Modern Activism Is Too Trendy to Get Anything Done
Just two Sundays ago, a 36-year-old climate activist followed the Greta Thunberg® MO and smeared cake all over Mona Lisa's bulletproof glass hoping the consequential internet clout would somehow prevent the poles from melting. "Think about the planet," he said, trying to be taken as seriously as someone who mere moments ago wasn't dressed like a woman in a wheelchair.
Still, some people celebrated the stunt.
Cause y'know the climate is an important issue and at least now "we're talking about it"—but when does talking about things ever solved them? Look I get it, handling pamphlets on a subway entrance can get pretty boring but if you're gonna waste cake like that, at least be a proper clown and splash it over the face of Monsanto's CEO or something that actually hurts the planet.
Here's the problem with modern activists.
They don't need to be qualified for the position anymore. Anyone with the Ukraine flag on their Twitter handle can stop taking their Prozac medication, pay full price for a Louvre ticket, occupy the handicapped spot and try to ruin a priceless work of art so that their cause is turned into a hashtag for a couple of weeks.
Jump to this conclusion: performative activism is kinda like Gal Gadot when she dragged a bunch of other celebs to make the worst cover of Imagine ever produced: tone-deaf and unnecessary.
That is not how real activism works.
The Civil Rights, Antiwar and Women's Rights movements didn't behave like a bunch of opinionated vegans with a Facebook group. They were organized and task-oriented, they had strategy and follow-through. They understood that drawing a catchphrase on a cardboard sign and painting your hair blue is not enough to save the world.
Hard to argue with this: social media is a network of people, not a power structure. Without hierarchy, decision-making is impossible, so all viral social media movements become popular but ultimately useless.
I'm not saying all armchair activism is bad, though.
If you absolutely couldn't take a weekend off to go pour buckets of water on a stranded whale you could pour a bucket of ice water over your head and donate a few bucks to ALS research. Yeah, that Ice Bucket Challenge worked. That search engine that uses the ad money to plant trees also works—the point being, slacktivism works if there’s an organization turning all the viral noise into actual efforts.
That won't be the case with Mona Lisa's frosting.
For one because blaming La Gioconda for global warming is like blaming the Fast and Furious franchise for drunk drivers. But also because younger generations already need adult servings of anxiety medications to cope with all this climate alarmism telling them that the world will end up looking like a raisin before they can start growing chest hair. More of it won't help.
So, technically...
Modern activism is too trendy to get anything done. Social media has made it easier for any cause to circulate the world, especially if you wrap it around a summer-themed viral challenge. But without coordination and organization, all clout-chasing on the internet becomes just a vanity metric. And it's not the first time someone does that by trying to ruin the Mona Lisa.