Click the button above to make a donation

Couldn't find what you were looking for? Please contact us so we can fix the problem. Thanks!

Click here to find your copy of THE END OF PROTEST worldwide 

Chuck Mertz: In the weeks before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, millions of people around the world took to the streets to protest the pending war. At the time, antiwar groups said it was the biggest mass protest in history. Millions more signed online petitions to declare their opposition to the war, and with all that force and energy of activists, we actually stopped the war in Iraq.

Wait, what? We didn’t? The war went forward despite millions of people marching against it? Despite all those online petitions they signed?

Here to tell us what’s wrong with protest and how we can make it right, award-winning activist Micah White is the author of the new book The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution. Welcome back to This is Hell!, Micah.

Micah White: Thank you, Chuck.

CM: You write about the success Occupy enjoyed: “For a few magical weeks in 2011, peoples’ encampments sprung up in 951 cities across 82 countries.” Being that there are only 196 nations in the world today, that means nearly half of them had an Occupy. What did those nations have in common? What experience do you think those people in 82 nations, in 951 cities, shared that created fertile ground in each place for an Occupy encampment?

MW: At one level it’s a signature of the fact that we live in a world where no matter where you live you’re basically oppressed by the same enemy, which is the power of money over democracy. As the recent Panama Papers leak revealed, it doesn’t matter if you’re living in Pakistan, the UK, the US, or Russia. You’re facing the same enemy, which is the hyper-rich who use their money to control governments while at the same time hiding their money from the taxman.

That is the political analysis. But the deeper issue here is that humanity has been trying to rise up for thousands of years. We have records, going back to ancient Egypt, of people overthrowing kings. When a new kind of social movement arises, people actually believe it’s going to win. That’s the important thing: that for a brief moment, people actually believed Occupy was going to fundamentally change the world. So we saw everyone rush to join it. Occupying became the way that we protested.

That’s basically what happened. If we are able to create something that people truly believe is going to win, then people everywhere will run to it and use it as a way to express their own local discontents.

CM: You write that Occupy Wall Street was a “political miracle.” How so? And can something be a miracle and not be a success? There are many who say Occupy “failed.” Is the mere fact that it occurred make it a success unto itself?

MW: There are two really important parts to that question; one gets at what the nature is of these political miracles, these rupture moments that seem to come out of nowhere, and the second is whether Occupy was a failure or a success.

Starting with the second question: a lot of people like to say that Occupy Wall Street was a success. There is a common narrative within activism that Occupy didn’t fail, it merely splintered into a thousand shards of light. And it changed the discourse! Look at Bernie Sanders! Now everybody knows about the 99%!

But I call Occupy Wall Street a constructive failure. I think Occupy Wall Street failed to achieve its revolutionary agenda. It didn’t get more political power for the 99%; it didn’t jail the bankers or get money out of politics. It’s a constructive failure that revealed the limitations of our contemporary notions of activism and our contemporary theories of social change.

I think it’s good and productive to think of Occupy Wall Street as a constructive failure. I think that revolutionaries in the past would look at the Paris Commune or the uprisings of 1848 or the failed revolution of 1905 in Russia, and they would see those as constructive failures that they learned from in order to get towards their successes. If we’re unwilling to do that, then we don’t reach towards our success.

Then there’s the first question, though, about the political miracle: I think it gets at the heart of why Occupy Wall Street grew so big. Think back to 2011; were you to ask the average American—at Adbusters we asked David Graeber whether or not a revolution is possible in America. And he said no, it’s not possible. This was just a couple months before Occupy Wall Street. And that was the feeling on the street from a lot of activists. They thought the revolution can’t come to America, it’s not possible. Kind of like how we feel today, in fact. But then it did happen.

I call it a political miracle because it gets at the heart of what truly revolutionary moments are. They are always surprising, they always “come out of nowhere,” they always seem to do the impossible. That was amazing about Occupy.

CM: So you recognize the constructive failures of Occupy. You’ve thought about it, you’ve analyzed it; you’re one of the co-creators of Occupy Wall Street, and you realize the constructive failures. What explains why it has taken so long, and a lot of people still haven’t learned the lesson of the constructive failures of marches and parades and online petitions?

MW: On the one hand, activists themselves are actually afraid of revolution. A lot of activists have started to believe that revolution isn’t possible—and that it’s not even desirable, quite frankly, and they don’t actually want to succeed with the actions that they’re doing. This is one of the key things. A lot of people protest, but they don’t actually want to become the government, or topple the government and then replace the government with themselves, because that’s terrifying for them. But that’s what a real revolution would be. There is, within the activist culture, a propagation of behaviors that people in their hearts know will not result in a revolution, because they’re actually afraid of revolution.

That’s one reason. Another part of it is that it’s very hard to get any detachment, because there’s actually an industry (I call it the protest industry) that propagates ineffective protest in America and in other countries. To say it quite plainly: we saw that quite recently with Democracy Spring, which was another scripted protest where people did synchronized arrests, where they worked with the police department beforehand, all that kind of stuff. I think these events are being created to prevent other revolutionary uprisings from happening.

CM: Petitions and marches make us feel like we’re doing something rather than nothing; while we might not have time to participate in an encampment like Occupy, we can fit a petition-signing into our busy day or we can participate in a march for an hour or two on the weekend and then go home, and go back to work the next day.

But in a sense, is doing nothing better than enabling this kind of failed protest strategy?

MW: The dominant theory of social change basically says that human action creates change, so if we want to change the world we need to get into the streets, we have to do direct actions, we need to do things—this kind of activism would reject the idea that doing nothing could somehow actually change the world.

If you think about it from an activist’s perspective, a lot of us have been activists long enough that we realize we can only really have one big activist event per year. This is a strange thing I’ve noticed. We can have the People’s Climate March, and that’s it. Or we can have Occupy Wall Street, and that’s it. Or we can have the antiwar march in 2003, and that’s it. We can basically have one big thing, and then that’s where all the activists pour their energy, and if it works, great, and if it doesn’t, then you’re bust. We have to stop wasting our time around these kinds of events that are ineffective, because we only have one shot at it. That’s the problem here.

CM: You quote Edward Snowden commenting on the limits of the conception of protest at Occupy, saying, “Occupy Wall Street had limits because the local authorities were able to enforce, in our imaginations, an image of what proper civil disobedience is: one that is simply ineffective.”

To what degree are effective acts of civil disobedience criminalized? And are all legal protests ineffective ones?

MW: This is something that it’s hard to talk about, but the fact of the matter is that revolution is always illegal. The definition that I like to use for revolution is that it’s a change in legal regime. It’s switching who has the sovereignty to make laws. That change in legal regime is always illegal, by definition. In the same sense, protest that tries to get a change in legal regime—whether it’s in Egypt or the United States of America or Pakistan or the UK or Russia—if it’s trying to get a regime change, it’s an illegal behavior.

This is fundamental. All effective forms of protest are illegal until they succeed. All revolutions are illegal until they succeed, and then they become the government and all of the sudden these people are celebrated as heroes and all that kind of stuff. What we’re talking about is very real. This is what distinguishes fake protest from real protest. Fake protest is underpinned by the idea that our actions don’t need to be illegal, that we can get permits from the government, that we can have “free speech zones” or we can do scripted arrests; it doesn’t need to be illegal or dangerous or disobedient. I think that’s completely misguided. We didn’t get a permit for Occupy Wall Street. We asked people to bring tents knowing that it was illegal for people to set up tents. We did these behaviors because the legal regime doesn’t matter when you create a protest. You operate outside of the law.

It doesn’t mean they have to be violent. There are lots of different ways to be illegal. But it does mean that you have to say, “I’m trying to change a situation that is so important that I will disobey the law. My protest stands above the law.” And you also have to accept the consequences of that. For Occupy Wall Street seven thousand people were arrested. That’s an astounding number. People had their bones broken. People lost their jobs.

Absolutely. Real protest is always illegal. For sure.

CM: In 2000, when the Bush-Gore debate was going on over who had won the election, I remember seeing Tom Brokaw on TV saying “we’re so lucky to be in a country where we allow these kinds of protests,” while at the same time not pointing out that many of the protesters were hand-picked Republicans who had been sent down there to close down voting facilities.

Do we have the right and freedom to assemble, speak our minds, and protest in the United States, but we do not have the right to hold protests that could actually cause real social change?

MW: This is the crux of the issue. I called my book End of Protest. But the end of protest doesn’t mean the absence of protest. On the contrary, the end of protest means the proliferation of ineffective protest. We live in the time of the largest and most frequent protests in human history, so I’m not saying that there aren’t protests happening. What I’m saying is that what we call protests aren’t actually protests. They are some other sort of behavior.

In America we can create any sort of mass spectacle: you can bang on pots in the street, you can make noise, you can do anything you want as long as it doesn’t actually register as a threat to the US government or to thestatus quo. Once it becomes a threat, then you are shut down mercilessly, and immediately. This is what we saw at Occupy Wall Street. They shut that thing down. People remember that. They brought in the riot cops; they brought in the sound cannon; they shut it down.

We have to figure out how to create new and effective forms of protest that aren’t just performance pieces, which is what a lot of activism has become.

CM: You write that the “first step toward creating positive social change is to take responsibility for the failure of the protest-protest-protest paradigm. This process begins from the acknowledgment that contemporary protest is broken, and the willingness to fix it.”

Is protest-protest-protest “too big to fail” for establishment activist organizations? I’m trying to figure out if we need to quit individually participating in this broken paradigm or if the problem is the bigger activist organizations themselves and their insistence on continuing the broken paradigm.

MW: I think it’s both of those things. There is, as you’re saying, this activist establishment, this protest industry, these large “activist” organizations that rely on broken forms of protest in order to gain publicity for themselves, in order to build their email lists, in order to get donations. They have to do these kinds of behaviors, otherwise they would wither and die.

That’s why Occupy Wall Street, quite frankly, did not emerge from any of the established activist groups in America. That’s something people should really think about. Earlier in 2011 there were protests on Wall Street. Someone did a march on Wall Street just a couple months before Occupy Wall Street broke out. It was a complete failure, because it was a march. But still, an activist group in America did call for one. There were a couple dozen people; I don’t know who showed up, I’m just saying.

So on the one hand we do have these large activist NGOs whose very livelihood depends on propagating these broken behaviors, behaviors that they know won’t threaten the government, and my dark perspective is that some people in these large NGOs might even be working for the government, for all we know. That has happened in the past.

What is an individual activist supposed to do in this situation? We tend to think that we need to join large coalitions in order to have success; this is a common paradigm within social activism. We need to get the biggest possible coalition and work together to create the biggest possible march. But there was a study done in the 1970s that found that social activists who don’t coalition have just as much success as social activists who do. What I take this to mean is that as an individual activist or as small groups of activists, we can just let the fake activist NGOs do their thing, do their fake protests. Let’s just ignore them. Let’s suck away their members, let’s keep chipping away at them, let’s keep telling people that they’re doing ineffective and broken forms of protest. Let’s let them do their thing—just don’t coalition with them. Don’t sign on to their things. And build your own stuff on the side. Experiment. Do new forms of protest. Import new forms of protest from abroad. Do experimental stuff in your city, and try to get something that sparks.

We’re never going to be able to stop groups like Democracy Spring and Greenpeace and Avaaz from doing their fake protests. But what we can do is start to chip away at their following. We can help other activists realize that these groups are not helping, and are in fact quite dangerous.

CM: You write how you and Kalle Lasn “assumed that the United States would be unable to use force against nonviolent democracy protesters without eventually capitulating to our demands, because the eyes of the international community would be on our political performance. But the faith that brutal repression of dignified Occupiers would backfire against the United States proved to be wrong.”

Were you surprised that there wasn’t much uproar over the police crackdown, over the violence against Occupy? And in your opinion, why wasn’t there much of an uproar? What does that say about the US?

MW: I think the useful thing about Occupy Wall Street is it tested a whole series of hypotheses that have been dominant among social activists—that I believed, that Kalle believed, that a lot of people believed. One of those theories was that if you do an event where the protesters are so dedicated that they withstand police repression, then the government will have to listen to them. They will realize this is an authentic spirit among the people. That turned out to be not true.

I was very surprised. It was brutal. Someone did a Freedom of Information Act request on complaints made against the city of Oakland police department around Occupy Oakland. People had their knees broken, got stomped on their backs; police would find them in alleyways and beat them up. Extreme stuff, backed by evidence. And it was widespread. There was an article with people talking openly, saying, “They were breaking our bones in order to stop our movement.”

It was very surprising—and at the same time Obama never publicly mentioned the movement until it was evicted from Zucotti. So what’s going on here is there is a double standard. Western governments will use the presence of protest abroad in order to justify their preexisting political agenda. If they see large numbers of protesters in Egypt, they’ll say, “Hey, Mubarak, you’d better step down; look, your people are rising up.” But if the exact same protest behaviors are being done in their country, in America for example, there’s no force that says, “Hey, Obama, you need to listen to your protesters.” The UN won’t say that; there’s no greater political authority that says you need to listen.

But I think it’s good that it shattered that myth. We don’t have to keep repeating these same behaviors, then.

CM: In January we spoke with Jodi Dean, author of Crowds and Party, about how we move from an inert mass to organized activists. Jodi quotes a speaker at Occupy Wall Street, on 15 October 2011, saying “We can take this park. We can take this park tonight. We can also take this park another night. Not everyone may be ready tonight. Each person has to make their own autonomous decision. No one can decide for you. You have to decide for yourself. Everyone is an autonomous individual.”

Jodi then adds in her book, “The mood was broken. The next few speakers also affirmed their individuality. We were no longer a we, a collective asserting ourselves as individuals. We became individuated, concerned first with our own particular preoccupations. Collective strength devolved into the problem of individuals aggregating by choices or interests that may or may not converge. Reducing autonomy to individual decision, we destroyed the freedom of action we had as a crowd. Occupy Wall Street foundered against a contradiction at its core. The individualism of its democratic anarchistic horizontalist ideological currents undermined the collective power the movement was building.”

In your opinion, how much of a role did individualism play in any failure that Occupy may have experienced? Because individualism is definitely something that we really embrace here in the United States.

MW: The way I would look at it is from the angle of horizontalism. Again, in every protest, in every social movement, we’re testing a hypothesis about social change. We were testing hypotheses at Occupy Wall Street; one of the hypotheses we were testing was leaderlessness, horizontalism. The way I parse out the problem of individualism versus collectivism is to say we were practicing horizontalism incorrectly.

One of the negative things that happened was we started to believe that if this is a horizontal movement and everyone is equal, then no one is better than me, no one has any more knowledge than me, no one has any better strategy than me. You get to this position where the whole group gets pulled down to the lowest common denominator: some guy who’s never protested before in his life, perhaps is working for the police, or maybe he’s on drugs—we don’t know. Who is this guy? He shows up and has just as much say as someone who’s been studying revolutionary history for twenty years and has been waiting for this moment. That gets at what Jodi’s talking about, which is that we fractured ourselves into these isolated individuals rather than seeing ourselves as a collective social movement.

Rather than pulling ourselves down, it’s a question of seeing how we can pull ourselves up. Instead of saying “there’s no one above me,” we need to say, “there’s no one below me.” So we talk as equals, but at the same time we recognize that some people have gotten to higher levels of understanding about economic matters (for example), and we should listen to them or at least heed their advice.

Social movements work when they give us that collective experience, like we’re part of something that is going to win. The mood of it makes us lose our fear. When we pull down into our own individual concerns we start to get afraid again, we start to get egotistical again. These things are the death of the movement.

CM: You told the interviewer on the CBC show The National that Black Lives Matter learned the wrong lesson from the failure of Occupy Wall Street. What was the wrong lesson that Black Lives Matter learned from the failure of Occupy Wall Street?

MW: This is one of those touchy areas. It’s very difficult. I’m black, so obviously I support Black Lives Matter. But the key thing, it seems to me, that Black Lives Matter learned was that Occupy wasn’t disruptive enough. “We need to be more disruptive. If we want to stop things, we need to block traffic. We need to disrupt things.”

We’re seeing this ideology of disruption with Trump: “If we want to stop Trump, we need to disrupt his rallies all the time.” But at the end of the day, Occupy Wall Street was plenty disruptive. We blocked a lot of traffic. We blocked lots of things. We mic checked lots of politicians. We used the idea of disruption very effectively in our movement.

The real lesson of Occupy Wall Street is that activism needs to be oriented around the very specific goal of gaining sovereignty, which frankly means if the people want something, they get it because they are the sovereign power. They’re not asking someone else to do something. So in Black Lives Matter we’ve gotten ourselves into a situation where we’re asking for the police killings to stop; we’re asking for these police to be punished. Well, we’ve seen it: none of the police have been punished. The police killings have not stopped. In fact, they just shot and wounded another person on the anniversary of the Freddie Gray killing in Baltimore. We know that these things are still happening.

So how does Black Lives Matter get to the position where it ends police killing? The only way to do that is to become the force that controls the police, the force that is the police. That’s a whole different challenge. That’s a whole different thing. That’s a scary thing. What would a police force that’s controlled by a social movement look like? What would a police force that’s controlled by Black Lives Matter look like? It gets back to this question of whether we’re willing to become the ones in power. Or are we content just to complain about the situation?

We need to stop complaining, and start to become the ones in power, even to the degree of going into dangerous territory, which is: how many Black Lives Matter activists are actually willing to become the police commissioner, or willing to become the police in their communities? That’s a scary thought. But that’s where we need to go.

Social movements need to own our cities. We need to own our police. We need to own our legislature. We need to own all the structures of sovereignty.

CM: Alex Cockburn used to tell me this all the time: we need to have the worst people in office. Vote for the worst possible people, because then we’re going to have a revolution. Do we need to boycott an election? Maybe have a Donald Trump as president—is that what we need in order to light new change?

MW: Back in 2011, the 15 May movement was in the streets in Spain; they had encampments everywhere, hundreds of thousands of people in the streets doing their general assemblies. And they did say, “You don’t represent us! We’re not going to vote! We don’t believe in the electoral system!” Then of course the right wing got into power. And I do think that was a major impetus now for Podemos to rise up, and now that they are engaged with the political process, they are winning.

But it’s defeatist logic that says first we need to lose and then we’re going to win. That’s a really dangerous thing to say, because we don’t know how grave the defeat could be. On the one hand, I personally am not voting. I think it’s important only to vote with your heart, and none of these candidates truly inspire me. But on the other hand I don’t wish for Donald Trump to win.

Instead what we need to do is build a social movement that can win elections. This idea that only a really bad situation will cause the people to rise up is a very flawed theory of social change. People join social movements because it gives them a feeling of losing their fear. They don’t join social movements out of fear. What will happen, if people get fundamentally afraid, is a withdrawal from social movements, not an increase in social movements.

What I’m trying to get across to American activists is that there is still time to fundamentally influence the US presidential election. It only took ten weeks to call for the birth of Occupy Wall Street. We could see a movement arise two months before the election that’s only initiated in July, for example. There’s still time to fundamentally change and swing the election. But we have to orient around that goal. We have to talk openly about that goal. We have to create that goal, and figure out what kinds of tactics we have to use in the streets, how we can make it work. That would be an exciting direction for activism.

CM: Micah, it is always a pleasure speaking with you on our show. Thank you so much for coming back on This is Hell!

MW: Thank you Chuck, it was awesome.

Transcription provided by Antidote Zine

Susan Cole: So we only have 45 minutes to figure out how we're gonna change the world, so let's get started. So let's start by the fact that you challenge us right from the beginning with the title of your book, THE END OF PROTEST. 

Micah White: Yeah. 

SC: Because most of us have the sense that we're supposed to be getting our voices heard, and yet here you are almost advocating, almost advocating the end of protest, or describing it. Tell us a bit about why you called this book The End of Protest, and to what extent does that phrase frame our conversations? 

MW: Yeah, I think that's the perfect place to start, thank you. Yeah. So what I mean by "the end of protest" isn't that there's an absence of protest, but instead, on the contrary, that we have a proliferation of ineffective protest, that we have more protests in human history that are larger than they've ever been in human history, and yet these protests don't seem to be creating the social change that we desire. So for me, the end of protest is it's part of the cycle of social change. It's that time during the cycle of social change when the tactics stop working, the activists don't know what to do, and it requires a kind of innovation and renewal to break out of that period. But I think that you can't realize that you're in the end of protest until you start... You can't break out of the end of protest until you acknowledge that you are in the time of the end of protest. 

SC: Well, you were involved in the Occupy Movement, and we had our own contingent taking over the St. James Park out, downtown. There would be some people who would say that, actually, there were many things that Occupy did accomplish, and yet you've referred to it consistently as a constructive failure. So, talk a little bit about the extent to which you think Occupy failed. 

MW: Right. Okay. So there's a common narrative, I think, within activism, which is that nothing's ever a failure, nothing's ever a defeat, especially in reference to Occupy Wall Street. Very frequently we'll hear people say that, "Well, you guys changed the discourse. Look at the national elections that are happening right now. Bernie Sanders is using this language, even Hillary is using this language." Those are... It's true, and other things that we did, we trained a new generation of activists, we launched, we made activism cool again. Okay, fine. But those are symptoms of the fact that we created a global movement that spread to 82 countries. Those weren't the objective; those are merely just byproducts of the fact of what we created, this large, global social movement. So I call it a constructive failure, which is not the same as a total failure. A total failure would mean that we did nothing good. Of course, we had many good things. I'm glad that Occupy happened, we should all be glad that Occupy happened. But it's a constructive failure because it taught us about the limitations of our current notions of activism. I think it's very important to realize that with Occupy Wall Street, we basically achieved the paradigm, the storyline of what the ideal social movement should be. We had it for about 60 days. It was global, largely non-violent, had pretty much a unified message, it's cut across demographics, but it didn't achieve what we set out to achieve. 

SC: But what's interesting, Micah, is that I had done this little test with a number of activists, friends of mine, to ask them, "What did you think was the primary impulse, the first impulse for the Occupy movement?" I'm not gonna test my audience here tonight, but most people say, "Oh, it was to talk about the income gap," and "Oh, it was to talk about how there's too many people controlling all of the money." But in fact, it started off as an attempt to change legislation regarding who can contribute money, including unions and other corporations to campaigns. Is that the case? 

MW: Yeah, yeah. If you go back to the original tactical briefing that we wrote at Adbusters, so having at Adbusters is we basically, we wrote this tactical briefing and calling for the Occupy Movement. And in that tactical briefing, we basically said, "Let's go down to the financial districts and have these general assemblies and come up with our one demand, the one demand that's really gonna change the world." And we put forward the idea that it should be to get money out of politics. 

SC: Okay, so let me stop you here. How many of you actually knew that? I see seven hands in the audience. [laughter] But the reason why I mentioned it is because at the same time, Occupy... None of us... Many of us didn't actually know what the initial impulse was. It didn't work until this incredible conversation, and you mentioned this in your just previous comments about, nobody was talking about the 1%. Now that's almost a mean. I mean, it's just going viral to a certain extent, but you wouldn't be considered raising consciousness enough. Right? 

MW: No, I think that's precisely the point. I think that when we... I think that seeing raising consciousness as a success lowers our horizon of possibility. Occupy Wall Street was a revolutionary social movement. It was born out of the Arab Spring that had toppled dictators abroad, and our goal was to fundamentally transform society. So I think that one of the dangerous things that's happening right now is this idea that social activism, the best you could possibly hope for is informing people or getting people to talk about an issue, which I would call social marketing, not social activism. [chuckle] And I think that social activism is actually about transforming the world, having revolutionary transformation of the way we live. And so I see this kind of argument that, well, you guys changed the discourse. That's symptomatic though, of our own defeat because we're not able to point to something greater. We comfort ourselves with this lesser, lesser thing. 

SC: In fact, you have three cardinal rules of activism. So I will share them with you. One is never broadcast inaccurate news. The other is never conceal defeat. And the other is never exaggerate victory. And I think what you're saying is that in the case of Occupy, all of those things, in fact, happened. Is that the case? 

MW: Right. Yeah. And those three rules, those are from Regis Debray. And so I think that probably the reason why we broke those rules was because of social media. There's this tendency to want to make ourselves feel good. I think that we... It's social marketing again. It's this idea that, why don't I just throw up some pretty pictures of the protest movement and make myself feel better? But instead, I think that that tendency is the reason why we aren't really breaking through to the next level. 

SC: You have a... I don't know whether it's a strategy. I think you'd be happy if I used the term "theory of activism" in which a successful revolution can only exist if four paradigms are integrated together. So, I'd like you to go through the four of them so that our audience can get a sense of exactly what we're talking about. So, the first... So what we're talking about are four different approaches to change that have to be integrated in order for a movement to be successful. So we start with volunteerism, right? 

MW: Right, right. We realize that revolution is the interaction between humans and, let's say, in the world of arts, okay? So there's basically, if you draw or think of a grid, there's a few different ways it can interact with us and it comes up with four options. On the left side of the grid would be theories that place an emphasis on human agency, human action. And on the right side would be theories that say revolutions don't actually involve human agency. There's something outside of human control. On the bottom would be theories that say revolution is a material or a natural process that involves physical forces in our world. And then at the top we have things that say, no, revolution is some sort of supernatural or possibly spiritual, but in any case, it's immaterial. It's not a material thing. So we're gonna start with the most common understanding of activism, which is volunteerism in the bottom left-hand corner. And what that says is that revolution is an interaction between humans and the natural world. So if we want to change things, then what we need to do is, we've all heard this phrase, direct action. Right? We need to put our bodies on the line. We need to get out into the streets. We need to block the traffic or go up and stop the coal factories with our physical bodies, because social change under that paradigm is the result of humans acting on the natural world. It's called volunteerism. 

SC: Gotcha. Now we can get to structuralism. 

MW: Structuralism is another option. Now, if you go to the bottom right-hand corner, and that's the idea that actually revolution is a material, a natural phenomenon, for sure, but doesn't involve humans at all. And this we kind of understand from like Marx and historical materialism, the idea that we need... There has to be a willing historical moment. There has to be an economic crisis. And there's been really interesting studies. I think that people should check out this idea that they've studied. They've found that, actually, if food prices pass a certain threshold, that, more than any other factor predicts revolution. And if you go back in time and you look at the food prices, you'll see that the Arab Spring and Occupy coincided with record high food prices. And then, as soon as those movements started to decline, that's when the food prices pass this threshold. And now we live in a time of decreasing food prices. I know in Canada, you guys are experiencing some, but overall, internationally, it's lower then. So that's structural in the idea that social change happens. It doesn't involve humans at all, it's some sort of other process involving... 

SC: Does the digital revolution fit into that?

 MW: In what way? 

SC: Well, I'm looking at events outside of human... Well, obviously, the digital revolution is propagated by humans, but it's something that kind of feeds itself. But no, that's not it. 

MW: Well, I mean, I think under... It depends on... There are different arguments about what kind of structural factors could be... I think in terms of what kind of empirical studies have been done, food prices are the primary one. I think Marx's theory would probably just say general economic crisis, but we have seen that stock market crashes don't necessarily entail a revolutionary moment. 

SC: We move onto subjectivism. 

MW: Subjectivism. So, if we go up into now the top left-hand quadrant, this would be the theories that say, "Well, revolution is a human... It involves humans, but it doesn't involve the material world at all." And here we have ideas that are like, "If you want to change the world, you have to change how you see the world." Because the way we see the world, or the way we... Our internal reality dictates external reality. So, the best kind of activism here is some sort of like mediation, yoga, things that make us feel more positive about reality. This is the subjectivism; target people's interior minds in order to change how they perceive reality. 

SC: So it's about perception of reality. It's not like, if I take care of myself, I can become a better activist? 

MW: Right, no. It's about... It would be literally like this idea that the world seems so gray when you've been dumped, but then you fall in love and everything is like, "What are you talking about? I love life. Everything's going great." 

SC: That was a good example. [laughter] And let me get to more challenging, the most, from my point of view, and I'm sure that this will surprise some people. I wanna make sure I'm pronouncing it right, theurgy? 

MW: Right. Theurgism. Theurgism. 

SC: Theurgism. Theurgy? 

MW: Yeah.

SC: Okay. Go. [laughter] 

MW: So, this is the area that... The reason why I diagrammed it out is because, if you do the diagram, you realize, "Oh, there is a whole fourth quadrant that no one talks about." And that's this idea of, could revolution possible be something that is both, that doesn't involves humans and is not material? What would that be? And so, I talked about this idea of theurgism, the idea that revolution is some sort of divine intervention into our world. It's a process that involves supernatural forces that are not under the control of humans, and are also not physical and material. And this is for western activists, obviously. You cannot go to this territory. Don't go there. 

SC: Well, no, because it sounds like God to me. 

MW: Theurgy means "God work" in Greek. So, literally, we're talking about sorcery, we're talking about theories of social change, though, that were dominant in the past. There had been times in human history when people did, for example, before a battle or whatever, pray to the gods and think that that was the result of it. But I think that this type of theory of social change is really helpful to think about, if you consider the case of the origins of Christianity, I mean, the victory of Christianity really, because Christianity is a social movement that was persecuted for 300 years. It was the only social ideology in Rome that was outlawed. It was the only belief system. They had a pluralistic pagan society, but only Christianity was oppressed. The Christians were thrown to the lions and killed in front of cheering audiences. So, how could it possibly be that Christians conquered the world? How can it be that so much of the world is now Christian? And the answer is because two people, Saint Paul and then Constantine, had visions of Jesus Christ in their dreams, right? 

SC: Well, I guess what might be problematic about that is that even though many of us are aware of the radical origins of Christianity, its current manifestation is not the most progressive, and over the centuries has been problematic rather than something you would want to celebrate. 

MW: Right. No, of course, but I'm not talking about its current manifestation. I am talking about its path to victory. 

SC: This Christianity thing really got me, I gotta tell you. There are many who would argue regarding Christianity, because we know that Saul had the revelation, became Paul. 

MW: Right. 

SC: But we also know that the church could not have grown without basically direct action, which is to say to go out into the people who are alienated from Kings, and give them a piece of the cross and say, "This is a piece of the cross or a piece of the shroud or whatever." So, there still had to be some kind of organization... 

MW: No, that's a really good point, and I think that leads me to the point which is that, you can't just pick one of these four options and then focus on that and say like, "No." I think contemporary activism just basically wants to be voluntarist. They don't wanna really think about the other ones and if they do, maybe they'll consider subjectivism sometimes. But structural makes them really uncomfortable because it might mean that they're protesting for no reason or something like that. So, what I'm saying though, is that successful revolutions and successful social movements involve all four elements. So as activists, we need to combine them to varying degrees. 

SC: So let's go through some of the current movements that I'm sure members of our audience are involved in or have been involved in the past that have the most potential, possibly, to integrate all of these four elements. 

MW: Okay. 

SC: Okay, so obviously, I wanna start with environmentalism because I can see the potential for all of them to coalesce, except for the fourth, the most challenging, and you are saying supernatural, so a natural disaster doesn't qualify, right? 

MW: I'll give you an interesting example for the fourth one. Okay. Here's one thing to think about, and people can debate. Maybe this is structural, maybe this is theurgism. But now, there's been this really weird study that a Russian cosmologist did in the early 20th century, that he said proves sunspot activity predicts revolutions on earth. So, what does that mean? 

SC: Are you buyin' it? Let's see. 

MW: I mean... 

SC: No, seriously. 

MW: No, really. Yeah, that's the truth. So he went back and he... I don't know if you guys know this, but there's basically storms in the sun, and this scientist went back throughout human history and he found statistically significant evidence that revolutions most often occur during elevated sunspot activity. So, the sunspot obviously is something that we can't cause on earth, but some people worship the sun as god, that's why I call it theurgistic example. So the sun is kind of a deity, and the sun's sunspot energy and activity is somehow creating revolutions. I'm not necessarily saying it's true, but I'm just saying that, what if it were true that revolutions like Occupy coincided with sunspot activity? What would you do as an activist? 

SC: Well, yes. That's what I was gonna say. Would we have to look and kinda predict when these solar events are gonna take place? Or do they reflect what's going on? Or do they influence what's going on? 

MW: Right. I mean, this is something that I think about now because we are entering... I mean, if this theory is true, it's bad news for activism because we're entering a period of sustained low sunspot activity. [laughter] 

SC: No, no negativity tonight. No negative... You have actually some, I think, really valuable critiques to make of the current environmentalist movement and in particular, you have said that there have been some you find problematic, the catastrophic approach to what's happening and you have some certain fears about how, about the development of ecofascism, and you throw some words around that are very powerful. I'd like you to share some of those views with our audience this evening. 

MW: Yeah. I think that the main thing I find troubling about contemporary environmentalism is that it's become so dominated by technocratic or scientific world view. For example, almost all of environmental activism has been oriented around this idea that we need to keep the temperature below a certain degree, raise, or more importantly, that we need less than 350 parts per billion of carbon dioxide. All these things are things that only scientists and technocratic people can tell the people. We can't feel how much carbon dioxide is in the air and stuff like this. And I think that that, more importantly though, it kind of justifies a potentially negative approach in the sense that, I think that there will be people who start to see that actually because of the severity of climate change, the fact that it's a global existential crisis that affects the survival of us all, is a tremendous political power that can come from being the one who promises to be the saviour on that issue. And so, I think that right now, we see traditionally on the right, or whatever, "Oh, they're gonna deny climate change." But I could see it actually flipping right to the other side where they say instead, "Oh, no we're gonna save climate change, but it's gonna mean no civil liberties for any of you because we need to completely extend the scientific world view to every aspect of our lives." 

SC: And prescribe how we're living our lives as well, right? 

MW: Right, right. And control how our living our lives and all these kind of stuff. So I think that, yeah, for me I think that the main thing about environmentalism is that it needs to find its soul again and realize that it doesn't need to be purely a scientific movement, and I think we also have to put our faith in a social movement. Only a social movement's gonna be able to solve climate change. Only a global social movement will be able to gain sovereign control over the planet in order to break down barriers and borders, and allow climate refugees, and all those kind of ideas... 

SC: So you've been clear that huge demonstrations protesting climate changes have been... They're kinda useless. 

MW: Yeah. I do think they're useless. I think that they're not designed... Let's put it in clear terms. Large marches for climate change are not designed to overthrow or change the regime of any government on this earth. They're designed... They're social marketing. They're designed to publicize the presence of an issue in order to give the elected representatives a way to say, "I'm responding to this constituency that's in the streets, that's why I'm doing this thing." 

SC: Well, why is that bad? We've experienced a time where the climate change deniers were winning, and now, I think they're losing. We don't know how it's gonna shake down in our own country because I'm not sure where the pipelines are going or anything like that. I sometimes think that raising consciousness is kind of a good thing. I see that as happening with Occupy. I definitely feel the environmental movement has it. We have the experience here with the plastic bags. It just was completely transformed. People look at you with plastic bags now as if you're not so good. So, I mean, those kinds of things to you are not as meaningful, or are they just the first step in something bigger? 

MW: I think what I'm saying is that, that's easy stuff. That's easy stuff to accomplish. And so, if you set your sights at only doing that, then you miss out on the much larger and the more difficult and far more important challenges of gaining sovereignty for the people in order to actually institute the changes they wanna see instead of demanding changes from our government and this kind of thing. So, I'm not denying that activism is able to achieve those kind of things, like the ketchup debate that you guys just had. Yes. We successfully got... 

SC: We love our ketchup! [laughter] 

MW: Successfully got them... 

SC: Canadian tomatoes taste better than American tomatoes. 

MW: Right, exactly. And that's great and everything, but at the same time, let's be real. It hasn't fundamentally changed the economic structures of Canada. So what I'm saying is those things are easy, and we shouldn't just content ourselves with them. 

SC: Maybe we should stop for a second and talk about what we mean by revolution, because I think that might help the conversation, which I'm enjoying by the way, but this still might help the conversation. I remember when they were demonstrating in Tahrir Square and then Mubarak left, and I looked around at the NOW offices and I said, "We gotta go out in the streets, man." I couldn't believe that you could have a demonstration and actually overturn a government. Now, of course, that didn't last long and no good has come of it. But one of the things you say very pointedly is that we have to take over. We, or the people, the good guys, have to take over legislative and executive powers, which I think... I was kinda surprised when I read that, Micah, because it sounded almost like, and I know that you don't mean this, and I don't mean this as a judgement, a soft revolution, that it's almost like working through the system. But that's not what you mean when you say we have to seize those powers. 

MW: No, I don't mean... Wouldn't it be great if it was soft, though? I mean, I don't think that we should somehow fetishize a hard revolution. But that's not what I'm saying. I think that, if you take the example, I think the example of Egypt is really, really important. So, what happened in Egypt, it seems to me, is that they basically had these secular youth who inspired a beautiful uprising and they got all the people into the streets and Mubarak stepped down due to international pressure, because the international community was able to say, "Look, you have these people in the streets. You have to step down." So he steps down. But then the secular youth made a major tactical mistake, strategic mistake, which is that they didn't then run for power. They didn't run for power. They stepped aside. The Muslim brotherhood got into power. So I think what I'm trying to... 

SC: Well, there was a candidate from... 

MW: ElBaradei. Yeah, but he just... He didn't... You know what I mean? He didn't have the base... He didn't have that backing. The Muslim brotherhood saw that this was... 

SC: The vacuum. 

MW: Yeah, they saw the vacuum and moreover they realized, "Oh my God, we were just like a literally illegal organization moments ago, and now we're about to become the leaders of this." So, I think that the thing is that activism, that's kind of what parallels what happens in a lot of countries. In a lot of countries, we just think that our role somehow is to protest and make noise, but we don't think about the second part which is we could actually protest as a means to becoming the government and gaining control of the government in order to actually carry out our desires. That's what a revolution is. So revolution, it's very hard to define, but I think the definition that I try to put forward that I think helps us give a broader horizon is, "A revolution is a change in legal regime." That's it. That's why some revolutions can be very small, like overturning a law, a specific law, it's kind of like a revolution. But in the broadest sense, what it really is, is it's a struggle over who creates the laws. It's a change in legal regime. And so the goal of activism is to become the power that sets the laws, that creates the laws. 

SC: So I think it's useful to distinguish between a single issue protest, 'cause many of us in this audience have been... Every time Henry Morgentaler's clinic was busted, we were out there in the streets trying to make sure that women had access to reproductive freedom. We've had an issue here with police carting black people, and a huge response and trying to develop change in that way. And sometimes in those situations, we've been successful. But you're looking at something bigger. 

MW: Right. 

SC: And I was interested in your section of the book where you talk about the slow change versus the short change. So, I wanna talk a little bit about feminism 'cause I think it's a really interesting example, and another movement that could, I mean, possibly integrate all four of your paradigms except in terms of theurgy, in which case, somebody like Gloria Steinem would have to be considered a goddess or something like that. But I don't mean to trivialize your point, but I mean those of us who are involved in that movement... Somebody like me who's been involved for now 40 years, have... It's so not over, but we have seen unbelievable change. When we started, nobody was talking about sexual assault. And what was so wonderful about the movement is that we knew that we could approach change in almost every single level of our living lives, that everywhere we looked there was an issue we could take on. And in fact, you see much potential in women as a power. And we can see what's going on in India with sexual assault there, we can see how women are almost beginning to change some of the economics in Africa. Tell me a little about how you see feminism fitting in, or women's movement fitting into your paradigm. 

MW: Yeah, for sure. The thing about revolution is it always comes as a surprise. And I think that people... It's very difficult to predict when it's gonna happen, in fact, just as an aside, it's kind of interesting to note that the Russian Revolution of 1917 started on International Women's Day, and that in fact, at that time, everyone, the Bolsheviks included, they said, "The time isn't right for revolution or protest." In fact, they tried to ban protest on International Women's Day, but it was the women textile workers who went into the streets, and from that action, it spiralled into this whole revolutionary moment. So I think when I look into the future and try to get, "What's my revolutionary instinct telling me about what could happen next?", I think it's a women-led social movement. I think a women's social movement could emerge that eclipses Occupy Wall Street so fundamentally that one day we could wake up, and just like when we woke up and we saw people in the squares, in their encampments, we could wake up and we could see women protesting, of all ages, and we don't understand, where did they come from, and what's going on, but suddenly it's spreading to 82 countries just like Occupy did. So, how would that happen? I think that the core thing to understand is that social movements are created by a contagious mood combined with a new tactic. So I can imagine some sort of contagious mood just sweeping among women, and then all of a sudden, it's just like, "Yeah, I feel that, too." And then there's some sort of new tactic, we won't know what it looks like, but something that surprises people and suddenly makes them believe, "Wow, this is it. This is gonna work, we're gonna get the feminism. We're gonna have that feminist revolution, or matriarchal revolution, or whatever, that we finally ever wanted." So, I see that as one of the beautiful scenarios that we could see in years ahead. 

SC: You made a point of saying that one of the big challenges of revolutions and activism is that the power, and the powers that be have become more and more adept at responding and co-opting, and getting ready for us. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

MW: Yeah, yeah. I think that protest has become part of the political spectacle. I think we all kind of know that in our hearts, that we realize that these politicians are able to absorb a certain level of protest. I think the best example of that, of course, is the 2003 anti-war march that happened in every single country, basically, all over the world. People went into the streets with a unified message of no war... 

SC: This was to oppose the proposed war in Iraq? 

MW: Yes, so February 15, 2003, so about a month before the war started. Everyone went into the streets, it was beautiful, it was amazing, and if you Google images of that, you Google February 15, 2003, you'll see these amazing shots of like a million people in London all holding a sign that says, "No to the War." It was very obvious what this was about. And something really important happened that night is that after all the protesters went home, George Bush got on television and he said, "I don't listen to these protests, because if I listen to the protests, it's like listening to a focus group, but I base my politics on what I believe, not focus groups." And so he just dismissed all of these global protests as a focus group, and I think ever since then, actually, politicians have realized that actually, we can just do that. These protests are just people's opinions, they don't matter. That's how they treat them. So I think that as activists, we've been chasing this paradigm of, "No, no, if we can just get more people into the streets rallying behind this thing... " And I think that's kind of a poor insight. The truth is that there's no reason or power that forces elected representatives to like, "Oh, what? You got 10,000 people in the streets? Oh okay. I agree." That doesn't exist. We act as if it does exist, it sounds funny, but we do, we really act as if it does exist. Well, if a million people marched in New York City, then I guess the President would have to listen, but no. Why? There's no law that says that, nope. 

SC: I see your point. [chuckle] But let's talk a bit, I mentioned it briefly, about the long view versus the short view. Because I know that a couple of years ago, I guess it might have been in the nine... I can't remember exactly when it was, but a bill to give same sex benefits to gays and lesbians did not pass in our Ontario legislature, and I was really, really upset. I had a real personal crisis, and a great old activist came up to me because I was doing an event, and I had made this impassioned plea and explained how upset I was. As a lesbian mother, I was just freaked out. And he came to me and he said, "Do you know how long it took us to get Medicare in this country? It did not take us a week, and it didn't take us a month, and it didn't take us a year. We worked for decades to develop," what I think we'll all agree, "is one of the great social policies of this country." You guys need one, by the way. [chuckle] But it's not your fault that we don't have one. I'm not pointing at you there. And yet, at the same time, sometimes we do see incremental change in short moments. But talk a little bit about the long view versus the short view. You have the 28 days thing, I like that, too. So if you can integrate some of that into your answer, I'd appreciate it. 

MW: Right. So, there's basically two timescales of activism: There's the fast time, and there's the slow time. So the fast time is that amazing ability that we see of social movements to suddenly arise suddenly, go into the streets, all of a sudden, within 20 days or 28 days, they basically... It took 28 days for Occupy to basically reach... 50% of Americans had heard of the movement, which is a tremendous feat. 150 million people knowing about a word, a phrase, "Occupy Wall Street" within 28 days. So we have this fast time perspective, which is enabled by the internet and social media. But then there's also this slow time perspective, there's this... The slow time perspective, it says things like Thomas Jefferson, who said that the generation that starts the revolution rarely lives to complete it, or other people have said that all revolutions actually take three generations. Or, if you think about it on an even larger scale, you realize that the people have been rising up against tyrants and against dictators and trying to get to a more egalitarian society since ancient Egypt. We actually have papyrus from ancient Egypt that talks about revolution against the king. So from the long-term perspective, we are just kind of a blip in a much longer human journey, multi-generational journey that's 5000 years old. But on the other hand, we do, as activists, are trying to create social change within our own lifetimes. And so you have to balance the two against each other. I think that it's really important not to just... There's a kind of quietism that can happen when you just say, "Well, revolutions take three generations, I'm probably the first generation, so there's probably two more, so I should just kinda chill out a little bit." 

SC: Chill, right? [laughter] 

MW: But it's hard to say, maybe we're the third generation. You always have to fight as if you are the third generation or something. But at the same time, I think that what that activist said to you is correct. We do have to have this kind of nuanced perspective about how time works. But on the fast side, I think the fast side is really crucial for activists to realize, which is that when planning a protest, I think a rough metric for how fast it has to be, is that we shouldn't plan protests, fast protests, that lasts more than 28 days. 28 days is how long it took for the Arab Spring to topple Mubarak, it's how long it took Occupy to reach mass consciousness. And when we try to go past that point, we inevitably start to lose. And there was this moment, I think, with Occupy Wall Street, that was so telling, which is that in early November, things were really turning sour, the winter was coming, the police were sending all these drunks into the encampment in Zuccotti, really changing the mood. And at Adbusters, we sent out this tactical briefing, saying like, "Hey, guys, we should... Why don't we just declare victory and wrap it up until the spring?" But I would talk to people on the phone, these occupiers in New York, and they would say, "No, no, no, we have so much money, we're gonna buy $40,000 winter tents, and we're gonna live in these winter tents in the square." And I would say to them, "No, it's not that the winter's too cold, it's that it's too long." They had no sense of the fact that it cannot last that long. And as we saw very soon, it was evicted. So for activists, I think we have to figure out, how do we do these fast events that achieve their objectives very quickly, while also maintaining this long-term perspective that kind of ties it into a longer story? 

SC: So when you look out into the world, and I know that you're frustrated with the way activism has unfolded, that it's not taking into account all of the elements required for successful revolution, but, are you feeling hopeful at all? What gives you hope? Or are you... 

MW: Yes, absolutely hopeful. I do think it's really important that people realize that revolutions always happen when they seem least likely. And so... 

SC: And when there's a sunspot. 

MW: And when there's a sunspot! I don't know, you guys. Check that one out, I mean, that's interesting stuff. But it is true that the Russian Revolution in 1917 started at a time when no one expected it. Occupy started at a time when no one expected it. I know that because I was editor at Adbusters and we solicited people, asking them, "Can a revolution happen in America?", and they all said no, and then of course, Occupy happened. So there's no use getting demoralized at all, because it's almost as if it needs to seem impossible before it can happen. So it's almost like when you're losing, you're about to win, so you might as well just be really happy at all times. [laughter] I think that we are still within that revolutionary shadow that inspired Occupy Wall Street. I think we're still within that time in which people are desperate for social change. And our challenge right now is merely to innovate activism. It's merely to develop new forms of protest, new ways of inspiring people and then I think we'll see social movements that eclipse Occupy Wall Street. But we do stand at a kind of a choice. We can stay here, celebrate ourselves, tell ourselves that Occupy was this great success, that Black Lives Matter is doing this amazing thing, and all this kind of stuff. Or we can start to say, "Okay, how do we get serious about this? How do we really do this?" Yeah, I have a feeling that when I look at the world, the international community, international protests, I think we're gonna see some amazing stuff happen. Even in Brazil right now, there's a million people in the streets... It's not unlikely that they could innovate some sort of new tactic that does topple that government. And then we might see a kind of Brazilian Spring that inspires a wave this direction. 

SC: It's interesting you mention Brazil, because you did comment that part of the problem with the situation in Egypt was that government was toppled, but there was nothing to come in afterwards. And when you were mentioning about seizing legal and executive control, I think that's the big question. I guess, in Russia, they take over the Kremlin and it's done. I guess that's what baffles activists. And that's... Because you're right; the protest is the easy thing. "Here I am, here's what I care about, listen to my voice." And finding that way to innovate to actually figure out what the next level is supposed to be the biggest challenge, don't you think? 

MW: Absolutely, yeah, I think that the Brazil thing is really telling, because they had a social movement in 2013 that was very much like Occupy. It started around a fare hike; it spiralled into a massive social movement, and then it dissipated just like Occupy did. And now they're getting a second chance, 2016, it's early in the year, just like Arab Spring started early in the year. But they also... They still have to solve that problem of, how do we not just topple the government, but how do we, and I think, how do we run the government? I think a lot of activists are afraid of that question. I think that we don't want to... There's something weird if you read the history of the Russian Revolution, the same thing happened; the people wanted to protest and then as soon as the tzar was overthrown, they're like, "Okay, let's give the government to the bourgeoisie now." [laughter]And that's what the Bolsheviks had to fight against. They were like, "No, no, stop trying to give the power away." I think we kind of... Which is what the secular youth did in Egypt, too. It's like we're scared to hold the power, because it's so much easier to be the complaining side that's throwing temper tantrums in the streets. But we have to combine the ability to overthrow governments with the ability to be a good government. So it's really a challenge. 

SC: So are you feeling hopeful versus challenged versus... But you're not depressed, obviously? [laughter] You're feeling hopeful. 

MW: Yes, I feel hopeful. I will never forget... You have to remember the experience of Occupy and how it came out of nowhere. And I just... It could happen at any time. It could happen any, any time. We could wake up tomorrow and Brazil could be toppled, and all of a sudden people are inspired. We could wake up tomorrow and there could be women in the street. That's the nature of social movements is that they bubble up seemingly spontaneous, but right now there could be a group of activists who are really planning something beautiful. And I think that that's one of the reasons I wrote my book is to kind of like increase the sophistication of how we think about activism. So yeah, I think there's no use being demoralized at all. It's not... The end of protest is not a permanent state. It's just one of those phases within the cycle of social change that we have to break out of. I mean, we could be here a long time for sure, but I remain optimistic instead that activists that are more innovative than we ever have been before, and that somehow, because of the power of the internet and our ability to move tactics around the world very quickly, within 24 hours we could, if something did come out of Brazil or China, it could be in Canada within 24 hours, and all of a sudden, it's just a beautiful time again. 

SC: It could happen in this room, for all you know. 

MW: Yes, it could.