Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
So claims an article from the BBC from 2019. It refers to the research of Erica Chenoweth which in turn inspired the Extinction Rebellion group.
I think there is hope in such research that seems to show that nonviolent activism that reached a relatively low threshold actually led to change. I say this, because I at least have a hard time believing protests do anything positive at all. Which is a sad and cynical take, I know. So reading this kind of stuff makes me skeptical, yes, but also hopeful, that there is something to it.
In light of what I recently wrote about AI: That I don’t think that LLMs are going anywhere, even if they are not going to fulfill their promise. And that we won’t prevent their development by individual consumer choice. Which therefore means we should instead explore them carefully and with an eye for making them a part of our shared experience (by hopefully making them more sustainable (et. al.) and enacting policies towards this) instead of trying to look away and excluding them from intelligent and more complex discourse that tries to think a whole world - that, like it or not, includes AI and VCs and Techbros - no matter what our individual values might be.
So in light of that I wonder what a “3,5% rule” for web discourse could look like. The truth is: I can’t think of one. The Web and its visitors are not really a society or a nation state (or a union of such things) and therefore do not govern themselves. We are citizens of the web only in a very metaphorical way. The policies are enacted by governmental bodies like the EU. This makes me think that in order to change the web you need to change the society you’re living in. Which means that a “3,5% rule” - if it exists - for the web would just be the “3,5% rule” for non digital societies.
So activism of the web would necessarily need to interface with the physical world and non-violently protest its rampant development to become not much more than a collection of hellish and exploitative platforms owned by rich people that actively threaten any and all live on this planet by exploiting resources, exploiting people and undoing democratic progress everywhere.