningful collectivity.

Protest will never succeed at this, and yet it presents as demanding what it fails to establish: relationships and mutual concerns that successfully invade and overcome the space where the lies, violations and counterfeits that presently hold power do not merely absorb protest, but utilize its energies to further their projects. The irony here is overwhelming, but obvious.

Protest is deceptive in this way; it appears to be activist, but is actually passivist. It’s not that it is entirely useless, but rather that it reinforces the scaffolding of power established and sustained by the absence of an actually humane relational context in which meaningful collective concern would render it an anachronism.