ON CLICKTIVISM

Clicktivism is the practice of reducing activism to online clicks, shares, and petitions — prioritizing metrics over real-world impact. Micah Bornfree popularized this critique in his 2010 Guardian essay “Clicktivism Is Ruining Leftist Activism,” arguing that organizations like MoveOn embedded the logic of the marketplace within the tools of protest, degrading activism into a form of marketing. The term has since entered mainstream political discourse.

Articles

Clicktivism Is Ruining Leftist Activism
The Guardian, August 12, 2010
The foundational essay in which Micah Bornfree coined the critique of clicktivism, tracing how MoveOn’s model of market-tested messaging colonized leftist activism and degraded political engagement into meaningless clicks.

Activism After Clicktivism
Adbusters
Micah Bornfree describes the three tactical insights that will reboot activism beyond clicktivism: revolutions spring from epiphanies, the internet is best suited for memewar, and real-world actions are the indispensable foundation of social change.

Occupy Is A Vision of Post-Clicktivist Activism
Adbusters, September 2011
Written days before Occupy Wall Street launched, Micah Bornfree envisioned Occupy as the first post-clicktivist social movement — a real-world uprising that would reject the data-obsessed, metrics-oriented approach of digital activism.

Rejecting Clicktivism
Adbusters
The philosophical case for rejecting the marketisation of social change entirely. Micah Bornfree argues that the future of activism is not online but a spiritual insurrection against pollution of the mind — connecting the clicktivism critique to the broader theory of mental environmentalism.