The Age of Useless Activism

Slacktivism and the rise of protests that change nothing.

AI generated image for illustrative purposes.

Everyone “stands with” something these days, usually while sitting on their phone. The bar for being an “activist” has never been lower: a repost, a flag in your profile picture, maybe a day at a march.

Protest once carried weight because it carried risk. Suffragettes chained themselves to railings to win the vote. Civil rights marchers faced batons, dogs, and water cannons to end segregation. They weren’t staging moral theatrics for likes online. They had clear goals and a plan. That’s why they won.

In much of the world, to protest is still a matter of life and death. In Iran, women burn hijabs knowing they could be beaten, jailed, or killed. In China, a single post can make a dissident disappear. In Saudi Arabia, people have been handed decades-long sentences or executed for tweeting.

In the West, the danger runs in the opposite direction. We do not risk prison for speaking out, we risk social exile for staying silent. For not posting the black square, not joining the march. The courage activism once demanded has been replaced by the performance of it.

Here, enjoying freedoms others can only dream of, we squander them by rallying behind causes we no longer understand. We spread ourselves thin, declaring strong opinions on everything while knowing less than ever about the issues we claim to support. And sometimes, almost without noticing, we end up cheering for the very regimes that jail, torture, and silence their own people. When the Ayatollah of Iran publicly congratulates your campus protest for its “solidarity,” that’s the moment you should stop and think: wait… are we the baddies?

Yes, war is bad and pollution is harmful. Anyone with a primary school education could tell you that. Announcing you’re ‘anti-war’ or want to ‘save the planet’ doesn’t mean you have the faintest idea how to solve either.

Political identity has eclipsed personal identity. Activism turns tribal: causes become creeds, badges of belonging. People don’t argue policies; they cheer for sides. And as faith, family, and community have eroded, political tribes have stepped in to fill the void. Activism has become as much a religion as a movement.

Topics that once barely registered now spark the same fury as matters of life and death. The stakes don’t matter; the performance does. Even small talk feels like a minefield. I’ll meet another parent at the playground and find myself steering around religion, abortion, vaccines, as if defusing a Facebook bomb. And the worst part is once I hear their view on one topic, I can usually predict the rest.

If I spot a rainbow flag pinned to their bag, I won’t be surprised when the next thing unfurled is a Palestinian flag. If their feed is full of Greta Thunberg, odds are they’re big on decolonisation. And if I see a MAGA hat, I can already guess their stance on guns, immigration, and probably Dr. Fauci.

What does that tell us? That we’re not really thinking for ourselves anymore. Our opinions aren’t maps of reality but loyalty badges. Looking like you’re on the “right” side has become more important than actually being on it.

It’s no coincidence that so much modern activism comes from the most privileged corners of society. Ivy League and Russell Group universities produce far more protesters than mining towns or manufacturing hubs, not because their students face more injustice, but because they have the time and safety to treat politics as a lifestyle.

And for a generation already in the grip of a mental health crisis, activism doubles as therapy. Anxiety and identity confusion are funnelled into causes that promise belonging — less about changing the world than quieting the chaos inside.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone’s doing an actual degree anymore, or if the entire curriculum is just “How to Build an Encampment 101.” Somehow, the most comfortable and coddled cohort on earth has managed to convince themselves they’re on the front lines of a proletarian uprising. It’s almost funny: the same kids who think they’re rebelling against the system are often just parroting lines the KGB planted in Western universities half a century ago, but that’s for another post.

The biggest predictor of activism isn’t oppression, but comfort. Or more accurately, boredom. The middle and upper classes are politically active precisely because they aren’t busy surviving. Freed from the grind of meeting basic needs, they reinvent themselves as moral crusaders, usually with all the merchandise to match.

We’d do well to remember that student protest has gone disastrously wrong before. Take the America First movement before WWII, when students backed isolationism even as Nazis terrorised Jews, telling themselves it was about being anti-war rather than antisemitic. Or the Maoists of the 1960s, who romanticised China’s Cultural Revolution, blind to the famine and purges it unleashed. History is full of youthful zeal fuelling oppression.

When I was at uni (and I promise I’m not that old, things just move that fast), activism wasn’t really a thing. Binge-drinking was. If a protest had crossed my path, I probably would have joined if my friends were going, not out of conviction, but because it was a fun day out. In hindsight, I’m glad none did, because I was far too ignorant to have the faintest clue about world affairs.

A decade ago, in the UK, I stumbled into my own activist phase. I turned up to the November 5th protest in London, hardly knowing who Guy Fawkes was, but eager to find my “people.” The Anonymous masks and the air of anarchy was intoxicating. The irony that our anti-capitalist fervour was literally branded on masks funnelling profits to Warner Bros escaped me and most of my new comrades. As for what the protest was meant to achieve? Nobody cared. If someone had stopped me for an interview, I’d have gone viral as the idiot who didn’t know what she was protesting.

Looking back, what drew me in wasn’t the cause but the performance of rebellion and the identity it offered.

Global protests rose 11% a year from 2009 to 2019, but now they feel routine. Policymakers treat them less as revolutionary demands and more as temporary venting. The sheer volume diffuses focus, distracting from the slow, difficult work real change requires.

Corporations have learned to profit from this dynamic, changing logos during Pride Month or Black History Month, then doing little else. Activism has become an accessory, worn like a fashion item. Keffiyehs, rainbow pins, tote bags. The same companies that profit from child labour or fossil fuels happily sell them, because causes have become commodities. Symbolic gestures let corporations bask in moral approval without making real changes.

Nowhere is the hollowness clearer than the Western pro-Palestine movement. It has mobilised millions, filled streets from Sydney to London, and dominated social media for nearly two years. Yet it has done nothing to improve Palestinian lives. Instead, it has prolonged their suffering by rewarding Hamas and Iran’s strategy: keep Israel under siege in global opinion and block any step toward compromise.

This is one of the most studied conflicts on earth, with decades of failed peace treaties and broken ceasefires. Yet some Gen Zers who discovered the conflict last year are marching with signs demanding the same things tried for half a century. Someone sent me a petition for Israel to “end the occupation”, when Israel actually pulled out of Gaza in 2005. That withdrawal set the stage for the war we are seeing today.

The result is streets flooded with flags and chants, an illusion of impact that leaves Jewish communities facing a surge of harassment and violence, while the protesters allowing this bleat that anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism. Meanwhile Palestinian leadership remains as entrenched and unaccountable as ever. For the marchers, the optics may feel powerful, but for the people they claim to stand with, the net change is zero.

At most, it pressures Western politicians into empty bluster about recognising a Palestinian state, a gesture that offers Palestinians nothing but the guarantee of more war. If statehood were really the answer, the conflict would have ended in 1937, or in any of the ten offers that followed.

And it is one of the most privileged forms of activism on the planet. Western demonstrators never live with the consequences. There’s no personal risk in chanting for a cause from a safe distance, no fear of rockets or kidnappings. October 7 proved the point in blood: the most pro-peace Israelis on the Gaza border, many who had dedicated their lives to freeing Palestine, were among the first to be murdered.

It is a moral abomination that there are more protests against Hamas in Gaza, where Palestinians risk their lives, than in Western capitals and Ivy League quads, where speaking out costs nothing, except social exile perhaps.

Israel is despised for prioritising security over moral posturing, yet that security is the only reason such posturing can exist. And in the ultimate irony, these activists champion regimes that would abolish the freedoms letting them speak.

The contradictions would be funny if they weren’t so destructive: anti-imperialists waving the flags of Iran, boycotting Israel while live-streaming through apps coded in Tel Aviv, climate activists jetting to bloated corporate summits to discuss sustainability over beef tartare.

They can get away with such hypocrisy because the deeper flaw is that these causes lack clear, tangible goals. Extinction Rebellion became famous for blocking roads and trains, often alienating the very public they needed to persuade, while struggling to articulate achievable policies. “Defund the Police” turned a nuanced debate into a slogan that sounded like chaos to most voters, killing its own momentum. Many collapse into noise, more preoccupied with moral theatre than helping anyone.

It’s less civil rights march and more temper tantrum: soup on paintings, gluing themselves to roads, activists convinced utopia can be willed into existence by behaving like toddlers denied a treat.

The problem isn’t just the immaturity, but that it fits perfectly into the machinery of social media, which supercharges herd mentality. Activism today is shaped less by conviction than by algorithms. Social media is where nuance goes to die: awareness skyrockets while understanding shrinks, leaving people waving signs they couldn’t explain. I’m reminded of my own activist phase, right up there with the shame of my first email address.

It used to be that the main threats to a society were external. Now it’s our own internal division and obsession with self-sabotage, symbolised by an Australian flag in flames and ‘abolish Australia’ graffitied at a recent march. It’s clear we’ve traded shared purpose for tribes defined only by what they oppose. The God-shaped hole has been filled with woke dogma. And the more we posture, the less we achieve.

Activism isn’t inherently bad. In a healthy democracy, it’s essential. We’re lucky to have a voice and a vote, and I’ll always defend the right to organise and protest, even when I vehemently disagree with the cause. But that won’t stop me from calling out moral theatrics without substance. They’re worse than silence: wasting time, eroding trust, and leaving real problems untouched.

In the 1700s, annual newspaper circulation in England rose from under a million to fourteen million, enough that satirists mocked readers as “walking newspapers.” Today we absorb around 74 GB of data a day, the equivalent of sixteen movies. No wonder we’re drowning in information we were never meant to handle.

If we want activism to mean something again, we need to funnel that energy into causes that demand courage and clarity, the kind that solve problems instead of just shouting about them.

History is littered with movements that mistook a racket for progress. Before we get swept up in the next one, we’d do well to pause and ask a few questions: Do I understand this issue beyond what I’ve seen on social media? Do I know what the protest is actually demanding? Would the solution help the people I claim to support, or make it worse for them? If there is any uncertainty, maybe pick up a book instead of a placard.

Activism has never been louder. And it has rarely meant less.