Slow Activism

Quick read

“Easier to mobilize does not always mean easier to achieve things.”

In the TED Talk "How the Internet has made social change easy to organize, hard to win" techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci makes an argument against digital activism, exclusively. And an argument for what I'll call "slow activism."

Real social change takes painstaking, long-term work: planning, collaborating, organizing. The capacity to work together and think together, collectively, over time.

Zeynep contrasts the 1963 "March on Washington" and the Civil Rights Movement with Zuccotti Park and the Occupy movement.

You might think of what futurist John Naisbitt calls "high tech, high touch": the more high tech humans have, the more high touch humans want.

This is certainly our philosophy at Re>Think Local, a nonprofit collaborative I co-founded, and BEAHIVE, collaborative spaces for work and community — as it is for the larger Localism movement.

Keep this in mind as you consider your organization's mission or plan your next campaign or programs.