Don’t Confuse Marching with Action

Old rituals aren’t strategy. FAST, CLEAN, and CHEAP is.

Don’t Confuse Marching with Action
Old rituals aren’t enough. FAST, CLEAN, CHEAP—and COGENT—wins.

There’s a creeping staleness in the circles of people who still give a shit.

You feel it in the rhythms of protest culture: choreographed chants, wheatpaste posters quoting Angela Davis, performative urgency that rarely sharpens into strategy. We’re trapped in the semiotics of radical heritage. Marches, sit-ins, raised fists, murals, hashtags—the iconography of resistance has hardened into a cargo cult. Symbols mistaken for action.

The problem? That’s old technology.

The forces of cynicism—state actors, billionaires, techno-feudalists, far-right media machines—aren’t just powerful; they’re adaptive. They’ve got capital, psy-ops PhDs, aesthetic fluency, and armies of well-paid thinkers propping up zombie ideologies. These are the legal scholars drafting voter suppression laws, the lobbyists embedding deregulation into policy, the pundits spinning narratives that keep us living like animals. They’re creative in a slithery, nihilistic way, hijacking language, mood, meme cycles, and tragedy. They flood a zone before it knows it’s a zone.

And us? Too often, we’re out here with a march. A drum circle. A Canva infographic styled like a ‘90s zine.

Let’s be clear: marches and mass action still have teeth. The 2025 No Kings protests showed how street presence, amplified by digital campaigns, can force institutional reckonings. Collective action builds solidarity, channels rage, and signals defiance. But their original power wasn’t in the form—it was in the surprise. The novelty. Marches worked when power didn’t see them coming. They were emergent, disruptive, not ritualized.

We’ve forgotten that. We confuse repetition with momentum.

Worse, we’re neglecting the boring, essential slog of thinking and persuading. Zombie ideologies—those tired dogmas of individualism, deregulation, or supremacy—thrive because well-funded thinkers churn out cogent-sounding defenses: legal briefs, op-eds, think tank reports. These aren’t just noise; they’re policy frameworks designed to entrench power. To beat them, we need counter-policies that are sharp, persuasive, and accessible enough to change minds that aren’t yet closed.

It’s time to upgrade our tactics and our thinking. One principle should guide us: FAST, CLEAN, CHEAP, and COGENT.

This is how we outmaneuver the resource-rich. How we embarrass the lumbering, overfunded center. How we dismantle zombie ideologies with better ideas and better moves.

Look at Ukraine’s drone warfare: cheap, off-the-shelf tech turned into precise weapons that gut billion-dollar Russian assets. That’s FAST, CLEAN, and CHEAP. Strategy disguised as mischief. It works. Or consider the 2017 Women’s March organizers, who paired street protests with a clear policy platform—reproductive rights, equal pay, anti-violence measures—that swayed moderate voters and shaped midterms. That’s COGENT.

We’re seeing glimmers in activism. Online creators are doing sharp rhetorical work—a viral TikTok dismantling a senator’s talking points in 30 seconds or an X post flipping a corporate narrative with one brutal meme cuts deeper than a thousand white papers. But cleverness alone isn’t enough. We need policies to back it up—ideas that can be explained to a skeptical uncle at a barbecue, a union rep on a picket line, or a councilmember in a hearing.

It’s time to outweird the cynics and outthink them.

We need to stop cosplaying the ‘60s and build the tools of what’s next. This doesn’t mean ditching public action—it means reimagining it. Stop being predictable. Stop being legible. Surprise is the currency. Weirdness is the weapon. But cogent counter-policies are the foundation. The goal is to get under their skin while winning over the persuadable.

Imagine:

• Protest as alternate reality game (ARG): In 2011, Occupy Wall Street’s Adbusters campaign used cryptic imagery and decentralized calls to spark a global movement. It was chaotic, unscripted, and paired with demands for financial reform that resonated with moderates.

• Collective action as meme swarm: In 2023, Trans Rights activists on X flooded hashtags with absurd, joyful content to drown out transphobic narratives, while pushing for state-level protections like gender-affirming care bans reversals.

• Disruption as performance: In 2019, Hong Kong protesters used laser pointers to disrupt surveillance cameras, alongside clear demands for democratic reforms that swayed international opinion.

• Satire that reroutes attention: The Yes Men’s fake corporate stunts—like impersonating Dow Chemical to announce Bhopal reparations—forced media to cover ignored issues, backed by calls for corporate accountability laws.

That’s the terrain now.

But let’s not kid ourselves: memes and stunts don’t dismantle systems alone. Systemic change demands the slog—drafting policies, organizing coalitions, persuading skeptics. It’s tedious. It’s unglamorous. It’s sitting through city council meetings to push rent control, or crafting legal arguments to block voter ID laws. It’s explaining Universal Basic Income to a small-town voter who thinks it’s socialism but worries about their kid’s job prospects. This work isn’t sexy, but it’s where zombie ideologies are killed.

The old rituals aren’t sacred, but they’re not trash. Use them when they work—marches disrupt when they target choke points; chants bind us when they carry shared purpose. But don’t rely on them because they’re familiar. Strategy is sacred. Strategy means inventing what power can’t predict and articulating ideas that stick.

This isn’t just for digital wizards or policy wonks. It’s for anyone who gives a shit. You don’t need a law degree to testify at a hearing or a design app to make a meme that stings. Start where you are: a spray-painted bedsheet, a group chat plan, a policy brief scribbled on a napkin. Small moves ripple. Clear ideas that persuade—a neighbor, a coworker, a councilmember—scale.

Don’t march because your predecessors did. March because you’ve found a new way to make power flinch.
Don’t chant. Sing something they don’t know the tune to.
Don’t just disrupt. Outthink the bastards with policies they can’t dismiss.
FAST. CLEAN. CHEAP. COGENT.
And for god’s sake—stop being polite.