Can Revolution Survive in the 21st Century?

But while social media platforms and digital tools supercharged our ability to raise awareness and enabled movements to explode overnight, they ultimately undermined our ability to organize effectively, engage in material action, and sustain transformative momentum.

None of this means digital tools can’t catalyze real power. In Nepal, Gen-Z organizers used sprawling Discord servers to coordinate mass protests that toppled the prime minister and his government in days. That digital tools can allow these moments of rupture to spill out into the streets was never in question. But whether that rapid mobilization consolidates into durable institutions is still in doubt. The test isn’t virality; it’s whether movements can translate flash mobilization into the enduring infrastructure that survives the fleeting news cycles and repressive blowback, and whether the tools of the digital age help or hinder that process.

What we see over and over again is that technology has enabled movements to scale up and leapfrog the critical steps of establishing organizational depth, identifying leadership, and developing strategies needed to articulate movement demands, address challenges from within, and maintain prolonged political pressure in the face of repression. Influenced by social media’s “popularity contest” dynamics and a general opposition to hierarchical leadership, many movements adopted horizontalist strategies that prioritized inclusivity and peer-to-peer participation. While this made them more accessible and democratic, it often came at the expense of clear leadership or internal cohesion, leaving movements ill-equipped to respond collectively to threats or maintain momentum. This has repeatedly led to “tactical freeze”—when movements cannot agree upon a unified path forward.

And rather than its fostering long-term movement commitment and encouraging cultures of sacrifice, we’ve watched social media—which, despite its name, promises influence not through collective action but through individual expression—incentivize fleeting displays of performative engagement: the viral post, the trending hashtag, the aestheticized protest. What’s more, the alienation that the digital age produces has left many people more isolated from one another than ever. In this environment, the notion of “activism” has become less about engaging in mass disruptive struggle and more about personal visibility. In its more unscrupulous forms, the lines between awareness and action, between solidarity and self-promotion, blur to the point of collapse.

If there’s one example that encapsulates the dissonance between digital enthusiasm and genuine political consequence, it’s Kony 2012.

For a few heady months in 2012, it seemed, at least to naïve, indefatigable high-schoolers like myself at the time, that the world would be moved to collective action thanks to a viral video calling for the arrest of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. The Kony 2012 campaign introduced a simple, yet tantalizing premise. If by raising enough awareness we could “Make Kony Famous,” governments would be compelled to hunt him down.

Kony 2012 was a masterclass in branding. From the eye-catching posters to the bumping campaign soundtrack, all of it was formulated to make people feel powerful. And with the help of YouTube and Facebook, the movement did make Kony famous, practically overnight. But that is just about all the campaign actually achieved. With no long-term strategy or clear leadership structure, there was almost nowhere for the movement, such as it was, to go, and it quickly disintegrated.

Kony 2012 was designed around a society composed of individual actors, inherently driven by self-interest, not one that encouraged collective sacrifice for the greater good. Thanks to the commodification of the campaign itself, supporting the cause—and fighting for wider political change—became synonymous with buying merch, sharing videos, and updating your Facebook status. In other words, Kony 2012 created a mass cadre of activists in name only.

Kony 2012 should have permanently killed the idea that “awareness” is powerful in and of itself. But we see its legacy everywhere. In 2020, “Blackout Tuesday” saw millions post black squares in solidarity with racial justice protests—a gesture that was visibly powerful, but ended up achieving little more than drowning out critical organizer communication. Similarly, in 2024, the viral, AI-generated “All Eyes on Rafah” graphic dominated social media, but did nothing to stop Israel from leveling the city because all people committed themselves to was resharing a photo.

What links all of these failed movements is not just the role social media played in encouraging the performative activism that drowned out real organizing, but something far deeper: the isolating logic of capitalism—one that commodifies dissent and corrodes the conditions necessary for revolutionary politics.

Hyper-Individualism and the Dulling of Dissent

In addition to distracting us from the strategic necessities of long-term organizing, the luxuries of the digital age have also played a major role in reshaping our very sense of self, fueling an epidemic of isolation that is eroding our ability to act collectively.

Human progress has always depended on our ability to build communities and work toward shared goals. Solidarity, cooperation, and mutual responsibility make life worth living and help us survive a dangerous world. And without them, we can never build and sustain mass movements.

Yet today, capitalism, by embedding competition, consumption, privatized risk, and the primacy of the self into not only our daily life but our very psyches, has gnawed away at our collectivist instincts. Hyper-individualism now permeates everything, from our politics and economics to our sense of identity. In many ways, it marks one of capitalism’s most profound triumphs: not just in concentrating wealth or privatizing the public sphere but in reshaping human nature itself, from collective to individual. And it is this atomization that social media both thrives on and perpetuates.

Recent studies show that Gen Z is the loneliest generation on record, marked by declining civic engagement and rising anxiety and alienation. Only about 34 percent of Americans think they can reliably trust one another, while 16 percent feel strongly attached to their local community. In 2023, then–Surgeon General Vivek Murthy even called loneliness an “epidemic.”

Why does this matter? Because mass politics is built around precisely the instincts capitalism discourages. We’ve been trained to see ourselves not as interdependent actors in a joint struggle but as isolated competitors in a social marketplace. In place of collectivism, our new reality offers the illusion of security through the pursuit of self-interest and consumption. And even as we become more aware of the systemic contradictions and crises capitalism breeds, we’re increasingly unable to conceptualize alternatives to our status quo. As Mark Fisher famously wrote, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It’s not just that we fear losing material comfort; it’s that we’ve been conditioned to perceive the prevailing order—as inevitable, even eternal.

People know things aren’t right. But without an inspiring vision to cling on to, what would incentivize atomized individuals to act and make inevitably painful sacrifices in the numbers needed to confront the increasingly repressive systems aligned against them?

From Manufacturing Consent to Elite-Guided Pacification

Just as hyper-individualism has eroded our capacity to think and act collectively, the increasingly elite-managed nature of our media, both social and traditional, has made it harder to perceive, let alone challenge, the structures that oppress us.

Even before the Internet, control over information was increasingly consolidating into the hands of a narrowing elite. A few powerful corporations determined what much of the public saw, heard, and read. Optimists once believed that digital platforms would radically democratize access to information and public discourse.

And for a time, it seemed like they did. Facebook and Twitter enabled real-time information sharing and grassroots mobilization, amplifying uprisings from Tahrir Square to Gezi Park. But that window was brief. Both governments and social media conglomerates were quick to develop novel forms of control—both overt and algorithmic—that have since come to define the limits of the digital public square.

Consider who governs our most-used platforms. Elon Musk owns X. Mark Zuckerberg controls Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. While these platforms serve vital public functions, they are neither democratic nor public. Movements that have no choice but to rely on them for visibility do so at the mercy of two largely unaccountable and increasingly reactionary billionaires.

Dystopian forecasts in popular culture have long envisioned a future of total, crushing censorship—societies living in abject fear of an all-seeing Big Brother, words and topics deemed too taboo to touch. But the reality of mass censorship in the contemporary digital age looks very different. Of course, “traditional” censorship persists. Pro-Palestinian content, for instance, is routinely suppressed under the pretense of combating antisemitism; Meta has reportedly complied with 94 percent of the Israeli government’s censorship requests. In the days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, leading officials and allied media figures pressed for punitive speech crackdowns and leaned on employers to fire employees who criticized or ridiculed Kirk, illustrating how effectively state power and private leverage can leverage social media to chill dissent.

But more subtle—and arguably more effective—in achieving the broader aims of social control is the algorithmic gatekeeping, the infinite scroll of distraction that now defines the digital landscape.

Today, narrative control can be achieved by simply ushering users away from the discomfort caused by political consciousness and towards the solace of mesmerizing spectacle. Social media algorithms, designed to maximize engagement and profit, send videos of cats, dance trends, and lifestyle hacks floating to the top, while hard news sinks into an abyss. This algorithmic pacification triggers what Zeynep Tufekci calls the attention economy “trap,” where movements are forced to compete in a marketplace of distraction, fighting for slivers of attention under rules they don’t control.

With the public primed to avoid discomfort and nuance outright, the natural outcome is detachment. Israel’s information warfare strategy in Gaza illustrates how these dynamics play out at scale.

Israel has long understood that controlling Palestinian land and bodies is not enough; it must also control the narrative in order to sustain Western support. But over recent years, Israel’s PR efforts have come up short, unable to explain away the country’s endless tide of atrocities. Even as Israel continues to wield the blunt bludgeon of traditional censorship—from pressuring social media companies to erase pro-Palestinian content to detaining and killing Palestinian dissidents and journalists—it has become increasingly difficult to deny the images of Palestinian children mutilated by Israeli bombs and starved by Israeli blockade that make it through the algorithms. So Israel deploys a different tactic: a cascade of lies and half-truths, the so-called “firehose of falsehood.”

When Israel bombs a hospital, all it has to do is insist that Hamas built a command center underneath it. When Palestinians share footage of babies torn to shreds by Israeli bombs, we get unfounded claims that the babies are not actually real babies but dolls. It matters little that Israel rarely provides independently verifiable evidence to back its claims, or that upon further investigation, the evidence it does provide is often entirely fabricated. Every hospital bombed, every baby massacred, every Palestinian word is shrouded in that artificially manufactured fog of war. If people can be convinced that they simply don’t know enough about what’s happening in Gaza, how can they be expected to intervene?

Relentless grassroots organizing and the undeniably grotesque images of Israel’s atrocities have broken through these filters to shift public opinion further than many thought possible. But while hearts and minds are being won, policy remains inert. Of course, entrenched political and financial interests, combined with the power of the pro-Israel lobby, are the primary obstacles to progress, but the movement has yet to secure the critical mass of support required to break these strangleholds. This collective reticence is not a failure of conviction, but the product of the same forces that shape our wider political paralysis: individualism, algorithmic distraction, and elite media control. Just imagine what might have been possible if the anti-genocide movement weren’t forced to fight uphill against these structural constraints.

And while many are taking action to hold Israel accountable, many more—the mainstream masses—continue to avert their gaze. A recent study found that 53 percent of Americans now say Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. But what share of that majority is taking concrete steps to stop their tax dollars from funding it? If it isn’t outright apathy, it’s inertia, informed by a reluctance to make sacrifices, disinformation-induced paralysis, and fear of punishment—from employers, the state, or even one’s own social circle. Whatever it is, it shows us an anesthetized generation—one that can livestream a genocide and then immediately swipe away the horrors. Now apply this equation more broadly and you’ll begin to see the contours of a much broader phenomenon: mass incapacitation.

It’s not that people don’t recognize that something is seriously broken. But when you combine the effects of manufactured ambiguity with the temptations of ignoring the horrors completely and instead basking in the comfort of a life of entertainment and consumption, the result is revolutionary paralysis. Gaza may be the most searing case, but the paradigm is not unique.

Repressive Tech and Growing Power Asymmetries

Even when movements do manage to outmaneuver these systems and build real challenges to the status quo, they are then met with a final line of defense: the increasingly repressive technologies and tactics of the state. It is only getting easier for authorities to crush us.

While we have grown more fragmented, distracted, and strategically disoriented, governments and repressive regimes have only grown more integrated, coordinated, and technologically advanced. The result is a historic expansion of the power asymmetry between the masses and the forces they seek to challenge—one increasingly enforced not just through tools of brute repression but with advanced surveillance capabilities, spyware, and transnational policing practices that have infiltrated the very digital platforms we once hoped would serve as tools for liberation.

In the late 18th century, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham envisioned the “panopticon”—a prison designed so that a single watchman stationed in a central observation node could observe all inmates housed in a circle around him without them knowing whether they were actually being watched. This state of constant surveillance created an environment of perpetual uncertainty among inmates, making them feel they had to incessantly police their own behavior for fear that they were being watched at any given moment. The result was an outsourcing of order enforcement to the prisoners themselves.

Nearly two centuries later, in 1975, the French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the panopticon Bentham envisioned symbolizes the broader power dynamics of modern society. Surveillance, Foucault maintained, allowed regimes of control to shift their attention from engaging in explicit, often physical threats and coercion toward invisible and ubiquitous manipulation.

Our current reality surpasses even Foucault’s most prescient warnings. Digital technologies—from CCTV networks and facial recognition to sophisticated spyware and algorithmic monitoring—have constructed a contemporary surveillance panopticon that not only pushes us towards ever-more adherent norms of self-policing but also the capacity of those in power to subdue us.

The surveillance of activist spaces has effectively moved from the streets to the feeds and chat rooms of social media platforms, giving authorities easy access to track movement organizers and decapitate movements through arrests or even assassinations. And spyware technology allows for intrusion that reaches far deeper than social media monitoring.

Perhaps the most advanced spyware technology available today is Israel’s Pegasus. Developed by the NSO Group, Pegasus surreptitiously infects smartphones without user interaction—granting complete access to messages, e-mails, photos, location data—and can even remotely activate microphones and cameras. Pegasus was reportedly found on the phones of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s associates, including his wife, prior to his brutal murder in 2018. It was deployed in Mexico against journalists, activists, and human rights defenders investigating state corruption and cartel violence. And it has repeatedly been discovered on devices belonging to Palestinian activists and NGO workers.

If all that wasn’t enough, the past few years have seen a bonanza in AI-driven law enforcement entrepreneurship, fueled by partnerships between state authorities and private companies like Palantir. Facial recognition and biometric tracking have transformed physical public spaces into zones of state observation. In Hong Kong, the use of facial recognition technology during protests has enabled mass arrests, creating a chilling effect that sapped energy from the streets and forced organizers underground. In the United States, facial recognition is being used by both police and private groups to identify and arrest activists who protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which, combined with efforts to criminalize support for Palestinian rights and criticism of Israel, is deterring people from getting involved in protest activity whatsoever. These technological advancements don’t just crush resistance—they fundamentally reshape the terrain on which movements are conceived.

Historically, when authorities close spaces for peaceful resistance, movements shift along the repertoire of contention from petitions and protests to armed struggle. But the same architecture that strangles potential for peaceful assembly also constricts both the clandestine and direct avenues through which resistance movements can confront the state. The anticolonial struggles that continue to inspire resistance movements of today, ranging from the Algerian War of Independence to the successful defeat of the United States in Vietnam, depended on guerrilla tactics—the ability to hide, disperse, and wage asymmetrical warfare against occupying forces. But today’s military technology, marked by drones capable of precision strikes from stand-off range, AI-assisted targeting, autonomous weapons systems, and more has dramatically reduced the space for traditional guerrilla warfare. The ultimate result is that the cost of armed resistance, whether it’s one of many tactics in a wider movement or the dominant approach, becomes insurmountable, thus further reducing the availability of viable avenues to contest oppressive forces.

The deepening power asymmetries we currently face must be recognized and appreciated by those seeking to build resistance movements today. Where at one point, decades ago, resistance fighters could count on engaging in sustained guerrilla warfare and popular mobilization aimed at gradually eroding the will of more powerful colonial or state forces, that paradigm has changed, perhaps irrevocably. Each repressive technological advancement deepens and entrenches these existing power asymmetries. The failure to recognize this new and constantly shifting threat environment only continues to result in the devastation of resistance movements today.

What Now?—Salvaging a Future for Revolution

Recognizing the scale of the threats arrayed against us and our capacity to resist is not a call for resignation, but rather a plea to rethink our strategies and tactics in the face of a changing landscape. Because if we are to reclaim the possibility of revolution, we must first understand the world that has been so meticulously constructed to preclude it.

“There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.…

“Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

“Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

“Remember this: Try.”

Those words were not uttered by any real revolutionary or resistance fighter. They were written by Karik Nemik, a fictional character in Disney’s Andor, a Star Wars spin-off that follows the story of how thief turned rebel spy Cassian Andor becomes radicalized against the Galactic Empire and joins the Rebel Alliance. As such, Nemik’s manifesto is a corporate product designed primarily to entertain and delivered via Disney, one of the largest entertainment monopolies on the planet. It is, in other words, yet another example of the way revolutionary ideals have been aestheticized, repackaged, and commodified by those they’re meant to challenge.

But to its credit, Andor offered a powerful meditation on the false promise of neutrality in the face of oppression—the futility of trying to keep your head down and live a normal life under military occupation. The series even communicated the inevitability of resistance and the clarity with which it can erupt, often spontaneously. And regardless of their corporate origin, Nemik’s words might still manage to send shivers down your spine. Because not only do they echo what countless real-world revolutionaries have fought and died for—they diagnose the pivotal crossroads we are faced with today.

The truth is, we do find ourselves at a moment in which “the struggle seems impossible,” dwarfed by the scale of oppressive systems we find ourselves up against, from vulture capitalism to the ever-tightening grip of Israeli occupation and everything in between. Yet, as Nemik writes, “the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural.” Because of that, resistance has always been both inevitable and reliably unpredictable. We have never been good at predicting the point of no return, or what it’ll look like when it finally boils over. As history teaches us, revolutionary moments of rupture have a habit of bursting onto the scene unexpectedly. But today those moments are being born into a new world and it feels like everything we’re doing simply isn’t working.

If revolution is to survive, if it is to mean anything at all, we cannot simply replicate the past. The revolutions of the future won’t look exactly like Algeria in 1962 or South Africa in 1994. And we need to make sure they don’t look like the failed mass movements of the past two decades either. Because our oppressors have adapted. Where we could once deliberate in private whispers, they now break into our phones and computers and read our messages; when a few rusty carbines could once take out heavily armed soldiers in a well-planned ambush, they now operate unmanned drones from the safety of their bases, killing resistance from above.

But more than that, our oppressors have managed to reshape us into atomized creatures averse to collective action, driven primarily by individual self-interest, and conditioned to fear loss more than we desire liberation. They’ve infiltrated not only our devices, but our very sense of imagination, replacing our capacity to envision emancipation with algorithms of distraction and conflating collective struggle with performative posturing.

Scholars and organizers today are already exploring alternatives, emphasizing hybrid online-offline organizing to foster stronger local solidarity networks designed to withstand surveillance and fragmentation. Activists increasingly stress the value of “prefigurative politics,” building tangible alternative institutions that demonstrate possibilities beyond the status quo. There’s also growing acknowledgment that fully horizontal structures can stymie effective decision-making, leading to advocacy for transparent leadership structures. Meanwhile, digital literacy and security training is becoming as foundational to activist training as traditional organizing methods. Transnational solidarity networks, as exemplified by global movements like BDS, illustrate how coordinated global activism can challenge repression and amplify effectiveness.

But the moment we’ve found ourselves in is one of crisis, and it demands a lot more than tactical creativity. There will be no walking back the trappings of the digital age—the good or the bad. But our outlooks, our imaginations, our capacity to conceive alternative futures, will always be reclaimable. The real genius of modern power is not simply its mastery of brute force but its success in deputizing us as self-enforcers of the status quo—in convincing us that there is no alternative. This is what must first be contested and shattered. It doesn’t mean waiting around for the stars to align in the perfect moment. As Nemik said: “Try.” Try, because apathy will destroy us before our oppressors do.

And while those revolutionary moments of rupture will always appear spontaneously, they don’t come out of nowhere. Although they may feel like tidal waves when they strike, they emerge from countless, cumulative currents. And in that accumulating tide, even the smallest acts of dissent, resistance, and organizing can shift the window of what can perceive to be possible.

Here, we once again return to Gaza—will it be a laboratory of our future or a line in the sand? Because what Israel and its Western benefactors are doing in what, to many, may seem like an inconsequential, faraway strip of barren land is a lot more than a genocide. As Tahseen Elayyan told New York magazine recently, “The peoples of the world need to know that the issue today is not only about the rights of the Palestinians. They need to know that the Palestinians are defending human values and trying to free the world.”

Gaza has become a portal connecting the past, present, and future of humanity, where all the modes of contemporary power and control are converging in one grotesque experiment to see what can be gotten away with. It’s both a laboratory for the AI-fueled weapons of the future and an incubator for the algorithmic hypnosis and information warfare campaigns that are conditioning us to accept and internalize such hideous acts as the erasure of an entire people as the new normal. If they get away with numbing us to genocide in Gaza for good, then they’ll have successfully laid to rest the promise of “never again” and perfected a blueprint for crushing resistance wherever it arises.

The truth is, moments of rupture aren’t predestined, and oppressive systems aren’t inherently unsustainable. In fact, they’ve withstood their internal contradictions longer than many anticipated through both coercion and force. And today, elite-managed digital algorithms, hyper-individualism, and advanced repressive technology make them more durable than ever before. The future of revolution hinges on whether we can redefine it for this terrain and collectively confront the sacrifices it will inevitably entail.